Greatest Hits #4 - How To Sell Your Company for $750M - Meet Vungle's Jack Smith

this episode is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network but what is the hubspot podcast network that's right it's a new thing by hubspot they started with our podcast and now they're branching into more and more podcast with experts in different business areas so you might have a podcast about marketing or sales or operations or customer service and we're gonna go over through the different podcast podcasts on this network some are more entertaining some are more information informational some are good mix of both that's what we try to do here and hubspot goal here is to have on demand mentors so if you're an entrepreneur your a startup you're scaling up you're gonna be able to hear practical tips and inspirational stories by listening to the different podcast on their network which by the way i think this is a smart idea too many brands just try to sell you their thing hubspot they i love their approach here they're like let's put out great valuable free content and help more companies succeed and the more companies that we help succeed the more will eventually come back to us sort of like a good karma kind of thing so listen and learn and grow with hubspot podcast network hubspot dot com slash podcast network alright we have another greatest hits episode this one is with one of my closest friends jack smith sean interviewed jack about a year and a half two years ago and it's a great episode people still write to me about this episode and jack is a really interesting person because he thinks differently than anyone i've ever met so for those of you who don't know and it's probably most of you jack smith is pretty low key you're not gonna hear a lot from him because he doesn't talk too much and he likes us kinda stay under the radar on social media but jack when he was only about twenty two starting this company that he sold when he was around thirty maybe twenty nine for around eight hundred million dollars in cash and he only worked on it for about three years before leaving to pursue some other stuff but it worked out wonderfully and he's done something a bunch of big big stuff and he's done a ton of other big things and so it's really interesting to hear what he has to say but more than what he has to say i want you to listen to how jack thinks so what i love about jack is that basically when i think of ideas i will think of a a company idea and i'll think well if i do this then it might not work because of x y and z but that's not really how jack thinks you see when when he thinks about stuff he thinks well this actually could work for this reason this reason and this reason and he doesn't ever let any type of outside perspective ruin his ideas or prevent him from thinking that it can work so when i think of ideas maybe when you think of ideas if you think well this person tried it and it failed because of blank or i can't do that because i don't know the right people or i can't do that because it's never been done before if you spend enough time around jack and this podcast is about fifty minutes long so hopefully it's enough time for you to kinda absorb this you'll notice that he thinks differently than anyone and i think that there's a lot that you can learn from this and a lot that you can that can shape the way that you think because i listen to this podcast every couple months to kinda reflect him and change how i think and i also call him on a weekly basis so i can kinda absorb his way of thinking and it's really refreshing so listen to this a few of my favorite parts are when jack first moved to america he's from england when he moved to america he put ads on linkedin darren in order to meet his first investor he actually raised a little over a million dollars with just a death because he was really good at explaining his idea so listen to that and just get a sense of his attitude you know he has very little ego and it's just it's very refreshing so check it out this is a really good interview with jack smith who started bun sold it for around eight hundred million dollars he also helped start this company called ship and he's done a lot of interesting stuff check it out i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a road travel never looking back basically he stood up during the pitch and he's like banged on the table and he's like you guys don't want 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 company 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 v for an undisclosed sum that is hot rumored to be solar and fifty million dollars in cash okay and is it rolling guys okay 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 you like experiment some of new kinda clever thing you're i i would call you sort of you're the most clever guy i know in silicon valley like i i asked some friends of it day i saying you know if we had to nominate one of us to go on a game show 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 if we clever solve puzzles whatever and you know what i feel like you would be my pick because you are you are very clever and it seems like whatever system gets put in front of you you you end up cracking the code and is that fair or 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 final of me like was a like i do think about like game shows and stuff as well like how could you reverse engineer the rules to them typing think yeah exactly so we're gonna talk about a couple of the 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 has 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 six s 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 network are 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 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 all 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 in and was that even a 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 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 nerve 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 been playing in the local park and then i've found that there was this kind of seed on this tree by my house that you kind of open 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 keep 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 get a little to and then i think i sold each one for twenty five cents and yeah got quite a lot like people from people's older siblings and stuff were coming buy them for the playground and stuff so that's probably the first old memory i can think called okay well what did you have a name for them or or were you just calling ritchie boss i yeah i just brand it as like she on to 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 kind context how old are you now i'm thirty thirty and how old do you look probably like thirty that i was trying to imagine you at eight and i was like it's not actually that big of a jump from how you how i see you today because you gotta you sort of the baby faced assassin so so what did you try what you try next well we're all or 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 about 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 if 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've gotta do it like dishes and like tidy up and etcetera etcetera and then so i said like okay well why don't you use i don't wanna do that stuff so just stop giving me an allowance and i'll just figure out how to make some money myself so i was more going the freedom than the money right and then so basically at the nowadays they're they're very popular at the time it was slightly small about these websites like at work which it just ipo a couple of months ago like at work or go 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 i basically i bid 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 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 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 think i was age three or so and i had a let's say like a sip cup you know like a baby drink there yep milk out of these that comes 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 this has meant it i like this and they're like right what if we bought the cup off you we'll offer you five dollars for the cup and then so i remember thinking just like wow he's guys say 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 and i was like okay you can take the cup and and i'll take five dollars for it and so i felt like i was ripping them off but then the next day i was like she i wanna i want the cut back and i buy it back from you and they're like oh we already throw away but i think like that kinda it just shows that my parents kind of even for me now and i just got the strategy that i didn't like being told what to do but if it it was like a business fee or something then i'm like i i i was like more rational right am my thinking yeah nice so so the first acquisition offer was five bucks but yeah very good okay cool so you so you start bidding on a el atlanta so what's what that what type of stuff are 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 tow some stuff but like if i was speaking to like a silicon valley engineer then they'd quickly find out that time 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 so like could 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 version of 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 productivity hack and i think like i i myself do this as well but with kind of like over glorified productivity nowadays mh kind of have like a lot of product fifty porn yeah like these articles saying like you know the best way to be productive is intermittent and fasting and and use this to do this there and 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 is 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 in news and i see something interesting just reaching out to the company or building a relationship with the so so give me an example get 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 an example as you send an intro that had like founded it bang and then left around when we'd raised the series be 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 news and then not the number one or two or whatever article that you know that those often get a lot of attention but actually on the second page of aca i just saw this post and there was two guys just saying that they were at idea stage and just test testing out this idea that ended up the 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 hold you just wanna join at a c founder 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 kinda referred wheel but it was interesting experience nevertheless and yeah that just came from procrastinating i was just really had can use saw something that i an idea i thought was called and then found into 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 two of hacker news stream custom 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 kind of 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 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 not at of 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 from do you have like do you have pockets like that well i mean relevant to that is that dropbox launched in the hacker news show section through a house i think i think was a solo founder announced his dropbox idea in the hacker can news show show section you can actually still see the post online and this is where 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 why don't i need i've got usb stick this a shit i idea yeah this dropbox thing is going nowhere so if you'd had found that thing when he posted it and being contra terrarium and had your own opinion instead of going on one with the crown order 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 me 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 you 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 paycheck because i knew that they would 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 alright i wanna take a second to talk about hubspot crm platform i know it's all the rage nowadays they have a bunch of features that make it easy for you to adopt this thing the important part is that hubspot crm platform is easy to adopt nobody wants something that's complicated and cumbersome so what makes it easy they have a contact timeline they have a mobile app the contact timeline it's what gives you the historical context you need to get your work done with customers it's a single source of truth where you can see oh the customer joined here then we sent them this then they scheduled a meeting right do you wanna have all that in one central timeline and then they have the mobile app and that gives you access your crm whenever you need it maybe you're on your yacht maybe you're on a roller coaster you wanna check your crm you can access the crm wherever you are whenever you want because it's all in your mobile app it's on your phone i mean i don't even own a laptop i only use my phone so i need something like this you know you don't have to spend a bunch of time training your team to do this you can make sure all the contact info goes into one system your team is so efficient it's like those bobs led teams at the olympics where they're all running in unison and then they all hop in at the right time that's what your team's gonna look like with the hubspot crm this also leads to better adoption better data richer insights it's a flywheel it's easier to use which means more people use it and when they use it there's better data in it which makes it easier for you to actually have business impact so that's how the crm works and best of all hubspot has flexible pricing and access to community a supportive community for all startups ups scale ups and beyond alright learn how you can scale your company without scaling complexity at hubspot dot com again that's hubspot dot com scatter company don't scale complexity and had raised funding for that and so i was saying if you need help with your pitch deck then i tap be happy to be helpful with that and my intention was just to be helpful and i'd advised and i a have a companies at point so i can't of thought maybe they my wife 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 that 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 a bit smaller than 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 and events and then at this guy came up afterwards 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 within them a second time and then you know meets gonna dragging on and stuff and we're like so like how much money do 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 in manage i i invest my time so that was kind of our experience in london one of the one we got one way we got one vc fund who they're the two kind of associates liked what we were doing there there was kind of ra like one actually one of them and then they took us into a partner meeting like or well a meeting with one of the partners at at like six pm or something and then after like ten minutes the guy was like okay i gotta go now yeah this school thanks by because basically we were like so terrible at pitching or ideal so terrible you guys say walked out after like ten minutes and were you like devastated or were you yeah yeah oh yeah yeah we're pretty devastated we also had like and yeah had he lot of weird experiences and then honest one of 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 founder and i in separate rooms and and we were like dude wait why don't you spend money right renting these conference rooms you need to impress us like what were doing and why went giving 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 actually i'll change for my mind so all this like you know there was not very established ecosystem in london at a time i think it's got better now but yeah we were having a very tough time raising funding and then basically the big brand 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 crimes readers so if you're interested just like apply here and i said to my c cofounder are like hey look what we're doing with no money imagine what we could do with a hundred and twenty thousand dollars we should apply and he's like you know it's that's gonna waste of time it's 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 tie like there's not much to lose and so he was like okay just give it like three hours max and then they ethanol them just move on i'm so basically just recorded a video or my phone of my top founder and i just talking into to the camera like tomorrow senior background to a legend reserve this last bottle where i let you down it's my phone number this my email address and a called and then basically again kind of from procrastinating i'd found this kind of loophole hack on linkedin and i was able to create an advertisement and target it down to a specific person so linkedin has this kinda own ad system like google adwords but they i think it was a software engineer like i think some software engineer head then it as a bug that i found i could set the targeting so specifically say like job title and your ad job title ceo that there's kind of only one person who that ads would show it you know and when 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 like let me create an ad and then it had this interesting feature where you created an ad and you said you're targeting like company apple job clubs or whatever and it told you on the right how many people your advertisement would reach so 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 you yeah like why minimum on an add right yeah i mean why would they let you run run an add talk to the person but then again just because i was just curious i guess and i like just doing trying stuff 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 and add that targeted two people this time again it was like the this audience is to sold 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 an add when i had an advertisements targeting only seven people i don't know why seven was the number again probably someone pushed wrong the is seven thousand people when they only press seven by mistake but yeah so armed 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 will sort so what you do with this ad so i created an ad can't of 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 creating and targeting all these connections saying and i also found a another hack on linkedin ads 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 talking whatever and then i change it after they approved it because i otherwise they would have approved it so basically the anne said had a picture of the founder of angel pads face and it said do you tomas mars we've got an urgent message we need to get to him click here and so you click it on it took to a one page landing page and it's basically got the video again i was talking to the camera saying oh we researched you really want this last spot and then i put my phone number and email i guess and i put a button just saying quickly to email this thomas us and in england 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 best shot and then it was the next day i kinda figure forgot about experience 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 the call and then so you phoned me and is like hey is that jack and i'm like yeah and he's like well i'm seeing the ad we can chat but first of all take it down now is like everyone's calling me about these ads he told us late from that he'd been on a flight from new york and francisco got off the plane he had like counsel twenty emails from people i'm saying like pay let you seen this allen ad people these young kids that i really wanna speak to that's so so you didn't 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 mh 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 and you might have was he annoyed or was he like was he impressed or annoyed or a mix of both i think the bits of both yeah he was like take down this causing no trouble but yeah you guys are like hustling that you really want this and you obviously as you said like going putting in work and thinking outside the box yeah when i when i moved to silicon valley i was in australia at the time so was sort of like you on the outside of the bubble and i wanted to work at this place called monkey inferno which was my michael birch is incubator i was wow this guy's is like a 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 idea ideal lab where you know sort of like any idea you want you can come and work on it here so i 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 they got me a meeting and 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 i only was applying to one job i didn't like yeah i didn't identify the 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 principle you were using to get to angela angel at sure yeah i mean i've never even heard of y comb until we didn't even play 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 crunch post on a thursday had the 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 had at that point were amazing software engineers most of them were from google one guy had written youtube's api these other the two were i had phd in video coding 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 don't you just choose us as just like a wild card like it could be an epic failure or it could must success so now our here to like we know don't fit in but at least we can be a wildcard card 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 have like one wild and so are week after he was like i to made my decision who's got the final spot let's have a final skype video call and we were like oh man copy to your phone call they will got our interns here or do you have to reject us on the video and i was like yeah we've got it and so with on the call ending he's like i've made my decision and 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 in 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 the 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 c cofounder and i we didn't even need to look at each other we've not discussed at point we were just like yeah yeah no problem that's fine and he's like okay then well the program 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 to i think yeah and so what was the pitch at the time because we haven't really even been talking about the idea i'm 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 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 across platform app store where every app would have a video showing you how the app works so it was like an android and iphone and pc app store and were never never actually worked but basically when we got to angel japan 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 he said like i 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 weren't app developer to meet tax and stuff and we asked what's your biggest challenge and they told us oh we're app developers we know how to build in it but then we don't know how to do the marketing or how to get users for it and basically how have works is they have a demo day so the the whole program mask is twelve weeks and at the end you have a demo day where you pitched to investors to the 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 ne 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 user there anyway and so two like 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 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 were like oh we can help you get this to done to different blogs and getting to like cover your app and we 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 of different and stuff everyone was like wow this idea is amazing yeah like i'll sign up when get home we didn't get single sale like people just were telling us that 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 short person but i think that how we came out with the 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 chief mentioned had where he was getting advice and we were like is exactly okay if we will call this meeting we opened the app and in this like crazy like the rise and or coke like video ads had started playing really loudly or we couldn't mute and it was like really annoying and but then we thought like oh wait a minute instead of advertising like coke or something why don't we have the video advertising another a different game and so we kind of again we haven't we haven't we're in a single line of code with new directors engineers but we spoke to that developers and we're like by what if you could have like a movie trailer for your ramp like fifteen seconds and then when pass when a gamer is playing a different mobile game they could see a trailer for your ramp and then people we knew would hit the right idea at that point because people were basically like oh wow i need this so badly like i wanna be your first customer like then knew hadn't launched yet but they were like i wanna be first in line when it launches like put me down to like five thousand dollars ten thousand dollars like people were throwing money at us even though we hadn't got a product it's that's when we knew we got the buying idea and so i mean is that like is that real a meaning that people were were that excited 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 day the advice that also while we put up 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 well it's just an itch it doesn't matter like your you're 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 on a blog or reviews or something that's not really users having like 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 at that time the only real option for mobile games was banner ads and so we said like you're 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 trailer like they're gonna see what your 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 throwing 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 well 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 this like we can't show them how fun our game is this little banner and what you guys brought to the market was the video at yeah so that they can make a little you know a 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 yeah other bit to bear in mind as well as thomas the age of her guy actually had worked at google for many years and so we clear all these different ideas and so we met him during pattern and again we were super lame and so just i remember drawing on the whiteboard 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 practice investor pitch so i think he was kind of in the acting mode it we made him feel guilty about afterwards but basically there was another investor thing as well basically he stood up during the pitch and he's like banged on the table and he's like you guys don't want nfl 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 you think you can come up with better advertising company you will never raise a single dollar of funding as so we reschedule providing about that but the reason they work 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 an advertisement 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 role so i guess we should follow it we fall back from the needs of our customer the app developer and we just bought like wait a minute they don't care how many people see the video they just won users and so it was a risk like could have totally not worked but we said alright 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 were just trying 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 naive and you know if we had more experience we could've have just said no this you know this 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 the 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 tension was it you were tired of it you invested all your stock what was the reason you left on lots of different reasons i think like as humans we like to have very simple and clean explanation of story and lots of stuff right but like there's lots of dynamics going here on in a company i think that for me it was like various things one is that after putting in all of this effort getting to your pads and then 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 that was very unhealthy and not in a good frame of mind really because i get gone haul in on my company and then the important thing as a company scales and you get more 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 accountant the company office manager everything so throughout the time of the company i was doing everything like marketing 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 a lot by investors and and stuff like that they give up 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 who get confused and so i kind of didn't really take my own advice about breaking rules i kind of just accepted these silicon valley 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 say companies work over a billion now there's loads when i looked at them pretty much every single one broke one of those rules event b know was as a husband and wife team stripe they are brothers lift one of the c cofounder as as ceo the one is president so kind of there is no rules silicon of barrel but at the time i kind of went along with want different investors for telling me gotcha okay it 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 not liquids yet and so how did you think about that and how did you how do you actually do that and to to walk us through how that works how do you do how do sell secondary stock yeah so 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 wants to do it that much because they want you to be incentivized and like hungry to get an exit so that 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 ours just not in any rush to sell but they they want you to be hungry but because i'd had 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 cofounder 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 forth agreed rough valuation and then like just sold a small amount 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 know 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 did i didn't want to take money to do thing 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 barely salary was like i know eighty a hundred thousand dollars or something i just thought it 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 percent of my stock gotcha okay and you you you wanted to continue to ride that upside so you found that yeah balance 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 on 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 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 were trying to make it again you 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 twenty years old again today i would be again like reading tech news like tech ranch or hacker and 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 bang one bit did idea is i saw product hunt it launched had i think under two hundred views or sign and i was like oh this just seems pretty instinct 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 hunt 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 consistently 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 could probably get it down for like ten dollars or something i basically did this myself but i could hired something ten dollars i created just script to automatically schedule a post 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 do any work it were just post product finish inch day i'm i was the number on user and so nobody else could catch me and then because there's a leader old 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 like 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 wanna be 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 that's cost any money at all 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 a product company many startups reach out to me all the time you're pitching me else you can help me go onto 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 seemed interesting try and be a code founder the same as happened with share i described so something like that mh jack this is why you would win the game show you you you are quick to sort of find the exploits the platforms that are fast you new and fast fast growing and you you jump on i like that very good strategy and it it reminds me of 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 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 exactly hey so listen and we're gonna we're gonna hop up 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 jackson in their life which we all want yeah my website is just jack smith dot au u i've got blog up i haven't posted it in a while but maybe if more people reach out to me via that and then i can start posting more i guess but that's probably the best way to find me and then it links off to my twitter over stuff like that from there awesome great jack ma'am good talking to you and hope i'll see you soon when you're back from new york yeah after the summer yeah absolutely thanks for have me on and best of luck