Hi.
I'm Sarah Lacy backstage at
TechCrunch Disrupt with Ashton Kutcher.
The guy in the hat.
The guy in the hat.
So you were just onstage,
and Charlie Rose did not
get out of you what I'm about to get out of you.
He just didn't ask.
That one of your angel portfolio companies
that no one knows about, very
popular company, Air BnB.
Yeah.
When did you invest?
I've been working with
them since about February.
I'm an investor, but I'm
also a strategic eally
taking the brand international, which
is really important for them right
now because there are so many
ex-US companies trying to chase what they are doing.
Right
And so that's kind
of our primary focus
right now is working
on the UK and Germany
and starting to build the company there.
Now you're a very different Ashton
Kutcher than the Ashton Kutcher who
came to Tech Crunch 40 or
Tech Crunch 50 or whatever we were calling it back then.
First of all, you seemed more
nervous to be in front of the techies then.
You seem very calm and self assured these days.
I'm still nervous.
I probably just know better words now.
But you've also evolved
more from Ashton Kutcher,
entrepreneur, to Ashton Ashton
Kutcher, entrepreneur and Angel investor.
You have a portfolio of 12
companies, and really good
companies, things like AirBnB,
Skype, I don't know
how many others I'm allowed to say or not.
So how do you see that
your role has really evolved
in this ecosystem from a
couple sort of silly, early
companies that do so well
to be attached to pretty big names now.
I think when I
came here three years ago,
I came with a media property.
It wasn't really a tech company.
It's the space that I knew, I knew how to create media units, right?
That's what I was
educated in and that's
what I knew and that's what I've
been doing for the last whatever five or six years.
And then when I came
here, I saw this
entire ecosystem of people and
I just sort of became
an apprentice and, like, sat
next to some of
the smartest people in the
system and really just
tried to suck information from them, learn from them.
I just started reading
a ton of stuff because I
don't like to fail.
And then what I
found from sitting down with
them is, I would go
through different people's
investment portfolios and I would
say "I like this
one" and "I'm interested
in that one" and "This makes
sense to me", "I don't get
this, but I understand this",
"I think I could be
helpful this company through an
introduction to these people,
because there are certain
people in the media
world that can be
really, really influential to a company.
I can kind of
get a return phone call from most
people that I place a
call to, and that can become really, really valuable.
Like that level of introduction
for people, when they're first
starting out a company, can become extremely valuable.
So some of my
first investments were Skype, obviously,
Foursquare, and I'm in
investor Path and TinyChat.
And when I saw,
I wasn't an angel investor in
AirBnB
but when I saw the power of
that company, I actually
saw it as one of
the first companies that is so truly
cutting edge in what it's
doing taking social trust
and manifesting that into commerce.
And some people would say online is eroding trust, so they're taking.
So they've actually managed
through an integrity of a
product and integrity of
people to start to
create social trust and transfer that into commerce.
And if you go, it's
like going to a restaurant and looking
at tips on Foursquare or something like that.
Or like now using Explore
on Foursquare where you go
and you, I want
pizza, and it shows you, like,
oh, these are six places that
my friends have gone to, and
I go, I have trust
the fact that these people have
the kind of taste that I
would endorse, so thereby I'm gonna go to that place.
AirBnB is really doing
that with the way
that they're creating an ecosystem of trust.
And now their new Facebook implementation does
it even further, where I can see the places that my friends have stayed.
It's actually, its
actually doing something in
technology that is a
social interaction that people
may not have the trust
to do without that level of social.
Right, it's solving the trust
problem not just trying to not destroy it.
It's actually solving the trust
problem, exactly, as opposed to destroying it.
I mean, granted, you would say "I'm going to New York for the weekend.
Do you have a friend whose place I could stay in?"
Sure, maybe.
But maybe they don't.
But maybe you have a friend of
a friend who's endorsed this place
and you say to your
friend, hey you know
that girl, does she have good taste?
And where she would stay is my kind of place.
Yeah, absolutely.
Right.
It takes out all like sort of the inefficiencies of it.
It takes out the inefficiencies of it
and actually lands you in
a new commerce that
I think is going to have extraordinary value.
Now I want to ask.
You've just signed on to a
very high profile, very demanding
job, being the replacement on Two and a Half Men.
You said on stage with Charlie acting is still your first love.
Is Catalyst Media, your venture
investments, everything you've done
on the tech side, now going to suffer?
No.
It's to get a benefit.
How?
I'm not going to
end up on a set in Shreveport,
Louisiana for three months working sixteen-hour days.
Predictability.
Yeah.
So, I've worked this
job before when I was on The 70s Show.
I know what the schedule is and
I know it really, really well and
I built Catalyst while I
was making that show.
I built Catalyst, I made multiple
movies, I produced
Punk'd and starred in Punk'd as well.
I was able to have about three
different jobs while I was working on a sitcom.
And the great thing about
sitcoms is that, absolutely
brilliant, the schedule: you work about thirty hours a week.
And you work for two weeks and then you get a week off.
So, it's two weeks on, one week off, two weeks on, one week off.
That 's pretty sweet.
And then you have three months off
in the summer, and three weeks
off at Christmas, and a week off at Thanksgiving.
So, the way the
schedule works, one, it keeps
me in and around
my office instead of ending up in France shooting a movie.
And secondly, there's an
extraordinary amount of time around that.
And thirdly, it's just an absolutely brilliant job.
I get to make people laugh for a living.
I don't know if it gets better than that.
Wow, suddenly I'm envious.
I thought I had a great job at TechCrunch.
I think we work like 90 hours a week and I never get a vacation.
Thank you so much for joining us Ashton.
Always great to have you here.
Thank you.
Pleasure.
Ashton Kutcher started dabbling in tech startups a few years ago, but he is no longer a dabbler, as his his Disrupt interview with Charlie Rose last week made clear. Kutcher is an investor in a dozen tech companies, including Skype, Foursquare, Path, and Kevin Rose’s Milk. In this backstage interview with Sarah Lacy, he reveals that he is also an investor in AirBnB (whose CEO Brian Chesky was also at Disrupt) and why he thinks the company is different.
Kutcher talks about his approach to investing in startups. At first it was very much a leraning process for him. “I became an apprentice” to other tech investors, he says, because “I don’t like to fail.”
Will investing become more of a hobby now that he is about to start a full-time job replacing Charlie Sheen on the CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men? Not at all, he says. Sitcom hours are much more predictable than movie-set hours. You can expect Kutcher to keep investing.
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