Good morning, John. It's the final day of Pizzamas.
This is not a complaint, but Pizzamas is a challenge.
We have more demands on our time than we did in 2007.
And even though we mostly clear out our schedules
during Pizzamas, stuff creeps in.
It's hard to do.
Especially because I always try to do like, one or two really ambitious Pizzamas videos.
Almost as if I enjoy a challenge as long as it's achievable.
But Pizzamas has been extra weird this year for me
because I already haven't been working at full capacity,
because I've been transitioning out of cancer treatment and into recovery,
which is not insubstantial.
Like, I should definitely be clear. I don't always feel the way that I look
like I feel when I'm on a video.
Like, this is a challenge and recovery is just time consuming.
Whether that's like walking
for a half a mile and then a mile
and then for 2 miles, it just takes time.
But the biggest weirdness is that I'm not going to go back to
my jobs the way I had them before I got sick.
For more than ten years,
I have been the CEO of two different companies.
During part of that time, I was the CEO of three different companies.
And there's maybe a couple of things
that you would know given that I was the CEO
of three very different companies at the same time.
What are those things? One, I'm a mess.
I'm a mess. I'm not making great decisions.
But second, and more importantly, like, I'm not doing this by myself.
You might have noticed that also during that period of time,
I wrote two novels and made a billion TikToks
and spent way, way, way, way, too much time on Twitter.
I have never in my life as a CEO been a full time CEO.
And there's disadvantages there.
Like, I have had many times when I have felt bad that
I couldn't do all the things I felt like I needed to be able to do.
What makes it possible is a bunch of people who understand
and believe in the missions of the organizations
and great leadership from people who are not me.
Two of my best friends, Dave, who has run DFTBA with me,
and Julie who has run Complexly with me.
Like, where those companies are now and where they were when those people
started working at them is wild.
So before I got sick, it was already becoming clear
that as both of these companies continued to grow,
it wasn't going to be sustainable in the long term.
And it wasn't an immediate need, but like, eventually it would be.
And you don't want to do
a big change when the need is immediate. So we started looking for a CEO.
We got some great candidates. I noticed a lymph node in my armpit.
We talked to some of those candidates. I got a biopsy.
We interviewed more of those candidates. I was diagnosed with cancer.
And by then, we actually had a pretty good idea of who we wanted to hire.
But it was like the day. Like May 4th
was the day I got diagnosed with cancer.
I remember that because it's the day before my birthday
and the next day my birthday, I went to work and had a long meeting
with the people were working with to recruit a CEO.
So before we had this big meeting where were trying to figure it out,
I had to send an email to be like, hey, just so you know,
this might is why I'm acting weird.
But everybody was great. We handled it fine.
It's all part of life. So the person we ended up hiring,
LJ Joukovski, is amazing. I am so happy.
Like, while LJ had family members who are certainly aware
of John and I and our work, she's had a bit of a Crash Course in Pizza John
over the last couple of months, but watching her absolutely embrace
the weird has been amazing.
It's weird hiring a CEO, because different high level leaders
are going to be very motivated by different things.
I think it's safe to say, and I don't think LJ would mind me saying it,
that she could make a lot more money at a different company.
Like, DFTBA is not set up to grow super fast
to maximize revenue or profit and get to the point where you sell
and everybody makes a bunch of money when you sell.
So we knew that were going to have to find somebody who is more
interested in interesting, more interested in weird.
Like, professionally, I don't tend to really know what I'm doing.
I don't have business training. I don't have goals that I'm chasing.
I have, like, that looks interesting. Let's go look at it.
But obviously, I have a lot of my identity
tied up in these companies. I care a lot about them.
I care a lot about the people at them. I worry about them all the time,
and I like that worry.
So letting go of leadership has been weird,
even though it's not just that I thought it was the right thing to do.
I also wanted to do it. At least a really big part of me
wanted to do it.
And the thing that was, like, holding me back, I mean,
fear that it'd be like, the wrong person,
that it wouldn't work out, that could be really contentious and hard.
But also, I know that these companies
are weird and special, and I worry that no one else
could understand their weird and specialness like I do.
And really the root of it is,
like, what if they make a different decision than I would?
Which, like, yeah, that's how this is going to work.
And that's good because LJ knows way more than I do about a lot of things.
But also, in our first conversations with LJ,
something she said comforted me a lot. She said, I don't really want to take this job
if you're just going to check out and go do other stuff while I do this,
because part of the appeal is getting to work with you.
And, I mean, LJ flattery will get you everywhere.
That feels really good. And I'm totally aware
that a lot of this is about feelings, and it's about how I imagine myself
and how I want to be imagined. And that also means, of course,
that I'm still very involved in DFTBA. We're probably going to get together
some kind of actual job title for me at the company eventually,
but there's a ton of stuff that DFTBA is still going to be able to do,
and I want to help it do it.
And I don't know if you know,
but DFTBA does lots of cool, weird things, and it's, like, surprisingly big.
So meanwhile, as all of that was going on, I was getting cancer treatment,
and you took over as CEO at DFTBA and Complexly before LJ started,
and I was like, I will start back up as CEO after I finish treatment,
because I didn't understand how cancer treatment works.
I thought I would finish, and I'd be like, all right, put me back in coach,
and I would do that if I felt like I needed to.
But the reality is that the recovery from cancer treatment takes time,
and I didn't realize that. I don't know.
This is all very new to me. Reality is that Julie's
been running the day to day at Complexly for ages anyway,
so we have promoted her to acting CEO, with the acting being for, like,
if at some point Hank comes back, then Hank can come back.
And obviously I'm also not leaving Complexly. Like, there's so much still to do there.
I think maybe we're going to put me on some special projects,
and I can do smaller things, but just generally stop being
a giant bottleneck for the whole company because I'm either sick
or just too busy talking about worms on TikTok.
The teams at both of these companies are great, and I love working with them,
and I'm very glad that I get to continue working with them.
And if there's anything I know about me, it's that I will fill the time up.
Like, I'm not worried about not having stuff to do.
I had, like, two bizarre
but not terrible business ideas during chemotherapy,
and then before I finished radiation, I was on stage doing cancer stand up comedy.
I have received a wildly outsized amount of support and opportunity over the years,
and there are certainly ways
that I have helped and enabled both of these companies.
There are also ways that I have been a limitation, for sure, and despite my part time leadership,
and also, I hope, a little bit because of my part time leadership,
both of those companies have really thrived and are doing really amazing,
cool things, in large part, honestly, because of the support of this community.
Like, neither of those companies or VidCon could ever have existed
without this foundation to build upon. I don't know, I'm just, like, really lucky.
Which is a weird thing to say a few months after you get cancer,
but I am.
Also, you should have seen Katherine's eyes when I told her that I was going to be
stepping down from executive leadership at both of these companies.
Best anniversary present ever. Oh, also, I told her that today
was my last Pizzamas video so I could shave my mustache,
and she said, you don't have to.
What?
Anyway, a thing about getting a lot of support over the years
is that you understand how much support matters,
and you want to turn that back and support others when you can.
Which is why for over ten years now, half of the advertising revenue
from the Vlogbrothers channel has gone to grants to small educational
internet content creators. It's just a lot harder to get into this game
than it used to be, so we want to make it slightly easier.
In a tiny way, these grants over the years
have gone to creators like Alexis Nicole,
Answer in Progress, The Financial Diet,
Wendover Productions, Real Engineering,
a little channel called Kurzgesagt got a grant the first year.
If you're working on educational content on the Internet or you know somebody who is,
you can apply.
The link is in the description to the application. It's for people who are currently making content,
mostly focused on long form or short form video.
And the grants aren't huge, but they can be helpful.
They're usually between, like, one and $3,000. We sometimes go higher than that.
And since you made it to the end of the video, do what you will with this.
We ordered too many of a few things. This actually happens every year,
but now we have a CEO who's actively trying to solve problems,
and LJ is like, we don't want to have
some of these things in the warehouse for a whole year.
Like, for example, 100 of these don't take up,
like, a small amount of space, so we have steeply discounted.
A few items, they include the rug,
which is now a mere $50, Chizza John,
the earrings and the oven mitt,
which I thought was going to sell great because they're wonderful.
All of those are steeply discounted right now. And since you made it to the end of the video,
if you use the code Hank sent me, that will give you
an extra $5 off on any or all of those items.
So if you would like to commit to the bit, now is the time. John.
This Pizzamas, has been wonderful. Thank you so much for being my brother
and for being a temporary CEO and for helping and supporting me.
Thank you to Drawfee for making a Pizza John shirt I love.
This is my favorite, personally. Teamwork, though, is the top seller,
which is not what I predicted.
I thought I was going to be this one. Thought this was going to be number one,
this is number two. But who knows?
It could still switch. There's still time, but not very much.
This year's Pizza John shirts are only available for the next couple of days
and then never again. That's how it works.
So you have to act now. John, I'll see ya when I see ya!