How I Built This with Guy Raz - Wirecutter: Brian Lam

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

When Brian Lam walked away from a high-profile job at Gizmodo to launch a product review blog, he had no plan for how it would make money. He just knew what he wanted: a user-friendly site with reviews that could be read in a few minutes, with the best products clearly listed, all backed up by meticulous research. But when he launched The Wirecutter in 2011, Brian’s business partners worried that the site’s posts were too brief and too infrequent to build an audience on the web, where clickbait was king. Eventually, Brian’s targeted approach paid off; users trusted his recommendations, he hired more writers, and traffic and revenue grew. In 2016, The Wirecutter was purchased for $30 million by the New York Times, where it was rebranded simply as Wirecutter.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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But I was not at all sure of how we were going to make money ever. 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 broad. Ryan Lamb built a blog to review tech gadgets and gear, grew it slowly on purpose, and helped it evolve into wirecutter, one of the most trusted review sites on the internet. When it comes to deciding about what to buy or watch or where to vacation, human beings love a list. Best hiking boot, best hotel, best stroller, best college, best pizza, best place to live, best podcast. You've probably seen a list for some or all of these things.

And the thing is, many of those lists, even ones that come from seemingly reputable publications, many of them are just written by one or maybe two people. It's just their opinion. There's no empirical evidence or statistical analysis to justify the decisions. So, pro tip, be a little wary of those best-of lists that you see everywhere. But back in 2011, Brian Lamb had an idea for a different type of lists for shoppers, actually a series of lists that would live on a blog called The Wirecutter. He wanted to review electronics and appliances with the same kind of rigor that consumer reports was known for,

but more streamlined and faster to read. When Brian first thought of the idea for the wirecutter, he was working at the tech blog Gizmodo. You might remember it as the site that broke the story of the iPhone 4 several months before it was released. A story that incurred the wrath of Steve Jobs himself. And we will definitely hear that story because Brian was running Gizmodo at the time. But it was also at Gizmodo that Brian noticed something that stayed with him. The advertising model for blogs incentivized writers to churn out stories as quickly as possible so that readers would keep returning to the site.

But when Brian launched the wirecutter, he wanted to do things differently. Just a few articles a week, meticulously researched, and as close to being objective as possible. It was counterintuitive because that model wasn't how blogs made money. But Brian's approach eventually paid off. People trusted the reviews. He hired more writers, and traffic and revenue grew. Brian was able to run the wirecutter from his home in Hawaii with a team of writers working remotely. And in 2016, the wirecutter was purchased by one of the most prestigious media companies in the world, the New York Times.

But before any of that, Brian went through the usual growing pains as a young tech journalist. And before that, he spent about five years getting literally punched and kicked at a boxing gym in San Francisco. Francisco, and we'll hear about that too. Brian grew up mostly in New Jersey. His mom was from mainland China, and his dad was born in Hong Kong. And as a kid, Brian spent his summers in Hong Kong with his grandparents. But he says that in one major way, he didn't have a stereotypical immigrant upbringing. Yeah, it's true.

Like, my parents were strange compared to other Chinese-American's parents. Like, we weren't really forced to do much at all. They didn't, like, check your grades and sort of make sure you're doing your homework. They kind of let you do your own thing. Yeah. We were just left to our own things. They were making a living. Yeah.

And we were just used to, like, grabbing our things and playing and just being somewhat self-sufficient, you know. Those were the best parts of my childhood, that independence. You know, and I'm always really careful when I talk about our generation because it always, you know, you don't want to sound like, well, we did this and this is better. But I have to say, because we're in that we're sort of in similar ages. And the thing that our parents gave us, our generation, was independence because it was basically neglect. Not really neglect, but they were working. Like we had to let ourselves into the front door and like make like pop a pizza and the toast drive. and then watch TV until they got home, right?

Like, that was my childhood. And but it meant that, and I find this with a lot of my peers, and it sounds like with you too, it forced us to learn how to be independent very early. Yeah, some of the stuff I did as a kid, I'm like, I would, I can't imagine that happening now. Like, I remember being in Hong Kong and like taking a bus to some area and just, walking around, looking at like electronics and window shopping and just going around and maybe getting a snack, maybe playing like in an arcade if I could sneak in because I think it would be 16, and then getting kicked out because I was literally seven when this was happening.

Yeah, yeah. And that was just like how you rolled in a place like that then. Yeah. And anyone who's been to Hong Kong, especially anyone who's into toys and cool, like, stuff that you just would not see in the United States, Hong Kong is like a, it's like Willy Wonka's factory. Like I remember going to Hong Kong, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago, just walking through these streets of just toy shops. It was crazy because now you have globalization and like a PlayStation comes out and it's everywhere.

But then you'd have like a two, three, four year gap in technology. Yeah. So you'd have like this chunky Walkman only a little bit smaller than like a cigar box. Yes. Right? And then. Yeah. In Hong Kong, you'd have something just a little bit bigger than the actual cassette tape.

Yes. And it would be like half the price. And so my brain would just flip out seeing all this stuff. I remember my dad would take business trips to Hong Kong and Japan and come back. He once came back with a walkman that was smaller than the cassette. The cassette would actually pop out of the walkman. Yeah. I mean, how can you resist buying something like that, honestly?

Yeah. All right. So you're clearly like. And, I mean, this is not, it was not necessarily, like, part of the plan. But as a kid, you were already kind of becoming a little bit of a gadget head. Yeah. I mean, it's really, someone who I work with said, I think you care more about finding the right thing more than anyone I've ever met. And I'm like, that checks out.

And really, like, in my whole world, a piece of gear you can depend on is honestly a big part of my mental and emotional security. Do you remember what you were interested in when you were in high school? Because I know you would go on to Boston University and you'd kind of experiment with different majors, jump from different one to another to another. But did you have a sense of what you thought you wanted to do when you left for college? Yeah.

So I switched, right? I switched from like, I think it was like philosophy, English, computer science, journalism. And then I ended up in business school. But the only class I enjoyed was the strategy game. And it was like this rudimentary networked thing where it's like you're in the sneaker industry and you like choose which factories and what pricing and the quantity you want to produce. And I think I beat like a couple hundred kids at that.

That's super aggressive on pricing. I basically was like cut throat business person long term thinking right away. And I would like undercut them by like two pennies and like win that week. and I just kept winning, winning, winning. It was like a business school class on strategy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so when you, I mean, we could go down in this rabbit hole for a long time, but probably not because I also went to college in around the same time in Boston

and was not from California. I'm from California. And so it was totally alien to me. Like the weather, for one thing was just nuts and depressing. Did you study abroad or did you stay in Boston all four years? I stayed in Boston. I mean, I really, you know, like, people say, like, they don't blossom until college or, like, you know. Yes.

I didn't, I feel like I didn't blossom until, like, in my 40s. You know, like, college was just the same difficulty for me as high school, academically, socially. It was just rough, man, you know. Tell me more about that. Were you, I mean, socially can, it can just be, you know, some of us are just more introverted. just harder for us to kind of like walk into a room and just, hey, how are you? I'm Brian, I'm guy, whatever, right? Like, that's very normal. Is that what you mean when you say it was challenging for you socially? I would like have great friends, cared about each other, and they'd be

like, let's go to a nightclub. And I remember dragging myself out and I would stand there. It would be super loud. Everyone around me would be having fun. And I would be falling asleep standing up, almost falling over. Yeah. It's just not engaging to me to spend time like that. I mean, just emotionally, I don't think I felt safe. I felt more unsafe than most people. And it always pushed me to gear, honestly. It always pushed me to like this perfect object, which is like a little, it's like perfect objects are like examples of how you wish the world was and how wish you were in a way. All right.

So after you graduate from college, you move out, I guess you move out to San Francisco and get kind of like a starter job. as a web developer. But I guess it only, like, it only lasted a few months, right? Because like around that same time, the dot com, like, whole bubble burst, right? It was like four months or something in the bubble burst, yeah. And then you were laid off. That's right. And that was it.

They were just like, you have no job. And you were 22, or I guess, 21, 22 around that age. Were you worried? I had no. I remember everyone crying. And I was like, thank you for the opportunity. I shook their hand. And I was like, I'm free.

From what I understand, which seems like a really unusual move, you did not, you kind of decided not to look for another sort of quote unquote white collar job. You went and actually worked at a boxing gym, just like basically started by like sweeping the floors and answering phones. I was unhirable, first of all. I would have gotten a job if I could. I mean, I'm glad I didn't, but I'm happy the way things turned out. But like, at that time, it was so dire in San Francisco for someone out of school, basically no experience, no technical skills. So I ended up just kind of training at a boxing gym a lot and then started working for like, I think, $5 an hour, mopping the floors, answering the phone, opening the gym in like a very early time, maybe like 6 a.m. or something. How did you get into boxing?

I'd always been into martial arts. I think, you know, when you're an Asian-American kid, it's very empowering to, like, watch Bruce Lee films. Yeah. You know, I know we're stepping back to high school, but, like, I was super depressed in high school, and martial arts was something that really made me feel good. Yeah. Martial arts teaches you, you know, you're tired, but you actually do have more, and then you start to trust that you have more in you. What type of martial art did you do? In high school, I did, like, Taekwondo, but we dabbled, and my friends.

would dabble in like judo, juditsu, I did some kung fu for a while. And then when I got to this gym, I basically, it became my life in San Francisco. And it was a boxing gym. It's a Thai boxing gym. It was run by, it was basically run by

former champions in Bangkok who would like come over. And so it was a very good pedigree. It was like world class for sure. Like, so you were learning from like a very pure source. And my day would be like, open the gym, work for like a full shift from like six to something. And then I would train. And they paid you like 10, they paid you like 10 bucks an hour or something?

Dude, it was like less than $5 an hour at the time. I mean, it's a long time ago. But still, it was like my rent was like 500 bucks in the mission with like four, four roommates or something like that. Yeah. So at this time in my life, I was eating a taco for dinner every night and I would load up on free chips and salsa. and it would be like two or three bucks, right? And if I bought a CD, I had to check my budget. And it was like a really good time in my life. Remember working out one day after one of those long shifts and you do like a seven-mile run to warm up.

Yeah. And then you'd start training and then you would start sparring. And I remember being done right before the evening classes came in and lying under the skylight. And I remember lying there and just me taking a note. It's almost 20 years ago, and I remember saying this is the most simple and satisfying my life might never be. You do this for almost four years. It was in my life for, yeah, at least half a decade.

Yeah. I mean, you knew inside of you that there were many things that you probably could do. And this was a disciplined life. Like you were at this gym, you were probably getting really strong. but did you have a sense in your mind that you were building up towards something, I mean, whether it would be a professional boxer, or maybe you would open your own gym at some point, or not at all.

Was it just like focused entirely on just every single day going in, training, going home, eating, sleeping? Yeah, I did have a goal, but it wasn't around like a championship belt or going pro. it was just about having like a certain proficiency in flow state. I wanted to be good at it. And I also remember my nose bled every day for like almost three years straight. Wow. And I went to a doctor one time at UCSF and he was like, his advice was so useless to me at the time.

But in hindsight, I see the wisdom. He was like, just stop getting punched in the face. Yeah. But clearly at some point, you were searching for something different because you would eventually go and get an internship at a PC magazine, Maximum PC. But before we get to that internship, how did you even start to think about, because you did some journalism in college, but how did you start to think about like, okay, I got to, I can try something else. I got to do something else. What was a catalyst that led you to start to think about that? Fear?

Hmm. I mean, I feel like I have to depend on myself. But, okay, so my family does okay, right? My grandpa did great. And all my aunts and uncles pretty much live off my grandpa, what he did. And I remember this one time at dinner, my grandpa was really grisly. and he was gruff. He'd been through a lot, and he made it happen.

And we had a very good relationship while he was alive. And I remember him looking around at all my, like, aunts and uncles, and they were, like, kind of squabbling. And, you know, they act like they have no consequence in the world. They're really, like, happy-go-lucky, right? And I remember my grandpa, and he looked over at me, he let out his huge sigh, and he was like, as a saying, right, it takes three generations to lose a fortune. And I just remember that moment.

And I remember looking around and I'm like, I don't really want to, I don't want to be like my aunts and uncles. I want to like do something with all my heart and make a living and support my loved ones in a very just, you know, basic way. But in my own style. And I think I always had that in the back of my mind. well, I'm pretty smart and my brain is worth something and I'm basically getting punched all the time in the head. So it just didn't seem like it was going to go anywhere. And four years is a lot of time and the economy was starting to recover. And so that led to me meeting the editor-in-chief of a magazine who I had a really like lucky break because I basically screwed up really bad trying to apply for the job.

This was the editor of Maximum PC magazine? That's right. John Phillips. Had you meet him? He was a member at the gym. Okay, you met him at the gym, okay. That's right. And I applied for an internship.

And there was a writing assignment, and I was so nervous that I didn't have anything written. And I just wrote an email saying, like, I don't have the assignment. I know what that means in journalism. When you're late, please give me another chance. And he was like, okay. He should have said, no. I mean, I would probably say no. I should remember that as I work with young people because maybe I'm too savage.

But he gave me another shot. That was a huge deal. I shouldn't have gotten that shot. And, man, I killed that job. Like my life depended on it because it kind of did. And when you say you killed it, you got this internship and you just basically threw everything into it. Yeah, I mean, when you're working for $5 an hour or less mopping floors of a gym and you went to college for like whatever it was, like $30,000 a year and I had loans

and you're just getting punched in the face every day, you're motivated. Yeah. So tell me about that internship. What did you start to write about? I would write like really small reviews. Reviews about of PC PCs or products. equipment. That's right. I would take really small assignments and I was only supposed to be there like eight, 10 hours a week and I ended up working like 40, 50, 60 hours a week to the point where like

one issue, you know, like magazine issue articles get pushed if they maintain their freshness. So it's not like I did all this in one month. But one issue, even though they had like three or four full-time staffers, I had more than half the content in one issue. Wow. As an intern. And I think you spent like what six or seven months at maximum PC before you eventually got an internship at Wired, which at the time, this is like 2004. That was, I mean, still is, but it was a really important magazine with big budgets. And I mean, it was owned by Condi Nast. I mean, it was a big deal, right? But it took you a while to get that job, right?

I think you rejected a few times. Oh, yeah. So many times. but when I got that job, I remember asking Maximum PC if they wanted to just pay me more and I would stay. And John was like, no. Like, get out of here.

Do you remember feeling intimidated when you got there? I think it triggered some kind of defense mechanism where my way of dealing with that is just coming as hard as I can. I just go so hard when I'm in situations like that. And I just show up as fully as I can. And I did that there too. Like this is it.

You're not going to get another chance. Yeah. Because it was my one shot to have more than a taco for dinner. When we come back in just a moment, how Brian gets handed one of the biggest tech stories of the early 2000s. And in the process gets the good cop, bad cop treatment from Steve Jobs. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This.

this. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2004 and Brian Lamb has just started an internship at Wired Magazine. And over the next few years, he'll do a mix of reporting and editing, but really, the gig is kind of a mixed bag. It was a really good fit. I mean, in a lot of ways. But looking back now, I kind of feel like it's just like most of America where you have to look and be from a certain background or way to advance. So for me, like, I didn't smell like an editor there. And you know, like, frankly, I'm not that smart. I'm not that intellectual. I'm a much more emotional person. And that doesn't always fly well in corporations I find. And so you really didn't have a big voice there. You were sort of assigned to edit pieces or rewrite things, stuff like that.

Yeah. I would say that I learned how I don't want to manage people there. To be honest, people were not experienced managers. I remember asking one editor a question about how the magazine was made, and I got thrown out of the office for asking that question. What do you mean? Like I was like, hey, I don't, I'm not sure how this process goes. I'm just curious once it gets past this step where I handed off. And the person was just like, I can't believe you're asking me that question and don't

know that answer. Get out. It was like really that kind of. you know, leadership. Yeah. And man, I had so many ideas. Half of them were really terrible. And half of them were really good.

And they just all got ignored, basically. And I just kind of kept doing the gear work. Hmm. I know, I know that you would eventually leave Wired a couple of, sort of a couple years in to go on to, uh, to Gizmodo where you became the editor. Yeah. Uh, I think this was around 2006. Um, this, this, Gizmodo was part of the Gokker family of blogs.

And blogs were, I mean, it was still like, it was like going to a podcast in 2011 leaving radio. People were like, what are you doing? That's, who listens to podcasts? That's, what are you crazy? You're leading the radio? That was kind of the reaction, right, that when you decided to leave wired and go work at Gizmodo in 2006.

Yeah. San Francisco media is like, it was like simple made at the time. and it was wired, right? So it was just one Condi Nast magazine. People don't leave that place. People stay 10, 20 years longer. And I probably was the first Condonast employee to leave for a blog.

Blogs were so rudimentary at the time. But when we were doing front-of-book stuff to find gadgets for Wired, people around me were like, yeah, just check out Gizmodo and just find leads. there. I was like, okay, we're just basically getting leads from blogs. We're not like going to find new stuff. So I decided to work there because I felt like I could have impact there and control over the editorial. I read that you were like working like 15, 16 hour days, just constantly updating, constantly cranking out copy, like nonstop seven days a week.

Yeah, we had really savage competitors. And it was just constantly updating, constantly cranking out copy, like, nonstop, seven days a week. Yeah, we had a really savage competitors. And it was just us in the room at the time. And we just drove each other to be better. Who are your competitors? TechCrunch, CNET. No, it was just Engadgett. End gadget, okay.

And stories about, like, any news related to the tech, like, gossip. Like, what were you covering? Anything, any personnel changes at a tech company, like, news you heard, or was it more about products? It was about products, and, like, they kept it strictly about products. got into like, we were really experimental about it. And when I got there, they wanted traffic. That's what Gawker wanted at the time. Unapologetically, traffic. Didn't matter. Go get it. And there was a bonus system for traffic. Very Gawker. But it was tied to equity, right? Meaning what? If you exceeded your traffic goals by a certain amount, you'd get a certain amount of equity. Okay. Okay. Yep. And so from

my brain, that's just great. Because even without the bonus, I'm going to do it. Right. And I think within two or three months, it's been a while, but within a couple months, certainly less than four or five months, they shut the program down because I had exceeded the traffic so much that I ended up owning in two months like over one percent of the company. Wow. I was like one of the largest shareholders just based on those two or three months. Oh my God. And I only confirmed that like a year or two ago. Yeah. When there was paper work for like sale of Gawker. And then I talked to some of the finance people and they're like, oh yeah, you didn't know.

You had like a lot, you had more equity than like most people who weren't there from the very beginning. And like Gizmodo probably made most of the revenue of that company. Wow. Because it's technology and we were big, you know. And you were getting ads, a lot of ads. Yeah. And where, did you work out of an office?

Was it like, would you go into an office every day with a couple other people? I worked from home and I worked right next to my fridge and whenever we'd get scooped I'd eat like an ice cream sandwich like 10 in the morning I would eat an ice cream sandwich I was just eating

every time we got scooped that's how I gained like 30 pounds in that job So Gizmodo was never there was never an office It was entirely remote Yeah I think at some point there was a move to like get everyone into an office

And we were just like no Which is a very modern thing But I worked remote the entire job. I'm trying to figure how you did it then without Zoom and Slack and all that stuff that makes it so much easier now. There were some precursors to Slack that we used. I don't remember them now.

Aim probably. But we used what we used. Yeah. Yeah, we were using, oh my God, you're right. We were using Aim. You're using Aim, yeah. We built the $300 million media content on Aim. That's right.

Amazing. But, I mean, it's in a sense, it's like the parallel, between what you're doing at Gizmodo and at the gym, to me, seem very similar because you were just focused. It was like you're going in, you're just like working out and just exhausting yourself and eating dinner and going to sleep. And it's the same, it sounds like it was a similar kind of rhythm at Gizmodo. It's only a partial evolution going from being punched in the face in real life

to being punched in the face in the common section. I want to talk about, I want to ask you about probably the thing that you're, anyone who knows the Gizmodo story knows this story, but not many people listening may know it, which is the biggest scoop of Gizmodo's life, which happened on your watch. And basically, you guys got a hold of an iPhone 4G months before it was to be released, or maybe a year, it was a prototype. And it's actually an amazing story because it was written a lot of, There's been a lot written about it, and certainly at the time.

But this was like a big deal. Apple was really pissed off. How did you, what do you remember about getting that phone? Yeah, it went down something like that. But there's a backstory to it, which is earlier that year, we were so good at our jobs and so bored. So we were at that time doing what I now know a lot of places do, but we were pre-writing stories, and we would pre-write multiple

versions of stories. You would pre-write stories. It's almost like newspapers have obituaries ready to go. Someone dies is just plug in a couple quotes. You were basically doing that for everything. You had versions of stories written because you could anticipate what might happen. Yeah, we were very prepared, very fast, backup plans. And so we started just dreaming about like scenarios to plan for them, being prepared.

And one of these scenarios, like earlier in that year, we talked about, fantasized, really, about what if we got a prototype of an iPhone. So months before this phone even got to you, you were also sitting around saying, what if we got an iPhone early? Let's prepare for that possibility? Yeah, we went to our lawyer in house and said, can you look this up? What would happen? How we can do this safely, legally. and we discovered these laws about returning stolen property. You can't get in trouble for it, basically,

and the person who claims the property has to claim it formally. Wow. So it turns out that this guy, an Apple engineer, had accidentally left the new iPhone at a restaurant in Redwood City. This guy, Brian Hogan, found it and started calling around different blogs to see if somebody wanted to buy it. Is that what happened?

Yes. I know he contacted Wired and he contacted another publication, maybe Engadgett. And they all started just kind of like not sure what to do. They didn't have a plan and they were slow. And they were worried that they get sued. Yeah. And we already checked that aspect out. So we were able to move quickly. And we knew we were never going to have a bigger story than that. So you guys decided to publish a story about this new iPhone. And you could see new features on it, and you could talk about those features, and Apple was not happy. You get a call from a one Steve Jobs, from what I understand.

He calls you up. Yes. He got my number through a mutual acquaintance. And, yeah, it was like every book I've ever read on Steve Jobs personnel. but on the phone. What do you say to you? RSD is a good cop. You know, hey, you have my phone.

I'd really like it back. I'm not mad at you. You know, I got, I lost it. And I go, I understand, you know. And I knew what to say from reading like every book on Apple. I knew what to expect. And this is, so this is before you published anything.

They just were aware that you had. Oh, no. Oh, no. This was like after we published it. Okay. And I said, we're happy to get it back to you. It's always been our intent. But we need you to verify.

It's actually yours. And he said, well, I don't want to do that. I go, well, it's the law. We can't. What did you need from him? A statement. A statement. A letter.

Yeah. And then bad cop came. He was like, you know, this is serious stuff. You can go to jail for this. And I just said, I would love to go to jail for an iPhone. Because I was just thinking about how much. traffic we can make from it. I mean, how much more legendary would that story have been if we went to jail?

I mean, he knew that at that point that I think Steve also understands, my understanding of Steve Jobs from talking to people who work at Apple and he just understands when he finds someone who also is fully committed. Yeah. And so at that point, he kind of just backed off. And he got the letter written. And I knew that we would impact sales. And I was glad because you shouldn't buy the old thing

right before the new one comes out at the same price. Especially because you're going to keep these things for multiple years. And like, that's a really big deal for people spending their money. You know, these things cost so much money now. So I felt very spiritually engaged in this idea of this telling people to wait because most people have no idea about the timing and the cadence of product.

And I think he was really upset for many months. Like he would, he would, probably against all advice, would go to like a conference where he was speaking and he would start talking about Gizmodo being horrible randomly. He was really obsessed with that moment where he was told what to do. Wow. You know, he was able to dominate entire industries and hear these like, honestly, pretty stupid bloggers telling them what to do. That probably doesn't feel good.

I'm curious because from what I gather, I mean, listening to this story now, and this is we're talking about something that happened 13 years ago, it's kind of amazing, right, because he was so powerful and you were standing up to him and you had the justification to write about this. But from what I understand, you started to feel bad about this. Yeah. It's hard not to respect steep jobs, even if you are the editor-in-chief at Gizmodo and you have a job to do. And so I just, I wrote this blog post about what happened and how I felt about things. And I had very mixed feelings because so many of the values at Apple, you have to respect to someone who eventually would start a company and try to do things in a way that's uncompromisingly good. And so yeah, just had

a twinge of regret. You wrote that article after you left Gardner, after you left Gizmodo. Yeah, I wrote it way later. I was just like, that was a really crazy situation. And it's, I had so much respect for the people at Apple and

that culture. So that's always been complicated. What, within a year, I mean, that was the biggest story that Gizmodo ever broke for sure. But from what I understand, you were just, I mean, and I can't believe it took this long. I mean, you were at Gizmodo for like, I don't know, almost five years. And just a relentless pace, just nonstop writing. And you had a bit of a

sabbatical, but just relentless, that by the time you're 34, you're burned out. You're just totally burned out. Yes. And I think I had some kind of record for staying editor-in-chief for quite a long time by Gawker standards. And it's because I had a really good team and I was getting better at delegating and managing. And they protected me. I protected them. And that's the only way I was able to stay there that long. All right. So around this time, like 2011 or so, you left Gawker. But I also think around this time that you were, I think you were already kind of forming a plan

for what would become wirecutter, right? Yeah. I had the idea for wirecutter while I was still at Gawker. Mm-hmm. You know, we hadn't really fully formed the idea, but it was impossible to figure out what to buy quickly on almost any site with any sort of secure, emotional feeling

about that choice being good. Why? Just there was just done enough information or there just wasn't a good place that was giving advice. The information is out there on the tip of the tongues of the editors covering those beats. But the formats that were common and the business models attached to them encourage you to click on like 40 different articles about, say, TVs, for example. And then you have to compare all of them and their prices and their features and decide which one's right for you. And that's a lot of work, or a little work if you don't care. But it's a lot of math. And it's a lot of just we have to figure it out.

And every major publication at the time would do that. They would just force you to sort through dozens and dozens of reviews. or look at a huge chart full of like circles and dots that don't really mean anything. Yeah. And it's just really stressful. We just knew that I didn't want to have that experience of hunting through blog archives and reviews and user reviews and collating all that in my head, turning it into like a soup and then drinking the soup. You thought there needs to be an easier way. like an easier consumer reports kind of thing, like a review site that would just review stuff,

but that would basically say to people, this is the one you want to buy? Like, was that fully formed? That's the concept. And believe it or not, that didn't exist very readily at the time, if at all. So, so while you were at, why you were at Gawker media, did you, did you go to anyone there and say, have this great idea? I think I want to do this or, no. Oh, yeah.

You did? Yes. I had this idea. I wanted to do it and just nobody wanted to do it. Hmm. You know, I pitched it for Wired. I pitched it to a lot of places and nobody wanted to do it. And like so many good ideas, you can't get people to take it for free.

Yeah. You know, I had a promising career if I wanted to pursue tech news and writing about things. And I had at some point negotiated. some really crazy job offers that I couldn't pull the trigger on. Something was just telling me not to do these things because it was going to be same old thing, working for big corporations, which I have a problem working for. I'm just not compatible with that. At this point, you're 34, you're out, you've left Gawker. Did you leave San Francisco at this point and move to Hawaii, or were you still in San Francisco? I started wirecutter first.

In San Francisco. Mm-hmm. That's right. All right. So tell me how you did that. I mean, was it initially just you writing and a blog and then like just writing about what you already owned? Like tell me, tell me how you, the first thing you wrote under the word, the term wirecutter. I wrote the first bunch of guides, a couple dozen, and I edited the first couple hundred.

and it was always just a combination of aggregation of what was out there plus my own verifications at the end. We would take a layer of the shopping experience and stack that on top of all the information out there and do some verification. So you wouldn't have to do that whole shopping process yourself. You keep saying we, but I'm assuming initially it was just you. At the very start, but I very quickly started bringing friends in. Okay. And so from what I gather, you partnered with the all, which was like another kind of media company, like a group, a loose group of blogs. What was their role? They would, it was your site or your blog, but they would finance it. Like, what was that? What was the story? Do you remember back in the day it was possible through these advertising agencies to get launched sponsorships? Sort. I mean, yeah, explain what that meant.

These don't really exist anymore, but you could pitch an idea for a new site to a company, and they would basically take over the advertising for that entity. So we had a launch sponsorship deal to start this thing, and that is a lot nicer than raising money, and it's a lot nicer than starting it and just hoping to sell ads after the fact. So that money was designed to finance as much of the early site as possible. That's correct. And I think it was like a quarter million dollars. But then the advertising agency took half and then the all took all of it because I didn't want.

I just needed money for expenses. But something about it felt like I didn't want to pay myself yet. Yeah. How did you retain ownership of the intellectual property? At the time, they were doing like 50-50 splits with site owners, which is not advised because then no one can make a decision. Someone should be a majority owner. So I negotiated to give up all the long sponsorship for 65% of the site. But I also had a clause in there saying that if I didn't feel like things were going well, I could basically leave and take the entire company with me.

Got it. Smart decision. So you register the name, the wirecutter, like you got that domain name? Yeah. And the name was really arbitrary. I'd learn that from talking with J.J. Abrams at one point. The director, J.J. Abrams? Yeah.

It was just a connection I had through a friend. And I asked him about naming things. I had this really complicated name. He basically told me in a nutshell, if you name something, a really boring word, you can, like, own that word. Like lost. or alias. It's those super simple names, but you have to show up. You have to really own them by doing something impactful. When we come back, how Brian's plan to grow the wirecutter very, very slowly does not sit well with the suits. 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 2011, and Brian Lamb has just launched a new blog called The Wirecutter, kind of a streamlined site for reviewing electronics and technical gear. You had to review a lot of things. So would you buy like 20 headphones or did you go to the companies and say, hey, send them this to us? We'd go to the companies and send us stuff. It's pretty much industry standard, you know, and it's not yours.

It's a loan. So you send it back or you donate it if they don't want it. How did you train? or guide the people who were doing reviews. Like, let's say, or even you, like, how did you, you know, how did you test these things? Let's say it was television sets. And you had somebody write an article. What advice would you give them?

Because presumably they're not just going to watch, you know, 15 minutes on each TV. They're really got to spend time with it. So how would you suggest they put these different television sets, for example, to the test? The trade of editing reviews is a pretty established culture. Yeah. You find a writer that's on the beat. TVs are hard because people don't have space, so that's a very difficult writer to fill, but you can find them. But very early on, there were steady freelancers who came on and started doing regular work,

and they had to take a lot of convincing to start working with me. Yeah. And these are some of the best reviewers in the field. and I was very much working hand in hand with them during the process, whereas that does not happen at all in front of book stuff. You just get an assignment and you come back with some copy and some picks. But I was like, no, I want to develop the test with you. I want to talk about these things.

Let me see your list of things that you think could be good. You forgot about this brand, and that's how I steered things. And it was more the way that craft people are trained. than they are in like mass media. It's like more of an apprenticeship happening all the time. And once people heard that we were doing things better and different, say instead of a front of the book, a couple hundred dollars for review, we were offering several thousand dollars to do the same work.

To a reviewer. Yeah, because it was hourly. And really what you're investing in is the expertise of that writer. They're on that beat. And what did you, I mean, what we think of us of wirecutter today is reviewer or reviewers, they really put like five or six, maybe ten different brands of a product, a TV or a washing machine or a coffee traveler mug or whatever to the test. And they really, really run them through, you know, try them out in different places. And then they basically pick one.

Was that the model at the beginning? That was the model at the beginning. But very quickly, it evolved into a mutant form of that, which was way more powerful. Like, for example, if you review 20 headphones, normally on the internet before wirecutter, you had thousands of opinions on headphones that were subjective, and maybe you had a few people who were professionals who would objectively record things. So we had a process that involved both of those things and a blind test with musicians, audio engineers, and surprisingly, most of those people would agree on which one sounded better.

blindly. So even though it's a subjective thing with enough process, you can make it a little bit more objective. And here's the thing that makes it even cooler. Now that you've got the top two or three, the next time you can introduce another 40 and you don't have to compare the new 50 to the previous 50. You just have to compare it to the current Kings of the Hill and see if they get dethroned. You now have tested a total of 100. And so as you work on this evergreen article with updates over a decade now, it's probably hundreds, if not over a thousand headphones that get tested. And that, from what I read, was really what guided you.

You did not want a wire cutter article review to be, you know, one and done. You wanted it to be something that could live on for a long time. That's correct. And it's basically a distillation of if someone, say, you knew that headphones. writer. And you're like, hey, you need to buy some headphones. It's for this. Which one should I get? And they would tell you, oh, if you have a hundred bucks buy this one, or if you have 200 bucks by this one, that's a very humanistic. It's a very human experience. But not everyone has access to someone like that. And that's what we were trying to put down on paper. And ultimately, even on a higher

level than that, we're trying to give you that feeling of just how sure you feel when someone tells you that. So when you, when you started to, I mean, so basically, were you financing this out of your own bank account or was the launch money enough to pay the writers for the first, I don't know, several months until you start to get some revenue? I had like one or two writers then and I think I paid that out of the all, that launch sponsorship money. But we weren't really like humming along yet. It was just me living off of, say, And I was in a real headspace of just recovering. And that's when I moved to Hawaii and I slept on a friend's couch for like six months swimming and just working on this.

And Hawaii gave me my energy back. And every time I published something, a little more energy would build. The project started feeding me and the feedback from other people in the industry. other people started to see that it was crazy work. So here's what I'm curious about, because I think from the get-go, you decided that advertising was not going to be a revenue stream. That was not how this site was going to become sustainable. Yeah. And by the way, when you launched Wirecutter, did you think this could make a lot of money, or did you think I know it can be sustainable?

I know it can sustain a team of people or both. I was so obsessed with just doing this service and like, say, taking a two-hour shopping experience and making it a 30-second shopping experience with the lead containing the thing we thought you should get. I thought it was such a great idea that didn't exist. I was not at all sure of how we were going to make money ever. But I also wanted to grow things really slowly because I was so burnt out for the first year, I could only basically work 10 hours a week. And I think my partners must have been like,

you're only going to publish one article every three weeks. And I said, yep. And I knew that if you projected that over a couple of years, you'd have like a hundred articles that were evergreen. But that cadence is so alien to media and to investors and to the public. But I knew working a gawker where we were doing so much quantity of news that would become basically useless tomorrow, it was a good use of time. Right, because you guys were still partnered with the all, which managed a bunch of different blogs. And I'm guessing that their business side may not have been too happy with the sort of relaxed

approach you were taking, right? I mean, were they okay with what you were doing? Yeah. So basically, when you are a business person running multiple sites, you don't have the focus to basically switch into a completely different way of making money. It's too hard. It's too much work to reinvent a whole business model for one site that looks really small. And so there was just no attention and no support for like this format.

Like we were asked if we wanted to do news and it was like, I don't want to do news. of course we could have done all this stuff that basically everyone does when they start a media company. We could have done all that stuff. I didn't want to do it. Yeah. And we just felt like we had no choice but to leave, sadly. To leave. The all.

Right. So when you decided to kind of take this independent of the all, which happened pretty soon early on, you would land on this sort of this affiliate model, where if somebody would click on the product that you think is the best product, you would get a cut of that. Yes, that's correct. I'm wondering how that worked. Did you have to, because you are, I mean, yes, you had a reputation as a good writer and you are known quantity, but you still had to get the companies to agree to pay you a fee if people bought something through your site. Was that hard to do or was that relatively easy to get these companies to agree to that?

Well, the truth is we would link up all sorts of stuff and any of the really cool stuff would not have affiliate links on them because you're right. That's a lot of work. But for like the majority of the electronics, we could link to Amazon or Best Buy. And that was pretty easy to do. They had like an affiliate program that you could just sign up for. Yes. The affiliate program was like super cheap marketing for them. And it was designed to live on mom and pop blogs. So they'd have all these like cheesy widgets. If like some blogger wrote about something they like make it link on Amazon and make a few bucks, that's what that was designed for. It was never designed for the scale of like big media companies that use it now. So you wouldn't have to negotiate with Samsung or Whirlpool or GE. or whatever, you were really not negotiating.

You were just signing up for initially the Amazon affiliate program that was available to anyone who had a blog or a website. That's correct. And with those affiliate links, you probably don't even know what they were paying you. It was probably just pennies or a few dollars, right? I mean, if somebody were to buy something, maybe you guys would get a couple bucks off that. So initially it probably wasn't a whole lot of money, but that was a revenue stream or it

was the revenue stream. That's correct. And as a CEO, I never checked anything like traffic or I knew the size of the checks coming, but I didn't pay attention to anything except the quality of the work. I'm curious. I mean, did you, I mean, you had a, people knew who you were from Gizmodo, obviously, in San Francisco, for sure. And you had a reputation for, you know, for being a solid editor. But how are you getting the word out about wirecutter?

Did you have like a big social media presence? Were you doing that kind of marketing? Like, how did people discover it at all? We did no marketing. We were mostly editors. We didn't have business people. We didn't have social media people. We were really light.

We had no offices. Hmm. I really liked having a silent media company. Because it's just like all of media is like this party where everyone's talking over each other and saying the same things other people are saying. Even worse, they're spending money on reporting, duplicating other people's work. And so I just wanted to contribute in this way that was different.

And the power and focus of it, I think, caught people off guard in our industry. And it was all word of mouth. So you were really, I mean, it sounds like you were motivated by just like, something that you would have wanted, right? Which is just to save people time. Just like trust us, we're going to do the work for you, and you can have this information for free. But if you do want to buy it, you know, maybe click the link.

That was basically your, how you would kind of present this to readers and consumers. That's right. And I think I'd expand on that and say, I really love service work because you're helping someone. You're not just writing for your own ego. And at the same time, I'm not egoless. I love to compete. And I feel like I could do better work than billion-dollar companies with huge budgets

with a small team that is motivated. Yeah. So here's what I'm curious about, right? You start this site in 2011, really 2012 it gets going. And there was consumer reports that existed. Like, you still, to this day, you can. subscribe to it and read it. And I wonder if you, once you start to get some attention, did you start to get some blowback from those traditional, more traditional review sites that

I don't know, we're maybe saying, oh, well, they're accepting affiliate dollars or they're compromised or anything like that. Did that, did you start to hear any of that? I think editors were freaking out in other publications because they wanted a format like that. and business people were maybe scared of that change because you're talking about a severe loss of time on page and traffic. If someone's just clicking on one article and leaving in two minutes,

they have to understand that can lead to a different type of business and a better service, but you're also sacrificing maybe 50 page views and like an hour on your site. It's significant. Yeah. So people were really slow to move,

and at first I was scared, people were going to copy, and then I realized that big companies are incapable of really competing in that way. And from the get-go you knew that advertising was just not a direction you wanted to take because it was basically a race to the bottom to chase those ads. I think advertising is one of the great evils of the world because it gets in your brain no matter what. And the metrics they use are basically what has made media what it is today.

like really shallow, fast cadence. And it's crazy that if you are like a high-end brand for like a watch or something, it's crazy that you don't want to help reverse that because your amazing watches need to live next to like BS top 10 lists or like a magazine you flipped through in like five minutes that they took a month to put together. Yeah. It's all just like, really trashy, and I can't wait for this trend to reverse and reverse in more areas than just what wirecutter did around product.

Yeah. And the other thing is if someone returns something that you recommend, the affiliate fee gets reversed, you get zero. You can't say that for like the Rolex ad next to the top 10 list or something factually incorrect. The advertiser never gets that money back for being next to article that are terrible. And the readers don't get that time back on clickbait.

So for me, it's more ethical. Yeah. I think about two years in, you started to see some profitability, enough where you could pay yourself a little bit of money. But did you, I mean, I know that you started this because you really wanted to do it. It was exciting and interesting to you. But at a certain point, did you start to see potential

for this to actually be a significant job? generator of revenue for you? Yes. By the fourth year or the third year, it was making seven figures of profit. So it was a pretty quick transition from nothing to something for something that I owned the majority of. Yeah. How did you, I mean, how did you hire people? I mean, were these, were a lot of the people that you hired reporters or journalists that you'd worked with previously? No, we would find a beat. We'd find someone crazy and obsessed.

And we would bring them in. And it'd be a big investment to teach them our format. But we would do it. And half the people didn't work out. And I think even more important than hiring was firing. Yeah. Like when it's your company and you're paying someone six figures to do something and they don't do it, it's literally, you know, taking $100,000 in a stack and then lighting

it on fire. Yeah. It's very painful. And you can't survive that way. and you can't take care of the people who are good that way. How many people did you have before you will get to the acquisition? How many ultimately people did you have on payroll, full-time payroll? When we sold about 60, and I think the sweet spot was under 30 in terms of everyone being on the same page culturally.

Wow. All right. So let's talk about the acquisition. I mean, the New York Times announced that they were acquiring wire. I remember this in October of 2016 for 30 months. million dollars. What led you to seek out an acquire? You know what's really funny is that number is actually wrong. It was a leak that was incorrect, but the Times published it. It was more, but it wasn't an extraordinary amount. Yeah. I always knew that we would end up at the Times.

I thought it could fit in there from an editorial standpoint. I had an introduction to some of the Salsbergers, and I told them about what we were doing, and I said, I love the times, and I believe the times deserves better, and the readers deserve better service. And so there was another meeting after that meeting where I said, let's do a collaboration. So I commissioned a cheap printer test, and I said, we actually found the best cheap printer. You can do this work if you are motivated enough to do it. And we did a collaboration. It was one of the most trafficked pieces they had because that had that wirecutter punch of we were actually doing the work. And so we did more collaborations.

And then one day, I got an email from someone on the strategy team saying, do you ever think about selling? And I was like, yeah, I've thought about it before. And we started a process. It's pretty remarkable. I mean, five years, more or less, within five years of launching this thing, you took it from nothing, an idea, to a company that's sold to the New York Times for, you know, more than $30 million. I mean, that's, I mean, if you, and probably didn't feel that way the time, but that's, it's pretty great.

I mean, that's pretty fast. It's fast considering it was bootstrapped, more or less. Yeah. And it's fast considering the first year, I was only working on it 10 hours a week, because that's all I had. That's all you had to give because you were so burning. out. Yeah. So once you sold it, that was going to be it for you. I mean, you were not going to be running the business. You weren't going to be in charge of it. You weren't going to be leading a team anymore. You were kind of going to be out. And was that okay? Were you okay with that?

If I could do it again, I would have negotiated a job for myself because I thought I'd be hovering like an owner does. You basically as an owner, you put yourself where you're needed. And then as soon as you can hire for that need, you go to the next need and you keep building. But that doesn't work in a big company. And also, it's not really great to have someone like me around if you're trying to establish yourself as like the new leadership, to be honest. So I really think there's wisdom in what they did, which is they put me in an advisory role. And I got to work alongside the person running wirecutter from a business standpoint for many years. and it was really wonderful.

All right. Now, I have to raise this because it's important and it's something that is on my mind as a citizen of the world. I love wirecutter. I think it's awesome. I check it all the time. But what I don't like about it is,

and you can even make this accusation about how I built this, by the way, is that it encourages consumerism. It encourages us to buy. buy more crap. Yeah. And everybody wants to have a bunch of stuff, you know, kitchen gadgets and audio video stuff and a new TV.

And is any part of you conflicted about wirecutter? And that it does, you could argue it does encourage people to just buy more crap. I definitely am. Let's put it this way. If I were starting something now, it wouldn't necessarily be about things. Yeah. But since that's kind of my wheelhouse, maybe it would be. But it would have to be in a way that's more in tune with today's values.

Yeah. You know, I spend most of my time these days fixing up this old house, and I'm basically talking with craftsmen all day. And I have started to build and practice craft myself, specifically, woodworking with Japanese hand tools. And, like, a lot of these tools are made by hand by blacksmiths, and the speed of craft and the values of craft are so precious and humbling to me. And I've started to recognize that the best media is also like craft, the best podcast,

the best books, the best everything is not capitalistic at scale. It still needs to be capitalistic. People need to afford their way of life and their tools. but that scale is something I'm really allergic to now. When you think about where you landed, you know, you're in a boxing gym 20 years ago, and here you are retired, semi-retired, but, you know, able to focus on craft and woodworking and financially secure, do you think that is because of your incredible hard work and dedication and intelligence? or do you think there's part of that

is you got lucky? I mean, obviously all of the above, but it's really just mostly hard work and skill. And then I guess I believe luck is like

being able to be in those situations for long enough for things to work out. That's Brian Lamb, founder of wirecutter. By the way, Brian no longer boxes, but since moving to Hawaii, he has become an avid surfer with a kind of insane collection of surfboards, like 50 of them. It's the cadence of surfing too and like waves is really what informed wirecutter is cadence, which is slow and clean and like impactful as opposed to a bunch of like tiny little waves knocking all over the place in a messy way. Yeah, that's a great sport.

It's a great support for your whole body. Yeah, it's good. I'm glad I didn't discover it earlier because... That's all you would do? I'd be bussing tables, man. It's, like, bad to discover surfing too early. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you want to contact our team, our email address is H-I-B-T-at-I-D-Wondery.com.

If you want to follow us on Twitter or Instagram, our account is at How I Built This, and mine is at Guy Raz on Twitter. and on Instagram at guy.ros. This episode was produced by Josh Lash with music composed by Rantin Arabley. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Sam Paulson. Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Alex Chung, Carrie Thompson, Catherine Seifer, Elaine Coates, John Isabella, Chris Messini, and Carla Estevez. Our audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez.

I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. this.