Pod Insights The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch 20VC: The Story of Turning Around MTV, AOL and Time Warner | How To Be Effective When Making Hard Decisions | Tactics vs Strategy and Why Plans Are BS with Bob Pittman, CEO @ iHeartMedia About this episode Bob Pittman is Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, Inc., the number one audio company in America. Prior to iHeart, Bob has just had the most amazing career as a co-founder and programmer who led the team that created MTV. He has also led some of the most incredible turnarounds as CEO of MTV Networks, AOL Networks and Time Warner Enterprises and as COO of America Online, Inc. and later AOL Time Warner. In Today's Episode with Bob Pittman We Discuss: 1. From Flying Lessons to Radio: How Bob first made his way into radio at the age of 15? What does Bob know now that he wishes he had known when he started his career? What is the most painful lesson Bob has learned in his career that he is pleased to have learned? 2. Decision-Making in Leadership: How does Bob structure all decision-making as CEO today? Why does Bob ensure that all decisions are made within 24 hours? What are the pros and cons? How does Bob prevent consensus decision-making? How does Bob create dissent in a discussion? How do the best leaders know when to kill a project? What do most do instead? 3. Tactics vs Strategies: Why Plans Are BS! What is the difference between a tactic and a strategy? When is the right time to change your strategy and tactics? What have been Bob's biggest lessons on how to get teams on board with tactical changes? Why does Bob believe that plans are BS? When can they be useful? 4. The Secret to Messaging and Storytelling: What does Bob believe is the universal truth to successful consumer messaging? What has changed and what has not changed in the way companies tell stories to their customers? Is there a difference between a great product and a great company? What are examples? What excites Bob most about consumer habits today? 5. Bob Pittman: AMA: What does Bob believe is the success to successful parenting? How has it changed? How does Bob analyze his own relationship to money today? How has that changed? Why does Bob not believe in legacy? What do people get most wrong when it comes to ego?
Transcript 12,094 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 I think a failure and a success is exactly the same thing. It's a stepping stone. What we call a failure is one of the stepping stones we make a turn on. We go left or right. And a success is one we goes forward. But all of them are just stepping stones. We're constantly moving. Nothing ever gets there. It's not finished.
0:16 Harry Stebbings? This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. And what a show we have in store for you stayers. I'm thrilled to welcome Bob Pittman to the hot seat. Now, Bob is the CEO at iHeart Media, the number one audio company in America. And prior to iHeart, Bob just had the most sensational career as a co-founder and programmer, who led the team that created MTV. He also led some of the most incredible turnarounds as CEO of MTV Networks, AOL Networks, Six Flags Theme Parks, Time Warner Enterprises, and as COO of AOL America Online, and later AOL Time Warner. Huge thanks to Brad Gerson, Ryan Seacrest, and Joe at Human Ventures. Some fantastic question suggestions today. Really did make this episode so much more special.
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2:23 Harry Stebbings? often in areas of sub-Saharan Africa that are so remote that other aid groups aren't able to reach them. Visit givedirectly.org/20vc to learn more and send money directly to someone living in extreme poverty to spend on what they need most. That's givedirectly.org/20vc. And finally, from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. And there are three things that are just fantastic about Squarespace. First, mobile-optimized websites. All websites look fantastic and are optimized for mobile. Content automatically adjusts, so your site looks great on any device. Second, email campaigns.
3:06 Harry Stebbings? Squarespace makes it super easy to grow and engage your audience with Squarespace email campaigns, so you don't need any other providers. Finally, SEO tools. Squarespace takes the guesswork out of SEO, so you'll get found in search by more people more often. And if that wasn't good enough, go to squarespace.com/20vc for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code 20vc to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. But that is enough from me, so now I'm so excited to hand over to the one and only Bob Pittman, CEO at iHeart Media.
3:46 Speaker 00 You have now arrived at your destination.
3:49 Harry Stebbings? Bob, this is such a joy to do. I heard so many good things, especially from our fan Brad Gersner before, but thank you so much for joining me today.
3:56 Speaker 00 Oh, I'm delighted to be here. Thank you.
3:58 Harry Stebbings? I heard from a little birdie that you started in radio at fifteen. How did you start in radio at the tender age of fifteen?
4:05 Speaker 00 I grew up in a very small town in Mississippi, and I needed a job to pay for flying lessons. I tried every place in town. I tried the men's clothing store. They said I was too young. I tried the high-paying job in town, which was bagging groceries at the Piggly Wiggly. No jobs. And I walked. Into this little radio station and asking, I'm Bill Jones, who owned the station, if I could have a job. He said, you got good grades? I said, yeah, I have pretty good grades. He said, you're in trouble. I kind of really goes. Okay, come in this room, put on a tape. He gave me some wire copy. Back in the days, all the wire came off teletype machines. He tore some off, said, read this. And a minute or so, he came back in and said, that's good enough. You're hired. And that began my career in radio. And back in those days, technology was such that there was no way to bring in signals from outside your market.
4:48 Speaker 00 So in little towns, they hired high school kids to be on the air. And it's just gunning the number of people who got their start doing that.
4:55 Harry Stebbings? Did you love it from the very first minute? Or was there a moment where you were like, this is what I really have a passion for?
5:00 Speaker 00 No. At first, I loved Airflings. This was a way to get there. What I did love, all the kids in town would call me on the request line, including girls, which age 15 is very important to you. I actually began to fall into radio. And by the time I was sort of 17 or 18, I was just mesmerized by it.
5:17 Harry Stebbings? I always think careers have inflection points, big break moments where for some reason you're given more opportunity, chance than maybe one should at a young age. When you think back over your career, what would you isolate as a big break point in your career? Where you really scaled trajectory fast?
5:33 Speaker 00 Most of them were by accident. How did I go from being a 15 year old disc jockey in Brookhaven, Mississippi? To programming the NBC station in Chicago when I was 20 years old? At the moment, it didn't seem like that. So it's so unusual. I look back, and by the way, I went to program WNBC in New York, the flagship, when I was 23. I go, how does that happen in an eight year period? Clearly, there were some people along the way who really believed in me. And sadly, they gave me a shot. I might not give a kid. I may go, that's a gen. I can't give him a shot like that.
6:00 Harry Stebbings? Why do you think that is?
6:01 Speaker 00 No idea what they saw in me. And by the way, Charlie Warner, who's the guy who took me to Chicago? And then took me to New York with him, is still alive. He's in his early 90s. And I've had this lifelong relationship with him. He worked for me for a while at AOL. He said, you just impressed me. You knew what you were talking about. And there was just something there. That's why he did it. Things happen. And then there are obviously other ones. I went to MTV because my great mentor at NBC at the time, Herb Schlosser, who is the president of NBC, got kicked upstairs and I thought my Trajectory is over. So I went over to this cable company that was beginning to form a programming company called Warner MX Satellite Entertainment Corporation as their head of programming. But at that time, cable was nothing in the U.S. And everybody goes, why would you leave NBC to go to this thing I can't even pronounce?
6:44 Speaker 00 It's sort of dumb luck. And I went with Steve Kay. So AOL, I joined the board in 95, Steve in 96, there were some issues going on. And Steve asked me if I would come down and be the president and the board, and I was still on the board. And I sort of went as a lark, did not see the great potential of it. And I came here to this company, which I've been at the longest of any place I've ever been. And I came in as an investor originally in 2010. And I just thought, wow, this company has an asset no one appreciates. Audio is so underappreciated, undervalued. People don't know what it can really do. I do. And by the way, we're going to take it into digital. I didn't foresee podcasting, but obviously that was big for us, events, et cetera. And it just seemed like this great platform. I took a chance on something that was a little crazy.
7:29 Speaker 00 Big moves have always been when they didn't look like good moves. Actually, when I went to AOL, I was running Century 21 Real Estate after Time Warner and Six Flags theme parks. And my friends go, why would you leave Century 21 to go to AOL? That's how unappreciated the internet was and how the potential of AOL was so underestimated.
7:47 Harry Stebbings? You said that multiple times, underappreciated. We're going to get to your insight into new markets. I do want to start at the top there in terms of your leadership. I spoke to so many of your friends, your colleagues before the show and stalked the shit out of you, really. My question to you is, when we think about leadership in particular, when I say the words high performance, what do they mean to you, having led so many different organizations?
8:07 Speaker 00 The key is, at the end of the day, there's something we're trying to do. There's a goal, there's an objective. It's just being religiously focused on that goal and objective and being pretty open to any way to get there within reason. And also to always do it as a team. I've never been successful without a great team. For me, I'm constantly looking around, who are the people I want to be in the foxhole with? Who can do stuff I can't do? And by the way, if they've got a big weakness, as long as somebody else on the team can cover the weakness, who cares? We're looking for that combination of people who gel as a team. Work as a team, respect each other as a team, and I'm never seen, by the way, big success without it.
8:45 Harry Stebbings? Bob, you said about team there. I spoke to someone on your team. I normally have references with other VCs or founders. When we were doing the prep for the show, you gave me Ryan Seacrest. Bob, that's pretty cool. And I appreciate that a lot. And we had a chat yesterday. Well, and said specifically, Bob has the ability to forecast things that are marketable before they're on the horizon. Going back to that, people didn't see or appreciate what you did. I want to understand, how do you gain an instinct for where the world is going ahead of the world?
9:16 Speaker 00 I don't think I do. I think what I am is I'm wildly observant. I spend a lot of time listening to a lot of people. My ears perk up when something catches my ear and I go, well, that's sort of interesting insight. If you're a leader or you're running a company, you're constantly looking for the unique insights and the epiphanies. Most of the stuff we do day to day does nothing except to keep the trains running. But to keep the business growing, we've got to find those, wow, there's something going on here. That's what I'm constantly in search of. And by the way, it matches my skill set and my interest because I'm wildly curious. When I spot that stuff, I dig in and I'm asked a lot of questions. I want people to educate me. But I don't think I'm seeing something that's unknown. I think I'm seeing the first glimmer of something.
9:59 Speaker 00 And saying, wait a minute, this is what's happening. And then I usually try and figure out why. I don't want to chase it if I can't figure out why is that happening? But if I can say that's happening and I go, and now I know why it's happening, I feel much better sort of turning the team toward.
10:14 Harry Stebbings? I do want to go to an example, but just first, my question to you that I struggle with here is naturally when we're suddenly growing in work, we surround ourselves with the same people. Often the people are quite similar in many ways. They all love media. They all love venture capital. And you don't get a diverse set of opinion. And that unique insight is often quite common thought because the people and their backgrounds are all the same. How do you think about ensuring that you do actually get the consumers insights? Not just execs in media or media talents.
10:43 Speaker 00 Several layers to that. One is if everybody agrees on something, it's a bad idea because that's group think and that's. If it's in the headlines, I'm not going there. There's no upside in that. The opportunity is to find something that everybody's not doing. I also think their management styles, build a team not of people like me. I've already got me. We need people who are not like me, that are disparate people, but still have enough chemistry to hold together as a team. And we have a couple of things. Look, we worship dissent. I want to hear where people disagree. When people throw up an idea, say, well, work this out and this is what we're going to do. I said, what did the dissenters say? The first time I mentioned that to people, they go, oh, no, we all agree. And I go, well, then you hadn't really dug in enough. Because there's always a dissenting point of view and we need to look at it and examine it. And the example I use is John Kennedy.
11:28 Speaker 00 When he announced he was going to put a man on the moon in the early 60s, he had not told NASA. It was 100% a political announcement and NASA hears about it on the news. Well, as you can imagine, they go batshit. The people from the White House go over and meet with them. And what they did next was really changed the course of not only space program, but management in the US is they said, well, why can't we put a man on the moon? And they start listing out no rocket fuel, navigation, no heat, blah, blah. They got this whole exhaustive list. Anything else? That's it. So what you're telling me is, so as we solve these problems, who put a man on the moon? And they built these teams of people, not general to a private, but people of equal rank and they made somebody a team leader.
12:11 Speaker 00 And these teams worked on each one of those problems and they put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. And I find the same is true in business, that if we listen to the dissent, what they're really, not personally saying, like, I hate it. That's not very good to say, but that's not going to work because of X, Y, and Z. We need to examine the X, Y, and Z. We need to make sure we solve X, Y, and Z to make this a successful idea. And the dissenters become very important in my process. And I think the other thing we do is we also don't expect everything to be perfect. If you're a genius, maybe you get it right 50% of the time. You're going to get it right. We're going to get it wrong most of the time. So just be ready for it. And if you're going to get it wrong most of the time, then what goes along with that? And what goes along with that is quick decisions. Because when you get it wrong, admit it, you made it wrong and change it quickly.
12:56 Speaker 00 When you change it quickly, the damage of getting it wrong doesn't really- Hurt and it iterates till you keep trying until you get a better chance of getting it right. One of the problems till we have quick decisions, we said we have a half serious rule that we have a 24 hour rule. The problem I have is if you ask people, when will you have this decision ready for me? It'll be a long time out. So I always start with, we need it in 24 hours. And make people justify why they can't do it in 24 hours, which tends to pull decisions in by putting that construct on it. And when you push that sense of urgency on it, and we also say no study and review. People often say, I said, when you make that decision, I said, we're going to decide next week. And I go, what are you going to know between now and next week?
13:38 Speaker 00 You don't know right now. If you're not going to know something important in that period of time, why don't you make the decision right now? So probably the reason you're putting it off till next week is it's a hard decision. Time doesn't help hard decisions. As a matter of fact, it often hurts them. So let's make a quick decision and keep going. The third thing I look at is when we make decisions, I'm making these numbers up. Let's say we're making 10 decisions. Two are clear winners. We just go, wow, that worked. That was great. Exactly what we expected. Two are clear losers. Wow, those are stinkers. Get rid of them. Problem is I got six in between. What do I do with those? The ones that were to go, well, it didn't do exactly what I want to do, but it's helping. It's got something that they were sort of looking at the good in it. If we had said our goal is what it's doing, would we have done this? The answer is almost always no, but it's doing something good.
14:20 Speaker 00 The real courageous people kill everything that's not a clear winner. Most people totally kill things that are clear losers. So you figure if there's two on top, two on the bottom and six in between. Imagine what happens to a company if you let everything live that's gunk in between a clear winner and a clear loser. We call it weeding the garden. By the way, and I'm as guilty as everyone else of justifying why something happens. When we have excruciating honesty with each other, we can say that's not working. Even though you fell in love with it, even though you're trying to justify, get rid of it. Those three things in terms of a management technique helps.
14:54 Harry Stebbings? You mentioned that about kind of killing things that may be odd working or kind of are in between. We're both in the content game. It took me 200 episodes before we got 2,000 plays per show and no money. And now we get hundreds of thousands and millions in some cases, but this is a. Years in, how do you think about that? Kill things that aren't material and sizable in longer time?
15:16 Speaker 00 I don't think kill something that's not sizable or material, because I think there are many things that aren't sizable or material, but will be. I think what you kill are things that aren't doing what you initially said. I started tequila with my good friend, Alberto Gonzalez, back in 2000, launched in 2009. We deliberately said, let's take a long time. Let's let people, this is going to be a product people discover. The goal was not to have instant, we were pushing to have 100,000 cases in the first two years. We built a plan to allow it to breathe. So I think especially when you're doing content, what you're really saying is, I'm going to build this show to reach these people. Then you're probably going to say, okay, you got, let's say, 2,000 downloads. Are those 2,000 the right people? And do those 2,000 people like it?
15:59 Speaker 00 And if you say, yeah, those are the right people and they do like it, that's okay, then our issue is scale. Now we go from, we did a show, but now how do we scale it? Or they say they liked it, but they didn't like it because of X, Y, and Z. Okay, I'll adjust that. I think the back and forth dialogue is so important with the consumer. It's also important in terms of what's my goal? Am I hitting my goal? And part of it is you can't have unrealistic goals. If you want something and you say, I'm going to have 200,000 downloads, the episode, well, that's probably a stupid goal. But I think it's a matter of understanding realistically what you're trying to do. By the way, sometimes you start big and say, wow, I got a million downloads. And you go, yeah, but you know what? People don't like it. They don't look like they're going to come back. The show stinks. We can't sell advertising in it. Get rid of it.
16:43 Speaker 00 Things aren't a success or failure based on big numbers. Success or failure based on what you're trying to do. And part of it is precisely know what you're trying to do.
16:51 Harry Stebbings? When should you change your goal?
16:53 Speaker 00 I think when you change your goals, when you're ready to change your business. I use a process in budgeting called GHOST, which is goals, objectives, flowing to strategy, and then tactics. So I think you sort of start with what are we trying to accomplish here? And then you'll have some strategies to do that. Then you'll develop your tactics. Your tactics are your operating plan, and those will usually be your key KPIs. Over the years, my goal rarely changes. My objectives change. Sort of year to year because that's I'm going to have a million dollars of revenue or two million dollars or $10 million. There are external factors that affect some of that. But the strategy to get there is almost always the same. What changes radically are tactics and tactics change day to day.
17:33 Speaker 00 And I think that the key in a business is focus on those tactical solutions. If you have the right goals and strategies, but if you're having to change your goals and strategy, you probably don't have a good plan and you probably don't have a good business.
17:46 Harry Stebbings? What's the difference between a goal and an objective? They seem the same to me.
17:50 Speaker 00 A goal is what am I trying to do? I'm trying to give everyone in America a friend anytime, anywhere using my. Is there more your mission statement? Or by the way, we're going to make in the case of AOL, we're going to make the internet as essential to people, as important to people as their telephone or television. Those are the goals, big real goals. The objective is, okay, and we'll make $10 million this year and $12 million the next year. And we'll do a profit of 2 million this year. So know there's a quantifiable output of the goal. And then the strategy is how we're going to get there.
18:21 Harry Stebbings? I listened to you on many and many driver talk and I loved it. But you said like having a plan and I have a plan and it kind of flies in the face of almost ghost, which I love, but I'm going, huh? Are they counterintuitive and why?
18:33 Speaker 00 And it depends on what we're calling a plan. I think some people have a plan for their life, a plan of what they're going to do. That plan is never going to come true. Even when we're talking about this ghost, the plan is sort of the tactical level. Since I was at MTV, I've had a weekly operating committee meeting. Senior most executives get together. Why? Because we have to change the plan every week. Things they'll turn out as planned. That I can't tell you over the years, how many people I've offered a job to. They said, I can't take it because I got a plan of what I'm going to do. Call most of the person, those people, they'll say, boy, I wish I'd taken that job. My plan didn't come true. I think plans are something we do to reduce anxiety about the future. Because it's always, it's a little, huh? Takes your breath away a bit to say, I don't know what tomorrow's going to bring. I don't know what I'm going to do in five years. I don't know what I'm going to do in 10 years.
19:18 Speaker 00 None of us ever got married thinking, I'm going to get married and then I'll get a divorce. We had a plan of a life together. Things don't always work out. We take a job. We say, I'm going to stay at this job for 10 years. You may stay at the job six months or you may, in the case of AOL. Well, I told Steve I'll come down and help out for a year. So I stayed seven or eight years. Plans are not the reality. Now, we're talking about a company. The operating plan is what is that thing we're operating from? And I think when we call it the plan, you better be prepared to change it and change it often because nothing. I don't think we go a week without changing the plan because there's something that's better, something that's worse, or some external variable has shifted the world and you gotta take it into account.
19:56 Harry Stebbings? I love that in terms of hiring people and then coming back to saying it didn't go to plan. Even when you're hiring people or when you're addressing consumer product adoption, messaging and storytelling is so crucial. I spoke to so many and they said you are the best in the business. When it comes to kind of packaging and messaging, especially around consumer products, I just want to kind of open up with a broad question of how do you think about what makes great messaging, Bob? And what is great storytelling to you?
20:20 Speaker 00 I'm a Southern and Mississippi had great storytellers and I had a bunch of uncles who were great storytellers. And the family was always about storytelling. That part is sort of you culturally come to it or genetically come to it. But I think what makes a great story is what is interesting to people? What's the sort of sense of tension or discovering in that? What makes it exciting? Whenever I develop messaging, I use, and I have a podcast called Math and Magic, because it's sort of what I live by, that I think there's the math of marketing. Who are the people? What do they like? What are they looking for? Once I know that, that doesn't make it interesting. I just sort of know where they are. Now I have to have magic. I've got to have something that sort of brings them in and captures their imagination. And a lot of the messaging is what's the attitude? What's the mood?
21:05 Speaker 00 What is the image I'm trying to convey? At MTV, we were trying to convey the image of we were not TV. We were throwing TV, we were spitting on TV. We're the new TV. We're the rebellion. So everything had to reflect that kind of attitude. We all have a personality type and I'm probably much more of an empath. I lost an eye when I was six years old, have an artificial eye. You can imagine as a kid, you're the outsider, you're the kid with a glass eye. And being an outsider is great because what the outsider does is I learn to read people. I learn to watch people. By the way, I was a skinny little kid in a bullying old South. And I have one eye and we moved two or three times during my childhood, truly makes you an outsider again.
21:44 Speaker 00 But I learned to just watch people and listen to people and think about, so what I think and you say, what's an innate skill? I have a pretty good skill of saying, oh, that's a cringe worthy message or that's a cool way to say it. And sometimes I come up with the line, sometimes I don't come up with the line, but I'm a really good editor. When I hear the line, I go, that's the line. Let's go with that. And there's not a lot of indecision. I worked for, I had Henry Silverman once, who's a great pal and great thinker. And Henry always talked about study and review is the greatest insult. We're not study and review people, it's make the damn decision. And I think in the creative process of messaging, it can't be committee decision. There's a keeper of the vision of every product. When I was at MTV, I was the keeper of the vision. I was not saying, is this a good idea, a bad idea? I'm saying, did it fit MTV or not?
22:27 Speaker 00 It's a great editor. When Graydon Carter edited Vanity Fair, he wasn't making decisions about this, a great article or bad article. He said, this fits in this issue of Vanity Fair. It's the vision of what's going on. And when we had Nickelodeon, the keeper of the vision was Jerry Leibman. There's always the keeper of the vision and I always step in as sort of, it's not obvious. I'll make the decision about what we're trying to do. I did a podcast, Math and Magic with one of the guys that'd be on air, look for me, Fred Cyber. He talks about how we came up with this idea of the look of MTV. And we're sort of pushing and I sort of told him this sort of outlandish radical idea of what a logo could be and what a random issue could go. He goes, okay, great. I'm there. I'm with you. You'd say a couple of things and people began to frame what it is and understand it.
23:10 Speaker 00 And I think that's important in a message, but I usually start with, is there something I can say? That's so important that that alone will sell it. Instead of four clicks, it's one click. Oh, I like that. Something that's radically different from what you have today. If you've got something like that, say it. If it's more subtle, you have to convey it with messaging with sort of image and concept. That's what you sort of wrestle with and the creative process often works. The people I think that do it best, by the way, David Eagleman says, this is sort of the way that the brain works. One of my favorite books, you sort of look at everything you need to know. You think about it, you fill your head full and then you forget about it and you let your subconscious do the work. One day when Your most meditative state, mine happens to be a 15 minute hot shower in the morning.
23:54 Speaker 00 Suddenly I go, God, I got it. Where did that come from? And I've got the answer. And your subconscious has been ruminating and working it. And almost everyone I know who does is in the creative side of the business. Their decisions come to them like that. So I think that's sort of tee it up and be that way. And don't think there's an MBA approach to, and we're going to rigorously develop the message. Cause I rarely happen to that, right?
24:14 Harry Stebbings? Have you ever got the messaging wrong? Have you ever embraced a project, done the messaging and it's just flopped? Did you learn anything from that?
24:22 Speaker 00 I must have, but mine is I don't ever think I'm there. I think we're always moving. So whatever was wrong is just the reason to do more. Talk with my kids about decision making and failures and successes, which they're in their early twenties, which means my younger kids, that's very important in that stage. And I think a failure and a success is exactly the same thing. It's a stepping stone. What we call a failure is one of the stepping stones we make a turn on. We go left or right. And a success is one we goes forward. But all of them are just stepping stones. We're constantly moving. Nothing ever gets there. It's not finished. And when you think about it's just constantly moving and it's a journey. Then you don't keep track of when people say, wow, you had a great failure. I go, I don't know. I don't keep track of them. I don't keep track of, if I don't have a ledger of failures and successes,
25:06 Speaker 00 it's just all a process to try and get to the right place. And by the way, what's the right place today? Could be the right place tomorrow. When I was at MTV, we used to have the Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, planting the flag. And we originally were going to have one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. And then Neil Armstrong said, we couldn't use his voice. So we never had the voice. And then when the space shuttle came out, we changed it. We changed the animation to being the space shuttle taking off and the space shuttle delivering the MTV satellite. And it was great. And then Challenger blew up. So we go whoops, wrong icon, wrong. It's so internal factors can come into play, which change what you're doing. That was obviously a radical example.
25:45 Harry Stebbings? Can you talk to me about, I love that in terms of successes and failures being the same. I spoke to Joe from Human, who actually mentioned, obviously you both owning tequila brands. But he said, one of his favorite memories from your relationship is when you told him about how you marketed Six Flags against. Disneyland and he said, I had to ask this. How did you market Six Flags against Disneyland, which was a competitor for context? How did you market it? And what did that teach you?
26:10 Speaker 00 It actually, Disney was not a competitor and I used them to market Six Flags. That Six Flags were regional theme parks. I had seven of them around the country at the time. Eighty percent of America lived within a day drive of one of the parks. They were parks that people come out to for the day. Disney was a destination park. People would go there for three days, a week, whatever, and they would stay there. But Disney was, in terms of theme parks, it was sort of Disney and then all these regional theme parks. Part of the problem was, and I sort of thought about the cola stuff, but Pepsi did the Pepsi challenge against Coke. They weren't trying to compete with Coke. They were trying to get away from all these others. They wanted to be the other ones. So I said, you know what? Disney's that. I want to get into Disney category and be a crummy Disney. That's a win.
26:53 Speaker 00 People say, what do you think of Six Flags? Well, you're not as good as Disney. I win. If they say, you're much better than Dorney Park, I lose because they got me in the wrong category. So it's like Pepsi, they say, wow, you're a lot better than Hojo Cola. Pepsi would not think that was very good. If they say you're not quite as good as Coke, they go, great, I'm in the right category. So I wanted to use Disney to get in the category of Disney so I would get that halo of Disney on Six Flags. And then we also, we managed to sell it as, what could be the advantage of a day trip versus the vacation? What we knew from the research was that dads are stingy bastards and they're selfish as hell. And they only want to do what they want to do. Moms always look to the kids and say, what do kids want to do? That's what I want to do with the kids want to do. So we began to play a little bit to dad.
27:38 Speaker 00 So he said, you can come to Six Flags and you can come for the day. You can be home in time to feed the dog. We began to say, and so the dads go, this is great. I can just take them out to Six Flags for a day and I don't have to fricking fly to Orlando for a week. It began to be a way also to begin to position it as, and there's one thing that really matters of all consumer products, which is convenience. We managed convenience. You don't have to get on a plane and go somewhere. You can just go out for the day and come back. That's more convenient and convenient always has a huge advantage in any consumer decision.
28:10 Speaker 00 Line was bigger than Disneyland, closer to home. So we played the convenience angle of closer to home and tied to Disney with the bigger than Disneyland. I remember just looking for an excuse to hang on. Oh, they did sort of the same thing at AOL. We were so easy to use, no wonder it's number one. So again, we're like size wise, everybody always likes number one. But if you say I'm number one, you sound like you're bragging. So you have to have a reason to mention that you're number one. And then easy was the winning strategy. At the time, you were early talking about group think. The group think was AOL is the internet with training wheels. It's not sophisticated. It's not really the internet. That's not what consumers thought. That's what the tech industry thought. The consumer said, oh, this is very complicated. Make it easy. So we did spots with kids saying, it's so easy, even my dad can do it.
28:54 Speaker 00 He was saying, that's none of that computer mumbo jumbo. And we're all about easy. And we weren't the best. We weren't the whatever, but we were the easiest and we owned easy. In my day and Steve cases to hit AOL, half of the traffic of the internet came through AOL in the US. So it was a smashing success. But again, in terms of the marketing, sort of similar thing, play to what you know about the problem.
29:17 Harry Stebbings? Does human psychology change around messaging, do you think? Easy, you mentioned that stingy bastard dance cost. Easy and cost today, isn't that what 90% of great brands there built on?
29:29 Speaker 00 I'm going to tell you, I've only done consumer services business. I never do B two B. And I will tell you the one thing that all, only one thing matters, convenience. When I was at AOL, we described AOL to the business community as convenience at box. What we were in the business of doing is taking everything you did in your life and make it easier by doing it on the computer. And it's interesting, the one thing I really got wrong was I said, yes, I know it's more convenient to look at something on the phone, but people are going to want those big screen TVs. Years later, I see my kids sitting in front of a big screen TV turned off, looking at their laptop or looking at their phone, watching a TV show. Convenience beats quality. And it's, you hate to say that loudly because people think I'm a horrible guy and they're like quality, appreciate quality.
30:11 Speaker 00 But if quality won, everyone would still have a wired line instead of a mobile phone because the quality is a lot better. They would have never used a microwave oven because the conventional oven cooks so much. Better, but convenience is the winner, not quality. And when you understand that, then you can just bake everything down to is more convenient. We were talking to engineers at AOL in those days. Sometimes they come in and say, we've got a great new feature. And you say, is it one less click? They go, no, it's one more click. So I don't want to hear it. If it's not one less click, it's not more convenient. Nothing you can say about quality is going to justify more clicks, less convenience.
30:44 Harry Stebbings? The question I have subsequently, does convenience always equal a great business? And I think about Getty or you have in the US, Go Puff. Fantastic convenience service, delivering groceries to your door. Amazing, respectfully, and there's no argument on this. Margins are really hard. It's a really hard business. Probably not a good business, respectfully again. Does convenience always lead to good business?
31:08 Speaker 00 No, and by the way, great products don't lead to a great business. You have to have a business model. Spotify, great product, people love it. Is it nothing more than a retailer that all the money's going to the record companies? And they're just letting Spotify have just enough margin to stay in business? Is it a great business? I mean, you look at all these delivery services. I can't imagine those are a business. Maybe one day it will be, maybe a smaller subset of the consumers will be willing to pay more money. So have fewer consumers paying more money, maybe that's a business. When you talk about businesses, I always want to see an envelope. If you can't show me on the back of an envelope, about three or four lines equal the business, I don't think you've got one. And we go through periods in probably the world, certainly in America,
31:49 Speaker 00 where we build up this bunch of things that aren't based on it's going to earn money. And the nineties, we're going to get a lot of eyeballs. Then it's going to get a lot of traffic. Then it's going to get a lot of revenue. At the end of the day, all those are IOUs to the investment community for earnings. Because when you're saying it implicitly, you're saying one day that will turn into earnings. But if it's not going to turn into earnings, you don't have a business.
32:10 Harry Stebbings? Can I be really direct and ask? If you were to do those three to four lines on iHeart, just so I get an understanding for what sort of thing that would look like, what would you say the three to four lines on iHeart is?
32:21 Speaker 00 Oh, the iHeart is revenue minus expenses equals a bottom line, EBITDA, our earnings. And then I take it one step further and say, how's our free cash flow? What else did I invest and how did I use cash? How much do I have left? I think every business ultimately boils down to free cash flow. I'm always looking at, okay, and if I'm going in a new line of business, what's the margin going to be on that? We've done the podcasting business in the US, an adjacent business to radio in my mind. And we are now the size of the next two podcast publishers combined. So we got the more downloads than anywhere else by a mile. We've also got more revenue than everybody, but what we really have is we're probably the only podcaster. And as real profits and we may be 20 or 25% of the revenue of the podcast business.
33:04 Speaker 00 I'll bet we're probably 90% of the profits of the podcast business because we refuse to do deals that aren't profitable. And there are plenty of people go, we gotta get in and we'll buy our way in. You don't buy your way in by doing unprofitable business. It never gets profitable. You may buy your way in because as you pointed out, you'll start small and do 2,000 to 5,000, 10,000. But you know, when you hit 20,000, you'll make money. Or when you have 50,000 and you can see a sure path to get there. I just always demand that things are really profitable. I don't believe in phony stuff. And there are times in my life in which I'm out of phase with the world. Because there's great value in businesses that are never going to make any money, but I've never seen it last. And I think the lasting part is the key.
33:44 Harry Stebbings? When you think about the business that you have today, how do you think about the split between content that you own and package yourself? And it's pure I heart versus that which you buy and the ones you own. Like, how do you think about the different economics between the two? I'm fascinated as a podcast.
33:59 Speaker 00 There are several gradations of that. We started the radio and we really don't have content in terms of shows. We're keeping people company. We're competitive ship. And by the way, I would argue we're that in podcasting as well. It's very host driven, just like radio. And what people are really doing is they got a friend to hang out with. It's like, are you competing with Spotify? I guess Spotify is not even close to being a competitor. Spotify replaced Apple downloads, which replaced CDs, which replaced cassette tape. There's always a symbiosis. I listen to my music collection when I want to escape the world. I listen to radio while I hear what's going on in the world. By the way, 70, 80% of Spotify, Pandora, et cetera, listeners, the main way they do discovery music is FM radio. These are their pals. That's Ryan.
34:40 Speaker 00 Sea Crest, they ride to work with every day. It's these friends they have L and K that they know and trust. And so that's the business we're in. When we go to podcasting, and so by the way, on the radio, we have all variations of deals. We have some people who make probably union minimum wage and we have people who make fortunes on the air. Some of them are guaranteed, some of more revenue split. We're sort of look at any deal that economically makes sense and works with them. And when we go to podcasting, we're sort of the same thing. Some of our podcasts, we come up with the idea, we produce it in an house and somebody just voices it. Well, I'm mad at Magic. We have no profit participation. They don't pay me anything. And then you've got some that go up, but we refuse to do one where anybody makes so much money, there's nothing left for us.
35:21 Speaker 00 And we also say, what do we contribute to it? What we contribute is we can get traffic for podcasts, hit podcasts more than most people can. Because our radio's group alone reaches 90% of Americans every month. Only two companies come close to that and they don't surpass it's Facebook and Google. Everybody else, the biggest TV network in the US reaches about 35% of Americans. Biggest cable network reaches less than 20%. Spotify, Pandora, Sirius XM reach less than 20% of America. We've got this huge asset of this 90% reach. We advertise podcasts on the radio and make them a hit if they can be, I mean, you can make something not a hit. But if it's going to be a hit, but four people can't find it, we can solve the problem. We also have so many hit podcasts that we can cross promote with the other podcasts.
36:06 Speaker 00 We have 270 million social followers, I heart all of our products and brands and people. So we can push it through that as well. When we do the I Heart Music Awards, we get twice the social impressions of the Super Bowl or Grammys. People talk, because it's back and forth. That's what people are doing with us. They think it's a friend. They think they're talking with us. So we can make podcasts. And the other thing we can do is we can monetize. We have the biggest audio sales force. We have about 1,500 sellers. We have now with Triton, some of the other pieces we have, we have this terrific ad tech platform as well. And by the way, we do about four times as much ad revenue as the next largest audio player in audio ad revenue. So we're able to plug people in that system and maximize it.
36:50 Speaker 00 Gives us an advantage and because we're so big, almost everybody's got a great idea comes to us first. The ones we don't take are the ones that are in economics. And so by definition, the other folks are getting, as you go down the list, the less and less economic deals. I think when you're the leader, what you don't do is you don't cave on economics. It's either a business or it's not a business. Can love the idea and love the people, but there's no economics in it. Go, that's great, but it's not for us.
37:13 Harry Stebbings? Do you see an eighty twenty distribution in the revenue generated on a podcast basis? Meaning that the twenty percent of hits produce eighty percent of the revenue.
37:22 Speaker 00 Probably more than that. It's probably, given how many podcasts there are today, it's gotta be one ninety nine.
37:28 Harry Stebbings? For you though, within iHeart?
37:30 Speaker 00 Well, no, not within iHeart. Within iHeart, we're hundreds of podcasts and maybe it is eighty twenty or ten ninety. But the big ones always make most of them. Maybe the same is true on radio too. Our biggest stations, our biggest talent make a outsized portion of our overall ad revenue.
37:44 Harry Stebbings? What worries you about the podcast industry? I think when I look forward, especially even that's twenty four months, funny, I'm worried about a macro recession impacting advertiser sensitivity towards marketing budgets. For me as a media company owner, that's unnerving. What are you worried about and would you share my concern there?
38:00 Speaker 00 And I think podcasting is, of all the businesses we have, is the least affected by the macro because it has such a fundamental spring. It's growing like crazy. Huge engagement on podcasting. People are absolutely listening to or hanging on every word. When people are watching a TV commercial, most of it's like second or third screen. They don't know what's going on there. They got something in their lap. They're doing their email. They're doing something else. When they're running and they're listening to something, they're actually listening. When they're in a car and they're driving by themselves, they're listening. They don't have a second screen going on. And podcasting is sort of that on steroids. And so I think the impact podcast has, the idea that the audience is just ballooning and also it's the desirable audience. Talk radio tends to be older. Podcasting tends to be younger.
38:43 Speaker 00 So you've got this young, interested, engaged audience that you can activate and they'll act. Podcasting is just, you say, what's your list of ten things to worry about? Podcasting's not on that list. What is number one? The macro. I mean, how much money are people going to spend on advertising? And are they gonna? Pull back. And by the way, clearly, everyone said what began as a very robust year, we've sent our earnings calls turned out to not be so robust, but it's probably doing better than we expected. The question you ask yourself was, why is it doing better than we expected? The reason is that we just had a downturn two years ago. Normally, it's about 10 years between downturns. And the people making the ad decision forgotten all the lessons from the last one. And the most important lesson to learn is, and you learn it the hard way, is if you cut back during an ad recession,
39:26 Speaker 00 when you want to restart after it costs you more money than if you kept advertising through it. There was a study done during the last, in the pandemic, companies that cut back their advertising saw about a 17% drop. Companies that advertised through the pandemic saw about a 17 or 18% increase in sales. Huge delta. And I talk to people, say, God, I wish I just kept going. You know how expensive it is to try and capture that customer back that I lost because I didn't advertise? Or worse, my competitor advertised and got them. And I've got to try and win them again. Because it was two years ago, the people making the ad decisions today are the same people who made the ad decisions then. If this is fresh in their mind, and I think that's why we're seeing a moderating effect in terms of an ad downturn. By the way, I could be completely wrong, maybe this thing's a ball of clips somewhere.
40:11 Speaker 00 I think that's what's going on. You talked earlier about human nature. Human nature governs everything. Just bet on human nature every time. And human nature is, if you've had a recent painful experience, you will learn something from it. If it was really long ago, or it was a lesson in the history books, you didn't learn any lessons.
40:27 Harry Stebbings? You mentioned two things which made me feel very insecure. One is I'm unknown about advertiser willingness to pay. As I said, running business that relies on it. And number two is not really seeing it before. You said about an ad recession two years ago. Respectfully, I didn't really feel that. It was short, it was brief, didn't feel that.
40:42 Speaker 00 Our podcasting business and our digital, if I looked at numbers, I wouldn't have known there was a recession. Traditional advertising, I think in the month of April of 2020, advertising revenue dropped 40%. Never seen anything so precipitous in my life. It was a terrible year for us overall. I think podcasting and digital were a little immune from it then. I think now that they're bigger and they're more sizable, they probably have less immunity they had then. But I still think they're much better performers through a downturn.
41:10 Harry Stebbings? Honestly Bob, you're a seasoned wise leader. What are you insecure about in leadership today?
41:16 Speaker 00 Well, I guess I'm insecure about what I don't know. But I think at this point, the beauty of being old. You get really comfortable with all of this. And I probably am not as passionate or as fiendish as I just like, maniacal as I was when I was younger. But I'm also a lot more chill. When people have a bad crisis, I always say, enjoy this one. Because when we get the next crisis, you'll wish you had this one back. We'll get through them. Getting it all worked up ain't gonna help us solve it any better. Some of it's within our control, some of it's not. It's just a matter of trying to figure, okay, whatever it is, what is it? Let's diagnose it. And then let's do all we can to respond to that diagnostics. But I, very important on this stuff is to diagnose it correctly.
41:53 Harry Stebbings? Bob, you've been very successful in your career. When you think about your relationship to money, how do you think about and describe your relationship to money today?
42:01 Speaker 00 I took one job in my life for money. Every other job I've taken, because it just sounded like great fun. And it was a grand adventure. And I happened to make, some places more than others, a lot of money, or at least a lot of money for me. I've never chased money, I've never worshipped money. I don't think money ever defines me. I am, try to be very careful that I don't hang out with just people who also have money. But then I also have a great variety of friends that keep me grounded in what's really going on in the world and give me an interesting life. Money doesn't give you happiness at all. If you don't have a certain amount of money, you might not be happy. But above a certain amount, it's like when I tell kids about, give them career advice, I go, look, you're gonna spend more time at work than you are spending the money you make at work. So do something you love to do. Find something that you can't wait to get to work in the morning.
42:45 Speaker 00 And at the end of the day, you're sad you have to put it away. And when you're not working, you're thinking about it. And it's challenging to you and it satisfies your curiosity. As long as you make enough money, you can pay the bills, you're a winner. Sometimes you get lucky and make a whole lot of money. It's usually luck, it's usually accidental, unless you go into finance. But that's sort of the game we play. And by the way, if you do happen to make a lot of money, then be generous with people who didn't make a lot of money and provide for a lot of other things that help the world.
43:10 Harry Stebbings? How do you think about bringing up, you have three children. How do you think about bringing up your children who have more money than maybe you did growing up? And make sure that they have that humility and hard work ethic? Despite having money in childhood.
43:22 Speaker 00 I think it's hard. I think it's hard to have the total influence on your kids. I think you can be an advisor. I think you can set a tone. I think you go through a period from sort of fifteen, sixteen to sort of mid to late twenties in which I'm an idiot. But some of the things I told them later in life, they go, I remember you told me that. But they have to build their own life. The hardest problem that we have as parents is not to do too much. What worries me to death about the world today is when I grew up, I would go outside and I would get on my bike. My mother had no idea where I was. She knew who I was with. She'd be home by dinner. I would be home, they called it supper then, be home by supper. I was home by supper and she had no idea. When I moved away from Mississippi, when I was eighteen, I moved to Milwaukee.
44:05 Speaker 00 My parents had no idea what was going on in Milwaukee. There was no information source from Milwaukee unless they subscribed to a newspaper, which would come probably a week later. Long distance phone calls were very expensive, so we talked once every couple of weeks. And I saw them in person once or twice a year. I was completely independent and I was able to build me. I worry about my kids and I try to resist this temptation, but I have them on the friend finder. I know where they are at all times. I text with them constantly every day, running family texts. I see them all the time. We fly everywhere together. It's like, how are they gonna build their true independence? How are they gonna be independent from me? Forget money, but independent from me in terms of their own thinking and their own, who do they want to be? I look at three kids, all of them have very different personalities.
44:50 Speaker 00 All of them want to do different things and what I really hope for them is they do that. And I try not to give them advice. My parents used to tell me, they'd go, why don't you get out of that radio business? You're just wasting your time. Just finish college. Cause I was going to college and on the radio. And then I moved the next time, I'd say, why'd you leave them? They were so nice to you and don't you feel bad about? And then when I was about thirty, my parents go, God, I'm sure I'm glad you didn't listen to us. And I remember that. It's a great parental lesson. Don't listen to me. Listen to yourself. And the only thing I would ask you, have you examined it well? Have you thought it through? And if you've thought it through, whatever decision you come up with, I'm supportive. I'm behind you. I want you to do what you want to do to build you. If you know you chose to make a mistake, do you let them make it anyway? Things that look like Mistakes often turn out to be brilliant ideas.
45:32 Speaker 00 I want to be careful that I'm not imposing my judgment of mistake on them, but rather I let them decide for themselves what's right, what's wrong. I thought my kids were gonna commit murder or something, I would probably step in. But beyond that, I think they're gonna discover it and they're gonna have problems in life. But I can't solve their problems for them. I can support them. And I can be a sounding board, and the less judgmental I am, the more they'll use me as a sounding board. And the more judgmental I am, the less they want to use me as a sounding board, because I'm not a sounding board anymore. I'm a controller.
46:04 Harry Stebbings? I love children and I want to have children, but I also work my fucking ass off and I'm terrified about losing any inch on performance. How do you think about being there for your children in the way that you want to be, but also being a rock star CEO and bluntly leading hundreds and thousands of people?
46:19 Speaker 00 Retired once in my life when my little kids were young and took about eight years as just sort of an investor. And I'm a pilot, so I flew all around the world. I had them in 50 countries by the time they were 10. I fed my curiosity and fed them and hopefully helped them develop some of theirs. Life-work balance is hard. I think life-work integration is easier. And it's a matter of how we all sort of do it together. I wouldn't hold myself up as being the greatest parent in the world. I try as hard as anyone does, but boy, is it hard work. When you get to kids, you don't do the kids for you, you do the kids for them. I'm willing to, just like I want to contribute some of my money to charities which are important and help them, I want to give the world some more human beings that I think are good human beings that I helped raise.
47:03 Speaker 00 But it's work. It's a lot of work and it's a commitment. And I love every minute of it. I adore them and I learn a lot. I learned as much from them as they learned from me. And you asked me, how do you keep in touch with ideas, etc.? As my kids open the world to me, ideas they have and interests they have, I would have never had. Their ideas would have never occurred to me. And if I listen to them, I go, they gave me something. Often their critique of my behavior, their critique of my clothing, their critique of my businesses, there's often a real something to the idea, even when they were very young kids.
47:34 Harry Stebbings? Final one, I promise. What's the hardest part of being a parent?
47:37 Speaker 00 Control, loss of control. The hardest part of being a- A parent is you can't will things to happen. Even if you work really hard, even if you spend every penny you have, you can't guarantee outcomes. It's scary to be in that position, but at the same time, it's very rewarding.
47:51 Harry Stebbings? Bob, I'm going to move into a quick fire round, otherwise I'm going to take all of your day. I say a short statement, you can give me your immediate thoughts. So what's your favorite memory from the MTV journey?
47:59 Speaker 00 Best memory was when we did a meeting with Steve Ross, who is the CEO of Warner Communications and Jim Robinson, who is the CEO of American Express. And we had to ask him if we could do the idea and they said yes. So that has to be the best moment in all of MTV.
48:13 Harry Stebbings? What's the best concert you've ever been to and why then?
48:16 Speaker 00 It's either the first iHeartRadio Music Festival that we did in Vegas, when we used it originally just to launch the app. And it was such a hit, we do it every year. And the other one was Live Aid. And I sort of modeled the iHeartRadio Music Festival on Live Aid, because it was this great collaboration of musicians. So many musicians sharing one stage. And in the case of Live Aid, we had the UK and the US. And only one musician played both, Bill Collins. And the iHeartRadio Music Festival, we do two nights, one stage. But I think having musicians on one stage together. And by the way, when you go backstage and they're all sort of chatting and seeing each other, meeting people is great. And Paul McCartney, when he played at the iHeartRadio Music Festival backstage, he said, can I go out front and watch? Said, I never get a chance to really see concerts.
49:00 Speaker 00 And we took him out front, put some security people around him. And he got to sit in the stands and watch the other people perform. And so I think it does something for both the music, the musicians and us as well as the consumer.
49:12 Harry Stebbings? What do you want your legacy to be, Bob?
49:14 Speaker 00 I don't think there is a legacy. But it's funny, I worked for Steve Ross, who took his father-in-law's two funeral homes, turned it into Time Warner. Couldn't have been a greater entrepreneur. People today, Steve Ross, they go, the guy who owns the Miami Dolphins. I go, not that Steve Ross. Or I go, Lew Wasserman. They don't know who Lew Wasserman is. They don't know who Bill Paley is, who started CBS. There are no legacies. Unless you put your name on a building and then they think you are the building, but have no idea who you are. Legacies don't matter. I mean, you should do what you want to do. And I think anybody who's trying to build something for a legacy is kidding themselves.
49:40 Harry Stebbings? What's your biggest lesson from the Caster Dragan's journey?
49:43 Speaker 00 God, there are so many of them. One is that passion really does matter. Two is that it's possible. In the business, I gotta grow fast. Every business, I mean, and constant drive is we said, we're gonna let it grow at whatever pace it grows. Cause we want it to be authentic and we want it to just roll out in a way. We own the tequila connoisseur and we let it go. And that was hard for me because that's so different from me as normal business person. But we had the luxury to do it. And for me, consider it was great because my thought was is a win win. I either have a successful business or have all the tequila I ever need for the rest of my life.
50:17 Harry Stebbings? I love that. And also one, what consumer habit are you most excited about today?
50:22 Speaker 00 The consumer habit's the same, which is convenience. The ability to reach the consumer quickly and to get a retail response from a reaction quickly has been great. But I'm not sure the consumer behavior has changed much. It expresses itself differently when they're watching this screen than they're watching NBC. But at the heart of it, it's still the same desires.
50:43 Harry Stebbings? Final one for you, Bob. Five years time, we're gonna do another show. It's gonna be 2027. Where will you be then? I hope I'll be alive. I mean, you are the only person to have given me that response. Bob, I cannot thank you enough. Honestly, I've so loved doing this show, so thank you so much for joining me.
50:58 Speaker 00 Thank you and congratulations on the show and thanks for having me on.
51:03 Harry Stebbings? I so enjoyed doing that show. I think the favorites for me were the lessons on parenting and decision making. Such a special guest to have on. If you want to see more from us, of course, you can find us on YouTube at 20VC. And you can find us on the site at 20vc.com. But before we leave you today, Angel List is making it easy to launch a fund, launch a startup and invest in either. I love using the Angel List platform because it removes all the friction associated with starting and scaling a fund. Whether you're running SPVs, a venture fund like me, or a rolling fund, Angel List has you covered. For founders and their teams, Angel List also has a suite of startup products that abstract away all the complexity associated with running a startup. You can launch a fundraising ready startup in just a few clicks.
51:47 Harry Stebbings? And Angel List handles incorporation, banking, cap table, compensation, fundraising and more, all in one place. This allows startup teams to focus on building. So if you're a founder, you can launch your company at angellist.com. Whether you're a founder, funder, or investor, you're in great hands with Angel List. And speaking of turning complex processes into a very sleek and streamlined process, this holiday season, consider giving money directly to people in need. GiveDirectly is a global nonprofit that lets you do just that with no strings attached. Did you know that due to operational efficiencies, about ninety cents of every dollar donated through GiveDirectly go directly to someone in need compared to only fifty cents of every
52:31 Harry Stebbings? dollar, fifty cents of every dollar for more complex programs like job training? GiveDirectly also uses poverty data and advanced targeting to identify those in greatest need, often in areas of sub-Saharan Africa that are so remote that other aid groups aren't able to reach them. Visit givedirectly.org/20vc to learn more and send money directly to someone living in extreme poverty to spend on what they need most. That's givedirectly.org/20vc. And finally, from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. And there are three things that are just fantastic about Squarespace. First, mobile-optimized websites.
53:15 Harry Stebbings? All websites look fantastic and are optimized for mobile. Content automatically adjusts, so your site looks great on any device. Second, email campaigns. Squarespace makes it super easy to grow and engage your audience with Squarespace email campaigns, so you don't need any other providers. Finally, SEO tools. Squarespace takes the guesswork out of SEO, so you'll get found in search by more people more often. And if that wasn't good enough, go to squarespace.com/20vc for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code 20vc to save ten percent off your first purchase of a website or a domain. As always, I so appreciate all your support and I can't wait to bring you a phenomenal episode this coming Monday.
Previous 20 Product: Marty Cagan on The Four Questions of Great Product Management, Product Lessons from Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and eBay's Pierre Omidyar & The Difference Between Truly Great Product Teams and the Rest Next 20VC: Mailchimp's Ben Chestnut on The Biggest Leadership Lessons Scaling to a $12Bn Acquisition and $1BN+ ARR, The Secret to Happiness, Being a Great Husband and Father & Why 2021 was the Right Time To Sell to Intuit Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
