Nick Tran, Former Head of Global Marketing @ TikTok, Farfetch

Welcome aboard Venture Passport, a podcast living inside view of early stage global markets. Me, Jack Richardson, along with my co host Richard Armstrong, explore insights from the world's most innovative entrepreneurs and investors. This episode is brought to you by TAV. TAV is a global early stage VC with over 240 investments, 56 successful exits, six IPOs, 15 unicorns, including globally recognized names like SumUp, DeepL, and many others.

They write checks ranging from a hundred k to 1 mil and are sector agnostic. With a dedicated global team, TAV is focusing efforts on The US and Europe, while also targeting emerging markets such as Indonesia, Thailand, Brazil. If you're an ambitious fan of a great idea, don't hesitate to reach out. Ladies and gents, this episode is of Nick Tran, a seasoned marketer who is CMO at both TikTok and Farfetch, shaping the growth and brand strategy behind two of the most influential consumer platforms of past decade.

At TikTok, he helped redefine how to brand market it to a global audience, fueling its explosive rise to over 2000000000 downloads and over 16,000,000,000 in revenue in 2023. After that, at Farfetch, post going public in 02/19, he led marketing as the company scaled into the most dominant platform for luxury fashion with over 5000000 customers per quarter and connecting customers in over a 90 countries with 1300 of world's top brands. We speak marketing in the twenty first century.

It's an absolute amazing episode. All indications, coming in, to the control center at this time indicate we are go. Go. Go.

Lift off. We have a lift off. So, Nick, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on.

You know, we've heard so much, obviously, your background from amazing companies like TikTok, Hulu to, you know, as I say, to Samsung. But, I mean, it's it's great to have you on. You're probably one of our first marketing specialists on the podcast. Usually, we have founders and investors, but we wanted to do a special episode today.

Maybe before we start, you could tell us a bit about your background growing up. Did you always think you were gonna be into tech, especially marketing in general? Yeah. It's great to to be on here.

Thank you for having me. I grew up in Southern California. At the time, I don't think tech was even on my radar, but I knew I wanted to go into marketing. My path into tech came through the marketing, route.

I started my career in food and beverage at Taco Bell, which is as far from tech as you could possibly be. Then ended up at a small startup called Stance, which literally makes socks. So not very tech heavy, But it was from there that I got introduced to Samsung and then with the Guru and then TikTok and then Farfetch. So it does seem like a lot of tech in recent years, but I did not know that's where I was gonna end up.

Awesome. We're not allowing you to get off that easy. So, so maybe you can expand more on your particular experience, perhaps, host stamps, how you first ventured and made the switch from consumer brand to consumer tech. What did you find most interesting, most surprising for you at the time?

Overall, how was the experience? And would you ever go back to a consumer brand that would be such kind of darker wild world of tech? I, I genuinely love consumer brands. Even at the places I've worked at were more on the tech side.

There was a component made for consumers. If you think about the places I worked at, whether it was TikTok, Samsung or Disney, the intention was always to make the brand known to a wider audience and to really cater to the mainstream mass consumer and allow them to adopt whatever it was that we were creating or selling. So I don't really see myself as anything but a consumer brand marketer by trade. How I fell into it was a mix of my background in psychology, which is what I've studied in, in, at university and, this passion for trying to impact pop culture at scale in the world of business.

You're either gonna be a founder that creates a product that'll revolutionize an entire generation like the iPhone and Steve Jobs, or, you become a badass marketer who can influence a lot of people at scale without necessarily being the genius that can create the actual products, behind the scenes. I've never been great at coming up with new concepts, but I've always been really good at trying to showcase why a product should be in the hands of everybody globally speaking. So that's more so my background and skillset.

Awesome. I would be a terrible marketer because I really like the feedback loop and the ROI, which is ironic considering I'm in venture. It's very hard to quantify results within marketing, especially when you're running so many different, I guess, campaigns across different, should you say, mediums, I guess, to work. So do you agree?

And, and, and why, why, why marketing more generally? You said that kind of that, that was a real passion, like putting brands and products in the hands of so many people at scale isn't something that really appeals to you, but I guess what, what kind of more, more on the phone there would you say? Yeah. To your, to your first question, I don't know if I necessarily agree with that.

I think everyone always uses that same adage that says half of marketing doesn't work, but nobody knows which half it is. I think it's evolved a lot since then. In today's age, if you just look at like the totality of what you're doing on the market perspective and see what it drives in terms of your objective. Let's say if it's revenue, there should be a fairly easy path to showing when we do a bunch of this stuff, revenue goes up.

When we don't do this, revenue stays flat or goes down. So I feel that, it's a cop out for marketers to claim that it's impossible to measure everything. I think we've gotten to a point where so many things are able to be measured that the question is, should they be measured? I think it's a better question.

Can you measure the impact of it? I tend to be a more balanced marketer who finds that a mix of growth and performance in the early phases of the company, and then layering in the brand elements and driving more brand marketing components once it has some market share tends to be best for the company. At the end of the day, I think the impact it has on sales and revenue is what you can use to justify whether what you're doing is working. Yeah.

That's very interesting. Let's talk about you know, you're one of the first global head of marketings of, you know, TikTok, essentially CMO. Right? You saw the rapid growth of the company from the early days.

What was your most memorable moment there? If you have to say one of them. There's so many things. I think when I first joined, they just acquired Musically.

And the idea that this app that was really more of a social media app that lended itself towards, younger audiences that were looking to do lip syncs and dances could become what it is today is still pretty like mind blowing to me. Yeah. Like it's just an amazing testament to the product and the ability for the company to evolve into something way beyond what it initially. I also find moments of crisis in my career tend to stick out and be more memorable because they're so traumatic at the time.

But you know, a few months into my role leading marketing for TikTok, we had the executive order from the Trump administration to potentially ban. Obviously that didn't happen, but that in of itself was a very memorable moment as you as you put it. But I also think the Well, what was like the, I mean, you know, whenever that happened, because it was so quick, what was everyone like in the room at TikTok? Was everyone super shocked?

Maybe you can share more about that. I think there was a bit of a surprise that it was happening. I think at the time we were also dealing with the ban in India. To this day, I don't think it's it's been unbanned.

It's been a couple of years since I've left TikTok, so I don't know exactly what's, happening, but I would say that the sentiment overall was a lot more optimistic than many people from the outside would have expected. I think at the time we were so young as their company, maybe it was like a year or two old at the, at the most that, you don't realize how significant something is until you're able to step away and look at it from the outside in. But when you're in the middle of it all, I don't think any of us realize the magnitude of what that looked like or how crazy that might've been.

We were just focused on doing our jobs and making sure that we continued to drive, the growth, of the product and ensure that the user community, was supported during that time and to make sure that the message was very clear that there was nothing that, should impact the experience for the people that we had at the time. So it didn't feel like it was a big change in, in, in the atmosphere, the mood. The other nuance is it was during COVID. So it wasn't like we were in an office where people are running through the halls about this news and creating this issue.

A lot of the stuff happening was actually through video, conferences. So I think that also created this bit of stability where we were already so jarred from COVID and lockdown and the way that the world had changed that you could have thrown anything at us at that time. And I think we would have been resilient and still optimistic because I didn't really feel a sense of concern or dread when the executive order first, came out. It was really just people realized, okay, this is another thing we're gonna have to overcome and push through, which speaks to a lot of the, the people that were working there at the time.

Yeah. Do you think that level of scrutiny was warranted in many ways given the origin of a company or do you think that was blown way out proportion both from an Indian perspective, but also US perspective at the time? Yeah. That's kind of getting into an area that I don't know if I can speak to.

Once you get into the whole world of geopolitical concern, outside meaning, it's tough to have a strong opinion on. At the end of the day, my take on it is that certain companies are going to be looked at more carefully than others, whether it's right or wrong. I think just the nature of the geopolitical world we live in. We were banned in India mainly because we were an app from a country where they banned 58 other apps as well.

So it was just a blanket ban. It wasn't targeted towards one company. It was any app from a specific country of origin banned in India during that era. Whether that's right or wrong is still to be determined depending on how things unfold over the next years.

In the world of marketing, it didn't really impact what we were doing or trying to do. From my perspective, not being in any meetings with government relations or public policy, I I was just focused on doing things, as you were doing prior to to that situation. Yeah. So maybe you can talk about your, marketing efforts at TikTok now.

Right? In terms of you're responsible for all the aspects of TikTok's global marketing efforts, including brand strategy, media, advertising. These are very fun experiences for you, but at the time when a company is growing this fast, it must be quite stressful as well. Stress manifests itself in different ways for different people.

You either have stress where it's almost debilitating, where you're overwhelmed. You don't know what to do and it's tough to focus on how to navigate forward, or you have a stress that's more like excitement and energy. There's so much to do, you know exactly what you want to do. It's just a matter of having the bandwidth and the time to get it all done.

I feel that the early days of TikTok were more the latter type of stress where there was this energy and excitement that everyone in the team had. It had me work harder than I've ever worked in my entire career. But it was just so fun that it was fine to, to be able to do that. Right.

So that, that was a very different type of stress. The, the way that we were really positioning ourselves though, was moving away from this idea of being a social media platform, but really being more of an entertainment platform. When you consider those nuances, it might not seem like a big deal now because I think a lot of people feel that they're being entertained by social media. But at the time it was a little bit more of a pivot from what the company set out to do initially.

The, the reason why we felt so strongly about moving into entertainment was because from a practical standpoint, I'd recognize that in the world of social apps, the average person in The US only had three social apps on their phone and they didn't want to download an additional social media app because there's this feeling of like a burden that that when you're on a social media platform, you also have to contribute stuff. So you're either posting, tweeting, adding pictures, or doing whatever it is that you you're doing.

Because of that, you don't want a commitment to four or five or six apps. You just want to stick to your core three. And you know, most people don't move beyond that. The difference with the world of entertainment is that there is no obligation for you to contribute to an entertainment app.

You can consume and solely consume and you're totally happy doing so. And what I sound really fascinating is that in the world of entertainment, people are willing to download any number of apps, as long as it's something that's entertaining to them, or there's a program that they specifically want to see. So even if you have three entertainment apps, if there's a new program on a new app that just comes out and all your friends are talking about that new program, you're going to download that app just to watch that one thing so that you can be part of that conversation.

Another random stat that I found fascinating was that the number of hours people spend on social media versus entertainment apps or screen time is very different. So the amount of time that you spend on social media might be like thirty minutes a day or forty five minutes a day. But if you look at the average screen time where people are watching entertainment or shows or selling or movie, it's like upwards of three and a half to four hours. So if you really want to break out and be successful with a new app, it's much easier to play in a place where people spend four hours a day on, various competitive apps versus being on a place where they spend thirty to forty five minutes.

So that made me push us to go into this entertainment space. And then thinking about like what made us different from an entertainment standpoint from any other app like Netflix or Disney plus It was this idea that we aren't creating highly produced, highly polished content for people to stream. We're letting the community create the really fun, engaging content that was snackable and allowed people to engage a lot more than they otherwise would have enabled on something else.

So those are all things that I thought were very interesting and exciting. To your point, coming into TikTok at that time, you just saw an entire world of opportunity at your disposal, which made it really fun and not stressful in that sense. Makes sense. Yeah.

I can imagine, sir. That's a really interesting interview. And, did just, so I have a context for my next question. What was the employee size growth rate when you joined TikTok versus when you left?

It's just super quickly. I don't know the total numbers, but I can share it with my team. When I first joined, my team was, about 16 people. When I left, it was probably closer to 300 to three fifty people globally, but that doesn't include any of the agencies or freelancers that like helped support us.

It, it, it obviously grew exponentially in a two year period. And we opened up a lot of different offices around the world to support the marketing efforts in each of the different regions. So from my perspective, one of my one of my favorite things I remember and, and love doing was expanding the offices and, and growing the team in different regions. And then seeing how nuanced it was because as a student of marketing, the way that people were marketing in Japan versus, versus The Middle East, Brazil versus The US versus all these different places, it gives you such a level of realization that you mostly spend time within your little bubble.

But like when I, when I took on the global role, I saw how people responded to work in all these regions. It, it really gave me a humbling, moment where I realized the world is so big. People are so different. People are unique.

And even if you take the same product and export it to different parts of the world, you really have to adjust your creative and adjust your marketing efforts in a way that that specific country or region, or even like, you know, town might digest it because it's not easy, in today's world to take the same work and spread it everywhere. It it just doesn't work that way anymore. How do you even begin to structure a team that large of the day, especially across geographies? And what kind of parameters or mediums had you set up in your geography to make sure that particular demographic achieved the results in terms of penetration usage, daily monthly active users that were the North Star metric of your KPIs?

Yeah. I think being a content platform makes it a lot easier. Right? So a lot of the work that we put out on the marketing front was inspired by the videos that were posted by the community within the specific regions.

So if you imagine content from The Middle East versus content from Southeast Asia versus Latin America versus North America, you have so much gold that you could find in each of those regions that you could then elevate and turn into a concept that could become advertising and marketing for the platform. That it's just much easier than if we were a company selling cans of water. It could just be very different. I find that the team was inspired by the content that the community produced and it didn't make it very hard to manage once you realize that each region had a source of inspiration that was independent of all the other regions.

So there was some learnings that you would have that would cross over into all the different global regions. But the individual work predominantly came from a specific country so that you didn't really have to worry about what the rest of the globe was doing. As far as the structure you're talking about, we ultimately had four major regions. And then out of those regions, we had a few satellite offices to support.

So we just had a lot of coverage in individual markets to ensure that like everything from language to cultural context and content was all relevant. And we, we tended to avoid having one HQ home base that would set that the strategy for everybody. It was really more driven on a regional basis, which was different than a plate like Samsung. If you look at Samsung, it is driven out of a global HQ.

There is a single product and there's a way to market that versus marketing content and entertainment. It's just a very different beast. So I think the structure in, in, in every place I've been, it's really more built around the thing that you're trying to offer and sell. But you can imagine that the world of streaming, like at Hulu and Disney was a lot more similar to what we ended up doing at TikTok because you you're essentially trying to get people to download an app and consume content.

The more contextual it is for their region, the more likely they're gonna download it. So you wanna market to them in a way that feels familiar and more like the place they're from. That's very interesting. You open so many markets.

Right? But if you had to say one market which outperformed your expectation, what would that be? And one that formed what would you say if you had to say two of them? It depends on the company that I would that so, like, example for TikTok.

Oh, for TikTok. So a place that oh oh, outperformed, I'd say, Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia. That makes sense.

Crush of it on TikTok. Whether it's Indonesia, The Philippines, Thailand, or even Vietnam. The numbers on TikTok earlier on were just like blew my mind. And I think it was just a product of like, you know, a free app.

Like you just, you download it for free and it's just like highly entertaining and engaging. And it's more creators from the different regions were able to create content that almost broke beyond geogra- like geographical barriers because a lot of them didn't necessarily use like a specific language. They would just be doing like sketches or like fun things that didn't require you to understand that language. As that started to like proliferate, you just saw more success come from creators from Southeast Asia, which then made more people wanna download and use it.

I was always blown away by, the numbers there. TikTok was just such a global phenomenon that it's tough to think of a spot that quote unquote, I don't I, there's just so many people. Here's the thing that I realized that was also crazy to me. No matter where I've traveled in the world over the last, like four years, five years, you can guarantee that somebody wherever I travel, we'll talk about TikTok organically.

I remember we would be at a lunch place and a table behind me. But in some random country, people would just be talking about a video that they just saw on the platform. Right. Or you'd have a situation where somebody on platform.

Right. Or you'd have a situation where somebody, on the street would be like filming themselves doing like a TikTok or something like that. So I, I can't even guess where it underperformed, but as far as my individual anecdote, like there was no country that I visited where somebody didn't at least talk about TikTok or I didn't see someone doing a TikTok or someone like talking to their friends about it. Like it just always naturally comes up, which to me is an insane thing to know that I was able to, be there during a part of it.

Yeah. That's incredible. Maybe you can talk a bit about TikTok shop. Right?

You were involved with the launch of TikTok shops. It's such a big revenue driver for TikTok in general, especially in emerging markets. Right? The numbers there are just exceptional.

Did you know this was going to work from the early days, TikTok shops or was it like a lot of iterating? I'd say yes, just because one, there was precedent for something like this in other markets, especially in Asia. Right? So you know that it's something that could be, you know, it, as far as the use case, it was like, for sure, it's just a matter of how quickly other markets adopted the social commerce.

So I think that's a factor where most people wouldn't be able to tell you if it's successful. It's just like someone telling you way back in the day that like a smartphone will be successful, but they couldn't tell you when. Right? They'll know they can tell you like one day, this thing is gonna take over everyone's lives and take over the world, but they wouldn't be able to pinpoint when, because user adoption is a very different beast.

The reason why I felt a lot of conviction for what the team was working on is, taking this idea from my personal experience and applying it to what TikTok shop would ultimately be. Growing up in The US, the thing that I did as a kid with my friends was we would go to the mall. In junior high and high school, the place that you went to hang out with your friends was the mall. You don't necessarily plan to shop, but you go there to hang out.

You're having fun. You might drop by the food court to grab lunch, and then you might go to the movie theater. You might go to the arcade. And then as you're there, you see something in a window at one of the shops that catches your eye.

So you all pile into that shop. Before you know it, you've all made a purchase of something you weren't expecting when you first came to the mall. That's that's the shopping experience people grow up with. There's been nothing from a digital perspective outside of Asia that provides that kind of spontaneous purchase behavior.

If you think about the best e commerce platforms today, they're really geared towards knowing that you want to buy something, then going to look for it and then going to buy it, right? When you go to Amazon, you have a list of what you need. You go there, put everything into your shopping cart as quickly as you can. Then you just like you check out and then you're onto the next thing that you're doing in your life.

The, the reason why that's different than TikTok is because TikTok created this behavior of spontaneous purchase intent. There wasn't a path to purchase yet, but it was like purchase intent. So then you started seeing hashtags like TikTok made me buy it. And like things like book talk, clean talk, where you see a video and then all of a sudden you're like, I have to go buy this thing right now.

Then you go to another platform to buy it. If you recognize that's the natural flow of people's behaviors where they see something that they're inspired by, They're spontaneously interested in buying it. So they then go somewhere else to find the item they found on TikTok and then make that purchase on another site to connect those dots just seems like a no brainer because if you can create less friction and provide an easy access point for somebody to buy the product that they were just inspired to go buy, it almost becomes like a automatic, you know, way for commerce to evolve.

So that, that, that to me is just a very easy way to describe what that looked like earlier on. Double sense. I'll say. Yeah.

%. When you hit, hit, hit that word, how much more potential has that got? Do you think we've hit a ceiling in regards to the total, like, market value of that particular economy? Like, you mentioned two to three apps on your phone from a social media standpoint.

Do you think there's headroom and space for an unwanted occupied people's home screens on their smartphone? And how do you see the two interlinking? I don't mean think that there's a ceiling yet. Take TikTok aside for a second and just say like social commerce overall.

There's probably like five or six players right now that matter. And I don't think that's even capped. Beyond TikTok, you have like certain categorical platforms, like let's say Fanatics, that's now pushing, a lot of like live commerce. You have whatnot on the collectible space in terms of live commerce and live shopping.

And you have a lot of individuals that are creating their own retail presence on platforms like Instagram or other channels. The fact that viable businesses are being created out of social is more so speaking to me on the trend of how things are evolving. Back in the day, the only way to get customers is to like advertise your retail store, whether in real life or online, and drive that traffic into your ecosystem. So whether it's your footprint in a real store or your website, they see what you have available and make purchases.

The way social platforms work today is if you make really fun engaging content, it doesn't matter how many followers you have, that content will be served to millions of people potentially. So in theory, if I have a item that let's say people want to buy, like I'm, I'm gonna have this for everybody. So it's like pretend I want to sell this gold can of liquid death. Back in the day, the way to do that would be I have to get so much awareness for this thing and get so much intent to purchase that I then drive you to my website, you know, liquid.

com, let's say, and then you can buy like a can of water from there. Or do you go to the store and you buy it. In today's world, if I make really fun content and I make it so compelling that the algorithms are now serving that to a bunch of people, I might have a million people see this gold can of water and want to buy it without me needing to tell anyone where it is because they'll eventually try to find it themselves. That's changed the dynamic so significantly that I think we're going to see more brands leaning into social commerce.

We'll see more brands selling live and doing things so that the only scarcity is not finding it, but being able to find the right window to buy it. And that becomes the game. I think shopping is going to be more exciting. It'll be more entertaining than we've probably seen in the last decade.

And it's only going to get more innovative and more interesting. Do you believe brick and mortar is here to stay as well? I think brick and mortar has a place. Everything from building brands to being a consumer touchpoint to potentially being a place for sales.

I think that brick and mortar will evolve and that it's not going to be the primary point for purchases in the future. I don't know when that's going to be, but I do believe brick and mortar will have to evolve, whether that's going to become more of an experiential destination for people to like have a relationship with your brand or if it becomes a point of distribution, like many distribution centers to have delivery be easier. I don't know what that will look like in the near term, but longer term, I think it's gonna have to evolve from being a place that just holds inventory as you go in, buy the units and restock the inventory.

That just seems like a very outdated approach to the way that the world is already moving. Yeah. Makes sense. I mean, we talked a bit about creator commerce there, but let's maybe talk about consumer social.

Right? Especially, you know, you and I know that this is extremely tough place to crack. I mean, do you think that there is opportunity for someone to be build the next, I guess, TikTok, Instagram, or even, you know, these other apps? Or do you think these other players Oh.

Have massive distribution that you just can't compete? I personally feel that media comes in cycles. And if you remember way back, there used to be a handful of newspapers. Right.

And then the newspapers would cover everything. And then over time you'll have specific magazines that will be categorical, you know, publications that are gearing themselves towards a specific interest group or an audience. Instead of being a newspaper that has everything, people might subscribe to a sports publication or like a business publication or whatever publication, you know, news publication. And then you're getting that specific category delivered to you in the form of print.

You see this then happen with TV, right? People have a bunch of different options for television. There used to be channels that covered everything. And then cable exploded where there's thousands of channels that all cover very specific interests and categories.

I don't think social media is immune to that type of evolution. In the initial phases, you start to have these aggregators compile all the different content into one place, which is what we saw with newspapers, what we saw with TV. And then you get to a point where people realize that they only wanna watch what they wanna watch. So then things pop up that are category or interest based content that's very specific to what they want.

And then they start to navigate toward that stuff. So my hunch is that you might not see something at the scale of a Facebook or Instagram or a TikTok or, but there's a good chance that something will pop up that might be solely based for music or fashion or sports. And that those will end up becoming the real next wave of successful social media platforms, especially if they can tie in commerce and experience and other things to it that the big social platforms can't necessarily do at scale as easily.

I think though those will definitely be things that'll start to break out and, and then see success in the near term for sure. Yeah. Super interesting. Super.

Super, super interesting. I can see this episode has been massively TikTok focused. I've TikTok myself, so I have absolutely no problem with that. To the end of the year, having spent some time at Farfetch, obviously being, in a bit of a different position, obviously, like kind of, I guess, public company up until the acquisition.

I guess, how did that experience differ? Not from just a product point of view, but also, I guess, like marketing efforts point of view from, from your previous kind of three, three, four years prior to that. Yeah, I think we were just scratching the surface on what we could do from a brand perspective. I think people oftentimes forget that when you're the dominant platform or player in any industry, you don't tend to need to rely on marketing or branding as much.

But as you get into a place that's more crowded and a lot of competition comes in, people having a relationship with your brand matters even more. Right? So I think it got to a point where Farfetch was so early into that luxury econ space that it just kind of benefited as we were ramping up our efforts to build a brand. I was really excited for what we were thinking about doing and what we're eventually going to do.

With the acquisition, we obviously had to scrap a lot of the plans, but, in my mind it was a different animal in the sense that the platform was established. It was like fifteen years old. The user base and the customer base was pretty sizable. But there was just no loyalty to the brand.

You have people who are shopping for the products and not shopping because of the site. And if they can find a better deal for the same item on any other site, they would just go there. Right? Or if there was two hour shipping on another site, they would go there.

Or if there was a special gift of purchase, they would go there. So in my mind, the game was a little bit different in the sense that we weren't just trying to create a new product or sell anything that was exclusively ours because Farfetch itself didn't sell Farfetch branded items. Like Farfetch was just a marketplace for other brands. Samsung sold Samsung products.

So I, I had a, a moat around what I was trying to sell because no one else could sell the same thing. Like we were Samsung, we were selling sampling products. Even at Taco Bell, clearly a lot earlier on, even though they're competing against a bunch of fast food places, what they've sold was a unique offering compared to McDonald's or Chipotle. You could focus on what you sell and not worry about anything else.

The, the Farfetch dynamic was very different because we sold the same thing that not only other luxury e comm sold, but other retail places sold. And then on top of that, the brands themselves sold them directly as well. So we were really trying to figure out how do you drive a reason for people to buy from your platform versus any other platform or even from the brand directly, which I think was a very nuanced and fun challenge. We were acquired only a few months after I joined, so I didn't get to see the work come to life and really judge whether it was a great strategic way of doing things or not.

I feel what we were doing would have been one of the more exciting campaigns I would have ever worked on. We were planning big moments that would describe immediately why Farfetch was different and what made Farfetch special and unique. But, you know, obviously with the acquisition, you just kind of gotta roll with it and, you pivot as needed. The challenge there was much different than anything I've ever faced that it was actually fun to do.

Yeah. That's really interesting. Maybe you can move on to a quick fire now and then just to wrap it up. So I'll start first.

TikTok or Instagram. That's a hard, I should have looked at the, the, the critsider line up with my IG's in the. You're like, you're like, sounds sounds good. Yeah.

I was like, sounds good. I think I'd say Instagram right now. Oh, wow. Okay.

I'm about to say something super, super quickly. Why? Okay. Am I allowed to add context to the quick bite?

Yeah. Instagram has always been really good at copying other platforms. I think reels is pretty engaging and I appreciate being able to see things from family and friends in addition to content that's fun and entertaining. For me, it's a good balance where I can get a lot of the stuff that I want to see in just like one app in one setting.

Whereas none of my friends post anything on TikTok because they're not TikTok creators. And I definitely don't want to see my mom on TikTok, like creative content. Right. But if my mom posts a picture of her garden on Instagram, I'm happy to see that.

So it's almost like I'm getting the best of both, on, on, on Instagram. The one that you didn't mention that I'm even more fascinated by is YouTube. Between YouTube Shorts and YouTube Longform, I, I, I really feel like there's a lot of things that could be done there that make it, really compelling and engaging. But I find that to be super interesting just because of, the fact that they have such great search capabilities coupled with the fact that they're exploring this whole short form video format.

Like to me, it's like a huge opportunity for them to actually break in and, and do something, more interesting than both of the other platforms. So we'll see. Yeah. And, what what's next for you?

Is it going back to being an operator? Is it, you you mentioned at the very start of this call, like investing on the side of your full time role previously, or are you kind of going back to perhaps a founding position? What what's kind of the overall strategy for you? I don't know professionally what what's next.

My gut is that it'll likely be a big brand a big global company in some capacity. That's just what I'm naturally excited about and good at. Being able to take some time to spend with the family and travel and recharge is something that I don't take lightly. There was such a blessing to be able to do that and spend the time.

I think my family and I we've been to 17 different countries in the last couple of years since we've been in London and being able to take the time away from work. I've been very fortunate to be able to do all that. I don't see myself starting anything just because at the age that my kids are right now, my feeling is that being an entrepreneur is hard. I don't see that as being something that you can do part time.

I think being an entrepreneur is beyond full time and it becomes something that if you want to be successful, you gotta be obsessed with it and you really have to put all your energy towards building that thing. For me right now, that energy is going toward my kids. And I'm putting all that energy in growing them and, helping them and doing stuff with them. If I were to go back full time to a job and, put a % into it, it'd probably be a big company that I love, that I'm excited about, that I want to grow and do something fun with.

But that still allows me to be present for my kids. Whereas I just feel like being an entrepreneur and founding your own thing, it takes away from a lot of that, which is unfortunately the nature of what it takes to be successful in today's age with an entrepreneurial role. Yeah. I mean, what do you believe in the greater economy that is not consensus?

I don't know what's considered consensus because I've been a little bit out of the game, but a feeling is that, the next generation of brands are going to be built from creators that have significantly sized audiences right now, and not from the big CPG brands that are trying to incubate a brand and pick up these creators as ambassadors or spokespeople. I genuinely think, the brands that'll be replacing your shelves in the grocery store and your shelves in like a convenience store are all going to start to come from creators as opposed to from the big conglomerates.

So my, my gut is that the, the creators that can build a sizable audience and have relationship with them will be able to sell them almost anything in their pantry versus a big CPG company in, in, in the future. I, I definitely think the creator economy is gonna go beyond just like creating content and monetizing the content and going into like owning shelf space in major retail, you know, spaces. I totally agree there. Sorry, go ahead, Rich.

So to wrap it up, I totally agree. I'm totally on the same page. If you talk about creator economy, in the ventures ecosystem, VCs run the other way, especially when you talk about creator brands and stuff like this. But I actually think this is where the opportunity lies.

So anyways, Nick, this was such a good episode, myself and Jack. You know, we really appreciate it. I think we learned so much as well. Hopefully, we can have you on in a few years' time, see what you're doing, Maybe I'll walk into the streaming business or work on something cool, but we'll keep in touch, obviously.

Thank you so much, Nick. We really appreciate it. Alright. Talking.