Paul Ollinger
speaker
141 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Paul Ollinger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And I think there's also part of this thing that you want to achieve because I wanted to get good grades because I wanted to know that I was okay. And that's part of the thing that I've been exploring in the last five, six years with the podcast is to say – You know, we chase these things in our life, money, accomplishment, fame, recognition, because we want to feel okay.
We want to know that like, hey, I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. Look at my bank account. Look at my six pack abs. Look at my, you know, look at the outward signs of success because they are indications of inner peace. But often they are not. And so that's the thing I've really been trying to unpack and explore on the podcast.
I went to Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. And then I ended up going to business school at Dartmouth.
I was like 250th employee at Facebook. So still pretty early. And if I'd been smart, I'd have stuck around another few years and we'd be talking on my yacht right now. But I was very, very fortunate to get there when I did. And I worked with a lot of good people. Before I worked at Facebook, I was very fortunate to
be an early employee at a company called launch.com, which eventually got bought by Yahoo. And, and it was in the relatively early days of Yahoo and like phase two of Yahoo after the.com bubble burst and the company came back and rebuilt itself in kind of like internet 2.0.
And and that was a great I worked with so many excellent people at both of those companies that sometimes it's hard for me to, to muster empathy for people because I don't know what it's like to not work with great people. I've been just really, really fortunate my entire career to be surrounded by outstanding peers and mentors.
Yeah, I got it. I came out of business school in 1997 and I was like, I had told jokes that I'd never done comedy before in business school where I went to business school because I was very practical. I wanted to make more money. That's what I wanted to do. I didn't know, I couldn't tell you exactly what I wanted to do.
But when I got there, I was like, I saw Dartmouth at the top of my resume and I'm like, I can get in most doors now, right? And the truth be told, I could have gotten in most doors if I had just willed myself into those doors without those things. But what's nice about a credential is you get three things with a fancy education. You learn some stuff, hopefully.
You get the name brand credential and you get a network and the network is very helpful. It just gives you an advantage to help open some doors, right? And your network is probably the most powerful thing you can invest in as a young person, right? And it's paid off for me over and over again throughout my career, both in business and even in comedy.
So when I got to Dartmouth, I was like, well, I can really do what I want to do. What excites me? And all I could say was I loved and this was in 1995, 96, right? I was like, I love reading magazines. I love going to movies. I love TV. So I want to be in media. And I tried to get into those industries, but I had no experience. And I thought, well, what the hell?
Nobody has any experience in the Internet. Surely somebody will hire me there. And I got, I got in and, and, and the economy was so good in 1997 that these guys couldn't find anybody to hire with any experience in the advertising industry. And if they could, they wouldn't have hired me. And, you know, a few years later when I had some industry experience, I wouldn't have gone to that job.
So we were perfectly, you know, uh, inexperienced at the time at the right time, it was a perfect match for us. And I just happened to meet some of the greatest guys that, that, that I could have met at that point in my career. who became mentors and did a lot for me over the next years. But I ran the New York sales team, the ad sales team for launch.com from 1997 until the thing blew up.
And then I was out in LA and then Yahoo kind of brought us into the fold. And I stayed on the ad sales team at Yahoo for a long time too.
Yeah, I did. I mean, you know, I didn't know what I was doing. I had never lived in New York before. I'd never worked in advertising before. And what I'd sold was, you know, I, I basically talked my way into this job because I was like, okay, I raised money at my college for three years after graduation. I sold ads for the Dartmouth, the business school student paper.
I was like, I sort of like, you know, wove this, this story that I could sell. And by the time I got to the interviews with the launch guys, I was so clear about what I wanted to do and the kind of people I wanted to be with. I ended every interview when I was like, if there's any reason you don't want to hire me, I want to talk about it right now because I want this job.
I want to be a part of this company. I want to be a part of this industry and I want to see where this goes. So I talked my way into the job, but I still had no idea what I was doing. And probably nine months or a year in, my boss sat me down. I'll never forget this lunch. Good buddy of mine today still.
But he sat me down and he said, look, man, if you don't start closing, we're going to fire you. And it was at the restaurant at Black Rock, which was the CBS TV headquarters on 6th Avenue in New York City. And he basically threatened to fire me. And that night, it was a Friday and I went home and my girlfriend at the time came over and I told her what happened.
And I opened a bottle of champagne with her. And she's like, why are we celebrating? I was like, because I'm going to give it everything I have. And it's either going to work or it's not. But I'm going to go all in. And we had some champagne. And the next morning, I got up and I went to the office. And I started working 80, 85 hours a week. Because why not? I was single. I had no kids.
My roommate at the time was working on Wall Street. He was working 100 hours a week. My girlfriend was a consultant. She was on the road four days a week. I had the time to work. And so I just started putting in the hours and I was like, if I'm going to fail, I'm going to go out swinging. Right. And so, and go figure it started working out.
Well, you know, there's a lot of things that were going on that we, you know, I didn't really have, I didn't really have a focused person telling me what, showing me how to do what I needed to do. I don't think. And. Um, and, and I think what I needed to do was just not take no for an answer and not allowed myself to be ignored.
Showing 21–40 of 141 · page 2 of 8
← Previous
Next →