3 Lessons To Learn From Ryan Seacrest

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to Founders Journal, my diary as a founder made public for the world. First of all, I want to just thank you all for the abundance of emails that I've received over the last few weeks since we rebooted the show. People saying hi, people introducing themselves, sharing episode ideas, sharing feedback on episodes we're trying out like Temperature Check. And I'd love to keep the momentum going. So shoot me an email at alex@morningbrew.com. And either say hi if you don't have a lot of time, or share a little bit about yourself and something you want to see me talk about on the show moving forward. I promise you I will read your email and I will get back to it. It just may take a little bit of time because I am sitting on exactly one shit ton of emails right now. But without further ado, let's get into today's episode. And today I am talking about the television personality who made $500 million from from doing one thing exceptionally well for 30 years. There's a headline that came out this past week. I actually found out about it through Morning Brew Daily. Subtle plug of our daily news show hosted by Toby and Neal. That is incredible. And the headline was that Ryan Seacrest was named the host of Wheel of Fortune after Pat Sajak retired after a storied career. Now, that is interesting in itself. You know, any time a longtime show host passes the baton. What really struck me was the rumor of Ryan Seacrest's salary for the show that hasn't been confirmed. But if it's anywhere close to it, is absolutely absurd. Supposedly, Ryan Seacrest is going to be making $28 million per year. hosting Wheel of Fortune. And so this sent me down a very deep rabbit hole, looking at the career of Ryan Seacrest, looking at how much has this man made in his career, what has he done over the arc of his 30-year career, and what are lessons that we can learn as builders from what Ryan has been able to achieve. So quick background. Ryan Seacrest grew up in this town of Dunwoody, Georgia, and he was into the arts and acting from a very early age. He talked about how he would play sports, but he wasn't very good at them. And he was always into things like radio and being a personality. And before high school graduation, at the age of 16, he started DJing at Atlanta's WSTR radio show. And this was before he started on TV, but this was really his start in hosting anything. Now, I want to skip to the punchline, and then we're going to go back and talk about why it's so impressive. Ryan Seacrest. Now, the details, you're never going to have the exact specificity of their true fortune. But if this is directionally true, it is insane. Ryan Seacrest has amassed a $500 million fortune from basically exclusively hosting TV shows for 30 years. I want to run through his hosting resume just so you can get a sense for basically how maniacally focused this man has been and how hard of a worker he's been since 1993, which is when I was born and when he started hosting his first show. So let me go down the list. WSTR in Atlanta at 16. Radical Outdoor Challenge, an ESPN show. Gladiators 2000, which was the kids version of American Gladiator. Wild Animal Games. Click. Beverly Hills, 90210. NBC Saturday Night Movie. Ultimate Revenge. American Idol. American Juniors. The Million Second Quiz. Knock Knock Live. New Year's Rockin' Eve. Larry King Live. E! News, E! Red Carpet shows, NBC Olympic coverage, Live with Kelly and Ryan, and now Wheel of Fortune. It gets crazier than that because then obviously everyone knows Ryan Seacrest originally, like his big break was American Idol. So Ryan Seacrest started as the host of American Idol in season 1. The show was created by Simon Cowell. Ryan actually started as a co-host of the show and became the solo host of the show. He tells this interesting story where Basically, his job interview to be host of American Idol was like a four-day interview. Like it was very short, and he was first pitched on being a judge for the show, and he was like, "I don't want to be a judge. I want to be a host." That's the thing that I'm into, and so they interviewed him for that role. But basically, he was the host of American Idol from season one until season twenty-one. Season twenty-one was in 2023 this year. I started running the numbers. He made $5 million for his first 8 seasons. He made $15 million from seasons basically 9 until season 15. And then over the last 5 years where they've rebooted American Idol because they took a break for a few years, he's made roughly— they don't know the exact number— $10 million. So if you add it all up, this one show is probably about 20%, if not more, of his entire net worth. I calculated $210 million of salary pretax from American Idol. And so as I dug into his story, I wanted to really think through the lens of an entrepreneur. You look at Ryan Seacrest, what are things you can learn from this guy who's worth $500 million, who's done the same thing for 30 years? How can you take what he's done as a television personality and apply it to your business? Well, there's a few lessons I think we can take from his trajectory. The first and the most obvious one is that Ryan Seacrest did one thing exceptionally well for a very long time, and he had faith that if he was focused on doing something that he enjoyed hosting and he was talented enough at— he's very talented— good things will happen over the long term. The guy, like I said, has been hosting since 1993. That's the year I was born. He's been honing this craft for 3 decades. And I often talk about when people ask me about Morning Brew and why Morning Brew is successful. I always talk about this idea that for the first 4 years of the business, and we're talking about 4 years versus 30 years, for the first 4 years of the business, we did one thing exceptionally well, which was write email newsletters, grow them organically and through paid marketing, and convince large advertisers to spend money with us because they would want to get in front of our really valuable audience. We did that thanklessly for 4 or 5 years when newsletters weren't sexy, and that gave us the foundation to go and do other things. That is ultimately That focus is what led us to being, you know, a $75 million plus company. And so you look at Ryan Seacrest, where basically he's done that for 9x the time we did for Morning Brew. And I think you look across successful companies or successful individuals, it is this maniacal focus of doing something that people would deem boring or unsexy for a long period of time and knowing that good things will ultimately happen if you continue to be consistent. That's my view of this show also. I'm not expecting Founders Journal to be massive in month 1, month 6, or month 12. But my view is I enjoy this enough and I think I'm good enough at it that if I do this for the next 10 years, I think it can turn into something really special. We're going to take a quick break, but more from Founders Journal when we get back. Now, this idea of him doing one thing exceptionally well for a very long time ties into the next lesson, lesson, which I would say is Almost a cautionary tale. Every decision you make— this is obvious, but every decision you make has significant tradeoffs, and it's important to be aware of those tradeoffs. Ryan has been relentless in his career. I was reading articles about him and everyone from Bob Pittman, who is the CEO of iHeartMedia and Clear Channel, to other folks who know him well. Ryan is asked to talk about work-life balance. They laugh because they basically say work is his life. It is his balance. It is his hobby. And I was reading an article in, I believe it was The Wall Street Journal, about Ryan and his career. And he's talked about like the very significant cost of him basically hosting 3 to 4 shows and executive producing a lot of things at any given time. He shared that he has basically given up the most basic human gift of close friendships because he said no to most personal life things over the arc of his career. He's talked about how he's missed Thanksgivings with his family because he was always doing something that would be better beneficial for his career. A few years ago, during one of the live American Idol episodes, he had this on-air health scare where he started having trouble reading the prompter. His voice slurred, his right eye drooped. People were worried that he had suffered a stroke. He went on to say that he didn't suffer a stroke, but he was going through some health issue. And so something to just be very aware about, you know, the decision to build a business or be an entrepreneur or be super career-oriented. It's not as easy as just saying, hey, I'm going to control what I can control and work really hard for a long time and good things will happen. You also need to be calculating constantly because it evolves over time. You have to constantly be calculating what is the cost of me working really hard. So said differently, like the cost of me working really hard as a founder and in business when I was in college. So 8 years ago when we started Morning Brew, The cost was way lower. I didn't have a wife. I didn't have a family. I didn't value balance nearly as much. I didn't have hobbies that I wanted to really work on. And so me spending 15 or 16 hours a day on Morning Brew was worth the tradeoff of basically not having a life. But I did forego friendships. I did forego certain aspects of my social life that I'll never get back. If I look at that today, the opportunity cost or the tradeoff of working incredibly hard for my career and for my businesses is way higher, which means the hurdle for the thing that I'm doing in my career has to be significantly more attractive. The return has to be significantly better. I have to enjoy it that much more because the tradeoff is that much higher. One other lesson that I want to share about the trajectory of Ryan Seacrest is this idea of being really smart about diversifying the portfolio of your wealth and your business as you build up kind of this foundation through relentless focus, right? So lesson one was he did one thing exceptionally well for a long time. He just crushed the role of host and being a great host and did it for 30 years. But once you build a foundation, then the interesting question you start asking yourself is, what are other parts of my supply chain? Let's call it my supply chain that allow me to diversify my wealth. So in the context of me, Alex Lieberman, as I was building a media company or as I'm building a new ghostwriting business, what I'm constantly asking myself is, what are other things around my orbit? Like, what are other things that touch the value chain of what I'm building that potentially give me an opportunity to launch other businesses? So I'll just use a random example. Like, let's say for the ghostwriting business, we end up hiring sellers and we end up finding that we don't want full-time salespeople, we want part-time salespeople. And say we find that hiring part-time salespeople, there isn't really a great option or product for it. Well, that could be an interesting idea to build a business to basically serve what we need in our company, which is maybe like freelance offshore salespeople. And we could be the first customer of that. And ultimately we can launch that as a business. But in the context of Ryan Seacrest, what he ended up doing is basically he saw himself as kind of this hub that could have spokes. And one of those spokes is he was always the host, so he was always talent on shows. But he asked himself, I'm sure, why don't I start going upmarket? So in the way that Simon Cowell would come up with ideas and ultimately be the creator of shows, Ryan, I'm sure, asked himself, why don't I think about creating shows for myself? Like, I'm getting exposure to a ton of shows, but I'm only getting the upside of my salary. I'm not necessarily getting the upside of the IP that's being created or the money that's going to the production companies for the show. So Ryan ended up launching a production company in 2007. And I don't know if people realize this, but up until I think this past year, he was the production company for Keeping Up with the Kardashians. So you can imagine how much money his production company made from every year this show getting more popular and TV stations paying him for the rights to that show. I think a really interesting thing, a lesson for entrepreneurs, is as you're building your career, How can you look at other parts of the value chain you're involved in and either go downmarket or upmarket? So he went upmarket with production, but a way he went downmarket is he built a personality for himself. He has millions of followers on Instagram and on Twitter. So he went and started businesses like he ended up launching Ryan Seacrest Distinction, which is basically a menswear company that in 2018 did $50 million. So that's the final lesson I'll leave you with is focus for a long time on building up a center of gravity. But once that center of gravity exists, think about how you can diversify your one channel for revenue or for cash flow into other things that are only one step away from what you've been doing for a long time, right? I think about MrBeast. It's the same example. He focused for 13 years on building a huge YouTube audience, and he went and launched businesses off the back of his YouTube audience in order to diversify the way that he's making money and building his wealth. And so that, my friends, is the story of Ryan Seacrest, this crazy individual who has worked tirelessly in his career for 30 years to build up a net worth of $500 million. He deserves it more than anyone. And I hope you found value in the 3 lessons, which are the tradeoffs that every career has, the power and value of doing one thing exceptionally well for a long time, no matter how sexy or unsexy people think it is, and diversifying your center of gravity or your foundation. Once you have had that focus and you've earned the ability to do other things. With that, thank you so much for listening to Founders Journal, and I'll catch you all next episode.