YouSaid · the spoken record

Nick Hanauer

lines on the record: 171
first: 2015-06-21
most recent: 2015-06-21
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

“That was Now is a sale, I think, very, I can't remember. I made money, I know that. I'm embarrassed to tell you it's been so many years. I don't remember. That was”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Exactly. And so we built that company into something. It was going pretty well. We got a big investment actually from Amazon.com to scale that thing up. And then we sold it to overstock.com. What”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amazing. It was a much harder thing to get a business up to escape velocity than it is today. Couldn't scale that. It was very difficult to scale when everyone's on the internet.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you forget it. They were terrified. Now, basically, everybody. Date of birth. Everything. It's everywhere. We've gotten over to hack away from it. So when you were trying to start these companies when only one in ten consumers had access to the internet in the early days. And when only one in ten of those were willing to buy something on the internet.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it was tough sledding because you may forget, but it wasn't that long ago when people were like, well, I'll never send my credit card on the internet, right? You remember those days. Yeah, I'm never going to buy anything on the internet. I”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is 99 as good as this year's tennis racket, but if I can buy it for 20 cents on the dollar and sell it to you for 50 cents on the dollar, everybody's happy. And so we went off to do that. But, you know, like a lot of the companies in the early days.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, yeah. That's what I was talking about. Is that Okay. That was a great one. So that was a really early internet company. And we had this, again, this is in the... Oh my gosh, it's the late 90s, right? Before any of this stuff really, really got going. And we had this insight, which of course is true that there was a terrific opportunity to liquidate things on the internet, to buy overstocks and so on and so forth and sell them to people via the internet. And we wanted to focus just on sporting equipment, in particular hard goods and stuff like that, reasoning that last year's tennis racket.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For $350 million. What was market leader? Market leader was a company that sold leads much like Zillow to real estate agents. We were an early entrant into that business And basically connected real estate agents with people who wanted to either buy or sell their house and evolved into a company that both did that but also built software to help agents manage their businesses. And so truly bought that and then Zillow bought Truly.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aeronautical engineers now working in this tiny town building UAVs, and now you have all these spin-off technology companies making wings. All the suppliers and all that stuff. And so it's just an extraordinary story of economic development. And now Boeing owns it.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the best part of it is that this tiny town is a tiny, it was a tiny, crappy poor town with like one sawmill. And I think one of the most, this company has turned this county into one of the Washington State's most affluent counties today. Really? Yeah. There are like 800, you know, like PhD type.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And so we built this just an extraordinary company, and Boeing came along. Boeing was an integration partner and came along and finally said, no, we got to own it. So they bought it from us. But here's the great part is a four.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Huge tactical advantage. And so these things were really, really, really useful to the military, both on land and at sea, right? These things are now deployed all over the place.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, all that stuff. You don't have time to pussyfoot around with it regular opposition process. Go buy this product. Yeah, so this is a 10-foot wingspan, 33-pound plane that launches via catapult from the ground. From the ground, you just launch it via catapult. It doesn't need an airfield of land. It actually flies into a rope to land and is totally autonomous flying, totally invisible at 3,000 feet and can basically not quite read your watch, but...”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Through giant fits with the Department of Defense to get this stuff through the supply chain. Oh my god. Oh my God. And they were just like, no, you will do it right now.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's not battery power. They're just like little RC engines, right? Okay, so little gas engines, right? And so they build some of these things. And, you know, we had some interest in it. And then 9-11 happens and you realize that UAVs are going to be a big part of the military apparatus. And so we made this investment. In situ was lucky enough to grab. some really, really incredible managers, some really visionary managers, in particular a guy named Steve Sliwa, who is one of the best CEOs I've ever come in contact with. Really? And they built this thing into an incredible company with incredible technology. And these UAVs were so effective that the Marine Corps”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seattle. Yeah, and so here's the great story that a couple of aeronautical engineers who were also windsurfing freaks wind up in a place called Bing in Washington, which is across the street from Hood River, Washington in the Columbia Gorge on the Columbia River, which is one of the windsurfing capitals of the earth. And they start looking around for a thing to do. And this guy, Tad McGear, had been doing experiments with UAVs. Guys get together and they start building this UAV company, and their early idea is that they're going to build these small, unmanned vehicles with cameras on them that can help tune a fisherman, find tuna without helicopters. This was our big idea. And so we thought that's all.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, this is a fantastic company and a great story. So in situ makes unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance and combat. Perfect fit.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, and he would generate Ton of cash flow, and so something you could do, I mean, you could literally do with the push of a bundle”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And there's a trade-off between growth and profit. And if you would raise wanted to raise the prices on every product at Amazon 3%, no one would notice. Right.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, I've grown up. With Amazon, I'm more sympathetic to their market cap than I am to a lot of companies because I am so sure that if Jeff wanted to generate tons of free cash flow and profit, you could do it in a minute. He is now and has been from the day we opened the doors, the metaphorical doors, been”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I have a ton of friends now who are complaining about the fact that their companies are public because if they were private, they'd be worth twice as much as they are.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or dinners, or that's theoretically where they're. Yeah, but that's different than Tech was 30, 40 years ago. I mean, technology enables so many things. My point simply is that Know there's a whole bunch of companies out there that are valued in the billions or tens of billions where a little tiny thing goes wrong and it's worth hundreds of millions. I think we're riding the ragged edge on a lot of those valuations. And you have this weird thing, right? As you know, that the public markets and the private markets have flipped.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, gotta be tech bubble. You say yes. Well, I mean, you know, tech is everything now, right? What's not tech? Is Uber a tech?”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think there's a touch of hyperbole in it. Yeah, there's a touch. He's obviously being hyperbolic, but I think he's making an interesting point, which is true that we have an economy today, which in many ways is a winner-take-all economy, and where great success really is great success. Wildly reward, just wildly, insanely rewarded. But to be moderately successful actually is becoming harder and harder and harder because the society is bifurcating, because we're turning into a society and economy of a tiny number of winners and everybody else is a loser.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, a lot of TED videos go viral. Yeah, Moment in history, and it just blew up. Yeah. Yeah. And so, and because this is a very important issue, and I think that most smart, even rich people agree that economic inequality is something that we're going to have to deal with somehow. Obviously, when it comes to what to do, it gets the conversation becomes more difficult because it involves trade-offs that people often don't want to make.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The beautiful news is that after a couple of years, Chris Anderson, who's a great guy and I kissed and made up because Chris is a good guy and realized that, you know, this was a very important issue and something that Ted had to tackle head on. And so he asked me to do another talk, which I did last August, based on the Plutocrats piece, by the way. And now we're good friends again, and I'm going to the conference. And you did.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pre Picketty. Yeah, yeah. It made people uncomfortable. And as a consequence, they didn't want to post the talk. And that created a lot of controversy. And they chucked me out of the conference and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, how did that result?”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, basically, it was called raise taxes on the rich to roar the true job creators because if you understand a capitalist economy in a 21st century way, which you have to see is it's really it's essentially an ecosystem and it's characterized by circle of life-like feedback loops and the true job creators in a capitalist economy are consumers. And when the middle class thrives, people like me get to start companies. sell them stuff and the more stuff they they buy the more people we employ and i gave that speech at ted uh some years ago but it was before the issue of economic inequality was one that was you know”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Phone line How to get fiscal. And there is no earthly reason why giant profitable corporations can't pay their workers enough so that they can be robust participants in our economy. I want every single worker at Walmart to be able to earn enough money to buy the products that the people that I employ make. It's just not fair that their people can't afford to buy my stuff, but my people can afford to buy their stuff. And my people have to pay taxes and their people don't. So now let's talk a little bit.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Able to afford to buy stuff from the companies that I start, right? Which is the problem is you've got this giant industry of free riders, right? McDonald's pays their workers poverty wages and not one of the people in McDonald's can buy the products, the companies that I start products, right? All of my employees can afford to go to McDonald's every day, right? But not vice versa. All of my employees pay taxes. All the McDonald's employees, they don't pay taxes. In fact, they need public services like food stamps and Medicaid that my employees”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have let the minimum wage fall to historically low levels, right? If the minimum wage had tracked inflation, it would be 10.5 dollars. If the minimum wage had tracked productivity gains in the country, it would be $21.70. That's amazing. If the minimum wage had tracked the wages of the top 1%, it would be $28. Instead, it's $725, but $2.13 plus tips for tip workers, right? And remember, most tip workers don't work in some fancy New York steak restaurant where they make huge amounts of money. They work in some sherries or Denny's in a small town, and they don't make anything in tips. The truth is that we need to dramatically increase the minimum wage. And if we did, not only would those workers and their families be better off, but the economy would work better because those people would now be better.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fall apart Yeah. So there's a lot of consternation. And quite rightly, a lot of rich people don't feel like this is their fault. It feels like they're being blamed for economic inequality. And obviously a lot of rich people didn't set out to make other people poor, right? And so when you raise the issue of economic inequality, lots of rich people feel like they're being attacked unfairly. And there's a legitimate, and that feeling is legitimate. But the simple truth is that wealth is concentrating in fewer and fewer hands, and the average family in our country is struggling more and more. And that's a consequence of a bunch of policy decisions that we have made in this country over the last 30 or 40 years that we need to reverse.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Down a third. Down a third, right? Wow, that's huge. Here's the thing all you got to do is put that data in an Excel spreadsheet and just run the extrapolation out 30 years. The numbers are scary, right? Because the top one percent will control in the mid 30s, 35, 36, 37% of national income, and the bottom 50% of Americans will share 5 or 6% of national income. At that point, you don't have a capitalist. Democracy anymore, you have some kind of feudal system. A plutocracy. Yeah, yeah. And it's just not going to work out for anybody. It's just not going to work out for anybody. And there's no reason for it. It just makes no sense.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Blah, blah, blah. Right. All good. The problem is increasing amounts of economic inequality over time, right? In 1980, the top 1% had about 8% of national income. Today it's closing in on 24%. The bottom 50% of Americans in 1980 shared about 18% of national income. Today it's down to 11%.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, you know, just a generalized concern about the trends. And this data isn't hard to find. You can look it up pretty easily. And the trend, you know, it's not the fact that we have economic inequality that's the problem. Some economic inequality is indispensable to having a high functioning capitalist economy. And all that. The problem is”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And the worst thing about economic inequality is you're basically systematically destroying your customer base, which you're eating your seed coin. Yeah, it makes no sense. So let me throw.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The day exactly eventually it ends badly. And my view is that with just a tiny bit of moderation, with just a tiny bit of policy change, we can build an economy that isn't just fairer and work better for people at the bottom, but ultimately will be essentially a richer opportunity set for people like me who build companies. When workers have more money, people like me, business people have more customers. Henry Ford said that.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, Barry, I write a lot. And my main area of interest is political economy and economic inequality and the connection between growing inequality and a variety of problems, including a crappy business environment. And, you know, my very strong feeling is that concentrating all of the wealth and power in the hands of a tiny minority of people at the top is not going to end well, particularly for the people at the top.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did you say How do you respond to a six? From a pillow company. Yeah. You know, it was a great moment. I won't lie. And the thing about that company was that we built it was really the highlight of my business career, mostly because the team that we built. Was such a great team, and people liked each other and worked so well together. So just a super fun, super fun thing. I can't even remember. I mean, my wife and I, I think, had dinner with another couple who owned a little bit of the stock and they made a whole bunch of money too. And it was, you know, it was a very nice thing.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anyone who potentially. We sat in between everybody and the advertisers, right? So it was a very strategic position to be in. And the company was generating huge amount of cash and growing like a weed. And so it was very attractive business and a very attractive strategic acquisition. And it ended up a pretty crazy bidding war. You were in Seattle. They were in Seattle. Yeah, we wanted to. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, to be honest, a lot of the Microsoft people are our friends, right? This felt like a good thing. Yeah, we was 6.4 billion. Yeah, exactly. It wasn't even a stop. No, no, no, no. It was good. Yeah, it was good. Yay. Yay us. So how did how?”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This wasn't a law. Well, I mean, you know, I think within 60 or 90 days, or I can't remember, Barry, I should remember, but not that long after DoubleClick was purchased, we were in a process. And before you knew it, there were a lot of suitors because a lot of people were very, very interested, which is why anyone...”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I, you know, did your wife ask you out the first time or did you ask her? No, she did. That was pretty clear. She wanted nothing to do with me. Well, I think it was slightly more nuanced and complicated in the case of a quantov in Microsoft. I can't remember exactly who did what first, but I think somebody asked a leading question and somebody else followed up with a leading answer. And before you knew it, we're in a process. This was pretty.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A quant Then volume of double click. Double It was. They started before us. But we had an agency business and we had a bunch of other businesses going and we were, you know, we felt like we were worth about twice as much. And we had been doing a lot of strategic work with Microsoft in their ad business all along. And when Google bought double click, that started to make, it made Microsoft nervous. It made Yahoo nervous. And it made a bunch of the big agency holding companies nervous. And within weeks, we were in a process.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know what? I think it was approaching. I mean, we're growing at like 50% a year, but I think it was approaching three quarters of a billion dollars in revenue and $150, $200 million in cash flow.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly and drive better results as a consequence. And that company became very successful. It was a big company when we finally sold it, generating a huge amount of cash flow.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The pillow company website. These in the very early days, we realized that we either had to shut this thing down or go turn it into a business and we decided to turn it into a business. And so we spun it out of the pillow company. Basically, the early idea was to expand this into a click network. And that didn't really work. And again, to make an incredibly long story short, we ended up being essentially an internet advertising agency. What we did is we built one of the early web servers and we enabled our customers to do was to place ads with a variety of publishers and then measure the relative effectiveness of those advertising.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And sort of by accident, we built an affiliate network, which at one point made my company's stupid website one of the highest trafficked sites on the internet.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, we gave people an incentive to send traffic to us from their website by giving them a commission or a affiliate network, basically.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so Avenue A Media morphed into this company Aquantive. And we had this, again, this goes back to the very early days of the internet. We had at the Pillow Company, Pacific Coast, we had this idea that we would have a website. And we had the idea that we would build essentially what we now know as a click network to drive traffic to the website”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As my friend Eric Dylan said, Jeff would call us to decide what kind of pop to put in the pop machine. But after a while, Jeff has a brilliant guy. He got his management legs under him and he doesn't need a lot of help today. I want to emphasize something about Amazon.com Amazon.com's success that almost nobody understands that contributed more than anything to it. And it is something called the negative cash conversion cycle. And what that means is that because our terms with our suppliers, the book resellers, was 60 to 90 days. And because they could ship to us within a day, we could collect cash from our customers 60 to 90 days before we had to pay our suppliers. And what that means is the bigger you get, the more cash flow you have.”
2015-06-21 · Masters in Business · Second Avenue Nick Hanauer: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source