YouSaid · the spoken record

Rufus Griscom

lines on the record: 32
first: 2015-12-31
most recent: 2015-12-31
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

“It's a business for us. I mean, it's great in general with these disruptive dynamics, it's good to be a small entity figuring out ways to benefit from it. I mean, generally, there's a long period of time during which dollars get turned into dimes. And if you're starting with pennies, you can turn into dimes, you're in the right place. If you got dollars, you've got a problem. That's kind of a.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. And the problem is that these stars become lost leaders. The economics for the media companies no longer support getting in bidding wars over the stars. I do think that it's a problem for the big media companies. It's a business.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that I'm a huge fan of the New York Times. I think they've done a great job online managing a really challenging situation. And I think it's a problem for a lot of these media companies that the stars, Glenn Beck defected from Fox, Nate Silver was running basically election coverage for the New York Times. And I'm guessing ESPN probably paid him more money.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The fourth one I should mention is Bertelsmann, BDMI, which is important because they own Penguin Random House, which is half the book publishing business in the U.S. now. You know, I think it's broadly, I would say that of all the meetings that we took with different investors, and we also have some wonderful VCs and private investors in Helio, the media companies were the quickest to start nodding their heads and say, this makes a huge amount of sense. Let's do this.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So now you're creating these little mini media companies. One thing that's interesting is that you've got media companies as your investors, Comcast, New York Times, Bloomberger, those three big ones that have invested in you. Yeah, what does that mean if we're thinking about the future of media and we notice that these relatively big or very big media companies are putting money into your version of a new media company? What does that mean?”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so our big revelation was that the more we looked around, we thought, gosh, one of the effects of social media has been to make individuals more important than institutions, right? Because people are not, of course, we want you everybody to follow Helio on Twitter and on Facebook, but people tend to like to follow people. And we think that basically the power of individuals as little media companies is rising in proportion to the power of institutions. And so we think that the future media company were a compelling version of a future media company is one that is basically a platform for a partner for all these one-person media companies. And we were doing that in a small way in the mon blog category of Babel.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you mean the 300 mom bloggers you're saying. Yeah, they had their own blogs, but they were blogging for us on Babel. So they had a separate presence on Babel. And yes, they were very effective at driving traffic. We amplified the sort of the social distribution traffic driving on the supply side of sort of traffic. And we also sold the advertising.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you're scaling a business by getting these people to sort of do the heavy lifting by sort of your users become sort of the people who are also generating revenue for you, right? They're doing the work. I'm not saying it's untoward. I'm saying that's how you scale the business instead of focusing on a handful of people and trying to build significant businesses around them. You get a lot of people to build smaller businesses.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Yeah, what we learned at Babel was that partnering with these mom bloggers were one person media companies, the top two or three.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Congratulations. That's a successful exit, as they say. And there's a connection between Babel and Helio, right? So we spent the first part of this conversation talking about how Helio is going to focus on a dozen or so really brainy people who are also famous. But then your idea is to sort of expand Helio and sort of make a bigger base of people who maybe are not as well known, but also have followings and sort of create a platform for them. Is that the connection?”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's find a better ad category that we also care about. So, my wife and I had been clumsy. We'd procreated. We had a kid. We were parents. We looked around. We didn't relate to any of the parents or magazines. We said, hey, there's an opportunity to create a more honest magazine for parents, not magazine website, and resource community for parents online. And what we learned very, very quickly was that the people who were telling the story of what it's like to be a parent and providing and curating kind of resources and services for parents most effectively, where it's this universe of mom bloggers, which in 2006 was in co-aid, it was very small. I mean, it was, there were a lot of them, but it was not a business. And we basically built Babel into a platform for mobbloggers. Eventually we had the top three or four hundred mob bloggers on Babel blogging and built it into a decent-sized business.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We launched it in late 2006, and our logic was gosh, we've learned a fair amount about online publishing or building audiences online. And back then, a few million uniques was huge, right? It was sort of the equivalent of 20 or 30 million today. It was kind of a 10x. I mean, there were probably a tenth as many people online. But what we learned very painfully and were sort of slow to wake up to is that a smart magazine about sex and culture is not a great ad category. We managed believe it or not to generate some ad revenue. We survived because of premium subscriptions and personal revenue. But we thought, hey, we've learned something about online publishing. Let's find out.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Just very quickly to fill in the gap. We launched an online dating business, Nerd Personals, which was really the most successful part of Nerve from a business perspective. We spun off an online dating technology company, Spring Street Networks. We ended up selling both Nerve and Spring Street Networks, but not for a lot of money. Nerve is currently owned by IAC, and it's still published nerve.com. Babel, we launched basically.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, nerd.com is sort of what made you famous. We weren't wildly successful sort of as a business, though, right? Then you launched a second company, Babel. I'm skipping one of the network. Yeah, so explain what you wanted Babel to be and what Babel became”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly by 98.99, right? So 96.97 was very different from 98.99. By 98.99, I mean, things had heated up. And by 99, it was just crazy. And there's a lot of money flying around. And then there was ad revenue. A lot of the ad revenue was different. Internet companies advertising on each other's sites. So nerd.com.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“News story sometimes. Yeah, particularly because we were like girlfriend and boyfriend both wearing glasses, starting a website about sex and culture. So that helped. But yeah, there were many fewer websites. It was much easier to get attention. On the one hand, on the other hand, there were much fewer people online. There were sort of no real revenue streams or business models. And there weren't investors. You basically had, I mean, we, you know, took us, you know, nine months to raise 100 grand. And there weren't venture capitalists and seed investors as there are today. So it was even harder to raise money, at least in 1997. But it was easier to get attention.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, so there was obviously dramatically less noise back then, which was very, very helpful. We had a few weeks after we launched, there was a page on us in Newsweek, which at the time was a big deal. Right.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Early on Which is very common at the time to have no business plan. Now we're fate, we're entering that phase of this Web 2.0 cycle or Web3O cycle where people are expected to not only have business plans but maybe even revenue or products. But beyond the fact that you were famous then, what are some other differences between launching a business in 2015 and launching a web business in 1997?”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You were a famous New York internet celebrity. It is true that there was actually a New York magazine cover that said Silicon Valley 1.0 and there were something like eight or 10 or 12 of us on the cover. And I was one. And Stephen Johnson, who's now one of our thought leaders, was another one because he'd started Feed Magazine, which is an early online magazine. But I love that period because I think the first instinct that we had, or a lot of people had when this kind of whole internet thing emerged was, oh my gosh, it's the next generation printing press, right? And so the instinct was to become pamphletiers, right? Gutenberg comes out with a printing press and people print pamphlets and share their ideas. And there was something very pure about that. That we have a new kind of more efficient way to share ideas. And so that was, you know, it was a huge amount of fun. And we went into it with no business plan, with very little, you know, we started with 100 grand.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do anticipate that we will have a space for sponsors, that, for instance, we might say, hey, we're going to identify the top 25 science thinkers in the US, and that could be brought to you by a GE or some kind of entity. And they could pay for the first 5,000 downloads of the Helio Essentials sort of short format book product. So we do think that's an opportunity. It's a secondary revenue stream for us.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so our thesis is that what we've said consistently to investors and our partners and the writers and thinkers we're working with is that we don't think that, say, Malcolm Gladwell, for instance, can generate $50 million in subscription revenue like Glenn Beck. We do think that Malcolm Gladwell and people like Gretchen Rubin of the Happiness Project and Steve and Johnson and a lot of other great writers and thinkers can potentially generate half a million or a million a year in subscription revenue, right? That's real money. When you think about it When you look at our top the first 15 people we're starting with, at least half of them have sold more than a million copies of their books, right? If they can sell 10,000 subscriptions for $10 a month, that's 1.2 million a year in revenue. So it doesn't take a huge amount of traction to generate pretty meaningful revenue for them.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We think now there have been other entities like Tap TV that have brought on Sarah Palin and some evangelical Christians.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the Glen Beck case study is totally fascinating, right? This guy leaves Fox News, starts his own website, grows to what we're told is 400,000 people paying 10 bucks a month. So close to $50 million in subscription revenue, negative option recurring subscription revenue. And these are people, and this is not through an app, this is people typing with two fingers their credit cards in. And on top of that, they have ad revenue rumored to be a total of about 90 million year in revenue. So this is the Glenbeck case study, I think, has provoked a lot of interest from a lot of both internet startups and established companies thinking like, hey, if this is replicable, this is potentially transformative for media. The problem has been that a lot of the people who've tried to replicate it in different categories have not succeeded until recently, frankly, with the Kardashians, with what Whale Rock has done with the Kardashians, where they're rumored to have generated a 30 million run rate in the first week of downloads with a Kardashian apps, which is obviously a very different subject matter. But so...”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The That's right. I mean, we're definitely by design, we're starting with very successful, very famous writers and thinkers, intersection of business, science, and optimization, helping you get better at executing your business, at optimizing your life based on kind of great ideas and science. And that's our starting place. And we spent a lot of time thinking about, you know, should we start with pets? Should we start with gardening? Should we start with food? And we decided this was the right subject area. And that within that subject area, we should start with the top people.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're missing, but yeah, but that's part of it, right? So the idea is to take a famous person and say, we're going to create a business based around your personality, what you say, what you think, and we're going to share the revenue with you.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, so we're not charging them. Everything we're doing initially is free. We will, it's effectively a freemium model. We will be offering sort of paid products that are like distillations of their books that include video. And effectively, you will be able to subscribe to a channel to interact with these thought leaders through Helio.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So yes, they do. I mean, they'll be fine without us. All of them, but what's so interesting is you look at these top writers and thinkers, and most of them, they tweet, but they don't really use Facebook. They don't have YouTube channels. They have lots of videos on YouTube, but they generally, they're 60-minute speeches they've given somewhere and 15-minute television interviews. Nobody's editing those down to the great 30, 45-second clip video clip, A-B testing headlines, and putting it out there in kind of more snackable form.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's exactly right. So we're taking the ideas of these people. And almost most of our first 15 people have top TED talks, right? So it is precisely these kinds of people, and they have best-selling books. A lot of them sold millions of copies of their books. And we're basically taking their ideas. We're helping them to distribute them through social media. We're creating a whole range of different ways of kind of bringing those ideas to life. So we're creating like infographics as blog posts. We're shooting original video with them. And we're also kind of covering their ideas and making them relevant and topical.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a matter of a couple months. These are people who've published books, sold millions of copies of books, they have very popular TED talks. You're going to do the same thing on your site or you're doing something different.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you go there and you discover people like Susan Kane, who wrote Quiet, the Power of Introverts, Dan Pank, who wrote Drive About Human Motivation, Gretchen Rubin who wrote The Happiness Project, right? We have a collection of, at launch now, we have 15 of these big writers or thought leaders. We'll soon have 50 to 100 in a matter of a couple months.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What is Helio? Helio is a platform for discovering and interacting with the ideas of the world's great writers and thinkers. And not only interacting with their ideas, but interacting with them directly.”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thanks, Kare. One of the cool things about my job is I get to talk to people who create lots of interesting companies, but usually they create one company, maybe two. I'm here with Rufus Griscom, who's created three or four interesting companies. Want to talk to him about the fourth, but let's go over the list, Rufus. You started nerve and nerve.com. Spring Street Networks”
2015-12-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rufus Griscom, Heleo CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT