šļø On launching the first major online cosmetics company, despite being told repeatedly āwomen wonāt shop onlineā
šļø How Minted.com unlocked the creative genius of thousands of designers around the world
šļø Why the more we live online, the more we value art and handcrafted objects
šļø What itās like to raise $400 million ⦠and counting
This episode is for anyone who enjoys entrepreneurship, art, and the power of perseverance!
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āļø Exclusive tease: Mariamās new venture, arcade.ai, launching soon!
š¤ Mike's favorite art picks every week, recommended books for leaders, and more: mikesteib.com.
š Up next: More from the world of art and design with another one of my favorite CEOs. Submit your questions at 213.419.0596.
Welcome office hours. We sit down with the chief executives shaping the world and answer your most pressing questions about leadership, careers, and life. I'm Mike Stive and today we have the pleasure of chatting with my friend Mariam Nafisi. Mariam is a serial entrepreneur and a perennial rockstar of the tech startup world. She pioneered online cosmetics with her startup eve dot Com in nineteen ninety eight, which sold for over one hundred million dollars. Mariam later disrupted the cards and stationary industry with Minted dot Com, one of the first companies to unlock the power of crowdsourced designs from independent artists. She now leads Heretic Ventures, a venture studio that is launching new startups in the creator economy, including most recently Tonic Labs of Marketplace for Generative Digital Art. Mariam sits on the board of directors of Minted, Medium, Victoria's Secret and Every Mother Counts. She is a trustee of William's College and a member of the Advisory Council of Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and she's the author of The fast Track, The Insider's Guide to winning jobs and management, consulting, investment, banking and securities trading. Marry him. I'm so glad you're here. Welcome to the show.
Thank you. It's wonderful to be here.
So we first met when I was running the not I was planning weddings and you were ad minted and you were you all were selling wedding invitations. So we were like we were destined to be friends. But it's been a few years since You've been good.
I have been I've really enjoyed really taking a break from being a full time operator and CEO and being able to sort of keep tabs on many many developments, technology developments and trends happening and really spend a lot of my time studying just really studying what's happening, studying new technologies. And I have a nice, wonderful group of colleagues at heritaic Ventures who I love working with.
Awesome. Well, we got a bunch of questions on your journey is as an entrepreneur and as an operator, how you generate ideas for the next big thing, all of it. So if it's all right, we'll jump into we'll jump in with the audience wants to hear from you and me. All right, so the first question is from Barry in Dallas, Texas.
Hey all, I'm Barry calling from Dallas, Texas. I'm in investment banking, but lately I've had an h to do a little more. In Mariam, you wrote a book about in consulting in banking jobs, then you turned entrepreneurship later. I wanted to ask you how did you know that that was the move for you and also when was the right time to make the lead?
Thank you very much.
Do real entrepreneurs work in investment banking and consulting and go to business school? Obviously? The answer today is yes, yeah.
You can. You can because you could find somebody who's actually not a good match with investment banking. In investment banking, they might be a better match with entrepreneurship. And I have found other people like this who left and actually went to start things because they realized, you know, find this is a great background. It helps you with the language of your raising capital. Subsequently, I've raised I've raised a lot of capital. I think my latest talent it's almost close to four hundred million now for my different businesses, which is pretty crazy. But you know, it's something that grounds you and being able to have a language that you can share with investors, which is not a bad background. Yes, computer science these days is great, but finance isn't bad. And being quantitative and metrics oriented isn't a bad way to go either. Anyway, So I ended up going back to business school, but really with this intention that I would never enter you for a job coming out, and I would fully focus on entrepreneurship and I would try to make friends with people who could get me access to capital, which at that point was a big concern of mine. I thought, you know, honestly, as a woman and as a minority woman, I was not sure that I would be able to raise capital as easily. And I thought that if I went to the Stanford I would meet people who were in the venture capital space who I could make connections that would help me raise capital later. And that was one of the major reasons that I decided to go. And then I started and then I started starting businesses.
And I have multiple friends who started their businesses in or on the way out of business schools, so that's not wildly uncommon. Yeah, yeah, And yet we have this archetype of sort of every founder is a college dropout and is nineteen and has nothing to lose. But you had actually developed a real base of understanding of what you were going to do as a leader and as an entrepreneur.
Yeah, that's right. I think that's right. At least I'd seen some businesses how about that? And I started to understand strategy, and then the business school gave me the sort of a toolkit to understand what was out there in terms of research frameworks to solve problems. I mean, for example, how do you design compensation inside a company? It's kind of tricky. Actually, we studied that, and there were some people who really were very, very expert at that. And at that time it was not the industry of raising money was not as transparent. So being able to sit in IRV gross Backs Entrepreneurship class and understand that venture firms could at that day in age collude with each other to negotiate with you, for example, that there were things like that that could happen that you needed to understand work your way around a term sheet. Those were things I learned. I learned a lot a lot about that at Stanford.
It's funny you mentioned compensation. I had some young entrepreneurs had come to me years ago and had just started their business and told me some of their management insights, including that they thought it was ridiculous that people got paid different amounts of money for different jobs in the company, so everyone would have the same compensation. And I was like, man, I cannot wait to see you guys again in two hours. I can't wait. Learning by doing is you guys are could have a great time.
Yeah.
So you had you at eve dot com just it was a pioneer in the online cosmetic space, and then later Minted dot com, where you and I met that One of the dms I got was from Keighley in New York City who wanted to hear from you. Everything seems to be moving to digital. People meet online, shop online. Some people are even apparently dating their AI companions. You've both made a business of physical goods from creators. Are you surprised there's so much demand still for objects like paper, invitations and paintings.
I'm not particularly surprised, but I sometimes think, gosh, am I am I? This is when I started Minted. I thought, am I just starting a niche business that only I am going to care about?
You?
Know, beautiful luxury cards that really express you know, your express your your personal style and taste and design and your and then send greetings and love from your family. Am I the only one? Maybe it's a small group of us, but that's okay, you know, we're going to go after that group. I think that there are not everyone, but there's a substantial I would say there's a substantial, substantial majority of the country that has something physical in their lives that they care about. Whether it's a car or it's a you know, a beau, a beautiful set of you know, ceramics, or a beautiful painting on the wall. We are living in the physical world and there's probably something in each person's life, a piece of jewelry that they care about. That everyone. I think everyone probably if they think about it, you know, there's something they care about. And if you just look at consumer spending on what we spend on, you know, one one would argue that there are important physical objects for everyone in the US. So I think I'm not terribly surprised for paper cards in particular. I think for minted, you know, it's what's happened is you send less mail, but the pieces of mail that you do send are very have become much more important because it's so rare to get a piece of mail, and so your wedding invitation, you know, or your annual holiday card, those things that are really meaningful. There are a few things left that people want to receive in the mail, and then they spend they spend more on it and they yeah, they're more thoughtful about it.
It feels to me as a recipient too, that I get far more holiday cards than I used to, probably thanks to you having reduced a lot of the friction that used to that it used to entail, used to have to hand address and all of this stuff, and now you can do it very, very seamlessly through formed Thank you.
We've tried. Yeah, we want to. We want to. It's fun to have to think of your friend receiving a piece of mail from you, opening it up and getting that surprise of the family photo, your family's photo, updating people on what your kids look like now, how grown up they are. I mean, it is fun to imagine your friend's open that card. And so I think there we want to keep the fun in it and take the friction out of it absolutely like not make it difficult for you to have that fun and that experience.
Well, I also found, you know, at arts where we sell we sell physical paintings, we had more growth and painting sales and just and in straight traffic to the website and the app in the year where we all started working remotely right after COVID, so we all migrated from the physical world to the cloud, and the demand for physical objects in our experience just went up. Because when you step out of the cloud and you step out of zoom and you're back in your physical world, you want it to you want it to be a place that that gives you endorphins, a place that that fills you with joy. Now I want to go back to something you touched on in the introduction, and we heard this from one of our our listeners, Lucy and San Francisco had hit me up on LinkedIn and wanted me to ask you, Mariam is a woman starting businesses more oriented towards women, How hard was it to convince predominantly male venture capital firms to support you.
It is a little bit more difficult when you're dealing with products that largely target a female audience. With Eve dot com, which was the first cosmetics company online, which I started in nineteen ninety eight and sold in two thousand, just before the bubble burst. The you know, we were so early at that point that shoes were not being sold online, clothes were not being sold online yet. I remember, you know, we had launched and the Zappos launched right after. But people were saying to us, you know, cosmetics are never going to sell online. And this is more maybe a message to all the would be entrepreneurs out there that you're going to get a lot of very people who are very certain about their opinion. And you know, I think part of entrepreneurship is persisting and believing that, you know, believing that some of the rules can be broken. But we were told that women will not shop online, and that cosmetics would not shop, would not be sold. And of course we know women are huge purchasing for us now online. I think it's something like sixty to seventy percent of everything purchased online is actually bought by women, just like in the real physical world, and cosmetics we all know sell very well online. So we had a lot of doubters on that. Same with Stationary. Stationary people also said, no one's going to buy paper products online, same thing. Very very knowledgeable, very knowledgeable people, and it was very discouraging to have a very knowledgeable person say this is not going to work. Because somebody you really respect says that to you. It's scary. It's really scary. And you know, three hundred million dollars later, which is mint, it's about three hundred million in sales. It's funny.
I'm kind.
I'm really glad I didn't I'm glad I didn't listen. Same with the cosmetics thing, because we launched in nineteen ninety nine, we raised in ninety eight, launched in ninety nine, the beginning of really in the early days of e commerce. We turned the side on and we thought we were going to be selling replenishment products, like you know, skincare that you already know that you like and then you just replenish. Instead. All the color cosmetics like eyes shadows and blushes and things that you really need to try on. All of that's just started flying off the shelves the minute. Seriously, the first hour we opened. Cosmetics, color cosmetics flying off the shelves all over the country, predominantly to people who lived in areas where there was lack of access to the really hot new brands, and that just started selling like crazy. So I don't know, I think your question so really, I think what I would do in this case is just say, you know, if your face seen that challenge, you just have to keep talking to more investors until you find the one who believes in the idea and who relates to the product. And that's what we did. We found investors. Eventually. It's a little tougher, a little slower sometimes, but you eventually find And by the way, at this point, things have changed so much since ninety eight that I would say there are a lot of male investors who have really tried to put themselves in the shoes of the female consumer. And really especially when the markets are very large, and they can see that the market is very large, the tam that you're addressing is really large that they can definitely come around a lot faster than twenty five years ago. So do not be discouraged. There is a path. There's an investor out there waiting to believe in your idea if it's a good idea, and then market is big enough. I think there's an investor out there for you, And.
I think This is why entrepreneurs so are so fun, because it's so fun to work with because there are people who've been told no, no, no, this won't work, and they just persist it yeah, and found success. And that's as you've encouraged the audience. That's what it takes to be successful. Jordan and San Francisco asked us.
You've both led businesses through the dot com crash, the financial crisis in two thousand and eight and COVID, what have you learned about surviving difficult markets?
Mary Mint had got off to a slow start.
I remember, Yes, Mint had had a tough beginning because we started and then there was a recession. Then Leavin Brothers failed immediately right after we raised, maybe two weeks after we closed our round, the bank failed and we were in a really bad recession. It was I mean, I would say what I learned was that we had to really focus on cash and runway and preserving cash, preserving and runway, so there should be somebody if you're if you yourself are not financial. I had a great partner in Melissa Kim who just she's the kind of person who can feel cash moving around intuitively, like she can feel it going out the door. It was she's very financially, very financially intuitively talented, so she was on my side and she really helped me make sure that we didn't run out of money and would basically nag me to make sure that I cut costs and in a good way, in a nice way. And so we managed to hang on and get by on and build this entire crazy e commerce business with a lot of physical fulfillment needs and had to build a customization app really on like two million dollars, you know, which was skimpy, and so I had to be really creative. You know, we hired. Everybody we hired was probably twenty two twenty three. There were no there was there was no one we could afford who was an experienced VP of something. So it was it was a very young group of people. But we had fun and I was steeped. I call it being steeped in millennial bath because everybody I was hiring was a millennial coming out of college at the time. And you know what, that turned out to be a huge win for us culturally, because you know, when we for example, we sell our cards at Target now and Target has told us, you know, you know you're the millennial company. The millennial millennials love you, and I think it's no wonder because the whole company, besides me, we're all millennials, and every part of that culture and ethos infused the company, and that was that's really a big win. So sometimes like really positive things can come out of those really difficult moments. But I would say the number one is to act like you have half the cash you do really cut if you're going to go through a shake up like the pandemic, the sooner you address the cost structure, the more optionality and that's a made up word, but the more optionality you have, so days and weeks count. We did a layoff within four weeks of the pandemic, which was very fast, but we just we just had much more wriggled room to save the company and save everyone everyone else's jobs because we had because we acted quickly.
And it's such a hard thing to do. It's emotionally so painful as a leader when you signed up to take care of this team to have to to have to tell people that they don't work at the company anymore. Yeah, really, but they're at moments like this, it's it's that or no one makes it, and so you have to make that. You have to make that really difficult choice.
Exactly. That's very exactly what what what I was thinking is that I have to sacrifice some of the jobs to save the rest, and that was difficult.
I've also found I wonder if you have as well. The teammates and employees who have been through a crisis are just so much better at the job than those who haven't. And we had we had a pretty big gap between the financial crisis and COVID and and I remember at the beginning there was this sense of like, how is this bad thing happened? And when did the bad things stop? And really I found our team and as people came to the conclusion, they're like, bad things happen, that's the job. It changed how everyone leaned into the pain of these situations, and I think it made us better professionals and better companies.
I could not agree more.
Alexa in Boston, I.
Heard in an interview on Masters of Scale that you raised more money than you needed a minted this year's were notable for all the companies, so I found themselves in valuation traps after raising it. Hyped valuations during the recent venture boom. Do you staw have the same advice for earlier stage companies?
Mariam I, I recall I think I've read that you had raised the most capital in a single year of any female founder in America at one point. This may be the reference that election that was.
Later in our history. Once we had made it, meaning once we had it, once we got past that recession part where we only had two million. Yes, after that we were we had a lot of offers to take more capital, and we took a lot of capital. Some of that, I'll be honest, was went out to shareholders and secondary sales. Because we knew we were in it for a long haul. We had to sometimes give liquidity to employees and to investors, so some of that money did A lot of that did not go into the company.
Just to be clear, that's interesting because a lot of people think, is an employee at an earlier stage company or a privately held company, you will only see value in your equity if you go public. But a lot of companies do what you did, which is allow an investor to buy up shares from folks who are already who are already there, so that they get the benefit of a lot of the hard work they've done.
That's right, that's right. And I'm always thinking about liquidity for the different shareholders like employees, investors, and I have this preference to always if I'm going to do a secondary, everybody across the entire cap table gets to participate. Employees and investors, everybody, everybody gets to participate at the same time because I want the I want employees to be able to have some liquidity as we go towards a very long term, long term outcome. So I would say that I think, now, how do I feel? I think it really depends on the industry you're in and how competitive it is. So for example, if it's a very competitive industry that's attracting a lot of capital moving very quickly, I think it'd be best to accumulate funds quickly. And that would be like the eve dot com situation where we raised twenty six million in the first year of business and we raised in I know this is going to sound crazy, but I believe in fourteen months we did four rounds.
Wow.
Yeah, and that was a that was a land grab moment. So this is a moment where literally there this.
One if you wanted to be online, you had to build everything yourself. There was no Amazon Amazon hosting for your website. You had machines on premise. You were building your own content management system. Everything was everything home spun. It was much more expensive.
Everything was homegrown, exactly, custom code everything. And then on top of that, it was a landgrad from a marketing perspective. So we had television ads running. We had in our first year, we had television ads running, we had print ads running. We were such a big advertiser at condy Nast that we were invited to the White House to meet President Clinton. I mean it was it was absolutely an insane experience. The whole thing is a twenty twenty eight, twenty eight year old, twenty nine year old. But the problem was that after we launched, we had four competitors, all VC backed, launched in the market after us, all of which had raised money. So that situation very competitive. You're trying to build market share and awareness as quickly as you can because really there a lot of benefits in terms of awareness accrued to like a first mover, and we were the first mover. We were the biggest that that that's a different environment if you're dealing with Minted where nobody nobody's really going into stationary There's not much investment going on in e commerce at the time in two thousand and eight. It's not fashionable to do a direct to consumer company at that time. You have, you can take it a little more slowly and you can build up the capital. Also, I had different objectives. Mint was meant to be a cash flow business, one where you know, we we were trying to maximize cash flow. I had a different lifestyle and personal objective in mind. And entrepreneurs don't all have to be aiming towards like a VC investment with a public company outcome. You know, you could also be an entrepreneur who says I want to build a lifestyle business with cash flow, you know, and you could have you could build a different business that has a lower revenue outcome, and it's really about cash flow. And that's what Minted was actually originally supposed to be. So then you could raise less money potentially at this point in time. And also, by the way, if you're willing to do all the VP jobs yourself retain your ownership, you know, you're willing to do that, and you're willing to hire twenty two twenty three year olds. That's a different kind of HR approach and you need less capital for that.
So mid Journey has eleven employees, amazing and apparently two hundred million of revenue.
Well that that is magic when you have when you have that kind of employee revenue employee ratio.
Well, but it was like like WhatsApp, these were these are businesses that didn't require a performance marketing drive train. They were technologies that either caught on or didn't, and they each caught on with think. I think What'sapp had thirty five or forty employees when they sold the business.
To Meta Yeah, exactly, so.
What seventeen billion dollars, nineteen billion.
Dollars or something crazy. Yeah, that's the dream. Of course, is even nice small team.
Listeners, if you have that option, do that?
Do that? That one's the very that's the best one of all.
We're going to talk next about something you and I have a lot of passion for is the greater economy. And I got a text to our number, which I'll remind the audience of at the end of the show from Samantha and the Bahamas wrote, the creator economy is estimated to be a one hundred billion dollar market soon, but it is highly fragmented and seems to have power law distribution to a few top creators. Do you think this will be a real job category for millions of people in the future, Well, I assure you, But Mariam, I'd love to hear your there's so much experience in this.
That's a really, really great question. There is a strange pareto principle that I've observed in almost really on everything I've touched from a consumer perspective, where twenty percent of the products or twenty percent of the people generate eighty percent of the revenue. And I keep seeing it. It's a strange natural phenomenon. I don't if you should google it on Wikipedia. It's it's really fascinating, but I've seen it over and over and over again. In content businesses, it can be even more extreme, or just a couple of hits drive you know, ninety plus of the revenue, So content can be very extreme creator economy. I do think that there's one. I think AI is going to actually shake things up a lot and could end up upturning the apple cart, meaning that some people who might have been not at the top of this pyramid could end up at the top because they are better utilizing tools that are now available to them. And I'm talking about all sorts of creative disciplines. So that could cause a lot of change, and it could cause rapid change, such that one minute you're at the top, one minute you're at the bottom, the next minute you're at the top, but you might slide down again. And I think there could be a little bit more dynamism and who is quote unquote at the top of this pyramid, meaning that it could change more rapidly. So that's I think in that respect, it might give people a better shot and maybe make things a bit fairer. I do think. I do think that I do think there will be more I think there will be more ways for creators to reach people. I think. And then if you fly like for example and minted, let me give you an example. If you finally slice wedding imitations versus birth announce birth announcements versus holiday cards, et cetera, you're going to find a different group of people at the top of non photo holiday cards, different group of artists who do non photo heart holiday cards. The best versus holiday cards the best with one photo versus multi photo. So there are all these like fine slices of creation out there. Even within something as simple and as innocent as a holiday card, You've got lots and lots of different category subcategories, and within each of those you have a different pyramid of people. So when you talk about who's going to get the outside returns, as long as we have a lot of categories on offer for sale, you could have different people being at the top of some very very micro specialty. And I think that that's one way to think about it.
And I say what I've seen with creators as well is just as you noted with companies, there there are different paths. There is the you know, there's only maybe one mister beast on YouTube was going to spend a million dollars on an episode, and you know I have one hundred million subscribers, But there are countless people who can make a living. And yes, I read the other day two of the top five jobs desired by teenagers today our creator economy. Jobs that did not exist twenty years ago. Influencer, professional gamer, YouTuber or like the top ten job. It would never have occurred to me when I was a teenager that those are jobs because because the Internet didn't exist, so people couldn't sit there and watch me play video games. I would have thought it was a pretty cool idea.
Yes, I so much has changed in twenty five years because back well even thirty years didn't even have the interview. We didn't even have access to the Internet. So we if you think about you know, where we started our careers, Mike, we probably never thought we would be spending so much time on this thing called the Internet and that our careers would so much revolve around this. Right we didn't even come out of college. So there's probably something for college students right now that doesn't exist that will really dominate their careers when we don't know what it is yet. And I'm starting a new business that will launch in January that is also a creator economy business called Arcade dot ai that I haven't really shared with shared with the public yet. It's in stealth mode. It's launching in mid January. Let's just say that it's a it's a place where I think it will that you will have you will be able to invent new career. There will be a new career invented and I think it's just exactly what you're talking about, where we've tried to create a new kind of job for creative people. So check it out when it comes, because I think it's going to be really well suited to certain certain kinds of people with an unusual mix of skill sets that I think that I think just creates another outlet for people with creative vision.
This is terrific Well to our audience, I'll either drop a link in the show notes where you can find out more, or when the company drops, I'll put it in a link of the show notes in a future episode. Angela in White Plains, New York sent me a DM on LinkedIn and she asked, as innovators, how do you come up with new ideas? What is your process for finding the next big thing?
Well, I think there are probably a few, like maybe two to three buckets. Let's talk about them. One is a bucket of sort of pattern fitting where I can see this pattern over here, and I think I can bring this pattern over here. And that's for example, my first company, eve dot com, where I saw books being sold online, music at this point physical CDs being sold online, and my partner Varsha had an idea to sell cosmetics online, and I wanted to work with her. I wanted to she do market research funny enough online. She wanted to do put cosmetics online, and I wanted to work with her. So I said, you know, I'm going to I'm going to just do your idea.
Great, fine, we'll try yours and that we'll do mine. Yeah, and you sell it for.
I like cosmetics, I use cosmetics. Why not let's try it. So we did our and by the way, we did our Michael Porters five force's strategy analysis, and it looked the outcome was really bad because one of the things that asks is.
You get the money's worth out of your MBA.
I know, it's seriously we tried, but then of course the conclusion was wrong. It said, this is bad because there's so much concentration on the supply side, which is a bad bad thing. In Michael Porter's framework, right, this is because Cesta latter companies own more than fifty percent of the cosmetics market, and that means you've got a very consolidated supply side. We did it anyway, I was thinking, oh my gosh, I'm not sure. Let's see what happens. But it turned out that and this is just goes to you. If you're at the surface level looking an idea, you have to get your you almost have to have a hand in the game and be at the table to really actually develop the right idea. So you're circling around an area, but get yourself into the game and have a hand in the game, otherwise you won't. And what I mean by that is we started Eve dot com, we had a hand in the game. We realized that when we opened the doors that we were a raging success. And why because there were all these small brands popping up at the time that could not pay for department start distribution, but they were getting some coverage in magazines, women's magazines, and so there was this like pent up demand across the US for a brands like Mac and Nars and Hard Candy and Urban Decay and Vincent Longo and all these little tiny brands, and they could not afford department start distribution, so you couldn't get them, and so.
The stolars were more fragmented than exactly then one would have thought. But you just like you did with just like you did with holiday cards, or you took the friction out of it. You took the friction out of getting access to the longer tail suppliers.
In yes, unknowingly, I'm just going to say that was an accident. That was it was an accent. So you know, we had the hand in the game. We realized what was going on. I mean we we sort of accidentally stumbled into it. But just taking a little bit of risk and trying it ungated this massive business. So that was a pattern fit business. The other kind that I can think of right now is sort of the light bulb, build it and they will come type of well and I would say more more, hypoth more, and I would say hypothesis driven. So the hypothesis behind Minted was that Minted could that The hypothesis behind Minted was that there were artists that were undiscovered all across the world, and the Internet could find better artists that if you held design competitions that there was there's got to be talent that could not get to market. That's a hypothetical. And the other hypothetical was that if people like to the card and they would turn it over and look at who made it, and you would have inherent virality of your product. Those are the two hypothetic couples that drove mint it. And that was so that was a different kind of where does the idea come from? Was more around that people were seeking better and better design in the world that they were hit there was hidden design talent and that this virality factor could drive the growth of this business. And so it was all a bunch of light hypotheses that drove Minted. It wasn't a pattern fit type business. So that's a different kind of way to source an idea. Is you think the world is going a place, you think the world is going in a direction, you have an idea as to where it's going, and you try to build against that idea. That's so to me, those are two kinds of ways to get to get to a business idea.
And I think what may keep a lot of people out of entrepreneurship is this idea that you have to have. You have to have the light bulb moment, completely new creative idea. How many times have you heard somebody say, oh, I thought of that, I wish I had patented it like that. It's not actually a shortage of ideas, it's, if anything, is shortage of willingness to try and hustle, and I remember I was it's this wonderful organization. Michael Mimslansky, who was on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, introduced to me to he's on the board. It's called pencil dot org and they have executives go be the principle of a public school for a day and it really just means you get to meet the kids and tell them what it's like at your job, and it's a ton of fun. And I was at a school last year and the kids asked a question sort of like this. They're like, well, you know, how do you come up with the idea to say? Okay, guys, like take a couple of minutes and then tell me like a brand new idea that you have that you want to start. And they were like, they didn't come up with anything. I said, okay. Now I have a friend who runs a declining magazine in the travel space and they're trying to figure out what to do next. And the problem they try to solve is people want to go traveling and they, you know, and have new experiences. What could you do if you were that company and they had a hundred ideas, they just needed to have like their attention focused on something there, like, oh, you could have an app that does this when you're in a town, and you could have a social feature and it does this and this, and all the creativity started to come out. But it wasn't you go from no idea to all the ideas. It was I see a consumer problem not being quite solved by the current technology or the current business or the current owner in that space. And I've got a better angle. And so for our you know, whether our audiences aspiring entrepreneurs or just folks showing up at work tomorrow who think that there are no idea. You know, there are no great new ideas that they're going to come up with. They're all there. They're all there. The last one. I'm really looking forward to hearing your answer to this. Jackson Detroit called in an asked us you are both leaders in your creator economy. I'd love to know what are some of your favorite art or creator projects right now? How do you choose what the acquire and how do you choose what to acquire in your own personal life? So, Mary, you must be a collector of wonderful objects. And yeah, I'm sitting here surrounded by art where do you start?
I which are really with personal connection to the piece is always number one, whether you feel personally some sort of emotion or some sort of feeling of the piece provides it gives you. I love everything from really exceptional you know, artisanal goods, you know where there's really beautiful evidence of the hand evidence of hand crafted quality and it's very handmade and very unique to pieces of art that really inspire me. And I have to say the past year and a half I've been spending collecting a lot of generative art where coders that I've met, like William Mappen, for example, have been able to with code create things that look absolutely hand drawn. And on top of that, it's generative, meaning that he will run a line of code and the engine will produce according to the parameters he's set, unexpected art that he doesn't know what's going to happen.
And it's that intersection of human creativity and machine machine creativity or randomness that yes, crazy crazy these objects.
And what's amazing is that if you're good enough of an artist coder, you can actually have everything in a series of five hundred look absolutely beautiful. But that requires a huge level of talent, and so William Mappen. You know, I bought a Strands of Solitude piece which is part of his collect collection. I've been also really interested in in video, in you know, dynamic art, because I really enjoy the combination of the senses sound and visual. So I've been really I've been really delving into that world and really collecting a lot in that world recently.
And Tonic Labs is a great place to do it. Really.
Tonic is great. We only work there with you know, top notch, you know, really like the most collectible artists. Yeah, so I think, I, uh, what would you say, Mike, What's what are you collecting right now?
Well? I run artsy guys, So I'm buying. I'm buying a ton of artists. It's just in Miami at the art fairs. And I'm always on. I mean, I'm on my app every day. And we have this really cool thing where we have a widget for the iPhone and our team curators of Great Taste, they pick one painting a day, one one item and they put it in the widget. I've bought. I've bought two paintings out of this out of the widget this year, so you know, it's art. But what I would say to folks more broadly is the vast majority of creators, whether they are artists or independent musicians or crafts people, designers, they are they're struggling to make a living. They don't have an employer who's paying their paycheck every two weeks, they don't have health care that comes from their corporation. They are somebody who's been called to the arts. They've been there's somebody who's been called to create and bring that bring joy to other people, and bring an artist like they tell the truth to you through through their work. And they might have to stop creating if they don't make a living. And so what I always remind folks like, when you buy a painting, it's not like you're buying a watch, right If you buy it, you buy some cool leather crafted thing on Etsy. It's different than just buying a sweater at the store. You're supporting an artist, you're a patron. And and I know a lot of these people now personally, when they get that email that says you just sold this object, like their life lights up. They get they get to go back to the studio and keep doing this for another month and so you know, whatever you were, you know, whatever folks, folks tastes are. I would just encourage everyone to have that mindset, which is you're not You're not just acquiring something for yourself. You're you're doing something nice for the world. And I'll drop in the show notes. I sort of keep a published list of the artists I like and artworks I like, and everyone can check it out or there's always a standing offer. If you DM me, you say I want to buy art, I will. I will personally, I will personally put a painting on your wall. You just tell me your budget and what you like, and that's what I'm doing. For nice Mariam. This has been such a pleasure. I've always been, you know, so inspired by your journey and you're You're a wonderful person to work with and I think our I think our audience probably got a lot out of this conversation today.
Good what's been great to see you again and catch up and I look forward to staying in touch.
Well.
Friends. Today we talked about the entrepreneurial journey scaling up a business. We talked a lot about creators. In my opinion, the most interesting thing happening in business right now is not some new technology. It's the explosion of human creativity that we've seen and the power of the Internet to give those people a following and allow them to make a living. As we all move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs from food and shelter to love and self esteem and self realization. The arts, whether it's visual arts, design, entertainment, beauty, they're all going to play a bigger and bigger role in our lives.
You know.
I read a study one time NASA found that ninety eight percent of five year olds tested as creative geniuses and ninety eight percent of adults did not. But what is it that made us go from being creative five year olds done creative adults. I think it's because we stopped trying. I don't know, Maybe we're embarrassed to try, Maybe we stop believing that we had it in us. But I, for one, see creative genius in my colleagues, my teammates, my friends all the time. So this week, as you grind through your week, I just I want to leave you with that thought that we're all creators in one way or another. We're all creative people, and I'm really excited to live in this this new economy, this new world where creatives play such an important role. We've got some amazing guests coming up in the next few weeks. We've got a leader of one of the top luxury marketplaces. We've got a serial entrepreneur, a bunch of exciting topics we're going to cover. So make sure you text or call in your questions at two one, three four one nine oh five nine six, or always sit me up on LinkedIn, slide into the DMS, or respond to one of my posts about the show. I love hearing from you. I want to thank Miriam and of course Jen, Cara, Meg Jada, Matt and the whole team at Blue Duck Media for pulling this all together. Thank Dylan and Sasha Gay and Nathan and Christine at iHeart and Ben and the team at William Morrison Dever for all their support. Office Hours is a production of Blue Duck Media and we are distributed by iHeartRadio. Have a great week, everybody, make sure you stay on your grind