Are You Informed? A Conversation with Founder Kira Shishkin

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Highlights

Growing up between Ukraine and Israel convinced Kira that all conflict has its roots in information, he tells Michael Millward of Abbasida. Michael describes UK channels that carry news in their names and opinion on their air; Kira answers with a filter that would put a UK and US tariff deal ahead of a deadly bus crash in Croatia. Software reads the world's reporting, and a human editor reviews every briefing.

Top Quotes

"Being informed doesn't mean simply consuming everything. You're not going to be more informed if you read every article in circulation today. Chances are you'll be very confused." (Kira Shishkin)

"We consume information like fast food. We get the same message again and again because it's controlled by media and politicians, and we get their view of the world rather than enough information to create our own view of the world." (Michael Millward)

"At the root of all conflict is information conflict. The wars that burn our world today started that way too, and they remind us of how high the stakes really are." (Kira Shishkin)

Transcript

Michael Millward: Hello and welcome to The Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abbasida and people who think outside the box about how work works, with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone. I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abbasida. In this episode of The Independent Minds, I am meeting Kira Shishkin, the founder of informed.now, the news concierge service that aims to beat misinformation overload.

As the jingle at the start of this podcast says, The Independent Minds is made on Zencastr, because Zencastr is the all-in-one podcasting platform that really does make every stage of the podcast production and distribution process so easy. Regardless of whether you are an experienced podcaster or just starting out, I recommend that you use the link in the description to visit zencastr.com and take advantage of the built-in discount.

Now that I have told you how wonderful Zencastr is for making podcasts, we should make one. One that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading, and subscribing to. And probably good enough to share with your friends, family, and work colleagues as well. As with every episode of The Independent Minds, we will not be telling you what to think, but we are hoping to make you think.

Today's Independent Mind is Kira Shishkin, the founder of informed.now, the news concierge service that aims to beat misinformation overload. Kira is a 4-time serial entrepreneur, strategic advisor, and investor in the technology industries. His experience spans investment banking, corporate strategy, and private equity investments in category defining ventures. He attended the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and Stanford University. Kira has also been included in the Forbes 30 under 30 list.

Originally from Ukraine, Kira has also lived in Israel and now lives in San Francisco in California. I have not been to Ukraine or Israel, but I have been to San Francisco. If I ever get the opportunity to travel to any of these 3 places in the future, I will use my membership of The Ultimate Travel Club to access trade prices on flights, hotels, trains, holidays, and all sorts of other travel-related purchases. In the spirit of sharing, I have added a link with a built-in discount to the description so that you can become a member of The Ultimate Travel Club and travel at trade prices.

Now that I have paid some bills, it is time to make an episode of The Independent Minds and say, Hello, Kira.

Kira Shishkin: Thank you for having me, Michael. That's a very generous introduction.

Michael Millward: Oh, I did my research, mate. I did my research. And you've certainly achieved an awful lot for someone who qualifies for the Forbes 30 under 30 list.

Kira Shishkin: Well, thank you for having me. I'm flattered to be here. And it means a lot to be welcomed on your show.

Michael Millward: Thank you. Could we please start with you just elaborating a little bit on the sorts of organizations that you have founded and built?

Kira Shishkin: The underlying force of my life that brought me to what I'm doing now especially is growing up across conflict. All conflict is ultimately information conflict, or at least it has its roots in information conflict. As you mentioned, I was born and raised in Kiev, in Ukraine. I came of age in Israel, in Tel Aviv, and then came to the United States, initially spent time on the East Coast, then in the Midwest, and then in California to see all the major polarities of the United States.

In that journey, having had the chance to delve into finance, into technology, and into many other sectors, the problem that kept haunting me, and the problem that I felt most devoted to, and still do to this day, is this idea of how we can, very much in the spirit of the show, help people think, help people make up their own mind without forcing them to pick a side, whether that be political, economic, social, or cultural. Without forcing them to agree or disagree, and without triggering them into outrage or some sort of "hell yeah, that's my team."

Instead, we equip them with an informational knowledge base so that they can make up their own mind without being influenced in the process. That's very much the spirit of what I'm building today.

Michael Millward: You talk about conflict in Ukraine and Israel. They're all places where technology entrepreneurs are based as well. Conflict and technology seem to coexist quite happily in some ways, I suppose.

Kira Shishkin: Technology is a savior of a lot of problems, but I think it arises when there are problems to be solved. I think technology and the industry itself has a lot of entrepreneurialism in it, perhaps even more so than other industries. And so to me, I've always thought of the technology space as unlinkable from the entrepreneurial drive. To me, they've always been very, very hand in hand.

And I think both that drive and technology rise when there are ample problems to be solved. In the environments where I grew up, all of which are also very technology forward cultures and societies, there has been no shortage of problems to solve. I definitely come from that spirit and from that state of mind.

Michael Millward: Yes, and creating real world useful technology. I have to say thank you very much for your comments about The Independent Minds and our approach to not telling people what to think, but giving them enough information so that they can actually create their own opinion about a particular issue. The slogan doesn't come from us. It came from early audience members who told us that they were used to being told what to think or what to do by the podcast they were listening to. But when they listened to The Independent Minds, they didn't feel as if they'd been told what to think, but they did know that the content had made them think.

It's almost as if we consume information as if it's fast food. It's always the same. We get the same message again and again and again because it's controlled by the media, and it's controlled by politicians. And we get their view of the world rather than enough information to create our own view of the world.

Kira Shishkin: I think that doesn't get talked about enough. This idea that not everybody has an opportunity to go to university and develop their own critical thinking skills around reading, writing, and digesting information, which I think is ultimately what a lot of university educations give you. Not everybody has the chance to afford fancy information subscriptions that will distill things in all kinds of ways that will inform you.

The everyday person, and we see this on the US side primarily, but I think this resonates with the UK as well, is generally very robbed of factual insight. They are left with not news, but news commentary. You can walk into any bar, you can pick up a paper, or if you're online, you don't really get the facts. The everyday person doesn't really have access to that. That's expensive, and that's quite fancy.

What you wind up with is news commentary, some pundit telling you what their reaction to the news is, right? Or suggesting what is the correct reaction to a certain event. And I think that's really tragic because that decays society. I think that causes radicalization and polarization that then obviously have so many more trickle-down effects. So that's very much the problem that we're paying attention to and responding to with our work today.

Michael Millward: Yes. There has been a rise in recent years in opinion-based news. So in the UK, we've had the rise of a couple of news channels which have news in their titles. They're called news channels, but they are the news from a particular angle. And there has been the debate as to whether they are news channels or opinion channels. The presenters, instead of just telling us what has happened, give us their opinion. The guests give us their opinion.

And you can see that if the opinion of a guest doesn't match with the hosts and the channels, then the expression that comes to mind is that it's all out attack on that person because of their opinion, rather than trying to get all of the opinions on the table to then enable people to form their own opinion. That, for me, is a great sadness in many ways. We have lots of information. We live in a very, very connected world. But the information that we have very often comes through a filter where someone has decided to present that information in a way that they want us to have a particular reaction to that information.

Kira Shishkin: On top of that, obviously we all know what clickbait is. But I would say there is this emergence of outrage bait, where there isn't even the drive to get a person to click and get a person to engage. There's actually a drive on behalf of the publisher to make the person outraged, whether that's in disagreement or in agreement with the commentator, but outrage over the other side that's being framed as the enemy.

I mean, I think historically, humans have been easily controlled when they're in fear. To this day, at least in our Western cultures, we live in such safety sometimes. When you look at the news and just read everything that's on in terms of headlines, you'll see that there is an attempt at either getting you to be angry and outraged, or getting you to be scared. And that is just continuing to this day, which is, you know, I thought we were over that. It turns out that practice is still around.

Michael Millward: We've identified what the problem is and what the challenge is. How does informed.now address that challenge? How does it create the solution?

Kira Shishkin: We really think of our mission as, I mean, it's covered in multiple ways. Obviously one way to say it is we remove the noise from the news. But when you dig down into what is noise, what do we consider to be noise? It's actually a whole package of things. We're not just changing one thing about the news. We're looking to fully reshape the news reading habit.

And it's worth diving into what the news reading habit is today. Today, most folks don't read the news because it's paralyzing. It's very, very overwhelming. It causes paralysis. Because it's extremely biased, and people can see through that and they're like, why am I reading this creative writing masked as reporting? And obviously a third reason is that it's pregnant with solicitation. It's absolutely full of it.

You can't hide from another pop-up, another paywall showing up. Ads on the left side, ads on the right side, ads in the middle of a paragraph, ads in the middle of a sentence. Those 3 horsemen of the apocalypse, right? They create an experience that turns people off from reading news, which is extremely self-disenfranchising. Because once you lose tabs on what's going on, you don't really have a way to influence it or even just be in touch with what's going on.

And so the current news reading habit is the act of wading through endless scroll, endless feed, endless bombardment that is filled with sensationalism, verbosity, solicitation, and just pure overwhelm. In the building of informed.now, we thought about how we can do better across each of these dimensions. And so the habit that we've introduced is trying to make news much more accessible and digestible so that it can become part of a daily pulse check, a daily check-in.

What it looks like, very literally, to our reader is that the news comes to you instead of you having to go and seek it out. It comes to you via SMS, via text, so that it is so immediately accessible and in front of you that you don't have to go far. You don't have to click around. You don't have to pay for annual subscriptions or paywalls or cross-check things. It comes to you.

And the second thing that I think is a lost art is that the news is curated based on significance. No, we do not create your own echo chamber. No, we do not pick things that are going to engage you and that are going to outrage you. Our only filter is significance, meaning how much this development is changing the world today. And if it doesn't change the world, you're not going to hear about it from us. There'll be plenty of other places where you can get outrage baited. So we focus on significance.

Michael Millward: So you're not covering then the news that would be an organization has launched a new product. It's the news that has changed the world, or has the potential to change the world.

Kira Shishkin: We focus on this utilitarian model of how many people are affected by how much, right? And so if there's a local accident somewhere in, let's say, Croatia, and there's a big bus crash and 20 people lose their lives, it's a terrible thing. But is that going to change the world more than the reciprocal tariff action between the UK and the US, or an arms deal between Ukraine and Germany? That is going to change so many more lives and so many more trajectories that we always prioritize the most life-changing, world-changing phenomenon. That's the curation model that we use.

Michael Millward: If you think about television news or internet-based news, the picture of the crash is likely to be higher up the running order than the news about a defense deal because of the graphic image that can go with the story.

Kira Shishkin: It's almost like a well-known phenomenon at this point where news aren't really looking to inform you anymore. They're looking to influence you, to engage you, inadvertently perhaps to overwhelm you. But we're looking with this very pure mission of we actually just want to inform you. Being informed isn't just about knowing everything. You're not going to be more informed if you read every article in circulation today.

You become informed by reading the right things, the things that are going to make a difference in terms of your decision-making, what decisions you're going to make day to day, or your awareness of the world or the environment that you inhabit. Our readers are quite busy. If they have a limited amount of time before getting out of a cab and going up the elevator to a boardroom, or before finishing making a meal for their children and running out to do more chores, they don't have the time to look at all these pictures of a crash, to hear all these political commentators jab at each other.

They have a few moments, just to capture what matters. And that's where we come in to give them that personal newswire, so to speak.

Michael Millward: So the commentator in the newspaper or on the internet receives information about a particular event and then comments on it and positions it in a way which complements and supports the message that they want to communicate. What you are doing with informed.now is taking that news feed without the commentary, without the influence, and presenting it to the reader. So the reader can then form their own opinion based upon what they have seen on informed.now because it's news without comment. How do you make sure that the news that you are receiving is comment-free, is authentic, is almost like first witness type news?

Kira Shishkin: I love that you mentioned that, and I love how you described the structure. I think you said it better than I did, which is essentially bringing the newswire to the everyday person, which is not really accessible, right? Because the everyday person gets the filtered version of the news, filtered through another person's perspective or a media company's perspective, right? Which inevitably has an agenda.

But before it gets commented on, read out, and reinterpreted, there is this reporting layer fact base that news companies actually all use and have access to. We are bringing the power of those facts to the everyday person, right? Removing all these layers that have been mounted in between the facts and the person. We are bringing that direct bridge between our reader and the facts. So I think that was put really well, Michael. I appreciate you saying that.

Michael Millward: Thank you very much. But how do you guarantee or how do you ensure that that information is authentic first person?

Kira Shishkin: I was going to tackle your question. Thank you. I think it's a really important one. Okay. There are maybe 2 or 3 points. One is we have an unbelievable loyalty to the primary source. If you read the everyday news, they're going to talk about a phenomenon, but they're not going to give you the primary source. For example, Trump makes a certain decision, right? It's shaking the world once again. Again, the news article isn't actually going to give you the original announcement. Or if the UN made a decision, for example, to reimpose sanctions on Iran, the news article is not going to give you the primary source.

We, on the other hand, are so loyal to the primary sources. That's what we read. We think of our work as research, not as journalism and not even as reporting. We think of our work as research. We have direct connections and plugs, technologically and personally, to primary sources that feed the news to the world. What does that mean? That's the White House. That's the Chamber of Commerce. That's the UK government, right? That's the Parliament. That's the Congress. That's the Central Bank of Europe. The United Nations.

It's the original source that breaks the news initially. So we have a very close relationship to these sources. I would say two-thirds of the time, if not more, when our reader is reading the news, it's coming directly from primary source research, where it isn't going through any layers of interpretation. We even cite the primary source in our work so that when a reader wants to learn a little bit more, we don't take them to another commentator. We don't even give them our own commentary. We don't really do that. We take them straight to the primary source, to the horse's mouth.

So that's maybe one point that I think is very important to stress because it's so obvious, and yet you cannot reasonably access this through any of the current media landscape solutions. So number 2 is aggregation of reporting. In our process, which is half tech, half talent, we read all the news of the world. We leverage a lot of technology that is proprietary and in-house and purpose-built for our use case to read all the news of the world.

So when, for example, there's an announcement by Parliament, we are not just reading a single source or a few sources. We actually read all the sources that are available on the web to determine what is the common fact base that is being referenced. What is the commonly agreed upon set of truths that precede the commentary of each publication? And so from there, we take the aggregate reporting when we have an absence of a primary source. We take the aggregate reporting of what is commonly agreed upon and what happens to be the common fact base.

And we leverage that in the absence of a primary source to feel confident in our insight, and feel confident in the fact base that we share. We are able to do that at a scale that an all-human company, a traditional legacy media company, could never do, because it's a human rights violation to have someone read 10,000 articles an hour.

Michael Millward: It would be, definitely. But you're using the technology to be able to analyze all of the different news sources to develop a broader picture of what is actually happening.

Kira Shishkin: So we take the reporting insight. In the absence of a primary source, our source becomes the primary reporter on the issue, on the topic. But we don't just take it from a single source or a single reporter. We take it from the entire base of reporters that exist. And so the aggregation of reporting insight is part of what makes it significantly more credible.

Michael Millward: It sounds brilliant.

Kira Shishkin: It's brilliant. And I would say there's an important piece that is combining the best of both worlds here, which is, you know, we are both a technology company and a human company. We don't really wear either one hat and say, okay, we're all AI and we're all just a tech company. No, we're not that. We're also not all human, in the sense that we gather the best of both worlds into a single solution.

We hand off a lot of the grunt work of our research to technology to enhance and expand our capacity to do research, to expand our visibility into the world of information that exists on any 24-hour cycle. But then there's still the human review, human in the loop, as we call it, approach, where nothing goes out fully automated. And that's really important to us. Nothing goes out without the review, supervision, and quality assessment, an editorial pass, of the human team.

And so that allows us to take responsibility, because technology on its own is a play at your own risk model. If you're using Perplexity or ChatGPT or Anthropic, you can't actually trust the output of those models without double-checking or triple-checking. And so in our case, we maintain the expanded capacity of technology and an AI company with the retained credibility of a media company that you can trust. Every time that we send something out there, we take full responsibility for it every single day. So there's never something out there that we can't feel accountable for.

Michael Millward: Which is important in news information. You mentioned AI there, and I'm thinking, what does the future look like for informed.now and news information? What's the future going to be like?

Kira Shishkin: I appreciate that question. We have been doing really well in our flagship product slash service, which is world news. It's what we call global priorities. And we have a mix of technology and talent that enables us to take that further into new realms across industries and across locales. We can tune our approach and our mix of tech and talent towards, okay, well, we've got a great product out in the market that's making folks feel like global citizens.

Now, what if we created a solution, for example, for the local market, right? What is the news in London today? What is the news in Belgium? And hyper-localize our approach. Another direction that we're also very interested in, and we have private pilots in the making, is custom approaches for businesses. If a business thrives on information asymmetry, whether it's a consulting business or a thought leadership business of some sort, there is a huge alpha to be gained through information asymmetry.

And so can we offer them a way to know things first and be the first to know in their industry, whether that's real estate, healthcare, materials, or industrials? We have the capacity to tune our work towards their end. And I think that's a direction that we're very excited to go into in the quarters ahead.

Michael Millward: Yeah. Sounds very exciting. I wish you well with it all. And I look forward to watching how it all grows. But for today, Kira, it has been fascinating to just explore this issue of misinformation overload and a very practical real world solution to that. I really do appreciate your time today. Thank you very much.

Kira Shishkin: Michael, thank you for having me. Thank you for welcoming me. It's been delightful.