20VC: Giphy's Adam Leibsohn on From Being Homeless To Founding a Multi Hundred Million Dollar Startup & The Challenges of Creating One of The World's Largest Search Engine

Adam Leibsohn is the Founder and COO @ Giphy, the company that brings you joy and laughter through gifs. Earlier this year, Giphy raised a phenomenal $55m Series C financing from the likes of General Catalyst, Lerer Hippeau, Lightspeed and Betaworks. As for Adam he is one of the coolest and most genuine founders I have ever interviewed and is so committed to the startup cause that at one point he went without a home to pay for the startup dream! In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Adam went from being homeless to the Founder of Giphy? 2.) What were the biggest lessons Adam learnt from his failed startup? When should founders know when is the right time to stop? 3.) Why gifs and why now? What has allowed for the spectacular rise of gifs? 4.) How has Adam created such a unique culture at Giphy? What have been his key learnings? What has worked, what has not worked? 5.) Giphy is now a cultural icon but how does Adam look to turn that into a massive globally profit making business? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Adam’s Fave Blog and Newsletter: The Information, Dealbook Adam’s Fave Book: East of Eden As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Adam on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.uk and enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve. Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com.

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Welcome back to the 20 Minute VC with your host Harry Stebbings at H Stebbings on Snapchat. Now for today's show, I'm not going to do the traditional boring intro because that's just not in keeping with the guest today. So this will be on the fly and chilled, just like our guest. So joining me today is Adam Leibsohn, founder and COO at Giphy. Now Giphy is the company that essentially brings you fun and laughter through gifs. And they raised a phenomenal 55 million Series C from the likes of General Catalyst, RRE, Lightspeed and Beta Works earlier this year. As for Adam, where do I start? Genuinely, he's probably one of the coolest, most zen founders I've ever interviewed. So committed to the cause that at one point, he didn't even have a permanent home in order to pay for his startup dreams.

• 0:43Harry Stebbings?

  And he came with the highest recommendation from Spencer Lazar at General Catalyst and Steve Schlaffman at RRE. And I'd like to say a huge thank you to them for making this interview possible through their introductions. And in the spirit of it being Founder's Friday, for the past few days, you've heard about Cooley, the global law firm that formed the first venture fund in Silicon Valley. Well, they are also one of the market leaders in working with thousands of entrepreneurs and newly formed companies to ensure that they are structured for growth and long-term success. Cooley is a world leader in financings, M&A and IPOs. And since 2005, Cooley has been ranked the number one most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. So to learn more, head over to Cooley.com and also at Cooleygo.com. And with the weekend coming, it's also time for that Saturday morning line.

• 1:28Harry Stebbings?

  And so good to know that we have Eve to make sure it is as most enjoyable it can be. Eve is the UK's number one direct-to-consumer mattress company. Because they don't sell through high street stores, Eve cuts out 70% of traditional costs and pass those on to you, the consumer. Developed over four years with thousands of prototypes, Eve are so confident of their product, they give customers 100 nights to try it at home before committing. So for those of you who don't love it, which there will be none, they even do a free return pickup with a full refund. So head over to evemattress.co.uk, enter 20VC and you'll get a fantastic £50 off and it'll be with you the next day. However, now it's time for me to shut up and to hand over to the main man, Adam Leibsohn, founder and COO at Giphy.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:21Harry Stebbings?

  Adam, such a pleasure to have you on the 20 Minute VC. Huge thank you to previous guest Spencer Lazar, general catalyst for making the intro, and to you for joining me. So thanks for joining me, Adam.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, Harry, and thank you as well to Spencer, a great investor of Giphy's, and always a good referral. So I'm glad we could connect. Thanks.

• 2:38Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I'd love to kick off today with what led you to Giphy. Spencer actually gave me a couple of hints, so there were some amazing pre-Giphy hustle stories. So what are the hustle stories?

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Oh, man. Alright, so the hustle stories are interesting and fun and ridiculous, but I don't get to tell them often, so I'm kind of excited that Spencer sort of leaked it a bit. I got to Giphy because I got there through like six or so, seven years of startups and doing stuff and making things and breaking things and failing at things and starting again and trying again and failing and getting a team together and then pissing people off and then making people happy. But the first thing I ever did was I wanted to start a startup and I didn't know how to do it. Tech was really new sort of in New York and I had always been a fan of the web and internet and technology and sort of what people have been doing to hack technologies together. And that was something I specialized in at an ad agency and I was working there for quite some time.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  And I would come up with digital products for our clients. And I kept using them as ways to experiment with building. So I built a video game. I built a VR kind of thing. I built a check-in type object like kind of Foursquare based. And I built a couple of other different sort of apps and platforms. I happened upon an idea I really wanted to execute. I was very passionate about it. It was called Voyeur. A really bad name, by the way. That's one of the mistakes I learned quickly. It was a cool pun, but a terrible name. And it was a combo of voyeur and URL. And it allowed you to look at everything everyone was looking at on the internet. As long as you installed our plugin, you could sort of voyeuristically look over the shoulder of everybody looking at stuff online. What I did was, because I didn't know anyone in startups, because I didn't know anyone in VC

• 4:14Speaker 02

  or seed funding or anything for that matter, I did a lot of research and I came to the conclusion that I'm screwed.

• 4:22Harry Stebbings?

  So you're screwed, no one in tech and no connections to VCs.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Nothing, and I think I have this amazing idea of a thing that I should build. I realized, well, I'm a big believer in sort of put your money where your mouth is. And part of my motivation for doing this, for doing this hustle I'm about to tell you about, is because I saw a lot of people in ad land criticizing technology, criticizing new products, criticizing startups or betas or alphas. And when I dissected all of it, it was very clear to me that those people who were criticizing really hadn't done anything, they hadn't built anything themselves, they hadn't taken a great risk, and it felt weird to have someone criticize these objects and not have done it themselves. So I'm thinking, listen, if I want to be in tech, and I want to be in startups, and I want to do this, and I want to have an opinion on somebody else's hard work, I better have done it myself.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  So, not knowing anyone, not having a team, not knowing what to do, but just having an idea, I actually gave up my apartment and I went homeless for a year. And instead of quitting my job, I kept my job, and I paid rent like I would pay rent, but I didn't have anything to rent, so I paid that rent into a savings account and built my own fund. At the same time, I'd crash on couches, I slept to the office a bunch, I did sleep outside a few times in New York, I shower at the gym, and do all of the stuff that, you know, made it look like I had a home, but I didn't. And I lived out of a messenger bag, and the goodwill of a lot of good friends, and the office, and some other things. And after that, I built up a fund that allowed me to build my first startup.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  And I used that cash to recruit a team, so I put a team together, I used that cash to help design a product, to design the product, I used the cash to help launch it, and I used it to help do a little bit of clever PR. And so then the next thing was, okay, I have cash, who do I get? So then, I start working with a buddy of mine in ad land to design the startup. So we designed it, I should say the product. And it was called Voyeurial, and it had a stream, and it had login, and all this stuff. So we worked on all the flows, the user flows, the user pages, the account pages, the main screens, all that kind of stuff, so we had that built. So then I had this package that I could go merchandise, so then I used that, and I networked like crazy to try to find people, and I found a couple of really nice fellows that were distributed, one was in California, another one was in Ohio, and we got together and we decided we wanted to build this.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  We did and we built this product and it was pretty incredible to see it come to life. It was pretty incredible to see it, you know, those designs move, to see everybody interacting, to see everybody using it, um, internally at least. And then it came time to launch it and I had to get people's attention. I didn't know what to do. So this was like phase two of the hustle. Phase two was, uh, I started taking out search ads against, uh, prominent VCs and reporters in tech. So that when they Googled themselves, they'd get an ad from me and it worked astonishingly well. And it wound me up on the front page of TechCrunch. This is when M G Siegler was still, um, a reporter at TechCrunch. And I took out an ad against him, uh, against another guy named Joshua Schacter. You know, he built Delicious.

• 7:13Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  And, you know, I took out ads against John Borthwick, Josh Auerbach, who else? Uh, some guys at First Round, um, I think some guys at First Mark. Yeah, just anybody in New York I could get ahold of and anybody I knew who wrote online. And that wound me up on the front page of a lot of main tech news sites, which was awesome. And so that all pointed at my registration page for Voyo. So then we got like 50,000 signups and then, you know, low and behold, we turned the service on and it goes great. Um, and everyone's talking about it and we're on CNBC, we're in New York Times, Mashable TechCrunch, Engadget, Gizmodo, Harvard Business Review, Newsweek. I mean, it was crazy. Um, it went great, uh, and then it didn't because it's a startup. So it was a lot of fun. I learned a lot and then I had to shut it down because honestly, we couldn't raise the money.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  Uh, it was very expensive for me to fund personally and it had been about a year and that was enough time. So we turned it off. We said it was a great battle. Uh, we gave it a shot and I learned a lot. Um, so that's one of my, those are, I guess, one or two of my bigger startup hustles.

• 8:10Harry Stebbings?

  What were your biggest takeaways then from that, um, not failing, but experience?

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Uh, it's something I tell everybody honestly is that you better love the thing you're gonna build. Because if you don't, you're gonna find out really quickly or you're gonna find out way too late. And it's gonna be upsetting. It's gonna be sad, but it's also gonna be a big frustration and a waste of time. Cause you would risk all of this stuff, you'd risk this time, this cash, this energy to just be met with adversity and then give up. Versus, you know, if you love it, you're willing to go through hell to figure. And you can be objective still, which is like, if you go through hell, Winston Churchill likes to say, keep going. But honestly, you know when to give up and you know, like, you're cool with adversity, you're cool to do the things that are difficult. And it doesn't bother you, but you know that you like, I can't be homeless forever. That's not, that's not sustainable. It's not the right move. But you just know in your heart, like, when it's time to be done.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  But if you start with like a false sense of purity, it's going to catch up with you pretty quick. So one is, you know, love what you do and be passionate about it and make sure that you'll drive hard to get it done. The second is obviously know when to stop. I would actually say with four year old, I stopped, I stopped a little too late. I could have done that a little earlier.

• 9:17Harry Stebbings?

  How do you know when to stop?

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Ah, I think the writing's on the wall. I think if you're telling yourself to keep going too much, you're, you're, you're like, you're maybe in denial. I think that's what I was doing a little bit, which was like, oh no, the beat, oh, we could just get around this corner. If we could just do this one more thing, if I could just get this one more deck done. You know, this VC is totally going to give us money. Uh, oh, we'll totally be able to raise a round. This thing's going to start. You know, when you start dealing in too many what ifs, you probably know it's, it's done. I think that's a good signal and it's, it's not to say that your idea isn't great. It's not to say that you didn't put in a lot of hard work. It just might not be the right time, the right place, the right fit. There's always a way to come back around. This startup in particular dealt with personal data. I wanted to turn people's personal data into currency and let them spend like money. I was not the first to try this. I have not been the last. I think it'll come around again and again and again. So there's always more opportunity.

• 10:03Harry Stebbings?

  And I want to move now to, to the present and with Giphy. So let's, let's start with the meta view. Why gifts and why now? I mean, I'm not cool. Obviously I'm, I'm a 20 year old who loves venture capital. So you're going to have to walk me through this. Why, why give some why now?

• 10:20Speaker 02

  Harry, you're 20, you're plenty cool. You're cooler than me, man. I got, I got gray hair in my beard, so you win. Um, so why gives why now? We'll start with the why now part first. So a lot of reasons for why now are our technology and economics based. The market dynamics for moving imagery for the last 50 years have been really, really shitty. It's been very, very expensive to move an image from point A to point B. Um, and even if you go a hundred years back or 200 years back, it was still very expensive. Market dynamics prohibited imagery from. Being widely circulated because of how pricey it was. And that's what the printing press afforded people just without the images. The printing press happened, it was a system, it was repeatable, it was consistent, it was replicable. So you can make a book happen, you could put it in a binded object and you could ship that thing around the world.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  It was really, really easy to do, relatively speaking. But if you wanted to put an image in there, then you had to like carve it out. You had to use color, which is more expensive, you had to like lay out more paper, which is more expensive. Suddenly it became prohibitive to move imagery. That's why illuminated texts are so rare, are so sought after, are so desirable, so expensive. Then you move forward a little bit and you get into like the modern age of printing. Still it's black and white because it's cheaper. Then you get into technology and processing speed is slow. Transport cost is high, bandwidth is slow, cost of technology is high, right? To buy a computer in the seventies was kind of a crazy thing to do. To buy a computer in the eighties was still expensive. Even in the nineties, I remember my computer, I saved forever to buy that thing. Processor speed was also slow.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  And so again, imagery was hard to move and that's why the initial web was very textual. And that's why Google was so good at indexing stuff because it was all filled with words and not with images. Then you fast forward to today and you've got processing speeds going through the roof. You've got bandwidth penetration very, very prevalent throughout the world, even in emerging markets. You've got technology penetration also high because affordability is down. Everyone can, well, not everyone, but many people can afford smartphones and mobile phones. And so you see screens in everyone's hands, again, even in developing markets. And as a result, that means it's very, very easy to move imagery. Imagery became cheap. And so now you've suddenly seen this whole visual renaissance on the web. Because the market dynamics are such that it's very, very fast, easy and effective to move images.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  And then the, the reason why we're going to prefer images is because basically we're biologically wired for it. We are visual animals first and foremost. You know, before we were writing in letters and characters, there were drawings on caves, drawings in the sand, paintings and such. And that's because we had to be able to distinguish, you know, predator from prey. We had to distinguish objects in the foreground and the background. It was something that was vital to our survival and that's something that still lives with us today. It's also true that like we process images, something like six Sixty thousand times faster than words. Um, if you think about it, like, read the definition of a hamburger and then just look at a hamburger. And which one of those will you understand much faster? You always pick up the image faster.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  And so, these things being true, GIFs sort of came to the fore because there's this quick, easy hit of visual information. And this visual information is inundating us because now there's movies and TV shows and snaps and Instagram and all sorts of other types of content floating around the web. We can wrap all these things up into these tropes, these little pieces of self-expression uh, that really travel fluidly throughout this, this web that we've got that's highly visual now. Um, so, part of it has to do with technology and part of it has to do with our predisposition to be visual.

• 13:43Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I, I guess, I guess a really big question for me is at the moment, for me in particular, and, and you may hate me for this, so please don't. Uh, GIFs are kind of an, an addition to text, you know, I will do, uh, I'm thrilled, I'm really happy you're coming on the show. And then I'll do a little guy dancing, as I think I did in one of our emails.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:00Harry Stebbings?

  But do you want it to be an addition to text, or do you want it to be instead of text?

• 14:05Speaker 02

  I don't think we intend to, we, we don't want to eliminate any modes of communication. I think we enhance and we're additive, but I really think where the either or happens is in context. And maybe this is another part of why GIFs. We talked about our natural predisposition, we talked about what the market dynamics are like and the penetration of technology. But the other thing is, if you think about the modes of consumption, if you look at all the feeds and all the channels and all the social networks and all the new apps and all the new broadcast methods and all the new sort of over the top messaging and VOD. We are consuming a giant amount of content at a pretty rapacious pace. And so, there's not a lot of time for stuff. And in addition, we're always mobile because our phones are in our hands.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  And so, I think GIFs are not necessarily the elimination of text, it's really the efficiency of expression. And that's what's happening when you send a GIF like you sent the little guy dancing. You might have been in front of a keyboard, it might have been easier to write. But as we are increasingly mobile and as we have more and more channel fragmentation, people are going to be looking for the most efficient way to express themselves maximally. And GIFs are really that amazing sweet spot of making a point, but having to do very little to get it across.

• 15:15Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. And I want to talk about Giphy itself now, because we've got a question from Spencer, as we said earlier, from GC.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:23Harry Stebbings?

  So he asked about your unique culture at Giphy and what your learnings and observations have been on creating such a unique culture, and what's worked and what hasn't.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Oh, man. So Alex talked about this too, and we've basically been very, very lucky, but also very deliberate to put together a really excellent group of weirdos and creative folks and designers. And, you know, everyone just has a very really awesome, interesting and varied background. First and foremost, because we hired our friends, which is a lot of fun. You know, we've worked with a lot of great people.

• 15:56Harry Stebbings?

  Would you advise that? It's always an interesting balance.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's doable, as long as everybody's professional. It's something we've been able to do pretty well. And, you know, everyone was an adult, and so, you know, we've all had jobs before, and we know what it's like to work hard, and we know what it's like to work for something. And in many cases, we've actually all worked together at one point or another. And so this wasn't, this wasn't like a complete blind faith leap. Like, we'd done this. I'd worked with Alex before, Dan, Randy, a few other folks here. And they worked with other folks they brought on. So we all knew this was something we were open for and would work really well. And so first, you know, we got a lot of our friends in, and that made it really easy. We knew each other already. We had previous working relationships. We sort of knew everybody's strengths. We knew how to work together, and that was awesome. And then, you know, from that, we all have very interesting, funny interests. You know, a lot of us have philosophy backgrounds,

• 16:42Speaker 02

  a lot of us have art and media and tech backgrounds. Some of us are designers and previous lives and things like that. So there's a lot of creativity in Giphy. A lot, a lot of creativity. And then everyone's sort of like a oddball goof, which is a lot of fun. I think we're like the best group of weirdos you could ever put together. And we've really, really been passionate about maintaining that. You can be yourself, you can be kind of out there. Everyone's got funny jokes, everyone's got funny points of view. And then we've also made sure that people, you know, are able to sort of foster their ambitions and their interests. And they are widely varied, which is great. You know, we have people who have masters in journalism, masters in film studies. We have artists, we have musicians. Obviously, we have engineers and hackers and technology.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  But you know, we even like Tiffany, one of our editors is also a host on TCM, right? She's like literally a TV host for classic film. We have a couple of folks who are featured on Spotify with great bands. So Danny Newman has a band called Sly Moth on Spotify. We go see shows. Yeah, I think we've just been able to make sure everyone feels and is able to be open and like pursue everything they love. And that's great.

• 17:51Harry Stebbings?

  Is there anything you've done that hasn't worked or that you'd like to improve on within the culture?

• 17:55Speaker 02

  Um, I mean, so far, so good. I think.

• 17:59Harry Stebbings?

  Is it difficult? Is it difficult to maintain that kind of individualist creative culture with the scaling of the firm and the 250 million valuation and the big round?

• 18:09Speaker 02

  I mean, we're, we're definitely picky about the folks we bring in. So like we have this, this sort of casual thing we called the road trip test, which is like, would you be able to go on a road trip with someone?

• 18:18Harry Stebbings?

  I have this for founders. This is my assessment thesis.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Oh, no way. Seriously?

• 18:22Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah. Eight, eight hours is mine.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we say five days.

• 18:26Harry Stebbings?

  Okay. Well, you're a little bit harder than me.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. You know, could you go on a road trip with someone that you're in the room with and at the end of it not want to, you know, wring their neck? And that's been a pretty good litmus for making sure everyone gets along and it's good. Yeah, I think everybody worries that at scale, you know, if we have to grow to several hundred people, can you maintain that? I think you can. I just think you have to do it carefully. Uh, and I think if you give everyone here the information, the power and the knowledge to make those decisions, then you know, they will definitely stand by that because they want to work at a great place too. So everyone will sort of be bought in to do that. And I think it's really more about empowering everyone else to understand the culture and try to, you know, try to expand it.

• 19:05Harry Stebbings?

  And then I've got one more question before we dive into a quick fire. And this one's from another one of your investors, Steve Schlaffman at RRE Ventures. And he asks, Giphy is now a cultural icon. So how do you look to transition that cultural icon into a massive global profit making business?

• 19:22Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you, Steve. Another great investor. He's a good guy. If you ever get the chance, you should definitely hang out with him to grab some coffee with both Spencer and Steve. All right. So how do we have this global icon turn into a global profit making leader? Was that what it was?

• 19:35Harry Stebbings?

  Business, but yeah.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:37Harry Stebbings?

  It's an easy question. I mean, to say.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Super simple. Um, so we've been really careful to grow our brand in a deliberate way. We, you know, made sure that we are the number one brand in gifts. We're a brand that not only platforms trust, but also content owners and IP owners trust. We work very carefully with both sides and closely with both sides to make sure they're getting what they need out of the platform we're building. Um, that means, you know, they get the right gifts at the right place at the right time. That means content owners make sure they're getting the right distribution to the right audiences. And they get the benefit of all the technology we're building to create and distribute gifts at large. But if you think about the platform we're really building at its core, it is a search engine. It's a giant, giant search engine for culture, um, probably the best and biggest there is.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  And so if you are searching for what happened on the Video Music Awards last night and you're on Giphy and you're looking for that content, you're looking for it inside of Twitter, you're looking for it inside of Facebook. You're also looking for it, uh, on Giphy.com or on our app. You know, there's an opportunity for us to take that search behavior and that intent and monetize it much like Google does for their own search, more from an information standpoint, same idea. And so we're looking at the idea of turning gift search into something that can be contextual, that can be highly relevant, highly targeted, where you're getting delivered content against a query that is directly related to what you're looking for, but may have been paid to be put there. Uh, and it's just basically a paid search model. And as we grow, you know, to become the leader in, I guess we are the leader in gifts,

• 21:04Speaker 02

  then we have a really big opportunity to monetize that search behavior. Um, and that's, that's our path to making sure that we're going to be, you know, a global profit-making business.

• 21:14Harry Stebbings?

  Very, very good answer. My one question following up from that is, would you say your biggest competition is internal, uh, gift makers like Twitter, you can press the gift button and they have their own search engine? Is that competition for you?

• 21:26Speaker 02

  No, that's actually good for us. We actually power that button. We power the gift button inside of Twitter. We power the gift button in Facebook. We power it gifts in Slack.

• 21:33Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, fuck, I give up. Then you win. You win.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, that's been part of our strategy all along is, you know, make sure that people can find the gifts they want wherever they are. And so, yeah, we work closely with all these platforms to pull that off.

• 21:44Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, winning. All right, great, fantastic. I was like, I was worried about that, but we're done. Well, sorted.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  That's awesome. Yeah, that worked out.

• 21:52Harry Stebbings?

  Um, the, okay, I want to finish though today with a quick fire round. So sixty seconds per answer. Um, yeah. Let's start with your favorite book and why.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Uh, my favorite book and why is East of Eden, uh, John Steinbeck. And I don't even like John Steinbeck novels, but I like this one a lot. Which is crazy. Um, because it's just an epic story. It's beautiful, uh, has highs and lows. It talks about the depression. It talks about being a businessman. It talks about family. It talks about all these important things that, uh, you know, touch our lives. I don't know. It just, it ma- it just moved me when I read it. I, I've never forgotten it.

• 22:26Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, another one from Steve at R R E. Very serious chap. He's gone from global profit-making businesses to what's your hair routine? What goes into it and how long does it take?

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Thanks, Steve. Great. Um, I have a lot of hair. So, uh, what goes into the hair routine? Nothing. I use shampoo and then I dry my hair with a towel and that's it. It is, uh, pretty much simple.

• 22:47Harry Stebbings?

  The magic takes place on its own?

• 22:49Speaker 02

  The magic takes place on its own. I, I guess, I can't take any credit for it. My hair does its own thing.

• 22:54Harry Stebbings?

  And it's evidence for God's creation, isn't it then?

• 22:57Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so let's do your favorite gif and why. I want to hear this one.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Oh, man, my favorite gif is, well, I have to send you a link to it. I can show you what it is. Uh, but I think if you Google my name and favorite gif, it comes up somewhere. But, uh, it is these two women at a concert. They're at like a rave slash EDM concert and they're just in the audience and they are just having the wildest, best time of their lives. And you can just see them losing their minds. And they're just doing all these funny dance moves and sort of facial expressions and they're just really into the music. And for whatever reason, for me personally, like every time I watch that gif, I find something new and I just think it's hilarious and amazing.

• 23:34Harry Stebbings?

  Are you sure this just wasn't a video of you at your last concert?

• 23:37Speaker 02

  I swear to God.

• 23:40Harry Stebbings?

  And then let's do your favorite blog or newsletter. What are your must reads?

• 23:43Speaker 02

  Oh, my goodness. This is tough because I haven't had a lot of time to read that much, uh, interesting things these days. I read Dealbook pretty much every morning from New York Times. It's just sort of their finance catch-up newsletter. I do that a lot. I catch the information, uh, and email a bunch. That's pretty good. I honestly, I use Twitter a lot to get my news. I figure if it's really important, it'll find me through the, the Twitter list that I've got. Those would be the three.

• 24:07Harry Stebbings?

  And then let's do, what challenges does the GIF world face today? The biggest challenge?

• 24:12Speaker 02

  Making more people happy.

• 24:16Harry Stebbings?

  Do you see any obstacles though to mass kind of proliferation of GIFs if I'm gonna eat an HBS business school book?

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, you know, we still have scale to go. We're, we're big and we, we are, we're the biggest player in the space, but you know, it's still something my parents from time to time have some, have some trouble with. There's, you know, there's a giant group of people out there that don't know what GIFs are still, that don't know how to use them. Um, and our job is to make sure they can and then make sure that it's easy. And so you wanna make GIFs as fluid as what, you know, at once was making a phone call.

• 24:45Harry Stebbings?

  No, my mother doesn't know. I just had to give her a lecture.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, my parents had me send them a little explainer to send to their friends because they wanna use them more often. And I think, you know, I think we're on the cusp, I won't lie. But I think, you know, it's our job to make it really easy for everyone to grasp, not just like yourself and myself. Everyone who works at Giphy, who, who's sort of like a first, first order citizen of the internet.

• 25:05Harry Stebbings?

  Basically just someone who's really cool.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  Hell yeah, su- super, super cool.

• 25:10Harry Stebbings?

  Uh, and then let's finish today on the next five years for you and for Giphy. What have we got in store?

• 25:15Speaker 02

  Oh man, lots of crazy stuff. GIFs in virtual reality, GIFs in your glasses, GIFs outside of computers, GIFs on paper. You know, a whole new kind of search engine that no one's ever seen before, where everything moves, which resembles all of life. Just think of what you look at in the world and how that actually behaves in your real life. That's how we want the internet to behave. Everything should move. And so we're working on it.

• 25:40Harry Stebbings?

  Adam, I've enjoyed this interview far too much. Um, really it's such a pleasure to hear about the amazing rise of Giphy and your pre hustle beforehand. I thought I had hustle. Fuck, you were homeless.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Thanks, man.

• 25:52Harry Stebbings?

  Seriously, it's so fantastic and I'm so grateful to you for giving up the time.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  I appreciate it. Thanks for the opportunity.

• 25:59Harry Stebbings?

  Such a fun interview with Adam and a huge thank you to him for giving up his time today to reveal the amazing story with Giphy. Also, a big thanks to Spencer at General Catalyst and Steve at RRE for making the intro to Adam today. So grateful for that. And if you love the show with Adam and do not want to leave the world of the 20 Minute VC, then you can add me on Snapchat @HStubbings or you can follow me on Twitter @HarryStubbings. Hey, you can even sign up for the newsletter on the 20minutavec.com so you never have to miss an episode or an update from us. Also, do not forget to check out Cooley. If you're a founder setting up or running a startup, Cooley are one of the leaders in working with thousands of entrepreneurs and newly formed companies to ensure that they're structured for growth and long-term success.

• 26:40Harry Stebbings?

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• 27:22Harry Stebbings?

  For those who don't love it, they even do a free return pickup with full refund. So head over to evemattress.co.uk, enter the promo code 20VC and you'll get a fantastic £50 off and it'll be with you the next day with next day delivery. As always, I so appreciate all your support and I look very forward to bringing you next week's shows.