Nick Thompson on Value-Based Businesses
b'Nicholas Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic and the former editor-in-chief of WIRED. Under his leadership, WIRED won numerous awards for design and reporting and launched a highly successful paywall. Thompson also wrote many features for the publication, including two cover stories on Facebook that have been cited multiple times in Congress.\\nThompson is a former contributor to CBS News, where he regularly appeared on CBS This Morning and CBS Sunday Morning. He is a cofounder of The Atavist, a National Magazine Award\\u2013winning digital publication and multimedia content management system that was sold to WordPress in 2018.\\nThompson previously served as editor of NewYorker.com. Before The New Yorker, Thompson was a senior editor at WIRED, where he assigned and edited the story that was the basis for the Oscar-winning film Argo. In 2009, his book \\u201cThe Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War\\u201d was published to critical acclaim. Thompson has long been a competitive runner; in 2021, he set the American record for men 45+ in the 50K race and is currently ranked as one of the top 10 masters marathoners in the world.\\n\\xa0\\nNick had a number of amazing insights during our conversation. Some of them include:\\n\\u201cI try to do my best within all the limitations of how darn hard it is to be a good parent\\u201d (10:30).\\n\\u201cIn some ways, [being a CEO and being a parent] are the opposite\\u201d (10:50).\\n\\u201cMy job as a CEO is to try to drive the organization in the best direction based on our most important values\\u201d (10:50).\\n\\u201cI\\u2019m driving things more as a CEO, and as a father I\\u2019m supporting more and trying to help them find their way\\u201d (11:30).\\n\\u201cMy job is to make the business as successful as possible, as innovative as possible, as future-proofed as possible, so that we can sustain that mission of the magazine that\\u2019s existed since 1857\\u201d (13:35).\\n\\u201cWe are open to a much broader range of opinions than our peer publications\\u201d (15:40).\\n\\u201cI\\u2019m trying to develop a new platform for conversations that will allow people\\u2026 to increase empathy\\u201d (18:20).\\n\\u201cYou start with the assumption you\\u2019re going to do the absolute best content. You\\u2019re going to do the best content you\\u2019re capable of, and then you build the business model around that. You don\\u2019t do that the other way around\\u201d (31:35).\\n\\u201cJournalism is not a profession for people who are economically motivated\\u201d (32:15).\\n\\u201cI got into journalism kind of by accident\\u2026 I fell into it\\u201d (33:40).\\n\\u201cYou can come to something thinking about the right things, and then propose a solution that doesn\\u2019t actually make things better\\u201d (37:55).\\n\\u201cI look at every piece of data on every story\\u201d (43:15).\\n\\u201cThere\\u2019s a period in the process of the creation of a story that is sacred and should not be touched by the people who care about the analytics, and that is the process from when the story is assigned to when the words in the story are finished\\u201d (43:40).\\n\\u201cBeing a good editor requires being able to juggle a whole bunch of things at the same time\\u201d (45:30).\\n\\u201cThe adrenaline flow of being a CEO is very different than the adrenaline flow of being a writer or being an editor\\u201d (47:00).\\n\\u201cI\\u2019ve always been hyper-curious, which is something that\\u2019s good for a writer. I meet someone new and I\\u2019m curious about who they are and what they do\\u201d (48:40).\\n\\u201c[As a CEO], you have to be curious about how everything in your business works because you have to master it\\u201d (49:20).\\n\\u201cI\\u2019m learning a lot, but am I getting smarter?\\u201d (50:15).\\n\\u201cRunning gives me a connection to the outside world, to the natural world\\u201d (54:20).\\n\\u201cThe discipline it takes to be a good runner rubs off on the discipline it takes to do well at work\\u201d (55:00).\\n\\u201cYou learn lessons while you\\u2019re running\\u201d (55:05).\\n\\u201c[Running and playing the guitar] are the two things I do in my life that are the most meditative\\u201d (57:00).\\n\\u201cMaking sure you\\u2019re balancing the needs of the moment with the needs of the future is one of the great challenges of being a CEO\\u201d (1:01:10).\\n\\xa0\\nAdditionally, you can find Ni'