The Exchanges

Q a better time for us to be having this conversation with you, Leonard. So I, Maybe the best place to start is, like, where did the idea of Caravan come from, and where did the idea of bringing this into a bigger company like CAA, and why is that, like, a perfect match for the two of you to be, to be partnering for these, the future of these brands?

A Yeah, I mean, CAA started building brands long ago, and, uh, one of the partners leading the charge doing that was a guy named Michael Yaniver, and Michael and I got to know each other, you know, a few years before, and, And I think the intention was they had done quite a few experiments in building brands and building companies here and using talent-led initiatives to do that, and they were quite successful. And I think they're no different than any other startup that you're building, which is, it's a ton of work, and you can only do so many of them at a time without having an infrastructure, and so as you become more successful, more and more people want to do it, but the problem is if you're only one or two people, it's incredibly hard to do them at scale, and I think the intention was to bring Caravan as a studio, co-found it, so that you could take more swings at bat, you could have Uh, a community and a team and a SWAT system that you could go in and actually build at scale and systematize a little bit of the operation of it. And so instead of doing one a year, you could now do three or four a year. And I think it was also, um, really important to build a sophistication and a muscle around when does it matter to bring talent in? When is it effective? Who are the right kinds of people? And you really need, it's a skill. You know, you really have to know how to do that and …

AI assessment note: “the intention was to bring Caravan as a studio, co-found it, so that you could take more swings”

Q types of different talent differently? Do you look at an athlete in a certain way, and a celebrity in another, and an actor in another way, and maybe an online content creator like Emma Chamberlain, who was a YouTuber, like, do they all have uniqueness to themselves of how you could potentially partner with them and work with them to create something, and what are the similarities and dissimilarities here?

A Yeah, I, I think inevitably we treat everyone as individuals and, and as you think about what you're looking for in a partnership and a co-founder and a company from, from talent, it's specifically, you're looking for an engaged audience, an understanding of the segmentation of that audience. You're trying to understand, um, what are the things that authentically connect this person to their audience? Because where the, where these things go wrong immediately is when these things are inauthentic marketing partnerships rather than someone desperately cares about the subject matter. You know, you gave the example of Yummers. You know, Jonathan Van Ness and Anthony Porowski are super passionate about their pets. It, and, and they were desperate to find healthier solutions for their pets than that we were seeing in the market. And so they're all about that. They live it every day. It's a huge part of animal welfare. It's a huge part of their life and it was very authentic to them. And I think the other thing you're looking for often in these folks is do they understand what it means to be an entrepreneur? Because You have to be able to say to them, The meeting that you're about to have with a buyer at Target, or you're gonna do a live stream with 200,000 fans, like, those are as important as a shoot you may be doing at Netflix, or they're as important as the other side of your care…

AI assessment note: “inevitably we treat everyone as individuals and, and as you think about what you're looking for”

Q at the other end, you have this talent that you're just like, you two need to talk to each other? Or does the idea come from the talent? Like, how does that work? Because I feel like I could see the cases of someone has Built and created a phenomenal product. They just don't have the audience, and it feels like bringing those two pieces together can be extremely valuable.

A Yeah, the ideation for this stuff happens, uh, in a couple of different ways. So, so we are often the genesis of a lot of the ideas, and because we're spending a lot of time and data looking at market opportunities, and we're, a lot of our life is spent talking to consumer buyers and large consumer companies and CPG, and so we kind of understand the market, um, In that way, so we're able to think about the opportunities. It is very common for clients to bring you ideas and companies, and sometimes those, those two worlds collide where the opportunity matches with the interest of the client immediately on day one. I, I think you also have typically the founders that are coming through that we work with are very much in the market opportunity side first, but there's definitely, and there's lots of divisions inside CAA that are, that That are hugely involved in matching entrepreneurial ideas with clients, and they're just not necessarily building them in the way, in the way that we build them. You know, we're, we're kind of the Keebler elves building this stuff behind the scenes, and most of us are technologists. We, we've started to really develop a muscle in retail over the last year and a half. We've brought on a lot of retail expertise. Just, I think it's important if you're selling to consumers that you have multi-touch points, but most of us inside Caravan are kind of Tech n…

AI assessment note: “ideation for this stuff happens, uh, in a couple of different ways.”

Q Is discoverability part of that, or is it not in the top three?

A No, no, no, you're right. I would say discover, I always think of that as cutting through the noise problem, like, but, but yes, discoverability is a better way to look at it for sure, and, and I think when you have a tool that says, and again, I'm not suggesting this is the right model, this is just thinking about how things look differently. If I'm an artist, if I'm Daniel Ricciardo, or, or I'm, um, An influencer, like iShowSpeed, or someone like that. If I want to build a brand, I can utilize tools like I almost like don't even want to say AI, but like I could use tools like generative AI in my stack to be able to design merch and design information in a way that, that is just much faster for me to get out and iterate, but I can engage my customers and my fans in that by letting them have stakes in the business, and we're in a place now where If I can build an audience for a particular brand in a subset and keep them engaged as also people that are selling the brand and sort of your ambassador group, but they're constantly active, that becomes really relevant. And the best way to keep people active is give them access to information and product they didn't have before and pay them in meaningful ways when they contribute. And so if I, like, if I could get a percentage of the revenue I've stuck into airlines over the Last. 20 years of my life.

AI assessment note: “yes, discoverability is a better way to look at it for sure”

Q happening where people will, and maybe it's to your point, the value that's attached to a product or the celebrity that's attached to it, we then will go out and buy the product and then have that consideration about why did I buy this? What is it for? So I'm just wondering if you've seen anything about that, that purchasing funnel and what shifts are happening in the landscape here.

A Yeah, I, so I'm a bit of a contrarian on this. I think that most people, Demography is made up nonsense that isn't true. And I think it's, it's often done to sell consulting services and to make marketing seem like they're creating generations. The truth is, I don't really believe that with one exception, which I'll come back to, that there's much difference between Gen X and Gen Y. I don't think there's a ton of difference between the millennials and Gen Y. Like, it's just, Being young has different meaning in one context, which is in the pre- and post-digital era. That's the only demarcation, in my view, that's real. If you were born after the iPhone was created, and you were born into that, so all you know is digital first, then that, clearly there's a demarcation line there where you behave quite differently. Your social norms, your values are a little bit different. Your health issues are a little bit different. Like, to me, that is the one, because I, because I think if you looked at demographic changes over time, you, if you shrink the graph long enough, short enough, you'll see blips. But if you look at it long enough, it's pretty similar until you see that demarcation point of the truly, what I would call the mobile, the mobile side of the digital age. And that is a, to me, a massive cliff in demography. So I think a lot of this stuff, like, we have conversations here …

AI assessment note: “I'm a bit of a contrarian on this. I think that most people, Demography is made up”