You Might Also Like: Possible with Reid Hoffman

Camille François (0:00)

Today, one in 25 American teenager says that they have had a deep fake nude produced of them. I'm not saying one in 25 tell you, I know somebody to whom this has happened. One in 25 tell you, yes, this has happened to me. If you want fast collective innovation, if you want people to have access to the tools they deserve, if you want people to trust the things that they run their lives on, give them good shared open source foundations. Policy without tools is basically poetry. It looks great. You can recite it, but you can't really protect people with it.

Aria Finger (0:34)

In June 2018, Twitter bought a trust and safety startup called Smyte and abruptly cut off its other customers. Platforms like GoFundMe and TaskRabbit lost their anti-abuse tools overnight.

It exposed a bigger problem. Safety infrastructure was concentrated inside a handful of companies, leaving smaller builders dependent on tools that they didn't control.

Reid Hoffman (0:57)

Dr. Camille François has spent her career investigating online harm and building ways to combat it. In February 2025, she launched Roost to make safety tools free, open source, and available to anyone building an online space.

Aria Finger (1:12)

As a kid in France, Camille wanted to be a space baker, baking croissants on Mars.

She's chalked that up to being French. Today, her ambition is to make building safely as accessible as building itself.

Reid Hoffman (1:25)

Her colleagues describe an anti-authoritarian streak, drawn to frontiers over fiefdoms. That may help explain Roost's approach, sharing technologies that others have kept proprietary and giving communities the tools to protect themselves.

Aria Finger (1:43)

Camille François is the founding president of Roost and a professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.

Reid Hoffman (1:51)

Welcome, Camille. Your colleagues describe you as having an anti-authoritarian streak.

More pirate than institution builder. Does that sound like you? And what were you like growing up?

Camille François (2:07)

I'll talk to my team about that.

Reid Hoffman (2:11)

In an authoritarian way, I hope.

Camille François (2:13)

No, yes. Of course, I recognize that description.

I do think that I am able to work with and within institutions.

But yes, I like the energy of doing something together in a collective, maybe with a little bit of a pirate spirit. And when we were preparing for our very first Roost team retreat, I actually found a book, which is great, called Be More Pirate, that looks back at the history of the glorious days of piracy and think through, okay, there are institutional lessons to take from those days. And there's a way to rethink about that moment in time as a moment in time that brought a lot of advances in equality and democracy. And so maybe there's a different lens we can apply to our understanding of piracy. But jokes aside, I think that I've always been part of the open source and free software movement. When I was a student, I founded Students for Free Software France and then sort of served on the board of the global organizations, actually how I met my husband. And that organization no longer exists, but back in the day we were referred to it as Baby Pirate Hacker Club. So yes, I can see where that comes from.

Reid Hoffman (3:40)

Yeah. Exactly.

Aria Finger (3:41)

I mean, anti-authoritarianism. I'm with you. That's great.

And it seems like everyone is talking about online safety, privacy. You were way ahead of the curve on this. You were building Roost, you mentioned, which is a nonprofit that makes online safety tools free and open source. For someone who is hearing about this for the first time, who are these tools for and what do they help people do?

Camille François (4:05)

Yeah, they're for everybody. And Roost is a nonprofit. It's also a movement. And so we do this with a lot of people. We do this with large AI labs, but we do this with small builders. We do this with philanthropic organizations. We do this with many different types of institution. And essentially, if you think about safety, we have at least three problems.

The first one is, I think it's fair to say that tech and AI has progressed faster than our ability to keep people who interface with these technologies secure, not only when it comes to kids and children. And so we have an innovation gap, right? We need to fast forward our innovation and progress on safety tech. The second problem that we have is sort of a distribution gap, right?

There are a lot of safety tools that are okay, but people don't have access to them. And there are many more builders who are building new applications, websites, and who want access to the tools to do things right, to protect their users, to protect their communities, to do safety by design, right?