Adam Torres and Erik Huberman discuss the AI Vibes Summit.
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Listen to coverage of the AI Vibes Summit in Santa Monica, California. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Erik Huberman, Founder & CEO of Hawke Media, explore marketing, media and AI.
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About Erik Huberman
Erik Huberman, founder and CEO of Hawke Media. Since they launched in 2014, Hawke Media has swiftly risen to become the fastest-growing marketing agency in the U.S., now valued at over $150 million.Erik’s vision for Hawke Media has always been to revolutionize marketing, and we’ve achieved this with their AI-enabled and tech-integrated approach. They proudly serve over 4,700 brands worldwide, including industry leaders like Red Bull, Casamigos, Verizon, Crocs, and Barstool Sports.
His entrepreneurial journey began early. By 26, He had successfully launched, scaled, and sold two e-commerce companies. He noticed a significant gap in the market: agencies were either prohibitively expensive with inflexible contracts or lacked the expertise needed. That’s why I founded Hawke Media with a model that prioritizes flexibility and affordability, setting new standards in the industry.
About Hawke Media
Hawke Media is a marketing powerhouse, utilizing AI and proprietary technology partnerships to redefine the landscape. We’ve grown 4,700+ diverse brands over the last decade. Their offerings include a complete suite of expert-led marketing services and the transformative Hawke AI platform that continuously processes data from 7,000+ brands and over $500M in media spend to help brands beat the market.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. I’m at the AI Vibes Summit in Santa Monica, California today. And I have Eric Huberman who just walked in the door. I had to snag him for a quick interview. Eric, I think I got you, man. You just walked in. I literally just walked in.
I walked from my office too. It’s nice. We’re down the street. Man, that’s amazing. And so it’s. It’s been a solid seven years since I’ve seen you, which doesn’t feel like it. I feel like social media just puts this mask on. I’m still in touch. We talk all the time and it’s like, yeah, it’s probably, yeah, exactly.
Comments. I’ve been following your journey. I’ve been following the rise of Hawk media. I remember the first time I met you and we’re sitting in a conference room. I Christopher Kai’s there with me. We’re all hanging out and, and you’re talking to me about your plans for the future and building the company and where you’re at.
And man, seven years later, I just saw you open a new space. Yeah. Yeah. And again, it’s. Walking distance from here, which is fun. But yeah, we actually took Headspace’s old office. We got lucky with that, but that’s, that’s, you know, small stuff. It’s just more, we found, you know, we went remote when COVID hit and stayed remote for three years.
And a year ago I went, we need to put some training wheels back on this and like get some people back in. So we got this little office, worked for a year and I was like, no, this was what I thought it was like, we need to now have a good office. A friend of mine reached out that was, that’s a real estate agent here that I’ve always stayed in touch with this great space.
And so, yeah, we walked it in. We’re, we’ve got a new Hawk nest. Yeah. What, what do you attribute some of the success of Hawk media to? A lot of things. I mean, the, the early success came from like, was Our space is super crowded. There’s, there were 24, 000 digital agencies in the U S when I started. Now there’s 90, 000.
So it was already crowded. Now it’s absurd. Yeah. And you require 10, 000 of them, I believe, right? Yeah. Somewhat, give or take. When I started, it was really just, you know, I found lack of better word. 99 percent of these agencies are full of shit. And all you have to do is do what you say you’re going to do and, you know, deliver what you say and actually know what you’re doing and you’re already in the 1 percent of agencies.
So I’ve seen it like a lot of things. Doing the right thing, putting in the work, being good at what you do, you’re in the 1%. Like, just, it is. And I hate to be so flippant about that, but the more I read studies and polls, and it’s not because of people having a lack of ability, it’s actually a lack of intent in my experience.
So I saw a poll two weeks ago that actually took me back a little bit. It was basically, it asked a question, would you rather, Work 25 hours a week and make 125, 000 a year or work 70 hours a week and make 300 grand a year. To be clear the hourly wage is I think about 10 percent lower or actually no, it’s about 20 percent lower for the higher But the actual outcome is two and a half x almost so it’s like would you rather make 125 work 25 or work?
70 and make 300 It was an easy answer for me. No work 70 make 300 as i’ve said over and over again I want to work like most people want so I can live like most people can’t motto of mine something I heard a long time ago that really resonated And What I found was, so that poll, like, I assumed that the majority of people would rather work less and make less.
Yeah. But what do you think the percentage of people that, I don’t know if you saw me post this, but what percentage of people lean towards 25 hours a week? I’m going for the majority. Yeah, but what majority? What do you think? Is it 60? 60, I’ll go 60. Yeah. 98. 2. Wow. So, That right there is like, so when I look at that, I go, okay, so literally only 1.
8 percent of the people that answer the poll, but it was thousands and thousands of people actually want to put in the work to make the money because of diminishing returns or whatever it is. It’s, it was a very simple answer for me. And it still is after watching all the people that commented about like why they would work less.
I’m like, no, it’s still. The answer is still my answer. And so again, you ask about the success of Hawk. Some of it is just like, we wanted to put in the work to get the outcome. And then I think ambition has to do with it too. And goal setting where it’s like, I want to build a big enterprise. I want to grow.
I want to keep learning. I want to, once I hit some certain threshold, I want to know how to get to the next one. And so that just intent, you know, I was advised by a really brilliant Brilliant investor when we were starting our venture fund, invest in the ambition of the founder. And I think with us, the ambition has always been grow, build, go big, be the best at what we do and easy to work with has been kind of our marching orders.
And you were like, one of the things that always stuck out to me, especially with the original model, so dating this a little bit, if for current Hawk media clients, I don’t know if there’s available or not, but in the early, early days, there wasn’t a contract. Like you were leading with venture capital.
Value leading with, Hey, we do the work, we do it right. You’re not going to leave. And I remember when you first explained that to me and I’m like, man, first off, I’ve never heard of that. Like, first off I, at that point in time, if it exists, I never heard of it. And then as I watch you systematically build through the years and add and grow and things like that, you led even in the model and.
We still do that, to be clear. I didn’t want to date you. We still do that. We discount for commitments, basically. And it’s not anything It’s very obvious why. If we get a longer commitment, we can bank on that. It makes it easier, so we’ll discount it. We just made it simple. A lot of our clients are still month to month, and for the same reason.
It forces us to do the right things. The good news is The main reason we lose clients isn’t because of anything we screw up. Communication is the only thing I’d say we screw up on that we can control. So we’re still constantly training our people to communicate well. And it’s not my communication. It’s teaching the team to communicate, right.
And be responsive and all that. And other than that, like we deal with a lot of startups and things that have changes. And so that makes it a little more volatile of the business, but it also is so accessible that we are able to balance that and that’s been part of the vision. And it’s funny, cause now at our scale, Every private equity suitor that wants to talk about buying us and every advisor is like, Oh, you got to go up market.
You got to work with enterprise. And it’s like, We have a profitable, fast growing business. It’s gone really well. And you took that stance, by the way, from when I met you seven years ago, I remember you saying, and I remember some numbers way back then where you’re like, why would I do it next year? We’re going to be bigger next year.
We’re going to have more, you stuck to your guns. You’ve done some acquiring some other things like that. I said as a joke earlier, but I do think it’s interesting. I have been meaning to ask you, so talk to me about how you are Picking and finding founders or otherwise that you want to partner and bring on board.
Yeah, it’s been a really fun part of the business So running an agency is a fucking nightmare. Like it’s just it is for admission matters. Don’t worry We just do podcast interviews good It is it’s hard to run an agency and what’s even harder like I have an incredible executive team now I’ve got a team of people that been with me and Like my business partner who’s our COO and president has been with me.
We’ve been together. I mean, we started together, so 10 and a half years. And we ran companies before that together. My head of marketing has been with me eight years. My head of sales has been with me six years, my head or seven years. My head of service has been with me four years. Like, I know we have a team I can rely on.
We have a backhand and like, just like we’re. We really are in sync when you’re a one and a half to 4 million agency, you have none of that. So as the founder, you are the head of HR, accounting, legal sales, marketing, client success, everything. You’re the janitor too. And that’s fine for a little while, while you work through it.
But when it’s been, Three years, four years, five years. And you’re kind of growing, maybe you’re growing at 10, 20 percent a year. It starts to get to like, what the hell am I doing? And the problem is you can’t focus on growth. Cause you’re bogged down like this. I was fortunate enough to have my business partner that frankly, I would just punt the shit to him.
And I’d be like, you deal with this. I got to go grow us. Like I don’t have time. And I still, to this day, I, I go through phases where I try to jump into some of that stuff. And then I realized like, this is not good for my energy. Cause it actually like, I don’t do well, like I’m really bad at tedium and being in the weeds and the chat, like the.
The challenges of interpersonal problems and stuff like that. Like, you know, I don’t want to hear about any of it, honestly. Like, unless I really have to, cause I have to change some things we’re doing. Like, don’t even bother me with it. And I didn’t even ask for that. My business partner knew me well enough that he’s like, I’ll find out about stuff.
And he’d be like, yeah, that’s been going on for two months. Don’t worry about it. Like go do your thing. You’re it’s like, you’re I’m way better off spending my time growing the business and not worried about that. But I have that benefit. Most people don’t. So when we go to these agency owners and we find, Hey, we can take this all off your plate and you can then go focus on growing your business and the things you did in the beginning that you want to do again and not getting bogged down with the operational side.
It’s music to their ears. And so it’s, for us, it’s finding like solid teams, profitable businesses, good client base, and a founder that wants to grow and drive, and then taking that off their plate. We jokingly called it like the reverse franchise model, where it’s like, instead of. Take our operations in a box and then build your business.
It’s you’ve built your business now take our operations in the box. And that’s, that’s really how we built it out. And it’s worked. We’ve done 18 acquisitions, not 10, 000, sadly, but we’ve done 18. They’ve gone, they’ve gone really, really well. And it’s, it’s now very much a part of our strategy because Some of the best people the company have come through that and it’s we have incredible people working at Hawk that came through them being entrepreneurs or their teams, you know, the person running all of our creative and our creative branding PR side of the business was through an acquisition.
She’s not the founder. She was working on that business. And we went, wow, you’re really talented. And she expanded to one of our senior executives. Like these are things. And what’s cool is then the acquired companies, their people go see that opportunity and go instead of working at 10 person agency where until this grows, I’ve hit my limit.
And by the way, it’s only growing at 10 percent a year. Now I’m at this big. You know, big organization where I can maybe if I’m the right person, step into something bigger, different, better, or transition to something that’s more exciting to me, whatever. So yeah, it really is a win, win, win. Cause then the clients as well, like thankfully in 10 and a half years, we’ve built some really good processes.
We’re at this AI conference today where. We started investing in our own AI system nine years ago. And so now it’s become this really powerful tool and system that when we plug in these agencies, we also give them all our tech stack and all our processes. And all of a sudden their clients were able to take it up a notch.
Yeah. And I see this when I was thinking about it and I’m looking again from the outside looking, I’m like, Oh, this is like a Warren Buffett model over here. You’re bringing in some of these really like high level founders that have done some things that businesses that are going great teams, and now you’re, you’re really in.
Abling them to take their business to the next level as well within the business. That’s exactly what we’re focused on. I think it’s interesting content creation. Yep. Like I saw you have a podcast. I saw, I know you for making a lot of different, amazing content with, and also collaborating with people like Cedric the entertainer.
I mean, you have all these different things going on. How does AI, since we’re at AI conference, how is AI fueling some of your decisions or ideas around content creation? If it is, if it is. Yeah, no, it’s funny. We, cause we did a little bit of a prep work for my, my talk is in an hour here or 45 minutes.
And part of what we talked about, and I will be talking about is I actually think AI is way more interesting for logic driven side of things now, cause AI isn’t AI. That’s not artificial intelligence. It’s machine learning in a more complex way now that feels like artificial intelligence. Mid journey chat GPT all these blogging things like they’re great thought joggers But I think the best metaphor for AI is it’s an army of 17 year old interns And so do I want to set army of 17 17 year old interns creating my podcast?
No, yeah, can I use them for some ideas some question prompts some thought joggers? Sure like that stuff I think AI is way more powerful on the analytics side, like whether you’re talking about data and analytics, you’re talking about accounting, you’re talking about legal, anything that’s logic driven, that’s where AI I think has the highest and best use currently.
I think on the creative side, it’s mid journey again, I like to use that example, because if you have a mid journey piece of creative, it looks like a mid journey piece of creative. And so it’s like, yeah, it’s novel, it’s cool, it’s fun. It’s why it’s fast. That’s why it gets attention. But like, even I watched it on memes for like three weeks, all the meme channels were putting, like, you know, we had AI create this and it was like, Oh, that’s fun.
After like three weeks, no one gave a shit. And it’s like, all right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don’t think it’s going to do whatever, you know, and this happens with every big innovation in the world, people go to the extreme and go, it’s going to replace everything. And then it doesn’t, it just becomes a new integrated part of society.
The best I heard this stat two weeks ago and I will, or two days ago and I love it. So cloud computing in 2012, 2013 was really coming online and it was going to displace all, you know, on premise computing. And like, it was obviously like clouds better and there were arguments pushing back saying it wasn’t as secure, et cetera.
But like, it was pretty obvious that like, it was more efficient, better, and you aren’t going to have these giant server stacks in offices anymore. And that started, I think, in 2010, but like 2012, 13, it really started to gain traction. And so a lot of these bigger networking companies couldn’t get funding anymore.
They shut down, et cetera, because it was like that industry’s over. Going back to stats and not trying to catch you off guard. Cause you know, it’s a loaded question, but what percentage of computing do you think is done on the cloud versus on premise these days? I’d say 40%. Actually pretty close. 30 percent is in the cloud.
Okay. In a world where we’re like, all we talk about is the cloud. Yeah. Over a decade later, it’s only 30%. So when you talk about AI, I think AI is similar to the internet. And I hate that I say that after hearing too many cliches say that about crypto, which was always BS to me. I do think crypto has some place, but it’s not going to be like the internet.
Every company is not going to have a crypto strategy in the next five years. But I do think almost every company or 30 percent of companies in the next five to 10 years will be augmented by AI in some major way. And similar to the internet, like I’m not talking about creating an internet company, I’m talking about every company has a website.
So like, it’s weird to say internet company these days, but 22 years ago, three years ago in the, you know, tech bubble, it was all about internet companies, dot com. And you were going up, man, you were going up. You had a. com on your web. Exactly. And now it’s, and then you realize, wait, no, there’s just another tool to build the things we’ve always needed.
And that’s fine. And I think AI is going to be the same in that way. Yeah, I’m excited about it. No, I don’t know where it fits and how it’s going to fit and everything yet. But every know we’re working on an Adam AI or somebody at some point, there’s going to be a we’re gonna feed all these interviews into it, we’re gonna have something trained.
And my goal, my personal goal is I’m gonna be an old man one day watching TV. And I’m gonna be like, did I do that interview? Or was that Adam AI? I’m not gonna be able to tell the difference. I’ve already seen in their jokes. Thank God there’s been a bunch of what do you call it? Even Elon Musk shared one.
Oh, the fakes? The fakes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But fakes that we know are fake. But let’s be real. They could do it slightly better, and it wouldn’t, you wouldn’t know it was fake. And I’m, and I’m entertained by it, personally. Oh, I think it’s hilarious. I like some of the fakes more than the real people. But I’m also, yeah, but I’m also very conscious that that could be nefarious very quickly.
Like, by the way, like, taking current events. Was it last night? I’ve seen the viral video of Trump saying that, is Kamala black or Indian? Obviously both. Yeah. Did he say that? Yeah. I don’t know. Like, it would, by the way, now he’s tweeted, not tweeted, but what is this thing called truth or whatever? Yeah. He’s messaged about it.
So he obviously did. And now someone’s hacked his entire life. But like, there’s going to be things, I think this year in this election, in the next few months that it’s like, I never said that. Yeah. That’s fake. I believe it wholeheartedly. We’re in that era now. And that’s going to be. Interesting to navigate.
Eric, I want to say thank you for coming on the show. Final question or final directive. I want you to look at the camera, tell people how they can follow Hawk Media. You, what you got going on, please. Easy. Hawkmedia. com H A W K E media. com. And then I’m on every social channel at or slash Eric Huberman and Eric’s with a K.
Awesome. And for everybody, just so you know, we’ll put the links in the show notes. You can just click on the link, head right on over, check out Hawk media. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe button or that follow button.
This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new interviews, and hopefully new inspiration. Along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow because tomorrow you’re going to get a notification. Another episode come on and Eric. Thank you so much, man.
So great to catch up with you. Finally, great to see you.
