YouSaid · the spoken record

Reed Hoffman

lines on the record: 25
first: 2021-12-14
most recent: 2021-12-14
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'm Reed Hoffman. Thank you for listening. Master of scale is a weightwater original. Our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren Triff. Our senior producer is Jordan McLeod. Our supervising producer is Jay Punjabi. Our producers are Adam Skeuse, Catherine Clark Gray, Heile Bondi, Marie McCoy Thompson, and Christina Gonzalez. Our editor at large is Bob Saffian. Our music director is Ryan Holliday, original music and sound design by Eduardo Rivera. Audio editing by Keith J. Nelson, Steven Davies, Andrew Nolt, and Mike Gallagher, mixing and mastering by Brian Pugh. Special thanks to Chrisier, Elisa Schreiber, David Sanford, Saida Sapieva, Greg Beato, Adam Heiner, Emily McManus, Kelsey Capitano, Tim Cronin, Anna Pizano, Ben Richardson, Mina Kurosawa, Sarah Tartar, Charlie Manessis, Cheneme Ezequena, and Colin Howarth. Find out more at masterscale.com.”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I like the fact he was already working on iterating in exactly the direction. So, you know, actually, in fact, people might think it's strange when I go, well, I'm perfectly like good that my answer wasn't useful to you because you're already doing it because that's what entrepreneurs should be doing.”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“LinkedIn, people were like, What is it? Oh, is it like friends? What is this thing? So I hear you on the difficulty. So I don't know. Is that helpful?”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ooh, this makes lots of money. That's exciting. Doesn't have to be the latest Disney film or something else. It's like, no, no, no, no. I'm excited by high growth, good margin, defensible businesses owning shares is a good thing. So you could do that way. And then the other one, you know, entrepreneurs frequently undercount how much a pitch can really make a difference. Like doing a pitch in a way that gets someone kind of lean in and be excited. Because by the way, sometimes people go, look, I don't know about your business. And so you go, look, you've got energy. You've got grit. Sometimes actually, in fact, they go, like, I don't know this business, but I want to be behind this guy, Ricky, right? And so somehow how you do the pitch and show how you're excited about it and why you go, look, this is an awesome business. And then that's infectious. And so that would be another thing to possibly try in it. But I hear you, like, because by the way, when I started pitching.”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, great question and kind of canonical. The first thing that I tend to point out to entrepreneurs in this dilemma, this question, is that you're not looking for everyone to offer you a term sheet, everyone to offer you investment. Don't need that. You need one or more of the right people to offer a term sheet, offer investment. And so therefore, implicit already in your thinking and implicit already in your analysis, going to people who would be naturally good partners. Because if you end up with an investor who didn't understand it, it's going to create some turbulence for you, which is substantially less good. So that's a good place to be. Now, on the other hand, you go, well, it's too small, too few. I may just not get to the investment that I need in order to grow this really amazing business. And then the question flops to how do I make this business more interesting? Now, some of that is to, you know, kind of describe how big the market is, how much you have a competitive edge in that market, what the actually possible Kagers and other kinds of things go, by the way, most investors, they actually understand the...”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of copycat copiers for this. And so you might say, okay, I want to get some acceleration before I get there, but you know you're going to need to end up there. You know you're going to want ultimately to have all your products on Amazon, all your products on, Target, et cetera, and growing as strongly as possible. So that also then gets to what are the things that you can do to reinforce your competitive position. One, obviously, I'm sure you've thought about as brand, all right, because you go, okay, how do I have that brand? How do I become synonymous with it? You might say, hey, I'm going to try to get more broad reviews and messaging out there that are already out there on the web so that that's harder to replicate because I use that early time in order to make that happen. And you might actually, in fact, do something like, all right, so what's the way that I can move much more fast? Now, if you can think of things that would essentially give you competitive moats, I think that could be very useful in terms of kind of how you accelerate forward and kind of what you.”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, that's kind of a classic innovator's question. You're doing all this innovation and you're putting energy and risk and work into the innovation. And is someone else going to make life difficult by copying your innovation and then challenging it in various ways? And this is, again, quintessential entrepreneurial problem. And so I guess the question is, you know that you're going to need to grow and be successful. You know you're going to need to size. You know when you get to that size, you're going to have the copycat problem no matter what. It's not an if, it's a when in terms of how to play out. So what you want to do is you want to strategize about how you best deal with that when. Now you could say, well, look, I could grow in these other areas that's not on major platforms, Amazon, Target, et cetera, and get to more elevation before people realize how successful the products are or how valuable they are is one of the problems, of course, on Amazon, so people can see how well it's selling. So that's part of what drives potential.”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And by the way, that's one of the reasons why we celebrate entrepreneurs, because that is scary and difficult and yet so essential for creating the future”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that might be exactly why you would want to essentially say, okay, I'm going to put an order of magnitude difference and an ability to move faster. And that might be why you would consider it. So Matthew, thank you for asking a question that is on the majority of entrepreneurs' minds.”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Speed of my business because if you change the Kager and the speed of what you're going in your business, that might be worth taking the risk. Because just like all of the entrepreneurial things, you're very familiar with this because you went and took the risk of building a bootstrapping business. You didn't know the pandemic was coming just like you had a sense of the market and puzzles and probably had some personal engagement and knowledge of it. But taking that risk might be worth it to change a growth curve. And a little bit like when I was talking to Britt, you know, there's kind of things like, well, could you test it right now? I don't know how you test whether or not there's non-existent competition, but if you look around at competition and see what they're doing, see what's happening. Entrepreneurs will buy low-cost test ads on Facebook or somewhere else and see if there's demand for a product within certain things and then say, okay, if there's demand there, then I will go for that and I will build that out, whether it's a product line or a new market extension. Those would be the kind of things that I would.”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Done in order to have gotten to the success you've achieved. And what you have to look at is a simple set of questions. One, is your competitor to come in? Because if a competitor comes in, raises a bunch of money, and then attacks the market, that could disrupt you because the capital side of it is part of the entrepreneurial competition. This happens all the time in tech, raising large rounds, going really fast and inefficiently, right? Kennedy blitzcaling speed over efficiency and an environment of uncertainty. So if you have that, that's a reason. And if you think that's possibly going to come, you may want to be the first mover in proactives. Competition's one. Another one is when you look at it, you say, well, is there some velocities that get me to a different level of business, right? And this could be the, well, if I had some capital, I could experiment with more channels. I could run some marketing campaigns that maybe I'm not running. Maybe I could have a broader product line. Maybe it could be in markets that I'm not in currently. And that will change the level and...”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Matthew, excellent question, one that applies very broadly to very many entrepreneurs. So thank you for coming on and asking it. And one of the things I'm going to have to remember to do is come order one of your puzzles since my family likes doing puzzles. So I'm familiar with the puzzle explosion during the pandemic, and it's a great place to be. Now, some of it is you do the analysis, and I obviously don't know what the puzzles market is. When you kind of make the decision about should I get serious capital hit the rocket boosters, take additional risk, do dilution, because the risk is not just the capital, not just dilution, but changing the way you operate. Usually when you raise money, you go into the red sum, which is scary, especially when entrepreneurs such as yourself said, look, I did this on my bank balance sheet. I made it work. I'm very cash flow attentive. I calculate the cash daily, weekly, I model my growth and all the rest, all those things that you have.”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it could be like kind of thinking, okay, well, let's expand the virtual a little bit, or maybe let's think about is there a way to experiment doing a hybrid just like offices are not just going to be fully distributed or fully back, but there's going to be more hybrid. Maybe that's something that could have an analog. Is there a technology that's coming or that it's currently present? You know, people being familiar with the market on these things that could be pretty central to this. Those would be the kinds of things that I would look at. So Britt, thank you for your most excellent question.”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Growth is always good in terms of business strength, position when it makes sense in the market. I'm thinking about the Danny Meyer episodes that we've done, where it's thinking a little bit about like, well, how would you test what it would be like to do the fourth studio or the fifth studio? Could you do it without fully committing to it and see if that makes a decision? It's a little bit like what Danny found when he was doing the hospitality business was to say, well, wait, I have such a special experience here. I don't know what to do. Now eventually that led him to Shake Shack. And that might be the kind of thing that could be really important to you. And so my primary modification of the nudge for you is to think about, okay, how do I experiment and try to act to get some answer to the question, not just growth or not growth? And what that could be? I mean, it could be a, I don't know, you're an expert in your business where I'm a novice, right? But something in that.”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this may be funny from we're here on the masters of scale and so forth, where you'd think the answer would be no, scale always, scale always. And actually it isn't. There's a couple different things where that could be. One is the question of if things are working well, if you can project the future and you don't see competition or disruption coming either in technological or shift of the market, then it's actually in fact not irrational to say this works and we're going to actively continue it. You shouldn't continue it just because you go, hey, I don't have any better ideas. You should always have that active mind to disruption might be coming. I actually think that that little internal voice you have is part of the reason you're such a high performer, which is a good thing, which is, no, shouldn't I be doing more? Shouldn't I be doing more? And I think that you want that voice to stay. You don't want the voice ever to go. Nope, these three studios, those are what I'm doing.”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gym business through the pandemic, you must have grit and kind of just heart of going forward because my heart goes out to you.”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll start with the punchline. I think Becky is going to win. Tudor, the challenge was, of course, by referring to the Slack thing. You lost some time in getting your answer out, which is actually kind of, by the way, a classic for your kind of two floor elevator pitch. I think you were going to end up in a very similar place because the notion of diving into the team, the problems that they've been solving before exactly is the kind of lab that Becky was describing is actually in fact a very good way to find it. You both had some very smart answers and not envy. The very quick answer you have to give, but it's been a delight. Thank you both. Thank you so much.”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is actually inspired by the Slack story, which I found really impressive. In the course of developing this app, there's been a lot of ideas about how the technology can be built. And in order to make sure we respond to a need that we realized wasn't there, we actually found out other needs that we were actually solving in the course of building this app. One of them is the speed of getting A rough game, I wouldn't want to be in your guys' shoes.”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
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2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think this time I will pick Becky because I actually think the question is also how do you reframe what you think the market is? It's a classic kind of thing that entrepreneurs need to do and go, okay, obviously there's the mommy daddy I want and the kind of the classic, but yet it is that decision. And then as you were beginning to sketch your pivot, you begin to sketch things that you could then go measure very quickly and know whether or not that pivot is the right thing to be doing. It's kind of like analytics, data, theory, customers, all the things that are the things that live and die for entrepreneurs. So thank you both very much.”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really kind of lean into what we do well. And also analyze the market to see what can we pull in that's really successful. That's achieving the goals.”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So look, both of you are entrepreneurs, so you understand measuring the customer. And both are responding to a limited data circumstance. I'm going to actually say today the winner is Tudor because I think going to the theory of the case where you go, okay, I'm going to go to a hypothesis as to where I'm pivoting in addition to the data and the customer is the right place to go. And I also share the sympathy of stress eating through the Halloween candy, which is the reason I don't go trick-or-treating. But both quintessentially smart entrepreneurial answers.”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm looking for is less like, oh my God, lightning strikes, like you were just genius at this particular thing, but more how it is that you operate at a kind of entrepreneurial speed. Because one of the things that's very key around entrepreneurship is the speed at which you make decisions, the speed at which you analyze possible outcomes because part of the thing that in almost every entrepreneurial scenario is you have a limited amount of time for making those decisions now, that being said, just like entrepreneurship, you're going to have to express yourself clearly and quickly, just kind of like the classic three floors in an elevator pitch, but that's the nature of the entrepreneurial game is running fast through the dark, you know, in the fog with uneven ground and then still keeping a coherent vision and being able to articulate your particular answer to the pivot point quickly.”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is always frustrating. Right. You'll be able to kind of measure through it. And then I think the last thing that I always do for this kind of data measurement is there's this kind of philosophy of this, which is like data is fact. It's like Newton, you know, dropping the ball from the tower. And actually, in fact, it all comes from a theory of the world, a theory of how things are today, how things are moving, and kind of where they're going. And so refining that theory, and that means talking to the other smart people you know, because that can help you evolve your theory. And then in evolving your theory, you can essentially kind of get to, is my theory for interpreting my data is the way that I should be monitoring it, right? And then, you know, I guess the last thing I'd say is look for cheap, quick ways to measure that are specific to your kind of virtual events. You guys are in it and you guys are entrepreneurs and clearly part of the innovative hustle.”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's the exact right set of questions. One of the pieces of wisdom in your question already is you can't just say, hey, I measured this piece of data and that piece of data says X and now it's stable because the very market might change, not just competitors and all the rest. And so I think you need to be keeping a relatively fluid measurement going just as you're gesturing. Now, usually when you're doing that, you're trying to do good, not perfect. You're trying to do quick and hasty data measurement like, for example, surveys or not very quickin, like, okay, how is this working? Or did you guys like this or would you like to see more of this like fall offs? What registration look like? I actually would do what internet entrepreneurs do, which is kind of paper testing, which is like do little, low cost advertising inventory saying, hey, do you like this or do you want this? And that gives you some market signal and you want to do it every so often as you're kind of thinking that things might be evolving or changing. And even though some of the data will be noisy, some of it probably even inaccurate.”
2021-12-14 · Masters of Scale · Strategy Session LIVE!: How to protect yourself from copycat businesses? When should you seek funding? How to entice funders to invest in a niche business? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT