The Science of Storytelling: Three Steps to Master the Perfect Story

Yeah. We we were at an event that Magic was hosting for the Boys and Girls Club where he was auctioning off the chance to play basketball with him and go to a Lakers game, but it was one of those things that was only available to the high net worth individuals sitting in the room. And me and my buddy were in the room, but not high net worth individuals. We’re like the guys who get invited last minute to fill the table and come for the free drinks.

And so we sat there and watched as the auction went up to 15,000. We were in grad school. We couldn’t afford to participate, but Magic was our childhood hero. Like, there’s nothing to this day that I would rather do than play basketball with Magic. And so we were driving home, like, that makes no sense. Magic has fans around the world, not just in that room. And celebrities weren’t really on social media yet, but we’re like, they’re gonna be, and they’re gonna be able to reach their fans in a whole new way.

So if we make it so anybody can donate $10 the chance to win, you could raise so much more money, so much more awareness, open up a whole new donor base.

So I was still in grad school at the time and I basically get rid of all my classes and just focus on doing this, figuring out the legal construct, all that. And then we start trying to convince different celebrities to do this. I had been a filmmaker before Omaze, like, doing cause content, working on storytelling. And you have no subscribers at this point? Zero.

No one waiting for us. We got nothing.

Our first experience was to be a guest judge on Cupcake Wars.

I

That raised $780. So $780? Yeah. So it was very know, we spent, like, six months on that.

What happens to this? The next year, things continue to go not well. We the most we raise in any experience is 18,000, and we’re almost out of money.

We had raised a million seed round before we ever launched. We’re almost out of cash, and we don’t have a case study to show that this model works. And then what happened was we got a deal with Brian Cranston for Breaking Bad. You’re a Breaking Bad fan. You know the show? Yeah. Of course. And so this is the end of Breaking Bad when it was massive. And and we think, okay. That’s gonna be our breakthrough. We’re gonna do this with him. And then we get a call from the person who runs this charity saying, I’m sorry, but Brian is gonna go work with this other company.

And we found out this other company had came along, and they had done a campaign with Samuel Jackson, and it had raised a 180,000. So 10x what we had done, which is it might as well have been a billion. Like, it just seems so impossible to us. So And she tells us, okay. He Brian’s out. And we’re like, no. I mean, that’s literally that’s it. That’s our that’s the company. And I was like, he’s gotta you gotta get us, like, in a meeting with him. You know?

And she’s like, I’m sorry, but, like, tomorrow, he’s got a charity event. And then Sunday, he’s going out of town for a shoot. And we’re like, okay. Well, where where’s the charity event? And she was friends with us, so she told us where it is. We went to the charity event. Snuck in the charity event. We found Brian, walked up to him and said, look. Brian, we’re the guys from Omaze. We never met, but we were gonna do this campaign together, and then you changed your mind.

And he’s like, look. It’s nothing personal, guys, but these guys just seems like they’re gonna raise a lot more for the charity. They promised they could raise 200,000. And I said, well, we’ll raise you 250,000. He said, what’s the most you’ve ever raised? I said 18,000. And he’s like I mean, like, what are you talking about? And I said, look. Like, our whole company depends on this. You remember when you were at the beginning of your career and you knew that you had it inside of you, you believed in yourself, but no one else did, and you just would fight away.

I was like, we will find a way to make this work. We will do everything we can. And so then over the next couple of days, he finally agrees to do it. And then that campaign raised 300,000. Oh. And then he introduced us to Aaron Paul, and we did a thing around the finale of Breaking Bad where you got to ride in a Winnebago with them. You got to cook meth. You got to cook eggs in hazmat suits and watch the very last episode of Breaking Bad with those two, the rest of the cast.

Warren Buffett was randomly there. Fuck. I’ll pay for this. Yeah. That one raised 1,700,000. Woah. Woah. And they had done it at auction, and and they had done 40,000 so it kinda proved the model.

Storytelling content. We did a Reddit AMA with him where we seeded the opportunity in the Reddit. Back then, like, there wasn’t even paid advertising on, like, Facebook and Twitter. We got him on Facebook. We got him on Twitter. We started pushing stuff out, and it would just fly. We did a bunch of, like, short viral videos with him. And then with Aaron, we took it to the next level. And we got AMC to be part of it and Netflix to be part of it because they realized it was starting to promote their show and became this huge thing.

It just spread. And we would do these funny little videos with Aaron, the top 10 reasons you should enter, all this little content that hadn’t really been done on social in this way, and it just it went crazy.

Then we kinda started to take off. We did a thing like riding a tank with Arnold Schwarzenegger and crush things. Then we got dis

You’ve killed it with Brian. You’ve killed it with Breaking Bad. Solid. Yeah. The next big thing was Star Wars. Like, Star Wars was about to relaunch Star Wars The Force Awakens after it had been dormant for, you know, ten years. We did an opportunity where you got to be in Star Wars. And it was huge. Like, we were meeting with Disney and Bob Iger. They didn’t know that we were only six people, and, like, we didn’t really even have the tech stack to support that kind of traffic, but it ended up working out.

Yeah, then we How much did that raise? That raised 4,400,000. Woah. Yeah. In 10, you know, dollars

We didn’t even have subscribers back then. We didn’t do subscribers till we launched houses, like, years later. So this was just individuals putting in $10. Like a raffle ticket? Yes.

Yes. At that

we are.

We’re definitely starting to get inbound investors at that point. And then we from there, it’s just, like, years of just doing crazy celebrity stuff, riding a tank with Arnold and crush things to win a Lamborghini where Pope Francis hands you the keys. That was probably the craziest one. Does that raise a lot? It did. I think it raised, like, 3,100,000 or something like that. What did you think would raise a lot that didn’t? We thought being Call of Duty, you got to have a character in Call of Duty would raise a lot.

That did not. We thought Ronaldo, get your haircut and play football with Ronaldo, would raise a lot. That did not. Wow. You realize, like, not all followers are created equal. Some were so totally surprising. What do you mean by your side? Not all followers created equal. Well, someone like Ronaldo has a massive you know, at that point, I think he was he had the most followers on social, but they’re actually not incredibly engaged. Whereas, like, a guy named Sam Hewen, who’s on a show called Outlander, which is a kind of a sci fi romantic show set in Scotland.

He’s our highest grossing talent of all time more than George Clooney or Brad Pitt or Matt Damon or you name it because he has this community, mostly of women, who find him very attractive and have this dream of wanting to go on a date with him, and we made it available. And he’s really good at storytelling and engaging his community. And so his follower base was a fraction of those others, got the greatest outcome.

We’ve

They’re connected. So we did celebrities for a long time, and they were starting to see a little bit of limits on scale of just how many of these you can do and how many

They did, but the problem is we couldn’t give a consistent inventory of similar things because, like, you can only do Star Wars so many times or Game of Thrones so many times a year. And so and we didn’t build a great subscription product to make that work, so we hadn’t cracked that. Yeah. So we were incredible at storytelling and acquisition, but not greater retention at that point Uh-huh. And which part led to the business model change later. But in terms of the thing that really changed it was that I had this personal experience where I had a near death experience, and then the result of that is what changed my perspective.

Yeah. I did flatline for four and a half minutes, and, yeah, I was on the other you know, I had a whole experience of being on the other side. The way it happened was when I was born, my stomach was twisted and not. I was supposed to die when I was born. They saved me about this crazy surgery then, and then all these years later, the scar tissue from that surgery kind of broke off and created a bowel obstruction. And I didn’t know it at the time.

I just saw that my stomach was getting bigger kind of each day. I went from, like, three months pregnant to six months pregnant to nine months pregnant. And you’re getting really worried. Yeah. My stomach could always hurt, and I was a psycho worker anyway, so I’d always work through whatever ailment. So I was kind of just ignore these things. But then after, like, I got to a certain point where I called my buddy. Was like, hey. It looks like I’m nine months pregnant. Like, what’s going on?

He’s like, you should go to the hospital. Your appendix might be bursting. I was like, I’m throwing a party tonight. I can’t go. He’s like, you should go. So I went, and they did all these tests. They couldn’t figure out what was going on. And then my parents came, and our COO at the time came. They said after a while, like, it’s 10PM at this point, they’re like, alright. You guys go home. We’re gonna keep Matt overnight. And if he’s not better in the morning, then we’ll figure out some kind of surgery to do then.

They start to go home, and our the CO, her name is Helen, she drives back to her house, and she gets there. It’s it’s maybe almost midnight at this point. She’s exhausted. She’s been in the hospital all day, and she’s going to get out of her car, and something tells her to drive back to the hospital. And Helen is British. She’s a COO. She’s not like a Venice Beach, like, listen to the cosmos type person. You know, this is, like, very out of character character for her, but the voice was undeniable.

So she drove back. And if she hadn’t driven back, I would have probably died forty five minutes later.

you were already there, though. I was there, but my blood pressure had plummeted, and the machines had not alerted the nurse. And so she came in, and she’d been in the hospital with her grandmother, so she kind of knew how to read them, and she saw how low my blood pressure was. So she went and grabbed the nurse, said, look. This looks really bad. And the nurse was like, this can’t be right. He wouldn’t be getting oxygen to his brain. So they did another test, got the same results.

Finally, she’s like, fuck this. Like, I need to go. Am I allowed to say that on the show?

Yeah. Yeah.

I grabbed the doctor. She grabbed the doctor. The doctor came in, took one look, and called on the crash team. They rushed me down to surgery. I came out of surgery, and they said to my mom, the good news is we figured out what it is. It’s a bowel obstruction. The bad news is he’s in critical condition. His heart rate is continuing to plummet, and we don’t know why. Then a couple hours pass, and my mom goes downstairs to get my dad and my brother, and she’s coming back up the elevator, and she hears loudspeaker over code blue in Room 437.

And my mom works in a hospital, so she knows that means flatline, and she knows that’s my room. So she gets out of the elevator. She runs down the door. She gets to the door of the Operating Room, and the nurse says, I’m sorry. You can’t come in. This is really serious. And she says, Look. I was there when he came in this world. If he’s leaving this world right now, I’m gonna be in that room. So she lets her in the room, and I’m on a table kind of like this one right here, and I’m flatlined.

And they’re doing the compressions and they’re doing the defibrillators, the electric paddles. My body is bouncing up and down, but I’m not responding. So my mom starts to crumble. You know, it’s one thing to lose a child. It’s another thing if you’re in the room when it’s happening. And at the same time, my dad was outside with my brother, and this doctor came out and said to another doctor in front of my brother, not knowing it was my brother, Hey. I think we lost this guy.

I think he’s gone. And so my brother pushed my dad in the room. My mom’s kind of faced this way towards me, and my dad comes from the other side, and he was crying so loud. My mom turned for me to my dad to say, like, Harry, you gotta, like, shut the fuck up or they’re gonna kick us out of this room. And she said when she when she did that, she said she saw something that she had never seen before in a hospital. She said that every nurse and every staff member and every doctor had gravitated outside the window, and there was, like, 40 of them.

And she said they looked like this silent church choir just sending in this positive energy. And she was so moved by these people that were sending in love to her son that they didn’t even know that it was like this spiritual experience for her. And it was kind of transformative. She just kinda, like, took a deep breath, she turned back, and she started coaching me, almost talking shit to me. And she was like, Matthew David Pohlson, these people are fighting to save your life, but you’re not fighting hard enough.

You need to show them you’re a fighter. You need to fight to come back to us. You know, and they said it was surreal to watch because here’s this 65 year old mom in a room. If you watch Grey’s Anatomy, there’s never a mom in that room. But because she kept fighting, they kept fighting. They don’t usually fight that long. They don’t usually let it go for four and a half minutes, they did because of her. But then at one point, she started to think like, this has gone on too long, and I’m going to lose my son.

You know? And if I lose my son, like, my husband’s going to die of a broken heart. And right as she went there, the main doctor kind of, like, like, shook his head as it to say, like, this is over. And she said, no. Please. Like, don’t call it. She grabbed his arm. And they kinda turned back to the table, and he said, wait a second. I think we might have a pull. And then all of a sudden, they’re all just kinda looking at that machine, that flat line, just looking for it to tick up.

Instead of it ticking up, all of a sudden, I just pop up. And I look up, and there’s this whole room of people looking at me with their mouth like eyes open, mouth open, because the patient doesn’t usually do that, and then all of sudden I look over and I see my mom. Do you remember this? Yeah. And you see your mom? I see my mom, and then I see my dad, and I was kind of on my

side, and I kind of lifted my right arm and gave him a thumbs up.

No. There was, like, couple more days of crazy stuff that happened. After that, like, the doctors kinda rushed down, and they they have these models, like, to assess probability of survival. And they looked at me, and it was, like, well below one percent. And so he turns to my mom to basically say, like, hey. I know this just happened, but you gotta understand, like, this isn’t pacing to end well. And she says, I understand. He says, you don’t understand. His organs are shutting down. And she said, I understand.

But two minutes ago, we didn’t have a pulse, and now we have a pulse. So what are we gonna do about that? And he says, okay. Well, there’s this thing called an ECMO machine. It’s not a great option, but it’s our only option. But only about half the people who touch this machine live to tell a story, but the problem is is we only have one of these things. And then we are at UCLA Santa Monica, and this machine is at UCLA Westwood, and we’ve never transported it before it’s ever been done.

The other problem is there’s only two doctors who do this surgery and neither of them are on call, and it’s Father’s Day. And then randomly, the guy that I had, like, initially reached out to the doctor, happened to be at a bachelor party in Vegas, and he was with the head of cardiology at UCLA, and he said, Hey, can you check your phone to see how my buddy’s doing? I sent him to the hospital with a stomach thing yesterday, and they can see the real time records.

So the guy pulls it up, he said, Dude, your buddy’s gonna die any minute. And so they got ahold of the head of UCLA. They got him to sign off in sending this ECMO machine to the patient. First time in the history of The United States, maybe the world. They send this thing to me in, like, a JRig duct tape ambulance. They do the surgery, then attach me back, send me back to a hospital,

The first time was when I came back, like, in that room after they’d done, like, the defibrillators and all that. I was conscious again. Then I went back into a coma, and then I didn’t come become conscious again for, like, three or three days after that.

Yeah, I mean, it fundamentally changed my relationship to fear. What I realized that I was a lot more fear driven, fear of what other people thought, fear of not being enough, fear of not being liked or loved. And I used to let that drive a lot of my decision making, even what quote unquote, like brave choices I would make were really made out of fear, like trying to avoid something of happening. And if you really, like, deconstruct, like, what fear is, in most cases, it’s very rarely, like, you’re running from actual life threat.

It’s really mostly just a story of some kind of imagined consequences that really only exists in your own brain. And when you realize when you go through something like that is that the actual thing is never as bad as the fear of the thing. Death is most people’s greatest fear. Like I experienced some version of that. I was like, Oh, that wasn’t actually that bad. I’ve met a lot of people who’ve been through trauma or lost everything, you know, lived to their greatest fear and then realized, Oh, I’m okay.

Like I can bounce back from that. So what that means now is I think fear is still useful. Can be very motivating, and a lot of people lead by fear and and that can work in the short term. If you study the teams or the groups that have done something that is enduring, is truly world changing over time, they’re also able to make decisions out of a place of love, out of a place of expansion. Because the opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s fear. Right? That may sound too, like, hippy dippy for a VC podcast.

No. No. No. I like it. But you’re actually smarter when you’re in that expansive place. Right? You’re you’re making decisions from your prefrontal cortex instead of your amygdala. You’re taking in more information. You’re more creative.

Hate is actually closer to love than you think. Right? We’ve all experienced some version of that. Love is you can define love a bunch of different ways, but in its greatest form, it is expansive. It is opening. It makes you take in all sorts of information around you that you might not otherwise. Fear constricts you, makes you focus on things that you think are threatening you, spikes your cortisol levels. Again, it can be very motivating, but over time it makes you make worse decisions. So it’s not like I stopped feeling the fear, but I think I’ve just developed techniques to get past it faster.

man. How much time do we have? There were some big decisions I made about Omaze that I allowed others to influence me, make me go against my gut because of my fear of being criticized, my fear of the group not liking me, being unpopular, investors not thinking I’m experienced enough. I allowed the noise to come in when I actually knew the better answer.

Which decision? Yeah. I made the decision after I came back from near death experience to change from being a business that was focused on celebrities to a business that offered prizes. That may sound obvious now, but that was a huge change for us. How

We had done a campaign with Daniel Craig where you got to go to New York. You got to ride around in a one of a kind Aston Martin, and you got to keep the Aston Martin. And it was the first time we’d offered a prize. We thought it would raise 300,000, and it raised 2,100,000. And so I then I went to our CFO, Nina, and I said, Hey, think we should offer a car. We should go buy a $250,000 McLaren, offer it with just Omaze, no talent.

Because if we could do that on our own, then we would control our own destiny, we would really have something if we could raise $500,000 let’s say. The problem is we only had, like, 900,000 in the bank at that time, so it was a big bet for us. But we took the bet, and then that car coincidentally launched the day before I unexpectedly went into a hospital.

Well, yeah, that turned out to be great. Because when I came back, I was sitting down with her, and I’d had all this distance and all this perspective and said, by the way, whatever happened with the McLaren, did it raise the 500,000? And she said it raised 1,900,000. And I was like, that changes everything. You know? So I went to the board and the team and, like, we’re going all in on this. There was huge resistance. Why was that resistance? We were this is what we were known for.

This was our magic. This is why people came and joined. We were we were a well known brand in this space. We were featured on The Tonight Show on we’d have dedicated, you know, HBO special, all this stuff. Like, Omaze was kind of a thing, and you’re like, you’re getting rid of the thing that makes it the thing. Like, what are you after this? For people internally, that was part of their identity that they were doing this cool stuff that everyone would look at and be like, you get to do riding a tank with Arnold.

That’s so cool. Like, giving away a Aston Martin is not as cool. So that’s where a lot of it was, where I may have caved to that before I did not in this situation. I was okay with people not liking the decision.

No. That didn’t come until we launched the houses. So, yeah, so, basically, we did that transition, then we started we started doing holidays. That did well. We started doing cars. That did well. And then we said, okay. This is really at is houses. A car changes someone’s lifestyle. A house changes someone’s life. We launched that here in The UK because we had a great operator here named James Oaks and smaller country, less expensive houses. And we also had a really good business going. The The US business was going really well at that time.

Really well. I guess this an overstatement for this podcast. For us, it was really well. It was like a 100,000,000. You know, it wasn’t nothing. Pretty freaking great. Yeah. But we felt that if we made it just about houses and made it a monthly draw, then we could start offering subscriptions and we could still create this sense of life changing. We could use our storytelling, but there would be much more natural retention. And so that was the thesis in launching it here. And then, yeah, it just took off.

So we

So the we we do houses for subscriptions. It doesn’t come until we get to a house a month.

Because it took us a while to get that. Eventually, gonna happens

The first house was amazing. It was a million pound house in Cheshire, though now we do £5,000,000 houses, so it was quite it was pretty far from what we offer now. But it was great. Mean, like

Yeah. For sure. Yeah. But the first house, like, right from the beginning, you’re like, oh, people are into this. And

Yes. We did. Now we made that first house go for six months. Right now we do for months because we were nervous about it, but yeah, then we had a big thing. Okay, do we go up for the second house? Do we get a £3,000,000 house? Like, will that work? That was a huge decision. People went both ways, decided to do it. And then it was like, alright. We gotta get so we can offer a house every month. But that’s expensive. Right? You have to buy seven, eight houses out in front in order to do that because you gotta you gotta we renovate them.

We design them. We do all that stuff, and we produce and create all the content.

We have to be seven houses ahead in our purchasing.

Yeah. It’s hard.

we build them now.

Yes. Wow.

It’s not that cleanly correlated. We’ve had some of our best houses that have been £3,000,000 and others that were five not as good. It’s really just there’s a threshold where you can make something really stand out, where that really catches your attention, whether it’s on Instagram or on television. It has certain we know the the the features that really matter. Like, we’ve tested you know, we’ve had over 10,000,000 different performance marketing ads. We see what people click through on. We see what kind of design. We’re now building towards those designs.

We know what matters to people. We know what matters in a kitchen. We know what matters in an office. We know some of the things that punch above its weight class, and so we create the houses accordingly.

Yeah. I think there’s a science and then there’s a fundamental principle. So the science is really simple, which is that our brain is constantly scanning for information that helps us survive or thrive. And so your brand has to very clearly communicate how you will do that for that customer. That can take many forms. Right? Saving money is a form of survival to our brand, saving time, increasing your status so that you can be part of a tribe, whatever it is. But you’ve got to very clearly communicate that.

And if you confuse, you lose. The other thing our brain is doing is constantly trying to conserve calories. So if your message is not super clear, if the brain has to work really hard to figure out why like, how you’re actually contributing to that, it will just tune you out. So that’s that’s the very basic science of it, and I can talk through the principles of how you do that if it’s helpful. Yeah. I’d love to understand the principles before I dig in there. So we this is a a lot of this is driven by this guy named Donald Miller who wrote a book called Building a Story Brand, and he deconstructs the the the seven steps that every story follows.

And so we we study those. But the main principles that would hopefully be relevant to people who are listening is the first thing is make the customer the hero. So many brands make themselves the hero. What

So here’s a good example. You remember Tidal? Tidal? Yeah. The The Jay Jay

Yeah, exactly. So they had all the celebrities in the world, all the, you know, the top musicians, Jay Z, Beyonce, you name it. Like, they were part of this thing. The technology was just as good as Spotify’s at the time, and they ended up losing when they should have won because they made all of their marketing about Jay Z and Beyonce are overcoming the music industry, and they’re this is the new thing where they are the hero that is going to conquer. Whereas, like, Spotify is giving you your rap and saying, this is what you did this year, Harry.

This is what you listened to, and we know this about you. That subtle difference is massive in terms of, like, what a customer sees. So title for a customer’s perspective was not participating in their status and their survival and anything that was meaningful to them. It was about they made them the heroes. Your job as a brand is being the guide, And so you’ve gotta communicate with empathy and authority to become a trusted guide.

Exactly. Those entrepreneurs are the heroes. The ones investing in the fund are the guides. And I think you did it the other way around.

Fuck. Well, you

I mean, it can be huge for a company. Dollar Shave Club is a great example. Insane. But that’s storytelling. Right? That’s they were the guide. They used empathy, communicate through laughter to show you they’re gonna guide you in your journey to be more manly. That was huge. Mean, I our launch was terrible. We did Cupcake Wars in 3780, so you can’t survive

communicate with empathy and authority.

So empathy means show your customer that you see them. Right? So by the language that you use, laughter is the best version of this. You can make a customer laugh. Laughter is like a neurological, like, shortcut to connection. It’s a it’s a dopamine release. It brings down your defenses. It builds trust. Like the gecko. The GEICO gecko is a great example of that as a guide. They had grown at, like, a 2% CAGR for, like, forty years until they launched the gecko in 1999. At that point, had 21% brand awareness.

Ten years later, they had 90% brand awareness. They went from 4,000,000,000 in premiums to 15,600,000,000. They went they doubled their market share because this was, like, a very accessible funny thing that made auto insurance, like, less intimidating to people. So it was like a trusted guy. It was funny. Do you lose

Not if you do it in the right way. You can, like, if you just show a bunch of jackass videos and, you know, it might not work, but if you speak to people in the right way, it’ll work. That’s why, like, can you imagine being in the boardroom of GEICO when they came in? They’re like, hey. Our new spokesperson’s gonna be a six inch lizard, like, at an auto insurance company. And they listen, like, are you kidding? But now they all do it. All those, like, at least in The US, like, all the insurance companies do that.

There’s two other kind of principles that are key. One is that, like, you need to show the customer how you’re gonna participate in their transformation. Almost every consumer brand is selling transformation. You know, Nike is saying put on this rubber and leather on your feet, and you will transform into an athlete. Right? Gatorade is saying drink the sugar water, and you will transform into Michael Jordan. And so you’ve gotta be very clear about that. And then you gotta use the principle of story gaps. Right? Every form of entertainment that is interesting is created by a gap in the story.

Is the hero gonna make it across the bridge? Is the cake and the cooking show gonna turn out okay? Am I gonna make it to the next level of the game? You know? Like like, our our whole business is a story gap. Like, people subscribe every month waiting to see if they’re going to transform their life by winning a house. It’s that gap keeps them entertained, and they stick as a result of that.

No. It’s not it does matter. It’s not a gap.

Know how, and you don’t yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of but there’s a ton of mini gaps along the way. Yeah. A Rose and Jack can end up together. There was

That

It’s

gonna say anything about Rose, because

gonna get to that. I mean, I probably am too, but there’s a lot she could’ve done to help him out there.

Yeah. We teach class to everybody at Omaze no matter what your role is Why? About storytelling. It serves every part of the business. Obviously, marketing, that’s an obvious place. Product is maybe an obvious place understanding the customer psychology, but fundraising. You know, if you think about it, like, what’s evaluation? Evaluation is just metrics plus a story equals valuation. Right? So we teach it to our finance team. We teach it to our analytics team so they can be better storytellers to the rest of the company so they can make their analysis actually usable for their customers, which is the rest of the company.

We’ve all had analytics people that think they’re the heroes, and they do this incredible, like, complicated analysis, and no one has to do it no one knows what to do with it.

The science is really critical. We believe deeply in the science. We test each of these things within an inch of their life with on every moment of what we’re showing in a house or the call to action or whatever it is. Like, so that stuff is very important. But the real gains, the real differentiation now is coming from creative. Like, a lot of people like, these algorithms are reaching efficiency frontiers, so, like, that’s really how you differentiate.

It really works for us.

It used to be. It’s not anymore, but it’s number two. Commercials that work best on TV are ninety seconds.

Yeah. I think that’s another misnomer around storytelling is that shorter is always better. That’s not the case. If if the story is well told, you can keep them engaged for a longer time. But, yeah, ninety second commercials work really well for us.

Oh, it really depends. But, I mean, we’re investing significant amounts in television.

Is this like We’re all we’re everywhere. We’re in the Premier League. We’re Do you find it?

Island. We’re Does Love Island

do well for you? Love Island does do well. Love Island is very highly educated audience. High household income, high educated. Serious? Serious. Same in The US. Like, The Bachelor the highest educated audience in The US is The Bachelor.

You wanna escape.

Facebook itself still hits. It really does? Yeah. It still works.

Yeah. We put them in categories. We have our celebrities, like, we’ve had David Beckham or Prince William or those people promote houses. You’ve had

We we did the London Air Ambulance, and he’s a patron of that charity. So we partnered with him to fund the London area, which is it for people who don’t live in London. These are these red helicopter ambulances that come and save people. But that’s not government funded. It’s charitably funded. And they the ambulances were 25 years old this year, and so they had to re by law, they had to retire them. And they needed to raise 20,000,000 for new ambulances, and they were 5,000,000 short.

And so we did a campaign and raised that money for them.

remembering what people care about. I mean, we’re we’re lucky in that the product that we’re offering, a new house, like, hits all of these principles that we’re talking about. Right? It’s all of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s safety. It’s security. It’s status. It’s relationships. It’s self actualization. So when someone looks at their Insta and sees a new house that could change their life, like, that is engaging. So we’re working with a pretty strong story to begin with.

But each house is different. Each month there’s a new house. 40% of all television in the world is about house, like some kind of house transformation show, some kind of DIY. You know, 60% of all TV is reality, and two thirds of that is about houses. You know, HGTV in The US is sec is third only to ESPN and Fox News, and it’s just about houses. And that network has worked all around the world. The food network only worked in three countries because food culture really changes.

HGTV has worked in 83 countries.

down over time? I think the general law of physics of CAC is that it goes up over time. You can mitigate that the natural course of things by spreading your brand. You know, we’re lucky in that this is a pretty broadly appealing product, you know, age wise, gender wise, household income wise. And so we’re able to find new pockets of kind of untapped audiences, but we expect it to you know, we model it to continue to go up over time.

It’s right up there with the top consumer subscription companies in the world. I mean, it’s comparable to Netflix, Spotify.

How

It’s the story gap.

lottery basket? We’re not that. You know, we’re a prize draw, so it’s not technically what we do. It is an entertainment product like others in that space are, but, you know, we’re not kind of fussed

Yeah. We think there’s endless amounts of content.

Yeah. We think there’s a lot of opportunity there, especially as we expand into different markets. We’re gonna start doing kind of transformation for different people in The UK. We we say we have a house that’s gonna be in Liverpool. Right? We would go find someone in Liverpool who’s been doing great things in the community. A guy named Harry is he’s mentoring entrepreneurs, and he’s doing out of kind of a dilapidated kind of community center. We come up in the Omaze Dream Mobile. We say, Harry, we’ve heard you’ve done great things.

We’re gonna help make your dream come true. We’re gonna use our design team to redo this for you, another show of transformation. So it’s just like different stories of transformation.

The channels are constantly changing, but your capacity to produce it is easier than ever. You have so many tools. And so I think I think to get attention is harder than ever, but to produce content is easier than ever.

I think so. I don’t know if the talent would have worked as well. I think we would have a hard time break harder time breaking through. And

is it? Yeah. Think we would have a hard time today. We were constantly onboarding talent onto social to say, hey. Here’s a way to reach your audience and raise money for a cause that you care about. There now everybody does that. Right? Influencers wasn’t even a thing back then. I don’t think the talent version would have, if we launched today, would’ve done as well. I think the house part is very enduring for all the reasons we talked about, and so I think that still would.

people

know

I think they underestimate their power and sometimes overestimate their power depending on where they are. Like, I think they underestimate the power of small communities and engaged communities.

Yeah. They do. But, like, know, like, clean talk. You know, there’s a whole, like, TikTok report of people who love cleaning. Like, that like, that community is rabid. They buy crazy amounts of products. Plant talk, same thing. Like, people who talk about, like, how you optimize the plants in your house. Like, there’s just you can do real business through those things.

It’s great. It’s emerging for us, but we have big plans for it. We we look at the house as a surface area to be able to do all these things. So we’re gonna start allowing influencers to go to the houses and do something around the gym in the house, something around the plants in the house, something around the food in the house, something, you know, it just creates an opportunity for all those communities to make sense.

The influencers we pay, the celebrities do not because they’re doing it. It’s for their charity.

Yeah. We’ve done all sorts of different affiliate deals and so that’s And paid works best? We do a variety of stuff. It’s, like, kinda different relationships with different people. Okay. No. I mean, it’s performance. It’s it’s typically performance driven, but there’s some that have different, depending on the reach, less micro influencers, but some bigger influencers.

Oh, yeah. Oh, we we almost went out of business.

times. But How

How come we almost went out business? What happened? In the old Omaze one point o, the celebrities were starting to plateau, and we saw that. And we got and so we started to think about, okay. What new products do we need to create to combat that? We then got a inbound acquisition offer from, like, a really famous CEO with a famous company. And so then we had the choice of, okay. Like, we really don’t have the resources to do both of these well. Which one are we gonna focus on?

We so we decided to go for the offer. Spent six months on that.

I’m not gonna share that, but I’m glad we didn’t do it. But it was at the time, it would have been a great outcome for us. For sure. And we so I spent six months just focused on that. That’s all I thought about, and then it fell through on my actual birthday when I had, like I was hosting, like, a a whole thing. And so then we’re like, oh, man. Okay. Now we’ve just wasted six months, not solved this problem. Then I had the actual near death experience.

So then I’m out for many more months. So when I came back, we were, like, really just skating by. Then we flipped to the prize model and started to take off again, and we wanted to go towards the houses, and we felt confident we were gonna be able to raise a round. So we started making some investments in the houses, and then we were supposed to close the round on 03/13/2020, which is not a great week to close a round. If you remember that week, like, March 11 is when Tom Hanks got coronavirus, and then the NBA player got coronavirus.

The number two investor in the round was an NBA owner. March 12, the stock The US stock market went down, like, 30%. And then on the Friday, like, they pulled out of the round. Understandably, like, the world it felt like the world was melting, and we were done then. That was that was a death knell for us. So, like, I went to him and said, look. This was a competitive round. We brought you in because of your reputation for supporting entrepreneurs. You gotta give us a chance to show you how we’re gonna make it through this.

And he’s like, alright. Like, let’s meet next week. I was like, no. Like, let’s meet Monday. You know? Because you’re running out of cash. Yeah. We’re running out of cash, and this is not gonna get better. It’s one of those moments where, like, you’re trying to say, like, yeah. We need

Yeah. Exactly. We and we’ll also you know, we had enough to get through that, but, like, each new piece of information was not gonna be good. That was clear. You know? And so people are not gonna get more bullish over the next couple weeks. So we said Monday, and then we we literally our team spent forty eight hours totally redoing our deck that had taken us, you know, however long to put together in the first place. And we, you know, did research on the growth of ecommerce during SARS, you know, in 2003, all this research about it.

The bubonic plague of nineteen

TikTok during the Spanish flu was huge.

this seems made up. That’s weird. Yeah. We did we we showed all this stuff and why we thought people were gonna be in their houses and they were gonna care more about winning stuff. They’re gonna need entertainment and, like, all this stuff. Did that prove out? It did. It did. We didn’t really know that at the time. Obviously, no one did. But then so then we presented to them on that Monday. And then How did it go? And then he called me on a Tuesday and said, alright.

We’re in. And I literally How big

run? It was a $10,000,000 check, but the whole they were the number two in the round. Rick Heitzman and and First Mark was leading the round, but if they would have fallen out, it just would have made the rest of the round. Not Rick, but the other Chuck would have made the rest of it really difficult. And I remember getting that call and literally I just collapsed. Like, I fell to the ground. I just started, like, wailing. I mean, because it had been three years of crazy stuff, you know?

Like, I thought, like, each one of those was, like, the thing that we had to overcome. And then so when it finally came through, it was, like I mean, it was just, like, such a release. You know?

I would argue with that. You’re incredibly successful. What you’ve built is amazing. It’s a great question. I would say I probably even spend more alone time now than I did, but feel less alone. And I think back to that moment, I was totally alone. And, like, one of the biggest moments of my life, I’m crying on the ground by myself. I’m probably the only one who really couldn’t even understand it. You know? But I think I’ve I’ve learned to create a better relationship with myself. I used to be horrible to myself.

Like, I used to beat myself up. I used to say stuff to meet myself that if a friend said it to me, would no longer be friends with that person. And it took me a long time to

wrong? I don’t think it’s wrong. I think but I think it evolves. And so I think you have to decide if it’s still serving you in the way, and it was no longer serving me in the way that it once did. I thought like the only way to be motivated was like to beat myself up and be better and you have to be more and you’re bad for all these reasons. And then I just learned to be a better friend to myself and recognize that, like, actually supporting through these things is gonna make me work even harder.

It’s gonna make me wake waste less time on repetitive thoughts. You know, like the I saw I read some study the other day from the NSF that said the arbitration has 30,000 thoughts a day. 80% of them are negative, and 95% of them are repetitive. And I would bet you I was higher than eighty and ninety five percent on those things. And that’s just not that useful. Is there anything you do, though, to stop yourself? Yeah. Absolutely. So I have a very regimented kind of meditation, working out, sleep, food, all those things are, like, designed to create that space.

You meditate? I have to work really hard to do it.

I meditate twice a day. I have a protocol that I use that I learned from this teacher who I think is incredibly valuable. He’s guy named Jim George.

I have the meditation twice a day, you know, very serious like you are about fitness and health. Maybe not as serious as you. You do two marathons a weekend, which is absolutely insane, but that’s a part of it. Sleep’s obviously a part of it. I do journals around intentions. Like, I think that stuff really matters if you if if done the right way. So, yeah, I just have created kind of like a a sequence of how to do this stuff. The other thing I did is I did this thing called the Hoffman Process.

It definitely changed my life. How so? It is a work of genius. That whole process is true genius in action. But it fundamentally changes your relation it changed my relationship to me. It made me understand what self love actually means. And every time I hear that term, it sounds like, I don’t know, so cheesy. I don’t know how to avoid that. But like, there was a point in the process where someone said, Hey, do you ever hold grudges? And I said, no. I don’t I always forgive people.

And they’re like, yeah. But do you ever hold grudges against yourself? Sure. I was like, there’s stuff I did, like, ten years ago I haven’t forgiven myself for. You know? And it’s like, is that still serving me? I actually don’t think it is. So I’ve like, I still get these moments, these fears, all these things, but then I can just process through them. Like, Hoffman teaches you how to kind of rewire your brain to process through them much faster.

I don’t think I would have been able to make the decisions I made around switching the business, going from US to UK. I think how I show up in meetings, how I receive bad news has fundamentally changed.

It’s similar to what we were saying before of, like, are you making a decision from a place of fear or expansion? You can make the same decision from two different places. You still make very hard decisions. I’ve still done massive layoffs, like, let people go, given tough feedback. Is layoffs the hardest decision you’ve made? Yeah. It was. You know, we shut down our whole US team because to focus on the house model in The UK.

Yeah. It might have been. I’ve done both of those. Keeping the morale of people after others have left can be challenging, but it can also be galvanizing. I think letting that go was just you know, it’s like so much part of your identity. It’s also like you care like, you developed a real bond. Like, Mode a lot of those people had been there ten, twelve year, you know, since the very beginning.

like, a 100%. I don’t I’m much better now. I can’t say I’m totally that I totally separate those things. I think of it as so much more than just, like, a a business. I think for all of us who work at Omaze, I think we feel like we’re part of something that is bigger than us individually, like, that we’re able to make a real ripple effect. I mean, it’s not about any of us individually, and so I care about, like, serving that mission in a really deep way.

But I am better now at separating my identity from it.

I didn’t have a ton of preconceived notions coming. I’ve loved building in The UK. I think there’s great talent here. I think there’s great educational institutions that create great talent. People are very motivated, like, by the collective. I think you get a lot of immigrant talents. You get a lot of different ways of thinking. So I think it’s a great place to run a business. I think it’s I think it’s a very dynamic. London is incredibly dynamic city. You know, it’s the only city in the world where you have a a relevant center for politics, a relevant center for entertainment, a relevant center for finance that are within a mile of each other.

So that creates a dynamism. I know all the narratives now about, you know, UK and Europe are sinking into the ocean, but, like, I just don’t I don’t experience that.

I feel like you’re better poised to answer that. What would what would your advice be?

I totally agree. I think also a lot of the things coming out of universities are really hard to commercialize. A lot of the biotech, a lot of the AI advancements, like, that that commercializes way faster. And there’s a lot less impediments, so there should be ways of inflecting that too.

always know that you would be successful? No. I think deep down, I believe I had the potential. There were so many times along this journey where I was like, we are fucked. Like, if you would have told, like, the ten year ago me or the five year ago me, like, we were here right now, he would have been like, what are you talking about? The best way to think about our business is, like, a third, a third, a third. So a third goes to VAT and charity.

So 16% of VAT, 17% to charity. Spend about a third on pricing. So the house plus the taxes. We cover all the taxes for the winter. We cover all the furniture. We give them £250,000 to move in, and then we have a bunch of sub prizes like cars and other cash and and that kind of stuff. And then a third is marketing and operating expenses, and out of that comes our profit. And so, you know, at scale, this will be roughly a a 30% EBITDA margin business.

We’re not there now.

Just in The UK.

And we’ve announced Australia, which we’re really excited about.

There’s obviously a lot of reasons that it’s not the obvious choice, not very close, it’s not the biggest market. But, you know, this has been such an extraordinary success here that we wanted to remove as many variables as possible. So language, obsession with property, regulatory, population density. Even though Australia is a much larger country, 83% of the population lives on the East Coast. The distance from Melbourne to Brisbane is almost identical from London to Edinburgh. So and there’s been proof that that’s really worked there. So that’s the other thing that’s really helpful.

If you’re doing something and it’s not working is if you know that other people have done it, you at least know that it’s your execution, not some kind of fundamental lack of demand in the market. So we’d rather have competitive risk than demand risk. So that’s why we chose that.

Oh, absolutely. It’s an obsession. Yeah. I mean, it’s the way their tax system is set up. It’s the most efficient way to build wealth, and so that’s why you have that. At your size, you could go public today. Why don’t you? I think being bigger when you go public is really important now. I’ve watched a lot of companies that were, you know, in relatively small market caps. You can just you’re better set up to weather the increased volatility of the world, and that volatility is only going to increase.

And the nature of the markets leads, you know, with the retail investors, everything else leads to increased volatility.

I mean, there’s a lot of reasons to not go public. You know? You don’t have to deal with, like, the volatility of the yen carry trade reducing morale in your business. And if you’re Stripe or you’re SpaceX, then, you know, you have access to liquidity in ways that are pretty similar to being public. Not every company, though, is Stripe or SpaceX. It’s still the most efficient way to and most impactful way for most companies to get liquidity for their investors and their shareholders. It’s still the on margin brings down the cost of capital.

I mean, it still can be a branding moment for some companies that is important in terms of their international expansion. It’s more of a question than it once was, but it’s not everybody are those companies. Would you go public in The UK?

got syndicated everywhere. I remember reading that. Was that was from your show?

That’s hilarious. Yeah.

That that came up at our board meeting. That’s funny.

You know, I think it’s mostly around people decisions because people are just hard. There’s never kind of a right way or wrong way to do things. So I’m constantly adjusting. You We have our virtues that we’re very serious about living that we reinforce and one of them is seek and offer feedback, another was raise the bar. And so I’m constantly trying to figure out the right cadence of that. I could give feedback every day to every single person if I wanted to, but that would probably be overkill.

And so how do you continue to raise the bar by also understanding when people are maxed out? We’re a very small team. We’re only 57 full time people at that revenue, so it’s like

Yeah. We have another, like, almost 52 contractors that are doing production, so you could say our company is really a 109 people, but it’s it’s pretty

Yeah. It’s it’s an efficient business, but we’re bringing on more people, you know, more senior people. But, we’re still a pretty tight group in terms of how we operate. So that

done. Thank you. Have a really good team, really smart people, really efficient. We’ve made mistakes on over hiring before.

knowing the right amount. It’s not like I think I’m generally pretty good at it because I really care about the people who work and I care about their development and I push towards that, but like finding the right amount is a constant evolution. That’s where I probably spend the most time calibrating.

I would say that’s also been my lesson. There’s this guy named general Anthony Zinny. He was he’s a four star general in The US. We did an experience with him at the very beginning. We would do stuff like play chess with a four star general and stuff, you know, like stuff like that. We can get a lot of celebrities. But, anyway, he ran all of troops for NATO. And so, basically, like, he had, you know, the army, the marines, the navy, plus whatever, how many different countries is part of that.

So just think about all the different cultures that you’re having to navigate. I was like, that feels like the most intense leadership challenge ever. How did you do that? And he’s like, you realize that all relationships are just between two people and each person’s different, so you have to constantly kind of adjust that. Now you create your systemic kind of messaging that is true to you, but then you have to adjust to the people. I used to think that everyone wanted to operate the same way that I did.

That’s wrong. I think the other thing I learned too is like what leadership is is much more about I used to make myself the hero, and this my job is actually to make my team the hero because and set them up for success. And then actually, like, I would try to do more things because I thought it would help them, but actually, I was getting in the way of what they could do. And so creating the right, like, guardrails to allow them to flourish. I know you’ve you’ve railed against on your show about against the word empowerment.

enough to know if there’s a caveat. Why do you disagree, though? Because alignment saves time. Like, we’re really clear. Okay. This is our moonshot. This is our north star. This is how we’re getting there. And then everybody needs to be able to articulate what their role is in getting to that place. So we have them all write it out on Google Docs. Everyone’s like, this my role connects to the strategy, connects to the North Star in this way. And by doing that, then that should enable them to say So

We have our yearly North Star metric. Yep. We have our five pillars of our strategy. Mhmm. And we have our OKRs. So it’s like, how are we gonna get where we wanna go, which is a strategy? Where are we going this year, which is our North Star? What are you gonna do next, which are your OKRs? And then your job as an individual on the team is to write about how your work connects to each of those things. Mhmm. By doing that, you create a coherence within an organization where then people can say, no.

Don’t do that. And we try to celebrate that. Like, tell us about a time that you said no to something. You know, strategy is a lot a lot of times about what you say no to, and so they should constantly be on the lookout for things that they should not do that saves them time.

Oh, man. You have a good answer to that?

I said no to SpaceX early.

I initially said no to subscriptions before we got to House of Month. James, who I mentioned, Amit, Prem, the leaders on our team, they thought we could do subscriptions with House every other month. I was like, no. You gotta wait till this comes. Like, people don’t want it. They were right. I was wrong, and, like, change the business faster.

Man, I saw I just made so many mistakes in my life. It’s really hard to narrow it down. I think it’s it’s a series of failures. I was an actor for a while. I was really bad at it. Did it help you to

I think so.

I

think so. If I wanna just if I if I wanna justify. It does it does help you storytell. I think it helps you to see the world through the eyes of another, which I think helps with marketing and product.

I think you need to do that too.

I don’t think vulnerability is about just being totally open every time you feel any fear. You know? It’s like you’ve gotta, like, you gotta pick your your moments. But I think I think the old school image of a leader, which was like, you know, General Patton, Jack Welsh, like, I know everything at all times, and we’re gonna take that hill, and nothing’s getting in our way. Like, it’s not real. It doesn’t work anymore. And so I think you have to be candid about when you’re not sure what the answer is and when you do have concerns.

You know, as a leader, you also have to be able to work past those because people can clue off your energy. That’s why we practice laughter within our company. We invest in it. We hire for it. So when you get in those, like, difficult situations, like, I’m always working to be as lighthearted as possible and have as much fun as possible in the really shit times. You know, some of our biggest laughs is when we’re like, we might go out of business next week and, like because then you’re you can come to a solution faster that way because you get a little distance from the problem.

We don’t have anymore, though, but we used to have it a lot.

Yeah.

Yeah. Had that. T t s Did you ever have lawsuits? We did. What what was the worst lawsuit? Oh, man. We had we had these guys

who basically, like, were they were recruiting plaintiffs on Facebook to sue Omaze. These guys had also recently before that had sued ginger ale for not having enough ginger in the ginger like a ginger ale company for not having enough ginger. These guys were like Harvard and Yale lawyers that were just like farming for some kind of tort that they could do, like exploiting The US system. Anyway, they they had people suing suing us us or, or, like, like, they they gathered gathered these people. They brought a lawsuit that, like, one said both that people didn’t really understand the odds.

Like, that, you know, some people thought that they automatically won and therefore, like, we were misleading. And we’re like, at no point are we communicating that everybody wins this thing. Like, this is that seems that’s crazy that the fact that people could enter it was a sweepstakes in The US. The fact that people could enter for free was a problem that was following the law. Like, there’s just all this, like, crazy stuff. We ended up winning it, but it was, like, so crazy. That’s nuts. There’s so much of that in The US.

Like, it’s just so value destroying.

It’s really not great for society.

Sounds good.

I think people are more alike than different.

They try to do too much. Focus is the price of greatness.

you ever lose focus?

Yes. Where? In the beginning, we were doing a whole content series alongside all the celebrities and T shirts, and we did all sorts of stuff.

That shorter is necessarily better.

Yeah.

They don’t have the attention for boring stuff.

have to get in faster than you once did, but it can still work.

I think the the back to the people are more alike than different. I thought going into new markets, were gonna have to wildly customize for that market. I’ve actually heard people talk about this on your show. The Revolut’s growth guy talked about this. Mhmm. But I think, especially when you’re talking about a product like they have or we have, which is, like, core to survival in a customer’s mind, a lot of the way you communicate with people can be the same from market to market.

I love YETI. Why? It’s a great product. They’re incredible storytellers. They, like, they they totally understand this at a fundamental level. Like, you’ll see an ad for them that says, be the guy with the story about the bear. That’s genius. Like, that is Why is that genius? Because it makes the customer the hero. It shows a moment it shows a transformation for them. Right? Like you go from someone No going, worries and not

And so it creates a sense of adventure. Yeti’s a perfect guide for that experience. Their products are great to go out and do that. It hits all of it in a really, like, visceral way.

Netflix. Why? Because I think it’s the perfect blend of science and art. Obviously, I love storytelling. I love content. They do that incredibly well, but the way they do it understands these principles, but also uses, you know, best in class technology to do these things.

Inequality of opportunity. At these much differences there seems in the world, I think we all most humans would agree would agree in in the power of competition or the importance of competition, and that if smart people work hard, they should be able to go up the ladder in society. And I think that we are making that harder and harder to do.

I would agree with you. There are more tools and there’s more access to information than ever before. I think there are a lot of structural impediments built into society’s value capture, regulatory capture at the top, especially in The US that makes it harder for people to get started and to move up.

I love The US. We’re headed back there.

Yeah. Of

course. The the point is just like, I used to think, like, the fear made it like so I didn’t have the constitution to be an entrepreneur. I would look at, you know, these famous people like Richard Branson or Oprah, a different kind of entrepreneur, and be like, oh, wow. They must have always, at all times, knew exactly what they’re doing and felt courage. And then I’ve met these people or others that we think that of, and you realize, oh, they feel the same fear. They just process through it fast.

And so, like, it’s okay.

John Stewart. The

Yeah. The Daily he had The Daily Show. Yeah. Because I think he used humor. I said this before, but we believe laughter is the shortest distance between two people. I think he he used humor to raise consciousness and awareness around societal issues in a way that, like, if he didn’t have the humor, he couldn’t. I think he’s incredibly articulate and balanced in the way that he looks at things. But, also, like, we did an experience where you got to be in his writer room writer room for a day, and so I watched him lead.

And, like, the camaraderie and the fun that they had producing, like, a very stressful show day in, day out, like, that’s really hard that had to react to the news and then write comedy about the news that had happened that day. Like, think how hard that is. And the organizational setup that they had and the creative machine that they had, like, we modeled like, I learned a lot from that to model our creative machine, and I thought that was really impressive.

The process with which they ideate that then goes to a room where they beat up the ideation and, like, stress test it, and then the, like, the testing and how they learn from the episodes before. At one point, we were producing 400 celebrity videos a year, you know, and our team, like, figured out that process, was really good at learning from that process. Like, that’s why we like, that’s why we’re the only ones who did a celebrity that made it. We’ve committed. WME tried to do it.

CA tried to do it. Even Airbnb and Groupon at the time tried to do it. But that machine is why we were able to beat them. And so we learned watching that from him.

Can you reach up and grab that thing for me? I’m short. That I find it strange that I’m not asked. Do have what’s the best answer you’ve heard of this one? I don’t know gonna for me is, like

Oh, that’s a great question.

to that?

Is that your neurology, or is that, like, something you because something happened in your childhood that has made you that way?

Do you think you can be great without being Absolutely not.

Yeah. It really depends on how you You find

Do you feel fulfilled by what you’ve achieved?

Really? Less fulfilled every day? Do you think feeling fulfilled will make you less ambitious?

You think being fulfilled and hungry are mutually exclusive?

Yeah. I I’ve changed my mind on that. I know, but that’s why I need to go to Hoffman. You should go to Hoffman.

And you’ll be just as hungry, but you’ll enjoy it more.

Some of the administrative tasks I don’t love. I mean, I would do a lot of them, but when if I have to do any of them, fairly impatient for them. Like, there’s a lot of things through this journey. Like, I used to write site copy and contract partnerships and, like, all these things. I didn’t love all that stuff when I was doing it, but I felt like it was the best thing I could do to serve what we were doing. Final one. Where is Omaze in ten years?

It’s not our ten year vision, but it’s our fifteen year vision. Is Fortune five hundred impact number one? The Fortune five hundred is right now is 8,000,000,000 in revenue to be on that list. Impact number one means the number one source of charitable funds in the world outside of government. Right now, that’s the Gates Foundation. We think the math is on our side to be able to do both those things. That requires expansion into 14 markets. We think we can do that.