YouSaid · the spoken record

Hernan Lopez

lines on the record: 84
first: 2023-12-11
most recent: 2023-12-11
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

“I think that over my life I've probably been at the 0.1% of lucky. and the point one percent of unlucky at different points in my life and sometimes you don't know when bad luck can become good luck later on but he can control that no matter how much luck you have or don't have in your life hard work is essential yes there's always some degree of luck in every success story but People often don't tell you about the degrees of bad luck that happened in success story and again you can only control what you do and how you respond to events around you”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I definitely remember at the beginning I talked about being too early or too late and maybe I was a year too early but Yes, my timing was really fortuitous in that if I try to launch one the exact same version of Wander in 2018, I don't know that it would have gone to it.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I look, I don't know much about specifics because I don't get the data that I used to get when I was in the industry, but yes, there might be pockets that are less financially viable than they were before, but as a whole, the industry continues to grow. In fact, there are lots of companies that are pushing to add more video to podcasts. And I think we're still in the early innings of podcasts in different languages. So I think the industry has lots of room for growth, absolutely.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is a possibility, yes, but I am living my life as if this chapter is over because I know that the truth is in my side and having seen the strength and the weaknesses of our legal system. And actually there's research, even despite the presumption of innocence that we all taught in school people that go to serve on a jury believe that indicted equals guilty. And deep down, I was one of them. And I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I was one of them. And it took me to go through this grueling experience to realize that not only indicted doesn't equal guilty, but sometimes guilty doesn't equal guilty. You work in podcasts, I work in podcasts, I'm sure you listen to many stories of wrongful convictions, and you don't think that it could happen to you until it does.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't describe it. I mean, getting that call on that Friday night, on Friday, the before going into a long weekend from my lawyers, they themselves could not find the words because we were always confident that this was going to be the outcome ultimately. We just didn't think that it was going to happen at this particular stage necessarily, but we were all confident that this was going to ultimately be the outcome. But yes, I was obviously very happy.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really something that you need to find in yourself. And I talk to a lot of people who went through adversity that they did not expect. I read this book called Ikigai. It's essentially a Japanese philosophy about how to live a longer and more fruitful life. And that's the other thing that helped me get through reading lots of meditation, trying to stay with my routine as much as I could, trying to spend a lot of time with the kids, spend more time virtually with my parents who came to visit me. Yeah, all of that.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yes. And most importantly for me as a founder would allow me to see Wanderick become the best possible version of what it could become. I knew that Amazon had the resources and the wherewithal and the motivation just to turn it into something a lot bigger than I could probably do on my own. And so I'm very happy that we ended up doing that deal.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are a number of acquisitions, but there were multiple people that were still interested in the space. And we had hundreds of shareholders, including every single employee in Wandri was a stakeholder. And we have, you know, at the time was the minority owner with my family of Wandery. I had sniffing a steak, but more people than me on the majority of the company. And there were lots of conversations in the board, and some people wanted us to continue to build. But ultimately, we came to the conclusion that taking the deal with Amazon was in the best interest of the company.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So around that time in the summer we were approach by investment bank that had been working with the saying that there was renewed interest in one reacher had just been bought by SirXXM and serial productions by the New York Times.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He wasn't us much ever because the process works in slow ways and there are times obviously preparing for trial but that was not for two years later that yes I was spending a lot more time I eventually had to wait three years to get my case heard before a jury.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not a single one said that. We had, if anything, the one thing that got me through, Guy, was an amazing group of friends and my family, my now husband at the time. We were just starting dating. My employees, every single person supported me because they knew my character. They knew that what this guy was saying was a lie and they were just determined to help me get through.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when he got caught in 2015, he decided to become a witness for the government and he falsely implicated a number of people, including my colleague and myself, as being aware of what he was doing and not stopping him, which for you as law is the same as doing something.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was shocked a thousand percent shocked as was my lawyer. This actually happened in April of 2020, so we are just going to work from home. Everybody in the team, I had two third graders doing school from home and we were being hit with advertiser cancellations and listener dropping and we felt all these great thing that we had built now was under question. But I first let me take you back to what happened. Remember when I was at Fox, this is 10 years before our business had hundreds of entities all over the world, some of them were wholly owned, some were joint ventures. One of them, a joint venture in South America, was being run by a partner who unbeknownst to us had been bribing sacrificials in South America and taking tens of millions of for himself. For years before we bought into the joint venture.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and remember that's what attracted me to cable television at the very beginning, the fact that they had dual revenue streams. And so when we raise our series A, I present it to our investors a five-year plan, not year by year, but essentially told them, look, in 2022, I want to be here and I want us to have so many listeners and so much revenue. And of that revenue, so much needs to come from our own original content, and so much needs to come from international, so much needs to come from sources other than advertising. We were putting all in a bucket. And yes, revenue diversification was a key goal of ours from an earlier on.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you take investment from venture capital, that's something that you have to accept, that venture capital will want an exit, and the only two ways of exiting a company are either selling to another company or going public. And I thought the more likely outcome was to be acquired, but there was a chance if the company had a lot bigger to go public as well.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But every time that a pitch came to us, we thought, could this be turned into a high-stakes, character-driven, interesting human story that will resonate with showrunners because it would resonate with viewers? For example, if somebody came to us and said, I have this open case and nobody has been able to solve it, and I want to create a show of me trying to solve it. We would always say no thank you because one of the most tried and true things in Hollywood is that you need to have a satisfying ending to a story. And when you don't have a clear ending, people will not recommend the show to other people. It's just as simple as that.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it really helped us that we were in LA and we're kind of alone in LA and a lot of people had listened to the region. The other thing that helped us was The fact that Dirty John, even though it was owned by the early times, very quickly got option to television, it was turned into a very successful television show for Bravo. It really put us in a position where because we weren't in Hollywood, we could give creators the potential of having their show be turned into a television show because we were starting to show that there was a track record.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had, so for that for all those reasons it was a scary thing to do, but I was having a lot of fun and I always thought that there was a chance that we could even take the company public one day. So there were a number of options, but regardless, I felt that I had taken investment from some of the best and brightest investors in the venture capital world. it would have been disappointing to them to essentially sell that quickly and even if it was Fort Times what they invested out.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At over 80 million bucks. Again, hard to say no from the perspective of, okay, if this was my business. Maybe it would have been tempting, but it wasn't my business anymore. I had great investors and a great team, and it were just scratching the surface of what we could do. And we know that, again, Dr. Death had come out, Gladiero had come out, and we knew that the following year would do that times two or maybe more. But we turn them down.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You would have to value the company at something that just wouldn't make sense for you. And they said, well, can we try? So we exchanged an NDA some basic information. They came with an offer that was... Four times when we erased that.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they contact you. They contacted me and said, Hernan, we actually were fans of what you've been doing and we've been following and we would like to make an offer for your company. And so first I told them, look, thank you. I'm very flattered, but quite honestly, we just literally raised money, as you know, from VCs. And VCs are not in the business of investing so that somebody's a company in nine months. So in order to make this work for their perspective,”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“$22 million less than what I expect in a year before. And this company says Hernan, we've been following and they hadn't bought any companies in the podcast space.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They called us, and again, this was a call that I wasn't expecting, was maybe nine months after or maybe eight months after we closed our CSA run, which had valued the company at $22 million, so less than.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was because at the same time he had listened to Derry John every episode so he understood emotionally. And also we felt that we couldn't rely on only miniseries. So at the time, we came up with this concept of the always on shows that also came from the emotionally immersive storytelling. The first one was American history tellers. It was a show that allowed people to put themselves in historical moments. And so that was the first show. And then we had also lined up business wars, what the second show that we created. And that allowed us to essentially have wholly owned One Reshows that in the future would allow us to have a library that that made Wandry possible.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And many people consider him the father of modern venture capital. He called me up for a meeting in New York and he eventually became the lead investor alongside with Larry Hippo and Advancing, Sherry Redstone Company. But that took several months.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, yes. And again, there was a non zero chance that this could go nowhere, that there would be no buyer or there would be no wondering in the future that nobody would see the value in it.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh god, he was carried. Yes, because I had two kids and my husband at the time had gone back to work, but he was still building his medical practice.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's where we finally hit what Wonder was meant to be. We came up with a name for it, what we called emotionally immersive storytelling. True stories with a perspective that allowed listeners to immerse themselves in the shoes of all the people in the story and to understand what was happening to them. And I think that was from that moment on the defining trait of every one reshow.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. And look, we're all good. We still remain in our relationship. But yes, I was very mindful. Okay, that's not going to be ultimately the buyer of my company. But so we went and launched Dirty John in October of 2017. And it really hit the zeitgeist. It was number one on Apple Podcasts for 30 days straight. inmates something like 2 million listeners within the first month But you know, guy, the one thing that made me proudest of was that we kept hearing all these stories about mothers talking to daughters and vice versa about listening to Dirty John and saying you should listen to Dirty John. To find out about toxic relationships and red flags.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're done with a company. There is not that they're going to come next year. Sometimes they do. I mean, their cases where a company keeps chasing the valuation up, but more often than not, you're done with a company because they're going to feel bad that you turn them down.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not only that, but also I'm sure you heard this before, that it's very often that happens that a company that makes you an offer, you turn it down.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe even more than that at the time. But I said, no, what I really wanted to do is what you guys promised and we should shook hands on, which is do an investment run so that we can make this company a lot bigger than big plans. And there's this dirty John thing that you guys don't know how big it's going to be. And believe me, it's going to be great. And they said, well, either we buy the company or nothing. There's no investment. And our stuff, but I ultimately decided to just not take the offer because I just was confident that we were about to hit something big.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was very exciting. I felt okay. Now we are finally going to be able to take this to the next level where we shook hands. And then don't hear anything for a couple of weeks. And the corporate team says, actually, we've been looking at the deal and we decided that instead of investing, we want to buy your company outright for the same valuation.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, and we could go to any meeting and say, we are the company that made Dirty John. In the middle of that happening, we got approach, finally looked like we were going to raise money. One major company agreed to essentially fund our CSA at $5 million at a $25 million valuation.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On me, and exactly her daughters really did not like him. And there was a really high stakes family drama of two generations of people who are not seen eye to eye. And it was this incredibly rich psychological thriller and with a completely unexpected ending. And then finally, we went to the Apple podcast team and actually share with them the first episode of the show. They loved it so much that they agreed to give us what at the time was called the Beyonce treatment, you know, the takeover of the top carousel of the Apple podcast app. And this put us on the map.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a story about a woman in Orange County who had been tricked by this grifter who obviously pretended to be who he was not. And she fell in love with him.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And they went around the room and they pitched different stories that they have been working on. And at the third one, I said, that's a one.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think that has always been one of my skills. I've been always adaptable. I remember growing up in Argentina and just seeing how realities can change from one moment to the next. I think that gives anybody who comes from a similar environmental background the ability to just adapt. And at the same time, there was this sense of community in the podcast industry that everybody was excited every time they met somebody who understood what they understood. And we all felt that over time, everybody else will get it too, but we just are excited to be at the early stage of what we now realize was a new golden age of audio.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is true, and we really were paying attention to who was out of the market. We're going to podcast meetups. I think it helped that we were the only ones in LA, everybody else in the East Coast was competing with the same pool of talent, and we're the only ones in LA. And people who were in our world sometimes were... Really working for Hollywood projects that essentially allow them to pay the bills and they were doing audio as a passion project on the side.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a way of really getting more people to see you and see your show and see your brand and see what the Wanderer logo was, which just would put a lot of attention into all those details that sometimes are overlooked.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the first show in which we realized that if we tell a true story with the Hollywood playbook, with character development and with stakes and with sound design, then people were going to listen. And it was also the show in which we tried the marketing playbook of having a launch campaign that allowed people to get excited about the show. It wasn't an accident that we launched in the first week of January. We knew that nobody else was going to launch a show at the same time. So our chance of getting to the top of the Apple podcast chart, which at the time was...”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and I said, but that's precisely what I'm doing. That's our plan. Believe me. And they said, yeah, come when you've done it.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Content because we think that at the end of your agreement that those margins can be competed away, we can fund you if you bring a significant amount of your revenue coming from your own content that is.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nope, no there wasn't. And I remember thinking, oh my God, what did I do? Even if we get to ten times this, this is still not going to cover the cost, even if we get to 100 times this, it's not going to be a big business of the scale that I thought that it would. But look, I mean, there are times in which you have to overcome every no that you get and you have to be able to distinguish between the helpful no's and the unhelpful nose. And I got some of both every time that I went to a venture capital meeting and they told me, no, we cannot fund you because the TAM is just not there. That was one thing and it was hard to respond to that. But there were times where they were saying, look, we cannot find you now because we don't want... to fund a business that relies primarily on third party.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did, but I just didn't make enough money to pay for the car. So the first year we lost a ton of money. I remember looking at the P&L statement by the end of that month, and we had maybe $10,000 in revenue.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I could not compete with that, and quite honestly, felt that there was a bigger opportunity in the one space that Wandri was creating, in which we were alone.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And by the way, the reason why I didn't follow what Alex and Matt and other people in that space were doing was that they were so good at it that I did not think that I could do a better job at doing what they were doing. So there was a space to do something completely different.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And also, I should say that at Fox, we paid a lot of attention to sound. We were often fond of saying that sound is where the motion comes from. I'm sure you heard the story that you watch a horror movie with the sound turned off and it's not scary at all. And then the marketing playbook of trailers and super trailers and podcasts about the podcast and how to just build momentum, one of the most difficult things is how to create urgency for something that is evergreen, that's something that my colleagues in the movie studio used to talk about a lot.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's when I became a listener of how I built this. And again, I think what we learned in Secret Scrimes was that there were so many people, the audience for an audio drama was limited. But podcast listeners loved true stories. That's how I fell in love with podcasts. So the inside was that we could actually tell true stories but following the Hollywood playbook of character development cliffhangers, high stakes and sound design.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I wanted to bring everything that I learned in 25 years in television to the area of podcasting From storytelling style to marketing to business model, but the first product that we wanted to launch were audio dramas. It hadn't been done much. It was only maybe one or two audio dramas. And I essentially wanted to create those Hollywood soundscapes with characters and sound design and essentially turn it into scripted audio. And we did. We launched this great show. I thought, or we all thought at the time, called Secrets Crimes and Audio Tape. It was an ongoing audio drama. And it hit only number two on Apple Podcasts. And we couldn't get to number one because there was this one other show that launched at the same time called How to Build This. Have you heard of it?”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT