The Transcript

The Art of Working between Your Comfort Zone and Your Panic Zone

Jonny Nastor: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at HacktheEntrepreneur.com/Rainmaker.

Voiceover: Welcome to Hack the Entrepreneur, the show which reveals the fears, habits, and inner battles behind big-name entrepreneurs and those on their way to joining them. Now, here is your host, Jon Nastor.

Jonny Nastor: Welcome back to Hack the Entrepreneur. I’m so glad you decided to join me today. I’m your host, Jon Nastor, but you can call me Jonny.

My guest for today wasn’t always an entrepreneur. In fact, he attended Harvard and worked in investment banking at Goldman Sachs. He did policy work for the National Economic Council at the White House and political organizing for the Service Employees International Union. But then, he gave it all up and became an entrepreneur.

He is now the CEO and co-founder of Mic, a leading news and media company for young people. Each month, more than 20 million readers rely on Mic’s unique sensibility to stay informed and make sense of the world. My guest was also named to the 2014 Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Now, let’s hack Chris Altchek.

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Welcome back to another episode of Hack the Entrepreneur. We have another brilliant entrepreneur today. Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris Altchek: Thanks for having me, Jon.

Jonny Nastor: Absolutely my pleasure, Chris, absolutely my pleasure. Let’s jump straight into it, shall we?

Chris Altchek: Let’s do it.

Jonny Nastor: Chris, as an entrepreneur, what is the one thing that you do that you feel has been the biggest contributor to your successes so far?

The Importance of Picking Something You Are Passionate About

Chris Altchek: That’s a tough one. I would say the thing that’s been most important to our success so far, and to my success, actually has evolved over the course of the life of Mic. The thing that I was doing best probably the first two years has now evolved very differently in the second two years of Mic. But in the very beginning, that thing we did the best was actually solving a problem that we were really passionate about.

Starting a company is incredibly challenging in a very good way. But there’s more obstacles and more roadblocks than you’ll ever imagine before you start. If you’re not super passionate about the problem you’re solving, you’re likely going to hit a wall and fall down instead of run through it.

We’ve had some pretty awesome, epic stories, especially in the beginning. When we started Mic, I was working in finance before my co-founder, who I know from high school, Jake Horowitz, was working at Change.org. This was in 2011. Media was not very sexy as an industry. We decided to quit our jobs and start a media company focused on creating smart, interesting, informative stories for young people that we talked about as the CNN/New York Times for the next generation. That was our pitch.

We quit our jobs and quickly realized that investors were not very interested in a smart media company for young people that was digitally first. They were skeptical that online advertising would ever become meaningful enough to support a really expensive content company. We couldn’t raise money from the beginning. We moved into an apartment in Harlem, 127th and Lenox, and every day would work out of this apartment together with our first couple employees. We d make some coffee, start working. We were all in the kitchen together.

I remember this vividly: we were sitting on the couch one night looking at the analytics, and we had just crossed our first day where we reached 2,000 people. It was the first day we reached 2,000 people. We ran some math — this was like a month in — and realized that we were going to need to reach 2 million people a day if Mic was going to be successful, or sort of successful. We were looking at 2,000 people and were like, “Oh man, how are we going to grow this 100,000 times?”

We were looking at a pretty daunting challenge from the beginning. It was really our passion for building something that we actually believe should exist and could exist that made us persevere through — I wouldn’t say crazy hard times — but times where we could have definitely packed it up and quit. I think in the beginning, it’s all about picking something that you’re very passionate about.

For the last two years, though, as the company has gone from We started last year with 15 people. We ended last year at 50 people. We’re now at 65 for the last two years. It actually gets a little bit simpler, and it becomes mostly about raising money, making money, and hiring really, really good people. Your job very quickly goes from doing a little bit of everything or doing all of everything to doing a very limited subset of things, but having to do them really, really well. As CEO, that subset for me has worry about the money, so raise money or drive revenue, and hire really, really good people. That skill set is very different than the initial skill set and is super challenging.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah, that’s a lot. Obviously, when you started, there were just a couple of employees. Your co-founder Jake and you had to do, like you said, a little bit of everything. You were probably officially on paper a CEO at that point, but of a very small group of people. Then you went from 15 to 50, now to 65 people.

During that process, what was one of the first things that either your co-founder or yourself was like, as soon as you could, Chris, you can’t do that anymore, because you’re just not that good at it. We have to get somebody to replace you for that part and move you to something where you can obviously provide more value.

Lessons Chris Didn t Learn Fast Enough as CEO

Chris Altchek: There is a lot of things that I’m not good at. That’s a long list. I think it’s hard to point out or pinpoint one thing. But if I had to pinpoint a few things, I was alternating every day writing our newsletter, which was an editorial summary of what was happening in the world at 5:30 AM, with my co-founder for the first year. When you think about it, I was writing the newsletter and then running financing processes, running tech, and doing all these things. That was a little bit crazy.

Getting me fully out of editorial was the first thing. I’m not a very good writer. That was very important and happened very quickly. Now we ve got a 39-person editorial team with some really amazing people. Thankfully for them, they don’t ever have to read anything I write.

I would say the second thing that I didn’t hand off fast enough was running product. You’ll see a lot of CEOs hold on to products for a long time. Some of the best product companies are driven by really product-driven CEOs. I probably held on to product too long at Mic.

The reason I say that is because while I care a lot about product, I m much more of an analytics and numbers person and much less of a truly forward-thinking product person. I think I thought I was more than I actually was. Since we found a really talented VP of product, I can still inform our roadmap based on the numbers, but he’s got much deeper sense of what users actually want. That’s been hugely valuable to us. Those are two of the big lessons.

What you realize pretty quickly on is your job as CEO is to replace yourself in all these functions as quickly as possible. I think most of the time, I didn’t learn that lesson fast enough. But your job is to really hire leaders, empower them, build them up, and build a process where they can get your feedback and/or suggestions on things, but we’re there as the true owners of the different pieces of the company. I think that was something that I’d figured out or I figured it out way too late.

Jonny Nastor: I think that’s very true. I like how you’re aware of it now, that your job is to replace yourself and that you might have done it too late. Not even all CEOs at your point are even aware of that at this point. It’s really, really impressive in that way.

But let’s go back when, to the very like the spark of the idea, for creating a media company — like a CNN but for millennials. It’s massive. It’s a huge, massive undertaking. You’re fairly recently out of school. You had a job for, I believe, about a year. You and Jake sit down

Was there ever a time from the idea that, We should create this massive media company that changes the way news is given out to the younger generation, where you were like, “We should try something smaller? What’s the mindset that it takes to be like, “No, we can do this. This is something we should definitely do?

Chris Altchek: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think there’s a few things. One is the founding story. I’ll tell you that in a second. But it definitely started with a more narrow scope. Most successful startups start with a more narrow scope, and then you realize as you start building your product, as you start seeing the opportunity, that a bigger opportunity is unfolding that was in the back of your mind but wasn’t fully your driving beacon at the very beginning. In the beginning, for Mic, it was actually called Policy Mic. It was more narrowly focused on issues around politics, policy, and social issues.

In the beginning, we were very focused on creating a platform that would spark meaningful, important conversations among young people about what we thought to be substantive issues around politics. Then, it broadened out into a much bigger idea around news as we saw that opportunity open up and we actually thought it was possible. Actually, I’ll take you a step back.

Jake and I actually played in a jazz band together in high school. We go way back. He was the creative mind of our jazz band. He wrote all the music. I was the business operation sales guy that booked the gigs and marketed the band. That was our split back then, and it’s pretty funny. It’s still our split today.

Jonny Nastor: You were the CEO of the band, basically.

Chris Altchek: I was the CEO, and he was the creative genius. We go way back to high school. Fast forward to 2010. Jake had just moved back from the Middle East. He was working for the Carnegie Endowment in Lebanon. I was working at Goldman.

We were having lunch and essentially had this idea that young people care a lot more about substantive issues than most people realize. We saw it in the 08 Obama elections, and you still see it today through Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and Ferguson. These social issues drive conversation that is really ongoing amongst our generation. People are very, very tuned in to these things. We’ve felt that undercurrent, and at the same time, we didn’t see legacy media companies — the CNNs, the New York Times — successfully pivoting to reach and speak to people like us.

We saw those two things. We actually launched Policy Mic while we both had other jobs as a small blog to crowdsource ideas from young people that we knew that we thought were smart: Let’s see where this goes. That was the very initial idea. It was not a business. It was something we were focused on doing in terms of passion.

We launched this thing in November 2010. December 2010 rolls around, and we had a writer in Tunis, in Tunisia. He sends us an email at like 2:00 in the morning one night. I was up because I was working at Goldman, and I was still at my desk. I called Jake, and I’m like, “Jake, you get this email?” He’s like, “Yeah, this is crazy.” We had this writer in Tunisia who was essentially live-blogging the revolution.

He’s like, “Hey guys, sh*t’s going down. This is crazy. This is a much bigger thing than anybody realized. The streets are going crazy. They’re rioting. They’re breaking buildings. Like, there’s a full-on revolution here. Post my stuff as fast as possible.” We stayed up all night posting, this guy, David Dietz, his articles from Tunisia as this unfolded. The story was not being covered by CNN yet. It was not being covered by Reuters. Nobody really had correspondents in Tunis. It wasn’t a media hotspot.

We ended up being one of the first on this. It didn’t get a ton of traffic because we weren’t set up for it. We didn’t have the distribution. But, what we realized was that media was fundamentally changing at a very core level and that news was evolving into something very, very different than it used to be and that this was super fun. This was addictive. We wanted to be in the middle of this, and we wanted to see where this would play out. I remember the next day, we were like, We need to be doing this all the time.

That’s when we decided we were going to quit our jobs. By March of 2011, we had both left our jobs. It was time to start Policy Mic.

That’s how we got hooked. Then a bunch of things changed in our favor in the broader industry that set it up so that now we actually had a legitimate chance of building a brand that’s going to become as trusted as CNN. But in the beginning, we didn’t really know if that was possible.

Jonny Nastor: Interesting. Do you still live-distribute news as it breaks, like in conjunction with how Twitter would be doing it now or people on Twitter?

Chris Altchek: No, we don’t.

Jonny Nastor: Okay. Because in 2010, it sounds like that was but now Twitter gets used for that.

Chris Altchek: Yeah, Twitter owns breaking news in real time. Twitter is an amazing platform for real time. That’s actually been a really big evolution for us in terms of how we think about it.

Why Mic Needs to Provide Depth, Not Headlines to Its Readers

Chris Altchek: CNN’s job is not really breaking news anymore. News gets broken on Twitter. If you’re 25 years old with a smartphone, you see news through a push notification on one of the 5 news apps you have on your phone, or you see news on Twitter, or you see news on Facebook. You don’t really need a news company giving you headlines anymore, because you live in a world of headlines.

If you’re 25, what you need is perspective that you can trust. You need a deeper look at what’s actually happening. You want to think about what the future looks like. You want to engage at a layer deeper. That’s really the role of media companies today — to provide depth, not headlines. That’s where I think CNN and The New York Times are eventually going to go, but that’s where Mic is right now. We want to be real-time. We want to be current, but