Pod Insights Summation with Auren Hoffman beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk - why email beats social media About this episode Tyler Denk is the co-founder and CEO of beehiiv, a newsletter platform that has grown to over $20 million in annual revenue in under four years. He was the second employee at Morning Brew, where he built the growth infrastructure that helped scale the company to 3.5 million subscribers before its $75 million acquisition by Business Insider in 2020. He’s also the creator of big desk energy, a newsletter with over 100k subscribers. In this episode of World of DaaS, Tyler and Auren discuss...
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Auren Hoffman? Hello fellow data nerds. Welcome to World of DAS. I'm your host, Orin Hoffman, CEO of Incubate and GP of Flex Capital. Discover more episodes, get weekly data as a service news, original content, articles on data and more at worldofdas.com. That's world of das, D-A-A-S, dot com. Hello fellow data nerds. My guest today is Tyler Denk. Tyler is the founder and CEO of Beehive, a newsletter platform that has grown to over 20 million ARR in under three and a half years. He's also the creator of Big Desk Energy, a newsletter with over 100,000 subscribers. Tyler, welcome to World of DAS.
0:41 Speaker 01 Thanks for having me. Good morning.
0:43 Auren Hoffman? Morning. I'm a big fan, also a Beehive customer, so super excited to dive in. Now, if you think of the big daddy in this space that had a big exit, which was MailChimp, I think they sold for $12 billion. You've said that Beehive could be worth, hopefully, a lot more than that one day. Why is this still a big business?
1:03 Speaker 01 I think historically, a lot of content creators have become overly dependent on posting content to platforms that are algorithmically driven. So Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, the algorithm dictates what content is served to people who follow you or don't follow you. And there's really just email and SMS. It's kind of the two direct-to-consumer, direct-to-audience channels where you kind of own the distribution and the content that you are sending to your audience.
1:31 Auren Hoffman? Assuming your email gets delivered, the deliverability is high. If someone subscribes, they're going to see your email, essentially. Whereas if someone subscribes to me on X or on Instagram, they may not see my post.
1:44 Speaker 01 Exactly. And I think more people are waking up to the realities of actually owning their audience and distribution, and especially in a world with AI where a lot of these publishers who were overly dependent on Google and these other channels driving traffic to their website, suddenly seeing with AI summaries and other things that they're getting a fraction of the traffic they saw before, you start to see the power of being able to hit send to your 100,000 readers and 100,000 people receiving it is extremely powerful. And I think that's why we're seeing this huge resurgence in newsletters.
2:12 Auren Hoffman? Email, it's been around forever. The first email was sent, I think in like 71. AOL was launched in the early 90s in the email. It still just seems like email newsletters are still one of the most important ways to communicate. Do you see that going away in the future? Or do you see that continuing going forward?
2:34 Speaker 01 As many people that had predicted that it's the death of email and that we've already hit peak newsletter, peak email. As you graduate college and enter the real world, you kind of need email for work. Most business communications happen via email, whether it's flight receipts, travel plans. Email is really the core, central communication channel for most adults, I would say. Obviously, there's SMS and whatever else, but primarily email for doing most business correspondence. And as long as people are tied to their email and have to open their email every single day for work. I think there is a business and a channel to be utilized in terms of transferring information or content or entertainment via newsletter. So when I raised our seed round four years ago, everyone told me that we were peak newsletter then.
3:19 Speaker 01 And fast forward four years, Substack raised at a $1.1 billion valuation. We have 35, 40,000 active senders on the platform today. I don't think we're even close to peak newsletter and think that it has a lot of staying power.
3:34 Auren Hoffman? From a product perspective, is the just the most important thing? There isn't even a number two, it's just getting the email delivered?
3:42 Speaker 01 Well, if you don't do that, nothing else really matters. When you think of product around the email itself, there's only so much innovation that's happening actually within the email. What I think is actually more interesting, where we spend a lot of time is the entire suite of tools built around the newsletter. So understanding exactly who's on your audience, how did you acquire that reader? How are they engaging with your content? How can you monetize that reader better? How can you serve them? And then everything around the newsletter as a whole, in the sense that a lot of these content creators don't just send a single newsletter, but they have a YouTube channel, they have a storefront, they have a website. So how can we tie everything together where the newsletter is this centralizing force of reliable communication to their audience?
4:25 Speaker 01 But whatever they're doing on the back half of that, whether it's community or storefront or you name it, we can play nicely and help them succeed in whatever they're doing online.
4:36 Auren Hoffman? It seems it's still really hard to customize the newsletter beyond just saying like, "Dear Tyler" and "Dear Orin." It's really hard to actually build a custom newsletter to people. Why is that so hard?
4:48 Speaker 01 I think it's because the underlying tech with email is actually very antiquated and hasn't been updated. And the number one request we've always gotten from day one is can you add a video into email? And the answer is no, and that's not a Beehive problem. That's just like an email problem. Email just doesn't support video. As so much of the web has advanced, whether it's AI or crypto or decentralized, whatever. And obviously webpages that load instantly and have video. Email has remained primarily text-based. So it feels like it's lagging behind of what you actually receive in the inbox. I think that's the biggest limitation. There's also just so many different clients. When you send an email, it needs to look amazing on Superhuman, Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Microsoft, and then all of these up and coming.
5:33 Auren Hoffman? And on your phone, of course.
5:35 Speaker 01 Right, and so there's mobile, there's tablet, there's desktop, there's Windows phones. There's everything. That's what makes email hard and why customization's always been a challenge is because we as a platform need to make sure when you send your email, whether it's your grandparents who are still using Outlook 2003 or someone that's using the latest email client that's in beta. We have to ensure that it looks great and that puts a little bit of constraints in terms of design.
6:00 Auren Hoffman? Even just classically, you do different subject lines to different types of audiences. Or if you've got five news items, you might try to reorder them in a way that is more appealing to some audience than the other. Some audience is more into sports, you lead with that. If some audience is more into the crypto thing, you lead with that or something. But even that seems really hard to do.
6:20 Speaker 01 It's possible with dynamic content, which is something we're building now. But I'd say what makes it hard is not the tech. It's knowing who your audience actually is. I have a list of 110,000 people. I have a decent idea of the type of profile and the people that I'm speaking to based on my interactions when they reply and the other data that I collect. But I don't know exactly all 110,000 people. Age, demographic, interests and whatever. So if you don't have 100% certainty in that, it's hard to customize your content accordingly. And I think that's actually a huge gap with newsletters and something we have a few pretty interesting ideas to build.
6:54 Auren Hoffman? If you think of Beehive itself, it's like World of Dass, this newsletter, like we run on it. We get charged about 1,600 bucks a year for 5,000 subscribers, which is pretty high. I think most of our companies would use it more if it was cheaper, but obviously you've come up with like the right pricing. How do you think about pricing in the way that you've thought about it?
7:15 Speaker 01 Surprisingly, that's like one of the first times I've heard pricing as a complaint. If you remove Substack from the ecosystem, which Twitter and Threads and LinkedIn don't charge you to use the platform, and Substack is becoming more and more of a social platform than it is actually like a software service provider. Removing free as an option, which has anchored everyone to thinking that that is how you can build a sustainable business. We're actually one of the most competitively priced platforms in the entire market, and I'd argue even underpriced in many circumstances. Price has never really been a factor in terms of why people don't use the platform, unless of course they have one foot in Substack and are used to getting things for free. But what you're losing on Substack is control of your audience.
7:55 Speaker 01 So Substack can send emails on your behalf saying, hey, you should subscribe to these other 30 newsletters because they own the audience relationship. They take 10% of all the revenue that you generate on the platform. They push your readers that you've acquired into their ecosystem and their app. So really, as soon as you acquire a reader, it becomes their user more than your reader. So those are kind of like the trade offs of being the product versus paying for the product. And I feel really good about our pricing model.
8:20 Auren Hoffman? You've come out to some sort of thing of we want to be this to MailChimp. You're looking at these other competitive dynamics and pricing accordingly.
8:29 Speaker 01 The traditional email players, whether it's MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, Campaign Monitor, like we are competitively to like lower price than almost all of them. We also offer a website builder. So we acquired a website builder a year ago, launched it about a month ago, natively in the platform, and that we believe we can compete with a Webflow, Framer, Squarespace type solution. So it's both website and email in a single platform. And then we also help our users monetize. So we have an ad network with advertisers like Nike, Netflix, HubSpot, AG1. So we believe regardless of what you're paying us, that you should actually be able to earn many multiples of that in revenue directly. So ideally, most of our users and like our North Star is that our users are generating more revenue on the platform than we're charging them to use the platform.
9:12 Auren Hoffman? I'm always interested how people think about pricing. I know there's these different tiers. And when I was talking to someone who runs like the world of desk at 5,000 subs, there's a big jump. So she's constantly like trimming out the subs, which maybe is good. Maybe we don't need those subs. So maybe it's a good thing. She's doing all this extra work to not get that next tier of jump that's in there. Have you seen a similar thing in your, you have a lot of people are like super close to the top tier, but they're constantly trimming out the subs because they're worried about jumping up to another thing. And is that a good user experience because people who don't want the emails aren't getting them?
9:49 Speaker 01 Our business model is also fairly unique and most email senders charge based on the volume. The more emails that you send, the more you charge. So if you sent an email every morning and every afternoon, you're charged for each of those email sends. Where we actually went more the creator friendly route and figured that people don't want to calculate or estimate how many emails are going to send in any given week or month and then get surprised by the billing. So instead we just have flat rate pricing based on the subscriber count, which I think is much more creator friendly.
10:18 Auren Hoffman? Certainly good for people who send emails fairly often.
10:21 Speaker 01 I'm sure there's some people, I don't think our price jumps at any point are drastic. And again, compared to any of the other competitors in the space, I think we're underpriced relative to almost all of them. I don't think we run into too many instances of people churning their list to remove a $20 or $30 a month price increase. But I'm sure there are some people who are more price conscious than others and are doing that.
10:42 Auren Hoffman? We've got this marketing dollars that flow from like an ad perspective. And I don't know necessarily how much is flowing into email today because it's kind of hard to put ads into email. Like where do you think that goes over time?
10:57 Speaker 01 Historically, there's the duopoly of Meta and Alphabet being Google and Facebook or Instagram or whatever. That's where most ad dollars go, with the exception of maybe Amazon is the third. If you have a physical product, we obviously are making a big bet that the hive can build a massively scaled ad network where advertisers who are carving out their upcoming budget, put some into Google, some into Facebook, and then carve out 5, 10% to hit all of these niche audiences via newsletter. Because to your point, it was more or less impossible to do that previously. You would actually have to have relationships with all of these different newsletters, negotiate one-on-one with the pricing of all of the newsletters, and then follow up, send assets, creative, do the reporting and the invoicing.
11:42 Speaker 01 That's impossible to scale as like a smaller, growing team. What we've built is we have north of 30,000 active publishers on the platform. We're sending nearly 3 billion emails a month. So we have advertisers like Nike, like Netflix, who come to us because they want to get in front of these niche audiences in an ad format that is much less twitchy than scrolling through Instagram, and frankly, less competitive than bidding on Google, and more untapped than a lot of these other acquisition sources. And they're getting high-quality impressions from very engaged readers and thousands of newsletters with a single buy. So that's our bet.
12:18 Auren Hoffman? Right now, it's kind of an older model where you're paying to almost sponsor a specific type of content based on how many users they have, how engaged they are, the type of content that it is. It's not a one-to-one type of ad where I want to advertise to Tyler.
12:34 Speaker 01 So we do have a feature that allows you to do the latter, and there's more there where if you want to own the relationship directly with the advertiser, as a publisher, you can. And you can build your own storefront, facilitate payments. But the Beehive Ad Network fundamentally is AG1 comes to us. They say we want men and women in their 20s and 30s, very health-conscious. We have all of the first-party data of all of our publishers, and we know which newsletters have which type of audience. Historically, what type of newsletters convert well for these types of advertisers and purchase these types of products. And then we can provision that ad to dozens, hundreds, thousands of newsletters at once to choose to accept that advertisement and run in their newsletter, which we think is a huge value add to these creators.
13:17 Auren Hoffman? Have you thought about doing a custom audience where an advertiser can come in with the audience that they want to run it to? And you'll have some sort of subset of that audience, and then you insert the ad just for those people in those newsletters?
13:31 Speaker 01 Yes, right now, our advertising targeting is newsletter based, so it's more category, content and historical performance. Eventually, we're going to move into a world where it's subscriber based, where when I send my newsletter to 110,000 people, there might be 20 different ads going out in that newsletter, depending on who the recipient is. Subscriber specific targeting is something we plan to launch sometime in 2026.
13:56 Auren Hoffman? As an advertiser, I love custom audiences and there's only a small number of places I can do that on today. I can do that on Meta, I can do that on X. It doesn't really work on X, but I could try to do it on X. I could do a little bit on LinkedIn, but it doesn't really work that well. And then a little bit on Google. I'm somewhat limited. I pay often four to 10 times more CPM for a custom audience because it's niche and those people I really want to reach. And I'd love to just bombard those people with like a specific ad that I'm trying to do.
14:27 Speaker 01 Our North Star from day one of the business was can we build Meta's Facebook Ad Manager, more or less, directly for email? I don't know if they call it the Meta Ad Manager now. It's been a while since I've been in there, but everything that you can do in there is really the North Star of the advertising tools that we're looking to build.
14:42 Auren Hoffman? And they've done such a great job because it's self-serve. So you don't have to have like a sales force to go out there. Literally, people just go in and set it up. It's so nice.
14:51 Speaker 01 And then that's again, our North Star as well. So somewhere in the next six to eight months, I would imagine a self-serve version for the Beehive Ad Network where any advertiser can come in, upload their custom audiences, upload the types of content and target demographic that they're looking to reach. Tell us more about their product and we can serve those ads to the right people. I'm very bullish on the ad network.
15:11 Auren Hoffman? There is a point where there's some sort of limit to the number of newsletters you want to pay for. You would think that advertising would become a bigger and bigger portion of the revenue that these newsletters would get. Where do you think that breaks down?
15:26 Speaker 01 That's been my hypothesis and thesis from day one. We launched Beehive three to four years after Substack. Substack at the time, and they've seemed to change their tone here, were very anti-advertising and also very pro everyone can monetize their audience directly. You can do subscriptions. There's no such thing as subscription fatigue. And coming from my Morning Brew background, which was 95% ad-based revenue, I saw the power of being able to serve high-quality ads to a very engaged audience, where the audience got value because it was relevant to them, where the advertiser also got value because they were seeing incredible performance. It's hard for Netflix to get people to pay their $10 to $15 a month. It's hard to get newsletter operators to get their readers
16:07 Speaker 01 to pay $10, $20 a month as well, and there is some sort of fatigue there. That being said, we do offer users the ability to monetize via paid subscriptions, monetize their audience directly. We're actually the only platform in the ecosystem that doesn't charge a percent fee. What you charge minus the Stripe fees is exactly what you take home, counter to Substack, who takes 10% and other competitors who take between 5% and 12%.
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17:15 Auren Hoffman? There are people who are putting together newsletters to monetize that newsletter, either through paid subscriptions or through like at Morning Brew, some sort of advertising. But there's also a lot of content creators who are hoping to monetize other ways. They're trying to get their name out there. Maybe they run a consulting firm and putting out free content, or if you think of all the B2B newsletters that are out there, often it's because you want people to have other types of relationships. How do you think about those ultimately?
17:45 Speaker 01 I think actually that is the bull case for when people say that we're peak newsletter. One, if you live on the coasts and are very in tune with tech and the media ecosystem, I think maybe you're subscribed to quite a few newsletters. I would imagine that most of the middle of the country and most of the world actually doesn't rely on newsletter as a huge form of regular information and news. So I think there's a huge opportunity there. But you also hit on B2B newsletters and businesses. I think what HubSpot did in acquiring The Hustle, where they turned The Hustle into basically just lead gen for HubSpot, where every day you're served one to two ads about HubSpot, but you're actually getting information from The Hustle in terms of tech news. They're speaking directly to their core ICP. They're providing value.
18:28 Speaker 01 They're giving them relevant content with the hope that on the 17th time that you've seen this HubSpot ad and you're thinking about a new CRM, that you choose HubSpot and now you're paying them $50,000 a year. And I think this content as marketing and getting people into a newsletter as a top of funnel, only to drive them into a SaaS product or consulting service or something else, is actually the minority of businesses who are participating in that. And I think it just takes patience, kind of like SEO. For those who do have a better content strategy and can acquire their ICP for $1 or $2 for their email, rather than $400 for like a lead in the platform, I think that's a winning formula and I think you're going to see more businesses do more of that.
19:09 Auren Hoffman? How do you think people are going to be consuming this? Cause you get a newsletter in that maybe you want to read, but it takes some time to go read it. It's not just a quick two-line email you can respond to. Maybe some people have filters and they're filtering it into like a read later folder. Some people are bookmarking that somehow. Some people just delete it because they don't have time to go through it. How's the user going to engage with all this content?
19:36 Speaker 01 I think the same way that they have been for like the past five to 10 years. I think we've seen more companies and more content creators adopt newsletter and email as a strategy. At the same time, depending on who you are, you've also received a lot more cold email, like the proliferation of all these different AI tools. And so the inbox is more crowded than ever. The super humans of the world in these other inboxes will get better at filtering out mail that you actually want to read from mail that you don't want to read and don't need to respond to. But I think it all goes back to as a content creator, if you're creating quality content that is providing value to people, people will go out of their way to read it. And if you go out and prove to your inbox that this is content that you want to engage with, they'll continue to surface that content.
20:18 Auren Hoffman? You now data on billions of emails, thousands of newsletters. Do you have a sense what you can learn both about the behavior of these people that are subscribing and about the content creators?
20:32 Speaker 01 The content creators that are the most successful are very consistent. And I think you hear that from any type of content creator, whether you're an individual or a business, is having a reliable schedule where your readers know to expect content being delivered at that time. And the type and quality of content, I think, is super important. We see a lot of content creators sending it all different times. They send it one week when they feel like it and then go three weeks without sending again. And I think you can't create a habit with your readers and audience. It's harder to get adoption and really scale anything. So I'd say consistency is something that we see the most successful content creators have.
21:08 Auren Hoffman? And I find content creators, some of those successful ones send it all different times. I get good ones on Sundays even, I get good ones on Fridays. They're all over the map.
21:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I don't think there's like a specific winning time by any means. It's just consistent for you and your audience. I get some on Friday afternoon, which I would never think is an optimal time to send an email personally. I know the three that are sent on Friday afternoon. I look forward to them every week. It's the expectation of behavior that they've created. As far as like readers, I think it's what you would expect. A lot of people who read newsletters read many newsletters. So there's very few people in our database as readers who have only subscribed to one newsletter. Most of our readers subscribe to, and I don't know the exact average, but more than one newsletter, whether that's through our recommendation features or whether that's just because people who consume information in their inbox are more likely to consume other types of information in their inbox. But that's something we see in the data as well.
22:00 Auren Hoffman? There's this content void that people really want to read about. You could potentially help content creators fill that void. Is that something you could somehow figure out?
22:12 Speaker 01 You would think so, and maybe if that's why I spent a lot more of my time, maybe. I'm super heads down on the product side of things. I listen to users all day long that are trying to scale their newsletter and what features and things we could be doing to help them. And that's where I spend most of my time. But do we have the data? Maybe I think one of the one interesting things that maybe Ben Thompson said years ago was that the internet is so much bigger than people give it credit for. And it's kind of like the thousand true fans thing where if you are passionate about anything, whether it's gardening or a certain type of truck, there's probably tens of thousands at a minimum, other people in the world who have that same fascination and interest. And so truly just finding that audience. I don't know if I'm the best arbiter of what's interesting and valuable to people.
22:56 Auren Hoffman? So if it's super interesting to you, there's enough people probably that's super interesting to them.
23:01 Speaker 01 And then you just have to figure out like, where do those people live? And I also think there's different motivations for launching a newsletter. Some people do it as a pure hobbyist because they like writing and want to reach other people who care about the same thing. Other people are a bit more calculated of like, I want this to be a revenue generating business. And so I'm only going to launch it if I know that there's a large enough TAM and I can acquire those users for a certain price and then sell advertising or subscription revenue that is higher. I think it depends about how you go about it. That's why we try to keep our plans as cheap as possible. So hobbyists can succeed on the platform as well.
23:33 Auren Hoffman? What's some of the most surprising thing you've seen about user behavior? People who are consuming these newsletters?
23:40 Speaker 01 How many they actually subscribe to. On the high end, you can imagine 30 or 40 newsletters that people are actively reading. I'm a huge newsletter advocate.
23:50 Auren Hoffman? You're just seeing the stuff from Beehive. Obviously, that same person is probably subscribing to newsletters through other platforms.
23:56 Speaker 01 Yeah. And so I think the inbox as a channel for communication and receiving content, whether it's news or entertainment, is still early despite so many people claiming that we're peak newsletter.
24:10 Auren Hoffman? Where do you see like the difference between building an audience versus building a community?
24:15 Speaker 01 The way that I would look at the difference between building an audience and building a community is an audience is typically one to many. So in my case, it's me communicating with my 110,000 readers. Maybe it's bidirectional. They'll reply to me, I'll reply back to them. So there's some bit of bidirectionality where a community would be if I created a space where all 110,000 of them could actually interact and engage with each other and that they could provide value just by being a part of this community without me having to do anything, even though I'm maybe the centralizing force that has brought them together. And so it's an interesting thing. I think it's why a lot of larger newsletters pivot or expand into launching a discord or having some sort of community platform that can drive like-minded
24:57 Speaker 01 people into the same space to engage with each other and provide value.
25:03 Auren Hoffman? I'm on some Reddit threads and I love them. And sometimes they're super nichey type of things about a specific passion. And maybe they're somewhat related to a newsletter or maybe because I'm on some newsletters, I get involved in some Reddit threads.
25:18 Speaker 01 Exactly. So I mean, Reddit is a great example. Anyone who's participating in any of these subreddits, I think that's definitely a community where there's being value provided bottoms up versus top down. I think bottoms up versus top down is probably the easiest way to think about community versus audience.
25:33 Auren Hoffman? Is it the simple thing, if you're giving advice to a creator, it's just create great content?
25:38 Speaker 01 Everyone's always looking for like cheat codes and silver bullets of how to grow faster. At the end of the day, until you can provide value reliably to your users or readers where they are going out of their way to seek your content, or they're recommending your content is probably the greatest signal that you found content market fit. And that's what we did at Morning Brew, honestly. We built the referral program out of Morning Brew strictly from the signal that our readers, when we would ask them how they found out about us, was that their friend or their teacher or their parent recommended it to them. There was already this mechanism of people referring the newsletter to other people that they felt would enjoy it before we even added incentives into the referral program. That's the strongest signal
26:20 Speaker 01 that the content that you're creating is resonating with other people. But there's really no way that I've seen any newsletter or content creator, regardless of the platform, succeed without focusing on the quality of content. There's a lot of like gurus and newsletter operators who will tell you how to get the cheapest leads and how to build these automations. But if the content isn't great, I don't think anyone actually sticks around.
26:42 Auren Hoffman? Now, when I go to like Big Desk Energy, your newsletter, it kind of hearkens back to the UI of the 1990s or maybe even earlier. Is there something deep about tech nostalgia that gets us excited? What about that is so interesting to people?
26:59 Speaker 01 Depending on who you are and how old you are, like those were the formative years of the internet building itself. In my personal life, when I was first exposed to the internet, we had the loud startup modem or whatever that makes all the different sounds. And you have to wait 15 minutes to actually get online. And then you have to like re-download a bunch of programs. There's no like password savers or anything. And the process of going online, that's like my childhood.
27:24 Auren Hoffman? Even like the old Nintendo graphics, old Atari graphics or those types of things.
27:29 Speaker 01 In a way, it's beautiful of how terrible it was. There's something about, I guess, when people were growing up in the formative years of their childhood of the core memories that as you get older, I feel like there's work, there's stress, there's other things that are going on. And when you're a child, fortunately for me, and hopefully a bunch of other people, you're hanging out with friends, you're playing video games, you're on the computer. Life was like a much simpler time. And I think when you think back of your like core memories of a child, when it's more overwhelmingly positive, you're probably more likely to associate other things in that time as positive as well.
28:01 Auren Hoffman? What about those 1990s, early 2000s tech or internet culture? Do you wish we could somehow recapture?
28:10 Speaker 01 Definitely recency bias because I just read a piece on the shutdown of AOL, which brought up something that I thought was pretty interesting. And I think a good way to answer this question is back in the late 90s and early 2000s, the internet was a place that you had to like seek and go out of your way to go to. The internet was like a destination. And today, the internet is everywhere. You actually have to try hard to avoid the internet. It's on you with your phone, your smart watch. People are pretty much plugged in from the second that they wake up until the second that they go to sleep. And they're just constantly surrounded by push notifications and messages and information. Early 2000s, the internet was this startup dial-up modem thing that took 30 minutes to get to before we could even get access to anyone else on the internet.
28:53 Speaker 01 I thought there's like a really interesting perspective of a destination versus it being all encompassing as it is today. And there's something cool about the people who went out of their way to build these online communities, knowing that that was like a very intentional destination, not just a push notification that got pushed to their phone.
29:09 Auren Hoffman? You're an interesting person because you're both CEO and founder of a successful startup, but you also were one of the very first employees at Morning Brew and other successful company. What'd you learn about adding value to startup as an early hire versus a founder?
29:24 Speaker 01 Obviously, I wasn't a founder at Morning Brew. I was the second employee there, but it's a very gray area. But as far as like the day-to-day responsibilities, when there's three to five people at this company, there's no turning to someone else to get things done. Like you either do it or it doesn't get done. The jack of all trades, the bias towards action, to have to actually identify what's the highest value thing that you could be doing at any given time and just executing without all of the different guardrails and managers and bureaucracy that happens in larger companies. I kind of view my time at Morning Brew as almost feeling like a founder. The best early employees do feel like a founder. No disrespect to the obvious founders, but I think those are the types of people that you want to hire as a founder.
30:04 Auren Hoffman? If you're looking for employee number three at your company, how do you ID that?
30:08 Speaker 01 Extreme bias towards action, high agency where they aren't looking for consensus. They aren't looking for a bunch of approvals. They have a track record and a history of identifying. I felt this was interesting. I acted on it. I made something of it. I was right and it's worked.
30:25 Auren Hoffman? They're getting stuff done at a high velocity or?
30:28 Speaker 01 High output, but also like not afraid to fail. A lot of people that come from.
30:33 Auren Hoffman? McKinsey or something?
30:35 Speaker 01 McKinsey is exactly what I was thinking of. There are certain career choices that are very calculated, very careful, clear line of command, whereas the startup culture and the nature of high-agency founders are just constantly shipping. I've made thousands of mistakes at Bihai. That's totally fine, as long as you understand what was the hypothesis going in, what worked, what didn't, and how can we learn from this and be better the next time? It is hard to like communicate the types of people that kind of fit that criteria, especially in like a few interviews. But I think most people know it when they see it. There's definitely people that I get off a call with where if this person was on our team, there are so many gaps and gray areas in the structure of our company where they could just fill the gaps and get things done.
31:18 Speaker 01 And I'd also say the ability where like nothing ever slips by these people. I recently hired a chief of staff and like has been life changing. They're on every email. They will ping me at any time. Hey, this happened three weeks ago. We still need to follow up on this. They have a running list of everything. There's certain people that I've hired throughout the journey of the company where nothing gets by them.
31:38 Auren Hoffman? How did you ID that person or how did you get the most out of them? You just happened to get lucky and find someone who's super high agency? Or is there some playbook you have to make sure you can manage that person correctly?
31:51 Speaker 01 I wish I had a playbook and I wish I had a better way of identifying them. One of my superpowers is being able to identify really good fits for different positions and roles, or like just people that I think would be amazing to work with. A lot of the people that I hired at Morning Brew, two went on to be my co-founders at Beehive, and that's worked out extremely well. And a lot of my other early hires have gone on to do amazing things. You can get a sense of someone who views their job as a job and someone who actually views what they're doing as a passion and something that they really care about. And the more that you can find the people who look forward to Monday to like actually build something meaningful and take pride in what they're building, it's harder to find and harder to test, but you can kind of get like a gut feel.
32:33 Auren Hoffman? I've seen lots of different curveballs that have happened to companies. In your case, one of your co-founders tragically passed away not too long after you founded the company. Can you walk us through, how did you guys get through that? I can imagine that was like a very, very tough time. I don't want you to have to relive it now, but I think I've heard everything except for that one.
32:53 Speaker 01 Tough times probably an understatement. It was definitely the worst experience that I've had in my life. I've been pretty fortunate not to have close friends or family pass away. Andrew, who is our CTO and co-founder, was the closest person that I've ever had that has passed away. And what made it more difficult is it's so hard to build a successful startup and the odds are always stacked against you. And we were six months in and starting to see real momentum. I feel guilty that it's impossible to separate Andrew, the person who I care about, and like Andrew, our CTO, who's the most important person at the company and a huge reason why we were having success. If there is a silver lining, it's since going through that experience, I feel like everything else pales in comparison of obstacles and challenges.
33:37 Speaker 01 We were hitting our first major scaling issues at the time, which he was owning and resolving. Obviously could not continue to own and resolve that. And so no one else on the team had the experience or the context to get us out of that situation. We were growing super quick at the time for like being a small five-person team. Everyone had to step up, take on new responsibilities. My co-founder was teaching himself a new coding language over the weekend, really like do whatever it takes to keep the business running. So definitely set us back for a while. If Andrew was here today, we'd be years ahead of where we are now. It kind of set us on this whole eight-month journey of hiring a CTO who wasn't the right fit, finding another CTO, ramping that CTO up, backfilling the position. We were treading water for three months, trying to not go under.
34:22 Speaker 01 There is a lot of resiliency at the company. It's baked into the DNA that everything else that comes across our path is a challenge that we can overcome, but clearly set us back quite a bit and was probably the most difficult part of my life.
34:37 Auren Hoffman? Well, thank you for telling us that. Two more questions we ask all of our guests. What is a conspiracy theory that you believe?
34:45 Speaker 01 I think a lot of the food that we eat and the water that we drink is not nearly as healthy or clean, at least in America. And I think people who travel internationally kind of feel this way. I have like a lot of friends who live internationally and come to the US and feel like a huge difference in like the food that they're eating. So I think there's like a common acceptance of just because it's normal and comes from the government pipes in the sink and it clears whatever regulations or whatever that they have. I think there's a lot of toxins, carcinogens, metals, plastics up and down the food chain, both in the food and water that we drink.
35:19 Auren Hoffman? And there's some conspiracy because there's someone benefiting from that somewhere down the chain.
35:24 Speaker 01 You can go that in a million different directions. There's the healthcare industry who benefits from people being sick and the longevity and the medicine, the pharmacy. I'm fairly cynical in that. I think that a lot of people just take information as, oh, everyone else is just doing the same thing and everyone eats this and drinks this, so it's totally fine. I think that there's a lot of toxins and bullshit that a lot of people eat and drink that I think we're starting with this new health wave, this whole medicine 3.0, and that getting more proactive tests are starting to shine a bit more of light. I'm pretty big on to that.
35:54 Auren Hoffman? What do you do that maybe is a little bit different from our listeners on the health stuff?
36:00 Speaker 01 I'm a total health nut. If I sit in the back, I have like an air freshener and an air purifier in every room, making sure that I'm breathing in clean air when I can while I'm inside. I have like a reverse osmosis water filter because I don't trust the water in LA and the tap water and everything.
36:15 Auren Hoffman? That just attaches to the sink or something or?
36:19 Speaker 01 Some overpriced thing that you put under your sink and it filters out. And I've done my research in knowing that to remove all of the different carcinogens and toxins and metals and everything else in the water, that's typically in tap water. That's how you remove all of that. I try to eat regenerative farming and organic and everything that I possibly can. And the more direct a farm that I can find, the better.
36:39 Auren Hoffman? So you're not on like the all Twinkie diet or something like that?
36:43 Speaker 01 I don't know if I've ever ate a Twinkie.
36:45 Auren Hoffman? Oh, man, that's tough. Last question we ask all of our guests. What conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?
36:52 Speaker 01 I think it depends on who you are and what you're trying to do. But if I'm speaking to founders, I think the generic advice of finding work-life balance is total bullshit.
37:01 Auren Hoffman? But does anyone give that to founders?
37:03 Speaker 01 Honestly, yes. I think a lot of people say like, oh, it's a marathon. You don't want to burn out. You need to take care of yourself. You need to make sure that you actually carve out time for yourself to do X, Y, Z, and whatever. For me, at least while I have the ambitions that I do, and I think this could be truly a multi-billion dollar company. It's not easy to build a multi-billion dollar company. And me going to dinner at six o'clock on a Tuesday or Wednesday, maybe that's balance because I'm not staring at my computer until nine o'clock at night. But I actually don't think that's helping me achieve the goals that I've set out to do. And so for this part of my life, where the company is the most important thing in my life, I actually don't think work-life balance is reasonable. And I don't think that's advice that other founders should work with.
37:45 Auren Hoffman? That makes a lot of sense. This has been great. Thank you, Tyler Denk, for joining us on World of Desk. I follow you at Dank underscore tweets on X. And I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. I also subscribe to your newsletter as well, Big Desk Energy. And I hope that all of our listeners subscribe to that as well. Thank you for joining us.
38:06 Speaker 01 Thanks for having me.
38:10 Auren Hoffman? Thanks for listening. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe to World of Desk wherever you consume your podcasts, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and more. And please help us get discovered by leaving a review and check out worldofdesk.com. That's worldofdesk.com. And of course, connect with me on Twitter, at Auren, that's A U R E N. Would absolutely love to hear from you.
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