Quotes from Freddie Wong

Defying genre conventions is instantly a risky move.

A lot of people have difficulty wrapping their heads around what VR is good for. And the direction people go first is wrong. The wrong place is always: How can we do something we've done before, but on this?

We want to be a studio that makes a whole bunch of stuff we believe in, in all ranges of scale and time and length, and own as much as that IP ourselves and generate as much of that IP ourselves as possible.

People always ask us, 'When are you guys gonna do a movie? When are you gonna do a TV show?' And to me, that feels like such a step backwards from where are.

YouTube is the place where people go to consume advertisements willingly. It's some capitalist dystopian nightmare.

Shooting on location and dressing locations in Los Angeles is shockingly expensive, especially when you're talking about webseries-level budgets, so the opportunity to build our sets in YouTube's space gives us a lot more room in our budget in being able to create the world of 'VGHS' properly.

When we started out doing YouTube videos, I think we were very, very early on in terms of people doing a behind-the-scenes component.

When we started doing YouTube, the goal was, hey, let's make stuff that we want to see, that entertains us.

It's hard to sell merchandise off YouTube.

YouTube's a funny place because so many creators fall into their aesthetics out of necessity and the visuals are driven out of an urge to create. You get a lot of interesting examples of interesting design choices that have roots in practicality as well as an artistic sentiment.

A user who essentially costs YouTube money has very little say. The way to have a say is to concretely support the creators and channels you watch directly by giving them money.

Hulu understood how much content costs. By remaining defensive, YouTube is losing various aspects of video - long-form, for example - to other companies.

When you have a home and create a brand people believe in and want to support, it makes it easier for you to control merchandise and sell it.

I get occasional tweets from people asking what shampoo and conditioner I use. I go straight for the Costco brand, Kirkland brand, the bulk shampoo. That's as far as I go.

As you reach more people, there is a potential to make a living with what you are creating, and that's the goal.

On the advertising side, view count is not the most important thing. It's engagement.

We are not frou-frou creative types. We have done both sides of the business and are constantly asking ourselves, 'How are we going to pay for this?' But the criteria is that it must fit with our world.

In general, a lot of content creators find that their success is unable to support any sort of organization of scale. It's pretty difficult to support even three or four employees.

People predicted in the 1910s that live theater was going to be all gone and that we'd just be watching movies. No, live theater is still around, because it does things that are specific to it.

A vlog look is a very specific look, and it's basically a phone look.

We were looking for representation that was creatively and commercially in synch with our core DNA. The team at WME understands where we're going, and we're looking forward to taking our company to the next level with them by our side.

We always said that directors work their whole lives to get final cut on a movie. We have that. So why would you want to run away from what every other director is sprinting toward their entire careers?

Youku Tudou gives us the reach into China that we've been looking for, and we look forward to sharing even more content with international audiences in the near future.

The Lionsgate deal came at an opportune time. It allows us to get our projects financed and create long-form content without needing to be reliant on brand deals or crowdsourcing for external financing.