Lessons Learned and Pushing Forward | Gerard Adams

Whew. This is so awesome because it's been such a long journey as an entrepreneur. When I started, it really wasn't the cool thing to do. I grew up in a small town in New Jersey, and I owe it all to my mother and father, my family. That has been my big support system because they taught me at a young age that I pretty much had to become a hustler. I had to grow up fast. I had to understand certain values in life. And those morals that my parents taught me at a young age has really built me to be the successful entrepreneur I am today. My mother and my grandparents had immigrated here on both sides, my father's side from Italy, my mother's side from Venezuela. And my mother grew up in a small, one-bedroom shack with 6 siblings. And I'll never forget, growing up, she told me that that little studio apartment caught on fire and she lost everything. And she actually had to drop out of high school just to get a job to help provide for my grandparents. And she always told me that if I was able to do that with the shirt off my back and now build my family, you and my 2 sisters, Monica and Cynthia, then you can do anything. And even still, growing up in that small town in New Jersey, I saw my mother work 7 days a week at a supermarket. So that motivated me so much to want to be able to give back to my mother. And then my father really instilled leadership at a really young age. Same thing, extremely hard worker, very educated. He worked for Prudential, and he put a lot of pressure on me. Growing up, it was like, constantly told me, you have to be a leader. He wanted me to go to Princeton University. That was very important to him. Getting honor roll, being a great student was so important, and my family consistently pushed me. But growing up, I really wasn't the smartest kid. I didn't really relate to books as much as I did real-life experience. I was very outgoing, very charismatic, where I wanted to learn from just different experiences and people. I ended up making friends with everybody in my neighborhood, all the older kids. And I was an artist. I loved art. All I asked my parents was to put me into art school. So fast forward a little bit, I'm getting ready to graduate high school. And I also was an athlete, very competitive, but I never really was a big kid. So I was most of the time second string or third string. And because of that, I learned No matter what, being a part of a team, it doesn't matter what position you really play. As long as you show up to practice and you're about motivating your team and you're there to help them win, it's really— that's what really counts. And my team always respected me for that, even though I would get beat up or, in the beginning, made fun of, sometimes third string as a wide receiver. No matter what, eventually the team respected me because I always showed up, rain or shine. And I took that same mentality. So once I graduated high school, I wanted to go to college, make my family proud. They told me that that was really the path to success for me. And quickly I saw the internet, how internet was really evolving and changing things. And I was really interested in the internet. I was also very interested in investing in the stock market. And quickly, After my first semester, I kind of really felt like— and just so you know, I didn't make it into Princeton University. I was planning on hopefully being able to transfer. But first semester, I just felt school was, in my opinion, not for me. I felt it was a really big business. They were telling me what classes to take in order to get to the major that I wanted to take to learn about entrepreneurship, to learn about business, to learn about finance. And I was accumulating debt. So I said to myself, I need to find a mentor. I need to learn how to self-educate myself. And if there's ever a time to take a risk, it's now. So that was a big day for me when I ended up deciding that I was going to drop out my first semester and take a shot at being an entrepreneur. And that was the very beginning of my entrepreneur journey. Yeah.

Can you tell us about a moment when— you described the background of your parents not having much and instilling in you that there was a lot of hustle. Can you tell us about a moment when you were running Elite Daily where you remembered those lessons and they got you through a really tough moment?

Throughout my whole entrepreneur career, all the way up until Elite Daily— Elite Daily, I mean, it took me a long time to even get to Elite Daily. So those values, those morals, that mindset that my parents instilled in me at a young age helps me till today, no matter what. Because you're always going to have— as an entrepreneur, it's like when they say riding a motorcycle. Eventually, you're going to make— it's inevitable. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to have to learn how to pivot. And you're going to learn how to bounce back. You've got to have resilience. You gotta be able to have real confidence that you can persevere through those different obstacles. And with Elite Daily, we got— in the very beginning, we had to experiment a lot. We made a ton of mistakes. And we got a ton of nos from people.

Yeah.

People were telling us it was hard to raise capital, getting advertisers to believe in us. They didn't believe in our content. They didn't believe that we were a real publication.

Why was that? Why wouldn't they believe in the publication?

I think, one, because of our age. I think we were— I had mentored my partner and CEO, David Ahrabov, who was 19 when we started it. And we were a young team, one. But for me, it's never been about age. I think the biggest thing was the way that we were disrupting content at the time. We looked at the industry and saw an opportunity where we looked at every publication out there that was writing for millennials, and we felt that there was a void in the market of the type of authenticity in the content that was written for us, by us, and hitting every single vertical at the time. We wanted to open this up to all millennials that have a story. We felt everybody has a story. Everybody should be able to have a voice. And we very much allowed— we really didn't have too many rules. We kind of allowed people to kind of say it the way it was and how they felt. And this kind of caused a lot of backlash on us initially in the very beginning.

And can you tell us about a moment— you said you made a lot of mistakes in the beginning. What about the moments where you were sure it wouldn't work?

You know, I think that that was more my role with my co-founders is there was— I don't think there was ever a moment that I ever said, this is not gonna work. I always was the one pushing the team, pushing my co-founders. that we have to believe in ourselves, and we have to believe in what we stand for, and just keep pushing forward and keep believing. And we are seeing the results ourselves. I mean, a lot of people didn't believe our analytics in the very beginning either. They felt a lot of it was, or all of it was, bought traffic and bots and things like that. We knew what we were boosting and what we weren't boosting. And we knew what was truly organic. And we had to learn the game. We had to learn how much Comscore played a role in certain how to be able to gain the notoriety with the agencies and things like that. But until we did, we still knew, based upon eventually understanding our analytics, that we had something, that we were engaging our audience. And we were building a product and content that we knew was valuable to our audience and that they enjoyed on a daily basis. And no matter what, even though if we can't raise enough capital in the very beginning, or we're not getting the advertising dollars that we and the brand deals that we wanted, we knew at the end of the day that didn't matter. Because as long as we focused on our product, as long as we focused on our content, as long as we focused on the value that we're bringing to our users, and that they enjoyed that on a daily basis, we knew that it was only a matter of time before the outside world would catch up.

And to young entrepreneurs who are having those same struggles, what advice would you give? Where do you strike the balance between persisting with the product for the amount of time that you believe it's going to take for people to recognize it, or just giving up and trying something new?

You know, I think if you focus on the product, you know, you focus on a great product, and, you know, you truly believe in it, and you test the market, you prove out the concept even on a smaller scale, you know, and you study that, you study those metrics, I think it may take some time. You look at Snapchat, how big Snapchat is today. But it didn't happen overnight. Nothing happens overnight. It takes time. So I truly believe, if you believe in it, if your team believes in it, if you see that the product— there is a marketplace for that product and people enjoy it, but it's going to take time to educate a market.

Yeah.

generation where we're disrupting things constantly. And that's what's so exciting about the opportunities that we have today as a generation. Technology is— what has happened over the past 100 years as a civilization, and then you look at what's happened in the past 10 years as a civilization, like with technology and how much we're disrupting things so quickly. It's unbelievable. So you have to, I think, believe in yourself and understand, though, that it's going to take time for people to adapt. But if you have a great product, stick it out. And maybe that means that any great product isn't going to be perfect from the beginning. It's going to become something that— I always say the process becomes the plan. What you think your product may be when you first start to what it may become— when we started Elite Daily to what it became today, It's night and day. We went through many, many iterations. And any great product is going to continue to— is going to evolve. So you just have to be willing to continue to push the limits, continue to evolve, and continue to educate your users and consumers. Thank you.