Patrick Lee
speaker
30 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Patrick Lee’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, I knew that it was going to happen. I had heard rumblings of what the amounts, what the figures were.
At the time, I thought it was ridiculous, not from like a worth perspective, because I thought that the net worth and the sheer amount of views and metrics that you get to deliver a brand from a marketing perspective, that number was warranted. But I also understood how unprofitable and like how big of a debt Vine collected as a company in an operation.
There's got to be a middle ground of like, you know, there's no creator funds in that day, and I still don't think creator funds are necessarily a good idea. I don't think they're equitable, but... that should have been day one of creator fund, which is like, what if we paid everybody a small salary of $35,000 a year to create Vines?
And then you get bonus incentives for working with our brand partners, bonus incentives for talking about Vine on Instagram. Like there was frameworks that I think we were even talking about as creators.
And they, of course, they went to the table with like, you know, give us the yacht.
I remember my reaction to hearing at the time was like, brother, we don't make no money. Where are we going to get a million dollars for you from? We don't sell ads. But, you know, it's a symptom of you created this culture where you empowered 100 people
to be the lifeline to the entire product and then like when those people decide to use their leverage you're in deep shit that's sorry like that's that's your problem like you you hitched this entire thing on you know 20 21 year olds who at any point could just decide like actually like we're not getting paid for this we can go anywhere else and like their audience will come and they were right you know
I mean, just using a CPN calculator right now... CPN, if you've forgotten, is how much money brands would be willing to pay a creator based on how well their videos performed. Somebody that's driving you maybe half a million views on a singular video, that's a $12,500 video. And you're looking at creators that are generating... 12.5 K in potential impressions per video.
They're uploading it three times a week. They're doing that for four weeks during the year. You're already looking at about $150,000 a month in like just a standard CPM on impressions that run rates over a million dollars a year. Like that's like one and a half million dollars. And they're asking for a million dollars for their video.
existence on the platform so to not think that from a vine perspective you can squeeze that out of them if you can squeeze profitability out of paying them a million dollars is like just at the time if the industry wasn't there i just don't think the foresight was there to say yeah these people are worth a million dollars i think the audiences were well worth a million dollars and they just didn't they just didn't click that i just i don't think they had that perspective i
The true conversation that was happening was like, everybody sub that tier was fucking pissed. We were like, why them? Like, they don't push the bounds creatively. At least at that point, that wasn't there. It was, you know, videos that are still memed today. But like, it was stuff that, you know, we're like, oh, really? Like, that's your idea?
Like the idea that some other smaller binder had six months ago with like a slightly different twist. Yeah. I think everybody was just pissed. We were like, you know, the immediate aftermath was like the fact that that meeting even took place. It just felt like this weird succession style summit.
Like, you know, it's like the evil geniuses getting together and like, you know, controlling as Illuminati. It just felt weird. And we were just kind of like, yeah, this is the ecosystem that we live in where, you know, everybody else who's like getting together and throwing vine parties and, My entire group of friends in LA at one point was, like, 25 people deep. Everybody was a Viner.
And, like, it was just, like, this is the community you're ignoring versus those people who, like, talk shit on each other left and right and have beef in the comment sections. Like, come on. So yeah, I think it was just disappointment and frustration from a lot of people after that meeting took place.
Jason Topp, the GM, left. We had an interim GM for a moment and then we brought in the last person who was GM, this woman named Hannah. And I remember we did...
this, like, off-site, and part of it was some stupid exercise where it was, like, you write down your fears about the product, and then, like, you know, we're going to put them up on the wall, and then, like, you know, we'll let them go, whatever. I don't think I even did it, honestly, but a friend of mine, what she wrote was, like, it's too late. Like, you blew it, basically.
That's what happened. That's the most Silicon Valley thing I've ever heard of, like, everyone write down your fears. I know. It's interesting because I don't think she was from Silicon Valley. I think she was from New York, but that's the thing that we don't do here.
Even today, culturally, there's a very big difference between New York tech and California tech, and this is one of those things that I would categorize as California bullshit.
Oh, big time. I still have the email because it was so insane. So I knew something was happening. I assumed that they were going to do layoffs, actually. I didn't assume they were going to shut it down. I assumed that there was going to be a pretty big layoff, and then maybe they would, like, fold it into Twitter or something like that.
And it was to the degree that, like, I was pretty confident it was going to happen. I was already, like, I was planning to leave. I was, like, ready to... I was already, like, halfway out the door. And it's funny, like, literally the night before they did, um...
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