Peloton | Acquired | ListenLeap

Ride to greatness.

We're not here to work out.

We're here to outwork.

I said that to Jenny the other day and she was like, what are you talking about?

Outwork.

Just internalize all the Peloton instructor slogans.

David, just make sure you live, learn, love well.

See you next time.

Welcome to Season 10, Episode 2 of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them.

I'm Ben Gilbert and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

And we are your hosts.

Well listeners, we have been waiting to do a Peloton episode for a long time, just searching for that right moment.

We didn't do it at the IPO, and then there was the big stock run up, and we thought about that, and we got a zillion listener requests, and of course, the pandemic hitting, and David and I both becoming customers and these crazy commercials.

And somehow none of these ever felt like the right moment.

So we figured, well, how about this wild company changing news?

We just scramble over 24 hours to prep and have done basically nothing in the last 24 hours except learn everything we possibly can about this company that we are so intimate with already.

Well, I mean anytime Barry McCarthy gets involved.

Like we were texting, Ben texted me the news and I was like that's it.

We got to do it.

Emergency pod acquired superhero, Barry McCarthy, literally writing again.

Yes.

Oh, just so excited.

And you know, there's this fun thing too of like I've seen articles that are like John Foley stepping down as CEO.

Technically, technically, people are saying he's staying involved.

He's staying very involved.

And we'll definitely dive into sort of how this duo is going to conquer the road ahead together.

Indeed.

Well, first we want to say we're recording this on February 9th and that is important because yesterday, February 8th, was the day that the news broke about all of this Peloton stuff.

Today, February 9th, was Barry McCarthy's first day in the CEO seat.

And I think he frames this better than we ever could have in his email to the company this morning.

He wrote, and now that the reset button has been pushed, the challenge ahead of us is this.

Do we squander the opportunity in front of us or do we engineer the great comeback story of the post-COVID era?

I am here for the comeback story.

We are here for the comeback story.

Indeed.

All right.

Well, we spent the last 24 hours getting everything in order, all of our thoughts.

I've done 167 workouts since January of 2020, when I got my Peloton bike.

All right, listeners, now is a great time to thank a new friend of the show, Koifin.

And it's funny, they're new, but actually I've been using their product for years.

My research project for every single new acquired episode involves Koifin.

So when they reached out to sponsor the show, I thought, well, this is convenient.

Indeed.

So Coifin is a financial research tool loved by both individual investors and financial advisors.

Individuals use it for stock research, graphing financials and portfolio tracking, and financial advisors use it to build model portfolios and create client proposals.

They have live market data and powerful analytics tools.

So it's kind of like a Bloomberg terminal, except without the huge price tag, right?

Yes, essentially.

It's a web app, and it's totally self-serve.

I've actually not talked to anyone at the company for the first few years that I used it.

So Koifin is a product that the broader market, like all acquired listeners, would use, not just Wall Street investment bankers.

It's where I pull things like growth rate or gross margins or the p-e ratio or revenue multiples for every company we study, and you can compare these things over time with historical graphs or against other companies.

It's often what i use when we're studying private companies too, like rolex or mars or ikea, to look at the comparables, to estimate what these companies would be worth if they were public.

They also have a screener that lets you filter across thousands of stocks so you can quickly surface investment ideas Yep.

So the general idea is, if you're someone who's used to living in data, you should have that at your fingertips as you think about investing.

Exactly.

It's got these great graphs for data visualization wrapped around institutional grade data.

So if you want to understand what assumptions are baked into the stock price today, Coifin is for you.

I was about to say that Acquired listeners have a great offer.

But Koifin's free product is actually already really robust.

Which is what I was using for years.

I know.

But indeed for Acquired listeners and also for you, Ben.

If you go to koifincom slash acquired and you end up upgrading to paid, you'll get 20 off your first year.

Our thanks to Koifin.

That's K-O-Y-F-I-N dot com slash acquired or click the link in the show notes.

Other things, you all know the drill by now.

If you want to join the Slack, you should.

Acquired.fm slash Slack.

NZS Capital Guys.

We talk about all of that and semiconductors in our latest episode.

You can search Acquired LP Show in any podcast player or you can become a member at acquiredfm slash LP if you want those two weeks earlier, or to join our LP-only Zoom calls, one of which is tonight, if you are listening, the day that this episode comes out.

So LPs, excited to see you in there.

The LP Show has been on fire recently.

We've got like...

I'm just so pumped about the guests we're getting.

10K Diver.

That was really fun, too.

Pseudonymous interview.

We've got some great founders coming up.

Yep.

It's awesome.

Listeners, as you know, this is not investment advice.

Very much not investment advice this time.

It may be product advice, though.

I definitely want to discuss Peloton's product lineup because I have some thoughts.

I bet you do.

But it's not investment advice.

I bet you do.

We may have investments in these companies that we discussed.

The show is for entertainment and informational purposes only.

And before I hand it over to David for history and facts, we do want to acknowledge that a big part of the news yesterday in the restructuring is that Peloton laid off 2800 people, including 20 of their corporate office.

And as fascinating as it is to dive into this business and the strategy and, of course, some of the drama, this is a super tough day, a super tough week for those 2800 people who had a really, really terrible Tuesday reading this news, talking to their managers.

All that and our hearts go out to those folks.

Yeah.

Layoffs are tough.

There probably weren't layoffs when you were at Microsoft, were there?

Like two months after I left, there was a massive round.

Yeah.

There were layoffs at UBS in my first job out of college during the financial crisis.

Ultimately, gosh, I think like close to 50% of the company was laid off while I was there.

It's hard.

It's so hard.

I mean, layoffs are just no fun.

I mean, that's an obvious statement, but it's hard.

Yeah.

And to transition us in thinking about one of our previous episodes with Barry McCarthy.

He was a part of that big company-changing moment at Netflix where they had to restructure the whole thing.

And I think that also had a huge round of layoffs before they committed to a new plan going forward when Netflix was on the ropes and about to die.

Yeah.

Yep.

40%.

40% riff.

So he's kind of clearly good at sort of taking a bare bones team and making the most of it.

Indeed.

Well, with that history and facts, I think that is the perfect transition.

Barry McCarthy, the acquired superhero.

We talked about him on the Spotify episode.

We talked about him on The Netflix two-parter both parts of the Netflix episodes because he ended up staying for 12 years at Netflix through all the crazy.

That is such an amazing story.

Going back, reading the transcripts of those episodes, the Netflix journey is amazing.

But we haven't talked about him too, too much since until today.

And I thought in preparation for today, it would be fun to dive a little more into his background.

First off, something that just like is wild.

He's 68 years old.

The spring chicken coming in to turn this thing around.

It's unbelievable.

He's roughly the same age as our parents, if not maybe slightly older, I think, than yours.

Right, definitely older than mine, meaningfully older about a decade.

But yeah, as other people ease into retirement, Barry accepts his first ever public company CEO job.

I know.

Oh, amazing.

He's like the Sean Connery of tech.

He is James Bond.

He will always be James Bond.

So great.

Well, a few quick things about his background.

There's not a lot on the internet about or with Barry McCarthy himself.

In fact, as far as I could find and I looked pretty deeply the only like dedicated long form interview with Barry McCarthy on the Internet is on YouTube with the headmaster of his high school that he went to a school called the Hill School.

Is it a boarding school?

It's a boarding school in the Philadelphia area.

It was when I went to Tower Hill School in Wilmington Delaware, also in the broader Philadelphia area.

And people would always get the Hill School and Tower Hill School confused.

We had a little chip on our shoulders.

But your upbringing is somehow like related to every episode these days.

It's like, are we only selecting for people in the southern southeastern Pennsylvania region?

Totally, totally the mid-Atlantic region.

Well, this interview is actually amazing.

It's an hour long.

We'll link to it in the show notes.

As of yesterday, it had like 100 views total on YouTube.

Now it's up to like five or 600.

It's still super small.

If you do nothing else from this episode, go watch this interview with Barry and you will get a sense of this man and his experience.

It's also six months ago.

So it's like very recent.

I mean, for a very long time, he had basically no public appearances.

And very, very relevant to this news today that I was going to save this for later in the episode.

Well, you know Barry, are you bored in retirement, now that he's retired from Spotify fully at this point?

And his answer is yes, I'd like to think that I have another game in me, and how prescient that would prove to be.

So we all know that Barry becomes the CFO of Netflix when the company is very, very small, still a startup.

I think there are only about 40 people at Netflix when he joined and it was certainly pre-IPO, pre there being a real business there which we'll get into.

But how... This was also not early in Barry's career.

How did he end up becoming the CFO of Netflix?

Well...

He had been the CFO previously to Netflix of another company, actually a digital music streaming company.

Did you know this, Ben?

Really?

No.

He was the CFO of a company called Music Choice.

Music choice.

Do you remember back in the early days of digital cable and satellite TV?

There used to be those channels.

We had DirecTV growing up.

I think they were in the 600s or 700s.

It was sort of like SiriusXM in a way.

It was like each one was a genre.

It was exactly like SiriusXM, but just on your cable box or your satellite box.

You'd go to XYZ channel and they'd have some crazy, you know, like 90s era visualizations.

Yes.

You still see him in hotel rooms sometimes.

Totally.

That was Music Choice.

Barry was the CFO of Music Choice.

And what is it like?

It's a cable channel.

It's subscription, revenue, music streaming, music, right?

Like...

What?

How prescient?

Well-primed for the ultimate Spotify gig that he would take when he took them public.

Some other things that I learned most of this from that interview.

How did he end up?

So he had been a management consultant at Booz Allen, I think early in his career, and then an investment banker for a long time.

And it's a well-trodden path from senior investment banker to going and becoming CFO of a company.

Music Choice may have been public at that point in time.

How did he find his way out to California and Netflix?

He got fired as CFO of music choice.

I don't know if it was part of a riff and if there were layoffs or if he got fired directly, but he's very open about this.

I mean, most riffs don't include the CFO unless it's performance based, right?

Usually the CFO is the one, you know, organized orchestrating the riff.

Um, Yeah, he got fired and he was 45 years old.

He had already had this sort of long career as an investment banker and then as a CFO, been fired.

What an inspiration to go from that to having so many more chapters, to come even now to a new chapter at 68 years old.

Gosh, I hope my life is that interesting.

Yeah.

Label it what you want, growth mindset or learning from your mistakes or anything like that.

It does feel like this guy is compounding knowledge.

And I wonder if also you know again.

We talked at the top of history and facts about how this was a hard week for so many people at Peloton and you know our hearts are with them and it's hard.

It's like Barry went through this himself.

Yep.

So how does he end up going out to Netflix?

Netflix was recruiting for a CFO and like nobody wanted the job because I think we talked about we may have talked about this a little bit in our Netflix episode.

But the early days of Netflix, like it was not good.

A hot startup in silicon valley?

No, it was far from it.

You know, mark randolph had originally started it.

Uh, reed got involved a little later.

Uh and um.

I also did not know this.

Uh, or at least i didn't remember it from the netflix episode.

It was not a subscription business.

The original business of netflix was you paid parental.

It was literally like blockbuster and that is not a good business.

Oh, I don't think I knew that either.

Or at least I didn't remember that.

The other crazy Netflix thing that I always sort of forget about until I reread it is that they sort of timed it, with DVDs becoming more widely distributed.

And when they were starting the company they sounded extra crazy, because it not only was kind of a crazy idea, but it was a bet on DVDs and DVDs weren't popular yet.

And it's like what do you mean?

Totally.

So this was not, this was a tough role to recruit for.

Um, and, and that's how Barry ended up becoming a candidate.

And then he and Reed immediately hit it off and you know he joined and obviously sort of you know in many ways the rest is history there.

But also, I think it's important.

It wasn't a subscription business.

Barry was, you know, alongside Reed, part of architecting the true, you know incredible, business model of Netflix, of becoming a subscription business?

So they had done before he joined just about a million dollars in revenue on the like paper paper rental business model.

He joins this is all pre-ipo.

They implement the subscription business model.

It goes from 1 million to 5 million in revenue that year, the next year 35 million and then hundreds of millions.

You know after, after that so, And then the IPO.

There's the fight with Blockbuster, all that that we talk about in the part one of the Netflix story.

And then 2003, it's a public company.

Barry tells Reed, you know what?

This has been an incredible journey.

I think he had been there for maybe... five years at that point, five or six years.

Uh, I'm ready for my next challenge.

I want to go be CEO of a company next.

I've realized I'm really operational.

I love this.

He talks with Reed.

He talks with the board.

They announce on an earnings call, public earnings call that Barry's going to be stepping down.

He's staying an extra year, throughout the year of 2003, to manage the transition, do it right, find his next challenge.

Um, Netflix is boring.

It's done.

Everything's going to be smooth sailing and successful from here on out.

So I'll go do something else.

And then Amazon.

I don't know if they ever publicly announced, but word got out that Amazon was going to enter the market and compete directly with Netflix which, of course, they did in a different way much later in history.

The stock is... gets hammered it dropped literally the stock price drops 60 60 percent shades of what's happening with peloton now and 60 is a modest drop compared to what happened with peloton yeah right and it's it's crisis mode it's it's wartime again at netflix and barry in one of the most just like One of the many reasons why we love him here at Acquired and his story is he says, I can't leave.

I got to stay through this fight.

He literally word for word, on a public earnings call, announces that he's staying, he's not leaving, and his reason is, quote you don't leave your friends in the middle of a knife fight.

It's just so good barry, is mr wartime, like in in the parlance of uh ben horowitz's peacetime ceos and wartime ceos.

This is Mr Wartime, when things kind of feel easy and like they're going to keep growing year over year and we don't have a, you know, existential crisis in front of us.

So that's when he decides like to you know okay, you guys are good without me now, but by all means, if we're in battle like, put me in coach.

I mean he literally in the Hill School interview.

He says, quote you got to ask yourself are you a wartime fighter or not?

And I've always gotten my biggest thrills being in the fight.

And then, of course, there's the Carl Icahn battle and the price wars and all the all the stuff that happens at Netflix.

He ends up staying until 2010.

So many, many more years than he originally expected.

When he finally does announce that he is leaving Netflix in 2010, he could totally retire at this point.

He's in his mid-50s, and he announces it at an investor conference.

This is just also amazing, amazing quotes here.

He's telling the story.

And if Barry is saying that, you can take that to the bank.

And then it bent to what you were saying.

This is also from the Hill School interview about him.

You know, really being getting fired up by wartime and peacetime is not as interesting to him.

Uh, the headmaster asks you know why did he leave netflix?

And he says i got bored.

The more successful the business was, the fewer the challenges there were for me fascinating And listeners.

As you can tell, we're spending a lot of time here on Barry, in part because I think it's really important to know, as we think about the future of Peloton, what is his MO.

Who is this guy?

And why, to the extent where you're excited about the future of the company...

Why?

And what's the track record of this person?

So what's he likely to do when he comes in?

And of course, he has an amazing way of instilling confidence.

He has a way with words and especially a way with words to investors to bring a sense of calm.

And I think there is nothing more necessary for Peloton than that than right now.

I think the other half is what he learns from this Netflix experience and frankly, going all the way back to Music Choice before that, and then compounds with Spotify.

That we'll get into in a sec, which is like he is.

Probably the number one world expert in managing subscription businesses.

Like he helps architect the OG Internet subscription business of Netflix.

And then, you know, again, go back and listen to our episodes.

So much of what he was doing during those wartime years was modeling out in incredible precise detail the economics of not only what netflix's subscription business was but blockbusters and what amazon could do and like they had to make company uh, you know decisions with the whole company on the line about how low they were going to cut prices and how long they were going to hold them low to fight blockbuster and amazon.

So they had to understand the financing ability of those two other companies in addition to their own and their access to capital for how they were going to win that war.

If there are other people in the world who have done this to the degree that he has, they are few and far between.

He is in the dictionary under the definition of strategic finance.

Yes.

Particularly subscription business strategic finance.

Yes.

So then, when he retires from Netflix, he goes and joins TCV which, of course, has a storied history of investing in Netflix and helping them through all of their challenges as a financing partner.

And we should say TCV stands for Technology Crossover Ventures which, while it seems like everyone is doing this now, investing in both private and public companies.

This was a unique enough strategy when they were formed that they named themselves after it.

I mean, that says a lot about how long TCV has been doing that.

So he joins them as a venture partner.

And I don't know if he was thinking that he was just going to sort of be on boards and be an advisor for the rest of his career.

But in 2014, he joins the Spotify board.

And he's sort of so taken by both the Spotify business and Daniel Ek and the opportunity ahead.

And they need someone like him to really come and transform that business.

Yes.

Taking a page out of the Ben and Jerry's playbook.

Indeed.

So he goes and joins Spotify as CFO, and not just CFO, but also eventually he would add, head of their free business, the advertising supported business at Spotify.

So not just the subscription business of Spotify.

Right.

Oh, I didn't realize he's like an operational leader of the ad-supported business.

So originally he moved to Stockholm and was CFO of the business in Stockholm and then moved to New York to set up and really drive the free portion of the Spotify business, which is what Taylor was so upset about.

And that now that they've built out since when he took that over, they built that into a real business and working with artists and making that actually work for for the company and for all the stakeholders.

Um, so he had this incredible chapter there, the dpo, everything and then in january of 2020, he retires presumably fully at this point in time, because he's 66 years old And rejoins the board of Spotify and spends, you know, thinking he's going to go spend the next few years joining boards again.

He joins the Instacart board and reestablishes his relationship with TCV.

Didn't he also join the board of Pandora, if I'm remembering right, speaking of music subscriptions?

That was back before Spotify.

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

Got it.

But just to add yet another piece of credibility on music-related subscription businesses.

Totally.

So now let's switch over to the Peloton track of the story here.

Peloton, as many folks probably know, was founded in 2012 by John Foley.

And this is where the connections just go so deep here.

Yeah.

David, I think it's inappropriate to start the Peloton story in 2012.

I just have to say, I know you're usually the one who goes back.

This story starts in 2006 with SoulCycle.

And I think, without going into the whole SoulCycle story by the way, there are two awesome episodes of how I built this.

One on SoulCycle, the founders there, and then another one actually interviewing John Foley on Peloton, which is great.

And this...

We don't think about the narrative of Peloton that much this way right now.

But if you think back to when you first heard about Peloton, it was SoulCycle, but on a screen in your living room.

And SoulCycle was this massive dominant brand.

If you were touchy-feely and then there was Flywheel which, if you were more numbers driven, Flywheel was more your shtick.

So I guess it was more of a Flywheel than a SoulCycle, but it had the prestige brand of a SoulCycle.

And I actually don't know the history on this.

You may know, but there's very intertwined history with SoulCycle and Flywheel, right?

There is.

We will get to that and what would have happened otherwise.

Ah, okay.

Okay.

We'll save it for later.

It is totally inappropriate to think about Peloton in a vacuum.

The moment in 2012, and I think even 2011 when there was ideation happening, was totally...

You know, I'm John Foley.

I live in New York.

SoulCycle is totally taking off.

And this, you know, not yet connected fitness, but sort of... Boutique fitness.

High-end group boutique fitness is taking the world by storm.

And of course there's John, who's not really the most numbers-oriented schedule-oriented, disciplined person, more of a visionary product leader type person.

And he's thinking, you know...

I can't commit to five days from now making sure that I schedule that spot in SoulCycle.

What if I could decide last minute and there was an infinitely scalable version of SoulCycle where the room wasn't bound by four walls?

Totally.

Well, we'll get into who John is in a sec, but I was going to do this second.

But you're absolutely right to start with SoulCycle and Boutique Fitness and Flywheel and Barry's Bootcamp and you know all the other similar businesses out there.

Yeah, so John and his wife Jill lived in New York, which is the epicenter of all of this.

And there's so many great, great instructors at these places that have cult followings.

People fly from all over the world to come to New York.

That's where you want to be if you are an up-and-coming instructor in this burgeoning sort of new category.

And this is what's just brilliant.

You know a it's so, like you said, it's so hard to get spots in those classes like you gotta the instant they become available, like you even had to do this in seattle, i remember, but like in new york, it's impossible.

It was a meme to buy the shirts, and the shirts said noon on monday, because noon on monday is when you had to stop whatever you're doing and scramble to reserve the spots.

So anybody, it's hard to get spots with the best instructors in these classes.

John and Jill, his wife, they were super into this.

They had two little kids.

I've got one little kid.

Obviously, we live in a different era now, but Even if we didn't, there'd be no way I could do this.

There were a lot of people out there that just wanted this product and couldn't get access to it.

So the Peloton idea, it was revolutionary on a whole bunch of dimensions.

One was democratizing location like you didn't have to be in new york to get the best stuff.

Two was, like you said, elastically scaling access to the best instructors not the average instructors or the low quality instructors, like literally only the best and infinite class size.

And so if you think those two vectors alone infinite class size and geography agnostic that's massively TAM expanding.

Theoretically, the TAM for connected fitness should be way bigger than boutique fitness.

But then there's even a third layer of icing on the cake, which is time shifting.

So what if you can't make it to that 5 a.m. class?

So to feather back in preview a little Barry element here, you know one of the things that he talks about to the extent he does talk publicly and learned deeply from Netflix but has just become kind of ingrained in him.

And I think is now an obvious insight, but definitely at Netflix.

And at this point in time, when Peloton was getting started, not obvious is his quote is everything linear dies, everything on demand wins.

And it's so true.

This element of being able to access best in the world content on your schedule when you want it.

That's what makes Netflix awesome.

That's what makes Spotify awesome.

That's why podcasting is better than talk radio.

That's why music streaming is better than listening on the radio.

That's why Netflix is better than linear TV programming.

Yeah.

Which is mostly true, but not entirely true.

You got sports is probably the notable exception.

Right.

And Barry always says that sports is sort of the one.

There are a few categories out there.

But here is this concept being applied to something, a whole radically new market like fitness.

Who would have thought?

It's absolutely brilliant.

And we can't give enough credit to Peloton and John Foley for innovating on this.

In fact, you could even argue Slack is indicative of this trend work going async instead of synchronous, pulling out of meetings and going to, you know, chat based or document based forms of collaboration.

That is a, you know, on demandness of something that was previously linear.

Totally.

Yeah.

Like how many people still obviously have, you know, work phone calls and whatnot.

The number of Slack conversations that used to be a meeting or the number of document reviews that used to be a meeting is just awesome.

Yep.

And to then create a product that is like native to that, you know, like email existed.

Right.

But like it's slow and it's not, you know, anyway, that's what Peloton was.

So who's John Foley?

This is like it's such a small world out there.

He had been, prior to starting Peloton, he had been the head of Barnes & Noble's Nook business, their e-reader business, which is based in New York.

And it was like, actually, you know, Barnes & Noble was a great company and then eviscerated by Amazon.

And the Nook business and the Nook product.

I think was probably a decent product, but it was just too late.

And they were really a fierce competitor in this market.

I mean, they outlasted Borders.

Yeah.

Totally.

But you know, it's interesting to thinking about the book and e-reader market relative to Peloton too, and maybe some lessons that fully learned from that.

You know you could have the best hardware in the world, but you needed the books.

Like the content was what really mattered.

It didn't matter if the Nook hardware was better than the Kindle or not.

Like Amazon, had the biggest selection of books, the easiest buying experience and had the most lock in.

Okay, I do have to pull forward that thing from what would have happened otherwise, because we can save the analysis for later, but I should share what actually happened.

So you might be giving Foley a little bit too much credit here.

When he was starting the business, they wanted to build the best bike, beautiful piece of hardware like Apple.

They wanted to build software that was equally elegant and really differentiated that bike.

The original vision actually was a connect-your-own-iPad vision.

They did not want to unify it but sort of learned over time that we really do need to unify it to control more of the experience.

But here's the interesting thing.

They actually didn't want to produce their own content.

They thought if we have a bike, even if it's a bike with our software, that's interesting enough to people and we can partner with either SoulCycle or Peloton.

Oh, or Flywheel, you mean? or Flywheel, yeah, to get access to their instructors, their content.

That's the thing they're good at is the content.

We'll just make this elegant device.

And they actually got to term sheet with Flywheel.

I think SoulCycle sort of gave them the cold shoulder as sort of know.

They were so hot at the time and so big and so dominant.

But uh flywheel, they actually got to terms on.

What would it look like to make this thing not only um uh, content partner but i think also like a go-to-market partner, like this was going to be the distribution strategy, but flywheel ended up pulling out and walking, walking away from the deal, so peloton were sort of forced to do their own content and and pivot to a really vertically integrated strategy.

Oh my gosh.

Talk about history turning on a knife point.

Wow.

Just like the echoes of the blockbuster Netflix situation.

And Amazon.

Remember, Netflix tried to sell itself to Amazon.

Yep.

Amazing.

Okay, so that's what Foley was doing immediately before starting Peloton.

But before that, he had been a longtime IAC guy, interactive court, working for Barry Diller.

Like, oh my god!

The original tech media conglomerate.

I mean like I'm kind of annoyed at the number of people that try to characterize John Foley as someone who was breaking into the industry or didn't have a tech background, or No.

He was in the middle of this stuff in the late 90s, early 2000s.

We should do an episode on IAC because it is fascinating.

Barry Diller and media and tech and him being really the first person to integrate all that.

But for a long time, sort of the jewel of IAC was QVC and the Home Shopping Network.

Yeah.

And what is that?

That is like literally streamed media out via, you know television, with an interactive component that people at home were you know buying and calling and like the DNA is just like so, so perfect.

So what was John doing at IAC?

I believe he was working on part of the city search team.

And then he also, they had a business called pronto.com.

I think I'm not sure exactly what that was doing, but he had bounced around.

And I think a lot of people at IAC, you know, go between a whole bunch of their properties.

Yep.

And I think I'm not sure if this was IAC or his next gig but he ended up taking over the post-bubble Evite team that had shrunk from like hundreds and hundreds of people down to this like very small group and grew it to like I think he grew it from like a million bucks to 25 million in revenue or something.

Still, you know, relatively small compared to the grander scale.

But you know had sort of done this take a startup and rehab it and build it bigger.

So he hadn't actually done a startup from scratch, but had built something meaningful with a small team.

Man, Evite, that's like the cockroach of the internet in a good way.

It just won't die.

Yes.

Amazing.

So you would think like, you know, gosh, we're telling this story now and hindsight is 2020.

Like incredible vision, proven demand for this product like yes, it's going to be hard to build a full stack company around this, but like financing hard stuff like that's what builds moats like this should be an easy fundraise.

And ben, as you referenced, the john's episode on how i built this is great around all this, so we won't rehash all of it.

But it was incredibly hard to get this funded, like all the vcs passed, but again and again and again they end.

He ends up raising four hundred thousand dollars to start from friends and family at a two million dollar post money valuation oh my gosh.

And of course, you know folks probably all know now uh, i think it's later in my notes maybe what the current market cap of peloton is, but at its peak it was a 45 billion dollar public company IPO at 8 billion went all the way up to, I think, 49 billion.

And then today is floating a little above the IPO price between $9 and $10 billion.

Wow.

I mean, from a $2 million post-money valuation for that first round.

I mean, that's 20% of the company he sold for $400,000.

Yeah.

All from individuals, $25K and $50K checks.

And then did a $3.5 million round, I believe also all from individuals after that.

They do a Kickstarter in 2013.

I had forgotten this.

I can't believe this thing was a Kickstarter.

Until it got pointed out in the acquired slack, like...

It was a Kickstarter and it was like essentially a failed Kickstarter.

Like it didn't technically fail, but it was not good.

So here's the thing.

I just pulled it up.

We'll link to the Kickstarter page in the show notes which, by the way, has basically the bike exactly as it is today on there from eight years ago.

Aside from what like the weights holders and they tweaked the water bottle location.

It's the same bike.

Yeah.

So they raised $307,332 in the Kickstarter.

Their goal was $250.

And John says on the How I Built This episode that half the people who backed the Kickstarter were already investors.

So...

It's a very interesting thing here where we all know Peloton is a killer product.

I mean, you and I rave about it.

They have these ludicrous NPS scores.

And yet, when they laid out the vision and they showed a very well-produced video with a very You get a sense of what the experience is like from this video.

It was not enough to communicate to people that this thing is going to be awesome.

And so I think it's worth pointing out that...

Until you actually tried it, you didn't know it was going to be good, which makes it a pretty hard thing to sell.

Totally.

We're going to get into this more in a sec.

But yeah, this is not, at least in the early days.

Things may be different now, although maybe not.

We'll discuss.

Yeah, this product is not something you can really just sell over the internet.

Like you said, you either got to try it or you got to have a bunch of friends who are using it and be like this is awesome.

Right.

There needs to be sufficient social pressure or your own experience.

Let's go right in.

So how do they start and end up selling it?

They make the especially at that point in time completely orthogonal decision to how tech companies and startups were supposed to sell.

They go to the Short Hills Mall in New Jersey and they rent a store in the mall and set up a mall store and they start selling these by hand in the mall.

It's a beautifully contrarian bet to say our strategy is to go to malls which, by the way, they continue to do, like hundreds and hundreds of in-mall stores, as malls across America are declining.

But they did have the realization I don't know if it was super explicit as a strategy, but the realization that hey, until you try this thing, you actually don't understand how awesome it is.

You can hear it described to you, but it's not compelling enough to buy, especially at this high 2000, a bike price plus a subscription fee price point.

And so the mall was sort of necessary.

And they have these anecdotes about how people actually weren't in the market to go buy gym equipment.

But they're walking by, they try it.

They have someone size the bike for you, you throw on the headphones.

Their goal, their sort of KPI, is get you in the experience as soon as possible after stepping in the store.

And this is, by the way, how I bought mine.

It is like you wander in and- You bought it in the mall?

I did, yeah.

I had intent beforehand, but it is this experience where they're like, do you want to try it?

And they make it easy and fun to try.

And then, once you're in and you've got headphones on and typically people are together, so you look at your partner or whoever, and then you're like whoa.

And it takes all of three to five minutes before you're like, oh, I see why this could be cool.

And they needed the mall store as the way to sort of do this.

I'm just remembering my own experience before I bought the Peloton, which I didn't get until this summer.

So it was not like a pandemic purchase per se.

But I had been hearing from you and plenty of my friends how much they love it for years.

And that wasn't even enough to put me over the edge.

I got a digital subscription.

So I had a crappy old bike in my garage that I was using it with.

I was like, oh, this is pretty good.

And then we went on vacation.

We went on a baby moon before our daughter was born.

And the hotel...

And I was like, well, I'll try.

I'll see what the actual bike is like.

And I was like, oh, this is awesome.

And my $200 Amazon bike in the garage, it's night and day compared to this.

It really is a great bike.

It's the sort of magnetic resistance.

It's the belt instead of the chain.

I mean, everything about it is it is a nice piece of hardware.

It really, it really is.

But yeah, yeah, you gotta, you gotta try it.

Which it's, it's interesting.

You're describing that how you got hooked into it.

That's like, sure.

You want to sell bikes to hotels because it's nice to sell bikes.

But I think a big part of the we need to be in hotel strategy is just more and more ways for people to experience it and want to buy one.

But yeah.

Okay.

So you mentioned price $2,000 bike.

So at the Kickstarter, I think they priced it at like $1,500 on the Kickstarter, I think, as early.

But then when they first tried to start selling these things, they priced it at 1200 and it wasn't selling.

This is like fascinating.

This is a fascinating little detail.

And then they talked to some people about this.

So you're getting customer feedback.

And what they realized was that For 1200, they're thinking hey, the strategy is to sell the hardware at cost or at a loss.

It's like the video game console strategy.

Get the video game consoles in there, and then we've got this awesome subscription business that we're going to layer on top of it, and that's where we're going to make our money.

People thought the hardware couldn't be that great if it was $1,200, and they realized that... if they raise the price they raise the price up to two thousand two hundred and forty five dollars that then in people's minds this becomes this like jewel premium expensive aspirational luxury product like i'm treating myself to this because it's so awesome and I'm going to love it.

And at the $1,200 price point, it was hurting that.

It was preventing that from happening.

That's absolutely fascinating.

So they didn't change a thing about the bike.

They just raised the price by $1,000.

You know, in the Buffett parlance of price is what you pay, value is what you get.

They're using price to signal value.

And that's... supposedly another one of the big things that really helped sales take off.

Well, yeah.

So I'm going to pull forward a playbook theme here.

So the second order thing that I don't think they realized by jacking up the price is that now they're picking their customers and they're, And in particular they're picking customers who have extremely low price sensitivity.

And what happens when you pick people with extremely low price sensitivity and you select for only people who are willing to throw 2300 post tax at an exercise bike?

They're pretty unlikely to churn, even if your fitness subscription is pretty expensive.

And so, even to this day, their annual churn.

If you sort of take their monthly churn and annualize, it is something like 9.

This is an unbelievably sticky business.

When you look at most consumer businesses, they're like 50% annual churn.

Yep.

As of last summer, so they're on a June 30 fiscal year.

And so when they reported their last full year fiscal end, I believe churn was like 06, monthly churn was like 06, worked out to about 7 annual churn.

Wow.

Those are Netflix numbers there.

I'm not sure.

Yeah, I think it's meaningfully better than Netflix.

I should look at what Netflix's churn is, but I think that that is the best I've ever seen.

So on the one hand, it's hard to acquire customers because you got to go sell them a $2,400 bike.

On the other hand, once you get them, boy, is that sticky.

So I don't know what revenue was for 2014, which is their first kind of full year of sales.

And they implement some of these strategies.

I believe it was $10 million-ish.

In 2015, though, they do $60 million of revenue.

And, ahead of that, at the end of 2014, they are able to raise their first institutionally-led round of capital.

This is 2014, led by the legendary early-stage investor.

It is technically a Series B, but the seed was the 400000 round and then the A was the, you know, still individuals three and a half million dollar round, led by the legendary seed investor.

They are quite now a legendary seed investor among others, tiger global.

Get out of here.

This is amazing.

It's an unbelievable bet by leaf Excel in 2014.

It was a 10 million total round on a 35 million posts, where tiger put in 5 million, and Tiger would go on to become the largest shareholder at IPO, owning just under 20 of the business.

Amazing.

Like there's so many little things about this story that just sort of you know, presage everything that would be to come in tech over the years and in venture.

Yeah, Tiger leads the first institutional round.

I do think.

By the way, this is one of the things that gave, among many other very successful investments, but was a big part of the story for Lee when he left and started Addition and raised over a billion dollars for Addition's first fund.

Peloton was a big part of that.

Yep.

For Lee, for addition, you know, and for tiger itself too.

I mean, yeah.

Got to imagine that that was a big part there.

Notoriously tight lipped.

Our friend Mario Gabrielli wrote, I think the best piece out there on them uh, which was still without, without insider access um, but shaped their strategy too.

Yep.

So $60 million in revenue in 2015.

2016, they do $170 million in revenue.

2017, there is $325 million at a $1.3 billion valuation.

And this is where I think Silicon Valley really started to wake up and be like oh my God, we missed this.

How did we miss this?

Yep.

Because he pitched everyone.

Everyone.

Literally everyone.

Uh 2018, they introduced the tread product.

Uh the treadmill and the digital app subscription.

It'd be fun to talk about that.

The, you know, I started as a digital app subscriber and then, which is how it's like $13 a month.

Yep.

It was 1299.

I think I originally started cause I think there might've been like a some a deal with Apple or somebody like a first free trial, a free month trial or something like that.

Were you a part of the COVID offering, the three-month COVID thing?

Yeah, I think that might have been.

So that was totally nuts.

So John Foley talks about this.

He says about the beginning of COVID.

He said six months ago we had about 100000 digital subscribers for the business.

And within 45 days of COVID hitting, they gave this deal that said you're not getting a month free, you get three months free because people need to work out at home.

And within 45 days, we had close to 1.2 million people who had jumped on the trial.

So call that a 10x increase in weeks.

Wow.

So that was a very, I mean, again, we'll get into the unit economics of it later.

But at least from a customer acquisition perspective, that was a great way to spike the number of subscribers they had.

Totally.

And the digital app experience is surprisingly full-featured.

I used just that for quite a number of months before I got to try the actual hardware at a hotel.

And for people who are wondering, you know, why isn't it as good?

If you haven't ridden the Peloton, like, why can't I just mount an iPad on an old exercise bike?

The biggest difference is that when the bike is not feeding information into whatever device you're using, you know your iPad or something.

It doesn't know what the resistance is and it doesn't know what your cadence is.

And so you don't know things like your current spot on the leaderboard.

It knows you're doing the ride and it knows how far into the ride you are, but it doesn't actually know anything about how you're doing in the ride.

Leaderboard.

And then I think also there's just like, it is a really good bike.

You can hack together.

You can do a hack a Peloton and get some of the integrations with third party sensors.

Um, but I think to get like a similar quality bike you're going to be spending roughly the same amount anyway.

And so like why wouldn't you just like?

That's what I kind of decided is like well, I'll just get the whole ecosystem.

Why wouldn't you get one anyway?

Because the connected fitness digital only subscription is $13 a month.

And once you have a bike, you're, it becomes $40 a month.

You're Okay, so I know you've got some fun stuff on this.

2019, people start talking about... Everybody in Silicon Valley knows this is a great business now.

People start talking about an IPO going public, which happens in September 2019.

But leading up to that, there's kind of an issue with the business that they got to sort out, which is uh, earlier in 2019 they get sued for first 150 million.

And then they up it to 300 million by the music publishers, national music publishers association.

Uh, because they're obviously using all this music as part of the classes at Peloton and they didn't have proper sync licenses, uh.

Yes.

So this is one of my larger bear cases for Peloton.

So music licensing and gross margins, a treacherous tale.

Well, if you look at Peloton's income statement today and across recent quarters, so we're at sort of a relative point of maturity here about a third of the revenue that comes from subscription.

So not like the physical bike sales, but if you just look at the subscription revenue a third of that goes to cost of revenue.

And while we don't know for sure, it's very likely that the majority of this goes to music licensing.

So even though investors love a good subscription business, this is not 86 gross margin like SaaS is.

It's more like 66% gross margins.

So a little examination.

Why do we think that this mostly goes to music?

Well, in part, the variable cost for everything else should be pretty low.

I mean, maybe bandwidth is probably the next highest cost for streaming video.

I have some particular beef as a pedantic person with the video that they do stream.

I find it to be too low frame rate, too low frame rate to have some motion blur to be a little bit compressed.

But all that aside, it's still expensive to stream video.

Now, do you know, do they put content production cost in variable costs here, too?

I don't know if that is in the cost of revenue for the subscription.

I would guess not.

I would guess they would put that down in either GNA or... I don't know.

It might be in there.

I don't know.

I haven't dug in deep enough to know, but I don't think it's that expensive relative to the amount of subscription revenue they get.

We'll get into powers later and scale economies and all that, but my understanding is that the top peloton instructors make like 500k to a million.

Yeah, i think that's about right, and then obviously you've got all the production costs around that.

But like still, compared to you know, hundreds of millions of uh of subscription annual revenue, that's a drop in the.

So okay, let's assume that the largest part of this 33 of cost of revenue is to pay for music.

So why is the music so expensive?

Well, if you remember from our Taylor Swift episode, there's a bunch of different types of licenses.

And, unlike Spotify or the radio, Peloton actually requires multiple licenses for the particular way that they use the music.

So first, Peloton, I think, is technically, just like the radio, a live performance.

So live performance royalties must be paid out.

And if you are curious for how those are paid out, go listen to the Taylor Swift episode where we talk about the difference between the publishing rights holder and the performance master rights holder.

But they also need a sync license in addition to synchronize those songs with the video content.

If you're going to use a license in a commercial or a movie...

Exactly.

And just as a quick aside, an aside from an aside, the interesting bit about sync licenses is they require the approval both of the sort of songwriter, the person with the publishing right and the performing artist who owns, or whose label owns, the master right.

So there's a lot of people who can say no, I don't grant you a sync right, which is why, in this lawsuit that you're referencing david, when peloton did end up pulling a bunch of stuff off of uh, the service, which a lot of people were really upset about, it was weird because so you're like wait, but some of this artist's songs are on there and some rides with those artist songs got removed and that's because those songs had different songwriters behind them.

Yeah Ah, so many people with veto power.

What a Byzantine industry.

Crazy, right?

Okay, but back to sort of this like gross margin problem.

So, according to a piece from Tricordist, which is a music industry site, Peloton pays out 31 cents every time that you are on a ride and hear a song.

That number should actually sound pretty high to you, because that's meaningfully larger than what we talked about on the Taylor Swift episode per stream.

So let's take that 3.1 cents.

If you ride every day and people don't ride every day, but I think people ride about 20 days or they use the product about 20 times per month.

But let's say you ride every day and assume there's about 10 songs per ride.

And I went back through my recent rides and looked, that's about right.

That's $9 of your subscription revenue that is going straight to music.

So if you're on the bike subscription, that's like 23 of your subscription that you're paying to Peloton goes immediately to the labels, which kind of checks our math.

Above that, the biggest part of that you know one third of the cost of revenue is actually for music.

Now, of course, if you're on the digital-only subscription, that's really high, because that's only 13 a month.

If you're actually using that thing every day, I assume the royalty structure is similar.

It may be the case that Peloton is large enough that they've negotiated a specific revenue share somewhere between 15 25 30, something like that.

Uh, with the music labels rather than needing to pay out a fixed amount per song, because if it's a fixed amount per song then they could get underwater pretty quick on that digital only subscription.

God, the parallels to spotify are just like amazing with, like the two different tiers of customer experiences and like vastly different implications of that for their back-end costs.

A hundred percent.

I mean, it is.

OK, you're leading the horse to water.

I'm the horse.

Here's the water.

So because there are very real marginal costs in this business, just like Spotify.

At the end of the day, this actually does have the same incentives that a gym membership would have, like an old school gym membership, which is sign you up, keep you subscribed, but really no incentives for you to actually go to the gym all the time.

They kind of want you to do the minimum amount to stay subscribed, like stay engaged enough with us.

But don't cost us any money.

We want to minimize the amount that we have to pay the music labels on your behalf, which is interesting.

So I was thinking about this, prepping for the episode, and I slept on it.

When I woke up this morning, I kind of realized...

Because they're bragging about in all their earning stuff, increasing user engagement over time and having internal KPIs around.

We want people to use the service.

I sort of came to this conclusion that they have to have a pre-negotiated revenue split with the music labels rather than paying per stream, because Peloton could end up in a really tough position if their own incentives are for you to stay subscribed but not ride.

So I bet they did some kind of like blanket license type thing where you know 20 or 25 or whatever it is ends up of all subscription revenue, no matter what, ends up going to the labels.

Well, if they don't have that, they probably have a new CEO who could help make that happen.

Very much so.

If they don't, they should.

And now they probably can't.

Yes.

One last quick piece of math, just to underscore the gravity of this.

I ran the math on what it would cost Spotify to pay the labels for the same amount of music listening time, based on the data that we used in the Taylor Swift episode.

So 15 hours across a month.

So I was thinking the same as a 30-minute ride every day for a month.

And instead of the $9 that I estimate that Peloton has to pay...

Spotify is closer to like a buck 20.

Wow, that's massively different.

That sync right and the performance licenses, very expensive.

So you know Barry is definitely used to the Spotify world of we pay a pittance to.

You know the labels and the artists.

And in this world, because of the license structure, it's a meaningful part of COGS.

One way to look at it is the meaningful part of Cogs and sort of in the bear lens.

Another way to look at it is like artists should really embrace Peloton.

Yes, very much so.

What you got to wonder is that part of what's driving, like the Taylor Ride series and the Beyonce Ride series.

And Peloton is notoriously very collaborative with the most popular artists.

So September 2019.

They've settled this lawsuit.

They figured things out, at least with the sync licenses.

They go public.

The IPO happens.

S1 hits fiscal year 2019.

So fiscal year ends June 30th, as I've said.

So for the 12 months leading up to June 30, 2019, it did revenue of $915 million.

Wow.

For a five-year-old company, or a product that's been in market for five years, that is impressive.

That is up over 100% from $435 million the year before.

Of that 915 million, 181 million is subscription revenue, which is up from 80 million the year before, so growing even faster.

We already talked about the margins on the subscription revenue.

Interestingly...

The hardware revenue connected fitness products is the segment they call it, also about a 40 gross margin.

So this is the benefit of raising the price $1,000.

Right, right.

They actually make pretty good margins on selling the bike itself.

So I couldn't find this, mostly because I was scrambling for just the last day to put together everything we did learn.

If you have data on this, please come and share it with us.

Acquiredfm slash slack and we would love to talk about this.

I remember, around the time of their IPO, seeing some analysis that said that they basically were breakeven on the bike if you add in customer acquisition costs.

So the cost of manufacturing the bike and delivering it, and all that plus the cost to acquire, which was really expensive.

You know, they're in these malls, they're sending you... ton of social media ads.

They're really trying to convince you.

They're putting on Super Bowl commercials, which we'll get to.

They're putting on other commercials where people are in these multi-million dollar homes riding in fancy places.

It's expensive to convince people to do this new behavior.

And I think the plan at the time is like okay, just don't lose money acquiring a customer when we sell them a bike.

And as long as we're kind of breakeven on that, then we can make a lot of money on the subscriptions.

So I actually did do a little modeling on this.

Now, don't take this as gospel, because I'm mixing time periods here, and it's hard to know exactly.

So this is not like a sharp pencil.

This is back of the envelope modeling.

And these are pandemic numbers, so may not be applicable anymore.

But in the most recent full fiscal year, which ended June 30 2021, they spent 730 million on sales and marketing.

And they added about 1.4 million gross ads on subscribers.

So now I'm assuming that like all those are bikes, obviously not.

A lot of those are digital subscriptions, et cetera.

But let's just make it simple.

So CAC on that is $521 per gross subscriber added.

That is, to your point, a lot of money.

That is a lot.

That is a very, very high CAC, $521 per new subscriber.

Not in the B2B world, but it's almost unheard of in B2C.

Like I'm getting a consumer, like paying $500 for a consumer, like no one does this.

If you go out and put that in your pitch, deck around Silicon Valley, you're going to have to have a very high LTV.

Well, now at the 1895 price point for the bike, which is what it was until they started doing crazy stuff with their pricing, but they had lowered it from the 2245 to 1895.

At a 40% gross margin on that hardware, that's $758.

So they're more than making their money back.

Right.

They're making they're making a little maybe a hundred couple hundred bucks total on each bike.

Yep.

They're making they're making some amount of contribution margin on the bike.

But then you attach the subscription which you know, with the crazy low churn rates that they have, the implied lifetime dollars.

A month.

Is over 10 years.

66% gross margin.

Right.

Let's cap it at five years for a customer lifetime because 10 years is too crazy.

Let's assume that that's not going to happen.

At $40 a month, that's $2,340 in subscription revenue over five years.

Wow.

So...

This is a pretty dang good business.

Interestingly at, the IPO happens right after the whole WeWork debacle which we covered on this show with Dan Primack, also a big Peloton fan at the time.

That was that was fun. the IPO is, is not a good one.

Uh, prices around $8 billion, but then trades down 11% on opening to a $7.2 billion market cap.

So we're talking like seven X trailing 12 months revenue, but like this company is growing over a hundred percent a year.

So you know three X forward revenue with pretty good unit economics that we just discussed like interesting, uh Yeah, and this is in an era too, where you don't have a lot of busted IPOs.

So this is before COVID, but it was still pretty go-go times for these tech businesses.

A little disconcerting that it traded down from their IPO price.

Indeed, indeed.

And then they don't really help things shortly after the IPO and the holiday season 2019 rolls around.

Wait, wait, wait.

Before we get to the Peloton ad, can I clarify something?

Can you give me the numbers again on the cost to acquire a customer and their LTV?

Just because I want to hold that in my head as we continue through here.

Okay, so rough, rough numbers.

$500, $520 to acquire a customer.

And let's say they are breakeven to slightly profitable on that with the hardware.

And then $2,340 of lifetime revenue, assuming a five-year customer lifetime.

Okay, so $2,300 of LTV.

And is that contribution or is that... That's revenue.

So then two-thirds of that per your analysis is contribution.

Okay.

Okay, so we're looking at something in the neighborhood of like 1500 of contribution on the subscription, even if we cap it at five years.

So every single person they acquire, not only are they breakeven or probably a little profitable just by selling them a bike, but then they make another 1500 plus in pure profit by retaining them over time.

Yep.

So you would understand why this company and management and the board would be like we should advertise.

Yes, we should go and pull forward as many new customers as we can.

We should take out an infinite amount of debt.

Not that they did this, but we should raise an infinite amount of money so that we can spend on marketing so that we can go get as many people to buy this thing and get hooked on it. because oh my god what a business we have on our hands and thus we end up with the holiday tony 19 peloton wife commercial uh which kind of is a funny story i mean like you know it's uh does it end up being bad for peloton or is this just good marketing in the end i think it was good marketing i think it's good for everyone it ends up being good for that actress yep good for ryan reynolds Oh, my God.

The Aviation Gin thing that came out the next week is just genius.

We'll link to it, but people go Google Peloton Wife Aviation Gin and watch that commercial.

I also thought the Peloton Wife commercial thing was pretty overblown.

I mean, it feels like every year stuff gets more and more insane.

So this commercial at the time, I think, had a lot of people up in arms.

But you're like, this is not that scandalous commercial.

Yeah right, compared to everything that's happened since.

Also, it was probably great for peloton because i i didn't go back and watch it, but my recollection of it, put the controversy aside, is that the commercial itself was like, yeah fine, you know, uh like, but then they got so much hype out of it.

But this sets peloton's track record for uh, they can become a dominant trending topic in a pop culturey way, which every time they would come to dominate headlines after this.

It's not really good for them.

Other than the one which is like hey, now that the pandemic hit, Peloton has perfect product market fit.

But every single one other than that which we're about to talk about the shipping delays and the consumer.

What is it?

The treadmills.

The treadmill recall and the, yeah, like it basically was never good again.

Yep.

All right, listeners, it's time to talk about another one of our favorite companies, Statsig.

Since you last heard from us about Statsig, they have a very exciting update.

They raised their Series C, valuing them at $1.1 billion.

Yeah, huge milestone.

Congrats to the team.

Timing is interesting because the experimentation space is really heating up.

Yes.

So why do investors value stat seg at over a billion dollars?

It's because experimentation has become a critical part of the product stack for the world's best product teams.

Yep.

This trend started with Web 2.0 companies like Facebook and Netflix and Airbnb.

Those companies faced a problem.

How do you maintain a fast, decentralized product and engineering culture while also scaling up to thousands of employees?

Experimentation systems were a huge part of that answer.

These systems gave everyone at those companies access to a global set of product metrics, from page views to watch, time to performance.

And then every time a team released a new feature or product, they could measure the impact of that feature on those metrics.

So Facebook could set a company-wide goal like increasing time in app and let individual teams go and figure out how to achieve it.

Multiply this across thousands of engineers and PMs, and boom, you get exponential growth.

It's no wonder that experimentation is now seen as essential infrastructure.

Yep.

Today's best product teams like Notion OpenAI, Rippling and Figma are equally reliant on experimentation.

But instead of building it in-house, they just use Statsig.

And they don't just use Statsig for experimentation.

Over the last few years, Statsig has added all the tools that fast product teams need, like feature flags, product analytics, session replays and more.

So if you would like to help your team's engineers and PMs figure out how to build faster and make smarter decisions, go to statsigcom slash acquired or click the link in the show notes.

They have a super generous free tier, a 50000 startup program and affordable enterprise contracts for large companies.

Just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

All right.

So David, tell everyone why I was the most fortunate person in the world to, in January 2020, have just so happened to have bought a Peloton at that moment in history.

I didn't realize you bought it before the pandemic.

I bought that and my car in January of 2020, totally randomly and by happenstance, which both ended up being unbelievable assets to have.

I actually bought a, uh, Olympic weight set off Craigslist right at the same time.

So not as, not as high value as you, but like stuff that like immediately became unavailable.

I think it'd be like 180 bucks maybe for like a full Olympic weight weight set.

Which now is like a thousand dollars.

Yeah.

So great.

So the pandemic hits.

You know, like you said, if Peloton had very good product market fit with a certain narrow customer segment before the pandemic was great business, the pandemic made it have.

Instant product market fit with many, many more segments.

They add roughly a million subscribers in the next year.

Revenue in the fiscal year ended June 30th, 2020 is 1.8 billion.

In the fiscal year ended June 30th, 2021 is $4 billion.

The stock trades up as we've talked about to a peak of over $150 billion. per share at a 49 i believe billion dollar market cap people think this is going to the moon and like rightly so i mean it's amazing product uh if you know fitness has now become fully digital they are the leader in the category uh you know so much so much to love here there's a zillion copycats not just in the like you know nordic track and target making black and red bikes and making up peloton like sounding names for them and There's like Echelon out there.

It's crazy.

But also pioneering this category of connected fitness which says sure, Peloton is going to do a tread and a bike, but they're not going to do a mirror and a band-based weight set and a yoga thing.

There's all these brands that are saying like yeah, Peloton does a little bit of that, but that's not their core competency and they're never going to take it seriously.

So there really is this super real category of connected fitness that Peloton totally pioneered.

I'm curious your thoughts.

Connected fitness, both within the Peloton suite of products and competitors.

Is it a broad thing or is this something that just works really, really well for spin classes?

Great question.

I've done a bunch of the Peloton strength stuff.

I think that works well.

And I think that the Peloton strength classes definitely appeal to a crowd who is not going to buy an Olympic weight set in their garage or is not going to go to a gym.

I know people with the mirror who are very happy with that.

I think it's pretty broad.

I think the bike is the first and best instantiation of it.

Interestingly, Foley and I think he's right on this, I think this isn't one of his grandiose statements that ends up not being true thinks that the tread market is like 3x what the bike market is, because running is a much more.

Treadmills are a bigger thing, I think, than stationary bikes.

Well, they also sell the treadmill for a lot more money.

That's true, too.

It's interesting, right?

It's different, though.

I'm sort of halfway in between on this.

I agree with you.

Squatting and bench pressing is less appealing to me.

I think the strength stuff is pretty good, but I can't imagine buying a treadmill or using a connected fitness for running.

It's so true.

We're lucky we live on the West Coast.

We can run outside year round.

There's plenty of places where that's not possible.

Yeah.

I mean it says a lot that ultimately, all connected fitness is a digital facsimile of a real-world experience.

And there was a very, very popular real-world experience of spin classes.

And it's interesting that that behavior never really existed in the real world for running.

I mean, there's like Barry's Boot Camp, but...

That is not a sweeping.

Well, part of it is like what a third of it is, or half of it is, but there's not like a sweeping international movement, the way that there was with spin, where it's running to an instructor.

Yep.

So maybe to super simplify your question, my answer to your question it's anything that's instructor-led, that is a big market on the offline world can be an instructor-led large market in connected fitness.

I agree with that.

Yeah.

I'm just not sure that running.

Maybe there will be some innovation at some point, that is, an instructor-led running class.

But as a runner, I don't really want an instructor.

The joy of running to me is to be outside in beautiful places and just kind of go.

And you have a bias there.

I'm the exact same type of runner, but you know, the hardcore cyclists would say the same thing they're like a spin class, wouldn't?

But the beauty of cycling is that you know right right, right.

And then the beauty of spin class is like these are two different products.

Yes anyway, september of 2020.

This is where i think things start to get a little wonky with peloton.

They introduced the bike plus in september of 2020.

And we should say by September of 2020, it's basically impossible to get one of these, the Peloton bikes, at all.

There's like a four month backlog.

Pandemic hits.

And unless you're getting one in the first week or two, you're out months before you can get one, because Peloton doesn't make any of their own bikes.

They certainly don't make any in the US.

So we're at the whim of international shipping, supply chain partners.

They really haven't ramped any in-house manufacturing capability.

And so good luck.

Right.

Which makes all of this even a little more puzzling.

You would think, a reaction that would be to raise prices, like they certainly they have in total pricing power.

Now to their philosophy.

And like we've been talking about, they want as many people to access Peloton as possible.

Blah, blah, blah.

OK, great.

But so they introduced the bike plus they price it at twenty four ninety five.

The original bike, remember, had been twenty two forty five.

And David, you bought a Bike Plus, so you know the differences of this product firsthand.

So they lower the price of the original bike to $1895.

Why would you lower the price of this right now?

There's insane demand for it.

And why would you introduce the Bike Plus at only 2495 when you're selling treadmills for 34000 plus?

Yeah.

Clearly there's like appetite for your core segment to buy expensive products here.

And they're not that price sensitive.

So the bike plus, yeah.

After, when I decided to buy a Peloton, I was I don't know if my experience is universal, but I was like you know what.

I'm really going to invest in this.

This is awesome.

I want the best.

I'm going to buy a bike plus.

And I didn't even really think about pricing or how much it was relative to the bike, because it arrived and i gotta say like this is only my experience it was a super crappy product.

The bike plus yeah, i thought it was actually a worse product than the bike and cost more.

And many of the like key features were irrelevant, like the auto follow feature, like it'll auto change the resistance, the instructor well, I never actually want my resistance, exactly what the instructor has.

So that was actually like a negative for me, you know, not to mention that there's like a bigger screen, but it's the same resolution.

So it's actually a lower DPI on the screen which, as someone who already has beef with the video quality, would drive me up a wall.

I was going to get to that last, but yeah, a few other things.

My garage is a little bit sloped, and the bike plus only has four feet.

The front only has two feet and it was impossible for me to align it, whereas the regular bike has three feet in front and is way easier to stabilize.

It's just a whole bunch of really weird little things like that.

The main gimmicky feature is you can flip the screen out sideways so you can do these boot camp rides where you're on the floor for part of it, you're on the bike for part of it.

Did you ever try that?

Yeah.

A, I don't use that that much.

Usually when I'm doing strength, I'm doing strength.

And when I'm doing the bike, I'm cycling.

But B there's like a 40 little bracket you can buy.

That I did for the original bike that you can install pretty easily to then have the screen swivel.

And it's like wait, why would I pay 1000 more for that anyway?

But yeah, what you said about the screen, that was the.

That was the dagger for me.

I was like this is a worse experience because they have a higher, a bigger screen but they're using the same 1080p crappy video on it and it looks way worse.

It's just like it just didn't make any sense to me, so i returned the bike plus.

So now let's think about me as a customer for peloton.

By the way, I love that in these episodes where we have personal experience.

Half the Airbnb episode was my experience as a host, and now here's David's Peloton buying experience.

People are probably like, this is irrelevant.

But no, I think this is illustrative of some of the problems with Peloton.

The product was not quite right.

The pricing was weird that they did with the product suite here.

So they roll a truck to do the delivery for me as a customer for the bike plus.

Which is crazy expensive.

Crazy expensive, right?

But they're selling this.

They own all their own distribution and they're driving around neighborhoods all over America.

Yep.

They roll a truck in old cable parlance of a truck roll for a customer service.

They install the bike plus for me. the shoes that come with it, the cleats didn't fit.

So they had to send me new cleats.

So all right, that's another.

You know shipping costs, customer service, et cetera.

A customer service call.

Uh, I used the bike plus for a little, and I'm like, this is not that good.

I return it because they have a 30-day return policy.

They roll a truck.

They pick it up.

I bought the original bike, which by that point in time, the price had dropped to $14.95.

So I had spent $24.95.

They've rolled a truck twice already.

Oof.

Now I just spent $1,000 less.

I got the bike.

They rolled a truck.

There were some problems with the pedal.

They rolled a truck to do another customer service for me.

So four truck rolls, a purchase, a return, a restocking, mailing me new cleats.

Wow, they're probably not profitable on you until like maybe year three as a subscriber.

Absolutely.

Like it's brutal.

And I can't imagine that my experience is wholly unique here.

I wonder.

Yeah, we only had the person come out once and it all thankfully worked really well.

So I'm a very happy customer.

But yeah, to your point, like how long do they have to retain me to even break even on me now?

Right, right.

I think a lot of this could have been avoided with some different product decisions and some different pricing decisions.

There's a trend that they need to follow over the entire lifetime of their business, which is dropping the price point so they can keep attracting that next concentric circle out from the core affluent customer.

If they're actually interested in continuing to grow the business, they need to do that.

But even though that's true over the long period of time, this probably wasn't the right time in history to do that.

Given what happened with the pandemic and with demand, and let's not talk about supply chain and inventory and stuff yet, because I think that made their business really not resilient, all the things that they did there.

But they probably should have easy to say in hindsight but not shipped the bike plus and not dropped prices yet, even though they know they need to do both of those things in the longer term.

Yeah, the Bike Plus was a product that needed more work before shipping.

And then in terms of cannibalization of their existing customer base, and I think they really hurt themselves a lot on some of the aspirational aspects of the Peloton brand around this.

Also simple things like...

The bikes that the instructors use in the classes are the original bikes.

If they really want to push the bike, like, why don't they use the pluses?

Totally.

I thought that was so weird.

Like, I don't think that hurts anything.

And that's just great merchandising for higher margin products.

I wonder if there's custom software that's written for instructor bikes that they didn't want to invest in porting to the new bike pluses.

That could be.

Anyway, there's just a bunch of puzzling decisions here.

And perhaps the most puzzling, is in December 2020, they announced that they're buying Precor for 420 million in cash.

In cash.

And you and I both went and looked this up because we were like I remember the 420 million Precor acquisition, which is a Washington-based company, by the way.

That's right.

And... Windmill, right?

Yep.

And I was hoping they'd use some stock to pay for it, given their stock was trading ludicrously high at the time.

Maybe they want to take this fully in-house.

A secondary benefit that comes with it is pre-core is really really good at selling in commercial distribution channels.

So Peloton sort of then can inherit all those relationships with all the hotels to get more, more Pelotons in there and eventually maybe merge these two product lines.

But for now they're running it as a totally separate independent business unit and um starting to do some work leveraging pre-course uh manufacturing to hopefully start manufacturing some, some Peloton bikes.

Right.

That feels like kind of a I want to say pipe dream.

Either a pipe dream or a very, very far out investment.

The idea that you would retool pre-course manufacturing to manufacture bikes, the commercial relationships that that makes a little more sense to me.

But so it was a little puzzling at the time.

Then they announce in spring of 2021 that they are going to build the Peloton Output Park to insource their own manufacturing in Ohio.

So this is now both of my homes they're trying to manufacture in.

That's right.

We'll come back to that in a bit.

But that's another $400 million that they announced they're breaking ground on.

Yep.

Again, cash outlays.

And then in the spring of 2021, there's the treadmill recall and some of the tragic accidents around with the treadmill.

The company doesn't handle that super well.

At first, they sort of say, oh, people aren't using it right.

It's like, well, kids are dying and getting hurt here.

That doesn't matter.

Stock drops 15% around that.

They ask you a mea culpa and say, you know what, we are going to play ball with the investigation.

We feel super bad that we mishandled this originally.

And then November of 2021, last fall, they miss earnings.

They cut their outlook and the stock gets. hammered down 32% in one day with earnings announcement.

They have some more holiday season media commercial.

This is also probably good with the new Sex and the City where Mr. Big dies on a Peloton.

No, because that tanked their stock price and it never recovered.

It did.

Although I know that to me feels like the wrong reason to sell the stock.

I mean, yeah, but...

It's indicative of the... I think when something like that happens...

So someone died on Sex and the City and was on a Peloton and Peloton stock dropped.

And you might say, that's so stupid.

But I think what to read into that is people are on such uneasy footing about the future prospects of this company that merely imagining that something like that could happen is enough to spook investors.

And that says a lot about that says way more than the sex in the city episode.

Yes.

So then the other shoe drops, the other cycling cleat drops.

On January 20th, news comes out that supposedly Peloton is completely stopping production of new hardware, as they have an inventory glut that they can't sell.

Demand has completely dried up.

It all got pulled forward through the pandemic and, And this is bad news.

There's a $1.3 billion worth of inventory that they're sitting on now.

Yeah.

So we went from literally they can't make this stuff fast enough.

They're hiring delivery teams all across the country and around the world, delivering bikes into people's homes, picking them up, servicing them, bringing them back to now.

They can't sell these things.

There's a lot of things to applaud the management team about and John Foley and the doggedness and the entrepreneurism and the pure invention of a movement and recognizing talent and hiring the right instructors and finding ways to align incentives and building this like so much.

The one that is really, really damning is all the quotes that Foley and other folks gave along the way saying sure, this pulled forward demand, but we think it will only ever be more.

We think we will only ever continue to sell more and more of this stuff.

Demand is just going to keep growing.

And they were just completely wrong, like completely wrong.

The incredible slowdown, the really really scary slowdown that has happened for them is to the point where they only grew 9 in Q4 and then 5 in revenue in Q1.

And this company just believed that there was way, way, way more demand out there.

And sure the pandemic accelerated us, but we're not going to have to sort of make up for everything that was pulled forward.

It's just going to continue to be high demand from here.

And they were just flat out wrong.

Totally flat out wrong.

And we'll wrap up the few last points to bring us to literally today, present day.

But one of the things when they release earnings yesterday is they cut guidance.

Guidance had been for full fiscal year revenue of four to four and a half billion.

They cut it down to 37 to 38, which is actually going to be down.

Like revenue is going to be down sequentially year on year, this year versus last year.

Like that is not.

That is not good.

That is not good for a growth company.

No, and you look at the, the level of certainty that they had that it was that they just needed to keep expanding to service all this demand.

Not only did they plunk over 800 million dollars into manufacturing capacity between pre-core, which has its own business so it's justifiable um, assuming they paid a reasonable price for it And, of course, the Ohio factory.

But you look at their employees.

I mean, they were growing employees pretty quickly from 2015, 16 to 2020.

But when you look at as of January 2021, they had 4,000 employees.

That ballooned over the next year to about 9,000 before these recent layoffs.

Now, this is a very complex business, but like 9,000 employees.

And that's just corporate, right?

Yeah.

No, that's everyone.

Oh, that's everyone.

Okay.

Yeah.

And the layoffs, of course, were 2800 people across the whole business and, I think, about 20 of the corporate staff.

But they were really, really investing and very certain this demand was there.

Yep.

So, after that news, on January 20th, a couple of weeks later, an activist investor called Blackwell's Capital comes out and announces that they've accumulated a 5 stake in Peloton, the share price and market cap of which, by the way, have dropped below the IPO price which, as we chronicled, was not a great IPO in and of itself.

And they publish a deck calling for Foley to resign and for the company to initiate a strategic sale process.

And that brings us to yesterday, February 8th, 2022, where they announce earnings.

They're bad.

They lower guidance significantly.

They pull the plug on Peloton Output Park.

They cancel the plans to build the manufacturing facility in Ohio.

They lay off 2,800 people.

And Barry McCarthy is riding in as the new CEO.

And the way they sort of message this is that John Foley is stepping down as CEO, which is the, Or at least that's what people hear.

That's what people hear.

And it's somewhat to appease these activist investors.

But let's zoom in on what mechanically is actually happening here.

So John Foley becomes the executive chairman.

Now what an executive chairman is as compared to a non-executive chairman.

Is they're still the chairman of the board or the chairperson of the board?

They no longer have day-to-day responsibility running the company.

However, I believe they still are a compensated employee.

They still draw a salary.

They're still like an employee of the company in addition to being just a board member.

So they share both this sort of like director level and... pseudo operational.

It's more like they're working with the current CEO to sort of set strategy with them.

And so, while they're not running the day to day, they are still the senior, most person who is an employee of the company.

I don't think it would be correct to say that John Foley is currently Barry McCarthy's boss, but it totally is fair to say that John Foley is on the board, is the chairman of the board.

The board hires and fires the CEO.

And here's the real kicker on this whole thing.

As many of you will know, we've been on a heck of a run over the last 20 years of having dual-class structures put in place for founder-led companies.

And here's a quote from Matt Levine at Bloomberg.

Peloton has a dual class structure in which the founders and some insiders have stock with 20 votes per share, and Foley has a lot of it.

According to Peloton's proxy statement, he controls 396, so right around 40 of the voting power of Peloton's stock, and his co-founders own another 18.

So there you go.

That's over 50% of the voting power of the company right there.

Right.

Foley can't do it alone, but certainly both of his other co-founders basically can make a unilateral decision.

So the message Peloton wants Blackwell's and other upset shareholders to hear is John Foley has sort of moved on, stepped down as CEO and we've brought in Barry McCarthy.

In practice, dude still holds the cards.

It's more complicated.

Now, all that is true.

At the same time, I don't think Barry would take this job if he didn't feel like he had full autonomy.

Totally agree.

And the memo that he writes to staff, which we've already read some from some of it and I want to read a bit more because it's amazing.

It's like barry is like who wouldn't want to work for a great leader?

Yeah oh, what a leader.

So he writes i know today's restructuring news has been difficult.

There's no sugar coating it.

It's a bitter pill and in my experience this thing has a long half-life.

But the hard truth is either revenue had to grow faster or spending had to shrink.

The math simply didn't work otherwise and the status quo was unsustainable.

One of my core management principles is about getting real.

We have to be willing to confront the world as it is, not as we want it to be, if we're going to be successful.

We have to be honest with ourselves and with each other in order to make that happen, even when the truth is uncomfortable or inconvenient to deal with.

And then Ben, I think you read the great part about the comeback story after that.

You know, and then he closes it.

He says when he closes the memo.

He says in the months ahead, you can expect to hear from me about our strategy and the choices we're planning to make to drive our success.

For the avoidance of doubt.

We are in the business of driving growth.

I just like full stop.

That is what we are here to do.

And that will require us to take risks, to be willing to fail quickly, to learn quickly, to adapt and evolve quickly, rinse and repeat.

I promise the journey won't be dull.

I look forward to working with you, Barry.

Of course, this is after he opens by talking about how much he loves writing with Matt Wilpers.

It is great that he opens the whole memo.

Yes, the whole memo is like kicked off with, you know, rather than like, hi, I'm your new CEO.

It's boy, do I love writing with Dennis Morton and Matt Wilpers.

And I think he says like who don't yet know me from Adam, which is pretty funny thinking about the fact that they're reading this email.

Well, Barry has no social media presence.

He's basically not on the internet.

You got to wonder, has he met any of the instructors yet too?

Probably not.

Probably not before yesterday at the earliest.

It's wild.

I wonder what the instructors think of all this.

Because they're like, they've built such brands.

I mean the Instagram following and the Twitter following of the top instructors is like they have immense power.

Emma Lovewell and Allie Lott.

I mean, they're getting up close to a million followers.

Robin Arzon, Alex Toussaint.

And they've all parlayed this into other things too.

Like Allie is the in-arena host for the Brooklyn Nets, or at least was last year.

And everyone's got noon deals or Under Armour deals.

Even though they're making 500 to a million from Peloton in salary or whatever their contract is, I bet they're making a lot more from their other engagements.

Oh yeah.

They're like professional athletes.

Like the, the earning power from endorsement and other deals is way higher.

All right.

So there we are on history.

We thought this would be short, with the emergency pod on history and facts, but never underestimate acquired.

We're also incapable of just going on air unprepared.

So of course, you and I, while we only had a day to do this, we kind of put together a full.

There are so many more deep cuts in the history that we didn't go into.

Like John and his friend prototyping the experience on a Disney cruise.

Did you read about that?

No, I didn't get that.

All right.

So I'll pull that one out, even though we skipped over it.

Uh.

So John Pleasance uh, who got a big job at Disney, uh got convinced fully to come on a Disney cruise with him.

And so they're on this Disney cruise and fully rolls out a couple of spin bikes and stood there like for the first, like 10 minutes of the ride, like coaching John Pleasance.

Yeah.

Like, and being like, okay, imagine there's a screen here and like, you know, the really given him.

And then Pleasance becomes one of the first angel investors in that 400 K round, right?

So it's like a pretty cool there's.

There's so much crazy lore in the building of Peloton um, which I think we would have done if we gave this the three hour treatment, but let's, let's go into our uh, our narratives.

So like what's, what, what is the media narrative right now for the bull case and the bear case?

Well, on the bull, there's just an insane level of customer love for this company.

I mean, the NPS is around 90.

You're wearing a Peloton hat as we do this.

I'm wearing a Peloton hat because I referred you and they sent me 100 of free credit to buy gear for myself which I proudly wear around.

And I hope Peloton stays a prestige brand because I've definitely bought a decent amount of the merch.

Yeah.

Even if they sell, I have to imagine this will stay a prestige brand for a reasonable amount of time.

It's funny how I feel a little bit weird wearing my SoulCycle shirt and stuff now, because I just haven't been in two years.

But the Peloton stuff, maybe it says a lot about me, but...

Happy to wear it.

So a huge component of the bulk case is, oh my God, we've built this brand that people love.

They love the product.

They love the experience.

David, after we record I will probably go hop on for a ride, because we're recording early in the morning and I missed my morning ride this morning.

Another huge component is say what you want about growth right now, but how could they possibly be worth less than they were worth before COVID?

They grew membership from 700,000 to nearly 3 million.

And it's not like they're just selling bikes here.

This isn't one time.

They just added all that subscription revenue with an incredibly low churn rate and high NPS.

Yep, totally agree.

They invented the connected fitness category, and they're still the largest player in it.

We'll talk about this on power, but there are network effects from your friends having Peloton.

So the fact that they grew all these subscribers you know there is some amount of lock in that comes from that.

The biggest thing we talked about is this insanely low churn rate and, to date, the fact that they selected for customers that aren't going to churn.

And that's slowly shifting, because that's the other side of the sword of selling a product that is cheaper than it used to be is that you're going to have customers that are more sensitive to price all around and so are going to churn more often than your initial cohort.

Even still the churn has gone up.

But I think it's gone from like I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but it was at like 06 per month to like 08 per month.

So it's still good.

Totally.

I do want to call out and this is sort of between a bull and a bear case, but it's just an interesting stat to know.

So when Affirm went public there was some information in their S1 where at the time Peloton was the largest customer, the largest source of revenue to Affirm.

Now Affirm has grown a lot and diversified, but I took a firm up on their offer and Peloton up on their offer to finance my bike over the course of a few years rather than pay for it in cash outright because it was a 0 deal.

Someone was basically saying do you want to keep investing your money and you can pay us once a month over the course of two years and generate some, Some money?

Well, you know you keep the float and I was like sure I'll do that deal.

That sounds.

I know how the insurance business works all day.

I will do that deal and it's funny how much I've thought about this for how little the actual dollars are that that is like marginal for me to have done this versus paying cash.

But I did and That's the most Ben Gilbert thing that is possible.

I love it.

Well, Peloton and Affirm did a back-end deal where Peloton said, if you agree Affirm, to do 0 financing, we will pay you an amount in order to make it worth your while.

And so you tell us what that amount is.

At the time of IPO of Affirm's IPO, 28 of all of the revenue in the previous year leading up to the IPO was from the Peloton deal.

Wow.

If I'm doing the math right, based on what their revenue numbers were at the time, that is 150 million a year that Peloton was paying to a firm to offer this 0 financing thing.

So that gives you a sense of how much...

Peloton knows and knew even then oh my God, we need to expand down market because we are saturating our wonderfully price insensitive core customer base, or initial customer base.

Wow, that's...

That's huge.

We're about to release a great LP show episode with Christina Malas-Kiriazzi, who just joined Bain Capital Ventures.

She's been a longtime friend of mine, but was an early employee at a firm.

We talk with her about the whole buy now, pay later space.

One of the key value props to merchants is this enables sales that wouldn't happen otherwise.

But Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

But like, I think that's just you're right.

This is between a bull and a bear.

But trending into the bear category here, like the focus on their core customer, is really like things have gotten so wonky in the past year plus.

Well, the bare case to make out of that is, when you look at their demand recently, the fact that they only grew 9 in Q4 and 5 in Q1, even though they have this Affirm deal out there, even though they're dropping the prices on their bikes.

That's the scary thing is that their attempts to make this more interesting at more price points to a much broader swath of people is not really working.

So I think, unless you have more, I think the last bull case which I think really is a valid bull case is like Hey, you know I don't like to put faith in single people uh, in general, but like, I do think there is a lot of like fundamental like to my mind.

That is not a controversial statement at all.

There have 100% been bad product and marketing.

Well, and bad strategy, bad financial decisions, bad forecasting.

You got to think that Barry can make a huge difference in fixing a lot of these issues.

Yes, for sure.

I mean, Barry's not going to be the product person by any means, but that's why Foley's there.

That's why all the great people that they brought on are there.

And hopefully...

Barry can provide the right sort of it's almost like the check and balance to make sure that Peloton can do its thing of creating products and brand and experiences that people love without screwing themselves over financially.

Yep.

And the market, the market liked the deuce.

Peloton was up 25% yesterday.

Yeah.

It's kind of a bear case to bring in a CFO, a career CFO as a CEO.

That is a strong admission of how in trouble a company is.

But I suppose trading down where it is, that makes it a bull case to want to invest if you feel like that person can sort of turn it around.

Yep.

It's definitely not giving Barry enough credit to call him a career CFO, especially given his divisional responsibility in building the ads business at Spotify.

But you know what?

The right comp might be to Apple when they transition.

I mean, this was a much different high-flying company at the time of transition.

But transitioning from a product founder you know product person who was the founder of the company as ceo to an operational financial supply chain, contractual legal person, uh and, and you know, maybe barry can be the tim cook of peloton.

Yeah, that's actually a great analogy.

Um, I certainly think he's capable.

And I think the business is capable.

It probably will never be an Apple, right?

But I think it's capable of performing better than it is now.

Okay, more bear narratives.

So we talked about the slowing growth.

We talked about the fact that they revised down not only...

The revenue targets, but also the subscriber targets.

They're only predicting they're going to be at around 3 million at the end of the year rather than 35.

They have piled up 13 billion worth of bikes and treadmills and it's not good to hold it on the books.

Another interesting narrative that I haven't seen as much around Peloton specifically, but seems to be a fairly widely held belief is that in the last 10 plus years there has not been a breakout consumer hardware piece of technology that survives as a standalone company.

And you look back at...

Fitbit and GoPro and Jambox.

I even want to call out, this one's going to be a serious callback, but Flip Video.

Some of these companies that kind of invented a new category and they built real, they imbued it with meaning and they pioneered it on technology, that was hardware, that was just now available.

But That investment doesn't pay itself back.

Lots of cheap facsimiles come in and they can't defend the castle.

And you look at Jambox.

They made a 300 Bluetooth speaker and now you can get 20 Bluetooth speakers that are reasonable.

And Jambox, of course, went out of business.

Flip Video sold to Cisco in a very strange M&A.

GoPro, still an independent company, but certainly not the high flyer it was when it first IPO'd.

Fitbit couldn't really survive Apple coming into their market and ultimately landed at Google.

I think there's probably a similar story around Nest.

Again, a little bit weird and some bungled M&A.

But I'm trying to think of what...

I suppose Sonos might be the only example of a recent consumer hardware company that has been successful and with Sonos successful kind of in quotes as a standalone public business.

I thought about bringing this up earlier in the episode and I decided not to because I decided it was unfair to Peloton.

I still think it's unfair, but it's an interesting point of comparison.

The only very strong counterpoint I can think of is Tesla.

I thought you were going to go there.

Yeah.

And lots of different dynamics there.

But you know, if you just look at what Tesla has done with in many ways, a very resonant strategy, a similar, you know, harmonizing strategy with Peloton, of like, start with the high, you know the the Elon master plan.

Right.

And then how they've adapted that over the past several years.

You know, it was not that long after Peloton was started that the model S came out and like what is Tesla done with their brand strategy and their pricing and their marketing and their position within the market and their product development and their software development?

And you know, gosh Model S to Model X like double down on the high-end brand.

And you know, and then the Model 3, which was affordable, but it was like it was still it's still aspirational right.

Like you're competing with BMW now.

You're not going all the way down to like Toyota.

You know, the autopilot launch, like just the Tesla, has executed incredibly well and incredibly strategically through Again different but resonant market dynamics.

Well, they've also been able to manipulate the capital markets to raise a ton of capital on extremely favorable terms.

I'm using manipulate with a lowercase m not accusing them of doing something that has legal implications.

And to that point, they had their near-death moments, too.

Totally.

But Peloton has been exactly the opposite at manipulating financial markets for their own favor.

I mean, they had a massive stock run up and then did a $420 million all-cash deal.

And now, more recently, they've raised more money after its... I don't know.

So there's another bear case which is being floated by our good friends, the activist investors, which is hey, everyone did.

You know, john foley sold 96 million dollars of peloton stock in 2021, when the price was really high, and he was talking about what a strong future the company still had in front of it.

And their point in doing that is both to accuse him of insidery things uh, doing things that are against sort of company policy but they're also trying to drive home the point that the incentives are now misaligned because he's taken a lot off the table.

He's now a very wealthy person in cash.

That doesn't hold a lot of water to me though, because his current remaining stock, even at the closing price on Monday, was 500 million.

So I don't care if you have $96 million.

The potential of turning that $500 million into $1, $2, $3 billion, that's motivating.

So come on.

And also like, it's hard to, you know, look, he, uh, he started Peloton in late 2011, early 2012.

It's been a long journey, you know, and he talks about on the, how I built this episode, you know, it's not like, even though he had done well in his career, like it was, he didn't have any big wins, you know, he wasn't fabulously wealthy before starting, um, uh, you know, before starting, he wasn't a ramen founder, but he wasn't, you know, he didn't have $96 million.

Let's put it that way.

So I can't begrudge him that.

Despite being of the Harvard Business School network and having worked at IAC and been close with a lot of CEOs and executives.

That really only manifested in him being able to raise a couple hundred thousand dollars, despite the fact that he runs in pretty wealthy circles and still couldn't convince any institutions to come in.

So it was like, you know, he had good jobs, but he had a family to support.

And he knew a lot of wealthy people, but that actually didn't really accrue to him successfully capitalizing the business for a long time.

Look, sometimes activists have good points and they're good points to be made against Peloton here.

And I think we've been making them.

But like they're also just so whiny and like the like the incentives are so misaligned.

And of course they want to never be happy because they want to keep buying more to then, you know, sell anyway.

OK, power.

Uh, branding.

Yes.

I mean other stuff too, but like did I pay 2000, 2300 for a bike because it was Peloton bike that otherwise I would have paid maximum I don't know 1000 for?

Yes.

Yes, I did.

It's interesting, right?

Yes.

Definite brand power.

Yes, that is correct.

But I do think I did a lot of research and I seriously consider doing a hack a Peloton.

I kind of enjoy doing stuff like that.

You know um, and to get the same quality of bike.

You really yes, you can do it cheaper with a hack, a Peloton, but not that much cheaper.

Like they um uh, it really is like it's a very high quality bike relative to the price.

So but yes, agree on brand um, i definitely, to me one that stands out and i think one that attracted uh barry, is scale economies here.

Like you know, the amount that peloton can invest, even with the music uh, variable cost overhang, but the amount that they can invest in content and in the best instructors, i think which is where this plays out the most relative to a SoulCycle, to a Flywheel, to anything else.

And then even relative to other connected fitness companies, because Peloton has the largest member base.

Just like with Netflix, they can invest in more great content because they have more resources from more subscribers.

And then that's a virtuous Flywheel.

Totally, totally agree.

And it says I mean the proof's in the pudding that, like Emma Lovewell and others, used to be SoulCycle instructors.

Yep.

I think Alex Toussaint started with Flywheel, I believe.

I can see that.

Yeah, it just makes total sense that Peloton would say like we can make this much more interesting for you, both in terms of fame dollars, career advancement, because your rides are going to be 5000 people instead of 40.

And duh, you're going to get the best instructors and content.

Which does that make?

Do the contracts?

I don't know what the contracts look like, but would that make the instructors and all the content that they've produced a cornered resource?

Yeah.

At least my perception is that is the best on-demand content I can get for working out.

Yep.

Certainly the library of content.

And, you know, it's interesting.

I'm curious what your feeling is on this from a user perspective.

Yeah.

It is valuable to me that my favorite instructors mostly just Alex, he's so awesome are constantly adding new content and stuff like the Ride to Greatness.

We'll get into that more later.

That's extremely valuable to me.

If he stopped adding new content, I would seriously consider churning.

But the year's worth of library, I do go back and do old library content.

And that's quite valuable to me too.

And so even if he switched to another platform, then yeah, it would take a long time to build up.

I've got a few 20-minute rides that he did years ago that are really high quality for me.

By the way, there is someone who switched to another platform or at least left.

Their name's escaping me.

I looked into this a couple of years ago.

And I think Peloton pulled all their content down, which was an interesting move, because it's basically saying we don't want to continue to build your brand for free to compete against us, which I found fascinating.

Because I bet that's totally case by case how they would think about whether they should leave it up or not.

And that's a big stick for the instructors too.

Like if you leave, then all of your library of work goes away.

Right.

I would kill build, look at the, the, all those contracts and understand how all that works.

Totally.

Okay.

I think those are the big ones.

Those are the big ones.

So few interesting little.

What would have happened otherwise?

To go to a old, acquired standby section.

Um, Uh, so what if they actually had pursued a deal with SoulCycle?

And I'm going to use Soul over Flywheel because I think, even though Soul wasn't given him the time of day at the moment, that's the more interesting one.

Uh, SoulCycle has not had a very good last couple of years, and first there was the trump fundraiser and then there was the like failed go public of the soul cycled equinox fitness conglomerate.

And then i think i mean, i i'm not a doctor, so this is the we're an epidemiologist, but this is not investment advice and also not health care advice.

The number one place to go and get COVID would be a box, an unventilated box of 50 people breathing as hard as they possibly can for 45 minutes in a room.

But they have candles in there.

That helps.

I was trying to think like where is the single last place on Earth that I want to be during the pandemic?

And it's at a SoulCycle studio, even though I used to do that a lot before I got my Peloton.

And frankly, probably never will again.

I can't imagine going back to that behavior, for even for non-covid diseases, it's like just yeah, if you want to stay healthy, i would only consider it in, like you and i when, when we would get together, we oh yeah, it was really fun to do it with friends.

I would maybe consider that again in the future, but definitely not on a you know yeah, day-to-day basis.

So obviously, SoulCycle came out with a Peloton competitor after Peloton did very well.

And it wasn't fully SoulCycle.

It was part SoulCycle, part Equinox parent company.

I have to imagine that thing was a total flop.

Yeah.

What would have happened if you had this sort of like JV between Peloton and SoulCycle, five years in, in a strong position, six years in, when COVID hit?

It's interesting.

I want to say I don't think the JV would have worked nearly as well as Peloton did as a standalone full stack entity.

Putting cameras in, building a little SoulCycle studio.

There would have been too many.

I think back to power.

There's an element of counter-positioning in the early days of Peloton.

There would have been too many incentives and resources within a SoulCycle or a Flywheel.

You would have to really cannibalize a lot of the core in-person operations.

Take your best instructors and make them dedicated to the online offering.

There would have been some weird dynamics there.

Every class kind of prints money.

So if you're running one of those local studios you're like well, Right now you could just record that and put it on this JV with Peloton.

But I think that would be lower quality content than what a full Oh the Peloton rides are so produced.

In doing this, I was looking at videos about their control room and the number of cameras that they have set up.

And I mean at this point.

They're a TV production company with celebrity instructors who happen to be good at riding bikes, but it's a TV studio.

And it would be very hard to turn any of these SoulCycle places into TV studios.

Yep.

And so if you're making the decision at SoulCycle, I'm going to take our best content and instructors dedicate them to that.

For this thing that I revenue split with.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Okay.

Well, there's another one here.

Which I know you want to do is how should Peloton have managed over the last couple of years?

What could they have done that would have enabled them to come out really strong?

It's easy here to sit here and say the pre-core acquisition was dumb.

The Peloton output park was misguided.

Probably good in the long run to bring your production in-house, but that big using cash at that moment in time probably not the right thing.

I've talked everyone's ear off about my feelings on the product and pricing decisions.

Yeah.

At the same time, I think we've got to be intellectually honest here with ourselves and with the market too.

It was easy to believe.

It would have been hard to really think about the downside over the past year, as everything was up and to the right.

It's a rare rare, rare leader and company that I think can stay disciplined through what was probably one of the biggest boons for any company of all time.

Yep.

On the other hand, other companies.

I think the difference is a lot of these other companies.

Demand didn't go away.

Like Amazon saw a spike, but then it kind of kept rising from there across all their businesses.

Uh, whereas Peloton saw a spike and then a decline.

Yep.

It's funny, I was thinking about what would be an interesting comparison here.

And I think Eric Yuan against John Foley is sort of an interesting one, or let's just say Zoom against Peloton.

Both of these were pandemic era go-go stocks that have totally crashed.

Peloton down over 80% from peak, Zoom down over 70%.

But for Zoom, despite the fall, I think it's still growing revenues at close to 100 year over year and is a free cash flow positive machine.

Monster.

Whereas Peloton is deeply unprofitable on a full bottom line, still raising billions from the public market with new stock issuances.

They seem to convince that this demand spike would last forever with these acquisitions and expensive investments.

It's funny.

I don't want to blame the management as much as I kind of want to blame Well, maybe it is management, but it's like kind of inability to forecast and know that demand was drying up.

And being in a business that just requires a lot more moving pieces, a lot more atoms, and that's just really hard.

This demand spike created huge complexities for Peloton as a business, in a way that you know for zoom, like I created some complexities for zoom.

Like, I don't want to say like, it was just easy, but like, you know, the shipping software, like it's, it's, it's different here.

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All right, let's grade this one.

So I think what we should do is paint the A scenario and maybe a C or an F scenario for what Barry does from here and what those outcomes are.

Yeah, well...

Maybe let's start with the C scenario, because I think that's the sort of more interesting one.

You know F is obvious of like this business falls off a cliff and you know there's no more demand ever.

It sells for parts.

It all.

Yeah, right.

I don't think that's likely, but that's that's.

I think a C is it's selling in the next six months.

Six to 12 months.

I agree.

For eight to $10 billion.

Yep.

Or even $20 billion selling within the next year for a nice short-term shareholder return.

I think that's a C.

I think a lot of shareholders would be very happy selling this thing in a year for 20 billion.

I totally agree.

I think shareholders would be happy.

But I think that's like, you know, I think it would be sort of sad if that happened.

And I doubt, you know, we don't know Barry at all.

We've never talked to him.

Barry, open invitation.

When this chapter is over, you got to come on the podcast and we got to do like a recap.

Or if you want to do a follow up now, what do we get right?

What do we get wrong?

We're happy to host.

Yeah, totally.

We are such huge fans of yours.

But I don't think he would have taken this just to package it up for a sale in six to 12 months.

Like, why would he do that?

Yeah, agree.

Agree.

I will say I don't think this is an independent, enduring company at this point.

I think it's going to be more along the lines of a lot of the consumer electronics companies that we've talked about, where I think Barry can turn it around.

I think you can have sort of tight financial controls where it's run like a good company, um and and some smart and make make smarter investments.

But i have a hard time knowing how they're going to grow 50 year over a year at any time in the future, like where are they going to go find more demand or where are they going to really meaningfully alter their product lines to go find more demand?

I mean, that's the A.

That's the A is if they can figure out how to stay an independent company and become a big, profitable independent company and meaningfully find demand in concentric circles outside their current customer base.

That's it.

That's the dream.

So, right.

Yes, that's the A+.

That's the dream, for sure.

Let's think about that.

They have, what, a little under 3 million subscribers currently?

Something like that.

That's actually not that many people, right?

It is not, especially in several countries.

I think about across the world, even let's assume, I don't know, I don't know the numbers.

Let's assume two thirds of that is US and one third elsewhere.

That may be generous, but let's just use that as a swag.

So that's 2 million US subscribers out of a nation of 330 million people.

There are probably a lot more than 2 million people that could be in an addressable segment for Peloton, you know.

Like the digital app is a good experience.

I started that way.

I graduated up, but like, it's a really good experience.

Um, you know, Apple is investing in a similar strategy to the digital fitness app.

And I think for 1299 a month for super high quality class, like this is the Netflix model, right?

For the best content out there with the best instructors um For 1299 a month.

That's accessible to a lot of people.

So I think there's probably still headroom on the core affluent, aspirational segments.

Maybe you call those two segments.

I think they can address both affluent people who don't care about cost, and aspirational people who do care about cost but are willing to invest in this.

And then you layer on the digital product.

I do think it could.

There is a world where this could become a you know, maybe not forever, but a longer term standalone company that actually is justifiable of a 49 billion market cap.

I like it.

Well, I don't think that's the most likely outcome.

I think two years from now, I think the most likely thing is that it's acquired by someone.

But the fun thing is, we will get to watch and see and we both just said all that on air.

Well, we'll revisit with Barry in a couple of years.

We will.

How about that?

Deal.

We're shaking hands on it.

You and I are, yes, over video chat here.

Carve-outs?

Carve-outs.

So related carve-out.

As I said at the top of the episode, whether you enjoyed this emergency pod or not, whatever you think of it, go watch that interview with barry mccarthy at the hill school.

It is so good uh, and really the only artifact uh long form interview with him dedicated to just him.

There's some stuff where he talks about direct listing on the 16z podcast and others, but uh um, that's just about him and his career.

It's worth watching and there's a great nugget in there.

He talks about his um uh strategy exercise that he likes to do.

Uh, that they did in Netflix and Spotify.

And I'm sure he will bring the Peloton of uh how to how to plan and build your organization to be resilient and robust for the future.

And uh, his four to five year strategy exercise.

I won't spoil too much of it but um, it's very good and worth watching uh, and and listening to that.

Sweet.

Mine is also related.

So since the Taylor Swift episode, I've been listening to a lot of Switched on Pop.

And there is a awesome episode called the James Bond Spycraft episode. theme spycraft sound and uh the hosts are just awesome of uh of switched on pop the show is reliably great it's it's sort of like acquired for music as another as a way to sort of think about it i've been really hooked on music podcasts but this one in particular gives the whole history of the bond theme of all the songs that are used for all the different movies across all the decades and they're musically related And it's really cool to listen to how they pull out these different elements of that very mysterious chord at the end of the Bond theme and how that gets used through the decades and all the different movie themes.

So highly recommend that song.

Super fun.

That's my car route.

I went and listened to that episode after we were texting about it.

And it's so good.

The whole show is so good.

But yeah, it's so good.

And one of my favorite parts about it was it reminded me that Chris Cornell's song for Casino Royale is so good.

Oh, man.

Yeah, it is.

Rest in peace, Chris Cornell.

But that is one of the best Bond themes of all time.

Yes listeners, thank you for going on the journey with us.

Go check out the lp show.

Our latest episode with the nzs capital folks is uh is really good, like i.

I they're just so smart.

And if you're staring at stock tickers getting anxious uh this this, this i mean not investment advice, but like it will help you bring a cool, steady hand.

Uh, it's a nice warm cup of tea.

I otherwise trying times.

Yes, uh and uh, if you want to join us for the zoom call tonight, if you're listening to this on drop day, then uh join acquiredfm, slash lp.

And uh, we will.

We will see you in the zoom later tonight.

We have a job board acquiredfm, slash jobs, find your next great career move.

And uh, Yeah.

Tell your friends about this.

You can find us on Spotify uh, right alongside Taylor Swift and many other great artists and podcasts, or anywhere where you get your your podcasts.

And, um, we'll see you next time.

We'll see you next time.

[The Peloton Reset: Barry McCarthy and the Road to a Comeback]-[Peloton]

📋 Summary

The Peloton Reset: Navigating the Post-COVID Reality

The "Wartime CEO" Strategy

The Anatomy of the Crisis

Unit Economics and the "Hook"

The Path Forward

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Peloton Reset: Barry McCarthy and the Road to a Comeback]-[Peloton]

📋 Summary

The Peloton Reset: Navigating the Post-COVID Reality

The "Wartime CEO" Strategy

The Anatomy of the Crisis

Unit Economics and the "Hook"

The Path Forward

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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