Latest / High Five Energy Founders / The Drummer of Linkin Park Led Him to a $1B Company | Scott Dudelson, Swag Bucks

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The Drummer of Linkin Park Led Him to a $1B Company | Scott Dudelson, Swag Bucks · High Five Energy Founders

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: If you have in you the ability to fail and not let that crush you, then you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's Scott Duddleton, co-founder of Protege and Swag Bucks, who after bootstrapping the company from his attic, sold it to private equity for over$1 billion.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: One of the key things of being an entrepreneur is understanding where your knowledge gaps are.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: Inherently, like I had no experience in anything.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like I got blessed this this happened.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: He pivoted from charity search engines to rewards, and it reveals why agility and the will to survive is the key.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: If you can just last long enough, you'll find what works.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: As an entrepreneur, survival is is key.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you could survive long enough and you can persevere, you could figure out where to go.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now he's one of the world's most published live music photographers, capturing everyone from Kendrick Lamar to Paul McCartney and mentors young entrepreneurs.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: If you believe in something and you have data to support it, just don't ever lose sight of what the market tells you.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: To me, that's how you get from zero to one.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: What's up, guys?
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Jeff.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a serial entrepreneur and investor.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: And on this podcast, I sit down with the world's top founders to unpack how they actually build, scale, and think to help entrepreneurs get the tools and inspiration they need to succeed.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: The first thing that a lot of entrepreneurs deal with is they have an idea and they've just been sitting on it.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: And people have like read books like just do it, just fucking do it.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: What was your just fucking do a moment?
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: When you were starting out, like what was it like for you?
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And what were people saying?
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: And was there a moment for you where you just had to just do it?
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: Throughout college, you know, I studied classical civilization in college, and people would ask me, What are you gonna do with a classical civilization degree?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, I'm gonna be an entrepreneur.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: I had an ambition to work for myself.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't have necessarily an ambition to be rich.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't have an ambition to be famous, but I had an ambition to not have a boss.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so after I, and I made that pretty clear when anybody would ask me what I'm doing.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: But after I graduated college, uh my peers would all start, you know, they get jobs in bank as a, you know, working in banks or, you know, at uh wherever, just traditional.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I still had this mindset that I'm not gonna go that route.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: And early early on, I would have a lot of friends who would tell me I'm crazy.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: They'd be like, when are you just gonna give up this idea?
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: I was living in an attic in this house and I had to climb this ladder.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: I couldn't stand up in my room.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: They're like, When are you gonna just give up and get a job that will pay you?
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, I'm I'm I'm never gonna do that.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like, if if I can live in this attic and I don't have a boss, and that's all that I have, that's pretty freaking good.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's pretty good for me.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, at but I I kept hearing in my ear my friends, a lot of people, because none of my friends were entrepreneurs, none of them had the ambition to start anything.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it started getting in my ear, and at one point I I went to UCLA for undergrad, and I'm like, oh, you know, I'll go check UCLA grad, you know, business school, the Anderson MBA.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: I'll see what that's all about.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I went to a I went to a um uh like an orientation and there was probably 80, 90 people in the room, all of them plus or minus my age, a few years, wearing suits, dressed really like dapper, ready to be bankers.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I walk in with sandals, long hair, big ass beard, and I realize that like I'm just I'm not this is different.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: This is a whole different uh world for me.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like I'm I'm not gonna be accepted in this banking world.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not gonna conform to any of the standards or the norms that you know people would expect from me.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, just from from that early, early time, I just knew I was gonna do I was gonna do something.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it didn't matter if people thought I was crazy.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't peep it didn't matter if I was gonna make a lot of money, it just mattered that I could do what I want.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: So what was the moment?
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: So for for what became Protege, what was that first early moment of what the company was and how it got started?
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell Well the early the early moment and the the backstory, and we we talked about this a little when we when we we chatted before, it's like there's serendipity in in every story and magic in every story and how these things come together.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: And the the founding story of Protege uh I find pretty interesting and it's it's magical and how everything connects.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I grew up uh in the San Fernando Valley, and one of my friends growing up was the drummer of Lincoln Park and very nice guy, just a really, really great guy.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: But we didn't keep in touch after after school.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but after school, uh after college, I was doing my own uh consulting work.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: This is when I was living in this attic, and I was raising money for nonprofits.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the uh and I was putting on a lot of benefit concerts, it was like music and nonprofits.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the clients I was trying to get was the Grammy Foundation, the recording academy.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I was courting them very hard, and they really liked me.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: And in 2006, they invited me to the Grammys.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: And it happened to be on my birthday, February 8th, 2006.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like, oh, this is great.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: So they gave me two tickets, I invited my mom, and I got there, and we go to our seats, and they gave us front row tickets to the Grammys.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like this is the stage where everyone's on.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like right in front.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like, wow, this is incredible.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I look back, right behind me is Lincoln Park, Paul McCartney, and Jay-Z.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: Because they were all gonna be playing together.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I look, I do a double take, I'm like, holy fuck.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like, Rob, what do you you know?
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: And Rob's looking at me doing a double take.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, what are you doing in in the front?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so I start explaining, I start explaining to him, like, hey no, I'm doing this nonprofit work.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, Oh, that's awesome.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we have a nonprofit called Music for Relief, which they start, Lincoln Park started for to benefit victims of the Indonesian tsunami.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like 2004, 2005.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: And he's like, you know, maybe there's something you could do with us.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, we we met this guy who's got a pretty interesting idea to raise money for our charity using internet search.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I don't know what you're really even telling me, but if you're willing to hook me up with this guy, that would be really cool.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, yeah, no problem.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: Next day he sets an introduction to his attorney.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: The attorney connects me with this gentleman, his name's Josef Gurowitz, uh, who had this idea for what became protege.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: It was just an idea at that time.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I immediately, when I met this guy, I was just like, this is this is my lifelong homie.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: This is gonna be what I do.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I'm dropping my consulting firm, which is just me and not making a lot of money, which didn't matter.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: Because again, as long as I could live in my attic and I didn't have somebody like hounding on me, it was all good.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like if I can make my own schedule, I could go do what I want.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: That was the moment, uh, you know, and I owe it to the drummer of Lincoln Park, a guy named Rob Borden, who's just a generous, incredible man who dude doesn't have to help anybody, but he did.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And what was that original idea for the company?
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: The original idea of the company, so I was doing charity fundraising and I was doing putting on a lot of benefit concerts.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: I put on a lot of shows, and but I really felt that you know there's this is 2005, 2006, I thought there was a bigger opportunity than putting on shows.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: Putting on shows is a lot of cost, there's a lot of effort, and I'm like, there's gotta be a way online to make money for charity while I'm sleeping.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: So Yosef, his original idea that he brought to me was we're gonna create a search engine that's powered by Google or Ask or Yahoo, just a search engine.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: But we're gonna brand it to charities.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: So we're gonna put like an American Red Cross logo on it or whatever charity organization logo on it.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: And those organizations are gonna get their supporters to come on the site, use it, do their daily internet searches.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: And the way search engines make money is the first few results are sponsored.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: And whenever somebody clicks on those sponsored results, uh, the search engine provider gets paid.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: Advertisers pay for that.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so Yosef's original concept was we're gonna take that money from the search engine uh um from the ads, and we're gonna share that back with the nonprofits.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: Nonprofits are gonna be distribution, we're gonna collect the money, we're gonna share that money back with the nonprofits.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I was blown away.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, wow, I'm spending all this time putting on these concerts that don't net a lot of money.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe they get a lot of attention, maybe it's cool, I had a lot of fun, but it's not ultimately moving the needle of the nonprofits.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: And this I thought was a really innovative.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's 2005, 2006, a really innovative way to raise money for charity organizations.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: I just want to take a moment to talk about something that's really important to me and something I've been working on for years.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: If you like these conversations with founders, the mindset shifts, and the real questions behind building companies, I go much deeper on all that in my book, High Five Energy.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote it for people who are thinking about starting something or who already have, but want to lead with more clarity and purpose.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: The book gives you practical tools to get into high five energy flow state, attract the right people, and build in a way that actually feels aligned.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: High Five Energy includes interviews with 18 legendary founders who've had over 200 billion in exits and IPOs.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: If you're new to entrepreneurship or even just considering taking the leap, this book is for you.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: High Five Energy is available now wherever books are sold, or hit the link below.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: So, original idea, and we know that original ideas change over time.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh let's talk about pivoting.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because the pivoting is sort of the, you know, entrepreneurs are very rarely ending with the idea that they originally started with.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: Were there a lot of pivots?
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: Was it did the first idea end up becoming the main thing?
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there were there were a lot of pivots.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, as an entrepreneur, survival is is key.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you could survive long enough and you could persevere, persist, you know, you could figure out where to go.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, sometimes it's just timing.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so with this original business model, it was pretty interesting to me because you know, anytime people whenever I tell people search engines, they're like, oh, I never click on sponsored results.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: But it's like clockwork.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like 5% of people, 5% of searches will end up as sponsored result clicks.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: So it was always a matter of not it wasn't a matter of will this idea make money?
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's a question of how much money will this idea make.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that always depended on the distribution.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: Will the nonprofits bring users to us?
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: And if nonprofits brought users to us, we will make money.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: So in the early days, um, again, I keep bringing back 2005, 2006, and it was past the internet uh bust, things are starting to pick up again.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: But nonprofits are very, very slow to grasping how to raise money online.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I would pitch nonprofits, I'd try to get them on board.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them did get on board, but it was it was like pulling teeth.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: Just it was it was a fundamental misunderstanding of how it worked, how they promote it.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: But we did get a few nonprofits on board, and some of those sites made eight dollars a month, nine dollars a month, twelve dollars a month.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: And that seems horrible.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: Like you could look at that and be like, well shit, you've made thirty-five dollars this month.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: I looked at it and I'm like, this shit works.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: This really works because you know, we may only have 400 people using the site right now, but you know, if we get more people, it's just like clockwork.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: This thing will print money.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: So at a certain point, we realized with the nonprofits, we're like, they just don't get it.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: They're not gonna be the distribution we we we need.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so my background, I had a lot of contacts in the music industry through this nonprofit fundraising I was doing, and they trusted me at that time.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm like, well, maybe we should get the bands involved, and we'll create branded search engines for the bands.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: So it would be like uh a Google search engine, but branded to Maroon 5.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: And Maroon 5 would tell their fans to uh use the site, and we added a special, an extra twist to it because we knew that people aren't just gonna use a Maroon 5 branded search engine.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: And we added this element of search the web and win rewards.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: So search the web on your maroon five branded search engine, win Adam Levine autographs, earn a meet and greet with Adam Levine, and that was gonna be the distribution.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: So we built out this network of it's probably at its peak, 200 sites.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's like Beyonce and uh Kanye and the New York Giants, WWE World Wrestling Association, Green Bay Packers.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: As we were doing that, we started making real money.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: So we saw when WWE promotes this or KISS promotes this, we're making now$1,000 a day because they're getting more users in.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: And we're like, okay, this works.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: But what ended up happening, so we built that for about two years, and it was good.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: We were making a very lean team, it was probably like six of us who were making a few million dollars a year.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: It was very good.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: It was very, very good.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: But over time, what we realized was our incentives, the my company's incentives and the band and the brand's incentives were not aligned.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: A sports team or a band, their business is selling music, selling merchandise.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's not promoting a search engine.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's like tangential to what they what they do.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: So we'd launch these sites, they'd promote it, they give us rewards, people would use it, great.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: But over time, there would be a lot of attrition because we'd we'd run out of prizes.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: And when you have no prizes, people don't want to use your site.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: The artists would go out of cycle, because when an artist releases a record, they want to promote, they want to be active, but when they go off tour, they don't have a record, they're just quiet.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: So they didn't want to promote us anymore.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: So as time went on, you know, we'd be making, you know, let's say three, four million uh top line a year, but every month it would go down.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: And the only way to get it back up was getting more bands, more sports teams.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: And there's an infinite amount.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like we could have done that forever, but we knew that there was no long-term strategy.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: So, like, okay, we need to pivot this again to figure, because we know, we know that people will use this, we know people want free stuff, um, but we need to find something that's sustainable and that we control our destiny.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so the big, the big realization was that, and we created the same exact product that we had with all the bands, but we called this one swag bucks.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: And instead of earning Beyonce autographs or Adam Levine meeting greets, you'd earn Amazon gift cards.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's it.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: PayPal Cash, Amazon gift cards.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: And within months of launching that, it was a rocket ship.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: That was the pivot that that really allowed us to break free.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: You gotta survive long enough to find the right thing.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so we started this thing early 2006.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: Early um, mid-2008 is when we launched the swagbucks product, and it coincided right when the economy crashed.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: Stock market tanked, people were losing jobs.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: It was pretty 2008 was a rough time.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so we had this product, though, that allowed you to do what you're doing every day.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: You're searching the web.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody's searching the web every day, all day.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: We had this product that you could do that and we'll pay you for it.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: So that value proposition was appealing.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so as we we launched this, we started looking at the analytics, you know, and everybody should, if you have a product or anything, you always look at your analytics like fucking live and die by your analytics, look and die, live and die on who's referring traffic to you and forging those relationships.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so it was a lot of mommy bloggers at the time.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: Mommy blogging didn't even exist.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't exist.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: There were just blogs that were moms, and they wanted to teach people how to, you know, get free diapers for their children because they're, you know, the families were struggling.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: So I saw in our analytics, it was like money saving mom was referring us, you know, 200 people a day.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like, oh, this is interesting.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: I contacted them.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: Turns out you know, the money saving mom was still exists, it's still a huge mommy blogging site.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: I owe her a lot.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I was talking to her and I was asking, like, where did you even come up, come across Swagbox?
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: She's like, Oh, used to you, we had a site with Winona Judd.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: She's like, I used to use the Winona Judd search engine, and then you guys ran out of rewards for it.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, through we used to promote cross promotes.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: If you ran out of Winona Judd rewards, you could go to Miranda Lambert or wherever.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: And she found Swagbox, and she's like, this is actually really brilliant because my husband just lost his job, and this is a way in which I'm actually paying for the diapers I need for my children.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, oh, this is this is great.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I forged this relationship with her, and then it was it was wild because over the the next like two or three months, I'd look at the analytics every day, and it'd be a new mommy blog, a new blog.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: It could be coupon saving moms, whatever it was, was referring traffic to us.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: What ended up happening is there was, I'll call them like the master mommy blogs.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: The first few inspired everybody, inspired all these other mommy blogs.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: And because the original mommy blog, the master mommy blog, was promoting us and she was trustworthy, all the other blogs started theirs and started promoting us.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so every day I'd see new blogs were sending traffic to us.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'd reach out to them, I'd thank them, I'd form an affiliate relationship with them.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: And it was huge.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know, within the first year, let's say, this wasn't the first year of the company, this is like three years into the company, but that first year when we launched Swag Bucks, I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was something like, let's say we were doing two million a year, it went to like 14 million.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: It was huge.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: We were uh ranked, I think, number two for the in the LA Business Journal's fastest growing company, just because of those, you know, this pivot we made and the insight we had of the mommy blogs that these are going to be our huge champions.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, now 15 years later, 18 years later, mommy blogging is huge.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, those bloggers make a lot of money, and every brand, CPG or internet, all of them want to be involved with them.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: And we got really lucky.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's the timing.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: We were there at that time when they were starting and they loved us.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: I have this concept around just being human in entrepreneurship, where we're in living in this world where there's hate, there's competition, there's trying to be number one versus a lot of the energy around the kin, right?
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: I talk about conscious entrepreneurship as this being a person and treating people with respect and empathy.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: How do you think that influenced or didn't influence your path and your communication with these mom bloggers and all of it?
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, we the whole company started as an altruistic venture.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: Again, we our goal wasn't to make a shitload of money.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: It would have been very nice, but it was all about how can we do good and give ourselves a good, healthy life.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so, like in our core was good.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: We were always trying to do good.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: And as we got and pivoted and we got into these like reward programs, we also recognized that at that time the history of the web was just littered with scams.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you were offered something for free online in 2006, 80%, 90%, you were gonna get ripped off.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: You were you weren't gonna get what you what you were promised.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so we always went out with it in the idea that we're gonna be the most trustworthy um brand out there.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: If you earn points from us, you will be able to redeem those from Amazon for Amazon gift cards, and you will get the Amazon gift cards.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so really early, we you know instilled that trust by doing everything we can to ensure that our customers got the value that they they did they desired and they deserved.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: And because of that, those mommy bloggers would write about us and say, hey, this isn't a scam.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: This is real.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: Here's, you know, a picture of all the diapers and all the Amazon stuff we've gotten from this company.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: And that authenticity and that truthfulness was it just separated us from everybody, and that that helped grow it.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: I know you went on a a VC run.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: You you didn't raise money for a long time.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, the general concept of finding your champions out there, whether it be investors or people you're selling to, you have to find the champion within the organization, within the partnership of the VC that truly believes and like praises you and becomes your biggest advocate.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have those people across across the journey?
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: And like you said, we we didn't raise any money.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: We bootstrapped this company.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: My partner put in uh some of his money.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: We found a dentist who gave us a little money, and we built this thing to you know a hundred million dollars without raising any money.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's extraordinary.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: And there were people along the way.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: This guy right here, Ross, wrote.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Ross helped help me a lot.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: But we we went up to Silicon Valley to great uh to meet all the all the big VCs, and it was demoralizing.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: It was like I went up there with a lot of confidence.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, we've got this amazing business that we built without outside help, it's churning out profit.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: And as we go up there, we would get uh shunned.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, people did not either understand it, they'd look at me.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: I had a big ass beard, I had really long hair, I had sandals, my partner doesn't look like my partner's a genius.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: Genius.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: Does not, you know, we don't both don't fit that look, that mold.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: So people didn't really want to get involved with us.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: We took like 15, 20 meetings, but there was one meeting where there was a dude in the meeting who was a partner.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: His name is Chuck Davis.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: Chuck Davis ultimately became the CEO of my company.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: We pitch the investors, Chuck's in that meeting.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: Chuck comes up to us after, and he goes, he's like, I don't know if these guys are going to invest.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: I can't tell you, I don't know.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: They'll talk about it, but this isn't really necessarily in their wheelhouse, but we'll see.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: But he's like, I get this.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: I know this, and I know what you're doing, and I like you guys, and this is this is real.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: So Chuck Davis was the um former CEO of Fandango, which he sold for you know 500 plus million.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: He was the former CEO of Shopzilla, which was you know over$500 million exit.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: This guy was like legit.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: He was one of the first guys in this whole entire run who's like, I like you, I get it, let me help you.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: So he's like, I'm in LA, you know, let's talk, let's see, you know, what we could do.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: So he started digging into our business, said, okay, you know, I built, he's like, I built two big businesses, I've got a team, I know the people who know how to do this, who know how to scale you from where you're at to a billion dollars.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, he's like, he had the vision.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, I know what to do.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: So he's like, you need a CFO and you need a CTO and you need this HR.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: And he just started bringing in all his old, you know, cohorts, the people who he built, you know,$100 million,$500 million companies with.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: And that that was that was transformative to our business, bringing in a lot of these people.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: And then ultimately, Chuck uh, you know, he got very involved and he wanted to become CEO, and he brought in of investors with it.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like, and that's how we ended up getting our investment, uh, first investment with uh technology crossover ventures in 2014 was because of uh Chuck.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: And how'd the company culminate?
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like what happened after that?
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: And like take take me to the exit.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so so in 2014 we had a very big exit to TCV.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: I ostensibly I left the company at that point.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: I have a lot of passions beyond being an entrepreneur, and I have a lot of things that I want to do and that I like doing.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, well, I did this for eight years and it was really successful.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: I got really fucking blessed.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna go.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so I still kept some skin in the game.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: I kept a lot of skin in the game.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so Chuck and my partner Yosef, who stayed and who just left a couple weeks ago after, you know, almost 20 years, they they had real vision.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like they knew what we had, what me and Yosef built was a pretty powerful revenue machine, and we had a ton of data.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: Chuck and Yosef recognized that that data needs to be structured a specific way and creating products around it.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: So the short of it is they they um they continued scaling the company so from 2014 to 2021.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: In 2021, uh they sold it for over a billion to private equity.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: What was one of the if you met if like if they if they were here today, like how would they describe the company and like what it does?
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: The company they would describe now would be, you know, an online market research firm.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: So what we ended up having a ton of data on hundreds of millions of people, their preferences, um, their interests.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: It was really it was pretty powerful, but it was unstructured.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so we we started adding a survey product where Fortune 500 companies or anybody really could go and survey these users, and those users would get Amazon gift cards for doing it.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: And that product and that vision became the huge growth, the 10x uh of the company.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I guess when I left, let's say the company was worth, you know, 120 million or something.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: And by the time these guys did what they did, it was over a billion.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of entrepreneurs, I meet a lot of these entrepreneurs, I know a lot of entrepreneurs, and a lot of entrepreneurs think they know everything and they know exactly what to do, and they don't necessarily like delegating, or they don't necessarily like getting other people involved because it's gonna mess up their vision.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: But really, one of the key things of being an entrepreneur is delegating.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's also understanding where your knowledge gaps are.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I I understood uh inherently, like I had no experience in anything.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like I got blessed that this happened.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I even recognize that the the where we got, let's say at 120 million, is only a fraction of what it could be if we had the right people who knew how to scale it.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so when we meet somebody like Chuck Davis, who has that experience, instead of like putting the guard up and saying, This is mine, like we opened up and said, No, dude, show us the way.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: He was enrolled in your vision.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and he had he had his own, he had his own.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: He like he was enrolled in our vision to begin with, and then after he got into it, he he just knew the different different parts.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: He he always would say, There's a starting pitcher when a baseball game, he loved sports.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, there's a starting pitcher, and then there's the relief pitcher.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you get you're the starting pitcher, Scott.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: You get this game started.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: You you get it to where we're ahead and we're you know, we're we're doing great, and then you bring in the relief pitcher.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: Bring in the middle pitcher, the middle relief, and you bring in the relief pitch to close the whole thing.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: And he always described him and his team as those middle relief and those relief pitchers.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: Take what you do, solidify it, and uh make sure it it closes.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, a lot of these folks are earlier in their career, of their entrepreneurship journey.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: Where did that same concept of enrollment and like getting people into division show up in the beginning stages of the team?
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: So the the very beginning, protege was interesting because we had no money and we needed people to do things.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I happen I I grew up with a bunch of really like talented people who I just love and they're they're great.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I think they had entrepreneurial spirit also, but they had gotten themselves into jobs that were not gonna produce anything in their lives that beyond a nine to five.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I convinced two of my best friends uh to join me.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: Said, you know, you're making uh 20 bucks an hour or whatever.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: Come make less than that, but you know, you won't have a boss.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: The upside of it could be huge.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I enrolled them.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I enrolled two of my best friends, my partner Yosef.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: He my Yosef is a very interesting man.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he came from a yeshiva background, which is like a Jewish um school for boys.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: So not a traditional college, not a traditional education.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like he had a religious background.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's what he said.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't study you know English or history, he studied the Torah.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so all his f all his friends were similar to that, but they they were also, some of them were coders, some of them were just entrepreneurial in their own way.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: So he also managed to convince some of his people to work for very little to nothing.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: We gave everybody equity.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: That was another thing, is we share, we were very generous, sharing equity with the early people.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that ended up paying up great because there was a lot of people who became very wealthy when the exit happened.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they started off working for nothing and they became millionaires because of it.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: Was there a way for you to, you know, I meditate, especially when I am in the throes of it and I just need that that ended it?
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: But meditation for me is like 20 minutes silent.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I do it, sometimes I don't.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: And meditation is other things to other people.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: How did you find your path of like tranquility throughout this journey, if any?
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: I I've never been a good meditator.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: I want to be good at meditating, but when I get focused on something, I get really into what I do.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so simultaneous, um, so I'll give a little backstory and then I'll get into that.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_01: While I was I had this consultant company producing benefit concerts, I was also writing for a lot of music magazines.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I really liked it and I made a lot of great contacts, but I was never felt myself as a good writer.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: And it took me a lot of time to write.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: So as I was getting this company going, I just found myself with less and less time to do my journalistic efforts.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: But I would go, I still had a crazy passion for music, crazy passion to go to live concerts.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: And every time I go to a show, you know, right in front of the stage, there's a little area, a little barricade.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: And in that barricade would be photographers.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I always thought, I'm like, that's pretty fucking cool.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: These people are right in front of the stage, they got the best seats, and they're taking pictures and they go home, they just have to download their photos and edit them and send them.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas I'm at these shows and I now have to write reviews, I have to do interviews, it takes a lot of time.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I had an idea, this is probably around 2006, 2007.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, I'm gonna become a photographer.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I hit up one of my editors who I wrote with for a long time, and I told him that I was an amazing photographer, which is not true.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'd never taken a picture outside of a point and click in my life.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: And he's like, Oh, that's really great.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: You could, you know, I'll get you an assignment for a specific festival, which happened to also be serendipitously, Lincoln Park was playing it.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the first bands I ever photographed was Lincoln Park.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, so I I that day I went out and I bought a camera and I went to this festival and I got hooked.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: Because the thing about, you know, when you're at a concert, when you see live music, it's it's live.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: Like these moments happen and then these moments pass.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: And if you miss that moment, you miss that moment.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: So when I'm in the photo pit and I've got my camera and the camera's up against my eye, and Chester Bennington or whoever's running around doing something, there's a moment you got to capture.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: And if you your mind goes elsewhere, you miss that moment and you're done.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: You miss the shot.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so it really was pretty powerful because I'd be obsessed with my company all day, every day.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like that was my life.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_01: Like the company fails, then I got to figure out something new to do.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then that would, you know, I'm neurotic in my own unique ways.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: So that would go on.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: And but when I was in the photo pit and I'm taking the pictures, the world melted.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: Like my business didn't exist, my dramas didn't exist.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: The only thing that mattered was this band is right in front of me, and I'm gonna get this great shot.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: And after that first show, like I felt it in my heart.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, this is this is what I'm, you know, I'm meant, I think I'm meant to do a lot of different things because I have a lot of different passions.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm like, this is this is one of the things I'm meant to do.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so throughout the run of my protege career, three nights a week at least, I would go out and I'd photograph concerts.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I became friends with a lot of music photographers.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: I that became like a network, and none of those people knew I had a business.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: None of them knew I did anything but music photography.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: Because when I was doing that, nothing else mattered.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like all I cared about was getting, you know, pumped up to get the best shot that I can.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: And when I'm in there, just literally trying to capture that moment.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I have this whole concept of identification.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like for me with my first company, Ride Amigos, there was a big deal.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: It was the early days, and I just sort of became obsessed with closing this one contract that was going to change the course of our history.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: We were gonna get VC funding, and I started dreaming about it, and the CEO of the company we're partnering with went cold.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it just sort of became part of my identity.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like, Ride Amigos was me.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: I was Ride Amigos, and then I read this book called In The New Earth by Eckhart Tole, and for the first time understood that, like, oh, wait a second, like this is this separate thing that I'm working on, and it's not me.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I need to disassociate myself from this other thing.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that really helped me for the rest of my career.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think photography helped you do that with with Protege?
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh absolutely.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it gave me a different path in life to pursue.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_01: And to this day, I mean, what I do mostly now is this music photography.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and you know, I never associated myself as an entrepreneur.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: I don't I still don't.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_01: I don't associate myself as a photographer.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_01: I do podcasts, I'm a podcaster.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: I don't associate myself doing that.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm just a dude that has a lot of passions and I want to pursue all those passions.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm pretty competitive and I don't need to win.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: I don't need to win, but I don't like losing.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I just, you know, need to go as hard as I can and pursue these different things.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: When you reflect back on this journey with Protege from the early days of the addict to you being in the pit, getting the closing documents on this crazy journey, what do you think the biggest lesson or one of the many lessons that will really, if you were to pass that along to young entrepreneurs out there and give them a piece of advice as they're thinking about jumping in or thinking about quitting their job or this thing that they think is a good idea, but they haven't gone for it?
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: What advice would you give to them if they happen to be sitting in front of you right now?
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: Two things.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, one is perseverance.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's not easy.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like starting a company is not easy.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like those deals you think are gonna go game change your business often don't game change your business.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: Like the things you think are gonna be the biggest thing for you are not the biggest thing for you.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: So it's about getting through those barriers and those blocks.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's really, really important.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: And then also not getting married to any specific idea.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you you should always, as an entrepreneur, you should always be looking at the data.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: The data needs to dictate where you go.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: And some people, I've seen this over the years, I've invested in companies that have that have failed because of this.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's like they're married to an idea.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: This is what my company is, this is what my company does, and this is how we're gonna get there.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: And when the data shows you otherwise and you keep pursuing the same path, you're gonna fail.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_01: So that's where pivots come in.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's like really understanding what's working about what you're doing, what's not working about what you're doing, and doubling down on the things that do work.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, you you just I there's for every Chuck Davis, there's five people who said, we're gonna game change your business, we're gonna make you so rich, we're gonna do all this that just don't come through.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_01: But I I always I like people, I like people, and I like talking to people.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: And anybody who has a willingness to help me, like that's a blessing because I've had so many people in my life who don't want to help me or have told me what I'm doing is stupid.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: So if somebody wants to help me, I'll go pursue it and I'll go talk to them and I'll keep going with it, and then you eventually find out who's legit and who's not.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't hate on anybody who isn't legit, but I know that that's not where I'm gonna go spend my time or energy.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: But the people that are legit will come through for you with something.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: A guy like Chuck Davis came through, it's like he doesn't just say you need a CFO.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like we didn't even think, like, why would you need a CFO?
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: What does a CFO even do?
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: But this guy says you need a CFO, and I know the guy who you need to have.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: And that guy came in and he explained to us why you need a CFO.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_01: We're like, okay, versus the people who just say, we're gonna make you rich, and then they don't come through with anything.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: I was a cool boss.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: I was good at delegating because I'm I don't know if I'm I wouldn't say I'm like really smart, but I am smart enough to know what I don't know.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm really, really open to giving empowering people to do things uh that may be a little risky, that may be a little off-center, and give them that that opportunity.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: Because that was always my fear of having a boss.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, and I never really I've never I had bosses, like I worked at Barnes Noble, I was a short order cook.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_01: I had a lot of jobs growing up, and they would basically tell me what to do.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, sometimes I liked it, sometimes I'm like, I don't know if I agree with that.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_01: So I was I was never somebody who told them exactly what to do.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: I would talk with them, we go through it and empower them to do it.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like people trusted me too because I was always I was different.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: I looked, I just looked different.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: Right now I look kind of normal.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: But in the days where I was doing this company, I had like hair down to here, I had a beard that was like down to here, I didn't own shoes for like 15 years.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_01: It was a whole different mode where people felt, I feel like they felt comfortable.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: They felt like this isn't the stuffy corporate deal.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and and I kind of try to instill that with all the people who ultimately became bosses, just like find good people, hire fast, fire fast.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_01: I always believed in that.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: I fired a lot of people.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: I was still a good boss, but if something's not good, you you don't double its data, you don't double down on something that's not good.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: But you empower the people that do good and let them keep going.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: If you got value from this conversation, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss future episodes.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: This podcast is about sitting down with people who've actually built things and unpacking the mindset, decisions, and moments that make the difference.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for being here.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.