YouSaid · the spoken record

Neil Robertson

lines on the record: 61
first: 2018-07-03
most recent: 2018-07-03
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

“I think probably the kindest and most impactful thing that happened to me was in the first business we built service metrics. That was the one I moved to Colorado for, the guy that was running the business, his name was Tom Higley. The kindest thing he did was let me be involved. There wasn't a part of the business that he just sort of cordoned off and said, I don't want you in the board meetings. I don't want you to talk in the marketing. I don't want you to do anything. He just let me give me some room to run. And I put a hell of a lot of work into that business to try to not make that a bad decision on his part. And I think that was like probably the kind of thing he could have done because he changed my opinion about what I wanted to be from someone that just sort of told technology stories to someone that built business stories. And I think that access was everything. So, yeah, that's what comes to mind.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just started this journey of getting deeply into Motocross and doing the big, big jumps and doing the hair scrambles with 150 riders of all levels and battling it out with people on the course and ending up in the hospital a bunch of different times. And it's just an incredible addiction. But I think what I really love about it is that there's something different, intrinsically different about feeling like I went out to learn how to ride a motorcycle and now I'm extremely competent at it. probably don't get from anything digital. And I can read whatever I can do Rosetta Stone and learn French for a while, but I don't know. Maybe it's just a much more kind of like caveman-y visceral thing to be able to physically do something. But I think that's the last art. I think if everybody tried to learn one new physical thing a year, they would leave a much happier life.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, fortunately, I was never trying to be very, very good. I also have this other thing I really, really believe that's important every year to find a new physical skill. I mean, it could be knitting, learning how to ride a motorcycle, you name it, becoming a professional rower, throwing a frisbee 100 yards, whatever the case may be. I think in our digital age, we consume a massive amount of new information about new topics all the time. And so we think that we are learning and evolving, but we're doing very little learning and evolving tactically. And so I got on this kick of trying to just do a lot of new physical things that would require mastery. And my friend one day said, hey, I'm bored. Let's in Colorado there's a bunch of motocross tracks, said just, hey, come out with me one day. And I thought of motocross as kind of a pretty red necky hick thing to do. Got out there, threw me on the bike, essentially showed me how to ride it for five minutes, and then just left. And I literally bought the bike from him the next day.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For 10 years by the time I sold that. And I don't know anything about restaurants. And it's kind of like an obvious lesson. But I think it's just this very natural path I see with a lot of people that become successful is they just think CESS is laterally translatable. And I really don't think that's true. I think there are very few people that can just jump from one thing to another and have the same outcomes.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then they tend to not go as well as you think because either you got lucky or your success doesn't translate very well. But you don't have really enough time because you got a lot of projects and they're all kind of needy birds to focus on them and you continue to tell yourself, oh no, if I just focus on that, I would be successful at it. But for the time being, I'm just going to give it more money. And so you give it more money to buy yourself more time because you still believe that you can actually jump in on that and be successful at it. And so you end up putting a whole bunch of money on the table and then you have the gambler's dilemma of walking away versus continuing to double down on it. And this is exactly what happened in the restaurant space. And it was a really important journey for me because it was probably the most humbling experience that I had, which is a necessary part of my overall business experience. Because what it really taught me is nothing new. The restaurant industry is hard, but it really taught me is that, I mean, I built my first software company when I was 14 years old. I've been thinking about how to be good at building software companies.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mentioned I started my first venture back business when I was 22. We sold it when I was 24. So I had that success at that age. Anybody that would have that kind of an experience at that age would go find something that sounded very sexy as a contrast to building tech companies. And for me, those are restaurants and bars. The other thing I think that's really been an interesting kind of arc in my life is that when you're young and you have success, you tend not to be honest with yourself about the silos in which that success is repeatable. And so what you, I see this pattern with a lot of my friends. You have some success, you make some money, and so you start just getting fascinated in a lot of other things. I'd love to be involved in a restaurant. I'd love to be involved in a fashion house. Maybe I'll go build a gaming business, whatever the case may be. And you kind of go through this arc where you just think that your success in one industry has translatable into another. It's a very sort of naive thing to do. But what happens is you anchor yourself with a lot of investments in things.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right? I mean, it's like, yeah. And so, in the same way that we just paid 99 cents for an app or for a song on iTunes for 10 years, we're paying 99 cents or a ringtone. I mean, content subscriptions is just a new ringtone business. There was a whole generation of people that paid 60 bucks on their phone bills to have 16 different ringtones and ringbacks and things like that. We know that people will pay $199 to $3.99 a month ad infinitum for things that they like as long as they're associated with something that they like. We're just moving that from pithy media and games, sorry, pithy, pithy entertainment and games into content. And frankly, it works for me because I'd rather give my money to someone that's really spending a lot of time doing the work, like a journal or something like that, than spending hours and hours and hours hunting around.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Drip stuff down in, so I think it's genius to go and get people that are producing probably really great public opinion on finance stuff and continue to support that, maybe because they're part of a larger infrastructure that can fund that. But inevitably what will emerge is that some of the information gets some of the good information gets held back gets held back, right? And this is like, I mean, everything, like whether it's, you know, whether it's the journal or whether it's the information or, I mean, every single source that I pay for strategic at the end of the day, that's the future, right? There are two ways to”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love that strategy. It's sort of like a private GLG, right? I love that strategy because I think what allows them to do at some point in time is to separate what's publicly available from what's privately available. And I think maybe another way to answer your last question and this one at the same time is that's the future of content. It's front-of-house, back a house. You're just going to start to see people not give it all away for free anymore. And one of the things I think that I see influencers doing and maybe this company is doing this too is they are starting to look at different channels as essentially part of the funnel. And there wasn't really anything at the bottom of the funnel before. I'm not trying to be glib about it. I think there really wasn't. What was at the bottom of the funnel is does doom more stuff at the top of the funnel, right? It was like that was the loop. But now that the bottom of the funnel, now there's a generation of people that are growing up paying $2.99 a month for the bottom of the funnel. That's important. That's money at the end of that rainbow. And so all of the other channels are now essentially going to be used to sort of like.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A picture on Instagram that shares a bit of information that gets people to ask questions to longer form content that is then backed up by discussion in a community related to it. I think you're going to see people being a lot less successful with just giant content engines that have good keyword density and the right H1 headers and going and doing a ton of backlinking. And we've even seen this in the influencer space. There are 40 different articles about how to write a good campaign brief for influencers, but what we focus on is actually allowing influencers to put a piece of content that they created with a brand and then tell the story of how they got that content, what the techniques were, the choices they didn't make, published all the information around that content. We call this showcases, and that's been an incredibly successful part of our site. So it's maybe like content with soul or content with community is the future, not just raw, raw volume. I think it's not playing anymore.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say the content creators that are the most successful. So one of our good friends is a woman named Lauren Everts, whose sort of handle is the skinny confidentials. He's a lifestyle blogger. She talks about this a lot with me, and she's very successful. What she does. She does podcast and Facebook group and things like that. I think the most successful content creators are those that are thinking about engagement in community behind the content they're creating. And they're thinking about content that facilitates that. I think because content marketing became a channel that was so utterly adopted by everybody, the just general proliferation of content that sort of soulless and has nothing behind it, it's just there to become searchable, to answer a quick question, has devalued content massively. And so I think the people that are most successful are thinking about content that gets people to lean in and engages and allows people to have conversations around it. And that might be, it's anything from”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hard to thank you for in return. And at that point in time, either being very comfortable with them leaving and becoming an alumni of the business and thinking of things as an extended network or talking about a new tour of duty and what that could be. I completely refused that notion five years ago and now I've completely and utterly embraced it. And the last person I hired at Influence.co, we set up everything about his involvement that way, about what his title was, what his focus was, his equity compensation, his goal structure. I had very blatant conversation that said, in two years, I either want you to be negotiating with me again about your next thing, the next tour, a job here, or walking out the door and going on to your next thing having leveled up here. That's a big, big change I think that's happening in the workforce that I know that I myself was resistive to. But once you embrace it, it just makes it a heck of a lot easier to build organizations.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Become hierarchical to run themselves. It's just sort of the nature of the beast. So I see that sort of as an interesting challenge as a leader to guide a generation of people that have started in a non-hierarchical world into necessary hierarchy at scale or to work with them. I think one of the most interesting transitions I've had is I very much viewed people leaving my companies that when they work for me as like I had a personal failure. I took it very hard when anybody joined the company and left. Two years later, three years later or four years later. And there's a great guy named Ben Casanocha who wrote a book about essentially with Ruth Reed Hoffman. He was Reed's chief of staff at LinkedIn for a long time. He wrote a book about essentially a new generation of people that go through tours of duty. So taking a look at a leader not as trying to retain all of your staff as long as possible, but to help them go through a journey for a couple of years to achieve something personal for them, which they then will work with.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, there's four members of my family, my sister and I, my mother, my father, and my father is an opera and Symfini conductor. So connected here at New York City Opera and all over the world, my sister runs an English department at Los Altos High School and has taught many classes. And my mother is a mother. So she's managed the family and everything. And I built startups. And we just think it's really interesting to compare the fact that we all have been in various kind of management and leadership positions and what our styles are. I think there is an interesting dynamic emerging between a generation that has grown up experiencing and hearing a lot about network organization, so non-hierarchical organizations, because a lot of their experience are in smaller companies. And smaller companies can survive with networked organizations. But I think at some point in time when they grow bigger, they have to be”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, if I was doing well, schooling, I don't know, depending on how I wanted to school my children, I might be able to get that all through something online now. I don't know. So I think that the sort of, if you're going to look at the companies that are essentially competing with that, with the life stack blob as independents, I would be scared. I'm trying to think of like a good example. I don't know, something like a regional telephone company, like I don't know if Southern Bell exists anymore, but something like that, right? I mean, that'd be scary to be one.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was involved in utilities, the government was involved in housing and taxes and things like that. All this stuff has been abstracted completely away. And all of those companies are now actually big U.S. companies operating on a global level. I don't go to banks. I don't take any currency out anymore. All that stuff is done through Uber and Uber Eats. And so that to me, I think, is the sort of very subtle biggest disruptor of big companies. And the answer might be it's just smaller versions of those companies in other markets, not the United States. And I'm not waving the American flag here. I just think that the accessibility of US-based services on a global basis that displaces a lot of local companies is highly, highly disruptive. So I don't know. That was just was an interesting epiphany that I had. I was trying to think of things that I don't get. I mean, healthcare is still a complete and utter mess, right? I have to get healthcare locally in Australia.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a roundabout way of answering it, but maybe it'll lead people to understand that players better than I do to some conclusions. When I was in Melbourne last, so I spent about three months of the year in Australia, and I go between Melbourne and Sydney, I realized that about 90% of the services or sort of the things that I need were provided to me by American companies and not by anything in Australia. So I stayed at an Airbnb. I plugged in my Netflix onto the television. So I've got entertainment. We ordered Uber Eats. We get Oliver Transportation from Uber. All of my phone was travel passed by Verizon. I don't have a local SIM card anymore. And like, there's a few other examples. And I'm sort of calling this the government operating system. Like in the 1970s, everything that I just said would have been gotten in part from some government.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To those people. And it's a really simple mechanism for doing that. What's interesting about it is, can you dig into it? And one of the biggest problems is essentially giving people compensatory income. So in the SARP world, we give people options. So you can actually build into the token the concept of activity in the same way that you could give someone advisor shares in a business. And as long as they keep doing something for the business, they can keep their options. They never have to essentially pay for them until they have a liquidity event and they can just sort of pay the difference. You can do the exact same thing from a technical perspective in a community. So as long as you show up to the community once a month, you essentially retain your token that you earned and you don't have to pay tax on it until there's actually a liquidity event. And so that's really interesting to be able to do that at scale. And to tie just sort of like basic participation in things into ongoing ownership of something that's tied to a real class of stock.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talk a lot about the idea of security tokens in a business like influence, any kind of a business that's a community. I think it's sort of sad that the first million people that joined LinkedIn and probably created critical mass in that business that was sold for what, $24 billion, something like that didn't get anything. They maybe didn't even get a job, right? They got to say that I was LinkedIn number 372 or something, and that might be enough for most people. But there's a lot of people that are essentially creating value for you. It's way too impossible to deal with traditional stocks and options for that level of people. But tokenization, security tokenization is a really interesting way to solve that problem. So for example, you could take 10% of the common shares of a business that was a community and essentially issue securitized tokens to the first 500,000 people in that community, we would make those tokens tradable, but also at sale time, there would be enough.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Players. They're people that are literally looking through the blockchain for opportunities, like a trader would look through stocks or write things algorithmically and are actually executing things directly at the blockchain level, sort of kind of a headless player, if you will. And that's where a lot of the money is being made. It's a lot of where the transactions are happening. And so I just think you can basically build something new on that and you instantly inherit all of the people that are already playing. It's sort of like saying I don't need the NASDAQ, right? I mean, getting around securities regulations, if I wanted to find a way to issue ownership in a company, I could do it. But you want all of the participants in the market there and a set of rules and regulations and a set of technology they built around it to be able to apply to whatever new thing you put onto the market. So I think there's a lot of value in that.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think a lot of this comes back to the underlying infrastructure of blockchain being transparent. I mean, I think the thing that's such a funny dichotomy in crypto to me is anonymity plus complete transparency. That seems like you couldn't put together a coherent sentence that way. And I think that what happens is because there's complete transparency, you essentially have a built-in information API to anything that gets built on it. So to my knowledge, I can't go and pull information on every World of Warcraft object and who bought it and who sold it and for how much and when it was last bought and sold and if something just got found, but I can go look into the blockchain and see that in Ethereum. And so what I think is really fascinating in the digital collectibles world, like Cryptocaties, is a lot of the players are not front-end players. They're back.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some hammer, right? Sort of smoting or something like that, right? That helps you get through some challenging part of the game. I don't necessarily want to go and sell it because I earned that thing. I want that thing. But I might lease it to you for three months so you can go on your own adventure and try to get through whatever part of the game you want to get through with that and to have a kind of a decentralized authority to handle a lot of that stuff is really interesting. I think it's the ability to have authentic ownership of something that leads to things like the leasing of that authentic ownership that gets super fascinating.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I think there's a lot of people that are experimenting with games on this. Related to the gaming industry, I think it's really fascinating. So, for example, a lot of games, not Fortnite games, have the concept of finding and earning things, finding coins, finding weapons, things like that. Well, if those are now exportable and tradable back to distribution, it creates a lot more value in those things. So I think if you take the concept of digital collectibles and you add one more thing, which is the ability to lease a digital collectible to someone, the amount of space that you can cover with ideas gets very big, very fast. So to use a gaming example again, and there's a lot of other real world examples, imagine if I worked really hard in World of Warcraft to gain some item in the game, which is really...”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With individuals. I think if you abstract the concept of unique ownership from things like a digital collectible, like owning a crypto kitty or owning a digital piece of artwork or something like that, into things like owning a movie ticket or owning something that allows you to play Fortnite with ninja. And that's the thing that you own and it can be tradable and movable and it's completely digital. That gets really fascinating to me. It becomes highly disruptive to a lot of traditional industries that have digital equivalents but have central authorities that essentially are in control of those digital equivalents.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's fine. But it sort of tries to translate the concept of uniqueness and authenticity onto the blockchain. I think that's a really interesting side of the world because I think to me, it translates into a lot more things that a lot more just generalist human beings feel comfortable with. I think the biggest problem with blockchain is the early entrance are kind of really wed to a lot of the philosophical underpinnings and anonymity complete and utter decentralization of these sort of like extremist parts of the landscape, which I think is partially why it's been successful. But in general, that's not how most people work. They want to know about things. They want to not have anonymity. I mean, I think Twitter's biggest problem is that it's highly anonymous. And so it just encourages a huge amount of bad behavior. And so the collectible side of things is kind of a step towards that where you're starting to associate ownership.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was one of these people that sort of watched crypto and just let it do its thing. More fascinated by the headlines and actually more fascinated by the incredible amount of ingenuity that's gone into some of the hacks that have happened. And then I stumbled across the digital collectible side of the world. And I kind of got into it because of all the fervor over crypto kitties. And for those that don't know, essentially, while Bitcoin is a distributed ledger, they keep track of how much Bitcoin everybody has, the fact that you have one Bitcoin versus another Bitcoin is irrelevant. It's like you're having a physical dollar bill versus another physical dollar bill are completely exchangable. But Didro Collectibles is essentially a standard on top of Ethereum, the ERC 721 standard, that allows for a distributed knowledge of ownership of a unique item. And that doesn't mean that you can't have the same unique item in the same way that you might have a seven prints of an Ansel Adams photograph. You know, there's not only one of them, but you know that you have one of seven.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They could do a lot more stuff with video content. The creators are on that platform really like that platform. They're very content-centric. It's in their nature. They're a funny beast that if you sort of like look at all the checkboxes of what kind of the future of media is, they check a lot of those boxes. They just haven't organized them into an assault on anything yet. Yeah, I think if Pinterest goes public, I'd buy some of that stock.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Twitch is, I mean, really, Amazon is fascinating, right? Every time I have to stop myself and all the time remind myself that Amazon is Twitch and Twitch is Amazon, and Amazon is, they're just smart. And because I think what's happening with Twitch is they're getting incredible scale so they can back into things that other people can't do. I am really interested to see what Pinterest does. They're this funny little company. They're this funny in the broad scheme of things, but they have like 450 million dollars of revenue. They're, I think, almost profitable. They're about to go public, I think. And they have $250 million users that's growing. They just keep chugging along. And they, I don't view them as in any kind of trouble at all. I think the opportunity is all upside for them. And I think they could make a couple moves and do things like much more native commerce integration, a la Amazon.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's actually pretty true. If you think of it, the newsfeed is basically the same. They've built a lot of stuff, you know, a lot of neighborhoods around the city for marketplaces and facebook.gg and all this kind of stuff, but they just kind of have it screwed with the base because people don't like relearning new stuff. I think Snapchat is kind of suffering from this problem of trying to get people to relearn. And Twitter, I think, is in this really tricky thing where they're trying to get a whole bunch of people to relearn because the core is really hard for a very broad audience. So I'm not huge on Twitter's future. I think they place a big bet on live and I think out of a few categories like gaming, I personally think that live has never produced significant returns. I mean, I think that Instagram is backing off of live. I think Facebook is backing off of live and going more into just traditional long-form content, eat it when you want. So no, not a huge Twitter fan.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As much as I love Twitter because they bought one of her favorite companies. I was talking to a friend of mine who runs strategy at Edelman and he made a really, really smart comment about Facebook, which was also a comment about Twitter in the process. He said, Facebook's genius is they basically haven't changed anything for six years.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If they add kind of one piece, which is a place to aggregate your community and manage them, which is a little bit of what's happening kind of around their tricks experimentation. But they also have one thing that no one else has, which is they have a neutral to positive opinion by most influencers and creators. A lot of the other platforms have done things with demonetization or they're viewed as platforms for older people, not younger people, or have come and gone. And Amazon, pretty much everybody's like, yeah, I like Amazon. That's actually one of their greatest strengths. And so I think they're going to kind of just slowly put all these pieces together, kind of let the rest of the world battle it out right now, and then introduce a way for influencers and creators to essentially monetize three or four different ways.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you have a long form content distribution network that is already sitting in people's homes. You have an Amazon influencers program, which we work on with Amazon, where they actually allow influencers to build storefronts of all of the products they talk about on their various channels, because it's actually, if you go on someone's Instagram and you see like, here's a dress I really love, you can't buy it off of Instagram. You have to go hunting for it and find it on Amazon. So now they just say, hey, here's the product to talk about. And you can drop that in the bottom of YouTube video or you can put that in your Instagram link or wherever the case may be. So they have thousands of those things. And so they have native commerce integration, which no other platform has. And if you kind of sew all these bits and pieces together,”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He just sort of watches. They get really good at their own thing, and then they figure out how to give their own thing to everybody and build a multi-billion dollar business out of it, right? So they're going to get really good at Twitch and streaming and communities and monetization. And then they go, well, cool, like, you don't have to do live. You can just put up videos here too. And then all of a sudden, they've got a billion people watching Twitch videos every single day. It's very easy to then extend. Is that the number? No, I'm saying at some point in time. Jesus Christ. But it's in the hundreds of millions already. It's massive. People will look back just like people look back at the 1 billion purchase of Instagram and thought, wow, that was cheap as hell or the 3.2 billion 1.6 billion for YouTube, which seems like a steal. People are going to look back at the 900 that was paid for Twitch and think it was the cheapest thing they ever did. So they're just going to sit there, lurk in the water, and all of a sudden look at everything else in the Amazon ecosystem. You got a hundred million prime members that have access to prime channels.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Month, 50,000 people, that's $150,000 a month. They're just going to pay for that for everybody. The influencer gets the money. The brand gets a native advertising sponsor at scale. The participants are happy because they don't have to pay that money anymore. And you're going to start seeing more and more of these opportunities for brands to come in and have a way to spend a lot of money in a non-invasive way. It's nothing different than the Yahoo homepage takeover of old. That's a jumble of things, but what I think really matters is distribution. And I think the absolute sleeper in this game is Amazon. I think they are actually going to be the player that wins because they're sitting there with Twitch and they have an incredible business and they're learning. They're like, I think Bezos is like the internet crocodile, right?”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Industry right now. You can spend $5,000, you can spend $100,000, but it's very hard to spend a million dollars on an influencer marketing campaign right now. This is exactly the same problem that happened in the SEO industry when it started. It was really hard to spend more than $5,000 a month on SEO. Now the industry is $80 billion a year and people have multi-million dollar budgets, but it's very hard for a lot of the early companies to get scale and to get off the ground because there just wasn't enough money flowing around. This is a prediction. I think that what people are trying to do is trying to become the platform where people essentially monetize all those eyeballs so that they can then go back to the brands and say, look, there is a hundred thousand people paying on this channel. This is a million dollars sponsorship opportunity. Yeah, exactly. And what will happen is we'll go from here's $1,000 to put up a picture of my product on your Instagram feed to just like Google sponsors your Wi-Fi at Starbucks. Maybelline will sponsor fashion influencers channel and every single person paying $2.99 a month.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Distribution to audiences that are willing to pay back to distribution again because I am not so sure that your audience on Instagram, if you're whatever an Instagram model your audience on Instagram is the one that's going to pay you $2.99 a month, it's more likely that if you've created a Facebook group and you have a highly engaged audience there, they're going to be able to turn into money. Or maybe it works really well on Twitch because people are just sitting there watching you all the time. One of the most monetizable categories is actually podcasting because as a friend of mine who's in the space said, like you're getting someone to listen to you for 30 minutes or an hour, they're already pretty heavily engaged. They're probably likely going to end up paying you $2.99 or $49 for specialized content. I think the thing that is the long-term strategy here is both for platforms to be able to win the future of kind of eyeballs by having the creators on their platform that are essentially creating content. But also one of the biggest problems for brands is they can't spend enough money with influencers and creators. This is actually one of the biggest issues with”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the platform companies are scrambling to try to create these relationships and try to create these monetization strategies for them. Is it better to be an influencer or a platform? I think the challenge of an influencer is how do you scale yourself? How do you not have to be streaming for 80 hours a week on Twitch to make ends meet? Because I think what people are very wary of is that early, early YouTubers started to make money, but the CPM rates dropped so much that you could be essentially making videos with millions of views and making $2,000 or $3,000 a month, barely enough to survive as YouTuber. So I think it's going to take a major shift for people to be able to directly monetize with their audiences and for those audiences to learn what kind of content they want to consume in a way that they'd be willing to pay for it. And then I think whoever wants that kind of formula is figured out and it's happening, it'll probably take another few years, I think whoever has the best dish.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“CPM rates dropped dramatically on YouTube, which sort of sent everybody into refer, and that was right around the time that sponsored content was actually rising. So people started to be able to charge a lot of money to do sponsor content and maybe to create a video about how to use a piece of software, where the case may be. And those numbers went up because there's a lot of supply now in that space because everybody sort of flooded in and said they were an influencer, those numbers are flattening up as well. So what people are really starting to do, and this was led by a company called Patreon, is start to do direct monetization with their audiences. That means I'm going to hold back some of my content for the audience that wants to spend $4 a month with me. And Patreon is a company that was funded, has about $100 billion that kind of led the charge in helping influencers and creators essentially just collect money from their audience.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, which one to be? I mean, my friend Ryan, who I work with technically on all of our projects, we always have this phrase, just everything is hard. Nothing's a layup. So a bunch of different comments. One is, I think the battle that's happening between the platforms right now is really around who can create a relationship with an influencer creator by giving them the most ways to monetize themselves. Anytime you're an individual building a business and monetizing is hard, no matter what you're doing, if you're a musician or you're a digital marketer that's doing consulting or you're someone that's creating content to an audience. And so they're trying to sort of win over these friendships by looking at all the different ways you can make money. And what's happening is that there's actually a lot of different ways that you can make money now as an influencer. This is another big change that happened. So in the early days, you could basically go onto YouTube, try to build a big audience on YouTube, and monetize your YouTube shows with ads.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was like a million people that watched that happen. So that's like all of a sudden in the middle of the football game, they decide to take all the laces out of the football and cut the football into pieces and create a new game of pogs out of the football leather and just play that for an hour, right? It's like nothing to do with the game, but that just doesn't happen in traditional structured sports games. And so I think that complete and utter experimentation of what the actual game is inside of the game itself is just going to lend itself to a different type of engagement. So I don't know. I thought it was fascinating.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that game is actually like a battle royale game. I don't know if you ever saw the movie Battle Royale. Yeah, sure. So you basically are dropped onto an island that has sort of diminishing amount of space to run around. And you basically pick up weapons and you build structures essentially knock everybody off. Try to kill everybody else.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The game industry is shifting around a lot as well because I think people are trying to build games that are as interesting for viewers as they are for players, which is a really interesting thing, right? I mean, you and I probably maybe grew up with an Xbox or PlayStation or whatever and played Grand Theft Auto until our fingers bled. But someone maybe came in for a minute, watched him left. So creating games that are as interesting to view as they are to play is like a whole new category. I think the one that he was talking about now is Fortnite, which kind of came out on YouTube and Twitch and just dominated everything. And that was the one that Drake was playing with Ninja, one of the Twitch stars, and ended up getting something like 608,000 concurrent views, which is more than a lot of professional sports will get for a single game.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think the challenging thing about giving an overview of esports is that it's sort of becoming everything at once. It's changing how people think about building facilities and where they think about building facilities. It's changing. My friends in Australia are very tied to a casino that's in Melbourne and they have a huge amount of esports events in the casino that drive a lot of business there. And that's not something, I mean, I guess you can say esports is related to sports betting and that makes sense for a casino, but that's not what it's about. It's really about what the event space and the casino is being used for. Merchandise ticketing, I mean, of course, with all the sports betting changes in the United States. And then now, not to make everything about influencers and creators, but like the audience builders on Twitch are unbelievable. Pop culture is essentially moving into games, which is fascinating. Can you say a little bit?”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The distribution side. People are actually going back to things like hiring 150, 23 year olds and sticking them in an office and having them call people. I mean, I did that 10 years ago when I built my business and I thought everybody had kind of gotten away from that. And that's pretty much what people are doing now. It's really amazing. Or doing huge amounts of scraping on LinkedIn, right? There's just rooms full of people in the Philippines that for $4 an hour just go through and scrape information off of LinkedIn and try to compile this for you. And those lists are primarily for phone lists. It gets really interesting too, depending on how aggressive the authorities are about GDPR because those traditional, you scrape and put stuff into marketing trips break a lot of the GDPR regulations. I think it's going to get harder before it gets easier probably the next five years for those kinds of companies to scale really quickly out of the gates.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There will be a lull and then something new will arrive. So, I mean, I wish I could give you some divine insight, but I actually think perhaps one of the insights from an investment perspective is that it's really, really hard to build unit economics in a B2B software company now, which is what completely drives the whole B2B scale and investment side of the house because there aren't new creative things that are emerging. On the product side,”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Attribution goes to that person. So there's a whole affiliate sort of attribution last in war that goes on. But this is a huge part of how Amazon built their business early on. They pioneered the concept of taking traditional word-of-mouth referrals and putting them online. It is a very, very effective way to grow some types of channels. Blogging has essentially, that really is kind of the birth of influencers at the end of the day, is finding people that have a graded audience and then talk about products and push people towards those. It's great because it's very traceable. But as things move to being a much more visual medium on Instagram, people just took the simpler way of having someone put up a picture of the product and off you go. I think when it comes to B2B, it's really tricky to find an angle. There's always something new. So SEO was very big for a while.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it really does depend categorically. So one of the other businesses that I helped build with another fraternity brother of mine at MIT is a business called VigLink. And VigLink is the largest, really kind of, we call it a meta-affiliate. So a lot of people don't actually know much about the affiliate world, but it's fascinating and it's billions of dollars. If you're reading a blog and the blog, say it's a mommy blog and the blog mentions a stroller and that stroller links to Amazon, you might perceive that as just utility, but deeply buried into that URL is a code that allows the blogger to make money if you click on that link and then buy something. What's interesting is you don't have to buy the stroller to make money. You can buy anything. And so embedded in that URL or that cookie is essentially a time window that says whatever you buy in this time window on Amazon, you get paid four to eight percent of. But what's interesting is if you then go read another mommy blogger's blog and click on another link that sends you to Amazon, the...”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up selling that business, I think, to internet brands. So Jeff and I said that's the model, no pun intended, is to build a community. And so two years ago, we set off to do that, to build a company called Influence.co, really in the shape of a LinkedIn or Stack Overflow where we studiously avoided being in the middle. We always wanted to just be the matchmaker to acquire information and turn it into something SEO and thus be able to build a very large scalable business that cost very little to grow because of the SEO value. And that's where we're at now. It's really, really fun to, I probably overly obsessed every day by looking at the growth numbers, but it's great.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Familiar with IMDb. We search on movie stars all the time. And what movies were they in? And where's that shoot taking place with that beautiful building in the background? And they're producing a lot of content as well. IMDb has 350 million page views a month. It's actually owned by Amazon. And so House, which is another multibillion dollar company, is a community for designers. And guess what? You search on things about your home design and designers like to show off the designs that they've done. And it's actually a very content-centric community. So the actual original inspiration of a community that I thought of first was this company called Model Mayhem, which 10 years ago helped models who have a lot of content, their portfolios, put them online and disintermediate their agencies. And guess what? A lot of guys and gals are searching on these models to try to find these pictures. It's not always business related, but it creates a massive landscape for SEO. Before Instagram existed, Model Mayhem had about 300 or 400 million pages a month as well.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Business professional. But if you think of my kind of two dimensions, searchability, when I met you or when I was introduced to you, the first thing I did was type in your name LinkedIn and look through your history, right? That's how I get to know you and find commonality. But also, you create a lot of content. And so your resume is content, but you also might publish this podcast to your audience on LinkedIn or in other places. So the community around business professionals is a perfect fit. For my example, if you look at other professions, there's almost one major website for every single important profession. So Stack Overflow is a huge, probably multi-billion dollar valued company that's about 50 million developers on it. And developers discuss code and ask each other questions. That's the content of developers. Dribble and Behance are for graphic designers, and each have about 10 million members in the community. And those members show off all of the photography and their artwork and design they're doing.”
2018-07-03 · Invest Like the Best · Niel Robertson – The Future of Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.94] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source