I remember at one point, you're telling me in Slack, you're like, these people just offered me two million bucks for this. I'm like, holy shit, you did it. We started the podcast, my first million, you just made your first two million. Congrats, I can't believe this worked out. You're like, I'm not gonna sell though. And I was like, wow, this guy's insane. I was like, that's an insane story. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my law in it like a day zone.
All right, so I can't tell you how many times I hear this. People will DM me every single day and they'll say, hey, I'm just calling my shot right now. Today, I'm a small boy in three years from now. I'm going to be on MFM. I'm going to be on my first million. I'm going to make my first million do an XYZ. Yep. Every single day I get a message like that.
Here's somebody who actually did it. This is a Sean. He was my intern, turn guy who's made millions and millions of dollars, lost millions of dollars and had crazy journey in between. You were the guy who I created this podcast with. Yeah. You were the guy who the cover of our podcast. He created it. The intro song originally, the original intro song he created it. You know, I didn't even know how to record it audio at the time. This guy did all of it. You went from behind the scenes to now you're on the stage.
here in my house and we're going to reward this episode. So I've made it. You made it. That's the teaser. All right. Let's tell the story.
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All right. What's up, man? Yeah. What's up? I, uh, so people don't know this. So you are, he's Sean. You, uh, I've, I've known you since you were 18 years old. You still are kind of like 18 years old out. Yeah. Yeah. I still look like you're 23 now. Yeah. All right. So I'm thinking this episode is kind of like,
Your title wasn't intern, but it's going to be good for you. So we're going to be like intern. My intern became a millionaire. I was like, yeah, I was a glorified and my top official title is cheap stuff, but just like out of life. And by the way, I got a good track record with this. I don't know if I'm doing anything, but I'm good at picking people because I worked with you at age 18. Yeah. Steve Bartlett, 19, maybe 20 years old.
There's a guy, another guy named Sean who just tweeted out today that he's like, those four months I worked with you were super influential. He went from like guy just working someplace. Now he's got an eight figure agency. So that was cool. Danny Miranda works with me for a little bit. People know him in the podcast game now. He was with us for a couple of months before he started creating content. So I feel like those two ishans and maybe getting people that like sounds similar to Yoda. Yeah, the closer the better actually. All right. So you've had a crazy run.
But let's do, let's do the history. So how did we meet? Well, I followed you on Twitter when I was like 12, 13 years old. I was tweeting. My whole strategy was let me get my like, like profile picture. And you'll afford to do that. I'm gonna re-intro the one part, which is. Yeah.
One thing that people don't know is this podcast was started actually, not with me and Sam, me and you. I hit you up on Twitter DMs. And I saw that you were doing a podcast editor for somebody else I knew.
I think Corey or Angel List or something like that. Yeah, Corey Levy. And so I had this idea, all right, I want to do a podcast. I hit you up. I didn't know how old you were, but I was like, Hey, do you want to, you want to produce for me? Then we got on a call. I was like, Oh, man, this is like a kid somewhere. You were at school at the time. And I was like, well, you do you know how, how audio works? And you're like, yes, I got you. So the, if people see the, the cover art of the podcast, you made that.
Um, the initial like, you know, 20 episodes or whatever, all those intros and all the audio, you made that. Yeah. Then we started doing business experiments together. This was at a time where I was kind of like, I think I want to build an audience. Yeah. And I also want to just launch some businesses. We launched ecom businesses. We launched a bunch of shit together. And then we all went off our own ways and then you had a crazy journey after that where you made millions of dollars, lost millions of dollars and all the rest. So we're going to talk about all that. Let's start at the beginning. So.
I DM you, but we, you were actually were on Twitter. Were you sitting here with what? 13 years old, 13 years old. I followed you. I was trying to just get my face like on all these people. Cause I was, I'm from Australia, right? There's no, there's no Silicon Valley. There's no like VCs and cool angels and all these people. So I was like, I let me, this is my avenue to get to these people. Um, and then let me just like, even if it wasn't like a lot of value add out, let me just tweet random shit at you guys and write.
I was doing that. So if you just go on my Twitter, you'll find tweets of me tweeting off to Sean, random shit, and you'll respond here and there. But yeah, so I was like, what else? Yeah, literally like 13, 14, whatever. And then a couple of years later, when I was with a podcast with Corey, is where they had you DM'd me. And I was like, yeah, I already know who you are. And let's do this. I think your name was, I think I found you because your name was also Sean. And I was like, this is, this is it to me. But yeah, so you, um,
talk about the start. So when we were working together, tell me some of the things you remember, because I remember, well, I only wrote everyone's got their own version of history. Yeah. I remember in my head, like, you know, what we were thinking back then, but I'm curious. And this is our first time catching up in person because you live in Australia, when you're just in town. And you used to live it where I lived. I was living in Brisbane. You also like way back when I lived in Brisbane. Yeah. So what's your version of history? What do you remember? The first thing I remember, well, I think the first thing I remember is when we're doing the
podcast coverout and stuff. I sent you over some like, uh, you know, like his version A version B, blah, blah, blah. And then you're like, hold on a second. You should add your name to the, to the cover out. Yeah. And I thought, I thought that was really cool. Like I gave like me a lot of confidence. Like, oh, okay. Yeah. This says, I'm like, I'm, you know, a part of this as well. I don't know. That was, that was a cool thing you did. Cause.
I think maybe there's some learning there with people that are higher. Yeah, you can feel special. Yeah. Yeah. You make it feel special. Do that. So that was also a really cool thing. I remember. Also, I'm just like the kind of craziness of like, let's start a crystal store today. And then like a few weeks later, let's start this other dynasty thing, like make up, make the store 72 hours, go off and do it. It was like, it was.
It was like some variation of like an incubator, but it's just like guys. At this time, I'm working at Twitch. I'm a hurting out idea. We sold the Twitch. I'm now earning out and I know, okay, maybe here I get this vesting check. But in the meantime, like, frankly, I was pretty bored inside of a big company. It's not.
I knew that's not my long term. And I was like, you know, on the side here, what can I do to entertain myself? The podcast was one cool thing I'd always wanted to do. And then the other would be like, I would meet somebody and I'm like, oh, this person's killing it in ecom. Yeah. Joey Sean, I'm making an ecom store. And I remember for the crystal thing, I was like, I read some article.
I saw some magazine like I was trying to look outside of like I don't look at tech crunch to get tech ideas or like business ideas. I look separately. So I remember reading like a people magazine and it was like Adele was saying she won't go on stage unless she has her like rose quartz crystal.
And I was like, what? Like, that's insane. Like, you who believes in this crap? And I googled it. And I was like, after Kim Kardashian got mugged, she had like a $4 million ring. She got mugged. And it was like, how did you recover? She's like, well, my crystals really grounded me. And I was like, and then you see all these celebrities. I'm like, it's again.
I just think people are sort of like, I have this tweet that's like, the economy is just smart people paying beautiful people to market to sort of like average people. And I was like, if all the celebrities are doing this, then there's got to be a bunch of other people that believe in this.
And so I remember calling you and you're like, the best part about you was your game. Uh, that's like this, my favorite thing is like, if you hire somebody with no experience, there's a bunch of bad things. Like I'd be like, dude, like, I haven't heard from you in two days. Where'd you go? Yes. But then on the good side, it'd be like, it doesn't know any better. So I could just be like, Hey, we're doing this and it's going to be, we're going to launch it in two days.
And you're probably just like, I don't know, is that normal? Maybe that's normal, right? Besides, I've always been working for like internet people. I've never had like a traditional go to an office. And like, I was, I remember at the time, I was like, I'm like, I'm going to finish uni. Should I go and be a consultant for like some bad good ever? Yeah, you asked me that.
So yeah, I just didn't know what the other, I guess I was just gay because I didn't know what the other world was like. I was like, all right, this is kind of normal and doing this. So crazy stuff like just, yeah, creating different e-comm stores or different experiments. We did like a newsletter, the good terrible bad, very bad. And then dude, I was like, that one, top five before it comes to road, right? Milk road became a successful newsletter company. But I guess before that, I don't even remember that.
We do launch a newsletter called the no good, very bad, terrible, something, something newsletter. I don't know why we called it that, but we basically were launching a bunch of experiments. And I remember at the time, one of my takeaways from that is that crystal store, for example,
I didn't even know what winning looked like. So one problem with an experiment, because these need to use this word experiment. But the way science experiment works, you have a hypothesis. You're like, I believe this. Then you run the test and either confirms it or doesn't. But I was using the word experiment wrong, which was like, I'm just going to try a bunch of shit.
Without actually knowing what is the wind condition? What is the success or failure condition of this? And so now that I actually have an e-commerce business now is doing very well, it's an eight figure e-commerce business, now that I know what an e-commerce business looks like, I can go back and think about our crystal store. Actually, it was doing very well. I just didn't know. So for example, we were running Facebook ads and the key metric for all e-commerce businesses is your ROAS or return on ad spend.
And I think we were getting like 1.7. Yeah. Well, like the rocks. Yeah. We were selling these rocks. Like 50, 60, no, no, no, no. They're crystals. Yeah. And yeah. And I remember like the first few hours we got that that Shopify ding. Yeah, it's like amazing. Like that was, I mean, most people start up a story that then I'd have sales for like a couple of days or whatever or weeks. And so yeah, I think our problem was like just didn't continue.
We didn't get there exactly because now that I look back, it was like 1.7 to 2X. Yeah. And I remember thinking, oh, it's supposed to be three or four X, I think. I heard some idiot saying that somewhere. And I just thought that's what it is. And so I was like, I guess this is bad. Turn it like, shut it down. Let's do the next thing. Uh, you know, in retrospect, as I, you know, maybe I'm glad I'm not running a crystal store, but at the same time, like there is a lesson there of
I mean, sticking to it is obviously a crit like you can't win without the stick to it. And this, but one of the things that makes you stick to it is not just willpower. It's like knowing your wind condition. So like you do you even know what to look at? And do you know what winning looks like? Do you know what the benchmark should be so that you can actually assess a successful versus unsuccessful experiments? That was one of my learning one of my things I remember from back then. The other one I remember is like with the pod.
We kind of like, we called our shot a little bit like we made this Google Doc. Yeah, of the plan, the one page plan. And now I call that my kickoff doc, but it was like before we started it, I wrote this out. Do you remember that? Yeah, I remember. And it was, well, the first thing that you hopped on was like, you need your 1000 true fans. Like that was the very, very first thing you go like, if we just got this, you can build a pretty big business just with.
with a thousand people. That was like the first thing I remember. And then you had a few things like, we need to get to a hundred thousand listeners and get a bunch of other, like maybe build a business of all like, you know, these ancillary businesses, adjacent businesses across it. And I mean, you did all that. That's one thing. You kind of step back and it's like, I'll share the dog. I'll put the dog, uh, if you're on YouTube, I'm going to put it on the screen so you can see literally like word for word while we wrote back then. And it's not that it, it wasn't all right in that, uh,
It all happened, but it definitely didn't happen on the timeline. I remember thinking that we're going to hit. Let's get to 100,000 downloads per episode. So that's the thing, like per episode. I want 100,000 downloads by the end of the year. So it's like 12 months. Yeah. Took me three years. So like, you know, now we do that, but like, you know, it took three years for us to ever hit that mark.
So it's kind of this old phrase like, don't confuse a clear view for a short distance. It's like, I feel like we had a clear view. I just thought things would happen faster. I overestimated kind of like what could be done in one year. But with that one, because it's so fun, I just kept going and like, sure enough, like, you know, at all, we, we, we, that was like the right thing to keep going. There's a lot of things shiny things. And that was like the right one. The one that was making no money actually costing me money. Cause one of the things I wrote in that doc is,
I plan to lose $10,000 a year doing that. But it'll be worth it because I thought, you know, creates like some serendipity. Yeah. And you kind of talked about that too, like contact creating serendipity or like just being online and being like in the mix. Yeah, creates fortune, liking a post or applying to something or putting putting yourself out there because of some of this. Like when you, I mean, it's difficult for you to know if you post this, you know, as people that look at it, but like just for like a regular person, when you post like a tweet and it says like 116 impressions, it's going to be like,
That's a little like, that's still some people that have looked at it and you don't know who it is, but you know, lay it down the line. That could, that could come in the head. And when we talk about some of the stuff I'm doing now, I can, I've gotten all my opportunities. Every single one of them has been like through Twitter or like through some like LinkedIn or some email or thing I've sent and late years later down the track. It's all come. Well, tell the story about the billionaire. So what, what happened there?
That's it on Twitter yet. Oh, that was a that was me just like saying I need a I just made this like kick-ass investment and let me like I want more people to know about it So I was like talking to like journalists and stuff like that like hey right about the story and no one was really Taking the time but there was one dude that was actually on Twitter. Yeah, I just he wasn't responding to anything else. I went on Twitter. I started active there
I was just like, I just kept lacking his post. I didn't actually say anything. And then like he checked out my LinkedIn profile and we started talking and he's like, okay, yeah, let me write about the story. And it was like, it wasn't like a Forbes or anything. It was like a pretty small news site that it's, it's so weird that they posted that article in a few days later. Billie and I read that article and then reached out to you. And then we'll tell that story. So even that is like, um,
There's this phrase that I read once. I think Mark Suster did a blog post about this called lines, not dots. Basically, the idea is like a line is just a collection of dots, like mathematically, that's what a line is. It's multiple dots just all connected.
And so what he says is like, you know, he's like, what people think happens is they see on TV that you go in, you meet this investor cold, you blow their socks off with this pitch. And then they write you this check and say, you know, here you go, son, go, go on. And it's like, that's not what happens. Like that's movies. That's shark tank. That's not real. And the real thing is dots. And so he's like, you know, many interactions that stack up.
that when you look back later is a line. Investors invest in lines, not dots. Maybe they're not just gonna, it's not the very first interaction typically where it's all just gonna happen for you. And so it's following the person, like in the post, replying to something, they noticed that this person said something smart, not the first time, but the third time. And then after that, they follow you back. And then because of that, they see this other blog post you wrote that you don't even realize that one of your 98 views was this person who's actually legit,
And then go, you know, like, and then so those will dot stack up and ultimately that's how trust gets built. That's how framework. This is the framework king. Yeah. Watch me close, baby. That's what I do. Yeah. So that's, I think, you know, what you've done really well. So all right. So let's get to the bar where.
We break up. So at some point, we break up. We worked here for a while. I think it was a couple of years of knowing each other and doing stuff. So we get to some point where you come to me one day, you're like, I want to day trade or something like that. To be fair, you were actually kind of good at this. I remember one time we were on a call and I was telling you some instructions or some action items and then there was no feedback.
And I was like, yeah, are you listening? What are you doing? What happened? What happened? Is this thing on? Hey, you were like, oh, hang on. Bitcoin just crashed to $3,500. I'm like, this motherfuckers looking at the Bitcoin price. We're supposed to be working on our very important crystal store or whatever, whatever, you know, scheme we were in at the time. Yeah. And I remember really like,
like two reactions, one, like annoy, like, dude, this guy's like not paying attention. Two, wait, Bitcoin crashed? Like, you know, he's buying shit I buy. You're like, cause you told me you're like, Bitcoin crashed. I'm trying to, I'm trying to place an order real quick. It was down like 60% on just that day. And everyone, everyone in crypto like knows that day. It was a very like, it was like in March or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was, and like, it was like, you just never see it happen. This is like, this is not some altcoin. This is like the coin. This is right. This is Bitcoin. And so when that happened, I was like,
I've seen a few of these. I just wasn't a part of it as I was like, that's my story. I know I should be working and listening right now. I was like, I need to act right now. And so, yeah, I mean, I grabbed all the money I had. It was a couple of thousand dollars. And I, well, I didn't just buy the credit. I was like, the, the generate in me. I was like, okay, let me try and maximize the opportunity. So I went on people that are bit mex.
I went leverage long on Bitcoin. So I took all my money, did that. And when I went leverage long means what here in this case. So if you buy $1,000 with the Bitcoin and you buy 20x leverage, that means you actually buy $20,000 worth. But if it goes down by even a little bit, you'll have your experience of things called liquidation. So getting liquidated is like your worst nightmare. And I remember you were like, what, four or five grand?
Yeah, that was just like a little grand. That was my collateral. I was 20X or 25X leverage. And when I clicked the button to buy, like everything went frozen. And I was like, I was like, oh shit, is this just me? Or like, I'm kind of freaking out. And I go on Twitter. That's why I was like, not really talking. I went on Twitter. And everyone else was like, bit mex just froze. And I'm like, OK, it's not just me. It's like the actual exchange. And I was kind of freaking out because I thought, all right, it's gone. I've already clicked by.
and when you're looking at the chart, if you look at the one minute chart, it was just going down, like it went down, down, down, down, down, and it just stopped. Yeah, you'd assume that when it unfreezes, it would have just kept going there, because who knows? This was like a Black Swan event, right? So we don't know what's going on. And so that's why I was like frozen for a while, because I thought I'm an idiot. I just lost all my money. But when it unfrows, I saw I was up like $40,000. I was like, I was like, oh, is it like my heart was happening?
And yeah, I think you went to Coinbase. You'd be able to. When you told me, I was like, I was like, come on, man. I was like, whoa, wait, what? What's the price? And I went and I went and bought 25K that day too. Yeah. And so, which was actually an amazing trade. Like we made more money in that one minute. Yeah. Then we did like, you know, six months of experiments together, you know, whatever, three months of experiments that we were working on at the time. And there is a lesson there, which was like,
You know, the best kind of like ideas don't all just come from your head. Like, you know, you're at the time, like in turn, chief of staff, but you were like, this is a buy right now. I'm going to do this. And by following you, I kind of like got the benefit of that at the time.
And Bitcoin wouldn't trade it up to like 70 grand or whatever, and then come back down to earth. But do I take away from 10x from that day? Yeah, my takeaway was there's a very few moments where you can make all the money versus trying to make a little bit of money every single time. I think I'm not a day trader. I don't think I'll go back to being a day trader or whatever.
But I think all the money is made when there's like a few key decisions that happened maybe once a year, once every few years, once every few months, whatever it is. And you just have to act on it with like, it's a bit degenerate. You have to like, there wasn't a lot of thoughtful planning around, I'm going to buy Bitcoin because of this mathematical equation that's forgot. It was just.
Times like this doesn't happen every right all the time. So in the moment, I was like, this guy's a fucking degenerate, right? Like I didn't know exactly how an option trade worked. I was like, OK, this is crazy. But at the same time, you're right. Like if you go read that Buffett quote, where he's like, you know, there are.
moments or seasons where, you know, the clouds fill the sky and it's about terrain. And he says, in that moment, let us not come out with spoons, but bathtubs to sort of like make, hey, there's also, you know, the vol has a quote that similar to this, which is he's talking about luck. Is it one of the versions of luck is being able to recognize an opportunity? Yeah. So it's the version of luck. It's like, he goes at level two, whatever, or
He's not the inventor of this. I just heard it from him. But you know, the original guy who wrote this, he basically says, you know, it's sort of luck favors the prepared mind. So anybody could have seen that price. And most people when they see something going down, they get scared. You were like, this is Bitcoin, Bitcoin flash crash, blink decision that this is a good bet for me, like whatever risk reward adjusted. Yeah. And you know, you were correct in that. Later, I'm going to tell a story. So.
You come to the States, we fly you out. And I remember we go to a restaurant and we invite my buddy, Sui, and we're talking. And so we was like, okay, Sean, like, you know, tell me, like, what, what are you excited about? Yeah. And you go, I'm excited about this company called Annie Mocha. And you were told me about this company three times at this point. And you were like, I love the stock Annie Mocha. I like the stock. It was like, you're like the GameStop guy, right? You're like, I like the stock.
And I was like, any mocha, I've never heard of this, sounds like a yogurt. And then I was like, why do you like it? And then you told me something, I didn't really ask, but I was like, what does it do? And you're like, oh, they're making these like bubble games or something like that. Okay, whatever. Later when we're at this lunch, I was like, hey, slowly built a mobile gaming company and sold it for whatever, 100 million bucks more. Tell them about that. What's that mobile gaming company? And you started telling them, he's like, okay, interesting.
So I'd heard it like four times from you. It never took action. Because again, I was not at that time listening and probably the way I should have. That's an investment you made millions dollars off of. Yeah. Tell the story of how after we stopped working together, you go from intern to multimillionaire in a very short, like how long? Yeah, it's a very photobotted type. So at, so I've known about Animaka, it was a Australia, the listed company. So it was on the stock market and initially bought like a few thousand dollars worth. And it did well. It went up like Forex, something like that. So I was like,
Okay, great. That's, you know, I've done, I've done my thing here and I, I was looking at it as an investment. So I didn't sell it. And then the Australian stuff exchange, they came after it and they were like, uh, you guys are dealing with sweet crypto stuff. We're going to have to deal with you. Well, they work crypto initially. They pivoted to, yeah, they, yeah. So what about the time when I bought, so I bought them initially because they had an announcement and they were like, we're going to do a thing called crypto kitties. Um, and we're going to work with them.
And so I saw that as like, this was before like a pre-born robot company. Now it's like a sexy crypto thing. Yeah, it's like a sexy crypto thing. It's like, how do you value a blockchain game? Like, this is like, things that are like content value is kind of what I like, because then nobody knows what the price is. And so, like, as a degenerate, I like that. And so, yeah, so anyway, it did well. None of this episode is financial advice. This is actually an FAA.
laughing at the craziness of the story. So let's tell the story. So you buy more. So I bought it, it got delisted. And so I'm like, holy shit, my money is gone. How much money were you in at that point? It wasn't a lot. It was like 25,000. It became, yeah. But to you, that was a lot. Yeah, that was everything. So you put everything you have, which is 25 grand at a time. It gets delisted off the stock exchange, because you guys now do crypto. We don't know. We don't like crypto. We don't know what crypto is.
Now your liquid stock, you can't even sell. Yeah, I can't sell it. And so this was like, tell me this, I'm laughing at you. I remember you told me this, you're like, dude, I got fucked on Animoca. And you're like, it's delisted. I'm like, wow, I thought you'd probably just lose money because the stock goes down. I didn't think you would lose money because you just can't sell it anymore. Yeah.
But you did something even crazy you double down on crazy so tell sir throughout that year i did a few things i want about like secondary markets or something i didn't yeah i wasn't really exposed to before about that i did a lot more research into what they were doing and i've always been in the and i was the perfect person because.
I, you know, I had a mic off server when I was a kid. So in high school. So I understood how, uh, if you turn these in game items into something that you could sell, um, this is a win-win for everyone. So there's that I was a gamer at heart. So when you, when you, and I was in Bitcoin way long before, maybe 2016. So when you mix all of that together, I was like the perfect person to see the light. I was like, okay, what they're doing is actually,
something that I want to get more exposed to and, you know, why buy a bunch of different tokens and companies, but I can just buy the, get exposed to the people that I think will be the overall winners here. And so once I, you know, got, had that conviction, I was like, okay, well, how about, I can't market buy the stock.
Right. So I was like, how do I actually buy this thing now? And this was like a year. It's been listed. So in that time, I was working for you and another guy. And I had a few other bets that did really off to pay was one of them that ended up being, you told me about that one too. Yeah.
You're, we were talking about buying out pay later. Yeah. And I had met a max lecture from a firm. Yeah. I was like, oh, this was a great startup idea. And you go, oh, we have actually after pay is better. Yeah. And I was like, bro, your little Australian version is not better. You're like, no, look at these numbers. It's better. And that stock just went.
That went crazy from that. You told me like really early on that one. So I, yeah, yeah. So I did, yeah. So I did really well with that. I also have a pretty crazy story there where I followed one of like, I didn't have a lot of edge being like a kid from Australia investing in a public stock. So I followed, you know, all the C-suite people on Strava to see where they're at. And one of them was like near the square offices and they never like
So that's what, um, yeah, it ended up acquiring. So I got like the little kids. So that was, uh, that was like a little hack. You're like, I don't have satellites to track cars, but you, you're less legit. You follow the guys. Yeah. And he was at the square offices. You're like, they might get bought. So as a guy from off to pay, um, the CACR was at, it was in San Francisco and he was like pretty close to square offices doing his run. And I was like,
This, there might be something I didn't know what was going to happen. I'm like, I feel like a partnership would happen within, you know, Square Command bought them for like 30 billion or whatever. And, you know, the stuff go away crazy. But anyway, I made a bunch of stuff. I met money from doing trades like that. And working for you guys.
So how do I buy animal fella by more and you know, the way I went to like Facebook groups initially, we told me you were like, there's a Facebook group of people just like, commiserating. Yeah, we're wailing. Yeah. Recovering, uh, animal custodic holders were just there pitching and moaning, like they were just scrunchled. Like they were talking about at one point, doing like a, like a class action against animal code, whatever, like all this stuff. And so I was like,
Okay, this, like at the time when they were listed their worth like 80 million or $100 million, I was like, okay, I could get a huge discount on that. And so yeah, I went to Facebook, I got a few people and they're like small trades. I was like, I need bigger. How do I get like people that have a big money? So I got the list of the top shareholders. You can request it publicly in Australia, might be the same here in the States. But I got the top holders and I was like, let me go through each one of them, which one of them is disgruntled. And there was
a few that I still couldn't, like the Australian press wanted me to like name these people. I think one of them is very public, but they're like pretty big time people that, I mean, they're already rich. Yeah, they're smart money. They're already rich. They had this because they invest in some fun. They had some allocation and blah, blah, blah. So they were like, just willing to get rid of it. They're like, it's de-listed. They don't know. They probably don't know that they were in crypto or they're gaming. It's just one of the things in their portfolio. That's, you know, right. And so, so you have buying it for like what discount? Like 50%. It was more like,
80, 90% discount to what the lot. And I remember when you told me, I have the slack messages, what you told me, I'm buying it for, you know, 10 cents on the dollar. Yeah. And I'm like, bro, you're just lighting money on fire. Like, you're going crazy. Like, what's going to, like, that's a insane reaction to the bad news bears. That was, I'm going to, like, double down.
But it worked. So I didn't, I think like mother like the drill down. I, yeah, I put everything I had is about a hundred K that I just like, uh, this, this should work at equal. It's also like, I'm, if I lose all this money. All right. I'm in my twenties. Oh, like, you told me, like, you know, you're like, I'm 20 years old. Yeah.
I'm just gonna, I'll just like get a job and I'll save up again and all of that. I'll just, I've got, this is the time to do every, take all these crazy bets. Um, I don't have kids. I don't have anyone that's read on me. So, uh, yes, I made the bet. Um, I did all the transactions. That itself was like a bit of a crazy thing because they take some time to do, to do private transfers in Australia, like the documentation for that. Um, the people that were handling the transactions, they were taking a long-ass time. So one of them, actually the biggest transaction
after Animal Co. announced their now worth a billion dollars they did a raise. I was like, do I even have these shares? Because it'll still take my time to process. I'm like, I put the money in the escrow account. I obviously ended up getting the shares, but yeah, it was like this whole new world of
I couldn't like I wasn't like an angel investor before I didn't understand how to do so I had to just like on a claw and Do they even know you're like these guys know they're dealing with like a 20-year-old counterparty and these are actually like that had no clue that they were Yeah, that was yeah, it was pretty like these are like pretty serious legit guys that were
I mean, they thought they were, you know, shoveling dirt onto me. And then, right. I was, they're probably laughing. Yeah. Their perspective was, let me give dirt to this person. And I thought I was buying a gold mine. And so let me, let me do this. But I remember I, and a lot of this, there's a lot of luck involved, obviously. And so when I bought it,
I thought this was a very long-term play. After five years, there might be something here, but it was only after about three months. I bought it at the valuation level, that was 30, 40 million. A few months afterwards, they raised it a billion dollars. I'm getting a call, there was this Hong Kong fund that reached out to me. I had to flex a little bit to people. I bought this company, so you're up 50x.
Yeah, I'm up. Yeah, it was worth, like, I think $2 million. And I was like, holy shit, let me like, let me like, I'm not, let me like have a think of what to do here because people want to buy it. And yeah, I had a Hong Kong fan that reached out. I was like, we'll buy all of it. We'll give you $2 million today. You're 21 years old or something. This was actually right before they actually announced they're raising a billion dollars. Some fund probably heard they were going to raise a billion dollars.
Then we're trying to get it off me at a discount. So it was like, I think the initial offer was like a million dollars or whatever. And I am calling my dad. I was like, oh, we should, like, this is worth a million dollars. And obviously, like brown parents, you know, this is a million dollars. You took this to jail, but take the money. Like, what are you doing? Take the money right now. And so, like you said,
I was like, just wait a few months. Maybe this will be more. I was like, I don't even think that I like this is it here. And especially because I was tracking all the numbers, especially NFT, like, like NFT volume sales. And I've been tracking this every single month. And for like, it was like a flat line. It was like someone was dead here. And then in this month, there was a little uptick. So I'm like,
This, these little upticks don't just like start and end here. There's, there's some like praise that goes on here. So I was like, if this is worth a billion dollars now and this, this, the hype is just starting now. Let me like ride this way at the peak. Animoca was worth what at the peak, they raise the latest round with six billion, six billion. So yeah, we're buying in effectively like a $20, $30 million valuation. Yeah. It runs up to six billion. I remember at one point, you're telling me in Slack, you're like,
because people just offered me two million bucks for this. I'm like, holy shit, you did it. We started the podcast, my first million, you just made your first two million congrats. I can't believe this worked out. You're like, I'm not going to sell though. And I was like, wow, this guy's insane. I was like, that's an insane story. So you held it. What's it at now?
who knows. No one knows. I mean, I was with us. I met. I met. Yeah. And I met the board. It was a few weeks ago in Sydney. And that the real thing here is, I forgot who he set up, but they were like, never count your winnings unless it's like cash and bank. It's realized. And so.
I was like, hey, you have to exit this. And the way to exit it is either I sell it privately. All these unicorns, they're at massive discounts right now. So it's like, I could do that. I hate like, you know, at its peak, it's worth eight figures. Do I sell now for seven figures and cash it in? That's always like a decision that plays a lot of mind. Otherwise, you know, to have plans to list and do an IPO and what you told me at the time, because I was like, dude, this is insane. I was like, Hey, man, listen, as your pseudo father, father figure here, you should sell this. And you were like,
I see what you mean, but you were like, what do I need $2 million for? You were like, I don't have something I'm going to go do. I'm not going to change. I don't want to change my lifestyle. Like I like my lifestyle. Yeah. You were like, I'm just going to look to invest it somewhere else. And if I think this is still the best place to invest it, I'm just going to do that. And like, yeah, if I lose it, I'm so young that like, whatever, I get the story and I'll just keep going. Like, and I'm not. And the way you said it, like the my meter went from, Oh my God, this guy's insane to like,
Honestly, I see his perspective, which is that 2 billion bucks changes most people's lives, but you were like, I don't think that that doesn't get me where I'm trying to go. Yeah. And in fact,
You know, if I still believe in this, I just want to see where this goes in for, you know, for a while as crypto as NFTs, you're right, like became the thing that year. Yep. You know, there was sort of like a peak moment in that where it became worth more than $10 million, right? So it would have played out very well. Timing is always very, very tricky. Do you look at this as I was trying to try it? I was trying to time a bubble or do you look at this as
I believe in this company and I still believe in this company and that's why I have to stop. Believe in the company and also, I was kind of seeing this as like, there's, there's like a few people that have like these life holds. It's like, you know, you hold these, like, this is a lifetime hold. This isn't like you buy it, you sell out, whatever. And also I was convincing myself of that. It's like,
I'll buy this and, you know, when this becomes like the next 10 cent, I'll have a couple hundred million dollar stake and that's how, and I didn't have to do it. This is like the early investment I had to do. I didn't have to make all these other investments. There's still some like part of me that believes in that. It's like, I still see a pathway where like in the next 20, 20, 30 years, whatever this is like.
100, 200, 300 billion dollar company or whatever. And it's like, I've got a pretty decent stake in that. And so, yeah, that's what I was like, convincing myself of. That is a bit less now during times like this, but I still have some thing here where I'm like, okay, is it hard to
not just get attached like identity wise to like, I don't want to be wrong. Yeah, I've made that mistake before. Like, I think, you know, especially this is such an extreme case. It's one specific thing. You were so right. You were boy genius. Then it crashes, but you're like, am I now boy idiot or my boy genius? Is this the moment where I held through the tough times or did I just fuck up and I need to learn that lesson? Like, yeah.
Really hard. Yeah. Well, I do with that. Well, I think, um, well, I went into, let me just like do something. Um, so I was like, I was still investing some money on behalf of other people and I was going around and meeting, meeting founders and stuff like that. And that's why I'm like, I'm doing something else right now. Well, okay. Yeah. You have other bets. Yeah. I've got other bets. So that's what got me through. And I was like, if this goes away, I need to make sure that this is the next big bet. Um, I don't need to be.
I don't need to be right on this one. If it ends up the way it's going, I've got time to make more bets and be really right on someone else.
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Yeah, and also you had done so much degenerate trading that like you don't emotionally mood swing. Like most of the money will act like becomes play money in a way. Well, aside from Adam Walker, I had a bunch of other token investments, especially when when Facebook renamed to meta. Remember, I was buying up all the meta vest coins to central land, Axie, Sandbox, and so.
I experienced, you know, making millions of dollars, like liquid cash. I also, I want a lot of lessons that I've also lost a lot of that money when, you know, I didn't manage my risk post, post, post, uh, but I, I experienced like the numbers just became like you're looking at the screen. I have no attachment to it. Um, then we'd like those days where I'd be up a couple hundred thousand dollars. Um, like, oh, obviously I spent a lot of it. I was like, I was, you know,
All my boys are treated when i when i eat we all eat yeah it was like i was a pretty shy nerdy nerdy guy right so i did really have to talk to girls but if you want to learn how to talk to girls get rich i have it's like a it was like a huge confidence freestyle yeah i was.
It's just gives you the coffin. It's just the coffins for you, which, yeah, I think it was a confidence. I was like, even if she rejects me, I'm still, I can go look at my meta bass later and feel good about myself. Yeah, it was, it was more like, yeah. And also for me, like having $2 million in a bank felt like a billion dollars to me. Of course, yeah. I'm like, I'm spending a lot and it's just like, it's not going down because I'm like, I don't have kids and I have family. I don't have any, I have no obligations whatsoever. So even a lot didn't put a big debt. Would you do anything stupid?
Uh, sorry. Yeah, I got an apartment. I got a, I got a Tesla. Um, I spent like, there'll be weekends where I'd get like, limers out for me and my boy would get like, like, my grandma, like my birthday. We got like three limers. We drove down to the, a golf course, which is like, you know, with golf. I says, in Australia, um, do I still happy to hear this? Cause when I, like, I don't know when I was paying you back that it wasn't much. Like the, the very first thing was, it was 30 K a year. I think it was, yeah, we started 30 K. I think it went up after that. I think to maybe like,
80 to 100. That's what I was paying you then. And I remember at the time being like, oh, this is not going to work. This guy's getting like super rich doing these like crazy investments on the side. Like, yeah, it's not going to make sense for him to have a job at some point, which is great. Like my goal wasn't to have you work.
For me for 20 years, it was like, here's a young entrepreneurial guy, come get some reps with me, come like, just get you off the traditional path. And then like, I hope you go do big shit and like, you know, I could be your biggest fan and all that. That's kind of what's happening. And I'm, yeah, I've had my popcorn, you know, watching, watching you do this stuff and it's being totally entertained the whole way. Yeah. Cause you definitely like had like a roller coaster.
Um, you're kind of like those like Wall Street bets kids basically like yeah, I was on Wall Street bets like themselves and like high school like I was yeah, I was always on that farm with this equivalent in Australia. Um, there's I think called hot copper, which is like the equivalent of Wall Street bets and on there I was like the most active person I've got and my nickname was mr. Silicon Valley because I was just investing in tech stocks, right? And I'm like if you go on like everyone can look at my profile. It's like
I'm, oh, I'm tweeting about Adam Walker. I'm like talking about Adam Walker on that platform. And there's another company called Brainship ended up becoming like a multi-billion dollar because the AI craze and stuff like that. Um, I was constantly looking at anything to do with what is like the next hundred X stuff. Cause for me, it starts trying to kind of. If you tell me some story, a billionaire takes you out the lunch and it's like,
What's the next animoca? I mean, he reads the article and he's like, I got to meet this WizKit. Takes you out. He's like, what's the next one? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You shit your pants immediately. You're like, I don't know if I can know. Yeah. Cause during that time, like I'm, I mean, this was the era. All right. So I'm like, everything I'm telling people to invest in, it's going up and up and up. And, um, yeah, I'm a genius. Yeah. I'm a genius. Um, and so I was like, Oh shit. But I truly believed I was like, I didn't want to just raise it a billion dollars. I was like,
You should, you should invest in Anamoc. Anamoc, here's the thing. That is the next thing. And he was like, oh, okay, whatever, blah, blah, blah. And in the next few days, but inside, he's like, God damn, I love that confidence. Yeah, next few days, he ended up becoming like the top 10 shareholder in the company, bought out tens of millions of dollars of stuff. And then obviously, Anamoc didn't stop at a billion. Yeah, so he made, you know, over nine figures in that. So then that he tipped you a little bit on the way out or it tipped the dealer and there's no comment.
Fair enough. Yeah. So, um, all right. So you go through that crazy journey. One of the things that comes out of that was you were then on behalf of this guy plus other people, you were doing other investments. Yeah. One of them is shuffle. Let's talk about shuffle. So, um, you had flacked me a while back and you were like, Hey, crazy story. I think on the pot, I was like, can't say who told me this. Right. Yeah. Now it's all now. It's like way more public at the time. You were like, Hey, there was a company called stake. Yeah.
Unbelievable amounts of money. You were like, they had like a, whatever, $800 million dividend last year. Like that's just the profits they took out. You're like, this guy, one of the owners, I don't how old are they? They're like, they're in the like late twenties, mid twenties. Yeah, like 27 years old, about a $50 million house in Australia. Yeah. And then another guy bought like a $100 million house. And it's like, that's how you know someone's like rich, by the way, when they're buying like a look at the real estate. Yeah, that is like, you know, that when they're buying an asset like that, like people didn't know it. You know, articles are basically like,
Mystery mega millionaire buys $50 million home. And then it was like, they had two companies. They had like a software company that makes, like, it makes like the gaming software to go play like the games. And then they have stake, which is the casino, the, like, basically crypto casino. And they're like, you know, intertwined companies or whatever. Yeah.
little alameda, you know, FTX, you know, I'm getting some vibes here as I describe it all out. But either way, like steak has been, you know, it's become like huge, you know, they have Drake playing and then whatever gambling and shit like that. So you meet these guys who are doing a competitor to that in a way. Yeah. How do you describe shuffle and tell us about like,
this crazy space is I only know what you told me about the state thing at the time. Yeah. And then since a bunch of users come out like kind of validating what you said, tell me about the space and tell me at the time. So I was, so I was traveling around to Australia meeting other founders and I was at this dinner. And at that dinner, the guy, there was a guy there that was like pretty good friends with the state co-founders.
And he would say these numbers, this is before the articles and stuff like that. So he would say some insane, bad shit, crazy numbers. And I'm like, if these numbers are true, this is the fastest growing tech startup in Australia, history, like this is like maybe in the world, like this is like very, I mean, they were founded in 2017 and they're going to do a couple billion dollars in revenue. And this is like some kids in their twenties, right? So.
I initially heard of that. I was like, OK, and then already at that time, I remember messaging you about I want to start like a crypto trading, like, let people do it. Like, I want to start a I think I titled the document. I want to build like the world's largest casino. Right. And I remember this document.
Yeah, and the way that product is actually like a huge product down. I don't know if you've heard of a roll bit, but yeah, they have like a crypto trading thing. I was looking to do that, but that's like regulatory, just like a nightmare. It's like an unlicensed thing. And so I was like, okay, but I see this gambling stuff. It's huge. Stakers, you know, they just did a billion dollars in that profit in a single year. How do I get some exposure to that? And this going back to like how I find these opportunities, I just remembered.
There was another hidden uni that lived in a whole different city to me in Australia that posted his research on afterpay. And this was like a couple of years ago. And I don't know why he popped out in my mind again. So I went looking for that article. I found his name and I hit him a message on LinkedIn, like, hey, what are you doing these days? Let's catch up or whatever.
And yeah, we caught up, and then that's when he started telling me about these other crypto kids in Australia that have made it pretty big, doing all this degenerate stuff, and they're starting our crypto casino, and it's going to be a competitor to, not to stake, but this is the thing. The market is so huge. There's a few other competitors that are also doing a billion dollars, and it's just not really reported on, right? It's kind of like a shady industry.
I was like, okay, for me, coming from pretty small town in Australia, when you meet other people that are kind of like you, and we all had a success in our domain, I'm like, if we just come together, we're going to hit something big. And I just wanted to be around those people. And so it was more like a bet on this group of
Yeah, it's like also ambitious, smart, I need to generate or vary the general statistic. Yeah, like 20 young, young year olds, basically. Yeah. And these old people, we've all kind of been through the same thing of making a lot of money, losing a lot of money. So we can kind of like lead on each other. And that way, like we understand each other in that. So by the way, this happens in like, it's happened in almond cover. I remember like,
the rise of online bovery and the kind of poker kids who all made it. And they all kind of lived in houses together and yeah, figured out how to like each, like beat the game together, basically. Same thing happened with social media. So like the tick tockers of the vineyards. We all went and lived in the same building in Los Angeles, right. Collabed with each other, plus traded tips, plus like.
got brand deals for each other and they all like rose up way faster than the people who were on their own or didn't have the kind of connect. Just was my Jun Tower. Yeah. So yeah. So that's how I met them. And I was like, we all kind of agreed a lot of the background of the shuffle team. They come from like the big exchanges. FDX is one of them. Bitmax, crypto.com. That's all that background. So we all had the hard heard of the sketch world.
I was like, we all, and obviously I've traded on all of them. And we all just had like, we all agreed on this macro thesis of every single cycle, there is like this one clear big winner, which is the exchanges, right? Their business model is every bet, every degenerate bet you take, they have a little fee. It's called transaction fee for them.
For us, it's called hazards, but it's the same exact thing. Same model. The same model. The legal structure is actually really similar as well. They will get a license out in Seychelles or, you know, F.J.S. was in Bahamas. Crypto Christina is adding a Dutch Caribbean in Curacao. So it was like, there's all these similarities. What is that? There's like some place that's like, they just made their business some country. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, Curacao. Yeah, that's the best place. Where the hell is Curacao? What is Curacao? It's just a place where you can
I mean, anyone, if you want to get a license to do like an online crypto casino, you could probably spin one up in like six weeks. And that's their model. They're like, we're open for business for casino for online casinos, basically. Yeah. And like, that's where everybody goes to get their.
Yeah, we're like in the same structure as Steak and all the other guys. We're all under the same license. And there's some risks to that, obviously, like what happens to our license? How long can you sort of play this game? And you have to sort of calculate what a matter of risk you want to take there. But yeah, that's exactly the same as these exchanges that were out in the satials or Bahamas. And so,
We saw that more like, okay, here's a clear difference between exchanges and casinos though. Exchanges are raising at tens of billions of dollars and that they've got all the fame. Whereas, if people just understood, if this was more public on how profitable these casinos are and how they're very similar businesses to exchanges, then there would be some re-rating evaluation for these casinos.
That was like, that's good. But a lot of these investors and funds, they have like a no vice clause, right? Yeah. They just can't invest in me. They can't invest in gambling or porn or whatever. Yeah. Even though there's money to be made there. So I think like that's one of the other reasons is like, yeah, some people just either themselves individually morally say that or their fund charter basically prohibits them from doing those things. So they're just like out on. Yeah. Even if they know it's a great business, I mean, who doesn't think a casino is an amazing business? We raise the seed round and that was like the hottest.
I guess. My biggest regret was not investing. I tried to invest and then I was like, oh, it's like one entity here here. And I was like, oh, God, if I have other people's money, that's my own money. Fine. Like when I have other people's money, I have to like, you know, think twice. And just in that time, they like closed or whatever. Yeah. But anyway, like that's, we will agree that in this like next cycle, whenever it is, it could be five years down a lot of who knows, but in the next cycle for crypto,
We believe that there will be one, two, or three casinos in the top 20 of all coins. And that's billions of dollars of value that we think that we could do. And it had a big difference with us. I'm on this podcast right now. We're not anonymous. We're not these people that have all these crypto casinos. Usually, they're very anonymous people. And if you're putting your money into a platform, you want to know who's behind it, right? You want to know who these guys are?
Like all the, that is, you follow all the FTX stuff going on right now. I'm like really into this trial. It's like my show, Bob, right now that I'm paying attention to, it's your Roman Empire. That's, there's my Roman Empire, exactly. Do you, after you're following it? And also like, how do you feel about that? How do you think like, because it seems like crypto casino is like risk times risk in that sense, like,
I don't know, something between, you know, malpractice to like, you know, the craziness that comes with with just that amount of money flowing through something. Yeah. And you said you have people that worked in some of those places. What did they, I guess, what stories have you heard? And I guess, I don't know, like, not like Pichon Spokesman, you know, like, not you professionally, if we can, just like my friend, like, how do you think about that stuff? Yeah. It's like, it's
I mean, being in crypto already, you already have an appetite for speculation. And so anyone that's already in the industry, you're taking some risk on, OK, there is some regulatory risk already that one day this license might close down and your business is screwed up. And so you have to be kind of smart and calculated about that. It's like, OK, what are the other licenses? Can we start building that? We have to build our entire platform in a modular way.
If something happens to one license, we can split off, let's say, our casino and then put a license to a sportsbook and offer it in a different region. So it's like lost. It's like, we had to move the island. Yeah. Yeah. We moved it. Yeah. So, so some regulatory risk. The sunlight's funny. Like products have, most startups have product market fit risk. Like we don't know if anybody wants what we have to offer. Yeah. You have no market risk.
Then the second tier is technical risks. It's like, uh, if we can make a, um, whatever, self-driving car, right? People are going to want it. There's no market risk, but there's technical risk. Can you even build a self-driving car? Yeah. But this, there's no technical risk either. Right? It's like, I mean, obviously you have to do technical work, but it's not, that's not the risk in the business. It's all regulatory.
Uh, there's all regulatory risk in this, which is so different than like 99% of the other startups I look at. Yeah. Very few times you just just get regulatory. There's also just like actual risk that you have to manage of your book, like limits that you like, we will sweat sometimes like when we, cause we had to stop helping the limits, you know, there's some high roles like coming there like, we, I want to do a 10 K blackjack hand. I want to do a 25 K blackjack hand and use like.
Okay. Holy shit. We have to, you know, if they have a few good runs, it could be all of a sudden down a couple hundred thousand dollars. And SEO revenue is not always guaranteed. That's also like the biggest difference in the stocks with the traction. So you guys launched, I don't know when in February of this year. Yeah. What's the, what can you share traction wise?
We're probably going to do a half a billion in volume this month. This is generating a few million in revenue a month. Hopefully, this month will be a few million in profit a month. This is also another thing that these businesses are built to strip out the cash flow.
you build the business and then you have to pay this out. This is not like, you're not praying for some exit. We all went into it knowing that no one's going to buy a cryptocurrency note. You build it to make a lot of money and then, you know, strip the money out and pay it out to all the holders of the business. So that's also like, yeah, it's a very like, yeah, it's great. Yeah, it's a good problem to have. So yeah, it's only been a couple of months, but yeah, it's probably 50 million run rates probably where we're at right now.
super impressive, crazy. Any good stories about like, I don't know.
How did you bootstrap it? Where'd you go get your first customers? How did you, yeah, because that was your job. Yeah. Yeah. So you'd be like, um, and fucking Asia right now, uh, you know, meeting people. I'm like, what are you doing in Asia? You're like, I'm, I'm building the brand and I'm figuring out how to get this thing out the ground. Well, this is like a really, the, the first thing that I, I don't know why I didn't really know this, but the people that come in play on your site, if they like to gamble,
You know, they probably also have some other vices and like, they're probably not. Some of them are probably, you know, can get very angry, very easy. The whole thing is about either you make money or lose money. So when they make money, obviously, they're happy. When they lose money, you know, right, this place especially this beyond like.
I'm going to find out where you live and i'm going to find out like we said that was like the when you talk about your first time customers like the first time customers are a pretty rough people that you have to do so i mean the first thing we went to was all a bunch of crypto kids that made a bunch of money and we gambled it ourselves so like we already had a lot of.
other crypto kids that made a bunch of money and, you know, like to gamble. So we went to those guys first and like, hey, come, come, you know, plan our website and, and test it out. And we would, you know, there's little tricks and stuff of like stuff with like deposit bonuses or like, yeah, like a standard kind of standard, like sports play motions and stuff like that. Um, one thing that I think we did that was all of that. That's pretty interesting that we found out was
Okay, we should stop spending so much time trying to get thousands of people who will deposit like $10, $20 or whatever, because they'll come on. They'll come on your side and it's good for them to, you know, play, but they will lose $5 and then, you know, spend 48 hours in your support. You know, I'm going to kill you. Where do you guys live? I need my $5 back versus like, okay, let's, let's maybe try and find customers that are
You know, not like that. And we got pretty lucky in some parts of Asia, especially Japan, right? Like they are people who bet really big and they're very respectful. And they're very like, they don't waste any of that time. Like they will lose money and play with honor. Yeah.
So it's like, okay, these are the customers we want. Now we know the customers that we want. And there's good for the business. And yeah, we started making some pushes there and trying to find, you know, this is a pretty heavy, like affiliate business. You want to find, you want our people to go out and do the work because you can't do Facebook. We can't do Facebook guys. We're prohibited from doing Google. So you can't do PPC. So you have to find really creative ways of trying to acquire customers. And yeah, that was, yeah, well, this is why like, speak, I think, are they created?
Yeah, and they're basically like paying Twitch streamers, you know, gobs of money. Reportedly, like 50 million, 100 billion dollar contracts to come play because they're like, oh, these are popular people. One of the things they'll play is we'll give the money to gamble on our platform that gave Drake, like tens of millions of dollars of like go play.
Show people that you're doing a $20 million bank. Yeah. And are your gambling $20 million one night? It makes you look like a baller. It creates great content that's going to go viral and get you likes. And all those people are going to see that gambling on stake is fun and Drake does it, right? Like that's like they're, yeah, that's accurate. That's my perspective. So stake pie need that look like they'll like
Uh, we can't bid on these other channels with all these other crypto, like other casinos. Um, and so let's try and find other ways. And the streaming model, like they've highlighted that thing. It was like, is the theater students about also is that instead of like an influencer posting a picture, say, Hey, come play on stake, they're playing the product. They're showing you how it works. They're seeing their reaction. They're seeing the reactor in picture.
the whole thing. So it's not only are you educating people about how to play it and how to like this like next level in terms of I guess like player value as well. Like like they will deposit and you know they'll play they'll lose and they're watching the favorite stream of play again. They're like all right time for me to also deposit again. So we found out like the affiliates or the influences that are really like they have a discord channel or they yeah they have a you know they're constantly live streaming. Don't you want to make the most believe something you said like
We would not, like rather than have you have a million followers, we want you to have, you know, 2,000 people like active in a Discord that you talk to all the time. That's more valuable, right? Like, and I think this doesn't just, this isn't just for like casinos. I think like for e-comm and they're like, there's people that do Facebook groups and right anywhere. There's like a concentrated, like you have like there's thousand, you know, loyal fans, whatever.
There is custom is a worth. Yeah. All the money. We did a influencer campaign. We spent $100,000 on influencers, probably the first paid influencer campaign we've done. Yeah. So we put out, I was like, let's try $100,000 and we're going to spread that across these like, I think we did, um, seven influencers, I think. Right. And so these people who have like, you know, let's call it 250,000 to like three or four million followers on Instagram. And.
I show you not some people some of those people who have a lot of followers literally had zero conversion zero like Dude, I could post on Facebook. You get one conversion like it's crazy Some people kicked ass and as like what's the difference? I've noticed that you know the Instagram has is one feature which is like when
Not everybody has it, but like you can broadcast. So like, I don't know if you've seen this, but like, it's almost like one domain group chat. You can send a message and they can only emoji react. They can't like, it's not like your fans can chat back, but it looks like a chat. Right. And I noticed that the people who have active versions of those where they'll just be like, Oh, you know, my favorite mug. Yeah, it'll get like 3000 like lights there. Right.
That's a way better signal for who actually converts versus like just a generic post or story or follower account, which is like, you know, neither here or there. And I think it's a really moved product. You can tell like the difference in it. It's also just about them being like very high intent. And so I think about the people that would go into that broadcast channel in the first place, it'd be like a small percentage of like that person's like most loyal like fans or whatever that are active and, you know, right. Yeah. So I think, um,
that could be applied everywhere. Wherever you can get like, who cares about trying to get, you know, 4 million impressions. I just want to get, I want my product in front of like the thousand most, I keep using the word to generate, but not to generate, but like, you know, whatever the thousand people that are, by the way, I used to generate positively too. When we were hiring, we used to, you know, companies have like corporate values. Yeah. It's like integrity. Yeah. And honesty and like, everybody has the same amount of values. It's like, don't know somebody or something. I don't know.
ours was degeneracy yet and people are like why does it say you should be a degenerate tour here and we were like. What it is like that's what we want people who are who like.
when they work on some, like there's just two types of people. There's some people that like, you know, they work to live and some people live to work, right? Like, right. We are the types that when we do a project, we go all in, we love doing it. We obsess over making something fucking awesome. That's going to take a lot of work. And the late nights, we don't want to feel like we're like asking for a favor every time we try to go above and beyond to do something cool. Like, right. And by wasn't about working hours only, that was just one aspect. The other thing we used to say is like, we noticed that the people who were the best
earlier in their life had a degenerate like obsession with something that wasn't like
The thing your parents would reward you for, or the school would reward you for. Right. So for a lot of people, it was gaming. It's like, oh, yeah, I just spent like an ungodly amount of hours in, in Ultima 4 or like, you know, RuneScape or something like that. That was such a strong signal to us that like this person is going to be great now with us because they have that switch where once they get really into something, they practice to like to master it and they get obsessed. They want to beat the game.
And like, they're not doing it for the, you know, because people told them to do this. They're, they're doing it because they can't not do it. Yeah. And so we found that people who had early obsessions in life were the best people that we wanted to work with. You also want that in customers or an influencer who's got people that are diehard fans. Like why do people love Taylor Swift? Like Swifties, they just, they identify in that tribe is what you want. Yeah. And I think that like whether people like the idea of a crypto casino or that makes them feel like really crazy or whatever,
I think that the marketing lesson about how these guys market themselves is like one of the best marketing hacks that created a multi-billion dollar outcome was this one realization that, hey, let's pay these influencers and celebrities to specifically do live streaming on Twitch was not the main marketing channel for 99% of other brands. Let's give them money to gamble so that people can watch the sort of thrill of victory in the agony of defeat live in real time. And that is the best marketing for our product.
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I also think for those guys, I think they're really, they're like one of the most like fascinating entrepreneurs to come out of Australia because I think for cake, it's not, it's actually, I think the goal here is, all right, they've now, you know, made this five to 10 billion dollar like crypto casino. It's like, where's this? They want to go more now. They, you know, Twitch was valued at 40, 50 billion. I think these guys legitimately just want to go in and
Yeah, although it would have the money to be twin. Yeah, they want to use money to like, this is their next thing to get them to. Like, I think they want to leverage, they were already working with all these streamers, paying them, you know, millions of dollars to gamble. It's like, well, let's actually just also pay you guys a million dollars to stream. But on our platform, it's like, I think they saw a sort of gap here. They came at the right time. But I, yeah, I don't think it's just for gambling. I think these guys truly, you know, love the way that works because streaming doesn't make that much money.
Yeah. Yeah. There is no way that that works in the sense that, uh, you know, they would really have to be betting that they could and, you know, okay. So I don't think it could work, but here's the case where maybe could. So I remember to TikTok now is obviously massive. Yeah. Do you remember when TikTok came out? So like, yeah, it was musically and then they did like a musically and musically was doing good, but then like,
make it to like the full mainstream. And it was kind of still seen as this like kitty lip syncing kind of, it wasn't like TikTok. Today, you can go learn shit. You can, you know, people make your laugh. You can promote your business. You can sell products. You can do anything. That's not musically was literally like tween girls lip syncing, right? That's like, all it was, right? There's like more of what the more of what the product was. So then they rebrand it. It's like they get bought, they rebrand the TikTok.
which I remember laughing about the name, like, what is that name? And they literally spent a billion dollars marketing that app to make sure every teenager has it installed on their phone. And like, we had a kid who was working for us at the time that was in high school, but he would come and work at our office. I was like, dude, what do your friends think of TikTok? He's like, oh, it's like the joke. But he's like, you got to say, like, everybody knows TikTok. He's like, there's no one to the person in my school that doesn't know TikTok. He's like, we don't think it's cool yet.
But like, I got a given to them, like 100% of every kid in my school is aware that there's a TikTok app that they want you to help out. Yeah. And like they actually brute force like created the network effect. I guess there's a world where a kid could do that. But it's also, I think that banking on maybe they do something where the friction to buy something on live streaming is lowered. And it, yeah, that's a whole new like avenue. I think this, I think they know that
The traditional model is not going to ever work and that let's just get all the eyeballs and then maybe they can flick some switch somewhere and you know, like Instagram Reels makes like 10 billion dollars a year. I don't know how. Like you've been plugged into the world's greatest ad engine in the world. I mean, Facebook's ad engine is the greatest ad engine. Maybe Google's one or two, but like the Reels makes that much money because it's plugged into one of the greatest money makers ever.
And live streaming is live streaming commerce is like a pretty huge thing in Asia. And so if it can somehow work in Western markets, I think like there's something I think there where they could flick the switch and then, you know, this is this is how they go from already worth a couple billion dollars. How do we get to 10, 20, 50.
And maybe they don't care about how much they work, but what's like the biggest game? Yeah, what's like the next, they've already won one game. It's like, how do we, how do we get to the next? So I think, yeah, that's super, like, I think more people should probably know about those guys. And are you like, I'm going to be a degenerate forever? Or do you like?
I'm just going to do this for this period and then I'm going to do something else. I really wanted to be a part of something that could be huge and that could grow really fast. I want to do that with shuffle and ride this wave. Will I do another thing in sports betting or gambling or whatever? I don't know, maybe not.
I, like, like I mentioned to you earlier before, it's like, you make your not and go to your noble mission. I think, I think I'm just a mare's quote. I love that quote. I love that quote, not because I think it's right, but because so many people when they hear that, they're like,
That's what I'm doing. Because it's such an easy out to just point anything that you're doing in the moment. Because you're like, I'm going to do the noble mission later. And so I love it because it's hilarious how much people love that quote. I don't know if it's good wisdom or bad. But by the way, what ideas do you have? So yeah, if you know MFM, you know, that's what we do here. I'm going to get out my notes up really quick. And we might have already talked about some just.
Uh, really quickly, there was, um, before we talking about kids that were playing RuneScape, the stuff like that, I literally have already won in here. I had incubator around kids who are building businesses within games. Um, I like that. Cause I think every loss and yeah, every, so I guess during my era, like I'm a bit older now during my era, it was.
kids that were building Minecraft servers, or I know for the guys that did stake, they were RuneScape kids. They built a casino in RuneScape first, and then they did their own thing. So it's like RuneScape, Minecraft, I think now it's like Roblox, or like maybe Fortnite creator maps and stuff like that. Like if you're building business within games, every single person I've met that's done that, they're all like super successful millionaires. I think I tweeted this out, I go, what people think of the winners backgrounds looks like.
You know, what the world tells you is like, you know, good grades, he goes to a good school, has good internships and like, you know, after school activities, runs for student council. But it's like, what I've seen is like what the real winners are are like.
kid, the guy who's running his own gaming server when he's 14. Yeah, kind of because he just wants to be able to buy games, not like even running it as a business, right? Like the sneaker head, like sneaker flippers, basically, you know, people that are like hardcore gamers that are like become best in the world at a video game that's like super competitive. Yeah, that type in like, you know, which requires
skills, strategy, communication, obsession. Those are pretty translatable skills. Speech and debate is another one. There's these unorthodox backgrounds. RuneScape is one that's crazy. The RuneScape Mafia, a number of rich young people I've met, though. The common denominator is, yeah, we used to be
I didn't play RuneScape, but they're like, yeah, RuneScape has like the marketplace or the plaza or something. And they were like, yeah, we used to run the plaza or the marketplace. And I was like, geez, this is something. I have an idea around that, which is, I was like, I want to create kind of like the outcast conference. So basically what I want to do is be like, these are actual hotbeds of talent that nobody's really talking about.
I want to invite like the people who do that. It's like your point of entry is like you need to hit one of those criteria. You run in gaming server or like, yeah, you're like elite at this, like, you know, I found this one. They called mine sport. It's like someplace you go that you put it's like Olympics, but for nerds. So you don't do you don't run.
You play chess and then you play backgammon and then you play like, yeah, you play like this like advanced version of chess like go you play go you play like all these games. Whoever's like the best across these like 10 really hard strategy games is like the minesport champion. Yeah, and you know that guys are free. You guys are all going to be amazing. As soon as they decide like, okay, it's time for me to have a career now. Yeah.
As long as they just get to like funneling in the right place and don't just go be a McKinsey drone, like, you know, those people are going to kick ass. So I'm like, Oh, I want to make thing where it's free for them to attend, but you got to be the best of the best. And I want to just be able to like.
curate that talent and be like, I'm going to place my bets on these people now. Like, hey, if any of you ever started company, just remember this goodwill of me bringing you here paying for all of this because I want to be your first investor. I genuinely think that's going to be like one of the hard, highest ROI things that I could do. Well, I think a lot of them, so a lot of them get lost to like banking or something like that. And then there's a lot of them as well that.
They just don't have guidance coming out of the first thing that they do. And so they fuck around for maybe like a few years. And then like, that's why I'm doing an outcast. Because they probably feel like I'm kind of like, crying a little bit. I wasn't doing all the shit that the other, like, achiever kids were doing. But I don't know. Trust me.
Let me show you 10 other people that are like you, and then they're like, oh, I see myself in them. I can do it too. This is the basis of a lot of sports. You see a guy that's from your hometown, and now you start to believe you can do it too. Why do you like Australian entrepreneurs so much? What do you care? Because they're from Australia, I'm from Australia. If they made it, I can make it. That's cool. But had you never heard of any,
Because you would probably also be banking somewhere, you know, on that. And also, like, I think a lot of them, when you spend your time with your childhood or whatever, like, in a room, doing all this stuff, you're, whenever you're making money or, like, you're learning business skills, but then you start lacking in other areas. So then, like, that's setting up, you're setting yourself up for failure to waste some time with whether it's then afterwards, you know, you have some girl troubles or afterwards, you don't know how to do something with family or whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, that. Yeah, I think that
That's why I was a great idea about I'm just gonna have a kissing. I'm gonna hug girls like yo, if you haven't had your first kiss just let's just go out and we're gonna get that all out of the way. We're gonna crush these like lingering stuff in your head. But yeah, that was one of them. I mean, what was your idea? I thought the idea was like just like a like a like a.
you know, giving these kids like mentorship and like this incubator again. Okay. Just like a little white combinator thing for all these weirdos. Um, when I see, yeah, there's a, I was just at a conference. I was just really surprised. Um, I mean, something within conferences where I think maybe more people should, uh, make conferences for like cast up niches. Um, because especially if you do like the exhibitor model where it's like, Oh my God, like that, you know, and some of these people are
The one I just went to, they're paying a couple hundred thousand dollars for a boost. So maybe that starts off as you do your newsletter. You do like the, the low effort thing first, the low price level thing of newsletters, whatever, build that audience and then just immediately go into, like, I'm surprised you guys haven't done a conference yet. Cause I feel like that would, that would make like an MFM one. Yeah, like an MFM. Yeah.
Another one that actually kind of related, I think is kind of boring, but like a CRM for again, like cash stop niches. So we're right now looking for like a new CRM platform and, you know, everyone goes to like Salesforce, whatever, but they operate in like a hundred different verticals, right? And so who's going to get our 10k a month? It's going to be the one that is still, yeah, built specifically for
iGaming, which is our niche, whatever. So right now, we're making a decision, and we're going to go with some other small cup. We're not going with Salesforce, we're going with this other one. They're going to get out 10 grand a month or whatever, because they're specifically for iGaming. So that's like another one that's a little bit boring, but if you could just find some niche about it. What are these other cash companies? So one, for example, I think is like farming.
Yeah, yeah, any real estate is another one, right? Yeah, within that you could even be like senior living or right age back, you know, like things like that where you know that everybody there can spell you better. Well, it's like it's I think for anything that
the interactions or the behaviors of your customer is very, it's very high value, but it's also, it's very different to like maybe like an e-com order, like, or like just a transaction, like on our one, it's like you have a bunch of games that you like and you spend, you know, we want to know exactly if you've lost this amount of money in the next few hours, we want to like,
make some contact with you and stuff like that. We can't really do custom behaviors like that with like a salesperson because, or, or like whatever else here in platform because it's, it's very tailored to a very broad niche. So anything that has like, you're saying high value customers and then basically figure out like first principles, what should this look like for Disney? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I think something like that. That's pretty good. I like that. That'd be a good idea. I think that's a very like.
That's a very good sandbox for somebody that wanted to explore. And we just watch out for, there could be someone that does like, sort of in the gaming biz, there's VIPs, like VIPs make up your whole type business. And we're talking about, there's actually other verticals as well where VIPs is like, your thing. Actually, every single business probably has VIPs that they're just like not interacting with. So maybe like VIP medicine software,
for ecom, for whatever, you know, even for like retail businesses or whatever, like you probably have, yeah, you probably have like customers that will come in. Let's say I started getting into like the hot cold exposure therapy stuff. So I started going like, how to tech bro? I was like, I started going into these places like, you know, three, four times a week. But, you know, if these guys just would have
Know that like I'm paying this much money right come up sell me on something else or something else like I think that even like retail businesses like just if you were to focus less of your time on trying to you know broaden and like getting really paying on these Facebook ads to get.
the next thousand customers, what about the 10 that's going to spend like, you know, you know, whatever, five, 10 times more on the business. Um, so that's probably, I think some VIP management software for the guys that would be, I think it's sit on top of whatever, whatever niche you choose. It could just sit on top of the current software and just be like, yeah, but this one is all about your VIPs and we're just going to extract the data that we need and then give you the actions or the recommendations or the, the triggers in order for you to like,
When should we reach out? What should we give them? What do they like? That could be one. This is probably not so unique, but I don't know if you've used these people like this, but like agencies for content that do it's like full service of like thumbnails and editors. And I don't know how hard that is to find like people that really know this shit about
you know, creating online content. Cause it seems like every single person wants to like, you know, be a personality or brand right now. Um, and so people that, I mean, a lot of these are like uni kids that know how to do this. Um, but it's like exactly how to connect those middle, yeah, they'd be the middleman for the unit. It was like done for you. So D F Y. Yeah. So like people who do this ecom now, honestly, I think they're pretty scammy, but they're like, Hey, we will just hand you a D commerce business that makes cash flow. Right. Yeah.
Anytime someone promises you pass up income, just run away. But that's what they're promising. And a lot of people, these companies that are promising this are making a ton of money. And one of the reasons why is it's tempting to, instead of just saying, here, we'll teach you Facebook ads, but now you got to go figure out the rest. What product, what's the supply chain, what's Google ads? They're like, we're just going to give you the whole thing. Turkey. And so there's a version of that. There's video editors and content.
There's copywriters, but you kind of want the whole thing that's sort of like done for you package. Yeah, I think like a full service agency for all that sort of stuff might work out. So I think of what else you see.
Oh, this one's kind of related to like maybe what you do with Shepard, but so recently we like weeks, we had to expand to Japan, right? And that is like none of us speak Japanese. We don't know how to scale in that country. And so what we had to do was like, first, let me research what other companies have done. And I remember reading, I think maybe it was like a Tamar video when he was at Facebook and he was like,
uh, we hired some MBAs and they flew over to Japan. They came back and, you know, a few months went by, we weren't growing. We're like, what's going on? We fired those MBAs. We got this like young woman from that who was actually living in Japan. And within the first month, we were seeing growth and we're like, wait, what? Okay. What are you doing that these MBA people haven't done? She's like, well, I, you know, on, on the Facebook profile, like we don't care about your relationship status. We care about your blood type.
And it's just like stuff like that that you would only know localization, no translation. And to find those people was like, yeah, it's pretty hard to do that. So maybe if there's some like agency where, like, so we hired unique kids that are that speak native, like fluent English that we can communicate with them, but also they're fluent, you know, in Japanese and
Doing that growth would be like TEDx or just like, they know the market in terms of... None of them knew anything about gambling. They don't need to know that. We can teach them that. They need to know what are the people like, how do you communicate with them, how do we localize all that content, do everything.
to cater to this market where, in certain markets, it's very important that you are respectful and you appear like you're not a foreign company that's trying to attract the customers. You appear like you're born out of that country. So doing that whole process for me was very hard to find the right people that spoke English that also was native in Japanese and knew all that. So maybe if there was some shepherd-like
agency to help you, okay, you're expanding into this country. Here's like your, you know, growth assistance that a native that language and can do all these things. That's cool. I like that. Yeah, there's two crazy things on that. One, if you look at the Facebook growth chart, like one of the key things for Facebook was getting the site translated and localized across like, and they did a, they had to do some crazy Wikipedia like shit to get the whole site translated because we're so many different
I mean, Facebook site was complex at the time. And so I remember seeing that. That was very impressive to me. Second is there's a subversion of this, which is just to do business in certain places. You have to establish an office. Yeah. Like China, you can't do business there unless you have a local office. You can't do business in certain places. You can't pay, you can't pay local people unless you have a thing or whatever. And just that can take like a year. Yeah.
And so like, I remember with Twitch, when we're at Twitch, it's like, oh, yeah, we're trying to put our servers here. We're trying to do this here. We're using, we had to use Amazon's people to do international expansion, like Twitch, even as a multi-billion dollar company, didn't have like that expertise in house. And they would be like, yeah, it's going to be 12 months. And they'd be like, we're finally live in whatever so-and-so country with our office. And I'm like, what?
And they're like, this has been a year of effort. I mean, that's insane. Like, that seems like, can we turn that to software somehow? Like the way that Stripe Atlas did for company corporation? Like, is there a Stripe Atlas for the world in that way? I've been a little funny story about the localization stuff. So, like, everyone probably listening is probably thinking like, oh, but why don't you just get AI to translate your stuff? And it's
It's not there to the point, because we were using just chat TPT, a bunch of guys that were non-Japanese speakers, and chat TPT. And, you know, we're talking to like very high value customers, right? And, you know, the AI hasn't really caught up in like tone or like certain like nuances. And so, apparently, like, you know, we were talking to a VIP, like they were a kid, like we're saying, good boy, and like stuff like that. And yeah, it was, yeah, I'm not going to say more into that shit. Yeah, these people like, and then, you know, yeah, definitely, these people definitely were, they were like, they stopped playing with us.
Yeah, like disrespecting a blah blah blah. So yeah, so getting like native. Yeah, getting like, well, especially like we're just like that, like getting like native people tonight is big. Yeah, no way. So what one of the, what are the projects that worked on when I was at Twitch was like, we were trying to grow like crazy in Brazil. And so I was like, all right, luckily we had a group of people like there's four people in an office of Brazil that like, no one was even talking to really they were like, they were so at arms late for me headquarters. And I was like, Hey,
I'm here and you guys are like, like, key people. They're like, oh, awesome. We have so many ideas. Like, can you help us do them? We're like, yeah. I was like, what sorts of ideas? And they were like, well,
You know, everybody here uses YouTube. And so subscribe is like how you follow people on YouTube. But on Twitch, subscribe is you cost money. So if everybody here, they open the Twitch app and they click subscribe to follow the someone they find interesting. It says pay $5. Right. They're like dollars. First of all, five. That's a week of groceries. Yeah. And secondly, this slide, you have to pay to watch people through this. They don't even know that it's free to watch. Right. And they're like, can you just change the text on that button?
And I was like, Oh, damn, how many more of those are there inside this app? And another one was like, we were like trying to come up with like his marketing campaign, like marketing, like our marketing experts were coming up with these ideas. I asked the local team, they were like, Hey, can you buy that? Can you just like give me your credit card? I want to buy five iPhones. I was like, iPhones, why? He's like, in Brazil, an iPhone is like a gold bar. This is like, he's like, we're just going to give these away.
Trust me, you'll get like 20,000 people watching the stream. I'm like, what? And he's like, this is a gold bar. Imagine somebody just giving out like golden bars. And he just kept saying that. And he did it. And it was exactly like all of a sudden was just number one most watched guy on Twitch that day was the guy giving away with one iPhone. And he, he'd milked it for like four hours. He's like, I'm not giving it away until we get like 30,000 people in here.
Yeah. And he's like, any work is insane. Yeah, it's stuff like that, that way that we find out like every week of like, oh shit, you guys actually do it this way. And by us, have you heard about what Mr. Beast does with this? Is it like the dubbing videos? So first he exploded his growth by just being one of the few American YouTubers to like
create his Brazil page, create his Philippines gift, create his Indonesia page. He created separate accounts for all those, localized them, hired somebody who space the language and like, yo, like when we were over hanging out with some lady watching the speak of Portuguese. And I was like,
Like, yeah, what the hell's going on? And he's like, oh, yeah, she manages like my whole page for Brazil. You know, like you have to have somebody who speaks the language and knows it. And then what they did was I was like, so do you dub it? He's like, yeah, we dub it, but we hire like voice actors. I'm like, why don't you, you can use AI. I'm like excited to be like. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure you can. But like he's like, what we do is we go and we find the guy who did the Spiderman voice in Brazil.
And he does my dub for pretty cheap. And then every comment is, holy shit, it's Spiderman. And he's getting crazy engagement because they're like, that's Spiderman. And he's like, yeah, it costs me an extra five grand. But look at what it did to my page. I think they turned that into an agency with it. They do a lot of other people as well. They do the done for you thing. They're like, yeah, if we did this for growth, we should do this for 20 other YouTubers. And I was like, dude, of all your businesses, like beastibles or whatever. Yeah.
This is like the most underrated one because I'm like, this is genius. It's selling your sawdust, your, your byproduct stuff you already built in the house. You're just making it available for others. Like that's a no, and you're Mr. Beast. If you just said, Hey, every YouTuber, like you can use what I use, they'll all sign up, right? So it's like instant customer acquisition, paying, and they take like, they're like, dude, you don't even have a page in the Philippines.
We're going to run. We're going to create it. We're going to run it for you. We get half or whatever. We get 30 to 50 percent. So it's like they don't just take like a monthly fee. They own like, you know, the majority, like, you know, like a huge chunk of that channel. I'm like, that's a really good model. Yeah. I wonder if anyone has done like a roll up of YouTube channels and brands or whatever. Like that seems like she's like every niche ends up being like, you get rolled out. Get rolled up and do that. I don't know. I don't know.
No, I haven't noticed. So they're kind of doing it. What they're doing is they go to the creators and they say, we'll buy your back catalog. Right. So they say, we'll give you $2 million today. You can invest that in your videos now to make better videos. And they're like, we can just see with AdSense, we'll make our money back in two years. And then after that, like forever, we profit off your back catalog. That's like the equivalent of like Taylor Swift selling. Exactly. Exactly. So this company is like, I don't know.
Raise a lot of money. I don't know the key is underwriting. It's like, I don't know if they correctly underwrite these deals or not. Yeah. But like Mr. B sold a bunch of his back channel of that catalog, a bunch of other people have. So I think they've like, either raised at a billion dollar valuation or we're close to doing that for YouTube. I have a friend that I work with who manages speeds. You know, you speed the kid. He manages his IP.
I don't want to call it like, uh, whenever there's a video of speed going viral on YouTube or TikTok, whatever, they will claim it and then they make revenue off. No, they'll actually, they'll run ads on it. And I think, I think very quickly, like just speed a lot and that's generated like a million dollars so far. And he's like, we should just be doing this for like.
No, just be like all these different create. Yeah. No, put it down as a, you know, create like a big business that might be also like a number like within that. Because the way that works is if your video, if your IP is being played by somebody else, you can claim it and either they take it down. Yeah. Or you get all the ad revenue. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And I think any should just do, yeah, do a lot of like it, do that. So because they found like they were like,
just like what people create as like speed, like a lot of the eyeballs that is on him is not on his videos. It's on the millions of compilations and stuff that that's that's going unclaimed. Like you're just like easy money that you could be claiming and getting. So yeah, it's probably another thing that people should, you know, look into and it is so good.
Uh, this is great. These are some, some, these are fun ideas. Um, I'm glad we did this, man. This is awesome. And, uh, yeah, Sean, uh, where should they follow you or go? What can they do? Uh, yeah, you can follow me. It's like Twitter, um, it's Sean, uh, Sean, uh, but the lawsuit led us to my name's Carlos. This is H.A.Q. So if you're your S H A A N. Yeah, I'm I S H A N H A Q. That's, that's my Twitter. Nobody knows what H is in America. Uh, H is. Exactly.
But yeah, follow me on Twitter if you're all linked it or it's look me out put it in the description Dude amazing. I'm proud of you. Yeah, this has been amazing to I've gone to validation Yeah, yeah, you know, I'll say it I am super impressed. I just I'm so glad you kind of
You've taken, you know, vol, you just run with it and you're taking just such interesting shots on goal. Yeah. And like, whether any of these work or not right now is pretty secondary. Like, yeah, by the time you're 30, your scoreboard is going to be filled up. You're going to have made all the successes, whether it was this or that. I don't know which one.
Yeah. By the time you're 30, you're going to have it all done in terms of like, you know, the achievement side, but you're also just going to have had so much fun. Right. And like, you know, these lessons you're learning about like hiring these kids in Japan because of this. Yeah. Those are the real lessons of business. And so I'm so glad you're getting them. And this is so cool to see. Thanks. I appreciate it. I've got one last question. Yeah. I read you said, so you, I felt like your one life goal was like, I think it was like, you want to educate with a one seven world or whatever.
And what I said at the time was, I want to be like, for 1% of the world, I want to be their favorite teacher. Yeah, like, you know, which was at the time, I think like 60 million people or something like that. I was like, if 60 million people thought like, because like for me, I'm like, oh, like, I learned so much from Tony Robbins or Tim Ferriss or Nicole, or these people like,
I'd love to just be that for for people. I think that's like, yeah, I know what they kind of have done for me. That'd be so cool if I was that for other people that I think that would be like the highest calling for me. Yeah. Yeah. And do you think so is that a is that still the case and then be like, do you still want to do that and be like, what do you think will be the.
Well, what do you think will be like the avenue that way you achieve that? Like is it because you're already in the ears of, you know, all these people, whatever those stats are now. Yeah. Very different. So that's where I started. Yeah. But do you think it'll be podcasting? It's not actually that goal. That goal, I think, was arbitrary. Like, who cares if it's $16? Who cares if it's 1%? It was ambitious. It's a little headline. Yeah. It sounded good, but I'm like,
I'm only need to say this to myself. I need to believe it for myself what this actually means. And that's not something I needed to die to do. I didn't feel like it was do or die to be able to pull that off. It was something that sounded better than what I really meant. It was also kind of virtuously, you know?
I don't even know if like teachers the right word, but I guess the thing that I think about now is almost like the D. I stripped the ambition out of that and just made it really simple, but more true for me, which was I want to be somebody that if I was 21, I would look up to this person. Like I'd be like, that is what I want to be. That guy is awesome. And that's a combination of things. So for example, part of it is making content being out there. Otherwise I wouldn't have even known that this guy existed. Part of it is.
Do cool shit so that like stuff that like I respect more things cool in some way some of it is like Build a cool business some of it's like You know this outcast conference like that's cool. I'm like like I like his reasoning behind that I like that he went and did it or like, you know
You know, just giving somebody, you know, a bunch of money because you believe in them and like my version of philanthropy, it's not like donating to the cause and going and sitting on the board of some nonprofit. But like, if you see somebody who's got a dream, like funded and like make that happen. So I want to do cool shit that like I would respect. And the last part is the way you come across like, I know that my favorite people were charismatic storytellers. They were funny. They were likable. They didn't feel like they were bullshitting you.
They had moments where they were honest and like, they could have just not shared that or they could have said. A sanitized version, but they chose to just be real. So I'm like, those became my like scoreboard is like, would I at age 18 to 24, like, would I have thought this guy's. The man.
And like, I know even at that time, like if I saw something that was awesome, like Elon Musk, oh, he's amazing. I remember watching some documentary about him on the plane before he even started like Tesla, I think it was like a long time ago. And I remember thinking this is awesome, but he had like had four marriages at that point. I was like, that's not winning to me. Yeah. I like that he's an outlier in this one domain, but like I didn't want to replicate these other three. So like, you know, to me, I'm like, the thing I would have respected is
somebody who's like, they're a really great dad. Like for example, one of the things I want to do instead of, instead of doing another business or ready to check is like, I want to go coach like a high school basketball team, like Mighty Ducks style for a year or two years or something like that. Yeah. And I'm, if I remember, if I remember,
If old me, if young me had heard that some guy was, do some rich guy was doing that? Yeah. I would have been like, I don't care if he's not the richest or most successful. That guy's awesome. And so I just kind of want to be the person like, you know, what's that? Well, like be who you needed when you're younger. Yeah. Not needed, but like be who you would have admired when you were younger. Right. And.
That's the goal. Yeah, not the, like, exact goal I had before, which I don't know if it's better or worse, but like it's more true for me. I think you'll say on some part, you're like, you, I think you went to LA or something. You met a bunch of like rich people. And at this point now, I've met a bunch of billionaires and other cool people. And the most part, like a lot of rich people like miserable and.
And like we mentioned before about the kids that stay in their room and they'll do businesses, they lack other components of life. And I see that reflected throughout all these people that are, yeah, they've made a bunch of money or they've done this one cool thing, but they've neglected every other part of their life. And it's like, okay, there's, yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, you know, trade. I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to be in those shoes. It's similar to what the, I forgot who it was, but some guy talked to the Instacart. So yeah, and he was like,
uh, how old are you? And he was like, I'm 33 and he's like, I would be and this guy's worth billions of dollars. Like I'll do anything to be 33 again. Uh, like, I hear trade, trade all these money. So it's like, I see that a lot more now and I, you know, I'm hopefully mature, you know, I don't know because before I was like, yeah, I just want to get all this and get the money and stuff like that. Um, but yeah, that's something too. And one thing that one of the probably the most important thing, not important, but like,
Effective things that I love working under you was I mean everybody maybe it was maybe you're talking to silly or silly taught you this was like aggression like just being like aggressive and like getting Getting things done and what you want like I think most people don't don't do that like they don't follow up or you know they don't They don't be annoyed like they don't try to be annoying When I when I started applying that I was like okay things are moving away way way faster. Yeah, I remember probably like
Cause I used to kind of, you were like my dear diary. It's like, I come home and I'd be like, I don't even know what time it was your time. I'd be like, three a.m. and I'd be like, hey, I'm ready to work.
I'd be like, I met this guy or I noticed this thing. And I would like kind of like use you as my sounding board to like play some of these lessons back. Yeah. So it's cool to hear what like stuck. But yeah, that idea of like intensity is the strategy. Meaning like, yeah, this guy's not smarter than me. He's not more knowledgeable to me about this. He's not like, there's no special aura around this person. What is it that's made this person so successful? And what do I, what's the difference between me and them?
And I just noticed I was like, oh, he doesn't have these imaginary walls where it's like, you stop here. Right. He's just like, no, like, OK, we want to do this. Like, I remember one time we wanted to do a deal. The guy who we want to invest in this company. And he was like, I was kind of on the fence.
And he was like, what if we just wire him the money? And I was like $2 million. And he's like, is it? Yeah, like, what's the wire on the money? He's honest guy. Like, we met the guy. He's like, not like a crook. Yeah. Um, he's like, let's just wire him the money. And then like, I feel like that'll tip the scale. Once the money's in his bank account, he's not going to have like one of like wire it back.
And I was like, this guy's insane. And like, we had another moment like that where we were working on a one of the founders was like, Oh, I really need to raise this round. They're telling us this urgency. I really got to do this. We're running out of money. The pitches are not going well. The first few pitches didn't go well.
Can you guys help? We're like, yeah, we can help. We can help. Right now, sound like an emergency. Oh, we got a thing. We're like, you got a thing? You just said this is like so important. Okay, whenever you can, they get on, they get on a call with us. We go through the deck before we set, send the deck in advance.
There's like 40 minutes before the call. What do most people do? 40 minutes before they call this. We'll talk about it in 40 minutes. Yeah. No, no, no. So he was like, by the time the call happened, he had already emailed back, like slides nine through 13, suck, eliminate them, slide four is backwards, put it in slide one, slide one needs to say this. It already given them the full first round of feedback. Yeah. They were like, what the hell? So they were like looking at it. And we're like, cool, let's just make these changes right now. And they're like, no, no, we don't want, we want to be respectful of your time. He's like,
The thing that's respectful of my time is like showing that you're like full force going for this, not that you're not going to use my time. I'm here to hell. But like, let's do the thing. Yeah. You want to make this awesome? Let's make it awesome. So they start working on it. And they're like, okay, we, we, we know what we need to do next because we need to go pull some data and do whatever. And so we'll check back in with you whenever he's like, uh, you know, it was like noon. He was like, cool. Like let's check in at six p.m. today.
And they're like two calls in a day. And even I was like two calls in a day. I've never done that with something. Have you ever scheduled two calls in one day with somebody? Like it never happens. It's not that it's so crazy. It's not like running into a burning building, but it's kind of the business equivalent of running into it. It's like, whoa, that's unusual. That's like a highly intense way to do this. Yeah. And you could tell they were kind of shipped by it and then they did it. And at six p.m, it was like still not like exactly where we needed it to be or we realized something.
And we're like, cool, nine and tomorrow. Let's do it again. By the third day, we were like, this deck is in great shape, but these guys were like worn out. Yeah. And so it was like, dude, I'm just getting warmed up. This is like what I live for is find the thing and laser in and to go for it and like.
Who says we can't meet twice in a day? Who says that they said no to the first proposal? Well, let's, what if, you know, there is some number they'll do this at. What's that number? And like, you know, he'll just think about it differently. Yeah, that stuff with me. I'm glad that kind of that idea stuck with you. I say it out loud so that somebody out there listening will be realized like, yo, my intensity knob is stuck at six. Yeah. Like 10 is it more hours? It's just
like more focus and it's more intensity at the main issue and not self limiting and by by fake imaginary walls that don't exist. Yeah. Yeah, you got to bring the engine. Uh, nice mobile stuff. That's where there we go. All right. That's it. That's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. Put my own in it like no days off on the road. Let's travel. Never looking back.