YouSaid · the spoken record

Carley Roney & David Liu

lines on the record: 54
first: 2018-03-12
most recent: 2018-03-12
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

“Yeah, and I think we would never be in a position to say, oh my God, we know exactly how things are in wedding should be done or how things in pregnancy should be done. We learned it by the seat of our pants and we embraced the people who are courageous enough to do that as well.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I think we never walked around with a hubris and notion that we knew better. And that the process of discovery, in the process of learning, was constant. In a team.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't know, go ahead. In our used Honda, our friend had come to help and we had, you know, Havana in the little car seat in the back. And as we're driving back from Mount Sinai, our friend asks,”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's surreal. I mean, at one point, someone said, Do you realize 700 families are gainfully employed because of what you've built and that, you know, they can send their kids to college and buy homes and actually thrive? And there's a great sense of satisfaction to that. I think the company has always been just this extension of our family. There's a great deal of pride in having been able to build something that is sustainable and can continue to grow that way.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. You know, I think we were ultimately so different as people. I wouldn't say that we necessarily worked well together, but we were incredibly complimentary, where there is no overlap, there's less conflict, and when there was overlap, oh my God, it was like World War III.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our stock actually held up a relatively well. I think most media companies were down 20%. We grew 5%. We actually grew that year because”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like specific. I mean, in 2006 and 2007, we wound up, we bought wedding channel. There was unbelievable sort of frothy expectations on what that acquisition was going to net us. And the stock hits $32. We have a billion dollar market cap. then precipitates the next minor nuclear winter where the stock starts declining again because you just can't live up to those expectations and then 2008 happens and it's the great recession”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We yeah, but I think it was the work. We were launching a TV show, we were launching a national magazine. There were so many really exciting things that we were building. The nest came, the bump came. The nest and the bump.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and he said, because you're delisted And getting relisted is like carrying a gorilla up 30 flights of stairs. It's impossible. It's too hard. And I remember the day we got relisted in 2005. I was dying to send him a postcard with a big gorilla on it saying, 30 flights delivered. Take that.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I had this one meeting with a competitor, and I think he said these fatal words that sort of propelled this thing forward. They saw this as an opportunity to acquire us and they said, listen, you have a broken IPO, we should just put these companies together, 70, 30 their way. You can repackage it and go public.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So, in fact, I spent the next three years going to dentist investor club meetings at the back of the red line in, going to small cap conferences, drumming up retail support to try to get the stock retail.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The big funds are not going to invest in you. Yeah, the fidelities. And unfortunately, that's where a lot of the volume and the support comes from with public stocks. And so the moment we got delisted, two million shares just automatically get ejected into the system. And that's when the stock just really cratered. We went down from like 90 cents to that 26 cents in a matter of minutes.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're still a stock, you're trading in the bulletin boards, but the key difference is now the major funds are no longer allowed to hold your stock.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, exactly. And, you know, you had to go down to DC and beg Nasdaq to reconsider. And I still remember there was a little tribunal. You make your case and then this old gentleman looks over and says, I'm sorry, we're still going to have to delist you, but you have a great little business. Don't let it fare.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The low point was the summer of 2001, where the stock dropped below a dollar for over 90 days. You get delisted. Nasdaq delisted you. No longer in the newspaper.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We never had layoffs. We were able to downsize through attrition, but we never formally had to lay people off. And part because we were always running relatively lean. And there were people who panicked and basically sort of got out.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, he was horrific. We had our competitors faxing our stock charts to our advertisers saying, look what's happening. They're going out of business. Do you really want to give them the money?”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, we were not allowed to sell. I mean, we were locked up, and by the time the six-month lockup had released, and honestly, we were also, we were way too loyal and dedicated. We did not want there to be any indication that the founders had lost faith, and so we were going to hold on to the bloody.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We never had the super spiky jump, and we didn't have a super cataclysmic crash. It just over the course of a year and a half.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so in 99, we actually had just raised money to build out and flesh out the registry. We raised $15 million. And literally a week later, we're approached by bankers who said the window is going to close, you need to go public. And we had fresh money in the bank, and I couldn't understand why there was such urgency. But we took the advice, fortunately. And within, I think, seven months of that meeting, we were going public. So that was December 2nd, 1999. We go public. The entire internet world collapses four months later.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The three million we made that last, but we essentially were looking to raise another round. And within a year, we raised another 15 million.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is actually the critical thing where Carly was the secret weapon. Carly became the person who, when we publish our first book, suddenly appeared on the Today Show, suddenly and became sort of the kind of way.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, exactly, and we New tab, and we suddenly saw within, I think, three or four months, we had close to 150,000 couples registered in our registry. To put that into context, that's more than what Bloomingdale's was registering back then.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a really long slog. I mean, it was hard to raise money for anything that was female centric in the digital space. And the fact that a large component of our business would now be predicated on e-commerce on top of advertising, the first question people said was like, they're not going to give you a credit card number. It's like, you know, people are too paranoid about that. They're not going to register. They're not going. And I think we probably were marketing for almost a year before we came across venture capitalists out in the West Coast that said, you know what, this is really interesting. And I think we're going to take a flyer on this.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we said, this has got to be the thing we do. And that actually prompted us to go try to raise money to build the first online gift registry.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make money and build the business. And we had this idea, and we said, you know, the thing that brides seemed to be really vexed about is this whole registry process. Yeah. Isn't there a way to completely reinvent that and create an online gift registry where they can?”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Carly, we had just had our first baby, and so Carly literally came back from maternity leave all of maybe three weeks. and I still the image I still have of her is like breastfeeding our daughter while furiously typing away at the computer because we had to deliver the first manuscript at a certain time.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was almost gone. We were rapidly running out of money. And what saved us was we had found an amazing book agent, Chris Tomasino. And remember our aspirations was always to create these multi-bland branded platform. And she actually managed to get a bidding war from multiple publishers on a three-book deal for the not.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we realized that she didn't have a website to link to. And he said very quickly, well, they'll link to a catalog of dresses that we'll build for you. And she was like, oh my God, that's amazing. And we were basically selling links and buttons and clicks that were bleeding to other places that we had to suddenly create for the advertising.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In fact, one of our first advertisers, in fact, I think she may have been our first advertiser, was Nicole Miller. And she had this bridesmaid's dress line that was cued and she wanted to market it as something that you could wear again. Nicole came to our office and I remember we were showing her the little pieces of art that we had created that were essentially the first banners. You know, they were little buttons that would sit on the site. And, you know, Rob would explain to her, hey, people can click on this. And she said, well, what will my buttons do?”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And boy, was that the fire started. The room would explode. Everyone who was lurking would jump in. You were a troll. You were an early internet troll. And I could slow them back away and that room would just keep going for hours and hours and hours.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's where AOL was the perfect training ground for that because the key sort of gravitational center of all this stuff were in their chat rooms. And these chat rooms, you had to try to turn into these thriving, continuous conversations. And we all had to man the chat rooms. We had aliases. Mine was Anya. And I would sit in this chat room waiting for people to show up. And most people tend to just lurk. They wanted to hear and read other people's conversations. And you had to try to figure out a way to get people engaged and get them to participate. And so I always had this one thing that I would write and to get people started, I would say my fiance forced me to buy a dress two sizes too small and said if I can't fit in the dress on the day of the wedding to not show up.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We wanted to make sure that the audience came to our site would see something fresh in you every day. So we treated this like a daily publication, like a newspaper. We had 10 content channels. They had to be fresh content, you know, distributed every single day.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And, you know, there was no such thing as open source software. So we were paying software licenses. You know, there was no WeWork, so we had to find an office to rent. In New York. In New York.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got our seed financing by 1.6 million. I think it was their largest investment at that time, too, in any content partners.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in 90 seconds, we went from the worst business idea he'd ever heard to, you know what, let's give these guys a chance.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No one had done it. There's no IAB, there are no banners. It was all basically a subscription business. And Ted looks at us kind of funny. And then he picks up the bride's magazine we brought as sort of the show and tell. And I still remember he picks it up, brings it to his nose, and flips through the pages, goes,”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To this day, I credit our co founder Rob, who stood up and said, you know, we're going to sell advertising. And Ted looks at us and says, there's no advertising on AOL. There's no advertising.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We hadn't gotten to that point yet. But he basically said he was like, look, wait a minute. What's the lifetime about? I mean, how long is an average engagement? And we said, you know, nine to 13 months. And he said, so your average lifetime value of your customer is nine to 13 months. How do you ever plan on recouping any of your marketing costs in nine months? This is impossible.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rent our little car, drive down to Vienna, Virginia, and we had this audience with Ted. And we go through this whole dog and pony, talk about what we're planning on doing and what we're going to build. And he looks up and he says, this has got to be the worst business plan I've ever seen. And the air just got sucked out of the room. By the way,”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So, Michael, our rainmaker, co-founder, had an inn and managed to get us an audience with Ted Leonces, who was running the greenhouse and was making investments. Yes. And I remember we put together this deck, we practiced this presentation. Carly, Michael, and Rob were like the marketing and presentation geniuses.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if you looked at the landscape, Bride's magazine had been around for 50 years, modern bride for 35 years, Martha Stewart was like a hot thing, been around for 10 years. And we didn't know which way to attack that. And we suddenly realized based on also Carly's belief and the differentiation of our brand that we would become weddings for the real world. And we defined that as interracial couples, interdenominational couples, same-sex couples, hipster couples. You're pregnant. You already have babies. You're divorced, second marriages, all the stuff that we knew that the traditional media companies couldn't touch. These are the marginal areas, and we're going to declare ownership of those.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was not an MBA between the four of us four film grads. So our research was going to the magazine store and pulling different categories like bridal, travel, epicurean. And we looked at these wedding magazines like, wow, they're huge. Look, they're 400 pages.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, we started brainstorming. What can we build? You know, because our vision was now to create this multi-branded, mult Platform, content studio, and we started looking at the different categories and we said, you know, sports, news, entertainment, that's what you were doing.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I dropped out of grad school because suddenly I realized well, we have this company now and we're going to work on the next project. We were a little digital media studio.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so the publisher was actually very aggressive about getting the discount. And, you know, no one was really making any money on CD-ROMs. And pretty quickly we realized that this was not going to be the medium that was going to change everything. But this publisher managed to get the CD-ROM OEM bundled with every one of the early IMAX. So if you bought one of those iMacs, you got our disk. And as a result, you know, we got maybe, I think it was like a dollar per disc that was actually distributed. It became a windfall for us. Yeah, no.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we literally hired all my classmates. Everybody. Everyone said we're on board. I mean, you know, we're all in school for this. And suddenly to be able to create a commercial product with the Smithsonian brand was exciting.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and we actually said, can we go to the bar area to discuss this for a second? And we go in there. We're like, is this binding? Is this a real contract? What happens? And we just said, you know, whatever. Let's just go sign it. And we went in and we signed it. And the guy turns to us and says, you know what? You know this is not a binding contract. We said we assume so. And he said, but this was a test. This was a test to see if you guys had the Hutzpah to actually sign this napkin. And he said, let's do it. Wow.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, no, don't agree. Know nothing about anything. And we walked into the Egghead software store and started pulling CD-ROMs off the shelf and writing down the names of the publishers and started faxing proposals to people. And we have this one group out in Portland, Oregon called us up immediately, said, we're doing edutainment discs. This is right in the center of a bullseye, American history disc with the Smithsonian brand. They flew out, took us to Smith and Wolensky for a big steak dinner. And at the dinner, the guy writes on a cocktail napkin one gold master American history CD-ROM Smithsonian content $100,000 budget, six-month delivery date, sign here.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We pitch the Smithsonian, and they thought it was an awesome idea. We thought they had a budget. And they said, great, you guys, if you can find someone who will pay for it, you can do it.”
2018-03-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT