Tech entrepreneur Bob Goodson came up with the like button that powers today's web. He tells Insights why studying liberal arts can be the foundation for a successful career and why humans are hardwired to give and seek approval.
Bob Goodson: There are two things I've been fascinated with since I was eight years old. One is programming and the fact that we can teach computers to do stuff for us. When I was going into university, I didn't see a future in that from a career standpoint. For me, it was always a hobby. My other big fascination has been language. The power of words to shape how we think, to me, seems like the ultimate frame. Which is why I studied philosophy and literature. I wanted to be a professor in literature and philosophy.
Suddenly I was predominantly working as a front-end programmer and user interface designer. I was doing my hobby as a profession, but my interest in language was always there. What I loved about Yelp is that we were collecting all these words from people, reviews of local businesses. We were collecting millions of these and really not able to do much with the sentences themselves beyond basic analytics. That brought me back to my interest in language, and that's where Quid came from. We've been analysing large language data sets since 2013, which brought my two interests together. And now look at Gen AI - the focus on language is suddenly the most interesting thing happening in tech.
I do think it’s still the case. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, studied philosophy at Oxford for two years and has a liberal arts background. He once said to me that entrepreneurship is the last great apprenticeship career, which is an interesting phrase. In the Middle Ages, we had apprenticeship careers in everything. If you wanted to make barrels or something, you had to study with a master for years. We like to think of entrepreneurs as these people that just go and figure it all out. And that does happen. But most people start by working for an amazing manager, leader or another entrepreneur and learn the trade.
I don't want to make that claim, because it goes against the way I think about invention and innovation. Various people made significant contributions at different milestones. At Yelp, we were the first to put multiple emotions on a piece of web content and, perhaps more importantly, we were the first to let you react and stay on the page. We put those buttons on the website just a week or so after I did those sketches. One of the ideas I put down was the word "like" and a thumbs up as one of the options, which no one really put together for several more years.
There are two major factors. One is the dopamine release that's triggered by giving a like and also receiving a like for your content. The dopamine cycle has two important moments. One is when you imagine what it's going to feel like to get the thing you want, and the other is when you actually receive it. While you're uploading a photo or a post, you're thinking about the likes you're going to get, which gives you a little buzz. When people start liking it, you're getting another dopamine hit.
We are conditioned for intense social learning. We gravitate to be around people like ourselves, and ideally, people who are slightly ahead of us in some way. Liking is a way of us acknowledging the people we admire and are learning from.
There are around 50 billion likes happening every day. Think of the billions of dollars a year it costs to store that data, so there has to be a real benefit for sites. It serves as a sort of rocket fuel for social media because it creates higher engagement. Brands absolutely love it, because there is no better evidence than likes that your advert is working.
We are wired to give and seek approval
It's connected to the addictive nature of social media which is a big topic of conversation. How do you regulate the addictive nature of it, and how do you provide the regulatory framework for protecting younger people? Adolescence is a very sensitive developmental phase when you’re finding out who you are in relation to your peers, so how do you make sure it doesn't have negative consequences? There's a lot of work to be done around these questions.
First of all, I don't know what weaponizing social media means. The way things get developed is more like an evolutionary process. It's very ego-driven to think that you really make that much of a difference when you're an individual developer. Take the biggest figures in tech right now - people like Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, Tim Cook - who are making these massive decisions. We should think about them as midwives, overseeing the birth of something that they don't have much control of at all.
Well, I don't think it's my baby. The like button is something that has evolved. Am I proud of what information technology has delivered for humanity in the last 20 years? I think people involved in it should be proud. History will bear that out as a really important stage of human development, as an important stage of creativity. I grew up in a household where we couldn't really afford books, and I loved reading. We've just made encyclopaedias free for every child in the world who can access a phone or laptop, which I realise isn't completely free, but they can walk into any library, they can pick up any device and can access all the world's information. The contribution to convenience and to knowledge sharing has been absolutely enormous, and that's why I continue to work in tech.
It's clear that we can communicate with machines via thought. We have people now who can interact with computing in very nuanced ways with chips or sensors on their brain. I don't know the time frame, but it's inevitable that we're going to have a seamless connection to compute through thought. Machines will know what we like, with some controls as to what we do and don't reveal about our thoughts.
Martin Reeves, Bob Goodson: Like: The Button That Changed the World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025)
Person
After poring over 15th-century poetry at Oxford, Bob Goodson moved to Silicon Valley in 2003 to become the first employee at the review platform Yelp. He went on to found data analytics firm Quid, whose AI models are used by many Fortune 50 companies.
