How This Billionaire Founder Finds +$20B Business Ideas | Kevin Ryan Interview (#495)
Building, Business Insider, Buzzfeed, and DoubleClick - September 14, 2023 (over 1 year ago) • 01:00:11
Transcript:
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Sam Parr | You violate this rule that I have for myself, and you do it so wonderfully, which is focus. Or at least it appears as though you do. You launch, like, I don't know how many companies a year. Do you launch... eight? Eight? Goddamn!
Alright, we're live. Kevin, do you remember me?
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Shaan Puri | I don't remember where we met | |
Kevin Ryan | I know we've met but I don't remember where | |
Sam Parr | That's good. Okay, you don't have to remember.
So basically, I'm going to tell you why this is funny. I've studied you for maybe 10 years. You started as the President and CEO of DoubleClick, which had like a $1,000,000,000+ exit. Then you started like 4 or 5 companies; one is worth, I think, $28,000,000,000 today, and you have a couple of $1,000,000,000 exits.
But you also started Business Insider. I cold emailed you maybe 50 times because I admired you so much. We'll talk about your career, but I wanted to be like you. One of those emails, you finally replied and just said, "Thanks for the updates," or whatever.
Then I lied and said, "I'm going to be in New York tomorrow. Can I get 20 minutes of your time?" You let me do that, and I came to your office for literally 20 or 30 minutes. We had such an impactful conversation.
Then you did another follow-up call with me, and I have the notes from those calls. This was in 2017, and you made a bunch of predictions about my life, as well as the media business and a few other things that were 100% true. I refer back to that note sheet on a consistent basis to help make some decisions.
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Kevin Ryan | oh interesting | |
Sam Parr | I'm glad | |
Kevin Ryan | I sometimes I get lucky and I get it right and you wanna know what | |
Sam Parr |
Your PR people cold-emailed us to get you on the pod, so the tables have turned, my friend. Welcome to my world!
Exactly, but I just want to say... I've admired you for a long time. You're a really big deal to me, and so I'm so happy that we're able to finally do this. This is awesome!
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Shaan Puri | And Kevin, you don't know me, but I did not stalk you. I did not cold email you. In fact, I was a little bit just jealous of you because at the time, when Sam was telling me about you, I was working at a startup incubator studio.
We were launching four or five companies a year, and after three or four years, I was like, "I don't know if this model even works." I just feel like there's something inorganic about the studio model versus a normal startup that comes from an entrepreneur solving their own niche.
He said, "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." I was like, "I guess I should shut up and just... you know, it's not the model that's the problem; it's me."
So, you know, I think not only is it cool that you built big media companies, but it's also cool that you made the studio model work when very few people have been able to do that.
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Kevin Ryan | Yeah, no, I still enjoy it by and large. It's still working, you know? Things go wrong. I wouldn't say it's easy, but we have a lot of companies that are doing really well in different sectors.
That's what's so fun. And look, there are more things to be done. There are many problems in society that have not been solved, and basically the...
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Sam Parr |
The high-level story of you is that you had a normal corporate career, but then you kind of worked your way into DoubleClick, which eventually, I think, became AdWords at Google.
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Kevin Ryan | Exactly, yeah. So, Google bought it for about **$3,000,000,000** in **2007**. The company started in **1996**. I was there for **9 years**; it was public for **7 years**.
In the first **4 years**, the company grew from **10 people** when I joined to about **2,000**—crazy, in **25 countries**. So, that's what I spent my early thirties doing.
Then, we spent **3 years** bringing it back down to **1,000 people** as the internet collapsed and **70%** of our clients went bankrupt. So, don't do that.
We had huge market share and basically controlled ad technology. Then, Google bought it, and I started **Business Insider**, **Yamongo**, and **Gilt**.
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Shaan Puri |
I want to point out one thing in this journey. By the way, your career starts at Prudential, so 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!
So you did like Prudential, Euro Disney, blah blah blah, and then you joined DoubleClick as employee number 20. But they brought you in, I guess, as a senior person at the time?
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Kevin Ryan | Yeah, what happened is I had launched an internet website for E.W. Scripps, which is a media company. I was the COO and CFO of a division of that company. | |
Sam Parr | wasn't it basically just like gilbert comics or was it I think yeah | |
Kevin Ryan | Gilbert Comics... 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 and e-commerce, which 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." They said no. I thought, you know, I actually believe that the internet's going to be huge, which is obvious now, but a huge part of the next 25 years. I wanted to go do this whole time.
So, I was going to start a company, but I ran across DoubleClick, which was already in the ad tech space. They convinced me to join them instead of starting my own company. I became the CFO, the president, and then the CEO.
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Sam Parr | And then when we met, you basically outlined that after selling DoubleClick, you said, "My partner Dwight and I came up with this thing we call the Ally Corp."
You mentioned that you get like 2 or 3, maybe even one good idea a year. Then, you find good people and give them $300,000, saying, "You have 6 months; let's see if we can make this work together."
You did that with Insider Business Insider, which I think had a $500,000,000 exit. You also did it with Zola, which is still running and kicking ass. I believe you did it with Gilt as well, which I think got to around $500,000,000 in sales, but it didn't end up working out wonderfully, as you said.
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Kevin Ryan | We sold for $250,000,000, which was less than we thought, but it's still obviously a real number.
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Sam Parr | Good, yeah, great. And then you can go ahead and correct me, but you've done this with like 4 or 5 companies. I remember this meeting from 2018. I said $300,000; that was wrong, right?
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Kevin Ryan | Yeah, so we started each company with **$1,000,000**—**$500,000** from each one of us. That was for Gilt, Business Insider, and Mongo.
After that, Dwight semi-retired, and I did that with Nomad and Zola. By now, I’ve put about **$1,500,000** into each company when we start them.
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Sam Parr |
...which isn't a significant amount of money for how big, I mean... MongoDB right now is trading, I think its market cap is $26 billion today. I'm sure at its COVID peak it was like 40 or 50 [billion]. That's not a lot of money for the outcomes.
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Kevin Ryan | 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 $1,000,000,000 before they had a profitable quarter.
Now, they already make $300,000,000 a year in profits. So that's why it's so valuable. It's just an incredible company, growing quickly, with enormous market share, and it's going to grow for the next 10 years. | |
Sam Parr | It'll be a $50,000,000,000 company. Well, you told me in our call, you said one of my notes is basically: if you're not hiring fast enough and, by the way, this is like the VC route, but you said 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. So, you need to grow... grow faster. Well.
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Kevin Ryan |
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 $150,000 and they're selling $500,000 worth, you need to hire those people all day long because you have an opportunity.
If you have other products to create, you should hire engineers to build them. So again, it's not spending money to spend money, but if you're building a big company, it's going to take eventually 1,000 people or a few thousand people to do a billion dollars in revenue. Well, you and...
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Sam Parr |
Your analogy was: "Look, if my idea is good enough, I'm gonna build a machine that turns $1 into $2."
Yep, 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.
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Kevin Ryan |
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. You know, you run out of market share, it's not as big a market as you think, or something's not working as well. So then the right thing to do is to not invest.
I have companies right now that we've cut 30% of the people in the last year because, given this market and what they were doing, we had too many people.
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Shaan Puri | So, there's also a note in that call that I thought was really useful.
Say I'm looking at Sam's notes from your call back in 2016. Sam's building the hustle; he's trying to figure out what to do next. I assume you were considering raising money because you wrote this down.
I thought it was obvious when you hear it, but most entrepreneurs, I don't think, think this way. You said, "Let's say you're gonna raise $2,000,000 at a $20,000,000 valuation." So, you're gonna dilute 10%.
You're saying you just have to ask yourself, "If I took that $2,000,000 and I invested it into growth, people, whatever, over the next 18 months, is our company gonna 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. And if it's not, I should not. Did I capture the logic properly there?
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Kevin Ryan | Yeah, no, exactly. That's what you have to look at. You know, you don't want to raise too much in that round. If you sold $10,000,000, then that's very expensive capital. If you think it's going to be worth $100,000,000 someday or $200,000,000, you should raise that money later.
But you do need to get moving, and time is never on your side. You know, any good idea I've come up with, eventually, even if it's 6 months later, 3 other people are going to come up with the same idea. So you need to move quickly. People tend to... most people understand the risk of doing something; they understate the risk of not doing something.
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Shaan Puri | Can you tell us a story where moving fast either benefited you or cost you big in one of these races that you ran?
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Kevin Ryan | Absolutely. So, Double G is the perfect example. We expanded to 25 countries before our first country was profitable. 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 Procter and Gamble, Caterpillar, or IBM, who did you work with? You worked with us because we had operations in 25 countries and you had offices in those countries. You didn't work with our competitor who had offices in 6 countries. As a result, we swept the market.
We lost a bunch of money, but we were able to fund it. That is the reason today, 25 years later, that Google still has a commanding share. We got in early on, and it's never been given up.
But you're taking a chance. I mean, there are times when you invest in something and it doesn't work that well, and you're like, "Wow, we should have waited." You don't have time to wait. | |
Sam Parr | What insight was Insider? Business Insider was that. So, you sold DoubleClick. Back then, when you and I met, you actually told me how much money you made off the DoubleClick sale. I won't say it unless you want to say it, but did you? Which I thought was amazing that you told me this. I was like, "Damn, this guy is helping me out so much by telling me all this information."
Did you and Dwight get together to start... I don't know if you call it an incubator or whatever you call Alicorp, but was Insider the first idea that you had? What led to that? What led to the insight to start that?
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Kevin Ryan |
Yeah, so the Insider idea was so simple that you can't even give us credit for it. This is 2007... I love business publications and media publications. I'm sort of a compulsive reader of that, and I didn't have the publication I wanted.
It's so hard to remember for people today that *The Wall Street Journal* and *BusinessWeek* at the time did not basically update their websites during the day.
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Sam Parr | that's crazy | |
Kevin Ryan | They're thinking that's impossible. The reason is that they were still on that schedule where the paper comes out in the morning, and the articles have to be done late at night. So, at 10 AM, no one's updating anything. They just had not adapted.
Don't forget, we only got mobile phones in 2008. All of a sudden, all day long, you're in a taxi, and of course, you want to get an update on what's happening.
The things we did are so obvious and done today, but we were early. We were updating things continually, writing stories that were not complete. If we heard a rumor that Company X was buying Company Y, we'd say, "That's what we're hearing." You know what happens when you write that? Someone from that company calls and says, "Yeah, actually, it's true."
Then you get more information, and you might write four or five stories during the day as you gather more and more information. We also had a point of view, so we'd write, "So-and-so just overpaid for a company." It's more important that we have a smart perspective.
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Kevin Ryan | Of view than that we're right in the long term. 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 Businessweek magazine, does the headline result in more revenue for you? No.
But when we would A/B test three headlines very quickly on a story, we realized what was working.
So, you know, what I'm proudest of is that Business Insider is at 300 million uniques today and never spent $1 in advertising.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, you told me. Well, you said we were just going to churn out these articles, which is common now. But you had this really cool insight. You said, "It's kind of like Honda in 1985 versus General Motors."
Americans laughed at the Honda car. They said, "This is just too flimsy; this isn't good." But they were going to capture some market share and improve.
You said it's kind of like that with Business Insider. The critics, or the real people in the industry, whatever you want to call them, laughed at you. They said, "This is just low quality; this is junk." And you were like, "Well, we're going to get more traffic than you."
I think it took like five years or something, but we got more traffic than The Wall Street Journal. Now they're looking at us like, "Holy crap, you surpassed us!" We could afford to have more substantial journalism that maybe is taken more seriously, if that's even...
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Kevin Ryan | Something you care about... I would guess by 2015, we had 7 people covering military and defense. That's deep coverage. I mean, you have a lot; you're writing great stuff. In the beginning, obviously, we had 5 journalists covering the whole world. It's not going to be amazing, but that is a good parallel.
The product did get better over time; we started winning awards. But it always was intended to be a different positioning. It was punchier, it appealed to younger people, and it was opinionated. You know, it's just a different product.
But I think the company, you know, Henry Blodget, who's still the CEO, has done an extraordinary job over 15 years. A lot of these insights came from him. He was one of 7 people I interviewed for that job, and he killed it. | |
Shaan Puri | what'd you see in him that made you pick him | |
Kevin Ryan | Yeah, I know you. If you remember, it was a bold choice because Henry had had some issues on Wall Street. Some people felt like he was tainted. I knew that he... | |
Sam Parr | and the the issues by the way were I think he got accused of was it insider trading or no | |
Kevin Ryan | No, not insider trading. What happened was, at the time, what was standard was that the Wall Street analyst would come pitch the company that was going public. They would say, "Look, we're going to write great things about you," which is potentially a conflict with their recommendations to their investors.
So, everyone did that. Henry actually wrote internal emails saying, "I feel really uncomfortable with this," which then was used against him. You know, no one else did that. Legally, I don't think he did anything wrong. Everything he wrote was approved by his superiors and ordered.
But anyway, some people felt like he was tainted. I didn't at all. What I did know is he was an incredible writer and a perceptive journalist. He was writing pieces for *The Atlantic*. I mean, he's just so good. He's so talented, and he also truly understood internet journalism.
So, the people I interviewed for *The Wall Street Journal* basically just wanted to redo *The Wall Street Journal*, which we didn't need. Henry was fresh; he had never really worked in a newsroom, which Kibbe viewed as a weakness. I viewed it as a strength.
He changed the rules, and we were willing to do that. He did an incredible job.
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Shaan Puri | You know, that same strategy of kind of like starting 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 36 cents with a $50,000,000 market cap. What do you think they got wrong? What happened to BuzzFeed? Because it seemed like they had that whole same playbook. And Jonah Peretti, if you ever hear him talk, he seems like, you know, whip smart in the same way.
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Kevin Ryan | For me, it's very clear, and I've felt this from day one. Even when they were theoretically worth $2,000,000,000, I rarely ran into someone who said, "I love reading BuzzFeed every day."
I don't believe they built up a true brand. They showed up in search results and 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.
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Sam Parr | And you guys have another funny part about you, which is I was telling my wife this because we were talking. I was telling her I was going to talk to you.
I followed Dave Portnoy on Twitter from Barstool. Business Insider is the only one to get one up on him. So you guys had this article about some stuff that he had done, and he went apeshit. He went crazy.
Yep, 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.
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Kevin Ryan | I wasn't really involved with that whole exchange that happened after we sold the company.
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Sam Parr | I thought it was pretty funny. I thought this is... since they actually handled it wonderfully. They were the first people that I saw who got one over on him.
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Shaan Puri |
You know, Kevin, you guys have had so many hits come out of the studio. As somebody who ran a studio for 6 years and did not have billion-dollar hits come out of it, I gotta know: what's the secret? What was it that you guys were doing differently? I'm sure you've talked to many other...
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Kevin Ryan | people you've seen many entrepreneurs start | |
Shaan Puri | These labs, and you've probably seen the same results that I have, which is that very, very few come up with anything that works. What do you think you guys did differently than others?
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Kevin Ryan | So, it's not that, you know, detail-wise we did anything 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. That's just it; there's nothing else.
We've had some good ideas and we do a lot of research. At any one time, we're doing deep dives. Someone will spend two and a half months interviewing 50 people, doing the same thing that I would do if I were an entrepreneur about to start a company. We have a lot of knowledge; there's a 50-page deck. We've really gone into it, and then we're committed. After that, we go hire a great team and we help that team.
But again, it's a little bit like watching, you know, a good basketball player or 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. We have a bunch of people, including myself, who have a lot of experience doing this. It's just a series of judgment calls. I think I'm able, because of my track record, to convince some good people to be CEOs. That's important too.
We spend a lot of time helping them. I chair 12 companies, so about half of my time is spent focusing on those 12, which are 12 of our most valuable companies, to really guide them and make sure that they do as well as possible. | |
Shaan Puri | as possible walk us through like one of those ideas | |
Kevin Ryan | So, okay, here’s an example. Two and a half years ago, I became very interested in psychedelics for mental health. I am the leading funder of the Yale Center for Psychedelic Research. I'm involved with a bunch of nonprofit research initiatives aimed at pushing psychedelics forward so they can be legalized either by the FDA or by state legislation.
With that context, two and a half years ago, I said, "Let's do a deep dive and see if we can come up with a for-profit idea." The person on my team, who works with me, interviewed 50 people. We talked to everyone and came up with a solution that was partly influenced by some of the work done at Yale. We started a company called Transcend.
The person on my team, which is unusual, spun out to become the CEO, Blake Mandel. There was a big article in the Wall Street Journal about five months ago regarding Transcend. We started off with $1.5 million, but we raised $40 million about a year to a year and a half later in two tranches, at an $80 million valuation.
So, it was a big step up with a big valuation. We have a compound that you haven't heard of going through the FDA process; it's currently in phase 2 trials. People are obviously optimistic about the future. They like the team and the execution. We did some things very well there.
For example, we have been awarded patents. If you follow this industry, you know that you can't patent MDMA or mushrooms because those have been around for a long time. However, we actually did get a patent for methalone, which is the compound that we're working on.
So far, so good. There are still risks, but that company currently has a $50 million position based on our $5 million investment so far, and we think it has a lot of potential.
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Sam Parr |
What about MongoDB? That was started, I think, in 2007. So Alicorp was a little bit early, yep. Did you have a team helping you research ideas back then?
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Kevin Ryan | I didn't... that was purely Dwight, myself, and Elliot Horowitz, who was the most brilliant young engineer at DoubleClick. Now, out of 700 engineers, if you could pick out one person other than Dwight, you would have picked him.
So, we started a company together in 2005 called ShopWiki, which is a search engine for shopping. It did okay, not great. We sold it in 2007 and made a little bit of money. Then we asked ourselves, "What are we going to do next?"
We came up with this idea and started working on it. It was a very hard slog. It's very easy to feel good about it right now, but for three years, we had $0 revenue. It was not easy to keep funding going back to VCs with $0 revenue. However, we had a lot of people using it, so we broke through that.
We had some ugly financing rounds, especially back in 2009 and 2010. That was not a good time to be raising money with no revenues. Then finally, Sequoia came in, and we raised a lot of money. Now, it’s getting close to a $2,000,000,000 run rate.
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Sam Parr | did that company make you a billionaire | |
Kevin Ryan | So yeah, I mean, look, for all of us, it definitely... yeah, we all made lots of money on that company. Definitely. | |
Shaan Puri |
During those 3 years of no revenue, were you like, "Yeah, people just don't understand that this thing is... like others don't see it, but I see it"? Or were you in the fog of war, thinking, "I don't know if this is a thing, if this is gonna make it"?
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Kevin Ryan | You know, let's keep going. No, no, I would say that all of us were nervous because, you know, you like to have revenue and you're going to run out of money at some point.
What helped us on the inside was that the utilization, the number of people using the product, was growing every single month all over the world. So, there were probably 50,000 small companies using the product.
There were hundreds of meetups about Mongo, and people were showing up. We could see, in a way, that the dogs liked the dog food. We just needed to make it good enough that larger companies would pay money for it.
And now we got there, and the rest is history.
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Sam Parr | But what's crazy is, like, alright, Business Insider, I understand that. Well, that's media; I get it perfectly. Guilt, that's commerce; that's fairly easy to understand. Zola, the kind of media-ish related, but like, I feel like I understand that business.
Then you have psychedelics, which I don't know anything about. But then Mongo is like highly technical. I barely... I don't even know the use case, to be honest. It's a database company; it involves SQL. Like, I don't even... I'm so not technical. It's pretty amazing that... are you pretty... I mean, you are now, but were you well-versed on what this idea was, or did you just trust Elliott?
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Kevin Ryan | So, Elliott and Dwight, you know, were the brains and the technical jobs. The product could not have been built without them. I understood.
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Sam Parr | the | |
Kevin Ryan | High-level problem, which I saw, was that Oracle was not the right database for the future. We were going from structured data to unstructured data.
The way to think of that is, if I told you I have 10,000 videos, can you put that into your spreadsheet? You're like, "Well, no, actually, it's not built for that." But of course, data was moving that way. YouTube came out in 2005; video was going to be enormous.
So, I knew that trend was happening. I knew that the Oracle product was extraordinarily expensive for us, and there had to be a cheaper way. We had seen Linux come out, which was an open-source operating system that was enormously successful. We thought collectively that we needed an open-source database that was structured for the future. That was the bet.
So, to understand if you said five levels down, do I understand the code? No. But, you know, when you start a company, I'm not a particularly good writer; Henry is, 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 have to think of yourself as the coach, not the player. If you're a coach and you manage to persuade, you know, LeBron James and Kevin Garnett and a bunch of people on your team, your team's going to do well. That's actually the job.
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Shaan Puri | You know, when you're talking about Transcend and you're like, "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."
He goes into totally different spaces with totally different business models and probably has a whole bunch of new things to learn. Even if you're the coach, you're betting money, and you need to be able to recruit the right players and steer the ship.
Do you feel like fearlessness is something you have? Do you notice that? Sometimes I look at other entrepreneurs and think, "Man, I can't believe that more of them are not doing X." Do you feel that way about the way you approach entrepreneurship? I don't know, I feel like more people should be trying to think this way, but they don't seem to.
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Kevin Ryan | I mean, look, what we do is just a slight variation of an entrepreneur. They just happen to have entrepreneurs working for me, and we have a structure.
Don't forget, I also have 70 engineers who work for me. I have my own in-house outsourced engineering company, which helps us build products quickly. We've had that for the last three years. I own a big chunk of a search firm—a 10-person executive search firm that we set up so we can get some of the best talent working for us, finding CEOs.
So, we built infrastructure around it, but still, most of it goes back to a good idea and a good team. When we get that right... yes.
And by the way, the last one on psychedelics: I have 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.
Look, what I am thinking about all the time—and everyone here does—is where is the world gonna be in 10 years? That's the north star for what we're doing. If something's gonna happen next year, it's too late. I need to bet on a 10-year trend.
So, you know, we do a bunch of things in robotics and automation because I feel good about that trend. Psychedelics is a 10-year trend. MongoDB was a 10-year trend. These are the things we're betting on.
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Sam Parr | what are you consuming on a daily basis to spot these trends | |
Kevin Ryan | Yeah, so tons of things. One thing I'm on, you know, many newsletters that are industry-focused, general-focused, or science-oriented. I read 40 books a year. I'm in conversations with people all the time where there's a lot of learning.
Then, people in my team are more specialized than I am. I have two MD-MBAs who head up our healthcare practice, and then people below them who have worked in healthcare. They are thinking of very specific issues that I probably wouldn't think of.
The same goes for a person on marketplaces, a person on semiconductors and material science, 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.
I'm a bigger and bigger believer now in industry focus. You know, you and I are not going to think of something that applies to the chemical industry right now. But if that's all you did for six months and interviewed a hundred people, you'd probably come up with some ideas that make sense.
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Sam Parr | and the industries that you care about right now are health | |
Kevin Ryan |
Healthcare definitely, then the ones I mentioned:
- Semiconductors
- Material science
- Developer tools (with some security)
- Marketplaces (B2B)
- Social impact
- Robotics and automation
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Sam Parr | what's an example of a b2b marketplace that you're interested in | |
Kevin Ryan | Yeah, so we invest. We have done a deep dive into the maritime industry, specifically shipping. No one thinks about it, but it's a multi-hundred billion dollar industry that is very behind in technology.
We invested in a company called Boxhub, which is a marketplace for those containers that are on container ships based in Toronto. Most people wouldn't have known about it. We led that round.
We also have just started a company in maritime that’s going to be a procurement marketplace. So, let's say you're a ship arriving in Cartagena and your boiler breaks. What are you going to do now? You weren't planning on that.
Having a site you can go to that becomes sort of the Amazon of that, and can get you those parts, is something everyone in the industry told us is needed. So, we literally just built a team two months ago. There are probably four people right now. | |
Sam Parr | and so we're off and running what's that company called | |
Kevin Ryan | it doesn't have its official name yet | |
Sam Parr | So, alright, let's use that as an example. Did you just go and somehow network your way into talking to 50 people?
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Kevin Ryan |
Oh yeah, so a woman on my team absolutely did that and went to two maritime conferences, which she said were fascinating. It's basically people from Venezuela, you know, the Middle East, Russia... you know, from all over the world. Greek and so on. I'm trying to understand the history.
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Sam Parr | just about the pirates | |
Kevin Ryan | just about the pirates want | |
Sam Parr | to hobble hobble it around and a bunch of parrots had burned shit all over the place | |
Kevin Ryan | She said it did not look like her Princeton reunion at all.
Yeah, so, she met with a couple of investors who invest in this space: you know, ship owners, data providers, everyone. They're just trying to understand how the industry works. I think there's an advantage sometimes coming from outside because some people just say, "Oh, that's just how it works here." The person on the outside will be like, "Wait a second, it doesn't have to work that way. We can do better," right?
And that's why, like, you know, Henry was the perfect person coming from outside. When I started Gilt, 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 interesting and unusual.
So that's the right approach. We just started a company in assisted fertility. I'm sure you guys know friends who are getting IVF. I did it. My brother and his husband had a child through surrogacy, freezing eggs. That's going to grow for the next 10 years for all the reasons we know about people having children later. Sperm counts are down, a bunch of things.
So we started Cubby, what, four months ago? We put in $1,500,000 and we just signed a term sheet to raise, you know, $5.5 million. A lot of people wanted to do it. People are excited about the team we have, you know, a good set of people, mostly from Stanford Business School on this team. It's a big space, so I'm going to bet on that team and that trend for a while. | |
Sam Parr | What does that deck look like? You said they do like a... or maybe I think a 50-page memo or deck. I'm not sure what you said. Do you have a structure for it?
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Hubspot | Yeah, it's generally about one thing: talking about the industry. Where are the problems? Where are the pain points? And then, where are the opportunities? What's the product idea?
One of the reasons I do almost nothing in e-commerce these days is because I don't see the problem we solve. The industry has solved the problem. Meaning, if you name anything on planet Earth, just about, you can find a site that will have 10,000 of them, and it'll be sent to your house by tomorrow. I don't know how to do better; that problem is solved.
Whereas when I started Gilt, you actually couldn't get Marc Jacobs at 50% off online. No one offered it, and so we offered it, and people went crazy over that. E-commerce is very mature. Frankly, media is pretty mature right now. There's a lot... you know, people say to me, "I just can't find what I want to read."
But even, you know, once in a while, we're working on one idea right now in the early stages in the media space, but I'm not sure yet. So we're looking for problems.
One of the reasons I like health care is because it is not solved. As you guys know, if you have knee surgery, either you or your insurance company are going to pay a crazy amount. There's too much knee surgery. Someone's going to pay $40,000, yet in France, it's $20,000, and the results are better.
So can it be done better? Yes, it can be done better. Do 20 times more Black women die in childbirth than in Sweden? Yes. Is that something that is just inherent and is always going to happen? No. We don't do enough prevention. There are many structural issues in health care that have not been solved, and we're solving some of them.
Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot? Most CRMs are a cobbled-together mess, but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM. Our software is the best. HubSpot: Grow better. | |
Shaan Puri | it sounds to me like what you do is you look think about what's the world gonna look like in 10 years | |
Kevin Ryan | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | You know, either what's a problem that, if somebody could solve it, would be a major unlock? Or, hey, the puck is going this way. Then it sounds like you say, "Cool, let's go find out everything we can learn about that space."
We go in kind of open-minded about what problem we're going to solve. We try to figure out where all the pain points are. It sounds like you're looking for what I'll call the big obvious problem. If it's too complicated and nuanced, it doesn't sound like you're that interested.
It's like, "Hey, you can't find luxury fashion online for 50% 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 take some expertise, but the problem should be in your face once you're looking in that industry.
We have this thing we say on the podcast, which is that there are business plans that are what I call "one chart businesses." You could just look at one chart and it just tells you, "Oh, that's so obvious."
Like, we were looking at one that was around in the death space, around cremation. It was like cremation went from, I don't know, 7% of all things to like 50%. It's now the majority of what choices people make when it comes to a funeral. This is like, that's a one chart business. You can look at nothing else and say, "Alright, I know there's opportunity."
When I look at a chart like this, does that jive with your way of thinking, or do you have anything you could add to our understanding of that?
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Kevin Ryan | No, no, absolutely. I mean, I'll give you another example. The cost of labor is going to just keep going up.
Waiters were paid $15 an hour; now it's $20 to $25 an hour in New York. Unless we change immigration or something fundamentally changes, that could be $30 an hour.
So, you know, over time, that changes the calculus of automation. Whether it's making French fries or other tasks, we're all going to have to find ways to use less labor.
When the cost of technology goes down and the cost of labor goes up, what does that tell you? More automation is going to happen. So, I'll bet on that trend all day long.
Now, we're an investor in a company that provides robotic massages. There are 17,000 open positions for massage therapists in this country.
So, you know, there are hotels that just can't offer massages because they don't have the people. We hope they're going to offer a massage service. That is just one example, but I have ten others.
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Sam Parr | What are those 10 other ideas, just related to automation or other concepts?
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Kevin Ryan | No, just... I'll give you one other example. Another company we invested in is focused on driverless cars. As you know, it's not legal in most countries and states. However, having a remote driver is a possibility.
So, would you, if you're in New York City, pay money to have a rental car brought to your apartment instead of having to take your 7 suitcases and 2 kids to the rental car? Of course, you would!
We can have someone in the Philippines or in Arizona drive the car because we put software and hardware in the vehicle. They can see everything, and that's legal in many states. Airports are already talking to us about the vans they have to drive around to bring people to the rental car lots at 2 in the morning.
Hardly anyone is there, and you have to pay someone double time, $40 an hour. That should be done by someone remotely. So, things like that are going to be automated.
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Sam Parr |
So, Sean and I, we've had a bunch of cool people on this podcast. One of our great friends is this guy named **Andrew Wilkinson**. He owns maybe 40 companies, a lot of agencies and web stuff, mostly bootstrapped. It's publicly traded now.
And then we had this other guy named **Saeed**, who's like 32 years old, who owns a bunch of WordPress plugins... basically.
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Shaan Puri | bootstrapped a unicorn wow amazing | |
Sam Parr | And, well, of which he owns most of. So we have a lot of... and I fall in this category as well. I bootstrap a lot of my things.
Mhm. And then there's this other category. So there's a category of people who bootstrap stuff and just use their cash flow. Oftentimes, that same group of people prefers to go and buy companies as opposed to building them from scratch.
You're taking the opposite approach a little bit, where you're like, "I'm gonna fund it. It's not gonna make money at first, but I might go and raise a shit ton more money." This might be a huge idea, and I'll own a small piece of it.
What, like, have you ever considered the bootstrapping model? Or is your approach just to go big right away? Have you ever considered buying? What's your buy versus build kind of mindset?
Yeah, so it...
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Kevin Ryan | Really, it depends on the type of business. If you're running an agency, you just don't need a lot of capital. You hire five people, and then the agency makes money. You use that money to reinvest and grow.
If you're building what I'm building, it's closer to a hotel. You have to build the whole building before anyone comes and stays with you. It's a little different because, like Mongo, you have to take years to build a good enough product. There's no way to bootstrap that. It takes $20 million to $50 million, or generally around $100 million, for those types of companies to get there.
That's why it's not an option for those things. Look, I would love to have companies that I own all of. For example, the agency that I have, I said those engineers—I basically have an outsourced engineering company. I own all of that because it has clients and it builds as it gets more clients.
But those businesses are not as scalable, and profit margins are generally lower. Those are not the type of business that I generally go after. | |
Sam Parr | Why is that? Is it just a matter of you enjoying something more? Do you think that one is better for wealth creation? I mean, what's the motivation?
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Kevin Ryan | I just prefer creating a product—a real product—that's hard, and then, you know, making it more scalable and building it up over time. The vast majority of quite successful companies are in that category.
The service-oriented companies, you know, it's harder. It's harder to become a unicorn. It can happen, but there aren't that many. Have you?
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Shaan Puri |
Over time, I've gotten more selective on project selection because I look at... You know, you did Business Insider. I think you were the... Were you the CEO for like a... A period of time there?
"9 years," is that right?
"No."
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Kevin Ryan |
No, I was the chairman for all 9 years. I did step in to be the CEO of Gilt when we were growing really quickly. I just decided that I was the right person at that time for probably 2 or 3 years. But otherwise, I've been chairman of many companies for 15 years.
I stepped into MongoDB... I changed CEOs about 8 years ago, and for 3 months I was de facto the CEO as I was doing so.
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Shaan Puri | You've run these for a period of time, but mostly not. When I think about businesses, I look at my career and reflect. I think, "Okay, of these 10 things I did, 2 of them ate up all of my time and gave me a bunch of gray hair for relatively less payoff."
In contrast, there were these other 2 opportunities where I just kind of wrote the check. They were obvious opportunities, and they just paid me. It was wonderful.
Have you thought about what's the best business you've done in your portfolio? Is there one that you look back on that has the combination of value and the pain it took to get there? Do you have a framework around that, or do you think it's just luck of the draw?
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Kevin Ryan | I think it's luck of the draw. I mean, Mongo is the one where I got the most return for the least amount of money. I mean, I've essentially never worked there full-time, so I've been chairman for 13 years, and yet it's a super valuable and fascinating company that's going to be around for the next 50 years.
But, you know, I'm intellectually curious. What I love about what I do is that, in an hour, I might be in a meeting on psychedelics and then on semiconductors. I have to try and keep up and learn something about these topics. That's what's so amazing. We have one in cardiology; there are so many different things. It's just incredible.
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Shaan Puri |
And for someone who's thinking about 10 years, I'm a little surprised I don't see AI all over the stock. 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, like might be a tool you use, but are you bearish on it for some reason? What's your thinking around AI?
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Kevin Ryan | No, I'd say two things.
One, it's coming down now, but if it were six months ago, the pricing on AI was insane. Now, three people walk in and say, "We're worth $100,000,000 because we're going to put together an AI company." It just didn't make sense, so we didn't make any direct investments there.
Each, we're really encouraging each one of our companies to use AI. I think the real use of AI in the short term is going to be much more mundane. It's about optimizing customer support, making your coding more efficient, things like that.
We're a long way before true AI companies are coming, but it's on its way. We did something unusual this summer: our entire technology team shut down for a week, went home, and their only assignment was to learn about AI. The entire week, they read about it, thought about it, and talked to people. Sean did that too.
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Shaan Puri | I did the same thing I shut down for a week | |
Kevin Ryan | Yeah, just to get up to speed because it is a very important thing that we all need to be thinking about. Then we came back, compared notes, and made sure that our companies are thinking about it. Did you?
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Shaan Puri | do it too or just the engineers | |
Kevin Ryan |
I do... well, no, these are not engineers. This is the investment people on the tech side. So I do it on a more continual basis. You know, I'm spread thinner than other people, so I have 60 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.
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Shaan Puri | yeah as one does | |
Sam Parr | nice flex I love that and then I'm that | |
Kevin Ryan | then I'm off the grid and I don't have a choice | |
Shaan Puri | I'm going to change all of my auto-reply messages to "I'm in Antarctica," even though I'm actually just in town. No.
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Kevin Ryan | that's the only two times I'm truly off | |
Sam Parr | The grid... you, you, you like violate this rule that I have for myself, and you do it so wonderfully. Which is focus, or at least it appears as you do. You launch, like, I don't know how many companies a year. Do you launch 8? 8, goddamn! And you could do 8 now, but I don't know how big your team was early on. It seemed like you were still creating a lot of companies.
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Kevin Ryan | I mean, generally it was **one a year**. There was that one year where we did **three** between the two of us, but I would never be able to do **eight** on my own. I mean, they take real time.
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Sam Parr | If we were to reverse the roles, you know, I look up to you. If you were a 23-year-old and you looked up to me, I would say, "Man, you gotta do one thing well, and that will pay more dividends."
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Kevin Ryan | I agree | |
Sam Parr | oh well great so what's your like opinion on that then | |
Kevin Ryan | No, no. So, I think that anyone... People come to me all the time and say, "Look, I'd like to have a studio like you." And I'd say, "Look, don't do that. Start by trying to build a successful company and end up not being a CEO." That's already not that easy, you know?
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 its chairman, you can then decide to do another one. You know, you can't truly be CEO of multiple companies, but you can be chairman of multiple companies.
But you've got to start with one. If you try to do two or three at the same time on your own, it's not going to work. It's not that easy, you know? I have 25 people.
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Shaan Puri | what does a chairman actually do | |
Kevin Ryan | So, a chairman is, in this case, the ultimate person that's going to be around 15 years from now. The CEO may change, but this is a person that's going to guide and is a co-founder.
You know, if along the way somehow Henry Blodgett quits, 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 they have one company that is going to have a tricky financing round. We need to get the internal investors together.
That's not going to 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, and come up with the right solution.
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Sam Parr | What type of relationship do you have with your CEOs? Like, before, in the first one, two, three, or four years, how often are you working with them?
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Kevin Ryan | Yeah, so I mean, we're going to have a call probably every week or every two weeks soon to touch base. They can reach out if they need something. I love the relationship; I feel great about it because, you know, I don't want their job. If I wanted the job, I would have taken it. I want them to succeed. I don't want to be CEO of one company, and hopefully, I can stay out of the way because they know much more about the company than I do.
But there are certain things where I have either relationships, some experience, tricky issues, or introductions to a VC firm where I can add value. So, I love that relationship.
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Sam Parr | I like you so much because you do things.
So, Sean and I are in this like stupid Twitter world where a lot of our friends are popular on the internet. There's this whole thing that I don't buy into, of like "build in public" and "use your audience." It's people selling like $100 a month things or something like that.
You have these really big ideas, but also, for how successful you are, we take pride in finding interesting people who are amazing but not incredibly well-known. You are really good. You're one of the higher people on this ratio of being pretty low-key, under the radar, but having had a massive impact.
Exactly what I want! And like, you don't have an audience. You violate all these stupid rules that people talk about.
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Kevin Ryan | I do know social media | |
Shaan Puri | why is that | |
Kevin Ryan |
You know, it's... I look, I think other people use it very well and they like doing it. I don't want to spend the time. I don't want to do it. I don't need to be out there. That time should be used for thinking time and managing time. And so, yeah, no... the people who are on my marketing team know that the goal is that we are very successful and that when I walk into a restaurant, no one knows who I am.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, I mean, I just think it's awesome. Well, I... but you're on like CNBC and stuff. Every once in a while, I'll see you there. I think there are rumors that you're going to run for mayor. Is that true?
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Kevin Ryan | so 2 different things 1 is you haven't seen me on tv in a long time | |
Sam Parr | right yeah that was you that was about 4 or 5 years ago yeah | |
Kevin Ryan | when when | |
Sam Parr | I think I was leaving your office or something like that in the Yahoo building, or maybe I was at a friend's. I saw you on TV.
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Kevin Ryan | Yeah, that'd be right. I don't think I've been on for at least 5 years, so I don't do that. You know, actually, podcasts are the only thing I do because it's sort of enjoyable. You don't need to prepare; you just have a good conversation.
So I've done that, but other than that, I do almost nothing. I did think about running for mayor, you know, 8 years ago. I've been very involved in politics in many ways, representing the tech community in every dimension all my life. I thought that would be the one other thing I'd want to do, and then I decided, you know, 7 years ago that I didn't want to do that.
It's a miserable process. You know, if you said to me, "You could be mayor tomorrow," I would actually do it. But if you said to me, "No, no, what I mean is that you can be one of 7 candidates. You can spend 8 months getting the shit kicked out of you and being humiliated..."
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Sam Parr | I'm going to be in Antarctica that week. Sorry, guys. Can we do this next week? No.
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Kevin Ryan |
You're telling me I can't go see my kids who are, you know, at various points all over the world? I get to see them all the time; we do great things together. That's a big trade-off that I don't want to make anymore. So I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing for a long time.
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Sam Parr | You were involved in one company that I always thought could still work. It didn't work, but you almost had it.
So, you invested or were a board member; you were heavily involved in, I think, HotJobs, which had an exit. But you did this other one called The Ladder, or Ladders. This was in the mid-2000s when a $100,000 job was considered good.
If I remember correctly, I don't recall if the user paid or if the job company paid, but it was a job board. That's kind of dismissing it, but it was a job site for $100,000 jobs. Yep, and I remember seeing that and thinking, "That's pretty cool."
I tried launching a company where the user would pay a subscription, and then an editorial person would try to survey and effectively find out what it's like to work there, as opposed to the company just telling you the best stuff.
You've always had a couple of companies in the job space, and I've always thought that was pretty cool. I always thought that could have been done effectively. I remember the...
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Kevin Ryan | Was it "Ladders" or "The Ladders"?
The Ladders is still around, but not nearly as successful as it was. It started in 2004, and I was one of the early investors. It's actually still there, but I've lost... you know, LinkedIn basically did a much better job.
I'm an investor in RippleMatch, which is a jobs-oriented company aiming at people in college. The job situation is still not fully solved, and that's going to be one where AI will be used intelligently as a recruiter.
It takes enormous time to figure out the 50 resumes you should look at, reach out, and say, "Can I have a phone conversation with you?" Responding to that takes hours and hours and hours. That needs to be productized, and we're on our way—my company, as well as many others.
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Sam Parr | Hasn't it been solved? Has Ally Corp ever taken any financing, or are you strictly using your winnings? How much did you use to fund the company when you first started?
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Kevin Ryan | Yeah, I didn't hit that much, but I, you know, I've invested probably **$250,000,000** into various companies over the years.
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Sam Parr | and that came from like the the the | |
Kevin Ryan | various sales yep | |
Sam Parr | But do you take cash flow from anything, or is it strictly you? Is your income lumpy or not? Your personal income, but no.
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Kevin Ryan |
I haven't gotten paid in a long time. I'm purely just investing my own money, but I have all the infrastructure and a whole firm that does that. So it's like... it has historically been a single LP fund. Everyone has carry. It's no different than Unstructured Ventures or Thrive or anything else, just has one LP instead of many.
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Shaan Puri |
What are you looking to change or improve? If we talk to you 10 years from now, what do you hope is different about you, your lifestyle, or your businesses versus today?
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Kevin Ryan | So, I'm doing most of the things I want to do now. It's going very well; the results have been great. I spend 3 to 4 months a year in Europe, working from there. I grew up in Europe, my wife is French, and I have one child there. I enjoy that, so I'm planning on continuing it.
I want to keep doing various athletic and interesting trips around that, which I enjoy. From a high level, I'm not planning on changing it dramatically. I actually love what I'm doing. I think we're having fun, and we're going to continue to do this.
I don't want to make it much bigger; I don't want to have that many more people. That would just make it more system-oriented, where I'm not close to the companies. What I enjoy is being close to the companies and the problems, and that's where I think I add value.
I'm just trading off; I'm very old in this industry, and so I'm 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 are going well.
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Sam Parr | And another thing that I like about you is that you're very emotionally stable. Every time, you know, I've only talked to you three times, but you are quite logical. You seem like a guy who isn't rattled.
I read an article on Business Insider about selling, and I think the article said Henry Blodgett is a very emotional person, which makes sense because he's a journalist. He's a great writer.
During the sale, I think someone was saying, "I'm not even talking to Axel Springer or whoever bought it. Kevin has to do it." Yes, like, "I just can't even be in that room."
And it was like, "Alright, Kevin steps in, and he's the reasonable one," or he's like the emotionally stable one.
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Kevin Ryan | I negotiated the entire deal, and you know, I could not be a bigger fan of Henry's. But it would be like if someone kidnapped your daughter. Are you a good negotiator with the other side? The answer is no, right? You're like, "Give them everything, you know, we can just get her back."
So, we need someone else to do that. It was better for me to do it. He was very nervous because I was pushing to get a higher price. But we did it.
At the time, we were doing $40 million, and we sold it for 11 times revenues, which is a big, big number for our media properties. Insane!
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Sam Parr | It's insane! We're good friends with one of our best friends, Austin Reif, the founder of Morning Brew. Yeah, and they're killing it for BDI. Great!
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Kevin Ryan | That happened for me, but great acquisition. I still get that product every day. I think they do a really nice job and have a great editorial tone.
But you're right, I don't mean this... I think it's important to not get too emotional about any one company. That's one of the things I can bring to the table.
When you're a CEO, you're just so close to it; you're in the forest. I can step back a little bit and sometimes say, "Look, you know, this is going to be bigger than you think, and we should double down," or "It's not working, and let's figure out a way to sell this." It's easier for me.
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Sam Parr |
A question that we like to ask people is, "What do you do with your money?" So, if you look at your pie chart of your 100% portfolio, how do you allocate to different assets? Do you have public equities and just normal bonds and stuff? Are you all in on private companies? What are you doing?
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Kevin Ryan | All in on private companies, so probably 90% of my net worth is just in my own firm, investing in various companies and things. I have some in some VC and private equity firms, you know, as an LP.
I do have some real estate. I bought a commercial real estate building between Mott and Broom, in between Soho and Bowery. So when you come visit in a year, that'll be the Alicorp headquarters. There'll be a restaurant on the retail floor, five floors of commercial real estate, and an amazing roof deck with parties for 150 people and dinners for 30 people up there.
So it's going to be a real tech center. It was a shell of a building, and construction starts in a week. We've designed it over the last nine months. It's a super fun project, but it's also a diversification for me in owning some real estate.
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Sam Parr |
But you don't have any public equities, no? Other than, I imagine, you still own stock in MongoDB?
"Yes, but... I don't have any boring indexes, really."
Are you heavy on cash?
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Kevin Ryan | Yes, I always keep a lot of cash. I need to keep a lot of cash because I don't have a salary, and I don't know when money's coming back.
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Sam Parr | where do you keep your cash just in a in a in yeah as simple as a high yield savings account yep | |
Kevin Ryan | yep exactly I need to be super liquid | |
Sam Parr | dude that's so fascinating this is awesome kevin thanks | |
Shaan Puri |
Thanks so much for coming on. We, as you could tell, are big fans, and what you've done is pretty incredible. Also, I think there's just... 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 brainstorming what that could look like.
Our entire audience is people who like hearing about those opportunities or stories of people capitalizing on them. So I think this is a, you know, very, very good fit. Thanks for doing this.
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Kevin Ryan | right well thanks for having me on this is fun and again good to reconnect | |
Sam Parr | And I hope you realize, like, I'm not talking shit. You had a really big impact on my life, and I'm going to be following a bunch of stuff that you do.
I have this document that’s about 500 words of the notes I took when I talked to you. You actually predicted how much we were going to get acquired for, by the way. You did! I really... you nailed it.
You said, "I think in two years you're going to get bought for about this much." You nailed it! You predicted two other acquisitions in the media space as well.
In my notes, I'll share it with you so you can see the notes. But you've had a really big impact on me, and it's really cool to talk to you. Hopefully, we can stay in touch.
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Kevin Ryan | Yeah, of course. It sounds like we need an in-person meeting. We need to get together and see what the next five years are going to look like.
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Sam Parr | let's do it man I would love that and and and we appreciate you thanks for coming on | |
Kevin Ryan | alright thanks |