Why Advance Publications launched a tech incubator to build new products

Advance Publications is one of the world’s largest media companies. It owns Conde Nast, home to magazines like The New Yorker and Vogue, as well as dozens of newspapers across the U.S. It even has a majority stake in Reddit.

A few years ago, it launched Alpha Group, an incubator meant to launch brand new tech products and grow them into fully functional companies. Rather than acting like a traditional media company, Alpha Group takes a much more expansive view as to what constitutes a 21-century media company, and its products span a wide range of functions, from a social polling app to a Facebook chat bot.

I sat down with David Cohn, a senior director at Alpha Group, to talk about how the company comes up with new product ideas and what it’s like to try to launch multiple tech companies from scratch.