Adam Ryan on Workweek's verified professional networks and the state of independent media

got Adam Ryan from Work Week, the legend. The legend. Bring it in. It's the platform for professional networks. Welcome to the show, Adam. Second time, third time. I've lost track, but thank you so much for joining us. I'm going to turn this microphone here.

We're going to be talking about your strategy to bring erotica to professional networking. I've been waiting. I've been waiting for this moment. That's exactly what it's all about. Actually, kick us back off. This is the thesis of the whole company is that people wanted erotica and their work in the workplace.

Kick us back off with like the actual uh the actual overview of the company, how you introduce yourself uh these days and and the the quick history too for anybody that that met uh missed the last interview. Yeah. Uh started the company four years ago.

Um and uh this guy was part of the the founding founding story of that. And uh today, you know, one of the things that we learned along the way that uh everyone has focused on consumer behaviors of hey, I trust individuals over institutions and beauty, fashion, gaming. There's a Kylie Jenner out there.

There's nobody in work. Yeah. Uh if you're VP of marketing, if you run a hospital or health system, who do you go to? uh if you're into into beauty, you have Kylie. You don't have anyone else in that space. Yeah. So, that was the first problem we wanted to go solve.

And then we thought it was potentially because of money, bandwidth, like this what these people are busy. They already make a lot of money. That's why they don't create content. We realized that there's there's an actual just platform missing. Uh people aren't going on LinkedIn being like, "Hey, I'm prepping for a riff.

Can someone help me? " Uh and uh all these platforms are open networks. can't necessarily have the conversations with your peers that you want to. All the other options are mostly analog. Mhm.

So, so putting it in in uh my terms, you're building you effectively a professional network, but hyper specific to people like within basically certain I don't know if the right way to say it is bands, but if you want if you're a VP of marketing and you want to interact only with other VPs of marketing, like work week is the platform that you can do that on.

Yeah. So, we've built a horizontal platform and then we verticalized it by the profession. So we have one for uh uh in healthcare, marketing, HR, e-commerce, etc.

And so if you're in if you're a kind of senior leader in one of those spaces, we verify you so that prevents the bots, the erotica uh as uh as well as uh make sure that you can kind of have those those trusted discussions and I mean I I imagine that uh with the with the erotica discussion that the HR group support group is probably going wild.

All the HR leaders across the Fortune 500 HR leaders are like, "What are we going to do about this? " Because we've given Chad GBT to everyone and then they're going to be able to use it for whatever they want. Yeah. And I'm I'm assuming on business plans you can just turn off that like this is maybe 40 chess.

You got to upgrade to the sub uh to the enterprise solution now because you got to be able to fine-tune your entire organization so we can keep intern Tyler off of the off of the adult version. Tyler's been grinning this whole series. Uh, he's just wrapping up. That's funny. Um, yeah.

I mean, I've heard I've heard there's like I've heard crazy stories of value in these like niches. There's some phrase like there's riches there's riches in the niches. There's reishes in the niches, something like that. Uh, I heard about one company that was just doing pure Slack communities.

So they would go and find all of the chief of staffs across a whole bunch of different startups, put them all in a Slack community that they had to pay to be part of, but then when they got a request from their company, oh, I need to, you know, fix up the HVAC system, they'd be able to just go to this Slack channel and say, hey, who who else is, you know, managing an office and needs to figure out a regular delivery schedule of uh filtered water or, you know, a better Wi-Fi provider or something like that.

And that makes a lot of sense. Same thing with VP marketing, a whole bunch of other stuff.

Hey, we're we're we're talking um how do you think about the the like if there's this continuum between like LinkedIn's this super broad category or you have someone like you know a Lenny a Substack creator with a show uh that's like you know this individual off in this world versus like these like curated communities like where do you see like the water cooler existing for the for the average user?

I think there's there's the traditional social networks which are all free to join. Yeah. And then you have the chief of staff one. Silva owns that one. That's a subscription. Okay. Uh most of those, you know, it's the YPO but for X. Like they've all created those but subscription.

There's really only been one company that's done verification with making it free. Interesting. Uh which is Docimity uh professional network for doctors. They're like a 10ish 14 billion company today. Produces more cash flow than Airbnb since starting and only raised 50 million. Wow, hell of a company. Go buy the stock.

Not financial advice. When he said buy the stock, it was not financial advice. Uh and and we're really following a lot of that blueprint of how do you how do you build actually a platform where you create engagement loops like a social network, but you still have the verification. Got it.

So because the because if you have a bunch of VPs of marketing in a in a on a network that the impressions against that audience are are worth thousands of times potentially the average impression on a LinkedIn, right? Well, and I think it's to the uh Alexis on the show yesterday talked about the dead internet theory.

It's like the perfect time uh for trying to solve that is like how do you actually know who's doing what? And I use Reddit. I love Reddit, but I used to be able to tell are you smart by your reply?

And now with chatbt I'm like have you put effort into and if you did I'm like all right that's now I'm like I have no idea who this is and so the kind of whole trust of the internet's I think shifting particularly when it comes to work like really care about who's giving you advice. Yeah.

Isaac friend of the show posted a couple days ago do what Rya did but for a social network humans only human verification hard to get into no idea how to do it but feels intuitively like it could work. Uh, and I love seeing this because work, this has been work week's thesis for years now.

You guys have been building towards it. So, uh, people are are finally, uh, realizing. Uh, what do you think about some of the recent, uh, changes on X. They're adding functionality that shows where the user is based. There's probably a lot of reason good reasons for this and then some bad reasons.

I think uh some of the concerns for people that are in areas like the UK that don't tolerate free speech, you could be targeted uh or or or authorities there could be trying to come after accounts.

But um it's like such a X is such an interesting platform because we effectively all use it as a professional network and a place to talk about our the industry or various industries broadly. Uh but at the same time, it's like John compared it yesterday to being a dive bar, right?

It's like uh it's the people are getting in fights all the time. There's like, you know, uh that that shady guy in the corner that, you know, it's got a history. He's got a history. Um but uh yeah, I don't know. I mean, that's what Nikita's doing. If you're an open network that's free, you're going to get bots. Yeah.

And then you also are going to get, you know, people abusing. We love I on Twitter all the time, but the Twitter lost its trust identity when they started allowing more bots and then also the blue check mark.

It changed the the verification process a little bit um where you could buy your own uh verification, but Russian bots still have credit cards. I remember I got I remember I got verified and then six weeks later they did the they did spent years too like texted grandma. I finally went through the flow.

found like old you have to you used to just have to like five news articles or something about you. So I found some old news articles and process got approved and then a week later it was like oh everyone everyone thinks uh give us your take on the current state of of independent media.

You uh were a key player in building the hustle. There was a time that everybody was saying I want to build the morning brew for X or the hustle for X. there was some great businesses built off of that. Are they are many of them still thriving?

Uh what is the current state of the maybe start with like the newsletter media business? Yeah, I mean I think what uh Substack has done uh has democratized access.

I think like ultimately what people always come down in media is you need to like help people make money, help people get eyeballs or help people make content faster. And like you solve one of those things, you have a decent business, solve all three, you have a good one.

Uh, and what's happening is, you know, I think the independent side is starting to rise because platforms like Beehive and Substack have started to really allow that to be the case. I think we're starting to to make our own case there for for more uh specific kind of uh verticals.

But the uh I think consumers in the end are the ones telling the telling the truth. There's like Lenny is getting more more money on a subscription basis than most publishers in B2B trade publications have been around for like 50 years. Yeah.

So consumers wallets always end up where walk me through trunk fans existence his business writes on business with work week. Uh not at work weekek. Is he an employee? Is he on the network? Like he has a newsletter. How does that work? Trunk was one of the first one of the first creators that work. Yeah.

Well, so we signed him at the hustle. Uh I had known him for a while. Uh, and he actually was a big part of like our our shtick is cuz when we brought him on at the hustle, he was so funny and so much better than everyone else. He changed the engagement of a newsletter with 1. 5 million people like like overnight.

I mean, it was like everyone just started like reading more and opening more. Um, ads went up and so uh we actually that was like a big part of is like one person could totally you have like the 100x creator which everyone talks about developers. um today. Uh one, he's like the best dad in the world.

Uh you can't mention Trunk and not talk about TJ Trunk Jr. Uh and uh I don't think he's ever been on a uh an all hands call for any company I've ever been a part of with him, but uh you know, that's just kind of his vibe of what he does. Uh and he comes with comes with it all. But yeah, I think he's got rockar.

But is he an example of someone who's who's stewarding a a smaller community of professionals that could be given some sort of moniker? He he works more on the work weekek side of helping us. Uh so what we have a lot is we have people like Blake Madden who covers healthcare. Yeah.

If you're in healthcare, you know who Blake is. Okay. Very hard to get someone viral in covering niche healthcare. Trung's the guy to help us do that. Okay. So he's a little bit more like Tom. He's a halo. He's a Halo creator. Got it. Okay. And then there are specific niches.

Is there a power I imagine there's some sort of power law to those uh to the various communities that you have like what's at the top like where are you really like dominating about like 30% of revenue is HR 9%'s healthcare but if we look at like TAM it's actually pretty indexed pretty equally of like how many people we think we can get per per network.

And then within HR for example are there multiple communities multiple creators uh or is it all just one big pool? How do you think about that? So we think about it more like a network. So, uh, Safe Space is the HR network. And I think this is part of it.

You have to use the lexic kind of lingo like Blake uses very different language than HR like they just talked about. And so each one's developed uh to match that. And uh, and then within the network, we have creators.

And so we believe if you want to write for write for HR leaders, we're the best place to get the eyeballs. And then we have our own ad platform that helps fuel that that they that they can get money off of.

Are there other uh are there other kind of services or or activities that are kind of I don't know advertised or shared across the entire platform? Obviously ad sales seems like one of them but actual software or do you say hey Trung like there's no better product than just posting on X.

So we're not going to try and build our own short form text app. We just let them do their own thing. Yeah. Use your use whatever tools best for the job. If you want to be on Substack or a Slack, we use our own newsletter.

So newsletters uh newsletters particularly is is that and that's our way that we we use content to drive people into the networks. Yep. And then you can shuffle people around through the different networks. Not that different than how Substack's now doing it for theirs, but ours is more vertical. Yeah. Yeah.

And theirs is more like news driven. Makes sense. Political and wanted your take on on uh David Ellison's recent actions with Paramount and Sky Dance. A lot of people thought that the price they paid for the free press was crazy. I think we came in the defense of it.

when you look at it from a talent acquisition standpoint and having a very high value audience, but I wanted wanted to hear how you thought about it. The the merger itself, I mean, it allows them to compete. I think like taking a big step out, everyone wants to win streaming. I mean, that's like the name of the game.

And so, it allows Paramount to now finally have more IP to compete with Disney Plus and Netflix.

while they're all and Netflix just announced I think today a partnership with Spotify to start bringing more podcasts on like it is an IP race of the streaming uh and Paramount was losing and I think this allows them to do that.

So that's I think the bigger picture is actually that free press is like a rounding error as part of the it's 150 million total and they're buying you know 12 of revenue of that it's not the end of the world I think that was also uh if you're going is that their was that the revenue number uh 12 to 15 I think yeah it was higher than 20 but um yeah it was around like 10x multiple I think or 10 to 12 um but they um I also think when you're starting your own company which basically David Ellison is like you want your own people.

Sure. And that's you're going to you're going to make sure you you build the right foundation. And yeah, that's that's Yeah. Everybody's focused on what is uh what what did they pay for the free press, you should be focusing on how much more valuable will Barry Weiss make CBS.

This is no different like in a totally different world and very different numbers. But then Zuck saying like I need an AI team. I'm going to go get the people that I want to get. He's saying I want to have the best editorial team. I'm going to go get the people I want to have. Yeah.

Do you think the the bigger platforms, the public platforms have kind of uh become less relevant in those niche professional networks?

I feel like if I went back like 10 years on Twitter, there would be like hashtag like marketing Tuesday and all and I would see a bunch of marketing people talk about marketing that on Tuesday. Yeah. Yeah. Basically, it was like that crazy, wasn't it? Maybe it was marketing Monday or something.

Manif manifestation Mondays. That was a thing.

There was a thing around like hashtags, chats around certain things and you'd see a lot of those people that were just talking about their specific like but now X feels like teapot political news like there's there's there's it's at a much higher level than any sort of niche.

The the irony I think was like when they went all algorithms first they lost the sense of communities.

Um, and when you used to follow people and that's who you did, it was like your people and with the algorithms, it totally changed the dynamic of the product, but because it was the same brand and logo, no one thought about them differently.

It's still it's I think it makes the feed more interesting, but we definitely lost some and they make more money. I mean, like you're you're there for engagement and your dowo goes up as Nikita makes that algorithm better. So, like that's all he cares about.

Um, and I think that's like ultimately what their incentives are. I do think like LinkedIn, you know, I know you guys are huge there and really rely on the sports center of LinkedIn, so hate to hate to say this, but you know, I think like 10 years ago someone be like, "Hey, I saw your connect on LinkedIn.

Can you make that introduction? " I'd be like, "Oh, yeah. I I know. " Today I'm like, "I have no clue who that is. " I think there's a negative network effect happening across most social. The more people add it, the worse it gets. Yeah. No, that makes a ton of sense.

We were talking off air about how Only Fans hasn't been able to sell itself. They've been trying for a long time now. The news yesterday obviously uh you know other companies leaning into that broad category of monetizing romantic chatting which Only Fans has done better than probably any company in the world.

Uh when XAI was leaning into romantic companions earlier this year, we were like it made sense for them to do. they needed a strategy to uh drive, you know, new user signups, engagement, subscriptions, etc. But uh why do you think have you been surprised that there's no buyer for Only Fans?

Yeah, it's like the on a a cash flow per headcount. I think it's the best company in the world. Um until what what is it? Tether tether 1. 9 billion I think Only Fans does in cash flow a year with like 70 employees or something. It's like absurd.

Um, I know the owner takes like a f he pays himself a 500 million dividend check a year and they leave like plenty in the bank, but they've never they can't take themselves public. They've not been able to find a buyer because of the content.

And now the irony is most of it's just a face, but they allow they've created the tooling um the C old CEO of Only Fans, uh, former colleague of mine, she's amazing. She created so many tools for the models to make content in a safe way and then to monetize it better.

And now they've advanced further to where like it's a chatbot. They essentially like not even having real conversation anymore. It's not that different than what we're talking about for OpenAI. Um, and it's just branding. And I think that's the, you know, X being the everything app. You're like, I can kind of see that.

That's that's I think your point earlier about the Apple comparison. This, this is a little bit of a tarnish on that comparison, I think, for OpenAI. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we have some breaking news we got to cover before our next guest hops on. But thank you so much for stopping by. What's the breaking news?

There's a ton of these. Uh Mr. Beast has filed a trademark launching his own bank. It will be called Mr. Beast Financial. He clearly saw our post about Arabore and was like, I got to get on the action. Just kidding. Uh the application was filed two days ago. Oh, but it's real. It happened this morning.

I saw what's your what's your take on this? It feels like if you want to monetize an extremely broad audience of young people, maybe just creating a bank that you can monetize deposits is a fairly aligned way to do that. It's kind of like I guess. Yeah. I mean, I just don't know that. I don't know.

There's like a lane of trust sooner or later that like you're just going to screw like you're like, why do I want a Mr. Beast bank? I don't know. I mean, the the the lesson from the Mr. beast bar or the the hamburgers is that it it has zero price discrimination.

And so if you get a rich person in your audience, like you're only going to be able to charge them a $5 for a can. Okay, but but let's break it down. A bank you can actually get shipping basically. But yeah, but but think about like wealthy people are not going to see this bank launch and decide I need this.

I'm going to move a bunch of think decades. Think in decades. A kid watches Mr. Beast is like, "Yeah, I need my first checking account. I'll set up Mr. Beast checking. " And then 20 years later, they're like, "Yeah, I should probably switch to something more serious.

It's kind of ridiculous that I'm still on beast financial, but like if he's actually a bank charter charter, it means he can get into doing mortgages and like hardcore. I mean, I think like that all it always sounds good in like a board meeting. " Yeah.

And then you like don't care about the product and you don't actually make it differentiated and then you're like cool. When distribution's like your only moat, it's not a moat. Yeah. I So, so I guess I guess if he runs the numbers on like, okay, if the average person in my audience is like 16, Yeah.

how much money do they spend a month, I bet I bet teenagers will think this is cool and will want to use it.

And you can probably just run the numbers and calculate like, okay, the average teenager spends uh their parents are going to send their their uh allowance or maybe they have a job, they send it into the account, maybe they spend a couple hundred dollars a month. I don't know what teenagers spend these days.

I I was I remember back in my day it was like, you know, allowance is like $20.

Um and and so it gets deposited in there and then they spend it and he can give them rewards and that's cool and cash back and he can monetize some of that that I don't I don't really believe like I became an adult and I was like I want to use a real bank. I'm an adult, you know?

Like I I just remember I I migrated from like a credit union in my hometown to like uh I want to You're using a card all the time. It's coming up. Like you think you're like a a a kid that goes into college is like yeah I'm still using my Mr. Beast like debit card.

I do think it's like a lunchables competitor and a bank. Like know your audience a little bit. Yeah. But I so so I guess like from from the bull case is that if you can get millions of kids to to just be using Beast Financial as their as their I mean as a tech called it's technically called Mr.

Beast Financial which is I I I think I like Beast Financial more than Mr. Beast Financial. Uh the filing was submitted on intent to use basis which under trademark law means there are genuine plans to bring this to life. So I think he should have went with Jimmy his like a gr grown-up version of the bank.

clearly got it clearly got Will Manitis up in arms. He's thinking about it because he says he's calling the top on incubations subweeting Mr. Beast. Just kidding. He's probably not subweeting Mr. Beast. But uh Will Manitis did call the top on incubations.

He says every guy I've talked to in the past 6 months that even vaguely worked at a hot company is now incubating four, five, six companies. Who are all these hired CEOs? Why is the Why is the market equilibrium that no one wants to go allin? They just want to clip 20%. And so, yeah, cubations are incredibly hard.

He says there are amazing. They're way more work, way more work than just investing. Jordy and I spent some time trying that. It's tough. Uh, it's tough game. Individuals. I cannot say their names here or they will blow my car up.

You are not incubating anything if what you are doing is clipping 20% for an idea and some intros. You are not the tax man. The real incubation platforms put a huge amount of work in. Uh what's he talking about? Like Snowflake at Sutter Hill. Like that's a real incubation.

I I guess like you could kind of Thrive drive Oscar. There's a healthcare one that's done really well that like they only focus on like certain healthcare um one. Um but their like model was like they had no capital risk. Yeah. And they're also like a platform that's done this and they take it very seriously.

We did we did talk to somebody who incubated like what 200 companies in a year or something. It was Yeah.

There was a there was a there was a there was a there was a a studio that made so many companies and were so aggressive around how much equity they would take that every tier one announce like we will never fund these companies because when a CEO walks in there he's like how much do you own CEO founder they're like 10% 10% like who owns the rest and also like are you the like 199th of the 200 CEOs or like number five yeah I think that's actually I I I'm coming around to the Mr.

Beast uh financial. You like it, you're bullish. I I'm not What's the terminal value? I think that they can. So, this idea came up in 2021 2022 during the fintech craze.

It was like it's not that hard to start a a software product that can take deposits as I mean in this case it sounds like he's may maybe trying to be a chartered bank. He's trying to go to the like base. I mean, it's unclear, but who knows?

It's literally, but still, it's like if you just run the numbers on like how many million uh accounts you can get open up, what the average deposit size, how much they're going to be spending on a recurring basis.

I And then and then the even the um partnerships that he'd be able to drive around like being becoming a referral partner for Netflix and you know, yeah, to be clear, I don't think it's I don't think it's confirmed that it is truly a bank. It could be Mr. be financial. Get some financial advice.

It would be like a clever idea and like I would be supportive of this. Like you buy one of his feastable lunchables, you get like a nickel uh in a savings account. Yeah. You keep going or something like that. Flip it around. You pay the for the Lunchable with $1. If you don't pay for the rest of the Lunchable, Mr.

Beast comes and personally breaks your legs, becomes a lone shark. That's another option. But I don't know. We'll see.

Um, in other news, uh, on the way back to the United States from NATO's defense minister's meeting, the Secretary of War Hegsth's plane made an unscheduled landing in the United Kingdom due to a crack in the aircraft windshield. The plane landed based on standards, procedures, and everyone is on board is safe.

Thank God. Uh, what a crazy story. Uh, crack in the windshield. That is, uh, that is a very crazy moment. Um, in other news, uh, an exciting milestone in AI from science. Sundar Pachai was probably holding this in his back pocket for when OpenAI does something that's negative aura.

Uh Sundar Sundar busted this out and said our C2S scale 27B foundation model built with Yale and based on GMA or Gemma then generated a novel hypothesis about cancer cellular cellular behavior which scientists experimentally validated in living cells with more preclinical and clinical tests.

This discovery may reveal a promising new pathway for developing therapies to fight cancer. He he he dropped it. Oh, just a coincidence. Just a coincidence. They're doing that. You absolutely dog. Tyler, tell me more about this. Like what is actually going on? Do you have you dug into this at all?

Uh I haven't read the full paper, but I mean it is there is like a stark distinction between this and what Sam was talking about, especially with all the um Gemini 3 rumors going on. It's like this is the most cracked model of all time. Interesting.

So I don't maybe it's just like this is just maybe maybe it's just like a vague post as a blog post. This is interesting paper vague papers now.

I mean you see that with a lot of new papers where it's like oh we have this new way of doing that's way better but we're not going to really get into the details obviously we don't want to share.

We are sponsored by Google AI studio the fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini chat with models code monitor usage. You're going to hang out for you can hang out. You get to interview the next person. I'm having fun. I'm loving it. Uh, this is an interesting post from Brendan Buck.

He says, "Here's a telling sign of where we are on day 15. There are zero stories about the blank in both the print New York Times and print Wall Street Journals. What is blank? " I have no idea. The government is shut down. Oh, the government shutdown. Yeah, that's right.

I'm getting a new passport and I have no idea if I'm going to get it in time. I I paid for uh it to be expedited because I have to go to Europe uh unfortunately. I mean, obviously, it's a fantastic event, but I never like leaving America.

Uh but it was it did rise to the occasion and I I need I need a new passport and I'm not sure if I'll be able to get it if the government is shut down. But are there really no new articles about this? No news. It does feel a lot less like newsworthy.

I think a lot of people just don't like the government and so they're like, "Yeah, shut it down. We don't need it. I'm over the government. See you. See you. I do think most of those uh it we'll get I heard this uh uh most of the departments had four to six weeks of funding for their employees. Okay.

So they can hang out. So basically for like fourish weeks they're no one's paycheck is affected quite yet because they have no reserves. Once that happens I think it starts to get noisy. Okay. Well we do have our next guest in the reream waiting room. Adam, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank