YouSaid · the spoken record

Joey Levin

lines on the record: 71
first: 2022-02-15
most recent: 2022-02-15
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

“Not that long ago, sort of the prevailing wisdom, and maybe it still is in some ways, that actually customer acquisition is something that only bad businesses spend money on. If your product is good enough, then you don't need any customer acquisition costs. And that was a thing in Silicon Valley for a time period.”
2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Built a desktop product. And that became so much more easily and so much more naturally there. I think that it's very hard for an institution to change itself dramatically. It is definitely easier to take the learnings that you have from the one product and then apply it to something that builds native in whatever the new medium is or the new platform is. Those things were totally separate. In fact, Tinder was built in an incubator in IEC, not even an incubator in MAT. The goal of incubator in IEC was to build multiple businesses in mobile, and one of them happened to be this. And then eventually it moved into match, which made sense, but building it outside of there was really helpful to, I think, its early success.”
2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And within Match Group, there's multiple brands there's the original brand, which is still a successful brand called Match.com. And then as you would say, there's Tinder and OKCupid and Hinge and a bunch of international brands, many others. What I remember talking about at the time was how hard mobile was, how hard it was for match.com now to make the transition to mobile, and how there was some fundamental flaws in that. So for example, going into the App Store was a big challenge for Match.com because for Match to go into the App Store was to give up 30% of revenue to Apple or to Android at the time. And there was, for good reason, a lot of resistance to that. And in came Tinder, who never knew you could have that other 30% of revenue, essentially. And so it could play in that in building that up. And here came Tinder, built mobile native, and never even.”
2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a ton of great lessons in that one. And going back to the future is obvious part, not just the people will date, which of course they will, but also more importantly was the way that you found people being set up by somebody. Or if you wanted to, there was a thing called personals ads. That was a big market. People won't even imagine that this would possibly be true. You put a little blurb of text in the back of a newspaper to meet somebody. And that was a very large category of advertising dollars in newspapers and magazines. So we said, okay, there's this static thing that doesn't do any matching or you can have a dynamic thing that does do matching and puts people together. So that was the first turn of that. It evolved a lot. But I do remember talking about mobile at match and how hard it was for match group, which is a parent company which spun off of IEC.”
2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's times to do that, there's times not to do it, there's times it's absolutely essential because you have to control your own destiny to be able to continue to innovate. So it's very, very hard to say what is the same. The only thing that's the same is 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
“And then you be very small. So, what are big addressful markets, and how do you have big ambitious vision? That's an important one. But again, I could actually come up with exceptions to that, which is you start going after something very, very small and you are so good. Probably Shopify is a great example of that. When Toby builds Shopify, he was building something over his snowboard shop and did a great job with that. And I don't think he thought he was going to take over the world of e-commerce then, but he was so good at that and such an exceptional person and he got so good at so many things they built that. So it's very, very hard to come up with a rule. I guess probably the most important, which is maybe consistent with that point, is the ability to change, the ability to keep adapting, the ability to keep looking bigger, looking for bigger opportunities, and the ability to keep changing with the market as necessary or changing what the product is necessary. Change is also tactical things like when do you start?”
2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is so hard. I think about this question all the time. And every time I think, okay, I've got the alchemy. Now I've got a perfect example for why that didn't work. A lot of people say back the best teams. Of course, we want to back the best teams. Of course, we want to back ambitious people. Of course, talent is amazing. But we have some of our most successful businesses of all time where the very early talents bark was unequivocally the wrong talent for the next phase or some of the later growth phases in there. Then we have examples of the opposite of that. Again, not at all to discount the importance of talent, but the different talent at different phases and it's not one thing that says, okay, the biggest winners are when we found some amazing human so early in their lives. But of course, we do have examples of that. One for sure is large addressable markets. What are you going for if you're going for something very small, then you can succeed?”
2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that actually, that's so far the highest customer satisfaction product we've ever seen in the category by an order of magnitude. You realize that some homeowners want to negotiate, want to make sure they've looked somebody in the eyes and whatever. But many say if you're going to stand behind this and you're going to make sure it gets done, then you just get it done for me and find the one person. And I alluded to it a minute ago, but some of the UI now demands that on voice. Say, I want this. The voice can't say, well, here's 10 possible responses to this. The voice says, here's the answer. I think that'll be increasingly true of the way user interfaces work.”
2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“who can definitely do that job when you want the job done in the time frame you want the job done they're available where we are now with the product and we've combined home advisor and angie's list into a brand now called angie and what is now the fastest growing solution is one where somebody says here's what's wrong with my house and we say”
2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be ethically consistent with the things that I believe in. Just give me the one, and that's a better solution for me. Then I don't have to look at 10 and I don't have to figure out which one's better. Have you know my preferences and you know I think about it and I trust this for anything, just give me the one. And that's a better solution. You could think about it for our businesses Angie is probably one of the best examples of that and the evolution of how that category went. That category started as yellow pages, which had a list of everything with no information. And then there was a great innovation which was Angie's list, which was a list of everybody with grades and with reviews. And so you could sort through that list much better. And then home advisor came along. We own Angie's list and home advisor. Home advisor came along and said, well, we're going to match you with up to three. So you give us the information. You need the house or you need the roof. It's this kind of shingles and you need it on this date. Whenever you give us the information, we'll give you three people.”
2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that was one phase. Actually, the current phase is the exact opposite of that, meaning you could take Google as the example or Amazon and how amazing those businesses are and continue to be, but also where they're vulnerable. You would remember the first time you used Google and it was like you searched for something trivial and it was 3 billion results for this. And I was like, holy cow, there's 3 billion results for this thing. You rarely got past the first page as the first 10 links, but nonetheless, there's a billion results for this thing. The platforms today, and especially with different interfaces with platforms like voice, a billion results is obviously useless. I mean, it speaks to the power of the platform, but it's obviously practically useless for the end user. And even 20 results to the second page or even 10 results to the first page or even three results is not that helpful if you actually can technologically say and expect, just give me the one that worked, if I can trust you to be fair priced, to be reliable.”
2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wire, we ended up with all three of those, but the point is definitely where the future was going was clear. And where we find those things, we just like to make sure we have enough exposure to that and enough angles on it that we can participate in that change and help some of that change. There is probably a time where people might have been doubtful of travel. But I think if you look at these things, when you see what the new product looks like relative to the incumbent product, you know that the new product is going to be meaningful. You just don't know who's going to deliver the winning new product.”
2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exposure to what we think is an obvious future. And we'll do that and we'll challenge ourselves. Or we've been in something for a while and there's something that can disrupt it. We'd rather, of course, disrupt ourselves than have somebody else disrupt us. And that's also kind of central to the philosophy. Another piece I'd say is I alluded to this a minute ago, but I talked some time about where are we going with our capital, and you alluded to this too a minute ago. It's where the future is obvious. It's not so much seeing around corners. When you see something, it's saying, okay, is travel going to happen this way in the future, or is travel going to happen where people can access an online travel agency and have access to all data? Are they going to use travel agents and the way they're using travel agents? Or if they have all the data in the world and they have it at their fingertips and they can make the decisions for themselves, what are they going to do? That future is definitely obvious. Is it expedia that's going to win or hotels.com is going to win?”
2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very philosophically, and I see as a result has always embraced change. Think about this during his career and how many different categories he's been a leader or part of a leader in exceptional. Most people get very good at one thing and you're exceptional at one thing and then move on to retirement or philanthropy or something else. And he's on multiple industries. And that is an important part of what we do with bracing change and also that intellectual curiosity. So embracing change can mean a lot of things. It can mean, for example, challenging your own businesses, competing with yourself. That's something that we've done multiple times. We believe in a category. We have a bet in a category of business that we're backing and we might also back a direct competitor to that because we know the category is going to work. We don't know whether we've got the product right. We don't know whether we've got the team right or we just want 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
“Things that just by virtue of being a group move much slower because of the way we're organized, we can drive accountability much sharper and much swifter. And I think that that also works very well in that structure.”
2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be able to go for the biggest upside in their business. So those things go well together, meaning we can't centralize because at some point we uncentralize, but also we philosophically don't really believe in optimizing the centralization as much as we believe in optimizing the business for its cleanest and clearest and most accountable path forward. And we also are structured for accountability in ways that maybe other organizations are less so. To compare it a business within IEC compared to, say, a public company with a public board or even a private company with a private board made up of investors and whatever, our ability to execute change and hold accountability is much, much swifter than those other alternatives. I've been part of those alternatives. Public companies controlled public companies, uncontrolled public companies, private companies, all that. There's a level of group think, there's a level of politeness, there's a level of”
2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't centralize very much, and we don't do that for the reason I just said, but we also don't do it because that's usually not the right way to optimize the business, meaning the cost side, and we're vigilant on the cost side, but the cost side of a business by definition is finite. Each business that has a number that's finite. The revenue side is infinite for all those businesses. And so if you say, okay, we're going to take away this control or this flexibility or we're going to centralize this marketing or sales or technology or whatever it is, you remove some level of accountability from the leader of that business and you remove some flexibility of the leader of that business. When we can save on an accountant or a centralized function, we like to, but I would much rather be a little bit inefficient there for the ability of the business and the business leader to have absolute accountability.”
2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of times ask us it's a related question about synergies or what's centralized or things like that. And I think that when you say, okay, the businesses are staying in this one umbrella forever, then you do seek more synergies. And some people view that as a good thing. And some people have succeeded very well with making that a good thing, which is, well, we always have accounting or we always have pick a function. We're very good at that, that's centralized, and then things can grow off of it. Because we know that things”
2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All things for us pretty much have been bottom up. Expedia was the first. And when we spun Expedia, it was the right decision for Expedia at that time, but there was not a decision, which is, oh, let's start doing this as a model. In fact, it probably wasn't until after we had done several that we said this is a model and this makes sense and this is something for us to continue to do. We try stuff and we say we're opportunistic. We say we're always willing to try something new. We're not wed to one sector category, business stage, whatever and we're also not wed to a structural thing. But then when we saw this working, we said, okay, this makes sense. This is the right thing to do. It's not just learning from what we did. It's also learning from what others did or didn't do and seeing what's happened there, meaning that you see businesses stay under the umbrella for too long and they start to no longer be optimized for their own success.”
2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Together are pretty unique in our operating model. Investing on a forever timeline is a very different structure than a lot of capital is organized. Most capital is organized with a finite thing. You go in in this period and you come out in that period. And with those incentives, people organize to do things. What do you do in the end period and what do you do in the out period? For us, there is no out period, even when we're spending something off. It's not like we say, okay, well, we got rid of it at just the right point to get rid of it. We're only giving it to ourselves. It has to be doing well and has to be doing well forever. So organizing on that timeline is unique. And then the ability to say with the leaders of our businesses, you can grow up here in this house and hopefully learn a lot and grow up well in this house. And then at some point you probably get too big for the house and you want out of the house and maybe we want you out of the house. And that's okay too. And you can have a thriving life outside of the house as families do as teen.”
2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are in the business of building businesses, and everything that's part of IC supports that. And there are others, every business is in the business of building their business and some are in the business of building multiple businesses. The best ones have to be in the business of building multiple businesses. Two things that are pretty unique about IEC is number one, our time horizon. And number two, the reality that we don't try to keep all of our businesses under one umbrella. We take our best and most successful businesses and instead of saying what many do, which is let's hold on to that business, we say, okay, it's ready and we give it to our shareholders, which doesn't mean we get rid of it. We give it to our shareholders through a spin-off. And then those shareholders get to own it directly and be a part of that business directly and continue or not on their own directly. And those two differences.”
2022-02-15 · Invest Like the Best · Joey Levin - Building an Anti-Conglomerate - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 264] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source