#1 - From making $76k at Microsoft to selling TinyCo for $100M+

Just like okay, I gotta move on with the rest of my life. This chapter is over and The bet that we made failed. So I fall asleep, I wake up the next day, I immediately go to look at our stats and I'm like oh We just generated four hundred thousand dollars in revenue yesterday. So this is working. Holy fuck, this is actually working. We're winning. Today we have a entrepreneur and investor, Sulman Ali. He is the founder of several companies, Tiny Co, which

If you ever played the Family Guy mobile game or the Harry Potter mobile game, you were playing with his handiwork. He has built and sold multiple companies. He's an investor in over 40 companies. And we're here to hear that story of how he made his first million. It's a wild, wacky story where you won't believe the way that he did it. You have to hear it to believe. He's gonna be telling us about his first company, his second company, some of the investments he's made, and it's an awesome conversation. I'm excited for you guys to listen to it. Here we go. So Right. We're rolling. This is my first million podcast where we talk to entrepreneurs, investors to find out the backstories of their businesses. We want to hear the good, the bad, the ugly.

the untold stories behind how they built their fortune. We have our guest here today, Suleiman Ali of Ali Capital and of Tiny Co Fame. So we you I guess the best way to describe you would be You're an entrepreneur? You started and sold. Multiple companies now, maybe three companies.

Invested in forty some odd other companies. You're a great friend of mine and I'm glad to have you on the pod. You don't usually do podcasts. My first question is why is that? I think I'm just a little shy about talking about myself in in this public way. But since you're doing it, I had to get on and be supportive of what you're up to. Okay, good. And uh of course this is the uh podcast where I'm looking to find the backstory. So we often hear I remember when I moved to Silicon Valley six years ago

Before then I was sitting in Australia and I was reading Tech Crunch and I was reading books and blogs and At first I wanted to know tactics, but what I realized I actually liked a lot more was hearing the backstories. Um the failures, the successes, the trials and tribulations that it took for people to achieve what they did achieve. Because everybody's story ends up being different. But when you hear so many, you know, hundreds of entrepreneur stories, you end up finding the commonalities, the patterns, and uh that could be the motivation for you to continue. So my hope with this podcast is to Find guests like you.

who have incredible stories, hear them unwind all those stories from the beginning and let the listeners use this as motivation. I don't know if you know this, but there's gonna be hundreds of thousands of people who are Putting in their headphones. in the morning, listening to this on their way to work, on their commute to a job that you know, maybe they don't love and they're dreaming of starting their own business some day. And uh the responsibility is yours, my friend, to uh to make it worth their while and give them a little inspiration today. That's great. I think I can do it. I remember being in that same place, uh, having a job that I wasn't excited about and feeling like Um I was sort of stuck on this path.

And so I'm really excited to share my story and hopeful that inspires people to find their own path in life. What was uh what was that job and what were you doing and How'd you get off that path? So I studied computer science in undergrad at Georgia Tech. I graduated and I was really excited about graduating. I was really excited about entering the real world. I interviewed a ten or twenty different companies I got a job at Microsoft. That was probably the best of the companies I'd interviewed at

uh had the hardest interview and was really prestigious at the time. So I started in uh January two thousand and four at Microsoft. And I remember on my first day I get there, go to the employee new training thing, one of the senior vice presidents of Microsoft is there introducing himself, telling us his story, telling us why he's so passionate about being at Microsoft. And I'm just so excited. I then uh go to my office at at Microsoft. It's in this other building. I walk there, there's all these people that are young and excited about what they're doing. I get to my office, it's got my name on the door. Somebody shows up and is like, Hey

I'm Eric. I've set up your computer for you. This is your phone. And I was like, Oh wow. Yeah. I was just not expecting this kind of treatment. And so I arrived and thought, wow, this is amazing. I'm like a real professional and I've arrived and I'm getting the respect that I deserve, even though I probably didn't really deserve any respect at this point. I'd done nothing. And the first thing I do is I pick up my office phone, I call my dad and I say, Hey Dad

This is my uh new phone number. Whenever you're trying to call me, call me at this number. Um this is from my office that I'm calling you right now. And he says, Uh, that's all great, you know, cool, you got an office and this is all great that you're you're excited about what you're doing. But really you should quit your job immediately and start your own company. That's really where the action is at. you know, I was like oh my dad he's always pushing me to do this so I I kind of uh talked to my mom and my mom was like This is so great that you're working at Microsoft. I'm telling my friends

And she was like the you know marriage proposals are just gonna start coming just from the fact that you work at Microsoft. And so that's kind of my first day and my first uh time having a a real job. Right. And the moment you realize your your dad is uh gonna be hard to please. Yeah, my dad is insatiable in his appetite, so he's eighty now. And whenever I call him or talk to him, he's got New business ideas.

He reads all about tech and uh you know always be asking me, What do you think of Uber stock price? What do you think of Airbnb, when is it gonna go public? So he's really passionate about Entrepreneurship in general. His goal in life at the moment is to buy a tea garden. Uh so he had a tea garden when he was younger in Bangladesh. And he really wants to buy a tea garden because he sees that as uh his legacy that will

own as a family for hundreds of years and it will continue to generate revenue and employ hundreds of people for hundreds of years. The Rockefellers of T. Yeah. That's his dream for sure. Awesome. Awesome. So so if we bookend the story, because I think What's interesting is the beginning and the end and then figuring out how how did point A lead to Z, right? So if the beginning is You get to Microsoft.

Your name's on the door uh of your office. You sit down, you call your dad from your office landline and you say, Hey, this is my new office number And then today, you know, where I met you, you know, one of the reasons this is called the How I Got Rich podcast is because it's not about money, it's about sort of the lifestyle uh of of being able to do what you want when you want on your own terms. And uh and you are somebody who does that. I see today where You start businesses, you sell them.

You invest in, you know, a number of companies. Um you're an investor in maybe twelve, thirteen venture capital funds. Have control over your time. I you know, it'll be the middle of the day and you'll be working out, or it'll be you know, the next week you'll be in London or Japan and doing something completely different. And so I think it's gonna be interesting is to figure out From that first day at Microsoft, how did you end up getting the financial freedom to be living the life you live today? So let's pick up basically

You're at Microsoft. You were excited about the job. Was that just a false promise, or did you actually enjoy what you were up to and then eventually decide to leave? I guess how how did that go at Microsoft? Uh I was really excited about my job. It was working with a bunch of other people who I thought were really brilliant, passionate about their work. But I think after six or twelve months at Microsoft I got

a sense of okay, this is not really where I'm gonna be able to make my mark. Nothing that I do will enable me to really make a mark here. And w why is that? Just a big company? What was the reason why'd you come to that conclusion? Yeah, I think no matter how much I But how hard I worked or the sort of quality of my work.

Um I would get promoted every six or twelve months, something along those lines. But those promotions didn't really do much. from a sphere of influence or authorship over what I got to work on. And I just realized that that that was never gonna happen.

So actually what happened for me is I started at one team and then I switched to this other team inside Microsoft that was building a new product from scratch. uh called the Windows home server team. is run by this guy, Charlie Kindle, who'd been at Microsoft twenty five years at this point, and he had a fantastic career at Microsoft. He'd sort of started three or four startups within Microsoft and had a really good time doing that. And he had joined Microsoft early enough where the stock that he had was worth a lot of money. He had a house on a lake and a boat. And I was like wow, this guy's living the life that I I want to live.

But I realized that because I joined Microsoft twenty years after he had, there's no way I was going to be able to achieve that same success at Microsoft in the same time period that that he had. So I I just felt like I'm doing good work. People are valuing the work that I'm doing. But I'm still stuck within

a specific team at Microsoft and I can't really come up with an idea that somebody at Microsoft will say, that's great, we're gonna go Fun that's the same. And I c I could only work within the construct of Microsoft, which is you're a software engineer or program manager. on some team working on some project. And I felt over time like those were chains that wouldn't let me do something beyond that.

And really when I when I graduated undergrad, you know, you put an objective on on your resume. The objective I put on my resume was to fully exploit what my mind and hands are capable of doing. And I just felt like W which is just thinking about it now. Such a pissant arrogant thing to do for a

twenty three year old kid. unusual but I'm guessing if you were reading somebody's kind of resume today, if somebody wanted to work with you to maximize what I'm capable of in terms of my mind and my hands, w my abilities. I feel like you would like that.

I would love that. Uh so I I think one of the great things about Silicon Valley is it's made for people that are of that mindset and want to be surrounded by people that are like that. what I was doing was putting it on resumes and applying to Microsoft National Instruments, McKissant. Right. Uh just giant companies where that isn't valued at that Stage. So it's it's a s line of thinking that I think is the right line of thinking. I want to encourage everyone in their life to always be thinking in that way, whether they're at Microsoft and twenty three or

Google and sixty. Uh I think you should just be thinking about What What what else should I be doing? What are all the other possibilities that I'm not seeking out by doing my current job? And Do you remember the day when you were like, Okay

This is This is the end of the Microsoft chapter for me. Yes. I joined this team called Windows Home Server. We built a product over an eighteen month period. I got to do all these things I wouldn't normally get to do at Microsoft because I was one of the first fifteen or twenty people on that team. The team grew into ninety-five people.

So just for the level of experience I had I just got to sort of punch above my weight on that team. And we were launching the product. We were announcing the product so it was in stealth mode. Bill Gates was doing his last keynote at CES. And he announced a product as part of that keynote.

the whole team was down there in Vegas manning the booth and talking about the product to people who were coming up at CS and asking what is what Windows home server, why would I want one? And Bill Gates announces the product at his keynote. We then all all go out to dinner as a team. The guy who ran our product called uh Windows Home Server was this guy Charlie Kendall

He gets up in front of everyone in uh Las Vegas. to uh do a toast. And he just starts crying. Uh because he's so passionate and so excited to see this.

And I looked at him and was like wow, this is amazing. This guy is in his forties and he's crying about this product being born. And I realized that even though I really wanted what I was doing, I didn't feel that sense of authorship over the product. and uh that I would not feel the way that he's feeling at Microsoft ever So I decided then and there that I wanted to quit. So when we got back from C S I went to his office and told him, Hey, I got I gotta do what you're doing here. I don't think I'm gonna be able to do that at Microsoft. I wanna go out into the real world and do it.

One of the other funny things is um when you're at a at a big company You're living in this bubble inside the big company where all of your peers are talking about what's happening at the big company and uh all the press that you're reading, all the blogs and information that you're reading is about that company I remember Quitting and

leaving Microsoft and being like, wow, I was stuck inside this bubble and there's a whole big wide world out here. I remember sending an email to somebody and saying, Wow, I felt like I was in a prison of my own making by being at Microsoft. Right. Wow. And so now you You leave Microsoft. You know what you're gonna do next, or you just know

Enough that will get you started. Where were you at mentally at that time? Yeah, so a lot of people, um I told all my peer group that I was leaving And they were like, Why would you leave Microsoft such a cushy gig? You're making so much money and you're gonna take this risk by leaving. Why are you gonna take that risk? And I really think a lot um most people overestimate the risk that they're taking when they leave their job.

The unemployment rate in the United States is sub four percent. For people who are competent and uh skilled in their line of work, it's easy for them to go back to their job. I think if I quit Microsoft, started a company and failed for a year or two or three, I could go back to Microsoft and actually get a higher position than what I would have if I had stayed, just because even Microsoft values that entrepreneurial experience that that people will have. So I think people in general overestimate the amount of risk. So I I left. I didn't really know anything about what I was gonna do except I was gonna move to Silicon Valley. I'd been reading TechCrunch and went to an event that Michael Arrington hosted uh in Seattle for TechCrunch.

and was just like oh this is where the action is at Uh I gotta be down there. I just know that when I get down there I'll uh meet people that are like minded. and figure out what to do with myself. I was just so excited to do it. that I just quit. So I went to visit my parents in Florida before moving out to Silicon Valley just to say hello to them.

After three days I was Totally bored. All my friends from high school had moved out of Florida. And I just didn't know what to do with myself, so I said, Okay, let's start working on something right now. I had not done any software engineering or coding at Microsoft for several years at this point.

So those skills were rusty. I said okay, let me just start working on something. Facebook had announced the Facebook platform right when I had left Microsoft the day that I left. And uh I said, okay, this is something that seems really easy. I can make a web app Um I can put on Facebook and it's just a good way for me to get my feet wet in building something and learning how to code again. So I did exactly that. I got a friend of mine named Jamal from

Georgia Tech to start working with me on it. and uh we made it together and uh took us about two weeks to make and we launched it. Our goal really was to get a hundred people to use it. uh ever and we expected that ninety eight of those hundred people would be our friends. And and what was it at this time? You you built w what was the first idea? Uh so the first app we made was called Superlatives.

the idea was really simple. You got to pick a superlative and give it to your friends. So we made a bunch of really funny superlatives. like most likely to wear a bunny costume for no apparent reason. most likely to get conned by old ladies in Las Vegas. things that we just thought were kinda offy and funny that you would want to give to a friend.

And uh that friend would go to the app and give one back to you. So we launched on the Facebook platform and within a month a million people had used it and our servers were melting. We didn't know anything about database architecture, so our database was melting, the the app was going down all the time. all these friends of mine were like, Did you make superletives? I love it. This is amazing. I love using this thing. So it was just a smash hit right away. And

How did that feel for you? What how was that different than what you had been doing up till that point? And I guess like What was it like when you woke up that m you know, the first morning when it started to click? Wha what was going through your head at that time, if you can go back Yeah, I think it was just joy, uh pure joy and pride of this is a concept that We dreamed up. We made, we launched and people are using it and they like it or love it.

and we created something in the world that people are using. So it just felt very it was a very different kind of joy than any joy I'd experienced at Microsoft. Right. And I at Microsoft, I'm guessing it was more joy of I got the approval and appreciation of the kind of my boss, the person above me, or the peers around me. versus This is almost like art. It's uh you know, the market loves what I made.

Yeah, I think at Microsoft I was constantly focused on impressing somebody, uh whether that was my boss or somebody else on the team or Somebody else I would go have lunch with that worked at Microsoft. And here I was focused on on sort of my own values, doing something that I was proud of.

And it's just a very different calculation that those two things. Gotcha. So it's you and Jamal now. The servers are melting. What happens next? So we very quickly learn how to make servers not melt. Uh we find people who do MySQL consulting. They enable us to keep our servers up.

And we just start making the product better and better. And it's really exciting. We then get a phone call from somebody who lives in Silicon Valley. And so by the way, this whole time I'm in Florida And Jamal's in Atlanta. And you're living in your childhood bedroom at the time. Yeah, I'm I'm uh living in my uh parents' house in the bedroom that I grew up in.

And I'm sort of keeping the the opposite schedule of them. They'll wake up early and go to sleep early. I'll wake up really late at like six PM and stay up all night working on the product. So I get this phone call from this guy. His name is Naval Ravakant. Never heard of this guy before and he just called you.

Yeah, actually I think we we might have initiated it. We reached out to some other Facebook app and said, Hey We have a question about Facebook platform or question about how you're growing so quickly. Can we talk to you? And Naval was the guy behind that app and he called us. Gotcha. Okay. So what does Naval have to say? Naval who's now, you know, I guess for those who don't know, Naval is the founder of Angel List.

Uh one of the most sort of famous and and and uh respected people here in Silicon Valley today. And at that time he was also a kind of well known entrepreneur. And did you know who he was at the time? So I didn't know who he was at the time. He had started a angel fund called Hitforge and was investing out of that fund. and he was really excited about the Facebook platform and was investing in companies on the Facebook platform. So I get on the phone with him. This is the first time I'm talking to anyone who's a true Silicon Valley person in my life.

And uh he's like, Hey, love what you're doing. I think it can be really big. I want to meet you in person, how do we make that happen? And you know, I'm kind of waffling about how to make that happen. And he cuts through all the bullshit in my head and says What's it gonna take to get you on a plane tomorrow to come meet me here in San Francisco? And I say, Oh, okay, I can do that. Right. Uh, and so I buy a one way ticket to San Francisco and come out here and meet with them. His office is in uh Soma in San Francisco.

And it's really it's surrounded by homeless people, it's nondescript, it feels like a warehouse, it's empty. So I immediately get the heeb jeebs from from it. Uh, he's a super nice guy, super clearly very intelligent, clearly got a ton of experience in Silicon Valley, and he's got that Silicon Valley ethos of anybody can do anything. The next person I meet might be the next Mark Zuckerberg building the next big thing. And so I meet with him, he takes me out to lunch, he asks me a bunch of questions Those questions are really designed to get a sense of

Am I technical? what's sort of my level of ambition And Am I an entrepreneur? Uh am I sort of made of the same cloth that entrepreneurs are that he is And I think he concludes in the lunch that yes, uh to all three of those.

and says okay, great. During lunch he says I wanna invest. You know I'm gonna wire you two hundred K. Let's go back to my office. And you're not even asking for investment. Yeah, I d I don't really we didn't really need investment. We didn't actually know what we needed. So I wasn't asking for anything. I was just kind of like I'm here You know something, I don't.

Teach me. that's kind of the way I approach it. Like he was Yoda. We go back to his office, he prints out a term sheet and he says sign it and I'll wire you the money right now. I read the term sheet and I uh don't actually understand any of the words on the term sheet.

I uh don't end up signing it and don't end up uh sort of taking his capital But Let me think about this. Let me touch my lawyers or This looks like it's in Portuguese to me. What what did you tell him at the time to uh to to exit gracefully. Yeah, I said this is really exciting. You're awesome. I love meeting you. I wanna work with people like you, I wanna work with you.

I don't understand what this is. It's all a little too sudden for me. So let me go home and kinda think about this and I'll I'll follow up. And Naval to his credit is when he knows what he wants is just aggressive and is like sign it right now Kind of the same way he was about me coming to San Francisco. He was like just eliminate let's eliminate all the bullshit that you've got in your head. Let's sign this right now and start working together immediately.

Yeah, I I like uh I really appreciated that approach. And also now that I understand term sheets, I went back and looked at that term sheet once. It was a super entrepreneur friendly term sheet. he is such a great guy for not Like it was all common stock, it wasn't preferred stock. the term sheet is just set up in a super uh entrepreneur friendly way. So I appreciate that he was doing that.

So I I had the meeting with him and then I'd set up a meeting with a slide Slide was this other company that had started um making Facebook apps and it was venture funded, run by this guy, Max Levchin. And uh this guy Keith Reboy So I'd set up a meeting with those guys too. I go over there Meet meet them.

And they start asking me questions and I very quickly that oh okay, this is actually an interview where they're trying to see if I want to be an engineer or pr or a product manager. At the slide team. And having just left Microsoft, I'm like oh I I don't really want to do that. And I remember this moment where Keith says Okay, well we really like what you've built.

But You know, he opens the door to the room we're in and he's like, Do you hear that? That's all the engineers that I have working at Slide. And it's gonna take them about thirty minutes to copy everything that you've done. And integrate it with Top Friends, their biggest Facebook app, and I think the biggest Facebook app in the world at the time. And then you're gonna be Toast. And uh I was I was like oh wow, right like

That's some hard love that you're you're giving me here. But You know, for me at the time I just worked on it for a couple of weeks and it didn't mean anything to me, so I was like, you know, if you want it, you can just have this app. And it's not a big deal, but Uh what you can't have is my time. I'm not gonna come work for you or for slide, even though I really respect what you guys are doing.

And you guys are really brilliant. That's kind of how the meetings in San Francisco went. I went back to Florida and I was like, Oh wow, this is actually What I'm working on I seen as kind of the silly trivial Facebook app. And I was like, Oh, that's not what this is. This is actually a business. These people out there Respect what I'm doing.

And they've got a vision for the future uh where people are gonna be buying airline tickets on Facebook. And uh commerce is gonna be happening on Facebook. So let me start buying into that vision and seeing what we can build. So I moved to Atlanta where I'd gone to undergrad uh and where Jamal was. We uh started working out of my sister's apartment.

She had a two bedroom apartment. I took one of the bedrooms. took all the living room furniture, sold it, and turned it into an office. We put ads up on superlatives and those ads started generating revenue. We use that revenue to hire a couple of Georgia Tech employees, Georgia Tech grads, or Georgia Tech interns. And we just start making superlets better, we start making more apps.

Super Live grows to about ten million users over time. We uh make other apps that end up also getting millions of people using them. And so for a couple of months we think, wow, we're really good at this. Right. Uh look at us. We didn't need the money from those guys. We hired all these people. They work for us. We're their boss. We keep coming up with great ideas for what to build and we launch it and it ends up being successful. So we just felt really good about ourselves. Yeah, the mightest touch at the time. And this was the Facebook heyday. So the the people you're talking about are

you know, from Naval, who's kind of like a luminary in Silicon Valley. Keith and Max are you know, the ex PayPal guys who have done amazing things, you know, from from slide onward really And Here you are sitting in Georgia in your sister's apartment. And uh

Things are going well. You can't you can do no wrong at this point. Yeah, that's certainly how it feels. But we very quickly that, oh wow, we don't know what we're doing and we've made a lot of mistakes here. So we realized that people that we hired Actually weren't that good. And

We didn't know what to do about that in some cases. the way our our strategy would work is I would wake up in the morning and come up with an idea and fall in love with the idea and say, Okay, everybody, stop what you're doing. Let's work on this idea. And the idea would be a compelling sort of viral

social thing like superlatives was where you send it to your friends and then Your friends log in and they send it to you and then ten of their friends. So all of a sudden it starts growing sort of exponentially. without us spending any money user acquisition or trying to market the product in any way. So we were really good at coming up with things like that, but we didn't really have a sense of what metrics were valuable or

what was the value that we were actually creating? So for example, today a lot of social apps will track things like monthly active users and daily active users. We didn't track those things. We just tracked how many people had ever used our app. So we were optimizing for fundamentally the wrong thing. What you want to optimize for is building something that people are gonna use constantly for a long period of time.

frequently ideally. We were optimizing for something that people would touch, get ten of their friends to use, but never come back to. So we realized that okay, this thing that we've built is kind of valuable. Uh what should we do next? So I came out to Silicon Valley and met with a couple other people

And you know, folks like Naval, Keith and Max Levchin, those guys are all are Silicon Valley Luminaries today and they were Silicon Valley luminaries then. But I feel like they've sort of a hundred X from the time that I met them in terms of the clarity of who they are as individuals. and uh the work that they like to do as individuals. And you know, Naval I think of as one of the preeminent philosophers of our time in the same way that people thought about Russo.

or Kant or other philosophers in previous ages. We were quickly realizing the shortcomings of what we were building. We came out to Silicon Valley to raise money. we got a couple of people who are like, Yeah, I like what you guys are doing. I like you guys want to invest But we realized that we didn't really have a sense for what we should build next. And we then decide okay, let's try to sell this thing instead. So we didn't really know how to go about selling a business. So we thought okay, w the best thing we need to do is talk to people who are in this space.

go to every event and conference that's in this space and see if we can sort of catalyze a chemical reaction or an acquisition in that way. So we went to uh this event called Graphing Social Patterns in San Diego. We get there, it's all people who are building apps on the Facebook platform. of lots of different varying levels of success. We've got sort of a middle level of success at the time. There was a a website that tracked how many people had ever used one of your Facebook apps by company and we were in the top ten companies there.

So uh we go to this event, we meet this guy, Shervan Pishavar. And he says I love what you guys are doing. Wanna buy you guys. So let's go to lunch and talk about it. We go to lunch Mission accomplished. Yeah. Yeah. Uh it's crazy. It's a crazy story. So we we meet this guy, goes to lunch with us.

sort of again tests us in the same way Naval did of are you technical, are you entrepreneurial? What's your level of ambition? and says, Okay, I want to do this deal. He writes a number, Shervin has a uh real Flair for the dramatic in the best kind of way. So he writes a number on a napkin, turns it over, slides it to us. We look at it and we immediately say, Okay, let's do this deal. So it was a two million dollar number on the napkin and we started the company sort of nine months ago. What could he have written on that napkin that you would have said yes to? Was that like you know, was that your minimum there? Or had he written two hundred thousand, would you have also said, Sure, take it.

Yeah, we would have probably said yes to any number, frankly. So at the time when I was at Microsoft I was making seventy six thousand dollars a year. So you offered us two million dollars for nine months worth of work. And really nine months worth of work where we felt like we just made a ton of first time entrepreneur mistakes. So we felt really good about The two we felt Overjoyed over the moon about the two million dollar number.

I think we would have probably had the exact same feeling if the number was two hundred thousand. Right. Okay, so he slides over the napkin. Um Do you even look at Jamal or you both you both just say yes without even having to consult each other? Yeah, that's that's the weird thing is it's like we I think we probably looked at each other for a second and immediately said yes. So we didn't negotiate in any way. And uh yeah, we just said yes immediately. And and I remember when you first told me this s the story that not in so much detail, but There was

sort of a string attached of It wasn't just buying you, he was rolling up a couple of companies. So you had a little bit more work to do at the at this conference, is that correct? Yeah, so what Shervin was doing was a strategy that's called roll up. So you uh get somebody to back you and give you a a big check. In this case he'd gotten uh venture capitalist to give him fifteen million dollars. He's gonna use that fifteen million dollars to buy up The top

five players in the space. Combine them all together with a goal of You know, that costs ten million dollars, but creates fift million or hundred million dollars of value. And that's what his goal was. And so he went on to at that conference and bought a couple of other companies as well. Gotcha. You've now got a win under your belt.

You don't have to go work there, or d did you spend a little bit of time at that company as well? Yeah, so uh we moved the whole team out to Palo Alto, which is where uh the company was called SGN is based. We stay there for a couple of months and uh I moved to New York City because I've always wanted to live in New York City and I just wanted to start a new company and it was a great way to Sort of leave SGN. By moving across the country.

That was maybe You know. Baseball analogy. And then here come the home runs. Uh and and so y you don't like to brag about it, but I'll I'll I'll brag for you a little bit. So Here's the spoiler.

Uh the next couple chapters uh for you were Huge hits. You built a company that got backed by Mark Andreessen, um and Andreessen Horowitz, one of the top firms in the world. Mark was on your board, I think. You took that company, you ended up selling it for Let's say many buckets of money, many more than the first company. And then you did uh with your brother, you built a company called Native, which for anybody out there who's looking for deodorant, no better deodorant in the world than Native, which you sold to Proctor and Gamble. And so so many big hits were to come. So Let's jump through those real quick about how you You know, how you took that first win, the small win, um, and parlayed it into bigger wins.

Yeah, so I felt really good about the win and it f definitely immediately felt like a win. And I said, Okay, this is good. But let's take all of the lessons that I learned the first time and apply them and try and build a company That's ten X more valuable or a hundred X more valuable. And I immediately sort of got the entrepreneurial bug.

And said, Okay, I'm gonna do this for the rest of my life. And by the way, what was your dad saying? You know, dad who was like, Hey, you gotta get out of Microsoft, you need to go start a business Uh at this point, what was Dad saying kind of after the first f Facebook app, the superlatives, uh did he even see that as a business or was he like you're wasting your time with this uh you know, who which of my friends are gonna wear a bunny suit uh game? Yeah, so my parents are really funny. They uh no matter what business me or or my brother start are really dismissive about it and they say, Oh, this isn't a real business

until we sell the business and then when the business is sold they're like oh I knew the whole time that you were gonna win with this business. We l I love this business the whole time. So I think for my parents when the company sold they were like oh wow. Mom was like I can now have a new story to tell about you, which is You're an entrepreneur, you started and sold the company. Uh so she she was feeling pretty good.

And I think my dad was like okay My son is now following in my footsteps of starting companies and trying to create value on his own as an entrepreneur. So I think he was also proud. Gotcha. Okay. So so you wanted to start uh a new business, you uh decided to stay on the Facebook platform, is that right? Uh that's where all the action was? Or what was the thought there? Yeah, so actually I got together with a friend of mine from high school named Ian Spivey in New York City. We uh started jamming together at cafes and in New York City just trying to come up with ideas for what to work on.

So we go start working together and spend about twelve months working on a bunch of Really bad ideas. There's a company called Daily Candy, which was a a newsletter for women that Comcast bought for four hundred million dollars. So we were like, oh the newsletter business, we've got to be in this newsletter business. We thought that green energy was a big deal. So we thought we got to be in the green energy business in some way. So you launched a green energy newsletter.

Yeah, we launched that's exactly what we did. We launched We launch a green energy newsletter and very quickly we realized uh w we don't know anything about the newsletter business. We should stop doing this altogether. One of the other ideas we had was building Twitter for colleges. So we felt like uh college. you're um talking to and meeting all kinds of new people And instead of using Twitter, which is this generic platform, we could build sort of a local Twitter which tells you about

parties and events and and things that are happening on the college campus. We've worked on that for about three months. before we kinda gave up and said, Oh, you know what, Twitter for colleges is just Twitter. Or actually it ended up being just Facebook. So we kinda stop working on that idea. And then we kind of came back to the Facebook platform because we felt like

We had had enough failures where we wanted something that was that we felt like was more likely to succeed. Where was your confidence at at this time? Were you f sort of humbled, okay, you know, uh you know, the last few ideas or not Taken off like I hoped. you know, where was your confidence levels at?'Cause I think that's always interesting, right? Like

As an entrepreneur, you some people are blessed with this confidence that's unshakable. And it it just never wavers. And we hear about that a lot. W but I think in reality most people have confidence of sort of ebbs and flows. Sometimes dependent on the traction, sometimes dependent on really small things like you know. one specific investor's confidence in you or uh you know something you know your mentor tells you. And so

Yeah, w g give me a s give me a sense of your psychology at that time. Wha what were you thinking, how were you feeling? Yeah, I would say I always have this weird level of confidence that whatever I'm gonna work on, I'm gonna will to success. So I that's sort of this

confidence that is this the sort of omnipresent Confidence. That applies to anything that I work on? There have definitely been times where I realize oh what I'm working on is not a good idea and

I just wasted six months of my life and the life of my colleagues. And uh then I I sort of realize that I'm maybe I'm not actually very good at entrepreneurship or building companies or building products. So I would say there's definitely this ebb and flow based on

When I start a new idea, I have a lot of confidence and excitement for it. As I build it, that confidence sort of builds. As I launch it. generally when you launch something You're met with resistance.

So I expect uh some amount of resistance and that resistance dramatically decreases my level of confidence. And then over time I just end up sticking with something and persevering and focusing on willing it to success.

And that ends up leading to growth and success over time. And uh as that happens my confidence sort of increases. Gotcha. And so okay, so you decide to go back into the Facebook platform. And so just talk a little bit about what was Tiny Co.

there's a story within the story there of, you know, there was what was Tiny Co and then what happened. And so I want to get to the what happened, but first let's set the stage. What was Tiny Co and how did it even become Tiny Co? Ian and I started a company called Tiny Co. We started making games on the Facebook platform The iPhone launched in two thousand eight, and then in two thousand nine they launched the app store with uh in app purchases. So we said oh wow, this is actually an amazing platform. Nobody else is on it.

And we started a company called Heiny Co that made mobile games for iPhones. And so why was it called Tiny Co, by the way? We were looking for domain names that were really cheap and fun. And Tiny Co we bought for seven hundred dollars. All the other domain names and ideas that we had were very expensive.

So that's how we arrived at the name Tiny Co. One of our engineers, Bo Shi, came up with the name. Gotcha. Okay. And then I have a So this is the quote from I think it's Ben Horowitz. He's writing on the Andreas and Horowitz blog. about Tiny Co. So he the blog title was

A big opportunity for Tiny Co. And he says, you know, he describes the company and at the end he says, you know, despite terrific early traction in what appears to be a massive market. It would be too early for us to invest in this type of company unless we believe that the entrepreneur behind it was so skilled, determined, and talented that he would build the team that wins the market. That's pretty good. Yeah, it's amazing. How's that feel?

Drink that one in. I almost printed that out. That's my friend that they're talking about over there. You get this backing and you're in this market that everyone thinks is uh maybe at this time, you know, that the sort of forward looking people are thinking, hey Mobile's gonna be big, mobile games could be big. And uh and you're in that space and so what happens? Does it take off right away like the first idea or Where you met with a lot of resistance. We get immediate traction when we launch our first mobile game.

So the first game was called Tapper's Alert. We um launch it. We do a a marketing partnership with a friend of mine from Microsoft named Lee Linden. He started a company called Tap Joy, that's a mobile ad network. where in uh Tap Joy promotes our game Tap Resort. And by promoting it they push it in the top five free apps on the iPhone app store.

So we get hundreds of thousands of downloads immediately and those downloads are turning into revenue. So in the first month of launch we generate five, six hundred thousand dollars of revenue. Not bad. So we immediately are like, Oh wow, this is successful and working.

We had a couple other side projects or SkunkWorks projects that we were working on. And we say let's immediately stop working on those and focus on making mobile games. Because we think this is a place where we can win. And so you start building mobile games like Tap Resort. And I guess take me through'cause there's a butt that comes up. So things are going well. But

What happens. So things are going well. We launched Hap Resort generates five hundred thousand in revenue um the first month and sort of keeps doing that in subsequent months. We uh launch another game and now are generating another four or five hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue from that game. So we're at a ten, eleven million revenue run rate per year. A bunch of V Cs notice us and say

Love what you guys are doing. Wanna meet with you. We take one of the meetings. And they say, We want to invest in your company. We really believe in the mobile game space. And we want to be investors in the in the space. So we take the meeting and You know, our intent initially is not to raise venture capital. We like the fact that we own the company and that we haven't raised any outside capital.

But the venture capitalist capital firms start asking us questions that make us realize wow These guys know what they're doing and are asking questions that are gonna guide us in a way that We're not gonna be able to guide ourselves. So uh we decide okay, we do want to raise venture capital money Um so they give us a term sheet.

We then take that term sheet and go up and down Sandhill Road and pitch to a bunch of other V C firms. Uh so end up getting a handful of term sheets. The one that we like the most is in Dreessen Horowitz, uh Dreessen Horowitz. Just their process is really different for evaluating an investment than most of the other firms.

they ask us a bunch of questions that are specific to our business, and as we talk to them, you can sort of see the gears turning where they're connecting the dots. and realizing how big an opportunity Tiny Coat could be. So we end up taking um money from Andreessen Horowitz, eighteen million dollars, first money into the company. Mark Anderson joins the board. And uh we say, Great, we're gonna take this money and and put it to work.

So we start doing that. We hire a bunch more people, we grow the team to about eighty people. We make a bunch more games, we take that money and start spending it to do customer acquisition. And that's all working and working really well. So uh we end up growing revenue to uh you know, twenty million in the first year and then forty million in the second year.

And we're about break even. you know, again, we're feeling really good about where we're at. And the humbling events are are yet to come. And a bunch of companies are coming to us and say, We love what you guys are doing, we want to acquire you, and we say okay, we're not ready for an acquisition, we we see the future. to be bright and rosy. What ends up happening is we run into this giant brick wall that we

foolishly didn't see coming. We would spend about a dollar acquiring a customer and we generate about two dollars and fifty cents in net revenue from that customer. A bunch of Japanese mobile gaming companies were making so much money in Japan, but kinda saturating that market and there was no more growth left there for them. So they were moving to the United States, opening up offices in San Francisco and saying, Okay, we're gonna

become dominant mobile game companies in the United States. And They drove the cost of customer acquisition up from a dollar to four dollars and then to six dollars and eventually to nine dollars for for the games that we were making.

in a matter of six months. So that took our unit economics and turned them upside down. That meant that every time we were spending money acquiring a customer, we were actually losing more money instead of making money. So that ended up being a giant problem for us. And uh I can imagine. Yeah.

We um went out to go raise new money and every time you raise a new round of funding I would say it becomes ten times to fifty times harder to raise the next round of funding. You need better product market fit, better unit economics, more clarity on how you're gonna grow the company ten times bigger than wherever you're at at the moment.

And so the the guys were uh meeting us, the Series B investors, and saying, Okay, we really like you guys, we like the business you've built. But it looks like the unit economics are kind of falling apart. So we don't want to invest. So that becomes a s real problem for us because we haven't been profitable, we haven't been running the company on profit. because of these Japanese mobile gaming companies spending so much money on customer acquisition, we start losing money every month.

So instead of being break even, first we're losing two hundred thousand dollars a month, then five hundred thousand dollars a month. Uh and those numbers become pretty significant pretty quickly as the months go by. So You know, I I think that one of the things you need to do as an entrepreneur is Never lie to yourself about reality.

It's very easy for an entrepreneur to lie to themselves about reality, especially when they've got investors that they always want to say the the nice thing to or the right thing to, especially when you've got employees and you always want to be your employees to be excited about your business and where you're going. So I definitely see as I've invested in companies now that Entrepreneurs will lie to themselves about r the reality of the market that they're in. and uh kind of fumble the ball as a result of that.

So I'd say one of the strengths of our team at the time was that we realize that okay the reality that we're living in is not the same reality we were living in twelve ago. Uh so we're not gonna exist twelve months from now unless we do something dramatically different. And we do it immediately with reckless abandon. And

You've told me this before and it stood out to me and ever since I've asked myself this question other companies that I'm investing in. I try to get a sense of Is the founder. Looking reality in the face. Or is reality in the room and they're just looking around. They're looking away from it. And the weird thing is that this even happens to really smart people, really talented people. Uh it there's sort of no correlation between just sort of intelligence and talent

And this ability to look reality in the face. We'll go more into detail on that'cause I think this is super, super important and can really this can tank Years of effort if you do this wrong. And so it seems like something worth double clicking into. Yeah, I think it's really easy to get high on your own supply. It's really easy to look at the numbers and just look for the the places where you've got traction and evidence that things are working.

you wanna succeed, you wanna find evidence of that success. And as you're talking to your friends, you're parents, your investors, your employees. you also want to be successful. So it's very easy to sort of seduce yourself into thinking that things are working when they're not.

And there's so many outside uh external factors that help people think they're successful even when a business is failing. So raising a new round of funding And those investors now believing in your planning on doing over the next twelve months? getting press and press talking about your company in this fantastic way.

meeting with friends and only telling them about the things that are going right. Those are all the things that make it really easy to to lose sight of reality. So so do you have Some checks and balances. Do you have a question you ask yourself or a tactic that sort of prevents you from doing that?'Cause that seems like the natural way. That'll happen by default. So you need to fight the default

Uh do you have something you do or is it just sort of inherent to you? Yeah, I'm just uh constantly paranoid and I try to look for metrics that prove that the business is not working or that the business is degrading or the unit economics are degrading. I think about what are all of the things that could be a media that take our business out. And um

I sort of lean into those things and say okay, I'm gonna proactively Um identify and try to resolve those problems. One thing I heard uh Keith Rebois say once is when you start a company you should think about all of the reasons that it's not gonna work and all of the reasons that it's gonna fail. And you should

start with that list, make a prioritize list, and try to prove that these aren't things that are gonna make your company fail. And you want to do that as the first thing. Whereas I think it's very easy for people to do that as the last thing where they start by getting their co-founders and their friends to start working with them. They start working on the product. They launch the product. And only then do they start asking themselves those questions. You want to start asking yourself those questions up front. Before you've written a line of code.

I think it's really worthwhile to make a a deck or a memo that describes what your business is. why it's gonna work. Why it's not gonna work. And try to

disprove all of the reasons why it's not gonna work. Makes sense. And so you're having that meeting now at Tiny Co. You and a handful of trusted folks, I guess. you sort of see the writing on the wall that hey if we don't turn this around This company's not gonna exist in twelve months. And uh that eighteen million bucks they put into us down the drain.

Uh this is not gonna be pretty. And so What happens. Yeah, uh it's really hard time at at the company'cause I realize this is happening and I think uh nobody else on the team has quite realized it. I think they realize it six months later. And so I I immediately start thinking about what do we do to Change our business.

And I get this guy, Andrew Green, who's our head of business development. And I confide in him and I say, Okay, w together you and I are gonna figure out how to turn this business around. And we come up with a long list of ideas. And then we say, Okay, that's not not gonna work, that's not gonna work, that's not gonna work.

One of the ideas that we come up with is licensing brands from giant media companies and making games using those brands. The number one problem we have, the existential problem we have is We can't find a way to get forty million people to download our game. without spending

sixty million dollars or a hundred million dollars to to get forty million people to go download it. And so that's the problem we want to solve. We want to not have to rely on paid user acquisition to get customers into our games. So you wanted to leverage the existing brands out there, like the the way that you know Kim Kardashian put puts her name on a game, that game gets a pop and and markets itself because

Her name carries that weight. You wanted to to do that. Yeah, exactly. And you saw this working or this was just a brilliant idea out of nowhere? You saw somebody else doing it or or wh how did you get this idea and why did you think it would work? Yeah, so a lot of mobile games uh So this was new in the mobile game space. A lot of uh console games do this all the time. Um and a lot of the games I played as a kid growing up do uh had have been had been doing this for

Generations. I think we just realized that oh we can apply that playbook to the mobile game world. People aren't already doing that. It's a huge wide open opportunity for us to go do it. Um Apple will be really excited. our consumers will be really excited, our employees will be really excited.

Uh this is gonna work. Love it. And so How do you do it? So we make a list of brands where we think this brand is so powerful we're gonna be able to get forty million people to download the game just based on the fact that I have this brand. in the app store.

One of the brands that we come up with is Family Guide. So there'd been a Simpsons game launched and the Simpsons game was beginning to do well and we said, Okay What's like the Simpsons? Family Guy. Let's go try to get the family guy license. and uh make a game using that brand. So we go through these Herculean efforts to get in front of

the Fox team who is actually coincidentally right now In the process of deciding to license Family Guy and whom to license it to.

So we realized wow, this could actually work. We then kinda Andrew and I kind of bet the farm on making this deal happen. So we stopped working on Andrew and I stopped working on the other games. We just spend

eighty percent of our time trying to close this family guide deal. we make a pitch deck that is our concept for the game. We go down to LA, we pitch it to them. they love the concept that we come up with. It's the exact game that Everybody who loves the TV show Family Guy wants to see as a Family Guy Mobile game.

the guys that meet us at Fox realize wow these guys are really passionate about Family Guy. They have the right idea for what the game should be, should we bet on these guys. And so we're competing directly with EA. Fox had just done a deal with EA on the Simpsons. And that's beginning to show that it's gonna be successful. So they're kind of the incumbent and the

Team that team and company that Fox is leaning towards going with already. Uh, Zinga shows up and also wants to license the Family Guy game. Um so we're kind of the smallest company of the three that's competing for it. But we're the ones that

uh need it the most. And we're insatiable about making this happen. So We uh pitch the idea to them, they love it. We then go back to uh San Francisco and we say, Okay How do we get this deal? We come up with all of the reasons for why EA is not the right partner for making the Family Guy game.

We send that to them. Um and we say, Let's do a call. We wanna talk to you about why we're the right partner and EA's not. they read it and they they think start thinking, Okay, wow, these guys are right. There are some problems with EA being the company that we go with. We then say okay, that's good, we're doing great, but that's not enough. We didn't close the deal, let's do more. So every day I would go to Andrew and say, what more can we do to get the deal done today? And he was like

There's no more. I have nothing. There's nothing we can come up with. And I was like no, we need to come up with something more. Mark Anderson is on our board. So call him up and say, Hey we need your help. How do we get this deal done? And he says, Oh, coincidentally I'm friends with this guy Tom Rothman, who used to work at Fox.

Call him up. We called Tom Rothman up. Tom Rothman is this amazing Hollywood guy who's been making films for decades. He's like, okay, coincidentally the guy who is making this decision was my protege at Fox. So let me call him and uh tell him that They should go with you. I'm also gonna call we asked Tom Rothman, can you join our board And call this guy. Tom Rothman is an incredible human being, where he just says, look, I'm happy to join your board, but let me call this guy first and see if it's going to make a difference.

Calls this guy and says, I love the Tiny Co team. I vouch for them, I want you to go with them. Uh these guys are the best guys to make a family gamble game. Wow. What a break.

Yeah. Uh amazing moment that he does that. So that's amazing. But then I remember when you first told me the rough outline of the story. The thing I took from it was He came into the office every day and was like

How do we get this deal? You don't ever want to kinda bet the farm on one partnership that's kind of unlikely to come through, but you know, the situation called for it where you really didn't have another choice. And I think that asking that question every day.

You would have never got to that answer had you not Just persistently, annoyingly and almost maniacally asked that question every day. Is that is that right? Yeah, absolutely. We did all these things that nobody else in our position I think would have done. And in fact when we got the deal done with Fox, they said

We had to give the deal to you because we were afraid of who else was gonna call us if we didn't do the deal with you guys. We were afraid of what else you might do next if we didn't give you the deal. Gotcha. So okay. So you end up getting the deal through uh through Tom's nudge. But this isn't.

Oh, you know. It's not it's not rainbows in and dolphins in in sunshine here. Tell tell the story about that problem because this is my favorite part. This is when I scheduled this podcast, it was Because of this story. I think this is an incredible moment that

That has inspired me and I think would inspire many other people, but t the only inst the inspirational moments only come when you're really at rock bottom. And so so what happens after this, after you get the deal? Yeah, so you know, we're really excited that we get the deal. The company is still failing. There's still no clear path to actually succeeding as a company. When we sign the deal with Fox

We sign a deal that says that we're gonna pay them ten million dollars for the license and that we're going to pay them ten million dollars within thirty days. We have two million dollars in our bank account. So the first thing we need to do is go convince somebody to give us the money to Pay Fox. We go to Silicon Valley Bank

and say, Hey, we're making this game. We have all of these other games that are generating all of this revenue. Will you give us a loan? And through tremendous amounts of cajoling by us and by Mark Andreessen at Andreessen Orwitz, again, Mark really Mark really comes through in making the family guy deal happen and he really comes through in getting S V B to step up

and uh give us a loan. So they give us a loan of about ten million dollars. We give ten million dollars to Fox, and we've got a couple million dollars left to go make the game. So that was our first major existential problem after signing the Family Guy game. At the time have about a hundred and sixty people at the company. And we realize that that's too many people for where our business is at.

we realize that we're not We're gonna run out of money unless we trim unless we sort of decrease the size of the team and decrease our burn rate. We realize that while we're doing the family guy deal, while we're trying to get that deal done. Mm.

And we also realized while we're trying to get the family guy deal done that We wanna lay off significant portion of the company, but we can't do that until after the deal is signed by Fox. So deal gets signed, we pay them ten million dollars. then uh we say, Okay, we need to take the team, which is about one hundred and fifty, hundred and sixty people, and trim that to about ninety people.

So I get up in front of the whole company one day and say, Hey guys, today we're gonna lay off about eighty Seventy people. And then we go through that process f and it takes us the whole day. We take each person that we're gonna lay off. one at a time and talk to them and say

Hey, here's um you're being laid off, here's what's happening. Um We're really sorry about this. Yeah, that's A really unpleasant experience.

to this day, whenever I'm walking around uh San Francisco, I'll see somebody that I laid off on that day. And you know, that person will not look will pretend they don't see me or cross the street and not walk by me. And uh you know, I totally understand that. I think it's definitely a failing of mine. to have gotten us to this point. And so it's it's a

reality that I I sort of live with every day. In a way. So anyway, we lay off about uh eighty people that day, seventy eighty people. Then we come back the next morning and say, Okay, guys Yesterday really sucked, but today is the beginning of a new era at Tiny Co.

We're gonna build this game. This game is gonna get forty million downloads. because of the Family Guy brand. Here's all of the marketing ideas that we have that are free and that are gonna get us to forty million downloads. We are gonna focus on profitability and we're gonna make this game be profitable and we're gonna be profitable off of this game. And it's gonna take us about

but ten to twelve months to finish making this game. Each of you is necessary to finish making this game. Please stay with the company and please help us. Some people buy in to the vision and then what starts happening is every week uh we get somebody new coming in to um to me and saying, Hey I'm sorry, I've decided to leave the company. I'm gonna work on

S somewhere else. That was because morale was down after the layoffs or they just didn't believe? What was the what was the core reason there? Uh both those things. So I think morale was down. People felt like this is a sinking ship. I better get get off of it immediately instead of waiting for it to completely go under. And even this this guy who was uh my right hand guy Who re led our product management team. Rajiv Nagpal was like

I don't believe in the strategy. This isn't gonna work, I'm out. And so he quit over over this sort of At this time. One of the I I love Marvel, one of the m uh my favorite movies is Iron Man, and in Ironman he's got sort of this artificial heart that's keeping him alive.

And I felt like during this whole time period. The only thing that was keeping the company alive was people seeing me in the office, people seeing the level of conviction that I had. And that uh if my heart stopped beating for one beat, the company would die and uh everyone would quit and Give up. Wow.

And so you put on a face. Every day and went in. Yeah. Regardless of how you actually felt. Yes, and no matter of what level of conviction I actually had, which varied from moment to moment I um went in the office every day and

said we're gonna win this battle. This game is gonna launch, it's gonna be successful. And we're gonna do this. And so you fast forward, you guys build in the game. You don't build the game in time.

What happens. Yeah, so we have two million dollars to finish making and launch the game. Nine or twelve months have gone by and all that money is gone. We've spent it building the game. We were supposed to have launched the game by now, but it's not quite finished. And funny things happen c start happening like creditors come to our office, there'll be somebody that

we're supposed to pay, but we don't have the money to pay them. So they s knock on the office and try to meet with me or somebody else and say, Hey, Tiny Co has this unpaid bill of twenty thousand dollars. You know, it's supposed to have been paid two months ago. What's going on? When are you gonna pay me? So that's also a really difficult period of time. And you're just pretending not to be there, or how are you dealing with the with this creditor at the door? Yeah. Um so we have this person named Susan Steele who's uh Steel Willed, that's where she got her name, I think. She goes and uh sort of deals with all of that and creates this artificial brick wall. And she does a really good job of figuring out which people do we need to pay right now.

Uh which ones can we sort of Pay thirty days, sixty days, ninety days, one hundred and twenty days from now. Um so she really uh handles that for us, actually. Gotcha. And so you get to the end. But I do remember one person quit and he quit because he was like I'm quitting because I signed this contract that says we were gonna pay them. And you have not paid them and I don't want to be at this company anymore. Right.

Fair. Yeah, and totally fair, uh legit thing to do. Um the the guy's a really great upstanding human being. I really like him and I've worked with him since then. Yeah, and and this is the thing. I mean success is not always pretty, right? There is a Uh

Not just difficulty, but there's just ugly patches where You do something wrong and then there's consequences of doing it wrong. Or You come short and now You don't have the money to pay the creditors. And so Uh this this goes all the way to the end where

You guys basically run out of money, uh and and are not able to ship the game. But w wha what happens there? What happened? Yeah, so we run out of money. Um I tell Andreessen Horowitz and I tell Silicon Valley Bank and both of them are kinda like Look, we're not gonna put any more money into this company. And uh I say, Okay, fine, totally understand it. I get that I missed the deadline that I created for myself.

I had invested in this company called Mo Pub, started by this guy, Jim Payne. And I'd invested a hundred thousand dollars into it. It got acquired by Twitter. And that hundred thousand dollars turned into a million dollars. So I said, okay, I just made this million dollars.

I'm gonna go put that money into the company. And that million dollars is gonna be behind the ten million dollars of debt that we've got from Silicon Valley Bank. And then Dreason Horowitz also says, Okay, for every dollar you're putting in, we're gonna put in a dollar. So they put a million dollars as well. So now we've got two million dollars. So you're putting your personal net worth basically Into the company.

in a spot where it's behind all this other debt. So you at this time do you think you'll ever see this money again, or w what was the thought process? Yeah, my my thought was this money is never coming back to me. There's no way that we're gonna be able to pay off Silicon Valley Bank and then be able to pay me off. Um And financially I felt like it was the wrong decision to make. But

Emotionally I just felt like I need to see this through. I've got come this far. Just need to see if this game is successful when we launch it. and I can't give up and if what it takes is me putting this money in and losing it to fight to turn that card over.

And find out whether there's an ace in the hole or not. I gotta do it. Unbelievable. And so you you do it. You put the money in.

Um Stomach and knots, I'm assuming. And uh does the company even know that you're putting your own personal net worth into the company at this point? Or is this sort of your your secret? Yeah, so it's it's something I keep secret. Only me and Susan Seele know and our investors and Silicon Valley Bank know. The last thing you want to do is tell y your team that okay, we've we ran out of money yesterday. There's there's nobody backing us but except for me. Right. That's not a good thing to tell anybody, so I keep that to myself. Gotcha. Okay. So you uh you end up shipping the game off this sort of bridge. That gives you how many months. Um that gives us the time that we need, maybe another sixty days or so, or ninety days to finish. So we launch it and you know, our goal was to get the the top spot in the app store featuring.

We spent sort of six months talking to Apple and wooing them and telling them about how great the game was and all the marketing that we were doing to support it. Um Fox does uh ads on television. Mm. Andrew Green and Mike Sanwick come up with this great marketing strategy where we have an event in LA that all these press show up to.

that get everyone who's a Family Guy fan to be amped up about it. So I come into the office the day that we launch the game We see that the apps are featuring is bad. And I think oh fuck. This company just died. What do you mean it's bad? What's bad? It's not there or it's just it's not. We expect that the featuring is gonna drive tens of millions of downloads over the next uh seven days.

And the featuring spot that Apple gives us is bad. So it's not gonna do that. So I come into the office, see that And say, okay, this company it's over. This is not gonna work.

And uh I leave the office at noon when I see this featuring. And we we just launched the game. Where did you go? I just went home and watched Netflix for two hours and fell asleep because I was so tired. And I was just like, Okay, I gotta move on with the rest of my life. This chapter is over and The bet that we made failed. So I fall asleep, I wake up the next day, I immediately go to look at our stats and I'm like, Oh

We just generated four hundred thousand dollars in revenue yesterday. So this is working. Holy fuck, this is actually working. We're winning. I run to the office and like rally the team and say, Wow, this is working. We did it, guys. And um It's just an amazing moment of joy and pride for the whole team. So many people work so hard. And I was really glad to see it work.

Amazing. And so that game takes off You guys have since gone on to build You know, the Family Guy games, the Harry Potter games, I mean that's incredible. You got the license to that. That huge franchise.

And so where did the company go from there? Just kind of get to the kind of the the the sort of the end of the Tiny Co chapter for you. Yeah, so w the day we launched the Family Guy game, it's about seventy five people Um we grow with a team to about a hundred and fifty people. We launch a Marvel game, we sign a Harry Potter deal and are working on a Harry Potter game. The Family Guy game goes on to do more than one hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred million in revenue at this point. We again offer to buy the business.

We hire an investment banker. This guy named Dick. Filipini to di uh who helps us get a couple more offers. We sell the business. The year that we sell we do we're doing about eighty five million in revenue, fifteen million in Ebida. About a hundred and fifty people at the time. Amazing.

And so you've since you sol you sell Tiny Co and you've since gone on to do a couple of other interesting things. You you and your brother started company called Native, uh Native Deodorant. It's it's a all natural deodorant that you know, started in a bedroom and is now sold And Target. Um and so I wanna just I wanna get your take on I guess like how do you even think of your own story since Tiny Kill? Like what what are you what jumps out to you as the highlights uh of what you've been up to since then and

We'll get into where you want to go from here. Yeah, I think one of the highlights is definitely Um working with my brother on native, so we we are living together at the time. And what he does is he goes and buys deodorant from Etsy m and we test it. at home. So

We put some of the deodorant that we bought from Etsy under each of our armpits. We go run a mile. Uh and then we sniff each other's armpit. to see is is this deodorant actually good. It's totally unscific, but also very effective.

not effective and we find one that works And he takes that and brands it native and starts marketing it. Over time he changes the formula.

uh happy to run a mile and be a guinea pig with different deodorants under your armpits or did you see like yeah this is gonna be it's gonna end up being huge'cause I remember when you first told me about it, it sounded like a cute business. It sounded You know, cool niche, but you know, didn't really get a sense that it would

And eventually, you know, Procter and Gamble sees this as something that it has to buy uh in a sort of nine figure transaction. I mean that's not that wasn't obvious at the beginning. Yeah. Um definitely not obvious at the beginning that you can build a meaningful business selling twelve dollar deodorant. Over the internet. Like you know, my

I think m my brother had the faith. I didn't have the faith in the business, but I had the faith in him. And I'd say the the sort of greatest joy of my career has been um, you know, working with him and seeing him succeed and helping native succeed. Uh one of the weird things I find about

working is I remember when I was graduating, I was like, you know, I want to be rich, I want to be successful. And over time it's been really surprising to me how much more joy and pride I take when other people are successful.

and when other people's careers sort of leapfrog because they worked at Tiny Co or at Native or at anything that I've worked on. So yeah, I think that it was really great to work with him on native and really he started the business and ran it. I provided some advice, brotherly advice, and helped him sell the business. Love it. And so uh and then

You kinda went back to the old formula. You went back to your parents' house just to visit. Got bored. Spun up a new business. I know we can't talk too much about it'cause it's in uh stealth mode right now. Normally stealth mode is like a pretty

uh like a lame thing. I when mo when most people come to me with a stealth idea, they're afraid to even talk about it. It's because They don't even know what they're doing. Um, they're so insecure about it that they don't want to talk about it. And they really haven't done anything yet. But this is different. This is The company's up and running. It's generating a ton of revenue. You're keeping it quiet.

totally respect that. So we won't go into what it is and how it works. Uh maybe for You know. the future podcast when you when you when you come back you can tell the story of of what's going on here. But you did go back to that formula. So I want to take the last Ten minutes here. And do rapid fire questions. So

First thing that comes to mind First answer is the best answer. Uh a couple of random off the wall questions. So uh let's take a little sip of water, get get to uh get to the to the rapid fire. Okay, so If you were twenty one years old today. You know, same pr same you, but you you gr just graduated today from college. What do you think you'd work on? So I think that

I would work on something in the biology space, uh genetics or uh bioengineering. I think In the last twenty years, what we've seen is the internet revolution and the computer revolution and the mobile phone revolution. I think the next twenty years is gonna be about hacking our bodies hacking genetics, being able to

sort of design babies before They're born eliminate disease at the genetic level, that kind of thing. You've heard the Peter Till question of you know what's something that you believe to be true that few others would agree with you on the other. Engineering is becoming a commodity in Silicon Valley. And that the next generation of entrepreneurs are gonna be not necessarily technical, but people who are

more well rounded in their skill set. If you could buy a a billboard. you know, on the one on one here in San Francisco and you got tens of thousands of people who are driving by it every day. It's just a blank billboard and you could write any one message that a whole bunch of people would see every day. What would you write on that billboard?

I think it's two things. One, for people who don't live in Silicon Valley and have never lived in Silicon Valley, uh I would say move to Silicon Valley, it will improve your life and you'll be better off ten years from now. 'cause I think the culture of Silicon Valley is really positive in making you realize that you can sort of will your hands and mind into making things that matter in the world. uh and that anybody can do it with any skill set, any experience.

Everybody in Silicon Valley is treats everyone else like they could be the next Mark Zuckerberg. And I really like living in a place where uh you're almost afraid to be mean to somebody because uh they could end up being uh successful and powerful. Here it doesn't matter what your last name is, doesn't matter your age, doesn't matter your resume, doesn't matter your the school you went to.

Everybody, even you know. You see somebody with a hoodie on and a and a bar. A hoodie and flip flops and uh sort of here the default assumption is that That might be That might be the next sec, right? And so you don't sort of judge the book by their cover uh here. You wait to see

What are they working on? What are their ideas and what are they capable of? Um So my last one is

you know, I believe is an important question everybody should ask themselves. Um The question is What's something that comes easily to you? that you see is quite difficult for others. I I say this is important question, you know, while you think of your answer because

For most people, we spend a lot of time doing things that we're really bad at, trying to get better at them because we think that that's what will improve things. But often it's better to figure out what's something that comes really easy to you, something you're really good at or you don't mind doing that other people seem to mind doing, or other people really struggle with, because that can be sort of the foundation that you use. So I'm curious for you. What's something that comes easily to you that you notice does not come so easily to others? I think it's faith. I think that a lot of people

I I sort of just believe that whatever I'm working on is gonna succeed over time. And I think I see a lot of people that kind of lose faith in what they're working on too quickly, or they'll have faith or lose faith on a regular basis. So I think for me it's having faith. And uh having a sense of urgency. Like I wake up every day.

and run to the office and say, you know, how can we win today? What do we need to do to win today? Those two things just come really Easily reason. And do you have the opposite? Something that you notice comes easily to others, but you find Really difficult for yourself to be able to do. discipline for other people it seems to me like they

can be really disciplined about their schedule and time in. Uh like it's my goal to work out every day. And I probably work out about fifty percent of days at best. And other people will say, I need to work out every day, and they'll just be able to do it. Nice. And last question, uh when's our next workout?

Uh let's go right after this. Okay. Fantastic. All right. Uh Silly, it's been amazing having you here. I knew you'd be an awesome guest for the podcast, even though you don't like to do podcasts. You don't like to talk too much about yourself, but I think this is This is an episode I would have wanted to listen to. So I thank you for coming. My pleasure. I think you're gonna do a great job. I'm so excited to see who else you have on on the podcast.

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