BARK: Matt Meeker

Summary

Podcast Summary: How I Built This with Guy Raz – Episode: BARK: Matt Meeker

Introduction

In this engaging episode of How I Built This, host Guy Raz sits down with Matt Meeker, the co-founder and CEO of Bark, to explore the journey of building one of the most iconic brands in the pet industry. The conversation delves into Matt's entrepreneurial experiences, the challenges faced while growing Bark from a subscription box service into a multifaceted pet care company, and the personal motivations that drove him to succeed.

Matt Meeker’s Early Career and Previous Ventures

Matt Meeker's entrepreneurial spirit was evident early on. Before founding Bark, Matt and his partner launched a pioneering venture in 1999—a credit card-sized device capable of sending and receiving text messages. Although the business lasted only 18 months, it provided Matt with valuable lessons on what not to do when starting a company.

Founding of Meetup

Following the failure of his first startup, Matt co-founded Meetup alongside Henrik Wordelin, inspired by the sense of community and connection he witnessed post-9/11. Matt recounts pivotal moments during this period, including their collaboration at the Summit Series conference where the spark for Meetup was ignited. Their mission was to create a platform that fostered real-life connections around shared interests, addressing the growing societal disconnect highlighted in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone.

Founding of Bark (Barkbox)

In June 2010, Matt adopted Hugo, a Great Dane who would become the inspiration behind Bark. Frustrated by the limited availability of products for large dogs, Matt identified a gap in the market for high-quality, curated pet products. This realization led to the creation of Barkbox in December 2011—a subscription service delivering toys, treats, and other dog-centric items. Matt humorously shares the early days of assembling boxes by hand and the playful mishaps that added character to the brand, such as a misspelled holiday note.

Challenges and Growth of Bark

Bark rapidly gained traction, especially with innovative marketing strategies like leveraging Groupon for initial subscriber growth. By 2013, the company boasted 15,000 subscribers and attracted attention from major political campaigns, propelling Bark into a prominent position in the pet industry. Matt emphasizes the importance of focusing on core strengths—specifically, dog toys—and resisting the urge to diversify prematurely into areas like cat products.

Financial Struggles and Exit of Matt Meeker

Despite substantial revenue growth, Bark faced significant financial challenges. By 2018, the company was burning through $30 million annually, leading Matt to reassess his role. Overwhelmed by the responsibilities of managing a growing team and the impending strain on his personal life, Matt decided to step down as CEO in 2020. This decision was influenced by both personal considerations—such as the impending loss of his beloved dog, Hugo—and professional aspirations, including his reluctance to lead a public company.

Adoption of Hugo and Inspiration for Bark

Adopting Hugo marked a turning point for Matt, deepening his commitment to creating products that catered to large dogs. Hugo’s needs highlighted the scarcity of suitable pet products, driving Matt to innovate and ensure that Bark offered exceptional value to dog owners.

Early Days of Barkbox: Sourcing and Subscriptions

Launching Barkbox involved meticulous sourcing of products and building a subscription model that resonated with dog owners. Matt shares anecdotes about the initial hand-crafted boxes, the feedback mechanism that ensured high customer retention, and the strategic use of prepayments to manage cash flow effectively. This customer-centric approach resulted in impressive early retention rates, laying a strong foundation for the company’s growth.

Struggles with Funding and Business Model

Navigating the funding landscape was a significant challenge for Matt and Henrik. Initially hesitant to raise venture capital, they focused on building a profitable business through subscriptions. However, as the company scaled, Matt grappled with investor expectations to diversify into more lucrative markets like dog food, leading to internal conflicts and strategic missteps. This period of financial strain underscored the complexities of sustaining rapid growth without compromising the company’s core values.

Survival Through 2018-2020

From mid-2018 through early 2020, Bark operated on a tight budget, balancing the need to maintain operations while facing dwindling cash reserves. Matt describes this era as "more stressful," dealing with board pressure and investor expectations amidst slowing user acquisition. Despite these challenges, Bark continued to innovate, launching initiatives like BarCare—an in-home veterinary service—which, although financially unsustainable, demonstrated the company’s commitment to enhancing pet care.

The Pandemic and Its Impact

The COVID-19 pandemic brought both challenges and opportunities for Bark. Initially facing uncertainty with potential cash flow issues, the surge in pet adoptions during the pandemic led to a boom in customer acquisition. Matt narrates how the unforeseen circumstances accelerated Bark’s growth, enabling the company to weather the financial storm and pivot towards new initiatives.

Stepping Down and Return to CEO

In September 2020, Matt stepped down as CEO, entrusting leadership to Manish Juneja, a former Amazon executive. This transition coincided with the tragic passing of Hugo, prompting Matt to return to the helm of Bark to preserve his legacy. Upon his return in January 2022, Matt found the company in dire financial straits, burning $194 million annually. His immediate focus was on survival—streamlining operations, optimizing supply chains, and instilling financial discipline to steer Bark towards profitability.

Current Initiatives with Barkair

Under Matt’s renewed leadership, Bark has embarked on innovative projects like Barkair, a pet airline service that offers luxury flights for dogs. Despite high ticket prices and limited flight availability, Barkair has garnered substantial interest, highlighting the demand for specialized pet services. Matt is determined to make these flights more affordable, aiming to resolve the logistical challenges associated with transporting large dogs.

Conclusion and Reflection on Luck and Timing

Reflecting on his journey, Matt attributes Bark’s success to a combination of hard work, strategic decisions, and fortunate timing. He acknowledges the role of serendipity—such as launching during a period of high pet adoption and leveraging the pandemic's unique circumstances. Matt emphasizes the importance of resilience and adaptability, highlighting how perseverance through financial hardships and market shifts ultimately led Bark to profitability.

Notable Quotes

• Matt Meeker [03:11]: “The immediate challenge is do everything possible to keep this thing alive and floating and don’t die.”

• Matt Meeker [05:58]: “It was the most eye-opening experience ever. Instantly you knew he was talking about something important and big and that the world was about to change.”

• Matt Meeker [39:52]: “We had no churn. Not one. Not one subscriber left.”

• Matt Meeker [44:12]: “I'm at the desk, necessarily 18 hours a day, but my head is in it 24 hours a day.”

• Matt Meeker [72:21]: “I definitely work hard at it and always have. But some of this, I think it goes back to when we were talking about 2018 and not raising that money…”

Key Takeaways

• Persistence Amid Challenges: Matt’s journey with Bark underscores the importance of resilience in the face of financial and operational challenges.

• Customer-Centric Approach: High customer retention rates were achieved through attentive service and responsiveness to feedback, fostering strong brand loyalty.

• Strategic Focus: Focusing on core strengths—dog products—allowed Bark to build a strong market presence without diluting its brand.

• Adaptability: Navigating through economic downturns and unexpected events like the pandemic demonstrated Bark’s ability to adapt and capitalize on emerging opportunities.

• Legacy and Passion: Personal motivations, such as Matt’s relationship with his dog Hugo, played a crucial role in driving the company’s mission and sustainability.

Conclusion

Matt Meeker’s story with Bark is a testament to the blend of strategic vision, personal passion, and adaptability required to build a successful brand in a competitive industry. From humble beginnings and early setbacks to overcoming financial hardships and embracing innovative ventures, Matt’s journey offers valuable insights into the dynamic landscape of entrepreneurship and the unwavering commitment needed to build a lasting legacy.

Transcript

[Guy Raz]

Wonderyplus subscribers can listen to How I built this early and ad free right now. Join Wonderyplus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. This episode is brought to you by American Express. Business owners like you can understand the importance of having the right tools to pursue your passions. Tools like the American Express Business Platinum Card, the card that works just as hard as you do. With its world class business and travel benefits, you can get more for your business wherever it it takes you. The Amex Business Platinum Card offers a flexible spending limit that adapts with your business, plus access to over $1,000 annually in business and travel value. And with the ability to earn 1.5 times membership reward points on select purchases, you can take your business to the next level. See how the amex Business Platinum Card gives business owners like you the tools and rewards to do more of what you love. Not all purchases will be approved. Enrollment requ terms and points cap apply. Learn [e-mail] AmExBusiness you know what I love most about listening on Audible? It lets your imagination soar. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking. There's more to imagine when you listen. I've recently been listening to Table for Two by Amor Toles, an incredible collection of shorts, stories and a novella that takes us back to a character from his book Rules of Civility. And as an Audible member, you can choose one title a month to keep from the entire catalog, including the latest bestsellers and new releases. New members can try audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.combilt or text built to 500500 that's audible.combilt or text bilt to 500500 to try audible free for 30 days audible.com built with Amex Platinum you can really be in the now access to resi priority notify yes 4pm checkout with fine hotels and resorts booked through Amex Travel. We needed this and dedicated card member entrances at select events.

[Matt Meeker]

Let's go.

[Guy Raz]

Means you can focus on the present moment. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Terms apply. Learn more@american express.com with AmEx card Member entrance access not limited to Amex Platinum Card. 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, you know, not fun to to be reminded of. But still was and is not profitable.

[Matt Meeker]

So that year ending March 31, 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 do everything possible to keep this thing alive and floating and don't die.

[Guy Raz]

Welcome to How I Built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how a Great Dane named Hugo became the inspiration for Bark, a subscription business that sells toys, treats, and even airplane rides for dogs. It might surprise you to learn that Americans spend more on their pets than they do on cosmetics and footwear combined. In 2023, we spent almost $150 billion on pets. And that's just in the U.S. the opportunity is so big that one company is now offering luxury flights for you and your dog. A standard one way ticket from New York to LA runs around 6,000 bucks and the seats are going fast. That business is called Barcair. It's part of a larger company called Bark. That brand was co founded in 2012 by a guy named Matt Meeker. At the time, Matt was frustrated by the lack of dog toys for large dogs. In his case, a Great Dane named Hugo. So Bark began as a dog toy subscription box, which eventually morphed into all kinds of dog products, food, treats, furniture, and now chartered flights. Before Bark, Matt and a partner launched an idea back in 1999 that was way ahead of its time. A credit card sized device that could essentially send and receive text messages. The business flopped after about 18 months, but it taught Matt an important lesson about what not to do when starting a business. A lesson he would definitely apply when he co founded his next business called Meetup and we'll get there. But for now. Matt Meeker grew up in the 1970s and 80s in the small town of Mason City, Iowa. He spent a few years in the Navy and then studied finance and marketing at the University of Minnesota, where one of his classes made a huge impression on him.

[Matt Meeker]

And I walk into a class that was called Marketing Communications and the professor was a visiting professor from the London School of Economics. First words out of his mouth, he said, who in here knows what the Internet is? And he got zero hands out of maybe 35, 40 of us, nothing. And he said, from now on, this class is Internet 101. It's not marketing Communications. If you don't want to take that class, that's fine. But that's what we'll be doing this quarter. And I didn't know what he was saying. I liked him. Just I liked the person. And it was the most eye opening experience ever. Instantly you knew he was talking about something important and big and that the world was about to change.

[Guy Raz]

And I mean, clearly that was a pivotal experience for you because I guess when you graduated, you wound up applying for a job at a digital ad agency in New York called Eye Traffic. And that was. That was just probably, I mean, 1997, doing that kind of work. Right? I mean, you were just at the cusp of a revolution. So it was. There was probably a lot of action.

[Matt Meeker]

There, A lot of action. And by the time I got there, they had signed Disney as a client and it was just booming. It felt like new things got invented in the world every day. And we were on the front lines of learning about those and then incorporating them into our work instantly.

[Guy Raz]

And this was really the sort of the beginning of the dot com boom era. But I guess this company that you were with, iTraffic, it got acquired before all that happened and probably got acquired for quite a bit of money.

[Matt Meeker]

We did. We were acquired by Agency.com in December of 1999. And it was a great learning for me. This was the first time anyone had talked to me about ownership or equity of the company you work for. And everyone there had equity. My piece of that ended up being $30,000. And to me, that was fantastic. Yeah, that was all the money in the world. It was great.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, you got a $30,000 payout for just working there for what, two years or something? A little less than two years, yeah. So when that happened, you know, you're like what, 26, 27 at that point, I guess you started to think about maybe starting your own thing.

[Matt Meeker]

I did. I knew my time was up and I was looking for the next thing to do. And I came across this couple who had a bold, ambitious idea at a time where the whole world had big, bold, ambitious ideas.

[Guy Raz]

And who was this couple and what was their idea?

[Matt Meeker]

Shimon and Robin Neustein. And they had a concept where what they wanted to do was. It sounds silly today, but they wanted to put mobile devices in everyone's hands and create a text messaging channel that connected everyone in the U.S. actually, the network that we were using to send the messages was the existing paging network. So you're sending text messages through the paging network, very low cost into these devices that were the size, the form factor of a credit card, and the credit card had an LCD screen built into it. Imagine going into your wallet today, taking out your credit card and reading a text message on it.

[Guy Raz]

Right.

[Matt Meeker]

That's what it was.

[Guy Raz]

Amazing. I mean, now you've got better options. But yeah, I mean, in 2000 that was like. That could be life changing what happened at that company. Because obviously that device did not come out. And it's not a story that I've heard of. So what happened?

[Matt Meeker]

I believe in starting the company, we made every mistake that you could make in starting a company. And for me, I believe that starts with having access to way too much capital leads to some bad decisions. And we had a COO who was a C level executive at Citibank and we brought him over.

[Guy Raz]

Wow.

[Matt Meeker]

We brought over the CMO from AT&T to be our CMO.

[Guy Raz]

So you guys are paying big salaries.

[Matt Meeker]

Absolutely. As a startup does.

[Guy Raz]

Right.

[Matt Meeker]

So you have very talented people who are bringing. You know, imagine you're running marketing for AT&T1 day and the next day you're trying to start something. You're bringing that approach.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Matt Meeker]

And it meant we spent a lot of days in conference rooms talking about PowerPoints and when we got stuck on things, we hired consulting firms to help solve those.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Matt Meeker]

So it was just wonderful. People who were not meant for that stage. So we took a good idea and didn't do it well.

[Guy Raz]

And probably burned the cash.

[Matt Meeker]

Yes.

[Guy Raz]

Like more than $10 million.

[Matt Meeker]

I would guess more like 30.

[Guy Raz]

Wow. And now it wasn't. You were not. I mean, you were of course brought onto the team, but you were not the guy who was kind of seeking out the financing. I mean, but you were part of this project and. Okay. And that fizzles out. And so what. I mean, and I guess this is probably. This probably takes you through 911 in New York City. Right. I mean, you were probably in the city at that time.

[Matt Meeker]

I was. And for me, I didn't know what to do. So I kept coming into our office and I kept working on this problem and trying to start this company that everyone had given up on. And I'm meeting with Shimon, the founder, at the same time, Scott, who is the founder of iTraffic, he was also coming off of a failed startup attempt. And. And we have a bunch of ideas and we're more and more, we're hanging out, we're walking around the city. Like you said, it's post 9 11. One of the most striking things in the city then was people actually cared about each other.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, yeah.

[Matt Meeker]

And you'd walk down the street and people would say, how are you? And they meant it, they wanted an answer. And it really hit us. So we had a collection of things we could do, ideas we could start. But the one we kept coming back to was what ultimately became Meetup. And one of the inspirational moments for it was, boy, when all these strangers come together and they actually talk, they really talk and they listen to each other, there's some serious power in that.

[Guy Raz]

So this is interesting. This is your friend Scott. And Scott Heiferman, I think is his last name.

[Matt Meeker]

Heiferman. Yep.

[Guy Raz]

Hi, Sherman. Okay. And because you guys come up with this idea after 9, 11, like let's create these sort of a way for people to meet up. But did you feel like, you must have felt like people weren't meeting up in real life?

[Matt Meeker]

No, we didn't. And there's a really great book from a guy called Robert Putnam.

[Guy Raz]

Bowling Alone.

[Matt Meeker]

Yeah, Bowling Alone. And all the trends there showed that the American community had just disintegrated from the 50s.

[Guy Raz]

Much worse today than it was in 2000.

[Matt Meeker]

For sure. For sure. And then of course, all the side effects of that, the health effects, the mental health. So we wanted to create a construct that made it safe for people to come back together and have healthier communities and be closer to their neighbors.

[Guy Raz]

And how would they be organized? It wasn't going to be a dating service. Right. It was going to be like just gather, but I'm assuming around shared interests.

[Matt Meeker]

Around shared interest, yes.

[Guy Raz]

So first of all, how did you find somebody to help you kind of do the tech side of this?

[Matt Meeker]

It was March of 2002. We put an ad on Craigslist. It was very obnoxious saying interviews are next week. We were looking for co founder, cto. If you're not here in New York City next week, then you can't be interviewed. And that's it. Within 24 hours, we had 450 applicants. We chose 60. We did 8am to 8pm One hour interviews Monday through Friday. The following weeks interviewed 60 people. And we came out with our co founder, Peter Kamali.

[Guy Raz]

And what about financing? I mean again, at this time, it wasn't cheap to start an Internet company.

[Matt Meeker]

It was not. And Scott and I both felt like we had just learned the lesson that too much capital is a bad thing. And so we swung the pendulum way to the other side and said, how about zero? How about we raise zero dollars? But to your point, it's hard to rent an office or hire people or really do much of anything with zero.

[Guy Raz]

And you didn't have any cash at the time.

[Matt Meeker]

Very little. Very little. So we ended up raising an angel round of $250,000 and large Scott's network. So many lessons in that for me as well. First I asked my parents to invest. They wouldn't do it. And So I invested $10,000 for them because I said they would regret it if they didn't do it. But then you get to the end and I'm sure it's a familiar story for founders of you get a lot of commitments saying, I'm in, I'm in, I'm in. But getting that signed document and getting that check is another thing.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Matt Meeker]

And so herding the cats was a challenge. So what we did, it was the exact moment where the ipod came out and we sent notes to all of them and we said, hey, Matt's going to come up and pick up your paperwork and your check. If you hand it to him today, he's going to hand you back an ipod pre populated with a thousand songs on it. So I went over to the Apple store in soho. I bought like eight of those, we loaded them up and I traded ipods for checks.

[Guy Raz]

So you raised the money, the initial money you need. And you know, with that money, the idea was to start, presumably just to start in New York City. Right. It's just to see what you could do in the city.

[Matt Meeker]

No, it was everywhere.

[Guy Raz]

Oh, wow.

[Matt Meeker]

Which probably went as well as that sounds like it would go. You've got a computer in New York City making decisions of how things should go in Moscow. We started with a couple hundred topics and then we would tell people it's 7pm at that Starbucks and how did.

[Guy Raz]

You get the word? I mean, actually initially, who did you think would sort of gather together? What were their interests?

[Matt Meeker]

So the people who were more disenfranchised and in the shadows were the ones who really grasped onto it initially. So it was witches and pagans and vampires and vampire hunters and these real fringe groups and then technology oriented groups around Python, coding language, things like that.

[Guy Raz]

I mean, was it hard to get people to kind of trust in it in 2002, 2003? Like, was it just because people were, I think, you know, wary about meeting strangers through the Internet?

[Matt Meeker]

It was very difficult. And we would, we would go stalk the local meetups in New York and there was a common, common behavior worldwide. What we would see is about half of the people who RSVP'd would actually show up, right? And we would go and we'd sit across the street and sort of watch. And you had this common thing where people would walk by wherever the venue was and sort of slow down and look in the window and keep walking slowly but looking. And then they would either go up and they'd circle back and then come in or they'd run. So they had seen what they needed to see and they made their choice. But it was a new activity and they didn't know what to make of it.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah. But then, I mean, something pretty significant would happen that would help you guys gain traction, which is that. And in 2003, Howard Dean announced he was going to run for president. He was the governor of Vermont at the time. And I mean, this is in the days when politicians were like starting to tap into the power of the Internet. Right. And it seems like pretty early on, I guess, some of his people saw the potential in meetup. Right.

[Matt Meeker]

Yeah. In February of 2003, a young guy on our team.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Matt Meeker]

Very boldly called the governor's mansion in Vermont and said, well, I have a proposal for you. And that turned into a meeting with Governor Dean and Joe Trippie, his campaign manager, at which they said, I intend to run for president and I don't have a lot of money, but I can promise you this. From now until the day I get out of the race, I will end every speech I give with join your local Howard Dean meetup. At that point, no one knew who Howard Dean was outside of Vermont. He ended up racing to the head of the Democrat nomination.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah. In 2004. Yeah.

[Matt Meeker]

He was a big deal. And so By March of 2003, there was a good sized venue on the Lower east side, New York. And he showed up and they were opening the windows and there was a huge crowd on the street and about 500 people inside just to hear him speak. And that was the moment we said, we did this. And he knew we did it. We did it together. And that catapulted him to the point where every other campaign, Wesley Clark, John.

[Guy Raz]

Kerry, all of them started using it.

[Matt Meeker]

Yeah. Well, came to us and said, can you do for us what you've done for governor? Teen, please.

[Guy Raz]

And so presumably they weren't paying for it. Right. But there was a business model like you had to pay a membership fee or something to use it or to post.

[Matt Meeker]

We were scrambling for a business model in the early days. And so the initial idea for a business model was, this will be great for all the businesses. What we'll do is we'll direct traffic into these local businesses and they will pay us for sending foot traffic into their business. So as an example, we sent a group of about 30 people into a Barnes and Noble in Union Square in New York. And then our smart plan was to call Barnes and Noble the next day and say, see all those people last night? We can do that every day for you if you just pay us. And we called them and we said that, and they said that was you. Don't ever do it again. They weren't ready for it. And so we learned something there. But we really tried everything we could, and we were cobbling it together and making a little bit of money, but it took us probably four years to get to the subscription service.

[Guy Raz]

I guess at a certain point, from what I understand, I mean, it got, you know, it was starting to get, you know, pretty, pretty stable and I guess around 40 to 50 people now on staff. And you left in 2008. You decided that you didn't want to be part of it anymore. Can you kind of explain your thinking around that? Because, I mean, it seemed like it was just starting to hit its stride.

[Matt Meeker]

Yeah, it was doing very well, growing quickly, profitable, supportive investors on board, everything looking very good, and 10 million plus active members worldwide every month.

[Guy Raz]

Oh, wow.

[Matt Meeker]

At that point, I kind of took a look at it and looked at myself and said, if I had said to myself at the beginning this is where we would get to, would I be happy with it? And I absolutely. This would have been a great outcome right here. And the other part was I was feeling very overwhelmed by the size and the size of the team and thinking, 45 people, this is enormous. And I think, oh, wow. They're all depending on us to keep this afloat. So it became an overwhelming thought to me and. And I decided to opt out for those reasons.

[Guy Raz]

So what did you do?

[Matt Meeker]

I ran a marathon, spent a summer training for that. I was trying to find what's next, and I was struggling with that, sort of looking for that next lightning strike and feeling frustrated by it.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah. Were you, like, financially? I'm assuming you hadn't made any money yet. Right? Because, I mean, meetup was not. It wasn't acquired, it wasn't sold or anything, or had you.

[Matt Meeker]

No, it wasn't acquired or sold. I had taken a little bit of secondary money off the table and enough to sustain me for a bit.

[Guy Raz]

And this is going to factor into the next chapter in your life. You adopted dog?

[Matt Meeker]

Yes, In June of 2010, I adopted Hugo.

[Guy Raz]

Right.

[Matt Meeker]

A little Great Dane.

[Guy Raz]

A little Great Dane, I think a big great. How big was Hugo?

[Matt Meeker]

Well, when I got him, he was 10 pounds. He grew to be 140 pounds.

[Guy Raz]

Wow. That's a human.

[Matt Meeker]

Yes.

[Guy Raz]

That's not a dog.

[Matt Meeker]

Yeah.

[Guy Raz]

So, all right. And having a Great Dane. And did you live in an apartment? Presumably you live in an apartment in New York, right?

[Matt Meeker]

Yep, sure did.

[Guy Raz]

And a Great Dane is like a roommate. Roommate. Not paying rent.

[Matt Meeker]

Yes. Took a lot of space and took. Took a lot of food, a lot of medical care.

[Guy Raz]

Tell me how Hugo kind of starts to affect your life and the way you're thinking about a problem that eventually you want to solve.

[Matt Meeker]

Mainly, I became obsessed with Hugo, and I loved him more and more. He was my first child, and so I fell into the mode of I want to make him happy. And there was a local little pet store right around the corner from my. My apartment, and they would hand me a bully stick and charge me $12 for it.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Matt Meeker]

And I'd take that home and give it to him. And if I'm honest, Hugo was probably thrilled with that setup, but it wasn't connecting for me. I was just disappointed with the offerings and tried the local petcos and petsmarts as well, and it was all the same.

[Guy Raz]

And you felt like everything was made for smaller dogs.

[Matt Meeker]

Absolutely. Even the food. It took us a while to find the right food for him, and everything was difficult to find the right thing for a Great Dane.

[Guy Raz]

And I guess, I mean, how does it kind of lead you to start thinking about, well, maybe there's something I can do about this?

[Matt Meeker]

Well, it took a bit of time, and there was another intersection that happened. So In April of 2011, I went to a conference called Summit Series. I had never heard of it before. It was up and coming, but this year, they were doing it on a cruise ship. And so it was three days at sea. I was cheap, so I bought the cheap ticket. And what that meant was you got paired with a roommate who you didn't know. And that gentleman was Henrik Wordelin, who's my co founder in Bark.

[Guy Raz]

Wow. And he was just. He happened to be your roommate there. Okay, keep going.

[Matt Meeker]

And what happened was we had three days at sea, getting to know each other and talking about our philosophies. We had both gone through startups in the early 2000s where we raised too much money and flamed out. We had a lot of shared experiences and ideas about, how do you do this? So after summit, we would get together every Friday afternoon for beers and talk about possibilities and ideas. And at that time, one of the hot startups in New York was Birchbox.

[Guy Raz]

Yes.

[Matt Meeker]

And so we were looking at that subscription service. Yes, subscription service. Sending samples of different beauty products. And we were looking at that and saying, wow, what if we did that for dogs? And we sent samples of food and toys and treats and things that were appropriate for the different size of dog. And Henrik came up with an absolutely terrible name. He's Danish, so we forgive it. But he called it Doggy Baggy, which was just awful. We said goodbye for that Friday afternoon. And on Saturday morning, I woke up to a mocked up designed homepage of.

[Guy Raz]

A site that he put together, that.

[Matt Meeker]

He put together overnight. And he said, I really like this. And when I got the visual of it, I thought, well, that's interesting. And I had my phone, I took that image and I put it as the lock screen on my phone. And nearly everyone I would come across, I'd show them and I'd say, what do you think of this? And they'd usually say, oh, that's cool. When it's live, let me know and I'll buy it.

[Guy Raz]

And there was nothing at that time in 2011, 2012, there was no dog subscription box. There must have been.

[Matt Meeker]

No, not at all.

[Guy Raz]

Wow.

[Matt Meeker]

But nothing had been designed or built. So again, this is an image on my phone with now a square account attached to it. So I started to carry a square in my pocket and I'd show people and they'd give me the reaction. I'd plug the square in and I'd say, it's live. Swipe your card. And I'd hand the phone to them and their faces would change. They'd be like, oh. So the first person I did it to is a very good friend. And he said, I don't even have a dog. And I said, well, Evan, you know, people with dogs, buy them a gift. Come on, get out your credit card. And he got out the card and swiped it. And those were the first two we sold.

[Guy Raz]

When we come back in just a moment, how Matt eventually expands the business beyond dog toys to dog food, dog healthcare, even an airline for dogs, but not cats. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built this. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all in one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Squarespace can help any business owner craft a strong web presence and sell anything from products to content to time, all in one place, all on your terms. With Squarespace Blueprint, you can build a completely personalized website optimized for every device with powerful SEO tools that help you grow the way you want. Squarespace makes checkout seamless for your customers, accepting credit cards, PayPal and Apple Pay, and in eligible countries, Afterpay and Clearpay. And you can easily manage your clients and invoices, from vetting leads to receiving payments in one streamlined, customizable workflow. So check out squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to Launch, go to squarespace.combilt to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain if you've been listening to me for a while, you know that I'm really interested in health and fitness. And for the past year the single biggest game changer for me has been a biowearable. Why is it a game changer? Well, because it's helped me figure out which foods leave me energized and which ones make me foggy and sluggish and even hungry. And that matters because it turns out 88% of us have suboptimal metabolic health. That's why I'm so excited about Lingo. It's a new bio wearable from Abbott that tracks your glucose in real time and gives personal insights and science backed recommendations to eat in a way that works for you. To see how your body responds to food and learn what you can do to improve your metabolism, try Lingo. It starts at $49 for a two week plan, no prescription needed. For a limited time. Save 10% off your first order by using the code hibt@hello lingo.com the Lingo Glucose system is for users 18 and older not on insulin. It is not intended for diagnosis of diseases, including diabetes. For more information please visit hellolingo.com us you know when you're shopping for like a new car or even a new bike, which I was shopping for recently, and you want to find one with all the right features, something that fits exactly what you need. Well, that's the way it feels today, trying to find the right AI tools for your business. You want to get it right, but but it's not always clear which tools are actually going to help. Grammarly is designed to fit your business's unique needs and works right away to help contribute to your overall success. Grammarly works effortlessly with the apps I already use every single day and it saves me so much time while I'm writing. With its super helpful AI prompts, Grammarly works where you work from docs to messages to emails, integrating seamlessly across 500,000 apps and websites. No cutting, no pasting, no context, switching join 70,000 teams. Teams and 30 million people who trust Grammarly to work faster and hit their goals while keeping their data Secure. Go to Grammarly.comenterprise to learn more. Grammarly Enterprise Ready AI. Hey, 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.

[Matt Meeker]

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 of that. E commerce was hot at that point. It was on fire. And so part of the day job was meeting a lot of companies and I'd say a quarter to a third of those were commerce related. And I felt so dumb. I didn't know how those businesses worked. I didn't know how to engage in the conversation and to, 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.

[Guy Raz]

At that point and this was Carly Strife who had worked at Uber to kind of help you guys turn this into. So she must have been really encouraged by this idea. Did you? And I think this is around the time where you've got again, I mean you mentioned Birchbox, which got Dollar Shave Club and I mean there's some interesting new business models starting up. Was it easier for you guys to raise initial funding and financing for this?

[Matt Meeker]

We didn't try.

[Guy Raz]

You didn't try?

[Matt Meeker]

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.

[Guy Raz]

And the idea was when we need it, we'll start to raise it.

[Matt Meeker]

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. It was like, here's Carly, we'll give her a little bit of money and off she goes.

[Guy Raz]

How did you attract her from, I mean, Uber, man. I mean to leave Uber in 2012 was, I mean it turned into a massive company. Right. 2012 Uber was still early days, but how did you guys attract her with very small salary? Presumably you gave her a big chunk of equity.

[Matt Meeker]

We did an equal chunk of equity. So a third of the company. And yes, I hope she's not listening, but 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 black car services. And yeah, I think the line we used with her is, do you want to be a cab dispatcher your whole life? But she was very hungry to start her own thing, and we made this her thing.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah. And by the way, I mean, what exactly did you plan to put into the subscription boxes at this point? Like, did you have a plan for how you were. Like, how are you going to source them, the stuff inside?

[Matt Meeker]

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?

[Guy Raz]

I think a reasonable question to ask.

[Matt Meeker]

Yeah. 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. And she put together products from all these different companies, sourced them, had them shipped to my. 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, we're 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 1L or 2? And we said, Henrik, it's 1L. And he said, should I redo all of these? And he's like, no, just leave it. Somebody will have a story to tell about that. That was month one, and the first box was shipped in December of 2011.

[Guy Raz]

Got it. And these are to the initial 50 subscribers, friends that you signed up?

[Matt Meeker]

Yeah, we sent 78 boxes, I believe.

[Guy Raz]

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? How much did it cost?

[Matt Meeker]

We started at $25 a month.

[Guy Raz]

Got it. Okay.

[Matt Meeker]

And then we heard from people that that's too much. And our reaction to that was it doesn't cost too much. You just don't love your dog enough for this product. But 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 upfront, 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. But now I have $200 of cash that's going to fund this month's inventory.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah. And so you could front, load the cash and then presumably negotiate with the companies where you're buying the products from for discounted prices on their products.

[Matt Meeker]

That's right, yeah.

[Guy Raz]

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 were presumably offering a cut rate price to sign up.

[Matt Meeker]

They were very popular to the point where as we got into 2013, we were calling it, we needed to get off the group on crack. We were. Just.

[Guy Raz]

Because it was probably losing money on those subscriptions.

[Matt Meeker]

Probably, yes. I mean, we had a very good deal with them. But if I remember right, we were selling three month subscriptions for $45. So $15 a month. But you'd probably have a $20 cost of goods in every box.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah. Probably just generated tons and tons of subscribers.

[Matt Meeker]

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.

[Guy Raz]

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?

[Matt Meeker]

Well, certainly auto renewing subscription is part of that. But you're trying to be very responsive. We're very curious. We send out a product to you, we want to hear from you. 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 out of over 100, 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. But somebody paid for something, and they expect something for it. And if you miss the mark, make it right, make it unforgettable for them where they just can't leave it. And it becomes hard to do that when you get much larger.

[Guy Raz]

At what point did you feel like, or was it clear that you had to raise money like a year into it?

[Matt Meeker]

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 around 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. And that wasn't even something I had considered before then. That was a difficult choice for me.

[Guy Raz]

All right, so what did that mean? I mean, tell me sort of more specifically about what you raised. Yeah. And what that meant.

[Matt Meeker]

We raised $1.5 million. I think it meant come to that fork in the road of if you're taking venture capital on and you're now deciding to build a different kind of business in a different way.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Matt Meeker]

And 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.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Matt Meeker]

It doesn't happen all the time. So when it happens, do you have a responsibility to take on that capital and. And supercharge it before someone else does?

[Guy Raz]

One of the things that 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 of this thing grows. You said, you know, we're the new generation of pet brands. Like, 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 and.

[Matt Meeker]

Yeah, yeah.

[Guy Raz]

So there was a lot of ambition behind this. I 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.

[Matt Meeker]

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 your life. And often at the expense of many other things.

[Guy Raz]

Obviously you couldn't do that other job. That was one thing.

[Matt Meeker]

Exactly. Mentally, 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. And so anything that sort of fell outside of bark or Barkbox 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.

[Guy Raz]

You were just head down, working 18 hour days.

[Matt Meeker]

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. Even if I'm just sitting in my home, I become consumed by it. Probably unhealthy.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, but that's, I mean, that's part of the deal.

[Matt Meeker]

Yeah, it is.

[Guy Raz]

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.

[Matt Meeker]

True. But we kind of hit the market at just the right time, where when we started, there were 38 million households in the US with a dog. And today that's 65 million.

[Guy Raz]

Wow. In just a decade. A little bit more than a decade. That's incredible.

[Matt Meeker]

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.

[Guy Raz]

But of course that would also attract competitors. Right. And that. And competitors started to pop up almost within a year of you guys launching.

[Matt Meeker]

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. And 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.

[Guy Raz]

The other question I have about this time period, 2013, I have to imagine that especially your investors were like, well, you're calling it Barkbox now, But really you have to think about what else you're going to do. And you're going to want to serve all kinds of pets, not just dogs.

[Matt Meeker]

We were very clear from the beginning, only dogs.

[Guy Raz]

Only dogs.

[Matt Meeker]

I hear almost everyone say, the dog is my child. I don't hear a lot of people say the cat is my child.

[Guy Raz]

That's true.

[Matt Meeker]

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 bark box for your dog. Take all the stuff out, give the box to the cat. Ta da. There's your product.

[Guy Raz]

And so what were the things that would stress you out or keep you up at night? I mean, you're growing and acquiring more users. Like, what were some of the things that worried you?

[Matt Meeker]

Well, we made mistakes. We started a service in 2013 called BarCare, which was an in home vet service in New York. And people loved it, dogs 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.

[Guy Raz]

This was like an on call vet that would come to your house.

[Matt Meeker]

Yeah. So we had vets on staff. You'd make an appointment and the appointment happened in your home.

[Guy Raz]

Wow.

[Matt Meeker]

And it was magical. But we couldn't make it work financially with the resources we had, so we, we shot it down.

[Guy Raz]

And what about conflicts? Did you guys, I mean, are you just personality wise, were you just so well matched or did you, did you have disagreements about, I don't know, initiatives or the direction that you wanted to head in?

[Matt Meeker]

We'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, too. 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. 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. It's like you just don't fit. I'm sorry, nothing personal, but you just don't fit. All right.

[Guy Raz]

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.

[Matt Meeker]

We did, yes, A few.

[Guy Raz]

And you just outright were not interested in having those conversations yet?

[Matt Meeker]

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, 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. If 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.

[Guy Raz]

What were some of the decisions you started to make?

[Matt Meeker]

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. And we were just saying back to them what we thought they wanted to hear. And not surprising. 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.

[Guy Raz]

In 2018, yeah, we'll just.

[Matt Meeker]

We'll generate our own cash, we'll be our own company.

[Guy Raz]

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. Because 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.

[Matt Meeker]

Yep, that's right. In 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.

[Guy Raz]

When you say hand to mouth, what do you mean?

[Matt Meeker]

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. So for about two years, we just ran steady. We grew enough to maintain, but our cash was very flat.

[Guy Raz]

Would you call that, I mean, a much more stressful period than the actual first five years when you were really just a scrappy startup?

[Matt Meeker]

Definitely more stressful. And I was probably shouldering the stress for our board and our investors, 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.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah. And so, I mean, I guess there were initiatives that you launched. Like, 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. I think it's called Bark Eats.

[Matt Meeker]

Right, Exactly. We've gone in and out and in and out of food. 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 milkman in the US and we deliver your food to your home. And I think we started that in January, February of 2020. And 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 is very different.

[Guy Raz]

All right, so you. So let's talk about the pandemic 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. People couldn't get. They couldn't adopt dogs. And I imagine that you must have seen some kind of uptick at that time.

[Matt Meeker]

We did. 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. But it wasn't that certain. 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. So we accelerated very fast through 2020 and 21.

[Guy Raz]

You, I think at the end of 2020, stepped down as CEO. A couple things were going on. 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.

[Matt Meeker]

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. And eventually I said to them, we got to take this seriously. I really mean it. But, but the, 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.

[Guy Raz]

This is Manish Juneja.

[Matt Meeker]

Yes.

[Guy Raz]

And he was a former, I guess, Amazon executive. So he comes in as CEO.

[Matt Meeker]

Yep, yep, yep. He came over from Amazon Big dog person loved and a very good guy that I think we put into difficult spot. You'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.

[Guy Raz]

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. I love a great deal as much as the next guy, but I'm not going to crawl through a bed of hot coals just to save a few bucks. It has to be easy. So when Mint Mobile said it was easy to get wireless for $15 a month with the purchase of a three month plan, I called them on it. But it turns out it really is that easy to get wireless for 15 bucks a month. In fact, the longest part of the process was the time I spent on hold waiting to break up with my old provider. To get started, go to mintmobile.combilt there you'll see that right now all three month plans are only $15 a month, including the unlimited plan. All plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all your existing contacts. To get this new customer offer and your new 3 month premium wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month. Go to mintmobile.com bilt that's mintmobile.com Bilt cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com Bilt 45 dollars upfront payment required equivalent to 15 dollars a month new customers on first 3 month plan only speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. As a B2B marketer, you know how noisy the ad space can be. If your message isn't targeted to the right audience, it just disappears into the noise. With LinkedIn ads, you can precisely reach the professionals who are more likely to find your ad relevant. LinkedIn's targeting capabilities allow you to filter by job title, industry, company and more and reach your customers in A respectful environment. You'll have direct access to and build relationships with decision makers. On a platform with a billion members, 130 million decision makers and 10 million C level executives, you'll be able to drive results with targeting and measurement tools built specifically for B2B. In the technology space, LinkedIn generated two to five times higher return on ad spend than other social media platforms. And 79% of B2B content marketers said LinkedIn produces the best results for paid media. And we know this because we hear this from the founders who are on this show every single week. Start converting your B2B audience into high quality leads today. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com BuiltThis to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com BuiltThis. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn the place to be. To be. Hey, 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 timeframe without as much oversight.

[Matt Meeker]

I was getting calls left and right. You call it the SPAC craze. Like everyone was coming at me saying, we want to merge with you and our spac. And I kept pushing away, saying, this is a fad. This is a fad.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Matt Meeker]

And I asked around for someone who could teach me about it and got introduced to a guy named John Ledecky. And 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 SPAC and I think 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, you 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 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.

[Guy Raz]

You stepped away for, I think, about a year and a half and came back as CEO in early 2022. Tell me the thinking behind it. When you had left, did you think it was temporary or did you think that it was for good?

[Matt Meeker]

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. 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 so I had this strong urge or desire to jump in. And that. I don't want to speak for Manish, but if I'm reading the room, it coincided with Manish's probably feeling very burnt out, and 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.

[Guy Raz]

All right, so you come back, and you've got a big task ahead of you, because this is a business that you launched at the end of 2011. There was massive rapid growth. 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? I mean, were you. Did you feel like, I'm assuming you felt a charge to kind of get it to that place?

[Matt Meeker]

More than a charge. Our fiscal year ends March 31st. I came back January 11th. So 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. Right. 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 size, 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. And we have really turned that around and gotten ourselves into profitability and into cash flow generation. And now that's starting to compound.

[Guy Raz]

So tell me about 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?

[Matt Meeker]

I 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 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.

[Guy Raz]

You have your own design in house design team.

[Matt Meeker]

We 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.

[Guy Raz]

You don't own your factory, for example.

[Matt Meeker]

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. So let's become a great product company and put our products where the people are.

[Guy Raz]

One of the things that you guys have, 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. Because it'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. There are a couple of smaller companies like JetSuite X here in the Bay Area. They operate here and you can fly with your dog on those flights. So you are doing A version of this. Right. You're basically working with charter companies to fly between New York and London. Like long haul flights.

[Matt Meeker]

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 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. Those tickets are six 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 six thousand dollars ticket and turn it into a six hundred dollar ticket and really, really solve this problem?

[Guy Raz]

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.

[Matt Meeker]

Right in the seat, on the floor, at your feet. But they usually wander around and say hello to everyone else. And there's so many touches to this experience. It's the dogs are served meals, the dogs get their drinks first, then the humans, the dogs are our pilots. Come back and say, come on, bring your dog up front. I'll put him in the captain's chair and we'll take some photos. So mid flight, the dogs are up there flying the plane. Yeah, it's. Everything is built around them and their comfort.

[Guy Raz]

And how many, I mean, how many flights are you doing a week now?

[Matt Meeker]

Two.

[Guy Raz]

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 Barcair. And everyone's like, cool. Love that idea. Obviously, I'm sure you did some research before, but in your mind, like, how much time before you pull the plug on something new? Like six months, a year, two years?

[Matt Meeker]

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, you have line of sight to something that works and can be meaningful. Barkair 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? We have 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.

[Guy Raz]

You mentioned your revenue is public. I think your revenue is about half a billion dollars a year, which is a Nice, healthy revenue. You're much higher than your market cap. So you have reasons to be optimistic. Do you have a timeline in mind of when you hit equilibrium, when you hit profitability?

[Matt Meeker]

This year?

[Guy Raz]

This year, yeah.

[Matt Meeker]

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 up from there. And what I say to people now is, I intend to die in the saddle. Truly, it goes back to Hugo and that responsibility and the legacy. But. But I say that knowing that I'm a month away from having a baby boy.

[Guy Raz]

A human child.

[Matt Meeker]

A human child, yes.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Matt Meeker]

Maybe that becomes my obsession. And, you know, if you'd asked me if I'm going to be in the pet industry in 2010, I would have thought you were crazy. But right now, my intention is, this is my life's work.

[Guy Raz]

Matt, when you think about where you are and what you know, 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 the work you put in and how much do you think has to do with luck and timing and good fortune?

[Matt Meeker]

I definitely work hard at it and always have. But some of this, 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. It 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.

[Guy Raz]

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?

[Matt Meeker]

Eh, I'm okay. Okay. Whatever.

[Guy Raz]

Just lay it online. I mean, come on. I mean, it sounds like you hate cats.

[Matt Meeker]

I don't hate cats. I won't go that far.

[Guy Raz]

But you deeply dislike them. Cats are amazing, amazing animals.

[Matt Meeker]

I would encourage you to start the cat company. Go for it.

[Guy Raz]

There is nothing like watching a kitten chase a laser pointer. Like there is nothing, not a single animal on the 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. Give us a huge opportunity. There's a lot of custom laser pointers you could put in those boxes.

[Matt Meeker]

12 months of laser pointers. I love it.

[Guy Raz]

Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the Follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And of course it's free. And if you're interested, insights, ideas and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my [e-mail] this episode was produced by Devin Schwartz with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research assistance from Olivia Rockman. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Maggie Luthar. Our production staff also includes Alex chung, Carla Estevez, J.C. howard, Sam Paulson, Chris Messini, Kerry Thompson, John Isabella, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built this. If 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 [e-mail] survey Klaviyo powers smarter digital relationships from more than 151,000 successful brands, including Hedaley and Bennett, Fishwife and Dagny Dover. Klaviyo's unified data and marketing automation platform turns your customer data into personalized connections to make every moment count across AI powered email, SMS analytics, and more. Build smarter digital relationships with your customers. Visit K L A V I Y o dot com to make every moment count.