All-Time Top 10 Guests – #5 Carey Smith (Big Ass Fans: The World's Least Sexy $500M Business)

We explore the world’s least sexy $500M business. We’re joined by Carey Smith, Founder of Big Ass Fans. We cover the importance of humor in business, receiving and listening to feedback, and Carey’s investment philosophy with Unorthodox Ventures. “I think in some ways it's trite, but you really do learn an awful lot from failures. And the other thing you get from a failure—or certainly I did—was the fear of completely wasting my life. That was a much greater fear—to imagine that you wouldn't accomplish much of anything was just more than I could bear and what it moved me to was looking for other opportunities.” – J. Carey Smith EPISODE GUIDE (LINKS, QUOTES, NOTES, AND BOOKS MENTIONED) https://www.danielscrivner.com/notes/carey-smith-outliers-show-notes  FULL TEXT TRANSCRIPT https://www.danielscrivner.com/notes/carey-smith-outliers-transcript  CHAPTERS This episode is our definitive guide to building the world's least sexy $500M business. In it we cover: 00:00:00 – Introduction 00:01:17 – Carey’s childhood and first forays into business 00:06:24 – What Carey learned from the failure of his first company 00:11:42 – How Carey started Big Ass Fans 00:21:00 – Why humor is so important in business and customer service 00:32:46 – Focusing on excellent quality when selling a higher-priced product 00:36:51 – Receiving and listening to feedback to constantly improve a company 00:45:40 – Carey’s investment philosophy with Unorthodox Ventures 01:01:41 – Inspiration from one of Carey’s first supervisors ABOUT BIG ASS FANS AND CAREY SMITH Carey Smith is the Founder of Big Ass Fans, a business that he built from the ground up and scaled for nearly 20 years before selling for $500 million in 2017. Since then, he's founded Unorthodox Ventures, where he backs extraordinary founders and helps them scale their companies faster, using all of what he learned building Big Ass Fans. We go deep on a bunch of interesting topics, including lessons learned scaling Big Ass Fans, why it's important to deeply understand the people purchasing your product, not just those enjoying it, and building lucrative businesses in unsexy markets. 💌 FREE NEWSLETTER https://www.outlieracademy.com/newsletter 🎙 LISTEN ON iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/outlier-academy/id1523851182 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/58edVNgqaPNaCSGSxM6pef?si=88f37a5d20434775 Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1523851182 ABOUT OUTLIER ACADEMY Learn timeless lessons on work and life from iconic founders, world-renown investors, and bestselling authors. Outlier Academy is the forever school for those chasing greatness. Past guests include Gokul Rajaram of DoorDash, Scott Belsky of Benchmark and Adobe, Joey Krug of Pantera Capital, Mark Sisson of Primal Kitchen, Luke Gromen of The Forest for the Trees, and Brian Scudamore of 1-800-GOT-JUNK. Website: https://www.outlieracademy.com Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/outlieracademy ABOUT DANIEL SCRIVNER Outlier Academy is hosted by Daniel Scrivner. Over the last 15 years, Daniel has led design teams at Square and Apple, turned around a $3M+ ARR SaaS business, and invested in more than 100 companies. He launched Outlier Academy in 2020 to learn from the world’s best founders, investors, authors, and peak performance experts. Website: https://www.danielscrivner.com Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/danielscrivner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices