BARK: Matt Meeker

30:41only. The Lingo glucose system is for users 18 years and older, not on insulin. It is not intended for diagnosis of diseases, including diabetes. Individual responses may vary. If you've shopped online, chances are you've bought from a business powered by Shopify. You know that purple ShopPay button you see at checkout? The one that makes buying so incredibly easy? That's Shopify. And there's a reason so many businesses sell with it. Because Shopify doesn't just make amazing buying experiences for customers. They're also the experts in helping small businesses grow big. Stop seeing carts going abandoned and turn those sales into...

31:25Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash built. Go to shopify.com slash built. Shopify.com slash built.

31:48Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2011, and Matt and his partner, Henrik, are trying to drum up excitement for their new business idea, a subscription box for dog toys. Meanwhile, to pay the bills, Matt's running a startup incubator in New York called, coincidentally, Dogpatch Labs. so in a way i got paid to be the co-founder of 20 different startups simultaneously without the headache of sleepless nights or what's going to happen next week or any any of that e-commerce was hot at that point uh ever it was on fire and so part of my the day job was meeting a lot of companies and I'd say a quarter to a third of those were commerce related.

32:39And I felt so dumb. I didn't know how those businesses worked. I didn't know how to engage in the conversation and to suss out, is there something here? So part of this for me was I want to educate myself through experience as to what's important. How do these things work? So we found our third co-founder at that point. And this was a Carly Strife who had worked at Uber to kind of help you guys turn this into, so she must've been really encouraged by this idea. Did you, and I think this is around the time where you've got to, again, I mean, you mentioned Birchbox, which got Dollar Shave Club. And I mean, there's some really interesting new business models starting up.

33:22Was it easier for you guys to raise initial funding and financing for this? We didn't try. You didn't try. No, not at all. Henrik and I together put in$10 ,000. And kind of that same story of too much money or money at all isn't the type of company we want to build. We want to build something for us and something that's profitable. And this isn't going to be a venture-backed thing. It's going to be a business that we build. And the idea was when we need it, we'll start to raise it. We thought we would never raise money. That was the hope. That was the plan. And Henrik and I had no intention of leaving our jobs either.

34:06It was like, here's Carly. We'll give her a little bit of money and off she goes. How did you attract her from, I mean, Uber, man, I mean, to leave Uber in 2012 was, you know, I mean, it turned into a massive company, right? 2012 Uber was still early days. But how did you guys attract her with a very small salary? Presumably you gave her a big chunk of equity. we did an equal chunk of equity so a third of the company right and and yes i hope she's not listening but um it was she was the 13th employee at uber they had done had a good start in san francisco and travis brought her on and said we've done this in san francisco we started in new york and so she was at that time running around making deals with uh black car services and And I think the line we used with her is, do you want to be a cab dispatcher your whole life?

35:02But she was very hungry to start her own thing. And we made this her thing. Yeah. And by the way, I mean, what exactly did you plan to put into the subscription boxes at this point? Did you have a plan for how you're going to source them, the stuff inside? so Carly did the work of what you're doing asking all the questions of what kind of products do you think and where are you going to get them I think a reasonable question to ask and we said those are great questions you should answer them and she's a force and so as quickly as she asked she's on a plane in Vegas at a pet show walking the floor selling people on this concept and how big it will be and getting them to sell her products that she thought was cool.

35:52And she put together products from all these different companies, sourced them, had them shipped to my incubator. And then in December, we went in and we packed all those boxes. We assembled the boxes into boxes, and then we filled them up with the products. And because it was our first one and we're doing it by hand, were writing holiday notes on the lids of every box on the inside. We got almost all the way through where Henrik said, I have a question. Is holiday spelled with one L or two? And we said, Henrik, it's one L. And he said, should I redo all of these? And I was like, no, just leave it.

36:36Somebody will have a story to tell about that. That was month one. And the first box was shipped in December of 2011. Got it. And these are to the initial like 50 subscribers, friends that you signed up. Yeah, we sent 78 boxes, I believe. So I guess, I mean, my question is like with so little money, right? I mean, eventually you would not be able to survive. You would have to bring in more money. If you're going to go to, you know, if the idea was to really scale this thing, and even before you scaled, I mean, you would have to buy, get inventory and you would have to ship this stuff out. And what was the subscription fee every month?

37:19How much did it cost? we we started at uh 25 a month got it okay and then we we heard from people that that's too much and our reaction to that was it it doesn't cost too much you just don't like love your dog enough for this product but we one of the things i had learned from meetup was about generating cash flow I had a cash flow generation trick up my sleeve offering a long-term discount for prepayment. So saying if you subscribe now for six months or a year and you pay it up front, it's not$25, but it's 20 or it's 18. So today I would collect$200 from you that I owe you back in product over the next 12 months.

38:05But now I have$200 of cash that's going to fund this month's inventory. Yeah. And so you could front load the cash and then presumably negotiate with the companies where you buy the products from for discounted prices on their products. That's right. Yeah. So this launches at the end of 2011 and starting with your friends, right? But you launch at a fortuitous time because of Groupon. I think Groupon really kind of supercharged your early growth because you are presumably offering a cut rate price to sign up. They were very popular to the point where, as we got into 2013, we were calling it, we needed to get off the Groupon crack.

38:55We were just... Because it was probably losing money on those subscriptions. Probably, yes. I mean, we had a very good deal with them. Yeah. But if I remember right, we were selling three-month subscriptions for$45, so$15 a month. But you probably have a$20 cost of goods in every box. Yeah, probably just generated tons and tons of subscribers. It did. I mean, tons and tons is relative, I guess. But that first year, we thought we were huge where we ended the year with about 15 ,000 subscribers. And how did you keep them? I mean, what kind of tactics did you use after those three months ended to retain some of those or many of those subscribers?

39:38well certainly auto renewing subscription is part of that but you're you're trying to be very responsive we're we're very curious it's we send out a product to you we want to hear from you yeah did you love it did you hate it if you didn't love it tell us why we'll make it right so i remember the first four months that we were alive we had no churn not one not one subscriber left now not a whole lot of subscribers there but um out of over a hundred no one left i remember the first one leaving was someone that i knew and i called him and i said whatever it is we'll make it right i'm not i'm not falling off of this 100 retention rate come on let's do it so a lot of that idea though of caring deeply that somebody paid for something and they expect something for and if you miss the mark, make it right.

40:34Make it unforgettable for them where they just can't leave it. And it becomes hard to do that when you get much larger. At what point did you feel like, or was it clear that you had to raise money? Like a year into it? Again, I don't know that it was clear. And it wasn't the plan. In May of 2012, Mike Hirschland, who had started Dogpatch Labs, And Mike and I obviously worked closely while I was there. And he reached out and said, I'm starting this new fund. Can I invest in this thing? Can I lead a round for you? But that came with the string for me of, if I invest, you have to jump in full time and be the CEO and run this thing.

41:23And that wasn't even something I had considered before then. That was a difficult choice for me. All right. So what did that mean? Tell me sort of more specifically about what you raised and what that meant. We raised$1.5 million. I think it meant you come to that fork in the road of if you're taking venture capital on, you're now deciding to build a different kind of business in a different way. Henrik and I, at least, we knew it was a fork in the road and we were wary of taking it. We were also, I'd say, somewhat inspired by the traction in those first eight months saying something like this doesn't come along very often.

42:09Yeah. It doesn't happen all the time. So when it happens, do you have a responsibility to take on that capital and supercharge it before someone else does? One of the things I read at the time, this is around 2013, you had said was, and I'm assuming this is sort of in reaction to raising capital because now the ambitions grow and the scale this thing grows. You said, you know, we're the new generation of pet brands. Like we're, we want to be a$5 billion company. You know, PetSmart, Petco aren't, they don't speak to our needs and the needs of millions of dog owners. Yeah, yeah. So there was a lot of ambition behind this.

42:53I mean, you were clearly, you know, kind of publicly saying, you know, sort of planting a flag and saying this is what we're going to be. there there was after that turn and mentally i had to make a turn but i certainly didn't want to start something because i knew what comes with starting a new company i mean that for me it becomes the center of your world it's it's your life and often at the expense of many other things um obviously you couldn't do that other job that was one thing exactly mentally i i do very well when I focus on one thing. I'm not great at giving a little bit of myself to this and this and this.

43:33And so anything that sort of fell outside of bark or bark box at the time and dogs really didn't get my attention. And so those things suffer. I was married and my marriage suffered and ultimately failed because of it. And I didn't know that would be an outcome, But it doesn't surprise me either. You were just head down working 18-hour days? It's not about the heads down. I'm at the office at the desk necessarily 18 hours a day, but my head is in it 24 hours a day. My interests are aligned to it. You asked me to go to dinner with friends on a Saturday night, and it's a bother for me because there's something I want to crank on.

44:23And even if I'm just sitting in my home, I become consumed by it. Probably unhealthy. Yeah. But that's, I mean, that's part of the deal. Yeah, it is. So my first question, I mean, this is a question that you would have been asked today if you were starting this business today. But I wonder back then if anyone ever said, you know, the challenge with this kind of business is that it's easily replicable. The only thing that you're doing here is just curating products. And there's risk. There's inherent risk to that kind of business. True. But we kind of hit the market at just the right time. When we started, there were 38 million households in the U.S.

45:08with a dog. And today, that's 65 million. Wow. In just a decade. A little bit more than a decade. That's incredible. We caught a wave. And we were very lucky to catch that wave. We also caught another wave where it was early 2013. Facebook advertising became a thing. Instagram started to become a thing. But of course, that would also attract competitors, right? And that and competitors start to pop up almost, you know, within a year of you guys launching. They did. Competitors would pop up and they would look exactly like us. and that's where we would stop being worried about them. We'd say if they lack creativity so much that they have to copy us pixel for pixel, that's not a competitor we need to worry about.

45:56And we would just, we would lean on them. They're usually copying the whole playbook. So taking to Google search or Facebook advertising and it's easy enough to just lean on them and outspend them. If you're bigger, we'll bleed you over time. and that happened time after time after time. The other question I have about this time period, right, 2013, I have to mention that especially your investors were like, well, you know, you're calling it BarkBox now, but really you have to think about what else you're going to do and, you know, you're going to want to serve all kinds of pets, not just dogs.

46:39We were very clear from the beginning, only dogs. Only dogs. I hear almost everyone say, the dog is my child. I don't hear a lot of people say, the cat is my child. That's true. So let's go deep on the thing that we're good at instead of branching out further into the pet department. We had customers who would contact us early days and say, what about for cats? And we'd say, order the BarkBox for your dog, take all the stuff out, give the box to the cat, ta-da, there's your product. and and and so what were the things that would stress you out or or keep you up at night i mean you're growing and acquiring more users like what what were the some of the things that worried you well we made mistakes we started a service in 2013 called bark care which was an in-home vet service in New York and people loved it.

47:36Dogs loved it. Everyone was loving it, but it would have taken us a tremendous amount of capital to do it and scale it the way that it needed to be done. This was like an on-call vet that would come to your house. Yeah. So we had vets on staff. You'd make an appointment and the appointment happened in in your home. And it was magical, but we couldn't make it work financially with the resources we had. So we shut it down. And what about conflicts? Did you guys, I mean, are you just personality-wise, were you just so well-matched or did you have disagreements about, I don't know, initiatives or the direction that you wanted to head in?

48:18we're very well matched. Carly and Henrik are two of my best friends in the world to this day. And when there are disagreements, when there were, it was usually between two of us. And so the two of us would be complaining to the third one who would be taking on board that information and trying to guide us back closer together. And it was never the same two. It just sort of kept rotating around the triangle. So what we were trying to do was build a company where we could come in every day and be around a lot of people that we just wanted to hang with. Like we genuinely liked everyone. And if someone made their way into that, if we made a mistake and hired someone that we didn't like, we got rid of them pretty quick.

49:03It's like, you just don't fit. I'm sorry. Nothing personal, but you just don't fit. All right. So the first kind of five years, what I'm wondering is in that time period with that really rapid growth, because I think by 2016, you're doing like$100 million in revenue, not yet profitable from what I understand. You must have started to field some acquisition offers or some interest in potentially acquiring the brand. We did. Yes, a few. And you just outright were not interested in having those conversations yet? uh we had the conversations and we walked away from a couple but we took them seriously we just couldn't get there we're trying at that point to you take on the new capital we invested the new capital in the way we we said we would it was successful and we get into 2018 and it was a it was a thing that henrik and i forgot from the beginning we never looked at the market data or the market sizing and said, let's go here.

50:06If we had, we would have never chosen toys. And when we started to look at a market is when we started to make decisions for the wrong reasons. What were some of the decisions you started to make? We started to talk to investors in mid-2018 about another round, and the questions were always about food. To make dog food? To make a product in food. We didn't really know what it was, but we were starting to sell the idea that investors wanted us to sell them. The toy industry is relatively small and everyone starts to point us to, well, food's really big. You should get into those bigger categories because you have this great brand and it connects to people.

50:51And we were just saying back to them what we thought they wanted to hear. And not surprising that that fundraising round didn't turn out well. what it felt like we were becoming. We didn't like the feel of it. So I definitely freaked out my board and our investors, but walked away from the fundraising round and said, forget it. In 2018. Yeah, we'll just generate our own cash. We'll be our own company. And they were scared. And presumably scared, because I'm pretty sure your growth was slowing. I mean, at this point, your user acquisition was going down. And at the same time, I have to imagine that your board and investors wanted you to diversify, right?

51:40Because you were a subscription service. And I think just the year before, you did start to sell at retail, like start to sell toys at Target. Yep, that's right, 2017. And they did want us to diversify, but it wasn't leading to the best outcomes. and boy, we were really living hand-to-mouth there from mid-2018 through early 2020. When you say hand-to-mouth, what do you mean? We were running out of cash and that model that I talked about early on of how we can generate cash to pay for the inventory today, if you're not growing, it catches up to you and works in reverse and eats away at your cash.

52:25So for about two years, we just ran steady. We grew enough to maintain, but our cash was very flat. Would you call that a much more stressful period than the actual first five years when you were really just a scrappy startup? Definitely more stressful. And I was probably shouldering the stress for our board and our investors where I would say they were downright freaked out. Personally, I'm more comfortable with very little cash on hand than with a lot. So it didn't bother me a bit. I feel like I can find my way through that. But I was taking on the stress of everyone else. And so, I mean, I guess, I mean, there were initiatives that you launched.

53:14Like, first of all, the food idea, you abandoned it, but then you must have come back to it because you do have a food vertical today. a bark i think it's called bark eats right exactly we've gone in and out and in and out of food um the idea again maybe a misfortune of timing but we went right before the pandemic we launched a food thing saying food is food but what is the service layer that you can apply to it that makes it special and so we had this concept of bringing back the the milkman in the u.s and we deliver your food to your home. And I think we started that in January, February of 2020.

53:57And we found out during a pandemic, people don't really like someone coming to their door and coming in for a conversation about their dog. So it kind of shot the whole theory right there. But we've continued to try to navigate it. We continue to this day. And there's a concept just on the horizon for food that I think we're all pretty excited about. It's very different. All right. So you, so let's talk about the pandemic for, for a moment. I mean, you, this is actually going to be a boom time for you because there was a, at that time, there was a spike in the number of people. There was a massive demand for dogs during the pandemic and there was a shortage.

54:39People couldn't get, they couldn't adopt dogs. And I imagine that you must have seen some kind of uptick at that time. we did it was it was that and now you're home with your dog all day and they need to be entertained because they're bothering you you're trying to work so but but it wasn't that certain we were we were scared again we were going month to month on our cash i remember in march of 2020 having conversations with investors and our banks and saying well we'll see we'll see what retention looks like on april 1st and then all of a sudden customer acquisition is just off to the races, just booming.

55:19So we accelerated very fast through 2020 and 21. You, I think at the end of 2020, stepped down as CEO, a couple of things were going on. You know, first of all, imagine it was, you just went through this two-year period of extreme stress, right? Of just like cash crunch. Tell me about that decision. Well, yeah, actually the decision came almost a year before I did it. So I'd had a couple of conversations with our board saying, I think I need to step down. And they'd say, oh, that's a good idea. We should talk about that at the next meeting. And then it would get punted to the next one and the next.

56:01And eventually I said to them, we got to take this seriously. I really mean it. But the rationale for me was twofold. It was Hugo was getting old and I knew his time was limited and I didn't feel I'd want to be around the company when he passed. And then we also had ambitions of someday being a public company. And I had an idea that I didn't want to be a public company CEO. fast forward to September of 2020 and Manish steps in as the new CEO of Bark this is Manish Joneja yes and and he he was a former I guess Amazon executive so he comes in as CEO yep yep yep he came over from Amazon big dog person loved uh and a very good guy that I think we put into difficult spot.

56:56You're saying to someone, take on a CEO role, take it on in the middle of a pandemic. You'll live in Seattle, but you'll commute to New York. That's fun. You won't get the opportunity to meet most of the team or engage with most of them, but take responsibility for a culture. And by the way, we just signed up to do this thing called a SPAC and go public. So now you're going to be a public company CEO. Congrats. When we come back in just a moment, Matt talks about Bark's latest initiative, an airline where dogs get to roam free. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

57:41As a founder, you're moving fast toward product market fit, your next round, or your first big enterprise deal. But with AI accelerating how quickly startups build and ship, security expectations are higher, earlier than ever. Getting security and compliance right can unlock growth or, if you wait too long, stall it. With deep integrations and automated workflows built for fast-moving teams, Vanta gets you audit-ready fast and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring as your models, infrastructure, and customers evolve. Fast-growing startups like Langchain, Writer, and Cursor trusted Vanta to build a scalable foundation from the start.

58:26I love that over 10 ,000 companies from startups to huge enterprises trust Vanta because it makes me trust them. Go to vanta.com slash built to save$1 ,000 today through the Vanta for Startups program and join over 10 ,000 ambitious companies already scaling with Vanta. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash built to save$1 ,000 for a limited time. It seems like every day we hear about how AI is coming for our jobs and people are getting anxious and fearful. But a recent survey from Miro reveals that 76 % of us believe that AI can actually benefit their role, while 54 % struggle to know when to use it.

59:15Well, enter Miro's Innovation Workspace. It's an intelligent platform that brings people and AI together in a shared space to get great work done. Miro has been empowering teams to transform bold ideas into the next big thing for over a decade. We've recently started a new project using Miro, and it's a really awesome creative partner. It helps us develop better processes for organizing. It even generates new ideas. You don't have to be an AI master or toggle to yet another tool. The work you're already doing on Miro's canvas is the prompt. Help your teams get great done with Miro. Check out Miro.com to find out how.

59:56That's M-I-R-O dot com.

1:00:06Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2021, and Matt's temporarily stepped away from the CEO job at Bark. But he's still getting besieged with inquiries about taking the company public. Not in the usual way, but through a SPAC. Essentially, a way to take Bark public in a faster, compressed time frame without as much oversight. I was getting calls left and right. You called the SPAC craze. Like, everyone was coming at me saying, we want to merge with you. our SPAC. And I kept pushing it away saying, this is a fad, this is a fad. And I asked around for someone who could teach me about it and got introduced to a guy named John Ledecky.

1:00:51And John was introduced to me as the godfather of SPACs. And John gave a lot of advice and he knew the subject matter quite well. And then shortly after, John formed a SPAC and said now i have a spec and i think you we should merge and you should do it quickly and here's why and john's theory which turned out to be right he's he's usually right about most things he said chewy stock is at an all-time high the pet category is on fire and what that means is chewy is the only public pet company that means january 1st there's going to be a line of these people signing up for SPACs. You don't want to be the eighth company.

1:01:36You want to be the first one so you have access to the best quality capital out there, which means we got to go now. We got to go fast. That was mid-November and we went fast. We did a two-day virtual roadshow in mid-December of 2020. Yeah, we went out to raise$100 million through that pipe process. We had an interest of nearly 500 million. So we ended up raising 200 from that. In addition to the SPAC funds, he was absolutely right. The market was very hot. And the third, fourth, fifth, sixth didn't have nearly the same success that we did. You stepped away for about, I think, about a year and a half and came back as CEO in early 2022.

1:02:25Tell me the thinking behind it. I mean, when you had left, did you think it was temporary or did you think that uh it was for good i thought it was for good we brought in manish i moved to florida with my wife followed her for her job and i thought that was that and then in december late december december 28th of 2021 hugo passed away and my feeling was the opposite of what i expected which was more this company is his it's his legacy uh i can't entrust that to someone else regardless of how i felt about them i felt deep responsibility to make sure that that legacy lived on and and so i had this strong urge or desire to jump in and that i don't want to speak for manish but um if i'm reading the room it coincided with Manish's probably feeling very burnt out.

1:03:26And he's a very positive, energetic person who was just feeling worn out. So I think we caught each other at just the right moment. All right. So you come back and you've got a big task ahead of you because, you know, this is a business that you launched at the end of 2011. There was massive rapid growth. You know, You saw it go public. And I'm sure this is not fun to be reminded of, but still was and is not profitable. And so what did that mean? Did you feel like, I'm assuming you felt, a charge to kind of get it to that place? More than a charge. Our fiscal year ends March 31st. I came back January 11th.

1:04:14So that year ending March 31st, we burned$194 million. And if we had done that for the next 12 months, that would have been it. We're done. We're gone. So the immediate challenge is don't die. Just do everything possible to keep this thing alive and floating and looked at every angle to do that and got the unit economics in shape, got the supply chain fixed, brought on really great talent, brought on a fantastically talented CFO, brought discipline to the business, right-sized the team. There are a lot of those things that are difficult in the moment. They're not fun in the moment, but it was just survival mode.

1:04:59And we have really turned that around and gotten ourselves into profitability and into cashflow generation. And now that's starting a compound. So tell me about, you know, where you see opportunities, right? It's a different marketplace. It's harder to acquire users today. Instagram and social media is just harder. I mean, a lot of people say it's just not worth it. You spend more than you actually get in return. I mean, what is sort of, give me a sort of sense of the playbook. I mean, is it expanding product offerings? Is it trying to get into a bunch of different spaces and seeing what works and what might not work?

1:05:41I think it's returning back to who we are and what we're good at. One of the things that we're great at and we have big advantage in is toys. And it does get, it gets poo-pooed by a lot of people because, well, that's only three and a half billion dollar industry and you already own 10 % of it. Okay, but we don't own 90 % of it. So I understand relative to food, it's one-tenth the size, but this is one thing that we're very good at. And there are a lot of places that we don't show up and a lot of different types of products that we can create and we can invent. You have your own design, in-house design team?

1:06:22We have our own in-house design team. We have a very strong supply chain. We're about as close to being vertically integrated on the toy side as you can be without being vertically integrated. You don't own your factory, for example. We don't, but we're getting closer. So we're inching in that direction. We need to show up where the customers are as well. So one way we're growing very rapidly right now is Amazon. People love their Amazon Prime. Yep. So let's become a great product company and put our products where the people are. One of the things that you guys have do, and I think I imagine this is not a huge part of your business, but it certainly has generated a lot of news stories is you are working with some charter airlines to offer flights for humans and their dogs.

1:07:14It's really hard to bring dogs on airlines now. They're really cracking down. Most airlines just don't allow, and certainly big dogs, don't allow them. on their couple of smaller companies like jet suite x and here in the bay area they operate here and you can fly with your dog on those flights um so you are doing a version of this right you're basically working with charter companies to like fly between new york and london like like long haul flights yeah yeah and this is a classic huge problem for people with dogs and especially those with larger dogs which has a special place in my heart obviously but but we We're going every other week between New York and Los Angeles, every other week between New York and I'll say London, but we mix Paris in there too.

1:08:02Those tickets are$6 ,000 to$8 ,000 one way. And we're sold out in September. We were sold out in August. So we're not flying enough at those prices. But the other thing that I'm obsessive about right now is how do you take a$6 ,000 ticket and turn it into a$600 ticket and really, really solve this problem? Yeah. And so the flights you're offering, you literally can have your dog like out of a cage, like next to you in the seat, right? In the seat, on the floor at your feet. But they usually wander around and say hello to everyone else. and they and there's so many touches to this experience it's the dogs are served meals um the dogs get their drinks first then the humans the dogs are uh our pilots come back and say come on bring your dog up front i'll put them in the captain's chair we'll take some photos so mid-flight the dogs are up there flying the plane um yeah it's everything is built around them and their comfort.

1:09:08And how many, I mean, how many flights are you doing a week now? Two. Two a week. How, I mean, how do you, how much time do you, do you give a new initiative? Like, you know, bark, someone's like, let's do bark air. And everyone's like, cool, love that idea. Obviously, I'm sure you did some research before, but in your mind, like how, how much time before you pull the plug on something new? Like six months, a year, two years? I think it depends. There are a lot of factors in that. It's the capital being burned, the consumer reaction, your belief that you have line of sight to something that works and can be meaningful.

1:09:47BarkAir right now, customers love it. We have ideas of how it expands. We have line of sight to how do we get to that$600 ticket? it. We have a very clear line of sight to doing that, I'd say, in the next year. So that's one where the good idea is panning out better than I could have ever hoped. So, I mean, is getting to, I mean, you mentioned, you know, your revenue is public, right? So I think your revenue is about a half a billion dollars a year, which is a nice, healthy revenue. You're much higher than your market cap, so you have reason to be optimistic. but do you have a timeline in mind of when you hit equilibrium, when you hit profitability?

1:10:33This year. This year? Yeah, we've turned in those profitable quarters and our fiscal year 22, when I stepped in, we lost$57 million. The next year it was 31. Last year it was 11. This year we should make four or five million dollars and and and up from there and what i what i say to people now is i intend to die in the saddle it truly it goes back to hugo yeah and that responsibility at that and the legacy but i say that knowing that i'm a month away from having a baby boy a human child a human child, yes. Maybe that becomes my obsession. And if you'd asked me if I'm going to be in the pet industry in 2010, I would have thought you were crazy.

1:11:22But right now, my intention is this is my life's work. Matt, when you think about where you are and what I think you've done pretty well from some of the businesses you've been involved with, how much of where you are now and what you're running and what happened in your journey do you attribute to to the work you put in and how much you think has to do with luck and timing and good fortune i definitely work hard at it and and always have but some of this like you know when i think it goes back to when we were talking about 2018 and not raising that money and there wasn't a clear idea of how do we get this accelerating again into profitability.

1:12:06It was about hanging on. And we hung on 18 months there and then the pandemic came and your fortunes changed. The world changed around you and we got lucky. We were in the right place at the right time in 2011 with the right product. We didn't do some market study. So sometimes it's just grinding away until the world turns in your favor and working hard through it and making smart, sensible decisions along the way. That's Matt Meeker, co-founder and CEO of Bark. By the way, just getting back to your thing about cats for a second. Do you just not like them? I mean, do you not like cats? I'm OK.

1:12:51Whatever. Just lay it on the line. I mean, come on. I mean, it sounds like you hate cats. I don't hate cats. I won't go that far. But you deeply dislike them. Cats are amazing, amazing animals. I would encourage you to start the cat company. Go for it. There is nothing like watching a kitten chase a laser pointer. Like there is nothing, not a single animal on a planet comes close to the entertainment value of a cat chasing a laser pointer. It's just un-freaking-believable. I'll give you that. You're basically a huge opportunity. There's a lot of custom laser pointers you could put in those boxes.

1:13:2912 months of laser pointers. I love it.

1:13:59Olivia Rockman. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Maggie Luthar. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, JC Howard, Sam Paulson, Chris Messini, Carrie Thompson, John Isabella, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

1:14:23If you like How I Built This, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. For a limited time, earn up to 200 ,000 bonus points with the IHG1 Rewards Premier Business Card. Visit IHG.com slash business card. Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC offer subject to change. Terms apply.