YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Leventhal

lines on the record: 71
first: 2025-01-20
most recent: 2025-01-20
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

“We loved it. You know, I think one of the Important things about being an entrepreneur is that you have to be willing to break the rules. And sometimes you don't realize the rules you're breaking until after the fact. And sometimes you don't realize that it matters until after the fact. But, you know, at the time that we started ITER, there were rules about food content and there were rules about embargoes. And there was an unspoken understanding that if as a publicist you gave Florence Fabricant a story, she continues to be a writer at the time, writes the sort of newscom.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was more or less sustainable. We didn't raise more money for quite a while after the initial Angel round. It was a small lean company. We ran it modestly and we didn't have that many employees and a lot of the writers were freelancers. It was lean. We ran it lean.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Time. Yeah. We had San Francisco, we had LA, but the gravity of the company was, you know, New York was the center of gravity of the company.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. It didn't even occur to me. We had a joint venture on Eater, and Locke did more of the work of building the business, and I did more of the work of building the editorial. But I was close to it and sort of understood more or less what was going on. I wasn't just sort of a naive, creative writing content. But the passion for me was around the content, no question about it.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did. You know, it was a lot of our energy and our just unbridled enthusiasm for restaurants that was coming out. And it often showed up as snark. Idea of eater was that we loved restaurants. We were obsessed with restaurants, I think about my career as a hype man for restaurants. And Eater was the start of that. And we were just so, it was just all energy And that often showed up as snark. And, you know, knowing what I know now, I wouldn't do things like Deathwatch, which in hindsight were. And cruel to the restaurants that became its subjects. But we were outsiders and we didn't know any better. And we didn't know, we didn't know. We just knew how much we loved the scene and how fun and fascinating and exhilarating it all was.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We started by both contributing Locke and I, my recollection is three or four posts a day. We didn't have any other contributors for the first year or two, but we just sort of went about posting. I mean, that's the thing about those days in digital media, the key to getting one of these things stood up is you just, in some ways, you just have to start posting. You have to start producing content.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we had a couple of advertisers and credit to Locke. He had attracted several advertisers through curbed. And so there were companies like my recollection is the New York Times was a company that advertised with curbed. And when I left, what we decided to do was we decided to raise some money. And we raised an angel round of funding for the enterprise, the curb eater enterprise. And that's how we funded it. And we grew into it being a sustainable advertiser supported content business.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As I still do at that time, we held the big time food critics in extremely high regard and had a ton of respect for what they do. And we just said we can't compete against those guys. But what we did have was we had the cadence of blogging, which was certainly a competitive advantage. We could post things whenever we wanted to. And we had, you know, our take on restaurants. We had our take, which was that these places are these incredible, wonderful, magical places and the chefs and the operators of restaurants were heroes and villains to be talked about.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, eater was the idea was let's put up a couple of posts a day and then it turned into six and then it turned into 12 posts. And it was a regular feat of content about restaurants. Now, we did say we're not going to write reviews. And we also said we're not going to post photos of food. And we said, we're really not interested in adding to the noise with more photos of food. And we're really not interested in writing reviews because we're actually not going to be any good at that.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he also was writing at that time a newsletter called Curbed about street level, neighborhood level real estate in the city. And he took to this idea of restaurants and he said, well, the easiest thing to do is to launch it off of curbed and we'll make it eater.curb.com. And that's how that was the first place at Eater Launch was a subdomain of curbed. And we sort of mapped, sketched it out, and essentially drew up a wireframe for it. And we both contributed some ideas as to how it would function.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember us having two seminal conversations about this. We met at a bar and I said, I think we should do something. And it should be about restaurants and it should be called eater. And I said we should call it eater because one is it sounds a little bit like Gawker and two is eater is the most dressed down way of thinking about people who go to restaurants. They're not foodies. They're not gourmets. They're not connoisseurs. They're just eaters. And I said, we should do this blog. And, you know, we'll post about restaurants. And we'll both do it. And Locke was much farther along in terms of his understanding of digital media than I was at the time. In part because he was already at Gawker and he just generally was way more in the scene and already had a feel for it.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gawker was an insider thing, but Gawker was pretty well read at the time. I mean, anecdotally, I remember that when Gawker would link to one of my Shiloves New York newsletters, it would really spike traffic. Would really be a big win for me.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lockhart Steele was at the time doing two things that were interesting and relevant to me. One was the managing editor of Gawker. And two is that he was writing a blog called Below 14th Street. And below 14th Street was a very early blog. I mean, he was blogging when I was still sending out this newsletter. But I used it as a source a lot. One of the hooks of She Loves New York was that it was extremely up to date in terms of intelligence, what was opening and where. And so it was below 14th Street was one of my sources. And we had been introduced through a mutual friend. And we hit it off.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No It was a thing to do, and it had no commercial value or potential at any point, although I did think in the broadest possible sense, I said, well, maybe there could be something here, but I had no idea what that might be. And I was simply motivated by the fun of writing it.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't snarky. The tone of Sheila's New York was really, it was in cidery. It was awestruck in a way, really sort of a fascination with the city. But it wasn't really snarky as such. It was just kind of quippy and insidery”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think at its height it was 10,000. It was really just commentary and color and observations. She loves New York initially was anonymous, and I thought that was an interesting kind of hook for it. And there was a sort of curiosity as to who's writing this and what's really going on here.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On a blog, it was initially a newsletter called She Loves New York, and that turned into Eater. She was the theoretical, she just a woman in New York who loves the city. Was a weekly newsletter, and every week I wrote about 10 or 20 restaurants somewhere in that range, places of interest. And I categorized them around pop culture themes and moments. So if it was baseball season and you wanted to go watch the Yankee game, it would be four places with screens. It developed a kind of cult following and”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that happened towards the end of my time at VH1 is I sort of didn't have very much to do. And the job that I was doing was pretty easy. So I had some time on my hands. And that's when I sort of initially started doing things on the side and started writing about restaurants and writing about the city. And those projects.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know what happened is I didn't see myself making any progress. I held the executives there in extremely high regard. Those were the days where MTV executives were just epic heroes of, I guess, the sort of early media, cable media environment. I mean, Tom Freston and Judy McGrath and John Sykes. I mean, these guys were huge figures. And I held them in very high regard. I did want to be one of them. And I spent Bunch of time at MVH1 and MTV, and I didn't really make any progress.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first thing I did there was I worked on the big shows, sort of things like storytellers and VH2N used to have a show called Divas, which was a big concert. And I got to meet all kinds of people. I was once for all of five minutes Madonna's security for one shoot. I had to escort her, get her safely from her car to her dressing room and back.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think people understand quite how hard restaurants are. If you think about the moving parts at the average independent restaurant and how complicated the production and assembly and delivery of food is to the table, and you compare that to any other small business, it's orders of magnitude more difficult. I mean, you don't walk into a store and say, I need a pair of socks and sneakers and somebody down in the basement makes you the shoes and socks. But that's what happens when you walk into a restaurant.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT