– Welcome, everybody, to “Building My Legacy” podcast. Today I have with me, Geoff Cook. Geoff is fascinating because he comes out of Harvard and he is a serial entrepreneur. And so, those of us who have entrepreneurialship in our blood, I think he will speak to you a great deal today. And he has, I think, addressed needs and issues in the marketplace in many different ways, which I think is also interesting for today’s time, because so many people right now are looking for what’s next. How do I transition? How do I do things again? And so, just to give you a sense of his background, he had been CEO of Quepasa and myYearbook. He has bought and sold that company. And what? You bought it back and sold it again. And he’s taken the company from beginning stages to being a very profitable company. So I want him to share a little bit about what brought him to doing what he’s doing, and the companies, and also that entrepreneurial journey that he’s been on, how he’s approached it and lessons he’s learned that he can share with us.

– Great. Well, I appreciate being on the show. This is very nice and I’d love to answer any questions you have.

– Okay, so let’s start with being an entrepreneur, it takes a special kind of mindset. You started that while you were still in college, at the university, at Harvard, and you did it out of need to just generate income and you didn’t want a job where you were reporting to somebody else. So just tell me, how did you get started and how you used that learning to go to the next level?

– Sure, so yeah, I went to… I grew up in New Jersey, middle of New Jersey, South Plainfield High School, and went to Harvard, it must have been ’96. I never really thought of myself as an entrepreneur back then. I thought maybe I’d be a scientist or something like that, quickly learned that there’s a lot better physicists than me at Harvard, but I did need a job. And so, you know, I was gonna, I thought about working at a library. I didn’t particularly wanna clean my classmates’ toilets. And so, I thought, well, what are the types of things I can do? Now, again, this is ’96, 90, this is actually ’97 when I started thinking about it, it was my sophomore year. And I thought, well, I could edit. I thought I was a good writer at the time. And so, I decided, well, let me just offer my services online. And so, I took a cash advance of $600 against my credit card and started a little editing business. I figured the worst case scenario would be that no one would use it. And I would have learned how to create a website and integrate any commerce backend, which at the time, you know, wasn’t something you could just get off the shelf. And so, that was, I thought I’d learned something, and lo and behold, people started ordering stuff. And so, it was a perfect little side job for me at Harvard that year. And I would tinker with the website, try to improve it, learn about search engine marketing, grew that ultimately to millions of dollars of revenue before I would sell it a couple years after I graduated. But, you know, by senior year, is making three or $400,000 and I was hiring editors because I could no longer do all the work.

– So off of that experience, Geoff, what were your biggest learnings? I mean, that was very early in your life. What were some of the biggest learnings that you took away from that experience?

– Yeah, I mean, you know, I think you gotta begin, right? So I think the main thing I took out of that is that was a story all about just beginning, right. So I had an idea, I didn’t necessarily think it was a big idea, I just thought it was a little side job, and the trick was actually building it, right. So having the initiative to just go do it and then continue to tinker with it, which is apparently something that I was reasonably good at. And so, I think the lesson I’ve learned is that, you know, there, especially when you’re that young, as I was 19 years old, you know, there’s just no downside to failure, like a business failure at 19, right? Like, there isn’t a downside to failure, like, even if the thing were to have failed, you would have learned from that experience. It’s a totally different thing to have a successful job and then say, well, I’m gonna quit that to go do something else, despite my three children and mortgage, right. So, you know, being a college student, being, you know, young, I thought it was an advantage. And then, you know, I went through that whole process, raising some money, selling the company ultimately to a fairly large conglomerate. And then, you know, I would say I went through that whole withdrawal process too, you know, once you sell a company that you spent so much time with, you almost feel like, you know, you lost your child. And so, you know, learned how to manage that as well.

– How did you manage that? Loss is always difficult.

– You something new. So I found that the main thing that helped with that was start something new. So, it’s around the time I sold the company and exited it, I started three other companies. One was an admissions college and university admissions business called Insider Guides. Another was an art business called artstudio.com. And that would actually also have an art community called wetcanvas.com. And then while I was working on both of those.

– The purpose of those companies was what?

– So the purpose of Art Studio was to bring home an original. So the idea would be, you know, instead of having all these prints or whatever people put on their walls, to have an original artwork to connect artists, local artists with people who might wanna buy, but around the price point that was lower than typical art. So instead of, you know, buying something for two or $3,000, you know, buying something for two or $300. And then Insider Guides was meant to replace college guidebooks, which at the time were kind of written by almost like, you know, professional writers and maybe by the universities themselves with kind of an insider perspective written by the students. As I started doing some, you know, research on that, I realized there was a kind of another company called College Prowler at the time, who was well-positioned and seemed to be doing something very similar to what I wanted to do. And so, I didn’t really think that was valid. The art thing I put some serious effort into. We acquired the wetcanvas.com art community. We imagined connecting that community who was basically original artists with buyers. But at the same time, I started a social network called myYearbook, along actually with my brother and sister at the time, still my brother and sister, and that’s was kind of a, that was meant, I was Facebook user, you know, 13,000 or something, so I was fairly early to Facebook and I thought social networking, I just sensed that social networking was gonna be massive. I didn’t necessarily imagine how massive, but I thought that there would be social networks for different things. And so, Facebook seemed to be the friends and family one, maybe you could have a social network for meeting new people, which is similar to dating, but maybe more casual, more like the bar, the coffee house vibe. And so, that’s where we started. And that started kind of taking a mind of its own. It was clearly the most successful idea of the ones I had been working on. So I stopped doing everything else. And then I’ve been doing that for the last 16 years.

– Okay, so how does that work? How do you meet people that way and how do you connect?

– So we, well today, the way it works is people–

– Today, because of COVID or today in terms of just general?

– No no no, today, meaning, back then it was a website, then it was a mobile app, and now it’s kind of a live streaming mobile app. So, the way people meet kind of changes with technology. But what it was always about is just connecting to people near you, based on age, gender location, you know, people within 15, 20, 30 miles of you, connecting around interests, connecting around, you know, things, you know, people that are mutually interested in each other’s appearance potentially. And so, we have made, in the last four years, a pretty substantial bet on marrying live streaming video with dating. And our live streaming video products, as far as I know, we’re like the first people to be doing this to an English speaking audience. It’s something we have seen done in China by the company Momo. And so, we took that concept, we applied it here, but we’ve put our own spin on it. We created a mini dating game called Next Date, which is part of our MeetMe app. So we have five apps. They all have more than four and a half million daily active users. MeetMe, Scout, Tagged, LOVOO and GROWLr. And they each serve a different part of the dating landscape. GROWLr’s a gay dating app, MeetMe and Scout are kind of US oriented dating, Tags, an African-American oriented dating, LOVOO is European dating. But they all do more or less the same thing. They connect people, sorry. They all do more or less the same thing, they connect people to each other around their interests, around their preferences. And by adding live streaming into the product, we found that we could grow dramatically by taking the same users we had, but taking, let’s say, a quarter or 30% of them and getting another 20 minutes a day from them. And so, we’ve always imagined ourselves as the mobile version of the bar or the coffee house by adding live streaming, it made it feel more alive, like a very lively bar or coffee house, and it ultimately helped the product quite a bit. And now, you know, now that we’re in the age of, unfortunately in the age of this virus, we’ve seen, you know, people increased their use of the live streaming platform by more than 40% in just the last six weeks.

– By more than 40%. That’s amazing. So people are desperate to connect, I mean, we know that from what we’re seeing and reading elsewhere. And they’re using this as a source for doing that. So tell me, live streaming, there’s nothing about it that gets saved, correct? Or tell me, how does that work?

– Yeah, so the way, there’s a couple different ways it works. The primary way is you have a streamer. So any user of the app can be a streamer on the app. And that streamer goes live by tapping the go live button and then other viewers and anyone, any other user of the app can go view that stream. And the viewers can hit the like button, they just show that they, you know, appreciate the streamer, they can write in comments that the streamer can then answer in real time. So you might ask questions. A lot of people ask questions in the comments, and then the streamer can answer those questions. Or, you know, the streamer, the viewer can even ask to be a guest streamer. So that you’re both, both parties are streaming, and then everyone else is watching the conversation. And then in addition and what monetizes about it is you can give gifts, you can give virtual gifts to the streamer. So any user, any viewer can give a virtual car, a virtual rose or virtual kiss, or any number of virtual items, dozens of virtual items. And these are just simple animations that go away after a few seconds. But what’s interesting about them is they convey some monetary benefit to the streamer. So it’s a way of basically tipping the streamer.

– How does it convey monetary value? It’s not real monetary value, so it’s a perceived value.

– So it’s actually real. So, basically, you get some, so if I give you a $1 rose, you will actually have 30 cents, let’s say, and then you can, you know, cash, you can basically claim some cash reward at some point once you reach some threshold of dime, of kind of this currency. And so, it’s basically tipping content producers. And what was interesting about that model, and it’s something we saw first pioneered in China, but now, you know, Facebook has something similar to that and so does, you know, certainly Twitch, Microsoft Mixer, you know, so now it’s essentially in a lot of different places. We applied it into this dating use case, and we found that, you know, it’s actually not too different from kind of buying a drink at the bar. You know, like if you think about a real world situation where you might wanna meet someone at the bar, it would be a custom to go up there and maybe offer to buy a drink. And here, you know, if you have a crowded dating platform and you wanna stand out, giving a virtual rose separates you, it says, look, I have a little disposable income. You know, I am willing to show you that I’m interested in you. And it ends up that what you get is you also get this class of streamer who’s actually a talented content producer who is almost like doing talk shows, like personality driven talk shows, and some very successfully. And so, you have this really interesting dynamic where you have maybe, you know, a couple thousand streamers who are extremely talented and treat it almost like their full time job. And then you have this long tail of many hundreds of thousands of streamers who are just interested in meeting people and dating. And you have this really vibrant community. And that’s what, it’s basically what we’ve found we have.

– So obviously you began this and the in over what period of time have you developed this?

– So, I started the company originally as myYearbook in 2005. And so, it’s been over the last 15 years that we’ve been doing this. We’ve been doing live streaming since 2017. So only the last three, four years we started doing live streaming. We started building it in 2016. And live streaming is a big thing, right? Like it’s not easy to build a live streaming platform. We’ve spent tens of millions of dollars, probably a year, building out our solutions as they exist today. You know, when we decided to go into live streaming, we saw it as an all in bet of the company. And the reason is ’cause, you know, it’s not just building out the live streaming function, you have to build out significant moderation, you have to make sure that users aren’t gonna do bad things on your live streams, not an easy problem to solve. And so, we’ve got, but then once we built it, we said, you know what, we’ve already made this all in company bet on live streaming video, and so let’s double down, let’s triple down, let’s continue to move all in, and let’s apply this live streaming video solution to other apps that look like ours. And so, we started acquiring our competitors in 2017 at the same time, as part of the same live streaming strategy. And we acquired these competitors, and those include Scout, Tagged, LOVOO, GROWLr. And so, these other apps we acquired really just to add our live streaming solution to it. And in each case, it was tremendously successful with growing revenues, you know, as by at least a quarter, and as much as a half for that app. And so, very meaningful. And so, from there, we said, well, look, now we’re very good at acquiring things and adding video to it, but there’s things that we can’t acquire, because it’s either too big or they don’t wanna be acquired, you know. Can we power video for those types of things without buying it? And so, then we started doing that and we recently did that with one of the larger dating companies in the world, the Match Group for an app called Plenty of Fish, which we have a trial agreement, a moment of power. And so, we’ve been kind of taking this video thing and just continuing to extend it in, in new directions.

– Explain. What do you mean by power video?

– So by power video, I mean, just, what video is is basically a tab where you can meet, a tab of an application where, when you tap into that tab, you can see everyone else who’s streaming right now. And then you can tap into those streams, you can ask questions, you can give gifts, you comment, it’s doing that for apps we don’t own. And so, by power, I mean, we supply all of the technology, we supply all of the moderation, we supply all of the talent management. And in some cases, we even supply the streamers. So, we combined behind the scenes, the streamers and the viewers, so that it’s one big pool. And that’s pretty successful. That’s been a successful model so far.

– So, with all of what you’ve done, what’s next for you?

– Well, you know, we we’ve recently entered into an agreement. It’s not done, it’s not closed. In March, we agreed to sell the company for $500 million to a company that powers, that’s the company behind eHarmony and Parship, two pretty significant international dating brands. And I expect that I’ll continue to run the Meet Group as part of this larger thing and that we’ll continue to bring live streaming video to all sorts of apps, not necessarily just dating where we’ve been mostly focused, but potentially extending that into other areas like gaming.

– Tell me, you were a writer that’s, I don’t know what your major was at Harvard, but you started because you were good at content and writing, right?

– That’s correct.

– Where did you learn app creation? Live streaming, pulling it all together, because I think many times what limits people in their thought processes, “But I don’t have that skill.” You obviously were not stopped by that. So how did you go out and acquire what you needed to know?

– Sure. So, you know, I think I tend to be just naturally curious. So, I don’t expect to be able to do the tech. I’m not a technical person. I don’t do the development or the engineering. But what I am able to do is specify a product and have a vision for it. So I could say, you know, I think this idea that I may have seen elsewhere applied to some other industry, with a small tweak, could work in the dating landscape. And so, it turned out that what I, you know, provided in terms of value is really value as an entrepreneur. So seeing opportunities that aren’t yet realized, and then leading a group of people to go realize them. And that doesn’t need, you don’t need to be a specialist in order to do that. You could be, I mean, there’s certainly plenty of entrepreneurs who are specialists. But you could also just be good at a lot of different things. And I would say I’m probably more of that where I’ll spend most of my time worrying about the product, trying to make sure we’re giving the right users, the right product to our users. But, you know, I can understand project management, you know, I could understand finance, you know, not to the level of the people that work for me, but, you know, enough, and that’s all you basically have to do if you have talented people around you.

– So in the process of doing the things that you’ve done, biggest mistake you ever made, what would that be?

– Yeah, the biggest mistake I’ve ever made. Boy, that’s a tough one. And I imagine it would have to be business related. Let’s see. You know, there was a recent failure for one of our apps and it was, you know, saddened me ’cause I really loved the idea and thought of it, and it was an app called a Podcoin where you could actually listen to podcasts and earn some virtual currency. But, you know, it ran after, you know, running for a while, there’s certain rules in the store guidelines, you know, that, you know, you can’t incent, well, you know, or at least were interpreted to say, you can’t incent audio minutes. And so, you know, I wouldn’t, it’s hard to say that that’s necessarily a failure ’cause there’s no real way of knowing that. And there was no way at the time of knowing it, but it is, you know, one of the more recent failures. Most of the app ideas I’ve ever had have failed, you know, I’ve probably started a dozen or so app ideas that have all been shut down, Podcoin only being the most recent. But, you know, if it’s a failure, you learn from, or, you know, it doesn’t really count. And so, you know, I wouldn’t say, I would probably say that that was probably the biggest, but again, that wasn’t all that big, you know, in the scheme of things.

– Got it. So, Geoff, as you see people starting things, if you have a friend who’s starting a new idea or getting going on with the business, advice you give, what’s the most important advice you give?

– Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of advice probably to potentially give. Begin, you know, always be beginning is kind of a, you know, if you think you’re successful, then it’s time to begin something else. If you just failed, well, that’s a good time to begin something else, right. Because any success is short lived. And so, it’s live streaming today, it’ll be something else tomorrow, right? Like that’s just the nature of the business. You have to constantly be changing. And so, you know, you can’t be an entrepreneur if you’re not embracing change, right. And if you don’t even, you have to not only embrace the change, you have to like, want the change. You have to enjoy it, you know, because, you know, that’s how it goes. You know, I think another thing I try to deal with, you know, because you deal with a lot of ambiguity as an entrepreneur, you have a lot of problems where you don’t know if something is gonna work out one way and be devastating, or work out another way and be okay, or work out still another way and be great. And then you might have four or five of those balls in the air. And so, you know, I try to maintain this kind of, you know, do no harm view, like, I’ve said it before as fight harmlessly, right? So like, you can have a tough negotiation with someone, but you don’t have to make it personal. They might, but, you know, you can do whatever you can to just fight harmlessly. Like, look, I’m interested in a fair deal, this is what I need for it to be fair, tell me why you need this. Like, it doesn’t have to become, and I would say, as I was younger, I was more frequently, yeah, more, yeah, I’d be more angry in a negotiation like that to the point where, you know, like hanging up on each other, but then still maybe finding a deal. Now, I basically, I think said, you know, just a lot, there’s so much going on, there’s so many different types of people, everyone’s going through their own thing, you know, can you, you have to fight gas, but you can do so in kind of a harmless way. And then I would say, you know, there’s a mental health aspect to a lot of this, you know, I think, you know as you grow your company, you know, there’s often, and a lot of entrepreneurs go through various problems where they feel like they have no one. I fortunately, have had, you know, a strong family support system. But there’ll be lots of dark moments in the midst of, you know, a business, especially one that’s 10 years, 20 years long, you know? And in those dark moments, you have to be willing to accept that, you know, you almost have to enjoy it, right? Like, ’cause you you’ll have the, you know, the moment where the short sellers, I run a public company, the short sellers are attacking you or there’s some concern or there’s some media problem. And the best you can do is try to be fair and relatively clear with people and try to understand what happened and realize that other people make their bones by trying to bring you down. And so, you know, I think it’s kind of this clarity of understanding that’s the way the world works. And that’s really the only way you’re gonna be able to bring your business into the world is by worrying about all of these details, but ultimately, not letting it try to get at your underlying mental state. Like, at the end of the day, you know, things that are gonna happen are gonna happen. So, you know, I think those are some of the things I would give.

– Wow. So Geoff, we have been on the phone for almost half an hour. What other thoughts do you have that you want to leave too with our listeners today before we close?

– Yeah, I mean, I would say, you know, the, and I understand that your listeners, I believe are interested in legacy and things of this nature. You know, I think the best way is really just to begin, like I’ve been thinking quite a bit, like what, you know, having recently entered an agreement to sell the company, like, what is the legacy here? Obviously I’d like to continue to be a part of it, but what is the legacy? And, you know, I think we have a lot of time right now, at least a lot of people do, kind of isolated in their houses and apartments, and, you know, now is as good a time as any that may be put to paper what some of those things, ’cause one way of leaving legacy is to leave a book, you know, you could write a book now. Another is to create a business and spend this time that we have, you know, trying to create something. I would say that the virus has probably shortened the timeline by which I think about goals, both business and professionally. So rather than, you know, if I have 10 things I might wanna do, obviously you can’t do those 10 things. You have to pick two or three of them. And so, how do you pick those two or three? Now I’ve started to think more of, well, which of these will I, you know, matter to the next six months, matter to the next few months, not necessarily matter, you know, two or three years from now. Like, there’s so much uncertainty right now that thinking through that is probably not even useful. And so, I’ve kind of shortened timeframes for everything we’re building on the product side, to even personal goals and say, look, that’s great, that might be nice to have in five years, but that’s irrelevant right now, this is not normal times. You know, what will I wish I’ve produced on the other side of this pandemic? And so, you know, I think shortening timeframes and being thoughtful about, you know, what you wanna have left as this mark on the other side of this virus is maybe something helpful.

– What makes you wanna wake up in the morning and get to work and do what you do? There’s the passion you have somewhere.

– Yeah, I would say it’s probably a lot to do with wanting to create something new or wanting to see something I’ve thought of be born, right. And so, both of those are the things that excite me the most, certainly my family as well, you know, three small children and my wife, and that of course is important as well. But I would say professionally, the desire to create something new, I’m definitely enjoying, a good day is a day in which, you know, I could write, you know, if I could write something on the side, I do write on the side, or had an idea for something that I think could come to fruition or I’ve seen progress against an idea I already had.

– You know, it’s so interesting to hear different perspectives. Yours is, and your journey is such an interesting one, because you’ve taken a route that’s not typical of a lot of people in the business world. A lot of entrepreneurs will have come out of a very typical business world. But you’ve created your own path along the way. So you’ve had incredible stamina. You’ve also had an amazing ability to know what you want, which I think is so important. A lot of times I think we don’t know what we want. And so, we flounder a bit.

– Yeah, you know, I think there’s something to that. I think something that you don’t necessarily learn in a business class is, you know, these ideas and companies are often just a reflection of the entrepreneur’s inward nature, right? So, an idea kind of by its nature, comes out of the inwardness of a particular person and, you know, enriching that inwardness through reading, through varied, you know, opportunities, and not necessarily just being all business. I actually, basically don’t read business books. I read all sorts of stuff, but not that. But I think, you know, you can get an idea from any, you could get ideas, to apply to business, from poetry, you get ideas to apply to business from, you know, Conquistadors or anything like that. There’s anything, from philosophy, from fiction, you know, having, you know, you’re probably not gonna get those, everybody having the same ideas is not gonna lead to a great idea, period. And so, you know, how do you enrich your inward nature in order to be looking for an idea and in order to encapsulate enough other concepts to create that idea when it’s needed. And so, there’s obviously a mystery that lays at the heart of all of that. And so, that’s, I mean, I look at it as more of a kind of this inward nature. Like, it’s not, building a company is not just about team and technology and ideas. Like, of course, those things matter, but it’s really enriching the inwardness of the person who brought it into existence, because someone without some natural capability or some something that shows to somebody else is not going to be able to recruit a talented team around them. And, you know, those people are going to have to see something, they’re gonna have to see somebody who has a goal that’s worth pursuing and that has a chance of pursuing it. And so, you know, when people talk about culture, it’s often just a reflection of the entrepreneur’s personality, of warts and all. And so, you know, I think there’s this aspect that, of just inwardness that people just don’t appreciate as it relates to business. And, you know, you might be able to develop that in a business school class, but you’ll probably just learn a lot of how-tos and you don’t really learn the kernel.

– That note, Geoff, thank you so much for your time and for being with us today. It’s been wonderful to learn about your journey and also just the sharing that you’ve done in terms of what you’ve learned as an entrepreneur. And those of you who are listening to us today, thank you for being with us and “Building my Legacy” podcast.

– Well, thank you.