YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Sandow

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69
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2024-06-04
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2024-06-04
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  1. “You're an assistant. And I've not gotten this question before. Can I point to one thing? I got to tell you, I have incredible parents that have always given me incredible advice and support through all of my endeavors. And I think that this constant support, good times or bad times, it's something I try and do to my two girls, it's given me an underlying ability to do what I do. I used to joke back in the early days, like, what's the worst that happens? Business goes out of business. I'm moving my parents and I'll get back on my feet. But I think my parents were always incredibly supportive of success and failure. And it's something that's always stuck with me. And it's something that is hardwired into me with my two kids and my wife. It's a foundational building block that I think is essential in life. And I was lucky enough to get it. And I think I give that to those close to me.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I mean, it's hard to beat the economist, although, if it was the only thing I could look at, I think the diversity of Monaco, I would have to say, would be an interesting one. It's hard to get through an issue. There's so much content in there. But economist or Monocle, I think, are two really good ones that are hard to beat.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I can build something and hand it to someone, and I can come in for a quarterly meeting and I leave impressed going, my God, they're killing it with this business. That to me is when I feel like most successful and I'm most proud is it's living beyond me so I can go build the next thing because I love that zero to one.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Sure, that those foundational businesses are good that can help you grow. There was a point where it was just so you talk about mistakes. One of the mistakes I made early on was I didn't build enough leadership in the company. So I was doing everything on every brand. I've addressed my team in the times when I'm the most proud. If you were to say to me, Adam, what are you the most proud? It's actually when I build something that I turn over to a leader and they continue to be successful and grow without me because I truly believe in no ego in it all, but I just have the mentality that I will figure it out. I don't care what the hell happens. I will figure out how to make it successful. I will work 100 hours a week if I have to. I will build it. I will make it successful. So through sheer force of nature, I feel like I can do it. But that's not sustainable.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Bigger than just another piece in my ecosystem. And if I don't raise capital, I run the risk of not scaling it fast enough. Now, material bank today has scaled massive operations in Europe. We've got a partnership in Japan. We're looking at other big countries. It is a global business today. I raise capital and made that decision to bring in outside investors. I was always in control and to this day to control the board and to control the company because I took all those early risks. So I wasn't raising seed capital and then raising a series A. And then by the time you're on your sieve, you've lost control of the board. And we were lucky enough to find, and I brought in an incredible CEO, incredible background, amazing person is now the CEO. And I've moved to executive chairman, which again frees me up to build the next thing. So you got to start by making.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Are using the cash flow to build the next thing. And I've done that my whole life. And by the way, Patrick, sometimes it's been really, really hard. You start to use bank debt. Economies change. It's easy to look at certain things we've done and go like, my God, it's billions of dollars of value created. But when you're on your own, when you don't have partners, when you don't have investors, when you don't have a board, it's unbelievably liberating and free and that's how I'm wired. But you're also one guy. And when things turn and change on anything else, I'm the guy that's got to fix it. So very careful to build businesses that allow you to build the next, the next, the next. And Material Bank was unique. I knew that I had the potential of something very, very big. And we funded a lot of it the first few years and a lot of capital myself. But I made that decision. I said, this is a business that is going to be.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I've always been a builder versus a flipper. And I don't mean flipping in a bad way. There's a lot of founders going, I'm going to build it. I'm going to raise capital. I'm going to exit. And I'll go on to maybe the next thing. I've always taken a long-term approach to every single thing I do in my life. I have never built a business going, okay, I'm going to start it and here's my exit plan. And we have exited some businesses and have done really well in those exits. But for the most part, I've always liked to build and hold and see what I can build on top of. And I think advice is starting with building a business that is really strong and that's got a good model with good economics because one feeds the other. So if you can build something that cash flows and use that cash to build the next thing, that to me is the magic. You're not selling it. You're not flipping out of it.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “To help build those value creator businesses that, to your point, can be worth 100x the media or more, but they work together. I just think media guys have just not done enough of this. They're sitting on great assets and they're still thinking media. And then you got the startup guys thinking of startup and they're both pretty far apart.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So the new baby that I'm incubating, which is another technology and logistics business having nothing to do with design, but very much technology and logistics, a much bigger industry candidate, B2B and B2C. We are actually doing the reverse. We're inventing the one-of-one business that's never been built before. And we're taking a media property and completely pivoting the media property to dovetail right into the editorial content that will help support this and help us build that ecosystem. So for the very first time, we're doing it the opposite. We're starting with our business thesis. We're building out this technology. And building the media, but we're building it on acquired platform that's got massive user base and tangential users that we think will dig this particular content. I think it's important. I think it goes back to that ecosystem of having this multidisciplinary media ecosystem.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Goes back into that. And I think when you build that ecosystem where it is a component of that's where the OnePlus One is five. And I think it's a necessary evil.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “And the reason there's so much garbage is that media company desperately, desperately needs you to misclick on a stupid banner to get the two pennies. And that is a recipe for disaster. And I can't tell you more times than not, I will follow a link to an article and I will abandon the article because there's 12 pop-ups or there's fake this and it's unbelievably irritating. So my time is more valuable than that. I think that's where print comes in, but it's part of an ecosystem. It has to be, in my opinion, part of. And there's a time for that print when you can do it. It's the same thing like a podcast. Why I think I love podcasts so much. I think why they're so popular is that you're giving yourself that time. There are podcasts I listen to, an hour, an hour and 15 minutes of my life and I've focused on one thing. That is deep, deep, deep value. You can't compare that to bouncing on a website or flipping a social media thing. So I think...”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Design, and you're really dreaming about your next home, you want that peace and quiet. You don't want the blinking banners. You don't want things popping up. Here's the best example. Go on and read an article from a popular news site on your mobile phone. You want to throw your phone across the thing. There's trick banners, things, pop-ups. You don't know where the article stops. There's just so much garbage.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Patrick, here's the most important thing. Here's the thing that I believe in more now than I ever have. Like boating when I sit at my desk, I give myself time to look at one of the boating magazines I like. I'm not distracted and I'm captured. There's no blinking things with messages. I'm not flipping on TikTok. There's nothing blaring. I'm in the moment. And it's getting my undivided attention. And that's a luxury. Now, I'm more curatorial than ever of what I will do that with. I picked up a business magazine in the day. I couldn't wait to get through it. The paper was horrible. The advertorials, everything about it was terrible. There was somewhere on the cover I wanted to read about. And that was it. And I couldn't wait to get done dropping the trash. Other magazines, if it has a place on my desk or at home, I think that's where print shines. It's hard to capture the imagination. You need the right mix of content, quality. It's got to be the right niche. But if you're into these things, if you're into home.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Chance of a lifetime. It would be a little startup business buying vogue pretty amazing. Those opportunities don't come around a lot. And a lot of the times the media is just too beaten up. It's too hard. In really good, frothy times I build and in really bad times when the world's ending, I buy.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, because I use my own capital and certainly bank debt on things when you need it, but because I don't have private equity in the business or we don't raise capital, I mean, we raise capital for material bank, but that was it. When I buy things, we're typically value buyers of distressed product. We're not a roll-up buying incredibly high performing assets and trying to roll them up. I think that's a really tough thing to do in media. So we tend to buy things that we look at and say under our cost structure with our team and our ability, I believe this can become accretive pretty quickly. We tend to look for those kinds of deals. Today we're not buying as much. It's just not a core part of my strategy. I prefer, unless it's something really special, like interior design magazine was the idea that this was even available was shocking.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “It's how we run our most important relationships. I mean, Sherry, we sell ads, but our most important relationships are solutions to their problems. Our media teams do that interior design rolled out a new program. The CEO there is Erica Holborn. She rolled out this new program called Max. And it's an entirely new solution, turnkey, really comprehensive solution to companies' problems at many levels. Every one of our brands does that. We've always had to do that to keep ahead of our competition, but it's the same thinking. Before I had anything else but media, I would sit in meetings going, what are your business problems? Well, we have a problem getting our reps into architecture firms. They literally will not take our call because they love our competitor and they hate us. Okay, let's figure out how to use the tools that we have to accomplish a solution, not just what ad would you like. And we've always had that DNA. And I've just taken that DNA further.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Works, but that's what I love. And it's something I've done my whole life because at the end of the day, when you start your own business. I was a salesman. I had to go sell the ads. I needed a really great pitch, and I would talk about what the ad could do for you and how can we design the ad to deliver the solution. So this has always been ingrained in me as a media guy. You would have built material by and going, let's just charge a monthly fee for the listing and horrible model. You're limiting the business would be a tiny peanut business today. So I take a lot of pride in the engineering of the solution and the refining of the solution. I'll come up with the answer. Literally, when I came up with material like, oh, we'll figure out fulfillment. I know I can figure it out. If other people could figure it out, I know I can figure it out. I didn't let that bother me, whereas a lot of other companies may have said, where's your logistics team? And how do you build it? If I've got a viable way to generate a lot of business, I feel like I can build almost anything.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I ask a lot of questions. And because, like I said, I'm constantly as a human collecting data points on everything. And because I'm so naturally curious, I take it as a challenge to find the problem. I don't get the answers. I never talk to people. Let me tell the problem and they hand me an answer. But it's really the way I have this iterative process of absorbing the information and really thinking about it. I parallel path the thinking with the business model. And I literally will sometimes do this by hand. I'll sit with my notebook and I will fill 20 pages of handwritten math, manual math, thinking through the business model, everything at once. The only way I can explain it is I do everything at one time. I envision the solution, the business model, the economics, the look, the feel. I do everything at one time. And that is something, it's a gift from my parents, I guess.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Great heritage. You can probably do something incredible with that. But it's got to be something special or it's going to get lost. So they're out there, those opportunities. And I love those heritage brands personally.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “We literally live in a world, if you look at the old science fiction movies of the guy walking down the street and billboards talking to him and things flashing and things hovering and that's the world we live in today. Our attention span, you go to a website and you're like, what's the average time on site? 38 seconds. That's pretty good. Like, no, no, it's not. That's not great. But in the world of web, you're a minute. My God, you're killing it at a minute. Tough. So where do you find those really juicy meads where there's an underserved or completely missed market? And how do you do it differently? I had a group, they ultimately didn't win, but they were trying to buy Time magazine. And I sat and I brainstormed a half a day with them. I'm like, how I would re-envision Time Magazine. And it was tough. I had some ideas, but it's like tough. How do you do that? You can, but it's tough. But we're seeing, I mean, look, Life magazine was just bought by Kushner and amazing brand.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Have to obsess? Where is there a hole? And by the way, really hard to find holes today, but they're out there. I'm sitting on this few ideas I've had that I want to build. I'm so busy on other launches right now. But there are holes in the market. But you've got to have a real reason for being. If you're just being a Me Too, the world doesn't need it. And now you've got to basically outperform, out operate an incumbent, which maybe you can do, maybe you can't. But I never wanted to be that guy going, we're just like that one, but we're cheaper or we're just like that, but different. I don't know. It's not exciting for me. I think that I would urge anyone in media, certainly, to have a love for it. What's different? Where is there a brilliant business model attached to it? Where is there a need that's underserved? There's a niche you can go into because there's a lot out there. I mean, today, fighting for attention is everyone's fighting for attention.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “The most important thing, forget brand, forget design, forget quality, is what is your value proposition? The world doesn't need another whatever. So what are you doing that's unique and special? I have never built MeToo businesses and sometimes to our detriment. I've never followed whatever wave is coming. A lot of times people call it great ideas, whether it's a magazine or anything. I've got a great idea for this. And maybe even the TAM is there. But what is the viable business model? Again, because I fund everything myself, there is no downround for me. I spend all of our money doing dumb things. We go to business. So I try and find businesses where it makes sense to me. And I feel there's an incredible value proposition that I'm delivering to the user. And there's a business model attached. And if I was teaching a media business today, that's where you...”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Did with worth some of the most beautiful magazines we've ever produced. We did illustrations on the covers. It was just absolutely gorgeous. And it really resonated with the industry. If you can buy it, I'm a big believer in buying. I think today building is hard. Still, I love to build brands and we're constantly building new things. But we're still acquiring. We acquired a 15-year-old design website called Design Milk. I bought that a few months ago. We're about to buy two more digital platforms in the design space just because they fit in our ecosystem. So I'm a big believer in buying. I love to build. I'm a zero to one builder. I love to invent. But if you can do that on a brand that's got credibility, I think it's even better.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Look, I think if you can buy a brand that's got a story, a heritage, a reputation, it's always better. Obviously depends on the deal, depends on structure, depends on how well the brand has received sometimes. In the media business, they kill the brands and then you can buy them and they're not worth a lot because they're a bit bastardized. But I think there's a lot of great media brands that could eventually be bought. And there's something to do with heritage. It's like licensing business. Brands are resurrected all the time and reimagined. There's something to be said for that history. I like a story. When I bought interior design, we were given the archives going back almost 100 years. And I love that. To go back in there and see what were people talking about 90 years ago about office design or home design. Worth is another one, like the archive of worth is a brand everyone knew. So when you reintroduce it, there is a credibility. And again, if you look at what we”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Robert Singer is still the chairman from the day I started that magazine, one of the most important successful plastic surgeons now retired. But he guided us. We didn't know what the heck we were doing. Even our editors were early. We were able to be guided to have Ezrael integrity to make sure that our content was vetted properly. Media companies don't do that. It's certainly 2005. No one was handing over a lot of power to a board from a privately held business, but it allowed us to have an incredibly high value of editorial product that to this day has never waver. But I just never felt right to chase what everyone else was chasing. And if you look at some of the biggest digital media companies that have blown up, companies with five billion dollars, they're the future of media and they're literally gone or in bankruptcy. Who would have thought? So it's just a tricky, very tricky industry. It's not an easy one.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Of the media, and this goes across all media, has changed to that mass eyeball. They're not going to compete with TikTok. They're not going to compete with Instagram and TikTok for literally Mindshare or podcasts as a category today. So you better have extraordinary content. It's got to be special. And that was my attitude from the beginning. When I built New Beauty, I said, how do I create a different kind of beauty magazine? There were other beauty magazines out there. They're gone now, but there were a bunch. How do I create something really special? I did something unique with NewBeauty. I went ahead and I built an editorial advisory team of some of the most important, best minds in beauty. Now this is beauty from nutrition all the way to plastic surgery. And we got these incredible people that helped us create guardrails for the product. And to this day, I mean, literally, the chairman of the editorial advisory board, Dr.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Well, it starts with having the best people, the people that are at the foundation of our editorial products, have been here a really long time. They're honestly the best in the industry. And because we don't play those games of clickbait or any of our websites. So when you allow the editorial teams to really do what they want without the constraints of a lot of media companies today that are just constraining them to produce a certain kind of content for mass eyeballs, that is, in my opinion, absolutely the way to lose is to do that. So I try and find the best people and give them a lot of autonomy to allow them to do what they do best. And it used to be that way. They used to have these editors that were exalted and just powerful. And that doesn't happen anymore because a lot of people.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Materials when they're looking to source it. And we've got today we're probably a third of the Fortune 1000 companies that use us. So it's not just architects and designers. You've got some of the biggest corporations in the world. Their teams sourcing materials and we connect them right to the manufacturers.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “CEO loved what I was doing, and I said, I'm going to build my business on your backbone, on FedEx's backbone. You got to help me. And they did. And we spun up our first logistics operation. And in May of 18, we literally were doing midnight cutoff of everything. We invented packaging, everything that was done. And today we're in a massive facility handling, can't imagine the volume. We have hundreds of robots and an amazing team of people, but you can order tonight at 1158 89 pieces of material from 25 companies, and you'll have it at 1030. And our failure rate is 0.01. Our team in Memphis, our chief logistics officer, Steve Smith, is just incredible. That warehouse doesn't fail. And it's now become, many years later now, the utility that the industry runs on because that's where everyone goes to find.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “These companies in Memphis were like, you want to have 20 million pieces of material, 500,000 SKUs. You want to take a brick and a piece of glass raw, put it in one package, and overnight it at three in the morning. Literally laughed out of the room. Like, we're not interested. You'll never do it. We left Memphis going like, no one wants our business. So we do. We always do. We found an 80,000 foot building. There was this ramshackle old building. And I'm like, we're going to figure out how to do this because the value of mastering midnight cutoff overnight delivery to the country is a big value. And I didn't want seven o'clock. I wanted midnight. So we hooked up with a robotics partner called Locus Robotics from.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “But what I had to do and where that story of microwarehouse comes in is. Even our research showed us seven o'clock cutoff would be so beyond expectations forget it, game over, they would love it. I said to my COO, I said, we're going to do midnight because there's one place on the entire planet that you can do that. It's Memphis, Tennessee, because of FedEx. There's no other place on planet Earth to do it. So I'd never been to Memphis. He'd never been to Memphis. Like, we're going to Memphis, and we're going to find a logistics provider because we've never been in logistics. We go to Memphis. We have two big meetings. We meet with FedEx, and we say to FedEx, we will be the number one shipper of priority overnight packages out of Memphis. Please help us get there. And they were amazing. FedEx has been an amazing partner. They took us serious. They actually really took us serious. And then I went to all these fulfillment companies. And we were laughed out of the room.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “To do anything but wake up, have his coffee, and go, Who got my samples? Who do I follow up with? And I'll charge you transactionally. I'll charge you cost per action. So manufacturers were saying, wait a minute, no sampling, no warehouses, no nothing, no, you're just going to put leads into my CRM and I'll pay you transaction like Google done. So we were able to build a model that supply and demand sides of the marketplace were very happy with. And because of that media platform that I spent the prior 20 years building, I had access to customer acquisition, which is, again, talk about the hardest thing in any business with digital. It's your customer acquisition cost and your lifetime value. Well, I had this ability to enter the firms to this day. Our media company still drives the awareness for material bank. We were able to build this really, really innovative model.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Sure, I was bloody jealous of it. So I said, How can I build a model? Because I know the designer, I know the demand side will be there if I can do it, hard to do, but if I could. But how do I create a model that is compelling for a manufacturer? And I looked at that Google AdWords model and I thought, well, this is so brilliant. And I started to talk to manufacturers like, I got an idea. I'll take every piece of material, every piece of data. I'll do all the data work myself. Don't lift a finger. I will literally build and normalize your data structure and put it on my website. No cost. I'll take every sample you have, bring an 18 wheeler, back it up to my building. I will load it into my warehouse, no cost. I want X dollars every time I find a designer that I've qualified that says I love that carpet. I want the carpet. I'll fetch it overnight. I'll put all of that data right into your CRM. So your salesman doesn't.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Never. They're too hard. They're too hard. You wake up one morning and your business has been taken over by Microsoft, Amazon, Google, startup kids. I don't like pure digital businesses. They're too hard to build. Your failure rate is just astronomical. I don't like pure digital businesses. I like things that are messy and complicated because the pain to do what I want to do with Material Bank is not the pain the average person or the average startup would ever do. So I like that barrier. So then I went to manufacturers and I said, I would walk into a meeting and it's like, I'm jealous of Google. What do you mean? I'm like, well, Google has the best ad model in the world. Google's ad model was, hey, we'll run your little link as many times as you want. We won't even charge you for it. But when someone clicks, we'll charge you two bucks. Greatest ad model ever. Amazon and Google, they each have a different models, but this Google ad words model as a public.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “You're going to do it. So I went to, I won't say who, but one of the people used to work for me, a top guy. And I said, I've got this crazy idea. Again, another side note. I will never build a business pure digital.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Would save. And then I said, and what if I could turn that box I sent you into a return box, postage paid, and whenever you don't want the samples, keep what you want, sent back so I can put them back on the shelf. So designers were already, I stopped being focus groups because they're like, Adam, you'll never do it. We would never use anything else. If you could do that game over, but come on, how are you going to get these materials?”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “How do you handle samples? I'm like, well, we've got eight guys in our warehouse, and we're in St. Louis, so at two o'clock we cut off. We ship everything ground because we're not going to spend the money. It was like a mess on both sides. It was just a bloody mess. And I would start doing focus groups with designers. I'm like, hey, I got a question. If there was a website that you can go on with every manufacturer you cared about and all their data was there, all of the photos were there. And you could request samples for free as a designer until midnight. And then at 1030 in the morning, this beautiful, I spent a year designing this packaging, this beautiful package shows up at 10.30 on your desk with every material from every manufacturer. And they would go like, I don't believe you. I'm like, no, no, I think I can build this. There's no way. And designers would say that would change the hours that that would give me back. The boxes that would save, the mess.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Over to me in a few days or whatever. And I said, But how many samples do you get? I'm like, oh, we get thousands. This is our job. That sounds pretty unbelievably slow, inefficient, not even sustainable. Getting boxes. And they're like, oh my God, you come to our mailroom. I'd go to mail rooms. And there was hours of taped boxes and bricks and glass and these hailmade boxes. It was a mess. So I go to a manufacturer and I would say,”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “She goes, Oh, sir, that's really easy. She goes, We are at the DHL headquarters. It's like I heard nothing else the rest of the night. It's the most brilliant thing I've ever heard in my life. And then why isn't every warehouse at the DHL headquarters? But by the way, I'm not price shopping at three in the morning. I'm getting whatever price they're giving me because I want it tomorrow. Obviously, Amazon took this and ran with this, let's say. But micro warehouse was this incredibly visionary company that would get me everything the next day. And this is the 90s. I'm driving in my car at midnight that never left my head. It literally never left my head. So fast forward and we're building Material Bank and I'm talking to designers. And I said, tell me about sampling. I said, wow, it's kind of a pain. We sometimes have a little closet. It's very messy and disorganized. But usually I'll go on the website. I'll fill out a form. And in a week, I get the sample or I'll call a rep and bring it up.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Everything. I'm immensely curious about everything. And there was a company called Micro Warehouse. I think it was owned by Felix Dennis who passed away Maxim. He's a brilliant English businessman. And this was in the 90s. And micro warehouse, company that was ahead of its time. I would get the catalogs. And on the cover of the catalog, I remember like it was yesterday, there was a woman with a headset on and it said order anything from our catalog by 3 a.m. and you'll have it tomorrow. This is the 90s. Amazon wasn't even a thing. And I would only order from them because in the 90s I was wearing every hat and I was building my company and I would drive home at midnight from working all day and night ordering a laptop for some employees starting the next day. One that I call and I'm talking to the operator, I'm literally driving, giving her my credit card over the phone. And I said, I have a question. How the hell are you?”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “You might college down from 20 Marvels to three, but the physical review of a sample to make a buying decision is this essential, messy, complex step. And I remember someone who worked for me at the time many years ago, and I said, I've got this crazy idea. Talk to designers and see, I'd pose this to everyone. And I said, What if I could change the way that whole process happens? I'm going to go tell you a little side story. I am obsessed with collecting data points and knowledge. My brain does not turn off. I feel like all I do is collect data points and I collect just bits of information and knowledge my whole life. And I've got this curiosity for.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Kinds of things to make that decision. And by the way, as they get further and further in the design process, now the client, the owner is starting to get those samples. These decisions are made with these physical samples. Now you go and you switch to a manufacturer and you say, tell me about pain points. And they'll say, well, marketing is harder than ever. Google, the rates are unimaginable how expensive it is. It's getting harder to market. Our reps can't get in to see designers like they used to, just harder in general. And oh, by the way, 12% of my revenue goes to sampling. 12% of your revenue. Yeah, sampling is not going anywhere. And by the way, I don't care how good the goggles and haptic feedback gloves get. You're not speaking 80,000 feet of a marble by going, well, it looks good in the goggles. Let me go ahead and buy it.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Yeah, I started to do what I always do. Everyone that works me, this was something very familiar. I started to ask about pain points. And I started to make sure that these weren't marketing pain points. These weren't, what do you think I can solve for you? I said, tell me what are your problems just in general. As a designer, tell me about frustration points. As a CEO of a company that globally makes carpet, tell me your frustration points. What I started to see was this physicality of our industry was becoming a real pain point. So here was, in essence, the problem. You sit with a designer and the designer would say, look, I'm building a hotel. I've got a spec 80,000 square feet of marble for this incredible hotel. And I've got to find just the right product. Well, when a designer does that, they spend months looking. They're getting samples.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Of fame. He's a friend of our firm, and he's got this crazy idea. He wants you to help him refine it. And these were all decision makers in the firm. And walking in with this relationship and this trust where we're going to help him with this because he helps us. And it was those moments that stuck in my mind as these things that you can't do as an outsider, no matter how brilliant you are and how much cash you have, it's very hard to do that in certain industries. And we were fortunate enough to have worked really, really hard in the media businesses and employ incredibly talented, brilliant people that help to build those brands. And that allowed me to move to the next big thing, which was, okay, let's try and change how the whole industry runs. And that led me to invent and build and then really scale material bank.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “And there were many, many meetings where I'd say, Look, this is years away, but what if? And when you start to hear designers and CEOs of these design companies, the manufact carpet, tile paint. And what I love is when they say to me, Adam, my God, you build that, that could change the industry. Patrick, how many times do you talk about here on the podcast like marketplaces? Well, you need two sides to really make that flywheel work. And we had both sides at a pretty amazing level. We had that trust. So it was amazing. I remember going into a meeting with one of the largest architecture firms in the world. And I was walked in by one of the board members. And it was a big group of people in that meeting. And he says, you might not know who Adam is, but you know what he owns. And he talked about all our magazines and things. And I never forgot this. He said, he's a friend of the firm. Because what have I done for 50 years, written about them, awarded them, inducted them in the hall?”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Started to say, I've got this incredibly fortunate position of being a trusted partner in the design industry. And that gave me liberty to go talk to manufacturers and designers back to the same thing I love to ask. What are your pain points? But I had that license. And I also had capital. I didn't have to go and raise money. I was able to fund all of the R&D and all of the proof of concepts myself. And MaterialBank is a great example of that. Material bank really came as a byproduct of, let me really think, what could I do that's game changing? And I couldn't have done it. I really, really could not have done it without the media and the people that worked in those media companies and the relationships that they built with the biggest brands in the world that had a love and a trust for my media brands that would at least listen to me.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Everyone could understand could a magazine build something that has credibility in its industry well beyond and way more valuable than the magazine? And that's why I started to, going back to the test tube, which is the beauty sampling business. Was our first experience a year in, candidly, making more money even than the magazine was super high margins. That thesis carried me through where I kept saying to my internal teams, guys, what are the tools and services we can build for our industries? Don't just think about what ads we can sell. Sure, we've got to sell ads, and we still sell a heck of a lot of ads across all my media, digital, video, print. It's a foundation for us. When I started to think bigger.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Years. And she said, We're going to figure out how to completely re engineer the workflow of the fashion industry. And we're going to create software to completely transform the fashion industry. I think I can go and get it adopted. Now, could you imagine someone like Anna Winter walking into Raffler and personally going, Ralph, I think I have completely reimagined fashion. I might be crazy, but I want you to try it. That's a 10-minute conversation with someone like Ralph Lorenzo's going to go down to his people and go, oh guys, Anna's coming with some software. Get ready because we're going to give her every bit of testing versus two guys in a dorm room startup. They're not getting into the building, let alone going to see Ralph Loren.”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “I don't believe that a magazine producer, again, there are certain outliers, but I don't believe that a magazine producer that has got a big magazine business is going to be able to replace the lost dollars in print. And by the way, print is very high margin. I don't believe you're going to replace lost dollars with blinking banners and fake content and all the other fun and games that everyone does. I said, and this was my thesis for the business and still is to this day, is what can you build on top of your media business that is not media, that gives you license to do something much, much bigger? I always gave this example, it's a juvenile example, but if as Vogue magazine Anna Wintor, who owns fashion and Vogue owns fashion, but if Anna Wintor would have sat down with a team of engineers,”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “This stuff, I'm always under the radar. And I said to the gentleman, he was CEO of Time Inc. at the time. I said, Look, I'm pretty contrarian to the digital stuff. Not to say digital advertising is not right, but as a magazine, I don't know if you're going to kill it. Facebook, Google, yeah, but as a producer of Thai magazine, I don't know that you're going to dominate digital. He says, no, no, no, I love it. You'll be the contrarian on the stage. I remember my message to the people in the audience and to every employee I had. And I would always say this was,”

    2024-06-04 · Invest Like the Best · Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source