Alex Chung, founder @ GIPHY

Yep. All right, what's going on, going on everyone? Sorry about that. I'm Sam Parr, this is Alex Chung, founder of Giphy. Lindsay rattled off a few stats, but there's a few things interesting. Basically, how many of you have used Giphy? Right, so they have 500 million people a day going to the website, so the likelihood that you've been there is quite high. So Giphy's pretty interesting not only because they have 500 million people a day coming to the website, but they've done this in a crazy short amount of time. So the site was launched in February of 2013, right?

Yep.

You have over 100 employees, or about 100 employees based here, but you've built this very huge website, very huge brand, very, very quickly. Raised $150 million, so you guys have done a lot in a short amount of time. So today we're gonna talk a little bit about that story, but I'm a pretty— I said this at my last Q&A— I'm a very casual person and I want to make this about you all. So I'm gonna have this iPad up the whole time and go to —what's it called? Slido. Slido.com. Type in HustleCon East and ask questions as we go, and I'll be able to pull them up. But first of all, welcome.

Hey, thanks. Thanks for being here.

So tell us a little bit about— give some context. I already gave a little bit of context, but give context as to what Giphy is, how big it is. Just so people have a little bit of a background of the company.

Yeah, so Giphy is a search engine, so we are essentially a search engine, but the difference is we are the only search engine in messaging. So, you know, messaging is blowing up right now. If you look at your screen use time, it's probably all iMessage or messaging apps. There's never really been a company or a product that has been able to to create search inside of a messaging app and that's exactly what we've done. We're in every messaging app in the world. We're in Snap, Instagram, WhatsApp, WeChat, not WeChat yet, sorry, oof. Very soon, someday, except for the whole Chinese situation going on right now. We're in all the messaging apps. We have the number one behavior. We've gave people a search in messaging. Right now, over, we know that at least 500 million people use search every day in Giphy, and we serve about more than 7 billion pieces of content a day. So we're at scale now, and so we, you know, we, we pretty much can hit everyone on the internet. Our reach is— if you think about Snap and Facebook and WhatsApp, they all have user reach, and it's, it's, it's kind of peaked out because they've kind of maximized how big their products are going. The, the big difference that we've done is we're a superset of all companies because we are embedded in every one of those apps, so our reach is exponentially growing all the time. So we can reach pretty much everyone on the internet at any given moment.

Got it. And so Alex and I have been chatting over the past couple weeks to prepare for this, and I thought that his story was most— was one of the more interesting stories of anyone I've talked to because he has a very unique philosophy and perspective on life. You know, someone like me, I think I just wanted to— I like building businesses. They're exciting for me. I tend to kind of stick to one thing for a while, whereas your career, you've jumped around. You consider yourself— you said you feel like a musician, almost like a rock star, and you're able to jump around.

I didn't say that.

What did you say?

So not— so if I were a rock star, I would so not be here.

No. Well, what did you say?

No, I said it's like a band. Maybe like a really bad, like, indie rock band, you know, like playing over in Bushwick, maybe Greenpoint every once in a while if you were cool enough.

So you said you're like a band. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you jump around from project to project, and that's not something that people typically say when they're raising money or talking to people. And so your outlook is significantly different from most everyone I've talked to, or at least you admit it and they don't. So to talk about like how this outlook came to be, can you explain a little bit in like 30 or 60 seconds your background and kind of how you got to to where you are now?

Yeah, I'm originally an engineer. So I'm a hardware engineer. But— so I worked in hardware. I worked at Intel. I worked at a bunch of different places. And then I went to school here at Parsons and went back to design. So I was a graphic designer in the fashion scene for a little bit. But I found out you can't really make money as a graphic designer. Or actually, you can't make money at anything in New York. And so then you have to go back into doing tech, which is the only place where you can actually make a decent living. So with that, if you're going on the year-long kind of strategy, it's really, I mean, I think everyone who's young knows, I'm a little older than all of you. I just maybe look a little younger, but I'm not. Millennials right now, they do about a year, maybe less, actually like a lot less, and then they'll jump from job, you know, they call it the gig economy, but it's really about trying to maximize as much as you can do in the shorter amount of time and then moving on, which is exactly, if you think about bands, what they do is, You do an album, you go on tour, and if no one wants to go on tour, then you go on to do another album, and that may suck, and then you keep doing it until you like get in a Volvo commercial, and then you're making a ton of money. And then you just end up doing that one song forever until you get really old and then go on tour. So what we do is, the way that I try to figure it— I've been doing startups since, it's been 25 years since the early or late '90s, and this is about my 12th startup. I've been a part of a bunch of different startups that people have done. I founded a bunch of startups. And what you really want to do is you want to optimize for that first year. You know, I've spent a lot of time in companies trying, being super stubborn and trying to get something to happen. And you want to be a little bit stubborn, but you also want to know when it's not the right time and place, when your song is like not going to be number one on the Billboard, you know, top 40s. And so you usually try to put a year in, which is kind of like how school works, right? It's your major. You put a year in. And then you kind of see where you are at the end of the year. And if you can keep going, then you do a year at a time. So it's not— when people, young people say, hey, we're going to do this for the rest of our lives, you're like, OK, if your company's still around, maybe. And then if you— and then when you grow up and you like have things that you want to do and you have to like be a part of the world, maybe. So the way that I like to think about it is you plan for 4 or 5 years. You plan for forever. But you go in 1-year chunks and you do as much as you can in a year, and then you, uh, if it doesn't work, you fold that and then you move on, which is pretty much what I've been doing with my career for most of my life.

So I'll play— I told you this earlier, I was like, "Oh, I'll play devil's advocate on that," because you said that you plan— you said, "I'm not gonna plan too far in advance because I don't know if my company will even be around in a year." Yeah, where you guys are now, you've raised $150 million, you're at scale, the likelihood that you're gonna be around for a long time is quite high. And you never know, you're right, but I would bet, and 151 things, 150 million things have bet that you're gonna be around for a while. When you're talking, talking to investors or trying to raise money or trying to recruit employees, Do you tell them that you're only looking ahead one year at a time, or you're only planning one year at a time like that? Because if I were wanting to invest, I would be nervous about that.

No, I think I would take it the other way. Investors want to know that you have a one-year plan. They don't want you to be like investors. You got to remember, VCs have a 7-year return window. You need to return their money and they need to make 10x on their money because they're capitalists, right? So like, I mean, Jeff Bezos just said like last week that he was hoping, you know, he was waiting. He was just holding on until the eventual day when Amazon fails. All companies will fail at some point. Someone's just going to come out and be better. So what the VCs, what they really want to do is, if you follow Paul Graham's— maybe it's my mic. If you follow like YC Paul Graham's advice, startups are all about growth. And so if you're not growing, then you're not a startup. You're not doing something successful, and you probably have a year to make it up. So the way that I go into VC meetings is, "Hey, in a year, we're going to be here." And I usually put a 10x number on whatever our KPI is, and I'm like, "This is what I'm committing to, and if we can raise the money, we will get there." And if you can get there, then you're successful. The worst thing a VC wants to see is, "Hey, in 1 year— in 5 years, we're going to do this thing," and then there's no plan for the first year, and it's going to take us maybe 4 years to figure it out, and then we'll figure it out on the 5th year. They want to see growth right away. And so if you plan yearly growth, 10x, 10x, 10x, 10x, that's exactly what they want to see. And if you can't pull that off, maybe you get a little bit more time, but if you can't pull that off for 2 years, then you should probably sell the company or do something, find something else, because you just aren't there at the right time and place. So I'd say VCs actually prefer you to optimize for the year, so especially for the next round of funding. But have an outlook for the future. So you plan for the future, but you really, really operate in a year at a time.

So then what would happen if your company didn't 10x? I mean, a lot of people when they're first getting started, like, I get asked this question all the time, when do I know when to quit? Or how do I know when to quit? And is that your metric, is 10x growth? I mean, Like, if you didn't hit that, would you— what would you do?

Yeah, I think because startups are all about growth, it's only— there's only two things that you're optimizing for. You're optimizing for traffic or people, right? Like, you're looking for user growth or you're looking for revenue growth. And there's two types of businesses. If you want to make an e-commerce company that's just a lifestyle business that's making money, don't take any funding. Take the bare minimum you can, and then you're just kind of chilling out and you're making money, and that's totally fine. That's like having a pizza parlor or having any kind of like operating business. That's a totally cool thing to do. And there's funds for that. But if you're talking about high growth, hypergrowth startups, unless you're making 10x gains every year, your company probably isn't going to be on the hockey stick curve. If you follow that, you know, like everyone talks about the hockey stick, though, that's an exponential growth. That's going to be 10x growth every year. So if you can't do that when you're starting out, then there's something fundamentally wrong about your product market fit or you're not operating correctly. You give it a little bit of time and then you pivot. Or you either— there's a couple of options. You either then just start making revenue and then just build a business, like a small growth business, or you keep optimizing for trying to get that curve up. If you can't get the curve up, at some point there's something wrong, right? And that's when you have to ask yourself, is this something that you want to keep doing or do you find something else?

When you were starting out, was your goal— I mean, I'm sure it's many people's goal to find that 10x growth company, but did you start it thinking, I think this can grow 10x, or did you feel like you just started something fun and fell into it?

So, uh, it's— that's— I look at it differently. It's not like you have an idea and you think it can grow 10x. Obviously, anything can grow 10x possibly, but it's more you just put the number on the board and you say, what are all the ways you're gonna get there? Because if something was so obvious that it's gonna grow 10x naturally, someone would have already done it. Someone's gonna pull it off. It's too easy of a problem to solve. So what you really want to do is take the thing that no one thinks is ever gonna be big, a GIF search engine, and then put 10x on the board and then figure out every possible way that you can get to that 10x. And then that is when the creativity opens up and you're like, oh, like, yeah, in our case, it was like we did, we actually did 10x every year for the first 4 years. And it was like 10, you know, it was like 3 million people, then it was 300,000, 3 million, 30 million, 300 million. And so we've been doing that every year. And we got to a point when we were like, there's no way that this is gonna do this without— we're not gonna be able to hit 300 million until we get onto Facebook. But Zuckerberg had just said that he would never put GIFs on his platform like 2 months before. And so everyone's like, you're dead. And we're like, no, we need to get this GIFs onto Facebook. And so we hacked this whole solution into Facebook through like a Flash player where you could actually play GIFs onto Facebook. And we did it, and then you see the 10x grow, and then next year we were on stage at F8 with Mark Zuckerberg, and he was sending GIFs on the Giphy platform. And so it really is put the goal and then go towards the goal, if that answered that question.

Yeah, it does. When you did create that huge goal, something I've, I don't know if you guys experience this, but when I'm working with my team as CEO, or founder, I'm like, I'll create these huge goals and there's immediate pushback of like, oh, this can't be done. What did you do to motivate your team?

So yeah, if you put these things, there's two types of people. They see that as we can't do that. And there's other people that are, oh, that's a crazy goal. I wonder how we get there. And the people that we work with are the ones that are like, if you give me 1% chance and it's possible, we will figure out a way. I like the low odds because the high-odds things, like, those are boring. One, they're boring and everyone's doing them. Like, if you're in Bitcoin right now, like our crypto, it's like a billion companies are doing obvious. Well, now everyone's losing money, but if it's like a GIF search engine and no one really knows what you're doing and you put these goals, it's a challenge. So I think the startup people, the people who are the boldest and the craziest, are the ones that are going to see the 1% chance. And go for it, and then figure out the plan to get there, and then have the team that is going to embrace that small chance of winning. Because being the underdog and doing something crazy— like, we are doing a large percentage of Google search traffic. Like, we are like a multiple chunk of Google search traffic. No one thought we could compete with Google. They have 30,000 employees. We have 100. But yet we're competing every day and beating them. And so I love that. And you want a team that has that kind of challenge. If you have a team that's like, we can't do this, you have the wrong team. And your startup is going to fail. Everyone should just work at Google or Facebook, because that's where people go when they give up.

So just a reminder, if you do have a question, just message me here, and I'll pull it up. You guys like that. Talk to me a little bit—

They all work at Facebook.

Talk to me a little bit about the very first 6 months of the company. What was— where did the idea come from and what was it— what were the first maybe 3 to 6 months of trying to get users like?

So in the very beginning it was a project that a friend and I were talking about. I had been doing— I had done like 6 other projects and launched them and we had like a anonymous chat thing. We had like a nonprofit Square Reader thing we were working on. We crypt— some crypto stuff. So this was just one fun project out of— it's like if you're putting out an album, this was just one of like the B-sides that we put out. And it was— it ended up taking off. And in maybe 15 minutes of it starting to get traffic, we got offers from everywhere for funding.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What? How did you even get— how did they get that much traffic early on?

Someone, uh, you know, I actually just never meant it to go public. I sent it to 4 friends just as like a fun thing for us to find. And we're like, "Oh, this will be our secret weapon. We can now find GIFs on the internet when no one else can." And then someone like sent it to a friend, and they sent it to a friend, and then it got on the COVID of Gizmodo, and then it got cover of everywhere. And then People were yelling at me because they were telling me it sucked, and I was like, "I wrote this in like not that long." The search engine was like 3 lines of code. And so then the first month was just me working on it full-time, just trying to get it not to crash. We got offers of funding, and then I was like, "Okay, we'll take a little bit." I brought on all my unemployed friends to come work on it. They were happy because they had jobs. We ended up like, we had work-at-home Wednesdays, which is like not a good idea. And so the first few months, it was just us hanging out, just trying to figure out what is this thing. And we would, you know, we'd go to the Standard and like have oysters and like this back when rosé was still a thing. And we would hang out. And then 6 months into it, we were like, okay, if we're going to devote the next year of our lives to this, let's like commit to it and then let's think about the plan of what we're trying to do. And that's when we put the 10x goal on the board. And then we got serious and we started coming up with a strategy. And you can exactly see if you look at our Google Analytics, our traffic was like, you know, big peak and then they call it the trough of despair, wherein all your traffic goes away. And it peaks out until we— for like 3 or 4 months until we got serious and then the traffic goes like that and it's been going that way. Since those first 6 months when we stopped eating oysters.

What were you doing to get that traffic up? Everything.

I mean, like, it matters what kind of— for us, in the very beginning, it was SEO. Like, we wanted to be synonymous with GIF. It was getting integrated into platforms. It was pretty much every trick you could possibly think of to get traffic. In the very beginning, it's very easy to double your traffic because you're only talking about hundreds of thousands of people. When you start getting into the tens of millions, you have to change your strategy to something a little more drastic. And when you start going into the hundreds of millions of people, that's when you have to start piggybacking off of the large networks. So your strategy always changes with every other goal. And so, you know, our— what we were good at was constantly changing the strategy for the goal that we put on the board. So you have to be super adaptive because the internet changes every day.

When you were working with your team, how often were you changing strategy? Every day. So, and how many employees did you have when you were changing every day? Because what I love doing is I love going to companies that I like or startups that are growing quickly, and I like looking at the Glassdoor job reviews. That's creepy. What? I like looking at what employees say it's like to work there because I want to learn what good CEOs are doing or what bad CEOs are doing, so I don't do that. And one thing that most, a lot of people complain of is strategy is constantly changing. So when you were doing that, how many people were you and how were you dealing with that?

You know, we, in the very beginning there were 5 of us for the first almost year and then we went, we doubled to like 10 and then 20 and now there's 100. And we used to reorg every month because when you have 5 people, you can't just do one job, you have to do all the jobs. And so we would reconfigure for every strategy. And so we kept reorging every month, then we made it every quarter, and now then we made it every 6 months. And now we all— now there's enough people that we do it about once a year. And if you are that type, it's a startup, you know, we, we are We're competing, literally competing with Google and Facebook every day. And we don't have the resources to compete with them, so there's no way we're gonna beat them on a head-to-head basis. So we have to be a lot more clever, and we have to change, and we have to adapt, because the benefit we have is we're far more creative, or so we think. But we are much more nimble, and we can change faster. We can change our product in a day. It takes them months or years to change their product. So I would say, you need, in a startup scene, if you don't have employees that are okay with that, you're going to fail. Like, it just is the nature of the game. Like, there is, you know, people will come in and say, "Hey, we need a 4-year plan." If you have a 4-year plan, you've already failed, because that means you haven't, you're not adapting to the changes of market. So we have to change all the time. It's a fundamental nature of the company. And so, you know, what we do is, I think part of why people stick around too is, you know, in our company values, we have all these crazy values. One is the heart emoji. We optimize for the company first. So like we have this thing where it's one of our sayings, it's like product over people or people over product. That's— sorry, that was from Google. We optimize for the people in the company, and when you optimize for the environment of the people, then all the products naturally end up showing up. But when you optimize for the product, you get a bunch of people that just care about their careers and the product, and not about the community of people that are actually working on it. So if you ever watch Friday Night Lights, it's like we are that Odessa, like, not that awesome, well-staffed, or— but kind of like attractive team. And we just end up doing just better than everybody else because we're just craftier. Because we have to be. And we like each other. That's a big thing.

How— so you have this very— you may push back on this, but you have this very family-oriented culture, it seems like, right? Yeah. The difference between a family and a team is you can't fire your family, so whereas on a team you can replace someone. So how are you balancing this, this culture with the reality that you have to make money, you have to— you have people, you have outside investors to please?

So there are two types of bands. Both of them are on Giphy. Like, let's say there's like the Beatles who were a band and they stuck together as the music changed. They went from like the '50s all the way to like '60s, '70s. And they made crazy different albums. They all stuck together. Even though they had tensions, they were a family. So it was really about the people first and the music second. And then you have bands like Gwar. Like, who knows who's in Gwar? They just get random people coming in. And for that, that's all about the music and not about the people. And that totally works. But that's why they can never change. They can never not wear costumes and do this whole thing, because that's the one thing they do, right? So if you're going to be adaptive, you have to really focus on the people of the company, because you need to be able to change configuration, pivot, do all these things. So we spend a lot of time on building the community of the company. Most of the first early employees were friends of mine. People who you know they're not going to abandon you for a job at Facebook or Google. We're all in it together. We always say, "We either succeed together or we fail together." And if people aren't useful when we grow, we try to find other roles for them. It's like people are going to— We're going to optimize for the people and what they're best good at. Multiple people, large percentage of people move roles within the company over the last 5 years. And we'll move people and we'll try to get them to the best point they are. One thing that we have is we have another value that we call post-Giphy. Because I think a lot of companies think that this is going to be your last job ever. And that's not true. Like everyone here has, unless you're just right out of college, had multiple jobs, right? That company that you were at, last year is not— or maybe 4 years ago if you're you, 5 years ago— was not the company that you're going to be in in 4 or 5 years. So our promise to everyone is we are going to give you the skills and the training to be better and make a lot more when you leave the company than when you started. So we put that commitment on, and people stay, and we've had very little turnover over the years. And then when people are ready to leave, I'm always surprised that people are sticking around longer than a year. But when people stay for 4 or 5 years, and if they want to leave, we're like, great. Now go be fancy someplace else. But say nice things about us. And maybe not at Facebook or Google. Because that's giving up.

Talked about the business model. We actually didn't mention it. but basically you have 500 million people coming to your— coming to GiveaDay. You've raised all this money. You said that you're starting to make revenue this year. A lot of speakers we have who speak at these events are bootstrapped, so they're making money from day one. You're a little bit— you're not in that category, so talk about how you plan on building the business.

Yeah, in the very beginning, you know, it was— you have a couple different— like, again, you either optimize for growth or you optimize for revenue. If you try to do both, you're most likely going to fail at both, and you're not going to get hypergrowth. Like, hypergrowth— like, if you look at it, making money is actually the easiest problem, easier problem than having growth. A lot of people can make money or have really good retention, but it's really hard to get hundreds of millions of people to your platform. So we optimized for growth for the first 5 years, and that's where we got to. And now that we have scale, like, we have more inventory in our platform than we know what to do. Now it's about turning on to the, the second phase of revenue growth, and that's what we're doing right now. So we started in January, and our business model is very, very simple. The two most monetizable platforms on the internet are Google and Facebook. One is us. One is an ad network, an ad platform based off of search, and one is an ad network based off of feeds. And so our business model is very simple. We are search and messaging, so— and we also have feeds and messaging. So these are our trending feeds. So we just follow the Google and Facebook model, and that's all we're doing. We are the largest ad network in messaging right now. No one's been able to figure out how to monetize messaging because no one's been able to create an ad network in messaging. Since we're in every messaging app in the world and we have the search behavior, we can now build, and this is what we have built, the world's largest ad platform for messaging. So for, you know, the, the way to think about it is every possible message is a possible search, and every possible search is a piece of media, and every piece of media is a potential ad. So there's 78 trillion messages sent every year. If you monetize that at Facebook CPMs, that's That's almost a trill— that's like $780 trillion or billion dollars in revenue potential right there, just in messaging. And that's more than global advertising right now. So messaging has the potential to be as big as the entire advertising ecosystem. And that's all we're doing. We just want 1% of that, maybe 2%.

No big deal. I mentioned this earlier with Appdiv, when I was with Appdiv. But something that I hear often is people say before they're starting something, they get nervous about all the legal implications. Typically what I say to them is like, you know, you first need to create something, a product that users actually want, people actually want, and then like if I were you, I would worry about making sure that legally you're perfectly sound because the likelihood that you're gonna get sued is a lot less lower than the likelihood that you're going to create something that people actually want. So focus on that first. You guys are in a similar— are in a field where I would imagine you get a lot of people threatening to sue you for copyright reasons. Is that—

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Ow. You can talk about most San Francisco startups— I won't name them, they're friends of ours— they all ride off of fair use. Fair use is cool and like there's a lot of legal precedent on it, but once you start to try to monetize, no one wants to advertise on your platform when you're using a bunch of weird like fair use kind of stuff that may be their content on the internet. So I used to work at MTV on music videos in Midtown and I did a lot of the licensing on that side. So day one, we decided to be 100% licensed content. So we have a bunch of UGC content, which is about 10% 10% of our catalog, but 90% of our catalog is all licensed. So this is every sports league, the NFL, NBA, all those, all of the, uh, the movie studios, all the— pretty much anything that you see, we have license. So we have actual rights to distribute that and our users to use, which is something that no one else in the world really has. And that took us 5 years to get. That's why we're totally— from a copyright point of view, we've— we don't have problems because we work with the artists and the content providers directly. Because they see this as a huge win where here's someone that's not ripping off their content, that's working with them directly. And so this is why we get— it's easy for us to get advertisers, because we've been so straight on board with it.

We have about 8 minutes left. Alex has specifically said that he may not answer every question, but every question is— he's game for any question. To be asked. So if you do have something that you want to get asked or get answered, feel free to put it up there because we've talked about how he's not afraid of any question. Can you talk about some of the— let's answer this question. Advice for building the tech MVP, so your first version as a non-technical founder. You built yours in-house, right? Yeah, I built it myself.

Yeah. It's very hard to outsource your product because the life cycles are too slow. You outsource it and then you get feedback and then you outsource again, you get feedback. If you have a small growth company where you just need an app that doesn't need iteration and you can make a little bit of money, that's— Oh, it's right there too. It's totally cool. That's fine. But if you're actually going to try to compete on some hypergrowth scale, you have to have a technical co-founder. You have to be— You need to build it in-house. There's no way that you're going to compete because you have to— again, you have to be faster and more clever than all the other people you're competing with. And if it's a good idea, which it probably is, some YC company is going to crush you, like day one. So why even bother? You know, like, every day people come out of business school saying, "I have the greatest idea." It doesn't really matter. There's a lot of great ideas. It doesn't matter until you build it. Like, you just have to be able to build it yourself.

When you were— you've worked on a dozen or so companies in your career. Were you ever partnered with someone who wasn't technical?

Yeah, so I— a lot of times I picked to be— like, who cares? Like, a lot of times, like, John and Lennon and, like, Paul McCartney, right? Even though Paul wrote all the songs, they both still get credit. Like, I was the CTO of half those companies, you know, because I'm the technical a lot of times I have a business person, because go figure, engineers and designers, we don't really like talking to people too much. We spend all of our time locked in a basement working on code. We are naturally not social people. And then we come on stage and have to talk to people, but I'd rather just be at home working on stuff. Maybe watching some TV. Not that this isn't awesome. Thank you. But so you want a partner. It's usually a technical person. You want like a little bit of an introvert and you want an extrovert. Someone that goes out and does all the business meetings, because you know that person is not building anything. But the person building something doesn't have the time to go out and do all of that stuff. So 80% of startups, successful startups, are done by 2 people or more. YC almost never invests in a startup of 1 person. But on the corollary side, 65% of startups fail because of founder tension. So like, you're not going to get there unless you have a co-founder, but you're more likely going to fail because of your co-founder. So what do you do?

When you were working with some of your business co-founders, what was— what made you interested in working with them?

Friends first. Like, I made the mistake in the early days of just picking the smartest people that I thought were cool, and eventually what happens is you get a lot of money And then people get greedy or like people don't have different interests or, you know, your professional careers diverge and there's nothing personal keeping you there together. And so now I only work with friends because friends, you know, and people say it could ruin your friendship. Well, you know, if you're in it with a company and you're really truly friends, you'll see it through. Like you'll see it through to the end. Right? Like, I would rather work with— and also, like, if you're gonna work with— work 8, 12, 16 hours a day, you'd want to hang out with your friends, right? Like, you don't really want to hang out with random people that left Google.

Do you have a Facebook profile?

I do, but I deleted all my posts years ago, so I have every profile, but there's no content, because, like, why would you be on social media Yeah.

Great. Let's answer this top question. And this is interesting for me as well because you have this very unique perspective of this 1-year planning and you just have an interesting perspective and lifestyle to me. So what is your personal endgame?

It's not that interesting. I live in the East Village in a tiny apartment. I like to eat pizza. Endgame. When do you walk away? You walk away when you're not doing interesting work. When it's not fun anymore. When you're not enjoying. When the pain of going to work becomes so much that it's not worth the end. And everyone's been there. And that's when you're like, okay, you're wrapped up. As long as you can keep going and you like hanging out with your friends and you're doing cool things, keep doing it. This is the longest job I've ever had. I never thought we would be here. This is my 6th year working on this. It's mostly because the community that we have is so good that I actually— there is no other place, I can legitimately say this, that I would rather go work because I go to work with my friends every day. And the work changes every day, but that's much more interesting. As soon as all my friends left, I would be like, okay, we probably have to figure out something else.

We'll answer that most recent question in a second, but before we do, How— you're painting a very nice picture of loving to go to work. How many times have you felt, "This is fucking horrible. I'm out of here.

I quit"? Like every day. But I mean, that's the day— that means you care. Like if you just have— are apathetic, that means you don't care at all. Like it's better to care and be like, "Okay, but I'll get there tomorrow." I think the difference is For me, I've been doing this for 25 years. And so like I'll always keep doing— this is like my thing. You know, like I will do another one after this and keep doing it and doing it. And if I can work with my friends— so for me, this is all about getting VCs to pay for my life so that I don't have to get a real job and I don't have to work at Facebook or Google. Because who wants to work in a carpeted office place? That's so weird. The carpet in New York is disgusting. Have you seen outside? So for me, it's really about maintaining— like, just being creative is doing as much as I can do. And if I can get my friends to do it, I'll keep doing this forever. If Giphy can keep going on and it's fun, why not? Like, where else am I going to work? I mean, I'm really bad at making coffee too, so probably nowhere.

Um, let's address this question down here, Alex, about, um, uh, Giphy ads. Um, right now I don't see a lot of advertisement or ads on Giphy, but what happens if you take it to the limit and try to— and try to— it's right here, this last one. Let's say you take it to the limit and you try to monetize as much as possible. What's that gonna look like then, and how do you think it— how How do you think that's going to impact users?

So the secret, which most of you, I think people don't understand, is you have already been all sending branded content. 90% of all the content on our site is branded. We just don't, haven't charged for it. So you've already sent an ad. We just never got paid for it. And so people are like, oh, these ads are going to be disruptive. Oh, guess what? They're already all, like 90% of them are ads. We just haven't put a pay gateway onto it.

Wait, what's that mean? Why are you saying there are ads already?

Because it's all branded content. So most of our content comes from trailers from movies. They come from McDonald's, from like Pepsi, from all these places. All these brands are putting up content every day. Like the WWE does a really good job of putting up, you know, these promos for like things going on, scenes. This is all advertising for them. We just haven't charged them we haven't done yet. I see. Or we have for a few of them, and we will for all of them. Not— except for the ones we like, 'cause they're awesome. Um— Because what's the difference between an ad and good content? You know, there is no difference in this world.

Let's do, uh, maybe 2 or 3 more questions. Uh, let's answer this one about mistakes. So you've, uh, grown to over 100 people now, $150 million in funding. What are some of the biggest mistakes mistakes that you've made and what have you learned along the way? I know there's a ton, but just the top 2.

Like every mistake you ever think you're gonna make, we've probably made. Like it's like everyone, everyone. Yeah, the— what did they say? I think I saw this in a fortune cookie. The master is one that makes 10,000 mistakes. Like the thing is, if you're not making mistakes, that means you're not trying hard enough and you're not actually progressing. So I would say Biggest mistakes have been making a GIF search engine, but that ended up being— turning out pretty well. I don't know if we've— I'm— there's too big of a question, like everything.

Okay. Probably what I'm wearing today was a mistake. And why, why don't you, or why do you dislike Google and Facebook so much? And you dislike them so So much that they came and offered a massive amount of money, would you sell to them?

It matters how much money. Like, it always matters on how much money, but no, the difference between Google and Facebook, those are— it's fine. I've worked at large big companies, but for anyone young that's trying to do interesting things, you know, they just have— it is a different— it is, okay, maybe the way to put this, if you're like an indie rock band and you just want to make good music, there are these huge, huge bands that kind of just take all the market share and are monopolies. And we like working with them. I actually love Facebook and Google. We have a lot of friends there. We work with all of their product teams. But we are just a different type of business, and we're competing. We're competitive, right? So I would say I don't really have a beef with the companies. I more have, if you're young and you're interesting, I think you should try to do something else first and then go retire there when you're old and boring.

I'm going to ask just one more question. So go ahead and pull up the app and vote on anything you want, and I'll try to wait a second until we see some of the top ones. But before I get to that last one, You see a massive amount of GIFs. What's the favorite, most— what's your favorite one that you've seen?

That changes every like 5 minutes. We probably like— yes, people can upload GIFs on Giphy. They can upload— we get millions of uploads.

Well, here, answer this. What's the most popular one on the platform?

It literally changes every 10 minutes. It changes on what's going on popular, what's going on in the world right now. A few weeks ago was Ariana Grande, now it's Cardi B, now it'll be anything that's really going on pop culture. It's kind of saying like, what's the most popular thing in your head right now? Like, I don't know.

Well, don't you have all-time stats?

Yeah, but popular for today or for all time? All time. Well, all time is tough because all time is like, you get the history of momentum. If you go to YouTube, you know, the all-time best videos are like It's not like— it was like evolution of the dance for like years.

Sure, but there's the most popular one. What's it for on your platform? In terms of all time?

Most popular. Well, for 2018, it was Cardi B on Jimmy Fallon saying, "Okurr." You've seen that? And that was like the most popular of all time, or of 2018. Of all time, it's, you know, probably some random cat GIF that's been around for 20 years. Cat playing piano? That's a good one.

Okay, last question. When— let's do the— I don't think you could see it here. We'll do this one. It's the most upvoted. The future of the business, of the company. What's going to happen in the next one? I know you don't like planning. 5 years?

I don't know. We'll probably have self-driving cars. Giphy, like, Giphy pizza. I don't know. Who knows what's gonna happen in 5 years, but the next thing that we're doing is we, you know, we want GIFs, we want stickers, and really now that we're messaging, we're really about bringing content and new formats to messaging. So we launched a video platform 3 weeks ago at the Metrograph. We'd had a premiere of a very short, short 18-second or less video film festival. Casey Neistat and some of our friends from The MoMA and the Met were judges. So in Q1, we're gonna launch an entire short-form video product, which is basically the number one reason— way people are gonna watch content and messaging. So that will be something that you should watch for. It's coming out very soon. The future really is, if we are search for messaging, we are going to take a large percentage. You know, our goal is to be 50% of Google search. We're gonna be— and then 100% of Google search. And then we— our goal is to take out Google first from search so that we can be the old company that you don't really want to work at. But that's okay because we will all be old and boring, and so we will love our jobs. And then we're gonna go after Comcast and take out all the media because no one watches long-form TV unless it's on Netflix anymore. So we think content can be much, much shorter. All the great shows like The Today Show, Good Morning America, I don't know anyone that's young that watches those, but there should be versions of it. HQ is doing a good job of making game shows more fun, but what about all of daytime TV that supposedly millions of people in Middle America watch, but no one— but no one here watches, because you're here, otherwise you'd be at home watching TV. But I think the future really is going to be a combination of messaging and communication networks where media comes into that. And it's going to be a big mix of a crazy world where new content is going to be invented, new formats are going to be invented, and the ways that people will watch it are going to be totally new. And you can kind of see the trend. This is why AT&T and Time Warner, Verizon, all these communication companies are merging with entertainment companies because the future really is when entertainment, messaging, communication, search are all one platform. So that's the long-term vision. We, we want to take out basically all of the people in communication and entertainment, put it into one platform that's very similar to look with an MTV brand, and make advertising not be horrible. Because advertising on the internet sucks so bad that it's really, really painful. And we have the one advertising format that actually doesn't suck that people send every day. Millions, millions, hundreds of millions of times a day. Billions? Probably billions.

Let's actually wrap up with a quick answer to this last one. Currently, what's stressing you out the most throughout your day? Stressing? Like, uh— Yeah, what stresses you out?

Oh man, everything. Things seem like they're going great. The company does— I mean, you know, you got to keep the company, everyone employed, so my number one duty is to to make sure everyone in the company is happy and they're currently employed and that we can get to keep doing that. So that's a stress. Like the whole political climate, peace in the Middle East. I don't know. I didn't eat anything all day, so I'm kind of like a little dizzy. I drank like 3 cups of coffee before I got here. So pretty much everything in the world is probably stressing me out right now. And then I'll go back to work and my friends will just chill me out. And that's kind of— work is more like the less the least stressful place of the world than this whole situation going on here. I think you guys probably stressed me out a little bit too, so maybe that's it.

Well, if only we could all be so lighthearted as you, but I just— Lighthearted? I'm totally serious. What are you talking about? Yeah, that's my takeaway. Well, look, I appreciate you coming, man. I'm a huge fan of Giphy. Maybe you'll be hanging out for a few more minutes before you head out. But thank you for coming. I know people still might have some questions afterwards. Will they be able to catch you over here? Sure, I think so.

I'll be over there with my entourage. Turtle.

There they are, right over here. Well, look, thanks for coming, man. We really appreciate it. We've learned a lot, and I appreciate you taking the time.