TJ Leonard, MBA ’08

TJ Leonard, MBA ’08, joins Christopher Reichert, MOT ’04, to discuss his career in the marketing industry and how that led to his current role as CEO at Storyblocks, a stock media subscription service dedicated to providing accessible, affordable stock for creatives. 

Sloanies Talking with Sloanies is a conversational podcast with alumni and faculty about the MIT Sloan experience and how it influences what they're doing today. Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts, Google, and Spotify. 

Episode Transcript

Christopher Reichert: Welcome to Sloanies Talking with Sloanies a candid conversation with alumni and faculty about the MIT Sloan experience and how it influences what they're doing today.

So, what does it mean to be a Sloanie? Over the course of this podcast, you'll hear from guests who are making a difference in their community, including our own very important one here at MIT Sloan.

Hi, I'm your host, Christopher Reichert, and welcome to Sloanies Talking with Sloanies. My guest today is TJ Leonard, a 2008 Sloan MBA and CEO of Storyblocks, which we'll talk more about in a moment. Welcome, TJ!

TJ Leonard: Thank you very much, Christopher. It's wonderful to be here.

Christopher Reichert: Great to have you. So, TJ has been with Storyblocks for almost eight years now, previously as senior vice president for marketing and then chief marketing officer before getting the top job. And prior to that, TJ was with BabbaCo, which was acquired by Barefoot Books, and a senior principal for mobile marketing at Nuance, a pretty big company, ascended Vlingo and Digitas. And it looks like MICROS. It was well before that. And you attended Sloan from 2006 to 2008, if I'm not mistaken.

TJ Leonard: That's right.

Christopher Reichert: Was it scary emerging from graduate school into that cycle’s economic downturn? Was it apparent?

TJ Leonard: Yeah. So, what I should never do is go back for a doctorate because I got out of undergrad in the summer of 2001 and then I graduated from Sloan in the same time in 2008. So I guess, the initial experience of trying to find my first real job made it easier, I think to exit Sloan in the middle of the financial collapse.

Christopher Reichert: That's why I never carried an umbrella because I just don't, I don't want to encourage rain.

There was a marketing track in your career. And so, this makes the chief executive officer role a little bit different. Tell us about that journey to where you are now.

TJ Leonard: Yeah. It's a wonderful question. So, I moved, actually to your point about looking for work in an economic downturn, I actually moved to Washington, D.C. after undergrad, September 12th, 2001. So, basically the day after the 9/11 attacks and I had a job working for a digital startup in the travel space. And much like this time, last year, no one was getting on planes then. And what was really interesting about the experience, it was sort of the early days of performance marketing, growth marketing, and I sort of fell in love with—it was Overture back in the day—was the early pay-per-click platform, but fell in love with this idea of, "Hey, I can put a quarter in over here and like out spits a couple of dollars over there.” And so that is really the work that followed me from TIG, which got acquired, to Sloan, to Digitas, and then through some of my marketing roles in the Boston area, before we moved back here to D.C.

Christopher Reichert: Wait, go back a minute. What was it about the quarters and the money coming out over there?

TJ Leonard: Yeah, exactly. Therein lies the beauty of performance marketing. It's all about figuring out a way to put a quarter in somewhere and have a couple of dollars spit out further down the funnel. And I think, the other interesting part of that line of work is it's always worked in the digital world. When I was at BabbaCo, we had a physical product, but everywhere else along my career journey, it's always been digital. And so I think, we're living in a world now where millennials and Gen Z are becoming a bigger and bigger part of the consumer base and these are all digital native generations. And so, I don't know, in some ways I look at that early marketing experience, the fact that I am truly a purely digital CMO when I was, and it makes the transition of course, running a purely digital business that has lots of millennial team members, as well as lots of younger customers, it made the transition a relatively smooth one.

Christopher Reichert: So, you used the term performance marketing as opposed to?

TJ Leonard: I mean, growth marketing, performance marketing. Again, I think, there's the sort of traditional offline version. The sort of pre-digital version of marketing is very brand-oriented. It's very messaging-oriented. It's the caricature of “Mad Men,” crafting slogans and pushing those out through mass media. And, the discipline just fundamentally changed right about at the time that I picked it up. It's much more quantitative. I think, you think very differently about messaging. It's not spend six months in research and then ta-dah! It's let's try things and see which one sticks, and then we'll roll that out to all of our impressions. So, that's why I think that the marketing has perhaps taken a fork in the road. You have these traditional brand-driven enterprises. You have more growth-oriented, more performance marketing-oriented folks. And again, those tend to be revenue owning marketing roles these days, which again is I think another thing that made the transition relatively straight forward.

Christopher Reichert: So, let me see if I can paraphrase this famous quote that someone said, "I know I'm wasting half my money on marketing. I just don't know which half."

TJ Leonard: That’s right!

Christopher Reichert: Do you think that we've come to a point where it's less than half wasted?

TJ Leonard: Depends on what you think of is waste! The waste is much more informed these days. No, but I think for a long time, marketing was opaque and frankly viewed as a cost center, a lot of the time. Think about a Super Bowl ad or I guess these attribution models have gotten so good now you can bridge offline and digital, but some of these big sponsorships. It's just hard to really know. Whereas a performance marketing truce of digital like you do know. And of course, there's imperfection in the way that you attribute or measure, but in a lot of ways, it's certainly viewed as a revenue driver now as opposed to purely a cost center.

And oftentimes I think, one of the hardest jobs. Sales was always a hard job, because you carry quota and you know, I hit my number. I don't hit my number.

Christopher Reichert: ABC, always be closing.

TJ Leonard: That’s right. And I think, in the traditional marketing offline world—the legacy world—it was harder to hold a marketing leader accountable. Whereas today, it looks a lot more like sales. It's highly measurable. It's highly quantitative. There are concrete goals. We are either hitting them or we are not hitting them. And so, I guess that's how I think about sort of this modern digital discipline of performance marketing, group marketing, whatever you want to call it.

Christopher Reichert: You talked about Gen Z and millennials becoming the economic force in the marketplace. But something my father asks periodically, which kind of drives me bonkers is, he'll sit back— and is 95 by the way—he'll say, "So, who are the Beatles of today?" And I say, "It doesn't work that way anymore." Back in the day you had Walter Cronkite telling you the news. The New York Times was telling you the news. But now, it's extremely sliced and diced and targeted and the same thing's for music. And I'm sure it's the same thing for marketing and advertising.

TJ Leonard: Absolutely. And that's one of the big things that attracted me to Storyblocks in the beginning. My experience as a marketer, you see these trends like wow, video is a much more powerful media when you're trying to drive a customer behavior. The duration of content that people are consuming is getting shorter and shorter and shorter. There were all these wonderful, new, lightweight tools that people are building that facilitate the creative process.

So, when I was thinking about my experience in Boston at Vlingo, for example, we pushed out a new feature. There'd be a big new app release. You build press and all this exciting stuff around it. And we want to make a video explaining how the new features worked. Well, I'd write a creative brief and throw it over the wall to external animator or videographer or something like that. They send me back a script, I'd send back at it. Six weeks later, I'm looking at a rough cut. So, two months ahead of your release, you got to know what you want to be in the video. Today, that whole process takes place in an afternoon, maybe. Everything just happens so much faster.

And I think that, again, all of these big trends or reasons why Storyblocks exists. The big problem we solve for our customers is, everyone is struggling to create enough professional quality digital video to keep up with the demands of their audiences in this world. You can't afford to pay a ton of money for a piece of content that has a shelf life of 24 hours. It's much more about experimentation, velocity, affordability, and really more and more people getting their hands in the creative process, even if they don't bring a super sophisticated editing background to that process.

Christopher Reichert: Tell us about the history of Storyblocks and how you work with creators and who your typical clients are?

TJ Leonard: Yeah. We work with the full spectrum of creators. So, we have SMBs, digital marketers, people who wouldn't self-identify as creative professionals, people who are using content to promote their business, to sell whatever product they use. But again, content creation is a big fundamental part of their business. We work with sort of the classic creative professional. These are gig economy workers, freelancers, videographers, people who make content for a living, typically for clients. And then, we work with big institutions, the NBCs, the major broadcast, major production, big agencies, sort of your more traditional, again, institutional content creators. You'll work with a wide range. And we've noticed that there is some universal challenges that they all face. Again, one of the big ones is, how do I create enough to keep up with my audience?

Christopher Reichert: So, when you talked about NBC and those sorts of organizations, they're providing content through the Storyblocks platform, or are they consuming it or both? I'd imagine-

TJ Leonard: They’re consuming. A great question. We don't have as much overlap as you actually would suspect between people who contribute and people who consume. The people who consume, again, they tend to be, they’re big media institutions, they’re industries, whether it's healthcare, financial services, often using our content to promote their products and services and all the way down to individuals who are new to video creation.

Christopher Reichert: So, you're providing a library of stock, video, blocks, I guess you could say, for various consumers to use and clients to use as needed?

TJ Leonard: Yeah, that's right. I would say, the way I've thought about sort of the evolution of the business is, in the beginning, it was all about affordable, high-quality stock footage. And, what we realized was, again, going back to this sort of generation of digital natives, this was a creative utility that again, big creative industry players had depended on for a long time. But, these digital natives, they were priced out. The rates were too complex for them to understand. That model just didn't work for them. So, in the beginning, it was about more affordability, more access to then this creative resource.

As we've grown up, we've realized that that's just one piece of the puzzle, access to affordable content. And so, we started in video, we expanded into music, we do some imagery, but we really are a motion-oriented business.

We've since added an API. So, anyone with a product out there that could benefit from having content available natively, you can pipe our library indirectly for your customers. We've built an editor. So, again, even if you don't arrive with any previous editing skills, you can create a professional quality short form video in 10 or 15 minutes. That's called Maker. And then we're also increasingly working in the workflow, helped me organize my projects, help with review and approval. And then again, if you zoom out and you think our role here is more about how do we make the creative process more efficient, how do we support this new challenge, again, of forever struggling to keep up with the rate, the demands of our audience, this insatiable appetite for digital video? That's really the way we view ourselves, helping customers exist.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah. And, I want to talk about your new initiative, your commitment to have 20% of your footage with people, Black, indigenous, people of color by 2022. I think, one of my previous podcasts, I think my last one actually with Kimmy Paluch at Beta Boom, we talked about the sort of inflection point between Black Lives Matter, and I think, also demographic changes about how there's a changing need for content beyond what has been provided previously. So, tell us. How's that going, the 20% commitment? And, how did that kind of bubble up to sort of adding to the mission?

TJ Leonard: It's a wonderful question. And I would say, it came from two places. So, one is, we always felt a responsibility as an organization, as a media organization, who, to your point, we are providing the raw materials to storytelling. We've got an obligation for our library to represent, as authentically as possible, the world that we live in. And, the Re:Stock concept was actually born, I think at the end of 2019, early 2020. It was born before the pandemic and George Floyd's murder and the broader push around social justice. Certainly, we redoubled our efforts once we saw some of the other changes underway, but that's part of it for us. We've always felt that responsibility.

To be honest, the thing that's perhaps changed the most and caused us to even pick up our cadence is, our library has always been demand-driven. That's one way to where a little bit different.

We only let things in the library that we know our customers want. Spend a lot of time looking at the data, and what the data told us was, there was a ton of demand for authentic, personal stories that represented, again, these nuanced, highly intersectional lives of traditionally underrepresented groups. But, the supply wasn't there. Stock media has this, I wouldn't say problem, but element where a lot of the contributors are, they're from Europe, they're from Eastern Europe, they're white, they're heterosexual, they're cis-gendered, whatever. They come from the majority. And so, you ended up with an industry that really reflects that majority.

So, that was the neat inflection point for us. We saw this moment where our values and our personal belief systems are aligning with the huge commercial trends that we see. Let's be a first mover. Let's take advantage of this. Let's solve this global supply problem. And, it's been really exciting. Obviously, the tailwinds, if you will, around social justice, it really helped raise the visibility of it. But I think more importantly, the response we've gotten from our customers, whether again, you're a small business or a big institutional creative agency, has been amazing. Everyone wants more. They want to know when the next collection is coming. And so, that's been the cool part is, you start off on a journey sometimes not knowing what the response is going to be like. And, we're now in a place where we're just trying to move as quickly as we can, fold in as many new filmmakers who have these incredible stories to tell, and create a platform that allows them to do so authentically.

Christopher Reichert: You were talking about how you let things into the library that people are asking for. And so, what's the source of your data? So if I go to your site, do I search for a particular scene that I'm looking for, candle lit, whatever it might be and tick a few boxes for the content, and then it goes off and searches your library? I guess, my question really is, how do you get content in there when the need is nascent and bubbling up?

TJ Leonard: Wonderful question. And maybe, I will answer that by first, by contrasting it with the way the traditional model works. Most of the businesses in our industry before were real marketplaces and marketplaces are great because you kind of just open your doors and say, "Hey, anyone can upload whatever they want." And if it sells it sells, and we'll share a little bit of the revenue back with you. And so, again, what's going to happen in that environment? You got a ton of content, only a little bit of it is going to be useful. It's going to be hard to find that content. You've got a needle in a haystack problem. And because you're looking at, people are voting with their purchases, right, you're going to end up with the plurality or the majority is going to drive the supply.

Christopher Reichert: If your analysis is purchase, completed purchases, versus maybe before, earlier in the process, the searches, maybe the departures?

TJ Leonard: That's exactly right. So we're looking at everything from how are people hovering over clips when we display them? We have these metrics around what a successful search looks like? We look not just at the overall performance of search broadly, but at quite literally thousands of subcategories. And so, we have our teams sort of doing two things, simultaneously. One is we are looking for gaps. So, if a lot of people are looking for snowy mountains and you don't have a lot of snowy mountains, we'll find some snowy mountains. But similarly, and this is where Re:Stock comes in, when someone looks for family having coffee, for example. We want that search results page to be representative of all the families on planet Earth or in that particular geography.  You shouldn't have to search for “Black lesbian couple having coffee” to get, right-

Christopher Reichert: You should be able to but you shouldn't have to.

TJ Leonard: You should. I think that's exactly right. And, that's the way we've thought about it. We thought a lot about, we look at the trends. We look at the search behavior. We look at the performance of our existing library and that informs what we actively go source. So, we'll reach out to contributors who sell to the other stock services. And we'll also go out and increasingly identify filmmakers who we think are incredible storytellers, who are sort of native to some of these traditionally underrepresented communities. And, we'll reach out and say, "Hey, we love your work. We'd love you to contribute," and sort of fold them again into our library from there.

Christopher Reichert: So, you're a talent agency as well, I guess? I mean, in other words, you're kind of managing a pool of talent to produce content for you, as well as just to make content that they have.

TJ Leonard: Yes, we've got a group who almost serves as an A&R function, if you will, who's living at emerging talent, whether that's a musician or a filmmaker, people from outside of the traditional stock circles. I think, that is an increasingly important community for us to build a relationship.

Christopher Reichert: And I can see what Shannon Beveridge, and Aiden Korotkin, Sannchia Gaston, and Daisy Gaston, more artists that don't look like Steven Spielberg.

TJ Leonard: That's right. And, the amazing thing, you mentioned Shannon. Because they come from not the traditional contributor pool, they're often earning a living doing other things, whether that is making music videos or as an influencer. And so, that's been the really cool part of the Re:Stock project and platform, is you've got all these different communities that are coalescing around a single belief, around a goal of improving representation in media. And so that part has been a lot of fun. Our team has produced a ton of terrific content around it as well, which is again, always something that's very easy to be proud of.

Christopher Reichert: How'd you guys handle COVID? How did that change the business?

TJ Leonard: Yeah, the business did great. We had, I guess you call it survivor's guilt for a little while, where the world was falling apart and we're looking around and the walls aren't shaking. And so, we were very fortunate and we recognize that some of that is because of the good work we did. And some of that is just dumb luck. Again, going back to my original experience in the travel vertical, there are lots of wonderful travel businesses in D.C., Boston, and other places. And that was a tough pill to swallow last spring, no matter how well you operated the business.

So, I think, our team did a great job building a product that is useful, that our customers really value. And, as more and more people depended on the digital world, as opposed to the physical world to go out and tell their stories, to promote their businesses, fortunately, we were in a good spot to take advantage of that.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah. I mean, I guess being a digital product, it's available immediately and readily.

TJ Leonard: There are other parts that were hard though. Admittedly. Culture is one of those things. We were a very in-office oriented company and I was certainly guilty of the kick the can strategy with a lot of days. It's like, "Well, maybe we'll be back in a quarter. Well, maybe by Labor Day, everything will be back. Well, maybe by the end of the year." And I think eventually, we got to a point where we said, "No, not only is this not going anywhere anytime soon, but even when it does return to normal, it's not going to return to the old normal. There'll be this new normal." And so we've worked harder to tackle everything from how do meetings work when everyone is virtual, to how do you onboard someone when they've never met anyone or never physically been in the office? So, yeah. There are some things that have gone well, there are other things that we've goofed. So I think, we're like everyone else in that sense.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah. It's a 360 challenge for sure. So back, you were a TIG Global, which was purchased by, who was it, MICROS? And then, I guess, what did Oracle eventually buy MICROS? Anyway, the fish keep eating the fish…

TJ Leonard: That’s exactly right. Long after I had departed. I can take no credit for any of that, but it was a wonderful experience in the sense that I was one of the first non-founder employees. I was a 22 year old kid, didn't know anything, but I was given a ton of autonomy and a ton of freedom. And, it was a very much an outcome-oriented, this is if you did well, great, you got new opportunities. And I always appreciated that. And I think, that is something that most entrepreneurs are a little bit irreverent. They have a natural distrust towards authority and the status quo, but I think the other one is, they love the idea of let the outcomes determine your path. It's not about where you went to school. And it's not about even how many hours you've put in. It's like, what's the impact we're able to drive for the business? If you drive real impact, great, you're going to be upwardly mobile and you're going to have new, exciting things to work on.

Christopher Reichert: And so, that was sold. And were you already considering Sloan? And why did you choose Sloan when you were looking at graduate schools?

TJ Leonard: I chose Sloan because I'm a New Englander, in parts. I grew up in New Hampshire. So, it was a bit of a homecoming, but the real reason I chose it was, I decided that I wanted to work in startups. I decided I wanted to try and make a career out of entrepreneurship. And at that point in time, this was 2005-2006, there wasn't as much of a tech scene in D.C. as there is today. And of course, Boston is really the east coast hub for innovation. And so, that was the big draw. I was really interested in being part of the entrepreneurship community at Sloan. And, that certainly didn't disappoint. The plan was always to come back to Boston for two years, but we stayed for seven and change and worked for a few companies.

Christopher Reichert: Were you married at the time?

TJ Leonard: We got married, so this is a great trick to anyone who is listening. So, I asked Ashley to marry me. Then I told her I was going to quit my job and saddle us both with a ton of student debt. So, that was the right sequence, I think, in retrospect.

Christopher Reichert: I think, didn’t Jeff Bezos do something similar?

TJ Leonard: Yeah. Worked out okay for him.

Christopher Reichert: Think back on your time at Sloan, I guess is what now, 13 years later? How did your time at Sloan changed you? What do you reflect on?

TJ Leonard: It's funny. There are all sorts of wonderful memories about the friends that you made. And certainly, one of the nice things about Storyblocks is my traveling hubs are New York, Santa Monica, and San Francisco. And I would say more often than not, you're reaching out to a Sloanie and making a connection when you do some travel. But, on the personal side of that, I remember those foolish nights at the Beacon Hill Pub, I remember…

Christopher Reichert: Not the Muddy Charles?

TJ Leonard: Yeah, no. That's right. High class. A lot of Big Buck Hunter. But I remember, obviously Global Entrepreneurship Lab, G-Lab, was an awesome experience. So, getting to, I didn't, because Ashley was working at the time I was in school. I didn't travel as much as others because that just felt cruel. But, G-Lab was great. We did some traveling around that, spend time in the Middle East and in Africa and hiked Kilimanjaro. Had those types of experiences that lead to lifelong friendships. Spending the time in the Entrepreneurship Lab itself when we were on campus in Cambridge was also great. So, there are all sorts of wonderful things like that, as well as the unexpected things. I think about my 8:00 a.m. financial accounting class, which was nobody's favorite class, but it was a great class. It kept our engagement. And I think of all of the classes that I took, the one that proved to perhaps be the most important was some of those financial accounting classes and the ability to navigate a financial statement and all of that terribly practical, even if you didn't think it would be in the moment.

Christopher Reichert: Is there any class you would do over or a class you miss that you would like to take?

TJ Leonard: Ah, good question. I mean, there are. I would have taken more Game Theory. That's just one of those things. I like so many of these days, have found myself down the crypto rabbit hole. And so, I know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be any sort of expert. And even in business, when you think about these again, everything is a repeated game, and you're trying to think about how your company is going to respond, how competition is going to respond. That's one of those disciplines that has way more real world applicability than perhaps I thought at the time.

Christopher Reichert: I was just reading about some people who were Sloanies, who just went back to the Beer Game in when they went back to work and reflected on the system dynamics and the Beer Game.

TJ Leonard: Yeah. A hundred percent. It's just another wonderful example, especially now we're living in a global pandemic. But even before that, I think as a marketer, as a growth marketer, even the way that you saw things go in our digital economy, the last 10 years, virality, loop, systems, it's just such a fundamental part about whether how products go to market or how they get built. Some of the in product folks that now have helped build some of the biggest tech companies in the United States.

Christopher Reichert: If you haven't been back on campus recently, well, first of all, Kendall Square is completely different, but the entrepreneurship center, Martin Trust, has changed a lot, but even more interesting is this upcoming, which is open to alumni by the way, is this iHQ. It's an innovation HQ that just opened up in one of the new buildings. So, it looks like a fantastic space, but also it takes the entrepreneurship across MIT and then within Sloan to a whole new level. I'm excited. I'm lucky I'm in Boston, so I can wander down to it.

TJ Leonard: I know. I miss it. I do miss Boston and I know Cambridge, I know Kendall Square. It's one of the places that has changed the most, really on the East Coast in the last 10 years or so. So, I've been back a few times, but not enough. I'll be back in August and I'm looking forward to now post-pandemic, seeing some familiar faces and taking a walk around.

Christopher Reichert: So, what's your definition of success? Whether that could be at work or in your personal life.

TJ Leonard: Yeah. I mean, I think increasingly, there's more overlap the older I get. And I think a lot of people, at least professionally, think about this concept of legacy and what you leave behind. And I think, there's a 20th century version of that that was very brick and mortar, and we're building buildings and all of these things. And so, you do think about a digital world and how that concept changes. I've also been asked like, "What type of CEO are you?" And I always go back to this. People, products, and profits framework. And I've always been very people-oriented leader or tried to be. And so, I think of things like goals and success, and if at the end of the road, you look back, what does good look like?

And I think, over many years, over decades, you sort of lead with principle. You build relationships and these people who have worked with you, have worked for you, have gone out and seen enough value in what you were trying to build and how you were trying to build, they took that with them to their next place. And, those are the organizations that I admire the most is, someone will say something or they’ll introduce a framework, or they'll talk about the way they run one-on-ones and be like, "Wait, did you work out?" And I think, that's really cool, when different organizations, again, through their values, through their culture, produce people in leaders that are distinct or fundamentally human, and then sort of take those things with them to future organizations.

Christopher Reichert: So, sort of like the MIT Sloan motto to create principal leaders.

TJ Leonard: That's great. So, there was a good match there always.

Christopher Reichert: We're just conscious of time here, but a couple more questions for you. Tell me about happyly?

TJ Leonard: So, happyly is a wonderful new business that I do very little with, just a little advisory work, but came through a friend in Caitlin, who's the CEO and founder, in the D.C. tech community, who has set off. And the problem that she saw was, there's a huge wellness push at organizations really around the world. The pandemic has only brought that more in focus. And so, you have families like ours. We have an 11 year old and a seven year old, and you want to make the most of the time that you have with your kids and that tends to manifest itself in like three hours on a Saturday afternoon. Right? Like I want to do a day hike. And the time that it takes to put those plans together in a way that's engaging and age appropriate, it's really hard.

In a lot of ways, they are parallels with BabbaCo in the problem that we set out to solve. It really was just about how do we make the very limited time you're spending with your children more valuable, more engaging? And so, Caitlin and her team have done a wonderful job of building this incredible network that builds you adventure plans. It's really a map for your weekend activities in a lot of ways. And so, it's been wonderful to be a part of. And again, I think something that's very much on trend with all of this wellness, all this focus on wellness at work and increasingly viewing. The office is about, it's about more than just a place. You go, produce widgets and collect a salary. It is in a lot of ways the center of our social lives. And you look for support, not just for you as professionally, but there's the whole person. That's what I really loved about again, the project, the product, and Caitlin's vision.

Christopher Reichert: Yes. Excellent. Well, thanks very much for joining me today on Sloanies Talking with Sloanies. My guest is TJ Leonard, CEO of Storyblocks, that's storyblocks.com. And, well done on your Re:Stock initiative to get at least 20% by next year of footage that represents all of us, and hopefully 40, 50 and 80%, a hundred percent! Right?

TJ Leonard: Right. Just the first step. But thank you so much, Christopher. I really enjoyed being here. Thank you for having me on.

Christopher Reichert: Pleasure to have you, thank you.

Sloanies Talking with Sloanies is produced by the office of external relations at MIT Sloan school of management. You can subscribe to this podcast by visiting our website, mitsloan.mit.edu/alumni, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Support for this podcast comes in part from the Sloan annual fund, which provides essential, flexible funding to ensure that our community can pursue excellence. Make your gift today by visiting giving.mit.edu/sloan. To support this show, or if you have an idea for a topic or a guest you think we should feature, drop us a note at sloanalumni@mit.edu.