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subscription today for only $99 at video blocks.com slash recode. I'm here with Elizabeth Spires, who's had many cool jobs, which we'll talk about several of them. The one I want to start off talking about is your first job in New York, was it your first job in New York? Founding editor? No, of course not. You had a job. We're here with Elizabeth Spires, who, among other things, was the founding editor at Cocker. Welcome, Elizabeth. Oh, thank you for having me. She's also my neighbor, so this fulfills every sort of stereotype of Brooklyn media people hanging out. The caveat is we haven't seen each other for a year, so that destroys the stereotype a little bit. Yeah, I think we used to run into each other more in Manhattan than we do living four or five blocks away. Yeah, in Deep Bay Ridge, too, so that's part of the Brooklyn stereotype. It doesn't hold up. Hello again. Thank you for joining us. When people hear this, Gawker Media will have a new owner via a bankruptcy court auction. Later tonight, I'll see you at a New York Media Party that Gawker's having. It's a wake for Gawker. I want to ask you about sort of where you think the company will go. But start off by explaining how you got that job. How did you become the founding editor of Gawker? I met Nick Denton at a Metafilter meetup in 2000. We were introduced by Anil Dash. I met Corey Seca there, too. Explain to people who are not steeped in New York blog world, what a Metafilter party is.

So Metafilter was still around.

It's a group blog founded by a guy named Matt Howie.

In 2000 or so I don't think a lot of people were blogging categorically.

And so if you knew about Metafilter, you were probably part of an you know, an early web community or just kind of an

outlier. I mean, people who were blogging at that point were blogging about technology or

politics and almost nothing in between.

Blogger wasn't a job, right? It was something you did. It was a hobby for giggles.

And it was fairly obscure. You know, the New York Times was still having to explain what a blog was,

and any time they wrote about it, and they were still spelling it capital, W-E-B-L-O-G.

So I went to a New York meetup for Metafilter, and I kind of, you know, there are several of us

who had blogs, and we were reading each other. So I was reading Next blog, he was reading

mine. We were both reading Anil Dash, I was reading the morning news and Corey was writing there. So my perception is all you guys lived in the Lower East Side of the East Village or at least we're like... I think we all lived downtown at the time. Nick had just moved to New York. So he'd been there for two weeks. Nick and Nick had built and sold a couple

businesses. Yes. He started a company called First Tuesday with three other entrepreneurs in London,

sold it, moved to San Francisco with a childhood friend of his David Galbraith and a third friend,

and they started moreover in San

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