Ronnen Harary says Spin Master became too rigid after he stopped being co-CEO

Ronnen Harary did the rare founder thing on How I Built This: he admitted the grown-up version of his company may have gotten a little too grown-up. Spin Master, he said, “became too rigid” after he moved out of the co-CEO role, which is a funny thing to hear from the company that turned cartoon puppies into a geopolitical force in preschool living rooms.

And I would say that we probably over-rotated in the last few years since I, I like to say, stepped up from being CEO of the company or co-CEO where we became too rigid. And so our culture was actually starting to shift, which wasn’t a good thing for us.

That is the line worth underlining. Not because founders never complain about bureaucracy. They do, usually while standing in front of a catered lunch and a slide that says “nimble.” It matters here because Harary is not selling a garage myth from a garage. He is talking about Spin Master, a public, multinational toy and entertainment company with legacy brands, licensed franchises, movies, seasons, and the kind of operational machinery that can quietly sand the weird edges off a business.

The toy company disease is called adulthood

Harary’s diagnosis came while Guy Raz was asking about the balance between buying established brands and inventing new ones. Spin Master has done both. It built hits like Air Hogs and Bakugan, then hit the jackpot with PAW Patrol. It also bought Etch A Sketch, Rubik’s Cube, and Melissa & Doug. That portfolio sounds like a parent’s basement and a private equity deck had a baby.

One of the things we did was we took a lot of the earnings that we made from Paw Patrol, and we bought Melissa and Doug. And the reason for that was to have to even out the ups and downs of the toy industry.

This is a perfectly sensible move. The toy business is a slot machine with packaging. A preschool hit can print money until the kid ages out, the YouTube algorithm mutates, or a new piece of plastic becomes the thing every adult hates buying. Melissa & Doug, with its wooden kitchens and open-ended play, is ballast. Stability. A nice clean revenue stream that does not require a talking dog to save Adventure Bay every fiscal year.

But Harary’s more interesting point is that ballast can become a blanket. Buy enough stable brands, build enough process, and the company starts protecting yesterday’s hits instead of making tomorrow’s strange object. His verdict on Spin Master is blunt enough to cut through the usual founder fog: the culture shifted, and not in a good way.

Like for example, with Paw Patrol, we have our third movie coming out this August. You know, we bring out a new season every year. And within the season there’s specials and there’s new characters. And then with the toy line, we make sure that we keep the toy line super innovative. So we’re constantly refreshing everything within the franchise. You know, our goal is Paw Forever.

“Paw Forever” is both brilliant and slightly terrifying, like hearing Disney announce “Mickey Until the Sun Explodes.” It is also the cleanest expression of Harary’s business brain. A hit is not a hit. It is a machine that must be fed, refreshed, extended, protected, and occasionally zapped with a new character so a child can point at a shelf and ruin your Target run.

Then he gave the same advice three different ways

The calls made Harary’s Spin Master confession feel less like a throwaway update and more like a worldview. To Anne Williams of Yearly Co., a Nashville fine jewelry brand getting squeezed by gold prices, he did not recommend clinging to the sacred origin story. He told her the brand name gave her permission to sell things besides gold. Translation: your customer bought meaning, not just metal.

To Felix Colon of Island Bee Company, Harary pushed harder. Colon was debating corporate gifting and weddings versus a more direct consumer path for a Martha’s Vineyard honey and hive-based skincare business. Raz worried, reasonably, that a viral hit could create operational chaos for a tiny family company. Harary disagreed, politely but firmly. He saw a repeat-purchase consumer brand, not a seasonal gift basket business in a nice zip code.

You know, if you want to build a $5 million business, then you can take guys’ path. But if you want to build a business that’s $20 million, $30 million, $50 million, $100 million, I think you got to take a different path.

That advice can sound a little founder-brained. Not every family apiary needs to become Burt’s Bees. Sometimes a nice business is a nice business, and not everyone dreams in retailer sell-through reports. But Harary’s point is consistent: if you say you want scale, stop picking channels that flatter the founder and start picking channels that create repeat behavior. Corporate gifting is dopamine. A customer who comes back every month is a business.

His final caller, Matt Smith of Wandering Soul Beer, pulled the episode somewhere more human. Smith’s beer began as a grief project after his daughter was stillborn, and his question was how to keep the business from swallowing him. Harary’s answer was almost aggressively practical: get an office, stop working from home, do not talk about work with family and friends. For a man promoting a book about betting on yourself in your 20s, this was refreshingly unromantic. Founders love to call the company their baby. Harary sounded like a man who knows that metaphor can eat a person alive.

So yes, Harary’s Spin Master admission is self-serving in the familiar founder way. “The company got too rigid after I left the operator seat” is not exactly a neutral audit. But it is credible because every piece of advice he gave pointed in the same direction: protect the weirdness, keep the customer moving, and beware the beautiful spreadsheet that quietly kills the thing people loved.

If your company is using stability as an excuse to stop inventing, Harary is basically telling you that you are not being disciplined. You are becoming a wooden kitchen with quarterly targets.