path: root/transcripts/forbes/30under30/2019/ryan-breslow.mdwn

Ryan Breslow (Bolt)

Please welcome to the stage, Jeff Copeland staff writer for Forbes. Thanks for coming today and we have some great talks on fintech and blockchain. I and my colleague Michael del Castillo will be moderating a few talks. Let's get started. Thanks to our sponsor, Samsung.

Please welcome marketing director of Samsung Electronics. Good morning. Are you guys awake? Alright, some energy. Who stayed out late last night? I'm not judging you, I am you and I am probably a lot oolder than you. I am so excited to be here. It is my first time in Detroit and there's so much energy here give it up for Detroit. I was in an uber last night and I was asking all these questions about Detroit and you could hear the passion about the culture and the spots I should hit. People are excited that we are here; thank you Forbes for choosing Detroit to host this year's summit. Again, I am the marketing director for Samsung's mobile computing category which includes tablets. As you noticed, you had to walk through our marketing space to get in here, that's intentional that's marketing 101. Hopefully you have had a chance to play with some of the computers out there and get you some swag, because we all know that's why you are here. I have the ultimate swag to give away, so get excited about that. I just need three volunteers, three brave volunteers. You in the yellow come on up. Round of applause for our volunteers. I am going to play a game, called three true similie plus the memory game. It's three truths and a lie, and I'll read out four statements. Three are going to be true, one is going to be false. It's the memory game becaues it wont be projected on the screen so you have to remember the statements. True or false, Martin Luthor King Jr originally gave his I have a dream speech in the city of Detroit. B, Detroit's district theater is the largest in the United States. You could fit San Francisco, Boston and Manhattan into Detroit's 140 sq miles. Also, Detroiters eat more potato chips than any other city in the world. Do you need me to read it again?  We have two answers of B. Detroit's district theater is not the largest in the city. The tie breaker is, how old is the city of Detroit? You don't have to get it exactly, whoever comes closest will win. Detroit is 318 years old. You won a brand new Samsung Galaxy Note 10. You would have all gotten a tablet, I feel bad. You're here and investing in myself and your future and you're getting all this knowledge. As you go through the next few days, don't mind your own business and get the knowledge and content tracks even the ones that have nothing to do with you because knowledge comes from unconventional places and the places you least expect. I personally believe it's a circle and it's all related. I was in the startup hub yesterday; you should check that out. So many great businesses and startups, and I am really inspired. When we're at Samsung and thinking about our innovation pipeline, you guys are the ones I'm talking about, like what can we do to make your lives better. As I walk off the stage, it doesn't matter where you are whether you're a student or you have a successful business or sitting on an idea right now today you have a story that people have to hear. Don't wait to share your idea; you can start doing it right now and use your voice right. Thank you guys for this platform and thank you Forbes. Enjoy the rest of your time here and congratulations on your tablet.

Now welcome Ryan Breslow, CEO and cofounder of Bol.

JC: Alright. Everyone knows we have a way you can submit questions. I just want to let everyone know. I think there's something on the screen mentioning it. If you go to slido and type in under30summit and then make sure you're in the blue room and you can submit questions. We will leave 5 minutes at the end for audience questions. Let's get started. So Ryan, in terms of just growing up and your background, I know you grew up in Miami. Tell me about growing up in Miami and what that was like.

RB: Miami is a pretty awesome city. I'm very grateful for my experience there. There's great diversity. I grew up doing a lot of unique jobs that I probably wouldn't have taken if I had grown up in San Francisco or somewhere that tech was so dominate. Something we have talked about is that I grew up and I was a bag boy. I was in publix. Pubsubs, yeah. I was working as a bag boy for 3 years. I saw thousands of people going through a checkout experience and a lot of them were very frustrated. I ended up realizing, going to the internet for my entrepreneeurial ambitions and a lot of that ended up feeding into Bolt like my website building projects.

JC: Why were you a bag boy?

RB: I just wanted to make money as a kid. When I turned 14, which is the legal working age in Florida, I said I wanted to get a job and I started working. I realized I could make more money doing other things. So I started building websites and I was really good. I started working for various clients in Miami building their ecommerce stores and implementing shopping carts, payment tools, fraud tools, and checkout flows. I gained that experience of building an online checkout flow. Both of those groundfloor experiences were a big part of the inspiration for what I ended up doing later.

JC: How did you learn how to build websites? It's not something that you learn in school.

RB: To learn how to code online and how to do things, we live in an amazing time where there are so many tutorials out there. I think I took an AP computer science class in school but the teacher got reallocated to a chemistry class and we were put online. Florida had an amazing online computer science class. 35 of us in the computer lab, 2 of us finished. It was unbelievably difficult. We learned a lot there. And a lot of tutorials. That's the great thing about the internet; you can learn anything that is on the internet. Every day after school, I would go home and look up how to build this or do that. It wasn't just programming or build websites, it was like how to run an adwords campaign, how to do marketing, how to do SEO and a ton of different things.

JC: In terms of-- going to college. In high school, you were building websites. Before you went to college; I know you went to Stanford. How many clients did you have? How big was this website building business that you had?

RB: Probably a few dozen.

JC: How did you pay for college?

RB: I'm really grateful to Stanford because they had amazing financial aide. I did not grow up in a high income household. Stanford paid for most of it on a need basis. I also had some pocket change from my businesses previously. I didn't need to pay for too much of it because I ended up leaving after a year and a half.

JC: Why did you do that, how did that come about?

RB: In school, I loved my first year of college and wouldn't trade it for the world. I didn't go to Stanford to become the Stanford dropout. I actually got really into a new subject area which was cryptocurrency back in the day for any of the crypto fans out there. I became obsessed, starting the Stanford Bitcoin Group in early 2013 with a few friends of mine. Not many people on campus knew about it, but now the group is 100s of people. There were 8 of us; we lived together and talked about it all day. This continuation--- I was very passionate about the future of money, digital currency, and this led to the idea for Bolt. But then I decided that for me I had always been big on following my passion and gut and it wasn't school or classes. There is just so much out there that you can teach yourself. I didn't like the idea of taking classes I didn't want to make. It was a big decision to leave school, but easy for me to make because of my passion about other things.

JC: Tell me about Bolt and what it is.

RB: It was a combination of my past experiences; it was seeing people physically frustrated with checkout. I also saw the future of money through cryptocurrency. I realized everyone was focused on infrastructure and tools around online checkout. But a retailer for the life of them can't put together a good checkout flow. So the end user experience as it pertains to payments, was a big area of opportunity. We all checkout online and we know the friction that exists if you're not shopping on Amazon. So  ifigured, why isn't there a comapny out there that is specifically focused on the experience of payments? I just decided to go ahead and do it.

JC: I understand-- so you make the software such that when someone is going to buy something on a watch website, you click buy and your software pops up a window saying enter your information and you do a better job in converting users to actually purchase. How do you do a better job and avoid cart abandonment? How do you get people through that flow at a higher conversion rate?

RB: Checkout is a complex piece of software. That's important to understand. When you're going through a checkout flow, you wonder why is this so difficult. Why can't this be easy? The reason is that checkout touches dozens of different systems. A retailer has a system for tax calculations; shipping; fulfillment, inventory management, fraud detection, shopping cart, inventory management, ERP systems, and the list goes on. The checkout flow needs to speak with all these systems and also be elegant to the end user. We do all the hard work of integrating with those systems and making sure there's consistency among all of them. To the end user, we need to make sure it's extremely fast, that it's easy, that there's no bugs, works on every device and every browser; and the UX is optimized down to the pixel. We do all the backend labor intensive work; and then we do all the frontend work for the end user. Ultimately it's about making it as fast as possible and as high converting as possible. This could be removing unnecessary fields; making sure it loads faster; it could be not asking for billing address in certain low risk transactions. It could even be showing security signage to make a user feel more secure upon checkout. We're doing all these things.

JC: How long did it take to build the first version? How many engineers were working on it too?

RB: The first question I asked myself is why has nobody built this before. It's a very obvious problem. Everyone checks out online; it's problematic and why hasn't someone improved that before? I ended up realizing, it's because to get a product to market you had to integrate with all these systems and it was just really difficult to do. So I had to recruit just based off of our vision a really elite group of engineers, about a dozen of us. It took us 2.5 years to get to market and to launch. I think we're all out here talking about starting companies... a lot of startups are like an iceberg; you see the tip of the iceberg above the surface, but 90% beneath the surface that you don't get exposure to. A lot of startups go through tough challenging times before they see success. For us it was 2.5 years of slogging away to get something to market, and then one customer and a few more. We launched in January 2018 and then things started to take off and we went from one dozen people to 160 people. Thank you.

JC: Did you get funding?

RB: We got funding from the early days I was very fortunate to have some great mentors. I think, I had done none of this before. I hadn't started a company before. I sought advice from a lot of people. Fundraising is a tricky one because you get a lot of bad advice. So a piece of advice is, don't take all the advice you get. Do what feels right. So I made a lot of mistakes fundraising at the start, but eventually got good at it. I'd say, mid 2014, so I have been working on this for 5 years. We raised a few million dollars and found some people that believed in what we were doing-- I don't think they understood what we were doing; they just believe din the team and that we were going after something ambitious. We didn't raise on a slide deck or anything like that. It's really about relationships and conveying trust.

JC: How did you-- yeah, fundraising tips would be great. In terms of building trust, how did you do that if you didn't do it with a slide deck? Any other tips for fundraising that you have.

RB: I would say that, really put yourself in the shoes of an investor. You want to invest in someone who is irrationally ambitious and really knows their stuff and is going after a big idea in a big market. So you have to, as a CEO of a company, I say you're like the chief storyteller in a way. You have a story, about the future of the world that you really believe in, and you're just one person who believes in that story. Eventually you want to convince some investors in the story too, and eventually you will convince customers and make the story a reality. How do you get the story in the first place? Go really deep. I knew a lot about ecommerce. I conveyed that I was an ambitious founder, and I knew myself, and I knew everything about this space and I had a clearly articulated vision for the future of the space. If you can convey confidence and back it up, and you have a compelling story that you really believe in, that's the most important part of fundraising. If you don't have that story or that pitch nailed down to a science, then all the introductions and meetings you can get are irrelevant.

JC: In terms of culture, building a culture, what is something that you do differently from other startups?

RB: We had a really difficult business to build. I knew it would take a long time to get to market. So we had to focus on culture to attract and retain great talent for a long period of time without a lot of traction initially. So one thing we learned early on from great coaches and mentors and making mistakes, was that, we didn't want a culture of politicking. So we didn't want a culture where the loudest voice in a room wins or be argumentative; we wanted a culture where the best ideas win and we can be collaborative and hop into a room to address difficult challenges and be a positive environment. We realized that we could accomplish this as having a culture of writing instead of talking. When you have issues or discussing strategy; we come to meetings with writing done in advance. People are more thoughtful when they do something in writing, instead of coming into a room and arguing on the spot. So we solved some of our toughest challenges with as much writing as possible, to prepare for meetings, so that our meetings were efficient and the loudest voices in the room wouldn't necessarily win.

Q: How did you overcome age discrimination that you have experienced in a world dominated by adults?

RB: Age discrimination does exist to some degree, but probably less so than any time in history. You get the benefit of the doubt in Silicon Valley in tech-forward cities if you're younger and ambitious. There's sometimes age discrimination in the reverse direction; it might be more difficult to raise money if you're older and don't have an amazing track record. You don't want to take this granted, and you should focus on becoming a more mature CEO. I have focused on coaching and mentoring on how to be a great CEO and how to hire more seasoned executives.