Niel Robertson – The Future of Media

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:59)
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**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (1:24)
This week's episode covers a new set of topics. The conversation with Niel Robertson covers media, e-sports, content distribution, marketing, and a lot more. Niel started the software company out of his bedroom when he was 14 years old and sold his first company in 1999 for $280 million when he was just 24
He has started and sold other companies to Twitter and Cisco. He started another large business that ultimately failed. He's been an investor, venture partner, and serial entrepreneur. You can find more about Neil's background in the show notes.
As I often do, I cut the long background section from the interview so that we can get right to the meat of things. But Niel concluded that section saying, I think it could all be summed up by saying, I just like building things and I can't stop doing it. In addition to the overall media landscape, we discussed the role that the biggest media platforms will play and where other opportunities may exist. We covered digital collectibles stored on the blockchain and what type of digital assets may be leased out to others. We close with a discussion of leadership, company structure, content creation, and something you should do each year. Please enjoy this unique conversation with Niel Robertson.
So there's in our, when we first met and in our thinking and emailing back and forth about this conversation, there are so many different avenues that we could go down and talk about. So I'll do my best to return to a few common themes and those might be the state of media, content, the role you already mentioned of influencers, this idea of marketplaces and technology and content and how these all fit together. We could talk about things like e-sports and digital collectibles and I think all of these threads can be tied back to some core concepts. So maybe you could begin by giving your assessment of the landscape along those major themes as you see it today, maybe specifically with media and content as like the big thing overarching all of this and then we'll go down these individual paths.

**Niel Robertson** (3:12)
Absolutely.
So I got sort of sucked into thinking heavily about this problem, problem space, because my business partner and I jumped into the influencer marketing game. And for those that are not familiar with influencer marketing, they've witnessed it even if they don't understand the underlying industry. Generally speaking, it's finding anybody that has an audience, whether it's this podcast or a model on Instagram or anything in between. Now people on Twitch, for example, playing games, anybody that aggregates an audience and leveraging that aggregation of an audience to help promote something, usually products.
That's kind of as complex and simple as it is.
When we started in the industry, it was very much focused on retail. So there had been a number of really insightful people that had built really big businesses out of nowhere by taking advantage of this new channel. So one of the early players, for example, an Australian company called Frank's Body Scrub was someone who was a barista in a coffee shop and people kept coming in and asking for the coffee grounds. They said, why are you putting them on their plants? And they said, no, we actually put them in our face cream and there's something about the caffeination of the coffee grounds that is really wonderful. So they looked into this and decided it was a great product category and they built this campaign where essentially they got early on Australian models who essentially rub coffee grounds on their face, post it on Instagram and say, like, this is the new, new thing.