YouSaid · the spoken record

Brent Montgomery

lines on the record: 65
first: 2022-08-08
most recent: 2022-08-08
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

“Life work balance. It's a complicated answer to give to entrepreneurial people, but people who know me since I was in my 30s and 40s see a guy who has a lot more fun than I had in my 20s in college. I worked 50, 60 hours through college and then worked seven days a week in New York because it's the toughest place, at least in the U.S., to make it, I think. I can't look back and complain about it, but I'm sure most entrepreneurs are all about trying to find that life work balance. Certainly COVID has thrown another wrench in it, but I think COVID has also taught me life is short. Every minute that I got with my kids.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Adaptability. I was a military brat. We didn't have a bunch of money and we were moving around all the time. And for one reason or another, my father would just buy real estate at the wrong time. And he always had the entrepreneurial bug and he was probably the biggest force in pushing me out to be entrepreneurial. But it was that adaptability of moving around, of throwing me in so many different situations, which at the time I absolutely hated. You make a bunch of friends and then you move. And then you get put into a classroom, an eighth or ninth grade with braces, and you really got to rely on, in my case, bad jokes and some soccer ability back then. Just try to get along with people and be adaptable for everything I've ever done. It's at the core of. So I don't know if that was necessarily taught all the time on reason, but they certainly told me I needed to adapt and get after it.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One that really taught me was how I started my first business. I spent the first year, and this is maybe a little note for founders or at least creators of things that they think they might want to do five or six of and roll out, whether it be a product or a TV show. I spent a full year working on one concept. By the time we delivered it, there were two other people making the same show. I found out I didn't need to deliver a fully baked pilot of thirty minutes. We could have done basically a trailer, what we call a sizzle reel, of a few minutes. Suffice it to say when Pawn Stars came around, we just did the sizzle reel and were able to hit that mark because ironically, some people may remember there was another show that came out right after ours called Hardcore Pawn. It didn't have the lasting power, stain power, or rate quite as well, but who knows if history channel would have bought that one instead.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Accidentally putting footage on television that was supposed to be Bill Clinton and was a guy in a chicken costume on live television was certainly a learning lesson in my early career obviously was not done on purpose almost got me fired”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he had a business degree, but it was also a showrunner like me, so he could talk to both sides of my right brain and left brain. Always made me think bigger and pushed me where my more conservative partners who I give a ton of credit to as well reeled it all back in and we landed in natural place. But Ed left with me from ITV to start Wheelhouse along with our president, Rob Leah, those two guys and I hatched this all up on a piece of paper to go from a piece of paper where we are now has been incredibly fun and incredibly difficult through COVID, but there's still a long way to go and I expect those guys to be there every step of the way.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not just saying this because I'm married to her. My wife came into my first business never in any way, shape, or form, wanting to be part of a startup. She is complimentary to me in every way. She is smart and organized and thoughtful and has empathy, and she really became the heart of the business, but also equally matched with brains and helped me build that business. She was there before Pond Stars and then helped me through the sale. And now she's taken her talents to a completely different world, but I think our world of making stuff happen on television translates and she's running a really great real estate business with her two former female lieutenants. And I think it's great because they boss guys around all day and they deliver on time and on budget, which is unheard of as a consumer in that world. And then the other one would have to be my chief strategy officer at Simpson. He came over from the UK and had seen what had happened in media over there, which happened five years before it did here in the States.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't like when people say something's not going to work with such clarity because nobody knows. TV, at least historically to me, was baseball. If you hit 300, you should be in the Hall of Fame. That means getting three out of ten shows that would go through the pipeline and maybe come back either to make it on air or it actually come back for a second season. So when people speak, like, we just did this research and it said this, investing TV, any stuff that's not black or white and binary, it's got to be a series of data points. That goes to another pet peeve, which is whether people think with tunnel vision or if they see the full connection of all these things. The people who can see the full picture and get it are obviously the ones I think all have repeat bigger business with.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who don't see things from the other person's point of view, that manifests itself between employee employer, personal relationships and everything else. To me, that's the only way to have a real conversation. If you're an investor and a founder, you're representing other people's money or you put your own money in. And if you're a founder or you understanding, that's where they're coming from. And conversely, if you're an investor, you might have 15 of these and this is this person's life soul mission. And they may have given up everything to do this.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Straight Texas until baseball. Cowboys, which was a great time when I was actually covering them back at the top of my career, been a rough run, but I think Dak Prescott is going to lead us somewhere, hopefully, without help from his management. San Antonio Spurs, I will put hand to heart. I thought Greg Popovich was not qualified to be our coach. I've never been more wrong or more happy. I think the guy's the greatest professional coach of all time of any sport, but it is hard for San Antonio to now compete when guys are going to LA or New York and Miami to play because of all these other off court activities. And then I get to baseball, Cubs fan, all because they play day games when I was a kid, which meant I got to stay up and watch it. And then finally, because I'm not trying to put my kids, I'm playing to Texas every day, we've inherited the Rangers as the hockey team. So this is a big four, but I'm also curiously watching Premier Lacrosse League and pickleball and some of the other things.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With family is taking my kids to sports games because I just think it's the most fun thing in the world. I would say being on the water as somebody who grew up landlocked in San Antonio, Texas and who now lives in a coastal town in Connecticut, Connecticut's beautiful from land, but even more so by water. So anytime I can get out on a boat is my favorite time.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And too frothy evaluations. We've been fortunate that we haven't made big bets on those type companies. More than one or two that have been significantly marked up that we think have a little room for correction. Getting in at too high of evaluation, I think probably like most investors who are over the age of 30, I just always thought you had to create EBITDA or have a pathway to profitability. Most of us finally gave up that that was as hard and fast a rule as we once thought it was. And now we've been reminded that it does matter, which I think will be good for those of us who always were focused on that.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Zigazoo that is trying to be a younger version of TikTok, but much more educational, created by two young parents who have built and sold an ed tech company before. So we're quite excited about that. But we also just see the merging where it used to be if you were going to take a story, it would get made on film or television, but not both. That goes back to Walt Disney. I think now if you've got a great story, you could see it as a podcast. Then you can see it done as a documentary series, a scripted series, and a movie. all within a short span. And that's exciting because that means you can monetize the IP in more and more ways than you have historically. And I think the other thing in media, which you're a part of obviously, is audio. Who thought 10, 20 years ago that audio would be the hot soup du jour ever again, much less for the time it's been lately. Because the world is so busy and scattered, I think people want to go and learn and delve in and go deeper.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Olympia has a doll called Quakewe. Quakewe now has an incredible following on her own. Very weird things to say to classic public investors and other folks when you think about the creativity of people it's endless. So that stuff we're watching. What's really interesting is all the animation, a lot of the stuff that we would have done historically in Hollywood can be done all over the world now and can be done at a fraction of the price. So it's allowing stuff to get made that doesn't have to go through the gatekeepers of the Hollywood studio system. That's really the biggest shift. Hollywood now is run more by tech than it is Hollywood. This direct-to-consumer allows people to create content from anywhere. That's real, but a little bit more speculative. I don't think this idea of people watching real people on their phones and their friends is going away anytime soon. We are very focused on safety, though. We invested in a company called”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talent athletes have obviously bandwidth limitations too. So we're seeing some interesting companies that will allow talent to either have an avatar or something they're the likes. We're seeing a lot of AI, some stuff where with permission you can grant your voice to a company to go out there and create these new revenue streams for the biggest talent. We invested in a company called Invisible Universe, which is very, very fresh and new, but it wants to be the Pixar of Web3. It's going to step further than what I just said. Don't quote me on this, but I think they've created an entire world and IP around Jennifer Anniston's dog. I believe that's a fact, but you get the idea for Alexis O'Hanian and Serena Williams, Alexis founder of Reddit, one of our investing partners, and Serena, who needs no introduction.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funny, you almost go through these phases. We went from having one production company to creating an engine that served four different companies. I always say we've got to treat our new children with more love than the current family because we should have a little bit more patience and understanding built up with those guys. But it's about building an organized infrastructure. I have a big saying that's framed on my wall because my assistant made it for me a few years ago. Replace yourself. And in order for us to grow as big as we want to grow, we have to have that next person up. We want to find the people who are just as curious.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As you grow the number of investments you have, how do you think about effectively taking care of more and more children? When you have one project and you get one person on Jimmy Kimmel and then how do you do it again and continue that momentum once you get it started?”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we're seeing founders who are getting better and better at it. I remember watching Harry's Shave business. They just told a pretty good story from the very beginning. The two guys, just really simple, simple product, really smart tech founders don't come from anywhere near storytelling or Hollywood. They're Silicon Valley. So for us to be that bridge and to help those businesses and brands, a lot of these brands are hiring what they call chief content officers. A funny example I saw, but Smart was Nerf hired chief TikTok officer. That's where we really get most excited. Eventually we'll incubate and launch our own businesses that we'll put through our own platform. But right now we want to. We want to really focus on doing it well for others.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm generally most excited about the investment arm because I love discovering talent, discovering stuff early. Of course, you can make mailbox money in 10 twenty X where we're working for every nickel on a TV show the old fashioned way. The two work together. We call it the platform, so we've gone out and built entertainment, marketing, PR, events and experiential that all works together in a symphony on a good day to amplify the investments. The investments was the whole reason we started, but we wanted to create the platform and we've done a lot of M&A and brought in a lot of significant partners and have a lot more in the works across sports and entertainment. Timing is arguably the most important thing in investing, which getting right is always luck and science. But what we see is those companies and those brands really want somebody to tell them about storytelling. They know their story.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alongside of all of this creation, you've created this investment arm, how do you think about the importance of the investment arm relative to all the things that get you excited on the content creation and the building of those businesses?”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Young African American artist just absolutely crushing it A with great art, but then figuring out the digital world faster than most 13 year olds would and had the proud parents there to videotape it all.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said, well, you know the very famous people that have come out of it, and of course, they knew all of them. We were able to not just sell their story to Netflix as the first show in many years on creators and influencers. But now we have podcasts with them. We're able to put them on other shows. We're able to bring them into businesses and brands we're investing in. I surround myself with 23-year-old young wannabe television or digital executives and listen all day to what they think is hot, what's coming. What I love about this generation is they're much more entrepreneurial as they should be. If you have a great idea and it can go global tomorrow night, last night I was at NYC, NFT event with my two kids, Nyla Hayes, 13-year-old, has made four million on NFT art. Of course, there's going to be a billion stories that don't go that way, but how inspiring to my nine and seven-year-old to see this.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I sat with a bunch of them right before COVID, and we were competing against everybody in town to win the deal to work with these kids. And I said, you guys remind me of the Mickey Mouse Club. I think TikTok is the new Mickey Mouse Club. And they're like, we don't know what that is.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Network. It was harder to sell it to Mark to do television for just keep doing what he did. Now we've set him up with a couple series at Discovery Plus that he's in production on. Mark can be the face of pop science. He can be the face of the Discovery Channel. He cares about kids. If kids like Mr. Beast, they typically like Mark. Another younger typical version of a TikTok influencer creator would be the Hype House. The Hype House became the first TikTok house. What does that mean? It used to be if you were moving to LA and you wanted to be an actress or an actor, you would go wait tables. And then more recently you would be driving Ubers. Now you're Charlie Demelio. You create this global audience of 100 million followers plus in Connecticut and then you move to Hollywood and become the next wave of the Kardashians. For us, Hype House was the version where Charlie and a lot of these other kids came out of.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mark Rober is one of the more impressive guys out there, and he won't be known to a lot of the viewers, but I strongly encourage anybody to look him up because he's about 40 years old. He was a literal rocket scientist at NASA and an Apple designer. But like I was saying about Rodriguez early, Mark is a genius who really can tell incredibly complicated scientific information in digestible bites. And he uses humor and clever storytelling. And instead of doing 12 second TikToks, he does 20-minute YouTube clips when Jimmy Kimmel found him. Mark had a couple hundred thousand viewers and Jimmy started putting on his show as the science expert. People saw him and fell in love more. When we got to Mark, he was making a ton of money directly from brands going straight to an audience getting forty or sixty million views a video. People were sticking through the whole episode. That's not hard to go sell to a television.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're promoting a spirit, and the audience realizes that knows that, they're just not going to go buy it. For people that are our age, it's kind of hard to understand how our kids or teenagers or 25-year-olds are so addicted to their phones, but they really believe that these people are relatable and authentic. And I believe that the stars of our future are on those platforms. So it's our job as TV producers to go find them there.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But for brands, which is what we're investing in, that ability to get to a Charlie D'Amelio or a Mr. Beast, or in our case, a Mark Rober or some other talent we work with, that can be done today, tomorrow. You don't have to go through a studio. You don't have to go through as many layers as some of the legacy talent have. That direct to consumer, we had already seen in so many other retail markets. I think the answer, much like we're seeing in DTC now, you still want retail. There's a move back to having inexperience and having a hybrid model. But that talent right now, we've always specialized in real people. I think brands and businesses are better served putting money behind real people versus actors because actors are just not known by their audience for what their passions are. If you're a Kardashian, we all probably know way too much about these people, but at least a brand can get behind it. If you're somebody who's so”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imagine if you're a baseball fan, Derek Jeter, if you're a basketball fan, LeBron James. These two guys decided that they wanted to go direct to an audience. They started the Players Tribune in uninterrupted. That is what TikTok and Snap are. It is the chance for a talent to go straight to an audience, to not have twenty five people between them changing their message. That means these kids generally are”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who we really love working with, they knew the supply chain and how that hydro machine was going to be made and hit market and not run into some of the pitfalls that previous connected fitness had. And they also had looked at every single one. They believed that they had all the inner workings to give us confidence that if we did the things that they were asking, that Hydro would hit the mark. We're in such a brave new world and every business is so complicated. We really look for founders who don't think they know at all and private equity who respect the founders. And we come in and try to respect both equally. It's always a learning lesson. And we've seen some that are really, really good at it and others that the marriage between the investor and the founder goes up really quickly. And that's not good for anybody.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's founders and there's CEOs, and rare occasions the founder can be the CEO. And obviously, when that works, I think it works most beautifully. My biggest surprise was how much disconnect there can be between the founder and the CEO when they take the capital and how much ill will can get developed really quickly between the investors and the founders. We're quite used to managing talent and having relationships to where neither side can ever hopefully push too far and go past the point of reason. We're very relationship bound. Private equity puts a time frame on the investment and the founder and puts a real noose above their neck if it's not seen as a real partnership. So we can go in often now with these private equity folks and help give them a founder's point of view from the outside and help them with the founder in ways that might just sound a little different coming from somebody else other than a traditional private equity. On the flip side, Caterton, for instance.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Introduced it to Howard Stern and his team. Howard bought one for his wife. She loved it. They started talking about it at the show. We then chase it with what's called live reads, which are the best conversion for advertising dollar to purchase because people who listen to Howard trust him. They've been in with him before on stuff he liked. We introduced it to Jennifer Aniston. She went on Ellen and gave them away for her Christmas special. So doing those kind of things is how we add a ton of value.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The coolest part Rally still has it, so we will take it to our venue, we'll take it to our events. You'll get to take pictures with it. It just raises the profile. We introduced Rally to CNBC. CNBC is not going to cover them unless they're really cool. So we'll often call a booking agent or a friend who's on air and we'll say, hey, take a look at this. If you like it, go with God. If not, if it's not worthy of CNBC or Bloomberg, then we'll come back with the next one. But they thought it was really cool and different. And then we've got them in our Netflix show as well that we're coming out with. We will always try to tell their story. And then of course, after Pawn Stars aired, they'd never had as much user sign up as that first night. And then the re-aired same thing, their number two night ever. Another quick one is a company called Hydro that Caterton brought to us. Rowing is twice the workout as cycling. Twice the muscles half the time, but not too many people knew that. And it was considered very Northeast sport. And so our job was to get it into culture.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trade off of what they think they know better than anybody. If you're a day trader, you're always looking for that little edge. And if you're sitting at the tip of culture and your edge might be knowing about which basketball player is about to do something that's going to touch them into culture in a more profound way and drive up their value on their memorability of their cards, that's where we're seeing the cross section of some crypto, DraftKings, and all these same guys that might start to get a little bit scared about stuff that's more digital and think, all right, Rally still has real cool stuff. So we helped put it in a couple episodes upon stars. They had one of the original copies. There's about 15 of them of the Declaration of Independence. And I'm like, let's put this together. Pawn Stars is always looking for cool stuff. And they were able to find that item and then actually go to market with it and fractionalize it. It's still owned by Rally. I think it's worth two and a half, three million dollars.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mentioned the one golden auctions. That's the first one that we've built an entire TV show around. We have another company that we're really excited about called Rally. Rally is the fractionalization of stuff. Again, this is close to my heart. We know collectibles are being professionalized now. The baseball card, boom, when I was doing it back in the late 80s, early 90s, they just kept printing cards if they were selling. Devaluing the cards. Tops, fanatics, all the people that are in this space now are doing it in a much more professionalized way and really thinking about scarcity. If you're a 25-year-old kid who just thinks Giannis is the greatest thing ever, or Mike Trout rookie car going for $2 million, you're not going to own that. Frankly, 99% of the country is not going to own that. However, if you buy it and fractionalize it, it's not technically a stock market, but it's treating it more like a stock market for stuff. Then you're allowing these passionate investors to”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guys, want it to sit there and talk to an investor at the highest levels of baseball. Why I think he's been such a great announcement is he breaks down highly complex stuff in very understandable terms. And it works the same in both directions. I think these athletes and entertainers are just as excited to meet these founders. There's a woman who is high level in the music industry who told me many years ago, this is the first time in the modern era where rock stars and athletes aren't the richest people out there. It's these founders. Maybe they're paper rich right now, but we've always said that athletes wanted to be rock stars or rock stars want to be athletes.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We'll write checks off the balance sheet for early stage stuff to get relationships with the founders to learn more about spaces because we can offer the founders access to NBC host or Bloomberg's top bureau chiefs or stuff like that. We'll always get a little bit more attention and love from founders than people just investing straight capital. At that stage, it's about forming a relationship and seeing if they'll show up. We try to protect both sides of our introductions. So if you're somebody like Alex Rodriguez, who we've been fortunate to do stuff with, who I know you've had on your shows, Alex is a pretty savvy business guy who, like me, isn't formally trained, but did as much as he could while he was playing and working 12 hours a day because he works harder than anybody. So if we're going to try to introduce Alex to somebody, we want to make sure whoever that other person is isn't going to embarrass us with Alex. And vice versa, as part of that, you can't talk down to people. Alex, we're on real.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then another one who's the best one liner title, initial creator, he's able to kick it off to all of a much larger team to actually take that kernel of an idea and put it onto television. And then on the investing side, it's a mix of people who know our world and know how to bridge the world of entertainment, but have pretty good business and investing shops and then people who come from Lindsay Goldberg and real private equity shops. So it's a nice blend of both. We're very fortunate to follow El Caterton or a churning group or Alexis O'Hane into these other deals. We rely on them quite heavily for supply side and other stuff that we're not best in class at. And they look at us to go tell the story every which way you can.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And had Jimmy be a bit of a traffic cop to the right people to lean in for Diageo, it fostered a relationship inside that building that when he said, hey, I want to leave to go do something more entrepreneurial, but I want to bring the family with me. We've done the same thing with ITV. It's always trying to think about how are these businesses where we have so much deep-rooted success and shorthand with, and how do we bring them in? So for us, for Diageo, they came in as our biggest and first brand partner and they show up in great ways at all of our events. And there's real synergies there. Danza, a tried and true marketer, and I'm not. Dan may show me who he's going to hire and I may meet him before they start, but he's running that business. Then we have an entertainment business where I've hired folks who I've worked with over the years or wanted to work with who I think are best in class who all have different skill sets. One tried and true producer. One has represented talent forever and can help bring big talent into the family.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's one thing I've tried to do, and it hasn't been hard. It's always hire smarter people, and it hasn't been hard because my IQ is not that high. But this has allowed us to hire best-in-class people. Our marketing head, Dan Sanborn, came out of Diageo, which is the number one spirits brand in the world. They've been innovative in ways that I've just found so exciting. He was charged with building what's called culture and partnerships inside Diagio. And what that meant back when spirits were not allowed to have 30-second commercials, they had to show up in culture in cool ways. He had to get into writers' rooms. He did work with Silicon Valley, the TV show, Game of Thrones, and enormous deal, or he'd partner up with the most entrepreneurial celebrities, guys like Diddy, who put real skin in the game with Sarak and has built that to a place that most talent would have never done the work. And Dan had brought Kimel in to Dion.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those are a lot of the type of people for us, these founders who we call it founder flow because they're out there every day, whether it's this guy Nate Checkett, who founded Roan Men's Activewear. He's referred four or five things that would have been 10X had we invested in all of them. Thankfully, we did a couple of them. It's getting all these like-minded people who want to collaborate, which we think in a global world is even more valuable. And if they don't want to collaborate or that they have sharp elbows, then they're not really going to be invited back to our events and our little family.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like to think of as the most special people in our wheelhouse wheel fortune. They get to work with a marketing team, a PR team, a production team that's also an investor, not a vendor. So we'll always go that extra mile because we have more at stake with them.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“TV, that's meant to be very lifestyle focused. Very few people have run both of those networks that have done quite well through Cable's woes of the last decade. Those two have held strong. Her name's Courtney White. Again, here's another trend spotter. She came here not just to make TV shows, but to really plug into everything else we're doing. We have another company called Portois that really focuses on digital stars and YouTube channels. They do Steph Curry's YouTube channel. There's another way maybe to get Steph and the family to do other stuff. And then we have a marketing team that bridges the gap between our investing arm and our content arm because often we haven't traditionally as producers had marketing in house. Now we have a company that acts as an agency of record for both publicly traded companies and then also our portfolio companies that we invest in. And for our founders who we”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I started to get into finance and investing, it all looked the same. And certainly when I moved up to Connecticut, there were a lot more vests than I was used to seeing Brooklyn and Manhattan. But it's also different from hedge funds to venture to public versus private, et cetera, et cetera. It's very similar on the entertainment side. Now the biggest names in the world for young people are on TikTok. They're on Snap. That's going to become the spot and is the spot where we go casting for that age group. So that's one division of what we do. We try to be the bridge between the young stars of tomorrow and today, frankly, on these digital platforms and make sure that they make it onto the Netflix who lose discoveries. Then you get into unscripted versus scripted. Those are different genres. We're fortunate to have a company that does film, that does scripted television, Kimmel touches all of it. We do scripted with Jimmy and unscripted. And then we just launched a new venture with the woman who was running Food Network in HD.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From paper. So if we think it's a cool TV concept, we can start developing that from the beginning with the company. We could highlight on an HGTV the actual business from startup. We invested in a company called Golden Auctions, really legitimate investors, Steve Cohen, Peter Chernin, the Chernin Group, have all invested in, are a little way for us to elbow into the cap table was by saying, hey, we'll take out a TV concept on the business. If you've never heard of Golden Auctions, he is the goat of sports collectibles. And now that extends well into other areas. You take my skill set of telling the stories of stuff. But then we also want somebody that brings in his own audience. So we bring Peyton Manning in to not only executive produce, but appear in the show. That all the sudden could lead to us seeing investment opportunities with patents business partners. So we bring it all together through what we like to refer to going back to the Disney model is our version of Disney.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Early to try to cast this pawn shop is the next big wave. Chefs. Nobody was watching or talking about chefs as celebrities before unscripted TV. Certainly the same about real estate brokers. We just announced two shows for Netflix in Miami and LA. It's called The Agency, a real estate firm where the husband is one of the guys on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. And then in Miami, there's a husband wife design firm. These folks are at the typical culture of real estate trends. We'll make the TV show with them, but for us, it's about with a guy like Mauricio who owns the agency. What can we talk about when we see the next big investment opportunity in real estate and lifestyle? are both interior decorators same thing. We can reverse engineer, for example, one of the PR companies we've invested in, seize ideas for companies before they've actually gone.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you've ever seen the Disney flywheel, it's pretty easy. You Google 1957 Walt Disney business model. I always joke that he's Walt Disney, so he drew his business plan instead of writing 500 pages. It doesn't matter where the intellectual property starts. My daughters met frozen through the music first. My son met Star Wars through the theme park first. But then they want the toothbrushes, the nightgowns, the Halloween costumes. They want to listen to the music, go to the movie theater, and then watch Disney+. I should mention that my more famous partner is Jimmy Kimmel. Jimmy really leveled us up with talent and relationships that is sort of second to none. We joke that he's the mayor of Hollywood because once a year the biggest stars in the world are going through his couch to promote whatever is the most important thing for them at that time, whether it's us as unscripted producers or Jimmy, we're always seeing trends by design.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So for us, the idea of starting wheelhouse was to be a bridge between startups or even growth companies and marketing and content capabilities. The best recent example I can think of, which is not our show, is drive to survive on Netflix. F1 has been around for a long time in the US, much like soccer, much like Premier League. But if you think about what's driven the crazy numbers happening right now in F1 and Premier League over here, it's the TV show on Netflix and the video games. This is storytelling. This is content. This is not advertising. This is reaching an audience much like Disney has historically. And so we thought if we can partner up with best-in-class investors, whether it's venture or private equity, we can co-invest and they won't look at us as competitive. We're not trying to lead. We've just piggybacked with these folks on coming into great opportunities and making sure that the brands there.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“of what we wanted to do. And we saw pawn stars, for instance, there were 75 people a day going through the shop. We put the show on. There were 5,000 people in dead August lined up around the building waiting as we shot inside to meet our funny lunatics and their business just exploded. Fixer upper, maybe the best example of what Magnolia and the Gaines family was able to do to transform their business and frankly that town of Waco, Texas. So we really saw this opportunity to invest in businesses and brands of people. And we also saw for what was happening in tech and consumer, anything that was consumer facing, celebrity was really starting to mean more and more. The world for investing and starting businesses never been more crowded, which is great, obviously. There's a lot of competition out there and the barrier for entry has never been lower. But to be able to go from a great idea to making sure everybody knows about it, what is a company's ability to get their message?”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were in a nice cushy position. My chief strategy officer has been the co architect of everything I've done in the last 10 years, Ed Simpson. We could have stayed where we were. I go back to that curiosity and opportunity when you're working for a publicly traded company. You can't do side bets that are outside of what you've told your investors they're investing in. We saw the opportunity to create a version of Disneyland for real people. Nobody, I think, has done a better job than Walt Disney of creating a flywheel for monetizing intellectual property, whether it be a brand, a film, or something that might start as music or even some of their rides have turned into films. Nobody's better in our estimation than Disney, but nobody's really thought of all the different ways they could do that in-house at the modern-day studio. That's a big idea, and we're still a hell of a long way from being there. But that was the kernel.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many companies will go to market and talk to 15 buyers. We were in a spot where we didn't think we had to sell, which of course is a nice spot.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mount told us what the company was making and would make if we didn't pump every single penny back into it and what they thought we could sell it for, which I thought was not going to happen. But it turns out motivated bankers can deliver every other time.”
2022-08-08 · Capital Allocators · Brent Montgomery – The Disney Flywheel at Wheelhouse (Capital Allocators, EP.265) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source