EP 56: Kevin Ryan (AlleyCorp, MongoDB, Business Insider, Zola) – The Rise of Psychedelics as Healthcare, Early Days of the Internet, State of the Market

In the 56th episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, Kevin Ryan (AlleyCorp, MongoDB, Business Insider, Zola) joins to discuss the rise of psychedelics as healthcare, the early days of the internet, and the current state of the market. (0:00) Intro (2:38) Current State of the Market (6:21) Early Days of the Internet (16:04) Layoffs (24:48) AlleyCorp (32:20) MongoDB (42:39) Business Insider (1:00:50) Interview Process (1:13:59) Healthcare and Psychedelics (1:28:51) Education (1:38:11) Journey to the South Pole Mixed and edited: Sam Dewees Produced: Andrew Nadeau and Rashad Assir Executive Producer: Josh Machiz Music: Griff Lawson 🎙 Listen to the show Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/three-cartoon-avatars/id1606770839 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb4br3LlyVrdqOYYb?si=3076e6c1b5c94d63&nd=1 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9zb0hJZkhWbg 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes. Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

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

• 0:05Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the 56th episode of the Logan Bartlett Show. I am your host, Logan Bartlett, a partner at Redpoint Ventures. And what you're going to hear on this episode is a conversation that I had with Kevin Ryan. Kevin is one of the more interesting people in the technology world, having started a number of different companies. So he was the CEO of DoubleClick, which was acquired by Google for $3.1 billion. He co-founded MongoDB, which is a $15 billion public database company. He co-founded Business Insider, co-founded Gilt Group, co-founded Zola, among many other businesses. And so he is a prolific and serial entrepreneur that has a kind of an incubator studio-type model, where he comes up with a bunch of different

• 0:49Logan Bartlett?

  ideas and helps turn them into companies. And so we have a really fun conversation about where he's spending time these days. The answer is healthcare and psychedelics as well. And so definitely an interesting perspective that he has on the state of the regulatory market and some of the benefits of different psychedelic drugs and how it can treat antidepressant depression. And it can also be used for PTSD, among a bunch of different things. And so we talk about that. We talk about co-founding all those different companies, his view on New York as a venture landscape and how it's kind of changed over the years. So one of my favorite conversations, just given the breadth of experience that he's had and the depth of perspective. So really appreciate him

• 1:31Logan Bartlett?

  coming on. I trust everyone's going to enjoy this discussion with Kevin. But before we get into that, just this is the moment of the podcast where I would normally shill Athletic Greens. Instead of doing so, I am just asking people to like, subscribe, share, all that usual stuff. We do this just to grow the podcast. We don't try to hit you with advertising. So if everyone can do that, we really appreciate all the support. And thanks, everyone, for listening in. Now, my conversation with Kevin Ryan from Ally Corp and co-founder of a bunch of different businesses. Kevin Ryan, thanks for doing this.

• 2:03Logan Bartlett?

  Happy to be here.

• 2:04Logan Bartlett?

  I've heard your name in this ecosystem. So I've been in New York now for 13 years. I guess I grew up outside the city as well. But I've heard your name for a long time. So it's a pleasure to finally get together and do this.

• 2:14Logan Bartlett?

  So I guess one of the interesting things that you've lived through, so you joined into the internet when that was getting going, right? And we'll talk a little bit about

• 2:24Speaker 02

  1996.

• 2:25Logan Bartlett?

  Double-click and the run-up, fall-out. And I do want to talk about parallels between that experience. But you've been through bubbles, crashes, good times, bad. I guess, what do you think of the state of the market right now? What advice are you giving to your founders? What does this remind you of at this current second?

• 2:44Speaker 02

  So first of all, I think that the market today is better than people realize. It's definitely not as good as it was a year and a half ago. And I think those valuations were too high and they were not sustainable. And so in the long term, that doesn't work. We are not at all in a true downturn. In 2001, there was no money. And so people had to survive. Good companies went bankrupt. That's not happening today. We had 10 companies raise money in the second half of last year and eight of them raised money. We had to fund one and one went under. That's perfectly, that's good. That's a really good market. So I'm not concerned about that at all.

• 3:18Logan Bartlett?

  From a behavioral standpoint, by the way, there being no money, just to draw the contrast between this and that. There was money, right? Theoretically, firms ended up cutting. Redpoint actually cut the fund size. Excel cut the fund size. Battery cut the fund size. So a lot of people cut the fund size. When there was no money back then, in a very literal sense, there still were funds. Were people just cowering and saying, "Hey, don't talk to me"? And was that the difference?

• 3:40Speaker 02

  It was, yeah. Part of it was actually driven by LPs were telling their fund, "In theory, you can call this money. Don't call this money." And there were LPs, there were important institutions out there that didn't have cash. And so they said, "Don't call it."

• 3:53Logan Bartlett?

  Which is the denominator effect of all this of, hey, their public markets have gone down to near zero. And now if you call this capital, we're going to be 50% weighted to venture and we don't want that.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  And people forget that VC funds don't have money.

• 4:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  LPs have money.

• 4:08Logan Bartlett?

  Yes. We have some portion of money that we call that's sitting in a bank account. But it's a very small percentage of theoretically what we have access to.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  And it runs out in two months or three months.

• 4:17Logan Bartlett?

  It runs out in two months. We call it when we need it theoretically versus the LPs have committed to us to give us the money. So if they're saying, "Don't call this money", then if you want to have a longstanding relationship with those funds, you're not going to call. Okay, so that was the distinction there.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that was very different. There were lots of people who didn't have a job for nine months. That's not true today. There's 3.4% unemployment. So, things are pretty good. There's just less capital than there was, and at the high-end, prices are down. But it's not unsustainable. I don't feel bad about where we are at all. I also feel like there's still tons of great things happening. You know, more people are willing to quit their job and start a company today than was the case in 2001. You know, there was just a lack of confidence. Everyone had thrown in the towel. All stock prices were down 95%. That's not the case today.

• 5:02Logan Bartlett?

  So, DoubleClick was ultimately a $3.1 billion sale to Google in 2007, right? Maybe take us through your journey of ending up there in the internet. Like, what drew you to the internet originally? How'd you find DoubleClick?

• 5:17Speaker 02

  So, I was working in 94, 95, beginning of 96, for a EW scripts, which was a media company. As part of my responsibility there, I was the CFO and COO. We started a website, and the website was actually, ironically this week, the Dilbert website, which became very, very successful. We sold advertising, we sold ecommerce, super early on.

• 5:36Logan Bartlett?

  Were you working with Scott Adams at the time?

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:38Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, interesting.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and didn't see any weird behavior. He was incredibly funny and incredibly fast, so that's what I saw at the time. But anyway, so we did this, and I started to feel like this internet thing was gonna be huge, which sounds very obvious today, but in 95 was less obvious. Went to the parent company and said we should really invest a lot more in the internet. They weren't certain about that, and so then I thought, you know, beginning of 96, I'm gonna go off on my own and do something, start a company. I thought it might be like a DoubleClick company. And so I ran into the founders of DoubleClick. They had started four months before, had a great technology tool that I didn't know how to develop, and they said, "Why don't you come join us?" And so I joined them as CFO for a few minutes, then president, and then later CEO.

• 6:21Logan Bartlett?

  Can you take us to, like, seeing this internet thing is gonna be big? And I think there's parallels in my career, my early venture career, there was mobile, right? And kind of understanding what the derivatives of it were. And yes, there were... There was a lot of linear lines you could draw to it, like, hey, okay, mobile apps are going to get big and probably more companies are going to have it. And then there were some of the stuff that happened on top that was unexpected, right? WhatsApp, for example, and ultimately Facebook pivoting to mobile and whatever. We can go through all the laundry list of stuff that mobile-enabled Uber, Airbnb, all that stuff. What was, at that point in time, like, hey, I think this internet thing's going to be big? Was that an inevitability that was kind of mainstream among people?

• 7:04Logan Bartlett?

  Or was that a kind of paratical view that, hey, this is actually going to be disruptive or transformative to all businesses? Because if you think about it, mobile created a ton of value, but a lot of it was to the incumbents, right? The internet created a lot of value, and it was a lot of net new value, right? It was Google, it was Amazon, it was Facebook. It was some of the iconic names in the world were started at that point in time. So what was that like in the early days?

• 7:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, the most important thing I saw was that just in 95 and then 96, people were actually getting onto the internet and were starting to use it. And so I can remember hearing construction workers saying, oh my God, I bought something online or I did something, and thinking, everyone's going to be doing this. And it's just so obvious today that it's hard to imagine that that wasn't the case at the time. And so every quarter, you'd be telling me, I'm using a new site for dating, to buy shoes, to do something. And they were clunky, they weren't perfect, but the use case was just so obvious. I mean, you could connect so many people. And so commerce and advertising seemed to me the biggest things that would be happening. And so I just felt incredibly bullish about that.

• 8:06Logan Bartlett?

  And was that, did people within the media company agree with you on...

• 8:11Speaker 02

  There was one line, they came to me and said, you know, this, there's, yes, the internet is happening right now, but there's probably going to be a new internet.

• 8:18Logan Bartlett?

  And what did that even mean?

• 8:20Speaker 02

  They didn't know what that meant either. What they really meant, though, was that in 94, the phenomenon were CD-ROMs.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  And so that created multiple companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Because it's true, you could send a whole set of CD-ROMs for fitness, for all kinds of things. It was better than what we had before. And then that went down, because obviously the internet was a much better idea. And so that sort of collapsed, the value came down. And so they just thought there'd be some new thing that would be happening, but didn't know what it was.

• 8:48Logan Bartlett?

  Interesting. Yeah, I remember my high school, or sorry, middle school at the time, invested in LaserDisc, and that was like, they probably spent, I don't know, $50,000 to equip it with LaserDisc, and that was a funny thing. But some of those businesses on the CD-ROM side, like Incurs started as a CD-ROM business. Some of them actually ended up pivoting to internet or whatever made it through. So you found the DoubleClick guys. I assume the ecosystem in New York was pretty small.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Tiny. 50 people, I mean, it was the same 50 people. Scott Hyferman was involved, eventually started Meetup, but he was running an agency at the time. So there were a bunch of people. There were alumni from AOL, who were floating around, because that was a real company at the time, and CompuServe.

• 9:28Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, interesting. And so DoubleClick, maybe tell people what DoubleClick did.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  So the beginning product of DoubleClick was just saying, there's going to be many sites selling advertising. They're all too small. If we put them together in a network, it creates a product that made sense. It was just a big ad network. And we had dynamic ad technology, which made that work. So I could reach you on one site, but see you on another site, and realize that we're only going to show you this ad three times and cap that, which was very powerful. And we could do some targeting as well. So then we could have 10 sites that all were interested in technology, and then go to Oracle and say, why don't you buy ads? And we'll run them across the technology sites. And so that helped tons of sites. And so we were doing $500 million in revenue after four or five years, which was a staggering amount at that time.

• 10:13Logan Bartlett?

  Well, you joined at 10 people, is that right, roughly? And the company had only been around for six months. And two years later, public.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. So crazy, crazy. We, you know, four years after I joined, we had 2,000 people in 25 countries. And yeah, we went public, you know, 18 months after I joined. So at that point, we had about 180 people. We had gone really, really quickly. The reason DoubleClick today is still the dominant player in all ad technology, although it's part of Google, is because we moved faster than everyone else did during that time. We raised money, we executed. That was, you know, especially the time in New York had never been done before.

• 10:50Logan Bartlett?

  It's an interesting thread of, I assume other people had that insight at the time, right? And so who were the competitors and was it really, I mean, you rode the right wave, but was it hand-to-hand combat in terms of just funding and beating people to getting the aggregation and the scale so that you could do it across the different websites?

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Absolutely. First, the core was that we actually had a better product and a better technology product. And that's because my co-founders had deep technical backgrounds and were incredibly brilliant. And then we did move faster. We were able to raise money. People believed in us. We went public faster. We were competing with companies like 247, who ended up going public and were worth significantly less than we were, but were out there. The challenge in 98, 99 was there were 37 competitors. And so everyone, our competitors were giving away the product. It made it much tougher. And so when actually everything crashed, I always tell people, on the one hand, you know, we lost a lot of business, but we lost all of our competitors. And so we ended up with 60% market share, dominant position, huge profit margins, which they still have today, even though it's 25 years later.

• 11:54Logan Bartlett?

  So peak valuation at the top of the bubble was?

• 11:57Speaker 02

  13 billion.

• 11:57Logan Bartlett?

  13 billion.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  And people need to remember that that was a big number at the time.

• 12:01Logan Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  I mean, no one here had done that. You know, Caterpillar was worth 15 billion at the time. So that was an enormous, enormous number.

• 12:09Logan Bartlett?

  So internet bubble hits.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:11Logan Bartlett?

  75% of your customers go bankrupt?

• 12:14Speaker 02

  70% of our clients go bankrupt progressively over two years, while leaving us with the bill every single time. You know, brutal time. So we did seven rounds of layoffs. In the beginning, we didn't think it would be that bad. We thought, oh, you know, it'll be okay, one round of layoff. When you do the seventh round, you know, it's just, it's debilitating. For the company, for morale. Everyone was so excited at 13 billion. Now we're down at like 600 million. It's a very tough time.

• 12:39Logan Bartlett?

  What was the peak employee size?

• 12:41Speaker 02

  2,000.

• 12:42Logan Bartlett?

  2,000, okay. So you had 2,000 people and you see this is correcting the initial signs of warning and I guess sort of drawing some parallels to today for people. What did you see at the time? And what were the incremental like, you know, things that happened along the way? That made you, oh, this is getting worse, this is getting worse.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  You know, it was really more just a progressive, you know, decline. Because there was no VC funding, because most companies in our space didn't make money. Eventually, they just went out of business. And so that just meant fewer clients, fewer, less money. I mean, just, you know, brutal. I mean, very, very tough time. So if what we've seen right now continues for two years and, you know, 70% of companies go out of business, then it'll be comparable. But it's not anywhere close to that.

• 13:29Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, and I guess in the 70%, it was also a, it was a little bit circular or all intertwined, right? That you were selling to those people by and large, right? And so if they went out of business. So seven rounds of layoffs, I assume you got, you developed a skill set that you probably never wanted to develop of how to lay people off. Anything that you, that you learned from that? That would be helpful for people if they need to do it?

• 13:51Speaker 02

  No different than what everyone has always said, which is just trying to do it as humanely as possible, as fairly as possible. What we learned though is in the beginning, at the end of the first round, I said, look, you know, we're done. We're finished, we've done our layoffs, it's the right thing to do. And then had to go back three months later and say, actually, we're not done. And so that, saying that, now I don't say anything, I never commit anything long term. I mean, I don't know, I don't know. If a satellite hits the world, we'll have a different conversation and I don't know what's gonna happen. So I felt like I had to go back to people and sort of say, I was wrong. And people are wondering, were you lying? Did you know? There was a lack of trust from everyone because no one saw this coming and everyone blames you. Every decision we made in 99 and 2000 looked terrible a year later.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  I signed a huge lease because I needed space for 2,000 people, which then was empty. Rates came down. Fired companies that looked dumb. Every new hire I made looked ridiculous. So it's a humbling experience.

• 14:50Logan Bartlett?

  The old adage of measure twice, cut once in this. Like each incremental point, would you ever have been able to bundle those together? Having thought about it now, if you were to go through it again, would you have cut deeper initially? Or was it just too hard to know? It was too incremental along the way?

• 15:08Speaker 02

  I mean, it all depends if you know the future, you should definitely do that. But you don't. If I said to you, what's the stock market or the real estate market going to look like in two years? You have a theory, but I always remind people, we're sitting here a year and a half ago. We probably wouldn't have talked about the three most important things that have probably happened, which is the war in Ukraine, you know, most of us didn't see it coming. The rise in inflation, we didn't see it coming. This tech crash, people didn't see it completely coming. And all those impact. So you just have to react. When you're fighting for market share with other people and realize you're in a business where being the biggest matters, you have to go all out. You can't worry about it. You know, did Uber make the right move by becoming the number one player? Did they waste money along the way? In retrospect, yes. But you know what? Would you rather be Uber or Lyft?

• 15:53Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  You'd rather be Uber. And so they did what they needed to do. And from a business point of view, it was the right thing to do. And then at some point, when the music stops, you may have to make cuts.

• 16:03Logan Bartlett?

  One interesting thing I've heard you say about layoffs is that there's also a need after you do it. You actually had to fire people as well, separate from the layoffs, because psychologically, those people were, they just weren't able to keep going with the mission, right? And so how did that actually play out? That some executives, like after the third or fourth round of layoffs, maybe capacity wise, you would have wanted to keep them around or capability wise, but they were just too dejected and couldn't keep going.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  They needed to do something different. They just, they didn't believe anymore. And I understand, it's a hard thing to believe in when you're going back and cutting really great people. Who, and you know, it's not like today. You let someone go today, they're going to have a job in two months. You know, they're going to be fine. Here, you're like, you're not going to have a job. You know, probably for six months. In fact, I don't know when you're going to have a job. There are no jobs out there. So that's very rough. And so you just were in a better position by saying, you know what? I think you need to step down. And you're number two, who doesn't feel the responsibility of all the layoffs, super excited to be number one. It's a stretch job for them. They're gonna be like, you know what? I'm gonna kill here. This is gonna be great. And they're a better person to have at that moment.

• 17:11Logan Bartlett?

  The battlefield promotion rather than the person that's done it before just because they're excited and energized to go at it. Now, you weren't the founder of DoubleClick, although you were there super early. Having gone from CFO to president to then CEO, was there an element, to some extent, our founders have the credibility of, hey, we were there from day zero. It came from nothing. And so the ability to look everyone in the eyes and say, hey, you know, I messed up and all of that. Was there a difference at all in not being the founder CEO in your mind?

• 17:43Speaker 02

  I don't think so because, first of all, people who came in, you know, three years in, realized that, you know, I had been there for like 95% of the company. And so, and I thought of myself as a founder, although I'm technically not. We were incredibly close, the three of us. So I don't find there's any difference. I think there's actually this myth of only the founder really understands things. And Silicon Valley has always encouraged that. And I don't actually think that's true. In fact, we've talked about Mongo. David Tichiria is the CEO. I, you know, hired him as chairman. He's incredible and fantastic and better than anyone we would have had in the beginning. And the right person for the right time. He's been there for 70 years and has, you know, added incredible value.

• 18:22Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, Dave is one of the more, at some point, we'll get Dave to come on here. But one of the more impressive CEOs, leaders I've ever been around. As well, I mean, you got to know Larry and Sergey around the same time, right? And they obviously had this insight that was only incrementally better than the next best competitor. But that incrementality was all the difference in the world, right? In the early days, they were the ultimate acquirer of DoubleClick. After a few years, after the internet bubble and all that stuff came back around.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Well, actually, if you start at the beginning, they were, we were much bigger company than they were in 98. And we sold their first ads. So when I was talking to them, they had 60 people. And, you know, we had 1,000. And so it was very early on. And, you know, they were super smart and have been obviously incredibly successful. But for me, you're an example. They didn't necessarily have a vision for outside of search. They developed that in the same way that someone else who wasn't a founder could have developed that.

• 19:21Logan Bartlett?

  When you met people at that point in time, like meeting Larry and Sergey, did you say, "Hey, this is different," or you're like, "Hey, those are smart guys and maybe they'll figure it out?"

• 19:29Speaker 02

  No, I don't think it was completely obvious that that company would be more successful than others.

• 19:34Logan Bartlett?

  The hindsight bias that ultimately happens is like people try to pattern match against things that have happened in the past, but often these people don't look anything like what they then become.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  In the 90s, everyone met everyone. I'm still around, but Bezos was there. I met Elon Musk when he was 27. He was doing Zip2. He wasn't even doing PayPal. Larry and Sergey. No, the person I think who's always been unbelievably impressive from day one is Jeff Bezos. I mean, so good, such long-term vision, a true independent thinker.

• 20:07Logan Bartlett?

  How did you psychologically shift to that? Ben Horowitz calls it the wartime CEO mindset. Were there things you had to do at a personal level to kind of gear up to be able to make all those layoffs, to keep plowing ahead? Because you still had a bit, I mean, $600 million, it sounded like a bottomed-out debt, but you were probably still doing, what was the low of revenue?

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we were still doing $400 million, $500 million in revenue.

• 20:30Logan Bartlett?

  So you had a business.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  And we always had cash. I had actually luckily or skillfully raised a tremendous amount of cash. So there was never a risk of going out of business. It was just how ugly it was going to get. So for me, I actually didn't think of it that different. When you're growing from 0 to 2,000 people in four years, that's a different wartime. That's just an expand, land grab, making decisions every second, moving quickly, losing, winning, and you're just doing the same thing on the downside. So one of my strengths, which is I don't take it all that personally, and so there's different business challenges. And so you just have to stay rational and do the best you can and realize, like you were playing poker, it's just a new hand. And so you're going to play that next hand, even though it's worse than the last hand, the best you can.

• 21:15Logan Bartlett?

  What about expectation setting with the investors, right? So you had to do it internally and externally. Were you, were you trying to set different levels of expectation with them? Because I imagine at some point, the hedge funds that bought in the IPO were thrilled with you, or whoever bought at 13 billion probably wasn't thrilled with you at 600 million.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  You can, you know, out of all this, though, you can never actually take all that personally, what investors think in the public markets. You know, they're happy to sell your shares in two months if it goes up 20%. That's, that's their business. That's what they do. They don't fundamentally, most, the vast majority, didn't care about your long-term business, weren't thinking about it. So that's not, it just can't be one of the drivers. My, my drivers are my employees and my customers. That's what I'm thinking about, because that's what creates long-term value.

• 22:01Logan Bartlett?

  So the nadir of all of this was what year?

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Probably 2003.

• 22:06Logan Bartlett?

  2003, 600 million dollar valuation, doing a couple hundred million in revenue. And then you start to see light at the end of the tunnel. What were the signs that it was changing?

• 22:14Speaker 02

  You're just seeing companies that you hadn't heard of start to become very large. And their ad volumes going up. And the one thing that always made me feel better during the entire downturn is if it weren't for the stock price, fundamental business was great. If you ask me, Kevin, this is really grim. You must be terrible. You must be horrible. I'd say, but ad volume grew 150% last year. And that was true in 2001, 2002, 2003, because more and more people were coming online and they were looking at things, they were buying. Pricing came down. But the fundamentals, did the dogs like the dog food? The answer was yes. If I saw that ending, then it was time to throw in the towel. But nothing, there was never a moment where I thought, the internet's not going to be big. We're not going to be, it's going to become so much more important. We're going to buy more things.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I sold to 100 people in 96, 97, when I was raising money, that internet advertising would be $3 billion by 2000, because it was 50 million in 95. And now it's 60 billion. There's never been a moment where I didn't think that was gonna happen.

• 23:15Logan Bartlett?

  The path of progress was along the way. It was just a question of when and valuation. Did you actually stop checking the stock price? Would you do it out of?

• 23:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, you know it's there because you're the CEO.

• 23:25Logan Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  It's just you don't control it. And look, it was insane on the way up. It was insane on the way down. But, you know, we ended up building a company that is fundamental to the internet even today. And the product is good, which is why we won. And we moved quickly. And that's what you want to do. And I think Mongo is the same way. I think Business Insider is actually the same way.

• 23:47Logan Bartlett?

  I want to talk about those two businesses. But the exit itself, what made the decision that that was the right time and the right buyer for Google?

• 23:54Speaker 02

  So I left when we sold it to a private equity firm in 2005.

• 23:57Logan Bartlett?

  Helman and Friedman.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so at that point, our stock price was so undervalued that by selling it, we got a 50% premium.

• 24:04Logan Bartlett?

  Got it. What was the exit price at that point?

• 24:06Speaker 02

  A billion.

• 24:07Logan Bartlett?

  Billion, got it.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  And the founders, we didn't actually want to sell the company. But it's very hard to turn down a 50%, you know, premium.

• 24:14Logan Bartlett?

  Those public market investors, I assume that they...

• 24:17Speaker 02

  And the board as well, the outside board members. And, you know, in a way, they were wrong, not intentionally, I mean, who knew? But the market was on its way up. And over the next three years, 2005, 2008, everyone's valuation went up a lot.

• 24:29Logan Bartlett?

  Yes. The H&F and JMI guys got some multiple appreciation that ultimately occurred, having exited in 2007, rather than what they probably would have got six months later or 12 months later in 2008 or something like that.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  So it was a good sale at the time. It was a good sale ultimately. And today, that company would be worth 20 billion.

• 24:46Logan Bartlett?

  Sure. So then, Ally Corp, was that actually incorporated? Like, what was it in the early days? Because you went on a pretty prolific spree of founding companies. So Mongo and Business Insider. I think we're two of the first.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  And Gilt.

• 25:01Logan Bartlett?

  Gilt, those are all around the same time?

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, so what happened was, at the time, Dwight, who had been the CTO and co-founder of DoubleClick, and I decided we wanted to start new companies. And so we came up with one idea, and then we came up with another idea. We didn't have a strategy yet. But in the very beginning stages, we could actually do more than one company, which no one thinks you can do. And we decided we thought you could do that. Dwight spent most of his time on Mongo. I spent more of my time on Business Insider and Gilt. I was chairman of all three. And it turns out that all three were in very different businesses and all three were quite successful. And so that was a real learning experience. For three years, I didn't start a new company because I stepped in to be CEO of Gilt. Gilt did 175 million in its second year. Still no one's ever done it in New York. It was a phenomenon.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  And so I needed to actually be the CEO to manage that growth. And then I hired a CEO to replace me and started Zola the next week. And then have since then started more and more companies and invested in more and more companies.

• 25:59Logan Bartlett?

  Was the initial, were there any models that you looked to in the early days? Or was it just like, hey, we can do this and we have the money to do it, so we might as well?

• 26:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it was more that just opportunistically made sense. We had ideas, we thought we should do it, and we believed that we could do it without being the CEO.

• 26:17Logan Bartlett?

  And so how did that evolve? So you had those three and then four. And today, maybe, how would you describe AlleyCorp today?

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so AlleyCorp today just does a lot more of that. It's more of a, much more institutional firm that does that. So we start about eight companies a year, and we invest in about 30 companies a year. So we invest about $100 million a year into those two buckets. And so I have a team of 28 people and separately 60 engineers that work for AlleyCorp, you know, on my payroll, that are there to help us build those companies. And so we really are company builders, either ones we started or ones we are their first investor in.

• 26:53Logan Bartlett?

  And no institutional outside capital?

• 26:56Speaker 02

  So as of now, we have no institutional outside capital. It's just my capital.

• 26:58Logan Bartlett?

  You say as of now, maybe at some point as you guys...

• 27:01Speaker 02

  We're going to look into whether we will raise a fund at some point, but to date we haven't.

• 27:05Logan Bartlett?

  Got it. So you're launching these companies, how are you actually coming up with the different ideas?

• 27:08Speaker 02

  So we do, you know, most of the old, number one question I get at business school is how do you come up with eight ideas a year? And when I say to you, have you spent 200 hours on your idea? Most people are like, well, no, I think about it in the shower once in a while. Like, that's not going to get you there. So we are doing deep dives at any one time. So for example, we've been doing a deep dive in assisted fertility over the last two months. So, you know, more women are having children later, gay men are having, money and having children, sperm counts are down, a lot of reasons why I think more people are going to need help over the next 10 years, having children. So we then have 50 interviews, you know, people have gone through the process, OB-GYNs, data providers, the whole ecosystem. And we try, one of three things will happen.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  We come up with an idea that we want to start, because we really do know this industry by now. We keep hearing about a company that looks really great, that's early stage. We try and invest in that. Or we have nothing and we move on. So we're doing, we did a deep dive in that. We just did one in, we're doing one in the maritime industry right now. We're doing one in organoids.

• 28:09Logan Bartlett?

  What are organoids?

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Organoids is a fascinating thing. So imagine that in a Petri dish essentially, we could create the beginnings of your esophagus. Not to put the esophagus in your body. But because when J&J wants to test a new drug on an esophagus, right now they have to find 50 people and stick it in your esophagus, which has risk, incredible costs. You gotta recruit people. Who wants to do that? Very, imagine they could test it right now in the Petri dish. That would revolutionize, you know, testing of drugs and drop the cost maybe down by 90%. Fascinating, we happen to have a relationship with a very important person in this space. So we're looking into that to see if we're gonna go down that path.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Those are just three very different examples of things we're doing deep dives in and may end up as companies.

• 28:56Logan Bartlett?

  Where do they tend to come from? Maritime's a very different industry than organoids.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  They're all completely different. So all of us, and it used to be seven years ago just me. So, you know, Business Insider and Gilt were my ideas. But now they come from everyone on the team. And that's what we hire people to do, to come in and want to look into things. We're talking to people all the time. We're thinking about fundamental trends. We'd like to have things that are gonna grow over the next 10 years. But that's the intellectual part of what we do, which is, which is different. It takes much more time than just seeing a business plan come in, spending two weeks on it and saying, sure, let's do it. We have to come, we have to create this from scratch.

• 29:34Logan Bartlett?

  And so you get to the point of, you do all this research and then you get to the point that you validate there's an idea here. What's the next step? Cause I've heard you say that you ultimately wanna raise institutional capital on the promise rather than the metrics of it. So what happens after you come up with one of these ideas?

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. So let's say you and I have an idea, we have a 40-page deck, we feel good to go. We then say, okay, we're gonna pull the trigger, which means we're gonna put roughly a million and a half dollars into the company. We're gonna generally hire a CEO. Sometimes we actually don't start with the CEO, we start with the head of product. But let's assume we start with the CEO. And then over the next nine months, we're going to build out the management team. And we're going to start building the product. And so if that's a consumer product, hopefully, we're going to launch and show some traction. If it's a B2B product, we'll have initial customers. And then, at the right moment, we'll go out and raise $5 million all around from someone, from a Red Point or someone else. And because we derisked it in their mind. You know, now I see the team, I like the team, I see the idea, I see the traction. And now, just like any other company.

• 30:35Logan Bartlett?

  And raising at a local maximum of where the potential is highest, but the metrics and all of that are still on the come. It's an interesting sort of psychological point.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it depends. Sometimes, sometimes we need to show, like in B2B and healthcare, we need to show that we have a contract or two. Like, the payers are going to want to pay for this. So we'll often wait till that point to do it. We're just trying to derisk it for the people out there. And so, once you even have two contracts, you've established pricing, you establish people like it. Now, we're just debating how many people are going to like it. But that's very different than just a PowerPoint presentation.

• 31:11Logan Bartlett?

  How do you think about idea versus market versus, I guess, tailwinds sort of fit into the idea and the market versus the people that are the early founding team? Like, what's the weighing on all that?

• 31:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, I mean, it depends. Obviously, you'd like to have a market that's going to grow. Yes, since fertility will grow, like, we're very deep in robotics. There's 0% chance there are not more robots 10 years from now than today. So you do have wind at your back. But more important is just this specific idea. You know, when I started Zola Wedding Registry, there were many registries. Everyone had a registry. And so, I didn't have the wind at my back. But I had a product idea. That was my idea that I thought was much better. And, and the existing registries had not realized that you didn't want plates and glasses anymore. You actually wanted yoga classes, or Knicks tickets, or honeymoon, or a whole bunch of things that Bloomingdale's doesn't sell. Yeah, Bloomingdale's just offered you what they sell, not what did you want.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  And so that was a pretty good realization. And then the second part was I, you know, the team is incredible. They're all ex-Gil. And so now that, you know, we've done a million different weddings since then.

• 32:19Logan Bartlett?

  Now, now, some of the other greatest hits, and we've touched on a bunch of them, but Mongo was one of the first one, 15 billion dollar company today. I think got up to 40 last year. Obviously, David Cherry, amazing CEO. What was the original insight there? And coming up with Wedding Registry or Business Insider or Gilz? Well, not easy by any means. It requires a business intuition and some of those insights. This requires that same intuition, but at an IP technical level as well.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  So I couldn't have done that on my own. The fact that I did it with my two co-founders, Dwight, the CTO of DoubleClick, and Elliot Horowitz, who was the most brilliant young engineer at DoubleClick. So out of 700 people, he was the up and coming LeBron James that you could just see. And so the three of us wanted to do it. I knew the business problem that when I looked through all the money we spent at DoubleClick, the money we regretted was database cost, that it wasn't scaling. It was incredibly expensive. 17, you know, consultants had to come in to install something. It just didn't make sense. And it wasn't the right database for the future when data had changed from relational to non-relational. But Dwight, I bet that's, that's high level.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  Dwight and Elliot sat there and thought, you know, we can build this. We know how to build it and can do it. There are very, very few people who can build it. That's true technology. I mean, today, a billion dollars has gone into R and D at Mongo over the course of history. That's why it's a successful company. And we had to be able to muscle it through because we started in 2008. There wasn't, it wasn't a great time and we had no revenue for three years. Zero. And so funding that is hard. And that's why there weren't that many database companies at the time.

• 34:01Logan Bartlett?

  Funding it, I've heard you say was like your high school dating career a little bit. Rejection, rejection, hostile rejection?

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, hostile rejection. Followed by, if you were the last company on earth, I still wouldn't invest in you.

• 34:11Logan Bartlett?

  Yes. So the insight at that point in time was, hey, we're moving from relational and kind of SQL-based to this NoSQL and structured data. But no one had database backgrounds, right? This wasn't, we're investors in Snowflake. Like, Snowflake, they came out of Oracle, right? They're like that. But this wasn't that. This was, hey, these are bright people. And I think in general, I mean, it sort of seems like that's a theme for you of taking, drawing on experiences from other industries, importing it into whatever specific domain of it. Was that a skepticism in the early days? And how did you think about, like, hey, this is so different than DoubleClick? Although DoubleClick, I'm sure, had tons of IP and these people were very bright.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had real technology. It's just that people tended to think that if you hadn't worked in databases, you couldn't understand them. And I think people generally overvalue narrow expertise. So that, you know, if you've worked in some sort of financial product, that you just can't learn another industry. Most industries, you know, aren't that complicated. If you spend four months, I mean, I don't understand black holes and deep things like that, but trying to understand how does the furniture industry work or how does something else work? It's not that complicated. And so I think that what people have not noticed is that most of the consumer internet companies that are very successful were almost always started by someone from a startup, but not from that domain. You know, did the people who started Uber come from the taxi industry?

• 35:37Speaker 02

  The people who started Airbnb come from the hotel industry? No. There were many people who should have understood that problem better. I mean, even Business Insider, none of us had a media background. Yult, none of us had a fashion background.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  But we can understand it. It's just we understand the problems that our clients have and what you're looking for. And so sometimes you're coming from outside and saying, I don't understand why this doesn't work. And one of the things I've said in the past is that when I have a new idea, I have to remember that the people who are going to hate it the most are the ones who are closest to it. Who in theory know, like everyone I talked to at Wall Street Journal told me, no one wanted what Business Insider was selling.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  Because they just weren't wrapped up in their own product.

• 36:18Logan Bartlett?

  Well, and their career is beholden to some extent to the success of that. And statistically, it's actually probably true if you talk to most experts, right? And that's sort of the change management disruption type thing is actually statistically, the probability of Business Insider's success was low enough that it actually didn't make sense for Wall Street Journal to pivot and go in that direction until there were the incremental proof points around it.

• 36:43Speaker 02

  But I always remember going into Barney's, when it existed, beginning in guilt, and going to the salesperson, and the store was almost empty, and saying, by the way, so are a lot of your customers shopping online? And he said, absolutely not. None of my customers shop online. It's completely overrated. And I remember thinking, maybe that's why the store is empty. Because your customers are shopping in the store, and there aren't that many of them. And so that's what people don't see, is the people they're not talking to.

• 37:08Logan Bartlett?

  The self-selection of what your data points are around you, right? Yeah. So in terms of Mongo in the early days, the original name was Tengen, right? And so you made a decision to be open source from the start, hence why no revenue for a while. What was that, at that point in time, there, I mean, Red Hat's sort of the canonical example for a long time.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  That was in our deck and the only one. And so our whole point was, you know, they were, you know, very successful. They were doing a billion dollars in revenue at the time, and we were going after a bigger market. They were operating systems, we were going after databases. The challenge was, we were forced to go open source because there was no way for our product to be good enough that you would pay a ton of money.

• 37:48Logan Bartlett?

  Was open source a distribution strategy in that case? Or a wisdom of the crowds and the ability to QA things?

• 37:55Speaker 02

  We never thought that many people would contribute to the product, but they did and helped a little bit. No, it was more that, it was open source, but really a different way of calling it would be freemium. That we wanted many, many people to use the database and play with it, which gave us feedback, which taught them about it. And then often, a guy who worked at, let's say, you know, Goldman Sachs, would use it for his own website at home. For a year, and then you'd be like, wow, this works great. Maybe I should bring it in to Goldman Sachs. That's how it worked. We just needed thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of people to use it.

• 38:28Logan Bartlett?

  And the original insight was cloud computing, right? Something that was broader. And so, I mean, one of the things we talk a lot about is like staying sort of refined and narrow and solving a very specific problem. And then you get the right to win and expand sort of wallet share from there. This is sort of the opposite, and then you had to end up there. Maybe take us through that journey.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, many people have a pivot. This was not a pivot at all. We started trying to do everything.

• 38:53Logan Bartlett?

  This was throwing stuff out.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  We went with cloud computing, which was the right conclusion and not obvious in 2007, 2008. But we were going to build a database as well as many other things. And then realized that, one, the problem was bigger than we thought. We were never going to be able to do all these things. Two, we weren't going to be able to raise the capital to do them, certainly at that time. And it was going to take many, many years. And Dwight and Elliot felt like we had breakthroughs on the database side. And it was a huge market in and of itself. And so we should just focus on that. And so we bet the company on not doing anything else and just focusing on that.

• 39:26Logan Bartlett?

  And the funding journey there was, you got all this distribution. It took off like wildfire. And there wasn't a clear business model. You could point at Red Hat and say, hey, they figured out how to make money. Maybe we can figure out how to make money. And so what was the journey on the funding side as well? And you didn't step in as CEO. Were Dwight or Elliot ever CEO?

• 39:46Speaker 02

  So technically Dwight was the CEO for the first two years because it's really just a development project. I mean, if you're not coding every day, there is really nothing to do. And so we had a team, a small team. We were constrained by capital. Dwight and I funded at the beginning. Union Square Ventures came in. Albert Wenger understood it from day one and was hugely valuable. Flybridge came in, and they came in only because he had worked at Greylock, Chip Hazard, and had done very well with us. And so thought he'd do it. But we raised money at very low valuations.

• 40:15Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, Chip was at Greylock and an investor in DoubleClick?

• 40:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:18Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, funny. I didn't know that.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  He worked on the DoubleClick deal. I think it may have helped give him a down payment for his house. And so, when he was associate. And so Eddie, he's an amazing guy, still on the board.

• 40:28Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  And has been a real contributor there, so it's been great. So we muscled it through. But in retrospect, when you think about it, here we were the team that had started the most successful company in the history of the internet in New York and still had trouble raising money. Real trouble raising money. We got it done, a little bit slower. Then eventually, the traffic numbers just looked overwhelming. Sequoia came in, then NEA came in. We raised a lot of money and then went public.

• 40:54Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it was interesting because I remember the journey of that, the business itself was, it was, it sounds like it was difficult in the early days. And then Sequoia came in, the numbers were through the roof, right? And then the question of the business model started to come up and it was probably a little harder at some point. Like the round before public was 1.3 billion or something like that. And it wasn't, it wasn't totally clear how big that was going to go because there was this little bit of disconnect between how good of a business it was versus the utility that it was providing. And obviously now, we were talking a little bit about this before, but it's what Mongo Atlas and Dave's team have been able to do around that. I mean, it's an absolute rocket ship.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, that company will, and I have no inside information, I've been off the board for three years, but I think that company's going to grow for the next 10 years. You know, it's, there's a big market, it's, you can't have three guys in a garage duplicate a billion dollars of R and D. And we had very, very smart people there. And so it has just grown at 40%, you know, roughly for like eight years in a row.

• 41:56Logan Bartlett?

  It's amazing how much, you can get wrapped around the axle about the minutia and probably at each point along the way, there was a venture firm, probably ours, that talked themselves out of it because the, hey, this is support revenue, not software revenue, right? Hey, how are they going to be monetized? Hey, is this CEO, whoever it was at the time, actually going to be the person to make it? Ultimately, if you ride that tailwind and you're right about the important concept, it's in the pack of progress.

• 42:22Speaker 02

  We were turned out by everyone.

• 42:23Logan Bartlett?

  Everyone, yeah. Definitely us.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Everyone at least once, but sometimes three times. Because it wasn't obvious. We did have the background, it was a new business model, and it was a new technology. So those are three huge things to get over.

• 42:38Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Now, Business Insider, another big hit, another initial one, that was one of the ones out of the gate, basically?

• 42:44Speaker 02

  Yep, absolutely.

• 42:45Logan Bartlett?

  And what was the insight there?

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Oh, and now people forget that in 2007, you know, Businessweek and Wall Street Journal did not update their websites during the day.

• 42:53Logan Bartlett?

  Because it was difficult, it would probably hurt their print business, right?

• 42:55Speaker 02

  They thought about the print business. First, they'd always been on this schedule. I mean, every journalist in the world wrote their articles at night and then it came out the next morning. Because that was just how things worked. And so they also didn't want to hurt their print business. It was just a whole mentality. And so that was one big thing, which now sounds obvious. I mean, the things we introduced are so prevalent now that you can't imagine they didn't exist. Having just punchier headlines and saying, you know, having a point of view was very important. And so theirs are always, you know, very neutral, which has a benefit. But some people wanted to know, what do you think of this? Why is this acquisition a really dumb idea? That makes you want to read it. And the third thing was, you know, the reason I also couldn't raise money for Business Insider was that we had no media background. Media was a terrible business.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  And we would tell people, we're never going to spend a dollar of advertising. And we'll eventually be the biggest in the world, just because the product's so good. And that really doesn't work very often.

• 43:48Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  And you've never seen an ad for Business Insider, still today. And they are 300 million uniques. And it's the biggest business now broad publication in the world.

• 43:58Logan Bartlett?

  Ironic that you came out of advertising and both of your, both of those businesses, Mongo and Business Insider, were fundamentally not, hey, we're not going to do advertising. Was it something philosophically that you think perverts the customer base in some way? Or gives you, you're hooked on a drug that you can't get off of?

• 44:14Speaker 02

  And don't forget, for just seven years, the only revenue for Business Insider was advertising.

• 44:19Logan Bartlett?

  From a business standpoint, but you weren't advertising to acquire customers, right?

• 44:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, for media, it just doesn't work. There's no chance of that. The numbers can't work there. So you just have to assume and focus on doing the right things there. No, I think one of the interesting things I did decide in 2005 was that, and I've lived this, even though I was arguably the number one person in ad technology in the world at that point, because Double Q was the biggest company, that I have never had a one-hour meeting about ad technology since then. Just because I was completely bored of it. You know, I spent nine years of my life, I did most of my whole career doing that. We had solved most things, most things, you know, that were, had been created at that point. There's only so many ways you can serve up an ad. And so I just thought, I would rather do something else, even if I know less about it, because I'll be intellectually interested in it.

• 45:06Logan Bartlett?

  It's funny, Zach Weinberg sat in that seat, whatever, a week ago, and he said the same thing. It's, it's an interesting, because advertising in general is such a, it's so competitive, it's so IP and technologically difficult to do. It's actually a very good sharpening of the spear, but then everyone burns out of it. Everyone's like, I, I, I'm gonna do something else. I made my money doing this, and I'm gonna do. So it's a good training ground. It's sort of like gaming and enterprise software, like Stuart Butterfield, the Discord guys, a bunch of people come out of gaming, because it is the, the tip of the spear. Like, your users hate you if you really mess it up. Enterprise software is much more forgiving. But then, once you do it, you're like, I, I just need to, I need to get out of there. So Business Insider, so the, the insight was, hey, these folks are doing that.

• 45:50Logan Bartlett?

  How, how did you go about validating that that was actually gonna work? How'd you find Henry Blodgett?

• 45:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, I mean, I just said, let's start a publication. And I went out, interviewed seven people, Henry was one of them. And Henry had got it within 30 seconds, was an incredibly good writer. So most of them were thrown off by the fact that the stuff on Wall Street in the late 90s, last century.

• 46:13Logan Bartlett?

  Which, which, everyone was doing at the time. Not that, not, maybe if you give the details of like, what was going on in the 90s at that point.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  At the time, you know, investment bankers were saying, I'm gonna take your company public, and we'll make sure that our analysts write good things about you.

• 46:26Logan Bartlett?

  Give you the buy coverage and whatever, all that stuff.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Which essentially is still true, always, because no one's gonna take a company public unless they talk to the analyst and he feels good about it.

• 46:34Logan Bartlett?

  But Henry put it in writing.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  Henry actually put his concerns in writing. I mean, the irony is, everyone else just did it. Henry said at one point internally, like, I don't feel very comfortable what you're asking me to do here. And then got punished for that. So I didn't take that. My takeaway was not that he did something wrong there. And I saw what every other analyst did when they came to us and said, "Look, we'll write whatever you need." So I didn't blame Henry for that at all.

• 47:00Logan Bartlett?

  We could debate whether or not it was something wrong, but he didn't do something different and wrong at all. It was something pervasive to the industry. And some of the people that covered internet stocks or software stocks at the time are still today. Some of them were prominent people in the industry.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  Also, everything he wrote was approved by someone else and was structurally in the system. It wasn't like he independently came up with the idea that he wanted to do something. There was part of the senior people who said, "We're going to do this."

• 47:27Logan Bartlett?

  How did he get scapegoated for that?

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Merrill Lynch threw him under the bus.

• 47:31Logan Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  And I actually think he probably should have fought it more, that's just me personally, and probably could have gotten away with that because, I mean, there was no scenario where he was a rogue warrior doing things. It didn't happen. So, anyway, I think he's an incredible guy. He is still running it today. He's done a remarkable job, and he deserves the credit for why it's so successful.

• 47:52Logan Bartlett?

  Building Business Insider, in building a media company in general, doesn't sound... It feels like a very difficult business. We talked about why people didn't want to fund it and all of that. Was it lightning in the bottle right away from a growth standpoint? And ultimately, the question was the monetization or how far it could go in terms of the upside?

• 48:12Speaker 02

  The chart for probably nine years in a row was basically that traffic doubled every year. Except that, you know how that doubling works, that doubling gets big. And so, when we had 2 million uniques going to 4 million, you're like, "You don't care." When it was 32 going to 64, and then doubling again, obviously it had to slow down at some point. But, you know, people just liked the product. They passed it on. It just... The product worked. It was fundamentally different, and great execution, great point of view.

• 48:39Logan Bartlett?

  And it ended up, I mean, it's still... It ended up being sold for 300 million?

• 48:43Speaker 02

  Axel Springer bought it for 450 million in 2008.

• 48:49Logan Bartlett?

  One of the bigger

• 48:50Speaker 02

  2015.

• 48:51Logan Bartlett?

  15. One of the bigger media-related deals.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  And actually, interestingly, which Henry and I still watch, is that at the time, people said, "Oh, BuzzFeed is more valuable than you. It'll be more valuable." I'm not sure ultimately they're going to be more valuable. I think Business Insider may end up being the most valuable publication. And even today, and this is seven years later, BuzzFeed's not worth more than what we sold Business Insider for.

• 49:14Logan Bartlett?

  Was the business all advertising at that point?

• 49:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, we had started the subscription business. And so we knew long-term that that would be the ultimate business. And today, I don't see the numbers, but I'm sure it's a very big part of their business.

• 49:26Logan Bartlett?

  Were you involved in... How involved on a day-to-day were you of that one?

• 49:30Speaker 02

  I was chairman. I mean, I talked to Henry a lot, but Henry ran the business. And I was involved with other things. So, you know, helping him and involve... I negotiated the sale, for example, to Axel Springer. But in general, Henry was CEO, ran that business, and did a great job.

• 49:44Logan Bartlett?

  So Gilt, you actually stepped in and were the CEO. And that was one of the rocket ships of all time, certainly in New York, right? Maybe take through people... I tend to have a little bit of a younger audience at times, and maybe don't even remember what Gilt was.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  No, it was a phenomenon. And I had this very simple takeaway, which was because my wife is French and I grew up in Europe, I knew this company, Voltaire. And Voltaire was doing, it was just Gilt there. It was flash sales every day. They were doing a billion dollars in revenue in France, you know, in 2008. And so I sat there and thought, "Why does that exist there but not here?" And so I just thought I should do that here. And so I adapted it, but, you know...

• 50:26Logan Bartlett?

  It's kind of the reverse rocket internet.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  Absolutely, absolutely. And so I didn't know anything about fashion, but, you know, brought on a team, launched it, and it just took off from day one. So the first year, we launched in November. The first year, the next year, we did 25 million in revenue, which is a staggering amount. The second year, 175. And so we had to race to keep up to that. So we were selling products. It was a fantastic time. We brought very good people on board. Everyone in New York was on it. And everyone who started across the country, you know, got on as well. So we got to $500 million in about four years. We had 1,000 employees. Unbelievably fun business to run. You know, we started selling home, kids, you know, travel. I had a $100 million travel business called Jetsetter that's still around. And so we, it was, it was, it was a fun time.

• 51:11Logan Bartlett?

  And the 500 million in revenue you got up to. And the highest watermark in valuation, General Atlantic did around at 650?

• 51:19Speaker 02

  No, like a billion.

• 51:19Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, a billion, wow. And what, what lessons, ultimately it sold for 250 million, right? And then after that, I think sold for even less.

• 51:29Speaker 02

  Five million, Saxmo for 250, and then they sold it for five or 10 million three years later.

• 51:34Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, so, so I guess you got off at, maybe not the top point, but, but a better point than what?

• 51:40Speaker 02

  No, and I wanted to sell the business and actually had to convince the board because I didn't like the dynamics of the industry. And what was really happening, which we didn't have a solution for, was that everyone started discounting everywhere. So when we started, Marc Jacobs didn't have a website. And Macy's had a terrible website. But then at the end, you know, Farfitch was selling Marc Jacobs. Marc Jacobs was selling Marc Jacobs. Macy's was selling Marc Jacobs. We were selling Marc Jacobs. And so it became a race to the lowest price and became very hard to, to make money. And ultimately today, you know, there's no one successfully doing that business model. I still think it should work somewhere, but it's very hard.

• 52:17Logan Bartlett?

  The, and so, so at the time, the insight and the phenomenon behind it was partially high-end products, right? Discounted to, so, so why did it work at the time? Like what was the?

• 52:29Speaker 02

  Because you couldn't buy Marc Jacobs at 50% off unless you went to a sample sale. And I walked by a sample sale when I was thinking about this idea. And there were 200 people waiting in line. And I remember thinking, you know what? There's 50,000 people who'd like to be in this line. But they're in their office at Goldman Sachs right now, mostly women, but not only. You know, they're, they're in Philadelphia.

• 52:49Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, they're in Ohio somewhere, yeah.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  And they're dying to be in this line to get Marc Jacobs at 50% off or name any other brand. How can I bring it to them? And so TJ Maxx does a version of that. But still, many brands came to us and said, "You know, we didn't really want to be a TJ Maxx." That's not brand enhancing. But online, I could create something that was brand enhancing. It looked beautiful. It didn't look like they were discounting. I could control it. And so, it was a great product for many brands. We benefited by the fact that in 2009, times were tough. They had a lot of unsold inventory. But then, it was super convenient. You know, who doesn't want to see great merchandise at a great price if it's carefully curated for you?

• 53:31Logan Bartlett?

  The lessons along the way, other than probably selling earlier than you did, was there anything that... It sounds like you think it could still work today. Was there anything that strategically... Like, would you have gone slower in that ramp? Or was going...

• 53:45Speaker 02

  This is the one bit. I generally move quickly. And that's both my strength and weakness. And here, if I did it again, I would restrain the growth. In the same way that if you open a nightclub across the street, if you try and scale it forever, it'll be worth zero. Right? Your nightclub is only worth something if there are people at the door waiting to get in and they can't get in. And so, you always have to operate so that some people can't get in. You know, the right amount of supply is sort of demand minus one or two. And we let it run. We had so much opportunity, we let it run. And I should have kept a constraint. I should have. In retrospect, I would have started to kick people off the site if they didn't buy. And that would have, you know, that would have gotten people excited.

• 54:27Logan Bartlett?

  The scarcity, the constraint, the cool factor of all that. Like, "I want to be a club," with the Groucho Marx quote. "I don't want to be a part of a club that wants me as a member."

• 54:35Speaker 02

  So I said, "Look, we have a limited number of members. You haven't purchased anything in six months. Really appreciate it. But unfortunately, we're not going to be able to do this anymore." And I think you would have been like, "I want to buy something to get there." And then I would have had a real waitlist. So you just can't get in.

• 54:50Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Now, Zola, you had the insight we talked about a second ago. But there were a ton of wedding websites. And you said, "Hey, there should be a better way of doing this. People don't want to go through a single registry at Bloomingdale's," or whatever it was.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  There were two big conclusions. One is that because people were getting married later, often they just, they already lived with their spouse, future spouse. They already had a kitchen. In 1955, you were 21. You married someone out of college who was 21. You didn't own anything. We're not getting you yoga classes. You don't have a fork to eat with. And so that made sense at the time. But it's evolved. The second thing, though, that had changed. And so Zola could not have been created five years before because you need to be able to drop ship everything. So the department stores had advantage at everything in their warehouse in, you know, 2005 and no one else could get that. But we could drop ship from everywhere.

• 55:38Logan Bartlett?

  Maybe explain drop shipping and what that.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that when we sold something from Crate and Barrel or any brand, it wasn't in our warehouse. You bought it from Zola, we sent money to Crate and Barrel, they shipped it to you and you got it, you know, five days later. And so that allowed us to operate without a warehouse and without a photo studio. Guilt, I had to have an enormous photo studio and enormous warehouse. This lowered the costs a lot.

• 56:03Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, got it. So that allowed it to be a good business in a financial sense, is that you didn't actually have to house unused inventory.

• 56:09Speaker 02

  That business has more than, you know, half a billion dollars a year now in wedding gifts, which, you know, is quite extraordinary.

• 56:14Logan Bartlett?

  So shifting gears a little bit, I want to go through some of the philosophies that I've heard you say and just your opinions on them. So I heard you say you'd rather have someone ship a B-plus work than an A work within startups. Why do you think that's the case?

• 56:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I always tell people on the team in everything, not just shipping, that I want you to do B, B-quality work, B-plus work, not A work. And that almost confuses them because obviously they got to this place by doing A work in our work life. It's more important that you get something out the door and that we move quickly. Because we're going to change it anyway. And we're going to improve whatever you just wrote, whether it's a marketing brochure or something else. Nothing is here forever, you know. So, but getting it out the door and getting feedback is so important. And it takes a lot more time to do an A paper than it does a B paper.

• 57:02Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, the getting from the 85, whatever a B plus is, 88% to the 100% is not, it's not 12% more work, right? It's actually 50% more work or 100% more work to get there.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  There are some things in life that, you know, if it's a healthcare product that's mission critical and a database is another one. You actually can't go that quickly there. But everything else needs to get out the door and move really quickly.

• 57:24Logan Bartlett?

  Now, in starting companies, you are very much of the fail-fast mindset, that the problem isn't the failure itself. The problem is actually continuing to go. And in particular, as we're in this more recessionary environment, how do you think about that and why that's the case?

• 57:42Speaker 02

  Because, and it's more an advice to people as well, that entrepreneurs are obviously congenitally optimistic, or they wouldn't be doing something that is insane and has a low probability of working. And that is good to get them off the ground, and it's bad over time because they keep convincing themselves that it's going to work. And I always tell people, "Your time is so valuable, that it's better that after two years, it doesn't work, and you move on to a better idea." And the truth is, the majority of things work in the first two years, and you see those signs. Once in a while, we can all cite some examples where in your four, it really takes off, but actually, that's pretty rare.

• 58:18Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, the overnight success story tends to be the one. And it also, I mean, back to the original point, a lot of these best internet companies didn't spend a lot in advertising, right, to get going.

• 58:28Speaker 02

  The product was differentiated. Whether it was Airbnb, or any of these things, Uber, they worked really, I mean, maybe it was a small market, maybe it was tiny. You know, even Gilt, I put 50 dresses for sale the first day, and I told the team, "After 45 minutes, say that everything's sold out." So we create the impression that it's all sold out. It turns out, they all sold out, and from day one, things were selling. I almost had a problem at one point, because so many people were coming in to buy, that it was selling out in a minute, and no one believed that there was actually merchandise there. So that was a good problem to have, but we thought about stopping people from coming in, because it was hurting the product.

• 59:10Logan Bartlett?

  A corollary to that is, and this is something we definitely battle, is people optimizing too much for titles versus the companies they're on. They'd rather be VP of shit co than, you know, whatever, random person at a super-successful company.

• 59:22Speaker 02

  I give that advice all the time. You would rather have been the 40th employee head of Google with a bad title and bad initial compensation, because ultimately, success solves everything. One, you're probably going to get promoted, because we just need people. Two, you'll end up making a ton of money, if you're there. Three, you're going to work with really good people, because really great companies get better people. And four, your resume's going to look better. So, everything works out. And I have friends who continue to keep stretching, let's say, to be CEO and not be head of business development, but have four companies in a row that aren't good.

• 59:56Logan Bartlett?

  And if it's growing like a weed, inevitably the battlefield promotion will come that you'll get promoted because you're the person that's there, right?

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:00:03Logan Bartlett?

  And I always think about, there's only a handful of resumes that will, or a handful of brands that will define your resume at some point in time. And forever you will be associated with MongoDB, forever you'll be associated with Gilt and DoubleClick and all that. And it's, no one ever cares really about the title that it was. They look much more at, you were at Stripe, you were at Google, you were at Facebook.

• 1:00:26Speaker 02

  And I actually think that on resumes, people overvalue. I mean, not every person at Stripe or at Gilt or Mongo are great. I mean, even if the average quality is higher, but people have a tendency to think, "Oh, you were just 10 times better than everyone else." You know, going to Harvard is, on average, maybe much better than the community college. But it's just not true that every single person at a company that didn't work is not good.

• 1:00:48Logan Bartlett?

  Another interesting thing on the interview process, where people tend to overwait, it seems. I've found that I am not particularly good at interviewing people in the sense that I'm able to discern the quality that they're going to be with when they're on the job. You've had an interesting approach of, you would rather not interview people and only do references. Maybe talk a little bit about that.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think, for me, I like it just sports. You know, do you want to interview basketball players? Or do you want to watch them play? And so, any coach would be like, "I don't care about the interview. I want to watch them play." That's the game. Well, you can't necessarily watch someone play, but a reference check is someone who did watch them play. And so, that's the best you can get to, and it's more important. And we all get thrown off. We have, you know, every single study has shown that we have inherent biases, whether we think so or not. And so, you like the person, you think they're great, they're personal, they have a great handshake, and so then you want to hire them. And that just doesn't matter. There's so many things that we all know are important, like attention to detail, focus, grit, things like that. They don't come up in an interview. You know, you can just say, "I have great attention to detail."

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  But someone who worked with him will know. So you would just do a better job and you wouldn't mail in your reference checks.

• 1:02:00Logan Bartlett?

  And so if you're actually going about this, if you're talking to a founder and giving advice and you come to me and say, "Hey, Logan, I want your references." And I then go to a friend that I used to work with and say, "Hey, Kevin wants to interview me, give me my references." They're probably, they don't know you, they do know me, they're gonna give you positive references. How do you actually go about getting the quality references?

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  So most people pride themselves on saying, "Oh, I interviewed 25 people for this spot." Which took 25 hours plus the search, right? How many hours did you spend trying to get to someone on your own who knew this person? Just in 25 hours? No one does. So they're just not, they're not valuing you. And so if you spend a lot of time getting there, and I use this example that someone I know very well called me and said, "Kevin, do me a favor. A friend of mine who you don't know wants to do a true reference check on someone you do know, and I'm calling to ask you to make sure that it's really fair and honest." So now I have an obligation to him. And so you're right, he's flipped it around. So you can get, unless someone's 21 and they've never worked somewhere, people move around,

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  there are people. And we even have, once in a while, we had to call up randomly. But if you call enough people, you'll start to piece it together. You'll start to hear little signals of like, "Oh yeah, you know, they're really focused or attention to detail," or something will come up three or four times and you realize there's a problem.

• 1:03:20Logan Bartlett?

  And getting you those references, how many would you actually, I'm sure it depends on the role and all, but how many do you think it takes to actually get the confirmation?

• 1:03:29Speaker 02

  For senior people, it's gonna, we're gonna do at least five.

• 1:03:31Logan Bartlett?

  At least five.

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, at least five. You wanna see people who worked generally alongside them, that peer relationship is really important, that's where assholes come out. You want people who worked for them. Most people focus on who they worked for, but that's, you know, somewhat important but not as important. Anyone who's coming in as a manager, you know, their job is to recruit other people. And everyone has a choice. We have 3.4% unemployment. So if you don't have a good reputation, you're not going to be able to build a team, and that's your number one job.

• 1:04:01Logan Bartlett?

  It's interesting. Probably the direct reports probably actually have a better insight into the person than the top down. You're getting some superficial level thing.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  The person working for that person, there was not only what they thought, but they know the peers. I mean, if we all work for the same guy, you know what we talk about a lot? Him or her. And so I'll know what other people think as well.

• 1:04:23Logan Bartlett?

  Do you do the linkages as well of if they got hired by someone that they worked for or bring people along? Is that a helpful data point?

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  Very helpful. You really want to see when people have started to move companies once or twice, did someone follow them? When I talk to people, I point out the fact that I have many, many, many people who worked for me at one point and now came back to me and want me as an investor or a board member or something like that. And they have other choices. They don't have to do that. And so I wanted to see that in other people as well.

• 1:04:51Logan Bartlett?

  Are there qualities some people talk about like the hiring for the lowest or making sure they don't have any weaknesses, right? I've also heard a lot of people making sure they optimize for the spikes. And I'm willing to take an asshole if they're freakishly smart and they're able to whatever, get stuff done or whatever the things are. Are there things that are non-negotiable, maybe it's asshole, that you're not willing to take on? And then do you tend to hire more for the spikes or more for the high minimum across the board?

• 1:05:20Speaker 02

  So actually, it depends a little bit on individual contributors can be more spiky. But managers need to be a little bit more gentle. At the end of the day, you have to be able to attract people. Now, if you're a real asshole, it's not going to work. People don't want to work for you. But you can be finally grumpy or especially in the technical areas. Not everyone has the best personality. But if the team respects them and they're going to learn from them, which is why a lot of people are in tech, then you can get over that. So but no one's perfect. You're always balancing a couple of different things. And you never get the perfect person that has everything. So that's why all these things are ultimately judged with calls.

• 1:06:04Logan Bartlett?

  Now, I've heard another thing on the interviewing process as well. Or I've heard you weigh in. As two straight white men, this feels like the appropriate forum for us to weigh in on diversity in the industry. But are there elements of ability to bring more people into the industry that you've seen? Because I've heard you talk a lot about the, some of the upstream considerations that go with the diversity, in the tech industry especially, right? And so, how do you think about that and some of the systematic issues that probably exist today?

• 1:06:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look, there's no question that the tech industry is not diverse on every dimension. On some it is. On Asian men, it's unbelievably overrepresented and very diverse. Not intentionally. Look, when you're getting into the technical areas of the internet, it is going to reflect what undergraduate education looks like. So, it's not a tech industry problem necessarily that, right now, something like 15 or 16% of computer science degrees are given to women. You know, there are certain jobs, if you don't have that, you just can't really do the job. And so, we operate with a smaller pool. Everyone just tries to do a good job, but we can't solve that problem.

• 1:07:20Speaker 02

  Society, parents, schools, need to try and solve that problem. So, that's the only thing we need to balance off there. And, look, I gave a speech the other day at a Columbia tech group, and for better or worse, that still today is heavily male and heavily white and Asian. And so, that's the pool that's coming out in that area for the next 20 years, whether we like it or not.

• 1:07:42Logan Bartlett?

  I want to talk about education in general, because I know you have some thoughts on that. But what about CEOs? We touched on this a little bit earlier, but there's this lionized example of the Jobs and the Zuckerbergs and the people that can go the distance. I get the feeling you don't have that exact same opinion, that the ability to scale is something that we should hold in that regard.

• 1:08:03Speaker 02

  It's probably the most contrarian thing that I've done, which is, when you start a multiple companies, then, theoretically, I come up with the idea, but I'm not the CEO. And everyone believes in the sort of Silicon Valley ethos is that, that only that original founder has the vision. And it's just not true, that, you know, the vision develops over time, there are other people that can do it. Now, it's not easy to get a good CEO. But I also think there are many companies, and Mongo's a good example, where the right person for the first three years was programming every day. And the right person for the last seven years is someone who can understand that product, but it's not the one driving it. You know, the CTO is driving that, but it's one driving the enterprise sales, managing 5,000 people, a public company. Those are different skills.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  Once in a while, the same person does both, but there's no reason why those can't be different people. And that works just fine.

• 1:08:51Logan Bartlett?

  Do you think the success of the founding CEOs often is related to the credibility that they have in those situations versus that they're actually the right person for the job at any point along the way?

• 1:09:03Speaker 02

  I mean, right now, because Silicon Valley believes this, it definitely helps and it's become self fulfilling. But, I mean, look at Microsoft. Does anyone think that for the first time that we have a non-founder CEO, that there's a problem? Just the opposite. Everyone looks and thinks Satya is better, doing a better job than Ballmer was, and the company has done unbelievably well since then. So, do we need a founder now?

• 1:09:27Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. It's interesting. One of the psychological shifts that the non-founder CEOs, at least I've worked with, and I think the ones I've observed see be successful are, they actually are willing to burn the boats if needed, right? And that's one of the things, I mean, if you talk back in the day of Steve Jobs coming back in, or whatever the case may be, Reed Hastings being able to pivot Netflix, or all those decisions along the way. Oftentimes, if it came from nothing, and when that person started it, then they're willing to take the big risk that could bring it back to nothing. And so it's kind of that psychological difficult shift. But I guess, in some ways, like Satya has done a lot of things that were antithetical to the way Ballmer ran the company, so I guess it...

• 1:10:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I don't, I don't even like the categorization in some ways, because this is all down to a person. In the same way that no one would be happy if we started talking about how, you know, black CEOs do versus white versus Polish versus French versus Christian. That would be a topic that everyone feels uncomfortable with, because it's down to the person. Founders and non-founders are doing the same thing. There are many bad founders who don't change and drive the company into the wall. There are amazing founders that we all hear about who pivot, do this, it's incredible. And the same is true otherwise. So there can be some tendencies, maybe, but those don't matter. I'm not interviewing a tendency, I'm interviewing a person. And is it the right person?

• 1:10:50Logan Bartlett?

  At a personal level, you've been able, so you've done all these things, started all these different businesses. And I want to get into some of the stuff that you're thinking about today. You've also managed to raise a family and seemingly have a good balance. You've been married for a while. How many kids do you have?

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  I have three kids.

• 1:11:06Logan Bartlett?

  Three kids.

• 1:11:07Speaker 02

  Three years together.

• 1:11:10Logan Bartlett?

  Presumably going well on both accounts, the father and the marriage. But even at DoubleClick, you were taking off five weeks a year, like kind of non-negotiable. Now it's closer to eight or nine that you go over to Europe, right?

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:24Logan Bartlett?

  How do you think about the balancing and the fulfillment of life in that regard? That like this isn't going to be the only thing that defines you, you're going to have these other things as well.

• 1:11:33Speaker 02

  Well, I really push and encourage my CEOs that, you know, if, obviously if there's a fundraising that's closing in 10 days, yes, you should be working really hard, you have to close it. We get that. But over time, this is like a marathon and you just have to be at a pace that is very good for you. I want you to be in this position five, seven years from now. And so I think it's better for people to take those five weeks, they feel good about their family. You know, the reason people step down and have problems is they burn out. And so, yes, you need to work hard, you need to be focused, you need to use your time. But you need to be balanced. I'm still working the same schedule as I was, you know, 25 years ago. I work hard, I mean, I'm interested in a lot of things, I stay in shape.

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  Those things are all important to me and why I'm still feeling good and many people have burned out.

• 1:12:21Logan Bartlett?

  What motivates you to keep, I mean, presumably after DoubleClick, you could have hung out, right? You could have done my job, become a full-time VC. And what motivates you to keep going? Like what are these things that excite you or keeps you coming back every day to start companies?

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, the two things I like are really just the challenge of starting a company or building a company is just what I like to do. Like if I was at someone's wedding tomorrow. You know, for better or worse, I'm not talking about the most recent opera that came out. This is not something that interests me. And I am happy to talk to some random person there about the new idea they have. I just find it really interesting. And I love the variety of things that are happening. I love the change. I love the challenge. You know, it's hard. You're trying to do something that no one else has done, or this company would already exist. And so there are existing players. So that is just, I think, the hardest thing in business, and therefore, why not the thing you want to do? I love the fact that literally every day, I'm thinking about a new industry and trying

• 1:13:17Speaker 02

  to learn about, you know, organoids or something else that I didn't know existed before. And I also really like working with people, mentoring people. And now I've been doing this for a long time, and so hopefully I can add some value. You know, I don't want their job. So it's not like a chairman, a CEO steps up the chairman and then micromanages the next CEO. That often doesn't work well. I definitely don't want to do this job. I want this person to be successful. I'm a shareholder. I generally pick them, and I think they're amazing, and I want them to do well.

• 1:13:46Logan Bartlett?

  We touched on some of the areas that you are interested in today, organoids and maritime and that stuff. Are there broad thematic areas that you have kind of general interest in, even at a higher level than those?

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  I mean, certainly at the very highest level, healthcare is an industry that I think has enormous opportunities for startups. I always tell people that, you know, in e-commerce, there aren't very many opportunities. And the reason is that every single thing you can name right now will be delivered to your door by tomorrow. And incredibly inexpensive. I don't know how to do better than that. Whereas you want to have knee surgery, someone's going to pay about $40,000, even though everyone in Europe will pay $20,000, and have better results. So it's, yours is both poor results and expensive. That, for me, is an opportunity. So many things can be done better there. And then there's technology shifts that excite me, so in terms of robotics, things like that, deep science, semiconductors, nanotechnology. Those are all areas where things are changing. You need change.

• 1:14:44Speaker 02

  I don't think e-commerce is going to be that different five years from now from today. And frankly, it's not that different from five years ago. But some of their areas are. So then within healthcare, there, you know, value-based care is a big fundamental trend, but there are many things to be done there. Psychedelics is a space that is, I find personally interesting and is going to be a multi-billion dollar industry and is going to help mental health. So I have multiple companies in that space as well.

• 1:15:05Logan Bartlett?

  Psychedelics is a particularly interesting one. How did you get into that originally and start pursuing that?

• 1:15:14Speaker 02

  So I started, I actually was very influenced by the Michael Pollan book, which changed the trajectory of psychedelics, How to Change Your Mind, which is one of the New York Times' 10 best books of five or six years ago. And then, you know, in the tech world, started learning about it. Yale happened to have historically a very strong academic presence in psychedelics. They did a lot of the original work in ketamine. I was on the board of Yale at the time, so I thought I should just reach out and get to know this department. Saw they were doing fascinating work. Became now the leading funder for the Yale Center for Psychedelic Research. Now that I've looked at all the academic studies, things like that, you know, the results are unbelievable. And I also felt like I could play a role because VC funds often can't even invest

• 1:15:55Speaker 02

  or couldn't invest in this area because they're scheduled drugs, which is insane. These are, we're getting money from the federal government to Yale to do research. It's not exactly, you know, a shitty area. And 295 academic studies have been done, they're almost all positive, and they're helping solve one of the biggest problems we know of, which is mental health.

• 1:16:14Logan Bartlett?

  Can we talk at a, just because it's such an interesting area, and I don't think a lot of people understand what's going on. Can we talk at a like granular level about like the benefits of ketamine that have come out in the studies and psychedelics in general, what they're being used for and where it is in the approval process and all of that?

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And my recommendation of the week would be the John Oliver Show a week and a half ago on psychedelics, which does a very good job of painting the picture over 20 minutes.

• 1:16:44Logan Bartlett?

  So I don't know when we're going to air this. That would be late February probably, when it came out.

• 1:16:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, yeah, so what we're seeing that psychedelics, and we're talking about psychedelics, we're generally, even though there are 300 of them, we're generally talking about MDMA or FSC, psilocybin, magic mushrooms, LSD, and ketamine. Those are the big four. Where most of the studies were done. There's small ones like ayahuasca, ibogaine for addiction that are coming, but majority of the first four. And what we're seeing, depending on the condition, is that you can come in, for example, for PTSD, which is an enormous problem for veterans and sexual assault victims, that almost 70% of people who had taken one, two, or three doses of MDMA, six months later were diagnosed with zero PTSD.

• 1:17:32Speaker 02

  We've never come close to that for any form of drug, any form of treatment. It's mind-blowingly, epically different. And that's what we're seeing. And where you don't have to be on an antidepressant for the next 30 years. You don't have to spend $30,000 doing that. You have three sessions, and there's a good chance, not always, that you'll be in a much better place.

• 1:17:51Logan Bartlett?

  And three sessions in the MDMA case, are you, I assume they're not sending you to a rave? Like, are you in a, are you in a facility the entirety of the time?

• 1:18:00Speaker 02

  You're on a couch like this with a guy who's there the entire time. Who has spoken to you. So it's therapist-assisted. So, and that is very important for the true mental health benefits. You can go to rave and take it, but you're not going to get the mental health benefits.

• 1:18:16Logan Bartlett?

  You're going to have a good time, but...

• 1:18:17Speaker 02

  You're going to have a good time. And it'll probably be better than alcohol.

• 1:18:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:21Speaker 02

  And safer. But, so this is what's amazing about this. And the thing that people forget is, we all grew up thinking that these drugs were super dangerous, that all drugs were bad. And most drugs are bad. Psychedelics, though, unlike alcohol, are not addictive. If we're talking about mushrooms, probably with MDMA, or probably with LSD. Ketamine can have some addictive possibilities, but they're not addictive, and you can't overdose. And yet, people will say, "I don't take these things because they're too dangerous." Whereas, you know, alcohol is addictive, and you can overdose. It's just fundamentally worse for you and more dangerous.

• 1:18:57Logan Bartlett?

  How dating back to prohibition and then also through the 60s and all the stuff that sort of I think brought these psychedelics more into the mainstream consciousness. How does this actually get regulated at a federal level versus a state level and where are we in that journey right now?

• 1:19:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so the psychedelic movement was really set back by the Nixon administration because they wanted to paint anti-war activists as being all druggies and there was some overlap. And so it was very easy to do that, so they scheduled all the drugs, they meant that no one could do research on them, even though the research done in the 60s was extraordinary and people had fantastic results and yet we cut it off for 40 years. So now that's being relaxed, people are realizing that's not a good idea. And so we're seeing good work there. The federal-state thing is very complicated. So at the federal level, the FDA will by next year approve MDMA for PTSD and probably a year or so after that, psilocybin for depression, those are on schedule. And then other companies are moving forward.

• 1:19:58Speaker 02

  I have a company called Transend that is taking methadone, which is a company we wouldn't know as well, through the FDA process and we're in phase two right now. And so if that goes well, probably 2 or 4 years away. And there are other companies doing interesting things as well. But then at the state level, Oregon, on a ballot initiative, approved psilocybin, which is legal this year to be given out.

• 1:20:21Logan Bartlett?

  Psilocybin mushrooms, as people know.

• 1:20:23Speaker 02

  Mushrooms, for sure, mushrooms. Oregon just approved, which will kick in in a year, for plant-based medicines to be illegal. And at the state level, states are already passing legislation. So New York has legislation in front of it right now to decriminalize and schedule differently drugs at our state. So many things are happening at the state level and at the federal. And sometimes they're actually in conflict, but that's inherent in norms.

• 1:20:49Logan Bartlett?

  Where are suppliers ultimately coming from of all this? I assume, like, are there regulated mushroom makers?

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:20:58Logan Bartlett?

  And are they local to different states or how does that actually work?

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

  No, it doesn't have to be statewide, but they have to be approved by the government. There's a lot of strict... All compounds that are very dangerous are quite regulated. And so you can do it. Like when Yale gives out psilocybin or mushrooms, they actually, the federal laws are that you have to store it in a safe. And I think the safe has to weigh 300 pounds and it has to be bolted to the floor. And you have to track every milligram and say, look, I'm giving him two, which means I have 10 milligrams left. They just don't want to run the risk that it's floating around. It's very regulated, it's very bureaucratic. I don't think all these things should be scheduled in the way that they are, but for the time being, they are.

• 1:21:41Logan Bartlett?

  How is the progress? What was the big unlock in the last couple of years for this? Because 40 years after the Nixon administration, I should say no to drugs. I guess Nancy Reagan probably didn't help all this stuff. Like, what, how did this sort of unlock?

• 1:21:56Speaker 02

  A combination of, I would say, three things. One, that the Michael Pollan book was very, very important.

• 1:22:02Logan Bartlett?

  And that came out in 2016, 17?

• 1:22:04Speaker 02

  But before that, MAPS, which is an organization that has done incredible work for 30 years, you know, on MDMA, had slowly been making progress. The fact that places like Burning Man and more people, especially in the tech and other industries, were taking these drugs and having good results. And then a series of underground guides, which still exists today, dozens and dozens and dozens of technically illegal, but guides in New York City that are not regulated and not, nothing is enforced against them, are doing one-on-one sessions with people for these various conditions and having, on average, unbelievable results. And so all of that, the word got out. So right now, I mean, I was with a guy who was a Goldman Sachs partner, and he's like, oh yeah, I did a psilocybin session and it's

• 1:22:49Speaker 02

  really helped my depression. And when he tells 10 friends, all of a sudden people are like, wow, that's not so crazy. So the word is just getting out, almost the way that Business Insider traffic grew because people liked it and they told their friends, that's what's happening here. So, usage at every level is growing a lot. Australia is the first first world country to legalize both MDMA and psilocybin. And that-

• 1:23:13Logan Bartlett?

  For not recreational use, for-

• 1:23:15Speaker 02

  Not for, when we say legalize, this is for doctors to prescribe.

• 1:23:19Logan Bartlett?

  Prescribed, yeah.

• 1:23:20Speaker 02

  Almost no one is a proponent right now of saying you can just buy it on the street like you can cannabis. So it's most important that we get these into the hands of people who have mental health issues and help solve those problems.

• 1:23:34Logan Bartlett?

  Now, the flip side of, I guess, some of the benefits of drugs, I think you've also spent some time on the other side, which is coming up with things around meth

• 1:23:44Speaker 02

  support. Yeah, a company that deals with meth addiction and other forms of addiction, which is an enormous problem.

• 1:23:50Logan Bartlett?

  And so what is that? How have you thought about going about trying to help and solve some of those issues on that very, very negative side?

• 1:23:58Speaker 02

  No, no. And so there, I just put into the category we talked earlier that you're trying to think of problems to solve. Like, e-commerce is not a problem to solve, so I'm not trying to solve it. Many healthcare issues are. Everyone here knows that the number of meth addicts is staggering. And it's, by the way, much bigger than most of you think, because your friends aren't meth addicts.

• 1:24:16Logan Bartlett?

  Yes. It's very regionalized in a lot of ways.

• 1:24:19Speaker 02

  Regionalized, socioeconomic.

• 1:24:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 1:24:21Speaker 02

  But it's millions and millions of people. And their ability to get them off that is very hard. So we did a lot of research. So my team is interested in addiction. He had started Groups, which is an opioid addiction company, which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and treats a lot of people and is a fantastic company. And he thought about the rest of the world and said, no one's doing anything in meth. Did the research then to see what is the most promising thing I see. And it was digital therapeutic. So sort of like Noom for weight loss, so that every day I can get a reinforcement like, oh, good job, Kevin, you didn't do meth today, or you didn't work out, or you didn't do this. And that's better. If I can't talk to a doctor all the time, that's the next best thing. So our results so far appear to be better than comparable programs.

• 1:25:05Speaker 02

  And healthcare systems have now realized that if you, one of your employees is on meth, but healthcare costs are staggering. He loses a tooth, used to think that was a dental problem. It's not a dental problem, it's a meth problem. He fell down the stairs, that's not a sports injury. He broke his leg, it's a meth problem. And so that person can rack up, you know, $120,000 worth of cost during the year. So they, healthcare systems like, we'll pay a lot of money if we can have a chance of getting this person off meth. Not to mention it makes the world a better place.

• 1:25:36Logan Bartlett?

  You've spent a lot of time in healthcare, both as it relates to some of these psychedelic benefits, in addition to other things that... Is there anything that, if I gave you a magic wand, you're also, I think, have some political interests too. Is there, is there anything within the healthcare system that if I give you a magic wand, either add a, hey, you can get a company to some scale to do these things, or the government would change XYZ thing at a federal level or state level? Is there anything that you see, just the lowest hanging fruit to...

• 1:26:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, the structure, we have many structural problems, but one of the biggest ones is that there's no incentive to prevent things. You know, if you're a doctor, you don't get paid to prevent anything. In fact, arguably, if you think about it, it just reduces your revenues. And so, the people have, you know, healthcare systems overall have that incentive. Because we give it to private companies right now, on average, I know you're going to be gone in two years, right? Three years? Is cancer my problem? As a healthcare system, no. And so I don't care. Only the ultimate payer, which is the government, cares. And so we need to get to a system that in some form, it doesn't have to be nationalized, it could be a state level, it could be others, but that we have structurally solved that problem. The second problem is that...

• 1:26:48Logan Bartlett?

  Structurally solve the problem of incentives, or...

• 1:26:51Speaker 02

  That your doctor will spend as much time trying to make sure you lose weight, because it helps us 20 years from now as just, you know, repair your knee, because you were too heavy and put too much pressure on your knee.

• 1:27:03Logan Bartlett?

  Getting more of the value-based care and risk.

• 1:27:06Speaker 02

  We're trying to get there in one way, which is the best way that the government can do right now. There are a lot of interests that are hard to control, but that's the single thing we have to solve. Then we'd all care about, we do care about smoking, but we care about sugar and diet and exercise and things like that. We care about you maybe doing yoga instead of getting back surgery. You know, we have more surgery than anyone and poorer results. So it's, but, there's a lot of incentives. You know, if you say, go to a surgeon and say, should I get back surgery? He's like, mm, I think so. I think so. When on average, maybe that's not a good idea.

• 1:27:40Logan Bartlett?

  So giving you the magic wand, are you making, I mean, how do you actually drive these incentive changes? Is it that the government, that there's a either state or federal sponsored health insurance plan that everyone can prescribe to? And then there's more preventative measures that get made? Or are you making Medicare and Medicaid advantage like, or Medicare advantage available to all? How does that actually work?

• 1:28:02Speaker 02

  There's different ways of solving it.

• 1:28:04Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:04Speaker 02

  I'm not sure I know the perfect one, but all of those go in the right direction.

• 1:28:08Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, got it.

• 1:28:09Speaker 02

  You just care about long-term costs.

• 1:28:11Logan Bartlett?

  Getting people to not go to the emergency room over and over again and just kind of finding some of those preventative means.

• 1:28:18Speaker 02

  Just the mere fact that so many people don't have health insurance even today is so horrific. I just, a friend of my son's, your mother just lost her job and now has huge healthcare costs of $50,000, which she can't afford it. That doesn't have any sense. And so she'll make a number of, I mean, not she, someone might make poor decisions along the way, not go to the doctor because they can't afford it. And maybe a $500 procedure would have prevented the ultimate, five years from now, $50,000 cancer treatment.

• 1:28:51Logan Bartlett?

  Okay, well, I know you also have a passionate interest in the education system. One of the things I heard you say is that you actually can't, I don't know if this is still true, but you can't teach a computer science class without having a PhD in related to computer science or something?

• 1:29:05Speaker 02

  Or put another way, you can, and it is true of almost every academic institution. You can have a PhD from 1985 when you were studying Fordham.

• 1:29:14Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:15Speaker 02

  But if you are a cutting-edge person at Google, you can't teach a course because you don't have a PhD, even though you are doing the world's definitive work on it right now.

• 1:29:25Logan Bartlett?

  Is that, is that just an institutional psychological thing?

• 1:29:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's confusing, teaching versus research. So we still maintain that all of our professors have to be doing research and doing cutting-edge work there and publishing papers. And the truth is, there's a disconnect because you know, your people you know who are going to good schools want to learn a lot of practical skills.

• 1:29:48Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, they don't want to learn Cobalt or Fordham.

• 1:29:50Speaker 02

  And the vast majority don't want to teach. They're going to, the vast, vast majority. And yet, all of institutions are really designed to prepare you to teach and glossing over the fact that most of you are not.

• 1:30:01Logan Bartlett?

  Is there any way to? To normalize or make changes? Or is it just each school needs to do it at an individual level?

• 1:30:07Speaker 02

  It's very hard because it's so prestige-driven. You still want to go teach at the top places because that's good for you.

• 1:30:13Logan Bartlett?

  U.S. News and World Report probably.

• 1:30:15Speaker 02

  I've wanted to do this. One of the many things I want to do is start a university. My wife and I are very involved with University of the People, which is an enormous nonprofit university that people haven't heard of, which has 125,000 students. It's about 10 years old. And it's online. And it's mostly for people all around the world, for refugees, people like that. It's accredited. It's a great place. And so that is a really practical degree. And it costs, the cost for us is like $1,200 a year. Whereas, you know, the Ivy League institutions right now, not what do they charge you, what do they spend? They're spending about $200,000 per year per student.

• 1:30:52Logan Bartlett?

  How, how do you think if we're projecting this forward? Do you think there's just much more democratization of how people learn? That the Ivy League survives? And a handful of the, you know, liberal arts schools survive? And then everyone else sort of goes to University of the People? Or the state schools? Or whatever it is, just to learn the functional skills?

• 1:31:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, we need, we absolutely need to replace, you know, the bottom 50% of education and have a different, lower-cost method. Someone who, you know, graduates from a not-well-known university in the middle of somewhere that with $200,000 of student debt, they're not in a good place. That wasn't worth it for them. You know, the people who graduated from Yale now have on average $12,000 worth of debt. And they're going to pay that off in no time at all. So you never have to worry about the Ivy League.

• 1:31:42Logan Bartlett?

  $12,000 worth of debt because of all the scholarships and.

• 1:31:45Speaker 02

  So much money, $40 billion endowment. So, you know, plenty of money. But, so the problem is not there. The people are making poor decisions and have poor products. But even, you know, local U in the middle of the Midwest still has to offer, you know, tenure to as professors, still only has courses, you know, 20 hours a week, doesn't use all of their facilities, still feels like they have to have a football team and offer theater and things like that. And so we just need a better variety of products out there. You know, it's, there's nothing wrong with a Lamborghini. There's nothing wrong with a $20,000 cheap car. I choose where I want to be in that spectrum. But at universities, in a way, I can't.

• 1:32:25Logan Bartlett?

  What about the computer science issue? We touched on the diversity of only 13% going in to STEM-related stuff, I guess, or in engineering and computer science. What are there things to be done there, both from a diversity standpoint as well as getting more people into the actual funnel in general?

• 1:32:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of it really starts at high school. It's not even the university problem. You know, if you look at even the girls' schools in New York City have far, far, far fewer people in computer science than the boys' schools do. And they're not competing against boys, they're there. So somewhere along the way, we are not encouraging girls starting at age 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. And I still am frustrated with, you know, my kids went to very good private schools here in New York. They didn't do any computer science when they went in first, second, third, fourth, fifth grade.

• 1:33:15Logan Bartlett?

  But they probably had Latin requirements or something.

• 1:33:16Speaker 02

  They did. And so that's, you know, the one is Latin is looking backwards, computer science is looking forward. I'm not against Latin, but don't require that over computer science. That is just not the right decision for your children long-term.

• 1:33:28Logan Bartlett?

  And is that, is that just rooted in the institutions themselves? It's just like that's a philosophical thing that they need to get away from?

• 1:33:34Speaker 02

  Absolutely. It could be changed tomorrow. Look, we're starting to see, you know, over time, it just takes time. Schools that are starting up today don't do that. You know, they're not, they're more innovative, and they'll start to put pressure on the other ones over time.

• 1:33:47Logan Bartlett?

  Now, what about, you've been in the New York ecosystem when it wasn't an ecosystem, right? It sounds like back in the day it was 50 people around a table. We've seen it grow very materially.

• 1:33:58Speaker 02

  Probably 300,000 people working in tech now.

• 1:34:00Logan Bartlett?

  300,000 people working in tech. It's everything from, we have the Mongo, we have Datadog, we have Etsy, then we have Google, Facebook, Amazon, everyone with major offices there. What's your, what's the evolution of all that stuff been like for you to see? And where do you think we are on that journey?

• 1:34:14Speaker 02

  It was incredibly gratifying, mostly because vast majority of people didn't believe it was going to happen. You know, I had people say that we wouldn't invest in DoubleClick unless we moved to California. Now they're all moving here, because VC firms have to have people here, you can't ignore it. It will be, I've said this for 20 years, this will be the largest tech ecosystem in the country. We're just going to debate the time. You know, it's probably not five years from now, but it easily is 20 years from now. And it all stems from the fact that young, smart people who make up most of the tech industry want to live in New York City. It's just the and the edgiest, cutting-edge, top 1% people. They want to be here because they the best clubs are here, the best museums are here, the best ballet. Whatever you're into, the best is here.

• 1:34:56Logan Bartlett?

  Knicks actually have a good basketball team these days.

• 1:34:58Speaker 02

  Exactly. So now everything is changing. So and New York has also solved the one problem, which was a real problem when I moved here, which is there in 1990, there were 2,200 murders. And now there's going to be this year will be like 375 or something.

• 1:35:11Logan Bartlett?

  Yep.

• 1:35:11Speaker 02

  And so we've become much safer in an unprecedented historic way. And other places like San Francisco have become more dangerous. You know, A, my son is at Stanford Business School and I think he thinks 40% of his classmates have had their car broken into. Just going into San Francisco, which they do once a month. Doesn't happen here.

• 1:35:33Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Now, uh, I can't let you off having seen all these different changes, internet, mobile. And now we've been waiting for the next big thing for a while, right? I know you've spent much time in healthcare, but there's a lot of optimism about AI. How do you think about that and the potential there? I didn't hear it come up in some of the areas you're interested in.

• 1:35:51Speaker 02

  No, it's a subset of things incredibly bullish. Like I'm not, you know, you haven't heard me say crypto either. And we've never been strong there. Use case is not as good, don't feel as good here. Uh, I do feel very good. It's it's more that it's not just one industry. It's going to be used in everything. And it's just really more an extension of technology. Chat GPT showed what can be done, but more fundamentally is we just need that person who currently we're paying a hundred thousand dollars to process insurance claims and is taking two months to get back to you, have it being done by a computer.

• 1:36:22Logan Bartlett?

  The number of crypto skeptics that are bullish on AI, it's a pretty remarkable thing that I think shows the use cases and the potential and what can be.

• 1:36:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. And by the way, seven years ago, I was more bullish on crypto than I am today.

• 1:36:36Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:37Speaker 02

  But started to realize years ago that just the use case is not that great. Blockchain is not much better than comparable database structures. And for whatever reason, we haven't gotten to the point where crypto is useful.

• 1:36:49Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:50Speaker 02

  But AI is fundamental and it's.

• 1:36:52Logan Bartlett?

  How do you think about the amount of when we talk about the amount of equity value that the internet companies created? The amount of value that the mobile ecosystem kind of created? Do you think AI is on a, how would you weight it? If internet is 10, where would you put, uh, and mobile is whatever you want to call it? Where do you put AI?

• 1:37:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's pretty significant. The thing that is gonna be hard is, in a way, it's just not really an industry. You know, we've seen technology in manufacturing grow steadily since, I don't know, 1970. Is there a breakpoint? No. Just every year, some comes up with a new tool that allows you to make that table or that mug or that something using a machine. And eventually that displaced jobs, but there's nothing to talk about. This is the same thing. There's just not a breakpoint. Every single industry, the insurance industry will work this in, but they've been working it in. They've been becoming more efficient over time. They'll just continue. It's a steady curve forever, and I just don't think it'll all be called true AI.

• 1:37:52Logan Bartlett?

  That's the way I think about software as well. It's like, what is being a software investor? Well, it often means you need deepened industry knowledge in the vertical markets, right? Knowing Veeva versus Mongo versus Workday. Like, sure, the business models are maybe related in some ways, but the actual, like, end user and what it gets used for and all that stuff is gonna be very, very different. Now, last one before you hop. You went to the South Pole.

• 1:38:14Speaker 02

  Yes. Fascinating trip. Part of a scientific expedition. Went on foot. So, there's only about 200 people a year who actually go to the South Pole. But seven days, eight hours a day of pulling a sled. You have to have your tent, your food, everything. No one's pulling things for you. It's 25 degrees below zero, and then the windshield can bring it much colder. And then the whole thing is the equivalent of 11,000 feet of altitude. So, it's physically demanding, psychologically demanding, incredibly impactful. A beautiful thing to see, very meditative, and also quite hard. One of the great things for me was that, in our group, I was by far the oldest person. I'm 59, and my son was me. One of my sons who's 25, he was the youngest.

• 1:38:57Speaker 02

  So, we were the bookends. Everyone else was in their 30s and 40s.

• 1:39:00Logan Bartlett?

  Wow. And what was the impetus for doing it? What made you just unique experience?

• 1:39:04Speaker 02

  A doctor I know has worked with extreme conditions. So, the British military was a sponsor, and one of the things they want to understand is, five years from now, they want to send 25 soldiers into the Afghan mountains and monitor each one of them and say, "Ah, Fred here has glucose levels down. He should not go on mission tonight. And Mary has lost 10% of her body weight. That's not good. We need to do something there." Not just let them float out there. We're monitoring our computers better than our people. And so this was part of that to understand. We were wearing glucose monitors. We had our urine taken. We had blood taken before, after. Interviews every single day. Special watches, Oura rings. And all this will be put into academic papers at the end of the year. So it was just an interesting thing to be a part of.

• 1:39:49Speaker 02

  I like physical outdoor stuff. And so this was a great thing to do.

• 1:39:53Logan Bartlett?

  Well, we'll end there. We're going to get the, I want that little video, the drone footage of you flying and pulling a sleigh or a sled or whatever it was around. But Kevin Ryan, thanks for doing this.

• 1:40:03Speaker 02

  Thanks for doing it. That was great.

• 1:40:04Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:09Logan Bartlett?

  So that'll do it for the 56th episode of the Logan Bartlett Show. Thank you to Kevin Ryan for spending so much time talking through all his history of starting companies. Thank you to Rashad and Sam for their efforts this week in pulling this show together. And thank you, everyone, for listening. I look forward to seeing everyone again next week on the 57th episode of the Logan Bartlett Show. Hope everyone has a nice weekend.