Casey Neistat and Matt Hackett on Live Video's Struggle for Interestingness

I mean, didn't Google just announce last week some clip-on camera that captures what's in front of you? In typical Google form, they pitched it though. It's like this is the center of our AI learning platform about the world, which is the same marketing mistake they made with everyone. Everyone wants a face computer now; everyone is a computer. Everyone does not want an AR learning camera clipped to their chest, but they probably do actually want a camera.

Mmm, I think from really a creative perspective, I think that the struggle for interestingness—that's a line that we see—is allowing what we were pitching. But like, solving the struggle for interestingness from a video perspective is paramount to having anything succeed. And I think what Snapchat did that was so amazing, beyond the story mechanism being so fascinating, is that I dismissed lenses as kind of a gimmick when it first came out. But what lenses did was it solved the struggle for interestingness from both the creators' perspective and the viewer's perspective.

"Here, put dog ears on," that's amore. That's interesting, that's fun. I think the trouble that we're seeing—certainly we saw at Beam, that they're seeing with spectacles and that I think every single live platform, none of which have truly succeeded yet—is because they don't address that struggle for interestingness. I think that the reason why video games have succeeded in the live space is because they do. Here's something that we all understand: it's a game and I get to see your face playing it. That's dealing with the struggle for interestingness.

But I think broadly, live is too wide open; there's too—there is no box there. And I think what we were trying to do with Beam, like one of the things we talked about, should be a four-second clip or a six-second clip. So if you string a bunch of them together, it needs to feel fun like you're watching an edited movie. We were wrong; it got boring quickly. Watching people's raw lives got boring quickly.

So how are you going to deal with that in the future if you're handling multiple feeds from all over the world? With the product, we learned a lot with Beam V1 that we imported to a much, much smaller problem set, which is what we're dealing with in panels—the product that's out now. Panels is just purely about opinion. It's what is your opinion on these five stories today, these things happening in the world? We wanted to be this place where you get to actually see the full spectrum of perspectives on an issue that might be controversial.

That might be, you know, what do you think about the Republican healthcare proposal? To actually see what a civil debate in video looks like on that. The reason, the way we made it more interesting is it's just really contained. So I think we took a lot of the little product cues about how to set some up, one up in context, both to create and consume, in which they're going to be articulate and pointed and fast. Let me do that some priming.

There's just some ways that we actually try and guide you towards creating something that's really compelling, but the domain is much, much smaller. We're not trying to make this—that's not the platform for everything you could possibly take a video of in the world. It is, what do you think about this story? Yeah, it's—it's—it's if you had so many cameras, and I say something interesting there, you have no idea what to say.

If you hand someone a camera and say, "You know, what do you think about the latest healthcare proposal?" they might know probably something to say, and that something will be tied to a specific narrative. So that is an attempt at addressing that struggle for interestingness, right? I mean, it's tricky because it seems that the internet deviates towards like kind of a [ __ ] show most of the time people aren't—you've turned off YouTube comments. I see that you still have them, but I'm mature enough. YouTube comments, yeah better. You still get views, yeah, not as many as you.

Yeah, you'll get an island in the algorithm for that. They punish you severely for that. Oh really? Yeah, maybe we should turn them back on. But I agree, comments are absolutely toxic. If you go into your community settings on the left-hand side, you can go down, you can highlight words, and if any of those words pop up, those comments will be automatically hidden. Oh, all right! So if you were to go into my library of those words, you would find the most disgusting dictionary bibliography of words that humans have ever, ever uttered.

The funny thing about that is people who use the kind of slurs and profanities that I have blocked they also don't have to spell those slurs or profanities, so you have to come up with every spelling of every derogatory word you could ever identify because they don't know how to spell well. But yeah, I mean, here's the thing about that that I think it's really easy, and I especially think for people our age who sort of grew up on the very early internet, which was a very, very small place compared to the almost half the world that has access to it now.

There's this easy thing to go like, "Oh, it's just the internet; it's a gross place. Like, anyone can say anything." I actually think we as people who make products need to stop thinking like that and start thinking about, now the entire world now has access to this thing. How do we actually design it purposefully so that that doesn't happen? How do you actually create a place for people to not be harassed, to actually have a civil discourse? If you're designing a social product, and you kind of just throw your hands up and go, "It's the internet," you're wrong.

Like, that is not the era we live in, and we need to take on that responsibility as people who make these things. Who just said? Somebody smart just said, "I used to go to the internet to escape the real world, and now I go to the real world to escape the internet." Oh yeah, I don't know who that was. That's how tweet was floating around, but I think that that pretty much sums it up.

So is it just like heavily community moderated? Like, how do you guys—because this is like obviously a contentious opinion—how do you put these ideas into your product? Yeah, I mean, there's no one answer, and I don't think we are not going to come and say like, "Here's exactly what we're doing; it is perfect." What we're doing right now with panels is we're very purposefully building it slowly. It's not an open community yet; you have to sign up, give some info about yourself, and we're trying to let people in in real demographic balance.

We're trying to, you know, in general, tech early adopters tend to skew a little bit male. We're trying to make sure that that doesn't skew the community, and so we actually set up a place where when we do open the doors fully, it is something where you're like, "Oh, all kinds of opinions are welcomed here." Mmm, trolling doesn't work and isn't going to get me attention.

So moderation is definitely a piece of that, but it's every aspect of the product design and every aspect is how you build the community, which I don't think—at this point you can just have—okay, we'll just let everyone in and free-for-all and we'll moderate out the bad stuff. You'd be thinking a lot more carefully, yeah, and you're also building like a media plus product company. I mean, they're kind of wrapped together. Do you see the world shifting towards that? You know, like controlling your content and making lots of content that people like while also building product?

Yeah, I mean, I think that almost every media company right now, their technology products are just a device to further disseminate the media that they're making. There isn't a holistic consideration of how can the media and then the technology they're using to promote that media, how can they have a more symbiotic relationship? I think that's easy to talk about that problem; it's very hard to talk about solutions.

And I think panel being—panels is a very literal version of integrating those two; it's a very good example. But I can tell you plainly that it's very hard to realize like the way we've integrated Beam thus far into our content. I think so boring; I don't think it's that interesting. I think it's much more interesting to explain it like we have this crowdsourcing product that we can have people chiming in from around the world, and instead of having panelists that are old bearded men, we have panelists from all around the world.

If that's fascinating, that's a very compelling idea, but then when you see the reality of it, you're like, I don't care. So these are very challenging problems to solve, and I think, again, the benefit that we have here is that we are trying to solve them from day one. We're trying to solve them proactively instead of reactively. We're not going to be backing our successful big media company into solving these problems; we're building a company around those problems.

Hmm, and is managing these like disparate kinds of teams new and weird for you, or have you felt like you figured it out so far? No, I mean, I absolutely—it is new and weird. You know, I think I've always been on the other sort of the other arrangement where we have like—we have a technology team where people or I work on a technology product or in a team that makes technology products that lots of media gets made with, never having both of those ends of the same roof. So every single day, it's on that very basic thing that I was talking about: getting people in the newsroom to realize that this can change, that we are in 100% control of the product we're using.

That's, I mean, that requires like daily reminders, rejiggering of the way that we work, figuring out, "All right, how do we actually get a producer who sits not just on the news team but also with the product team and actually, you know, gathers feedback, brings it into the actual product?" The perspective of, "Hey, I have to make a video and it's due tomorrow, and I would love to include people from panels, but like these 10 things don't work right." So yeah, no, it is very—it's very different; I think it's fairly uncharted.

I don't think there are many people who have tried to do both simultaneously like this. My response to that question is that… that does a great job, so kind of transitioning. But something that I also think is really cool about you guys is just like overall creative output. Like when you started vlogging—'cause I've known Matt for a while—but like he started talking about you to me, and he's like, "Oh, yeah, man, he's doing videos every day," and like having made some videos myself, I was like, "Holy [ __ ], this is a lot of work and this is a lot of editing."

One of the common questions throughout all the Twitter responses to us was about like creative process in creative energy. Do you guys have any like rituals or practices to just consistently put out creative work, both on the engineering side and videos? I mean, on the video side, that's something I can speak to very well. The ritualistic aspect of what I do is entirely wrapped in kind of my own self-reliance.

One thing that's made abundantly clear to me as I'm working with this big, unbelievably talented, skillful media team here at Beam is that I'm a very effective person when I'm by myself, and when after working groups, like I fall to pieces. Like, does not work well with others is what it said in every report card I got until I dropped out of high school in the 10th grade, and I think that's very true.

So for me, that creative process is one where finding that cadence that you talked about of making a video every day was one where I removed every obstruction between me and finishing it. Other people are the biggest obstructions. I have an idea—well, let's talk through that idea—and the metaphor that I use of discussing ideas in groups is like when an idea at its inception it's an ice cube and it's rock-hard. You can look at it, you can see it, and you can study it, and you know what it is, but when a discussion begins, you have to pass that ice cube around the room. It starts to melt and melt and no one—after enough discussions, the ice cube's gone and everybody's hands are wet and nobody quite remembers what that idea was; that's a major obstruction.

So for me, when it comes to creation, like remove that obstruction—don't talk, don't involve other people—don't need anything from anyone to realize this new video every 24 hours. That's wildly effective; it doesn't scale, period. It seems to crush you to just like actual time and energy. I mean, no, not me; I feel great about that. It's like that—it's like an energy source for me.

It's the same thing; it's like running the country—so tired you run a dozen miles a day. It's like, "No, I'm not tired because I run a dozen miles a day." Like, "No, I'm not crushed because I made my video." Like, the days that are done—there are days that I don't finish anything, and there is that sort of dopamine rush you get when you finish something, and there's no greater sort of punctuation to finishing something than clicking upload and sending it out to millions of people.

So no, like that's a power source for me. What's crushing is like now we're trying to scale that, and there's one thing I'm hyper aware of: it's my own limitations—creatively, editorially, I have a lot of them, and the people we have here working on our media department, especially in the editorial side, are all way more skilled than I could ever be as far as a journalist goes. Incredibly smart, articulate, capable, amazing on camera—looking people than I could ever. So then how do I sort of impart my understanding that I've gotten via, you know, eight million subscribers and eight hundred videos?

How do I share that understanding and scale at least some part of that with this incredibly limited capable team? I think the answer to that is something that we've been working towards for the last year. Mmm, and what about you, Matt? I mean, I'll talk about engineering and like coding, building a product, because I think at this point, I'm—this point in my career, I'm a manager and like that's very different. It is a very different skillset, and it's something that you need to work on a different way.

But like, I don't think that's quite as interesting probably to the early-stage founder as that, like, I'm the technical half of the team and holy [ __ ] we have to, you know, have this thing ready for an Apple Keynote—and what am I gonna do? Right?

So that's the context I would give this advice in, and I'd— to me, like, we know when that was me when I was sitting there going like, "Oh yeah, this Apple presentation, and I have to hot glue this app together so we can show it to them so they'll get excited and maybe include us in this keynote." The thing that I always try to pay attention to is just listening to my own body and head.

This is something that I think all of the—not all, but a lot of the startup rhetoric will push you away from and you say like, "You know, crush it; drink a monster energy drink, stay up all night, deliver it," and there is, you know, once a year max where that's actually effective and that's the right thing to do. Most of the time, if you sit down and the code's not coming, it's just—you're struggling; you shouldn't be doing. Like, step away, go for a walk, come back in half an hour, try again. Mmm, go do something else; it's mindless; get your head off of it, but programming is like a deeply draining, incredibly mentally complex task, and doing it 12, 14 hours a day—you're not getting 12 or 14 hours of work, and you're just completely fooling yourself.

So actually listen to what your head is telling you; you know like "All right, I'm not doing this 100% right now, take 15 minutes." And what's your equivalent to Casey's running? My equivalent to Casey's running is I am so unlike Casey; I need like—I need seven hours of sleep and I need to exercise four days a week, and like those are—that's basic, basic, basic context for being a functional human for me. I'm in too many years to get to that point where I'm like, "That's why I'm not functional in the weeks," and I'm not functional. But just like that is baseline that needs to happen or nothing.

Yeah, what else can we want to talk to early-stage founders? Sure, yeah, that's why I want to talk to you right now. Okay, well, I mean, there are plenty of broad questions around like advice, right? First, yeah, company. Let's do advice supported by funny anecdotes. Dude, I'm gonna start with the funny. I've got a great one; I got a great like a tight five-minute bit right now. It's way less than five minutes when Matt and I were first pitching the very first iteration of Beam, which is like Matt totaled it, and it was mostly just duct tape and spit.

It was glued together; it was a framer demo that we were pretending wasn't it. Yeah, it was… we—you know it was a series of—what do you call it?—like an email feed or something like a series of cells, I guess, and you would press on a cell and a video would start playing. We figured out that when we would hand it to someone who would be an investor, after they'd scroll up and scroll down their finger would typically be over the sixth cell. So therefore—under the sixth cell under each cell we had videos that we meant to feel live, but were actually pre-recorded and edited and manipulated and put in there.

Under that sixth cell was a Google Glass video of Jack, who worked this at the time, being pulled over by a police officer and the interaction of him talking his way out of a ticket. It's like bright lights, ready blue—like nothing more interesting!

Yeah, so when we hand it to an investor, they would come through and invariably hold down on that like whoa what's happening here? And Matt and I would have this dog-and-pony show—we leaned over the table, I'm like, "Oh my god, oh that's Jack, the police!" Hey Mike, yeah the crazy stuff that pops up in this feed. That was like—the kind of theatrics that we would put on, to me it's reminiscent of like the stories of Steve Jobs' first demo for the iPhone where if he didn't follow this specific path through the product demo, the entire OS would collapse.

And that was some of the dog-and-pony show that we did in first sharing what the app was capable of, or what our hopes for what we had. Well, then you also have like… dog-and-pony show before CNN, right? We should talk about the acquisition. True, and I think it's the same.

I think the thing that, especially if you're an engineer and you're approaching these things, you're like you don't think about all of these interactions. Our sales process is like every single time you talk to someone external, whether it's a potential investor, you are selling, and I think it's really hard for engineers to get that mindset. They're like, "you know, if I make a good thing, it's just gonna sell itself or my co-founder will sell it."

It is every single interaction. You're solid—running a fundraising process, running an acquisition process mechanically, and what it's like in the room, they're a little bit different, but essentially it's the same thing. You're selling, and selling isn't just performing, and it's not acting a certain way. It is getting as much information as possible about the other party, what they want, how they think, what motivates them, what's gonna make them feel like they're gonna miss out if they don't do something with you.

And that's exactly the same for fundraising as it is for the acquisition process, and we've both—we played games, we figured out ways to create psychology in the people we were trying to sell where they really, really thought they had to work with us and this is an opportunity and a window that's gonna close.

It's Robert McNamara's rules of war: it's like empathize with your enemy. In our case, it was always— for me the psychological approach was always sort of empathizing either the people we were asking for money from we were raising, or potential suitors when it was, you know, acquisition time. But I think that was something that was really, really effective. And honestly, like this sounds naive or almost a bit of a platitude, but once I realized what demonstrating the passion behind what we were doing—the effectiveness of that, you know, I lean on that really, really hard for the first phase of fundraising because of my own insecurities about my lack of technical understanding.

And to quantify my lack of technical understanding, I have zero, zero technical understanding; that has to help me set up my email accounts. I was really insecure about that, and I used to look to Matt, and it was only through the process that I realized that any investors, any understanding, realizes that a good founder will hire the best engineers, engineers that are better than he or she is, and they really don't give a [ __ ] about how well you can write code. They care if you will succeed or if you will not succeed, and Gary Vaynerchuk, who really is all he's cracked up to be, I say that with no hesitation—extraordinary human being—but Gary is one of the first people I met with and I pitched the product to him by myself as best I could.

At the end of that pitch, he had this look on his face, and I looked at him and I said, "You don't have any idea what this is, do you?" And he's like, "I don't get it at all." And then he said, "Put me down for half a million." And when I asked, I said, "Why?" He said, "Because I bet on the jockey, not on the horse." And that was extremely telling for me because I think to hear Matt's story and what Matt represents and why he's doing this and then from me, it is a much more compelling story and a much more compelling narrative than what we saw the potential of our product at the time.

And so were you relying on each other during that sales process? Because like I know, like you're—for people who don't know you like, you're a very, very personable person and not just like this engineer guy who sits in the corner like, yeah, it's—I mean, it's obvious through the podcast, but for those of you who don't know. Because like what have you learned from Casey in this whole process? Obviously, your interesting person, YouTube does really well, you're captivating and now you have a crazy reach. Were you guiding this like fundraising process or were you relying on each other?

Yeah, I mean, we’re absolutely relying on each other, and I think the thing about the fundraising like, fundraising acquisition process both is we developed an act for both of them or it was like the first time we did it, it was a disaster.

We were both talking at the same point. An investor—you know, sitting at Sequoia and Sequoia Partners asks a question and we both like, look each other and start to answer at the same time—total disaster, the pro tips. Yeah, so but no, but it took… I mean, so the pro tip on fundraising actually like those kinds of sales processes like start with someone you don’t care about. You don’t think is gonna—you know them well enough to know they’re not gonna invest or like don’t shoot for the moon and then screw it up. But the first person you talk to should be someone who you know is gonna say no, so you can get all the jitters out; you can try the act.

And literally, what we would do is you know we drove all around the valley for our fundraising. And we would go to a meeting, you know, have this very typical hour meeting with a partner at a VC firm, and then we would go as far away as we could.

So we would go to like a donut shop where we knew nobody said that was gonna be there—there was always, there’s this one in Redwood City, in fact, that we probably had, I don't know, I don't know, ten hours of conversation in—but we literally go to this donut shop, sit down, and debug the entire meeting. We would just go there and go like, "Okay, that part where you jumped in and said X, that was perfect; we need to do more of that." Or, "We got too much in the weeds when they asked this question."

Like, actually, Casey, you should just take that one and kill it immediately. So we developed a pretty honed routine. Yeah, and I’ll say the SAP can bar was my MIT professor and, or one of the earliest investors—the first investor in Winded Up being Beam. He said to me, "Practice your pitch on people that you don’t want money from."

Don't practice on friends; practice on real-world but real investors. And when he said this, Matt, I rolled my eyes, not to be dismissive of him, but that idea just seemed like, "Why would I waste that opportunity as just an exercise?" But he could not have been more right. He could not have been more right. If, like you know, you have to—your nerves, your anxiety, all the things you think you’re going to say, things that make sense in your head when you get derailed by a single question—like all those things are real-world and they matter.

You know, I always think back to presidential election or presidential debates and like all the practicing they do. Like it can prepare them in some capacity, but what the real world is like with those cameras and all these variables, so fundraising for us exactly the same.

Like we learned so much more from when we completely screwed up than we did from the ones where people like, "I'm really excited about this; let's you know, we could feel like it was a win. Those, we just walked away from high-fived and had donuts with less conversation, but it’s when we really [ __ ] up.

And there were a couple like we should have been home runs, and I think that we just screwed up. I just straight up did terrible pitches, had a terrible time. Specifically, like what did you do poorly in the pitch that people can learn from? Sure! Okay, well first of all, you're—we're going way back here. This is—I asked me what my first date with my wife, but I think that failing to really understand how siloed the skills that we uniquely bring to the table are.

When I say steals, I don't just mean that the languages that Matt can write code in. I mean like, you know, Casey should be this sort of loud, over-the-top passionate blind aggressive sort of—

I should be the hutzpah at the table that's just like borderline hysterical, and Matt has to be this like rock-solid voice of reason that has an incredibly practical—like Matt has to be the confidence and Casey has to be the passion.

We didn't understand that, and the trouble with that is, that's not a square that a passionate guy like Matt, someone who can be incredibly emotive, and like we can both represent that. Like I can sort of [ __ ] about technicalities all day long and muster in confidence, but like he's better at that than I am, and I'm better at this than he is.

Understanding that, and then to get more granular, it’s like a question that may seem like a technical question has an answer that should be more driven by passion than about the technicalities. How do you distinguish for that? And then like at what point in time do we stop looking at each other to say who’s going to answer this one? Who lets us know would that poetry is going to be okay?

And that Robert McNamara is sort of empathizing with your enemies. Think it's like if I'm being, if I'm on the other side of the table, I want to see two people that are firmly in control. I want to be blinded with passion and then completely reinforced the confidence that they know how to turn that passion just to a real business.

I think it's very difficult for one person to represent that dichotomy, and that was something we evolved into after a lot of screw-ups. Well, yeah, I think the other thing—this is derailing a little bit but fundraising wise—which I wish somebody had told us and maybe they did because we got so much advice, which you should get so much advice.

We talked to SEP almost every day when we were in the valley; we would go back to the hotel room and like Skype with SAP; it was incredible for doing that with us. He’s a very busy man, but aside from getting advice, this is one that never either I never heard and it didn't stick or I heard and it never stuck or I never heard but understand what a "no" is, and understand the many, many, many varieties of "no" that you can get from investors, and they're all "no's" and they all should be treated the same.

This is my favorite one where Casey and I left the meeting and we’re like, “Yes! Like that’s a huge jack excited our lead.” And then we started talking to our advisers and other investors, and they’re like, "Oh, that’s a no." It’s “Is” and this is something that I’ve since seen in other companies have asked me for advice is someone going, “That’s great! We’re totally in for X amount as soon as you find a lead!”

Okay, and that is just such—you're like, "Alright, great; they’re in for X amount!" and actually, they’re not in at all unless you can sell someone else truly willing to take more of the risk. But there’s a million varieties of that, and there’s some good blog posts about this, but just like understand that if you don’t have a term sheet it’s not a guess.

Yeah, and even if you have a term sheet, there’s still some chance that it’s not a guess but probably is—but don’t leave a meeting and hear, “Yeah, we’re super interested! Tell me who else is investing,” and you know “We’ll definitely be in!” That’s a no! Almost everything other than a term sheet is no. We were raising, and SEP was our voice of reason.

He’s just one of the most thoughtful people, especially when it comes to fundraising or anything in the startup world, of anyone that I’ve ever interacted with and he was who we leaned on the most. But we had another friend who’ll remain nameless was in the valley at the time who was in the process of—it was like an 80 or 100 million dollar raise which he did execute on, and we would go meet with him when we needed nothing more than a proper ass-kicking.

And I remember when we finally closed our lead, which was a wing of a prayer. It was—I think you know, the Jeremy Lou at Lightspeed really believed in what we were doing; he saw the vision but I think the most impressive thing about Jeremy is he took a big swing.

He took a risk, like he…I can speak more to that but he’s an incredible VC because of his willingness to sort of assess and understand the risk that he saw in us. But he took that chance, and he was decisive too. I think lots of other investors, he was like a day later we got a yes; extremely decisive.

But when we went to this crazy maniac that was our voice of insanity, I remember we finally told Mike, “We got our lead! We got our lead!” And I just remember this guy being like, "Okay! Here’s what you do: You get him on the phone and you say you listen to me, you [ __ ] bloodsucker! Here’s what we’re gonna do, I want quadruple the amount of money at a 10% evaluation that we discussed or the deal's off the table!"

I think he was 80% serious when he was talking like that, and I think what I learned from seeing that kind of maniac-type person succeed exceeds, at least in the fundraising part of the process, is that just how much people respond to that blind passion because like he was nuts, but he was not for what he was doing so much so that he’s able to raise, you know, nine figures based on his idea.

But Matt and I would always sort of leave our meetings with him jazzed up, and we would always say like we would dismiss 99% of what he said but that 1% was just enough to sort of give us a little bit more confidence in our future pitches.

That’s why, was there anything you guys did to kind of build that up within you? Because it’s even just doing like podcasting, like the counter-transference of energy between people is such a thing that’s not necessarily obvious to people when they start podcasting.

Like what did you do to build up that skill to countertransference? I was like power! It’s—people use countertransference as a psychological term of energy. So if you go into a room and you're kind of just like constructs, I understood what you meant; I just had never heard that before. So, okay, what did you ask me?

How do we do—how do I get better at it? Yeah, I want—I think Matt is like an extremely level person, and I’m not, and seeing—I know, I mean it. And like if Matt gets nervous, I've never seen him show it, and I have to say like I drew a lot from that.

Like there was a lot, I think walking into a meeting alone would have been very, very scary, but like that counter-transference was not from them to me but it was sort of mitigated by the fact that there’s two people on this side of the table.

And again that sort of dovetails back into that balancing act, that the Costello routine that we had worked ourselves into, but for me that's what a lot of it was, was like learning how to rely on that to keep myself level in meetings and be as effective as possible.

Mmm, I think the other thing is just getting yourself in the mindset, like before, especially if you go to like Sand Hill Road, if you go to these places that feel—that are designed to feel powerful is to just take a breath outside and go, "I got invited here," like I got this meeting. I think that was easier for me to do because I've been part of Tumblr's fundraises and have been to a lot of like big… to these physical spaces.

It was like, "It's okay," but even if you haven't, I think it's just important to sit there and go like this isn't, you know, I'm not begging; I'm looking for a partner. I came here because you invited me. Mmm, just to get yourself in that mindset of, "Look, I absolutely belong in this room."

What's a little bit more counterintuitive advice that you’ve learned along the way? I know Matt, you think a lot about startups, maybe Casey similarly thinks about startups all the time but also just creative work. What’s the counterintuitive advice you’ve learned?

Sure, I mean my counterintuitive advice is just the power of brute force. And I mean that; I think that it’s always about intellectualizing and thoughtfulness and listening to more podcast and reading more books and all that—I think at the end of the day, like it is brute force; it is hard work; it is an absolute unwillingness to accept failure, to accept no.

And that’s true with fundraising, and that's true with ideation, and that's true with making a YouTube video. And you know, in the home of my 36 and the 18 years of my career, I found that to be the one sort of consistent—the one constant through everything that in any version of success, it's been because of an absolute reluctance and that sort of brute force like I will not stop moving until I achieve what I wanted to succeed and what I want to achieve.

Every time where that I would identify as a failure was because of a lack of that or questioning of that, and I think Beam 1.0 is a very good example. Like our product failed; that the company succeeded, and I think a lot of that comes back to sort of that absolute relentlessness and tenacity—not just Matt and I as leaders but the entire team.

We had a product that was failing—like nobody, no other team quit, nobody cared; nobody really gave a [ __ ]—heads down. What else can we build?

So we started building all these weird products and experimenting, and we built one about the election, and it was just like, "No, let's just keep going, heads down. Keep moving, keep pushing, keep pushing." I think that that is not sexy advice, that’s not romantic advice, that's not something that can be analyzed and broken down, but I do think it's absolutely pivotal for any kind of success in life is to embody that in everything you do.

Mine’s not necessarily counterintuitive, but I think especially for engineers, people with a more technical mindset, it’s really tough to learn is just ask for what you want super directly. I mean, sit in the really, like this is a very tactical sort of micro thing, but I think it's something that I see I’m now on the receiving end of a lot because people are asking me for startup advice, and I often get emails that are just super roundabout in it essentially.

"Hey, can I—I’m starting a company; it’s a social app. Can I get by you coffee?" I don't wanna be bought coffee. If you sent me a one-line email that said, “Hey, I’m really looking for an amazing iOS engineer who’s looking to found a company,” like about there are three people that I can introduce you to and I can do the research on who you are; you don’t need to fill me in.

I'd like just ask if that’s what you’re asking; I’d love to help. If you’re asking for an hour of my time to vaguely talk about ideas, I don’t know. I literally have the words "pick your brain"; I had that as a Gmail filter.

So if somebody emails me saying, "I’d love to buy you lunch, so I can pick your brain," that filter goes into the trash, yeah. I’m completely like how I start—I had literally was running last week and a woman stopped me and she works at a big, one of the biggest publishers in the city, and she’s I don’t want to have lunch through and discuss with you this thing I’m building. I think you could be a really big part of it, and looked at it and I’m like, "What is it? And what are the actionable x's?" and she could not do that; she couldn't do it.

There's no [ __ ] way I'm giving this an hour of my time. Well, and if you can't do that, you're probably not ready—that's it! Get that advice to ask that question like if you can't write it in the subject of the email.

And this is my favorite, by the way, like my team probably gets annoyed at some point; probably get 10 of these emails today, but it’s just a question that it’s the long subject line of the email, and that is it! Yeah, and that is me asking for something very directly that I need.

If you’re not in a place where you can do that, and it might be, "Hey, I think you might like—I need really specific advice about how to build a technical team. Can you give me advice on how to build a technical team for my company of eight?" Like that's a specific question I can do something with. Respecting other people's time is something that sounds sillier, elementary, but especially in the world of startups like nobody has time, so respecting other peoples' time I think is absolutely paramount.

And I think that comes down to how effective of a communicator you are, and I think that that idea permeates everything we’ve discussed today—from fundraising to being an effective manager to being a good leader to being good at anything. But if you can't be effective in the way you communicate and not waste other people's time, I think it's difficult to succeed in this space.

So Matt, one of the questions we got like over and over and over again was about the acquisition. So we talked about this off-camera, but if someone asks you how do I get acquired, what do you say? The number one place where I would start with this is it takes forever.

And people will tell you this; our best advisors told us this. They said it takes six months if you want to go down that path at a minimum. And me, as a process optimizer—hyper-organized—like, "No, we can of course, we can in three months." You cannot!

So 90% of people ask me this question when they've got a month of cash left, and the answer is, "You can't!" There’s no, like what's that thing we were told so many times? It’s like you can never, you can never sell your startup; it can only be bought!

Yes, something like that because we were trying to raise more—like I think the best move here is for us to sell this time. Like let’s be a part of something bigger than us; I think it’s how we can be most effective and most successful. And like the first move, the minute we started telling our trusted advisors—either they will stop saying that.

Don't ever say that—what you're doing right now is your fundraising. And when you meet with people who you think might be interested in buying your company, you tell them you're fundraising. You were never in the process of selling your company until it's been sold, and that is extremely good advice because throughout the entire process just how true.

And we spoke with a number of potential acquirers. Like it was a—it was a major process for us, and that one truth sort of permeated every single conversation. I don't know, we're not selling the company; we're interested in something.

I've never actually—we're going to love a raise right now, which was 100% true, but it didn’t sort of—it was—you’d say, "Oh, that revealing your whole card", which is that you know, we’re very interested in pursuing potential acquisition opportunities.

And how did you manage—so CNN like slides an offer across the table, and what do you do after the fact? Or maybe that's not even how it works? Were that it were that simple? No, I mean to talk about how we even got to how you get to that first offer?

That probably you know we made—we made the decision sometime in the spring, say March or April, we’re like we’re going out for this raise, but we should really, really seriously talk to acquirers and like let’s put our energy and focus actually there.

That decision led to probably four months of conversations with eight to ten different companies, none of which—because of the psychology of it were, you really—that Casey said that device is very true! You can't go in and say, “Hey, we’re selling the company,” and so those conversations had to be pretty roundabout. They had to be, “Well, we're doing a raise and we think it might be interesting to have you strategically involved.”

Oh, we're looking for deeper partnership; all these sort of by words were people ISM, “No, we’re saying!” But it just it took an enormous amount of time because you couldn't—you couldn’t be that direct.

You know the irony of all this? I don't know if you know this, Matt, but like my first meeting ever with Jeff Zucker was not about Beam. It was about YouTube, and meeting with his—his son was on his way to Harvard, and it was a bit—it was a broader conversation.

But at the very end of that meeting, when Jeff, who just had knee surgery, was rushing out to another meeting and running a gigantic company and had two kids in the room, as I was leaving that meeting, with my skateboard in my hand, Jeff said, “How can we work together?”

And I looked at him and I said, “You should buy my technology company!” So there was no beating around the bush; there was no bullshitting, and that was for a lot of reasons. It was because of someone like that who is—as you know, I think as capable and as smart as a Jeff Zucker—like I had 30 seconds for I was walking out the door.

There was no bullshitting someone like that in that position. So knowing when to sort of lay all your cards on the table and say this is what’s in front of me. I think it’s also like that is just pure sort of human nature like understanding what might feel appropriate about that.

I also think it was a—the fact that it was a media company that Jeff stock was at the helm of, not a technology company. You know, they're not used to typical tech acquisitions the way that a gigantic tech company might be. So it—it was some latitude there for some creativity in how we kind of pitched it.

And I will say immediately thereafter, I immediately after that conversation it did become much more typical. The next step was that meeting with Matt and understanding technically what we had and I'm sending a team down here to sort of interview our team to see if we're as capable as we say we are, looking at some of the tech we've built like digging into it—it was a very, very formal process that was initiated by a very off-huff statement.

I think the other key thing there is that we were far enough along in conversations with a couple of other companies—that’s right. We could really—we could leverage that. Right? It's to say, “Look, we could [ __ ] and you can’t [ __ ] because you’re, yeah.”

If you’re in the Valley, all everyone talks to each other; assume that all the information is out there. If you're not in the Valley, it's maybe tuned down a little bit, but still, like don't get caught lying. It’s not worth it, it doesn’t make sense, right?

But you could stretch, you could push, you can, and we legitimately were in other conversations and so we could say, “Listen, we’re in other conversations that are moving along and constantly create these forcing factors.”

We need to tell this technology company that shall remain unnamed whether we should pursue the process or not; we need to hear from you by Friday. And we could only say that and we did say literally what Matt just said: we said those exact words, those are the semantics we used.

But we could say that; we could say it with confidence because we weren’t bullshitting and I think if there was no truth to saying something like that, then that would have been found out; that would have—that would have been transparent no matter how convincing either of us could have been.

And is this all wisdom from your advisers? Because it’s unlike meeting with investors; you can't really do that; there's not a lot of like dry runs of these acquisition conversations.

We—I mean one, so there are two of our investors, advisors, who were super instrumental in this episode—super instrument as well, yeah. I’m the one who said… I’m thinking for what Ryan’s Berg and Merrick last name I can’t pronounce that's terrible of locu and they had gone through this process with GoDaddy maybe a year before we had.

And so they just like, Renee was so tuned to exactly the moments we were in, and we did the same thing the fundraising room would be like we would debrief at least once a week if not two or three times a week with him, and just go, “Here’s what they said! Here’s what they said!”

Those were—those were, yeah, throughout the acquisition process, they were much closer to therapy. Like you go to a therapist because you need to make sense of all the things in your brain, and like we would go to Renee to make sense of all the things existing in our acquisition conversations because it was—it was very hard to find anything sort of sensible or straight line in there for us to build actionable around.

But a difficult, scary process that I think was made easier by the fact that our backs were up against the wall. Like Matt and I knew we knew when we were out of money, we knew when the gig was up, and there was something for me, something very confidence inspiring about that.

It was black and white; it wasn't—that didn’t make me more scared; it was like optionality I think can often be to one's detriment. I would say that like when people ask me what was it like having a kid when you were 17 versus having a kid now and it was like, "Well, I have resources now, I have money now, and I have 17 as I'm welfare."

So it's very easy when I had, "Oh, and this is a binary; can I have that? No! Yeah!" Can I do this? No! Yeah! And now as I have this little kid, and like I just want to give her whatever the hell she wants, and she's like a spoiled monster who waits at that point the more efficient wants to play with Elsa.

But yet there was something about the do-or-die environment with which we were going through the acquisition process that I found tremendous confidence in. And was this—were there any books you resorted to throughout this process to kind of like figure out, you know, like a mental model or like how to deal with this or is it just straight-up advisor, adviser therapy?

I mean there are—it's funny; I ended up buying like—is like venture deals for entrepreneurs, like venture and acquisitions for entrepreneurs, like a literal business school textbook which was useful for looking up like three terms in the eventual term sheets we got—but no advice!

I read all—I read all those books because of my own insecurities and I went through, you know, every VC that I was a fan of, all their blogs all the way back and all of that helped to the same degree that like I did give you a book on how to read on how to skateboard.

And you can study that book and memorize that book and fall off the board immediately, but skate with Tony Hawk for five minutes, and you'll be better than anything that book could impart. And I think that’s what it was like for our advisors—one 30-minute conversation with Renee or with SAP informed us in such a tremendously impactful way that everything that had read up and told them just sort of felt like, "Yeah, it was—it was—it felt unnecessary because it was in real world."

It wasn't reacting to our specific set of circumstances, so how could I apply these general principles to what is a very, very nuanced environment? I also think people—the psychology of it is just so hard. Like this is the part that nobody told us about because it's not really a way to talk about it, huh?

But the psychology, especially with your team, is one of the hardest parts because you are, you know, it feels like you're cheating when you're because you've not told your team you're potentially selling the company and I’m gonna disappear San Francisco for three days under the guise where I made money, I’m just gone for a couple days under the guise.

So I mean, the way that we did it is we told—indeed—we told everyone increasingly more as the certainty went up, and my feeling about all this and just this is a general thing, being a manager, executive founder is you should get people as much information as possible. You really should try and be transparent if that information is actionable.

If it can actually cause them to do something, create a new venture, build a new tool, build something that will actually have an impact on it, there is zero you can do as an engineer on our team if I say we’re talking to CNN and these six other companies about potentially being acquired; all that does is make you panic and go okay paralysis.

And this is a team of a dozen people who rely on their paychecks as everybody else does, who's aware of the fact that our core product is not working, we've stopped really focusing on it, they don’t know what else we’re focused on, they don't know what the future of this company is and they're unbelievably talented and skilled and sought-after by other companies.

So how—you know you can’t [ __ ] them, and you can’t tell them the process like what Matt just described. So you don’t have anything to tell them, so it’s just really like avoid eye contact—scary! This isn’t days; this is months!

I was like the more I think one of the best—one of the best business decisions Matt and I ever made was summer 2016. We’re out of money; we had like five months left of money. We could barely pay like our Amazon bills like we were struggling; we’re pinching. I—it didn’t work; I had cut my salary to zero.

We were struggling; we didn’t know what to do; we were just started; we didn’t know what to do. So Matt and I came up with this decision, like it was one of our meetings; it’s like okay, nothing's off the table! What should we do right now?

And we came up with the decision to spend God knows how much money renting two huge mansions on the beach in the Dominican Republic and flying the entire team, flying the entire team down there for a vacation at the beach where we all like rented banana boats and went fishing, and Matt crashed a golf car.

And I think at the time, it was just like we needed to do it because we needed to—we needed to talk; we needed to fix things; we need to show a vote of confidence in the team. But what that enables us to do is get the hell out of the office, break that unwillingness to make eye contact, to be as honest with the team about how we can’t be honest with the team.

You know, there was a common—there were many conversations, I was like, "Look guys, we want to share with you what's going on, but like it's a liability." We can't like read between the lines. We're trying to figure things out; all we're asking for you is, you know, have confidence in us.

I think the other thing that you have to have if you’re trying to manage your own psychology in the situation is you have to think it’s—it all goes south. Everything goes to [ __ ]; deal falls through, I'm gonna spend every waking hour making sure that everyone on my team lands with an amazing job.

I’m gonna pump my network; I'm gonna make sure that everyone gets out of this before I think about myself, and that was always something rolling in the back of my mind. It was like alright, what doesn’t come through and run out of cash? Like, well that’s what I’m gonna do, okay?

And having that, that at least helped me get going—okay, like I can actually help everyone land in a great place, and frankly because everyone is an engineer, highly sought after, like they're gonna be okay. Let’s like as long as I know I'm gonna dedicate myself to that if it doesn’t work out then it’s okay.

Yeah, we did—I think through all the tumult that was the last quarter of being 1.0 pre-acquisition, you know, no one on our team ever—there was never a mis-payroll; there was never a delayed payroll. Like this was something that Matt and I have always made priority number one, and I think that like look, no one left.

No one left, and this is a shitty seven-month process really, from when we knew this app was not going to succeed, what’s next, and then telling them that we’re gonna be acquired. It was—it was not a short amount of time, and little things like that stupid retreat in the Dominican Republic was just sort of—it was us showing, it was us trying to demonstrate to the team how much we believe in them.

Like guys, look, here’s something awesome we’re gonna do together. Does it make sense right now from afar? Probably not, but like we’re all here having conversations we wouldn’t be having at 1:00 in the morning.

We’re drinking like really terrible warm beer, and the effectiveness and the importance of that—like these are things that are intangible things that are very challenging to quantify. Chemistry is something that you cannot quantify, but I think it is chemistry that makes a team bold.

On the inside and on the media side, on the creative side, it makes a team cohesive; it's what makes a team work and it’s what makes a team ultimately effective. And it’s easier to do when you’re small and as you grow it gets more and more challenging, but that was always a really, really primary focus for us through all the ups and downs of us being a venture-backed startup.

Would you change anything about how you did it? I mean, me personally? Yeah, you know, I never ever talked to anyone on the team about the vlog, and I—the reason why is because I knew in the back of my head how instrumental the vlog could be to benefit this company, and I had insecurities about saying that the team—so I didn’t want it to diminish their work, and then ultimately if we didn’t succeed, you know I wouldn’t have wanted to falsify expectations because of the success of this YouTube channel.

Yeah, so I guess I just kept my mouth shut and made videos all day every day, and I think that that must have been really challenging for the team to see. But then in the end, like you know it was a big part of why the acquisition took place; it’s why now this is no longer just a technology company but a media and technology company is because I think there was a demonstration of what we can do within that cross-section.

So I guess the question that I've been wondering is this whole process of like you guys getting together, starting Beam, selling Beam, working at CNN—a tremendous learning experience and it probably seems like a crazy amount of time, but it’s been like, what, two years, three years? It's been three, a little over three years.

Okay, so what are you working to learn now? Like how are you personally trying to improve yourselves? I mean, for me, this is about learning to run a completely different kind of company and a completely different scale company. To think about a business that I’ve never had to think of, which is media, like we were a technology and media company. Technology, I think I understand the parameters there; media, I don’t, and I'm learning on the job.

And that’s like—that is 95% of my—what I'm reading, what I'm consuming, who I’m sure that I had breakfast, lunch, and dinner with is learning that. Yeah, I’ve never had a job before. The last time I get a paycheck every two weeks, the last time I got a paycheck over two weeks when I was washing dishes and I was 16 years old in southeastern Connecticut.

I mean, I’ve never had a job before; yeah, it’s not sort of a fun new thing for me to learn about. But certainly like working with teams and you know I’ve always been an entrepreneur; I’ve started and built companies my entire life since I— you know, stoves in my early 20s and understanding that our focus here is purely on building a successful company not so much worrying about kind of the resources that are around us.

Like I look at these cameras and I immediately—I mean by that is I look at these cameras, I immediately get stressed out, so I know how much that cost. I have to figure out how much we’re gonna earn to be able to compensate for that, the price of that camera.

And then understanding that when you’re part of—in the apparatus, when you’re part of something that is huge as Time Warner, as CNN—that those sort of considerations are not entirely relevant because this is a long game.

This is a long play for CNN; like they want Beam to be wildly successful for the next 10, 20 years. They want to break into new markets, and that’s how they view it, and that is so foreign to me. I mean Beam 1.0 venture-backed Matt and I were week to week focused on the success of that cut, and I'm getting really upset when I found out people were ordering blue bottles in the carton or whatever the hell it was, cause there are six bucks each, and be like, we can't afford this right now!

This is absurd! So being in an environment like this where it's—not about the minute by minute or the day by day but really trying to build a successful company that will last long into the future is completely foreign to me. Because as a startup entrepreneur, it’s always—that day-to-day, it’s always about the right now, and we’re trying to build something that has much, much longer legs.

And so that's just done by what? Stepping back and like kind of imagining what your more absolutely like deep breaths kind of thing? It’s like, you know, we talk about the reason why I don’t take it granular. Like an example we had discussed yesterday with the teams, it’s like I’m not promoting Beam’s YouTube channel on my main YouTube channel right now, and the reason why is I want the dent—the bench to be deeper on Beam’s channel. We have like nine videos right now; I wanted to be 20 amazing videos.

So when I push my audience there—which haven’t done in a while— and they show up, they’re like, “Whoa, this is incredible!” And it’s like, “Yeah, I want to do it today! So I want to see our numbers bump today, but let’s be thoughtful here. Let’s understand what the long play is here, and if my—if I’m going to ask that of my audience, I want them to be really rewarded by what they find when they get here, and we’re not there yet.”

So it's like taking that deep breath, taking a step back from those. No, no, let’s be thoughtful here, and doing that at every turn is a foreign practice for me. One of the fun things about getting into the media side of things has been learning how—especially how expensive that media does not have processed thinking in the way that engineering does.

Yeah, and I think that a typical engineer would be shocked to see that there are all of the elements of an agile or similar sort of methodology of development but none of the vocabulary and none of the sort of feedback loops which are actually critical to making that happen.

And this is not, I don't like a file naming convention, but I think if you ask people on our media team—like, and I have people on our team who are like, this is the most transparent feedback oriented media team I’ve ever been on and I look at it, I'm like, “Oh my god that is so much messier and way, way less feedback.”

Like they don’t—there’s not a two-week sprint, there’s not a retrospective. So I think as an engineering manager, I’m starting to realize how much of that is applicable to media. And I’m also learning where it is absolutely not applicable. Hmm, but it’s been so long—I think it’s of interest to listen to the podcast; if engineering thinking has applications way outside running an engineering team, and I think I have some unique advantages and some disadvantages in running a media team because of that.

I think that everything Matt just said really underscores why I—I find such success in - ease in making content when it’s just me and why I struggle so much when it’s a team. Because everything that he just described is exactly right when you talk about inefficiencies and opportunities for greater efficiency, but where does efficiency contradict creativity?

What are those two butt heads? And if you’re focused on efficiency, there's creativity start to fade and all of those variables are completely annihilated when it’s a one-man show, right? Because none of those considerations have to take place; there is none of that intellectualization taking place.

It's purely that brute force, start at zero, get across the finish line and that’s an environment I [ __ ] love and thrive in. An environment that’s far more managed is one then I'm like, that’s the thing I’m most excited about really learning.

Are you guys doing any like long-term planning for your lives? Like do you have a long-term goal like Casey or Matt 20 years from now? Yeah, I mean I have a half of one: day three, day five, day one week, one month, three months, six months.

I’m not kidding! One year—all right, what's it—how far out can you go? And I’m all the way to death! All right? Like, I have hired a man or you die. I mean really, like I was curious like how you guys are thinking about the future.

Sure, what you’re working at. To me, like I want to move to Los Angeles on leave and you leave New York City in the next three to five years, and I want to do that because like you know I think New York City is a wonderful place from 20 to 40, but 40 to 60 I want to be out of New York City.

I think New York’s amazing when you’re young and broke or old and rich, and I’m neither of those. So in raise our kids outside of the city. So when I think about that, what the implications could be— you know, even bringing that idea up to Matt very anecdotally he’s like, "Well look! If we don’t—if Beam doesn’t have an office in LA in three to five years we got bigger problems."

And I love hearing that, so it’s like that’s—that’s nothing more than a little sort of nugget that’s a tiny nail for me to start hanging things off of, but this is the kind of planning that eventually—those ideas turn into actionable—that actionable is become much more practical, and three to five years from now, who knows!

But some version of what’s now consideration will most likely be the reality—that’s some broad strokes, that’s a five-year plan. For me, it’s critical to have a totally different career.

Like, I want to—I don’t know when this is, then I have thoughts and timing and yeah I’ve already, I guess you could say I’m probably on my second or third career, but I have a degree in Victorian Studies. I knew this but the listeners did, I also, my first career which lasted at approximately 18 months was in contemporary art.

But no, I think the biggest sort of long-term goal in my head is find success in a completely different career, completely different field; start from scratch; learn something completely different. I have a few thoughts on what the possibilities for that are, but I just think you know I want to basically be at the bottom again and learn how to do something completely different. That’s great!

All right, let’s wrap it up. Thanks, guys! Yeah, of course!