Kevin Ryan: How This Billionaire Founder Finds +$20B Business Ideas

You you like violate this rule that I have for myself and uh you you do it so wonderfully, which is focus. Or at least it appears as as you do. You like launch like I don't know, how many companies a year do you launch? Mm. A God damn.

Yeah. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to Alright, we're live. Kevin, do you this is Kevin Ryan. Do you remember me? I don't remember where we met. I know we've met, but I don't remember where. That's good.

Okay. You don't have to remember. So basically I'm gonna tell you why. This is funny. So basically I've studied you for maybe ten years. So you started uh you were the president of uh And CEO of Double Click, which had like a a billion dollar plus exit. And then you have started like four or five companies that are one's worth, I think, twenty-eight billion today. One's worth the Uh you have a couple billion dollar exits, but you start a business insider.

And I cold emailed you maybe fifty times. And one of those times, because I admired you so much, and we'll talk about your career, but I I wanted to be like you. And one of those emails you finally replied. And you just said like thanks for the updates, whatever. And then I lied.

And I said, I'm gonna be in New York tomorrow. Can I get twenty minutes of your time? And you let me do that. And I came to your office for literally twenty or thirty minutes. We had such an impactful conversation, and then you did another follow up call with me, and I have the notes from those calls, and this was in two thousand seventeen. And you made a bunch of predictions about my life as well as the media business and a few other things. That were one hundred percent true. And I refer back to that note sheet.

On a consistent basis to help make some decisions. Oh, interesting. So I'm glad I sometimes I get lucky and I get it right. And you wanna know what? Your your PR people cold email bus to get you on the pod. So the tables have turned, my friend. Welcome to my world. Exactly. But I just want to say, like, I've admired you for a long time. You're you're a really big deal to me. And so I'm so happy that we're able to like Finally do this. This is awesome. And Kevin, uh you don't know me, but I I did not stock you. I did not call email you. In fact, I was a little bit uh

Just jealous of you'cause I was at the time working in a um when Sam was telling me about you I was working at a uh startup incubator studio. And so we were launching four or five companies a year. And um After three or four years, I was like, I don't know if this model even works. I just feel like it's like this because there's something inorganic about the studio model versus like just a normal startup that that comes from an entrepreneur solving their own itch.

And he's like, Well, I don't know. This guy Kevin Ryan seems to do it. He's cranked out four or five billion dollar companies out of this and I was like I guess I should shut up and uh Just you know, not the model that's the problem. It's me. Uh you know, I I I think Not only is it cool that you built built big media companies, it's cool that you made the stuff the studio model work.

When very few people have been able to do that. Yeah. No, no, I still enjoy it. Yeah, it by and large it's still working. You know, things go wrong. It's not I wouldn't say it's easy. But we have a lot of companies that are doing really well in in different sectors. And so that's what's so fun. And look, there are there are more things to be done.

There are many problems in society that have not been solved. And basically the high level story of you is you uh You have like a normal corporate career, but then you kinda like worked your way into uh double click. Yep. Which eventually I think became Ad AdWords at Google. Exactly. Is that right? Yeah. So Google bought it for about three billion dollars in two thousand seven. Uh company was started in nineteen ninety six.

I was there for nine years. I was public for seven years. First four years went from Ten people when I joined to two thousand. So Crazy in twenty five countries. So that's what I spent my early thirties doing.

Um Then we spent three years breathing back to a thousand people as the internet collapsed and seventy percent of our clients went bankrupt. So don't do that. Uh then We we had huge market share controlled

Basically had technology and so then uh Google bought it. And then I started uh Business Insider Yeah, Mongo and Guilt. I wanna point one thing out in this journey, by the way. Your career starts at prudential.

Uh so sh shout out to all the listeners out there who are in boring companies right now, boring huge companies, consultants and bankers out there. There is hope for you yet. Um so you did like Prudential Euro Disney blah blah blah and then you joined DoubleClick as employee twenty, but you you they brought you in, I guess, as like a senior person at the time. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, what happened is I had launched an internet website.

For EW Scripts, which is a media company, and I was the COO and CFO of a division of that company. Wasn't it basically just like Gilbert Comics? Or was Exactly? Yeah. Dilber comics and and we had other comics. We owned Peanuts and a lot of other ones, but On a relative basis, it became very successful as a website. We sold Advertising e commerce Uh, so things that were not that easy to do because we didn't have the vendors at the time.

So I went to the parent company and said, Look, we should Build up an internet division. And they said no. Which I thought, you know. I actually believe that the internet's gonna be a huge which is obvious now, but Yeah, like huge part of the next twenty five years.

I want to go do this full time. So I was gonna go start a company, I ran across double click that was Already in the ad tech space. they convinced me to join them instead of starting My own company.

I became the the C the CFO, the president, and then the CEO. And then when we met, you basically you you kind of outlined after selling double click, you said basically my partner Dwight and I We came up with this thing where uh we called it Aly Corp and we're like You we get like two or three, maybe even one, good idea a year, and then we find good people. And we give'em three hundred thousand dollars. And we say, you have six months. Let's see if we can make this work together. And you did that with Insider, Business Insider, which I think had a five hundred million dollar exit. You did it with

Zola, which is still running and it's kicking ass, I believe. You did it with with Gilt, which I think got to like five hundred million in sales, but it it didn't end up working out wonderfully. I I think you said Yeah, we s we sold for two hundred and fifteen million, which was less than we thought, but it's still obviously a you know a real number. Good, yeah. Great. And then You you can go ahead and correct me, but you've done this with like four or five companies. Yeah. I I remember this meeting from two thousand eighteen. I said three hundred thousand. That was wrong, right?

Yeah. So we started each company with a million dollars. So five hundred thousand from each one of us. And that was for guilt. This is Insider and Mongo. Uh and then we I did Yeah, after that.

Wait. semi retired. And so I did that with uh Nomad. I did that with Zola. I and now by now I put about a million and a half dollars in each company when we start them. Which isn't a significant amount of money for how big I mean I uh Mago D B right now is trading I think at I think its market cap is twenty six billion dollars today. I'm sure at its at Covid peak it was like forty or fifty.

That that's not a lot of money for the outcomes. No, no, and look, we had to raise a lot of money. I mean Mongo Between being a private and public company raised and lost a більn dollars before they had a profitable quarter. And now already make three hundred million dollars a year in profits.

So that's why it's so valuable is because it's an it's just an incredible company growing quickly, enormous market share and is gonna grow for the next ten years. It'll be a fifty blade larger. Well, you told me in our call you said One of my notes is basically.

If you're not hiring fast enough and and by the way, this is like tr this is the the V C route, but you said if you're not If you're not hiring fast enough and losing money, AKA investing You either haven't figured it out or you don't believe that your idea is good enough.

Um, and so you need to grow grow faster. Well, and but it you you don't want to grow fast just to grow fast. If you have a good idea. And if you're hiring a salesperson who costs one hundred fifty thousand and they're selling five hundred thousand dollars worth, You need to hire those people all day long. Because you have an opportunity.

And if you have other products to create, you should hire these engineers. to to build it. So again, it's not spending money to spend money, but if you're building a big company, it's gonna take eventually a thousand people or two thousand people. to do a billion dollars in revenue. Well, you and you your analogy was you go, look

If I b if my idea is good enough, I'm gonna build a machine that turns one dollar into two dollars. And if I have that machine What are you gonna do? You're gonna go get as much money as you can. And back that truck up into that machine and dump it in there. Exactly. Now there are times in various companies where it doesn't make sense to invest a lot more money because we're not getting the return.

Yeah, you run out of market share. Uh, it's not as big a market as you think. Something's not working as well. And so then the right thing to do is to not invest. And I have companies right now that We've cut thirty percent of the people in the last year. Because

Given this market and what they were doing, we had too many people. Sam's building the hustle. He's trying to figure out what to do next. I I assume you were considering raising money. Because you wrote this down and I thought it was uh Um it's obvious when you hear it, but I I it most entrepreneurs I don't think think this way, which is You said

Let's say you're gonna raise two million dollars at a twenty million dollar evaluation. So you're gonna dilute ten percent. And you're saying. You just have to ask yourself, if I took that two million dollars and I invested it into growth, people, whatever Over the next eighteen months. Is our company going to be worth more than 10% versus if we do not? And if it is, then I need to do that. I should do that trade.

If it's not, I should not. And uh Did I capture the the logic? Properly there. Yeah. No, exactly. That's what you have to look at and You know, you don't

You don't want to raise too much in that round because if you sold ten million then that's very expensive capital. If you think it's gonna be worth a hundred million dollars someday or two hundred million dollars, you should raise that money. But you do need to get moving. And time is never on your side.

Yeah. Any good idea I've come up with. Eventually, even if six months later. Three other people are gonna come up with the same idea. So

You need to move quickly. People tend to they most people understand the the risk Of doing something. They understate the risk of not doing something.

Can you tell us a story where moving fast either benefited you or cost you big in one of these races that you ran? Absolutely. So double tape's the perfect example. We expanded to twenty five countries before our first country was profitable. So if we were a big company

Everyone would have said, look, let's wait and see and make sure our model works. But the result was if you were Proctor and Gammel or Caterpillar or IBM Who did you work with? You worked with us'cause we had operations in twenty five countries and you have off offices in those countries. You didn't work with our competitor.

Who had offices in six countries. As a result. We swept the market. We lost a bunch of money, but we were able to fund it. And that is the reason today, twenty five years later.

that you know, uh Google still has a commanding share it'cause'cause we got it early on and it's never been given up. But you're taking a chance. I mean There are there are times when you invest in something and it it doesn't work that well and you're like, Wow, we should have waited. You don't have time to wait. What insight w was insider, business insider was that? So you sold

Double click. You back then when you and I met, you actually told me how much money you made. off the double click sale. I I won't say it unless you want to say it. But W did you Um, which I thought it was amazing that you told me this. I was like, damn, you this guy's helping me out so much by telling me all this information.

Did you You and Dwight got together to start I don't know if you call it an incubator or w whatever you call Ali Corp, but did you Was insider the first idea that you had? And what led to that what led to the insight to start that? Yeah, so the insider idea was

so simple that you can't even give us credit for it. So this is two thousand seven. I love business publications and media publications. So I I'm a sort of a compulsive reader of that. And I didn't have the publication I wanted. And it's so hard to f to remember for t people today that The Wall Street Journal and Business Week at the time did not basically did not update their websites during the day.

That's crazy. He's thinking that's impossible. And the reason is that they were still on that schedule of The paper comes out the night you know, the the morning. Articles have to be done late at night. And so at ten in the a ten AM no one's updating.

And so they just had not adapted and don't forget Uh you're we only got uh mobile phones. In two thousand eight. And so then all of a sudden, all day long, you're in the taxi. Of course you want to get an update on what's happening. So

We the things we did are so obvious and done today, but they were we were early. Which is updating things continually. Writing stories that were not complete in a way. We'd hear a rumor that X company was buying Y company. We say that's what we're hearing.

And you know what happens when you write that? Someone from that company calls this Yeah, actually it's true. Um And so then you get more information.

And so you Maybe write four or five stories during the day. As you get more and more information. And we also had a point of view. So

Yeah, we'd write uh so and so just overpaid for a company. It's more. Important that we have a smart point of view. than that we're right in the long term. And so

And we did a great job of Making sure we showed up in search results. So Again, everyone does that today at the time. No one cared about headlines because

If you had Business Week magazine, does the headline result in more revenue for you? No. But When we we would A B test three headlines very quickly on a story. And realized what was working. And so

Yeah, what I'm proudest of is that Business Insider is at three hundred million uniques today and never spent one dollar in advertising. Yeah, you told me. Well, you said you s you you said we were just we were gonna just churn out these articles, which Um It's common now, but you go

You had this really cool insight. You go, it it's kind of like Honda in nineteen eighty five versus General Motors. Americans laughed at the Honda. uh car. They said this is just too flinsy. This isn't good. But they're gonna like capture some market share and they're going to improve.

And you said it's kinda like that with business insider. p the the the quote the critics or the the real people in the industry, whatever you want to call them. They laughed at you. And they said, This is just low quality, this is junk. And you're like

But we're gonna get more traffic than you. And I think it took like five years or something, but we got more traffic than Wall Street Journal. And now they're looking at us that like Holy crap, you surpassed us, and we can afford to have a more substantial journalism that maybe is taken more seriously if if that's even That's something we care about. I I would guess by

Twenty fifteen, we had seven people covering military and defense. That's deep coverage. I mean You you you have a lot. You're writing great stuff. In the beginning, obviously we had, you know five journalists covering the whole world.

Not gonna be amazing. But that that is a good parallel and we it the product did get better over time. We started winning awards. Uh, but it always was intended to be a different positioning. It was punchier. It appealed to younger people. Uh it was opinionated.

No, it's just a different product. Uh but I think I think the company, you know, we Henry Blanche, who's still the CEO. has done an extraordinary job. Over fifteen years.

And a lot of these insights came from him. And he was one of the seven people I interviewed for that job. And he killed it. Uh, what did you see in him that uh made you pick him? Yeah, I know when you if you remember it was a bold choice because Henry had had some issues on Wall Street.

Um so we've Some people felt like he was tainted. I knew that he and the the issues, by the way, were I think he got accused of Was it insider trading or not inside trading at all? What happened was

At the time what was standard there was that uh the Wall Street analyst would come pitch the company that was gonna go public. And they would say, look, we're gonna great write great things about you. Which is potentially a conflict with their recommendations to their uh their their companies, their investors. So Um

Everyone did that? Henry actually wrote internal email saying I feel really uncomfortable with this. Which then was used against him. Yeah, no one else did that.

And so legally, I don't think he did anything wrong. Uh I everything he wrote was approved by his superiors and and ordered. But anyway, uh you know, some people felt like he was tainted. I didn't at all Um, what I did know is he was an incredible writer. And he was a perceptive

journalist who's writing Pieces for the Atlantic. I mean he's just so good. I mean, he's so talented. And he also

He truly understood Internet journalism. So the people I interviewed for the Wall Street Journal Basically just wanted to redo the Wall Street Journal. And which we don't need.

Uh. Henry had was was fresh. He had never really worked in a newsroom, which Can be viewed as a weakness. I gave it as a strength. And so he changed the rules.

And we were willing to do that, and he did an incredible job. You know, that same strategy of kind of like Start with the content. quickly that gets traffic. Don't try to be don't look for kind of like the peer acclaim in the industry, look for what the market wants, and then over time improve the quality.

That was also BuzzFeed's strategy. But today I'm looking at the Buzzfeed stock. It's thirty six cents. It's a fifty million dollar market cap. What do you think they got wrong? What happened to BuzzFeed?'Cause it seemed like they were They had that whole s that same playbook and Jonah Peretti, if you ever hear him talk, he seems like you know, whip smart in the same way. For me, it's very clear and I've I felt this from day one, even when they were theoretically worth two billion dollars.

I rarely ran into someone who said I love reading Buzzfeed every day. I I don't believe they built up a true brand. They showed up in search results, they got traffic.

But there were Many, many people that Religiously read Business Insider every single day. So it just had a brand that I think was much stronger and more defined. And you y you you guys have another uh

funny part about you, which is I was telling my wife this'cause we were talking I was telling her I was gonna talk to you and I was gonna and and I followed Dave Portnoy on on Twitter. Barstool. Business insider is the only one To get one up on him.

So you guys had this you guys had this article about some s some stuff that he had done. And he went Ape shit. It went crazy. Yeah. And business insider had the best response, which was no response. You guys didn't reply. to anything. And it's the only time I've ever seen Dave Portnoy get one up. Uh I wasn't really involved with that whole exchange that happened after

Yeah, I we sold the company. So Well, I thought it was pretty funny and I uh I thought it was I thought the systems that are actually Hell, there wonderfully. And they were the first people that I've saw that got one over onto him.

You know, you know, Kevin, um, you you guys have had so many hits come out of the studio. And um As somebody who ran a studio for six years and uh did not have billion dollar hits come out of it. I gotta know. What's the uh what's the secret? What uh you know, what what was it that you guys were doing differently? And I'm sure you've talked to many other people, you've seen many entrepreneurs start these labs and you've probably seen the same results as I have, which is that

Very, very few. What do you think you guys did differently than others? So it's not that, you know detail wise we did think differently. At the end of the day

This is a simple business, but hard to do. In other words You need a good idea and you need a good team. Uh so that's just there's nothing else. Uh so Yeah, I we've had some good ideas. Uh, we do a lot of research, you know.

Any one time we're doing deep dive, so someone will spend two and a half months Interviewing fifty people, doing the same thing that I would do if I were an entrepreneur about to start a company. So we have a lot of knowledge. There's a fifty page DAC. We've really gone into it. And then we're committed and then we go hire a great team and we help that team. But again, it's a little bit like watching

Yeah, I don't know, a good basketball player, a good soccer player. We know what they do. We can see what they do. Can I do what they're doing? Not very easily. So I think we've executed well there. And you know, we have a bunch of people, including myself, have a lot of experience doing this. It's just a series of judgment calls.

Yeah, I think Uh, I'm able, because of the track record, able to convince some good people to be CEOs. Um That's important too. And we you know, we spent a lot of time helping them. So I chair twelve companies.

So about half my time is spent focusing on those twelve, which are twelve of our most valuable companies. uh to really guide them and make sure that they do as well as possible. Walk us through like One of those ideas. So Okay, so Yeah. For example, two and a half years ago. So I'm

Uh I'm very interested in psychedelics or mental health. I'm the leading funder. of the Yale Center for Psychedelic Research. Yeah, well, I'm involved with a bunch of things. nonproper research for, you know, pushing psychedelics. for forward so they can be legalized either by

By the FTA or by state. So with that context, two and a half years ago, I said, Let's do a deep dive and see if we come up with a for profit idea. My team Works with me. Interviews fifty people.

Yeah, we're talking to everyone. And we come up with a solution that was partly influenced by some of the work that's been done at Yale. And we start a company called Transcend. The person on my team actually, which is unusual, spins out. To become the CEO.

Uh Blake Mandel. big article in uh the Wall Street Journal about five months ago about transcend Because we We start off at the million half dollars. But we raised forty milyen dollars.

About a year to a year and a half later in two tranches at eighty million free. So Big, big, big, big step up, big valuation. And we have a compound that you haven't heard of. going through the FTA process. It's in phase two trials right now.

Uh And so people are obviously optimistic about the future, like the team, like the execution. Uh we did some things very well there. We And been awarded patents, for example. You follow this industry, you know that

You can't patent MDMA or mushrooms because those have been around for a long time, but we actually did get a patent for methylone. Which is the compound that we're working on. Uh So so far so good. Now there's still risk, but that company is yeah, we currently have A fifty million dollar position.

Based on our five million that we've invested so far. And we think it has a lot of potential. What about um Like with MongoDB, so Um

That was started I think it Two thousand seven. So Alicorp was like a little bit early. Did you have a team helping you research ideas back then? I didn't. That was purely Dwight. Myself. And Elliot Horowitz. Who was the most brilliant young engineer at Double Click.

Now out of seven hundred engineers, if you could pick out one person other than Dwight, you would have picked him. And so we started a company together in two thousand five called ShopWiki. Which is a search engine for shopping. Did okay, not great. We sold it in two thousand seven, made a little bit of money. And then said what are we gonna do next?

And so came up with this idea. Uh started working on It was a very hard slog. It's very easy to feel good about it right now. For three years we had zero revenue. So

Not easy to keep funding going back to D C's. With zero revenue. But we had a lot of people using it, so Yeah, we broke through that, but we had some ugly financing rounds. Yeah, especially back in two thousand nine, two thousand ten.

It was not a good time to be raising with no revenues. Uh, then finally Sequoia came in and then we raised a lot of money. And now it does Getting close to a two billion dollar run rate. Did that company make you a billionaire?

So Yeah, I mean look for all of us it definitely uh yeah, we all made lots of money on that on that company. Definitely. Those three years with no revenue, uh at the time were you like People just don't understand that this thing is uh like Others don't see it, but I see it. Or

Where you're like in the fog of war, you're like, I don't know if this is a thing, if this is gonna make it, but um you know, let's keep going. No, no, I would say that all of us were nervous. Because uh yeah, you like to have revenue when you're gonna run out of money at some point. What helped us on the inside was that uh the utilization the number of people using the product It was free.

Was growing every single month. all over the world. So there's you know, probably fifty thousand small companies using the product. And so Yeah, there were Hundreds of meetups about Mongo.

And people were showing up. And We can see In a way that the dogs like the dog food. Uh, we just needed to then make it good enough that larger companies would pay money.

For it. And then we got there and And the rest is history. But what's crazy is like all right, business insider, I understand that well. That's media. I get it perfectly. Gilt. That's commerce. That's fairly easy to understand.

Zola kind of media ish related, but like a fill like I understand that business. And then you have like psychedelics, which I don't have anything about, but then Mongo is like highly technical. I I I I barely even I don't I I don't even know the use case, to be honest. It's a database company involves SQL. I like I don't even I'm so not technical. It's pretty amazing that like are you Are you pretty I mean you are now, but were you well versed on what this idea was, or did you just trust Elliot?

So Elliot and Dwight, yeah, were the brains and the technical jobs like the product could not have been built without that. Only understood. the high level problem, which I saw, which is that Oracle was not the right database for the future because we were going from structured data to unstructured data.

Way to think of that is that If I you know, you think of a spreadsheet, which is how we all thought about data. But if I told you I have ten thousand videos. Can you put that into your spreadsheet? And like well

No, actually it's not built for that. But of course data was moving that way. YouTube came out in two thousand five. Video is gonna be enormous. Uh, so I knew that trend was happening. I knew that the oracle product was extraordinarily expensive. For us.

And so there had to be a cheaper way. We had seen Linux come out. So that was an open source you know, operating system. That was enormously successful.

And so we thought collectively that we needed an open source Database. that uh was was structured for the future. Yeah, so that was the bet. So that I understand. If you Said five levels down, do I understand the code? No.

But you know, I was working with any time you start a company No, h like I I'm not a particularly good writer. Henry is Uh, and he was in charge of that product. I knew the market well enough in both cases. High level.

And then it's about assembling the team. You gotta think of yourself as you are the coach. You are not the player. And If you were a coach and if you manage to persuade Yeah. LeBron James and Kevin Garnett and a bunch of people on your team.

Your team's gonna do well. That's actually the job. You um you like with the when you're talking about transcend And you're like, we're we've got a drug going through FDA trials. I had the same reaction that I think Sam's having, which is like, Man, this guy's pretty fearless. Like goes into totally different spaces with totally different business models. And um w with probably a whole bunch of like new things you gotta learn.

Um, and even if you're the coach, you know, you're betting money and you need to be able to recruit the right players and you need to steer the ship. Um Do you feel like fearlessness is something you have and do you s do you notice that like Do you feel like sometimes I look at other entrepreneurs and I think Man, I can't believe there more of them are not doing X. Do you feel like that about the way you approach entrepreneurship? Like I don't know, I I feel like more people should be trying the thinking this way, but they don't seem to.

I mean look, what we do is just a slight variation of an entrepreneur. They just happen to I have entrepreneurs working for me and we have a structure and And don't forget we also have, you know, I have seven D engineers who work for me. I have my own in house outsourced engineering company. Which helps us build product now very quickly, which we've had the last three years.

Uh I Oh Big chunk of a search firm ten person executive search firm that we set up. So that we can get

Some of the best talent working for us. Finding CEOs. So we've built infrastructure around it, but still most of it goes back to a good idea. And uh a good tea. Yeah, and when we get that right.

Yes. And by the way, last one on on psycho. Yeah, I had done plenty of work. I mean I'm not a scientist, but

I've gone through the academic papers. I know the state of research in psychedelics. I know it's working. And look, our what I am thinking about all the time, and everyone here does, is where is the world gonna be in ten years? That's the North Star for what we're doing. If something is gonna happen next year, it's too late. I need to bet on a ten year trend.

So you know, we do a bunch of things in robotics and automation'cause I feel good about that trend. It's like, you know, this is a ten year trend. MongoDB was a ten year friend. Um these are things we're betting on. What are you consuming on a daily basis to spot these trends? Yeah, so tons of things. No one thing. I'm on, you know, many, many

Yeah, newsletters that are industry focused or general focused or science or I I read forty books a year. I mean conversations with people all the time. Where you're you know, there's a lot of learning. Uh.

And then people on my team are more specialized than I am. So yeah, I have Two M D M BAs who are Head up our health care practice.

And then people below them that have worked in health care. So they were thinking of very specific issues that I probably wouldn't wouldn't think of. And the same as driving. person on marketplaces, a person on semiconductors and material science. And a person on developer tools.

And enterprise software. And two people on social impact. So a lot of what we do is in those areas and I'm a Bigger and bigger believer now. of industry focus.

Yeah, it it's a you're you know, you and I are not gonna think of something that applies to the chemical industry right now. But if that's all you did For six months. Interviewed. A hundred people, you'd probably come up with some ideas that make sense.

And the industries that you care about right now are health. Healthcare. Uh definitely uh then the ones I mentioned. So semiconductors and material science. developer tools, uh with some security. Marketplaces

B to B marketplaces. Uh social impact. And robotics and automation. What's an example of a B to B marketplace? That you're interested in.

Yeah, so we Invest we have done a deep dive into the maritime industry. So shipping. No one thinks about it. Multi hundred billion dollars very behind in technology.

We invested in a company called Box Hub. It's a marketplace for those containers. Than on container ships. Based in Toronto. Uh most people wouldn't have known about it. We led that round. We also

Have just started a company in Maritime. that's gonna be a e ka a procurement marketplace So you're a ship, let's say you're arriving in Cartagena. Your boiler. Breaks.

What are you gonna do? Yeah, we weren't you weren't planning on that. And so having a site you can go to that becomes l sort of the Amazon of that. And has delivery and can get you those parts.

Uh Everyone in the industry told us that that's needed. So we're literally just built a team. Two months ago, there are probably at four people right now. And so we're off and running.

What's that company called? It uh it doesn't have its official name yet. So all right, let's use that as an example. So you basically did Uh, did you just go and somehow network your way into talking to fifty Oh yeah, so a woman on my team.

Uh absolutely did that. And went to two uh maritime conferences. So Which

She said we're fascinating. It's basically people from Venezuela. You know, the Middle East, Russia. Yeah. From all over the world.

Greek. And so trying to understand the history of the buttons of pirates. But the pirates hobbling around and a bunch of parrots and bird shit all over the place. She said it did not look like her Princeton uh reunion at all. So yeah, and so and she met with the couple investors who invest into space, you know, ship owners. uh data providers everyone You're just trying to understand how does the industry work? And I think there's an advantage sometimes coming from outside.

Because some people just say, Oh, that's just how it works, yeah. And the person on the outside will be like, Wait a second, it doesn't have to work that way. Yeah, we can do better. Right. And that's why like you know

Henry was the perfect person coming from outside. Yeah, when I started guilt. None of my Initial five people had worked in the fashion industry. But

We understood the problem. It wasn't that complicated. So we could create something that was that was Interesting unusual. Uh so that's the right approach. We just started a company in assisted fertility. I'm sure you guys know you have

Friends Yeah, who are getting IVF. I did it. Yeah, my my brother and his husband, you know, uh had a child through surrogacy. Freezing eggs.

That's gonna grow for the next ten years. For all the reasons we know about people having children later, sperm counts are down. Much nicer. So we do we saw we started clean. But uh four months ago. We put in a million and a half dollars and we just signed a term sheet. To raise, you know, five and a half million dollars.

Um Lot of people wanted to do it. People were excited about the team. Uh yeah. Yeah. good set of people, uh, mostly from Stanford Business School on this team.

And it's a big space. So Uh I'm I'm gonna bet on that team and that trend. For a while. What does that deck look like? You said they m they do like a or maybe I think a fifty page memo or deck. I'm not sure what you said. Do you have a structure for it?

Yeah, it's generally one just talking about the industry, where are the problems, where are the pain points. And then where are the opportunities? What's the product idea? So one of the reasons I do almost nothing in e commerce these days Is because I don't see the problem. We solved the industry solved the problem.

If you name anything on the planet Earth, just about Yeah, you can find a site, they'll have ten thousand of them. It'll be sent to your house by tomorrow. Mm. I don't know how to do better.

That problem is solved. Whereas When I Yeah, w when I started guilt. You actually couldn't get Mark Jacobs at fifty percent off.

Online. Uh just no one offered it. And so we offered it and people went crazy over that. Uh so E commerce is very mature. Frankly, media is pretty mature right now.

There's a lot, you know, not that people say to me, I just can't find what I wanna wanna read. Uh, but even you know once in a while we're working on one idea right now, the early stages in the media space. Uh but not not sure yet. So we're looking for problems. The health one of the reasons I like healthcare Is because

It healthcare is not solved. Yeah, as you guys know. Yeah, you have knee surgery. Either you or your insurance company are gonna pay a crazy amount. One, there's too much knee surgery. It's gonna someone's gonna pay forty thousand.

Yet in France it's twenty thousand and the results are better. So can it be done better? Yes, it can be done better. You twenty times more Black women die in childbirth. Then

In Sweden? Yes. Is that Something that is just inherent and is always gonna happen? No. We don't do enough prevention. There are many structural issues in health care.

That have not been solved and we're we're solving some of them. It sounds to me like what you do is you look think about what's the world gonna look like in ten years. Um you know, either what's a problem that just if somebody could solve it, that would be a major, major unlock, or hey, the the puck is going this way. And then it sounds like you say, um Cool, let's go find out everything we can learn about that space. We we go in kind of uh open minded about what problem we're gonna solve.

We try to figure out uh where all the pain points are and then It sounds like you're looking for What I'll call The big obvious problem. Which is

If it's too complicated and nuanced, it doesn't sound like you're that interested. It's like uh Hey, you can't find luxury fashion online for fifty percent off. Right. Okay. That's like a big obvious Problem. It doesn't take that much explaining or expertise to even understand the problem. Maybe the solution might be might take some expertise, but the problem should be in your face. Uh once once you're looking in that industry.

Um We uh we have this thing we say on the podcast, which is that there are businesses that the their business plans that are what I call one chart businesses. You can just look at one chart and it just tells you, oh, that's Yeah. That's so obvious. Like we were looking at one that was around um

uh in the death space around cremation. And it was like cremation went from I don't know. Seven percent of all things to like fifty percent. It's now the majority. Of uh of of of what ch choices people make when um When it comes to her funeral.

And this is like that's a one chart business. You can look at nothing else and say, All right, I know there's b I know there's opportunity when I look at a chart like this. Um Is is that s does that jive with your way of thinking, or do you have anything you could add to to our understanding of that? No, no, absolutely. I mean I'll give you another one.

The cost of labor. is gonna just keep going up. And so, you know, waiters were paid fifteen dollars an hour. Now Yes.

twenty to twenty five dollars an hour in New York. Unless we change immigration or something fundamentally changes, that could be thirty dollars an hour. So you know what? Over time that changes the calculus of automation. Whether it's making French fries, whether it's through this.

Yeah, we're all gonna have to find ways to use less labor. Yeah. And so when cost of tech goes down and the cost of labor goes up. What does that tell you? More automation is gonna happen.

I've so I'll bet on that trend all day long. Yeah, we're an investor in a company that Gives robotic massage за севтін та Open positions for massage therapists in this country. Huh. And so, you know, there's hotels that just can't offer massages because they don't have the people.

So Yeah, we hope they're gonna offer uh uh sorry, so that there's just one example, but I have ten of it. We uh Well, what are those ten others? Uh of just uh of just automation or are other ideas. No, just I'm I'll give you another example of another

Is so driverless cars is as you know not legal in most countries. Most states. But having a remote driver is So Would you if you're in New York City, would you pay money To have a car

Bru a rental car brought to your apartment. As opposed to you having to take your seven suitcases. And two kids and go to the rental car. Of course he would. Um And yet we can have someone in the Philippines or in

you know, Arizona drive the car because we put software and hardware in the in the car. They can see everything. That's legal in many states. Yeah, airports already talking to us. Uh about

Um the vans that they have to drive around to bring people to the Mental car lots at two in the morning. Hardly anyone on there. You gotta pay someone double time.

Forty bucks an hour. That should be done by someone remotely. So things like that are gonna be automated. So Sean and I um We've had a bunch of cool people on this podcast. So one of our great friends is this guy named Andrew Wilkinson. He owns maybe forty companies, uh a lot of agencies and and web stuff.

Mm mostly bootstrapped. It's publicly traded now. And then we have this other guy named Saeed, who's like thirty two years old, who owns um a bunch of WordPress plugins, basically that bootstrapped a unicorn. Wow. Amazing. And well of what she owns most of. Um and so we we have a lot of like and And and I fall in this category as well. I I I bootstrap a lot of my things.

Um, and then there's this other category. So there's a category of people who like bootstrap stuff and then she's their cash flow. And then oftentimes that same group of people prefer to go and buy companies as opposed to build them from scratch. You're taking the opposite approach a little bit, where you're like Uh, I'm gonna fund it. It's not gonna make money at first. But I'm and I might go and raise a a a shit ton more money, but this might be a huge idea and I'll own a small piece of it. What um

Like have you ever considered the bootstrapping model or is your is your you just go big right away and have you ever considered buying? What's your like buy versus build kind of mindset? Yeah. So it really depends on the type of business. So if you're running an agency You just don't need a lot of capital. Yeah, you hire Five people.

Who uh and then They that agencies make money and then you use that money to reinvest and grow. If you're building what I'm building is closer to like a hotel. Yeah. You have to build the whole building before anyone comes and stays with you.

So little different'cause like Mago, you gotta take years to build a good enough product. And there's no way to bootstrap that. Yeah, it takes twenty fifty

Yeah, there's a hundred million dollars generally for those types of companies. to get there. So that's why it's it's not an option for those things. Look, I would love to have companies that you know, I can own all of um for example the The agency that that I have, I said those engineers. I basically have an outsourced engineering company.

I own all of that. Uh because It has clients and it builds as it gets more clients. Like those businesses are not as scalable. Profit margins are generally lower. Um

Those are not type businesses I generally go after. Wha why is that? Is it just a matter of you just enjoy something more? Do you think that one is a better better wealth creation? Are you mo I mean what what what's the motivation? I just prefer creating a product, a real product that's hard. Uh and then you know, making more scalable and building it up over time. The vast majority of Quite successful companies are in that category.

The services oriented companies Yeah, it's harder it's harder to get to be a unicorn. It can happen, but there aren't there aren't that many. You over time gotten more selective on the project selection? Cause I look at you know, you did business insider. I think you were the C were you the CEO for like A a period of time there? Nine years, is that right? No. No, I was the chairman for all nine years. I did step in I did step in to be the CEO of Gilt.

Growing really quickly. I just decided that I was the right person at that point. For probably two or three years. But otherwise I've been chairman of many companies for fifteen years. I stepped into Mongo, I Changed CEOs about eight years ago.

Uh and for three months I was de facto the CEO as I was doing. So you've you've run these for a period of time, but mostly not. Um but uh but I guess uh When I think about businesses, I look at my career and it's like I look back and I think okay, of these ten things I did Two of them. were like ate up all of my time and gave me a bunch of gray hair for like m relatively less payoff.

versus these other two, which was like I just kinda wrote the check. It was an obvious opportunity and it just paid me and it was wonderful. Have you like What's the best business that you've done in your portfolio that you look back on that has the combination of The value, the pain that it took to get there, you know, um, all all of that. And then Do you have a framework around there or do you think it's just luck at the draw?

I think it's like the draw. I mean Mongo is the one where Yeah, I got the most return for the least amount of money. I mean I I Essentially never worked there full time. Uh so I'm chairman for thirteen years. Um, and yet it's it's super valuable and

Yeah. Fascinating company that's gonna be around for the next fifty years. Uh. But you know, I I'm intellectually curious. So what I love about what I do is that

Yeah. In an hour, I might be in a meeting on psychedelics and then on, you know, semiconductors, and I have to try and keep up and learn something about these. Um And that's what so you know, we have one in cardiology. Uh just so many different things. It's

That's what's Amazing. And for someone who's thinking about ten years, I'm A little surprised. I don't see AI all over this doc. Uh, you know, you're not saying AI, AI, AI. It sounds like it might be embedded in some of these things that you're doing. Uh, like Might be a tool you use, but Are you

Bearish on it for some reason, or what's your thinking around AI? No, I I say two things. One It it's coming down now, but if it were six months ago, you know, the Pricing on AI was insane. Yeah.

Three people walk in and say, We're worth a hundred million dollars'cause we're gonna put together an AI company. Just didn't make sense. So we didn't make any direct investments there. Um Each we're really encouraging each one of our companies to use AI. Yeah, I think the

Yeah. The real use of AI in the short term is gonna be much more mundane. It's Optimizing customer support. you know, making your coding more efficient, things like that. Uh, we're a long way before, you know, true AI companies are coming. But it's but it's it's on its way.

We did something unusual this summer. The our entire technology team shut down for a week. Went home. And their only assignment was to learn about AI the entire Read about it, think about it, talk to people. Sean did that too. Yeah, I did the same thing. I sat down for a week. Yeah, just to get up to speed,'cause it is a very important thing that we all need to be thinking about.

And then came back. Yeah. Compare notes. And made sure that our our companies are thinking about it. Did you do it too, or just the engineers? I no, these are not engineers. These are the the investment people on the on the tech side.

So I do it on a more continual basis. You know, I'm spread thinner than other people. So you know, I have sixty board meetings a year. I have a lot of things I have to I can't shut down as easily. Unless I'm at Burning Man or Antarctica.

Yeah. As one does. Nice flex. I love that. Then I'm done. Then I'm off the grid. And I don't have a choice. I'm gonna change all of my uh my my uh autoreply things to I'm in Antarctica, even though I'm just actually in time. No, that's the the only two times I'm truly off the wrong. You uh You you like violate this rule that I have for myself and uh you you do it so wonderfully, which is focus. Or at least it appears as as you do. You like launch like I don't know, how many companies a year do you launch?

Mm. A God damn. It you could do eight now, but I m I don't know how big your team was early on, but it seemed like you were still creating a lot of companies. I mean generally it was one a year, one a year. Um

There was that one year where we did three between the two of us. Uh, but I would never be able to do eight on my own. I mean they they take real time. If we are if the roles were reverse, you know, I look up to you. If you were a twenty three year old and and you looked up to me, I would say Man, you gotta do one thing well and that will pay more dividends. I agree. Oh, well great. So what's your like opinion on that then?

No, so I think that anyone I I I people come to me all the time and say, Look, I would like to have a studio like you. And I say, look. Don't do that. Start. By trying to

start a successful company. And end up not being the CEO. That's already not that easy. Yeah. If you have that.

And six months later, the company has raised its external round of financing. has a full management team in place. And you are the chairman? You can then decide to do another one. Yeah.

You can't truly be CEO of multiple companies. But you can be chairman of multiple companies. But you gotta start with one. And you try and do two or three at the same time on your own. Yeah. It's not gonna work. It's not that easy.

Yeah. I have twenty five people. What what does the chairman actually do? So a chairman is one the in this case is the ultimate person that's going to be around fifteen years from now. The CEO may change. This is a person that's gonna guide in and as a co founder. Yeah.

Yeah. Along the way somehow Henry Blarger had quit. That's my problem. I need to find a CEO. I need to solve that for the board.

So you're just the most active board member. We had other investors, but everyone knows I got one company that is gonna have a tricky financing round. And Uh we need to get the in the uh

the internal investors together. Not gonna be easy. I need to do that. So I'm having calls with all of them. I need to

Wrangle everyone, encourage them, push them. Come up with the right thing. W what type of relationship do you have with your CEOs like before it's like uh you know, in the first One, two, three, four years. How often are you working with them? Yeah, so I mean there, uh we're gonna have a call probably every

week or every two weeks soon. touch base, and then they reach out if they need something. I mean, I love the relationship. I feel great about the relationship because Yeah, I don't want their job. If I wanted their job, I would have I would have taken their job. Um I want them to succeed. I don't you know I don't want to be CEO of one company.

And hopefully I can stay out of the way,'cause they know much more about B company than I do. But there's certain things where I have either relationship, some experience Tricky issues. uh uh introduction to a V C firm. Where I can add value.

Uh And so I I love that. relationship. Uh the I like you so much because You do things

Okay, so Sean and I are in this like stupid Twitter world. Where like a lot of our friends are popular on the internet. And there's this whole uh thing that I don't buy into of like build in public and like use your audience, but like it's people selling like hundred dollar a month things or something like that.

And you have these like really big ideas, but also like for how successful you are. We take pride in like finding interesting people who are like amazing but not incredibly well known. You are really good. You're you're one of the higher people on this ratio of like Pretty low key under the radar, but has had massive impact. Exactly what I want.

And like you don't have an audience, like you you violate all these like stupid rules that people talk about. I do no social media. Why is that? You know, it's I look I think other people use it very well and they like doing it. I don't wanna spend the time. Uh I don't wanna do it. I don't want to I don't need to be out there. Uh I that time should be used for thinking time.

And managing time. Uh and so yeah, no the People are on my marketing team No, that the goal is that we are very successful and that when I walk into a restaurant, no one knows who I am. Yeah, I mean I I just think it's awesome. We're well I I but you you're on like C N B C and shit like that every once in a while. I'll I'll see you there. I think there's rumors that you're you're gonna run for mayor. W is that true?

So uh two sort of th one is you haven't seen me on TV in a long time. Right. Yeah, that was you that was about four or five years ago. When I think I was like leaving your office or something like that in the Yahoo building, or maybe I was at a friend's I saw you on TV. Yeah, that'd be right. I don't think I've been on for At least five years. So yeah, I don't

Yeah. Yeah. Actually podcasts are the only thing I do because It's sort of enjoyable. You don't need to prepare. You have a good conversation. Uh so I've done that, but I other than that, I do almost nothing.

I did. Uh think about running for mayor, you know, eight years ago. I've been very involved in politics in many ways, um, representing tech community in in every dimension. Um

All my life I thought I would want to that'd be the one of the thing I'd want to do. And then decided, you know, seven years ago that I didn't want to do that. It's It's a miserable process. Yeah, if you said to me you could be mayor tomorrow, I would actually do it.

You said to me, No, no, what I mean is that you can be one of seven candidates You can spend eight months getting the shit kicked out of you and being humiliated You're like, uh I'm gonna be in Antarctica that week. Sorry, guys. Like can we do this next week? No, and I you're you're telling me I can't go see my kids who are, you know, at various points all over the world and I get to see them all the time. Uh, we do great things together. Uh and so That's a big trade off that I don't want to make anymore.

Simon. Gonna keep doing what I'm doing for a long time. You were involved in one company. Um that I always that I think could still work and it didn't work. Uh, but you almost had it. So you invested or were a board member. You're heavily involved in I think in hot jobs, which had an exit. But y you get this other one called uh the ladder or ladders. Yeah. Where at the this was in

the mid two thousands where like a hundred thousand dollar job was considered good. And it was like I think if I remember correctly, I don't remember if the user paid or if the job company paid, but it was a job board, but it w that's kind of dismissing it, but it was a job site. for hundred thousand dollar jobs. Yep. And I remember seeing that. I was like, that's pretty cool. And I tried launching a company where the user would pay a subscription And

then editorial person would try to survey and uh and effectively find out what it's like to work there as opposed to the company. Uh like telling you the best the best um Like you know, like the the best stuff. I always you're always in you had a couple of companies in like the job space. I've always thought that that was pretty cool and I always thought that that could have been done effectively. I I remember the uh was it ladders or the ladders? Yeah, the ladders and uh it's still around, but not nearly as successful as it was. It started in two thousand four. I was one of the early, early investors.

Uh and it's It's actually still there. I lost. Yeah, LinkedIn basically Yeah. Did a much better job.

Uh I'm an investor in Ripple Match, which is uh a jobs oriented company aiming at people in college. The job situation's still not fully solved, and that's gonna be one where uh you know, AI will be used intelligently. Yeah, as a recruiter, as you know. It takes enormous time.

Yeah. Figure out the fifty resume you should look at. Reach out and say, Can I have a phone conversation with you? Respond to that. hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. And that needs to be real productized. Uh

And we're on our way. We being My company as well as many others. Has him in the Has Alicorp ever taken any financing or are you strictly using your winnings like or and how much did you use to to fund the company when you first started? Yeah, I did hit a much better.

I've invested probably two hundred and fifty million dollars into the various companies over the years. And that came from like the the various. Yeah. But you but do you take cash flow from anything or is it strictly you yeah, is your income lumpy or not your personal income, but no, I I I don't I haven't gotten paid in a long time. I'm purely just investing my own money, but I have all infrastructure

and a whole firm that does that. So it's like a s it has historically been a single L P Fine. Everyone has carry. It's no different than Union Square Ventures or Thrive or anything else. Just has one L P instead of many. change or improve. So if we talk to you ten years from now, will you hope

What do you hope is different? about you or your lifestyle or your businesses that versus today. So I'm doing most of the things I want to do now. So One Yeah, it's going very well. Results have been great.

I spend Three to four months a year in Europe. Working from there. I grew up in Europe. My wife is French. Uh uh one child there. Uh and I I enjoy that. So

I'm planning on continuing that. Wanna keep doing various, you know, athletic and interesting trips around that that you know that that that I enjoy. So From a high level, I'm not planning on changing it dramatically. The

I I actually love what I'm doing. I think we're having fun. And we're continue to do this. I don't want to make it much bigger. You know, I don't want to have that many more people.

That'll just make it more sort of system oriented where I'm not close to the companies. But what I enjoy is when I'm close to the companies and the problems and That's where I think I I add value. I'm just trading off.

Yeah, I'm very old at this point in this industry and so I'm you know hopefully reaping the benefits of the judgment. that you get after dealing with these things and making lots of mistakes along the way. But a bunch of things going well. An a another thing that I like about you is that um

You're very emotionally stable. Like every time you know, I've only talked to you three times, but like You were quite logical. And like you seem like a guy who isn't rattled. And I read an article about business inside are selling and I think uh the article said Henry Bodgett is a very emotional person, which is makes sense'cause he's a journalist. He's he's a great writer.

And during the sale I think someone was I think he was like I'm not even talking to Axel Springer or whoever bought it. Uh Kevin has to do it. Yeah. Like I I just I can't even be in that room. Yeah. And like it was like all right, Kevin steps in and he's the reasonable one or he's like the emotionally uh like No, I I negotiated I negotiated the entire deal. Uh and

Yeah, and look, I could not be a bigger fan than I am of Henry's, but It would be like if If someone kidnapped your daughter Uh, are you a good negotiator with the other side? And the answer is no. Right. You're like

Give them everything. Uh yeah, we can just get her back. So we need someone else to do that. And so Um, it was better for me to do it. He was very nervous because I was pushing to get a higher price. Uh and but which we did, you know, we were doing forty million at the time.

We sold it for eleven times revenues. Which is a big, big number for immediate properties. Insane. Yeah. It's insane. We're we're good friends with um one of our best friends is Austin Reef, the founder of Morning Brew. Yeah. And And they're they're killing it for for BI and uh Great that happened that for me, but great acquisition. Uh

I still get that product every day. I think they do a really nice job, have a great editorial tone. But you're right. I'm I'm don't I mean this I think It's important to not get too emotional about any one company and that's one of the things I can bring to the table. And when you're CEO, you're just so close to it.

You're you're you're in the forest. I can step back a little bit and Sometimes say look. Yeah, this is gonna be bigger than you think. And we should, you know, double down or

It's not working. And let's figure out a way to sell this. It's easier for me. A a question that we uh that we like to ask people. is like what do you do at your money.

So like if if you know, of your of your pie chart of your hundred percent portfolio W how do you how do you allocate Uh w to different stuff. You know, do you have public equities and just normal bonds and stuff? Are you all in on private company? What are you doing? All in on private companies.

So probably ninety percent. of my net worth. Is just in my own farm. In in Investing in various companies and things.

Uh I have a l I have some in in some V C and private equity firms. Now, as an LP. Uh you know, and I do have some real estate Uh I bought a building

A commercial real estate building, uh between On Mott and Broom. In between Soho and Bowery. And so when you come visit in a year, that'll be the Alley Corp headquarters. There'll be a restaurant.

In the in a meet in the m in the retail floor. five floors of commercial real estate and an amazing roof deck. with parties for a hundred and fifty people. And dinner is for thirty people up there, so it's gonna be a real tech center. So were we it was a shell of a building?

And construction starts in a week. We've designed it over the last uh nine months. It's a super fun project. But it's also a diversification for me. And owning some real estate. But you don't have any public ac public equities uh other than uh I imagine you still own stock in uh um Mongo like you don't o you don't have any uh boring uh indexes really. Are you heavy on cash? Yes, I always keep a lot of cash.

I need to keep a lot of cash because I don't have you know, I don't have a salary So and I don't know when money's coming back. Where do you keep your cash just in a in a in Yeah. As simple as a high yield savings account. Yep. Yep.

Exactly. I need to be super liquid. Dude, that's so fascinating. This is awesome. Kevin, thanks so much for coming on. We uh as you can tell, big fans and what you've done is is pretty incredible. Also, I think there's just like what you do about thinking about where the world is going, what ideas, what opportunities, what problems. It's also, you know, the premise of our podcast. When we don't have guests on, that's all we're doing. We're thinking about that.

And we're we're brainstorming what that could look like. And so our entire audience is people. Who like hearing about those opportunities or stories of people capitalizing on them. So I think this is uh Yeah, very very good fit. Thanks for thanks for doing this. Right. Well thanks for having me on. This is fun. And I'm again good to reconnect. And I hope you realize like I'm not just talking shit. Like you had a really big you you you had a big impact in my life and um I'm gonna be following a a bunch of stuff that you do and and I have this document that I it's like

uh five hundred pa five hundred words of the notes that I took when I talked to you. And I've and you actually predicted that how much we were going to get acquired for, by the way. You really you nailed it. Yeah. You you nailed it. Um you said I think in two years gonna get bought for about this much. You nailed it. Uh you you predict two other acquisitions in the media space as well in my notes. I I'll share it with you so you see uh the notes. But uh you've had a really big impact on me and and it's really cool to talk to you and hopefully we can stay in touch. Yeah, of course. We uh it sounds like we need a an an in person uh meeting. Uh we need to get together and and See what the next five years are gonna look like.

Let's do it, man. I would love that and and and we appreciate you. Thanks for coming on. All right. Thanks. I feel like I can rule the world I know Be what I want to I'm putting my all in it like my days off On the road less travel never looking back

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