Entrepreneurship Uncovered: Courtney Reum's Trailblazing Journey to Success

We all get pitched on these ideas that just sound great and we love them. But at this point I would always take what I perceive to be a better entrepreneur or founder and a pretty good idea versus what seems like an amazing idea and a pretty good founder entrepreneur. Because when I say really good founder, what I mean is I assume that person's going to be able to navigate it better or execute it. There are so many good products and companies that you and I will never hear of because the execution isn't there. The founders aren't willing to do the hard yards. Welcome to super entrepreneurs podcast. I'm your host Shahid Durrani. Today we have with us Courtney Ream. Courtney is the co-founder of M13, a disruptive brand development and venture capital firm that has invested in over a hundred startups such as Lyft, Pinterest, ClassPass, and Slack. He's been recognized as one of Goldman Sachs, a hundred most intriguing entrepreneurs, four years in a row. And his entrepreneurial venture Veve earned him a place on Inc's 250 fastest growing companies. Welcome to our show, Courtney. Great to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Oh, it's my pleasure, my friend. This definitely sounds like you're busy. Yeah. Trying to take a little time off on the weekends. That's good. You have to keep that time for you. Yeah. I think when you, when you start by doing investment banking out of college, you're not great at balance, but I've slowly figured a lot of it is about prioritization and keeping your energy for the things that really matter, whether that's a personal or professional. No, that's good. So Courtney, can you walk us through basically your journey from being a top hundred entrepreneur with Goldman Sachs to co-founding M13? I would love to hear the mindset behind it. Yeah, I think so. My brother, who's been my business partner for coming up on 15 years now, we originally started out, we're from Chicago, went to school out East, did as you do, and you don't know what you're going to do after going to some of those places and ended up working on Wall Street at Goldman Sachs, great experience. Got to see some really successful brands in the early days. I did some work for vitamin water, which is not necessarily a product I endorsed, but an incredible brand and marketing story. Did some work with them early on, was part of the team that helped take Under Armour public and pretty simply guys like a Kevin Plank, who founded Under Armour, who's just got a vision, a passion, a lot of drive. And you think he can do it. I don't know if I can, but let's give it a whirl. And so my brother and I, my brother who also actually went to the same schools and also worked at Goldman Sachs, we left to be entrepreneurs about 15 years ago. And since then, starting myriad of things, you touched on one, our first company was the first, we'll call it like vodka alternative called Veeve, have done a bunch of other stuff in consumer tech and now decided it was time to try to have our cake and eat it too, whereby we started M13 as a consumer technology holding company where we have mainly venture capital funds. So we invest in other people, but we help launch our own stuff too. So it's fun to feel like you're an entrepreneur and an investor and helping to build great companies. Do you have some sort of a ritual or a process that you go through to come up with ideas? Yeah, that's a long process. And my brother and I wrote a whole book about it called shortcut your startup about five years ago. And it was talking about everything from getting in the trenches for ideation to doing what we used to call the farmer's market test for your products, just your minimum viable dose or your minimum audience and finding your evangelist. But yeah, I think in general, the way the world works now, it's about the right idea in the right context, the right time, and it's hard, it's. Believe it or not, it's easy to figure out two of those three things. It's really hard to find all three. And so that's what we're always looking for. Very good. So when you were actually evaluating, for example, Lyft and Pinterest, what were the deciding factors to go with those ideas? Yeah, I think it's, as I said, it's the right idea at the right time in the right context. The thing about something like Lyft is I've living here in Los Angeles. I had many a time where I walk out of some place and you could sit there for hours looking for a taxi and you just say, this doesn't make sense. There's gotta be a more efficient way to do it. There's taxis looking for people and there's people looking for taxis, but it might not have been the right time for the idea because for example, maybe self-strength wasn't strong enough or technology wasn't there and so as we started to see it, that all came together. We saw that whether it's Uber or Lyft, but just the rideshare market, there was a chance to, I guess, optimize it and have a lot more transparency. Oh my gosh, I see that there's a car two blocks away from me. Hopefully that one can come pick me up, things like that. Yeah. So I know you invested in a number of ideas or startups that are destructive. Can you share some commonalities that you have noticed amongst these successful startups that helped them stand out? Yeah, we're always looking for people that are disruptors, things like Airbnb that I was on with probably or Uber or Lyft as disruptors in their industry. I think we always look for something with, we call it a lot of frictionless scaling, meaning can it grow pretty big, pretty fast before it hits some huge bump in the road? That could be a regulatory thing. That could be a, who knows, a manufacturing thing. So we love companies like that and we love companies that have, I guess you'd call it extreme product market fit. And to go back to something like Lyft or the Airbnb, at first, no one thought anyone would be willing to share their house. Then all of a sudden, once you saw the people were willing, all of a sudden it turns out we were all just wrong. Almost everyone is willing, a big percent of the population. So that's when you see these things start to take off. There's just a high kind of net worth effect and virality to it, where a lot of people all of a sudden start telling their friends and showing their friends. They're doing it. So you get a lot of, I guess, free brand building and marketing by people talking. Yes, that will definitely help. Word of mouth. So what were some of the challenges that you faced while you were scaling Veve? It's great that I pronounced it correctly. I wasn't really sure if it's Veve or something. And how did you basically overcome those challenges to make it a fastest growing company in 250? Yeah, I think, I think there's no substitute for a lot of grinding and a lot of execute really well. Something like Spirits is really interesting because it's an industry where we do technology now. So technology, you can actually try to reinvent the real wheel. Sometimes there's no kind of upper bound to things. Spirits, the opposites. It's called the three tier system, how products get distributed. Obviously it's alcohol. It can be dangerous. It's highly regulated. So I think the biggest challenge is that we didn't know it at the time when we were 20 something, but we were, we were playing in a container that was really defined. And we had a lot of limits to what we could do. We couldn't just go sell Veve online and try to blow it up using influencers or other things that we were good at. We had to work through a distributor. The distributor had to rely on the distributor to help get us into accounts. We had to rely on people to order it. Although that sort of stuff that was just a good, a really good, I think, lesson in one, being really careful, the industry and the container you choose, because some of it played well to our strengths and some of it did not, but also realizing that a lot of building great companies is just, as they say, ideas are cheap. Execution is dear, as my dad used to say. Spirits is an industry where even if you have a good product, it is all about the really tight execution. Yes. Execution is the heartline for it though. Right. For when it comes to startups. Yeah. Or any business. Yeah. People always say we all get pitched on these ideas that just sound great and we love them. But at this point I would always take what I perceive to be a better entrepreneur or founder and a pretty good idea versus what seems like an amazing idea and a pretty good founder entrepreneur, because when I say really good founder, what I mean is I assume that person's going to be able to navigate it better or execute and that's what it comes down to. There, there are so many good products and companies that you and I will never hear of because they're just, they're not built right or the execution isn't there. The founders aren't willing to do the hard yards. You're just sitting and planning. Yeah. The perfection stage. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Basically your experience as co-hosting that TV show. I don't know if it's still around. Patch. Yeah, it was kind of an alternative to Shark Tank. So did that help in your journey getting on TV? Yeah, I think, I don't know if I'd say getting on TV helped per se, but it definitely raised our profile. But I would say the combination of being on hatch, which, you know, was on CBS. So a couple million people saw it for episode on, on weekends and then writing a book shortcut, your startup. I think the combination of those two together really did, because I think one, it raised our profile, but two, it also, sometimes you don't know what you think until you say it, or sometimes you don't know what you think until you write it down. And so doing all that actually helped us in some ways, articulate what I'll call the generic blueprint for what we're doing at M13 now, because it forced you to put on paper or organize your ideas of the pattern recognition of how these great brands and companies are built. Yeah. A definite bonus for your career. Yeah. And writing a bestselling book, I joke is a, has become like a, it's like a funny adult business card. People, I think most people have either that I come across have either written a book or more likely want to write a book. So it's a good topic of conversation. And how do you write a bestselling book? Because it's a really, it's a really interesting thing because I think we've been really surprised by the longevity of our book, but right when you launched the book to be a bestseller, it's a lot about your profile and who you know, and who's talking about it too. It's an interesting exercise altogether. So you had to get collaboration on that book, I assume. Yeah, we helped. We had someone that wrote it with us and my brother and I did it together because we were one and never written a book. So it was nice to have an author who was used to putting things in a book format, but also we had other day jobs and things we were working on. So it was great to have a little bit of help with part of the book. Yeah. So you mentioned your brother. Can you share any lessons that you have learned working with a family a brother being a partner in a thriving company as M13? Sure. I think when people say I've used this joke a lot, but I'll use it again. When people say, what's it like working with your brother? I always say it's like the opening line of Charles, Charles Dickens tale of two cities. It was the best times. It was the worst of times when it's going well, there's nothing better because it's family. And when it's going rough, it's kind of nothing worse because this family had the extreme highs and the extreme lows, but I would say I think the biggest lesson were there's different types of family relationships. There's those families where I guess different types of founder relationships. There's the complimentary one, like one person's kind of a business front person, the other ones, the chief technology officer, there's more. Complimentary. My brother and I are a little bit more what I'd call substitution, meaning we're of course different enough, but similar enough in our ways of thinking and background training that I think our superpower early on was that we could always step in for the other person. So I'd be working on something and something would come up that he had been working on and he was like, Hey, can you jump on this? Here's a little background and I'll introduce you to this person. And it would, it was an 80 20 rule. Like we did want to be duplicative, but always good to have an idea of what the other person's doing, because then we can jump in and take over things and trust each other to close a deal or build a relationship or whatever, or work on this strategic direction. So I think that was the biggest thing early on. And now with M 13, we've got lots of employees, lots of partners in all different areas. So it's great because there's a lot of people who are better at a lot of things than we are at M 13. And so it's great to be able to lean on those folks. And then also I think it's big enough and diverse enough with what we're doing now that I can, my brother and I can, I guess in some ways do some of our own things and of course we do lots of things together, like employee reviews and strategic direction on a day-to-day basis, I think more than ever, we've found our own lanes of things we like to do and can be the kings of our own little castles, if you will. That's pretty cool. Growing up. Were you guys close? Were you like friends? Yeah, I would say more than friends. We're two years apart, which to me is kind of perfect difference. Oh, amazing. Yeah. Yes. It is like we did everything together, but far enough apart that there's a little healthy distance. That's wonderful. I love seeing this. You guys are doing great things and you guys have that support of each other, not just the business side of things, but the family side of things. There's more heart in the relationship, hands down. Yeah, exactly. Could you share some success stories or milestones from a hundred plus startups that M13 has invested in? Sure. Milestones. I think it's, I think it's most of the way I measure milestones or success early doesn't have to do with the things that everyone talks about, like sales or things like that. It's more, we're always looking for when it's things that have some kind of consumer angle, we're always looking for adoption and stickiness. And you don't need a million customers. You need a hundred really devoted customers and what are they doing? And are you observing their behaviors? And it's all about learn, iterate, move, learn, iterate, move, keep observing what people are doing and keep tweaking your product or your platform or mission. And that's, I would say that's how we usually measure success early on because it's all about getting that exponential growth up the J curve where in the old days you grew things more linearly and now the way a lot of these big companies are built, it looks like nothing's happening, but you, then you have some breakthrough insight and all of a sudden it just grows exponentially through the roof and that's what we look for in a lot of the things that we start that product market fit. When you working on your business and investing in these startups, do you base your decisions on feelings on top of all the other stats that we look at? Do you still go with what your heart says when you get into a business and does it have something to do with the success? Meaning, do you believe is going to be successful when you go into it? Yeah, we're interesting in that given that we're investors and entrepreneurs, there's always that element of I'm, I think I'm not a hopeless optimist, but I think when you're an entrepreneur, you kind of have to be an optimist and when you're an investor, you kind of have to be a realist and you kind of have to blend the optimism and the realism. And I would like to think we do pretty well at that, but I also would never sit here and pretend to not tell you that there's not some bias involved in it. Like you said, some emotions. I think we all have bias in those decisions we make. So it's not about pretending you don't have bias. It's actually about going, Oh, I tend to buy it for this type of founder, this industry or this company. Now let's talk about it, realizing that there is some bias. But I do think to your point, so of course there's some bias, but I also do think that there's some good. I would like to think that there's that gut feeling is some good pattern recognition from all the stuff we've bought and seen, and sometimes I can't actually articulate why I believe in it or articulate it strongly enough, but I just do, and some of those have been some of our best investments. Yes. I love that answer. Wanted to see if that was the type of answer that I was going to get. There is some sort of help that we get as human beings from that belief. Thank you so much for sharing that. Can you share like a biggest risk that you have taken based on feelings or based on whatever you're looking at, any kind of project, and you took this huge risk in your career, overall career. And how did it go? What was the result and what did you learn from it? And would you take such a risk again? Yeah, I, I do think I'm someone that it's all relative, meaning I actually think so by most people's standards, I probably, if you look at different things I've started and different things I've done, I think my brother and I would be people who are considered risk takers yet at the same time, I don't necessarily consider myself taking the ultimate risk because the honest truth is the ultimate risk is people do stuff like you, you leave a job and you've got a family to feed and kids and you put all your life savings into a huge risk. Yeah. I'll be honest. I have not done that. So I, I bow to those who have, and the real risk takers, I think doing something like leaving Goldman Sachs and starting an alcohol brand Viva at the time, I think that was a very big risk in the sense that when you're working at Goldman Sachs, it's about as prestigious as it gets in finance, you have a lot of options from there, but the more you do other things, the less relevant your Goldman Sachs experiences or your resume, if you will. So I think doing something that was totally different to what we had been doing when at the time we probably could have tried anything was a pretty big risk, but I think when you're in your twenties, it doesn't feel like a risk. And it also feels if this doesn't go well, you're at a point in life where you can build or rebuild it. And I do think, I think entrepreneurship is a little bit like love, better to have love into loss than never loved at all. I think most people, when they have that itch to scratch, I always tell people, I meet lots of people who I just don't know that they have that entrepreneurial gene or that entrepreneurial drive, but I do say to them, if you're really, if you really feel that itch constantly, you should scratch it and try it because you'll probably regret not trying more than you'll regret trying and more than you'll regret never trying. Yes. Great point. So for the anticipation for the future, what are some of the industries that you have a very close eye on when it comes to new development ideas? Yeah. Glad you asked because our thesis for M13, everything we invest in is what we call future of consumer behavior. We're always trying to figure out where the puck is going. As they say in hockey, since you're up there in Canada, is we're always trying the biggest percentage of spending that's always up for grabs is consumer discretionary spending. And so we're always looking for things that are at the future of consumer behavior, whether that's, we'll have some sub areas we're focused on the future of health, future of commerce, the future of money and the future of work. So I think between all those, we feel like we're looking where people are going to be spending in the future. And so that's what they say. The future is here, but it's not evenly distributed. We're trying to make sure we're asymmetrically ahead of where other people are looking. That's our goal. Very good. Courtney, can you share with us what you feel your innermost superpower is that got you to this point in life? I would say in some ways I would say probably my innermost superpower is being really adaptive. I think to try and do some of the things we've done, you really have to be somewhat maybe universal and chameleon like. And I think my, both my brother and I are good at adapting to people or situations or whatever it is to help. Build rapport. And so I think by the out output of that superpower is that we're really good at being able to connect the dots and that there's someone who's, Oh, I'm thinking about this and someone who knows this person, but be able to package it all together and create a company or put together a deal and find synergy. There is something we're really good at. Wonderful. It was great to have you on our show and a great inner superpower. I can see you guys taking this to the next level just to make sure you remember us little guys as you grow. If there's anything that you are launching or would like us to help share that message more than welcome to come back on our show, just let me know. And definitely it was a pleasure meeting you Courtney and wishing you all the best. Thanks so much. It was a pleasure to be on the show. Thanks for having me. My pleasure audience. Thank you once again for joining us for another episode, you definitely can check Courtney's information, the show notes, and if you do have an idea and you're looking to do something with it, why not have a chat with Courtney and see what their firm can do for you guys. Thank you. And we'll see you next time. And thank you. Thank you so much.