YouSaid · the spoken record

Alyssa Ravasio

lines on the record: 61
first: 2021-04-29
most recent: 2021-04-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“2016 or so, and I would say that was really when we became a marketplace. And in that moment, much like the democratization trend of the internet that we've been talking about, I realized that the existing traditional outdoor infrastructure, while amazing, one is really limited and two is actually often quite narrow in who it serves. You don't want a tent camp and sleep on the ground and a campground with a bunch of other people, or if you don't want to backpack many miles into the wilderness and bring absolutely everything you need to support yourself for a few days, maybe getting outside isn't for you. And what happened with hip camp as we opened up this platform that supported now tens of thousands of entrepreneurs in creating these new outdoor experiences, we learned that there's a huge amount of demand and a huge amount of supply that's so much more diverse and so much more relevant than the traditional.”
2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing that, I hate you, hip camp. And I was just like, Oh my gosh, how are we ever going to fulfill our mission to get more people outside when our existing outdoor infrastructure is already chronically underfunded, which we should fix, and overcapacity? How are we going to solve this problem? My first attempt was to try to convince the government to build a lot more campgrounds. I worked on that earnestly for years. Finally, due to really financial necessity and needing to find a business model to keep this company and this team and this dream going, we said, hey, let's work with private landowners. Some of them had emailed us. They actually reached out to us and said, hey, I've got land. It's expensive to maintain. Maybe people would want to camp here. The idea was not intuitive to me at first. I'm not ashamed to admit I had no experience getting outside on private land. So it just wasn't obvious to me that that was something that might be fun or enjoyable. But we decided to give it a try. And so that was.”
2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Evolved quite a bit. So if we zoom back to that first moment of gosh, getting outside is hard, and if it was easier, more people would do it and the internet could solve that, the original, I don't even know if I'd call it a marketplace back then, it was really more of a discovery tool. Our goal was at that point to aggregate the existing places one might go camping. So we put the state parks and the national parks and the county parks all on one map, one easy unified interface, reviews, photos, et cetera. It was a great product. People really loved it. It solved a very real need for a community. But over the first few years, we kept hearing this feedback again and again. It was pretty scary from like an existential standpoint as a company, which was, hey, your product's cool, but everything's booked up all the time. So I can't actually get upside. Or when we finally would find a campground that wasn't totally at capacity and we put it on the homepage, we get hate mail. Hey, that's my spot. You're blowing up my secret spot. Why are you?”
2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't think the internet's here to save us. I don't think that it's an incredibly positive thing that's going to fix everything. I believe it's a neutral technology. Its impact will depend on who learns to use it and what they use it for. That could look like tons of fake news, completely degrading the integrity of our political system because no one has a solid set of facts to operate from anymore. Or it could look like the greatest revolution we've seen in creativity with creators now everywhere telling their story and really creating a culture that has much more diversity in how we represent our lived and shared experiences. So it can really go either way and that belief I think also was really at the core of why I decided I had to make my life about this technology. I don't believe that it's inherently good or bad.”
2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, it became the name of the majorization. So the major actually ended up being called digital democracy. What that meant to me and what I think is so powerful about the internet is it takes opportunity and information and access that traditionally has been super limited to a few and in many cases has been consolidating to a few and blows that bottleneck wide open. So good examples like television, like before the internet, there was like the set number of stations. Obviously cable TV had kind of helped expand it from a very limited number of network stations. But then the internet comes along and is like YouTube, TikTok. Everybody can have a TV channel now. That dynamic in particular to me has persisted across so many of the biggest trends that the internet's helped catalyze that I think really are genuinely reshaping whether that's good and bad. One of my other big places at technology is actually neutral.”
2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was a hard rate turn from wanting to make movies. And so I actually tried to pitch the film school, let me create a special major in the film program where I don't learn cinematography and directing. In order to get my degree, which I'm pretty sure that I ended up getting, I actually creating a major about the internet. There's a special individual studies program where I was able to spend the last couple years at UCLA really hand picking classes that by my mind and with my professor advisors sign off constituted a major with a focus on the internet's impact on our society so if anyone out there ever has a chance to create a major or your kids do i think it's one of the best ways to get the most out of educational institution because you get to learn about what you love and what grabs your interest”
2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To UCLA in a study film that had been my dream since I was nine years old, my very first company was a film production company where I employed my two little sisters and we made music videos going to GCLA and being a film director like Francis Ford Coppola. Like that was the plan. That was the dream. I got in. It was incredible. And then something very unexpected happened, which was I became obsessed with the internet. There was in particular one moment where Brand Farron, who was, I believe at the time, the head of Disney Imagineering, said that the internet is the greatest sleep in technology since language itself. And just in that moment, I was like, oh my gosh, I believe that. I think that's true. And if that is true, that's even close to true. The next hundred years are going to be among the most transformative of many millennia preceding this moment in time. And how could I possibly spend my life doing anything but learning about the internet, how to harness its power and how to really shape the impact it's going to have on our culture and on our planet? And so.”
2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the internet. I love the internet. I created a major about it in college, and I'm a big believer in its power to transform our culture. That was the original kernel. Let's use the internet to make getting outside easier for people with the belief that if it's easier, more people will go.”
2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This camping trip because there had been no mention of surfing, I took it out of my car, and so I'd actually driven down to this campground without a surfboard only to show up and find that despite all my hard work and research I'd really missed for me what would have been the most important piece of information about the specific campground. So, you know, it was still a good trip, but it really highlighted for me, one, how broken the process was. And two, how much it sucks even when you've tried really hard to kind of end up left out and not knowing the best beta about the outdoor spot. And so driving back into San Francisco just the next day, it was New Year's Day, it just kind of hit me. It hit me all at once, actually, where I was like, wow, hold on, going outside is amazing and makes me happier and healthier and just a better human, I'm convinced. And it's really hard. It's way too hard to do so. The experience is broken and there's just no good technology that really makes that accessible and easy to us. So I kind of had this idea to solve getting outside.”
2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“County parks and private parks and federal parks. It was a total mess. But I persevered and finally found a campsite at a state park called Andrew Malero and didn't take reservations, which was good news because I took one look at the reservation website and was not willing to go there. We ended up driving down on New Year's Eve for 2013, got to the campground. It was a beautiful spot. We got the last site actually at the campground. So we're pretty lucky. But when I walked up to the campground, everybody else at the campground, seriously, almost every single other campsite had surfboards, wetsuits, all this surfing gear and we walked out to the beach and it turned out there was an incredible wife, beautiful point break, so really well formed barreling right in front of the campground. And I had read hours about this campground. I had researched everything I could find online and no one had mentioned a surfbreak. And so as a huge surfer at the time, especially I was keeping my surfboard in my car.”
2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. And thanks for having me, Patrick. There were a couple important kernels. It's kind of a company that's evolved pretty organically over the years. So the original kernel for hip camp really came as a result of unsurprisingly a camping trip gone slightly awry. I was very fortunate I got to grow up spending lots of time camping with my little sisters and my parents and my friends and it was always just this huge part of my life and really a lot of what I looked forward to and loved most about growing up, what catalyzed hip camp was for my then boyfriend, now husband, who's from Australia. And I wanted to show him the beauty of California's coast. And so I was like, you know what? I'm going to figure this camping thing out. I normally just go with my friends who do the hard work, but I'm going to do the hard work. I'm going to find the campsite and take him on this trip. And I just could not believe how broken and hard the process was. I almost gave up five different times in the process. I crashed my Chrome browser because there were too many different tabs for state parks and counties.”
2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source