How I Built This with Guy Raz - BARK: Matt Meeker

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

When Matt Meeker started sharing a Brooklyn apartment with a Great Dane, he didn’t know it would inspire him to launch a multi-million dollar company. But, disappointed by what pet stores offered for big dogs like his, Matt co-founded BARK, a subscription service for dogs of all sizes. After launching in 2012, the brand expanded to include food, furnishings, and luxury charter flights, where dogs roam free about the cabin. Along the way, Matt applied critical lessons from his past startups, including a failed text-messaging company, and the social platform Meetup.This episode was produced by Devan Schwartz with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. This episode was edited by Neva Grant, with research by Olivia Rockeman. Our audio engineers were Patrick Murray and Maggie Luthar. You can follow HIBT on Twitter & Instagram and sign up for Guy's free newsletter at guyraz.com.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And if we had done that for the next 12 months, that would have been it. We're done. We're gone. So the immediate challenge is do everything possible to keep this thing alive and floating. and don't die. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how a great day named Hugo became the inspiration for bark, a subscription business that sells toys, treats, and even airplane rides for dogs. It might surprise you to learn that Americans spend more on their pets than they do on cosmetics and footwear combined. In 2023, we spent almost $150 billion on pets, and that's just in the U.S. The opportunity is so big that one company is now offering luxury flights for you and your dog.

A standard one-way ticket from New York to L.A. runs around $6,000. And the seats are going fast. That business is called Bark Air. It's part of a larger company called Bark. That brand was co-founded in 2012 by a guy named Matt Meeker. At the time, Matt was frustrated by the lack of dog toys for large dogs. In his case, a Great Dane named Hugo. So Bark began as a dog toy subscription box,

which eventually morphed into all kinds of dog products, food, treats, furniture, and now chartered flights. Before Bark, Matt and a partner launched an idea back in 1999 that was way ahead of its time, a credit card-sized device that could essentially send and receive text messages. The business flopped after about 18 months, but it taught Matt an important lesson about what not to do when starting a business. A lesson he would definitely apply when he co-founded his next business, called Meetup, and we'll get there. But for now, Matt Meeker grew up in the 1970s and 80s in the small town of Mason City, Iowa. He spent a few years in the Navy and then studied finance and

marketing at the University of Minnesota, where one of his classes made a huge impression on him. And I walk into a class that was called Marketing Communications, and the professor was a visiting professor from the London School of Economics. First words out of his mouth, he said, who in here knows what the internet is? And he got zero hands out of maybe 35, 40 of us, nothing. And he said, from now on, this class is internet 101. It's not marketing communications. If you don't want to take that class, that's fine. But that's what we'll be doing this quarter. And I didn't know what he was saying. I liked him. Just, I liked the person. And it was the most eye-opening experience ever. Instantly, you knew he was talking about something important and big

and that the world was about to change. And I mean, clearly that was a pivotal experience for you because I guess when you graduated, you wound up applying for a job at a digital ad agency in New York called eye traffic. And that was just probably, I mean, 1997 doing that kind of work, right. I mean, you were just at the cusp of a revolution. So there was probably a lot of action there. A lot of action. And by the time I got there, they had signed Disney as a client. And it was just booming. It felt like new things got invented in the world every day. And we were on the front lines of learning about those and then incorporating them into our work instantly. And this was really the sort of the beginning of the dot-com boom era. But I guess, This company that you were with, I-Traffic, it got acquired before all of that happened and

probably got acquired for quite a bit of money. We did. We were acquired by agency.com in December of 1999. It was a great learning for me. This was the first time anyone had talked to me about ownership or equity of the company you work for. And everyone there had equity. My piece of that ended up being $30,000. And to me, that was, that was fantastic. Yeah, it was all the money in the world. It was great. Yeah.

You got a $30,000 payout for just, you know, working there for like, what, two years or something, a little less than two years. Yeah. So when that happened, you know, you're like, what, 26, 27 at that point. Mm-hmm. I guess you start to think about maybe starting your own thing. I did. I knew my time was up and I was looking for. the next thing to do. And I came across this couple who had a bold, ambitious idea at a time where

the whole world had big, bold, ambitious ideas. And who was this couple and what was their idea? Shimon and Robin Neustin. And they had a concept where what they wanted to do was, it sounds silly today, but they wanted to put mobile devices in everyone's hands. And I'm create a text messaging channel that connected everyone in the U.S. Actually, the network that we were using to send the messages was the existing paging network. So we're sending text messages through the paging network, very low cost, into these devices that were the size, the form factor of a credit card, and the credit card had an LCD screen built into it. Imagine going into your wallet today, taking out your credit card and reading a text

message on it. Right. That's what it was. Amazing. I mean, now you've got better options. But yeah, I mean, in 2000, that was like, that could be life-changing. What happened at that company? Because obviously, that device did not come out. And it's, you know, not a story that I've heard of. So what happened? I believe in starting the company, we made every mistake that you could make in starting a company. And for me, I believe that starts with having access to way too much capital leads to some bad decisions. And we had a COO who was a C-level executive at Citibank. And we brought him over. Wow.

We brought over the CMO from AT&T to be our CMO. So you guys are paying big salaries? Absolutely. As a startup does. Great. So you have very talented people. people who are bringing, you know, imagine you're running marketing for AT&T one day and the next day you're trying to start something. You're bringing that approach. Yeah. And it meant we spent

a lot of days in conference rooms talking about PowerPoints. And when we got stuck on things, we hired consulting firms to help solve those. Yeah. So it was just wonderful people who were not meant for that stage. So we took a good idea and didn't, didn't do it well. And probably It burned through the cash? Yes. Like more than $10 million? I would guess more like 30. Wow.

And it wasn't, you were not, I mean, you were, of course, brought on to the team, but you were not the guy who was kind of seeking out the financing. I mean, but you were part of this project. And, okay, and that fizzles out. And so what, I mean, and I guess this is probably, this probably takes you through 9-11 in New York City, right? I mean, you were probably in the city at that time. I was.

and for me, I didn't know what to do. So I kept coming into our office, and I kept working on this problem and trying to start this company that everyone had given up on. And I'm meeting with Schemin, the founder. At the same time, Scott, who was the founder of Eye Traffic, he was also coming off of a failed startup attempt.

And we have a bunch of ideas, and more and more we're hanging out. We're walking around the city. Like you said, it's post 9-11. One of the most striking things in the city then was people actually cared about each other. Yeah, yeah. And you'd walk down the street and people would say, how are you? And they meant it.

They wanted an answer. And it really hit us. So we had a collection of things we could do, ideas we could start. But the one we kept coming back. to was what ultimately became meetup. And one of the inspirational moments for it was, boy, when all these strangers come together and they talk and they actually talk, they really talk and they listen to each other, there's some serious power in that. So this is interesting. This is your friend Scott. And Scott Hefferman, I think is his last name?

Hyferman, yep. Hyferman, okay. And because you guys come up with this idea after 9-11, And like, let's create these sort of a way for people to meet up. But did you feel like, you must have felt like people weren't meeting up in real life? No, we didn't. And there's a really great book from a guy called Robert Putnam. Bowling alone, yeah. Bowling alone. And all the trends there showed that the American community had just disintegrated from the 50s.

Much worse today than it was in 2000. For sure, for sure. And then, of course, all the side effects of that, the health effects, the mental health. So we wanted to create a construct that made it safe for people to come back together and have healthier communities and be closer to their neighbors. And how would they be organized? Like what, like how it was, it wasn't going to be a dating service, right? It was going to be like just gather. But I'm assuming around shared interests. Around shared interest. Yes. So first of all, how did you find? somebody to help you kind of do the tech side of this? It was March of 2002. We put an ad on Craigslist. It was very obnoxious saying interviews are next week.

We were looking for a co-founder CTO. If you're not here in New York City next week, then you can't be interviewed and that's it. Within 24 hours, we had 450 applicants. We chose 60. We did 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. one hour interviews Monday through Friday the following weeks. We interviewed 60 people. And we came out with our co-founder, Peter Kamali. And what about financing? I mean, at this time, again, at this time, it wasn't cheap to start an internet company. It was not. And Scott and I both felt like we had just learned the lesson that too much capital is a bad thing.

And so we we swung the pendulum way to the other side and said, how about zero? How about we raise zero dollars? But to your point, it's hard to rent an office or hire people or really do much of anything with zero. And you didn't have any cash at the time. Very little, very little. So what we ended up raising an angel round of $250,000. And largely from Scott's network. So many lessons in that for me as well. First, I, I asked my parents to invest. They wouldn't do it. And so I invested $10,000 for them because I said they would regret it if they didn't do it. But then you get to the end and I'm sure it's a familiar story for founders of you get a lot of commitments saying I'm in, I'm in, I'm in. But getting that signed document and getting that check is another thing. And so hurting the cats was a challenge. So what we did, it was the exact moment.

where the iPod came out. And we sent notes to all of them and we said, hey, Matt's going to come up and pick up your paperwork and your check. If you hand it to him today, he's going to hand you back an iPod pre-populated with a thousand songs on it. So I went over to the Apple store and so, oh, I bought like eight of those. We loaded them up and I traded iPods for checks. So you raise the money, the initial money you need.

And with that money, the idea was to start, presumably just to start in New York City, right? It's just to see what you could do in the city. No, it was everywhere. Oh, wow. Which probably went as well as that sounds like it would go. You've got a computer in New York City making decisions of how things should go in Moscow. We started with a couple hundred topics.

And then we would tell people it's 7 p.m. at that Starbucks. And how did you get the word? I mean, actually, initially, who did you think would sort of gather together? What were their interests? So the people who were more disenfranchised and in the shadows were the ones who really grasped onto it initially. So it was witches and pagans and vampires and vampire hunters and these real fringe groups and then technology-oriented groups around Python coding language, things like that. I mean, was it hard to get people to kind of trust in it in 2002, 2003?

Like, was it just because people were, I think, you know, wary about meeting strangers through the Internet? It was very difficult, and we would go stalk the local meetups in New York. And there was a common behavior. Worldwide, what we would see is about half of the people who are CP'd would actually show up. Right. And we would go and we'd sit across the street and sort of watch. And you had this common thing where people would walk by wherever the venue was and sort of slow down and look in the window and keep walking slowly but looking. And then they would either go up and they'd circle back and then come in or they'd run.

So they had seen what they needed to see and they made their choice. But it was a new activity and they didn't know what to make of it. Yeah. Yeah. But then, I mean, something pretty significant would happen that would help you guys gain traction, which is that in 2003, Howard Dean announced he was going to run for president. He was the governor of Vermont at the time. And I mean, this was in the days when politicians were like starting to tap into the power of the Internet, right? And it seems like pretty early on, I guess some of his people saw the potential in Meetup, right? Yeah, in February of 2003, a young guy on our team very boldly called the governor's mansion in Vermont and said, well, I have a proposal for you. And that turned into a meeting with Governor Dean and Joe Trippy, his campaign manager at which they said, I intend to run for president. And I don't have a lot of money, but I can promise you this from now until the day I get up. out of the race, I will end every speech I give with join your local Howard Dean meetup. At that point, no one knew who Howard Dean was outside of Vermont. He ended up racing to the head of the Democrat nomination. Yeah, in 2004, yeah. He was a big deal. And so by March of 2003,

there was a good-sized venue on the Lower East Side, New York, and he showed up. And they were opening the windows and there was a huge crowd on the street and about 500 people inside just to hear him speak. And that was the moment we said, like, we did this. And he knew we did it. We did it together. And that catapulted him to the point where every other campaign, Wesley Clark, John Kerry, all of them. Start using it. Yeah, well, came to us and said, can you do for us what you've done for Governor Dean, please. And so presumably they weren't paying for it, right? But there was a business model. Like, you had to pay a membership fee or something to use it or to post? We were scrambling for a business model in the early days.

And so the initial idea for a business model was this will be great for all the businesses. What we'll do is we'll direct traffic into these local businesses and they will pay us for sending foot traffic into their business. So as an example, we sent a group of about 30 people into a Barnes & Noble. in Union Square in New York. And then our smart plan was to call Barnes & Noble the next day and say, see all those people last night? We can do that every day for you if you just passed. And we called them and we said that and they said, that was you.

Don't ever do it again. They weren't ready for it. And so we learned something there. But we really tried everything we could. And we were cobbling it together and making a little bit of money. but it took us probably four years to get to the subscription service. I guess at a certain point, from what I understand, I mean, it got, you know, was starting to get, you know, pretty stable. And I guess around 40 to 50 people now on staff.

And you left in 2008. You decided that you didn't want to be part of it anymore. Can you kind of explain your thinking around that? because, I mean, you know, it seemed like it was just starting to hit its stride. Yeah, it was doing very well. Growing quickly, profitable, supportive investors and board, everything looking very good. And 10 million plus active members worldwide every month. Oh, wow.

At that point, I kind of took a look at it and looked at myself and said, if I had said to myself at the beginning, this is where we would get to, would I be happy with it? And I, absolutely. This would have been a great outcome right here. And the other part was I was feeling very overwhelmed by the size and the size of the team and thinking 45 people, this is enormous. And I think, oh, wow, they're all depending on us to keep this afloat. So it became an overwhelming thought to me. And I decided to opt out for those reasons. So what did you do?

I ran a marathon. Spent a summer training for that. I was trying to find what's next, and I was struggling with that. Sort of looking for that next lightning strike and feeling frustrated by it. Yeah. Were you, like financially, I'm assuming you hadn't made any money yet, right? Because, I mean, Meetup was not, it wasn't acquired, it wasn't sold or anything, or had you? No, it wasn't acquired or sold.

I had taken a little bit of secondary money off the table and enough to sustain me for a bit. And this is going to factor into the next chapter in your life. You adopted dog. Yes. In June of 2010, I adopted Hugo. Right. A little Great Dane. A little Great Dane.

I think a big great. How big was Hugo? Well, what I got him, he was 10 pounds. He grew to be 140 pounds. Wow. That's a human. Yes. dog. So, all right. So, and having a great Dane, and did you live in an apartment, presumably

live in a apartment in New York, right? Yep. Sure did. And a great Dane is like a roommate, not paying rent. Yes, took a lot of space and took a lot of food, a lot of medical care. Tell me how Hugo kind of starts to affect your life and the way you're thinking about a problem that eventually you want to solve. Mainly, I became obsessed with Hugo. And, I loved him more and more and more. He was my first child. And so I fell into the mode of I want to make him happy. And there was a local little pet store right around the corner from my apartment.

And they would hand me a bully stick and charge me $12 for it. And I'd take that home and give it to him. And if I'm honest, Hugo was probably thrilled with that setup. But it wasn't connecting for me. I was just disappointed. with the offerings and tried the local petcoes and pet smarts as well. And it was all the same. And you felt like everything was made for smaller dogs?

Absolutely. Even the food, it took us a while to find the right food for him. And everything was difficult to find the right thing for a great day. And I guess, I mean, how does it kind of lead you to start thinking about? Well, maybe there's something I could do about this. Well, it took a bit of time and there was another intersection that happened. So in April of 2011, I went to a conference called Summit Series. I had never heard of it before.

I was up and coming, but this year they were doing it on a cruise ship. And so it was three days at sea. I was cheap, so I bought the cheap ticket. And what that meant was you got paired with a roommate who you didn't know. And that gentleman was Henrik Werderlin, who's my co-founder in Bark. Wow. And he was just, he happened to be a roommate there. Okay, keep going. And what happened was we had three days at sea getting to know each other and talking about our philosophies. We had both gone through startups in the early 2000s where we raised too much money and flamed out.

We had a lot of shared experiences and ideas about how do you do this. So after summit, we would get together every Friday afternoon for beers and talk about possibilities and ideas. Yeah. And at that time, one of the hot startups in New York was Birchbox. Yes. And so we were looking at that. Subscription service. Yes, subscription service, sending samples of different beauty products.

And we were looking at that and saying, wow, what if we did that for dogs? and we sent samples of food and toys and treats and things that were appropriate for the different size of dog. And Henrik came up with an absolutely terrible name. He's Danish, so we forgive it. But he called it doggy baggy, which was just awful. We said goodbye for that Friday afternoon. And on Saturday morning, I woke up to a mocked up designed home. page of a site. That he put together. That he put together overnight. And he said, I really like this.

And when I got the visual of it, I thought, well, that's interesting. And I had my phone. I took that image and I put it as the lock screen on my phone. And nearly everyone I would come across, I'd show them and I'd say, what do you think of this? And they'd usually say, oh, that's cool. When it's live, let me know and I'll buy it. And there was nothing at that time in 2011, 2012, there was no dog subscription box, it must have been. No, not at all. Wow. But nothing had been designed or built.

So again, this is an image on my phone with now a square account attached to it. So I started to carry a square in my pocket and I'd show people and they'd give me the reaction. I'd plug the square in and I'd say, it's live, swipe your card. And I'd hand the phone to them and their faces would change. They'd be like, well, so the first person. person I did it to is a very good friend. And he said, I don't even have a dog. And I said, well, Evan, you know people at dogs, buy him a gift. Come on. Get out your credit card. And he got out the

card and swiped it. And those were the first two we sold. When we come back in just a moment, how Matt eventually expands the business beyond dog toys to dog food, dog health care, even an airline for dogs. But not cats. Stay with you. with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to how I built this. I'm Guy Roz. So it's 2011, and Matt and his partner Henrik are trying to drum up excitement for their new business idea, a subscription box for dog toys. Meanwhile, to pay the bills, Matt's running a startup incubator in New York called, coincidentally, Dog Patch Labs. So in a way, I got paid to be the co-founder of 20 different startups simultaneously.

Without the headache of sleepless nights or what's going to happen next week or any of that, e-commerce was hot at that point. It was on fire. And so part of my day job was meeting a lot of companies and I'd say a quarter to a third of those were commerce related. Yeah. And I felt so dumb. I didn't know how those businesses worked.

I didn't know how to engage in the conversation and to suss out is there something here. So part of this for me was I want to educate myself through experience as to what's important. How do these things work? So we found our third co-founder at that point. And this was a Carly Strife who had worked at Uber to kind of help you guys turn this into. So she must have been really encouraged by this idea. Did you, and I think this is around the time where you've got, again, I mean, you mentioned Birchbox, we've got Dollar Shave Club. And I mean, there's some really interesting new business models starting up. Was it easier for you guys to raise initial funding and financing for this? We didn't try.

You didn't try. No, not at all. Henrik and I together put in $10,000. And kind of that same story of too much. money or money at all. Yeah. Isn't the type of company we want to build. We want to build something for us and something that's profitable. And this isn't going to be a venture back thing. It's going to be a business that we build. And the idea was when we need it, we'll start to raise it.

We thought we would never raise money. That was the hope. That was the plan. And Henrik and I had no intention of leaving our jobs either. It was like, here's Carly. We'll give her a little bit of money and off she goes. How did you attract her from, I mean, Uber, man, I mean, to leave Uber in 2012 was, you know, I mean, it turned into a massive company, right? 2012 Uber was still early days.

But how did you guys attract her with a very small salary? Presumably, you gave her a big chunk of equity. We did, an equal chunk of equity. So a third of the company. Right. And yes, I hope she's not listening. But it was, she was the 13th employee. at Uber. They had a good start in San Francisco and Travis brought her on and said, we've done this in

San Francisco. We started in New York. And so she was at that time running around making deals with black car services. And I think the line we used with her is, do you want to be a cab dispatcher your whole life? But she was very hungry to start her own thing. And we made this her thing. And we made this her thing. Yeah, and by the way, I mean, what exactly did you plan to put into the subscription boxes at this point? Like, did you have a plan for how you're like, how you're going to source them, the stuff inside? So Carly did the work of what you're doing, asking all the questions of what kind of products do you think and where are you going to get them? I think I think a reasonable question asked. Yeah, and we said those are great questions.

You should answer them. And she's a force. and so as quickly as she asked, she's on a plane in Vegas at a pet show, walking the floor, selling people on this concept and how big it will be and getting them to sell her products that she thought was cool. And she put together products from all these different companies,

sourced them, had them shipped to my incubator. And then in December, we went in, We packed all those boxes. We assembled the boxes into boxes and then we filled them up with the products. And because it was our first one and we're doing it by hand, we're writing holiday notes on the lids of every box on the inside. We got almost all the way through where Henrik said, I have a question, is Holiday spelled with one L or two? And we said, Henrik, it's one L. And he said, should I redo all of these?

And it's like, no, just leave it. somebody will have a story to tell about that. That was month one. And the first box was shipped in December of 2011. Got it. And these are to the initial 50 subscribers, friends that you signed up. Yeah, we sent 78 boxes, I believe. So I guess, I mean, my question is, like, with so little money, right?

I mean, eventually you would not be able to survive. You would have to bring in more money. If you're going to go to, you know, if the idea was to really scale this thing, and even before you scaled, I mean, you would have to buy, get inventory and you would have to ship this stuff out. And what was the, what was the subscription fee every month? How much did it cost? We started at $25 a month. Got it. Okay. And then we heard from people that that's too much. And our reaction to that was it doesn't cost too much.

You just don't love your dog enough for this product. But one of the things I had learned from Meetup was about generating cash flow. I had a cash flow generation trick up my sleeve, offering a long-term discount for prepayment. So saying if you subscribe now for six months or a year and you pay it up front, it's not $25, but it's 20 or it's 18. So today I would collect $200 from you that I owe you back in product over the next 12 months, but now I have $200 a cash that's going to fund this month's inventory. Yeah. And so you could front load the cash and then presumably negotiate with the companies where you buy the products from for discounted prices on their products. That's right.

Yeah. So this launches at the end of 2011. and starting with your friends, right? And but you launch at a fortuitous time because of Groupon. I think Groupon really kind of supercharged your early growth because you are presumably offering a cut rate price to sign up. They were very popular to the point where as we got into 2013, we were calling it, we needed to get off the Groupon crack.

We were just... Because it was probably losing money on those subscriptions. Probably, yes. I mean, we had a very good deal with them. Yeah. But if I remember right, we were selling three months subscriptions for $45, so $15 a month. But you'd probably have a $20 cost of goods in every box. Yeah.

Probably just generated tons and tons of subscribers. It did. I mean, tons and tons is relative, I guess. But that first year we thought we were huge, where we, we ended the year with about 15,000 subscribers. And how did you keep them? I mean, what kind of tactics did you use after those three months ended to retain some of those or many of those subscribers? Well, certainly auto renewing subscription is part of that.

But you're trying to be very responsive. We're very curious. We send out a product to you. We want to hear from you. Did you love it? Did you hate it? if you didn't love it, tell us why. We'll make it right. So I remember the first four months that we were alive, we had no churned. Not one, not one subscriber left. Now, not a whole lot of

subscribers there, but out of over a hundred, no one left. I remember the first one leaving was someone that I knew and I called him and I said, whatever it is, we'll make it right. I'm not, I'm not falling off of this 100% retention rate. Come on, let's do it. So a lot of that idea. A lot of that idea, though, of caring deeply that somebody paid for something and they expect something for it. And if you miss the mark, make it right. Make it unforgettable for them where they just can't leave it. And it becomes hard to do that when you get much larger. At what point did you feel like, or was it clear that you had to raise money, like a year into it? again, I don't know that it was clear, and it wasn't the plan in May of 2012.

Mike Herschland, who had started Dog Patch Labs, and Mike and I obviously worked closely while I was there, and he reached out and said, I'm starting this new fund. Can I invest in this thing? Can I lead around for you? But that came with the string for me of, if I invest, you have to jump in full-time. and be the CEO and run this thing. And that wasn't even something I had considered before then. That was a difficult choice for me.

All right. So what do that mean? I mean, how to tell me sort of more specifically about what you raise and, yeah, and what that meant. We raised $1.5 million. I think it meant you're, come to that fork in the road of if you're taking venture capital on, you're now deciding to build a different kind of business in a different way. Yeah.

And Henrik and I, at least, we knew it was a fork in the road and we were wary of taking it. We were also, I'd say, somewhat inspired by the attraction in those first eight months saying something like this doesn't come along very often. Yeah. It doesn't happen all the time. So when it happens, do you have a responsibility to take on that capital and supercharges? it before someone else does. One of the things that I read at the time, this is around 2013, you had said was,

and I'm assuming this is sort of in reaction to raising capital, because now the ambitions grow and the scale this thing grows. You said, you know, we're the new generation of pet brands. Like we're, we want to be a $5 billion company. You know, pet smart, pet co aren't, they don't speak to our needs. and the needs of millions of dog owners. Yeah, yeah. So there was a lot of ambition behind us.

I mean, you were clearly, you know, kind of publicly saying, you know, sort of planting a flag and saying this is what we're going to be. There was after that turn. And mentally, I had to make a turn, but I certainly didn't want to start something because I knew what comes with starting a new company. I mean, that, for me, it becomes the center of your world. It's your life. and often at the expense of many other things.

Obviously, you couldn't do that other job. That was one thing. Exactly. Mentally, I do very well when I focus on one thing. I'm not great at giving a little bit of myself to this and this and this. And so anything that sort of fell outside of bark or bark box at the time and dogs really didn't get my attention. And so those things suffer. I was married and my marriage suffered and ultimately failed because of it.

And I didn't know that would be an outcome, but it doesn't surprise me either. You were just head down working 18-hour days? It's not about the heads down. I'm at the office at the desk necessarily 18 hours a day, but my head is in it 24 hours a day. My interests are aligned to it. You asked me to go to dinner with friends on a Saturday night, and it's a bother for me because there's something I want to crank on. Even if I'm just sitting in my home, I become consumed by it. Probably unhealthy.

Yeah, but that's, I mean, that's part of the deal. Yeah, it is. So my first question, I mean, this is a question that you would have been asked today if you were starting this business today. But I wonder back then if anyone ever said, you know, the challenge with this kind of business is that it's easily replicable. There's the only thing that you're doing here is just curating products. And there's risk, there's inherent risk to that kind of business. True. But we kind of hit the market at just the right time where when we started, there were 38 million households in the U.S. with a dog.

And today that's 65 million. Wow. In just a decade, a little bit more than a decade. That's incredible. We caught a wave, and we were very lucky to catch that wave. We also caught another wave where it was early 2013. Facebook advertising became a thing. Instagram started to become a thing.

But of course, that would also attract competitors, right? And competitors start to pop up almost within a year of you guys launching. They did. competitors would pop up and they would look exactly like us. And that's where we would stop being worried about them. We'd say if they lack creativity so much that they have to copy us pixel for pixel, that's not a competitor we need to worry about. And we would just,

we would lean on them. They're usually copying the whole playbook. So taking to Google search or Facebook advertising and it's easy enough to just lean on them and outspend them. If you're bigger, we'll bleed you over time. And that happened time after time after time. The other question I have about this time period, right, 2013, I have to mention that especially your investors were like, well, you know, you're calling a bark box now. But really, you have to think about what else you're going to do. And, you know, you're going to want to serve all kinds of pets, not just dogs.

We were very clear from the beginning, only dogs. Only dogs. I hear almost everyone say, the dog is my child. I don't hear a lot of people say the cat is my child. That's true. So let's go deep on the thing that we're good at instead of branching out further into the pet department. We had customers who would contact us early days and say, what about for cats? And we'd say, order the bark box for your dog, take all the stuff.

out, give the box of the cat, ta-da, there's your product. And so what were the things that would stress you out or keep you up at night? I mean, you're growing and acquiring more users. Like, what were some of the things that worried you? Well, we made mistakes. We started a service in 2013 called Bark Care, which was an in-home vet service in New York. and people loved it, dogs loved it, everyone was loving it, but it would have taken us a tremendous amount of capital to do it and scale it the way that it needed to be done.

This was like an on-call vet that would come to your house. Yeah, so we had vets on staff. You'd make an appointment and the appointment happened in your home. Wow. And it was magical, but we couldn't make it work financially with the resources we had. So we shut it down. And what about conflicts? Did you guys, I mean, are you just personality-wise?

Were you just so well-matched? Or did you have disagreements about, I don't know, initiatives or the direction that you wanted to head in? We're very well-matched. Carly and Henrik are two of my best friends in the world to this day. And when there are disagreements, when there were, it was usually between two of us. And so the two of us would be complaining to the third one, who would be taking on board that information and trying to guide us back closer together. And it was never the same too.

It just sort of kept rotating around the triangle. So what we were trying to do was build a company where we could come in every day and be around a lot of people that we just wanted to hang with. Yeah. Like we genuinely liked everyone. And if someone made their way into that, if we made a mistake and hired someone that we didn't like, we got rid of them pretty quick. It's like, you just don't fit. I'm sorry. Nothing personal, but you just don't fit. All right. So the first kind of five years, what I'm wondering is in that

time period with that really rapid growth, because I think by 2016, you're doing like a hundred million dollars in revenue, not yet profitable from what I understand. You must have started to field some acquisition offers or some interest in potentially acquiring the brand. We did. Yes, a few. And you just outright were not interested in having those conversations yet? We had the conversations and we walked away from a couple, but we took them seriously. We just couldn't get there. We're trying at that point to, you take on the new capital. We invested the new capital in the way we said we would.

It was successful. And we get into 2018 and it was a thing that Henrik and I forgot from the beginning. We never looked at the market data or the market sizing and said, let's go here. If we had, we would have never chosen toys. And when we started to look at a market is when we started to make decisions for the wrong reasons. What were some of the decisions you started to make? We started to talk to investors in mid-2018 about another round and the questions were always about food. To make dog food. To make a product in food. We didn't really know what it was. was, but we were starting to sell the idea that investors wanted us to sell them. The toy industry

is relatively small and everyone starts to point us to, well, food's really big. You should get into those bigger categories because you have this great brand and it connects to people and we were just saying back to them what we thought they wanted to hear. And not surprising that that fundraising round didn't turn out well. What it felt like we were becoming, we didn't, we didn't like the feel of it. So we, I definitely freaked out my board and our investors, but walked away from the fundraising round and said, forget it. In 2018. Yeah, we'll just, we'll generate our own cash. We'll be our own company. And they were scared and. And presumably scared, because I'm, I'm pretty sure your growth was slowing. I mean, at this point, your user acquisition was going down. And at the same time,

I have to imagine that your board and investors wanted you to diversify, right? Because you were a subscription service. And I think just the year before, you did start to sell at retail, like start to sell toys at Target? Yep. That's right. In 2017. And they did want us to diversify, but it wasn't leading to the best outcomes. And boy, we were really living hand-to-mouth there from mid-2018 through early 2020. When you say hand-to-mouth, what do you mean? We were running out of cash.

And that model that I talked about early on of how we can generate cash to pay for the inventory today, if you're not growing, it catches up to you and it works in reverse and eats away at your cash. So for about two years, we just ran steady. We grew enough to maintain, but our cash was very flat. Would you call that a much more stressful period than the actual first five years when you were really just a scrappy startup? Definitely more stressful. And I was probably shouldering the stress for our board and our investors where I would say they were downright freaked out.

personally I'm more comfortable with very little cash on hand than with a lot. So it didn't bother me a bit. I feel like I can find my way through that. Right. But I was taking on the stress of everyone else. Yeah. And so, I mean, I guess, I mean, there were initiatives that you launched. Like, first of all, the food idea, you abandoned it, but then you must have come back to it because you do have a food vertical today.

a bark, I think it's called bark eats, right? Exactly. We've gone in and out and out of food. The idea, again, maybe a misfortune of timing, but we went right before the pandemic, we launched a food thing saying, food is food, but what is the service layer that you can apply to it that makes it special? And so we had this concept of bringing back the milkman in the U.S. and we deliver your food to your home. And I think we started that in January, February of 2020. And we found out during a pandemic, people don't really like someone coming to their door and coming in for a conversation about their dog.

So it kind of shot the whole theory right there. But we've continued to try to navigate it. We continue to this day. And there's a concept just on the horizon for food that I think we're all pretty excited about. is very different. All right. So let's talk about the pandemic for a moment. I mean, you, this is actually going to be a boom time for you because there was a, at that

time, there was a spike in the number of people. There was a massive demand for dogs during the pandemic. And there was a shortage. People couldn't get. They couldn't adopt dogs. And I imagine that you must have seen some kind of uptick at that time. We did. It was that.

And now you're home with your dog all day and they need to be entertained because they're bothering you. You're trying to work. But it wasn't that certain. We were scared. Again, we were going month to month on our cash. I remember in March of 2020 having conversations with investors and our banks and saying, well, we'll see. We'll see what retention looks like on April 1st. And then all of a sudden, customer acquisition is just off to the races.

Just booming. So we accelerated very fast through 2020 and 21. You, I think, at the end of 2020, stepped down. As CEO, a couple things were going on. First of all, imagine it was you just went through this two-year period of extreme stress, right? Of just like cash crunch. Tell me about that decision. Well, yeah.

Actually, the decision came almost a year before I did it. So I'd had a couple of conversations with our board saying, I think I need to step down. And they'd say, oh, that's a good idea. We should talk about that of the next meeting. And then it would get punted to the next one and the next. And eventually I said to them, we've got to take this seriously. I really mean it. But the rationale for me was twofold.

It was Hugo was getting old. And I knew his time was limited. And I didn't feel I'd want to be around the company when he passed. And then we also had ambitions of someday being a public company, and I had an idea that I didn't want to be a public company CEO. Fast forward to September of 2020, and Manish steps in as the new CEO of Bark. This is Manish Janaja? Yes. And he was a former, I guess, Amazon executive.

So he comes in as CEO, yep. Yep. Yep. He came over from Amazon, big, dogs. person loved. And a very good guy that I think we put into a difficult spot. You're saying to someone, take on a CEO role, take it on in the middle of a pandemic. You'll live in Seattle, but you'll commute to New York. That's fun. You won't get the opportunity to meet most of the team or engage with most of them. But take responsibility for a culture. And by the way,

we just signed up to do this thing called a SPAC and go public. So now you're going to be a public company CEO. Congrats. When we come back in just a moment, Matt talks about Bark's latest initiative, an airline where dogs get to roam free. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz.

So it's 2021, and Matt's temporarily stepped away from the CEO job at Bark. But he's still getting besieged with inquiries about taking the company public. Not in the usual way, but through a SPAC. Essentially, a way to take Bark public in a faster, compressed time frame without as much oversight. I was getting calls left and right. You called the SPAC craze. Like, everyone was coming at me saying, we want to merge with you and our SPAC. And I kept pushing away saying, this is a fad, this is a fad.

Yeah. And I asked around for someone who could teach me about it and got introduced to a guy named John Ledecki. And John was introduced to me as the godfather of SPACs. And John gave a lot of advice and he knew the subject matter quite well. And then shortly after John formed a SPAC and said, now I have a SPAC and I think we should merge and you should do it quickly and here's why. and John's theory, which turned out to be right, he's usually right about most things. He said,

Chewy stock is at an all-time high. The pet category is on fire. And what that means is Chewy is the only public pet company. That means January 1st, there's going to be a line of these people signing up for SPACs. You don't want to be the eighth company.

You want to be the first one. So you have access to the best quality capital out there. which means we got to go now. We got to go fast. That was mid-November. And we went fast. We did a two-day virtual road show in mid-December of 2020. Yeah, we went out to raise $100 million through that pipe process. We had an interest of nearly $500 million. So we ended up raising $200 from that in addition to the SPAC funds. He was absolutely right. The market was very hot. and the third, fourth, fifth, sixth didn't have nearly the same success that we did. You stepped away for about, I think, about a year and a half and came back as CEO in early

2022. Tell me the thinking behind it. I mean, when you had left, did you think it was temporary? Or did you think that it was for good? I thought it was for good. We brought in Manish. I moved to Florida with my wife, followed her for her. job and I thought that was that. And then in December, late December, December 28th of 2021,

Hugo passed away. And my feeling was the opposite of what I expected, which was more this company is his. It's his legacy. I can't entrust that to someone else, regardless of how I felt about them, I felt deep responsibility to make sure that that legacy lived on. And so I had this strong urge or desire to jump in and that I don't want to speak for Manish, but if I'm reading the room, it coincided with Manish's probably feeling very burnt out. And he's a very positive, energetic person who was just feeling worn out. So I think we call him. So I think we caught each other at just the right moment. All right. So you come back and you've got a big task ahead of you because, you know, this is a business that you launched at the end of 2011. There was

massive rapid growth. You know, you saw it go public. And, you know, I'm sure this is, you know, not fun to be reminded of, but still was and is not profitable. And so what did that mean, I mean, were you, did you feel like, I'm assuming you felt a charge to kind of get it to that place? More than a charge. Our fiscal year ends March 31st. I came back January 11th. So that year ending March 31st, we burned $194 million. And if we had done that for the next 12 months, that would have been it.

We're done. We're gone. So the immediate challenge is don't die. just do everything possible to keep this thing alive and floating and and looked at every angle to do that and got the unit economics in shape, got the supply chain fixed, brought on really great talent, brought on a fantastically talented CFO, brought discipline to the business, right-size the team.

There are a lot of those things that are difficult in the moment. They're not fun in the moment, but it was just survival mode. and we have really turned that around and gotten ourselves into profitability and into cash flow generation. And now that's starting to compound. So tell me about, you know, where you see opportunities, right? It's a different marketplace. It's harder to acquire users today. Instagram and social media is just harder.

I mean, a lot of people say it's just not worth it. You spend more than you actually get in return. I mean, what is sort of, give me a sort of sense of the playbook. I mean, is it, is it expanding product offerings? Is it trying to get into a bunch of different spaces and seeing what works and what might not work? I think it's returning back to who we are and what we're good at. One of the things that we're great at and we have big advantage in is toys. And it does get, it gets poo-poohed by a lot of people because, well, that's only three and a half billion.

dollar industry and you already own 10% of it. Okay, but we don't own 90% of it. So I understand relative to food, it's one tenth the size, but this is one thing that we're very good at. And there are a lot of places that we don't show up and a lot of different types of products that we can create and we can invent. You have your own design, in-house design team. We have our own In-house design team. We have a very strong supply chain. We're about as close to being vertically integrated on the toy side as you can be without being vertically integrated. You don't own your factory, for example. We don't, but we're getting closer. So we're inching in that direction. Right. We need to show up where the customers are as well. So one way we're growing very rapidly

right now is Amazon. People love their Amazon Prime. Yep. So let's be a great product company and put our products where where the people are. One of the things that you guys have do, and I think, I imagine this is not a huge part of your business, but it certainly has generated a lot of news stories is you are working with some charter airlines to offer flights for humans and their dogs. It's really hard to bring dogs on airlines now. They're really cracking down. Most of most airlines just don't allow, and certainly big dogs don't allow them. on there are a couple of smaller companies like Jet SuiteX

here in the Bay Area they operate here and you can fly with your dog on those flights. So you are doing a version of this, right? You're basically working with charter companies to like fly between New York and London, like long haul flights. Yeah, and this is a classic, huge problem for people with dogs and especially those with larger dogs,

which has a special place in my heart, obviously. But we are, we're going every other way, week between New York and Los Angeles, every other week between New York and I'll say London, but we mixed Paris in there too. Those tickets are $6 to $8,000 one way. And we're sold out in September. We were sold out in August. So we're not flying enough at those prices. But the other thing that I'm obsessive about right now is how do you take a $6,000 ticket and turn it into a $600 ticket? it and really, really solve this problem. Yeah.

And so the flights you're offering, you literally can have your dog, like, out of a cage, like next to you in the seat, right? In the seat, on the floor at your feet. But they usually wander around and say hello to everyone else. And there's so many touches to this experience. It's the dogs are served meals. The dogs get their drinks first, then the humans. the dogs are our pilots come back and say come on bring your dog up front I'll put them in the

captain's chair we'll take some photos so mid-flight the dogs are up there flying the plane yeah it's everything is built around them and their comfort and how many I mean how many flights are you doing a week now two two week how I mean how do you how much time do you do you give a new initiative like um you know bark someone's like let's do bar Eric Air and was like, cool, love that idea. Obviously, I'm sure you did some research before, but in your mind, like, how much time before you pull the plug on something new? Like six months a year, two years? I think it depends. There are a lot of factors in that. It's the capital being burned, the consumer reaction, your belief that you have, you have line of sight to

something that works and can be meaningful. Bark Air right now, customers love it. We have, have ideas of how it expands. We have line of sight to, how do we get to that $600 ticket? We have a very clear line of sight to doing that, I'd say, in the next year. So that's one where the good idea is panning out better than I could have ever hoped. So, I mean, is getting to, I mean, you mentioned, you know, your revenue is public, right? So I think your revenue is about a half a billion dollars a year, which is a nice, healthy revenue. You're much higher than your market cap, so you have reasons to be optimistic. But do you have a timeline in mind of when you, when you hit equilibrium, when you hit profitability? This year. This year. Yeah, we've turned

in those profitable quarters. And our fiscal year 22, when I stepped in, we lost $57 million. The next year, it was 31. Last year, it was 11. This year, we should. make four or five million dollars and up from there. And what I say to people now is I intend to die in the saddle. It truly, it goes back to Hugo and that responsibility and the legacy. But I say that knowing that I'm a month away from having a baby boy. A human child. A human child, yes. Yeah. Maybe that becomes my obsession. And, you know, if you'd ask you'd have me if I'm going to be in the pet industry in 2010, I would have thought you were crazy. But right now my intention is this is my life's work.

Matt, when you think about where you are and what, you know, I think you've done pretty well from some of the businesses you've been involved with, how much of where you are now and what you're running and what happened in your journey do you attribute to the work you put in and how much you think has to do with luck and timing and good fortune? I definitely work hard at it and always have. But some of this, like, you know, I think it goes back to when we were talking about 2018 and not raising that money. And there wasn't a clear idea of how do we get this accelerating again and to profitability. It was about hanging on. And we hung on 18 months there. And then the pandemic came and your fortunes changed. The world changed around you. and we got lucky. We were in the right place at the right time in 2011 with the right product. We didn't do some market study. So sometimes it's just grinding away until the world turns in your favor and working hard through it and making smart sensible decisions along the way. That's Matt Meeker, co-founder and CEO of Bark.

By the way, just getting back to your thing about cats for a second, Do you just not like them? I mean, do you do not like cats? I'm okay, okay. Whatever. Just lay it online. I mean, come on. I mean, it sounds like you hate cats.

I don't hate cats. I won't go that far, but... You deeply dislike them? Eh. Cats are amazing, amazing animals. I would encourage you to start the cat company. Go for it. There is nothing.

Like watching a kid and chase a laser pointer. Like, there is nothing. not a single animal on planet comes close to the entertainment value of a cat chasing a laser pointer. It's just unfreaking believable. I'll give you that. You're basically a huge opportunity.

There's a lot of custom laser pointers you could put in those boxes. 12 months of laser pointers. I love it. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show.

And of course, it's free. And if you're interested in, insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my newsletter at guyraise.com. This episode was produced by Devin Schwartz with music composed by Rumptina Arablui. It was edited by Neva Grant with research assistants from Olivia Rockman. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Maggie Luthor. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, J.C. Howard, Sam Paulson, Chris Messini, Carrie Thompson, John Isabella, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.