Six years ago, Sophie Schmidt left her career in technology to focus full-time on telling important stories she felt weren’t receiving nearly enough attention: how technology was affecting the non-Western world.
To do that, Schmidt, daughter of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, founded and largely self-funded Rest of World, a seriously good publication with a tongue-in-cheek name—one that “encapsulates the problems we fight head-on: a casual disregard for billions of people, and a Western-centric worldview that leaves an unthinkable number of insights, opportunities, and nuances out of the global conversation.”
In its relatively brief tenure, the publication has won dozens of awards, including a National Magazine Award, and has received grants from the Ford Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation and Luminate. Schmidt herself was named a 2024 Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.
She recently sat down with Brunswick’s Kirsty Cameron for a wide-ranging conversation that traversed everything from Bhutan’s only AI company to a technology firm helping prevent deforestation in the Amazon.
What led to the founding of Rest of World?
I’d always been obsessed with what technology is causing to happen outside the West. What I quickly discovered when I left the US was that outcomes from tech were either shocking or thrilling, but teams on the ground had trouble getting the attention of the CEO at big tech companies. If they reported to HQ that a product was going sideways in their part of the world, it was difficult for them to be heard.
My prior job was at Uber for three years—it was a true rocket ship startup experience. When I joined there were a couple thousand employees and by the time I left, there were over 15,000. I was able to see how companies make decisions when things get really sticky. Halfway through, I joined the press team because it was the most kinetic and interesting. I started to work with journalists and understand how journalism is produced.
After I left, I went back to my original fixation. Things are materially different in emerging markets. Their outcomes with technology are materially different. There are genuinely new ideas. I eventually landed on a theory that a lack of enthusiasm and interest was due to an information gap. People can’t be excited about something if they can’t read about it.
How did you decide on your format and approach to coverage in Rest of World?
Narrative storytelling is one of the most durable and, I think, powerful ways to present information. Telling stories can get into people’s hearts and minds in ways that data reports and bar charts won’t. There’s something mesmerizing about the human story.
At Rest of World, we want to build out the canon of what tech looks like outside the Western world, how people are experiencing it and what it’s causing—so that the local companies are taken seriously, and their achievements are taken seriously.
We landed on a style of journalism that smashes business and culture together as our sweet spot. Even if non-Western markets are smaller, they still have a lot of tech users. Often, they had to build their own products to meet local needs. And that’s rich territory for storytelling, because sometimes that goes really well and sometimes it goes really poorly.
We did our first Bhutan story recently. It’s about the only AI company in Bhutan—which is seven college students in a dorm room. Their company now has the national airline as a client. It’s extraordinary, the degree of difficulty to even get that far, let alone how smart these kids are, with all the economic challenges and infrastructure issues.
“We want to build out the canon of what tech looks like outside the Western world … so that the local companies are taken seriously, and their achievements are taken seriously.”
International journals have a long history of parachuting in Westerners and saying, “here’s the view from the ground.” That disenfranchises an untold number of local journalists who are very capable of telling their own story, understand local nuances and can immediately identify stereotypes.
Many of the countries that we cover are often depicted in Western press as somewhat doomed, to conflict or corruption. The narrative is these are not growth markets, or even if they are economically, the political and social dynamics are inherently less interesting than the US. That’s a big part of what we try to overcome by using a technology lens in our reporting. Tech is actually changing the way other countries should be understood because of the quality of the talent, the quality of innovation and how ubiquitous smartphones and mobile technology are.
Now, you have a lot more people building stuff. It’s not the same story that it was 20 years ago. A big part of our publication is trying to bust myths, and present countries and local companies on their own terms.
With so many interesting things around the world being underreported, who do you think the audience is for Rest of World? Where do you see your readership?
One of the hardest things to figure out for the types of stories we do is the “so what?” Let’s say something has happened with tech in the Maldives. Why would someone in the Western world care? A big part of what we’re building is a mission that convinces anybody anywhere—but especially in the West—to care. Yes, you don’t live in Ukraine, you don’t live in Brazil, but there’s something significant happening in this trend or innovation that you’ve never heard of. These are indicators of where the world is going.
If you work at a ridesharing startup in California, you could benefit from knowing about a ridesharing app in Iran, because they have probably figured something out within their circumstances that might inform your ability to build a better product.
How do you find ways to raise visibility of those stories?
When it comes to reaching people, we are subject to all the same headwinds as any publication, and ours is essentially a portfolio approach. No publication can rely on a single distribution platform anymore. You can’t just have a Twitter strategy or a Facebook strategy. You can’t just publish and think, “It’s brilliant!” The battle for attention has never been tougher. We have worked hard to build a network of distribution platforms, including apps like Pocket. Our newsletter is our core distribution product. Those are the most engaged users.
It takes more work than having the basics of SEO and platforms down; that’s table stakes now. You have to really understand where readers are going. Trend reports have shown that news avoidance is high. So how do we keep making our work as accessible as possible? A big tenet of being a nonprofit for us is that our stories will always be free. The site is built extremely lean and fast. If you live in South Africa and your data costs are high, you should be able to download the story about yourself without paying an arm and a leg.
Who do you think your competitors and/or peers are?
What we’re doing is pretty different. We exclusively cover the non-Western world as a starting point, and that’s very rare. I got a ton of feedback when we launched from smart people who said, “This is never going to work. No one in the West will ever read about tech in Nepal.” I think we’ve proven that to be wrong.
One of the most interesting indicators of success to me is copycat journalism. We’re trying to grow the sector of this type of coverage and grow the enthusiasm. We’re proving there’s a demand for these stories. So competitors is a funny question—we actually want people to copy us! That means we are expanding the number of people that are telling these stories, which helps the entire ecosystem.
That said, we compete on talent for sure. We really invest in working with local journalists who then get poached by bigger publications, which is always bittersweet.
“A big part of what we’re building is a mission that convinces anybody anywhere—but especially in the West—to care.”
Has there been a particular story from the last few years that’s really resonated with your readers, or a favorite story you’ve covered?
I could talk about our stories forever! Our strongest story of the year was written by Viola Zhou, one of our talented reporters . As part of her investigation for a piece on TSMC’s plans to build a semiconductor plant in Arizona, she managed to track down a group of Taiwanese workers who would have never been allowed to speak to her if she’d gone through official channels. One Sunday, she went to a local Taiwanese church in Phoenix and introduced herself. And it turned out they were very happy to talk, and the story that emerged was fascinating.
What our publication does very well is share the perspectives that you often don’t hear about. Viola was able to present what the experience has been like for these employees, how they find the work culture in the US, and TSMC has struggled to pair an engineer from East Asia with an American boss. She told a sweeping story about the challenges of trying to compete in one of the most critical industries in the world when you need to have intercultural cooperation.
AI is a hot button topic in the West. How are you seeing AI play out across the developing world?
The low resource language problem is profound. There are lots of questions about who gets to decide what the answers are in the LLMs [large language models] and that gets us into internet governance and censorship. Unfortunately, governments can and will exert control over digital space. They have the legal ability and a technical advantage to do that. If Uganda’s President decides that he wants Ugandan AI to reflect the country’s anti-gay legislation, he can do it.
Unfortunately, governments tend to get smarter faster than civilians do. They have more money, more tools, more surveillance. We need to recognize that these huge developments in AI are also playing out in conditions that have a much higher degree of state control or state interest than we are used to. Because most governments now understand how critical the internet and mobile access are.
Do you see AI as generally a positive thing or are you more conservative?
I’m aware of several projects outside the West that are genuinely awesome. There’s a company called Planet Labs using satellite imagery and analytics to prevent deforestation in the Amazon. And I admire the use cases that I’ve heard about in healthcare and pharmaceuticals.
But I do worry a lot about AI deepening inequality in the countries that we cover, because of who will control access to it and where they’ll deploy it.
“I want VCs sitting in Palo Alto to think twice when a proposal from Indonesia comes across their desk—I genuinely believe they will feel differently about that opportunity if they’ve read a few of our stories.”
Does AI genuinely change the game? Is it materially different from the bias and hate speech that is already a problem online?
It depends on whether AI reaches the transformative heights some people think it will, the huge interconnection of systems. Imagine you’re a minority in your country and the dominant culture thinks that people like you are lazy. As in, “Everyone named Kirsty is lazy.” That would show up in training data, because it’s considered the truth by the majority. Then you, a Kirsty, go to interview for a job and your first interviewer is an AI program with an AI interviewer. AI interviews are common now in China and India. You won’t know it, but the bias against anyone named Kirsty is already in the system. So you don’t get the job.
So, I think AI is materially different as a risk to inequality and to marginalized groups around the world. And there isn’t really a good way to prevent bias. But then, the other risk is what happens if you don’t support AI in developing countries? Does that leave them further behind economically? It’s a very, very hard choice.
What impact do you hope Rest of World is going to have on the journalistic landscape, and on conversations about tech and culture?
We think of impact in a few lanes. One is finding good talent on the ground, setting them up for success in their career to go do the kind of things that they did with us, and for more news outlets.
Copycat stories are another. Understanding that our stories are competitive now with The New York Times—that’s a great feeling. And that’s impact, because it’s all amplification.
The tech community are important readers for us. My goal is to change hearts and minds. I want VCs sitting in Palo Alto to think twice when a proposal from Indonesia comes across their desk—I genuinely believe they will feel differently about that opportunity if they’ve read a few of our stories.
There’s a lack of investors in these markets. That can create a doom loop because founders can’t get far enough to really scale their businesses. You have to give these entrepreneurs a chance. You have to treat them as seriously as you would treat a team coming out of MIT, because they’re that good. If our storytelling can get into tech’s bloodstream, particularly in the generation that will become CEOs or start their own companies in the future, that’s everything. I’m hoping for a systems-level change.