Welcome to Decoder! I’m Alex Heath, Deputy Editor at The Verge and author of the Command Line newsletter. This is the first in a series of Thursday Decoder episodes that I’ll be hosting while Nilay is out on parental leave.

I’ve been covering AI a lot at The Verge, and I’m excited to start sharing some of the conversations I regularly have with leaders in the space here. The plan is for each episode to focus on a specific theme, from the rise of deepfakes to how AI is reimagining the browser. 

This week, I’m focusing on how AI companies talk about what they’re building. My guest is Ellis Hamburger. He’s the founder of Meaning, a marketing firm that works with a lot of buzzy AI startups. Ellis actually used to work at The Verge shortly after it first launched in 2012, when he covered the early mobile app boom. 

Now, he’s in the trenches with a lot of AI startups, helping them figure out how to present their products to the world. That gives him a pretty unique perspective.

First, some disclosures: Ellis has a lot of clients that we cover at The Verge, including Nothing, Raycast, Readwise, Daylight, Friend, Mainframe, Tolan, and more. He also previously worked at The Browser Company and Snap. We recorded this episode together in Los Angeles, and as you’ll probably be able to tell, Ellis and I have been friends for a long time. 

I’ve always found Ellis to be an original thinker, and I hope you find our conversation as interesting as I did.

If you’d like to read more on what we talked about in this episode, check out the links below:

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