I'm Katie Perry.
I'm Austin Hankwitz, and this is After Earnings, the show from Morning Brew and Stakeholder Labs that brings investors up close and personal with the executives behind the world's most interesting companies.
Today we're speaking to Matt Meeker, who is the CEO of BARK, the maker of BarkBox. The company serves millions of dogs every year through their monthly themed box of toys and treats. They offer satisfying treats, personal meal plans, and even snacks.
And we covered a ton of ground, from the launch of their new dog cereal to their recent Girl Scouts collab, expanding retail strategy, and we even talked about artificial intelligence. Yeah, AI with BarkBox, kind of a weird thing to think about there, but it was a really good conversation. Now, Matt gives us his best Minnesota accent at the end, so stay tuned for that. And do me a favor: if you're watching this interview on YouTube, comment below how many times you count my own dog coming into the frame behind me. With that being said, let's jump into the interview.
Wow.
All right, Matt Meeker, the CEO of BarkBox, how's it going, man? Thanks so much for joining us today on this episode of After Earnings.
Thanks for having me. I'm excited.
I saw your LinkedIn profile picture is of a dog. Makes a lot of sense. My profile picture is me in a suit, but yours is of a dog, very cute dog. You're the CEO of BarkBox, so I would expect nothing less. I'm gonna assume it's your dog?
It is. It's my dog, Hugo. He's the inspiration, motivation for BARK. My wife gives me a hard time because she says it's absolutely the worst photo of Hugo that was ever taken. And it's very mean to him, but it's from when he was a puppy and he's asleep and he's snoring. So, yeah, it's better looking than me. Even on his worst day, he looks better than me, so I went with that.
It's an incredible picture of Hugo. Now, here's the $64,000 question. If Hugo had a favorite Girl Scout cookie dog treat flavor, what flavor do you think that would be?
Ooh, probably lamb. A lamb-flavored cookie. Yeah.
Okay.
I think, I think in his mind, his favorite flavor would be probably a mix, like a blend of a squirrel and a rabbit, but he never tastes them, so he doesn't really know. It's just that's his goal.
Squirrel Girl Scout cookies would be amazing and potentially break the internet. I love that.
Yeah, congrats on that Girl Scouts cookie partnership, by the way. That is, can you talk a little bit more about that, actually? Kind of how the pilot went and then sort of what the expansion process might look like over time?
Sure. It's been, it's been a long courtship, if you will, of us with this generic idea of we'd love to work with you and be part of the cookie program. And understandably, they're really, really protective of, of that experience and, and the products for customers. So after a few years of begging and convincing, they said yes, and then we got ourselves to a pilot in this past year. And, we had a, an initial projection for how that would go. Before every troop even received the opportunity to sell that, it was sold out. So then we had to.
Wow.
Double it and then do a little bit more on top of that. So it ended up being 2.5 times larger than the initial projection.
Wow.
Which was fantastic. Really great way to start. Ultimately, if everything keeps going well and we're really lucky, then we get millions of little salespeople walking door to door selling human cookies with a box of dog treats that are co-branded BARK and Girl Scouts. And who can say no to that, so.
Who could say no to that? Oh my gosh, just bring around a picture of Hugo with you too, and it's game over.
Yeah.
I feel like if you want something sold, just give it to the Girl Scouts. They will move units.
Absolutely. They really do. You can't say no to them.
Yeah.
You just can't.
Of course not.
The Girl Scouts have been, you know, collaborating actually pretty recently, right? I'm not sure if you guys saw on Target, but they've also collaborated with a deodorant brand, Native. I thought that was ingenious, right? I mean, you guys starting working with Girl Scouts has inspired a bunch of other companies, right? Next to, you know, Apple Vision Pros now are gonna start coming with Thin Mints. It'll be crazy.
No, it's really terrific. I mean, and by the way, that's their term, millions of little salespeople. That's what they call them, so it's not, I can't take credit for that, but it's really special to be part of that and have them representing our products, our brand, and going door to door and introducing it to so many people. Such a great opportunity, a great partnership, and we're really happy about it.
I really love those unexpected brand collaborations too. It's interesting for you to kind of explain your approaching them. I think a lot of us always wonder how those come about. It's super interesting to hear that you all had that idea and approached them with it.
We do, and we have a lot of those collaborations, and more in the future. There's some really fun ones coming up later this year, but going back several years, we've done a lot of work with Dunkin'. There's fun product collaborations there we've done. Subaru, which seems unusual, but they're big dog people, and so we were typically taking their cars and making them into dog toys, and then they sell them or give them away through their dealerships. And maybe a favorite one, or at least a fun one, is the Budweiser 7-Pack. So it's a 6-pack of Budweiser bottled beer, and then hanging off the end of it is a 7th bottle that is a dog toy.
Oh.
Of Budweiser beer. We really wanted to sell that in stores, but there was trouble closing the cooler or the freezer on the 7.
Oh my goodness.
That's good.
Yeah.
Okay, hear me out. I'm gonna pitch it live here right now. Next big collaboration, Scrub Daddy. We're gonna have the Scrub Daddy sponge and the Scrub Daddy dog toy. Huh? Yeah? I could see it. I could see it.
You will, you will like what's coming up this year. It's just a teaser. Sorry.
Amazing.
Well, speaking of things that are coming up, you know, congratulations on the recent launch of your cereal. That is awesome. Your press release says, you know, folks can now purchase your dog cereal at Target stores as well as your website, bark.co. My real question is, how the heck did you come up with the names of these flavors? Porky Meat Hunks, Frosted Socks, and Clucky Nuggy Yums. I mean, these are crazy.
The way we come up with that is the creative team doesn't allow me in their space, and then I don't interfere with their work. And they come up with engaging, fun names like that. But really, the inspiration for it was you noticed, like, one of the major chains that we're working with and launching this product with is Target. Really, they kicked this off, I'll say, a year and a half ago-ish, came to us and said, "We love what you've done for our toy aisle. You've brought a lot of fun to our pet department. Could you bring fun to our treat aisle?" And we took a look at it, and we saw a lot of muted colors, boring packaging, and then started to look at the rest of the store for inspiration, for fun.
There's a lot of fun in the cereal aisle or in the candy aisle. You've got these bright colors, these fun names, these characters, character-driven stories. So we took our inspiration from there, and this is the output.
I think I heard on Target earnings call too that one of their core strategies is introducing new and innovative brands via their retail experiences. So this seems like a part of that, perhaps.
Yeah. And they've been a very good partner with us for the last six or seven years. We wouldn't have gone to retail as soon as we did if not for them coming to us and saying, "Please." Looking back, we were really dumb. They came to us and said, "We'd love to put your toys in all 1,800 stores." And we just said, "Sure. No problem." We had no idea what that involved, and we caught up to it. We've got our mind around it now, but got lucky.
Yeah. It's also interesting, the nostalgia angle. And I feel like, unlike other companies, you're appealing to an end consumer that is a dog and then an intermediary human. And so you're kind of needing to appeal to both of those audiences. So can you walk through sort of the approach on these throwback cereals? And maybe are there other similar ideas that didn't make it but are on the R&D floor over there at BARK?
There are a lot of ideas that don't make it, but.
Can you share any of them?
Oh, yeah. I wanna hear some of these now.
Yeah. What didn't make it? He's like, "What can I say?
He's like, the Scrub Daddy thing was actually an idea. It didn't make it awesome. We did not like the idea.
If you are at all familiar with our Instagram, you might see that the limits get pushed quite a bit. I have a bit of a standing challenge for the current social media team, which is, "I want you to do something this quarter that I have to publicly apologize for." They're trying harder and harder for that.
What a brief.
So, yeah. Yeah. And they haven't met it yet, which is disappointing. The things that get caught really, I don't know what kind of podcast this is or what.
Whatever you want it to be. You're the first guest.
Oh, well, I don't know if it's family-oriented or it's always in the thinking. And I'm often joking, but half-joking, we need to get the human out of the middle and give the dog the ability to transact. We've got to find.
Yeah.
Credit cards. It would make our business so much easier. But really, I think we take an unusual mindset or point of view. One thing that we call it inside is the dog's eye view. And it's really serving the dog as your primary customer and sort of trying to forget the human exists, with the idea that the people love their dogs so much and are so obsessed with them that if you create a product or experience that the dog has to have, the human has to give it to them. Almost like Disney World and children, right? That, that's such a great experience. Every parent is just forced to take their kids there. There's like a gravitational pull.
So trying to serve the dog in that way, to your point, it's very hard to stay in that mode all the time because the human has the credit card, unfortunately. And so you do have to think about how do you capture their attention? How do you appeal them? Or how do you even explain that benefit to the dog? And so that works its way into the storylines, into the positioning. Yeah. And there's a nostalgia part of this, with the, the cereal positioning and the character-driven narratives. And hopefully, that engages the human, and then what we've put inside is, is exciting enough for the dog and rewarding enough that they keep coming back for more.
Hey, dogs with credit cards. I don't know who would ever oppose that. I'm also curious what else.
Capital One will acquire us for $35 billion.
Hey. Fintech. Let's go. Also curious to hear all this dog talk. Cats? Just not a cat guy? Not a good economic opportunity for you? What's the story on focusing only on dogs?
Don't like cats.
Same. Okay. Cool. Let's go.
I mean, there you go.
All right.
There you go.
Get into that.
If you want if you want a more thoughtful answer, I mean, that's true. But my mother has cats and loves cats, so she's very disappointed in me. But really, we think of them we think the relationship between people and their dogs is very different than people and their cats. A dog and I know people feel like the cat is a family member, but their relationship is different. Like, you can feed the cat for three days and walk away, and you don't no one can stay with them. It's fine. You can leave them home alone. They have a different need or type of affection that they seek or don't seek. The dog-human relationship, in our view, is much closer to the human-parent-child relationship. And so you, you may have seen maybe not.
In December, we actually created a companion toy for some of the dog toys that was for human children. Because what we've heard over and over is, like, Box comes into the house, the human child reaches in, takes the toy, and plays with it. So we created a companion toy for children so they can play with the same toy the dog got.
Aww.
That relationship is so much easier for us to understand than a cat or a hamster or a horse or whatever.
That makes yeah. I feel like cats are just not as appreciative also, so makes clear sense to me.
Yes. I'm also allergic to cats, so I'm team dog on this one.
All right.
All right. All right. Great.
All right. Let's jump into the recent earnings. Congratulations on an awesome quarter. Obviously, gross margins expanded 2% year-over-year, up 6% when compared to 2022. Jefferies published a really nice report about you guys expanding now into 2,400 doors, starting here in the spring with additional marketing investment to support that rollout. Obviously, the Girl Scouts partnership, you know, tons of potential for expansion there. But, you know, Wall Street says it might be a little bit too early to tell if pet discretionary spend is completely ready to rebound, but early signs are very positive. So, Matt, I'm curious, are you doing anything today to prepare the company for what is probably gonna turn into future demand, right? If that might be from a supply chain perspective, a marketing perspective, any operational perspectives.
Like, are you guys laying any groundwork today to prepare yourselves for an increase in demand if that's in 2025 or beyond?
We've done a lot of that work over the last 2 years, mainly on the, well, all the way through. I came back into the business 2 years ago as the CEO after a 16-month break. When I came back in, it felt like there's a 3-year turnaround here, in terms of the economics and the, the structure of the team, pretty much everything. Part of that is setting that foundation of how do you grow from the $500 million of revenue and springboard up to $1 billion and $2 billion and $5 billion beyond there? The first part of that was getting the unit economics in shape, and that meant going back to a lot of suppliers, renegotiating our relationships, narrowing so we had a few key suppliers instead of just a wide number across everything.
We've done really well with that, and that gives us that ability to, to turn it up or turn it down. Whenever we do that, we're going from a very profitable foundation from the start, get the cash flow going in the right way, clear some of the inventory, consolidate your fulfillment, all, all the, the boring stuff that really matters to the, the results. Now we're sort of entering year three of this three-year turnaround. This is, for me, the fun part where it is time to turn on those growth levers. It's how do we grow with the current products and marketing playbooks that we have that we've had for the last 12 years? How do we turn those up and get more out of them? But what, what else do we add? What products and services come on top of that?
How do we layer in awareness marketing? How do we get all these products on one, on one destination instead of scattered across many? So now we're hitting the growth engines of it, and we're only able to do that because we spent the past couple of years building the foundation to support it.
100%. Now, before I jump in, actually, into the question about some of those efficiencies, a little bit more detail, you took a 16-month break. What caused that? Where'd you go?
Where did I go? I moved to Florida, so that's where I am here.
Florida man.
I am now.
Very cool.
Yeah. Yeah. I took a 16-month break. What caused me to step away primarily was we talked about my dog, Hugo, up front. He was getting older, and he's a big dog. You know, big dogs don't last as long. And I had the sense that he didn't have many years left. And once he would pass, I felt like I wouldn't wanna be associated with BARK in any way. Just get it away from me. Can't look at it. Can't think about it. So instead of just being a public company and walking out the door one day, thought it might be more responsible to put a successor in place. And we did that. And over those 16 months by the way, really tough time to be a new CEO in anything, stepping in in the middle of a pandemic. It's really gets.
Oh, gosh. I know.
Jeez. What a and for this guy, he also got that added surprise of basically, on day one, me going, "By the way, we're going public.
Bye.
So it was a really tall order, but jump forward 16 months, and Hugo passed away, which was very, very sad. But also, I was not met with that energy. I, the energy I felt, was more responsibility to him and his legacy and to BARK. And it was like, "You gotta keep this alive. It has to be meaningful. It's gotta be huge. That's what he deserves, not for me to go throw my head in the sand." So I stepped back in. And as people ask how long I'll be here, I usually tell people I intend to die in the saddle.
Wow.
That's inspiring. Well, so kinda now bring the conversation back to whenever you returned. You know, the company's doing a great job driving toward profitability, right? You mentioned consolidating your suppliers and vendors, right? That added about 2.5% gross margin improvement. You mentioned some website consolidation there and some other ideas, I think, for the quarter, that subtract, I think, 3.5% SG&A expense year-over-year. Now, Wall Street's modeling about a 4.5% gross margin improvement, between 2024 and 2025, another 5% with, the, sort of expense subtraction there. You talked about briefly about all these incredible things you're doing to help build this company into a profitable multi-billion-dollar behemoth. Talk to us about the decision process while also keeping the customer at the forefront of every decision you make, right?
I mean, at the end of the day, you are in love with dogs as much as I am. I'm sure some of these decisions might be a little tough. I mean, give us sort of the play-by-play on how you are making these decisions while also keeping your customers at the forefront of those outcomes?
Yeah. There's tension in that the main place where there's tension for me in that trade-off, if you will, is in pricing and just the general idea that the lower the price, the more accessible our products or services are to everyone. But it doesn't matter if you're not profitable and sustainable. So the first thing you have to do is find a way to be alive consistently. And we've swung into that. We delivered an EBITDA positive quarter. We need to deliver those more consistently and now deliver an EBITDA positive here and then keep going from there. But then it is, like, really the focus is on the mission. And our mission is to make all dogs happy. And the word all is very important in there. It's not to make rich dogs happy or some dogs happy.
It's to make all. So we have a responsibility of creating products, some products, maybe not all, but some products that are accessible to every dog and every family. We also have a responsibility to take care of or not let out of our sight those dogs who don't have a family, those who are hungry, those who are not as fortunate to get a monthly subscription of toys coming through the door, when they would just accept a meal on a daily basis. So we've gotta balance all of those things. But again, none of it happens if you're not profitable. Eventually, you'll just run out of money, and you won't serve anyone. So we need the baseline there, and you need some buffer in that in order to weather the harder times or the turns that are unexpected.
But I, I don't see us in profit maximum maximization mode for several years for that reason, but also for the reason of we, we have this long list of expansion ideas that we can invest in. So we can we can keep moving the growth rate up and up and up as we invest in those. I think when we start to run out of ideas, then maybe the, the profit starts to expand a bit. But I would I would view that as a bad sign that we've turned into a slow growth, not interesting, out-of-ideas business rather than.
I mean, let's talk about that for a second, Matt. I know Katie had some really good questions regarding marketing spend, customer acquisition, so I'll let her dive into that. But that's so interesting, and I appreciate that additional perspective.
Yeah. Actually, before we get into that, I'm curious. When you're talking about expansion, what can you tell us about that? Is that expansion within the core product suite, or are there perhaps other areas of the life cycle of a dog that you guys feel like you can plug into? Healthcare for pets, things like that.
There's a whole universe of expansion outside of the core product set. So the core being, we have a toy or a play business that's very big, does very well, has great margin. And like I mentioned, there's an expansion opportunity in there just continuing to grow it. But also, if you start to think about the opportunity to introduce children's toys and sell those to families or to retailers, that's an expansion just within that vertical.
Right.
You've got consumables where we've barely scratched the surface, a lot of upside there. So we can grow there. We've talked a little bit about services. And, and I think when people hear services, they think of a typical dog service like grooming, boarding, daycare, things like that. And generally, I would take the approach that we don't need to invent something if it's already served. If, if the boarding works for everyone, great. If we have a great idea of how to make it significantly better and, and make a real business there, awesome. But I'm viewing the dog opportunity or the dog market or ecosystem as probably the way I envision that human children were viewed 100 years ago. There were no theme parks. There, there weren't toy companies that existed for them.
It was basically, "Here's some food, and here's your healthcare." And that's what dogs essentially have today. And so when you start to think about that, it's think about every business out there that accommodates a human child and how they do it of restaurants have kids' menus and special events and setups for kids, hotels and resorts have programming for them. And you just kinda keep going on.
Yeah.
Very little of that has been designed for dogs who are a significant part of the household in 65 million U.S. households. The spending keeps reflecting that. There's so much opportunity beyond food and healthcare and, you know, where does the dog get a haircut? Not to say those aren't important or good businesses, but they solve problems. They're more interesting things for us to do.
Super interesting lens.
My whole point about that was you mentioned the amusement parks, Matt. Are we gonna get a dog cruise ship? How fun would that be? Listen, we all go. It's like a booze cruise. We're on the ship. We have dogs to pet, all different sizes. They're groomed. They don't smell bad. And they know tricks, so they can, like, sit and stand and dude, how fun would that be? I would pay a pretty penny to be on a dog-only cruise ship.
I like it. I like it. That's a great idea. Maybe a bigger capital investment than we can take on today, but it's a good one.
I know. I would pay to watch that.
You will like where we're going, Austin. I promise.
Well, no. We'll get more into the product suite in a bit, but do wanna touch on the AI element. So that was pretty prominent on the call talking about AI implications specific within the marketing and design org. Super interesting to hear how you guys are applying that. Sounds like it's for creative iteration, things like that. Can you voice over how you are deploying AI within your marketing org? And are there other pockets of the business where you see opportunity there in a real way and not just, "Hey, we're doing AI"? Where's it actually making an impact?
Yeah. It's something we actually think about a lot. And I'm sure every company says that. My co-founder, Henrik, is absolutely obsessed with it to the point where he's got an AI podcast. He's been going around to major universities speaking about it. He's really all in. And so he puts that pressure on me and the organization to keep up. So what we talked about on the call, I would say, is what I would think of as pretty basic of using AI technologies in order to create different iterations faster, come up with, you know, almost like your brainstorming partner of learning how to prompt and get back something that's the starter of a creative unit or a creative execution, and then have many iterations off of that to power your A/B testing. All that seems straightforward and table stakes.
And it's kind of in line with, "Can you take AI bots or agents and deploy them against your customer service?" Like, I think everybody is thinking that way and should be doing that. Some of the more interesting things that I have to give Henrik credit for is Henrik, for years since the beginning, he's been our, I'll call him, our brand snob. He's the one who leads the BARK brand and all the standards and is very, very particular about what we do, how we do it, how we say it, what it looks like. And it's tough for one human to do that across hundreds or thousands of employees. What he has done is he created an LLM, basically a bot. I call it the Henrik bot. He calls it the brand bot.
But it's the opportunity for anyone in the company to bring an asset, you know, "Here's a product," or, "Here's an ad unit, a creative execution, copy, whatever. Bring it, put it to the brand bot and say, 'Is this on brand?' and get back a, 'Yep, absolutely. That's on BARK brand,' or, 'No, it's not,' but also a very detailed explanation as to why it is or is not. And it's spot on with the way Henrik would say that to someone. So now we've taken him and scaled him across the whole organization. You can be proactive with that and ask the bot, "Did I do it right?" If the bot says no, you might; let's use a food bag. It's a real thing. Like, we can show them a Purina bag and say, "Is this on brand for BARK?" And we'll get a no.
You can ask why. It'll explain why. And then we say, like, "Can you make a food bag that's BARK?" And in a second, "Here's a food bag." And then you can start to iterate off of it. And it's when we do that, you get the reaction internally of, like, "It's actually pretty good.
It'll surprise you. I actually got into, I'll say, a borderline argument last week with somebody who was bullish on automating all marketing functions with AI. And I'm a writer by background. And I was like, "Well, ChatGPT sucks at writing." And he's like, "Change the make a custom GPT. Upload all your writing, all your documents. Train it." And so now I have this writing intern that has basically scaled me. And that's something for the folks at home. You guys can go play with that right now. But I think that's fascinating with fielding those inputs and, like you said, scaling a special talent within a org, like you mentioned, using AI. Super interesting.
It's fascinating. And it just if you are as you learn to prompt it better and better, the way I've started to think about it is that prompting it is no different than prompting the team that reports to me of, like, "I need to give you really clear instruction about, like, what we're trying to accomplish here, and then you're bringing work back to me." It's usually bringing work back to you in a few seconds and not a few days. But you can go so much faster. And when the work comes back and it's not quite what you were looking for, that's where you start to make those adjustments. And it's so we've done that on the brand side, and we're starting to deploy that. I think that opportunity is in everything.
Like, think of the people function of how many of us have questions about how we can use our healthcare benefits, and you can read through the policy documents that are all created, but nobody ever does. Being able to ask an agent, a bot, just, you know, "What's my deductible for this?" Boom. That's it. Scales that whole organization. And it's not to say, "All right. Great. Get rid of all the people," because you need those people to populate and train and prompt. But it's a very different skill now.
Yeah. Definitely.
Absolutely. We'll speak to your brand.
Sorry. I went on and on there. I'm sorry about that.
Oh, no. This is great, Matt.
No, that was awesome.
I'm learning so much. I don't even honestly, I'm such a noob to AI. I'm learning AI right here in this episode, y'all. Well, listen, you mentioned brand, and I wanna talk about brand a little bit, specifically brand awareness given your partnership with Target. Can you talk a little bit about how, you know, you guys approach retail partnerships in general, not just from a revenue play, but also brand awareness play? 'Cause I think that's really important that some listeners right now might not be connecting the dots on.
Yeah. Our marketing, if we have a poor model, it's my fault because we spend a lot of our dollars and our energy in direct response and mainly digital direct response. And that's based on me. I'm a numbers guy. I grew up in digital direct response. I'm obsessed with a CAC, a CAC to LTV calculation. And not to say there's anything wrong with it, but when it's 100% of your playbook, maybe you've over-indexed in that direction. So at the same time, we have to create awareness. And we've done so digitally through social media, big followings there, a lot of engagement there.
When we think of brand out in the world, like you're talking about in Target stores or the 40,000 retail doors we're in, what we need, including Dunkin' stores and Subaru dealerships and those, and, like, when a Girl Scout goes to a door, we think of the brand as how you show up in the world and where you show up. And it's fine. It's great, actually, to show up in a Target store or a Dunkin' location. We wanna start with from the place of when we show up somewhere that it catches everyone's attention and brings them into BARK's world or, or makes them aware that we exist in the first place. But we've started with, "How do we wanna make an impact?" And then we back our way into, "Okay.
If that's the impact we wanna make, where is the best place to do it? And then what's the product or experience we need to craft in order to make that happen?" With the retail partners, you need products on shelf in order to make them money, make you money, like, sustain that. But the awareness really can be mutually beneficial. So in a Target store, if we're on an end cap, we'll have 30 million people a week passing by our products and our brand across 1,800 stores and then Walmart and Dunkin'. And so this is the best kind of awareness that you can get where you can build a profitable business model and achieve that kind of awareness. We need more ideas and more awareness-driving activity beyond just the retail channel as well.
Did I read in your recent earnings, Matt, that you guys are also in Costco? Did I read that correctly?
Yeah. Yeah.
Very cool.
Yeah. They're very fun. And that's some of the best stuff where that idea of, like, how we show up comes alive.
I was gonna say, are there any anything coming on the snack section next to the hot dogs?
The first product we ever did for them was we created a Food Court Bundle. So it was a big package with four items from their food court presented in that. And they were all toys.
Oh my God!
They love it.
It was a little of the $1.50 hot dog toy. I love it.
Perfect.
Yeah. Yeah. They love that. And I'll say that they recently introduced in the food court, like, this giant cookie. I don't know if you've seen that.
Yes.
We're a little bit obsessed with the giant cookie right now and thinking what we can do with that.
Oh my God!
Oh my gosh. That's awesome. Well, listen, before we jump into a little bit more about your background and leadership style, I just wanna give you the opportunity. You've gone through the gauntlet, right? Earnings calls are stressful. Wall Street's asking you questions left and right. I've asked you plenty of questions. So is Katie here. Do you have any, you know, sort of questions you wish someone had asked you but never asked yet as it relates to this earnings or even your company in general, something you just wanna scream from the mountaintops and answer to?
Oh. That's, that's a good question. I don't know. I don't, I no. Nothing, nothing's leaping to mind. It's such a good question, and I'm letting you down here. I don't know. I have to, I have to think on that.
No, it's cool. You're good. I saw, you know, someone, you know, might be working on something fun behind the scenes. You never know.
Your PR team's gonna give you a word about that one. That was a.
Oh, it's, it's quite the opposite.
Yeah.
We are working on a lot of things. And usually, the note that's coming into this is like, "Do not talk about this thing.
Amazing. All good.
It's usually, I get in trouble for saying too much.
Okay. Yeah. That kinda goes with the Instagram strategy it seems you've laid out as well. So you sound like a fun CEO.
I have my moments. We'll see.
You know, I did a little bit of, as I mentioned before, some browsing on your LinkedIn. I saw Hugo. Awesome, awesome profile picture. But I also saw a little bit of, a little background there on, being a founder of Meetup.com. How the heck did you go from Meetup.com to BARK? What like, how did you make that? What happened? Give us the background, the play-by-play, everything you can.
You know, I, I just don't interview well for jobs. So the only, the only job I can get is one that I create for myself. And Meetup came off of the heels of starting another company and my first, my first try of starting a company where I did everything wrong or we collectively did everything wrong, made every mistake in the book, shut it down, and then instantly went into Meetup and said, "We'll do it everything the opposite. That's gotta work." And it, it turned out it did work really well. The, the inspiration for Meetup, though, really came from the, the time period we were living in. One of my co-founders, Scott, and I, living in New York at the time, both kind of in the ashes of, of startups. And we were talking day to day about ideas every which way we could go.
One was that we would open a fine dining restaurant in New York City that only served breakfast cereal. We took it very, very seriously. There were a lot of ideas discussed. Meetup was one of them. The reason it stuck with us, this was late 2001, early 2002. Right after 9/11, there was a very different feel in the streets of New York where you'd walk down the streets, and people would say to you, "How are you doing?" but they meant it. Strangers, they wanted to hear, "How are you doing?" People are stopping on the sidewalks to engage. That's faded, as things do over 20 years. It really hit us of, like, this is powerful when neighbors are coming together and truly connecting and caring about people. That's powerful.
So we wanted to set up a mechanism where it was structurally and societally safe to meet strangers who you met on the internet, which was not a given at the time. It was actually the opposite. So great time. Learned a lot from Meetup. Really fun building the business. Great partners, co-founders. And then I exited after 7 years. I went to the venture capital side. I had what I would describe as, like, the dream job, running an incubator, hosting 20 startups at a time and helping them be successful. And then after 6 months, off they went. It was really fantastic. And I knew I would have done that for the rest of my life. But I brought Hugo into my life. And he was a Great Dane. He lived in New York.
Pet stores don't wait for Great Danes to come through the door. And it was like, "He needs stuff. He needs stuff that I can't find or can't get anywhere else." And that led to the idea of The Box. And we launched it. And 7 or 8 months later, it was going so well that it yanked me in. And my life has never been the same since.
What a great story.
Yeah. That's incredible. I think Meetup.com, too, it's still up and running. It's still doing its thing.
It is. Yeah. It's great to see that it is.
Yeah. Lives on. Not a lot of things from that time in the internet have lived on. I was in New York in the 2010s in the pivot to video era. And it's been crazy seeing Vice, BuzzFeed, all of these headlines. But it's pretty impressive that that's been going for so long.
Yeah. And there's gotta be a lot of credit to the team that's doing that who I don't know at all. It's kind of a bizarre thing of if I walked into the building today, everyone would be like, "Who's that guy?
Security. Yeah. That's awesome. One thing I noticed, in the earnings call transcript, was the use of the word momentum. And that really stuck out to me because I really believe that in business and life, momentum is so important. So speed, the power, the energy, and kind of things happening in a in a cadence order. Can you talk about how, how you think about momentum as a leader, how you build momentum within the company, and how, how you sustain it through great times, not-so-great times?
Yeah. I agree with you. And I think the kind of straightforward answer, and I mentioned, like, I'm very data-driven, very metrics-oriented. I've had a process for a very long time, like, going back to the start of Meetup and even before that in other jobs or businesses where, like, I wake up on Sunday morning. I'm starting to analyze or look at the data from the week before and make sense of it. And I do it for myself. But then since stepping into a CEO role, I've got this added responsibility of communicating that and making sense of that for the team. And sometimes that's, you know, it's not always good news.
So I think the consistency of the message, just having a message for me every week and saying, "This is how things are going," and when they're not good, being very clear of, like, "This isn't good, and we need to address it. And here's how we'll address it or who's responsible. And, and we're looking at them to, to find the way out of this." But when it is good, I, you know, I tend everybody wants to talk about the positive things that are happening and highlight those. And there's always positive things in every business. And, and, and so really taking great effort to highlight the positives and celebrate the positives.
And even one of our approaches is I think there's a lot of across a lot of businesses or companies, people tend to focus on fixing the things that aren't going well. And you need to do that. But we actually take good effort to look at the things that are going well and ask ourselves, "Why are they going well? And what can we do to make them go better or capitalize on that more?" and maybe put the negatives out of our our line of sight unless it's going to be fatal if you're doing that. So really doubling down on the winners, looking for the bright spots and amplifying the bright spots is part of that.
Something I wanna just follow up with real quick, Matt, and maybe I'm wrong here, but when I was reading your earnings call transcript, either you or your CFO mentioned - and this was sort of, like, a closing remark - you're like, "The underlying momentum and excitement for the business is not reflected right now in the stock price." As you lead hundreds, if not thousands, of employees, how do you help get that point across to them? Because, you know, people are people. We see numbers go up and down. And, you know, we see things, and we hear headlines. And, you know, all those different types of outside just channels are always sort of distracting us as employees or, you know, other team members of a larger organization.
How do you help people and specifically your employees kinda keep the blinders on of just, like, "This is the goal. Here's where we're going. And, like, just come along for the ride"?
This is the hardest or worst part of being a public company CEO. And the, you know, the earnings calls, the interactions with investors, whatever the bad things that people say about the role are, those don't bother me at all. I like the earnings calls. They're fun. They force you to organize your thinking. And you get to meet smart people who give you a new way to think about your business. So I like that. This is hard. This is, like, constantly saying, "You gotta keep the faith," when.
Mm-hmm.
Over this period of time, there's no reason to. Our stock has been bloodied. And a lot of that has to do with the sectors that we're viewed in. Like, we're a SPAC. We're a pet company. We're a direct-to-consumer. We're unprofitable. Like, we are the trifecta of things that are not favorable in the market at this time. And so you kinda have to just keep repeating to them and to yourself that if we do the right things, if we build a business that's growing and profitable, over time, this rights itself. But it's convincing yourself as much as it is convincing your team. So part of that goes back to the hiring and the people you bring in. And I feel like we're fortunate that we have a lot of people on the team.
The people that we hire are what I'd say, like, true believers who they wanna work at BARK because of the brand and who we are and the opportunity to serve this customer. They see the growth potential. Yeah, that would be really nice if we got 10 times our stock price. But there's so much more great quality of life or quality of career in there.
Mm-hmm.
That, and so much belief. That'll take care of itself. But it's a really difficult thing to manage. You're, you're absolutely right. And I'm, I don't know any way around it.
That was a great answer. You're absolutely correct, right, just sticking to the plan, executing the plan, and ensuring that you're hiring the right people that, you know, believe in the mission and the long-term vision. I love it.
All right, Matt. So I know I know we gotta wrap soon, but we had one more. We were curious. We were also stalking and saw you went to school in Minnesota. So we were wondering if you could do a Minnesota accent for us.
I never had one. But my uncle Vaughn has a Minnesota accent. So I have to, like, channel him.
Amazing. All right.
He's like the friendliest guy. So I'm trying to channel coming into his home for Christmas. It's like, "Okay. Here we go." So hard. Oh, hey. How are you doing? Oh, it's good to see you. How's everything? Is that good?
I love it. Let's go, Matt, round of applause.
That was amazing.
What a guy.
That was awesome. Was that Amy? Matt? I don't know.
That's a first for an interview. I've gotta say.
Yes.
That's what we like to hear. Well, you know, Matt, thanks so much for hanging out with us on this episode of After Earnings. It was incredible learning more about your background, the company you've built, all the intricacies as it relates to customer acquisition, all the perspective you all added on artificial intelligence. And again, congrats on the new dog cereal.
Thank you so much. It was a lot of fun. Well, can I come back sometime?
Absolutely.
Yeah. Let's do it. We'll see you back in six weeks.
Absolutely. Wow, Katie, what an incredible conversation with Matt Meeker, that Minnesota accent. I was not expecting that.
That was a level of transparency you do not often get from CEOs, I gotta say.
Yeah. 100%. I mean, the way that he talked about his AI, he was talking about the Girl Scouts stuff. I mean, could you imagine a Girl Scout knocking on your door with dog treats and cookies? I would say yes immediately.
Totally. I am so bullish on the Girl Scouts. They could sell anything. And I think that's a smart move by BARK. I also loved hearing about their retail strategy. They came up as a direct-to-consumer brand. They have this retail component now, super interesting. And he did a great job of breaking down how those two lines of business work.
100%. And I really, you know, agree with him from the perspective of the profitability, right? He's like, "We want to serve all dogs, but we can't serve all dogs unless we have money to serve all dogs. Therefore, we need to be more efficient as a company," and things of that nature. I mean, it was a great conversation. What an awesome, awesome guest. And looking forward to having him back on the show.
I'm Katie Perry.
I'm Austin Hankwitz.
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