Tim Armstrong

Ryan Serhant:		Welcome back to a brand new episode of Big Money Energy, where we talk to super successful and self-made people to find out exactly how they did it, how they went from nothing to something. I’m Ryan Serhant, and today I am pumped because I’m talking to Tim Armstrong. You might not know who Tim Armstrong is, but he has affected your life in ways you probably don’t know. He’s a pioneer in the business realm of the internet. He was in the room at MIT when people showed them up on the screen the internet, and he jumped all over it. He is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor. He’s the former CEO of AOL and former president of Google’s America Operations. He was part of the initial Google team, it’s totally, totally crazy. We talk about a lot of things, including how to not only welcome change, but wield it as a weapon. We talked about how expanding your network actually expands your net worth. And how to stay open-minded in business to create a culture of free flowing ideas. This is awesome, let’s get into it. Welcome to another episode.
		Today is a very, very special one because I’m sitting down with one of my favorite people. He doesn’t know that yet, but I’m going to tell him. He is a mega, mega businessman and serial entrepreneur. Literally, the definition of an entrepreneur, Tim Armstrong. This man has done it all. He is a leading entrepreneur, angel investor and former CEO of AOL, one of the largest companies in the world. And not to mention he was the president of Google’s America operations. He helped establish Google’s AdSense, And now he’s the founder and CEO of DTX, a technology company focused on the direct to consumer economy. I mean, talk about an entrepreneur. And he’s easily, one of the most knowledgeable and influential people in the world. I am so excited to be sitting down with him today, so without further ado, Tim Armstrong.
Tim Armstrong:		Ryan, good to see you and I’m a huge fan of yours. And I always get a lot of energy around you, so I’m really happy to be here.
Ryan Serhant:		Yeah, man. I am pumped. Well, that’s why I have energy when I’m around you, because I’m just super excited. You’ve lapped so many people over the years. I mean, just looking at your timeline from when you graduated college in Connecticut in 1993 to where you are today. Did you know when you graduated college that you were going to be an entrepreneur? Did you think maybe I’ll just go get a regular job and get a white picket fence for the rest of my life? What was that thought process like for you?
Tim Armstrong:		Yeah. I’ll tell you Ryan, and I think you and I have similar backgrounds to some degree, which is, actually when I was about 10 years old, doing businesses, even before I got to high school. And so I did a couple things that kind of got me in that direction, and then kind of naturally by doing some small, little neighborhood entrepreneurial things. In high school, I started to read business biographies just because I just enjoyed business so much, I thought I was going to go into investment banking and that’s kind of the path I went on.
		And I was there for about three months, and the guy I was sitting next to at the place I was, was so much better at the job than I was that I went to my boss and I said, “I’m going to be leaving, because I’m going to go off and do something entrepreneurial.” And the guy said, “Why are you leaving?” I said, “Well, the guy next to me is a monster at what we do, he’s amazing.” So I said, “You should promote him or do whatever.” But I realized that if I had to compete against this guy the rest of my life, he should be the CEO of this place sometime, I’m going to go off and do something that I’m good at. So I left and started a newspaper, and from there I’ve pretty much been doing that type of stuff ever since.
Ryan Serhant:		Were you always in tune with your own strengths and weaknesses that way? Because that takes complete balls, most people wouldn’t do that. They would say, “Ah, I’m going to beat that guy.” Or they’d be angry or they’d be jealous. You were humble enough at such a young age to be able to go and ask for his promotion and then quit to go start a newspaper from an investment banking job, are you crazy?
Tim Armstrong:		Yeah, I don’t know. It’s probably one of the things that has… If anything that I’ve been successful at, I think, in life has been because I don’t know if my parents brought me up with this kind of ethos, and then I played a lot of sports and I had a couple of teachers that had an impact on me. And they constantly used to say to me, “Celebrate other people’s success, and it’s not a reflection on you, it’s a reflection on them. And the world’s a big place you can be successful and other people can be successful.” So I have a personal mission statement that I have that I wrote seven years ago, but I think it encompasses kind of my philosophy even back then, which is… And to this day, nothing makes me happier than seeing someone else kicking butt at what they do.
		And it’s one of the reasons when I met you for the first time and I got to know your background, I love people like you because I’m really energized and inspired by people who are successful and people who take the risk and do all the things you need to do. So I don’t know, I’ve never had a gene where I’m competitive with other people, I’m competitive with myself. I don’t know that’s been actually a… I don’t know if it’s natural, it kind of got taught to me, but it’s actually been a big advantage.
Ryan Serhant:		You’ve got to be open to possibilities, right? You’ve got to be open to the power of saying yes. And to also, I mean, taking risks. So sitting at a bank, what made you think at that time that media and digital journalism and advertising was the future and was going to be your future and a profitable future?
Tim Armstrong:		When I was going to leave the bank, I thought, I want to be successful, and I’m sure there’s a bunch of people that have already gone through the gauntlets to be successful. So I’m like, “I’m going to call all the CEOs in Boston.” And so I made a list of all the CEOs in Boston, at the big places like Fidelity, there was a bunch of big types of companies. And I started calling and of course, I’d either get rejected at the front desk or sometimes I get transferred to the assistant.
		Well, one day I called the CEO of a big company, and the assistant said to me, “How old are you?” And I said, “I’m 22, I just want to ask the CEO some questions about career advice and stuff.” And she’s like, “Look, the only people who get through to him directly are journalists.” So I hung up the phone, pick the phone back up and I called and I said, “Hey, I’m Tim Armstrong. I’m from a new publication that’s coming out in Boston for young people, and we want to do an interview with the CEO.” And boom I got through. And I started thinking, everyone my age probably has the same problem, so I started a newspaper called Beginnings in Boston with my best friend from high school. And all we did was try to interview people and give stories and roadmaps. In your young 20s, how do you become accessible? But literally, that’s how I started it was from that one phone call.
Ryan Serhant:		That’s crazy. And it’s so funny because that’s now… You starting that newspaper, that’s people today starting blogs. I guess you could still start a newspaper, but it probably makes more sense to do it online.
Tim Armstrong:		Well let me tell you a crazy story. So I start the newspaper, I have no idea what I’m doing, it’s business bootcamp 101. We, my roommate and I, I learned how to program, because we had to program the interface. I sold my car, I bought a Quadra 650 computer, a Apple computer. We learn how to publish, put the newspapers out. We have them distributed all over Cambridge and Boston. And a friend of mine calls me and says, his name is Peter Dunn, he said, “Hey, there’s these guys down at MIT who said they can publish something like a newspaper immediately without paper on a computer.” So I’m like, “All right.”
		So I went down to MIT and the guys from the University of Illinois, who had the first browser were there. They turned it on, they loaded a website, and I said, “Wait a minute, did you just put an information that you inputted someplace else through this network and up on the computer screen? And that’s all that happened, is somebody had to input electronically?” And they’re like, “Yep.” I literally got up, left the meeting, went back to my office, told my best friend from high school, I’m like, “We’re selling the newspaper and we’re doing this thing called the internet.” I’m like, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s a thousand times cheaper and faster than what we’re doing with the newspaper, and we’re going to put the newspaper online.” That’s how I got introduced to the internet, and that’s changed the rest of my life, that one meeting at MIT.
Ryan Serhant:		That is crazy. What did you learn that stuck with you from building the newspaper, as you said, business 101, to building companies, which you did later on?
Tim Armstrong:		You have to understand your business at a core level. And I think that’s something else that people don’t appreciate, is when you’re younger in your career and you look forward, you think that all the people went up the career, they just got bigger and made bigger decisions and things like that. But many of the people that I met during that early part in Boston, some of the CEOs and some of the other people I ended up networking with, I noticed that they were all super knowledgeable about the details of their business. And I [inaudible 00:08:46] when we built the newspaper, I knew how to do everything at the newspaper. And I think that’s another powerful attribute is being the world’s at what you do. And I know you are for what you do, Ryan, and you write books about it and you talk about it and meet with people. And if you don’t have that, you’re going to lose to other people in your business. If you don’t want to become the world’s expert, guess what, someone else is. So that’s one takeaway.
		The second takeaway is just change. Change is a weapon, it’s either pointed at you or you’re holding it. When I didn’t know what I was doing, I was able to learn, change, learn, change, learn, change. And then that formula gave me risk-taking, I learned how to take risks. And so I always think back to that, which is, if I’m not changing and evolving, I’m probably losing.
Ryan Serhant:		It’s about being part of the running river, instead of the still pond. The still pond smells, it’s weird. It’s still a body of water, but you might not want to go swimming in it. The running river’s clean, there’s fish, there’s life, there’s things happening and there’s amazing opportunities around every bend, even if you don’t know it. So you sold the newspaper and then you got involved and started working at a company called Starwave. What was Starwave?
Tim Armstrong:		I got invited to go to a NASCAR event with the owners of NASCAR, the France family. So I went to this big meeting and I was sitting in the back of the room-
Ryan Serhant:		How do you meet all these people, I’ll ask you that later.
Tim Armstrong:		Basically I went to this meeting, the France’s gave this whole presentation on NASCAR. And at the end they said, “Oh, by the way, we’re going to launch a website.” And so in the back of the room, I was like, “Oh, hell, yes. Now you’re talking my language.” So after the meeting, I went up to them and said, “Hey, I’m Jim Armstrong, you don’t know me, but that last thing you’ve talked about I’m super excited about it. I’m building this company in Boston that’s been doing internet stuff.” So anyways, Ryan France said to me, “Hey, there’s this company Starwave in Seattle that’s growing. Paul Allen started it and it’s growing quickly, they’re doing internet content. For how excited you are you should think about Starwave.”
		So I went back to my apartment in Boston and I had a message from the recruiter at Starwave, because they had been calling around the United States, trying to find people who were doing internet stuff. And it was so small at that point that they had called somebody that I knew, and they said, “Hey, this kid…” And I had at the same time had sent my application, and so I said this woman, I said, “You’re not going to believe this, I just sent it an application. It was a third-party recruiter to Starwave.” And she said, “Well, your name came up because we were asking around of people who are doing internet stuff.”
		So anyway long story short, flew to Seattle, got a job offer the day I went there. Told them yes on the spot, moved out, I don’t know, maybe two months, no, no, two weeks later or something, with a bag of clothes, didn’t know anybody. And started at Starwave, and Starwave launched espn.com, nfl.com, nascar.com, abcnews.com. And it was the beginning of the internet, and all these smart people from engineers and content people and media people from all over the US showed up here to work for Paul Allen. And this guy, Mike Slade, who’s one of Bill Gates’ best friend. And Tom Phillip, the guy who started Spy Magazine and I worked with him at Google also.
		So anyways, long story short, it was an amazing environment. My first environment on the West Coast. I grew up in a small blue collar town, I didn’t travel much. But I learned, it was West Coast, high energy, technology, smart people. And also I was really creative growing up, and where I grew up was not a hyper creative environment. And this was the first place I got dropped, where I was like, “God, I’m home. This is all creative people.”
Ryan Serhant:		Walk us through how you met Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and landed at Google. That meeting alone is something that millions and millions of people could only dream of, and you actually got to do it and you got to work with them. How did that all happen?
Tim Armstrong:		This is another super important lesson. As I always say, the most important decisions of your career happen when you’re not in the room. At Starwave, I had the opportunity to do a couple mega deals, bigger than any other deals the company had ever done. I got a very good reputation as someone who was highly creative, knew the space well and could do mega deals. So one of the woman that I worked with who was a peer of mine, went to go be a recruiter after we all… We all left Starwave, and I did a couple other things after Starwave before Google. Again, this came back around as a super helpful thing. She mentioned to the Google people, “Hey, there’s this guy, he’s in New York.”
		So Omid Kordestani, who’s now the chairman of Twitter, came to New York. He was at Google, he was really the first business employee at Google. So another crazy thing, it was a Friday afternoon, pouring rain. I was downtown, this woman called me. She said, “You got to meet this guy, there’s this company, Google.” And I said, “Oh, I’ve been using Google.” Because I was savvy on the space. I said, “I love that company.” And I had another job offer at the time to go be the president of one of the gaming companies. And I said to her, I said, “I have this other job thing I’m working on.” And she said, “You know, Tim…” She’s like, “I know you, just take the meeting.” So I said, “All right, yeah.”
		So I hustled uptown, went to the Regency Hotel, met Omid, who I didn’t know, who’s now one of my really close friends. I sat down with him. We had a great conversation and he said, “Look, I don’t know what’s going to happen at Google. I don’t know if we’re going to be big in advertising. I know you’re like a big ad guy, blah, blah, blah, blah. Come out and meet Larry and Sergey.”
Ryan Serhant:		What was Omid’s role at that time at Google?
Tim Armstrong:		He was basically the chief business officer of Google. So Google was, I don’t even remember, it was probably 50 people at that point or something, or maybe 75 or a hundred, I don’t know. It was basically all engineers and then Omid and another woman, Joan Braddi, and a guy named Bart [Wiskowski 00:14:41]. And there was three or four business people, all engineers, and it was the search licensing business. And they had just started to think about getting in ads, there’s another guy, David Scott [inaudible 00:14:52].
		So anyways, long story short is, I fly out and have breakfast with Sergey and Omid, and Sergey comes to breakfast and he’s like, “Hey, Tim.” we had a little chit-chat. Then he’s like, “I don’t know what questions to ask you. You interview yourself, ask yourself the questions you think I should ask you.” So I was like, “All right.” So I asked all the tough questions. I’m like, “I’m not going to pull any punches, I’m going to ask what I think you should ask.” He would interject some questions, Omid would ask some questions, but in general, I would say the main part of the interview was me coming up with the questions and explaining why I was asking the questions.
Ryan Serhant:		He made you have a conversation with yourself?
Tim Armstrong:		Yeah, but by the way, this is one of the things that Larry and Sergey, absolutely brilliant at, is he was getting a much fuller picture of me, which is how do you think? How do you handle that situation? What questions do you come up with? Why did you come up with the questions? And then I can tell you a million stories about how they did stuff like that at Google, but they were incredibly brilliant at that stuff. And I’ll tell you this, I had another job offer that was, I forget the number, it was probably twice the amount of money. It was a massive benefits package. I think it had a car. It had house payments for a year. It was an unbelievable offer. Google was way smaller, way riskier, all those other things, and I was just in the process of getting married.
		So I was engaged and about to get married, so I came back and I said to my wife, who is my wife, Nancy now, I said… And there’s another lesson in this, which is one of the biggest decisions you’re making your life is who you partner with. They have a huge imprint on you and what you think, and those things. So I said to my now wife, then fiance, Nancy, “I’m trying to make a decision between these two things.” She said, “What do you think?” And I said, “Well, this, there’s that, there’s all this money and all this other opportunity, and gaming’s going to be big and all this other stuff. But Google, I don’t know, I’m more passionate about it, but it’s a way not as good of an offer, blah, blah, blah.”
		So she said, “Tim, I’m going to give you one piece of advice.” She said, “I’ve been watching your eyes while you’re talking about the two companies for the last month or so, go to Google. You’d be going to this other place for the wrong reasons. And you’re a passionate guy, your energy level when you talk about Google is 10X what it is the other thing.” And she’s like, “We’ll figure it out. We don’t have…” By the way, we had no money. We were living in a one bedroom apartment on 86 and Columbus. And she said, “Whatever, we’ll figure it out. Don’t worry about it.” So anyways, so that’s how it went down.
Ryan Serhant:		What was it like being on the Google train in those nine years? Because that’s when it went from Google to Google.
Tim Armstrong:		It was like the world’s most intense science project. First year I was there, it was an unmitigated mess, a messy science where we were testing everything. And when they hired me, by the way, this is a funny story, so when they hired me they gave me a one-page sheet that said, “We’re hiring you at this. Here’s your salary. Here’s your equity. And by the way, if it doesn’t work out, no harm, no foul.” [inaudible 00:18:03]. But, the reason I was able to go to AOL was I didn’t have a non-compete because Google didn’t know whether or not they were going to be big in the ad business, so I had this sheet of paper that said, “If it doesn’t work out, we’ll just part ways, no harm, no foul.” So anyways, long story short is the first order I got, I said, “I have an order coming in for advertising.” And Larry and Sergey, I said, “I need to get a fax machine, because I can’t get the order.
Ryan Serhant:		Just so that we’re clear, they made you head out of US, right? Head of US sales?
Tim Armstrong:		[crosstalk 00:18:32] ad sales. And I was in New York, I wasn’t in California. So my apartment in New York was the first office outside of Mountain View. So I get the first order, I call them, I say, “Hey guys, I got an order.” And I’m like, “I got to buy a fax machine.” And the fax machine was, I don’t know how much it was, it was like 120 bucks. I’m like, “I got to buy this fax machine.” They’re like, “Prove that you have the order.” “What?” They’re like, “Yeah, prove that you have the order.” I’m like, “Guys, I can’t get the order unless I have the fax machine.” They’re like, “We don’t want to spend the money on the fax machine unless you have the order.” And I’m like, so-
Ryan Serhant:		For $120?
Tim Armstrong:		[crosstalk 00:19:04], another lesson, Larry and Sergey were cheap, and when you go to Google’s profitability, why Google is so profitable, it’s because they were super, super good with expenses and where money was at. They’d rather spend money on tech than spend it on a fax machine. And by the way, I totally get that and respect that. But that story is the story, that’s like having an order and fighting over spending $120 on a fax machine, that’s that’s a true story.
		One thing Google did that other people did not do, and people in media business today still don’t do this, which amazes me, this is Google secret. Every single week, we used to look at the high performing customers and low performing customers, and if you were below a 2% click through rate in our ad program, even early on, we kicked you out of the program.
Ryan Serhant:		So you’d let clients go and you’d let money go.
Tim Armstrong:		Yes. And, because we wanted the highest quality stuff for our end users. And what it did was it trained our algorithms of what good ads worked. So if you think about it today, Google has pretty much mopped up the entire ad business and Facebook has and those types of companies. And one of the secret sauces to that is they put in a quality algorithm for ads, you can see how many bad ads you get as a human everywhere you go. They put in one quality algorithm that changed the entire game. And by the way, if you’re a customer and I call you and say, “Hey Ryan, you can’t run your ads unless they’re high quality or I’m going to kick you off.” hat do you do to your ads?
Ryan Serhant:		You make them higher quality.
Tim Armstrong:		You make them high quality. It has a network effect, right? And customers used to complain about it all the time, but we ran it and did it and that’s a lot of the foresight that Larry and Sergey had and the team had. And we did tons of testing, it was a lot of fun. My world was Monday through Thursday, California, Friday, Saturday, Sunday in New York. So I was living this bi-coastal every week life, and I saw the difference between how New York City was doing business and how Silicon Valley was doing business every week. And I could see, I said, “Wow, these guys are good. We’re going to mop up the whole universe.” Just the openness, the openness, the learning, the science.
		And my friends in New York, they were all in different industries, but a lot of New York was like, “Hey, I’m going to beat your head in, and I’m the best at this. And it’s my way or the highway.” And California was like, “Hey, you have a good idea, come on into this room. It doesn’t matter what your hierarchy is here, you have a great idea, you speak.” And it was like over and over and over and over again, big difference in culture.
Ryan Serhant:		Then walk me to that role where you were an entrepreneur, you had that newspaper, and then you started working for other people as you created your net worth through your network and you kept building and building and building. And then Patch Media came around.
Tim Armstrong:		I did Associated Content with my roommate from college, [inaudible 00:21:56] he ended up running it, but I was the biggest investor in it, and then I did Patch. And Associated Content ended up, it’s a long story, it ended up selling to Yahoo, it was a very good financial transaction, sold it to Yahoo. And Patch, one of my theories was local news was going to get destroyed, newspapers because they weren’t transitioning fast enough. Local news is the most important, one of the most important things the United States has as a country. So I started Patch with Jon Brod, another really close friend of mine and somebody I worked with before.
		And Jon and I tested in three towns, and then we started scaling it up. And then our goal was to basically put a digital news site in every town in America. So we eventually got up to the point where we were in 3000 towns in America, and I had taken the AOL job, Time Warner had bought Patch. Patch was part of the thing I was doing at AOL at that point. Unfortunately, an activist investor, who’s actually now a friend of mine, attacked us at AOL and I had to sell Patch because they thought we were spending too much money on it. But Patch, it’s profitable and growing. And the people who own it now are Charles Hale and Hale company, great people, they’ve done a great job with it. And I still think local news is one of the biggest white spaces for business in the US [crosstalk 00:23:13].
Ryan Serhant:		That so cool that it’s still there. What did it mean to you to have that interview with those guys, you’re interviewing yourself, and then you get to a point in your life where that one negotiating item allows you to cash out for that amount of money where you could take 25 million of it and put it into this new company that you are now completely in control of? It’s a huge company that everyone knows around the world, I mean, what was your mindset like at that time? Because most people would say, “I’m out, take me to the island.” And you said, “No, I’m going to go run AOL, and I’m going to rebrand it, rebuild it. I’m going to help them out.” And then you obviously didn’t stop there.
Tim Armstrong:		I have of saying, learn to earn. And when the AOL opportunity came up, I met with Jeff Bewkes, who was the CEO of Time Warner. He called and said, “Hey, can we have a meeting?” I thought it was about the Google/Time Warner partnership, that’s a whole another story, because we did a huge deal with those guys. But I flew over there he said, “Hey, we got to spin AOL out of Time Warner, would you be interested in being CEO?” And so I left the meeting, I called my wife, called a couple of friends. And one of my friends said to me, “Tim, you went from a company that was almost zero like Google, that went to 150 billion market cap. And you before that, where at Starwave, that got bought. Before that you were with Rick Scott…” Who was the Governor of Florida, and then Senator, but at the time period he was the CEO of Columbia HCA. We bought a company, sold it to News Corp.
		So I’d done a bunch of other things. So he said to me, “The only thing you don’t have on your resume is, why don’t you do a turnaround?” And so I thought, “You know what? Learn to earn. I’ll figure this out. I don’t know how I’m going to figure it out, but I’ll do it.” So I made a fairly fast decision, actually. I did it, I told Omid, and Larry and Sergey, which was pretty painful and Eric Schmidt. And then went to do it, and then what I did is I went back to zero-
Ryan Serhant:		Sorry, did they make you give yourself an exit interview?
Tim Armstrong:		No, I was in a room with them for two and a half hours. And they pretty much told me how stupid the decision was and why I was going to regret it, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I sat there for two and a half hours, and I didn’t feel very good by the time I left. But I just said, “I just know myself. I’ve been here for almost 10 years and I don’t know-“
Ryan Serhant:		It’s time to grow.
Tim Armstrong:		So I left. One thing I did at AOL, which I took advice, I called a bunch of other CEOs, big, big CEOs just to ask for their advice. And a couple of them told me, “Tim, It’s a different job. Being in the number two chair, number three chair or whatever, it’s just different.” Anyways, I decided myself… I just did it again about three years ago when I left Horizon. I went to zero, I said, “I know nothing. I’m going to start from scratch.” So I read every single book I could read about a CEO. I like to see Howard Schultz, Ken Chenault, Jack Welch-
Ryan Serhant:		You just called these people and said, “Hey, can I come pick your brain about how you’re the CEO of-“
Tim Armstrong:		Yes. What’s the job? What is it? What do you do? All these other things. I’ll tell you some stories, so I went out to see Howard Schultz. I love to see Howard Schultz. I had a whole strategy plan with me, I’d done all this work at AOL already, boom. I went out there expecting to show him this strategy and give me feedback. I whip out the deck, I said, “Howard…” I knew him a little bit. I said, “I got this deck, I want to show you this strategy.” He said, “Put the deck away.” He said, “Where’s your people plan?” And I said, “What?” He said, “Where’s your people plan?” He said, “Being a CEO is about people.” And he said, “The two things you need is a people strategy and you need an awesome head of HR. Then we’ll talk business strategy, but I want to talk to you about people first.”
		And I would say that was the most impactful conversation, in general. The other ones were super impactful too, but that’s just ask just one quick story. And it really helped me reset. Really, really helped me reset. And so I kind of try to cheat as much as I could. I tried to steal everybody else’s knowledge and start with that. And I made a boatload of mistakes and we had a boatload of success also, but I credit a lot of the help I got from those other people for why would we made it through some of those situations. I have a lot of advice on that topic about mentors and stuff like that, but I thought they were so helpful and so gracious with their time and energy.
Ryan Serhant:		And then you became the CEO of another company?
Tim Armstrong:		Yeah, so I started a company, DTX, and that’s the company that we’re doing now.
Ryan Serhant:		Tell me about it, and what it is and why you started it?
Tim Armstrong:		Yeah, so I started it because I think the structure of the Internet’s broken. I think there’s too much value in the middle of the marketplace. I think the really big companies, I think there should be more ability for brands and people to go direct to consumer. I think that it’s really important to have an ecosystem. So I’m much more into moving value to the edges of the marketplace, back to consumers and back to businesses. So the business we built is essentially a direct to consumer company that connects offline to online and gives people control over their information and data, both on the consumer side and on the brand side.
		I just think for someone like you, for instance, I’ll tell you one thing. This is one thing people don’t realize about the internet, most of the brands on the internet and a lot of the influencers on the internet rent their own customers. And what I mean by that, and I’ve had this conversation with a lot of people is, they’re like, “No, that’s not true. I have a million Instagram followers or 20 million Twitter followers.” And I say, “Yeah, but what’s their address? How do you directly communicate with them?” They’ll go, “I do it over those platforms.” I’m like, “Yeah, but those platforms own those customers and you’re renting them.” I want more people to own their own customers.
Ryan Serhant:		Do you think learning that and allowing people to own their customers… Is that what you’re bullish on right now as you think about the next 10 years? Because before we know what it’s going to be 2030, and we’re going to look back at the 2020s and 2021s, just this wild time a decade ago.
Tim Armstrong:		Yeah, I think, by the way, here’s the deal, for your business in particular, you have your film and acting background, you have the real estate background, you have the entrepreneurial background. You’re someone who deserves to have a direct relationship with all of your customers. The reason is not just for your business, but because you are somebody who adds value outside of your business and you have other interests, I think it’s your and principle. A lot of people in life will benefit by having a direct relationship with you because you bring the and principle. You might help them doing your core stuff in real estate, but you might also help them in something else that you’re interested or doing. And that’s the network effect. And you’re not going to have a network effect, if you’re only in relationship through everybody is Instagram, one way relationship. Yeah it’s a great tool and a great platform, but hey, why not have relationships with everybody and know who they are, know where they live, know what they want, serve them more things.
Ryan Serhant:		One of the last questions I have for you, I reached out to you and asked you to do this, and I told you, the title of the podcast was Big Money, Energy. Without knowing anything about it, what’d you think?
Tim Armstrong:		Well, I’m just going to tell you something, honestly, one of the other skill sets I have, which I think maybe was a quality that I was born with, is when I meet people, I sometimes get a sensation that I know that they’re going to be super successful. So the minute I met you, and I can name a whole bunch of other super successful people I’ve met, even when they weren’t successful yet, that I was like, “This guy’s going to be successful.” And again, going back to the stage point, I’m on your team, anything you want me to do to help you, I’m going to do, only because I know you have the drive… From talking to you for a minute and a half, I was like, “This guy knows the formula and he’s working the formula and a good way for humans and sharing his knowledge.” So when you asked me to do anything, I said, “Of course.”
		And I think that the energy piece is important. Jack Welch said something, and I think it’s in one of his books. He had a way to assess people, and the first two assessment, he had these things, the four E’s and a P, and a couple other things. But two of the first four E’s were energy. Number one of yourself, and two is to be able to bring out energy in other people, and you have that. So when you asked me to do this, I figured it would probably help build the stage, maybe [inaudible 00:31:24], you already got your own stage, but maybe somebody else gets help. So that’s what it is, and I think you have the first two… You got all his principles, but the first two E’s are your title speaks right to that.
Ryan Serhant:		This has been great, thank you so much and have a great rest of your day.
Tim Armstrong:		All right, you too. See you, Ryan.
Ryan Serhant:		All right. See you, man. If you’re ready to take action today based on Tim Armstrong’s entire blueprint for how he got to where he is, go to bigmoneyenergy.com/podcast to download an action plan I put together for you, as well as the show notes. That’s bigmoneyenergy.com/podcast. Find more podcasts like Big Money Energy on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Big Money Energy is hosted by me, Ryan Serhant, and It’s produced by Mike Coscarelli and Joe [Laresca 00:32:15], and executive produced by Christina [Efrent 00:32:19].

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