YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Meeker

lines on the record: 88
first: 2024-11-04
most recent: 2024-11-04
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

“There is nothing like watching a kitten chase a laser pointer. Like there is nothing, not a single animal on planet comes close to the entertainment value of a cat chasing a laser pointer. It's just unfreaking believable.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I definitely work hard at it and always have. But some of this like, you know, I think it goes back to when we were talking about 2018 and not raising that money. And there wasn't a clear idea of how do we get this accelerating again into profitability. It was about hanging on. And we hung on 18 months there and then the pandemic came and your fortunes changed. The world changed around you and we got lucky. We were in the right place at the right time in 2011 with the right product. We didn't do some market study. So sometimes it's just grinding away until the world turns in your favor and working hard through it and making smart, sensible decisions along the way.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A human child, yes Maybe that becomes my obsession. And if you'd ask me if I'm going to be in the pet industry in 2010, I would have thought you were crazy. But right now, my intention is this is my life's work.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we've turned in those profitable quarters, and our fiscal year 22, when I stepped in, we lost $57 million. The next year was $31. Last year, it was $11. This year, we should make $4 or $5 million. And up from there. And what I say to people now is I intend to die in the saddle. It truly, it goes back to Hugo and that responsibility and the legacy. But I say that knowing that I'm a month away from having a baby boy.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it depends. There are a lot of factors in that. It's the capital being burned, the consumer reaction, your belief that you have line of sight to something that works and can be meaningful. Bark Air right now, customers love it. We have ideas of how it expands. We have line of sight too. How do we get to that $600 ticket? very clear line of sight to doing that, I'd say in the next year. So that's one where the good idea is panning out better than I could have ever hoped.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The seat on the floor at your feet, but they usually wander around and say hello to everyone else. And there's so many touches to this experience. The dogs are served meals. The dogs get their drinks first, then the humans. The dogs, our pilots come back and say, come on, bring your dog up front. I'll put him in the captain's chair. We'll take some photos. So mid-flight, the dogs are up there flying the plane. Yeah. Everything is built around them and their comfort.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and this is a classic, huge problem for people with dogs and especially those with larger dogs, which has a special place in my heart, obviously, but we are going every other week between New York and Los Angeles, every other week between New York and I'll say London, but we mix Paris in there too. Those tickets are six to eight thousand dollars one way. We're sold out in September. We were sold out in August. So we're not flying enough at those prices. But the other thing that I'm obsessive about right now is How do you take a $6,000 ticket and turn it into a $600 ticket and really, really solve this problem?”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't, but we're getting closer, so we're inching in that direction. Right. We need to show up where the customers are as well. So one way we're growing very rapidly right now is Amazon. People love their Amazon Prime. So let's become a great product company and put our products where the people are.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our own in house design team. We have a very strong supply chain. We're about as close to being vertically integrated on the toy side as you can be without being”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's returning back to who we are and what we're good at. One of the things that we're great at and we have big advantage in is toys. And it does get poo-pooed by a lot of people because, well, that's only three and a half billion dollar industry. And you already own 10% of it. Okay. But we don't own 90% of it. So I understand relative to food, it's one-tenth the size, but this is one thing that we're very good at. And there are a lot of places that we don't show up and a lot of different types of products that we can create and we can invent.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More than a charge, our fiscal year ends March 31st. I came back January 11th. So that year ending March 31st, we burned $194 million. And if we had done that for the next 12 months, that would have been it. We're done. We're gone. So the immediate challenge is don't die. Just do everything possible to keep this thing alive and floating. And looked at every angle to do that and got the unit economics in shape, got the supply chain fixed, brought on really great talent, brought on a fantastically talented CFO, brought discipline to the business, right-sized the team. There are a lot of those things that are difficult in a moment. They're not fun in the moment, but it was just survival mode. And we have really turned that around and gotten ourselves into profitability and into cash flow generation. And now that's starting to compound.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought I was for good. We brought in Manish, I moved to Florida with my wife, followed her for her job, and I thought that was that. And then in December, late December, December 28th of 2021, Hugo passed away. And my feeling was the opposite of what I expected, which was more this company is his. It's his legacy. I can't entrust that to someone else, regardless of how I felt about them. I felt deep responsibility to make sure that that legacy lived on. And so I had this strong urge or desire to jump in and that I don't want to speak from Anish, but if I'm reading the room, it coincided with Manichae's probably feeling very burnt out. And he's a very positive, energetic person who was just feeling worn out. So I think we caught each other at just the right moment.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What that means is Chewy is the only public pet company. That means January 1st, there's going to be a line of these people signing up for SPACs. You don't want to be the eighth company. You want to be the first one. So you have access to the best quality capital out there, which means we got to go now. We got to go fast. That was mid-November. And we went fast. We did a two-day virtual road show in mid-December. Yeah, we went out to raise $100 million through that pipe process. We had interest of nearly $500 million. So we ended up raising $200 from that in addition to the SPAC funds. He was absolutely right. The market was very hot and the third, fourth, fifth, sixth didn't have nearly the same success that we did.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was getting calls left and right. You called this fat craze, like everyone was coming at me saying, we want to merge with you and our spec. And I kept pushing away saying this is a fad, this is a fad. And I asked around for someone who could teach me about it and got introduced to a guy named John Ladecki. And John was introduced to me as the godfather of SPAX. And John gave a lot of advice. And he knew the subject matter quite well. And then shortly after John formed a SPAC and said, Now I have a SPAC, and I think we should merge and you should do it quickly. And here's why. And John's theory, which turned out to be right, he's usually right about most things. He said chewy stock is at an all-time high. The pet category is on fire.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, he came over from Amazon, big dog person. Loved and a very good guy that I think we put into difficult spot. You're saying to someone, take on a CEO role, take it on in the middle of a pandemic. You'll live in Seattle, but you'll commute to New York. That's fun. You won't get the opportunity to meet most of the team or engage with most of them, but take responsibility for a culture. And by the way, we just signed up to do this thing called a spec and go public. So now you're going to be a public company CEO. Congrats.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, actually, the decision came almost a year before I did it. So I'd had a couple of conversations with our board saying, I think I need to step down. And they'd say, oh, that's a good idea. We should talk about that at the next meeting. And then it would get punted to the next one and the next. And eventually I said to them, we got to take this seriously. I really mean it. But the rationale for me was twofold. It was Hugo was getting old. And I knew his time was limited, and I didn't feel I'd want to be around the company when he passed. And then we also had ambitions of someday being a public company. And I had an idea that I didn't want to be a public company CEO. Fast forward to September of 2020 and Maniche steps in as the new CEO of BARC.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did. It was that, and now you're home with your dog all day, and they need to be entertained because they're bothering you. You're trying to work. But it wasn't that certain we were scared. Again, we were going month to month on our cash. I remember in March of 2020 having conversations with investors in our banks and saying, well, we'll see. We'll see what retention looks like on April 1st. And then all of a sudden customer acquisition is just off to the races. Just booming. So we accelerated very fast through 2020 and 21.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so you talk about the pandemic for a moment. I mean, this is actually going to be a boom time for you because there was a, at that time, there was a spike in the number of people. There was a massive demand for dogs during the pandemic. And there was a shortage. People couldn't get. They couldn't adopt dogs. And I imagine that you must have seen some kind of uptick at that time.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. We've gone in and out and in and out of food. The idea, again, maybe a misfortune of timing, but we went right before the pandemic. We launched a food thing saying food is food, but what is the service layer that you can apply to it that makes it special? And so we had this concept of bringing back the milkman in the US. And we deliver your food to your home. And I think we started that in January, February of 2020. And we found out during a pandemic, people don't really like someone coming to their door and coming in for a conversation about their dog. So it kind of shot the whole theory right there. But we've continued to try to navigate it. We continue to this day. And there's a concept just on the horizon for food that I think we're all pretty excited about is very different.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, I mean, I guess, I mean, there were initiatives that you launched. First of all, the food idea, you abandoned it, but then you must have come back to it because you do have a food vertical today. A bark, I think it's called bark eats, right?”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely more stressful. And I was probably shouldering the stress for our board and our investors where I would say they were downright freaked out. Personally, I'm more comfortable with very little cash on hand than with a lot. So it didn't bother me a bit. I feel like I can find my way through that. But I was taking on the stress of everyone else.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were running out of cash. And that model that I talked about early on of how we can generate cash to pay for the inventory today, if you're not growing, it catches up to you and works in reverse and eats away at your cash. So for about two years, we just ran steady. We grew enough to maintain, but our cash was very flat.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, that's right. 2017. And they did want us to diversify, but it wasn't leading to the best outcomes. And boy, we were really living hand to mouth there from mid-2018 through early 2020.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make a product in food, we didn't really know what it was, but we were starting to sell the idea that investors wanted us to sell them. The toy industry is relatively small, and everyone starts to point us to, well, food's really big. You should get into those bigger categories because you have this great brand and it connects to people. And we were just saying back to them what we thought they want to hear. And not surprising that fundraising round didn't turn out well. What it felt like we were becoming, we didn't like the feel of it. So I definitely freaked out my board and our investors, but walked away from the fundraising round and said, forget it.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're trying at that point to you take on the new capital, we invested in the new capital in the way we said we would. It was successful. And we get into 2018 and it was a thing that Henrik and I forgot from the beginning. We never looked at the market data or the market sizing and said let's go here. If we had, we would have never chosen toys. When we started to look at a market. When we started to make decisions for the wrong reasons.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're very well matched. Carly and Henrik are two of my best friends in the world to this day. And when there are disagreements when there were, it was usually between two of us. And so the two of us would be complaining to the third one who would be taking on board that information and trying to guide us back closer together. And it was never the same too. It just sort of kept rotating around the triangle. What we were trying to do was build a company where we could come in every day and be around a lot of people that we just wanted to hang with. We generally liked everyone. And if someone made their way into that, we made a mistake and hired someone that we didn't like, we got rid of them pretty quick. Like, you just don't fit. I'm sorry, nothing personal, but you just don't fit.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You'd make an appointment, and the appointment happened in your home. And it was magical, but we couldn't make it work financially with the resources we had. So we shut it down.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we made mistakes. We started a service in 2013 called Bark Care, which was an in-home vet service in New York. And people loved it. Dogs loved it. Everyone was loving it. But it would have taken us a tremendous amount of capital to do it and scale it the way that it needed to be done.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's go deep on the thing that we're good at instead of branching out further into the pet department. We had customers who would contact us early days and say, What about for cats? And we'd say, order the BarkBox for your dog, take all the stuff out, give the box of the cata. There's your product.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We would stop being worried about them. We'd say if they lack creativity so much that they have to copy us pixel for pixel, that's not a competitor we need to worry about. And we would just lean on them. They're usually copying the whole playbook. So taking to Google search or Facebook advertising. And it's easy enough to just lean on them and outspend them. If you're bigger, we'll bleed you over time. And that happened time after time after time.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We also caught another wave where it was early 2013 Facebook advertising became a thing. Instagram started to become a thing.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“True, but we kind of hit the market at just the right time where when we started, there were 38 million households in the US with a dog. And today, that's 65 million.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not about the heads down. I'm at the office at the desk necessarily 18 hours a day, but my head is in it 24 hours a day. My interests are aligned to it. You ask me to go to dinner with friends on a Saturday night and it's a bother for me because there's something I want to crank on, even if I'm just sitting in my home. I become consumed by it probably unhealthy.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Mentally, I do very well when I focus on one thing. I'm not great at giving a little bit of myself to this and this and this. And so anything that sort of fell outside of Bark or BarkBox at the time and dogs really didn't get my attention. And so those things suffer. I was married and my marriage suffered and ultimately failed because of it. And I didn't know that would be an outcome, but it doesn't surprise me either.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was after that turn and mentally I had to make a turn, but I certainly didn't want to start something because I knew what comes with starting a new company. I mean, that for me, it becomes the center of your world. It's your life. And often at the expense of many other things”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that I read at the time, this is around 2013, you had said was, and I'm assuming this is sort of in reaction to raising capital because now the ambitions grow and the scale this thing grows, you said we're the new generation of pet brands. We want to be a $5 billion company, Pet Smart, PETCO, they don't speak to our needs and the needs of millions of dog owners. So, there was a lot of ambition behind this. I mean, you were clearly kind of publicly saying, sort of planting a flag and saying this is what we're going to be.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We raised $1.5 million I think it meant You're now deciding to build a different kind of business in a different way. Henrik and I, at least we knew it was a fork in the road, and we were wary of taking it. We were also, I'd say, somewhat inspired by the attraction in those first eight months saying something like this doesn't come along very often. It doesn't happen all the time. So when it happens, do you have a responsibility to take on that capital and supercharge it before someone else does?”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, I don't know that it was clear, and it wasn't the plan. In May of 2012, Mike Hirschland, who had started dog patch labs, and Mike and I obviously work closely while I was there. And he reached out and said, I'm starting this new fund. Can I invest in this thing? Can I lead around for you? But that came with the string for me of if I invest, you have to jump in full time and be the CEO and run this thing.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of that idea, though, of caring deeply that somebody paid for something and they expect something for it. And if you miss the mark, make it right. Make them make it unforgettable for them where they just can't leave it. And it becomes hard to do that when you get much larger.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, certainly auto renewing subscription is part of that, but you're trying to be very responsive. We're very curious. We send out a product to you. We want to hear from you Did you love it? Did you hate it? If you didn't love it, tell us why we'll make it right. So I remember the first four months that we were alive, we had no churn, not one subscriber left now. Not a whole lot of subscribers there, but out of over 100, no one left. I remember the first one leaving was someone that I knew and I called him and I said, whatever it is, we'll make it right. I'm not falling off of this 100% retention rate. Come on, let's do it.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It did. I mean, tons and tons is relative, I guess. But that first year we thought we were huge where we ended the year with about 15,000 subscribers.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably, yes. I mean, we had a very good deal with them. But if I remember right, we were selling three month subscriptions for $45, so $15 a month, but you probably have a $20 cost of goods in every box.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were very popular to the point where, as we got into 2013, we were calling it, we needed to get off the group on crack. We were just.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then we heard from people that that's too much. And our reaction to that was it doesn't cost too much. You just don't love your dog enough for this product. But one of the things I had learned from Meetup was about generating cash flow. I had a cash flow generation trick up my sleeve offering a long-term discount for prepayment. So saying if you subscribe now for six months or a year and you pay it up front, it's not $25, but it's $20 or it's $18. So today I would collect $200 from you that I owe you back in product over the next 12 months. But now I have $200 of cash that's going to fund this month's inventory.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Holiday spelled with one L or two. And we said, Henrik, it's one L. He said, Should I redo all of these? And I was like, no, just leave it. Somebody will have a story to tell about that. That was month one. And the first box was shipped in December of 2011.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And we said those are great questions. You should answer them. And she's a force. And so as quickly as she asks, she's on a plane in Vegas at a pet show walking the floor, selling people on this concept and how big it will be and getting them to sell her products that she thought was cool. And she put together products from all these different companies, sourced them, had them shipped to my incubator. And then in December, we went in and we packed all those boxes. We assembled the boxes into boxes and then we filled them up with the products. And because it was our first one and we're doing it by hand, we're writing holiday notes on the lids of every box on the inside. We got almost all the way through where Henrik said, I have a question.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Carly did the work of what you're doing asking all the questions of what kind of products do you think and where are you going to get them?”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the line we used with her is Do you want to be a cab dispatcher your whole life? But she was very hungry to start her own thing, and we made this her thing.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did an equal chunk of equity, so a third of the company And yes, I hope she's not listening, but it was, she was the 13th employee at Uber. They had done had a good start in San Francisco and Travis brought her on and said, we've done this in San Francisco, we started in New York. And so she was at that time running around making deals with black car services.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We thought we would never raise money. That was the hope. That was the plan. And Henrik and I had no intention of leaving our jobs either. I was like, here's Carly. We'll give her a little bit of money and off she goes.”
2024-11-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · BARK: Matt Meeker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT