How I Built This with Guy Raz - Live From HIBT Summit: Payal Kadakia, Tristan Walker, and Perry Chen on Innovation

Episode Date: July 22, 2021

Our second episode from the 2021 How I Built This Virtual Summit is from our innovation panel with Payal Kadakia of ClassPass, Tristan Walker of Walker and Company, and Perry Chen of Kickstarter. In this live conversation with Guy, the panel talks about how innovation doesn't require newness, but rather, authenticity. We'll be releasing more episodes from the Summit, so keep checking your podcast feed. 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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It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hey, everyone, it's Guy here. Welcome to a very special edition of how I built this. So you might have heard that back in May, we held our first ever live virtual how I built this summit.

Most of the time we do it in person, but for obvious reasons, we had to go virtual this year. But still, more than 3,000 people from around the world attended. And this summer, we're releasing some of our conversations from the summit here on the podcast. Today, we've got one of those conversations. It was a panel discussion on innovation with three incredible founders, all of whom have been on how I built this in the past. So you're going to hear from Pyle Kodakia of Class Pass, Tristan Walker of Wynne Walker, of Walker and Company and Perry Chen of Kickstarter. We started off by talking about how each of them came to their ideas.

And before Perry Chen launched Kickstarter, he actually had no intention of starting a business. I wasn't coming from entrepreneurship and I wasn't working in business at all. I was DJing and working on electronic music. And, you know, I had this idea and it wasn't in my field. It's just an idea. And so you assume, you know, there's probably something wrong here. It's the kind of problem that comes up a lot, like funding. So every project I'd have, I'd be like, where could I get money for this?

So every time it would come up, it would be like, well, why doesn't this thing exist? Yeah. And I'm usually pretty good with those things. And, like, you know, in a couple days, it will come to me. And I'll be like, ah, of course. And that just never happened. And so I just never let go in a way, or it never let go of me. I kept feeling like this should exist.

I think that's kind of maybe the best way to say it. This should exist. Yeah. And maybe Tristan, maybe that's what you were feeling as well with your project. And at a certain point, you kind of just feel like, well, maybe I need to make this happen for this to exist. I felt disrespected. And I felt we all deserve to be respected, not only as people, but also as consumers. So what should exist? Respect.

For me, it was respect in my retail experience when I walked down an aisle. It was respect to, you know, have efficacious products that do what you say they're going to do. It's respect in terms of how we kind of build a company and a brand and the people that are employed within it. So for me, it started as a frustration. I felt disrespected. And the result of those two things made me recognize the should in it. And we went right after it. I think that's a really important point, Tristan, because we don't often talk about anger or frustration.

Well, frustration we talk about, but about anger or feeling disrespected as an engine for creativity. is an engine for innovation. It can actually be a hugely powerful catalyst. That's right. Isn't that what founders do? I mean, our job is to solve problems, right? I always think about that. Like, it's the first question I ask an entrepreneur

when they're telling me about their product of like, what problem in the world are you solving? Right? Because that's usually, that means that there's not a solution that exists today and there needs to be a new blueprint for it. Yeah. Yeah, I think there's the scratch your own it thing, right? And everybody on the panel today is talking about having started something that addresses a problem that they were facing right in front of them.

And that versus what a tweens want right now is definitely the way to go. And you're so much more likely to be successful if you're solving a problem that you have so you know when you're really solving it. You don't have to focus group it. Paul, I want to ask you about the inspiration, one of the inspirations behind class best. Remember in the podcast you talked about being inspired by brands like Open Table and ZocDoc, which is a platform that connects patients to doctors. And your innovation was essentially taking a version of that concept and applying it to health and fitness, right? Yep. So, you know, Class Pass started because of my passion for dance, right?

And I was always going to classes. I was always finding a way in my busy schedule. Like most people, I had a job that I felt like I was responsible to take after college, and I had to kind of go and do the normal thing. But I wanted to keep dancing. So I was that person who was always looking for classes, you know, to fit between my lunch break or fit after work. And one day for me, I hit that moment where I realized that technology could really solve this. And I was really inspired by companies that had sort of already done this offline to online model, right? So things like Zoc Doc, open table, seamless web.

And this was 10 years ago, so I feel like there's so many more now, obviously, in the breadth of this. But at the time, I remember looking at those companies and realizing that, hey, why couldn't I do this for the class space? You know, it's a very similar model where people need to go and do something. It was inefficient. People need to book appointments. And if we could solve this via technology, I quickly thought that because this worked in another industry, it would work in mind. but I was very easily proven wrong. You know, I remember, Perry, I remember one of the things that was unusual, certainly when you started out, was given that, you know, Kickstarter is essentially technology company, took you a long time.

I mean, comparatively a long time to stand it up. And I remember you describing like almost three years to get it up and running. And there were moments where you weren't sure whether it was going to work and, you know, just this long, long slog. And I remember you told me during that time, you and your co-founders made every mistake in the book. Tell me about some of those mistakes that you made. And what, you know, what did you learn from those mistakes? I had never worked at a company, period. I was to work living a musician's lifestyle in New Orleans.

And so I didn't know anybody at all, period, to talk to. So I spent so much time, you know, kind of in a vacuum on my own, conceptualizing it. By the time I was able to find people that could help program it and do things like that, it had been incubating in my brain for so long, so long that the web had changed to where the initial idea happened. It was before YouTube. So I was like, I didn't even think, I was like, there wouldn't be a video there.

It would be just an image. By the time we actually got years later to where they're actually building it, YouTube it happened. I'm like, okay, great. So now it's a video. That's amazing. That's amazing. That's so funny.

And in Pile, I mean. It took you, like Perry, a few years to get the product right, but, but, and to make, well, to make the business model work. But unlike Perry, I mean, you were iterating this in real time while customers were actually using your product. So you were testing it out. It wasn't quite right. You would go through several iterations. But you were learning what wasn't working in real time, right? Yeah.

I mean, actually, Perry, when you were speaking about your starting journey, I feel like that was the exact thing that happened to us. I mean, the first product we built, we spent half a million dollars building it, a year in the making. We actually got into this huge incubator, so we thought it was going to work. And I always think back to even like the mistakes we made. And one of the things I was now I'm so wary of is something I call like false signals of success, which are things like you can have funding or press or followers. And that still does not mean anyone is going to use your product. And I think, like, for me, when I think about that moment when we launched and no one went to class,

I think that was really heartbreaking. But I think back to what Guy was just talking about, since it took me three years to sort of get one booking on the platform, I think once I earned that relationship and that right with my customer, I kind of started realizing, like, I could test with that. And I think it, because I had failed for those three years before it started working, I think it made me more resilient to test things once it was actually one. right. So yeah, we changed from having different plans to going to a credit model, to launching new products like video and even new categories in the past five years. I think it just taught us how to be resilient and figure out a way to get back to the mission, back to moving forward, and not changing what we're doing every day. But I think failure is hard and I think a lot of

people stop in that moment. But for us, it was more about improving the model to get to a better place for our customers, our partners, and our business, ultimately, because it doesn't work if one side is benefiting at the benefit of the other. You know, sticking with this idea of small tweaks and tweaks and tweaks, Tristan, I always think about how you, it wasn't only that you were taking an old technology and reviving it, but it was also how you approach the packaging and the design and that you wanted it to be beautiful and that you wanted it to make that whoosh sound like when you open the iPhone box. You wanted it to be, you didn't want to be hidden down on aisle nine at the bottom at the drugstore, but right there

next to other high-end products, high-end shaving products. That was the innovation that you were baking into in old technology, right? It's, forget the technology. It's the service and the experience, you know? Yeah. It was so far removed from what we were used to. First of all, to get a beautiful package, to have a product that works. If you didn't know how to use it, you could hit us up. We'll do a Skype video check to teach you how to shave. We did things that didn't scale. So for us, this is about the little things.

And not only that, like, yes, it was far removed. And to the consumer, it felt perfect, but we knew it wasn't perfect. So I think the true innovation that we built into the platform that we were hoping to create was this idea of continuous improvement in the same way that you think about, software, right? Like, send out this release to the app store, right? Nobody had thought about that for hardware. And, you know, over time, the first five years of the business, yes, we launched that razor. But people don't know, we made continuous multiple improvements of that razor in our manufacturing lot. Our trimmer, when we launched, we never had a V2. We always had a V1.01,

0.03, right? And now we have something that we are uniquely proud of. So I kind of took what I had learned in the technology companies that I was a part of before, software companies that kind of already had that continuous improvement baked in and thought, how can I bring that to hardware in the analog? And I think that was the thing that was differentiated in a CPG industry that operates on two-year cycles. We operated on three to six months cycles. So that innovation continued over and over again and still continues to this day. You know, I'm curious, this is a question for all of you, but I want to start with you, Pyle, which is as you were, you know, during the process of kind of reimagining and reimagining and iterating and changing the business model and how did you know that you weren't necessarily losing sight of the vision and how did you know what it meant to stay on track? Because I'm sure a lot of people watching right now are like, yeah, I'm not sure if the thing I'm doing is exactly.

right, but I'm not sure if I should change it too much. I just don't know what to do. So how did you know? Such a great question. And it took me, I wish I knew this answer earlier. It took me three years to figure it out. The thing that mattered to the most was getting someone to class. That's all that mattered, because that was the mission. That was engagement. That was revenue at the end of the day. It was the leading metric that would tell me how my product was working if my partners were happy. But I didn't know that in the beginning, right? Because in the beginning, everyone tells you to create a business model and you're looking at revenue, you're looking at profit, you're looking at costs, like you don't know exactly what number to focus on. And over time, and I still always make

this the most important number that my team sees, it's the reservation number because that is the heartbeat of the company. That means our product is working. That means our partners are happy. That means our customers are engaged and are going to continue to pay us the following month if they're going to class, right? So to me, it was about figuring out what that metric is. And It kind of goes back to like that question I was thinking about earlier whenever I asked somebody, you know, what problem in the world are you solving? How will you know when you've solved it, right? So what's the action your customers are going to be taking? So it took me a little bit to figure it out.

But for me, it was knowing what the metric was. How about you, Perry? When did you, I mean, three years, you scrapped a whole, you know, year of work. How did you know that you were on the wrong track and when did you know that you were on the right track? Well, at that point, I was in my co-founders. We were so in it. I think I said this one when I was on the show that at a certain point, it had taken so long. And you have these calamitous things happen where they're like, the year is gone.

And then the money you spent on that is gone. And also, it's an indictment on you because how could you make such a mistake? That I switched my goal from like, I can't wait to create this thing because I think it's going to have really great impact to, I, just need to launch this thing so that everybody I know doesn't think I was making up that I was working on this thing. But to your question, I think it's just that you do have to be diluted when you're in those stages. You have to not think about the odds, you know, you have to have just incredible belief that it is worth it. I didn't really have a vision of what that meant, how big or numbers or this or that at all. It just felt.

this thing, it was worth it, I think a big part of it was because it was something I would want to use and something that a lot of people I knew would want to use. I didn't know what that scaled to. And by the time I was that far down the road, like I was so soaked in the belief of it. I just needed to get to where we would just launch it and put it live. That was the goal. Tristan, when you were, and as you continue to innovate and develop, I mean, but certainly in the early, early days of Walker and Company, now you've got a men's product line, women's product lines, and obviously product lines for, you know, folks who are non-binary, but for anybody. But how did you deal with uncertainty, the uncertainty of whether a product that you were

working on was going to work? Because part of innovation is also dealing with the uncertainty that it could fail. It was funny. I was quite certain. You know, remember, you get immediate feedback. You use this thing, you either have brazen bumps the next day you're done. My not getting it

the next day was a breakthrough. It's hard to explain the moment, right? 15 years, and I only had to use that one product, and I did it, it worked. I asked another friend who looked like me to use it,

and it worked. 80% of us have this issue. 30% of people who don't look like us have this issue. I knew the product was going to work. At the earliest stages, the thing that I was also certain about was I wanted to kind of inspire for the next 150 years. I wanted to inspire the majority

of the world, folks of color, to say, you know, we're looking out for you. What the company was going to end up being in year 150, that's what I was uncertain about, right? And it's funny, I speak to, you know, a whole bunch of journalists or just people. And they're always like, you know, where do you see yourself in five years? And it's always an impossible thing for me to answer. I always say, you know, I know where I'm going to be in 12 months, and I know where I'm going to be in 150 years. 12 months is very tactical. And the five-year plan is just a set of well-executed 12-month plans, right? So that's how I've tried to manage it.

I can only control the next 12 months, and I can try to steer the ship toward the 150-year true north. But all the stuff that happens in between is really, really messy. And I just need to ensure that my team is ready for the messiness. When it comes to an idea, right? It's, I mean, people say where ideas come from? And, Paul, you said it earlier, you look for a problem that you have ideally or that other people have and you try and solve it. But sometimes, oftentimes, and I know this happened with all three of you, you have lots of ideas before you land on the idea that you actually pursue. Tristan, you had an idea for a logistics company.

You had an idea, you had a bunch of ideas before you landed on this idea that you were sure of, that you had this. sense of certitude around. Did you need to go through, I mean, I'm assuming you had to have, do you have to go through the process of thinking through other businesses you could start? And you must have had doubts about whether those would work because you didn't start those. Guy, I wasted a lot of time. It's not a waste of time. No, it was a complete waste of time.

I had to come to the ultimate conclusion that I had to do the thing that I felt uniquely positioned to do. I think all too often I speak to a lot of entrepreneurs. Look, there are 8 billion people on the place. each of whom has a unique lived experience. No one has lived my life. And for a while, I was almost embarrassed to tap into that lived experience. You know, imagine how much better the world would be if all eight billion people tapped into that lived experience to build the thing that they were uniquely positioned to do. And I try to encourage people to get as quickly as possible to recognizing

what that is. And then you can innovate. And the way that that scales guy is to hire people who reflect the, well, at least in my case, the diversity of the consumer base that we wanted to serve, but also provide an opportunity and grace and space for those people to be who they are. Now our innovations, plural, can scale. Pyle, you are, I mean, you're like a world-class dancer, and one of your initial ideas was, you did,

you started a dance troupe. I mean, that was really where your focus was. You had other ideas before you land. on class pass. Yeah, so I think for me, I think starting my dance company was one of those entrepreneurial endeavors for me where kind of what Tristan was saying, I needed to break free of what I think society wanted me to do. And I needed to just start being creative and being a leader and following something that felt more like me and my calling. And so I think starting my dance company helped me on that path. But I knew that there was like something else that the world was going to

need for me. And I think when I hit that problem of looking for the classes that day, I just remember thinking in that moment, even though I didn't necessarily know what the product idea would be, I felt like I was the person who was going to solve this, because I was the one who cared enough to solve it for people. I was the girl who was, you know, 25 years old inviting her entire company to her dance show when no one else was doing that. And it was because I felt like passions were so important to keep in our lives. And I think that was the missing ingredient. And that was the fire for me that I knew was going to help me put together sort of my intellectual side with my creative side. And I think that's really like back to what Tristan was saying, like this

moment for me where I was like, I'm going to keep doing this until I figured out. I didn't know what the product was. So as you know, we said, like the company was still class fast. I mean, I changed the name three times and I changed the product probably 50 times. But in a way, it started that day because the mission never changed, right? And I think back to like, I realized as a founder from day one, I was going to be mission obsessed, not product obsessed. To me, my product helped serve my mission. And I think that's where innovation comes from. It's not about being sort of tied into a product idea. And honestly, like, I was my first product launched and I remember the day I shut it down. It was a hard conversation to have with my team to say, you know, we're going

to go in a different direction. But I knew I wasn't serving anyone, just having a beautiful website out that was serving no one to go to class, right? So entrepreneurship comes with these. really hard decisions that you have to make, but it's these hard decisions that really gets you to the other side. And I think now, like, I'm so used to failing. I'm so used to making these decisions because I also know the Nord Star of where I'm going. When we come back in just a moment, more of my conversation with Pyle Kedakia, Tristan Walker, and Perry Chen, and whether entrepreneurs who want to be innovative actually have to come up with new ideas. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

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Listen now to every episode of the new podcast on our watch from NPR and KQED. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So as part of the innovation panel at our virtual How I Built the Summit back in May, I spoke with Tristan Walker of Walker and Company, Perry Chen of Kickstarter, and Powell Kodakia of ClassPass. And here's more of that conversation. Perry, I think unlike Tristan and Pyle, I could describe you more as an accidental entrepreneur Is that fair? Yeah, I'll take it.

Yeah, right? I mean, Tristan and Pyle were going to start businesses. They were thinking of ideas, something was going to happen. You were a musician. I mean, that was your focus. But this kind of came into your mind because you had to solve this problem for yourself. Right. But were you thinking about other business ideas before you came upon Kickstarter?

No. I mean, I tend to have a lot of ideas. I'm sure everybody who you meet God does. But they would be everywhere. You know, it'd be like, oh, doc, that's documentary film idea. That's a this, that's a that. So, you know, it was all over the place and not typically businesses at all. So I don't really recall any other ones that really were things that I had kept around as pet ideas.

So you're right. And I think in a way that probably gave me more confidence because, you know, this is not something that I gravitate to doing. I'm not, I don't, it's not an idea I had for myself was to start a, business. And so in a way, probably it wasn't forcing anything like we all have. I've talked to a lot of people that are starting things, they're interested in starting things, and those conversations about, is this the right idea? And I've seen that struggle from the other side of sitting across for people like that. And I wonder sometimes that, not that people don't ask themselves that question when they go on to have successful businesses, but there is a level of question

with that sometimes, which leads me to think that this is probably not your idea, because sometimes the way people are questioning it shows their own lack of belief in it. And sometimes it's a clever idea, but sometimes a clever idea is not the right idea. And it's hard for people to let go of things that are clever, because you can often get patted on the back for a clever idea. And it works really well in conversation. But if you don't have a deep connection to it as the entrepreneur, you just have a connection to the cleverness of it. It's going to be hard to to persevere through all the trials and tribulations that you're going to need to go through to get to the other side. I don't think it's accidental at all. I know hindsight is 2020

on it a bit, but this was not my first passion. This was my last passion, you know. Pyle wanted to dance. I wanted to play basketball, right? You know, Perry wanted to DJ. Well, I wanted to DJ too, so we got to, I got to hang up there. But I think we, the kind of wonderful binding fact about the three of us is that the idea came to us at the right time, at the right moment. And I think that there's a beauty and a purity in that, right? Like it came authentically and we didn't force ourselves on it. So I don't think it was accidental at all. We just did it at different paces.

But you have to do the work of interrogating yourself, interrogating everything around you to come up with. the idea. I mean, that's, it's like, you know, mining for a tiny sliver of gold. It could take years to find that bit of gold. You have to, I mean, you said that you wasted time, but you didn't. You had to go through that. Well, I think that there's just two things. Number one, you got to live and keep your eyes open, right? That's number one. And then the only other requirement is to have courage, you know, like Perry was working at restaurants and still making it happen, right? Like, Pyle's still dancing. That's awesome. Right?

You know, you've got to have the courage and you've got to pay attention. Yeah, the courage is a great point, you know. And maybe it's the same thing, but maybe the way I've always thought about it is kind of risk tolerance, I suppose. And that delusion, I think, too, which I think is common in artists as well.

You kind of just like, there's an idea or something, anything where you're conceiving of something that doesn't exist and you have to bring it to life and it's not so easy, there is this delusional. illusion, you know, that takes over that I think is important in a way to carry you through it. I have a philosophical question for all of you. It's sort of a broad question, which is how important is it for the idea to be completely new, totally innovative, or can it just be a

slightly elegant tweak, as I was describing earlier? I mean, if somebody's coming up with something, does it have to be something totally, completely new? Does that even, is that even possible? I don't think it's a requirement of tribe building to have newness. The tribe building just requires soul. It requires values alignment. I mean, our innovation existed 100 years ago. I don't think newness matters. In fact, it's like that couple in the Midwest running an HVAC business for their local community that everyone calls on when they need their HVAC fix. Right? Like, that's tribe building. And you could build something really successfully for that. And I think the thing that matters most is how big do you want it to be? Because not everybody wants it to be that big.

And that's a really important nuance that needs to be respected. Newness is not necessary. Soul is. Yeah, I think it's not necessarily about newness, but it's about having a unique perspective, right? Like, I think there has to be something you're looking to improve, right? Or maybe the world changed and something that worked before isn't working anymore, but you need to add a new perspective to it. Because at the end of the day, and I even think about this with class pass a little, like, I'm actually not a fitness person at all. And there were a lot of fitness products in the market

that were actually speaking to the 1% of people who already did fitness. And I realized I wanted to go and talk to the 99% of people who were like me and who were scared to walk into a spin class because they didn't know how to clip on their boots. And that was a whole other market. So to me, it was actually about the unique perspective of saying, wait, there's a different customer here that actually doesn't know how to approach this market and get into it. And we can massively grow an entire industry if customers would go there. So I think it's really about honing in onto something that is different. Yeah, I think it's an interesting question.

And the first thing that came to my mind is just, you know, I think it also depends what the entrepreneur wants. You know, I mean, I think certainly we've seen businesses be successful that are just small, small, but important changes, or even the same business, but just in a different market. You're in a different region, you're a different country. A successful business may not rely on it, but successful business also relies on the entrepreneur being kind of immersed and enjoying their job through the long slogs as well. So, yeah, I don't know. I think it's two ways of looking at it. One of the things that I know a lot of people, because I've been bouncing around to these networking sessions that we do earlier in the day and hearing people's ideas. And, you know, one of the challenges, as you all experienced when you started out, when you put something out into the world that is slightly different or innovative or unfamiliar, it's explaining it to people, helping them understand why the world needs this. How are you all able to navigate that? because that can be really frustrating. I mean, you were repeating the same story hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times. You know what's interesting from class past perspective?

Like, I realized early on that my best marketing method was going to either be sort of tricking people into using it or getting their friends to tell them about it. And I realized that early on. And so one of the things we did and we figured this out early on is we gave away Lou Lemon gift cards for anyone who joined and stayed for six months. So we said, hey, this is a $99. product, you get a $100 gift card if you stay for six months. Everyone was obviously so excited to get the $100 Lulam and gift card, but what they ended up going on was the journey. And it was actually very hard to explain what ClassPass was because it was such a real life thing that people needed to actually use. And I couldn't always explain it in marketing because it felt like a lot of just

salesy words of go discover or go. And everyone was like, they could have actually done what Class pass did without class pass, right? But they didn't do it anyway. So what was going to be unique here? And then the other big thing, and I think like this is what really, this is when I knew this we were really onto something. It was the viral coefficient of every person saying, I'm going to have five of my friends join this, right?

And when you build a product like that that people want to talk about and share, I think there's really a lot of magic to that. And that was something that, you know, for us, we focused in on. Yeah, you know, going from, I think the time most when I was explaining it, was before we had launched. And I'm sure everybody here remembers, like the difference between when you can show people or something or they can just go look at themselves and you are just abstractly words,

like telling them through words, it's absolutely night and day. Once you move to that point, and depending on what you're working on, it could be earlier, it could be a prototype or it could be, but it's so much better to just show people, or even more so for them to just,

for them to use it, and then maybe your response to a few questions. But by the, let's talk about the most, I mean, the elephant in the room, which is the past 15 months that has forced for better or worse innovation across the board. I mean, not just in the way we work and the way we're interacting right now, the fact that we're doing this virtual summit. We have actually, this has been one of the most innovative years in my life, if not the most, for how I built this, for my children's media company. We make a kids programming.

You know, it's been actually, it's forced us, and it's been difficult, been very difficult, but it's forced us to make changes that will accelerate our growth, hopefully, and certainly is accelerated changes. Tell me about how the past year has changed the things that you all have created. Look, for the past year, I've had to expand my capacity for empathy in ways that it would have never expected, five years ago. That's a good thing, right? It's a good thing for me as a dad, as a husband, as a CEO, right, as a board member, that sort of thing. In service of our consumers, too. Right? That expansion of capacity for empathy means, you know, we got to remember that employees, consumers are people, right? They're people. And we talked a little earlier about like, you know,

how do you know that you're certain that the idea is going to work? This is what I mean by the 12 month and 150 and the messiness in between, none of us would have predicted this. I'm so grateful that we set up an infrastructure to help prepare us for it. And that preparation is just giving people the grace to have that empathy, right? So, you know, one of the kind of best lessons that I've learned here in Atlanta, CEO of Delta, Ed Bashan, he said something to me recently that really stuck with me. He said, let us just hope that we never get too busy to not have the space to reflect again, right? This past year has provided us space and patience to think so that we can actually act in the way that consumers expect, employees expect,

and our families too. That's beautiful. You know, for us, mandated by the government, almost every studio is shut down, right? Within two weeks of COVID starting. So that was like a 95% drop in revenue. It was just a shutdown completely. And I mean, for us, we wanted to make sure we were very empathetic for our customers, right? I think that was first step. It was making sure we turned off all accounts, making sure no one was being charged. It was obviously the whole world needed to go through this. And we didn't know how long it was going to take. And that was, I think, the hardest part is the uncertainty of the length of this for our business like Class Pass, because it was so dependent on these businesses. And I think for us, we realized that even more than our customers, and they were

obviously okay when we were providing them video streaming, we, and we still need to make sure our partners survive this, right, because they have fixed cost businesses. So a lot of our attention went to partner survival because, you know, we believe that there's a future head and PASPAS is going to work. It's just a matter of making sure that our T-shirts and our studio owners get through it. So at the crux of it, you know, we kind of went into a protection mode, of course. And I think one of the other, like, beauty parts of this, which I like, is, you know, the vision of Class bus was always a little bit broader than fitness. This gave us, gave our team to evolve the product to start expanding into other categories.

So, you know, there's a lot of beauty on there now. There's massages. There's wellness. And, you know, those activities are also, you know, doing a bit better in COVID times than some of the other fitness studios. So we, you know, it was forced us to think a little bit bigger and, you know, in line with our vision, but still give customers what they want. Harry?

Yeah. I mean, I think from, you know, at the beginning, it's now over a year now. We saw a lot of less projects launch. I think obviously, you know, creators were uncertain. And, you know, you're asking for money. It's a very strange time to be asking for money as well. So we saw a big drop-off in the first probably a few months.

And the biggest concern we found for creators was that people would not be interested in backing projects at this time. But when we saw that not change, we saw that the projects that launched, even though it was much fewer than them, we're still doing as well, in some cases, even better. And once creators started to understand that,

you saw people come back onto the platform. But at the same time, you know, these fields that use Kickstarter, right, these are people in theater, these are people in art, these are people in design. Like, most of the creator audiences that use Kickstarter have this other,

their main worlds being kind of like totally shaken up. So, you know, I think that in some cases there was even more of a need because you might have been like, look, this is what I was planning to do this year and that's out the window. Maybe I'll take this project that I've wanted to do for years and I'll go do it. I actually expect that that's even now as things are kind of getting back to normal, there's going to be even more of that because understandably a lot of people haven't been able. They're like, I can't even do my project in these conditions. So I don't want to raise money yet because I can't go fly over there and

film and I can't. There's no theater I can go use. So we'll be really to see how much latent, you know, kind of latent creative projects there are out there that people have been developing while they've been kind of in these bubbles and now want to go bring them to life. Friends of mine who work in Hollywood say there's going to be an explosion in scripts and new television series because people have been sort of stuck at home working on that. One quick thing before we go to all of you, as you kind of survey the startup landscape, you may just, you may have some, random thoughts. Where do you see sectors that are most ripe for innovation? Is it energy, healthcare, I don't know, gaming, fintech, I don't know, what, Tristan, where do you see it? I think, and Perry, we probably know this well. I think it's the blurring of this new consumer imperative, particularly a new diverse consumer too, and this empowerment of a creator, right?

You know, today we live in a world where a consumer is a creator, is a consumer as a creator. And I think there's a lot, a lot of value to be created and captured kind of in that blur. And I'm very, very excited about, particularly in a post-COVID world where folks are figuring this out, like I can be my own boss. I think that's going to be a really, really important theme for the next decade plus. Perry, where do you see innovation? Well, I would say I think governance is the killer app. Ooh, I like that.

And I don't mean leadership at like the operational level. I mean, at the organizational governance level, the corporate governance level, I think that's a big thing that people are going to start paying more and more attention to. We've been running so much on this kind of totally profit-centric system in the U.S. And even the biggest businesses are giving their head nods to a lot of other things that matter in the social contract. but that's going to take real evolution of governance. I think that's something that nobody thinks about it all, has thought about it all for a long time,

but I think this is going to be an error. And that's how things are going to differentiate because you look at like an Uber and a Lyft and you're like, it's the same thing. Like what's the difference? You know, over time, the difference in a lot of things will be governance. It's so good and so true.

Interesting. Yeah. Pyle. You know, I feel like the world is about to change in terms of, I really think, like, consumer behavior is going to be reset. And because of that, there's going to be so much new technology that can serve that. Because any time customer habits change means that there's opportunity for seamlessness, right, and efficiency that needs to be made to help make that better.

You know, I also think, like, back to what Tristan said, I think diversity is a big thing. And I think for me, being a female entrepreneur, I see it all the time. I think there are just so many communities that have different types of issues. I mean, even as we were doing the fellowship last week and hearing those pitches, like I think so many of them were also in more niche communities. And I think that's something really beautiful, that there is going to be innovation, that there's going to be money going to these communities that need them. And yeah, these might not be a billion-dollar ideas that are serving every single customer,

but they are important to solve and important to serve. That's Powell Kodakia, founder of ClassPass, She joined me along with Tristan Walker of Walker and Company and Perry Chen of Kickstarter. You've been listening to my live conversation about innovation from the How I Built This 2021 Virtual Summit. More conversations like this one from the How I Built the Summit will be in your feed soon, including my live interviews with Gary Vaynerchuk, Brenna Brown, Adam Grant, and Rashad Robinson. You will not want to miss those. So please keep an eye on your podcast feed. This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music composed.

host by Remteen Arablewee. Our production staff for the summit includes Neva Grant, Casey Herman, Julia Carney, Farah Safari, Liz Metzger, Janet Ujong Lee, Annalise Ober, Gianna Capadona, John Isabella, Ali Prescott, Joanna Palofska, and Jessica Goldstein. Our intern is Harrison, VJ Choi, and Jeff Rogers is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. Not everybody wants to run around the White House or Congress all day. That's where the NPR politics podcast comes in. At 5 p.m., NPR's best political reporters get together and break down the biggest political stories. No noise, just friends making sense of Washington. Listen to the NPR Politics podcast every weekday.