• last year
0:00 Inside Athletic Brewing’s Plan To Make Boozeless Beer A Billion-Dollar Business
6:36 This Multimillion Dollar Brand Built Robots To Scoop Cat Poop So You Don't Have To
19:21 How This Estonian Startup Beat Uber At Its Own Game
27:52 Meet The New Billionaire Behind The 76er's Center City Project
49:33 This CEO Made AMD Billions – Now She Wants To Dominate The Market With AI
56:05 From Refugee To Sriracha Billionaire: The Man Behind One Of America’s Favorite Condiments
1:05:51 Vanta: The $1.6 Billion Unicorn Automating Complicated Security Compliance For Businesses
1:14:39 This 27-Year-Old Executive Flunked Her College Entrepreneur Course. Then She Built A $200 Million News Brand
1:24:37 How Brash Boxing Promoter Eddie Hearn Turned Matchroom Sport Into A Multimillion Dollar Company
1:52:10 How Course Hero Is Preparing For The Looming College Enrollment Cliff
2:06:59 How Nick Cannon Built His Empire Beyond Wild N' Out
2:13:24 Pharrell Williams’ $1 Billion Plan For Black And Hispanic Entrepreneurs
2:27:15 From C-Student To CEO: Creating An "Uninterrupted" Path For Entrepreneurs
Transcript
00:00:00 No one grows up thinking I want to be a great non-alcoholic beer producer.
00:00:05 Non-alcoholic beer had never really crossed my mind as any sort of thing that would be a big part of my life
00:00:10 prior to being in the business of non-alcoholic beer itself.
00:00:13 My lifestyle was an intense one.
00:00:19 I've never been someone to go slow at anything I do, but it was wake up early, work out,
00:00:25 very intense day job in the financial world,
00:00:27 in one of the most intellectually challenging environments there is at Point 72.
00:00:31 And then go out to work dinners, really burning the candles at both ends,
00:00:35 and wake up and do it again the next day.
00:00:37 It was everything about high performance in my workouts, my job, and everything I did.
00:00:43 I grew up, as most people did, with all the jokes around the existing category and why would you drink it,
00:00:55 kind of the decaf coffee jokes.
00:00:57 And it wasn't until I was living this high performance modern life that it occurred to me.
00:01:02 Beer and adult beverages in general have not adapted to the modern lifestyle,
00:01:05 and there was an enormous gap here.
00:01:07 About only 50% of adults consume alcohol on a regular basis,
00:01:11 and the breadth of non-alcoholic options at on and off premise places for high performing adults was super limited.
00:01:18 And that struck me, and once the wheels started turning, I couldn't turn it off.
00:01:23 Because I was drinking five or six nights a week, not in huge amounts most of the time,
00:01:28 I assumed everyone drank with regularity every time they went out to a bar, restaurant, anything.
00:01:33 And it took me stepping away from drinking for performance lifestyle reasons to realize
00:01:37 that not that many people actually consume a lot of alcohol with regularity.
00:01:41 It's actually a very small percentage of the population that consumes a majority of the alcohol.
00:01:45 So as I was in these places, bars and restaurants, and in pain looking for better options,
00:01:51 I realized that there were a lot of people like me.
00:01:54 And it didn't start out as I was researching a business idea,
00:01:58 and I didn't necessarily know I was going to do this, but it became a passion that I just couldn't turn off.
00:02:02 Before I knew it, I was working on it nights and weekends, waking up at four in the morning before I went to work.
00:02:07 I found myself in a spreadsheet working on the business plan on a Saturday when it wasn't even my full-time job.
00:02:12 And that's kind of when I knew that this was something I was really passionate about for the first time in my life.
00:02:19 I expected when I started talking about non-alcoholic beer, all my friends, family, and colleagues would think I was absolutely insane.
00:02:24 And they were all like, "Yeah, if it tasted good, I would probably drink that a good amount."
00:02:28 And that's when I was like, "Whoa."
00:02:31 If there were better options, I think almost everyone would drink a great non-alcoholic option with some regularity.
00:02:37 And then I started running actual surveys and got big data behind that.
00:02:40 The non-alcoholic beer market in 2016 and '17 was 0.3% of the overall beer market in the U.S.
00:02:47 But as I ran surveys of thousands of people, 55% plus would say they would drink great non-alcoholic beer with regularity
00:02:54 if it didn't come with the bad taste and the stigmas attached to it.
00:02:57 But then when you talk to people in the industry, everyone would very nicely say,
00:03:01 "Hey, be really careful how much you invest here. There's no demand for it. There's no evidence that this is going to be a thing."
00:03:08 And I think it just wasn't a thing because there wasn't great options that got people excited.
00:03:15 We ended up with an incredible co-founder of Brewmaster in John.
00:03:18 And he was by far the most talented person who had ever turned his attention on this category before.
00:03:23 John had won every alcoholic craft beer award under the sun.
00:03:27 And we started brewing at super small scale on Gatorade jugs, just making tweaks, dialing in that process,
00:03:33 and getting the real award-winning craft beer that just happened to be non-alcoholic.
00:03:37 The first batches were kind of fun and kind of terrifying.
00:03:41 We had been brewing for seven years at that time, but we really had to deconstruct brewing as it was
00:03:47 and think about the ingredients in a much different way.
00:03:50 And so it was the first time I had experienced those same ingredients in a different format.
00:03:55 And so it was a great learning process for me as a brewer, so really I was starting from scratch.
00:04:00 It really started with the product at a super small scale, hundreds of trials,
00:04:05 and then the same kind of grassroots attention out in the world.
00:04:08 We went door-to-door, taste testing retailers, meeting people at finish lines or races when they were sweaty
00:04:13 and having a good time, putting a non-alcoholic beer in their hand and telling them a little bit about it.
00:04:17 I think we created thousands and thousands of super fans face-to-face that first summer.
00:04:22 And then we just have kept doing that, building our community authentically,
00:04:25 talking to people, getting people excited along the whole way.
00:04:28 The biggest difference between brewing traditional and non-alcoholic beer is food safety,
00:04:34 primarily because you don't have ethanol as a preservative.
00:04:37 We want to create a shelf-stable product that will be good for six months or a year.
00:04:41 And in order to do that without a preservative, you have to be really careful about your entire process
00:04:47 through and through until it's a finished product in a can and pasteurized.
00:04:51 What makes us unique and not unique at all at the same time is that we don't ever remove the alcohol.
00:04:57 So we don't require that single unit, that single machine that strips everything out.
00:05:02 We brew a beer that is fully fermented to under 0.5%, so we don't have to add a step.
00:05:08 We don't have to remove anything or add anything back.
00:05:10 It's a really exciting time for Athlotic as we take on Kerg Dr. Pepper as a new partner.
00:05:21 They led our Series D with a recent investment.
00:05:24 In that, we're getting a really scaled partner who operates at the biggest of the beverage industry
00:05:28 and a great advisor in our corner.
00:05:30 Building a manufacturing business is expensive.
00:05:32 We've built two of the biggest non-alcoholic beer breweries in the world in Connecticut and California.
00:05:37 And that investment allows us to get those facilities up and running profitably
00:05:42 and puts us on a really good sustainable financial future for all of our teammates.
00:05:46 Being commercial hasn't always been cool in the beer industry, but from John and I's perspective,
00:05:51 there's nothing cooler than providing great jobs, great opportunity for teammates,
00:05:55 and that comes with financial stability, especially in this economy.
00:05:59 One of the biggest learnings I found in developing Athletic and our brewing process
00:06:04 was that it wasn't alcohol I was after, it was all the ingredients.
00:06:08 And if we can just find a way to showcase those same ingredients in a different format,
00:06:12 people are going to like it just the same.
00:06:14 Humans have been drinking beer for 5,000 years.
00:06:17 We think it's got a really important place in society.
00:06:19 And so we wanted to give people options that fit their life anywhere, anytime,
00:06:23 no matter what their preference is.
00:06:25 Giving people the full social and taste experience of drinking beer without the alcohol,
00:06:31 it just allows us to take beer where it's never gone before.
00:06:34 For the 45.3 million American households with a cat,
00:06:44 the annoyance of scooping cat litter is a daily one.
00:06:47 And pet owners are big spenders.
00:06:49 Cat litter in industry sales reached $124 billion in 2021,
00:06:54 according to the American Pet Products Association.
00:06:56 That spending, combined with the popularity of robot vacuum cleaners
00:07:00 and the acceptance of technology in our homes,
00:07:02 has led to a growing business for Michigan-based Whisker.
00:07:05 Revenue reached nearly $180 million last year,
00:07:08 a 24-fold increase from 2015's $7.5 million.
00:07:12 And it all began in the basement of Whisker founder Brad Baxter.
00:07:18 I've been in the business for over 20 years, back to 1998.
00:07:21 Now at this point, I had decided that I wanted to go into business for myself.
00:07:25 I wanted to start an engineering services, product development services company.
00:07:30 And I ended up doing that.
00:07:32 And while I had some success with that,
00:07:34 I realized that what I really wanted to do is I wanted to invent.
00:07:37 I wanted to build a company around that invention.
00:07:40 And at the time, I didn't really know what that was.
00:07:42 I was working on a few different things at the time, you know, experimenting, exploring,
00:07:46 and I really hadn't found that "aha" moment that set me on the right path.
00:07:51 A year later, after starting that business,
00:07:53 that opportunity actually came in the form of two cats and an overflowing litter box.
00:07:59 I was down in my basement cleaning up kitty litter mess
00:08:02 because when my cats had a dirty litter box, they wouldn't actually go in the box.
00:08:06 They would go outside of the box.
00:08:08 And while I was doing that, I was thinking about ways that I could somehow automate the process
00:08:13 because I was just sick and tired of having to scoop the litter box.
00:08:15 What I was thinking about was really some kind of a rotational sifting device
00:08:20 using gravity to our advantage instead of raking through the litter and pushing clumps.
00:08:25 And that was a fairly inefficient process.
00:08:28 And I thought the next step really is to start to do a patent search.
00:08:32 So I went ahead, did a patent search, and found something very similar to what I was already doing.
00:08:38 And instead of abandoning the idea or the dream of pursuing this product,
00:08:43 I would contact the inventor and see if we could work out a license agreement,
00:08:47 which is exactly what we did.
00:08:49 I was in California demonstrating the very first litter robot in April of 2001.
00:09:03 The early days were actually pretty difficult.
00:09:06 There was no funding.
00:09:07 My parents actually refinanced their home so that they could provide $35,000,
00:09:13 which was what the tooling cost to get this off the ground.
00:09:16 And so my dad became a partner in the business.
00:09:19 He owned 35% of the business at the time.
00:09:21 And that was really my first source of funding.
00:09:24 After that, there was no external funding.
00:09:26 Banks were not going to touch me with a 10-foot pole because there really wasn't any collateral.
00:09:31 So I had to find a way to make it work.
00:09:33 And the other business that I had started in 1998, which was an engineering services business,
00:09:38 and I kept that running for almost 20 years.
00:09:41 And it was that business for the first five years of starting Automated Pet Care,
00:09:46 that other business kept Automated Pet Care alive.
00:09:49 I was able to funnel all my profits from the automotive business back into the pet care business.
00:09:54 There were a lot of challenges early on because this was really a new segment of product.
00:09:59 And although there was one other product on the market, the way I was doing it was quite different.
00:10:03 And there were a lot of things that we learned about safety,
00:10:06 making sure that the appliance is safe for the cat.
00:10:09 There were a lot of learning experiences there.
00:10:11 There was a lot of experiences and lessons learned about running a business.
00:10:16 Especially without external funding, it made it very difficult.
00:10:19 I actually had to retool the product at about the fifth year in in order to take cost out
00:10:25 to make it more efficient so that we could actually start making a profit.
00:10:28 Once we started making a profit, I was able to reinvest a lot of that money back into marketing,
00:10:33 and then we started to see real growth after that.
00:10:36 In 2015, Jacob Zupke came on as a consultant to help Whisker with its marketing.
00:10:43 A serial entrepreneur, Zupke was asked by an old friend to help the Pet Goods company with their digital marketing.
00:10:49 He built such a good relationship with Baxter that he stayed on and became CEO in 2022.
00:10:56 [Music]
00:11:00 In 2015, when I joined the company, I saw a really cool opportunity
00:11:04 where the company had a phenomenal product, was about to launch a new version of the product,
00:11:09 and maybe lacked a little bit on the marketing front.
00:11:12 I know I can poke some fun at Brad there and he won't be offended,
00:11:15 but if you do Wayback Machine and you take a look at our 2015 website,
00:11:19 I think you'll see there was a lot of room for improvement.
00:11:22 As a marketer, I saw this really cool opportunity where the reviews were just insanely cool.
00:11:27 I remember reading one specific review of a woman who said that it saved her marriage
00:11:32 because her then-fiancé did not want a cat in the home,
00:11:36 and the only way he would tolerate it is with a little robot.
00:11:39 And I remember reading that at the time not having a cat and saying,
00:11:43 "I can tell this story, and I can do something with this."
00:11:47 And my big "aha" moment was at the end of 2015 as we got ready to launch the Litter-Robot 3.
00:11:53 I lined up what was at the time called Social Celebrities, and we had 25 Social Celebrities lined up.
00:12:00 And each day in December, they would give away a Litter-Robot.
00:12:04 At the time, our previous record traffic was about 35,000 visits to our website in one month.
00:12:10 On December 1st alone, we had 35,000 website visits.
00:12:14 And it was an "aha" moment for me, and I carried that into 2016,
00:12:18 where we ended up growing by over 80% that year, and we continued to double down and double down.
00:12:25 One of the things I had a misconception about was marketing.
00:12:28 I felt that if I built the greatest product, that they would all come running for it,
00:12:35 and I wouldn't have to really spend all that much on marketing, and that word of mouth would take over.
00:12:39 That is not the case.
00:12:41 Marketing is something that you have to constantly invest in, you have to constantly adjust and adapt,
00:12:47 because everything is changing in the marketplace all the time.
00:12:50 I didn't realize this early on, but as I started investing in marketing,
00:12:53 I realized that that is a very important component of what we do,
00:12:58 and it's something that you have to constantly adapt and change and modify.
00:13:02 And so the more money we made, the more we put into marketing.
00:13:05 And the results of that, and the success of that, are what really sold me on taking that approach with marketing.
00:13:14 At the end of 2017, we started to see the landscape change a little bit,
00:13:25 and at that time we really pivoted to television.
00:13:28 So in 2018, we shot our big first commercial called "Don't Be a Scooper."
00:13:33 And it was our way of poking fun at people that were still scooping.
00:13:38 We almost made it a negative term to be a scooper.
00:13:41 It was an "aha" moment for the company.
00:13:44 How do we tell a story about how this litter box can truly change your life,
00:13:49 and how the thing of the past is not the thing of the future?
00:13:52 And it was a really cool moment for us, where we really saw the direct correlation
00:13:57 between putting out a spot that helped people see the litter box differently,
00:14:02 and the goal of that spot when we set out to go on our creative retreat and write that spot together was,
00:14:07 we want somebody who's previously scooped to never be able to look at the litter box the same again,
00:14:13 and to remember this spot the next time they're elbow deep in cat noose.
00:14:17 And that's exactly what we came out of it with.
00:14:19 And I think ever since then, we've tried to find creative moments of telling our story different,
00:14:24 and breaking through the noise and the clutter of what is advertising.
00:14:30 It's been great working with Jacob. I think the key to us working together is that we are very different.
00:14:35 He is very much a people person, open. I like to call him the glue within the company.
00:14:41 He's also very adept at walking into a room, distilling the situation,
00:14:46 and figuring out kind of what the next steps are. I think that's very important for a leader.
00:14:50 We complement each other because I'm a lot more focused in tactical operations, engineering focused.
00:14:57 I really get into problem solving. I'm spending a lot of time with focused work, where it's a different way of working.
00:15:04 And as the company has grown, there's been a greater need for, let's call it that glue, that Jacob provides in his role.
00:15:13 We work together very well, and we have a mutual respect for each other.
00:15:20 With the direct-to-consumer business growing, they moved to a 30,000 square foot factory in Juneau, Wisconsin in 2008.
00:15:27 Since then, they've expanded the factory to 225,000 square feet.
00:15:32 So in 2015, when I joined the company, I remember Brad telling me that in 2009,
00:15:43 when he bought the property that we're still in today,
00:15:46 that he was going to tarp off half of the building to rent it out to somebody else.
00:15:50 And fast forward to 2023, we have now done several expansions of our facilities,
00:15:57 investing as much as $13 million into our Juneau, Wisconsin location here,
00:16:03 proudly manufacturing our robots here in America.
00:16:07 That's allowed us to go from 30,000 square feet to 60,000 in 2020-2021.
00:16:13 And then we did another expansion in 2021-2022 that carried us from 60,000 to 222,000 square feet today.
00:16:22 That allows us to employ over 300 employees here in Juneau, Wisconsin, for a total of 500 in our company.
00:16:30 That allows us to keep up with consumer demand,
00:16:34 and will allow us to grow into what will be nearly a million robots a year here in our factory in Wisconsin.
00:16:42 For us, manufacturing here in the United States is important,
00:16:46 and actually it's a good business decision, really, because we make a fairly large product.
00:16:52 And to have this product made overseas, brought over on a boat,
00:16:57 stored in a warehouse, and then shipped to the customers,
00:17:00 there's a lot of expense in the supply chain in actually shipping the product over from some other offshore supplier.
00:17:07 So, from early on, we decided we were going to locate our manufacturing close to our suppliers,
00:17:13 and we identified our plastic suppliers here in Wisconsin,
00:17:18 and we decided to locate the plant here for that reason, so that we would be close to the supply of parts.
00:17:23 So, all we were doing is integrating the actual assembly process with the warehousing of the product and the fulfillment side of things.
00:17:31 And it just made a lot of sense to be vertically integrated.
00:17:35 [Music]
00:17:38 When I think about what makes Whistler magical, it's really our inventive culture.
00:17:43 We have a lot of people that are super passionate about building the future of pet care,
00:17:48 and they get to bring that inventiveness and their tenacity to work every single day.
00:17:52 Whether you are in our operations facility, where you are working on the line,
00:17:56 and you're saying, "I have an idea, and I think I can make this process a little bit better."
00:18:01 Or you're in our engineering lab in Michigan, working on a new inventive product
00:18:07 that may redefine a new category in pet care in the future.
00:18:11 The goal of what we're trying to do is bring a lot of very creative people to Whisker
00:18:16 to help bring their best selves to work every day, and really help us shape the future of pet care.
00:18:21 I've been at Whisker now for 23 years, and Whisker is completely ingrained in me.
00:18:30 I mean, Whisker is a part of my life.
00:18:32 This was a vision I had over 23 years ago, and I was told many times that this would never go anywhere,
00:18:41 that it was not suitable for retail, but I stuck with it.
00:18:46 And I think our success is what shows that it was the right decision to stick with it at the time.
00:18:53 And I think for me, Whisker is evolving a great deal,
00:18:58 and I'm very excited to see what we're going to do in the future with our digital products and our apps,
00:19:04 and what we can do with the data that we collect from all the hardware,
00:19:07 and how we integrate that into a holistic view of the pet wellness.
00:19:13 That's what I'm really excited about, is the data side, as well as the great hardware that we can couple with that.
00:19:18 Bolt is a ride-hailing company, just like Uber, you can book a taxi through them.
00:19:27 Now, you can also rent an electric scooter, or have your groceries or your takeout order delivered.
00:19:33 You can even book a rental car through them.
00:19:35 And Bolt is mainly competing with Uber in Africa and in Europe.
00:19:41 There are a couple of things that stood out to me about Bolt and Markus Willig when I started reporting on this story.
00:19:47 Markus was unusually young when he started this company, he was only 19 years old.
00:19:51 So what I saw in Markus Willig and Bolt was something of a sort of David and Goliath story.
00:19:57 You have a much smaller startup and a young founder going head-to-head against a much larger,
00:20:03 a much better resourced American rival in the form of Uber.
00:20:07 Uber also play very, very tough.
00:20:10 We're seeing Markus and Bolt at times winning, despite the odds being stacked against them.
00:20:17 Starting any business is hard, but it's especially hard if you're starting as a 19-year-old kid in a small country like Estonia,
00:20:24 with very limited experience and funding.
00:20:26 So the first months were brutal.
00:20:28 I was coding the app myself during the summer, I was going on the streets of Thailand signing up taxi drivers one by one.
00:20:35 90% of them immediately said, "Get out of my car, you're just a young kid, what are you going to offer me, it makes no sense."
00:20:41 So it was very, very tough and it was just persistence and very hard work that got us to where we are today.
00:20:47 So Bolt has grown very quickly in recent years and to date has raised $1.8 billion for venture capitalists.
00:20:54 At its last round last year, that valued the company at $8.3 billion.
00:20:59 But when we look at corporate filings for 2021, we can see that they generated around $570 million in revenue.
00:21:08 How does that compare to Lyft or Uber?
00:21:11 On a revenue basis, that means that Bolt is around five times smaller than Lyft, or around 50 times smaller than Uber.
00:21:19 Markus Ville grew up in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, a small European country on the Baltic Sea in northeastern Europe.
00:21:30 He founded this business right out of high school.
00:21:34 So he had a few entrepreneurial ventures beforehand.
00:21:38 He was web designing and he started a small ed tech app.
00:21:43 He quickly realized it would be very difficult to scale that and started looking around for new ideas, new opportunities.
00:21:50 And I think a big inspiration was Skype.
00:21:53 Skype was Estonia's kind of pioneering unicorn startup that created a pre-Zoom online video and online calling software that ended up being acquired by Microsoft.
00:22:07 Several of his early investors came through Skype and his older brother Martin, who helped co-found the business, had also worked at Skype as well.
00:22:15 Estonia actually has an interesting background where due to the Russian occupation for 50 years, all entrepreneurship was outlawed.
00:22:22 So nobody could start the business.
00:22:24 And that was the environment I was first growing up in.
00:22:26 But also, of course, as soon as the occupation ended and Estonia gained its independence, everybody wanted to start something new.
00:22:32 So actually starting a company seemed like a very popular, new, trendy thing to do.
00:22:36 And what also happened was there was no other big companies to join because the economy was so new.
00:22:40 So it wasn't like you could go and join a large corporation.
00:22:43 What many young people exactly wanted to do was start their own business.
00:22:46 So it was actually a pretty natural environment for me to grow up wanting to be like that as well.
00:22:51 Marcus talked about having been in to see many of the kind of leading venture capitalists across Europe and beyond and was met with the same answer.
00:22:59 No, thank you.
00:23:00 Investors were intrigued by him and what he builds.
00:23:03 But when they were looking at the opportunity of this very young founder from this very small country to build a product that could compete with Uber, which already raised over a billion dollars, investors were not optimistic about his prospects.
00:23:17 As a result of that, Marcus had to learn to do things his own way on a very small budget.
00:23:22 This meant that Marcus and Bolt had to find new ways to grow and had to find smart solutions to do that and to beat Uber.
00:23:30 Some of these examples would be looking at Africa, where Bolt was very quick to offer cash payments.
00:23:36 This meant that you could book a taxi through the Bolt app and instead of making a payment via Apple Pay or with a card, you would hand your driver cash and the driver would settle up with Bolt at the end of the day or the end of the week.
00:23:52 This may sound like a small thing, but around 25% of people in South Africa don't have access to a bank account or credit cards.
00:23:59 And that's even higher in other parts of Africa where Bolt operates.
00:24:05 I'd say the hardest part of our journey so far were the first five years, because we were barely able to raise any funding at all.
00:24:14 We managed to raise about 1 million euros and we built the company into more than 10 countries with that limited amount of funding, while our competitors were raising more money than any company in the history of technology.
00:24:26 So we were completely outspent by all these other players and the only way we could succeed was by being smarter.
00:24:34 So we were really focused on making sure that the team is very focused on frugality and we count really the impact of every euro that we spend.
00:24:42 It's a common playbook for startups in Europe that as soon as you start to build some traction, you should go to the US, which is the largest possible market.
00:24:50 However, Marcus was relying on his own data there. He started looking at the stats and saw that the greatest possible potential was actually in Africa, specifically in South Africa, rather than the US.
00:25:04 He also knew that he would face less competition there than he would do where he had to go head to head with Uber or Lyft in the US market.
00:25:13 You need to expand only to the cities where you can actually offer something better than the incumbents do.
00:25:18 Otherwise, you're just generating no value there. So we realized very early on that Central and Eastern Europe was underserved.
00:25:24 Other platforms didn't really understand the local customer as well as we did.
00:25:28 And that translated into many things, for example, local payment methods.
00:25:32 They didn't work with all the drivers in these markets. They didn't necessarily focus on safety and some other aspects that were important here.
00:25:38 After years of running Bolton on a very tight budget, Marcus was able in the pandemic to raise some really large sums of money from investors.
00:25:47 That supercharged the growth of Bolt and helped it expand into new areas like scooters, like food delivery, like groceries, and even offering rental cars.
00:25:58 That's been really expensive. E-scooters are a tough business, though.
00:26:01 Investors around the world have invested around $5 billion into startups like Bird, but many of them still don't turn a profit and are aggressively burning money.
00:26:11 Most companies can barely build one product that reaches millions of customers.
00:26:15 And even less companies are able to actually build multiple products that ever work really well.
00:26:20 So we were always very conscious that we don't want to expand into products that are not centered around our core mission.
00:26:26 But with electric scooters, we realized very early on that there's many synergies that we can benefit from by having the leading ride-hailing service in the city
00:26:33 and by also having the leading scooter-sharing service in the city, because it's largely the same customers anyway.
00:26:38 So we don't need to spend nearly as much money on marketing to acquire those customers, but we can take that money that other companies spend on marketing
00:26:45 and actually invest that into having a better product and cheaper prices.
00:26:49 Bolt's mission from day one has been that we want to build better cities, and we believe the best way to do that is to replace private cars.
00:26:56 So it's never been that we only want to be a ride-hailing company. I don't even have a driver's license.
00:27:01 So for me, it was always, how do we expand the product set so we can truly replace the private car?
00:27:06 And electric scooters were the next obvious place for us to expand into, because most of the trips in cities are short,
00:27:12 and electric scooters are one of the best ways to replace those trips.
00:27:16 Ride-hailing is a tough business. It's hard to make money here with very tight margins.
00:27:20 Bolt has got a lot bigger, but the business also burnt through $600 million in 2021,
00:27:25 and investors will be watching Marcus's and Bolt's numbers very closely, but also Uber and Lyft, which have still yet to turn an annual profit.
00:27:34 Our mission is to make cities better by replacing private cars, and we think that we're truly at just the very early stages of that.
00:27:41 We already have more than 100 million customers across Europe and Africa, but when you look at the potential,
00:27:46 then we think there's more than a billion people that we can address over these two continents over the next 10 years to come.
00:27:51 David Adelman is CEO of Campus Apartments, a student housing company headquartered in Philadelphia.
00:28:03 As CEO, he's expanded the company to 80 schools in 23 states, managing properties valued around $2 billion.
00:28:11 Adelman is also a minority stakeholder in the Philadelphia 76ers,
00:28:16 and recently became the face of the NBA's team effort to build a $1.3 billion arena in Philly's center city.
00:28:23 So who is David Adelman, for those people who don't know?
00:28:28 Just Philly guy, love the city, love the town, love my friends, family guy, just a guy.
00:28:36 Yeah, just a guy, right? Nobody's just a guy, though.
00:28:39 I'm just a guy.
00:28:41 You're just a guy that wants to do a big thing, and we'll get to that in a minute, but talk about Campus Apartments, right?
00:28:49 You're the CEO of Campus Apartments, right, one of the biggest college real estate companies in the country,
00:28:54 and you took over this role at age 27 years old, right, a 27-year-old CEO.
00:28:59 What is it about Campus Apartments that's so unique? What is the business talking about?
00:29:03 Well, it's unique because it's kind of a fabric of what made me a businessman. It really is.
00:29:07 I started as a kid, as people know my story, I had a great mentor/founder who taught me business,
00:29:13 and for me it was the way to cut my teeth and learn how to accomplish things.
00:29:17 But what was really satisfying is how University City changed kind of on my watch out here.
00:29:23 You know, I think people used to look at University City, West Philadelphia very differently.
00:29:27 I think us helping establish the creation of the University City District, I'm very proud of that.
00:29:32 We were the first business to sign on, the largest business contributor at the time,
00:29:36 and then literally redeveloping block by block in University City.
00:29:40 When you see those sidewalks and brick walls out there, that's not the City of Philadelphia doing that.
00:29:44 We did that, and we learned that the way to make a positive impact in the local community is to do it yourself.
00:29:50 And so I didn't ask for help. The streetscape lighting, the new sidewalks, the brick walls,
00:29:55 all things that people rely on city services for, I did it privately.
00:29:59 You know, we'll talk about my, you know, the arena ambitions there, but for me, I'd rather control my own destiny,
00:30:07 prefer not to ask for help or assistance, and I just want to do it.
00:30:11 Yeah. Taking back to the 11-year-old David Ademen, right?
00:30:13 We're going to get back to campus apartments, but you were trying to control your own destiny then,
00:30:17 where it was a bet that you made with your Uncle Alan Hurts, who, you know, you were betting a basketball game, and you lost, right?
00:30:26 Why were you so overconfident that you were going to beat this grown man in a basketball game and as an 11-year-old kid?
00:30:32 Well, first of all, you know, I've grown to realize I'm not very good at basketball, but also, you know, most people let the kid win.
00:30:38 Yeah.
00:30:39 Not Alan. Very competitive guy. Like I said, I'm going to teach you about life. You know, you don't always win.
00:30:46 Yeah. What did you lose?
00:30:48 Oh, my basketball, my football, my baseball glove, and my bank book.
00:30:51 Your bank book.
00:30:52 Remember back then, like, savings? People don't know what a savings book is, but yeah.
00:30:55 I remember a bank book very well. Why did you lose your—what did he want with your bank book?
00:30:59 He just was like, "I'm going to teach you about betting," and, you know, he roped me in.
00:31:03 And he just said, you know, "Take your possessions. You don't have to earn them. Do something to earn them back."
00:31:09 All right. And it was at this very headquarters, right, this very building that you came here during the summers and learned about real estate.
00:31:15 It is. So I started here. In the back behind here was a little warehouse where I stacked lumber, swept sawdust because they would, you know, kind of prefab things there.
00:31:25 And all these properties around there, you know, cleaned, painted, you name it, leasing, accounting, whatever it took.
00:31:32 Yeah.
00:31:33 Shoveling snow. So when it snowed, I had to come down here even as a property manager and, you know, start clearing the path.
00:31:39 Even as an 11-year-old kid that you were doing it? 12-year-old?
00:31:41 No, no, no.
00:31:42 As a teenager?
00:31:43 As a teenager.
00:31:44 As a teenager.
00:31:45 So what got you hooked on real estate when you were in this? You were, you know, most people when they're working in the back with lumber, they have to sweep up sawdust.
00:31:52 They don't want nothing to do with real estate. But here you are, this big real estate interest.
00:31:55 I think, you know, the people who follow your publication would understand this.
00:31:59 You know, the power of the fact that you could have your customers or your tenants essentially paying your bills, paying your debt, reducing your mortgage, amortizing your properties was fascinating to them.
00:32:11 And so the ability that you could provide a service, do it respectfully, treat your customers, your tenants very well, treat your staff well.
00:32:19 And you have this kind of notion. You pay down your debt. There's appreciation and value. And, you know, the middle in between is for you.
00:32:26 Yeah. You had a story that you told me when you were in college about one electrical outlet at a frat house that you fought to get more outlets in this house.
00:32:34 And that was your first experience as a landlord. Right.
00:32:37 And here you are decades later as this landlord is David Adelman, just another landlord. Is he just another guy who was a landlord or is he a different landlord?
00:32:45 Well, so first of all, the cops think I was a tenant and the landlord only had one outlet in each bedroom.
00:32:51 Absolutely. And I asked for another for us each four rooms. And he said, no.
00:32:55 And I was like, it doesn't seem right that you can like one outlet per bedroom.
00:32:59 I went down to the city of Columbus and asked the building inspector, what's the rule? I was 20 years old, 19 years old.
00:33:05 And I said, shouldn't it be on like every wall? And he told me what the rule is. He said, can I have a photocopy of that?
00:33:11 Handed it to the landlord. And I said, we'd all like outlets every eight feet like this says.
00:33:16 So it was supposedly every eight feet?
00:33:18 Every eight feet on a wall. Yeah.
00:33:20 OK. How many per room?
00:33:21 On whatever the square, so it would be, you know, instead of one, there could be four or six, whatever it was.
00:33:26 But every eight feet on the wall. Wow. Wow. And so all those outlets got passed.
00:33:29 But now here you are again as a landlord. What makes you different than any other landlord?
00:33:34 Because most people hate landlords. Nobody wants to pay rent.
00:33:37 But most people hate their landlords. I think what we try to do is we have a unique constituency. Right.
00:33:43 So I have the students, these college kids, it's usually their first time renting an apartment or experiencing not being under mom and dad's roof.
00:33:51 So you're their landlord, but you're kind of their parent and their guardian a little bit.
00:33:54 So we take that responsibility very seriously. But you still have mom and dad as constituents.
00:33:58 And how do you manage all of that at once? And so communication, you know, teaching your staff patience because, you know, kids back and I am dating myself.
00:34:08 But, you know, a lot of kids couldn't balance their checkbook to pay their monthly rent.
00:34:11 Their check rent check would bounce, not because they meant to, but they were like not keeping track.
00:34:14 And now they're been knowing it and electronic payments that doesn't happen as much.
00:34:17 But, you know, for us, it's just being compassionate. You know, most of the people who work with me all have kids.
00:34:23 I have kids in college. I'm paying rent to other landlords. So I understand what they're going through.
00:34:27 Yeah. Yeah. How would you look at real estate today? You know, I mean, you see it and we talked before.
00:34:32 You say commercial real estate is in trouble. How are you looking at it today?
00:34:35 What would if someone wanted some investment advice from you, real estate investment advice, what would you tell them?
00:34:41 I am a long term thinker. And so I'm not looking at today. Certainly our office buildings in trouble.
00:34:47 Absolutely. Not all of them. Many of them. But that's based on debt. What kind of debt do you have?
00:34:52 And so for me, it's about, you know, are you investing in an asset class, whether it's student housing, hotels, retail?
00:34:59 What's the long term value? You know, not all asset classes are dead or hurt.
00:35:03 And so where do you find the value in that asset class? Yeah.
00:35:07 And when you look at campus apartments, right, the business, you help build this business by convincing colleges to outsource running those apartments,
00:35:14 especially off campus and over two billion in assets under management property management.
00:35:19 Now, how did you build this? Take me on the inside of how David Allen helped build campus apartments.
00:35:25 One is I'm stubborn. And so I looked around and I thought that universities shouldn't be in the real estate business.
00:35:32 Institutions should stick with whatever their their core competency is.
00:35:37 So for colleges and universities, that's educating students. You know, they figured out a long time ago that food service,
00:35:43 they didn't need to employ the man or woman that was serving the sloppy Joe sandwich at lunch.
00:35:47 They could hire an hour marker, a Dex or a levy or somebody else out there that could perform that.
00:35:53 So really what pops in my head is like, why can't I be, you know, the levy or hour mark of real estate colleges?
00:36:00 No one had done it. I thought it was a problem that needed to be solved. And that's when I started pitching.
00:36:04 Yeah. Now the company is successful. Right. But what keeps the even up at night when it comes down to campus apartments and its future?
00:36:11 Considering where we are, right, you have high interest rates, turmoil at the regional bank level.
00:36:16 Those are big lenders for commercial properties. What keeps David Allen up at night in 2023?
00:36:21 Well, you know, fortunately, it's not interest rates. I've never been greedy. I've never had floating, very rarely had floating rate debt.
00:36:27 Everything's long term fixed in seven years, 10 years plus. So usually that weathers through a bad time.
00:36:32 I think for me, you know, as I get bigger between campus apartments and my other activities to make sure that we don't lose kind of the culture we have here,
00:36:40 where people really care about each other, take care of each other. I believe that you should enjoy going to work.
00:36:44 OK. In my 25 years of working in this office, I've never once said I'm going to work. I say I'm going to the office.
00:36:51 There's a real distinct difference there. And so I encourage everyone who works with me to they need to enjoy this.
00:36:56 If they come to a point in their career where they're not, they should come talk to me and we should figure out what's best for them.
00:37:01 And so can I create an environment that does that? So culture is a big thing that keeps me up at night to answer your question.
00:37:06 How do I make sure people feel good about getting up every day and coming here and doing my job?
00:37:10 Yeah. And how do you do that?
00:37:12 Communication.
00:37:14 What do you tell them?
00:37:15 Well, one, I'm very accessible to our team. You see something, tell me, reach out. OK?
00:37:21 They can call you at one o'clock in the morning?
00:37:22 100 percent. 100 percent.
00:37:23 Will you answer?
00:37:24 I do. I'm sleeping a lot better now, but usually I will. Yes. But, you know, I want to know what can I do to make their lives better?
00:37:32 What can I do to make your family's life better? And for me, that's important.
00:37:36 If we know that we have a team member that's struggling, what can we do to help?
00:37:39 You know, unfortunately, when you have, you know, lots of employees, things happen in their families that are really unfortunate.
00:37:45 How can me or the company be there to support them through that?
00:37:48 How would you define good culture in your business?
00:37:52 I think good culture is at the end of the day, if our customer is happy, the people providing that service are coming from a happy and comfortable place.
00:38:03 You know, and you see if you ever have an experience where you're getting bad customer service, it's probably because those employees aren't being treated well.
00:38:10 So, CEO of campus apartments, FS investments, vice chair, men of FS investments. People, you corrected me off camera.
00:38:19 And you're a billionaire. And you told me you had to sit your daughters down and you had to talk to them about what was coming, public scrutiny perhaps.
00:38:27 What was that conversation like? What did you tell them and why didn't they know?
00:38:31 I mean, I think my kids knew that I worked hard. They knew that, you know, I was making sacrifices, you know, to be able to do things for them, but also do things for our community.
00:38:41 Philanthropy is a big part of my life. And I think I sat down with them and I said, look, you know, with money comes responsibility.
00:38:48 And, you know, we can talk about philanthropy and how I sat down with my teenage girls and said, like, what's on your list to make things better?
00:38:55 To obviously this arena project is local here and they are their friends.
00:39:00 And I just said, like, you know, we're signing up for, you know, a little bit of publicity here.
00:39:05 And, you know, I took them downtown. I showed them what it looks like now on Market East.
00:39:11 And I said, this is what I think will happen if I build this. And I said, hopefully your kids will be standing here.
00:39:18 And like, say, your grandfather did this and he changed a neighborhood and improved it and brought back, you know, a quality of life that Philadelphia deserves.
00:39:26 That's what I said to them. Yeah. Jumping forward. But since you took it there, also minority ownership group in the minority ownership group of the 76 is which makes you so involved in this arena project downtown.
00:39:39 You're proposing a one point three billion dollar project in the heart of downtown.
00:39:45 There is concern. Chinatown is residents. There are people who believe that there could be some disruption there and it may put you in a bad light.
00:39:54 Right. Tell me about this arena project. Why you feel like this is so successful.
00:39:58 And also, how you plan on pushing back against the resistance that historically has always been there.
00:40:04 And now you're coming with this another big idea again. How are you going to pull it through?
00:40:08 Well, you know, first, you know, the idea is, you know, it's time for the Sixers to control their own destiny, have their own home and build an arena that is fit for an NBA team of this day and age.
00:40:21 Two, to be able to do it with my partners, Josh Harrison, David Blitzer, in a way that can be great for our team, our fans, but the community.
00:40:28 And so we picked a site that had great infrastructure. It's on top of the best urban transit station in Philadelphia.
00:40:34 Two, could we make an impact immediately? You know, Market East used to be the center of commerce.
00:40:40 The department store was invented in Philadelphia. Market East had nine department stores at its heyday.
00:40:46 It has one left right now, Macy's, which was the old John One Makers. And how do we take boarded up retail in the heart of our city and reactivate that?
00:40:55 And so for me, to be able to take a mall that was built 49 years ago in the heart of the city, so it's not as if this, you know, there wasn't a big large scale project there already,
00:41:04 and take a mall that isn't living up to its full potential, take part of it down, build another box, I like to say, and create energy and vibrancy into the city.
00:41:14 To me, it's a no brainer. It's exciting. Nine thousand construction jobs, a thousand permanent jobs.
00:41:19 And that's not even counting what we think will be the direct benefit to the adjacent properties on Market Street when those get redeveloped.
00:41:26 And that could be another 20,000 jobs that get created. Yeah. Why do you think you're getting so much resistance?
00:41:30 If this project seems to be any, 400 million, right, in annual economic impact. Right. Why is it getting so much resistance?
00:41:38 Well, I don't know if it's a lot of resistance. What I've learned is the people who support projects like this and other people who are supporters who think it's a no brainer, don't feel the need to speak up and support.
00:41:47 So you really only hear the dissenters. And I probably need to do a better job of getting the folks that are for it to come out so people understand the level of excitement for the small business owners,
00:41:59 for our fans, for the people who aren't moving back into Center City because of what's happened post-COVID here.
00:42:05 You know, the city's dying a slow death here. We need to reinvigorate it. And so all of those people who are excited spoke up.
00:42:12 You'd probably have a different perspective. Yeah. People look at it and say, oh, this is a land grab.
00:42:16 This is a real estate play. Do you push back against that? What do you say? A land grab.
00:42:21 I mean, that that doesn't make sense to me. The goal is like, let's build an arena. Let's do something great down here.
00:42:26 You know, I need a piece of real estate to do it. But when you look at how I'm doing this and we're doing this,
00:42:31 we're not displacing any community residents or any community businesses. We're taking an existing box.
00:42:37 That's the mall and putting a new box. You already had an entertainment center. It didn't work. Let's put a new one there.
00:42:43 And so to me, you know, there's so much noise around this and misinformation.
00:42:47 But when you look at the fundamental impact that Market East has been the center of commerce for 100 years.
00:42:53 OK, this mall has been there for 50 years. I've never heard anyone complain about that mall.
00:42:59 I've never heard anyone say that that mall is in Chinatown. OK.
00:43:02 And so for me, take one box, put a new box on top of a train station.
00:43:07 The Sixers are playing Boston Celtics right now. Boston figured this out 20 years ago.
00:43:12 Their arena, the TD Garden, sits on top of a train station.
00:43:16 And that helped redevelop a part of downtown Boston that was not doing well.
00:43:20 You have residential, you have office. So I walked out that arena because I'd never been there.
00:43:25 And I'm like, oh, my God, this is it. I don't even need renderings anymore.
00:43:30 I just need people to come see what happened up here. And this is Boston. Philly's way better than Boston.
00:43:35 Like we're going to do a better job. And they figured that out 20 years ago.
00:43:39 As a real estate guy, when you hear things like, hey, arenas don't have the economic impact, they promise a lot, but it doesn't bring in.
00:43:46 I've been through enough arenas throughout the United States.
00:43:48 And I can say there may be some truth and also some that that's not true when it comes to that particular narrative.
00:43:53 What do you say about that? So I think you normally hear that dialogue related to if the city has put city dollars in there.
00:44:00 What was the return on investment? OK, how do you grade it?
00:44:03 Five years, 10 years later, was it a good investment for the city?
00:44:06 The beautiful thing here is I'm not asking the city to put any money in.
00:44:10 This turns out to be a bad deal for Josh, David and I. That's our problem.
00:44:14 It won't affect the city. They still get the vibrancy.
00:44:17 And so for me, if we don't have to take city money, which we pledge not to do and are willing to privately invest in this, what does the city have to lose?
00:44:27 That's what I don't understand. You have critics that push back, they'll say, hey, development is already there.
00:44:32 Right. It's risky knocking it down and trying to build something on top of it.
00:44:36 Why not choose an empty spot? What do you say to that?
00:44:39 I'd say that if I wanted just some parking lot somewhere, I don't accomplish the goal of that vibrancy back in the core of our city.
00:44:46 And there's a reason that every NBA team but one plays in a downtown.
00:44:50 That's where people want to be. That's where our fans want to be.
00:44:52 When you're going around the country and you're developing other properties, what's your strategy?
00:44:56 What do you look around? What do you see when you're standing in the middle of something that could be where this developed or not?
00:45:02 What are you looking for? One, I'm looking for like, you know, if I build it, will they come to what's the experience that I'll be here once it's open?
00:45:10 And I already know the answer for this. People are going to come. People are going to be able to be thankful that they're not paying, you know,
00:45:17 you're spending an hour in traffic coming downtown when they take public transit that goes right underneath.
00:45:22 Like we have this amazing infrastructure. It has some challenges. It needs some branding. It needs some things.
00:45:27 But, you know, we're going to include for the first few years that we're open, we're going to include a septa pass on your ticket to come to the game.
00:45:34 Yeah.
00:45:35 We're going to make it really user friendly.
00:45:37 Speaking of this, what's it like being a sports owner now? You're in the public light. We know you're a billionaire.
00:45:42 And again, you're putting up this fight to get something that you feel is going to leave a lasting legacy for your family and help revitalize an area.
00:45:51 What's that like? And at the same time, trying to balance being a public figure as a sports owner of a major team?
00:45:58 Being an owner is really fun when you win.
00:46:01 Yes.
00:46:02 Right. So I'll say that, too. You know, I'm a firm believer and I'm learning from my partners that, you know, at the end of the day, this is the city's team.
00:46:10 Right. We're stewards of it. But like, you know, this is the you know, these teams belong to our fans.
00:46:15 Yeah. And so how do we make sure that they can have the best experience watching our teams?
00:46:19 Does David et al and Josh and they're pushing you, obviously. But does David Edelman give up at all for this arena play?
00:46:28 I'm not stopping.
00:46:29 Not stopping?
00:46:30 I'm not stopping. You know, I feel very comfortable. There are forces at work that would like us to give up. I'm not giving up. This is too important. Our city needs this.
00:46:39 And that's what I say to myself every day when I wake up and I'm getting punched in the face is that our city needs this. We need the energy. We need the activity.
00:46:48 You know, there were people in the city before me, other developers. Willard Rouse is a famous developer in Philadelphia. He was the first guy, I don't know if you know this, no one could build a building taller than William Penn in Philadelphia.
00:46:59 It held Philadelphia back all through the 60s, 70s and 80s. It wasn't until the late 80s that they finally passed it, that this guy fought for it to build Liberty Place. It changed the skyline of Philadelphia.
00:47:11 And everyone thought he was crazy. So maybe I'm not crazy.
00:47:14 When you walk around the arena as a sportsman, does people give you flack for this at all? Or you know, what do they say?
00:47:20 I can tell you overwhelmingly, I get way more excitement, especially when I'm walking downtown in Philadelphia, not even at the games. People stop and say, don't give up.
00:47:29 So they know who you are then? They do see your face?
00:47:32 Yeah, I'm actually surprised about it, but yes.
00:47:35 So is that weird at all that when you in public people know who you are now?
00:47:38 Yeah, I mean, look, I've been here a long time. I do a lot, you know, from a philanthropy perspective. So, you know, obviously I conduct business and know people, but I'm certainly getting more fans.
00:47:46 Talk about your philanthropy. What does it mean to you and who's your biggest, you know, people you donate the most money to?
00:47:53 I think for me, it's, you know, where can I make a difference? Where can my wife and I make a difference?
00:47:58 And, you know, we kind of have three buckets.
00:48:01 Jewish philanthropy. My grandfather was in the Holocaust and, you know, we built, our family led the construction of the Philadelphia Holocaust Memorial. Very important to me.
00:48:12 Two, I'm chairman of the Jewish Federation here in Philadelphia, which, you know, provides services to both here and in Israel.
00:48:20 Second, my wife is a former teacher, a former college professor and children's book author. Schools and education are very important to her.
00:48:27 So that's a bucket where we spend a lot of time supporting schools and supporting kids. And then three, you know, health and medicine is kind of our last bucket.
00:48:37 Thinking, bringing it full circle again, you're a billionaire. Right. When that word, when you hear that word now and now that you're associated so closely with it, what comes to mind? The arena?
00:48:48 You know, one, like I cringe a little bit, you know, because I think about my kids and stuff like that, you know, reading it.
00:48:56 But I think for me, I just think about, you know, I'm proud of the work I've done to build my career, the businesses that we've helped build, we've created.
00:49:03 So, you know, I'm fortunate and I'm appreciative. I don't take it for granted, the success that's come with it.
00:49:08 And as I keep saying, like, you know, this arena and I know no one's going to feel bad for a real estate guy or my partners, but this is not a great economic deal for us.
00:49:18 OK, compared to other opportunities where we could put capital and invest capital in our business life.
00:49:23 We all believe, the three of us believe that making an impact on the city is hugely important. We're the poorest big city in the country right now.
00:49:31 What can we do to make an impact? And that's what we think about.
00:49:34 David Adenbough, thanks for the time.
00:49:35 Thanks for having me.
00:49:36 One of the things that's really helped me a lot is I love solving problems and I believe, you know, in engineering, you can always solve a problem.
00:49:48 And I think that's actually true in business as well.
00:49:50 My name is Lisa Su and I'm CEO of AMD.
00:49:56 Lisa Su is the CEO of AMD. She's an MIT PhD. She's a Taiwanese immigrant and she really saved this historic Silicon Valley company, bringing it back from the dead and making it one of the most important chip companies in the industry.
00:50:10 I was born in Taiwan and I came to the U.S. when I was two with my parents.
00:50:15 And, you know, growing up, my father used to quiz me with math tables at the dining room table.
00:50:20 So that's how I first got into math.
00:50:22 And when I was young, I liked to actually take things apart.
00:50:26 My brother had a toy remote controlled car and it stopped working.
00:50:29 And I was wondering, why did it stop working?
00:50:31 And so I opened it up, tried to see what was going on.
00:50:33 And there was like a wire that was loose and we were able to get it back working again by putting it back together.
00:50:40 I went to the Bronx High School of Science in New York and I was surrounded by people who loved math and science and technology.
00:50:48 I will say there was a part of me that wanted to be a concert pianist, but I don't think I was good enough to do that.
00:50:53 So I ended up being an engineer.
00:50:55 What I was really inspired by when I was a freshman at MIT is I went into a semiconductor line for the first time and I saw how you made chips.
00:51:04 And that was just so cool to me.
00:51:06 That's really how I ended up being in semiconductors, having a summer job when I was a first year college student.
00:51:16 I was at IBM in the mid-90s.
00:51:18 We were working at the forefront of semiconductor devices.
00:51:22 Semiconductors were so interesting to me.
00:51:25 I mean, I love the idea that you could really make something that works.
00:51:29 All of these transistors, these tiny little things that you could really put together in a chip.
00:51:33 And so we worked on some of the newest innovations, things like copper interconnects and new ways to make devices faster and less power and denser.
00:51:44 In those days, people always said, you know, is Moore's Law ending?
00:51:48 Are we not going to be able to make devices smaller?
00:51:51 And so much of the challenge was how could we keep increasing performance and increasing capability while also making these devices smaller so we could put more transistors on a single chip?
00:52:02 So that was the key thing.
00:52:03 And we had a great team that was working on that.
00:52:05 I joined AMD in 2012.
00:52:08 I always knew about AMD as an important company in the industry and it was an opportunity to work on a bigger platform.
00:52:15 So I was very interested in joining AMD.
00:52:17 There are a lot of things happening at that point in time.
00:52:20 There was this whole revolution of, you know, where were PCs going?
00:52:24 What was happening in mobile phones?
00:52:25 What was going to be the next big tech going on?
00:52:27 So I wanted to be at a company that really would work at the bleeding edge of technology.
00:52:34 When Sue came into the role, she had this really gargantuan task ahead of her.
00:52:39 The company's stock had plummeted.
00:52:41 A quarter of the workforce had been laid off.
00:52:43 And she's really been able to pull off one of the greatest turnarounds in Silicon Valley history.
00:52:48 Sue really boiled down her turnaround strategy to three things.
00:52:54 Building great products, focusing on customer relations, and the third thing is simplifying the company.
00:52:59 So focusing on strengths like PC chips and data centers.
00:53:04 In the early days when I joined AMD, it was actually about getting customers and large partners to trust us
00:53:10 and trust that we could develop the best technology in the world and that they could trust their roadmaps
00:53:15 and their business with our technology.
00:53:18 You know, what I would say is, look, it's going to take us five years, but we will be best in class in the industry
00:53:25 and we're going to do it in these three steps with our new Zen architecture and our new microprocessors.
00:53:30 And so it really is about a track record and doing what you say you're going to do and ensuring that we meet our commitments.
00:53:36 The people who know her also point to this unique mix of technical ability and people skills.
00:53:53 And that's kind of what's driven her success.
00:53:55 Being able to bring people together, problem solve, and focus on more than just the business.
00:54:01 What I've really enjoyed about being an engineer is really building products.
00:54:07 That's what I love in life. It's really, you know, how do you build great products?
00:54:10 How do you see where your products go and, you know, really make the world a better place?
00:54:14 And the role of a CEO, you know, that's one piece of it. That's not all pieces of it.
00:54:18 We have many stakeholders. We have our employees. We have our board, our shareholders, our partners.
00:54:24 And so it's really balancing not just the technology, but also balancing and ensuring that, you know, we are really meeting all of our stakeholders' expectations.
00:54:34 The thing about semiconductors and, you know, developing, you know, chips is you really do have to make bets three to five years in advance.
00:54:44 And you have to think about, okay, where is the industry going?
00:54:47 And how are we going to bring, you know, sort of new ideas to an industry that really has lots and lots of great companies and lots of smart people?
00:54:54 So, you know, at AMD, we spend a lot of time thinking about where is technology going in the future?
00:54:59 What's going to be really important? What are the limiting factors?
00:55:02 And how do we do something that nobody else can do?
00:55:05 I've been in the semiconductor industry for the last, you know, 30 years.
00:55:10 And, you know, sort of in the beginning, people didn't really understand what semiconductors were for.
00:55:15 They were kind of like underneath the surface.
00:55:17 You know, you knew something about chips and something about computers, but not exactly, you know, why they were important.
00:55:23 I think what's been amazing over the last few decades, and especially even over the last three or four years, people now understand that semiconductors are essential.
00:55:31 Like you need chips in everything that you do, in every part of your life, in every part of the business, in every part of how we deliver, you know, great health care and, you know, great technology and great capabilities.
00:55:42 And I think that's what makes it cool is that, you know, semiconductors are now something that everyone thinks about as being super important for our daily lives.
00:55:50 We love seeing our products and technologies really make a difference in everyone's lives.
00:55:57 I'm not sure I'm ready to talk about legacy. I think we have a lot to do right now to continue pushing the envelope on technology.
00:56:03 Touching billions of people with AMD technology would be a wonderful thing.
00:56:09 So the U.S. hot sauce market is estimated to be around $1.5 billion as of 2021.
00:56:14 The largest in that business is Tabasco, which is made by McElhenney, a family-owned company.
00:56:19 Second is McCormick, which is publicly traded.
00:56:21 They own Frank's Red Hot, and they also own Cholula, which they purchased for $800 million in late 2020.
00:56:28 And then after that, we have Huifang, which is around 9 or 10 percent of the market.
00:56:33 So they're still much smaller than the two biggest players in the market, but they have grown a lot in the last two decades or so until now.
00:56:41 So Huifang Foods is a company that's best known for its biggest product, Sriracha.
00:56:46 They're based in Orindale, California.
00:56:48 They were founded by David Tran, who came to the U.S. as a Vietnamese immigrant in 1979.
00:56:54 And obviously their biggest product is Sriracha.
00:56:57 That's what everyone knows them for, the iconic rooster logo on the bottle with the green squeeze cap.
00:57:02 They also have two other products that they make.
00:57:04 One is called Sambal Elek, which is very similar to the Sriracha hot sauce, but it's not blended.
00:57:11 And then Chili Garlic, which is very similar, but also without the vinegar and the sugar.
00:57:16 So what's really interesting about Huifang is that, you know, it's never done any direct advertising.
00:57:21 It's only pretty much grown through word of mouth.
00:57:23 Initially, its main customers were Chinese-American, Vietnamese-American communities, restaurants, markets in L.A. and Southern California.
00:57:31 And it's just spread, you know, organically since then.
00:57:35 You can actually sort of see its growth based on the factories that it's had.
00:57:38 It started out with a 2,500 square foot facility in Chinatown.
00:57:42 In 1987, they moved to a much larger one.
00:57:45 He eventually expanded that to around, you know, more than 200,000 square feet.
00:57:48 And then in 2013, they moved to what is now their main facility in Orindale, east of L.A.
00:57:53 That's 650,000 square feet.
00:57:56 They can make up to 18,000 bottles of Sriracha an hour.
00:57:59 Sriracha is now everywhere, right?
00:58:01 It's really become a cult product, and it's a very unique example of a product that has gone from being, I guess, fairly niche initially,
00:58:09 to being so widely used, to the point that it's now the third largest hot sauce in the country, according to market research from IBISWorld.
00:58:18 And it's only behind Tabasco, which has been around since 1868, and then Frank's Red Hot, which is owned by McCormick, right, a publicly traded spices giant.
00:58:28 So for a company like Huifang that was only founded in 1980 to reach that level, competing with a company that's got, you know, more than 150 years of history at Tabasco,
00:58:38 and then a, you know, massive publicly traded corporation is really astounding.
00:58:43 So David Tran, he's the founder of Huifang Foods.
00:58:47 He first came to the U.S. in the summer of 1979.
00:58:51 He was born and grew up in Vietnam.
00:58:53 During the Vietnam War, he was in the South Vietnamese Army. He didn't fight, but he was drafted to it like everyone of his age was at the time.
00:59:01 He had actually started producing a hot sauce using the chilies that were grown on his brother's land in South Vietnam after the war ended.
00:59:10 In 1978, there was a lot of pressure from the communist Vietnamese government on citizens of Chinese origin, like David Tran and his family, to leave the country.
00:59:18 And so he and his son and his wife, as well as other members of his family, ended up leaving Vietnam as refugees.
00:59:26 They had to leave on different trawlers.
00:59:28 He left on a freighter called Huifang in December 1978, which is actually how he got the name of the company eventually.
00:59:34 All that he brought with him was a locket and 100 ounces of gold that he hid in cans of condensed milk so that they couldn't be taken by the communist authorities.
00:59:44 He landed up in Hong Kong after a brief journey on the freighter.
00:59:49 In Hong Kong, he was at a refugee camp for eight months.
00:59:53 And then in the summer of 1979, he was resettled to Boston.
00:59:57 However, Boston was cold. They didn't really end up liking it that much.
01:00:01 And his brother-in-law had actually resettled to L.A.
01:00:04 He mentioned that he would call his brother or his brother-in-law, and his brother-in-law had told him there were chilies available in the markets in L.A.,
01:00:12 which he was not able to find in Boston.
01:00:15 So they ended up moving to L.A. in January of 1980.
01:00:19 That's when he started looking for freshly grown chilies, jalapenos in local markets in L.A.
01:00:25 He sold some of the gold he had brought with him to open up a 2,500 square foot factory in Chinatown.
01:00:31 Started producing the hot sauce that we now know as sriracha, which was similar to the recipe he had been making back in Vietnam.
01:00:38 In the first two months of business in 1980, the company brought in $2,300.
01:00:43 And he would actually sell the bottles of hot sauce out of a blue Chevy van,
01:00:48 driving around L.A. to different Vietnamese and Chinese markets to sell it.
01:00:53 So Huifang, I think because it started out as a product that was mainly used by various types of Asian restaurants and Asian communities in the U.S.,
01:01:05 it sort of grew out organically from those communities and those customers.
01:01:09 It wasn't sort of advertised or pitched to a lot of different places.
01:01:13 You know, it's used by a lot of sushi restaurants around the U.S.
01:01:16 There was actually a study made in 2015 by the NPD Group, which showed that nearly one in ten households in the U.S. stocks sriracha.
01:01:24 And actually higher than that if you look at households with people under the age of 35.
01:01:30 It's also kind of iconic, right?
01:01:32 Everyone knows the rooster logo, the squeeze cap.
01:01:35 It's sort of dependable as a very spicy hot sauce you'll find anywhere.
01:01:39 And it's interesting. There was a documentary made in 2013 on sriracha by Griffin Hammond.
01:01:45 You know, he talks to all these people who are big fans.
01:01:47 And a lot of people don't even know that sriracha is made in the U.S.
01:01:51 Right. If you look at the bottle, it's written in Vietnamese and Chinese.
01:01:54 The people have this idea that it's more authentic because they might believe that it comes from outside the U.S.
01:02:00 It's not, right? It's a product made by David Tran and his family.
01:02:03 He's American. But obviously he came from Vietnam. He started making it in Vietnam.
01:02:08 It has that authenticity and that simple recipe and the ingredients that he's used that never change.
01:02:14 The recipe has always been the same.
01:02:16 And you know what you're getting when you're getting sriracha, right?
01:02:18 It's very identifiable. And they focus on that product.
01:02:22 They also have Hassan Balalek and chili garlic, but they're a much smaller source of revenue for them.
01:02:28 It's really mainly sriracha that they sell. And they're so highly identified with that product.
01:02:33 Over the years, Huy Fong has had to deal with some challenges, including some lawsuits, shortages of chilies,
01:02:39 and also counterfeiters that have tried to sell their product illegally.
01:02:43 One of the first ones that sort of got a lot of news coverage is when the city of Irwindale,
01:02:47 which is where their facility is located, sued Huy Fong for basically odors that the factory was emitting.
01:02:55 And this ended up going on for a little while.
01:02:58 Huy Fong actually opened up their factory to the whole community. They started doing factory tours.
01:03:02 Eventually, the city dropped this lawsuit.
01:03:05 It's interesting. This actually got a lot of coverage around the U.S.
01:03:08 Senator Ted Cruz actually asked Huy Fong if they wanted to move to Texas to get away from Irwindale.
01:03:14 That didn't end up happening. And then another lawsuit that happened was in 2021.
01:03:18 Huy Fong used to have an exclusive chili producer up until a few years ago called Underwood Ranches,
01:03:23 based in California, and they would produce all of the jalapenos that Huy Fong needed.
01:03:28 There was a lawsuit over sort of the agreements that they'd had with Underwood Ranches.
01:03:32 The lawsuit has since concluded.
01:03:34 And what's interesting about sort of the production process is that the chili growing season is pretty short.
01:03:39 And so if the harvest goes bad, that means that they're not going to have enough chilies to produce the sauce for the rest of the year.
01:03:45 And so they had all the production with this one producer.
01:03:48 Now they have multiple producers, I believe, in California and in northern Mexico.
01:03:53 So that's in the past now. But that was a major challenge for them in terms of having to deal with that lawsuit
01:03:58 and also on sort of how they were going to get their chili production.
01:04:02 More recently, in 2022, there was a severe chili shortage in the spring.
01:04:08 Huy Fong actually sent out a notice to a lot of their customers saying that it was going to severely impact their ability to produce any sriracha.
01:04:16 And so there's a lot of news articles around the U.S. about the sriracha shortage.
01:04:20 I actually spoke to an analyst who was looking at Nielsen data that showed that sales initially spiked after this announcement.
01:04:26 People were trying to hoard all the sriracha. That's passed now.
01:04:29 They've been able to sort of get back to regular production.
01:04:33 And also the fact now that they have sort of a diversified sourcing for their chilies.
01:04:38 But when there's severe weather events like happened in 2022, and there's only one chili growing season,
01:04:43 that can sort of severely impact how much you're able to produce for the rest of the year.
01:04:48 David Tran, by all accounts, is a very humble person. He is fairly press shy.
01:04:54 He has done a few interviews over the years.
01:04:56 But what's really interesting is one of his main phrases I've seen a lot of that he said to me also over email,
01:05:00 is that he's just focused on making a rich man's hot sauce at a poor man's price.
01:05:05 He's not changing the ingredients. He's just trying to keep making the same product and make more of it as long as more people want it.
01:05:11 He's also said in the past that his American dream was never to become a billionaire.
01:05:16 He said in the past that he's received offers over time to buy the company and he's not interested.
01:05:21 He just wants to pass it on to his family and to keep growing it as much as possible.
01:05:25 And that's what's happened over the last 40 plus years that the company's been in business.
01:05:29 Especially in the last 20 years, the company's grown so much.
01:05:32 In some years, they've grown even by around 20% each year in some years.
01:05:37 It's this phenomenal growth and a very humble backstory.
01:05:41 An immigrant refugee from Vietnam built this company, grew it organically,
01:05:45 and is not interested in selling it or bringing out new products
01:05:49 or changing the recipe that has brought the company and the family so much success.
01:05:55 Vanta is a company that basically automates other companies' security and compliance processes.
01:06:05 So the security part is making sure a company is managing and storing customer data in a way that's safe.
01:06:12 So a lot of the software we use has all this customer data, it knows so much about us.
01:06:19 And we found that when there's a data breach or there's a security hack,
01:06:25 and that data is everywhere, it has real consequences for people.
01:06:28 I think like Equifax or Target or these big breaches.
01:06:31 And so there's just so much scrutiny on whether companies are doing the right thing
01:06:36 and securing the customer data they have.
01:06:38 And there's rightly a lot of scrutiny on that.
01:06:41 The notable thing about Vanta's investment strategy was Christina, the founder and CEO,
01:06:47 worked in venture as her first institutional job out of college, basically.
01:06:53 And from that, there are two lessons that she likes to talk about.
01:06:59 One is that companies are the best at raising money when they don't need it.
01:07:03 And the other is that it's easy to confuse fundraising success with company product success.
01:07:11 And I think she's been really conscious about trying not to fall into those traps.
01:07:16 Christina actually waited until Vanta reached $10 million in annual recurring revenue,
01:07:22 which is the way Vanta measures revenue because it's a subscription-based company,
01:07:27 to raise its first big institutional funding round at Series A.
01:07:32 Most companies usually try to raise a Series A when it's like $1 million at that metric,
01:07:38 so Vanta waited until much later.
01:07:40 So that was in May of 2021.
01:07:42 They raised $50 million in a Series A led by Sequoia.
01:07:46 And then a year later, they announced a Series B in June of 2022.
01:07:51 It was an $110 million round led by Kraft Ventures.
01:07:55 And that round valued the company at $1.6 billion.
01:08:00 So when Vanta launched in 2018, we launched this category of automated compliance,
01:08:08 so helping companies get compliant and secure quickly.
01:08:11 Since then, we've grown with our customers and now offer a broader trust management platform,
01:08:16 but still staying core to helping technology companies secure the customer data they have
01:08:22 and then go demonstrate and prove that they have reasonable security to their customers
01:08:28 so they can go grow their business.
01:08:30 When I was a product manager at Dropbox trying to take a new product to market,
01:08:34 and we were really excited about giving the product to big companies, enterprise customers,
01:08:39 and then the legal team kind of correctly told us we couldn't do that.
01:08:43 We couldn't show that the product was secure and compliant.
01:08:46 We thought we had reasonable practices,
01:08:48 but we couldn't demonstrate them in the way these enterprises expected.
01:08:52 And I didn't know anything about the space, but as more and more I learned,
01:08:56 the process itself or the goal made sense, right?
01:08:59 It's like, of course, we should show we're trustworthy to big customers and do the right thing.
01:09:04 What that scrutiny ends up meaning is these companies have to, one, have reasonable practices,
01:09:09 and two, then go through these pretty onerous processes to prove they have good security practices, right?
01:09:15 And they're actually securing the data.
01:09:18 And historically, that was like spreadsheets and manual audits and everything was one-off,
01:09:24 which both took a ton of time and effort and also was pretty inefficient
01:09:29 because we were talking about software and we're taking it into pieces of paper almost literally.
01:09:34 But companies would still go through it because it was so important to them
01:09:38 to show that they were good stewards of customer data
01:09:41 and their customers wanted that almost before they'd make the purchase, right?
01:09:45 So it was such an important thing to prove and felt like a large problem and an important one to solve
01:09:52 because as someone who builds software, I actually do believe,
01:09:57 I still believe in the transformative power of software, but we can't do that if we don't trust it.
01:10:02 I think in the beginning, because we created the category, because we created the product,
01:10:09 we didn't have software competition.
01:10:12 We truly were the only thing.
01:10:13 And so the trick and the kind of sales or go-to-market processes
01:10:17 was convincing someone they could rely on software for something they had a bunch of manual processes before.
01:10:23 As 2020 and 2021 went on and just more startups got funded,
01:10:28 there were more entrants into the space, people copied what we did, took it to market.
01:10:34 And I think that just breeds some amount of resilience.
01:10:38 It deeply shows that in software, you're sort of only as good as your last release in a lot of ways.
01:10:45 And you may have created the category and brought this new product to market and done this innovation,
01:10:49 but if that happened two years ago, right, it's much more about, well, what are you doing this quarter, next quarter?
01:10:56 How are you continuing to show that you're useful to customers
01:11:00 and not sort of resting on the laurels of a prior success?
01:11:03 I think waiting until we were 10 million in ARR to raise our Series A instilled a lot of discipline in the company.
01:11:11 It forced us to think about, are we doing the right thing? Do we have a good business?
01:11:15 Not, does some VC think we have a good business?
01:11:18 Right, it's kind of made it more insular in a helpful way there.
01:11:22 I also think it forced some discipline around practices,
01:11:25 like we charge customers annually up front and these like cash flow things
01:11:29 that actually helped us not need funding for longer.
01:11:33 And in those ways, it, you know, those sort of smaller decisions helped us build a stronger, more resilient business.
01:11:40 And I think finally, the answer was like we didn't need the cash.
01:11:44 And again, some of it was things like charging annually up front, but we, you know,
01:11:48 we certainly had problems to solve, but they weren't problems where it felt like it was, you know,
01:11:52 more money would solve them and felt like more money actually might make it more complicated
01:11:55 or raise the stakes or do other things.
01:11:57 And so, you know, why don't we solve those problems first?
01:12:00 And then when we get to the problems where it seems like money can solve them, you know, go, go pursue investment.
01:12:06 Two things came across really clearly when I was talking to Christina and like her former and current business partners and investors.
01:12:15 One is that she's like super scrappy and really prioritizes like product over ego.
01:12:21 Like when I was asking her, oh, like was Vanta the category creator?
01:12:25 She was like visibly uncomfortable.
01:12:27 Like, I don't want to like claim credit for this kind of thing.
01:12:31 And that's definitely something that carries into like how she runs a business.
01:12:35 The other thing is that she's like clearly someone who like will learn anything for the sake of learning it.
01:12:41 So prior to Vanta, I worked at an early stage investment firm, a VC firm in New York, Union Square Ventures.
01:12:51 I think working at the early stage VC firm and interacting with like seed stage founders,
01:12:56 I very much wanted to be one of them and start a company.
01:12:59 I didn't quite know in what yet.
01:13:01 I got into Beanie Babies when I was like in fourth grade because my mom's family lived in Chicago
01:13:07 and they found out about them a little earlier than everyone else and collected Beanie Babies,
01:13:12 still have hundreds of them in my mom's basement, much to her chagrin.
01:13:17 And then got to like buying and selling them on eBay, like early eBay,
01:13:24 and putting them together in different like groupings and trying to sell them that way
01:13:30 and riding my bike to Kroger, local grocery store, to get money orders
01:13:35 because this was before there were many credit cards in the Internet
01:13:38 and I definitely didn't have a credit card at this stage.
01:13:41 So I'd like go to Kroger and like slide quarters across the counter and get a money order basically to go pay for them.
01:13:48 I think one thing from when I was a kid to now is kind of a deep curiosity
01:13:54 and I really do like to learn things for the sake of learning things, sometimes to a fault.
01:14:00 As a college student, it meant I changed my major like 12 times.
01:14:04 I like couldn't really settle on something.
01:14:07 So there's definitely too much, but I think in this role, it's been really helpful
01:14:11 because for the first couple years of a quickly growing company,
01:14:15 you're sort of doing all of the different roles in a company until you can sort of do them well enough
01:14:19 to convince someone who is much more experienced and much better than you to come in and do it better than you were.
01:14:24 And going into each of those new roles and being like,
01:14:28 "Well, you know, I didn't know what customer success is,
01:14:31 but I'm going to go talk to the people and do the things and learn about it."
01:14:35 And figuring out how to have joy in that versus just feeling like it's another hill to climb.
01:14:41 I think that curiosity piece has been helpful.
01:14:44 I basically started the News App because I went to BU.
01:14:53 I was not admitted into the business school like I wanted to.
01:14:58 I was admitted into the general studies program
01:15:01 and I'm actually doing the business school commencement speech in a few days.
01:15:05 So that's going to be cool because I barely graduated.
01:15:09 I actually almost got kicked out.
01:15:11 My name is Daniela Pearson.
01:15:13 I am the founder and CEO of the News App Media Group,
01:15:18 which encompasses News App Media and Newlander Agency.
01:15:22 And I'm also the co-founder of Wonder Mind.
01:15:25 When I was growing up, I definitely had a huge fascination with media
01:15:30 in terms of reading magazines.
01:15:33 So I remember going into the grocery store Publix because I'm from Florida
01:15:37 and my mom just saying, "Only one,"
01:15:41 because I would just come to the register with ten magazines.
01:15:44 So I always wanted to work for a magazine.
01:15:47 In terms of being an entrepreneur,
01:15:49 I was kind of an out-of-the-box kid.
01:15:54 I didn't really like school.
01:15:56 I didn't really buy into it.
01:15:58 Even in middle school, I would say, "Why do I need to know about the Earth's crust?
01:16:03 I'm not going to be an expert in that, I swear."
01:16:06 And I felt really stupid as a kid because I'm an identical twin
01:16:11 and my sister, Alex, is a genius.
01:16:16 But I ended up being so excited for college.
01:16:19 I was like, "I'm going to learn about what I'm going to do."
01:16:22 And so I get there the first day, and guess what we're learning about?
01:16:27 The Earth's fucking crust.
01:16:29 As a sophomore, I realized, "Okay, I have four years where I'm lucky enough
01:16:34 that I don't have to have a job right now."
01:16:36 So this is the perfect time for me to basically create a job
01:16:41 because if no one's going to hire me because I have bad grades,
01:16:44 I need to hire myself.
01:16:46 And so I made a list, and I had one column, "What am I good at?"
01:16:51 And then the other column is, "What do I love?"
01:16:53 And I am ashamed--or not that ashamed now to say,
01:16:58 but before I was ashamed to say that I was not good at anything.
01:17:01 Literally, that column was blank.
01:17:04 And I'm not just saying that to be humble.
01:17:06 I really was not good at anything.
01:17:08 I had zero passions, skills.
01:17:11 I just was kind of there.
01:17:13 And that was an eye-opener.
01:17:16 So then I said, "Okay, well, if I'm not good at anything, what do I like?"
01:17:20 And the first thing was magazines.
01:17:22 And so I thought, "No one's going to hire me to be an intern at these magazines.
01:17:26 I don't have amazing grades and usually have to know somebody
01:17:29 who knows somebody, whatever.
01:17:31 And so why don't I just make my own magazine?"
01:17:35 But instead of it being printed, what if it was like a daily magazine,
01:17:39 almost like a daily gift in your inbox?
01:17:41 And that's when I came up with the Newsette.
01:17:47 The second I started the Newsette, I felt like even though it was this, you know,
01:17:52 shitty little newsletter that eight people read,
01:17:54 every single day after that, I never missed a day for the five years
01:17:58 I wrote it myself every weekday.
01:18:00 I would wake up at 5 a.m., I would get my Fruity Pebbles, my orange juice,
01:18:04 and I would just write it.
01:18:06 And I would literally, like, finish writing and say, "Oh, my gosh, it's 10 a.m."
01:18:10 Like, five hours went by, but it didn't even feel like it
01:18:13 because it was such a rush.
01:18:15 Every time I saw my little newsletter list grow,
01:18:18 it literally felt like I was winning a lottery.
01:18:22 Essentially, the first month when I graduated, I made $25,000 off of ads.
01:18:29 And I was like, "Oh, shit, I can do this."
01:18:32 So I moved to New York. It was just me.
01:18:34 And then I had an intern, and then I had two interns.
01:18:37 And it just kind of kept growing from there.
01:18:40 But I think the year that we did a million dollars in sales
01:18:43 without any VC funding, I was really proud
01:18:47 because at that time, the media was only covering people with, you know,
01:18:51 "How much have you raised?"
01:18:53 It was all about, you know, raising money.
01:18:55 And I was probably 22 or 23 at the time.
01:18:58 And I felt so embarrassed that I wasn't able to raise any money.
01:19:00 But then I thought, you know, honestly, it's kind of more impressive,
01:19:05 and I'm actually more impressed with entrepreneurs now
01:19:07 when I invest in their companies.
01:19:09 It's more impressive to convince hundreds of customers
01:19:14 to believe in you to make a million dollars
01:19:17 than convince three guys in a boardroom to give you a million dollars.
01:19:21 And so that's when I kind of felt like, "Maybe I don't need VC money.
01:19:25 Maybe I can actually grow this big."
01:19:27 The next year, we did seven million, and then we did 40 million.
01:19:30 And, you know, by the end of the year,
01:19:32 we are going to have over a million subscribers.
01:19:35 And that's a big deal to us because we could have had
01:19:38 over a million subscribers, you know, a year or two ago.
01:19:41 But we clean our list to make sure that only the best, you know,
01:19:45 500,000, 600,000 people are reading.
01:19:48 And so for us to get to a million,
01:19:51 those are a million people who are reading, you know, almost every day.
01:19:54 They're engaging.
01:19:56 And so they're real, you know, people and views.
01:19:59 So I have always been in the quality over quantity approach for everything.
01:20:05 We want people that are going to be so excited
01:20:08 to read our newsletter every single day and almost wait for it
01:20:11 and, like, refresh their inbox until it comes.
01:20:14 And I think our editors, because they really are the people
01:20:18 that are writing the content, are the people who are reading it.
01:20:21 And it's so authentic, and there's no red tape.
01:20:25 There's no board that we have to abide by.
01:20:27 Oh, don't write about this. Don't write about that.
01:20:29 The buck stops here.
01:20:31 And I don't think I've gotten involved in anything editorial in years
01:20:36 because I trust the people on my team.
01:20:38 It's just whatever our readers want to read about, let's write about that.
01:20:42 Pearson is also a co-founder of WonderMind,
01:20:45 a platform for exploring and maintaining one's mental health.
01:20:48 Its underlying philosophy is that mental wellness requires daily effort,
01:20:52 the same way that achieving physical fitness requires regular exercise.
01:20:56 The company, first announced in November of 2021,
01:20:59 raised $5 million in August of 2022
01:21:03 from Serena Williams' venture capital firm, Serena Ventures,
01:21:06 valuing the pre-revenue startup at $100 million.
01:21:10 I have OCD, which is obsessive compulsive disorder, ADHD, and depression.
01:21:17 And those were things that, you know, even just a few years ago,
01:21:22 I would have rather, you know, just had the--
01:21:26 there's a saying in Spanish,
01:21:28 have the earth just, like, rip open and eat me up,
01:21:32 rather than say I have OCD or ADHD
01:21:36 or anything having to do with mental health.
01:21:39 When I spoke on the Forbes 330 panel
01:21:42 and I left the auditorium after I was done and I was standing there,
01:21:47 and we all of a sudden were bombarded by this huge line of other entrepreneurs,
01:21:52 other Forbes 330 recipients, like, people that I look up to,
01:21:56 and I had a line of people wanting to talk to me
01:22:00 and shake my hand and take a picture with me.
01:22:02 Some people were like, "I can't believe how open you are with your, you know, mental health.
01:22:06 Like, good for you, but, like, I would never be."
01:22:08 But then some people were like, "Wow, like, you talking about that,
01:22:12 like, I, like, have OCD, like, whispering it to me and stuff."
01:22:16 And even just that is, I know, so hard.
01:22:19 In a world where you're supposed to be emotionless and fierce and tough
01:22:24 and make all the right decisions and be perfect, you know,
01:22:27 a CEO wouldn't say-- wouldn't be embarrassed about telling people
01:22:31 that they had a heart problem or diabetes,
01:22:33 so why should somebody be embarrassed about saying that they have a mental health disorder?
01:22:38 And so I thought, you know,
01:22:41 how can I basically change the narrative around mental health
01:22:46 and make it so that it is treated like normal health
01:22:50 and it's actually cool to talk about it?
01:22:52 And so that's when, you know, Wonder Mind kind of came to be
01:22:56 and Selena Gomez and Mandy Teefey are my co-founders,
01:23:00 and it was just really important for us to set up an ecosystem
01:23:05 that made it okay and fun and cool and trendy and exciting
01:23:11 to learn about mental health
01:23:13 and learn about how the most powerful people in the world,
01:23:16 the people who are like this on the cover of Forbes,
01:23:19 you know, how they deal with their anxiety or their mental health,
01:23:23 because truly, that's how I felt comfortable enough to say something.
01:23:28 The people I'm hoping to reach are not the people
01:23:32 who are actively trying to find a therapist.
01:23:35 Of course, we want to reach them, and we have, and it's great.
01:23:40 We're looking for the people who maybe have thought about it,
01:23:43 but thought, "Oh, you know, like, I might see a therapist,"
01:23:47 and their friend's like, "Why? You have a problem?"
01:23:49 I have accomplished things that I didn't even know I could dream about.
01:23:54 I didn't even think that it was a possibility ever.
01:23:58 People who are not, you know, Ivy League students,
01:24:01 people who are from minorities,
01:24:03 people who come from different backgrounds,
01:24:05 they don't have, you know, all of this pedigree,
01:24:08 they don't have connections, you know, all that stuff,
01:24:11 those people should feel like they have a chance.
01:24:14 They shouldn't count themselves out, because I counted myself out,
01:24:17 and the only reason why I'm sitting in this chair
01:24:20 is because I was in survival mode, and I had no other choice,
01:24:25 and I am stubborn as hell,
01:24:27 and it shouldn't be like that for other people.
01:24:30 And so the next five years,
01:24:32 I want to continue investing in entrepreneurs,
01:24:35 especially entrepreneurs that, like me, are not the conventional,
01:24:40 you know, "Let me invest in you" type.
01:24:43 Matchroom is a family business built out of passion for live sport,
01:24:54 built out of the fundamentals of sport,
01:24:57 for competition, for legacy, for greatness,
01:25:00 for putting a smile on people's face.
01:25:02 Now, that's key for us, is not just to deliver for athletes,
01:25:06 but to deliver live events and content
01:25:08 that the viewer watching on platform or live in the arena
01:25:12 can leave with a smile on their face
01:25:14 and realize the true beauty of sport.
01:25:17 Eddie Hearn is the chairman of Matchroom Sport,
01:25:20 which is a British event promotion company.
01:25:22 It was founded by Eddie's dad, Barry, in 1982,
01:25:26 and they cover all sorts of sports like snooker, darts, nine-ball,
01:25:29 and eventually boxing, which Eddie revitalized over the years.
01:25:32 When I moved to the company,
01:25:34 I took the golfers that I was representing
01:25:37 on the PGA Tour and European Tour
01:25:40 from another company to Matchroom to set up a golf division.
01:25:44 Boxing was a tiny, tiny part of the business.
01:25:47 Our biggest business probably was the emergence of online poker,
01:25:51 and we were in charge of putting together
01:25:53 all the major productions globally for televised poker,
01:25:57 and I took over the poker department,
01:25:59 and we grew that to a substantial size,
01:26:01 to the point where virtually every televised poker event
01:26:04 that you would see was a Matchroom production,
01:26:07 and it made us a lot of money.
01:26:09 We like characters, you know, we like creating content,
01:26:11 we like creating formats, we like creating compelling TV.
01:26:15 If by sports, even better.
01:26:18 But I looked at poker and I looked at the characters
01:26:21 and the personalities of the players
01:26:23 and just believed that we could create something fun.
01:26:26 We could create great content, great narrative, great storylines.
01:26:30 I think one of the reasons we've been so successful in sport
01:26:33 is through building those characters,
01:26:35 those personalities, and those storylines.
01:26:38 All great sport events have great narrative,
01:26:41 and that's something we've been very successful with.
01:26:44 And in poker, the characters were some of the best we've ever worked with.
01:26:47 Eddie's impact has primarily come in boxing,
01:26:50 which Matchroom had boxing operations,
01:26:52 but not to the level that Eddie has transformed it to.
01:26:55 Barry Hearn is Eddie's dad, an accountant by trade.
01:26:58 He founded Matchroom in 1982,
01:27:00 and he told me that was because he was bored.
01:27:03 He had been buying up snooker halls around England,
01:27:06 and that had become a pretty viable business for him.
01:27:09 And he had become close friends
01:27:11 and worked with former world champion Steve Davis,
01:27:14 and they had seen a real interest in the sport.
01:27:16 And from there, they found they could just promote those events,
01:27:19 and one thing led to another, one sport led to another,
01:27:22 and Matchroom eventually became the company that you see today.
01:27:26 When Eddie joined Matchroom in 2000,
01:27:30 the firm was pulling in roughly 1 million in profit on 10 million of revenue.
01:27:34 I was playing a poker event, the World Series of Poker,
01:27:36 and I bumped into Audley Harrison,
01:27:38 who was the Olympic gold medalist heavyweight,
01:27:40 tried to kind of guide his own career and lost,
01:27:44 and kind of was a bit of a dead end in his career.
01:27:48 And we just started talking, and he said, "Could you promote me?"
01:27:51 Because I don't work in boxing.
01:27:53 He said, "I know, but I know Matchroom do a few shows here and there."
01:27:56 So I said, "Look, I could take you into Prizefighter,"
01:27:59 which was this tournament we were doing,
01:28:01 "and then you could fight for the European title,
01:28:03 "and if you win that, you could fight David Hay for the World Heavyweight title."
01:28:06 And he sort of said, "Really? Can you do that?"
01:28:09 I was like, "Yeah, 100%!"
01:28:11 And left that conversation, phoned my dad, who wasn't an Audley Harrison fan,
01:28:15 and he just said, "Look, you're on your own."
01:28:17 So he won Prizefighter, he won the European title,
01:28:20 and then he fought David Hay for the World Heavyweight title.
01:28:23 We did that fight. It was a disaster.
01:28:25 It was a complete mismatch. Audley Harrison didn't throw a punch.
01:28:28 We made some money. Audley made seven figures.
01:28:30 And I said, "That's me done in boxing."
01:28:32 All of a sudden, all the fighters started calling me.
01:28:35 "Would you represent me?"
01:28:37 So all of a sudden, next we've got Carl Froch, who was the world champion,
01:28:42 Darren Barker, Kell Brook, three of the best fighters in the UK wanting to sign with me.
01:28:46 I was all of a sudden in front of all the cameras at the press conferences
01:28:50 selling this fighter.
01:28:52 I was mid-20s or late-20s and didn't really know what I was doing,
01:28:57 but I was a breath of fresh air in boxing.
01:28:59 I mean, I've seen everything that you could ever see in boxing.
01:29:02 And I never felt that I would necessarily become a boxing promoter,
01:29:08 but Mattrum had a great reputation in boxing, but British boxing was dead.
01:29:14 No one was trying.
01:29:16 Our broadcaster, which was Sky Sports, had four promoters,
01:29:20 which was Mattrum, Frank Warren, Ricky Hatton and Frank Maloney.
01:29:25 No one liked each other. No one was really trying.
01:29:28 The industry and the old guard didn't like me,
01:29:31 but all of a sudden, this young kid's coming in,
01:29:33 whose father's a Hall of Fame promoter,
01:29:35 saying he's going to rip up the script of boxing.
01:29:37 And then I went to our broadcaster.
01:29:39 I said, "You need to get rid of everybody and just sign an exclusive deal with me."
01:29:43 He said, "We don't do that. We've got our four promoters."
01:29:45 He said, "It's never going to work.
01:29:46 None of them have any ambition and none of them like each other.
01:29:49 You need to get rid of them and give me the exclusive deal."
01:29:52 I said, "I'm going to show you what I'm going to do."
01:29:54 And I went out from local leisure centres,
01:29:57 started building big fights in big arenas, 7, 8, 9,000,
01:30:01 creating big numbers and big audiences on Sky for boxing.
01:30:04 And when the deal came up, six or eight months later,
01:30:08 they got rid of everybody and gave me the exclusive deal.
01:30:10 From there, Eddie did things like embracing social media,
01:30:14 putting boxing in stadiums more often,
01:30:16 embracing the celebrity in women's fighting spaces,
01:30:19 and ultimately, eventually tried to crack the US market
01:30:22 and brought fights to the Middle East.
01:30:24 We don't sit here and profess to be Albert Einstein,
01:30:29 but we know that you will never outwork us.
01:30:33 And he keeps it simple.
01:30:36 If things start getting a little bit tough,
01:30:39 he just says, "Make sure you go to sleep an hour later
01:30:42 and get up an hour earlier and work harder."
01:30:45 It was a very unforgiving development that I had.
01:30:49 I had a nice house, but it was just drilled into me from day one.
01:30:55 Work, work, work, work, work.
01:30:59 Don't give in. Don't let them get you down.
01:31:02 Just outwork them and outperform them.
01:31:04 And when you have consistency and when you have ability
01:31:07 and when you have a drive that is unbeatable, you can't lose.
01:31:11 It's just a case of playing the game over time.
01:31:13 Forbes estimates that in fiscal year 2023,
01:31:17 Matchroom posted revenue of $365 million
01:31:20 and a net profit of $60 million across the entire business.
01:31:23 DAZN is a streaming service that has strived to be the Netflix of sports.
01:31:27 They've bought up all sorts of different sports rights around the globe,
01:31:30 and their partnership with Eddie and Matchroom
01:31:33 was a means to enter the US boxing market.
01:31:35 In 2018, Eddie and Matchroom, to a degree, shocked the boxing world
01:31:40 by signing an estimated $1 billion deal with DAZN.
01:31:43 DAZN has had a bit of a rocky course, but has more found its footing of late,
01:31:47 and they operate globally.
01:31:49 They have all sorts of different sports rights around the world.
01:31:51 But this deal was supposed to be Eddie's entrance into the US market.
01:31:55 This was going to bring the successful things he had done with Matchroom in the UK
01:32:00 overseas into America.
01:32:02 When you're putting on a fight, there's a lot more risk than,
01:32:06 let's say, when an NFL team plays a game.
01:32:09 And that's because if you're the New York Jets, even if nobody watches the game,
01:32:12 you're still going to get your share of the media rights money
01:32:15 that comes down from the league.
01:32:17 Whereas in boxing, the event has to make money or exceed that
01:32:21 to reap the rewards.
01:32:23 Now, promotions and broadcasters have gotten pretty good
01:32:27 at working with other companies to project out
01:32:29 how many pay-per-views they can actually sell,
01:32:31 and they can get it to a pretty good margin so that they can prepare for the worst
01:32:35 and hope for the best.
01:32:37 And that makes it so it's hard to kind of completely miss on a fight.
01:32:41 But there's a risk there, and they're taking a risk.
01:32:45 The US is one of the richest, loudest, noisiest sports markets on the planet.
01:32:50 There are so many different things competing for eyeballs,
01:32:53 whether it's professional football, basketball, or whatnot.
01:32:56 And boxing already has its own established presence here.
01:32:59 So for him to say he was going to come in and take it over,
01:33:02 essentially it was a bold claim.
01:33:05 We've been with Sky for decades in boxing,
01:33:08 and they were a fantastic broadcaster.
01:33:10 But our vision had changed from a British promoter to a global powerhouse.
01:33:16 We wanted to replicate the success of the UFC and the WWE
01:33:20 to become a global promoter.
01:33:22 We wanted to go out and do individual broadcast deals in new territories,
01:33:26 create government interest, and start taking our brand globally for boxing.
01:33:30 The Zone shared that passion and that vision.
01:33:34 They had a platform globally that could be used
01:33:36 and would invest in different markets that were key to our expansion.
01:33:40 So UK, we did a big US deal.
01:33:42 All of a sudden we're doing six shows a year in Mexico,
01:33:45 Italy, Spain, Australia, the Middle East.
01:33:48 And the only way we could move forward with that global vision
01:33:52 was to do a deal with The Zone in the UK space.
01:33:56 And obviously, financially, it was a huge deal for us
01:34:00 that really changed the look of our business as well.
01:34:03 So it was a difficult decision because we took a risk, if you like,
01:34:06 in terms of the exposure to follow the growth.
01:34:09 And we believe in streaming.
01:34:11 We believe that streaming is the future of live sports.
01:34:15 And I believe that OTT platforms are also the future of live sports as well.
01:34:19 I just believe that the way the new generation
01:34:23 digest content is now completely different.
01:34:26 We know that people do not sit at home
01:34:30 in front of their big screen like they used to.
01:34:33 They want to watch content on the go.
01:34:35 They want to watch it via their handset.
01:34:37 I'm a strong believer that that's the future of broadcast.
01:34:40 You only have to see the next generation.
01:34:43 When it comes to fight fans, the sentiment can be mixed.
01:34:47 But when it comes to other promoters, especially here,
01:34:50 it seems that there's no love lost for Eddie Herndon-Matchroom.
01:34:54 And part of that stems from The Zone deal and entering the US market.
01:34:58 He's someone who has never been afraid to play the villain
01:35:02 and to be in front of the camera and to piss people off.
01:35:06 So naturally, people aren't going to like you when you do that.
01:35:09 I mean, everybody likes to be a hero.
01:35:12 I receive a huge amount of criticism, and a lot of it's my own doing.
01:35:16 I'm very outspoken.
01:35:18 As you've seen today do 50 or 60 interviews a day,
01:35:22 I'm going to say something that's going to piss somebody off.
01:35:25 And the way the Internet works, the way headlines work
01:35:29 and clickbait works of all these different outlets,
01:35:32 you're going to upset people.
01:35:34 When I went into America, the strategy was to upset people quickly,
01:35:37 to build a profile, to create noise, create interest.
01:35:41 I'd like to be a hero in terms of the time
01:35:46 and the sacrifices I've made for the sport of boxing.
01:35:49 I love boxing. It's my life.
01:35:52 And I've given a lot of my life to boxing.
01:35:54 And I make a lot of sacrifices for boxing and for the business.
01:35:57 But at the same time, I've no problem being a villain.
01:36:00 And every market that I go into, they try and get me out ASAP.
01:36:04 So when I came into the UK, there's a very famous photo
01:36:07 of all the current British promoters who all hated each other.
01:36:11 And they all put their hand in the middle in this picture,
01:36:14 and they said, "A united front for British boxing."
01:36:17 And then there was Eddie Hunt. And that was it.
01:36:19 And that's the same in America now.
01:36:21 Oscar de la Hoya, Bob Arum, Al Heyman, Leonard Elaby,
01:36:25 they're all talking with voice to, "Say this, say this.
01:36:29 "Keep the pressure on. He won't be able to handle it."
01:36:32 Because that was the thing in the UK.
01:36:34 It was like, "We're just going to break him." And they never did.
01:36:37 And now in the US, they're trying to do exactly the same thing.
01:36:40 Keep the pressure on, force him out, turn the fans against him.
01:36:43 But they don't realise one good item,
01:36:45 but also the power I have across my platform.
01:36:48 They can't work like me.
01:36:50 So I'll do as many interviews as it takes.
01:36:52 And I'll communicate with the fans all the time.
01:36:54 And that's the most powerful tool we have,
01:36:56 the ability to talk to the audience.
01:36:59 (Barry and Eddie have a really good relationship.)
01:37:04 Barry and Eddie have a really good relationship.
01:37:06 Barry said to me that him and his son are very close and best friends,
01:37:10 but they are almost unhealthily competitive.
01:37:12 They will still go back and forth about, you know,
01:37:15 how different divisions in the company are having financial success.
01:37:18 (Barry and Eddie are both very successful in the industry.)
01:37:22 I had a very famous father,
01:37:25 certainly within the area that I grew up with.
01:37:27 And I loved it.
01:37:29 I couldn't stop telling people that Barry Helm was my dad.
01:37:32 And probably from my early years,
01:37:34 everyone knew me as Barry's son, or Barry's boy.
01:37:38 My dad was quite flamboyant, came from nothing really,
01:37:43 made money, was quite extravagant, and enjoyed himself.
01:37:47 He was away a lot, but always had the time when he was at home
01:37:51 to play with me, play sports with me.
01:37:55 And that was really what my childhood was built on, sport.
01:37:58 We played every sport, we played to win, competition was ferocious.
01:38:02 And that's how I was brought up, winning is everything.
01:38:06 It was never about taking part.
01:38:08 If I went out and lost 3-0 at a game of football,
01:38:11 he'd say, "What are you doing? Come on.
01:38:13 "Oh, well done, you did well there, son."
01:38:16 Sport was the foundation for us to learn about the important aspects of life.
01:38:22 And that transferred into business.
01:38:24 When I left college, I wrote to every major sports event,
01:38:30 athlete management, sponsorship, marketing consultancy in London.
01:38:35 You know, Advantage, IMG.
01:38:37 I wanted to cut my cloth in the industry without just working for Matrim.
01:38:42 And I went to one sponsorship and marketing sports agency called BDS,
01:38:47 and I sat down with them, and they were reading my CV.
01:38:52 And they said, "Can I ask you, are you any relation to Barry Hearn?"
01:38:55 I said, "Yes, my dad."
01:38:57 And they sort of said, "What are you doing here?"
01:39:00 It was about the time when Jerry Maguire came out, really.
01:39:02 I always saw myself as a budding sports agent,
01:39:05 and that's the field that I wanted to go down,
01:39:07 and that's really where I cut my cloth before moving into the business.
01:39:13 You know, my dad is, as I said earlier, he's money mad.
01:39:16 You know, every day he's analysing...
01:39:18 I mean, my dad's a chartered accountant by trade.
01:39:21 So every day he's analysing accounts, he's looking at bottom lines,
01:39:25 he's looking at profit and losses from each individual event.
01:39:28 And he drives me berserk, because we're working with--
01:39:33 in boxing particularly, sometimes there's more of an emotional attachment.
01:39:37 You could be investing in a fighter to bring a major world championship fight
01:39:42 to their home city, but the show loses money.
01:39:45 But you've got that emotional investment for the fighter.
01:39:48 He'll remove himself from that.
01:39:50 But, yeah, I think that my father has always said,
01:39:57 "No shareholders, no float. We do things our way."
01:40:03 And I convinced him to change his mind on that probably three years ago
01:40:09 as our growth continued to move rapidly, and he's changed his perception.
01:40:16 So probably that. Probably that the opportunities we have
01:40:20 for a rapid global growth come potentially in different ways.
01:40:25 And he leads those conversations today.
01:40:28 Eddie wants to take Matchroom public,
01:40:30 and he does think that could happen sooner rather than later,
01:40:33 which is one of the reasons why he has been talking about
01:40:36 a private equity investment in the company.
01:40:38 But also he does see a future beyond boxing.
01:40:41 One of the sports that Matchroom promotes, darts,
01:40:44 they effectively own the sport.
01:40:46 They just completed a lengthy acquisition acquiring the Professional Darts Corporation,
01:40:50 and Eddie is extremely bullish on the growth of that.
01:40:53 We want to make sure that our sports, our business, our brand name
01:40:56 is recognizable in every key market across all our sports.
01:41:02 It's a natural move for us to lead to an IPO.
01:41:05 I think it's only a matter of time.
01:41:07 I think we're so unique in what we do in terms of ownership of sports
01:41:11 and how we're able to mold those sports.
01:41:14 But we must continue to have fun, because that really is his mantra.
01:41:18 We love what we do, and we love to have fun what we do.
01:41:21 We believe we've built an incredible management within the business
01:41:26 that must be free to continue to spread their wings.
01:41:30 But we also realize the opportunity that presents itself
01:41:34 in this economic world of growth for the business globally.
01:41:38 And to do that in a rapid way, then these conversations that are ongoing
01:41:44 that will lead to an IPO is a natural progression.
01:41:47 Corsiro was co-founded by Andrew Brower, his two brothers,
01:41:51 and a classmate of his at Cornell, Frederick Kerrigan, in 2006.
01:41:56 It started and still is really this online library,
01:42:00 a collection of class notes, essays, exams for students, uploaded by students.
01:42:08 Before Corsiro, I spent hours looking for help online
01:42:12 when I was stuck on homework or setting for a test.
01:42:15 Ever since a friend told me about Corsiro, it's the only tool I use for every course.
01:42:20 I just drop in whatever I'm working on.
01:42:23 We started Corsiro about 17 years ago in 2006,
01:42:27 and the whole idea was born out of helping students study
01:42:31 and helping students who are studying for a test,
01:42:35 prepping and working on an assignment and feeling stressed, feeling anxious.
01:42:40 And it was something that I had empathy for being a student myself.
01:42:44 I experienced it.
01:42:46 And so really when we built it, the idea was,
01:42:50 how can we best build something that would help students study?
01:42:54 And the lucky and most important thing that we got right was that we started,
01:42:59 we just did it, and we kept building.
01:43:02 In the beginning of Corsiro, we focused on crowdsourcing resources,
01:43:09 study materials, test prep materials,
01:43:12 materials helping people with homework from students and educators across different campuses.
01:43:18 And the idea was, can we connect people to knowledge that came from other people
01:43:24 versus having to go to people to get to the knowledge?
01:43:27 And the visual in our heads was to build a Wikipedia-like product
01:43:33 that instead of organized around an encyclopedic taxonomy,
01:43:38 we would build a product that was organized around a course-specific, school-specific taxonomy.
01:43:44 Corsiro is a Forbes 30 under 30 company,
01:43:47 and with all of those companies, we like to stay in touch.
01:43:50 And we were seeing the acquisitions Corsiro was making in recent years
01:43:56 and then how they created their new parent company, Learneo, in late 2022.
01:44:02 And so really jumped on that news and became more interested in his strategy,
01:44:07 his acquisitions, and just how they're pivoting.
01:44:10 Corsiro began acquiring companies in 2020 with his first acquisition of Simba Lab.
01:44:15 And since it has acquired seven businesses,
01:44:18 and it really was a combination of things that led them to this strategy of acquisitions.
01:44:24 You know, first, gap-based yin-yang competition in the ed-tech space.
01:44:29 Another factor was a surge in venture capital during the pandemic.
01:44:34 Corsiro raised nearly $500 million total by the end of 2021.
01:44:39 And so that capital is really used for their acquisitions.
01:44:44 Another factor were college enrollment decreasing.
01:44:47 It led the company to look for ways to diversify.
01:44:51 And so that was through acquisitions of companies like CloBot and Simba Lab focused on professionals.
01:44:59 And so the company now rebranded under Learneo is focused on adhering to both students and professionals.
01:45:08 You know, how do you take that core clientele and carry it on through the work world?
01:45:14 Building Learneo and acquiring different businesses that are founder-led with really entrepreneurial builder teams is incredibly important.
01:45:23 At Learneo, the idea of building a platform of businesses and founders,
01:45:30 each continuing to be led by their CEOs,
01:45:33 is a belief that decentralization and delegation of autonomy is incredibly powerful.
01:45:40 And each of us, each of the CEOs, are able to focus on building for a closely clustered set of customer needs.
01:45:47 They can go incredibly deep and they don't have to worry about another teammate or potential future teammate being able to take on an incredible new opportunity.
01:45:56 And that's the opportunity to be able to balance going super deep and also broadening and going after new opportunities.
01:46:06 It takes an incredible amount of time and energy, passion, to be able to start something, work on it, build it over time, get product market fit, get to expansion phase.
01:46:17 And for us, that is something we want to really facilitate and continue post-acquisition.
01:46:26 For us, creating an environment that empowers autonomy and responsibility, entrepreneurialism,
01:46:35 just like when we're startups individually, is incredibly powerful.
01:46:40 And that's core to how we want to build Learneo as a platform of businesses that are powered by founders, builders, and entrepreneurial talent.
01:46:49 Rohan Gupta is a co-founder of CoBots, which is essentially an AI-powered writing and paraphrasing tool for both students and professionals.
01:46:59 It was founded in 2017 and acquired by Learneo in late 2021.
01:47:04 My co-founder and I were studying at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
01:47:09 We both were in love with artificial intelligence and we were just tinkering with the technology,
01:47:15 made a breakthrough in technology to rewrite sentences.
01:47:20 Thought it was pretty interesting, just put it up on Reddit and it started going viral and that's how we found a CoBot.
01:47:28 Back when we started in 2017, there was not a lot of support for building AI tools,
01:47:34 especially compared to what it's like to build on top of AI today.
01:47:39 And yeah, back then we were just, the three of us were tinkering in an apartment on campus.
01:47:45 We had next to no funding, we just had a small grant from the university.
01:47:49 So we had to be very scrappy and it was just a green field and every day was a new experiment.
01:47:55 I met Andrew in the winter of 2020.
01:47:59 It was really exciting. I was a user for Course Hero for several years and so it was nice just meeting him as a fan
01:48:07 and then as a fellow entrepreneur, understanding his experiences and getting advice from him.
01:48:13 It completely changed our trajectory.
01:48:16 I mean, one thing is just having access to so many brilliant founders and CEOs to share best practices with and learnings from.
01:48:25 It's also been a privilege to be able to partner with some of the best writing businesses in the sector
01:48:31 and collaborate with them on new product development.
01:48:34 And finally, we just have access to way more resources than we would have otherwise.
01:48:40 Every single business has a unique culture and a unique way of operating
01:48:46 and you can think of it as many different experiments being run at the same time.
01:48:51 So seeing what works for another business and how I can apply it to my own has been invaluable,
01:48:58 especially because everyone within Learneo is so transparent about what's working well and what's not.
01:49:04 Some of the challenges in the evolution of building up Learneo from one business to a platform of now eight companies
01:49:13 have to do with how can we make sure that we stay true to our operating principles of empowerment and responsibility.
01:49:23 We think there's a huge value in being a decentralized platform and creating autonomy for the different businesses.
01:49:30 And as you scale from not just running one business with multiple product lines to two to four to eight,
01:49:37 being able to create an operating model that is effective at each of those stages is an incredible challenge
01:49:44 and also something really fun to solve.
01:49:46 The pandemic saw an increase of venture capital specifically in the ad tech space.
01:49:51 And so now companies are kind of dealing with the decrease in that.
01:49:55 From 2021 to 2022, it nearly halved. It went from $20.8 billion to $10.6 billion.
01:50:03 And so companies are dealing with less venture capital out there right now.
01:50:07 College enrollment has decreased the last three years as students and Gen Z particularly are rethinking the value of a college degree.
01:50:16 And that means, you know, declined customers for ad tech companies like Learneo.
01:50:22 And so companies like Learneo are asking themselves, how do you diversify in this space?
01:50:27 And so they're focused more on professionals as well as students.
01:50:31 And so Learneo's acquisitions of Clobot, Symbol Lab, you know,
01:50:36 indicate that trend of professionals using ad tech tools like these.
01:50:41 With artificial intelligence tools like OpenAI's ChatGBT and Google's BARD popping up,
01:50:48 it's really created just a lot of competition for these education technology companies like Force Hero and Ched.
01:50:56 I think with so many students and professionals looking for resources for maybe school reports or business reports,
01:51:04 they're looking for more of a free option that maybe ChatGBT can provide rather than a subscription service like Ched or Force Hero.
01:51:14 Ched was kind of an extreme example there where they had said ChatGBT affected signups.
01:51:21 It ended up plummeting stock. And really just with these tools, it's creating a lot of competition for, you know, customers,
01:51:30 both professionals and students looking for tools like this.
01:51:34 Artificial intelligence is an incredible theme and opportunity and disruption in the world today.
01:51:41 And at Learneo, we're incredibly excited about how these technologies and transformer-based technologies,
01:51:48 large language models are impacting language, summarization, translation, question generation, question answering.
01:51:57 And I'm not sure I've ever seen a time in our history of building where there's so much opportunity
01:52:06 and a huge amount of energy being developed to act fast and with conviction and to iterate on a huge technological change.
01:52:17 [Music]
01:52:35 I was six years old when the plane crashed in 1970.
01:52:39 I was sitting at home with my brothers watching television with my mom and dad.
01:52:43 We heard the sirens blaring. My mother's nephews were actually first responders,
01:52:48 so we were always very attentive when we heard a siren.
01:52:51 So the phone calls began to be made. There were CB scanners, which were basically radio scanners
01:52:56 to see where the police or the fire trucks were being dispatched.
01:52:59 All the neighbors were talking about there had been a plane crash.
01:53:02 And so I ran to the back window and I looked out and I could see the haze and the sky glowing red.
01:53:07 And you could see that that fire basically was happening.
01:53:10 And at that moment in time, I started to see the beginning of a life lesson,
01:53:14 which is that we're all born angels with one wing and the way we fly is by holding on to one another.
01:53:19 So I'll never forget how that community came together and helped each other rise from the ashes.
01:53:24 [Music]
01:53:29 Brad Smith is the former CEO of Intuit, which is the company behind QuickBooks and TurboTax.
01:53:34 And since January of 2022, he's been the president of his alma mater, which is Marshall University in West Virginia.
01:53:40 Smith grew up in a small town of about 3,000 people called Canova, West Virginia, which is right next to Marshall.
01:53:45 And back in 1970, there was a plane crash near campus that killed 75 people, including the school's whole football team.
01:53:52 Viewers probably know these events for later depicted in the Matthew McConaughey movie, We Are Marshall.
01:53:58 He and his brothers were the first in their family to go to college, and he initially went to West Point.
01:54:02 But he ultimately decided to go back home to Marshall after a semester.
01:54:05 And he still wears the Marshall-class ring that his dad gave him right before he had a heart attack a few days later.
01:54:11 After receiving his master's degree in management from Aquinas College in Michigan, Brad took a sales job at PepsiCo initially.
01:54:18 Despite an early boss's insistence that he attend corporate communications courses to rid himself of his West Virginia twang,
01:54:25 Smith quickly climbed the corporate ladder at 7-Up and direct mail marketer Advo with the inherent flaw of his accent proudly intact.
01:54:33 My dad taught me servant leadership. My dad became the mayor of that hometown of 3,000 in Canova,
01:54:39 and he became known as something that other mayors hadn't done. He rode the sanitation trucks every week.
01:54:45 He would ride with the drivers as they picked up the trash in the city.
01:54:49 And I asked him one day, I said, "Dad, why do you ride the sanitation trucks? Why are you not in the office?"
01:54:54 He said, "Son, first of all, this is the best way to get to know your team. You ride eight hours in a truck with someone,
01:54:59 you learn about their family, you learn about the things that keep them awake at night, and you learn about how you can help them.
01:55:04 And the second is there's no better way to know your city than to go down the back of the alley, not in the front,
01:55:09 where everyone has it all spruced up. So I know where the real problems are that we can help solve."
01:55:14 So when I got to Pepsi, I became known as the young district sales manager that rode the routes with the drivers.
01:55:20 And when they called in sick, I delivered the soft drinks and the snow.
01:55:24 And at the end of the day, they always remembered that I was willing to work with them.
01:55:27 And so when we had sales contests, we won every time. Not because of me, but because the drivers knew that I was in it with them,
01:55:34 and it ended up helping my career because I simply served them. And in return, they did great work.
01:55:40 After rising to the role of Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development over seven years at ADP,
01:55:48 Smith joined Intuit in 2003 as Vice President and General Manager of its Accountant Central and Developer Network.
01:55:55 Just five years later, he was running the entire company.
01:55:58 Smith inherited a 25-year-old business with really tremendous brand equity,
01:56:03 whose TurboTax and QuickBooks software products were beloved by individuals and small businesses alike.
01:56:09 But few could have foreseen its radical transformation over the next decade.
01:56:14 Its market capitalization soared almost sevenfold to $51 billion, and revenues nearly doubled to $6 billion by 2018.
01:56:23 So when I joined Intuit, I had the opportunity to join the accountant business in Dallas, Texas, in Plano, Texas.
01:56:33 The company was known as a leadership development factory and started out in the accountant business.
01:56:38 Then I was asked to go to TurboTax and lead that business in San Diego.
01:56:42 And then I was asked to move up to QuickBooks, the small business division, and lead that business.
01:56:46 So over a five-year period, I'd had a chance to see all the corners of the company at that time.
01:56:51 When I was then asked to step in as CEO, and they announced it in August of 2007, that I would take the role in January 2008,
01:56:58 I knew that I had the privilege to serve an iconic company that had a strong foundation.
01:57:03 But candidly, in 2008, there were a few things happening.
01:57:06 The first was we had started to see social platforms like Facebook move off of the education campuses and move into the dot-com world.
01:57:13 So you had this notion of social.
01:57:15 The second is Steve Jobs had just released the iPhone.
01:57:19 So this move to mobility and mobile became big.
01:57:22 And then ultimately, because of the cloud, we were starting to see local markets become global.
01:57:27 So we stepped back and said, "We're going to be the same great company we are, but we're going to lean in to being more of a connected services company."
01:57:34 An analyst told me Brad understood the power of the cloud early on, and not just on the application side, for their tax and QuickBooks businesses.
01:57:42 He also shut down all their own data centers and moved their data to Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud,
01:57:48 which really positioned them well to take advantage of AI now.
01:57:52 Intuit's billionaire founder, Scott Cook, told me that Smith's impact on the company goes beyond business results.
01:57:59 Cook called Brad "the ultimate servant leader" and told me that Brad had changed the lives of the company's customers and employees' lives forever.
01:58:08 When Smith left Intuit in January 2022, at the height of his career, the company etched his signature phrase,
01:58:14 "Work hard, be kind, take pride," in stone on the face of its headquarters, which was recently renamed for Smith.
01:58:21 We had developed a balance scorecard where it was employees first, customers and our community second, and our shareholders third.
01:58:28 And I began to tell the stories about why, because everyone saw it clinically, but I don't think they really understood it ideologically.
01:58:35 So we said if we were a human body, the employees are the oxygen, they're the air.
01:58:40 The body can only make it about three minutes without air and it begins to shut down.
01:58:44 And then they go to customers and communities. They are the water.
01:58:47 You can make it about three days, but then the body starts to shut down.
01:58:51 Then ultimately you have the shareholders as a public company, they own the company, but they're the food.
01:58:55 You can make it two or three weeks and the body shuts down. So you have to serve all of them.
01:58:59 But it begins with employees first who are there with one purpose in mind, to do amazing things for customers and their community.
01:59:05 If you have great employees who are fired up and you've supported them and you've taught them,
01:59:09 they'll do unbelievable things for customers and communities and as a result, the shareholders will win.
01:59:14 So we became an employee-centric company with a purpose.
01:59:18 And our purpose was the power of prosperity, to fight for the overlooked and the underserved,
01:59:22 to help those who struggle to make it paycheck to paycheck, which was a story that many of us grew up with.
01:59:27 And we could be the ones that could be their champion. And that's what really bonded us together.
01:59:32 Brad's sudden move from Mountain View to the Mountain State really shocked many in the industry.
01:59:43 But, you know, to those who knew him, it really made sense because they'd heard him reminisce about West Virginia over the years.
01:59:50 Smith and his wife, Elise, a lawyer from Ohio with a shared love for Appalachia,
01:59:55 founded their education, entrepreneurship and environment-focused Wing to Wing Foundation in 2019.
02:00:01 But their philanthropy in the region goes back even further.
02:00:04 Just since 2015, they've donated $35 million to Marshall to establish a scholarship that gives preference to first-generation students from West Virginia and Ohio
02:00:13 and to transform its recently renamed Brad D. Smith Schools of Business.
02:00:19 So first of all, when he stepped down, we thought, wow, we'll finally have an opportunity to spend a little more family time.
02:00:27 Well, that's just not the case because Brad is a workhorse.
02:00:31 He's wired to work. He would do coaching, executive coaching.
02:00:36 He would coach entrepreneurs and he would do that 12 hours a day.
02:00:41 But he was unfulfilled. And then he got a call from several people.
02:00:46 Actually saying, hey, would you be willing to consider becoming the president of Marshall University?
02:00:51 You know, the job's going to open up. And at first he thought, oh, no, no, no.
02:00:57 This is not something I'm interested in. You know, so he he mentions it to me when we're in South Carolina.
02:01:03 We're we're taking a walk on the beach and he mentions it.
02:01:07 And I immediately said, oh, oh, no, I'm not going to West Virginia.
02:01:12 I mean, I love California. And then we decided to go through the whole pro con thing.
02:01:18 We decided, you know what, let's get this opportunity, a real shot.
02:01:23 And ultimately we just decided, you know what, you're not happy doing what you're doing, Brad.
02:01:29 I've been looking for something that makes me feel that I'm doing what I was meant to do.
02:01:36 And here's that opportunity. Let's just do it.
02:01:39 The couple also has an outdoor economic development collaborative named after them at rival West Virginia University.
02:01:45 Thanks to a twenty five million dollar gift in 2020 that's being used to recruit and retain talented out-of-state workers and to develop outdoor recreation resources in the area.
02:01:55 Clearly, we want to focus on Appalachia because Appalachia is both overlooked and underserved.
02:02:03 And that is the community that we want to focus on because very few others do.
02:02:09 You know, all the VC firms in the country focus most of their money on California, New York and Boston.
02:02:17 And the people in Appalachia are every bit as bright and talented as anybody in those locations.
02:02:25 We can do everything that they can do and quite honestly, maybe better.
02:02:30 And so we decided that we would focus our energy and our our money on helping people in Appalachia have greater opportunity.
02:02:40 And we chose these three areas because we think they're the great equalizers, particularly education.
02:02:46 It's by far the great equalizer. It can raise anyone up to do whatever they dream, dream of in their lives.
02:02:54 There is a period of reinvention happening at higher ed right now.
02:03:03 You have the enrollment cliff coming. Fewer high school seniors will be graduating starting in twenty twenty five.
02:03:09 That number is going to go down 15 percent a year across the country.
02:03:12 You have fewer high school seniors who are now also less likely to go to college.
02:03:17 And so the number of those that want to go to college is decreasing by 12 percent.
02:03:21 You've got digital transformation. You have all these amazing things like chat GPT, where you have Khan Academy or you have Coursera or YouTube.
02:03:30 So all these alternatives to learning. And so it was a chance to step back and say, how can we as Marshall University hold on to the hundred and eighty six years of things that we've done that embrace the new ways and be the platform for the 21st century?
02:03:44 And so when I stepped in, we facilitated a process across the campus, 38 listening sessions, a thousand people, twelve hundred ideas.
02:03:53 We engaged with two outside firms and we began to explore the best practices all around the globe.
02:03:59 And we developed a strategy that we're now following called Marshall for all.
02:04:03 Marshall forever. Marshall for all. Marshall forever is focused on a value proposition that has three components. Affordability, flexibility and achievement.
02:04:14 Since 2007, the average college tuition has gone up 10 percent a year and student loan debt has grown 45 percent.
02:04:23 That's become a barrier to a lot of people who need access to a college degree.
02:04:28 So we're tackling affordability. I'll talk about how in a minute.
02:04:32 The second is flexibility. Many students today are non-traditional students. They're working adults.
02:04:37 They may have dropped out for a period of time. They may have a kid. They may have a full time job.
02:04:41 They can't come to class in the middle of a work shift. So you need to basically be able to have a flexible work schedule and a flexible class schedule.
02:04:49 And then a third is achievement. They want to know that they're going to have the ability to get a degree or to get a certificate and then have that translate into some sort of earnings potential.
02:04:59 So Marshall for all. Marshall forever is that we're going to have an in-demand curriculum that teaches on demand classes.
02:05:06 So you can take them online. You can take them in a classroom or you can take them a hybrid environment.
02:05:11 And we've chosen where we're going to be distinctive. Our goal is for individual success.
02:05:15 One hundred percent of our students will graduate. They will get the career of their choice and zero percent will have student loan debt.
02:05:23 So our first promise is 100 percent placement, zero debt. The second promise is we're going to take our research, our grants and contracts that advance innovative ideas from today's 65 million dollars to 150 million.
02:05:36 And in doing that, we want to increase the number of small businesses getting started in our state by 3x.
02:05:41 And then economic impact. Today, Marshall for every dollar the state invests in Marshall, we give them a 14x return.
02:05:49 Our goal is to make it 30x. That's two and a half billion dollars.
02:05:53 So we've set those true north goals and everyone here is fired up. And to let you know, it can be real.
02:05:59 We just admitted the first 100 students this fall on the guarantee that they will have a job and no student loan debt.
02:06:10 The thing I was most struck by in talking with Brad and doing my reporting was just, you know, how personal it is to him. And it comes across as totally authentic.
02:06:22 You know, he talks about believing there are as many geniuses there in West Virginia as there are in Silicon Valley.
02:06:30 And, you know, he gave up a lot to go back and do what he's doing.
02:06:35 West Virginians have always answered the call. We've mined the coal. We forged the steel. We built the roads. We built the trucks. We fought the wars.
02:06:45 When our president said we want to have a man on the moon, we produced Homer Hickam and the boys in October Sky that built the first NASA rockets.
02:06:52 And then when we needed that astronaut home, we produced Katherine Johnson and the hidden figures and brought them home.
02:06:57 And for a while, people told us we didn't belong. And we believed them.
02:07:01 I don't. We do belong. We've got another chapter and we're showing the world who we are.
02:07:07 Here at the 2023 BLK Summit in Atlanta, man, Nick Cannon in the house, man. Really appreciate the time.
02:07:17 What do you think of the event, man? Jabari, man, y'all setting it off up in here. It's live. It's electric. It's us, man. Job well done.
02:07:25 I appreciate that, man. You know, I wanted to do this because every time I watch that clip of you and Kenan and how he always used to be a Jabari.
02:07:32 Right. Like it's amazing. And now you sit and talk to a actual Jabari. Yeah. You talk to an actual Jabari.
02:07:39 How does it feel to talk to an actual Jabari? I've been bitching Jabari's in my life.
02:07:44 Nah, man, it's a inside joke that Kenan and I have. That's one of my best friends in life.
02:07:49 And we literally because, you know, that's that's like that's a black name. Yeah, we all know it's your name.
02:07:55 So like everybody know what Jabari is. When I when I write the name and I fill out your ethnicity, I'm like, come on, y'all can figure that out.
02:08:03 So what's what's 2024 in store? And 2023 is over. Right. And, you know, I'm so excited about 2024, all the innovation and entrepreneurial efforts that we're putting together in the space of just content, ownership, assets, acquisitions.
02:08:17 You know what I mean? Like I've had the opportunity throughout my career to kind of watch the game shift and be able to adapt.
02:08:25 And now I'm in that space, man, of really building platforms to give others opportunities.
02:08:29 So, you know, we got a few new shows. We got the Future Superstar Show that just launched that really is about the next generation of music artists.
02:08:37 We got a show doing a lot of stuff on the Amazon platform and building.
02:08:42 You know, they have so much going on from the space of commerce and content merging together.
02:08:47 So I'm on there daily. I'm on Twitch. I'm on Prime. I'm on Freebie.
02:08:52 So we're doing stuff with them. And then, of course, building this Wild 'N Out brand to kind of continue to sustain in the space of, you know, content creators, comedy and really just brand innovation.
02:09:03 What's the future of Wild 'N Out, man? Because you just mentioned it was with MTV for a long time.
02:09:07 Do you continue on that path? I think it's grown beyond it. I mean, I love what Paramount is doing of how they, you know, kind of compartmentalize everything, but still keeping everything under the Paramount umbrella.
02:09:18 So now it's not Wild 'N Out isn't just MTV, it's just BET, it's just BH1, it's its own brand.
02:09:25 And you'll see that more and more. It's Paramount's most number one digital brand out of all of their, you know, entities combined.
02:09:34 So I'm excited to just allow it to grow and continue to partner with them and allow it to stand on its own, because that's where it's going.
02:09:41 Like we used to, you know, turn to a certain channel to watch something. Now you just type it in.
02:09:46 And from that, you know, we've had so much traction and so much growth, especially in the digital space.
02:09:51 So we live in there super strong. Yeah. And you're just coming off of our panel, man.
02:09:55 Thanks you again, talking about Africa and ways you can expand on that continent.
02:09:59 And I've been having so many conversations with people that live in Africa, businesses. I know FinTech is one of the areas that they're looking at.
02:10:06 What are you looking at when it comes? I know you want to expand Wild 'N Out over there, but is there any other areas?
02:10:10 Yeah, the diaspora and the talent there. I mean, obviously, music has already led the charge.
02:10:13 Absolutely. You know, they're the number one music around the world right now.
02:10:18 And then I feel like that's the same way in the space of film and television.
02:10:21 And I want there's so many stories that should be told about the continent. Great historical stories.
02:10:29 And I wanted to even talk more about that on the panel. Like we want to hear the story of Mata Musa.
02:10:34 We want to hear the story of Nefertiti. We want to hear the story. Yeah.
02:10:38 It's so it's so many that, you know, if we if we dig deep, because I'm always one of the the pontificators when it comes to like, yo, we're much more than just, you know, our our post-traumatic slaves.
02:10:52 And I mean, the African-Americans here always believe our history starts with slavery.
02:10:58 When we come from great lineage of keen scientists, creators, you know, the architects of our culture.
02:11:03 And I want to be able to help tell those stories. Yeah. 2024. That's what the future is.
02:11:08 But let's flashback one minute to 2023. Right. Because you cannot talk about hip hop culture without mentioning you in that. Right.
02:11:15 I mean, you can't go and drum line was a piece of hip hop culture. Right. You're a piece of hip hop culture.
02:11:21 Did you like the way that hip hop was celebrated on 50th anniversary or could have been better?
02:11:26 I mean, I always believe it could have been better just because I feel like I am a child of hip hop.
02:11:30 So I want to see it on on on the biggest stage. I think everybody who saluted it and celebrated did a fantastic job.
02:11:37 I love the fact that, you know, everything from seeing the hip hop museum go up in the Bronx to all of the things that we got to see at the Grammys and certain.
02:11:45 I believe there's even another coming up literally this week, a celebration at the Grammys and CBS are putting on.
02:11:51 But we got to keep going. We got to go harder because it is our culture.
02:11:55 It's the it's the number one export. And everyone knows that hip hop is taking over the world.
02:12:00 So and it's still young. It's 50. But I want to scream it, scream it louder from the mountaintops.
02:12:06 But every celebration has been dope. And it's so dope to see our OGs get recognized.
02:12:12 You know what I mean? And and bring it together with, you know, everybody who's who's moving and shaking in the culture right now.
02:12:18 I think Jay did it. You know, Jay was celebrated in such an amazing way with the, you know, the Brooklyn Museum.
02:12:25 You know, have you been having I want to go get back to New York next week.
02:12:29 So I'm gonna try to get you got to make us not to be there forever. Yeah.
02:12:32 I can't begin as an exhibit. So I got to go myself. Yeah. Listen, I get you out of here on this because you got a plane to catch.
02:12:37 Yeah. Always ask people at the end because Jim Collins wrote a great book called Good to Great.
02:12:42 Yes. How do you transition from good to great? You've been in it. You've climbed the ladder.
02:12:47 And it's a man. Steve Harvey's one of your mentors. I know. Done that.
02:12:51 How does one get from good to great in this society? Perseverance. You get from good to great by not stopping.
02:12:58 It's going to be many obstacles, going to be many challenges. But those are only meant to sharpen you from good to great.
02:13:03 You start off as good. We all got some goodness in us. But that perseverance, that that that stick to it.
02:13:09 This is what allows people to become great. You know, I mean, especially when you weather the storm and you see adversity.
02:13:16 That's that's where the greatness occurs. Perseverance. Yeah.
02:13:19 We see it in Canada. Twenty twenty three. Be OK. Something got to have you back in future.
02:13:23 Come on, man. Let's do it. Absolutely. And you want to Africa, Botswana.
02:13:26 Let's go. Yeah. I'm here. Make me part of the Forbes family. You already are.
02:13:31 Man, there is a time. Thank you. I'm looking at the dream right now. So congratulations.
02:13:38 Here at the third Black Ambition Demo Day. Pharrell Williams, sir, thank you so much for the time.
02:13:42 Really appreciate it. Congratulations to on making it to year three of this initiative.
02:13:48 When you get to year three of something like this, how does it feel?
02:13:53 It's awesome. I think more and more I just try to like take myself out of the forefront because I just want like these black and brown ideas to.
02:14:05 To get the shine that they deserve. They're the ones that's really they're keeping it going just as much as our, you know, our crew and staff.
02:14:13 Yeah, it's it's really but it's really these great ideas. Yeah.
02:14:16 So take me back. I mean, twenty, twenty one, twenty, twenty. What that what was that in twenty, twenty that that we see after George Floyd died?
02:14:24 You know, you had about 50 companies at the top companies. They committed 40 plus billion dollars.
02:14:29 Right. To help racial inequality. What did you see up to twenty, twenty nine?
02:14:33 I went twenty, twenty three every regressed at all when it comes to funding black businesses.
02:14:38 Well, it's funny you say 40, because I remember the number being more to the tune of 66.
02:14:44 A lot of it felt like marketing. Yeah. I'm just being honest.
02:14:48 And it's interesting because a lot of like charities are headed up by the marketing departments of a lot of corporations.
02:15:02 And as long as you do the work, I mean, and yes, yeah. You know, but we need it.
02:15:08 We need the real change, you know, and.
02:15:14 The thing is, we can't keep waiting. You know, our parents and their parents and their parents, parents, parents, you know, for them, equality was number one.
02:15:22 And for us, equality is absolutely on the list. But, you know, equity is more powerful than equality, because with equality, you're asking for an acknowledgement of justice and fairness with equity.
02:15:44 You have to ask for anything. Yeah, because it's yours. Yeah.
02:15:48 And that's what we want. We want more black and brown ideas to be supported, you know, by the strategic scaffolding of mentorship.
02:16:00 Resources. And an opportunity, you know, in their fair share of light under the sun.
02:16:10 And it's crazy because you would think that like black and brown ideas are like a new thing the way that it's portrayed in the media.
02:16:22 But black and brown ideas are not new. I was just saying this tonight to the audience, you know, the pyramids.
02:16:30 You know, it's a black and brown idea. All the way to now, you know, you think about the GPS systems that like we did, we all depend on in the world.
02:16:42 That was a black woman, Gladys West. And I'm not sure how she fared.
02:16:47 I believe that she fared well. But there's not hundreds of thousands of stories at Arthur and created and conceptualized by black and brown ideas where the people have equity and ownership.
02:17:04 And that's what we're wanting to change is that part. Yeah.
02:17:09 Take me back from when you was a kid. When did you first know you wanted to be an entrepreneur?
02:17:13 I did not. You know, it all. I didn't know. I didn't know what that word meant.
02:17:19 Once you discover what it meant. When I first started really making money.
02:17:27 And then, you know, you have bankers talk to you, you have the investment people talk to you and.
02:17:32 Yeah. That's funny, I wake up this morning. Right. First thing I see this Tower Banks clip rolling around.
02:17:38 It was you slim dog sitting next to each other in the car. And you were so enthusiastic about what you had discovered.
02:17:45 Slim had did right. Being independent, making money. And at that point you were like, yo, we do business different because of what he is.
02:17:53 What that moment was that when you thought it was amazing? Yeah.
02:17:57 That's still like one of the highlights for me. Because he was a millionaire before I met him.
02:18:02 Yeah. Yeah. He's he's and he's still doing well. If you look up, if you look up slim dog right now, he's still doing well.
02:18:11 He did a thing. It's like a month ago.
02:18:17 And he was like every day he was he was showing a different car that he had. They're all black.
02:18:23 He was showing all of his cars. And he's not just like car rich.
02:18:29 Like slim puts a lot of money away. He's been doing that since before I knew him.
02:18:35 Yeah. You know, so if you see all those cars and you know that like he's he's doing his thing, it's amazing.
02:18:42 Black ambition. That's up. That is a black ambition. Yeah. Yeah.
02:18:47 When you think about where we are now, 2023 hip hop at 50. Right.
02:18:52 I mean, this is your core. So you come from. Right. And some people may think it wasn't celebrated the right way.
02:18:58 What do you say? Oh, I don't know.
02:19:05 That's not what I know. I didn't think about it that way. I just thought how blessed we are to have this opportunity at such a crazy, divisive time.
02:19:16 The opportunities for black and brown ideas are not drying up.
02:19:20 They're becoming more plentiful because even the powers that be, some of the ones that are.
02:19:26 How should we say racially conservative folks?
02:19:33 Even they know where we are, where the profit is. There's no denying that we influence it, you know, and.
02:19:44 I think they're also realizing they can't use that word minority. I mean, how can you be the minority when.
02:19:51 You make up a huge your DNA makes up a huge portion of this world.
02:19:57 And we influence a lot. It's kind of like where the wind blows.
02:20:02 It's like the black tastes black and brown tastes. It's a beautiful thing.
02:20:07 And across many genres. And so the idea that like we can actually have equity and some of these things and some of these tranches that we influence.
02:20:21 It's a it's a it's a it's a it's beautiful. Even in the most trying of times, you know, all these trials and tribulations that.
02:20:29 We're all going through a site. It's still beautiful that like we have this opportunity.
02:20:34 And I'm just so excited that like something like Black Ambition exists because it just shows you, you know, the intellectual prowess is at an all time high.
02:20:44 It's not going backwards here at your demo day. You saw you out on stage. You were out there for a minute.
02:20:48 Yes. And you were holding those checks and saying all those black entrepreneurs, Hispanic entrepreneurs come to the stage.
02:20:54 Yes. What do you feel? God is the greatest.
02:20:57 Was that the feeling because you were able to provide and help these black entrepreneurs get some capital, take their business to the next level?
02:21:06 That's a beautiful thing. Everything you just said. That's amazing.
02:21:11 Now, I was growing up, I never seen nothing like that. Nothing.
02:21:16 We were staring at a television just completely unaware, oblivious.
02:21:23 And I grew up at a different time. You know, we had like cable boxes. And if your parents couldn't pay for the cable, then like, you know, we get cut off.
02:21:30 It'd be cut off. And then you get static. Yes. You know.
02:21:35 But look at us now. I know. And this is just the beginning. Yeah.
02:21:39 You see, you I was at your dinner on Wednesday and you see, you know, Felicia has just said something that kind of shook me a little bit.
02:21:45 And she said this particular initiative is a return on investment by ancestors sacrifice.
02:21:51 I thought that was powerful. You said she JGJZ you with that.
02:21:56 Oh, because she has the bars. Yeah. She is one of the best speakers I've ever heard.
02:22:03 She motivates me the way that she sees things. She's such a value for her.
02:22:07 Jermaine, the whole squad, they're just different. Man, those are different kind of women, bro.
02:22:13 You know, and. We think about it like. For her to speak the way that she does,
02:22:21 and I don't mean because she has one of the most amazing, you know, folk chabula ever.
02:22:28 I hate when people like, oh, you know, you speak so intelligently like, oh, what do you think?
02:22:34 It's not what I mean. I'm saying the way that she can motivate people.
02:22:41 Her. You know, because she's an empath. You know, the gravity on on black women is like.
02:22:50 Three times as much as anybody else in this country. Yeah.
02:22:55 And to be able to speak with that kind of load on your shoulders, to be able to or a and like change the energy in the room
02:23:03 and motivate people and make them really believe in their hearts that they can do and be anything they want to be.
02:23:09 And she ain't even shook your hand yet. That's powerful.
02:23:15 She's I adore her and I admire her so much.
02:23:19 Why did you hire as a CEO? What made you what did you see before you even met her that you knew she was the one?
02:23:25 Well, she comes well. Her her resume is well decorated. I mean, this is she's been changing lives.
02:23:30 Been one week. Absolutely. We're lucky to have her.
02:23:36 When you look at that now, where you are, where is black ambition going?
02:23:40 Let's fast forward to 2030. Where do you want to see it by the end of this decade?
02:23:45 Onwards, upwards. I heard the 90 million plus that was funded out.
02:23:52 We're 92 million, 92 million. Where should that number be by 2030? I'm crazy.
02:23:58 North of a billion. Speaking to existence, right?
02:24:03 It's too low. Oh, OK.
02:24:08 Oh, north of a billion. Yeah. I like that number. Yeah. Yeah.
02:24:12 I thought she was saying like, oh, it's too low. Yeah. All right. Two, three billion. Yeah.
02:24:17 2024. What is Pharrell Williams looking at? Is a lot that's going to occur.
02:24:21 Right. We have an election year coming up. Politics always tend to shift things and shift narratives and shift motives and shift company.
02:24:30 Their objectives. And as you said, we had a lot of marketing that was done between 2020 and 2023.
02:24:35 Was twenty twenty four looking like for you? I'm not a politician.
02:24:40 But but I think we should all be prepared for. Just getting our business in order.
02:24:52 I think we should be galvanizing. We should be sharing the codes amongst each other and we should be supporting each other's businesses.
02:25:01 Yeah. And that way it doesn't matter who's in office. We'll have our own buildings.
02:25:09 Expand the ecosystem. Why not? Absolutely. That's what they do.
02:25:13 Yeah. You got a lot of entrepreneurs out there. I want to let you go and I'll get you out of here on this.
02:25:17 Yes. Jim Collins, he's always resorting. One of my favorite books, Good to Great.
02:25:22 And I look at your career as a whole and I see all the things you've done.
02:25:26 I mean, when you think about collaborations, that's how you had to make a living, right?
02:25:30 You had to be a master collaborator. You did it with Jay Norie. Despicable Me.
02:25:35 Yes, sir. I'm from North Philly. I remember when clips and Ab Lava rolled through Blumberg projects when my mother was born.
02:25:41 Well, and that whole neighborhood was just shook because they saw you. They saw clips.
02:25:45 They saw some people come through that just changed them. Right.
02:25:49 That's crazy. That's crazy. North Philly. That's crazy. Ab Lava 69 Don. That's crazy.
02:25:54 That was a good collaboration. That was a great collaboration.
02:25:58 What is the difference or how do you go from a good collaborator to a great one?
02:26:02 And you've gotten some great collaborations. LVMH, Chanel. The list goes on and on and on.
02:26:07 What's the difference between a good collaborator and a great one?
02:26:11 A good collaborator knows how to make it work. And enjoys it.
02:26:17 A great collaborator knows how to reduce and pull back their energy to allow someone else to shine as bright and be comfortable to get the best out of them.
02:26:37 Not everybody can deal with having equal energy in the room.
02:26:44 And so for me, I. For people who are really like super out alpha, I become more of a mirror than I am anything else.
02:26:55 And I'm helping them to see their blind spots without pointing them out.
02:27:00 I'm just being a mirror. I think that's the greatest in collaboration when your energy is not impeding on somebody else's ego space.
02:27:12 Be themselves. Yes, sir. Uninterrupted. Uninterrupted. You study for our wings.
02:27:19 Thanks, man. Thank you. Thank you for your time. I was never supposed to go from C student to CEO, but I'm here here at the Black Ambition.
02:27:32 Third annual demo day. CEO Felicia Hatcher, Black Ambition.
02:27:36 Thank you so much for the time. I know you're right on fumes.
02:27:39 Right. It's been a couple of crazy few days, but hey, you are though.
02:27:43 It's just over. And I'm seeing those entrepreneurs out there.
02:27:46 I saw the faces on the looks on their faces when they were getting them checked, especially the million dollar.
02:27:51 I mean, it must feel good over the you're running all films to see that you change.
02:27:56 Yeah, I mean, it feels amazing. Right. Just to not only know that we're changing lives,
02:28:01 but the lives that those entrepreneurs are going to change as a result of the investment, the mentorship, the support, the community that we've built.
02:28:09 Like to me, that is what matters the most. Yeah. So we had that strange elevator moment.
02:28:14 Right. We want to elevate it. Is that her? Is it her? OK.
02:28:18 But after that was over, I was thinking through the night as you were talking on your throw on the mic.
02:28:23 And I'm thinking, I said, what do you see? What do you look for in an entrepreneur? What is that?
02:28:28 Yeah, we look for quite a few things. You know, I think we're one product market fit.
02:28:34 Right. Like, is it the right moment? Are they building? Are they the right team as well?
02:28:40 Then really looking at the founder itself, like, do they have the risk tolerance? Do they have the tenacity?
02:28:45 Do they have a level of resource magnetism? Like no matter what, they can go out and get it and find the resources that they need and attract it to their business.
02:28:53 Those are a lot of the things that we look for. And then the black commission, we kind of have this unspoken rule that we're investing in for profit companies.
02:29:00 Absolutely. We're also looking for people and entrepreneurs that we know are going to have a connection, like a deep connection back to their community.
02:29:07 And so it's that other thing that we're looking for in the conversations that we have in the interview process as they're in their mentorship pods.
02:29:15 We're also evaluating them as well. And then it's that that it factor. Right.
02:29:19 Like, are they building the right product at the right time and are they the right person to be building the company as well?
02:29:25 Yeah. For us, pitch competitions are very unique. Right. Because this is Ashley Samuels and Bill and Tulsa down in Oklahoma.
02:29:31 I love what she says. She says that all it takes is sweat equity. Right. You're not doing is sweat equity. Right.
02:29:37 When you're on stage, a little swag, a little entertainment factor in it as well.
02:29:42 And then passion. Right. Like, you know, when you meet an entrepreneur and the passion is just exuding out of them,
02:29:48 they're going to figure it out. They're going to knock it out the park.
02:29:51 They are going to weather the ebb and flow of entrepreneurship because it's not easy as well.
02:29:57 And like you feel that when you're having conversations with them. And then the other part of that is vision. Right.
02:30:02 Like the organization was founded by a visionary. And so seeing entrepreneurs showcase like the bigger vision that they have,
02:30:09 that they're building something much bigger than themselves, like those are qualities and characteristics that make them like the ideal candidate for a black
02:30:17 ambition entrepreneur. Yeah. I was just sitting here. You said that by 2030. Right.
02:30:22 So we want to see the number as it stands out. We black ambition. Ninety two million that they have raised.
02:30:29 So black founders. Let me check the number. Right. Ninety two million. What is that?
02:30:33 Yeah. So ninety two million is the number that those entrepreneurs have raised in venture capital venture capital.
02:30:38 Yeah. And so the entrepreneur that we invest in, as well as the we work with about 250 entrepreneurs in a year.
02:30:44 There are cohort style mentorship program. And so that's considered the black ambition network.
02:30:48 OK. And so over the course of the three years, we've worked with 750 entrepreneurs and they've raised over ninety two million dollars.
02:30:56 And then they do about twenty seven million dollars annually in revenue combined. Combined. Combined.
02:31:01 Yeah. How much as far as a ninety two. How much has black ambition given out total? Yeah.
02:31:06 So as of today, close to 10 million dollars. Close to 10 million dollars. OK.
02:31:09 And so for us, it's about 2030. You want to see that number. Me, too.
02:31:15 How do you get there? Yeah, I mean, we get there with strategic partners that align with our vision,
02:31:20 that understand the ROI of investing in black and Hispanic entrepreneurs at the highest level.
02:31:27 They not only become massive contributors back into their communities, they're good customers as well.
02:31:33 They're opening up innovative processes in which corporations can acquire those companies.
02:31:38 Like there's so many different they become vendors for these.
02:31:41 There's so many different ripple effects that happen when you invest in these companies at the highest level.
02:31:46 But then we also need those companies to be funders and supporters of our work so that we can mentor those entrepreneurs so that when they get the opportunities, they get the funding.
02:31:55 They know what to do and how to grow and scale of companies. So is that right?
02:31:59 It's strategic partners. And then it's also really good retail partners.
02:32:03 So the e-commerce, just the e-commerce companies that we're working with, but we invest in a lot of CPG companies as well and making sure that they can get their products on the shelves or the virtual shelves as well.
02:32:13 Again, the initiative Black Ambition is empowering black and Hispanic entrepreneurs, black and brown people.
02:32:18 And the focus here is tech, design, health care, consumer products. Why those areas?
02:32:24 Yeah, we looked at high growth areas in which that's what you consider high growth areas in black and brown communities.
02:32:29 Absolutely. And so they're growing by leaps and bounds in the technology industry.
02:32:34 Most of most we see a high majority of those companies in consumer packaged goods.
02:32:38 That's a low barrier to entry for them. But there's a high upswing in potential for them as well.
02:32:43 And then we're also looking at in areas in which culture is an asset.
02:32:47 Like they don't have to explain away their culture in order to be able to do business there.
02:32:50 And so like those are a lot of the reasons why we pick those sectors.
02:32:54 And then we're also looking at like which sectors are ripe for innovation and then also need a higher level of respect and innovation from us.
02:33:02 And so health care is one of those sectors. Right. We know the large number of disparities in the health space as it relates to black and brown communities.
02:33:10 Well, we want to invest and fund those innovators that are building the technology and the health care solutions to make sure that that is a place that is much more helpful to us and can alleviate some of those disparity numbers that we see.
02:33:23 Yeah. And Felicia, as a CEO, black ambition. Take me back to that young Felicia Hatcher.
02:33:28 Because I'm looking at the young. I got C's in school, too. Right.
02:33:32 So much that my dad left me back in the seventh grade because he didn't think I learned enough. Right.
02:33:36 He didn't want getting C's. Why were you getting C's at high school? Me? I was lazy. I didn't do homework.
02:33:41 I was only looking at girls and I was not paying attention. Why did you get C's?
02:33:45 Same story. My mom hates when I tell that story. I'm like, if I can major and minor in anything in high school, I major and minor in the two B's boys and basketball.
02:33:52 So that's where I spent most of my time, unfortunately. Right.
02:33:56 But I also, you know, not dating myself. Like, I love MacGyver as a kid.
02:34:01 So I was like, well, one of those kids that would tinker. Like, I taught myself how to code at 16.
02:34:06 I could rewire cable into my room. But like as far as what showed up in the classroom.
02:34:11 Were you doing all that because you weren't punished because you got C's or what? Because I'm just a naturally curious kid. Right.
02:34:17 And I think, you know, one of my favorite quotes is an Albert Einstein quote. And it says, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life feeling that it's stupid.
02:34:26 And that was me as a kid. Right. Like I was being judged by what was happening in the classroom, but not all the other stuff that I was doing.
02:34:33 I was a big sister. I was on five different sports teams. I had over, you know, 1500 hours in community service.
02:34:42 But that didn't equate to my GPA. And so there's more than one pathway to success.
02:34:47 Like that is the thing that's most important. Right. I think Black Ambition exhibits that, you know, we hear the titles of non-traditional and underrepresented and underestimated.
02:34:59 Well, there's more than one pathway to success for them as well. And that's why we do the work that we do.
02:35:04 But like that was my story as a kid. I got a guidance counselor who told me I've never had a guidance counselor told me I'd never make it to college.
02:35:12 But she went on to say I should just get a job or go to vocational school.
02:35:16 She knew community college and community college except everybody. Right.
02:35:20 And so it's unfortunate that at 15, 16 and 17 years old, you can have people that put such a limited belief on your life and they're projecting that.
02:35:30 And so with Black Ambition, when we talk about things being uninterrupted and being limitless and you look at like our logo and our branding and being the sky and constellations is making sure nothing stands in the way, especially doubters.
02:35:43 We do not have capacity for any of those people to disrupt what we're doing with Black Ambition.
02:35:49 2002, you're at Lynn University, right? You swore off entrepreneurship.
02:35:53 You said, look, I don't want to do it anymore. And but you did get back and you started a business.
02:35:58 And while you were in Lynn, what business with that, why did it fail? And what did you learn?
02:36:03 It was an educational consulting company. Sounded much more sophisticated than it really was.
02:36:08 I had won one hundred and thirty thousand dollars in scholarships as a C student.
02:36:12 And what immediately happens after that is your mom.
02:36:15 They're selling all her church friends that you can teach their kids how to do it, too.
02:36:19 And so I actually turned that into a business. And so companies like or organization like DeVry University, the Urban League, the YMCA start hiring me at 19 years old to build out their college prep programs and then build out like opportunities for nontraditional C and D students to be able to get into college and then also find scholarships.
02:36:39 And so that was my first business, which was a really successful business. Where it failed is I got a contract for twenty five thousand dollars.
02:36:48 I thought I was like rolling in the dough. You can tell me nothing. The work start consuming me from this contract that I had.
02:36:57 I asked my parents if I could leave school in order to pursue this as a business.
02:37:01 I hired one of my friends and within three months, they sold the company for me.
02:37:06 Wow. And so I was devastated, absolutely devastated. And I swore off I would never be an entrepreneur ever again because I really kind of bet so many things like compromise, but sacrifice so many things in order to actualize this dream only for it to be taken away from me by somebody that was really close.
02:37:25 And so that was my only image of entrepreneurship other than my dad being an entrepreneur in the construction space and coming home like dirty and tired every day.
02:37:34 And so like those are my first two early experiences with entrepreneurship. I'm like, I want to do this.
02:37:39 Like I want to be as far away from this as possible. But that was what happened to me with my first business.
02:37:44 What you got back in. Right. It was a famous story that came out. She thought she would never be an entrepreneur again. And then a recession hit.
02:37:50 Then a recession hit. And then you find you and your husband, you're you're going full full steam ahead with entrepreneurship.
02:37:57 And it doesn't sound like you regret that decision. I don't regret that decision. I think if I were to do it over again, I'd make some different choices.
02:38:04 But I don't. Right. And it was just it was at a time where there was an economic downturn of 2008. I did not know.
02:38:11 We all collectively experienced it. But it was such a defining moment for me because I could like if I could have gotten a job back in my field, I would have never pursued another business.
02:38:23 And marketing field and marketing. Yes. And experiential marketing. And so that's what led down that path of just not having a check, not having an opportunity moving back home to my parents house, not just by myself, but also bring my husband with me.
02:38:37 And so like those moments when your back is up against the wall and you have no other options, like so many of our entrepreneurs have those stories like you're just forced to figure it out because you do not have a plan B, C or D.
02:38:50 And like that was the moment that brought me back into entrepreneurship. Now we're going to stay hip hop 50 right. 50 anniversary. What song, what artist or what album got you over that hump as far as motivation?
02:39:02 Right. Like what was that music playing? Like, you know, like we all we have when we go through heartbreaks all days there. Right.
02:39:08 Yeah. But what music or what hip hop artists or album got you through? Oh, I don't know about hip hop, but rap for sure. I'm a South Florida girl. So it was it was a combination of Rick Ross and Trick Daddy.
02:39:20 I don't know. Not Trina? No. OK. Yeah. So those those two, because it was just like, you know, when you're going through your go through, it's such an out of body experience that oftentimes like the lyrics of just like,
02:39:34 although the life experiences weren't similar, but that grit, that tenacity, that get up and get it, like that was really helpful in me in those moments.
02:39:44 And so it was definitely between those two. When Hustling came out, it was like. And Jay Z, I would say Jay Z as well. Yeah. Hustling, I mean, that was a great time.
02:39:54 But back in twenty twenty one, you decide that you're going to leave, you know, black tech and, you know, go over and you're going to help Pharrell build Black Ambition. Who pitched who?
02:40:04 Y'all this is demo day, right? You're telling everybody else to pitch. Who pitched who on this CEO position?
02:40:09 You know, the interesting thing is it started with a conversation with his chief of staff at the time and was telling me about like Black Ambition.
02:40:18 And I think it was a little bit of a pitching both. Right. Because I had understood what the organization was and saw the announcements.
02:40:27 And I thought that there were just some some some holes that we could fix at the organization that I co-founded at the time.
02:40:34 And by the next day, I got a phone call. I was just like, you do you want to run this thing?
02:40:38 And I was like, run what? You know, because I didn't think the conversation was going in that direction.
02:40:43 But I definitely thought that there was some ways that we could be helpful. It's like that's where the conversation initially started with with his chief of staff at the time.
02:40:50 And when you talk to him, what was the thing that got you to say yes? The money?
02:40:56 It was so being an ecosystem builder for the past 10 years, like literally building Miami startup ecosystem,
02:41:04 making sure that the black community was not only an active participant, but like a financial beneficiary of the innovation economy.
02:41:11 It had been my work for the past 10 years. The one thing that we hadn't been able to do was actually physically like write direct checks to organization to companies and to entrepreneurs.
02:41:22 Like we were able to get the VCs to come together, look at them, invest in them.
02:41:27 But like personally being able to say this company needs investment and I can bet on this.
02:41:33 Like I hadn't been able to do that in the work that I've done and built the community to support every every every avenue of that happening.
02:41:41 And so that was the thing that really stuck out to me with with the role.
02:41:44 I would say the other the other part of that is building family legacy is something that's really important to me.
02:41:50 And I just realized like that was a component that Black Ambition represented. Right.
02:41:55 And so Pharrell being the visionary and like the architect and coming up with the idea and the importance and the partners for Black Ambition.
02:42:04 But then building upon what that means. He often talks about like it being like a ripple effect. Right.
02:42:09 Or like the echo. He starts it and then it continues like this cycle.
02:42:13 And so being able to build upon that with his family legacy, I think, as a part of that was something that was really important for me.
02:42:21 And I think that when you did he say a phrase, anything at all, he gets you like click at all.
02:42:26 You know, it's a good innovator. Right.
02:42:28 Yeah. He is. Hey, sis. Right. It's usually that.
02:42:33 That's it. Hey, sis. Was the thing. I mean, it's it's sparked a conversation. Right.
02:42:38 You know, I have to tell the story of like us just having a conversation about Lovecraft Country. Right.
02:42:46 And like, you know, like, who are you? Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?
02:42:51 And like, who are you? Uninterrupted. And like that was a big connection point for us.
02:42:55 It was a conversation with not just him, but then also Virgil, who actually created the logo for Black Ambition.
02:43:00 Many people don't know that. So like that conversation with the three of us around what does it actually mean to build Black Ambition,
02:43:10 what does it mean to build Black Ambition? And then like, you know, we're going to be building it together.
02:43:16 And then really kind of building the thing from there. I'm building the team, building the infrastructure and support so that we're now here celebrating 100 companies at the three year mark.
02:43:26 Yeah. For those people who may not ever or have not heard Virgil, how would you describe him in one word?
02:43:32 I mean, I don't know.
02:43:34 He's going to be a visionary and innovator. He's going to be right there at the top.
02:43:39 I've only had the experience to meet him once, but our conversation was purely around Black Ambition and what is required.
02:43:46 And then also the role that the mentorship played in him getting to where he is.
02:43:51 And like, those are so many of the pillars of our organization and kind of building upon,
02:43:57 you know, the conversations that him and Pharrell had in the very beginning that led to so many different fingerprints on the organization.
02:44:04 Now that we're here, right, take me inside of the organization. Nonprofits are a very tricky thing for me. I like for profits.
02:44:10 Yeah, me too.
02:44:11 I know that the nonprofits, you know, the operational costs, there are a lot of people who look at that expense and say, this is where all the money gets locked up.
02:44:18 You know, operational costs, you got to pay staff and none of the money really gets to the people it's intended to, right?
02:44:23 How is Black Ambition going to navigate that?
02:44:26 I mean, we're literally sitting in the distribution of the funding, right?
02:44:31 And so it's very clear where our funding goes because we directly, financially support entrepreneurs with the work that we do.
02:44:40 And so, you know, we have our programmatic work that we do, like the mentorship, the HBCU tour, the HBCU pre-accelerator to help those entrepreneurs become better applicants of our prize than any other accelerators and programs like that.
02:44:54 We have our So Ambitious Dinners that we do across the nation.
02:44:58 And then we have like our big moment where we support the entrepreneurs.
02:45:02 And so we invest about three million dollars into about 35 to 36 companies every single year.
02:45:10 And now we're at 101 entrepreneurs that we've invested in.
02:45:13 Yeah. How do you get that number up?
02:45:15 Do you got to go back to your partners and say, hey, we need more funding coming in?
02:45:18 Do you go to other entertainers who got a lot of money to say, bring some money in?
02:45:21 How do you get that number so you can be given out more every year?
02:45:24 Yeah. Yeah. It's all of the above of what you just said.
02:45:27 Right. And so finding partners and funders that align with the vision, continuing to have conversations with our current partners as well.
02:45:36 Most of our current partners are multi-year partners, which is absolutely amazing. And looking for more institutions, family offices, organizations and foundations that can also make those multi-year commitments to our organization is extremely important.
02:45:52 I think, you know, when you're talking about supporting black and Hispanic entrepreneurs at the highest level, it's not a one off thing.
02:45:59 Right. Because then it's not helpful to the entrepreneurs at the end of the day.
02:46:03 It doesn't allow you to build the momentum that turns into the tangible results.
02:46:07 And so, you know, the more Congress, we get conversations all the time with partners that are interested in supporting our entrepreneurs at the highest level.
02:46:15 And then we've just showed that the model and our thesis around supporting black and Hispanic entrepreneurs work.
02:46:20 Yeah. And so, again, that ninety two million dollars is how much the companies have raised.
02:46:24 And you guys have given out that number in twenty plus.
02:46:28 Ten million.
02:46:29 Excuse me, ten million. They're bringing in collectively twenty three million when it comes down to.
02:46:35 Twenty seven.
02:46:36 Twenty seven.
02:46:37 You got to include all the zeros.
02:46:39 I don't want to miss any number at all. Twenty seven million. That's what it is. Right.
02:46:43 Looking at that again, Brookings Institute came out with a very in-depth research papers called was driving black business growth.
02:46:51 Insights came out in May twenty three. And in that finding, they found some very interesting stats in the multi twenty twenty right.
02:46:57 Black business employers employ about one point three million people, created forty eight thousand more to forty thousand new jobs and added an additional one point seven billion to the payroll of the US economy.
02:47:08 Right. And then it says black business ownership. It continues to grow. But if it continues to grow at its current rate, right, which is about four percent,
02:47:16 it will take two hundred and fifty six years to reach parity to the share of black America. Right.
02:47:22 But if you want to reach parity in 15, you need a 74 percent growth.
02:47:26 And if you want to do it in twenty five, forty four percent and so on and so on. How can we speed this up?
02:47:30 Yeah. Yeah. One of my favorite quotes from my mentor, Myron, is wealth has a need for speed.
02:47:36 And so things need to happen faster for entrepreneurs in order to even begin to close the wealth gap.
02:47:43 What I've realized in this work is that there's so many institutions, people, corporations that have gotten really comfortable wasting the time of black and Hispanic entrepreneurs.
02:47:53 Yes. So that part has to stop. Right. Getting them the funding faster is also something I think from a nonprofit organizational standpoint,
02:48:03 I'd love to see that shift happen just in that industry alone, because we are forcing them to continue to qualify over and over again to be able to receive funding.
02:48:13 The other part of that is the respectable amount of funding. Right.
02:48:16 And so I think in the past three years, we've seen a lot of initiatives stand up to support black entrepreneurs specifically.
02:48:23 But like their processes and their cycles are so long that it takes forever for those entrepreneurs to actually get the funding that they need in order to grow their companies.
02:48:31 And so like there's some changes that need to happen in how we support entrepreneurs. Structural change.
02:48:36 Structural changes. Absolutely. As a whole, so that we can get them the money faster, that they can build faster, they can hire faster.
02:48:44 They can continue to raise additional sources of capital much faster as well.
02:48:48 And then I think the other part of that is we see a lot of funding and support in the very beginning stages of entrepreneurship for black and Hispanic entrepreneurs as they start to grow and scale their company.
02:48:59 The funding available to them at those next levels is almost non-existent.
02:49:04 And so we can we're doing all everyone's doing a really good job of getting them to start.
02:49:08 But when they start to scale, which is required for them to become massive contributors to their communities, to be able to become massive employers, then that capital that they need, that growth capital is even more extremely hard for them to be able to get.
02:49:21 You know, I'll tell you, I love the spirit, though, and I was at the private dinner that you guys had, Cedric and Antoine was buzzing through the zone.
02:49:28 Sitting, listening to these entrepreneurs talk, you know, one sister at my table talking about free cost.
02:49:33 And I'm like, oh, they're getting busy. Right. I love that. Right.
02:49:37 When you hear that talk, right, and you hear it, is it, hey, we're getting there.
02:49:41 We're getting. Yeah, I think we are farther along than most people will give us credit for as a as a I think as a race, just in respect in the venture startup space as a whole.
02:49:54 The other part of that is, you know, a lot of these entrepreneurs are building very sophisticated systems and solutions that don't get the respect that they need.
02:50:04 Right. And so as a result, you get a lot of like, well, they need financial.
02:50:08 They pass that they are past that what they need are the right experts at the right moment, at the right time so that they can grow and scale their companies.
02:50:17 And so, like, we actually learn a lot from our the companies that are in our network and our corporate partners equally learn a lot from our entrepreneurs.
02:50:25 One of the things that we launched last year was like a learning lab series where we bring our entrepreneurs into some of our corporate partners for for two days.
02:50:34 It's literally a two way street, even though they're working with some of the C-suites at some of the top brands and across the globe.
02:50:42 They those companies leave saying to us like we learn more than the entrepreneurs probably learn from us.
02:50:48 But it's an absolute two way street. And it's because a lot of them are, you know, top graduates of their classes at the at the universities that they've gone to.
02:50:57 Many of them have worked years in in corporate America, have run and exited successful businesses as well.
02:51:04 And so there's these multitudes of stories to tell about who these actual entrepreneurs are.
02:51:10 They are not always just like literally like starting from the bottom.
02:51:13 Now, they're here. Many of them have a high level of subject matter expertise, years in the game,
02:51:19 and then have seen problems that they can solve through the businesses that they've launched.
02:51:23 And so giving a higher level of respect of who they are is also really important.
02:51:27 Yeah. I mean, as you said, problem solvers, right. People solve the problem.
02:51:31 They are the best. Yeah. Within Black Ambition's portfolio and what you guys have seen from companies you've helped,
02:51:39 I'll think that when I call my investor friends and VC friends and I ask them about some of the companies I'm being pitched on,
02:51:45 they always say Jabari, are they companies or are they tools? Right.
02:51:49 What do you guys sit on? Are companies a tool? I would say a combination of both. Right.
02:51:53 And so and that's all because we invest in so many different stages of entrepreneurs.
02:51:59 Most of all of our entrepreneurs are early stage, but then we also invest in HBCU entrepreneurs.
02:52:04 So current college students or, you know, post five, five years.
02:52:08 And so we have a mix of entrepreneurs that we're invested in. I would say most of them were companies.
02:52:13 Maybe not all of them were startups is the real thing. Right.
02:52:16 But a lot of them have built companies that can play really well in the startup space or in the venture space.
02:52:23 But they're small businesses at their core. So they're not going to rapidly accelerate in two years with a repeatable fundable model.
02:52:30 But they are building companies that may be around for the next 10 or 20 years and their family businesses or like their lifestyle businesses.
02:52:37 And that's also just like the dynamics of in black and brown communities. You need a mix of both. Right.
02:52:43 I think more than anything, what we saw during the last economic downturn over the past few years during the pandemic is that people went back to small businesses as a core that kept us our communities afloat.
02:52:55 And so you always need to be nurturing both of those at the same time, the companies that are going to accelerate and high growth,
02:53:01 but then the companies that you can rely on that are going to be in your communities, they're going to be in the mom and pop shops,
02:53:07 they're going to solve local solutions to local problems. You need to be able to invest in both. And we're able to do so.
02:53:13 What do you say to the entrepreneur that just can't get the fund that that's been trying and trying and trying to always go back to assist the name Adrian Smith company,
02:53:21 Blitz Champs card game has an NFL license. Yeah. For some reason, some VCs or people,
02:53:27 they're not interested because it's just as having a hard time maybe attracting funding that she wants to scale.
02:53:32 What do you say to people like, oh, look at alternative sources of funding.
02:53:37 Like I said, not every company is well suited for venture capital.
02:53:41 And you've got to be very careful to make sure that you are what you want to go down that road.
02:53:46 You can actually play on that road. You can actually offer some sort of return and you can scale and grow at a rapid pace where it makes sense.
02:53:52 Not every company is like that. And it's perfectly fine.
02:53:55 You know, I think for government is what one of the largest employees of the world or the largest employees of the United States.
02:54:04 But then they also are some of the largest contractors. Right.
02:54:07 And I've seen some really amazing companies get the funding that they need from local government, from federal government as well.
02:54:14 And it's what they get to fuel their companies.
02:54:17 Some of our companies have received SBIR grants that allow them to get the capital that they need coming from the government.
02:54:24 I would say continue to apply for pitch competitions.
02:54:28 They serve a really, really important role of getting entrepreneurs unrestricted capital, oftentimes serving as like that friends and family round for them.
02:54:36 Also looking at crowdfunding and equity crowdfunding.
02:54:40 We crowdfund every Sunday in the black church. Like it's not new to us.
02:54:45 You know, I mean, with the plea. That's why.
02:54:49 The utility of like a Kickstarter Indiegogo is the exact same thing.
02:54:54 Peers are coming together with a small amount of money to help you get to your goal to be able to fund the thing that you've done.
02:55:00 That's not foreign in the black community. It's like it's existed in the Caribbean for for generations called Partner.
02:55:09 And then on the continent of Africa, literally generations is called Susu.
02:55:12 So like this coming together to like fund things is not new to us, but it's definitely an underutilized tool that you can play really, really well in, in the absence of going, you know, in the absence of venture capital.
02:55:24 And oftentimes to be able to fund your thing much faster. You look at like Angela Benton, who's been able to raise.
02:55:31 I think she's raised over a million dollars on inequity crowdfunding.
02:55:35 Max Tuckman, who we had come in and do like a learning lab for entrepreneurs, the first Latina to raise over a million dollars in equity crowdfunding.
02:55:41 So it's like definitely a possibility for these entrepreneurs to like literally use their social capital, their peer networks to raise the money that they need to do in order to grow and scale their companies or at least give them a little bit of runway while they're playing the venture game.
02:55:56 Felicia Asher, CEO of Black Ambition. Two more things to get out of here because you're CEO.
02:56:01 Right. You're busy. Right. Even though it's nighttime. It's nighttime. You're probably going to be going to bed.
02:56:05 It's a party out there. You know, looking deep into it now at that dinner, you said something that was very intriguing.
02:56:14 You said that Black Ambition, this initiative is a return on investment for our ancestors.
02:56:20 Yeah. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah. You know, there's our own. And by the way, Pharrell said he loved that you Jay-Z'd him.
02:56:25 I Jay-Z'd him. You always do that, huh? We have a thing back and forth.
02:56:29 Yeah. If you Jay-Z him, what does he do to you? Does he Deena Siegel you?
02:56:35 Maybe. Maybe. A lot. A lot. Yeah. You know, there's we often talk so much about return on investment in the business space.
02:56:45 Absolutely. It's super important. But I think from a cultural standpoint, a return on your ancestors' sacrifice is also something that's really important.
02:56:54 There are people that have come before you that you only get to do what you're doing today because of their sacrifice.
02:57:00 Right. And no matter who you are, from a cultural standpoint, what your background is, all of us owe the people before us that level of attention, care, dedication, grit and tenacity to what we're doing.
02:57:15 And so, you know, entrepreneurship will punch you in the gut more times than you can ever be able to count.
02:57:20 Like I can attest to that myself. But those moments where I wake up and I'm like, I don't really want to do this anymore.
02:57:27 I don't want to build this company anymore. Like any of those things, natural feelings that you have as an entrepreneur,
02:57:33 remembering who came before you and what they sacrificed in order to do so is really important.
02:57:39 I'm the granddaughter of a Jamaican sugar cane and yarm like farmer.
02:57:44 Like that's my history. And I know what my grandfather did so that I can actually be able to do the work that I'm doing.
02:57:50 He paid ultimate sacrifices. It was really hard walking miles in order to be able to sell his yam and his sugar cane to put a roof over my mother's head that I can actually do what I'm doing.
02:58:02 And so knowing that is a thing that is my deep why.
02:58:06 I mean, that's what I mean by making sure that we are providing a return on the sacrifice of those that have come before us that paved the way.
02:58:13 Absolutely. Always like to get CEOs and ask them because they are some of the more intelligent people.
02:58:20 Right. And you're definitely intelligent. You were studying MacGyver. By the way, did you like the car?
02:58:25 That was like really good technology. You had a car. I got in a lot of trouble.
02:58:28 I used to do all the weird stuff that MacGyver used to do. That was your favorite show.
02:58:34 Absolutely. Still is today. We are a teenager. Right. That was my favorite show.
02:58:38 I haven't watched it in years, but like hands down, I go back. I feel like I can solve any problem with the iPhone, like a rubber band in a paperclip because of MacGyver.
02:58:49 Jim Collins wrote a great book. Good to Great is my favorite business book because it really teaches you how companies make that transition and leaders how they lead.
02:58:59 What's the difference between a good CEO and a great CEO? A good CEO listens. Yeah. A good CEO, good leader listens probably more than they talk.
02:59:10 And I think that's the difference. Right. And so I'm a big person on communication as far as like words and how they have meaning and how it affects change.
02:59:22 And, you know, communication is at the top of the four highest levels of value. Imagination is number one. Communication is number two.
02:59:31 And so, you know, CEOs are vision. Why that order? And, you know, the people that come up with the ideas rule the world. Right.
02:59:38 You think of if you think about Apple. Right. Who is the most impactful person to Apple? I'm asking you to turn to Steve Jobs, I guess.
02:59:47 Why not Steve Wozniak? He actually built the technology. True. Right. Or Tim Cook. He took the company from a one trillion dollar company to a three trillion dollar company.
02:59:56 Steve Jobs didn't do that in his lifetime. Well, at that point, then I would say the customer is the biggest thing to Apple because they can do all of that without the money.
03:00:04 Steve came up with the ideas. Yeah. And that's why he's remembered and revered as being the number one top contributor to the organization.
03:00:13 And so you can have vision. But if you can't communicate that vision in order to make your team do what they need to do, you don't really have a company.
03:00:20 Right. And if you can't communicate the value to your customers, you don't have business. Right.
03:00:25 And if you can't communicate the big vision to the people when you're an entrepreneur, you don't have money.
03:00:30 You need to pull this person from like one of the top technology companies to come be your engineer.
03:00:35 That is vision at the end of the day. And so having the ideas and being able to communicate the ideas are the two highest levels of value, especially as it relates to someone that's leading a company.
03:00:45 Absolutely. So that makes a great CEO. That makes a great CEO. That's the top.
03:00:50 But there's a lot of a lot of components for sure. Absolutely. Uninterrupted CEO. An uninterrupted CEO. I like you. Felicia Astrid, thank you so much for the time.
03:00:57 Thank you so much as well.
03:00:59 Thank you.
03:01:00 Thank you.
03:01:01 Thank you.
03:01:03 Thank you.
03:01:04 Thank you.
03:01:05 [BLANK_AUDIO]

Recommended

2:06:12
I
Up next
Best Of Forbes 2023: Women In Business
Forbes
58:32
Finding the Passion and Vision for success: Interview Jerry Norton
Entrepreneur
3:12
The Top 5 Wealthiest Young Billionaires In 2024
Forbes
1:37:35
Best Of Forbes 2023: Music, Movies & Entertainment
Forbes
2:00:55
Best Of Forbes 2023: Forbes Talks
Forbes
1:45:04
Best Of Forbes 2023: Manufacturing & Industry
Forbes
1:26:36
Best Of Forbes 2023: Billionaires & Wealth
Forbes
2:40:49
Best Of Forbes 2023: Innovation, Science & Technology
Forbes
13:18
The World's Billionaires Netted A Record $14.2 Trillion. Here's How They Made Their Money
Forbes
3:14
Jay-Z, Oprah And The World’s Richest Celebrity Billionaires Of 2024
Forbes
20:04
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos Top The Forbes List Of Richest Americans | Forbes
Forbes
15:12
This Thrill-Seeking Billionaire Made a Fortune in Luxury Apartments
Forbes
2:11:55
Best Of Forbes 2023: Influencers & Internet Culture
Forbes
5:23
How Phil Knight Grew Nike Into A Multibillion-Dollar Company And Became A Billionaire In The Process
Forbes
23:29
How Diddy’s Empire Lost Millions Amid Mounting Legal Troubles
Forbes
13:45
The Shark Tank Winners Building A Billion-Dollar Bathroom Brand
Forbes
3:55
Here Are The Top 10 Richest People In The World | March 2024 | Forbes
Forbes
21:49
How America's Richest Billionaires Made Nearly $1 Trillion In A Year
Forbes
29:47
Inside Alex Cooper's $125 Million Deal To Grow Her Multi-Media Empire _ Forbes Cover Interview
Forbes
5:39
These Executives Became Billionaires While Working For Others
Forbes
16:15
Steve Ballmer On The LA Clippers New Home the 'Intuit Dome'
Forbes
22:34
How Drew Afualo Built Her Brand To Become 'Too Big To Ignore'
Forbes
8:35
Meet The New AI Robot Billionaire
Forbes
39:36
Consider These Tips For Teaching Financial Literacy To Gen Z
Forbes
20:59
The $2 Billion AI Startup That Could Replace Coders
Forbes