The subscription market is predicted to grow nearly $500 billion by 2025. Recharge is the leading subscription management solution, helping ecommerce merchants of all sizes launch and scale their subscription offerings. Over 15,000 merchants use subscriptions powered by Recharge to grow their business and their communities by increasing average order value, reducing churn, and providing predictable recurring revenue, turn transactions into long term customer relationships, and experience seamless subscription commerce with Recharge. Check them out at slash dtcpod.

What's up, Dtcpod?

Today we're joined by Roy Rubin, who is the co founder and CEO of Magento, as well as a founding partner of R Squared Ventures. So, Roy, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, what you built with Magento, and then maybe we can get into some other questions about some of the projects you're working on now.

Awesome. Thanks, guys. Ramon and Blaine really happy to be here. So, yeah, Magento, you know, the story is that I was a student at UCLA and I had no money and I had some programming skills. So I started to do some freelance work focusing on open source ecommerce. This is pre magento. And the market was really evolving. This is like 2001, 2002, and I was focusing on what was then expected to be a growing ecommerce industry.

Right. It's kind of funny to think 20 years back, but stores were just coming online and folks are trying to figure how to do that. And there were really two alternatives, right? One was open source and the other was these million dollar software products brought to you by Oracle and Microsoft and some other big companies. And as a freelancer, I only had access to the open source, obviously and I felt very comfortable in servicing that world. So started really doing freelance build up a small consultancy which actually grew fairly quickly because demand for bringing stores online was something that was pretty clear. Right? And these were the early days of Google ads. I'd place an ad for open source e commerce services and I would generate enough business for six months within like a day or two and I would shut down the ad, right. Because I'm like, I can't take more work, it's just impossible for me to do that.

So that services, little freelance services gig grew to about 25, 30 full time people while still at UCLA. And that was fun because one, I was able to pay my rent and I actually made good money doing that and that was a lot of fun. And I got to see, I was there really in the front lines to see what merchants today, well at that time and the future were really thinking about, right, how do they think about their brands, how do they think about the digital experience, how they were continuing to innovate along those lines. And we were just there to have a front seat and have these really interesting conversations with a lot of smart people and that's kind of the genesis story for Magento. We had a great services company and ultimately I think we got a little bored of servicing clients and we had this aspiration, as a company and myself of course, as well, to go build a product. These were kind of the early days. I haven't shared this a lot, but like 37 signals were just like the big thing back then and they had all these mantras and sort of this interesting perspective about life and about business and about work and I said I want to be like these guys for a while. I was thinking what to go build? It wasn't all that clear to be honest.

I thought everything was already done in the internet days. Yeah, this is 2005, right? We were just the beginning. But I knew that there was an opportunity to kind of innovate on the open source model and this was sort of the heyday of open source as well. Especially the commercial open source models where a lot of companies in the space MySQL, and there were many others that were getting funded and there was a big acquisition, MySQL was acquired at the time for a billion dollars by sun, which was like wow, people can make money in this open source world. But nobody was really doing this for commerce. So that was always sitting in the back of our head. And I think we finally at some point made the decision to say, look, what will this new generation platform look like? And that was sort of the catalyst for thinking about developing what ultimately became a gentle. And I had the smart engineer on my team who was just getting bored and I knew I couldn't lose him.

And I also knew that I had this really interesting project that I wanted somebody to help me think through. And we put him on it and we said, look, go figure this out. Go build what you think is sort of that next gen platform. Here's a few things we think are going to be meaningful. He came up with something and we loved it. And we decided to double down on it. Double down on it to the point where we said we're going to fire all of our customers now, we're going to no longer service clients and we're going to go build this really great product. And I figured that's the only way to do that.

Because when you're running a services company and maybe a number of your folks in the audience also run services companies, it's really hard to build a product from a services company because you're always thinking about splitting resources and priorities and you have customers that need to be served and ultimately expect value. Right? And it's just really hard to kind of split that. So the only way that I could figure out how to do it was to fire all of my customers. That's one way to do it. And luckily we got it done.

How did you recruit those 1st 20 to 30 people if you were still in school? I mean, was this your friends, right? People with potentially no experience previously.

So I did hire people with experience, PHP experience, right? So a lot of them were freelancers from different parts of the world. Eventually hired some people in La. I found my CTO and ultimately my co founder in Magento at UCLA. We were introduced by a friend and he's brilliant. He was a computer science major at the time and he joined me as my first hire in La. And on the service aside, he worked for me, but he was so great and brilliant that we decided to partner up. And as we were building Magento and sort of creating this new company, he came in as a co founder in Magento. But you're right, it's tough.

I mean, I had to go to school during the day and then come back in the afternoons and an evening and go figure it out, right, and start to service clients and make sure they're happy. I did that because I had to pay rent, right? I mean, ultimately I didn't have anything. So this was sort of my way of just kind of making sure that my life is taken care.

One question just to jump in there for a second. For our listeners who may not be as familiar with Magento or what you guys were, how things were in the landscape at the time, how did you guys differentiate your product, what was available out there. So if you were going to launch an ecommerce store, right, like you said, you were building kind of a purpose built database for these sort of merchants. What was out there for them, what would they currently use? And how did you realize that by productizing it you would be able to carve out a nice little niche part of the marketplace.

Yeah. So as far as what was available at the time, it was really sort of like old school open source packages that were really difficult to scale, really difficult to customize. Every little bit was a fork in the code. It was just messy and ugly. Right, guys? This is all pre cloud guys, right? So this is very different from a technology stack than what we know of as of now. So open source was really one option. The other option was enterprise. There was really nothing else.

There were free prepackaged solutions, I think, for Microsoft servers. This is so dating me, but like Microsoft servers, right? So like ASP or VB or ASP net, I mean, all the stuff that was very Microsoft centric that I never cared about. But those were out there. But those again, were on the fringe. They weren't common, right? They were really limited to a few folks that had this Microsoft centric knowledge. But open source was, you know, open source was evolving and growing at the time. So we kind of rode the tailwind of this open source story. But what was different about what we one was really this breadth of knowledge around how commerce was done in a very modern well at the time, modern time.

Right. So we did really innovative things. Like we had all the internationalization built in, so multi currency kind of all built in. You could have multiple sites on a single implementation, multiple brands on a single implementation. You could really leverage the technology very efficiently. No limits. As far as customizations on the front end, that was a very big thing because every single project we do on the services side, customers would tell me we have a unique design, we have unique requirements for what our brand really needs. So we obviously took that in mind and said, look, when merchants launch their websites, they're very sensitive about the way the site looks and feels.

So we built an entire sort of template engine and gave full flexibility in a way that could be extended quite easily without having to incur real friction around technology debt and sort of complexity around that. The product was incredibly modern back then. It blew people away. I mean, this is part of why Magento did so well, because people did not understand how in the world this product was open source and free. Right. We actually had a full time UIUX designer. Like what open source product had a UIUX designer back then? It was all like command line stuff, right? We actually said, hey, people are going to care about how this looks. So everything we did just had a high degree of touch and finish to it, because we knew that if we could tell the story and have a product that looked like an enterprise level offering but give it away for free, the market would be very interested.

And the way that we brought it to market was a bit creative at the time, in that we started sharing wireframes on our blog that had a big following by then and said, hey, here's what we're building. Give us input. And I would have 100 comments, 200 comments on every single post I do of people saying, hey, here's how we do this in Australia and here's how we do this in Europe, here's what you need to think about. And the community really helped us build this product. We were extremely transparent. I didn't keep anything under guard. Everything was done in the open, which today happens maybe in some cases, but back then, nobody did this. And I'd have three to four blog posts every single day.

Religiously. That was how we told our story. And before we released a product, we had this massive following already. So when the product was released, it was just like slam dunk from day one.

So this was the original build in public.

I guess I never thought about it. I've talked about this a lot, but I've never said that before or heard that. But you're right, we did do this in public. We just didn't call it that. We just said, hey, we want feedback. But yeah, you're right, it's exactly what it is.

Because I know you said you wanted to take it open source and you had this business where you had to kind of get rid of all the people and all the services layer that you guys were providing in order to pursue it. So what was the revenue model in the early days for it? How did you guys make money? You said you were going to be able to start giving it away for free. What was the kind of game plan there? Did you raise or did you have a different game plan?

You're going to love this. Because I didn't really have a revenue model in mind. I knew that I had an amazing product and we had a massive following in the market, but we were weeks away from shutting down the business, which is crazy. Like, you have this incredible product, everybody loves it, it's the talk of the town, it's the newest thing on the market. And I was like, oh, holy shit. I guess I should have thought about that closer. But no, what was always in my mind was to say, look, we'll provide support for the product and a level of sort of relationship with our customers that if you're using the product, obviously it's mission critical and you'll need some engagement with the vendor. I mean, otherwise who's going to support you? But here's what I didn't take into account, that we were by then a great product company, but a not so great support company.

And I also didn't take into account that a lot of my partners at the time sort of agencies were so smart and so good that they ended up providing a better level of support that we could ever do. And almost overnight when I released the support products, I had competitors, my partners competed against me because I think they understood that there's a business here to support people and that's what they do anyway, so why not, right? So I was pissed at first because I said, crap, I have no way to monetize this now. But I also understood that, you know what, there may be something good here because we're never going to be as good as these guys are. That is their core business. I came from the agency side, right? So it's like, I got it. Immediately, I got it. I'm like, yeah, hell yeah, we're a product business now. My team doesn't want to do support.

I have to figure out how to do that. But there's guys out there that are really strong at that and that's what they know how to do. So we decided early on, once we sort of understood what was happening, to pivot a bit from a business model perspective and offer an enterprise offering. So in commercial open source, this was very common at the time, the same product can have two license strategies. One would be free and open source under a GPL type license. The same product can be dual licensed under a different license as well under a commercial license. So what we did is we had a dual license strategy for the core product and for our enterprise customers. We would provide to them a set of capabilities that was not available in the open source product.

So additional capabilities, additional extensions. Think about this in the Shopify App Store world, additional apps that we wrote that specifically filled some gaps that the product had that you could not get in the free and open source product. And we package all of that up and called it a commercial enterprise offering.

And just for the audience to have some context when you say support, it's not like necessarily just answering questions of customer support. It's probably like technical support, hands on help that the agencies were probably best suited to help with. Is that right?

Yeah, like your team for that support.

It's not product usage because we had a lot of sort of self serve and we did screencasts and we had a ton of content that explained how to use the system and be efficient at it and that was given away for free. We're talking about things like, hey, I'm trying to customize and add this button to the page and have it do X y and Z and something is not happening. Right. What is the issue? Right. And I thought we would have this unique vantage point where we would immediately understand what the problem is and be able to fix it quickly or give a resolution to the customer. Ultimately, when this came back to our team and this is why we kind of weren't great at it, is that we had to do a lot of work to figure it out because it was a very complex product. The agencies who were in the code base the entire day, they got it right away. So it was really hard.

I think in hindsight, it was smart for us to pivot. We created a great enterprise business which ultimately sold tens of millions of dollars, ultimately probably over $100 million of enterprise sales for the product. But it wasn't clear on day one that this would be where we would end up.

Yeah, so when you went out to market and started selling it, you have weeks of runway. So now the concern becomes, okay, we're selling it, but now we have to grow faster than what we're burning capital. I assume that was the case.

Right?

You guys started growing just much remember what's happening.

The product continues to grow independently of us. Even if we shut down the company at the time, we would still see billions of dollars transact on Magento. Right. So the question for us is, how do we create enough revenues and do so quickly enough to be able to continue to mature the product, fix the issues that we have, build additional components and capabilities? But the product sort of had its life already in motion by being open source. And that's what we know. As soon as we started to kind of scale, we began offering additional capabilities and services and really maturing the product.

So, Roy, what was it like then? Once you guys figured out, you clearly were like, okay, we need to monetize this. We need to start putting things into action. You've decided that the best channel to go is enterprise. What was it like? How did you go from there into growing this into a massive company over the next call it four or five years. Once you guys realized that, you're like, okay, we're going to start generating revenue. Here's our go to market, here's what we're doing. On the enterprise level, what was the next path? What did it look like? Why don't you just characterize the next phase of growth for the company, for the listeners?

Yeah, I think look, I think commerce matured fairly quickly, right? So now we're at 2006, 2007. So commerce matures very quickly. Every retailer out there has a website. B, two c isn't quite a term that we hear of quite yet at the time. But I think the reality that commerce continues to grow is upon us, right? And we just get continuously pulled upstream. We work with larger and larger brands, we have to build the infrastructure to do so. From an enterprise sales model to now professional services. For some of our key strategic accounts, we provide some layer of professional services, agency type services.

We began building these very complex partner programs and start to work with really interesting agencies from across the world. The business just matures and grows. At the time, we had over 300 agency partnerships. I think we measured at some point we surveyed and did some analysis where we were driving over a billion dollars in service revenues for our partners. We saw very little of that, almost nothing. But we were happy because what was happening was that the market was maturing and people were really seeing a lot of opportunities for revenue and do so on top of our product, right? Which created this flywheel and great tailwinds for this story and this company to continue to grow and evolve. But everything happened pretty organically for us. Again, a great product at the right time in the market that painted a vision and a story that I think people loved.

We gave a great product away for free. I mean, oftentimes people ask me like, how do you sort of explain the success of Magento? I point to the story of, look, you give a great product away for free. People are going to love it, it's a no brainer, but it's hard to monetize when you do that. So be ready to figure out how to do that pretty efficiently. It took us years, but ultimately the business caught up and we were able to really build a sustainable, growing business.

And how long were you there? Right? So I know you said you started this in the early two thousand s and so what was your trajectory with the company as one of the co founders and CEOs, how long were you with the company and at what point did you say that you were ready to move on to new adventures in your career?

So I started the services business in 2001 that ultimately transitioned to Magento around 2006, 2007, and I sold a company to Ebay in 2011 where I was still running Magento for three years up until 2014. Right. So for me, this wasn't an overnight story, this was really 2001 to 2014. And I came back, actually, I came back in 2016 when Magenta was spun off. Ebay spun off at the time, a number of businesses, PayPal being of course it took it public, but it spun off a number of businesses, including Magento. And I came back on the board in 2016 before we sold it again to Adobe in 2018. So I spent a great, almost my entire career right in this Magento story and it was amazing. And.

What was it like to join a corporation, know, building Magento and now just like being changed completely in terms of the structure and how you make decisions and operate yeah, not easy.

Not easy. We were a very entrepreneurial company. We were aggressive, we wanted to conquer the world, we had big dreams, and we felt that we were executing really well. We were very innovative. We can make decisions on the fly, and we felt like we had the right team and the right incentives aligned with the team to actually execute and deliver on it and coming into a much larger corporation, ebay, I think, is the exact opposite of that. So, you know, decisions became slower and there was much less risk taking. And we we take all the risks in the world because we had high conviction, right? So when I fired all of our customers back in the day in the services world to go build product, it just shows how much risk we're willing to take if we believe something needs to happen, right? And I think that when you come into a larger organization with very different incentives, with very different priorities, with people that have been there for years, and they're thinking about their next role more than they are about innovation those are things that, for a person like me at the time or for any innovator or entrepreneur out there, is probably going to be very difficult to do. There are better organizations out there that I think understand this DNA and certainly want to drive value from it.

Ebay wasn't one, to be honest. It was a struggle, and we fought hard to keep what we had and what we believed was still very relevant in the market. Remember also at the time, this is the cloud sort of evolution. Cloud comes on the scene at some point here, and we see this and we're actually doing something about it, right? In fact, at the time that we sold the company in 2011, we were on the cusp of yet again transforming the company into a cloud company, sort of taking baby steps, but I knew that I had a window of a year or two to make this happen, right. Begin to deliver magento in the cloud, and then we come into ebay, and that put the brakes on it. I mean, although they were actually very excited about it, they just had other priorities ahead of it, and we kind of missed out on that opportunity, which I think led to Shopify's growth. I mean, it would have happened independently of this, but shopify, I think, obviously took advantage of the tailwinds of cloud and did so amazingly well.

Talking about shopify for a second, obviously having left kind of you said you left in 2011 or so, and then you came back and you were involved kind of at the board level after it went through acquisition, could you guys have built out similar products to what shopify was doing? Had you been still full focus building it, or do you think it was just built differently in a different evolution of product?

No, I do think so. If Magenta would have remained independent, I think the landscape would have been different. It would have been different because a lot of what shopify is built, app Store and all of that, we actually had that years before, right? We called it Magento Connect. Okay. The Magento Connect ecosystem had apps in it dating back to maybe 2008, 2009. In fact, magento was built, if I'm not mistaken. I have to look back, but I think Magento 2008 was already built with an App Store, our first version. We knew that this would be important.

Magento had a mobile story from the first iteration of the iPhones, right? From the first iPhone app store, we already had the ability to actually build apps, mobile apps, mobile commerce apps on top of Magento. So we knew where the market was going. And we understood that things have dramatically changed with the growth of the cloud. We launched our first iteration, which intentionally we did so with the smallest of Magento's client base. The product was called Magento Go. We invested a lot in what we called the Magento Go platform, which was going to be our platform as a service offering. It wasn't great at our first iteration. I never got to our second because we sold the company.

But when I think back ten years, it's about ten years since a lot of this was relevant. And I see sort of the evolution today. Nothing surprises me because we all thought about that back then, right? I mean, even the Shop app today is something we talked about back in 2006, 2007. I mean, this is all stuff that's been around the table forever. I haven't seen anything that I would say, holy crap. This is truly like jaw dropping new and innovative. The execution is done very well today, but the ideas have been circulating for a very long time.

It just shows how important of a factor the timing is, which is an element that you mentioned earlier, which was the timing for Magento at that time. And then there was a timing for the cloud. And so now, 2018, you sell and then what is the timing for? Then? What happens then? What do you venture into?

It's a really good question because I think about it a lot, right. I think about these new models on premise, cloud, mobile, what's next? And I don't know. Right. I guess it's never clear when you're on the cusp of it. I have to tell you though, I do think a lot of what we're seeing now in the AI world is super interesting. Right. And it feels like there's a new platform here. It feels like there's new innovative models that could be built on top of this.

I agree. Like anything that can help make the speed of iteration faster and the rate of deployment of things and testing that accelerated it's, probably what is the next phase? I couldn't really see that. Very much with Web Three because it was so tied to just finance and payments, but it didn't really just impact the rate and speed of innovation, whereas I actually feel like this is happening here. So I think we're entering an interesting and exciting phase now.

Yeah, and I've looked at Web Three and the blockchain and crypto, but I can't put my finger on this stuff. It's, like, elusive. I don't get it, right? I mean, I try to get it, I think I get some of it, but when I try to explain it to anybody, I get lost. And I'm like, I don't know. I don't know if this makes I can't convince myself every other day that this is real, but I have a lot of smart friends that are doing incredible things in this world and I hope they're successful. But ultimately, when I look at the AI stuff and I've spoken with a good number of companies that are doing something in the space, I begin to imagine a different world, right? And I'm curious about it and I can see how things are going to change. It's funny because my son comes home last night, he's 13, and we sit down on his math homework and at the end he's like, oh, he's 13, okay. He's like, oh, I'm going to start doing my essays on GBT Three.

Like, what? Oh, my God, how do you already know about this? He's like TikTok. Yeah, they're showing you how to do this.

And I said, okay, change academics.

Yeah, and I had this other conversation yesterday and I said, well, look, as humans, we're continuously pushed to use our best resource, right? Which is like, I guess we used to do a lot of manufacturing kind of work with our hands. Now there's machinery, industrial revolution machinery comes along. We're continuously pushed towards adding value where we are uniquely positioned to do so, and not machines. But that line is getting really thin. Like, how much more can we be pushed into adding value if machines can actually do so more effectively and at scale than us? And I think it feels like we're very close.

Yeah, I mean, it feels like we're really close. And I think what we've seen so far in the AI space, it's like you've had a couple companies that came out and productized things on top of OpenAI, which has been really interesting, but those are kind of the more generic use cases. And then I think the entrepreneurs who are able to really identify core needs and core use cases that can use the AI to help them scale whatever their product, service, et cetera, is, are really going to be able to tap into those markets. But like you were saying, it's kind of like the tech, it doesn't really work. And then all of a sudden it starts to do it. And we're kind of seeing that cusp right now. And Ramon, I know you guys are working on some really cool stuff in that space with Trend as well that's going to totally change the way that content is served to brands.

Yeah, it reminds me of what Roy mentioned earlier, when he know, when they were thinking about what to build in the early days of the Web, and you thought, everything's already being built. It's the same application. Here where you go on Twitter, you see everything AI, and you think everything's already being built. But truly, the innovation comes from inward discoveries. The moment you guys stopped looking for, what can we build outside, and you found it inside, that's when Magento was born. And I think that it's what Blaine just said, that the best applications and use cases are going to come from people that can literally implement this into whatever workflows, whatever problems they currently have, rather than by the time you see one of these things on Twitter, there's already like a hundred being built. Now you have no code. It's open source, right? Like anyone can find this on OpenAI, but I certainly think it's exciting.

100%.

Okay, so maybe your kid is now going to be the one with 30 to 50 employees before even getting to UCLA, following your paths.

No, but it's crazy because you think about this, right? It's only like two weeks old or three weeks old, right. This GPD three, and all the kids know about it. If my child knows, I'm assuming everybody already knows. So the question is, how does education change? It's kind of interesting to think about this, right? Because I said to him, I said, you know what, probably when they invented the pocket calculator, somebody said the same thing, right? This isn't fair. Technology is going to ruin you. You're never going to learn math. But yet we figured out how to learn math with a pocket calculator. I guess we could do the same now with GPT-3 on the side in our back pocket.

But it feels like, look, there's change. I know there's some other stuff in their pipeline that's coming out. We're going to be blown away by all this stuff. The question is, can we build interesting companies and businesses on top of it that add value? Because all this stuff is going to be a commodity.

Absolutely. The tech is the commodity. I'm curious. You have your fund. R squared Ventures. You've had all this experience selling, the company, going back, selling again. You've seen it all. How has that shaped your lens for what you look for, what opportunities you find interesting? And what is R Squared Ventures about and your guys thesis and what you find interesting?

Yeah. So R Squared Ventures is an early stage fund that I started with a very close friend of mine by the name of Roy Arres, hence R Squared. Roy and Roy. And he's an incredible entrepreneur. He started loop commerce. He's actually a tenure VC turned entrepreneur and back now in the investing world. But it's a partnership of two. We're an early stage fund and we typically co invest with great other funds in the earliest stage of companies where we can come in focused on fintech, on commerce, marketplaces and editing staffs.

Look, we're looking for teams that not only have, I think, a great product and technology acumen really understand what they're building and who they're building it for, but also have a side of them that understands the go to market pretty well. And we've learned over time, right? We have some amazing technology companies in our portfolio. Strong technology teams that sort of have that, but don't have the go to market. We have great go to market folks and with phenomenal sales acumen that just need some work on product. But I think the best teams that sort of shine are the teams that have both of these worlds kind of figured out. Funny because I'm hearing an investor saying, I want everything. But ultimately, we want founders that have, I think, curiosity and some level of experience and how to build product and take it to market. We've made from the fund so far? About 20 investments across both of our funds.

Fund one and fund two. We started about two years ago and we were very active for the first year. And then obviously the market took a turn in 22 here. So we slowed down a bit. Or a lot, I would say. But we're excited to get going in 2023. We are operators, both my partner and I. We've both built companies and sold companies.

So a lot of the value that we bring to the founders that we support is sort of rolling up our sleeves and really helping them as they see fit across product and technology and go to market and sales and culture and how to scale and build up a team. We're very different than most VCs in that. If you're just looking for capital, we're probably not the best partner for you. But if you're looking for capital, that can really help your team, and you as a founder or co founding team, really take advantage of the experience that we have. We're happy to do that, and that's what we do. We spend a lot of time with the founders that we back and really act as an extension to the founding team, and we love it. I mean, that's what really drives us. Roy.

How has that been for you? Right? Because you've gone from the position of owning operating your own company for several several years. I'm sure through your career you've been able to see and interact with other founders entrepreneurs. So what's the experience been like? Working with companies, being on their side and being able to see growth happen across a whole portfolio of amazing companies?

I have to tell you, it's been really rewarding. It's been awesome. It's been just so much fun, right? Because you see a lot of the potential, you see a lot of the energy. We've backed some phenomenal founders that are building amazing products, and you come in, you help solve a problem, you help them take something off their chest. And for me, it's great because I get to have a sane life. I keep saying, are we doing video on this podcast? Because what I want to say is, I lost all my hair with Magento, right? I'm losing a little bit less hair. There's nothing to lose anymore. But look, being an entrepreneur is hard, right? And the fact that I can have a life with my children and get to know them again and spend time with them and be there for know is, for know really important these days, right? When I was building Magento and it was all about that and I was fully immersed and there was nothing else in my life when I left Magento.

It's interesting, I found myself with no friends and no Hobies because all I knew was just to go build this company. So it's a little known secret. I've had many friends over the years that sold their companies call me and say, what do we do now? Right? Because you don't have time for Hobies, you don't have time to really have friends. You have colleagues, you get drinks with some folks, but these aren't lifelong friends, right? So that's important to me. Now, maybe I'm older and I'm starting to sound a bit old, but those are things that for me are important. Great friends, great family, enjoying life and really spending time with great people. And we have that in the founders that we back.

No, that's amazing. And I think it is so important to be able to see that, especially as you're so heads down building your company and it's kind of like you pop up like you're saying, and you're like, oh my God, there's so much more to do. We're super pumped for you that you're able to be able to work with great founders and do all that. So one of my last questions before we wrap up here is so clearly you're working with amazing founders who are building really cool companies. But what about you? Are you working on any projects? Are there any other projects that excite you personally in the future beyond just investing in advising or how do you think about the next phase of yourself as a know?

So what we do as well in the know, given that Roy and I are both operators and we still have this sort of muscle in our body that still looks at opportunities sometimes when teams come to us and they're not fully baked and they're missing something right. And we can't back them for some reason, right. They don't have tech or they don't have product or they just don't have kind of everything figured out neatly. Yet we look at these teams where I think most VCs would pass on them and we say, look, can we actually do something here? Right? So we see this as an incubation opportunity where we actually add a lot more value and roll up our sleeves and spend a great deal of time with these teams. And we did one last year where we brought it to life, and that is a company called Book Outdoors, which is really the first attempt to build a booking.com like experience, an Ota experience for the professionally managed campgrounds. And I say professionally managed because we're not going after peer to peer. We're going after those RV parks and tent campgrounds that have professional management. Believe it or not.

There's no aggregation happening in that world. You don't have a booking.com product in that world. You literally have to go to Google, search, make a phone call, write an email, send a letter. Right. All this, like, old school stuff, sort of pre digital almost. And we know this know I know this from firsthand account. I have an RV, and for me to actually book an RV campground in a trip that I take with the kids, well, they're a little older now, so they're giving me a fight not to go anymore. But when they were younger, I took them all the time, and it's like, it's such a pain in the ass, right, to actually do this.

So I knew this as a consumer. I had a team come to me. It wasn't fully baked, and we sort of were able to now build a company around it and have a great story there that we're continuing to build. So that's that. We also almost had one more done and ultimately decided not to do it. But we're looking for teams that we can partner with and add value to that are missing something, and they're having a hard time maybe completing the picture. I think oftentimes we could do that for them and help them.

Sweet. We're super excited to keep up with not only you, but all the companies that you're backing. I was going through the portfolio. I know we've had furnish on the Pod as well. That's one of their companies as well as so anyway, congrats on all the success so far. We're excited to see what you continue to get involved in because I know myself and I know Ramon knows, as a builder, you're just always excited to get your hands dirty and keep building, right? So really excited for that. Thanks for coming on the Pod. And then for our listeners, where can they connect with you, learn more about you personally, r squared.

If you want to just give your socials a shout out.

Yeah. So Roy ribbon on LinkedIn and Twitter. I think it's Royribin Five on Twitter. And just Roy Ribbon@gmail.com. If there's anyone out there that needs chat, we'd love to do that.

Thanks so much, Roy.

Thank you.

Thank you, guys. I appreciate it.

Thanks for tuning in and we hope you enjoyed this episode of DTC Pod. If you enjoyed the show, we'd love your support. A rating and review would go a long way as we continue to host the best builders in DTC and beyond. Follow and subscribe to the show and make sure to check out our show notes. Where you can find our socials and weekly newsletter, visit us on dtcpod.com to join our founder community and access resources from every episode.