Why Linus Left NCIX

so i want to go all the way back to when linus was working at the computer store and you had a decent salary life is good yeah what made you decide to take the jump to do your own thing so there were a couple of reasons number one was i had some fundamental disagreements with my boss about the direction we were going as a company so there was one particular night and our relationship was a little tense at that time because um i had recently sent a very complainy email to the development team all the product managers and all the category managers because there was a new feature in our internal system that added an extra click to my workflow for something to do with inventory management contributed absolutely nothing increased page loading times and was not on the list that we had provided the development team at the beginning of the year of our top 10 priorities that everyone down from the ceo to all the devs had committed to delivering they hadn't delivered one of those items and instead they were working on this crap that was just making my life more difficult bureaucracy so i sent out this email i go who requested this feature who green lit this this is not what we asked for i c basically the whole company everyone in senior management what was this company by the way ncix yeah i get back uh uncc'd everyone else i get back a three-word response it was me from the ceo so things are a little tense between me and mr steve wu at this point and so it's probably i don't know it's like a week later or something like that and we end up having a conversation after hours because i was there finishing something up and so was he and he says our number one priority as a company is to reduce our on hand inventory and i say no i fundamentally disagree with that as a retailer our number one priority is to sell more stuff move more boxes out the door because if you sell more stuff your on hand inventory is not a problem and so we've had some conflicts over the years like there was this one time that i bought do you remember coolit systems no okay so they still exist but they were in the consumer space before they lost a patent disagreement with asetek they make all-in-one close-looped coolers for cpus okay so coolit um had to exit that business because they lost this patent dispute and basically they had to get rid of like a few thousand of these things all in one go they had to get rid of it now because they couldn't sell them anymore so i bought the entire thing for like half price and i bled those things out over the course of almost 18 months and so there was this tension because he was mad that it was in his warehouse for 18 months but i thought it was fine because i was making anywhere from 25 to 75 margin on it which from my perspective is just fine so if you're making money it's not a problem if you're not making money it's a problem so anyway we had this disagreement things got a little bit heated he said something along the lines that i'm paraphrasing but if you can't march behind the banner of the directive that i'm laying out for this company then maybe you shouldn't be on the product management team maybe you should just make youtube videos and i kind of went oh well that's a good idea i'm sure he meant for him but but you were like idea so and it's not like i hadn't had my eye on the increasing adsense like i'm a very number one person you were thinking about um so this was back in six and a half years ago or so so whatever year that so adsense exists people are making money oh yeah sort of yeah so i'm not making a ton of money at this point but what i am seeing is the growth i'm really numbers driven and i remember very distinctly this was with not the ceo but with another boss that i had um i remember being so excited because for the first time ever we had done a dollar of adsense in a day and he's like wow good for you go get a mcdouble and then get back to work we're talking about mcdonald's um dollar menu here and i was like no no but don't you see that's double what we did six months ago growth growth yeah it's all about growth and he was like cool um call me when it's a million dollars you know like like that kind of thing so you were making videos for them yeah okay yeah so linus tech tips has been around over 10 years and i've only been independent for six and change i did not know that okay so it started under that umbrella that's right you were searching for the independence basically you so what happened after that conversation was i started to crunch some numbers and i went okay i don't know the first thing about editing i don't know anything about shooting the only thing i know is tech and hosting and also i have some management skills because that's the kind of role that i was in at the company so and i started to try to figure out okay can can we make this work and i figured that yes we could but what i really needed was the youtube channel so linus tech tips at that time had um just under 200 000 subscribers and i figured i could start over but that would be really really difficult like even for someone like me and i'm not saying i'm some kind of mega genius or anything but i'm obviously an experienced youtuber i know how the space works i can build a successful youtube channel i've done it multiple times now but even for me the prospect of starting over at zero at that point was incredibly frightening so i had to work out a deal where i could take the channel with me now i couldn't take it by force there was no legal ground for me to stand on there but what i could do was i could negotiate so the deal i ended up striking and now that ncix doesn't exist as an entity i guess i can talk about it because there's non-disclosure agreements and stuff like that but they're gone um so the deal i ended up striking was i bought the linus tech tips youtube channel for one dollar and whoa hold on no no i sold my soul a little okay in exchange what i gave up was i signed a two-year non-compete so i could not do any paid work with an e-tail or retail organization that operated in north america other than ncix so i would have to work for two years that's right exclusively with manufacturers i tied into a very bargain basement rate to continue to host the videos for their channel ncix tech tips for two years i signed a um like a no poaching clause so i couldn't hire any talent from ncix and i think that's pretty much it it was it was mostly about the non-compete the um because basically at that point i had decided i was leaving i didn't agree with what we were doing so i had to go so i laid it out this way i said look either i'm leaving and i'm going to memory express or canada computers or newegg or something or i'm leaving to work independently and i will sign a thing that says i won't help them at all and there's a lot of people don't know but there's a lot of behind the scenes to a lot of channels you know you have like philip defranco with discovery you have grace helbig with my damn channel yeah they're there's so much that goes on behind the scenes but it is really cool to hear that yes those two years were probably a long two years but to be on the other side of that and to have built what you've built now is amazing right and i'm sure you like this much better than not having a job for a company that's out of business yeah yeah i mean honestly my timing was looking back at it was outstanding i got out before being at ncix was any kind of black mark [Music] you

Channel: That Creative Life Clips

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Keywords: linus tech tips interview, linus tech tips podcast, linus tech tips that creative life, that creative life podcast sara dietschy, linus tech tips why he left ncix

Id: RUz10TAmsXA

Length: 8min 34sec (514 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 02 2020