#103 Patrick Lee— Rotten Tomatoes Founder: The Secrets to Building an Enduring Business

. But generally the more focused you are in anything in your life, the better you'll be. So much time and money and whatever in the day, you can put it against a lot of things or you can put it against like one thing. And if the one, the people who, I think it was like Bruce Lee, they said like he doesn't fear the man that can do like what, 10,000 different kicks. He fears the person who can do one kick that he's practiced 10,000 times. Right. And I think that, so focus is really important and network, same thing in your entire life. Like whatever you do, network is important. For your career, for your company, or personally. Knowing a lot of people, I think, is just makes life more meaningful, right? To have all those things. So focus what you do, do one thing, network, know lots of people and know them well. Like, they're opposite in that way, but I feel like that combination is a winning combination for anyone, anywhere, at any time in their life.

Welcome back. This is From Sharp to Grown Up. My name is Alisa Cohn, and today I'm thrilled to welcome Patrick Lee to the podcast. Patrick is the founder and former CEO of Rotten Tomatoes, the movie review site that became a cultural staple and is still going strong more than 25 years later. Patrick and I talked about the wild early days of Rotten Tomatoes and how a side project gathering reviews for Jackie Chan's Rush Hour turned into a full-fledged business that attracted the attention of Pixar and Roger Ebert. He shared what it was like to navigate the dot-com crash, cutting his team from 25 down to 7, while living out of his office just to keep the company alive, and ultimately what it was like making the tough decision to sell. We also dig into the lessons he carried forward into the 6 other companies he founded, including why focus and network are the 2 things he wishes he had known earlier, and what he's learned the hard way about knowing when to push forward and when to let go. Patrick was incredibly candid about the highs and lows of the founder journey, the toll of running a company in zombie mode, and the importance of figuring out whether you truly have the DNA to be a founder. This is such an honest and insightful conversation, so please enjoy my discussion with Patrick Lee, founder of Rotten Tomatoes.

Patrick, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

I'm so excited. And I know that we have so many things to cover and we're just chatting, you know, backstage as we say about a few of these things. But I wanna start with what you're most known for, which is being the founder and the former CEO of Rotten Tomatoes. What was the founding story? And kind of what was the deal with Rotten Tomatoes?

Right, so we actually had a web design firm doing a lot of work for the entertainment industry. We were doing online flash games, websites, et cetera, for Disney Channel Online, ABC, Artisan, MTV, VH1. We did the online flash game for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? And basically we had this creative director, Sen Duong, he was a huge movie buff and a huge Jackie Chan fan. And Jackie had this movie Rush Hour coming out that was Jackie's first big, really big Hollywood film. And Sen wanted to know what everyone was saying about the movie. So he went to the library, he looked up magazines and newspapers because back then most reviews were not online. And he would write out and list out all these reviews that he found. And then when he gathered it, he was like, you know what? I'm going to go home and put it online so other people can kind of see this research that I've done. And he put it out. And I think from idea to start, it was like 2 weeks. We were hosting it for him. And almost immediately, it started getting noticed because it was immediately useful. Like the scores for these wide-release movies coming out that week, that's the stuff that people really cared about. So he didn't need to go back and, you know, do thousands or tens of thousands of movies in the past. He just focused on the movies coming out that week. And it got, you know, written up in like USA Today, highlighted by like Netscape and Yahoo!, which were like the big, you know, search engine browsers and stuff back then. Roger Ebert wrote an article pointing out his favorite movie websites. Rotten Tomatoes is one of them. I remember when Pixar released A Bug's Life, we saw a spike in traffic and this is super early on. And it turned out that that traffic, when we looked up the IP, was coming from Pixar itself. And so after about a year of hosting and Sen was just working like nights and weekends on this stuff because he was still working at the company at the time full-time, we were like, maybe we can turn this into a business. And so I went out, talked to some of the investors and people that we worked with that were our clients to see if any of them would be interested in investing and supporting what we were doing. Ended up raising $1 million in funding, and then we essentially passed our design firm off to another group to take over. That took a little while to transition. Then myself, our CTO Steven from our design firm, and then Sen, the three of us basically became the founders of Rotten Tomatoes and we transitioned most of our design team over to focus on it.

That's incredible. And that was in 1998, is that right?

Yep. And we started running it as a business in January of 2000.

Okay. So, it took that long to sort of go from hobby, hobby and idea with a lot of traffic to then like into a business. That's really incredible. I do wanna do a little translation for the kids, right? So, when you had movies in wide release, you mean to the movie theaters, which is where people people saw movies in those days, right? You, the reason you were let, went to the library to look up, or the reason your co-founder went to the library is 'cause as you said, many things were not online. What was the state of the internet back? It just places in the state of the internet from 1998.

Uh, 1998, um, I think was around like Yahoo was really big. There was a bunch of search engines that got big. A bunch of them went public, a number of— most of them went under, actually. Economics weren't there. They, they were doing portals back then. So a lot of search engines became portals where they try to get all the news and every other thing out onto one place so that you could— it would be your first page whenever you open up a browser would be to go to a portal and you could do everything there. You could check your stocks, you could see your news, you could see the sports, etc. I think Yahoo is one of the only ones that kind of survived that. And even now, I think no one really does that anymore. Um, there are battles around browsers back then. Uh, Microsoft had their browser. Um, there was Netscape. Netscape ended up dying.

Um, right. But that was the first browser that everyone got all freaked out about.

Yeah. And then later on you would have things, gosh, I can't even remember the Microsoft browser name. Do you remember now?

No, I don't remember actually either.

Yeah. And then, and then later on, uh, Mozilla had Firefox. And then, and then later on Google had Chrome, which I think is the dominant one now. But for a while there was, I guess Apple had Safari, but that never really picked up. So there's like browser wars, there was search engine wars, there's portal wars and just a lot of really early e-commerce companies, tons and tons of e-commerce. And eventually Amazon just dominated everything and basically expanded to every— Amazon back then was just books. They gradually did DVDs and CDs, which are very close to books, and then eventually everything, and gobbled up the entire market pretty much. So it was an interesting time back then. Back then, any idea you had, you could try it out and you could actually be the first. Whereas nowadays I feel like it's harder and harder to have like an actual unique idea. I mean, yeah, with new technologies like AI and stuff, but, but back then it was like wild, wild west.

Right. And also, to your point, I mean, you could put anything online and sort of try it out online. And I think that was like a fresh— a different, a fresh time. And certainly everybody was freaking out about just being online. And I guess I'm just curious, when you guys started realizing, first of all, getting traffic from Pixar, like, that's amazing. And also, what's Roger Ebert? Roger Ebert. So again, for the youngins, Roger Ebert— Siskel and Ebert were these movie reviewers. And they would give their two thumbs up or two thumbs down or one thumb up and one thumb down reviews, and it was kind of like iconic for the time. And so to get the attention of him, that must have— what did that feel like when you had Roger Ebert?

Um, no, I mean, it was crazy. Like, for us, uh, when we were growing our design firm, we were just hidden. I mean, even when, when all this stuff was happening, it was the site, not us as founders, but to actually see it being in newspaper, you know, featured on these big browse portals in magazines, seeing Pixar and Roger Ebert and all these groups using it. For us, that was like, there's something here. You know, when you talk about traction, when you talk about product market fit, that was like clear product market fit to us. We're like, this is something that people need and want. And if we didn't exist, they would still be trying to do it, but just by themselves, right? Like if you're a studio and you had a movie come out, what are you going to do? You're going to go out and read every review you can find, but you're going to have to go out to the library or go out and buy a bunch of magazines and newspapers to figure that out. We did it in one place and standardized it, and it's just something that just people have needed. And the site is over 25 years old now, and it's something that just people need.

Yeah, definitely. It's, has stood the test of time, obviously, for sure. And was there, as you were kind of evolving this idea, was there for you a moment of truth? Or, and I guess, were you the CEO of the web, of the web design firm? Like, was there a moment of truth where you and the team just decided, okay, we're not doing that anymore. We're gonna figure something else. We're gonna go all in on Rotten Tomatoes. Like, what was that moment like and how did you decide?

Yeah, so we were kind of just focused on the design firm. It was constantly growing. We went from Disney Channel getting in to do one project with them to eventually becoming the lead developer for them. I mean, we had like a million-dollar contract, a contract where it's like within a year we were making 50 games for them. And so we got really big. But the thing is, we were doing all this work. There was not really any recognition on there. Web design work is very hard, like especially with the entertainment industry. Everything is like, hurry up and get it to us like by yesterday, you know what I mean? Like a lot of waiting and then suddenly like everything is last minute because everything has to get approvals. And we also had a lot of friends who were doing startups that had raised a lot of money or had exits and whatever. And we're just like, when we were looking at services versus like something that actually has the ability to scale, we thought doing something that was kind of like our own was much more appealing. So we internally, we discussed it among everyone and everyone's like, yeah, you know, we'd rather do something that is our own and not just building for other people and just getting paid for that. And so there was that, then there was a discussion where I had to go and talk to Sen to be like, hey, you know what, maybe let's actually work together and make this the company because he, you know, he had built a really interesting product, but with our team, with our design firm, we had a full team, we had the engineers, he wasn't an engineer, we had the relationship with the studios. You know, we have people who would go and sell websites, but they could potentially sell ads. So we're just like, we basically have every other piece that you would need to make it work. And so he was like, yeah, that makes sense. And then we approached our own clients that have worked, we were working with, and they were the ones who actually invested in us and gave us our first million. So it was just a good fit where the pieces we had, because we came from a design firm, perfectly matched with this, the site that he made as a hobby project that was finding product-market fit. And then, and so that's how we managed to pull everything together and have a, like a basically a fully formed team within that year. And again, we could see the traffic growing. We were hosting it, we could see the traffic, we could see the news and the press happening. And he could see what we were doing on the design firm side in that we were constantly at that point in time, the things were more simple. Our team could make anything you needed on the internet at that point. Like we were making Flash games, Shockwave stuff, which was at that point was like almost the most complex things you would be seeing on the internet, right? As well as websites, all that stuff. So it, it was just a very good fit, very good timing for everything together.

Yeah, I love that. And, and the timing. So it sounds like you, you sort of turned it into a business in 2000. Which was also a wild time in the world of the internet. So kind of play, what did you think was gonna happen and then what did act— what actually happened?

Things were getting very frothy. Lots and lots of companies IPOing that didn't have like really good economics behind them. What was happening at the time was people are raising a ton of money they were using that money to buy eyeballs, basically buying traffic from other websites to then show like, look at all this traffic we're having to then raise more money and just repeating that process to buy more eyeballs and eventually trying to IPO, right? And so everyone was doing that. But then basically it was kind of a little bit of a house of cards and everything toppled over. This was around March 2000, the internet stock bubble burst. And the problem there was companies couldn't IPO. There was no more fundraising, like funding market. So all the funding dried up. But even worse was the revenue that these companies had was coming from each other. They were just buying eyeballs from each other. Right. And so when your revenue dries up and your funding dries up, you have no money. And, and just tons and tons of these internet companies died. Like it felt like 98%. I don't know what the actual math was, but that's what it felt like. The ones that survived were either super crazy lean like we were— we actually had to be lean. We, we had 25 people. We had to cut to 7. 2 of us went to zero salary. The other 5 people took a 30% pay cut. So our 7 was like 3.5 kind of in terms of salary-wise just to keep the lights on. So either you're super crazy lean or you're already big and ideally you were making revenue that wasn't advertising based. So like Amazon made it through really well. eBay, you know, made it through because they're making money from users. Netflix, right? Those companies tended like tended to get really, really gigantic during that time and take advantage because anyone who's relying on advertising they went through a very painful period. Eventually you had ones like Facebook and Google that are kind of advertising-based, but it's much more targeted and smart advertising versus just like, let's put up a banner ad. Like no one made it through that was just like pure banner ads. I feel like that made it through and, and did really well during that time.

Yeah. Right, right. So what happened with Rotten Tomatoes and what did you, again, what did you think was gonna happen? And then what actually, how did you, How did it go from there?

Right, so we raised money and we're like, okay, now we can fully focus on this. Let's transition, let's kind of pass our design from off to another group. And a transition, you can't just pass it on. We actually had to have a good chunk of our team still working on the project as we integrated the people over to like start taking over, meeting the clients, all that kind of stuff. Otherwise, if you just pass it off, you probably end up losing like most of your clients.

Right, wait, when you said that, you mean the design firm? You're passing off the design firm and were you still gonna be a part owner in the design firm?

Yeah, we kept a 40% stake in that company.

I see. So you had a vested interest in making sure it didn't just all fall apart.

Yeah. So we had a good chunk of those people doing that, but then meanwhile, Rotten Tomatoes, initially we had, we went from, you know, Send gathering reviews himself. He brought in some friends, we transitioned a bunch of people over to help with gathering the views because back then everything was manual. So we had like 10 people gathering reviews at the same time. We started putting our engineering group on that and so they started building stuff like parsers to, you know, spiders to go out and just grab links to all the reviews, bring it back, built a content management system. You know, Stephen was in charge of that content management system to make it very easy to be like, show the, show the review, show the link. Then our editor could go in and just be like, it's fresh or rotten, pull out a quote that made sense, you know, that kind of stuff. And it would show like the rating that they have and all that stuff to just make it very fast for an editor to say like, oh, this is a fresh review or rotten review and build the pages automatically, put everything into a database. So we did a lot of that stuff like on the engineering side and then gradually Unfortunately, because the market turns so, so fast, we had to cut. We went from 25 to 21 to 17 to 14 to 11 to 7 in like a year. And, and we told people when the market crashed, everyone saw what happened and we're like, look, we have to like, like slim down or we're going to die because we were burning $100,000 a month, we had raised a million. We're like, we're not gonna make it through the year if we don't make changes. And so we basically told, a lot of people were like, people outta school, like from Berkeley, we were all at Berkeley. Most of them were just students outta school that we had hired. We were all, a lot of us were, we were all friends at that point. And we said, look, start looking, try and find something else, and we'll keep you employed until then. And so we had people who were looking, people who were still working on the design firm during the transition, so they still had work that way. So that's how we kept a lot of them employed. And then some people that we were paying to focus on Rotten Tomatoes. And so the vast majority of people, they were able to find other things because we had a good team and they would go to like Pixar and ILM and Fox Sports and Blizzard and other, you know, really good companies. Um, but then that way we were able to kind of slim down, but not just be like, hey, everyone, just, you're fired. But like try to do it in a nice way.

I see. That must have made you feel better considering that was one of the challenging things to do.

Tough to go from this like full office to, you know, less than a third of those people still around and, and the office empty at that point.

I can imagine. I mean, it's like sort of ghosts like running. What was that, what was that like for you and the people who were left? It was tough.

I mean, one way I went, I went to zero salary. I was able to do that because we couldn't get out of our lease. We were in a Class A building, office space, 5-year lease. I think it was like maybe 2 years in. So we still had a few years left. They obviously wouldn't let us out because everyone's trying to get out. That's like, you know, imagine like COVID, same thing happened, right? I basically got rid of my apartment because we had so few people. I took 3 cubes that were like in an L-shape, right? And I just made that my home and I put all my clothes into the drawers and stuff. And so if you came in during the day, you couldn't tell, like with all the drawers closed and everything, you can't tell that someone was living there. I had a fold-out like mattress kind of thing. So in the evening I could just fold it out. And just sleep under my, like, literally under my desk. Eventually we had another friend. They had gone from 100-something employees, huge space, raised at that time, I think it was like $20 million or something. But they also had to let go almost everyone. And so they sublet our space. They got rid of their space because it was way too big. And then they sublet space from us. So that kind of helped filled it out. And so there's two companies there. Yeah. But I think it's at that time, because everything was so hard, it kind of pulled everyone closer together to, because you're just like, we just gotta make it through this, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. I can relate to that. That was before you had a wife and kid who were not in the office with you. So you have probably had more flexibility from that point of view. So then what happened? So you sold the company in 2001, right?

2004.

2004. Sorry. Okay. So tell, how did that all kind of play out?

So when we got ourselves down to 7, the site continued, you know, quarter by quarter to grow traffic. We continued to find more ways of bringing revenue, you know, with advertising and licensing and affiliate programs. We got to a point where we were break-even, you know, I can't remember exactly when, but maybe around 2002 or so, companies were starting to sniff around about possibly trying to acquire us. Originally it was like really bad offers, like 10 cents on a dollar, um, 25 cents on the dollar, uh, and eventually— and we were like, no, you know, we're, we're basically breakeven. There's no reason to sell and, and have our investors lose money. So we said we're not going to seriously entertain anything unless our investors can at least get their money back, which is, looking back, was like a very low bar. But again, given that that time period, almost every company wiped out. So for investors to even get their money back was— is actually a pretty big accomplishment. And then we finally got an offer that was, you know, where our investors would actually make a little bit of money. We did have one of our investors was like, we think you should hold on. Looking back, like they were probably right, but we negotiated, got a little bit more on the offer. And so we did make our investors some money. And again, back then, like no one else was really doing that almost. But once we had that offer, we had been doing the company for 5 years. And at that point, I think started Rotten Tomatoes started when I was 25, started running as a real business around 26 or so, sold 30. And, and for me, I was like, I wanted to try different things. I didn't want to just do this one thing my whole life. And so yeah, we decided to sell. After we sold, I ended up going to check out Asia and trying to do some stuff out there. I was born in the States, grew up in the States, so I just was like, I just wanna see more of the world and experience more of the world. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, that makes sense. But that's interesting. Like looking back, do you, I mean, it sounds like your investor, one of that one investor was saying, you know, you really have something here, like keep going. But it sounds like in addition to probably being exhausted from that experience, right? Which sounds— it was just that time. I mean, I was also in the dot-com world in that time. It was a challenging experience. Everyone was exhausted and a lot of pain. It was just hard. It was just hard. Also, to your point, it just felt like every company was going out of business. So like your company was doing one thing and everyone around you was like falling apart. So it was just a very challenging time. Do you feel like you were maybe tired out from that? Or do you feel like, hey, no matter what, I was I was gonna be like 5 years, I would be maybe 6, whatever, but I was done. Like, what was your experience of deciding this was enough?

One thing I would say is because of the environment and we had just, it was our first time raising money to do our own thing. And literally 2 months in, internet stock bubble burst, right? So you're in survival mode, you're cutting like crazy. And if you remember, a year and a half after the stock bubble burst was 9/11. Right. Which was also a crazy time. I mean, I literally remember we had a big ad campaign coming from Spider-Man for the movie, and they had to pause it because they had to go back into the movie and like literally erase the Twin Towers from the scenes.

I forgot that, right?

Because it was set in New York and, and like most marketing campaigns just in general were paused, stopped, canceled or paused for everything because who wants to watch a bunch of ads during that time, right? And so it was such a crazy time where everyone was like, stock market's going to crash again, stock market's going to crash again. There's going to be another terrorist attack. I mean, we had a war, right? And so, you know, back then everything was like orange level threat or whatever it was. And so we got to this point where we— I feel like a lot of this external stuff made us not think as big as, you know, if you were pre-2000 or if you're post-Google going public where you're like, oh, sky's the limit, we are just like, don't die, don't die, don't die. And I think— but the problem with— and it was good, it made us like a cockroach that just survived. But it was bad in terms of we didn't think big the way you would have seen entrepreneurs thinking big again pre-2000, post-Google went public. And I remember we actually had a discussion when we had an offer and we're like, you know, this isn't the best offer, but What if the stock market crashes again? What if there's another terrorist attack? If that happens, the window will close and it might not open for another few years. So maybe we should just take it now while there is an offer on the table and our investors can make money. And the other thing we were thinking about, which was very conservative, is like, if you've ever gone to Vegas or a place to gamble, I'm not a gambler, big gambler or anything, but like maybe you're like, I'm going to play with $100., right? And you're playing with $100 and let's say you, you're up to $200. One thing you do is you're like, okay, well let me take that first $100 back off. So at least no matter what, I wouldn't have lost money. That was kind of that thinking where we're like, okay, we can just take this money off the table. Our investors can make some money, we make some money, and we can always raise for a new thing. And we did. I've raised for a bunch of other things. What I didn't appreciate is how hard, especially in consumer, it is to make something like a Rotten Tomatoes. I mean, that is almost like a once in a lifetime kind of thing. And you've seen there's tons of consumer-focused founders that can never do a second one and have tried many, many times. Like if you, if you took Zuckerberg away from Facebook and say, go make another consumer thing, I think you could give him 1,000 tries. I don't think he's getting another Facebook. Like, how hard is it to get a Facebook, right? And so I think that's one thing that I severely underestimated. I think at the time We were just really lucky. I think part of it because the internet was growing so rapidly. We did a design firm, it, you know, was throwing off millions a year and it just getting these great clients. And then we said, okay, let's try Rotten Tomatoes. And it just seemed like everything just kind of worked even though we did go through hard times. You did something. And because I think the market was growing so rapidly around this new technology that you, as long as you did it and you didn't screw up too badly, like you could make something interesting. I think we, we underestimated how hard it was, especially once things were more entrenched and a lot more competition was coming in. All the easy ideas had been taken, you know what I mean? So yeah, I think that's kind of how things were at that point in time. Yeah.

Yeah, that totally makes sense. I mean, we're so much a product of our environment and it's so fascinating to me that for you it's like, well, this is easy. You know, you started the web business, the design business that worked out, rotten tomatoes, that worked out. And so, you know, with its ups and downs, it sounds like you were like, well, we'll just go off and do something different and it'll, it'll be just as easy. That's really interesting. I'm gonna ask you, 'cause I know that you founded 7 companies, so we wanna talk about that and kind of the entrepreneurship gene there. But before I get to that, I am just curious, do you have advice for other founders on the topic of how they should think about the kind of decision that you were making at the time?

The biggest thing around making that decision that I would say was my biggest learning from that is network. When I did Rotten Tomatoes, you know, my co-founders and I, we were quite introverted. We just happily work on a product working with our friends, but we barely especially then it was like 7 people just in an office in Emeryville, which is East Bay of the Bay Area. We really didn't interact with like anyone, especially during that time. There weren't accelerators, there was no accelerators, pre-Y Combinator. There weren't really tech mixers and all that. And we didn't have the personality to be like, hey, let's go to some mixer, let's go network with VCs and all that. We were a dot-com, like an internet company, but we weren't in Silicon Valley, we weren't in San Francisco, we were focused on movies and we weren't in LA, in Hollywood, right? So we were just by ourselves and we had very, very little network and we did have some advisors and stuff, but we didn't really use them very much, a little bit. And so I think the main thing is when we had this opportunity. Entrepreneurs, I think in general, tend to learn through mistakes. They're like, let's try this out. It doesn't work. Okay, let's try it this way. It doesn't work. Problem is selling a company is not something you get multiple chances of. It's this thing that when you, when you're going to do it, you need to do it right the first time. And I think had I had a better network, I could have gotten a lot more advice about how to do it right., you know, should we sell? Is this the right time to sell? How to sell? Do we need, do we use a bank? How to get competitive offers, et cetera. We didn't know anything and we just, I mean, our investors kind of gave us a little bit of feedback and stuff, but we were basically figuring it out on just like winging it. And the group that bought us IGN, they had gone public, they had gone private after that, they bought a bunch of companies. They, they like knew, they were running circles around us. Like we were just total noobs on that. And one very clear example, I had a friend who was another founder who had a really good exit much later when we were meeting up and he was like, if you just had more offers at that same time, you could have gotten at least double just at that time. And one example of another friend, they had a company, uh, that their VC was forcing them to sell, and they had an offer that if they took that offer, the VCs would have gotten back some of their money and the founders would have gotten zero. But again, a couple of these other tech founder friends were like, that's a terrible offer, let's make some intros. They made some intros, and then another group came in, offered $80 million,. And basically the founders could retire after that. They retired. Oh wow. Yeah. And it was like, it went from they would've made zero to they retired. And that is like a super clear example of like how a network can really change everything. And when people are like, it's like not what you know, it's who you know. I mean, it is both. We did the execution really well. We did nothing on the network side. And then ever since then, I tried to make it much, much more of a point to get out, to meet people. I used to be terrified of public speaking. I went out and took acting classes to learn how to deal with that fear so that I could get in front of people to speak. You know, I've spoken a bunch of stuff. I mentored a ton of stuff and really turned my weakness of my network into a strength. Like I would actually say now my best thing out there is my network. And obviously, hopefully if I ever encounter something like Rotten Tomatoes again, I won't make that same mistake of not having a network to kind of optimize on that because I think it went from— yeah, it was at the time an exit that was not bad for a bunch of kids at 32. Had we done a better job, like, you know, we could have done— I think we could have done a much better job for our investors, for our employees, for everyone. Yeah.

Yeah. And for yourself.

Or, or maybe not have sold even and just kept—

Right.

Yeah.

Right, right. But just as a result of getting some different advice. Well, I didn't know that. That's really fascinating. And I, I feel like it puts into context some of the activities you're doing these days, which we're definitely gonna get to. But before we get to those, you know, so like you founded 7 companies, I think. Is 7 the right number? Sort of like, you know, more or less. And, and this was really your third company, Rotten Tomatoes. And so, I guess I would just ask you, is there like an entrepreneur gene? You know, what, what happened to you that made you so entrepreneurial?

I think one thing I've always liked doing, even though I wasn't a networker, I always like to gather people. Like maybe it's 'cause I'm OCD or whatever. When I was in high school, I helped to start the Chinese club at our high school. You know, when I was in my Chinese school on the weekends, I would try to get people together to do things. At Berkeley, I was really involved with the club before doing Rotten Tomatoes. And actually a lot of people we recruited for our design firm came from that club. And so I think of the companies that I've done generally as an extension of me just like getting some people together to be like, 'Hey, let's, let's get together, let's do something.' And so 6 out of the 7 companies had at least one founder, if not multiple founders, that I were friends with from freshman year of college. Oh wow. Yeah. And all 7 are like doing something that seemed like it would be interesting to do at the time. And so for me, it was really about like, I want to work with friends and I want to do something that I like because I felt like with corporate, you might not have either of those things, right? And so for me, it wasn't really about money. It was more just like, life is super crazy short. And I feel that even more strongly today, but I've always felt that. And it's like, if life is so short, why, why not work with friends? Why not do things that you want to do?

Yeah, for sure. How did you know at age 25 or 30 that life is so short? That's usually some insight that we get later in life.

I felt it. I remember distinctly feeling it around 16. And I'm like, if I could just pause right now, I can drive a car and I feel like I really kind of know what's going on in the world. If I could just freeze myself at 16, I would love to just do that and be like that forever. Like, why do people have to get old? And, you know, you see grandparents passing away and, you know, now it's kind of the next, like the aunts, uncles, that kind of stuff. And you see that and you see people you know, like work really hard at high school to get into a good college, work really hard in college to get a good job, to then save a bunch of money to buy a house and get married and have kids and get your 2 vacations a year or whatever it is. And it just seemed like, why do you want to just be on that same path as everyone else? That seems so crazy boring. Yeah, and even seeing people who are working so late in their life on the same job, and you're like, why don't you spend more time with family? It's like, oh, I got to keep working. Or why don't you go, you know, see your dad that's sick? And they're like, oh, I'm too busy. And it's like, that's just all those things always seemed off to me, that people are not realizing like what's really important a little bit. And so, yeah, I've always wanted to take a different path. Even now, married with a kid, you know, 95% of the time I'm traveling, I'm bringing them both along with me. Almost every time I speak, I didn't a couple days ago, but almost every time I speak, my kid is there watching me. Oh, that's so sweet. And I just think that's really, really important. And, and you see it so often where people think they have a certain amount of time and they, they don't.

Yeah. Yeah. So true. So it sounds like for you, you really wanted to build the autonomy of being able to be in control of your life. And part of control of your life was to do the things you enjoy doing with people you enjoy doing them with, because you just never know when the end's gonna be. So it's like spend your time doing those things which are meaningful, basically. That's what, it sounds like that's what entrepreneurship is to you.

Yeah. And I also felt like it is creative. I mean, it is a business, but you're making something, you're, you know, you're creating something that hopefully people use. And so I've actually found a lot more like in common as a founder with creative people like writers and directors and actors and whatever, singer-songwriters, etc., because they're all making things. They're all creating something, putting out in the world versus just like someone who's just doing a job for money and they're not making anything, they're just working for someone. Yeah.

Yeah, I can totally understand that. So what were the, what were the different businesses you did after Rotten Tomatoes? And, and I guess I'm curious also about the insight, like, oh, it was so easy, web design, it was so easy, Rotten Tomatoes, that was so easy. Like, was there one that was not so easy and didn't work out so well?

Yeah, I mean, well, the first one was actually selling computer systems computer systems and components from our dorm or no, from our apartment. That didn't work so well. It was a bad time because the, the prices, CPU memory prices were dropping so fast because things were improving so rapidly that you held any inventory and it would be worth far, far less even within a month. That one didn't really work, but we did save enough money from that, that kind of paid for rent. And stuff. Second was the design firm. Third was Rotten Tomatoes. Fourth was a friend that I did my first company with, was from China. I went to visit him and he convinced me to join his thing. And I actually even brought my old CTO, Simon, along too. And it was trying to do something like Yelp a little bit, but more complicated, a lot more complicated, but something like a Yelp for China. It didn't really work. A lot of it was also like I couldn't add that much value because I'm not from China. I didn't grow up there. My reading, my speaking was like elementary school level. My reading, writing was like kindergartner level. So it just, it was tough. After that, I went to Hong Kong, tried to do something like a MySpace. Working with celebrities and artists to connect to each other and their fans. Co-founded with this actor Daniel Wu. That's very— he's very big in Asia. We did the official Jet Li site, Jackie Chan, Kelly Hu, Karen Mok, like a lot of these pretty big actors, especially back then it was much closer to their prime. But unfortunately we ran into all the social networks and social media coming out of China as well as all the ones in the US, because Hong Kong kind of is this in-between between China and the US kind of. So we ran all these competitors. We were not funded at the same level. We had like 2 engineers competing against companies with 10,000 engineers and all this stuff. We were also trying to do way too much. Came back to the States, did another company again with a friend, a different friend that I did my first company with, and we tried to make a mobile game. We've always loved playing games. We're like, let's make a game. It was his idea over a dinner with a bunch of friends, and he was kind of we had a lot of drinks and he was like, he just stood up and he's like, let's make a game. And like literally the next day I'm like, were you serious about that? And he's like, yeah, let's do it. And so we went out, raised some money, we decided to make a mobile game because that's, we felt like that was more doable than trying to make a console game or PC, which is like a lot more resources. But we, you know, we didn't know what we were doing. Again, made a ton of mistakes, but it was, it was fun, but it was a lot of time. It was like 5 years working on that thing.

5 years?

Yeah, most on average my companies were like about 5 years each. And then that one I was a bit burned out, but finally working on this new company and it's, you know, trying to build a community around geek fandom. So again, yeah, and this one is not friends I knew from freshman year of college, but it's friends I knew from for like a decade. Yeah, 2 out of 3 of them were also Berkeley, but just we weren't— we didn't overlap at the same time. And, and it's still something that I love doing. So that theme is still pretty much held true. But I would say the biggest thing I learned from all these companies were the ones where we were super focused on the product, on what it is and what we were doing worked and all the other ones didn't. So Rotten Tomatoes is movie reviews and our design firm was just like web design for the entertainment industry. And those ones were crazy focused. And also that's when the internet was getting big, but all these other ones we're doing, we're just doing way too much, way too complicated, whatever. And that's like a recipe for death.

Yeah, for sure. With the, with the game, for example, um, was that also in the time when mobile games were still kind of new? Like what year was that? And what other insights do you have from trying to make a mobile game?

2013 to like 2015. 17, 18, something in that range. Um, it was no Zynga, all the big ones were out. It was actually competitive at the time. So we were making a multiplayer synchronous role-playing game. So like almost like a fighting game that's in real time. So you're actually fighting against someone else at the same time. And at the time we were trying to do it, there were very few games that were synchronous online, like Fortnite and stuff were not available on mobile yet. I think it was really just Hearthstone from Blizzard and Clash Royale by Supercell were like the only big synchronous multiplayer games. But, you know, it was already very developed. It was— if it was very early mobile, people are making like really simple Facebook games and eventually made really simple mobile games. That would have been an easier time. That's when the big growth was happening. When we came in, it was already very developed, very competitive, and we ultimately made our game. We did have people who got really into it. I mean, we had 10 folks who were super hardcore that spent over like $1,000 each on it. The top spender spent $2,000, which is, you know, but still compared to like what a whale would spend, let's say on a big mobile game. I mean, some games the top spenders spend like $2 million, which is a bit crazy.

Yeah, really.

We were much less aggressive as far as trying to monetize. We did a lot of stuff where we're like, no, we don't want to do it this way, we want to do it this way, and we try to be much more friendly. But end of the day, if the economics don't work, if you can't make enough money from the payers to help cover the cost of acquiring users, like, you're done. If the unit economics don't work, you're dead. You're dead in the water. And we couldn't make enough relative a week relative to what it costs to acquire a user.

Yeah. So, when you had these different, so you had these successes and then you had kind of, you know, some like not so successes, like maybe failures or however you want to frame that, did you have any like self-doubt or any concern or you thought, oh, we'll just move on, it's fine?

Um, I mean, it's not, it's not great if like you spent, let's say 5 years on a company, which I've done multiple times. And you raise this money, you convince all these people to join you and work with you for all that time, and then ultimately it doesn't go anywhere. Sure, you may have learned some mistakes, you might have learned a little bit about the industry and what to do, but that time, that money, you can't get back. And especially the time is what hurts the most. You know, 5 years is a lot of time in someone's life. And it feels bad where you failed your employees, your investors, your users. And a lot of these times, unfortunately, when it's 5 years, usually it's like 3 years in, you're low on funding and you kind of go into almost like a zombie mode. You're like, let's cut back on costs, let's cut our salary to zero for, you know, the founders. Sometimes put your own money in to try to make it work. But looking back, a lot of times if it's not working, like Rotten Tomatoes, it was working. So cutting was just to allow it to keep working and keep growing. But a lot of these other ones, it wasn't working and you're just dragging it out. And actually you should have just let it die, you know, 3 years in and just be like, okay, we're done. Return what money's left back to the investors and let everyone move to their next thing., you know, I think that would've been actually the better and more correct thing to have done. It was not easy, tons of doubt. Going into zombie mode for a company is like the worst thing. It's soul-killing because you have to constantly keep trying to figure out how to make it work or keep figuring out how to believe and making other people believe. And if you're the CEO, you're the battery that everyone has to charge from, right? But when it's not going well, it's really hard for yourself to stay charged and see the bright side of things and convince other people of the bright side of things. And it's really, really, really tiring and draining to be in that state. You know, it's easy when things are going up, right? At Rotten Tomatoes, when we're letting go of people, sure, that sucked. But at the same time, everyone who's there that was left could look and they could see traffic constantly going up, revenue constantly going up, it being written up, whatever. And that will keep you going. And the last thing I would say about that is one thing you see a lot of times when you get these really toxic cultures in Silicon Valley, I think it's because things are growing so fast that it kind of hides all the bad stuff because everyone will almost ignore it or not really worry about it. Because they can see everything's growing so fast. But once things slow down, then all those things become much more noticeable. And you think about culture, the most important thing culture-wise in some ways is having a company that grows versus a company that's flat or dying, right? Because you can have all the ping pong tables and parties in the world, but if you're— if your company is like flat or dying, like people are going to leave.

100%. And I think what you're also saying is like, you know, what you need is a good vibe and people who wanna work together. And a big way to get a good vibe is winning, right? And if like you're not winning, then it's like, unfortunately, you can have all, like you said, the ping pong, even like career development and motivational talks. Free lunches. Free lunches, purpose, right? Whatever, all the things that make culture, but ultimately, Actually, you're not going anywhere. And that just must have been really hard for you. I mean, when you walked away from each of these different, you know, companies that, that were not working or zombie companies or what, did you feel a sense of relief?

Usually by then I was pretty burned out, needed some time to just recharge. And then usually once I'm recharged, I'm like, oh yeah, I guess, I guess let's go do it again. You know, let's go do another one. But, but for me, the vast majority outside of the design firm, everything else has been consumer and consumer is hit or miss. So it's just, it's really hard to get a hit.

Yeah.

And you're going to fail much, much more often than you succeed, you know? But when you do have one, it's great, you know? And I would say Very likely I'll never have another Rotten Tomatoes again in my life. I mean, realistically, but at the same time, how many people in their lives can even have even one like that, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

And to make something that has affected so many people's lives over such a long time period and, and hopefully will, you know, last 100 years or 1,000 years, you know, totally, totally.

So long-lasting and so impactful for sure. And then you're working on something which seems to me not to be consumer these days. So tell us about Fanverse.

Yes. Yeah, so I'm basically building this like super curated community around geek fandom, right? So geek fandom—

And define, define, yeah, define geek fandom.

Comic books, video games, anime, manga, sci-fi, fantasy. And when I'm saying super curated community, I'm looking for the best builders, creators, and talent. So it's not about the fans who just love it. It's more about the people making it. And our idea is to get them all together. I mean, one, I love that space and I love community and I love making things. So I'm trying to get a whole bunch of people who are, who are those things, making people, making things in the space that I really love, getting them together with the idea that they can build that network, that they can collaborate, support each other. And we've already seen that, like folks working together on projects that they met, having these great friendships, having these connections that can help benefit their career or their company, investing into each other and all that's already been happening with our group. And our idea is just, yeah, like really get this amazing group of people together that can become your network, your collaborators, everything, you know, hopefully for the rest of your life.

Right. Totally makes sense. And how do you distinguish what you've already been doing? So I was fortunate enough to go to one of your Stone Soup gatherings where you bring people together and tell us about that. But then how do you distinguish kind of just your gatherings that you do from the company you're building?

Right. So the gatherings I did was almost by accident. When one thing, when I was trying to build a network, after realizing like I did such a bad job of doing that from Rotten Tomatoes was I created a group for notable tech founders and it would have folks like, you know, Max Levchin from PayPal and Steve Chen from YouTube and all the founders of Twitch and Guitar Hero and all these different great companies. And so we would meet once every 2, 3 months 20 people out of, what, 150, do a dinner and have one person speak, share their founder story. And it was, you know, people really liked it. We ended up doing one in LA for one of our founders who was there. Couldn't get enough people who were willing to fly down. I think 7 of us were going to fly down. And so I was like, let me invite other people who are interesting, who are already in LA, and which tended to be entertainment. And the second I invited entertainment people, both sides wanted to come. It blew up to 40 people, easily kind of gone to 100, but she was like, I can only host 40 comfortably in my house. And then from there, one of the attendees came up to me, this person, Janet Yang, who's now the president of the Motion Picture Academy. And she was like, I love what you're doing. If you do another one, I wanna co-host it with you. So I'm like, sure, let's try that. Did another dinner, 40 people. And she brought like 2 Olympic medalists. One of the writers of Crazy Rich Asians, which just had come out around that time, and like Steve from YouTube and co-founder of Guitar Hero, a bunch of them, they got a plane and literally came, flew down just for the dinner, just came to dinner and then left and went back up to the Bay Area. And so I was like, oh, there's some—

again, what a flex.

There's something there. And so we ended up doing more and everyone was constantly, we do one and everyone's like, when's the next one? When's the next one? So we're like, oh, I guess we'll do another one. I guess we'll do another one. The one you went to was number 11. I mean, we did 5 in 2019, 2020, you know, basically one per quarter. COVID stopped everything and eventually we brought it back last year, did 4 last year. We've done 2 so far this year. And for that, it's really kind of intersection tech and entertainment, I would say, especially because of what we're doing now. Most of the ones we've done since 2023 have focused around geek fandom and pop culture. So we had ones with, the last one was Nolan Bushnell who founded Atari and Chuck E. Cheese. We did Neal Stephenson, the sci-fi author. We've done one with Karen Gillan, you know, from Guardians of the Galaxy. And we're bringing together a really curious group of people around this intersection of like tech, venture, entertainment with a leaning towards pop culture and geek fandom. The company itself is separate. We're still figuring out how exactly it's gonna work, but we're looking at models like YPO, you know, Chief, like these membership-driven stuff companies, things like Soho House, you know, curated events like a TED or Upfront Summit or these other ones. You know, we've been looking at the really curated kind of smaller dinners. I went to one with like, it was Dialog. I went to the influencer dinner. Recently. And so we're trying to see all these things to think about how do you make this really great community. We know we want it to be very curated. We know we want it to be around geek fandom. But how do you make this community really bond and connect with each other in a strong and powerful way that they can really actively support each other, not just like, oh, they're just on there like a LinkedIn, but they're really, really there connecting and supporting each other. That's the thing that we're trying to solve again, to trying to find this like product-market fit. Because we're like, if we can get these great people on, they're really engaged, they're referring other people in, like that to us would be product-market fit. And we know something is really working. And I think we have a feeling of it, but we're still trying to really crystallize it.

I see. So you're trying to create like a YPO or like a Chief or like, what's the new one that Sam Parr is doing? Like the Hampton Group?

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah.

Yeah. And I see now, I understand that better. And it's so interesting that you just were talking about your, the genesis of Stone Soup. Like the genesis of Stone Soup is so organic. It's like the genesis, to your point about Rotten Tomatoes, like the feeling of like, oh, people seem to want this actually. People are flying in for chartering planes and flying in for this. And so you have this, the signals from the marketplace. Saying this is really, this really has legs. This has something there.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think the ones like that where it's like people are pulling it from you, they're like, we want this, we want this. And yeah, like you said, like we'd have people flying from Asia, from the East Coast, you know, every time we do it, we'll have 30 to 50 people flying from the area down, you know, all on their own dime. This, um, to us, they're like, oh, there is something interesting about this. We're just trying to like, really figure out exactly how, how to optimize that and, and really make it, make it stronger.

Totally. And that's why you're studying these, you know, these sort of well-known communities like TED, you said, and Dialogue, and our mutual friend John Levy, who does the Influencers Dinner, which is definitely a wonderful experience, like, for, for bonding and whatnot. What have you personally so far— I know you're earlier in your journey, but, like, what have you learned so far about how to build community and that kind of bonding?

One thing I would say is curation always helps. When it's like, you know, a typical thing, like a concert or you go to Comic-Con, it's just like anyone buy a ticket and it's not curated. That's fine from like a fan perspective. But I think if you really want to create a good community, it's incredibly important, a close, tight-knit community, to curate it properly. And if it's like the difference of, hey, I'm throwing an event, please buy a ticket, please buy a ticket. And like, no one wants to come versus like, hey, I'm doing this very curated thing and only these people are invited. And you have people are like, how can I get in? How do I get in? Like, it's like the whole mentality of the attendee changes when you do that. The other thing that we're thinking that I feel like I've, I've learned, I guess, around community is I see a lot of communities that are very broad. I feel like TED feels quite broad, even YPO, Chief, a lot of these ones. And when it's so broad, you know, like the way I like to think about it is like everyone's seen a TED Talk, probably everyone on the planet almost. But when you look, if you show them every TED Talk out there, maybe an average person would care about less than 10% of all the TED Talks. What, what I want to do is where it's much more narrow so that the people that are in it and the content and the people you meet, 90% of those people would be interesting to anyone else. Right. And it'd be almost like rare that someone in that group is not interesting to someone else in that group. Right. At the same time, I don't want it to be so focused and tight, um, where they can't really collaborate well. Uh, I like to say 100 pure actors can't make a movie, right? They need a director, they need a writer, they need all that kind of stuff. Um, and so if you want to make a movie, you need a lot of people in different positions. If you want to make a game, same kind of thing. Because we're trying to cross over and we bring in the tech people, but we also bring across industries of like gaming and whatever, you see a lot of this geek fandom crossover. Walking Dead was a comic book that became a TV show that also is a very popular game. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if there's like an anime or manga attached to it, or, you know what I mean? Like, and so you see all this stuff and it's already kind of in this sci-fi kind of setting. So they tend to cross over naturally. And our idea is that way it's wide enough that people are across industries, they can work together, they can collaborate, but it's not so broad that the vast majority of people, like you have no interest in meeting or connecting with.

Right, right. So you're trying to find that sweet spot of curation.

Yes.

And that, it sounds like that's what's, what you see is gonna be your sort of your special sauce for this community.

Yeah, I think that's the special sauce in terms of like the makeup of the community, but I think we have a lot to learn. We've already learned a lot just from doing the events ourselves, but we're actively, I think for the first time ever, really very actively trying to go and check out other communities and, and, and learn from them and, and potentially, you know, even support each other. Like if they have any cool people in their community that touch geek fandom, like please bring them over and, and vice versa, you know, stuff like that.

Yeah, totally. Besides the fact that it has to be tightly curated and become kind of like a little bit of a, of something that's creating buzz, what else have you learned? You said you've learned a lot so far. Like what else have you learned?

Generally, the more notable the people, the busier they are. So it's actually generally very hard to engage them. One thing that we did as a hack, I guess, to help get around that is if they speak or we don't do it, but like if they're honored, right? If you throw a gala and they're the ones winning the awards, they're going to show up most of the time. We don't do, we don't do galas or awards or anything like that.. But if you have them be the speaker, you're guaranteed pretty much that they're going to be there. And then once they're there, the, the speakers that you have will help define the attendees. The bigger the speaker, the more notable the attendees, right? And it all kind of builds on itself. So a lot of times it's about how to set it up properly to get the best speaker or the most relevant speaker you can, and then build around that and then properly curate around that.

Those are great insights. I think those are such important insights. And you were also, when we were, when I saw you in California just last week, something else you said that really struck me, you, when you were younger and you were building your first companies, you did it with your buddies from school and the people you were friends with. And that kind of continued for a long time. And you had one experience of founding with them. And now, you know, you're founding Fanverse, you're, you are much more established yourself. You're building it with much more established people. Can you kind of compare and contrast your experiences building companies with these two different groups?

Yeah, I mean, I would say like right now everyone I'm working with are very successful founders. Um, co-founders of Kabam, Twitch, and Crunchyroll, which are all basically like billion-dollar companies. I mean, when they sold, like, let's just say what their actual value is right now, right? And if anything, they're all more successful than me from an outcome standpoint and in many other ways of measuring. I think the difference is, I mean, we're all friends, we've known each other, we're doing something we're quite passionate about. But when we did companies right out of school, we didn't know what we were doing. I think personality-wise, whatever, naturally, I think folks were more lined up, whereas where it's like, okay, I'm the CEO, that people for the most part like, yeah, let's go. And we're kind of all moving in the same direction. I think what's a little bit tougher when you have a bunch of folks who are all very successful you know, one other person was— had been CEO before of their other company, that you end up with this like too many cooks in the kitchen problem a bit where everyone has a strong opinion. And we may be, because of our experiences, may not be as seeing the exact same direction as, as with my previous companies. And everyone is more firm about the direction they want to go. So That's been something that's— that didn't exist so much before where people— yeah, that is a— that's a challenge. I mean, there's a plus of having such great founders behind you, the network, the experience, the brand, everything. But I think the negative is very strong voices. It makes it harder to move quickly in any direction. There's a lot more like talking to get to a point that everyone kind of agrees on versus a situation where you're just like, let's go that way. And people are like, yeah, that sounds good.

Yeah, right. Totally. So what— how are you navigating that? Like, what tools are you using or techniques are you using?

A lot more communication, a lot more time around that, and You know, I think with what we're doing now, like we've been going for a year, I think we have, again, we're interesting spot, but spending a lot more time trying to get on the same page about exactly what we're trying to do and stuff. And with the hope that hopefully we can get to the point where we're like really, really super aligned and can then move forward much more quickly. Yeah, I think, yeah, I think if we can get aligned, we can move very, very fast because we have a lot of ability, network, resources, experience. It's just a matter of if they point the same direction. If they're pointing not the same direction, then you don't make any progress. And we're not like not aligned at all, but it's just, I think it's a little bit different than when you have folks who are much— back then we were much more junior. Much less experienced, but we could move more cohesively as a unit.

Right. Much less opinionated, probably. You said less experienced and less opinionated.

I think you're going to have that problem with any, like, kind of successful folks working together on something. But in any industry, a bunch of really successful actors trying to work together may be challenging unless they have a really strong director or producer kind of pushing the same thing. Or I don't know, look at like a a Sam Altman and Elon Musk fighting about Elon, uh, OpenAI or something, right?

Right. Totally.

You're gonna run into that problem anywhere you go. If you try and put like 3 or 4 really great chefs together and be like, go cook something, see what happens, you know?

That's so true. That is so true. Um, I'm just curious, are you guys openly discussing this, this topic?

Uh, uh, not, not so much. I mean, in public, I guess this is a little bit, but like, But we all know it, we all acknowledge it, and we're all trying to figure out how the best to do it. I mean, having great people work together like this, there's advantages and disadvantages, and I think it's gonna be true any people you work together, right? Like of this, of these types in any industry.

Yeah, totally, totally. Just a few more questions, Patrick. Have you ever experienced imposter syndrome or severe self-doubt?

I want to say I think everybody has it, honestly. Like everybody. Like you would think, oh, you could be the richest person in the world. I'm pretty sure he has it. Or, you know, actually most of those folks, right? Like how many of them are divorced now? How many of them go on their social media and watch them fight each other out? I mean, they're kind of still normal people. You could be very powerful world leaders. I think if you look, I'm pretty sure they all have it. Like, and I know for a fact our tech founder group, these are all really successful people. The vast majority, if not all of them, have it. I think everybody has it. I know for a fact a lot of actors. Oh yeah. You know, you see them on TV or whatever. I mean, partly because you have all these like tabloids and things constantly saying negative things about them. But they're very insecure, right? And you see all these, unfortunately, like really successful people who like take their lives.

Oh, I know.

Linkin Park and all these, like, was Anthony Bourdain and whatever. They all are human. They all deal with depression and loneliness and everything, same as anyone else. They bleed like everyone else, right? And I think they all have imposter syndrome. I 100%. All the time, all the time. You know, like I'll say very frankly, like sometimes it's sad to be like, have to keep talking about the thing I did 25 years ago in a way, right? I mean, I'm very proud of it too, but I know for a fact tech folks, entertainment people, whatever, they all have it and I can see it. Like just look at people's Twitters and whatever. Of these extremely— I'm not naming names— extremely rich and powerful business leaders, politicians, etc. They all have it.

Totally. I totally agree with you. What advice do you have for founders in dealing with imposter syndrome?

I think, again, it's staying charged is one thing, you know, one of the simplest things is make sure you get a good night's sleep. Right? Like, if you're feeling really depressed, blah blah blah, or stressed out, like, get like a good 9 hours, 10 hours, and you'll probably already feel a lot better. Get out, go for a walk, you know, a little exercise, a little diet. I'm not great on those things, but they all help. Be around friends and family, especially positive ones. If someone's really negative, someone's always talking talking down to you or making you feel bad, cut them out of your life. I mean, if they're family, spend less time with them versus other folks. Be around people who are positive and supportive, makes a giant difference. Try and make improvements in your life. If you're like, whatever it is, I'm not in shape or I'm too skinny or I'm too fat or whatever, take, you know, it's like the Power Habit or one of those things is like start a new habit and like make a little bit like go walk 10 steps today or go walk whatever and make a little bit of improvement in something, but keep doing it. And over time it becomes huge, right? And, you know, it's just like in the old days, I'd be stressed about like, oh, I have a research paper due or I have a test. The best way to be less stressed about your test is to open the book and start studying. And like 20 minutes of studying, you'll feel a million times better than that 20 minutes of not doing anything and just being stressed that you have that test coming, right? And so just the act of doing makes a big difference. All of these things I think can help a lot, but you have to actually want to do it. And it's very easy for people to get stuck in, trapped in their depression or their sadness or their imposter syndrome or whatever, and not being able to do that, not getting the sleep, not eating well, not exercising, not making any steps to improve anything, not being around friends and family. And they hide away. And it just gets worse and worse and worse. And then you have to break that cycle.

Totally. So wise. And you're also teaching yourself self-efficacy when you do those things. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Patrick, what do you wish you had known earlier on your journey?

I brought them up before, focus, network. I think for any focus, actually both of those, are good for anything you do in your life, right? Focus doesn't just have to be for a company. It can be for a person in their career. You look at most influencers, let's say, who've gotten popular, they're usually doing something around a really weird, specific topic like, oh, I'm the dad that repairs things or whatever. Like really? Or I'm the lawyer person that can give you advice on how to save money on airplane trips that are delayed. Like really, really specific things. But generally, the more focused you are on anything in your life, the better you'll be. You only have so much time and money and whatever in the day. You can put it against a lot of things or you can put it against like one thing. And the people who— I think it was like Bruce Lee, they said like he doesn't fear the man that can do like, what, 10,000 different kicks. He fears the person who can do one kick that he's practiced 10,000 times. Right. And I think that— so focus is really important and network, same thing. In your entire life, like whatever you do, network is important for your career, for your company, or personally knowing a lot of people. I think it just makes life more meaningful, right, to have all those things. So focus what you do, do one thing, network, know lots of people and know them well. Like they're opposite in that way, But I feel like that combination is a winning combination for anyone, anywhere, at any time in their life.

I love it. It's so good. You may— this is my last question, but you may have already answered it, but you tell me, what advice do you have for other founders as they embark on their journey to grow into leaders?

And I would say those two things, focus, network. I would also say for founders to really know if they're founders or not. Because not everyone is. People like the idea of doing a company, but are they willing to grit it out, like to go in and take all these nos? Like, I like to say founders, the successful ones, need to have irrational confidence, this belief in themselves based on nothing, right? Rotten Tomatoes, we weren't movie people. Airbnb, Airbnb were not hotel people. Uber, they weren't taxi people. But the way they go in and they disrupt things is they don't, they can think outside the box because they never had the box, right? But to do that, you have to have this like irrational confidence in yourself and what you're doing to be able to push forward. Because everyone's like, you don't know what you're doing, you don't know what you're doing. But actually that's a strength. But you have to realize that that's a strength. I would say a bad entrepreneur, They get all these nos and, you know, 98% of anyone you talk to about anything, employee, potential employee, investor, a client is gonna give you a no. They get the nos and they're like, yeah, you're right. And then they give up. A good one will push through. A great one may convert some nos to yeses, right? That's like a Steve Jobs, like the reality distortion field, right? And I would say when I meet a lot of, you know, I would speak and help mentor at like at Berkeley and other colleges and you'll have these students and they'll come up to you and they're like, I want to start a company. I'm thinking about starting a company, but I think I want to go and work for a couple of years first, get that experience and then start a company. And I'm like, honestly, you're not an entrepreneur. You're not a founder. Like you're telling me right now you're too conservative to go out and just take that risk where you don't have the experience to go out and do it. Like, look at I mean, we left school early to kind of do Rotten Tomatoes and these companies and Mark Zuckerberg or the Yahoo people, the Google people, whatever. How many of them started right out of school? Like they basically stopped whatever undergrad or PhD program and went to go do it. They can't wait. But the people who are like, once they get into a normal job, I mean, they're going to have bonuses, they're going to have promotions and they're going to get stuck there. I mean, they're designed to try to keep them in there. And be very— it's very, very hard to leave once you get in there. And they, they're saying, I want this comfort, the safety of, of being in a corporate job, of having these benefits and all these things that I won't have from a startup. So I would say that's my advice besides focus and network is really ask yourself, are you, are you someone who has the DNA of, of being a founder? And I think you've interviewed so many founders and talked to so many of them. I think you probably— I haven't seen all those, but I'm pretty sure you would see that common thread of this like confidence in themselves and this belief in themselves that I think you have to do if you're gonna go on any kind of these creative paths, including founders.

Totally. I so agree with you, Patrick. So much wisdom. Thank you so much. This is such a great conversation. I really, really enjoyed it, and I know that people will get a lot out of it.

Yeah, no, thanks so much for having me. Um, yeah, I know it's, it was so great meeting you last week and I would love to stay in touch and continue, uh, more conversations in the future.

Absolutely. Thanks for listening to From Startup to Grownup. If you like what you heard, give it a review on Apple Podcasts so other people can find it. And if you know of a founder or someone else who is meant to be on this podcast, drop me a line through my website, alisacohn.com.