December 9, 2024
December 10, 2024
Editor’s note: This interview is part of Mission North’s new Boundary Breakers series, an ongoing exchange with executives and industry observers on the business impact of new tech.
In all of his work, Bloomberg Businessweek features writer and best-selling author Ashlee Vance combines and communicates endless enthusiasm and curiosity about emerging technologies and the fascinating humans behind those developments.
I first met Ashlee at the start of his career in daily news coverage and beat reporting. I’m a huge fan of the multi-layered and engrossing tech stories he’s written over the past two decades, in particular, his illuminating biography on one of the most controversial tech personalities around—Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and The Quest for a Fantastic Future.
After working at The New York Times, The Economist, and The Register, Ashlee describes his current job at Bloomberg as “the last great magazine job.” He’s given free rein to pursue his passion for “chasing weirdos” around the world both in his writing and as host of Bloomberg TV’s ‘Hello World,’ a popular travel show highlighting the work of inventors across the globe.
I chatted with Ashlee about his new book due out next year on the latest space race pioneers, as well as about his advice for tech companies, PR agencies, and journalists on how to work together. What follows is an edited version of that conversation:
What excites you about emerging technology at the moment?
My next book is about space so I’ve been buried really deep in rockets and satellites for the last four years. This is a moment in time where all this private capital is coming into space, resulting in an explosion of economic activity. Essentially, it's like a free-for-all, sort of Wild West between rocket and satellite companies. There’s this crazy land grab going on above us and there isn’t really anyone in charge. It’s as bad as you might think it is, but also fun and exciting.
We’re at this super interesting time where almost out of nowhere there is a fascinating revolution going on in transportation, whether it’s rockets or self-driving cars. Something has happened between software and electric motors and materials, and people who were in the hardcore tech world are being placed in more traditional industries and revamping them.
There’s this crazy land grab going on above us and there isn’t really anyone in charge. It’s as bad as you might think it is, but also fun and exciting.
What’s good and bad about technology becoming more ubiquitous?
I picture us as building this ‘computing’ shell around the planet that’s going to analyze Earth in pretty dramatic ways. For example, in my book I talk about Planet Labs which takes a picture of every spot on the Earth every day. They’re able to track deforestation since they can count every single tree on the planet. They can measure how much methane is coming out of factories. They can track refugees so they can also provide sort of a counting system for truth on the Earth. Obviously they don’t track people’s faces, but now you’re being watched all the time.
It’s the same thing with the space internet that Elon is building. On the one hand, you can bring the internet to half the world’s population who can’t really get it today. That connectivity seems to have some very direct correlation with economic activity and being able to participate in the modern economy. But then, we’re talking about a world where you can never ever escape the internet again, and Facebook is on every mountaintop.
My overall impression is that all this has happened without the public paying any attention to it at all and it's kind of too late to stop it now. We’re about to repeat the same mistakes in heaven we’ve already made on Earth—all these people are going to rush in and do whatever they want.
For you, what would be the optimal relationship between a PR agency and a journalist?
I could probably count on one hand the PR people who really get the nuance of what I’m after. They always come to me with good ideas about colorful, probably eccentric characters who are doing something slightly unusual. They know I might take a long time doing the story.
It’s pretty rare to find a PR person who understands what goes into a magazine article or puts themselves in the shoes of the reporter who’s going to write a 5,000-word story and will need three to five ‘scenes’ for the piece. Here’s an example of a great PR pitch to me: ‘GitHub wants to store all their source code in Svalbard in an ice cave. We will go there to Norway with the CEO, an open-source guy who’s ended up working for Microsoft, and who hasn’t had a profile written about him in five years.’ It’s these layers of a story which take the reader on a journey.
We’re about to repeat the same mistakes in heaven we’ve already made on Earth—all these people are going to rush in and do whatever they want.
What are your thoughts on how PR people should engage with journalists?
I’ve been saying the same thing for 20 years–’Look at what the journalist has been writing about.’ It’s also the ‘pick up the phone’ thing too because even reporters are the same now, they just email everyone. You get such a better story and relationship if you actually get off your arse and go meet people. That would be my biggest advice, especially if you want to get stories in The Wall Street Journal and in The New York Times.
What advice do you have for a tech startup on how to engage with a journalist?
Working with PR agencies does help startups. I mean, 20% of the emails I get are from tech startup CEOs. It’s always the same message: “I read your stories all the time—you should write about my company.” It’s very desperate and has the opposite effect because they’re begging for attention.
So, I would start by being less transactional and focus more on building a more authentic relationship. Go and meet the journalist, talk to them, and see if anything comes out of it. Think longer term. For example, I first met the Collison brothers at Stripe when they were 12 guys in a room. I thought they were fascinating but what they were doing with internet payment was so boring. So, I told them ‘I’m not writing about you, but let’s stay in touch.’ I’d see them once or twice a year for four years, and I still couldn’t bring myself to write about them.
Finally, I went on a trip to Palestine with Patrick Collison and we met some of their users. That was the first time I really understood the business because there were these mom-and-pop shops that had international sales as a result of using Stripe. Then, I wrote the story and it's like my most read story of all time. So, that article probably took five years, but was worth it in the end. Some of the best things just take a little more time, so have some patience.
