Former Barstool CEO Erika Ayers Badan wants to bring some edge to the lifestyle industry

Erika Ayers Badan, the new CEO of lifestyle brand Food52 and former CEO of Barstool Sports, is eager to borrow from the model that turned Barstool into an online cultural juggernaut. Whether it be cultivating a community of fans, or leaving the cameras running to capture viral moments, Erika shares how she plans to bring a little David Portnoy to the food industry.

I have tried to think about how to ask you about your career, but this move from Barstool to Food52 is so different. Can you start just by describing how you define what Barstool Sports is and was about? And then how do you define that for Food52?

I would describe Barstool Sports as one of the most wild and free and creative and disruptive, no holds barred, us against the world, anything for a laugh mentality company and what was so staggering about Barstool Sports. I joined in 2016, it had an insanely rapid period of growth.

Crazy growth, right? The revenue went from like 5 million to 300 million. 

Really crazy run. So in a lot of ways, it’s hard to put words and your arms around Barstool sports because you can get caught up in the controversy of it all, but I really loved Barstool Sports and it was really electric, wild, stressful, painful, exhilarating, terrible. Almost a decade that I spent helping grow that company.

And then I made the change to Food52, which is a lifestyle brand. It was founded by two women. It is about home and table and food. There’s a lot more perfection. The bathrooms are insanely better, cleaner. The office is beautiful. At Barstool, people were sleeping on my couch and living in my extra bedroom.

There’s grownups at Food52. But it is foundationally not that different from Barstool, which is a company that is centered on community. It is a company that is both commerce-driven and advertising-driven or content-driven.

Barstool was incredible at building community, but it did it in a very specific way. Do you apply that to Food52? Cause it’s a very different community.

Yes, crazy different. The average age of a person at Barstool Sports was probably 22, 23 years old. The number one place we recruited people from was a college network we created. Food52 has people who are pedigreed. Chefs. There’s a lot of people who’ve worked in industry for a long time.

A lot of grownups.

A lot of grownups, which is both good and bad, to be honest with you. Barstool was so on the edge. And so fearless that we tried and experimented and created things all day long. I would always describe Barstool Sports as a company where every day everyone showed up and it was a blank page.

When our creators came to work every day, they had to make people laugh, and they had to start over every single day to make people laugh. Some of that will apply to Food52 and some will not.

When you’re developing a recipe or you’re making a cooking show, you can wing some of it, but you can’t wing all of it. And it’s not driven off of headlines. And so it’s not viral in the same way. But community is built around personality and I’m eager to add more personalities to Food52 so that we can build.  I’m looking for our big cat will there be a Dave Portnoy? Probably not. There’s only one Dave Portnoy on the planet, but we need to find people who have opinion and perspective and charisma around home and design and lighting and furniture and food and, you know, I’m eager to bring that here.

Barstool a lot of it was around humor, But food brands haven’t historically liked to define themselves by that kind of personality.

Exactly. And that’s why I think there’s a lot of opportunity. You look at the food industry and it’s like fashion a little bit. It’s so much about perfection. It’s so much about authority and what the top person has to say and I think that’s kind of bullshit now. Like I had a chef in here yesterday, a 24-year old guy who started cooking over COVID and is self-taught and now he’s developing a recipe book. He’s got a huge following.

The internet has changed this notion of authority and it has for good or bad, and you can argue it either way. It has ushered in this era of personality. You look at Julia Child, she was a legend not just because of her cooking, but mostly because of her personality.  We’re in an era right now where there’s so much fragmentation, anyone can be a chef, anyone can be an influencer, anyone can be a personality, and it’s so fragmented that there’s actually a very large business opportunity in the home and lifestyle space around that.

You ran Barstool in a way that few CEOs have ever led a company with cameras and mics everywhere and audiences with a front row seat to your office every day, seeing the decisions you were making, it was almost like a reality show. Is that a model you liked?

Yeah, it’s funny. I never intended to be public. I can remember the announcement video when I joined Barstool and I think I had like 5,000 followers on Twitter, and the announcement video went out and then all of a sudden I had 50,000 followers overnight. It was a little bit like getting a mutant chip put in you from being at Barstool where you’re getting comfortable being that exposed, is highly, highly uncomfortable. And it does change you, it makes you recognize how to talk to people. It teaches you a lot of good things. And then also I think it makes you very guarded.

So you get a thicker skin, but you also get more wary about what, how you are? 

Definitely, you get a thicker skin. While I do think there’s some negatives about it. I do also think it changed my life in really extraordinarily good ways.

Are there things you learned from working with Steve Balmer when you both were at Microsoft?  

I’m not like Steve Ballmer. Steve Ballmer is one of the greatest executives of all time. He has so much charisma, so much energy. Microsoft was a fascinating company. I always say that I learned how to say no at Microsoft.

Bob Safian: Because they ask too much?

Erika Ayers Badan: There’s just so many people who have so many different agendas and they want so many different things done that you, if you don’t know how to say no at Microsoft, like you’re utterly screwed.

Learning how to say no as a CEO that’s mostly your job, right? Saying no to ideas and every now and then saying yes.

People are so reticent to give the answer no or to be like, “I got told no,” but no is really the second best answer to yes. And sometimes a better answer than yes. Microsoft really taught me to be decisive and quick in that because the longer things languished and hung between yes and no, the more anxiety and angst and inertia was created. So, I like a fast no.

Why is no a better answer than yes?

Because if you say yes to everything, you’re really doing nothing, and it’s quite easy to say yes, and I think a lot of times people say yes for the wrong reasons. They want to please other people, or they don’t want to offend someone. But when you say no, it indicates that you are much more clear on who you are, and what you want, and what you’re trying to achieve, and you’re far more protective of it. I think if more people said no more swiftly and clearly, people would be in a much better place.