YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Lee

lines on the record: 52
first: 2022-09-09
most recent: 2022-09-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Would actually probably do as much research as I can in their team members. And it's like just as you just named off Southwest culture, you could probably do a lot of digging and just find out what that culture is for the company and whether or not it resonates with what you believe in and what you want to invest behind. It doesn't take much to reach out to some folks on LinkedIn even and just talk to them.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In good times or bad times, they're there for you, again, when you need them, but they let you run. So I've had investors in the past who, when things go south, they're all up in your business, right? We've all, many of us have dealt with these types of investors, and they actually think that they could go and fix it themselves. So they start inserting themselves more and more and more. It doesn't work that way, man. It just doesn't. It's like as an investor, you could suggest things. You can try to advise. You could try to mentor, right? But you can't run the only thing you can possibly do is fire the CEO, right? And bring in a new management team. Sure, you could do that, but you're still not running the company yourself unless you decide to fire the CEO and become the CEO yourself. But that rarely is the case. That doesn't happen with venture capitalist or rarely. So I think, again, the best, I think investors are ones that are supportive when you need them and let you run what you don't.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I really look up to really two investors. It's Jeremy Liu from Lightspeed, who has just recently left Lightspeed at kind of said take some time off, but he's fantastic. And also Neil Sekura over at Defi Ventures. These are probably my two favorite investors in the world. And the reason I say that is because I've gone through so many ups and downs in my career, and they've always been supportive. And that's a true sign of, I think, a great investor. It's someone who is absolutely there when you need them, right? When you need their advice, when you need their help, but they let you run when you don't, right? They're not all up in your business. trying to get metrics from you every day you know or trying to insert themselves into into whatever it's like they understand their role right and they like to be helpful and the other thing is that i think great investors don't change their color”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of us just like self analyzation too. I'm pretty self aware of my limitations, right? And I work on those limitations, but there's only so much you can do also because you're born a certain way, really. It's like you can try to change yourself, but at some point, you know, it's hard, right? So I understand how to buttress myself with the right team, with the right people. For example, even my wife, my home life, right? I luckily found the right partner who is really my partner, right? And it really makes me, you know, a better husband, a better father, right? It's the same way with being a CEO. You got to find the right partners that are going to help you be the best CEO you can be. That's really understanding what you're lacking, right? And being understanding and self-aware of your weaknesses.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I've always been a really, really hard worker. I'm pretty focused once I'm in the groove. I think I've gotten smarter in terms of time management. I understand how to structure my tasks a little bit better and how to kind of lessen my workload in certain areas that I know others can do better. And that's something that you'll learn over time also as an entrepreneur is that you like to control everything. Like I like to control everything, but you can't. right and it's something that i've learned over time is that you know delegation to the right folks at the right time is key right you've got to let people run and you got to trust them to run and so that's kind of um something that i've learned over time to let go of is that control”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cards, I mean, a lot of cool people. PSA2, you know, or whatever it is. You're meeting so many people. It's like, it's fascinating to me. So I'm having a lot of fun learning again.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think I would have lost you dazzle for fear, like just seeing how many companies were producing shoes and trying to sell shoes. I was just like, oh my goodness, this is nuts. I'm not going to succeed. I'm competing against a thousand million retailers and people trying to sell shoes. Sometimes it's like better not to know, not always, but sometimes. Sometimes it's better not to know. No, and even with diapers, I mean, I didn't know how to make a diaper. I remember the first time I saw a diaper machine. They're gigantic. I'm not sure if you've ever seen one, Trey, but they're the size of like a convention. It just goes on forever, like just going and make these diapers. It was like, wow, that's fascinating. I had no idea, you know, but you learn, right? And that's the one thing about me is like I'm not scared to learn. I think a lot of entrepreneurs are probably the same way. I actually enjoy learning. I enjoy learning new industries. I enjoy meeting new networks. I enjoy everything about it. And so starting a company in trading.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The capital raised. We had the website built. We had the marketing geared up. Kim Kardashian was ready to promote. We had everything, but we had no shoes, right? Because none of us knew shoes. But we were told, like, oh, you could just go to this area and they've got all these warehouses, that little sewing shoes. And so we went and we were picking out some shoes and we're like, I'll take 100 pairs of that and 100 pairs of this one. And they're looking at us like we're nuts, right? And they're like, no, the minimum order is 2,500 pairs, right? And we're like, oh, we got to kind of stop the launch and find partners to work with us to create shoe dazzle shoes. And so that kind of put a delay on things. And then I remember when we launched, I went to my first shoe show, right? It was the World Shoe Association in Las Vegas. And this is when the WSA was gigantic. I mean, they took over like two big convention centers. I really think like if I had seen that before we launched Shoe Dazzle,”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a little bit of platform because it's more just experience as a platform, but it's completely different categories, right? So legal Zoom from law to selling women's high heel shoes to selling diapers to a trading card service. None of them are all that related. And I've never, it's like, I don't know how to explain this, but I think I actually am missing an antenna when it comes to like, you know, not understanding things and just trying things without the experience, but it's never stopped me because I just kind of figure, you know, none of this is rocket science. It's business. It just is. It's like, yes, are there different margin profiles, metrics, and different marketing tactics and everything else? Sure. But it's stuff that you could learn, right? And sometimes it's like as an outsider, sometimes you bring a fresh perspective into an industry. And that's what we're trying to do again with Arena Club. I'll give you an example at Shoe Dazzle back in the day. I remember we had.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's a captain. That's why I actually kissed her and Derek Jr., one of the greatest ball players who have ever lived, who have ever swung a bat. And so just his leadership ability, his demeanor, he's incredibly smart and dedicated. And so I think, and this really resonates with him. And so through some mutual friends, I got to know Derek. And I think it's going to be a fantastic launch for us. We'll see what happens. You never know. So we'll see what happens.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Old, and you know, my happiest days are really going to the card shops and card shows with him. And so I kind of took this hobby slash passion into starting a company here. I'm building something that I would want as a hobbyist, right? As a collector, and it's just something that's never really existed where you have this social kind of marketplace as opposed to what exists today is much more about community and a club, which is why it's called Arenaclub.com. And so we're super excited to watch it on September 8th and hopefully some of your listeners will come check it out.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So happy you asked about a radio club. So, yeah, I'm super excited to be a CEO again for the fourth time. And we're launching the company on September 8th, knock on wood, hopefully. And Derek Jeter's been fantastic to work with on this. And it's in the trading card category. And so baseball, basketball cards. We were using computer vision and machine learning to grade sports cards. And then we digitized them, put them on blockchain, and then create these digital marketplaces where you can buy and sell and trade cards with other showrooms, other online showrooms. And so that's really the idea. I've been collecting cards my whole life. I started as a kid and I never stopped collecting cards in high school and college, law school. I remember when I was at Scadin, my very first paycheck from the law firm, I bought more cards. And so it's something that I've been doing for a long time. And I started collecting with my son probably about six years ago when he was about seven years ago.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I saw a strong team, right? I saw George and Ryan, George Ron and Ryan. I remember I gave a talk once at a accelerator program. And I remember they came up to me afterwards and they were kind of describing what they were working on. And it sounded interesting.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I never was driven by taking a company public. I'm driven by building something great, right? I like building things that will last and be around for decades. And so that's what drives me is the impact that I like to make as opposed to dreaming of taking a company public. It's more, can we build a beautiful business that has staying power? That's much more fulfilling to me than the IPOs or even selling a company for a large amount. Is this company going to be around? Will my grandchildren say my granddad started that company or helped start that company? That's what I look for.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, absolutely felt a lot of pride in having these companies go public and being part of them, part of their history. But to me, it was this, I don't know, it's more just a check mark taking the company public, you know, started a company that went public. It wasn't a cause for celebration. I don't think it was just more, that's the new structure of the company. You have public investors, and that's that. It's just another, you know, just a period, a season of the company.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, those three kind of believed in it. IVP was an investor in Legal Zoom. Lightspeed was an investor in shootazzle, and General Callas were friends of mine. I'm still close with Neil Sakira, who's now at Defy. But they just believed in us. They believed in us. The craziest thing happens, Trey, is when you're an entrepreneur first starting out, it's tough, honestly, to raise capital. And we all know that. And you really have to hustle and round up as much money as you can. When you have a company that's already successful, it's so much easier to raise capital, right? It's like success begets success, right? And so raising that 27 million was actually not that difficult. We had even more than the 27 million available to us. We could have probably raised, you know, 50 or 60 to start the company, but we needed about 27, 28 to hit our plans for the next two years.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I knew we had to raise a significant amount of money because I knew the roadmap, the volume of product that we had to bring in the door for these types of products from the baby shampoos, the wipes to the diapers was significant. I mean, you can't just order 10 packs of wipes to get started. You're going to have to order millions of dollars more. And so, and I also knew that the advertising was getting expensive. So unlike legal Zoom, where it was cheap, it was one cent per click or unlike shoe dazzle where we kind of lashed onto the earliest days of Facebook marketing where it was inefficient. And so we took advantage of that inefficiency. That wasn't the case for the honest company. And so we kind of had to raise enough capital to go out there and really promote it and market it and advertise and so forth. So we needed some more capital. Fortunately, you know, we had the right partners who gave us that capital in light speed, general catalyst, and IVP.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually think it's not necessarily the celebrity, it's mostly the team, right? It's mostly the team. And it's really surround, if you're a celebrity, you have to surround yourself with the right team that can execute on your vision. And also, it has to be authentic. I've seen a lot of times where a celebrity will promote something or an influence where it will promote something that just doesn't make sense to promote. You'll have an MMA rustler who wants to start a furniture company. It's like, what do you have to do with furniture? I don't know. So sometimes there's that disconnect. But if there isn't, if there really is authentic belief in what you're doing and people find it, consumers find it to be authentic, then if it doesn't work is probably the team. And so I actually always like as an investor myself, you know, I invest in teams. I don't invest in ideas, right? Ideas are a dime a dozen, as you know.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of fixed as we were going along. And so it just was just a lot of hustle. It was a lot of hustle, a lot of great partners that we worked with that would iterate on products very quickly for us and work with us. We had a company called Valor that was making our diapers down in down in Mexico and there were fantastic partners. They would fix any issues that we would have and so forth. It was really just kind of getting to that type of volume that quickly too working with factories that could crank out that type of product and hit our growth rates that we're hitting and working with us. It wasn't easy by any means, Trey. It was just more working in concert with team partners, vendors, all of it.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. I mean, there was a lot of growing pains. A lot of sleepless nights. Yeah, it was really, again, bringing in the right people at the right time. We couldn't have done it without the team that we put in place. We were having a lot of issues. When you grow that quickly, you have a lot of eyeballs on you watching your every move. And so we had to be ultra careful in terms of everything that we said and did and produced and everything else. There are so many things that we learned early on that we had to fix kind of on the flight. It was almost like flying a plane and fixing the engines as it's in the air. It's the same old story. So basically, I remember we created these laundry pods once. They're a great product. It was great pods. And we would strip them and we never really tested them in freezing cold weather. And so when we shipped them back east in the winter, they would explode on people's front porches, right? Like stories like that were like abundant that we had.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I inherently knew that a mother would pay even a slight premium for the safety and well-being of their child. They might not pay that slight premium to save the environment necessarily. Everyone wants to do good for the environment, right? We all do, right? But do we want to pay for it? We will pay for health and safety for sure. And that's why I knew that little nuance for the honest company, that lane to go into non-toxic chemical-free was a pretty large kind of lane that was wide open.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, a lot of it has to do with Jessica Alba, who was so incredibly passionate about the product and what we were building. Honest company more so than any other company I've started was extremely mission driven. And the vision of trying to create a non-toxic world really resonated with a lot of folks from consumers who especially our own team members said to everyone involved in it, we were very driven by that mission. And so with Jessica, she was so incredibly passionate, she would do every interview. She would promote it. And it really resonated with a lot of moms. And we knew that it would because at the time we started the honest company together, it was really a time where eco was really picking up a lot of steam, right? So eco was like kind of going into the mainstream. But no one was actually talking about chemicals as opposed to the environment.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We Kim because her father used to work with Robert Shapiro, my partner at Legal Zoom. And so we would see Kim at some of his events or at dinner or this or that. And it was my wife that really wanted to get Kim involved because she had watched the very first episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. And my wife, Mira, said she's going to be huge, right? We should go talk to Kim about Shoe Dazzle. And so that's who we talk to. We really didn't talk to anyone else. It was really Kim that we were focused on. And sure enough, it worked. And we couldn't afford her today. But back then, she was, you know, she was just getting started. And so it worked.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hard. It was just anytime you have to go in and kind of change a lot of major things, it's never easy. And it's like there are a lot of days at Shoo Dazzle where we couldn't pay our bills. We had lawyers chasing us. We had the electric company chasing us. We had everyone chasing us. It was a scary time. And I know a lot of entrepreneurs have been there, but luckily we landed the plane and got out.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was legal and shoot houses, it was a really fun business to start. It started with Kim Cardashian, and she was terrific. She's one of the hardest working women I think I've ever met truly. She's all over it. But we grew it. We launch it. It grew very, very quickly. And then about three years into it, that's when I was going to join the honest company with Chess Guy Alma to start the honest company. So we found a CEO to run Shidazzle. And it just didn't quite work. Part of it was a culture shift. Part of it was for some other reasons. The model was kind of not working as well as we wanted it to. So I came back in to kind of help us shoot Azzle. And it was tough. That's when we laid off half the people. We were, you know, kind of rejiggering a lot of things. I mean, luckily, we sold it to a competitor. And, you know, our investors actually were made whole, which is fantastic. But it was just hard.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think culture is extremely important at every company. And I think once you establish a culture that's working, stick with it. Because if you change it, things fall apart. And we all know there's a very different culture at Disney as opposed to Zappos or Nike or name the company. They have their own cultures. And it works for them. And in my case, it's the culture that I like to set is one of understanding. communication. I like to lead by basically I have a lot of empathy towards people and the team and I really love”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So little things like that, that's when you start realizing, you know what, it's not moving as quickly as I want it to. And I really should go off the data. And there's people who are really good at it. Like, take life, some of these folks that probably were on your show before. Like Jeff Bezos or, you know, Elon Musk or whoever these ultra successful folks are, they can scale from zero to billions and not miss a beat. Honestly, I'm not like that. I'll be honest with you. It's like I'm really good at the earliest stages. I'm probably not the guy you want running a multi-billion dollar business, I'll be honest with you.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Investors and this and that. There's a lot more going on in terms of that as opposed to just building. I like building. I'll give another example at one of my more recent companies. I remember I wanted to change the color of one of the buttons, the continue buttons to green as opposed to the color yellow that it was in. And I remember I was talking to the product team. I said, why don't we try making that green? And they're like, okay, we'll do that. And then a couple weeks passed, and it's still yellow. And then finally, we have this meeting, and there's probably 15 people in the room. And they said, well, we've done all these tests. And the right color is purple, right? And I was thinking to myself, well, that's great. It's terrific that we decided that, you know, you did the research and did all the UX testing and everything else and purple is the right answer. Terrific. Let's go with purple. In my head, I'm thinking I wanted a green.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's always tough to make that final decision to move on. But in my case, it was really comes down to the best and happiest days of my life at LegalZoom, my career, was at the earliest stages, right? You mentioned that I was eating ramen and peanut butter, jelly sandwiches, which is true. But I was happiest then. Just being in a room of four or five people iterating and building very quickly and coming up with this ideas and trying things and so forth. That is fun for me. So I'm kind of addicted to startups in that sense. Now once a company scales to a thousand employees, it's just a very different company than it was at the earliest age. And so I just find a lot more enjoyment at the earliest stages of my business as opposed to the later stages where there's just a lot more involved in terms of structure organization, decision making, a lot of outside factors.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was actually a blessing, Trey. I think I see it the same way as you do in that sense. I actually think if we had raised a boatload of money for LegalZoom, I don't think it would have worked. I think just by being savvy and frugal, if you will, making sure that the growth, that we're not outgrowing our own infrastructure and just being smart with capital, I think it really helped with LegalZoom. I think, because we'll put it this way, there were probably five or six other legal companies that did receive venture funding back then and none of them are around today.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, what we realized, though, was after we built it, it was very, this is a very different market, right? Knocking on doors of attorneys, getting them to try a SaaS product was very different than marketing a last will or corporation services to an actual consumer. And we almost went broke. There is one time where we couldn't pay payroll because we sunk all of our money into proxy law. And it's just a lesson that I've always taken with me for every company. You just got to stay very focused, your core. Make sure that you're incredibly strong at your foundation before extending, right? Don't extend until you're ready. And it's just something that I took with me after week once went bankrupt at legalism.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said, Well, I'm just confirming your ninth divorce order here. And he's like, Yeah, I absolutely get this. And I'm like, oh, we'll have it to you by tomorrow. We'll have all the documents done. And I realized that he was an attorney, right? He was a divorce lawyer using us to do all the back-end documents for him. And of course, like bing, bing, bing, like, oh my goodness, we're more than just a D2C company. We're actually a B2B company too, right? And so we started like thinking, wow, we could like, you know, double our growth. We could like grow into this other category. And this is about year two of legal zoom, year three maybe. And so we started building something called proxy law, right? Which was a much more robust kind of back end paralegal document service for attorneys, for law firms. And we're like, okay, we're going to build this. So we put all of our best resources, our best technologists. Eddie Hartman was working. Like we were all working on proxy law. Because we thought that was like our next big venture.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we always grew it responsibly. We never really hit a deficit at LegalZoom. Legal Zoom was, it was never a sexy business, right? It was never like, hey, we're going from zero to 100 million overnight. It was never that business. It was always, you know, we grew LegalZoom, call it 10 to 25% year over year profitably. And when you look back 20 years later, becomes a sizable business, right? And so for us, we always just kind of knew that we had to remain profitable. Now, we didn't have enough profits to really try too many new things. But one big lesson I learned at LegalZoom, and I don't share this often, but I remember we got this one customer who ordered, I think it was like nine divorces within a month, right? And we're like, wow, this guy's getting married and divorced a lot. It's like nine times in a month. So I called him. And I remember he was out in Florida. I called him up.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you mentioned restored implementing at ShoeDazzle years ago, so more than a decade ago. We were one of the earliest to really do a lot of social media marketing and influencer marketing at ShoeDazzle. Just as LegalZoom grew with paper click, Shoe Dazzle grew with Facebook marketing. So the earliest days of Facebook marketing, we kind of fell into, and we understood that, you know, because we were a subscription business for women's shoes, that we could pay a head in terms of a certain CAC and over a two-year lifetime value, you know, we could get paid back. So that's how you could get very, very aggressive with your spend. But you got to be careful with that, of course, because LTV has changed, right? LTVs change, and anyone who's kind of going out three, four, five years on a lifetime value, the world can change, right? And a lot of other things can change.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, we were pretty aware of our metrics and our KPIs at LegalZoom, and we would track them basically every minute. So we knew exactly how much we were paying per click and how much revenue that was generating because we didn't raise outside capital, we knew we had to be profitable within that first order. So we knew how much money we could pay per click for a certain group of customers and that the payback would have to be immediate. Now things did change over time because then you start realizing that that customer is more than that one order, right? And that over the lifetime of that customer, they might come back and form another company or make a revision to their last Will and Testament, you know, whatever that might be. But that came much later, right? What we were looking for initially was this is the price per click. This is how much we could afford so that we're profitable on the payback. on that first order. Now the CAC to LTV raised.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Documents and become a brand name in law, we could extend into a myriad of other categories. And so that's kind of like what was the vision behind legal zoom was building that brand name alone.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we really thought that we could really kind of democratize law in a lot of ways. And so incorporation services, trademark services, last will and testaments and living trusts were kind of like the core of what we did. And these were what we considered very simple legal processes or documents that attorneys in general were still charging a lot for. And we kind of felt that the masses would prefer to pay, call it $99 to incorporate as opposed to $2,000 at that time. And so that was our thesis. And sure enough, it was true. LegalZine has incorporated more companies than any other entity in America at this point and form more wills and living trust than any other entity in America. And so we really kind of ramped with the core kind of legal document services. But then we always had in the back of our heads that, you know, if we could dominate legal...”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it was interesting. I think Robert Shapur brought a lot of credibility, but besides just the credibility piece, every time he would go onto CNN or this or that and had an interview, he would mention LegalZoom.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Forewarn was calling it for information. I got Robert Shapiro Attorney Center City. I called the number, it was about nine o'clock at night because I had my voice message written out and I was going to pitch them on LegalZoom or leave him a message. But he actually picked up the phone and said, this is Robert Shapiro. How can I help you? And I kind of freaked out for a second. And I said, Robert Shapiro, the attorney. He said, yes, how can I help you? And so I kind of told him, well, my name is Brian Lee, and I've got this business idea called LegalZoom. And the first thing he said was, I'm not interested. And he was just about to hang up on me, I thought. I said, well, wait, how do you know you're not interested if you don't hear me out? And he basically said, you got two minutes. And so in those two minutes, I told him the whole story for legals and the whole vision behind it. And at the end of it, he said something really interesting. He said, you know, I've actually been thinking of something similar. And so why don't you call at a normal time tomorrow instead of an appointment to come in and we'll talk. And so that's how we got Robert Superior involved.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. And so when we started Legal Zoom, the internet was still relatively new, and people were scared of it. Not a lot of people remember this. Like you're too young to remember this, Trey, but when it was new, people were scared to put their information online, right? And they were very scared to put their banking information online or their credit card information. They weren't sure where it was going. And so we knew that we had to kind of fix that, right? And bring credibility to the site instantly. And that's when we started reaching out to attorneys that we knew because we knew a famous attorney as part of Legal Zoom would lend a lot of credibility. And so Robert Shapiro was at the top of our list because he was just coming off the OJ trial. Everyone in America knew him. And so, and he was right here in Los Angeles. And so I reached out to my network, which was pretty small at the time, but no one knew him personally. And so I honestly, I call 411. This is before Google, right?”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess I'll never know. But at the same time, you know, my dad's company has done well under my sister who took it over with my brother-in-law, so they're doing great.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the thing, actually, I have a great relationship with my father, with my dad. I actually don't think our relationship would be as strong if I had gone into the family business. And I think it's really because we're both super type A personalities and we want things done the way that we envision them being done. And so I think we probably would have butted heads a lot if I had joined him. He wanted me to join. Actually, when I told him I was going to law school that I wanted to go to law school, he was actually the only one that said or asked me why. Like, why would you do that? Why don't you just come work for the family company? And so I always just knew that I wanted to forge my own path, right? And I wanted to make a career that I wanted to set. And in hindsight, you know, I kind of question it, right? I kind of question like, I wonder what would have happened if I had taken over the stainless shill company versus starting Legal Zoom and starting my own path.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not exactly sure, Trey. I think I was just kind of born with a lot of grit. I think a lot of it has to do with my upbringing being from an immigrant family. I was born in Korea. And so when we came to the United States, I remember being poor as hell, honestly, Trey. It's like we couldn't afford food. And it was tough times. And I remember watching my father work two jobs, watching my mom work a factory job, even though they were educated. They have college degrees. They didn't speak the language. So when we first started in America, they just had to outwork everyone and save. And so I kind of think I learned from that a lot probably without even knowing I was learning. But I just saw how hard they worked and how hard it was to, you know, provide for your family. So I think that always stayed with me.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we got really lucky. So we have a very close friend named Eddie Hartman, who was our founding CTO, one of our co-founders at LegalZoom, and he did all the coding. And we worked on the product and marketing and everything else. But he was fantastic and he's still one of my best friends. And one of the smartest guys I've ever worked with. So Eddie, if you're listening to this, you're truly one of the smartest guys I've ever met. But yeah, we gotta fortunate with him.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that's kind of like the environment. And so, but we really believed in technology and what the internet held and the potential of it. And so without raising any capital, we quit our jobs and we just started working out of our condo and just building.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know it was interesting because we were pretty early, all things concerned with e commerce, e-service online. And I remember it was impossible to raise capital. It's not like we didn't try. We probably met with probably 30 venture capital firms or so, and we didn't get a single bite. And so we realized that we were going to have to go it alone and kind of feed ourselves. And so we knew we had to be profitable really from the get-go. So that's kind of how we started LegalZoom. It was an interesting time because to your point, the dot-com crashed led a lot of people to question whether or not the internet was viable. I remember one of the VCs we sat down with actually told us the internet's over. It's not coming back. And that's how bad it was.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And as such, we would be classified as a law firm and therefore cannot raise capital from non-attorneys. There's a lot of fee splitting rules in law. And so we realized that we couldn't really start that because we couldn't raise outside capital to get it done. We could never take the company public. There are a lot of regulations involved with it. So we moved on and”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Law Garden was our earliest iteration of Sorry Sound. It was me and Brian Liu who I went to law school with and we're best friends. And our first idea was that we would have stay-at-home attorneys answer questions online for nine cents a minute. That was like the general idea. And so we kind of went down the path. The reason why we named it Law Garden, by the way, is because we were both into Sound Garden at the time, the band. And so we named it Law Garden. And the problem with it, though, is that in order to hire lawyers throughout the country, you'd have to be licensed in all 50 states, right? So you'd have to pass a bar exam in 50 states. And neither of us wanted to do that. It was bad enough to take the California bar exam, let alone 50 bar exams. The second thing is that the malpractice insurance was going to be pretty high. But number three, at the end of the day, you're still practicing law, right? Providing legal”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, my earliest mentor was my father, who was an entrepreneur, and I learned a lot from him. I used to work in his warehouses in the summer and kind of work with the team and so forth. But I would say a couple of mentors of mine were probably the lawyers that I worked with. And so it would be like Eric Peterson or Eganzalis. And they really taught me a lot in terms of how to manage teams and how to lead. There are lessons I've taken with me from the earliest days. And actually, I still hang out with these guys. And so Eric Peterson's a great friend of mine now. And I respect him tremendously and I look up to him. So he's always there when I have questions.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The thing is, I actually enjoy the people I worked with. I thought they were all incredibly smart and driven hardworking. And I enjoyed them. But it was actual work that I didn't really like. I was in tax law, and I was doing a lot of just a lot of corporate tax work. And I just wasn't getting the fulfillment out of the work that I would want. Part of it is because I was working for large corporate clients. And even if I saved a certain amount of money and taxes, joined certain structures and this and that, it's like, I don't really feel the effects of it. It wasn't something that resonated with me personally. And so that's when I decided to move on and start my own company.”
2022-09-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP474: Building 4 Unicorn Companies with Celebrity Partners W/ Brian Lee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT