YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Lam

lines on the record: 84
first: 2022-10-10
most recent: 2022-10-10
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

“The cadence of surfing too in waves is really what informed wirecutter cadence which is slow and clean and like impactful as opposed to a bunch of tiny little waves knocking all over the place in a messy way.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obviously, all of the above, but it's really just Mostly Hard work. And skill And then I guess I believe luck is like. Able to be in those situations for long enough for things to work out.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I spend most of my time these days fixing up this old house and I'm basically talking with craftsmen all day. I have started to build and practice craft myself specifically woodworking with Japanese hand tools. And like a lot of these tools are made by hand, by blacksmiths, and the speed of craft and the values of craft are so precious and humbling to me, and I've started to recognize that the best media is also light craft, the best podcast, the best books, the best everything is not capitalistic at scale. Still needs to be capitalistic. People need to afford their way of life and their tools. But that scale is something I'm really allergic to now.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I definitely am. Let's put it this way. If I were starting something now, it wouldn't necessarily be about things. Since that's kind of my wheelhouse, maybe it would be, but it would have to be in a way that's more. Tune with today's values.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I could do it again, I would have negotiated a job for myself because. I thought I'd be hovering like an owner does. He basically is an owner Put yourself where you're needed, and then as soon as you can hire for that need, you go to the next need and you keep building. But that doesn't work in a big company, and also it's not really great to have someone like me around if you're trying to establish yourself as like the new leadership, to be honest. So, I really think there's wisdom in what they did, which was they put me in an advisory role. And I got to work alongside the person running Wirecutter from a business standpoint for many years. And it was really wonderful.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fast considering it was bootstrapped, more or less. It's fast considering the first year, I was only working on it 10 hours a week because that's all I had”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so there was another meeting after that meeting where I said, let's do a collaboration. So I commissioned a cheap printer test. And I said, we actually found the best cheap printer. You can do this work if you are motivated enough to do it. And we did a collaboration. It was one of the most trafficked pieces they had because it had that wire cutter punch of we were actually doing the work. So we did more collaborations, and then one day. Got an email from someone on the strategy team. Do you ever think about selling? And I was like, I've thought about it before, and we started a process”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know what's really funny is that numbers are actually wrong. It was a leak that was incorrect, but the Times published it. It was more, but it wasn't an extraordinary amount. I always knew that we would end up at the times. I thought it could fit in there from an editorial standpoint. I had an introduction to some of the Salzbergers, and I told them about what we were doing. And I said, I love the times and I believe the Times deserves better and the readers deserve better service.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we would find a beat and we'd find someone crazy and obsessed, and we would bring them in, and it'd be a big investment to teach them our format, but we would do it, and half the people didn't work out, and I think even more important than hiring was firing. When it's your company and you're paying someone six figures to do something and they don't do it, it's literally, you know, taking $100,000 in a stack and then lighting it on fire. It's very painful. And you can't survive that way, and you can't take care of the people who are good that way.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. By the fourth year or the third year it was making like seven figures of profit. So it was a pretty quick transition from Nothing to something for something that I owned the majority of.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the other thing is if someone returns Something that you recommend. The affiliate fee gets reversed and you get zero. You can't say that for the Rolex ad next to the top 10 list or something factually incorrect. The advertiser never gets that money back for being next to articles that are terrible. So, and the readers don't get that time back on Clickbait. So for me, it's more ethical”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think advertising is one of the great evils of the world because it gets in your brain no matter what and the metrics they use are basically what has made media what it is today like really shallow fast cadence And it's crazy that. You are like a high Brand for like a watch or something. It's crazy that you don't want to help reverse that because your amazing watches need to live next to like BS top ten lists or like a magazine you flip through in like five minutes that they took a month to put together It's all just like Really trashy, and I can't wait for this trend to reverse and reverse in more areas than just what wirecutter did around product.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think editors were freaking out at other publications because they wanted a format like that and business people were maybe scared of that change because you're talking about a severe loss of time on page and traffic. If someone's just clicking on one article and leaving in two minutes, they have to understand that can lead to a different type of business or A better service, but you're also sacrificing maybe 50 page views in like an hour on your site. It's significant. So people were really slow to move. And at first, I was scared people were going to copy, and then I realized that. Companies are incapable of really competing in that way.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, and I think I'd expand on that and say, I really love service work because you're helping someone. You're not just writing for your own ego. And at the same time, I'm not egoists. I love to compete and I feel like I could do better work than billion-dollar companies with huge budgets with a small team that is motivated”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did no marketing. We were mostly editors. We didn't have business people. We didn't have social media people. We were really light. We had no offices. Really liked having a silent media company because it's just like all of media is like this party where everyone's talking over each other and saying the same things other people are saying. Even worse, they're spending money on reporting, duplicating other people's work. And so I just wanted to contribute in this way that was different. And the power and focus of it, I think. Caught people off guard in our industry. Was all word of”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's correct. And as a CEO, I never checked anything like traffic or I knew the size of the checks coming, but I didn't pay attention to anything except the quality of the work.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, the affiliate program was like super cheap marketing for them, and it was designed to live on mom and pop blogs. They would have all these cheesy widgets if some blogger wrote about something they could link on Amazon and make a few bucks. That's what that was designed for. It was never designed for the scale of big media companies that use it now.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the truth is, we would link up all sorts of stuff in any of the really cool stuff would not have affiliate links on them because you're right. That's a lot of work. But for the majority of the electronics, we could link to Amazon or Best Buy. And that was pretty easy to do.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So basically, when you are a business person running multiple sites, you don't have the focus to understand, to basically switch into a completely different way of making money. It's too hard. It's too much work to reinvent a whole business model for one site that looks really small. And so there was just no attention and no support for like this format. Like we were asked if we wanted to do news. And I was like, I don't want to do news. Of course we could have done all this stuff that basically everyone does when they start a media company. Like we could have done all that stuff. Want to do it. We just felt like we had no choice but to leave sadly.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I knew working at Gawker where we were doing so much quantity of news that would become basically useless tomorrow. It was a good use of time.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was so obsessed with just doing this service and like say taking a two hour shopping experience and making it a 30 second shopping experience with the lead containing the thing we thought you should get. I thought it was such a great idea that didn't exist. I was not at all sure of how we were going to make money ever. I also wanted to grow things really slowly because I was so burnt out for the first year I could only basically work ten hours a week. And I think my partners must have been like Only going to publish one article every three weeks. And I said, Yep. And I knew that if you projected that over a couple years, you'd have like 100 articles that were evergreen, but that cadence is so alien to media and to investors and to the public.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we weren't really like humming along yet. Was just me living off of savings. And I was in a real headspace of just recovering. And that's when I moved to Hawaii and I slept on a friend's couch for like six months. Swimming and just working on this, and Hawaii gave me my energy back. And every time I'd publish something, a little more energy would build, the project started feeding me, and the feedback from other people in the industry. Other people started to see that it was crazy work.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's correct. And it's basically a distillation if someone, say you knew that headphone writer and you're like, hey, I need to buy some headphones. It's for this. Which one should I get? They would tell you, Oh, if you have 100 bucks, buy this one, or if you have 200 bucks, buy this one, that's a very humanistic. A very human experience, but not everyone has access to someone like that, and that's what we were trying to put down on paper. And ultimately, even on a higher level than that, we're trying to give you that feeling of just how sure you feel. Someone tells you that.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, even though it's a subjective thing with enough process, you can make it a little bit more objective. And here's the thing that makes it even cooler. Now that you've got the top two or three, the next time you can introduce another 40 and you don't have to compare the new 50 to the previous 50, you just have to compare it to the current Kings of the Hill and see if they get dethroned. You now have tested a total of 100. And so as you work on this evergreen article with updates over a decade now, it's probably hundreds, if not over a thousand headphones that get tested.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was the model at the beginning, but very quickly it evolved into a mutant form of that, which was way more powerful. Like, for example, If you review 20 headphones, normally on the internet before wirecutter, you had thousands of opinions on headphones that were subjective, and maybe you had a few people who were professionals who objectively record things. So we had a process that involved both of those things and a blind test with musicians, audio engineers, and surprisingly, most of those people would agree on which one sounded better, blindly.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And these are some of the best reviewers in the field. And I was very pleased. Much working hand in hand with them during the process, whereas that does not happen at all in front of book stuff. You just get an assignment and you come back with some copy and some pitch. But I was like, no, I want to develop the test with you. I want to talk about these things. Let me see your list of things that you think could be good. You forgot about this brand, and that's how I steered things. And it was more the way that craft people are trained. Than they are in mass media. It's like more of an apprenticeship happening all the time. And once people heard that we were doing things better and different, say instead of a front of the book a couple hundred dollars for review, we were offering several thousand dollars to do the same work.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You find a writer that's on the beat. TVs are hard because people don't have space, so that's a very difficult writer to fill, but you can find them. But very early on, there were steady freelancers who came on and started doing regular work, and they had to take a lot of convincing to start working with me”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'd go to the companies and send us stuff. It's pretty much industry standard, you know, and it's not yours, it's a loan. So you send it back or you donate it if they don't want it.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was just the connection I had through a friend. And I asked him about naming things. I had this really complicated name. He basically told me in a nutshell, if you name something, a really boring word. Can like own that word like lost or alias, right? It's those super simple names, but you have to show up, you have to really own them by doing something impactful.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the time, they were doing like 50 50 splits with site owners. Is not advised because then no one can make a decision Someone should be a majority owner. So I negotiated to give up all the launch sponsorship. 65% of the site, but I also had a clause in there saying that if I didn't feel like Things were going well, I could basically leave and take the entire company with me.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct, and I think it was like a quarter million dollars, but then the advertising agency took half, and then the all took all of it because I didn't want. I just needed money for expenses, but something about it felt like I didn't want to pay myself yet.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These don't really exist anymore, but you could pitch an idea for a new site to a company and they would basically take over the advertising for that entity. So we had a launch sponsorship deal to start this thing And that is a lot nicer than raising money, and it's a lot nicer than starting it and just hoping to sell ads after the fact.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wrote the first bunch of guides a couple dozen, and I edited the first couple hundred, and it was always just a combination of aggregation of what was out there plus my own verifications at the end. We would take a layer of the shopping experience and stack that on top of all the information out there and do some verification so you wouldn't have to do that whole shopping process yourself.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I had this idea, I wanted to do it, and Nobody wanted to do it I pitched it for Wired. I pitched it to a lot of places, and nobody wanted to do it. And like so many good ideas, you can't get people to take it for free. You know, I had a promising career if I wanted to pursue tech news and writing about things. And I had at some point negotiated some really crazy job offers. That I couldn't pull the trigger on Something was just telling me not to do these things because it was going to be same old thing working for big corporations, which I have a problem working for. I just not compatible with that.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's just really. Stressful. We just knew that I didn't want to have that experience of hunting through blog archives and reviews and user reviews and collating all that in my head, turning it into like a soup and then drinking the soup.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The information is out there on the tip of the tongues of the editors covering those beats. The formats that were common in the business models attached to them encourage you to click on like 40 different articles about say TVs for example. And then you have to compare all of them and their prices and their features and decide which one's right for you. That's a lot of work or a little work if you don't care, but it's a lot of math. And it's a lot of just we have to figure it out Every major publication at the time would do that. Force you to sort through dozens and dozens of reviews or look at a huge chart full of like circles and dots that don't really mean anything.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I had the idea for wire cutter while I was still at Gawker, you know. We hadn't really fully formed the idea, but it was impossible to figure out what to buy quickly on almost any site with any sort of secure emotional feeling about that choice being good.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and I think I had some kind of record for staying editor-in-chief for her. A long time by Cocker Standards. And it's because I had a really good team and I was getting better at delegating and managing and finding. They protected me. I protected them. That's the only way I was able to stay there that long.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I wrote it way later. I was just like, that was a really crazy situation. And I had so much respect for the people at Apple and that culture. That's always been complicated”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Hard not to respect. Steve Jobs, even if you are the editor in chief at Gizmoto and you have a job to do And so I just wrote this blog post about what happened and how I felt about things. And I had very mixed feelings Many of the values in Apple you have to respect as someone who eventually would start a company and try to do things in a way that's uncompromisingly good Yeah, I just had a twinge of reg”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And, like, that's a really big deal. People spending their money. These things cost so much money now. So I felt very spiritually engaged in this idea of this telling people to wait because most people have no idea about the timing and the cadence of product release. And I think he was really upset for many months. He would probably against all advice would go to like a conference where he was speaking and he would start talking about. Gizmoto being horrible randomly. He was really obsessed with that moment where he was told what to do. You know, he was able to dominate entire industries and hear these honestly pretty stupid bloggers telling him what to do. That probably doesn't feel good.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then bad cop came. Was like, you know, this is serious stuff. You can go to jail for this. And I just said, I would love to go to jail for an iPhone. I was just thinking about how much traffic we can make from it. I mean, how much more legendary would that story have been if we went to jail I mean, he knew that that point that I think Steve. Also understands my understanding of Steve Jobs from talking to people who work at Apple and he just understands when he finds someone who also is. Fully committed And so at that point, he kind of just backed off. And he got the letter written And I knew that we would impact sales, and I was glad because you shouldn't buy you shouldn't buy the old thing right before the new one comes down at the same price. Especially because you're going to keep these things for multiple years.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh no, oh no published. This was like after we published it. And I said, We're happy to get it back to you. It's always been our intent. We need you to verify it's actually yours. And he said, Well, I don't want to do that. I go, well, it's the law. We can't each.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He is a good cop. You know, hey. You have my phone. I'd really like it back. I'm not mad at you. Our guy lost it. And I go, I understand, you know. And I knew what to say from reading every book on Apple. I knew what to expect”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, he got my number through a mutual acquaintance. And yeah, it was like every book I've ever read on Steve Jobs' personality, but on the phone.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we already checked that aspect out, so we were able to move quickly, and we knew we were never going to have a bigger story than that.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I know he contacted Wired and he contacted another publication maybe and Gadget. They all started just kind of like not sure what to do. They didn't have a plan and they were slow.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we went to our lawyer in-house and said, Can you look this up? What would happen? How we can do this safely legally? We discovered these laws about returning stolen property. Can't get in trouble for it, basically, and the person who claims the property has to claim it formally.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we were very prepared very fast backup plans. And so we started just dreaming about scenarios to plan for them, being prepared. In one of these scenarios, like earlier in that year, we talked about fantasized really, about what if we got a prototype of an iPhone.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Went down something like that, but there's a backstory to it, which is. Earlier that year We were so good at our jobs and so bored. So we were at that time doing what I now know a lot of places do, but we are pre-writing stories and we would pre-write multiple versions of stories.”
2022-10-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wirecutter: Brian Lam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT