beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk - why email beats social media

Hello fellow data nerds. Welcome to World of das. I'm your host, Orin Hoffman, CEO of Incubate and GP of Flex Capital. Discover more episodes, get weekly data as a service, news, original content, articles on data and more@worldofdas.com that's worldofdas d a a s.com hello fellow data nerds. My guest today is Tyler Dank. Tyler is the founder and CEO of Beehive, a newsletter platform that has grown to over 20 ARR in under 3 and a half years. He's also the creator of Big Desk Energy, a newsletter with over 100,000 subscribers. Tyler, welcome to World of Das.

Thanks for having me. Good morning.

Morning. I'm a big fan, also a Beehive customer. So super excited to dive in. Now if you think of the big daddy in this space that had a big exit, which was Mailchimp, I think they sold for $12 billion. You've said that Beehive could be worth hopefully a lot more than that one day. Why is this still a big business?

I think historically a lot of content creators have become overly dependent on posting content to platforms that are algorithmically driven. So Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, the algorithm dictates what content is served to people who follow you or don't follow you. And there's really just email and SMS as kind of the two direct to consumer, direct to audience channels where you kind of own the distribution and the content that you are sending to your audience.

Assuming your email gets delivered, the deliverability is high. If someone subscribes, they're going to see your email, essentially. Whereas if someone subscribes to me on X or on Instagram, they may not see my post.

Exactly. And I think more people are waking up to the realities of actually owning their audience and distribution. And especially in a world with AI where a lot of these publishers who were overly dependent on Google and these other channels driving traffic to their website, suddenly seeing with AI summaries and other things that they're getting a fraction of the traffic they saw before you start to see the power of being able to hit send to your a hundred thousand readers and a hundred thousand people receiving it is extremely powerful. And I think that's why we're seeing this huge resurgence in newsletters.

Email, it's been around forever. The first email was sent I think in like 71. AOL was launched in the early 90s in the email. It still just seems like email newsletters are still one of the most important ways to communicate. Do you see that going away in the future? Or do you see that continuing going.

Forward as many people that had predicted that it's the death of email and that we've already hit peak newsletter. Peak email. As you graduate college and enter the real world, you kind of need email for work. Most business communications happen via email, whether it's flight receipts, travel plans. Email is really the core central communication channel for most adults. I would say, obviously there's SMS and whatever else, but primarily email for doing most business correspondence. And as long as people are tied to their email and have to open their email every single day for work, I think there is a business and a channel to be utilized in terms of transferring information or content or entertainment via newsletter. So when I raised our seed round four years ago, everyone told me that we were peak newsletter then and fast forward four year substack raised at a $1.1 billion valuation. We have 35, 40,000 active senders on the platform today. I don't think we're even close to peak newsletter and think that it has a lot of staying power from a.

Product perspective is just the most important thing. There isn't even number two. It's just getting the email delivered.

Well, if you don't do that, nothing else really matters. When you think of product around the email itself, there's only so much innovation that's happening actually within the email. What I think is actually more interesting, where we spend a lot of time, is the entire suite of tools built around the newsletter. So understanding exactly who's on your audience, how did you acquire that reader, how are they engaging with your content? How can you monetize that reader better, how can you serve them? And then everything around the newsletter as a whole, in the sense that a lot of these content creators don't just send a single newsletter, but they have a YouTube channel, they have a storefront, they have a website. So how can we tie everything together? Where the newsletter is this centralizing force of reliable communication to their audience, but whatever they're doing on the back half of that, whether it's community or storefront or you name it, we can play nicely and help them succeed in whatever they're doing online.

It seems it's still really hard to like customize the newsletter beyond just saying, like dear Tyler and dear Oren, it's really hard to actually build like a custom newsletter to people. Why is that so hard?

I think it's because the underlying tech with email is actually very antiquated and hasn't been updated. And the number one request we've always gotten from day One is, can you add a video into email? And the answer is no. And that's not a beehive problem, that's just like an email problem. Email just doesn't support video. As so much of the web has advanced, whether it's AI or crypto or decentralized whatever, and obviously web pages that load instantly and have video, email kind of has remained primarily text based, so it feels like it's lagging behind of what you actually receive in the inbox. I think that's the biggest limitation. There's also just so many different clients. When you send an email, it needs to look amazing on Superhuman, Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Microsoft, and then all of these.

Up and coming and on your phone, of course.

Right. And so there's mobile, there's tablet, there's desktop, there's Windows Phones, there's everything. That's what makes email hard and why customization has always been a challenge is because we as a platform need to make sure when you send your email, whether it's your grandparents who are still using Outlook 2003 or someone that's using the latest email client that's in beta, we have to ensure that it looks great. And that puts a little bit of constraints in terms of design.

Even just classically, you do different subject lines to different types of audiences, or if you've got five news items, you might try to reorder them in a way that is more appealing to some audience than the other. Some audience is more into sports, you lead with that. If some audience is more into the crypto thing, you'd lead with that or something. But even that seems really hard to do.

It's possible with like dynamic content, which is something we're building now. But I'd say what makes it hard is not the tech, it's knowing who your audience actually is. I have a list of 110,000 people. I have a decent idea of the type of profile and the people that I'm speaking to based on like my interactions when they reply and like the other data that I collect. But I don't know exactly all 110,000 people, age, demographic, interests and whatever. So if you don't have 100% certainty in that, it's hard to customize your content accordingly. And I think that's actually like a huge gap with newsletters and something. We have a few pretty interesting ideas to build.

If you think of Beehive itself, it's like World of Das, this newsletter, like we run on it, we get charged about 1600 bucks a year for 5000 subscribers, which is pretty high. I think most of our companies would use it more if it was cheaper. But obviously you've come up with like the right pricing. How do you think about pricing in the way that you've thought about it?

Surprisingly, that's like one of the first times I've heard pricing as a complaint. If you remove Substack from the ecosystem, which Twitter and threads and LinkedIn don't charge you to use the platform, and Substack is becoming more and more of a social platform than it is actually like a software service provider removing free as an option, which has anchored everyone to thinking that that is how you can build a sustainable business. We're actually one of the most competitively priced platforms in the entire market. And I'd argue even underpriced in many circumstances, price has never really been a factor in terms of why people don't use the platform. Unless of course, they have one foot in Substack and are used to getting things for free. But what you're losing on Substack is control of your audience. So Substack can send emails on your behalf saying, hey, you should subscribe to these other 30 newsletters because they own the audience relationship. They take 10% of all the revenue that you generate on the platform. They push your readers that you've acquired into their ecosystem in their app. So really as soon as you acquire a reader, it becomes their user more than your reader. So those are kind of like the trade offs of being the product versus paying for the product. And I feel really good about our pricing model.

You've come up to some sort of thing of we want to be this to mailchimp. You're looking at these other competitive dynamics and pricing accordingly.

The traditional email players, whether it's mailchimp, activecampaign campaign monitor, like we are competitive lead to like lower price and almost all of them. We also offer a website builder. So we acquired a website builder a year ago, launched it about a month ago natively in the platform and that we believe we can compete with a webflow frame or squarespace type solution. So it's both website and email in a single platform. And then we also help our users monetize. So we have an ad network with advertisers like Nike, Netflix, HubSpot, AG1. So we believe regardless of what you're paying us that you should actually be able to earn many multiples of that in revenue directly. So ideally most of our users in like our North Star is that our users are generating more revenue on the platform and then we're charging them to use the platform.

I'm always interested how people think about pricing. I know there's these different tiers and when I was talking to someone who runs like the World of D@5000subs, there's a big jump. So she's constantly like trimming out the subs, which maybe is good, maybe we don't need those subs. So maybe it's a good thing she's doing all this extra work to not get that next tier of jump that's in there. Have you seen a similar thing in your. You have a lot of people who are like super close to the top tier, but they're constantly trimming out the subs because they're worried about jumping up to another thing. And is that a good user experience? Because people who don't want the emails aren't getting them.

Our business model is also fairly unique in most email senders charge based on the volume. The more emails that you send, the more you charge. So if you send an email every morning and every afternoon, you're charged for each of those email sends. Where we actually went more the creator friendly route and figured that people don't want to calculate or estimate how many emails they're going to and in any given week or month and then get surprised by the billing. So instead we just have flat rate pricing based on the subscriber count, which I think is much more creator friendly.

Certainly good for people who send emails fairly often.

I'm sure there's some people. I don't think our price jumps at any point are drastic. And again, compared to any of the other competitors in the space, I think we're underpriced relative to almost all of them. I don't think we run into too many instances of people turning their list to remove a 20 or $30 a month price increase. But I'm sure there are some people who are more price conscious than others and are doing that.

We've got this marketing dollars that flow from like an ad perspective and I don't know necessarily how much is flowing into email today because it's kind of hard to put ads into email. Like where do you think that goes over time?

Historically there's the duopoly of Meta and Alphabet being Google and Facebook or Instagram or whatever. That's where most ad dollars go with the exception of maybe Amazon is the third. If you have a physical product. We obviously are making a big bet that Beehive can build a massively scaled ad network where Advertisers who are carving out their upcoming budget, put some into Google, some into Facebook, and then carve out 5 to 10% to hit all of these niche audiences via newsletter. Because to your point, it was more or less impossible to do that previously. You would actually have to have relationships with all of these different newsletters, negotiate one on one with the pricing of all of the newsletters and then follow up, send assets creative, do the reporting and the invoicing. That's impossible to scale as like a smaller growing team. What we've built is we have north of 30,000 active publishers on the platform. We're sending nearly 3 billion emails a month. So we have advertisers like Nike, like Netflix, who come to us because they want to get in front of these niche audiences in an ad format that is much less twitchy than scrolling through Instagram and frankly less competitive than bidding on Google and more untapped than a lot of these other acquisition sources. And they're getting high quality impressions from very engaged readers and thousands of newsletters with a single buy. So that's our bet right now.

It's kind of an older model where you're paying to almost sponsor specific type of content based on how many users they have, how engaged they are, the type of content that it is. It's not a one to one type of ad where I want to advertise to Tyler.

So we do have a feature that allows you to do the latter. And there's more there where if you want to own the relationship directly with the advertiser as a publisher, you can and you can build your own storefront, facilitate payments. But the Beehive Ad network fundamentally is ag. One comes to us, they say we want men and women in their 20s and 30s, very health conscious. We have all of the first party data of all of our publishers and we know which newsletters have which type of audience historically, what type of newsletters convert well for these types of advertisers and purchase these types of products and then we can provision that ad to dozens, hundreds, thousands of newsletters at once to choose to accept that advertisement and running their newsletter, which we think is a huge value add to these creators.

Have you thought about doing a custom audience where an advertiser can come in with the audience that they want to run it to and you'll have some sort of subset of that audience and then you insert the ad just for those people in those newsletters?

Yes. Right now our advertising targeting is newsletter based, so it's more category content and historical performance. Eventually we're going to move into a world where it's subscriber base where when I send my newsletter to 110,000 people, there might be 20 different ads going out in that newsletter depending on who the recipient is subscriber specific targeting is something we plan to launch sometime in 2026.

As an advertiser I love custom audiences and there's only a small number of places I can do that on today. I can do that on Meta. I can do that on X. It doesn't really work on X, but I could try to do it on X. I could do a little bit on LinkedIn but doesn't really work that well. And then a little bit on Google. I'm somewhat limited. I pay often 4 to 10 times more CPM for a custom audience because it's niche. It's those people I really want to reach and I'd love to just bombard those people with like a specific ad that I'm trying to do.

Our North Star from day one of the business was can we build Meta's Facebook ad manager more or less directly for email? I don't know if they call it the Meta Ad Manager now. It's been a while since I've been in there but everything that you can do in there is really the North Star of the advertising tools that we're.

Looking to build and they've done such a great job because it's self serve so you don't have to have like a salesforce to go out there. Literally people just go in and set it up. It's so nice.

And then that's again our North Star as well. So somewhere in the next six to eight months I would imagine a self serve version for the Beehive ad network where any advertiser can come in, upload their custom audiences, upload the types of content and target demographic that they're looking to reach, tell us more about their product and we can serve those ads to the right people. I'm very bullish on the ad network.

There is a point where there's some sort of limit to the number of newsletters you want to pay for. You would think that advertising would become a bigger and bigger portion of the revenue that these newsletters would get. Where do you think that breaks down?

That's been my hypothesis and thesis from day one. We launched Beehive three to four years after Substack Substack at the time and they've seemed to change their tone here. Were very anti advertising and also very pro. Everyone can monetize their audience directly. You can do subscriptions. There's no such thing as subscription fatigue. And coming from my Morning Brew background which was 95% ad based revenue, I saw the power of being able to serve high quality ads to a very engaged audience. Where the audience got value because it was relevant to them. Where the advertiser also got value because they were seeing incredible performance. It's hard for Netflix to get people to pay their 10 to $15 a month. It's hard to get newsletter operators to get their readers to pay ten $20 a month as well. And there is some sort of fatigue there. That being said, we do offer users the ability to monetize via paid subscriptions monetize their audience directly. We're actually the only platform in the ecosystem that doesn't charge a percent fee. What you charge minus the stripe fees is exactly what you take home counter to substack who takes 10% and other competitors who take between 5 and 12%.

World of Das isn't just a podcast World of Das membership is a private, invite only community for founders and executives of important data and AI businesses. It's a place for off the record high trust conversations focused on the biggest questions data leaders are facing. The community is about peer learning, curated intros, and access to private events. Everyone in the group is building or leading something meaningful in data. If that sounds like you apply to join@worldofdas.com that's World of D A A S.com There are people who are putting together newsletters to monetize that newsletter either through paid subscriptions or through like at Morning Brewing some sort of advertising. But there's also a lot of content creators who are hoping to monetize other ways they're trying to get their name out there. Maybe they run a consulting firm and putting out free content. Or if you think of all the B2B newsletters that are out there, often it's because you want people to have other types of relationships. How do you think about those?

Ultimately I think actually that is the bull case for when people say that we're Peak Newsletter 1 if you live on the coast and are very in tune with tech and the media ecosystem, I think maybe you're subscribed to quite a few newsletters. I would imagine that most of the middle of the country and most of the world actually doesn't rely on newsletter as a huge form of regular information and news. So I think there's a huge opportunity there. But you also hit on B2B newsletters and businesses I think what HubSpot did in acquiring the Hustle, where they turned the hustle into basically just legion for HubSpot, where every day you're served one to two ads about HubSpot, but you're actually getting information from the Hustle in terms of tech news. They're speaking directly to their core icp, they're providing value, they're giving them relevant content with the hope that on the 17th time that you've seen this HubSpot ad and you're thinking about a new CRM that you choose HubSpot and now you're paying them $50,000 a year. And I think this content as marketing and getting people into a newsletter as a top of funnel only to drive them into a SaaS product or a consulting service or something else, is actually the minority of businesses who are participating in that. And I think it just takes patience, kind of like SEO for those who do have a better content strategy and can acquire their ICP for $1 or $2 for their email rather than $400 for like a lead in the platform, I think that's a winning formula and I think you're going to see more businesses do more of that.

How do you think people are going to end up consuming this? Because you get a newsletter in that maybe you want to read, but it takes some time to go read it. It's not just a quick two line email you can respond to. Maybe some people have filters and they're filtering it into like a read later folder. Some people are bookmarking that somehow. Some people just delete it because they don't have time to go through it. How's the user going to engage with all this content?

I think the same way that they have been for like the past five to 10 years. I think we've seen more companies and more content creators adopt newsletter and email as a strategy. At the same time, depending on who you are, you've also received a lot more cold email. Like the proliferation of all these different AI tools. And so the inbox is more crowded than ever. The superhumans of the world and these other inboxes will get better at filtering out mail that you actually want to read from mail that you don't want to read and don't need to respond to. But I think it all goes back to as a content creator, if you're creating quality content that is providing value to people, people will go out of their way to read it. And if you go out and prove to your inbox that this is content that you want to engage with, they'll continue to surface that content.

You now date on billions of emails, thousands of newsletters. Do you have a sense what you can learn both about the behavior of these people that are subscribing and about the content creators?

The content creators that are the most successful are very consistent. And I think you hear that from any type of content creator, whether you're an individual or business, is having a reliable schedule where your readers know to expect content being delivered at that time. And the type and quality of content, I think is super important. We see a lot of content creators sending it all different times. They send it one week when they feel like it, and then go three weeks without sending again. I think if you can't create a habit with your readers and audience, it's harder to get adoption and really scale anything. So I'd say consistency is something that we see the most successful content creators have.

And I find content creators, some of those successful ones sit at all different times. I get good ones on Sundays. Even I get good ones on Fridays. They're all over the map. Yeah.

And I don't think there's like a specific winning time by any means. It's just consistent for you and your audience. I get some on Friday afternoon, which I would never think is an optimal time to send an email. Personally, I know the three that are sent on Friday afternoon. I look forward to them every week. It's the expectation of behavior that they've created. As far as like readers, I think it's what you would expect. A lot of people who read newsletters read many newsletters. So there's very few people in our database as readers who have only subscribed to one newsletter. Most of our readers subscribe to, and I don't know the exact average, but more than one newsletter, whether that's through our recommendation features or whether that's just because people who consume information in their inbox are more likely to consume other types of information in their inbox. But that's something we see in the data as well.

There's this content void that people really want to read about. You could potentially help content creators fill that void. Is that something you could somehow figure out?

You would think so. And maybe if that's why I spent a lot more of my time, maybe I'm super heads down on the product side of things. I listen to users all day long that are trying to scale their newsletter and what features and things we could be doing to help them. And that's where I spend most of my time. But do we have the data? Maybe. I think one of the one interesting things that maybe Ben Thompson said years ago was that the Internet's so much bigger than people give it credit for. And it's kind of like the thousand true fans thing where if you are passionate about anything, whether it's gardening or a certain type of truck, there's probably tens of thousands at a minimum other people in the world who have that same fascination and interesting. And so it's really just finding that audience. I don't know if I'm the best arbiter of what's interesting and valuable to people.

So if it's super interesting to you, there's enough people probably that's super interesting to them.

And then you just have to figure out like where do those people live? And I also think there's different motivations for launching a newsletter. Some people do it as a pure hobbyist because they like writing and want to reach other people who care about the same thing. Other people are a bit more calculated of like I want this to be a revenue generating business and so I'm only going to launch it if I know that there's a large enough TAM and I can acquire those users for a certain price and then sell advertising or subscription revenue that is higher. I think it depends about how you go about it. That's why we try to keep our plans as cheap as possible so hobbyists can succeed on the platform as well.

What's some of the most surprising thing you've seen about user behavior? People who are consuming these newsletters, how.

Many they actually subscribe to? On the high end, you can imagine 30 or 40 newsletters that people are actively reading. I'm a huge newsletter advocate.

You're just seeing the stuff from Beehive. Obviously that same person is probably subscribing to newsletters to other platforms. Yeah.

And so I think the inbox as a channel for communication and receiving content, whether it's news or entertainment, is still early. Despite so many people claiming that we're peak newsletter.

Where do you see like the difference between building an audience versus building a community?

The way that I would look at the difference between building an audience and building a community is an audience is typically one to many. So in my case it's me communicating with my 110,000 readers. Maybe it's bi directional. They'll reply to me, I'll reply back to them. So there's some bit of bidirectionality where a community would be if I created a space where all 110,000 of them could actually interact and engage with each other and that they could provide value just by being a part of this community without me having to do anything, even though I'm maybe the centralizing force that has brought them together. And so it's an interesting thing. I think it's why a lot of larger newsletters pivot or expand into launching a discord or having some sort of community platform that can drive like minded people into the same space to engage with each other and provide value.

I'm on some Reddit threads and I love them and sometimes they're super nichy type of things about a specific passion and maybe they're somewhat related to a newsletter. Maybe because I'm on some newsletters I get involved in some Reddit threads.

Exactly. So I mean, Reddit's a great example. Anyone who's participating in any of these subreddits, I think that's definitely a community where there's being value provided. Bottoms up versus top down. I think bottoms up versus top down is probably the easiest way to think about community versus audience.

Is it the simple thing? If you're giving advice to a creator, just create great content.

Everyone's always looking for like cheat codes and silver bullets of how to grow faster. At the end of the day, until you can provide value reliably to your users or readers, where they're going out of their way to seek your content or they're recommending your content is probably the greatest signal that you found content market fit. And that's what we did at Morning Brew. Honestly, we built the referral program out of Morning Brew strictly from the signal that our readers, when we would ask them how they found out about us, was that their friend or their teacher or their parent recommended it to them. There was already this mechanism of people referring the newsletter to other people that they thought would enjoy it before we even added incentives into the referral program. That's the strongest signal that the content that you're creating is resonating with other people. But there's really no way that I've seen any newsletter or content creator, regardless of the platform, succeed without focusing on the quality of content. There's a lot of like gurus and newsletter operators who will tell you how to get the cheapest leads and how to build these automations. But if the content isn't great, I don't think anyone actually sticks around.

Now when I go to like Big Desk Energy your newsletter, it kind of harkens back to the UI of the 1990s or maybe even earlier. Is there something deep about tech nostalgia that gets us excited? What about that is so interesting to people?

Depending on who you are and how old you are, like, those were the formative years of the Internet building itself. In my personal life when I was first exposed to the Internet, we had the loud startup modem or whatever that makes all the different sounds and you have to wait 15 minutes to actually get online. And then you have to like redownload a bunch of programs. There's no like password savers or anything. And the process of going online, that's like my childhood.

Even like the old Nintendo graphics, old Atari graphics, or those types of things.

In a way it's beautiful of how terrible it was. There's something about, I guess when people were growing up in the formative years of their childhood of the core memory is that as you get older, I feel like there's work, there's stress, there's other things that are going on. And when you're a child, fortunately for me, and hopefully a bunch of other people, you're hanging out with friends, you're playing video games, you're on the computer. Life was like a much simpler time. And I think when you think back of your core memories of a child, when it's more overwhelmingly positive, you're probably more likely to associate other things in that time as positive as well.

What about those 1990s, early 2000s tech or Internet culture do you wish we could somehow recapture?

Definitely recency bias. Because I just read a piece on the shutdown of aol which brought up something that I thought was pretty interesting. And I think a good way to answer this question is back in the late 90s and early 2000s, the Internet was a place that you had to like seek, go out of your way to go to. The Internet was like a destination. And today the Internet is everywhere. You actually have to try hard to avoid the Internet. It's on you with your phone, your smartwatch. People are pretty much plugged in from the second that they wake up until the second that they go to sleep. And they're just constantly surrounded by push notifications and messages and information. Early 2000s, the Internet was this startup dial up modem thing that took 30 minutes to get to before you can even get access to anyone else on the Internet. I thought there's like a really interesting perspective of a destination versus it being all encompassing as it is today. And there's something cool about the people who went out of their way to build these online communities. Knowing that that was like a very intentional Destination, not just a push notification that got pushed to their phone.

You're an interesting person because you're both CEO and founder of a successful startup, but you also were one of the very first employees at Morning Brew, another successful company. What'd you learn about adding value to startup as an early hire versus a founder?

Obviously I wasn't a founder at Morning Brew, I was the second employee there. But it's a very gray area. But as far as like the day to day responsibilities, when there's three to five people at this company, there's no turning to someone else to get things done. Like you either do it or it doesn't get done. The jack of all trades, the bias towards action to have to actually identify what's the highest value thing that you could be doing at any given time and just executing without all of the different guardrails and managers and bureaucracy that happens in larger companies. I kind of view my time at Morning Brew as almost feeling like a founder. The best early employees do feel like a founder. No disrespect to the obvious founders, but I think those are the types of people that you want to hire as a founder.

If you're looking for employee number three at your company, how do you ID that?

Extreme bias towards action high agency, where they aren't looking for consensus, they aren't looking for a bunch of approvals, they have a track record and a history of identifying. I thought this was interesting. I acted on it, I made something of it. I was right and it's worked.

They're getting stuff done at a high.

Velocity or high output, but also like not afraid to fail. A lot of people that come from McKinsey or something. McKinsey is exactly what I was thinking of. There are certain career choices that are very calculated, very careful, clear line of command. Whereas this startup culture and the nature of high agency founders are just constantly shipping. I've made thousands of mistakes at Bey. That's totally fine as long as you understand what was the hypothesis going in, what worked, what didn't, and how can we learn from this and be better the next time. It is hard to like communicate the types of people that kind of fit that criteria, especially in like a few interviews. But I think most people know it when they see it. There's definitely people that I get off a call with where if this person was on our team, there are so many gaps and gray areas in the structure of our company where they could just fill the gaps and get things done. And I'd also say the ability where like, nothing ever slips by these people. I recently hired a chief of staff and like, has been life changing. They're on every email. They will ping me at any time. Hey, this happened three weeks ago. We still need to follow up on this. They have a running list of everything. There's certain people that I've hired throughout the journey of the company where nothing gets by them.

How did you ID that person? Or how did you get the most out of them? You just happen to get lucky and find someone who's super high agency or is there some playbook you have to make sure you can manage that person correctly?

I wish I had a playbook and I wish I had a better way of identifying them. One of my superpowers is being able to identify really good fits for different positions and roles or like just people that I think would be amazing to work with. A lot of the people that I hired at Morning Brew 2, it went on to be my co founders at Beehive and that's worked out extremely well. And a lot of my other early hires have gone on to do amazing things. You can get a sense of someone who views their job as a job and someone who actually views what they're doing as a passion and something that they really care about. And the more that you can find the people who look forward to Monday to like, actually build something meaningful and take pride in what they're building. It's harder to find and harder to test, but you can kind of get like a gut feel.

I've seen lots of different curveballs that have happened to companies. In your case, one of your co founders tragically passed away not too long after you founded the company. Can you walk us through how did you guys get through that? I can imagine that was like a very, very tough time. I don't want you to have to relive it now, but I think I've heard everything except for that one tough.

Time is probably an understatement. It was definitely the worst experience that I've had in my life. I've been pretty fortunate not to have close friends or family away. Andrew, who is our CTO and co founder, is the closest person that I've ever had that has passed away. And what made it more difficult is it's so hard to build a successful startup and the odds are always stacked against you. And we were six months in and starting to see real momentum. I feel guilty that it's impossible to separate Andrew, the person who I care about. And like Andrew, our cto, who's the Most important person at the company and a huge reason why we were having success. If there is a silver lining, it's since going through that experience. I feel like everything else pales in comparison of obstacles and challenges. We were hitting our first major scaling issues at the time, which he was owning and resolving. Obviously could not continue to own and resolve that. And so no one else on the team had the experience or the context to get us out of that situation. We were growing super quick at the time for like being a small five person team. Everyone had to step up, take on new responsibilities. My co founder was teaching himself a new coding language over the weekend. Really, like do whatever it takes to keep the business running. So definitely set us back for a while. If Andrew was here today, we'd be years ahead of where we are now. It kind of set us on this whole eight month journey of hiring a CTO who wasn't the right fit, finding another cto, ramping that CTO up, backfilling the position. We were treading water for three months, trying to not go under. There is a lot of resiliency at the company. It's baked into the DNA that everything else that comes across our path is a challenge that we can overcome, but clearly set us back quite a bit and was probably the most difficult part of my life.

Well, thank you for telling us that. Two more questions we ask all of our guests. What is a conspiracy theory that you believe?

I think a lot of the food that we eat and the water that we drink is not nearly as healthy or clean, at least in America. And I think people who travel internationally kind of feel this way. I have like a lot of friends who live internationally and come to the US and feel like a huge difference in like the food that they're eating. So I think there's like a common acceptance of just because it's normal and comes from the government pipes in the sink and it clears whatever regulations or whatever that they have. I think there's a lot of toxins, carcinogens, metals, plastics, up and down the food chain, both in the food and water that we drink.

And there's some conspiracy because there's someone benefiting from that somewhere down the chain.

You can go that in a million different directions. There's the healthcare industry who benefits from people being sick and the longevity and the medicine, the pharmacy. I'm fairly cynical on that. I think that a lot of people just take information as, oh, everyone else is just doing the same thing. And everyone eats this and drinks this. So it's totally Fine. I think that there's a lot of toxins and bullshit that a lot of people eat and drink that I think we're starting with this new health wave, this whole medicine 3.0, and that getting more proactive tests are starting to shine a bit more of light. I'm pretty big onto that.

What do you do that maybe it's a little bit different from our listeners on the health stuff?

I'm a total health nut. You probably see it in the back. I have like an air freshener and air purifier in every room, making sure that I'm breathing in clean air when I can while I'm inside. I have like a reverse osmosis water filter because I don't trust the water in LA and the tap water and.

Everything that just attaches to the sink.

Or something or some overpriced thing that you put under your sink and it filters out. And I've done my research and knowing that to remove all of the different carcinogens and toxins and metals and everything else in the water that's typically in tap water, that's how you remove all of that. I try to eat regenerative farming, organic and everything that I possibly can. And the more direct a farm that I can find, the better.

So you're not on like the all Twinkie diet or something like that?

I don't know if I've ever ate a Twinkie.

Oh, man, that's tough. Last question we ask all of our guests. What conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

I think it depends on who you are and what you're trying to do. But if I'm speaking to founders, I think the generic advice of finding work life balance is total bullshit.

But does anyone give that to founders?

Honestly? Yes. I think a lot of people say, like, oh, it's a marathon. You don't want to burn out. You need to take care of yourself. You need to make sure that you actually carve out time for yourself to do XYZ and whatever. For me, at least while I have the ambitions that I do. And I think this could be truly a multibillion dollar company. It's not easy to build a multibillion dollar company. And me going to dinner at 6 o' clock on a Tuesday or Wednesday, maybe that's balanced because I'm not staring at my computer till 9 o' clock at night. But I actually don't think that's helping me achieve the goals that I've set out to do. And so for this part of my life where the company is the most important thing in my life. I actually don't think work life balance is reasonable and I don't think that's advice that other founders should work with.

That makes a lot of sense. This has been great. Thank you Tyler Dank for joining us on World of das. I follow you at Dank underscore tweets on X and I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. I also subscribe to your newsletter as well, Big Desk Energy, and I hope that all of our listeners subscribe to that as well. Thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks for listening. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe to World of Das wherever you consume your podcasts, YouTube, Apple Spotify and more. And please help us get discovered by leaving a review. And check out worldofdaz.com that's worldofdas-a a s.com and of course connect with me on Twitter Oren. That's a U R E N Would absolutely love to hear from you.