Assertion Supported
Neistat: Apple refused to replace iPod batteries under official 2003 policy
“The other end of the phone explained to me that Apple as a policy does not replace the batteries in their iPods”
Opinion
Casey Neistat: The Neistat Brothers was a YouTube vlog before vlogging existed
“I mean, it was effectively a YouTube vlog. It was a YouTube vlog before the words YouTube vlog existed. It was sort of accessing someone's life in a way that I don't think people had seen before.”
Insight
Neistat: Creative Partnerships Are Harder to Navigate After Achieving Success
“When you have a partner, you have someone to blame all of the failures on, and someone to attribute all of the successes to. And when you are, when you combine that understanding with having nothing, it works, because you're in this together. But when you comb…”
What-if
Neistat: Knowing the reality of startups would have scared me off entirely
“If I knew then what I know now about what it means to start a tech company, I wouldn't have Not only not done it, I would have run as far away from that idea as I possibly could have. It was not knowing, and this has been true my entire career, you know, my en…”
Opinion
Neistat admits Snapchat Stories executed Beme's vision far better than Beme did
“To be honest with you, I was a huge fan of Snapchat stories, and the more I used it, the more I realized they did what I wanted to do, but they just did it way better.”
Disclosure
Neistat: Baseline Financial Security Ended My Motivation for Money
“The reality is the moment in my career that I got to a place where I didn't have to worry about paying for food or covering rent, I stopped really being motivated by money.”
Insight
Neistat: Privilege is a winning lottery ticket; hard work cashes it in
“I was born with a winning lotto ticket in my hand. All I had to do was cash it in. And that cashing it in is hard work. Like, that's what that meant. To cash it in was hard work. And I did my part. But I could have never done my part without first winning the …”
Insight
Neistat: Restaurants will always hire kids under the table for dishwashing
“Anywhere there's restaurants, there's a, somebody willing to hire a kid for eight or 10 bucks under the table to wash dishes, and I knew that would happen, and that's exactly what we did.”
Assertion Contradicted
Neistat: Apple iMac was the first consumer computer for video editing
“He bought an iMac computer, which was the first kind of the first consumer market computer that you could edit video on.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Neistat's 2003 'iPod's Dirty Secret' video crashed its host site within 24 hours
“Within 24 hours, it was everywhere to the point where the site was crashing but it did millions and millions of views in the days when to go viral required actually emailing somebody the video.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Neistat's HBO series was shot on a $200 camera and cut in iMovie
“We shot this video on a 200 dollar camera we bought at Walmart. We edited this in iMovie”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Neistat: HBO Programming Head Left Days After Acquiring Series
“The head of programming at HBO left the company in the days after she bought our show.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Neistat: 'Bike Lanes' exploded faster than iPod video due to social media maturity
“Not since the iPod movie had I seen a kind of reaction. It was everywhere, and the difference now is that social media was just really starting to pick up and I shared it as best I could, but it, Didn't need that. I don't know who picked it up, but it just exp…”
Disclosure
Nike gave Neistat an $80,000 budget for the 'Make It Count' commercial
“Which I've never really disclosed this before, but This seems like a great place to say, Guy, I think our budget was around 80,000 dollars to make this commercial.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Neistat: MIT professor Sep Kamvar offered $100k as Beme's first investor
“He goes, I'd like to be your first investor. You can put me down for a 100,000 dollars.”
Disclosure
Neistat: Beme raised just under $500k in initial angel funding
“And ultimately I raised just under a half a million bucks.”
Disclosure
Neistat started daily vlogging solely to build an audience for Beme
“I thought, you know, I need to really go hard on YouTube to get my audience engaged so when I tell them about this product that they'll, they'll be there for me. And I came up with this idea then to make a video every day, and every day share sort of a story f…”
Assertion Partly supported
Daily vlogging boosted Neistat's subscriber growth to 10K-20K per night
“My YouTube channel that took me, you know, six years, seven years at the time to get from zero subscribers to 400 Thousand subscribers. All of a sudden, every night I'd wake up and there'd be 10,020 thousand new subscribers.”
Opinion
Neistat: Beme's marketing and idea always outshined its actual product
“I think that the idea and the marketing were always better than the product that we were able to build.”
Insight
Neistat considers himself excellent at initial project launches, not long-term execution
“I'm really good at being the second man in a bobsled team, which means I get really excited, and I can push really, really, really hard, but the second it launches out of the gates, I just sort of jump in, and I'm like, okay, what now?”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Casey Neistat: CNN shut Beme down due to lack of rapid growth
“If you look at a company like that, and this is my understanding, if you look at a company like that, they need to see real growth. They need to see a real trajectory for success, and they need to see it fast, and I think that, I don't think we were able to de…”
Disclosure
Neistat: Beme acquisition financially secured his family's future
“Probably. Yeah, I think that if we didn't live in New York City or Los Angeles, that, that'd probably be the case. I can tell you that in the terms that I think of, which is, can I now give my children the lifestyle that I've always wanted to give them? The an…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Childhood friends' parents explicitly called Casey Neistat a 'loser'
“The thing that stands out the most now, when I look back on it, are the parents of my friends. I remember them, you know, calling me a loser, like literally using that word.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Casey Neistat left his parents' home at 15 and never returned
“I was 15 years old. It was a Tuesday night. And a school night, and it was cold, and, ah, I left. I walked, I took a backpack, and I left my parents' house, and never went back.”
Casey Neistat