An Unfiltered Conversation with Linus Tech Tips | Edited Transcript
A copyedited transcript of Colin and Samir's conversation with Linus Sebastian on LTT's origins, production systems, editorial independence, creator commerce, and company building.
CHAPTER TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Introduction: Linus Sebastian, LTT, and the shape of the conversation
04:54 Watching Linus shoot: one-take delivery and a high-output production system
10:05 How LTT develops ideas, scripts videos, and learns from audience feedback
15:03 Information density, scripting, on-camera energy, and the laws of writing
20:31 Why viewers detect forced enthusiasm and why creators need to enjoy the work
24:58 Repeatable formats versus building a channel around a distinctive host
29:18 The NCIX origins of Linus Tech Tips and an education-first approach to commerce
38:42 Getting the first camera and learning to present without prior video experience
46:48 Leaving NCIX, the one-dollar channel deal, and the non-compete arrangement
52:25 Running out of runway and reaching a sustainable creator business
58:31 The innovator’s dilemma: why established media underestimated YouTube
1:00:11 MKBHD, Fisker, Humane, and a reviewer’s responsibility for accurate criticism
1:04:26 Sponsored videos, reviews, disclosures, and editorial independence
1:09:59 Why LTTStore is a product company rather than a conventional merch operation
1:15:30 Designing sponsor integrations without making claims the hosts do not believe
1:20:25 How publishing volume and audience engagement drive LTT’s total viewership
1:26:40 The channel portfolio, paused formats, and decisions about where to focus
1:29:56 Employee departures, privacy, and why LMG stopped doing public goodbye episodes
1:34:54 Criticism, micromanagement, accountability, and mutually inconsistent narratives
1:40:12 Turning production mistakes into reusable rules for visuals and training
1:45:11 What company size means at LMG and the organizational cost of making videos
1:47:21 The chief vision officer role after hiring a CEO
1:50:06 Hiring specialists, expanding leadership, and building capabilities Linus lacks
1:55:20 HR, Yvonne’s role, and changes already underway before the controversy
2:00:01 Why Linus keeps building and the responsibility he feels toward the team
2:05:06 Being a YouTuber as an identity rather than merely a job
2:09:15 Whether creator companies are investable and the limits of relevance-driven growth
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A professionally copyedited transcript of Colin and Samir’s conversation with Linus Sebastian about the origins of Linus Tech Tips, high-volume production, editorial independence, creator commerce, organizational scale, and the future of creator-led companies.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00–02:05]
Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry: Today on The Colin and Samir Show, we’re joined by Linus Sebastian, better known as Linus Tech Tips. He is one of the show’s most requested guests. Linus has spent 16 years on YouTube, beginning as an employee at a computer store who made videos and eventually had to buy the channel from that employer. He went on to build a channel with 16 million subscribers and one of the creator economy’s largest companies, Linus Media Group. It is fair to call it a YouTube empire.
I think one thing that we get into in this conversation that really surprised me was how big his merchandise business is. It’s not just content. He is an absolute wealth of knowledge, everything from how to make a compelling YouTube video to the systems that go into scaling the process of making a YouTube video. He’s just very in the weeds when it comes to building a large YouTube company. And this year has been a significant year for his company. They went through some controversy earlier this year around their business practices, the workplace environment and accuracy of information in their reviews. And we talk about that in this interview. We also talk to Linus just about the present and future of Linus Media Group, which includes hiring a new CEO for the company and what that process has been like of, you know, being the guy in charge and now bringing someone else in.
[02:05–04:05]
Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry: I think he’s one of the most fascinating guys in our industry. He’s a big character and he’s really sharp and good at articulating his rules of YouTube. We start the episode and in talking about his 10 rules of making YouTube videos, which is really great. Have we also talked about how requested this episode has been? First thing I said, that’s the first thing you said. I don’t know where I was, but it’s the most requested episode. I’ll say it again. This is one of the most requested episodes. The amount of comments asking for Linus throughout the years has been incredible. Yeah, most requested the episode for years. So we’ve ignored those comments for years until now. One thing that always shocks me is creators like Linus who are capable of putting out four to five videos a week. Like I just don’t, I think it’s like unbelievable how dare you. Youtubers who can do that are unbelievable. But there’s one thing that if you are going to do that, you have to get really good at and that’s titles and thumbnails. And that is my segue into the sponsor of today’s episode.
I saw where you were going, Spotter Studio, Spotter Studio is a first of its kind software that’s designed specifically for YouTube creators to help you come up with titles, thumbnails and hooks for your videos. So you can either start brainstorming by typing in a title or if you don’t have an idea, you can just click surprise me. And because Spotter Studio connects directly to your YouTube channel, it gives you ideas based off your top performing videos as well as the top performing videos on YouTube. Once you have that title, you can turn it into a number of thumbnail variations and you can choose from a variety of styles. They have sketch, concept art and realistic. And one of my favorite things about this is that it really learns what we do on our channel. You’ll start to see in some of the mock-ups, the arrow that we’ve actually used in prior videos or even this one where you have our bookshelf. This is really similar to our 13 years of YouTube knowledge video. Samir you hear that? What is that? New feature alert. Okay, tell me. We’ve got YouTube preview in Spotter Studio now. So when you make a thumbnail, you can see what it looks like on desktop, on mobile, on TV.
So before you publish a video, you actually can see what these thumbnail mock-ups can look like in all these different environments.
[04:05–05:40]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: While you’re brainstorming titles, you’re also going to see words that get underlined. These are power keywords that are overperforming on YouTube. So you have a link in our description for you to try out Spotter Studio. Totally free for 60 days. Click that link in our description. Check it out. And now for our interview with Linus Tech Tips. All right. Linus, welcome. Thank you. So we just watched you shoot a YouTube video. You did. Yeah, that was amazing. I know maybe you don’t think it was amazing. Sorry, it was weird noise. I for one didn’t think it was amazing. Yeah, just to clarify, he didn’t like it. No, he lost you up the whole time. Yeah, that’s fine. I just mean, here’s a, here’s a weird question because you guys obviously make YouTube videos and watch YouTube videos and you’ve probably seen someone make a video before. How was that different from watching the video? I’m just, is it not the same? No, it was not the same. It was, it was unbelievably smooth top to bottom. Here’s what I’ll tell you. If I was doing that, I would have done those takes probably five or six times. You did it once with a few breaks. So I came up in a very different time on YouTube.
Let’s, let’s get into it. When I started out, there was no sponsor integrations, right? AdSense was meager. A big channel on the platform, like we were like a big channel in tech or whatever. We had, I think when we started out, we had about 120,000 subscribers when we started the company. So when we actually like went into and I didn’t work for a computer store anymore.
[05:40–07:29]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: And so when we did our first CES, our first consumer electronic show, we shot somewhere between like 45 and 55 videos when we were down there for one week. And to put this in perspective for you guys, like we’re there for about four or five days of the show. So I’m shooting literally like 10 videos a day. And you don’t, don’t forget, I in a lot of cases, I’m not on the show floor. I got a travel from hotel suite to hotel suite. So I’m here in the OCZ suite at CES and I’ve actually got their entire SSD lineup in front of me. It might not be. So I would basically walk up. I’d be like, tell me everything about this water bottle. Okay, now shut up. I turned to my camera and regurgitate it, but like, you know, with energy and try to demystify a few of the details, whatever the audience wants to know. Then I turn back and I go, look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude, but I have a limited amount of random access memory. I needed to retain everything you said. Thank you so much for briefing me on your, your product. I will see you later. And then I would go to the next thing. And that was out of necessity because for the first six months, we were running at a deficit.
Unlike most creators that I meet, I was never a one-man show, not even for one day. I always had operating a camera, operating a timeline, usually both. And so we had employees from day zero that had to be paid. You know, why I need to be able to just nail things is because everything was lean, super deep. We almost ran out of money. And we just wouldn’t have had money to pay pay checks. And so if I didn’t nail things, I had what I called the one-take policy. Basically just keep going fumble a thing a little bit. Doesn’t matter. Keep going. Keep going. Only time for one-take. That’s so good. Well, I’m not, I’m not that good at it anymore. I took two takes. That was embarrassing.
[07:29–10:29]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: But yeah, but like the thing, I take way more than that often these days. But the thing that’s amazing is on, on, on line of tech tips, you’re putting out a video a day. Is that right? Not anymore, but almost the past week, I think you’ve put out someone I’ve seen and the video you just shot is coming out tomorrow morning. Yeah. Yeah, but that’s unusual. But how many are you putting out in a month or a week? Is there like a specific amount? Four and a half a week is the target right now. It used to be six a week plus one show. Now it’s, we aim for four and a half a week plus one show. But just like you saw in the last, I think probably seven or eight consecutive days that we’ve uploaded, we’ll go periods of three or four days without uploading it all now. And it just comes down to how our production schedule works. I mean, we made a commitment to our audience a little over a year ago that we were just going to take a harder line on if something’s not quite ready. Just push it, just push it. And we’ve held to that. So meaning like, so Matt Pat had this rule when he came on here, he talked about the 85% rule that they were trying to get videos to 85% there, 85% push it out.
Does that feel representative? I would say that that’s more representative of our older philosophy. But I think that, you know, whether it’s fair or not or whether it makes sense or not, our audience is holding us to a higher than 85% standard. And at the end of the day, they’re the boss. Right. I talk about this a lot internally is like, I’ll ask someone and not in like a weird like pushy way, but just in a conversational way, like it’s a funny thing, right? Because think about it, like who’s your boss? And I don’t like make it awkward and make them like think about it and try to answer me and then correct them. I’m just like, like, who’s your boss? And I, you know, I’ll give you a hint. It’s not me. It’s not Terren Tong, CEO of Linus Media Group. It’s not Yvonne, you know, like my wife and CFO, who has a lot of roles. But it’s the audience, it’s the audience. And it’s the hardest boss in the world because you think about that, that iconic scene or line, whatever from office space where he’s talking about how he has like a handful of bosses and all these reports and the whole thing deals ridiculous, right?
Well, it’s like, it’s that, but times literally a million, you know, because everyone has a different idea of what kind of content you should be doing and know what the standard should be and, you know, what is acceptable and what’s not. And they’re all like eager to voice their opinions and it all gets mixed up into this cacophony of voices that’s pummeling you. And you somehow have to kind of sift through it and find the nuggets of truth that will drive you to greater success and drive you to do better. But they’re the boss. And so you don’t get to choose how your boss gives you feedback. You don’t get to choose how your boss sets the direction. So with the amount of output that you guys have now, how are the ideas coming together? How’s the writing coming together? Because from what I’ve seen, the script being that tight is what enables the turnaround to happen. Like if the script isn’t tight, then it’d be really hard to turn around four and a half or six videos a week.
[10:29–12:32]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: If there’s anything that I would say is my creator talent, right? Like I’m not artistic. I don’t think of myself as an actor, you know, like I’m pretty good. Thanks. If there’s anything that I am as like a creative, I would say it’s I’m a writer. And it was really, it was really funny to me. I was working on a challenge. I was using a Qualcomm snapdragon laptop for a month. And for those of you not familiar, basically that means I don’t have like a normal processor in it. So there’s a lot of applications that I can’t use if they’re not compatible with this platform. And I saw this like kind of ridiculous comment that I felt compelled to reply to that was basically like, well, Linus is perspective on this is so skewed because like creative professionals couldn’t even deal with this at all. And like he’s fine with it. But like creative is good. I’m sitting here going, what are you talking about? Just because your canvas is, you know, an iPad with an Apple pencil, just because your canvas is a piano keyboard or just because your canvas is something else, right? Like my canvas is a blank sheet of paper. I’m a writer. And so if there’s, if there’s anything that I am as a creator, right?
Instead of like a business person, there’s this person like Linus wouldn’t understand, right? It’s, it’s that I’m a writer. And so I, um, I still play a major role in ideation. I still play a major role in laying out key beats. I still play a major role in taking the finished script and altering the voice, tightening it. We have a great team. But I think the, the word writer is almost an improper descriptor of them because they do so much more than just write in a lot of cases. They’re sort of formulating opinions. They are, which is part of writing, but they’re also, they’re, so they’re writing, but they’re also like testing it in some cases. Like we do have our labs team that does some of the more in depth testing, but they’re also involved in there working with those guys.
[12:32–14:49]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: And sometimes they’ll even work on things like they’ll, they’ll go source a prop because we’re a very, um, we’re kind of, we’re kind of flat. Like we have more of a formal hierarchy now than we used to, but we’re still kind of flat. Like you don’t get to just be like, oh, well, I’m slightly above you on the org chart. Therefore, I don’t do anything for you and you do everything for me. Like it doesn’t work like that. How many writers are there? Uh, okay. So we got Jake James, who’s more of like the writing team manager, uh, then we’ve got, um, David and Jordan and then Adam and Pluf and Elijah and Alex. So eight, including manager. Got it. And is it like from what I’ve heard, you have like a writer’s meeting every Monday. And in that Friday’s now, but Friday’s, okay. So once a week, you have a writer’s meeting usually, are they pitching you ideas? And what are you looking for in those ideas? We pitch ideas to the group. Okay. So I will sometimes veto stuff. Like guys, like, come on, can we, let’s wrap up this conversation. This is not viable. Like, so I’ll sometimes have to kind of take on that role a little bit.
But in general, we, we want to make sure that we’re getting multiple perspectives on an idea because the thing with tech is that sometimes the story is really obvious. The story is that this thing performs 25% better and is 10% cheaper. Therefore, it’s a good value. And if you are looking for one of these, you should buy. Right. See, you got your guys, your eyes are glazing over just like listening to me say that because it’s boring. And so a lot of the time, the story is that I can’t be that. Yeah. We have to find another angle. And you need multiple voices and you need multiple perspectives to find the who, the who cares, right? And the why should I care? Like that’s, I think number one on the laws of writing good videos. I would love to hear the laws of writing good videos. But one of our laws that we talk about is exactly what you just said, who is this for and why would they watch? And those are really simple questions that sometimes creators just don’t ask themselves. Actually, I think sometimes marketers at everyone in business should ask themselves that. Uh, law number one, control the scope, make sure the point isn’t too broad.
[14:49–16:49]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: Keep it narrow, keep it focused. Love that number two, don’t waste the viewers time. Again, it’s almost the same one again. What is the point? Make your point as concisely as possible? Something I used to talk about a lot and I don’t talk about as much anymore, but it’s information density. Um, that’s one of the main reasons that we moved to scripted because in a lot of cases, I could probably add live a lot of what we do. And I still do a lot of our stuff is still unscripted. Um, our podcast is unscripted. A lot of our vlogs are unscripted. They’ll have kind of like beats we want to hit, but it’s like, we’re putting it in our own words on the fly. But the problem with that is the information density is very low and the editing lift is very high compared to scripting everything and tightening it down. Um, number three, load up the learning outcomes. And this one’s really important to me because I feel like our role is to make you feel at the end like you got more than just, um, you know, like marshmallows and, and cheese whiz, you know, like you got something of substance after you consume our content.
I think that there’s a lot of very addictive content online that, and I’m not going to say we’re the single most education channel or anything like that. But we try to, we try to have you walk away with something, just be a little bit, could just be a little bit every time, but we want you to walk away with something because I think it’s really important to building a long-term relationship. Um, plan for flow, make it personal why should I what is plan for flow? I mean, oh, some ideas will have a natural order. Um, you know, it could be physical outside to inside. It could be temporal beginning to end. It could be conceptual start with the background info, current events, futures speculation, you know, um, but make sure that you have a clear idea. And I, I put this one in because we’d run into a lot of situations where people wouldn’t intuit this and, you know, they would start with, okay, well, this new water bottle from lttstore. com. It’s got this new twist cap. And, uh, you know, if you look on the inside, it’s got this kind of this, this lining
[16:49–18:51]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: and then like, oh, but now we need to look at the bottom. Oh, my, oh, I spilled water all over the place, right? Because because what’s that part of it? If you don’t think about the flow through which you are going to go through something, you end up with something unnatural or something happening right? That is disruptive. And you’re, you’re, you’re drawing the viewer’s attention away from the story you’re telling. And on to, wait, weren’t we just talking about the internal specs? Why is he talking about how pretty the shell is? Well, now we’re talking about how much hard drive capacity it has again. Does that have what’s happening? Is it ever materialized in like a list form? Like, I’m going to tell you three things that I love about this. Or do you think that’s absolutely lists are great, right? Because you can basically organize any videos flow into lists. Here’s all the things we’re going to talk about. Here’s the things we’re going to talk about pertaining to that, then that end. And then you’ve just got the classic essay format, which I love. I know it’s a weird thing to say. I love the essay format. No, I love it too. It’s not, it’s not broken.
Those work really well and they’re easy to understand. Yeah. And they’re easy to follow. Yeah. So the last law is make it personal. No, that’s five. That’s five. Okay. There’s more laws. How many laws we got? We got 10 10 provide context. It’s not always obvious how good a screen is, how impressive someone’s subscriber count is, right? You know, you have to contextualize meeting benchmark it against something else or compared to something else. Yeah. Remember who you’re talking to, you know, not every video is for everyone. So you guys are going to see this a lot, right? Sometimes you guys are going to do a video that’s really targeting brand new creators who’ve never done anything. And sometimes you guys are going deep into the weeds for people who, if they don’t have like a million subscribers, it’s probably not how applicable. Don’t worry about it. Yeah. Right? Plan for the payoff. Really important to me. Tell and show us how to feel. Man. And this is part of this is part of the context one to provide context.
[18:51–20:45]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: It’s so much better to to to show people how we’re feeling about things versus just say, and that’s really good. You know, I had like in the video that you just saw, yeah, you know, I make sure that I’m being expressive when I’m excited about something. I make sure that my expressiveness falls extremely far when I’m exasperated about it. If you don’t show and tell people how to feel, they’re just going to tune out. They’re going to disengage and that’s not their fault. It’s just you do that really well with your voice too. It’s part of the it’s part of the natural process of creating video. And I tell people this anytime I deal with an inexperienced host, one of the things I really like to tell them is here’s the problem with cameras. They have they have this glass filter in front of them. And and it’s it’s real tough for them. It’s kind of like they have like like a like a screen that sits in it filters out probably 80% of your energy. So however you would normally talk to someone, right? When you’re talking to a camera, you’ve got to take that and you’ve got to give it like this much more energy.
You’ve got to act in a way that would actually be kind of uncomfortable, maybe even on putting to somebody that was sitting and talking to you in person. And I’m I’m I can confirm off putting. I’m dialing it back because this is more of an interview. Right. And I’m trying to seem like a sane human being. But when you’re presenting to the camera, it captures a fraction of your energy. It captures a fraction of your emotion. So you have to overdo it. If you don’t overdo it, you end up just flat and boring. Number 10 have fun. The audience is bullshit detector. It’s like finely tuned. Yeah, finely tuned. If they can tell that you don’t give a shit, why should they give a shit? They shouldn’t.
[20:45–22:21]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: And they only get better as time goes on, right? Like, obviously, as YouTube progresses, I mean, bullshit detector gets more fine. Some of them are idiots. All you got to do, all you got to do to prove my hypothesis is look at the like dislike ratio back when we had that on any YouTuber apology video. Right. It’s like that many people bought that. Okay. Yeah. You guys are just your detectors broken, bro. But in general, I do think the audience as a whole is evolving to become more savvy. Yeah, of course. They’ve just seen a lot now. Like what used to be reality is like progressing the same with that reality TV progressed. Right. Like it’s it’s all progressing in that way. How do you have fun with something that’s heavily scripted? Because for me, I look at unscripted, whether it’s a conversation or doing a vlog and like authentically, I will find moments where I’m having a good time or I’m just like, sure. I feel like I’m the realist interpretation of myself, and I enjoy that. But with scripted, I do feel a little bit like performative. And I still like that format. Like I like those videos. But when I’m doing it, it feels performative. Um, I don’t know.
I guess for me, it’s like, uh, it’s the little things, right? Like I love sneaking in little bits of personality. I love sneaking in little Easter eggs. I love making jokes that I know only three to five percent of the audience is going to get or care about. And then it’s such a it’s such a fun payoff for me when I get, I, when we go down in the comments and people like, hi, you said streets ahead. We’re going to make it a thing. Let’s go. You know, I love that stuff. Right.
[22:21–24:39]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: And, and so for me, I guess part of it is just kind of trying to keep that vision of the final product or realizing that if you’re doing a scripted format and you’re not having fun, your script probably blows 100% and you need to make it. Yeah. Yeah. So are you doing where does title thumbnail fit in on in the writer’s room and in these meetings? If you don’t have a title thumbnail, you don’t have a video. So is that a modern you, is that first or is it like discussion about the idea? And then you’re like, I really like that idea. Let’s has to happen in parallel. There’s got the general video concept, the title, the thumbnail, and the, and the flow and payoff. Got it. It all has to happen in parallel. It’s like you got your, your chicken, your egg, your rooster, and like your, I don’t know, can house or whatever all the things you need are to make like a baby chicken. And is hook a part of that kind of like the, the first few lines of the video where I say like the intro got it. So we have, we have lots of like laws that’s just one of the law documents. But one of our little laws, our intro, one of our intro laws is you have to pay off the title thumbnail in the first.
I think 10 to 13 seconds. Yeah. This was honestly based on a Mark Robert video that I watched like ages ago, I don’t watch much YouTube. So every once in a while, I watch YouTube and I’m like, oh, yeah, it’s evolving. It’s good. So I watched his one on the like deceptive manipulative, like gambling elements in kids arcades. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I basically was like, this is a really good intro. What’s in it? And so I kind of figured out, identify the problem, show me there’s more that I need to know, address the title thumbnail. And there’s like, there’s one more, but we basically had a template that you have to fill out before you write an intro that shows that you’ve identified all these things and made sure that they’re all going to be in there. Yeah. For us, we talk about like confirming title thumbnail and then introducing a new unclosed loop. Sure. Like within the first, we are also going to give you something you didn’t expect. Yeah. How do you think about formats? Because a lot of the top creators right now, you look at like Ryan Trehan. It’s like, I stayed in this type of Airbnb. Right. And if it works, you do it again and again.
And again, when I look at your channel, there are so many different types of titling conventions and thumbnail formats. And yet you still reach a consistent audience.
[24:39–26:29]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: Couldn’t explain it. Couldn’t explain it. Well, the format is Linus’s fish. Sure. It’s like a Linus Tech Tips video is essentially a format. That’s not repeatable, but I’m just saying it’s like, there’s things within it, right? Like the segues are like, if I’m a part of the community, I know what is happening in the show. Right. Did that make sense? Yeah. I mean, yeah, I guess you could say that. And we, it’s not like we don’t have some formats. I mean, we’ll react to stuff. We’ve done like the five versus 50 versus $500 thing a couple of times. We have some of our, some formats that we kind of started, like we have like a handy tech under $100 format kind of thing. The build, uh, build with only items from, yeah, build with only Amazon. That’s your most video is the wish. com. Yep. Build with only items from wish. com. So yeah, we have some formats, but I guess one of my big things and it’s both a really good thing. And it’s can be a really negative thing. Sometimes I hate retreading old ground, which when you’ve done 6,000 videos or whatever, we’re up to now means that a lot of the time our writers remains up like that South Park episode. Like, since it’s did it. Simpsons did it.
Except Simpsons is us like we’ve done basically freaking everything at this point. But YouTube rewards that. Right. Like, I mean, the, the vibe of YouTube is like if something works, like just keep doing it. Um, but I get bored, you can’t do it. And rule number 10 is have fun. Yeah. So if I’m bored, we’re just not gonna do it. So I’ve also heard you talk about how like in green lighting a video, you want to make sure that it gets, I think it was either a hundred or a thousand views in perpetuity. That is old meta. That’s old meta. That’s old meta. So you don’t think about that now. Like in terms of I need this to be evergreen for a long period. We still strive for evergreenness in our content. Okay.
[26:29–28:15]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: But it used to be that if we go and we look at the at the, at the all time, all time views for the channel, right? Like here, let’s pull up the dashboard. Lifetime. Come on. Or actually, I’m just gonna highlight on the graph where that meta died. That was terrible. Thank you. It’s a talent right there. Can we poke around this while we have it open to you? So this is lifetime from 2008. Wow. Oh my God. This is an amazing graph. Okay. Lifetime from 2008. Yeah. Where the meta of like trying to have those videos. So it looks like 2023. It used to be that there was just this finite amount of content on the platform. And if you made a good video, even a decent video, it would settle in eventually to like maybe a hundred views a day. And it would kind of stay there. And the, the idea. And if you look at that like total sort of channel viewership graph, it played out, right? The idea was that if every day you uploaded a new video that could get like a hundred views a day in perpetuity, then your overall channel viewership would always grow until it just always grew forever. Yeah. And it worked for a really, really long time. But eventually, competition heated up.
And there’s just so much content dude. I regularly at trade shows and stuff. I’ll run into like tech creators who have channels with like a hundred thousand or hundreds of thousand subscribers. And I’m just like, please don’t take this the wrong way. I mean no offense, but I’ve never heard of you. This is sure. Tell me about yourself. Like super nice to meet you and everything. But like, where did you come from? Like I, and there’s, and there’s so, so many people in the space now, especially with the way that production equipment has gone down in cost and complexity.
[28:15–31:03]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: Yeah. Like anyone with literally a smartphone can like make a good looking, good decent sounding these days. And so the barrier to entry is so low. And it’s a good thing, right? Like the democratization of, of media essentially, right? But what it does mean is there’s a ton of competition for attention on the platform. And so that, that meta just didn’t exist anymore. And you could see like we never really had like break out times. We always relied on just like slow and steady wins the race. Just make a decent video every day a little more decenter than the last one and keep going. But your first six years in the context here are pretty slow. Yeah, 2008 to 2014 is pretty flat. What was going on there? Well, from until 2012, I worked for a computer store. So I was, I was on payroll and I got a small bonus. I forget what it was. I think it was like 10 or $15 a video or something like that for uploading to LTT because I didn’t even own the channel. It was their choice to brand it, Linus Tech Tips because their store NCIX had NCIX tech tips. But those were a bigger production and more overhead. And we couldn’t produce that many of them.
And lots of our partners wanted videos for their products. And so they were like, Oh, well, we’ll do like this unboxing format is a thing. And I was like unboxing. That’s stupid. Look at me now. Okay. Yeah, fine. And they were like, okay, but like branding. Let’s keep the tech tips because that was a huge part of the kind of the foundation of the channel for me, the way that I pitched it was we weren’t going to try and sell anything. We were in an educate. And that would build a relationship and build trust with our audience, which would ultimately make them buy something, which is great because I worked for a store. And that’s, that’s our goal. But we wouldn’t cross that line to, to just just turning the video into a sales vehicle. They’re had to always be an educational nugget, which comes back to back to the law of making sure that you build in some learning outcomes, kind of what I call them. And, and so we were like, okay, so let’s keep the tech tips. But this is going to be like kind of unscripted slash like kind of off the cuff. And we’re going to lean more on like Linus, the personality.
What if he says something, you know, weird, you know, they were actually ahead of their time in terms of like preparing themselves for influencers doing or saying something outlandish, right? Like this guy’s going to get canceled. Yeah, eventually it’s a matter of time of time with this guy. Yeah, let’s see if we can get a good few years out of that. So what do we call it like Linus tech tips? That way it doesn’t reflect. Hold directly on the NCIX tech tech tips, which the second video I do want to play more with your dashboard.
[31:03–33:21]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: I went by your welcome, but there was NCIX tech tips, which the second video on that channel Hi, welcome to NCIX tech tips. My name is Linus Sebastian and 17 years ago now, you start hosting on that channel. Yeah, and you didn’t paid per video. Yeah, I think I got, I think it was $250 per NCIX tech tips. I’ve also heard that before you worked for NCIX, you were like essentially pro bono doing customer support for them in forums. Yes, that’s one way of describing it. Yeah, just hung out in there in their like community forum. And I would just look at people’s like build lists. Yeah, and I’d be like, yeah, actually you can get the OEM Samsung DDR for like $3 cheaper. It performs exactly the same. It just doesn’t have the shiny heat spreader on it. So you could go ahead and do that or not. I mean, whatever. It’s your money. So you were just really into this stuff. Oh, yeah. Yes, really into computers. Like dude, either I was on the NCIX forum, or I was on this Bicell trade forum, redflakedeals. com, and I was like buying low and selling high and wheeling and dealing. I would build computers for people who wanted computers. I’d go up by the parts. I’d charge them like an assembly fee.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can figure windows for cool. What was your plan? If you didn’t go on that like at that time where you’re just going to we’re going to build computers and you’re working a computer store like how did you see your life going? Oh, I mean, I was supposed to go to school. Like I went to university for like two and a half years and I was supposed to be like getting an education. During my two summers in that period, right? I also do you guys have college pro, right? Like college pro painters? No. It’s like college. I mean, we have. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I did like a college pro competitor called student works, which I don’t know if they have in the US. But anyway, so I ran a painting franchise in there as well. Also, I was like a certified lifeguard and water safety instructor. So I used to teach swimming lessons. I think once I had grown up past about greed too and you know wanting to be a fireman, you know, I probably thought I was just going to be a teacher. But I think a big part of that was just that so many influences in my life where teachers, like every adult I knew was a teacher. My teachers were teachers. My mom was a teacher.
[33:21–35:14]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: My stepdad was a teacher. Got it. My aunt on my biological dad’s side was a teacher. And these were all the like key adults in my life growing up. So I was just like, oh, I guess everyone just grows up in his a teacher. Yeah. And if he said it’s funny, because if you think about it, I basically still. Yeah, you are. I just get paid diversion. Yeah, poor teachers. They support your teachers. At what point in the early journey of making YouTube videos, did you realize that part of your identity or part of what you enjoyed was hosting and writing? Like, did you always see yourself as a writer when you were like a lifeguard and things were like, I’m also a pretty good writer. No, I mean, I was pretty good at it. I was not good at it until I somehow got put into like the advanced placement like AP English in grade 11. And I had a really great teacher. I think he’s still kicking Al horn. Really great teacher. He pushed us extremely hard. He was a stickler for detail. If you had an assigned all of our assignments were out of 10, if you had a punctuation mark out of place, you lost point five of your entire grade. It didn’t matter.
If something was not correctly capitalized, something was misspelled. And these were written assignments. There’s no spell check. You had to actually like write it out in the class. He penalized you. And I think there’s a lot of people that would look at things like spelling and go, well, these are arbitrary. These are not actual indicators of the quality of the work. But what we learned was that the quality of the work is an indicator of the quality of the work. And you could have a car that, you know, by and large functions mechanically, but if has a big scratch on the side, that’s the only thing anyone’s going to talk about. And I think that changing that mindset for me was really key in making me detail oriented enough to succeed at this.
[35:14–37:31]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: So I did my AP exam. I was, this is, this is one of my like favorite stories. Not because I’m like super exceptional. Lots of people get a four on the English AP exam, which basically means you skip through to your college English. And it’s like the highest grade basically. I think it’s four. It’s either four or five is whatever the highest grade was. But the only reason I cared so much was because the other like like exemplary students who beat me in every other subject didn’t. So yeah. So that was probably the moment that I figured out that I’m like pretty okay at writing. I read a lot like I read ravenously as a child. And I didn’t use it at all until man, we didn’t even start writing our videos until we’d moved into the Langley House at some point. But the thing is far beyond NCIX once you’re into. Yeah. But the thing is that the fundamentals of story structure of argument structure. And when I say argument, I don’t mean you dirty, but like I mean, I mean, I mean, formulating a concise argument to demonstrate a point and to win people over to your side, you can, you don’t have to write it down. Right.
As long as you foundationally understand it and you can verbalize it, then that’s just, that’s just a skill that you have. That’s something you have in your back pocket that you carry with you. And I, I’ve said so many times, I think sales is the most important life skill and sales is basically making an argument, selling your position, selling your skills, you know, whether it’s you applying for a job, finding a partner, right? Like selling the value of yourself as someone that you should accept a ring from, you know, everything you do in life ultimately comes down to your ability to argue your position. And if you can’t do it, it doesn’t matter how good your ideas are. They’ll never go anywhere. And so I think grade 11, grade 12 AP English was more foundational for me than almost anything I can look back at career wise. Wow, I love that. That’s, that’s really, I really believe that like making videos and writing are one and the same, right? Cause exactly what you’re saying, you’re crafting a perspective and an argument and you’re trying to get a point across in a story.
When you were doing this with NCIX, like that, that, that video that I watch at a whiteboard on, at a whiteboard. Propped under the camera. That was your tone of tripod.
[37:31–39:43]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: Got it. And it had like basically just my main sort of beats that I wanted to hit. So I’d be like, Okay, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Wow, that’s, but like, okay, just a guy who is spending his time in forums and building computers, yeah, the natural thought is not this guy would be great on camera. When did you realize like, or were you just immediately comfortable on camera? No, no, I mean, you’ve seen the videos, but I still have the guts to get on camera. How did the opportunity even come about? Did you ask for it to go on camera? They haven’t, no, I do. I already had like three full-time jobs. I was a product manager. I was, um, I was in charge of like our online like PC builder. I was involved in like some of our marketing. Like, dude, I did like so much that I did a little bit of like community management. Like it was, it was ridiculous. Like how much stuff that I had on my plate already. But basically my, my, okay, my boss, but not the one that I hired who works and is my boss now and not the president of the company.
So my then boss pulled me into his office and he basically goes, yeah, and like part of my French, but he pretty much said it exactly like this. He’s like, get the, the, the, the, the look. Tiger Direct has videos. We need to have fucking videos. Go make videos. Got it. And I, in his typical fashion, he was kind of like like hyper animated about it and like not open to conversation necessarily. Sometimes he was in a very different mood, but he was not in that mood at this point. And and he basically goes, now get the fuck out of my office and look, I, I love him dearly. He said, get the fuck out of my office in the most loving way, loving way, I still expected to leave, right? But in a loving way. So he goes, get the fuck out of my office and I’m like, okay, this is probably one of those things where he’s like read an article or something. And realistically he’s going to forget about it in a couple weeks.
[39:43–41:34]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: And if I just don’t work on this and I do other stuff that I know definitely has a value, he’s probably going to forget about it. And he pulled me back into his office like a month later, he goes, where are those fucking videos? When I give you an assignment, I expect some kind of follow up. He went and personally went to the president of the company and requisitioned a camera, which was a gift that the president had bought for his son that he didn’t really like use. It was some Sony camcorder. And he like, he hands it to me. He goes, no excuses, pretty much. Wow, make a video. Oh my fuck, I don’t know how to make a video. I didn’t even do like, I didn’t even do drama past the one third of a semester that I did in grade eight. Like I had no experience on camera, no experience behind a camera, nothing. And I was like, okay, so I recruited a helper internally who went by the alias cameraman, who I would often banter with because he was a Mac guy and I was a PC and he has asked me not to disclose his name. So I won’t, but I, great guy, we, we worked together extremely well and we produced the sunbeam tunic tower overview.
That was the very first ex-tech tips it was meant to be just like kind of a, okay, how does this work? Let’s pick the simplest possible story to tell and see if we have any idea how to do this and if anyone cares at all. And the rest is history. Do you remember the first time that someone came up to you and recognized you because I will, I will always remember, you know, our first channel was the lacrosse network. It was all about the cross and I will never forget we were at a lacrosse tournament in Utah and a little kid came up to me and was like, hey, it’s calling in Samir and we have the moment on camera. I remember being like, oh, that’s so cool. I think my camera though is like recording the kind of down. And I just like said to Samir, I’m like, whoa, Samir, we both were like, what?
[41:34–43:31]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: Like, it’s just I will never forget it. And it felt like a little bit of validation that we were doing something that people enjoyed and a moment of like, did my life just change forever than someone knows who I am. And I don’t know them. I think so. Yeah. I was at McDonald’s I was getting lunch. I hadn’t figured out that I shouldn’t eat McDonald’s yet. Um, so I was getting lunch with a colleague or a couple of colleagues and we’re in line and we’re just yucky acting about whatever and a guy turns around and goes, I recognize that voice. Oh, yeah. So it wasn’t actually the face. Yeah. It was the voice. Wow. That was the dead giveaway. And I was like, no way. And they obviously like ribbed me about it. They’re like, yeah, I don’t know. It’s course. Um, it is weird to go from the default, which is assumed anonymity at all times in your life, right? You’re walking to a McDonald’s. You’re like, no, I’m just here getting McDonald’s to that there’s a shift. And I think on YouTube, because YouTube works in these fragmented niches, there’s, it’s actually a murky middle ground.
If you still should assume anonymity or not, whether you’re at our scale, your scale, like, if I’m at a farmer’s market, it’s very unlikely that anyone’s going to walk up to me or at least it would have been not that long ago. Uh, whereas if I walk into a best bike, yeah, it’s okay. Like, yeah, you’re Justin Bieber. Yeah. Well, no, but no, yeah. But people are people, it’s pretty likely that if I, if I ever needed my ego stroked, you know, I could go do a lap in a best buy. Someone would walk up and tell me they think I’m cool or something. Right. Right. Um, so I don’t do that. But if you see him at a best buy, you do, please stroke is ego. Yeah. So the NCIX, did it start like working, like where they’re views on the, that channel, just started working. Yeah, just started working.
[43:31–45:46]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: That’s amazing. Pretty much immediately. I mean, there was so little competition. If I uploaded that video today, I would be drowning in obscurity forever. That would be successful. You have to be, it’s, it’s mind blowing, right? Because on the one hand, it is easier than ever. There’s so much inspiration out there. There’s so many tools. It’s also affordable, right? It’s so much easier than ever to make a great video and like, like be an awesome content creator. But on the other, on the flip side, it’s never been harder to compete against the literal millions of other people who want the audiences eyeballs. Right. So it’s like, people ask me sometimes they’re like, you know, is, was it easier to start out when you were starting out or is it easier to start out now? It’s like, it’s totally hard both times, but in totally different ways. Yeah. Like, getting a, getting a decent light was like, thousands of dollars back when I started or a decent camera. We couldn’t afford lights. Like, are you kidding me? We didn’t have a decent camera. We just straight up didn’t. Yeah. You just had crappy cameras and who cares because YouTube was 480p anyway. Yeah. Yeah.
So wait, I’m, how did the, the, the Linus Tech Tips channel starts because they’re like, who knows what he could say. Yeah. So we just had also like, when you plausible deniability, if he does something, but that is technically because you’re an employee of NCIX owned by NCIX. Yeah. Not technically 100% Linus Tech Tips was originally owned by this computer store. Yeah. How did that happen that you go independent? So I had an argument with the president of the company, the big boss. And basically, we didn’t agree on the direction for the company. And it was, it’s a stupid thing, honestly, when I summarize it, but he wanted us to carry less inventory. And I wanted us to sell more inventory, if that makes sense. Oh, I see. So he saw the future as going super lean. And if you look back, he was actually pretty wise in terms of where the market’s gone, like Amazon becoming a marketplace, yeah, more than an actual like retail or at this point and stuff like that. Anyway, we had this kind of fundamentals of agreement. And what it boiled down to was we, we had kind of, we were carrying too much inventory and it was a burden on our cash flow.
And he basically said, we need to figure out how to buy less.
[45:46–47:49]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: And I said, no, we need to focus our efforts on how to sell more. And he basically goes, look, if you can’t get behind the column, you know, the marching column, if you can’t carry the banner, then maybe you should just make videos. Well, he meant for him. But, you know, it got me thinking, right? Like I could see the AdSense checks. They were small, but they were growing. I could see the way the platform was going. I could see the potential in the future. I didn’t see this. I saw, you know, maybe having a small, maybe half a dozen person team and everyone makes a living salary. And, you know, we, we broke out and we make videos and test computer hardware. And that was, that was sort of as far as I could look into the future. But I did see a future and I kind of started to crunch the numbers and went, yeah, why don’t I just make videos? So I came to him with an offer that basically went, I’m quitting. And, you know, I kind of went, please don’t. I kind of went, well, I am. I’m quitting. I’ve made my decision and there are two paths. Path number one is you sell me Linus Tech Tips for one dollar.
I offer you a non-compete for a period of, I believe it was, it was either two years or three years or something like that. I offer you a, it was either a one year or two year contract to come back and help you build up a team and train a team to run the NCIX Tech Tips channel, which obviously I’m not going to take this branded after their store. And you couldn’t change YouTube channel names back then, but not easily anyway. And I will, did I already see the non-compete? Okay. And I will offer you a perpetual license to use any Linus Tech Tips content that we ever produce. Wow. For rich video merchandising for your products on your store. Wow. That one’s big. Although, NCIX doesn’t exist anymore. Well, we’ll get to that. So that was my offer. That’s offer. That’s path number one. Okay. Path number two, I don’t have a channel. I don’t have a means to support myself.
[47:49–50:44]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: I’m going to go work for Newegg. Wow. Good negotiating. Yeah, I’m not going to stay here. That ain’t a path. Yeah. And so after some back and forth and, you know, some stuff that honestly, I probably shouldn’t have done, I tried to take the cameraman with me. Got it. And he was also in a very senior position there. Got it. When the owner found out, he almost torpedoed the whole deal. Right. And so we had to, I had to basically say, okay, I’m not taking anyone with me. It’s just me. And like it was, there was a whole drama. Literally, literally at the 11th hour, like I was sitting there. He was in like China. And we were negotiating on, I still vividly remember this on December 31st. I’m standing in the family room at my house. And I’m on the phone with him. And it’s whatever a clock in China. And we’re like, hashing out this deal. Like, look, I am unemployed tomorrow. Am I sending out applications? Or do we have a deal? And we, we got it done. So on January 1st, Luke and Ed came to work for Linus Media Group Incorporated. And we had a channel. It was, it was down. It was that close to the liar is wild. And we had plans.
We were going to try to like make a go of it, like starting the channel from scratch. But it was, we all knew it was a far fetched. And looking back on it, I don’t think we would have succeeded. Wow. What is it? Makes for a good story. Have you always been comfortable sort of negotiating on your own behalf and getting into somewhat confrontational scenarios? Like, hey, I mean, they’re putting an application tomorrow or not, like when you’re in middle school and high school, are you, are you like, no, are you that strong headed? No, no, I was awkward dude. I was like awkward nerdy kid man. Like I, I was loud, maybe. And like I, but I didn’t say the right thing usually. And like, I don’t know. I, I have some very strong personalities in my family. So I guess like going toe to toe with them, probably the time of the pump a little bit, but no, how, how quickly did the line is tech that start working January 1st, you know, Luke and Ed come to work. You zero revenue, you’ve zero revenue, but the channel has 100 some AdSense some subscribers and 20,000 or so. I think some AdSense. Did you know how much you had to make to keep them around? How much I can do basic math?
Oh, I don’t remember. But they made, you know, more than minimum wage, less than what they were worth, but more than minimum wage, you know, they actually, well, depending on how you factor the hours, I think Luke was pulling a lot more hours than I even necessarily realized. He lives in our house. Yeah. Not everyone knows that, but he lived with me at the start of the channel. He just had like a spare room in our house like lived there. Part of the deal was that he could, my wife was on maternity leave at the time, and she was cooking meals. So you did this, you did this move. So when you had like kid, he had like room board and food as part of his employment deal. Like it was, dude, it was wild. That is crazy.
[50:44–52:38]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: Yeah. And no, yes, I knew board. We’d had our first son eight months prior. Oh, God, dude, board of wild time to do that. And we had this conversation, right? And I often, I often say this, maybe not that often, but I’ve definitely said it multiple times is like, people will ask me, when’s a good time to do something? I’m like, that’s never a good stuff. Yeah, just figure it. It’s never a good time. You just have to do it. And so, you know, when my wife and I are talking about this is probably like August, September timeframe when we’re like talking about this and starting to work it out and like, we couldn’t afford a lawyer. So we like tried to make our own like sale contract for the channel. I mean, the fact that NCIX doesn’t exist anymore slash the statute of limitations is probably over is probably a good thing because I have no idea how bullet proof that sale contract was right. I basically read it and like, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was rough, man. But so we got like a four month old when we’re like going through all this. But I was really lucky, right? I had a partner that was a able and he willing to support this dream. And she was working as a pharmacy manager.
She finished school. She’s the good one. Right. I dropped out after two and a half year. Flunked out and it’s complicated. I didn’t technically flunk out. I was on academic probation when I stopped coming to school. So I also was on academic probation. And did I get fired? Did I quit? I don’t know. Sounds like you left on your own accord. Yeah. It’s Schrodinger’s academic status. Yeah. So how long until Linus Tech Tips channel is kind of like working, quote, unquote, like it’s paying for itself at six months in. Wow. That’s a base had run out of runway. We didn’t have much. Okay. Was the problem. Yeah. We had a run out of runway and the first like check hit that was like this covers everything that’s going out.
[52:38–54:38]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: And we are at break even and we were on fumes. So we, yes, we managed to go from zero to profitability extremely quickly. I think most businesses would say six months. Wow. Great job. Yeah. But we also had no planning and no startup capital. Right. Like we were still paying the mortgage on our house. Like we didn’t have like our house paid off. We didn’t have like a nest egg. We were in debt, not like cash flush. Yeah. Did you feel like six months in? You were like, this can get exponentially bigger. No, you didn’t feel that. No, not even close. You were just like, I’m just making it through. We were, it was like day by day, we were fighting for every penny. We, by then we had our fourth of fifth kind of depending on how you counted on who technically wasn’t working for us because she was on maternity leave. But we added Brandon who was, we actually hired as an editor, but he ended up being more of like DP. And it was sustainable, but I don’t think there was a clear path to anything more than sustainable. Was the concept then just like make a video every day? Oh, yeah, 100%. Your daily cadence was a big part of what allowed us to iterate on our content. We take feedback.
We iterate. We upload. We take feedback. We iterate. We upload. Yeah. How much viewership was enough back then? I don’t remember. I mean, we got up with the dashboard. I can tell you like that, that feeling of like, oh, that video did well or that video didn’t do well. Do a sense. I don’t, you don’t remember what that was. Yeah. I have no idea. And do you remember that first AdSense check? I do. I do remember my first AdSense check, but it was actually before being. Oh, right. Linus Media Group. Yeah. And it was like, it was like a few dollars. Like, it really wasn’t very much. But it’s less the first one that I remember. They used to send physical check. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. I tell that story all the time. I remember that. It was less the first one and the milestone. I actually remember more was when it reached a dollar a day. So the first
[54:38–56:38]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: time I got a $30 check in the mail. And I went, okay, but this was $15 not that long ago. And then the next one was like $45. And I went, wait, this could scale. Yeah. Because it’s the scaling that matters. It’s not there. When I, when I showed the $30 check to people, because I was really excited they were like, yeah, what, like coffee. And remember coffee was cheap then. So like, that’s a lot of coffee. Yeah. Like what coffee? I’m like, no, no, but, but it’s, but it’s more than the last one. Yeah. So much more than the last one. And the next one’s going to be even more because there’s the two miles delay. Yeah. Yeah. And there’s a freedom to it to just it’s showing up that I think it’s hard to explain to people who don’t do like you can make this is actual like, internet money. I figured that out. Yeah. Yeah. It’s crazy too, because like what Colin just said, like, I was thinking about it. And when I was looking at our lifetime revenue and I was like, what’s amazing is we didn’t have to call anyone to make this deal. This money just shows up. Yep. That’s the amazing thing about YouTube.
That’s, I mean, that’s why YouTube is and will forever be the premier platform for creators because they enable anyone to do it. And, you know, you look at, you look at platforms where, you know, copious amounts of money are streaming into them like kick, for example. But that’s, that by definition cannot be forever. There is no infinite mountain of money. Yes. So unless you build a model that properly incentivizes people to build great content for your platform, it’s always finite. Yeah. It’s finite forever. Whereas YouTube has built a perpetual motion machine. The creators create the content, which makes the money, which pays the creators, which pays for the content, which makes the money, which pays, which pays, yeah, perpetual motion. Do you remember speaking of creators like during that time when, you know, you’re starting independent during the landscape of tech creators at the time,
[56:38–58:44]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: like where, where was Marquez at that time? Where was he? Like, didn’t exist. He wasn’t around yet. No, when 2008, I don’t think so. I mean, if he was, he was, he was. I guess you’re right, because he as irrelevant as me. So, you know, wow, I mean, when I first started, it was like, PC Wiz kid and like, locker gnome was untouchable. I would never catch up to locker gnome, Chris Porello, you know, uh, Chila Frilla. Wow. Doing the unboxing at Xbox 360, you know, like, wow. When did that tech scene start to emerge? And did you just steam? Don’t forget. I just did. She’s, she’s OG. And like, she was like, that’s true. Obviously like, on a level that I would never be touchable because this platform could never get that big. Right. Like, I don’t know, I don’t know, she probably had like 80,000 subscribers or something, right? But that’s, yeah. But that the creators who had 100,000 subscribers at that time felt like, yeah, impossible to get to. Oh, impossible, impossible. Are there even 100,000 people watching videos on the internet? Right? Like, it’s crazy. Um, I, I don’t know. The answer is that I still don’t watch a lot of YouTube. I’m not digital native that way, I guess.
And I, I never did. I, I came into this because my boss told me to. Did you read like PC Mag and like, see that with that, you weren’t expensive? I didn’t have money. Interesting. So they’re in Ford magazine, dude. Are you kidding me? I just find that like in the tech world, it’s so interesting to me, because it reminds me of the sports world where sports illustrated was like the major sports publication. Yeah. They didn’t create ESPN, which is fascinating to think about. Like ESPN came out of a different angle. It was like, actually, this should be like 24 seven sports on all the time. Right. If you think about tech creators, it’s a really similar concept. Like none of those publications really made it big as video creators, some of them have tried, but it was the independent who came in a different angle. We’re like, actually, we can make great videos about this stuff. Well, that’s the innovator still on my right. Like there was no money in video. There was no incentive to invest in it until all of a sudden video was eating written’s lunch. Yeah.
[58:44–1:00:23]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: And it was too late. Yeah. So if you’re not watching a lot of YouTube, does that mean that you’re not aware of like the competition in the tech space or the saturation, like you’re not feeling that as someone who’s been in it since 2008? I remember reading, I forget what show it was, but they basically had like a policy on their on their site or on their like contact us that was like, if you send like a like a pilot or like a draft episode or like an idea pitch or whatever else, just know that we shredded it before we ever read it because we don’t want to be put in a position where our idea that we came up with independently could be infringing on someone else’s idea, don’t send us anything. We don’t want it. And I feel like in some ways, it is a benefit to me that I don’t watch much because it means that even if I do end up doing the same thing as someone else a lot of the time, I didn’t see their video and we end up with a slightly different angle anyway. Yeah. It’s not like I’m not, I don’t try to be peripherally aware of what other people are doing. Like I keep up with our subreddit. I read a lot of comments.
So the community itself keeps me informed, but I see that as a very healthy information loop where I’m putting the best thing that I can do based on my community feedback and they are advising me on what I should be doing and what I shouldn’t be doing and what others are doing and what they’re not. So what did you have a perspective on this year when there was a lot of chatter around MKBHD and Fisker or MKBHD and Humane, like his reviews of those companies taking down the companies, quote, quote, bad products take down companies and bad business practices take down companies.
[1:00:23–1:02:51]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: I mean, this isn’t even in Fisker’s first time going down if I recall correctly, right? So I think that if if Marquez had said something untrue about those companies, if he had purposely sabotaged them, then that would be absolutely a cardinal sin, right? But as far as I could tell, these were bad products that all he did was explain why they were bad. I don’t really think that there’s any, I don’t think that the argument that he’s somehow responsible for their fate holds any water. So I agree with you, I was fascinated to see the reaction on the other side for that whole conversation and it made me think of like, is the assumption that you know, YouTubers or reviews in general are positive because that that shouldn’t be an assumption, right? There are reviews. I don’t think people, I’m going to say people, there are certainly individuals that do understand what a review is, but I think that the definition has shifted over time in a way that makes it hard to communicate. So we talked a little while ago on our podcast about the word scam and this was actually surrounding another market as controversy is a wallpaper app.
And people were referring to it as a scam and I went, well, it’s not a scam because a scam has to have an element of dishonesty to it. He told you what it was. He told you how much it costs. If you don’t like it, don’t fucking buy it. That’s not a scam. That’s not like miracle snake oil healing cream that doesn’t actually heal anything and actually gives you a rash. It’s just a thing that doesn’t have a value to you and therefore you could just not buy, right, which is totally fine. Now, if you want to have a conversation about how it’s out of touch or the quality is low or whatever these other things are, it’s fine. We can have that conversation, but don’t use the word scam. And I had people, especially it seems like younger people kind of coming back to me and saying, well, the meaning of the word scan is changed. It just means a really bad value now. I’m like, okay, but that’s a problem because a, that isn’t what it means. And b, yes, I understand. You want to talk about the evolving meanings of words and language and what a natural and valid thing that is.
But the problem is that when you allow this word to evolve in that way, you obscure the meaning of it and you end up painting with far too broad of a brush. The reason that words have specific meanings is so that we can communicate with clarity and so that the recipient can understand what we are saying.
[1:02:51–1:04:47]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: So if you say Marquez’s wallpaper app is a scam, that actually communicates to other people regardless of how you feel about having your Lucy, Lucy definition of it, it communicates a very different thing to other people. It’s a two way street. So the reason we have an agreed upon definition for words is so that everybody understands not so that just you do and just the people who use the same colloquialisms that you do can understand it. This comes back to this conversation around the the audience being the boss, right? Yeah. Cause like their reaction informs a lot of how you operate the business. I’m curious just when you’re thinking about the business now and growing or you thinking, how much are you thinking about like returning regular viewers and how much do you think about new viewers on a video to video basis and then also from a broader perspective. So coming back to the definition of review then, yeah, review means a lot of different things to a lot of different people and that has become extremely challenging.
So I will see often on a sponsored video that we upload on short circuit, for example, which I would define as more of a product showcase because anything that is sponsored and we do our due diligence when it comes to disclosures cannot by definition be a review because that video was reviewed by the brand whose entire reason for existing is to sell you that product, right? But you’ll see people going, oh yeah, the sponsored review is really great. That’s an oxymoron. We literally got a question. We asked people on Twitter on X is like what we should ask you and someone said ask him about how he feels about doing sponsored reviews. Yeah, there’s no such thing. There’s a sponsored video and that’s one thing and there’s a review which has to have editorial independence. But here’s the thing, even when you talk about the definition of an editorial independent review, you’re going to get a lot of different answers coming back to what you were saying about the earlier days of print media.
[1:04:47–1:06:47]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: They would consider even something as simple as sitting down for dinner with someone potentially conflicting, right? Whereas I would get into conversations with the written media guys back when they were invited to a new GPU briefing alongside me and everyone would have completely different lines. For some of them, they insisted on paying their own travel. For some of them, they insisted on they would allow Nvidia to pay the travel, but they would stay in their own hotel. Like everyone had completely different lines. And I basically was of the mind that like realistically, I’m here against my will if they would send me the card and just give me an online briefing. I’d rather do that. I’m most certainly not going to pay for the flight to be in convenience. So yeah, sure, I’ll take your flight. But if you imagine for a second that my integrity is for sale for a stupid plane ticket to somewhere I don’t even fucking want to go, then that’s ridiculous. Right. But that’s that’s my take. Yeah, not everybody agrees to someone else. I’m compromised immediately, right, especially the more old school guard.
So so this this inability to define review, I think has poisoned any possible broader conversation around who is and isn’t a reviewer. What is and isn’t a review? And what are their roles? So that’s where I think you get some of those conversations where people will be like, well, the review is supposed to be highlighting the positive. It absolutely isn’t. Yeah, there could be. It could be. That’s the review. Or it could not. Yeah, but you’ve got people’s you’ve got people’s perceptions so twisted now. But also it’s because the business is advertising and a lot of these products that you’re reviewing are potential advertising. Absolutely. And so yeah, and funny thing is you’ll see people go both ways with it. You’ll see people say, this is a really great sponsored review. I love this thing. I want one. And then you’ll see people saying like, oh, he said something positive must be an undisclosed paid partnership. Right.
[1:06:47–1:08:45]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: What actually that’s not the case at all? We don’t do undisclosed paid partnership. Yeah. And so yeah, it’s real difficult because no, there’s no consensus. And so just like the word scam has come to mean not a scam. It has come to mean bad value to some people, which really poisons our ability to communicate with each other clearly. The word review having no defined meaning anymore is extremely dangerous. Yeah, I agree with that. That’s a good point. It’s a very good point. You know, at one point, a lot of these creators emerged and then it was at first like, what is this? Then it became very aspirational to become a YouTube creator because everyone’s aware of what the outcome could be. If you do it right, sure, but it’s like the lottery that way, like I know I’m supposed to be like your channel is for aspiring creators, everything, but like it’s tough. It is tough. Yeah. Actually, I think it’s the lottery as much as just how long do you you want to do it for without getting paid or much validation? If you actually just enjoy it, don’t forget you have to pay for it. It’s exactly as long. Yeah, you pay into it. You spend your time on it. And someday maybe it will pay off. Yeah.
There’s a skill element. I’m like lottery. There’s a skill and you have to be able to call it like blackjack. I just think there’s a little bit more enjoyment in making videos and storytelling than there is in the lottery. But get that dopamine hit. But sure, yeah. Yeah. I think Marquez describes it as like NBA. It’s such a small amount of people who get to make it. Yeah. And you have to be so committed and you have to gain so much talent over so much time. And you have to be lucky. Yeah. I think anyone who says it’s a meritocracy is I mean narcissistic or arrogant or stupid. Like there’s it’s not pure talent. You also have to get lucky. I was in the right place at the right time. Yeah. And I retired and I was good enough at it.
[1:08:45–1:10:31]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: But that’s every on. And that’s every entrepreneur, I would say. That’s like entrepreneurship in general. Yeah. I think that’s fair. I just I reject the people who leave out the luck. So I wanted to ask you about how LMG makes money. Yeah. Because this is a graphic from 2020. Maybe I didn’t find it. But if there was a more updated version of this. Okay, this is 2020. Oh, wait, no, we did too. Is this the second one? Yeah. Okay. Then yeah, this is the most up to date one. So is this accurate of how LMG makes money today? No, we’re planning anyone. Okay. So if you did a breakdown of that, or maybe you, I guess you’ve already done it or are doing it. You even without percentages, if you could just give a break deck. I can give you like, I can give you a couple things anyway. So first of all, AdSense was 26% and merchandise was 15% then in 2020. Yeah. Merchandise is now six X. AdSense? Six times AdSense? Yeah. And I also have to six X. I also caught a peak at grad sense. So that’s insane. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Whoa, that’s a physical goods. Physical goods do not have the same margin as AdSense checks. Yeah. So you’re saying top line revenue is six X. AdSense.
Wow, that’s a big merchandise company. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I actually, I’ve been, I keep wanting to do this and I keep forgetting. I want to stop calling it merch. Yeah, it’s a brand. It’s not, it’s not merch. We make a apparel. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that consumer goods. We don’t, we don’t just slap our logo on things. Totally. That’s where we started. But I feel like we develop products from ground up engineer things, design things, bring them to market. I don’t think we’re a merch company anymore.
[1:10:31–1:12:32]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: Yeah. It’s a, it’s a very sizable company in some right. We’ve had so many conversations with creators who were like, yeah, I love your guys and stuff. Like, like, it can I be like, create a warehouse and we’re just like, something someday someday we’ve tried to do a couple of small collabs and our process is just it’s wild. Like, it’ll take us a year to bring a pair of pants to market. It took us, I think, three years or whatever it was to build the screwdriver because we really are just like doing things from scratch and we’re perfectionist about it. And we bet big. I can’t ask other people to bet big the way that in the way that we do to take on risk, the way that we do to basically book 10,000 units of something sight unseen. I hope they can sell it. You know, it’s not how most creators models works. And I think a lot of creators also have an expect, a margin expectation, of course, that is built on, you know, cheap goods, the lowest common denominator goods with a label silks screened on them. Wow. And, and they expect to make that kind of money. So, you know, we might have someone come to us and be like, okay, yeah, can you do our t-shirts? And I’ll be like, yeah, sure.
Are you ready to make half as much as you make on your current t-shirts? Because we can’t do it for nothing. And also our blanks, one, the project farm, um, merch t-shirt round up recently for just overall quality of blanks and printing. Um, there were some categories where we were a little behind, but there were some categories where we were way out ahead. And overall, we ranked number one. And it’s because that cost money. Uh, that’s amazing. I’m pretty taken aback by the size of that. But I also appreciate a lot what you’re saying too. Like, that’s, that’s the way to build a long lasting brand though. Because that has exponential returns over time. I hope so. Having like high quality product, that’s, yeah. So as long as we can figure out how to market it other than LTT videos, that’s something that, that we don’t have any experience with and we’re, we’re working on it.
[1:12:32–1:14:53]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: We’re trying to do better at just like, you know, creating short from video and like, paid feeds. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, wait, no, no, hold on. If no, people pay us for right now. Yeah. And, um, that was actually sponsor, uh, Mark has video. Yeah. Yeah. Um, a couple more recently to go in with Zach builds, um, I’m going to forget the rest of it. It doesn’t matter. Yeah. Point is up. That’s actually the title of our last podcast was like, look at me. I am the sponsor now. Oh, yeah. I saw that title. And we’re going to do more of that expect to see dozens of, um, LTTStore sponsorships on smaller spaces. Interesting for creators to become the sponsors. Yeah. Like, that’s cool. Right. Interesting. It’s so cool. And to support. We’ve done that with our newsletter a couple times. Yeah. To support that like next generation of, of like, in some cases, smaller creators, in some cases, like, we sponsored my KES. Yeah. And the screwdriver creators are size, you know, I don’t know. I think it’s cool. Oh, it’s awesome. Yeah. And you also know so much about what that means to do a brand integration and how it could be effective and where it can, yeah.
So, um, Amazon affiliate is not nearly as consequential these days. Other affiliates are more consequential. Flowplanes killing it. We have almost 41,000 paid subscribers on Flowplane for anywhere between $5 and $10 a month for people who don’t know what is Flowplane. Flowplane is essentially our own Patreon that we made. Amazing. Yeah. But it’s really focused on like behind the scenes. So that’s that’s huge for us knowing what I know. The number of times I’ve seen people talk about how much Flowplane is failed. Like, you do them there. Yeah. 41,000 times five bucks. You know, times 12 months a year. It’s still in fine. Yeah. Wow. I’d say sponsored projects and in video sponsor spots have probably switched spots. Really? Yeah. Sponsored projects. At this point in video sponsor spots was 27% of the revenue and sponsored projects was 14%. Yeah. So those have switched. We’ve found much better ways of working with our sponsors to be able to make the creative content that we want to do and integrate their products more naturally in a way that doesn’t really impact the flow of the video and the and the meaning of the video.
[1:14:53–1:16:50]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: How are you doing? What are some of those ways? Um, well, I think we’ve just developed more of of a hardline stance. You know, I think our business team is a lot more experienced now than they were back then. Uh, so they’ve learned that you can just walk away and everyone comes crawling back eventually. So if they have terms that we don’t find acceptable, they want us to like pretend that I use it every day when I don’t know, I’m not going to say something that’s not true, right? Um, so if we basically say, look, here’s the concept, we’re going to dump Coke on a computer and then we’re going to try and save it. Are you in or are you out? So you’re saying that’s like a full sponsored video that’s on LTT. Yeah, but it’s a concept that you would want to do. Yeah. And so that was fully sponsored with deep product integration by an origin PC. Their computer was built right into the whole thing. It’s their computer. We literally dumped Coke down it and then cleaned it and booted it back up. And we, we work in a little bit of more of a traditional read where we go, yeah, by the way, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, call it action or whatever. Yeah, call it action.
But that is the kind of thing that we’re doing more of now where we figure out what project do we want to do? We figure out a natural brand to integrate into it. We did one on cleaning an old water cooled system. Yeah. And we had an integration for, uh, for like sonic toothbrush. Yeah. And we used it to clean stuff. So it was great. But those trade at a higher value than the absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. That’s advantageous to both parties. I think everyone wins. Yeah, everyone wins there. I think that’s the direction of YouTube because, or it should be, because I actually think the short form ad integration works well in podcasting. But it’s a format that’s borrowed from the radio. Yes, someone’s like old school school school school school school. It’s a heavily visual video. It can be increasingly more difficult to then all of a sudden stop. Or if we’re like try and work that messaging. If you’re like traveling through Vietnam and then you like are back in your apartment, you’re like, let me tell you about Squarespace real quick. Yeah. And then you’re back to Vietnam. It’s kind of, it’s a bizarre. It’s a bizarre cut.
[1:16:50–1:18:59]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: But can I make an argument for that? Yeah, please. I like having a clear delineation. Yeah, that’s for the talking points and the content. Yeah. And so, you know, even when we do something like that spilling the Coke down the PC, well, yeah, but we have, you know, something that is clearly talking points and other than that, the PC is there. And it’s part of this content where we’re, you know, pouring Coke on it and then we’re cleaning it with vice or profile call and whatever the case may be. So we, we very intentionally have for years and years and years and years and years and years, made our sponsor spots very skippable. You know, like easily, sure, you know, left arrow or double tap. And we have resisted calls from sponsors to move our end rules at the very end of the video into the middle or move them toward the front, which has been the industry trend. And that’s because I just don’t want it. Got it. And now you have, and you also have the leverage now to say, no, we’ve always stuck by that. Got it. Just like, yeah, we do one at the beginning, a short one, we do one at the end, a long one. Yeah. And he’s been trying to convince me Colton’s out there.
He’s been trying to convince me to change it up. And I told him he can experiment with a couple, but I’m like, I’m pretty set. Yeah. And is that consistent across all channels? No, some of the channels do more of a mid read, um, but on LTT, which is the bread and butter of business. Um, that’s the way we do it. And LTT, in terms of viewership, you’re sitting at like 70, million views a month, 70 to 80, yeah, 70, 80 million views a month. And that’s primarily long form. Not a lot of that is on short form. From what I checked, it’s like under 10% of that is short form. I don’t know that number off the top of my head, but that’s a long form of long form viewership as well. That’s our, that’s our business. Right. That’s the business. Yes. We came from long form. I can make a short. I’ve even had a couple that have done really well. Yeah. But it’s not my, yeah, I’m not short native. Sure. You know, and across the channels, is it, is it like, are you talking about around 100 million views a month across LMG or do you think something like that?
[1:18:59–1:21:17]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: Maybe a little less these days. Yeah. But something along those lines. That’s an amazing amount of audience, right? Like, obviously, like the largest attention advertising market in the world is the Super Bowl. That’s around 100, a little over 100 million views. Like, that’s like a Super Bowl a month. Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny. We’ve used that line. You have. But I think 100 million people relate to that because that’s like in the world of advertising, you can benchmark again around like, that’s a Super Bowl. It’s a funny thing too, because we are, we’re kind of like the biggest channel that kind of, I feel like state under everyone’s radar for years and years. Like, we didn’t have a YouTube rep until like long after we probably should have in terms of our overall, our overall viewership numbers. We are small by some metrics. Like our average viewership for per video is pretty low compared to some really big guys in the tech space even. Yeah. Like Marquez is back back to him since we’re talking about a lot. His average views for videos much higher.
So you could kind of look at that and you could go, okay, yeah, that engaged audience is actually substantially larger from moment to moment. But in terms of who’s driving the actual views in long form, I’d say it’s us. And then I don’t have the breakdown for Arun, Mrwhosetheboss? Yeah. But he’s a major player there as well. Yeah. But we’ve just done it through just like sheer volume, sheer scale. And it is always interesting for me to see because the metric that I actually use more than anything else to determine sort of like, remember like celebrity stocks? Kind of. Yeah, where they like had their stocks would go up and down based on like doing a good interview or like whatever. It was just like, you could kind of, it was like a crypto thing. Play money. No, it was just like, play money. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the, one of my favorite ways to gauge YouTuber stocks is actually not by the performance on their own channels, but by their performance on other channels. So you can bet that I’m going to be creeping the analytics on this video going like, okay, where am I at? Yeah, where, how do their interviews usually like track and like, where, where am I?
Because the thing about tech and especially us where we do such variety, like we’re not always doing smartphones. We’re not always doing gadgets.
[1:21:17–1:23:21]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: We’re doing everything from like, okay, we’re touring a data center today. We’re looking at a factory today. We’re looking at like this CPU today. We’re building a Facebook marketplace home theater in my family room tomorrow. Like it’s, but we’re all over the place, right? So when push comes to shove, like, what’s the, what’s the brand recognition when we’re on another channel? I always find that fascinating because we don’t have the kind of viewership that’ll watch every video. We have a viewership that tunes in here and here and here and here. Interesting. So how big is the audience is actually a really difficult thing for me to measure that’s the only reliable one I have. It’s a fine. We’ve only been on interview to a few times and I have a hundred percent on the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. And at times, it’s been like, whoa, that’s amazing. And at other times being like, oh, my boy. I really go both ways, man. That’s really funny. In this context of like the audience being your boss and being the, the arbiter, I guess, so impossible to please boss. Yes. Very impossible to please. But how much do you think about returning viewers and how much do you think about gaining new audience?
Um, I am old school. I am really focused on the you in YouTube. Yeah. Right. And that’s me in this case. Interesting. And so what I’m looking for is like-minded people who share my interest and who think the same things that I think are cool are cool. And if they watch our videos all the time, then that’s chill. And if they don’t watch our videos all the time and they’re fly by, then that’s chill. On a video by video basis, I think that we will target things like a more tech savvy person who we might group into returning viewers. Right. Or we might target someone who is more of a of a fly by. They need to build a computer one time and we’re making a resource for them. So we might go over in more detail. Some of the things the regular viewers really don’t need to hear. Um, but I don’t think in terms of the new viewer, regular viewer buckets. And I probably should do a better job of that. Got it. Interesting.
[1:23:21–1:25:39]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: And do you think about that in when you started to expand to multiple channels? Absolutely. The channels definitely had a viewer that they were interested in. Yeah. But all of them need both new viewers and return. Of course. Yeah. But it was just sort of what we wanted them to be. When did you go from one channel to more channels? Very early after we, after we started the company really tech quicky originally started as a repository. I thought that our path to growth was actually going to be doing paid productions like like making commercials. Oh, really? And I was like, okay, our special sauce is twofold. One, you don’t have to explain the product to us, which is great because you’re a marketing agency and you probably don’t understand it anyway. Number two is we’re going to build up this channel where we’re going to publish the ads and they’re going to get like a bunch of views there. And it’s going to be basically free real estate, you know? And so some of the earliest uploads on Techquickie, they’re gone or they’re they’re unlisted now, but some of the earliest uploads there are actually just like ads for like a data and Coursera and Samsung just like random brands.
And we did have some weird stuff. We did this one where like a ninja brace into the house, it’s a native ad agency or production company, right? Exactly. It’s kind of the content. Yeah. And, um, and then I was like, okay, but no one’s going to subscribe to a channel that’s just ads. What did I know about what was coming? I mean, there’s channels these days that I’m basically every video is like fully sponsored, whatever, but I thought that was crazy. Um, so I’m like, no one’s going to subscribe to a channel that’s just ads. Let’s create a format that will drive subscriptions here and we’ll try to build it up because lots of people had secondary channels. So we came up with the fastest possible format and for Techquickie and just like quick explainers of basic concepts that realistically, the LTT audience had probably outgrown. Interesting. And do you have, because now how many channels do you have under LMG? It’s complicated. So we have, I think it’s like eight or something, but a handful are pretty much high eightist right now. So the ones we are actively uploading to our LTT, LMG Clips, tech linked ShortCircuit, ShortCircuit. Yes. I’m just going to game length.
[1:25:39–1:27:58]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: Not game length. Game length is high eightist right now. Yeah. That’s it. So we have, we have contracted a little bit to help streamline and focus right now. Do you have laws for launching a new channel? No, that’s lawless. We just have institutional like experience. We have people who have done it before and every time it’s kind of a cluster and we do our best. Do you have like a certain amount? Like how do you evaluate a new channel? We usually announce it on the main channel to kind of give it a kick in the ass and then, you know, beyond that, we’re basically just looking at like business operations, right? Like how much management overhead of, is this in terms of like IT equipment, HR? How much revenue is it driving? How, how much, you know, strife or conflict within the organization? Is it creating, you know, what’s the sustainability of this from just like a business standpoint? Got it. When you say that some of those channels are on hiatus to streamline and focus, what’s funny is like if you go to your Reddit with the hiatus channels, it is just like, people are going nuts.
Yeah, about like what happened there and like it almost feels like you could go down five different paths on the Reddit of like what happened and it’s like, and Linus conspiracy? None of them are right. Okay. I can tell you that with 100% candidness, none of them are accurate. And the cold hard truth is just like the controversy that we had last August, I cannot give you the answer. And I think that it’s really hard for people to hear that, especially because we’ve made such efforts to maintain our transparency over the years. I think it’s really challenging for people to hear that the cold simple truth is that I cannot give you the answer because there are a privacy laws that protect both our current and former employees that would restrict my ability to tell you anything about the details of whether they quit, relate off or were fired, right? Those are all three very different things, right? But no matter which one of them it is, I can’t tell you the circumstances. I can’t even tell you which one it is.
[1:27:58–1:29:52]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: I can’t give you names. I can’t give you anything. And that’s right. That’s a good thing. That’s that’s good. Nobody should get any kind of unwanted attention. Imagine for a second, right? We’re in your exit interview. And whatever the circumstances are, you handed in your resignation, you relate off because of lack of work or you were fired for negligence, whatever. It doesn’t matter. If I were to tell you, hey, we’re going to talk about the the circumstances of your departure on our podcast. And I’m good. Yes. Right. No, that sounds crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I’m, yeah, it doesn’t even matter if you’re willing to sign the piece of paper, sign the release. I’m a fucking asshole for asking. Yeah. Yeah. But that’s something that I think that the audience doesn’t understand. We’re not, you know, a sports team. We’re not, whatever. Yeah. We’re not. That’s a good, that’s a good note there. You’re not a sports team. Yeah.
And, and, and I think it was on our, our pre-brief for this where I basically went, I think part of the expectation of this, this information that people want is like part of the parasocial relationship, where they feel like because they’re engaged with us and with these personalities and these people in this brand, right? And, and with me personally, they feel entitled to know, but the reality of it is like, that’s pillow talk. You’re not entitled to pillow talk. You know, you’re a viewer. Yeah. And, and I’m so appreciative. And I live to serve you, you are my boss, but you are not entitled to know someone’s personal business about why they don’t work at their employer anymore. It’s not okay. Yeah. Period. Yeah. No, I, I mean, when you, when you ask that question, I think that feels like a really good way to contextualize.
[1:29:52–1:32:15]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: It’s gone. Yeah. Yeah. Why it would be ridiculous to share. And you know what? I understand where the expectation comes from because we used to do like a goodbye episode on the podcast for people. Sure. But the problem is that if you do that, and you do that for everyone, except one, well, then you’re basically you’re fueling the speculation. You’re answering the question of what happened without even answering it. Yeah. And there’s a liability there. And there’s, and there’s like an ethical responsibility to not do that. So yeah, we’ve changed our policy. And that’s how it’s going to be. And, you know what, there is no one literally, I promise you, there is no single person on earth who is more frustrated by it than me. I personally thought you guys handled that pretty well. We tried our best. Yeah. I actually thought you did. And granted, I’m not as engaged in, I wasn’t as engaged in the controversy. I wasn’t familiar with it until you were putting stuff out and you watched my deserve to downfall. You’re what my deserve to down. Is there a video that title? Yeah. I didn’t watch it. That sounds like that’s a ton of this video. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good. We name ours to do. Continue.
I haven’t fallen for a long time. But what, what did you learn about that experience last August? Like, what did you learn about the process of running a company like yours in the public eye about, I learned that you can’t win and you just have to be okay with it. Because imagine two scenarios, right? So imagine the scenario where everything that was said about me was 100% true. So we’re going to take a spectrum here. Everything that was said about me was 100% true. If I come out and I say anything, it’s 100% true and I’m terrible. Okay. Let’s go the other way. Let’s imagine that absolutely none of it is true. And it’s all complete horseshit, right? If I come out and push back hard, I’m a bully. And you might not think that’s right. And you might think that that like sucks and is stupid, but that’s the truth. That’s what every PR professional we talk to, that’s what every lawyer we talk to was ultimately saying is like, look, it doesn’t matter how good your case is. It doesn’t matter if it is tight bulletproof. You litigate any of this. You come out, you push back hard. You do fucking anything. You’re a jackass. You’re a powerful business person.
[1:32:15–1:34:24]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: And whether it’s, you know, some, whether it’s some YouTube channel that said something libelous or whether it’s an employee or whether it’s whatever it doesn’t matter because at the end of the day, I’m the bad guy. I’m the bully. And I should have just, I should have just taken it because if I try to silence them, I’m taking away their voice, right? And it’s like, okay. Now, like anything, the truth is somewhere on the spectrum. Yeah, it was new. I’m not going to tell you where because then I would be disclosing things that are not going to disclose. But what I’m doing is I’m laying out the spectrum and I’m going, okay, over here, I’m a bad guy. And over here, I’m a bad guy. And at the end of the day, I can never reach the full audience that heard the other side of the story anyway. So I just had to figure out and figure out how to live with that my reputation is irreparably tarnished. And there’s absolutely nothing I can do. And there’s nothing I could have said that would have changed it. But there are changes that you made internally after that.
But I think what a lot of people are missing about any changes that we’ve made since then is that the vast majority of them were in progress. I have seen the narrative that it was because of that. They hired these people and they did this and they did that. And it’s like, well, the CEO, the leadership changes that were happening at the company had literally, we’ve been in talks with them for an extended period of time. Yeah, it’s not a quick hire. Yeah, it’s not a quick hire. And he had already started at the job four months before anything happened. He had like the wildest like first quarter of the way then. But he made that video and I watched that video. I thought about that because that was within six months, right? That was when six months before he there. I was like, whoa, welcome to YouTube. What did I sign up for, man? You can see it in his eye. You can see it in that. I know he’s looking at the camera. He’s like, just CEO that’s having to address millions of people. Yeah. Yeah, that’s fascinating entry to that job. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you can either you can either take the heater. You got to get out of the kitchen and you can take the heat. I guess he’s still here.
[1:34:24–1:36:35]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: So one of the changes that I read about was you being, you didn’t watch the video, all the videos before they went out at that time. Is that right? No, you didn’t. I didn’t. Now you do. So it’s a funny thing because this is another like damned if you do damned if you don’t, right? Because half of the narrative was that I’m careless and sloppy and you know, I don’t care about the product. And it’s just like, yeah, quantity over quality. And then the other half of the narrative was that I’m like a control freak and overbearing. And I operate this oppressive workplace. And it’s like, well, which one is it? Either I am like a micromanager and I’m like doing everything myself or I am loosey-goosey and I don’t care. I can’t be both. It’s kind of like, and I’m not going to name any names, but it’s kind of like when you see like political discourse where one day they’re talking about how inept this person is. And then the next day it’s a conspiracy theory about how they’re like trolling everything with their puppet master strings. Like, well, these two things are actually mutually exclusive. They can’t be.
But in the context of being like overly like involved or like micromanaging and being loosey-goosey, that can be a fault. That can happen in the context of two different departments or two different like making videos and, you know, I don’t know, team management. I don’t know what I do is make videos. The only time that I. Okay. So you’re only involved in the video pretty much. And like I definitely, especially when I was still CEO and I’m still like primary shareholder, like I guess I dabble in everything. But the day to day for me is making videos. And so basically, you know, what I what I kind of realized was that, you know, right away, I was just going to have to to embrace more. I was going to have to take the reins back tighter because yeah, I had I had loosened them up in a big way. And I was just kind of like, okay, let’s, you know, go for it, you know, yeah, get it right, do it right. And you know, massive credit to our team, like what we do is not easy. And I think this is something that a lot of people sort of struggle with. It’s like, I’m not the one driving this hamster wheel. It’s algorithmic. It’s audience driven.
[1:36:35–1:38:35]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: I am sitting there on the front lines, like telling the troops. We need to charge. And yeah, this is the way we need to do it. And here’s the battle strategy. But at the end of the day, they are only employed as long as we are uploading videos that are getting views. It’s that simple, right, right? And and so, you know, I, I don’t want it. So they work hard. And we have a world class team. I use the world world class to describe our team all the time. And it really is apt. Like we are competing at the top of the game. And we do so as a team. But there were obviously areas where I needed to oversee more. And I do think that I’m not right about every call. In fact, we were having this conversation on the walk here, where Colt was talking about how frustrating it can be to deal with me and Yvonne sometimes, because realistically, between the two of us were probably right, 95 to 98% of the time when it comes to something, because we’ve seen it before. We’ve just seen everything at this point. And what can be really frustrating is those like one to five percent of the time when we really are wrong. And like getting that across.
And and and I value so much the team’s willingness to kind of go to battle against me and push back when I’m wrong about something, because it totally does happen. But in the case of like the final review on the videos, I just had to kind of come in and go, Okay, yeah, I’m just going to have to like make a bunch of calls here. Yeah. And I’m going to have to go back to doing that and making sure that the quality of the contents tighter. And it’s still not perfect. Nothing is ever perfect, but it has been better. What I find to be difficult when working with team on videos and edits is sometimes it’s not even there is a right or a wrong. Oh, 100%. It’s just that’s what I like. Yeah. That’s just doesn’t even matter if that’s right. I think it’s funny.
[1:38:35–1:40:18]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: You know, and it’s stuff to communicate that sometimes that like what you’re doing is not necessarily wrong in the way that you like to do it is right for you. I mean, none of that stuff was the problem. When stuff was wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there are still creative decisions that I’ll jump into or things where I believe that there is objectively a correct creative answer. Yeah. Um, like for instance, when we have a list of three things, I want three rapid fire cuts to those three things, not sort of an illustrative one of them that overlays over all of them. So there are, there are definitely, you know, areas where I am, I’ve, I’ve jumped in and given a lot of feedback. But what I will say is again credit to the team, their world class, I provide so much less feedback on videos today compared to when I first started using this framework flow to like annotate the videos. Um, yeah, I have an image of a doc here. Sure. This doc at the top here, is that like a, is that kind of like laying out the rules of, Oh, where’d you get this? Don’t worry about it, man. Did I send this to you? No. Oh, okay. Yeah.
No, this is, um, this is part of taking that annotation process that I was doing and turning it into processes that can be part of training resources so that we won’t run into the same things again. Yeah. So can you describe what’s what you’re training? Yeah. So I wrote this because we had this visual that popped up in the lower third of a video that was basically just like a wall of text. And I basically went look, a visual conserved one of three purposes. It can be reinforcing.
[1:40:18–1:42:23]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: So the viewer should process something from it while they’re also listening. It can be supplemental. So it’s there so that if they really wanted to, they could like pause the video and look at it or they could come back and look at it later or it can be entertaining. So that would be something that doesn’t add to the information at all. A funny character or whatever that pops in this just like, Hey, don’t forget, you’re still watching a video. Just stop doing whatever it is you’re doing on your main monitor for a second. This is important, right? One of those three purposes. And I kind of went, this is none of them. This is a dense wall of text that adds very little to what the host is saying. Nothing is highlighted, which makes it impossible to parse the important information and the time that I have to look at it. And it also isn’t entertaining. So it’s not number three and it just lingers there forever. This is, this is not good. And I called this one visual intent. So figuring out what the intent of our visuals are. And so yeah, there’s, there’s a bunch of stuff like this going on a dock like that.
Yeah, I loved looking at this because I think that’s been one of our biggest challenges is communicating some of this stuff into like frameworks for our own team. And that can be really frustrating as a team member. Part of the problem, guys, is that like, I don’t have formal training. Yeah. So where was I supposed to learn how to train this? This is just something that I intuited from doing this for 17 years or however long it’s been. And, and I’m not trying to make excuses. Like, yeah, I should have built training docs and like built processes like obviously like any function on freaking company, right? Yeah. But sometimes it’s not obvious to me what’s not obvious. And so it, it can take going through with a fine tooth comb and going like, Oh, this was clearly not obvious to everybody. Like one of the things that I run into all the time is, hey, if you don’t get a joke or if something doesn’t make sense to you, say something because a lot of the time you’ll get people just going through their daily work. And they kind of go, yeah, I don’t get it, but it’s probably some techno jargon thing that I wouldn’t understand anyway.
[1:42:23–1:44:19]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: I’m like, yo, that didn’t make any sense. That didn’t make any sense to anybody. And it makes it all the way through because people don’t know what they don’t know. And so it can be a problem at both levels. I don’t know what I don’t know. So I don’t explain myself clearly. And they don’t know what they don’t know. So they don’t realize that they actually did know it often. It was just, jar, it was babble. It was gobbledygook. It was nothing. It didn’t make any sense. I think to take away from me is how important it is to come up with that vocab, right? Whether it is like the word scam or review, the same thing applies to like your internal decisions that you make based on taste and communicating. This is called visual intent. Okay. Now we have a language to talk about. And that’s the easiest way for me to identify commenters or people on Reddit who have never worked in a mid-sized or large team. Right. Where they’re just like, this shouldn’t happen. This should be impossible. I’m like, bro, you ever played telephone? It can totally happen.
And it can even happen with everybody being competent in good faith, working towards a common goal, which let’s face it, having all three of those things from every member of a team, five days a week, 40 hours a day, ain’t happening. Yeah. I will say even for us with this podcast, we’ll do quality control watches. And I will do some of them. And then someone else will do it. And they’ll find things that I missed. And I’m like, yeah, okay. I I swear I watched that whole thing, but I missed that moment. Yeah. Yeah. I know have your experienced and competent. And you certainly have a vested interest. You care. Yeah. Totally. But we’re all human. We’re all human at the end of the day. So it’s always just, it’s comical to me to see the way that people will kind of spin these narratives that this could have only happened from malice, but I’m a firm believer in how man I forget whose law it is.
[1:44:19–1:46:19]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: But it’s like never attribute to malice, but can be adequately explained by stupidity because this was another conversation we were having on the way over here, which is like, I was basically like, yeah, I don’t know, people are kind of kind of idiots and colt and quips to me. He’s like, yeah, except you, right? I’m like, yeah, non-min idiot. Like, it turns out I’m also people like, we’re all just like, yeah, we’re kind of bumbling around and we’re like, we’re doing our best and humans are, we’re messy and we’re careless. And we have bad days and, and we have hormonal imbalances and we have all of these things, right? The fact that the fact that humanity accomplishes anything is sort of a miracle, right? And so it’s, it’s with all of that in mind that I, I try to kind of, I try to kind of see the best and I try to kind of assume the best, but I think there’s a lot of folks that don’t really see it that way. They kind of expect perfection. I’m like, okay, well, so there’s about 90 people who work at Linus Media Group. Somewhere between 90 and 105, I don’t remember somewhere between 90 and 100.
We have a buried a little, we have a disagreement that I think that’s a big company you think it’s not a big company. Well, it comes back to the definition of words. Right. According to the definition of a small company, we are a small company anywhere from like, I think it’s like one to a hundred. It’s kind of like a small company. So we’re a small to like borderline mid-sized company. Benchmarked against our company. Sure. Context between on the, I would say the average YouTube channel company, we had a base lot more larger company challenges than I would say the average YouTube company. The average YouTube company went for. Yes. Not everyone works for the same company. Creator Warehouse has like two dozen people and work at it. Got it. That is a, for all intents and purposes, they are in a different building. They do different stuff. Can you work very closely without the companies and just how? Half a dozen people in accounting and admin.
[1:46:19–1:48:16]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: Okay. We’ve got about half a dozen people on the business team. We’ve got a couple people in HR. We’ve got maybe more than half a dozen of the business team because there’s like marketing guy and like Dennis does like the creative sponsor reads. So it’s like, it’s all pretty small teams. The writing team I already said is like eight or something like that. Logistics is three. The lab is about another dozen, I think Floatplane is about a half a dozen. Then we have some developers that are not Floatplane. Creator Warehouse is a couple dozen. And that includes its own sub departments like they have customer service engineering, design, fashion, and then they have some administrative people too. Some of them are contractors. Am I missing? I’m like, I’m doing a, I’m doing a walk through the building right now to try to make sure that I catch everybody. Yes, my tea, folks, a handful of them. And I’m so sorry to whoever I probably missed. I’m deeply sorry, but it’s been a long day. And you are the chief vision officer of the whole media. Is that correct? I don’t like the word visionary, but vision sure. Oh, chief vision officer. You’re not the chief visionary.
I would hardly call myself a visionary. I run it. I run a YouTube channel and a screwdriver. Let’s get real here. I’m not changing the world. So what is what is the day to day of a chief vision officer? Basically, because I’m in multiple roles, I take on sort of an editor-in-chief role for Linus Tech Tips. I am an onscreen talent. I try to set the stage or like set the direction for the rest of the executive team. At the end of the day, you know, if I am not willing to stand on the stage at our expo, we’re not doing it.
[1:48:16–1:49:58]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: Right. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We have to have, we have to have alignment with sort of, you know, what I think is a reasonable direction. The reality is I’ve been doing this longer than anyone else. So, you know, I can extrapolate the trend line from more data, you know, in terms of where we’re headed. But mostly I just do my job. I review scripts. I host videos. Got it. I attend exec meeting. Maybe one out of every three. What do you think? Yeah, probably about a third of the exec meetings. They’ll come up with the stuff like if a huge budgetary thing needs to be approved. They’ll bring in me and Yvonne and make sure that as the shareholders, we’re on board with it. You know, we’ll have conversations about like if we were going to, if we were going to expand into new products category, what would it be? I want to do cables. I believe very firmly that cables are a super broken space right now. I would love you. You don’t know how many, you don’t know how many watts it does. You don’t know what data speed it does. The quality of the average cable that you buy on Amazon because they’ve eroded the margins when they’re sellers so much with their exorbitant fees.
Like I think the cable space is ready for a direct to consumer that’s going to be something that’s going on. That’s the kind of stuff that I’ll do. I do search meeting where I’ll go through and I’ll look at progress for all of our products and I’ll pitch and people will pitch to me and we’ll kind of talk through it. Do you have an appetite for more scale? Like in the beginning, was it your appetite for hiring more people and building it bigger? It was more just like, I don’t know. I feel like it just happens. Why do you hire someone? I guess we haven’t in a while, but it’s just typically when we just get more projects.
[1:49:58–1:52:07]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: When we say yes to more things than we can handle. Or when we get excited about something that we don’t currently have. Or you need skills that you don’t personally possess. I don’t know a ton about material science. I know a little bit. I took high school chemistry, but when we were looking at how do we improve the materials and quality of our merchandise? We’re like, yeah, we should probably hire someone with a background in this. I get very scared of building a team so big, at least again, for my context and my relative scale, building a team of that size of 90 people. I feel like I wouldn’t know how to do that. There’s days that I wish it was smaller. Not because I don’t like and enjoy working with all those people, but because I miss having a personal relationship with every single person of the company. Once you get past, I’d say probably about 25 to 35. It’s not feasible anymore. You can’t be close with dozens and dozens of people. It doesn’t work that way. We’re not wired that way. I miss it. It’s frustrating as someone who does care about putting out a quality product, whether it’s a video or whether it’s physical goods.
Not being able to have my finger on every single pulse can feel helpless and drift sometimes. You have to trust people and sometimes they’re going to do a great job and sometimes they’re going to completely fuck it up. You’ve got to be ready to roll with those punches and make changes and accept that you. What’s that prayer? Give me the knowledge to something and the wisdom to accept what I can’t change. The knowledge to whatever. I’m going to look it up. Grant me the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know one from the other.
[1:52:07–1:53:48]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: That is really good. Our words to live by. I like that a lot. Not the first time I’ve heard it. Yeah, but good, but I didn’t make it up. Literally, the serenity prayer. I don’t even know where it came from. It’s a history of Protestant theology and Reinhold me. What’s the experience of having a CEO? That must feel new and different. Having a leadership team that you’re pulled into meetings and is that fun for you that you’re like, oh great, I get to just... There’s been a learning curve both ways, I think. It’s a team dynamic as opposed to he’s my boss or I’m his boss because technically he’s my boss and I’m also his boss. There’s multiple dynamics at play. I’m a firm believer in reaching consensus. I think that whether you are higher or lower on a company or chart, if you don’t have a consensus, if you don’t all agree with the direction that you’re marching in, ultimately you’re going to have deserves. You’re going to have people that are breaking ranks and it’s not going to be healthy one way or the other. You’ve got to sell your ideas, whether you’re selling them up or whether you’re selling them down the chain.
I think that basically the biggest benefit for me has been to have someone taking care of the administrative thing. Someone running skip level lunches, making sure that individual contributors are getting a chance to meet with their boss’s boss’s boss and express their concerns. One of the things he coordinated when he came in was a management training seminar for all of our managers and supervisors.
[1:53:48–1:55:57]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: We did four sessions with homework and stuff and we did role playing and stuff like that. It’s not that I would have wanted to do something like that. I was on camera. I was on camera. What am I? I just had too many things on my plate. We had a part-time company leader because I was on camera. Some of the stuff last August had to do with the workplace. Those changes, have you made changes in that direction or how do you feel about what that means, like the workplace and coming to work at LTT or at LMG? I don’t know if I’m going to be able to answer that question without addressing the claims, which I won’t be doing. We released our statement. What I’ll do is I’ll paraphrase. After the third party investigation, the claims were found to be unsubstantiated and unfair. Got it. I think that unsubstantiated says a lot and I think that unfair says a lot more. Yeah. So, fine. I’ll answer your question. Has anything functionally changed other than tightening up our processes and expanding our leadership team, which we were already working on? No. Yeah. I’m sure some things are different. Absolutely. You’re always evolving. You’re always changing. But at the end of the day, no.
And a lot of the changes that we were being criticized for were things that had already changed anyway. One of the criticisms was that my wife and CFO was handling HR things and it’s like, okay, well, A, that wasn’t the case by the time the controversy blew up. We already had a dedicated in-house HR person and for years prior had had outside HR, like an outside HR contractor. And for two, it’s like, well, who the fuck else are they supposed to talk to? Like at the end of the day, when something gets escalated, who do you think ends up dealing with it? The last stop within the company is the owner.
[1:55:57–1:58:19]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: And if it can’t be resolved there, in the province of British Columbia, we have our human rights tribunal, we have work safe BC, we have a lawyer. Like if you have a problem, you have lots of avenues. And so why wouldn’t you talk to the owner? Sure. If you have a serious problem, if the problem is with the owner, then I guess it’s an issue, but I can tell you scouts on or I will swear on my dead mother, my mom’s alive. Okay. But the point is I will swear on anything you ask that Yvonne has not created an HR problem. Sure. So she is a very valid person to talk to. I can also understand that people who are less comfortable in some confrontational settings or even just non confrontational, uncomfortable conversations. Absolutely. Would be challenged to talk to the owner. And that is exactly why for years prior to the controversy, we had had HR resources. So that people have someone to talk to. That was really important to us. But that wasn’t new. Yeah. Wasn’t new. Yeah.
A lot of the stuff is so interesting because it’s like being a creative, making great videos, making videos for the audience, like that occupies more than when you’re talking about like RAM in the beginning of the show. Yeah. That occupies more than 100%. Yeah. It can. So to open up space, it’s just sometimes you don’t even have the learning or the understanding of at least I’m speaking for myself here of like, what is building a company look like? That’s not actually my craft. My craft is making videos. Yeah. So to then adopt the craft of building a company is just a whole other thing. I think we’re seeing. I think the best thing we can do is do a better job of like, and this is sort of separate now, but like I’m just thinking about it, communicating our own vision more frequently. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So people, who was it? Scott Bell, Scott Bell Steve from Adobe said something amazing. He said like, leading a creative team sometimes is like, you’re in the driver’s seat and all the windows are blacked out. Yeah. And the teams in the back seat. Yeah. Right. They have no idea. And they’ve made any progress.
What you have to do is make sure that you’re communicating to them and telling them, hey, this is what I’m looking at. This is where we’re going. Yeah. No, that’s that’s so apt. And that’s why it always comes back to communication.
[1:58:19–2:01:18]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: Yeah. And it’s really hard, especially when you don’t have time, because you’re literally on camera. So to bring it all the way back to your question, that side, say the biggest thing that has changed from having an actual dedicated person in a leadership position. It also creates yet another layer between ownership and the individual contributors for them to go to for a conflict resolution, which again is something that’s really important to us. A lot of the, a lot of the creators we spoke into on this show, they kind of fit into two camps. It’s either I’m going to do this for the rest of my life until I’m 85 years old. Yeah. Or I got a line of sight on on when at least I’m off camera or how I’m going to move on to the next thing. Sure. And they may not say that on camera that they’ve got like, they’re moving on. But what, what camp do you lie in it? You’ve been in this for a while. Thanks. You’re closing it on two decades. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I don’t know, sometimes it varies from day to day, hour to hour. I mean, I made that video I’m thinking of retiring years ago now. Yeah. Not that changed. That’s as true today. I can’t even watch that video because it’s like, it’s too real.
It’s like, none of it’s changed, not a, not a word of it. And so it’s one of those things that I just kind of look at and I go like, I mean, I’ll even have people internally ask me, like, what, what are you even doing? Like, why are you even doing this? Like, literally people who see the numbers, they know they’re like, why do you bother? And I’m just like, meaning the company is doing well enough without, oh, yeah, the rumors of like my mismanagement and being a terrible businessman or whatever are greatly exaggerated. Um, I, they’re just like, why do you, why do you still do this? And I don’t know, there’s like, there’s always, there’s always something. There’s always like a new hill to climb, um, you know, and it’s exciting for me. We had, um, someone on our, on our Creator Warehouse team is welcoming a child and just moved into a new house with their salary that they make from Creator Warehouse. How fucking cool is that? Yeah. Like, literally we went from nothing couldn’t get a credit card. I couldn’t get a credit card issued in my company’s name for like two years. Even though we had revenue, we had profits, we had growth. It didn’t matter. We were nothing. We were nobody.
We didn’t exist as a, as an industry. Um, cause, you know, this is 12 years ago or whatever, right? 10 years ago, um, to like, people treat this like an actual company that you can go to today and then you can leave at the end of the day and you can assume that tomorrow morning, the building will still be there and likely still be on. I have to say that I don’t know if people and sometimes I feel like my dad, cause he was a business owner, but sometimes I come home and think I’m like, do people understand how hard that is? That sounds like so dad lied to be like, we have fact that the lights are still on the next day and everyone gets their paycheck.
[2:01:18–2:03:23]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: We have never been laid on payroll, not once. I mean, say it, but that, and that’s like, I feel like a lot of people take that for granted. Of course. That is a huge deal. Yeah. Like, that is, that is, it’s such a, it’s such a foundational thing to us as, as owners and as, as business people that we are, we are providing that predictability. I don’t have that predictability, right? Like if I, if I hit my head or something, yeah, I don’t, I don’t get anything. I just, I just lose, I lose everything. I just lose my ability to make an income. I don’t, I don’t have a safety net. Right. I just have to get in there and do it, right? That’s the only option. And, and the ability to provide that to people is, is a point of pride. Yeah. And I think a lot of people don’t really understand that or they don’t relate to that. To answer your question. Yeah. Why do I keep doing it? I think the team is a huge part of it. I’m, I’m, it’s so we, we have, okay, this is pretty cool. We have our Christmas party. Is it this week called? Yeah. We have our Christmas party this week. Christmas party is a really big deal to me because our very first year, we had like an all hands meal where we like splurged.
We got like, we got like fried rice with truffle in it or something. It was a CES and Las Vegas. And, it was really exciting because like the show had gone pretty well at that point. And the first night we arrived, we didn’t, nothing but cheap chicken nuggets because that was, that was all we should afford. And so we, we remembered that one meal that we had that one splurged meal and we made it an annual thing. And that turned into our company Christmas party, our company Christmas party is very important to me. Um, because it’s, it’s the time when we get to talk about, we get to kind of celebrate the growth and take a second to just not make videos. You guys made a lot more videos. And just have fun, you know, and, um, and this year at the Christmas party, I’ve wanted this for a long time. We are going to have a Santa Claus.
[2:03:23–2:05:11]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: Oh, fun. Yeah, we’re going to have Santa because we finally have enough kids. Wow, that’s cool to have a Santa Claus. That’s cool. Yeah. So when we started the company, I was the only one with kids. And for years and years and years, I was the only one, but we’re going to have like a veritable gaggle. So one of the people on the party playing angle, committee, um, we’ve got like, wow, we haven’t got presents for everybody for all the kids. I was like rousing it in the warehouse the other day. And we’re going to have like an actual Santa. We’re going to do like Santa and Christmas presents. That’s so cool. So that’s amazing. I’m stoked, dude. I’m actually excited. That’s so cool. Yeah. That’s something that I feel like, um, a, a few creators, YouTube creators can actually probably share with you. Yeah. Yeah. We got a Santa at our Christmas party. Let’s go. Let’s go. I’m not like, like, just because I’m not like Elsa. Like caught out. I just get like a cool badge of honor. Yeah. Like you started when you started and you’re still doing and you’ve built a company that can now support other people. Yeah.
How many, how many YouTube creators really have been around for multiple generations? It’s cool. I’d say another big reason is that like my work isn’t done. People aren’t informed in their tech decisions yet. There’s lots more for people to learn. There’s always, you know, newcomers getting into the hobby. That’s never ending. Yeah. It’s, it’s never ending. There’s always something fresh. There’s always some new scandal. There’s always some new bad value for people to watch out for. Um, and then I think the last one is like, I don’t even know who I am without being a YouTuber anymore. Like this one, I say all the time, but, you know, people who don’t know me, right? I’ll bump into somebody at like a kid’s birthday party or whatever. Another parent. I’m like, Oh, yeah. What do you do? They’re like, Oh, what do you do? And I go, I am a YouTuber.
[2:05:11–2:07:12]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: I don’t say I do YouTube, but I don’t say I, you know, I say I am a YouTuber. And it’s something that I do reflexively. I do without thinking about it because it’s not a job. It’s a mindset, a grind set, if you will. So it’s, it’s a part of your being. It’s what you live, breathe, eat, sleep. Um, and I don’t even know what I would think about in my idle time if it wasn’t. You don’t just watch the action, you’re in it. Download the eBay app to stream and shop live. eBay live. Thanks. People love YouTube and videos and the audience and technology. Like whenever I take vacations, like my, my wife always quips about this, right? Because she’ll be like, yeah, within like three days, he’s like writing down video ideas and like tinkering with stuff because you just like can’t. Yeah. Yeah. I relate to that so hard. Like that is exactly the case. But I’m tired. Yeah. Everything that I said was true. Yeah. So make of that what you will. Can you leave us with some predictions for YouTube in 2025 or what like the creator economy, right? Like this, this thing emerged while we were all doing it because we were doing it prior. We started in 2011. Yeah.
You started like, you know, 2008 long before then. And then all of a sudden there was this thing. It’s like, yeah, here’s the creator economy. Yeah. It just kind of happened. It just kind of happened. Someone coined creator economy and then totally rough to the races. It kind of feels like we’re on the other side of that excitement level from the media and from the external VC money that started coming into the space.
[2:07:12–2:09:02]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: Yeah. I should have sold one out of the chance. There was probably a real opportunity. Oh, no, there was. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve talked about it. Oh, you have. Yeah. Yeah. We got a $100 million offer. Yeah. Well, um, what did that feel like to turn it down? Cool. Cool. Yeah. It does feel cool. Yeah. I felt pretty cool. Um, I wasn’t done yet. Yeah. Um, but do you think about that now? Pretty like, yeah. Well, that would have been yeah, because I would have been like, forget the exact timing, but like, when the whole controversy thing went down, yeah, I would have been like, not that far out of just like, waiting out the clock and being like, see. But then the question goes again. What the hell would you do that? I don’t know. Yeah. So I guess I’ll just like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Build computers for maybe I’d point a camera at it. Oh, shit. That’s just the same thing again. What type of company was interested? There’s a big media company today. I want a bunch of companies. Yeah. They own other media properties. Yeah. And I do think those guys are probably, you know, still around guys like that. But I do think that the appetite is probably in a, in a bit of a low point right now. Yeah.
But I do think another wave will come. Yeah. I think everything’s cyclical, right? Like, you look back at, um, you know, the revision three, like discovery deals that happened back in the day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I crazy monies coming in like acquiring YouTube channels. This will never happen again. Right. Like, make your studios and that stuff. And, um, and no, it’s totally like, still coming in. I mean, the reality of it is there’s, there’s an ever-growing population of people who have more money than they have knowledge about how things work and are just looking for places to park it and grow it. Yeah. Yeah. And that global trend is not reversing anytime soon. So, no, I actually, I have talked to myself completely out of this. I think money is absolutely not going to stop pouring into the creator economy. It’s just a matter of like what form that will take.
[2:09:02–2:11:31]
Colin Rosenblum, Samir Chaudry, and Linus Sebastian: But what you’ve done of like, here’s this big media property, um, that’s reaching a Super Bowl-sized audience once a month. And then we can build a product company like next to that and other companies next to that. That’s the thing that I think is like, I don’t think a pure play YouTube channel. Maybe I’m wrong is, uh, investable in and of itself. It’s, it can be capitalized in different ways. Yeah. But investable, I think is harder unless there’s something scalable attached to it that like, look, if, if you are gone tomorrow and there’s an investor there, there’s, it’s, it’s, they could continue building the media properties and building the product companies. Yep. And they would have a path to a lot of success. They could. Yeah. I think they could. Um, but it’s exponential with, with obviously having a host and having you there and like having a face to it. I think that you could, I mean, we’re off our exponential path. I’ll tell you guys that much. Um, we are, we’ve been, we’ve been linear slash flat for a few years now. Um, but I do think that like a creator company could be investable, but only like to a point because your relevance can only go parabolic for so long. Sure.
Everyone’s, it comes to, I call it the curve, you know, that’s the natural life cycle of the online celebrity. Yeah. But yeah, no, I think you’re probably right that once you reach a certain point, it’ll flatten or it’ll go linear. And there’s only so much you can do unless you, but that’s why you see, you know, whether it’s like Chamberlain Coffee or these, see like people building these screwdrivers or stickers or whatever, right? Ultimately finding other ways to diversify your business and reach a broader audience than your personality alone can attract is the only way. Yeah. Um, dude, thank you so much for spending this much time with us. No, I appreciate it. I really appreciate it. And, uh, hopefully we’ll come up to Canada soon. Oh, yeah. I want to come spend a day working at LMG. That would be great. Oh, you’re more than welcome. That would be fun. Don’t come any season other than the summer because it blows. I want to sit in the writer’s room. Like I want to feel it. Yeah, sure. We’re an open book. You wouldn’t be the first to just come in and be a fly on the wall. So cool. Awesome. Thank you, dude. My pleasure.
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