YouSaid · the spoken record

Ashton Kutcher

lines on the record: 95
first: 2016-10-17
most recent: 2016-10-17
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 media is extremely hard to scale, but I also wouldn't say that this is like a tech company per se. I would say it's a media company, given the fact that it has, we have built some technical tools that are first-generation technical tools, but I don't think that it has the same sort of technical domain advantage that some of these other companies do. I would say probably my most successful startup is my nonprofit, Thorn. We build software to help police departments prioritize caseload and identify and recover trafficking victims and victims of sexual exploitation of children. And so we're currently in all 50 states. We have 1,775 police officers or law enforcement officials using our tools to recover trafficking victims. And this year we've recovered or identified like 6,000 trafficking victims”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say relative to like an Uber and Airbnb or one of these companies that became like these sort of bohemoth like let me build a new industry. I wasn't building a new industry. So I wouldn't say”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've tried and I haven't been successful. I think one of the biggest things about building a tech company and another attribute is that you have to have a technical founder that understands and cares about the business as much as you do, whatever it may be. I say, I haven't done it successfully, so that's probably not completely true. I built a company called A that's a media company. We just sold that company to Chicken Soup for the soul. And we're trying to do just baseline positive journalism. So any story that's out there, we try to find a positive spin or an inspiring spin or an optimistic spin on the story. So that company has been and continues to be successful.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be and you know, that's just that's a series of questions that aren't about the company. And a lot of times you hear investors that get on the phone. The first thing they start asking about is the company and they forget to ask about who are you? And I think that that's one of our sort of core things that we look at really, really deeply. And once they sort of, they can demonstrate some version of them trying to persevere through the problem, or they can identify the problems that are going to come to them in their company. So whether it's regulatory hair on the company, whether it's being extraordinarily well versed in their competition and their relative advantages to their competition and whatever landscape that they're trying to build into, I think all of those things start to signal that that person's going to be able to persevere because there's not a day that goes by when you're building a company that you don't have a problem, especially when you're running it.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the first thing I look for in a founder is did they have a hustle when they were young? Because I think entrepreneurs were always entrepreneurs. And whether it's like selling blow pops out of their high school locker or like selling makeup back to their aunt that they would take from, like everybody's got some hustle when they were a kid. My assessment of grit is tell me the hardest thing that you actually manage to persevere through. And so, and it starts with having a passion for whatever you're building or the essence of the problem that you're solving. If you have a gumption about you or a disdain for the problem that you have, the likelihood of you persevering through some great obstacle that you meet along the way is going to be relatively high. And so I'd like to find out the things that those people are passionate about and how they've actually persevered through obstacles in order to attain whatever their goals might be.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've read like six books on it. There's a great book called The Willpower Instinct that's really wonderful and sort of lays out a lot of the qualities relative to grit.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a couple of things. So, one, I think that we have a very, very focused agenda as to how we invest. One, we're founders first. And we believe that every great company is built on the back of Really, really brilliant founders. And we have criteria for the founders relative to their grit, relative to their ability to sell their product, relative to their domain expertise. We have a series of things that we vet our founders on. And I think that that's like the first thing, because at the end of the day, companies are run by people. And if you can understand people, you can understand what companies may or may not work.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they're very generous towards us with helping with our back office and helping diligence deals. And it's also when you have a single LP like that, you can start to target focus your investments relative to some of their needs as well, which only just sort of broadens your scope of what you can invest in and what you're interested in.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We ended up investing in Airbnb and Uber and Howe's and a series of other companies that have all done really, really well. And then Guy and I decided we wanted to do a bigger fund. And so we branched off and built our own investment fund called Sound Ventures, which is our current fund. So now we have an early stage fund and a late stage fund. So how much total it is?”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With our third partner at the time, Ron Burkel, and we created A-grade, where Ron put up a lion's share of the finances. Guy and I put up some of our own money, and we built that fund out and then started a second fund. And now that fund is in harvest mode.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was mostly just really relative to the product and the usability of the product and then really just being willing to be the stupidest person in the room. Like I was hanging out with really brilliant people and we'd have an open conversation about this company or that company and they'd sell me on it. I'd use the product and I'd go, wow, this is actually really useful or wow, this is actually really interesting. And then I meet with the founder and say, hey, I'd like to invest. And back then, nobody was investing. Well, at least no actors were investing. And I think that they thought, hey, I can get a nice little press pop out of this. Right, right. And then I really just started to do relatively well and kind of double down on it. My current investing partner, Guy O'Siri, reached out to me and said, hey, I think I could raise us some money. I was like, good because I'm running out. Like I keep investing in these things on my own. I don't know how much longer I can do this. And so we...”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was either they called me or I called them. I invested in a company called GroupMe because a friend of mine introduced me to them and I invested in Skype early on”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like that. Making a couple early investments in companies that were doing that. And then as I started doing, I started just opening up this canvas of opportunity with various founders that they would reach out to me and I was like, well, I don't know how I'm associated with this company or that company. But I'll give it a shot. And then I think my race on Twitter with CNN brought light to the fact that I had a slight understanding as to how to do it. Tools. And then so I invested in Square, which is Jack Dorsey's financial transaction platform Because I got to know him through Twitter. I invested in Foursquare, a company called Optimizely, a couple early things just on my own with my own money.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I started off just investing as an independent person. I was running a production company and I saw buffering speed start to pick up online and realized there was going to be a migration of content delivery into that space. That was an avid Facebook user, an avid YouTube user and trying to promote a lot. It's funny, like when I was doing DudeWear's My Car, which seems like really welcome. I would get into AOL chat rooms. I would get into AOL chat rooms and start to do sweet threads and then leave that chat room and go to the next one. So I was like trying to like, you know, like digitally hack audience acquisition online then. And then when I said when I was running my production company, I wanted to actually turn it into something that we could use. And so I started looking for different ways to quantify digital audience and things.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here with Ashton Kutcher, who is a Renaissance man of Hollywood and entertainment, I would say. I think people do have a sense that you have lots and lots of tech investments, but you have some very good ones, actually. You've been in a lot of things, but you mentioned two, or one or two already. Talk a little bit about your investments because people realize how long you've been at it because a lot of celebrities sort of enter the investment picture and they're sort of just part of a press release versus really active investing.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that's the nature of what's happening with the digital landscape, right? Like before you only had X number of buyers and you were happy if any of them were interested. And now I think that you can architect a story that you want to tell and you can shop it directly to who you think has the most relevance to your audience.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Punked, which is an early thing that I produced. I was just, you know, making fun and trying to have fun. And, you know, I definitely thought as we were casting various people to punk on the show and as we would architect those into like there were like three segments to each show. And as we architected every one of those episodes, I thought about the demos and I thought about the general demos and who these various people would be appealing to. You know, this is really the first show like Soup to Nuts that I'm in that I think I had to have that kind of consciousness about.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And two and a half men, I made a joke about how much money Charlie Sheen must have been making, and that I would take that job and got a call like the next day and went, really, you want me to do this? Yeah, I'll jump on that grenade. And so I wasn't really, and given the fact that I wasn't a producer on either of those, I really didn't have like a consciousness about it. I think like”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so let's be clear. So, my first sitcom, the 70s show, I was 19 years old and happy to have a job, right? I moved to Los Angeles and booked it the first day. I was in Los Angeles. So I was just like,”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We want to create a great show. We want to create that show that you get off at the end of your day and you go home and you watch this. For Netflix, I think the measure of success with this particular show is to open up markets that weren't necessarily, that aren't going to watch house cards or maybe aren't into the sort of more urban fare shows that end up on the network. I think we can open up domestic markets and I think we can open up some international markets that really appreciate comedy and where this community exists in South America has a huge ranching culture. We're doing extremely well there. We're doing extremely well in a couple markets in Europe right now. But where we're showing, I think, the most growth, which is really exciting, is in the middle of America. So I think it turns on this different viewing behavior to a whole different market that didn't have access to it before.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so from a comedy perspective, there's functions of jokes where you can actually drop the setup for a joke in one episode and then pay it off in the next episode because you have a pretty good inclination that people are going to carry over and watch the next one. You can carry various props across episodes. You can start a storyline in episode three and finish it in episode five. And so it really opens up the writer's room to have to create an arc over a series of episodes as opposed to an individual episode, whether it's a comedic arc or whether it's a dramatic arc.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Next episode, and how what else can you do to be creative in that manner? Okay, if you're dropping 20 episodes at once, some people like and some people don't like. I think it's fantastic. But it creates a whole new viewer experience.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our show becomes really, really important and valuable because it's what gets you to the next episode. The most valuable thing on Netflix is the next episode. And it has to be the next episode. So you're constantly architecting your story in order to create the value in the next episode.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. And so each episode almost lives as their own independent little story. Whereas on Netflix, given the binge watching nature where people are going to watch 10 episodes in a row, now all 20 of our episodes are up there. And so there are people that are going to start today and watch all 20 as one rip. I think there's a different way that you tell stories relative to that, different ways that you carry character arcs. And the cliffhanger in traditional television, especially in sitcoms, has somewhat disappeared given the syndication cycle and the way they resell these shows afterwards. And we got to bring it back to life in our show, like the Who Shot JR.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when you go into syndication cycle, you can sell them in bundles and they can air them in any order that they want. And they don't have to count on the audience coming back week to week to stay with the storyline.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would their old terms, but relative to the way sitcom format, so sitcom has become this incredible financial engine for television, especially for studios where you don't want any of the episodes to be too deeply intertwined from a storytelling perspective.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An issue that is polarizing issue in our country and we'll look at both perspectives in a slightly deeper way than maybe usually gets done.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, the first 20 episodes of the show are really more just sort of like fun down home kind of stuff. Dealing with family relationships, internal family relationships, things that are going on. And anybody who's watched this new set, I don't want to give away too much, but the very last episode has a pretty aggressive cliffhang on it. And there's another character, Wilmer Valdorama, who was also in the 70s show with us that gets introduced. And Wilmer's an immigrant labor worker working at one of the ranches that's a local ranch. And I think that immigration is this really abstract thing that becomes this sort of policy conversation in the public zeitgeist. But when you connect with someone and actually have feelings for somebody who is an immigrant, I think that conversation is very different. And then I won't give it away, but the cliffhang of the last set of episodes, there's an event that happens that I think will dive very, very deep into.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, I don't. I've kind of like flipped between television and feature films my entire career. And I just like to build things. I don't really care whether it's a technology company or whether it's a television show or whether it's a movie or whatever it is. For me, it's about just sort of exercising that creative bug and trying to build something great that impacts people. I think the only question I would have is if I'm going to spend time and energy on something, I want to make sure that it's hitting an audience where what we're trying to do actually has some impact because I think, you know, this show on its face early on, it won't look like there's a very big social push relative to it. But I think over time people will start to see that there are real social hooks in this show that we're actually trying to connect with a mind frame and hone that mind frame towards maybe a little bit more open-minded perspective.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But as a well known person who's been in sitcoms, did you worry about making? Because some people have it or worried about moving away from the old model, moving away from movies, moving away from all kinds of things”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I know a couple companies that have the ability to do some reverse engineering on social. I think our audience is well in. The neighborhood of network television shows, and I think it'll only grow over time”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they've had a couple pits. Yeah, so Netflix won't share our numbers with us explicitly, but we've done a little bit of reverse.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean, we have executives that come to our tablery and executives that come, you know, they're with us all week long, but they're really our partners and they're supporting us. And I think as opposed to a lot of networks where you have, you get notes that are prescriptive around what they want changed and how they want it changed. They'll point things out to us that are story arcs that they feel like could be strengthened or character arcs that they feel like could be strengthened. But it's never like a prescriptive note relative to the stuff that we're building.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we took the show to one place. We had a script, and myself and Danny Masterson and said, we want to make this show. They read the script. We had a conversation about what we wanted to do and that we wanted to make a show about a conservative family in the middle of America with conservative views and where we're not making fun of people in the middle of America, but embracing those views and making fun of the coast. And they thought that there was a great opportunity for them to grow into those markets and that this is the kind of show that could help them do that.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we'll pursue them. And it's usually just because we can't do that. And I think it's just a lot of people afraid of getting fired, which tends to be the culture at companies that are slightly more seasoned. And at Netflix, we don't have that. I think the other thing is because of the way they actually know who's watching the show instead of how many are watching the show, you can start to cater your creative towards the people that actually love the content that you're creating. And I think that in a lot of ways that's freeing and it makes them a little bit more confident around the decision making process internally.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It could be a joke that they feel like is too crass. It could be where a character is heading or the direction of a character or the way a character is behaving or it could be it's just this litany of things where you go, I don't understand give me like some ground level reasoning as to why you want these things.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that they have a culture there that trusts creators to create. They really don't interfere with our creative process at all. At a traditional network, you get a list of notes at the end of a rehearsal before you ended up shooting something that would have to change the creative integrity of the show. We don't get”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I mean, there's audience for it. I just think that after you get about 20, 30, 50 episodes in, your creative bug starts to die because you can't really sort of build on it. You can't really kind of go outside of the box. And on this show, from a producing perspective, we've been able to like. Create weather inside of a studio, we go outside, we go inside, you know, we can really push what the content is, like all the way to the edge. We hired Sam Elliott, who's not a sitcom actor to be on a sitcom show, and Deborah Winger, who's not a sitcom actor to be on a sitcom. And I feel like we've been able to sort of start to press into a creative boundary that I don't think we would ever be able to get to and get away with at a network.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think it's why most sitcoms tend to look the same and feel the same and have, they're lit the same. They never have music underneath their scenes. They rarely take time to go into dramatic pause because they have to fit into this neat little 22 minute box that advertisers will like. From a content perspective, you can't be very specific about jokes or products because it might interrupt with one of their advertisers. You can't talk the way that people naturally talk and use whatever language people naturally use because that might offend somebody. And so you get kind of pressed down into this little box. And there are a lot of people that are very good at making that really good version of that kind of show. And I thought doing something with Netflix would give us the opportunity to really creatively go out and try to reset what a sitcom is. Because I think people really like sitcoms, but I think they've become tired over time because they're just the same.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, historically, yeah. So, like network television that actually generally does the sitcom format, you know, there's a format there that works, and it's a format that's worked for years and years and years and years and years.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I thought there was a chance to actually really advance what a sitcom looked like and felt like and sounded like and the kinds of content that were in it and the kinds of actors that you could have on it. And so the idea of doing a sitcom in a place where there were kind of no set rules and nobody knew what worked sort of opened up the landscape of what could be possible. Sometimes you get inside of these sort of factory content machines that have been doing it for years and years and years and years and they have to cater to certain advertisers and they have to cater to a certain ideology. They have to cater to a certain format.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first of all, I had already had a conversation with Ted Sorandos, who runs the program in there, and I knew that he wanted to get into the sitcom arena, and I knew that they hadn't gotten into the sitcom arena, at least with original sitcoms.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk about Yeah, well, I was doing two and a half men, and as I was wrapping it up, there was a conversation I was having with one of my best friends, Danny Masterson, who's my co-star and also producer on the ranch. And we were talking about doing a show together again. We'd done that 70 show together years and years ago. And had always wanted to do a show together. And the writers from two and a half men were talking about wanting to do a show together again. And so we all started to have a conversation about what that might be. And I really only have one place that I wanted to take it, which is Netflix. Why?”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't sleep on a Casper mattress only because I already have my mattress after I invested. But for the new home, I'm going to definitely outfit it with Casper.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your key sponsor is also an investment. So I just have to disclose that just in case there's some SEC issue with that. Yeah.”
2016-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Kutcher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT