YouSaid · the spoken record

Amanda Hesser

lines on the record: 114
first: 2023-03-20
most recent: 2023-03-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think it's really a blend of all of that. I definitely believe that in luck, and I think you have to show up in order to be there to be lucky. And so that kind of, like they're all tied, right? They're all to me like so tied together. I even think, you know, like my birth order has a big impact on what you end up doing. Like I was the last child, you know, in my siblings were all born right in a row. And then there was a five-year break and then I was born. And so like, I mean, the joke in the family is that I was the mistake. But because my parents had sort of been done with parenting, they took much, I was sort of like this kind of fun, oh right, you know, parenting is fun and it's interesting and now we have more time to pay attention to you. And like, so I think that that had a big influence on my feelings of that I could do things and that I was empowered and that I didn't.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ever leave. And so she, in her way, she would refer to Food 52 as my project, even when we had 20 employees. Now she calls it a company, and she's very happy. But, you know, it took a few years.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, she was. I mean, I think she was really frightened and unhappy that I left the Times. My mom is just, you know, she's of a generation where women weren't encouraged. And my mom is a really ambitious, smart, savvy person who unfortunately hasn't gotten to pursue her dreams. And so I think she's been a great supporter. She definitely has a tough love way about her, but I also think that's been really inspiring for me. And I think that like, yeah, part of my goal is to like, you know, prove that women can do these things, right? And, you know, show my mom and like kind of take advantage of the fact that I, you know, like of the opportunities that she didn't have because I think that's what she would want, right? And so I think that's why when I left the New York Times, she thought like, what are you doing? Like you have this amazing job. Why would you?”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think he would have been super excited. And that's sort of devastating because he never got to see it. And I was pretty, you know, like in a not a great state when he died. But I think he was always like conflicted person in that, you know, yes, he was sexist, but he was incredibly supportive of me and always told me I could do whatever I wanted. And yeah, I think that he would have been so pleased. And yeah, I'm sorry he can't know.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not everybody can or decides to leave at sort of an ideal time. I feel like we both lucked out, right? She was able to leave at a time when she can feel like, wait, wow, you know, we did build this great thing. And it was at a time when I, you know, like we had this, we had new funding where, you know, I could really build up my leadership team. And because with her leaving, you know, there was definitely going to be, there were going to be some gaps.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are new problems to solve every day, and there are new challenges. And I think that in the beginning, you know, I mentioned earlier that I had wanted to like do something that was outside of food initially. But I think I've come to really value that I have domain expertise in an area that really matters to me and matters to my life outside of work too. And so it's really, I'm excited to push this as far as we can. And Meryl, she left at sort of this perfect time. You know, it was like she left when we, you know, we got into a point where it felt like we had built something really great together. And, you know, and she wanted to take some time with her family and like kind of figure out what's next. So, you know.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm so happy doing what I'm doing. And I'm sure that anyone who's listened to my history, yes, I had been restless many times and I'm always looking for things that are different and new and ways to innovate. But that's the beauty of starting a company, right? Is that”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think again, though, I really am focused on the long game. I think it's important to, I don't, the way we've run the business is really focused on writing running it as lean as possible, but really staying focused on the long game because there are going to be years, you know, even if you're profitable, you might decide, well, in order for us to get grow to that next stage, we're going to intentionally spend and invest. In that growth, and that means the next year we're not going to be profitable. Companies do that all the time. And it's just so I think that I'm focused on the health of the business and not overly obsessed on profitability yet.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And every year we'd have kind of more profitable months than the last, but we weren't entirely profitable. But we were definitely on the path toward it. And, you know, in 2020 was a really for companies that are focused on cooking and home naturally. Those were companies that people were very interested in and needed help from and support from during the pandemic. So, you know, we had a lot of really strong organic growth last year.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the structure of that investment meant that, yes, we got a bigger, certainly a bigger infusion of cash than we had ever seen. But they were all, you know, it wasn't the total investment amount. A lot of the investment went into buying out existing investors, former employees who had vested stock and things like that, which were amazing and really great to be able to do at that what I really feel was a turning point for the company. And yes, but it has given us funding to grow our team, invest in more senior leadership, which has been really amazing, and to be invested in new areas of the business.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we just had good snacks, but we didn't have the other, all the other kind of accoutrements that, you know, that certainly people look for in startups.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we've always been super careful with money. I think through the B round we had raised only $13 million. That's a really small amount. I mean, it's a huge amount of money in my view, but in this world in the industry, it's a pretty small amount to fund a company of our size. But yeah, so we've always had to be just really pretty scrappy. And we've never been that sort of shiny new object that where everyone wants to, you know, where we were never the employer who was like paying the most or who had the most perks.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I've always been kind of assertive and ambitious. And so it just took me a while to understand that how I think as a leader, you have a different impact than you do on some, you know, when you say something than you do when you're a colleague. And I think once I started to see that, it just, you know, it was very clear that I should work on it. There was one employee survey where someone referred to Merrill as the nice one. And I thought that was, I mean, we joke about it still. But I'm not something I'm proud of, but I can laugh at it at least, you know.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I would hear about it, but once we started doing employee surveys and I, you know, reading through them could sometimes be quite painful. And I don't think I even realized it. It was just again, it certainly was how I was raised. You know, it was definitely not a like, you know, it wasn't super, um. There was such a tough love element to how I was raised, but also my work experience before starting the company was, you know, at the times, which is definitely not a warm and fuzzy place.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amanda, buy your own account, and I say this as somebody who totally identifies with this, and I appreciate your Vulnerability on this. You have said that in the early days of this business you gained a reputation for being difficult, hard driving and not at all warm, which is a reputation not a reflection of reality, of course. How did you discover that that was your reputation or that your perceived reputation?”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was really stressful. I mean, I was on winter break with my kids and I just had to forge on and try to, you know, put a smile on my face and refer them and like have a good time that day. But I was really tortured inside. Had so many, like, honestly, like gut wrenching, terrifying moments. It's like, you know, I think that in some ways that you do build up a thicker skin for them, but they're also in some, like, they sort of hit you harder over time because you just like, I fully expect that we will have other, you know, other challenges in the future too. It's like I'm ready for them, but, and I probably am more steeled for them, but they're pretty horrifying because they really can change the fate of a company.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know fully what happened because I haven't heard the other side. I can sort of only glean from the signals, but we had previously tried to understand what our board, like how they thought about exits and like what were like what was on their mind. And it's always a delicate conversation. And I think that conversation for this particular investor like signaled that like, you know, somehow like perhaps we want it out, which wasn't the case. So then when we wanted to raise money, I think he felt like it was like those were those were maybe for him confusing messages. Know it was a very strange experience because I think up until that point we'd had very supportive investors. And so it was really just like I think somehow we like lost his gaze. And, you know, he just checked out.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that was clear very early, and I think that there are a lot of people actually still say to me they're like, oh, right. So you added a shop so that you could have like a different revenue stream. And it's like, well, no, no, that's not why we did it. We really were focused on like what, like if we're going to say this a hub, if we're creating a real hub, we have to be able to serve people in a lot of different ways. So we focused on how we wanted to serve them. And then we figure out how to monetize them. In the beginning, it's just that like advertising was in a very established mechanism for funding media, right, online. And it was, of course, we needed to develop that as a core revenue stream. But if we were only going to build our business around that, we were just going to be a media company. And that wasn't.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just felt like food people aren't on Vimeo necessarily. Well, it turns out that somebody from Sirius Eats, which is another website, was on Vimeo and found it and published it. And that was, and it was essentially like, hey, you know, Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs are up to this. They're working on something new. And, you know, we've got like the first scoop on it. It was sort of this gift because what happened was thousands of people signed up on our splash page. And so which allowed us to do a closed beta where we could let a couple hundred people in per day so that when we finally launched, we already had like 10,000, I think, community members and we got a lot of good media coverage. In fact, I remember Goop wrote about it on our launch week and Daily Candy did and both of them like broke our site. Our site went down.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could be done. We put that video up on Vimeo and didn't put a password on it because we were like, you know, nobody knows us. Nobody knows we're working on this.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it helped in the beginning. We had a very lucky thing happen early on actually before we launched. We had a splash page up. Where we could collect email addresses. And we did a video that was just a video tour of my kitchen. And because we wanted, that was another element. We wanted people to be able to upload their own videos, show us what they were doing, show us their kitchens. Again, we were just trying to sort of plant little seeds of the different things that we felt like, you know,”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yes, everything. Oh, sorry. It was everything from salads to cakes to stews, braises, grilled food. You know, I had a little grill out on, we have a little terrace, so I have a little Weber grill out there. And so sometimes we'd have to go and shoot out there. But ultimately, it's really, it was stuff that can be cooked in a home because that was, that's our premise, right? We're really all about the home.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were cooking recipes that our community were uploading to the site and, you know, that we were, you know, kind of vetting through our curation process.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, because that was where the best natural light was. We had the northern light. And so we would clear off one of our bedside tables and set it up. And, you know, and it was really important to us that it was done in a home environment, that it wasn't overly styled, that it had style, but it wasn't. It felt real because I think we were trying to get across the message that this is really about like real people in their homes. But with the sort of elevated, you know, a little bit of elevated styling and, you know, really beautiful photography that you can get.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we did this in my apartment where I still live every Tuesday was our photo shoot day. And so we, and that, you know, in the beginning was Merrill and me and I think one other person and we would end up in a photographer who we hired and we would cook all the recipes and style them and then shoot them in my bedroom.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, here's the thing I mean, you are, I'm trying to figure out how you guys were kind of building out this site and the... The aesthetic of it because you had to make recipes, you had to make things, and then photograph them. Did you guys do this in your own kitchens? Did you rent a kitchen? Where did you start to do that?”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we didn't want to do that. Like, we wanted to build a brand and a relationship with people, and we wanted to do it organically, and we knew it was going to take time. And so we were really careful about how we spent the money because we didn't just make a bunch of hires or spend a bunch of money on marketing. In fact, I don't even think we spent any money on marketing for years. We just didn't have it. It was, we were really focused on just keeping the business going while we, you know, built this new path.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we were able to begin hiring. We hired sort of engineers and editors. And yeah, we just were able to then start like building more because we had nice traction. But we also, I think, you know, we understood that we were up against we were going to build the company differently than what the expectation in venture capital was, which was to put a lot of money. Well, at the time, and again, this is probably a gross generalization, but. It was to, you know, you'd put a lot of money into paid marketing. And also you would crank out content at an insane rate. You know, this was the age of Huffington Post when these like sort of. New kinds of media organizations started really gaining steam and they were We were just increasing content volume.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh no, you know, at this point I was like financially gasping for air, you know, it wasn't pretty, but obviously having the funding felt like we were heading in the right direction. But, you know, we didn't want to be spending the money on ourselves. So we gave ourselves $50,000, which is what I made in 1997 when I was hired at the New York Times. Wow.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, it wasn't really friends and family, it was actually mostly institutional or professional angel investors. We wanted this vetted by people who do this all the time and who could be really adding to the business.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we cried over pizza, but really good pizza. But we just had a conversation. I think we needed to have a conversation of where is our breaking point because it felt like we just had, we didn't, it wasn't that we had no traction. We definitely had people interested, but we just couldn't get that lead. We couldn't get that one person to be like, I'm going to champion this round. There were a lot of people who were like, yeah, I'll put in 25K or I'll put in this or that. And then I actually like because I'm often looking forwardly good at being reflective and often with things that are bad memories, I sort of shove them into a drawer somewhere in my brain. And I don't know, maybe it was a good pizza that we were just like, yes, we're going to keep going.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were absolutely focused on that as our initial primary revenue stream and that commerce would come later. And there would be cookbooks and there would be events and there would be other things. We didn't have like a big track record to prove this and we were also, I think, most more importantly, we were two editors coming from traditional media. And media was just not like it was in 2009, 2010, like nobody wanted to invest in media. Know there's just these shifting winds in venture capital, and I think that every time we went out to raise, we were always at the bad side of the shifting wind. But I think that in retrospect, you end up kind of with the right investors, right? Because you get a lot of no's, but you push, you know, if you can push through, you know, you end up with the real believers.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right We wanted them to trust our aesthetic, trust our point of view, and that was something I feel like so much of traditional parts of traditional journalism informed how we built this company. Sure. And that was like you have to earn your authority. You have to earn the trust. And the way to, and you need to have a really distinct aesthetic and voice for people to recognize you. We wanted it to feel like a home. Like you come to the site and you're like, oh, yes. I know if you saw a food 52 photo out in the wild, you would know that it was a food 52 photo.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Systems, like, well, they sort of barely existed and they were wonky. B, we really, it was so important to us to build trust”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That this was like this was taking cooking and really like playing it out in every kind of scenario of your life. And so that was like an important piece. Now we didn't transact with customers then. We just had a shop where we had a friend of ours would curate every day. curate like a new product and then it would go into the shop and it had you know categories just like any e-commerce site but if you clicked on a product we would tell you about it and then if you wanted to buy it you we would send you off to another site now that's really common now and there's a whole people get affiliate you know commissions for that But we didn't do that because we did A affiliate.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, anybody was welcome to participate, right? It wasn't this like this kind of gatekeeper mentality that we had sort of we were responding to. I want to note, though, so we launched in September of 2009. By December, we launched a shop because we wanted to put a stake in the ground and say, like, this isn't just going to be recipes or content. This is like we're just getting started. We're going to also be a place where you can discover like a new ingredient or a new piece of cookware or something beautiful for your table.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Described it as we're creating this hub for people who care, who see food as a central piece of their lives. where you can connect with others you can discover you can learn And I think it's one of the things I just want to point out is that we did, yes, when we launched, we were super focused on recipes and specifically recipe contests as a way to generate content.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We want to give those people a platform to express themselves, but a place that's centralized so that it's like it becomes this hub where you can connect with other people, you can get a bigger audience, you can create the sort of foundation of a really powerful media company so much more efficiently because you can do it through user-generated content as long as you figure out a way to curate it.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And people started all of a sudden out of the wardwork, you know, traditional media was like kind of like we are the gatekeepers, we are the experts and you're just you're kind of a home cook who follows us. Then all of a sudden you saw all of these people who know a ton about food and who are like lawyers by day or who just do this on the side or who or who just It's like their total life passion, they just don't make money off of it, right? And they have a lot of stuff to share. And we felt like that was really interesting. There was like this constellation of creators and knowledgeable people who did not have a platform. And so that was really where our heads were. We were like, okay.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People wanted something different. They wanted an interaction. And separate from kind of, you know, technology and media just in the food world itself, food had become, had really gone through the sea change from being this kind of niche area of interest for some people to becoming threaded throughout our culture and really threaded into people's identities. And we felt like no one was really acknowledging that. Where you saw it was online, there were all of these bloggers who were, you know, now these blogging platforms developed in the mid to, you know, 2000s.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we felt like the flaws of traditional media were very apparent, right? Like having a single revenue stream was not going to be lasting, which would, you know, in traditional media is just advertising. We also felt like traditional media was really just broadcasting at people and that with the digital age.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still have to defend. People are like, Yes, are you a commerce business or are you a media business? And I'm like, we're both and we're also many other things.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, when you're building something that's new and that's different and is going to be the it's going to really feel natural in the future, like people aren't going to necessarily have an easy way of describing it. They always want you to be the uber of something or they want you to be something that's already just familiar to them. But we were trying to build something that just didn't exist. Yes, there are components of what we do that have been sort of timeless, right? Recipes, helping people with their cooking and home life, connecting people to each other. Like our mission is timeless, but the way we're executing on it is very different. And so, yes, we spend a lot of time. And sometimes I would just kind of, you know, certainly socially, I was like, yep, it's a food plug. You know, but, you know, when it came to investors and really trying to sell it from a business from the business perspective, it was challenging. And sometimes it still is.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And, you know, I'm really glad you brought this up because it's something we still talk about at the company, that it's hard to describe what we do. And I spent a lot of time reminding people that that's okay because”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dwindling. But again, I was really determined and I just kept, I sort of really kept that in the background as much as I could. It was definitely like, you know, inspiration to get me out of bed every morning, but like I really needed to focus on like building something great and not focusing so much on either our dwindling bank account or how we were going to pay for things in the future.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's two other pieces. One is that I am also equally obsessed with doing things that I care about and that I feel inspired by and I think from growing up and seeing my parents like take this risk, I could see that you can't like if you want that financial security like you have to you have to put in the work and you have to take the risks. And so that's really like I think what I was believing. Like I knew it was a giant financial risk for my family in the situation and where we were with two young kids and a mortgage and my husband with a writer with nobody who was a writer with no benefits. You know, neither of us had benefits. So we, you know, we had to just, you know, pay for those on our own. And so our bank account was just like it was just like this ticking time bomb. It was just.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think that there were two things that were key here. One is actually that I am financial security is like an obsession of mine. And it's really important. But I do think that I also really understand that it's.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one of the things that I knew how to do was to sell a book. And because I felt like there was a kind of clean way to test the concept of a new kind of business and a new kind of food media company by using the construct of a cookbook. you know, create a cookbook through a website have it be crowdsourced, test out ways of curating it, and really see if people, if it resonates with people. And I felt like even if the idea did not resonate as a business and we did not see the other opportunities that we were hoping to see. I knew that we could come out with a good quality cookbook, but I really, you know, we were betting on it becoming a business, but we didn't want to have to try to raise money. And so that's where we use the advanced money, which is what you usually use to pay yourself as an author.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And just to be clear, Amanda, I guess your initial idea was to do a website where you would crowdsource ideas for recipes. And as I understand it, in order to help you launch this as a business, you wanted to start it by writing a cookbook?”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I unfortunately do not have that DNA. But the other kind of founder tends to want to do proof of concept, bootstrap. They're the students who sit at the front of the class and they want to know what they're doing before they try to sell it. And I just understood because I had tried to do the opposite with C. Winkle. in the process realized, okay, no, we've got to really like build a prototype. And no, you know, like I found myself gravitating towards like wanting to prove something out before I took anyone's money because I take that really seriously. It's not a game to me. I don't want to waste anyone's money. And so knowing that when it came time to try to start a different company, I felt like it was very clear that we wanted to bootstrap as much as we could so that we could prove that there were legs to this idea and then we could go and raise money.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT