The $3B mistake that built Paw Patrol: Ronnen Harary

What drove you to create this universe? I mean, I know it starts with toys, right?

Actually, that first big moment was a product called the Earth Buddies.

It was a small little potato head.

You put them in water, it grows grass right here.

Kind of like the 90s version of Chia Pet.

90s version of chia pad yeah so earth buddy is your first success correct that's the uh one and a half million dollars that you made from that product that you then take and reinvest into double sticks devil sticks or chaos what made you believe three college kids could make A billion dollar business.

Did you really even think about Mattel or any of those companies? You didn't give a shit.

You were just creating.

First of all, we didn't think like that.

What did you think like? We were like, let's go into business for ourselves and let's see what happens.

And then once we got into the toy industry, we said we're going to be open to ideas from wherever they come from around the world.

And we're going to grow this company as big as we possibly can.

We put no restrictions on it.

And that was it.

And so what we do is we sift through thousands of ideas every single year, and then we allocate capital to, you know, like 10, 15, 20 of them.

You put

like what the winners you believe are going to be.

Exactly.

You're a curator, a toy curator.

Yeah.

And so then we'll do the marketing, we'll do the sales, we'll do the product development, and we'll bring it to market.

But what I was going to say to you is that we went one product at a time.

So our big product in the 90s was the Air Hogs.

You know, that airplane that pumped it up, flew it around.

And then we had a string of failures, Key Charm Cuties, Don't Free Freddy, Tickle Secrets Baby.