YouSaid · the spoken record

Sam Reich

lines on the record: 102
first: 2025-09-22
most recent: 2025-09-22
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

“For sure, for sure. I mean, you could argue that we are certainly like using the content to market itself, but there's all sorts of ways that we're doing that. So casting and stun casting is certainly one of them. And Dungeons and Drag Queens was huge for us.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we do. We do. We sort of use the organic social performance to clue us into what clips we should amplify. And I think that's helped us out through lull periods.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was basically like I can't run an ad business. I'd be no good at it. I'm in a lot of ways like a terrible salesperson. Like sure. Like in that. So that just wasn't thing.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you turned it around where it's like this content only exists because of a thing that costs money. And if you would like to see more of it, you can come be one of the people who is the reason that this content exists by being a subscriber. I think”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that didn't exist five years ago. Like that, like when COVID happened, that was a very small ecosystem. And now it is a huge part of online video and also very hard to turn into value. So very few people are able to turn their reels and their shorts and their TikToks into any amount of money. Some people have ways, some people have very large audiences, and then it gets easy.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you get to claim a percentage of credit for that. That compliment. But it's so true, Hank. I mean, like you as that character creating moments on the show, some little voice in the back of your head is like, let me turn this into a moment. And when you have a great moment”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think Game Changer is good at this. I think makes some noises very good at this when you think of make some noise being prompt execution, prompt execution. Arguably, Dimension 20 really shouldn't be good at this, and yet it somehow is.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Changer is very good at this because it's just like kind of got that whose line is it anyway vibe for people who have never heard of any of this where where there's just like good clippable moments a lot”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are a few different ways the dominant one is through organic social, meaning they've watched clips from our shows on largely Instagram and TikTok and YouTube shorts.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they watch. So these people subscribe. They don't just like coast the way I do with Netflix, where I'm like, well, maybe there's something I'm going to want to watch there sometime. And I've, you know.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think what's working without putting too fine a point on it is that people subscribe and they stay subscribed and then more and more and also more and more people are subscribing. And they watch.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But hopefully I'll get there. But what's the? For a while, I've been saying now we're like spinning distance from a million, and that's still true.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do feel a little bit like Andy Warhol sometimes, insofar as I think Drop App means a lot of things to a lot of people. And like for my... Purposes, we are a Campbell soup can on a canvas, which is to say, like, the transaction is you pay us now $6.99 a month, and we deliver to you this collection of programming. And yes, we have all sorts of creative ambitions. And yes, I think Dropout has collected this really unique and wonderful. Audience of people who are connected to the content, they're connected to the talent, they're connected to certain things that they've come to understand the brand stands for. But at the core of it is this mechanism that's working. Could work or not work? And if it didn't work, all of this would go away And that feels really important for me to know”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I suppose although. Like really into boiling this business down to its essence and also not sort of like glorifying it. And I think what it is is basically a subscription platform. Like if you were to like really corner me, I would basically say I run a comedy SAS.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It has grown. What kind of business is it? Do you see yourself? So like obviously Dropout itself is a streaming platform. But I imagine that you do not consider yourself a person who runs a streaming platform.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's been way more successful than I could have ever imagined. And it is a lot more work and more stress and more complicated than I could have ever hoped for. So, yeah, I got into this to run a small business, and in fact, we're in a medium sized business. Yeah, you do.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, we are in an unusual position, to be clear. When I signed up to do this, I thought it might be nice and small and humble and that I could work without a boss on my own terms for a long period of time, which coming out of the corporate world is what I wanted.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then on my side of the aisle, these smaller businesses that arguably shouldn't exist because they're much more vulnerable. It's vulnerable to run a small business. It's very vulnerable to run a medium-sized business in the world we're in now where the middle class of our industry has been hollowed out. Sorry to sound like someone you know Your dad, my dad but We are run mostly by people who would be doing something like this regardless of how successful it was because we're so passionate about it which means that we need to be creators because no savvy business person would do this”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think what happens to industry in general, industries take on meta qualities as people want for them to be more successful and therefore business people take over in an effort so that those businesses make more money. I think therefore, what you get is a little bit of like separate what's occurred. What I've seen occur is this sort of separation between these companies that are giant and monolithic and they're run mostly by finance people or maybe like promoted legal or marketing people because those are the people who the board has basically decided can best pull the business levers creative is the product But let's pull the levers of the business. The product is a minor part of the business. I'm saying that facetiously, but that's the attitude of these companies.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess there was a lot of stuff that you would want to have happen. Okay. Turned out very well. But back to the thing. Why do you think that it is less likely and harder to have a creative person at the helm of a media company now than it once was?”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, to make him feel like there might actually not be a net underneath him and to trick the audience into thinking there might not be a net underneath him either Of course, I would not have let him fail. Okay. All right. You've ruined that for me now. I mean, the Game Future host I know would absolutely.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think so. I mean, I think that, like, we grappled with this internally. You know, because sometimes game changer is a game, and other times it's more akin to performance art, and there certainly are the game wonks who like those episodes better. And then there are sort of like the kind of lighter hearted audience members who appreciate Game Changer sort of no matter what it is. I really wanted to do this episode, and I would say that we pushed it through despite some inherent flaws. Gotcha, that it has. And one of them is that the conclusion is inevitable. But what we wanted to do with Jacob and with the audience is to sort of like tease them in terms of just how inevitable is it.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But wild. And also, like, you know, part of this is that you work with a lot of improv comedians. And so like, that's kind of the jam, that's the vibe is like, you know, we're going to play in this space together. But it does seem like you're able to direct the future with the way that you write the shows. It felt like it could have gone a number of ways that would have been much less satisfying than the way that it went. Was that an illusion? Did you create that illusion for me? Was that like sort of a written thing or could it have gone differently?”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so If you don't know this, the idea of this game changer is it is a game show in which the game is different every episode and the contestants arrive not knowing what the game is going to be and then they have to figure it out which”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a time when media companies were more likely to be led by people who enjoyed making media, and a time when now, maybe now media companies are mostly led by people who are kind of on the numbery side, the businessy side. And you are a current example of a person who is a media executive, if you'll excuse me saying that, but who is extraordinarily and deeply and constantly involved as a creative force, as a host on screen talent, but also constantly ideating and even writing. Like you're not just sort of showing up and reading the teleprompter. You are also coming up with ideas for shows and you are the creative vision behind, I think probably what is your most successful show, question mark.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I saw the writing on the wall, which is to say, like, I saw that they didn't have a lot of options. But for the record, I was a chief creative officer. And I didn't even then, much to my own lack of credit over the course of 10 plus years at IEC, I didn't really speak business. So it was a leap of faith in me as a non-businessman. That's what I felt very conscious of walking into that room.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then you had college humor, which has since rebranded to align with the name of the pre-existing streaming platform. But I would call it at this point a pretty different business, and thus I consider you the founder of Dropout. But you don't have to consider yourself that. You certainly are the CEO, though, and you're super in charge. And a strange way for this all to happen. When you proposed this, did you feel like it was likely that they would say yes?”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we signed our deal. In March of twenty twenty on Wednesday, the basketball team stopped playing, and on Thursday we were in COVID lockdown.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe. I mean, what we did with the company was so disruptive. I have a hard time imagining any corporate parent going, yeah, let's try that. Like it was so extreme. I think it probably only could have happened under in a new environment.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You feel like you saw something that the people at the parent company didn't see or that the executives who had been operating college humor didn't see? Like where the value was maybe wasn't where they thought it was”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Insurance for them in case things go very, very well. And I think that they liked the idea of gambling on me more than the idea of handing the company over to a competitor. It's a better story if it works out. It's more exciting for them. And so we did that deal. And for the record, I would not have done that deal purely sentimentally. I did it because I really believed in the business case.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I went and I offered IAC zero dollars, which was the amount of money I had to offer. There was another offer for $3 million, but it would have gone to a competitor. They would have fired everybody and taken the assets and see what they could do with them. And I think that they liked the idea of gambling. Oh, sorry. So my offer was zero dollars. They would end up in the minority. The minority stakeholder. So it was sort of like idiot insurance for them.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, under Clinton, which, as we all know, Labor Secretary is the most lucrative profession that you could possibly imagine.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I find it very funny when there's a certain soundbite on the internet that's like Sam used his dad's money to come and buy dropout. Oh, wow. Which is very funny in the context of my dad being the inequality guy of like you are misinformed in terms of how much money you think this family has.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tried to sell us, but we looked very bad on paper because we had just burned through their whole investment. So a lot of people were interested at first, and then they saw the amount of money we were losing and the business plan, which had us losing even more money before turning profitable. And they all dropped out one by one, leaving me.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, for sure. And I think IC kind of gets a bad rap in all of this, but for the record, they were patient with us in terms of us not delivering them a big chunk of money for over a decade. Arguably, they showed more patience than I think a lot of parent companies would in that same situation. And a lot of people in the meanwhile gave birth to spectacular careers coming out of college humor when I see did not very much benefit. So I remain grateful to IEC for being our shepherds through that decade. And then they, when they got bored of us, we didn't objectly fail. We just didn't succeed spectacularly either. We had like 75,000 subscribers at the end of year one. I think they were hoping for like double that number.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That sounds familiar. So it turns out you did have a marketing vehicle eventually arrived. But this did not end up being a successful thing for the people at IAC and College Humor. And IAC is like a big media conglomerate. They don't like people. They own a bunch of magazines and TV shows, TV channels”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The theory when we launched was that we would be converting YouTube subscribers to paid subscribers for a lot longer than that turned out to work.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, would budgets definitely be less? Like the thing about, like, obviously per viewer, you're making a lot more money. It's really about the number of people you can convert. And that marketing, was there a lot of discussion about how you would actually market the subscription product, or was it just like, let's make this available? We'll pop a bumper on the end of the videos and people will go sign up.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I warmed up to subscription. Like I warmed up to the idea of, oh, going direct to audience means we get to simplify this operation. It means that we get to call the shots. It means that even though budgets will be less, our creative autonomy will be more.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did not actually add advertising to dropout. There are fans who are very concerned that it's going to happen to happen.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Exactly. This was a big aha moment for me in running a business, realizing that the simpler your business is arguably the better it is, or certainly the more effective you can run it.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you, I mean, you can decide, you know, not to break Twa if, for instance, making money isn't important to you or satisfying the YouTube algorithm isn't important to you. You can decide that these aren't priorities.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a business rule. Honestly, sometimes I look at YouTube and I'm like, oh my God, their party, the YouTube party that they are having has so many different people at it that they have to satisfy. And that includes like the government, you know, like regulated. Totally. And I'm like, man, I just never want to break twice. I want to have my audience. I want to have my team.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not even a menage et troi, it's a menage form. And everybody knows once you break twice. It's just a mess in there. Somebody's”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's true. I think that was the sort of meat of our first announcement video, and I think it's really true where Avod, as it were, is like, what is Avod advertising video on demand? It's a word. Like you could also just say anyone who is not going subscription. Yeah. That is a business that involves like us, the audience, the platform, and the advertiser.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, things are always changing. Also, you're not just doing the YouTube thing where certainly you're selling against views, but also you're selling on these platforms that decide whether or not you get the views that can have their priorities shift in ways that are going to be advantageous or not to your business. And that's always going to be their idea.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It does fit like that phrase makes it feel like we're gambling the house. And in a way, we kind of were. Okay. Was a collection of executives who were very bullish about this within College Humor. I wasn't necessarily one of them. I slowly but surely wormed up to it imagining that if it didn't work, at least we'd get to create our own cool stuff for a while. The notion was go direct to audience. There won't be the gatekeepers that there are in Hollywood. We won't have to start over every year like we do in ad sales. That is, by the way, one of the intrinsic benefits of subscription is that you're not starting your business over every year versus ad sales where you have to go out and sell every year, start from zero.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is who own college humor, and for years and years IEC was trying to figure out how we would make not just a lot of money, but a lot, a lot of money. And there was always kind of a cynic might call it a get rich quick scheme of the time. And it was ad sales and then social media took a big chomp out of ad sales and then it was television and it turned out television production didn't scale very effectively. And then finally the idea was let's try going direct to audience.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes some people call me the founder of Dropout, which actually is not true Dropout. You beg to differ Great. I'll take it. Listen, dropout was a priority that came out of IAC, who is our corporate parent at the time.”
2025-09-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dropout CEO Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping culture weird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT