Our buddy sold his app for $200M in just 6 weeks?!

i tweeted the saddle a long time ago i said i have a new hero and his name is dan porter nobody knew who the hell i was talking about nobody idea why was saying that i didn't give any context but you're here and today you're gonna explain to the people you're gonna show people why that is true i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never i'll start with a few facts number one this is a guest i have been waiting for her to come on the podcast for years and the reason why is because i have dan you don't know this but i've had all these fantasies these entrepreneurial fantasies in my life there's a part of me that's like you know what one day i'm gonna make a hit social app and the hundred million people are gonna use it i'm gonna sell it for hundreds of millions of dollars you've done that i have this other fantasy that no no i'm gonna go change education i'm gonna start a big nonprofit i'm gonna be the leader of that i'm gonna help grow that thing i'm gonna help change the way the education works in america you've done that part of me wants to go to hollywood and work with the power brokers the people who are or who are in that world you've done that part of me wants to create a a brand that's like you know part of the culture that that you know in the in the world of sports takes off you've done that part of me wants to own a sports league you've done that you have done basically all the things that i've ever wanted to do as an amazing intro especially for somebody who's twitter dame him is his lame as mine i i appreciate that i would some text that with clearly jack trades master of not well i wanna start with the story because your stories are you came to our our basketball camp camp i of him and you didn't even play basketball which is the best part you were my favorite person there and you didn't even play basketball which is the the funniest part could you tell the story of a o pop and what happened there yeah so o pop was a gaming website built entirely in flash started with this incredibly creative guy charles mormon who g playing game boys in his garage it was like i wish the internet could connect us to play together and we made a ton of really fun games and we actually had success and it's a weird story because in some ways like we imagine that business is either succeed or fail but what happens like if you're in the middle and we had millions of people who played our games the problem is that farm bill came out and they had a hundred million people who played their games and all of a sudden millions of people who played your games was kinda way lame than a hundred million people who played your game on facebook and we we did our thing but then the world changed and it was facebook games and it was all of these other things and so at what point do you come back to the board and you're just like well we're you know we're kinda running out of money and they're like well why do we wanna invest in something that is good but not great and so i remember we went back and we were like okay so let's say that we cut all the snacks like how much runway would that increase for us and the answer was one day and at some point you're just like well am i in the runway extending business am i in a business of taking something that is good but not great and just continually taking money over and over over time and so i think at that point you kind of have that realization and the board is sitting around they're like oh we can take we can raise money we can borrow money and you're just like well what happens if like we did some cool shit it just wasn't cool enough and so yeah we're kind of i just said like maybe this is just kind of the end and we're just gonna make some more games and see what happens and maybe we're gonna go to business and a couple million people will be sad but you know not not a hundred million and so it's kinda what we did and in that process i i i just thought like let's make one or two more games and we had this one very big game that everybody in the company that was was working on a more kind of complicated game and so i said i i'd like to at least try to make the last game that we make even though i'm not a game designer i think i've i've worked here and i've kinda like internalized it and i i think that the cool as a sidebar one of the cool things about working the gaming space is it it change your mindset so that you're kind of one game always there always one game away from something changing the trajectory of the company and if you're in a website or an app or a product business that's dangerous because you always believe like oh my god just one feature away if i just enable push note if i just add this other thing then my app is gonna be gigantic and that can be an illusion which is which is challenging but in a portfolio theory kind of a games company is almost like a portfolio of a bunch of smaller startups in some ways and and even if you look at overtime you know we have basketball we have football we have a meeting media company and they all kinda roll up to some big vision but they're also a portfolio of different types of bets in some way so i think that definitely impacted my thinking but i was just thinking okay like we're gonna make one or two more games let's see what happens how how much time did you have four months five months left damn and did you believe or where where was the belief because you know startups so roller the coaster you you have the initial surge where this is gonna be awesome you have this the the trough of despair the trough of sorrow where you're it feels like nothing's working and then sounds like you're were at the end where was the morale at the time i didn't get up on a podium and say hey y'all we're gonna be out of business in five months so polish up that resume and we had millions of users i mean our average time on site was like four and a half hours and people loved us it's just that the scale at which they loved us was not the scale at which was happening when facebook transformed the gaming business and of course like all the money is focused on you and then they're like oh shit bright shiny objects sing a farm bill anything that ends in vi and they all ran over there and you're like hey what's i got a couple million users and they're like cool cool and so we're like wow we made these web based games but it's about social games and it's about you know mobile games and so you know you have four to six months left and at some point i think you hit this point where you're just like maybe it is just gonna go out of business like you know whatever they say wall street don't fight the tape and like all we're gonna do is do our best like we're not gonna mortgage the house and do all these other things like that to stay in the biz in business for the sake of staying in business this and you know we gotta we got a couple shots so we have this big game everyone's working on and i think i'm just like i'd like to make a game and maybe i can make a game and maybe i'm like super arrogant or really diluted or completely out of touch but like we have this kind of fun drawing and guessing game that we've been making on the internet and like maybe we could make it as a social game off in the corner so everybody in this fifty person company has making me game and i'm in the corner with like an outsourced dev and two people on my team and i don't know a ton about making games but the get the game seems fun and i just have this instinct that like wow the phone is a communications device and yet every game that's popular on the phone is basically a single player game and so we're back in this like okay everybody is a game boy but they're actually connected in some way so could we do something social and so i start trying to make like a version of this game which was called drama thing at that time which i think might have been a little intentionally ra and basically like every friday we would make a version of it and i would try to play it and i'm really dumb and i'm not good at games and i can't read instructions and i have a lot of limitations in that space i obviously i clearly can't even hoop really and so i just play the game and i just be like how can this game be simpler i don't really understand it and i'd recognize every friday when i played it on the subway home like wow this is really fun and i get it and and this isn't and so we kind of get to that point we rename it draw something and we're like kind of last gasp of the company and we try to promote it to our audience you know to our a couple of million people we have hey we got this new game it's based on this other thing and it's it's in my mind it is kind of this hail mary but you can't run a company and go like hey guys we're gonna be out of business in four months so by the way this is our a mary or else literally everybody in the entire company would have a psychic breakdown so they're working on this other game with fighting and all this other stuff when we kinda like release this game we give a lot of promotions so everybody knows about it and the game kind of like climbs a chart right because on day one like thirty or forty thousand people download it because we've given them free coins on our website to do that and it blip up a little bit and it blip up a little bit more and then it kinda crashes down and you're just like okay so what have we learn dan porter definitely not as smart as he thought he was probably not a real game designer and looks like it's not gonna save the company and that's the nature and we try some other promotion and before the weekend like a week out one of the back end developers comes to me and he says there's something broken in the game because like there all of these calls being made in the game and like they're not going through and he's like i think chris and i his name was jason gonna say all weekend we're gonna try to fix the back end of the game and i'm like cool like what's the downside of that so they stay and they rewrite the entire back end of the game over the weekend but then we've just submit it to the app store and at that time you'd submit it to the app store and it might take a week or two for it to get approved and so i call a famous investor who everybody knows who had written a seed check us and wrote a lot a lot of seed checks and i said listen i just need this one favor like if they could actually review the game and put it up in a day or two it might be huge for us and he says i i can help you but a you never get to ask me another favor b one day in twelve years when you're on sam sean's podcast podcasts you can't use my name so that other people don't ask me so blank blank i'm not using your name and i'll see what i could do he does it it goes in the app store he he uses his cloud and all of a sudden it's updated and what had been happening was that the game was actually spreading like wildfire but nobody could download it and they couldn't play it once they had download or they had downloaded it didn't work they fix it whatever and the thing just effing just like blows up it just like goes through the roof and all of a sudden it's the number one game in sweden and the colors were blue and yellow so people are like oh they must be confused about the swedish flag i was like i think they're are smart peoples and maybe they just like the game and it it it started getting really big there and then weirdly it started getting really big and small liberal arts colleges and in minnesota and all these other places i think what happened was that we were really successful at two things making a game that was really simple to understand and play and ultimately like grandma played like it was super broad and the second thing was making a game that really had just insanely powerful word mouth but word mouth works in a very small titan community so it works in a liberal arts college of five thousand people it works in a country like sweden you know at a giant university or somewhere else it doesn't and so it just starts to grow and well what's the time frame of this i would say literally day by day like in the first nine days we got to a million downloads and then in the first fifty days we got to fifty million downloads the only app that was in front of us was fucking flashlight because at bad time the iphone didn't have a flashlight and somebody make a minute every dad came out i was like fucking kill flashlight we gotta be more popular than the flashlight is and this is like in ten two thousand ten or something is it two thousand and twelve twelve yeah of course i played it i mean everyone played that game i mean how many users did you end up having so it it just blows up it just becomes the number one game in like every country in the world for six months straight so i would send on a da basis we had at least twenty five million people playing every day which was gigantic at that time we ultimately were downloaded two hundred and fifty million times and all of a sudden it was just everywhere and then everyone came to me and they're like we need influencers to make this big and someone's like i know cri ran ronaldo those manager and i was like that's really fucking random but like i'll do whatever and then a week later they come in and they're like miley cyrus is tweeting about it and like all these celebrities are tweeting about it has nothing to do with me it's like if you make something that's popular in culture like everybody does it and i remember i i end up making a game show with with ryan sea and i was like how did you find out about this game it's like all the all of people who sat in the front of the studio like secretaries and the assistance and the booker they were just playing it all day and they were laughing their ass off and i keep coming over and i was like what are you guys laughing at and they're like this game and so in this weird way especially in this influencer world like there's this level of traction that you get where people just participate in it because it's part of culture you you were like the hawk to girl before before she was around exactly i just meant to stay around for six months as opposed to like three days on twitter but you can tell by watching on twitter i i actually think that we were one of the first games that ever kinda broke on instagram because it was so visual if you google draw something and i look at google images there's billions and billions of of images around it and there were all these funny things about it number one like we didn't put any sharing capability in it so there was just no way to share and that was like the ant anti of what everyone did and so what happened was people just took screenshots of their drawings and they just texted and posted and in this weird way because you didn't ask celebrities to talk about it they talked about it because you didn't ask people to share they shared it and i remember at some point like i was walking through z as headquarters and they eventually bought bought the game and there were a bunch of developers and they were trying to figure out the game and trying to like map it so they could copy it and one of them said to me why didn't you put xp in this game i mean every good game has xp and i thought oh fuck you're right i'm meant to do that but i hadn't done it and so it was it end up just being this kind of organic game that we knew a lot about but that was built by kind of a regular person and then just played by regular people and i'll tell you one kind of like geek game thing about it is that i understood from our site that if you came on to our site and you played a game if you and sam played and sam juan fifty percent time you would never come back to the site again so let's say it was even checkers the first time you lose at checkers you're like f this site this isn't fun and you lose so what does that say to you about running a gaming site where literally somebody's gonna lose and then you're gonna lose them as as basically as a customer and so in my head i was like i need to figure out this way that you could have a game where nobody loses and that's like some like that's like one of those are riddles like which is the door you knock on to get into heaven or hell or other things like that is the game that has no winners and losers and so one day i was in prospect park with my son my younger some miles and his friend and they were throwing the football and i was like listen if you guys can throw and catch it fifty times in a row taking for ice cream because basically i'm just trying to get them to collaborate and they were like oh it's like a streak we're gonna keep doing it and i was like oh my god there's no winner and loser like they're both winners in this game and so i'm just like oh you're gonna have streak draw something like the more you can go back and forth and everybody's a winner and all this other stuff so it's fun for everyone involved so there are all these kind of non game moments in life and and subsequently somebody at snap told me oh yeah we took that idea of streak from what you guys had done in that game and it's not like i was like in some lab cooking up amazing like ideas about internet in the future of gaming it was just kind of like i was just this regular person observing trying to answer some of these existential questions and looking around me and i wasn't in a gamer so i didn't really use xp and i was like looking for the ways that what made people laugh i what made them smile and the biggest thing is listen if the first game was called draw thing what do you think people draw on the game like this is not hard well well that's something you and sean actually have that in common you have both owned social app where draw penis is were was one of the main features i remember this like very long board meeting where they were like you know we're gonna use optical character recognition and we're gonna recognize every dick in the game and then we're gonna blank it out and this other board members like it doesn't matter whether it goes to the left or the right we're gonna figure it out and we're gonna just get her out and i just felt like wow so it's really hard and it's like dan porter he he figured it on his grave he figured out how to use like early artificial intelligence to spot you know d k that behaves like that and so ultimately i just made this change where it's like you could only play with your friends because i just figured like okay so like whatever you send your friends something like that day either laugh or they're like dude come on just send me a real drawing and it's just kinda like one of these moments where it's like you're trying to solve this problem and the reality is is the solution for the problem is actually something that's like bigger in a way like that like i'll tell you a really dumb story i had like terrible knee pain and it's like at some point i was climbing stairs and i started wearing like pads on my knees and i finally went to doctor went to like an nfl doctor and you i'm thinking he's gonna tell me i need knee surgery it does all these things me and he says listen lie on the table it's like i'm gonna touch your heels to your butt and i'm like a it really hurts he's like yeah your quad are so freaking tight it's you have nothing to do with your knee what you think is the problem is completely not the problem you just need to stretch out your quad and i was like oh my god i just a avoided knee surgery and b learned one of the greater lessons in life which is you think it's this input output but they're all of these things that are around it it's like not about recognizing you know the knicks in your game it's about changing some other structure around you it's about figuring out a stretch out your quad i think we found your your biography title it's not about sound exactly hey dan were you i i know you had a business before this but were you financially successful before starting this company or was it like this has to work otherwise i'm broke and i gotta start over i was kinda like us i wasn't like in i mean my parents were college for professors so i didn't have a a a ton of money i had been a public school teacher and worked in nonprofit education before this so i didn't really have a massively lucrative group career i was average i mean i couldn't stop working but you know i didn't have to eat ramen in every day but yeah this this game and this company was the chance to completely change the trajectory of my life and my family's life from a financial perspective without a doubt i think the the insight about you know people why do people stop playing my game you sort of invert and somehow to make everyone play my game so why would somebody not playing a game well because they lose it and they feel bad and say you're like can you make a game where people don't lose and feel bad and the beautiful thing about the streak is let's say we lost well we're playing together we're collaborating i almost feel like i owe you to play again so instead of churning out because i lost i'm like no i gotta make up that my bad i dropped the ball let's start the streak again and and i i definitely have to play because i'm the one who costa us the street that was the first thing i also love i mean this game was amazing to do that this was like my flirt game you're you're basically my wing man i didn't even know you at the time i got a girlfriend through draw something because it was such a simple game you download it and immediately that i draw this the beauty of it was it would show the other person like almost like a a playback of you drawing it for those who didn't play these game it's like i don't remember the exact mechanics it's like you have to draw it'll tell you what to draw you start to draw it the other person doesn't know what you had to draw they have to guess and it would show you like kinda start stopping erasing it was really funny to see people's kinda like mistakes as they were drawing the thing and you could only be so good like nobody could really be that great unless you're really really talented because it's a finger on a little iphone screen so the expectations were low too and i just thought like i remember the first time i saw that oh it lets you watch the other person draw the thing and that makes you laugh and then that makes you feel connected with this person because it's like almost like both sides are like a little vulnerable in a way right you're you're embarrassing yourself it's like playing char aids it makes you like each other more and i remember thinking this is genius and this game is so simple there's been so many people come on this podcast to say the same thing it's like well my back was against the wall like we didn't really have another choice i wasn't an expert at this thing but i just wanted to make a game that that would be really fun to play and every week we would make it and every friday i would play test it and then i just tried to figure out what i could do to make it a little bit better than it was just that friday i'll try to make one week and i just did that one week at a time and sure enough if that actually resulted in a great product it's not this like highly complex convoluted grand theory approach to making things successful no totally i mean people used to say to me i'm not i love that game but i'm not really that good at drawing and i was like that's the kind of the point of the game like there were people who had pads and ipads who could draw great things but it should be accessible to everyone weirdly we released the game and within a week there were five games that were released that were similar but we were the only game that had the playback and you know how people always say like the greatest thing about the iphone is is when they text you that code and lets you hit that little thing it puts the code and any bait you're filling out like it's just like sometimes there's some aspect of the product that doesn't seem like the core aspect but it's so great and to your point it wasn't just the drawing it was the erasing it made you feel like there was a live person on the other side of it and that that really was the point of it and then there were a lot of other just like really totally random goofy things like i don't think i've ever said this before but like in the beginning there'd be a little scream and these letters would make a word and the word it made was man m a n c h u l man a aka t was one of our developers and we just punt him and just put his name in the beginning of the thing and nobody ever said anything and after z bought it for like two years they left it up there and you'd open it and it wouldn't say like draw something or whatever it would just say man was like this just like you just put these weird things in there just because because you can and because listen you could say from a strategy look i'm not having fun how can i make sure that the people who were doing the drawings are having fun and you sold it for you sold for like what two hundred million dollars to z yes and that was when z was that it's i was like five to six weeks after the game really kinda came out and burst like we sold that it happened so fast no way six weeks yeah so that was like the crazy turnaround so they hired two law firms one worked the first twelve hours of the day on the deal and the other one worked the second twelve hours of the day of the deal and the whole deal got done in nine days and i'm like how like all this paperwork and i'm trying to run around and figure out how how did it happen so the game's blowing up and what you get an email for mark pink kiss or is blowing up and not only is it so big it's literally sucking the user base out of every single other game on the market and so that's z that's ea that's like everybody else who's about to report earnings and talk about their da and m a and you know i have these videos of the download numbers and the counter is just broken because there's you know you there's a million drawings happening every five seconds and so you know mark knew somebody on my board they invited me to the headquarters i was a joker so i entered my name as doctor dr from the company n coming in i thought maybe somebody would know i was there or whatever ultimately there were five or six companies that were really interested in buying it because it was just the trajectory was so big and i think they were playing offense like they clearly was like these guys are some mobile game and i think they were playing defense because they were bleeding all of their users across everywhere and the deal closed six weeks after the after draw something went live that's gotta be one of the fastest that's gotta be one of the fastest closed like launched to close times ever it was insanely fast and the funny thing is that i went to g which is a game developer conference and the year before i went and like nobody knew who i was and it just so happened that had happened at the peak moment of the game and i went and like everybody knew who i was but then i could meet with like seriously like every buyer like in two days because everybody was in san francisco for that conference and we also got a term sheet for fifty million dollars which i had folded up and put in my pocket and went to event and i dropped it and i couldn't find it and i only had the printout out so i had a rough idea of what the terms were but it was on the floor of some party somewhere and i came back and i asked kinda like the og who had been there for four or five years since there were only seven of us and we were working above like a combination taco bell dunkin donuts where the smell was different on which side of the room you were on i was like you guys wanna raise money and like bills don't really big or do you wanna sell a company and they were like sell the company and i get it they had put five years of their life they were a pivotal time in their life and it was life changing for them so i think that was a decision and and i think people asked me a lot of times also listen we were really really good at making games and we made a really popular game and we were good at the community management the social media around that but you take fifty million dollars and you spend a lot of that on building a legal team building a sales team building all these commodity things that i didn't think we were necessarily gonna be better than anyone else at so we just wanted to be in a place where we could make games how did you negotiate the price they the buyers came back and they were like hundred and twenty hundred and fifty million dollars the board was ecstatic well where they come up with that number i think they were looking at probably we were making a ton of money because we so many screens in the game when you go back and forth and back and forth so we're tread out of advertising revenue you're looking at you know roughly kinda how much is an m a or a da interesting to you and so we bring it to the board and the board is ecstatic because we go from being like oh should we essentially wind this thing down and now we have this thing that's popular and somebody wants to buy it and so they're like great like a hundred and twenty million dollars i was like this thing has worth two hundred and fifty million dollars because like anyone i'm extremely high on my own supply at that time and you know there's this moment where basically the message they're saying to me is like you're the ceo your company it's our company like you don't control this thing and there's kind of a subtle message from me to them being like we'll find fucking sell this thing without me because the thing is worth so much money and that's fifty percent complete delusion and arrogance and adrenaline and all the other things that happen you know when you're in the desert and you have a couple million users and now you hundreds of millions of users and part of me thinking like maybe i actually am right and like maybe it is worth more and so they give me the small window and i go back flustered draw something the greatest thing somebody tweets like you know y comb pitch that draw something of x and you know that that matters to all those people and so i go back and i'm like i need this and i need that and i need this and you know it's a it's a gamble but it was right like we got way more money and a way better deal because a segment of the buyers really really needed it because they were you know they were telling results this hit to their stock was bad you know a somebody like ea was invested in sports games somebody like a z was over invested in farm bill you know you have strategic imperative to people so sure you're super valuable but they're all playing a much bigger game and if you can understand that that's where your leverage is and then boom all of a sudden we do that i come back i'm like the company be sold and it's you know this this whole crazy kind of episode and the funniest thing to me is like i start reading all of these things like why draw something succeeded and then these other articles why draw something failed and you know when you're an entrepreneur you read a ton of these and you come back and you're like did you see these you tell you your team you see this article we need to be doing this and the reality was this that every single article was wrong like it was completely the wrong like their analysis was wrong like there was this whole thing about why we failed but they were analyzing our ipad app and we didn't have an ipad app we just had a stretched out mobile app for ipad and then all of a sudden you just realized oh shit i've been reading these articles as an entrepreneur about why things succeeded and failed i've been making decisions and they were probably wrong there and now when it's happening to me they're really fucking wrong but it was this like crazy eyed they don't all of a sudden you know we're part of z and then all of a sudden the year later i'm not working there so it was an amazing rise fall totally turned around the company saved us and we did a whole bunch of things you know there were a bunch of employees who i had to let go and i just made the decision on my own to re hire them like the day before the deal closed that their options would there were people who had taken more cash than stock because they had little kids and i got a cash component that i could use at my discretion and so i just gave them the money that they would have made this just this chance to do like all this insanely non capitalist but like super cool shit to change people's lives and after the deal closed they had a debt free club where all the employees who had college loans all paid off their college loans and there's a moment when you have a little bit of money left in your bank account and that's gonna go to the other companies i ran to the apple store and soho they used to love me and i bought a hundred thousand dollars worth of ipads and all this stuff that i just gave it out to everybody who worked at the company and every now and then somebody will text me and they're like i still have that ipad from twenty twelve and so all of a sudden you just do kind of all the cool fun shit that they would never teach you to do in business school they'd teach you to up said but you can do it because you have this superpower which is not only does somebody want your company but you have this ability to impact the lives of all these people who've given you their all for the last five years and to me that was the coolest part of it sam you know one of the things i love that dan is we meet a lot of founders entrepreneurs and almost all of them i would actually say eighty ninety percent of them will say it's it's not about the money money is not the biggest thing for me i i would say most people want that to be true and then you go look at their actions and it's like those people are the most transactional they're the people that want the money the most and they they want to not want the money but they want the money and i i'm guilty of that too dan is one of the few people i met i believe who plays a game with money it's not that money doesn't matter to you but he's told me bunch of stories of it wasn't about the money like he made a decision that was actively not money driven or not even like logical but he just does it for the fun and for the kicks it's like the joker in batman right like most people wanna be batman dan i feel like you wanna be joker where you're just like i just wanna see what happened well if i do this what if i tie up this this person you love over here and this was lovely who are you gonna go get i can't wait to find out have you read his linkedin so his linkedin is pretty hilarious so it's so it starts with i think you were the president of teach for america when i when i think of teach for america i think of like kinda hip ish like do good for the world type of vibe then you go to gaming which is in my opinion the gamers are typically like the hardest core capitalist there are it just like you're practically working on an excel sheet on how to change things but then so you got this like weird hip side but then you're also this capitalist but then his lake did sean so after selling draw something he goes to work for ari emmanuel at endeavor who sean and i love we love reading about ari listen what he says he goes i told ari to pass on five companies for investing that he ignored me and he invested in a emanuel anyway all of them are now out of business know what you know my guy he's got this like shit head vibe but that i love that i love and that he's also like does good suffer america and he's also this like greedy capitalist he's the perfect combination of like a a being a holistic balanced human in bean i love it i i i appreciate those nice words i i will say i think like none of it is intentional or by design it's just kind of instinct and i think i understand what it's like to you know be average or not have no money but not have any spectacular upside and also have that potential in front of you you know i i i a guy who worked for me time for six years he left to take another job who's was the next step in his career i didn't have enough money to exercise his options so that happens all the time and so he just left them so one of my investors is like i want a bigger piece of overtime and i was like you should buy his options like there was no incentive for that he wasn't even working in the company but it was just the right thing to do like the dude worked for us for six years like if i could help him make some money based on that then i think that that part of it was was really cool and i would say like there's two things that really motivated me one was somebody who once said to me he was kind of oprah manager and helped her be really big and when i was in my twenties he once said to me the most powerful people are the people who know how to give up power and i not a lot of people say things to me that i either remember or have an impact but i just always was like i was like wow that's so interesting it is like it's not hard to be powerful and consolidate powers it's way harder to be powerful and somehow let go of power and i think there's some aspect you could substitute money or anything else like that sure like z has said here's five million dollars in cash i could've put that whole thing in my own bank account if i wanted to and sure i do i wish i had that money today sure who doesn't but like to be able to release that and give it to other people and change your lives is just it's just fucking cool and then i would say to me like and i told this to staff at the whole time the number one thing that motivated me was every day wrote the subway and everyday people played games on their iphone and i was just like i wanna make a game that people play on their and i remember there was a point in which the game was so big it was like everybody i knew was playing it it was everywhere and i was walking my dog with one of my kids in i'm prospect park and there was like this couple and they were like n on a bench and they were laughing and i'm thinking oh my god i wonder if they're playing draw something i gotta go check it out so i kinda like walk behind the bench and i look over and and they're playing it and i think in that moment and i'm like cool but i of course i can't help myself i tap them on the shoulder and i'm like i named that game and they were like looked at me like i was like a stalker and they were like oh cool and and they went back to doing what they were doing but to me it's the same thing it's like i walked to an airport and i see some kid wearing an overtime shirt and i just think like that's fucking cool like i made that everyone who i work with we made that and like the fact that you can make something that's out in the world that people love they don't even know you have anything to do with i did a a whole music festival when i was at virgin and i remember standing on stage next to richard branson and like roger dahl and the who were screaming and like dads have their kids on their shoulder there's like eighty thousand people there and i'm thinking like i was a spark that like made this happen and i'm not interested in these people ever knowing who i am i'm like that's not the point the point is you made something and it existed in the world and it touch people who have no idea of who you are and i just can't tell you how fucking existential cool that is can i ask you a little bit about branson and ari so yeah sean and i have been on this r emmanuel kick because he's not probably like us at all in that he's significantly more intense go go go take over the world sean and i care a little bit more about just having an our ideal lifestyle but then you've you got branson so you talked you you said the guy was like it's more about who can release power so branson seems like a guy where it's like decentralized ari like a guy where it's like he's a he's the boss and it's a little bit more dictatorship this is just a an outsider observation but what can you say about the difference between the two of them and what attributes each person had that made him kick ass yeah so let let let me say like ari is an amazing guy and i learned a ton working for him and richard is also an amazing guy i would say in ari case when i worked at w me before they bought i g before they bought usc three months into it people were like what does it like to work there and i was like it's the greatest fucking jewish family dinner you've ever been you've just sit around the table everybody screaming at each other at the top of their lungs but they actually love each other and had just never worked in an environment like that like are you walking to somebody's office and he said listen you fucking sc you know what about this or that and they're like that's not true and i'm like wait they're yelling at each other but they love each other it was actually wild and i think that ari is an example of somebody in a number of ways one is he's relentlessly curious like he reads he consumes information there's nothing he doesn't wanna learn about and i think that that is this incredible spark for him and within the company too clearly like richard but in a different way he has an incredible amount of personal charisma but he uses his personality to his advantage and in a way the person he actually reminded me the most of while works with later was actually david stern the former nba commissioner because like i'd be in a room with david and we'd be talking about bass he'd look at me and say listen dan i get it you're good at raising money but are you fucking good at anything else because clearly it doesn't seem like you are and so it's almost like this cat skill comedian style of using schumer and your personality that's probably rooted in some like jewish schumer and whatever that says to you hey like maybe you should turn left instead of going straight here but i'm gonna save in a way that that is funny but but you you get what i'm saying and and this gonna make you love me in the end too and i think that ari is very very funny and was very good at that by strength of personality and also like he could he could call you every single day that that's how he recruited right well was what's the story of how he recruited you when he wanted me to work there he just saw aside and he wanted me to work there and he called me every single day for four months and what did he say he would just be like you know we have all this ip we need to do this we should come here and then i'd go to talk and i'd realize he wasn't there anymore and that's a problem cell phones is he did did he did he hang up without saying by yeah that's awesome that's what the agents do they roll calls see a list of three hundred people hey hey how are you doing larry david good whatever and then he's on the next one and they understood it and i was idiot i just wasn't from that environment so i didn't really understand it so i'd be talking and i'd look and i'd i just see the time on my phone because he'd have hung up and eat on to the next call and i just think there's this incredible personal force and momentum that he has and sometimes i think for some people they have that but it can lead to a really toxic work environment and they're all kinds of exposures i think he loves life he enjoys everything he's very funny and i think he could he could have both of those in a way and he was good at understanding what made you tick and connecting with that i think richard is really different richard is very laid back but very cool and i remember going to this meeting at virgin mobile in canada and he wanted to talk to all the people in the phone room the customer support people want people just don't do that and he basically just tells them this story about when he lost his virgin virginia like no pun intended and it's his very funny story where he human eyes himself and he's just this regular guy and he's not talking to the c suite he's talking to all people who answer phone and they just leave that thing and they think fucking love richard branson he is like the man and it's just a it's just charisma it's just different for each of them and it's very rooted in what their brand is their brand is extremely clear and articulated but it's clearly they've understood how to make who they are they're not trying to be anyone they aren't but they they've rooted that and i think in this world where people become very studied and they read articles goals and they hire coaches and they do all these other things like that both richard and ari had the superpower that they just knew exactly who they were and they tapped in who that was and and that was their brand and maybe you make some comment about my linkedin and not like i wake up in the day and i think i just wanna fucking troll everyone who reads my linkedin i just think like maybe this would be actually funny and so i think there's some self realization and it helps to be charismatic and that's really hard to learn and and otherwise but i think in a way they both tap into it and they both are relentless but not in this grind way in this way that like everybody reads on reddit about how they're supposed to go and grind and grind and be relentless they just have zest to do something that matters and something that's bigger and where does that come from that's for the psychiatrist couch but again it's it's authentic and it's unique to them it's not studied and i think that's part of that what makes it so powerful the internet community or industry whatever you wanna call it we need more of that my father is a a small business owner and he does all of his business via own and i used to sit in his office and he'd be like i remember he just like would call someone be like hey sweetheart look what's money amongst friends right it's just money we gotta make some we gotta make something work here like and just like this like charm sweet talk i remember hearing this or just just like little things like look it's a little early for you to be busting my balls this morning we go let's make something you know just like this like gift to gap yeah we don't have that in our industry it it's all significantly more formal it's sick like calls are scheduled i recall is like the default calendar length of the google calendar which is thirty minutes like it's just different and i i actually love that that type of stuff it's the in between stuff that makes those things happen look ari he was an agent maybe like the most super super agent of all time and he he definitely understood that david understood that he was not a basketball player he didn't play basketball college jewish wish or stern and he came into a thing and he's dealing with basketball players and coaches in china and international and it's just you know there's there's like a a human connection there's humor there's charisma there's all those things that kind of fit into it and and i'll i remember you know that a thing that someone else said to me at some point this guy dick parsons who had run a big bank and it was some point was the chairman of time warner and very very influential and he said listen whenever i do a deal with somebody i always just leave a little bit extra on the table because you never know when you're gonna come back i wanna do another deal with them and like you know the internet is filled with here's how do you extract a maximum value from the other person here's how you fucking win in negotiation and the reality is it's like maybe there is enough to go around and maybe i'm gonna let you have a little wins because i care about our and maybe we're gonna do business in the future and and everything else like that so i i think you know per your dad's story and otherwise there there there is a bunch of that and and sometimes it makes it easier you know they just sent me this thing they're like what do you think about all these things we're proposing and i just wrote back and i was like these are seriously mid and that's like in front of fifty people so we have this meeting and the guy says to be listed my only goal in this meeting is how can we not be so mid so i'm like okay you get my point and yet i haven't cross some crazy hr line and you've given it back to me and so that what is the goal the goal is to actually make something that's slightly better but it requires you know trust in humor and may maybe there is a lost start in in in cats skills humor in business and maybe maybe that's gonna be my next company after this how old are you i'm fifty eight years old so you started over time when you were what fifty years old and your partner did i read your partner as twenty four yeah when we started zach was twenty two that's that's some leonardo d cap i didn't like it so you i would only doubt date found under twenty five so you by the way the the hilarious thing is i saw overtime and i was like man this brand is awesome i say i i don't think your eyes into kinda like the hoops mix tape culture not about the culture yeah you know like you are song exactly i've i've been waiting for somebody to call sam that lot the more than you know more than you know come on it's all good so we see over overtime and over overtime just takes off amongst basically like the young black market in america it's the coolest brand it's the shirt everybody's wearing it's the instagram page people are following i'm looking for the founder of this thing i remember when i first saw i'm looking for the founder and i have an image of my head of what i think the founder of overtime looks like what what was the image in your head oh man it's a sub guy maybe twenty eight years old and i was gonna have some business savvy tool them but i figured it was like a twenty eight year old black guy who used to play basketball or still play basketball maybe comes from the music scene as some sort of music promoter or record label exec because there was definitely like a culture crossover aspect of this where it was not just prospect rankings or shit like that like not just like a database of athletes or it was not done that way and then i see it's dan porter and i meet dan and dan actually really helped us out with milk to him i don't know if ever told you told you but no i didn't know that he was i know how we got connected because he's reading the boat road early on we asked him you know big fan of what you did can we just get on the phone for an hour and dan's like you gotta do this and he's like this is working and i think the instinct when something is working is to kinda button it up and grow up and he's like no that's exactly the thing that's great about this is that it's not as buttoned up because they're i think there was a big bitcoin conference going on he's like you should host the anti conference it's like you know just pb and people's backyard or something like that just like what's the counter programming you could do against the traditional thing and i started asking about the brand that he built over overtime and dan you told me you studied soccer clubs and bands and cults and you wanted to figure out what they did differently and you shared with me two or three things that we used at the milk road to help grow that brand so i definitely learned a lot about brand and words for richard you know and he really understood the idea of challenger brand and i think for me i was really interested in community especially coming from gaming and i was like what is the challenge around being in the media space and you know being tangent the digital media space i'm like it's all the content and views and it's like you're looking on your phone or somewhere else and it's like that's funny but it it it could come from anywhere and so i was like you know maybe what the audience wants is a sense of community a sense of being part of something you know belonging to something i think that was a clearly a growth hack for religion thousands of years ago like let's get a place where people can get together and make them feel part of something and i think people wanted that and so to me it's a it's just like you start from that standpoint and you just start to observe the world around you so you go you know you go to a british soccer game and you realize like they're singing like sweet caroline and you're like what does neil diamond have to do a soccer i never understood it's just it's such a good sing along song and then all of a sudden you're just like where else can grown men i guess aside from church go someplace and sing at the top of their lungs and like why are people fan and why do they paint their faces and i i remember i went to like a low baby birthday concert at state farm and everyone was holding up their phone and i was trying to make a video to put on my story to show that i was valid and all a sudden i realized they were all filming themselves i was like one of the only people actually filming a concert like they were all content creators they went to a concert as a platform for them to make content about themselves and i was like i'm not that way but like to me it was so fascinating their son ant understanding about you know you ask people which way you point your camera at a certain age you're you know you're filming other people in a certain age you're filming themselves and i just think i've had this relentless curiosity about that and to me you can google brand and you can read a lot of shit that has a high ranking in you know in google about how to do this and that but the passion of the soccer team or the passion that you feel for a sports team you think about things like the grateful dead that just gave away their music and let people record it when all that would happen when i was a kid is you go to a concert and they'd f you to make sure you don't have a recording device on you and how they understood like well shit i could let my fans be the distribution and it could grow ten x bigger than anything else like that and then all of a sudden it's not about your song it's like well i have that song it you know this show at nasa coli see and i have this show at hampton and i have this song this version of that and so i think in a way like all of those examples exist out there and i remember i watched the travis scott documentary that's on netflix and it's so interesting to me that his audience is so much more passionate about him they literally cry when they're coming out of the show he dives into the stage and you just ask there are a hundred rappers out there why is travis scott over here and they're all the way over there like why do people literally go do people go to a lil lucy vi show and cry i don't know maybe they do but i don't think in the same way well what's that answer i i spend hours of brain power trying to figure out what that is in reverse engineer because like why is this person or this brand so much more beloved and the other why is ari so much more effective in his business than other people are i think for travis scott it's something about the music but it is something about the fact that he cares so much more about his fans that he is literally able to jump in the middle and be there with him and then when you mag that the symbolism around that the storytelling i think even for me it's listen i you know sure i'm a guy who is not the same as the people who put on my account but i am willing to get in there and answer dms and talk to them and connect them without music and ask them a hundred questions i have this light you know they always have this thing they say if you could give respect you can get respect i don't walk into a room and think that anyone will ever respect me or care about me based on who i am unless i am the first one to give respect and i know that every single person in that room whether they're a sixteen year old hoop or a talent agent or a youtuber has something incredibly deserving of respect and my job is to figure out what that is and honor that and learn about that so over overtime instagram has like i know eleven million followers probably i know billions of views over the years and it's one thing to say you know i learned a lot from brands branson and or i've watched how other brands work and i noticed these two or three things it's like me watching digits two versus going in there and rolling with you know h crazy you've gone there and you've you've rolled with the gracie which which means you actually then went and did it with overtime can you talk about a couple of the things that you did intentionally that you think helped build the cult more of a cult brands so you know for example the hand symbol yeah tell me what's the hand signal every great gang in the world hasn't a has a hand sign you know and so like we need a hand sign and i was like oh o t and they were like simplify it make the o throw throughout the o which is hilarious just imagine your ceo sitting in on he's just throwing up symbols he's like i'm really working on something today guys it's gonna be pig okay what do you guys think you think the o should be oval or more circular and it sounds silly but i think you even you told your people you're like if you go to this event and you record every video you gotta get them at the end it to be like put up the o and say shout out to overtime the same thing because i remember s all once forget saw it twice forget once you see it like twenty five times and you got the like cool high school athletes to do it it was like now it's a thing i've had people do it to me at tsa actually well not ac my shirt and stuff like that i think it comes back to just if you want there to be community and you care about community and that was a premise you have to give community a away to interact and to share what makes that special with them right so i'm a philadelphia eagles fan i live in new york which is clearly not philadelphia i'm walking down the street and i see somebody in the eagles baseball i say go birds and they're like go birds you've given us this common language to say i don't know who you are we may have nothing in common but we got one thing for s in common and so being maybe nerdy or cerebral on that i'm like what are those things that are gonna give our community they're not just gonna be like hey my good fellow i enjoy the content on over overtime and he says thus i do too do you prefer tiktok or snapchat or instagram and so instead you give them this little shout out to overtime or this hand sign as a way to say yeah we're part of this community yeah this kind of if you know you know not unlike the secrets right it's like somebody it's like my father and law's is always like i'm gonna tell you the secret handshake for our fertility but he never gives secret handshake you just like tickle your figures something like that oh sorry i can't really tell you like you're a hundred years old who cares about the secret edge oh we're words the secrecy right you know and so you have these things the secret handshake knock on the door what's the password you know i can't tell you i can't let you in you know and i think you create you understand and consuming culture and even pop culture that there are these things that bind people together and sometimes you've gotta strong arm them into existence using the superpower of social media as a customer relations platform like a crm as opposed to a publisher every single dm to overtime and even to me starts out the same y i don't know why but that is apparently a very popular fit for people to dm large accounts y and you you go back in they're like y and the next thing is oh shit i didn't think over time responding mean i was talking to this twenty one on your old kid who works for me and we were talking about going and doing something he's like listen you all understand like i was like fifteen i dm overtime i just was like y and they dm me back and i'm thinking not they you work here we but he's saying they and so i think just figuring out how to connect with people how to use those super superpower what are the things that around religion around cults their songs their hand signs there's things that you wear you know part of the reason that i created this like shirt with the o that you know eventually all the talented of people work for me made way better and bigger was the people used to steal our content all the time so we'd go and we'd cover somebody and they'd just rip our video and then i'd make a watermark and then they zoom the video out of the watermark to crop it so i was like you know what have we just made a shirt with our o on it then we've like a permanent watermark in our thing and if they rip our video then that's fine then our o is actually everywhere we've turned our biggest challenge into our biggest opportunity and so all of a sudden there were people with shirts with always everywhere because people were ripping those videos and you know everyone would say oh shit how do i get one of those because it must mean you're famous so the biggest thing we did is for two years we we refused to sell it well you can't buy one of those shirts like you have to be on overtime to have that and then eventually you create so much pent up demand and i can't say that was in the deck or the business plan but as you start to get into a dance and a romance with culture you start to observe what's happening and you make some kind audible around that and you figure that out but like to be part of culture is to be part of community to be what's relevant to happening around you and you know listen we start a bass every single start up sports league in america has failed pretty much you know and by the way the nba the nfl these are fifty seventy five years old and you can think about all these start up football leagues that has spent a hundreds of millions of dollars and it's like why is ot over time a lead a startup best league in its fourth season and every other league has gone out of business what's it's because we're focused on the audience we weren't focused on just playing the sport it's like you know what people want they want more football they want more basketball they want more baseball so it's another league and it's like well they just they wanna know like why should i care about this why is this league about me who is playing what are the hopes and the dreams of the people were playing there instead it's like well we got a field and we had a bunch of city based teams and where he said here america you like more football but like if you can't appeal to the aspects of culture and community and emotion to them why should they karen and listen me i wasn't a gamer and i made a pretty popular game i i didn't know a lot about ticketing and i saw the first live event ticketing company i like sports i'm not a sports wizard i would come in last on a sports quiz show but it's like i am more like the consumer in that i don't wanna get sucked in so i'm so deep so it's like what is resonating oh shit there's a simple story about that i'll tell you one side thing that made over time big when we started i was like here's sean he's like six two he has an eight foot wings fan he plays for george washington high school he's a point guard he shoots fifty percent for three and like we'd put the video up there because that's what sports is about stats and all those things every single time i removed one piece of metadata it got bigger down to the fact that it was like sean is fucking dope boom everyone can love that because as soon as you tell me sean went to george washington high school like i don't know where that high school is i don't care anymore you know as soon as you tell me he shoots x from three i'm mike is that good or is that band i don't care anymore so in this weird way similar to the draw something game the more you can simplify it the more it's available to everyone the more you tell me this wine is from this country with this that and it's d and it's this grape or whatever i just think like fuck it maybe i'm just gonna drink tequila can you do this stuff with nerdy products or b b products or do you think that it's much harder and only possible for pop culture or consumer products i i think everything has a story at its core i always think of this dumb example from like a business book that i read thirty years ago where you know whether used to like do door to door selling of vacuum cleaners and the guy would go around and he would tell the person who answers the door you know like the suction is so strong and it's got these things and they sold all the features of the product and he sold ten vacuum cleaners and then the next guy comes around and he knocks on the door and he just fucking sells you the dream of a clean house and every time like you find your own salespeople people and they're in how many views we have and this is why our product is so great and i'm always thinking just gotta fucking tell the dream of the clean house and so in a way there is some abstract simplification of the core of what makes everything great and the more you know about it the worse you get and the further away you get at telling their story so it's like we have this basketball we have the number two pick in last week's nba draft we have the number eight pick we have four lottery picks in two years x number of people watched it on here you know all these people were playing professionally and at the end of the day like somebody from the nba is like why do people care about your basketball of league i'm like because it's their shit the nba that's that's your shit that's old people shit like this is their shit and i can never forget that i can't be distracted by the fact that you know alex went number two and rob went number eight and now they're on these max contracts and they went to ot and whatever it's like if you could keep that fundamental core aspect of why it matters in mind at all time and not get sucked down the vortex i think that that's you know that's the key it's like nearly impossible the bigger you get not to do that stuff sean and i both love u and the reason we like alright emmanuel is in part because he owns the u and what dana white has done there we love because like when sean strickland fights you're like well this guy he's a crazy person who just says wildly offensive stuff and it's really fun because he's insane or this guy from brazil and he's really scary looking and he doesn't even speak english and he wears a red paint painting on his face and it's really intimidating looking they do such a good job of telling a story even though they're a massive company now and they have right well you know you know what what's like i i remember i was a fan at the core of the usc and the core of the usc was every martial art against each other right this guy's a stand up guy this guy's gonna take them to the ground this guy's a college wrestler this guy's a j guy like that is the easiest fucking story to tell in the world you could even look at the nba finals or the super bowl or whatever ultimately were in these rival this city versus that city this boxer versus that boxer but if you could abstract to tell me this is actually a story about passing versus running or this is a story about something else like that then you're just like oh i wanna know how that's gonna play out like that's so interesting i was trying to tell people i went to the euro league championship with all these kind of young people and greece was playing turkey in the semi finals and they're like wow these fans are really passionate and i was like yeah yeah let let's talk about the history of two countries greece and turkey and it's not clear to them but i'm like yes there's something so elemental at the core of the passion i think the nba finals are amazing i'm not quite sure that boston and dallas have existential beef against each other that go back hundreds of years so you've gotta find some other core elemental story in it like these guys bought their team and these guys drafted their team your master he says your karate is better than why kung fu if you could state to that in all those stories and that's clearly a huge aspect of i think what had in the beginning that was so powerful and i think that's part of ari genius is he does understand at its core like what makes you like mark w when he signs him as an actor what makes these stories kind of simple in a way because as soon as you find yourself having to overs sell you've lost the cause as soon as you're talking about the third switch on the vacuum cleaner that has seven keypad hepa air filters you've lost the whole thing that's a great story you're fun to shit to talk to you got yeah like i i i i could hear stories that you say all day i'm just trying to figure out how all works k can i ask you like a life advice thing so you know if you were my dad so you you did a bunch of things right you you were a teacher in schools then you did teach for america you worked for these like high powered organizations like virgin and and you know endeavor with ari emmanuel start your own company in the gaming space you started your own company in the media space if you if you meet like a twenty four year old you know ambitious person just wants to have an interesting like wanna have a great life don't even really know exactly what they want what's your approach and what does dan think you should be doing in your twenties you know what what do you think you should be doing in your thirties how how do you what is like the nutshell of your career advice first of all there's a lot of ways you can learn about the world i learned about the world by being a public school teacher i learned about the world by you know giving guitar lessons like there's so many different ways and i think that so i i have this thing where i i just i really don't like to hire people want to business school and i'm kind of anti mba because to me if there's a funnel and it starts when you're like five years old and you ask why is this sky blue why do people walk on two legs that funnel goes through the education system and then it gets a business school and then it narrows and it closes and they're just like this is the way you do things and then you've lost all that like pie in the sky whatever so i kind of say to young people like your twenties it's like the time for you to get fired from a job the time for you to step way too late and go to a club time for you to like take a euro old pass across england a time for you for your friend to say i'm gonna do this crazy thing and you're like yes you know the time to just say yes and do all those things and ingest and experience as much of the world as possible a because all of those experience come and form you in some way like if i didn't go to the concert or i didn't sing at a soccer show or i didn't do any of these other things like that i don't think i would have ever understood these but also because the world is so big and so vast like if you haven't you know hitch hike through some other country or stayed on a hammock somewhere or done anything else like that you just have no context and appreciation for that and you you think your job is to graduate and then to get the job and then to be the analyst and then the associate and then of this and an the managing director and now you're on this pipeline but you've you've failed to do all these other things i've on master's degree in nineteenth century mexican history that i did while i was working my focus was the cast war of the yucatan people were like why are you doing that how does that help you in your career and i'm like it doesn't it just seemed interesting and like if you look on my linkedin i'll say it never had any impact nobody ever asked me about it i never got ahead by having a a master's degree i don't do business in nineteenth century mexico i don't know you just do shit when you're young because that's the time you do shit and you just learn about the world and you experience things and you laugh and you cry and you get out there and like if you think it's all about this ladder that you get to this other thing it it really isn't and every single one of those things that you do that has no rationale is really actually about opening a door to something else that's got of my advice you have to go to your rate your rate my professor profile your top task your top tag is inspirational to which i would to which i agree you are you are inspirational gives good feedback just like what your coworkers you said mid you're inspirational you love do you love group projects and get ready to read those are your tags for rate my professor that listen i like there is so much from business you can learn from the wire from breaking bad you know all the conference rooms and my last company were named after characters in the wire i just think i learned stuff from books i learned stuff from fiction movies i learned stuff from listening to a song i'm just like you know i remember like the first time one of my kid's friends said i went to irving plaza and i saw this artist billie e and i was like who is billie e and he's like i would do anything for billie e and i was like whoa and i look and she is like one spotify tree with and i'm like holy shit like what is going on here and you know what is the thing there whatever she was not marketed she was discovered the audience was the one they were like she is by billie e no executive in a high in a you know tower somewhere said you're gonna take billie out and so they're all just like if you unpack why things work in the world and you're willing to get out there and experience them then i i think that that's the opportunity the the one second piece of advice i would give is that a lot of times you think it's about adapting to your environment i i i had a a student of mine and she went to work a consulting and she was the only one who didn't get a job offer you know you get your whatever offer to come back and she's like i don't know what's wrong with me like i messed up and like i gotta figure out how to change and they told me i should stop talking so much in meetings or whatever and i said you just shouldn't work and consulting like you are just you you are the best version of you you're should send the wrong situation and then she goes to the startup and they're like you can't talk enough and they love her and she's so happy and i'm like you're the fucking sack same exact person you just gotta find the place that celebrates you for who you are and by the way you are you and you gotta do the best to be the best of you you can but you gotta put your yourself in the best place and you gotta think about your inputs and you know your inputs aren't necessarily like you know the things that you think they are they might be going into the tree lanka restaurant in staten island and having a life changing rote and just rethinking everything you ever knew about the world there's some episodes where in the youtube comments people are being like a why i saw sean put his chin on his hand and just stare into this front or or sam just sat crosses his arms and kinda had its mouth open and he was just staring at the guest these guys have a new man crush i would say this is one of those episodes where i definitely do appreciate you coming on thank you for not only this episode but also helping us when we were doing the mill road it's not even one specific piece of advice you had but after we talked to we were like we came away with a very strong sense of okay cool we're just gonna do this our way like we don't need to conform this in any way if anything let's double down into all of the like quirks and weirdness and fun versions of what this could become and let's just play that out and see what happens and so that was the the one thing that we took away from from hanging out with you and i hope you know other people do that too because i don't think you get that advice i don't think you get that vibe for most people i give that listen i just played a long game if i can be helpful to you and then you're successful and then you buy an mba team and then it's the playoffs and i want my feet on the hardwood then i'm hoping it days off i got you dan thank you so much for coming on appreciate you i appreciate you guys for having me yeah he in i feel like got rude to wear to know why i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back but