The Exchanges

Q So, so that takes us into creative live. I'll start with your least favorite part first so that you like me the most when we end the interview. Uh, how does creative life, how does creative live make money?

A Creative lives makes money by selling content that we create with the top experts in the world. We put it online on our platform. We have a freemium model that you can, you can watch whatever it is that we're streaming either while we're making the content or Or we have channels that are focused on photo, video, design, music, audio. You can watch whatever we're playing for free. If you want to own the class, watch it over and over and over on your own time, then you have to buy it. So there's, you have free access, twenty-four-seven, for stuff that we're playing or that's being made in real time, and if you want to watch it on your own device, on your own schedule, then you buy it. And it turns out that's a pretty good business. We've had more than ten million students. We've had Three or four billion minutes of video.

AI assessment note: “Creative lives makes money by selling content that we create with the top experts”

Q Interesting guys coming up. We'll ask Chase more about creative live, why he started it, what the growth looks like, how he sees it compared to other kinds of online course, uh, websites. But first look, you had a, a number one app for cameras. Why weren't you acquired by Facebook for a billion dollars?

A Um, I think timing is everything. And I learned a lot along the way for Sure. You know, it was definitely, I think not a lot of people can say they've made a billion dollar mistake. Um, but it was a handful of different problems. Like, uh, one was being so first, you know, early, um, that creates a challenge. It's not just about being first. Uh, and then the second is, you know, I had a relationship with a developer that got into a little legal snafu and that legal snafu, it did two things. One, it Slowed the development of the app down and two more importantly, it paralyzed me. I had companies asking to, you know, buy it for never work again money, like private jet money. And, uh, what is that?

AI assessment note: “it was a handful of different problems. Like, uh, one was being so first”

Q Chase, I want to get, we'll go deep into creative live here in a second, but I have to ask, I mean, other business people or artists or creatives that fear the same issue you went through on the I want to know what the issue was. They can avoid it. What was the issue? Was it who owned the IP? Was it equity? I mean, what was it specifically?

A I owned all the intellectual property. There was no, um, no misunderstandings about that. But when you write contracts about software, you can't actually predict what releases 10 and 11 and 12 are going to look like. Is there a year down the road? And I just specified that the developer needed to Um, needed to do a release and not the content of them. So I can't really blame myself. Uh, the contract was written as tight as it could. Um, but where I can blame myself is that I was very casual about where the IP lived, despite that it was mine. I had it living on their servers and their passwords. Yes. And their iTunes account to launch the app. Yeah. And this was 2009. So today that sounds It was catastrophic in 2009. It was like a pain in the ass to get an account. So we took the path of least resistance. So there was a couple small, um, legal and technical snafus. Um, but I think the one that is what your listeners should try and take away is that you need to overcome the psychology of being stuck of paralysis through analysis of, and then that's why I have a massive bias to action. Now I would rather do the wrong thing, figure it out quickly and adjust. Than to pontificate and burn cycles on what's the perfect move at this point.

AI assessment note: “I was very casual about where the IP lived, despite that it was mine.”

Q So why hasn't, I mean, the obvious answer is cost, right? But why hasn't that, why isn't every article written like that? In other words, if you were kind of in it, how do you decrease the cost structure so that we can get more quality content like that?

A I think feature storytelling will continue to see that grow and evolve in the way that that Snowfall piece did as a piece of breakout journalism. I think the news cycles now are so short. I mean, newspapers are basically physical newspapers are dying because it's, it's tomorrow's printout of yesterday's news, which is not interesting to anybody. So, um, just from a production standpoint, there aren't enough hours in the day to create every news piece like that. I do think that we'll see platforms that are embedded with those native sort of, um, bells and whistles continue to evolve such that a CMS could drop them into such a thing. And we'll see We're seeing some of that with modern, modern media. I mean, there was hyper, which is, you know, 10 curated stories every day, and it was presented in a really beautiful, especially on a tablet experience, but, um, I think journalism is moving in the same direction as tech. It's, it's a combination of what gets you the information the fastest. It's form and function, so it's not just wingdings for the sake of wingdings, um, but again, features, you're going to continue to see more and more of that, and I think as platforms become Templatized. We'll get a more interactive, exciting experience with, with our news.

AI assessment note: “I think as platforms become Templatized. We'll get a more interactive, exciting experience”

Q I was going to say, so that was the exit, right? I mean, you just, there was no money. You just shut it down.

A I could have, I still could have made a lot of money. To me, the outcome was a better outcome to shut it down, learn from it, build into something new, which is now CreativeLive, um, than it would have been, because I would have been ensnailed, or ensnailed, entangled, yeah, entangled in, A, a little legal dispute, but more importantly, I would have had to go to work for a company that acquired it, and that wasn't my passion. My passion focus was very, you know, very clearly on CreativeLive. So the flip side of those downsides are, Creative live. And I learned a hell of a lot. And now I'm, I got more juice to go help other people break through some of those problems. And if you're in that group that doesn't have all the privilege that I have, you know, how do we help them disproportionately? That's why creative live has a free aspect to it and why I put out so much free content.

AI assessment note: “To me, the outcome was a better outcome to shut it down”

Q that New York Times story and being sucked in and then thinking at the end, they use things like parallel scrolling and storytelling and auto start on videos in ways that, you know, spammy marketers would never even think to use it. There were no ads. It was a beautiful experience. Why can't everyone just create content like that? Why does fortune have to pump their pages full of ads?

A Well, I think the New York Times, uh, you know, wherever we sit in this weird modern era of journalism and media, They put 80 people on that story. They tried to do something different, and it just shows that if you're really focused on innovating and breaking out of a mold, that you can do it, even if you're in an industry that's as, you know, at that time was as stagnant, uh, as was, um, journalism. It was basically moved from a physical paper to online, and it was just a replication of that, and they broke out. The, the sad twist of that story is that story is about an avalanche, and, and one of my friends was killed in that avalanche, so it was, it was extra special To be able to contribute to it for me personally, uh, let alone, let alone the work.

AI assessment note: “They put 80 people on that story. They tried to do something different”

Q So I can ask you the question, like how many physical years did you go through or how many, how many emotional years did you lose? I bet the emotional question is 10 times as much as the physical passing of time.

A You know, I think that's one of the characteristics that, um, one of the, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm resilient. I think humans in general are pretty resilient. Um, so I didn't spend as much time dwelling on it. It was really only five years later in a blog post that I wrote about this. I detailed it, um, that, you know, it's called, I think my biggest mistake ever or something like that. If you go to my blog, um, we'll link to that chase in the show notes. Yeah, that'd be great. It was basically in looking backwards that I was able to process the grief in real time. I was just like, all right, onto the next thing. I don't really, not that I don't care about money, but money is, I know I can make money almost at will. So it's more about having impact on the world. And rather than poo poo and cry in my, you know, cry in my, uh, rice pudding, I'm going to, you know, go out and make something better and different, uh, leverage the experience and get on with it. So I don't want to, I don't want to gold plate it as Brene Brown talks about gold, gold-plated grit. We talk about our failures very quickly and our successes very slowly. Um, you know, it was a real deal, but I didn't, I wasn't really able to process it until, you know, basically a year, year and a half ago when I was able to get on Instagram. That was another thing. It was, I was, you know, as a, one of the most influential photogr…

AI assessment note: “I didn't spend as much time dwelling on it... It was basically in looking backwards”

Q Okay. How do you think about valuation? I mean, it's hard for, I'm asking you this cause I know it's something you don't think about as an artist. So I'm curious how you rationalize through it.

A I've learned to think about it as a, as the CEO of a venture backed company. Um, we're out to, you know, make a category defining game changing company. Um, The reality is if, you know, and things that get in the way of that are things that I don't love. I have a mission and we have a vision, uh, sorry, we have a mission and I have a vision of trying to make this transformative experience. I think the 120 people who go to work every day alongside me, we're trying to, to change the way that people educate themselves and, and help them live, you know, make a living in a life doing what they love. And if at some, you know, if you're a venture backed company, you're always for sale. There's always a number, but I have very smart investors that have a long-term vision, and, you know, given that everything is for sale, I would never say never, but I'm really interested in, uh, I would only be interested in that if things were helping propel the mission and the vision of what we want to do. If someone's gonna buy it, kill it, and shut it, like, this is not interesting to me, because we have a, you know, a vision that we see for CreativeLive and for the future of employment, education, work, and creativity.

AI assessment note: “I would only be interested in that if things were helping propel the mission”