YouSaid · the spoken record

Steven Sashen

lines on the record: 66
first: 2023-03-13
most recent: 2023-03-13
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

“Yeah, clearly would be an understatement. But Lena was on the other side of that equation. So the first time I came down, she says, you know, you can crash on the floor on the futon, but keep your hands away from me.”
2023-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Xero Shoes: Steven Sashen and Lena Phoenix · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“you were like what it's like Yeah, that's exactly what it was. And while it was Knowledge TV was from the Jones Entertainment Network, which had a bunch of different channels, a lot of people didn't really know it. It was on basic cable, very niche thing, but very entertaining.”
2023-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Xero Shoes: Steven Sashen and Lena Phoenix · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and that basically was my goal from the time I was about, I don't know, 16, 17. I used to say to my dad, I'd like to be retired by the time I'm 35.”
2023-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Xero Shoes: Steven Sashen and Lena Phoenix · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you're giving me way too much credit. So I would say that because I was too old to have gotten ritalin, I just kept doing things that I found interesting, which had me bouncing around from one thing to another pretty often. But when I was in high school, I think it was in high school, there was a book that came out called Your Money or Your Life written by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin. The premise being that you want to track your expenses and track your income, reduce your expenses as much as you can, take the difference between what you're making and what you're spending, and invest that at that time in. And once you're making enough money from your investments to cover your expenses, then you have financial freedom.”
2023-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Xero Shoes: Steven Sashen and Lena Phoenix · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, talk to the biggest dealer at that time and say how much margin do we need to give you to not sell scriptware? And they had an answer. But frankly, in the last two or three years before my competitor pulled the rug out from underneath me, I was just kind of bored. And so I was looking for the next thing. And I had gotten into internet marketing at that time. This is, again, 92, 93 is when that all began. And so I was spending more time on doing internet marketing, which was much more interesting to me than running a software company.”
2023-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Xero Shoes: Steven Sashen and Lena Phoenix · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no. Well, we were doing okay. I think at our peak we were not a big business. It was a million dollar business. But unfortunately, I discovered something about business that I didn't know, which is when you threaten other people's livelihoods, they don't go, congratulations, you have the better mouse trap and walk away. They will most likely went back into a corner try to screw with you before they try to improve what they're doing. And so after about 10 years, one of my competitors did something devilishly brilliant to kind of lock me out of the market.”
2023-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Xero Shoes: Steven Sashen and Lena Phoenix · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had about 17 credit cards with 0% balanced transfer fees and that also gave you either frequent flyer points or some other bonus even for a balanced transfer. So about for six years I was just shuffling balances from one card to another, racking up frequent flyer points and not paying any interest.”
2023-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Xero Shoes: Steven Sashen and Lena Phoenix · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, once I realized I was going to be in the software business and not the standup business, I said, hmm, I don't need to still be in New York. And two months later, I was in Bulver, Colorado.”
2023-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Xero Shoes: Steven Sashen and Lena Phoenix · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I met a programmer who worked at PC magazine at a comedy show one night, and we got together and I talked about my idea. And he had just gotten a new piece of software for creating programs that could do what I was talking about. And so we partnered up and started developing this program, which took about three years.”
2023-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Xero Shoes: Steven Sashen and Lena Phoenix · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So I realized that there was an interesting way of thinking about a screenplay in terms of the different elements, a scene heading, the action that you see on the screen, a character's name, what the character says, various things. And if you think about typing on a typewriter, there's cues that your motions are giving you, the tab and enter key, that if the elements were smart and knew what they were and how they related to other elements and how they related to the page, then you could do all the formatting, all the pagination, all this really complex stuff. It was very arcane, automatically on the fly in a way that no one had ever done it.”
2023-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Xero Shoes: Steven Sashen and Lena Phoenix · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, like six nights a week. In fact, when I started doing standup, for the first couple years, I worked seven nights a week, multiple shows per night often. And finally, I kind of burned out and someone said, you need to take a break.”
2023-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Xero Shoes: Steven Sashen and Lena Phoenix · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, one of the reasons that I adore my wife is she puts up with the fact that when we're watching TV on any given evening, I'm going, hey, I worked with that guy. Hey, that was my roommate. Hey, we hung out. So I opened for Jay Leno a couple times. I opened for Jerry Seinfeld, Brian Regan. I could literally go down the list. If there's a comic who's been doing it for more than 35 years, we work together”
2023-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Xero Shoes: Steven Sashen and Lena Phoenix · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Once I started doing stand up, it was just way too much fun because, you know, you hang out with the funniest people in the world for a few hours, you get on stage for 30, 45 minutes, and have a blast, except for when it doesn't go very well, which is very entertaining too.”
2023-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Xero Shoes: Steven Sashen and Lena Phoenix · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So student by day MC at night Basically, December of 84, 83, 84? I moved to New York and started working the scene”
2023-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Xero Shoes: Steven Sashen and Lena Phoenix · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Right around that time, that was when the comedy boom had just started. So, this is 1983-84. And a club opened in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I went down there and auditioned and they made me the house MC. So I opened for hundreds of acts. And then by the time I graduated, the guy who booked that club said to me, call me when you're ready to graduate because then I'll give you 10 weeks on the road. That 10 weeks turned into 10 months.”
2023-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Xero Shoes: Steven Sashen and Lena Phoenix · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They had a comedy competition, and they brought three comics down from New York, and we did our little competition, and then the three comics did their show. And I won the competition, and the three comics came up to me and said, you could be doing this for real.”
2023-03-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Xero Shoes: Steven Sashen and Lena Phoenix · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT