YouSaid · the spoken record

Mel Ziegler

lines on the record
79
first
2018-12-25
most recent
2018-12-25
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

  1. “some internal drive that's making me To speed things up when maybe I could get more done by slowing it down. But the fact is I was more likely than just making more work, but there you go. This is kind of the way I feel sometimes. But the fact is I was more likely just making more work for myself. What is it about business that makes one forget that no matter how fast or slow one goes, no matter how straight or meandering the path, all business people end up in the same place. Even if one gravestone happens to be bigger than another, there is only the journey to savour. The end is the same end for all of us.”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And investors who not only tend to see business in the most boring and narrow terms, but who usually also lack the humility to see how tiny a pinprick is their view on the world. So sometimes I'm going to be reading his words. I feel sometimes when I read them aloud, they kind of don't sound as good as when I read them in the mind, just because he has an interesting way to communicate. I was in no hurry when I started banana republic. I hurried and I found out afterward that it would have been a lot more entertaining and probably no less profitable in the long run had I not hurried. At that point in my life, hurrying made me feel I was getting more done. I feel this too. I feel my wife always tells me that I'm like in a perpetual rush. I think most people that know me think that way. And something I've been trying to do is like really kind of slow down and be a little bit more methodical.”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Period of time, we're going to get a lot done. So, what looks on the outside from a day to day perspective looks slow over the long term accumulates a lot of actual progress. So therefore, slow is fast. Okay, so it says as much as I loved volleying with Bill over the fax machine, it was not in my mind to actively involve myself getting another business started. So this kind of happens by accident. I had stashed enough money in the bank to buy myself the time to smell the flowers for a few years. This means after he left Bonero Republic, to reflect and read and write and raise my child. As much as I like Bill and loved the idea of being in the tea business, I could see no reason to torture myself for going round and round in the mine-thick unreality maze necessitated by lawyers, accountants,”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Okay, so let's skip ahead to the few pages later. And this is. Now What I'm going to reach you here is Mel's journal, like a journal entry that he, I don't think he ever sends to Bill, but I like this idea of slowing down. And immediately when I thought of this, is not only did I think of because I just came off of reading the book about Banana Republic. So you see a lot of, you know, they had, they were out of jobs. They only had $1,500. They couldn't afford to slow down. So they had to rush, rush, rush. But I thought of what we learned back on the podcast on Space Barons with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk compare and contrasting the two different ways they're building their rocket companies. The statement that Jeff Bezos would repeat over and over again has been in my mind since then. He's like, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. And so his thing is like, we're not going to rush and make a big bunch of mistakes. We're going to take our time. And because we take our time and think things through and we don't stop over a long time.”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Product has to come first. So he says communications is the business. And what Mel means by that is the communications they're going to have with their customer, right? Because they're selling. You know, some people could argue a commodity. How are you going to differentiate something that's been around a product that's been around for 5,000 years? So it says communications is the business, meaning we're going to have to explain why you should buy the Republic of tea over all the other competitors. But there is nothing to communicate unless we've got great tasting teas. And so the note I left myself is product first, then pro see, I wrote the word. Why do I do this myself? I can't even pronounce simple words. You know that proselytizing, the word like, you know, when religious people or other people go out and kind of convert people proselytizing. Basically product first, then go out and convert people.”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And Bill's basically Mel is basically trying to tell Bill listen because they're trying to talk about marketing, all this other stuff. And that's fine. Have a marketing plan. But what Bill's about to succinctly describe to us in two sentences is like,”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I find it fascinating that Mel is kind of using that metaphor to describe how he feels about the creation of a business as somebody that's never done it before. I think it's very, metaphors extremely helpful because basically it's just a compression of an idea. And I think because we live in an, especially now we live in an environment where we have so much information coming at us all the time, compressing ideas is valuable because it's saving people time. So I'm going to skip over the next week or so in the Faxes and I like this idea because Bill, keep in mind, he's from a consulting background. His faxes are much, much longer than Melzar. So he's sketching out all this other stuff. He's sending this over to Mel.”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So, I like this idea of thinking about the creation of a business as a movie because in that sense it becomes more of what I believe it is. It's an endeavor and creativity. And just like no movie should look the same, no business should look the same. And I like that you're applying the same skill set and thinking about it and using basically a metaphor to think about it. Like you have to do the exact same thing. Like when you're laying the foundation of a company, it usually comes from an inspired idea, just like a movie comes from an inspired idea or a narrative rather. And then you're like, okay, well, I'm employee number one. Who am I going to go and recruit? Who are the movie stars, so to speak? And then how do we, once we have the movie stars, once we have the script, how do we convey to people that we want to customers to go see the movie? How do we convey why you would go see the movie? Well, this is commonly done with a trailer. What is the business equivalent of that? And then I like the idea of selling tickets, you know, selling the product.”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “By the Minister of Enchantment. So he's writing the copy. Minister of Enchantment is doing all the visuals, which is Patricia, produced and directed by the Minister of Progress, which is Bill, and starring its customers. Now here's the weird thing. So that is being, I read that this week, and those words were written in April 12th, 1990. In case you're listening to this far in the future, I started numbering all the emails I send for founders notes. And so on founders notes 16, which also took place the exact same week I was reading this book, I took notes from one of the founders of the startup OpenDor. Let me just read the note I sent out, which is really funny how remember I always say history doesn't repeat human nature does. These ideas are separated by”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And so, Mel, a lot, what I really enjoyed about this book is we're seeing, and most of the highlights that I'm going to share from Mel's perspective is not just about specifically starting Republic of T, but it's more about his overall business philosophy and how he thinks about companies. And he's got a lot of unique and interesting ideas that are hopeful that I think we should steal and use in our own lives. And this is one of them. And he's writing this on April 12th, 1990. And he says, starting a business is like making a movie. So he says when it comes to creating a business, film is probably a better analogy than poetry. Starting a business is like making a movie. First, there is an idea, and then it gets worked into a treatment or screenplay. Next comes the money and the casting. Often those two go hand in hand. Next, you shoot the picture. So think of what we're doing as a production that we are going to call the Republic of T, written by the Minister of Leaves designed”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Drinking tea. I was exhilarated by the idea of forming the Republic of Tea, was motivated by some inexplicable energy to make it happen. Basically I didn't sleep. Everything became tea for me. The shelves in the supermarket took on a whole new meaning. I no longer saw tea as a product on the shelf to buy, but was now looking between the packages. What was missing? Where were the opportunities? Magazine and newspaper articles were suddenly speaking to me about the need for tea in our culture, and for the first time in my life I was noticing how many really weird teapots there were on the market. Honestly, I was feeling pretty woozy about this whole thing. I think I had fallen in love with an idea. Okay, so now this is a fax that sent the next day, excuse me, later on that day from Mel to Bill.”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “They start faxing each other. I'm going to skip over the first few faxes because in between the faxes, they also make notes in their own private diaries and journals that are also published in the book. So I want to start with one that takes place right at the beginning in April 1990. And it's Bill talking about what it was like because we just heard from Mel what his experience was like selling Bill on the idea. And then this is Bill's experience that's being sold on the idea. And the note I left myself is what it is like to fall in love with an idea. Okay, so this is Bill writing. He says, when I returned home to Sedona, he's living in Sedona, Arizona. I was really obsessed with this tea idea. I didn't know what had gotten into me. Neither did my wife. My plate was already full of other work and responsibilities, but it all seemed to dim in light of the potential of a new business and the thrill of collaborating with Mel and Patricia. I couldn't stop thinking, talking.”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Okay, and then a note. So somewhere along the line, Mel talks about the idea that he likes to confuse companies with countries. So they don't have like normal titles. There's no chief executive officer and president and stuff like that. That's not how they refer to one another. They're saying, hey, we're starting a republic. It's a republic of tea. And so the republics have ministers. So Mel is the minister of leaves, meaning he kind of sets the tone, the basic philosophy of the brand. Bill is the minister of progress means he's the one that's supposed to be responsible of running the business day to day and pushing and making sure there's progress and pushing forward. And then Patricia is the minister of enchantment. She's the artist in this. She's the one like she designs the product labels, does all the sketching, all that kind of stuff. Okay, so when you hear leaves, progress, et cetera, that's how they refer to each other. Just remember, leaves is male, progress is bill. Okay, so...”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “And mind alike gets less respect, then sweetened artificially flavored canned bubbles in the United States and most western countries. This is now he's waxing philosophically here, but now he's getting down to practical way to think about starting a business. He says, I would not think of starting a business unless I was its first customer. And no matter what's been said or written to the contrary, all it takes to launch a business in which you are the first customer is to find a second customer and sell him the product. That's what I did. I sold Bill Rosenweg on tea.”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Maybe we never actually really figure out who we are, but to have that introspection, that you can only do this alone in quiet moments by yourself because only you know what the contents of your mind and your heart are. Okay, I have not even made myself to the introduction. This is going to be a long podcast. All right. So now this is Mel talking about who he was at the time when they're starting Republic of T. He said, I am mad about tea. I can't think of a commodity more inappropriately marketed in the United States. I can't think of a product that is less appreciated for its awesome history, less heralded for its stunning effects, less savored for the haunting boundlessness of its many tastes. For reasons best left to the others to explain, which he's calling the cup of humanity, civilization's oldest beverage, an ancient friend to body.”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “How many people actually like what you do is in perfectly alignment for who you are, for the vast majority of people, for humans that have ever lived throughout human history to the ones that are alive today, that is a tiny, tiny percentage. And to me, that is a worthy goal in life. And it's not an easy goal. It's not going to happen automatically. But if you can somehow align how you spend your time with who you really are inside. And there's so many barriers to even get there. Like first you have to do some self-effection. Like I think it takes years. I don't even know if you like you could, I was going to say it takes years to figure out who you are.”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “It was almost too much to hope for that he could arrange a life in which what he did would be one with who he was. But he hoped for it anyway. And so now we're going to get to the end of this whole point. And so that sentence like.”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “It's going to grow into its own. Eventually, it will even grow to maybe departing from the founder, like Banana Republic did with its founders. So it says, although he was younger than I by nearly a decade and a half, now he's male describing Bill, I could relate to him in many ways. And this is going to sound very familiar. When I was his age, I shared his deeply conditioned need to succeed, his quick, curious, and restless mind. He was careful, but eager, astute, but naive, and he was on a personal mission to find the medium in the real world that would give his essence fullest expression. So that sentence right there, I think that not only applies to entrepreneurship, but I think that applies to everybody, period, even people that would never have no desire to start a company. We're all searching for some kind of personal mission to me that's just, he's talking about fulfillment. Nobody wants to live a life that has no fulfillment in it.”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Is exactly what the blurb was saying in the back of the book, that there's a big difference between when it talks about the moments when the rubber of an idea hits the bumpy road of commercial reality. And that... That experience is something that a lot of people understand because they've experienced it and a lot of people unfortunately never get out of. They don't get to the other side of, hey, there's an idea. Hey, this is a business I want to start to actually that business starting. And I think if there's anything I can do in the sense of like surfacing information that might be useful, I think that's a good use of my time because I do think that more people should start their own companies. All right, so I wasn't expecting going for that tangent. Let me go back to this intro. Okay, so it says he's talking about”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Where not a lot gets done other than talking about the idea, it's clearly, and then I'll get to the point later in the book where they take like a year break and then they go back because that idea won't go away. I think the reason I bring that up is because I know I've had this own experience myself. And so what's the chance that you haven't? It's very small. It's like you have an idea. You know it's what you should be doing, yet you constantly distract yourself. It's kind of similar to what Eddie Murphy was saying on the podcast last week, the clip I played, where it's like, I know what I want to do. Maybe I'm fearful of doing it, or maybe I don't know how to do it. So there's a level of uncertainty. And so I pick what I am capable of doing. And you're going to see that later in the book where Bill wants to start this company. He's enthralled with the idea. Yet he comes from a consulting background. So he winds up taking all these other jobs as a distraction because he doesn't know how to start a company. And I think that...”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “If I had this feeling, meaning the feeling I just described about the frustration with the cost of raisers in the buying process, I knew that there were other people that were experiencing the same frustration. Like a lot of entrepreneurs, once you become focused on an idea and you have identified a problem that needs solving or a thing you want to bring into the world, it is really hard to get that out of your head. That is like the perfect description of the beginning of this book because we're talking about a conversation on the plane. This idea sticks in Bill and Mel's head. Remember, from the time they start faxing each other and writing to each other, there's two years that you're going to see.”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “A business is a living thing. A confluence of energies, each of which wants to see its own self-interest served first. If you're a young, hungry entrepreneur, as I was when I started my business, he's talking about Banana Republic, you find it quite hard to make the distinction between you and your creation. But as a business grows, it becomes more concerned with its own survival than yours. This does not mean it is always smarter than its founder. It just means it doesn't always see things the way he does. And if he is unwilling to yield to its demands on him, it eventually grows willing to go its own way. So when I read that paragraph, when he talks about the idea taking control of you and then eventually that idea going out and becoming a real thing in its world and then kind of has its own life,”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Was revealing itself to us in its yet unborn state. Time and space reappeared seven hours later when we took up, or excuse me, when we looked up and saw that the plane was on the ground in San Francisco and already empty. By then, it was apparent the idea had been born in us. And so I'm going to skip ahead a little bit, but I love this idea. This is going to sound familiar to some of you. So it says the business had its own mind, a mind at least as strong as mind. And it was that mind given to needs other than mine with which I frequently find myself clashing. It might seem odd, if not a little unnerving, to some readers, that a business tends to develop a mind of its own that is independent of its founder. But in fact it is quite a natural development.”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Of a creative zone. So Mel, as I said last week, he's an amazing writer. He was the one that wrote the Banana Republic catalog that won best catalog of all time for the direct marketing association. And so he's very, he's got a beautiful way to communicate. But what he's really talking about here is they started talking about their love of tea. And so on this flight in the five or seven hours or however long it took, they come up with the idea to say, hey, why don't we start a business together? Kind of crazy if you think about it. So it says, we were in a highly charged, and this is something that's going to be very, what he's about to describe here is going to be very familiar for those of us that have had an idea that just kind of captures you. It's a high is the best way to describe it. And it's very, very satisfying if you've experienced this. We were in a highly charged no-man's land outside space and time. So basically in a state of flow, right? Where the source of an idea...”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “do is before I work off the book I'm going to work off of the updated I guess preface I don't know He calls it the first sip. These guys are very, very creative. So it would be to me like the introduction of the book or the preface of the book. So I'm just going to read the updated version and I'm going to go back to the version that was printed in 1994. So this is going to set the table for the entire book. So this is Mel writing. He says, I found myself sharing a car to the airport with a young man who had been attending the conference and was leaving early to make a meeting in San Francisco. As it turned out, we were on the same flight. We struck up a conversation in the car to the airport, a conversation that became so quickly intense that it obliterated everything else around us as we negotiated through the check-in procedures and boarded the aircraft. We immediately rearranged our seats so that we could sit together. Strangers on a plane speeding at 35,000 feet across America. We found ourselves in the grip of an energy that was clearly overtaking us. Whatever the energy was, it had us spinning into the vortex.”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Back and forth, and it sounds really silly, and it will get silly. Like, why does it take two years to start a tea company? And part of that has to do with the intrinsic doubts. In this case, Mell's the experienced entrepreneur trying to mentor and be partners with somebody 15 years, his younger than him that's never started a company. And so the reason I wanted to make this a founder's podcast is because I know there's a lot of people listening to this podcast that haven't yet started companies, but want to. And you're going to recognize a lot of your thinking here. Let's see.”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Live, whether or not it will realize its limitless potential, the destiny it will shape for itself, these are the things that cannot be foretold. The Republic of Tea is no longer a dialogue among us anymore. It is a dialogue between itself and customers, and if we correctly heard the winds whispering to us all those months that the Republic of T lived inside our heads, it will soon have people everywhere pausing for a sip and a little piece of tea. Okay, so that is from the epilogue of one of the strangest books I've ever read in my life, the book that I want to talk to you about today. That book is called The Republic of Tea. The subtitle is The Story of the Creation of a Business as Told through the Personal Letters of its Founders, and it's written by”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Everything happens as it does because the universe is as it is. There is no formula for starting a business. It is an exercise as unique as the individuals who undertake it. Starting the Republica tea was an exercise in allowing things to happen. So starting a business is no different from starting anything else. A marriage, a painting, a new life. The opportunity it presents as a path to self realization is the one most often overlooked and yet I feel this is the ultimately its greatest benefit. A business that is conceived in practicality will be congenitally dry. Bill and Patricia and I may have been a little wacky in some of our early ideas, but this is because we knew the day of practicality would come. So now we have the Republic of T”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “And so a business is born. Like all birth, it began with a gathering of the energies of conception, then effusion, and growth. As a gestation it was exactly as long as it needed to be, recognizing that true creation takes place outside time, the Republic of T came to life when it was ready to be born. It was, to be sure, Bill, who carried it in him for the twenty up and down all around months documented in these pages. And it was Bill, who in accepting his first dollar for a tin of tea in may nineteen ninety two delivered the baby to the world. As for my role, I got him pregnant. In compiling these letters for publication, a keystone of ancient Hindu philosophy comes to mind.”

    2018-12-25 · Founders · #52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source