TikTok is developing a new version of its app for U.S. users ahead of an expected sale of the app to a group of investors, according to a new report from The Information.

A climate change activist was arrested after spray-painting Apple’s 5th Avenue store as part of a protest against Big Tech’s “climate hypocrisy.” Protestors from the Extinction Rebellion environmental group staged a demonstration at the New York City storefront on Sunday, and one individual spray-painted “Boycott” beneath the Apple logo on the building’s entrance, along with “Tim + Trump = Toxic.”

In a press release posted after the demonstration, Extinction Rebellion called attention to the appearance of Big Tech CEOs at President Donald Trump’s inauguration, including Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. Extinction Rebellion pointed out that the executives “once claimed to be big supporters of the Paris Agreement” but are now “backing an administration that’s gutting environmental rules and funneling billions of dollars to fossil fuels.”

A pair of Extinction Rebellion activists also stood inside the Apple store to call out the company’s relationship with the “tyrant” Trump administration. “Apple claims to support climate action. Apple claims to be good for the environment, and they continue to support climate denial, and ICE raids on your community,” one of the protesters shouted. “Tim Cook lies and people die.” The protestors followed up with a chant: “Dump Trump, Apple!”

Extinction Rebellion, which has staged protests in New York City in the past, brought up the electricity demand that’s expected with the growth of AI in the tech industry, too. Last month, Google’s annual sustainability report revealed that its carbon emissions grew 11 percent last year to 11.5 million tons of pollution, and energy usage rose at its data centers. Microsoft is similarly moving further from its climate goals as it invests more in AI, which is estimated to consume more power than Bitcoin by the end of this year.

“In 2023, Tim Cook called combatting climate change one of the most urgent priorities of our time,” Miles Grant, an Extinction Rebellion spokesperson, said in the press release. “Fast forward to 2025, and he’s donating to Trump—the man leading the charge to roll back all climate progress. They’ve betrayed their customers and the planet at the most critical moment in human history.” 

Apple didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.

It’s summertime, which means it’s time for our annual grilling episode. In years past we’ve talked to the leaders of Big Green Egg, Traeger, and Blackstone, and it’s always fascinating how those companies have all the same kinds of problems and ideas as any of the tech companies we have on the show. 

In fact it’s funny — in what can only be described as a perfectly Decoder situation, I really wanted to have Blackstone CEO Roger Dahle back on the show this year because his griddle company is such a success that he’s in the process of buying Weber, the biggest name in the space. But he’s stuck in antitrust review so he couldn’t come on the show. Grilling episodes man — they’re the best.

Anyhow, all that meant that I finally had the opportunity to have SharkNinja CEO Mark Barrocas on the show. We’ve wanted to have SharkNinja on the show for years now, mostly because it has the best name of any company I think we’ve ever had on Decoder. It perfectly describes the structure of the company: there’s Shark, and there’s Ninja. And just in time for our grilling episode, the Ninja division of Mark’s business just launched its first ever grill, the FlexFlame, earlier this year. 

But as you’ll hear Mark and I really get into, SharkNinja is really a product design company more than anything. It has what you could only describe as a kind of relentless approach to product development — SharkNinja launches 25 brand new products a year across dozens of categories in countries around the world. So while we do spend a lot of time talking about the decision to launch the FlexFlame grill and what the business of grilling looks like for SharkNinja, you’ll hear Mark and I talk a lot about the company’s broader philosophy around product development across all of its different categories. 

That’s because a lot of that philosophy, which was developed back in the late 2000s for markets like vacuum cleaners and blenders, is now being applied to everything from slushy machines and pizza ovens to LED face masks. You’ll hear Mark explain that they have a product engineering and design team of more than 1,300 people around the world dedicated to figuring out new twists on household staples. It’s also remarkable how many of the products are built around fan technology, which comes up a few times in this conversation.

In fact, a key component of the new FlexFlame grill is a fan that lets it do a lot of different things. But the grill industry, as you might know, is a fiercely competitive market with a lot of brand loyalty, and product features alone might not be enough. I can’t tell you how many furious reader comments and emails we received when the CEO of Big Green Egg took a shot at Weber on last year’s grill episode. People love their grills, and they will fiercely defend them.

So I really wanted to ask Mark how his style of product development worked in the context of gas grills — and whether he’s envisioning Ninja’s outdoor grilling products as premium devices you keep for a long time, or as ones that might rust and get replaced after a few years as you would an iPhone. 

Mark and I also spent a good deal of time at the end talking about marketing. SharkNinja spends more than $700 million a year on advertising, a great deal of which now goes to product placement and content creators on Instagram and TikTok. You’ll hear Mark recount his history of selling products on television infomercials back in the 2000s, and how that’s now evolved into having his appliances become viral sensations online. 

Mark has a lot of thoughts about the state of the creator economy, which is already in the process of getting totally upended by cheap and limitless AI video, and whether he sees it teetering on the edge of a crash that could transform how he markets and sells his most popular products. 

This episode is a real ride — Mark’s background from infomercials really comes through at times, and I think you can tell that I found myself just trying to hang on throughout this one.

Okay: SharkNinja CEO Mark Barrocas. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Mark Barrocas, you’re the CEO of SharkNinja. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks so much for having me.

I am really excited to talk to you. I’m fascinated by SharkNinja as a company. It’s been around for a long time, but you’re having a bit of a renaissance lately. On top of that, this is our annual summer grill episode, and you guys just launched a new line of grills. So it’s perfect timing. Couldn’t be happier about it.

Great, really happy to be here.

Let’s talk about SharkNinja as a company to set the stage a bit. I think a lot of people know Shark, and a lot of people know Ninja. You’ve started marketing the main company a little bit more recently. Tell me about this company. Why have the two brands? How is it structured? How do you think about SharkNinja as a company?

As you said, the business behind these two great brands is SharkNinja. People know the Shark brand. We built Shark into an over $3 billion [a year] global business. We have the Ninja brand, which is over a $3 billion [a year] global business. Now, we’re actively marketing the SharkNinja business behind these two great brands, and trying to explain to consumers that we’re problem solvers. That’s what our business is all about. We find problems that others don’t see, and we solve problems that others can’t. 

We can get more into how we do that and why that’s unique to SharkNinja. We’re in 37 product categories. We sell in 27 countries around the world to everyone, from a high school kid doing a TikTok or an Instagram video about our products all the way up to a 60-year-old guy who’s focused on outdoor grilling or smoking. So, we’ve got a big demographic base and big socioeconomic group of consumers.

The idea that you’re going to market the central company, SharkNinja, as problem solvers comes up. There are lots of big household brands that exist in that space. OXO is very famous for this In the kitchen, where everything is somewhat uniquely designed, a little bit different. It’s  not a direct competitor to you, but the marketing there feels familiar. This is going to be the highest bit of design product that you can get. There are lots of others that play the same game. Is that what you’re thinking about? Do you want people to think of you as a design company or is it something else?

No. We want people to think of us as a consumer problem-solving company. You can focus on consumer products and look at it through a technology lens. You can say, “Hey, I have this core technology, and I’m going to take it and  apply it to two or three or four different categories of products that might be applicable.” 

Our core technology is consumer problem-solving. We’ve got a big team of ethnographic, consumer insights researchers. We’re mining consumer data, online reviews, social media content, and comments. We’re in hundreds of consumer homes around the world every year. We’re in restaurants. We’re in commercial environments looking at how people clean or cook there. 

We’re trying to find either a problem that a consumer has that they may not even know that they have — and we can talk about examples of that — or we’re trying to find things that the consumer is doing outside of the home that they’re not doing inside of the home. Ultimately, I think those two different things become the germs of innovation and ideas that we then have our 1,300 engineers around the globe focus on. And you say, “Well, hold on, vacuum cleaners have been around for 100 years. Hasn’t every problem been solved?” 

I’ll give you a great anecdote. We went into 100 consumer homes, and we watched consumers vacuum. During the cleaning session, about eight or 10 of those turned over the vacuum, took a knife or a scissor, sliced the hair off the brush roll, pulled the hair off, threw it in the garbage, and finished their cleaning session. At the end of the cleaning session, we said to them, “Is there anything you do to change your vacuum cleaner?” They said, “No, it works great.” We said, “Well, hold on a minute. How about that time when you turned it over and you nearly cut your hand and you sliced it?” They started apologizing for the product. They started saying, “Well, I have two daughters with long hair. I have three dogs.” 

A consumer works around the problems of the product. Well, for us, that becomes an idea. So, we go back to our engineers, and we say, “Can we develop a vacuum brush roll that doesn’t wrap hair?” Eighteen months later, we came out with Shark’s Self-cleaning Brushroll, and it became the number one selling vacuum cleaner in the United States. 

That’s just a little example. We do that in category after category after category, which is why we’re not limited to two or three or four categories. We’re in 37 different product categories in and outside the home.

There’s a lot there that I want to unpack. You’re talking about a lot of upfront investment in product development. Many of your competitors don’t do that. They really do take core technology and reapply it in different categories. Many of your competitors are based in China. They’re selling on Amazon, and they’re selling clones of your products. They don’t have to front that investment, and they can keep their costs low.

How do you think about that dynamic? What you’re describing requires you to constantly front the cost of innovation that will almost certainly get copied at higher rates across the board.

SharkNinja has two main competitive advantages. One is disruptive consumer innovation. We spend 7 percent of our sales on R&D and innovation in an industry where competitors spend 1 percent of sales or less on innovation. We bring 25 new, ground-up products to market a year. I’m not talking about a new product as a new color or button. These are ground-up, brand new products across so many different product categories. 

We enter into at least two new product categories that we’ve never been in before every year. Before last year, we were never in the skincare business. We were never in the outdoor cooler business. Last year, we went into four new product categories. We made an LED, infrared, cryo face mask, which was our first FDA-approved medical device. We launched a slushy machine that went viral on social media. We made our first outdoor pizza oven. You can’t think of more diverse categories. The common stream through all of those is that they all solve a consumer problem.

I think this is a great time for the Decoder questions. Usually, we talk about some controversy at the top, but you’re describing something that’s so interesting that I think the structure will actually help explain a lot. How is SharkNinja structured? How many people do you have, and how is it organized?

We’ve got nearly 4,000 people around the globe. From a structure standpoint, we have an executive management team that is half homegrown, with  people who have been with me for 17 years. That’s rounded out with other folks who have joined the organization and have been able to bring scale or global experience into their areas, like product development, engineering, sales, and marketing. 

Those folks have been with me a long time. We’ve really helped build the SharkNinja secret sauce together. We’ve rounded that out with great talent from other great companies and with other great experiences to build a really strong management team.

How is that organized? Do you have a Shark division and a Ninja division? Is it all one company? How’s that expressed?

From a functional standpoint, the administrative roles are all corporate SharkNinja. There’s a corporate CEO, a corporate general counsel, a corporate COO, and a corporate people and culture leader. When you start to get into the individual teams, we break it up. There’s Shark Home, which involves cleaning, home environment products, fans, and air purifiers. We have Shark Beauty business, which is haircare and skincare. Then we have the Ninja business, which is everything that we do within Ninja. So, that’s how we break down the business. There are two brands, but inside of those two brands is Shark Home, Shark Beauty, and Ninja.

If I look at that broadly and I just look at your competitive set, Shark and Dyson have always been back and forth. There’s been some lawsuits, some patent disputes. Some of those have settled over time. There’s a lot there. 

To your point, Dyson invented fan technology and it tried to express it across a number of different products that led them into beauty. It got into hairdryers, then expanded into the rest of the beauty products, and it’s done well. How are you thinking about Shark? You started with your core technology, you ended up at beauty, and now you’re going to do the rest of it?

If I go back 17 years, we were a small business. We were a $150 million [a year] business. I’d love to say that there was a grand plan of how to become a $6 billion global business without acquiring a dollar of revenue. 

Could you tell me? That would be great.

To be honest with you, we just wanted to make great products that consumers loved. If I go back to 2008, what we realized was that the consumer was getting more and more power in terms of being educated before they made a purchase. 

In 2008, there was a thing called Consumer Reports. You opened up Consumer Reports and it told you the eight vacuum cleaners to buy. If your vacuum cleaner wasn’t listed in there, you were going to have a really hard time gaining awareness. What my partner and I at the time realized was that consumer online reviews would be the great equalizer. You hear that today and say, “Well, what great equalizer is that?” Well, back then, people often bought from one brand or based on an expert recommendation. What started to happen was consumers started going online and started writing honest reviews about their experiences with products. 

Soon, consumers weren’t going to open up Consumer Reports before they would go out and make a purchase. They were going to go online and look at 10 million of their closest friends to figure out which vacuum cleaner or blender to buy. And they were going to get honest opinions. That is one of the major drivers of our business. If I go back 15 years, we built our business one five-star review at a time. So, if you had a great experience with a Shark vacuum, you say, “Hey, I might try Shark’s air purifiers that just came out,” or, “They got into haircare? I might try their haircare products.”

It’s interesting. What we look at is what gives us the right to be in the category. The right to be in the category is not because you have a brand that you can just put your name on because you see a sales opportunity. What are we bringing to the consumer that they can’t get anywhere else? What’s an unmet need that the consumer has? We set a very high bar on that within the company. There have been categories that we worked on for 10 years and never brought a product to market because, ultimately, we came to the conclusion that the consumer and world don’t need us. So, being anchored on this beacon and asking what gives us the right to be in the category has led us very methodically to the next opportunity and the next opportunity and the next opportunity.

What’s one that you’ve been rejecting for 10 years?

I loved the power tools business. I think the Shark brand can translate into power tools. We used to think of ourselves as in the home. We’re making a lot of products now for outside the home. I thought power tools were a great opportunity. We’ve tried it three, four… Ultimately, we got to the place and said, “You know what? We’re not bringing anything that’s game-changing or solving a massive problem that somebody else isn’t solving.” And we decided to go back to the drawing board.

I will tell you also that there are categories that we tried for eight years, and we eventually cracked the code. An example of that is the carpet extraction and stain cleaner category. We became the number one selling vacuum brand in the United States in 2014. Ever since, retailers and consumers would say, “Why aren’t you getting into the carpet cleaning business? That seems so logical from a brand extension standpoint.” The honest answer was that we never came up with something that was great. 

We finally cracked the code on that about two and a half years ago with a product called the Shark CarpetXpert. It cleans carpets better than anything else on the market. It’s much more lightweight, much easier to use. It does it with an attachment called the Stainstriker. In a short period of time, we gained over 20 percent market share in that category.

This shows us that just because we might bang our head against the wall a couple of times doesn’t mean we won’t eventually crack the code. We may figure it out. When we do figure it out, the innovation really connects with the other competitive mode of the business, which is creating viral demand for our products. We spend 11 percent of sales on advertising in an industry that spends very little on advertising. So, you’ve got a disruptive product that solves a consumer problem, and you’re able to go out and talk about it on things like social media, experiential events, and TV. When those things come together and you get it right, it really connects with the consumer. Not just in the United States but globally.

That’s a really fascinating piece of the SharkNinja story, and I think it tells a bigger story about the advertising market, particularly on the internet, than anyone really is giving credit to you. But I want to stay in corporate structure for one more second. So you’ve got Shark Home, Shark Beauty, and Ninja. Ninja feels like kitchen products?

Kitchen and outdoor. We do outdoor cooking, we do outdoor coolers. Yeah, kitchen and outdoors.

At the company, you’ve got 1,300 engineers. Are they split between divisions? Do you have central engineering? Do they compete for resources? How does that work?

We have 1,300 engineers today around the globe. They’re based in Boston, London, and Asia. There are certain functions within the company, like electrical engineering, that might go across different categories because they’re subject matter experts. But it’s not just the number of engineers that we have. It’s the competency of those engineers. We’ve got mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, mechatronics, app IoT, and software engineers. 

I think you’d be really surprised if you went inside one of our products. There’s an enormous amount of technology in a product that retails for $199. If I went back seven or eight years, most of it would be mechanical engineering. Today, the software team and the electronics team, together with mechanical engineering, have allowed us to bring so much more functionality to the product, allowing the consumer to have so much versatility with it than they ever were able to before.

So, when the Ninja team says they’ve got an idea for a gas grill and they need a bunch of software engineers to work on the app to run the FlexFlame system, and those same engineers are being pulled towards the next project, how do you divvy up those resources?

It’s a challenge, But here’s what’s super exciting about it. If you’re an engineer and you work at a company that has one product category that you sell, eventually after three or five years, you get to the point where you say, “Look, I’ve gotten tired. If I want to go to another opportunity or I want to work on something else, I have to find a job in another company.” At SharkNinja, you can find your next job within SharkNinja. You’ve been working on vacuum cleaners for three years. You want to try something different? How about air fryers? How about outdoor cooking? How about fans? How about robots? How about hairdryers or skincare?

I think the cross pollination of engineers is so powerful for us. Our ability to  to put out an intercompany message that says, “Does anyone have experience in LED lights? Does anyone have experience in airflow technology?” To be able to see the number of experts we have internally is incredible. If you’re a company, you might have to go outside and find a whole lot of subject matter experts. We have a whole lot of subject matter experts inside that are red teaming each other’s products.

The joke I’m always making on Decoder is that if you tell me your company’s structure, I can tell you 80 percent of its problems. You’re describing two big divisions, both of which are growing and aggressively launching new products. There are some subdivisions on the inside.I’m guessing if the Ninja team steals a bunch of LED lighting engineers from the Shark team, they’re not going to be happy about that. That’s you. You’ve got to mediate that dynamic. How do you mediate those resources? How do you allocate them?

I think a lot of it comes down to the needs of the product. We really don’t look at it rigidly by if it’s a Shark product or Ninja product. We start with a product pipeline of ideas, which might have 65 ideas that we start with. Over time, we whittle that down. We might put something into a prototype, get it into a consumer’s home. We thought it was a great idea, but the consumer says they’re not interested so we throw it away. 

We might just put something on packaging. We might not even put it into a prototype. We might show them a box front and say, “Hey, does this get you excited?” We might look at something and say, “It’s great, but it’s too expensive and we don’t think it’s commercially viable.” Maybe it’s too early for the consumer. Maybe there’s a problem, but the consumer doesn’t even know yet that it’s a problem. 

I’ll give you an example. They just mandated composting in New York City. It’s very interesting. A New York apartment is going to have to sit there with their food scraps, putting them into this little plastic bin and this little bag. They’re going to have to wait seven days. What do you think happens to that bag on day four or five? It doesn’t smell great. So, we had some young engineers that were super passionate about solving that problem. The challenge with it though is that it’s not in enough municipalities. The consumer hasn’t engaged with it enough to realize what the problems are. So it may be something incredible but it’s two years too early.

So, we’ll put that in the parking lot, and we’ll say, “Let’s revisit that when it comes to the next product innovation cycle.” We really do look at it at the product level and not at the brand or company level. I think that’s what helps us assess how to divvy up resources. 

The other thing I would say is that we use a tremendous amount of outside experts. This is a company where it does not have to be invented here. We are looking for the best and brightest people to help us solve consumer problems. In any given month, we could be working with as many as 50 outside subject-matter experts. They could be on things as little as gear systems or troubleshooting a particular heater that we might have. 

That’s something that I don’t want to underestimate because at a lot of engineering companies, engineers feel like, “Hold on, you hired me to solve it, so I have to solve it.” We’re sitting here saying, “At the end of the day, we want the consumer to open up the box and enjoy the product.” The consumer doesn’t care whether you made 100 percent of the product internally or whether you brought in five subject matter experts to help. We do a really incredible job of getting the best and brightest people to help us solve these problems.

That really comes down to how you think about investing in the core technologies. I’ll just stick with Shark and the vacuum cleaners, blow dryers, and air purifiers. At the core of that technology are high-efficiency small motors. They can move a lot of air. You can express that in multiple kinds of products. That’s a very competitive segment. That’s the patent lawsuits. It’s deeply competitive. 

You can go buy that core technology. Once you’ve developed it, the goal is to ramp it over time and take margin out of all that upfront cost. But you’re launching into so many new categories. You’re going out to buy lots and lots of new core technologies from 50 different subject matter experts. How do you think about managing those life cycles? Where do you think about spending the money on new technologies that will last for a long time and let you take margin out and where do you think the technology is mature, and what you need to do is actually expand the category?

It’s interesting. I’ll go back to the example that you gave on vacuum cleaners because I think that’s a good one. We have patented a no-loss suction vacuum technology, so the consumer can pick up whatever they want and won’t lose any appreciable level of suction over the life of the product. But as you start identifying the next consumer problem, you start having to then build evolutionary or add-on technologies. 

I want to give you some examples that I think you might find interesting. We had great no-loss suction technology when we developed our first vacuum cleaner, which was called the Shark Navigator, We cleaned carpets better than our competition, and we did it at a fraction of the price. Those were the core things. In 2009, we found that the American consumer was really interested in cleaning carpets. That was the proxy of a great vacuum cleaner. 

In 2010, we said, “Okay, what’s the next problem for us to solve?” We went into consumers’ homes, we watched them vacuum. In the homes that had stairs or multi-level homes, they would plug the vacuum in, pull the hose out, and clean the first three steps of the stairs. They would then unplug the vacuum, walk upstairs, plug it in, and clean the top three steps. The middle three steps would never get clean because the hose was never  able to reach that far. So, we looked at that and we said, “Why is the vacuum tethered to this base on the ground? What if you could lift it away, walk around with the vacuum cleaner, and have 30 feet of travel with the cord?” That product was called the Shark Navigator Lift-Away. It’s still the number-one selling vacuum cleaner in the United States. We solved the problem by having vacuums that not only cleaned on the floor but cleaned above the floor as well.

Now you might say, “Okay, hasn’t everything been developed?” Well, three years later, we want to know what’s the next problem. The next problem is cleaning under furniture. You don’t want to move the furniture. How do you clean under a bed? Imagine what under a bed looks like when you haven’t cleaned it for two years. So we developed something called Powered Lift-Away. You took the canister off the vacuum, and we had power that went down through the hose and to the nozzle. You could now take your nozzle, just like a canister vacuum, and go anywhere, under furniture or under beds. That became the number-one selling vacuum cleaner in the United States when it came out. 

So you say again, “Well, has everything been invented?” A few years later, we said, “Wow, we do a great job at cleaning carpets, but we aren’t doing as great a job cleaning hard floors.” With carpets, you need a really aggressive brushroll to clean. On floors, you need to be able to pick up the fine dust. So we looked at that and realized they were in conflict with one another. What if we developed a vacuum cleaner that had two brushrolls: an aggressive brushroll that cleaned your carpets and a fluffier brushroll that could pick up the fine dust on your hard floors? That technology was called Shark DuoClean. Today, that’s still our best-selling vacuum cleaner. 

So, finding the next problem and the next problem will lead you into new technology and new evolution. By the way, all of these things that I just mentioned to you are patents. They’re all things that only SharkNinja does at this point. But we’re constantly on this quest to find the next problem, and then that leads us into our innovation pipeline.

I’m going to push back on you just a little bit. I know the Decoder listeners quite well. I know what they’re saying to you in their cars as they listen. The vacuum cleaner market is pretty mature. It is ferociously competitive. There are products from LG, Samsung, Dyson, you name it that do all of these things and more in different ways. I hear what you’re saying. You see the problems and you innovate for the customers that you see and the problems they have. 

But the market is competitive. How often do you spend thinking about where the market is going, where the competitors are getting ahead of you, and how to leapfrog them?

Nearly every day. This is what we do. We’re consumer problem solvers. We’re trying every day. Look, we had zero market share in the vacuum industry in 2008. Today, SharkNinja has over 40 percent market share in the upright vacuum cleaner market in the United States, which is the largest portion of the vacuum cleaner market in the US. We became number one in 2014, and we’ve never given that up. Why? Because we’re continuing to innovate and innovate. 

We’re driving up the average sell price. You could buy a Shark vacuum for $129, or you could buy a Shark vacuum for $499. We are bringing the opening-price consumer up into our brand. We don’t have something for the $79 consumer, but I think the consumer looks at performance, value, quality, and innovation.

You’ve got to bring all four of those things together for the consumer. I think you might have innovation, but the consumer needs all of this and value is a huge component of it. The opening-price consumer can step up to a $129 Shark vacuum. The high-priced Sephora, Ulta consumer can buy a $499 vacuum. There is no brand that cuts across such a broad price range and such a broad feature range. 

The other thing that I think we do a really effective job of is being the vacuum for you when you move into your college dorm room. We want to be the first vacuum for you when you get your first apartment, when you get your first house, when you have your family, when you get your first pets, and when you wind up as an empty nester. I don’t think there is a brand out there selling corded vacuums, cordless vacuums, robot vacuums, hand vacuums, or shop vacuums that is doing such an effective and compelling job of innovating and innovating while also having extraordinary value and great quality.

One of the things I think about a lot here is how companies grow. You’re describing people buying lots of vacuums over time. A long time ago, I had the former CEO of Sonos Patrick Spence on the show, and I said, “Is your whole plan that people will just get bigger and bigger houses and you’ll sell one more speaker every time?” Is that the plan in the vacuum business? People are just going to buy new vacuums at a steady clip?

I think the more macro question is how do we grow and how do we think about growth? We think about growth with this three-pillar growth strategy. One is gaining share in our existing categories. We enter categories, and within three to four years, Shark or Ninja becomes the number one or number two market leader in that category. There’s still lots of white space within our existing categories. We’re in an industry with an available [total addressable market] of $120 billion. Last year, we were a $5.5 billion business. So, we’re less than 5 percent of the overall market. 

Number two is expansion into new product categories. Many companies say they can expand into new categories, but either the retailer or the consumer doesn’t let them. They don’t see them in those categories. I think we’ve been really effective at taking the Shark and Ninja brands into many different places.

Then, third is international expansion. This year, over 40 percent of our business is going to come from outside the US. So, when you think about us compared to brands that are able to scale globally, we launch 25 new products a year and we sell20 out of those 25 products n every market. The same product. We look at the consumer from a product innovation standpoint across this matrix. How does the American consumer think about a product? How does a European consumer think about the product? How does an Asian consumer think about the product? I think that’s an important point to note. We’re not just innovating for one type of consumer, we’re innovating for a global consumer.

I’m going to ask you the other Decoder question, and then I want to talk about expansion, particularly into grilling. This is our grilling episode. We spent too much time on vacuums. 

Here’s the other Decoder question. How do you make decisions? You’ve laid out a lot of frameworks here. It’s clear you’ve thought about this a lot. What’s your framework for making decisions?

We have something, and you can go to our website and see it.  We’re very focused on culture. Culture is our competitive advantage, it really is. We have 5,000 patents. We have great brand names. We have incredible innovation. What has enabled us to grow at a compounded annual rate of 21 percent a year for the last 17 years is the way we think. I’d invite you to go onto our website and look at a document called “Outrageously Extraordinary.” The idea is that we have this inextricable desire to be the absolute best we can be. That comes with this inherent fear of failure. How do we get rid of the fear of failure because you tend to play it safe when you’re worried about failing. So, for us, we set what we call these “unimaginably high bars” in a game worth playing.

You will seldom see a meeting at SharkNinja where you say, “let’s go after this,” and everyone in the room walks out and says, “I think we can do that.” Most people are going to walk out of the room saying, “How the hell are we going to do that?” We’ve just set a bar that seems absolutely impossible. So, we think that courageous leaders set an unimaginably high bar in a game worth playing. Even if you fall short of that, you will still do something extraordinary. If I set out to have number one market share going from zero, and that’s our goal and we wind up being number two. But hey, we started from zero. So we’ve got to set a very high bar to start. 

The second is this idea of leading with a relentless desire to know more. Answers in business are not surface level. People want an easy answer to a tough question. The answers lie deep, deep in the business with trying to understand the root cause of the problem. What is the mousetrap that you’ll create that will besustainable, that can’t be disintermediated by a Chinese factory that’ll come in and sell a low-cost product on a platform? So how do we have this desire to know more, or know more than anyone else that is competing against us? We want to be explorers, not tour guides. 

Most of what we’re doing, is in uncharted territories. My expertise ran out eight years ago. I’m running on fumes when it comes to expertise at this point. Every day, we’re exploring new territory. We’re pivoting quickly. We’re getting smarter every day. We use the phrase “we reserve the right to get smarter” at the company. We make a decision, new information comes in, and we decide tomorrow that we’re going to change the decision. I think one of the things that many companies, or many leaders, get stuck in is saying, “I made a decision, so I just have to go in that direction.”

We want to constantly be on the lookout for if the decision we made was stupid. I stood up in front of our town hall at  a corporate meeting a number of months ago, and there were some questions about changes that we had made last year. I said to the organization, “I made a change because previously I was being stupid and I’ve decided now to be un-stupid.” 

What was the change?

The concept of un-stupid went viral around the company. People felt empowered to say, “I want to be un-stupid today. We’re going down this path. It doesn’t seem like we’re going to be successful. Let’s pivot and change.” SharkNinja’s not curing cancer. We’re trying to delight consumers. We’re trying to positively impact people’s lives. 

So, the change that you mentioned is how we were investing dollars in the company. We have to stay focused and invest dollars in areas of growth: growth when it comes to product development, growth when it comes to geographic expansion, growth when it comes to marketing and building awareness for our brands. I think we got too scattered and went after too many shiny objects.

There are lots of great initiatives for a company to go work on, but you also need focus. You need to make sure there are certain things that are sacred in a company, and that’s what requires the investment. Everything else might have to wait in line. You just can’t do everything at once. So, we had to pull back on some of those things, and we had to make some tough decisions about where we were going to invest and where we were going to hold for a little while, and then relook at it going into the next year.

This is a perfect tee up for your decision to invest in grills, but I have to know, what did you pull back from? Was there anything specific?

I think we went after a lot of technology projects. We were implementing Oracle at our company. We were re-platforming our e-commerce site. We’ve got this great partnership with Salesforce, and we’re launching a new e-commerce site in September. There were certain things that were just really mission-critical. There were other things that were really just nice-to-haves. They were not going to make or break our business, they were not going to create a competitive advantage. So, we had to decide what are the most important things and what it isn’t the right time for.

All right. Let’s put all this into practice and talk about grills. I love talking about grills. Can you tell? I’m eager to do it.

Great.

This is one of my favorite episodes of the year, to talk about the grill industry. You’ve laid out a lot of frameworks here. You’ve said, “We should have to deserve to be in the market. We need something better.” You’ve laid out not wanting to get away from the core areas of growth. The grill market is ferociously competitive and extremely well-served with lots of innovative companies. 

It feels to me like the people who are really into grilling like having different kinds of things as opposed to just one thing. I see it in backyards all over my town. If you got one, you’ll soon have two. It’s also been disrupted. One of our very first grill company guests was Roger Dahle, who founded the grill company Blackstone. He’s in the middle of buying Weber. He actually couldn’t be on this year because of antitrust. He has to go through FTC review to buy Weber. That’s a big disruption. He bought the market leader. Why enter this market? Where’s the differentiation? How do you think you can get to number one?

I think you have to go back to the fact that Ninja is the kitchen market leader. We built up a lot of brand equity in air fryers, ovens, cookware, blenders, coffee makers, and all kinds of things in the kitchen. So, three years ago, we decided that it was time for us to go outdoors, and we did it by developing a product called the Ninja Woodfire Grill, which is a grill, a smoker, and an air fryer. It was all electric and it sat on your tabletop. We felt like there was a really unserved need. I’ll give you examples. People who live in apartments can’t have propane, but they can have electric outside — campers, RVs, boats, and things like that, along with tailgates, and you can just plug it in.

We found that people who owned a grill weren’t going to invest in another smoker. So, we found that people would be interested in buying something that was small and could fit on a tabletop next to their outdoor grill, or vice versa. If they owned a smoker, now they could own a grill. We saw this in the vacuum cleaner business. You have an upright vacuum, a cordless vacuum, a robot vacuum, a hand vacuum. So, we went into the market, and in a very short period of time, we took big market share. We’re the number-one selling electric outdoor grill right now. We sell a number of different versions of it. We then went into outdoor ovens. So, we’ve got a really great–

Wait, can I just ask something? Sorry, you’re just in my wheelhouse. Having the number-one selling electric outdoor grill feels like a small part of a huge category.

It is. But you have to understand that you have to enter in a place where the consumer accepts you, and then you have to figure out what’s next. So, we go into tabletop grills and then expand from that into tabletop ovens. Now, we’ve got this outdoor oven that allows you to cook up to 700 degrees Fahrenheit, roast, and make pizza in it. That becomes a nice business for us globally. 

Then, we decide where to go next. We’re doing great in tabletop, but now, as you said, there’s this big $5 billion market around large format, outdoor cooking products. So, we look at it, put ourselves in the shoes of the consumer, and ask, “What’s the empathy of the consumer?” The consumer goes to the Home Depot parking lot on Memorial Day weekend and tell one of the orange aprons that they want to buy a grill. The person says to them, “Well, do you want a grill, or do you want a smoker? Do you want a pizza oven, or do you want a roaster or a griddle?”

That becomes the first problem for the consumer. “I’ve got to make a choice.” Maybe there’s multiple grills outside in your neighborhood, but this person is saying you have one to choose from. “What do I do? Do I want a griddle? Do I want a grill? Do I want a pizza oven? Do I want a smoker?” So, we started with that and thought it felt like a really credible problem for somebody to solve. It took us two years, but we developed the world’s first grill that’s powered by propane, electric, and a cyclonic fan. That’s three things. There are incredible patents and technology in this product. 

Now, if you have those three things, what can you do? You can have incredible temperature control. Once I have incredible temperature control and I can move and circulate the air inside, I can grill, smoke, have a fully functional pizza oven, griddle, and roast. We called it the Ninja FlexFlame, and it’s the world’s first product that can do all of those things under one hood. 

So, we envisioned a world where the consumer can now go to the Home Depot parking lot, ask that same question to the orange apron, and that person will respond, “Well, sir or ma’am, you could either have a grill or a smoker, or Ninja’s got something that does it all.” And not just something that does it all and does it so-so. It grills like an incredibly professional $1,000-plus griller, smokes as well as a $1,000 smoker, makes Neapolitan pizza in a few minutes, griddles, roasts, and has incredibly even cooking performance. 

We came out with that product a couple of months ago. You can go online and look at it. It’s a 4.6-star rated product. It’s doing great. We launched it with an ad campaign with David Beckham. We think this opens up a whole new global opportunity for us.

You said cyclonic fan. There’s that fan again. This feels like core technology for you guys. Is it related to the Shark fans?

Well, sure. We understand airflow, we understand motors, and we understand electronics. Think about your grill 10 years ago. You put a bunch of charcoal into a pot, you lit it up, and it had some flame and it grilled for you. This product’s got a cyclonic fan. It’s got amazing amounts of electronics in it for precision temperature control. It has wood fire pellets that allow you to smoke. It has electrical power and it has propane power. What would a team of 1,300 engineers be thinking about if they wanted to build the most amazing product outdoors? I believe most consumers aren’t in a position to be able to have four different products on their outdoor patio. 

So we came out with this product, and we launched it at $999. We think this product offers breakthrough innovation, market-leading performance, great quality, and an extraordinary value for what it delivers.

I apologize, but I’ve had a lot of grill company CEOs on the show. I’m telling you, it’s one of my favorite episodes of the year because all of the grill industry’s problems are the problems that every other company has, but we don’t think about that industry in the same way. 

So, I would broadly describe the business models of your competitors in the grill industry as breaking down into two camps. There’s Big Green Egg, which wants to sell you a very expensive product that will last for a lifetime and that you will pass on for generations. They’re owned by a family foundation, and they’re not chasing profits in that way. It’s totally fascinating. There’s some high-end grill companies that also think the same way. Then there’s everyone else, and they say, “We’re going to put a hunk of metal outside. In three years, it’s going to rust out, and you’re going to buy a new one.”  

But being able to do everything at $999 combined with, “Oh, boy, my hunk of metal rusted out and it’s going away” is not a winning proposition. So, how do you think about that cycle, because those are basically the two camps. Are you trying to last forever, or are you trying to get replaced on a cadence outside?

Look, there’s obviously a replacement cycle for the product, but our business is about innovating and putting our products into retirement before their usable life ends. It’s no different than what Apple does. If you have an iPhone 14, you don’t really need the iPhone 16 when it comes out. Your iPhone 14 is just fine. But there’s some technology. It’s got three cameras. It’s got some other things in it. That’s  SharkNinja’s model. If I relied on a replacement cycle, someone would buy a product and they’d come back four years later to buy the next product. I want the consumer to get excited about what we do and say, “Wow.” 

Air fryers are a great example. We came out with our first air fryer, which had four cords and did an amazing job air frying your food. We immediately got feedback from consumers that they wanted larger capacity. So, we developed five-cord, six-cord, and seven-cord air fryers. We then found out from consumers that they were batch cooking. They were making the chicken tenders and french fries for their kids and putting in the salmon and asparagus for themselves. 

We said, “What if we could develop an air fryer that could cook two things at the same time in two independent baskets?” And that became the number-one selling air fryer on the market. We then, shortly after that, found out that consumers loved that concept, but it took up too much counter space for some consumers. So we took that side-by-side air fryer, stacked the baskets on top of each other, and made the world’s first stackable air fryer. 

Now, we found that consumers go home, prep their lunch, and take it to the office, or they meal prep their food for the whole week. What if we could develop an air fryer that fits in the palm of your hand? That’s a product called the Ninja Crispi. Now  there are consumers who are bringing these healthy glass cooking vessels to work. They bring their air fryer pod. Instead of putting their food into a microwave that’s going to make it all soggy and mushy for lunch, they’re actually air frying their food at their desks and eating it for lunch. They’re meal prepping in the beginning of the week, and then they’re just putting their Ninja Crispi on top of it.

So, if you look at the file on our direct-to-consumer business, you have consumers seven years ago that bought a four-quart air fryer and then bought a dual zone air fryer two years later. Then, they came back two years later and bought a Ninja Crispi. That’s how we think about the business. I can tell you that two or three years from now, we’re going to come out with some innovation that’s going to be even better, even more exciting than what we developed with the Ninja FlexFlame, and it will allow the consumer to make a decision. Maybe they’ll give that product to a neighbor or their child, whatever it might be, because Ninja or Shark has come out with the next great innovation.

I’m compelled to point out that the core mechanical component of an air fryer is a fan. Just saying it! It pops up over and over again in this conversation. You’ve got a lot of fan technology. It’s wild to see how disparately it can be expressed. 

You’ve mentioned software a couple of times. It’s in the FlexFlame, it’s in a lot of the other products. One of the running themes on the show is that once you start investing in software, that just becomes an exponentially increasing cost. The servers have to stay up, the apps have to be updated. Apple’s going to keep releasing new phones and change the design language of iOS on a whim whenever it wants to. Is that all in-house for you? Do you contract that out? Because one of the biggest complaints I see with smart grills and smart appliances is, “Well, I bought this expensive thing, the app broke, and now my grill is useless.”

It’s a great question. I would say that about 75 percent of it is in-house, and about 25 percent of it is out-of-house. This is an industry and a market that is changing so quickly. Having an app that is standalone on your phone, like Waze or Uber, is very different from having an app that is connected to some sort of hardware device. It’s a whole different situation. We’re the first to admit that we need to bring lots of great minds around this. So, a portion of that is absolutely outsourced, as we look at testing, validation, and development ideas. But we do have a great internal core team working on that. It works on that with our robot products and our outdoor cooking products. 

The concept of an app on a product is very interesting. I remember going to trade shows six years ago where every single booth just commented,  “We have an app.” I remember going down once into one of our engineering labs, and there was a blender there. A person handed me their iPhone and said, “Here, use the blender.” I went on the iPhone and I pressed go for the blender to start. I said, “Well, our blenders just have one button. Unless the app can put my bananas, my strawberries, and my protein powder into it while I’m in bed, why do I need an app on this particular product? I can just fill everything up and push a button. We have a technology called BlendSense with sensors that know when the blending is stopping.

With apps, the really important thing to understand is when the app is a vanity exercise versus when it’s bringing true value to the consumer and unlocking something in the product that they wouldn’t be able to do if the app didn’t exist. I think that’s the case with robots. There’s a case to be made with outdoor cooking. But as you said, it is very complex putting an app together with some sort of hardware and making sure that all of those pieces connect for every house, every router, every consumer that’s using it. So, we’ve got to work with both in-house and out-of-house people to help us do that.

How do you think about that cost? There’s the consumer experience of, “I bought a grill five years ago, they never updated the app. Some of my features went away because iOS changed.” That’s one side of the experience. From the company perspective, what I hear so often is, “Well, there’s no recurring revenue model for this product that supports ongoing development of this app.” 

You brought up Uber. Uber’s business is that app, and it spends a lot of money developing that app. Do you have that kind of model in place where you can say, “Okay, here’s the ongoing support cost of the FlexFlame Grill that will make sure we deliver updates to the app?”

Something interesting for you to know is that we update our robot app nearly every single month, and that goes out to all of the devices out there. It could be a product that somebody bought five years ago. There’s constant, constant updates as we’re looking at data from the apps, getting testing feedback, getting return information, or getting customer service questions. We could be adding bug fixes or we could be adding new feature functionality.

But you’re not charging subscription revenue?

No, no.

So that’s just cost. So how do you think about that cost versus the margin of the product at the onetime sale?

We look at it as all about positively impacting the consumer. I need the consumer to have a great experience so that they come back and when we go into the next category, they say, “I had a great experience with this Shark or Ninja product, I’m willing to try them in the next category.” You brought up other outdoor cooking companies and other companies. You have to understand that most companies have a business model where they want to sell you a product, and then they want to sell you another product four years later when it comes to the replacement cycle. I want to sell you two products a year. I want to sell you a cordless blender. I want to sell you an espresso machine. I want to sell you an LED infrared face mask. If you have a bad experience with one of our products, I’m going to lose that whole recurring revenue stream from you as the consumer. 

I’ve been doing this for 17 years. I want to do this for another 20 years. Over that period of time, there will be a finite number of consumers. And every day, as a business, you’re either gaining loyal consumers or you’re losing frustrated consumers. So when you say, “Well, what’s the ROI on that?” What’s the ROI on happiness? The ROI on happiness for SharkNinja is infinite. That’s how we’ve built our business. It’s not even a question as to whether we’ll go and do it. The answer is we have to do it. We have to make sure that our consumers are happy.

This conversation is really interesting, and there are two themes. One is that fans are everywhere, and the other one is how much you’re willing to talk about costs, things that cost money against growth. You’re constantly expanding. You’re launching 25 new products a year. It feels like you see growth as the engine that justifies whatever costs come about. Do you see an end to that growth?

Hopefully not.

I’m just asking because at some point. You’re going to run into a category problem, where you’re Apple and you have to make a car.

Look, I’ve been told that now for 15 years. “Mark, you have a $500 million business. Could it get any bigger? Now you have a $700 million business. Can it get any bigger?” If you’ve worked at a company that’s growing 1 percent or declining 2 percent, it’s tough. Inflation is going up 3 or 4 percent. There’s not much money at that point to invest, innovate, reinvent yourself, and all of those things. Part of what we’re trying to do is disrupt ourselves. We were known as Shark, the steam mop company, 17 years ago. Then, we were Shark, the vacuum company. Now, if you speak to a college-aged person, they think we’re Shark, the beauty company. We’re constantly reinventing ourselves. 

 So, what growth allows you to do is invest, but investing alone is not enough. It’s not enough just to have money to invest. It’s about how willing you are disrupt yourself. Are you willing to take your old business model, rip it up, throw it away, and start new again? Are you willing to pivot quickly? Are you willing to say, “I’m going down a path that likely won’t work or that someone else is going to catch up to me?” 

We go into these categories… I’ll invite you after we’re done with this, and it does apply to your air model. We have a product called the Shark TurboBlade. It is an indoor fan with 350 million impressions on social media right now. It is going viral on social media. When you look at that, you say to yourself, “Well, Mark, it’s a fan.” No, it solves an incredible consumer problem that the consumer didn’t even know that they had. It also creates a category of one. We’re not in the fan business, we’re in the TurboBlade business. We’re in the comfort business. So again, growth is the pathway. But it’s the mindset and the culture that allows you to be able to say, “I’m willing to rip it all up and start over again.” We’ve got to create a definable competitive advantage.

There’s something really interesting, and honestly refreshing about the idea that you essentially see infinite new categories that will allow you to invest in some of the costs. I see a lot of your competitors saying, “Actually, to preserve our margins, we have to stop investing in a bunch of stuff because Chinese companies are coming or Amazon is available.” Amazon at this point is ChatGPT for products. You type something in, and 5,000 suppliers will show up to sell you variations of the same product. 

The other piece of this, which I think is really interesting — and I want to make sure we spend some time on it here at the end — is how you think about marketing and about the brand. The brand is getting more upscale. We have a Shark vacuum from 1,000 years ago. I know that the plastics you’re using now are much higher quality than the one we have.

You’re moving up, and a lot of how you’re moving up is marketing on social media. Adweek had a story reporting that you’re spending $700 million a year on advertising. That’s 11 percent of your sales, and all that is going to creators and product placement. As we’re speaking, the whole ad industry is at the Cannes Film Festival in France right now talking about the future of the ads. I look at your spend and I think, “Oh, this is the meteorite. This is going to hit the earth, and everything’s going to change.” You’re at the bleeding edge of it. Why make that bet? How do you think that is going, and where do you think it goes from here?

Let’s go back 16 years. At that time, 100 percent of our ad spend was on what were called long-form infomercials, which were 30-minute infomercials. My partner would go on TV and run demonstrations. He and I would develop demo ideas to do. Why? Because we didn’t have any money at the time, and so we went on TV. A certain amount of the sales came to us directly and paid for the advertising expense. But a large portion of the sales went and got sold at retail outlets. 

So, every company has to find their white space. So let’s start with that. People would say to me, “Well, you’re on infomercials.” Okay, but that was our way of expressing to the consumer what was unique or different about our products and the problems that we were solving, and it helped build our brands.

I want to go back to the point about the online reviews in 2008. When I was a kid growing up in New York in the ’80s, there was the Sims Store, which would say, “The educated consumer is our best customer.” Well, in 1985, there were not many educated consumers. If you had a problem with a product, you returned it to the store, and you told your mom, dad, or friend that you wouldn’t buy this product. There was no forum where you could get the information out. 

So, when online reviews started, that became a great selling vehicle and a great referral vehicle for us. It evolved as you got into 2014 and 2015 on Facebook. You’d have these big Facebook group chats with 30,000 or 40,000 people exchanging recipes and ideas. Then, right before COVID and during COVID, it really started evolving into social media with Instagram and TikTok. Today, it’s so much more than that. The platform we are going to have the highest increase on this year will likely be Reddit. We’re spending more on Pinterest. We’re spending more on YouTube. 

There are now these ways for consumers and creators to express themselves, and for others to be able to get information about the product. So, if you go back a number of years and you were advertising, you created one message. You created one ad, you ran that one ad at nine o’clock at night on NBC, and the only people that saw it were the people who were watching NBC at nine o’clock at night. Go look at the comments section on some of our new products. “When is this product coming to Portugal? When’s the product coming to Norway?”

Wed did a really interesting exercise. We went and mapped how buyers consume social media all around the world. You’d be interested to know that they’re not just consuming it in English in the United States, Canada, the UK, and Australia. They’re predominantly consuming it in English in the Netherlands, Poland, the Nordics, and the Middle East. So, one of the things that’s really driven the global expansion of our business is that there’s already pent-up demand for our products even before we even bring them into a market. 

I’ll give you an interesting example. We were launching our Ninja Slushi in Norway. Social media got wind that one of the major retailers was going to have a Ninja Slushi product. The temperature outside was 5 degrees Fahrenheit. There were 400 people lined up outside of the store to buy a Ninja Slushi. That all came from this social media awareness that has no borders and just permeates all around the world.

One of the things I think about a lot with the creator economy is that there’s the organic demand, which you’re describing. People see things. The content can travel anywhere with little regard for borders. Then, there’s your spend. You are spending on creators and influencers. That is a huge part of the market. It is a growing part of the market. There’s a ton of excitement there. There’s a ton of money there. 

I see a supply and demand problem in the influencer economy. I think the creator-branded content economy is headed towards a crash just because of supply and demand. There’s an infinite supply of creators every day, and more creators are coming onto these platforms. There’s AI, which I want to talk about for one second here, that’s creating more and more content. There’s only so many people with only so many minutes. You can see the supply is just going to outstrip demand over time. Are you seeing your rates that you’re paying influencers go up or down in response to this?

So I look at it a little bit differently. I think the crash that’s going to happen will be a big shakeout for those who are not creating compelling content. If you’re able to build super compelling content, you become very valuable to brands and to market with. I think there are a lot of people out there who are nailing it on their content, and they’re not investing in themselves, not evolving, and not continuously getting better.

You as a creator might be able to do something for a brand, and you’ll say, “Hey, I did this post.” But I think you really need to be looking at the lifetime value you could be doing with this brand, not that one post. What if I was working with a company that was coming out with 25 new products a year, and they called me up every year to work with them on five of their products? I wouldn’t be thinking anymore about the short-term impact of getting through that one post and moving on to something else. I think that is what will to evolve and change over the course of the next year or two years as the metrics and the data become much faster, much more transparent. 

I think we already have dashboards in the company where we can immediately look at a person, scorecard them, and be able to say, “These are creators we don’t want to work with anymore. These are creators we want to work with tremendously moving forward.” I don’t think that was something that was looked at as closely or managed as effectively since there was this big swoop up. I think you will see that change considerably over the next 18 months. You will find that the best creators really rise to the top, and there’s a real bifurcation of the market.

When you look at those scorecards and dashboards, what are the metrics that you’re measuring to figure out who’s worth working with and who’s worth dropping?

We’re looking at engagement metrics. We’re not just looking at views. We’re looking at likes, shares, and comments, and we’re looking at the types of comments. Are they commenting about something that you did that got them excited about the product, or are they commenting about something that maybe you wore in the spot? 

So, there are tools and metrics now that have allowed us to get so much more educated. If I go back even 24 months ago, you’d get excited about a post that had 500,000 views. That 500,000 views is not the answer anymore. It’s now about drilling down and really understanding if a cohort of people engaged with that content. Did they get excited about that product? What did they do once they saw it? Did they just scroll to the next one, or did it elicit some type of reaction or feedback? I think that the world is getting much more educated and intelligent about that.

I want to read you this quote from Mark Zuckerberg, because what you’re describing is a trend I see everywhere, which is that this industry is professionalizing. There’s going to be some winners and there’s going to be some losers. It’s really interesting to me that your background is in infomercials because I see all of these social platforms turning into marketing channels. 

You’re describing the individual creator as something like a new generation ad agency or a marketing firm. They’re independent marketing agencies, they partner with you for a long duration, and they think of you as a client and they’re trying to deliver results to you. You could see how that would play out, but for AI. The platforms see that money, they see your $700 million, and they want it for themselves. 

I say this as explicitly as I’m saying it because I have Zuckerberg here. He said this on stage at various conferences. He said it to my friend Ben Thompson, who recently interviewed him. I’m just going to read you the quote: “In general, we’re going to get to a point where you’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect your bank account. You don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographics, you don’t need any measurement, except to be able to read the results we spit out… I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising.” 

So he’s saying, “You, Mark, are going to show up, and you’re going to say, ‘I just need to sell some grills.’” Meta is going to AI generate some advertising, put it in their feeds, and deliver you sales. How do you feel about that?

I think the professionalizing piece is spot on. The multi-year journey that we go on to develop a product and the insights that we get by having the product in 1,000 consumer homes, and all of this feedback that we get prior to launching the product that informs our creative and really allows us to hone the messaging and the testing. I think there’s a model out there where people say, “You know what? Forget all that. Just put out 10,000 pieces of content and see what hits. For the ones that hit, amplify, and for the ones that don’t hit, go away.”

I still believe that with what we do, with the knowledge that we gain and the testing that we do, there is a need for great content, a real understanding of the product, and a real understanding of how the product is going to delight the consumer in their home. I think there’s a role — I call it fishing with a big net and throwing the net out there — but I also think that it is not going to be as overly simple as the way it’s described.

I think that’s the other pressure on rates, though. I can feel that coming, that the platforms will find a way to take money out of the rates that the creators are getting paid. Like Instagram, for example. Today, creators make no money from Instagram. Their money is almost entirely from brand sponsorships and other integrated marketing. I think Meta will some of that money over time. How do you feel about the rates you’re paying to your best creators now, and do you think they’re going to go up or do you think they’re going to go down?

It goes back to your supply and demand conversation and the metrics piece. I think the people who are doing amazing, compelling content will probably be more valuable, and they’re probably going to be worth more. Conversely, I think there’s going to be a whole group of people you were overpaying for, and you’re going to realize you were overpaying. You’re either going to have to negotiate those prices down or decide it’s not a fit. It’s no different than the way you look at TV networks. There are TV networks that deliver you the viewership you want at a certain price, and there are TV networks that don’t deliver it.

Again, I think this is great for the industry. I think this is great for content creators. People have said to me, “Mark, what happens if TikTok gets banned?” The content creator community is here to stay. They will find other platforms. They will go to other places. They will find ways to express their creativity and what they’re doing. They’re providing great insight to people. 

I’ve got to tell you something, When I go to a city, one of the first things I do is I go on TikTok and look for the best food places in that city. There’s amazing amounts of content and information that is so useful. I think in the end, this is going to be great for the content creator community, but it is going to be a situation where those who are doing great work are going to get paid more, and those who aren’t are going to have to reinvent themselves.

Can I ask you an existential question? I know why it’s great for businesses that are trying to sell things. I can see that pretty clearly. I know why it’s great for the creators. They’re making a lot of money with essentially infomercials. I don’t know if it’s great for the people who consume media to open all the different apps on their phone, which are taking more and more time, and be awash in a sea of paid sponsored marketing messages. 

Ultimately, these platforms are just becoming marketing channels. That is the money that drives the entire content ecosystem on every single one of these platforms. How do you think about that? You are a consumer of media as well. How do you experience that?

We want to be relevant wherever the consumer is engaging and consuming content. We want to be relevant wherever the consumer is choosing to shop. I think it is the error of any consumer products company to not go where the consumer is going. I think if you head off to a different place where the consumer is not, and you just hope that the consumer would go there —

No, I understand the company’s needs and why you’re there. I’m asking about you as a consumer of media, when you open TikTok or Instagram and it’s all marketing messages.

Look, as a consumer, I’m consuming content in lots of different ways. I have my Apple News feed that I open up in the morning. I have my Bloomberg subscription that I open up in the morning. I’ve got options. I don’t have to open up Instagram. I don’t have to open up TikTok. I can open it up for the purposeful things I want to open it up for. But there are lots of other ways I can get information. I think it’s really up to the consumer to make that decision. 

I’ll give you a great example. We just put the SharkNinja brand on Brad Pitt’s race car in F1: The Movie. We never thought about investing in Formula 1 or movies in the past, but we were just at the premiere, and SharkNinja had incredible placement. So social media is one place. The point is how are we a part of culture? Culture could be experiential events. Culture could be movies, TV shows, or outdoors. 

I’m fascinated by what LVMH has done on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. Their store’s under construction, and they cover the entire store in a Louis Vuitton suitcase. You’ve got people on every corner snapping content in front of it. So again, I think it’s about being relevant where the consumer chooses to ingest content.

We got to add a Verge subscription to your list of subscriptions. It’s very important to me that we throw that in there. 

You’ve given me so much time, this has been great. Last question. You’ve got all these new products every year. As you look out over the next 12 months, what’s the one that we should all be looking out for?

Wow. You’re going to get me in trouble if I tell you.

That’s the idea. You get in trouble right at the end.

I’m really excited about our beauty business and the roadmap we have coming out in hair and skin. I have two twenty-something-year-old daughters. That’s just a category I have a lot of passion for. My wife is a beauty enthusiast. So I’m really excited about what we’re doing in beauty. 

On the Ninja side, I’m really excited about what we’re doing in the kitchen to bring things to consumers that make their homes and lives better. I think what we’re doing with the Luxe Café is incredible. The consumer can get drip coffee, iced coffee, and espresso, and can froth hot milk, cold milk, dairy milk, and non-dairy milk. I think we’re doing that in coffee. I think we’re doing that in slushies. I think we’re doing that in ice cream. I think we’re doing that in cooking. I’m just so excited. The roadmap of ideas we have in Ninja is really fulfilling this mission of positively impacting people’s lives every day and in every home around the world.

Mark, this has been great. We’re going to have to get you back. There’s a lot of stuff I didn’t get to talk about that I really want to talk to you about. So we’ll have you come back soon, maybe before the next grill comes out.

Look forward to it. Maybe fan season.

I’m telling you, once you start seeing fans, they’re everywhere.

Great. Thanks so much.

_{Questions or comments about this episode? Hit us up at [email protected]. We really do read every email!}

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For someone who says she is fighting AI bot scrapers just in her free time, Xe Iaso seems to be putting up an impressive fight. Since she launched it in January, Anubis, a “program is designed to help protect the small internet from the endless storm of requests that flood in from AI companies,” has been downloaded nearly 200,000 times, and is being used by notable organizations including GNOME, the popular open-source desktop environment for Linux, FFmpeg, the open-source software project for handling video and other media, and UNESCO, the United Nations organization for educations, science, and culture. 

Iaso decided to develop Anubis after discovering that her own Git server was struggling with AI scrapers, bots that crawl the web hoovering up anything that can be used for the training data that power AI models. Like many libraries, archives, and other small organizations, Iaso discovered her Git server was getting slammed only when it stopped working.  

“I wasn't able to load it in my browser. I thought, huh, that's strange,” Iaso told me on a call. “So I looked at the logs and I figured out that it's restarted about 500 times in the last two days. So I looked in the access logs and I saw that [an] Amazon [bot] was clicking on every single link.”

Iaso knew it was an Amazon bot because it self identified as such. She said she considered withdrawing the Git server from the open web but that because she wants to keep some of the source code hosted there open to the public, she tried to stop the Amazon bot instead. 

“I tried some things that I can’t admit in a recorded environment. None of them worked. So I had a bad idea,” she said. “I implemented some code. I put it up on GitHub in an experimental project dumping ground, and then the GNOME desktop environment started using it as a Hail Mary. And that's about when I knew that I had something on my hands.”

There are several ways people and organizations are trying to stop bots at the moment. Historically, robots.txt, a file sites could use to tell automated tools not to scrape, was a respected and sufficient norm for this purpose, but since the generative AI boom, major AI companies as well as less established companies and even individuals, often ignored it. CAPTCHAs, the little tests users take to prove they’re not a robot, aren’t great, Iaso said, because some AI bot scrapers have CAPTCHA solvers built in. Some developers have created “infinite mazes” that send AI bot scrapers from useless link to useless link, diverting them from the actual sites humans use and wasting their time. Cloudflare, the ubiquitous internet infrastructure company, has created a similar “AI labyrinth” feature to trap bots. 

Iaso, who said she deals with some generative AI at her day job, told me that “from what I have learned, poisoning datasets doesn't work. It makes you feel good, but it ends up using more compute than you end up saving. I don't know the polite way to say this, but if you piss in an ocean, the ocean does not turn into piss.”

In other words, Iaso thinks that it might be fun to mess with the AI bots that are trying to mess with the internet, but in many cases it’s not practical to send them on these wild goose chases because it requires resources Cloudflare might have, but small organizations and individuals don’t. 

“Anubis is an uncaptcha,” Iaso explains on her site. “It uses features of your browser to automate a lot of the work that a CAPTCHA would, and right now the main implementation is by having it run a bunch of cryptographic math with JavaScript to prove that you can run JavaScript in a way that can be validated on the server.”

Essentially, Anubis verifies that any visitor to a site is a human using a browser as opposed to a bot. One of the ways it does this is by making the browser do a type of cryptographic math with JavaScript or other subtle checks that browsers do by default but bots have to be explicitly programmed to do. This check is invisible to the user, and most browsers since 2022 are able to complete this test. In theory, bot scrapers could pretend to be users with browsers as well, but the additional computational cost of doing so on the scale of scraping the entire internet would be huge. This way, Anubis creates a computational cost that is prohibitively expensive for AI scrapers that are hitting millions and millions of sites, but marginal for an individual user who is just using the internet like a human. 

Anubis is free, open source, lightweight, can be self-hosted, and can be implemented almost anywhere. It also appears to be a pretty good solution for what we’ve repeatedly reported is a widespread problem across the internet, which helps explain its popularity. But Iaso is still putting a lot of work into improving it and adding features. She told me she’s working on a non cryptographic challenge so it taxes users’ CPUs less, and also thinking about a version that doesn’t require JavaScript, which some privacy-minded disable in their browsers. 

The biggest challenge in developing Anubis, Iaso said, is finding the balance. 

“The balance between figuring out how to block things without people being blocked, without affecting too many people with false positives,” she said. “And also making sure that the people running the bots can't figure out what pattern they're hitting, while also letting people that are caught in the web be able to figure out what pattern they're hitting, so that they can contact the organization and get help. So that's like, you know, the standard, impossible scenario.”

Iaso has a Patreon and is also supported by sponsors on Github who use Anubis, but she said she still doesn’t have enough financial support to develop it full time. She said that if she had the funding, she’d also hire one of the main contributors to the project. Ultimately, Anubis will always need more work because it is a never ending cat and mouse game between AI bot scrapers and the people trying to stop them. 

Iaso said she thinks AI companies follow her work, and that if they really want to stop her and Anubis they just need to distract her. 

“If you are working at an AI company, here's how you can sabotage Anubis development as easily and quickly as possible,” she wrote on her site. “So first is quit your job, second is work for Square Enix, and third is make absolute banger stuff for Final Fantasy XIV. That’s how you can sabotage this the best.”

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