YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Dubin

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66
first
2026-01-05
most recent
2026-01-05
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Okay, I got you. Okay. So, but I'm trying to understand, there must have been something about improv. I have to imagine that in your mind you're thinking, maybe I have a shot at being a comedian or being on SNL, or was that what you were thinking?”

    2026-01-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dollar Shave Club: Michael Dubin, From Zero to a Billion Dollar Exit in Five Years (December 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Yeah, you take a couple classes a week. If a sketch class, you have some homework to do, you have to write comedy sketches, you go and you practice the improv at night with a bunch of people that you've never met before and you go rent some weird studio space and you make jokes at 9 p.m. And You know, a very bizarre experience”

    2026-01-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dollar Shave Club: Michael Dubin, From Zero to a Billion Dollar Exit in Five Years (December 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Pay $300, take the entry level class, and see how you do. And it just stuck. I fell totally in love with it before too long. I was taking sketch classes as well.”

    2026-01-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dollar Shave Club: Michael Dubin, From Zero to a Billion Dollar Exit in Five Years (December 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “So I've always been passionate about comedy and I had heard when I worked at NBC that all of the great comedians that were on SNL had trained in improv and a lot of them had trained at the upright citizens brigade which at the time they only had one studio in the West Village. No in Chelsea. And I was just, you know, I said, well, I want to do that.”

    2026-01-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dollar Shave Club: Michael Dubin, From Zero to a Billion Dollar Exit in Five Years (December 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “All of this is happening in New York. You're in New York in the early 2000s, and you decide to take improv classes, something you did for Almost eight years, how did that start? Was it just something you wanted to do for fun?”

    2026-01-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dollar Shave Club: Michael Dubin, From Zero to a Billion Dollar Exit in Five Years (December 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Yep, exactly. Just figuring out what would be interesting to a user, how to present visual information with some copy in a way that's digestible. How would I lay out this website? And, you know, I've always been a bit of a visual thinker, so it's fun. UX UI is a maze or a puzzle. That's what great architects do. That's what great restaurant designers do when they lay out a space or design a hotel lobby. What great product designers do, UX, UI designers do. They create these mazes for people to go in, and that's enormously satisfying when you can watch masses of people follow your lead.”

    2026-01-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dollar Shave Club: Michael Dubin, From Zero to a Billion Dollar Exit in Five Years (December 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Well, I had this really sort of formative internship in Atlanta, and I got an opportunity through a friend of mine's cousin who ran a small marketing firm in New York City that was doing client service work for a couple minor league sports teams. The main project that I worked on was I worked on an early website for an alarm company, and then I left with one of the partners at that firm to go over to Time Inc. and Life magazine and the relaunch of Life magazine in 2005, I think this was. And I spent a couple years at Life and then I spent a couple years at Sports Illustrated, Sportsillestrated.com. And that work in general was I built back in the day, and people might remember the term microsite, I built microsites for some of the big brand advertisers at life and for Sports Illustrated, those could have been for Gatorade or for Sega.”

    2026-01-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dollar Shave Club: Michael Dubin, From Zero to a Billion Dollar Exit in Five Years (December 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Yeah, I was super passionate about it and went to work at NBC and then went to work at MSNBC first as a PA and as a writer and I thought that I would have a career in the media and maybe even in journalism. But I think at a certain point the 24-hour news cycle, you work all day to build a story and a narrative and then at 5 p.m. right before your show would air, there would be some breaking news and all your work would get thrown out. And then I also felt like it was right around the time that I started thinking like I really want to be in marketing or advertising.”

    2026-01-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dollar Shave Club: Michael Dubin, From Zero to a Billion Dollar Exit in Five Years (December 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Correct. Exactly. But this was before Kenneth made the page program cool or not cool. Kenneth wasn't very cool So, yeah, I was a page program, which for anybody that knows what the page program is you get to, it's 50 kids that they take right out of college. And you basically have the keys to the castle. You run around NBC, Rockefeller Center, and the studios, and you seat the audiences for the shows, you give tours of the studios. And the trade-off is that they give you an opportunity to take many jobs in different departments. And so those mini jobs can be with Saturday Night Live or nightly news, or at that time, the Rosie O'Donnell Show was still on the air. And you do those mini jobs or assignments for 10 weeks each. So I had some pretty cool assignments. And it was just, I mean, I've said this before, but outside of this job at DSC.”

    2026-01-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dollar Shave Club: Michael Dubin, From Zero to a Billion Dollar Exit in Five Years (December 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “I actually started out as a poly sci major, but I flunked Poly 100 actually twice. I flunked the same class twice. In back to back years, which goes to show you what kind of a student I was, my freshman and sophomore year. And then couldn't do that anymore. So I became a history major because I always loved history and I love reading about history and studying history. So I actually did fairly well. At that, I had a killer internship with a company called Brighthouse, and I also got super into my internships at CNN. So I actually did more extracurricularly, I think, in college, and I got really into those things. And that helped set me on my career afterwards.”

    2026-01-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dollar Shave Club: Michael Dubin, From Zero to a Billion Dollar Exit in Five Years (December 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “I was not a good student. I was not a horrible student. I was good at the subjects that I was interested in. But if I wasn't interested in the subject matter, it was really hard to get me to pay attention. I was probably one of these kids that went undiagnosed with ADD, and I think that probably contributed to it. Yeah, I don't think that I was much of a student. I did okay.”

    2026-01-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dollar Shave Club: Michael Dubin, From Zero to a Billion Dollar Exit in Five Years (December 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “So, I think you know why I'm asking questions about theater, because we'll get to that later, and the theatrical stuff. But what about general academics? I mean, did you feel like you were a good student or did you become a good student?”

    2026-01-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dollar Shave Club: Michael Dubin, From Zero to a Billion Dollar Exit in Five Years (December 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “I did. I was always in the school play. I was the lead in a school play Fourth grade, it was called Peace Child. And Peace Child was all about preventing a nuclear holocaust through song. Literally, no, truly, there was a song that was called I want to live. Want to live, and something like I want to live. Right to live my life. I don't know. I mean, it was really like, I'd love to see it.”

    2026-01-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dollar Shave Club: Michael Dubin, From Zero to a Billion Dollar Exit in Five Years (December 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Yeah, we weren't allowed to, you know, it was like you can have fun, but before you have fun, you're going to be productive. And I think we carry that with us wherever we go. There's like a little bit of guilt that we have whenever we have fun somewhere.”

    2026-01-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dollar Shave Club: Michael Dubin, From Zero to a Billion Dollar Exit in Five Years (December 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Literally, I got to the bank and I was like, here's my check for $100,000. You had to fill out the form that said $100,000. And I fill it out, and the woman looks at me and she's like”

    2026-01-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dollar Shave Club: Michael Dubin, From Zero to a Billion Dollar Exit in Five Years (December 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Our first investor was a company called Science throughout in Santa Monica. They gave us $100,000 check. Actually, no, they gave us a $100 check.”

    2026-01-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dollar Shave Club: Michael Dubin, From Zero to a Billion Dollar Exit in Five Years (December 2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT