Perkins Miller Transcript

Clint Betts

Perkins, thank you so much for coming on this show. It is a real pleasure to meet the CEO of Fandom.com. Fandom, as I understand it, was founded by the same founder, Jimmy Wells of Wikipedia. Tell me about your history and how you became the CEO of Fandom.

Perkins Miller

Well, thanks, Clint. It's great to be here. Yeah, this platform, and there are a few pieces of Fandom, which I'll just describe quickly, but these are about its core, which are these 200,000 plus wikis that Jimmy Wells sort of kicked off into the ether after he launched Wikipedia. And so this is about 20 years ago, folks got their hands on them, and it became this destination for everybody who loves movies, TV, games, and anime. And so there are, again, 200,000 wikis that cover basically the imagined worlds. We have 45 million pages of content, and about 300 million people come through every month just to consume all this information about these imagined worlds. I joined about five and a half years ago. The investment firm TPG purchased Fandom, and we then acquired a platform called Gamepedia, which sort of looked a lotlike these same wiki platforms.

It was just more dedicated to gamers, and we brought them together. We also had this business called Dungeons & Dragons Beyond, which was a toolset for D&D players that we've built up over time. And we actually sold that to Hasbro a couple of years ago. And then we've since acquired other businesses that basically super-serve fans. So we have this Wiki platform that about 300 million people a month come to. And then we've got an e-commerce platform. We have almost a million people buying video games, and that's called Fanatical. We've also acquired some media brands to help people on their fan journey. We own Metacritic, GameSpot, TV Guide, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, and a few others. In aggregate, there are about 350 million folks who come through every month to nerd out about all these fantasy worlds.And so that's its history and where we stand today in our business.

Clint Betts

What made it interesting to you?

Perkins Miller

Well, I was helping to run an e-commerce platform called StubHub at the time, and eBay was on the way to selling that business. And I was really interested in these vertical communities. I'd spent a fair amount of time in different businesses, so a lot in sports and entertainment. I had just done a stint in ticketing, and I was in the face of all the scaled conglomerates, from Google to Amazon to Facebook. I was more and more convinced that there were some underserved communities out there, and I was really curious about them. And I actually had built a deck, and I got a call about Fandom, and I was like, "Hey, I have this exact same model." And so it actually worked out really well because when we first had our conversation, I actually already built a thesis around it, and it was like, "Hey, that matches our thesis." So, anyway, I do believe that these vertical communities, in the face of a lot of large-scale platforms, are really meaningful in terms of engagement. So, it was just a perfect fit for what I was looking to do.

Clint Betts

What do you make a great community?

Perkins Miller

I think number one is that you have to have something you care about. So I mean, I think there are these shared values, and so those shared values in the worlds that we live in are around this intellectual property. It's a shared value. I like role-playing games and fantasy, or it's a shared value that I love horror, or I am a huge anime fan. And so, the archetypes that get kicked out of these worlds represent the identity of the community and those values that the community has and shares. And so they can come together and connect around this shared value and their identity. And then I think the second thing that's most important is that they have a way to voice it, and they have a way to share. In our case, we have a couple hundred thousand folks who are creating content, and then we have people who come to it in order to connect and feel that they can get the information.

In our case, we have the Canon, if you know that word. And if you want to know what the Canon is for Lord of the Rings, they'll come to fan them. Or you want to know what's Canon for Star Wars, they'll come to our Wookipedia section where there's 170,000 pages of content about everything you've always wanted to know about Star Wars. And so it's got to be a platform that serves the community, is authentic, and connects to them the things they want. Those two things are probably the most important. You have to have shared values; you have to have a platform I think works for folks. And then you have to, of course, in our case, maintain the standards so that folks feel like they're safe and feel like they've got a way to connect without getting trolled or otherwise folks behaving badly, so we do that as well. So those are the things that are pretty important for communities to govern themselves. But generally speaking, in our case, it's really about those values, identity, and the content that really makes a difference.

Clint Betts

And do you have the sense for, like, Hey, once you have that, then you got to figure out a way for them to do commerce with each other as you've done? How do you intensify that? Or maybe that's not the right word. How do you strengthen that community and the relationships of those who are inside of it?

Perkins Miller

Yeah, it really depends. That's the thing. It's one of those cases where it's like when you talk to someone about how they want to go global with their business. And when you hear that, for me, it's always a trigger, which is like, oh, guess what?There are about 210 countries you have to figure out. The same thing holds true with our case in communities. A fan of Japanese anime has very different needs than someone who's playing an RPG game or someone who's just trying to figure out the chronology of The Witcher. And so, in some cases, we build things that are very bespoke. So we've got, for example, maps in our gaming wikis so that as you're playing a video game, if you've ever played some of these role-playing or fantasy games, you can get into these and meet these worlds. And there's a lot of places you can go.

There are tunnels, there are caves, there are roads. You got to kind of... It's hard to sometimes keep track of where you are. So you build this mapping tool that says, "Okay, here's how you can keep track of where you are so that you know you're making your way towards the doom, whatever you're trying to get to the destination." In other cases, we build bundles of video games for people to play because they want that ease. Sort of like, "Hey, surprise me." We actually have this bundle of video games called a mystery bundle. You just buy it for ten bucks, and you get a whole bunch of video games to play.So there's a bit of that delight there that I think is also part of the service. So between the... Everything's got to essentially be relevant and authentic to what that fan or that user needs. I mean, Metacritic, it's all about Do I buy this game. Is it good? Or do I watch this movie? Is it good?

We aggregate all these rankings and ratings from both folks who are professional reviewers and fans to give you that picture so that you can make a decision. So our goal really is utility, and we have to be fairly discreet though, and it's what makes it difficult when you've got a very large platform, and you've got a very broad set of needs, how do you prioritize the work so you get the authentic connection to the fan, but you're able to do it at scale. So, it's been a pretty tricky project.

Clint Betts

Yeah, it's fascinating. As somebody who builds communities not near the scale that you have, I'm always fascinated with, in particular, online communities and how you strengthen those relationships and keep them active and all of that type of stuff. What is your revenue model?

Perkins Miller

We do this one here. We've done different ones. We had a business that was direct to consumers around the Dungeons & Dragons IP, and that one was a subscription model and had e-commerce to it, but we're about 80/20 advertising 20%. So, the core wikis and those media businesses I told you about account for about 80% of our revenue, and about 20% comes from e-commerce from selling the deal games.

Clint Betts

Would your main competitor be like Reddit?

Perkins Miller

Yeah, I think so. So between, think about Reddit, you think about IMDB, and you think about Twitch. Those are sort of trying to calibrate, maybe Rotten Tomatoes. Those are sort of in our time zone.

Clint Betts

Your're kind of the regulation of all, and that's not that way you say that. You're kind of like all of those.

Perkins Miller

Yeah, we've got a piece of each of them, but I think what we do is that we're uniquely positioned because we have such a broad footprint in entertainment. We've got these 200,000 Wikis and 45 million pages of content. We've got this really broad view, and actually, we've built this data platform called FanDNA. And what we've done basically is, you would've done the same thing, which is, okay, how do we build an ontology and a taxonomy on the platform so we know what's there? And then as those 300 million folks come through, we're able to... We're not capturing any PII, no personal information, but we're able to sort see the behaviors, and then we're able to draw connections. What we've done is buildthis thing called FanDNA Helix, which essentially identifies communities that you may not expect to be interested in your product. So we're able to say, "Hey, you know what? Turns out the people making this up who love RPG fantasy also love horror movies," and there's a non-intuitive connection we're able to draw for folks who are trying to reach and market folks.

I think what's unique about us compared to our competitors is that we have this really broad; I mean, Reddit's somewhat similar, but we're really about pure fans. Reddit's got a very broad mandate. Since we're so much about these imagined worlds, we're able to really diagnose what's happening between these different segments and genres and what people are interested in and find some really unusual connective tissue. And then being able to use that in order to build a better product to build a recommendation engine. And we'll build things that will delight people like a map. We'll also use it to make the ads work better. So that's the thing that's sort of unique about what we do.

Clint Betts

Your FanDNA product is really interesting in terms of the data, and I'm sure that it seems like the most valuable asset you have is that data and how you use it to learn about your customers and all that type of stuff. How does AI... How are you thinking about AI? Obviously, AI transforms data in a really interesting way.

Perkins Miller

Yes, you and I probably both could go for another couple of hours on this front. Very curious. I'm very nerdy about all this. We use AI on a number of fronts today. Some we use for moderation, so we look at images and detect whether or not somebody accidentally posts something they shouldn't or takes something down that shouldn't be there. We use AI operationally on a number of fronts for a core data set and use a lot of machine learning. I like to distinguish between what is really machine-learned and algorithmic, which basically is a more linear process, meaning A plus B equals, which is versus ai, which is used in vector math. And so I'm really careful when we start building these things that we've got a really well-tuned model, and we haven't been able to put the investment into building the model, but we are talking to a number of partners about putting our data to work.

And I actually think you've probably seen OpenAI's o1 version right now, which I think is a really interesting thing. The processing is moving beyond inference and moving towards more traditional synthesis and maybe some more recursive analysis. And what I think we'll do is for folks like us who have insights, we know what fans want, and we want to service them, we'll be able to plug into some of these AI utilities in the future because these frontier models are just, I think they're growing by orders of magnitude almost every 12 months right now. And I really think over the next 12 to 18 months, we'll be able to plug into them. We're really focused right now on making sure we've got a really good taxonomy ontology. We've got at least a schema where we think we can talk about weighting. We have roughly probably six or seven billion tokens on our platform.

So we do have scale. And so, between the insights, I think we have the work we'll do with our data to structure it correctly. And then we've got products we're building today. But again, those products are more derivative and machine learning and algorithmic math versus needing to plug into AI to get an outcome. There are certain things around game utility we will start working on sooner than later, and then we'll continue to work into that, I think, as some of the APIs are available to us to tap into run models on a bespoke basis against some of the insights we have. That's where we are right now in terms of our approach to AI.

Clint Betts

With the data you have, I'm sure that you've thought about this: these studios that make games that do all this type of stuff they're probably interested in fan sentiment, what fans are really interested in, and what they don't like. And so I wonder, part of this question is, do you work with them, and is there any kind of relationship there? And the other one is, have you ever thought about starting your own game studio? I mean, who would know more about fans and what they're looking for than you guys?

Perkins Miller

Yeah, so on those two notes, we do work with studios to give them insights to help them build a product that's going to be closer to the target that they're aiming for. Because we can say, okay, here's trending, or here's worked in the past, or here's just... Folks from Paramount have talked to us about Star Trek, just so you understand the whole heritage and Canon and so that what you write is consistent with the history of the IPS. And so we do that today, and each business has a different way of wanting to access the insights. And we have done some publishing launches in the gaming world where we're able to say, okay, we can take a game, and we can market it. And actually, that's what we do for several big gaming publishers today because they advertise on our platform; we provide them the insights to help them do a better job of that.

We also talked about getting into the game studio business. The tension right now in getting into game studio development is just the timing. These games probably know they... Mobile games are really not in our sphere. Those are usually fairly light-touch, lightweight, casual games. We're very much anchored in the PC games in the console game world, which is about the other 50% of the gaming market. And to release, in particular, AAA console games, it's in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars, and in other cases, it's at least tens of millions of dollars being invested in these builds over two or three years. And so that's very much a hit-driven betting, and in a lot of ways, the big franchises tend to work better than trying to break through with something new. So we've been cautious about getting into that space because, again, the cost and the time and the fact that it's a big bet, we'll really figure out, well, what we can be really good at.

Well, we think we can be really good at giving insights to people who want to place that bet. We may move into that realm if we feel like there's a to do it. Maybe the time rising comes down with AI that allows games to be produced in a shorter window, and then that way our insights are saying, "Okay, here's where we think the puck is going. We can put a game to market in 18 months that may have a higher chance to do well." Those are some of the things we're working on right now, but historically, we've been a little cautious there because of, again, that time and cost basis.

Clint Betts

What were you doing prior to Fandom?

Perkins Miller

I was at StubHub, so I was working in the ticketing space, so I spent a few years there as the GM of Americas, and then I was co-president for a little while with the CFO and I. Yeah, it was great time. Big ticketing, 5 billion in ticket sales, so that's a big platform. It was pretty fun.

Clint Betts

And then prior to that, we have some sort of Utah connection, you and I. What were you doing prior to that?

Perkins Miller

I've done a number... I was at the NFL before that and worked for the WWE E, but then from about '99 through about 2010-ish, I was in doing Olympic things. So, I worked at the Salt Lake Olympics and was there when Mitt and Fraser came in. Mitt Romney and Fraser Bullock are both known to those Silicon Slopes folks in Utah. And so I worked, went briefly over to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, and got seconded there a bit to keep an eye on things then, but I was really responsible in 2002 for very early internet stuff. We were streaming live results. Live results in the Olympics, believe it or not, 22 years ago was the big thing on the internet. I did that for a while, and then I had the privilege to work for NBC and do more of the sports and Olympics digital stuff. So I was the head of sports and Olympics digital and did the 2008 Olympics, 2010 Olympics, and NFL streaming, as well as a lot of golf and a bunch of other stuff in that realm. That was a chunk of time that... But the time I spent in Utah was fantastic to be able to work with Mitten Frazier and Dave Busser there on that project.

Clint Betts

Oh yeah, Frazier Bullock is a legend. I mean, I admit it is, too, but Frazier Bullock, he just brought the Olympics back-

Perkins Miller

I know.

Clint Betts

... to Utah, which is absolutely incredible and exciting. So yeah, love that guy.

Perkins Miller

Yeah, he's fantastic.

Clint Betts

He's a wonderful man. Did you say WWE?

Perkins Miller

I did.

Clint Betts

What was that like? Tell me what you did there. That's fascinating.

Perkins Miller

I was running technology for the WWE, basically the chief digital officer, and a little bit of what I did for the NFL. And so I was responsible for their social platform and mobile platform. The really big thing we did there was launch the WWE network. That was back in 2012, when we pushed over the top, as it was called back then. Now, everybody's streaming platform is sort of dominant. But we launched the WWE, a network on its like seven platforms, and it was very successful. We were able to stream WrestleMania, and it was a fantastic experience because it's a high-velocity business. They do live events every single week, 50 weeks a year, hundreds and hundreds all around the country and around the world. So it was quite an experience, very much unique in that they own their IP completely vertically and manage it really well. So, they own the rights to everything. They manage the athletes; they've got the licenses under their control for everything from merchandise to ticket sales. So it's a very vertically oriented organized business. That was prettyfascinating.

Clint Betts

Yeah, that is fascinating. Yeah, that many events and yeah, the amount that they turn out is crazy. That's actually wild.

Perkins Miller

It's quite something.

Clint Betts

Tell me what a typical day looks like for you as CEO of Fandom.

Perkins Miller

Well, you've probably heard this from other CEOs, they're sort of not terribly typical, although I believe in a fair amount of structure. I'm a get what you plan for kind of guy. I'm pretty religious about schedules, and so I usually run things on a six-month clock where you've got two board meetings, and you have QBRs quarterly business reviews. We do an executive monthly review and have a weekly staff meeting one-on-ones with my leadership team. I spend time with a whole punch list of external partners that I want to connect with and get smarter about, as well as our board members and stakeholders there. I tend to. Mondays are E-staff time, and then one-on-ones plus stakeholder meetings will happen during the week, and then I have to roll travel into that. I spend time on the road going to events, meeting with stakeholders again, and helping drive the business.

We're blessed in that we have a very broad business that's really efficient and mostly remote first. But we have offices in San Francisco, LA, and New York, two in the UK, and a big tech center in Poznan, Poland. A day for me will be some blend of operations, strategy, external stakeholder work, business development, and trying to make sure we drive growth and look ahead. And then the operational day-to-day stuff. I'm a bit of a data nerd, so as you probably hear me talking about AI, so I tend to keep an eye on the core business and see what's moving in what direction, ideally more up into the right than anything else.

Clint Betts

How do you think AI will transform web traffic and search? Because you, did you say 300 million views a month?

Perkins Miller

Yeah.

Clint Betts

I mean, that's a lot. How are you thinking about that? What happens if that goes away? And I'm not saying that it will or won't, but you must be thinking about how AI is going to change search engine optimization and all that.

Perkins Miller

We do. I spent a lot of time on that, and I think the benefit of what we do has sort of two legs to it: one on that core and 45 million pages of content stuff. If you come to one of our Wikis, you go to Wikipedia, or you go to Minecraft; I mean, it's so rich and so deep, and a lot of people come up with a solution; they're trying Google something for an answer, but they want to do they'll in the quality of it and explore a bit. Not exactly perfect. I spent a lot of time with the various models today, and they're trying to come up with a more precise answer. But in the cases we work in, these imagined worlds, I mean, we're not talking about formulating a new vaccine here. We're talking about figuring out what's going on with Captain Kirk in this episode.

So it's like, it's not something... People want to come and, as part of their entertainment enjoyment, do a little exploring and knock around a little bit. So far, Google's actually ranking us a little bit higher because they recognize that people want that connective tissue. And so far, the way the AIs are working is they're kind of working to get more and more precise about more and more transactional questions or doing work for you. Saying, "Hey, I've got..." And I use it all the time, "Hey, I've got this thesis for this thing; please pull in this spreadsheet and analyze this data and give me a trending forecast with plus or minus 5% variance over the next 36 months," and it'll give me that analysis and point me in the... Amazing utility. But again, if I want to, I'm trying to get through Skyrim, and I'm lost again; I'm just going to... I reallydon't know where I am, so I don't really know how to ask a good question, so I'm going to come to Fandom and explore a little bit.

I think that's distinct about what we do in these weird imagined worlds versus what you're going to get, I think, with an AI. Now, of course, that may change over time and surface the content, but ideally, we're going to be the ones who will be creating some of this utility. So, a game utility, you're playing a video game, and you're stuck right now, you come to Fandom; well, what if there's a native application on your desktop that you just had to say, "Hey, I can't get around this wizard. I've been here for 10 minutes, I'm dying here. What do I do?" And we'll be able to say, "Hey, you know what? You missed going and getting the strength coin back in that closet, and that strength coin will let you beat the wizard." So that kind of stuff will, I think hopefully be helpful with, and that's probably not something that Sam Altman's focused on right now and something probably we can make a difference on.

Clint Betts

What do you read? What reading recommendations would you have for us?

Perkins Miller

I read on the blog side for the AI stuff, and I would read Ethan Mollick, so I read him pretty regularly. One just came out, it's quite good. And then I read different business books, so I'm reading right now it's on my desk called Hope for Change actually, which is a Stanford neuroscientist writing about the difference between cynicism and pessimism. And I then read other business books. I've got Anti-Fragile, which I think is a really good book. And then for management, one of my favorite books is The Courage Be Disliked. It's a sort of interview set in a Japanese temple between a student and a master, and it talks about ego and conviction and knowing where you are from a self-awareness standpoint and how to operate.

I range between super nerdy tech stuff to business planning things that are like, okay, what did this person learn about strategy that I could learn from, to a lot of actually psychology books. I think being a CEO is actually a lot about understanding human behavior and how to operate in the dynamic of different personalities and getting people to align with diversity and get the best outcomes. I think that kind of psychology is really important.

Clint Betts

On that, I wonder what you've learned over the years as a leader, some of the traits or some of the things that make a great leader. How have you thought about that and what have you learned that maybe you didn't realize early on in your career?

Perkins Miller

I didn't realize... I mean, I think I didn't realize how important curiosity is. I think I'm a naturally very curious person. I've gone through a battery of exams at various times in my career, and one of the things that jumps out is I'm a learner. I'm really curious. I think as a leader, you have to be sort of naturally curious because you want to know how things work and what you can do to make them better potentially, or where you may not know the answer. And so that curiosity is really important. I think the other thing that's pretty important is humility. It kind of goes hand in hand with a little bit of curiosity, so knowing what you don't know and making sure you understand that you're playing a role even as CEO and you don't have all the answers, and being humble in that position is really, I think, critical. Then the other thing that was really important to learn as a CEO was the idea of being a servant leader or a force multiplier, which means N equals one. Again, sorry to bring so much math in here, but I can only have so much impact on a single basis and fact as a CEO. What a lot of people think would be surprised to hear is that, actually, you shouldn't be making a lot of decisions because if everything's coming to you, it's very hard to operate at scale. In fact, I think a CEO's job is to push decision-making down as far to the organization as possible because, again, expectations of quality, innovation, and outcome.

We have to perform. However, the more singular decisions a CEO makes, the slower the organization will go. And I think to scale; you have to really be, again, humble enough to understand that you're probably not going to make a good decision either because you're not really close to the material, and by the time it gets to me, it's been nuanced and packaged. Who knows what's really there? So that's another thing that's really important for me to learn, which is how to say, "Okay, well, I have to have a team of people underneath me that has a team underneath them that is able to scale and have an impact."

Clint Betts

It's interesting in your role; you're kind of where people go to escape reality in the current macroeconomic environment or what's happening in the world, geopolitics, national politics, and all that type of stuff. Do you ever find yourself having to think about... I mean, obviously, you'd have to think about those things, right? Do you ever find yourself where you have to speak out on issues that have nothing to do with your company, make statements, think about macroeconomic issues, and make forecasts? I am just wondering how you handled that part of the job as a CEO, which is so different from a CEO 10 or 15 years ago who could focus specifically on their company. It seems like CEOs are being asked to comment more often now on things that really have nothing to do with the company they're running.

Perkins Miller

I can see that. That can happen to, in certain circumstances; you've probably seen it happen. I try to do the best job I can.We have these values: we've set up, built, and joy. And whenever something comes up, and there's in the world around us, we're struggling in the circumstance, whether it's a tragedy or just uncertainty, I tend to just lean on the values and say, "Okay, well, does the community need to hear from me on this? Is this something our community of people..." And so again, as people who love these imagined worlds, is it affecting the imagined worlds they're living in, and do they need to hear from me about these imagined worlds? And so using that as the test and then, or they're building or there's joy, can I celebrate something that again, it's going to serve the community in some way?

And that served us, I think, pretty well and served me pretty well to serve as a test because otherwise you're, I think, for the purposes of running a company, sort of getting outside the lane, and I think community, I think we have some values that are really consistent around, if you look at the way we enforce moderation, we're going to have guidelines that are very bright, and we hold them firm. And so if something comes up that is, again, going to hurt the community or impair the community, we will address it and do so publicly if necessary. But that really is the guiding light for us, so to speak, on managing through a lot of this uncertainty and turmoil. Just say, "Okay, look, is this serving our community people who love anime?" If the answer's like, "Yeah, they don't really need to hear about that, then I'm not going to talk about it."

Clint Betts

Yeah, that makes sense. That's very smart actually. Finally, by the way, this has been incredible, Perkins, thank you so much for coming on. 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?

Perkins Miller

Well, I bring it because we're talking about Utah. I have to bring it back to that time back in. It was even in 2001 that I had actually stepped away briefly from the Olympics, had a long conversation with Mitt, and joined Campus Pipeline, which is a startup that basically was looking to do what Facebook did. And I got there, and I was like, this is probably not a good fit. And to Fraser's credit, Mitt's credit, and this guy Dave Busser's credit, I came back to the Olympics to really work on what I wanted to work on, which was technology and digital media. And so I have to give credit... And I was young back then when I was so inexperienced to have folks like Fraser and Mitt and this guy Dave Busser, who really have seen the world beyond the lens of my whatever it was, outlaw idea and let me take, come back and do what I wanted to do and have an impact. I ended up building a great partnership with the Olympics and NBC to do the work that I've come to love, which is working in technology.

And over the last 24, 25 years, if I hadn't been given that chance at that time to do that work, I definitely would not be here where I am today. So I'm very grateful to them for that chance.

Clint Betts

Perkins, thank you so much for coming on. Seriously, that was incredible.

Perkins Miller

Yeah, it's super fun. Thanks, and great to see you.

Edited for readability.

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