The Skimm | Carly Zakin & Danielle Weisberg
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Welcome to the Talks at Google podcast, where great minds meet. I'm Emma, bringing you this episode with Carly Zakhin and Danielle Weisberg, co-founders and co-CEOs of The Skimm. Talks at Google brings the world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. You can watch every episode at youtube.com slash talks at google.

The Skimm was founded in 2012 as a daily newsletter for women to make the news more digestible and to help you understand how the day's stories impact your life. Since then, it's expanded into a digital media company, including multiple newsletters, podcasts, a mobile app, and Skimm Studios. Carly Zakhin and Danielle Weisberg joined Google to discuss their book, How to Skimm Your Life.

With their trademark mix of real talk, humor, and inspirational messaging, the book covers everything from budgeting to owning your career to choosing the right wine. How to Skim Your Life breaks down some of the less glamorous parts of adulting. Originally published in 2019, here are Carly Zakhin and Danielle Weisberg. The Skim.

Thanks for having us today. We're so excited to be here. We love Google because you have the best food. Priorities. Yes. So thank you both so much for being here. Your book is out now. It came out yesterday. Congratulations. It came out today. Yes. Thank you.

Thank you. We had our first book tour event here in New York last night. The book dropped this morning. We're so excited. Kick off the rest of our tour. We leave here and go to the airport. That's so exciting. I love it. You're busy, busy women. So let's back up a little bit. So you started The Skimm in 2012. Can you tell us what The Skimm is for anyone who may not know? Sure. The Skimm is a membership to Living Smarter. So Carly and I started it in 2012.

We were 25 years old. We had about $4,000 saved up and our laptops that didn't really work. And we were producers. We grew up loving news. We love journalism. We love storytelling. And we knew how to ask people questions. And...

We graduated. We found ourselves in great jobs. We had moved up pretty quickly, looked around and realized for the first time that it's weird to get paid to read the news every single day. And that our friends who are smart and educated and on the go had other things that they had going on in their lives. And we took a step back and thought about millennial women and this demographic that is amazing and leading in so many different ways.

and making household spending and purchasing decisions. And there wasn't a new source geared towards how they like to live. And that didn't make any sense to us. So we did on a bigger scale what we had always done, which is break down what was going on that day and tell our friends, which has now turned into millions of women throughout the day. And

Obviously, over the past seven years, we focused on news, but we really started to have conversations. And with these amazing women in our community, we have over 40,000 Skimbassadors and our Skim Squad who helped us launch the book. And we would hear about what else was going on in their lives and the questions. And we found the common thread that no one has their shit together, that everyone has questions and

that everyone doesn't really know what it's like to be an adult. And you want to have experts to ask. And there isn't an expert because everyone's figuring it out. So that's really where we're going with this book. And The Skimm as a Company is working towards making it easier to live smarter across all categories of your life.

That's amazing. I don't have my shit together. I promise. We don't either. It's great. But that's what I love so much about the skim is that that's the secret. Like everybody is still figuring it out. And when we work together and we come together as a community, we make it so much easier on everyone. Share the knowledge. Like it's not a competition. It's a marathon that we're all running together. And I love that. What gaps were you seeing in the media landscape when you first started this? What made you say...

I don't like reading the news or I don't... Well, you guys like reading the news. But what was... What were you seeing that your friends weren't really into? Well, so we definitely loved reading the news. And I think Index probably very much out of our kind of age demo. We both watched the evening news at 6.30. We both were watching the Today Show and the morning shows all morning. So I think we were like skewing their demos. But...

Our friends, I mean, I think there were, there was a few things. One is, you know, when we looked at our friends routines, they aren't, they weren't home at 630. They weren't home in the morning with the TV on. And if the TV happened to be on, the volume wasn't on. And we were seeing, you know, where we worked, but not just at that company, but at all traditional media outlets that, you know,

They kept talking about, at the time, the word millennial. And it's kind of funny to think about that now. Seven years ago, that word was not overused the way it is today. We didn't even know we were millennials at the time. And I remember we Googled women in their 20s and 30s. And we were like, huh, that's what we are. And we saw that these companies were talking about how do we reach the younger audiences and having these town halls and all these internal conversations, but not actually...

hiring the people or building the teams to create content and experiences that fit into this audience's routines. And then when we talked, when we looked at the new media landscape at the time, this isn't kind of the heyday of Twitter, I would say, the heyday of cable news, different heyday than we're in now. And there was just so much noise. And you would leave Twitter open, you'd go away from your desk for an hour, you come back, there's 400 tweets to catch up on and you're like, okay, I give up.

And so for us, we knew we had to execute on bringing information into our own routines and our friends' routines. That's great. Yeah. I'm never home. Let's talk about the importance of empowering women. The articles in The Skimm are very much geared towards millennial women, as we said. How does The Skimm differ from other news outlets and media companies? Where are you guys

different than our traditional news? Well, one thing we're not different on is that we don't believe news is gender specific. So the stories that we pick aren't particularly for women versus men. We don't think that there's a need for different news. What we do look at is the day-to-day routines of women in this particular age demographic. And when we're creating products,

That is how we think about what time are they waking up? What are the demands on their time? How are they living their day-to-day? And we're really obsessed with that. So when we create products, we think about average commuting times and that influences our podcast and audio strategy. So in that

way our company is completely focused on millennial women as a demographic. And luckily enough for us, that's also a demographic that likes good things. And because of that, we have 20% male readership. And then we also skew older and to Gen Z. So it's been a sweet spot in the middle. Yeah. Oprah loves you guys. I saw.

We'll take that. Yeah. I'm not going to argue with that. It's exciting. You guys now have 7 million subscribers to this game, over 7 million subscribers. So congratulations on that. That is incredible after just a few short years. How have you seen the audience evolving and changing over the years? You're saying now you have 20% male readership and you're starting to skew more. Are you changing the way you are presenting things or how has that evolved? I think

think that, um, you know, when you go back to your question before about what's our differentiation, we've known who we are and what our value proposition is for a very specific audience. And, you know, we used to laugh early on. We've been very public about, um, kind of the industry, I would say like the investor industry sort of not being interested in us in the early years. Um, it will say GB has invested in the skin. So thanks. Uh, but, um, in the early years we were told women were a niche market and it means that it's laughable. So, but, uh,

Obviously, that's not true. But we've always believed if you are everything to everyone, you're nothing to no one. And we've always had this very clear focus on the millennial woman. And that doesn't mean that we are for women necessarily at a specific age, but it means that we follow them through their life. And we're particularly interested in this generation for a few reasons. You know, as Danielle said, like it's authenticity.

to who we are, obviously. We all are seeing the same stats that women are out earning their male counterparts in paychecks and degrees. For the first time, we are getting seats at the table. We are having the conversations that need to be had. We are the largest voting bloc. We are the future legislators. So it's this very inspiring moment for all of us.

And then on the same side, there is a dismal picture, which is we have more student debt than any generation before. We're making less than our parents did at this age. We're getting married and having children later, if at all, which then leads to rising costs of fertility. Our dependents are going to be our parents who are getting pushed out of work earlier. And we won't have Social Security.

That's really fucking depressing. It's fine. And scary. It's totally fine. Everyone's good. So we all do that. And then that's why our first chapter is about wine. But I think I would say that because this generation is so fascinating. And it's this incredibly optimistic moment for this generation. And then so many burdens that...

We don't even realize what we're up against. And I think oftentimes the millennial generation, you know, gets accused of being, you know, impatient or entitled. And it really comes from a feeling of lack of security. And what this book is and why it was so important to us was what is the reference guide that we all need to know how to be an adult? Ask all the questions we all have. And our goal in this is that we all have enough information to

To then make choices. Because of all the things I just said, there's a lot of really important choices we have to make. Yeah. It's a little scary, but it's okay. It's going to be okay. We're going to be fine. So let's talk about the book specifically now. I like to describe this as a picture book for adulting. Oh, I like that. But like in the most empowering and also charming way. Great.

You can come on the road with us. Okay. We'll just hang out. No, it is... I was reading it all last week and it was just so wonderful. I couldn't put it down and it was...

such a great way of breaking down these concepts of stocks versus bonds versus every type of wine versus how to fold a fitted sheet. Thank you. Oh, yeah. That was honestly the hardest part of all of what I was writing about that. But where did this idea to write an actual book come from? At what point did you say, we have this great newsletter, we have this great community, let's make a reference guide? So it was inspired by two things. One is

was our amazing community of women that we've gotten to know that have been our biggest champions and our first critics. And they were really pushing us to chime in on different aspects of their lives. And we have a Facebook group with thousands of women and we talk to them all day long and we would see the questions that they had. And it was really... The chapters that we talk about are taken from those everyday questions. Mm-hmm.

We would take a step back with our team and none of us really knew the answers to these things. And we're all smart. So it seems like there wasn't a good source of information that was putting this all together in the right place. The second thing that pushed us towards this book is that there's a lot of stuff that we've learned over the past seven years in running our business.

that we had to learn again and again and again. Like that time I charged spring break on my credit card and I didn't understand interest rates. And it's, you know,

You have to pass it on and you have to be open about things that you didn't know. And one of the biggest things we wanted to put in this book is how to ask the right questions and how to overcome that feeling when you walk into a room with some sort of expert. And it could be a sommelier. It could be a financial advisor. It could be...

an expert on foreign economic policy, whatever it is, having this baseline information to be able to feel like you can confidently start a conversation. And that doesn't just touch news. It touches all aspects of lives. Our wish is that people open this book and find one thing that they've been putting off or one area of their life that they haven't felt confident in, read it and start a conversation now.

and just try something different. And that's really exciting for us. I think as a startup, there's never the right time to do anything different. Every time we branch out into something, it's scary. We're kind of entrepreneurs who are very...

risk adverse in a way, which I don't think people necessarily realize about us. And so for the first three years, it was like, just keep your heads down and focus on the newsletter. And then it was, okay, we're going to focus on creating our apps, game ahead, and creating subscription revenue. And then it was, we're seeing audio becoming big. And so let's launch a few podcasts. And

And then it was this idea that a year ago was a line, skim book, question mark, with a year attached to it on like a list of things that we wanted to do. And at some point, there was...

We'd taken away all of the reasons that we could say no to it. We had the right team to bring it to life. We had the right support from an amazing publisher and publicity teams. And I think as a startup, you have to have focus and you have to have laser focus. And then you get really good at saying no and saying no becomes the default. That for us, this book is kind of a reminder of saying yes to things. Yeah.

That's great. That's, um, I like that one year time. I was going to ask you, how long did it take you to write? Because everything in here is very recent. It's actually, uh, so we didn't start writing it when we said we would last year. So, um, we were told that the book process from when you sign a contract to like launch day takes two years. We did it in 10 months. So, uh, our team worked very hard on that. I love it. That is some motivation right there. And I think, and honestly, I think it went fast because, um,

This has been something we've been sitting on for a while. It really just poured out of us and our team. That's great. So the book covers a ton of topics, everything from how to negotiate, investing one-on-ones, geopolitics, pairing the right wine with the right foods. How do you decide which topics to put in?

I think, well, as Danielle said, you know, one, we were looking at what our community was actually talking about. What were they asking each other about? I mean, I would say the biggest themes that really came up and surfaced was around the section we call Skin BA, career, how to ask for a raise, how to negotiate. That's a big one.

than, uh, skim money, which is how do I get out of student? How do I get out of debt with my student loans? How do I, um, decide when I can buy a house? How do I negotiate a mortgage? Um, how do I get a financial advisor? What do you even say to them to check up on how you're doing so that you actually sound like, you know what you're talking about and then do know what you're talking about. Um, and so a lot of that came from our own personal experiences as well. Um, I mean, I think one section that was very personal for me was around, um, health insurance.

And I remember in my pre-skim life, I didn't go to the all hands in my company around choosing the plan because they kept talking about like this year, the deductible will be X. And I didn't know what the word deductible meant. And I felt really stupid and I didn't want to feel stupid in front of my coworkers. So I just said I had a meeting and I didn't go.

And now as an employer, when I see when people onboard and then they get their forms and you see when people ask, can I'm going to take this home? And I'm like, I see that look in your eye because I've had a two where you're like, do I fill out the one or the zero on my W-2? Like, how do you choose the health care plan? So we wrote about all of that because we've experienced it ourselves. And it's not bad.

because we're not smart. It's not because our audience isn't smart. It's because a lot of these industries literally make money on making their industries complicated. And

And so if we can combat that, that's a win, we think, for our audience. Yeah, knowledge is power. And then also, I mean, when we look at like what is the day-to-day of this audience's life, we all travel. We have great travel tips in there. We like wine. Our audience likes wine. We're one of the top ways to sell wine, actually, for this audience on Friday mornings. Our audience likes to drink. And so we talked about, you know, how do you actually, when you go to a restaurant, how do you know how to read a wine list if this is not your area of expertise? So we go through a kind of a whole guide around that as well. Yeah.

That's great. So I feel like you two will have a great answer for this because you seem to know what's going on. So there's a ton of different do's and don'ts and there's so much information packed into this book. And a lot of it is a great start for then you to go off and learn more. But how do you not feel overwhelmed by everything? How do you go about remembering, well, I have to do this, but I don't know how to do this. How do you negate that every day or how do you navigate that? I think one thing.

One day at a time and one thing at a time. This isn't supposed to be like none of us have to and we actually say it in the first chapter, which is like having it all isn't a thing. No one has it all and no one has it all at the same time. It might seem like that, but we're all struggling with juggling things all day long. So just turn to it, try one thing out, read one section, and then come back to it. And the great thing about having a reference guide is that it's there.

And the things that we put in are evergreen. It's not going to go out of style. It's something that you can revisit at all points of your life. So if you just graduated college and you're looking into renting your first apartment to you've saved up enough that you're thinking about buying

an apartment or house. All of that is covered. And so you're going to turn to it at different times for different parts of information. Hey, we're going to start the Q&A in just a moment. So you guys, if you have any questions, you can start lining up at the microphones in the aisles. But right before we start that, I want to talk about your podcast.

Thank you. You guys have not one but two podcasts. I'm a podcast nerd. I love that. So you have Skimmed from the Couch, which is where you two have conversations with influential women in the industry, either in business or politics or... Yeah, it's actually, it's not a specific industry, which is one of the things that we love about it. It's not just female CEOs. It is all women and all women who have leadership positions.

And you name it. So we've interviewed celebrities. We've interviewed politicians. We've interviewed the head of the Girl Scouts. We've interviewed so many amazing women. Sarah Blakely, who's actually hosting our bookstop tour in Atlanta. Just amazing women we admire. So we love it.

Yeah. So that one is really great. And then you also have Skim This, which is a breakdown of the news each day that hits your podcast feed at, I believe, 5 o'clock. That has become my go-to every day. That's my train ride home. Thank you. So where did you guys decide to start doing podcasts? Where did that come into play? So I think it goes back to really our product strategy from the beginning, which is how do we decide to do the skim? How do we decide to do an email? Which is...

what are our routines? Like we all check email first thing in the morning for better or worse. Then we commute home. Like we all end up leaving the office and hopefully you're not texting and driving or texting and walking and reading while you're walking. I know a lot of us do that, but we all want to listen to something.

And so we really paid attention to how our own habits are changing, how our friends' habits are changing and our audience's habits are changing. We wanted to create audio content that was time to your commute. So we actually started doing that in our subscription app about two years ago where we created premium audio content. And then we moved into podcasts, which are free in these different areas. So one around career,

one around news and the news one skim this specifically made to be about 10 or 11 minutes long every day. And it's not just like, here's all the news that happened today, but it's here's the most complicated thing that happened that everyone's talking about. And we'll explain to you why it's complicated.

That's amazing. So we have a question here in the audience. I have been reading The Skim probably for six years since back when I was living in DC. So it's traveled with me. I'm now in business school. I'm an MBA intern here. And I was just curious, what advice do you have for female entrepreneurs? Network.

I think that is the advice I would give any entrepreneur that and take a vacation before you start. And like, seriously, do that one. We didn't. But I think that building your own network is...

I think that it is one of the most important things that you could do. You are going to have to represent whatever you start. You are going to have to be more passionate about it than anyone you could pay to do that for you. And so coming up with your own circle of people who know you, who are your 911 call, that has made all the difference in our business.

Thank you so much. Similar skim reader. It's awesome. But recently, I feel like I've had more of an issue just reading the news all the time as well. No matter where you stand on the issue, sometimes it just feels like it's a pretty dark world out there. And I almost it's almost hard to keep up.

with everything, um, being so kind of tied into all of that, how do you, how do you cope and how would you suggest, do you have any suggestions for how we can kind of remember that the world is still a good place sometimes? Yes. Um, one word vote. So, uh, and I say that, um,

with the kind of explanation that we are a nonpartisan organization. And so when we talk about what differentiates us, especially in today's media landscape, our audience is very divided politically. They are very geographically and politically diverse. And that's something we're very, very proud of. And it's enabled us to create this platform that we call No Excuses, which contributed to us getting, in 2018, over 200,000 people to vote. And

when we think about that and we think about how do you take, no matter what side you're on, like the news is crazy right now and it's exhausting. And there's, when we started the skim seven years ago, we felt there was a lot of noise, uh,

There's so much more noise today. And so what we, our kind of company mission was really to how do we clear the weeds? How do we clear away the noise and make sense of the world? We do that more than ever today. And I think we feel very privileged to be able to do that every day. And I think what drives us and what I would say to you and to anyone else who's sort of feeling exhausted by just

just kind of the pace of the news that we're seeing, whatever side you're on, is that voting is the way that you can be active. And it is the way that you can feel like you are really doing something and making a difference. And so we are already underway for our 2020 plans and a lot of it will involve our users. So I hope you will get involved. Thank you.

Wonderful. Thank you. We have a question over here. Yeah, that was actually a great leading question to mine. My friend and I have also read it for six years since we were in college. She's thus gone to law school. We are kind of divided politically, but obviously still really good friends. We actually were wondering and kind of discussing, like, how do you consider that nonpartisan view when you're editing? Because sometimes a relevant slang will creep in that sounds a little bit

Like you're leaning one way or the other, like girl boss or like slay or something that you put after a sentence, which is a period kind of like,

leaves it up for us thinking that you're maybe going one way or another. So how do you think about that as you write internally and before you send it out each morning? Well, first of all, thank you for skimming. We appreciate it. So two things that we think about. The first is that everyone on our team is a journalist and you're trained in a hard news background. And we are

are all trained to look at the news objectively. The point of the skim is not to express a particular opinion. There are a lot of places out there, there's no shortage of it. And that's not the business market or need that we saw. The second thing is exactly what you said, which is some days people will be like, oh, I think they lean this way. And then the next day they're like, oh my God, they're totally conservative. And we see that every single day because of the feedback that we get.

which is literally like, I cannot stand you. You guys are so conservative. No wonder why Fox invested in you. And then the next day it's like, oh my God, you guys are so liberal. No wonder why the tech people like you. And that means we're doing our job. And so I think that having that back and forth means we're calling it out like we see it. And that's what we try to do. Great. Thank you. And we have time for one more question. Hi, I've been reading for about five years. So

Thank you for demographing it. Thank you. I'm curious about the process and how you decide on the topics, right? You've got only so much room. You know, I feel like you do a good job at trying to describe each of those topics, but what's that process in trying to understand, okay, this is going to be relevant today versus tomorrow?

It's funny. As I think about our suite of products, it's the easiest part of our day and our team's day. And people are always surprised when I say that. But every product that we've built has a different purpose. The Daily Skim is meant to say, here's everything that happened yesterday. Here's what you need to know today. And we literally picture, okay, if I went to a work event or I sat next to someone at a wedding and they asked me about blah, blah, blah, what I know about it and can I talk about it? It immediately, going back to our

both our background and how we've curated our editorial team's background, we know what is a story, what will become a story, and what will feel old by tomorrow. Then when we think about our other products, our subscription app, Skim Ahead, we think about what are the events that you would want to know across the month or the year that if you had a genius executive assistant sitting next to you, they would tell you this is what you need to pay attention to. When we think about Skim This, our daily news podcast,

Again, it's not, okay, here's a news readout of everything that happened today. It's what was the one story that is like very complicated. And it might not even be like the top story in the next day's daily skim, but it's a story that has a lot of layers and how do we use our time to break that down? So really, I would say the kind of the connective tissue and all of that is we're thinking about how will you use this product and what is the conversation you would have with someone else after you use our product?

Thank you. Thank you for reading. Yeah. So one last question from me. Um, so you have the book, the podcast, you have your app that you mentioned, and of course the newsletter. What are your hopes for the skim? What do you, what do you want to see it become? What do you want to do next? What's on the list? Um, well, the next big thing on the list is getting all of you guys registered and voting for 2020. Um, I think it is the biggest point of pride that we have as a company. Um,

And we want to go bigger this year. Our goal is to make sure that every woman in America gets out there and votes. And Google has been a helpful partner in the past. So we will put it on you guys. And hopefully you can join in on this mission.

It is really our North Star as a company. The way that you show you are living smarter, cast a ballot. And as for the company, we are going much bigger thinking through what are all of the categories that involve living smarter throughout your day. That's great. Well, How to Skim Your Life is now out wherever books are sold. You can find more at theskim.com. Thank you so much to our guests, Carly Zakin and Daniel Weiss. Thank you, guys. Thank you.

Thanks for listening. You can watch this episode and tons of other great content at youtube.com slash talks at Google. Talk soon.