YouSaid · the spoken record

Ric Elias

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106
first
2025-12-23
most recent
2025-12-23
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “All the capital came out of my business school of friends, and I'm a proud guy. I'm like, I can't. So we literally just hunker down, hustle, sold, marketing program, sold anything anybody to hire us to do consulting things. And we knew a lot about direct marketing at the time. And for a couple years, just muscled our way through it. In 2004, we had enough money to pay our investors back. And we said, look, we made a commitment to you. Here's your money back times 10%, but we're done. If you keep your money in here at your own risk, and I hopefully hope you take the money back because that burden of taking someone's money was a lot. And in those 405 was when Google was becoming the de facto aggregator of intent, they had this rule where you could not double serve as a brand. And we started thinking, wow, brands are going to need somebody to kind of help them defend themselves in this environment.”

    2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “It will outlive us through the people that get trained in our platform, not as a company itself. And then many of the businesses hopefully are here for decades to be. But that's really where our basic principles. So when you start with that, the business plan was completely flawed. We raised $2 million from our friends. This is the frenzy of January 2000. This is before the first internet bubble implosion. Raise money on three PowerPoint charts on the dumbest of ideas, basically a paper based search engine, where we were going to help online companies use offline media. By November, we had 117,000 dollars left. No revenue. This crazy thought of like, I will never attend my reunions.”

    2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Look, I think we're more lucky than Sprinkle Luck. I've always believed that. And if I look back in our journey, Dan and I started this company in January 2000. Dan and I worked together before this at a company called Send In CUC. And we really started with two principles in mind. One was let's build a company we would want to work for. And Dan and I are not typical. We're very different in hopefully good ways, but we both are of the same opinion that life is to be lived with enjoyment and that we will want to work at a place or build a place that we will want to go work every day so we never have to work through definition of being an entrepreneur. And then the second one, and I think we said it at the time without really understanding it, which was a company that would outlast us. And even though we would want to do this for a long time, Dan retired about a year ago, a company that would outlive thus. What I have come to realize.”

    2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “The easiest way to understand it at a high level. You can think of ourselves as an operating private equity platform with permanent capital, hyper focused on the digital world with different business models under the belief that culture really matters and that if you use that as the connective tissue inside of the portfolio companies, you can get some level of alpha vis-a-vis these companies being separate. And today we, depends on how you want to count, have about 15 different companies inside of the portfolio all over the place between Europe, Brazil, Puerto Rico, and then our core businesses here, inclusive of a big joint venture with United Healthcare and so forth.”

    2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “We've been on this journey for 24 years. And in one sense, it feels like we're about to go on another 10-year journey of reinventing ourselves. Red Ventures over time, hopefully becomes a place where a lot of this, whatever success we've had gets put back into the system. So more of a full circle versus a full line to the right or to the left or down. But I still think that we're years or decades away from 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

  6. “My big dream is to live in a state of well-being most of the time and to have a sense of lifelong satisfaction when the incomes. So it's really very internal versus something that gets accomplished or left behind.”

    2025-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source