Sam Reich

My dad.

But we are run mostly by people who would be doing something like this regardless of how successful it was because we're so passionate about it, which means that we need to be creators because no savvy business person would do this.

Now, we are in an unusual position, to be clear.

When I signed up to do this, I thought it might be nice and small and humble and that I could work without a boss on my own terms for a long period of time, which coming out of the corporate world is what I wanted.

It's been way more successful than I could have ever imagined and is a lot more work and more stress and more complicated than I could have ever hoped for.

So, yeah, I got into this to run a small business, and in fact, we're in a medium-sized business.

I suppose, although...

I'm like really into boiling this business down to its essence and also not sort of like glorifying it.

And I think what it is is basically a subscription platform.

Like if you were to like really corner me, I would basically say I run a comedy sass.

I feel really anti-pretentious about what this is.

I mean, I think-

I do feel a little bit like Andy Warhol sometimes insofar as, like, I think dropout means a lot of things to a lot of people.

And, like, for my purposes, we are a Campbell's soup can on a canvas, which is to say, like...

the transaction is you pay us now 699 a month and we deliver to you this collection of programming.

And yes, we have all sorts of creative ambitions.

And yes, I think Dropout has collected this like really unique and wonderful audience of people who are connected to the content.

They're connected to the talent.

They're connected to certain things that, that they've come to understand the brand stands for, but at the core of it is this like, uh,

mechanism that's working yeah it could work or not work and if it didn't work none of all of this would go away right and and that feels really important for me to know