Stuart Miller
speaker
308 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Stuart Miller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So he let this 21-year-old run this thing and this completely inappropriate, massive imposter syndrome at the time. had 30 people working for me. Oh, wow. I don't think I knew that. Yeah, it built a big business. So if I were replaying that, there were moments at which, in retrospect, I was frustrated with him as source. Back then, I saw it as I'm producing The Richard Medley Show.
But the moments when I didn't want to produce The Richard Medley Show, I wanted to produce The Graham Show, they were frustrating. And he and I had conflict in a way that was extra. Like, no, I'm not source here. This is The Richard Show. At the end of the day, everyone, including me, needs to understand that. that the buck stops with him and he started it.
And over time, we tried to grow it off of him. But knowing source is super powerful of like, am I source? I think in some ways at East Rock, I didn't fully own source at times as an example. And my partner, Adam Shapiro, I kind of handed Source off to him, and now it's very coherent, is my sense. He's a great investor, and people in East Rock and the clients are living within Adam Shapiro world.
I'm helping an entrepreneur right now who I think is at risk of not fully owning Source. It's something that Enneagram 3s and 9s in particular, I think, are subject to where you can be so adaptable. and pragmatic that you write yourself out of the narrative. Because it's like at the end of the day, I'll take care of my own needs.
I'm going to take care of everybody else's needs and I'll do anything to make this thing work. And so there's a very fine line of being flexible and adaptable, but allowing your own creative voice, what's coming through you, the reason you started the thing in the first place. And it's why, I mean, so many things do not work.
At the end of the day, you need to be comfortable with the power dynamic of who is source. One tiny crimp in that hose and all sorts of weird shit happens. And if it's clean, if everybody in a system says, yeah, this guy's source and I want to live in this reality, it has such a healthy vibe to it.
It affects my mood when I'm in the space, obviously light and ceilings and all of that art, all that kind of stuff. But one of the things about the East Rock office that I was focused on is I wanted a lot of extra space. I feel like one thing that people with capital should do more is provide physical space for up-and-comers. It's such an easy arb. And Richard Rainwater did that.
I think Barry Sternlich camped maybe in Dan Stern in Reservoir Space as he was starting Starwood. There's holding a physical space and covering the overhead of that. That's what a certain set of people are lacking. You want to pay their overhead and collect them And ideally, they find things to do together and you find things to do with them.
So we have a cafe at East Rock with a great chef for some of the same reasons you do it here. Like it creates more of a restaurant or not quite a club, but just a vibe of.
In January of 2020, I had moved to Santa Barbara right before COVID. And I realized that there was enough of a difference in management style between partner Adam and myself that it was incoherent to have me trying to input my claim to source from the West Coast. He's an amazing investor. He has such a different style than me. When we were in the same office, it worked.
When I was on the West Coast... The people who worked for us were getting confused. This is no longer coherent. So I decided, you know what? At the highest level, what I'm really good at is finding somebody who's better than I am at doing a thing. And I realized Adam's better at running East Rock than I am. I'm not that great a manager of people I love. Coaching people.
I love having a sense of abundance. I love setting people free. I'm not that good a manager of people. If anything, not being that good a manager of people is in part why I have to be so good at hiring because I don't have the attention span or the desire to stay in their business if they're not doing the thing they should do.
And so I decided, you know what, I found somebody who's better than I am at running East Rock and he should take it and make it his own and turn it into the next era. And I always thought that there's this concept of third culture kid, which I learned about from a.
Israeli friend of mine who grew up in Puerto Rico and his Indian girlfriend said, you're a third culture kid, which is such a great mix. I guess the concept is it's when you grow up in a place that's not your family's home culture. A lot of military brats are like this and a lot of immigrants are like this, where you never quite feel like somewhere's home.
And I had grown up, my parents were hippies, started a nonprofit in Kentucky. And I grew up in Kentucky and And I was homeschooled, and we were so different from everybody else. It was like I was growing up in a foreign country. And in retrospect, it felt incoherent to me. I had no alternative basis other than the fact that we seemed very different.
I moved to New Hampshire when I was 14, and that immediately felt much more coherent. My dad had grown up in Boston. My mom grew up in Santa Barbara and on the West Coast. And when we moved in January 2020 to Santa Barbara, And it has felt like home in a way that I thought I was a third culture kid. One of the things about third culture kids is that nowhere ever feels like home.
They always feel like an outsider. They always feel like they're visitors. And so one way I made the decision was this feels like home. I don't want to leave. And whatever I do next, I want to use this as the base and travel from here. And so that is ultimately how I made the decision. And it feels like it's worn well. I miss the team. I miss the clients.
I miss being in New York and the flow of it. But then I almost feel slightly smug saying this out loud. But on a 100-point scale, my life satisfaction is like a 98 or 99. I'm saying this in that spirit of recognizing how fragile it is, how quickly it could change.
I had heard Danny Meyer say on maybe a podcast with Tim that there are some spaces, restaurant spaces, potential restaurant spaces, that if you gave them to him for free, he wouldn't start a restaurant there. That totally clicked because I'd been keeping an eye out kind of opportunistically in Santa Barbara and specifically in Montecito for a restaurant spot.
And it constantly felt like I was forcing it. And so a spot came up that has such good feng shui. It's like your car kind of wants to go there. It's the center of this particular part of town. And I instantly knew, oh, if that were available, I would be drawn to go there myself all the time.
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