Ian Hogarth

Now we're going to move on to the next speaker, which is Ian Hogarth of Sonick. He's the co-founder and CEO. Y Combinator funded Sonick in 2007, and a fun fact, it's actually through Ian that I found out about Y Combinator all that time ago. So if you don't know, Sonick is the simplest way to find out when your favorite artists are coming to town and now the second most trafficked concert service in the world, with over 10 million unique fans visiting every month.

So welcome! [Applause]

In, uh, cool! So yeah, I'm Ian Hogarth, and I'm one of the three co-founders of Sonick. This is Pete and Michelle, and I'm usually the one out talking, but they're even more responsible than I am for any of the stuff I'm about to explain to you that we've learned along the way.

So, uh, we started in 2007, and we were in the summer 2007 YC batch. Uh, yeah, we're the easiest way to find shows. If you've ever experienced the sort of frustration of finding out about a show you'd like to have gone to the day after it happens, that's the sort of problem that Sonick's trying to solve.

The average user who starts using Sonick goes to twice as many concerts afterwards, so it's all about making it easier to go to shows. Um, we're backed by some great VCs, Index and Sequoia. Um, I guess we sort of see there being three main music apps on your phone; there'll be an on-demand streaming app like Spotify, a radio app like Pandora, and a concerts app like Sonick.

And, uh, the average artist makes about 70% of their income from touring, so we hope we can be relevant to artists as well as fans. So, um, one thing that happens when you build the same company for seven years is you get to watch waves of startups succeed and fail around you, and it kind of rewires your intuition about startups.

Um, I guess I would liken it to watching the first season of 24 after watching all eight seasons in a row. Um, I remember being really terrified by this competitor, Songkick, that launched when we were just getting started, and they grew to millions of users in a pretty short space of time. I was so scared, like, “How are we ever going to do anything about that?”

And, um, you know what happened though is over time the distribution platform that they built their product on kind of like moved underneath them, and they disappeared. And that really resets your sense of what to be scared by.

Um, similarly though, you'll see startups that seem to have it all figured out, and they become the talk of the town. And, um, you know, that won't really surprise you; you'll be like, “Great! They're an awesome company.” Um, and they get, you suddenly read about them having a $100 million valuation.

What will surprise you is exponential value creation. So, you know, that startup that was suddenly valued at $100 million, the next year you read on TechCrunch they're valued at a billion dollars, and you're like, “Whoa! Okay, well, we've got a really good year coming. We're going to work really hard; it's going to get better.”

And then the next year they go from a billion dollars to $10 billion, and that just completely resets your sense of what is possible. And I think some of the people who've spoken today are perfect examples of that crazy exponential curve you can get into.

So, um, to put this all in perspective, if I go back to the summer of 2007, there were 22 companies in our YC batch, a lot less than it is now. Um, and I believe most of the others ended up getting shut down or acquired for relatively small amounts of money, and when you see that play out, it really makes you internalize how hard it is.

And, you know, I remember getting to Boston that summer and just being really intimidated by everybody. I mean, there were technically more brilliant people than us; there were people who were way more charismatic and better represented their products than us. Um, people with stronger product vision, and pretty much everybody was more experienced at building internet companies than we were.

And Pete, Michelle, and I, um, one of the startups in our batch that I remember being intimidated by was Disqus. Um, they're like an awesome pair of founders. Um, and it's plausible that Sonick and Disqus, you know, may end up being 10 to 100x more valuable than startups from our batch that were shut down or had an early exit, which on the face of it seems like we, you know, we must have figured some things out, and there must be something to be learned from our PA, the market, etc.

Um, but the other company that really endured from our batch is Dropbox, which is likely worth, you know, 100x more than both of us at this point. And I'm not all, you know, it's not about valuations and money, it's about impact, and I do think the valuation is often a pretty good indicator of that.

Um, you know, what's more remarkable about that still is that, you know, Drew and Arash are, you know, two of the most humble down-to-earth founders I know. So, kind of amazing.

Um, I think what's maybe more inspiring still is although Dropbox is an incredible company, you know, it's quite possible that one person in this room creates something that's 10x more valuable than Dropbox, which is kind of nuts when you think about it.

So, uh, I guess hopefully you take this all as a disclaimer for the advice that follows. Um, if you really want to know the mysteries of the startup universe, go talk to Drew and Arash. Um, also, I'm most interested in consumer stuff, so you know, most of this advice applies to that.

So, having a, you know, caveat that I probably have about 100x less insight than most people who've spoken at Startup School in the past, um, I thought about what I would like someone to explain to me in retrospect.

So, uh, first of all, doing a music startup is a pretty good way to get beat down. Um, secondly, understand as much of the game as possible before you start to play it. And finally, you know, nurture your resilience so you don't give up.

So, uh, on online music, uh, being an excellent way to get beat up, here are some exceptional founders who have all, to a greater and lesser extent, taken a beating from following their passion into a music startup: Dalton Cwell, who's spoken here before; Shawn Parker; Jeff Rolon; Dave Goldberg, who's now the CEO of SurveyMonkey; David Pacman, who's an amazing founder; Ali Partovi; it's, um, it seems to be a relatively well-trodden path.

Um, and I was thinking about it on the cycle over here that, you know, the founders of the most successful businesses to come out of, you know, startup business to come out of Europe, Skype, actually did two different music startups in Kazaa and AIO. Um, so I then realized that Doug basically given that talk.

Um, so I'm not going to rehash his advice here; you can find it on YouTube—it's a hilarious listen. Um, what I will give you is a slightly more reductive take on building startups in entertainment-related industries, uh, film, TV, art, um, music.

So, if you're going to build a startup in one of those domains, um, here is what I, here is the advice I would give you, and I have some advice for how this translates into other markets.

So, first of all, everybody thinks they're more into art, music, and film than they actually are. So, there was a pretty fascinating study that Zillow put out around the subprime crisis where, uh, they surveyed homeowners and they asked them what was going to happen to the value of homes over the next six months.

And the majority of people said the value of homes is going to go way down. And then, they asked those same people, “What do you think is going to happen to the value of your home?” And everyone was like, “Oh, my home's going to stay the same or go up.”

Um, and it's kind of the same, I think, with entertainment, and I think it's part of the sort of blind spot the founders sometimes have with the space. Um, actually, most people are into a much narrower set of, uh, kind of creative works than they realize. Um, and so a small number of creators drive most activity and revenue for these industries.

Now, the next interesting thing about these industries is 99.9999999% of creators end up struggling for a very long time without success. Um, and so, uh, when they do break out, they're very happy to transfer rights for their work to somebody who is going to give them some financial stability, whether it's a label, or a concert promoter, or a studio.

Um, and, you know, it might be tempting to sort of label that as selling out or something like that, but having had friends who’ve, you know, spent the last 10 years sleeping on couches to try and make their career as an artist work, it's just about getting stable and paying off your debts.

And unlike tech, where you can be, you know, a sick engineer, um, build a startup that totally fails, go get a great job at Google, you know, if you're a musician and your career doesn't succeed, you can't just go and join Radiohead.

Um, so have, have that sympathy. Um, so this transference of rights from the creators to these middlemen, um, leads to a pretty small number of companies owning all the rights for these, these, these verticals.

Um, so ironically, as the entertainment industry lurches from one model to the next, actually, it gets even more consolidated. So, for example, um, you know, music moving from CDs to mp3s to streaming, um, because the companies who represent the rights are like, "We're going to get killed if we don't consolidate further."

And the, you know, the Departments of Justice, etc., say, "Okay, you can merge." So, for example, during the last 10 years, the world's largest record label was allowed to get even bigger by acquiring EMI, so Universal Music Group now represents 40% of the rights in the recorded music market in terms of, you know, value.

Um, similarly, you know, and to a greater extent, the world's largest concert promoter, Live Nation, was allowed to merge with the world's largest ticket vendor. So, you know, it actually, you know, consolidation to me seems to be an increasing trend rather than a decreasing one.

Um, and you know, don't, don't sort of delude yourself that, you know, other creative verticals don't have rights. Typically, there is some kind of rights structure, whether it's similar to copyright, whether it's in ticketing or merchandise or visual art or film.

So, um, that level of rights consolidation means it's basically really, really hard for a startup to transform the entertainment industry without, you know, buy-in and support from those rights holders, um, which basically means waiting till they're ready to embrace you.

And there's lots of different tactics for waiting things out, but that, you know, in my opinion is one of the main reasons for the success of Spotify now versus the nightmare that Dalton went through.

Um, there is a caveat, which is much larger technology companies can just, through the scale of leverage they have, force things to happen faster. So, you know, Google saved YouTube from label annihilation, um, and, you know, eight years later owns the largest free streaming music service on the planet, um, or the way that Apple created the digital download market. So that's one caveat.

Um, so the biggest question you need to ask yourself if you want to build a company in the entertainment industry is why will the industry be willing to embrace you? How are you solving a problem for them? Um, you need to understand their problems as well as you understand the consumer problems.

So, I guess if PG said, "Kill Hollywood," I would say, "Help Hollywood grow, Hollywood or fail." Um, so the broader point here, which is hopefully useful if you're not thinking about doing an entertainment startup, is that the level of consolidation in your industry massively changes how you build your startup.

If it's highly consolidated, you pretty much have to find a way of partnering with the incumbency. Um, if it's much more fragmented, say vacation rentals or private hire vehicles, you know, you're probably best off just going full stack and competing with the existing incumbent.

So, I thought, I thought, you know, one of the things I most admire about what Patrick’s done with Stripe is the way that they worked with the banks rather than being like, "You know, kill Bank of America," or something.

Um, so the second thing I want to share with you guys today is the importance of understanding the startup game before you try and play it. So, this is another TV show, The Wire, and a great moment when the game of chess is being explained.

Um, I don't think startups are a particularly rational game to play if your goal is financial success, particularly in consumer startups. There is a level of randomness, and so if you're someone who's good at building things, you're probably going to make more money by going and joining one of the hit companies of our era or, you know, for example, I remember reading that the first, you know, hundred or multiple hundred employees at Facebook made more money from, you know, Facebook than, uh, the average successful founder of a successful startup, um, or finding a way to kind of be involved in multiple startups.

You know, VCs is one way of doing that, but there maybe new structures emerge. Um, and, you know, just a cursory overview of portfolio theory will teach you that, you know, if the market has a high degree of randomness, it's probably not a good thing to put all your eggs in one basket.

Um, there's this brilliant VC called Matt Cola, who I think is sort of the perfect Bayesian agent here. He, uh, he joined LinkedIn very early on, moved to Facebook very early on, and then became a top VC at Benchmark.

So, um, I think the main reason to try and build a startup is actually a pretty irrational one; you're just really motivated to solve a problem, a very specific problem. Um, and the satisfaction of building something to solve that problem kind of justifies 5 to 10 years of stress and a good likelihood of failure, a bunch of which will be kind of random and out of your control.

So, uh, if I haven't deterred you through that positive little positive message, then, uh, here are the rules of the startup game as I see them.

So there are three engines that, you know, I think determine a startup's success. Uh, this insight came to us about 3 years into Sonick's life from this incredibly brilliant guy called Sha Ellis, who is surprisingly not that well known, but I would track down his blog; he's just incredibly insightful about what it takes to make something work.

Um, so if I define a new variable unicornus, your level of unicorn will be roughly your gratification engine to the power of your growth engine to the power of your economic engine, and you become like a full unicorn, all Airbnb, Dropbox, Google, if you get all three right.

And every engine that fails, um, will reduce your unicorn by an order of magnitude. So if we take the gratification engine, um, that's been expressed in much less nerdy terms by Y Combinator as “make something people want.” In our case, that was a pretty brutal experience.

Um, we launched Sonick by combining some scrapers for ticket sites with, um, a downloadable plugin for your Mac that would, uh, once you downloaded it, scan the XML file that contained the information about what music you listened to, and at the end of all of that, you get a list of concerts in your area based on the music you listen to.

Um, and it was a pretty crappy first-time use. Um, this is a screenshot of early on. Uh, the return on the kind of five minutes of your life that it took you to sign up and install the plugin was this personalized list of shows, and some people were willing to do that and they liked it, uh, but the amount of friction involved was way too high for most regular people.

So for a long time, you know, you're kind of going around, “Why isn't it working? Why are more people using it?” And you know, we felt like the main reason that people weren't adopting our products in larger numbers was that it didn't do enough.

Um, and we added a pretty massive array of additional features that resulted in very little additional usage, and the turning point came when my co-founder, Michelle, inspired by Sha Ellis, started running these surveys.

They really dug deep into why the users that loved our product loved it and why the ones who were kind of like me didn't find it very compelling. And the bottom line was that our simple idea of personalized concert alerts and never missing a show was actually a very gratifying experience; like people found shows they would never have gone to, and they, um, and they had life-changing experiences.

And we'd get, you know, we would get these emails that said, “Oh my God, you know, I just went to four shows and they were some of the best nights I've had this year; thank you.”

Um, but too few users were getting to it, and we just needed to radically improve how easy it was to get that gratified experience. Um, and that became easier when new streaming services emerged and APIs emerged for mobile devices, so we could get your taste faster.

Um, and we also needed to have better underlying concert data, and that was a really big lesson for me. Um, I think engineers, startup people, they cherish the idea of 80/20 or MVP, but once you find something that works, the key is to do the 20/80 where you do this grindingly incremental work that gets the last 20% of value but takes, you know, 80% of your time.

Um, and for us, that I think that really ended up being around data, um, getting more and more high-quality, timely, comprehensive, trusted concert data, which is, you know, a relatively hard problem to solve.

Um, so that we would become the trusted authority for a fan, and, you know, when you talked to users you'd really feel it. You know, they'd be, they suddenly realize your data had, you had, like every small show in their city, and the trust level grew, and they became more evangelical about the service.

Or, you know, you wouldn't have those problems where someone said, “You know, I was waiting for you to tell me this show is happening; you didn't, you failed me; I'm not using your product ever again.”

So, data, we were always told that's a commodity, don't bother with it; it turned out to actually be really the linchpin around kind of solving this gratification engine.

Um, so, you know, your gratification engine will have many levels of refinement that kind of compound on each other, whether it's the messaging when someone arrives at the site, the core experience, the onboarding flows, various different conversion rates, and you should probably never stop trying to increase it.

Um, the next engine is your growth engine, how new users discover your product. Um, I guess the first big point here is that your growth engine has no chance of really starting unless you have a great gratifying experience, and I’ll talk about that more in a minute.

But, um, I think there's sort of four main ways of driving substantial growth with consumer products: word of mouth or viral growth, for example, WhatsApp or SnapChat, um, Kickdata, and typically, you know, one of the most compelling ways to do that is through building a communications app.

Um, paid acquisition, so for example, Groupon, Airbnb, and Zynga when you have a compelling economic model you can actually spend money to buy users or subsidize something about the experience they would normally pay for.

Um, SEO, so Yelp or Wikipedia or Rap Genius, and then kind of API widget distribution, so YouTube, SoundCloud, Twitter, and these aren't mutually exclusive.

So for example, Yelp has a killer mobile app, and they get tons of word of mouth growth in addition to SEO. Or, you know, you probably didn't think of Airbnb as a company that grew through, you know, spending money because they've done so many other aspects of growth right; they've got, you know, killer, killer product with word of mouth that's allowed them to spend money on optimizing a referral program.

Similar to what Dropbox did, they did an amazing job of PR very early on and throughout most of that company's life, and they also did really creative stuff like, um, like the Craigslist stuff that's sort of become famous. So it's, they're not mutually exclusive.

For Sonick, um, there were a bunch of different drivers of growth. So, um, the first big insight that really, like, kind of clicked was that there was no canonical page on the internet for concert or for a tour, similar to how there was a, you know, canonical page for restaurants in Yelp or a canonical page for a movie or director in IMDb.

And, you know, when you build enough kind of value and you know, compelling differentiated data to be the canonical page, you get all these other beneficial effects kicking in, whether it's social referrals or SEO or the ID linking to you or, um, you know, the ability to do distribution API partnerships.

Um, and that core insight when we sort of got it humming led to a lot of growth success. So, we know we would do these partnerships like Spotify and SoundCloud and YouTube; um, we started to optimize our site so that Google could discover the content we had better.

Um, we started to build products for artists so they could link to Sonick more easily. Um, the second big kind of growth factor came from mobile and word of mouth, and you know, in my opinion, you know, mobile app stores reward a gratifying user experience more than any other distribution platform in history.

Um, and so in that case, really, I think most of the growth just came from making the product more useful, easier to get into, you know, more, more compelling. So we've benefited from three of these channels— not paid because we've not had an economic model that would allow us to, um, to spend money to acquire users.

So finally, um, the economic engine. So, uh, this is how you make money from your users; you become a sustainable company. I can't say as much about that for us because it's still a work in progress, um, and it's the reason, you know, one of the reasons we're not in the pantheon of unicorns yet.

Um, initially, we bootstrap revenue by setting up these affiliate deals with ticketing companies so that when we found someone a show, we would link the ticketing company, and they'd give us a small cut for the transaction we generated.

Um, so kind of similar to Kayak or TripAdvisor, and that's taken us to a revenue run rate of millions of dollars, but it won't take us to a revenue run rate of hundreds of millions of dollars. Um, and I think it's always been, you know, it's always been clear what the kind of the optimal revenue model for us would be, which is just, you know, you discover the show and you buy the ticket at the same time from us.

Um, but, uh, that requires us being able to scalably access inventory, which going back to what I was saying earlier about supply-side consolidation and need to partner with the industry. So, that requires finding economic alignment with the people who currently hold the rights.

So, um, it's a work in progress, um, but it's quite exciting. In London, we actually have 25% of all the concerts in London you can buy tickets to and a few taps through your Sonick app. So we're, you know, it's quite exciting watching that develop for us.

Uh, finally, you know, there's the team that you build and retain to solve all these problems. This is our team pushing a bus up a hill when it broke down on the way to a festival, which is probably a reasonable metaphor for kind of startup life.

Um, so each of these things I just talked about—gratification, growth, revenue, and team— they're all dependent on each other.

So if I express it mathematically, you know, I've got this unicorn is gratification to the power of growth to the power of revenue. Um, gratification is dependent on your team, your economic engine, and your growth because you need an amazing team to build a world-class product, and you need, um, you need revenue to sustainably pay for those people's salaries.

And in many cases, having an economic model actually allows you to provide more value to your users. Um, and finally, you know, some products get better with more people using them, so you may actually need growth to be able to offer a compelling experience—social networks, marketplaces, etc.

Um, so the gratification engine depends on your team. The other two engines, you know, the next thing, growth, that is actually also dependent on other stuff; so your ability to recruit a growth team, obviously, is, you know, a big factor.

Um, if you have a revenue engine, an economic engine, you're able to access one of the most powerful sources of growth, which is being able to pay for users.

Um, and a key point to make here is it's a lot easier to grow by spending money than not spending money. Um, and if you want, you know, a simple example of that, just think about the number of world-class, highly effective SEO people out there in the world compared to the number of people who can set up an AdWords account or buy ads on Facebook.

Um, you know, most importantly, if you don't have a great product, you won't get the most powerful and fundamental driver, word of mouth, and you want to build on all the positive stuff that happens when that's working.

So, I mean, just as an example of how these things are interconnected, we have this partnership with YouTube that was very meaningful to us early on. Um, you know, we were on every single video page on YouTube, you know, within a few years of Sonick's life.

And that didn't come about because of some, like, epic bizdev introduction from VCs or hustling our way there; it came about because a product manager at YouTube was using Sonick and thought it was awesome and emailed our support, you know, support email to say, “You know, can we do a partnership? Can we do something here?”

So they're very interconnected, and if you know you have to get all the right bits to work to get one of the bits to work.

And finally, you know, the caliber of the team that you can recruit and retain is hugely dependent on how big a problem you're solving and how much your team kind of feels like they're building something awesome.

And there are some kind of funny paradoxes in the startup world. For example, you know, the most sophisticated, best VCs who are most in demand are actually sometimes the best people to go to if you want to fund a really crazy hard idea.

Um, and that's because they may have more confidence from all the success they've had to be more contrarian rather than just following the herd of what everyone else seems to be jumping on.

And similarly, it seems to be the case that you're more likely to get really amazing people to want to work on something that's a hard problem that's, you know, not a trivial thing to solve.

But great people also want career growth, and if you don't grow fast enough, it will be tough to continue to give them enough career opportunities.

And then finally, you know, at some point, if you want to sustainably grow your team, you need a great economic engine to do that. Um, so the team, again, depends on, you know, these other three things.

Um, make a similar bunch of arguments about why the economic engine is dependent on the others, but hopefully, you get my point.

Um, so unicornus is gratification to the power of growth to the power of economic gratification. It's dependent on everything; growth depends on everything; teams depend on everything; economics depend on everything.

Um, AKA everything is connected. And you're watching the first season of True Detective. Um, I've labored this point and hopefully not bored you to tears because to me it seems like one of the most important things to understand about the game of startups is it's all connected, and you need to get all these key pieces working in concert to build an exceptional business.

And the earlier you figure out the whole system, the earlier you get on the path to building the next Dropbox.

Um, I was just, uh, browsing Adora's LinkedIn while I was waiting to talk. Um, you know, she has a computer science degree and experience making products that people like. She also worked, um, she worked at Slide on all their growth stuff, and she seems like she did some sort of Master's in Economics.

So, you know, all three engines, there's an element of insight there that allows you to jump faster to something that really works holistically.

Um, so again, the earlier you figure out all three of these things, the faster you get on the path to being the next Dropbox or Airbnb or Google.

So, uh, the last thing I want to talk about is that, um, all of this takes time and is very hard, and you can't give up. Um, and that's, you know, that's, that's I think fairly commonly given advice in startup land.

So, I wanted to give you a few things to take away about how to develop your resilience and how to keep going.

The first thing is it usually does get better if you keep going. Um, I remember the bleakest point in Sonick's life was around December 2010, and nothing felt like it was working. When we went into Christmas, we had this brutal board meeting and we agreed to try a bunch of new things in the new year, and I remember just being like so miserable that whole Christmas.

Um, and you know, that was what it was. You know, that's what our graph looked like at that point in time. We'd, you know, we had some growth, but then we built these new features, nothing happened; no one really cared about them, it didn't really improve things, and it was just really bleak.

I can't remember how much cash we had, but it wasn't a ton. Um, and then, so when things get hard, I try, I go back and I look at our growth graph, and you know, I remember that that was the point that it felt that bad just before a lot of things started to work.

And now, you know, we have 10 million people using us, and the graph looks a lot better. Um, so it usually does get better if you keep moving.

And a founder of a great company told me once, you know, survival is a growth strategy. Um, and his was like a platform that essentially grown when everybody else gave up; he just kept getting all of their users and gradually got to, like, this crazy, crazy, crazy size.

Um, but I think the best thing about surviving is you get to see new platform shifts and changes in the market more broadly. So, for example, we've, you know, experienced the shift from desktop to mobile, and that's been a really, really positive thing for Sonick for lots of reasons.

Um, and everyone likes to talk about how new startups get built when new platforms emerge. So, for example, Uber getting built on the back of, you know, mobile. Um, but things that are already working can also suddenly work a lot better.

So, Shazam and Pandora were companies that were eight and seven years old at the time that the iPhone launched. Um, and at that point in time, I think they'd kind of been great but not spectacular breakouts, and the iPhone changed that.

I mean, I remember hearing from the Pandora guys that the iPhone doubled their growth overnight, so platform shifts sort of expand the set of startup visions that can finally be fully realized.

So, just let that be another reason to sort of push through the hard times, that the environment may get better.

Uh, another thing I would recommend doing is trying to articulate why you believe you're doing important work, and I think a good way to do that is to sort of do a five whys analysis on your motivations until you get to the root cause.

Um, and Michelle, Pete, and I did that a few years back and wrote them down, and they're good to refer to when things get hard. Um, so the whys for us were we believe that live music can change your life, and we believe that at its best, live music is this pure, intimate experience between you and an artist, and we believe that's what music's all about, and we want everyone to have that experience.

Um, and at present, seeing live music is too niche an experience because it's inaccessible, because it takes too much effort. Um, and we believe that fails artists and fans, and it's happened because the industry's lost sight of what's most important, which is that intimacy and connection between the two of them.

So, we, we don't accept that. We'll create a better future for live music where the online experience will be true to that feeling of being there.

So, when you're low, if you write that down when you're feeling good, you'll have something to refer back to that will remind you of, like, the fact that this isn't about, you know, whether you're kind of the next cool company on TechCrunch or whatever else; it's about the fact that you really earnestly want to solve a problem.

When you're really low, spend some time with your users. Um, the happy ones will remind you of why you're doing it, and the unhappy, disengaged ones will sort of transform this sense of kind of abstract impending doom into this more practical feeling of there's something to fix.

And our product team actually ended up knocking a wall in one of our meeting rooms and creating a makeshift user research lab that helps to set a regular tempo for getting users in and having your whole team watch the experience they have with your product as individuals, not in kind of an aggregate Google Analytics way.

Uh, finally, you know, start your company with people you can count on when shit's going sideways. Uh, I think it's really hard to know that about someone without a real foundation of friendship.

Um, so I thoroughly endorse YC's thing about building on top of a long-standing and trusted relationship. I've been incredibly lucky to have two amazing co-founders in Michelle and Pete and an amazing team of people, many of whom have been here right from the start, and I, I think, you know, I can't really imagine how you would get through some of the hard times without those relationships.

So, uh, in summary, if you're going to do a startup in the entertainment industry or any highly consolidated industry, uh, you'll probably need to work with the industry more than you realize.

So get started on that early on. Understand as much of the game and what drives success before you start building, and, uh, find ways to nurture your resilience because, you know, keeping going is usually the right answer.

Thanks!