Sam Reich

It means that we get to call the shots.

It means that even though budgets will be less, our creative autonomy will be more.

The theory when we launched was that we would be converting YouTube subscribers to paid subscribers for a lot longer than that turned out to work.

Oh.

Do you know what I mean?

Like that well ran dry fast.

Yep.

Yeah.

For sure, for sure.

And I think IAC kind of gets a bad rap in all of this, but for the record, they were patient with us in terms of us not delivering them a big chunk of money for over a decade.

Arguably, they showed more patience than I think a lot of parent companies would in that same situation.

And a lot of people in the meanwhile gave birth to spectacular careers coming out of college humor when IAC did not very much benefit.

So I remain grateful to IAC for being our shepherds through that decade.

And then they when they got bored of us, we didn't objectively fail.

We just didn't succeed spectacularly either.

We had like seventy five thousand subscribers at the end of year one.

I think they were hoping for like double that number.

They tried to sell us, but we looked very bad on paper because we had just burned through their whole investment.

So a lot of people were interested at first, and then they saw the amount of money we were losing and the business plan, which had us losing even more money before turning profitable.

And they all dropped out one by one, leaving me.