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.
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Appearances
And at that point in my life, I was like, you know, I had nothing to lose. I was completely naive about how little I knew. And all I know is I wanted to succeed. And so I just started going like, all right, I got real focused about, here's the scoreboard. Here's all the leads I have. Here's all the people I know. Here's who the people can connect me with. And I really started working that network.
And I had friends that... I went to business school with who were now in marketing. I would call them. I would call friends of theirs. I would call people who graduated four years before me and say, you don't know me, but I'm doing this thing. I'd love to talk to you. And if you can't tell me, if you can't help me right now, can you point me in the right direction? That kind of thing.
I just really started prospecting much harder than I had. And the thing is, man, like It's it's, it was easier to do then than it is now when I'm selling like my own thing. right? I really believed in my product. I really liked what we were doing.
We were on the cusp of the, of, of technology and music in like 1998 99 when things, you know, we were, we were, we were becoming Pandora or Spotify before there was even broadband to the home. And so we had a great idea. We had a great vision. It was just way too early. Now being early is also being wrong. I get it. Um, but
I was really passionate about it and I just started proselytizing the gospel of it and people could sense my commitment and my passion. The guy who is the senior vice president of marketing at Tommy Hilfiger called me after I pitched him and he said, I want you to come work for me. And, and I was like, I don't know anything about fashion. He's just, I just, I like your energy. I want you to come.
And I went and I interviewed with Tommy and I just was like, you know what? I, I, you know, and I talked to Tommy Hilfiger in his office about like Keith Richards and, you know, like fashion and Rolling Stones. And it was really, really cool, but I wanted to be a part of that gang. I wanted to be a part of this, this, this gang that I had joined.
Um, there's that word again, gang, the, the team I had joined. at launch and I stuck around and I benefited from that. But I don't know, I just started working in a way that most people would find to be irrational. But when you're 28 and you don't have kids and you're single and like, what else are you gonna do?
Well, they weren't mutually exclusive. I mean, I was also hoping to make a change there. And that wasn't the gig that paid me for the first, the first gig that paid was at Yahoo. You know, when, when, when Yahoo bought launch, we just, they just kept us alive. You know, we'd, we'd gone through the, the busting of the.com bubble, like, like everybody else.
And when Yahoo bought us, we had laid off, the company had laid off four fifths of the employees and I was lucky to make the cuts and, And we got to Yahoo and then Yahoo slowly started to come back. And I was very fortunate to be able to benefit off of that.
Well, I was very fortunate to not. not, uh, get the ax, but I could feel the breeze on my, on my neck, you know? And, and, you know, the first, what happened from like 98, what happened in 98, 99 was all this money was flowing around and companies were hiring people. They were growing way too fast. They were hiring people that it was kind of like, you know, the people doing mortgages in 2007.
And it was like, you know, anybody with a heartbeat could be a realtor or, um, you know, it's still that way. Well, being the mortgage business, well, this market's probably making it a little harder, right? So what a downturn does is sort of gets you back to right size.
And so the first round of layoffs, it's like, well, those people probably weren't the right people to be here in the first place. But then like the second and the third round, you start going, oh man, we're letting some good people go here. Like nobody is safe. And if there had been another round of layoffs, I wouldn't have made it right. Like it was, it was down to like family members.
So, so it was, you know, so the, the, but, but you know, what I think I saw was that people, people's attitude was the differentiator in many cases. people that were like doing their, everything they could to succeed, even if they weren't the most talented people. And I would count, I mean, I'm a talented guy.
I work hard, but like, I think my hard work kept me around more than my talent did in some of those interviews or some of those layoffs. And so I think that attitude and, and hard work,
I don't, you sound like an old guy whenever you say something like this, but like, I think it's an underappreciated asset in today's world where, you know, you, you do see some of the rhetoric around younger generation and you're like, I don't hear a lot of people talking about like willing themselves to succeed.
You see a lot of these posts on Instagram about, can you believe these banks are making their employees work a hundred hours a week? And I'm like, yeah, I can. That's, that's how they work. That's how they find out who's committed and who's not. Is it right? Well, is it unhealthy? Can be. But there's a lot of jobs that aren't investment banking out there waiting for you.
So if that's not the gig for you, go do something else. Go find something that you really love that is sustainable for you. I don't think anybody
you know, goes into bank, anybody who thinks the banking is a, you know, a job for a 40 hour a week job is going to be wildly disappointed at some point along the way, you know, the, in the senior partners, these are guys that cancel vacations because there's a deal that pops up and they got to come home from Europe, leave their family there. And that's why they make $5 million a year.
And if you don't want to do that, go do something else. Now, I'm not doing that. No, no, but I think there's a job out there for you where you can be you.
Send me the job link because I'd like to do it.
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