KEITH WRIGHT: Ryan Leslie is
a singer-songwriter, producer, now tech entrepreneur. You've done music genres such
as R&B, hip hop, pop, soul, and even gospel. Grammy-nominated
Harvard graduate. He's worked with some artists
such as P. Diddy, Britney Spears, Beyonce, Snoop
Dogg, Usher, Fabolous. The list just goes
on and on and on. So I think what is also
really interesting, and how it's relevant
here at Google, is that he is now a
tech entrepreneur, and becoming quite well-known
within the tech space. His recent startup
SuperPhone was actually just backed by Ben
Horowitz, which I'm sure we all are
very familiar with. I think it's one of the first
times a big popular artist has been backed by a
serious tech VC. So that's-- you know,
congratulations on that. That's very exciting. RYAN LESLIE: Thank you. KEITH WRIGHT: So
yeah, we're going to be touching on a few
different things here today. I definitely wanted to
hear more about kind of what you're doing
in the startup space, because I think it's quite
disruptive to the music industry. And the music industry, or just
the media industry in general, has gone through a really big
shift because of technology, mainly. RYAN LESLIE: Sure. KEITH WRIGHT: It's
something that can be really
leveraged by artists, but it's kind of
hard to navigate when you have new channels
being launched, like, almost on a daily basis. And I think you're one of
the few out there independent artists that actually
understands this space and was able to build
something to help young and independent
artists really take advantage of this space to
grow their audience, engage their audience, and
monetize their audience. So yeah, maybe I could kind
of hand it over to you. We'd love to hear about what
you've got going on here, and maybe hear it directly
from yourself on-- RYAN LESLIE: Yeah. For sure. For sure. So yeah, to talk
SuperPhone, I mean it's so interesting and cool
to be here actually at Google, right? Because I remember
actually being at Harvard in the late '90s. So I graduated from
Harvard in '98, and just learning about email
for the first time, you know? Like I actually,
when I was coming up, I was one of those, like, super
romantics that would actually have a penpal, you know, like
really actually write letters back and forth to people. Like being a young
teenager in high school, I remember like some girl that
I had met when my family was living in Belgium, I actually
kept in touch with her, writing letters for real. And I would wait
weeks for a response. And then we got introduced
to email at college. And I said wow, you know,
this is like cutting the wait time down. It's instant, right? It's instant delivery. I said Mom, look,
you can-- you know, I'm going to write this to you,
and you're going to get it, like, now. And she was like, wow, OK,
Ryan, that's great, I guess. And I guess later on,
there were-- you know, the rise of different
email clients, whether it's Yahoo
or AOL and, you know, the rise of different messaging. But this idea of just human
communication and the way that we can actually make
it as instant as possible so that it actually feels
as urgent as possible. And it's so funny
to talk about email because, like, now, all
of my different email accounts, or whenever
I spin up a new domain, I install Google Apps, right? So I can run my email
through Gmail, right? And the reason I like running
my email through Gmail is because all my other--
everything in my life is actually
connected via Google. So I use Google Photos, I use
Google Drive, I use Gmail, I use-- KEITH WRIGHT: You've
adopted the Google stack. That's for sure. RYAN LESLIE: Yeah, man. I've adopted the Google-- KEITH WRIGHT: You're a
personal Google house. RYAN LESLIE: Yeah, for sure. For sure. And I love it, man. I love the
collaborative documents and all kinds of stuff. And the beauty of it, for me, is
that as awesome as all of that is, and as useful
as all of it is, there are two Google
challenges that I face when I went to Google for the answer. One of them was when I decided
to start giving my phone number out to everybody. So you know, my phone
number is literally publicly available
on all my socials. If you wanted to, you
could text me right now. I get every single text
message, and I always respond at least once to
every single text message. Now, I'm able to do that
through advanced intelligence and auto-response logic,
but I'm able to respond at least once to every
single person who texts me. But I wanted to initially
do this with Google. I wanted to do this
with Google Voice. So I was running
into a problem that was the same problem,
or challenge, that every single person who's
building a social audience faces. And that is, I felt
disconnected from all of my Facebook friends. I felt disconnected from
all my LinkedIn connections. I felt disconnected from
all my Instagram followers. At the time, Myspace friends. Twitter followers. YouTube subscribers. It's all well and good. I was watching the numbers
grow and grow and grow, and I was watching
the engagement shrink and shrink and shrink
from a percentage standpoint. So when I had five Instagram
followers and I got five likes, I'm at 100% engagement. And then now I'm at 245,000
Instagram followers, and I'm only getting,
you know, averaging somewhere between 2,500
and 4,000 likes, which is putting me in, like,
a 2% engagement range. And so I thought that
the idea, and what was so cool about a
Google Voice number, is that the most
powerful social handle-- and I was having a
conversation with my boy Dan Cherry about
SuperPhone, and he said, well, Ryan, if you
really think about it, your cell phone number is
a social handle, right? And it's really the most
powerful social handle because it really
actually gives you the ability to
communicate directly outside of all the noise
of all of the platforms. It's actually like a native
social handle, right? But the issue with
that social handle is that-- the reason why we
don't give it out to everyone is because there isn't enough
sophistication on that social handle to allow us to manage
conversations at scale. So that's why we let Twitter
manage our conversations. That's why we let Facebook, and
that's why we let Google+ or we let Instagram manage
the conversations around our content that we put out. But it still doesn't negate
the value and the worth and the incredible power
of the cell phone number as a social handle, right? And so I set out to
actually be able to give that social handle to everyone,
and be able to actually find a way to have a real
exchange, or as real of an exchange as possible
over that social handle. And so like I said, two
ways that I felt really challenged when I went
to Google for an answer. Number one was Google Voice. So the first thing about
Google Voice, which is awesome, is hey, I can give a number that
wasn't actually my cell phone number, right? And I can do some-- there's
certain customization that I can do around OK, if this person
calls, play this voicemail. Or if this person calls, let
it go through to my cell. And there's some
cool stuff there. But I was actually
left to the restriction of my own human capacity
of actually managing all this, right? I couldn't add--
there was not an API for Google Voice at the time. And even though I'm
like a very XML, jQuery, JavaScript, CSS, a
little bit of Ruby on Rails, right, I couldn't actually just
plug into the Google Voice API and run these advanced
auto-responses that I wanted to run. I could maybe try to hack
an email auto-response which would respond via
text over Google Voice because it was
connected to my Gmail. It was very, very challenging
to do something as simple as just say thank you. So my idea was, hey, send me a
text of a receipt from iTunes, and I just want to
thank you personally. Because I feel disconnected. I don't know which of
my Twitter followers have actually bought my album. And because iTunes was a black
box, and Amazon, and Google Play, and Spotify, they're a
black box in terms of data, I felt like I didn't have a
real relationship with people who were supporting me. And I wanted to show those
people a little bit more love. Right now, if someone
sends me a tweet, that's cool and everything,
but I don't have any depth to that relationship. I don't know if they've actually
bought every single album unless they say it. But I can't verify
that with Apple, right? And so it started out with
a very simple concept-- text me your receipt so I can
prove that you've supported me, and I would like to
thank you personally. And so the first couple
hundred texts was awesome. It was like, wow,
I'm meeting people. It's Keith and it's
Danny and it's Mike and it's Nathan and it's
Brandon and, you know, it's real people, and I'm
able to text them back. And then my fingers started
getting tired, right? After the first-- KEITH WRIGHT: I could
have told you that. RYAN LESLIE: --hundred, 200. You know, and even
though as magical as it was, I
realized like, look, technology should actually be
able to enable me to personally thank all these people. It should verify
that it's a receipt, and it should say their name,
probably parse their name from the receipt,
say their name, and say, yo, I really
appreciate you. And that doesn't mean that
it's any less personal, right? It's just the fact that
the one unscalable resource that we all have is time, right? That's the only thing
that's always running out. KEITH WRIGHT: I think one big
important word here at Google that we use a lot
is scalability. RYAN LESLIE: Yes. KEITH WRIGHT: That's what
you're sort of running into-- RYAN LESLIE: Yeah,
running into, yeah. KEITH WRIGHT: Yes. We hear you 100% on that. RYAN LESLIE: Yeah. For sure. So that personally manually
texting everyone back thank you is ridiculously
unscalable, unless you just want to grow a long
beard, stay in your house, don't ever do
anything else but just text thank you to
people forever, right? So that wasn't scalable. And I ran into that
challenge, right? And then the second
challenge I ran into is that I have a
large following in Germany, in France, in the
UK, in Holland. And those people
were excited, oh my gosh, Ryan's social handle. We can text him directly. You know, I'm going to
send him my receipt. I got this from the
German iTunes store. And then all of a sudden, I
would try to send the response, and Google Voice
doesn't actually allow me to respond to
international text messages. And so I remember a text coming
in from somebody that said, hey, Ryan, I know you
can't text me back, right? It was an international number. I know you can't text me back,
because I did a reverse lookup on this number. I know it's Google Voice. I said, OK, this is
a real techie, right? He's got to be a real techie. KEITH WRIGHT: [INAUDIBLE]. RYAN LESLIE: And if you're
interested in doing that, there's other platforms that you
can explore which will give you the kind of control and power
to scale this kind of automation intelligently. And so I looked
into the platform, and I wanted to
spin up a number, and it was really just an API. So there was no user interface. I had a number. I could kind of put
a very simple XML code which said, hey, if
someone calls, open tag say, close tag say. It was a thanks for
calling, don't leave me a message because I don't
know how to get to messages. Something like that, right? And so basically, I
spent a bunch of time at Code Academy learning
the basics of how to actually interact
with this API so I could do three
very simple things. Number one, when someone
sends me a text message-- I don't know if
anyone has tried it, or if you're watching
at home-- send me a text message, the first response, if
you've never texted me before, is just going to say, hey,
you know, I need your info, because I don't want to text. Even though it's cool to have
your 10-digit social handle, I have no idea. It's just 10 digits, right? Or maybe it's more if
it's international. So the first thing
I'll do is say, hey, look, would you mind
adding yourself to my phone. And it's the equivalent, like
I'm able to actually scale-- let me see what my phone is. It's the same thing as
if you're out at a bar or you're at a conference
or you're at a festival or something, you meet up with
somebody that you think is cool and you say, you know
what, real quick, can you just add your
info to my phone. It's easier to have them do
it than you do it yourself. And so that's the
first thing SuperPhone does is, when someone
texts for the first time, it creates a link that
will pre-populate the phone number so you don't have to
type the phone number again, and it's the equivalent of me
virtually handing you my phone and you can add your
information in, right? That's number one. Number two is I
wanted it to be smart. And so in order
for it to be smart, it needs to be able to ping
something so that I know something else about someone. So it's easy to say, OK,
Keith sent me a text. He added his contact
information to my phone. He chose to give me
his Twitter handle, so now I can know how many
Twitter followers he has. Is he very influential on
another social platform? Do I need to show
him a little bit more love because if I
actually say, like, yo, Keith, man, you the man, and he
screenshots this and posts it on Twitter, more
people will actually come to my very
powerful social handle, which is my cell phone number. Oh my gosh, Ryan. You know? So that's something
that I wanted to do. But I said, look, I can
take it a little bit deeper, because I actually want to know
if someone's actually supported me. So it needs to be able to ping
my e-commerce platform, right? So if it can ping my
e-commerce platform the same way that Amazon
or Apple can look up your profile with your
Apple ID and see everything you've ever bought, I would love
to have that for me personally. That would be awesome. Whether I'm raising money for
a marathon that I'm running or whether I'm selling
the album or whether I'm selling bracelets or watches
or sneaker collaborations, I would love to be able to
acknowledge and appreciate the people who've actually
bought something or supported me or donated or invested. I need to be able to
ping some database. And so at the time, they're
now a public company, I plugged into Shopify. And so I started selling
my album on Shopify. And if someone texted me and
gave me their information, my phone, once they gave
me their information, would check that email
in my Shopify store and, if they hadn't
bought my album, very easily say, hey, look,
Keith, it's great to meet you, man, but it looks like you
haven't got my album yet. Here's a link to it. And that's what I
would do, right? That's the-- KEITH WRIGHT: You send me
the same text over the course of, like, three weeks? RYAN LESLIE: Yeah. KEITH WRIGHT: Until I buy it? RYAN LESLIE: Yeah. No, no, no. It actually-- KEITH WRIGHT: Put
me [INAUDIBLE]. RYAN LESLIE: No, no, no. It's really-- it's
like if I really thought about how would
I replicate myself 5,000 or 10,000 times, if I
could, how much more willing would someone be to actually
get my record if they actually had the ability to have
this conversation in person. I think that percentage
would be much higher. And then if I can't do
it in person, then maybe over video chat. Because I've got to
say, yo, Keith, man, you want to get my album? Like, you've got to
respond, because I'm looking right at you, right? And then maybe text is a
next layer down, right? And so if I could
have a text exchange and I'm not thinking
anymore about how do I message at
scale one to many, I'm thinking about a
conversation one to one. And it made all the
difference, right? It makes all the difference. It's one to one. I say, OK, yo, I
got your text, man. You mind just adding
yourself to my phone so I know who I'm talking to? Nine out of 10 fans added
their information in my phone. And then of the nine out of 10
fans that added the information to my phone, when I
ping them back and say, yo, Keith, great to meet you,
looks like you haven't gotten my album yet, here's a link,
why don't you check it out, one out of every two
bought the album, right? And then 100% of
those people, as long as my text stack is stable,
right, 100 of those people who actually bought something
from me, they get a thank you text saying, yo,
Keith, I saw you just got my album five minutes ago. That's awesome. Thank you so much. And anytime you see me
running in the streets, man, let's take a
selfie, whatever. And I see you live in
New York, so anytime I'm playing in New York, I'll
make sure to send you a text so you don't miss my show. Right? And so to really think
about that, like yeah, like you were talking
about, man, maybe that's cool for artists and, you
know, independent artists. It is powerful for
independent artists. And so any
independent artist who thinks that this is
a really awesome idea and they'd love to actually
have a scalable, intelligent messaging layer on top
of the world's most powerful social handle, which
is a cell phone number, then great. Just shoot me a text. We'll get you on
the SuperPhone beta, and you can use
it to sort of like have a deeper relationship, have
a more engaged relationship, have higher conversions
on your conversations, all that marketing speak. But what I really
started to realize is that the second challenge
that I went to Google to solve for me is I can go to Google and
I can search anything, right? I can go to Google
say, look, you know, is there a list
of names of people who lost their lives
in 9/11, right? And it'll give it to me. What's the biggest
fish that's ever been caught in terms of weight. And it'll give it to me. What are the statistics of Kobe
Bryant in terms of shots made, three points made,
rebounds made, et cetera. It can give it to me. But the minute I go to
Google and I say, Google, can you tell me about me? Can you actually tell me who
I talked to the most in 1998 when I was coming out of college
looking for an internship? Can you give me
that information? I can't get it, right? It's a challenge
that, once again, I said well, wow, man, it's
like we've been collecting all this information, and
actually before I came here, I said look, before I'm too
hard on my favorite platform, right, can I take a look at
something that I use pretty often, my Google Contacts. And then there is a group in
Google Contacts, a smart group, that says most contacted. And so I did some research, you
know, Google's most contacted, and all the results that
came up was like, hey, my most contacted, it
seems like it's off. It's not accurate. It's like is it the most used
emails, is it-- what is it? And it wasn't like a
great deal of people who were expressing
this challenge, because I guess most
people, like I said, the human capacity for
staying warm or keeping your relationships
warm is pretty easy. It's like hey, it's your
girlfriend, it's your family, it's your best friends, it's
people you work with, right? But if you want to extend
your network-- let's just say like-- let's say
you want to executive produce a film because you've
got a little extra money and want to be an executive
producer on a film. Or let's just say you want to
pick up photography as a hobby, or let's just say you
want to find people that you can be on a Fitbit
challenge with, or whatever. Sometimes our human capacity
is so restricted and finite to the people that we
communicate with the most that we need to rely on some
technology to know like, OK, maybe there's some other
relationships I can warm up to help me be more of the
person that I want to be one day, right? And so I started
to-- and this was kind of an extension of
what I had already built. I'd built a very simple
sort of automation chain. Hey, who are you? Would you like to get my album? Thanks a lot for
getting my album. And whenever I'm
in your city, I'll give you a shoutout so
you can come to my show. And that was very,
very successful. I did, independently of a record
company, no manager, no label, no PR, no music videos, just
like a little documentary of my album, we did $2 million
in gross revenue over SMS. Crazy, right? And I know every
single person that participated in that campaign. And even though that's pretty
incredible and crazy to me, when you look around
at the companies-- so, you know, the
companies, the stocks that I love-- Apple, Google,
Amazon, Starbucks-- Google, Amazon, Starbucks, Apple,
they already know this. Facebook already knows this. Facebook, you know, if
Mark really wanted to, he could sit down and say, who
are the 850 million people who logged into Facebook today. He could actually
literally just-- I mean, it would take a minute,
but he could actually literally just go through and
see who all those people were, right? And I was watching other
startups do the same thing, right? There is-- you know, when you
look at companies like Mixpanel or you look at companies
that give you analytics on your user, you look at
companies like Intercom for customer service,
they're giving you this kind of deep
information about how people are interacting with
something you've created. But for whatever reason, it just
doesn't exist in music, right? So if I created an app
for my music, right, I would know how many
people logged in. I would know how much time
they spend in the app. I would know what
buttons they click. I know what buttons
they don't click. I know when they log out. I know how long
they stream a song. Et cetera, et cetera. And so Spotify is
collecting this information. iTunes is collecting
this information. Apple, Pandora, all
these people are collecting this information. And the artists
themselves is still living like a Neanderthal,
right, in terms of, like, data. It's like, OK,
I've got this song. I'm going to just spray
it into the universe and pray that someone
listens to it, and pray that someone
buys it, and pray that my idea or my cool
gimmick to go viral actually gets it widespread enough
that the people that actually get it and share it will
eventually feel like, oh, OK, I should probably
support this, right? And in order to find
success in that way, you have to have
ridiculous scale, right? And so when you look at,
like, streaming revenue, or you look at my-- as a Google
partner on YouTube, the revenue that I get from
hundreds of thousands of YouTube views per month, it's
like a couple hundred bucks, right? And so unless you can get to
ridiculously massive scale, the little trickling
in-- and that's even for me, because I'm going
direct-- the little trickling in is just-- it seems like,
man, I can't make a living off of this, right? And then it even
becomes more challenging if you sign to somebody,
because what trickles in is after everybody else
takes their cut, right? And so the idea here is that
if you think about a phone number as your most
powerful social handle, how much different would
your life be if you actually did have a phone number on
every Instagram follower, so that when you actually
saw some photographer's photo that you really
liked, you could actually text them and say, yo,
my wedding is coming up. Yo, you're so ill. Would you mind shooting me
and the love of my life? I love to be
immortalized in pictures through your creativity. But you know, what
I've been finding is that artists and people
who are on Instagram, they're scared to
communicate with people. It's, like, not cool to
jump into your contacts. You know, jump into your
comment thread per se, right? Unless you have
a private profile and you've only got your
friends that are commenting. Oh, why would I want to
talk to a stranger, right? But the idea here is
that-- two things. One, growing up, two ways that
I thought the American education system failed me, right. Number one is they don't teach
financial literacy in schools, right? So unless your parents or
somebody-- like my parents were just like don't
even get a credit card. Don't borrow from anybody. So that was their financial
literacy training, right? And then I got to college,
and all the tables were set up outside of Bank of America. Oh. go ahead and sign up for
points and everything. And you know, you're going
to get this kind of limit. And that new stereo
system that you want to have in
your dorm room, you can go ahead and get
it right now, today. And then you don't
even have a job yet, and then you're cleaning toilets
to pay for your stereo system. I mean, they don't-- I felt like
the American education system failed me because it doesn't
teach financial literacy. It doesn't teach you how
important having a good credit score is so when
you move to New York and you want to get your lease
and you don't have somebody to cosign for you and your
credit score is less than 600, you're all the way messed up. You know what I'm saying? All the way gone. And I felt like the American
education system failed me. They didn't teach me that. And then number two, I felt
like it doesn't teach you about networking, right? You don't learn in
school like-- you know, there's maybe like
team-building activities. You play some sports teams. You go and play on tennis,
and you play soccer and do wrestling team. And you try to get
with cheerleaders and all kinds of stuff in
high school and everything. And there's like these social
sort of like microcosms which then become
later on the same. So it's like, you know, the
high school prom king and queen is like the equivalent of, like,
the biggest Instagram stars today, or the biggest
movie stars today. Like, it just keeps
getting increasingly more-- how should I say--
challenging to get, like, at the top of the social
consciousness, if you will, right? But they don't teach you
about networking, right? So once again, you're either
taught this because, you know, your family is
well-connected and then, when you needed to
get your internship, your dad picked up
the phone and called a friend who worked
at a biotech firm so that you could go be an
intern at the biotech firm, et cetera. Or, you get what I get when
I go and interview kids that look like me that
are in the inner cities, or people that want
to be interns for me and wouldn't get a job because
they dropped out of school or they dropped out
of college or they lost their athletic
scholarship, so they're not qualified for jobs. They want to work
hard, and I ask them-- you know, we
would ask these kids, we'd say, what do you believe
is the biggest chal-- what are the two biggest challenges
that you believe you face between who you are today
and who you would like to be, right? And the two biggest
challenges unequivocally are I feel like I
don't have the money, and I feel like I
don't have the network. And I say well, wow,
that correlates exactly to the two biggest
failures to me of the US, you know, American
education system. One, you know, having money in
your savings account is cool, but having access
to money from-- you know, because I just raised
a round, having access to money from
investors, or being able to go get a loan has a
lot to do with your ability to prove your fiscal
responsibility, that you're actually
not going to go and take somebody's money. Oh, man. And the music industry
I guess is kind of, you know, it's a funny--
it's really funny, because people will
take their advance, you know-- I think
Kanye said, you know, I went to [? Jacob ?] an
hour after I got my advance. Right? He just went straight on in. Wow, you know, I don't even
have to do this on credit. I got an advance check,
and it's not a loan. I can just pay it back
over my tiny record royalties, et cetera. And so like, that's all very
interesting and everything. But bringing it
back to SuperPhone, I think that, as
a startup founder, you think about the
challenge that you want to solve for, the
way that you really want to give to the world. And so when I was growing
up and coming out of school, the idea that I thought I
could give to the world, or the value I thought I could
give to the world at that time was, I can give value to
the world because I get up, do a little rap, sing a
little song, make some beats, make the world dance,
bring people together, they're going to
have a good time. And then I realized that
that impact was finite. And the reason it
was finite because-- is because it was subjective. Because if people don't like rap
and R&B music, you lose them. Even though yeah,
they might say, oh, man, Ryan's really
talented on keys, or I really like the beats
he makes, or he dresses cool, or his music video was awesome,
creativity and art in many ways is subjective, right? And that's why I
guess I would always be challenged with this idea
that the music business isn't a meritocracy. As much as I've spent into
like spending time trying to make the most incredible,
awesome beats of all time, or I watch friends of mine
that were horn players or bass players from Juilliard,
it wasn't that the most talented, most
prolific, most proficient musicians were the ones that
made all the money, right? How many amazing bass
players do we know? How many amazing guitar
players do we know? How many amazing singers,
you know, hairbrush singers do we know, right? They're not making the money. And now the beautiful
thing about social, the beautiful thing about
YouTube, the beautiful thing about the internet is that
you might have the chance to go from being a water
bottle singer to being on the forefront of, you know,
the global consciousness, right? But nine times out of 10, that
moment is so fleeting, right? So like, I remember that
viral video of the lady. She went to Kohl's, she
put on the Chewbacca mask, and she's just laughing
and laughing and laughing. And I shared it, and
everybody shared it. And today, people
remember it, but do we feel connected to that
little moment of fame? Do we feel connected? Do we want to-- is she
making more Chewbacca skits? Like, what's actually
happening now, right? And yeah, I think that
everybody has their-- you know, maybe Warhol called
it 15 minutes. Maybe it's now five seconds or
five minutes or whatever it is. But once again, the
idea, two things. One is it would've been
great if she actually had, like, a SuperPhone number
or something so that she could stay in touch with everybody. But once again, I
started to realize, like I said, being
a startup founder, what was the way that I could
impact the world the most, right? And not actually being
a startup founder, just being a person in general. What's the way I can
impact the world the most. And so initially, I said,
look, my talent and my passion first and foremost is music. And like, I could
have been a doctor or I could have
been an economist or I could have been
a political scientist or I could have been a lawyer or
I could have been a Wall Street trader, right, but
my interest was trying to give the most value
I possibly could to the world. And so when I saw people
responding to the music, when I see 2,000 people
at Olympia in Paris all rapping along
to the same songs, and we rashing out on
stage and Gabe is playing and John is playing
and Keith is playing and people are having a great
time and they're sweating and having an awesome
time, I realized that my reach, once again,
is not scalable, right? I can only be in one
city-- well, maybe. I can probably do to
cities a night, right? And give a two-hour
concert at that level. And even though I'm inspiring
people that are actually in the room, that value,
once again, when I really start thinking-- you
know, Ben Horowitz introduced me to Larry Page. Ben Horowitz introduced
me to Mark Zuckerberg. And when you really start
thinking about scalability of your impact, I
realized, OK, my impact, if I got to be Kanye West, is
going to be finite, you know, because even though
Kanye is my homie, and he's a polarizing figure and
a lot of people know who he is, some people just tune out in
terms of what actual value they feel like they
extract from a Kanye record or a Kanye concert or
a Kanye fashion design. Because even still,
like those choices that we make around the
clothes that we wear is still subjective. So what is it that
I could actually give to the entire world that
would actually be valuable, right? And what I started
to understand when I started giving my phone
number out to everyone was that technology could extend
my ability to manage and keep my relationships warm, right? I said wow, this is insane. Like, I could actually just
set a reminder every two weeks and just say yo to my
mom every two weeks. It was just a reminder, right? And so even though, as
crazy as my life would get, or, you know, I'm juggling music
and being a startup founder or whatever, every two weeks,
technology would send that, and it's called a
phatic expression. Small talk. It would send it to my mom. And I wouldn't have to
worry about the actual sort of mundane task of going to my
phone, navigating to my mom, clicking that, typing yo,
and sending it, right? And I wouldn't have to
worry about actually setting a reminder for myself in my
Google calendar to, you know, send a message to my mom. Just, you know, no
matter what's going on, send a message to her. It could actually do it. And that's also
kind of polarizing. If you say, oh,
that's not personal. The value of that exchange
is not the phatic expression. It's not the small talk. It's the initiation
of a conversation that's going to be immediate,
that's going to inspire you. My mom is going to say,
hey, how you doing? I'm praying for you. I see you out here trying
to change the world. Keep going. Your father and I,
we're proud of you. The yo, the action,
that's an action that can be scaled, right? And so I started to
realize that SuperPhone and in the idea of
SuperPhone, I could also offer to the world
something that's valuable, that's objectively valuable. It's not subjective. It's not is this
valuable or not. It's not like my rap song,
do you like it or not. It's not like my
cool Nike sneakers, do you like them or not. It's not like my Rolex
watch or my Ray-bans, do you like them or not. Will you pay for them or not. Objectively, there
isn't a person that I've talked to,
that I've interviewed, that I've run into
that doesn't find value from a warm relationship. And won't find value from
having more warm relationships in arenas and spheres and
verticals and pathways that they would like
to go down, right? So if you are a
singer and you have, attached to your powerful social
handle, you have 3,000 people, and they're all college
and high school kids, and then you're a singer and you
only have four people attached to your social handle,
and those four people are Craig Kallman, who's the CEO and
chairman of Atlantic Records, and Scooter Braun, and Troy
Carter, and Ryan Leslie, which one of those
two artists would you say is more equipped
to actually achieve their dream of whatever they
want to do artistically, right? The person with the
3,000 followers, or 3,000 phone numbers of college kids
and high school kids that think they're cool,
or the person that just has four or five phone
numbers, and you know, it's the CEO and chairman of a
large record company, a music producer, and two
great music managers. I would argue that a warm
relationship with those four people versus a cold
relationship with tens of thousands of other
people is actually going to trump the person that
has all the big relationships, or the big audience per se. And so how is it that technology
could potentially give you the support for--
that can actually counteract the
restrictions that you have in your own mental capacity? KEITH WRIGHT: So
this right here, I think it can be used
by almost any type of public figure, and
possibly even brands, right? It's a way of looking
at SMS that many have looked at social media. RYAN LESLIE: Right. KEITH WRIGHT: It's a
traditional channel that's being used in new ways. And again, you're talking
about a lot of relevant things to Google, whether
you know it or not. You got scalability. You're talking about a
personalized CRM database. You're talking about
segmenting audiences. RYAN LESLIE: Yeah. KEITH WRIGHT: I actually
do business development for Google Analytics 360. So that's well
within my wheelhouse. And that's what we're
doing with large brands. RYAN LESLIE: Right. KEITH WRIGHT: But you're also
talking about machine learning, as well. RYAN LESLIE: Yes. KEITH WRIGHT:
Artificial intelligence. RYAN LESLIE: Yes. KEITH WRIGHT: Being
able to develop a seemingly one-on-one
relationship with many people at scale. So I guess a
question I have is-- let's focus again on
the startup musician, the independent musician. RYAN LESLIE: OK. KEITH WRIGHT:
Like, how would you advise a newcomer to the
scene who possibly has a lot of talent and could
develop a large user base over the course of a couple
years, how would you advise them in starting out their
mission to become a star, I guess, in terms of
managing their database and managing their
audience and so forth? RYAN LESLIE: So I would
say-- and I do these talks, you know, I have
done these talks, is that like-- first
and foremost, you know, to have a warm
relationship with someone, there's got to be a value,
a cool value exchange. So you might meet
somebody at a bar and, you know, you're
talking to them, what's the value exchange? Can you make some
money together? Is there a romantic connection? You know, what's
the value exchange? Is it just a cool conversation? Do they make you laugh? Or whatever. And so the beauty
of being a musician is that, for people that
do like the kind of music you make, that value
exchange is instant, right? I like this song. I like the way they sing. Cool, you know,
you keep singing, and I'm going to be your friend. There's that kind
of vibe, right? But what I would say is that a
lot of folks, they come to me and they say, Ryan, can
you listen to my demo? And once again, that requires
my most precious resource, which is time. And so I have to
think to myself, OK, what are the indicators to
me that I might actually love their music? I might love the way they sing,
and I love their guitar riffs or whatever it is. But what actually-- you
know, what can I actually do? Let's say I love it so much
that I even buy their album. At that point,
the value exchange isn't the $10 I gave
them for the album. The value exchange
is-- you know, I got a kid right now who's
building his music career. His name is William Bolton. He's an early SuperPhone user. He has more phone
numbers than he has Instagram followers, right? And he just played Firefly. You know? And he's a grind-- he
went to Boston College. He grinds. He loves music. He's playing all the time. But I think the most
valuable tidbit of wisdom that I ever imparted to him
was this idea of relationship management, personal
relationship management. From the first time
that someone texts you, can you take a look at the graph
of, you know, when is there a flurry of text messages? When is there a
flurry of phone calls? How long does it go before you
have another flurry of text messages or phone calls? And you need to
build a core team. And I would say,
like, before you go and decide to build the largest
audience you possibly can, who are the people that
make up your core team that are the most valuable to you? So when you think
of a new artist, I would say there's
a few people. Unless you're a self-contained--
let's say all you do is rap. You just rap. You need a producer, right? But it doesn't mean that
the first producer you find is going to have enough time to
produce all your beats for you. So you actually need to have
a warm relationship with five producers, or 10
producers, right? And maybe one of them might
be Ryan Leslie or Mike Will or Brian Cox or Timbaland
or Pharrell or whatever, if you got so lucky. But the beauty of it is that
you can go on SoundCloud and find five or 10
really-- that's what happened with Desiigner, right? "Panda." He found a record-- I think
it was on SoundCloud-- from a producer
and, you know, he turned that-- he found it
wasn't a Timbaland record. It wasn't a Swizz Beatz record. It wasn't a Pharrell or Kanye
West beat or Ryan Leslie beat. It was-- I don't remember
the name of the kid, but he found a beat that
worked for him, right? And so that's number one, how
many producers do you know? Because if you rap,
you need great beats. And then once you put the
beats together with the raps, how many great
engineers do you know? And when I talk
about engineers, I'm talking about studio
engineers that can mix your record
so that it sounds competitive with everything
else that's on the radio. If you only know one, that guy
better be your best friend. Otherwise, invest the time to
go find four or five, right? And have warm
relationships with them. SuperPhone can help
you do it, right? And then once you've got a
great song, then it's about, OK, how do you want to
present the song to the world? Like, OK, we're in a
visual time, right? So you could just
put it on SoundCloud, but at least you've got
to put a cover, right? It could be just
a picture of you, but even if it's just
a picture of you, how many photographers
do you know? You know, are you
just going to do-- are you going to make your
album cover with a selfie stick, right? Who knows, right? That might be creative. I don't know. Like, people love indie stuff. Oh, he made his album
cover with a selfie stick. You know? Whatever that is. But how many
photographers do you know, beyond yourself,
who are actually dope that's going to
add to your art, right? If you only know one, maybe
it's worth going to-- you know, reaching out to a few
people on Instagram, whatever, finding four or five
and having warm relationships with those photographers. Because they might not
always be on call when you are-- you know,
you're at the Googleplex and you get to talking. And you know, oh, man, I need
somebody to just take a picture and memorialize this moment. If one's not available,
it's good to have a warm relationship with
two or three, right? And then once you've
got the photograph and you've got the
song and you've got the producer and
everything's looking good, now you've got to make a video. How many videographers
do you know? Hopefully maybe
the photographers are also videographers
or editors or post-pro-- and maybe now you want to
add some special effects to your video. How many post-production
people do you know? And the reason why
I'm saying this is that you could actually
just buy all of this, right? You just go buy a beat. You just go buy a photo shoot. You just go buy studio time. You just go buy,
you know, the time from a post-production house
to do your after-effects and all your other
post-production. But if you're independent
artist, nine times out of 10, you can't afford to do that. You don't have the
money to do that. What you do have is time. And what time allows
you to do, time allows you to build
relationship equity. Because that's the beauty
of the sort of like pyramid of relationships. The top of the pyramid, the
most intimate human interaction is sex, right? The next level of the
pyramid is, you know, like a one-on-one studio session
or a one-on-one dinner or, you know-- KEITH WRIGHT: [INAUDIBLE]. RYAN LESLIE: But we see
where it's going, right? KEITH WRIGHT: [INAUDIBLE]. RYAN LESLIE: Anyway. But speaking to
somebody one-on-one, where you have their
undivided attention, that's the next level, right? And then the next level is maybe
a group conversation, right? But then, as you get more
and more people around, like some people say
you can't have dinner with more than six people,
because the conversations break up and then you
just have two people on one end of the
table talking, and then the people aren't all actually--
you can't actually all, unless you're playing
Monopoly or something, how you actually get
everybody together all on the same page,
focused on the same thing. People have their-- in
dinner conversations, they have their own little
breakoff little conversations. Or even if you went with a group
of six people to Six Flags, and there's plenty
of people there and you can interact
with all of them, but you spend the whole day with
just your little party of six, right? So you know, there's the
closest human interaction. Then there's
one-on-one, in person. Then there's group. Then there's larger
group interaction. So even right now, if I walked
out of this Googleplex today and I got hit by a
car, you guys are going to feel it
more because you just had a human, a real in-person
human interaction with me. And you'll feel it more than
if you were just following me on Twitter and you read it,
hey, Ryan Leslie got run over by a yellow cab, right? You'll feel it more
because you're like, man, I was just-- he was just
right there in person, right? So those in-person
interactions, they require time. It just costs time. And this is time you
can't ever get back. Time's the most
valuable resource. It's always running out. You will not ever get it back. You can get money back. I could spend $5 on
this bottle of water, and then I could go make $5. But the time that I
spend making the $5, I can't get it back, right? So there's a ridiculous
finite amount of investment that you can make in
these sort of, like, deep personal interactions. But the beauty of the
return on that investment is that people will
do stuff for free. But it's not really for
free, because they've got to invest their time to do it. But now they feel like
there's a value exchange. They feel like it's real. So then it goes
down to like, OK, I work with some of my
engineers over, like, phone calls or video chat. So that's the next level. And then after that, I would
say text messaging, right? And when we talk about the
strength of the engagement, or the strength of
the interaction, I'm talking about it
because it comes down to the strength of the
engagement or interaction is the time of expected response. This is my thesis. The time of expected response. So if I asked you right
now, hey, Keith, man, what are you doing after this? You want to get some pizza? KEITH WRIGHT: I'm busy. RYAN LESLIE: Yeah. KEITH WRIGHT: I
got some meetings. RYAN LESLIE: Yeah. You've got, yeah. KEITH WRIGHT: Yeah. RYAN LESLIE: But you
responded immediately, right? And that's expected, because
we're sitting right here. If you took 10
minutes to respond, I might call an
ambulance, right? Man, Keith is just
staring at me. So the time of
expected response, that's how you can
measure, like, sort of like the power of the
relationship exchange. So if you're making
love with someone, and they just are
not responding, you really gonna call--
you're just like, oh man, is this a corpse. KEITH WRIGHT: [INAUDIBLE]. RYAN LESLIE: What's
happening, right? But OK, so it goes from
in person to video. So if there's video chat
and I say, yo, Keith, what are you doing? You've still got to
respond immediately. On the phone, you've still
got to respond immediately. But the next layer down,
and even though messaging is so powerful, it's not
as powerful as a phone call or whatever, because the
expected time of response isn't immediate. If I send a text message to
Keith and I say, yo, Keith, what are you doing
after the Google Talk? Do you want to have some pizza? And it takes him 10
minutes to respond, we don't think about it. Oh, it was 10 minutes. He must have been
busy or whatever. And then it kind of
goes down from there. Because email, like I can send
emails to people, or in-mail, right, and I don't even expect
a response sometimes, especially if it's a cold email, right? And then social, maybe
even weaker, right? And so for a kid that
doesn't have money, the resource that
they do have is time. And they can invest that time
in building relationships. And sometimes, it's great
to shoot for the stars. Y'all want to be friends
with Ryan Leslie. OK, try your luck. Go ahead and text
me, see what happens. You know, if you're
persistent, trust me, I've made a lot of
great friendships from people just sending
me a text, hey, Ryan, I saw you talk. I thought it was fascinating. I'm a developer. I'm an investor. I'm an adviser. I'm a musician. I'm a manager. I'm a producer. I'm a-- you know, I'm
a college kid that just wants to help my network. I love all of those
conversations. But I can't scale my day
to more than 24 hours to reach more people. So I need a layer of technology
to help me prioritize how I spend my time, right? But that's what I would say
to a kid that's-- you know, if they're trying to make it. It's not necessarily about,
you know-- first of all, it is about the value exchange. What are you doing
that's valuable. How do you make your
artistic expression the most potent,
undiluted concentrated artistic expression that's
powerful that people can respond to that's honest. And then, what's your
internal core team. And then after that, when
someone does actually interface with your
creativity, what are you doing to cultivate
that relationship with them? So for me, it was pretty simple. Hey, who are you? Would you like to get my album? Thank you for getting my album. When I'm playing
your city, I'm going to send you a text, right? And least I'm able to
do that at scale, right? I'm not able to do
concerts at scale. I can only do one
per night, right, because I've got to travel,
I've got to be there in person. People are not going
to pay to just watch me perform on a screen. They could do that
at home, right? So that's what I would say
for a musician is like, OK, once you've got your
value proposition, then you can also--
you know, we're going to start working with
major record companies, right? And not because I want to
dilute at all the message of SuperPhone really
being for everyone, because everyone can
benefit from having warmer relationships. But we're going to start
with record companies, right, because that's just
something music, people who are pursuing music, that's
something that's near and dear to my heart. And so it becomes very
transparent for an A&R, an artist and
repertoire person who's signing an act to say, how
well are you cultivating the audience that you have? How well are you engaging with
the audience that you have? How well-- how many SuperPhone
numbers do you have? How engaged are they? How many of them actually buy? How many show up to
shows, et cetera? Now you can make
informed decisions about whether or not to make
an investment in someone. And that's the same thing
that venture capitalists do. They want to know your
month over month growth, whether it's a monthly
recurring revenue. You know, your
dropoff, your churn. You know, they want
to know these things. And up to this point,
you know, unless you were Master P or
Cash Money Records back in the day and you--
people saying how are you riding around in all these cars? Oh, I sold 100,000 records
out the back of my trunk. Well, there's something
that's very clearly correlated with selling
a lot of records, and then that's why
they made these sort of like outsized deals
with Universal Records, and millions of
dollars, et cetera. But besides that, how do you
make a decision on someone when you're going to sign them? And so the other piece of it
is that like, as humans, we're just irrational, right. We make emotional
decisions, right? So if I'm really close to, like
I said Craig Kallman, who's the CEO of Atlantic, and he
sees me working really hard and, you know, and we're
close and maybe, I don't know, maybe I'm a janitor. I don't know what I'm doing. But I'm going to
actually find a way to spend some face time
with him and say, yo, man, I've got my concert. Here's my video. He's my everything. And he actually likes the music,
I don't care how much the other A&Rs are going to try
to turn this down. Humans are empathetic. So when you look at
early-stage startups, they say well, look,
we love the idea, but we're going to invest
in the founder, right? Because the founder came in and
he had such a compelling story, he doesn't have any
month over month growth, he doesn't have any revenue,
he doesn't have any numbers, he-- you know, he might
have a really bad [? NVP. ?] But he's so passionate
about what he wants to do, how he wants to
change the world, and he was going to
work 20 hours a day, so, you know, some
investors are going to make an irrational
emotional-- and I've done it myself. I'll write a check just
because I like the founder. I think they're
going to work hard, I think they'll figure it out. They want to be an entrepreneur,
and they have the stomach and they have what it takes to
pivot if their original idea doesn't work. I just want to invest
in somebody that's going to change the world, right? And so that's what I would say. Whether you're a startup
founder, you're a creator, you are a jewelry
designer, you're starting a Shopify store, you
want to start a teaching class, you're an author,
you're a script writer, you're a movie person, you
know, whatever you want to do, you want to actually
raise money for a charity or whatever you want
to do, it comes down to ideas are infinitely
more powerful based on who they're attached to, right. Who are they attached to. KEITH WRIGHT: I think we have a
little bit more time that we'd like to actually invest into
some audience questions. RYAN LESLIE: OK, sure. Yeah, sure. KEITH WRIGHT: So
I definitely want to open it up to the
audience for a few questions. RYAN LESLIE: Yeah. Thanks a lot, guys, for
being here for sure. AUDIENCE: Hey, Ryan. Big fan. So you've been very transparent. And I know that we're
running low on time, but I will be, too. So I used to sing
backup at a label, and I left because I thought
I was pretty good-- I think I am still pretty good,
but the color of my skin is quite different than most
people in the music industry. RYAN LESLIE: Right. AUDIENCE: Brown. RYAN LESLIE: Yeah, yeah. AUDIENCE: Yeah. And I'm Indian, and I
wanted to keep my name. So like, I made some
personal choices, and I left Hollywood
because it was, I mean, very, very superficial, and I
didn't want to play the game. So I came to YouTube, and I've
been making music and stuff. But when I would
go to producers, when I would go to
agents and A&Rs, they didn't really care
about how talented I was. They just cared about how I
can position me in the market to, like, sell lots of records. RYAN LESLIE: Right. AUDIENCE: So I'm
wondering, like, one, how do you feel about how music
is valued today, like we're looking at, like, 6.9
billion compared to, like, over 15 in the late '90s. RYAN LESLIE: Right. AUDIENCE: And then,
like, is music just, like, a front for, like,
selling other, like, t-shirts and brands? Or like are people,
you think, still going to keep consistently
buy actual album? Like not physical, but
like digital albums, or are they just
going to consume music through streaming platforms. RYAN LESLIE: Yeah. So I mean, listen. I think human nature
is always going to be challenging to convince
someone to buy something that they could be spending
that money on their kid, their girlfriend, you know, some
other, like, real experience, which is why the
bulk of music revenue is happening from social
experiences, which is, yo, on July the 9th, I'm going
to go to the Prudential Center, and I'm going to go with
a couple of my buddies who are not afraid to
say they're Justin Bieber fans, right? So that's-- and so that's
an experience, though. You know, it is
about Justin Bieber, but at the end of the
day, it's actually about the personal
value and experience that you get from going to
the concert with somebody that you care about. And that's something that is
etched into the history of you guys' relationship. Because there's
a very low chance that you're going to actually
shake hands with or hang out with Justin Bieber after
the concert, right? And so that's the beauty of
how music is valued, because I think music-- I think that in
the end of-- when everything is said and done, it's
about relationship building, you know? So the reason why it's
cool to like a Drake song is because everybody
knows it's a Drake song. So when you're like, (SINGING)
baby, you my everything or whatever, you know--
what's his record that he has right now? (SINGING) I need one dance. AUDIENCE: Yeah. RYAN LESLIE: Exactly, right? So people hear it, they respond,
thy all like that song, too. It breaks the barriers. It starts a relationship. That's the value, right? And so what music can do
is bring people together, but there needs to
be a value, I think, beyond if you want the
musician to actually get money. The musician has to be able to
galvanize, energize, and bring people together
for an experience that they can pay for that's
actually just valuable to them irrespective of if they
love the artist or not. Like the thing is is that what's
crazy if you look at bands like Phish or the Dave Matthews Band,
or you look at even like Iron Maiden, you know, the people
who line up around the corner, it's because they don't--
they're not hanging out with the lead singers of those bands,
but they sit around and listen to those records together. They talk about it. They analyze it. Yo, this is so dope, et cetera. And the value that
they're getting is that their relationship
is deepening because of these conversations
and their likemindedness around the music. So I would say like, look,
you know, I would say, first and foremost, you know,
is Jay Sean-- is Jay Sean-- AUDIENCE: Yeah, he
changed his name, though. RYAN LESLIE: He
changed his name, yeah. OK, yeah. AUDIENCE: Yeah. his real
name is Kamaljit Singh. RYAN LESLIE: OK. All right. OK. Great. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, look, you know,
at the end of the day, it also comes down
to what do you want to invest in order to
achieve your desired outcome, right? And so if you don't want
to compromise on it, then that's an investment
that you don't want to make. Like at the end of the day,
everything's an investment. And every investment
is a compromise, because there's the opportunity
cost of what you could have done with that money
or what you could have done by keeping
your name or what you could have done by spending
your time doing something else, right? And so it comes
down to what do you want to invest to get what you
want out of life, you know? And so I don't
know if I'm really answering your questions-- AUDIENCE: All good. RYAN LESLIE: --at all, but
I would say that, look, you know-- AUDIENCE: I'll text
you, don't worry. RYAN LESLIE: Yeah, yeah. Send me a text. Yeah, for sure. We'll continue
that conversation. AUDIENCE: Yeah. RYAN LESLIE: Great. AUDIENCE: Thank you so much. RYAN LESLIE: Thanks
for that question. Yeah. KEITH WRIGHT:
Question over here. AUDIENCE: Yeah. My question is also kind
of investment-related. RYAN LESLIE: Sure. AUDIENCE: Congrats on
the Horowitz fundraising. My question is,
was there a moment where they were kind of sold? Was there something that they
saw that really sold them on giving you funds? Only because, like,
obviously, [INAUDIBLE] I'm just curious what it was. RYAN LESLIE: Yeah, yeah. So let me just first be clear
that it's-- the investment did not come from a16z. It didn't come from
Andreeson Horowitz. It came from Ben Horowitz
personally, right? And I would say-- I would
say a couple things, right. Once again, getting
back to, like, how you rank relationships. So the reason why my phone,
if you put your information in and you add your
Twitter account, it will actually rank you
higher if you have more Twitter followers, right,
because maybe I should get back to you, right. So I have 550,000
Twitter followers. So maybe people are saying,
OK, what he's doing already, he's a thought
leader or something. People following him. That's number one. But number two, I didn't write
a cold email to Ben Horowitz, right? I actually had a very
warm introduction. And not only did I have
a warm introduction, he set the meeting and he sat
in the meeting during the town where I was talking to Ben
about my-- at the time, it was more like a
fan phone, right? And so-- and that guy
was Tristan Walker. And once again, he
was an entrepreneur in residence at Andreeson
Horowitz, but he was a fan. And our relationship had been
built based on him saying yo, I saw those YouTube videos
of you creating music, I feel like I have a
human connection to you. I'll take 30 minutes to listen
to you talk on the phone and rant and rave about how
the music industry people are disengaged from
their audience, they don't have any data, whatever,
and I'm trying to solve it. And I wasn't doing that
to sell him on a startup. And so the-- first and
foremost, the ability to sort of form a relationship
through, like, a music exchange, to then having
a 30-minute conversation, to then him saying, like,
hey, Ryan, you know, this is interesting
that you're doing this. You should meet Ben
Horowitz, right. And at the time,
I had only built a single-tenant application,
single-tenant database application. So anyone else who wanted to
try SuperPhone at that time would have had to spin up a
whole nother app in Heroku, you know? And so the bottom line
is that, like, I wasn't in there pitching to
him and saying like, yo, man, like yo, I got this idea. We're going to disrupt
the music industry. I just said, look,
bro, I had a challenge. I looked, I did an
exhaustive search to try to solve the challenge. I could not find it. I sat in my living room,
you know, put all the studio equipment to the side,
and for 60 days just ordered Chinese takeout
and, like, taught myself how to code, right? And I built this
little fan phone. And he said, bro, that
is who I invest in. I invest in founders who solve
their own problems, right. And you know, I feel
like you've solved a problem for every modern
business, every modern person. You might be--
eureka fell upon it, but every modern person
who's investing time, energy, and resources to build
followings on platforms where they have no data, no
insight, no analytics, and giving them a direct line
of intelligent communication to people that support them. I'm in. And I looked at Tristan and
said, what does that even mean? Right? Oh, well, you should
raise a round. And like, I literally-- it
wasn't even a moment, epiphany, it was like he just was
like, yo, man, I support you. And that's what I'm saying,
is that if you can even get to the in-person
time, I don't know if that was a rational decision. I don't know if that was. You know, I think it
was a good decision, because I'm very passionate
about what I'm doing. But I had met him
for the first time. It was 10 minutes
in, or 30 minutes in to talking to him
about why I wanted to solve this, et cetera. But I watched this happen
over and over again, because the relationship
with Mr. Horowitz, right, when we came
back to New York City, and we said, aw, man, Ben
said we need to raise 500. And I went and, you
know, my boy, once again, a warm introduction,
Eric [INAUDIBLE], brought me to a
product hunt, you know, brunch where we could all talk
about what we're working on. And John Borthwick
from Betaworks happened to be at that brunch. Said hey, Ryan, I like
what you're talking about. You've got 45 minutes
after this meeting. And literally 45 minutes later,
we were up another 100 racks, right? And maybe that had to
do with just the fact that, when you see
me talk about this, I'm ridiculously
passionate about it, right? I mean everything
I'm talking about, and I'm going to
go right from here, I'm going to call my
engineers and say, yo, how many actual-- you know, how
many text messages did we get. And then when it's
on Google Talk and it's publicly
available, I'll say how many more text
messages do we get. How can we make this easier
for every single person that needs warmer relationships. I think eventually,
there's going to be, like, a relationship
arbitrage, right? Which means that you'll
be able to say, like, OK, who's the person
that can give me the most valuable
introduction to Ryan Leslie? And whereas some people might
say, like, oh, man, maybe I should try to get in
touch with Fab-- right, because I do a whole bunch of
work with Fabolous-- and yeah, if he called me and
said yo, Ryan, you should meet this person,
I'll do it, right, because I've got a
lot of mutual respect. You actually might be
better off reaching out to Miles from my team
or Dev from my team, these people you see
tagged on my Instagram, and actually going at
them, because there's going to be a warm introduction
and because I appreciate their opinions. They work with me. They know who I am. They know my work ethic. They know the type of people
I would invest in, et cetera. Those are probably an easier
way to build a warm introduction into someone who may or may
not make an irrational decision to invest in you, right? And so it's very,
very interesting. I mean, I'd never
really gotten to, like, the science of networking. I had always just left it
to Facebook and Google+ and YouTube and Instagram and
Myspace and all these other things. But once you start realizing
that the technology does exist to give you the kind of
insight that you need to build warm relationships,
that's what I'm saying, now I believe that
SuperPhone is actually something that's way larger
than what I could contribute to the world as a
musician, because this is an objective value proposition. You know, it's even more of an
objective value proposition, in my opinion, than Uber. Because some people,
you know, yes, everyone would like the convenience
of Uber, right, but not everybody's going
to afford it, right? Some people are just going to
walk, take the train, you know, take a bike, city
bike or whatever. And so when you start looking
at the objective value of me having a cool
relationship with Keith, you've got to understand,
me and Keith go way back. He actually, you know, he
found me doing whatever I was doing on Facebook. Sent me a cold email. I said yo, you work at Google. We came in. You know, I was very
not appropriately dressed the first day I came in. I had, like, cutoff t-shirt
with a Led Zeppelin, you know. Crazy. But you know, but we've
actually grown a relationship. That's why I'm
sitting on this stage. He said, yo, Ryan, I think
you should have this platform. That's insane. And it wasn't like
I paid for this. The number of people
that would probably love to be able to say
oh, I've got a great idea, I would like to just pay for
the Google Talks platform to feature me, right? It didn't happen that way. It happened because
I actually-- and I don't have the warmest
relationship with Keith, but we have a relationship. And we built it,
we cultivated it. You know, I've hung
out and had drinks and talked to him about startup
ideas and all kinds of stuff, right? And we didn't even have the
best business relationship because, you know, whatever we
started working on at Google, it wasn't the actual perfect
fit for what I was working on. But the relationship
is valuable. And the other
piece about this is that the reason why I
think great investors still stay in touch with
founders, right, is because I don't
know a single person, I don't know a single
person, even kids, I don't know a single person
that if you talk to them and you ask them a
question and say hey, Keith, man, you
know, in five years, where would you like to be. They never say, oh, I'd like
to be exactly where I am today. Right? Everyone says, well, I would
like to have a big dream. I want to get my startup. I want to be promoted. I want to make partner
at my law firm. So the beauty of
actually-- the beauty of actually investing in a
relationship at whatever time you meet someone is
because, as a human race, as a human species, we
all want to advance. So if you look at relationships
as like a stock, the minute you get in, it is a stock
that is always, hopefully, if they have any
level of ambition or have any level-- whatever. It's a stock that's always
going to go up, right? Because no one ever
want, like-- you know, people are going
to make mistakes. They might end up in
jail or whatever it is. You know, you may
not reap the reward. Or they might just turn
out to be a bad person. How many relationships
have we been in where we invest
all kinds of time and then we just cut
them off completely, they might as well be dead. Don't call me, you
know, restraining order, get away from me,
don't-- you know, I don't want to see no
texts, you're blocked, don't talk to my friends, don't
try to reach out to my mom on Facebook to get back
with me and all that. You know, but nine
times out of 10, if you look at this
objectively, like, man, I probably should have
had a better relationship with all my exes, right? Because now all my exes are
doing incredible things. I mean, I can look at the
work that Kenza Fourati is doing for her people, right? And I don't have a
relationship with her because the investment that I
made, the mistakes that I made, that investment evaporated
when we-- you know, we're not romantically
linked anymore. She's married now, et cetera. Like so the idea about,
like, unlearning, or learning for the first time
what you've never been taught about
networking and relationship is going to actually solve
for a lot of the challenges that everybody feels
like they're facing. And if you can
have something that helps you to
prioritize your time, because that is a resource that
we all share, like somebody texted me before
this and was like, yo, do you have time to
catch up after the meeting. I said yeah of course. I'm going to invest a little
time, we catch up, see if we can do something together. That's cool. But the bottom
line is that we are going to exchange--
we're both investing an equal amount of time to build
something that hopefully is going to yield a great result. So I don't know, necessarily, if
you don't have-- as a founder, if you don't have
all the metrics which say this is my month over
month, year over year user growth, et cetera, can you
actually get to those meetings? Can you build a-- you can
join startup networks to build relationships with hackers,
build relationships with-- you know, my
buddy is Chris Lyons. He's the chief of staff at a16z. He doesn't make
investment decisions, but he does all of
the introductions and manages all of
the sort of inbound with founders and
influencers and investors that come all together. He's been an incredible
relationship, you know? So that's what I
was saying, like, when we got funded at
SuperPhone, it wasn't like, aw, man, this is the
moment in the pitch where everybody's eyes
lit up and I knew I was going to get my check. It was really that it was
a human exchange, right, at its very core. And it was about the
value proposition that initially I was
positioning for, you know, humans that were doing things
that I did, like did music. But now I realize
that it's a value proposition for every
human, you know, SuperPhone. AUDIENCE: But also [INAUDIBLE]
I don't use his products, but like his
relationship building online is actually impeccable. RYAN LESLIE: Yeah, for sure. For sure. So I mean literally, you know,
if this seems interesting at all, like, we do have
a beta pool of artists and independent musicians. But if this seems
interesting at all, the barrier is you
can't apply SuperPhone to your existing phone
number unless you want to port it to our service. But you can spin up,
like, a networking number. And I guarantee, like,
you know, we'll catch up. We'll do some research. We'll try to figure out if it
actually enhances and enriches your life and enriches
your relationship. We're building those
kinds of metrics. It's like a Fitbit for
your relationships, right. You can finally count your
texts, count your phone calls, how long-- when you do make
a phone call with Keith, how long does he stay on the phone. How long does it take for
somebody to respond to you. What's the time gap between
flurries of conversation. And then we're
building an algorithm to give you an index
to your relationships. So every week, you can just
look in and see, like, hey, I want to be more
of a family person, because last week I
looked at my relationship, I don't even talk to my mom. I thought I was a family person,
I don't even talk to her. Because who you're talking
to is who you are, right? Besides the
self-development that you're doing, like working out in
the gym alone or whatever, the rest of your life is how
you're dealing with people. And so-- but there's no
intelligence around it. Like I said, I can't go
to Google and search like, yo, who did I spend
time with last week. But the window into that
is who you're talking to. Because you've got
to talk to people. I've got to talk
to Keith, yo, I'm running 10 minutes late, right? So it's telling me who I am. It's telling me what I'm doing. Messaging is an incredible
window into who you are. So. KEITH WRIGHT: I think that's
a great message to end on. So-- RYAN LESLIE: Yeah. KEITH WRIGHT: Thank you
very much for stopping by. RYAN LESLIE: Thank you
guys so much for having me. KEITH WRIGHT: Really enjoyed it. RYAN LESLIE: Yeah. And send me a text, man. Yeah. KEITH WRIGHT: All right. I think that's it. RYAN LESLIE: Thanks
so much, man. KEITH WRIGHT: Yes. RYAN LESLIE: Appreciate it. KEITH WRIGHT: It's good, man. RYAN LESLIE: Thank you.
