YouSaid · the spoken record

Ric Elias

lines on the record: 106
first: 2025-12-23
most recent: 2025-12-23
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

“And so my buddies are like, man, the league in Puerto Rico. I'm like teasing, and then all of a sudden, like, we found a team. And then all of a sudden, the team is to farm. Like, I'm not driving an hour and a half for a game. It has to be in San Juan. I'm like sitting the most incredible boundaries. So they found a team that we can move to San Juan. And we could play at a little volleyball court for three years. Well, they build us a court and it's the worst team. It's never made the playoffs decent enough guy, but he couldn't afford the team. So we ended up buying the team. We bought it a year ago. And I'm like, I have no time. I'm not doing anything. It's been the greatest for you.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was agent till I'm super tall. I really almost never made any good team. I was always in the B team. I sometimes made the C team. I was really horrendous, but as I grew into my teenage, I got better and I started working at it and it became like one of those things where I recognize effort to growth and reward and I got better and better and better and I literally was the last cut of a semi-pro team my senior year in high school. And the assistant coach was my high school coach. So maybe that's why I was Alaska and not the first cot. But I was there and I belonged and then I was getting paid like $100 a week. I was a professional. And I loved it. And by the way, it was the best thing that happened to me because then I went and studied and that's when I left for the US. But I've always loved the game and I love it here. I sit next to the Hornet's bench. I'm good friends with like five coaches in the NBA that I talk to all the time. I know, oh, I know everybody. It's a language for me. It's one of the most beautiful language languages. College basketball. I know all these guys and I love it. And there's no currency other than love.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All my high school buddies, and we all get together, and we're that age again, and we all love hoops. And the inside story is, I always love hoops more than it loved me”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're involved in like rewriting laws that are good for the island or helping entrepreneurs and investing in things. And I'm finding insane purpose. On this, I love Charlotte. I love Puerto Rico. I can be both so I can see myself just part of that and helping people that need either courage or capital or conviction. Go do something bigger. And it's this beautiful movement called Forward 787 that we just are all a part of and it's authorless and all of that. Well, as part of that, now that's preamble to this thing. I love all that.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But as I have an idea, and we made this massive pledge that we were going to move Puerto Ricans back, that we were going to create real employment in Puerto Rico, that we were going to pay U.S. salaries, that we were going to train people and fast forward a journey. And we have five companies in Puerto Rico with hundreds of employees disrupting banking, disrupting media, really a phenomenal. And it's a movement. It's not even a company. All the CEOs, a little bit of a different org design there than we have here or in the UK. And it's been beautiful. I've reconnected with my island and I left Puerto Rico or I didn't go back after college because it was too small, that little island. And I'm falling in love with the island because it's too small and you actually can do something, right?”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I get two things out of this. But like many other Puerto Ricans that were on the mainland and had some resources, you felt compelled to help. We raised a bunch of money and flew a plane full of stuff. And I took a lot of my friends. We got them four by fours and we got into the mounts and we were delivering baby formula and medicines and all these things and feeling really good about ourselves. Our egos were super healthy that we were saving nothing. And I got back on the plane coming back and I'm like, I am such a hypocrite. I literally have been looking for an opportunity to reconnect with my island. I'm here today and I'm feeling really good because I deliver boxes. If you're really, really going to do something, this is the moment. So I came back and organized our comms team and they always get scary because I have an idea. It's code for like, oh no. And because a lot of them are bad ones.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Little bit of context Hurricane Maria was, I think it's seven years coming up now, six or seven years. After Hurricane Maria, if you're Puerto Rican, you really love your island. And I found this really interesting. A lot of people ask me, oh, you put a Rican and you're American. I'm like, I am both. I'm not a percentage. I'm 100% both. And I'm really happy to be both 100%.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do it in a way that is honorable and ethical and purposeful. I believe that all this random success I've had because it's more random than not is an opportunity to actually put it back into the system in ways. I'm reconnecting with Puerto Rico in the most beautiful ways. What a privilege. It's my purpose to put it all back in. So for me, life has become really, really simple. That was kind of my last 10 years until the last two. Until the next challenge comes. That's what life is about. The contrast of our challenges is what makes our growth feel meaningful.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing the things that society asked me to do, that I have forgotten that I actually can leave this place, this world a little better than I found it for my existence and to me that's the only meaning of life. And that manifested itself on like my kids. I really justify myself being a light 5% of the parenting, my wife carried the load and she did an incredible job. But I felt like, oh, I'm doing this side of the equation and she does that side of the equation. And I was like, I've changed dramatically. My relationship with my kids right now is fantastic because I realized that that to me is my purpose. But my purpose is also this business. I am here 24 years later and as engaged as I am because I believe that this place is a place of good, it's a place of good where you come here, you get invested in, you get trained, you graduate, you do go great things. And hopefully.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Super forgiving. And to me, true forgiveness, and there's many definitions, is when you forgive, when the other person doesn't apologize. Because the forgiveness comes from love and comes from a language of accepting the humanity of all of us. That was to me super liberating. At the time, it was commanded as a regret. All of this were regrets. And maybe the last one is this plane is about to crash. And, you know, when you fly, you can count down when we're going to hit the water. And you're like, okay, please blow up kind of thing. I really had this thought is, wow, I was not scared. And I thought it would be super scary. And I was certain. And the feeling was actually sadness. The feeling was somehow I had missed my opportunity to leave my mark in this world. I had not focused on whatever my purpose was meant to be. I was so busy accumulating.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saying, hey, this is who I am, I let go of all guilt. Not that I don't take responsibility, but the forgiveness happened to myself at the moment. It's like, I no longer had this notion and I think guilt drives a lot of our ego, a lot of our comparisons sit, a lot of this notion of having to be right versus choosing to be happy. And look, this is not a perfect journey. And at times your ego gets caught up in this and your ego gets in the way. Trust me compared to when this happened, I am incredibly, incredibly lighter. I don't want to die and I don't want the ego to be the one that shows up every day. And as a result, the problem that what happens when you have tremendous forgiveness for yourself, one, your conversation with yourself changes, you become incredibly kind, you become a lot more light, but you then find forgiveness in everything. I am super.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And how I showed up every day. And it was this notion that, you know what, I hate it. I hated what that meant and that I didn't realize that that was a mask that I was putting on and that I didn't need to have that mask on. That eagle started with, okay, where does that come from? And for me, Patrick was a lot of learning. I have this moment when the plane is going to crash. We talked about religion a bit today. I don't share this a lot. I don't know how people take it, but I ask myself, okay, do I buy insurance? I can ask for forgiveness. I was raised Catholic. I can ask for insurance right now. And for sure, if there is such a thing, and I was not, I'm not a practicing Catholic or wasn't at the time a practicing Catholic. And I said to myself, I am not because I'm not a hypocrite. I may be all flawed in many ways, but it's not that. And it just didn't feel natural to me. And what happened as a result to me after that, after just...”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do something wrong. I'm going to drink my best wines whenever the person is there. I'm going to say, I love you to anybody I love. I am going to try my very best every day to try to like not regret not doing or saying something. And that was wonderful. So I live out loud, so to speak, because I know it's going to change in an instant. Tomorrow, maybe that instant, and I'm not having that regret if it happens. The second thing that I thought about it was like you go into super human, right? Your adrenaline is shooting, you're in survival mode, you're going to die. There was this sense of almost embarrassment of how much I had allowed my ego to be who showed up in the world, how much I had spent energy being wronged by people or being more or less better or worse than how much my ego played a role.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, when I think about it, and I think about it now more evolved with time behind a lot of it had to do with the immediate emotion that I felt was just, oh no, it's over. It's this sense of real regret that it's over and there were so many things I had left undone. It all changed in an instant. Life changes in an instant. We all have had friends that things have happened to in an instant. I think in our evolution we're unable to process that because we would have never left the cave if we felt that, right? So there's this concept called hedonic adaptation that we will adapt to whatever situation. And that's what life is about. We have adopted this thing. And that was for me this notion of gosh, when the plane landed, I am going to live with intense purpose every day. I am going to ask for forgiveness the moment.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not knowing that it would ever get published. But by the way, it was the greatest gift I give myself because people talk about it. And it's a reminder of me of a promise I made to myself that day, which is I was not going to let that experience someday I wanted to be a part of me, not something that happened to me. I've tried to live very hard very consciously of the gift I got that day.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of it, especially to this. But at that moment, I look back at the flight attendant, Patrick, and then all of a sudden there's complete terror in her eyes. She's like, holy cow, and training this is, we are not landing at an airport. I don't know that, but I can see her eyes, and I know that that's what it means. And the great gift of that day was 90 seconds to literally say it's over. I am sitting there going like, oh my goodness, it's over. Not only is it over. And then some people you may have a near-death experience of a second or two seconds. This is a minute and a half to basically sign off from life. And that's for me been super formative. Previous to this last year and a half, it was a real moment of kind of resignation in life. And lots of things happened from how have I dealt with spiritual beliefs from that time all the way to how it did impact my life. And I did that.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're just managing the autopilot or whatever the inputs in the computer. In that day, it was a New York cold day. I was coming home to Charlotte. My biggest concern was landing and coaching my son's basketball practice. And as we take off, there's a large explosion in the plane. Bam, half asleep as you're taking off, you realize, I look at the flight attendant and I'm in 1D so I can see the flight attendant. There's nothing in their face. Just like annoyance, it's like there's going to be whatever because we turn the plane right away and nothing is happening. Smoke is coming in. You can hear the engine struggling, but you think we're just going to go back landing. We're not that high. Probably three, four thousand feet high. And then all of a sudden Sully gets on the microphone and says, this is your captain. So he identifies himself and he says, three words, the only three words he said. And this was the moment. He says, praise for impact. The movie is actually very true to a lot.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% certain. It was either I'm going to blow up and that will be a lot better than breaking into pieces in January 15th in the Hudson River in New York and freezing in 40 seconds. If we're given those two options, I think blowing up is better. And then you have 90 seconds to say goodbye to your life with no suffering, zero suffering. And then on the other side of this, no one dies. So you can talk about it and celebrate it and understand it at a time where our country was in incredible crisis. We were coming out of the financial crisis of, well, wait, this country was in a low place looking for a story. So we were really lucky that we had the most incredible pilot on that seat that day that in many ways, and we can talk about him, he'd been preparing for that moment his whole life. He was a gliding instructor. Later on, I've gotten to know him really well. And he would say you're only a pilot when you lose an engine. Otherwise,”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To find our connection to ourselves. And crisis usually reveals that. And that was, to me, the big transition for me, this crisis is giving me a perspective of true appreciation of the really nice things you and I get to do every day. The rest will come and go.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know many people that are well. I think everybody's on a journey, but you and I know a lot of people that are in those magazines. And it's not that they don't have well moments and it's not like their good is a bad thing either. But it's just really hard for our egos. It's really hard for what others may say of us. It's really hard for society's value to put on us not to affect us. And the fact that you're in the cover of a magazine tells you something. Vanity is life's greatest sin. A little bit of this, you got to decide what it is, but it can't become you. You can't put that inside of you. And I think we're all in some struggle, in some journey.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To that manipulates the way that we think the world wants us to show up. So to me, this is like a really interesting journey. And I think I'm early in this journey. My hope is in the next 10, 20 years is die peacefully will be understanding that I became super clear on how to live life the way that I think my soul was intended to live.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goals and no goals, and the value of goals. Think about another one: it's like we spent all our time doing things. We have to-do lists. Everything is a do. Society rewards us for accomplishing things, for 450 podcasts, for this and that that's doing. And what you realize when you get to my age, it's like being, it's like a much better state of mind. Being is a place where there's nothing to do, where you're actually doing things for no reason at all. You're doing it because you feel connected to whatever it is. And it's really hard when you spend 110% of your time doing to find the muscle and find the space to start being. And well-being is a place where you feel really settled inside and you spend the time you want just feeling connected to whatever you want to be connected to. And you suspend all the societal bullshit that we give so much power.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is what the part of well being comes from. If you think about well-being, it's really two different words because they're connected when we say them, we think about it as one thing. And if you look at the definition of well-being, it makes no sense. It's like double talk. But if you decouple those two words, will is actually that feeling that you get a peacefulness inside, that connection to your soul, that sense that you are showing up the way you want to show up, that you're in control, that you're your own best friend, that no matter what's happening in the world, nothing can change that feeling inside. And that, to me, has been the biggest realization of the last two years. It's like, I am really well. And I am well because, you know what? I'm kind to myself. I like my life. I do the best I can. I screw up all the time. I laugh at myself. And then being is the one that I find so interesting. We were talking about.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I felt well. I felt well because I was dealing with all the circumstances in the best way I could. And I was finding a tremendous amount of insight and peacefulness in that growth that I was having on how I was showing up. And I realized, wow.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite new thought. I think in life, things are good. Like people, I'm good or business is good and all these things. And that's okay. That's a reflection of externalities or what's happening in the world. I've been through some pretty difficult personal things in the last couple years. And I have found the notion of, people will ask me how are things good. I'm like, I'm lying. They're not good. They're horrible. They're actually really, really not good. And what I realized, but even though they were not good,”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the body, it's like heart disease starts in your 20s. It doesn't show up into your 50s. And specifically, for example, there's nothing you can do to reverse it. You can slow it down. We abuse our bodies because we can take it. But once you get into 40, 5, 50, 55, the same thing that's happening to your thinning hair or to whatever it is on your body, it's happening to your organs. It's happening to everything. You and I are both friends with Peter Artia, but I really want to live really well. I want to age as well as I can given the gene code I got. And for that, I need to take care of myself. So I'm probably 50 pounds lighter than I was when my kids were born. And it's been five pounds a year for the better part of 10 years. I want to enjoy my life at the end, but not for any other reason. I don't want to be the healthiest guy in the cemetery either. I think life is to be enjoyed and balanced.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For money. That's what we're doing. We work our butt off for money. And at some point, if you keep doing that, you'll end up realizing that you completely miss the point and that when you make enough money, you use that money to give you back your time. One of the things back to this point of 39 and 57, I was big into time and I have all these principles around time and how do I think about compounding time and all these things that are kind of weird. In the last couple years, I realized that time is actually a subcomponent of something more interesting or more important, which is our energy. I only want to invest my energy in things that give me multiple currencies back. And I'm very aware of my energy. If I'm with somebody and I feel like I drains my energy, it's like, you know what? I'm not doing that again. Or, wow, I love my energy with this person in this situation, then you lean into that energy, right? So I'm very thoughtful of today is like, I just want good energy.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Money is a tricky thing because money corrupts society and most people basically have set up that more is better, more is better, and we measure things in money and value and the value of your company and the value of your business. And in reality, if you focus exclusively on money, you miss the journey. You miss what this is all about. After a certain amount of money and everybody's a little different, but it's a lot less than people think, it doesn't really affect your lifestyle. And at some point, it affects how people treat you and it affects your kids. It affects what you're going to do with it, your responsibility with it. It affects all of it. I think money is one of those things that is a privilege to have. But if you're not careful, it can change you. Or more importantly, it can make you so addicted that you spend the rest of your life accumulating something that is worthless beyond a point. We trade all our time.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't really think the person is generally a good human being. It doesn't have to be like me or whatever. I'm turned up because that will reflect on the things that I won't be able to see. So I'm trying to get a sense of is this a good human being? If the person on the other side, if I sense that they're running away from something versus running towards something, they know something I don't know, so I'm very beware of why is it, why now, why us, why this price. I'd rather pay a little more on something that people want than steal something. And one of the things we do is once we lock in on something, Patrick, we've never retraded on anything. Our word really matters, and I think ultimately I expect that to be the case on the other side. Once we lock in, we go for it.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't compound growth at 20%, but we also are able to use the data for this and we can build a model for that and we can connect that to everything. Then you can say a bunch of 0.7s added up end up being two and a half, three times something. That's the value of the platform is that you can look at these things and sometimes these assets have a lot of insurance into the platform or other value that brings. And because of our cultural alignment, you can get that out. A lot of companies can't do this if it runs like a traditional portfolio or a private equity portfolio because the companies are not connected at the tech layer like we are or at the cultural layer like we are.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We really like the bets we're leaning into right now, so we're trying to figure out things that are kind of be augmentative to the bets we have that are going to unlock something and are going to motorize in some ways, give us a capability, give us something that is unique and different. But when I sit down, a couple of other things that I think about without thinking about I really try to understand what is this person's motivation. I've bought enough things and been around enough things that ultimately it's not what they're telling you, it's really what they want. If they're going to really sell you something and not really be committed to whatever the transition period is multiple years from whatever else, that's really, really important. Understand the motivation of the seller. And what we've done really well is when we've engaged with somebody that we really understand the why. The second thing is I like places where you can win in multiple ways. So when you make a single bet, psychocaving this happens and we have to.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the US, we're really excited about the mortgage space and what we may do as a mortgage lender. We have taken this operational chops now and are doing lots of different things that are not performance marketing. So we took this B2B business, ended up saying, wow, we can do this and buy assets to do this ourselves. And the value is now we get all that richness of data to take to our B2B business. So I can go to somebody and say, look, I have a ton of consumer intent data. But then we're saying, look, this chops apply to anything. Using the private equity head, we're like, we think we can do this in other places. And with fairly good success, we've been able to prove that we're good operators.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Compounding of a lot of things, a lot of 3% on each other quickly are 20%. But here's what's really interesting, Patrick. You could argue is maybe 50% of our business. The businesses we're super excited about in the UK, we own a true software business that powers 80% of all the real estate agents. We own a database that nine out of ten banks use to do all their valuations.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell me how someone gets paid, and I'll tell you how they behave. And most people that are in this space are here to grow something, to sell it to somebody else. And what we've been able to prove is we've been able to do this across seven or eight different industries. We've had lots of really good competitors shop in an industry or two. Some of them better than us at certain things. Some of them go the brand, okay, I'm going to build my own consumer brand versus building a much better middleware. In others, I'm going to do it really deep here and then I'm going to sell it to somebody. So I think a little bit of this is incentive structures.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have this ability to take anybody's customer flows and using all our capabilities make it better. So we have embedded a thousand, but we have had more of a quarterback completion rate than a baseball player batting average at taking a company. And if we bought it 10 times within two years, it was four times. And that gave us a lot of conviction to a point where probably we overplayed our hand on our last acquisition. It's just one of those, but we can take any. Faun all where there's heavy data, heavy experiences, and use our technology to basically yield a lot more out of the same flows. That has happened time and time again in every asset we bought.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You think about the core of what Red Ventures was and it still is to some extent. It's a B2B platform on basically doing customer acquisition, performance marketing, growth. Like at the end of the day, when I sit down with a CEO, I said, look, I can help you grow and you only pay me if that's true. It's not the hardest sell. Every CEO needs growth, especially. And we bring tech operators, data. We bring a bunch of tools that are really hard for you to replicate. And it's easy to measure that we provide incremental growth versus what you would do yourself. So it's usually is the rejection of the organization that makes it hard. So the timing of this conversation has to be either new CEO or a crisis or a situation, a business that is usually performing pretty well or feels like they're in a good spot will not want to engage with us in that sense. So by virtue of our value process.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Super talented kids that want to stay in this region and want to be in a place where they get trained, they get invested in, they are pushed on, they love coming here. We have insane talent coming here.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would not be accurate, and that would over inflate really what we did. We did not know we were earlier. Actually, I would argue that we were a little late. We were late to mobile. We're trying not to be late in AI, but we're also afraid to be too early. I think we better ourselves. We work collectively better than most. And we're hyper competitive against ourselves. And in our life, a lot has to do with picking the right competitors. And I always joke that if this building, this campus was in Silicon Valley, it would be relevant. This region is something. I love that saying that you can either be the tail of the lion or the head or the rat. So we get great talent because all the schools around here.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want it. And then I think typically athletes or people that are musicians, people that have been coach heavily in their lives tend up doing well in environments like this because coaching is not criticism. It's like you're making me better. People that are super curious. I think right now to be successful in the next five years, you almost have to be willing to re-underwrite your skill set. You need people that really are in that mindset and mode.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But how do you instill a desire of people wanting to go do something for their growth, for their own good? It's a really interesting challenge and kind of a leadership standpoint.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's seven beliefs right now. We've added some. Making every second count really matters because I think the world right now, those starting in a perch, which I think we are having an advantage, but those are going to be incredibly nimble and willing to adjust and adapt at a whole new wave of innovation coming. It's what matters. And one of the things that happened during COVID is our operating rigor diminished. I'm not sure that is for us alone, but this notion of working less intensely in the office, less together. There's some very good positive things that come out of it in a lot of capacities. And I worry about do we have that fight? Do we have that thirst? Do we have that fear of not being relevant in 10 years? I don't think the people that show up today and look at this beautiful campus feel the same hunger we felt when we didn't know if we were going to make it. It's a circle of life.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, this is all a game. At the end of the day, we've been really lucky to play 24 innings of an incredibly interesting game. Not every inning has been perfect. And that's part of what makes it beautiful.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That string of DNA that will permeate around the whole company. And when you walk into our building, you'll see a series of belief statements written on a wall. And our belief was, look, we can't teach you values. We can't teach you things that you learned at home, but we can tell you what we believe. And if those things resonate with you, then you may want to work here. And then when we do performance reviews, when we do evaluations of things, when anything we do, we come back to, okay, that is kind of our framework. The beliefs evolve and will evolve and will continue to evolve because the core belief is everything is written in pencil, which in itself is a bit disorienting at bad times that it can be other things.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ability to iterate and pivot and iterate and change and all of that. One of the real unique things, look, within race, outside capital into 2010, a decade of bootstrap when we raise capital, we didn't need capital. We didn't need it for anything. We did it because our employees wanted a little liquidity and investors were wanting to buy in. So as a result, and in general, ultimately we ended up in a structure where we have permanent capital. Meaning we have wonderful investors. General Atlantic was our first investor, still a great partner. Silverlake came in five years later, also equally a great partner. But the notion that we don't have a clock, that we don't have a photo up moment where we're going to go public or we're going to try to sell the business. For good and for bad, it's just giving us license to invest in things that others wouldn't. And back to the principle of a place we would want to work for, we decided that our culture was really going to become”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am wonderful at explaining the world looking backwards. We were talking earlier today. I can give you the greatest story, which I will in a second, but I'm not really sure that when we set out to do this, this was the original plan. This is just.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit every month, and our business model gave us the fruits of that. It was all performance-based deals. We got addicted to this notion of incremental performance just becomes really virtuous for us. And that was our thing. Your strengths become a bit of your vulnerability. I think to this day, our DNA, thousands of people strong is incredible operators, really good optimizers, maybe not as great people doing high-end product or experimentation and other things now. We've brought in a lot of people to help do that and all of that. That is probably our core DNA of our adventures.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Survival to some extent when you spend the first four years two little kids, both of us not taking any money home, humility, understanding that this could change easily. Early on we would meet with our 80 employees, call it 2007 and 2008, and we were now making millions of dollars of profit. And I will say, oh, enjoy this. These are the good old days. Someday this will end. It was this constant belief that this was a moment in time and it didn't work as hard as we worked the last three years. This will end. So a lot of it was like we were relentless. And one of the things early on is for whatever reason we have never competed against anybody. I never thought that our competition was somebody else. And we've really never competed. And maybe it's because of our near-death experience as a business so early against the fear of something. We always thought, look, if we can compound our performance.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First meaningful thing we bought where we literally broke the bank. We had a pristine balance sheet was bank rate. Bank rate at the time was $1.4 billion and it wasn't worth that. Before we bought Bancrate, we bought an asset in financial services that it was a tiny asset where we said let's go and prove that we can actually use that asset in Google and paid search and SEO and really start doing what we did in telecommunications using someone else's brand, using our own brand in financial services. We did really well. And we're like, okay, let's put all our chips in the middle of the table. And Bancreate was our first big acquisition at the time, creditcards.com, the point sky, bank rate, and a bunch of other miscellaneous assets. And it was our first, okay, we're in the big leaks now, and we have a lot of debt.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This notion of take your agency, take your call center, take your internal operations. We can all convert it by 30% if that's not true. Don't pay us. But if it's true, give us a piece of the upside. Don't pay us as an agency or a service provider. And that became kind of the first unlock and call it 2006 to 2010. And from there, there's a cemetery full of skeletons, a bad ideas. We went our way through it and lo and behold come from 2010 to now, and this is where we are”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disaggregating intent and customer acquisition is the life vein of all budgets and is actually a line that is not in the operating budget, it's in the revenue budget, so there's a lot more leverage. And we literally said, let's go try to figure that out. Over the first couple years, build a core tech where we can map a couple million toll-free numbers to an online experience and give you a phone experience that was quasi-personalized by how you navigate it online. So we could go to any brand and say we can out convert whatever you're doing.”
2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source