The Exchanges

Q take off. By the time you graduated college, you already Kind of a YouTube celebrity. You already had a relatively high number of followers. Not like today, but, you know, you know, you already had quite a bit of attention, and you were reviewing the new iPhones, and so on. Was it clear to you, like, ok, I gotta figure out how to make this into my profession, my business?

A Yeah, it was luckily a pretty perfect curve. So, on one hand, I'm going to school, I have class every day, and I'm playing on the Ultimate Frisbee team, and I'm, I'm doing videos in my spare time. But as you mentioned, like, yeah, I've been making a lot of videos and putting a lot of time into it and really enjoying it, and it's got an audience to the point where it does make money through the YouTube Partner Program. At the same time, in parallel, uh, Stevens Tech, pretty technical school, loves its relationships with tech companies all over the world, but especially in New York City, so they've built these curriculums to where students specifically will do a semester of class and then do a semester interning at maybe a potential future company they'd work for, you know. There's lots of them in New York City, and that was cool. And so I started my semester of school, and then it came time for me to do the break semester internship, and the only thing I wanted to do during that semester was just pour more time into making videos, because I enjoyed making videos so much. Yeah. And so every time I did that, I got a little bit of a taste of, like, what it would be like to be a full-time video creator. So by the time I graduated, it was both making enough money and obvious enough that, yeah, this is what I want to do when I'm done with school, that it was kind of a, yeah, it was a …

AI assessment note: “it was both making enough money and obvious enough that, yeah, this is what I want to do”

Q Ok, so you know that it's, this is what you're gonna pursue, because you've got this niche, and When you graduated, how did you decide to think about this business? I mean, you know, did you think about, okay, I've got to hire people, I've got to have another camera person, or was it initially, even after you graduated college, just you?

A Yeah. After I graduated, it was still just me. So basically the way I thought about it, and I've evolved the business part behind the scenes of this operation very, very slowly and deliberately. In the initial years after I graduated, it was literally just, oh my God, I have so much more time. I just get to pour that time into making videos. Yeah. So here I go trying to like learn new animation tricks and try new software tools and try to up my production. And it went from me doing videos in my spare time, and maybe doing one or two a week, to me not having class every day, and getting to do three, maybe four videos a week, or up the quality, do three videos a week, but way better videos. Yeah. So that's initially how I started thinking about it, and of course you could twist that into a business move and say, I'm building an audience that way, specifically by making better videos, but the whole, like, you know, scaling and building a team thing was not for many years after that.

AI assessment note: “After I graduated, it was still just me.”

Q Um, or the, or the Census Bureau. Um, but were your parents at all like, hey, Marquez, what are you doing? Why are you putting videos of yourself on the internet? Or were they okay with it?

A That's a good question. So basically, yeah, one day my parents brought me down to the kitchen table and I said, hey, Uh, YouTube videos, huh? You know, they found them somehow. I don't even know. You'd have to ask them how they found them, but yeah, YouTube videos. Like, that's a, it's a hobby. You know, asked me about it, how I was enjoying it, or whatever, and basically the only advice was like, don't reveal unnecessary personal information about yourself or where you live, because, you know, it's the internet. Anyone could be on there. Yeah. And, uh, I think they just figured there's way worse things their kid could be doing in their spare time, and so. Yeah.

AI assessment note: “they just figured there's way worse things their kid could be doing”

Q this video you did of the LG Flex, which I'm pretty sure doesn't exist anymore as a cell phone. You know, it was like this hot new thing, because it was bendy, and it was scratch proof. Do you like squash it down and you scratch with a knife and, and you were just doing this all on your own, right? You were editing and filming these just by yourself.

A Yeah, at this point I'm, like, taking my camera and a tripod to go shoot at, like, a table and a bench in the park, or I'd just be in my dorm room or whatever. Yeah. But yeah, I remember that, too. The LG G Flex was, like, it was a flexible OLED display, but they had to build the components to be flexible, too, so the phone could kind of bend a little bit, which is crazy. Hey, what is up, guys? MKBHD here, and this is the LG G Flex, quite possibly the most interesting phone in the world right now. And then on top of that, they had a self-healing back. You know, anytime you hear a crazy claim like that from a smartphone manufacturer, you're like, well, I gotta, I guess I gotta test this. So I decided to do a full test of my own. I did this for you guys, so thumbs up for that down below. So I took a knife to it. I just started cutting it up and then putting it to the test, seeing how long it would take to self-heal. And sure enough, when it pulls that off on video, yeah, people click. People are interested in watching that. There was a lightbulb moment, you know, and I quickly understood that there was a market for quick, timely information in the form of a high-quality video.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, at this point I'm, like, taking my camera and a tripod”

Q At the time, how long would it take you to make a video? Because, uh, You're setting up tripods, and you know, you want to write a nice script, and you want to edit it together nicely, and you were a student, so yeah, roughly how long would it take you to make a four or five minute video?

A Yeah, man. So I'd say if you pick like a standard, like gadget review, you know, there's obviously a testing period, like I'm using the device, I'm actually going through writing things down, taking my notes on it, but I guess just for production, sitting down, talking to the camera, and then editing, I could probably do an entire video back then in a day. Maybe I had class end at two p.m., and I would, uh, I would just work on it for the entire rest of that day until, uh, Midnight or something, and then post a video, and that would be my day. That process has evolved a lot since then, but things get more complicated as they get more intricate,

AI assessment note: “I could probably do an entire video back then in a day.”

Q Tell me, what was the turning point? What enabled you to go beyond just you making videos and starting to bring in one person, then two people, and then more?

A So I think the beginning, the genesis of building a team anyway, Was, uh, I'd gone to CES a few times, which is a consumer electronics show in Las Vegas every January, and Las Vegas is always just like a chaotic, like, running around, trying to see what you can see, make some videos, and I'd always had my slow, methodical process in my own studio, so I was super out of my element, and I think I got back from a CES one year, and I texted my friend Andrew, who I'd played a lot of Frisbee with, and I was like, man, it would have been nice to have someone, like, I don't know, carry the cameras and like point the cameras at me, make sure it's in focus, like just someone to help me out with all that stuff. And then we realized we should actually try that. And so he came out and helped out with a few videos and it immediately made a ton of sense. I mean, he's super smart. He has a technical background. He knows how to work with cameras. And so he was the first person I added to the team. And then it slowly just started growing from a what do we need standpoint. Um, And then I have my whole octopus analogy. I don't know if you have time for how crazy my analogy gets, but I, uh, I describe the, the team building act of a YouTube creator like an octopus cutting off its arms. And I say that because when you're a creator at a certain level, you realize you actually have like many jobs, sev…

AI assessment note: “the genesis of building a team anyway, Was, uh, I'd gone to CES”

Q wonder, as you started to really blow up, right, you went from hundreds of thousands to millions of views, you must have had a lot of big tech companies saying, hey, you know, we'd like to work with you, we'd like to partner with you, hey, we're Samsung, we're Apple, we're LG, like, hey, why don't you be our official brand ambassador? And, I mean, that must have happened, right?

A Yeah, there's a couple of really interesting, uh, Job offer type things that happened. One of them, yes, was what you're describing, which is, hey, come work for our publication. Like we've got a bunch of faces. We do a bunch of content. You can be one of them and you'll be under our umbrella. And it was way past the point of me ever considering that, like that was not something I was interested in, especially because I had all the control of exactly what I wanted to do. The other fascinating one was come help us make products. And I guess the other thing I found out pretty early in this job is that the authenticity and the unbiased nature of my reviews is the most important part of it. Yeah. And that felt like it would be pretty compromised if suddenly I could only, you know, speak a certain way about a certain company because I work with them.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, there's a couple of really interesting, uh, Job offer type things that happened.”

Q You know, there are some reviewers who are just mean and harsh, and maybe with good reason. You are not. You are really respectful, and even when you're criticizing a product, you do it in a very respectful and nice way. Do you ever find yourself getting criticized for being too pro-tech or too sort of not critical enough of tech companies?

A A little bit, yes, and I think there's two main responses that I can point to for why it might seem that way. Which is, one, we only have so many hands, and we only get to make so many videos every year. Yeah. And so, we do actually have to make a choice sometimes of, what do we make a video on? Like, there's seven new things that came out this week, and we only have the bandwidth to maybe cover two of them, or maybe we collect a few of them into one video, if it makes sense. And so, some things just get left out, and it's often the things that we're most interested in, or that are the best products, That we end up wanting to show and try and make a video about and cover and review. So that's one. And then on the other hand, it's also like, again, you know, going to a tech school, but also talking to the people that work on these products. What I've actually understood is a lot of them watch the reviews. Like they work on the product for months and months and they do their best work and then they turn it in and then it gets absolutely torn apart on the internet by everyone who doesn't make products. And so My goal is actually to help make a decision for people thinking about buying the thing, but also to help make the next version of the product better by giving actual, like real feedback on why something's bad, not just saying it sucks. I don't like it. And to give like that s…

AI assessment note: “A little bit, yes, and I think there's two main responses that I can point to”

Q feeding the beast, of just constantly having a new thing available, and a new thing available, and I don't know, I wonder whether at a certain point it becomes like a, something that you'd want to just not do that often. I mean, do you imagine that at some point you would want to kind of get off the hamster wheel of having to make new content all the time?

A Yeah, I've thought about that a bit. I think it's funny because it's not like the Like, pressure to make new stuff comes from, like, the algorithm or some, like, hamster wheel where everything will die if we don't make another episode. Yeah. It kind of comes internally from ourselves. Like, we're always out here with ideas of, like, oh, you know what would make a good video? And we just want to make stuff all the time. Yeah. And we actually kind of have to trim back in the opposite direction of, like, look, if we try to make all of those videos this week, we're gonna be insane. We're not gonna sleep. So we gotta pick and choose our battles here. But yeah, I think, In the super long term, it does make sense to, like, figure out what an appropriate pace of output is that is actually long term sustainable. Yeah. I think our rate right now is pretty good. It's maybe a little high for super long term, but again, I'm having fun with it, so hey, why not? But yeah, that is like a back of the mind decision that I guess I'll cross that bridge when we get to it, but it's like, we have the pieces of the team here We can turn down or turn up output if we want at any point during the year. So we think about that a little bit, but as of right now, we feel like it's pretty good.

AI assessment note: “In the super long term, it does make sense to, like, figure out what an appropriate pace”

Q Um, how did it work? You know, would these companies send out sample products to get reviewed? Like at this point you were getting some attention from people who were interested in technology. So did you start to get flooded with stuff to review?

A Yeah, so this was early enough that I wasn't, like, flooded necessarily with stuff to do videos on, but it was a pretty steady stream of interesting stuff happening to talk about, interesting devices to try that I could make a video about, and I'd graduated from my five dollar a week allowance or whatever to now actually the YouTube partner program existing. Which meant that based on the size of the viewership of a video, you'd actually get paid a little bit for people watching the videos. So this was a, it was a hobby, but it was also a hobby that was paying, which was pretty cool. Yeah. And yeah, this was like a, the beginnings of relationships between media companies and online video creators, super early.

AI assessment note: “I wasn't, like, flooded necessarily with stuff to do videos on, but it was”

Q what's really remarkable to me is that your scripts and just your delivery was so crisp. I mean, today, of course, too, but even back then, Who was giving you feedback? I mean, was there anyone that you could go to and say, hey, what'd you think about this video? What could I improve? Or like, how were you able to do such a good job just on your own?

A Yeah, I guess that is part of the beauty of YouTube, which is, I guess if you're an artist and making anything, you scroll back far enough, you start to cringe at your own work because you can see your own improvement. Yeah. Um, but the other part of YouTube is like the second I upload something, there's immediately hundreds and hundreds of people Watching it and giving their open, honest feedback in the comment section, uh, of things that they enjoyed, things that they liked from the last video, things they want to see done better, and I made it a point to, like, listen to that feedback and continue to not just make videos I would want to watch, but just try to make better videos, period.

AI assessment note: “hundreds and hundreds of people Watching it and giving their open, honest feedback in the comment section”

Q And I'm curious, what do you do if you're reading an ad for a product you really like, but then there's a product that comes out from that same company that you really don't like, and you are going to review it. What do you do?

A That's a great question. So, normally we don't do sponsored integrations from companies whose products we also review, and that was a choice that we made pretty early, but we have actually had like that happen with these sort of fringe overlaps. Uh, my job is to be completely honest in the review. And any compromise of that honesty is pretty obvious because, you know, there's other people reviewing the same phone. If I leave something out that's bad, like, everyone's gonna notice. Yeah. But, you know, that cannot and should not hurt my relationship with any sponsors or any companies because I'm just being honest about the product. I think it always comes down to being completely truthful about it, and the crazy thing is, maybe it's not crazy, but me being honest about the product, especially what's bad about it, Actually helps those companies.

AI assessment note: “my job is to be completely honest in the review”

Q So much respect for that decision, but from a business perspective, given that you have 13 people, and I know, you know, you're one of the top YouTubers, so your, your revenue is still high, but given that you've got a team, and, you know, there's a potential to make lots more money, how do you resist that?

A Yeah, I guess, thankfully, the business is in a position where it makes enough money to sustain and make extra on top that we get to reinvest in the business, which is already pretty visible, like, we buy equipment all the time, we have this crazy Camera robot. Like, we're trying to do fun things in the video production world, and so that means we just get to be really, really critical at every single decision that gets added on top. It's also like an audience expectation thing. Like, what does the audience expect when a new MKBHD video gets uploaded? Well, they definitely expect high quality production. They definitely expect honesty. They expect a tech video, and maybe Sometimes there's an ad in there. Yeah. It's not like there's an ad in every video, but if there is an ad in the video, it better be good because, you know, there's lots of other terrible ads out there on YouTube, and we're not really into watching that, so we try to find those things in the inbox that actually are a win for everyone involved. It's like a cool product or something that we were going to do a video about anyway, or it's just a fun video to make, and so we can, we can pick and choose. Yes, we do leave a lot of money on the table, but that's not really a problem in the situation we find ourselves in.

AI assessment note: “business is in a position where it makes enough money to sustain”

Q What about, like, criticism? You know, especially in the beginning of someone's career, when you get people saying mean things to you, or discouraging things, like, it can really be, you know, difficult sometimes. Were you getting any meanness and nastiness, and, and if so, how did you deal with it?

A Yeah, no, definitely. I I've always had at least some percentage of people just not like anything that I do or post. Uh, I think for me, it comes down to being able to specifically separate founded criticism and, like, real constructive feedback with just, like, baseless random attacks, which both of them will happen. But, you know, you might see, for example, like, uh, you know, the lighting in these couple shots was really muddy. If you'd shot this in a better lighting environment, You know, that's not hate. That's not someone just, like, spewing, like, criticism just to make you mad or something. That's actually, maybe they watch some other videos with better lighting, and they're just, like, tossing their two cents in.

AI assessment note: “comes down to being able to specifically separate founded criticism and, like, real constructive feedback”

Q saying, you know, Marquez, you got to bring on investors, you got to blow up, you got to be doing live shows, you got to have a book, you have an imprint and a publisher. I'm sure you've heard all these things, right? You've got to have your own cryptocurrency, put out your own coin. You know, what do you want to do? What do you want this to be?

A Yeah, I, I guess I have two main interesting things. One is the now, and one is maybe a little bit further into the future, but the now for me definitely is to make, we're still trying to optimize making videos that we want to watch, and then I guess in a bigger sense, making channels that we'd want to subscribe to. Yeah. Um, I spend a lot of time on YouTube. I really only watch YouTube videos. I have a Netflix account. I don't remember the last time I logged in. Like, I watched just tons of YouTube, so I really enjoy, like, finding a good YouTube video, a good YouTube channel, so we're just trying to make that happen. And then the natural progression, which is really interesting is after you've seen so many products, especially a bunch of tech products, it becomes a really interesting part of the job where you have all this context and you get to compare all these things. And then you eventually just want to make a thing that like is the ideal version of what you've been reviewing this whole time, which is like, that's a whole other process. That's really difficult. But it is always on the back of my mind of like, obviously products are fun, but my audience has grown to understand my taste and that I clearly like a certain type of thing. It's probably a pretty high quality thing, high quality materials. And so working on a product that falls in line with that seems like the so…

AI assessment note: “I guess I have two main interesting things. One is the now, and one”

Q I know that you were a little kid in the nineties. What were some of the coolest things that you remember just discovering and playing around with?

A Yeah, as a family growing up, we didn't actually have a ton of technology, and I think that was on purpose. Like, my mom only had one TV in the house, and it was in the basement, so, like, any time we spent on the TV was, like, precious before, you know, we weren't allowed to use it after a certain time, but there was still, like, this background interest in gadgets and computers and things like that, and then I do remember, like I said, sort of the earliest piece of tech I was able to interact with was a camera, and then Later after that, I'm growing up in the nineties, like I finally got a computer in high school, so I had a laptop, and that's sort of the beginning of my modern gadget history. You know, the beginning of smartphones and gadgets.

AI assessment note: “earliest piece of tech I was able to interact with was a camera”