#6 - How This Silicon Valley Outsider Hustled His Way to $750M Exit - Meet Vungle's Jack Smith

basically he stood up during the pitch and he's like banged on the table and he's like you guys don't anything about advertising there's people with like twenty years experience at google working on this and you just look this up on the internet like five minutes ago and you think you can come up with better advertising number you will never raise a single dollar of funding that's my friend jack c cofounder of v describing his first investor pitch it's not exactly how you want it to go so how's the company doing today private equity firm blacks stone is set to acquire van for an undisclosed sum that is hot rumored to be seven fifty million us dollars in cash okay is it rolling okay cool jack man i appreciate you coming on the show i've been excited to have you on because every time i meet you you are up to some new companies some of new like experiment some new kinda clever thing you're i i would call you sort of you're the most clever guy i know silicon valley like i i asked some friends of there that i was saying you know if we had to nominate one of us to go on a game show and you don't even know what the game show is but you want you know you're gonna need some set of skills to win it you're gonna have you know maybe you have to be good socially physically get be clever solve puzzles whatever and you know what i feel like you would be my pick because you are you're very clever and it seems like whatever system gets put in front of you you end up cracking the code and is that fair i is that surprising to you when i say that no i'd like to kind of think along those lines they're just like tryna whatever system is in front of me like it was it like i do think about like game shows and stuff as well like how could you reverse engineer the balls to them typing yeah exactly so we're gonna talk about a couple of things that you've built so for for people who are listening this is jack smith he is an entrepreneur and a friend of mine he started a bunch of different things like sort of called in the jack of all trades because he's got his hand in all different types of projects either starting the company advising companies investing in companies that sort of thing the biggest success is a company called v which is an ad network that's doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue despite only raising you know by silicon valley terms a small amount of money about twenty five million dollars they raised and they're doing you know north of three hundred million in revenue so very impressive company but i'm gonna talk a little bit less about that not just because it's an ad network and ad networks and not the most fun thing to talk about but mostly because i think jack does a lot of other interesting stuff so jack when i was growing up i thought that if you if you had a million bucks that meant you had like infinite money you had all the money and so at that number of million was always you know top of mind for me and so my goal is to find out you know from people old you know the different crazy things that they get up to in order to make a million bucks and and what i wanna actually know from you is you know i wanna rewind the clock so before v you're fifteen sixteen years old and you start your entrepreneurial journey what was some of the early days things you tried to do to make money and was that even a was that even a priority of yours were you trying to make money or were you trying to do something else yeah i mean i never actually obsessed about money very much but what i do value is freedom and i think that money and i also like to try and be like successful and i feel that just like money is just kind of the barometer by which we measure success like if i was a sprinter then i'd be trying to get the best time in the hundred meters but because i'm kind of an entrepreneur then that's why i was focused on money mh probably the first thing actually that i did like as a business idea that i can remember i think i was probably like eight years old or something and basically i was hud playing in the local park and then i found that there was this kind of seed on this tree by my house that you kind of opened it up and had always this like dust inside and it was kind of pretty itchy if it got on you mh and so basically i just clicked loads them with my brother and i sold the in in the playground as like itchy bombs and i told people like put this down someone's back and right they're gonna go for to and then i think i sold each one for twenty five cents and yeah i got quite a lot like people from people's older siblings and stuff we're coming buy them for me in the playground and stuff so that's probably the first open entrepreneurial memory i think god okay well what did you have a name for them or or were you just calling ritchie bombs i yeah i just pray it as like hit itchy bombs yeah okay alright so you started off with that and slightly evil but i like it and so where did you go from there you're eight years old then and just to give people like the kinda context how old are you now i'm fat you're thirty and how old do you look probably like thirteen i was trying to imagine you at eight and i was like it's not actually that big of a jump from how how i see you today because you got you sort of the baby faced assassin so so what did you try what you try next well we're all what some of the other notable experiments or attempts that you made well when i was i think around twelve years old all of my life i've been getting not a massive amount like small amount of pocket money like allowance i think about like two dollars fifty a week maybe five dollars a week maximum and then when i was like twelve or something my parents said okay you wanna keep getting your allowance then you're gonna have to start doing more to help out around the house and then so they said here's the stuff you're gonna do you gotta do it like dishes and like tidy up and etcetera etcetera and then so i said like okay well why don't use i don't wanna do that stuff so just stop giving me an allowance and i'll will just figure out how to make some money myself so i was more growing the freedom then i'm the money right and then so basically at the nowadays they're they're very popular at the time it was slightly smaller about these websites like up work which it just ipo a couple of months ago like at work or dot com yeah yeah so basically i just went on those sites and so as a worker i bid on projects and i bid on them even lower than like the guys in india and stuff right because i'm like twelve years old so any money is a lot for me and so basically i been on projects that i didn't even know how to do them and then basically i just learned how to do them so basically people were paying me to learn and so were you like were you like a naughty kid or what because i think most kids don't sort of look at their parents and say no deal when it comes to like the allowance for chores trade and so you were willing to do work you just didn't wanna do that work you wanted to do other things i just yes i wasn't really naughty i just don't like being told what to do mh i think that it's just something somehow in my personality i mean i can remember as well i think i was age three or so and i had a let's say like a sickly cup you know like a baby drink there yep milk count of these baby cups and it's my parents were like hey you're getting pretty old for this now so we need to get rid of it and i was like no this is the this make i like this and said like right what if we bought the cup off you will offer you five dollars for the cup and then so i remember thinking just like wow it's guys are idiots this cup is worth why this is not worth five dollars like i'm i'm ripping them off and then so i was like i did the deal when i was like okay you can take the cup and then i'll take five dollars for it and so i felt i was ripping them off but then the next day i was like i wanna i want the cut back and i buy it back from you and they're like oh we already threw it away but i think like that kinda just shows that my parents kind of even from me age just got strategy there i didn't like being told what to do but if it was like a business fee or something then i'm like i i i was like no rash snow right in my thinking yeah nice so the first acquisition offer was five bucks for yeah yeah very good okay cool so you so you start bidding on a el atlanta what set what type of stuff were you doing then because you have you're not an engineer right you're yeah are you technical enough like do you code at all or yeah so like i'm not an engineer i'm just like a crappy engineer so like i can code some stuff but like if i was speaking to like a silicon valley engineer then they'd quickly find out that i'm fraud but i can do like designing websites adobe flash was big at the time and so i knew like a basic stuff on there very crappy designer to like to do like basic design stuff and then kind of like three d modeling and stuff like that like i'd take on any project and then i could like deliver it it wasn't gonna be great but like i could figure out some way to you know do a basic version of it and what what were you charging at the time because you said you were going you're trying to undercut even the sort of cheap indian labor so so what what what are we talking maybe like one hundred to two hundred and fifty dollars for a project which could take like multiple weeks okay you've done so many different business i know i know i personally know of five different things you've done what's your sort of formula for thinking of these like business ideas that you think might work yes kind of i mean on a smaller level like a hack level is kind of done exactly what you described i was talking with someone else before and they asked like oh what's your favorite of productivity hack and i think like i i myself do this as well but with kind of like over glorified productivity nowadays kind of have like a lot of productivity porn yeah like these articles saying like you know the best way to be productive is intermittent and fasting and use this to do this there and blah blah blah i think actually most of the successes that i've had have actually come from when i maybe being like procrastinate because i think you can have all the productivity tips in the world but then if you're being productive working on the wrong thing then you're kind of being a busy b but with your head down you know not looking up to see what's surrounds you so i think that kind of allocating time or at least just not being embarrassed about procrastinating and discovering new things on on the internet it's so much just unlimited things to discover online i think that is is how i discovered lots of opportunities for me it's whether it's just like reading different tech news so like a lot of a number of breakthroughs for me have come just by one reading tech news but then like two actually action on it so if i read didn't use and i see something interesting just reaching out to the company or building a relationship with the so so give me you an example get give give me an example of one that comes to mind where you were sort of strategically being you know giving yourself open space you're were just browsing around maybe on the internet and something caught your eye what what's what's an example as to said an intro that i'd like founded the bang and then left around when we'd raised the series b sort of time and i was planning to take some time off because i was pretty burned out to be honest so i was thinking to take a a further time off but actually just one or two weeks after i left i was just reading hacker can use and then not the number one or to or whatever article that you know that those often get a lot of attention but actually on the second page of hacking news i just saw this post and it was two guys just saying that they were at idea stage and just test testing out this idea that ended up with becoming ship s h y p and so i just reached out to them and i said like hey let me know if you just want any help with your pitch deck or whatever happy to be helpful and then ended up meeting them and we've gotten really well and it very quickly spied all within a matter of days that they were like oh you just wanna join at the c founder mh with hindsight probably would have been better as an adviser because they had a very strong relationship together they were living together and they've worked together so i was just kinda referred real but it was very interesting experience nevertheless and yeah that just came from pro i was just really i can use saw something that i an idea i thought was called and then found the guy's email address and just send him an email i'm amazed you went to page two i don't know anybody that goes to too of happened this screen customer yeah i mean i go to the show tab on hacker news where people are just showing a project they built i find that sure way more interesting than just kinda people posting news or blog articles because i wanna see what people are making and they're just posting demos basically which is really awesome to check out but that's kind of one of my secret secret spots to go for kind of interesting stuff i think over time i've figured out you know on twitter i got these lists that are like these are my gems hacker news the show tab and i have like four or five of these different little you know oh it's almost like deal flow but it's basically like just creativity flow where it's like i go here and i get inspired one at of every ten times i find something amazing and maybe nine at a ten times it's just junk but i need that versus just you know otherwise i'll just go on instagram and then that's sort of like junk food for my brain and so i have these like little pockets on the internet that like i get cool stuff do you have like do you pockets like that well i mean relevant to that is that dropbox launched in the hacker news show section through a house i think benny was a solo founder mh announced his dropbox idea in the hacker can news show show section you can actually still see the post online and this is about another bit to bear in mind is like if you look on that post now all of the comments are about how his idea is so terrible and it's definitely gonna fail people are like what why don't i need it i bought usb this shit target it yeah this drop off thing is going nowhere so if you'd had found that thing when he posted it and being contra and had your own an opinion instead of going on a long with the crown out how telling him how terrible was idea is you could have been his c founder right and you i like how you just reached out of just like hey let me know if you guys need help okay let know if i could be helpful with x because a lot of people i think want to reach out but they don't know what to say do you have you know sort of is that is that typically what you do just sort of say hey this is this looks cool how can i help well not how can i help because then you know that puts the onus on the other party to have to think for you and then they don't know your skill sets and stuff right so for me i was like hey if you need help with your pitch deck because i knew that they were kind of trying to raise funding and stuff and i so i my email was just like a few sentences like hey i started this fungal thing need help making that first million the direct our sponsor monday dot com is here with a weekly dose of the monday dot com motivation you know what you want so ditch the fluff date your goals straight up send emails make phone calls network being able to communicate your goal directly makes achieving it that much easier is it monday dot com backslash pod backslash million to get ten percent off again that's mud dot com backslash pod backslash million and see how their color coordinated dashboards will improve communication it'll help your team increase their workflow manage your workload and get you one step closer to get that money and had raised funding for that and so i was saying if you need help with your pitch deck then i have to be happy to be helpful with that and my intention was just to be helpful and i'd advised that number have a company at that point so i kind of thought maybe they might want needs to join as adviser but then that kind of resonates with them because i was saying this is my skill set i can help with this and then they were like yeah actually we do need help with right and so speaking of raising money you have kind of an insane story about how you raise your money for v like let talk us through that so you you start v when you were how old probably twenty twenty and so i'm guessing at twenty you didn't have some like super impressive track record that you could point to and say hey trust me with your money i i i've done this before right so you're basically yeah new to the to the scene you don't have ton of connections and you don't have a huge track record is that all correct yeah and especially in london like the ecosystem is a bit bit smaller than in silicon valley and so you have this idea and how did you go about getting money for this well in london we just tried a lot of different stuff where you pitched a different events and just met anyone we could one time pitched at an events and then at this guy came up afterwards and i was like yeah that was a really great pitch we'd would love to get coffee with you guys and then he gave us his card and it's like blah blah blah angel investor or all something and so with him for coffee once and then we're now with him a second time and then you know meetings kind dragging on and stuff and we're like so like how much money do you generally invest in companies when you're getting involved with them and he's like oh oh no no no no i i i don't invest money i i invest my time we're not so that is kind of friends in london one of the one we got one plate we got one vc fund who they're the two kind of associates liked what we were doing and there that was kind of ra like one actually one of them and then they took us into a partner meeting like or a meeting with one of the partners at like six pm or something and then after like ten minutes the guy was like okay i gotta a go now yeah the school comes by because basically we were like so terrible at pitching or ideal was so terrible he guys say walked out after like ten minutes and were you like devastated or were you fine yeah yeah oh yeah yeah we're pretty devastated we also had like and yeah had a lot of weird experiences and numbers the one of a guy he was just getting started investing i guess and he like rented two conference rooms at like a hotel or bar or something and he went to interview my c and i settled rooms and and we were like dude why why did you spend money right renting these conference rooms you need to impress us like what were you doing and why you went few nuts in separate rooms super weird and then he was like oh i wanna invest a million dollars and in the next day he's like oh watch actually i'll change my mind so all this like you know know was not very established the ecosystem in london at a time i think it's got better now but yeah were having a very tough time raising funding and then basically the big branch who came again just because i was actually procrastinating so there was stuff that i was supposed to be doing in my company but instead i was just slack off from reading tech and i saw this article and it said there's this new incubator or accelerator in in silicon valley called angel pad and they're giving every company that joins a hundred and twenty thousand dollars and then at the bottom it said like oh and they they have kindly reserved one spot or kept one spot for tech leaders so if you're interested just like apply here and i said to my c cofounder are i like hey look what we're doing with no money imagine what we could do of a hundred and twenty thousand dollars we should apply and he's like oh you know it's that's gonna waste of time is not worth it because they were saying they had like two thousand applications for this last spot or something and i was like come we might as well just give it a try like there's not much to lose and so he was like okay we just give it like three hours max and then they if not them want to move on i'm so basically just recorded a video or my phone of my top and eye just talking to the camera like masks senior background to a legend insert this last spot where i let you down this my phone number this my email address and your call and then basically again kind of from procrastinating i'd found this kind of loophole hack on linkedin and where i was able to create an advertisement and target it down to a specific person so linkedin has its kinda own ad system like google adwords but they i think it was a software engineer like i think some software engineer head then this as a bug that i found i could set the targeting so specifically say like job title and your pad job title ceo that there's kind of only one person who that adds would show it you know and how did you find that you said you just like you stumbled into this yeah so i was basically just linkedin had launched a new ad system and i think this is where the most opportunities are is when it's like a nascent platform if you're trying to find hacks on google adwords there's probably none left because you know people have like fifteen twenty years experience with google adwords words you know and they've got loads of engineers working on it linkedin this ad system was new they've just launched it and so i was just testing it out but oh let me create an ad and then it had this interesting feature where you created a an ad you said you're targeting like company apple jobs or whatever and it told you on the right how many people your advertisement would reach like a hundred thousand people or like fifty hundred but then this actually at a very low level so i just thought like what happens if i print that targeting one person so the number on the side at one and i tried to submit the ad and in as you might expect it said oh your ad is not targeting enough people so you need to target a wider audience because that makes sense yeah like why would minimum on add right yeah i mean why would they let you run have run an add talk that person but then again just because i was just curious i guess and i like just like trying something breaking it i was like okay well what happens if i expand the targeting enough to make that number now say two people so i tried again to submit an ad that targeted two people this time again it was like the this audience is to small like increase it and so i kept on doing that one after another and i'm basically found out that it would let me submit and add when i had an advertisements targeting only seven people i don't know why seven was the number again probably someone missed wrong perhaps i meant it's seven thousand people when they only press seven by mistake but yeah so armed me with that knowledge i could now create an ad targeting the one person who i did want and then i would put in six random who i don't care if that they saw the ad or maybe wouldn't even understand it even if they did see it so maybe like a job title like jan at like a chinese bang or something you know like in china so it doesn't matter if those six people saw it and what was sort so what did you do with this ad so i created an ad targeting on his friends and our connections on linkedin so basically again i've seen this tech earlier in the day only spent like three hours doing this quit and then i targeting all these connections saying and i also found another hack on linkedin ad which was basically at the time because it was new all of their ads were manually reviewed like they didn't have like all alternative reviews and but the thing is that you could update the ad after it was approved so basically i would create like an innocent looking at just targeting whatever and then i changed it after they approved it because i otherwise they would have approved it so basically the anne said it had a picture of the founder of angel pads face and it said do you know tomas masks we've got an urgent message we need to get to him click here and so you click it on it took up to a one page landing page and it's basically got the video again us was talking to the camera saying oh we researched you we really want this last spot and i put my phone number and email address and i put a balance just saying quickly to email this to thomas us and in england's different time zone to america obviously basically just went to sleep didn't really expect anything to come from it just gave it a bet shot and then was the next day i can't forgotten about it's business and then the next day i just came into the office and i had an email just a one line email from thomas and it it just said like i'm seeing your ad what's your phone number left phone call and then so if phoned me and is like hey is that jack and i'm like yeah and he's like i'm seeing the ad we can chat but first of all take it down now he's like everyone's calling me about these ads he told a later on that he'd been on a flight from new york san francisco got off the plane he had like close to twenty emails from people i'm saying like pay and you seen this add add people these young kids they like really wanna speak to that's so so you didn't so so this this is you know lesson number fifty two of my first millionth podcast which is don't just put your resume on the desk that's not enough you didn't just apply to angel pad just like the other two thousand companies you applied and then you spent a few hours kinda messing around trying to get this guy's attention trying to stand out yeah and in a way that i feel like literally only you would have done you target the ad you figure out that you can target to seven people you put his face in it and it says you know do you know this person if so click this thing and and you got his attention he might have was he annoyed or was he like was he impressed or annoyed or a mix of both i think the mix of both yeah he was like take down this caused no trouble but yeah you guys are like hustling to you really want this and you obviously as you said like going putting in work and completely outside the box yeah when i when i moved to silicon valley i was in australia at the so sort of like you on the outside of the bubble and i wanted to work at this place called monkey inferno which was michael birch is incubator i was like wow this guy's like billionaire he's built and sold multiple companies and he's got this amazing place where he looks like he just bought a building decked out and he's it's an ideal lab where you know sort of like any idea you want you can come and work on it here so thought that was amazing but i looked at the job description and it said like you you were hiring a product manager i didn't even know what that was and it said you know you need seven years of product management experience i didn't even have seven minutes of product management experience but i applied and then i was like okay there's no way they're gonna just like pick me out of the bunch so then i made a custom website about you know why i'm the guy for the role i wrote a letter to him and then even that got me a meeting and then then they kinda blew me off and i started just doing the job even though they weren't asking me to so i would look at all the products they built and i would send them like a powerpoint saying hey here's how i think this product could be improved and i just start started doing the job and that was the only i only was applying to one job i didn't like yeah i didn't identify any of jobs i was like i'm gonna get this job and i'm gonna go further than anyone else and it sounds like that's pretty much the principal you were using to get into angel pad sure yeah i mean i've never even heard of y comb until we didn't even blind to that like we didn't applying to anything else and so you did you end up getting did you end getting the the funding from them yeah so basically i said like had seen the tech runner post on a thursday had to call with him on the friday the next day and then over the course of the next week we had maybe like one or two more skype calls at the time it was only my c cofounder and i and we had two or three interns in the office and then so a week after the initial call he said like okay guys i i made my final decision oh and by the way like when we've done the other calls we told every other company an angel pad at that point were amazing software engineers most of them were from google one guy had written youtube's api these other the two where i had phd and video encoding and so we knew that was a weakness that we didn't fit in at all but what we told mars is we said like hey look you've got eleven other companies all like heavy software engineering backgrounds and you've got one last spot and we were like why didn't you just choose us as just like a wild card like it could be an epic failure or it could be a success so now some is our page is like we know where they don't fit in but at least we could be a welcome so you turn inside weakness into us a strength based exactly yeah we were like your other things that we were like your other companies they're all really safe bets at one you to have have one wild and so a week after he was like i to make my decision who's got the final spot let's have a final skype video call and we were like oh man come to a phone call they got intense here do you have to reject us on video and i was like yeah we've got that and so we're on the call and he's like i've made banks decision i'm i'm gonna take a risk and go for a wildcard card like you got the last spot and we're like hi five being around on the office and he's like but if we do this then i'm invested in like foreign companies before and then after program they just like move back to home country and our investors don't like that so if you're gonna get the last spot then you have to move to america permanently and my cofounder and i we didn't even need to look at each other we've not can discuss that that point we were just like yeah yeah be no problem that's fine and he's like okay then well the programs are on monday so just book the first line out here that you can and so like two days later i think we just got on the plane to san francisco amazing and that's the company that turned into v which is the yeah sort of monster like how many people work there now over two hundred i think yeah and so what was the pitch at the time because we haven't really been talking about the idea i'm you know i'm more interested in your sort of clever hacks in your hustle of how you get what you want i think that is really the more interesting piece to me at least but like what was the idea was the idea at the time we're gonna be a mobile ad network or was it the the idea was terrible it would never have actually worked surprised that we actually and i said we got him not because of the idea or our backgrounds it was just because of our hustling the idea was terrible it was an app store where a cross platform app store where every app would have a video shoving you how the app works so it was like an android and iphone and pc app store we never never actually worked but basically when we got to angel hand he gave some advice which really was very compelling and he basically said i he said this all the teams but we kinda took it on the he said like by i want you to call like twenty prospective customers of yours and don't pitch them your current business idea instead talk to them and ask what is their biggest problem in their current like day to day role not in their life and so we are spoke to different app developers went app developer to meet us and stuff and we asked them what's your biggest challenge and they told us we're app developers we know how to build an app but then we don't know how to do the marketing or how to get users for it and basically how end have works is they have a demo day so the the whole program lasts was twelve weeks and at the end you have a demo day where you pitch to investors to a presentation and so basically there was actually only two weeks left and we knew what we needed to do we needed to come up with a new business idea we needed to recruit a cto because neither of us could code and you kind of need a cto type person to waste funding and we needed to raise at least some funding otherwise we would have had to go back to england because we were only there on a tourist theater anyway and so two roughly two weeks before the demo day what we did is we just came up with like six different business ideas related to this idea of how how can app developers get users and we we spent like half an hour inch like creating super crappy landing page for each one and basically we just spent a day trying to actually sell each idea so the first idea we're like oh we can help you get this to done to different blogs and get to like cover your app and then we're were like normally this is gonna be two hundred dollars but we'll give it to you for like twenty dollars this thursday now with loads different developers and stuff everyone was like wow this idea is amazing yeah go sign up when get home we didn't get single sale like people just were telling us it's a great idea to get us to go away right and so we tried a different idea each day and then the final day we actually came up with the idea i think i'm not sure for certain but i think that how we came up with idea for bang is that we had been trying to record a meeting that we had with one of our like like with thomas tomorrow that you mentioned had where he was getting advice and we were like is company people would call this meeting we opened the app and in this like crazy like the rise and or coke like video ads had started playing will really loudly that we can mute and it was like really annoying but then we thought like oh wait a minute instead of advertising like coke or something why don't we have a video advertising now a different game and so we kind of again we haven't we haven't we're in a single line of code with n engineers but we spoke to that developers we're like by what if you could have like a movie trailer for your ram like fifteen seconds and then when another press when a gamer is playing a different mobile game they could see a trailer for your ram and then people were we knew would hit the right idea at that point because people were basically are like oh wow i need this so badly like i wanna be your first customer like they knew haven't launched yet but they were like i wanna be first in line when it launches like put me down for like five thousand dollars ten hundred dollars like people were throwing money at us even though we hadn't dollar a product and that's when we knew we got the buying idea and so i mean is that like is that real i meaning that people were were that excited i mean why were they so some like differently excited about that and the other one and i guess like how do you know or how did they know that yeah this is gonna get me customers or what was the difference i guess well the first one is not really getting any like helping them get onto a blog or something that's a nice to have so one of investor advice that also while we the idea that also race and they did he said don't create a business where you're curing your customer's itch like that if you don't exist they're like oh worse just an itch it doesn't matter like your your that your antidote my itch is nice but you know whatever he's like creates something where it cures your customer's cancer and so for them getting onto a blog or reviews or something that's not really users having like a an ad network with video that would drive the natural users and i think they got the idea more because we compared it to the the current industry increment at that time the only real option for mobile games was banner ads and so we said like banner sucks right like they don't get what your game does it's a tiny banner the users click on it by mistake they didn't even mean to click it and they don't even know what your app does if you're gonna have a fifteen second video it's like a movie tray like they're gonna see what you're app does and so that will be a much better way to get users you know and five thousand dollars also even though it's spraying money at us it's not that much money they basically were willing to try anything that could potentially give them users they weren't committing a million dollars they were saying like yeah we'll we'll try this out when it launches we'll we'll for sure give you like five thousand dollar test budget so you know it wasn't a massive hurdle but what we were selling at that point was users they didn't a nice to have was blogs so they were already advertising it was but it was crappy banner ads and they were thinking oh this like we can't show them how fun our game is to this little banner and what you guys brought to the market was the video at yeah that they can make a little you know juicy trailer and they were like okay yeah i believe more people will come to us then we're currently getting if we do the video yeah the other bit to bear in mind as well as thomas the angel of her guy actually had worked at google for many years and so we were clint all these different ideas so we met him during pattern and again we were super lame and so just i remember drawing on the white model like i i've done some brief reading online i think this is how mobile advertising works like it's like you have an advertising but basically he he was also this was like a track investor pitch so i think he was kind of in the acting mode it we they didn't feel guilty about afterwards but basically there was another investor sitting as well basically he stood up during the pitch and he's like banged on the table when he's like you guys don't will anything about advertising there's people with like twenty years experience at google working on this and you just looked this up on the internet like five minutes ago and you think you can come up with better advertising company you will never raise a single dollar of funding and so we kept grinding about that but the reason they worked is it was actually no advantage that we didn't know anything at all about advertising because what it meant is that we looked at things just through the lens of the customer needs so at the time the industry standard for mobile advertising was it was charged on a cpm basis cost per meal and that means cost per thousand people that view out and a per time whether that's a banner or a video so it was like let's say like two dollars per thousand people that see you end and we were thinking we just thought about this through the lens of instead of thinking like oh this is just how everyone in the industry does it this is the rule so i guess we should follow it we fought back from the needs of our customer the app developer and we just thought like wait a minute they don't care how many people see the video they just want users and so it was a risk like could have totally not worked but we said i instead of charging cpm we'll just charge you you just pay us for each user that we get you mh so just pay us like two dollars for every user we get you it doesn't matter if we get you a user after they see your video once or like a hundred thousand times we we're just trying to charge you based on how many users we get you and then that again was a massive differentiator for us and it became because we were na and you know if we had more experience where we you could've have just said no this you know this rules i guess yeah i love it everyone does it this way so because it's it's so simple and it's it seems obvious in hindsight but for sure i mean that's the way the industry worked that's the acronym everybody knows cpm and so if you had come at it from that advertising background you would have taken that for granted and just continue going as is and so how did you you left the company at a certain point was that yes you know was it you know founder retention was it you were tired of it you invested all your stock what was the reason you left lots of different reasons i think like as humans we like to have very simple and clean explanation or story to lots of stuff right but like there's lots of dynamics going there on in a company i think that for me it was like various spins one is that after putting in all of this effort getting to angel pads and during the program like basically sleeping in the office and going all in and not having any weekends or holiday i was very burned out at the end and i think not you know blows was very unhealthy and not in a good frame of mind really because i just gone haul in on my company and then the important thing as a company scales and you get more and more people is the founders also need to scale as well so when there's two of you you need to do everything you need to be the company jan the company at canton the company office manager everything so throughout the time of the company i was doing everything like mark in product or risk and then as the company scales you kind of need to fire yourself from those responsibilities and hire people to take them over from you and you become very focused on what you're good at the the conventional wisdom that's given lot by investors and and stuff like that they give they say the certain rules like silicon valley rules they say like oh you should never invest in like family teams you should never invest in husband and white teams you should never have one founder be ceo and one be president because then there's not clear line of controls it got confused and so i kind of didn't really take my own advice about breaking the rules i kind of just accepted these silicon compelling norms everyone was telling me it was only after i left the company that when i researched at the time there was only about twenty unicorns so companies work over billion now was loads when i looked at them pretty much every single one broke one of those rules event bright is was as a husband and wife team stripe they are brothers lift one of the c cofounder as ceo the one is president so kind of there is no rules silicon of valley but at the time i kind of went along with all different investments were telling me gotcha okay that makes sense i i appreciate this sort of the nuance and so so when you left you know at one point you you know the company doing really well but you personally sold a little bit of the stock i explain to people who have never been in that position where you have this paper net worth that's you know you've it's worth something but the company is not liquids yet and so how did you think about that now how did you how do you actually do that and to to walk us through how that works how do you do how do you sell secondary stock yeah so our i mean investors often don't want when you're still working at a company they probably don't want you selling stock that much it's become a bit more normal but they don't want to do it that much because they want you to be incentivized and like home to get an exit so that they can make money as well you know if you sold a load of your stock then you're probably just gonna be more like oh or just not in any rush to sell but they they want you to be hungry but because i'd left then the company was bit more amenable to it and so you know i could do with having a bit of cash to so i on a day to day basis so my c founder who was still there just said like oh hey well there's these other investors who want to invest in the company but we don't really want to raise investment right now would you be interested in selling a small amount of your stock to them and then so i said like okay yeah that sounds like a good arrangement and then the company was all on board with it because it was only a small amount and it wasn't gonna be more dilution for everybody and so basically just chatted with these guys and it was fairly simple that i just sold a small amount that we kinda just went back on forwards agreed rough valuation and then like just sold a small amount that kind of reasonable valuation for both parties gotcha and so how did you decide you know how much you wanted to sell did you wanna do investing and you create other businesses or or invest in real estate or something like that like how did you what do you do how did you think about the money there i was just thinking i didn't i didn't want to take money to do investing because i also was confident that the company valuation was gonna keep going up so i kinda just fall i what's the minimum amount that i'm gonna feel comfortable the next few years at least just not have to worry about how i'm gonna pay my rent and stuff and not have to be forced to try and get a salary somewhere so i kinda just thought blank let's say that the average sort of valley salary is like i know eighty a hundred thousand dollars or something i just bought like i was a few years of that kind of salary range that would give me some money to live but i'm not selling i'm i'm still keeping you know like ninety five plus a percent of my stock gotcha okay and you you you you wanted to continue to ride that upside so you found the yeah balance that worked for you yeah love it cool and the last question i have for you is again i think you are one of the most clever and sort of outside the box thinkers and it's funny funny having you out a podcast and in general you do a great job of meeting a lot of people i feel like you meet a lot of entrepreneurs either through the internet or in person but you're actually kind of a introverted guy you're not the sort of loudest guy in the room and so i was i you know i wanted to have you on so that you could tell your story but also i think a lot of people can learn from you the one thing i wanted to know is if you were twenty years old again today and you take out v and you know you don't have that stock that's gonna be worth all this money and you're were trying to make it again you're were trying to do something new what would you what where would you gravitate towards you know if it's a per specific project that's great but even if it's just a certain space that you're interested in what would you do if you're were twenty years old again today i would be again like reading tech news like tech ranch or hacker news or things like this and then seeing what new platforms are launching so let's say like you had your blog platform right yep even after bundle one bit i did is i saw product hunt it launched and i think under two hundred views sign and i was like oh this just seems pretty interesting and then i just started using it every single day i just would post new product to it every single day so you know a few minutes of work each day and then quickly i've just became the number one user on the site and they had like a ranking board and then product tank just got more and more popular and then nowadays it's like a very established thing but i had just started very early and you're only allowed to post one product per day so kind of i had a head start that nobody else could catch me up with as long as i consistent and posted each day and so i just posted each day and i made a bit more scalable again i'm a crappy software engineer if i was doing this again i would just find some offer at work for could probably get it down for like ten dollars or something i basically did this myself but i could apply them for ten dollars i created just script to automatically schedule a post to product time each day at exactly midnight that's when the readable resets and then basically i just had a massive list of products and so i didn't have to do any work it were just post to product in each day and i'm i'm was the number on user and so nobody else could catch me and then because there's a leader i'm kind of getting free advertising if you like on the homepage and then a number of people kind of found me on there and we're reaching out sequoia is pretty much like one of the best known funds in silicon valley one of the partners from sequoia just reached out to me and asked like hey can we get lunch just because i i i think he just found it interesting like why is this guy so prominent on there and i did the same thing with so product tank has become popular i also did it with some other platforms one was called whale it was that a question and answer site that one ended up dying but you know if you place enough bets in different places then one of them might take off and because you're one of the over early users you know the early users of youtube nowadays are like hundreds of millionaires right so that's probably what i do is like doesn't cost any money at tool to become a power user on a platform that is new and so you have a good opportunity of becoming a number one user and then when you've got that you can leverage that you get connections because i was on product company many startups reach out to me all the time like pitching me ask can help me go on to product time and then i could have like asked them or transition back to be an adviser that at one of the companies or if they've seemed the interesting try and be a code founder the things happened a shit i described so something like that jack this is why you would win the game show you you're you are quick to sort of find the exploits the platforms that are fast in new and fast fast growing and you you jump on i like that e strategy and it reminds me of a a a framework that i have which is you don't always have to so some people look for windows and some people look for doors this is what i like say a window is something where you you can see through it you know exactly what's on the other side and you can decide is this worth my time or not and it's good to look through windows right you wanna look at opportunities to say is this gonna be worth it or not but sometimes you gotta open doors and you don't know what's behind the door but as long as you're reasonably confident that this door leads to four more doors it's worth going through and so i think there's a lot of people out there who look for windows and anytime they see a door they get a little bit scared they don't wanna open it and it's advantageous to be a door opener and just keep opening one door that opens four more and it sounds like you know what you do with product on is exactly that yeah makes sense hey so listen man we're gonna we're gonna hop off but i wanted to give you a chance to give people away to follow you to contact you to check out some new stuff you're working on this is your opportunity to kinda shout out how should the people who are listening to this how should they you know get more jack smith in their life which we all want yeah my website is just jack smith dot eu i've got a blog i haven't posted it in a while but maybe if more people reach out to me by that then i can start posting more i guess but that's probably the best way to find me and then then links off my twitter over stuff like that from there awesome great jack it's good talking to you and i'll see you soon when you're back from new york yeah after the summer yeah absolutely thanks for having me on and best of luck on the forward see comes on the podcast now