He watched spam and bots flood Reddit and Pinterest. Now he is building the fix.
Marty joined Pinterest as its second engineer and became Reddit's first CTO in 2015. At both companies he ran the fight against spam, bots, ban evaders and bad actors on platforms used by hundreds of millions of people, and today he is building VerifyYou.
Joined as its second engineer and later managed BlackOps, the team that fought spam.
02RedditFirst CTODoubled engineering and built the anti-evil team against spam, harassment and abuse.
Building HumanCheck, so platforms know a real person is on the other end.
Reddit had about 234 million monthly unique visitors while Marty was its CTO.
Source · TechCrunch · May 2016 ↗His team at Reddit cut incoming spam reports by about 60 percent within a few months.
Source · TechCrunch · May 2016 ↗Pinterest halved the number of people clicking on spam in six months while he managed BlackOps, its anti-spam team.
Source · MarTech · Feb 2015 ↗Within a year his Pinterest team went from four hours to a day per attack to dismantling entire attacks in milliseconds.
Source · MarTech · Feb 2015 ↗Each clip opens at the moment it describes, so you can jump straight to the topic you care about.
Pick the one that fits your audience and build the episode around it.
Marty was Pinterest's second engineer and later Reddit's CTO while it served more than 230 million people a month, so he can take a host through what cracks first when growth outruns the plan and which fixes actually held.
ScaleA banned account that returns an hour later under a new name turns the ban into a speed bump, and Marty explains what it takes to make coming back cost more than it pays.
Ban evasionSpam rings and fake accounts run as businesses with suppliers, customers and margins, and Marty describes how that economy looked from BlackOps at Pinterest and the anti-evil team at Reddit.
The bot economyHis rule for stopping fraud is to make it more costly to commit than the economic incentive, and he can walk through how that one idea shaped the systems his teams built at Pinterest and Reddit.
IncentivesAI can now write, talk and click like a person for almost nothing, so Marty makes the case that every platform will soon need to know a real human is on the other end, and he explains what that means for everyone online.
Proof of humanYou were Reddit's first CTO. What did you walk into on day one, and what did you fix first?
What breaks first when a platform grows past a hundred million people?
At Pinterest you ran a team called BlackOps. What did fighting spam look like there?
Your Pinterest team went from hours to milliseconds to take down an attack. What changed?
Why does banning a bad actor so rarely keep them out?
You say the way to stop fraud is to make it more costly to commit than the economic incentive. Where have you seen that work?
Who actually runs the bot economy, and how do they make money?
How does cheap AI change the math for spammers and fraudsters?
What happens to online communities when anyone can generate a thousand convincing people?
Why did you start VerifyYou, and why now?
Hosts always ask, so here is the short version.
VerifyYou is the company behind HumanCheck, which confirms that a real, unique, live person is on the other end of an account.
It is built for market research, AI training and online communities, where a platform's value depends on one person holding one account.
Marty co-founded the company with CEO David Graham and CPO Axel Eschholz, and he serves as its CTO.
verifyyou.comMarty Weiner is co-founder and CTO of VerifyYou, the company behind HumanCheck. He was Reddit's first CTO and, before that, a founding engineer at Pinterest, where he scaled the service and then built BlackOps, the team that fought spam. At both companies he led the fight against spam, bots, ban evaders and bad actors at internet scale. He co-hosts the podcast Last Humans in the Loop.
Send the name of your show, a date that works and the format you have in mind, and we will take it from there.
To confirm · Calendly link for Marty, if you want hosts to self-book. The embed drops in when SITE.calendlyUrl is set.
