Former Facebook and YouTube EMEA head of media partnerships Patrick Walker details the launch of his new curated expert video service Uptime.
Patrick Walker
You left Facebook last year and set about launching a new business. How did that come about?
I’ve been working at the crossroads of content and technology for a long time, starting out in public service, educational programming – in Japan with NHK and then with the BBC as a foreign news journalist in Asia.
Since then I’ve been very fortunate to work on the first international subscription services for Real Networks, the acquisition and launch of YouTube, then Facebook and Instagram. I’ve worked with the most amazing people, talent, broadcasters and media companies.
But I just felt about a year ago that for me, maybe it was time to go back to my roots in something that was more purposeful and that no matter what I did every day, the impact hopefully would be net positive for society.
The social platforms are great; there’s a lot of amazing stuff happening there. But they’re also becoming, in some ways, more addictive. People are trying hard to limit their usage but they’re compelling. And it’s not just social platforms but Netflix – all these things are full of great content but it’s also, in many ways, like sugar-rush content.
It’s not necessarily healthy for you to indulge too much, right? And do people have the wherewithal, or can they know enough about the addictive nature of the technology that’s out there to limit their use, for their own wellbeing and for their own family’s wellbeing?
And so, I thought to myself, maybe there’s something there that could be built, that is intent on helping people learn, grow and contribute positively towards a better world. We need to think carefully about the world we want to live in and what we can do as individuals and collectively to impact that.
The idea of Uptime came to me and right around then I met two entrepreneurs, Jamie True and Jack Beckor, who had just had a big exit on their corporate wellness app LifeWorks, and they had a very similar thought. So, we decided to pool our resources.
What exactly is Uptime?
In a nutshell, it’s a place where knowledge can be shared. The content is there to help people build a stronger self, better relationships, professional success and a better world. In a broad sense, it’s a community that’s all about learning with purpose. We really feel we need a movement that cares a lot about trustworthiness and brings a focus back on to believing in the experts, sharing their knowledge and making it accessible to people of all kinds all over the world.
It is a video-based platform, mobile-first. The things we’re producing originally or that experts are sending us are vertical, made-for-mobile, but we’re also integrating lots of other existing content out there. You can look at Uptime as your ‘five-a-day’ for your brain. It’s a safe, curated mobile video app focused on learning and sparking positive change. I would say it’s expert-generated content – we call it EGC.
So, it’s a kind of high-brow, intellectual version of Quibi?
That’s one way to put it. I wouldn’t say highbrow, though. Learning doesn’t and shouldn’t be highbrow. Everyone is a natural born learner and, unfortunately, often that gets beaten out of people when they go through this factory model of education. Everyone has got an inner genius, and so how can we help them connect with knowledge or information they’re curious about but maybe feel unsure who to go to and where, to trust that information.
Walker describes Uptime as ‘a community that’s all about learning with purpose’
The service debuted yesterday via Apple’s App Store. Who’s onboard?
We reached out to experts and thought leaders to see if they might participate in our launch with a special video message on Earth Day and the response was overwhelmingly positive, with over 40 wonderful contributions from physicist professor Brian Cox, Nasa astronaut Ron Garan, broadcaster, chef and environmentalist Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, futurist Jason Silva, philanthropist Lynne Twist, Colombian actress and activist Carolina Guerra and many others. The Guardian Media Group is also a launch partner. More are coming in daily.
What about the Uptime team itself, beyond yourself and your fellow co-founders?
We are lucky to be well funded, even in these difficult times, and backed by some great folks such as Tim Davie, CEO of BBC Studios, who is one of our board members, and we’ve got a team of 30 to 40 people. They come from backgrounds like TED, Benevolent AI, Tinder, Bumble, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google, the BBC, Channel 4 News and Sky – people who have some amazing experience that all are aligned on our mission.
How do you choose who you work with and what’s the business model?
We’re open to partnerships of all types. It’s important that we work with organisations and experts who are really leaders in their field. They are recognised by both renowned institutions or more general audiences for their depth of specialisation and experience. But it’s also broad across the categories of health and wellness, building professional success, empathy and relationships, being an informed citizen and building a better world.
What we are building over time is a subscription-based service. It’ll be free for some time as it’s new and still very early, at the beginning of a movement, we feel, for learning with purpose. We’re opening up for people to participate by giving us feedback and telling us what else they’d like to see. It really is about collectively building the right product for this time and going forward.
When we feel that all those things are fitting into place and working smoothly then we are looking to introduce a subscription tier like you might see on Spotify, but with a model that will be more applicable to this sort of system and, we hope, more equitable to experts and knowledge organisations who would receive a share of that subscription revenue.
You’re starting out on the App Store, but presumably it’s a service that could be rolled out to other platforms as well?
First, we wanted to get to market and we think the timing is great right now; we’ve had amazing support from Apple. We also intend to be on connected TVs. We want to be on other devices, of course, and as quickly as we can on Android, because it’s such a large market and in many of the countries where we want to operate. Android and Apple have a different share.
The idea is multi-platform but we also want to make sure we’re not rushing to that for the sake of it. It’s a mobile-first place to go and learn and a place where we’re going to remind people to look up and take time away from their phone. So, we’re going to be drinking our own Kool Aid and putting little messages in the product where people learn how to manage their online behaviour and nudge them to pause, look up and smile at somebody they know.
Part of the joy of building something around care for oneself and others in the world is that we need to build that into the product.
