YouSaid · the spoken record

Justin McLeod

lines on the record: 116
first: 2023-05-08
most recent: 2023-05-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I mean, again, it had a little bit, it just wasn't well designed for what we wanted it to be for, which is long-term. I mean, I started this because I wanted a girlfriend. I'm sorry, this is because I wanted that. Real connection, and it was not designed for that.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A huge part of me felt like that That article, it was by Nancy Joe's sales. I mean, I went to go meet with Nancy Joe Sales in New York, and I was like, I want to hear your experience as you put together this article. It was a really big. Yeah, it was a pretty big gut punch. And that wasn't it. I mean, there were some other things going on in 2015 where our growth was starting to slow a little bit. But I do think more importantly, it was like this just isn't the company that I wanted to build. It doesn't have the values that I wanted to have. It doesn't have, it's not having the impact that I wanted it to have. We're kind of just this copycat app that has the same interface with like a small twist of friends. But it was still like.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we are very focused on our competition and our competition release of future, and we release a feature. And yeah, they became very, very similar in their appearance. And we were still friends of friends. And so we had this different vibe. But practically speaking, the apps were very similar in how they operated.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My well, one, we had traction. And two, we had Tinder. Tinder was exploding, and no one could invest in Tinder because it was owned by IAC. And so the only place that people could put their money as a competitor Tinder at the time was basically us. And so we were raised a few million dollars towards the end of 2013. And then we raised a big round of like $14 or $15 million at the end of 2014. And I was turning away millions. I was like, I don't even know what, like, I can't take anymore. Like, we have to close the round. Like, I don't even know what I would do with all this money, so we're gonna stop here.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, the details make the difference for sure. Those are pretty big details. Mobile only simplified interface. Everyone's on it is very different than. Clunky interface. No one's on it. So, yeah, I mean, those details definitely made a big difference. So we started Washington, D.C. and then a waitlist built up in New York City, and then we opened up New York City and threw a launch party there. And then a waitlist built up in San Francisco and then, you know, et cetera, et cetera”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we were such a wholesome brand. We were friends of friends, right? So people would equate it to like, you know, a house party or a wedding. And that was the kind of crowd and the vibe that you'd feel on Hinge. Resin maybe on the other ones, it was a little bit more just like people nearby and random. And so it just felt a little bit more like a club. And so we sort of gain this reputation as the more wholesome, more relationship oriented app. And that was our niche”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the next day we had like 500 people log in to use the app who didn't have to. They just came of their own volition and used the app. And then the next day 600 people came. And the next day like 800 people came and we were off to the races.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is the day before the launch party, and we still have not gotten approval for the app. So we're about to throw this like launch party, and we have no app for people to download. I was just like, I was trying to get in contact with people at Apple. I mean, who cares? Like, we're like nobody, but I'm like trying to reach out to the head of the app store and reaching out to any VC I've ever met and seeing if they have contacts there and just like begging and writing emails, trying to get this thing approved. And I remember the night before the launch party, I just was like curled up in a ball in the floor of our little office at this incubator, crying. The last two years have been for nothing because we're going to launch this and we're going to have no app. And, you know, we skirted. We had like days of cash left at that point.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Open bar, we had a liquor sponsor who just, I think Tito's vodka just like shipped us a bunch of alcohol for free. We had like a DJ. We had an art exhibition. We had photo booths and a dance party. And everyone had to download the app to get in the door. Now, mind you, we actually didn't have an app almost because we had submitted the app to the app store for approval and they were not giving approval. And we submitted like two weeks early”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was on a floor of an office building that was about to be built out as a new incubator that we were moving into. And they hadn't touched it yet, so it was just this big empty floor. And so we just used that”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, because the other issue was the cold start problem. And when you get one or two or three people coming in at a time, in the early days, I would sit and look at the locks and I would watch. Someone would log onto the site and I would be like, oh my gosh, and I would watch them. You know, they would like someone and then pass on someone and then like someone and then they'd leave. And it's like, oh, I mean, that's the trickle that was happening. And we were just like, we've got to get everyone on at once. Like no one's going to stick around if there's not a lot of people on this thing. So we've got to just like throw this Hail Mary. We've only got 25,000 left. We're going to pivot to mobile and we're just going to like get 2500 people in here. They're going to be like the coolest, trendiest people in DC and they're all going to see each other downloading the app. And so they're going to think it's cool and they're going to keep using it.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of my really good friends from Colgate had moved down to DC with me. His name was Bennett Richardson. He and I were original roommates when we first moved to DC. And he was just very plugged into the social scene. And so we just used his email lists and we were just hustling to get people on and telling them to tell their friends. We started with just iOS and we just burned. I mean, we just worked all day and all night because we had to be when we were going to run out of money, which was February 7th, 2013-ish. And we took our last $25,000 and we threw a 2,500-person launch party in DC. We set the date and we just worked backwards from that.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Used at the time there were these. I don't want to get too technical, but there was a way to essentially build a website that looked like a mobile app and behaved like a mobile app that you could package as a mobile app. So that is essentially what we did.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was starting the App Store was starting to become more popular. There were more companies starting to develop things for the App Store. So it just felt like if we're the dating company of the future, the dating company of the future is probably on mobile. And I think, again, the simplification, it dovetailed with the simplification of the interface, which is that we'll just make this thing really simple. And if it's really simple, it should fit on mobile. It's almost like a good forcing function to make it simple because you can't fit that much on a three and a half inch screen. And so let's just distill it down to like a photo age, location, a few interests, and just like yes or no, do you like this person, move to the next person? And if it's a match, we'll let you know.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I was definitely depressed and anxious. I was worried and I was concerned with the feedback that we were getting. And at a certain point it became pretty clear that iterations weren't going to get us there. And around Thanksgiving, this is 2012, we have like $25,000 left in the bank at this point, and we probably raised like $150 or something like that. It's pretty clear this isn't going to go anywhere. So I had this kind of crisis moment over Thanksgiving. And I called the team and I'm like, let's start over from scratch. This needs to be simple. We got to get rid of all these questions. And by the way, it's 2012, so the world's going mobile, and this needs to be a mobile application.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It frustrated me, but it did not discourage me because I had a strong thesis that they were not dismantling, they were just drawing these other irrelevant analogies. And so a big part of being a great entrepreneur is being hopelessly idealistic but ruthlessly practical at the same time. You really have to balance these things. And I was being ruthlessly practical. I was like, no, no, no. There is a clear market opportunity here. And so I wasn't discouraged because they weren't dismantling the argument.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. The wisdom at the time was that it was a saturated market, match.com and eHarmony owned it and it would be impossible to break into, which I looked at and I'm like, I am in my mid twenties, none of my friends use, dating websites. It is not saturated. It's very clear.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was mainly talking to investors in Washington, DC. You know, there are a few VC firms there, and the amount of money we were looking for wasn't like Sandhill Road money. It was just a few hundred thousand dollars.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not really. It was People were weirded out by it. People weren't used to it. People didn't understand why you had to answer these questions about your friends. Know people were nice and they'd sort of nod their heads, but you know, you could tell like they didn't really get it. And there's just no way that we were going to be able to sell one, you know, maybe at the end of like an hour long focus group we would have sold someone on like how it works and why it's great. But we weren't going to be able to do that with thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that is where the complexity of the original idea came from. We would ask you questions about your friends that we would use for the algorithm. So we'd show you Susie and we'd say, would you describe her as more athletic or more book smart or more something? And you would answer that. And we'd build up these sort of like personality profiles based on quizzes that we would give you about your friends. And so we would show you someone. And then let's say you someone liked your friend Susie, tell her to join Hinge. And then you tell Susie and then she would join Hinge and then she would start answering questions about her friends and would unlock more people for us to have access to. And it was complicated and people were a little confused because they were like, well, I'm joining us to find new people. Why are you asking me questions about my friends? But that is how it worked in the early days.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the stigma was because it was difficult. The stigma was because you would have to spend a lot of time setting up a profile, answering long questions, paying a lot of money, so no one would do that unless they were really struggling in their dating lives and had to resort to that. And no one wants to admit that. Like, no one wants to admit to themselves or certainly to other people that they struggle in their dating lives and can't meet people. And so the idea was people still want to be able to meet new people. You just have to make it frictionless. You just have to make it easy. If you make it easy and you make a one-click sign-on, it won't have stigma. And if it doesn't have stigma, you're going to unlock the biggest single market, which is people who are 20 to 35. When those people didn't use dating websites. So that was the pitch.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to be stigma free. There was a lot of stigma around dating websites at the time. I think a lot of times VCs think by analogy. And they're like, that dating website has stigma. So like dating websites has stigma. Like that's just how that goes. But you have to look at the principles underneath that. Like why do dating websites have a stigma?”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We worked out of the accelerator. I mean, first, I was just working out of my apartment. And then when we got into the accelerator, I started working out of the accelerator.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is not where Hinge comes from. It was just like a placeholder name. I honestly don't love the name. I mean, it's kind of stuck now, but it was just, it was a placeholder. I was like, I needed something that connected two things that wasn't already trademarked. And any founder who's probably tried to name something before and spent lots of time on uspto.gov. Trying to find a name that hasn't been trademarked, especially in the love and dating space, is no joke.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no. That was pretty early on. We moved away from like. It went through a few iterations in the early days. It went from 0 cupid to secret agent Cupid to two degrees to three degrees. And each of these names had like trademark issues. And I just needed a placeholder name. And that's where Hinge came from. I was like, I just, it was a Friends of Friends app. And I was like, I just need a name for something that connects two things. Like it's the thing in the middle. And I was staring at a door and I was like, I'm going to call it Hinge. So I just got a hint”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And that is not how it works. So I'd go to these VCs and I'd be like, you know, we're going to create a dating app. It's going to be, you know, young people are going to use it and VCs would be like match.com owns this market. You'll never be able to beat them. But I got a few believers. And yeah, we just started building this website.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, initially it was a dating website. Initially, it was this Facebook Canvas app, and it was still, I think that was primarily the idea. And it was initially clunky and complex, and it would ask you questions about your friends, and it had all these bells and whistles features. And it was way overcomplicated. I was able to I ran around and I was able to raise a little bit of money. I got into this little incubator in DC called Fortify. raised like a little bit from my little friends and family round of maybe like 100, 150,000 dollars. You know, most VCs, of course, wouldn't pay attention to us at all. We always trying to, you know, you come out of Harvard Business School and you think the way that you start a business is you write a business plan and you go to Greylock and then they give you $50 million and then you.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, $24,000. That was it. And so that's what we used to pay these developers and started to develop prototype. And I was sort of the product person imagining what the interface was going to look like. And she would help talk to the engineers because she also coded. So I follow her out to Mountain View. I'm sleeping on her floor in Mountain View. And eventually she's like, this has been fun, Justin. I'm going to stay at Google. This isn't really my thing. So I left her apartment in Mountain View. I bounced around for a little bit around SF and then Berkeley. And then I just was like, this is not my place. I don't know anyone out here. And so I drove Cost Country back to DC where I had worked before and knew people and had a network. And I decided to start it there on my own.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And so I followed her out to San Francisco where she was going to take her job at Google, but sort of halftime work with me on Hinge.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I got together with a friend. Her name was Francis at Business School. She worked at Google. And we each put in twelve thousand dollars, which was obviously like a lot of money for us both. But it's what I had. And so we put in this money and we hired a team of engineers down in Argentina to start building a prototype.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's another piece that I think made it really accessible to the next generation. It's like these aren't random strangers that you're going to see on this app. You're going to see friends of friends. It's the same idea of like listing a crush, except now it's just people that you have a mutual connection with and you can see some of their photos. And then so you list them as a crush. That was like the idea that really got me to be like, I'm not going to take the job at McKinsey, or at least I'm going to push back the start date and see where this goes.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was obsessed with this idea. I don't know how to say it. It was like, I mean, the closest analogy I can imagine is like being, you're like pregnant with this idea and it is like coming out of you one way or another. And that's what it felt like. It was like I couldn't stop. I couldn't sleep. I just was like thinking about it all the time about how the algorithm would work and about how you would get people to sign up to it. And I just, it was like being possessed. And then I found out that other schools and other people had had this idea. And what happens is a lot of people join, people list their crushes, and then you find out whether you match or not, and then everyone goes away. And then that's when the insight came to me. You know, people mainly just like cruise their friends' photos and like, what if this were actually not about people you already knew, but it was about your friends.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You get on Facebook and you go through your friends' photos and you'd see someone kind of cute in one of their photos that maybe you didn't know that was like a friend of a friend. And so this idea sparked of like, if there was a dating app that was connected to Facebook, people would use it because it would be so simple. You already have your profile. It's already done. You already have your photos set up. You have social verification. If you just connected something that was really simple and connected to Facebook, I'll bet young people would use it as opposed to at the time all web dating websites used screen names and you had to sign up and fill out these long profiles and do all the stuff and it was a lot of friction and so that excited me. I was like there's really there's something here”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a small class and a bunch of people hopped on and did it, and it led to a few matches. It didn't lead to much, but it got me thinking. I just thought, why doesn't this exist in the real world? Because at the time, the culture was, you'd sort of like creep on your friends' photos on Facebook.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally to solve my own problem. I mean, it was very practical. It was very, there's a girl in this class that I have a crush on that I want to wanted to find a girlfriend. I mean, I'd always wanted to find, I just, I don't know why, but I've always just been this romantic who just really wanted to find my person and had this belief that when I found my person, like everything would just be amazing forever. So I built this very practically for me.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. The original name of this, by the way, was called Secret Agent Cupid, and it was this whole thing of like you're undercover listing your crushes. It was a terrible name, I can't talk about it. But it was the beginning of this whole dynamic of what's called like the double opt-in of you list someone and they don't find out unless they list you two or they like you two.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean, it's what sparked the idea. I don't think I would have. That initial spark would have happened had the dance not been cancelled, and I hadn't been walking with Brett that Wednesday afternoon to class.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it would use the Facebook network. You say you log in and you'd have a list of your friends. I mean, this was the Wild West early days before there were a lot of privacy regulations and all of that. So, you know, you'd log in, you'd download all their friend lists from the API, you would display them, they're friendless, you collect the people you ever crush on, you'd go through and select them. And then, if they selected you, then it would let you know that it was in mutual match.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was a web app. It was a Facebook Canvas app. It was like Farmville. I don't know if you remember Farmville, but it was like you could build an application within the Facebook frame.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then one day I'm walking to class in early February with the class president, Brett, and we're chatting. I was like, oh yeah, and dance is coming up the last chance dance. He's like, yeah, you know what? We decided it was just too complicated. It's like a thousand people listing people and all that stuff. So we just scrapped that whole thing. And I was like, what? I was like, this is my chance. I took it upon myself to build this. And computers is something I really threw myself into as a kid. I love to code. So I decided to build an application that would allow people in the class to list their friends on Facebook. And if two people matched, it would alert them. So I was going to build that and release it at business school.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Harvard Business School is throwing this Valentine's Day party in February. And I, back to try to rebound, I was like, this socially awkward person didn't like to go to parties, but there was this one girl in this one class that I sort of thought maybe there was a thing. And so I was like really excited to list her as like a crush party where you'd like list people that you had a crush on. It was kind of like a last chance dance dynamic.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A life now, and I've just moved in with a sky. We have a flat together in London, and I just can't see you. And I was totally heartbroken. In the back of my mind, again, I have these feelings, but I had this feeling like Kate and I were like meant to be together and we were going to be together. And when that happened, I was like, oh my God, like it's like over. I've messed it up. And I felt like I had torn the fabric of the universe or something. I mean, I know that sounds grandiose, but I just felt like this is not the way that it's supposed to be. And I like went into this total depression. Like for, I think more than a week, I just cried. I like went to go see the therapist. I was like to get antidepressants. I just wanted something. I just felt so horrible. And then I emerge from that”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said it was kind of like an amens letter. It was kind of like a, you know, I know that I did not act with a lot of kindness or integrity during our relationship. And I don't know how I could ever make it up to you, but I would love to try, basically. And she called me like the next day. And we had this phone conversation. We actually agreed to meet back in New York that Christmas. And I was so excited. Then she called back the next day and she said, I'm sorry, Justin, I just can't. If I see you, I don't know what's going to happen and I have.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. It was just such a magical relationship, and I think every relationship I had I would compare and just no one felt like home to me in a way that she did. And I'm a business school, and I can't get Kate out of my head, and I'm finally like, okay, Justin, it's been four years. You've been sober for four years. You've gotten into Harvard Business School. You've got a job at McKinsey. Do we think that we can reach back out to Kate? And so I did. I wrote her an email.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is so out of left field. I had no idea what I wanted to do and interviews were starting. Most people have jobs by Thanksgiving and the consulting firms are interviewing and I applied to all the consulting firms. I got rejected from all of them except McKinsey. So I took the job and signed with McKinsey. And so it's around Thanksgiving. And I've gotten John McKinsey and I'm actually dating this girl from HPS. And I just couldn't get Kate out of my head. I mean, everyone that I tried to date ever since I'd lost Kate, that was like four years ago at this point. I would just compare to her.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, because startups wasn't really a thing. I did have a sense that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. My dad ran his own business when I was growing up. So he was his own boss, and he lived this kind of leisurely existence where he really felt in charge of his own destiny and he really instilled into me like you should go work for yourself”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was so hard. I mean, there's just a lot of partying, and it's how people connect and how people bond, especially in the early days. And I just felt like a fish out of water. I just felt so around that. And so I kind of just stayed away. And socially, it was very hard for me to be there. Really hard.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hugely lucky. I didn't feel lucky. I'd go to these meetings. These old people would be like, I you know, I drank for 50 years, and you're so lucky. And I'd be like, I'd be like, you're so lucky. You got to drink for 50 years. I have to stop in them. I'm 22.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know, but I always had it. Only child syndrome perhaps, I'm not sure. But I was looking at my life at that point and I was like, God, I keep wanting to go in this direction. And yet every day I wake up and go this other direction. And I feel like I do not have control. And it scared me. You know, I hadn't gotten the job that I wanted. I was taking some other random job in DC that I didn't really want. I lost the girl. It felt like didn't seem like I was on track for success. And I just vowed that morning to stop. Know, I participated in 12 step programs and I really threw myself into work and that was”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On graduation day, I woke up and I've been up partying the night before. And I woke up like a stranger's house. And I had to get back home in order to shower off and meet my parents who were going to come over and meet me. And I was walking home that morning and I just thought to myself, it feels like the steering wheel on my life is broken. I just had this innate sense that I was like supposed to go do something big. And I held on to this belief that I was destined for success and I was going to do all these great things.”
2023-05-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Hinge: Justin McLeod (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT