Bill O'Dowd Transcript
Clint Betts
Bill, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's an honor to have you. You were recently named the Agency of the Year. Tell us about that. How does that feel?
Bill O'Dowd
Oh, thanks, Clint. Yeah, these are heady days. Our PR firms we are blessed to have four PR firms within our family, each specializing in a different section of our industry: movies and TV for 42West, music for Shore Fire or Celebrity Chef, Hospitality and Consumer Products for the Door, and Impact PR for L Communications. As a group, they were just named the most powerful PR firm in the country by the Observer, which is the list we must follow. So it's a real treat for us that just happened about 10 days ago, and that certainly led to a lot of incoming calls, for which we're very thankful.
Clint Betts
Good for you. Congratulations. Well deserved as well. Tell us about Dolphin Entertainment, how you became the CEO, how you came to found it. Give us the story.
Bill O'Dowd
Well, I guess it starts with being a failed attorney. I graduated from law school, and I always wanted to be a lawyer, Clint, and it's what I answered in kindergarten: what you want to be when you grow up. And I went off to law school and then eight months later said, "Boy, I made a big mistake. I don't think I'm a very good attorney." But my school taught entertainment law when I was there, and it gave me the bug for the entertainment business, even though I'm a kid from Miami with absolutely zero connections to it. And I was lucky enough to start Dolphin out of a second bedroom, I would say, but I think it was my bedroom in 1996. And here we are 29 years later, and we started as a
Clint Betts
What was the idea in 1996? What were you hoping to accomplish?
Bill O'Dowd
Yeah, it was to be a production company, and that's what we were and are, first and foremost, I'd say. But for those first 20 years at Dolphin, we hopefully built a pretty well-known and respected independent production company for television. We're most known for a very long partnership with Nickelodeon and family content. We were lucky to have a couple of number-one series on the air, and we launched a TV movie division with them to produce and sell these shows and movies.
And then, really, what a big turning point for us; there would be two, probably. We were early in digital content. I remember when the dad sold YouTube to Google because we had the kid's shows, and the first consumers of content online were obviously kids. So, we used platforms like YouTube or early Facebook to promote our kids' shows.
And then secondly, we got into feature films to expand our brand, our YA family content brand. We made a couple of movies in 2014 and 2015. And so in 2016, we had the idea that, at the 20-year mark of our company, maybe we could grow by acquiring these marketing agencies, and we learned what they do because we were promoting these movies. And that's a big difference between TV and movies. When you make a show for a television network, you make the show, and you hand it in, and they promote it in the US. When you make a movie, somebody's got to promote it to get Clint to want to go see it in the theater.
Clint Betts
Early on in those early days, at what point did you realize, "Hey, this is going to work, we've got something here"? What was kind of like the first big accomplishment or big win?
Bill O'Dowd
Yeah, and I'm definitely living proof. I heard once half of all startups fail in the first year and half of those that make it fail in the second year. But if you can make it to year three, you got pretty much an even chance with any other year. I was living month to month as a 26-year-old kid that first year for sure. I was ramping up a consulting business before I could produce on my own.
But if ever there was a time of life to do it, I guess that was it. And when I got my first production on my own, if we look back at it today, I'm not sure it should have meant as much as it did to me, but it allowed me to put, I think I got as high as $200,000 in the bank, and I thought I made it. I have more money than I certainly knew what to do with it at 28 or 29, and I could actually afford to hire somebody, heaven forbid, a little bit of blind leading the blind, I think. But I could start a company of two and then three, and we could just build it from there. But I think it was being able to get that first production that I could do on my own.
Clint Betts
What was that?
Bill O'Dowd
It was an English language telenovela. I'm a kid from Miami, Florida, and I have always admired these telenovelas that, to me, were the only form of television that the American style does not dominate worldwide, the soap opera. We have great soap operas, don't get me wrong, but I'd say the telenovela format is more popular globally because it has a beginning, middle, and end, and it goes for six months or so. And so you could write a better story because you knew you had an ending. As opposed to some of our characters, and it's fun to watch, they've been married 10 times, they have 32 kids, and they've been adopted by aliens. You have to come up with something new every time.
So, when I got a telenovela, it served two purposes. It gave me a contract to make a production that would take a year and a half. So it was good money. Second, it allowed me to learn about production. I didn't go to film school. And so to be in charge of something that's what's a gaffer? I don't know. And how do you edit a TV show? Certainly, I didn't know that either. So it was really. We did two back-to-back; it took three years of my life to make about 260 hours of television. When I came out, I was lucky enough to really understand how to make TV shows.
Clint Betts
That's incredible. What have you made of like... At '96, you're probably still; movies are king, right? Like movies are like the pinnacle, and then we get to, like, this era, maybe in the 2010s, something like that, where television almost kind of surpasses movies in some ways. It's like the artistic form. I don't really know where we're at. I really don't really know where entertainment and media are at in general right now in 2025. But what's that been like to kind of see the various forms and formats kind of have their day in the sun, and you know, obviously, you've done a lot of TV and Nickelodeon, and you've done feature films. Which one do you prefer, and how do you think it's going now? That's about 15 questions. Apologies.
Bill O'Dowd
Oh no, it's okay. You know what you're saying at the start of that question: I never thought of my career in that way, but as you get older, I'm 55 from a company that started at 26. I guess the analogy is that when my dad was alive, he would talk about how he was in the land development business in Miami, buying communities and building a thousand homes or whatever. And he was born in 1921, and he talked about the change in Miami, our city, over the years. And it is still home for me. And I guess in the film media business, like what you're saying, Clint, it really has evolved. Yeah, movies were undoubtedly the king when I came out. And there's still the power of a global theatrical release of James Bond, which is an example of a movie franchise. One, I love it. But two, we promote it. So I should love it, I guess. But I did as a kid. It's very hard to match the global star power of Tom Cruise, for example.
But I do agree that if you're a writer or director with your own signature, prestige TV, or whatever that means to you on Netflix or Amazon or Apple or Disney, then there's just a lot of draw to that. We're blessed to have Mike White as a client, for example, and he makes a show called The White Lotus. It just premiered. So it's at the top of my mind.
Clint Betts
I just watched it, I just watched the first episode of season three last night. Such a great show.
Bill O'Dowd
Yeah.
Clint Betts
Such a great show.
Bill O'Dowd
And I don't know that that's not the pinnacle for a writer-director, if I'm being honest. Where will this all go? That'll be a great question. More consolidation is to come, probably. But yeah, I do think it opens up; it's not just movies anymore.
Clint Betts
What have you learned about marketing and promoting, like promoting a movie that may be applicable to those who run companies, launch products, and things like that? What all goes into promoting a movie and being successful at that?
Bill O'Dowd
Yeah, I think there are some great analogies to consumer product launches, or, effectively, a movie or a streaming series is what I will say is much like a product launch, I'd say, versus a continuous marketing plan for an existing product that'll be in the market for 40 years. You're driving the audience to a singular date. And certainly, in a movie, this has been true forever, but it's as true today. The more of an audience you can get there on Friday night, the higher the likelihood the movie will do well because nowadays, in most movies, I'd say with 90% accuracy, you can predict what the final box office will be just from the first Friday night. It used to be the opening weekend. Now you'll know what your opening weekend's going to be within a 90% correct rate; you'll know your multiple, and you could apply to that.
So you're trying to build not just massive awareness but also, you know, to use marketing terms, the purchase funnel. You want people to consider it and then want to acquire it. And so it does translate very nicely into many consumer products. And I think that's why with our companies, for example, each one of our PR firms has a consumer products expertise too. Because the movie side came straight out of, Let's Launch consumer products with the movie launch. But now we launched consumer products for a wide variety of companies throughout the year because it's a similar discipline. How can you create the heat towards the drop date that gets it to be word of mouth when it launches?
Clint Betts
How do you do that, though?
Bill O'Dowd
Well, that's the alchemy of nobody knows anything. I think it was William Goldman's line in the film business. But I will say, though, and in a fascinating investment thesis, it'd be good to share with you and see what you think. Honestly, Clint is in the old days... I'm talking about when I was coming out; let's go pre-internet for a second. Certainly, pre-mobile internet, if you were going to launch a consumer product in this country, you needed a lot of capital because you were going to do it with a paid media campaign.
And so I think about Mark Pritchard, legendary CMO, still at Procter & Gamble, or you had a new laundry detergent, and you're going to introduce it to the American consumer. How exactly were you going to do that in the sixties, seventies, eighties, mid-nineties? And that was just going to be a conversation with your ad agency about the optimal media plan, right? From heavy TV commercials probably, but then also radio, billboard, paid media, and the light bulb that went off for me, right or wrong, in 2016, I was 20 years into Dolphin, and we were, knock on wood, a pretty well-known independent production distribution finance company. And we had just done those movies, like I said, and we saw having the market to the consumer.
The other half of the light bulb before it went off was, I'd seen early Facebook when it was at Harvard's campus and then Ivy League and then .edu. And then when it opened up to the public, and I remember early marketing efforts when we were early in digital, I'd say, other than the family business, Dolphin again was early in digital, probably be the second thing we were known for in Hollywood.
And so we were all experimenting. However, Dolphin had a unique partnership with a talent agency named CAA, where they were just starting their digital group. We made a few shows together, and we put them together without a business plan. This is 2011, 2012, and 2013, and there is no business plan. This is two or three years before Netflix put House of Cards on. And we were making these shows for a million bucks, 2 million bucks. We released one on AOL, Yahoo, and Facebook. And to show you just, we were all just; there was a handful of us that were trying this, maybe not even, there might have been three or four of us, we, and we put out installments of six minutes a week thinking it would hook the viewer. And then you're like, should we just throw it all up at once? We didn't know what we were doing, and Clintm was my only point.
Clint Betts
No one does, man. That's why-
Bill O'Dowd
In those days, you just didn't know. And would people even watch something on the internet? Did they have download speeds? And now you don't even ask yourself that. So where I was going with that is, but in the course of that, we did a presentation at what was called the New Fronts. CAA and Dolphin threw a party, and we had a presentation and a scripted show that was, for those early days, the pinnacle of production value for the internet.
We had a script from Anthony Zuiker, who's a tremendously well-known showrunner. He created CSI. We had a CSI movie, and we had Olivia Martinez as our bad guy, who was married to Halle Berry at the time. We had a tremendous lead actress named Missy Peregrine, who's been on TV for about 20 years as our lead agent, tracking them down. I mean, this was a real TV movie, right? And we're in the auditorium, and we announce ours, and we play a trailer, which didn't exist for internet shows at the time, and we got polite applause. And people were like, oh, that does look. Then, the next young lady at our event came up; her name was Michelle Fan. I haven't spoken to her since. I give her a ton of credit. She was a young makeup artist and OG YouTube influencer who had makeup tutorials, and she's done very well. Now, she must be in her early to mid-thirties, I'm guessing. And the place erupted. And when we went to The Streamy Awards, where we were blessed to win that year, the place erupted for a young lady who had her cat playing on the piano. And it hit me in 2011, 2012, and 2013 that, at the time, we were almost denigrated as mommy bloggers. These individuals were building followings at the time in the hundreds of thousands, and some were getting into the millions of followers scores today. And that as I swung it all the way around, it was a light bulb because when 2016 hit, my company at the heart of it was used to financing projects. We refinanced movies and TV and made it, and this will sound highfalutin, but it was really just this idea that maybe in the future, earned media of PR and influencer what's now called influencer marketing, or the creator economy would have an outsized ability to democratize, for lack of a better word, consumer product launches.
The theory was you could launch products with the power of influencers, what we call that today, and create hype around PR, which was already being used to complement paid media campaigns. But consumer product launches wouldn't be just the province of the people who had enough money for paid media.
I would say that's certainly proven true, but that was why the theory came in 2016 of building this group of it. So what if you could build a family of the best in class PR firms and influence marketing and then use it to what end? Sure. They'll cross-sell with each other. Sure. They'll grow organically, we hope. And get bigger clients or clients who want to access all of the entertainment instead of just one vertical. And you're a one-stop shop. And all that's true. But the point of it was, and what these owners saw was the idea that if we could launch products in partnership with our clients, whether it be an individual like Rachel Rae or a corporation, a studio, or whatever, that we'd have a better chance of success because we could bring this earned media power and we could launch it far more cost-effectively. That's really the thesis of Dolphin and what, in 2016, set me down this path to acquire these companies.
Clint Betts
In the consumer product space, I guess the corollary there would be Kickstarter, although I think even films have been launched on Kickstarter. And do you know, actually I'm from Utah. I live in Utah, there's a production company here called Angel Studios. You ever heard of them?
Bill O'Dowd
Sure, yeah. Great faith-based content.
Clint Betts
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't really know what they create, but I know that their model's really interesting because they are doing that crowdfunding thing and people are investing in their movies online. It's really fascinating, like all the various ways you can do this now, it's really fascinating.
Bill O'Dowd
Oh, yeah. And we've never done something like that. We've never crowdsourced. But to your point, though, Clint, others have been very successful, and what they're trading off of really is the credibility of their "influencer," in this case, Dallas Jenkins, with the chosen or others that know other successful products like that. And then people are fans of either their shows or their creators and want to support it.
In our case, we were looking at things as if they were probably a hybrid right in the middle. We don't use either our own capital or traditional investment vehicles or partnerships with companies to have the capital to launch a product. But we're doing it behind the power of our ability to promote and bring specific influencers into that.
I'll give you a great example. We did not do this deal, but you'll see how we tie in at the end in the consumer product space in skincare. A woman named Susan Yara literally did exactly what we're talking about. She was an OG makeup influencer, much like Michelle Fan; she's probably 40 today. I mean, God bless her. About four years ago, COVID hit; it was the summer of COVID. And she said, "I think I'd like to, this is my swing, I'm going to launch a product." Because she'd had mixed makeup, again, on her YouTube channel for maybe eight years.
And she was well-respected. She understood beauty from more than just applying the makeup perspective. She understood the industry. She launched a product in partnership with an incubator, so she inserted a dolphin called Naturium there. The entire marketing of Naturium, as I understand it for three years, was Susan and 10 or 12 dermatologists that she had formed a collective with to do influencer marketing. At some point, they dabbled in some PR, and it took a couple of years on Amazon Marketplace; they launched it and just posted it.
And about a two-year mark, they got into Sephora because they'd gotten a lot of traction online. But at the three-year mark, they sold it three years and two months later to Elf Beauty for $355 million. She sold on a Friday. And she and her group joined Dolphin on a Monday. She's happily retired, I might add, but a great consultant to us. And we loved it and the story because that's exactly what we think we can do. Now, of course, she caught lightning in a bottle to a degree, and not every company or product you launch is going to sell for 355 million 3 years later. But she did it entirely with earned media. There was no Procter and Gamble or Unilever backing her or Johnson and Johnson. And it's what you can do today that you couldn't have done when I started, I guess.
Clint Betts
Yeah, it does seem like ads aren't as prevalent as say... Unless you're talking like the Super Bowl. Obviously, Super Bowl ads still matter, which is interesting. But no other ads seem to matter or stand out in a way. Like, it does seem like influencer marketing, like if you can get on, if you have Joe Rogan talk about your product for a minute, or some of these other kind of influencer things who have their own like production, and it's only like three people running it. It does seem like that's the way we're going, right? Is that also the way we're going with movies and that type of thing?
Bill O'Dowd
I think so. I mean, if you really look at the world, it is splitting into the big stuff that has traditional paid media campaigns and then the stuff that you can launch far more cost-effectively. And so for a James Bond or Marvel movie, if you're going to spend 200 million to make it, you're probably going to spend 200 million to market it and do a huge paid media campaign.
And by the way, I agree with some of the assessments over the last decade that the safest movies to invest in are the biggest because they've done such oversized returns for those studios. Of course, there's a limited amount of IP that is big enough to warrant a $200 million swing. But Disney's success with Marvel, with Pixar, with Star Wars is well-documented.
But if you think about YouTube as an alternative to that, how many people have made a whole lot of money on YouTube with videos that cost less than $5,000? So then it's that magic elixir of what makes something viral, what makes something a hit, what makes a show on YouTube work? What makes a podcast more successful than the next? And if someone knew that answer, they'd be a trillionaire, right? But I do know this: if you can bring PR, influencer marketing, word-of-mouth events, and things that aren't traditional paid media, because no one has enough money for traditional paid media behind YouTube. When was the last time you saw an ad on TV for either a YouTube show or a podcast?
Clint Betts
Never.
Bill O'Dowd
I would argue I've never seen it.
Clint Betts
I've never seen one. Yeah. Not that I can think of.
Bill O'Dowd
But we could name Joe Rogan, who is a great example. Alex Cooper is another example. You can name people who make tens of millions of dollars a year, hundreds of millions of dollars a year. So they build a following, and then they monetize it. Now, if you're going to launch a new consumer product in certain categories where entertainment influences success, so let's say liquor is well-known, or a beauty brand, or how many, each generation has its own products where influencer marketing is far more influential than paid media and cosmetics. Ask any person buying cosmetics under the age of 40 and lead them to that purchase. And you're going to hear two-thirds of the time influencers and, less than a third of the time, paid media.
So there are certain categories where when you want to launch a consumer product, or there's content, a documentary, a podcast, a TV show, or a movie, if you can promote it using PR and influencer marketing, and again, experiential marketing events too, you just have a better chance of success. And that's the entire core investment thesis of putting a group together, like what we did.
Clint Betts
How is AI changing all of this now? It seems like we're going to get to a point where everything- voice, acting, everything, the actors themselves- is all AI. I don't know, that seems to be like, I don't know how that'll work or if people will like it or anything like that, but the capability is going to be there soon if it's not already, and it's not quite up there already. So, how is AI changing all of this?
Bill O'Dowd
Well, we're not an AI company, but we certainly use AI, and we're impacted by AI. So, if I just divided all the marketing into paid and earned, I'm going to take the liberty to try and divide AI into defensive and then offensive AI. And one of the things AI has is the risk of damage. However, you look at the problem of taking the jobs away in Hollywood or elsewhere, which is certainly at the top of many guilds' minds, and rightfully so. However, the proliferation of deepfakes also has problems for individuals and brands. Without going into the gory details, just imagine how many deepfakes there are of any female or male celebrity in the world out there.
One of the things we do as a PR is that four of our eight companies are in the PR business and have a very large influencer marketing team with over 250 influencers on our roster. We care about the public persona of our clients, and we're meant to put them forward in their best light. And when there are fake comments or fake anything, a lot of fake images, a lot of fake videos out there that are damaging, it can be frustrating because it's whack-a-mole. You could write a cease and desist letter, hire a law firm, and good luck when it's coming in from offshore, right?
Clint Betts
Yeah.
Bill O'Dowd
So we partner with-
Clint Betts
Offshore, there's nothing you can do, which is crazy.
Bill O'Dowd
No. And presumably, it's only going to get worse. So day by day, month by month, I mean, imagine where we were three years ago, two years ago, one year ago today, right? So, we partnered with an AI company called LODI AI because we're blessed to have a roster of leading celebrities and leading influencers. And so, we were on the search for and picked an AI company that was at the forefront. They certainly have other great partnerships, but we created a strategic partnership with them where we offered to promote them, and they offered to do sweeps for our clients who want to participate. Using AI, identify all the images, videos, and statements out there and mass send them. Using AI, cease and desist letters are funneled into the watchdogs and the government agencies that are doing it.
And all of a sudden, you go from whatever you think you could do as an output manually to turning AI on AI, and all of a sudden, you've got thousands and thousands of those going out a day. And it seems to be making a big difference for our clients. And by the way, the same thing is going to reach into brands too, and not just individuals. So that's what I'll say using AI to play defense. And sometimes, it's not even AI-generated fake content; it's just human-generated fake content.
And then, on offense, using AI for good, so to speak. Obviously, it's a tool all of us use daily. Many of us, I shouldn't say all of us use it daily in our job, but if you want a first draft of a press release, it saves you half an hour or 45 minutes.
Clint Betts
That's right.
Bill O'Dowd
And then, before you know it, you edit it and whatnot. Or, if you want to think, start different headlines that'll grab the attention of a magazine editor before you send out the breaking news. Some things don't need help. Like Springsteen announces his next tour, we have no problem getting it, but Bill O'Dowd wears a blue suit today; nobody's going to run that story. We need some ideas on how to pitch that more effectively.
So I think that's how we're seeing AI today, and I personally, as a producer for 29 years, don't want to see AI-generated movies from start to finish. I want the human element in the artists behind it at each level of it. But I'm not burying my head in the sand and realizing I teach this one course a year at the University of Miami Film School, very happy to do it. I've been doing it since the year I started Dolphin for 29 years, and I teach tonight. And I think about this generation and how it changes each generation too; by the way, by the time they're deep into their career, the push of a button, outcomes, story ideas, the push of a button outcomes to a movie, processing speeds are only going to be faster. What does the world look like when, 10 years from now, you can make your own movies based on your own ideas? And instead of maybe watching YouTube, you're watching your movies or other people's movies or short video clips.
Clint Betts
Yeah, that's where it gets super wild. We're like, "Hey, create a version of James Bond-like this," or whatever. Then you're doing something really weird. But it does seem to be that most of it's just going to be shit. Don't you think? I mean, that doesn't sound like... There may be more content. We may have the tools to do that, but I can't. Who's watching that?
Bill O'Dowd
Yeah.
Clint Betts
But again, who knows, we're probably-
Bill O'Dowd
Clint may be watching Clint as James Bond.
Clint Betts
That's right. Yeah. You'd be writing your own; you'd be watching your own stuff, for sure. And then you get super crazy at that point. Nothing kind of matters, which is pretty wild. As we've talked about PR, I've been thinking that you haven't really mentioned pitching media organizations or news outlets or things like that. And obviously, news and media outlets, it's kind of waned for whatever reason; we don't have to get into some of its politics, maybe don't have the influence that they once had. Is it more targeted towards influencers now in PR, or, I mean, what world does the traditional legacy media play in all of this now?
Bill O'Dowd
It just popped into my head; I'll go with this answer, Clint. It's a direct analogy to that whole paid-earned evolution of earned. I mean, 30 years ago, I didn't own PR firms 30 years ago, but when I was coming up in the entertainment business, and obviously, the entertainment studios own the news networks. What was your alternative of where to get your news? And now, the proliferation of eyeballs, I mean, advertisers follow eyeballs, and power and influence follow eyeballs. So again, let's go; if you're under 30, if you're under 40, are you watching the nightly news, or are you getting your news from your TikTok feed, your Instagram feed, your Facebook feed, from YouTube, really? And so-
Clint Betts
I couldn't even tell you who the nightly news anchors are.
Bill O'Dowd
Exactly. If you want to see somebody stumped, ask someone who anchors the CBS. And I'm sure they're fantastic, by the way. I just mean-
Clint Betts
Sure. Yeah, exactly. It's not their fault.
Bill O'Dowd
It's not that CNN or CBS or ABC or NBC have to do anything other than impressive work. It's that as a share of mind of the American consumer on the news, if in Walter Cronkite's day, they represented 100%, of course, there was no CNN then, but you had a CNN in the seventies, eighties then, but today, what are they? Are they even a third? I asked that openly without knowing the answer. I'd be surprised if they were. So, as PR professionals, you're trying to get your story to a hundred percent of the American consumer. And so, there are no digital outlets, and there are very few; I would almost go. No digital outlet has as big an impact as CNN, ABC, or CBS. But when you factor in our lists of a thousand digital outlets and podcasts and YouTube channels and et cetera, then-
Clint Betts
They become way bigger, right?
Bill O'Dowd
Yeah.
Clint Betts
It's not even, yeah, the independent ecosystem, when combined together, is, yeah.
Bill O'Dowd
It's just bigger than the traditional, a hundred percent. Do you remember in our lifetimes when cable viewership passed network, and now you've got streaming viewership passes cable? I remember when I started, cable was the laughing stock, or people said, "Oh man, I'd never want to make a TV movie for a Lifetime. HBO, nobody will see it." And I think there's a little bit of that, and especially in what we do, you're driving awareness to a particular date on so much of what we do. And if you're going to do that with just the traditional media, you're going to leave out two-thirds of your potential audience.
Clint Betts
At what point, I know that this happens, but it's not completely mainstream yet. Do shows get released entirely on YouTube? There's a 24/7 news channel entirely on YouTube, and that has become more mainstream. And again, I know that there are probably both of those things happening, but none that immediately come to mind. At what point does that kind of... Cause that to me, it seems like that's where you've crossed into something that's entirely independently owned, and then you're only up against what YouTube would allow to be published.
Bill O'Dowd
Yeah, and it'll come down to money, like a lot of things. It has the advantage the internet has the advantage of tearing down how I started in the business with geographic boundaries. When you sell a TV show, and you sell it to Germany, and Germany starts airing in September, but then you sell it to Italy, and they start airing in July, you can't sync your shows with the internet or what we're now calling FAST channels, free advertising-supported television. In theory, you could launch a global television network in real-time.
Now you run into the issues of language and time of day and things of that nature. But the open question on a YouTube channel for news. Now, if it's independently sourced, then that's where the money comes in versus taking the news that's, quite frankly, already being the heavy cost of researching it from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and then adding your opinion or spin on it and putting up a YouTube channel. Obviously, it's much cheaper. But it does beg the obvious question. I mean, how much capital would it take? And I'm sure they've investigated it. Would those traditional news outlets start a 24/7 video channel?
Clint Betts
Yeah, it's interesting, and I'm sure they do have their own apps and stuff, but to go on where everybody is, which is like YouTube or those types of places, is interesting. What have you learned over the course of your career so far about leadership, about business, about integrity? What have you learned looking back now?
Bill O'Dowd
Well, you'd like to believe you learned about integrity from your parents. I certainly do feel that way. Always better to be honest in all that you do. I heard a great quote once recently from Mark Twain that really resonated with me. I think there have been different versions of this over the decades, I'm sure in centuries, but you know about know what you choose to worry about, Clint, or don't sweat the small stuff and whatnot. I have always enjoyed Mark Twain's quotes because they have this spark of humor in them, and they really make you think.
And he said something like, "I'm now an old man and I've known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened." And I think there's just a lot of truth in that, or that you want to test your memory, try remembering what you were worried about one year ago today.
I think the other thing I've learned in business is that I feel like I gravitate to wanting to work; I tend to want to work with people that are optimistic. Everyone wants the hardworking and certainly kind and smart. But I think if you have a positive outlook on life, obviously that's an old truism too. But somebody made me laugh with a quote maybe a decade ago that said, "I've never seen a statue erected for a pessimist."
Clint Betts
That's pretty good.
Bill O'Dowd
And it was such a good one. And he was quoting someone, and Henry Ford once said for all of his issues individually, but obviously a great economic and business mastermind, he had said, "Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right." And I think those would probably be the lessons I most take away: stay optimistic, work hard, and try to remember what you're working towards instead of what the pitfalls along the way might be that might never pass.
Clint Betts
I love that. Finally, we end every interview with the same question, and that is at ceo.com, we believe the chances one gives is just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Bill O'Dowd
Oh man, where do I start that list? Especially as a solo persons. But if I go back to the beginning, I referenced them earlier, I'll say, my parents. I know maybe you want somebody in the business world, I'm happy to go there if you want.
Clint Betts
No, no, no, I want whatever you want.
Bill O'Dowd
Because my parents saved for college, and I'm seven feet tall, Clint. I played college basketball at Creighton University, and because I played college basketball, I paid for undergrad, and the money my parents saved wasn't going to be enough for both undergrad and law school. But taking that scholarship and playing four years for the Mighty Blue Jays, I might add, then the money my parents had was just enough to cover law school.
And when I came out of that long and storied eight-month legal career I had, the $5,000 signing bonus that the firm was kind enough to bestow gave me the money for the down payment on the car I needed to be able to drive back in those days from Miami to Tampa to take the bar exam and then also have a car for work. But eight months later, I realized, "Hey, this isn't what I was meant to do. And I'm sure there are a lot better attorneys out there, and hopefully, I can do well in business."
Sure, I was at a stage in my life when I could take that chance, but I could only take that chance versus so many of my classmates because I didn't have any debt. I think I'd saved maybe $15,000 from my job, maybe. I don't even think that much at eight months. But I had no debt. And so when I talked to, we're a company of 270 today, and we've probably got over a hundred, maybe even half, that are under 30 years old. And I talk about saving their money. Please put your money into our 401(k) program. I think about financial literacy.
And I am very, very, very grateful because I had a classmate who's from Utah, a great, great, great guy, John Wonderly; we've lost touch, but he came into law school and married, and he had a couple of kids, and he had a couple more. And Debbie, his wife, just a lovely lady, and I know he took a starter job he may have been happy with, I don't want to, but it was a job none of us thought he would necessarily gravitate towards, but he wanted to move back to Utah, but he had to stay on the East coast because he had, so many of my classmates had debt from both undergrad and grad. And I see that teaching at the University of Miami. And so I think that there is no Dolphin today without the sacrifice my parents made and allowed me to start my life with that mighty $5,000 bonus, but without debt.
Clint Betts
That's beautiful, man. That's incredible. Bill, thank you so much for coming on, man. What a career you've had so far. You're working on some incredible things here in the future. Thank you. What an honor. Seriously, we have to have you back.
Bill O'Dowd
Oh, I hope I get invited back, Clint. This was really fun. And I loved your questions there at the end. Holy cow. No one's ever asked me those before. So thank you and thank you for the time. I very much appreciate it.
Clint Betts
Likewise. Thanks, Bill. Appreciate it, man.
Edited for readability.