The ten year trend test, the two week business crush, and why every company he built started absurdly narrow.
With Kevin Ryan
"I start with a business crush, meaning there's an idea and I can't stop thinking about it. And then a week later, I'm still thinking about it." — Kevin RyanKevin Ryan, on the episode
Kevin Ryan has co-founded or built DoubleClick, Gilt, Business Insider, MongoDB, Zola, and Transcend Therapeutics, and he runs AlleyCorp out of a small office with fewer than 25 people. The pop framing of a serial founder is that he has a gift for picking winners. The actual operating system underneath is a repeatable filter: a trend has to hold for a full decade, the idea has to survive weeks of unprompted obsession before he commits, and the company has to start absurdly narrow before it's allowed to expand. He talks through the DoubleClick, Business Insider, and Gilt years not as war stories but as a method he reuses every time he starts something new. This pulls three of the sharpest operating pieces from that conversation: how he tests a trend, how he tests an idea, and how he actually builds the first version of a company.
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Kevin Ryan, The Tim Ferriss Show
Find the exact point where a ten year trend's cost and revenue curves cross, and build there, not on the trend alone.
Kevin Ryan says
I watch the specific cost and revenue lines falling and rising until they cross, that's the real signal.
Try this
Bet on a ten year trend and build at the exact point its underlying costs and revenue cross.
Kevin Ryan says
I know I have a real idea when I can't stop thinking about it for days. I let it keep building in my mind…
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