Jim McCarthy

why don't you explain? Gold Star is designed to help you answer the question what are you gonna do this weekend, tonight, in a couple of weeks, when your sister comes into town, whatever it is. And the way we do that is by bringing together a thout literally thousands of organizers, promoters, venues who have events to sell with people who want to buy them. The biggest problem that people have when it comes to live entertainment just knowing what's going on.

One thing that I do it almost never fails, is I asked somebody named three or four things that are happening in your town this weekend, as people can come up with zero to one. You know, they're really they're just unaware of the stuff that's going on. And the reality is that in every major American city there's just great stuff going on. So gold Star puts them all together. We work directly with those venues and promoters to make

the event content for sale on gold Star. We make the process to buy it and discover it really easy. In most cases, there's a discount, as you know, and the whole thing is that when you use gold Star, people go out twice as often as when they're not using gold Stars and members. So that's our goal. Let's look at it from the consumer rand, uh and correct

me if I'm wrong. For the consumer rand, it's basically a site that you can go into where you can find events in your area that generally speaking are sold at a discount. It's it's that's not a bad general statement about it. It's an app and a site also of course an email. Um, but it's it's a little bit of everything. I mean, you know, about ten percent

of our business is actually full price sales. So these are that are events that aren't discounted, but they are available on gold Star because again, and we have nine million people who come to us for one reason and one reason only, and that's to figure out what they're gonna go do. So as a platform simply to reach people who are looking for something to do. Cold Stars pretty much number one. Okay, at this point in time, it's hard to know what's going on. So mean, you

even get the newspaper. You read the newspaper, but an event that happened that you were unaware of. No one has been able to create one site that's a go to place for all events. Generally speaking. We're in Los Angeles now, you will only list events that you have tickets for, correct and of events. I don't know how we can quantify this, but of events, let's say in an average city like Los Angeles, how many of those events do you think you have tickets for? I think

we're in Los Angeles right now. We're selling about six events. So it's certainly not exhaustive. There are events that we don't have, but we have a lot, And I think the question is less do we have every single thing, and more can we find you something big or small, well known or or not so well known that's going to enable you to go have a great time. So

that's how we look at it. It's a lot of events, okay, because I know people who use the site and they'll say, well, it's Saturday night, I have no plans, or let me see what's on gold Star. Would you think that's your average customer. It's a combination of that sort of use case where it's like, hey, what can I do? You know, give me give me something to do, and another one where we do promote events and email is a big

tool for us. You sign up, you get emails that are automatically tailored for for what you like a little bit slower. Yeah, assuming I have to have it? Can I see the events if I don't have an account, Yes, you can. You can see the events, but to purchase anything you need an account. Yeah, I mean there's nothing to having in a kiss free. But but my next question is if I have an account, do I have to receive the not at all. You can unsubscribe from any and all emails and a lot of people, do

you know. Okay, So, assuming I have signed up to the service, I'm getting email? Am I getting the email that the person who lives down the street from me? Is every email is actually individual? How do you do that? It's a technology we call Matchmaker, which is a combination of all the data from everything that everybody does. You know, if you click on something, I click on something, I buy something, I forward an email. All of that creates a complex set of mathematics that I don't even begin

to understand. But it implies what your tastes are as opposed to mine, and it looks for things that are more likely to match yours than mine. And actually, you know, we've been doing this for We've been doing this for almost fourteen years now. The the filtering that's sort of automated, um, but in the last year we've actually really taken it forward with the next gen version of this technology, which is really making a difference in terms of finding things

that really suit people. Uh And by the way, the thing I like best about it's not just that people are you know, clicking on it more and buying more. We're actually sharing them a wider range of things. Why would it be wider because we're actually able to figure out a little bit more what's special about your taste

than somebody else's. So that means because we have this big pool of events to draw from, we're actually finding you know, events and putting them in front of people in a in a more diverse, you know way, because the technology is just evolved to be smarter. Okay, So if I'm signed up and I'm getting email, how often will I get an email? Depends? Many people will get an email about once a day, Some people get more often because they like to open them, and other people,

of course get maybe one or two a week. And then of course you can opt for none whatsoever. Let's assuming I'm opting in. How do you decide how many emails I get? It depends a lot on how much you like the email. So the more you open and read them, the more likely you already get a second one in a day, let's say, or two days in a row. If you don't open them, don't look at them as often, the amounts or tapers off. So it's all all within the It's the ghost in the machine

that's figuring this out. There's no human thing. There's program that's written and you have all that feedback whether it's opened or not. Does it also, uh, does frequency depend on whether I buy or not? Actually, no, it really doesn't. When it comes to email, which is just one part of the business. It really isn't about purchases as much as it is your your email behave. So if I get any email, how many events will it tell me about?

Some emails are focused on a single event, with maybe a dozen or so secondary events that are pulled out of this matchmaker technology, and some one of the most popular ones comes out on Tuesday. It's a great, big compendium of the stuff that's in your in your city, let's say. And so that could be okay, how do you get ed gold star? How do you get the tickets? We work and this is something that whenever I tell this story it seems incredibly painful and and arduous, because

it really was painful and arduous. But we have thousands of relationships with promoters and venues and we work directly with them to actually take this inventory on consignment. So it's not so you don't buy any of the inventority. So let's assume to reuse raw numbers, you have a hundred tickets and you sell fifty of them, you will give the other fifty back to the promoter. Yeah, like I said, it's like, think of it as a consignment,

you know, we we uh. And then what's interesting is it used to be as you're saying kind of a process of like, hey, give us I'm doing air quotes, give us a hundred tickets, We sell as many as we can and then sort of return the other fifty if it's fifty. But you know, because we're actually digitally connected with the key ticketing systems, now, it almost doesn't even it's almost just a maximum. You know, they put a hundred, we sell whatever. They never really left the

pool of state. So it's that's evolved. Let's just say hypothetically you sell a hundred and the events still a couple of days away, and let's assume the event is not instantly sold out. Do you tend to be able to get more tickets? Yeah. That that's one of the things that we've really keyed on over the years is when something is moving, we want to encourage the promoter to put more tickets to be available where people are buying. Uh.

In fact, that they can do it for themselves. Now, so if you're if you're a gold star organizer in our system, you can go in and actually add inventory directly with no human intervention in the system. Okay, let's say it's January one you need and let's focused on one city you need x amount of inventory to run your business at this point, to what degree is that automated or they're people at your company who are literally have relationships with the event producers and deciding how many

tickets and what events, etcetera. Those two things aren't necessarily in conflict with each other. The relationships and the automation, they work hand in hand because what we don't want people at gold Star doing is pushing paper around. We want them giving good marketing input to our partners in the venues. So although now we're about nine plus percent automated in terms of the process, by fall, it's can automated in terms of the process, the process process of

of inventor Yeah that's right, yeah, um. Even though our goal is to make the manual to the way I put it is, if if it's something a computer could do just as well as a human, then a computer should do it. Um. But there are a lot of things that a human and only a human can really do, which is to help people understand how to take best advantage of the gold Star audience. And so the the automation and the human touch don't conflict, but they change

right there. No longer do we have people doing as much sort of manual information manipulation as as in say, ten years ago. Let's focus on the consumer side first. So you have excellent X number of events. What do you do is the what do you do as a company to encourage me to buy a ticket other than send me an email? Is there marketing in the emails or any science in that they'll say, oh, this makes

it more attractive. Well, every email isn't, like I said, as individual, so that the email part of it is um is designed to respond to what you do. But in the same way. The app and the website do this do the exact same thing, So your experience of both the website and the app are also individualized based on the same matchmaker technology. That's one thing. I think.

The other thing is that, you know, one of the things that I'm happiest about is that we are able to bring to people's attention awesome events that they just wouldn't know about. I mean, give us a couple of examples. Yeah, I think of a couple of recent ones that you know, they're they're actually there was a whole serie. You may have seen this at some point. Do you see any of the for the record shows at the Rockwell Stages

in in in l A. No, I did not. It was a really great series of shows and there's still some shows that are going on there. And Shane Shield as the producer, really creative, sort of young, you know producer. Uh. These are shows that happened in a kind of a bar restaurant environment. They were these immersive shows where the performers were singing and performing all around you. And they would take something like the movies of John Hughes and they would do a little scene and in a song

from one of the John Hughes movies. And these are shows that, again you never heard of them, but they brought in really really high caliber performers and just did an amazing fun show. Um wasn't I mean they were full, right, I mean we we helped really people. And so how big were the venues? How many tickets were available at large? I think probably there were two or three hundred. I'm

just thinking back to the venue. They brought two or three hundred people who could be seated there, Okay, And how many tickets of the two or three hundred did gold Stars cell do you think? Um? I'm sure it varied, but I know there are nights when we sold fifty or seventy five of those. Okay, So to be in this particular case, this producer did not have a previous history with gold Star correct at some point? Yeah, I mean,

so how would they hook up with gold Star. We're pretty well known just out there in the industry, I would say, as a place where you're going to find a live entertainment audience. And so that's one thing, you know, where we put out every possible you know, feeler that we can to to make it easy for people to come in. But of course, what we do have people doing our venue team is looking around and saying, okay,

what's going on? You know, So we try to have people who have a real interest or curiosity about just what's happening in the places where they're serving um, and they go look at that. That sounds good? I mean that that's I think often where it starts as someone goes, oh, I want to go to that, you know, and as soon as you have that impulse of what I want to go to that, well, it's like, well then don't you think maybe there's a few hundred other people who

want to go to that? And so they'll they'll reach out and to the producer. They'll do some research and find out who's behind a certain show or a certain event and say, hey, you should, really, you know, put this on gold Star are and you can reach our vast you know, live entertainment audience. How many people are on are signed up ACT and are active in Los Angeles? About a million? Okay, so let's focus it once more on the consumer side. You have this for the record event.

Can you name another event that you brought attention to him? Sure, Um, there have been, Uh, let me think of a couple of We do a lot of theater and I think you know that too, that there have been some theater events that, um, for some reason are eluding me at the moment. But there's a there's a theater event in Burbank right now at the Gary Marshall Theater. Really interesting and I would just editorialize this is part of the

TV Academy. That's the theater. It's actually just Gary Marshall's project that he started some years ago before he died. Is a really small theater, beautifully done as you'd imagine, and he passed away a few years ago. But but this is one of his projects. He wanted to create a really attractive, you know, small theater space and has done great work, just great work there over the years in a really small setting that's just you know, nicely done,

great environment, etcetera. And there's a show there right now or may have just recently closed called wood Boy dog Fish and it is a really odd, very very well staged poppetry and immersive experience with a lot of technology. And we send a lot of people to it. I mean, it's a it's certainly an event that you probably have to be a theater person to really but but you could also easily miss it. Even even as a big theater fan, you can easily miss it. But we sent

a lot of people to it. And I'm just telling you it's done at an extremely high level of quality. Uh. And it's done, and it's done well. It's just that, you know, our audience is you know, coal for the fire of their success. Let's go to the other extreme. These are events the average person would miss. That's right. How about a major event that I want to ticket.

To give me an example, just use an example of something at the Forum the Greek Hollywood Bowl for us, we have a lot of that content, but where we don't see our role as being and and maybe the overtime this could change, but we don't see our role as being um a major player and where you go to for sure find that right. So if you if you want to be able to buy anything that's at the Hollywood Bowl, we we think you're probably going to

be able to find that, right. I mean, Google is if you know exactly what you want at a major, major venue, your your best tool is Google in most cases, So we don't we don't. We're happy to provide that. And one of the reasons that we have inventory at full price in many cases is because we know that we're the place where a lot of people do their ticket buying, so we wanted to be available for them.

But we don't see it as um. We don't see it as sort of our mission to make sure we have every single thing in those in those big venues. But let's say you know the Hollywood Bowl which plays over the summer. There are two different promoters there, one Live Nation, one the Philharmonic of the Let's call it a hundred shows over the summer. How many do you think would be on gold Start? You said, and with those fifty tend to be full price. I mean, in those cases with a really big venue would tend to

be a combination at price points. So even with the within the same you know, as you know that there's never any trouble selling right up front, right way far back at the Hollywood back, or oftentimes it's in the middle where it gets a little mushy, and just the

bowl issue. It's everywhere, right, the low price is attractive to people, the best seats are attractive to people, and where it gets a little mushy in general in the industry is that sort of middle point where it's not always easy to find the exact match of price and seat um. And so the bigger the venue, the higher that's, the more likely that is to be true. Right, the more complex the pricing. Okay, let's switch completely to the

producers side. So when gold Star started, which was what two thousand two, the image and you can tell whether it's reality, was this is a place to sell discount tickets. And let's use concert promoters as a classic example. They did not not want their tickets discounted. They didn't want the image and the value of the product to be do devalued. Is that an accurate description? I think it is. Yes, I think I think that's an accurate description of the

thought process in general about pricing in two thousand and two. Okay, so how did you deal with that change that, you know, interact with that. I think that we were onto something in the in the meta sense when we started the company in two thousand and two, which is that pricing would become more complex and more important in the live entertainment business than it was in the pre really the pre web era, go back to whenever prices were very

simple relative price structures. You know, we're very simple relative to today obviously, and and pretty damn hard to change, right, I mean it was, you know, whether it's because of the hard tickets or you printed posters that had prices or whatever, it was, changing price was difficult. Well, now of course it's easier all the time. You know, it's

just progressively easier. And what I think you see if you just look at the history of what computer technology has done with different industries, is it says, well, listen, prices a lever. Price is a lever that can change demand, can can change perception, can can change your business results in a way that's profound. It's one of the biggest levers in business. And so you can't really afford as an industry or an individual, you know, player within the

industry to ignore price. You have to take full advantage of it um and so I think we knew that was one of the intuitions that we had about where live entertainment was as an industry when we started the business, which is just like, there's so little ability to change and move price that it's needed, you know. And and the first one that was kind of obvious was, hey,

sometimes shows and sell out. So maybe if we made more people aware of them and used price as a motivator to really get them off the you know, out of that little rut and into actual ticket buying action, it'll work. And so that's how it started. So walk me through how long it took you to invade all these traditional players and how you ultimately convinced them to act differently and use your service. I mean it was a gradual process. I mean, we we were a bootstrapped organization,

so we really operated lean for for many years. I Mean, in some ways, I feel like our heritage as a bootstrapped organization is still part of how we behave today. UM. But we were strictly in l A for a couple of years and then added west coast cities and then went back east in two thousand six and seven. So it really took us a while to sort of move

out from from the base um our. Our initial success or, our initial audience was in theater and performing arts, because they're so many of those events, you know, and they really perceived a need to build audience, which is correct, um for anybody, it's correct. But so it probably when we started talking about more complex pricing and started to crack into UM music in particular, it probably took six or seven years to really start to say, listen, this

is an audience of some scale. You know, it's not the biggest audience in the world. There's millions of people focused on one thing, which is live entertainment, and we can do a lot of different things with price and promotion. By the way, I mean, I don't know that anybody promotes live entertainment sort of as as fervently as we do, right Like, we're constantly, you know, promoting in a whole

bunch of different ways, UM. And so you want to be part of that, right, Like, our our argument was this is the kind of media that you would spend real money for. You don't have to because this performance based and we're here to help you find what part of our audience can will benefit your business. We'll take a quick break and come back with more of my conversation with gold Star CEO and founder Jim McCarthy, recorded

live at the tune In Studios in Venice, California. Most of the time I talked to musicians like Moby or managers like Chef Gordon, but I also really love getting the stories of the executives in and around the music industry, like Jim. Whether you come for the music, the tech business, or otherwise. Be the first year next week's episode by subscribing to the podcast on tune in, Apple Podcast, or your podcast player of choice. While you're there, please rate

and review the podcast. Okay, let's get back to my conversation with Jim McCarthy. Okay, well, we know each other, but for the sake of the audience, you're originally from. I grew up in South Carolina. South Carolina. You know, how come you don't have an act set? Uh? Well, you know it's funny. I was a DJ at a radio station at home when I was in high school. That was my my high school job. And I was listening to this is a professional station? Yeah, well you know, yes,

it was Yeah. It was like, you know, you're a guy. I could ask this, how old are you today? I'm okay, so we're talking. You're a d J in the eighties and yeah, like eighties, eight six seven. Yeah, And we had there was a little AM station that had a you know, probably a nice forty mile radius, and then we also did a satellite FM station that all we

had to do is monitor it. But on the AM station, I literally was spenning the records, literally getting to the office an hour before my shift and pulling records down from the uh the collection and you know, planning out my my shift and everything. But uh and then you know, potting up the commercials and you know, the station identification ABC News at the top of the hour and all the rest of that stuff. Well, how did you get

that gig? Because I was the UH in the super Nerdy Broadcast club in my high school and we made a radio show every week for our high school, which was fun. Was just the most fun thing in my week of course, and uh and so we were we actually made it at this radio station. They very kindly allowed us to uh to use their studio to make the record, to make the radio show once a week. And so somebody said, hey, you know there's there's this weekend um DJ who's leaving? You know you sound pretty good?

Why don't you? Would you be interested in this? I was like, hell, yeah, I'm interested in this. You know, in high school your job options are few. But you know I didn't get and get paid diddly squad. But I mean, come on, you know, of all the things you could be doing as a high school job, that's pretty good. Well, how much were you on the radio

in a week? I was on usually for one or two shifts, So I would be on either a Saturday morning from sort of eight to twelve when no one else wanted to work no one else wanted to work, or even worse, from eight to twelve pm on Saturday evening when nobody When I went to college, I remember I was on the college radios. I had, you know, the morning on Saturday no one else wanted the already was people listened because they wake up and they listened

to the station. Absolutely, so that was a lot of fun. I mean, you know, that's just um. I didn't care when it was right, I was. I was so happy to be there and it was what do they call it? Not adult alternative? It was it was sort of a slightly on hip pop station, do you know what I mean? Um? But I of course had strong enough taste in music to be able to carve out a pretty cool set, you know, within the range. Okay, you're in South Carolina.

What do your parents do for a living? My father was a meteorologist in the Air Force meteat what is that? What do you actually do if you're a meteorologist? Well, I mean the Air Force depends on whether right, So you have to constantly make observations and forecasts so that the planes can either fly or not fly, or they're aware of whatever dangers there there might be out there. Okay, And your mother worked in the home, yes, okay, But

was he from South Carolina? No? No, we actually lived on most of the time, lived on an Air Force base in South Carolina, which is part of why I don't really have And I was gonna get back to that, yeah, because you know, it had this wonderful benefit of having this extremely cosmopolitan little island in the middle of South Carolina.

So I head so both you know, both influences. Um. But you know, an air Force base is I mean, it's just one of the most cosmopolitan places you can imagine because people are literally from everywhere, um, both around the country and also around the world, because people go overseas, they get married, they bring wives and I guess husband's back you know, to the states, and cultures mix and it's really interesting. Okay. And this was a public school you were going to? Yeah, oh yeah, okay. And did

you live in government housing? There were times when we lived on base, which is base housing. If you've spent a lot of time around military people, I have not. Yeah, so yeah, when you're in the military, which was true for part of my childhood. So he was literally in the middlitary I know, he was you know, you know, wearing a uniform of work and all that, all that kind of stuff. Um. And yeah, we lived in base housing for some of my childhood, not all. And then

how long was he in the military. He retired. It did not work again, I made a long career or do you have a second No, he was very young when he retired. I mean that's you know, that's one of the perks of the military, as you retire when you're forty and take your pension and go do something else. So did he do something? Oh yeah, yeah, he he continued, actually with meteorology. Um, okay, And there are how many kids in your family? I have two younger brothers, so

you're the older. I'm the oldest. Now you end up probably not a surprise to you, but you end up going to Harvard. Did where did your father and mother go to college? Well? Neither of them went to college? Really? Yeah, so you were did they Were they pushing you? Were they tiger parents? Well? There was unfortunately little more disorder in my family situation than if you were listening up

to now then you would probably pick up on. But my mother was one of these single, single ish mothers at least part of the time, just did a heroic job with me and my brothers. Do you know it just to be clear, because your father was out on on the road. Well, they got divorced and there was just this this chaos in in the was they got divorced, but then they got back together. Okay, So how old were they when you got divorced? Okay, relatively young? Yeah, yeah.

And did either of them get remarried? They both did, and there are other children, um no, no, no other children from from those subsequent Okay, so when your parents get divorced, you continue to live in South Carolina because and funnily enough, my my grandfather retired at the same Air Force base and so a little nexus of families sort of grew up in that area around there. Okay,

so your mother is a single mother. Yeah, yes, And so you were telling the story, well, just that her her effort in keeping the three of us on track in life, I would put down as being heroic, you know, in the sense that she didn't really have it. She was very young, my mother's my mother's was seventeen when

I was born. Yeah, so she didn't really have, you know, this huge background of knowing, you know, what college do, none of that, right, She just had a very strong focus on making sure that that we, you know, stayed on the straight and narrow and most importantly, like, be a good person, go to college, and then it's up to you. Like this was really her mantra for Okay, Well, Harvard is at the pinnacle of the America's educational system. At what point did you realize in your career that

you were on that track? Um? I mean, you know, I'm sure the ball could have bounced the other way and never to end up someplace you know, awful like Yale. But um, you know it was. It was fairly early on in my school career though. I just was getting good grades. And I think when you get to the point, you know, an early high school or junior high where you realize, okay, my future is largely gonna be it's gonna be reshaped in a few years by going somewhere

for college. Um. And so my logic was just the same as somebody who maybe realizes they're a really good basketball player, are really good, you know, It's like, Okay, this is an opportunity. You know, this is an opportunity to to level up my set of possibilities. So I'm gonna take it super seriously. So it took getting the kind of credentials and everything putting myself in a position to go, whether it's Harvard or even Yale, but you know wherever, right, Um, that's my last shot at Yale

for the of the day. Um. But what you know, whatever kind of place right that that I knew that that would mean a lot for me in terms of my my my view of the field, you know what I mean. Okay, Now, you have two siblings. We've discussed it before. One one got into a boy band, that's right. But did they go to college? Uh? He did not. He did not, but he is uh, super talented and you know, his college essentially was touring the world as part of a boy band. And for those listening intently,

the name of that boy band, no authority? Okay, Tommy, Tommy McCarthy. And then your other sibling, yeah, o, our brother, Jason is a general contractor building houses extremely successfully in um in Policy's Island, South Carolina. Did he go to college? He did? Yeah. In fact, he he went to uh the University of South Carolina, and then he got his master's degree in I think the degree is in education. But he was for a period of time a a counselor in the high school. Okay, so you go to Harvard.

Harvard is need blind such that if you don't have the money, they give you the money. I assume you've got some kind of scholarship tons. No, you know, I think it's one of the as as a you know, Harvard alum and interviewer, and that I just want to say, no, one should not apply to Harvard or and there's others, you know, many other schools because of the anny side.

This is one of the saddest things to me when people actually who might qualify might end up, you know, getting access to one of these places and doesn't apply because they make some assumptions about, oh, it's too expensible. Yeah, it's super expensive. But almost nobody pays for Harvard, at least in full. And certainly you know, Harvard and Yale and Stanford and several other schools of that nature have have made very specific statements of like, hey, if your

family incomes below this, you're not paying a dime. You know, it doesn't well as they say, they call it need blind such, if you can get in on the criteria of academics whatever, they will give you the money. If they you don't have it, that's right, And I think it's wonderful. And so when you went to Harvard, did you have to pay it all? Yeah, we had a little they go through. They went through and make a

little assessment of what you have to pay. I think if I had been their post the new policy and the mid two thousand's, I wouldn't paid anything. But at that point they were still okay. But you go to Boston and it's well established that a great percentage of the student body goes to prep school comes from wealthy families. Do you feel like a fish out of water? I felt like a fish out of water in a good way,

I really did. Like That way was that I felt that I had a somewhat broader kind of experience of of life than some of the people that I met. And by the way, I mean most of the people who went to you know, their and over and in these places that I really enjoyed them, you know. But I but I felt like I first of all, didn't

feel I was at an educational disadvantage. Um but I'm not sure why, but I but I've never felt like, oh my god, I'm just you know, I'm like a I'm like a Volkswagen Beetle in a race with Ferrari. It never felt that. And secondly, I felt that because of all the kind of odd things, not odd but just slightly unusual things in my background, that I actually had a kind of like I could see things going

on in the world that not everybody could see. You know, we were young, so you get life experience, you learned. So I had a little I guess, head start sort of the life experience side compared to some of them. So I saw it, you know, as a somewhat of a positive. And you know, Harvard Business School, which is certainly different from undergrad they have a lot of extracurricular activities that cost a lot of money. So when you were there, did you feel, which was not the business school,

did you feel you could participate? You had enough wealth to be able to do that. I think it those in those days, the imfas it was certainly different from the business school as you as you say, but in those days, I mean, you know, I had enough money to go to Pinocchios and have a slice, and you know, it was never you know, if we want to go to Boston, and I think it was a little different in those days. I think that was it wasn't an issue.

And what did you study? By the way, the other thing is, you know, you you get a job, you work eight or ten hours a week, and then you've got, you know, some money in your pocket. Like in the cafeteria, one of those cool jobs. Did you have to do that for your uh? For your wasn't required? No? Was, it wasn't required to Could I moved for an ure and you know, did a few other things like that? It was it was fine pocket money. So what did you study at Harvard? English? Okay? And as you can,

I speak English? And you graduate in what year? And then you think what, uh, I'm trying to remember what my mindset was at the time. I remember thinking this is the fish out of water moment when you're senior in college then and now. But you know, in a certain kind of school, they at the beginning of the year, I'm sure you remember this, they say, hey, here's this recruiting process. Don't worry, you're gonna have a job when you you know, at the end of I went to

College of the Dark Ages. Okay, nobody I know what there were recruiters at some point, but though all right, So there's this process and it's very organized and it continues to this day where at the beginning of senior maybe even junior year, they say, Okay, here's what it's

gonna be. On this date. These people come in and they meet you, and then you spend points to interviews with mackenzie or with you know, Boston Consulting Group or whatever um and they have big you know fares where you come in and you see like, here are all

the things, all the career of things. And so I went to these career things and it was basically and I'm not kidding here here management consulting, you know, like McKenzie, and then accounting like big, big what six or whatever it was at the time, some little smidgeon of real estate and the Peace Corps. And I just like, yeah, it's bad when the one I'm most interested in his Peace Corps, right, Like, I don't want to do any

of this stuff. So I really I think I had that moment that a lot of young people have, which is what are there and you know what jobs are there? You know, I had no idea that's where whereas other people were confidently like buying really nice suits and you know, interviewing with McKenzie and going through those problems where they ask you how many gas stations there are in the United States and all that stuff, like I don't want to talk about that with these guys. So what did

you do? So I, Um, I went to Japan and Japan doing what I taught English in Japan was that part of the Peace Corps. No, I didn't do the Peace Corps. That was just how did you get a gig teachings. So the woman UM, wonderful woman who owns a little English language school and Yamagucci Prefecture in Japan, came to Harvard every year as part of this process.

She hired one of my best friends and he went over there, um just right after we graduated, like a couple of months later, he was there and so I sort of, I don't know, skulket around for a few months trying to figure out what in the world I was gonna do. UM, and he said, well, you should consider doing this because the other slot in our little branch of the school just opened up. We'll have a

great time. Let me tell you more about it. And I thought, and this is a very mature thought for a person of my age at the time, one of the few ones I guess where. I thought, when will it ever be easier for me to just put all my stuff in a bag and fly to the other side of the world and just live for a while. And the answer was probably never, so maybe I had to do this, so I so I did. So how long were you there? I was actually there for two

and a half years. So I thought I was gonna be there for the one year contract and uh ended up there for two and a half year. And where is this place in Japan? So, Yamaguchi Prefecture is on the main island, Honsho, the main island, but it's way down at the at the southern tips. So if you can imagine the geography of Japan's just kind of like there's the four major islands, the big island down in the south. And so how far are you from a

city that we've heard of? Uh, well we are about yam Gucci is about a one hour train ride from Hidoshima, which you And so did you learn Japanese? I learned. I love to take you to learn Japanese. I mean it's a question of degree of course, but I mean I was pretty conversant in about a year. Uh, And by the time I left, I was, if not fluent, near fluent. And then you can you still speaking I can still speak it, but I'm super rusty like that.

You know, there are times and just words if I try to speak just did you take classes or did you just pick it up as it went on. I was kind of a self taught Japanese speaker with the great thing about learning a language when you live in the country is you can just learn it in a sort of academic way. You know, sit down with the book and go, okay, so listen, and then just immediately

put it into practice. And you the feedback is what, like, you say something, people go that doesn't mean anything, and so you you learn, you know, rapidly, as opposed to in a classroom setting where for all you know, you know what you're saying. What about the alphabet? The alphabet is different. Yeah, it's really complicated and can you write uh and read? Yeah? I mean, at at my peak, I was literate at the sort of seventh or eighth grade level. Um, so I'm sure I'm well into the

elementary school years at this point. Okay, so you pay your two and a half years of dues there. Yeah, it was great, and then how do you decide ultimately I gotta move on. I just think it was one of these things where, you know, my ambition in life was not to be an English teacher, even though it was fun. You know, it was a great for me, that was and it was a great opportunity, um for

for all those reasons. But you know, there's this thing that happens, and I think this is true in Japan, it's true and other parts of you know, the world, and you have ex pats who they do something like they go somewhere for a year like my plan was, and the next thing they know, they're forty right, right, you know what I mean. It's just it's so much you know, it can be so much fun, and there's a kind of like you're in a magical bubble from

from real life in those settings. In many cases. You know, this is not a perfect analogy, but when I was living in Utah after I graduate from college and I was there the secondary, I said, if I don't leave now the rest of my life, I think it's exactly the same. You know, it's exactly the same. Um. And it's funny because when you when you live in a place like Japan outside of Tokyo or Osaka, the really big cities, you also get the added bonus of having

this kind of weird celebrity. So you know, just being an American in the town that I grew up and meant that I was constantly being sort of greeted and and taking out for drinks and dinner and stuff like that. So you get that thrown in, and so you can imagine how you could get a little hooked on that, you know what I mean, without actually doing anything of

any real value, you know. Okay, So the thought process and the ultimate decision to leave, Yeah, it was just it's time for me to actually make a contribution to the world, as opposed to I mean, not that I wasn't making a contribution, but you know, anyway, it was it was certainly time to do something else. Um, I definitely had ambitions to do other stuff. And so what

did you do? Well? I went. So I thought to myself, I can go I'm gonna go home, but I can go anywhere, home being just the United States, right, And my very sort of unscientific thought process was, well, I should go to California. And if I think about it now,

the probably two reasons for that that worked together. One is it's where interesting stuff was happening, and two it's warm, because for me warm it was South Carolina important anywhere, Boston some of the worst weather anywhere yeah, that's right. The in fact, I remember the moment in my uh, in my time in Boston, UM that I decided, you know, I've had enough of this. I was. I used to do this job. I loved it. Actually it was great.

I had this UM, this old international harvester truck, UM and I would meet There was a weekly student paper that got delivered that they printed it in the outs in the like the suburbs of Boston, drove it in at like five in the morning, and I drove my truck, met this guy. We loaded all the papers onto the truck and then I drove him around campus and dropped him off in all the little places where you pick up the free student paper. That was my job. That's awesome, UM.

But it meant that I had to get up really early in the morning. And so it's February of my senior year or something like that, and I'm up at five o'clock. And you remember how these old trucks were where you gotta let them warm up for a while. And you you grew up in the north too, so you remember this, you know. And I'm scraping the ice off the front of this this truck, and I'm sitting there freezing, you know, it's whatever below zero and I and I remember it was like it was like something.

It's like a tone, you know, rang or a breeze washed over me. And I was like, Oh, I don't have to do this. I've had enough to go. Where the weather suit your clothes. That's right, you're listening to my conversation with gold Star CEO and founder Jim McCarthy, recorded live at the tune In Studios in Venice, California. I hope you're enjoying this episode of the Bob Left

Sets podcast. If you want to see videos, photos, and sound bites from Jim and the rest of my guests because they join me in the studio, visit at tune in on Twitter, Facebook, and into agree on Now. More of my conversation with Jim McCarthy on the Bob Left Sets podcast. So he decided to go to California. I decided to go to California, went to the Bay Area without a job. You're just going without a job. Good buddy of mine from college was actually at the Livermore

Lab as a laser physicist. UM, and so he let me sort of sofa surf for a while. UM. And my the sole direction of my ambition at that time was I think maybe I should be in business when we really I thought, you know, like this because and what's interesting about that is that you could living in Japan at that time, you could actually see what prosperous, successful businesses have done for this country. You know, you could actually still see evidence of the old Japan in

a way. Right, Like one of my friends in Japan said at that in the nineties that Japan was like the house of somebody who won the lottery. So you can still see that, like it was the same house, right, you can still see their life before they won the lottery, but now you know, and they worked hard for the lottery. But you know whatever, I don't know that metaphor doesn't really hold up, but you get my point. Or you can actually see the sort of um challenges and poverty

that Japan had come out of relatively quickly. And so my thought was, well, this is a sort of prosperity engine that society's need to put to use as best they can. So I was excited about technology and you know, um business as a tool for everybody being more prosperous. So what job did you actually get or what business you start? So I didn't start a business right away, Um, but I went to work for Noah's Bagels. How do you get a job at Noah's Bagels. They're not recruiting

in your off campus already. I mean, I'm two years out of school at this point, so no one cares what I do, right, So so I went. I went into Noah's Bagels as a store manager. So I but a little bit slower. You're reading the news, pay pretty, you say, oh, no, those big als looking for people. Well, so at that time, Noah's was the hottest restaurant concept in the Bay Area and really all over California, So you didn't have to look far to encounter the idea

of people being excited about it. And the closer I looked, no alper was. It wasn't as a real guy who just had some very innovative ideas about what business should be and ran the business to those ideals, and it was really working. It's just super duper working. So how did you literally get the job? So I literally got

the job by by. I don't know if I actually applied sent in an application, or if I called I know, I called I don't know whether I applied and then called or you know which order I did that in. But it was really a question of just saying, hey, I'm interested in this, and I had to kind of wade through the skepticism of like, really you why, why would you be interested in this? And I said, no, no, I'm interested in it because of what you all are doing as a business. I want to be around a

high growth business. I want to see what you know. If I can't run, you know, a bakery or bagel store, what makes me think I can run anything? Right? So they thought you were overqualified. They just thought I wouldn't stay if they gave me a job, um, And so I convinced them to do it. And you know, it was an adjustment of just like I didn't know the business at all, okay, but they immediately make you manager

of a store. Yeah, it's a there's a program for that, right like this, I don't know, this is like the training program. Yeah, yeah, exactly. At the time you worked out how many Noah's bagels were there? They were thirteen when I started, okay, so relatively small. How many of there today? Well, at the peak, I think they were a hundred and fifty. I'm not sure how many arts.

Is that a public company at this point? It was bought in a little later on by Einstein's Bagels, So that is what went public, you know, not too long after that. Um. And then now I'm not sure if they're public if someone's taking himself. How long was he still involved? Noah sold the business to yeah, and then he was out and then and he was sort of a spiritual figure. But but he wasn't like Ben and Jerry over at the ice cream Pie. Yeah, so he was. He is a lot like Ben and Jerry. Ben and Jerry.

So you gotta work the Noah's Bagels. How long is the training program? I think I was a trainee for two months and then you get your own store, which is weird. It was in Berkeley, Okay, and you go to work and go, I'm digging this or what the funk am I doing? It was a little both because you know, this is also a time when on Sunday morning on Solano Avenue in Berkeley, UM, the lobby would fill by seven am, and people would wait for to to order their bagels for two I'm not getting two

hours sometimes And it wasn't because we were slow. We were just mobbed with people, and this is true several of the big Noah's around the Bay area. Um. And there were times when I just thought, like, what have I gotten myself into here? Um. But on the other hand, you know, a lot of that sort of actual contact with customers and the importance of how you guide and direct people that work for you, all of that stuff. I just it was very much there to be learned.

How many people were working for you at that time. I think we had fourty or fifty employees at the store, not all that, of course, a lot of people. And how many hours a week did you have to work. I don't think I had a set number of hours, but I was there five or six days a week for you know, twelve hours however long it was. Yeah. So, but when they gave you the gig, they did the management trainee, and you're now going to run your own noise. Is there a promise or if you do well, there's

something in the future. No, not specifically, but I knew that there would be because my my sense was that the growth of this business, and they were very you know, upfront about the growth plans for the business. That the growth of the business was obviously going to necessitate different kinds of things being needed soon, right, And actually I left the store about six months later and came to l A to open the l A market with as part of the management team they sent down here to

do that. And that was how many people. It was three people, initially me and the guy who ran the region, and then the UM I guess it was just the district whose operations manager. I was brought as the training and HR and etcetera manager. So it was really there was the three of us coming down here to open what was going to be way larger than the home market the Bay areas because just because of the size,

you know, of the and so you did that. How long were you with know as Bagels all told three years? Three years? Okay, so after you're the training person, is there another gig? Yeah? I just kept picking up more responsibility within the l A market. Are you making any money? Not of any appreciable amount? I mean, the good thing was we went public and so we made a little money from that. And you know, it wasn't certainly wasn't

a money based thing. I mean, for me, I felt like I was making great money at the time, you know what I mean, Like suddenly I wasn't totally broke, you know. Okay, so you do that for three years, how do you decide to move on? Um? This is actually really one of these interesting stories that I don't know how I'm so personally involved in this, But there was a period of time, just two or three months where Noah's there was this crazy collapse in the culture

that Noah's. And you may or may not remember this, if I know you were here at the time, Bob, Noah's was a kosher keeping shop. So we had sixties seventy eight whatever restaurants up and down the West Coast that were under rabbinical supervision. And I say this like you know and Irish, Irish, Italian American, like you know

what I know about it? But I knew a lot about it at the time, right we I when I ran the store in Berkeley, I had a chat with the rabbi every single week, you know, and he'd walked through the store and um, but um uh. The decision was made. The ownership changed a couple of times, and the decision was made to walk back from the kosher certification.

And it was like you know, like Pavlov's Bell or something to where a lot of the people who really believed in Noah's as this somewhat better thing than just we're just slinging bagels. It's left over the course of about this. So the upper middle, that's that's where everything

stands or falls into. Companies typically is the sort of upper middle we all left over about three months because you know, you you have stories for years people coming in and saying, we used to have to carry suitcases full of food when we traveled, but because Noah's was there, we knew that we didn't have to, you know, um,

but now we do. And so you know, it's the kind of thing where somebody looks at a spreadsheet and says, only seven percent of our customers keep kosher, so if we can increase sales from the other by more than seven percent or whatever, the math is, Hey, you know, Bob's your uncle and no, no pun intended, But I mean, of course it doesn't work that way at all, right, because there are a lot of people who don't keep kosher, but who who liked that We did you know that

that mattered, that that signified something, um, And the minute we didn't stand for that, well, what did we stand for? And the same thing with it with the staff, right, the staff would would go like, you've been saying all this time that this matters. You know, you've been saying all this time that there's something we're about here, and now you're saying, well, never mind, we're gonna do turkey

and cheese sandwiches. And it really was a kind of cultural collapse that happened to her a very short period of time. Okay, so it collapsed on the inside on the business side, did it also collapse in terms of business, in terms of SUSTO per side, Yeah, it did. I mean there were certain stores where their sales dropped. We didn't collapse entirely, but there were certain stores where business dropped by more and they really the forward momentum of

the company basically came to an end. And so what how did you decide to leave? UM? I think it was you know that that was one of my reasons for staying not kosher per se, obviously because I definitely don't keep kosher um, but um, but because you know that the sort of magic of that had clearly sort of left the building. UM, and all of this is back justification, I guess. But the other thing is that, um,

I was in business school at the time. Where was this at the Anderson School U c l A. Now is that an executive program or a full time prob I was in what's called the fully employed NBA so FEMBA. So it was three years to do two years. Okay, so it's just like the regular school whatever. How did you decide to go to business school? Well, so, as I was in business and I thought to myself, there's

two way is to learn more about this. There's go do these jobs for a few years, or you can kind of I wasn't so foolish as to think that I could really no accounting or really but I know that in a business school saying I can at least understand the vocabulary of those things. Right. So, and did those pay for that, No, they didn't pay for it, but they they enabled it. They they allowed me to sort of work around the schedule and that kind of thing,

which was nice. And at the time, were you married. Wow, that's difficult, okay, so you will you finish up with school of the Anderson about the same time as this change from Kosher, about halfway through about halfway through. But in the course of being at Anderson, I um got super interested in this thing called the Internet, which was emerging at the time. So this is nineties seven, and I think my my thought process was as deep as, you know, this is probably gonna be something that I

should look into, you know. So as I left Noah's um and I thought, you know, this is a nice moment of reset for me. I can kind of pick a direction. You know, I've got some credible experience, but also, you know, I'm in school, so let's try something else. So I actually went to work at Geo Cities, which was just down the street from where we're sitting right in New Yo. Cities was it was so called portal

where you could build your own website. It was it was one of the very first places where you could build your own website. And it was free, which was a you know, incredibly bold idea at the time, you know, free website, Imagine that. And we had, um millions and millions of people who did that. So I drove from Pasadena down down here every day for for a while, which was pretty miserable, but it was a great experience in the Internet. And how long did you work for

geo Cities. I worked for geo Cities until it was sold to Yahoo in and then what And then I joined a group of people not as a founder but as a day one employee who started an e commerce startup in right in the middle of the dot com and that was it was called Keiko. What did that do? Keiko? The concept of Kiko was that we we were going to set up a system whereby um people could create educational content and you could map that to an individual student.

They would do lessons and earn prizes from their parents, and their parents would sign them up. They learned stuff, they'd earned credits or whatever and uh, and they'd get rewarded for it. Pele say, that didn't work out. It didn't work out. So how long were you there? I was there until two thousand and two, just before Okay, so the next step was gold Star. Yes, so talk to us about talk to us about the start of gold Star. The start of gold Star was really born

in the long drive between Pasadena and Long Beach. Uh. My other two co founders, Robert and rich Um, Are they still involved in the company. Yeah. Every day every day we drove. We all worked at kick together and drove the long drive down to Long Beach and sort of started talking about concepts and really struck upon this one and eventually what was the original concept? The original concept was not that far off the core concept that it that it is today, which is there's there's shows

that need people, and there's people that need shows. And if you think about it, going back to to two thousand and two, two thousand and one, Um, if you were a promoter and it was a week before a show, you didn't have that many options. You know, your marketing bullets had been fired, right, Um, but we knew that we could do something about that if we got in At the time, specifically, it was very much about email. We could customize the email at least in a crude way.

We could at least say well you like music, here's music, you know, and and move very fast. So was there a lightbulb moment in the car or it just evolved evolved? I mean it really did. Okay, So how long did you talk about it? Decide we're going to do it? You know, we had those conversations that I think people have where you know, one day we're gonna do it our way. You know that those whenever you're frustrated with

what other people are doing that you're going along with. Right, So evolved from those kinds of you know, general gripe sessions and probably you know two thirds ps. Two. As we got to the point where all of us were clear that we were going to leave Kiko because it just you know, wasn't going the direction that we thought it should go, or that we hoped it would go whatever, we started thinking, Okay, what could we really do? What could we really do? Um? And so in fall of

two thousand and one, we started business planning gold Star. Okay, so to start gold Star, what do you do for money? We didn't spend any So you didn't take any investment? No, no, And at this late date, are you interested in selling the old Star? Uh? Could could be? Could be? I mean, anybody anybody who starts a busin this that has ongoing value, that doesn't rely on them coming into work every day

has to think that way, right. It's just it's just something that you know, if you create residual value in the business, you have to be open to the possibility that one day you're not the best owner for it. Okay, So you start the business in two thousand two in Los Angeles, and it's totally bootstrapped on everybody's you know, money in the bank. Yep, Okay, how long after you

started doesn't launch? Uh? Well let's see. So we we firmly decided to to do gold Star on Halloween of two thousand and one, and we launched on Valentine's Day of two thousand two. Wow, well who did all the programming? And so you know how to do that? Well? So we all there were various parts of that. So before anyone thinks I know how to do any of that, I don't. However, what I do I do know that each of us was able to do the parts of it that made a difference. So Robert, who's the CTO today,

built everything. We we leaned on our I like to say, we tom sawyered our Internet friends and helping us with things like design. Right. We we hey, you want to help us do this thing? And they did, and you know we cut them in on the on the company later on. So it launches in Valentine's Day. How do you get your reach? How do you market? Yeah? That that's I like to say. We started with nobody to sell to and nothing to sell. So that's it's that

two sided marketplace problem. Right, Hey, everybody, come on down a gold star, because we got nothing to sell. And you, in this interim, certainly between Halloween and Valentine's Day, did you say to yourself, we're gonna need events, We're gonna need people to go. Yeah, salespeople. We definitely did, and and we did those things. But you know, it's like it's like the flywheel effect in reverse, right, It's it's

the inertia of not having anything. And so the one thing we had was we had credibility, right we we could demonstrate that we knew we were talking about. Not with live events, we didn't know anything about that, but with the technology and the way that you market online and stuff like that, we could say like, we've done these things, you know, and we just didn't come across as idiots, right, So we would go to venues and promoters and say trust us, because there's nothing for you

to lose if it doesn't work, you know. And you know that that wasn't necessarily an easy sell, but it was just one of these things where you have to build it a little bit at a time. Um, And really it was a question of you gotta have some inventory, you don't have anything. So the inventory had to run ahead of the audience a little bit. But then we had to find ways to get the audience there as

quickly as we could. So what happened, well, one of the things that we did in the early days was we went to big companies which we still had in l A at the time. Um companies like country Wide, Home Loans, earth Link right both not not there anymore, and we said, hey, we can create you a sort of page of event offers, we do a little branding to the company logo and stuff like that, if you

will tell your employees about it. And this was this sounds really lame right now, but at the time it was a very novel idea and so Countrywide um I was very excited about it, and they were like great. So they would send an email to fifteen thousand employees saying, hey, who's this thing? And so the Earthly same same thing.

And so we we did this for long enough that it actually accumulated enough people for the you know, there's sort of yeast to activate, you know, when we started getting this little viral spread right of people doing it, and then we got sales. So then it was easier for us to go get inventory, and the thing just built a little out of times. Okay, well, how long

did it take to you know, start moving? About seven months before I remember the time we we did it was a an event in Orange County called Tatra Zingaro, which was a horse ballet, a French horse ballet, and we just sent an email about it, you know, to whatever our our group of people was, and it just kept selling and selling and selling, so unlike everything we had done up to then, where it was kind of like pumping air into a leaky tire, you know. Oh,

you know, we sold a few, Oh nobody's there. All of a sudden, it just had momentum. Right, people had accumulated in enough numbers that they actually, you know, kept buying it um. And so that was the day that I thought, oh, we've we've actually reached the point where there's a little bit of viral coefficient on what's going on. So did you ever think of giving up? Probably? I don't know. Um, sure of course. And so what have

you learned along the way? Uh? One of the things that I've learned is that everything is difficult, you know, from from the point of view entrepreneur, everything is difficult. Um, I think that it's sometimes tempting too, you know, to think, well, why won't this work? You know, people get ideas. I hear it, you know, hear I hear concepts. I run a meet up for entrepreneurs in Pasadena, and so I hear entrepreneurs every month kind of talk through their their concepts.

And sometimes people get this idea that well, if it's gonna it's gonna work. I mean, that's a given. I'm just trying to figure out whether I want to go for a billion or or you know, you know, and and the and the truth of it is, like it's just nature doesn't care about your success, right. So it's just fundamentally hard for something that doesn't exist to exist

and thrive. It's just not likely, right. And so I think, you know, one of the things that I've gained a tremendous amount of respect for is the difficulty of every little thing, you know what I mean, whether it's you start a podcast and you want to build an audience, it's difficult, right, Like, everything is difficult. And and so that is one of the biggest lessons that we had.

And you can make some things easier with money, but you have all the money in the world, and it doesn't guarantee anything necessarily, right, It's been depending on what you're trying to do. Okay, So if you had this success seven months later with the horse show horse ballet, at what point were you confident this is is rolling, this is my future. Probably a year or two into it. I mean the first thing we had to overcome was

we needed to actually be able to pay ourselves. We had to be able to make a living and where you living off savings, where we were wives working or significant other combination of things, right, Like, there was a little bit of um, you know left you know, we we did projects. You know, we did web development projects and stuff like that. We it was a combination of all kinds of things. We did well, web development projects for other people. Yeah, absolutely, um And it was a

very challenging time. And this is the thing that I say to entrepreneurs all the time is that you know, if you're not prepared for at least a couple of years of a real scrap, you know, a real daily scrap, you're probably not ready. You know, unless you're going into a business where it's essentially the same thing you were doing for somebody else, and it's a professional services kind

of thing where're kind of just transferring your customers. That's different, right, But that's also a business that totally relies on your labor. If you're trying to build a business that you know, you know, I can sit and chat with Bob left Sets for a couple of hours and you know it doesn't affect my business, right. If you're trying to do that, it's it's at least a couple of years. If you're lucky, it's a couple of years of just sweating it out.

You know. We'll pause here for a brief moment and get right back to Jim McCarthy. Many of you already know that I'm a writer. I write about music, media, my life, and the world at large. You can check out my writing at left sets dot com. I'd like to give you a little taste of the podcast from behind the scenes as well. Go to left sets dot com and sign up for the newsletter to read about what you hear and a whole lot more. Now More with gold Star CEO and founder Jim McCarthy, recorded live

at the tune In Studios in Venice, California. One thing I deal with all the time, uh, in the music sphere is people email me and they say, I'm determined to make it. I'm not going to give up, and perseverance is very important, but sometimes people should give up. Yes, I agree with that. So what do you tell the people at the meet up? Uh? This is actually one of the trickiest things to answer because it's absolutely right

and and everybody has a different point. You know, it's hard to tell somebody to put the well being of their family, um at grave risk. How can you tell somebody, right, um,

because at best the odds are against you. Right. So one of the things that I think people could do more as entrepreneurs is find ways to to knock down some of the risk, you know, just little ways to learn how risky their idea is or how good their ideas as quick you know, as quickly and cheaply as they can, so that it's not betting the farm on

something that hasn't been proven at all. But it's just inherently I you know, I don't know that the Churchill quote about never never give up your you know this quote he says, except he says, you know, never give up in the face of I can't remember the exact quote strength of the of the enemy or whatever he says, except two accept to the considerations of good sense or something like that. So people always take that part of the quote out. But I think it's the key part.

It's like, just like information wants to be free. The other half it was, well, just don't remember that. Yeah, but okay, Um, Now, some people become infatuated with building businesses that since you've been with gold Star now for Nexus a fifteen years, that doesn't seem to be your viewpoint. Well, I think if if, if you know, you rebooted my brain and I didn't know who I was, or I didn't know what gold Star was, and I was just exactly the same person, I probably would think I should

start a business, you know what I mean. I think I would probably think automatically, you know what I had to do. I got to start a busin Okay. So you were destined to start a business, and that was my intention. From a career point of view, I felt like there was either either grow a business or start a business. So you know, I spent the first few years of my career in high growth businesses that I didn't start UM and I really learned a lot from that as opposed to being in a kind of static

state business. UM. And so I think all of that it's kind of what I'm sort of oriented to doing. Okay, in a world where everybody seems to build to sell, you have an opposite philosophy. How did you decide to do that? Well, it's not really an opposite full I mean, I think it's worth saying, like, we're not resistant to

the idea. I understand everything is for sale, this tables for sale or right of offer, but there are many people who were saying, I'm gonna do this for a couple of years, I'm gonna at this late date, I'm gonna lay it off on Google, Facebook, etcetera. But you've been doing this a long time, is it because that was never your thought or the offers of the right price never came in offers. We have conversations on a regular basis with with different folks and UM, and they're

always interesting. And I think that probably one day we'll sell the company to somebody and when it makes the most sense. UM. So I don't I think sometimes people think we're resistant to the idea of We're not really, it just needs to make sense, you know. UM. I just think when you build a business, very few people are slick enough to say, you know, I'm just gonna build this thing so that I can just dump it. And I'm just not that smart, I guess, right like,

I don't know how to to build to flip like that. UM. And I don't know how many people are I mean surely there are some, um, But you've got to build a good business. Okay. So at this point in time, how many employees are there a Cold Stars? Okay? So what does it take to move into a new market? Doesn't take much anymore because the technology is such that it's there's a lot of ways in which the UM, the business kind of comes to us. So you could, let's say you had a show in a in a

market that we're not in. You can go to the gold Star website right now, sign up, and that show would be active in a matter of hours and soon it will be instantly UM. And so, but it only works if I'm offering you sales inventory. Well you can, you can have full price inventory, but but inventory at all. You're not a listing services in terms of events, not

a listing service. And that's not to say we wouldn't potentially do that at some point, but at this point it's a it's a place where people buy stuff, they learn about it, and sometimes they don't buy it. But the point for us right now is that they do buy it. Um. And so let's just stop here for a seconds. People can ask, let's say a ticket is a hundred dollars, that you're selling it for hundred dollars. Forget what the sticker place may or may not be.

How much of the money goes to gold Star most cases, ninety dollars. I'm sorry, by the way around, ninety dollars go to this. So every thing is unique decision. It's it's virtually always on that. That's the sort of standard. Okay, So back to how you open up a new market. So somebody says I want to be on my on your service, they can they can create their event. Um. The way the system works now, a lot of stuff happens automatically. Stuff goes out to Facebook automatically, Stuff goes

into email potentially automatically. So while we're kind of guiding it in the in the broadest sense of aware of what promotions are happening where some of it just kind of happens now. Um, okay, well let's say somebody sits there and goes, okay, we're in twenty odd cities and I don't know whether you're in the city, but we

should do Boisey, right, how do you do that? There's there's two ways that if we if we deliberately said hey, we want to be in a city that we're not in, we would basically devote some uh people power to figuring out what's in boise who we need to talk to, and building a credible minimum inventory base there by reaching out by leveraging relationships we've got, right, whether it's with you know, Live Nation or Circus Lay whoever, whoever already

works with us in other places, and saying hey, we're gonna make a little bit of a push in Boise. Um. It might be a little light at first, but you've seen our progress in other markets, so help us out, you know, Well, we'll get there, We'll we'll promote your shows. And so we build a kind of critical massive inventory somewhat manually, and we wanted to make a specific push for a market like that, And what about growth potential? What do you mean in terms of you want to

go international, how many cities do you want to be in? Uh? Yeah, I mean we're not in Canada right now, which is really something we want to correct in the next year or so. Um. And then internationally, you know, internationally beyond Canada, we're not sure. If we do that will probably be with a partner. If we if we did an European expansion,

we'll probably do with a partner. And if you're in twenty odd cities in America right now in the United States, how much does that saturate the market or how many more cities can you be in? I mean we're actually in more than twenty. We're in upwards of six year seventy at this point. So h six years seventy cover it? It covers it mostly. I Mean the thing is, it's like being in a city and I'm doing air quotes again, is not a binary right, Like, there's how many people

do we reach and what's our inventory coverage? So there's a lot more depth to be had, you know, everywhere, I would say, but certainly outside sort of twelve fifteen really strong markets, there's a lot more depth, both in terms of people who should be our customers and inventory that we're selling so that the the infill opportunity is still being for us. And so what are the challenges you now face at gold Star. The challenges we face are are similar to some of the other challenges that

live entertainment. We have special ones and we have general ones. The general problems are that, you know, live entertainment as a whole is way harder than anyone thinks, you know, except people who are in the business, which is you have you know, I often say we sell mostly music in theater, so you can think of it as you know, music and plays, right like concerts in plays. That's mostly what we sell. Sixty plus percent fall into those two categories.

If we were selling instead of music and plays, you know, recorded music and books right analogs to those two things, then your problem is simpler in a way because you've got to find a product to match a person. You have that same problem in live entertainment, but then you also have to match the product the person, the place, and the time to have this four dimensional set of challenges.

And the way that the industry, as you well know, the way that the industry typically responds to that is either like really pushing hard or and this is not a this is a sensible idea, but it has its limitations. Or um, focusing on the very very biggest things because they have marketing budgets, they have pre existing awareness maybe that kind of thing. And the reality is that's a very limiting outlook on what what the market is and and it's a very limiting outlook on what people do

and how they think, right, um. And so that problem is one that's very general. And over the last few years, you know, there's just been more energy put into amping up the conversation about should you buy your expensive concert tickets or playoff basketball tickets from this guy, this guy, this guy or this guy you know, and what's the difference. Right, So the commoditization of what's being sold there is is stronger than ever because again everyone's focusing on those very

very top tier of events. When consumers are saying, well, I think I can find if I really want to go see you know, the Golden State Warriors, you know, playoff game, I know where I can go find. I know the parameters of that search, you know. Um. So for us, our challenge is to speak a different frequency in some way so that people go, oh, I see, I see, there's a lot of stuff I can go see that's actually quite great. That's not being crawled over

by every broker in the world. That's happening closer to me, that's probably closer to my actual taste. There's a whole world of this stuff. So we have to um, we still have to overcome the din you know, of all of that, uh and make that case in a way that's stronger than um than it currently has been for us. It used to be when we started was extremely novel. What we did was extremely novel, and so you know, saying that in a way that's still you know, sounds novel,

sounds novel. Anew is the thing that we're working on now, which is why we you know, part of that technology and part of it's not and it's all word of mouth. You' don't do any marketing gra average and we do, we do, I mean, you know, we we don't do well if we haven't done to a big bold brand campaigns. Because it's just one of these things where you've got to be you know, you can't do a little all of that. You're gonna have to do it or not do it.

So but we have you know, we have a pretty active um set of Facebook campaigns which are pretty targeted. We have an affiliate program that includes group on and Yelp and a bunch of other big Facebook and others that, uh, that syndicate the content um But yeah, I mean so in a way it is quiet relative to someone who would do a venue buy out at the Staples Center or something like that, We're not going to do that anytime soon. So how many tickets in a year does

gold Star sell? Millions? That that that's as as specific as I get about it. But we sell millions of Okay, so I'm a a vent producer, pitch me on gold Star. Gold Star has many millions of people who turned to us to find out what they're going to do, whether they buy from us or simply learn about your event from us. Not being listed in the gold Star listings

is a is a big missed opportunity for you. So we know, we ask people who've been to events that they bought from us, where did you find out about this event? People say I learned about it on gold Star varies a little bit. If you're Taylor Swift, that's probably not true. But for pretty much everybody else. That means that four or more out of five people would not have gone to your event but for gold Star.

And we all know that awareness at any given point of an event is lower than you think it is when you're the one marketing it, right, every marketer is sure that everyone knows every single thing that they're doing, But the reality is people are just living their lives, and so what you need is you need an outlet, a channel for a kind of on demand audience building, and gold Star is a place where people are only

there for live entertainment. Our only job is to make them aware of events and try to sell them take a to those events. Sometimes they buy from us, great. Sometimes they become aware of an event from us and they buy from you two or three weeks from now after a Google search, or they go to your website. That's all fine, but the key thing is this is a channel, a big pool of attention being directed onto live events specifically, and you can't miss out on it. Well.

The other thing I think, which we've danced around but haven't staid specifically, is that in today's tower of Babel society, you can reach people the event producer cannot that's that's the whole ideas. It's not like the old days when we all listen to a couple of radio stations, read the same newspapers, etcetera. Now flipping it over, I'm a customer.

Convinced me why I should be on gold Store because we can help you go out more by finding you stuff that is really suited to your tastes, will save your money. We are the best organization for customer service and the entire ticketing business because we're on your side. We're more like ticket buyers than ticket sellers. And if you sign it for gold started use gold Star, You're

going to have more fun in your life. You're gonna be enriched with the relationships of the people that you go to the shows with, You're gonna learn about your city. You can just have a whole lot more fun, and we're gonna make it easy fee to do that. But just uh, you amplify the point about your on your side and we have good customer service. So our our way of looking at I'm not I'm not bashing anybody here, but our focus has always been on thinking of ourselves

as ticket buyers rather than ticket sellers. UM Typically, if someone writes into gold Star with a problem, they get an answer in minutes, and they get an answer from an actual person actually solving their problem. Um. You know, we do a lot of things to take as much of the headache out of the buying process as we can. Things that people hate, like captures and tending i'm on sales and stuff like that that we just don't do.

It's partly because it's not necessary for us to do it, but we don't want to go in that direction because what we want people to understand is that, you know, we are a service oriented organization. You know, are not trying to prove to you that you know, we're so cool that we won't help you like we really, we really want to remove all the obstacles from your path for you to have a good times. What kind of

problems do people have? Uh, well, I mean people have the problems of well, okay, I don't tell me more about this event. So someone can write in and just say like, what's with this event and someone will say, well, it's this, you know, and they'll kind of give them a little more background on or they'll say, can I you know, um, you know, where's the best place to park nearby. So we're just we're just trying to remove the barriers as much as we can. If I email

about that, I'm gonna get an answer that quick. You're gonna get an answer very quickly. Yeah, I mean, it could be a matter of a couple of hours rather than than twenty or thirty minutes. But our our point is, you know, when when people and we do this, you know, I think people have an expectation that if they write in or however they contact a company for help, they may get an answer in a day or two. They

may never get an answer. Um. And I'm not saying specifically talking about ticketing organizations, because I think there's a lot of good ticketing organizations. But you know, our expectation is that people get an answer, and they don't just get an automated answer. They get an answer from an actual person who knows, you know, how it works on gold Star, and their goal is to get you through your problem. Their goal is not to tell you what the rule is. Their goal is to get you through

the problem. And so we see ourselves as being service oriented, not so much in the sense of just customer service, but that our goal is to facilitate making it easy for you to succeed, and success means you find something to do and you can have a great time. Okay, in doing this for fifteen odd years, a couple of events that you found out through gold Star that really rang your bell, change your life or you like to talk about. Yeah, actually there there's one that there was one.

This is I almost feel like maybe this was just a dream and it didn't really happen. But there there was a show. And this was pretty early in our in our history. Um, there was a show at the Los Angeles Theater downtown. Do you have you been to the to Los Angeles Theater But I have not been there. You gotta go into that building sometimes. I mean it's it's this old, you know, movie palace. There's pictures of you know, Einstein when he came to a premier there

in the forties or whatever it was. Um, but it's also in it's just in a state, just in an awful state. But I think it was two thousand four or two thousand five, there was a show They're called Alma and it was I guess kind of a theatrical production. It was almost like a concert and it was the story of Alma Maller who was married to Gustav Mahler and and like two other famous guys, and so you you get in there and the show starts and then

it just goes everywhere. So over the entire course of the three or four hours, the characters just go wherever they want. You can go wherever you want. Um the physically, yeah, yeah, just all over like nook and cranny, and there's a different thing happening everywhere, you know. In the middle of the thing, Gustav Maller dies and everyone comes together in the theater the actual theater part of the theater, and has his his funeral, and then everyone goes and this

all really happens. Everyone goes and sits down for the dinner after the after the funeral. So you sit down and you eat, you know, like Austrian food, and it was just nuts. Like at one point, at one point they're like, oh, come with me, we're going on We're going on a tour. And so I'm like, so we go, and we go sit in a school bus that's parked outside.

They say, we're gonna go on a tour of the imagination, and like, of course it's a tour of the you know, but it's like, okay, close your eyes, count down three to one. The school bus engine starts up and we drive away. So we're driving around the streets of downtown l A, you know, for like twenty minutes. Uh, and then we can get back and then like there's an air raid and there's smoke everywhere. We have to run back into this. This whole thing goes on for you know,

three or four hours. It was crazy. It's a crazy thing. Well, as you can tell, Jim McCarthy, CEO of gold Star, is excited about both his company and the events that they sell. Everyone. I certainly encourage you. As we've established here, it is free and it's in most communities, most metropoli in America. I check it out, as I say, at first, like many things with the Internet, even Google. I remember Google, it's too simple. I know how to use hot pot

whatever and alta vista. If you go back to the search engine wars people you say, oh, gold Star, that's a place where you go get discount tickets, etcetera. But it's really evolved into much more than that. And it's really in a society where we have no idea what's going on. Because there's too much going on. It's certainly cuts through the fog and Jim, thanks so much for being here on the podcast. Fun to be here. Okay, great.

Until next time. You're listening to Bob Left Sets with Jim McCarthy, CEO of gold Star on the Bob left Sets podcast. That wraps up this week's episode of the Bob Left Sets podcast, produced by tune In and recorded live at their studios in Venice, California. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with gold Star CEO and founder Jim McCarthy. For those interested in the tech world as it relates to music, ticketing and events. Jim was so informative. Did

you enjoy the podcast? I'd love to hear your feedback. You can email me at Bob at left sets dot com. Until next time, I'm Bob left Sets. Me don't know exactly