Jake Aaron Villarreal: Welcome to From the Ground Up, the podcast where we delve deep into the inspiring stories of entrepreneurs and their journey to build successful startups. I'm your host, Jake Aaron Villarreal, and in each episode, I sit down with the founders to learn about their experiences, the challenges they face, the lessons they've learned, and the insights they've gained while turning their dreams into reality. I'm excited to have with us today Eric Frankel, founder of AdGreetz. Welcome to the show, Eric.
Eric Frankel: Thanks for having me, Jake. It's a pleasure to be here.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Well, just a little background on Eric. Eric's an innovative business leader with a proven track record in both traditional media and new and emerging technologies. Before AdGreetz, the company we'll be talking about in this episode, Eric spent over two decades at Warner Brothers where he was President of Warner Brothers Domestic Cable Distribution. There, he created new strategic architecture in the broadcast, cable, and pay television landscapes, as well as advancements in new technologies such as voice, video on demand, HD, and the internet, while running a multi-billion dollar division. That's an incredible start, Eric, to a career here. So before we kind of dive into this story here, walk us through a little bit about where you grew up. Proximity can influence the kind of work you get into, the industries you work at. What industries did you grow up around?
Eric Frankel: So I grew up about 18 miles north of New York City. I had two parents who commuted into Manhattan every day on the train, so I guess I was a bit of a latchkey kid. I have this older sister, and typically came home to an empty house and eventually had to warm up dinner that my mother had cooked prior to going to work that morning, knowing that at 7:15 or 7:30 she and my father would be pulling into the driveway. We'd all sit down and have dinner. And I had many, many, many, many, many, many, many friends. My house was the hang house because my parents were gone. And it started off where people would come over and watch TV and hang out and play sports and do all of that, and then as we got older, more mischievous activities. And we were totally into pop culture, which included movies, television, um, all sorts of going to concerts and live events. And I grew up thinking that I would end up being a filmmaker or running a film studio. And that's what I pursued, and those dreams came true.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Interesting. That's great. Yeah, that was an era that might not be too far from what it's like today, but different technologies our kids use at their home waiting for their parents to stop working. With your very first job, as you were a latchkey kid and kind of coming, you know, into school years, high school, college, whatnot, what was your very first job you remember?
Eric Frankel: Well, I had lots of jobs, so I was always a hard worker. I was trying to make money to, whether it was going to be the cheeseburger, french fries, and a milkshake, or later take a girlfriend out for a cheeseburger, milkshake, or french fries and to dinner and what have you. So maybe the first one was one of my most short-lived jobs, which was I was a paperboy. You know, everyone, or two-thirds of the people in the community, got a newspaper five or six days a week, and they were actually delivered across the street from my house. And my first week, it rained every single day, the papers came about two and a half hours late. Um, the time change had just happened, so it was pitch black out. And after a week of doing this, my mother turned to me and said, "I'll give you $13 instead of you having to do this horrible job." So that was maybe my most short-lived career.
Other than that, I grew up riding a lot of bicycles and could repair my own bicycle quite a bit. So this is a pretty hilarious story because I was interested in working and earning money, I looked in that local newspaper and saw an ad for a Toys "R" Us type store to build bicycles for them, and I thought I knew what I was doing. So I applied, they said, "You're hired." And on my first day of work, I took a bus about 35 minutes down the big, big main drag towards White Plains, New York. I got off, went into the mall, met my boss who showed me a dozen giant boxes of bicycle parts and said, "Here you go, um, good luck. I'll be back in a few hours." And I took a box, opened it up, and poured it out, and it was 127 different parts that I really have no idea what I tried. My boss came and said, "Uh, Eric, it's time for your dinner break." And I went out of the store, I hopped on the bus, went home, never came back. That was my most short-lived. All other jobs were busboys at country clubs, raking leaves, washing cars, um, you know, shoveling snow, and then working at what those days they called the Army Navy store, but it was really where all the kids bought their Levi's and Lees and back-to-school clothes along with your, in those days, Adidas and Puma before Nike was on board. So I worked there for a couple of years after school and Saturdays.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: In all those jobs, kind of in your adolescent years, was there one point where you thought, "You know, I'd love to be a business owner or really create my own company," or when did the entrepreneurial spirit really kind of hit home for you?
Eric Frankel: Um, the entrepreneurial spirit happened when I went to college. I went to the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. And the short version of that tale is two things happened. One is day one of classes, you walk into what they call COM 101, and I can't remember exactly, but we'll call it 450 students who in those days all thought within a couple of years of getting out of school they would be running NBC, call it the popular network at that point in time. And I looked at them and said, "They're not going to be running it, I'm going to be running it." So I immediately got a friend of mine, called me up and told me his brother was the big DJ in town, so I went and got an internship working for him at the rock station that was an hour drive away and convinced my parents to lend me their car so that I could drive an hour in these torrential blizzards. I frequently thought, "This is it, they'll find me in a field in May," because you couldn't see the New York State Thruway on the way back.
Um, that, and then I decided to join something called the Concert Board. And the Concert Board was one of about a half a dozen or eight organizations that were funded from the university, and their job was to bring in national entertainment, rock and roll, and every other kind of jazz and pop and whatever artists. And I joined as a junior member as you do as a freshman, and it was there that I really had that aha or light bulb moment. Um, the head of the Concert Board at the time, who has gone on to become maybe a top five executive in the music field, but at the time I thought he did a disastrous job. So there are about 25 different tasks one has to do to run a successful concert. You have to book a band, you have to book a facility, you have to cater, you have to get tickets out to outlets, you have to run the house, you have to have ushers, you need to have stage crew, and uh, you need to have publicity people, on and on and on and on. And what I learned watching him was he thought he could accomplish all of those things on his own. So in my opinion, um, even though he had people show up for these meetings, um, he was "I can do it all myself." And in turn, he was able to do two or three or four events a year, um, them all kind of fail miserably while he was failing out of school or not getting the best grades. And it was a bit of a show in my opinion, watching.
And what I realized was you were only as good as your team. And two or three years later when I took that over, I went from the four shows they did to 39 shows. I did them in nine different facilities, I did an average of about one and a half shows a week, and I had 150 people who came to a meeting every Sunday night like it was a religious cult. And I had you run my tickets, and this person ran the house, and this person ran... and everyone took on full responsibility like they worked, you know, at uh Google or the top organization in the world. And in turn, we could accomplish things with excellence. Um, led the team, made sure that everybody felt that they were part of it and could make these decisions, and internally excelled. But no one human being could ever accomplish any of these things on their own, and it was about having these 150 people with about 24 core members. Um, and so it worked, like you know, it just worked amazingly, and we did so many, and we did so much marketing, publicity, and television commercials and everything in this whole giant upstate area that when I graduated, I had a portfolio about that thick of all the success we had in national articles and all of this. And in turn, I got offered jobs at a large quantity of companies and ended up saying, "This music business will kill you." Um, you know, you can't stay up till two o'clock in the morning in a world filled with drugs and alcohol and be healthy, and most of the people I dealt with who were 24 or 27 looked like they were 45. Well, I met someone over at Warner Brothers, the movie and television division versus the record company, and he offered me a job where I stayed for the next 28 and a half years.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow. So having that experience really as a young college kid was, sounds like a lot of leadership skills that you... sometimes you have it naturally, sometimes you develop it, and sometimes you have both and you have to develop it as well. But what, um, you left that entrepreneurial-minded experience, it sounds like a small startup really in college...
Eric Frankel: It was a small startup, and we were, we would either go out of business or the last three concerts we would just lower our ticket prices because our job was to bring in entertainment for the students. But because Syracuse wasn't a great economic town to do entertainment and make a lot of money, we in turn were the source of entertainment for the entire community. And if you were just a regular 18-year-old or 45-year-old who lived there, you were probably attending and waiting on bated breath for the next event to be announced.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. That's great. So you're at Warner Brothers for 28 years. It's a long time, that is not common in today's world. Where did you end up? I know we talked a little bit about that at the beginning of this where you were leading a division. Um, walk us through the progression at Warner Brothers and then also when you left Warner Brothers, how big of a division was that? The people you were leading in the, in the business itself?
Eric Frankel: I got hired by a terrific gentleman who I'm still friends with, he's 94 years old, and he took me under his wing. And again, just because it's a fairly interesting story, I met him and he said, "Come in for an interview at five o'clock on a Tuesday." Now my parents both left work at five o'clock. So his secretary came out and put me in a little office and said, "Please wait here, Ed will be with you shortly." A half hour went by, and an hour went by, and I heard everyone else on the floor saying, "Good night, see you tomorrow. Good night, see you tomorrow," and the lights went off. And I'm like, "Did they forget about me? Is this like this made-for-TV movie I saw where a guy got locked up in the bathroom at a department store and they let the German Shepherds out?" So I was freaking out because I had no idea that people worked this late, because the only experience you have is from your parents.
Um, anyway, at about a quarter to seven, they come and they get me and they apologize for being late. And it turned out, you know, he worked till 7:30 or 8 o'clock every night. And he called me in and he said, "Everyone wants this job that I have open. Everyone, all the industry pros." Um, and he looked at my resume and I had this portfolio and I did my dog and pony, and he said, "You know, I went to Syracuse," he goes, "but I didn't graduate." He said, "And you remind me exactly of myself, but instead of running the concerts like you did, Eric, I ran the radio station. I produced a show where Dick Clark was the announcer and William Safire, the acclaimed writer from The New York Times, was the writer, and I was the producer." And he said, "How about I offer you this job? We'll do it as a three-month trial. I'll pay you $300 a week. And after three months, if it doesn't work out, no hard feelings, best of luck. But if it does, I'll give you a raise from $300 to $335. And six months later, if it works out, no hard feelings if it doesn't, I'll give you a raise to $375 a week." This is 1980.
So three months later I get my paycheck because he hasn't mentioned anything, and I know, "Oh good, I'm making $335, I passed the audition." And six months later he calls me in and says, "You've done such a good job, instead of 375 I'm giving you a raise to 390." And that was my first nine months on the job that led to this 28-plus year career. And the short version of the tale is when I started with him, the division did about 50 million dollars a year in revenue. I ran the division for the last eight years on my own. I eventually became the person who hired me. One day the chairman called me up after 20 years there and said, as I had become his number two, and he said, "I bet Ed hasn't told you that he's retiring. Um, how would you like to move to California and take his job?" I didn't really think I wanted to move to California, I thought I was a tried and true New Yorker. But you can't pass up the number one job. So you say, "Of course I'd like to." And uh, and then I went. I moved out here. They said, "You have 18 months to find housing and get your kids into school." And we moved out here and I did the job for another eight years, and by the time I left on a good year we were doing about 1.6 billion, up from uh, up from 50 million.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow, that's incredible. How big was the teams that you were leading at that time?
Eric Frankel: Well, it depends how you count it, but approximately 180 people.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Well, because a lot of common resources...
Eric Frankel: Um, you know, uh, which was a smart idea. You know, how many people do you need to come up with the marketing campaign for the television show Friends? So these people would create it, and then this person would touch it for home video, and then we would touch it for television, and uh, and so on and so forth. But, you know, pretty much everything that I've done is, you know, what's a better way to do it? What's a better way to do it? How do you reinvent? How do you reinvent? Um, I always thought that if you did, you know, the same thing every day, you become the horse and buggy. Um, so you know, and today it's still the mantra that I try to, you know, preach to the 30 people who work for us today is: test, learn, improve, repeat. Test, learn, improve, repeat. And it always surprises me that it's harder to sell that through than one would think. And to me, that's the most enjoyable part is what did you learn on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and how do you do it better on Thursday, Friday, and next Monday.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yep, that's great. Well, let's dive into uh your company, AdGreetz. What inspired you to start the company and what's the problems, so the listeners understand, uh what's the problem in the market you're helping solve today?
Eric Frankel: Well, let's talk about the original premise and then we'll talk about them.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great.
Eric Frankel: Okay, so here I am leaving Warner after 28, 30 years. Two divisions are merged together. And I had a boss who was very, very old school, didn't want to reinvent anything, and I don't believe he ever liked the fact that I would come in every day with a new idea and a new idea and a new idea. And even more unfortunately in my opinion for him, he didn't like that all of my ideas came to fruition and were successful. And he was all about CBS and old school television, and I was cable and video on demand and new technologies and pay television. And he would think that we would be doing business the way we had for the last 25 years forever, and I knew it was going to change, and change right then. Um, so the short version of that story is that um, they merged two divisions together. The company agreed to pay me lots and lots of money for four years, which gave me the freedom to do whatever I wanted to do. And they let me stay in my office and gave me all these other benefits because it was just a merged entity versus, you know, "We don't like what you've been doing." In turn, I had generated 12 billion dollars over the last, you know, five years.
So, um, so I was reading all about personalization and how that was going to become a terrific business. And even though I wasn't really into it, I was reading about how ringtones were such a big business and a guy named Soulja Boy, who I didn't know any of his songs, was selling five or eight million dollars worth of ringtones as one artist. And after I studied it and studied it and studied it, staying in my office at Warner Brothers, being able to converse with my team who had worked with me for years and years, I decided that if we could take these things called ringtones and voicemail, and if we could create e-cards and e-invitations and have them personalized by a celebrity... So instead of your phone just ringing and hearing a couple of notes of a Soulja Boy song, if it could say, "Yo Jake, it's your boy Eric calling, pick up the phone" while Soulja Boy's hit song was playing. So I decided to pursue that.
Um, I raised about 12 million bucks over a period of time, including a bit of that money from myself. And we went into business. And we built this business that was working really, really well, but it was a little too close to what I had been doing before because I had to deal with celebrities, sports stars, agents, managers. And primarily what we would do is sell you a three dollar card um that had Mickey Mouse saying happy birthday to your child, one of your two children, with their name. "Hey Timmy, it's Mickey Mouse, your dad told me it's a big day, your birthday." So we had deals with Disney and all of these various uh celebrities. And it was all done with lots of production and all of these variables, and we were selling them. But we were selling three dollar toys, call it, and we were keeping half the amount of money and giving Mickey Mouse and Disney the other half.
And one day we woke up and said, we've built the world's best personalization platform. Rather... and this is pre-Cameo. Cameo figured out how to make it really successful because they figured out how you didn't have to do all this early production. Charlie Sheen could look at his phone and go, "Agent White, Susie tells me it's a big day," and he could do that in 40 seconds. And you got rid of the day and a half of production that we were involved in because there wasn't such thing as a selfie. And the short version is that one day we said, "What if we sold this to brands? What if instead of three dollars, brands paid us $33 and we enabled BMW to thank Jake... why the new BMW 4 Series is great, tell him where his dealership was locally?" And we pretty much stayed in this email type business doing that, and brands raised their hands, the innovative smart ones. And we started doing this.
And then somebody said, "We love this email. Can you do it on Facebook?" And so a week or two later we're in that business. And someone said, "We love the Facebook and the email, can you do this on YouTube or Google platforms?" Which led eventually to Snap, which led to SMS text, which led to apps, which led to TikTok. We were the first company in the world to do personalized ads on TikTok, which led to us opening offices all around the world, which led to us doing this on streaming television. Which sort of goes back to my TV roots, because I was the industry's first advocate for pressing buttons and watching what you want when you want. I had more programs than you could ever fit in a linear schedule, so I thought the television should replicate what I might commonly call a YouTube type model. But instead of watching a cat running around the bathroom or a Beatles clip, you'd be watching an episode of a particular program. Sometimes with advertising for free, sometimes with advertising for a not very expensive monthly rate. And then you could pay more to not have advertising and pay even more to get early windows. And at Warner Brothers, I spent a decade selling that concept through to the television industry, which they eventually embraced. My division got bigger.
And then I woke up one day after that, that the um, the... after we were doing all the cards and voicemails, and I said, "You know what, here I am, this gigantic consumer who had this big job at Warner Brothers, and brands still really converse with me... Macy's shows me ads and tries to sell me dresses and pocketbooks and high heels, and doesn't tell me where my local Macy's is, or where your local Macy's is." And advertising is dull, um, generic, very often static. Um, brands play the same ad for so long. Even if we love it the first time we say "brilliant," the second time we say "clever," the sixth time we say, "I think I'm going to kill myself if I see [this ad again]..." provide information. When I went to Manhattan I knew my Burger King was on East 86th Street. I don't know where my Burger King is [now], and I don't understand in the world of digital why a Burger King ad doesn't say "go to Santa Monica and 17th Street" or "go to DoorDash." But where you live it's called UberEats, and where someone else lives it's called GrubHub.
So that's what we do now. And we work for brands, agencies, strategic partners, and now all of these ad platforms, most of which have been selling one ad for five years, 20 years. And in the case of television, many of these people are broadcasters who went into streaming and they've been selling Coca-Cola or BMW or Macy's one commercial for the last 80 years. And now they understand that we can push out a different format ad to you, than your mother, than your sister, than your aunt. And we can tell you where your McDonald's is, or we can talk to you about different SKUs, or anything you can imagine. So that's what we do. We make hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of ads and messages on every ad tech and martech platform that exists to get people to pay attention, because we're going to talk to you about your blue button-down shirt and not your wife's skirt. Um, and we can sit there and say, "Hey we've missed you, it's been six months since you've been in," if that's what the strategy is. Or we can remind you that the lease on your car is up in 95 days and you have some decisions to make, or anything that anyone can imagine. You have young children, we can show you ads with kids in the back seat. My children are grown, we're no longer looking for the safest car like we did for two decades when they were in the back seat and it was all about their safety and the car seat.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So the problem, if we just kind of bring it all back to what you're bringing to market, is personalization in ads to whatever genre a brand is focused on, and doing it in a way that you're collecting the data, providing a better way to personalize, and then sharing the analytics and all the data with the brand so they're clear of...
Eric Frankel: So primarily it comes down to this. So there's ad tech and martech. Martech is what a brand gets to push out more or less for free. That's email, that's SMS text, and that's um apps. Yes, they may have to pay an SMS text, but they're not buying media from an ad platform or Facebook/Meta or Google. Those are their own channels and they can push things out. So we help them do that. And then there's something called ad tech. Ad tech is you buy inventory, and whether I'm going to watch a commercial on the new Netflix that has ad-supported tiers for those people who haven't wanted to buy the old one because it's more expensive, or whether it's Facebook, or whether it's Instagram, or whether it's Snapchat, or whether it's TikTok. So we look and see what a brand does today and we say, "Here's what the challenge is." And we build demos, we come up with a strategy. And we say, "For Eric we shouldn't show a smiling family at McDonald's because Eric's wife is no longer worried about what we're going to eat for dinner tonight because it's the two of us and she doesn't have to feed four people like she did for 18 years." So that ad and the smiling family and little kids hugging their parents' knees is irrelevant and a bad message. So we come up with a strategy, we build some demos to explain to the client, they go, "That's great." It could be for Facebook, it could be for Google, it could be for email, it could be for app, it could be for streaming television.
All of those platforms, all of those brands have data sets that... if your base is Macy's, has emailed products to 100 million people. If you were one of them, they know that you bought that shirt, they know you live at 25 Maple Street in Laguna Beach, they know, you know, that I don't buy kids' uh stuff, they know that my wife likes cooking tools there, whatever it might be. And in turn we come up with a strategy, we build demos. Once we get signed off on it, we've built the tooling and the technology to make hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands or more of these, to make them in a very short amount of time, hours or a day. Then we're able... we have integrations with every one of these kind of channels, we're able to push them into Facebook or Google or Snapchat or, or Pluto TV or whatever it might be, or email or app. And then the consumer, instead of seeing this old school generic message, is seeing one that's much more um related to them. "Hey Laguna Beach, it's Tuesday morning, thinking about lunch?" Um, and, and so on and so on and so forth. And reminding you where on that highway um you should go for you know, lunch today, whatever.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: I love it, it's great.
Eric Frankel: And then we... yes, we track the analytics, we do a retroactive analysis. So beforehand we know what all of their metrics are. Um, how many people click, how long do people watch, what does it cost them to get a click, what does it cost them to get a purchase, what's the average amount of the purchase. Um, and then what we try to do is beat all of their historic metrics and do it at a lower cost. So if you had a hundred customers, just for the heck of it, buying something in the month of April and we come in and we get 300 people, and if the average basket or cart was worth $10 and we're getting $20, and the average person watched for six seconds and now they are watching for 24 seconds, and, and if we're doing it... instead of it costing you five dollars to get that purchase, we're doing it for $2.50. We've cut your costs in half and we've quadrupled... and what have you, all of those important metrics. And we report them every day, have dashboards, remind you of the success and say, "Now that we're up and running, what do we do to improve it even further?" And no other competitor is both ad tech and martech, no other competitor does it on as many channels (that means the Facebook, Google, Snapchat, TikTok, app, all of that), and we do this all around the world. And I don't remember off the top of my head uh, you know, 28 countries in 35 languages.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow. That's incredible. Is the product specific to direct-to-consumer? You're talking a lot about it... could it be B2B?
Eric Frankel: So we do campaigns. The problem with B2B is there's usually a much smaller list, and most brands don't have good lists. So if you're trying to reach out to the people who run human relations um and at major companies to tell them that you have a better insurance offering than the current company they're working with, what we've found is that insurance company usually isn't very good um at knowing those customers. We don't know who every human relations uh executive is. Um, and also when you're trying to reach hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, and hundreds of millions (when we do this in India every day, billions of people), it becomes a lot more affordable than trying to reach um, you know, hundreds or a couple of thousands of decision makers. But we do run into certain businesses where a giant um pharma company will say, "We know who all 3,127 oncologists are in the United States of America. And we know their names, we know hospitals they are associated with, we know their genders, their age, their this, that, the other thing." So in turn, if they decide they want to do this, and you were one Jake, we can say, "Jake, there's a new, you know, pill from Eli Lilly and it does these things and it'll be great for your patients at Laguna Hills Hospital and whatever it might be." Or a more blanketed version, but maybe better to show you a guy who looks like you in that ad, which we cut in, versus a white-haired 68-year-old doctor, because you're a 38-year-old doctor. So you might identify and pay more attention, rather than saying, "Uh you know, I'm not an old woman, why are they showing me an ad with an older woman in a white lab coat? That's not me."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, got it. Great. Well, you've been running this company now for three years. What was the most effective marketing strategy when you first launched to help you gain traction? And how did you measure that success?
Eric Frankel: Yeah, when you began... for a lot of companies are just starting, you know, they're trying to get you know, into the market, and what was your, what was your most effective way of doing that? Um, time, energy, and patience. So if you remember 10 minutes ago, I talked to you about how it took 10 years to convince the television industry um to embrace streaming. Netflix was sending DVDs in the mail, not exactly what I would call a technological breakthrough. What it would... all you know, I always hated sending back those DVDs and stuff, you know. It was uh the horse and buggy. So what I've learned is, unfortunately, even though as a consumer we think that things happen overnight, they don't. So for example, we're having more success in the last six months and more people... so primarily what this is about is educating people. And the good news is, you know, for years people would say, "I don't get it." You show someone, we'd show executives at Macy's an ad that they show me trying to sell me a dress, a pocketbook, and high heels, and then I would play them one that's telling me to go to the Century City Mall showing someone who looks like me in the ad and talking all about SKUs that I would be interested in. And there are a lot of executives who would like to keep their head down, do things the way they always have, collect their paycheck and not innovate. So there's two cards.
And then on the other hand, we have brands where we do our presentation and five cards into it they say, "Where have you been? This is exactly what we've wanted to do. You've reinvented our entire business. I have 135 million SKUs and, and we need everyone as a unique customer, and we can't talk to them with one voice. We don't believe that people love the bouquet, we believe they love individual flowers." So there are many, many programs that I like on HBO, but I have no interest in watching the, the new Sex and the City for example. So I'll pay you a hundred dollars not to watch it. But if you talk to me about a half a dozen shows, I was just very sad to see Perry Mason end um a week ago. So it's using all sorts of data and knowledge and demographic information to guess what people want. That doesn't mean that there aren't guys my age who don't love Sex and the City, but there's a better chance that they'll like a Batman or a Superman or, or, or, or, or the series about the Lakers and, and, and whatever um else it is. And then, you know, on Facebook people say what they like, so you're able to utilize all of that um to make more compelling ads.
And we also don't believe there's a lot of customer experience and customer journey. If you and I went to lunch today, one of those restaurants on the main drag, on the way out someone would say, "Thank you, thanks for coming, hope to see you soon." And if they knew you, Jake, they'd say, "Jake, thanks for coming, hope to see you soon." Um, we could go spend $2,000 at Macy's or Saks Fifth Avenue or any, and nobody would really thank us. I don't understand why a brand doesn't reach out because you've opted in, Jake, to say, "Jake, on behalf of everyone at Saks, we want to thank you for coming into the Laguna Hills store, wherever it might be, and purchasing, and that we are able to via automation pull up SKU number one you bought, SKU number three, SKU number 27. Our way of saying thanks, purchase something again during the month of May and we'll give you 20% off." And how to turn a $500 sale into a $1,000 sale, and how do we make Jake feel good, and how do we differentiate Saks Fifth Avenue than every other brand.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Yeah, tell, tell us a little bit about some of the companies you work with, some of the big brands that we would know about.
Eric Frankel: Yeah, we worked, we've worked with a lot of them. And I mean the interesting thing what you learn is better ways to get that for longer. So, you know, they range from our longest-term client is a company called VCA Animal Hospitals that I had never heard of. VCA is a veterinarian uh set of hospitals that got bought by Mars (what you and I would think is the candy bar company um out of the UK) for I think eight billion dollars. So they're very, very substantial, and they have about 850 veterinarian hospitals. And in my neighborhood here um there are a zillion of them. And I got introduced to the CEO, who's very, very smart. He sold his company for eight billion dollars. And, and he saw the product and said, "Dog lovers will go crazy for this." And we've built them a set of nine different emails that we would refresh every year. And you'd get an email and it would say, "Hey Jake, on behalf of everybody at VCA Laguna Beach, it's hard to believe it's been a year since we saw Spotty, and uh Spotty is due for a checkup." And there would be a picture of the 25 employees from the Laguna Beach VCA in the ad, and that same team, that worked everywhere. And you would say, "Oh, there's, there's Susie and Billy, we love them." And you'd call up and you'd make an appointment. And people would watch these messages one and a half times and so on. Um, on the other hand, our longest-term client, our next longest-term client is a company that most people listening to this may not have heard of. I'll ask you if you have, called Flipkart.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yep.
Eric Frankel: Flipkart is Amazon... excuse me, is, is Walmart India. They, you know, when we first started dealing with them they were worth a couple of billion dollars, they're worth about 50 billion today. They get it, and we work for them every single solitary day. Um, we've done this for Amazon, for Amazon Prime Video, for Amazon Fire TV (the little plug on the side), we've done it for Amazon Fashion, we've done it for Amazon Echo, Alexa "call me a cab, which one would you like?" Um, uh BMW. We're currently doing 43,000 ads a month for Honda and Acura. 43,000 ads! Historically they would do an ad...
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow.
Eric Frankel: Honda dealerships and 300 um Acura, and we have three different campaigns going in video and display in all different sizes and where are you in the funnel. You know, we're trying to get you to go to Honda of Laguna Beach and not go to Eric's garage to get your car tuned up or a brake job. Um we've, we've done this with Mitsubishi, we've done this with, you know, we've done this with about a hundred brands that almost every one of your listeners would know. Every single one, with the exception of, you know, a few exotic brands in the you know, in uh in the Middle East that might not be familiar. But you could call it the Dick's Sporting Goods of the Middle East, um you know, the Macy's of the Middle East. We've done it for airlines. We, we've done it for Toyota, we've done it for cruise ships, we've done it for hotels.
And we used to let people test for a month, and it's a lot of work the first month. It's sort of like you haven't gone to the gym since you were in high school, and now you decide you're going to go in and do one-on-one workouts. And that happened to me. I took these very hard classes, and within five minutes I thought I was going to throw up. If the story is month one is hard, we now have people sign up for a minimum of three months. Month two is 80% easier than month one in terms of what the client has to do, and month three is 90%. So after three months they get it, they understand the cadence, the pattern. The workload is now de minimis and we do all the heavy lifting. But when you've been only pushing out one ad for the last 20 years, to sit here and have to contemplate 43,000... if that's the number, number, it's significantly more. And even if we're double or tripling your sales and doing it at a lower cost, many executives aren't necessarily the state owner, and they're just like, "I just want it easy. I just want to keep my head down." The agency would come in and say, "Here are four ideas," and we'd say, "We like number three." The media agency would say, "We need to spend 50 million dollars," we'd say, "You have 45," and then I should go back to my desk. Now they're looking at numbers every day, and they're seeing which ads work better, and why, and how, and which channel, and which SKU, and which language. And you make it more complex, but the results are outstanding.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well it sounds like I mean just listening to your story, you've got, you've raised 12 million dollars, you've brought a platform or a product to market, a service to market for a lot of big brands. They see the value, they've been with you for years. I just think of like, what's the competitive landscape here? And you mentioned that no one does what you do. There's a lot of technologies that are out there today. What is it that they're not doing that you're doing today, and how did you begin to scale? I mean you're in 28 countries or 38, whatever the number is, it sounds like you're global. Um, if you're a startup founder and you want to kind of take your company global, which a lot of companies are trying to get new markets, walk us through the competition landscape then how did you go global?
Eric Frankel: So, so number one, the biggest challenge in any of these businesses is having enough money to stay alive. Because remember, for years brands would say, "What's wrong with talking to Jake about dresses, pocketbooks, and lipstick? What we should be talking to you about is men's grooming items and shirts and blue jeans and Nikes or whatever else Jake likes." So um, so how do you keep the lights on? How do you have a good enough team? So, you know, we were lucky enough to be able to pull that off, um primarily because I kept on investing in the company whenever there was, you know, a bad time. Um so that's number one. Number two is because many of my competitors instead of 12 million, raised 100 million, 221 million. So I think rather than it actually being... it's on the one hand it was advantageous because they have 330 engineers instead of six. Um, but we had to be smarter, we had to be more muscular, we had to... we, you know, we're The Little Engine That Could. Because we had a fear we would go by the wayside, so we just didn't.
Um, whether it's a combination of leadership, the team that we have in place, we started off and we were okay at this or not that good, and then we got okay, and then we got better, and then we got pretty darn good. And so we kept on growing and evolving, and you make mistakes. So, so first of all, you get good at what you do, and you have to get good at what you do because you have to kick the other guy's butt who's got 400 employees versus 30, um and they have lots of leather couches and they have people getting paid hundreds and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. And you're saying, "And every one of my employees is an owner and we're all rowing the boat to try to succeed and eventually you know, uh, figure out an exit strategy."
With regard to globalization, then you take shots. Uh I decide we find an employee in London who's fabulous and becomes our head of creative, and this is before COVID. And we work remotely, and my assistant leaves and moves to New York. And we learn how to operate just like you and I are talking here today. And we find out that it works as well as anything we've ever done, and there's no reason for my colleagues to drive an hour and 15 minutes from Pasadena to be at the office. If you're 22 years old you may be losing some of the cultural, you know, participation that you have by being in the office, but we're getting three hours a day more work output. So we open up a shop in London. We, I... we throw money down and we hire all these salespeople, and we find out that either they're not very good at selling or the marketplace is different.
Um, what we've done primarily is I found people that I've known from all around the world who previously handled the most important programming in the world, um working at my company, and as Warner got became um AT&T and then became Discovery Warner, a lot of very talented executives got laid off. So we would have them come to work and, and give them an ownership stake where they get a large percentage of all the money they bring in. But I'm not a million and a quarter or two hundred thousand dollars out of pocket on a salary hoping that they deliver. And we continue to add team members, so we have people in Sydney, Australia. I'm... later today we'll close a deal with um, with a person who is one of the largest distributors of the most popular channels in the world in Latin America. So he knows every single broadcaster, cable system, satellite person, and now he's going to walk in and say, "You should be doing personalization, both to get viewership and more importantly for your advertisers. You shouldn't be selling one ad anymore. You should be telling Coca-Cola you could do 1600 ads and tell people where to get their Coca-Cola or their Burger King and, and, and, and, and so on." So um, it's just natural expansion. Uh hit and miss trial. So after you lose X hundreds of thousands of dollars on the sales team in the UK, and "why am I getting 28 meetings a week and they're doing three?" Yeah, um. So then you go, "Well I want to be nice, but they're not necessarily the right team." So you change them.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: I love that strategy where it's really you're in a lot of ways bringing people in as part owners and living, and basically immediately getting impacts from their, from their own affiliate relationships and distribution and without having it up... upside on the risk, but you're getting the benefit of, you know, their desire to really make it happen and, and dimensions and relationships that are pretty irreplaceable.
Eric Frankel: I have a guy who worked at Turner, so he was the guy who distributed TBS, TNT, CNN, Headline News, Adult Swim. Um, you tell me... all the Charter networks, many, many more that I'm, you know, forgetting. Uh I see Cartoon Network. Um, so he's one of the, you know, most prolific distributors of networks.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
Eric Frankel: I think he eventually also became the HBO guy and all of that. So you know, when he knocks on the door of the family in Brazil that owns all the media, he's warmly accepted, and he has the opportunity to make as much money as he can deliver, because he's now, you know, a participant in the business. And if he can turn it into a 20 million dollar a year business for him, he can end up making two and three times more than he did uh per year in his 30 years as an executive um at his old company.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, it's interesting. At the beginning of this um podcast, you talked a little bit about a pivot where you're at and pivoting from being at Warner Brothers into becoming, you know, building your own startup. Within the, within the startup, if you talk about a pivot, it sounds like you went from hiring full-time or salespeople to pivoting to more like this partnership of employing...
Eric Frankel: So I acquired lots of old people when I first started, um overpaid them all with this newfound money that we had raised. I hired lots of people I knew, and they weren't necessarily the right team to do this new business, which means selling Mickey Mouse cards and famous NBA players and comedians and MTV stars. When MTV was huge in the old days, you know, Pauly D from whatever, the Jersey Shore, you know, wishing you a happy anniversary or Merry Christmas or whatever it all was. Um so yeah, so you just, you learn on the job.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. You have to make decisions before the, before the blood is up to your knees, um or the deficits are. So you know, you can just try the next good thing.
Eric Frankel: So you replace it. I'm not being an ageist here or anything. You replace the 44-year-olds with 21-year-olds for a quarter of the money back then, and they understand um the religion, I would argue, much more. Um and, and the goal, and they're much more suited to the task.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, no that's great. I think a lot of that also goes to culture where you might have a startup culture where you have, you know, the desire to have people come in and build, versus they've been at big companies and systems have to be in place. They operate at a different level, at a different mindset when it comes to timing and getting things done. And we see companies make those mistakes all the time. You want the person to have the big experience at big companies, you bring them in and they, they don't know really how to operate. So that sounds interesting. You know, for us just to kind of give you a quick insight about a pivot we had to make which was similar. Where we, you know, when COVID hit, you know our, our business is we help companies scale and hire. It was great because you could hire anybody anywhere remotely. And then we started to get requests of, "Can you help us hire in Canada or Mexico or Europe or Asia or you know, Latin America?" And we weren't structured to do that. So we had to pivot as well and think about what's the best way to do this. We made some partnerships, we also put some systems in place, and, and now we're in five continents and, you know, can have people interviewing within 48 hours. They're up, up and running. There's no paperwork, it's just, it's super easy for companies to do that now and go global, whereas we had to adapt and figure it out, but it was challenging. And you had to put money back into the company and you're thinking about "can I do this the right way?" So as an entrepreneur you don't always have things the way you think they should go, you have to make changes and adapt. And there's been so many breakthroughs in technology, you know, you've got AI right now that's impacting almost every industry. If you look at your company and the platform you started, is it utilizing AI today? And if it's not, do you see it as a real benefit for you?
Eric Frankel: Um, we use AI today a little less for the creative, and more for determining what's working, where, when, how, and adjusting it. So if everyone loves the blue shirt, we're able to know that immediately and say "run more blue shirt ads rather than the black shirt." If everybody wants to go to Aspen and Cincinnati isn't working as well, you don't want to waste your money telling people you go to Cincinnati for $69. No one cares if they'd rather pay $600 to go to Aspen. So we use a lot of AI to find out in real time what's going on with these hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of ads on a multiplicity of channels with all these individuals. I call it fishing where the fish are. I'm going to assume that if I went down to the right place in Laguna Beach today with the right rod and reel and bait I could catch more fish than I would on the Santa Monica Pier. So we're constantly using AI to determine where we should put our hook in the water to make our clients' messaging and ads more fruitful.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. You know, we work with a lot of companies in the AI space and there's a lot that are coming out with video. Is that... you know, I'm talking to you but I can make my lips look like I'm talking to someone else. And, and do you see that type of technology having a role in your company?
Eric Frankel: I'm starting to, you know, not as much for the commercials that, you know, that a brand uses, but for in-house blog and for our own uh, you know, propaganda that we put out, why this is a better type of ad. So we're using, you know, um AI voiceover AI to pull all the various clips and, and all of that. And we've been an advocate for years. I mean, I think my first conversation with the guy who ran AI in Facebook, you know, was eight years ago, and I think he's still there and still in charge. I think he's like an NYU professor or something, but he's not running AI at Meta.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, got it. Great. Well, we got a couple more questions here. Um, for the, for the, the entrepreneurs out there today that are looking to raise capital... I know you raised 12... it's always a gray area of what do you raise, how much do you raise, how do you go about the process. Give us a little bit of your story of you went to raise, you raise a seed round and then later a bigger A round. Walk us through that. I want to know really three things. Your process in going into market to try and raise capital if you've never done it before. The second part is, how did you know how much to ask for? And then thirdly, how much should you give up or did you decide you had to give up to take the money? Yeah, which I don't always know is a really... a process of knowing. You just kind of hope for the best and you hope you got the right partners, but walk us through your process.
Eric Frankel: So the answer is you don't know anything when you're first starting, unless you've done it before, and then you know five times more than you did the last time. And if you do it a second time you'll know 10 times more than you did between the first and second. So um, we didn't really know what the business was. We didn't know what the revenue would be. We didn't know the real costs. So these are all made up numbers on documents that you create, and do presentation. And myself and a couple of very qualified colleagues with incredible pedigree, or at least one of them had incredible pedigree, and I got accepted to go have meetings with all of the VCs. Um, and I found that to be, you know, a fairly if not more than fairly horrific experience. Um, you know, uh, they were butcher shops where you went into a lobby and they had six or eight conference rooms going, and you'd walk in for 30 or 60 minutes, give them your pitch, you'd go out and the next person would come in. And that would happen all day and all week. And even if they liked you and invited you back three or four times, which happened with some of the largest um, uh, uh, uh VCs, then one day they'd say, "No, we'd have to meet next week," and there'd be no logical reason why. But one of the logical reasons was we didn't really exactly know what our goals were and what the business model was and so on. We were just a bunch of smart, talented uh people who were going to try to make an idea work and, and pivot if it didn't.
Um, so what happened instead is, um, I knew lots of successful, wealthy people from the industry. Many of them had worked with me before, and, you know, some of them said things, not to be egotistical and bizarre, but um one billionaire client of mine said, "Eric, you were better than, you know, in those days eight other studios combined. I would invest in anything." Now that doesn't... he's so rich and so smart that he limits what he'll do and so on. But the short version is we raised about six and a half million dollars, and everyone was in love, and everyone was happy, and everything was working. And then we had a [pivot]... and then we'd run out of money. And because I had some money from my nearly 30 years at Warner, every time we would get together and be in a jam I'd say, "Hey, I'm gonna throw a couple hundred thousand dollars into the mix. You guys are a lot wealthier than I am. Can I count on you also?" So that's what we did until we got to a break-even level um with the company.
Um, now we have people coming and saying, "Can we invest real money? Can we buy you?" And there's a whole bunch of different activities um happening, and it's a very different climate. Um, although climates change, um, you know, in one minute it's all uh about ad teching this, and then it's all about AI, and nobody really knows what that means and how it's all monetized and um, and, and, and so on. So um, so that was our journey. And um, it's a horrible journey. What I like doing is inventing products, I like selling the products, I like producing the products, I like deploying them, and I like looking at the increases in engagement and activation that we garner, more than I like going to nameless people and trying to convince them um to give us money.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, got it. That's not as much fun. And as far as valuations, you know, you're not really, really concerned about that.
Eric Frankel: In my opinion, you either want to do this or not, and you're either going to get money from someone or not. Um, and the trick is, can you, you know, I don't know what the latest numbers are, but somebody would tell you that 92 percent of all startups fail. Um, you know, so the question is, is it a good enough idea? Is there a broken 781 billion dollar business called marketing that doesn't tell me where my Burger King is, doesn't tell me where my Ford dealership is, shows me a commercial of a car with little kids in the back seat when I don't have little kids and I don't care about that and now I just want a fast car with a good stereo and a big screen, um, as you know. So um, so yeah, so there was a real problem. Problem there still is. Everyone will do what I'm telling your listeners and viewers today in the next seven years. This will be commonplace, this will be super duper popular, but old bad habits die slowly, and that's what I've learned, and you just have to have the wherewithal, desire, and capitalization to hang in until you, you know, convince the world. And there's really almost no such thing as an overnight success. Your typical overnight success takes 20 years, you know.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I know. Yeah, I think it was eight years until they really started to see significant revenue where they actually could take home some real capital, and now they're multi-billionaires. But yeah, it's a, it's kind of the long view and you've got to grind it out day to day and make incremental changes to see growth. As a leader, what's been your secret sauce in staying positive not just for yourself but also for your uh important partners or employees?
Eric Frankel: Well, we actually have, like, you know, we have meetings. We, you know, we have staff, all staff meetings nearly every week, and it's all about communication, communication, communication. So, you know, you try to be, in my case, maybe the old wise man. So I used to like to say at Warner in those days when everyone had receptionists, and nine out of ten receptionists would just offer you a bottle of water and maybe ask you to sign in, I would say, "Our receptionist can tell you what our top 10 goals and objectives are." So the right hand has to know what the left hand's doing. So it's really about communication. I mean, there's a whole other list, but the logic is every week we sit down and I say, "Here are our top 10 or 15 things we're working on." So no one can say they don't understand. And then every single person pulls up their page of a deck and tells the rest of the people, um, you know, with the exception of some, maybe some administrative people, but even they get a chance. And they say, "Here are the top five or ten things we're working on." So we know what's going on in engineering, and we know what's going on creatively, and we know what's going on with analytics, and uh we know every... and everyone knows. And at the end of an hour everyone feels like they're a member of the Lakers, the Yankees, the Dodgers, whatever you want to call it. It's a team, it's high five, it's "We're all in this together." Here's people who are looking to invest, people who want to buy, here's the opportunity, here's what we'll be giving out new options. Um, here's why it's all about honesty, here's why it's all about integrity, here's why we're a company... you know, you do whatever you want when you leave work, but don't do it with any of the employees you work with. I mean, yes, maybe you could fall in love, but this isn't, you know, we're training people to not be the Harvey Weinsteins, which is very important culturally, to teach people how to be good human beings, and how to deliver on time. And know that they will be late, but then you don't wait until two days later to say, "Sorry I didn't give it to you on Monday, I know it's Thursday," but uh five hours or the day before say, "I'm having a challenge with this delivery I said I'd have on Monday at noon, and I think I'm gonna have it on Tuesday at five o'clock." And again, you could say "oh" and not have it, but you keep people, keep it posted. I like to say there are two kinds of employees in my opinion: the kind who get everything done, keep a list of everything that needs to be done, and are sitting outside the door or outside the Zoom call waiting to walk me through the 15 things they've done; and the others that I have to run around and chase and say, "I thought Jake was supposed to be delivering the analytics for the campaign happening here. Where the hell's Jake? Um, he told me about it on Monday, it's Thursday." I can't remember. So we'd like people to be responsible citizens and to be reliable. Um, and that's what we try to, you know, teach everything. And that's, I talk to people that come and say, "Oh, I don't know anything the company's doing. There's never a town hall, never a meeting, I, I've never met the boss, we don't know what he does." And that was my life at Warner Brothers to a large degree.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Um, so you took that experience and made it better based on what you felt was positive, more engaging, and more collaborative.
Eric Frankel: Yes.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Communication sounds like it gets the heart of your culture.
Eric Frankel: Yeah, it's, it's the heart. You can't, the train doesn't run out of time, um, yeah, unless there's a schedule. I mean, and trying to teach people about roadmap and due dates and you know, you, you got to know where the, where the highway is you're planning to build. And everything can change. Hey, it took us longer to get through the mountains by Laguna Beach and build those those highways that I go on, or and I go down there, um, but there was a plan, and the plan can change, and change frequently. But you can't do anything without a plan and a tentative due date, um, and all of that. Yes, so in my, in my 30 years or so of working at a large, large company for a terrific boss who I still have a relationship with, and many other bosses in the mix, I learned as much what not to do as what to do. So if you're discerning or hopefully fairly intelligent, you know, all the positive things stick with you. And then you say, "Uh, what would I do better?" You know, "No, I don't want to keep it as a secret and have that nobody knows it because it makes me more powerful." I'm not saying that any particular boss did that. "No, you want to make everybody feel like they're part of the process." And then, of course, a good idea can come from anywhere on the team, so you're trying to get, you're trying to get participation, um, because you don't know that the new kid, you know, who hasn't found the bathroom yet isn't going to come up with a breakthrough idea.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, you know, and that's probably the biggest challenge that I face is not a lot of participation. You know, I'm the guy sharing articles with every, everything I read. I'm the guy that says, "Did you see this new commercial? Isn't this cool? Isn't this a great look? Isn't this something that we can be replicating?" And, you know, that this team of 30 people are watching, hearing, seeing everything. And I don't understand, I find it a challenge why they don't want to share the interesting things they see and learn with the rest of the team because it just makes everyone smarter. And I believe in having, you know, radar um, you know, that makes me better today. And the thing... and the guy who hired me in that original story where he kept me waiting for two hours and I thought they had closed the floor and forgotten about me, when I came in the following Monday to start work, he put me in my little office. He gave me a stack of trades which I had never seen before: Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Broadcasting, Broadcasting & Cable, and all of these things. Of course, they never mentioned these to you even though you went to what's supposed to be one of the best communication schools in the country. He said, "Your job is to sit here and read these for three or four hours a day and learn the business, because that's what you have to do to be good at what you do." And if you were a woodworker you might be, you know, or an engineer, you might be reading Popular Science or whatever the trade publication was for that industry. And, you know, and that's what I've learned and, and embraced. So when I'm not sitting and doing my regular work, I'm reading the Apple news feed and see what's happening. You know, "Oh, finally they got rid of this guy at Macy's and they're replacing him with that guy in Macy's. Let's try him or her. Maybe they'll get why dress ads are bad for me."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. I love it. Where do you see the company going from here? We'll wrap up here in just a few minutes, but where, where, where, where, where...
Eric Frankel: So now we've become super competent and qualified, and now we do very good work, and we do it very, very quickly. But now we're understaffed and, and people work too hard in our company. Like, very, very hard. Like, some people work like 14 hours even...
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow.
Eric Frankel: A day, yeah. Like, literally. That's wild. And um, so now we're looking for either a few of those whale clients, and we have all these partnerships. The partnerships not only with the individuals but with giant companies. So now we have giant companies bringing us revenue and bringing us... so one in Australia has bought, is a big broadcaster and in turn a popular streaming platform. They have 550 salespeople, so they go out and they sell us and we get a percentage of the revenue. Um, so we need them to bring in more and more clients. We have them all around the world now. So we need them to bring in more and more clients for those spends to be higher amounts so your percentage of that number is a bigger number. And we need them to become more recurring. So we want Volvo every month, not just three months.
Um, and then we have a bunch of people talking about investing and/or acquiring. That's what I'd really like to do is find someone who has the same vision, personality, um, and for them to give us X amount of money, um take some big ownership stake, pay back all of my investors who to a degree have ad fatigue... not ad fatigue but investment fatigue, because they've been on it, as you said, for 13 years now. The good news is they're not like 92 percent of people who have lost their money, and some of them I know invested 16 million dollars in this one or that one and are gone, and then other people made billions in other businesses. Um, so what we'd like is someone to come in and say, "I agree with your point of view, I think you have the best technology I've seen, and why don't we go from these 30 people to 60 and 90 the year after, and why don't we do a bunch of the, the things you'd like to do to make us go from really good and better than anyone, to great and excellent and amazing, and all of you know, the other things that we want to do but don't have the bandwidth because we're 30 people and not 330 people."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, got it. Looks like you're in the same space that a lot of companies are in, which is too much work to do and too little people to do it. And you at some point burn out, or you figure out how to scale.
Eric Frankel: Yeah. So I mean we're really good at scaling and we do things in a half hour that would take two days for someone else um, but we have more ideas uh to pursue and, and, and, and, and sort of a lot of things are coming in the inbox, and um, and just... And because we have that attitude of test, learn, and improve, it isn't like, "Hey we're, we're not In-N-Out Burger, you know, just making that same, you know, delicious (most people would think) hamburger, and over and over again." We're saying, "What's the next burger? What's the next burger? What's the next burger?" Or "should we be selling pizza and why?"
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, gotcha. Yeah, really cool. Well, as a successful founder, uh, what advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs that are thinking about starting a business in today's market, and what do you wish you knew when you were just starting your current company?
Eric Frankel: Um, well, you know, sometimes ignorance and lack of experience I guess can be terrific, because we see, you know, young people straight out of school, drop out of school go on to launch these significant companies. If you dig in, they really ran into lots of rough spots. Or, you know, Facebook was a way to look at the pretty girls or the pretty guys in your college class, and it has nothing to do with that to a degree now, or not a lot necessarily. Um, I mean, I would say, you know, follow your dreams of course, because that's what you want to do. But I would also argue it's terrific to go to work at a good organized company and learn a lot of fundamentals, from culture to just, you know, how things work, you know, to be able to read spreadsheets and understand economics and learn how to manage people. We see a lot of these startups, we go to the Harvey Weinstein and good behavior school that I was talking about. You know, you know you probably will have less success if everybody's smoking weed and having tequila parties and sleeping together. Like we've seen, we've seen the made-for-TV movies or series based on those entrepreneurs. Um, so it's good to have a mentor, it's good to learn what to do, what not to do.
And then, you know, the question is what's the idea that's going to convince someone to give you a million or, you know, 12 million dollars to launch this. And frequently the pedigree will help convince those people because, um, you know, because you have some kind of track record and experience and you're not going to be the person who ran a company and deceived all their investors for years, Elizabeth Holmes, you know, and you know, which never really worked, you know, the blood test. Um, yeah, Theranos. So, you know, um, so yeah, it's, you know, just put together your plan, know what you're talking about, know it'll take a lot longer, it'll cost a lot more money, and garner some experienced people around to help you, you know. You don't know that you have 60 bills if you get an office, you know, for electricity and, you know, for your internet and insurance and, you know, all of these things. It's, there are just a lot of hidden costs that are invisible to you if you're at a company like I was where I could do... you know, we generated so much money, any intelligent thing that we wanted to try, they'd say, "Go and try," because you bring a billion and a half dollars a year or something. Um, here you can get in a lot of trouble with every, you know, move that doesn't move the needle.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Great advice. Well Eric, you've got a great career track that you've turned into a startup that's been funded, you're global. Looks like you're on a really good track here. I appreciate your time. It's just wonderful to hear somebody that's taken your experience and really changing, helping change the industry. And also I want to appreciate the listeners that are taking their time to listen to us today and hearing really the story of Eric Frankel and what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. Look forward to hearing from you in the future, Eric, and uh stay in touch. Let's definitely stay in touch. For, for the listeners, we'll catch up on our next episode and thank you for listening. And if anybody wants to reach out...
Eric Frankel: info@adgreetz.com and we'll respond to them.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Perfect. Great. Thank you.
Before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to all the entrepreneurs that have joined to make this podcast possible, and for all the listeners for listening. It means the world to me that you chose to spend your time with us today. I'm your host, Jake Aaron Villarreal, signing off for now, but can't wait to connect with you all soon on the next episode. Take care.
This show is sponsored by Match Relevant, a company that helps venture-backed startups find the best people in the market and they do it in three simple steps. First, they sit down with founders to understand their story. Second, they tell their story into multiple candidate channels. And third, they schedule interviews within 48 hours. Find us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.
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