The art of the steal: Serial founder Eric Ryan on finding inspiration

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0:53 Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more. Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too.

1:20 Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. When I told my mom I was gonna do this, she's like I've never seen you make it better. You really the right person to start a cleaning products business?

1:44 Well that was a fair question from Mom. But it turned out that Eric Ryan was exact the right person to found method. The Cleaning Products Powhouse. Eric scaled the company to incredible heights before selling it. But then he faced a new question.

2:01 What to do next. But I felt Kinda rareless. I was not happy. And I realized I'd lost my identity as an entrepreneur, which I viewed myself since the third grade, as somebody I aspired to be.

2:15 In the second I decided to start my next company, I like snap out of it. And I was like, okay, I've got purpose again, I've got a dream This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Brevin, your host this week on the show, Eric Ryan. He's the brilliant serial founder behind companies like Method and Ollie, whose bright, bold branding has probably caught your eye many times as you've strolled down the cleaning and vitamin aisles at your local store. Eric has successfully sold both Method and Ollie, but he still has an insatiable entrepreneurial itch. In this episode, he shares his winning formula for blending artists and operators into companies capable of disrupting entire categories.

3:02 Eric, welcome to Masters of Scale. Thank you for having me. I've been such a fan of this podcast since it launch. So this is a thrill to be here. Well, long time customers. Uh happy to be first time conversation with you. I'd like to go back to your ad agency days. How did you end up in the world of advertising? When I was in high school, I read every book I could on entrepreneurship. And it knew the odds of launching something, particularly the first time and being successful, were so incredibly low. And at at heart, I'm a I'm a fairly risk-averse person. So the idea of like actually having a career first and creating that safety net as as well as hopefully useful skills that I could do as an entrepreneur. was really important to me, even though I was constantly dabbling with ideas even even in college. And I uh went to do an internship in London

3:48 And just got lucky that Yeah, I knew I wanted marketing and I was uh given an internship at an agency. And I absolutely just fell in love with that. Agency culture. Working across every element of a brand from packaging design.

4:02 And that agency world. What did you love about it? I love the problem solving. When you start to work on a brand, whether it's a something a piece of business that that agency already won. Or for the Don Draper fans out there, like the thrill of the pitch I just loved.

4:18 But it's all about Problem solving, reframing. Finding ways to tell stories differently. And so that challenge I truly love, but then being around artists. I was always hanging out in the creative studio and with the design teams, and I have zero gifts in that area.

4:37 But to be around the people who did have those gifts I just got such a high from. And then walking grocery stores in London is just like to me was like the Super Bowl of capitalism. And I realized in that moment I just I love the way brands get expressed through a physical product. What did you see walking through the supermarkets in London?

4:59 You know, I think it's still arguably my best tactic for developing new ideas is to be in a foreign market, ideally with a creative or a couple of creatives with you, so you can sketch as you go. Cup of coffee in hand, incredibly jet lagged. Nobody can bother you because you're on a twelve hour time difference. When you walk through a foreign retail store, you just look at everything a little differently, particularly if you can't read the language. So you have to rely a little bit more on like form and And I also think better when I'm in motion.

5:31 We were just in Sicily and first thing I hit was a grocery store. We landed there. I still find I get so much inspiration. from being out there versus ever flipping through Instagram or or anything else that just feeds you up lots of ideas. There's just no no substitute for me. Yeah, you know, I remember I was sitting with Jeff Curl from Stance a few years ago.

5:50 Jeff was saying that Part of where he found product inspiration was walking the aisles at Target. Or Walmart. And looking at product categories where everything looks the same. and trying to envision how something could look different.

6:07 So as you're walking through these grocery stores outside of the US, is that part of what you're doing is saying what's here that isn't in the US? Yeah. For sure. I just play this little mental game of like, what if this was this? What if that was this? A lot of my innovation approach is really just stealing. that belief of like real artist steal, but I never steal from our competition'cause it then you're just a hack.

6:29 That's embarrassing. I try to steal from his Far away. from what we're working on as possible. So it could be stealing an idea in a museum that you could apply to a brand. And if you look at my body of work as an entrepreneur, you'll see that through line.

6:44 And everything I do. So With method, I really stole from personal care. And I stole from housewares. And I mean this is back in the Sadly now the turn of the century in two thousand.

6:56 when cleaner was so ugly, of course you hit it underneath the sink, out of sight, out of mind. So stealing from personal care or bringing great fragrances and design and something was a product you wanted to use. And then housewares was really where I thought a lot about the industrial design. And if you look at method, a lot of it is designed to look like a vase that'd be sitting on your countertop. So that's always been a big part of my formula of innovating. you could have stayed in agency world and ended up doing incredible work, working at phenomenal companies. But you did make the leap. How did that come to pass?

7:28 I mean I always knew I would. I knew like that was my real love language was product. And I didn't know how long it would take me to write the business plan, launch it, or even if I, you know, had a great idea. But it took me about a year before I got the confidence that the way we were thinking about method was worth quitting our jobs and going to do. Why method? Why this category and why this company is your first step into this world? So I spend a lot of time at grocery stores and I just started looking at the cleaning aisle because it was like this giant sea of sameness.

7:56 So that was the clue dig here. And then going back to my planning skill set, trying to figure out like, okay, what is the big category insight or what I would call like a culture shift that the category was missing. And then I realized it was lifestyle of the home that you look at these products more than you actually use them. Like dish soap has Prime real estate in your kitchen, you know, and I was like, why can't those be objects of desire versus it's like really designed to be bought, but not to live with. And I was really into home design and decor, and so it was kind of connecting the passion of that of like, okay, well, what if we reframe this category?

8:31 as really part of lifestyle of the home. And then Adam was my roommate. We live with like six guys, just dirty flat in San Francisco. Like this is not the Martha Stewart story by any means. And my roommate call me Marvin because I didn't like to clean. I think when I told my mom I was gonna do this, she's like, I've never seen you make your bet, are you really the right person to start a cleaning products business? And then as Adam and I started formulating the product, you know, we were in our twenties, he had a degree from Stanford in chemical engineering. And we realized like wow, like cleaning is a dirty business. You pollu when you clean, use poison to make your home healthier. So we've we were lucky enough to be successful, essentially our business plan was to leave pretty little bottles of poison sitting on everybody's countertop.

9:09 Which There was just no way we were gonna do that. So we realized there was a second cultural shift, which was really sustainability and wellness. And so I guess I'm gonna take credit for it, because nobody's told us they've done it first of really combining high design and deep sustainability. And those were the two trends that that brand still today, twenty some years later, drives us growth off of. Makes sense. Like we can kill two birds with one stone here.

9:33 Was it Oh instinct and this honed understanding of consumer behavior from the agency and consulting world? Or did you have research against this as well, buttressing your Assessment of the opportunity. Yeah. No, definitely both.

9:48 So I was trying to de-risk it in every way that I could. But I it's still to the way I work, I try to set like what is a vision and kind of back into that vision, see if I can prove it. So I do top down and bottom up in the way that I develop concepts. And so What I did was I wrote this concept book. I gave it to the twenty smartest people I knew across a wide range of industries. And I didn't tell Mike, you know, hey

10:12 Tell me if you like it, because nobody's gonna ever step on anyone else's dream. They're always gonna like be like, Yeah, it's great, good luck. So I gave them the assignment, come back with three reasons why you think it's gonna fail. So that way I empower them to like beat up my work, please. And nobody could come back with a really tangible reason why it would fail other than It just seems odd that given, you know, you have these huge multinationals, which were the first multinationals, like Unilever, Procter and Gamble.

10:39 And that none of them are doing this. So I was like, and that was my point of insecurity. I was like, this seems so painfully obvious. Why is nobody else doing it? Why couldn't P and G or Unilever at the time see the opportunity and beat you to method? You know, I think big companies where they struggle to innovate is in areas that is gonna compete against their core brands, of course, right? The innovator's dilemma. And the way I also thought about it was I couldn't create a new brand. I really had to create a new category to be successful.

11:10 When you're building a brand, if anybody else can line extend away in and compete against you. you're really gonna struggle to compete against a big company unless you create a huge lead. So that's the way I thought about it. It's like I'm not creating a new brand, I'm creating this new category that I call premium home care. And it was premium because it was good for you, good for the planet. But yet formulas that worked, but also really the design and the fragrance. So trying to elevate the whole experience.

11:35 How did you and Adam go from business plan beaten up by 20 smart people asked to give you the the reasons it'll fail? to actually launching the company. What's the inflection point that actually gets you there? So we and this is the same advice I give entrepreneurs all the time of just break it down to like Like at the beginning, like you don't have to worry about how to start a company, you just gotta figure out, do I have a good idea?

11:59 And that's the process we followed. I always recommend other entrepreneurs to follow. So step one, like I said. Dreamed up the concept. made sure there wasn't a blind spot on that concept that we were missing. So that gave us some a little bit more confidence. So the next step was we created the prototype products and we gave it to friends, family, Ask them to use it. And when

12:19 People were asking for more and coming back and us using it ourselves, we realized like, okay, we've got a really great product. So gave us a little bit more confidence. Then what we did is we started going to all the local Bay Area in San Francisco, upscale grocery stores, the independents, where you can go in 6 a.m., you track down a really grumpy store manager. You've got like 20 seconds to give him the pitch while he's stocking a shelf. And I didn't know how to sell a price we just had to figure out. And then I realized like, okay, they're saying yes because they realize our persistence, we're just gonna keep coming back till they say yes. And then we uh we got in about twenty stores. Adam and I would take turns hand delivering every week.

12:56 Print a shelf. And seeing how it would turn. And so each step just gave us a little bit more confidence to keep going. The company was growing but not.

13:08 Fast enough. Method was still losing money on every bottle it made. These are categories of scale. And the only way this company was gonna be successful was to get a a national customer. So I assumed it was it was gonna be Target, and we were raising our next round. Of course I shot off my mouth and I'm like Target's gonna love us, like they're about design, we're about design, they're guests, our customers, like it could not be better, more aligned. And

13:34 The First meeting we piggybacked off of a distributor who got us a meeting. And the merchant didn't like the name. I'm like Your target. How do you not like the name method? You didn't like the size of the bottles, he didn't like the coloring. And he looks at us, he's like, guys, he's like Hate to say it, but

13:52 It's a bit of a snowball's chance at hell. And you know, Adam and I are like dumb and dumb, and you're like, So you're saying there's a chance. Yeah. As an entrepreneur, like the road

14:02 Backwards. of failing is always so much scarier than the road forward. So you just gotta keep figuring it out. So at the same time, I was trying to hire an industrial designer. So at this point, like our first line of spray cleaners, I found like this camping fuel bottle in Norway. We just kinda knocked it off. But I was a big believer that we needed industrial design. One to be able to like really going back to what I was saying of like embodying the brand through product in the love of product design. Bra cell. I realize like

14:32 the barriers to entry are so low that if we didn't bring in industrial design graphically it'd be m much easier to knock us off, which did start happening. So I had this list of like the most famous industrial designers, and I was just gonna go through down the list until someone said yes. And top of that list was Karen Machid. And Karen Rasheed talked a lot about democratizing design. And I loved his shapes. He did a lot of stuff in housewares. Like he was perfect. So I sent him a cold email.

14:58 Pitching of this idea to do a hand wash for us. in a dish soap and I was like, you know, these are products that sit across every sink within the landscape of America. And they sell for under three dollars and a chance for you to like Really,'cause most of his stuff was quite expensive still. And shockingly, he got right back to me and agreed to take it on in the meeting.

15:18 And I probably looked twelve at the time when I went in to brief him. So we then Use Keram. to get a meeting with the marketing team at Target, because they were doing the Fleep Stark line at the time and we knew they wanted to work with Keram. So I used Keram as my carrot to get a meeting with Target Marketing, who then invited the merchants Worst thing you could ever do is go over a merchant's head. Right. And we spent so much money on blowing out our vision for this category. Our first care and product, which was this inverted dish soap. So you don't have to like a stapler, you just pick it up, staple it. That's where I got the idea. So instead of flipping it over each time you go to, you know, to use it, you just like squirt from the bottom.

15:57 That prototype showed up in FedEx that morning, and the buyer who said snowball's chance in hell, when it got to him and he squeezed it, he goes, Oh my God. Even I think. And that was the point where it's like, Okay, we're gonna live to see another day here. There's so much to love about this story, including kind of the bank shot approach of being like, okay, what do I know about my no pun intended target customer? And what might get them over the hurdles that they've put in front of us, right? And the idea that they want to work with an industrial designer who is now your partner on the product. It's a really interesting approach.

16:32 To give yourself a better chance than the snowball in hell. Definitely part of what my success has been as an entrepreneur. Is relying on the Gifts of others. Mm. where again I when we play Pictionary as a family, my kids can't stop laughing at how bad my drawings are.

16:49 But I think also the way I've always been attracted to being around creative and design talent, but I'm not a threat to them because I can't do what they do. Mm-hmm. But then leveraging and being able to connect the dots has has been a a big part of my success. Feel ahead why Eric Ryan focuses so much on building culture. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies.

17:25 Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Chayubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives.

17:58 Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford's CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there.

18:40 Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and much more on our YouTube channel and Be sure to check out the show notes to find a link to our newsletter. There's this um theory of organizational growth and factors of one and three, you're one company, one person at three, at ten and thirty, hundred and three hundred, et cetera.

19:03 And in particular in that kind of thirty to hundred growth phase. It feels to me like it's increasingly difficult. to maintain and and grow culture in the right direction because most companies literally create things called divisions. Right. Right. I mean it's crazy, right? We're we're going to intentionally separate ourselves rather than unifying ourselves, uniting ourselves. And And look, below thirty, kinda everyone knows what's happening in the company, right? Just by nature of how you work, especially in an in-person world. Given how important culture has been

19:36 for not just method, but your companies and for you personally as a leader. How have you managed through the scaling journey keeping the culture heading in the right direction? I think you know, it goes back to advertising where I recognize That was an industry where your assets went down the elevator every day. And I was lucky enough to work for for an agency like Fallon where They cared so much about the culture. I mean, the joke was if you don't show up Saturday, don't bother showing up Sunday. Like it was a hard working culture. And I at that stage of my career, like I loved it.

20:09 But I recognize within advertising how important culture is and I always carry that forward with everything I do. So for me as an entrepreneur, I have two things I care most about. It's people and products. And I feel like if I can get the people right. Which is just culture. and I get the products right, generally everything else will get easier.

20:27 And I also think about the products are just really a souvenir of the people. And if you want to be one of those companies that truly leads and does things differently, you have to kind of create for yourself. And I think the best company, if you look at like Apple or Nike, the best companate for themselves. I don't know how you can't lead the consumer if you aren't the consumer. And then within CPG, that goes back to why some of these companies can't Innovate. is because they have to rely on the consumer and consumer research to be able to make decisions to drive their vision, which is always going to be a rear view mirror.

21:00 You know, at the end of day I wanna go to a place and work around people that really are energy giving and we're having a lot of fun together and the shows in the work. I wanna ask you one other question before we get to selling method, because you referenced your experience at Fallon where the culture was if you don't come in Saturday, don't bother coming in on Sunday. Jeffrezenberg's famous line. Is that where they stole it from? He may not have originated it, but he gets attribution for it. And if we don't give him attribution, we'll hear about it. It sounds like you and I had similar formative experiences where we're making a living wage, but not much more than it uh in our early the early days of our careers. And you know, you're putting in eighty hour weeks as a norm and hundred hour weeks are not unusual. And I'm not saying that that's the healthiest. I'm not saying we can't have better integration of work and life or work life balance.

21:49 But I learned So much. In those years. Um, not just from getting more reps, you know, go back to Gladwell and ten thousand hours and all that, but Because I got to be in the room. watching other people do it and usually do it incredibly well and learn from that, but also learn from where they didn't.

22:08 And try to pick the things that could work for me and figure out how I shape the things that I knew wouldn't. And one of my challenges and my concerns right now leading a largely remote company is how do we give our more junior people The exposure, the opportunity to learn to grow to mentor them, even the walk to the coffee shop after the meeting where you can debrief. And I'm just curious how you're leading through this era, having come up the way you came up and clearly invested in the success of your people.

22:38 No, and I agree. And we were talking about earlier with like my daughter at NYU and just like I was Always such a believer of the role of in person and We did remote Fridays at Ali got long before Covid ever showed up just because I always thought it was important to give people one day to work from home. And we were so efficient doing it. But one thing that I think people find also surprising about me is I'm very

23:00 Like so I call it creating cultures of artists and operators. So I want to build organizations that are incredibly innovative. That are creative. Pronto have operating rigor.

23:11 Because if you operate the business well, it gives you more time for the fun stuff on the creativity. And so I use this OKR system and we write these like really rigorous operating plans every year. And then we go starting Jan one, execute the crap out of this plan. But I use it as a way also to bring everybody along with me. It's one of my criticism early as a founder. You know, when you're a founder, you think about your business twenty four seven. You're just naturally gonna be way ahead of your teams.

23:37 And sometimes I would forget to communicate. Remember our CO is like Eric. Like you're some sometimes so far ahead of us that you kind of forget to bring everybody along with you in the planning process. I really took that to heart and so I try to design that to bring people along with me and I find this works so well. with our our junior employees. So my goal is everybody in the company understands the entire operating plan of the business.

24:01 And not just help shape it and mold it and things are delegated down. But truly. truly understand it and going back to that, you know, try to build a cross functional company. So everybody in finance knows what sales are doing. Everybody in sales understands what marketing is doing. And it's served us well as our organizations tend to be more remote.

24:20 to bring everybody along with us. And I've always been amazed at how many founders where everything's kind of in their head and they're a nightmare to work with because of that. And it's allowed our more junior team members to get better learning, but also just be more empowered because then they they can spot opportunities be like, hey. Can I take on this project or this challenge? Yeah. All right, let's go back to method. You decided to sell the company. Why make that choice?

24:42 I had a family that didn't fit into its house. That's real, by the way. We don't talk about that enough. That's real. No, totally. And it's You know, when ninety nine percent of your net worth is tied up in a single asset and you ride that asset up and down and you feel every ripple, it's hard. But I mean the reality is we took outside capital and so we're gonna have to provide liquidity. And this was in an era long before secondary, which has become now the norm and there's more ways, but

25:10 As founders, unfortunately, Adam and I had no way of having liquidity out of the business unless the company was sold. And we got to the stage where we were just ready to be able to buy a house for our family and have that safety net underneath us. I talk a lot about this with other founders, which is when you go through that sale process. You feel like you're gonna wake up the next morning like you won a Superbowl and you're gonna have a parade and like life is gonna be great. And it's like

25:37 Again, nobody's gonna feel bad for anybody going through this, but it's hard. You feel this loss of identity and You've got new owners with really high expectations. Your team members are feeling incredibly insecure. But the hardest thing is like, you know, I was like the method man. Like that was my identity. And then when you no longer own that

25:57 I'm somebody who generally like a golden retriever, I wake up pretty happy most days, is my default position. And it was like the first time in my life after that sale that I felt kind of rarerless. I was not happy. And I realized I had lost my identity as an entrepreneur, which I viewed myself since the third grade as somebody I aspired to be. And the second I decided to start my next company, I like snap out of it.

26:21 And I was like, okay, I've got purpose again. I've got a dream. Okay, so you've got the blank sheet of paper. Blank sheet of paper is a problem, but it's also an opportunity. Where does Ali come from? So Ali came from a very similar story, which was Target's always been a great relationship. And I was creating this program called Made to Matter years ago at Target. The goal was to help Target get credit for

26:43 all of these natural brands that were exploding in the scene from like Chabani yogurt at the time to, you know, Burtsby's was growing and Cliff bar. I was inviting these brands to be part of this program, but I couldn't find a brand in the vitamin space that really connected at the time with millennial moms. So I went walk that aisle And I was like, this aisle is so hard to shop that people are literally stressing out trying to choose something that's healthy for them. And before Ali it was like it was a dog's breakfast. I mean, the packaging was

27:14 Horrible. And so there's a clue dig here. And so I started trying to figure out like, okay, what is that culture shift, that insight, how could I refrain this category? And I was really inspired by Soul Cycle. And I realized I was like, Oh

27:28 Millennials view health and wellness as a lifestyle pursuit. So what if I reimagine the vitamin as a lifestyle product and then it all just flowed? You're like, okay, well, I'm gonna steal from the beauty aisle because I want it to look like a beautiful package. We're gonna not sell ingredients like melatonin or biotin. We're gonna sell benefits like beauty and sleep. And Everything just kind of flowed from there, that concept, really quickly, once I figured out how to reframe it that way. And then a year later we launched it at Target as part of the Made It Matter program.

28:01 The lessons from method. that you applied to building Ali. What did you keep that was critical and what did you change that was critical? Ah, such a good question. Alex Biguski said this to me once when I was leaving Met that he's like, It'll be interesting to see what they keep after you leave. Mm.

28:16 And what they change. That always really stuck with me. So every time I exit something, I pay attention to that. There's just great learning there. So what stuck with me was really what drove our success, the importance of culture. The importance of great products. really building a cohesive experience across sales, marketing.

28:38 Product. culture.'Cause I think of again going back to the idea of like who you are and who you serve. You know, you want that to be as small as possible. So Ollie was all about this idea of healthy lifestyle. So we set up the offices at the Presidio because I was like, Oh my God, we can be in a national park at our offices. We had recess. We called the office Camp Ollie. And uh we're met that if you walked in, people would ask me

29:03 Like you give people a two or method. And they're like, Oh, this is the design department. I was like, No, this is the finance department. The entire office look like like a design department because design is what mattered. And so I brought all those those same building blocks over. To Ollie, and I have to say it was so fun to be able to take advantage of all the mistakes we made at Method. And to be able to launch this new brand with all that learning. Ali starts growing like crazy, again an opportunity to build

29:32 you know, a scale to independent company or sell and you make the choice to sell the company, why make the choice the second time? I went through a divorce. And it was a really tough divorce. And I was single parenting three young kids. S CEO.

29:49 And Going through the divorce, I had protected our house to keep the kids in the house, but I gave up everything else. So everything I had created method was now gone. So I'm starting over again. Jesus again, like in all tragedy comes gifts. You just have to look for the gifts and that was the the greatest gift.

30:06 And uh found myself suddenly in this situation, but she left uh right as I was launching Ollie. And drove even more kind of grit. And to me to m to ensure this thing was was successful. But at the end of, you know, we we scale it to a hundred million in four years. Mm.

30:23 I definitely sold too soon, but it's that adage of like people have said, like I've you know People have made a fortune by selling too soon. It's better too soon than too late. And I just felt like for me and my family that was what I needed to do. And uh the board and everybody was supportive. It was a you know, it was a ten X return. It was just an amazing outcome. But it went back to another

30:45 personal situation that drove that decision for me. You know, in terms of what then came next, you twice had built brands one brand at a time, multiple product lines, but one brand at a time. You now, by my count, are working on 172 different brands. That may be a little bit of an overestimate, but it does seem like there's almost an announcement every few months that you're doing something else. How are you approaching this phase of the career and the different brands that you're building and developing? It shifted to this more of an incubator model. Which is why I've been involved with so many things. So I realize I can still work really, really hard.

31:19 But I needed flexibility in my life. And so I can be there for every school drop off pickup, which I just absolutely love. And so I've tried this incubator model where I create the concept going back to like that's what I really love is building concepts and then trying to put together the team and you know the talent and the capital. And then take a co-founder role, be very, very hands on, but not be the CEO. And I found I've had really limited success in that model. Welly is one of the success stories that came out of it. But We turned that into a joint venture with Unilever very, very early. And the team there was a team I was able to promote up. Like my head of sales at Ali became our CEO.

31:57 At Welly, he was with me also at Methods, so I've had the model work, but I've had two areas where I've tried the model. It did not work. I did a uh Start up with Serena Williams. And just found if I wasn't the CEO in it running it. every day, particularly with the dynamics, it was not gonna work. So I made the decision just to wind it down.

32:17 And then I tried my hand at I've always wanted to build my own retail expression, so I launched this brand called Cast. And we built three stores in the Bay Area. Nordstrom invested two million in us, and we're on the White Lotus season two, all over the cast. And Got really great celebrity pickup. Issa Ray got involved, and everything on the brand, product market fit, the retail experience, all of it was working. But we were in a fundraising cycle, path of profitability for you know building a four wall multi unit, like it's measured not in years, but decades.

32:49 And the tariffs had and as you know, consumer Funding is a tough place to be. And we just realized it was just gonna be too hard to raise capital for in this this environment. So my co-founder there is continuing to focus on keeping it going more on the wholesale, and I've pivoted back to really focused on And CPG. And then I most recently joined Greycroft for launching a new hundred fifty million dollar consumer fund. So that's really giving me better leverage on the venture side. And you know, venture's a a no game and when you're you have to be an optimist to be an entrepreneur. And so being part of an investment committee and a team and I've just got wonderful partners there and just really enjoying that journey right now.

33:25 The paradox of the modern moment is It's never been easier to develop and launch a brand, right? Everything's kind of open source. You know, you can find a manufacturer who will produce pretty much anything for you. And because the traditional walls have come down, you know, you can market through the social channels. And the paradox is it's never been more crowded. Right. I mean breaking through's never been harder.

33:46 When you're looking at an idea Especially when it's someone pitching you and not not something that you've been developing the same way you develop method and Ollie. What are you looking for and what tells you whether this is one of those handful that might get a a yes rather than a no? So for me it goes back to a lot of like where my successes come from. And that's first of all, it's gotta be grounded into an insight. So that's the one thing I'll really try to understand with the founder. Do they have a really big insight that they can be in service to as they build this business. And is that insight

34:17 Really grounded in what you would argue is a major macro trend or cultural. Then it becomes like okay, are they the right team. So I try to get to a place where like regardless of this team or this brand Is this idea going to be successful?

34:33 Because somebody's gonna do it if it's really well grounded. And then figuring out like, okay, now is this the right team that can go execute this idea. It's gotta have a really Not only clear product proposition, but highly differentiated. And particularly in this world of what you just said, where barriers to entry are so low on both the manufacturing side as well as the, you know, distribution side.

34:56 I see so many new startups where The product is very surface level. There's not an insight there, and the product really doesn't have a meaningful point of difference. So I kind of go back to those core tenets. And then when I think a lot about, you know, is it a team that can put together a great artist and operator culture to succeed? But at the heart of it is like

35:17 It's a simple thing, but Does the founder give me energy? Mm-hmm. Am I gonna be psyched? This is a 10 year marriage with this person, most likely. And every time I see a text from them Or a call, like am I fired up to talk to them? Working on a deal right now and I breakfast with the founder last week.

35:35 regardless of the investment. I think like this is somebody I just would love to work with. And so I think when you're constructing a portfolio People often underestimate how important that is. Really wonderful having you. Thank you so much for being with us. No, my pleasure, and uh we're all trying to master scale. It's never easy. So I love the show and I'm always learning from it as well. Thanks again to Eric Ryan for joining us.

36:02 He shared so many incredible insights, and I especially love what he said about products being a souvenir of the people who make them. I'm Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening. Masters of Scale is a Wait What original. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our senior producer is Trisha Bovida. Associate producer is Masha Makatanina. Senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern.

36:36 Mixing and Mastering by Aaron Bastanelli and Brian Pew. Original music by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is Letal Molad. Visit mastersofscale.com to find the transcript for this episode, and to subscribe to our newsletter. And please make sure. to check out our YouTube channel.

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