YouSaid · the spoken record

Joey Levin

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71
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2022-02-15
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2022-02-15
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1
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  1. “Patrick, thanks a lot. I really enjoyed this too and love what you're doing and love the whole concept of the intellectual curiosity behind your podcast here.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Many people have done many nice things for me in my life, but you think about kindness is like kindness requires some level of self-sacrifice and putting yourself at risk or stepping out in a way. And I think that Jack really did that with himself in ways where he just didn't have to, but he did for me. And I deeply, deeply appreciate it.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “When Jack Welch was an advisor for IEC and he became a very close friend and mentor and I distinctly recall this, but he didn't have to do this. But he held my hand in a way and brought me with him to a bunch of people and to a bunch of things in ways where he said that were welcoming and validating in ways that he didn't need to do that with his personal brand, which was the sort of greatest in the world from business and his personal capital, which was exceptional with everybody who knows him well. And he did that in the most gracious and the most”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “And evolution, by the way, is important too, because you need all those hotels or all those flights or all those whatever in there to pick the one. You couldn't otherwise get there. It evolves.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “The other one, which has been a bit of a theme today, is being open minded, being willing to be challenged and being willing to challenge others. And that candor and transparency is something I learned very much from Barry and very much a lesson in the company. Like if you're not talking about what the issues are, you're not going to solve the issues. If you're not raising the issues, you're not going to solve this if you're not challenging the decision, then you may be not getting to the right decision because you're not raising the issues that come with that. That's definitely been a theme.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “But you could also say, what kind of idiot wants to be in a conference room with a bunch of dull pencils all the time? Just sharpen the pencils. Those things turn into legend and people say it's silly and whatever, but you have to continue raising the bar. You have to continue to not be satisfied with what you have and you have to continue to figure out how to push to make it better, make the product better, make it aesthetically better, make the service better. If you don't challenge the thing that's not working, then you won't get it to work. So some people don't like to be challenged. Well, it's not that big a deal that this thing doesn't work. We don't even use it that much. Okay, well, then get rid of it, but don't have a thing that doesn't work here. Either make it work or get rid of it and don't tolerate a thing that doesn't work being here. That thing of constantly raising the bar and relentlessly raising the bar, it's a big challenge, but it is an important lesson on how to go for excellence.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “One is pushing me and others to always think bigger and more ambitious. I use the example all the time. You come in and you say, okay, I think we got this thing. It doesn't even exist yet. And if we do everything right and whenever we could build it up to 100 million of revenue or even 100 million of profit, why bother? That's what you're going for. Why bother? Why would you aim for something so small? It's like, and being able to reframe everything and that goes across all areas that you see Barry do this personally and I see him do this at the business. He's always raising the bar and that's hard on some people always raising the bar. People joke about the pencils in the conference room are always sharpened. And that's because at some point Barry said, well, why aren't the pencils sharpened? And you could say, well, what kind of jerk, pain in the ass, makes sure the pencil is sharpened.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Do things like competition and how to do things like what to pay for things and issuing stock. We're not easy on those things, I should say. But in the end, when it works and it succeeds for people, that absolutely brings me the most joy.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I only realized this recently in the last few years, but absolutely the things that bring me the most personal joy is when the people around us are doing well, are succeeding. In other words, when our shareholders have done well, when our employees have done well, that brings me more joy than not that I don't like to do well or do well financially or whatever, but I just vested into some stock or exercise some options. It's not like the happiest day ever, like a big celebration for me personally. I'm very grateful for it and I'm not unhappy about it, but it's not a thing that brings me the same amount of joy when somebody else does and you can see the impact that it makes for them. Those are the ones that absolutely bring me the most joy. I have people who a lot of times don't believe that because it would also be difficult and maybe an understatement in giving it away in the first place and challenging on how to.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Like selling stock, but maybe we can get comfortable selling stock at a 50 or 100% premium to where we are right now. And that's a convert. And we don't mind giving the downside protection in exchange for that. We've used that tool. And then another important one is, well, how do those instruments, and we've used debt to straight debt also, and how do those instruments of debt or debt-like securities travel with our companies? So sometimes when we spin companies off, we spend that debt or other things with it so that we can start over. But the whole toolkit always has to be available for us and it gets the same capital allocation discussion in that discussion, we are thinking about, okay, where do we put it, but also where do we get it and what are the things we can use to go get it.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “But when we were talking about raising capital, issuing stock, we've done that. We required Ask Jeeves, we did that for stock, but we also at the same time said we were going to buy back half the stock that we were issuing because that was what made sense for the seller wanted stock and we wanted to issue some stock, but not that much stock. But we can issue stock, we can issue public stock, so I see parent stock. We can issue subsidiary stock, public or private. So in the case of Angie's list, we had a private subsidiary called Home Advisor and we used that currency to buy Angie's list, meaning we merged home advisor into Angie's list and ended up with 87% of that company in that transaction. So we use private company currency. We've used public company currency. After that, we used the public company currency to buy Handy, which is where we got Machine as the currency CEO of Angie. We took public currency and issued that public currency of the subsidiary and issued that to our shares. We've done converts, which is...”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “We look at everything in the toolkit, but some of the principles that we've generally tried to uphold consistently and probably one theme from this discussion is there's not a lot of things we do consistently. But one is when we are spinning something out, we try to at least get our basis back, our basis just means basically what we put in it, but it's more of a tax term because we get that tax-free. so that we can essentially recycle the capital. So in all the examples of businesses we've spun off, and I think basically every case we have gotten our basis out or sometimes more than our basis, but generally our basis out tax-free so that we can recycle that capital. And then the thing that gets funded to shareholders is pure profit, essentially. It's incremental. So that's one component in replenishing the capital. The other is, as you said, to use everything in the toolkit. So the range of things in the toolkit is issuing stock and repurchasing stock, which are in opposition.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And that we know we're allocating capital to different businesses. And here's how we're thinking about it. And the first letter I wrote to shareholders was very much that. It was here's, I think, what we are. And here's how I think we're going to operate going forward. And it is very much about being a multi-business business and allocating capital and looking at some of the parts. And we know we understand the responsibilities that puts on us to treat it as a sum of the parts and embracing that, I think, is different than where we started. and getting comfortable with that is different than where we started.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Over that period, we embraced what we are and what we do well, which is being a multi business business, being an anti-conglomerate. You talked a little bit about how this evolved. We said, well, what are we good at? What have we done? What have we done well? Let's lean into those things and communicate on those things. There were times where we said, well, should we present IEC's earnings on a consolidated basis? Well, we never thought about it on a consolidated basis. So why would we present it on a consolidated basis? We should own the fact that we're a multi-business business and we should lean into that. one of our directors earlier this week said, I bet not a single one of our directors could accurately say what IAC's aggregate earnings per share is. And I think that's true. And I think that's something that I'm proud of, frankly. Because that's not the way we think about the business and operate the business. And we embrace that. We embrace that in the way we started communicating. We started communicating very clearly that we're a multi-business business.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Whatever advertising dollars, those are dollars that we go after, are important dollars that we go after. But what I think about it today is the home and how are we transforming homeowners' journey? How are we transforming what it means to own a home and the hassles of owning a home and all that? I don't think about it as what is local and how do you find a phone number, how do you find a contact or how do you find a contact in this thing where Angie goes in the future is what are you spending on your home and how can you make the amount of money and time and hassle you're spending on your home easier and that's a totally different category there's overlap in those categories but that is a totally different definition of the category in the way we think about today versus the way we started that I said surprises us it don't be that surprising but it is it was not the original way we thought about the category and i could make that example in other ones too”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Sometimes we're very surprised by this. We think we're getting into one category and we end up with a new category. I'll go to the origin of Angie. Angie going back was home advisor and combination of home advisor and Angie's list. And before that, home advisor was called Service Magic, which was a business we bought in 2004. We bought Service Magic more or less as part of City Search, which no longer exists. We spent a huge amount of money on successfully in City Search over a period of time trying to build a local business and we said, okay, service magic is in this category, which we at the time were calling local. And the local category is huge. It's the yellow pages. And this part of the yellow pages is big. So that's really interesting. When I think about Angie today, I don't think about us as going after what was then the yellow pages advertising dollars and what is now.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “What's the right vacuum cleaner for a certain crowd is different than the right vacuum cleaner for another crowd, but you want to review all the vacuum cleaners and test them all out in one place and then you can write different angles for why that's better for one demographic versus the other. It really is situation dependent, but you need a reason for the second brand to exist. And more shelf space can be a reason, but I don't think just more shelf space in and of itself is enough. Because if you can put your power behind something and say, we want to transform the category, we want to be leader in this category. We want to have the best product in this category. You'd say, then you should really put all your firepower behind that thing. It starts to be different maybe when something's more mature and the shelf space game's a little bit different. But I think with Angie, we said there's not enough difference here and we want to transform the category and we need a brand to do that.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Angie's a great example of we took too long on that. There's a big debate between Barry and I where he was right in the end that we had moved too slowly to make this, he was pushing to make this change sooner and I was resisting making this change. But we had Angie's list and we had home advisor. And at some point we were saying to ourselves, okay, what do you get at Angie's list versus what do you get at home advisor? At some point, we didn't have an answer for that who would do one versus the other. And we were spending a fortune on marketing. There also was, I think, some fundamental weaknesses in the home advisor brand, like notwithstanding spending a billion dollars, we couldn't get brand awareness above a certain level, and you would have a conversation with people. I talk about this all the time, but you'd go to the cocktail party and you'd say, oh, we have home advisor. And they'd say, what does it do? You'd say, oh,”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Forgotten for a period, or you go to an unknown URL, and so you have no traffic, and then you build it back over time. And the curve for.com became dot dash and all these different verticals was pretty sharp V. Maybe it was a U, but it was straight down and then boom, it went up and it just kept going up forever from there. And it was really the bottom of that U or V, whatever it was, was very uncomfortable, but we hung on and it went up and went up forever. And that's really a credit to Neil and the team that he built there to keep trying, not giving up and build something amazing.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And that didn't work. That happened a third time. And the fourth time he said, we have to break it up because we've tried every version of horizontal and horizontal doesn't work and we have to go vertical. So we're actually this thing that we bought that was valuable. It's a well-known brand called about.com. No one knows it anymore, but it was at one point. About dot.com. We're going to just basically get rid of that and we're going to create, I can't remember what it was, six or something new brands from scratch. And we're going to move all the content to these new brands and we're going to clean up all the content and we're going to have less content and we're going to have better, less content in these verticals. We had one for health called very well and one for home called the spruce and so on across a bunch of verticals. And I said, okay, this plan also makes a lot of sense. I said, but we're not going to have a fifth meeting like this. So I hope it works. Sure enough, everything went, and this happens when you change a brand online, your URL becomes.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “We started with Neil had an idea. And I remember when we had some inkling at some point where we hired Neil, he and I went out to drinks and I said, you're going to look like a hero for the beginning because we've got all these synergies and there's going to be a lot of profit and then you're going to have to figure out where to go from there. And I didn't at the time I said that. I believe that, but I didn't know how pressing I was. I didn't think it would just fall off a cliff. And he said, okay, we're going to try this and I can't remember what the first thing was, but when things were going bad, he said we're going to try this. And I said, okay, that makes a lot of sense. And so he went after it for however it was, three months, six months, nine months, or something like that. And it didn't work. Because it's some change to about dot com. And I said, okay, well, that didn't work. He said, I know we know exactly why that didn't work. We're going to try this other thing. And here's why it's going to work. They put together this whole thing and it made a lot of sense. And he said, okay, go do it. And he tried that for six months.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Delivered all that what we thought, but we absolutely missed that the world Google specifically, but the world did not want horizontally focused information site. The world wanted vertically focused information. And after that first year, I forget the exact timeline, maybe it was two, maybe it was a year and a half, it just went straight down and really disastrous. We bought the business, I want to say it had 30 million of profit that first year we took it up to 60 million of profit. And shortly after that, it was losing $20 million a year. It was a complete reinvention by Neil Vogel and his team that brought it back to a really good business, which we've now significantly put more capital into with a big acquisition. But that's.dash now. And then we just did this acquisition Meredith that was absolutely disastrously wrong. We went from zero to zero on that one very, very quickly.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Many, I can answer that question, but I'll just do one because it's top of mind. But about dot com, when we did about.com, now that's turned out in the end to be a very different business and a great business for us for reasons that are totally unrelated to our original acquisition. But when we did about.com, it was going to be integrated into ask.com and there was an entire strategy and there was an entire sheet of synergies on like the executability scale to be like eights or nines out of ten, not like stretchy, very, very easy. And we were right about a lot of that synergy. We were wrong about a lot of it too, but we were probably right about more than we were wrong, but we were way wrong about one, the fundamentals about business and how that would endure over time. And two, related, how those synergies would endure over time. So we crushed the synergies in the first year.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Or 20 or 30 percent more or less on the price. It's qualitatively. Do we think this has a huge future? Are we right about this huge future? And if we are, then that difference in prices and ultimately going to make the difference. And if we're wrong qualitatively on that, then we're wrong and provided we haven't bet the company. It's also not going to make it a huge difference. So of course, you'd rather have lost less money than more. It doesn't feel much better to lose $270 million than it feels to lose $300 million. Of course, rather have $30 million more.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Obviously, a mix of both, and every conversation, most of the people around the table have a general sense of how the financials work. So we're not running a model every week on every alternative that we could do. That would be a big computer to do that. So we're not getting deep into the numbers until we've made, I'd say, the qualitative decision. Let's say the numbers aren't relevant because they're in our heads and we're thinking about them for sure. But we're not running a model until we're pretty far along in the decision or until we think we have a strategy that we think makes sense and then we're looking at the numbers to verify and challenge and see whether that'll make sense or not. But in the end, you could say this is true of acquisitions too. The way that we're thinking about acquisitions and businesses that we want to buy, we're rigorous on price and we fight for the last dollar. But in the end, no deal we've ever done, the success has hinged on whether we've spent”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “And we get these questions all the time. But when we think about our capital and capital allocation, we think, okay, should we be spending angie? Or should we be buying Angie back in? Or should we be doing nothing? But all those things are on the table and they do get regularly reviewed when we're thinking about the priorities for our capital. And that is an important component.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Gray's use of a finite amount of capital, and we have that discussion, and I think sometimes people don't believe that either questions I always get from shareholders are, for example, when are you going to spin off X? And sometimes they get angry with that question. Why haven't you spun off X yet? And they say, well, we do think about it. We think about it all the time. And they say, well, you haven't spun off. Well, we spun off another business, so we are willing to spin off businesses, but you haven't spun off this one. Yeah, we haven't spun off that one yet, but we do think about it. And it's true. We go back all the time and we say everything's on the table. There is no sacred item in here. We say, well, we can't possibly do that. We'll never do that. It's on the table. And the opposite is on the table too. People will say to me now, why haven't you spun off Angie? Or why haven't you bought in Angie? Angie's a publicly traded subsidiary of IC. IC owns 85%. The public owns 15% at one point said publicly we were thinking about spinning it and then we decided not to.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I grew up in IAC. I won a job briefly out of college before IAC for a year and a half. It's been my whole career. And so I take this for granted. But when people come into IEC for the first time, they're always surprised by the candor in our conversations and relatedly the rigor in our conversations. Capital allocation is the most important thing that we do. And it is every week we are sitting down and talking about that. And that process always has everything on the table. And I think that is, I've come to realize, not firsthand, but secondhand, that that is, I guess, unique. But when we're looking at things that say, well, we could do this or we could buy back stock. We could do this or we could buy this other thing. We could do this. And which one makes the most sense over a long period of time? Which one is the most strategic value? Which one has the”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Bought them yet, so the liability just kept going up, and we had no idea where it was going to stop. We eventually purchased it at 15 or something like that. This year we did NFTs, and so we tried to get people to experiment. We want everybody to think about it because I do think it came transform a lot of businesses. But again, long-winded going back to the match analogy, I do think it's more likely, frankly, that there will be new things that we start that compete with our businesses that are more successful in experimenting with these things, then it is likely that our existing businesses make a big transformation among your product to suddenly turn into a DAO or suddenly distribute an NFT that changes the trajectory of the business or something like that.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “This is by far the hardest thing and goes back to the match analogy. We've asked all our businesses to think about it. One thing we do every year is we get top leaders of IC businesses together once a year in someplace nice and we hang out and do fun things. We go through annual plans, which is a bit of a grind, but the purpose is get together and get to know each other. And at the end, we have always given a gift of some relevance to the participants. And usually the gift has timely relevance. A couple years ago, we gave everybody a Bitcoin and we said something with this, sell it, buy something with it, hold on to it. But now you have one and now you know what it is to play with it. Bitcoin was three years ago or something like that. It was when Bitcoin went up to $15,000. I remember our CFO was very upset, rightfully so, which is we gave it to everybody at $10,000, I think, and it turned out we were naked short Bitcoin because we had.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Is really profoundly transformational. Everyone could imagine one unique physical thing existing, but no one could ever imagine one unique digital thing existing. And now that one unique digital thing can exist, that will change lots of industries and open up new opportunities. Some obvious ones, I think, like ticketing or fan clubs or ways that a consumer interacts with a brand, they can do that in a unique digital way where they have a representative of one thing that they own with that brand. I think that concept of a unique digital item has enormous change potential.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “It happens everywhere. Think about the other big phases of web and mobile. No one says anymore. Is this a web product or is this a mobile product? It's just Tinder, Uber. It happens to exist on mobile or whatever. That's absolutely going to be true of Web3 and crypto. There's been a lot of debate. I'm sure you've participated in or watched on these things lately of what is centralization, decentralization. how much of the espouse principles of Web3 are actually being truly adopted by the players or the successful players in Web3. The big innovation that happened and that will be an innovation for years and years, decades, at least a decade, is that a unique digital thing can exist. The fact that a unique digital thing can exist, one unique digital thing can exist.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Things like that, then we say, okay, let's keep going more capital and then let's organize it for it to go off on its own. That one can start with whether it's an internal idea or an external. We have one that we just, I think, announced yesterday or maybe we're about to announce called OR, which is an addiction medication. And”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “To give great people a pool of capital or give lots of different groups of great people a pool of capital and just say figure it out because their first five ideas are going to be wrong or their first five approaches are going to be wrong and then they're going to get lucky on the sixth and that'll be the one that works. And when you do it iteratively for us, we say, is there a sign of success here? No, okay, pull the capital and move it to something else. You might need to give each little team or each little an idea more at bats to be successful. So we still don't know whether that's the right answer, but what we are doing is in each of these businesses that we're trying to start, we go out and build a little bit of product and do a little bit of marketing to see what kind of engagement we get. And if the response on the marketing is above a certain threshold and if the product resonates enough, which is evidence in the marketing, but it's also evidence in some of the UI.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “We have a system now where companies can come from two places. One, internal ideas, which is all IEC companies or just the people who are focused on the incubator called NUCO. And then we go and try and find a quote-unquote founder or a CEO or a leader of that business. And then there's the alternative, which is somebody comes to us and says, I have an idea and I want to build it and I could use your help building it. We have engineers at Nuco who can build and who can build things quickly and marketing people and legal infrastructure and other things like that where we can test things and get things off the ground with relatively little capital. And then if we have signs of momentum, then we can put more capital into everything in there is iterative. And it's not yet clear that that's the right solution just to be fair. Some people would say actually the right thing to do is not”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “We are now on our second iteration of an incubator. And our first incubator was called Hatch Labs, which was tremendously successful in that Tinder came out of Hatch Labs. And it was the dumbest thing anyone's ever done or the smartest things anyone ever done, which is we shut down Hatch Labs after Tinder. Tinder was a one in a million success. We said, okay, great. We went one for one and let's avoid the next $999,000 failures. Or we said we somehow cracked the code and changed the formula and we know how to make the 1 in a million successes one in six. No one will never know the answer to that question, but we shut it down and it was shut down for a while while we were focused on other things. And we just recently, within the last couple of years, built back the incubator and all the businesses coming out of the incubator now are so early stage that it's impossible to say whether we are succeeding or failing.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “No, I don't think so, other than a good value catalyst usually is significant change underway in that category or significant change necessary. Although I go certainly more towards underway than necessary, you could have said in healthcare a significant change necessary for a very, very long time and still made no progress because it's so hard to change”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Exactly. You talk to everybody, say the same thing whenever you make a change, you wish you made it six months earlier or two years earlier or whatever. It is similar when some get overly obsessed with what's happening on the outside as against what's happening on the inside saying this business is doing that or there's a lot of interest in people doing that other business or whatever. So maybe we should do that. As again saying how do we move what we have forward I've seen this many times where that obsession moves from the internal to the external. It doesn't mean you shouldn't pay attention to the external. You have to pay attention to the external but the thing you have to be obsessed with, deeply obsessed with is the intern. What are you doing for your customers? What are you doing for your category? What are you doing for your employees? How are you changing that? Where is your product failing? That obsession and that, oh, by the way, here's what's happening externally and you can't be blind to that.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “A difference in how you build and how you think about your approach, but if you say, I think this can go on forever verse, how do I exit and start planning for the exit before you even enter?”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “at that amazing multiple and we're going to multiply that multiple times this thing and we succeed then we have that that usually is a bad sign because they're coming in with a plan to get out for our investment horizon we're coming in with a plan to take over the world with this business and this product and there is a difference i think between the best businesses that are built with one mentality and the other ones that people make money on it's a successful strategy i don't want to say it's not there's tons of businesses i'm sure who have said we're going to go in and we're going to get out and then they've actually done that but for us to build category changing businesses i think requires one personality and not the other and it's the one who says i love this i believe in this i want to build this and i want to build this forever and sometimes that's not a binding statement sometimes their interests change or something becomes less appealing or something becomes more appealing and the reality is things change all the time but there is”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Of all, it's so far from true anymore, knowing more than anybody else, and everything I'm in, I know less than everybody. And I guess that's inevitable, but it is the reality. We look at so many businesses, our own successes, our own failures, our current successes and our current failings. And then we look at so many businesses. And in those, there's successes and failures in the sense of we saw something and we knew it and we didn't act on it or we saw something and we were wrong about the action we took on it and the business went on to succeed or the business went on to fail, et cetera. You do see patterns in people, you see patterns in metrics, and you definitely do learn from those patterns. One pattern in people is there are businesses or business leaders or entrepreneurs or whatever who say from the get-go, here's what we're going to do and here's how we're going to exit. And by the way, this company is.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Company as anyone could possibly know that I was prepared for whatever the question might be or whatever the challenge might be and be able to do that. And the other thing I guess is having an open mind and being able to communicate. I do this all the time. I just did this again yesterday on something. But I think some solution is the right answer to a problem and I want to communicate that that solution is the right answer to the problem. I write a note to the group about why I think that solution is the right answer. And I would say a significant portion of the time I sit down and I start to write that note to the group explaining why it's the right answer. And by the time I get to the end, I've reversed my position complete. Because as I put it down, I organize the thoughts. I don't think they're coherent anymore. I go the opposite and being capable of doing that, I do think is an important trait in helping an organization go forward.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Probably a lot of things luck being a big one, but really believe this. I always tried to speak my mind clearly and candidly and think about what is best for the business, what is long-term best for the business. People talk about trying to act like an owner. I always felt like I was acting like an owner. That's the way I thought about it. I couldn't really think about it any other way. And I think that makes a difference. I always had a point of view on where I thought we could go, what I thought we were doing right or what I thought we were doing wrong. And I always was willing to push on that point of view. Again, I wasn't always right on my point of view, but I did have one, which is how you make progress on things. And also very early on, I always tried to be the most prepared person on something. If we were looking at a deal, I wanted to make sure I know as much as could be known about that.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “But you can move accountability. So yes, is marketing just receiving inputs and then doing the best they can? Or is marketing creating inputs and reversing that? And you can organizationally change that direction”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Different people have taken different approaches. We spun off Expedia in 2004, I think, or 2005, 4005, I'm suddenly forgetting. And I joined IC in 2003, and I was a PIP squeak, so I was not involved in much of that. But booking.com was probably the most successful scaling search marketing business maybe ever. There's others, I guess, that are closed, but that could be the top. And they always, as I understood it, again, I've never part of the organization, but as they did it, they divided into tiny teams, three-person teams to go after this, where everyone was optimizing for the same thing conversion. Everyone knew that whatever you were doing, you had to optimize for conversion. So they did reset the whole organization to do that. That is a very hard thing to pull off. And if you're built from the ground up that way, that works. I think it's very hard to transition an organization to something like that, split the whole organization into.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Absolutely, yes. One is get 100 more plumbers. The other is change this page. This page doesn't convert well. That didn't work. Change it again. Okay, that didn't work. Change it again. And keep going because we're not stopping to be successful on this particular area and this particular”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Every day, but we've gone up and down in our skills here. But you say plumbers in Indianapolis, okay, we're trying to market to people who need plumbers in Indianapolis, and we can't do that profitably. Well, forget that. Let's do roofers in Indianapolis and figure out how to do that. Okay, roofers in Indianapolis works really well. Let's focus on roofers in Indianapolis. The alternative is to say plumbers in Indianapolis. We can't get that working. Well, we only have 25 plumbers on the platform in Indianapolis. We need 50. So you go to sales and say we need 50 plumbers in Indianapolis. That doesn't work. Okay, we need 100. That doesn't work. Okay, we need 200. How many do we need until we do it? Because the one thing we know we need is it can't be possible that we can't reach customers profitably who are looking for plumbers in Indianapolis. And when you invert that, that is when it starts to really sort of scale infinitely.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “There's two approaches to it, and we don't always get to the more successful approach, which I'll explain, but there's two approaches to it. One is you do what you said, which is a lot of experimentation, and you say, okay, we're going to try and mark it here, and we're going to push the limit of what's possible. How do we get to profitable marketing, et cetera? We're going to go, go until we hit the wall, and then we're going to say, okay, that doesn't work. Let's push our dollars elsewhere. That's a totally reasonable financially sensible approach. But the best have a very different approach. What they say is this channel needs to make sense for us as an acquisition. And we've pushed and pushed and pushed, and we can't get to profitability here. What do we change about the product? Or what do we change about our supply dynamics or whatever to make it so it works? Think about it in the context of Angie, where we continue to get better.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Navigate those platforms. And then being early on the new platforms to understand those to make sure that you're staying ahead of the game there. Of course, everything is product first, and there's a lot of creative things you can do around brand, important stories you can tell to differentiate around brand, and that's really important. But the tactical blocking and tackling of making sure you know how to work in those platforms and optimize those platforms where many, many users spend substantial portions of their day or begin their day or begin their inquiry or whatever, that is a very, very critical skill to every major successful business, I think.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Absolutely, a better product is necessary, and the better the product gets, the easier it is to distribute and the more viral it is and all of those things. But actually, if you can have this wonderful product and then you can accelerate it meaningfully with customer acquisition, that's an even better thing because you have some tools in your control to add more fuel to the fire. We've always believed that's a really important thing. And I think now every pitch deck you see on every company is LTV to CAC, lifetime value to customer acquisition costs and all kinds of charts around customer acquisition costs. For us, staying ahead on customer acquisition costs is a huge portion of if you aggregated IC's P&L, huge dollars spent, billion dollars spent. We're in a world where a lot of dollars are concentrated in a few platforms, making sure that you are ahead of the game on those platforms, understanding how those platforms work and understanding how to name.”

    2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source