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

“That's right, that's right, yeah. Yes, he did, and we had somebody in charge of recruiting shows. This is one of the things I learned at Fox was that it's almost impossible to create a media brand with just your own content. You have to combine content that you produce with content that you license from others. And that was the model for Wanderie as well”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We hired six people very early on. We had somebody in sales ahead of the opering office, a chief content officer being with Fox for 20 years.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty much and setting up my own printer and trying to find out how to do payroll and get worse actually. So on top of that, that my husband at the time was in the hospital for a couple of months and then was unable to work for the rest. I was taking care of him, deepening into my own savings every month because we're unable to fund the company. There were many points in 2016 that I said, what am I doing? And I was ready to give up.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I could not I talk to I stopped counting the nose after I hit fifty on venture capitalists and they all had different versions on different reasons and they were legitimate by the way so the industry was super small I was a solo founder in my 40s with no experience in starting a business from the point of view of they were looking at it and had spent too much time what they thought was a cushy corporate job yeah and so yeah we just hit a wall”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh no, they did. He wasn't very much under the surface. I remember talking to colleagues that were wondering what the heck is Hernan doing. And it was just very, 2016 was tough. It was in a number of ways because we had that $250,000 check from Fox and then a few friends and former colleagues also offered to invest and we raised another 200 grand. And I thought, okay, this is easy. But then this is where it gets interesting. I try to go and raise money from venture capital the way that Gimlet had raised money. And the phones stop ringing. You couldn't”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of me thought that that was a fallback and I talked to a lot of people in my internal circle. And to be frank, a lot of people thought I was crazy about going into this new space because the whole industry was thought to be worth $125 million.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I talk to my boss at the time, Peter Rice, and I told them, well, I want to start this podcast company, and this is why I like to do. And he said, oh my God, that sounds like such a fun idea. I don't know that it will be commercially successful, but I believe in you and we'll make the first investment. As Fox, and so they put a $250,000 check”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, and the shows were funded by advertising, so there was very little friction, and you can promote shows through the Apple podcast chart and the app. And there were so many things lining up that I felt that this was an amazing opportunity. It'd be crazy not to take it.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right. So my analogy was that if episodic was a past and Tivo happened and that led to the golden age of television, which led to the new age of not only HBO, but FX and AMC and eventually Netflix, then podcasts were the Tivo moment, maybe serial was HBO, but there was an opportunity to create FX Showtime AMC all of that amazing IP that followed and I just happened to be witnessing a potential inflection point in what then became the golden age of audio.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, that's right, backpacking the post war, right? And they were replaced by television. And if you remember in the 90s, the most popular television shows were episodic. For procedurals and sitcoms, you can watch what episode Skip the next. And in the turn of the century, Tivo gets invented, and with it on-demand television. So people are able to watch television on their own time. Surprisingly or not, the sopranos 6 feet under and that new golden age of television, of character-driven drama starts at that time. That's when showrunners know that they're going to be able to tell stories overnight arc of a season. character development becomes more or as important as plot.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It didn't take a long time to be honest because I always felt that timing is important and you can be right on time too late or too early. Too late you cannot go back from too early is also bad. But if you have to choose, you better be too early than too late. It's always better to be just a tad little early before everybody else goes into one trend. And I went and studied the history of what happened in public radio in other countries and noticed that there were audio dramas being produced in the UK and Canada.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, and that happens in music as well. So it's a dynamic that has been well known and one of the reasons why libraries are valued as much as they are. And that, again, true of many, many areas of IP.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And when you talk to anybody who has run a movie studio or a television studio, they will tell you that library funds new production, right? The profits and the cash flow that comes from library typically is what funds new production because new production is expensive and risky and more new production doesn't work, whereas library, you only monetize what actually has worked.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I was looking for the CLI stories. Because remember, one of the things that I learned at Fox, and this was true of any entertainment company, there was a lot of value to be created out of having a library of evergreen IP. So I thought that Cyril, one of the reasons why you could spend the time in making a show. Like that was that people could listen it two years, three years, four years later would still be current.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. That's right. And I remember listening to it and liking it every bit as much because not only was an amazing narrative shared story, but it also happened to be about the creation of a company. And again, loved it and I look for other shows like those and zilt.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unbelievable, I remember I listened to maybe the first four episodes over a month and then the final four, and Binge listened to them on a flight back from Europe. And I remember crying and feeling that just it was an incredible story, so emotional and so well told. And so I said, okay, zero is great. What's next? And then somebody recommended startup, the show that Alex Bloomberg”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, I had a number of friends, not a lot, but they came to me and they all used the same language. You have to listen to Syri ill. And I remember listening to it and saying, whoa, now I understand. This is just something that I had never experienced before in audio.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I got married to my now ex-husband in 2008. We admit while on vacation and very quickly, the very first day that we talked about having kids, and we were trying through IVF initially that just didn't work out. And then we got on the adoption list. And in 2010, we were blessed with our son. And then within nine months, we were blessed with our daughter. So that was a busy, busy time at our hassle.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Parami wondered if I could create even a small version of that starting from scratch without the benefit of a large organization with amazing brands, of amazing colleagues. And so I had that nagging sense. And at the time, I felt that at Fox, I probably had risen as far as I would.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of me felt that I wanted to see whether I could go and lead another company. And at the time, I also was curious about entrepreneurship. And I remember part of my job was in business development, talking to founders, talking to entrepreneurs, and seeing how they went from zero to 100. And actually there's a moment I remember in 2015. There's this bank that generated or published valuation of the whole company of Fox. It's called some of the parts valuation where they go and value each part of the business. And there's FIC, which at the time had grown into one of the biggest parts of the Fox organizations, was valued at 10 billion dollars.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and noticing that the television market was hyper fragmented because every household had digital penetration and they had multiplex channels a number of things that weren't even available in the US And I remember thinking this is the way that multi-channel television will go everywhere, not just the UK. So in the future, we're going to go through a world of hyper-fragmentation of audiences. So that's when I start to realize that we need a new set of skills to create shows and market them in a way that would break through.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think most importantly, David, my drag boss was the best mentor and he gave me chances and opportunities to learn. But I was always somebody who was reaching out to other people and trying to learn. I heard this amazing expression that if you work international, you have the ability to quote unquote read tomorrow's newspaper because you're in a country and you're seeing a trend and that trend probably happened at some other country five years before two years before, three years before. And so you're much more able to predict trends that are going to happen from one place to the next. For example, my boss, David, gave me the chance to launch a television channel in the UK. And that would become the FX channel in the UK. And remember, flying in, we only had six months to get from zero to”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of That's right. Another apps that allow you to do it and it give you instant feedback, so it's a lot easier now than it was before.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thousand percent. And I remember the same executive gave that advice to somebody else who did get offended and didn't work on it. And you still probably can see that I still have an accent. It's not that I completely went away. But think about it if you are at a meeting with your peers and you come up with a great idea, but you're not communicating it well in a way that comes across. And then another colleague then communicates it in a way that inspires people, that gets people to say, oh, wow, that's a great idea. Who do you think gets credited for the idea?”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course In hindsight, yes, and I remember being at meetings and seeing faces of people frowning, and I remember that being the cue that, oh, I said something that people are not understanding. And that got in the way of my ability to communicate and to inspire people and to get my points across. And I remember hearing that advice and saying, oh my God, what a gift. How did I not see this before? And how did I not know that their accent reduction coaches? So I remember finding one in LA as far as time spent versus impact on my career. One of the best decisions I ever made and I recommended this to so many people over the years.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What happened was that in 2001, I started to report to a new boss, David Hasling, and I learned so much from him. He was an amazing mentor and coach, the person that took time to develop the skills from each of the executives that he took interest in. And my career was making progress. But I had this hunch that there was something that was keeping me from going further and his boss had sent word, had sent a suggestion that I should take accent reduction classes.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was really a beginning of a renaissance for the twentieth century Fox studio. And I didn't know this at the time, but that was the dawn of what's today considered the golden age of television. If you think about it, that was the time when the sopranos and six feet under were launching and our sister channel effects in the US was about to start that revolution with the shield, which was their way of going after the character driven. very greedy incredibly well produced drama and i was just very fortunate to be there to witness it all”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was in charge of programming and marketing and I with my team was in charge of deciding the programming schedule and how we would market them and how we would launch them.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had a little bit of an entrepreneurial streak. I remember when I was 18 with four friends of mine, we bought airtime on a neighborhood radio station. This was late at nine on Thursday at 11 p.m. And we had a radio show and we financed it by selling advertising. And that show was the equivalent of what a podcast today would be. and one with 10 listeners, and that's assuming that every one of us got both of our pants to listen. But it was short-lived because then I got a real full-time job at a radio and cable company”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not great. I think they were coming from the point of love, right? They were concerned about me and they were having the same concerns that any parent would have at that time or any time at that age. So they wanted me to get therapy and really believe whether it was a temporary phase or not. But they came around and they became loving and accepting. And that's what my siblings have an amazing relationship with them. I talk to them every weekend. They're still in Argentina.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not when I was a teenage. Well, I guess when I went to college to study advertising and communications, that was the first time that I talked to somebody and I told them what I was feeling. And they were open and welcoming. It was a stray guy. He was a musician. And then after that, as would happen, I met a guy and I fell in love and any plan of being in the closet just went out the window.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This also having to be at the same time of the AIDS crisis, I got to see the awful headlines that were being written about gay people in this context and reading headlines that were just not true and feeling if people knew what the truth is, they just would not be printing what they're printing. And I think that's probably when I got the bug that I wanted to work in media. I went to ride for the school newspaper and then becoming the editor of the newspaper.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We grew up for as long as I remember in this military dictatorship. And when I was 13, I remember we transitioned to democracy and the whole country celebrated as if it was 10 times Christmas. There was joy in the air and there was this enthusiasm with a newfound freedom of press. And I remember at the time going to the city to celebrate the new democratic government and also at the same time this is 1983, it was 13, something else was happening in my life. I was coming to the realization that I was gay Of course, a Catholic country.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nope, no, they wasn't. Like, even if we get to 10 times this, 100 times this is not going to be a big business of the scale that I thought that it would. And I remember thinking, oh my God.”
2023-12-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Wondery: Hernan Lopez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT