Kevin Ryan: How This Billionaire Founder Finds +$20B Business Ideas

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
You violate this rule that I have for myself, and you do it so wonderfully, which is focus. Or at least it appears as you do. You launch, I don't know, how many companies a year do you launch?

**Sam Parr** (0:11)
Eight.

**Shaan Puri** (0:12)
Eight? God damn.
All right, we're live. Kevin, do you, this is Kevin Ryan. Do you remember me?

**Sam Parr** (0:29)
I don't remember where we met.

**Kevin Ryan** (0:30)
I know we've met, but I don't remember where.

**Shaan Puri** (0:32)
That's good. Okay. You don't have to remember. So basically, I'm going to tell you why this is funny. So basically, I've studied you for maybe 10 years. So you started, you were the president and CEO of DoubleClick, which had like a billion dollar plus exit. And then you have started like four or five companies that are, one's worth, I think, 28 billion today. One's worth, you have a couple billion dollar exits, but you started Business Insider. And I cold emailed you maybe 50 times.
And one of those times, because I admired you so much, and we'll talk about your career, but I wanted to be like you. And one of those emails, you finally replied, and you just said like, thanks for the updates, whatever.
And then I lied and I said, I'm going to be in New York tomorrow. Can I get 20 minutes of your time? And you let me do that. And I came to your office for literally 20 or 30 minutes. We had such an impactful conversation. And then you did another follow up call with me and I have the notes from those calls. And this was in 2017 And you made a bunch of predictions about my life, as well as the media business and a few other things that were 100% true.
And I refer back to that note sheet on a consistent basis to help make some decisions.

**Kevin Ryan** (1:42)
Oh, interesting. Well, sometimes I get lucky and I get it right.

**Shaan Puri** (1:46)
And you want to know what? Your PR people cold emailed us to get you on the pod. So the tables have turned, my friend. Welcome to my world.
But I just want to say, I've admired you for a long time. You're a really big deal to me. And so I'm so happy that we're able to finally do this. This is awesome.

**Sam Parr** (2:05)
And Kevin, you don't know me, but I did not stalk you. I did not cold email you. In fact, I was a little bit just jealous of you because I was at the time working in a, when Sam was telling me about you, I was working at a startup incubator studio. And so we were launching four or five companies a year and after three or four years, I was like, I don't know if this model even works. I just feel like it's like this, because there's something inorganic about the studio model versus like just a normal startup that comes from an entrepreneur solving their own itch.
And he's like, well, I don't know, this guy, Kevin Ryan seems to do it. He's cranked out four or $5 billion companies out of this. And I was like, huh, I guess I should shut up and just, you know, not the model. That's the problem. It's me.
So, you know, I think not only is it cool that you built big media companies, it's cool that you made the studio model work when very few people have been able to do that.

**Kevin Ryan** (2:58)
No, no, I still enjoy it.
By and large, it's still working. You know, things go wrong. It's not, I wouldn't say it's easy, but we have a lot of companies that are doing really well in different sectors. And so that's what's so fun. And look, there are more things to be done.
There are many problems in society that have not been solved.

**Shaan Puri** (3:15)
And basically the high level story of you is you have like a normal corporate career, but then you kind of like worked your way into DoubleClick, which eventually, I think became AdWords at Google.

**Kevin Ryan** (3:26)
Exactly, yeah. So Google bought it for about $3 billion in 2007 The company started in 1996 I was there for nine years. It was public for seven years. First four years went from 10 people when I joined to 2,000, we're so crazy, and 25 countries. So that's what I spent my early 30s doing. Then we spent three years bringing back to 1,000 people as the internet collapsed and 70% of our clients went bankrupt. So don't do that.