What do we do now?

I think Luke put it best at the roast a few years ago when he said, Why the f**k are you here? That's a two-part answer. I'm speaking today because of the recent community outcry demanding change.

I'm here because I agree with the community. We do have a lot of work to do. Before we talk about that, while I wish this on better terms, I just want to say I'm very glad to meet you all.

I have spent the last couple of decades on the corporate side, but my educational background is in computer science. My first role in the tech industry was as the writer at NeoSeeker. My history building gaming PCs was even further back, to when I built I'd sell around 300 ARig, because everyone assured me it was guaranteed to overclock to 450 MHz.

I guess my trip didn't really get the memo. In any case, it feels really good to be back on most days. I'm only six weeks into the job, but in that time I've seen a lot.

I've looked at some budgeting, some team building, and operations. But my main focus has been to be a fly on the wall and gain an understanding of what's going right and what's going wrong. There's a lot of both.

I've asked the team to unflinchingly address both the concerns that have been raised and how we intend to fix them, with the money we'll make from our sponsor. Just kidding. I was asked for unflinching, and here it is.

Linus is a human gas molecule. You've been telling him for years, and I've been telling him for years. Staying relevant on YouTube is hard for everyone.

But we aren't fighting for survival anymore, and we don't need to run at this pace. In fact, in some ways, it's our efforts to keep doing more and keep doing better that have created our current situation. My background is in managing a pharmacy, where the small details matter a lot.

And basically, I agree with the community, so I'm putting my foot down. Effective immediately, all YouTube video production is on pause. And our teams are going to be spending this entire next week focusing on long-term workflow changes to make our content better in a lasting way.

This means for the first time in over 12 years, LTT will be missing not just one daily upload, but many. But improving to the degree that we want and need is going to take more than a week. So I'll be working with Terren and Colton to manage our sponsor commitments and the financial hit of both this housekeeping week and a reduction in our LTT upload schedule.

At least for now, while we get our house in order. But before anyone gets concerned that we're going to cut investments into the well-being of our personnel and our future capabilities, I can assure you that I've read the criticisms that we weren't willing to spend $500 to test a product. And as the one that manages the finance, I can tell you that couldn't be further from the truth.

Linus made a clear and egregious judgment error regarding retesting a product he felt was impractical. That was wrong, and I've told him so. He allowed his personal feelings on the matter to cloud his judgment.

And I want to stress that our organization is committed to our ongoing investments in making our content better. And we will do better as a team. Why don't I let our chief money spender take it from here?

Hi, I'm Gary, head of labs. First off, we've made some mistakes. Too many.

We're hoping that it's how we deal with them moving forward that will define who we are. And regardless, it's clear that we need to serve you better. So our team will be spending our week publishing living documents for our testing standards and opening them up to feedback from the community and our peers in the industry, should they wish to participate.

We will also test part of the team with going back through every video with labs data to ensure accuracy, make full corrections, and if there are any fundamental issues with the workflow design or results, pull or replace that video outright. I don't agree with every criticism that's been leveled at my team. But for my part, I need to own what we've done wrong and lay out our action plan for how to move forward.

Before I do that, one point I do need to address here is that Linus misspoke when he said we retest for every video. We retest for every project. When we use the same data for our RX 7600 and RTX 4060 Ti videos, we knew in advance that these cards would release two days apart and designed a broad test suite that accounted for all the numbers we would need to make those two videos and ran everything at once with no bios or driver changes.

In fairness, Linus, the project to video ratio is normally one to one, but the devil's in the details. Now, let's talk about what's coming. We will release our current mark bench harnesses as open source items so that the community can audit the code around our test integrations.

We will do a vlog style video on floatplane about our testing from start to finish so you can see how the sausage is actually made. We will open a new community forum post asking for transparency suggestions and more importantly, we will follow up. We will start placing our testing project number in the credits so we are always open about the data set that was used for the benchmark results.

And there is a lot more still to come ranging from test variation percentages per workbench to each benchmark we utilized in videos among others. It's going to be a busy week of not making videos. Same goes for us.

I'm James, head of the writing department. We are extremely grateful for everything the lab has done and continues to do to make our jobs easier. But the actual testing is not the biggest source of our recent struggles.

It's the human factor. There have been times when an internal video review caught an incorrect graph resulting in new versions of the graph being created only for those new graphs to not be put in the video. Just about every error that has appeared in a video in the past year has directly resulted in a process change designed to prevent that specific issue from ever happening again.

But this kind of problem pops up, create a new process, whack-a-mole isn't working. We'll be using our time to take feedback from our team on all of our processes and comb through all of our pending projects for areas where we can improve as we move forward with our reduced upload schedule. You'll see some of these videos go up during our time off.

We already have multiple videos that are scheduled for release. But my main message to the team is that we want to spend this time working on inter-department communication and cleaning up our house. What we won't be doing is sanitizing things too much.

We know that some of our best videos are centered around Linus and other members of the team goofing around with tech and having fun. That is not going to stop. But others like GPU and CPU releases certainly require all the rigor we can muster.

Those launches don't happen as often these days. So it will take some time before you see the full payoff of our continuous improvement. But it has already started happening.

Not only did the community love our 4060 review, but our team found it less stressful to put out. Have we had a flawless victory? No.

But since these last reviews, we've onboarded a dedicated visualization person whose full-time job it is to create graphs that are correct, digestible, and accessible. We've done serious development on our automatic specs database things so that our visualizations pull the correct info in every time. And we'll soon be announcing the details of a new crowdsourced fact-checking system for both LTT and Tech Quickie so that our content's correctness satisfies even our most discerning community members.

I'm Ed, head of our production team. We have some of the most comprehensive documentation and processes in the company, from automations to key project information accurate to communication procedures to standards for how loud videos can be. Those systems have helped with the video edit side of things, but I've seen some examples where we've failed to see the forest for the trees and allowed well-edited but erroneous content to slip through the cracks.

So for our part, we'll be spending our time looking at how we can improve communication to help the team address anything that seems off as soon as possible. A personal task for me will be putting the finishing touches on some cool ways that we can make small edits that avoid the slap-dash text-on-screen corrections whenever possible. As for how we catch those bugs, that's not my department, so I'm throwing it over to Nick.

Hold on, hold on. I'm mostly on the product side, lttstore. com.

What? Somebody had to say it. But the theme of today's video is transparency and accountability.

You might not see me in video credits, but I still serve as a last line of defense in reviewing most LTT videos before they are published. I typically check for security links and inappropriate or NSFW jokes, but there are times when I catch a factual error or a weird graph that doesn't really tell the full story. To be clear, we also have checks for technical aspects from our writing team, and in some cases, the lab, but our processes for ensuring those checks happen and following up these findings haven't been perfect and our corrections are often made quickly.

So while we take this time to reflect, I'll be focused on helping build a set of guidelines for our pre-release reviews and trying to set up a system that allows our team to take a finer look at every aspect of our videos. Every single time. And maybe with time, everyone here will be so aligned with our mission that my input is no longer needed, and I can focus my full attention on making little widgets that you don't need, but definitely want.

Like this retro-themed screwdriver. Errors in our supporting assets like tables and graphs chip away our credibility. So continuing to improve our process issues to minimize errors will mean a top priority under my leadership.

I guarantee there will be future mistakes. We are human. But in next week, we'll be creating and publishing a clear policy for correction handling, and I'll be working with the community management team to be prompt and transparent with corrections that are as visible as possible.

I think what happened with the Pwnage mouse is a perfect example of the kind of breakdown that should never happen again. Last Friday, Linus was notified of the issue a couple hours before the WAN show, where he discussed the errors of the video in short circuit and apologized unequivocally. But while we recut the video to remove the misleading information, no one closed the loop and dealt with the tone-deaf and frankly unapologetic correction in the pinned comment.

Our mission is to get the information in the community, which includes having a degree of humility about our mistakes, even if it makes us look less than perfect. The other side of my job as CEO is keeping the lights on, ensuring our staff is well taken care of and putting dollars into some fun stuff, like water cooling a PC with a pool. And that's through sponsorships, affiliate programs, paid subscriptions, or merchandise sales.

One thing that's not negotiable with me, ownership, or the business team on sponsored content, is we need to maintain control of the creative. I was on a call with a potential partner recently. They asked for a cream puff piece.

What's a cream puff piece? That's when they're like, how much money do we have to give you, just so that you tell the story that we want? Before I can jump in and say anything, just because I'm in shock at this point in time, Nick turns over and says, no, absolutely not.

I started laughing a little bit and I just said, hey Nick, there's probably a better way to handle that, where we could just soften up a little bit. But the truth is, I don't disagree with him. We've had many rocky periods with sponsors, where they're not happy with the content, or the conclusions, and because they couldn't affect the editorial events.

This has and continues to to have significant negative impacts on revenue. I think we're pretty transparent on how, where, and why we make our money. And one of our strategic pillars is to make sure that we can maintain editorial independence.

This has included on multiple occasions saying goodbye and good luck, to sponsors ranging from thousands of dollars a year to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, over remaining independent and doing right by the LTT community. While we were deciding if we were a good fit for each other, I was very pleased to see the integrity of the team here, based on the deals that these guys have walked away from. I think one thing that we've done a poor job of, however, is publishing these standards where a community can see them.

That's something I'll be improving upon. And so will I. I'm Colton, the head of business development, which includes departments like HR, procurement, logistics, events, and sales and marketing.

Sponsorships specifically, are an area where Linus has more limited oversight than he used to. And in my opinion, we haven't done a great job conveying that. It's up to my team to vet incoming sponsor requests and deal with issues that you, our viewers, have with our brand partners.

One way we do that is using our LMG Sponsor Discussion Subforum on LinusTechTips. com to create a dialogue between our business team and the community. It's obvious from some of the issues we're seeing that we need to be more communicative when we're actively working with brands to rectify issues.

Most content creators can attest to the fact that brands sometimes take forever to respond to messages or address problems. A perfect example is Anker not removing LinusTechTips from their Amazon pages, even though we've been asking to be removed since our partnership with them ended months ago. We work hard to push for accountability, but we also understand that these businesses are either large with lots of moving parts or small with limited resources.

So things can take time, but you shouldn't be waiting in the dark. It's critical for us to get the sponsorship piece right because real talk, you guys are the boss. If you're not happy with brands we work with, you won't engage with our sponsors and suddenly we won't be able to support all the cool stuff we're currently able to do.

Moving forward then, you can expect weekly updates in the sub forum on issues that need addressing and we'll also include an up-to-date list of product verticals that are off limits for our channels. We hope this will enable us to make better calls consistently from here on out, all while maintaining our long-time commitment to transparency. Finally, I want to apologize to Billet Labs for auctioning off their monoblock at LTX 2023.

Our processes failed when I was selecting items to include in the charity auction, but then it was compounded because when the issue was brought up to me via email, even though I replied two hours later apologizing and offering to pay for the component, I forgot to actually include our contact in that email. So it went to our procurement team instead of Billet Labs. Side note, that same team, God bless them, didn't ask our event team who won the silent auction items and proceeded to email everyone asking.

We don't need any of that. Certainly not for tax purposes. I clearly need to spend some of my week training the team unless I actually get fired for real this time.

Moving forward, we'll be implementing a more rigid process for separating items that need to go back and which ones we'll be holding onto for future testing. This might ring a little hollow coming from one half of the WAN show team that brought you trust me bro in the privateering incident among others, but we need to be better about our communication. Now I have no intention to like kill the silly humor or be less open with people.

I don't want anything to be less fun, but we do need to be respectful and conscious of the impact of our words. We should be proud of the work that we do, but we shouldn't negatively compare ourselves to our fellow tech reviewers. When issuing corrections, we need to apologize.

We need to respect people's time and their money. I said after the last round of this that you don't win by screaming loudly or drama-ing hard. You win by fixing problems, improving and becoming a hard target.

We're still f***ing up a lot and we need to own that, fix it and move on, not be defensive or shirk blame. That being said, I'm not really on the production side of things these days. What my teams and I are working hard on is to support the other teams in other ways.

Reintegrating into LMG has been somewhat terrifying. One of my team's jobs is to take over management of the infrastructure and while I have brought an experienced team member into the fold, it needs a lot of work. So far, we've mostly just been focused on documenting what we even have and most of our initial steps beyond that will be improving overall stability rather than flashy video-worthy projects.

Any production interruptions due to shoddy infrastructure add additional burden to the other teams and our goal is six nines. We will also continue to maintain and develop our inventory system, which with better processes, should be able to help keep things like Billet's prototype from being mishandled, misplaced and misused in the future. And the foundational work we're doing on reliable data management and storage should enable teams like the editors and the engineering folks in the lab to move faster and more confidently with lower risk of errors thanks to new tools like our specs database.

Among my other unmentioned and unrelated responsibilities is keeping Linus from driving off various cliffs, which I have failed at a number of times. And let's face it, he's gonna fail again. Hey, it's me.

I'm chief vision officer now, but realistically, I'm not gonna be able to hide behind my recent demotion here. I was the one at the head of the company for each and every mistake that our community has rightly brought to our attention. And once again, I made things worse by allowing myself to respond emotionally.

It's honestly really hard when people take an internal process error and then they run that all the way to Linus is a thief and wants to auction someone else's intellectual property to the highest bidder or accuses me of trying to brush something under the rug just because I do think it's important to get all the details before declaring me to be a lowdown, liar, straight up piece of s***. We were slow shipping back the GPU that Billet Labs sent us. There's no way around it.

That's our bad. But the delay in communication, the one that prompted the post that you guys just saw, it was less than two business days. The second that I was made aware of the situation on the 14th, I emailed Billet Labs and I explained what happened.

I even included Colton's attempt at apologizing and offering no questions asked full compensation for their stated value of the product, which happened on the 10th before we were under any pressure to do so and without Colton even bothering to check with me or Yvonne before just saying, go for it. He knows that our internal policy is to do the right thing. So he tried, bless him.

I guess his job is safe for another day. And I, I'm sorry, I guess I've actually gotten a little bit emotional here again. So I'm going to stop there because whatever's being said about me and whatever's being said about the team should never have allowed my feelings to distract from any valid criticism of our work.

My decision, for example, to not bother retesting the monoblock, that was obviously wrong. And my lame response on the forum was a huge and unnecessary blunder. I owe you guys better.

And I'm sorry, for my part, first, I'm going to be working through the other members of the exec team for any crisis communication moving forward. And second, I'm going to spend my week working with the other teams to develop a system of processes that will help our company fulfill my vision of being a world-class tech media organization. I'm also going to be spending my week just refocusing, guys, on what matters most, which is bringing you guys the best damn content that we can make.

It's been over 10 years. Lord, it's been almost 15. But I still love tech.

I love my team. And even though our relationship's a little rocky right now, I love this community and everything that it stands for. None of that has changed, and none of it is going to.

During my interview, one line from Linus that stood out to me was, I need somebody to come in who I know will be respectful of my life's work. That's when the gravity of what he was asking for, dawned on me for the first time. I'm by no means an influencer or social media guy.

But suddenly, I am accountable not only to Linus and Yvonne, and the entire staff at LMG, but most importantly, to the entire LMG audience. I'm fortunate to be inheriting a wonderful team that is passionate and has a ton of energy who shares the same goal. We celebrate our wins together, and when we make mistakes, we also share the responsibility.

I'll be coaching the team on the kinds of deep state corporate stuff that I think I'm reasonably good at. Budgeting, team building, relationship management, business development, operational processes. All things I consider to be essential life skills rather than the tactics of some sort of weird, Illuminati conspiracy.

We need to be a more well-oiled machine with better accountability as we've gotten more complicated internally with how technical, writing, editing teams all have to coordinate. There are still going to be deadlines, due dates, and time limit of goals that we still need to drive towards, but the how of all this obviously needs more polish. I planned these topics to be covered in internal conversations over the coming weeks, but instead, I'm talking to you about it during this on-the-job experience of what it's like to work at a YouTube company.

For all our awards, the team has worked hard to build up trust in the community and share the joy and the passion that we all have for tech, so I do not take for granted the responsibility and stewardship that comes along with this position. And I welcome continued constructive feedback. Thank you all for holding us accountable.

I feel ready for the challenge and ready for this message from our sponsor. Just kidding. Again.

But dbrand did offer.