Y Combinator Startup Podcast - #43 - Casey Neistat and Matt Hackett on Live Video's Struggle for Interestingness

Episode Date: November 1, 2017

Matt Hackett and Casey Neistat are the cofounders of Beme, which was acquired by CNN last year.You might already know Casey from his YouTube channel which now has over 8M subscribers.And before Beme, Matt was a Hacker-in-Residence betaworks and the VP of Engineering at Tumblr.

Hey, this is Craig Cannon and you're listening to Y Combinators podcast. Today's guests are Casey Nystad and Matt Hackett. Matt and Casey are the co-founders of Beam, which is a live video app that CNN acquired last year. And you may already know Casey from his YouTube channel, which has something like 8 million subscribers. And Matt, prior to Beam, was working at BetoWorks as a hacker in residence. And before that, he was the VP of Engineering at Tumblr. So just a quick note before we get going, if you haven't yet subscribed or reviewed the show, it would be awesome if you did.

All right, here we go. I mean, didn't Google just announce last week some clip on camera that captures what's in front of you? In typical Google form, they pitched it, though, is like, this is the center of our AI learning platform about the world, which is the same marketing mistake they made with everyone wants a face computer. No, everyone does not want a face computer. Everyone does not want an AR learning camera clip to their chest. But they probably do actually want a camera.

I think from purely a creative perspective, I think that the struggle for interestingness, that's a line that we used to use a lot when we were pitching, but solving the struggle for interestingness from a video perspective is paramount to having anything succeed. And I think what Snapchat did that was so amazing

beyond the story mechanism being so fascinated. But I dismissed lenses as kind of a gimmick when it first came out, but what lenses did was it solved the struggle for interestingness from both the creator's perspective and the viewer's perspective. Here, put dog ears on. That's interesting. That's fun. And I think the trouble that we're seeing, certainly we saw at Beam, that they're seeing with spectacles and that I think every single live platform, none of which have truly succeeded yet, is because they don't address that struggle for interestingness. And I think that

the reason why video games have succeeded in the live space is because they do. Here's something that we all understand it's a game and I can see your face playing it there's that's that's that's dealing with the struggle for interestingness but um I think broadly live is too wide open it's too there is no box there and I think what we were trying to do with being like it's one of the things we talked about should be a four second six second clip or six second clips if you string a bunch of them together it needs to feel fun like you're watching an edited movie uh we were wrong it got boring quickly watching people's raw lives got boring quickly so how are you going to deal with that in the future if you're handling multiple feeds from all over the world.

So with the product, so we learned a lot with Beam v1 that we imported to a much, much smaller problem set, which is what we're dealing with in panels, the product that's out now. And panels is just purely about opinion. It's what is your opinion on these five stories today, these things happening in the world? We wanted to be this place where you get to actually see the full spectrum of perspectives on on an issue that might be controversial, that might be, you know, what do you think about the Republican healthcare proposal, to actually see what a civil debate in video looks like on that.

And the reason the way we made it more interesting is like it's just really contained. So I think we took a lot of the little product cues about how to set one up in a context both to create and consume in which they're going to be articulate and pointed and fast. And we do that with some priming. and there's some ways that we actually try and guide you towards creating something that's really compelling. But the domain is much, much smaller. Like we're not trying to make this, that's not the platform for everything you could possibly take a video of in the world. It is, what do you think about this new story?

Yeah, it's, if you can hand someone on camera and say, say something interesting, they're going to have no idea what to say. But if you hand someone in camera and say, you know, what do you think about the latest health care proposal? They might, they'll probably have something to say. And that something will be tied to a specific narrative. So that is an attempt at addressing that struggle for interestingness. Right. I mean, it's tricky because it seems that the internet deviates towards like kind of a shit show most of the time. People aren't civil at all.

So generous. You said that so generously. We have turned off YouTube comments. I see that you still have them. But, uh... You turn off YouTube comments? Yeah, is that a bad idea? And you still get views?

Yeah. Not as many as you. Yeah, you'll get annihilated in the algorithm for that. They punish you severely for that. Oh, really? Yeah. Maybe you should turn them back on. But I agree.

comments are absolutely toxic. If you go into your community settings on the left-hand side, you can go down, you can highlight words, and if any of those words pop up, those comments will be automatically hidden. Oh, all right. So if you were to go into my library of those words,

you would find the most disgusting dictionary, bibliography of words that humans have ever, ever uttered. And the funny thing about that is, people who use the kind of slurs and profanities that I have blocked, they also don't know how to spell those slurs or profanities. So you have to come up with every spelling of every derogatory word you could ever identify because they don't know how to spell well.

But, yeah. I mean, here's the thing about that, though. I think it's really easy, and I especially think for people our age who sort of grew up on the very early Internet, which was a very, very small place compared to the almost half the world that has access to it now, there's this easy thing to go like, oh, it's just the internet. It's a gross place. Like, anyone can say anything.

I actually think we, as people who make products, need to stop thinking like that and start thinking about, no, the entire world now has access to this thing. How do we actually design it purposefully so that that doesn't happen? How do you actually create a place for people to not be harassed, to actually have a civil discourse? If you're designing a social product and you kind of just throw your hands up and go, that's the Internet, you're wrong. Like, that is not the era we live in, and we need to take on that responsibility as people

make these things. Yeah. Who just said, somebody smart just said, I used to go to the internet to escape the real world, and now I go to the real world to escape the internet. Oh, yeah. I don't know who that was. I saw the tweet was floating around,

but I think that pretty much sums it up. And so is it just like heavily community moderated? Like how do you guys, because this is like obviously a contentious opinion. How do you put these ideas into your product? Yeah. I mean, there's no one answer, and I don't think we,

not going to come and say like, here's exactly what we're doing. And it's perfect. What we're doing right now with panels is we're very purposefully building it slowly. It's not an open community yet. You have to sign up, give us some info about yourself. And we're trying to let people in in real demographic balance. We're trying to, you know, in general, tech early adopters tends to skew a little bit male. We're trying to make sure that that doesn't skew the community. And so we actually set up a place where when we do open the doors fully, it is something where you're like, oh, All kinds of opinions are welcome here. Trolling doesn't work and isn't going to get me attention.

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

lots of content that people like while also building product? Yeah, I mean, I think that almost every media company right now, their technology products are just a device to further disseminate the media that they're making. There isn't a holistic consideration of how can the media and then the technology they're using to promote that media, how can they have a more symbiotic relationship? And I think that's easy to talk about that problem. It's very hard to talk about solutions. And I think Beam panels is a very literal version of integrating those two.

It's a very good example. But I can tell you plainly that it's very hard to realize. Like the way we've integrated Beam thus far into our content, I think it's boring. I don't think it's that interesting. I think it's much more interesting to explain it. Like we have this crowdsourcing product that we can have people chiming in from around the world. and instead of having panelists that are old bearded men, we have panelists from all around the world.

That's fascinating. That's a very compelling idea. But then when you see the reality of it, you're like, I don't care. So these are very challenging problems to solve. And I think, again, the benefit that we have here is that we are trying to solve them from day one. We're trying to solve them proactively instead of reactively.

We're not going to be backing our successful big media company into solving these problems. We're building a company around those problems. And is managing these disparate kinds of teams new and weird for you? Or have you felt like you figured it out so far? No. I mean, absolutely, it is new and weird. You know, I think I've always been on the other, sort of the other arrangement where we have, like, we have technology team where people, or I work on a technology product or run a team that makes technology product that lots of media gets made with.

Never having both of those end of the same roofs. So every single day, it's on that very basic thing that I was talking about, of getting people in the newsroom to realize that this can change, that we are in 100% control of the product we're using. That's, I mean, that requires like daily reminders, rejiggering of the way that we work, figuring out, all right, how do we actually get a producer who sits not just on the news team, but also with the product team,

and actually, you know, gathers feedback, brings it into the actual product, the perspective of, hey, I have to make a video and it's due tomorrow. And I would love to include people from panels, but these 10 things don't work. Right. So, yeah, no, it is very different. I think it's fairly uncharted. I don't think there are many people who have tried to do both simultaneously like this. My response to that question is that Matt does a great job.

So kind of transitioning, but something that I also think is really cool about you guys, is a just like overall creative output. Like when you started vlogging, because I've known Matt for a while, but like he started talking about you to me. And he's like, oh yeah, man, he's doing videos every day.

And like, having made some videos myself, I was like, holy shit, this is a lot of work and this is a lot of editing. And one of the common questions throughout all the,

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

And one thing that's been made abundantly clear to me is I'm working with this big, unbelievably talented, skillful media team here at Beam is that I'm a very effective person when I'm by myself and when I have to work in groups like I fall to pieces. Like does not work well with others is what it said on every report card I got until I dropped out of high school in the 10th grade. And I think that's very true. So for me, that creative process is one where in finding that cadence that you talked about of making a video every day was one where I removed every obstruction between me and

finishing it. And other people are the biggest obstructions. I have an idea. Well, let's talk through that idea. And the metaphor that I use of discussing ideas and groups is like when an idea at its inception, it's an ice cube and it's rock hard and you can look at it, you can see it, and you can study it, and you know what it is. But when a discussion begins, you have to pass that ice cube around the room, it starts to melt and melt and melt. And after enough discussions, the ice cube's gone and everybody's hands are wet and nobody quite remembers what that idea was. That's a major obstruction.

So for me, when it comes to creation, like remove that obstruction. Don't talk. Don't involve other people. Don't need anything from anyone to realize this new video every 24 hours. And that's wildly effective. It doesn't scale, period. It seems to crush you, too, just like actual time and energy. I mean, no. Not me.

I feel great about that. That's like an energy source. For me, it's the same thing. It's like running. It's like, aren't you so tired because you run a dozen miles a day? It's like, no, I'm not tired because I run a dozen miles a day. Like, no, I'm not crushed because I made my video. Like the days that I'm down are days that I don't finish anything.

And there is that sort of dopamine rush you get when you finish something. And there's no greater sort of punctuation to finishing something than clicking upload and sending it out to millions of people. So no, like that's a power source for me. What's crushing is like now we're trying to scale that. And if there's one thing I'm hyper aware of, it's my own limitations, creatively, editorially, I have a lot of them. And the people we have here working on our media department, especially in the editorial side,

are way more skilled than I could ever be as far as a journalist goes. Incredibly smart, articulate, capable, amazing on camera, better looking people than like I could ever. So then how do I sort of impart my understanding that I've gotten via 8 million subscribers and 800 videos? How do I share that understanding and scale at least some part of that with this incredibly capable team? And I think the answer to that is something that we've been working towards for the last year.

And what about you, Matt? I mean, I'll talk about engineering and, like, coding, building a product. Because at this point, at this point, my career, I'm a manager. And, like, that's a very different, it is a very different skill set. And it's something that you need to work on a different way. But, like, I don't think that's quite as interesting probably to the early stage founder as that, like, I'm the technical half of the team. And holy shit, we have to, we have to, you know, have this thing ready for,

an Apple keynote and what am I going to do? So that's the context I would give this advice in. And to me, like when that was me, when I was sitting there going like, oh, yeah, we have this Apple presentation. And I have to hot glue this app together so we can show it to them so they'll get excited and maybe, maybe include us in this keynote. The thing that I always tried to pay attention to is just listening to my own body and head. And this is something that I think all of the, not all, but a lot of the startup rhetoric,

will push you away from and just say like, you know, crush it, drink a monster energy drink, stay up all night, deliver it. And there is, you know, once a year max where that's actually effective and that's the right thing to do. Most of the time, if you sit down and the code's not coming, it's just you're struggling, you shouldn't be doing it. Like step away, go for a walk, come back an half an hour, try again. You know, go do something else that's mindless, get to your head off of it. But programming is like a deeply draining, incredibly mentally complex task and doing it 12, 14 hours a day. You're not getting 12 or 14 hours of work. No. And you're just completely fooling yourself. So actually listen to what your head is telling you and go like, all right,

I'm not, I'm not doing this 100% right now. Take 15 minute break. And what's your equivalent to Casey's running? My equivalent to Casey's running is I am. So unlike Casey's, see, I need like, I need seven hours of sleep. And I need to exercise four days a week. And like those are, that's basic, basic, basic, basic context for being a functional human for me. It took many years to get to that point where I'm like, that's what I need. That's why I'm not functional in the weeks and I'm not functional. But it's just like, that is baseline.

That needs to happen. Or nothing else will. What else can we do? I want to talk to early stage founders. Sure. Yeah. That's what I want to talk to. right now. Okay. Well, I mean, there are broad, there are plenty of broad questions around like

advice, right, for starting the company. Yeah, because let's do advice supported by funny anecdotes. Do you want me to start with a funny anecdote? I've got a great one. I got a great one. You got like a tight five minute bit right now? It's way less than five minutes. When Matt and I were first pitching, the very first iteration of Beam, which is like Matt coded it and it was mostly just duct tape and spit. It was glued together. It was a framer demo that we were pretending wasn't it. Yeah, it was It was, we, you know, it was a series of, what do you call, like an email feed or something, like a series of cells, I guess, and you would press on a cell and a video would start playing. We figured out that when we would hand it to someone who would be an investor,

after they'd scroll up and scroll down, their finger would typically be over the sixth cell. So therefore, under the sixth cell, under each cell, we had videos that we meant to feel live, but were actually pre-recorded and edited and manipulated and put in there. Under that sixth cell was a Google class video of Jack, who worked with us at the time, being pulled over by a police officer and the interaction of him talking his way out of a ticket. It's like bright lights, red and blue, like nothing more interesting. So when we'd hand it to an investor, they would thumb through and invariably hold down on that cell. And they'd be like, whoa, what's happening in here?

And Matt and I would have this dog and pony show. We'd lean over the table and be like, oh, my God. Oh, that's Jack. Is that the police? And they'd be like, yeah, the crazy stuff that pops up in this feed. And like that was, that you wouldn't believe it. That was like, that was the kind of the kind of theatrics that we would put on. It, to me, it's reminiscent of like the stories of Steve Jobs' first demo for the iPhone

where if he didn't follow this specific path through the product demo, the entire OS would collapse. And that was, that was some of the dog and pony show that we did. for sharing what the app was capable of or what our hopes for it were. Well, then you also had like dog and pony show before CNN, right? Yeah. So, I mean, we should talk about the acquisition, too. And I think it's the same. I think the thing that you, especially if you're an engineer and you're approaching these things,

you're like, you don't think about all of these interactions are sales processes. Like every single time you talk to someone external, whether it's a potential investor, you are selling. And I think it's really hard for engineers to get that mindset because they're like, you know, if I make a good thing, it's just going to, it will sell itself or my co-founder will sell it. It is every single interaction, you are selling.

Running a fundraising process, running an acquisition process mechanically and what it's like in the room there a little bit different, but essentially it's the same thing. You are selling. And selling isn't just performing, and it's not acting a certain way it is getting as much information as possible about the other party, what they want,

how they think, what motivates them, what's going to make them feel like they're going to miss out if they don't do something with you, and that's exactly the same for fundraising as it is for the acquisition process. And both, we played games. We figured out ways to create psychology in the people we were trying to sell

where they really, really thought they had to work with us and this was an opportunity in a window that was going to close. it's Robert McNamara's rules of war it's like empathize with with your enemy and in our case it was always for me the psychological approach

was always sort of empathizing with either the people we were asking for money from we were raising or or potential suitors when it was you know acquisition time but I think that was something that was really really effective and honestly like this sounds naive or almost a bit of a platitude

but it's like once I realized what demonstrating the passion behind what we were doing, the effectiveness of that. You know, I leaned on Matt really, really hard for the first phase of fundraising because of my own insecurities about my lack of technical understanding. And to quantify my lack of technical understanding, I have zero, zero technical understanding. Matt has to help me set up my email accounts. I'm CNN for that. I was really insecure about that. And I used to look to Matt, and it was only through the process that I realized that any investors, any understanding realizes that a good, you know, a good founder will hire the best engineers, engineers that are better than he or she is.

And they really don't give a shit about how well you can write code. They care if you will succeed or if you will not succeed. And Gary Vaynerchak, who really is all he's cracked up to be, I say that with no hesitation, extraordinary human being. But Gary is one of the first people I met with, and I pitched the product to him by myself as best I could. At the end of that pitch, he had this look on his face, and I looked at him and said, you don't have any idea what this is to you.

And he's like, I don't get it at all. And then he said, put me down for half a million. And when I asked, I said, why? He said, because I bet on the jockey, not on the horse. And that was extremely telling for me. because I think to hear Matt's story and what Matt represents and why he's doing this. And then from me, it is a much more compelling story and much more compelling narrative than what we saw the potential of our products, of our product at the time.

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

You're captivating. And now you have a crazy reach. Were you guiding this, like, fundraising process or were you relying on each other? Yeah, I mean, we're absolutely relying on each other. And I think the thing about the fundraising, like fundraising acquisition process both is we developed an act for both of them. It was like the first time we did it. it was a disaster. We were both talking at the same point. Investor, you know, sitting at Sequoia and when the Sequoia partners asked the question and we both like look at each other

and start to answer at the same time. Total disaster. And it took. So wait, what are the pro tips? Yeah. So but no, but it took, I mean, A, so the pro tip on fundraising, actually, like, those kind of sales process is like, start with someone you and don't, this is something, someone gave us this advice. But like, start with someone you don't care about. You don't think is going to, you know, you know them well enough to know they're not going to invest. Or like, don't, don't shoot for the moon and then screw it up. But the first person you talk to should be someone who, you know, is going to say now. Okay.

So that you can get all the jitters out. You can try the act. And literally what we would do is, you know, we drove all around the valley for our fundraising. And we would go to a meeting, you know, have this very typical hour meeting with a partner at a VC firm. And then we would go as far away. as we could. So we would go to like a donut shop where we knew nobody from the valley was going to be there.

It was always a donut. There's one in Redwood City, in fact, that we probably had, I don't know, 10 hours of conversation in. But we literally go to this donut shop, sit down, and debug the entire meeting. We would just go there and go like, okay, that part where you jumped in and said X, that was perfect, we need to do more of that,

or we got too much in the weeds, when they ask this question, like, actually, Casey, you should just take that one and kill it immediately. So we developed a pretty honed routine. Yeah, and I'll say that Sep Cambar, who was my MIT professor and one of the earliest investors, the first investor, and ended up being Beam, he said to me, he was like, practice your pitch on people that you don't want money from. Don't practice on friends. Practice on real world. Real investors. And when he said this time, I rolled my eyes, not to be dismissive of him, but that idea just seemed like, why would I waste that opportunity as just an exercise?

But he could not have been more right. He could not have been more right. If, like, you know, you have to, your nerves, your anxiety, all the things you think you're going to say, the things that make sense in your head when you get derailed by a single question, like all of those things are real world and they matter. I always think back to presidential debates, and like all the practicing they do, like, it can prepare them in some capacity, but what the real world is like with those cameras and all these variables. So fundraising for us is exactly the same. Like, we learned so much more from when we completely screwed up than we did from the ones where people were like, oh, I'm really excited about this. Let's, you know, we could feel like it was a win.

Those we just walked away from high-fived and had donuts with less conversation. but it's when we really fucked up and there were a couple that should have been home runs and I think that we just screwed up that and I just straight up did terrible pitches had a terrible performance

Can you break that down specifically? Like what did you do poorly in the pitch that people can learn from? Sure. Okay, well first of all, we're going way back here. This is like asking you at my first date with my wife.

But I think that failing to really understand how siloed the skills that we uniquely bring to the table are. When I say steals, I don't just mean that the languages that Matt can write code in. I mean, like, you know, Casey should be this sort of loud, over the top, passionate, blind, aggressive, sort of, I should be the chutzpah at the table that's just like borderline hysterical. And Matt has to be this like rock solid voice of reason that has an incredibly practical. Like, Matt has to be the confidence in Casey has to be the passion.

And we didn't understand that. And the trouble with that is Matt's not a square. Matt is a passionate guy. Matt's someone who can be like incredibly emotive. And like we can both represent that. Like I can sort of bullshit about technicalities all day long to instill confidence. But like he's better at that than I am.

And I'm better at this than he is. And like understanding that. And then to get more granular, it's like a question that may seem like a technical question has an answer that should be more driven by passion than about the technicalities. How do you distinguish that? And then like at what point in time

do we stop looking at each other? to say who's going to answer this one and we just know what that poetry is going to be. Okay. And that Robert McNamara is sort of empathizing with your enemies thing. It's like if I'm being, if I'm on the other side of the table, I want to see two people that are firmly in control. Like I want to be blinded with passion and then completely reinforced with the confidence that they know how to turn that passion into a real business. And I think it'd be very difficult for one person to represent that dichotomy. and that was something that we evolved into after a lot of screw-ups.

I think the other thing, this is derailing a little bit, but fundraising-wise, which I wish somebody had told us, and maybe they did because we got so much advice, which you should get so much advice. We talked to Sep almost every day when we were in the Valley. We would go back to the hotel room and Skype with Seth, who's incredible for doing that with us. He's a very busy man. but aside from getting advice is one that never either I never heard and it didn't stick or I heard and it never stuck

or I never heard but understand what a no is and understand the many many many varieties of no that you can get from investors and they're all knows and they all should be treated the same so and this is this is very smart on the investors behalf they're very smart they want to keep optionality they want to make it possible to still invest in you if it turns out to be a hot deal and they just had the wrong perspective. So you will rarely, I think the best investors will give you a strong no, but in general, you'll rarely actually get a no. You'll get lots of things that sound like yeses but are actually noes, things like my favorite

one where Casey and I left the meeting and we're like, yes, like, that's a huge check. We're so excited. And then we started talking to our advisors and other investors and they're like, oh, that's a no. And this is something that I've since seen in other companies who've asked me for advice is someone going, that's great, we're totally in for X amount as soon as you find a lead. And that is just such, you're like, all right, great, they're in for X amount. And actually, they're not in at all unless you can sell someone else who's willing to take more of the risk. But there's a million varieties of that.

And there's some good blog posts about this. but just like understand that if you don't have a term sheet it's not a guess and even if you have a term sheet there's still some chance that it's not a guess but probably is but don't leave a meeting and hear

yeah we're super interested tell me who else is investing and you know we'll definitely be in that's a no almost everything other than a term sheet is a no we were raising and Sep was our voice of reason

He's just one of the most thoughtful people, especially when it comes to fundraising or anything in the startup world of anyone that I've ever interacted with. And he was who we leaned on the most. But we had another friend who will remain nameless who was in the Valley at the time, who was in the process of, it was like an $80 or $100 million raise, which he did execute on. And we would go meet with him when we needed nothing more than a proper ass kicking. And I remember when we finally closed our lead, which was a wing in a prayer. It was, I think, you know, Jeremy Liu at Lightspeed really believed in what we were doing. He saw the vision, but I think the most impressive thing about Jeremy is he took a big swing. He took a risk.

Like, he, I can speak more to that, but he's an incredible VC because of his willingness to sort of assess and understand the risk that he saw in us. But he took that chance. And he was decisive, too, I think, in comparison to lots of other investors. He was like, a day later, we got a yes. Extremely decisive. but when we went to this crazy maniac that was our voice of insanity, and remember we finally told him, like, we got our lead, we got our lead. And I just remember this guy being like, okay, here's what you do.

You get him on the phone, and you say, you listen to me, you fucking blood sucker. Here's what we're going to do. I want quadruple the amount of money at 10% the valuation that we discussed or the deals off the table. And it was like, I think he was 80% serious when he was talking like that. And I think what I learned from seeing that kind of like maniac type person succeed, at least in the fundraising part of the process, is that like just how much people respond to that blind passion. Because like he was, he was nuts, but he was nuts for what he was doing.

So much so that he's able to raise, you know, nine figures based on his idea. But Matt and I would always sort of leave our meetings with him jazzed up. And we would always say, like, we would dismiss 99% of what he said, but that 1% was just enough to sort of give us a little bit more confidence in our future pitches. That's why. Was there anything you guys did to kind of build that up within you? Because it's even just doing like podcasting. Like the countertransference of energy between people is such a thing that's not necessarily obvious to people when they start podcasting. Like what did you do to build up that skill to counter transference of power?

It's like this. People use countertransference as a psychological term of energy. So if you go into a room and you're kind of just like a dead fish. Oh, I understood what you meant. I just had never heard that. Yeah. Okay. Would you ask me?

How did we deal with that? How did you get better at it? How did you get better at it? You know, I, one, I think Matt is like an extremely level person. And I'm not. And seeing, no, I mean it. And, like, if Matt gets nervous, I've never seen him show it. And I have to say, like, I drew a lot from that.

Like, there was a lot. I think walking into a meeting alone would have been very, very scary. But, like, that counter-transference was not from them to me. But it was sort of mitigated by the fact that there's, you know, two people on this side of the table. And, again, that sort of dovetails back into that balancing act, that Abbott and Costello routine that we had worked ourselves into. But for me, that's what a lot of it was.

It was really learning how to rely on Matt to keep myself level in meetings and be as effective as possible. I think the other thing is just getting yourself in the mindset, like, before, especially if you go to like San Hill Road, if you go to these places that feel, that are designed to feel powerful, is to just take a breath outside and go, I got invited here. Like, I got this meeting. I think that was easier for me to do because I had been part of Tumblr's fundraisers and have been to a lot of like bid to those physical spaces I'm like yeah I could come here it's okay but even if you haven't I think it's just important to sit there and go like

this isn't you know I'm not begging I'm looking for a partner I came here because you invited me just to get yourself in that mindset of like absolutely belong in this room what's a little bit more counterintuitive advice that you've learned along the way I know, Matt, you think a lot about startups. Maybe Casey you similarly think about startups all the time, but also just creative work. What's the counterintuitive advice you've learned? Sure.

I mean, my counterintuitive advice is just the power of brute force. And I mean that. I think that it's always about intellectualizing and thoughtfulness and listening to more podcasts and reading more books and all that. But I think at the end of the day, like, it is brute force. It is hard work. It is an absolute unlawful. willingness to to accept failure to accept no and that's true with fundraising and that's true with

ideation and that's true with making a YouTube video and you know in the how am I now 36 in the 18 years of my career I found that to be the one sort of consistent the one constant through everything that in any in any version of success it's been because of an absolute reluctance and of that sort of brute force, I will not stop moving until I achieve what I want to succeed or what I want to achieve. And every time that I would identify as a failure, it was because of a lack of that or questioning of that. And I think Beam 1.0 is a very good example. Like our product failed, but the company succeeded. And I think a lot of that comes back to sort of that absolute relentless and seriousness and tenacity of not just Matt and I as leaders, but the entire team. We had a product

that was failing. Like, no, nobody other team quit. Nobody can. care. Nobody really gave a shit. It was heads down. What else can we build? We started building all these weird products and experimenting and we built one about the election. And it was just like, no, let's just keep going. Heads down, keep moving, keep pushing, keep pushing. And I think that that is not sexy advice. That's not romantic advice. That's not something that can be analyzed and broken down. But I do think it's absolutely pivotal for any kind of success in life is to embody that and everything you do. Mine's not necessarily counterintuitive, but I think especially for engineers, people with a more technical mindset. It's really tough to learn. It's just ask for what you

want super directly, simply. It's good advice. I mean, so in the really, like, this is a very tactical sort of micro thing, but I think it's something that I see. I'm now on the receiving end of a lot because people are asking me for startup advice. And I often get emails that are just super roundabout and essentially, hey, can I, I'm starting a company. It's a so, social app, can I get, buy you coffee? I don't want to be bought coffee. If you sent me a one-line email that said, hey, I'm really looking for an amazing iOS engineer who's looking to found a company, like, oh, there are three people I can introduce you to. And I can do the research on who you are. You don't need to fill me in. Just ask. If that's what you're asking, I'd love to

help. If you're asking for an hour of my time to vaguely talk about ideas, is, I don't have time for that. I literally have the words, pick your brain. I had that as a Gmail filter. So if somebody emails me saying, I'd love to buy you lunch so I can pick their filter and they go immediately in the trash. Yeah, I'm completely like, how I start me,

I literally was running last week, and a woman stopped me, and she works at one of the biggest publishers in the city, and she's like, I want to have lunch with you and discuss with you this thing I'm building. I think you could be a really big part of it. And I looked at it, and I was like, what is it and what are the actionable?

And she's like, well, let's sit down, let's have it. And I was like, I have three minutes right now. Tell me what it is and tell me what you want from me. And she could not do that. She couldn't do it. So there's no fucking way I'm giving this one an hour of my time. Well, and if you can't do that, you're probably not ready to get that advice to ask that question. Like, if you can't write it in the subject of the email, and this is my favorite, by the way, like my team probably gets annoyed at some point. I've probably sent 10 of these emails today. But it's just a question that is the long subject line of the email and that is it. and that is me asking for something very directly that I need.

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

So respecting other people's, I think, is absolutely paramount. And I think that comes down to how effective of a communicator you are. And I think that that idea permeates everything we've discussed today, from fundraising to being an effective manager, to being good leader, to being good at anything. But if you can't be effective in the way you communicate and not waste other people's time, I think it's difficult to succeed in this space. So, Matt, one of the questions we got over and over and over again was about the acquisition.

So we talked about this. off camera, but if someone asks you, how do I get acquired? What do you say? The number one place where I would start with this is it takes forever. And people will tell you this. Our best advisors told us this. They said, you know, it takes six months. If you want to go down that path at a minimum, and me is a like process optimizer, hyperorganized, like, no, we can, of course we can do in three months. You cannot. So 90% of people ask me this question when they've got a month of cash left. and the answer is you can't. What's that thing we were told so many times?

It's like you can never sell your startup. It can only be bought or something like that because we were trying to raise and we're like I think the best move here is for us to sell this company. Like let's be a part of something bigger than us. I think it's how we can be most effective and most successful.

And like the first, the minute we started telling our trusted advisors out they're like, we'll stop saying that. Don't ever say that. What you're doing right now is your fundraising. And when you meet with people who you think might be interested in buying your company, you tell them you're fundraising. You are never in the process of selling your company until it's been sold. And that is extremely good advice because throughout the entire process, we realized just how true.

And we spoke with a number of potential acquirers. It was a major process for us. And that one truth sort of permeated every single conversation. I don't know. We're not selling the company. We're interested in selling the company. We're actually in the middle of a raise right now, which was 100% true. But it didn't sort of, it was, you could say that revealing your whole card,

which is that, yeah, we're very interested in pursuing potential acquisition opportunities. And how did you manage, so CNN, like, slides an offer across the table, and what do you do after the fact? Or maybe that's not even how it works. Were that it that simple. Yeah. No, I mean, so to talk about how we even get to, how you get to that first offer, that probably, you know, we made the decision sometime in the spring,

like, say March or April, we're like, We're going out for this race, but we should really, really seriously talk to a quire. And like, let's put our energy and focus actually there. That decision led to probably four months of conversations with eight to ten different companies. None of which, because of the psychology of it, where you really, like Casey said, that advice is very true, you can't go in and say, hey, we're selling the company. And so those conversations had to be pretty roundabout. They had to be, well, we're doing a raise, and we think it might be interesting to have you strategically involved. Oh, we're looking for deeper partnership.

All these sort of bywords where people know what you're saying. But it just took an enormous amount of time because you couldn't be that directed. You know, the irony of all this, I don't know if you know this map, but like my first meeting ever with Jeff Zucker was not about Beam. It was about YouTube and meeting with his son. It was on his way to Harvard. and it was a broader conversation. But at the very end of that meeting, when Jeff, who just had knee surgery,

and was rushing out to another meeting and running a gigantic company and had two kids in the room, as I was leaving that meeting with my skateboard in the hand, Jeff said, how can we work together? I looked at him and I said, you should buy my technology company.

So there was no beating around the bush. There was no bullshitting. And that was for a lot of reasons. It was because someone like that, who is as, you know, I think is capable and as smart as a Jeff Zucker, like, I had 30 seconds before I was walking out the door. There was no bullshitting someone like that in that position.

So knowing when to sort of lay all your cards out on the table and say, this is what's in front of me, I think it's also like that is just pure sort of human nature, like understanding what might feel appropriate about that. I also think it was the fact that it was a media company that Jeff Zucker is at the helm of not a technology company. You know, they're not used to typical technical technology. acquisitions the way that a gigantic tech company might be. So there was some latitude there for some creativity in how we kind of pitched it. And I will say immediately thereafter that,

immediately after that conversation, it did become much more typical. The next step was that meeting with Matt and understanding technically what we had. Then I'm sending a team down here to sort of interview our team to see if we're as capable as we say we are, looking at some of the tech we've built, like digging into it. Like it was a very, very formal process that was initiated by a very off-the-cuff statement. I think the other key thing there is that we were far enough along in conversations with a couple of other companies. That's right.

We could really, we could leverage that. Right. Without bullshit. Without bullshit. And you can't bullshit. Because you're, yeah, if you're in the valley, all, everyone talks to each other. Assume that all the information is out there. If you're not in the valley, it's maybe tuned down a little bit, but still, like,

don't get caught lying. It's not worth it. It doesn't make sense. Right. But you can stretch. You can push. You can. And we legitimately.

they were in other conversations. And so we could say, listen, we're in other conversations that are moving along and constantly create these forcing factors of, you know, we need to tell, we need to tell this technology company that shall remain unnamed, whether we should pursue the process or not. We need to hear from you by Friday. We could only say that. And we did say literally what Matt just said. Right.

We said, we use those exact words. Those are the semantics we used. But we could say that, and we could say that with confidence because we weren't bullshitting. And I think if there was no truth to saying something like that, then that would have been found out. That would have been transparent, no matter how convincing either of us could have been. And is this all wisdom from your advisors? Because unlike meeting with investors, you can't really do this.

There's not a lot of dry runs of these acquisition conversations. I mean, one, so there are two of our investors, advisors who were super instrumental. The set was super instrumental as well. The other ones that I'm thinking of, Renee, Reinsberg and Merrick, whose last name I can't pronounce, it's terrible, of Loku. And they had gone through this process with GoDaddy maybe a year before we had. And so they just like, Brené was so tuned to exactly the moments we were in. And we did the same thing with fundraising.

We would be like, we would debrief at least once a week, if not two or three times a week with him. And just go like, here's what they said. Here's what they said. those were those were yeah those throughout the acquisition process they were much closer to therapy like you go to a therapist because you need to make sense of all the things in your brain and like we would go to ren to make sense of all of the things existing in our our acquisition conversations because it was it was very hard to find anything sort of sensible or a straight line in there for us to build actionable around but a difficult scary process that i think was made easier by the fact that

our backs were up against the wall. Like, Matt and I knew. Like, we knew when we were out of money. We knew when the gig was up. And there was something, for me, something very confidence-inspiring about that. It was black and white. Like, it wasn't, that didn't make me more scared. It was like, optionality, I think, can often be to one's detriment.

I always say that, like, when people ask me, what was it like having a kid when you were 17 versus having a kid now? And it was like, well, I have resources now. I have money now. When I was 17, I was on welfare. So it was very easy when I had Owen. a binary. Can I have that? No. Can I do this? No. Yeah. And now it's like I have this little kid and like I just want to give her whatever the hell she wants and she's like a spoiled

monster who wakes us up at 4 in the morning because she wants to play with Elsa. But there was something about the do or die environment with which we were going through the acquisition process that I found tremendous confidence in. And was this, were there any books you resorted to throughout this process to kind of like figure out, you know, like a mental model or like how to deal with this or is it just straight up advisors, advisor therapy? I mean, there are,

it's funny, I ended up buying like, venture deals for entrepreneur, like venture and acquisitions for entrepreneurs and a literal like business school textbook, which was useful for looking up like three terms in the eventual term sheets we got. But no, I mean,

this is really, Yeah, I read advice. I read all those books because of my own insecurities, and I went through every BC that I was a fan of, all of their blogs all the way back. And all of that helped to the same degree that, like, I could give you a book on how to read, on how to skateboard.

And you could study that book and memorize that book and fall off the board immediately, but you skate with Tony Hawk for five minutes, and you'll be better than anything that book could impart. And I think that's what it was like for our advisors is one 30-minute conversation with Renee or with Sep informed us in such a tremendously impactful way that everything that had read up until then

just sort of felt like, yeah, it was, it felt unnecessary because it wasn't real world. It wasn't reacting to our specific set of circumstances. So how could I apply these general principles to what is a very, very nuanced environment? I also think people, the psychology of it It's just so hard. Like, this is the part that nobody told.

Nobody told us about it because there's not really a way to talk about it. But the psychology, especially with your team, is one of the hardest parts because you are, you know, it feels like you're cheating. When you're, because you've not told your team that you're potentially selling the company. And I'm going to disappear to San Francisco for three days. Under the guys, we're raising money. I'm just gone for a couple days. Under the guys. So, I mean, the way that we did it is we told, we told everyone.

and increasingly more as the certainty went up. My feeling about all this, and just this is a general thing being a manager, executive founder, is you should get people as much information as possible. You really should try and be transparent if that information is actionable, if it can actually cause them to do something,

create a new venture, build a new tool, build something that will actually have an impact on it. There is zero you can do as an engineer on our team, if I say, we're talking to CNN and these six other companies about potentially being acquired. All that does is make you panic and go, okay, paralysis. And this is a team of a dozen people who rely on their paychecks as everybody else does, who's aware of the fact that our core product is not working. We've stopped really focusing on it.

They don't know what else we're focused on. They don't know what the future of this company is. And they're unbelievably talented and skilled and sought after by other companies. So how, you know, you can't bullshit them and you can't tell them the process, like what Matt just described. So you don't have anything to tell them. So it's just really like avoid eye contact, scary. And this isn't days. This is months.

Yeah, no, for sure. I was like, I think one of the best, one of the best business decisions Matt and I ever made was, was summer 2016. We're out of money. We had like five months left of money. We could barely pay like our. our Amazon bills, like, we were struggling. We were pensioning. It didn't work.

I had cut my salary to zero. We were struggling. We didn't know what to do. We were just starting. We didn't know what to do. So we, Matt and I came up with this decision. Like, it was one of our meetings. It's like, okay, nothing's off the table.

What should we do right now? And we came up with a decision to spend, God knows how much money, renting two huge mansions on the beach in the Dominican Republic and flying the entire team. flying the entire team down there for a vacation at the beach where we all like rented banana boats and went fishing and Matt crashed a golf car. And I think at the time it was just like we needed to do it because we needed to we needed to talk. We needed to fix things. We need to

show a vote of confidence in the team. But what that enabled us to do is get the hell out of the office, break that unwillingness to make eye contact to be as honest with the team about how we can't be honest with the team. You know, there were many conversations that was like, look, guys, we want to share with you what's going on, but it's a liability. We can't. Like, read between the lines. We're trying to figure things out.

All we're asking for you is, you know, have confidence in us. I think the other thing that you have to have, if you're trying to manage your own psychology in this situation, is you have to think if it all goes south. If everything goes to shit, deal falls through. I'm going to spend every waking hour, making sure that everyone on my team lands with an amazing job. I'm going to pump my network. I'm going to make sure that everyone gets out of this before I think about myself.

And that was always something rolling in the back of my mind where it's like, all right, well, it doesn't come through and we run out of cash. I'm like, well, that's what I'm going to do. Okay. And having that, that at least help me go, like, okay, like I can actually help everyone land in a great place. And frankly, because everyone is an engineer, highly sought after, like, they're going to be okay. Let's like, as long as I know I'm going to dedicate myself to that,

if it doesn't work out, then it's okay. Yeah, and we did. I think through all of the tumult that was the last quarter of Beam 1.0 pre-acquisition, you know, no one on our team ever, there was never a missed payroll. There was never a delayed payroll. Like this was something that Matt and I always made priority number one. And I think that like, look, no one left. No one left.

And this is a shitty seven-month process, really, from when we knew this app was not going to succeed, what's next? And then telling them that we were going to be acquired, It was not a short amount of time. And little things, like that stupid retreat to the Dominican Republic was just sort of, it was us showing, it was us trying to demonstrate the team how much we believe in them. Like, guys, look, here's something awesome we're going to do together. Does it make sense right now?

From afar, probably not. But, like, we're all here having conversations we wouldn't be having at one in the morning while drinking, like, really terrible, warm beer. And the effectiveness and the importance of that, like, these are things that are intangible, things that are very challenging to quantify. Chemistry is something that you cannot quantify. But I think it is chemistry that makes a team, both on the engineering side and on the media side, on the creative side,

it makes a team cohesive. It's what makes a team work. It's what makes a team ultimately effective. And it's easier to do when you're small. And as you grow, it gets more and more challenging. But that was always a really, really primary focus for us through all the ups and downs of us being a venture-backed startup. Would you change anything about how you did it?

I don't think so. I mean, me personally, yeah. I never ever talked to anyone in the team about the vlog. And the reason why is because I knew in the back of my head how instrumental the vlog could be to benefit this company. And I had insecurities about saying that to the team, so I didn't want it to diminish their work. And then ultimately, if we didn't succeed,

I wouldn't have wanted to falsify expectations because of the success of this YouTube channel. So, and so I just kept my mouth shut and made videos all day every day. And I think that that must have been really challenging for the team to see, but then in the end, like, you know, it was a big part of why the acquisition took place.

It's why now this is not just a, no longer just a technology company, but a media and technology company is because I think there was a demonstration of what we can do within that cross-section. So I guess the question that I've been wondering is this whole process, of like you guys getting together, starting Beam, selling Beam, working at CNN, tremendous

learning experience. And it probably seems like a crazy amount of time, but it's been like what, two years, three years? It's been a little over three years. Okay. So what are you, what are you working to learn now? Like, how are you personally trying to improve yourselves? I mean, for me, this is about learning to run a completely different kind of company and a completely different scale of company and think about a business that I've never had to think of, which is media. Like we are a technology and media company. Technology, I think I understand the parameters there.

Media, I don't. And I'm learning on the job. And that's like, that is 95% of my, what I'm reading, what I'm consuming, who I'm making sure that I have breakfast, lunch, and dinner with is learning that. Yeah, I've never had a job before. The last time I get a paycheck every two weeks. the last time I got a paycheck over two weeks when I was washing dishes

when I was 16 years old in southeastern Connecticut. I mean, I've never had a job before. Yeah. So that's sort of a fun new thing for me to learn about. But certainly, like, working with teams, and I've always been an entrepreneur. I've started and built companies my entire life since I was in my early 20s.

And understanding that our focus here is purely on building a successful company, not so much worrying about kind of the resources that are around us. Like, I look at these cameras and I immediately, what I mean by that is I look at these cameras and I immediately get stressed out. So I know how much that costs and I have to figure out how much we're going to earn to be able to compensate for the price of that camera. And then understanding that when you're part of an apparatus,

when you're part of something that is as huge as Time Warner, as CNN, that those sort of considerations are not entirely relevant because this is a long game. This is a long play for CNN. Like, they want Bean to be wildly successful for the next 10, 20 years. They want to break into new markets. And that's how they view it. And that is so foreign to me.

I mean, Beam 1.0, Ventra back. Matt and I were week to week focused on the success of that. I remember getting really upset when I found out people were ordering blue bottles in the carton or whatever the hell it was because they were six bucks each and being like, we can't afford this right now. This is absurd. So being an environment like this where it's not about sort of the minute by minute. or the day by day, but really trying to build a successful company that will last long into the

future is completely foreign to me. Because as a startup, as a startup entrepreneur, it's always like, it's always that day to day. It's always about the right now. And we're trying to build something that has much, much longer legs. And so that's just done by what? Stepping back and like kind of imagining what you want. Absolutely. Like deep breaths kind of thing. It's like, you know, we talk about the reason why I don't, to get granular, like an example we had discussed yesterday with the teams. It's like, I'm not promoting Beams YouTube channel on my main YouTube channel right now. And the reason why is I want the bench to be deeper on Beams channel. We have like nine videos up right now.

I want it to be 20 amazing videos. So when I push my audience there, which I haven't done in a while and they show up, they're like, whoa, this is incredible. And it's like, yeah, I want to do it today because I want to see our numbers bump today. But let's be thoughtful here. Let's understand what the long play is here. And like, if I'm going to ask that of my audience, I want them to be really rewarded by what they find when they get here.

And we're not there yet. So it's like taking that deep breath, taking a step back. I'm like, no, no, no, let's be thoughtful here. And doing that at every turn is a foreign practice for me. One of the fun things about getting into the media side of things has been learning how media especially does not have process thinking in the way that engineering does. And I think that a typical engineer would be shocked to see that there are all of the elements of an agile or similar sort of method. methodology of development, but none of the vocabulary and none of the sort of feedback loops, which are actually critical to making that happen.

And this is not... You have like a file naming convention. But I think if you ask people on our media team, like, and I have, people on our team are like, this is the most transparent, feedback-oriented media team I've ever been on. And I look at it, I'm like, oh, my God, this is so much messier and way, way less feedback. Like, there's not a two-week sprint. There's not a retrospective. And so I think as an engineering manager, I'm starting to realize how much of that is applicable to media.

And I'm also learning where it is absolutely not applicable. But it's been something I think is of interest to listen to this podcast. Engineering thinking has applications way outside running an engineering team. And I think I have some unique advantages and some disadvantages in running a media team because of that. I think that everything Matt just said really underscores why. I find such success in ease in making content when it's just me. And why I struggle so much when it's a team? Because everything that he just described is exactly right.

When you talk about inefficiencies and opportunities for greater efficiency, but where does efficiency contradict creativity? Where do those two but heads? And if you're focused on efficiency, the creativity start to fade. And all of those variables are completely annihilated when it's a one-man show. Right. because none of those considerations have to take place. There is none of that intellectualization taking place.

It's purely that brute force, start at zero, get across the finish line. And that's an environment I fucking love and thrive in. In an environment that's far more managed is one that I'm like, that's the thing that I'm most excited about really learning. Are you guys doing any like long, long term planning for your lives? Like do you have a long term goal like Casey or maybe? at 20 years from now? Yeah. I mean, I have a, I have a one day, three day, five day, one week, one month, three months, six months. I'm not kidding. One year. All right. How far out can you go?

I'm all the way to death. All right. Like I have the entire day before you die. I mean, really? Like, you want to get into that? I'm just curious, like, how you guys are thinking about the future and what you're working up to. I mean, from a more granular perspective, it's like I want to move to Los Angeles. I want to leave New York City in the next three to five years. And I want to do that because, like, you know, I think New York City is a wonderful place from 20 to 40, but 40 to 60 I want to be out of New York City.

I think New York's amazing when you're young and broke or old and rich, and I'm neither of those. So we want to raise our kids outside of the city. So when I think about that and what the implications could be, you know, even bringing that idea up to Matt, very anecdotally, he's like, well, look, if Beam doesn't have an office in L.A. in three to five years, we got bigger problems. And like, I love hearing that. So that's like, that's, that's nothing more than a little sort of nugget. That's a tiny nail for me to start hanging things off of.

But this is the kind of planning that eventually, like, those ideas turn into actionable, those actionable become much more practical. And three to five years from now, who knows? But some version of what's now a consideration will most likely be the reality. That's some broad strokes. That's a five-year plan. Okay. Cool. For me, it's critical to have a totally different career.

Like, I want to, I don't know when this is, and they still have thoughts on timing and ways to do it. Tell them what you majored in college, Matt. Yeah, I have. I guess you could say I'm probably on my second or third career, but I have a degree of Victorian studies. I knew this, but the listeners didn't. I also, you know, my first career,

which lasted approximately 18 months was in contemporary art. That is a multifaceted man. A man of many, many talents. But no, I think that the biggest sort of long-term goal in my head is find success in a completely different career,

completely different field, start from scratch and learn something completely different. I have a few thoughts on what the possibilities for that are, but I just think, you know, I want to basically be at the bottom again and learn how to do something completely different. That's great. All right. Let's wrap it up. Thanks, guys. Yeah, of course.

All right, thanks for listening. So as always, the video and transcript are at blog.combinator.com. And if you have a second, please subscribe and review the show. All right. See you next week.