Tiger Sisters - The Disney Playbook for Creators (Dude Perfect’s Next Move)

Starting point is 00:00:00 I had a boss at the NBA. She said to me multiple times, I've never seen you stressed. I'm constantly stressed. I am in a baseline state of stress. And so either A, I'm really good at faking, calm, or B, she's only seen me stressed, and she's never seen me not stressed.

Starting point is 00:00:18 And I never really figured out which of those two things it is. I'm Sheree. I'm Gene. And I'm Andrew. And we're the Tiger Sisters. We are your Wall Street and Silicon Valley Big Sisters. And we're a top 10 business podcast on Spotify, where we talk about money, power, and love. Today's episode is presented by SoFi, the all-in-one finance app that helps you bank, borrow, and invest your money in one place.

Starting point is 00:00:42 If you've been on the internet in the last 15 years, you know Dude Perfect. Five college roommates who turn trick shots into one of the biggest sports and entertainment brands in the world. What started with backyard basketball shots is now a global empire. billions of views, a fan base that spans kids to parents, sold out arenas, a massive merch line, and even plans for Dude Perfect World, their own theme park experience. And at the helm of this next chapter is Andrew Yaffy, Dude Perfect's very first CEO. A Stanford GSB grad, like me, with a career built in strategy and leadership. Andrew is helping take a creator brand to heights that rival pro sports franchises.

Starting point is 00:01:25 Today, we're talking about how you scale from content to commerce, what it takes to lead inside a culture built on fun and friendship, and where the future of sports, media, and community is headed. Andrew, welcome to the Tiger Sisters podcast. Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here. Yay! So for anyone who's watching this podcast and isn't familiar with Dude Perfect, could you summarize it in two sentences? The hardest question you've ever gotten. We are the largest sports account on YouTube with approaching 62 million subscribers.

Starting point is 00:02:06 We are a brand that represents sports, fun, family, and competition. And we create content that reflects those values. I love it. Sucinct. Yeah. I did it. You did it. So, Andrew, billions have viewed Jude Perfect videos. What is the secret to a viral video?

Starting point is 00:02:25 There's a couple of schools of thought on this. And we argue about the two of them all day in the office. One is, as has been true since the beginning of time, you have to make great content that is engaging and creative and the people haven't seen before. And that surprises you and delights you and is really authentic to who we are as a company and who our guys are as individuals. And I think that holds a lot of weight in our business. to then make that viral, there are some tips and tricks and tweaks depending on the platform you're on, depending on how the algorithm is feeling that day. And YouTube in particular, which is sort of a home base, I would say it's most true where your title and your thumbnail and the length

Starting point is 00:03:16 of the video and 30 second retention and average view duration, those are all deep analytical things that we have people who look at and work on and take. tests and now you can test multiple thumbnails and multiple titles and have different titles and thumbnails in different languages or locations. I, as a leader, try to keep as much of that in the background as possible out of our creative process as we're doing a creative offsite in a couple of weeks. And my approach is I'm setting the ground rules with our creative team on here are the types of things that we're looking for that I know.

Starting point is 00:03:56 are likely to drive virality, business success, brand opportunities, et cetera. Yeah. But I don't want them to be bogged down in those things because I think they actually interfere with the first part of it, the authentic creative process that is really genuine and helps drive what our brand is. Interesting. So are you kind of, you're going into being like, hey, from the business perspective, these are our goals and this is what we're trying to hit this year and beyond.

Starting point is 00:04:28 But just are you like take that with a grain of salt or like you're like learn it, embody it, then throw it all away and do you brainstorming? As an example, when our first videos were somewhere between three and five minutes because in 2009 on YouTube, that's what thrived. Nobody was making content longer than that because you didn't need to. It was expensive, et cetera. Now, as I'm sure you know well, the YouTube. algorithm and YouTube as a platform rewards longer and longer content.

Starting point is 00:04:59 And so one of the parameters as we go on to this is how do we aim for 30 minute videos? And I, you know, if someone comes with an idea, a creative idea, one of the threshold questions is, can that be a 30 minute video? And so I'm not guiding on within the first 30 seconds, we need to have four edits. Yeah. But I am guiding on a critical parameter that I know is instrumental for success. There are other things like sports selection. If we're going to do something and we say,

Starting point is 00:05:29 hey, we know we need a celebrity or an athlete in that, I'm and others on the team are thinking about, how do we ensure that we're reaching the certain geographies or audiences, what sports are resonating right now, what's in season, and what do we think we can get incremental promotion for? So there are all those things that I'm keeping, I'm in my back pocket or sprinkling into the creative process.

Starting point is 00:05:52 but we never want to go into it and say, hey, we need to make, you know, a video for this brand with this sport in this way and this is, these are all the things that it needs because that comes through in the content and you're then not delivering quality content for your audience or for your partners. I love that because it sounds like you're providing strategic frameworks that, you know, you can hand over to your team and then they can pick and choose within that framework, like how, like what geo to look at. but you're not like giving them a mandate that they must do this.

Starting point is 00:06:26 I try not to. They might disagree sometimes, but I try to be as sort of principle driven as possible as a leader and give the team, especially the creative team, learn to design their own sort of thinking and strategies and plans because it's not my area of expertise, and I don't want to over-engineer that part. Yeah. What do you know about strategic frameworks?

Starting point is 00:06:51 You know, I know some things about strategic frameworks. We can compare notes, yeah. Well, so, Andrew, you've had a long and storied career before Dude Perfect, working at the NBA, leading digital transformation. What are maybe like two or three key learnings from the NBA that you have taken now to new digital media at Dude Perfect? You need to follow your audience. The NBA, we had an amazing, audience of young and highly engaged and global fans. And we saw success, especially on social and digital, when we leaned into that and not away from it. When we started doing in-language content,

Starting point is 00:07:39 in foreign languages, when we would work with the platforms to test new things that they were looking to build because they knew that that's what audiences wanted. So we leaned. very heavily into vertical content very early on. We, gosh, when we redesigned the MBA app in about five years ago and changed basically the main content framework to be vertical rather than horizontal video on demand because that's where advertising is going. That's where consumption behaviors were going. And so we wanted to do, you know, not fight against that trend.

Starting point is 00:08:18 And so that's something I've definitely taken to Dude Perfect as well that, you know, similar to the first question, how do we see where content consumption is going on the platform? And that's longer videos. We need to go there. It doesn't mean we need to change who we are as a brand or what our creative is. But we need to follow our audience to longer content is what's performing. You know, as YouTube always tells me, the algorithm is just a reflection of what people are watching. and therefore, if that's what's working, we want to be able to deliver that specifically for our audience.

Starting point is 00:08:55 So that's definitely one thing. On the other side of the equation, I would say one thing I took away from my MBA experience is the NBA is a complicated place to work. As Mark Cuban might have told you as well, there's a lot of owners. There's a lot of stakeholders across players and ownership and management. teams, it can get very complicated very quickly and very difficult to progress. And so as I've come into this organization, I've tried to streamline things as much as possible and ensure that we are able to move quickly, that we can make quick decisions, that I'm not a bottleneck on decision making.

Starting point is 00:09:42 we've tried to keep teams, keep our organization lean and responsive because as you get bigger and as you have more stakeholders in your ecosystem, it can be really hard to manage. And that's something that I would shift slightly from my MBA experience and my dude perfect experience. Okay, so I'm really glad you mentioned the concept of internationalization while you were at the NBA because personally, I think as a nation, our greatest export is sports, live sports. And I think that that's so key to our international primacy and like American hegemony. What do you think about that? And is that something that you kind of like take into account when you're building products

Starting point is 00:10:29 and like building for your audience and thinking about like the long term future of your company? Absolutely. you know, especially in the context of a digital first offering. When I joined Dude Perfect, we'd never really done anything explicitly international in the first, whatever it was, 14 or 15 years of the company. Half our audience on YouTube was still global. Since I've started, we're now translating every piece of long form and short form content that we create into 15 languages, where we've included a number. number of international sports much more than we had previously. So we had a YouTube short with a cricket player generated 60 million views on YouTube, which is very exciting.

Starting point is 00:11:19 That was, I wouldn't say predominantly, but largely from nations where cricket is more popular than the U.S. We've done a lot in European soccer. Our guys were at the Champions League final presenting the Man of the Match trophy. I think sports is absolutely a critical tool for human connection. And international is one component where that's really valuable and obvious. Same thing at the NBA. And the commissioner would talk about it all the time. But it was a tool for global diplomacy.

Starting point is 00:11:54 And whether that's you see it in the Olympics, you see it and the power of, you know, basketball to bring the world together in the Olympics, even across. you know, sometimes complicated geopolitical relationships. But it's definitely something and it's something that I think we hold, we take really seriously and we view as an opportunity for us as a business as well. It's a big world out there and YouTube is a powerful platform to reach people across the world. And we know they like sports content. So you know how every year I have a New Year's resolution around finances.

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Starting point is 00:13:10 Sofi Plus is a great way to get more for your money and you can get started for just $10 a month. Go to sophy.com slash tigerplus. That's sophy.com slash tiger plus. And now back to our show. I know Tiger Sisters podcast is pretty different from Dude Perfect, but I got to ask like if we want to become like Dude Perfect in the sense of like growth and views and impact, what should we be doing? And I know that's a pretty general question, but I'm like, I want to pick your brain. Like, what are like the power moves or questions

Starting point is 00:13:46 we should be thinking about? Give us a five-year roadmap? In terms of strategic frameworks? I wish I had all the answers. You don't? I know. I can pretend. You know, I think, honestly, I think,

Starting point is 00:14:01 well, first of all, you're doing amazing work so far. So you're off to a really good start. but would you say you're a year into this journey. Our guys have been fortunate to be doing this for over 15, and it takes a lot of persistence and a lot of hard work and a commitment to kind of your vision and your ambition. It takes a lot of analytics and responsiveness

Starting point is 00:14:29 to what your feedback is from your audience. But I would say that, and I know everyone says this, but I truly do believe it that in a world where there is so much content out there, the more authentic and different and true to yourself you can be, the more returns there are. Obviously, a lot of other things have to go right. But I really do believe that being consistent and authentic in the content you create and the vision you have for what.

Starting point is 00:15:05 you want that content platform to be, the better off you're likely to be. Yeah. We can talk later about some tactical ideas around thumbnails. 30 minutes. No, I like that because that's something that we work on every single day. And I think that that is something that we have seen the Tiger Sisters family, our audience, react really, really well to is when we talk about our own mistakes and we are really, really vulnerable with the audience on camera.

Starting point is 00:15:35 Like that's been, I think, what has the most outsized positive reactions. It's what builds connection and people respond in the comments to some of the stories that we tell. And we talk about like money, power, love. We talk about the places we've messed up or like breakups and people have responses like, oh, I've gone through something similar as you have. And I think it's increased. Well, I don't know. I feel like it's rare right now when we're a business podcast and we're women in business

Starting point is 00:16:00 to have people talking so vulnerably about non-business topics that are very much a part of our lives. Yeah, and creating like this kind of safe space on the internet to have all these conversations in both like a serious way, but also with levity and also entertaining. It's, yeah. I think one of my broad observations about the internet, as ridiculous as that sounds, is I think what we've learned over the last 25 years is there are thousands and thousands millions of niches that are sizable enough to build a business, right? And so, like, one of the

Starting point is 00:16:40 things that our guys always tell me is we make content for people like us, and there are a lot of people like us. They're, you know, they're now dads and of families that play a lot of sports and watch a lot of sports and enjoy comedy and these sorts of things. And that's a big enough audience to start. And I would, you know, I would imagine it's similar. There are a lot of women in business who are going through a lot of the similar things. Like, that's a really big audience to start with. And then you can branch out, go from there to, you know, where else, where else can your sort of authentic selves take you? And so I think that's a, and then, you know, the power of the algorithms on all the different platforms is that it identifies people who are seeking out that content.

Starting point is 00:17:30 And it's really powerful to, you know, lean into that and identify where are those pockets, where are those audiences, how can I get in front of someone who's likely to like this content? But it does require that consistency and authenticity to continue to deliver for that audience. You've mentioned algorithm a couple of times. Is that something that you trust? Or like you hear people say like the algorithm is constantly changing and how do we play into it? And I know a lot of it is creating the content that will deliver value. But in a world where we don't have insight into how it is evolving on YouTube or Spotify or whatever platform,

Starting point is 00:18:11 like do you trust the algorithm and does it frustrate you? Is it like a nemesis or a frenemy or how would it? I would say I give, it's a mix of all the above. I think on some level I trust my friends at all. the platforms that they are transparent in what they're solving for. And that, you know, on YouTube, they want people to watch more YouTube. And so the algorithm is simply, what are the things that people are watching? Let's feed them more of it.

Starting point is 00:18:49 And if you boil it down to that, there's, I'm sure, thousands of things underneath it. But in essence, I think that's what it resolves to on most of the platform. And so therefore, there's always going to be tips and tricks and sneaky ways to to improve upon it. And that's part of the fun and the competition. One of the beauties of creating digital content is that it's a lot less expensive than it used to be. And so we're constantly testing and refining and posting different cuts of things on one platform versus another to see, is it an algorithm thing? Is it a quality of content thing? How does it work?

Starting point is 00:19:27 You know, there are certain platforms where 30 second content or 60 second content works better. And so we're looking at that all the time. You know, we're investing a lot and I want us to get even better at that analytical approach to really understand what's happening. And some other creators out there are do an amazing job with that. We aspire to that. But I don't think there's anything to fear in the algorithms of the various platforms. I love that phrasing. They're transparent in what they're optimizing for.

Starting point is 00:20:02 I guess that's kind of all you're going to ask for. Yes. So at Dude Perfect, why did they choose you to be CEO? You'd have to ask them. No, honestly, what they needed in my experience were shockingly overlapping. At the NBA, I spent, before I came to Dude Perfect, about four years, leading the content organization, building world-class content strategy,

Starting point is 00:20:31 helping us through digital transformation, overseeing all of our social, our long-form content production. And the four years before that was the head of business strategy for the company. And so there my job was essentially, how do we bring the NBA into new business areas or new business lines?

Starting point is 00:20:49 It's not present in using its IP, its brand, its assets, its content. And what I am tasked to do at due, Perfect is the intersection of those two things. It's how do we optimize our content strategy? How do we grow across platforms, across new channels, across new talent, all things that I did over the last four years of the MBA? And then how do we take Dude Perfect as a YouTube brand and grow it into a multi-platform brand, period, and leverage our brand, our content, our assets to get into new business lines where we don't already exist? And so they're,

Starting point is 00:21:27 days at work where I a problem or a issue or an opportunity will come up and I'll be like, gosh, I never would have thought that was going to come up, but this is exactly like something I did five years ago. Or, oh, I know the three companies we have to call to go do this thing because I did the, you know, at the NBA I launched our youth sports basketball competition. And so I know all the players in the space. And now if we want to have conversations about how to get into the youth sports ecosystem,

Starting point is 00:21:57 I know all the players. And so I think the board and the founders who went through an exhaustive interview process, I think probably understood even better than I did coming into it, how my background, how my experience. And also, I think, my demeanor and approach working, you know, with, it's really a transformation in some sense of they'd never taken outside capital. They'd never had real outside leadership before. How do we transform the company from what it was? was to what we all aspire for it to be, I think requires a certain interpersonal relationship with the existing company, the founders.

Starting point is 00:22:39 And that's, you know, candidly not an easy thing, I think, to find someone who can mix all those things together. And I hope I'm doing a pretty good job. Yeah. Well, it sounds like you are the perfect person for the job in terms of overlap. As you started the role at Dude Perfect, is there one area where you really wanted to learn and grow specifically. Like this was the most interesting thing

Starting point is 00:23:00 that like you didn't know before. So many. I think the biggest difference from my previous job is directly working with the talent. At the NBA, you're kind of a step removed from players or organizations

Starting point is 00:23:16 or whoever it may be. And here. You can't really control the game or anything. That's right. Yeah. And here it's a blessing that, you know, our talent are 16 years in. They're at the office every single day.

Starting point is 00:23:33 They're working on business problems. They're working on creative problems. They're arguing with me and each other about anything and everything. And I love that creative energy and passion and excitement. And I mean, you know, I always say our founders are our brand, is our culture. Like, that is sort of the through line for the whole company. and I'm incredibly fortunate to be a part of that. But it's just a very different management experience

Starting point is 00:24:03 to have your founders, five of them in the office, versus NBA players who are out doing their thing separately. And so that talent management piece has been a big and really exciting and valuable learning experience for me. Our founder is our brand, is our culture. Yes. Your verb, your tenses are probably better than mine. Well, no, I was just repeating it.

Starting point is 00:24:27 I was like, I want to write that down. I'm so glad this is being recorded. Because it's true for us. It's true for us, too. Yeah, because it's us. Yeah. Yeah. Tiger Sisters, ever heard of it?

Starting point is 00:24:38 Well, speaking of new business lines, I feel like that's something that you guys have really delved into ever since you started a CEO. And like sometimes it feels like you're doing a little bit of like the Disney playbook. Or I don't know, tell us about kind of your thinking around that. Yeah. on a very small scale for now, the Disney playbook. But ultimately, it's a simple, I think it's kind of a simple equation that we have an amazing audience, an amazing community that the guys have built for a long time.

Starting point is 00:25:12 And we want to know what other products and experiences and content does that audience want. And so the guys started a live tour now six years ago. They've done five live tours. We just concluded this summer. We were in 20, 20 cities across the country. NBA sized arenas, 95% sold out. They're at the tour. Incredible energy.

Starting point is 00:25:40 And it really goes to signal, hey, this is an experience that families, it's primarily six to 16-year-olds and their parents, families want from us. And we wanted to experiment with, okay, well, what are other experiences? So outside, we built a fan fest that had items from videos that we've done in the past. So ping pong table bounce shots and throwing a football through smaller and smaller holes and a board. And we had hundreds of people lined up for that fan fest. It was free. Hundreds of people lined up before every show.

Starting point is 00:26:19 we had to shut it down an hour before every show because the lines were so long. And so our hypothesis was like, all right, people love watching our guys. They like watching them on video. They pay real money to come and drive an hour and a half to come to our show with their family. They probably want to do some of this stuff too. And this was the first time we as a brand let them do things with us. And so that's something that now we're full bore into is, okay, we believe there are are millions of people out there, millions of kids. I have a six-year-old and a four-year-old,

Starting point is 00:26:53 so I have a focus group at home that would love to do and have fun with the experiences that we get to, are privileged enough to have fun with on a daily basis. And so when you think about the experiences piece of the, of Walt Disney's flywheel, we think there's real opportunity. It won't look like a Disney world, but we think experiencing our brand is a big piece of this. And just like the Disney model, if someone comes and has a great time at a Disney experience, excuse me, at a dude perfect experience, they're a lot more likely to come back and buy a t-shirt or watch one of our videos on YouTube. And, you know, we do believe that that, you know, the thesis is that that flywheel is going to work for us as well.

Starting point is 00:27:41 If we're laser focused on who is our audience, why do they follow us? How can we engage them further? and how do we deliver high value experiences and products for them? I'm like pretty blown away. I feel like it's a whole new vertical, like live experiences in the way that like Disney has theme parks or like you're thinking, I'm thinking today like how are families evolving what it means to spend time outside of the house? Are they going to the movies?

Starting point is 00:28:07 No, we know traditional entertainment is not doing well there. But like what are the things that families want to do together? Is it going to, you know, a theme park together or not Berry Farm or Berry Picking, but like, how are people experiencing in person together now? And coming out of the pandemic, you've seen a massive growth in the experiential economy generally and families more than anyone. I think everyone felt, again, I experienced this very cooped up with your kids. Yeah. And now wants to go out and do things. And so we believe there's very few brands better suited than us to.

Starting point is 00:28:43 do things in sports for families. And it's ironic in some sense that we are a content brand, right? We grew up with people watching us on YouTube. We're as big of believers as anyone of go out and do. You know, we love it when you watch our content. You love it when you don't. We love it when you're out. You know, nothing makes us prouder than when, and this happens all the time,

Starting point is 00:29:06 when parents come up to us and said, our kids watch your video, and then they were out in the driveway for three hours trying to recreate the shot. And we think there aren't a lot of brands in the world who have the power to get kids and families to go do things. And so we think that's a really unique aspect of our brand. And it's just a matter of then how do we build the experiences and the businesses around those experiences to make the flywheel work. And then in terms of the touring, you mentioned that you're into your sixth year of touring and it just keeps getting bigger and better. is that something, I guess like not only from the sort of like just pure business aspect of it, of it being profitable, of it being, you know, valuable to the bottom line, is that something

Starting point is 00:29:51 you think about more so in like connecting with people in person? Is that more of the value of it? A hundred percent. It is, again, as a digital first brand and our, you know, and our guys will tell you this, that they spent, you know, the first 10 years looking into a camera. reading comments and seeing views and that was their level of interaction right so for them to have you know 12,000 screaming people and they get to you know as part of the show they go up into the stands and they're high-fiving you know hundreds of kids it's just it's amazing connection that

Starting point is 00:30:31 those you know creates real affinity for the brand real connection to the guys in a way that watching a video can't. And so it is, don't get me wrong, it's a very good business for us. But it really, and we talk about this a lot, the goal is not to maximize profit on the tour. It's how do we get in front of our fans? How do we engage? How do we create that connection? Because it, you know, down, like that's the, that's the beauty and that's the power of our business. And it will pay dividends for years to come. Yeah, and that sort of growth in brand affinity and brand love and brand connection, is that something you guys have actively measured? Or is it more so like we just feel it, like we know it's there? No, we've started to. This is, since I came in, I'm a data nerd at art. And the guys do a lot of things well. Data Capture and Analytics was not one of the things that they had invested a lot of time in for the first, you know, several years of the company.

Starting point is 00:31:39 And so we've now instituted, we've weekly focus groups where we bring parents and families into the office to talk to them about what we're doing. We have regular surveys and pulse checks on our brand and to understand how various videos and activations and content has resonated with our audience or not. We have third parties that do some of this research as well on our behalf. We work closer with our brand partners to understand different levels of affinity and understand the demographics and understand who we should target. And it's been amazing to build really powerful, long lasting brand relationships in that sense because now, you know, body armor is our hydration partner. We talk to them all the time. We have a licensed product with them where there's a Dude Perfect branded body armor that is available for on a limited time basis at Walmart and Croker. You're not looking to the camera and say it?

Starting point is 00:32:45 It's not currently on sales. But we share a lot of data with them and they share a lot of data back on who purchased it, what their reactions were. Yeah. What those people had purchased before. How much body armor they purchased. after. And it's just a really powerful mechanism that I didn't even expect to get coming into this when, but they've been a partner for years. And we have a really trusted relationship with them. And it, it is really powerful to understand at a really deep level how our brand effects theirs,

Starting point is 00:33:18 how their brand effects ours, et cetera. This is, I'm learning a lot from you. Cool. It's a machine. It's an ecosystem. It's all very interconnected. That's the goal. The goal is to build. yes, an ecosystem where, you know, it starts with our families and our audiences to say, you know, what are all the touch points that they want and how can we how can we best deliver those? And I think it, you know, one thing we haven't talked about is it requires focus.

Starting point is 00:33:49 Like one of the things that I struggled with when I came in, the NBA is very much a mass product, right? We try to go after consumers that, you know, There's the NBA finals, it was watched by anywhere between, you know, 10 or 20 or at 1.30 million people. Like, that's everyone in the U.S. That's a mass product. And I came in and said, all right, we're a sports brand. How do we get 18 to 34 year olds? How do we get, you know, your average, your, you know, your general sports population to love dude perfect. And we went back and forth a lot on sort of what is our mission, why do we do this?

Starting point is 00:34:29 and became clear that focusing on the family and that sort of building deeper relationships unlocks a lot more of those business opportunities than just general mass appeal. And so that's been actually a big shift for me, even in my first year, to let's be laser-focused on, you know, we want to round out some elements of how we approach the family and continue to reach more families. But that's our target. It's not, you know, how do we get into 18 to 34? How do we appeal to, you know, the 50-year-old watching a live sporting event unless they have kids? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:35:07 So I think that's a big component of our success as well. Well, I think that's so smart too because you're by definition also solving the generational problem that a lot of, you know, companies, especially entertainment companies, come up against, which is like, okay, our main audience is aging out. You're like building in that next generation of audience by focusing on families. And it's tempting. Was that intentional? Somewhat. Yeah. I mean, I think when the guys founded the company, they were just college kids making content for college kids.

Starting point is 00:35:37 Yeah. They are, you know, they never intended for it to be a family friendly or sort of a family first company. But all their content was always very family friendly and very clean. And, you know, YouTube is a platform, has a lot of, uh, younger viewers and so it kind of just naturally gravitated that way and they leaned in and they you know they realize sort of this is who our audience is and they embraced it which I think is was a really smart thing well before I got there. We've since had that debate and there are certain things we do around the edges to ensure that there's some continuity for our audience but the fact that kids are always being

Starting point is 00:36:19 born and you know there's always more families is a is really beneficial thing for our brand. True. Cool. Okay, so Andrew, what parts of the dude perfect story do you think anyone, even someone who's outside of sports or media, could learn from and apply to their own careers or ventures? One of the things is most impressive about our founders and that I've really taken to heart and really aligns with how I approach

Starting point is 00:36:45 business is being values and principles driven. That the world is, shifting constantly around us, whether it's the algorithm, whether it's consumption patterns, whether it's platforms. One of the things I think our founders have never wavered from and it's really returned amazing results for them is adherence to their values. And so one of the first things when I came in as CEO was to define our values and communicate them to the company. I think they've always been sort of inherent, but as we scale,

Starting point is 00:37:29 needing to define them so that, you know, when a new employee comes in, they understand that. And, you know, we went from the founders interviewing every employee to me interviewing every employee to now at this point. I'm not even interviewing every employee. And so thinking about how do we scale our values has been a real challenge. And I don't pretend to have all the answers for that. But my first answer is to talk about them as much as possible. And so we start and end every all-hands meeting with our values. We highlight examples of employees who have adhered to those values or done something remarkable with one of those values. Because I think at the end of the day, that's what we've got. That it's very easy for, especially as a digital content brand,

Starting point is 00:38:22 to chase, to chase what's the shiny object, to chase what's cool in the moment. But that's no way to build a long-lasting, sustainable brand. And so I think that's one thing that I've learned a lot over the last year, and it's something that going forward in my career, wherever it may take me, is a lesson I will certainly continue to employ. I love that. Cool. That's awesome.

Starting point is 00:38:51 Great. Okay, now we have our next section. The last section. And our final section. Yes. And it's very fun. So one of my best friends started this company called Fortune Questions, which is basically fortune cookies that have questions in them that are either mild or wild.

Starting point is 00:39:10 I think I got to go mild. Well, we do one of each. It was a false choice. False choice. So let's start with these are mild. Who would you call first in a moment of crisis? Ooh. My wife.

Starting point is 00:39:28 Hi, sweetie. She and I've been together since my freshman year, or my sophomore year, her freshman year of college. Oh, my God. Oh, wow. Over. Uh-huh. How long? We're coming up on 20 years.

Starting point is 00:39:40 Wow. Thank you. We've had a lot of crises over the last 20 years. I operate passionately. So I swing high and low in moments of progress. professional or personal crisis. She is far more even keel. And so it's when I'm going through something, this happened earlier this week,

Starting point is 00:39:59 she is incredibly valuable at kind of bringing me back and grounding me in reality. And I probably don't say thank you to her enough for that. So thank you. But yeah, she would certainly be my first call. That's so sweet. Yeah, it's lovely. Great answer. On for the spicy.

Starting point is 00:40:20 Ooh, this is good. What's one personality trait? You fake well. Oh, you fake well? Yes. Ooh. That is spicy. It's like being on this podcast.

Starting point is 00:40:35 It's funny. I had a boss at the NBA who's also a GSB alum. And she said to me multiple times, I've never seen you stressed. And my reaction to that was, I'm constantly stressed. I am in a baseline state of stress. And so I was like, that just means either A, I'm really good at faking calm or B, she's only seen me stressed and she's never seen me not stressed. And that's just me to her is stressed me.

Starting point is 00:41:13 And I never really figured out which of those two things it is. But I do think I present calmer than I am inside. That's probably why I call my wife afterward when I'm incredibly stressed or anxious about something. But I try to be with my team, with our company, calm and clear and grounded outside, even if on the inside I'm very nervous or anxious or stress about something. So that'll be my answer. Like right now you're screaming inside. Oh my God, what am I doing here? Yeah, my inner monologue would be much louder.

Starting point is 00:41:50 So, yes. It's a skill. It's a real skill. Yeah, that's awesome. Awesome. Cool. Thank you so much for loving. Thank you guys. Thank you for having me.

Starting point is 00:41:57 This was really fun. Awesome. Quick note. So I know a lot of people think that podcasts are just about talking off the cuff, but I think what you don't see is that for Tiger Sisters podcast behind the scenes, there is so much research and cultural curation that goes into every single episode. Yeah. And I feel like you can kind of feel it because in every episode, we have a lot of studies that we

Starting point is 00:42:15 reference, a lot of research, and we want to make sure you guys get the signal through all the noise out there. That's why it is so important that you subscribe and follow us on every single platform, whether it's Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you're watching this on. It only takes two seconds to do, and it's really a simple gesture that has so much impact on helping us build momentum and build this community with you. Welcome to the Tiger Sisters family.

Tiger Sisters - The Disney Playbook for Creators (Dude Perfect’s Next Move)

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