Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome to this week's edition of the Bob
Speaker 1: Left Sets Podcast. My guest this week is my friend
Speaker 1: and CEO extraordinaire of gold Star Events, Jim McCarthy. Hi, Bob,
Speaker 1: how's it going good. We're here in the middle of
Speaker 1: the summer. I'm sure it's your busy season for those people.
Speaker 1: How many cities is gold Star in now? Seventy or
Speaker 1: eighty in the United States? Really it's all over the place. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But for those people unaware of what gold Star is,
Speaker 1: why don't you explain? Gold Star is designed to help
Speaker 1: you answer the question what are you gonna do this weekend, tonight,
Speaker 1: in a couple of weeks, when your sister comes into town,
Speaker 1: whatever it is. And the way we do that is
Speaker 1: by bringing together a thout literally thousands of organizers, promoters,
Speaker 1: venues who have events to sell with people who want
Speaker 1: to buy them. The biggest problem that people have when
Speaker 1: it comes to live entertainment just knowing what's going on.
Speaker 1: One thing that I do it almost never fails, is
Speaker 1: I asked somebody named three or four things that are
Speaker 1: happening in your town this weekend, as people can come
Speaker 1: up with zero to one. You know, they're really they're
Speaker 1: just unaware of the stuff that's going on. And the
Speaker 1: reality is that in every major American city there's just
Speaker 1: great stuff going on. So gold Star puts them all together.
Speaker 1: We work directly with those venues and promoters to make
Speaker 1: the event content for sale on gold Star. We make
Speaker 1: the process to buy it and discover it really easy.
Speaker 1: In most cases, there's a discount, as you know, and
Speaker 1: the whole thing is that when you use gold Star,
Speaker 1: people go out twice as often as when they're not
Speaker 1: using gold Stars and members. So that's our goal. Let's
Speaker 1: look at it from the consumer rand, uh and correct
Speaker 1: me if I'm wrong. For the consumer rand, it's basically
Speaker 1: a site that you can go into where you can
Speaker 1: find events in your area that generally speaking are sold
Speaker 1: at a discount. It's it's that's not a bad general
Speaker 1: statement about it. It's an app and a site also
Speaker 1: of course an email. Um, but it's it's a little
Speaker 1: bit of everything. I mean, you know, about ten percent
Speaker 1: of our business is actually full price sales. So these
Speaker 1: are that are events that aren't discounted, but they are
Speaker 1: available on gold Star because again, and we have nine
Speaker 1: million people who come to us for one reason and
Speaker 1: one reason only, and that's to figure out what they're
Speaker 1: gonna go do. So as a platform simply to reach
Speaker 1: people who are looking for something to do. Cold Stars
Speaker 1: pretty much number one. Okay, at this point in time,
Speaker 1: it's hard to know what's going on. So mean, you
Speaker 1: even get the newspaper. You read the newspaper, but an
Speaker 1: event that happened that you were unaware of. No one
Speaker 1: has been able to create one site that's a go
Speaker 1: to place for all events. Generally speaking. We're in Los
Speaker 1: Angeles now, you will only list events that you have
Speaker 1: tickets for, correct and of events. I don't know how
Speaker 1: we can quantify this, but of events, let's say in
Speaker 1: an average city like Los Angeles, how many of those
Speaker 1: events do you think you have tickets for? I think
Speaker 1: we're in Los Angeles right now. We're selling about six events.
Speaker 1: So it's certainly not exhaustive. There are events that we
Speaker 1: don't have, but we have a lot, And I think
Speaker 1: the question is less do we have every single thing,
Speaker 1: and more can we find you something big or small,
Speaker 1: well known or or not so well known that's going
Speaker 1: to enable you to go have a great time. So
Speaker 1: that's how we look at it. It's a lot of events, okay,
Speaker 1: because I know people who use the site and they'll say, well,
Speaker 1: it's Saturday night, I have no plans, or let me
Speaker 1: see what's on gold Star. Would you think that's your
Speaker 1: average customer. It's a combination of that sort of use
Speaker 1: case where it's like, hey, what can I do? You know,
Speaker 1: give me give me something to do, and another one
Speaker 1: where we do promote events and email is a big
Speaker 1: tool for us. You sign up, you get emails that
Speaker 1: are automatically tailored for for what you like a little
Speaker 1: bit slower. Yeah, assuming I have to have it? Can
Speaker 1: I see the events if I don't have an account, Yes,
Speaker 1: you can. You can see the events, but to purchase
Speaker 1: anything you need an account. Yeah, I mean there's nothing
Speaker 1: to having in a kiss free. But but my next
Speaker 1: question is if I have an account, do I have
Speaker 1: to receive the not at all. You can unsubscribe from
Speaker 1: any and all emails and a lot of people, do
Speaker 1: you know. Okay, So, assuming I have signed up to
Speaker 1: the service, I'm getting email? Am I getting the email
Speaker 1: that the person who lives down the street from me?
Speaker 1: Is every email is actually individual? How do you do that?
Speaker 1: It's a technology we call Matchmaker, which is a combination
Speaker 1: of all the data from everything that everybody does. You know,
Speaker 1: if you click on something, I click on something, I
Speaker 1: buy something, I forward an email. All of that creates
Speaker 1: a complex set of mathematics that I don't even begin
Speaker 1: to understand. But it implies what your tastes are as
Speaker 1: opposed to mine, and it looks for things that are
Speaker 1: more likely to match yours than mine. And actually, you know,
Speaker 1: we've been doing this for We've been doing this for
Speaker 1: almost fourteen years now. The the filtering that's sort of automated, um,
Speaker 1: but in the last year we've actually really taken it
Speaker 1: forward with the next gen version of this technology, which
Speaker 1: is really making a difference in terms of finding things
Speaker 1: that really suit people. Uh And by the way, the
Speaker 1: thing I like best about it's not just that people
Speaker 1: are you know, clicking on it more and buying more.
Speaker 1: We're actually sharing them a wider range of things. Why
Speaker 1: would it be wider because we're actually able to figure
Speaker 1: out a little bit more what's special about your taste
Speaker 1: than somebody else's. So that means because we have this
Speaker 1: big pool of events to draw from, we're actually finding
Speaker 1: you know, events and putting them in front of people
Speaker 1: in a in a more diverse, you know way, because
Speaker 1: the technology is just evolved to be smarter. Okay, So
Speaker 1: if I'm signed up and I'm getting email, how often
Speaker 1: will I get an email? Depends? Many people will get
Speaker 1: an email about once a day, Some people get more
Speaker 1: often because they like to open them, and other people,
Speaker 1: of course get maybe one or two a week. And
Speaker 1: then of course you can opt for none whatsoever. Let's
Speaker 1: assuming I'm opting in. How do you decide how many
Speaker 1: emails I get? It depends a lot on how much
Speaker 1: you like the email. So the more you open and
Speaker 1: read them, the more likely you already get a second
Speaker 1: one in a day, let's say, or two days in
Speaker 1: a row. If you don't open them, don't look at
Speaker 1: them as often, the amounts or tapers off. So it's
Speaker 1: all all within the It's the ghost in the machine
Speaker 1: that's figuring this out. There's no human thing. There's program
Speaker 1: that's written and you have all that feedback whether it's
Speaker 1: opened or not. Does it also, uh, does frequency depend
Speaker 1: on whether I buy or not? Actually, no, it really doesn't.
Speaker 1: When it comes to email, which is just one part
Speaker 1: of the business. It really isn't about purchases as much
Speaker 1: as it is your your email behave. So if I
Speaker 1: get any email, how many events will it tell me about?
Speaker 1: Some emails are focused on a single event, with maybe
Speaker 1: a dozen or so secondary events that are pulled out
Speaker 1: of this matchmaker technology, and some one of the most
Speaker 1: popular ones comes out on Tuesday. It's a great, big
Speaker 1: compendium of the stuff that's in your in your city,
Speaker 1: let's say. And so that could be okay, how do
Speaker 1: you get ed gold star? How do you get the tickets?
Speaker 1: We work and this is something that whenever I tell
Speaker 1: this story it seems incredibly painful and and arduous, because
Speaker 1: it really was painful and arduous. But we have thousands
Speaker 1: of relationships with promoters and venues and we work directly
Speaker 1: with them to actually take this inventory on consignment. So
Speaker 1: it's not so you don't buy any of the inventority.
Speaker 1: So let's assume to reuse raw numbers, you have a
Speaker 1: hundred tickets and you sell fifty of them, you will
Speaker 1: give the other fifty back to the promoter. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: I said, it's like, think of it as a consignment,
Speaker 1: you know, we we uh. And then what's interesting is
Speaker 1: it used to be as you're saying kind of a
Speaker 1: process of like, hey, give us I'm doing air quotes,
Speaker 1: give us a hundred tickets, We sell as many as
Speaker 1: we can and then sort of return the other fifty
Speaker 1: if it's fifty. But you know, because we're actually digitally
Speaker 1: connected with the key ticketing systems, now, it almost doesn't
Speaker 1: even it's almost just a maximum. You know, they put
Speaker 1: a hundred, we sell whatever. They never really left the
Speaker 1: pool of state. So it's that's evolved. Let's just say
Speaker 1: hypothetically you sell a hundred and the events still a
Speaker 1: couple of days away, and let's assume the event is
Speaker 1: not instantly sold out. Do you tend to be able
Speaker 1: to get more tickets? Yeah. That that's one of the
Speaker 1: things that we've really keyed on over the years is
Speaker 1: when something is moving, we want to encourage the promoter
Speaker 1: to put more tickets to be available where people are buying. Uh.
Speaker 1: In fact, that they can do it for themselves. Now,
Speaker 1: so if you're if you're a gold star organizer in
Speaker 1: our system, you can go in and actually add inventory
Speaker 1: directly with no human intervention in the system. Okay, let's
Speaker 1: say it's January one you need and let's focused on
Speaker 1: one city you need x amount of inventory to run
Speaker 1: your business at this point, to what degree is that
Speaker 1: automated or they're people at your company who are literally
Speaker 1: have relationships with the event producers and deciding how many
Speaker 1: tickets and what events, etcetera. Those two things aren't necessarily
Speaker 1: in conflict with each other. The relationships and the automation,
Speaker 1: they work hand in hand because what we don't want
Speaker 1: people at gold Star doing is pushing paper around. We
Speaker 1: want them giving good marketing input to our partners in
Speaker 1: the venues. So although now we're about nine plus percent
Speaker 1: automated in terms of the process, by fall, it's can
Speaker 1: automated in terms of the process, the process process of
Speaker 1: of inventor Yeah that's right, yeah, um. Even though our
Speaker 1: goal is to make the manual to the way I
Speaker 1: put it is, if if it's something a computer could
Speaker 1: do just as well as a human, then a computer
Speaker 1: should do it. Um. But there are a lot of
Speaker 1: things that a human and only a human can really do,
Speaker 1: which is to help people understand how to take best
Speaker 1: advantage of the gold Star audience. And so the the
Speaker 1: automation and the human touch don't conflict, but they change
Speaker 1: right there. No longer do we have people doing as
Speaker 1: much sort of manual information manipulation as as in say,
Speaker 1: ten years ago. Let's focus on the consumer side first.
Speaker 1: So you have excellent X number of events. What do
Speaker 1: you do is the what do you do as a
Speaker 1: company to encourage me to buy a ticket other than
Speaker 1: send me an email? Is there marketing in the emails
Speaker 1: or any science in that they'll say, oh, this makes
Speaker 1: it more attractive. Well, every email isn't, like I said,
Speaker 1: as individual, so that the email part of it is
Speaker 1: um is designed to respond to what you do. But
Speaker 1: in the same way. The app and the website do
Speaker 1: this do the exact same thing, So your experience of
Speaker 1: both the website and the app are also individualized based
Speaker 1: on the same matchmaker technology. That's one thing. I think.
Speaker 1: The other thing is that, you know, one of the
Speaker 1: things that I'm happiest about is that we are able
Speaker 1: to bring to people's attention awesome events that they just
Speaker 1: wouldn't know about. I mean, give us a couple of examples. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think of a couple of recent ones that you know,
Speaker 1: they're they're actually there was a whole serie. You may
Speaker 1: have seen this at some point. Do you see any
Speaker 1: of the for the record shows at the Rockwell Stages
Speaker 1: in in in l A. No, I did not. It
Speaker 1: was a really great series of shows and there's still
Speaker 1: some shows that are going on there. And Shane Shield
Speaker 1: as the producer, really creative, sort of young, you know producer. Uh.
Speaker 1: These are shows that happened in a kind of a
Speaker 1: bar restaurant environment. They were these immersive shows where the
Speaker 1: performers were singing and performing all around you. And they
Speaker 1: would take something like the movies of John Hughes and
Speaker 1: they would do a little scene and in a song
Speaker 1: from one of the John Hughes movies. And these are
Speaker 1: shows that, again you never heard of them, but they
Speaker 1: brought in really really high caliber performers and just did
Speaker 1: an amazing fun show. Um wasn't I mean they were full, right,
Speaker 1: I mean we we helped really people. And so how
Speaker 1: big were the venues? How many tickets were available at large?
Speaker 1: I think probably there were two or three hundred. I'm
Speaker 1: just thinking back to the venue. They brought two or
Speaker 1: three hundred people who could be seated there, Okay, And
Speaker 1: how many tickets of the two or three hundred did
Speaker 1: gold Stars cell do you think? Um? I'm sure it varied,
Speaker 1: but I know there are nights when we sold fifty
Speaker 1: or seventy five of those. Okay, So to be in
Speaker 1: this particular case, this producer did not have a previous
Speaker 1: history with gold Star correct at some point? Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: so how would they hook up with gold Star. We're
Speaker 1: pretty well known just out there in the industry, I
Speaker 1: would say, as a place where you're going to find
Speaker 1: a live entertainment audience. And so that's one thing, you know,
Speaker 1: where we put out every possible you know, feeler that
Speaker 1: we can to to make it easy for people to
Speaker 1: come in. But of course, what we do have people
Speaker 1: doing our venue team is looking around and saying, okay,
Speaker 1: what's going on? You know, So we try to have
Speaker 1: people who have a real interest or curiosity about just
Speaker 1: what's happening in the places where they're serving um, and
Speaker 1: they go look at that. That sounds good? I mean
Speaker 1: that that's I think often where it starts as someone goes, oh,
Speaker 1: I want to go to that, you know, and as
Speaker 1: soon as you have that impulse of what I want
Speaker 1: to go to that, well, it's like, well then don't
Speaker 1: you think maybe there's a few hundred other people who
Speaker 1: want to go to that? And so they'll they'll reach
Speaker 1: out and to the producer. They'll do some research and
Speaker 1: find out who's behind a certain show or a certain
Speaker 1: event and say, hey, you should, really, you know, put
Speaker 1: this on gold Star are and you can reach our
Speaker 1: vast you know, live entertainment audience. How many people are
Speaker 1: on are signed up ACT and are active in Los Angeles?
Speaker 1: About a million? Okay, so let's focus it once more
Speaker 1: on the consumer side. You have this for the record event.
Speaker 1: Can you name another event that you brought attention to him? Sure, Um,
Speaker 1: there have been, Uh, let me think of a couple
Speaker 1: of We do a lot of theater and I think
Speaker 1: you know that too, that there have been some theater
Speaker 1: events that, um, for some reason are eluding me at
Speaker 1: the moment. But there's a there's a theater event in
Speaker 1: Burbank right now at the Gary Marshall Theater. Really interesting
Speaker 1: and I would just editorialize this is part of the
Speaker 1: TV Academy. That's the theater. It's actually just Gary Marshall's
Speaker 1: project that he started some years ago before he died.
Speaker 1: Is a really small theater, beautifully done as you'd imagine,
Speaker 1: and he passed away a few years ago. But but
Speaker 1: this is one of his projects. He wanted to create
Speaker 1: a really attractive, you know, small theater space and has
Speaker 1: done great work, just great work there over the years
Speaker 1: in a really small setting that's just you know, nicely done,
Speaker 1: great environment, etcetera. And there's a show there right now
Speaker 1: or may have just recently closed called wood Boy dog
Speaker 1: Fish and it is a really odd, very very well
Speaker 1: staged poppetry and immersive experience with a lot of technology.
Speaker 1: And we send a lot of people to it. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's a it's certainly an event that you probably have
Speaker 1: to be a theater person to really but but you
Speaker 1: could also easily miss it. Even even as a big
Speaker 1: theater fan, you can easily miss it. But we sent
Speaker 1: a lot of people to it. And I'm just telling
Speaker 1: you it's done at an extremely high level of quality. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's done, and it's done well. It's just that,
Speaker 1: you know, our audience is you know, coal for the
Speaker 1: fire of their success. Let's go to the other extreme.
Speaker 1: These are events the average person would miss. That's right.
Speaker 1: How about a major event that I want to ticket.
Speaker 1: To give me an example, just use an example of
Speaker 1: something at the Forum the Greek Hollywood Bowl for us,
Speaker 1: we have a lot of that content, but where we
Speaker 1: don't see our role as being and and maybe the
Speaker 1: overtime this could change, but we don't see our role
Speaker 1: as being um a major player and where you go
Speaker 1: to for sure find that right. So if you if
Speaker 1: you want to be able to buy anything that's at
Speaker 1: the Hollywood Bowl, we we think you're probably going to
Speaker 1: be able to find that, right. I mean, Google is
Speaker 1: if you know exactly what you want at a major,
Speaker 1: major venue, your your best tool is Google in most cases,
Speaker 1: So we don't we don't. We're happy to provide that.
Speaker 1: And one of the reasons that we have inventory at
Speaker 1: full price in many cases is because we know that
Speaker 1: we're the place where a lot of people do their
Speaker 1: ticket buying, so we wanted to be available for them.
Speaker 1: But we don't see it as um. We don't see
Speaker 1: it as sort of our mission to make sure we
Speaker 1: have every single thing in those in those big venues.
Speaker 1: But let's say you know the Hollywood Bowl which plays
Speaker 1: over the summer. There are two different promoters there, one
Speaker 1: Live Nation, one the Philharmonic of the Let's call it
Speaker 1: a hundred shows over the summer. How many do you
Speaker 1: think would be on gold Start? You said, and with
Speaker 1: those fifty tend to be full price. I mean, in
Speaker 1: those cases with a really big venue would tend to
Speaker 1: be a combination at price points. So even with the
Speaker 1: within the same you know, as you know that there's
Speaker 1: never any trouble selling right up front, right way far
Speaker 1: back at the Hollywood back, or oftentimes it's in the
Speaker 1: middle where it gets a little mushy, and just the
Speaker 1: bowl issue. It's everywhere, right, the low price is attractive
Speaker 1: to people, the best seats are attractive to people, and
Speaker 1: where it gets a little mushy in general in the
Speaker 1: industry is that sort of middle point where it's not
Speaker 1: always easy to find the exact match of price and
Speaker 1: seat um. And so the bigger the venue, the higher that's,
Speaker 1: the more likely that is to be true. Right, the
Speaker 1: more complex the pricing. Okay, let's switch completely to the
Speaker 1: producers side. So when gold Star started, which was what
Speaker 1: two thousand two, the image and you can tell whether
Speaker 1: it's reality, was this is a place to sell discount tickets.
Speaker 1: And let's use concert promoters as a classic example. They
Speaker 1: did not not want their tickets discounted. They didn't want
Speaker 1: the image and the value of the product to be
Speaker 1: do devalued. Is that an accurate description? I think it is. Yes,
Speaker 1: I think I think that's an accurate description of the
Speaker 1: thought process in general about pricing in two thousand and two. Okay,
Speaker 1: so how did you deal with that change that, you know,
Speaker 1: interact with that. I think that we were onto something
Speaker 1: in the in the meta sense when we started the
Speaker 1: company in two thousand and two, which is that pricing
Speaker 1: would become more complex and more important in the live
Speaker 1: entertainment business than it was in the pre really the
Speaker 1: pre web era, go back to whenever prices were very
Speaker 1: simple relative price structures. You know, we're very simple relative
Speaker 1: to today obviously, and and pretty damn hard to change, right,
Speaker 1: I mean it was, you know, whether it's because of
Speaker 1: the hard tickets or you printed posters that had prices
Speaker 1: or whatever, it was, changing price was difficult. Well, now
Speaker 1: of course it's easier all the time. You know, it's
Speaker 1: just progressively easier. And what I think you see if
Speaker 1: you just look at the history of what computer technology
Speaker 1: has done with different industries, is it says, well, listen,
Speaker 1: prices a lever. Price is a lever that can change demand,
Speaker 1: can can change perception, can can change your business results
Speaker 1: in a way that's profound. It's one of the biggest
Speaker 1: levers in business. And so you can't really afford as
Speaker 1: an industry or an individual, you know, player within the
Speaker 1: industry to ignore price. You have to take full advantage
Speaker 1: of it um and so I think we knew that
Speaker 1: was one of the intuitions that we had about where
Speaker 1: live entertainment was as an industry when we started the business,
Speaker 1: which is just like, there's so little ability to change
Speaker 1: and move price that it's needed, you know. And and
Speaker 1: the first one that was kind of obvious was, hey,
Speaker 1: sometimes shows and sell out. So maybe if we made
Speaker 1: more people aware of them and used price as a
Speaker 1: motivator to really get them off the you know, out
Speaker 1: of that little rut and into actual ticket buying action,
Speaker 1: it'll work. And so that's how it started. So walk
Speaker 1: me through how long it took you to invade all
Speaker 1: these traditional players and how you ultimately convinced them to
Speaker 1: act differently and use your service. I mean it was
Speaker 1: a gradual process. I mean, we we were a bootstrapped organization,
Speaker 1: so we really operated lean for for many years. I Mean,
Speaker 1: in some ways, I feel like our heritage as a
Speaker 1: bootstrapped organization is still part of how we behave today. UM.
Speaker 1: But we were strictly in l A for a couple
Speaker 1: of years and then added west coast cities and then
Speaker 1: went back east in two thousand six and seven. So
Speaker 1: it really took us a while to sort of move
Speaker 1: out from from the base um our. Our initial success or,
Speaker 1: our initial audience was in theater and performing arts, because
Speaker 1: they're so many of those events, you know, and they
Speaker 1: really perceived a need to build audience, which is correct,
Speaker 1: um for anybody, it's correct. But so it probably when
Speaker 1: we started talking about more complex pricing and started to
Speaker 1: crack into UM music in particular, it probably took six
Speaker 1: or seven years to really start to say, listen, this
Speaker 1: is an audience of some scale. You know, it's not
Speaker 1: the biggest audience in the world. There's millions of people
Speaker 1: focused on one thing, which is live entertainment, and we
Speaker 1: can do a lot of different things with price and promotion.
Speaker 1: By the way, I mean, I don't know that anybody
Speaker 1: promotes live entertainment sort of as as fervently as we do,
Speaker 1: right Like, we're constantly, you know, promoting in a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of different ways, UM. And so you want to
Speaker 1: be part of that, right, Like, our our argument was
Speaker 1: this is the kind of media that you would spend
Speaker 1: real money for. You don't have to because this performance
Speaker 1: based and we're here to help you find what part
Speaker 1: of our audience can will benefit your business. We'll take
Speaker 1: a quick break and come back with more of my
Speaker 1: conversation with gold Star CEO and founder Jim McCarthy, recorded
Speaker 1: live at the tune In Studios in Venice, California. Most
Speaker 1: of the time I talked to musicians like Moby or
Speaker 1: managers like Chef Gordon, but I also really love getting
Speaker 1: the stories of the executives in and around the music industry,
Speaker 1: like Jim. Whether you come for the music, the tech business,
Speaker 1: or otherwise. Be the first year next week's episode by
Speaker 1: subscribing to the podcast on tune in, Apple Podcast, or
Speaker 1: your podcast player of choice. While you're there, please rate
Speaker 1: and review the podcast. Okay, let's get back to my
Speaker 1: conversation with Jim McCarthy. Okay, well, we know each other,
Speaker 1: but for the sake of the audience, you're originally from.
Speaker 1: I grew up in South Carolina. South Carolina. You know,
Speaker 1: how come you don't have an act set? Uh? Well,
Speaker 1: you know it's funny. I was a DJ at a
Speaker 1: radio station at home when I was in high school.
Speaker 1: That was my my high school job. And I was
Speaker 1: listening to this is a professional station? Yeah, well you know, yes,
Speaker 1: it was Yeah. It was like, you know, you're a guy.
Speaker 1: I could ask this, how old are you today? I'm okay,
Speaker 1: so we're talking. You're a d J in the eighties
Speaker 1: and yeah, like eighties, eight six seven. Yeah, And we
Speaker 1: had there was a little AM station that had a
Speaker 1: you know, probably a nice forty mile radius, and then
Speaker 1: we also did a satellite FM station that all we
Speaker 1: had to do is monitor it. But on the AM station,
Speaker 1: I literally was spenning the records, literally getting to the
Speaker 1: office an hour before my shift and pulling records down
Speaker 1: from the uh the collection and you know, planning out
Speaker 1: my my shift and everything. But uh and then you know,
Speaker 1: potting up the commercials and you know, the station identification
Speaker 1: ABC News at the top of the hour and all
Speaker 1: the rest of that stuff. Well, how did you get
Speaker 1: that gig? Because I was the UH in the super
Speaker 1: Nerdy Broadcast club in my high school and we made
Speaker 1: a radio show every week for our high school, which
Speaker 1: was fun. Was just the most fun thing in my
Speaker 1: week of course, and uh and so we were we
Speaker 1: actually made it at this radio station. They very kindly
Speaker 1: allowed us to uh to use their studio to make
Speaker 1: the record, to make the radio show once a week.
Speaker 1: And so somebody said, hey, you know there's there's this
Speaker 1: weekend um DJ who's leaving? You know you sound pretty good?
Speaker 1: Why don't you? Would you be interested in this? I
Speaker 1: was like, hell, yeah, I'm interested in this. You know,
Speaker 1: in high school your job options are few. But you
Speaker 1: know I didn't get and get paid diddly squad. But
Speaker 1: I mean, come on, you know, of all the things
Speaker 1: you could be doing as a high school job, that's
Speaker 1: pretty good. Well, how much were you on the radio
Speaker 1: in a week? I was on usually for one or
Speaker 1: two shifts, So I would be on either a Saturday
Speaker 1: morning from sort of eight to twelve when no one
Speaker 1: else wanted to work no one else wanted to work,
Speaker 1: or even worse, from eight to twelve pm on Saturday
Speaker 1: evening when nobody When I went to college, I remember
Speaker 1: I was on the college radios. I had, you know,
Speaker 1: the morning on Saturday no one else wanted the already
Speaker 1: was people listened because they wake up and they listened
Speaker 1: to the station. Absolutely, so that was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, that's just um. I didn't care
Speaker 1: when it was right, I was. I was so happy
Speaker 1: to be there and it was what do they call it?
Speaker 1: Not adult alternative? It was it was sort of a
Speaker 1: slightly on hip pop station, do you know what I mean? Um?
Speaker 1: But I of course had strong enough taste in music
Speaker 1: to be able to carve out a pretty cool set,
Speaker 1: you know, within the range. Okay, you're in South Carolina.
Speaker 1: What do your parents do for a living? My father
Speaker 1: was a meteorologist in the Air Force meteat what is that?
Speaker 1: What do you actually do if you're a meteorologist? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean the Air Force depends on whether right, So
Speaker 1: you have to constantly make observations and forecasts so that
Speaker 1: the planes can either fly or not fly, or they're
Speaker 1: aware of whatever dangers there there might be out there. Okay,
Speaker 1: And your mother worked in the home, yes, okay, But
Speaker 1: was he from South Carolina? No? No, we actually lived
Speaker 1: on most of the time, lived on an Air Force
Speaker 1: base in South Carolina, which is part of why I
Speaker 1: don't really have And I was gonna get back to that, yeah,
Speaker 1: because you know, it had this wonderful benefit of having
Speaker 1: this extremely cosmopolitan little island in the middle of South Carolina.
Speaker 1: So I head so both you know, both influences. Um.
Speaker 1: But you know, an air Force base is I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just one of the most cosmopolitan places you can
Speaker 1: imagine because people are literally from everywhere, um, both around
Speaker 1: the country and also around the world, because people go overseas,
Speaker 1: they get married, they bring wives and I guess husband's
Speaker 1: back you know, to the states, and cultures mix and
Speaker 1: it's really interesting. Okay. And this was a public school
Speaker 1: you were going to? Yeah, oh yeah, okay. And did
Speaker 1: you live in government housing? There were times when we
Speaker 1: lived on base, which is base housing. If you've spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time around military people, I have not. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, when you're in the military, which was true
Speaker 1: for part of my childhood. So he was literally in
Speaker 1: the middlitary I know, he was you know, you know,
Speaker 1: wearing a uniform of work and all that, all that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. Um. And yeah, we lived in base
Speaker 1: housing for some of my childhood, not all. And then
Speaker 1: how long was he in the military. He retired. It
Speaker 1: did not work again, I made a long career or
Speaker 1: do you have a second No, he was very young
Speaker 1: when he retired. I mean that's you know, that's one
Speaker 1: of the perks of the military, as you retire when
Speaker 1: you're forty and take your pension and go do something else.
Speaker 1: So did he do something? Oh yeah, yeah, he he continued,
Speaker 1: actually with meteorology. Um, okay, And there are how many
Speaker 1: kids in your family? I have two younger brothers, so
Speaker 1: you're the older. I'm the oldest. Now you end up
Speaker 1: probably not a surprise to you, but you end up
Speaker 1: going to Harvard. Did where did your father and mother
Speaker 1: go to college? Well? Neither of them went to college? Really? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you were did they Were they pushing you? Were
Speaker 1: they tiger parents? Well? There was unfortunately little more disorder
Speaker 1: in my family situation than if you were listening up
Speaker 1: to now then you would probably pick up on. But
Speaker 1: my mother was one of these single, single ish mothers
Speaker 1: at least part of the time, just did a heroic
Speaker 1: job with me and my brothers. Do you know it
Speaker 1: just to be clear, because your father was out on
Speaker 1: on the road. Well, they got divorced and there was
Speaker 1: just this this chaos in in the was they got divorced,
Speaker 1: but then they got back together. Okay, So how old
Speaker 1: were they when you got divorced? Okay, relatively young? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: And did either of them get remarried? They both did,
Speaker 1: and there are other children, um no, no, no other
Speaker 1: children from from those subsequent Okay, so when your parents
Speaker 1: get divorced, you continue to live in South Carolina because
Speaker 1: and funnily enough, my my grandfather retired at the same
Speaker 1: Air Force base and so a little nexus of families
Speaker 1: sort of grew up in that area around there. Okay,
Speaker 1: so your mother is a single mother. Yeah, yes, And
Speaker 1: so you were telling the story, well, just that her
Speaker 1: her effort in keeping the three of us on track
Speaker 1: in life, I would put down as being heroic, you know,
Speaker 1: in the sense that she didn't really have it. She
Speaker 1: was very young, my mother's my mother's was seventeen when
Speaker 1: I was born. Yeah, so she didn't really have, you know,
Speaker 1: this huge background of knowing, you know, what college do,
Speaker 1: none of that, right, She just had a very strong
Speaker 1: focus on making sure that that we, you know, stayed
Speaker 1: on the straight and narrow and most importantly, like, be
Speaker 1: a good person, go to college, and then it's up
Speaker 1: to you. Like this was really her mantra for Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: Harvard is at the pinnacle of the America's educational system.
Speaker 1: At what point did you realize in your career that
Speaker 1: you were on that track? Um? I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm sure the ball could have bounced the other way
Speaker 1: and never to end up someplace you know, awful like Yale.
Speaker 1: But um, you know it was. It was fairly early
Speaker 1: on in my school career though. I just was getting
Speaker 1: good grades. And I think when you get to the point,
Speaker 1: you know, an early high school or junior high where
Speaker 1: you realize, okay, my future is largely gonna be it's
Speaker 1: gonna be reshaped in a few years by going somewhere
Speaker 1: for college. Um. And so my logic was just the
Speaker 1: same as somebody who maybe realizes they're a really good
Speaker 1: basketball player, are really good, you know, It's like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is an opportunity. You know, this is an opportunity
Speaker 1: to to level up my set of possibilities. So I'm
Speaker 1: gonna take it super seriously. So it took getting the
Speaker 1: kind of credentials and everything putting myself in a position
Speaker 1: to go, whether it's Harvard or even Yale, but you
Speaker 1: know wherever, right, Um, that's my last shot at Yale
Speaker 1: for the of the day. Um. But what you know,
Speaker 1: whatever kind of place right that that I knew that
Speaker 1: that would mean a lot for me in terms of
Speaker 1: my my my view of the field, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. Okay, Now, you have two siblings. We've discussed
Speaker 1: it before. One one got into a boy band, that's right.
Speaker 1: But did they go to college? Uh? He did not.
Speaker 1: He did not, but he is uh, super talented and
Speaker 1: you know, his college essentially was touring the world as
Speaker 1: part of a boy band. And for those listening intently,
Speaker 1: the name of that boy band, no authority? Okay, Tommy,
Speaker 1: Tommy McCarthy. And then your other sibling, yeah, o, our brother,
Speaker 1: Jason is a general contractor building houses extremely successfully in
Speaker 1: um in Policy's Island, South Carolina. Did he go to college?
Speaker 1: He did? Yeah. In fact, he he went to uh
Speaker 1: the University of South Carolina, and then he got his
Speaker 1: master's degree in I think the degree is in education.
Speaker 1: But he was for a period of time a a
Speaker 1: counselor in the high school. Okay, so you go to Harvard.
Speaker 1: Harvard is need blind such that if you don't have
Speaker 1: the money, they give you the money. I assume you've
Speaker 1: got some kind of scholarship tons. No, you know, I
Speaker 1: think it's one of the as as a you know,
Speaker 1: Harvard alum and interviewer, and that I just want to say, no,
Speaker 1: one should not apply to Harvard or and there's others,
Speaker 1: you know, many other schools because of the anny side.
Speaker 1: This is one of the saddest things to me when
Speaker 1: people actually who might qualify might end up, you know,
Speaker 1: getting access to one of these places and doesn't apply
Speaker 1: because they make some assumptions about, oh, it's too expensible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's super expensive. But almost nobody pays for Harvard, at
Speaker 1: least in full. And certainly you know, Harvard and Yale
Speaker 1: and Stanford and several other schools of that nature have
Speaker 1: have made very specific statements of like, hey, if your
Speaker 1: family incomes below this, you're not paying a dime. You know,
Speaker 1: it doesn't well as they say, they call it need
Speaker 1: blind such, if you can get in on the criteria
Speaker 1: of academics whatever, they will give you the money. If
Speaker 1: they you don't have it, that's right, And I think
Speaker 1: it's wonderful. And so when you went to Harvard, did
Speaker 1: you have to pay it all? Yeah, we had a
Speaker 1: little they go through. They went through and make a
Speaker 1: little assessment of what you have to pay. I think
Speaker 1: if I had been their post the new policy and
Speaker 1: the mid two thousand's, I wouldn't paid anything. But at
Speaker 1: that point they were still okay. But you go to
Speaker 1: Boston and it's well established that a great percentage of
Speaker 1: the student body goes to prep school comes from wealthy families.
Speaker 1: Do you feel like a fish out of water? I
Speaker 1: felt like a fish out of water in a good way,
Speaker 1: I really did. Like That way was that I felt
Speaker 1: that I had a somewhat broader kind of experience of
Speaker 1: of life than some of the people that I met.
Speaker 1: And by the way, I mean most of the people
Speaker 1: who went to you know, their and over and in
Speaker 1: these places that I really enjoyed them, you know. But
Speaker 1: I but I felt like I first of all, didn't
Speaker 1: feel I was at an educational disadvantage. Um but I'm
Speaker 1: not sure why, but I but I've never felt like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, I'm just you know, I'm like a
Speaker 1: I'm like a Volkswagen Beetle in a race with Ferrari.
Speaker 1: It never felt that. And secondly, I felt that because
Speaker 1: of all the kind of odd things, not odd but
Speaker 1: just slightly unusual things in my background, that I actually
Speaker 1: had a kind of like I could see things going
Speaker 1: on in the world that not everybody could see. You know,
Speaker 1: we were young, so you get life experience, you learned.
Speaker 1: So I had a little I guess, head start sort
Speaker 1: of the life experience side compared to some of them.
Speaker 1: So I saw it, you know, as a somewhat of
Speaker 1: a positive. And you know, Harvard Business School, which is
Speaker 1: certainly different from undergrad they have a lot of extracurricular
Speaker 1: activities that cost a lot of money. So when you
Speaker 1: were there, did you feel, which was not the business school,
Speaker 1: did you feel you could participate? You had enough wealth
Speaker 1: to be able to do that. I think it those
Speaker 1: in those days, the imfas it was certainly different from
Speaker 1: the business school as you as you say, but in
Speaker 1: those days, I mean, you know, I had enough money
Speaker 1: to go to Pinocchios and have a slice, and you know,
Speaker 1: it was never you know, if we want to go
Speaker 1: to Boston, and I think it was a little different
Speaker 1: in those days. I think that was it wasn't an issue.
Speaker 1: And what did you study? By the way, the other
Speaker 1: thing is, you know, you you get a job, you
Speaker 1: work eight or ten hours a week, and then you've got,
Speaker 1: you know, some money in your pocket. Like in the cafeteria,
Speaker 1: one of those cool jobs. Did you have to do
Speaker 1: that for your uh? For your wasn't required? No? Was,
Speaker 1: it wasn't required to Could I moved for an ure
Speaker 1: and you know, did a few other things like that?
Speaker 1: It was it was fine pocket money. So what did
Speaker 1: you study at Harvard? English? Okay? And as you can,
Speaker 1: I speak English? And you graduate in what year? And
Speaker 1: then you think what, uh, I'm trying to remember what
Speaker 1: my mindset was at the time. I remember thinking this
Speaker 1: is the fish out of water moment when you're senior
Speaker 1: in college then and now. But you know, in a
Speaker 1: certain kind of school, they at the beginning of the year,
Speaker 1: I'm sure you remember this, they say, hey, here's this
Speaker 1: recruiting process. Don't worry, you're gonna have a job when
Speaker 1: you you know, at the end of I went to
Speaker 1: College of the Dark Ages. Okay, nobody I know what
Speaker 1: there were recruiters at some point, but though all right,
Speaker 1: So there's this process and it's very organized and it
Speaker 1: continues to this day where at the beginning of senior
Speaker 1: maybe even junior year, they say, Okay, here's what it's
Speaker 1: gonna be. On this date. These people come in and
Speaker 1: they meet you, and then you spend points to interviews
Speaker 1: with mackenzie or with you know, Boston Consulting Group or
Speaker 1: whatever um and they have big you know fares where
Speaker 1: you come in and you see like, here are all
Speaker 1: the things, all the career of things. And so I
Speaker 1: went to these career things and it was basically and
Speaker 1: I'm not kidding here here management consulting, you know, like McKenzie,
Speaker 1: and then accounting like big, big what six or whatever
Speaker 1: it was at the time, some little smidgeon of real
Speaker 1: estate and the Peace Corps. And I just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's bad when the one I'm most interested in his
Speaker 1: Peace Corps, right, Like, I don't want to do any
Speaker 1: of this stuff. So I really I think I had
Speaker 1: that moment that a lot of young people have, which
Speaker 1: is what are there and you know what jobs are there?
Speaker 1: You know, I had no idea that's where whereas other
Speaker 1: people were confidently like buying really nice suits and you know,
Speaker 1: interviewing with McKenzie and going through those problems where they
Speaker 1: ask you how many gas stations there are in the
Speaker 1: United States and all that stuff, like I don't want
Speaker 1: to talk about that with these guys. So what did
Speaker 1: you do? So I, Um, I went to Japan and
Speaker 1: Japan doing what I taught English in Japan was that
Speaker 1: part of the Peace Corps. No, I didn't do the
Speaker 1: Peace Corps. That was just how did you get a
Speaker 1: gig teachings. So the woman UM, wonderful woman who owns
Speaker 1: a little English language school and Yamagucci Prefecture in Japan,
Speaker 1: came to Harvard every year as part of this process.
Speaker 1: She hired one of my best friends and he went
Speaker 1: over there, um just right after we graduated, like a
Speaker 1: couple of months later, he was there and so I
Speaker 1: sort of, I don't know, skulket around for a few
Speaker 1: months trying to figure out what in the world I
Speaker 1: was gonna do. UM, and he said, well, you should
Speaker 1: consider doing this because the other slot in our little
Speaker 1: branch of the school just opened up. We'll have a
Speaker 1: great time. Let me tell you more about it. And
Speaker 1: I thought, and this is a very mature thought for
Speaker 1: a person of my age at the time, one of
Speaker 1: the few ones I guess where. I thought, when will
Speaker 1: it ever be easier for me to just put all
Speaker 1: my stuff in a bag and fly to the other
Speaker 1: side of the world and just live for a while.
Speaker 1: And the answer was probably never, so maybe I had
Speaker 1: to do this, so I so I did. So how
Speaker 1: long were you there? I was actually there for two
Speaker 1: and a half years. So I thought I was gonna
Speaker 1: be there for the one year contract and uh ended
Speaker 1: up there for two and a half year. And where
Speaker 1: is this place in Japan? So, Yamaguchi Prefecture is on
Speaker 1: the main island, Honsho, the main island, but it's way
Speaker 1: down at the at the southern tips. So if you
Speaker 1: can imagine the geography of Japan's just kind of like
Speaker 1: there's the four major islands, the big island down in
Speaker 1: the south. And so how far are you from a
Speaker 1: city that we've heard of? Uh, well we are about
Speaker 1: yam Gucci is about a one hour train ride from Hidoshima,
Speaker 1: which you And so did you learn Japanese? I learned.
Speaker 1: I love to take you to learn Japanese. I mean
Speaker 1: it's a question of degree of course, but I mean
Speaker 1: I was pretty conversant in about a year. Uh, And
Speaker 1: by the time I left, I was, if not fluent,
Speaker 1: near fluent. And then you can you still speaking I
Speaker 1: can still speak it, but I'm super rusty like that.
Speaker 1: You know, there are times and just words if I
Speaker 1: try to speak just did you take classes or did
Speaker 1: you just pick it up as it went on. I
Speaker 1: was kind of a self taught Japanese speaker with the
Speaker 1: great thing about learning a language when you live in
Speaker 1: the country is you can just learn it in a
Speaker 1: sort of academic way. You know, sit down with the
Speaker 1: book and go, okay, so listen, and then just immediately
Speaker 1: put it into practice. And you the feedback is what, like,
Speaker 1: you say something, people go that doesn't mean anything, and
Speaker 1: so you you learn, you know, rapidly, as opposed to
Speaker 1: in a classroom setting where for all you know, you
Speaker 1: know what you're saying. What about the alphabet? The alphabet
Speaker 1: is different. Yeah, it's really complicated and can you write
Speaker 1: uh and read? Yeah? I mean, at at my peak,
Speaker 1: I was literate at the sort of seventh or eighth
Speaker 1: grade level. Um, so I'm sure I'm well into the
Speaker 1: elementary school years at this point. Okay, so you pay
Speaker 1: your two and a half years of dues there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was great, and then how do you decide ultimately
Speaker 1: I gotta move on. I just think it was one
Speaker 1: of these things where, you know, my ambition in life
Speaker 1: was not to be an English teacher, even though it
Speaker 1: was fun. You know, it was a great for me,
Speaker 1: that was and it was a great opportunity, um for
Speaker 1: for all those reasons. But you know, there's this thing
Speaker 1: that happens, and I think this is true in Japan,
Speaker 1: it's true and other parts of you know, the world,
Speaker 1: and you have ex pats who they do something like
Speaker 1: they go somewhere for a year like my plan was,
Speaker 1: and the next thing they know, they're forty right, right,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. It's just it's so much
Speaker 1: you know, it can be so much fun, and there's
Speaker 1: a kind of like you're in a magical bubble from
Speaker 1: from real life in those settings. In many cases. You know,
Speaker 1: this is not a perfect analogy, but when I was
Speaker 1: living in Utah after I graduate from college and I
Speaker 1: was there the secondary, I said, if I don't leave
Speaker 1: now the rest of my life, I think it's exactly
Speaker 1: the same. You know, it's exactly the same. Um. And
Speaker 1: it's funny because when you when you live in a
Speaker 1: place like Japan outside of Tokyo or Osaka, the really
Speaker 1: big cities, you also get the added bonus of having
Speaker 1: this kind of weird celebrity. So you know, just being
Speaker 1: an American in the town that I grew up and
Speaker 1: meant that I was constantly being sort of greeted and
Speaker 1: and taking out for drinks and dinner and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: So you get that thrown in, and so you can
Speaker 1: imagine how you could get a little hooked on that,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, without actually doing anything of
Speaker 1: any real value, you know. Okay, So the thought process
Speaker 1: and the ultimate decision to leave, Yeah, it was just
Speaker 1: it's time for me to actually make a contribution to
Speaker 1: the world, as opposed to I mean, not that I
Speaker 1: wasn't making a contribution, but you know, anyway, it was
Speaker 1: it was certainly time to do something else. Um, I
Speaker 1: definitely had ambitions to do other stuff. And so what
Speaker 1: did you do? Well? I went. So I thought to myself,
Speaker 1: I can go I'm gonna go home, but I can
Speaker 1: go anywhere, home being just the United States, right, And
Speaker 1: my very sort of unscientific thought process was, well, I
Speaker 1: should go to California. And if I think about it now,
Speaker 1: the probably two reasons for that that worked together. One
Speaker 1: is it's where interesting stuff was happening, and two it's warm,
Speaker 1: because for me warm it was South Carolina important anywhere,
Speaker 1: Boston some of the worst weather anywhere yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: The in fact, I remember the moment in my uh,
Speaker 1: in my time in Boston, UM that I decided, you know,
Speaker 1: I've had enough of this. I was. I used to
Speaker 1: do this job. I loved it. Actually it was great.
Speaker 1: I had this UM, this old international harvester truck, UM
Speaker 1: and I would meet There was a weekly student paper
Speaker 1: that got delivered that they printed it in the outs
Speaker 1: in the like the suburbs of Boston, drove it in
Speaker 1: at like five in the morning, and I drove my truck,
Speaker 1: met this guy. We loaded all the papers onto the
Speaker 1: truck and then I drove him around campus and dropped
Speaker 1: him off in all the little places where you pick
Speaker 1: up the free student paper. That was my job. That's awesome, UM.
Speaker 1: But it meant that I had to get up really
Speaker 1: early in the morning. And so it's February of my
Speaker 1: senior year or something like that, and I'm up at
Speaker 1: five o'clock. And you remember how these old trucks were
Speaker 1: where you gotta let them warm up for a while.
Speaker 1: And you you grew up in the north too, so
Speaker 1: you remember this, you know. And I'm scraping the ice
Speaker 1: off the front of this this truck, and I'm sitting
Speaker 1: there freezing, you know, it's whatever below zero and I
Speaker 1: and I remember it was like it was like something.
Speaker 1: It's like a tone, you know, rang or a breeze
Speaker 1: washed over me. And I was like, Oh, I don't
Speaker 1: have to do this. I've had enough to go. Where
Speaker 1: the weather suit your clothes. That's right, you're listening to
Speaker 1: my conversation with gold Star CEO and founder Jim McCarthy,
Speaker 1: recorded live at the tune In Studios in Venice, California.
Speaker 1: I hope you're enjoying this episode of the Bob Left
Speaker 1: Sets podcast. If you want to see videos, photos, and
Speaker 1: sound bites from Jim and the rest of my guests
Speaker 1: because they join me in the studio, visit at tune
Speaker 1: in on Twitter, Facebook, and into agree on Now. More
Speaker 1: of my conversation with Jim McCarthy on the Bob Left
Speaker 1: Sets podcast. So he decided to go to California. I
Speaker 1: decided to go to California, went to the Bay Area
Speaker 1: without a job. You're just going without a job. Good
Speaker 1: buddy of mine from college was actually at the Livermore
Speaker 1: Lab as a laser physicist. UM, and so he let
Speaker 1: me sort of sofa surf for a while. UM. And
Speaker 1: my the sole direction of my ambition at that time
Speaker 1: was I think maybe I should be in business when
Speaker 1: we really I thought, you know, like this because and
Speaker 1: what's interesting about that is that you could living in
Speaker 1: Japan at that time, you could actually see what prosperous,
Speaker 1: successful businesses have done for this country. You know, you
Speaker 1: could actually still see evidence of the old Japan in
Speaker 1: a way. Right, Like one of my friends in Japan
Speaker 1: said at that in the nineties that Japan was like
Speaker 1: the house of somebody who won the lottery. So you
Speaker 1: can still see that, like it was the same house, right,
Speaker 1: you can still see their life before they won the lottery,
Speaker 1: but now you know, and they worked hard for the lottery.
Speaker 1: But you know whatever, I don't know that metaphor doesn't
Speaker 1: really hold up, but you get my point. Or you
Speaker 1: can actually see the sort of um challenges and poverty
Speaker 1: that Japan had come out of relatively quickly. And so
Speaker 1: my thought was, well, this is a sort of prosperity
Speaker 1: engine that society's need to put to use as best
Speaker 1: they can. So I was excited about technology and you know,
Speaker 1: um business as a tool for everybody being more prosperous.
Speaker 1: So what job did you actually get or what business
Speaker 1: you start? So I didn't start a business right away, Um,
Speaker 1: but I went to work for Noah's Bagels. How do
Speaker 1: you get a job at Noah's Bagels. They're not recruiting
Speaker 1: in your off campus already. I mean, I'm two years
Speaker 1: out of school at this point, so no one cares
Speaker 1: what I do, right, So so I went. I went
Speaker 1: into Noah's Bagels as a store manager. So I but
Speaker 1: a little bit slower. You're reading the news, pay pretty,
Speaker 1: you say, oh, no, those big als looking for people. Well,
Speaker 1: so at that time, Noah's was the hottest restaurant concept
Speaker 1: in the Bay Area and really all over California, So
Speaker 1: you didn't have to look far to encounter the idea
Speaker 1: of people being excited about it. And the closer I looked,
Speaker 1: no alper was. It wasn't as a real guy who
Speaker 1: just had some very innovative ideas about what business should
Speaker 1: be and ran the business to those ideals, and it
Speaker 1: was really working. It's just super duper working. So how
Speaker 1: did you literally get the job? So I literally got
Speaker 1: the job by by. I don't know if I actually
Speaker 1: applied sent in an application, or if I called I know,
Speaker 1: I called I don't know whether I applied and then
Speaker 1: called or you know which order I did that in.
Speaker 1: But it was really a question of just saying, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm interested in this, and I had to kind of
Speaker 1: wade through the skepticism of like, really you why, why
Speaker 1: would you be interested in this? And I said, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm interested in it because of what you all are
Speaker 1: doing as a business. I want to be around a
Speaker 1: high growth business. I want to see what you know.
Speaker 1: If I can't run, you know, a bakery or bagel store,
Speaker 1: what makes me think I can run anything? Right? So
Speaker 1: they thought you were overqualified. They just thought I wouldn't
Speaker 1: stay if they gave me a job, um, And so
Speaker 1: I convinced them to do it. And you know, it
Speaker 1: was an adjustment of just like I didn't know the
Speaker 1: business at all, okay, but they immediately make you manager
Speaker 1: of a store. Yeah, it's a there's a program for that,
Speaker 1: right like this, I don't know, this is like the
Speaker 1: training program. Yeah, yeah, exactly. At the time you worked
Speaker 1: out how many Noah's bagels were there? They were thirteen
Speaker 1: when I started, okay, so relatively small. How many of
Speaker 1: there today? Well, at the peak, I think they were
Speaker 1: a hundred and fifty. I'm not sure how many arts.
Speaker 1: Is that a public company at this point? It was
Speaker 1: bought in a little later on by Einstein's Bagels, So
Speaker 1: that is what went public, you know, not too long
Speaker 1: after that. Um. And then now I'm not sure if
Speaker 1: they're public if someone's taking himself. How long was he
Speaker 1: still involved? Noah sold the business to yeah, and then
Speaker 1: he was out and then and he was sort of
Speaker 1: a spiritual figure. But but he wasn't like Ben and
Speaker 1: Jerry over at the ice cream Pie. Yeah, so he was.
Speaker 1: He is a lot like Ben and Jerry. Ben and Jerry.
Speaker 1: So you gotta work the Noah's Bagels. How long is
Speaker 1: the training program? I think I was a trainee for
Speaker 1: two months and then you get your own store, which
Speaker 1: is weird. It was in Berkeley, Okay, and you go
Speaker 1: to work and go, I'm digging this or what the
Speaker 1: funk am I doing? It was a little both because
Speaker 1: you know, this is also a time when on Sunday
Speaker 1: morning on Solano Avenue in Berkeley, UM, the lobby would
Speaker 1: fill by seven am, and people would wait for to
Speaker 1: to order their bagels for two I'm not getting two
Speaker 1: hours sometimes And it wasn't because we were slow. We
Speaker 1: were just mobbed with people, and this is true several
Speaker 1: of the big Noah's around the Bay area. Um. And
Speaker 1: there were times when I just thought, like, what have
Speaker 1: I gotten myself into here? Um. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: you know, a lot of that sort of actual contact
Speaker 1: with customers and the importance of how you guide and
Speaker 1: direct people that work for you, all of that stuff.
Speaker 1: I just it was very much there to be learned.
Speaker 1: How many people were working for you at that time.
Speaker 1: I think we had fourty or fifty employees at the store,
Speaker 1: not all that, of course, a lot of people. And
Speaker 1: how many hours a week did you have to work.
Speaker 1: I don't think I had a set number of hours,
Speaker 1: but I was there five or six days a week
Speaker 1: for you know, twelve hours however long it was. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: but when they gave you the gig, they did the
Speaker 1: management trainee, and you're now going to run your own noise.
Speaker 1: Is there a promise or if you do well, there's
Speaker 1: something in the future. No, not specifically, but I knew
Speaker 1: that there would be because my my sense was that
Speaker 1: the growth of this business, and they were very you know,
Speaker 1: upfront about the growth plans for the business. That the
Speaker 1: growth of the business was obviously going to necessitate different
Speaker 1: kinds of things being needed soon, right, And actually I
Speaker 1: left the store about six months later and came to
Speaker 1: l A to open the l A market with as
Speaker 1: part of the management team they sent down here to
Speaker 1: do that. And that was how many people. It was
Speaker 1: three people, initially me and the guy who ran the region,
Speaker 1: and then the UM I guess it was just the
Speaker 1: district whose operations manager. I was brought as the training
Speaker 1: and HR and etcetera manager. So it was really there
Speaker 1: was the three of us coming down here to open
Speaker 1: what was going to be way larger than the home
Speaker 1: market the Bay areas because just because of the size,
Speaker 1: you know, of the and so you did that. How
Speaker 1: long were you with know as Bagels all told three years?
Speaker 1: Three years? Okay, so after you're the training person, is
Speaker 1: there another gig? Yeah? I just kept picking up more
Speaker 1: responsibility within the l A market. Are you making any money?
Speaker 1: Not of any appreciable amount? I mean, the good thing
Speaker 1: was we went public and so we made a little
Speaker 1: money from that. And you know, it wasn't certainly wasn't
Speaker 1: a money based thing. I mean, for me, I felt
Speaker 1: like I was making great money at the time, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, Like suddenly I wasn't totally broke,
Speaker 1: you know. Okay, so you do that for three years,
Speaker 1: how do you decide to move on? Um? This is
Speaker 1: actually really one of these interesting stories that I don't
Speaker 1: know how I'm so personally involved in this, But there
Speaker 1: was a period of time, just two or three months
Speaker 1: where Noah's there was this crazy collapse in the culture
Speaker 1: that Noah's. And you may or may not remember this,
Speaker 1: if I know you were here at the time, Bob,
Speaker 1: Noah's was a kosher keeping shop. So we had sixties
Speaker 1: seventy eight whatever restaurants up and down the West Coast
Speaker 1: that were under rabbinical supervision. And I say this like
Speaker 1: you know and Irish, Irish, Italian American, like you know
Speaker 1: what I know about it? But I knew a lot
Speaker 1: about it at the time, right we I when I
Speaker 1: ran the store in Berkeley, I had a chat with
Speaker 1: the rabbi every single week, you know, and he'd walked
Speaker 1: through the store and um, but um uh. The decision
Speaker 1: was made. The ownership changed a couple of times, and
Speaker 1: the decision was made to walk back from the kosher certification.
Speaker 1: And it was like you know, like Pavlov's Bell or
Speaker 1: something to where a lot of the people who really
Speaker 1: believed in Noah's as this somewhat better thing than just
Speaker 1: we're just slinging bagels. It's left over the course of
Speaker 1: about this. So the upper middle, that's that's where everything
Speaker 1: stands or falls into. Companies typically is the sort of
Speaker 1: upper middle we all left over about three months because
Speaker 1: you know, you you have stories for years people coming
Speaker 1: in and saying, we used to have to carry suitcases
Speaker 1: full of food when we traveled, but because Noah's was there,
Speaker 1: we knew that we didn't have to, you know, um,
Speaker 1: but now we do. And so you know, it's the
Speaker 1: kind of thing where somebody looks at a spreadsheet and says,
Speaker 1: only seven percent of our customers keep kosher, so if
Speaker 1: we can increase sales from the other by more than
Speaker 1: seven percent or whatever, the math is, Hey, you know,
Speaker 1: Bob's your uncle and no, no pun intended, But I mean,
Speaker 1: of course it doesn't work that way at all, right,
Speaker 1: because there are a lot of people who don't keep kosher,
Speaker 1: but who who liked that We did you know that
Speaker 1: that mattered, that that signified something, um, And the minute
Speaker 1: we didn't stand for that, well, what did we stand for?
Speaker 1: And the same thing with it with the staff, right,
Speaker 1: the staff would would go like, you've been saying all
Speaker 1: this time that this matters. You know, you've been saying
Speaker 1: all this time that there's something we're about here, and
Speaker 1: now you're saying, well, never mind, we're gonna do turkey
Speaker 1: and cheese sandwiches. And it really was a kind of
Speaker 1: cultural collapse that happened to her a very short period
Speaker 1: of time. Okay, so it collapsed on the inside on
Speaker 1: the business side, did it also collapse in terms of business,
Speaker 1: in terms of SUSTO per side, Yeah, it did. I
Speaker 1: mean there were certain stores where their sales dropped. We
Speaker 1: didn't collapse entirely, but there were certain stores where business
Speaker 1: dropped by more and they really the forward momentum of
Speaker 1: the company basically came to an end. And so what
Speaker 1: how did you decide to leave? UM? I think it
Speaker 1: was you know that that was one of my reasons
Speaker 1: for staying not kosher per se, obviously because I definitely
Speaker 1: don't keep kosher um, but um, but because you know
Speaker 1: that the sort of magic of that had clearly sort
Speaker 1: of left the building. UM, and all of this is
Speaker 1: back justification, I guess. But the other thing is that, um,
Speaker 1: I was in business school at the time. Where was
Speaker 1: this at the Anderson School U c l A. Now
Speaker 1: is that an executive program or a full time prob
Speaker 1: I was in what's called the fully employed NBA so FEMBA.
Speaker 1: So it was three years to do two years. Okay,
Speaker 1: so it's just like the regular school whatever. How did
Speaker 1: you decide to go to business school? Well, so, as
Speaker 1: I was in business and I thought to myself, there's
Speaker 1: two way is to learn more about this. There's go
Speaker 1: do these jobs for a few years, or you can
Speaker 1: kind of I wasn't so foolish as to think that
Speaker 1: I could really no accounting or really but I know
Speaker 1: that in a business school saying I can at least
Speaker 1: understand the vocabulary of those things. Right. So, and did
Speaker 1: those pay for that, No, they didn't pay for it,
Speaker 1: but they they enabled it. They they allowed me to
Speaker 1: sort of work around the schedule and that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: which was nice. And at the time, were you married. Wow,
Speaker 1: that's difficult, okay, so you will you finish up with
Speaker 1: school of the Anderson about the same time as this
Speaker 1: change from Kosher, about halfway through about halfway through. But
Speaker 1: in the course of being at Anderson, I um got
Speaker 1: super interested in this thing called the Internet, which was
Speaker 1: emerging at the time. So this is nineties seven, and
Speaker 1: I think my my thought process was as deep as,
Speaker 1: you know, this is probably gonna be something that I
Speaker 1: should look into, you know. So as I left Noah's
Speaker 1: um and I thought, you know, this is a nice
Speaker 1: moment of reset for me. I can kind of pick
Speaker 1: a direction. You know, I've got some credible experience, but also,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm in school, so let's try something else.
Speaker 1: So I actually went to work at Geo Cities, which
Speaker 1: was just down the street from where we're sitting right
Speaker 1: in New Yo. Cities was it was so called portal
Speaker 1: where you could build your own website. It was it
Speaker 1: was one of the very first places where you could
Speaker 1: build your own website. And it was free, which was
Speaker 1: a you know, incredibly bold idea at the time, you know,
Speaker 1: free website, Imagine that. And we had, um millions and
Speaker 1: millions of people who did that. So I drove from
Speaker 1: Pasadena down down here every day for for a while,
Speaker 1: which was pretty miserable, but it was a great experience
Speaker 1: in the Internet. And how long did you work for
Speaker 1: geo Cities. I worked for geo Cities until it was
Speaker 1: sold to Yahoo in and then what And then I
Speaker 1: joined a group of people not as a founder but
Speaker 1: as a day one employee who started an e commerce
Speaker 1: startup in right in the middle of the dot com
Speaker 1: and that was it was called Keiko. What did that do? Keiko?
Speaker 1: The concept of Kiko was that we we were going
Speaker 1: to set up a system whereby um people could create
Speaker 1: educational content and you could map that to an individual student.
Speaker 1: They would do lessons and earn prizes from their parents,
Speaker 1: and their parents would sign them up. They learned stuff,
Speaker 1: they'd earned credits or whatever and uh, and they'd get
Speaker 1: rewarded for it. Pele say, that didn't work out. It
Speaker 1: didn't work out. So how long were you there? I
Speaker 1: was there until two thousand and two, just before Okay,
Speaker 1: so the next step was gold Star. Yes, so talk
Speaker 1: to us about talk to us about the start of
Speaker 1: gold Star. The start of gold Star was really born
Speaker 1: in the long drive between Pasadena and Long Beach. Uh.
Speaker 1: My other two co founders, Robert and rich Um, Are
Speaker 1: they still involved in the company. Yeah. Every day every
Speaker 1: day we drove. We all worked at kick together and
Speaker 1: drove the long drive down to Long Beach and sort
Speaker 1: of started talking about concepts and really struck upon this
Speaker 1: one and eventually what was the original concept? The original
Speaker 1: concept was not that far off the core concept that
Speaker 1: it that it is today, which is there's there's shows
Speaker 1: that need people, and there's people that need shows. And
Speaker 1: if you think about it, going back to to two
Speaker 1: thousand and two, two thousand and one, Um, if you
Speaker 1: were a promoter and it was a week before a show,
Speaker 1: you didn't have that many options. You know, your marketing
Speaker 1: bullets had been fired, right, Um, but we knew that
Speaker 1: we could do something about that if we got in
Speaker 1: At the time, specifically, it was very much about email.
Speaker 1: We could customize the email at least in a crude way.
Speaker 1: We could at least say well you like music, here's music,
Speaker 1: you know, and and move very fast. So was there
Speaker 1: a lightbulb moment in the car or it just evolved evolved?
Speaker 1: I mean it really did. Okay, So how long did
Speaker 1: you talk about it? Decide we're going to do it?
Speaker 1: You know, we had those conversations that I think people
Speaker 1: have where you know, one day we're gonna do it
Speaker 1: our way. You know that those whenever you're frustrated with
Speaker 1: what other people are doing that you're going along with. Right,
Speaker 1: So evolved from those kinds of you know, general gripe
Speaker 1: sessions and probably you know two thirds ps. Two. As
Speaker 1: we got to the point where all of us were
Speaker 1: clear that we were going to leave Kiko because it
Speaker 1: just you know, wasn't going the direction that we thought
Speaker 1: it should go, or that we hoped it would go whatever,
Speaker 1: we started thinking, Okay, what could we really do? What
Speaker 1: could we really do? Um? And so in fall of
Speaker 1: two thousand and one, we started business planning gold Star. Okay,
Speaker 1: so to start gold Star, what do you do for money?
Speaker 1: We didn't spend any So you didn't take any investment? No, no,
Speaker 1: And at this late date, are you interested in selling
Speaker 1: the old Star? Uh? Could could be? Could be? I mean,
Speaker 1: anybody anybody who starts a busin this that has ongoing value,
Speaker 1: that doesn't rely on them coming into work every day
Speaker 1: has to think that way, right. It's just it's just
Speaker 1: something that you know, if you create residual value in
Speaker 1: the business, you have to be open to the possibility
Speaker 1: that one day you're not the best owner for it. Okay,
Speaker 1: So you start the business in two thousand two in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles, and it's totally bootstrapped on everybody's you know,
Speaker 1: money in the bank. Yep, Okay, how long after you
Speaker 1: started doesn't launch? Uh? Well let's see. So we we
Speaker 1: firmly decided to to do gold Star on Halloween of
Speaker 1: two thousand and one, and we launched on Valentine's Day
Speaker 1: of two thousand two. Wow, well who did all the programming?
Speaker 1: And so you know how to do that? Well? So
Speaker 1: we all there were various parts of that. So before
Speaker 1: anyone thinks I know how to do any of that,
Speaker 1: I don't. However, what I do I do know that
Speaker 1: each of us was able to do the parts of
Speaker 1: it that made a difference. So Robert, who's the CTO today,
Speaker 1: built everything. We we leaned on our I like to say,
Speaker 1: we tom sawyered our Internet friends and helping us with
Speaker 1: things like design. Right. We we hey, you want to
Speaker 1: help us do this thing? And they did, and you
Speaker 1: know we cut them in on the on the company
Speaker 1: later on. So it launches in Valentine's Day. How do
Speaker 1: you get your reach? How do you market? Yeah? That
Speaker 1: that's I like to say. We started with nobody to
Speaker 1: sell to and nothing to sell. So that's it's that
Speaker 1: two sided marketplace problem. Right, Hey, everybody, come on down
Speaker 1: a gold star, because we got nothing to sell. And you,
Speaker 1: in this interim, certainly between Halloween and Valentine's Day, did
Speaker 1: you say to yourself, we're gonna need events, We're gonna
Speaker 1: need people to go. Yeah, salespeople. We definitely did, and
Speaker 1: and we did those things. But you know, it's like
Speaker 1: it's like the flywheel effect in reverse, right, It's it's
Speaker 1: the inertia of not having anything. And so the one
Speaker 1: thing we had was we had credibility, right we we
Speaker 1: could demonstrate that we knew we were talking about. Not
Speaker 1: with live events, we didn't know anything about that, but
Speaker 1: with the technology and the way that you market online
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, we could say like, we've done
Speaker 1: these things, you know, and we just didn't come across
Speaker 1: as idiots, right, So we would go to venues and
Speaker 1: promoters and say trust us, because there's nothing for you
Speaker 1: to lose if it doesn't work, you know. And you
Speaker 1: know that that wasn't necessarily an easy sell, but it
Speaker 1: was just one of these things where you have to
Speaker 1: build it a little bit at a time. Um, And
Speaker 1: really it was a question of you gotta have some inventory,
Speaker 1: you don't have anything. So the inventory had to run
Speaker 1: ahead of the audience a little bit. But then we
Speaker 1: had to find ways to get the audience there as
Speaker 1: quickly as we could. So what happened, well, one of
Speaker 1: the things that we did in the early days was
Speaker 1: we went to big companies which we still had in
Speaker 1: l A at the time. Um companies like country Wide,
Speaker 1: Home Loans, earth Link right both not not there anymore,
Speaker 1: and we said, hey, we can create you a sort
Speaker 1: of page of event offers, we do a little branding
Speaker 1: to the company logo and stuff like that, if you
Speaker 1: will tell your employees about it. And this was this
Speaker 1: sounds really lame right now, but at the time it
Speaker 1: was a very novel idea and so Countrywide um I
Speaker 1: was very excited about it, and they were like great.
Speaker 1: So they would send an email to fifteen thousand employees saying, hey,
Speaker 1: who's this thing? And so the Earthly same same thing.
Speaker 1: And so we we did this for long enough that
Speaker 1: it actually accumulated enough people for the you know, there's
Speaker 1: sort of yeast to activate, you know, when we started
Speaker 1: getting this little viral spread right of people doing it,
Speaker 1: and then we got sales. So then it was easier
Speaker 1: for us to go get inventory, and the thing just
Speaker 1: built a little out of times. Okay, well, how long
Speaker 1: did it take to you know, start moving? About seven
Speaker 1: months before I remember the time we we did it
Speaker 1: was a an event in Orange County called Tatra Zingaro,
Speaker 1: which was a horse ballet, a French horse ballet, and
Speaker 1: we just sent an email about it, you know, to
Speaker 1: whatever our our group of people was, and it just
Speaker 1: kept selling and selling and selling, so unlike everything we
Speaker 1: had done up to then, where it was kind of
Speaker 1: like pumping air into a leaky tire, you know. Oh,
Speaker 1: you know, we sold a few, Oh nobody's there. All
Speaker 1: of a sudden, it just had momentum. Right, people had
Speaker 1: accumulated in enough numbers that they actually, you know, kept
Speaker 1: buying it um. And so that was the day that
Speaker 1: I thought, oh, we've we've actually reached the point where
Speaker 1: there's a little bit of viral coefficient on what's going on.
Speaker 1: So did you ever think of giving up? Probably? I
Speaker 1: don't know. Um, sure of course. And so what have
Speaker 1: you learned along the way? Uh? One of the things
Speaker 1: that I've learned is that everything is difficult, you know,
Speaker 1: from from the point of view entrepreneur, everything is difficult. Um,
Speaker 1: I think that it's sometimes tempting too, you know, to think, well,
Speaker 1: why won't this work? You know, people get ideas. I
Speaker 1: hear it, you know, hear I hear concepts. I run
Speaker 1: a meet up for entrepreneurs in Pasadena, and so I
Speaker 1: hear entrepreneurs every month kind of talk through their their concepts.
Speaker 1: And sometimes people get this idea that well, if it's
Speaker 1: gonna it's gonna work. I mean, that's a given. I'm
Speaker 1: just trying to figure out whether I want to go
Speaker 1: for a billion or or you know, you know, and
Speaker 1: and the and the truth of it is, like it's
Speaker 1: just nature doesn't care about your success, right. So it's
Speaker 1: just fundamentally hard for something that doesn't exist to exist
Speaker 1: and thrive. It's just not likely, right. And so I think,
Speaker 1: you know, one of the things that I've gained a
Speaker 1: tremendous amount of respect for is the difficulty of every
Speaker 1: little thing, you know what I mean, whether it's you
Speaker 1: start a podcast and you want to build an audience,
Speaker 1: it's difficult, right, Like, everything is difficult. And and so
Speaker 1: that is one of the biggest lessons that we had.
Speaker 1: And you can make some things easier with money, but
Speaker 1: you have all the money in the world, and it
Speaker 1: doesn't guarantee anything necessarily, right, It's been depending on what
Speaker 1: you're trying to do. Okay, So if you had this
Speaker 1: success seven months later with the horse show horse ballet,
Speaker 1: at what point were you confident this is is rolling,
Speaker 1: this is my future. Probably a year or two into it.
Speaker 1: I mean the first thing we had to overcome was
Speaker 1: we needed to actually be able to pay ourselves. We
Speaker 1: had to be able to make a living and where
Speaker 1: you living off savings, where we were wives working or
Speaker 1: significant other combination of things, right, Like, there was a
Speaker 1: little bit of um, you know left you know, we
Speaker 1: we did projects. You know, we did web development projects
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. We it was a combination of
Speaker 1: all kinds of things. We did well, web development projects
Speaker 1: for other people. Yeah, absolutely, um And it was a
Speaker 1: very challenging time. And this is the thing that I
Speaker 1: say to entrepreneurs all the time is that you know,
Speaker 1: if you're not prepared for at least a couple of
Speaker 1: years of a real scrap, you know, a real daily scrap,
Speaker 1: you're probably not ready. You know, unless you're going into
Speaker 1: a business where it's essentially the same thing you were
Speaker 1: doing for somebody else, and it's a professional services kind
Speaker 1: of thing where're kind of just transferring your customers. That's different, right,
Speaker 1: But that's also a business that totally relies on your labor.
Speaker 1: If you're trying to build a business that you know,
Speaker 1: you know, I can sit and chat with Bob left
Speaker 1: Sets for a couple of hours and you know it
Speaker 1: doesn't affect my business, right. If you're trying to do that,
Speaker 1: it's it's at least a couple of years. If you're lucky,
Speaker 1: it's a couple of years of just sweating it out.
Speaker 1: You know. We'll pause here for a brief moment and
Speaker 1: get right back to Jim McCarthy. Many of you already
Speaker 1: know that I'm a writer. I write about music, media,
Speaker 1: my life, and the world at large. You can check
Speaker 1: out my writing at left sets dot com. I'd like
Speaker 1: to give you a little taste of the podcast from
Speaker 1: behind the scenes as well. Go to left sets dot
Speaker 1: com and sign up for the newsletter to read about
Speaker 1: what you hear and a whole lot more. Now More
Speaker 1: with gold Star CEO and founder Jim McCarthy, recorded live
Speaker 1: at the tune In Studios in Venice, California. One thing
Speaker 1: I deal with all the time, uh, in the music
Speaker 1: sphere is people email me and they say, I'm determined
Speaker 1: to make it. I'm not going to give up, and
Speaker 1: perseverance is very important, but sometimes people should give up. Yes,
Speaker 1: I agree with that. So what do you tell the
Speaker 1: people at the meet up? Uh? This is actually one
Speaker 1: of the trickiest things to answer because it's absolutely right
Speaker 1: and and everybody has a different point. You know, it's
Speaker 1: hard to tell somebody to put the well being of
Speaker 1: their family, um at grave risk. How can you tell somebody, right, um,
Speaker 1: because at best the odds are against you. Right. So
Speaker 1: one of the things that I think people could do
Speaker 1: more as entrepreneurs is find ways to to knock down
Speaker 1: some of the risk, you know, just little ways to
Speaker 1: learn how risky their idea is or how good their
Speaker 1: ideas as quick you know, as quickly and cheaply as
Speaker 1: they can, so that it's not betting the farm on
Speaker 1: something that hasn't been proven at all. But it's just
Speaker 1: inherently I you know, I don't know that the Churchill
Speaker 1: quote about never never give up your you know this
Speaker 1: quote he says, except he says, you know, never give
Speaker 1: up in the face of I can't remember the exact
Speaker 1: quote strength of the of the enemy or whatever he says,
Speaker 1: except two accept to the considerations of good sense or
Speaker 1: something like that. So people always take that part of
Speaker 1: the quote out. But I think it's the key part.
Speaker 1: It's like, just like information wants to be free. The
Speaker 1: other half it was, well, just don't remember that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but okay, Um, Now, some people become infatuated with building
Speaker 1: businesses that since you've been with gold Star now for
Speaker 1: Nexus a fifteen years, that doesn't seem to be your viewpoint. Well,
Speaker 1: I think if if, if you know, you rebooted my
Speaker 1: brain and I didn't know who I was, or I
Speaker 1: didn't know what gold Star was, and I was just
Speaker 1: exactly the same person, I probably would think I should
Speaker 1: start a business, you know what I mean. I think
Speaker 1: I would probably think automatically, you know what I had
Speaker 1: to do. I got to start a busin Okay. So
Speaker 1: you were destined to start a business, and that was
Speaker 1: my intention. From a career point of view, I felt
Speaker 1: like there was either either grow a business or start
Speaker 1: a business. So you know, I spent the first few
Speaker 1: years of my career in high growth businesses that I
Speaker 1: didn't start UM and I really learned a lot from
Speaker 1: that as opposed to being in a kind of static
Speaker 1: state business. UM. And so I think all of that
Speaker 1: it's kind of what I'm sort of oriented to doing. Okay,
Speaker 1: in a world where everybody seems to build to sell,
Speaker 1: you have an opposite philosophy. How did you decide to
Speaker 1: do that? Well, it's not really an opposite full I mean,
Speaker 1: I think it's worth saying, like, we're not resistant to
Speaker 1: the idea. I understand everything is for sale, this tables
Speaker 1: for sale or right of offer, but there are many
Speaker 1: people who were saying, I'm gonna do this for a
Speaker 1: couple of years, I'm gonna at this late date, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna lay it off on Google, Facebook, etcetera. But you've
Speaker 1: been doing this a long time, is it because that
Speaker 1: was never your thought or the offers of the right
Speaker 1: price never came in offers. We have conversations on a
Speaker 1: regular basis with with different folks and UM, and they're
Speaker 1: always interesting. And I think that probably one day we'll
Speaker 1: sell the company to somebody and when it makes the
Speaker 1: most sense. UM. So I don't I think sometimes people
Speaker 1: think we're resistant to the idea of We're not really,
Speaker 1: it just needs to make sense, you know. UM. I
Speaker 1: just think when you build a business, very few people
Speaker 1: are slick enough to say, you know, I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: build this thing so that I can just dump it.
Speaker 1: And I'm just not that smart, I guess, right like,
Speaker 1: I don't know how to to build to flip like that. UM.
Speaker 1: And I don't know how many people are I mean
Speaker 1: surely there are some, um, But you've got to build
Speaker 1: a good business. Okay. So at this point in time,
Speaker 1: how many employees are there a Cold Stars? Okay? So
Speaker 1: what does it take to move into a new market?
Speaker 1: Doesn't take much anymore because the technology is such that
Speaker 1: it's there's a lot of ways in which the UM,
Speaker 1: the business kind of comes to us. So you could,
Speaker 1: let's say you had a show in a in a
Speaker 1: market that we're not in. You can go to the
Speaker 1: gold Star website right now, sign up, and that show
Speaker 1: would be active in a matter of hours and soon
Speaker 1: it will be instantly UM. And so, but it only
Speaker 1: works if I'm offering you sales inventory. Well you can,
Speaker 1: you can have full price inventory, but but inventory at all.
Speaker 1: You're not a listing services in terms of events, not
Speaker 1: a listing service. And that's not to say we wouldn't
Speaker 1: potentially do that at some point, but at this point
Speaker 1: it's a it's a place where people buy stuff, they
Speaker 1: learn about it, and sometimes they don't buy it. But
Speaker 1: the point for us right now is that they do
Speaker 1: buy it. Um. And so let's just stop here for
Speaker 1: a seconds. People can ask, let's say a ticket is
Speaker 1: a hundred dollars, that you're selling it for hundred dollars.
Speaker 1: Forget what the sticker place may or may not be.
Speaker 1: How much of the money goes to gold Star most cases,
Speaker 1: ninety dollars. I'm sorry, by the way around, ninety dollars
Speaker 1: go to this. So every thing is unique decision. It's
Speaker 1: it's virtually always on that. That's the sort of standard. Okay,
Speaker 1: So back to how you open up a new market.
Speaker 1: So somebody says I want to be on my on
Speaker 1: your service, they can they can create their event. Um.
Speaker 1: The way the system works now, a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: happens automatically. Stuff goes out to Facebook automatically, Stuff goes
Speaker 1: into email potentially automatically. So while we're kind of guiding
Speaker 1: it in the in the broadest sense of aware of
Speaker 1: what promotions are happening where some of it just kind
Speaker 1: of happens now. Um, okay, well let's say somebody sits
Speaker 1: there and goes, okay, we're in twenty odd cities and
Speaker 1: I don't know whether you're in the city, but we
Speaker 1: should do Boisey, right, how do you do that? There's
Speaker 1: there's two ways that if we if we deliberately said hey,
Speaker 1: we want to be in a city that we're not in,
Speaker 1: we would basically devote some uh people power to figuring
Speaker 1: out what's in boise who we need to talk to,
Speaker 1: and building a credible minimum inventory base there by reaching
Speaker 1: out by leveraging relationships we've got, right, whether it's with
Speaker 1: you know, Live Nation or Circus Lay whoever, whoever already
Speaker 1: works with us in other places, and saying hey, we're
Speaker 1: gonna make a little bit of a push in Boise. Um.
Speaker 1: It might be a little light at first, but you've
Speaker 1: seen our progress in other markets, so help us out,
Speaker 1: you know, Well, we'll get there, We'll we'll promote your shows.
Speaker 1: And so we build a kind of critical massive inventory
Speaker 1: somewhat manually, and we wanted to make a specific push
Speaker 1: for a market like that, And what about growth potential?
Speaker 1: What do you mean in terms of you want to
Speaker 1: go international, how many cities do you want to be in? Uh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we're not in Canada right now, which is
Speaker 1: really something we want to correct in the next year
Speaker 1: or so. Um. And then internationally, you know, internationally beyond Canada,
Speaker 1: we're not sure. If we do that will probably be
Speaker 1: with a partner. If we if we did an European expansion,
Speaker 1: we'll probably do with a partner. And if you're in
Speaker 1: twenty odd cities in America right now in the United States,
Speaker 1: how much does that saturate the market or how many
Speaker 1: more cities can you be in? I mean we're actually
Speaker 1: in more than twenty. We're in upwards of six year
Speaker 1: seventy at this point. So h six years seventy cover it?
Speaker 1: It covers it mostly. I Mean the thing is, it's
Speaker 1: like being in a city and I'm doing air quotes again,
Speaker 1: is not a binary right, Like, there's how many people
Speaker 1: do we reach and what's our inventory coverage? So there's
Speaker 1: a lot more depth to be had, you know, everywhere,
Speaker 1: I would say, but certainly outside sort of twelve fifteen
Speaker 1: really strong markets, there's a lot more depth, both in
Speaker 1: terms of people who should be our customers and inventory
Speaker 1: that we're selling so that the the infill opportunity is
Speaker 1: still being for us. And so what are the challenges
Speaker 1: you now face at gold Star. The challenges we face
Speaker 1: are are similar to some of the other challenges that
Speaker 1: live entertainment. We have special ones and we have general ones.
Speaker 1: The general problems are that, you know, live entertainment as
Speaker 1: a whole is way harder than anyone thinks, you know,
Speaker 1: except people who are in the business, which is you
Speaker 1: have you know, I often say we sell mostly music
Speaker 1: in theater, so you can think of it as you know,
Speaker 1: music and plays, right like concerts in plays. That's mostly
Speaker 1: what we sell. Sixty plus percent fall into those two categories.
Speaker 1: If we were selling instead of music and plays, you know,
Speaker 1: recorded music and books right analogs to those two things,
Speaker 1: then your problem is simpler in a way because you've
Speaker 1: got to find a product to match a person. You
Speaker 1: have that same problem in live entertainment, but then you
Speaker 1: also have to match the product the person, the place,
Speaker 1: and the time to have this four dimensional set of challenges.
Speaker 1: And the way that the industry, as you well know,
Speaker 1: the way that the industry typically responds to that is
Speaker 1: either like really pushing hard or and this is not
Speaker 1: a this is a sensible idea, but it has its limitations.
Speaker 1: Or um, focusing on the very very biggest things because
Speaker 1: they have marketing budgets, they have pre existing awareness maybe
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. And the reality is that's a
Speaker 1: very limiting outlook on what what the market is and
Speaker 1: and it's a very limiting outlook on what people do
Speaker 1: and how they think, right, um. And so that problem
Speaker 1: is one that's very general. And over the last few years,
Speaker 1: you know, there's just been more energy put into amping
Speaker 1: up the conversation about should you buy your expensive concert
Speaker 1: tickets or playoff basketball tickets from this guy, this guy,
Speaker 1: this guy or this guy you know, and what's the difference. Right,
Speaker 1: So the commoditization of what's being sold there is is
Speaker 1: stronger than ever because again everyone's focusing on those very
Speaker 1: very top tier of events. When consumers are saying, well,
Speaker 1: I think I can find if I really want to
Speaker 1: go see you know, the Golden State Warriors, you know,
Speaker 1: playoff game, I know where I can go find. I
Speaker 1: know the parameters of that search, you know. Um. So
Speaker 1: for us, our challenge is to speak a different frequency
Speaker 1: in some way so that people go, oh, I see,
Speaker 1: I see, there's a lot of stuff I can go
Speaker 1: see that's actually quite great. That's not being crawled over
Speaker 1: by every broker in the world. That's happening closer to me,
Speaker 1: that's probably closer to my actual taste. There's a whole
Speaker 1: world of this stuff. So we have to um, we
Speaker 1: still have to overcome the din you know, of all
Speaker 1: of that, uh and make that case in a way
Speaker 1: that's stronger than um than it currently has been for us.
Speaker 1: It used to be when we started was extremely novel.
Speaker 1: What we did was extremely novel, and so you know,
Speaker 1: saying that in a way that's still you know, sounds novel,
Speaker 1: sounds novel. Anew is the thing that we're working on now,
Speaker 1: which is why we you know, part of that technology
Speaker 1: and part of it's not and it's all word of mouth. You'
Speaker 1: don't do any marketing gra average and we do, we do,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, we we don't do well if
Speaker 1: we haven't done to a big bold brand campaigns. Because
Speaker 1: it's just one of these things where you've got to
Speaker 1: be you know, you can't do a little all of that.
Speaker 1: You're gonna have to do it or not do it.
Speaker 1: So but we have you know, we have a pretty
Speaker 1: active um set of Facebook campaigns which are pretty targeted.
Speaker 1: We have an affiliate program that includes group on and
Speaker 1: Yelp and a bunch of other big Facebook and others that, uh,
Speaker 1: that syndicate the content um But yeah, I mean so
Speaker 1: in a way it is quiet relative to someone who
Speaker 1: would do a venue buy out at the Staples Center
Speaker 1: or something like that, We're not going to do that
Speaker 1: anytime soon. So how many tickets in a year does
Speaker 1: gold Star sell? Millions? That that that's as as specific
Speaker 1: as I get about it. But we sell millions of Okay,
Speaker 1: so I'm a a vent producer, pitch me on gold Star.
Speaker 1: Gold Star has many millions of people who turned to
Speaker 1: us to find out what they're going to do, whether
Speaker 1: they buy from us or simply learn about your event
Speaker 1: from us. Not being listed in the gold Star listings
Speaker 1: is a is a big missed opportunity for you. So
Speaker 1: we know, we ask people who've been to events that
Speaker 1: they bought from us, where did you find out about
Speaker 1: this event? People say I learned about it on gold
Speaker 1: Star varies a little bit. If you're Taylor Swift, that's
Speaker 1: probably not true. But for pretty much everybody else. That
Speaker 1: means that four or more out of five people would
Speaker 1: not have gone to your event but for gold Star.
Speaker 1: And we all know that awareness at any given point
Speaker 1: of an event is lower than you think it is
Speaker 1: when you're the one marketing it, right, every marketer is
Speaker 1: sure that everyone knows every single thing that they're doing,
Speaker 1: But the reality is people are just living their lives,
Speaker 1: and so what you need is you need an outlet,
Speaker 1: a channel for a kind of on demand audience building,
Speaker 1: and gold Star is a place where people are only
Speaker 1: there for live entertainment. Our only job is to make
Speaker 1: them aware of events and try to sell them take
Speaker 1: a to those events. Sometimes they buy from us, great.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they become aware of an event from us and
Speaker 1: they buy from you two or three weeks from now
Speaker 1: after a Google search, or they go to your website.
Speaker 1: That's all fine, but the key thing is this is
Speaker 1: a channel, a big pool of attention being directed onto
Speaker 1: live events specifically, and you can't miss out on it. Well.
Speaker 1: The other thing I think, which we've danced around but
Speaker 1: haven't staid specifically, is that in today's tower of Babel society,
Speaker 1: you can reach people the event producer cannot that's that's
Speaker 1: the whole ideas. It's not like the old days when
Speaker 1: we all listen to a couple of radio stations, read
Speaker 1: the same newspapers, etcetera. Now flipping it over, I'm a customer.
Speaker 1: Convinced me why I should be on gold Store because
Speaker 1: we can help you go out more by finding you
Speaker 1: stuff that is really suited to your tastes, will save
Speaker 1: your money. We are the best organization for customer service
Speaker 1: and the entire ticketing business because we're on your side.
Speaker 1: We're more like ticket buyers than ticket sellers. And if
Speaker 1: you sign it for gold started use gold Star, You're
Speaker 1: going to have more fun in your life. You're gonna
Speaker 1: be enriched with the relationships of the people that you
Speaker 1: go to the shows with, You're gonna learn about your city.
Speaker 1: You can just have a whole lot more fun, and
Speaker 1: we're gonna make it easy fee to do that. But
Speaker 1: just uh, you amplify the point about your on your
Speaker 1: side and we have good customer service. So our our
Speaker 1: way of looking at I'm not I'm not bashing anybody here,
Speaker 1: but our focus has always been on thinking of ourselves
Speaker 1: as ticket buyers rather than ticket sellers. UM Typically, if
Speaker 1: someone writes into gold Star with a problem, they get
Speaker 1: an answer in minutes, and they get an answer from
Speaker 1: an actual person actually solving their problem. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: we do a lot of things to take as much
Speaker 1: of the headache out of the buying process as we can.
Speaker 1: Things that people hate, like captures and tending i'm on
Speaker 1: sales and stuff like that that we just don't do.
Speaker 1: It's partly because it's not necessary for us to do it,
Speaker 1: but we don't want to go in that direction because
Speaker 1: what we want people to understand is that, you know,
Speaker 1: we are a service oriented organization. You know, are not
Speaker 1: trying to prove to you that you know, we're so
Speaker 1: cool that we won't help you like we really, we
Speaker 1: really want to remove all the obstacles from your path
Speaker 1: for you to have a good times. What kind of
Speaker 1: problems do people have? Uh, well, I mean people have
Speaker 1: the problems of well, okay, I don't tell me more
Speaker 1: about this event. So someone can write in and just
Speaker 1: say like, what's with this event and someone will say, well,
Speaker 1: it's this, you know, and they'll kind of give them
Speaker 1: a little more background on or they'll say, can I
Speaker 1: you know, um, you know, where's the best place to
Speaker 1: park nearby. So we're just we're just trying to remove
Speaker 1: the barriers as much as we can. If I email
Speaker 1: about that, I'm gonna get an answer that quick. You're
Speaker 1: gonna get an answer very quickly. Yeah, I mean, it
Speaker 1: could be a matter of a couple of hours rather
Speaker 1: than than twenty or thirty minutes. But our our point is,
Speaker 1: you know, when when people and we do this, you know,
Speaker 1: I think people have an expectation that if they write
Speaker 1: in or however they contact a company for help, they
Speaker 1: may get an answer in a day or two. They
Speaker 1: may never get an answer. Um. And I'm not saying
Speaker 1: specifically talking about ticketing organizations, because I think there's a
Speaker 1: lot of good ticketing organizations. But you know, our expectation
Speaker 1: is that people get an answer, and they don't just
Speaker 1: get an automated answer. They get an answer from an
Speaker 1: actual person who knows, you know, how it works on
Speaker 1: gold Star, and their goal is to get you through
Speaker 1: your problem. Their goal is not to tell you what
Speaker 1: the rule is. Their goal is to get you through
Speaker 1: the problem. And so we see ourselves as being service oriented,
Speaker 1: not so much in the sense of just customer service,
Speaker 1: but that our goal is to facilitate making it easy
Speaker 1: for you to succeed, and success means you find something
Speaker 1: to do and you can have a great time. Okay,
Speaker 1: in doing this for fifteen odd years, a couple of
Speaker 1: events that you found out through gold Star that really
Speaker 1: rang your bell, change your life or you like to
Speaker 1: talk about. Yeah, actually there there's one that there was one.
Speaker 1: This is I almost feel like maybe this was just
Speaker 1: a dream and it didn't really happen. But there there
Speaker 1: was a show. And this was pretty early in our
Speaker 1: in our history. Um, there was a show at the
Speaker 1: Los Angeles Theater downtown. Do you have you been to
Speaker 1: the to Los Angeles Theater But I have not been there.
Speaker 1: You gotta go into that building sometimes. I mean it's
Speaker 1: it's this old, you know, movie palace. There's pictures of
Speaker 1: you know, Einstein when he came to a premier there
Speaker 1: in the forties or whatever it was. Um, but it's
Speaker 1: also in it's just in a state, just in an
Speaker 1: awful state. But I think it was two thousand four
Speaker 1: or two thousand five, there was a show They're called
Speaker 1: Alma and it was I guess kind of a theatrical production.
Speaker 1: It was almost like a concert and it was the
Speaker 1: story of Alma Maller who was married to Gustav Mahler
Speaker 1: and and like two other famous guys, and so you
Speaker 1: you get in there and the show starts and then
Speaker 1: it just goes everywhere. So over the entire course of
Speaker 1: the three or four hours, the characters just go wherever
Speaker 1: they want. You can go wherever you want. Um the physically, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: just all over like nook and cranny, and there's a
Speaker 1: different thing happening everywhere, you know. In the middle of
Speaker 1: the thing, Gustav Maller dies and everyone comes together in
Speaker 1: the theater the actual theater part of the theater, and
Speaker 1: has his his funeral, and then everyone goes and this
Speaker 1: all really happens. Everyone goes and sits down for the
Speaker 1: dinner after the after the funeral. So you sit down
Speaker 1: and you eat, you know, like Austrian food, and it
Speaker 1: was just nuts. Like at one point, at one point
Speaker 1: they're like, oh, come with me, we're going on We're
Speaker 1: going on a tour. And so I'm like, so we go,
Speaker 1: and we go sit in a school bus that's parked outside.
Speaker 1: They say, we're gonna go on a tour of the imagination,
Speaker 1: and like, of course it's a tour of the you know,
Speaker 1: but it's like, okay, close your eyes, count down three
Speaker 1: to one. The school bus engine starts up and we
Speaker 1: drive away. So we're driving around the streets of downtown
Speaker 1: l A, you know, for like twenty minutes. Uh, and
Speaker 1: then we can get back and then like there's an
Speaker 1: air raid and there's smoke everywhere. We have to run
Speaker 1: back into this. This whole thing goes on for you know,
Speaker 1: three or four hours. It was crazy. It's a crazy thing. Well,
Speaker 1: as you can tell, Jim McCarthy, CEO of gold Star,
Speaker 1: is excited about both his company and the events that
Speaker 1: they sell. Everyone. I certainly encourage you. As we've established here,
Speaker 1: it is free and it's in most communities, most metropoli
Speaker 1: in America. I check it out, as I say, at first,
Speaker 1: like many things with the Internet, even Google. I remember Google,
Speaker 1: it's too simple. I know how to use hot pot
Speaker 1: whatever and alta vista. If you go back to the
Speaker 1: search engine wars people you say, oh, gold Star, that's
Speaker 1: a place where you go get discount tickets, etcetera. But
Speaker 1: it's really evolved into much more than that. And it's
Speaker 1: really in a society where we have no idea what's
Speaker 1: going on. Because there's too much going on. It's certainly
Speaker 1: cuts through the fog and Jim, thanks so much for
Speaker 1: being here on the podcast. Fun to be here. Okay, great.
Speaker 1: Until next time. You're listening to Bob Left Sets with
Speaker 1: Jim McCarthy, CEO of gold Star on the Bob left
Speaker 1: Sets podcast. That wraps up this week's episode of the
Speaker 1: Bob Left Sets podcast, produced by tune In and recorded
Speaker 1: live at their studios in Venice, California. I hope you
Speaker 1: enjoyed this conversation with gold Star CEO and founder Jim McCarthy.
Speaker 1: For those interested in the tech world as it relates
Speaker 1: to music, ticketing and events. Jim was so informative. Did
Speaker 1: you enjoy the podcast? I'd love to hear your feedback.
Speaker 1: You can email me at Bob at left sets dot com.
Speaker 1: Until next time, I'm Bob left Sets. Me don't know
Speaker 1: exactly