ETL Speaker Series: Tony Mugavero, Rad.live

Tony and Eunice, let me know when we're ready to go. All right, well, welcome back everybody to the Winter Quarter Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Series for 2021. My name is Emily Ma and I am the co-host for this series for this quarter. This series is presented by STVP and BASES. STVP is the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, which is the entrepreneurship center inside Stanford. Stanford School of Engineering, and BASES is the Business Association for Stanford Entrepreneurial Students. Today I am so excited to welcome Tony Mugavero to ETL. Tony is the co-founder and CEO of RAD, formerly known as Little Start, a consumer streaming platform delivering live and on-demand esports, music, comedy, and sports from companies like NBCUniversal, WarnerMedia, Whistle, Showtime, Newform, Law Crime, and more. RAD's unique brand of edgy content for millennial and Gen Z audiences, coupled with the ability to watch your personal collection of movies and VR videos, makes it a hub for next-generation viewers. The platform delivers a broad range of content experiences supporting 2D, 3D, 4K, live, 360, 180 VR, and traditional video on its premium app. Beyond that, I'm super excited to host Tony because rarely do we have such an accomplished serial entrepreneur. And not only has he founded many, many companies in his professional career, he also founded a company that helps other people found companies. So, uh, not— I'm excited to ask him questions about his technology expertise, but also his entrepreneurship expertise. So with that, welcome, welcome to you, Tony. Let me kickstart the question to you. I know that you spent decades in the AR and VR space, and right now you are running a company that started in 2015. Maybe you could take us through the journey of how you found yourself in immersive technologies way before it was cool.

Sure, sure. Yeah, thank you for having me, by the way. That was an amazing intro and, you know, a better pitch than I give, I think. So I certainly appreciate that. Yeah, and I think my first experience, real experience with immersive VR was at Wired Next Fest in New York, you know, in like the mid-2000s. There was a big, like, mouse wheel that you had to get in and put a VR headset on and it was, you know, you'd run around in the mouse wheel and it was super clunky. And it was $300,000 to install in your house, and it blew me away. But, you know, at that time, I didn't think that that was anything in reach for myself. But I had been building a career in video streaming from like 2004, 2005. And so when VR started to make its way into the mainstream a little bit more, the mainstream consciousness anyway, as as a Kickstarter from Oculus, I perked up and said, "Hey, you know, my experience in distributing content, there's probably gonna be a need for that in the VR space." And then I started playing around with the Kickstarter. I got a Rift delivered and fell in love with it and pretty much immediately started building a dedicated platform for it, and me and a couple co-founders. And so we leaned super hard into it and I, you know, the industry, started to explode with interest and investment and resources flowing in, new content being created, hardware partners developing, all the way up to the biggest tech companies out there. And so, you know, we, we knew that there was something there and that somebody needed to figure it out. So, uh, and we were passionate about it and, and so we leaned, we leaned into it. And yeah, that's how we got started.

That's amazing, actually. So maybe you could share a little bit more about, if I double-click on what you just said, you know, maybe you could share a little bit more about how you got Little Star started, because I know that AR and VR and mixed reality have had lots of ups and downs. And so, you know, you have mentioned in numerous interviews that you feel like there's a critical mass coming together now, it's maturing. And so, you know, as what were some of the signals that you saw, more of the concrete signals that you received out in the market with users, with technology, that gave you the confidence to get Little Star going in 2015? And where is that now?

Yeah, I think it's, it's a lot different now. I think the reality is setting in now, you know, kind of the, you know, that I think Gartner hype cycle has a good visual representation of it. There's, you have an overwhelming amount of interest and then As things start to die down a little bit, you pump it out and they really start to build, and the hard work begins of building the actual platforms and the businesses that come out of that. And so, you know, when we leaned into it initially, we were the only dedicated distributor of 360 video content, and that meant that all the major movie studios were coming to us and saying, we're experimenting with this. You know, we have Alien VR, or, you know, National Geographic was touring Yellowstone, or, you know, Swimming with Sharks on Discovery. These were all 2 or 3-minute clips. Like, YouTube couldn't support it. Facebook didn't even support it yet. They hadn't even acquired Oculus. And so we were the only place to do that. And as that started to flow, the content started to flow to us, in parallel, the hardware companies that were building these devices perked up and said, okay, well, we were building these devices, but we need companies that are going to put content on these devices for us to sell it to consumers. And so we quickly started forming partnerships with Sony and Google and Oculus and HTC, and we were launch partners on all those devices globally. And, and so So, and we were building a direct-to-consumer application and had content coming from big recognizable names, working with the technology companies that were building the hardware, and then us as a distributor building a direct-to-consumer application started to find ourselves at this intersection of trust where, you know, the content companies needed us, the hardware companies needed us, and so it It started to build from there, and obviously, you know, 2015, 2016, 2017, there was a lot of investment dollars flowing into the space. So we were able to raise capital in that time based on VR pretty— in a pretty straightforward fashion. You know, a lot of interest in it, and people were making bets. And as things started to cool off a little bit, which I think everybody can see, really only a couple plays in the VR space. You know, Apple's been kind of threatening they're going to do something, but they haven't pulled the trigger yet. They're still very mobile AR based. And, you know, Facebook and Oculus just kind of turned into its own beast, but they're continuing to lean into it. So, you know, I think that could be partially ego-driven, but it's also like, we're thankful that they're continuing to lift the market. And Sony still has a presence with the PlayStation VR, so As we saw the shift and started to read the tea leaves a little bit on where VR and AR were going, just think, okay, let's not throw away all of this trust and these relationships and all of this technology that we built, but maybe start to zoom out, expand our scope a little bit to capture more of the customer, more of the content customer, more of the flagship devices on the hardware side, TVs, game consoles, things like that. So still remain innovative and still be a partner to these people, but adjust to what was happening in the industry. And that's kind of what gets us to where we are today with, with the platform.

You know, Tony, what strikes me in your description of firstly being agile and pivoting, and then secondly building relationships of trust and partnering, you've created this incredible ecosystem, this web where you're really at the center of it, So with that, for those of us who are not as well versed in the media distribution world, how does RAD's business model work with all of these different stakeholders involved?

Yeah, well, I think initially we kept everything free because, you know, that's a lot of times early consumer venture-backed businesses remain free to capture market share, and then they figure a business I'll figure this model out later. Sometimes that works great, other times that's not the right path. And so, you know, we were able to build a good audience early in the VR space. But as the market started to shift and content started to dry up and people weren't making VR movies necessarily, like there was really more attention to games, we started to have to think, okay, well, what's the actual model here? And we can keep some of it free, but start to introduce subscription service and start to bring in not only, you know, some of these, some of these VR films are 20 minutes long and, you know, really well-produced 8K, 360-degree spatial audio, multiple languages. There's, you know, substantial piece content that are worth paying for. There's just not a lot of it. And so as we started to introduce more traditional content alongside that with, like, for example, WWE, they created a bunch of 360-degree video, but then they also created a bunch of traditional video. I mean, everybody knows WWE at WrestleMania, and then we even experimented with them with AR holograms that we tapped in partnership with Microsoft. Using volumetric video. And so we had, we did our content deal with WWE was 360 video, traditional video, and holograms, which is like a content deal that nobody's doing. And I think people are willing to experiment with, but it puts us in this unique position from a business model perspective to say we can introduce people to these things for free. And give them a taste of it, then do some of the harder, more expensive things. And, you know, even from a content perspective, even traditional content can be expensive. Put some of those things behind an actual subscription to start to get the flywheel going a little bit. It breaks the chicken and egg of, of, uh, you know, we're not making any money on the content, so we can't spend any money on content, and that means we're not going to be able to make any money on the content. It's like So we were able to break out of that dynamic about, you know, 18 months ago, and it's started to roll now as a freemium, you know, very Spotify for TV kind of model.

Amazing, amazing. You know, again, as you speak, I admire you so much for being able to sort of manage all of these moving pieces, whether it's your partners developing new technologies, your content providers creating new content and wanting to work with you in multiple different ways. And one thing that you said to me while we were planning this conversation is, you know, a skill set that you have to have is to be able to figure out which opportunity to pursue. Because as a, as a company, as a startup, as a CEO, you have to choose where you put your resources. Your resources aren't completely unlimited. You can't go after every single opportunity, right? How do you choose, given that you are building relationships of trust with your partners, given that you're trying to carve out an area for your company, how do you, how do you think about making trade-offs?

Yeah, I mean, I think we, we always try to look back at our core DNA, which is, you know, where we started was taking things that were really hard to package up and get to consumers in the form of different, you know, content bundles, whatever it is. Doing that as an innovation partner to hardware companies and the content companies is part of our DNA, and that's what has provided value to us as a company, and it creates differentiators in the consumer market for us to do things that are ahead of everybody else, because like, how do you compete with Netflix? And they're spending billions of dollars on, on, you know, content, and we just can't compete with that. So, you know, I think in terms of picking where— how we're thinking about what we're working on, it always helps for us to go back to say, you know, does this line up with our core DNA? Where we've created value. And, you know, that doesn't mean that we can't shift the business but still point back to DNA. So, you know, looking at VR/AR only, that market is too small, particularly for— I mean, it's growing, but it's still too small for, you know, like venture outcomes, right? And a handful of companies have been acquired, lots of companies have just failed. Been shut down. And the companies that have been nimble and shifted kind of how they think about what they're doing, they've survived and thrived. And so we, I think, tried to listen to what we were built on and our principles, but then, you know, still honor those relationships that we had with the content companies and opera companies. So now we can go back and instead of Google Daydream, VR, it's talking to Android TV, which is a Slack device, and they're saying, hey, we have Google Voice Assistant that we want you guys to do some interesting things with. You did some really cool stuff with VR. Can you, can you help us on making TVs more immersive? Yes, that fits our core DNA. We can get a device, you know, a year in advance, work on SDKs that are undocumented, and our engineers can figure it out and work back and forth with their engineers behind the scenes. And that's allowed us to— it's provided enough of a guidepost for us to say, this is what we're good at. And as opportunities are coming our way, you know, some of them sound interesting, but then we say, well, this may be distracting, so maybe we, maybe we shouldn't do this because it's not core of what we're at. And so there's been some potentially short-term lucrative deals that we've had to pass up because it would have turned us into a production company or an agency, as opposed to a technology company building an engine for doing, you know, very advanced distribution of content.

Yeah, very powerful. You know what this reminds me of is As a startup, thinking about company culture, company values, the company DNA, and making that very explicit is actually really, really important. It's in some ways even more important than building a technology that is defensible because that allows you to make these trade-offs in a thoughtful manner. You have to stand for something, otherwise you're going to fall for everything. So, you know, I really appreciate you making that very, very clear to our students today. Today, because many of them have a tech background and love racing to solving a tech problem. But yet the culture, the values are so, so critical. So it's been quite a year, if I might shift a little bit. And, you know, with, with your core DNA in mind, COVID brought a lot of change to, I mean, all of our lives. And so could you tell us maybe a little bit more about how Rad has experienced COVID and how your community has shifted, your partnerships have shifted, how you've shifted during these sort of unprecedented times in the past 12 months?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think we, when we first started the company and being VR-centric, we had immersive technologies as a way to bring people to the platform and they are able to have fun and do cool things. And that was a real differentiator for us. There was nobody else doing it at the time. And that changed as the years went on. But at the beginning, that was a real differentiator for us. And so when we started looking at, you know, as COVID started to take hold and people were at home more often, we actually saw a rise in the amount of VR use in our apps. Because people were buying VR headsets and I think they wanted to escape reality. But since we had already kind of expanded into more traditional video content and even supporting live streaming is— so we got, we had a number of our partners coming to us. We have a bunch of music on the platform and so a number of those partners came to us and said, can you support live streaming music events? And, you know, we said absolutely yes. And so we started to put together this combination of, you know, if you just had a PlayStation or a TV or a phone, you could watch the live stream on the phone. And if you had a VR headset, then we created these like animated VR environments that, you know, we did Electric Daisy Carnival and there was like psychedelic planets flying around. And so, you know, there was a, there is still kind of this bringing back to the root where we started because we didn't throw all of that technology away, but we broadened the scope out of, you know, doing charity live streams and huge electronic music festivals, and, you know, and allowing people to chat. We introduced this watch party capability that allowed people to chat around the content, and that was all being like, okay, these people are at home, They need to connect with their friends. They're trying to escape reality. What tools do we have at our fingertips to make that better? And so that's what we did.

Amazing, amazing. I think you also mentioned people want to meditate together. Is that right? Like all these things.

Yeah, we had— there's a number of different use cases. I mean, we've done like, We've had like ASMR in VR, you know, we've done like yoga holograms that show you how to do the proper form and you can, you know, put the instructor in your living room. So that's going to be coming out in next month. So yeah, so there's like those kinds of things we looked at, you know, there's this It's this guy who we've worked with who basically does like 4 minutes of you sitting on the beach in Costa Rica in VR, and it's just beach and waves and, you know, you relaxing. And so, you know, that's part of the premium bundle that we have, and it's like, if you want to go relax on the beach in VR, you totally can. So yeah, there's been some interesting use cases that have come out of it and how we thought about the effect that COVID has had on people. From a direct-to-consumer perspective, there's been lift on our, on our business, which has been nice. But, you know, I always remind the team that, you know, we're so lucky to be in a position to see any kind of lift. And so what can we do to honor that? And we're not— we're not— that's not lost on us for sure.

It's so humble, so humble for you to say. So with COVID I'm actually curious, now that you've seen this lift, now that you've seen people sort of relax their notions of what an experience needs to be. I'm still kind of stuck on the yoga hologram one. That's very interesting to me. Do you— are you more excited about the future of this space as a result? Do you think, like, COVID actually, like, accelerated adoption? Do you think we're in a better place as a result of this, the changes that have happened?

Yes, yes. Yeah, I mean, I think it kind of accelerated everything that has to do with you being at home and engaging in technology. I mean, Zoom is a prime example. You know, you've seen that like Peloton explode and, you know, the mirror to work out at home and things like that. So there's going to be some permanent shift. It might be 20% of the world has some kind of a permanent shift in their lifestyle. Maybe once everybody's vaccinated, it goes back to normal. But, you know, arguably, I think it will change behavior, consumer behavior, and it did change consumer behavior more rapidly, which is one of the most difficult things to change. It's why VR had a really hard time time getting out there. And even on mobile phones is cool and gimmicky, but you know, your arms get tired after holding your phone up and moving it around. Like, your shoulders get tired. That's not a human behavior. We've optimized our experience to a game controller, and all we have to do is move our fingers about that much. And that's esports. That's sports now. That.

You all have fast fingers.

Humans are lazy. Humans are lazy. So, you know, like for people to put on a VR headset and move around or, you know, to do, you know, anything really substantially and change human behavior, that's a really hard thing to do. We ran headlong into that wall and I think the industry did also. Tough thing to change consumer behavior. And I think COVID rapidly changed consumer behavior, which is something that's almost impossible. You have to have a forcing function to really change human behavior. If you just let it happen, it'll tend to laziness.

I love your comment that humans are lazy, fundamentally lazy. So just default to that.

That's a good thing. That's a good thing. The best engineers are lazy engineers. They're like, I don't want to ever solve this problem again. I'm solving it one time.

Hear, hear. Well, I'm gonna have a few more questions for the next 10 minutes or so. I do wanna hand it over to the students to ask many, many questions. I wanna pivot over to your extensive experience as an entrepreneur over the course of many, many, many successful companies. You spent some time building a company to help other startups, Galvanize. You were a venture capitalist. I was curious how you decided to make that shift? You know, you went from, you know, being an entrepreneur to being more of a venture capitalist. That's one shift. And then, and then you shifted back. Could you tell us a little bit more about that chapter of your, of your career?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, I, I'd like to get my hands dirty and build, and I think I also enjoy teaching things that I've learned to other people so that they don't have to make the same mistakes. And even when I was at SMU, I was a teaching assistant there and even substitute— was a substitute teacher for kindergartners when I even started working professionally as an engineer. So I've always kind of had that streak in me, but always liked to build things. So through entrepreneurship, I found myself going in to pitch VCs and, you know, there's a story and, you know, getting better at that. And I think, and I saw an opportunity having gone through it a little bit myself and banged around and, you know, made mistakes that Maybe I could be helpful to some of those people to avoid those mistakes. But also, it's a relationship game and relationships are almost more valuable than capital. So inserting myself at the center of a community and building relationships with other entrepreneurs and other VCs and doing that more rapidly and and building that community. I thought it felt right at the time. And I'm still, still so thankful that I had that experience. But over time, I got the itch to build something new technology related again, and, and operate. And so, you know, it, it just changed from a learning mode. And I'm going to open this open my mind up to a new chapter and try to help people and learn as much as I can myself. But then eventually it turned into, I need to, I need to engineer a new product and get my hands dirty again. And I always joke with my wife that Galvanize was like, I went to engineering school, so, you know, computer engineering. And I always joke with my wife that Galvanize was like getting paid to get my master's a bit You know, it's like I completely flipped out of engineering and just learned about, you know, how to raise a venture fund, you know, what it meant to be LPs and GPs and write checks into companies and to seed rounds and A rounds and, you know, convertible notes and why you would set something up as a C corp versus LLC. And all of those things were very rapid fire and very hands-on. And so, um, yeah, it was a great, great learning experience and I think we were able to help some companies. So I feel good about that, but back, back to getting my hands dirty.

Amazing. Amazing. You literally hopped on the bike without knowing how to ride the bike and just like rode the bike when you went. Yeah.

Yeah. Best way to learn.

I want to go back to something you said, which actually applies to your time at Galvanize, but also what you're doing with your partners now, which is the importance of relationships and how you build them. And you clearly are really incredibly skilled at that. And I think, at least for me as an engineer, it took me many, many years to kind of even get like to like novice level. Like what sort of advice do you have to engineering students in building relationships of trust?

Yeah, I mean, I think that, uh, that realization for me came later than I would have liked, and it's something that you can get built into some degree in, in, you know, the Greek system in college, and you know that you can build relationships in school, and but if you're not really proactive about being in, uh, you know, in different networks of people and bouncing ideas off of people as fast as you possibly can, learning from other people and iterating on ideas with people in real time and having drinks with them, having coffees with them. And that's where the richness really comes from and the genuine connections with people comes from. And it stops everything from being transactional and just doing work with them. And I've I found that a lot in conversations with CEOs, you know, that there's some CEOs that are very much like, you know, I don't have time for this and I'm very strict about how I spend my time and, you know, I don't have time to just jump on the phone and just chit-chat. And that, I understand that to some degree, like some people try to take this stance of like very busy. So like either you're doing business with me or we're not talking about anything. I try to take a little bit different approach and I think it's very important to have conversations with your peers on a regular basis. They're always going through struggles, you know, that you can always learn from them. And so if, you know, another CEO reached to me and we'll have a conversation and just wants to have a coffee with no agenda, then I'd have that conversation because we get to form a relationship and then down the road, then it's like when you call them and you're like, hey, do you know so-and-so? Or. Hey, I'm trying to get into this fund, or I'm trying to do a partnership with this other CEO. They don't think it's transactional, just helping you because you're friends. And so, you know, those genuine kind of authentic relationships are so important. And that's why I say more value capital. You know, if you have, if you have the right relationships, it really, doors just start to open, you know, instead of on the out outside trying to get your way in. It's like you just have a network of people that are all helping each other. And so, yeah, I feel like that is such an important thing in entrepreneurship to focus on, to be really proactive about that. I was just heads down building when I graduated from college. I just like coding, not thinking about like, hey, I should be building my network. And so, yeah. I think that's a really important piece of the puzzle of entrepreneurship for sure.

You know, Tony, they don't have a class in that at school. It's very weird, right? We take all these functional topics. We get really good at like mechatronics, really good at like, you know, artificial intelligence. But there's like, it's actually a really important skill to be able to gain that social capital over time and then to also spend it very wisely. And you are incredible at doing that. You had one other piece of advice that I thought was incredibly powerful in another talk that you did for entrepreneurs. You said that one of the most, well, the most important piece of advice for entrepreneurs is to be like water. And I was very touched by that. Could you maybe give a little bit more meat to what you mean by be like water?

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's just like go with the flow, you know, path of least resistance. It's not always about the least resistance, but it's just flexibility is so important, and that kind of expands into empathy and understanding and, you know, the people that you're working with. If something happens and something comes up and it's going to be going to be, you know, a challenge to have to deal with. That's okay. You'll fit, you know, you, you, you'll figure out and you start to figure it out together. It's not about, you know, who said what and when, and, you know, arguing about all of that. When something comes up, start to figure it out and flow around it and lean into it and make it work. And, and so, you know, over the last handful of years, the core team of Little Star, and now as we've kind of transitioned the brand to RAD, as we go through those challenges and you're in the trenches with people doing really challenging kind of decision-making in the moment, the last thing you want to have happen is for there to be friction. You're all in it together, and it's okay to disagree and have productive, proactive debates about things, but everybody is understanding of each other's position and suggests things that, you know, if something— everybody's stuck on something, you're suggesting something new. There's ways to flow through any kind of issue that, you know, taking that approach is like just generally in life. I mean, entrepreneurship, you need that. If you don't have that, everybody blows up and the band breaks up and, you know, startup falls apart and co-founders leave and You know, like you just can't, you can't operate that way. That's, that's just in business. But in life, I mean, if you approach all relationships that way and like life just seems to get better, it's like, instead of your, instead of everything that you do being contentious, like we'll figure it out. How bad can it possibly be? So yeah. Um, I've, I've tried to take that approach more, uh, as, as things have progressed in the last handful of years in particular, because earlier on I thought that you had to stay hard and fast to something, and if you didn't, then you were earlier. And really, that's like the counter to what you should do as somebody in— as an entrepreneur. You should come up with a thesis, test it as fast as you possibly can, figure out if you're wrong, and go to the thing that closer to being right. And so, you know, that mentality is very much like, I'm gonna find the path of least resistance as quickly as possible. And, you know, so that's kind of where that mentality comes from.

That's incredible. It's so incredible. Just even you're tying that back to relationships and just life, right? It sounds like it's much easier to live a happy life by being like water rather than always being at loggerheads.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm going to kick off the student Q&A. So we have a number of questions that are flowing in right now. And I'm going to just go through them and read them out so that everybody hears what they are. And then we'll get through as many as we can in the next 15 minutes or so.

Cool.

OK. So first question. Siddesh asks, with budding technologies that may take a long time to adopt, how do you temper long-term business versus research goals with short-term goals, or business and research goals with short-term goals?

Yeah, I mean, I think we had to be realistic about, you know, looking at, looking at creating a new industry, which was essentially— I mean, the VR industry had kind of been around for a long time, but the consumer, modern consumer VR industry was effectively creating a new market and not re-segmenting an existing market. And so you have to approach it in a different way in that, you know, you can't just spend all of your money on R&D trying to figure it out. It's like you have to come up with some kind of a paradigm that has worked in other worlds and bring that into this new innovative thing and then lay those on top of each other so that even though the new technology is there, a familiar model exists so that, you know, you're not just down in the weeds burning money on R&D. So, you know, we do have a handful of things that we are kind of constantly playing around with in terms of R&D. And we do hackathons and, you know, our engineers contribute to open source and we play around with things like currencies. And, you know, so there's, there's all kinds of, uh, you know, R&D type things that we do, but the core business around content distribution and working with hardware partners and content partners has largely stayed the same, and it's a similar paradigm to other streaming platforms that exist, but we're just doing innovative things that kind of carve out a white space for us. So it is a delicate balance, but really have to be focused on building an actual business, especially with venture capital. It's so easy to just get lulled into comfort with money in the bank because you don't have to build a business. Occasionally that works, but not a lot.

Thank you for saying that. All right, next question. Maybe in similar vein, how do you build a company that is simultaneously stable in the present market and adaptable for future markets?

Yeah, I think that, that kind of dovetails from the previous answer. It's, it's, it's a little bit of R&D that we have to think, okay, how are we building for the future? And, but not sacrificing the, the existing business. And it's a little bit of the innovator's dilemma, if anybody's familiar with that. But, um, so many people get caught up in that where they only focus on their existing business. And they never focus on the future. And then over time they get disrupted by somebody else who has been thinking about it and they've been focusing on their business, which from a management perspective is a smart thing to do. But a lot of people don't, don't have the innovation component to kind of think to the future. And so, you know, we, I think, try to balance that in a way that allows us to continue to be innovative but also realistic about what the core business is. Yeah.

Thank you. Next question, a little bit of a pivot away, which is why did your service rebrand from Little Star to Rad? And does it indicate pivot or shift from your original vision or problem that your service seeks to resolve?

Yeah, I mean, I think as we start, we in VR, it was a a niche community that we thought was going to be more mass market. And RAD has, uh, it's a tie to Little Star. I mean, we thought the name came from like radiance, and, um, and there was— we were thinking like, how does this tie to stars? And so the, uh, the, the idea that it's still tied to Little Star, but it was a little bit easier to There wasn't any missing letters, simple, it's short, it's easy to remember. Little Star is easy to remember, but, and then also, like, you know, there's a lot of our content partners, they, I think in the VR space, they can get the nuance around Little Star. It's like if you watch anime, you know, I think American audiences miss a lot of the nuance in anime, but like in Japan, everybody's like, this is so amazing. You know, it's Similar to that, I think Little Star had a lot of nuance to it in that VR and AR community got that, but the broader content and mass market consumer might not connect to that as much. And in fact, you know, when you're dealing with Hollywood, people don't want to be little stars. Yeah. They want to be big stars. So, you know, we started to think about who our audience was, and it's kind of younger millennial, older Gen Z. There's actually, the millennials go back to when rad was actually like used a lot in, you know, kind of slang, and I grew up, things were actually rad. But, you know, the younger generation, Gen Z, is now also reusing that, using rad all the time. So it connects to language in a way that connects to you know, an older demographic, a younger demographic. It talks about what we do. It's easy to remember. So it's kind of a lot of things culminated into how we were changing the scope to more mass market content and who we were approaching and how we're approaching them.

So yeah, amazing, amazing. And it's, again, you're being like water, you're adjusting and reshaping as your company evolves. So beautiful. Okay, I don't fully understand what this question is. It's a very long question, so I'm going to read the first—

I fully understand it. I don't even have to read it. I, I know exactly what it's about.

Okay, I do need to read it so that our YouTube, uh, live folks can hear it. I'm gonna— I think I know what's going on, but I'm not going to read the whole thing. So the question is, do you have anything to comment regarding the dispute between independent investors, especially the WallStreetBets people on subreddit and hedge funds regarding GameStop. There's lots of stuff going on right now with GameStop. I'm just going to hand it to you because I know very little about this topic.

Yeah. My Reddit account is 14 years old. I've been on Reddit for a very long time. I saw WallStreetBets be born on Reddit and have seen a lot of the conversation that goes on there. And there are some really savvy— There's a lot of idiots doing a lot of stupid investing, but there's some really smart people on there coming up with strategies and diligence around companies that they found value in. And so I've always kind of been, I don't know how best to put it, but somewhat of an anarchist or against against the man to some degree. I always fight for the underdog and I love a good underdog story. Who doesn't? But I feel like I certainly don't fall on the side of defending Wall Street here. I think having communities and retail investors have access to the same things that hedge funds have access to is is critically important for how we should be shaping investment in the future. Particularly, you can look at IPOs, for example. A retail investor can't participate in an IPO and can't even participate in the private market before things get to an IPO. Guess what? VCs all are pumping that stock time they write the check, the angel check. And they just get to do that in private with their buddies. That's how— that's like, you can look at along the way and watch what happens when a lot of these companies IPO. You look at their balance sheet and they're losing $200 million a quarter, but they've IPO'd. And everybody, you know what, you know who buys in? Retail. At the last minute. They're holding the bags because all the people, all the private equity people got in in a way that none of the retail people could get in. And so they pump it all the way to the point of ridiculousness and then leave retail holding the bag. And the IPO pops right away and then it starts to die and falls off and the retail people are like, "Well, I got in at the peak of the IPO. Now it's dying. It's lost 50% of its—" Sometimes it goes up, whatever. But the same thing has played out here on WallStreetBets and hedge funds. It's just been reversed. Retail has figured out how to pump the value because they've identified a strategy that puts the hedge funds holding the bag. And so it's genius. I mean, it's genius. And the thing about, you see it on CNBC and Bloomberg and they're like, you have these hedge fund managers calling in and talking about it's a manipulation. They do the same thing and they've been doing it for years. And you see Ackman go on and talk about everything that he's shorting and how he thinks everything's going to go to zero, or he thinks everything's going to go to the moon. They go on and manipulate stock in plain view and leave retail holding the bag. And this moment is basically putting— now the community is like 3 million people because it's been memed like crazy. But WallStreetBets is basically, it was a small group of people that was community-driven hedge fund strategy. And they identified something that was going to pop. And did it. Now everybody's mad about it. All it did was expose what hedge funds have been doing and private equity has been doing for decades. Here we are. I'm on the WallStreetBets team. I got in GameStop at 60. I thought that was too late. I was looking at it at 20 and I was like, "Are these guys serious? This thing is going to moon?" and no, so I took the ride.

Amazing. Well, let's talk one more question about underdogs because I know you want to cheer them on. So for those of us who are in BIPOC communities, LGBT, underrepresented groups, what is your advice— this is our last question for this— what is your advice in terms of founders in those categories raising capital.

Yeah, I mean, I think I'm thankful now that the world is waking up to the fact that brilliance comes from everywhere, and there should never be any, you know, any other consideration other than merit. And, you know, what you're doing, does it have value? And is it cool and is it interesting, can it benefit the world? And, you know, like people are finally waking up. And so not to say that there hasn't been a struggle and, you know, where it's come from, but, you know, we even from a content perspective, you know, we feel like it's important to represent as many perspectives as possible. And, you know, they all have levels of importance. Everybody, no matter who they are, has good and bad views on things. You can see people from every group and say there are great things and there are bad things. And so we just try to identify the good as our own company. But if you look out in the broader investor community and what's happening, the investment in and, you know, minorities, women, LGBTQ. It's all becoming very intentional now, and I think that attention is really good. I've always— I was just raised, you know, Southern hospitality, be good to people, you know, take care of them, they'll take care of you. And so I've never even thought about that being a thing, like, as a consideration. I'm just like, you're my brother, you're my sister, so like, and you're building something cool, then you should get investment if you're trying to raise it, you know. It should— so I've never understood how anybody could have a separate mental— like, a different mentality that like splits people up and says that somebody's more deserving than, um, you know. There's probably some natural tendency of humans to gravitate to things that are like them. And so, you know, that, that's a, an introspective thing that I think people have to look at themselves and say, um, am I doing this right now? Or am I, am I looking at this like the bigger picture? And, and so, um, I think, I think there's more opportunities now than ever. And anybody who has any concern that they might not be able to raise capital, go into that room and slam your fist down on the table and tell them why you deserve it. I love it.

I love it so much. It's actually an incredible segue. I know we're running out of time. We actually are hosting a speaker who is part of the BIPOC community, the LGBT community, and actually was born homeless. So her name is Stephanie Lampkin. She's gonna be your successor next week. She's coming to speak about being CEO of Blendoor, which she founded to help with diversity in hiring. So with that, I wanna thank Tony for an amazing conversation this week. Thank you all in the audience for joining the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series, and we will see you next week, same bat time, same bat place. And if you want to see more in our archives going back 20 years, that's at etl.stanford.edu. So thank you again, everyone. And thank you again, Tony, especially for your support.

Thank you for having me. Yeah, this is a lot of fun. Thank you. Thanks, everybody.