What I want to do is not to be a student, the master of the club's laptop is ...
I'm saying, you can say that you're a hero. You're a hero, right? But you don't understand. Exactly. It's just a challenge. You're just a hero. You're just a hero. And if you work, you're a hero. - That's right? - Save. You're a hero.
- You're just a hero. - Now you're a hero. That's nerve, and it's much more fun. Stop, ask the recruiting spirals. With Stepstown All-Jobs, we'll be showing you all the time for one year.
In one package to a fixed price. So let's take a look at the 570% cost probability. And there's every time Flexibel. Now let's take a look at Stepstown.de/All-Jobs.
“Stepstown is the most important talent for all-jobs.”
I had a boss at the NBA. She said to me multiple times,
"I've never seen you stressed, and constantly stressed."
I am in a baseline state of stress. And so either A, I'm really good at faking calm. Or B, she's only seen me stressed. She's never seen me not stressed. And I never really figured out which of those two things it is.
I'm Shuri. I'm Jean. And I'm Andrew. And we're in the Tiger Sisters. We are your Wall Street and Silicon Valley big sisters. And we're a top 10 business podcast on Spotify.
Where we talk about money, power, and love. Today's episode is presented by SoFi. The all-in-one finance app that helps you bank, borrow, and invest your money in one place. If you've been on the internet in the last 15 years, you know, dude perfect.
“Five college roommates who turn trick shots into one of the biggest”
sports and entertainment brands in the world. What's started with backyard basketball shots is now a global empire. Billions of views, a fan base that spans kids to parents, sold out arenas, a massive merch line, and even plans for Dude Perfect World, their own theme park experience.
And at the helm of this next chapter as Andrew Yaffy,
Dude Perfect's very first CEO.
A Stanford GSB grad, like me, with a career built in strategy and leadership. Andrew is helping take a creator brand to heights that rival pro sports franchises. Today, we're talking about how you scale from content to commerce, what it takes to lead inside a culture built on fun and friendship,
and where the future of sports, media, and community is headed. Andrew, welcome to the Tiger Sisters podcast. Thanks so much for having me, excited to be here. Yay! So for anyone who's watching this podcast and isn't familiar with Dude Perfect,
could you summarize it in two sentences? This is the hardest person I've ever gotten. We are the largest sports account on YouTube,
with a project 62 million subscribers.
We are a brand that represents sports, fun, family, and competition, and we create content that reflects those values. I love it, so saying, yeah, I did it. He does not get it in his videos. And he's so Andrew Billion to view Dude Perfect videos.
What is the secret to a viral video? There's a couple of schools that thought on this, and we argue about the two of them all day in the office. One is, as has been true since the beginning of time,
“you have to make great content that is engaging and creative,”
and the people I haven't seen before, and that surprises you in the light to you, and is really authentic to who we are as a company, and who our guys are as individuals. And I think that holds a lot of weight in our business.
To then make that viral, there are some tips and tricks and tweaks, depending on the platform you're on, depending on how the algorithm is feeling that day. And YouTube in particular, which is sort of a home base, I would say it's most true, where you're title and your thumbnail,
and the length of the video, and 30-second retention, and every due duration, those are all deep analytical things that we have people who look at, work on, and tests, and now you can test multiple thumbnails, and multiple titles, and have different titles,
and thumbnails, and different languages, or locations. I, as a leader, try to keep as much of that in the background, as possible out of our creative process. As we're doing a creative off-site in a couple of weeks, and my approach is I'm setting the ground rules
with our creative team on here, the types of things that we're looking for, that I know are likely to drive virality, business success, brand opportunities, et cetera, but I don't want them to be bogged down
In those things, because I think they actually interfere with the first part
of it, the authentic creative process that is really genuine, and help strive for what our brand is. Interesting, so are you kind of you're going into being like, hey, from the business perspective, these are our goals, and this is what we're trying to hit this year and beyond,
but are you like, take that with a grain of salt, or like, you're like, learn it and body it, then throw it all away, and do you know, as an example, when our first videos were somewhere between three and five minutes, because in 2009 on YouTube,
“that's what thrived, nobody was making content longer than that,”
because you didn't need to, it was expensive, et cetera. Now, as I'm sure you know, well, the YouTube algorithm and YouTube is a platform rewards longer and longer content, and so one of the parameters, as we go on in this, is how do we aim for 30 minute videos?
And if someone comes with an idea, a creative idea, one of the threshold questions is, can that be a 30 minute video? And so I'm not guiding on within the first 30 seconds,
we need to have four edits that I am guiding on a critical parameter
that I know is instrumental for success. - Yeah. - There are other things like sport selection. If we're gonna do something, and we say, hey, we know we need a celebrity, or an athlete in that, I'm, and others on the team were thinking about, how do we ensure that we're reaching the certain geographies,
or audiences, what sports are resonating right now, what's in season, and what do we think we can get incremental promotion for? So there are all those things that I'm keeping, I mean, my back pocket, or sprinkling into the creative process, but we never want to go into it and say, hey, we need to make a video for this brand,
with this sport, in this way, and these are all the things that it needs, because that comes through in the content, and you're then not delivering quality content for your audience or for your partners. - I love that, because it sounds like you're providing strategic frameworks that you can hand over to your team, and then they can pick and choose within
that framework, like how, like, what geo to look at, but you're not like giving them a mandate that they must do this. - I try not to. They might disagree sometimes, but I try to be as sort of principal driven as possible as a leader, and give the team, especially the creative team, or to design their own sort of thinking and strategies and plans,
because it's not my area of expertise, and I don't want to over-engineer that part. - Yeah, you, what do you know about strategic frameworks? - Because you know, I know some things about strategic frameworks. (laughing) - We can compare notes here.
- Well, Andrew, you've had a long and storied career before Dude Perfect working at the NBA, leading digital transformation. What are maybe like two or three key learnings from the NBA that you have taken now to new digital media at do Perfect?
- You need to follow your audience.
The NBA, we had an amazing audience of
young and highly engaged and global fans. And we saw success, especially in social and digital, when we leaned into that and not away from it. When we started doing in language content, in foreign languages, when we, you know,
would work with the platforms to test new things that they were looking to build,
“because they knew that that's what audiences wanted.”
And so we leaned very heavily in a vertical content, very early on. We got, when we redesigned the NBA app in about five years ago, and changed basically the main content framework to be vertical rather than horizontal video on demand, because that's where advertising is going.
That's where consumption behaviors were going. And so we wanted to do, you know, they're not fight against that trend. And so that's something I've definitely taken to Dude Perfect as well, that, you know, similar to the first question,
how do we see where content consumption is going on the platform? And that's longer videos. We need to go there. It doesn't mean we need to change who we are as brand or what our creative is, but we need to follow our audience to longer content is what's performing.
You know, as YouTube always tells me,
the algorithm is just a reflection of what people are watching.
“And therefore, if that's what's working,”
we want to be able to deliver that specifically for our audience. So that's definitely one thing. On the other side of the equation, I would say one thing I took away from my MBA experience is the MBA is a complicated place to work,
Because Mark Cuban might have told you as well.
There's a lot of owners, there's a lot of stakeholders across players, an ownership and management and teams. It can get very complicated, very quickly, and very difficult to progress. And so as I've come into this organization, I've tried to streamline things as much as possible,
and ensure that we are able to move quickly, that we can make quick decisions that I'm not a bottleneck on decision-making. We've tried to keep things, keep our organization lean and responsive, because as you get bigger and as you have more stakeholders in your ecosystem, it can be really hard to manage.
And that's something that I would shift slightly for my MBA experience, so my dude perfect experience. Okay, so I'm really glad you mentioned the concept of internationalization while you're at the MBA, because personally, I think as a nation, our greatest export is sports, live sports.
“And I think that that's so key to our international privacy”
in American and Germany. What do you think about that? And is that something that you take into account when you're building products and building for your audience, and thinking about the long-term future of your company?
Absolutely. You know, especially in the context of a digital first offering.
When I joined to perfect, we'd never really
done anything explicitly international in the first, whatever it was, 14 or 15 years of the company. Half our audience on YouTube was still global. Since I've started, we're now translating every piece of long-form and short-form content that we create into 15 languages
where we've included a number of international sports, much more than we had previously. So we had a YouTube short with a cricket player, generated 60 million views on YouTube, which is very exciting. That wouldn't say predominantly, but largely from nations
where cricket is more popular than the US. We've done a lot in European soccer. Our guys were at the Champions League final, presenting the man of the match trophy.
“I think sports is absolutely a critical tool for human connection.”
And international is one component where that's really valuable. And, obviously, the same thing at the NBA. You know, the commissioner we're talking about at all time, but it was a tool for global diplomacy. And one of that's you see it in the Olympics.
You see it in the power of basketball to bring the world together in the Olympics, even across, you know, sometimes complicated, geopolitical relationships, but it's definitely something and it's something that I think we hold really, we take really seriously.
And we view as an opportunity for us as a business as well.
It's a big world out there, and YouTube is a powerful platform
to reach people across the world. And we know they'll explore its content. So you know how every year I have a New Year's resolution around finances. Oh, I have one, two for 2020, six.
New Year new opportunity to get our money right. And part of that is having a bank that isn't just a place to park our cash, but something that actually works for us. Exactly. And that's where our sponsor, so if I plus, comes in.
So if I plus is a premium membership that pulls everything together, banking, investing, and financial planning all in one place. With qualified activities, so if I plus members can unlock $1,000 or more in annual value. That value comes from things like 5% cash back at grocery stores or an investment match for your IRA.
Oh, my favorite one is the unlimited one-on-one sessions with so-fi wealth financial players. So if I plus is a great way to get more for your money, and you can get started for just $10 a month. Go to sofi.com/tigerplus.
That's sofi.com/tigerplus. And now, back to our show. I know Tiger Sisters podcast is pretty different from Dude Perfect, but I got to ask, like, if we want to become like Dude Perfect in the sense of,
“like, growth and views and impact, what should we be doing?”
And I know that's a pretty general question, but I'm like, I want to pick your brain. Like, what are the power moves or questions we should be thinking about? In terms of five-year road map, in terms of strategic frameworks? Yeah.
I wish I had all the answers. You don't. I know. I can pretend. You know, I think, honestly, I think, well, first of all,
y'all are doing amazing work so far.
So you're off to, you're off to a really good start, but would you say you're a year into this journey?
The air guys have been fortunate to be doing this for over 15.
And it takes a lot of persistence and a lot of hard work
and a commitment to your vision and your ambition. It takes a lot of analytics and responsiveness to what your feedback is from your audience. But I would say that I, and everyone says this, but I truly do believe it that in a world where
there is so much content out there. The more authentic and different and true to yourself, you can be, the more returns there are. Obviously, a lot of other things have to go right. But it really, I really do believe that being consistent
and authentic in the content you create and the vision you have for what you want that content platform to be, the better off you're likely to be. Yeah. We can talk later about some tactical ideas.
So we're gonna film now all the time. Yeah. You know, I like that because that's something that we work on every single day.
“Because, and I think that that is something”
that we have seen, the Tiger Sisters family, our audience react really, really well too, is when we talk about our own mistakes and we are really, really vulnerable with the audience on camera. Like, that's been, I think,
what has the most outside positive reaction. It's what builds connection and people respond in the comments to some of the stories that we tell. And we talk about like money, power, love. We talk about the places we messed up or like breakups
and people have responses like, oh, I've gone through something similar as you have. And I think it's increased, well, I don't know, I feel like it's rare right now when we're a business podcast and we're women in business to have people talking so vulnerability
about non-business topics that are very much a part of our lives. Yeah, creating like this kind of safe space on the internet to have all these conversations in both like a serious way, but also with levity and also entertaining.
“It's, yeah, I think one of my broad observations”
about the internet as ridiculous as that sound. It is, I think what we've learned over the last 25 years is there are thousands and thousands, millions of niches that are sizable enough to build a business, right?
And so like one of the things that our guys always tell me is,
we may content for people like us and there are a lot of people like us. They're, you know, they're now dads and of families that play a lot of sports and watch how to sports and enjoy comedy and these sorts of things. And that's a big enough audience to start. And I would imagine it's similar, there are a lot of women in business
who are going through a lot of the similar things. Like, that's a really big audience to start with. And then you can branch out, go from there to, you know, where else can your sort of authentic selves take you. And so I think that's, and then, you know,
the power of the algorithms on all the different platforms is that, you know, identifies people who are seeking out that content. And it's really powerful to, you know, lean into that. And identify where are those pockets, where are those audiences?
How can I get in front of someone who's likely to like this content? But it does require that consistency and authenticity to continue to deliver for that audience. You've mentioned algorithm a couple of times. Is that something that you trust or, like,
you hear people say, like, the algorithm is constantly changing and how do we play into it? And I know a lot of it is creating the content that will deliver value. But in a world where we don't have insight into how it is evolving on YouTube or Spotify or whatever platform,
like, do you trust the algorithm and does it frustrate you? Is it, like, an emesis or a friend of me or how it would be? I would say, I give, it's a mix of all the above. I think, on some level, I trust my friends at all the platforms that they are transparent in what they're solving for.
And that, you know, on YouTube, they want people to watch more YouTube. And so the algorithm is simply, what are the things that people are watching? Let's feed them more of it. And if you boil it down to that, there's, I'm sure, thousands of things underneath it.
“But in essence, I think that's what it resolves to on most of the platforms.”
And so therefore, there's always going to be tips and tricks
and sneaky ways to improve upon it. And that's part of the fun and the competition.
One of the beauties of creating digital content is that it's a lot less expen...
And so we're constantly testing and refining and posting different cuts of things on one platform versus another to see, is it an algorithm thing? Is it a quality content thing? How, how does it work? You know, there's certain platforms where 30-second content or 60-second content works better.
And so we're looking at that all the time. I, you know, I were investing a lot and I want us to get even better at the that analytical approach to really understand what's happening. And some other creators out there are doing amazing job with that. We aspire to that.
But I don't think, I don't think there's anything to fear in the algorithms of the various platforms. I love that phrasing. They're transparent in what they're optimizing for. I guess that's kind of all you're going to ask for. Yes.
So, I, I do perfect. Why did they choose you to be CEO? You'd have to ask them.
“No, honestly, what they needed in my experience were”
shockingly overlapping. At the NBA, I spent, before I came to do perfect about four years leading the content organization, building world-class content strategy, helping us through digital transformation, overseeing all of our social, our long-form content production. And the four years before that was the head of business strategy for the company.
And so their, my job was essentially how do we bring the NBA into new business areas or new business lines. It's not present in using its IP, its brand, its assets, its content. And what I am tasked to do, it do perfect, is the intersection of those two things. It's how do we optimize our content strategy, how do we grow across platforms, across new channels, across new talent, all things that I did over the last four years of the NBA.
And then, how do we take, do perfect as a YouTube brand and grow it into a multi-platform brand period and leverage our brand, our content, our assets to get into new business lines, where we don't already exist. And so their days at work where I, I problem or issue or an opportunity,
we'll come up and I'll be like, gosh, I never would have thought that was going to come up,
but this is exactly like something I did five years ago. Or, oh, I know the three companies, we have to call to go do this thing because I did it, you know, at the NBA, I launched our Youth Sports Basketball Competition. And so I know all the players in this space. And now if we want to have conversations about how to get into the Youth Sports ecosystem,
“I know all the players. And so I think the board and the founders who went through an exhaustive”
interview process, I think probably understood even better than I did coming into it, what, how my background, how my experience, and also I think my demeanor and approach, working, you know, with, it's really a transformation in some sense of, they'd never taken
outside capital. They never had real outside leadership before. How do we transform the company from
what it was to what we all aspire for it to be? I think requires a certain interpersonal relationship with the existing company, the founders. And that's, you know, candidly not an easy thing. I think to find someone who can mix all those things together. And I hope I'm doing a pretty good job. Yeah. Well, it sounds like you are the perfect person for the job. And in terms of overlap, as you started the role at Dude Perfect,
is there one area where you really wanted to learn and grow specifically? Like this was the most
“interesting thing that like you didn't know before. So many. I think the biggest difference”
from my previous job is directly working with the talent. At the NBA, you're kind of step removed from players or organizations or whoever may be and here. You can't really control the game or that's right. Yeah. And here, it's a blessing that, you know, our talent are 16 years in. They're at the office every single day. They're working on business problems. They're working on creative problems. They're arguing with me and each other about anything and everything. And I love
that creative energy and passion and excitement. And I mean, you know, I always say our founders,
our brand is our culture. Like that is sort of the through line for the whole company. And I'm incredibly fortunate to be a part of that. But it's just a very different management experience to have your founders, five of them in the office versus NBA players who are
Out doing their thing separately.
and really exciting and valuable learning experience for me. Our founder is our brand is our culture.
Yes. Your your your your your your tenses are probably better than mine. Well, no, I was just repeating it. I was like, I want to write that down. I'm so glad this is being recorded. He's like, it's true for us. It's true for us, too. Yeah. Because it's us. Yeah. Yeah. Tiger sisters have ever heard of it. Well, speaking of new business lines, I feel like that's something that you guys have really delved into ever since you started a CEO. And like sometimes it feels like you're
doing a little bit of like the the Disney playbook or I don't know. Tell us about kind of your thinking around that. Yeah. On a very small scale for now, the the Disney playbook. But ultimately it's a simple,
“I think it's it's kind of a simple equation that we have an amazing audience an amazing community”
that the guys have built for a long time. And we want to know what other products and experiences in content does does that audience want. And so the guys started a live tour now six years ago they've done five live tours. We just concluded this summer. We were in 20 20 cities across the country
NBA, size the Reno's 95% sold out. They're at the tour. Incredible energy. And it really
goes to signal. This is an experience that families, it's primarily six to 16 year olds and their parents, families want from us. And we wanted to experiment with, okay, well, what are other experiences? So outside we built a fan fest that had items from videos that we've done in the past. So ping pong table, bounce shots and throwing a football through smaller and smaller holes in
“a forward. And we had hundreds of people lined up for that fan fest was free. Hundreds of people”
lined up before every show. We had to shut it down an hour before every show because the lines were so long. And so our hypothesis was like, all right, people love watching our guys. They're like watching a fun video. They pay real money to come and drive an hour and a half to come to our show
with their family. They probably want to do some of this stuff too. And this was the first time we
as a brand let them do things with us. And so that's something that now we're full-bore into is, okay, we believe there are millions of people out there, millions of kids. I have a six-year-old and a four-year-old and I have a focus group at home that would love to do and have fun with the experiences that we get to our privileged enough to have fun with on a daily basis. And so when you think about the experiences piece of the Walt Disney's flywheel, we think there's real opportunity.
It won't look like a Disney World, but we think experiencing our brand is a big piece of this. And just like the Disney model, if someone comes in and has a great time at a Disney experience, all right excuse me, had a dude perfect experience. There are a lot more likely to come back and buy a t-shirt or watch one of our videos on YouTube. And you know, we do believe that that the thesis is that that flywheel is going to work for us as well. If we're laser focused on
who is our audience, why do they follow us? How can we engage them further? And how do we deliver high value experiences and products for them? I'm like pretty blown away. I feel like it's a whole new vertical like live experiences in the way that like Disney has theme parks or like you're thinking
“I'm thinking today like how are families evolving? What it means to spend time outside of the house?”
Are they going to the movies? No, we know traditional entertainment is not doing well there. But like what are the things that families want to do together? Is it going to, you know, a theme park together or not very far? We're very picking but like how are people experiencing in person together now? And coming out of the pandemic, you've seen a massive growth in the experiential economy generally and families more than anyone. I think everyone felt again, I experienced this very
cooped up with your kids and now wants to go out and do things. And so we believe there's very few brands better suited than us to do things in sports for families. And it's ironic in some sense that we are a more content brand, right? We grew up with people watching us on YouTube. We're as big of believers as anyone of go out and do. We love it when you watch our content. We love it when you don't. We love it when you're out. You know, nothing makes us prouder than when and this happens all the
time when parents come up to us and said our kids watch your video and then they were out in the driveway for three hours trying to recreate the shop. And we think there are in a lot of brands in the world who
Have the power to get kids and families to go do things.
aspect of our brand. And it's just a matter of how to then, how do we build the experiences and the businesses around those experiences to make the fly will work? And then in terms of the touring, you mentioned that you're into your sixth year of touring and it just keeps getting bigger and better. Is that something, I guess not only from the sort of like just pure business
aspect of it, of it being profitable, of it being, you know, valuable to the bottom line,
is that something you think about more so in like connecting with people to a person? Is that more of the value of it? A hundred percent. It is, again, as a digital first brand and you know, and our guys will tell you this that they spent, you know, the first 10 years looking into a
“camera and reading comments and seeing views and that was their level of interaction, right?”
So for them to have, you know, 12,000 screaming people and they get to, you know, as part of the show, they go up into the stands and they're high-fiving, you know, hundreds of kids. It's just
it's amazing connection that, you know, creates real affinity for the brand, real connection to the
guys in a way that watching a video can't. And so it is, don't get my wrong, it's a very good business for us, but it really, and we talk about this a lot, the goal is not to maximize profit on the tour. It's, how do we get in front of our fans? How do we engage? How do we create that connection? Because it, you know, down, like, that's the, that's the beauty and that's the power of our business. And it will pay dividends for, for years to come. Yeah, and that, that sort of growth in brand
“affinity and brand love and brand connection is that something you guys have actively measured”
or is it more so, like, we just feel it, like we know it's there. No, we've started to, this is, since I came in, I, I'm a, I'm a data nerd part and the guys do a lot of things well, data capture and analytics for, was not one of the things that they had invested a lot of time in for the first, you know, several years of the company. And so we've now instituted, we've weekly focus groups where we bring parents and families into the office to talk to them about what we're doing.
We have a regular surveys and pulse checks on our brand and to understand how various videos and activations and content has resonated with our audience or not. We have third parties that do some of this research as well on our behalf, even our, we were close with our brand partners to understand different levels of affinity and understand the demographics and understand who we should target and it's been
amazing to build really powerful, long-lasting brand relationships in that sense because now,
body armors, our hydration partner, we talked to them all the time. We've a licensed product with them where there's a, do perfect branded body armor that is available for on a limited time basis, so Wal-Mart and Crocker. It's not currently on sales, but we share a lot of data with them and they share a lot of data back on who purchased it, what their reactions were, what those people I purchased before, how much body armor they purchased
after, and it's just a really powerful mechanism that I didn't even expect to get coming into this one, but they've been a partner for years, and we have a really trusted relationship with them, and it is really powerful to understand at a really deep level how our brand effects there, so they're brand effects ours, etc. This is, I'm learning a lot from you. Cool. It's a machine. It's an ecosystem. It's all very interconnected. That's the goal. The goal is to build, yes,
any ecosystem where it starts with our families and our audiences to say, you know, what are all
“the touchpoints that they want and how can we best deliver those, and I think it, you know,”
one thing we haven't talked about is, it requires focus. Like one of the things that I struggle with when I came in, the MBA is very much a mass product, right? We try to go after consumers, that, you know, there's MBA finals as watched by anywhere between, you know, 10 or 20 or 1.30 million people, like that's everyone in the US. That's a mass product, and I came in and said, all right, we're a sports brand, how do we get 18 to 34 year olds, how do we get, you know,
You're your general sports population to love to do it perfect, and we went b...
on sort of what does our mission and why do we do this? And it became clear that focusing on the family and that sort of building deeper relationships, unlocks a lot more of those business opportunities
than just general mass appeal. And so that's been actually a big shift for me, even in my first
year, to let's be laser focused on, you know, we want to round out some elements of how we approach the family and continue to reach more families, but that's our target, it's not, you know, how do we get into 18 to 34, how do we appeal to, you know, the 50 year old watching a live sporting
“event, unless they've kids. So I think that's a big component of our success as well.”
Well, I think that's so smart too, because you're by definition also solving the generational problem. That a lot of, you know, companies, especially entertainment companies come up against, which is like, okay, our main audience is aging out. You're like building in that next generation of audience by focusing on families. And it's intentional? Uh, somewhat. Yeah. I mean, I think when the guys found at the company, they were just college kids making content for college kids. They are,
you know, they never intended for it to be a family friendly or sort of a family first company,
but all their content was always very family friendly and very clean and, you know, YouTube is a platform, has a lot of younger viewers. And so, uh, it kind of was naturally gravitated that way, and they leaned in and they, you know, they realized sort of, this is who our audience is,
“and they embraced it, which I think was a really smart thing. Well, before I got there,”
we've since had that debate, and there are certain things we do around the edges to ensure that there's some continuity for our audience. Um, but the fact that kids are always being born and, you know, there's always more families is a, is a really beneficial thing for our brand. True. Cool. Okay. So Andrew, what parts of the dude perfect story do you think anyone, even someone whose outside of sports or media could learn from and apply to their own careers or ventures?
One of the things is most impressive about our founders and that I've really taken to heart and really aligns with how I approach business is being values and principles driven, that the world is shifting constantly around us, whether it's the algorithm, whether it's consumption patterns, whether it's platforms. Uh, you know, one of the things I think,
our founders have never wavered from, and it's, uh, really returned amazing results for them,
is adherence to their values. Um, and so one of the first things when I came in is to yo is to define our values and communicate them to the company. I think they've always been sort of inherent, um, but as we scale needing to define them so that, uh, you know, when a new employee comes in, they understand that, uh, and, you know, we went from the founders interviewing every employee to me interviewing every employee to now at this point, I'm not even interviewing every employee,
and so thinking about how do we scale our values has been a real challenge, uh, and I don't pretend to have all the answers for that, but my, my first answer is to talk about them as much as possible, and so we start and end every all-hands meeting with our values, uh, we highlight examples of employees who have adhered to those values, or done something remarkable, uh, with one of those
“values, um, because I think at the end of the day, that's, that's what we've got, um, that it's very”
easy for, especially as a digital content brand to chase, to chase what's the shiny object, to chase, what's cool in the moment, um, but that's in the way to build a long-lasting, uh, sustainable brand, and so I think that's, that's one thing that, uh, I've learned a lot over the last year, and it's something that going forward in my career, or whoever it might take me is, is a less and I will, I will certainly continue to, uh, employ. I love that. Well, that's also great.
Okay, now we have our next section, the last, uh, final section. Yes. Um, and it's, it's very fun. So one of my best friends started this company called Fortune Questions, which is basically Fortune Cookies that have questions and them that are either mild or wild. I think I got to go mild. Well, we do one of each. It was a false choice. Yeah, false choice. Okay. So let's start with these are mild. Who
Would you call first in a moment of crisis?
since my freshman year, or my sophomore year, her freshman year of college. So, uh, over, uh,
“I want, we're coming up on 20 years. Wow. Thank you. Uh, we've had a lot of crises over the last”
20 years. I operate, um, passionately. So I swing high and low in moments of professional or personal crisis. Uh, she is far more even keel. Uh, and so it's, when I'm going through something, this happened earlier this week, uh, she is incredibly valuable at, uh, kind of bringing me back
and grounding me in reality. Um, and I probably don't say thank you to her enough for that.
So thank you. Uh, but yeah, she, she would certainly be my first call. That's so sweet. Yeah, lovely. Great answer. On for the spasse. Oh, this good. What's one personality trait you fake? Well. Oh, you fake? Well. Yes. Ooh, that is spicy. It's like being on this podcast. It's like, um, yeah. It's funny. I had a boss at the MBA who's also just BLM. Uh, and she
said to me multiple times, I've never seen you stressed, uh, and my reaction to that was
and constantly stressed. I'm in a baseline state of stress. And so I was like, let me just means either A. I'm really good at faking calm or B. She's only seeing me stressed. She's never seen me not stressed. And that's just me to her is stressed me. Um, and I never really figured out which of those two things it is. But I do think I present calmer than I am inside. Uh, it's probably why I call my wife afterward when I'm incredibly stressed or anxious about
something. Um, but I try to be with my team, with our company, uh, calm and clear and grounded, outside, even if on the inside, I'm very nervous or anxious or stressed about something. So that'll
“be my answer. Like right now you're screaming inside. Yeah. Oh my god, what am I doing here?”
Yeah. My inner monologue would be much louder. So yes, to scale, to real scale. Yeah. That's awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you guys. Thank you for having me. It's really fun. Awesome. Wake note. So I know a lot of people think that podcasts are just about talking off the cuff. But I think what you don't see is that for Tiger Sisters podcast behind the scenes, there is so much research and cultural curation that goes into every single episode.
Yeah. And I feel like you can kind of feel it because in every episode, we have a lot of studies that we reference a lot of research and we want to make sure you guys get the signal through all the
“noise out there. That's why it is so important that you subscribe and follow us on every single platform,”
whether it's Spotify, YouTube, Apple podcasts, or whatever you're watching this on. It only takes two seconds to do and it's really a simple gesture that has so much impact on helping us build momentum and build this community with you. Welcome to the Tiger Sisters Family.
