The Science of Success Podcast

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The Story of Big Think and The Unfiltered Lessons of a Female Entrepreneur with Victoria Montgomery-Brown

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In this interview, we dig into exactly what it takes to create one of the world’s largest personal development content producers, scale a company from raising money to monetizing, and so much more with Victoria Montgomery-Brown.

Victoria R. Montgomery-Brown is CEO and co-founder of Big Think. Since founding Big Think, Victoria has built the company from a fledgling thought-leadership media platform to the leading knowledge company for ideas and soft skills. Victoria oversees the growth and direction of the company and is also responsible for Big Think’s strategic partnerships with global companies, including initiatives with Shell, Intel, Merck, Mercer, Pfizer, Microsoft, and many more! Before founding Big Think, Victoria was also a PBS producer and was nominated for an Emmy for an interview she produced on Ted Turner. This year Victoria will release her first book, DIGITAL GODDESS: The Unfiltered Lessons of a Female Entrepreneur, where she provides a candid look behind the scenes of her success.

  • The story of how Big Think began and the mission to provide good content. 

  • What Victoria saw in the market that gave her the confidence to launch Big Think. 

  • Content has to be “significant, relevant, and actionable”

  • What it was like to raise 1.4mm to start Big Think and grow one of the most respected personal development content generators. 

  • When it comes to money - raise as little as possible to demonstrate you have a viable business model!

  • Unless you have a massive audience, advertising does not raise a lot of money.

  • How to harness the PBS “Brought to you By” Model

  • A deep dive into the subscription-based business model

  • What’s the difference between sponsorship and advertising and why does it matter?

  • Sponsorship is more about going deep and reaching a specific audience in a targeted way than blasting a message out to everyone. 

  • How can we embrace failures and setbacks to learn from them to achieve our goals?

  • What makes a great work culture and how can you create one?

  • How to ask for help when you need it. 

  • Lessons of being a female entrepreneur and her advice to other female entrepreneurs no matter where you are in your journey!

  • How to overcome burnout, deal with self-proclaimed “power player”, and much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

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Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research

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Episode Transcript

ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet, bringing the world's top experts right to you. Introducing your hosts, Matt Bodnar and Austin Fable. 

[00:00:20] AF: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Science of Success, the number one evidenced-based growth podcast oh the internet with over 5 million downloads and listeners just like you in over 100 countries around the world. I’m your cohost, Austin Fable, and today we’ve got an absolutely incredible guest, yet again, Victoria Montgomery Brown. 

We dig in to her story of founding and growing Big Think, one of the most popular personal development channels on the internet and one of my personal favorites. How they pivoted throughout the years and her journey as a female entrepreneur and her advice for other female entrepreneurs who may be starting out in the middle of their journey or experience. 

But I knew this was coming. Before we dig in, are you enjoying the show and the content that Matt and I work so hard to put out for you each and every week? If so, there are two incredibly easy, yet tremendously impactful things that you could do for Matt and I. As always on the show, we’re looking for easy things we can do for massive returns. And first, it’s leave us a quick 5-star review on your podcast listening platform of choice. It helps others like you find the show, find these learnings from these incredible guests. So there’s a little karma in it for you as well. 

Next, go to our homepage at www.successpodcast.com and sign up for our email list today. Our subscribers are the first to know about all the comings and goings about the show, but also you’re going to have exclusive content that you won’t be able to find anywhere else. Specifically, when you sign up, you’re going to get our free course we spent a ton of time on called How to Make Time for What Matters Most in Your Life. 

Now, are you on the go? Are you moving around? Maybe you’re working out? Like I always say, good for you staying active. Sign for our email list easily by just texting the word SMARTER, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R, to the number 44222 to sign up via text. Now, if you haven’t already, check out last week’s episode with Annie Duke. Annie has been on the show in the past, and Matt and I had a great conversation with her on how to make better decisions, the biases that can play into your decision making. And what was really, really interesting was we dug in to how to assess certain risks in the COVID area, like going out, being at parties, being social, and how you can look at making these decisions in an intelligent way. 

On this episode, we interview an incredible guest, Victoria Montgomery Brown. Victoria Montgomery Brown is CEO and cofounder of Big Think, which I’ve already mentioned, I’m a huge long-time fan of Big Think. Since founding Big Think, Victoria has grown the company to a giant media platform and one of the leading knowledge companies for ideas and soft skills. Victoria oversees the growth and direction of the company and is also responsible for Big Think’s strategic partnerships with global companies including initiatives with Shell, Intel, MERC, Mercer, Pfiser, Microsoft and many, many more. 

Prior to founding Big Think, Victoria was also a PBS producer and was nominated for an Emmy for an interview she produced with Ted Turner. This year, Victoria will release her first book, Digital Goddess: The Unfiltered Lessons of a Female Entrepreneur, where she provides a candid look behind-the-scenes of her journey and her success.

We had a great conversation. We’d love to have Victoria back on the show. And without further ado, here’s our interview with Victoria. 

[00:03:46] MB: Well, I’m here in the studio with Austin, and we are super excited to be welcoming our guest on here. Austin, what’s up?

[00:03:51] AF: Yeah, I’m super excited for the conversation today. We have Victoria Montgomery Brown, cofounder of Big Think. Big, big exciting stuff. I’ve been a fan of Big Think for a long time, Matt. I know you’re very familiar as well.

[00:04:03] MB: Of course, yeah. Frankly, I think we’ve crib notes quite a few things from Big Think for some of our interview prep in many of the people that we’ve interviewed, and there’s been a lot of crossover there. But with that, I’d love to welcome Victoria to the show. Victoria, welcome to the Science of Succcess.

[00:04:17] VMB: Thank you both so much. I’m really excited to be here.  

[00:04:19] MB: Well, we’re super excited to have you on the show. And obviously as we just said a second ago, we’re both big fans of Big Think and everything that you’ve done there. I’d be curious to learn a little bit about the story behind how you founded the company and really what got you into creating it in the first place. 

[00:04:39] VMB: Absolutely. So I have a business partner, Peter Hopkins, and in around 2006, I think YouTube popped-up right around then, and we saw kind of a dearth of thoughtful content on the internet and we thought that there was a great opportunity for that to exist. And we were working in an organization where we had access ourselves to notable experts and things like that and thought, “Well, all of these experts have access to other incredible, brilliant people and it’s sort of like a ring together that they only expose themselves to each other. 

And so we came up with this concept of why wouldn’t these experts really want to share their knowledge with a much wider audience? And so kind of an aha moment came to us when we thought Davos Democratize. And for people who don’t, Davos is this elite conference that happens usually in January every year. I guess it probably won’t be happening in 2021, where notable people, business leaders, politicians, Bono I guess is usually there, convene and share their ideas with each other and we just thought, “Wow! Wouldn’t it be great if we could expose a much wider audience to these people’s ideas?” And so we pitch that idea, Davos Democratize, to our initial investors and they really liked that idea, and it went from there. And we pretty much stayed true to that mission.

[00:06:04] MB: Such a great mission, and in many ways you were ahead of us in this journey for sure, but we have the same thought process, which is how can we in a world full of so much noise and so much distraction, how can we really bring thought leaders and people who are really trying to help us improve ourselves and people who are on the cutting edge of science and business? And I love the phrase Davos Democratize, because that really summarizes in many ways, there are so many thoughtful people out there. How can we create content that actually helped people improve their lives and is actionable and useful? 

[00:06:38] VMB: That’s right. I mean, the other mission of Big Think that we’ve said for 13 years now is that the content has to be significant, relevant and actionable. So while we may have on notable economists, or business leaders, we don’t typically ask them what’s going on today or what happened yesterday or what they think is going to happen tomorrow. We want them to share with our audience things that can help them be better personally or professionally like you guys do. And so it stands the test of time. We want it to be evergreen and not just a flash in the pan type of content. 

[00:07:10] MB: One of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned about the accumulation of knowledge is that if you focus on trying to learn things that evergreen that don’t change overtime or that change very slowly overtime, and this is the lesson I originally took from Charlie Monger, who’s one of my intellectual heroes. You can really build a much more deep, rich and solid foundation of knowledge than if you build it on the quicksand of the latest trend and the 10 ways to optimize your email list and stuff like that. Instead, go back and study the classics. Go back and study the stuff that you can really build foundational pillars of knowledge on, and that’s how you exponentially grow your knowledge in a compound way as supposed to just a linear way.

[00:07:55] VMB: Totally. I fully agree with that.  

[00:07:57] MB: I want to step in and look at some of the early days of the company, because one of the things that to me is always is the most interesting questions to understand is what were, or were there any kind of inflection points? If I look at any very truly successful person or story or company, to me there’s always a moment where that business or that person or both of those things diverge from the average trajectory of a company’s lifecycle or a normal existence and take on some category of the extraordinary. And when you look back at what’s happened with Big Think, in your mind, what were some of the, or what were one or two or the big inflection points that really you knew that, “Hey, this wasn’t just an idea that maybe had a little bit of traction.” Or, “Hey, this might work. We’re not really sure.” To, “Oh my gosh! We’ve got something that is really working, is really hitting on all cylinders, and we really have something. We have a tiger by the tail here.”  

[00:08:58] VMB: Well, one of the things that I think really let us know that we had a great idea was, as you know, we interview notable experts. And we were concerned at the start, like will be able to get these people? And we invited a few people on early on. Larry Summers was one, Richard Branson was another. And by the way, how we got in touch with these people is basically – Well, Larry Summers was the head of Harvard at that moment, and Peter, my business partner, went and met with him. And we started to share the idea with notable experts, and they just loved it, and wanted to participate. 

And so we thought, “Well, if these exceptional people love what we’re doing, there must be something here.” And so it kind of took off from that and it was like a rolling stone. Once we started to get a few of these experts to participate and come on, others wanted to. And it really catalyzed a trajectory. And today, probably about 60% or 70% of the experts we have on are pitched to us, which is fantastic, and not something that we would really have ever expected in the early days. 

And something that people ask also about failures along the way and how that has changed the business. And early on, we wanted to create essentially a way for our audience to communicate directly with our experts. And so we spent a large portion of the initial money that we raised trying to create basically the zoom of your. So in 2006, to have those communications with our experts and audience, and it just did not take off. We invested so much money into it, and it felt like a really bad thing that we had done. And honestly if it had succeeded, Big Think would not be where it is today. It had to be a scalable way to reach experts, and that just was not the way to do it. And so I think those two things were fundamental to Big Think and still are. 

[00:11:00] MB: I’m curious – I don’t know if you’re willing to share this or if it’s publicly available or not, but how much did you initially raise to capitalize the company?  

[00:11:08] VMB: Sure. It’s not publicly available. We only raised $1.4 million way back in 2007. And so while that sounds like a lot, it’s not really a ton when you’re starting with nothing and you obviously have to build a website, etc. And back then, things were a lot more expensive than they are today with open source and all that stuff. But I have always said this, that it was a blessing that we didn’t raise a lot of money, because it forced us to immediately confront that we were a business and had to be generating money from the get-go. 

And so our initial business model was sponsorship and advertising, and even before we had a website, we had two clients signed up based on the mission and what we thought might be the reach of Big Think going forward. So I would say to entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs out there, and maybe VCs would disagree with me. But raise as little as you can to demonstrate that you actually have a viable potential business model and get down to it and start building your business as soon as you can. 

[00:12:14] AF: I want to hone in a little bit on sponsors and advertising and just general monetization. When you were raising this money, obviously you had to have some sort of idea. Was that always the idea, was to primarily make money from sponsors and advertising? And what did that look like in the early days and how has that evolved since then? 

[00:12:34] VMB: I think if I’ll recall some of the early conversations with Peter, we actually had this notion that we could be a little bit like a virtual speaker as a bureau. And so we would charge to have access to these experts. And that just didn’t seem right to us. And so that initial business model, it also didn’t seem like it was scalable, really. And so the sponsorship and advertising, way back in 2006, 2007, was what we thought was feasible. Today I don’t’ know if I were to start a business, if that would be the business model that I would select. But that’s what launched us. 

And then it evolved. The advertising and sponsorship market was hit really hard in 2008, 2009 and took a long time to recover. I’m not even sure if it fully has. And so we thought to ourselves, “Okay, we need some type of revenue that is actually going to be predictable.” And so we created a subscription model as well. So probably 95% of our content is free for consumption on Big Think and across our platforms, and we’re reaching now around 40 to 50 million people a month. And I guess around 2010 or 11 we started to think, “Look, advertising and sponsorship is just not reliable. It’s going to be an important revenue source for us ongoing. We better figure something else out.” 

And so we kind of went back to the initial notion of subscription and created Big Think Edge, which is designed to help people primarily professionally in the soft skill area. And so we got a bunch of clients that way. And then in the last couple of years, individuals have said that they want access to that too. So we created a b2b, so business to business model as well as a business to consumer model. And so those are our three business models at the moment. And I think it’s really important to have if possible more than one revenue stream so that you’re not dependent on anyone of them. 

[00:14:42] AF: Absolutely. And obviously we play in somewhat similar spaces, but I definitely relate to the unreliability that can occur at times around sponsors and advertising. To back up a little bit, you mentioned it kind of launched with a bang, right? There are a couple lined up and then the financial crisis 2008 really took a hit and it’s been kind of recovering ever since. Have you all found that most of your sponsorship opportunities – Well, I guess let me rephrase that. So what does that look like? Is that purely off of things like AdSEnse on YouTube? I know you’ve got quite a sizeable audience there. Is there a team that sort of courts these advertisers and tries to entice them to come in and sponsor things on your page and on your videos? Sort of how unpredictable it may be, how do you all try to find predictability in that model?  

[00:15:28] VMB: Right. I mean, as I’m sure you know, unless you have a pretty massive audience, advertising does not yield a lot of money. So Big Think really only started putting ads on our site within the last two years. And there are a lot of ads there at the moment. Sponsorship was fundamental to us, because we would never create anything that was advertorial, but sort of like the PDS model, the brought to you by, was important to us from the get go. And we actually have an internal team and have for years who would come up with ideas and then pitch them to organizations. 

So one of our early clients was Intel, and every organization wants to pitch themselves or promote themselves as innovative. And so we came up with an idea for them called Moments of Genius, and we pitched it to them that there are all these people who’ve done incredible things. What was it that actually catalyzed them to do it? And so in that series, a couple of our guests were Elon Musk. I mean, he was famous at that point, but not like he is today. And the fellow – I’m unfortunately blanking on his name, who identified the HIV virus. And so that was our initial business model, and none of the contents was anything that we wouldn’t otherwise produce, and that’s been fundamental to us. 

So there is never content on Big Think that is something that is just about advertising. As time evolved though and advertising agencies were suffering and organizations are spending less on sponsorship, it was a real problem for us. And so we did have basically a come to Jesus moment where we are going to be in deep trouble if we don’t figure out another revenue stream. And that’s how we came up with the subscription model. 

And I will tell you another story of thankful failure, because yeah, I mean sometimes failure in the moment sucks, but sometimes it can be a big blessing. We also created a scenario. We were going to get experts’ advice for organizations, and we had no expertise in doing this, but we’ve invested probably 4, 5 months in figuring out how we might pitch Big Thinks experts to organizations, pay the experts and obviously make money for Big Think. That just went completely off the rails. And instead of Peter and I collapsing and thinking, “Oh my God! We’re screwed.” We basically just doubled down and came up with another solution. And I will say again, not having a lot of money or runway in these time can actually beneficial, because it forces you to be innovative in the here and now and not rely on the money that you have potentially lasting you for a year or two. 

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[00:20:11] MB: It's amazing how constraints can force creativity and activity. I’d be curious, you use these words very differently, and I think I understand the difference. But to me, they often get lumped together into one thing. And so tell me how you conceptualize the difference between sponsorship and advertising, because it seems like that distinction has really fundamentally transformed the way you've been able to monetize Big Think in many ways.

[00:20:38] VMB: I think so for sure. So in a sponsorship, we work really closely with the sponsor. We figure out what it is they're trying to present to our audience or their audience, and then we come up with ideas for them. And it really still has to be significant, relevant and actionable. And they’re often deeply involved in the ideas for the content creation. Big Think does all of that, from booking the guest, to production, to distribution, etc. But it's a very involved process with our clients or the sponsor. And advertising is just the ads that are on the site that we don't really have control over, except maybe not allowing gaming advertising on or things. So it's much more about the amount of viewers that you have on your website, where at least from my perspective, sponsorship is about who’s specifically you’re reaching and what the messages you're trying to get to that audience. And really you have full control over that and the content creation. Whereas advertising, we have not a lot of control about the ads that appear on our site and it's just literally about quantity versus, I think, specifically who you're trying to reach.

[00:21:52] MB: I’m going to paraphrases this. So tell me if I understand it correctly. The distinction is that sponsorship is more about going deep, reaching a specific audience in a very targeted and tailored way as supposed to just putting AdSense on your website basically.

[00:22:07] VMB: Absolutely. That is right. And I would say we didn't want to disturb our audience with ads if it wasn’t necessary and if it wasn't going to yield important revenue for Bit Think, which is why we really had no ads on our site for the first 10 or 11 years. And only once we got our audience up to such a significant level did we start putting ads on it. That’s what I’d recommended for others. If you can avoid putting ads on your site as much as possible to provide your audience with the best possible experience, I would do that. Obviously, once advertising revenue becomes important and somewhat unavoidable, then I understand doing that. But if you can avoid it, I would. 

[00:22:54] MB: I'm curious, tell me a little bit more about especially in the early days. I mean, it seems like you were able to land some big names. I mean, obviously, Richard Branson is huge. But some big names early on that maybe drove the acquisition of sponsors a little bit more effectively. But how do you, when you're pitching a sponsor, especially in the early days of Big Think, approach or broach the topic of looking at it in a way beyond just CPMs or some generic advertising metric and say, “Hey, we can deliver more than that, but you need to pay more than what you would normally pay.” Does that make sense?

[00:23:32] VMB: I does. I mean, I don’t have silver bullet answer for that. But how we pitched it was that we were going to be delivering excellent content that they would get to associate their brand with to a relatively small audience in the early days, but it would be meaningful and impactful and that they could also use the content that we created to target their own audiences internally. So while Big Think owned all the content, and after the sponsorship we would often remove the sponsor's granting, etc., from it, it was really about quality of reach versus quantity of reach. 

Now because we have a very significant audience, it’s a combination of the two. But I think even today, brands recognize that it really matters how you are reaching people and that quality is much more important than quantity. 

[00:24:22] MB: Yeah, that’s such a great point. And especially in a world full of so much noise and endless content, it's important to be associated with the right kinds of brands and reach people in the right way. That makes a lot of sense. 

You touched on one other question related to this, which I think is another really unique novel approach to the broader sponsorship business model. Tell me more about these unique campaigns that you would craft and pitch to corporate sponsors. How did you conceptualize or think about in a Broadway the idea of putting these campaigns together and how you tailored each pitch to each individual corporate sponsor? 

[00:25:05] VMB: Well, I will say that it starts with a lot of research and also kind of have to have a luck along the way. But we do and still do a lot of cold outreach. But we would research the brands, figure out what their mission is. Looking at annual reports is not a bad idea as boring as it may be to figure out what the company's mission is for the next year. And so one of our initial sponsors that we had was Bing, and we knew that they want to differentiate themselves in the search engine world. And so we pitched at that point to one of the senior executives there in marketing the concept of the future of search. They probably want to be on stage with Google. And so we contacted him. We came up with an idea that he liked a live streamed webinar on the future of search. And this is way back I think in 2010 or 2011. So the technology was with pretty difficult back then. We managed to convince them. We had the head of search for Google and the head of search for Bing on the same stage. It was covered by the Wall Street Journal and a bunch of others. We just thought, “What is the kind of thing that will excite both of these organizations and get Bing to want to sponsor it.” And being associated or on the same stage as Google was something that I think was important to them at that time.

So it’s a combination of things. Figuring out what is interesting storytelling. What is going to make these potential sponsors interested in it and how can you demonstrate to them that you are uniquely positioned to execute on it? And we also had a whole bunch of other. We had Jared Lanier on the stage as well. At that point it was like, “What is going to be amazing about this scenario? And will Bit Think be able to execute it?” I mean, it's not really I guess rocket science, but it is about creating a package that is complete and will satisfy the audience, the customers and obviously yield revenue for Big Think as well.

[00:27:09] AF: May not be rocket science, but that’s extremely insightful, Victoria. I think that goes right there. I mean, I think too often, especially when you start to amass some type of audience, you can really kind of abandon the detailed approach that you all have around kind of figuring out the win-win is, what the usual goals are and then how you’re uniquely positioned to help. I mean, we get sponsor opportunities all the time, as I’m sure you do. And I’d say 99% of them are just some sort of copy+paste of a template, right? Or some sort of like unequal as, but may not even be aligned with the content we’re kind of putting out. 

So I think really taking that time. And as you said, may not be the most thrilling of work, but ultimately is going to yield the right kind of sponsorships. And like you said earlier, maybe not in quantity, but in quality, which is really what’s going to bring these sponsors back.

[00:27:57] VMB: Yeah, totally. And we have probably completed – I don’t know, 30 requests or proposals over the years. We’ve only won one of them, and that was because the clients at that point was desperate. And so, really, those things where it’s just kind of check the box type advertising or sponsorship, we have never won really because of the approach I just mentioned we take. And the way that a lot of these RFPs go out is really, really difficult for any organization of ours where it is thoughtful people coming up with unique ideas versus organizations that just have tens or hundreds of millions of people that they reach. 

And so again, we have never won a scenario like that, because it is about thoughtful content on our end. And a lot of the advertising agencies will literally just look at how many people does this organization or website reach. 

[00:28:57] AF: I think just for the soul of your content, your approaches is much better, and obviously I think this results in a long-term speaks for themselves. That’s something I kind of want to pivot into a little bit. One of the things that Matt and I both spend a lot of time researching and interviewing guests on is really kind of the art and science of decision making, right? And how you come to the right decisions where you want to take yourself in different objectives you have in your life. And one of the things I know you’ve talked a lot about in the past is how to trust your gut, right? Specifically around things like attracting investors, hiring, firing, taking leaps in your life. How do we kind of balance the idea of trusting our gut and trusting our intuition with also kind of a pragmatic sort of disciplined approach to decision making?

[00:29:44] VMB: Well, over the years, I’ve learned to trust my gut much more than I did initially in starting the business. I'm not sure that there is a true science to it. But Liv Boeree who’s a Big Think expert and champion poker player I write about in the book has this advice about confidence bias, which is you or one tends to convince yourself that you see facts that align to what we want the outcome to be. So if you want to hire somebody, let's say, because they have an amazing resume and you think that they will add something incredible to your organization, but you're interviewing them and you get red flags and a bad feeling about them, that’s not particularly signs, but I would trust that. And 100% of the time when I myself have looked at what I want to have happened in the confidence bias way and gone against my gut, I have been wrong. 

So that’s not, as I said, science, but it is really trusting that something intuitive is guiding me and trusting that much more than what I'm wanting to have happened. 

[00:30:58] AF: Interesting. Do you happen to have an example or a story that you wouldn’t mind sharing? I mean, of course I don’t want to expose anybody unnecessarily, but I’m curious as to kind of just what the actual thought process is, right? What’s the information you’re seeing and then what’s your gut telling you kind of in a real-world situation? 

[00:31:16] VMB: Yeah, absolutely. One of initial or early employees was this extremely talented woman, and Peter had introduced me to her and really, really wanted to hire her. And her resume was outstanding. And I met her, I remember, at a coffee shop. The website hadn’t launched yet, and it was one of our initial employees. And I met her at a coffee shop and I just had a really bad feeling, but I couldn't get over or couldn't get past her resume and just convinced myself we have to have this person.

And so I hired her, and early on it was an okay working relationship. But over the course of a bunch of months, she developed some type of animosity towards me, and it was really unpleasant to work with her. And finally I was alerted to an email that she had sent bizarrely to our entire staff about me. And had I trusted my gut from the get-go and just not hired here, there wouldn't have been really unpleasant interactions with her along the way and eventual firing. And for her, it probably wouldn’t have been good either. If one person has a bad feeling about the other, it's not going to do the other person any good to force that relationship. 

[00:32:37] AF: Absolutely. In fact, it really kind of damages both folks and it’s just nothing but wasted time and wasted capital really.

[00:32:44] VMB: Absolutely. Yeah. 

[00:32:46] AF: When something – Like that’s an example, right? So you went kind of against your gut. This happened. There was an unfortunate outcome for everyone. How do you kind of go about it? And as you say in the book, like embrace your failures and setbacks. How do you not only embrace that failure but then learn from it and kind of move forward and make sure you don’t make the same mistakes again. 

[00:33:08] VMB: Well, I would be lying if I said I didn’t repeat the same mistake again and again, but hopefully each time I repeated it, I’ve learned a little more. But when I say embrace failure, I really just mean acknowledge it. One of the things that I talk about early in the book is transparency, and I think that as a leader or anybody in any organization or relationship, the way that you build trust with people is to be as transparent as possible and acknowledge your mistakes as quickly and as brutally as you can, and that will let people see, your colleagues or whatever, that you are somebody that is to be trusted and that does learn from their mistakes. In an organization I think that that is really important aspect of leadership is really taking on the mistakes you made and letting people know that you’ve seen them and that you're going to work to change them. 

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[00:36:15] MB: Yeah, I think that’s such an important insight, and there're two things really to me that come out of what you just said. One is this understanding and the example you gave a minute ago about that hire even underscores this more so, but mistakes are inevitable part of being in business. And I think many people go into business or really in anything they're doing in their lives and they try to avoid making any mistake. When the reality is you're moving quickly enough, if you're doing enough and you're taking risk and you're trying to create something, which you obviously have created tremendous amount from nothing. Mistakes are a part of that process, and you have to be okay knowing that going in. And you have to have this willingness, which is personally I believe one of the most important skills in life to face up to your own mistakes, your weaknesses, your failures and realize, “Hey, I screwed up and I need to correct it.” because the sooner you do that and the sooner you take ownership of it, you can progress beyond it, and it's so much better to do it quickly than it is to try and bury it under the rug or hide from it. 

[00:37:20] VMB: That’s exactly right.

[00:37:22] MB: So I want to change gears a little bit and talk about another challenge that I know many of us face and I've certainly faced it. I know Austin has faced it. How do you think about as somebody who's been in the trenches scaling a startup, building an organization? Eventually you're going to get burned out. How do you think about overcoming that dealing with burnout? Keeping yourself balanced if possible, especially in a business as challenging as online media and online content. 

[00:37:53] VMB: Well, as I write about in the book, I did not lead a balanced life the first 11 or so years of Big Think. So that's a long a long time. And I would learned from my mistakes, which is that Big Think was my entire reason for being, and I took it on as a reflection of myself, which is not. It’s a website. It's a business. I am my own person. I am not Big Think. It became sort of like Victoria and Big Think were one and the same. And that led to a lot of real mental issues for me. I became completely anxious all the time and even developed depression. And I remember this one instance when Peter and I were in San Francisco and we were seated at Yerba Buena, which is this place like coffee shop or whatever, and we were sitting there and I was talking to him about all the doom scenarios that could happen to Big Think. And while it is the role of founders and the CEO to see what possibly could go wrong, the more fundamental thing is to focus on what could go right and be optimistic and positive and impart that across the organization. And we are just sitting there and I was like, “This could go bad. This could go bad. This is going to go bad.” And he finally said to me, “If all basically so bad and so gloomy and doom-felt, why are we doing this?” And then he took a step back and said, “I really can’t at this point, Victoria, continue working with you in the way that you are at this moment, and you need to go and get help.” 

And so there are many different ways I think people can find balance and get help in other ways and basically go on vacation or whatever, but in this instance, I actually needed psychiatric help. So I went to a psychiatrist and was put on antidepressants, and that really helped me. And I’m very open about talking about it, because there are different ways that people can detox from work or what have you. But that was the way that I needed to at that moment, which was pretty severe, and I really am grateful to Peter for doing that intervention at that moment. 

[00:40:06] MB: Mental health is such a critical topic, and I applaud you for sharing your own struggles with it. It's something we talk a lot about on this show and the importance of prioritizing that, taking care of yourself, having the awareness to know that you need to deal with something. You need to face something. You need to – As we touched on a minute ago, you need to accept those challenges and address them. Again, thank you for sharing that and thank you for really underscoring one of the important things that doesn't get talked about enough. And we try to share on this show is the importance of keeping your mental game strong and taking care of your mental health, because it's so undervalued and it just doesn't get talked about. 

[00:40:50] VMB: Yeah, and it makes life really unpleasant if you don't.

[00:40:54] MB: So I want to jump around a little bit more, because there are so many interesting things you talk about in the book. Tell me about how do you deal with a lot of these big-name power player type of folks who come into the Big Think ecosystem? The Richard Branson, the Elon Musks of the world, etc. 

[00:41:13] VMB: Well, I mean, it’s easy to say. But these are just people too. They’ve obviously done extraordinary things. And for us, it's not about fandom or them being stars. It's really about understanding what it is they can help you or I learn to be better personally or professionally. And so when we tell them that mission, they’re very, very humble about it and want to help. So I think, for us, it’s because we've been mission-driven that there's never been any anxiety in reaching out to people, extraordinary people, or asking them to beyond Big Think. And that’s what I would say to anybody who wants to build something that requires extraordinary people to be a part of, if you have the right mission, they will most likely participate. It’s if you're asking them for the wrong reasons, they probably won't. And that’s what we found. I mean, as I said, we didn't even have a website until we launched, I think, January 7 of 2008. We had already interviewed well over 100 people before the website launched. And so we would go to experts and they’d say, “Well, whose done it? Okay, maybe you’re the 10. Can I see your website?” “No. We don't have one yet.” But then they would listen to the mission and be like, “Well, that's worth a shot. I’ll give it a go.” 

[00:42:33] AF: I kind of want to transition yet again and take a step back, because as Matt had mentioned, I appreciate you sharing with us your kind of struggle with mental health and the depression. And as somebody who also in period of my life that’s been diagnosed and been on antidepressants, kind of taken that rollercoaster. I think at least for me, I feel like they’re bouts within ways. It’s not necessarily something. And forgive me if I’m projecting, but it’s not really something that entirely goes away. There’re kind of peaks and valleys. And one of the things that I research a ton about and I’ve been curious for you to take on, is kind of these daily rituals, right? Things that you do daily or maybe through seasons of your life that kind of keep you from falling back into old mental patterns. What sort of daily rituals, daily habits or things that you do when things might get a little crazy, burnout and might start to creep up on you. What are kind of the ways that you maintain such a tremendous level of output running such a business with a reach like Big Think, but also taking care of yourself and just making sure that you don’t kind of fallback into old habbits?

[00:43:40] VMB: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for me, exercise has always been a fundamental part of my life. And so that’s something that I do on an almost daily basis. I will say that in, I guess, 2015 or something like that, I started listening to Headspace, which is the meditation app. And that really helped me at a particular moment in time and I should probably be doing that today. But to break myself out of crazy cycles, I will go and do meditation again. Would it be much more beneficial if I’m doing it every day? Absolutely. But that’s something that has helped and an intervention. And then my family, I’m really close to as well. And I’ve asked them in the past few years after I was diagnosed with depression to be open with me about what they were seeing and if they were concerned, etc. And so they are. 

So the number one thing I would say is just be willing to ask for help and do what it takes for you to get that help if you're in cycle. And there are strangely enough benefit to being open about it, because people that you didn't think would be supportive or receptive often will be and forged in even deeper relationship. And there’s something else I would say that anxiety and depression don't always have to be totally negative. There is a reason for anxiety. And while I tend to get way too anxious at moments, it has also catalyzed and fueled my drive to build Big Think with Peter and to have it continue going on. 

[00:45:17] AF: Something you’ve mentioned in or you touched on and how we ask for help. I feel like a symptom of anxiety and all of these sort of mental factors that we’re discussing is you almost underestimate the empathy of other people, right? Being anxious and being worried, it makes you think that if you open up about those things, if you bring them to somebody, even if it’s someone very close to you, that they’re going to crack the whip on you. They’re going to say like, “Oh button up, handle that.” But often times I believe specially if you’re opening up the right people, you’ll be surprised with the empathy that you get, the understanding. And in most cases, even some of the shared experiences and thoughts you might have with who you’re opening up.

[00:46:04] VMB: I think that’s right. I mean, one of our partners actually, they’re an important client of ours, and she and I had only ever people communicated on a very superficial level, and I went to go and visit her in Chicago. And she was asking me how I was. And for some unknown reason, I told her that I just started taking antidepressants. It’s like kind of not appropriate thing to say to a client. And she really opened up and we forged a much, much better relationship. And even today, this is a person who’s part of my life and a part of Big Think. And after I said it, I thought, “Oh my God! I shouldn't have said anything. I probably have jeopardized this relationship, etc., and may have lost Big Think business,” but not the case at all. It just strengthened the relationship.

[00:46:54] AF: It’s so funny. I can even relate entirely to the story. You kind of opened yourself up a little bit, and then you hang up the phone and you’re like, “I’m an idiot. Oh my God!” But like it’s never really the case, but it’s such an easy thought to kind of have creep into your head. 

[00:47:10] VMB: Absolutely. 

[00:47:12] AF: So Victoria, I want to talk a little bit. So obviously the book, Digital Goddess: The Unfiltered Lessons of a Female Entrepreneur. I do think females have a little bit of a challenge in today’s landscape when it comes to entrepreneurship. A lot of the statics we kind of discussed before we began recording, more females today are starting companies than males. But women only lead 24 with Fortune 500, right? And female founders have only received 2.2% of US venture capital. I’m curious, what do you think can be done to help even those numbers out a little bit? What is your experience kind of taught you obviously being a successful female entrepreneur about the experience and what needs to be done to make sure that female companies, that female-led companies are getting a fair shake?

[00:48:00] VMB: Well, this may not be a very PC answer, but I think as I write in the book, grow a pair. I just think being confident. And if you have an idea, confident, then you can actually do it and then just get started. No business, whether it’d be led by a male or female is going to survive or even start if there isn't a great idea behind it and the willingness of the founders execute upon that. So my number one advice for women is, number one, believe that you can do it. But more importantly, find yourself an amazing idea and go for it. 

There's really no magic to it. I’ve been extremely fortunate, the vast majority of our investors have been men. And I just really believe that the majority of men want to help women in business succeed. And that is an advantage as a woman, and I think women should feel comfortable using that. There is a lot of opportunity for women in terms of fundraising, and there are a lot of VCs that focus specifically on women. I wouldn't say there's anything magic about it, but there is I think a lot of opportunity for women that they may not feel is out there. 

And I have felt that me being a female CEO and founder has actually been super beneficial to me and helped us get in front of people that may be a male founder or a CEO might've had more difficulty doing so. 

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[00:51:24] MB: Such a great perspective, and I think the fundamental idea that you shared, which is just business in general is grueling. It's difficult. It's hard. And to be successful in any endeavor, you can't have a victim mindset. You have to be willing to take ownership as we talked about earlier of the difficult parts, the hard parts. Face the difficult truths and put yourself out there and be willing to do what it takes to be successful. And I think your story and many of the examples you shared throughout this conversation highlight that exact same theme. And to me, in many ways, that really sums up a lot of the lessons from this conversation, is this notion of put yourself out there, take risk, don't be afraid to act and don't be a victim. 

[00:52:12] VMB: I love that. I hadn’t thought about that, but yes, avoid the victim mindset. 

[00:52:18] MB: So Victoria, for somebody who's been listening and is excited, motivated, wants to take action and implement some of the things we’ve talked about today, what would be one action item that you would give them to start taking action to implement the ideas we’ve discussed?

[00:52:33] VMB: Well, one thing I would suggest, I just bought this book myself, which is called Best Self, which is a friend of mine introduced me to it. It's a 13-week plan to achieve three goals that you identify for yourself. And that to me, it’s just one step for myself where I want to achieve certain few things over the next 13 weeks. And by the way, it’s 13 weeks, because they say that a reasonable timeframe to achieve specific goals. It’s just take action. No matter what you do, basically jump in and start what it is that you want to achieve. 

Now as I say in the book, if you want to be an entrepreneur or learn French or whatever, tell people, and that you’ll be much more likely to do it if you have kind of the shame of not after you’ve told people that you would. 

[00:53:23] MB: Great piece of advice, and very practical and easy to implement. Victoria, for listeners who want to find more about you, Big Think, and your upcoming book, where can people find you and the book online?

[00:53:35] VMB: Well, bigthink.com is where you should go to find incredible content. And the book is available at digitalgoddessbook.com.

[00:53:45] MB: Well, Victoria, thank you so much for coming on the show. Austin, thanks for a great dialogue as well. This has been really insightful. I know I learned a lot. Some really great insights into the early workings in the business model and what helps you innovate, and then some great lessons about being a successful entrepreneur in any field or any endeavor. 

[00:54:05] VMB: Thank you both so much. This has been wonderful.

[00:54:07] AF: Thank you so much for the time. 

[00:54:09] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email.

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