Thursday April 06, 2017

Interview with Molly Swenson

Molly is on the founding team at RYOT, an LA-based media company, acquired in April 2016 by Huffpost/AOL. She was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 2017 list in Media, and was named one of Ad Week’s Young Influentials.
Molly was RYOT’s first hire, and as COO, led all sales, operations and financings from launch to acquisition. Molly was a producer on RYOT’s Oscar nominated short documentary Body Team 12, and on the Peabody finalist Gardeners of Eden, and has worked on dozens of award-winning VR films and documentaries.
Before RYOT, Molly designed and managed philanthropic strategies for celebrities such as Ben Stiller, Shakira and Kobe Bryant. While working at The Obama White House, identifying candidates for political appointment, she made it to the Top 50 on Season 10 of American Idol. She has been written about in The New Yorker, Entrepreneur, The Seattle Times, The Washington Post and has been a keynote speaker at CES, SXSW, Cannes Lions and TEDxBerlin.

View transcript

You just came off stage here at Nextem in Copenhagen. Could you give us your three key takeaways from that talk? Yeah, so there's a couple of them. One is this idea that proximity is an antidote to apathy. If you're using a technology like �심itvrtual reality in service of journalism, it becomes a really great tool because it puts people on ground zero where the news is happening. And I think that's critical to help people understand on a deeper level what's happening all around the world. The second is don't be afraid of trying new technology, whether you're in journalism, digital media, advertising, entertainment. It can be of service to you. And I think that it's never just about the technology for the sake of the technology. It's all about how can that technology enhance your storytelling or get your storytelling seen by more people. And so for us, fortune favors the bold in our case. And I think that there is a lot of rewards to be reaped by people who do try and harness that new technology. And then for the last one, you know, the takeaway that I ended with was this thing that my co-founder and I say to one another a lot when we think back about how we were three people in a garage five years ago thinking that we could take on the news industry, is that we had just the right amount of delusion to think that it could work. And I think that that little bit of delusion for any entrepreneur is critical. So in terms of all the different VR examples you had today in your talk, where do you see the breaking point in terms of it becoming mainstream and adopted by mass media and the regular consumer out there? Well, I think that headset proliferation is going to happen when the content becomes good enough for people to buy those devices, specifically to experience things that they can't experience using other technology. I don't know when it will happen. We sort of hope it will be soon. But I think, you know, it's a funny looking technology right now. You see people wearing VR headsets and I think back to the days when car phones and cell phones used to be this big and that looks ridiculous too. And in five years, we're going to look back and think that these huge headset, funky things were equally ridiculous. So I think probably what it's going to take, honestly, is a better designed wearable. You know, Google Glass tried to do it. Microsoft HoloLens is trying to do it. But really what there needs to be is a better designed wearable than this. Because if you think about it, it's just a poorly designed wearable. It takes a hand to use it. It's an appendage, basically. So call traction to all the manufacturers out there. I don't know. Find some interesting partnerships with like a Warby Parker or Tom Ford or any of the great eyeglass manufacturers and figure that out. Because I think that's what's going to have to happen is there will be some sort of a device that is a mixed reality tool also where it's not fully immersive all the time. But you can toggle between augmented reality, virtual reality. I can be wearing a pair of sunglasses and walking around Copenhagen and all of the signs are translated into English because I don't speak the language here. So I think when it becomes functional like that, as well as an entertainment tool where I can also see films or watch TV or see virtual reality in that same device, I think that becomes interesting.