Mike Steib - Leading XO Group to a $933M Exit and Becoming CEO of Artsy

Welcome back to the Casey Adams Show. Today we are joined by Mike Stibe, the CEO of Artsy. Mike, thanks so much for coming on the show today.

What's up, Casey? What's up, listeners? How's everybody?

Dude, I'm doing good over here, and I hope the listeners are doing well as well. But really appreciate you taking the time today. I know, first off, huge fan of your work and excited to dive into your story. And I think when I hopped on, I saw your background, and I see the beautiful arts and the craftsmanship that you have in the home. Let's talk about Artsy. This company, the world's largest marketplace for fine art. How long has it been that you've a, personally loved art, fine art, and then B, what's the story of how you led to being CEO?

So I've personally loved art like most people, since I was a child. We're actually. We come home from preschool and hang our art on the refrigerator. It's something that's. It's something that's inside of us as human beings very naturally, and it's something that comes out our entire lives. And people, you know, more people go to museums every year than sporting events and concerts. It's a natural human activity that everyone loves. And I was. But I was drawn to Artsy because despite that, the world of art collecting is small and insular and sort of feels inaccessible to lots and lots of people, even though it's. I mean, I have to tell you, like, it's the most fun thing in the world you can do. It's often an amazing investment and all that stuff. But I was one of those people who had the. The love of art and the means to be an art collector, but wasn't an art collector because I just wasn't on the. I didn't feel like I was on the inside of the tent. And when you see a business like that or an industry like that or a space like that, where the information is not transparent, where the access is limited, where the suppliers are fragmented, this is what the Internet was invented for, to aggregate, to bring transparency, to help with discovery. And I'd had some marketplace experiences earlier in my career that went real well. And so when this opportunity presented itself, I was really excited.

I love that. So where do you spend your time when it comes to your day nowadays as CEO of rt? You know, I'm always so fascinated by the CEO approach of, you know, where you spend your time, what's important to you? Obviously, everyone has their. Their differences of approach, but I'm Curious to know, where do you spend your time day to day?

You know, Casey is probably, I mean, first I'm like obligated to say, like, I get up at 5 in the morning and I meditate and then I lay in a compression chamber and do a cold. I, I don't. This is like the new fetish is what everyone who has had some success does with their life time before the sun comes up. Yeah.

Yeah.

Like my day is, My days are pretty simple. There's. I have three, broadly speaking, sort of three sets of things that have to happen in my life. One is the personal stuff. And that is where I try to get enough sleep and exercise and spend good quality time with my wife Kemp and our kids and you know, like, invest in, invest in the, you know, know, invest in the home front. That's, you know, it's the most important part to me. The second is professionally with artsy, we've, we've worked real hard to build infrastructure around the company because building a marketplace, managing a team and three different time zones and countries and so on is complex. We've tried to create simplicity with our operating system. So like, I could tell you very precisely when I'm reviewing each of the elements of the product roadmap and each of the subsegments of our budget and so on, like down to the hour by the day from here till the end of the year, because we try to put all that kind of. So the second thing I spend a lot of my time with is that infrastructure for running the company. But the third is, you know, as the, as the CEO, the job is essentially developing people and identifying areas that are stuck or maybe moving in the wrong direction as, like, as early as possible. So the third thing I spend a lot of my time on is digging in. Sometimes digging in means using our product and making notes and dropping them into the bug channel. And sometimes that digging in is like looking at how the P and L has come together over the last two months and where are we seeing, you know, revenue ticking up and ticking down and what might be the causes. But if, if you would. It's a, it's an oversimplification, but it's. It, it is two standard areas of my life, like getting up at the same time, going to the gym at the same time, walking my daughter to school at the same time, a set of operating same time things at work. And then the third area is trying to deploy my, my hours really intensely into the areas that might be stuck or people who need support and development and so on.

I love that, you know, we'll definitely talk more about culture and team building, but I want to take a step back. So you were the CEO of a publicly traded company, but the youngest, one of the youngest CEOs, public trading company, XO Group. Talk to me about that journey and where that began for you. And then I know you guys had an incredible exit in 2018. What was that journey like for you and what led to you not only being the youngest founder or one of the youngest CEOs, but talk to me about the experience and the lessons learned through that course of time in your life.

Maybe the, the, you know, the longer arc is I had developed a sense in my twenties for what I really enjoyed doing at work and the kind of impact I wanted to have. And I really am drawn to and enjoy and thrive in leadership situations. And I was, I was hoping to lead a, lead a company someday and one that does nice things for people. Like, I don't want to, I don't want to lead a company that sells soda or cigarettes or tries to get you to play Casual games 8 hours a day like I wanted to do. You know, I was, I, I, I, I had a, I had hoped and I had worked toward getting to a place where I could do something that touches consumers or small businesses that uses technology to make a part of your life better. And then, you know, I, I did not know that I was going to plan 10 million weddings. So the one that, that came up, I was, I'd been working at Google for five. I was an executive in the the US team at Google for like five years. And I had an E commerce startup that, it didn't go great. And then this, this opportunity for the knock came along.

Yeah.

And at a high level. First of all, it was like I, you know, because I wanted to be a CEO and a public company CEO and someone called with one. And so like, my first instinct was cool, because that's what I was hoping to do.

Yeah.

But secondly, it's this, it is this area where if you think about the human problem you're in, you just got engaged recently, right?

I did all right, in July. So I'm excited to dive into all this.

Congratulations to you.

Thank you.

You look too wide. Here's the thing. You are not an event planner. You do not likely. You do not personally know anyone who bakes wedding cakes or any calligraphers or any wedding bands, et cetera. And you now, like, you've got, I don't know, 12 months or six months or something. 2. If you're the average person in America, deploy the after tax income of your last 12 months salary to one event where everyone you know and love will come together for one of only two times in your life. The second one is when you pass away and if you get anything wrong, it'll be photographed, memorized, memorialized forever and you'll never forgive yourself. It's so stressful. Oh my God. And I thought about the opportunity at this company, the Knot, to build software and build a marketplace and build a company around the idea of helping people who should just be focused on being in love and being happy solve this really stressful problem, which is how do you get to that moment of making the wedding happen? So I don't know that thing. It came my way through a number of personal contacts and I was so pumped for it and we spent five years on it. It was a blast.

It's so funny because prior to this interview, my now fiance, I've heard about the Knot for a while and then you get engaged and now we're talking about wedding planning and then even preparing for this interview. Understanding the problem that you guys were solving is so massive. And it really hits that emotional cord of, as you said, one of the most important days of your lives. And it's hard to pinpoint another business that has the opportunity to solve for problems on a day that's so important to you and the people that you love. So when you think about that as the CEO of the not when you first started working inside the organization, how did that make you feel? And talk to me about the process and the changes within the company and more about the team, the culture, because I think a company like the Knot, as you said, right, you didn't want to just be a part of the company that's playing leisure games for eight hours or tobacco, alcohol, whatever it may be. What was the feeling as CEO that you brought in in terms of your leadership style for a company like the Knot?

So, Casey, the Knot was a waste of a unique situation the company had gone public in like the the Web 1.0 boom of the sort of late 90s, early 2000s. And it was a real pioneer in that it took paper magazines to the Internet in a really valuable niche, weddings in particular. And the company was winning for years by creating content and selling online ads against it. And then as the Internet evolved and Google made advertising data driven and performance driven and Facebook now meta convinced billions of people to create content for free and then use their personal information to sell them as an audience to advertisers. It took what had been a really healthy online advertising business and made it unsustainable for anyone who's in the business of making content. And so the knots, you know, the revenue headwinds were significant. The growth outlook was really challenged because of this situation. So we came in with the team that I put together, and I came in with a thesis that we could take what the knot had built as its real strength, which was its brand and its content, and latch it onto a different business model. And the different business model would be instead of just giving you an article that says, should you pick a band or a DJ for your wedding? You know, with an advertisement at the top for Disney luxury cruises or something, we would give you an article that says, should you have a band or a DJ for your wedding? And then we would connect you to bands and DJs in your local market that had good reviews from other couples. And, you know, we publish the pricing and make it easy for you to book an appointment or contact them, et cetera. That was the idea is we would effectively build a marketplace with all this content at the top of that marketplace's funnel.

Love that. No, absolutely. What were some of the challenges for that business when you were transitioning the business models that you had to, as CEO, really deal with and learn from and push through?

Well, the. So in a content business, the company had built a wonderful team of people who are experts in content and advertising. And we needed it then, but we needed a wonderful team with expertise in technology marketplaces, software. And so it's not always going to be the same people and it's not always going to be the same culture. I'd actually worked in media earlier in my career and technology later, and there is nothing. There's not a single thing that I experienced in common in working in television at NBCUniversal and in technology at Google. Like to give you an example, when you work at, like a big media company, people judge how senior you are based on how many. How many ceiling tiles there are in your office. And the office door closes and locks from the inside. And then I went to Google and they gave me a rolling chair and a rolling file, like a file desk for your pens and your and stuff. And the chair and the file desk would roll to different places all the time. And if you were in anything with a door, you were in there with like six or eight people. And I remember I got there and I was like, have I been demoted? What happened? But actually, just culturally, technology companies are really different, they're more egalitarian, they're based on transparency and openness and non hierarchical. And I had to make that, I had to make that transition. So the knot was a media company that needed to become a technology company. And over the course of the five years that required us to build a new leadership team. Not 100% new like some people made that transition well, but brought in a lot of outside talent. It required us to do a refresh of values and mission and culture around which people could, could rally and around which we built our performance management systems and so on. Required us to rebuild the technology stack from the studs up. We basically threw out every line of code that had been written for 16 years in order to rebuild on this new, you know, to rebuild this new vision. And we had to change the business model. We had been in the business of generating page views and selling them to advertisers and now we were in the business of taking people from page views to downloading our software, to connecting them to vendors, to getting paid by the vendors because we connected them with the audience. And so it was like, in a way it was like, you know, it was a startup on top of a public company. But we had to, we had to change it, we had to change it all.

Now that's, it's so great hearing that perspective, you know, when talking about pivots in companies. I've had a lot of early stage founders on the shows and pivots are the name of the game. Right. Things aren't working, you change, but it's kind of flipping the script where you're taking a company that's known for something that's been doing it for so long and you're pivoting from the top down versus just from the bottom up. Right. And I want to talk about pivots in personal life as well. Right. I went through an acquisition about a year ago. Now I had a tech startup called mediakits.com and we sold to a media company up in Toronto called Viral Nation and was there for six months. And I always find it fascinating when founders either go through acquisitions or make or CEOs make these changes in their careers where that time between leaving and then starting something new, where it feels, at least for me, where the world is yours. There's so many different ways you can go with your time and effort and expertise. For you, what led to the transition from the not to artsy and what were some personal just questions that you asked yourself to make that jump and commit to now being CEO? Of rt.

You know, I had, you know, I have this. I have a podcast just launched, too.

I was listening to it. Tommy Hilfiger, episode one.

I'm glad you checked it out.

Love that.

The idea of it. It's called Office Hours. It's a little bit like what you do here in that you. You get somebody who usually, you know, has all these secrets from their career and they open up the doors and they answer your questions about it.

I want to say that I love the call, the people sending in questions. It was really cool, the concept in the first episode.

Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. But I was the plug aside, the point. One of the episodes we haven't rolled out yet is someone who runs a big company who was a founder of something very important early in his career, like 30 years ago or so. And the conversation we had was after he did that, I was like, he had a big win early. And what was the lesson? He said, well, now I realize I could do whatever I wanted. And so I did. And he went on to describe all these cool things that he had done from the companies he went to run or start to becoming a pilot and being an art collector and just all this cool stuff. And then he was asking me about it, and I said this. After we sold the Knot, I felt like I had earned this real credibility. Like, I had never had my phone ringing so much. And people like, do you want to do this? Do you want to do this? You know, it just takes. I think it just takes. It takes one nice win like that. And with that in mind, it's like, all right, we're going to do. We're going to do something that is fun and special and impactful, and it's going to be a job I love and what I did and what I recommend anyone who's in that moment of transition is doing. Don't, like, listen to every inbound offer and consider it. Make a list of your filters and only consider the things like the way you would plan a trip on Airbnb or TripAdvisor. You don't go on there and say, I don't know, where should I go? You're like, I want to go to France. I want to go on these dates. I want to spend this much money. And when you do that, a lot of jobs that sound interesting don't make it through your filters. And a lot of people find themselves in second or third round interviews because they were lonely, because they were afraid no one was going to call because they don't want to. Like Miss something, and then you start to feel like you. Like you owe somebody something in this process. So I laid out the filters. And then again, life is what happens when you're making other plans. A buddy of mine, Carter Cleveland, who started Artsy, who I'd had, like, a couple of dinners with, but not in a business context, called. He was like, you sold your company. Do you want to run Artsy? And I was like, what are you doing for dinner? And so, you know, and hit my filters really nicely. It was. It was software in a marketplace that helps small businesses and consumers. It was here in New York, which is where, you know, where my. Where my life is. It was. And. And that was before Zoom, too, like, effectively. So, you know, you really were geographically constrained.

And.

And I, like, it felt like it did something nice for the world. And I like the board, and I like the situation. So, yeah, great.

I love that. What was the biggest lesson for you individually or also from a business perspective from that acquisition?

You know, earlier in my time, earlier on at at xo, we had a competitor. The Knot was owned by a company called xo. So if you hear me refer to exo, that's why we had missed an acquisition. It was an international company that, like, I didn't even really know about, and a smaller competitor of ours bought it. And I was like, how did I not get a phone call on this? How did I miss this? And it was a good lesson early on, which is, you're not always going to get the call. You have to be in. You have to be in the mix. And so we made a list of everything in the space that was interesting. And we assigned somebody from the leadership team to everything. And I said, if your name is next to this thing, you're not allowed to miss it. I want you to have a relationship. I want you to look for partnership opportunities. If they ever want to sell the company, I want to know first. Just be out there, be plugged in. And the most important one was our competitor who had bought that other company. And the CEO's name is Tim. He and I became buddies. We'd have dinner and, like, a bottle of wine, I don't know, every six months or something. And we had this running, like, is a running joke. I'd be like, hey, do you want to sell me your company? He's like, do you want to sell me yours? Like, you know, and the vibe was, we both knew it was matter of time before these companies should come together because they were the two largest in the space. But, you know, at the end of the day, you're also competing with Google and Facebook, and you're not that big when you're competing with Google and Facebook. So it felt like that would eventually happen. And we went through a cycle where we had tried to acquire them and it didn't click. And then it's like, all right, you know, the business was fine. You don't always. You don't have to do M and A mergers and acquisitions to grow your business. There's a lot of ways to do it. Our business transformation was going great. The business was growing like crazy. We had. Profit margins were significant and expanding. The stock was up like 4x, like, really good. Things were happening. And then that competitor got bought by private equity. And I was like, oh, no. Like, I want. Come on. That was my deal, and I've been staying so plugged in. How did this happen to me? How did I miss it? They called me the next day. They're like, the private equity guys want to talk to you too. I was like, ah, that's. That's the trick. And these guys, their credit. They saw two companies, mine and his, who were trying to come together, and we couldn't pull it off. Right. Why not? Because you don't align on price or there's ego or whatever. But at the end of the day, the combination would be so valuable. And my friend and I kept like, you know, you kept trying to keep too much of the pie for yourself. We couldn't get the deal done. So a private equity firm goes, borrows the money from a bank, buys both companies, puts them together, get, you know, we got value, they got value, but the PE guys got some value, too.

Y.

And that was. And that's where it landed. I don't know what was the lesson. The lesson, certainly, to be plugged in, like, you don't really. You don't have competitors. You have other people who operate in the space who are potential collaborators and friends longer term. So be plugged in with the other people in your space. And, you know, and the second is if you're working really hard, and that's always a secondary thing, because if you're working really hard and building a great business, something's going to pop, something's going to come your way. And we didn't know we got an offer with the company. We didn't have to sell it, but it was a great price. After we had already done a really nice job with the company. It was a huge moment for our employees and our investors. And I don't know Kasey had planned 10 million weddings. Is that enough? I thought it was enough.

I think that's more than enough.

Maybe I can some paintings now.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I'm not here to, you know, help you plan mine, but we can talk about that. For sure. For sure. No, that's incredible to hear, too. Like that story of the private equity play and how that all works out in the end. I want to talk about your book, the career manifesto, and I want to take us back to the early days of your career, Mike, when you were in school growing up. What were some of your career goals or the game plan that you had early in your career? And how did that change over time to your first job?

Well, so, Casey, earlier in life, I didn't. I didn't, like, live in New York City or Silicon Valley. I didn't. I didn't know what was out there. And I felt like everyone I knew, you asked everybody in, like, seventh grade, but they wanted to do. They either said be a school teacher or be president of the US because those are like kind of the two jobs we've been exposed to. So at the time, I would have told you president of the U.S. so that would, like, that's where I would have started. I didn't want to be a school teacher.

Nope.

When I went to college, I started to get exposed in a more significant way to consulting and banking and jobs and marketing and this and that. And that opened my eyes to the kind of career one could have in business. And I thought maybe I wanted to get a law degree or whatever. But I was sort of. I was working my way around, and I just took early on the best sort of branded job I could find. There's this. I read a good book. Jim Citron, who's the writer, runs the CEO practice at Spencer Stewart. His. He's had a bunch of books, but the one I read when I, like that age was called the Five Patterns of an Extraordinary Career. And it said, step one, get like a. Get a blue chip experience so that people know you're credible. Go to a good college and get a blue chip experience. So I took a job at McKinsey & Company, which at the time was like the number one place every MBA wanted to work. So I said, okay. I went to. I hated this job. It was just like. It just was not for me. I'm a doer. I'm not an advisor. I'm a. Like, I want to be in it. I don't want to be making PowerPoints about what it'd be like to be in it. So it just didn't click for me. It wasn't McKinsey's fault. I had a couple other jobs where I was sort of building out my skill set and learning. I worked in corporate development and media as part of a startup and I started to develop this sense for what I wanted to do. And I referenced it earlier and it was I want to be a CEO. And it changed how I started to think about the actions I took in my career. And instead of just taking the next interesting job or the job that seems more senior, it became more about how do I build out the skill sets that I need to be capable of that gig so that when the opportunity presents itself someday, I'm the person for it and I will live up to the responsibility if I get that job. And you mentioned the book. The book basically says that it's like chapter one, figure out your purpose, what impact do you want to have? Chapter two, what do you like to do? What's fun? Don't work in something that makes you. Don't work in sales if sales makes you miserable. Chapter three, how to sort of make a plan for what to go after. Chapter four, how to build out those experiences and on and on. We could get into it more if you want here, but that was the high, that was the high level idea. The Career Manifesto gives you exercises you can do to kind of build out that impact, happiness and then plan of attack that I was able to develop in my late 20s that got me some really good fun opportunities I've been real grateful for.

That's incredible. Would love to dive deeper and more so here. What inspired you to write the book in the first place?

Well, so the official story is I had written I held office hours at Google and for my team, I had a team of like, I don't know, a hundred people when I started doing office hours. And the idea was you would come with like a problem you were working on at work. I can't close this account or can't figure out this product feature. And we would talk about it and I'd help solve it. And every time someone came, they said, I can't figure out how to get promoted. I haven't been promoted. It was every office hours I want to be promoted. And then people started coming who didn't even work for me. And I started having this conversation, the Career Manifesto conversation, not realizing it was the Career Manifesto conversation. I remember and I referenced this in the book. A colleague and now then, and now friend of mine came and he just wasn't happy at work at all. And I was like, well, aren't you happy? And he's like, well, I haven't been promoted. And I said, well, you know, you weren't pulling all nighters at Princeton so you could be promoted to senior account executive. That's not your life's purpose. What do you. What's your life's purpose? We started getting into it and he was like, oh, I want to make movies. And I was like, what are you doing here? We don't make movies.

Seriously.

And all these reasons not to make movies, but. And not because of our conversation, but it's just illustrative. Two years later, I was in LA on the set watching him make a movie.

Wow.

And it was the most one, like, and if that's the way life is supposed to go. But when you're in a company, you get trapped in this situation, you're on this ladder, and they tell you, first it's step one, then it's step two, then it's step three. And at every point you get little prizes, you get more money, you get more prestige, and you can lose sight of what you really want to do, what you were put on the earth to do. And I found that I was able to have discussions like that with people that some of them found really helpful. And then I wrote a blog post about it, and then I, like, shared it with some friends. And according to my Google Analytics, it was read 10,000 times from like India to Brazil to China to the US and it was really. I felt like I had hit a nerve and I was like, you know, so I might as well turn it into a book. That's the official story. The unofficial story is I always wanted to write a book because books are important and I want to be important and I like being the center of attention. So I also had planned to write a book, but this is how I figured out what the book would be.

Got it. I love that. Do you have any books now or in your early career that inspired you that you read that?

Really?

More so hit a nerve with you early on.

I'll send you a link for the show notes. All right. It's. I think I have a bitly link. It's like bitly slash Mike Dash books. And there's 200 books on there categorized by subject by how much I'd rate it, etc. And. And so when, when somebody tells me they're like, hey, I want to. I want a good book, I'm like, there's, you know, there's unlimited books. What. What are you trying to solve? And so it's like, you know, I'm trying to get better at sales. I have the 10 books that changed my life, whether it's influenced by Robert Cialdini or Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman or the the Greatest Salesman in the World by Augmentino. There's, like, there's a. For me, there's a canon around each of these topics. And so I'm able. I share the full list with folks because if you're. If you're going down the path of I want to be a better marketer, it's a different set of books to read than I want to be a better operator than, etc. So, yeah, and a big reason to write a book is because we. We take so much from people who put in that time and put in that love to teach us that. I think. I really do think we have a responsibility to teach others. And so. And I hear from people all the time that the book helped. And I feel. I feel a lot of gratitude about that.

That's great. No, I appreciate that. And I'll definitely. Once I get that link, I'll make sure to link it in the description for all the listeners as well. I want to dive into. Well, first, I wanted to say, so my fiance, in the spirit of marriage and books, she is publishing a book right now. It's actually available for preorder, comes out in October. And I've seen the process that she's gone through as an author to cultivate her book. It's called Happiness Habitat. All the ways to optimize your opportunity zone. And being next to her over the years and seeing her go through that process, I've learned so much. And just on the topic of the book, what were some of the challenges and experiences that you went through when writing the book that you would want earlier? I would say aspiring authors to know. Maybe these are CEOs that want to share their knowledge in a book format, publishing recommendations or just personal theory of, you know, what would you do differently? Would love to hear your thoughts on that as it's so prevalent in my life, just from the association of it.

Yeah. Kasey, what's your fiance's name?

Jacqueline.

And has she written it or. She's in the process of writing it.

It is written. It's actually. It's available on Amazon right now.

That's amazing. Did she enjoy it? Writing it?

Loved it. Well, yeah, loved it. And then, you know, the work gets real and the editing and all that.

Yeah. So I met. I met Michael Lewis one time and he said. And he probably hasn't only said this to me, but he said, no, most people don't really want to write a book. They want to have written a book. But you're only like. His point being, you're only going to write something good if you actually want to do it, if you enjoy doing it. And what I found is I did. I enjoyed writing. Like, I even noticed when I send the, like, Monday email to my team with, you know, what I'm excited about for the week and my observations on the business. I enjoy communicating through the written word. So I had a sense that I would enjoy writing the book. I also was running a public company and helping raise two small kids. And so it's not like I was rich in time. And I did this exercise where I sort of started outline in my head and I just wrote a couple of pages and I timed myself and to write a couple of pages and go back and edit it. It was basically. It was basically an hour a page. Yeah. And I said, okay, so I need. I need a book. The Average book's about 350 pages, so I need about 350 hours, which means I need an. I need an. I needed. What did it come out to? 4. It was like three hours a week for like two years of four hours a week for two years, say, all right, so where am I going to find. Where am I going to find that time? And I came to agreement at home that on Sunday mornings, get up at 6 and I would go up to our house on the weekends has this like, lofted area up top. This kind of is basically an attic, converted attic. And I would sit up there and write for three hours. And I catch one more hour during the week. And it was often like subway time. I just do some notes. And then over two years, the book I've written. And so. And because I had found the time that was separate from the rest of my life. So I didn't feel like everything. It wasn't always competing. It wasn't like I could be with my kids or I could write the book. I could do my work. This was my hobby. You know what? Like, most people play golf and they're gone for more than four hours playing golf. I'm not sure I was going to write the book. And I enjoyed doing it. And because I was doing it, you know, a lot of people write the book after they've had the. The success or the career. Right. I mean, yeah, you know, Jack Welch wasn't writing his book while he's writing, running GE retires and then he starts writing books because he has no time. The problem is there's distance between the action and the lessons. And when you start to write it down, it's actually really hard for senior people to remember what it was like not to be senior people. I was writing the book while I was making weekly rookie errors running, running a company and I was able to see it real time. And so then you're able to bring the lesson to a sharper point with examples. And so I don't know, my advice, if somebody wants to write a book, count up the hours it's going to take. Find the hours and just give yourself that time over the course of a year or two or three, whatever it is, to write it. And then, you know, secondly, make it about something that you are knowledgeable and interested in and look for those examples throughout your life as it's happening. And my advice is do it while you're learning rather than later when you think you're an expert and you're looking back on it because you tell yourself some real BS stories once you've had success about how you're successful, how you got there right. It's like real life is messy and you don't want to miss the messy parts when you're doing some like doing nonfiction or self help or what have you.

Yeah, love that. Yeah, that's great feedback. Appreciate the context there when it comes to your journey as, as an entrepreneur. I know we were talking about the whoop prior to the podcast. I'm someone that over the past two years, I've always been an athlete growing up, played hockey for 10 years, played football. That's actually how I got into entrepreneurship. Is this neck brace trophy back here if you're watching? Got injured sophomore year of high school, was in a neck brace for six months, almost paralyzed, depressed. And it was just that point in my life where I had to redefine who I am, find that new identity. And over the years of recovering and then getting an entrepreneurship, after having that six month period where I just dove into the whole world of self development and personal growth and then business, marketing, entrepreneurship, fell in love with this whole new world. But fast forward to about two years ago, I found that happen in the context of running and just really prioritizing health, sleep. As someone that was raising money from my first tech startup and hiring, I said okay, how can I just stay aligned and on center and working out and fitness was such a high priority for me. Last year I ran my first marathon, and I've now committed to doing one a year for the next 20 years. That's the goal. But for you. And we were again chiming on the whoop before. How has health played a role in your life as CEO running a publicly traded company? How do you balance that and how do you prioritize that during your time running companies? And where do you see some CEOs go wrong if you may have seen that before? Where people don't prioritize their health and how it may get in the way and work and more so come back to bite them later.

I'm. I've personally found, you know, we're all ambitious and work a ton of hours, and it always feels like you're competing with those extra hours, right? You can put in 60 hours at work and take care of yourself. You can put in 70 hours of work and, like, get a lot more done. And, you know, we, we have these to do lists that. Mine's never been empty. You're just always like, checking off four items and adding five. And so it just, it just doesn't feel like there's enough time. But one of the things that I've come to appreciate, especially once you get past the level of individual contributor, once you're a manager, once you're leading teams, you're being paid, you're creating value to a large degree by your judgment and by your, I don't know, I'm missing the right word for it, but the energy you bring to the organization, the impact that you have on culture and velocity and the judgment calls that you make, and what I found, having been on both sides of it, is when you are tired and when you feel unhealthy, your judgment is worse, you are more prone to stress, and you don't treat people as well, and you don't respond to stressful situations in the way that you want to, or that would make you proud of yourself as a leader. And so redeploying hours from doing the 70th or the 75th hour of work every week to what for me is just a firm commitment of sleep 8 hours and work out an hour every day, it helps you build resilience against what's a very stressful job in life that you signed up for. But if you, like, you got your sleep and you went for a good run this morning, I don't know what you did, leg day, whatever your thing is. And then you get in there and you deal with the stress. And science has proven it you handle stress, you are more resilient, you're better at the work, you make better calls when you take care of yourself. So even if you're not doing it for you, do it for your teammates. I had a colleague years ago who would run in the morning and I always wanted to meet with him after the run because it was when he was in a good mood.

That's great. Yeah.

And look at it's high roi. There's something, I think it's like nine. For every one hour you exercise, you live another nine hours, statistically speaking. So you're like, you're getting paid, you're getting paid back for that investment. And I encourage people to do it.

I love that when I'm just all things health data. I've been wearing the OURA ring for a while. I have the eight sleep mattress now. Getting the whoop to try out that as well. When did that come into your life? As someone that obviously gets sleep works out, but how do you think about health data and as someone that is an entrepreneur and understands tech, what's your viewpoint on that and is it important to you? How do you think about it and more so why do you wear it and what's led to it?

Yes. So we're taking sponsors for my new podcast. So my answer is flexible.

I think you're having for sure, for sure.

No, let them. What I have found is there's look, this is very similar to business. There are an unlimited and overwhelming number of data points and there are like three that matter. And I can tell you what I like about. You mentioned the whoop. What I like about it is it's got two rings on it. One ring says did you recover? And one ring says did you exhaust yourself by exercise? If I fill the two rings, I feel great. So what was my resting heart rate at 8 o' clock this morning? I don't care. Just like, has your pulse changed? What's your skin temperature? Did you get this many steps today versus yesterday? Basically. Did you get a good night's sleep and did you exercise? If you do that at a high level consistently, you are going to be in the top 1% of adults in terms of health and fitness. Now, if you're really into it and you're trying to get your marathon time under three hours and then look like. Then the little extra things like when you do cold exposure and when you cycle in proteins versus carbohydrates, that stuff's gonna really matter if you're competing at an elite level. But if you're just like, if you're just trying to get to work with a smile on your face and like not have to get a bigger bathing suit nest next summer and like try to stay young, sleep and exercise and I love that.

I love that approach that's on point. I want to talk about all things art and artsy. What excites you about the company, not only today, but moving forward. You guys are the largest online marketplace, buying, selling, what excites you and when you think about the company as a whole, for people that may not be familiar with that, I'd love to just dive deeper into why it is that not only you are committed to it, but excitements for now, in the future. Especially when I think about art too. Thinking about the financial aspect of it is one thing for investors out there, but also people that love and appreciate it. But let's just hear more about where the company is today and what excites you as CEO.

Casey, do you have friends? Do you have friends who are artists? Do you know artists?

I do, yes.

So look, they're really, as you know, then they're wonderful people and they look at all the opportunities in the world. They look at all the ways to make money, to build a career, and they intentionally pick the one that is known to almost be a vow of poverty. Being an artist is such a difficult way to make a living, but they have something to tell the world and to share with the world. And despite all those obstacles, they're going to do it. And there's no way their parents encourage this. You ask people like, they have two kids and one comes to them and says, I'm going to work at Goldman Sachs. And the other one says, and I'm going to be an artist. They're like really worried about the second one, which, by the way, is not how the world should work. Be worried about the first one. Don't work at Goldman Sachs. I want to live in a world where you can be an artist and, you know, you can make a living. And the reason so few artists are able to feel confident that they'll be able to make a living is because not enough people invest their discretionary dollars in art. And why, you know, if you talk to people, why don't you do. Why don't, why, why aren't you in our collector? Why not buy art? If you look like every billionaire buys art, they know something, right? They got to be billionaires for a reason. They know something. Why aren't you doing it? And I see all these examples. People, once they Figure out art collecting. They buy art and it actually goes up in value. It's not only beautiful, but it goes up in value. You walk into someone's home and it's full of art and they can tell you, oh, this, this artist over here, this is so and so. And this is why I the one you see over my shoulder, this is Luke Butler and we got this from a gallery called Jessica Silverman. And he grew up in New York and then moved to la. And the way his practice works is blah, blah, blah. You hear that? You're like, wow, Mike's like a better person than me. He knows this stuff about art, right? I'm not, but I know this stuff about art. There's a thing that we know that is like the art makes your life more wonderful. I get endorphins from every work of art in our home that I walk by, but I didn't used to feel like it was available to me. I didn't think. I, I didn't want to be a schmuck. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't feel welcome. I didn't know what things should cost. I didn't know what's good and what isn't. I didn't know where to go. And with artsy, we're making it so that anyone can download our app and see a million works of art from almost 4000 galleries in over 100 countries and get all the information they need and the capability to click a button and buy it so that they can do it with confidence. And every day that we look up, if we've made a million dollars, we've created a one year living wage for 20 artists on that day. And that's really like, to me, that's, that is, it's, it's a fun business to be in. Art is just super cool. The people are smart and interesting. I love building technology products and we've built this marketplace that is just really, really slick and to me a real joy to use. But when people use it and when they click the buy button, something really, really good and important happens downstream. And every year that we grow the company, we do that for more artists. We're creating a bigger art. We're creating a bigger world where more artists can make a living. And I don't know, that's why it's motivating. It's fun.

I love that. No, it's, I think too just when you're saying that a couple friends top into my mind and understanding artists and why they do what they do. It's always so unique, but it definitely fits into that common theme of, you know, they see the world in a different way. They want to bring something to the world through their perspective, which is from the art lens. It's so expressive and there's so much passion that comes with it. So I'm sure the work you get to do outside of the technology, but working with artists and seeing the art is. It's a very great place to be in. And I'm sure that just obviously shows from the product that you make, but who you are as an individual. Before we wrap up here, Mike, I've.

Listen Kasey on the art thing. Anybody who's listening to this, who's like a business person, an entrepreneur, like, you're building a, you're building a career. Commit today, like, be somebody who's going to support the arts and put my contact, like put my Instagram or something in your show notes. Anybody who DM's me and says, this is my budget, these are the kind of artists I like, I will find.

You a good one.

I will personally, I will personally do it. I want everybody, we have a team that helps. Like, I might use the team. I want everyone to have the joy that I have of being a patron of the arts and having art in your life. It's the best.

I love that. Well, I will absolutely link that down below so people can send you a dm. I want to end on a note of just all things career advice, because your book, I think it's so impactful, especially in a time when you know this, this new wave of entrepreneurship and so many early stage founders wanting to either start a company or grow into a bigger entity, do M and A or just be a CEO and get recruited to a large organization. If you were to go back in time and give your younger self a piece of advice to find a career that excites you, what would that be and why?

What would yours be when you were in the neck brace, if you could have gone back and been like, things are going to work out great. Here's why. What have you learned on the journey that you would have shared with yourself?

I love that I've never had someone reverse that question at the end. This is great. I'm 23 now. Seven years ago, for me, it would be kind of what I did too, is just put yourself out there more. I think one reason why I've been able to have the career I've had thus far is just the curiosity to explore new opportunities, new conversations, meet new people and live in that curious mentality and put yourself out there. Because coming from a small town in Virginia, two parents that are non entrepreneurial didn't even know really what an entrepreneur was growing up to. Being the youngest of three siblings, I grew up in a small town where I didn't fly on a plane until I was 16 years old and bought the plane ticket myself. And having that mindset of putting yourself out there and putting yourself in rooms to meet new people and hear about new opportunities or different industries was critical and crucial for me in the earliest phase. And I think that's what I would say is just do more of that. Put yourself out there and create opportunities by meeting new people from all different walks of life.

That's good advice, buddy. I would say look. Number. I'd say two. I don't have one good crisp piece of advice the way you did, but I'd say the first one is there's a, you know, we're kind of trained by school that you show up a class, you take the class and you do the work that's assigned. And then you get an A, right? If you do it right, you get an A. And it's really, it's about receiving information and then, and then, and then being given the A that you deserved. And it's, it's terrible training for life, man. It's. It may be a good way to learn, you know, handwriting and French or Spanish, but it's like, it's a really bad way to learn how to be a professional. In real life. You have to create the plan. And if you, and by definition, if you follow the plan everyone else is on, you're going to get what they got. So if you want average outcomes, you have to do what the average, you know, everybody else is doing on average and when and when instead of letting it come to you, well, I want a promotion. When am I going to. What's going. Instead you say, this is where I want to go in my career, because this is the impact that I want to have. These are the lessons I need to learn. These are the experiences I need to create for myself. And then you craft a career around that. And if any of you. My book's helpful on this, and if any of your listeners don't have 20 bucks for the book, hit me up on Instagram. I'll send you a free copy. It really does help to just create a framework for thinking about your plan rather than living somebody else's plan. That'd be, that's my first advice, is to plan and let me buy you the book. The. The second is it's not about you. Nobody cares about you. You know, if you're in your first job and you go in to see your boss, you start telling them you want to be promoted, like, of course you do. Everybody wants to be promoted. Nobody cares. And then you're comparing yourself to the other people haven't been promoted. Like, if it's all about, like, what am I going to get? Where's mine, where's mine? It becomes an unhappy career. And if instead you make it about, what's the impact that I want to have? How do I want to help? Am I having that impact? It redirects your energies in a really positive way.

I love that. That is very great advice. And I know you brought up the book. I'll make sure to link that down below. And before we wrap up your mic, I just want to say once again, I really appreciate you taking the time today. I know I've learned so much and I hope the listeners and viewers did as well. Before we wrap up, where is the best place for everyone to buy the book, learn more about the new podcast and of course follow you and along your journey and learn more about artsy.

Hey, so if you guys want, if you want to keep up with me, all the links and stuff will be@mikestive.com or you can find me Mike Stive on Instagram. But the new podcast is all is called Office Hours with Mike Stib. It's co produced with iHeart, iHeartradio and you can iHeartMedia. You can find us in their app on Spotify, Apple, all those, all those places and check it out and shoot me a note, let me know what you think. I answer everybody on LinkedIn and Instagram, so I'm easy to find there. Just if I can be helpful, give me a shout for sure.

And I will say I listened to it earlier today and I know it recently came out. I'm not just saying to say this great first episode and highly recommended as a savvy podcast listener myself.

So what's your, what's your advice? You do it a lot, so there are people listening to you who are podcasters too. So you've heard mine. What should I do differently or what's, what's your advice as a podcaster?

Yeah, well, I think my advice is find what makes you unique. So for the show that you did, I loved the approach of people calling in, asking questions. And it wasn't just your advice and questions, which I think was unique and my next step would be you're one episode in. Keep testing that format and get as much feedback as possible, like an early stage MVP from a tech product. And you're in the phase where you put out something that's unique and different and it's you. I am therefore a listener in this context and I'm telling you it was great and I liked it and that's just subjectively. So therefore keep doing that and then make changes along the way. The average podcast and I'll end with this. From my perspective, the average podcast puts out 10 episodes and never puts out another one again. Obviously this is different coming from, you know, I heart and having a team behind it versus an independent podcaster. But the repetition of episodes and compounding the feedback, especially during that first 10, 20, 30 episodes, I think is more important than any direction to give you.

You just got to keep grinding everything.

Exactly.

Well, Casey, look, I love your show and I'm glad you and I are friends now. If I can ever help, give me.

A shout and will do.

Wish me all the best, buddy.

Thank you.