#StartupsEverywhere Profile: John Pettus, Founder and CEO, Fiskkit
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Promoting Civility and Critical Thinking Online
Fiskkit provides users a platform to engage granularly with online content, discuss important topics together, and present accurate, valid, and relevant evidence to counter misinformation on the Internet. Users can comment on and critique articles line-by-line, identifying what is true, false, well-reasoned, or unsound. Through this engagement, Founder and CEO John Pettus thinks that Fiskkit can promote critical thinking and civility in our discourse. We recently spoke to John to learn more about Fiskkit, how startups can benefit from a wider array of corporate structures, the importance of intermediary liability frameworks, the value of balanced copyright laws, and his vision for Fiskkit moving forward.
Tell us about your background and how it led you to create Fiskkit.
I grew up as a sixth-generation San Franciscan and attended Stanford—a very normal background for the startup world, but a little different, because I studied economics and East Asian studies. Early in my career, frustrated by how hard it was to get people to listen to my ideas, I prioritized finding ways to gain leadership experience. So I joined the military as a reservist—30 days before September 11, 2001. I spent two years enlisted before receiving a commission as a Military Intelligence Officer in 2003 and going to Iraq in 2005.
When I got to Iraq, I noticed inefficiencies in how certain reports, data, and information were aggregated and analyzed. Some reports were being written and compiled in such a way that they were relatively useless and rarely read. A couple of my colleagues were programmers, so we created a database system and webform for reports that were actionable rather than endless word documents. That solution was my first product. Around that time, I also did some work in private equity, which led me to pursue my MBA at Berkeley.
After business school, I was at a crossroads of going to get a “real job,” or pursuing an idea I had been mulling since the 2012 election. It struck me that people, including politicians and their surrogates, say things on TV and in the media that are pretty easily provably false. While that seems weird, it’s important to recognize that there can be qualitative and financial value from how disinformation propagates on media broadcast platforms. If any broadcasters fact-check—which only happens a small percentage of the time—that comes days after the initial disinformation, and is not spread as broadly by the media. The calculation around self-serving disinformation, therefore, can become a net benefit. To provide a tool for countering this incentive, I decided to create Fiskkit with a friend.
What is Fiskkit and how does it work?
Fiskkit is an engine for users to engage granularly with online content and comment on it line-by-line. It gets its name from journalist Robert Fisk, and is actually an old blogging technique called “fisking,” which was used to rebut problematic articles with evidence and/or better reasoning. To offer the cross-cutting perspective in-line, bloggers would quote a sentence from another article or blog post, and write a rebuttal, and do that all the way through the source they were critiquing.
Fiskkit enables anyone who creates an account to fisk any article online. In addition to allowing users to comment on or rebut articles, we capture cognitive judgement data when users employ embedded Fiskkit labels to call out facts (or falsehoods), bias, and logical fallacies. If they wish to tag a sentence “provably true” or “provably false,” they must link to evidence supporting their claim. Over time, for articles with a sufficient number of fisks, we can generate labels about the veracity and quality of each article by statistical analysis of the tags.
Reading a fisked article means the reader gets not only the original author’s point of view, but also gets the benefit of opposing views or additional information that can inform the reader what the author left out, where arguments lack evidence, or where authors commit logical fallacies. Users can also fisk another user’s fisk if they disagree or want to amplify what another user said. Through this deeper engagement, fisking promotes critical thinking. Seeing multiple perspectives also moves us out of ideological echo chambers and can promote civility. To encourage civil disagreements on Fiskkit, we have a ‘Respect’ tag that users can place on another’s fisk, for when they might not agree with the other’s point of view, but see the merit of the argument.
I know you have another product, Fiskkit Classroom. Can you tell us about that?
Two years ago, teachers reached out to us about using Fiskkit to teach critical thinking—how to tell facts from opinions, recognize bias words, and identify logical fallacies. These are such important skills, and teachers saw our tool as a valuable way to train students to approach content more logically, critically, and rationally. So we developed a specific product—Fiskkit Classroom—for schools and universities to use. We are currently piloting this with a couple of universities. Teachers can assign students to fisk an article individually, and then fisk again after seeing one another’s comments, using our platform and tags to engage their critical thinking skills. The sheer number of students in a class fisking the same article also allows us to run analytics so teachers can track improvement in critical thinking over time.
What challenges have you encountered as you try to grow Fiskkit?
Fiskkit is a tool with clear network effects—as more people use it, our insights for each article improve. But as Fiskkit grows, the incentives for unsavory actors to game the system increase as well. Right now, we have protections against this. We require everyone to sign up through a social network account to prove they are a real person, and we remove people after repeated bad behavior, but we will need lots of funding to scale up those protections as we grow.
To date, we have completely bootstrapped Fiskkit and relied on a 12 person team that believes in the mission. We are a social venture and no one has ever been paid but instead works for free or for equity. Our dedication to being a social venture, however, puts us in the valley of death for fundraising. We are mission-driven, not profit-maximizing, so VCs tell us to go to foundations for funding. But because we aim to be a for-profit, the foundations we talk to point us back to VCs.
It is difficult to find the right corporate structure and funding model for a mission-driven startup like Fiskkit. Most VC funding is not a fit, because we would have to give up control to someone that has to look at return on investment, and is not in a position to prioritize our mission. Instead, we really need to find an angel investor who cares about Fiskkit’s mission and is willing to mix our mission with profit goals. Likewise, we will probably convert to a B Corporation at some point, but there really isn’t a great corporate structure for us right now. Many VCs do not (or cannot) see the value of investing in a B Corp. startup. At the same time, a lot of talented young people want a job with mission and meaning, which will continue to exacerbate the tension in corporate codes, where it is difficult to mix business choices that both reflect mission and making money. Most B Corps.—like Ben and Jerry’s, for example—were already successful companies before conversion. Policymakers could encourage investment in startups in the B Corp. space by offering tax advantages or offering other forms of downside protection. And they should think about other corporate models for startups that want to align mission with business.
Fiskkit enables user-generated content and commentary on other’s works. Can you tell us about the legal and policy issues Fiskkit faces, for example on intermediary liability and copyright?
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is the rock on which all websites that deal in user-generated content are built—they would not exist if people could sue companies for whatever their users put online. Right now, there is a very dumb and highly political conversation around Section 230, and very few people are talking about intelligent updates to the law.
On copyright, in order for Fiskkit to work, our users must be able to criticize the writing of others. And we, and our users, cannot and should not be limited to criticizing articles only when authors give permission. Criticism is the most accepted form of fair use, and we’ve made many design and product decisions to build a non-permissive criticism tool that puts us on the “right side” of the four factor fair use test. But that comes at significant engineering costs. And there is an inherent gamble in pursuing this criticism-based business mode, as fair use is a flexible test where full court cases decide what is definitively fair use. Moreover, because many media organizations, content owners, and authors have infinite legal budgets—and even if they don’t, the cost to file a case is small but the risk of our losing is enormous—a small company like Fiskkit could be broken by even the threat or filing of a meritless copyright case over acceptable fair uses.
What is your goal for Fiskkit moving forward?
We are very ambitious. It is my hope that one year from now we are at the revenue stage and able to have conversations with investors to bring in some who are in agreement with our mission. We look forward to growing the use of Fiskkit in schools, showing students’ cognitive skills and teaching them to recognize facts, opinions, and logical fallacies. The current pilots are going amazingly well.
On the public side, we hope advocacy groups can use our tool to engage with the public and ignite substantive conversation about various policies. We as a society need to invite more people to participate in such discussions. And while these in-depth conversations won’t involve as many people as Twitter, we can substantially increase the quality.
We believe that through this education and through the use of Fiskkit by adults, we will see a societal transformation toward more rationality, and an elevation of public discourse.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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