Alex Chung, founder @ GIPHY

Sam Parr

Yep, alright, what's going on everyone? Sorry about that. I'm Sam Parr, and this is Alex Chung, founder of Giphy. Lindsay, rattle off a few stats. There are a few interesting things. Basically, how many of you have used Giphy? Right? They have **500 million** people a day going to the website, so the likelihood that you've been there is quite high. Giphy is pretty interesting, not only because they have **500 million** people a day coming to the website, but they've done this in a crazy short amount of time. The site was launched in **February of 2013**.

Alex Chung

yep

Sam Parr

You have over 100 employees, or about 100 employees based here. But you've built this very huge website and brand, and you've raised $150,000,000 very quickly. So you guys have done a lot in a short amount of time. Today, we're going to talk a little bit about that story. But I'm a pretty... I said this at my last Q&A, I'm a very casual person, and I want to make this about you all. So I'm going to have this iPad up the whole time and go to what's it called, Slido. Go to slido.com, type in "hustlecones," and ask questions as we go. I'll be able to pull them up. But first of all, welcome!

Alex Chung

hey thanks thanks for being here so hello tell us a

Sam Parr

Give a little bit of context. I already gave a little bit of context, but give some context as to what Giphy is, how big it is, just so people have a little bit of background on the company.

Alex Chung

Yeah, so Giphy is a search engine. We are essentially a search engine, but the difference is we are the only search engine in messaging. You know, messaging is blowing up right now. If you look at your screen time, it's probably all iMessage or messaging apps. There's never really been a company or a product that has been able to create search inside of a messaging app, and that's exactly what we've done. We're in every messaging app in the world. We're in Snap, Instagram, WhatsApp... not WeChat yet, sorry! Very soon, someday, except for the whole Chinese situation going on right now. We're in all the messaging apps. We have the number one behavior: we've given people a search in messaging. Right now, we know that at least 500 million people use search every day in Giphy. We serve about more than 7 billion pieces of content a day. We're at scale now. We pretty much can hit everyone on the internet. If you think about Snap, Facebook, and WhatsApp, they all have user reach, and it's peaked out because they've maximized how big their products are going. The big difference that we've made is we're a superset of all companies because we are embedded in every one of those apps. So our reach is exponentially growing all the time. We can reach pretty much everyone on the internet.

Sam Parr

Any given moment, got it. So, Alex and I have been chatting over the past couple of weeks to prepare for this. I thought that his story was one of the more interesting stories of everyone I've talked to because he has a very unique philosophy and perspective on life. You know, someone like me, I think I just wanted to... I like building businesses; they're exciting for me. I tend to just kind of stick to one thing for a while. Whereas your career, you've jumped around. You consider yourself, you said, you feel like a musician, almost like a rock star, and you're able to jump around.

Alex Chung

I I didn't say that

Sam Parr

what did you say

Alex Chung

so not so if I were a rock star I would so not

Sam Parr

be no well what did you say

Alex Chung

No, I said it's like a band. It's a band. Maybe like a really bad indie rock band, you know? Like playing over in Bushwick, maybe Greenpoint every once in a while if you were cool enough.

Sam Parr

So you said you're like a band... Sorry, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you jump around from project to project, and that's not something that people typically say when they're raising money or talking to people. Your outlook is significantly different from most everyone I've talked to, or at least you admit it and they don't. To talk about how this outlook came to be, can you explain a little bit in like 30 or 60 seconds your background and kind of how you got to where you are now?

Alex Chung

yeah I I'm originally an engineer so I'm a hardware engineer but so I worked in hardware I worked at intel I worked at a bunch of different places then I went to school here at parsons and went back to design I was a graphic designer in the fashion scene for a little bit but I found out you can't really make money as a graphic designer or actually like you can't make money at anything in new york so then you have to go back into doing tech which is like the only place where you can actually make a decent living so with that you know if you're going on the year long kind of strategy it's really I I mean I think everyone who's young knows I'm a little older than all of you I just maybe look a little younger but I'm not millennials right now they do about a year maybe it's less actually like a lot less then they'll jump from jump they call it the gig economy but it's really about trying to maximize as much as you can do in the shorter amount of time and then moving on which is exactly if you think about bands what they do is you do an album you go on tour and if no one wants to go on tour then you go on to do another album that may suck and then you keep doing it until you like get in a volvo commercial and then you're making a ton of money and then you just end up doing that one song forever until you get really old and then go on tour so what we do is the way that I try to figure I've been doing startups since it's been 25 years since the early or late nineties and this is about my 12th startup I've been a part of a bunch of different startups that people have done I founded a bunch of startups and what you really wanna do is you wanna optimize for that 1st year you know I've spent a lot of time in companies trying being super stubborn and trying to get something to happen and you wanna be a little bit stubborn but you also wanna know when it's not the right time and place when your song is not gonna be number 1 on the billboard you know top forties and so you usually try to put a year in which is kind of like how school works right it's your major you put a year in and then you kinda see where you are at the end of the year if you can keep going then you do a year at a time so it's not when people young people say hey we're gonna do this for the rest of our lives you're like okay if your company is still around maybe and then if you and then when you grow up and you like have things that you wanna do and you have to like be a part of the world maybe so the way that I like to think about it is you you plan for 4 or 5 years you plan for forever but you go in 1 year chunks and you do as much as you can in a year and then you if it doesn't work you fold that and then you move on which is pretty much what I've been doing with my career for most of my life

Sam Parr

So, I'll play... I told you this earlier. I was like, "I'll play devil's advocate on that." Because you said that you plan... you said, "I'm not gonna plan it too far in advance because I don't know if my company will even be around in a year." But, yeah, where you guys are now, you've raised $150,000,000. You're at scale. The likelihood that you're gonna be around for a long time is quite high. You never know, you're right, but I would bet... and a 151 things, a 150,000,000 things have bet that you're gonna be around for a while. When you're talking to investors or trying to raise money or trying to recruit employees, do you tell them that you're only looking ahead one year at a time? Or that you're only planning one year at a time? Because if I were wanting to invest, I would be nervous about that.

Alex Chung

No, I think I would take it the other way. Investors want to know that you have a one-year plan. They don't want you to be vague. You gotta remember, VCs have a seven-year return window. You need to return their money, and they need to make 10x on their investment because they're capitalists, right? So, I mean, Jeff Bezos just said, like, last week that he was hoping... you know, he was just holding on until the eventual day when Amazon fails. All companies will fail at some point. Someone's just going to come out and be better. So what the VCs really want to do is, if you follow Paul Graham's advice—maybe it's my mind—if you follow like Y Combinator, Paul Graham's advice, startups are all about growth. If you're not growing, then you're not a startup, and you're not doing something successful. You probably have a year to make it up. The way that I go into VC meetings is, "Hey, in a year, we're going to be here." I usually put a 10x number on whatever our KPI is, and I'm like, "This is what I'm committing to. If we can raise the money, we will get there." If you can get there, then you're successful. The worst thing a VC wants to see is, "Hey, in one year, in five years, we're going to do this thing," and then there's no plan for the first year. It's going to take us maybe four years to figure it out, and then we'll figure it out in the fifth year. They want to see growth right away. So if you plan yearly growth—10x, 10x, 10x, 10x—that's exactly what they want to see. If you can't pull that off, maybe you get a little bit more time. But if you can't pull that off for two years, then you should probably sell the company or find something else because you just aren't there at the right time and place. So I'd say VCs actually prefer you to optimize for the year, especially for the next round of funding, but have an outlook for the future. Plan for the future, but you really, really operate one year at a time.

Sam Parr

So, well then, what would happen if your company didn't 10x? I mean, a lot of people when they're first getting started... I get asked this question all the time: "When do I know when to quit?" or "How do I know when to quit?" Is that your metric, is 10x growth? I mean, like if you didn't hit that, what would you do?

Alex Chung

Yeah, I think because startups are all about growth, there are only two things that you're optimizing for: you're optimizing for traffic or people. You're looking for user growth or you're looking for revenue growth. There are two types of businesses. If you want to make an e-commerce company that's just a lifestyle business making money, don't take any funding. Take the bare minimum you can, and then you're just kind of chilling out and making money. That's totally fine. That's like, you know, having a pizza parlor or any kind of operating business. That's a totally cool thing to do, and there are funds for that. But if you're talking about high-growth, hyper-growth startups, unless you're making 10x gains every year, your company probably isn't going to be on the hockey stick curve. If you follow the... you know, like everyone talks about the hockey stick, that's an exponential growth. That's going to be 10x growth every year. So if you can't do that when you're starting out, then there's something fundamentally wrong with your product-market fit or you're not operating correctly. You give it a little bit of time, and then you pivot. There are a couple of options: you either start making revenue and build a small growth business, or you keep optimizing to try to get that curve up. If you can't get the curve up at some point...

Alex Chung

There's something wrong, right? And that's when you have to ask yourself, is this something that you want to keep doing, or do you find something else?

Sam Parr

When you were starting out, was your goal... I mean, I'm sure it's many people's goal to find that 10x growth company, but did you start it thinking, "I think this can grow 10x," or did you feel like you just started something fun and fell into it?

Alex Chung

So, I look at it differently. It's not like you have an idea and you think it can grow 10x. Obviously, anything can grow 10x possibly, but it's more about putting the number on the board and asking, "What are all the ways you're going to get there?" If something was so obvious that it's going to grow 10x naturally, someone would have already done it. Someone's going to pull it off; it's too easy of a problem to solve. What you really want to do is take the thing that no one thinks is ever going to be big, like a GIF search engine, and then put 10x on the board. From there, figure out every possible way that you can get to that 10x. That is when the creativity opens up. In our case, we actually did 10x every year for the first four years. It was like 10, then 3,000,000 people, then 30,000,000, and then 300,000,000. We've been doing that every year. At one point, we thought, "There's no way that this is going to happen. We're not going to be able to hit 300,000,000 until we get onto Facebook." But Mark Zuckerberg had just said that he would never put GIFs on his platform, like two months before. Everyone was saying, "You're dead." We were like, "No, we need to get the GIFs onto Facebook." So, we hacked this whole solution into Facebook through a Flash player, where you could actually play GIFs on Facebook. We did it, and then you see the 10x grow. The next year, we were on stage at F8 with Mark Zuckerberg, and he was sending GIFs on the Giphy platform. So, it really is about putting the goal out there and then working towards that goal. If that answers your question.

Sam Parr

Yeah, it does. When you create that huge goal... Something I've... I don't know if you guys experienced this, but when I'm working with my team as CEO or founder, I'll create these huge goals and there's immediate pushback of like, "Oh, this can't be done." What did you do to motivate your team?

Alex Chung

So, yeah, if you put these things together, there are two types of people. Some see it as, "No, we can't do that," while others think, "Oh, that's a crazy goal! I wonder how we get there." The people we work with are the ones who say, "If you give me a 1% chance and it's possible, we will figure out a way." I like the low odds because high-odds things are boring. One, they're boring, and two, everyone is doing them. If you're in Bitcoin right now, or crypto, there are a million companies doing the obvious. Well, now everyone's losing money. But if it's like a GIF search engine and no one really knows what you're doing, and you set these goals, it's a challenge. I think the startup people, the boldest and craziest, are the ones who see that 1% chance and go for it. They then figure out the plan to get there and have a team that embraces that small chance of winning. Being the underdog and doing something crazy, like we are, is exciting. We are capturing a large percentage of Google search traffic. We are a significant chunk of it. No one thought we could compete with Google. They have 30,000 employees; we have 100. Yet, we're competing every day and beating them. I love that. You want a team that thrives on that kind of challenge. If you have a team that says, "We can't do this," you have the wrong team, and your startup is going to fail. Everyone should just work at Google or Facebook because that's where people go when they give up.

Sam Parr

Just a reminder: if you do have a question, just message me here and I'll pull it up. You guys like that talk? Talk to me.

Alex Chung

little bit they all work at facebook

Sam Parr

Talk to me a little bit about the very first 6 months of the company. Where did the idea come from? What were the first 3 to 6 months like in trying to get users?

Alex Chung

So, in the very beginning, it was a project that a friend and I were talking about. I had done like six other projects and launched them. We had an anonymous chat thing, a nonprofit square reader project we were working on, and some crypto stuff. So, this was just one fun project. It's like if you're putting out an album; this was just one of the B-sides that we put out. It ended up taking off, and in maybe 15 minutes of it starting to get traffic, we got offers from everywhere for funding.

Sam Parr

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What? How did you even get that much traffic early on?

Alex Chung

Someone, you know, I actually just never meant for it to go public. I sent it to four friends just as a fun thing for us to find. We were like, "Oh, this will be our secret weapon. We can now find GIFs on the internet when no one else can." Then someone sent it to a friend, and they sent it to another friend, and then it got on the cover of Gizmodo. After that, it was everywhere. People were yelling at me because they were telling me it sucked. I was like, "I wrote this in not that long. The search engine was like three lines of code." In the first month, I was just working on it full-time, trying to get it not to crash. We got offers of funding, and I was like, "Okay, we'll take a little bit." I brought on all my unemployed friends to come work on it. They were happy because they had jobs. We ended up having "Work at Home Wednesdays," which was not a good idea. The first few months were just us hanging out, trying to figure out what this thing was. We would go to the Standard and have oysters. It was back when rosé was still a thing, and we would hang out. Then, six months into it, we were like, "Okay, if we're going to devote the next year of our lives to this, let's commit to it and think about the plan of what we're trying to do." That's when we put the 10x goal on the board. We got serious and started coming up with a strategy. You can see it in our Google Analytics. Our traffic had a big peak, and then they called it the "trough of despair," where all your traffic goes away. It peaks out for like three or four months until we got serious, and then the traffic started to rise again. It's been going that way since those first six months when we stopped eating oysters.

Sam Parr

what were you doing to get that traffic up

Alex Chung

Everything... I mean, like, it matters what kind of strategy you use. For us, in the very beginning, it was SEO. We wanted to be synonymous with GIF. It was getting integrated into platforms. It was pretty much every trick you could possibly think of to get traffic. In the very beginning, it's very easy to double your traffic because you're only talking about hundreds of thousands of people. When you start getting into the tens of millions, you have to change your strategy to something a little more drastic. And when you start going into the hundreds of millions of people, that's when you have to start piggybacking off of the large networks. So, your strategy always changes with every other goal. What we were good at was constantly changing the strategy for the goal that we put on the board. You have to be super adaptive because the internet changes every day.

Sam Parr

When you were working with your team, how often were you changing strategy? Every day? And how many employees did you have when you were changing every day? What I love doing is going to companies that I like, or startups that are growing quickly, and looking at their Glassdoor job reviews.

Alex Chung

that's creepy

Sam Parr

I like looking at what employees say it's like to work there because I want to learn what good CEOs are doing or what bad CEOs are doing so I don't do that. One thing that most... a lot of people complain of is strategy is constantly changing. So when you were doing that, how many people were you, and how were you dealing with that, you know?

Alex Chung

we we in the very beginning there were 5 of us for the first almost year and then we went we doubled to like 10 and then 20 and now there's a 100 and we used to reorg every month because when you have 5 people you can't just do one job you have to do all the jobs and so we would reconfigure for every strategy and so we kept reorging every month then we made it every quarter and now then we made it every 6 months and now there's enough people that we do it about once a year and if you are that type it's a startup we are competing literally competing with Google and facebook every day and we we don't have the resources to compete with them so there's no way we're gonna beat them on a head to head basis so we have to be a lot more clever and we have to change and we have to adapt because the benefit we have is we're far more creative or so we think but we are much more nimble and we can change faster we can change our product in a day they take it takes them months or years to change their product so I would say you need a in a startup scene if you don't have employees that are okay with that you're going to fail like it just is the nature of the game like there is people will come in and say hey we need a 4 year plan if you have a 4 year plan you've already failed because that means you haven't you're not adapting to the changes of market so we have to change all the time it's a fundamental nature of the company and so what we do is I think part of why people stick around to is in our company values we have all these crazy values one is the heart emoji we optimize for the company first so like we have this thing where one of our sayings is like product over people or people over product sorry that was from Google where we optimize for the people in the company and when you optimize for the environment of the people then all the products naturally end up showing up but when you optimize for the product you get a bunch of people that just care about their careers and the product and not about the community of people that are actually working on it so if you ever watch friday night lights it's like we are that odessa not that awesome well staffed or but kind of like attractive team and we just end up doing just better than everybody else because we're just craftier because we have to be and we like each other that's a big thing

Sam Parr

How so? You have this very... you may push back on this, but you have this very family-oriented culture, it seems like, right?

Alex Chung

yeah yep

Sam Parr

The difference between a family and a team is that you can't fire your family. Whereas on a team, you can replace someone. So, how are you balancing this culture with the reality that you have to make money? You have people to please and outside investors to consider.

Alex Chung

So, there are two types of bands. Both of them are on Giphy. Let's say there's the Beatles, who were a band that stuck together as the music changed. They went from the fifties all the way to the sixties and seventies, and they made crazy different albums. But they all stuck together, even though they had tensions. They were a family. So, it was really about the people first and the music second. Then you have bands like Gore. Who knows who's in Gore? They just get random people coming in. For that, it's all about the music and not about the people. And that totally works, but that's why they can never change. They can never not wear costumes and do this whole thing because that's the one thing they do right. So, if you're going to be adaptive, you have to really focus on the people of the company. You need to be able to change configuration, pivot, and do all these things. We spend a lot of time building the community of the company. Most of the first early employees were friends of mine—people who know they’re not going to abandon you for a job at Facebook or Google. We're all in it together. We always say, "We either succeed together or we fail together." If people aren't useful when we grow, we try to find other roles for them. We optimize for the people and what they're best at. Over the last five years, we've had a large percentage of people move roles within the company. We'll move people and try to get them to the best fit.

Alex Chung

They are one thing that we have is we have another value that we call **post-giphy**. I think a lot of companies believe that this is going to be your last job ever, and that's not true. Everyone here has, unless you're just right out of college, had multiple jobs. That company you were at last year, or maybe four years ago, was not the company that you're going to be in four or five years. So, our promise to everyone is: we are going to give you the skills and the training to be better and make a lot more when you leave the company than when you started. We put that commitment on, and people stay. We've had very little turnover over the years. When people are ready to leave, I'm always surprised that people are sticking around longer than a year. But when people stay for four or five years and if they want to leave, we're like, "Great! Now go be fancy someplace else, but say nice things about us." And maybe not at Facebook or Google, because that's giving up.

Sam Parr

Talked about the business model. We actually didn't mention it, but basically, you have 500 million people coming to your platform, GiveMe, a day. You've raised all this money, and you said that you're starting to make revenue this year. A lot of speakers we have who speak at these events are bootstrapped, so they're making money from day one. You're a little bit different; you're not in that category. So, talk about how you're planning on building the business.

Alex Chung

yeah in the very beginning you know it was you you have a couple different like again you either optimize for growth or you optimize for revenue if you try to do both you're most likely gonna fail at both and you're not gonna get hyper growth like if you look at it making money is actually the easiest problem easier problem than having growth a lot of people can make money or have really good retention but it's really hard to get 100 of millions of people to your platform so we optimised for growth for the 1st 5 years and that's where we got to and now that we have scale like we have more inventory in our platform than we know what to do now it's about turning on to the the second phase of revenue growth and that's what we're doing right now so we started in january and our business model is very very simple the 2 most monetizable platforms on the internet are Google and facebook us one is an ad network an ad platform based off of search and one is an ad network based off of feeds and so our business model is very simple we are search and messaging and we also have feeds and messaging so these are trending feeds so we just follow the Google and facebook model and that's all we're doing we are the largest ad network in messaging right now no one's been able to figure out how to monetize messaging because no one's been able to create an ad network in messaging since we're in every messaging app in the world and we have the search behavior we can now build and this is what we have built the world's largest ad platform for messaging the way to think about it is every possible message is a possible search and every possible search is a piece of media and every piece of media is a potential ad so there's 78,000,000,000,000 messages sent every year if you monetize that at facebook cpms that's almost a that's like $780,000,000,000,000 in revenue potential right there just in messaging and that's more than global advertising right now so messaging has the potential to be as big as the entire advertising ecosystem and that's all we're doing we just want 1% of that maybe 2

Sam Parr

No big deal. I mentioned this earlier with Aptiv. Something that I hear often is that people say, before they're starting something, they get nervous about all the legal implications. Typically, what I say to them is, you know, you first need to create something—a product that users actually want. People actually want. Then, like, if I were you, I would worry about making sure that legally you're perfectly sound. The likelihood that you're going to get sued is a lot lower than the likelihood that you're going to create something that people actually want. So focus on that first. You guys are in a field where I would imagine you get a lot of people threatening to sue you for copyright reasons.

Alex Chung

That no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can talk about most San Francisco startups. I won't name them; they're friends of ours. They all ride off of fair use. Fair use is cool, and there's a lot of legal precedent on it. But once you start to try to monetize, no one wants to advertise on your platform when you're using a bunch of weird, like fair use kind of stuff that may be their content on the internet. So, I used to work at MTV on music videos in Midtown, and I did a lot of the licensing on that side. So, day one, we decided to be 100% licensed content. We have a bunch of UGC (user-generated content), which is about 10% of our catalog, but 90% of our catalog is all licensed. This includes every sports league: the NFL, NBA, all of the movie studios—pretty much anything that you see, we have licensed. So, we have actual rights to distribute that and for our users to use, which is something that no one else in the world really has. That took us five years to get. That's why we're totally compliant from a copyright perspective.

Alex Chung

From our point of view, we don't have problems because we work with the artists and the content providers directly. They see this as a huge win where here's someone that's not ripping off their content, but working with them directly. This is why it's easy for us to get advertisers, because we've been so straightforward with it.

Sam Parr

I we have about 8 minutes left. Alex has specifically said that he may not answer every question, but he is game for any question to be asked. So, if you do have something that you want to get asked or answered, feel free to put it up there. We've talked about how he's not afraid of any question. Can you talk about some of the advice for building the tech MVP? So, your first version as a non-technical founder, you built yours in-house, right?

Alex Chung

Yeah, I built it myself. It's very hard to outsource your product because the life cycles are too slow. You outsource it, then you get feedback, and then you outsource again. You get feedback again. If you have a small growth company where you just need an app that doesn't need iteration and you can make a little bit of money, that's totally cool. That's fine. But if you're actually going to try to compete on some hypergrowth scale, you have to have a technical co-founder. You need to build it in-house. There's no way that you're going to compete because, again, you have to be faster and more clever than all the other people you're competing with. If it's a good idea, which it probably is, some Y Combinator company is going to crush you on day one. So why even bother? Every day, people come out of business schools saying, "I have the greatest idea." It doesn't really matter. There are a lot of great ideas, but it doesn't matter until you build it. You just have to be able to build it yourself.

Sam Parr

When you were... you've worked on a dozen or so companies in your career. Were you ever partnered with someone who wasn't technical?

Alex Chung

Yeah, so a lot of times I would think, "Who cares?" Like, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, right? Even though Paul wrote all the songs, they both still get credit. I was the CTO of half those companies, you know, because I'm the technical person. A lot of times, I have a business partner because, go figure, engineers and designers don't really like talking to people too much. We spend all of our time locked in a basement working on code. We are naturally not social people. Then, we'll come on stage and have to talk to people, but I'd rather just be at home, working on stuff, maybe watching some TV. Not that this isn't an awesome thing. So, you want a partner. It's usually a technical person; you want a little bit of an introvert and you want an extrovert—someone that goes out and does all the business meetings. Because, you know, that person is not building anything, but the person building something doesn't have the time to go out and do all of that stuff. Eighty percent of successful startups are done by two people or more. Y Combinator almost never invests in a startup of one person. But on the corollary side, sixty-five percent of startups fail because of founder tension. So, you're not going to get there unless you have a co-founder, but you're more likely going to fail because of your co-founder. So, what do you do?

Sam Parr

When you were working with some of your business co-founders, what made you interested in working with them?

Alex Chung

Friends, first I made the mistake in the early days of just picking the smartest people that I thought were cool. Eventually, what happens is you get a lot of money, and then people get greedy, or people don't have different interests, or you know, your professional careers diverge. There's nothing personal keeping you together. Now, I only work with friends because, you know, people say it could ruin your friendship. Well, if you're in it with a company and you're truly friends, you'll see it through to the end. I would rather work with friends. Also, if you're going to work 8, 12, or 16 hours a day, you'd want to hang out with your friends, right? You don't really want to hang out with random people.

Sam Parr

Google do you have a facebook profile

Alex Chung

I do, but I deleted all my posts years ago. So, I have every profile, but there's no content. Because, like, why would you be on social media?

Sam Parr

Right, let's answer this top question. This is interesting for me as well because you have this very unique perspective on this one-year planning. You just have an interesting perspective and lifestyle to me. So, what is your personal endgame?

Alex Chung

It's not that interesting. I live in the East Village in a tiny apartment and I like to eat pizza. **Endgame:** When do you walk away? You walk away when you're not doing interesting work, when it's not fun anymore, and when you're not enjoying it. When the pain of going to work becomes so much that it's not worth it anymore. Everyone's been there, and that's when you're like, "Okay, you're wrapped up." As long as you can keep going, and you like hanging out with your friends, and you're doing cool things, keep doing it. This is the longest job I've ever had. I never thought we would be here. This is my sixth year working on this. It's mostly because the community that we have is so good that I can honestly say there is no other place I would rather go work. I go to work with my friends every day, and the work changes every day, which is much more interesting. As soon as all my friends left, I would be like, "Okay, we probably have to figure out something else."

Sam Parr

We'll answer that most recent question in a second, but before we do, you're painting a very nice picture of loving to go to work. How many times have you felt, "This is fucking horrible, I'm out of here, I quit?"

Alex Chung

Like, every day... but I mean, that's the day that means you care. If you just are apathetic, that means you don't care at all. It's better to care and be like, "Okay, but I'll get there tomorrow." I think the difference is, for me, I've been doing this for 25 years. So I'll always keep doing this. This is like my thing, you know? I will do another one after this and keep doing it and doing it. If I can work with my friends, for me, this is all about getting VCs to pay for my life so that I don't have to get a real job. I don't want to work at Facebook or Google because who wants to work in a carpeted office? That's so weird. Carpeted New York is disgusting. Have you seen outside? So for me, it's really about maintaining... just being creative, doing as much as I can do. If I can get my friends to do it, I'll keep doing this forever. If Giphy can keep going on and it's fun, why not? Where else am I gonna work? I mean, I'm really bad at making coffee too, so probably nowhere.

Sam Parr

Let's address this question down here, Alex, about Giphy ads. Right now, I don't see a lot of advertisements on Giphy. But what happens if you take it to the limit and try to monetize as much as possible? What's that going to look like then? And how do you think that's going to impact users?

Alex Chung

So, the secret which most of you, I think people don't understand, is you have already been all sending branded content. 90% of all the content on our site is branded. We just haven't charged for it. So you've already sent an ad, we just never got paid for it. And so people are like, "Oh, these ads are going to be disruptive." Oh, guess what? They're already all... like 90% of them are ads. We just haven't put a pay gateway onto it. [Speaker change] Wait, what does...?

Sam Parr

that mean why are you saying they're ads already

Alex Chung

Because it's all branded content, most of our content comes from trailers for movies. They come from McDonald's, from Pepsi, and from all these places. All these brands are putting up content every day. Like, the WWE does a really good job of putting up these promos for things going on. This is all advertising for them; we just haven't charged them yet.

Sam Parr

I see

Alex Chung

Or we have, for a few of them, and we will for all of them. Not except for the ones we like because they're awesome. What's the difference between an ad and good content? You know, there is no difference in this world.

Sam Parr

Let's do maybe 2 or 3 more questions. Let's answer this one about mistakes. So, you've grown to over 100 people now and have raised $150,000,000 in funding. What are some of the biggest mistakes that you've made, and what have you learned along the way? I know there's a ton, just the top 2.

Alex Chung

Every mistake you ever think you're going to make, we've probably made. It's like everyone... every... yeah. What did they say? I think I saw this in a fortune cookie: "The master is one that makes 10,000 mistakes." The thing is, if you're not making mistakes, that means you're not trying hard enough and you're not actually progressing. So I would say the biggest mistakes have been making a GIF search engine, but that ended up turning out pretty well. I don't know if we've... that's too big of a question... like everything.

Sam Parr

okay it's probably what I'm

Alex Chung

wearing today with a mistake

Sam Parr

And why don't you, or why do you dislike Google and Facebook so much? You dislike them so much that they came and offered a massive amount of money. What did you sell to them?

Alex Chung

Money always matters, but the difference between Google and Facebook is significant. I've worked at large companies, but for anyone young trying to do interesting things, it is different. Okay, maybe the way to put this is: if you're an indie rock band and you just want to make good music, there are these huge bands that kind of take all the market share and become monopolies. We like working with them. I actually love Facebook and Google; we have a lot of friends there and we work with all their product teams. However, we are just a different type of business, and we're competitive. So, I would say I don't really have a beef with these companies. I more have the perspective that if you're young and interesting, I think you should try to do something else first and then go retire there when you're old and boring.

Sam Parr

I'm going to ask just one more question. So go ahead and pull up the app and vote on anything you want. I'll try to wait a second until we see some of the top ones. But before I get to that last one, you see a massive amount of GIFs. What's your favorite one that you've seen?

Alex Chung

That changes every like 5 minutes. We probably like... yes, people can upload GIFs on Giphy. They can upload. We get millions of uploads.

Sam Parr

well here answer this what's the most popular one on the platform

Alex Chung

It literally changes every 10 minutes. It changes based on what's going on in popular culture and what's happening in the world right now. Like, a few weeks ago it was Ariana Grande, now it's Cardi B. It could be anything that's really trending in pop culture. It's kind of saying, "What's the most popular thing in your head right now?" I don't know.

Sam Parr

I've forgot it don't you have all time stats

Alex Chung

Yeah, but popular for today or for all time? All time is tough because all time is like you get the history of momentum. If you go to YouTube, you know the all-time best videos are like... oh, it's not like it was "Evolution of the Dance" for like years.

Sam Parr

sure but there's a most popular one what's it for on your platform

Alex Chung

in terms of all time

Sam Parr

most popular

Alex Chung

Well, for 2018, it was Cardi B on Jimmy Fallon saying "Okur." Have you seen that? That was the most popular of all time, or at least of 2018. Of all time, it's probably some random cat GIF that's been around for 20 years—the cat playing piano. That's a good one.

Sam Parr

Okay, last question. When... let's do the... I don't think you could see it here. We'll do this one; it's the most upvoted: the future of the business, of the company. What's going to happen in the next... I know you don't like planning.

Alex Chung

5 years I don't know we'd probably have self driving cars giphy pizza who knows what's going to happen in 5 years but the next thing that we're doing is we you know we went gifs we went stickers and really now that we're messaging we're really about bringing content and new formats to messaging so we launched a video platform 3 weeks ago at the metrograph we'd had a premiere of a very short short 18 second or less video film festival casey neistat and some of our friends from the moma and the met were judges so in q1 we're going to launch an entire short form video product which is basically the number one reason way people are gonna watch content and messaging so that will be something that you should watch for it's coming out very soon the future really is if we are searched for messaging we are going to take a large percentage our goal is to be 50% of Google search we're gonna be and then a 100% of Google search and then we our goal is to take out Google first from search so that we can be the old company that you don't really want to work at but that's okay because we will all be old and boring and so we will love our jobs and then we're gonna go after comcast and take out all the media because no one watches long form tv unless it's on netflix anymore so we think content can be much much shorter all the great shows like the today show good morning america I I don't know anyone that's young that watches those but there should be versions of it hq is doing a good job of making game shows more fun but what about all of daytime tv that supposedly millions of people in middle america watch but no one here watches because you're here otherwise you'd be at home watching tv but I think the future really is going to be a combination of messaging and communication networks where media comes into that and it's gonna be a big mix of a crazy world where new content is going to be invented new formats are going to be invented and the ways that people will watch it are going to be totally new and you can kind of see the trend this is why at and t and time warner verizon all these communication companies are merging with entertainment companies because the future really is when entertainment messaging communication search are all one platform so that's the long term vision we we want to take out basically all of the people in communication entertainment put it into one platform that's very similar to look with an mtv brand and make advertising not be horrible because advertising on the internet sucks so bad that it's really really painful and we have the one advertising format that actually doesn't suck that people send every day 100 of millions of times a day billions probably billions

Sam Parr

Let's actually wrap up with a quick answer to this last one. Currently, what's stressing you out the most throughout your day?

Alex Chung

**Stressing...** Like, yeah, what stresses you out? Oh man, everything! Mostly, things seem like they're going great with the company. I mean, you know, I gotta keep the company running and everyone employed. So my number one duty is to make sure everyone in the company is happy and that we can keep doing that. So that's a stress. The whole political climate... peace in the Middle East. I don't know. I didn't eat anything all day, so I'm kind of like a little dizzy. I drank like three cups of coffee before I got here. So pretty much everything in the world is probably stressing me out right now. And then I'll go back to work, and my friends will just chill me out. That's kind of... work is more like the least stressful place in the world compared to this whole situation going on here. I think you guys probably stressed me out a little bit too, so maybe that's it.

Sam Parr

well if only we could all be so light hearted as you but I just would

Alex Chung

light hearted I'm totally serious what are you talking about

Sam Parr

Yeah, that's my takeaway. Well, look, I appreciate you coming, man. I'm a huge fan of Giphy. Maybe you'll be hanging out for a few more minutes before you head out, but thank you for coming. I know people still might have some questions afterwards. Will they be able to catch you over here?

Alex Chung

sure I think so I'll be over there with my entourage turtle

Sam Parr

There they are, right over here. Well, look, thanks for coming, man. We really appreciate it. We've learned a lot, and I appreciate you taking the time.