Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31]

My guest today is Alyssa Ravasio, co-founder and CEO of Hipcamp, a platform to discover and book your next camping trip. I was excited for this conversation as it combines two of my favorite passions – the outdoors and internet marketplaces. In our discussion, we cover how Alyssa bootstrapped demand in the early days of Hipcamp, the importance of creating not just great experiences but magical ones, and the evolution of Hipcamp’s business model. After listening to this episode, I’m sure the first thing you’ll want to do is get outside in nature. Please enjoy my conversation with Alyssa Ravasio. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Vanta. Vanta has built software that makes it easier to get and maintain your SOC 2 report at a fraction of the typical cost. Founder’s Field Guide listeners can redeem a $1k off coupon at vanta.com/patrick. ----- This episode is brought to you by DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean provides founders and creators with the platform they need to get their website and apps off the ground, all with low-bandwidth pricing to save them money over other cloud providers. If you are looking for the best place to build web apps or API backends on robust infrastructure, DigitalOcean is the place for you. They provide a fully managed solution that handles your infrastructure, operating systems, databases, and other dependencies on their new App Platform product. App Platform makes it easy to build, deploy, and scale apps. Get started for free at do.co/founders. ----- Founder's Field Guide is a property of Colossus, Inc. For more episodes of Founder's Field Guide, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Show Notes [00:02:57] - [First question] - The original insight that led to founding Hipcamp [00:06:15] - What she studied in college and primary lessons learned there [00:08:18] - Specific features of studying the internet that influenced her trajectory [00:10:14] - Deciding what to attack first when developing Hipcamp’s infrastructure [00:14:12] - Dimensions and market size of the outdoor industry [00:15:48] - Organizing fragmented data into a useable schema and data set [00:18:24] - What customers cared about most in the early days of Hipcamp [00:20:00] - Managing focus and liquidity of the initial marketplace [00:22:58] - Helping landowners manage the logistics of their property placements [00:25:16] - Liability insurance in the outdoor industry [00:27:35] - The biggest challenge faced in developing an outdoor marketplace [00:30:03] - Amplifying and accelerating naturally grooved distribution [00:32:32] - Identifying the top correlates of making magic happen [00:34:55] - An ideal future for Hipcamp five years from now [00:38:28] - What bad supply looks like and creating quality standards [00:42:08] - Their business model and revenue stream [00:44:45] - Deciding on their take rate and the debate around booking fees [00:46:14] - Lessons learned along the way as a leader [00:47:42] - Unit economics from the host’s perspective [00:52:33] - The most interesting businesses built on top of Hipcamp [00:53:35] - Why is Hipcamp’s mission so important to her [00:57:11] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for her

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

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• 0:45Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  With Vanta's continuous monitoring solution, you avoid hosting auditors on site and taking screenshots to prove that you're compliant, so you can focus on building your business. Vanta partners with audit firms who file your SOC 2 report directly inside of Vanta at a fraction of the normal cost. Hundreds of companies, including more than 100 Y Combinator businesses, are leveraging Vanta's today to streamline compliance and focus on building their businesses. Founders Field Guide listeners can redeem a $1,000 off coupon at vanta.com/patrick. That's vanta.com/patrick. This episode is brought to you by Digital Ocean. Digital Ocean provides founders and creators with the platform they need to get their website and apps off the ground, all with low bandwidth pricing to save them money over other cloud providers.

• 1:28Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If you're looking for the best place to build web apps or API backends on robust infrastructure, Digital Ocean is the place for you. They provide a fully managed solution that handles your infrastructure, operating systems, databases and other dependencies on their new App Platform product. App Platform makes it easy to build, deploy and scale apps. Or if you prefer to manage your own infrastructure, Digital Ocean provides a suite of products that gives you full control. To learn more about Digital Ocean, get started for free at do.co/founders. That's do.co/founders.

• 2:02Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs, and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way, and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. Founder's Field Guide is part of the Colossus family of podcasts, and you can access all of our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes, and resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

• 2:57Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  My guest today is Alyssa Ravasio, co-founder and CEO of HipCamp, a platform to discover and book your next camping trip. I was excited for this conversation as it combines two of my favorite passions, the outdoors and entrepreneurship. In our discussion, we cover how Alyssa bootstrapped demand in the early days of HipCamp, the importance of creating not just great experiences, but magical ones, and the evolution of HipCamp's business model. After listening to this episode, I'm sure the first thing you'll want to do is get outside in nature. Please enjoy my conversation with Alyssa Ravasio.

• 3:28Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So Alyssa, I think we need to start at the beginning. This is one I've been looking forward to because it unites probably my two top passions, the technology, software, marketplace world, and the outdoors. So I've been dying to talk to you about what you're building at HipCamp. I'd love to hear the kernel of original insight that led you to start this business as a place to jump off.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  Sure, and thanks for having me, Patrick. There were a couple important kernels. It's kind of a company that's evolved pretty organically over the years. So the original kernel for HipCamp really came as a result of, unsurprisingly, a camping trip gone slightly awry. I was very fortunate. I got to grow up spending lots of time camping with my little sisters and my parents and my friends, and it was always just this huge part of- My life and really a lot of what I looked forward to and loved most about growing up. What catalyzed hip camp was for my then boyfriend, now husband, who's from Australia and I wanted to show him the beauty of California's coast. And so I was like, you know what, I'm going to figure this camping thing out. I normally just go with my friends who do the hard work, but I'm going to do the hard work. I'm going to find the campsite and take him on this trip.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  And I just could not believe how broken and hard the process was. I almost gave up. Five different times in the process, I crashed my Chrome browser because there were too many different tabs for state parks and county parks and private parks and federal parks. It was a total mess, but I persevered and finally found a campsite at a state park called Andrew Malera. I didn't take reservations, which was good news because I took one look at the reservation website and was not willing to go there. We ended up driving down on New Year's Eve for 2013. Got to the campground, it was a beautiful spot. We got the last site actually at the campground, so we're pretty lucky. But when I walked up to the campground, everybody else at the campground, seriously, almost every single other campsite had surfboards, wetsuits, all this surfing gear.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  And we walked out to the beach and it turned out there was an incredible wave, beautiful point break, so really well formed, barreling right in front of the campground. And I had read hours about this campground. I had researched everything I could find online and no one had mentioned a surf break. And so as a huge surfer at the time, especially I was keeping my surfboard in my car. And for this camping trip, because there'd been no mention of surfing, I took it out of my car. And so I'd actually driven down to this campground without a surfboard, only to show up and find that despite all my hard work and research, I'd really missed, for me, what would have been the most important piece of information about the specific campground. So, you know, it's still a good trip, but it really highlighted for me, one, how broken the process was and two,

• 5:59Speaker 02

  how much it sucks, even when you've tried really hard to kind of end up left out and not knowing the best beta about the outdoor spot. And so driving back into San Francisco, just the next day, it was New Year's Day. It just kind of hit me, it hit me all at once, actually, where I was like, wow, hold on. Going outside is amazing and makes me happier and healthier and just a better human, I'm convinced. And it's really hard, it's way too hard to do so. The experience is broken and there's just no good technology that really makes that accessible and easy to us. So I kind of had this idea to solve getting outside with the internet. I love the internet, I created a major about it in college and I'm a big believer in its power to. Transform our culture. That was the original kernel. Let's use the internet to make getting

• 6:41Speaker 02

  outside easier for people with the belief that if it's easier, more people will go.

• 6:46Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Can you say more about what you did in college? What sparked that interest? What did you create? What's the primary lesson that you came away with?

• 6:53Speaker 02

  I went to UCLA to study film. That had been my dream since I was nine years old. My very first company was a film production company where I employed my two little sisters and we made music videos. Going to UCLA and being a film director like Francis Ford Coppola, like that was the plan. That was the dream. I got in. It was incredible. And then something very unexpected happened, which was I became obsessed with the internet. There was in particular one moment where Bran Farren, who was, I believe at the time, the head of Disney Imagineering, said that the internet is the greatest leap in technology since language itself. And just in that moment, I was like, oh, my gosh, I believe that. I think that's true. And if that is true, if that's even close to true, the next hundred years are going to be among

• 7:35Speaker 02

  the most transformative of many millennia preceding this moment in time. And how could I possibly spend my life doing anything but learning about the internet, how to harness its power and how to really shape the impact it's going to have on our culture and on our planet? And so that like was a hard right turn for wanting to make movies. And so I actually tried to pitch the film school on, hey, let me create a special major in the film program where I don't learn cinematography and directing, but instead I learn about how the internet's going to impact distribution and business models. And they were like, uh, that's not what we do here. That's not the program. And fair enough, right? They had a whole program, an incredible program built out to really focus on storytelling, the creation of film. And so it just wasn't a good fit. So I ended up, in order to get

• 8:16Speaker 02

  my degree, which I'm pretty sure that I ended up getting, actually creating a major about the internet. There's a special individual studies program where I was able to spend the last couple of years at UCLA, really handpicking classes that, by my mind and with my professor advisors sign off, constituted a major with a focus on the internet's impact on our society. So if anyone out there ever has a chance to create a major or your kids do, I think it's one of the best ways to get the most out of an educational institution because you get to learn about what you love and what grabs your interest.

• 8:50Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Was there any subsequent lightning bolt type moment in your learning in that self-directed major that got you most excited about the internet, generally speaking? So obviously, I think we all would agree with you now, like it is probably the most important invention. Is there any specific feature of it that got your attention most?

• 9:07Speaker 02

  This actually became, the name of the major was democratization. So the major actually ended up being called digital democracy. What that meant to me and what I think is so powerful about the internet is it takes opportunity and information and access that traditionally has been super limited to a few, and in many cases has been consolidating to a few, and blows that bottleneck wide open. So good examples like television, like before the internet, there was like the set number of stations. Obviously, cable TV had kind of helped expand it from a very limited number of network stations. But then the internet comes along and is like, YouTube, TikTok, everybody can have a TV channel now. That dynamic in particular to me has persisted

• 9:52Speaker 02

  across so many of the biggest trends that the internet's helped catalyze that I think really are genuinely reshaping, whether that's good and bad. One of my other big beliefs is that technology is actually neutral. I don't think internet's here to save us. I don't think that it's an incredibly positive thing that's going to fix everything. I believe it's a neutral technology. Its impact will depend on who learns to use it and what they use it for. That could look like tons of fake news completely degrading the integrity of our political system because no one has a solid set of facts to operate from anymore, or it could look like the greatest revolution we've seen in creativity with creators now everywhere telling their story and really creating a culture that has much more diversity in how we represent our lived and shared experiences.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  So it can really go either way. And that belief, I think, also was really at the core of why I decided I had to make my life about this technology. I don't believe that it's inherently good or bad.

• 10:45Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  One of my favorite things about the early internet, especially some of the companies that dominated it, was this marketplace concept. Think about eBay, you think about Craigslist as a directory. These were incredibly powerful things enabled by the internet in a really unique way. And they sort of also enabled this long tail of supply-demand matching. Hipcamp, obviously, is a marketplace. I'd love you to begin by describing like what you decided to do first. Maybe describe the marketplace even as it exists today or as it did on the first day and how it's evolved. How did you attack what to start first?

• 11:18Speaker 02

  It's evolved quite a bit. So if we zoom back to that first moment of, gosh, getting outside is hard. And if it was easier, more people would do it and the internet could solve that. The original, I don't even know if I'd call it a marketplace back then. It was really more of a discovery tool. Our goal was at that point to aggregate the existing places one might go camping. So we put the state parks and the national parks and the county parks all on one map, one easy unified interface, reviews, photos, et cetera. It was a great product. People really loved it. It solved a very real need for a community. But over the first few years, we kept hearing this feedback again and again. It was pretty scary from like an existential standpoint as a company, which was, hey, your product's cool, but everything's booked up all the time.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  So I can't actually get outside. Or when we finally would find a campground that wasn't totally at capacity and we put it on the homepage, we get hate mail. Hey, that's my spot. You're blowing up my secret spot. Why are you doing that? I hate you, Hipcamp. And I was just like, oh, my gosh. How are we ever going to fulfill our mission to get more people outside when our existing outdoor infrastructure is already chronically underfunded, which we should fix, and over capacity? How are we going to solve this problem? My first attempt was to try to convince the government to build a lot more campgrounds. I worked on that earnestly for years. Finally, due to really financial necessity and needing to find a business model to keep this company and this team and this dream going. We said, hey, let's work with private landowners. Some of them had emailed us.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  They actually reached out to us and said, hey, I've got land. It's expensive to maintain. Maybe people would want to camp here. The idea was not intuitive to me at first. I'm not ashamed to admit I had no experience getting outside on private land. So it just wasn't obvious to me that that was something that might be fun or enjoyable. But we decided to give it a try. And so that was 2016 or so. And I would say that was really when we became a marketplace. And in that moment, much like the democratization trend of the internet that we've been talking about, I realized that the existing traditional outdoor infrastructure, while amazing, one is really limited. And two, is actually often quite narrow in who it serves.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  You don't want to tent camp and sleep on the ground in a campground with a bunch of other people. Or if you don't want to backpack many miles into the wilderness and bring absolutely everything you need to support yourself for a few days, maybe getting outside isn't for you. And what happened with HipCamp, as we opened up this platform that supported now tens of thousands of entrepreneurs in creating these new outdoor experiences, we learned that there is a huge amount of demand and a huge amount of supply that's so much more diverse and so much more relevant than the traditional campground infrastructure. And so now on HipCamp, you can find a yurt with an oceanfront view and lobster that the host catches for you, brought to your door.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  You can stay in a glamping tent and go on a trail ride and learn all about rodeo culture from the father of the West Most Winning Rodeo Family. You can stay on a farm and learn about organic farming and have a farm-to-table meal and understand, you know, what a big role agriculture can play in fighting climate change. Like, that is a much broader and more, I think, relevant set of outdoor experiences than traditional campgrounds. And again, that's really what the internet makes possible. It's the democratization of that experience.

• 14:44Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Before we go a bit deeper into the business's progression itself, I'd love to ask a big question about outdoor recreation. And then also hear a bit more about actually the experience of surfacing the information, like making legible the V1 of literally just here are the campgrounds. So let's start with outdoor recreation. So one of the things you said to me ahead of time was this is a shockingly big industry. So it'd be interesting, before you give the answer for those listening, to guess what the size of the outdoor recreation industry is. But I'd love for you to walk us through that. Like, what are its components, its dimensions? And the size of the market when you explored it?

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Hopefully, everyone's got their guess ready. You'll never guess the answer. So I've actually had the good fortune of working with the Outdoor Industry Association quite a bit on this. And it turns out the outdoor industry, while a new industry, right? It's really only an industry that's been around for a few decades as like a proper industry. It's actually an $887 billion industry domestically. That's in the US alone. It employs over 7 million Americans and creates tens of billions of dollars in both federal and state taxes every year. And so it's actually this secretly just giant that's just sitting there. I think part of why it's not so well-recognized as an industry is because so many of the leaders are getting outside on their free time

• 16:03Speaker 02

  and aren't focusing on lobbying the government for subsidies or recognition or so much of what else, you know, drives recognition of other industry. But it's starting to happen. So if we zoom out 10, 20, 50 years into the future, I think the growth of this industry is going to be tremendous.

• 16:19Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So you came to this admittedly massive sort of hidden industry. I think you said, if you think about pre-COVID terms, it was bigger than like the pharmaceutical industry, like something that everyone would recognize as a huge thing. And there was no proper discovery mechanism. So again, back to the internet being democratizing, the other thing it does is make information legible in unique ways. How much of a bear was that to make happen? What was literally the process of if someone else wanted to start something where they're taking like fragmented, non-digital information and centralizing it digitally, like what is that process like?

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Super fun if you're a data nerd like me. So the first thing was to create a data schema. How are we going to organize this data? What does a proper schema look like? What's really the infrastructure in which we want to organize this data? So we were mostly focused on parks and campgrounds. And so really establishing, first of all, that hierarchy, right? There's a park that has one or many campgrounds. The campground has one or many campsites. What are the amenities that a campground might have? Like hot showers or running water? Like really establishing just that metadata, that structure that we're going to fill in. And then part of why the original Hip Camp product, despite not being a great business, was a great product, was because that data had not been structured and organized in a unified way across different agencies. And the reality is, most people don't have a strong preference. County campground, state campground, federal campground.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  They're like, I want trees and river and ocean. So like, who happens to manage the land is not always my first decision-making criteria. And so unifying that data set across different, previously separated and isolated silos of data was really helpful for people. So our process to build that data set, because we did build it from scratch. There wasn't like an easy API that I just got to pull down. My two little sisters, my original film production company employee and my best friend Natalie and I spent probably a couple of months just literally going. It's funny. We would literally go to like the state park website or the county park website. We'd often find sometimes some data on the website, but often it would be in the form

• 18:23Speaker 02

  of a PDF map. And we'd be like, is there a shower icon on the map? There it is. Okay, put yes in that Google Sheet Excel column. And then I would write a script that would pull the Google Sheet into the database. I'd recently learned how to code, partially out of wanting to create this website. And so I was good enough to do some data import. So that was literally how we built the data set originally. It was just great. I'm an organizer. I love when things are color-coded and organized and in their categories. So I got an incredible amount of pleasure from organizing the data around our parks.

• 18:55Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I love that. And I hope people listening like think about, I'm just always fascinated about these early like manual efforts in these businesses that lay the groundwork or the foundation for what comes next. When the product then was built on top of that new data schema and data set, what was most surprising to you in terms of like what people used the most or cared the most about when using the original product?

• 19:16Speaker 02

  It was actually showers shocked me and we also back then, this is another fun early great story. I somehow talked the RAI on Brandon Street in San Francisco into letting me just put like a table in front of their store. So it was just like sit there for days and and just talk to people coming in and give them, we had stickers. I'd be like, all right. Do you like to camp? If so, could you look at this website quickly? Could you give me some feedback? And I was shocked at how often, especially men would tell me they've been trying to get their girlfriend or wife to go camping with them. It's been a huge push, but she's only going to go if there's hot showers. It is like a deal breaker, which

• 19:59Speaker 02

  was surprising to me because that is certainly not a deal breaker for me. So I was like, what? There are people out there who will only camp if there's showers. And then it was cool because the data, we had some data tracking, some analytics back then. And showers became and remains one of the most widely used filters because people before hip camp did not have a unified way to say, I only want to see my camping options with showers. Thank you very much. But that became, I think, again, a way that in a little way back then, we just made the outdoors a lot more accessible to people.

• 20:32Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I've learned some large percentage of what I know about marketplaces from Sarah Tavell, one of your investors and board member. And one of the things that always stands out is the importance of focus and liquidity of the marketplace in the early days. How did you manage that problem to make sure that one, you were surfacing supply, but also that there was demand that would care, that would start to precipitate the classic marketplace dynamic and flywheel?

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Chicken and egg.

• 20:57Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Yes, the proverbial.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  I wish I could tell you this was my like brilliant master plan and it worked so well, but this was a beautiful accident, I'd say. Because we started by aggregating existing public campgrounds.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  We bootstrapped demand. We had demand. People liked the product. They understood how valuable it was to have that unified data set and infrastructure and interface to look at all their camping options across different government agencies. When we began working with private land, it was as simple as just slotting them in there and making them visible to our community. So because we already had the demand community, our very first host is another fun grit story. A beautiful ranch in Northern California. They have, I think it's about three hundred acres and a beautiful world-class fly fishing river running right down the middle of it. We got them to join by convincing Mountain Hardware to purchase fifteen thousand dollars worth of camping from them.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Basically pre-booking for a lot of the dates of their summer. It was amazing because Mountain Hardware really was helpful in like launching the concept, introducing the category, getting some of that initial awareness, but we were also just able to put their ranch on our search results and people started booking it right away. So I think getting that demand going put us in a position to create a lot of value for our landowners, for our hosts, for our partners there right away. And that was really important because then that host was like completely blown away at how much money they made that first summer. They actually told me at the end of the summer, he is a father of a few children. He said, this property, fun fact, won in a dice game during the gold rush era by his great-great-grandfather. Been in the family for hundreds of years, no real like

• 22:36Speaker 02

  clear intention or purpose for it, but they don't want to sell it. They love it. And he said, up until finding Hip Camp, this property's always felt like a bit of a liability. I've been worried to pass it on to my children because the cost of land management, especially in the West with all of the fire danger that we have, because most landowners are completely financially responsible for dealing with any fire management prevention or fire risk. It's really scary. I don't know if my kids are going to be able to keep this land in their family. I don't want to put the pressure on them. I don't want to create this hard situation for them where they have to sell or not sell. Hip Camp has flipped this property from a liability to an asset that I'm going to be proud to hand down to my children. And that was like our first customer four months in. And so I think being able to create

• 23:18Speaker 02

  that much value and unlock that much value on what was previously a fairly underutilized asset, certainly the most valuable asset that they owned as a family. That was only possible because we bootstrapped demand so effectively leading up to that moment.

• 23:30Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I love the idea of come for the tool, stay for the marketplace, or stay for the network and a unique way of aggregating the demand early on. Walk us through the, maybe we could use like a reference point that everyone will get. So like Airbnb, you go stay somewhere, you pay a nightly rate. I don't know what the range is or the average. There's maybe a lockbox or something. There's amenities. Land or a camping sites like very different. Like there's no key to get in. What are like the logistics that you had to build out to help landowners manage access to their property? And like, what were the just the unique aspects where Airbnb would start to fail as an analogy?

• 24:02Speaker 02

  The biggest one is that a lot of hip camps exist in places where cell phone service doesn't work. Early on, we didn't have a mobile app. We actually only built our mobile app, let's see, a year and a half ago. And part of why we waited so long to build the mobile app is we created this very funny solution of just relying heavily on SMS. So if we knew you were going hip camping, let's say tomorrow, we would text you all the directions, all the access instructions and be like screenshot this, or luckily, you know, people can access their text history even without cell service. So we knew they could get to it. Whereas like if we had just emailed that to people, depending on your email client, you might not be able to load your email out of the wilderness.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  So we pretty quickly moved to SMS. It's also one of the primary ways our hosts still interact with hipcamp, even though we have an app now. For a lot of them, the SMS is still actually the primary interface. So I think just really paying attention to the reality on the ground and with any market, but since it has an offline component. My strong perspective is that your product, it is that offline experience. Your website and all the apps are important products, but they really serve as ways for people to access the real product, which is this outdoor experience. And so SMS was a huge part of the solution there. And then we have a lot of gate code access instructions. And so you can imagine if you don't have the gate code and you drive up to a gate at 9pm on a Friday, that's a big problem without cell phone service. So we've

• 25:28Speaker 02

  just invested a lot in building, again, really structured data that our hosts really fill in. Do you have a gate code? What is it? Okay, here you go. Making sure that campers don't get that until it's time for them to arrive, but making sure they get it so that they can actually access the property even without service. So it continues to be a big learning process, but that was a huge part of the original learning curve.

• 25:47Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It also seems like other unforeseen problems would arise, given the nature of what they're doing outdoors, like things like injuries or safety, or what have you learned about other unique aspects of being outdoors versus indoors and things that might map back onto the hip camp experience, or even like things like liability?

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Getting our insurance policy, which covers our hosts for any liability incident, was just a huge milestone for the company. And it was pretty hard at first. We finally connected with an amazing advisor, Sarah Swenson, who had helped build a marketplace for boat rentals, a peer-to-peer marketplace for boat rentals. She was able to connect us to an insurance broker who's fantastic. And they were like, we got you. Don't worry. Previously, we were letting random people rent other random people's watercraft. So like, this is easy. I remember the day we got insurance, because we were able to call up all these landowners who we talked to, who were like, I can't do this until you guys can protect me. And I get them all signed up right away. I think actually in law school, there's like some case studies they go through where it's like, someone trust passed onto

• 26:48Speaker 02

  someone's land and broke their leg and still sued the landowner somehow. Like, it's just crazy how a lot of legal structures build around liability on land. And so having that policy has been critical there. I would say another big, interesting learning for us as a company and as a community has been our mission, which is get more people outside. Intrinsicly involves making the outdoors accessible to people who aren't already experienced and educated outdoors people. So that leads to all sorts of interesting moments of people who, maybe they don't actually know how to pitch a tent. Maybe they don't actually know how to light a campfire or manage it safely. And so we've just invested a lot in education. We're proud members of the Rec Great Responsibly Coalition. We've got all sorts of educational

• 27:31Speaker 02

  touchpoints, both in our checkout flow and after you make a booking, where we're really bringing people along on this outdoor journey and trying the best we can to be a surrogate or a stand-in for having that parent or that friend who taught you all those things at some point in your life. And often our hosts step in as well. I talk to hosts all the time who will see a hip camper group that can't get their tent up or can't get their fire started. And they'll kind of be like, hey, I don't mean to intrude, but if you need some help, I'd love to help. And for some of our hosts, that's like their favorite part of hosting. It's really being part of The movement to get people outside and introducing more people to how to do so safely and responsibly.

• 28:07Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I love that. And again, you said luckily, because of the tool you had solved often the most challenging part of marketplace, which is aggregating the demand, you could get the thing going. So if you think about that first client and then project forward 18 or 24 months, in that initial period of building the proper marketplace, what was the hardest challenge that you faced that you had to overcome?

• 28:27Speaker 02

  I don't know if we've overcome it. I think it continues to be our hardest challenge, which is just reaching landowners. In general, we continue to have far more demand than supply. There are way more people who want to get outside on a beautiful piece of land where they have space to themselves and often a really unique experience, be that beautiful glamping tent or access to a farm stand with fresh meat and produce from the land on which they're staying. People want that. That's kind of an easy sell. What's been more challenging as a company is how do we reach these landowners in a way that's scalable, makes sense financially,

• 29:08Speaker 02

  and also kind of sets people up in the right mindset to be good members of the community and kind of show up in the right way. Because landowners in general are just, they're hard to reach. They're not spending lots of time on their computer or watching TV or reading magazines. Like, they have land to manage. They're out on the land doing lots of work. And so just figuring out how to reach these people, that has been our biggest challenge. It continues to be our biggest challenge. I have a hard time imagining it won't always be our biggest challenge. I just think it's structurally what's so challenging about building this company. And look, we've made a ton of great progress on it. The primary way we reach landowners today, and this has been consistent for a long time, is just through

• 29:49Speaker 02

  word of mouth. And surprisingly, of course, sometimes landowners join and they make lots of money and they're really excited and they start talking about it. Especially if we have density in a local area, word gets out, we really can see a market start to take off that way. But more often than not, it's actually somebody goes hip camping, their eyes are open to this new type of outdoor experience, and then on the drive home, they call their dad, they call their aunt. They call their older brother and they're like, hey, this is perfect for you. This solves that problem we've been talking about for years about you don't know how you're going to make the blueberry farm work, but you don't want to sell it. This could work. This could be the answer. So demand creates supply wasn't something we kind of originally anticipated, but has ended up being a really important part of what's keeping the flywheel accelerating.

• 30:35Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  How would you suggest other entrepreneurs facing something similar? So trying to figure out how to solve a distribution problem, recognize that it's the nephew calling the aunt and then pouring fuel on that fire. Like, what does that look like? How have you tried to amplify or magnify the naturally grooved pattern of distribution to make it go faster? And maybe even like strategically, how do you think about it as a leader?

• 30:59Speaker 02

  I like that framing of natural groove. I'm a big believer that as entrepreneurs, we're not, you hear the term builder a lot, and I think that's true, but I often view it as more of a sculptor, chipping away parts of a block to see what might be possible to exist underneath. And there's just this intrinsic shape of the market that I'm not always going to be able to impact and certainly not create from scratch. And landowners just being kind of hard to reach is one of those things. It's just, it is what it is. I can't just spend $10 million on ads next year and expect that to completely transform. So for us, it's manifested in a couple of ways. Simple things like referrals and adding calls to action to do referrals in the right place in the life cycle, if that's obvious. It's also led to something we always have cared about a lot, but now see through a

• 31:44Speaker 02

  new light, which is just recognizing that the difference between a good experience and like a magical experience is everything. So when people have that truly magical experience as a hip camper, someone getting outside on the platform, those are the people who call their family members and their friends. And who are really kind of just being maniacally obsessed about what makes that experience magical? How can we make that happen as often as possible? That has become more front and center. And then, of course, you know, always thinking of ways like, for lack of a better word, to kind of hack the system is really good, too. So one example of that is local press for us. So, right, it takes time for people to actually go hip camping or bring their friends, et cetera. How do we reach those people faster?

• 32:26Speaker 02

  Getting an incredible article that really explains the company and what we do and the mission. That also can lead people to go call their family member or their friend. And so often when I hear somebody say, my family member or my friend called me. That's why I decided to sign up as a host on HipCamp. And I ask them, where did they hear about us? Often it's because they want hip camping, but increasingly because we're investing more in press. It's like, oh, I think they saw an article in Self Magazine. And not many landowners are going to read Self Magazine, but their nieces, nephews, daughters, sons. They might. So figuring out how to hack and kind of find more ways to kick off the flywheel that you know is working. It's been big for us too.

• 33:04Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  How do you know when magic has happened and what have been the top correlates to magic?

• 33:09Speaker 02

  It's actually a big data science question for us right now. What we see happen is someone will make another booking right away. Like in the first couple of days they get back. That's pretty obvious, but I would say so much of it comes down to the host. Are they someone who's really being thoughtful about creating an experience in a way that's going to become magical or has the potential to? And then of course the land. If you have like 200 acres to yourself with a private waterfall and a swimming hole, even if the gate code was wrong and you had to wait an hour, you probably show up and you're like, this is the best thing ever. It's a really good question because I can tell you, like I go to hip camps all the time. Of course I talk to hosts all the time. I feel it, like you just feel it, it's no.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  But we do need to allow the data science model to not only be able to better predict which hosts are going to be able to facilitate that experience, but also to help the whole community get closer to that and then really help them understand. It's not like, oh, if you have showers, that's the thing. That's going to create the magical experience. It's more of this kind of aggregate emergent result of where expectations set in a way that they were eventually exceeded. Through one way, shape or form or another. That's been a big one. And then, you know, I would also say the more thought and uniqueness a host really instills into the experience, I think the higher likelihood of really creating that experience. So for example, I was recently at a hip camp up in Oregon.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  This host has probably a hundred, 200 acres along a river, but they built out this incredible, it's a wellness themed hip camp. There's outdoor saunas, there's outdoor bathtubs right on the river. There's a tea house. And so when you stay there, you're just kind of walking into this beautiful woman. Her name's Mia. She actually has a festival called Spirit Weavers with like thousands of women every year, and you're really getting to walk into her worldview of how people might enjoy the land. And it's just so radically different from a traditional campground or like something else you've probably seen in the outdoors, that those experiences too can be quite transcendent and that you're like, whoa, like this is also, I can be sitting outside in a bath filled with rose petals and then step inside and have a chamomile tea that was grown on the

• 35:21Speaker 02

  herb garden along the river. And like, that's getting outside too. Like, that's interesting. That's magical.

• 35:27Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It's so interesting that your challenge is just getting to them in the first place is the challenge, but then also sort of, I guess, nudging them in the right direction to create these magical experiences. What does that mean for, if you think about like the next five years? If you squint and think of the absolute coolest version of what this has become, in what ways do you think that is most different than what it is today?

• 35:49Speaker 02

  There's at least a couple answers to that. One, I would love for Hip Camp to truly fulfill the potential of making the outdoors feel accessible, even in popular times of year. Because right now, the reality is unfortunately, we sell out early for a lot of our best spots for a lot of the year. I was at a conference that Andreessen Horowitz hosted, and it was really cool for me because obviously a specific demographic, but so many people knew about Hip Camp. They're like, I love Hip Camp. Hip Camp's great. By the way, you know that all your stuff gets sold out around the Bay Area all the time, right? And I was like, I know, we're working on it. And that kind of defeats the purpose of what we want to do. If we're just yet another sold out, hard to get into outdoor experience, we haven't really fulfilled what's possible here about making the outdoors feel truly easy for you to get access to on a regular basis.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  So. That's one big one. Another one that's really important to me and really coming into focus just in the last six months or so is building a community that is truly global first. I really, really don't want to have an American company that happens to be in other countries. To me, the opportunity here to build a community that's global in nature, that cares about the land, that is protective of the outdoors, that's such a big opportunity that I just don't want to miss it. And so over the next five years, expanding into lots of different countries in a way that's truly respectful of those countries, different lands and cultures like that to me is one of the coolest versions that this can become. You know, imagine going to Japan and getting to stay on a tea farm

• 37:18Speaker 02

  and going to Costa Rica and staying in the jungle in a treehouse. Like having those truly authentic experiences where, you know, much like the wellness themed hip camp in Oregon, you can step into someone's worldview and really experience what they think is possible for how people and the land might coexist and see that across the world. I'm personally very excited about that, obviously. And I think as our business has shown from a financial and from just a growth standpoint, it's a huge opportunity. Prior to COVID, we had markets in the United States. They're only available in the US. We had markets in the US where over a third of the people booking were coming from other countries. And so we know that this is a business that over time is going to trend towards global network effects kind of community. And so building into that over the next few years is super important to me.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  Right now, we're really focused on outdoor stays. That includes tent camping, RV camping, and then of course, structures. So glamping, cabins, yurts. Our hosts all the time are just pulling us and saying, hey, I host amazing weekend workshops on harvesting lavender and distilling the lavender into essential oil. Or I do an incredible outdoor dinner with like a live band and I'm only 30 minutes outside of Nashville. And like, can hip camp please become a home for all these ways that people might want to get outside, be it something where they're spending the night or just coming for a dinner or potentially coming for a whole week. I think over time, building out a platform that's truly about connecting people in the land

• 38:46Speaker 02

  and all the ways that might happen is both an important way for us to create value for our hosts, but also an important way to really build a community that uses the platform in a way that is most relevant to them. Not everybody wants to sleep outside all the time, you know?

• 39:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I for one can't wait for all three and I know you're a supply constrained and that's a key part of the story here. Even with that in mind, what is bad supply? What are the things that you've had to say no to? Like you are having a point of view and saying, no, this does not belong on the platform, even if it wants to be.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  I actually have a bit of trauma around this one still. It's so interesting. Marketplaces, when they're working, if you're not careful, they can really get away from you. And that actually happened to us in 2018. We found Facebook ads. Ooh. And we were like, wow, look at all this supply we can create so quickly. This is amazing. What have we been doing? Calling all these landowners. Let's just buy ads. Facebook ads are actually still an important part of our strategy as other digital average. By the time we were just kids in a candy store, as one of our investors calls it, the crack. You got hooked on the crack. Little girly.

• 39:51Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Sounds about right.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. We were able to grow supply really quickly. It was very exciting. It's only really our second or third year of doing this. We were like, we figured it out. We've cracked the code. And then this weird thing happened where the average percentage of people leaving a positive review started dipping. The ratio of safety or experience issues where people had a bad enough experience, they were reaching out to our support team, started increasing. And we started hearing from local regulators who were concerned about what we were doing for the first time ever. And all of this started happening kind of at once, really quickly. As so many of these things happen, you have this just random, call it random, call it coincidence, because you have this moment where you're just in the right place at the right time. And in this case, I was in LA, I think for maybe

• 40:35Speaker 02

  like an interview, maybe like a news thing. I wanted to find a hip camp to stay at that night. So I was just in LA and I was like, you know, maybe I'll just drive out of the city for a couple hours. I had the time and I'll find a cool ranch to stay on in Malibu or out in, out in the mountains. My feed, my search result, I was in West Hollywood at the time, became populated with driveways, a parking lot in Hollywood where you could sleep in bunk beds someone had put in a semi truck. Stuff that while technically, I guess, was like outdoor accommodations, was just not about nature, not about the land and not about getting upside. And it had some traction, by the way. And so that was the thing, our previous quality metrics to that point in time, we had QA, we were looking at listings, but as long as

• 41:18Speaker 02

  they were getting booked, we were like, okay, I guess the community wants them. Like, we don't want to have too heavy of a hand and saying yes, no, yes, no. But that experience changed me forever. I was actually, I think, on the phone with Sarah, or I called her right after Sarah Taplet Benchmark. And I was like, oh, my gosh, you have no idea how people are using Hip Camp here. This is so weird. I just don't think this is right. And it was one of the hardest decisions that I had to make as a CEO, but we ended up creating a set of host standards. We created new requirements, like you've got to have at least two acres, in addition to many other things. And then we actually went through the very painful process of offboarding about a quarter of our community. About one in four hosts, we had to do, and we called them all. It was terrible. We had to call them. Hey, we're so sorry. We know that this is probably creating some level of value for

• 42:02Speaker 02

  you, but this actually isn't in line with our standards. And here's our standards, and here's where you don't map. In some cases, people were able to close the gap, and in some cases, they weren't. It was a hard experience. They made 2019, at least the first half of the year, a pretty hard year for growth, because we were already supply constrained, and then just had offboard a quarter of the supply we had. But it was absolutely the right decision. And it allowed us in 2019 to build much stronger processes around quality control, around looking for those early indicators. We now have a whole system set up where if we see someone who has enough of those kind of indicators early on, where we're looking at them proactively and having those conversations. And it allowed us to build a much higher quality supply base.

• 42:40Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It's an incredible story, because it reminds me of Matt Mullenweg, the WordPress founders. There's some balance between like centralization, decentralization, like open, closed networks, and that the problem with open networks is that some weird, bad stuff can start to happen. And the quality filter almost necessarily is a centralized function employed by someone with a point of view. And there's a happy medium. It's an amazing story for other entrepreneurs. I would love to understand the business model itself, and it might be a remarkably simple and short answer, which is there's GMV, or I don't know what you call it, there's bookings, gross bookings, and you take a percentage of the bookings. Is that about as straightforward as it comes? And is there anything you've learned about the nuances of that marketplace model, whether that's take rate or something

• 43:23Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  else that you think is potentially valuable to other entrepreneurs out there?

• 43:28Speaker 02

  Our business model is exceedingly simple, which I'm very proud of. We have GMV, so gross marketplace volume. We take a percentage of every booking and that is our only revenue stream. We have said no many times over to advertising or any, it's just like, no, focus. Like this is an incredible, scalable business model, has very excellent margins. Like let's focus on scaling this one model. So it's pretty simple business. This is actually fairly recent, a really interesting and powerful thing we're gonna have to reckon with, which is that our platform, as we start to build out more and more tools and functionality, is now able to serve a more professional host. So previously, the average host on HipCamp has about two sites, but half of them only have one on their whole property.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  And for those hosts in general, I'll talk to them, even the really successful ones. And I'll often ask like, hey, what do you think about our take rate? Should it be lower? And they're like, no. I'd rather you spend more on building messaging in the mobile app for me or something. And I was like, okay, okay, that makes sense. Now, as our platform gets more professionalized, our customer base is starting to move that way too. And so now we have hosts, in addition to these, you know, incredible new hosts, that actually have full camping businesses. They have 50 different sites across hundreds of acres. They have 100 sites. And they're coming in with a whole new expectation of what they want from us, business model wise. And I think one big thing we've been reckoning with is how do we work with partners

• 44:54Speaker 02

  who are able to generate a lot of their own demand? So for a lot of these businesses, there's not great campground booking software out there. They want to use HipCamp for their whole business, but they've got a big website. They've got a big Instagram. They're sending us business all day, every day. They're like, we don't want to pay you that take rate. That's kind of crazy. And so we've started to really have those conversations. And I think over time, we'll just have to develop different business models for different types of hosts.

• 45:16Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Anything else interesting about take rate? Can you share your take rate? I don't know if it's public information. And how did you think about setting it?

• 45:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's actually changed a bit. I think originally we charged 20% or 15% to our hosts and we had no booking fees. I don't like booking fees.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  I thought it was cool. I was like a customer. I don't know. It's like always one of the most annoying things on Airbnb to me as like when you find something amazing and then you're like, that is so different from the price I saw on the search page. And look, HipCamp does that too now because it makes sense. So here's why. So we started that way. And in my mind, I was like, well, look, these hosts should recognize the logic and wanting to build a notebooking fee platform, and they should just charge more. Well, what actually happened was a huge amount of our early hosts were like, this is so unfair. Why do we have to pay the full fees? Why are the campers getting to pay nothing? That feels like not the sharing economy. Sharing economy should be shared fees.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  And so we ended up piloting, started as a pilot where we then took that fee. So our total take rate's a little over 20%. And we split it. So it's about 10% on the host side. And then like a similar amount varying on the size of transaction, right? For a bigger transaction, you take less. For a small transaction, you take more on the demand side. And there was no impact to conversion on checkout. That was a really good learning for the company. It was a good moment of humility for me where you kind of come in with this religion and then you just, you got to pay attention to what the community's saying and what the data's saying and you change your mind.

• 46:45Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What have you learned most about leadership inside the company and in the ecosystem in general? So I guess a fun way of asking the question is like a rate of change or something where if you compare yourself today as a leader relative to day one, when HipCamp was incorporated, in what ways have you changed the most in the right direction?

• 47:05Speaker 02

  Oh, so many. One of my favorite things about startups, and this is true for the founder, and this is true for all team members, is that startups are pressure cookers. And thus they're accelerators for people, much like YC is an accelerator for startups. You just grow so fast, especially in a company that's growing. So there's a lot of, gosh, there's a lot of ways to answer that. I'll do a couple. The one that comes first to mind actually is around the importance of taking care of myself and showing up with the ability to be in peak performance mode. That's the biggest one. Probably like lots of entrepreneurs, my first few years were characterized by really late nights and takeout at like nine thirty and like, I grew up an athlete

• 47:49Speaker 02

  and I just like stopped exercising, don't have time for that. Where that got me in pretty short order was just really stressed out, not able to have access to my higher cognitive functions that are required of a CEO or any leader, needing to make hard decisions. And just in general, not able to really function at the level that the company needed me to. And so I had, actually got shingles.

• 48:13Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It's like the more painful chicken pox, yeah, for adults.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  What's so shocking about it is it really shouldn't happen until you're really, really old, because it's a signal that your immune system was so suppressed that this virus, it's been in your body for decades. It's like, now is our moment, let's go. And it happened when I was like twenty five, okay? And I'm so grateful. I had a good doctor who was like, this should not happen. What the heck is going on in your life? Let's talk about what's happening in your life. That was a good little wake up call for me. And I think it's just been incredible and feels so obvious. I remember reading around that same time that Richard Branson's number one advice to entrepreneurs was exercise. This is top piece of advice. It's just been incredible learning how, for me, it was meditation, it was exercise, it was eating healthier, it was never compromising on

• 49:00Speaker 02

  sleep. I stopped using alarm clocks. I'm an early riser by nature, so I can do that. I don't set alarm clocks, I haven't for years, so that I can let my body take what it needs in terms of sleep. And that has been probably the single greatest transformation to my ability to be a great CEO.

• 49:14Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If you think about the potential supply that might be listening to this, describe a little bit what this feels like to the average host. How much is one of these things average booked for? Like, is it comparable to Airbnb? Like, what are the sort of economics that you see from the host's perspective that you think are generally representative?

• 49:33Speaker 02

  I would say there's a couple of ways in which a host really experiences hip camp and feels this. One is that it's just amazing to get to share your land with other people and watch them enjoy it and be part of that experience. So for a lot of our hosts, they join because they're interested in the finances and then end up staying. Of course, the income's helpful, but they also end up staying because they're like, wow, I'm like helping these poor, nature-starved city people, like, actually relax. I hear all the time, people are like, I love looking at how people look when they show up and how different they look when they leave. Their hair's down, they're smiling, their face looks different, they're holding their partner's hand. Like, getting to be part of holding space for people to have that critical restorative time that's so hard to find often in our culture today.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  That's some of the stuff that I hear our hosts really be the proudest of. I also hear them talk a lot about how much it impacts them and their family to have cool, urban people coming to the land all the time and bringing ideas and contacts and information. We hear all the time that hip camp hosts have their children, who previously had left home, come back. Because now there's like cool people on the ranch to hang out with and there's a business to manage and there's an economic future that actually is enticing and interesting. My head of host told me recently that her kids, she's a farmer, and her kids previously have been really embarrassed to be farmers. They viewed it as lesser than and they were the dirty kids and whatever. Then all these city kids come and they're like, seeing that they know how to like harvest chicken eggs

• 51:00Speaker 02

  from the coop and like take the goats out to the field and now they're like proud to be farmers. They're like, this is amazing. Seeing yourself through someone else's eyes, especially in a country that for some reason has really looked down on the people who are taking care of land, which is ridiculous. For a long time, it's powerful. And then, of course, the financial side is critical as well. So I think for your average host, it really depends on location. We have hosts that earn well into six figures. And are able to really drive a lot of that income. That tends to be the hosts who are really close to urban areas or really close to the entrance to a big national park. In one of those two areas, your earning opportunity, you know, absolutely is in the tens of thousands of dollars

• 51:40Speaker 02

  a year, if not hundreds. The more general host who's in an area, you still have the opportunity to generate thousands of dollars a year. We have an average order value around a hundred to $200. So it's still a nice chunk of cash. And I think what's really powerful about an outdoor type of experience, there's no sheets to change, not like a bathroom to clean. And so I think having a lower effort way to generate income off the land is really important. And so for a lot of our hosts, they'll actually start with just RVs and vans. And for the most part, those are self-contained. And so you really don't have to invest in infrastructure. There's not much cleanup. You just get to start earning income off of your land, this giant underutilized

• 52:22Speaker 02

  asset. And then one incredible trend we see that a lot of our hosts experience is like they're smart entrepreneurs. They see their customer, they understand their business. They might start with RVs and then they earn, you know, $10,000, $15,000. And they're like, hmm, I think I'm gonna build a couple tent platforms and an outdoor shower. Hmm, even to build an outdoor kitchen. Hmm, I think I'm gonna build a cabin or a treehouse. And so our average host earns three times as much in their second year as their first year.

• 52:46Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Wow.

• 52:47Speaker 02

  Five times as much in their third year, seven times as much in their fourth year, and 15 times as much in their fifth year.

• 52:54Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  That's incredible.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  They use the platform and they build these businesses, often using the money they've earned from their first couple of years, either by adding more sites or upgrading the inventory that they have.

• 53:04Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What's been the most interesting business that you've seen built on top of Hip Camp in this way?

• 53:10Speaker 02

  One that's coming to mind actually is a glamping retreat. It's just south of the Bay Area in Pescadero. One of her big focuses is on equine healing. So she sells alongside your Hip Camp, we do have the feature now where you can add on extra experiences or products or services. And she actually sells equine therapy. And so you can go spend time with these horses and she actually leads you through a session where you really get to get in touch with how you're feeling. Horses are amazing mirrors for people. They can tell if you're nervous. They can tell if you're scared. They can tell if you're worried. Sometimes just being seen by that horse is incredibly healing. So she's had children come. Who are autistic and really struggling with communication who leave being able to

• 53:53Speaker 02

  talk from a couple sessions with horses. And that to me, like, I knew nothing about that whole space. And it's been a huge part of, I think, what's really driven the success of her hip camp and her platform. And it's been pretty mind opening for me to get to learn about.

• 54:07Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I'd love to close with a couple of thoughts on the mission itself. Get more people outside. Can't imagine a mission I would be more aligned with. On the face of it, it's great. Why do you think that's so important? From the personal level up to, say, the societal level? Like, what are the reasons that that mission is so important to you?

• 54:23Speaker 02

  On a personal level and on a human, like, micro level. And I think the science is now really proving this, which is exciting. When people get outside, they become happier, healthier versions of themselves. And again, the science is just showing this to be true now. Back when we started the company, it was more of a personal belief that I now feel I'm like, okay, good, it's validated science. So I think just from a like, overall wanting people to be happy and enjoy their lives, getting more people outside is just a really high leverage way to encourage that and really make that possible for people. That's a big one. And I think that's really at the core of why this matters so much to me. And then if we zoom out to a macro level, it's really important as really the catalyst for one

• 55:05Speaker 02

  of my big theories of change, maybe my biggest theory of change, which is that when people get outside, there's this phenomenon known as biophilia. It's a theory postulated by E. Wilson, who I think is one of our greatest living scientists, grandfather of biodiversity and a lot of the conservation science we use today. And the theory is that people have an innate love for nature. And when you go outside, when you spend time with plants and with animals, and when you see beautiful rivers and trees, there's just something inside of you that's like, just kind of naturally falls in love with it. Like, you can't help it. And so when we get more people outside. That biophilia phenomenon occurs and people just fall in love with nature. It doesn't happen every person, every time, right? You need to be comfortable, you need to feel safe. A lot of things get in the way of that.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  But for most people, most of the time, you get outside, you're going to fall in love with nature. That's just the general shape of the dynamic. And then what's so important about that, especially given everything happening on our planet today, is we protect what we love. Okay? So when we fall in love with nature, we develop the motivation that we need to then figure out what we might do in our own lives and our own crazy hectic experiences on this earth to protect it. And that's going to look different for everybody. But I think so much of what I see happening around climate change today, around biodiversity loss today, is really fear driven. People are destroying the earth, you're the problem. Shower less, eat less meat, drive a Tesla. And you're just like, god damn it.

• 56:33Speaker 02

  Like, it gets really depressing to be told to just get smaller all the time. And when you also look at the numbers and you see population rise and you see how many billions of people want to live like you and I do with refrigerators and cars. This whole idea that by being slightly less incrementally bad, we're going to solve the problem is just ridiculous on its face value. And so I think instead, coming from a place of love and a love for the outdoors, and then really figuring out how you can develop your own system of having a positive impact on the world. To me, that's a much stronger way to create change on the world. And so that might look like learning how to compost or planting a certain species to support the monarch butterfly or figuring out a local stream that needs your help cleaning it up to support the local fish or frog. Like, it can look like anything.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  I really believe that figuring out how to have a positive impact, we say leave it better, which is really a very intentional play on leave no trace. There's so much great stuff about leave no trace, but if you look at how many people there are on the earth, we need to do better than leave no trace. It's not actually really realistic at this point. We need to figure out how to be net positive to the earth. And I think that's possible. We're only going to get there if people can really fall back in love with nature and come from that place of wanting to protect what they care about.

• 57:42Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Well, I absolutely love it. What a mission. So enjoy the conversation today. I asked the same closing question of everybody and I was to ask, what is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

• 57:52Speaker 02

  This was very recent. I feel like I'm the recipient of lots of kindness, but this was very recent. I was sitting on a rock at the end of my street here and was having a really hard day. I'd had one of those days where you just realize a couple of big, hard things need to happen that you don't want to do, but they need to happen. And you're just like, damn it. And I was actually crying. I was talking to my coach and just like, working through things. This woman just pulled over her car, walked right up to me and handed me this little silver heart. And she was like, you looked like you needed this. Remember that life is good. And I was like, wow, you had no idea how much I needed that. Thank you.

• 58:33Speaker 02

  Never seen her again since. I live in a very small, like thousand person farming. Never seen her again since. I still have the heart here on my desk and just seeing how much a random person who's never seen someone before can just want to put themselves out there, be a total awesome weirdo for a few minutes in order to make someone feel a little better. That really touched me.

• 58:52Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Well, I hope everyone listening goes and tries this particular product out. Couldn't agree more that on the individual and the macro level, this is a huge force for good. It's like one of those few things that there's not a counter argument for, which is great. Really have enjoyed our time together. Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule.

• 59:07Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 59:09Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  This episode was brought to you by Vanta. In this five-part mini-series, I sit down with Vanta CEO Christina Kachopo to hear about the origins of Vanta, how Vanta is automating security, and when companies should look to partner with Vanta. In this week's episode, Christina and I discuss the critical junctures for when a company should start thinking about security, how Vanta works with international customers, and the future of Vanta. So if I'm the CEO of a company, not the CTO, but the CEO, how should I be thinking about this? Like, at what point should I be worried about this? Not just as something that I need to do. So we've already talked about how at some point, someone's going to ask me for a SOC 2. That would certainly create behavior. But but ahead of that, how should I think about this, working with my engineering team

• 59:55Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  in terms of when to think about security and where?

• 59:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great question. So our broad advice is you should startups are a game of prioritization. And so you should prioritize this against everything else you're doing, which is probably a tremendous amount. And you should think of a SOC 2 or these security certifications as powerful tools to grow your business. So whether it is, we have some customers that do this early before their competitors and use as a competitive advantage and sort of let them appear a little bigger than they are. And their talk track to their buyers is something like, they just lead with it, right? So, hey, we're a HR tool. We take data really seriously and data privacy really seriously. Here's all the things we've done. Here's our SOC 2. Let me know if you have questions. We have other folks who push it off a little bit because they do have other priorities. And that's definitely something

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  you can do. But we've just seen people have tremendous success doing this early and then using it as like a real growth tool for their business.

• 1:00:48Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  We're living in an increasingly global world. Lots of companies doing business across borders. How should either international CEOs or companies outside the US or companies in the US that are dealing with international customers, what new us does that introduce to the security equation?

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'll give you the way we thought about this when we were developing Vanta. And Vanta, we took Vanta to market with SOC 2 as the first product. And the reason we did that is because SOC 2 is an American certification. And so it's what the American buyers ask for. There's a European version ish of SOC 2. It's called ISO 2701. Vanta now supports it. But honestly, the reason that was our second standard and not our first is because the center of the software market is the United States. And if you're selling to Americans, I say this is an American, Americans kind of think they're the center of the world. So they will ask you to get their certification. They will not care as much that you have the European one or the Singaporean one or whatever it is.

• 1:01:45Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If you look out, let's say 10 years. So we squint, look out 10 years. Describe this data Vanta to me. What would be successful in your mind, not just for the company, but for the way in which it's affected the security and software ecosystem?

• 1:01:57Speaker 03

  The world we're trying to bring about is have the software industry think about the security of the software it's making on a continuous basis. And we think the way to do that is really at the incentive level. And when your purchasers of software have a bunch of leverage. And so, again, we think they should be concerned about the security of the software they're buying. They are and will be concerned about protecting the customer data that's been entrusted to them. Vendor breaches are more and more of an issue. And so, just in response to that, having us all think about the security of software on this holistic, continuous level, not as a, again, once a year audit based on screenshots. It just seems like a silly way to do things.

• 1:02:36Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Well, it seems like just a totally critical part of the increasingly digital world we're living in and software governing more of our day to day lives. Thanks so much for doing this with me, Christina.

• 1:02:46Speaker 03

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 1:02:48Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If you enjoyed this episode, check out joincolossus.com. There you'll find every episode of this podcast, complete with transcripts, show notes, and resources to keep learning. You can also sign up for our newsletter, Colossus Weekly, where we condense episodes to the big ideas, quotations, and more, as well as share the best content we find on the internet every week.