IAM321- Entrepreneur and Author Disrupting the Online Dating and Video Livestream Space

Geoff Cook is a serial entrepreneur and public company CEO. He started his first company from a Harvard dorm and sold it for millions of dollars at age 24. He sold his second company for $100 million. He is currently the CEO and co-founder of The Meet Group (NASDAQ: MEET), a social dating and livestreaming company with a $400+ million market cap. He has spent $200 million in the last 3 years buying 4 companies, including most recently, Growlr, a dating app for gay bears.

Geoff also runs the leading podcast player, Podcoin, and can drive thousands of listening hours and hundreds of subscribers to podcasts on which he appears.

Geoff is the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award Winner for the Philadelphia Region. He is also a children’s book author and a mentor at Princeton University’s Keller Center. He lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife, two daughters, and son.

• CEO Hack: Turning off slack and email to be more intentional
• CEO Nugget: Never lose sight of the big picture and be focused on growth
• CEO Defined: Product leader- creating a product that users care about

Website: https://www.themeetgroup.com/

https://www.podcoin.com/

Twitter:
@geoffcook
@themeetgroup
@podcoinapp

LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/meetme
https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoff-cook-0a35ba3

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/themeetgroup/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meetmeapp/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/MeetMeVideos

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Transcription

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of.

This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:29

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Geoff Cook of the Meet Group.

Geoff, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Geoff Cook 0:38

Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Gresham Harkless 0:40

No problem. Super excited to have you on and what I want to do is just read a little bit more about Geoff so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. And Geoff Cook is a serial entrepreneur and public company CEO. He started his first company from a Harvard dorm and sold it for millions of dollars at age 24. He sold his second company for $100 million. He is currently the CEO and co-founder of The Meet Group (NASDAQ: MEET), a social dating and live-streaming company with a $400+ million market cap.

He has spent $200 million in the last 3 years buying 4 companies, including most recently, Growlr, a dating app for gay bears. Geoff also runs the leading podcast player, Podcoin, and can drive thousands of listening hours and hundreds of subscribers to podcasts on which he appears. Geoff also runs the leading podcast player, Podcoin, and can drive thousands of listening hours and hundreds of subscribers to podcasts on which he appears. Geoff, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO Community?

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Geoff Cook 1:41

Yes, I am.

Gresham Harkless 1:42

Awesome. Let's do it. So the first question I had was to hear a little bit more about what I call your CEO story. And what led you to start your business?

Geoff Cook 1:49

Sure. So I guess my CEO story begins as a sophomore in college I was at Harvard and needed a side job. And rather than go work at the library, which certainly I considered, it was in 1997. And I thought, let me see if I can create a website and make any money that way I asked myself, but what is it that I can do? And I thought I was a reasonably good writer and editor.

So I put myself out there as an editor of documents, and then started this website and made about $10,000, my first year as a great side job. My next year, and this is all student, my junior year, I was doing about 40k, senior year 300+ k, and they would eventually grow that to millions of dollars of revenue. Before I sold my second company, which is the one, I essentially still continue to run even though I sold it back in 2011. It's now a public company.

And I run that. But I was just coming off the first company and I was looking for something to do. And social networking, I thought it was going to be a billion-plus dollar market and certainly had seen Friendster, MySpace was dominant at the time, Facebook was just coming to Harvard. And I thought, Oh, this is going to be interesting. Like, let's start something in this space. I worked with my brother and sister on it. And it essentially started as my yearbook.

Back in 2005, did a couple rounds of Venture Capital Group group grew up very quickly in terms of user base got to a million users in the first nine months, and then sold it in November of 11. And came back as CEO in the beginning of 2013. And ever since then, I've been running it, it's now a public company, called the Meet group traded on NASDAQ.

Gresham Harkless 3:49

Nice, that's definitely awesome. It's great to hear always how you know little things, snowballed into these big, huge companies. And obviously, being a public street publicly traded company is a huge accomplishment. So congratulations to you for that. And I wanted to drill a little bit deeper and hear a little bit more about the Meet group, what you guys are doing and how everything's structured, and a little bit more about what I call your secret sauce.

Geoff Cook 4:12

Sure. So what we've been doing for the last few years really is building out our live-streaming ability. So we looked at and continue to look at what is happening in China. So we have Chinese speakers on staff who help us dissect what's going on there. And China is actually quite a bit more innovative when it comes to the United States when it comes to live streaming and video generally, and maybe even social generally. Maybe because the nature of the monopolies is a little different. Here you have Facebook that's just rules the roost, with Instagram and so forth. And there while there are very large players, there is a lot more competition among them. And so you see them spend billions of dollars on live streaming.

And we thought, well, let's bring this model to the US and give it a Western interpretation. And so we're really among the first I don't really know anybody else who added dating who blended kind of dating with live streaming video. And that's been going well for us, we were able to convert 20 plus percent of our users into live streamers. And that helps us extend our time with the user by 20-plus minutes. And then we combined that. So that's like one part of the secret sauce to build out a live streaming engine that's inspired by Asia.

And then the second piece is then acquired other assets that the live streaming engine might be successful on. And so we've acquired now, four different companies in the last three years tag, an African American dating app, Growler, most recently, which is a gay dating app, Scout this kind of more international, meet new people community, and then Lovoo, a European dating app. And so in each case, we acquired a pretty sizable community and then built out live streaming capabilities on top of its growing revenue.

Gresham Harkless 6:13

Nice, I love that perspective, because you're being able to tap into already built communities, and then you're able to add I guess, build a better mousetrap on top of that in providing those live streaming capabilities to those apps.

Geoff Cook 6:27

Exactly. Because what we found is that many of these companies that we bought, didn't want to or couldn't make the pretty sizable investment you need to make to build out live streaming video, like live streaming video is not something you put a team on or two teams on and wait six months and hope you have something like it was an all in company bet right now we have 17 of our 21 engineering teams working on live streaming in one capacity or another. It's more than just the streams, it's moderation. It's the AI and algorithms behind it.

But it's whole, live streaming, just as a feature is just dramatically big, right? There are so many different aspects of it from the engagement to the monetization, you can have one on one live streaming multiperson. There's a lot going on there. And if you're a smaller company that might not be able to spend 20- 30$ million a year building out live streaming tech, then this acquisition might be a good way to enable it for your community.

Gresham Harkless 7:32

Absolutely. So even for them, you're saying it's been a great opportunity, because they're able to provide additional service that they may not have been able to build in, and then you're still able to continue servicing that community.

Geoff Cook 7:43

Exactly.

Gresham Harkless 7:44

Nice, nice, nice. And I wanted to switch gears a little bit. And I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. And this might be an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient.

Geoff Cook 7:55

Yeah, I think one of the things that I think any CEO, and probably many people just deal with is constant interruption. And to some extent, that can't be avoided. But I think a couple of things that I do to try to limit the interruption is, for one thing, email, if you can not have your email box open all day, I think that's helpful. Or now slack too, right? If you want to get something done, turn off, or close both Slack and email, and you'll probably be instantly more effective. On my phone, I've mostly been trying to turn off all notifications.

So like, I don't want to be notified about anything by phone, right? So it's more like I have to be intentional. If I want to go into something, just turn off push. And then within the email, if an email contains the word unsubscribe, I will never read it. That's just another quick hack to like, filter out, 40% of my email.

Gresham Harkless 9:05

Yeah, it's funny, because I think people always forget that a lot of these notifications and things, they're built to distract you. So they even definitely tap into all this technology. I have psychology, I should say, to be able to distract you. So a lot of times, you're trying to figure out why you're not as efficient as you could be. It's because they're tapping into sometimes parts of your brain or psychology that you didn't even realize were enabled.

Geoff Cook 9:30

Exactly. And I think it's Tristan Harris, who's got a pretty good critique about this sort of stuff. But yeah, I think, that's right. Like this is an interrupt, a lot of interrupt-driven culture that we live in, and it goes beyond just even push notifications, right? I mean, your click goes all the way down to clickbait headlines, things that are supposed to get you for 30 seconds and then kind of outrage you or get you into the system to view a few more ad impressions.

Gresham Harkless 9:58

Exactly, exactly. And then a lot of time it takes you 30 minutes or so just to get back to the task at hand that you were doing. So I think that's a great CEO hack. And now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. And this is a word of wisdom or piece of advice. Or if you can happen to be a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

Geoff Cook 10:17

I think a useful piece of advice is to just never lose sight of the big picture. Because I think at various moments in your journey, there'll be some issue with some operational concern or revenue is not there or maybe a layoff is needed. And the more you could just go back to asking yourself, how do you grow this thing? What is it that's going to get the users satisfied? It's going to bring in more growth.

And I think you the CEO is in a unique capability to affect that because I think almost everyone else in the organization can't look for growth as broadly as the CEO can, everyone else in the organization basically might be saying, How can I grow this little feature to be a little bit better? Whereas the CEO could say something like, how do you add something entirely new that maybe no one in the audience is even no one that you serve is even asking for?

Gresham Harkless 11:27

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And I definitely appreciate and love that nugget. When you were saying that quote I think Henry Ford said if I would have asked everybody what they wanted, they would ask me to build a faster horse, instead of the actual car. So a lot of times, you do have to have knowledge of everything that's going on, whether it's in your industry, in your country, wherever, and be able to adapt in different places that sometimes don't fit, but you're so dialed into what your users want, or the vision of where things are going that that's a good bit.

So, now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote unquote, CEOs on the show. So Geoff, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Geoff Cook 12:08

To me, it really means to be a product leader, because I think in mobile, and social, which is the industry I play in, and all the kinds of most successful CEOs are also product visionaries, right? Like, they're the ones pushing the thing forward. So I really think to be successful as a mobile, social app developer, you can't have your CEO, be someone who's not also the product visionary, right? Like, you can't put a finance guy there, unless a finance guy happens to be a product visionary.

So I think, that's, to me, and I think it's industry dependent. But to me, it's product first and last, really. And the product, of course, encompasses why the user is there to begin with. But a lot of this stuff around team building all this stuff. That's important. But it's all part of a particular agenda, which is to create a product that users care about.

Gresham Harkless 13:06

Exactly, exactly, especially when that's a core part of your business, it's important to have that vision and one of the core, products and principles of why the business even exists itself. So I think that's a great definition. So Geoff, I truly appreciate your time, what I wanted to do was pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional, you can let our readers and listeners know. And then of course, how best people can find out about all the awesome things that you're doing and get in touch with you.

Geoff Cook 13:32

Sure, I mentioned the app pod coin. I think it's basically an unscented podcast-listening platform that pays you to listen to podcasts. And I think this is interesting because basically, we're blending this incented listening platform with and you basically earn Starbucks cards and Amazon gift cards. We're blending that with social to try to solve that other problem of podcasting, which is like, what should I listen to next? And it is based on what your friends are listening to or what you know, potential influencers are listening to.

So that's a project that it's just getting off the ground. We're only six months into this one and still in experimental mode. But some interesting stats we're over a million and a half listening minutes a day on this platform. A lot of listeners there and more every week, so we're pretty excited about it.

Gresham Harkless 14:27

Definitely, definitely. Well, we'll definitely have the link to that in the show notes as well. Is there any other best way or other projects that you're working on that you want us to follow you up on?

Geoff Cook 14:36

Follow on? I mean, our dating apps are live-streaming apps that are certainly interesting. Take a look. If you want to understand the live streaming business I'm talking about at Meet Me, Meet Me it's on iPhone or Android, that's probably the one to start with. And then we also have a podcast of our own called Stream Wars that basically talks about the global live streaming Industry Profiles, live streamers, as well as interviews. Use people at Twitch and other places. Pretty interesting.

Gresham Harkless 15:00

Nice. Well, Geoff, I truly appreciate you and appreciate all the awesome things you're doing. Of course, appreciate your time today, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Geoff Cook 15:14

Thank you for having me.

Outro 15:15

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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