YouSaid · the spoken record

Megan Greenwell

lines on the record: 55
first: 2025-05-29
most recent: 2025-05-29
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, no, VC is fascinating to me, and it's like, now I'm probably too rosy on VC because I just see such a distinction and because I have such a knee-jerk reaction to people conflating the two. If there's a negative story that happens in VC world, all of these people will tag me in it and be like, see, see, that's private equity. And I'm like, no, okay, different thing. But I am very interested in the VC system because I don't know enough about it.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel like you definitely have to write your next book on the venture capital industry and the market conditions it has created because that is a really interesting contrast that you're making there.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, yes, but the single part of that bill that I find the most I find the case for it the most compelling is actually pretty simple. The basis of leveraged buyouts is you borrow all this money and you as a private equity firm Nobody would ever think that if you're a VC and you invest money in a company, that you don't have something on the line there, but if you're a PE firm, you really don't have much on the line. There's a limit to how much you will make if you drive the company out of business, but it's also pretty hard to lose money because you're just not responsible for those loans. I think If there were one policy change I would make, I would just say, great, okay, you are legally responsible for the loans that your portfolio company takes out.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I'm just going to essentially plagiarize Elizabeth Warren here. She, for several years now, has introduced this Stop Wall Street looting act, which would regulate PE. All told would probably regulate PE basically out of existence. But the part of it that I find...”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It feels to me like the big solve is somehow connecting the inputs and the outputs once again, right? We talk to billionaires on the show. There's a part of me that says, you know. Fair play. If you actually run Google and Google exists and your goal is to operate Google and win in a market where Google has competitors, like, fine, right? Like at least I can connect the input and the output there. A lot of people like Google. You're motivated to make Google pretty good. Great. PE is all about disconnecting the inputs and the outputs. If you could wave a magic wand and just solve that problem, how would you do it?”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, those states, both blue states, real quick got very serious about doing some regulation. didn't come away from the book feeling totally hopeless about the chances of clawing a little bit back from private equity. I don't think the system is going to disappear anytime soon, nor do I feel particularly strongly that it needs to. But I think after several years of reporting, I certainly came away thinking this system is very broken and that here are some people doing some interesting things that seem to be gaining some momentum to do something about it”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is going to get private equity out of local newspapers, that's just that you have to rebuild the business model from scratch. The person I focus on works for a local nonprofit startup of which there is a big wave right now. That is not itself a silver bullet to anything, but is an interesting experiment. And the fact that there are people making these experiments is, I think, a useful thing to shine some light on. There are also court cases, and there are proposed bills. I don't think in our current political climate there's going to be a lot of regulation of private equity on the federal level, but there are lots of interesting things happening in various states right now, especially in healthcare, because after big private equity disasters,”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In that I also didn't want to do something prescriptive because I'm not an activist. The most natural way to do that felt like it was to look at people who were doing something after the fact. Where I ultimately came to is if we are serious about changing this system, it's going to have to be so multifaceted an approach. So the four characters in my book are quote-unquote fighting back in several ways the woman who worked at Toys R Us flew around the entire country for the first time in her life speaking in front of these pension boards trying to convince pension funds no longer to invest in private equity or at least to exert more pressure on the private equity funds they do invest in. The media example in the book to me is really interesting because that's not something where there's no regulatory situation.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me, what's really interesting is the conditions that create the health insurance market that we have today are three levels above. It is consolidation. It is cost control. It is profit extraction. And that seems to be becoming more apparent. I think more and more people are aware that PE shows up and then these effects follow. I think more and more people are aware that toys are US US was a company that existed and no longer exists or like red lobster, they're trying to blame a very obvious thing on endless shrimp and actually it's the PE company showed up Yeah, the”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is not to say there have been doctor shootings too, right? Because somebody's surgery gets messed up and somebody goes and shoots their doctor. But that feels so much more visceral, I think, as does a health insurance CEO than this fund three levels above even the parent company of your hospital does.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sounding terrible, but it is less surprising on some level to me that somebody would go after a health insurance executive as terrible as that is than if somebody were to look up, okay, so this fund owns my local hospital. This fund is run by XPE company. This PE company is run by X people. This is exactly what decisions they took. There is a level of shell companies and funds and all of this stuff that ends up disguising it a little bit from people who don't put in the work to really dig and who would unless they're crazy nosy journalists like us.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think it's felt no because I just don't think I think private equity guys know that are not yet being super closely looked at. And even if you know that American healthcare is super broken, you just have to kind of understand a lot to understand which part of that you can attribute to private equity people. A health insurance CEO, everybody hates their health insurance, right? I'm trying to think of how to say this without”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just feel like our customers hate us so much that some of them have started shooting us is the last market corrective, right? Like something has to happen there that at least changes the valence of the conversation. And you're saying for PE that pressure still isn't felt.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's true. I mean, yes, if you're paying enough attention to who's on the board of any art museum or who the children's hospital is named after, or whatever, yes, but I don't think most people, if told, see the Kravis Children's Hospital over there, could tell you who Henry Kravis is and why he matters. There's this interesting divide between our perception of private equity guys as Philanthropists, benefactors of cultural institutions, all of that, and private equity guys as private equity guys. If you don't know, I think this is a real fundamental problem with private equity is that nobody understands who they are or how they work. And that probably does give them a little bit of a better sense of security in the age of Luigi Mangione, but also the negative outcomes there are pretty bad too.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Health insurance executives felt like they were in that group. But I think that private equity executives probably still feel like they're in that group even after the Bryant Thompson shooting. Because who can name a private equity executive, right? Well, anyone.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe we need to change the system so the anger isn't so palpable. I also think talking about private equity specifically, and Brian Thompson, not a private equity guy, health insurance guy, those folks get to feel a little safer because of the knowledge that few people understand their influence. So most people do not know if their local hospital is run by a private equity company. Most of the workers I talk to a couple hundred people didn't know that their company was owned by private equity, even if they had worked there for years. Private equity loves to operate in the shadows, and when you start to think about like, yeah, is the anger so intense that it's going to result in political violence, maybe until December”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the eighties I picked it up in 2022, expecting it to feel incredibly dated. In fact, it felt so prescient because it traced exactly step by step how we went from this system of doctors treating their own communities to, okay, now we're starting to get professional hospitals. That's great. We're able to save more lives, but also now we're putting doctors into this system without really thinking about how do we design a system that makes sense. So from the very beginning, it was super broken, right? There was never a time where this system worked well and we could just say, let's go back to that. It's a tricky one to me because I don't think private equity is a good system for American medicine. And also I truly don't know what the solution is. without, like I say, ripping it down to the studs and starting over.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, there are a couple of reasons. One is that there's an imposed limit on how many doctors there can be, because there is an imposed limit literally imposed by the federal government on the number of residency slots. There is a shortage of doctors, but it is also true that you have everybody fighting for this number of residency slots. But the other thing is healthcare is an industry that breaks what we think of as the rules of free market capitalism in so many ways because of there's more government involvement than in a lot of industries, but also because this book that is the definitive history of American medicine as a business. It's called the Social Transformation of American Medicine. It's by this Princeton professor named Paul Starr, and it came out”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that is short circuited. And I kind of don't know why. Like I can see it in tech. If you're an AI engineer, like you get a boat, you know, like the market is ultra receptive to recruiting and retaining that talent because it's scarce. And in the healthcare market, it feels almost as though it's the opposite. And there's not some big supply of new doctors that's going to show up. We're certainly not going to immigrate them like they did with my parents in the 70s and 80s. Why do you think that's been so short circuited in healthcare?”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That dynamic is super interesting to me that you have this class of ultra-educated, pretty wealthy people, wildly divergent political views, and they can see the problem. And the thing that gets me is there are supposed to be systemic and market correctives to the problem. Like there aren't enough doctors. That alone should solve the problem, right? The market should be receptive to the needs of the scarce labor.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“in the same way that they had for years treated retail workers, for example, as cogs in the machine. Doctors are furious. They're the most common group of people I hear from too. There are all these groups of doctors wanting to organize against private equity. What's interesting to me is these are not all leftist doctors. These are a lot of folks who think that unions are exactly the wrong answer for doctors, for example, but there is this current of we may not all agree on the solutions, but we are completely”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That it's not actually just private equity. Academic medicine, my husband works in academic medicine, uses that same philosophy of ruthless consolidation as well. There's a story in the book about Yale which just bought up everything across Connecticut. And what you saw was patient satisfaction went way down and the costs patients paid went way up. That's Yale, right? That's in some sense the opposite of a private equity-run hospital, but it's all the same problems. The doctors at Harvard's hospitals, the internists are unionizing right now because they're so overworked they don't have any autonomy and they're just sick of it. Though private equity didn't create these problems, it certainly took advantage and made doctors into a cog in the machine.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The doctor I focus on in the book who is in small town Wyoming, he wanted to go into community medicine because his beloved uncle, who was his role model, was a community doctor. His uncle was a community doctor in the 30s, 40s, 50s, at a time when being a community doctor meant you just worked for yourself. You could set whatever prices you wanted if the market would bear them, the market would bear them. If not, deal with it. You could barter, you know, you could treat people who couldn't afford to pay whatever choices you wanted to make. And then as medicine in the US professionalized, everybody got pulled into the kind of hospital and clinic system. And then when private equity came in, it was just game over for doctors having any autonomy to themselves. One thing that I think is really interesting is”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, people do not like doing it. And you describe it very clearly in the book in a way that I don't think I've seen anybody just straight up describe it. You say people don't think of doctors as workers and private equity has made them workers. They still have the status, and they're still doctors, but PE has made them workers. Talk about that a little bit. Does that seem tenable? Because it's really hard to be a doctor and then to be a doctor and then to feel like an employee of a machine, it's destabilizing just from the experiences I've had with my own family and from the people that write in every time we do a PE episode.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right? Everyone was born in my town at one of the two hospitals, St. Mary's or St. Luke's, and people talked about it. And I don't know why that was a rivalry, but it was a rivalry. Like in the way that small towns just create rivalries. And then all of those things are merged into giant corporate entities now. And that has been the experience of my parents' career. My sister, her practice was bought by a PE company. Every time we do an episode about PE. We get emails from doctors saying, you don't understand how bad it is. We have operationalized and added efficiency to medicine in a way that has actually made the practice of medicine almost untenable.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did you know my parents were small town doctors in Wisconsin in the 80s? My sister's a doctor now. The reason that I focused on communities and businesses is the hospitals they worked at in small town Wisconsin in the 80s were just part of the community.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Require tearing it down to the studs and starting over, and that's a very difficult thing to do. And so private equity, you know, understandably to some extent, kind of came in and said, well, you know, this is real broken, but we see a way for it to work for us. Working for them generally did mean kind of the stripping it for parts model. You sell off the real estate, you cut back the services. And so all of a sudden, you know, I focus on rural hospitals in the book where people genuinely don't have other options. And that when you take away more and more and more of the services, they do have at their local hospital, yeah, that's great for the private equity fir, right? That's just cutting costs. And then you kind of ruthlessly consolidate to cut”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of the reason that a ton of private equity money flowed into healthcare in particular was the Affordable Care Act. The Affordable Care Act obviously had all sorts of positive benefits for society, especially for people who couldn't get insurance otherwise. It also meant, again, that there was a new source of guaranteed money for private equity firms because all of a sudden, worst case scenario, the government's going to pay a lot more people are insured than previously were. The problem of healthcare, which is not a problem that private equity created, is that everybody needs it. Many people can't pay for it. The government reimburses terribly for it. It really is a broken business model in a way that will require, you know, if anybody ever gets serious about fixing it, we'll”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's the money you're talking about. You need a lot of money to just wholesale change the nature of healthcare in America. That money arrived. We can feel it. I think people can really feel it right now, but there's no market pressure to make it better. But that's the thing that kills me about it, is everyone knows it's bad. And the idea that you could provide a better service in ultra capitalist America and make more money by providing the better service is just short-circuited. Why do you think that is?”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk about healthcare in that context. You have a line in the book that has really stuck with me that. Communities need businesses, right? There's some enormous value that just having commerce in your community provides, right? It makes the community vibrant. It makes people feel like they belong together. There's a relationship people might have between the businesses and their community and themselves, the people who run those businesses. Healthcare is part of that community and like a huge way commodifying that and making that an industrial product, that's a systematic change that private equity scale has brought to America.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those things, and those deals tend to have the worst outcomes. Ten times as many businesses acquired by private equity declare bankruptcy as other types of businesses. That is just a statistic that is hard to argue with. It's not that private equity never works. It's that when the ethos is you get bigger and bigger and bigger at all costs and you devour bigger and bigger and bigger things, then you start to end up with a problem where more people are negatively affected and the results tend to be a lot worse.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, there are certainly success stories. I do not want to say that private equity deals always end badly. That is certainly not the case. The private equity's main lobbying group loves to cite the statistic. I forget the exact number, but the majority of private equity deals are actually for small family-run companies. That is true, as best I can tell, and B, it is also true that more of those deals are successful than is true for the biggest companies. I do focus on the more disastrous stories in my book. While it is true that most deals are for small companies, most of the money is for the big companies, right? And so the larger leveraged buyouts just have much greater effects on the number of workers, our society at large, all of them.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That brings us, I think, directly into the book. You have structured the book in a series of four stories, four characters in retail and healthcare, in media, and housing. Those are all industries that have been just completely upended by private equity in ways that I think normal people can just feel. Your experience as a consumer at a retail store is shaped by private equity in ways you can just feel. Certainly in healthcare, which I want to talk about at length, lots of people have talked about in housing. We can just see the wreckage of the media economy around us, particularly newspapers.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cause this huge growth in private equity throughout the 2010s and has culminated for the moment in where we are now, which is just private equity devouring everything in a certain set of industries. There was a study last month that said private equity firms now own about 10% of all apartments in the US. In several metropolitan areas, it's over 25% or even over 30%. That is a result of you can get cheap money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and that was a deliberate policy decision, right, that was intended to benefit low and middle-income homebuyers and did benefit many of those people and also meant that there was just this fountain of money for private equity firms.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do think that's right. Private equity has always gone where money is cheap and where industries show an opportunity for them to make money, which again does not necessarily mean the industry is a growth industry. You think about industries like housing and healthcare, both of which I cover in my book, and those were industries where it was just like policy changes of various types led to a lot of cheap money. And for private equity, that just looked like gold, right? And so that world that created Uber, Airbnb, et cetera, very much is the same conditions that”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things have happened since New York in the 80s and now Among them, the rise of the tech companies, among them the 2008 financial crisis, there was a lot of free money floating around in a zero interest rate environment that created companies like Uber and Airbnb. It seems like that also accelerated and made private equity more aggressive. And that maybe is underrated compared to, well, a bunch of tech companies exist.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, absolutely. Donald Trump himself, obviously not a private equity guy, but what he is is a real estate guy, and the marriage between big corporate real estate and private equity has always been extremely tight-knit. A lot of the people in Donald Trump's close orbit have always been private equity guys. I think you're right that that ethos of just don't worry about anything else, don't worry about any downstream effects, like just do what we want to do in this exact moment without ever thinking about ramifications. Yeah, it very much unites them. And that really was all the same world in New York in the 80s, for sure.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That rise of KKR was probably the most important moment in private equity history, but also in setting the tone for everything is financialization. Kohlberg, Kraveris, and Roberts was three guys, one of whom was a generation older than the other two. He ended up leaving the company he co-founded because he found that his other two co-founders were far too ruthless in terms of the types of hostile takeovers and other deals that they would do just to make money for themselves, often at the expense of the company they were buying.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chronicles the RJR Nabisco deal, which was a KKR deal, and which was the largest leveraged buyout ever completed. I think that was a huge moment where all of these other folks looked at what KKR was doing and said, oh, we can do that. And that will make us a ton of money. Again, it really doesn't matter if the company is making money. They've sort of cracked the code of just using money to make money.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the rise of private equity started in the 60s, but in the 60s it was sort of taking over companies, a lot of family-run companies, they called them bootstrap deals, where you would take over a family-run company that showed the potential to expand but didn't have the capital to expand. It did start almost from what we now think of as a VC type of ethos. In the 70s and 80s, private equity turned into this different beast, the rise of KKR, Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts was a big moment for this wave of financialization and for the rise of private equity. Essentially, they said, great, let's take these little bootstrap deals and let's take them to massive, massive companies, right? And so barbarians at the gate, you know, to my mind, may be the best business book ever written.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Investments and selling things from one of your funds to another one of your funds to collect the dividends, it's really the game is simply making money. The game is not making money off of a product or a service or whatever.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One frequent confusion that people have is that they mix up venture capital and private equity. To me, they are so diametrically opposed, because venture capital false though it has. The point is to invest in people who are making something, right? The point is give the founders the money. Private equity is sort of the opposite because A, you're not investing. You're buying companies outright typically. But B, the ways you make money just don't have anything to do with making the product in a lot of cases. So financialization can mean any number of things, but at its core what it means is you're making money not from making the thing, you're making money from making money. You're investing the money. You're selling off the real estate, which is a big thing in private equity. You're collecting your management fees. You're making strategic”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the assumption is they're actually trying to run their companies. And that's a pretty base assumption that this show is founded on. And then there's this other thing you're describing, financialization, where the point is not to run the company. And that is a system that... Is everywhere. It's like an invisible cloud for the American economy. And you ran right into it. Talk about that a little bit.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really apparent to me, and I knew nothing about how private equity worked other than a vague kind of it can be bad sort of thing. Alden Global Capital in media had already become a boogeyman by then. I had covered a lot of things in my career by then, but I had never covered business, didn't know how this worked, and it was just very confusing to me that their incentives would be different than the incentives of the company they were running. And as I started reading more about it, I began to understand, yeah, that because of financialization tactics, they are just different incentives. And so they can make a lot of money off of a company they acquire without making the company itself successful.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which we do not have. Does feel like why did this sports journalist write a book about private equity comes from that moment, right? Because the private equity company just wants to increase returns and they have a lot of moves to increase returns that have nothing to do with the businesses themselves being more profitable. Feels like that disconnect became really apparent to you during this time.”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“touch this precious thing we've created we wanted to make more money and we felt like we knew some ways to make more money and that smart business guys would bring better ideas than what we had but instead it just was so nonsensical that we couldn't even follow”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said they wanted us to run score bugs along the top of the website. I was trying to explain nobody comes to deadsping.com to check who won the baseball games last night. That is just so far from what we do. And they said, right, but we want more readers. I was like, great, I can think of all sorts of ways to get more readers, but the way to get more readers is not to try to compete with ESPN, and they would say things like, well, why can't we compete with ESPN? And I was trying to explain the very basics of media business models to them and literally saying things like, so for example, ESPN has rights to NBA games, which we do not have. And it was like they had never thought of that before. So that was what was really maddening about it, was there was not like a journalistic purity thing where I was like, you could just”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I would have been much happier if it was going on any metric at all, but literally on day one, we knew they hadn't seen many of the numbers except top line numbers and diligence. And they came in and said, well, you guys need to stop covering everything that's not sports. My first reaction was sort of, I was trying to be generous, and I said, oh, yeah, you know, it's so funny. You would think that, but actually non-sports content, which was about 10% of what we did, outperforms sports content by two to one. Expecting that that would shut down the conversation because why wouldn't you want to do the thing that does better on the metrics, right? They said we don't care. You're getting rid of the non-sports content. And I think really their goal was to be ESPN. One of the other immediate things”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't that I thought that private equity buying media was a good thing, but it honestly didn't seem like the worst case scenario because they were telling us, yeah, we're going to properly monetize you, right? And we all wanted that. We wanted to be successful. Debt spin was profitable. You can define profitable any number of ways, and we were part of a network of other sites, not all of which were profitable, right? But by any metric I ever saw Dead Spin alone was profitable. We were sort of like, this is an opportunity moment. This isn't a slice moment. They talked a big game about how we were going to develop a subscription product and go hard on all of these other things that would make us more profitable, and none of us objected to that at all. It just turned out that what they actually wanted to do was dictate what we could cover and try to make us ESPN, which was”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that's basically right. We had been run by Univision. We were so far outside the core of what Univision did that they couldn't figure out what to do with us. We were definitely undermonetized, right? We had failed to develop a subscription product because we on the editorial side would say, hey, we should think about subscription products. It's 2018 and this is the time to do it. They would say yay, yeah, totally, but we don't have the business staff to do that. When Univision finally cut us loose,”
2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT