Ben Lerer Techstars Fireside Chat | Vlog #39

The guy who just cold-called me just DM'd me on LinkedIn and goes, sorry to bother you, I'm a subscriber. What up guys, it is August 9th today. We have a fireside chat later today from Ben Lehrer. He's the founder of Thrillist. Today's gonna be more of just like in the trenches, just like, you know, dealing with customers and stuff. Not a lot of like meetings and fluff. My name is Ryan Shank. This is our journey building PhoneWagon from the ground up. We're going through Techstars in New York City. Hope you guys are out there working hard, being pioneers. Being Wagoners, welcome to the vlog. Add a different user role that'll only be able to view certain numbers and campaigns.

No!

'Cause it's not like a real port, it's literally Twilio just like transferring data. What?

I'm going into the acronym, CTM. What? What?

Some guy, the guy who just cold-called me, just DM'd me on LinkedIn and goes, sorry to bother you, I'm a subscriber. Sorry for— Ryan Shank, sorry for disturbing, I'm a subscriber to your channel.

There's just like, there'll be something that's clearly happening.

Yeah.

And then we just see a bunch of people start going after it, and it's hard to— it's hard to necessarily like, you know, you want to have a sort of horse in the race because it's clearly something that's big, but you're not— it's just, it's hard. And I think probably one of the things that, you know, Techstars is doing and that you guys are all trying to do is figure out what's that unfair advantage or that special something that like differentiates between— and it can't just be— and sometimes it is, and sometimes the winner— but like, it's best if it's not just— or at least from where we're investing, like, it's not just brand, or it's not just like— like, I'll use Match as the example because like, this is It's not just a better packaging or a higher quality thing that's in the powder or in the bottle or whatever it is. It's like, what's the secret sauce to determine the winner in a space where there's gonna be 20 companies that say, "Botches are a giant growing market. There's lots of disruption happening in sort of like CPG in general. There's a direct customer relationship to be built and then the traditional guys are gonna do it." It's just interesting that there's several businesses here, probably probably more than several that in some way, shape, or form abut something that we've either invested in or a space that we spend a lot of time looking at. We're in a phase of startups now where they're wholly original. It's not about idea, it's about execution at this point.

I mean, I think that is something that has been frustrating to me is that I know exactly who is in my space and who you've invested in and In my mind, what we're doing is so different than what they're doing, and actually also like in education, there's such huge scarcity that there's a lot of room for people to come in.

Oh, by the way, you know we invested in them, they didn't do that. We invested in them and they were a social commerce company who almost went fully out of business, and then pivoted at the last fucking minute and decided to go into education, and we're like, well, this is weird. Yeah. Really, the last 2 years, we saw a change that was happening in media in general, and none of you guys are in media businesses, so I'm not gonna belabor the point 'cause it's not, They may not really be relevant to your industries, but I had this belief that consolidation was coming to digital media the way that it came to cable 30 years ago. And I had this belief that social media today, in many ways, looks just like the cable operators did in the '70s and '80s. And that there's an opportunity to build the next Viacom or the next Discovery Communications. With a new set of brands that are built unapologetically for social. And so, took Thrillist and merged several other brands at the end of last year. We raised a lot of money from Discovery Communications, who we are a partner to, and then the new company's called Group Nine. And so like, I've been operating all the way through and, you know, I love investing, but I like investing because it gets me out of the vacuum of running my own business. Like, you guys all know this in different capacities, is depending on how long you've been doing it, but like, you've all signed up for like some rare form of torture. And it's great, it's like I wouldn't give it up for anything, except that like it makes me want to like shoot myself a lot. And so, I mean like it's just being a founder is the hardest thing in the whole fucking world. The move towards like the best talent wanting to do their own things, It's not like a small thing, that's like a big thing. I can't tell you how valuable it's been over the last few years to be, we're the first investors in BuzzFeed, HuffPo, Business Insider, Refinery29, Brit Co, NowThis, The Dodo. We're in like most of the best digital media companies that have been built over the last decade. And the perspective that I have seeing what's going on from the inside out in those businesses, it's made me a better operator in the media space. Who are we kidding? By the way, it's also the team I feel like a better advisor to those companies because I have a perspective that's not just as a financial person that's like, yeah, you're right, the fucking ad market is tough right now. I know you're seeing this. Let me interview that sales leader because I know how to do that and that person is a fucking crook. So I can be operationally helpful as a media investor. And then the retail side, what's actually really interesting 'cause we, It's building a brand and it's building a brand using a lot of the same tools. And being a great retailer today is really about, it's still about, it's about content creation. And so we've been, so I like that whole thing. And so like me spending time with the new direct-to-consumer commerce company is not a bad use of my time. It gets me out of the, like, this wouldn't be the case anymore, but for years when I was starting Thrillist, particularly in the early days, you think that your brand's homepage is the homepage of the internet. You start it, right? You're like, get online. I was like, Thrillist. Here we are. And you just have no fucking perspective at all. And so going and forcing myself out of that every day is healthy and good. And interesting and like can be really inspiring. Woo!

That's it for the day today, guys. Today was crazy. We just had the fireside chat with Ben Laird from Laird Hippodrome Ventures and that was pretty dope. He was spittin' some, he was telling us the story about how he raised a bunch of money from Discovery Corp. They didn't dick him around and most other people, especially when you do like strategic deals or just like VCs and stuff, they will, they'll kind of like, they just want to like get to know you and like play the dating game for a while. And it's like not, you know, productive and things like that. So that was really cool to just hear his insight into all that. Uh, we're getting out of here today. We had a good day. We had 3 different sales today, our lowest sales day of the week, because yesterday we had I think 5 sales, which was like one of our biggest days. Um, so we're getting out of here. We'll see you guys tomorrow. We're out here every single day.

Peace.