← Earn Your Leisure
Earn Your Leisure
Sold a Company for $75M & Didn’t Get Paid 🤯 The Business Secrets They Don’t Tell Entrepreneurs
01:11:44
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A
Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads. Supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-IHeart. When segregation was a law, one mysterious black club owner, Charlie Fitzgerald had his own rules.
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B
Segregation in the day, integration at night. It was like stepping in another world.
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A
Was he a businessman? A criminal, A hero?
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B
Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him.
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A
Charlie's Place from Atlas Obscura and visit Myrtle Beach. Listen to Charlie's place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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C
Saturday, May 2, country's biggest stars will be in Austin, Texas, at our 2026 I Heart Country Festival presented by Capital One. Tickets are on sale now. Get yours before they sell out@ticketmaster.com that's Ticketmaster.
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A
When segregation was a law, one mysterious black club owner, Charlie Fitzgerald had his own rules.
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B
Segregation in the day, integration at night. It was like stepping in another world.
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A
Was he a businessman, a criminal, a hero?
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B
Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him.
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A
Charlie's Place from Atlas Obscura and visit Myrtle Beach. Listen to Charlie's place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
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D
When I did the podcast with you all, I was telling you probably the most impactful interview I've done in my career.
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B
Real heroes.
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E
I heard Rashad Detroit talk about the
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D
tax letter, about finance, but we talk in a language that is common to the people, that's from the community that we grew up in.
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E
You all are the bright spot.
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B
Thank you.
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D
Real estate.
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E
Thank you. And entrepreneurship for black Americans.
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B
This is the knowledge that actually matters.
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D
I applaud both of you for this.
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E
Thank you.
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D
Literacy isn't a country issue. It's not an American issue. It's a world issue.
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B
We came to earn our leisure.
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E
All right, guys. Welcome back. Eyl. We have a special guest, a friend of ours, somebody that we've worked with for several years and somebody that's been doing a lot of work behind the scenes and now stepping more into the forefront as far as championing creator equity ownership. Things that's very near and dear to our heart. So Jeff Fromer, CEO of Own, which is a equity creator platform launched in 2025.
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B
That's right.
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E
And before that, you had Malka.
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B
That's right.
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E
And you sold that, exited that.
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B
Yeah. To a public company. It was pretty good.
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D
Yeah, that's when we met you.
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B
Yeah, we met before. We had sold actually when you gu came on all the smoke.
- [02:59]
D
Yes, yes, yes.
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B
With Barnes and Stack just still running, those guys have been killing it. Absolutely killing it. Now own the boxing world, which is amazing. Yeah.
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E
So let's, let's, let's start the story first and foremost. Thank you for coming. Appreciate it.
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D
For sure.
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E
So let's start with the, the Malka, because that's where we, that's where we met you.
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B
That's right.
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E
And at that time we, we wasn't familiar what Mala was, but you guys were pretty powerful. You, I want you to explain it because I might misword it, but you kind of had ownership in all of these podcasts, like all the Smoke, Mike Tyson's podcast, all that, all of that.
- [03:34]
D
Barry Owen was there too.
- [03:35]
B
Yeah, we had a ton look, but it didn't start there. In 2013, 2014, Lewis had this idea to build the production company of the future. And we had this thesis of Hollywood level content at the speed of culture. Could you be really fast? Could you be inexpensive? And could you create something really premium? And back then what was happening is the legacy production companies were being paid 50,000 bucks to spend two weeks producing a piece of content for Snapchat that would be seen today and gone tomorrow. And we were like, that's crazy. And so kind of two guys and a dog. I was working at Adobe at the time helping media publishers go through digital transformation. I had always had this passion for creative and we got going and fast forward 10 years, we grew it to a little more than 200 full time employees. We built a film division. So we made eight feature films from back in time to on Netflix, to the TUA documentary, to stuff on Amazon and Fox. We bought a talent agency. So we got to got a chance to represent professional athletes on and off the field and then kind of saw where the puck was going around. The idea of making content where you can tell a great story and then you have the talent that helps amplify that story. But you needed to own distribution. Right. Obviously you guys get it. You know, when you talk, people listen. Right. And so if you were just a creative agency or production company and you just make a piece of content, you're not in charge or in control of how successful that can be. And so because we had so many editors and animators on staff, we were one of the largest production companies on the east coast. Showtime came to us and asked us if we could help them build a digital property. And that helped us kick off our studio in LA in 2016, which ultimately we grew to about 50 celebrity first shows, from Mike Tyson's Hot Boxing to all the smoke with Barnes and Stack. We worked with kg, we did stuff with Theo Vaugh, and we were reaching, you know, around 100 million people a month across, you know, audio and video. You know, we had this idea around, always on and everywhere. So, you know, today everyone was talking about clipping, you know, like, oh, make some piece of content, clip it, push it everywhere. We were doing that in 2016, you know, organically. You know, that's how, you know, people find you. They're on social, they might see a sound bite, they might see something that's a one minute snippet and then they keep seeing those little bits, you know, like, where is that long form story? I want to hear from Rashad and Troy about what they're building. And that's how we drove a lot of our fans organically to our long form YouTube page. And, you know, look for, for me and I think for every entrepreneur out there, you want to think about a flywheel and you want to think about when you, no matter what you sell, if you acquire a customer right, that is earning that person's trust, and if you can only provide them with one solution and one product that they can buy, you're not really capitalizing on that earned trust that you have with them. And so what we did was we just started to ask our customers in the early days when we were making content, like, what else do you need? What other vendors are not doing a good job? What problems are you trying to solve? And that led us to getting into talent, building a distribution network and really creating a flywheel so that once I acquired one single customer, I could land and expand across all the other media opportunities that they really needed as a brand marketer to tell their story to a mass audience.
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D
Yeah, you built a pretty strong portfolio. I'm wondering now, I'm sure everybody is wondering, why leave right at the time where we feel like especially talent led shows are reaching a climax? You're seeing it, you've been in it for a long time. Why decide to say, all right, it's time to move on, to do something different?
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B
Yeah, look, you know, we bootstrapped the business. That means we didn't raise any outside capital, you know, and I think if anyone's out there trying to figure out how to grow their business, you know, you have two choices. You can look for outside capital, venture Investors or angel investors that are gonna give you money to help grow a business with an expected return. Or you can go to a bank, right? And a bank could look at your balance sheet and say, you know what, I'll give you a line of credit or I'll give you a loan. And that's what we did. And so that's how we grew the business. And as we grew the business, you know, you start to create, you know, awareness and SP this is like 2019, 2020. You know, we had some conversations with some really powerful people who knocked on the door and said, hey, we, we'd love to talk to you about acquisition and we'd love to talk to you about, you know, how you could be more strategic in a larger Holdco. And you know, then in 2021 we, we had a, a knock on the door from someone who, you know, we, at that time was a client we trusted. They had a similar vision to us. And you know, financially it just made sense. And, and I think when you build something, you don't necessarily come out the gate saying, oh, I want to exit or I know exactly what the outcome is going to be. You just build it, right? And you just keep figuring out, are you happy, are you having fun? And you know, is this the right decision to take the next step? Either jump into a pool of a public company and get to learn from people who have experience that you could never have imagined sitting at the same dinner table with. And you know, when we got that offer, offer to be acquired, at the time, it just made a lot of sense. And I think looking back, like today with Netflix buying shows like you guys, there's so much opportunity for what you have built today. Way more. When we were in 2021, right at the time of sale. And I live life with no regrets, right? I think everything is both earned and learned right through experience. But at the time, man, when someone's offering you life changing money, right? And you, you know, my dad was a cop, my mom was a teacher. You know, my wife emigrated from Poland, didn't come with much. Like lived in a one bedroom apartment. Like that's the thing where you got to say, what if, you know, what if I don't? What if I do?
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E
Well, let's take it back a little bit. What exactly did Malcolm do for these, come for these shows? Did you own the shows?
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B
Yeah, for some of the shows. Like, like, you know, you, you want look, you know, ownership in equities, right? Really important. And so for a lot of the shows we had Ownership in the show.
- [09:57]
E
So you, so you co own the show, you co owned the show with the talent, right? In return, you took care of all of the media stuff, you shot the episodes for them.
- [10:05]
B
We provided production, we provided social media clips, marketing, social, the talent. And this is like the same thing if you're building the business, right? Like if you're a creator or a talent out there, you have a superpower, right? And that superpower is making engaging content and telling incredible stories and keeping fans to kind of hang on every last word of yours. The question is, who's doing the work? Who's doing the operations behind the scene? And so for Malka, we were the work, we were the engine. You know, talent could show up. We built the studio. We had producers, we had production, we had editors. You'd walk in, there'd be food. Like we had a facility like you want to be able to show up, do your business best job and make sure someone is out there making the, the best content for you and putting money in your pocket, right? And so that's what we did. And in return for that, we had a, we had skin in the game. We were both aligned and incentivized the talent and my team and, and Malka, the ownership to make the most successful product that we possibly could.
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E
So you, you own, you co own a lot of the shows. You did all of the, the, the legwork for the artist. All they did was just come in and just record. You sold the company how much you sell the company for?
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B
75 million.
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E
And then that gets split with the people that you own the shows with
- [11:24]
B
as well or no, the ownership of the shows was on the revenue side. So when you think about like equity of the shows, you know, like the ownership of the show was still owned by the talent, right? So you know, when I think about building a network in the future, right, if I was to go out and do it again, I think, you know, having all of the talent have equity in the larger Holdco makes a lot more sense so that everyone understands that they're not, you know, what I would call IC individual contributors, right? They're all a part of a network and you have some weighted value. So if I said, okay, hey, I want to do a roll up of, you know, media shows, right? Okay, everyone has, let's call it a million followers each. There's 10 of them. So everyone has 10% of the larger Holdco. Now we can structure, rev share individually on each individual show. Maybe you know, this creator and this talent, you know, they want 70%. And we're negotiating how much to spend on production. Each individual show could have its own little, you know, kind of economic box, but as a whole, as a whole, you want everyone to feel like they're participating. But let's say Joe Rogan comes in and he's got 10 million followers and we're like, all right, well, if everyone had equal on their 1 million and we all had 10 and Joe comes in, everyone should get crunched down because now there's 20 million in the pot and your 1% is no longer 10, it's 5. And I think you guys preach this all the time, but in life, you should get out what you put in. And I think for people that are thinking about either incentivizing employees or building a media company, you should create incentives that say, okay, look, everyone is not equal. And if you put in a lot more and you're driving success and you're growing, whatever metric that is, when that exit happens, you should participate more than someone who was just sitting, leaning back and, and not participating as much.
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D
You know, you, you. I mean, congratulations on the exit at the time. Talk, talk about the process of going through that, because I feel like everybody who, who's talked about it talks about the stress, talk about the learning lessons, the hardships that you learned of being in that process of saying, yes, we've built something. And I know it took a lot of effort to get to that point. Yes, there's some life changing money, but there's certain things that you have to have in order to exit, right? Like what, what does that, that process look like?
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B
Yeah. First of all, Mo, you know, you know I sold my company for $75 million, but today I'm still in a lawsuit for the majority of that capital, right? Not every exit has a happy end.
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E
A loss of who? With Moneyline, with people that purchase the company.
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B
People that purchase the company.
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E
You want to talk about that?
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B
All I can tell you is that I sold the company in 2020, one of which 10 million was in cash, that me and my partner split and the rest was in stock. And as of today, we haven't gotten a single dollar worth of that stock, you know, and, and again, if I go back to life as a lesson learned, right? When you're building something, right, you're building it with friends, you're building with partners. You know, someone becomes your work wife, right? Like you're in the trenches and when someone knocks on the door and wants to buy the thing that you've birthed, right, it becomes this really existential, like, conversation about, like, is it the right opportunity? Are we selling too early? Is it selling for the right price? But the. The bigger question that you need to ask yourself is who's buying it? Who are they? And if you don't know them and know what they're capable of, right? I've talked to so many exited founders who have gone through exits that had earnouts, and the majority of which those earnouts do not get paid, right? Because if you actually don't have mentors or people that have gone through it who understand the system, the system is not built for founders. The system is built for lawyers and for public companies who understand the pressure that they can create, that if they don't want to pay somebody, right, even if everything is on your side, you will spend millions and millions of dollars trying to fight for to get the money, the thing that you have earned, and rightfully so. But you have to prove that you've earned it, and you might get milked. You know, where that cost to actually, you know, whether it's just on, like, for me, I don't really care at this point. Having gone through what I've gone through, the outcome, other than I'm 40 and kind of like Scarface, all I have left is my word and my bond. And so if someone is going to try and take that away from you, indifferent of your life savings and what you've spent 10 years building and that you've earned, I can earn that back. But what you can't take from me is the respect that I have earned from my peers and from the industry. So that when I talk, people trust that. And you've tried to dilute and muddy that simply so that you can not pay what was contractually obligated, right? And so for founders out there that are going through the idea of selling, right, just know that what's going to happen is you're going to be put through the wringer of due diligence. They're going to look under every hood. They're going to go through your financial statements, and you got to get really, really organized. You know, like, your books got to be in order, right? And, like, you also need to know a lot of these terms that, like, you know, we're not taught in high school or college, you know, like, you know, Gap accounting and a store, you know, like, all these terms of things that, like a someone's going to want to go through or some person who's paid to tell the buyer, you know, this is what their ebitda is, or their profit margins are. Like, even if you have a cfo, even if you have an accountant, like, don't be naive. Invest yourself in learning a little bit more, right? And once that, like, you know, that wash comes through and you're just getting beat down looking over every little thing, what you need to remember is that you've got to do the same thing on the other side. Right? You really have to understand who the other side is that's buying you. Because if you're going to hand your baby off to someone, you know, whether you stick around or something breaks or it doesn't work out, you want to make sure that you're going to get that baby taken care of. Right? And that's, that's one of the regrets that I have, which was I didn't spend enough time through the excitement of potentially selling my business of understanding who was on the other side buying it.
- [18:03]
E
So when we hear these stories that people exited their businesses, that may not always be what it seems. That's what you're saying. Pretty much like you, you could hear somebody that sold their business for $100 million. But that, that's can be tricky if it's not, the deal isn't done correctly.
- [18:22]
B
Listen, there is a lot of reasons why lawyers make a lot of money both going into the deal. You need, you, you can't, you know, you. It's almost like you get what you pay for. Yeah, right. Like you, you know, you get a doctor who, you know, you're getting a vasectomy and like, you know, you got some guy who's gonna do it for 25 outside of the, you know, the back alley, you know, like, you may lose a ball here and there, you know, like, versus you want to get it done. Right. You know, and so, you know, you just want to have, you want to have protection, right? And yeah, like, I think, like, you look at like a Kabi lame and you see these headlines. Oh, like a billion dollars. Like, and then you look under the hood and that business that bought it is basically a shell company doing a million dollars. And like, he's never going to get a billion dollars. That's. It's not worth a billion. There's. There's no vat, there's no real money there, right? Like, you know, you sell the business for like, there's so many stories where, like, oh, this company sold for $450 million, but the investors, the VCs, had a prep stack that was like 3x. And so the founders end up with nothing, right? So you're like, oh, $450 million. You must be living in the Hollywood Hills and like driving a Ferrari, like, I made nothing. Because the way in which you got to that exit, you didn't realize that there were so many people that took change along the way that like, what was left over there was nothing left, right? And so in my case, you know, we bootstrapped the business. We didn't know what equity was. We were an llc. It wasn't until the time of exit that we actually gave our employees some participation in that exit. Which today when I look back, I go, man, if someone. I wish I had, Jeff, when I was building my business, you know, and, and if I have any advice for anyone, you two included, is like, find the person that has gone through it, right? You know, like, I wish I had mentors and people that had gone through it that I can lean on. Now I'm in this, like, post exit founders community and man, just having an open question like, hey, is anyone, does people want to chime in and help? You know, And I think if you don't have that today and you think about the questions that you would love to ask someone that you can't get answers to today, stop what you're doing and go find those people because I guarantee you they'd be willing to help if you just ask them, hey, I'm going through this. Can I spend five minutes? Like, people want to help, you know,
- [20:39]
E
so what advice would you give being what you went through? Would it be not to take stock options? Would it be just to get all cash up front? Like if some. If we were selling our business right now, what advice would you give us?
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B
Cash is king because of cash. If the cash is in the bank, it's really hard to take it away.
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D
As you were saying it, it made me think of like it in sports, right? Like especially in the NFL particularly, it's like the signing bonus is the money that you get, right? The contract, if you get hurt, they can null and void, they can cut you. It's. It's not guaranteed. This feels like if you get the cash up front, that's the money that you're going to get. Guaranteed stock option, maybe. We'll see what happens.
- [21:13]
B
I've talked to so many founders that would tell you assume that you don't get the money in the earn out, you know, and if you're the other side structuring the deal.
- [21:24]
D
Yeah.
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B
And I now know what I know. If I was to buy your business, I would wait it all on the back end, right? Because guess what? I'm going to incentivize you to work your ass off to hit those numbers. But if something happens, knowing what I know now, I probably could just put enough pressure on you guys that you would fold. And then when you think about the dollar amount that it's worth, it would cost you more in legal fees and you just wouldn't be able to fight. And that's what we're going through.
- [21:53]
D
That's the game.
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B
And it's an unfortunate. It's an unfortunate game.
- [21:57]
D
You know, you said you were in a group of post founders. This is interesting because we've had plenty of conversations. I didn't even know this story, so I'm hearing this for the first time and I'm really intrigued by it. What is the common conversation around? Because you don't hear these stories. You never hear these stories.
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B
You don't hear those stories because it's fear. Is it fear?
- [22:18]
D
Is it embarrassment?
- [22:19]
B
It's embarrassment, right? You read a headline, it's like, malcolm media sells for $75 million or so, and so makes $450 million. And you go out with your friends, friends for dinner, and you're like, you know, they're like, oh, he'll pick up the tap. You know, he just made $75 million. You know, but you don't know the truth. You know, you don't know what's really going on behind the scenes. You know, you don't know that I've spent five years in a lawsuit. I haven't been able to buy my mom a house, my sister house. I've been able to buy myself a house, you know, and like, for me, that pain that I feel is something that drives me to build the next thing. Right? And like, more importantly, it drives me to share with other founders how to not fall in the pothole that I fell into, you know? Yeah, yeah.
- [23:02]
E
So, okay, so you. So you. And then what's what births own, like going through what you went through. Was that the reason why you birthed it? Or what's the process of actually starting that company?
- [23:14]
B
If you ask a hundred founders, you put them in a room and you say, what do you all need more of? They would all tell you the same thing. Customers, sales solves all problems. And if no one knows you exist, you die. So how do you acquire more customers today? Well, I can. Am I going to put up a billboard or am I going to put an ad in the newspaper or I'm going to, I don't know, advertise in some show. If you're a startup, your attention is on your phone. Our attention is with people that we trust. Right? Attention is currency. Influence isn't some kid dancing in the middle of the street. It is when you talk, does someone listen? And I don't care if you are building a B2B SaaS product that's trying to compete with Salesforce or Oracle, you know, or you're building the next drink, you know, to compete with prime and Gatorade. Someone out there influences your customer. And my belief is, is they were invested in your success, you'd be more successful. So how do you use your most valuable currency, which is your equity, your ownership, as an incentive to drive growth? You know, and I kept talking to founders, you know, look, I put money in my pocket from the cash and I've been living off that. I haven't made a dollar in the last three years, you know, and I was still writing checks into founders as a, as an angel investor, believing in what they were building. And what I actually saw was I'd write a check and that founder would take my money, give me equity, and then turn around and pay a bunch of creators with my cash to go promote their product. And I thought there had to be a better alignment to the outcome of this business, which I'm now invested in, to the output that they're being paid for creators. And so I said, why is influence not investable? Just like cash, if it is the most valuable currency that we have, how can I help founders? I don't care if you're building a coffee shop on a street in Atlanta or you're building something that wants to compete with the biggest brands in the world. If more people know that you exist, you'll win. So use your currency to get the people who believe in it to be a part of the success, right? But when I looked at it, you hear about ryan Reynolds and 50 Cent and Hailey Bieber and all these great exits, and it's like the idea of ownership shouldn't be reserved for the 1%. It shouldn't just be celebrity for equity, right? But when you peel back the onion, the infrastructure just wasn't built at scale. And the harder something is, the more it costs, the less people do it, right? And so what I wanted to do was build the infrastructure for the next generation of attention first brands, right? There's platforms out there like Carta and Pulley and other platforms that like, hey, like, you're building a company, you're raising from investors, like, use our platform, they're a better spreadsheet, right? Because as a. As someone who's building a business, if you raise capital, those people need a system of record, right? I put in 100 grand. What's it worth? In the next round, someone puts in 55 million. What's my hundred grand now worth? Am I diluted? Like, someone's got to track that. And 10 years ago, those systems, like most SaaS systems, were expensive and you had to pay a lot of money for them, right? But today, I bet some kid could vibe Code Carta on lovable in like 10 minutes. Right now, as you get more sophisticated, Series A, Series B, like, you need some more sophistication. But right now, if you're a startup, an llc or a C corp, and you're trying to launch your business, right, how do you let more people know that you exist? All the top venture firms, A16, Harry Stebbings, they're all trying to talk about distribution as a differentiator. You guys are distribution. I'm sure brands have come to you and said, hey, I'd love for you to talk about my brand. And someone on your sales team or yourself might say, okay, hey, it's going to be 50 grand. We'll do a couple ad reads right here and there and there. But what if that person who's asking you to promote their brand, you're like, man, this could be a home run. This could be the next big thing. If you believe in it, ask for ownership, you know, because at the end of the day, as a founder, all you're trying to do is shorten the distance to trust. And you guys have earned that trust with your audience. So if you could tell your fans, hey, I believe so much in what Jeff and Om is building that we were willing to invest and become an owner, then the fans will lean in and say, oh, this isn't some paid promotion because you only own what you believe in. You only invest in the things that you know are true. Right? And authentic to who you are. You know? And I just don't think you guys have to reach into your pockets. I think you could reach into your audience, and that's what hopefully you've done.
- [28:14]
D
With what we're building, there's so much there, and I think it's very important, right? We go. And even in the conversations we've had, it's always been stressing the idea of equity, equity, equity. How does a person, a creator, know that they're at the point where they can ask for equity and how should they approach it? Because I Think that falls into a place where it gets tricky for them. They're like, well my community is this big. Are there metrics that they should meet before they get to that point?
- [28:41]
B
Yeah. First of all, like you can't feed yourself on equity, right? So I think about it as an end conversation, not an or conversation, right? Like if someone is offering you cash, right, and wants to pay you to promote something that you believe in, take the cash and see if you could do more and get more. Right? That's number one. You know, the other thing is, is like you'll never hit a home run if you don't swing for the fences. So if I said, hey, if TikTok or Instagram or YouTube like died tomorrow, what do you have to show for your influence? If the answer is nothing, the question is why? It's because you haven't asked to own anything, right? And so think about it as like an 80, 20 or 90, 10, right? If you look at a portfolio like do you have some small stakes in a bunch of companies that you are passionate about, right? You can invest because you are passionate. You might just want to be a part of something because you want that to exist in the world, right? But passion isn't purpose, right? Passion isn't profit, right? Like you might really want to build a kitty litter company, but your audience could give two shits about that. So it doesn't mean you should go out and build it with the expectation that you know your audience is right for that. Right? On the other side of that, I talk to so many creators every day that have 20 million followers and 50,000 and you'd be surprised about the ones who have 50,000 or a hundred thousand that are making two, three million dollars a year, right? They figured out how to monetize their audience by providing value, right? You don't sell ads. If you provide value, people will pay for that value, you know, so, so don't think that like just because you have a small audience that can't become life changing income. I talked to two founders yesterday. They're just on my mind to two creators yesterday. They build it up pasta and olive oil company right now. They don't have any digital marketing, they don't have any operations, they don't have any infrastructure, right? But I guarantee you they're going to do seven figures this year, right? Just off the back of the fact that their audience loves what they've built, right? And so I think that if you are thinking about building something, I see creators as the co founders and capital of the future. Let's just look at AI, right? AI will create a baseline for millions of entrepreneurs who have an idea to solve a problem or to build something. But what's going to happen is every single one of them is going to compete for attention. So all three of us, we all have the same idea. We're all living in different places in the country. We all tell lovable, we all tell cursor, we all use cloud code. We build something that was. It's just the perfect solution to the problem. Who wins? Well, I don't win because no one knows I exist. I don't have an audience. Maybe I'm smarter than you guys on business, you know, maybe I know operations better. But, like, you've got millions of fans that you could say, hey, you guys in the comments talking about this problem. I've been listening, listen and listen. You know what? We decided to build it, go check it out. First thousand people will be for free. You know, creating a community. We want to hear your feedback. You are both listening device and megaphone. And you have a competitive advantage because you have distribution. And that, in my view, is one of the last two remaining moats left in this world. In a world where AI will democratize access to entrepreneurship and content creation, which is distribution and trust. And those two things are not the same. Right. Like, you guys may have distribution, people may tune in and listen to you, but do they trust you? Right? And that's where I think a lot of the knowledge creators, people that are doctors or, you know, teachers, might have small niche followings. Those are the ones that will really monetize their audience way more than some entertainment creator who dances and makes funny Things and has 10 million followers. But the thing is, is once they try and provide value to their audience that isn't a giggle or a laugh. Right. That audience doesn't know them for that. And so it's hard for them to take a passion and turn that into a profit. Right, you're right. Yeah. Sorry for these long.
- [32:59]
D
No, I mean, you were spot on right there. We've seen it time after time where you watch Celebrity A, you know, we know them for this. They try to venture off into that and it's like nobody supports it. And they're like, well, what happened? Or big corporations will say, let's throw money at Celebrity A and try to transition into this. And let's. And then it doesn't work. And they're like, what happened? Yeah, they don't know from that. The trust isn't there.
- [33:22]
B
Yeah. And look, I Teach founders all day, because that's the business that I'm at. My. My job is to give founders and operators a superpower. And that super power is trust and distribution through a network of creators who are passionate and believers in the things that you're building, right? But the problem is, is like, what are you famous for? What is your influence? I always use the example of like, everyone will be like, oh, I wish Zendaya was the face of my brand. I'm like, great, I hope you have $20 million to let the world know that she exists because she's not a native content creator. It's like back in the day, everyone wanted an athlete on their cap table. That's cool. They got capital, right? But until LeBron James talks about your brand, his dollar's worth the same as mine, right? And if a creator isn't unfortunately opening people up into their lives, into their daily routine, right? Which a lot of people are now, even like a doctor creator who's known for oncology or dermatology is taking people through their day so they can talk about what they eat and what they wear and then what they put in their body, right? That means that they can diversify that trust across things that they could monetize not through ads, but solving problems for their fans, right? Versus, you know, someone who's famous, like Timothy Chalamet would be great, but like, you really need to have an engine if you're gonna put someone like that inside your business to tell the world that he's a part of it. Right? Versus, you guys, you have a platform you can get on here and you can talk to your fans and they, they're, they're leaning in. What are you gonna tell me that's gonna change my life, right? How are you gonna help me? And that trust is why I say it's earned, you know? And I fear, I have like this huge fear that much like the wealth gap in this country, the creator gap will be the same, right? Because if you think about it, and let me know if this is too long of a rant, but just like, just. I've been meaning to say this somewhere, like, AI will democratize access to content and because the platforms won't deny who is real or not, because they're monetizing so much through ads with virtual influencers, right? What's going to happen is everyone who's created brand equity in a pre AI world is going to continue to grow and lift. And I reckon it to like, Samuel L. Jackson's voice, right? You know, that voice. So if you're watching an animated film and you hear it, you're like, oh, there's Samuel L. Jackson. But if you don't know the voice, right, and 11 labs can create any voice for basically $0, then every other voice is worthless, right? And so everyone who is a voice actor goes to zero. And in the world of creators, trust is earned over time. And so those people who have earned it, you see their face, you recognize their face. In a world where you're going to 100x the faces in the platforms and a thousand x the amount of content that you could see with everyone making clips and all these virtual influencers, it's like you're going to stick to who you know, right? And that value, like you guys who have been here In a pre AI world, your IP and worth is going to 10x. So don't sell yet, don't get out the game just yet. I'm telling you, the monetization wave is coming.
- [36:42]
E
So do you think that creators that are not in it right now, they're not going to be able to make content once AI influencers? What you're essentially saying is AI influences is going to kind of wipe out a lot of human influencers, except for established brands, because those established brands already have a following, so they've already done the legwork. So they'll continue to go, but everybody else will kind of get hit in a tsunami.
- [37:15]
B
I think about it like I'm on the side of humans only, right? But, but let's just use and until we as a society decide that we will not accept virtual influencers holding up a product that they say they've tried and has helped them lose £50, right? For us to say you're not real. Why are you selling me something when you have no real experience? We have to make a decision as a society. Is that correct or not? If I'm a marketer, I've got to make a decision. Do I want to lie to my potential customers? You know, because right now if I create a UGC army, I might make 100 or a thousand creators a part of my affiliate army. I want to go source them, I want to go find them. They're real humans. I see that product out there, they try it and they have real feedback and they jump in front of the camera and they make something that hopefully drives sales because that's how they earn money as an affiliate, right? Other people who are just getting into the content creation game, you know, the way you cut your teeth is you get, get 100 or 200 bucks to make like, you know, a 30 second video. And like, that's how you learn how to create viral hooks and what your fans really want, what, what the algorithm cares about. But I can make a hundred thousand variations of that video for like a few hundred dollars today, right? And you wouldn't be able to know if that person's real or not. And if it works, I can instantly make a hundred more. Right? And if I want to create what I call hyper personalization at scale, meaning we have so much data on all of our consumers that the next time you open up Instagram, you might see an ad that says, hey, what's up? What's up, Troy? Like, I know you. You know, you live here and you got two kids and you do all these things, like, here's this product. Like, I know you were just shopping. You're like, hold on, this person like knows me. And, and wait a minute, that's Michael. That's like Mike Tyson talking to me and his voice with his face. But that's what the Kobby Lame thing is. It's about hyper personalization at scale. So there's like virtual influencers that are competing with humans. We've got as a society decide, are we going to deny this creator economy from being able to break through the noise, right? And then it's like, you know, imagine you're shopping on the Skims website and Kim shows up and she's like, I don't like that dress on you. Because you could digitally try it on. A model's been trained with her voice. Generative AI can show you who she is. And that is a world that will exist. And the reason why it will exist is because when Kim tells you you look fabulous, right? And you know it's not Kim you'll buy anyway, right? You will.
- [40:01]
D
You know, this is really interesting. So there's a couple of things, right? Obviously we need to figure out the creator economy because it is evolving. And then the equity conversation is definitely a part of it. Is there a world where you're pairing both, right? Like, you obviously speak to founders and you speak to creators. How do we get that creator to say, hey, I know there's a founder who's looking for somebody just like you, right? Or a founder to say, I know the exact creator you need to push that product?
- [40:33]
B
Yeah.
- [40:34]
D
How does that work in your world?
- [40:35]
B
So what I built at OM is infrastructure to allow partnerships to happen at scale, to allow founders and creators to build these audience first companies together. Let's call it the Church. There was no church to get married. You'd call caa, you say, who's on the roster? I'm building this cool company. They just tell you who's in their box, and then you spend six months negotiating and spend $50,000 in legal fees. Like that doesn't scale for the 99% of us who are trying to build something. So we built the church, but then the question is, how do you facilitate more dates? So we built a marketplace. There are millions of operators out there that are building things that have the operational excellence, the infrastructure, the project management, the heart and grit to build something, but they lack distribution, they lack trust. So how do you find the creators who want to be co founders, who want to be ambassadors, who want to be invested in the success? And so today we have over 10,000 creators who have raised their hand. And when they come on board, they tell us just one thing. Because I can scrape anything about a creator online. I can build really rich audience Personas to know when that creator talks, who listens, and what product will they buy. So I should know what product is product they should partner with. But what I don't know from a creator is what are you passionate about? Like, what's the one dream company you'd love to build or start? You know, and what's happened is, is that when you, when you get that piece of information and then you map that to the audience that they talk to, that engages with them, and then you have thousands of operators on our platform on the other side, and you find the two that are like, holy shit, that's exactly what I was dreaming of building. I Last week we had a conversation with the creator who has 5 million followers, and she spent $100,000 of her own money trying to build this product for six months and just couldn't make it work because her superpower and where she spends her time is storytelling. But when I got her on the phone with the two founders that were building this incredible product, you know, and we were going to give her some cash and some equity, she was like, listen, listen, I've dreamed of building this. This is exactly what I always wanted, to exist in the world. Can I lean in? Can I be the co founder? Right? And right now there's no place to find those partnerships, to marry people who are building things with incredible stories to tell with the incredible storytellers that want to build. Right? We need more coos in the creator economy. Right? You need more operators. Don't think that Jake Paul and Mr. Beast don't have Someone behind them that is driving the operations of this empire. Right. So how do you do that for the middle class? That's what I'm going after is we want to be able to create the marketplace where creators who want to stop renting their audience for brand partnerships and want to start building brands for their audience and go find the people that they can go build with. And for the operators who know that there is a gap in the market and know the incumbent is a shit sandwich and they can absolutely take market share from them, but just don't have the capital, you know, or the resources to reach the, the audience and the customers at scale. There are creators and athletes and celebrities and musicians out there that are hungry to build, and we have them on our platform and that's what we want to be able to do, create matches. Maybe they turn into a date, maybe they turn into a marriage, and if they do, great, we built the church. You don't have to spend $50,000 trying to figure out how to get it done.
- [44:08]
D
How do, how do you structure those type of deals? Is there more of an an ask from the creator? Right? Like you may have to do this, do this, do this, do this, right? In that scenario, like what would be an ideal or hypothetical?
- [44:22]
B
It's a great question. And that's the biggest gap. And I think two things. One is people are bad negotiators. That's number one. And two is they don't know the levers that they can pull. So I tried to create a framework and I think about it as three buckets. Is someone an advisor, an ambassador, or a co founder, right? And you should think about the time commitment that you put into something should be directly correlated to the compensation that you should expect to pay. So if I said, hey, guys, I want every week on your podcast for you to talk about ohm. And every time that you show up to an event, I want you to wear OHM shirt. And you can never talk about any other equity management platform. And I'm going to give you no cash in a quarter point, you'd be like, f that, right? Like, that's just not worth my time, right? But if I said, hey, I'm going to give you a retainer, right? I'm going to make you a co founder and you're going to have 20% of the business. You could say, hey, like this episode is brought to you by Om AI. This is great. Check out Jeff from no, but like that's it, right? And so you want to think about what are the levers that you can pull. And I try and advise people to think about, think about your. So I made a post on LinkedIn, if anyone is out there listening. I'm big on LinkedIn just because I'm trying to provide all the value that I wish I had when I was building. And I think about things in three layers. Trust, distribution, and amplification. So think about your brand, your business, as a movie poster. Who are the Avengers team that's standing in the front? Who could best represent your brand and give your brand the trust it needs to accelerate its success? Right? Who are the 1, 2, 3, 5 people put that Avengers team together? Right? Those are your anchors, those are your co founders. I call that your creator advisory board. Right? And the way to think about that team is what is the incentive and structure? And on the own website, we share this framework, but like, what is the incentive for someone that maybe is way out of my reach? Like, I could never get Troy and Rashad, right? But like, if I said, hey, I want you to talk about my brand, do all these different things, like, you know what? I'm putting this creator advisory board together. You guys have always talked about ownership. I would love for you to join this advisory board. All I ask is that once a quarter, you spend 30 minutes with me to give me the insight that you are hearing from your audience about equity and ownership, right? And you start to build a relationship. And, you know, what happens is people do more when they're invested and believe in something and then they'll talk about it. Right behind this army of creator advisory board, I would think about, okay, who are my amplifiers? You know, and I think about that as paid partnerships, creators, that, yes, you want to put some money in people's pocket. The best way to build a relationship with someone is to give them some money. Right? When you start feeding people, right, people start coming back, right? They know that, like, you're a part of that food chain, right? So who can you have some paid partnerships with? And then who is the army of UGC creators and affiliates? Right? And if you have a good creator advisory board, what I would say is, like, even if it's one or two people, go find a community of affiliates that will just work on like CPA or just paid performance. Meaning, like if I'm driving sales of a consumer tech app or something on Amazon or drink, whatever it is, doesn't matter, right? You want to just pay them when they perform, right? But to recruit them, you know what would be really cool? If you got, you know, Mark Hyman or eva Longoria or Mr. Beast or someone with some cultural cachet that can jump on a webinar with a hundred of these people to hear from you, the founder and that creator, storyteller, to draft off that excitement and go, holy shit, did you hear what Troy and Rashad were talking about with Ohm? Like, man, like, now they can go out and make better content because they can reference in the video, like, oh, man, you know, Troy and Rashad from running you leisure are doing this, this and that. And like, that's when their audience and fans lean in. And so structuring these deals means that you need to know two things. One is like, what's going to drive a business impact? Like, if you had that Ferrari on your wall waking up and every day you dreamed of hitting it, or if you want to lose 20 pounds, you can't just set out a goal without knowing what the next milestone is. So set smaller milestones that are going to help you get there, right? And think about how to reverse engineer those milestones to the person that has your audience's attention. And can you say, hey, look, I want you to do these five things, right? And then figure out what are all the levers, right? Get knowledgeable, category exclusivity, white listing, you know, do you know, should I, should I? Is it paid promotion? You know, like, are they going to show up? Like when they jump on a podcast, can they talk about it in their link in bio, does it say hashtag owner of, you know, whatever your brand is, These are little levers that can really make a difference if you put them in an agreement, right? So there's a lot more behind that. But, you know, I think those are just good frameworks for folks to learn. Listen, what's the.
- [49:47]
E
Create a stock option pool.
- [49:50]
B
Yeah, look, I think when you're building a business and just, just remember, Silicon Valley and public companies are not stupid, right? They call them golden handcuffs. They have an esop, an employee stock option pool, right? And if you work in Silicon Valley and you work for a hot startup, it's all about the options, right? You hear the graffiti artist at Facebook made a million bucks. And you know, the secretary of this company made a million bucks. Like, when you work for these startups, you're making a salary, but what they're trying to do is to get you to stick around and work your ass off long enough so that they can have an outcome. And ideally, you participate in that. And that's what an ESOP is, right? And so why shouldn't the middle Class have that. So for me, I think about this problem around the 8% of businesses in this country who don't use ownership as an incentive. That means 30 million businesses don't use profit share, rev share or equity to incentivize their employees the same way public companies and private companies do. So how do we solve that? Well, we're not going to solve it tomorrow because the education gap is what holds us back. People don't know what ownership is or why I even want it. What's it worth? You know, Robinhood just recently democratized access to fractional ownership in the public markets, right? And now people can start to understand. You know, I can buy a share of Apple for 10 bucks and I, and I can learn about it. Whether or not I'll make a huge impact, I can start learning about it. So for me, the creator stock option pool solves two things. One is I think every company that's being built today will be built attention and distribution first, right? And that means that you should set up an ESOP to incentivize the employees that work for you. But you should also set up a csop, a creator stock option pool to give the people who influence your customers the opportunity to earn equity. And the reason why I started with influence for equity when I built Ohm is because influence is the most performative. If I invested in earn your leisure and I wrote you a check for 100 grand, there'd be a value of the business and I would get some equity based on that value. But if you guys invested your influence, which is currency in my business, you have to do something to earn it, right? You don't get the equity on day one. So we're gonna say, okay, every week you're gonna do a post, or every quarter you're gonna show up to an advisory board meeting, you're gonna do something to earn it. And if you, you do that, then you should unlock that value. And if you don't, then you shouldn't. So a CSOP is the ability for founders to reduce the friction between having to go through board approvals or how to set up a pool or how to give a manager of a talent their 20% of the 1%. All of the things that would have cost $50,000 and just so much time and unnecessary energy to use a founder's currency to incentivize growth. And so I think every company in the future will have a creator advisory board, that avengers level team of people that can give trust to a founder and a startup at the very early Stages and help accelerate the go to market. And a creator stock option pool which allows them to say, look, if you believe in what we're building, I'll set some milestones and I'll put that Ferrari on the wall and I'll tell you how to hit it. And if you do, then you'll get it. And I think ownership, if I can do it for creators and teach them about why they want to be owners, you guys influence culture and conversation. And if you move that education gap more downstream, then more people will start to understand what ownership is, what equity is, and they'll start to ask for it. And it won't just be for Silicon Valley backed companies and for VC backed companies, it will be for all companies. Where someone who's walking into a bar says, you know what, maybe one day if I work my ass off, I could just own a small piece of this. And if you tell that person what they need to do to get that, I guarantee more businesses will be successful. Because when you own it, you treat it differently. And I think ownership is the next great economic boom in this country.
- [54:01]
D
He said something very important. People suck at negotiating. So I wonder what, what advice, what tips you can give to people who are in this space, who have gone through negotiations, who haven't gone through it yet. What should they look out for? What should they put at the forefront? What should, like how should they go about negotiating? Because it's tough. Right. Like people have an inflated or sometimes deflated valuation of themselves.
- [54:28]
B
Yeah.
- [54:28]
D
And that works against them.
- [54:30]
B
Negotiation tactics.
- [54:31]
D
Yeah. How should somebody go about that?
- [54:33]
B
Yeah, I, I think, I think first is know your opponent, know what they want, what do they want? What are they negotiating for? Right. Most people just want more money. Right. Okay, great. What do you want? Right. Write those two things down. What does this person want? What do I want? Then write, what if it doesn't work out? I think you need to understand what success looks like and what success doesn't look like. Without those two north stars. It's really difficult to even mentally create a framework in your head. Right. And then I think negotiations shouldn't be treated like a transaction. It should be treated like a partnership. And I think a lot of times, and maybe it's just because of COVID and I feel it like people are starting to negotiate over the phone or via Zoom. You know, if this thing is really valuable and the partnership is worth its time, get on the plane or go meet for a coffee and sit down. Human to human reaction and understanding how to see the other person and what they're looking for means that, like, you want to work with people that you like working with with, you know, and if you have the choice, work with people that want to work with you. And so indifferent of what you're negotiating for. Just make sure you know the stakes of the what if and the what whatnot, right? Go build that rapport. And then I told someone yesterday this, and I'll. And this is like, I think maybe not a big secret, but like, time kills all deals. But time also creates urgency, which creates action, right? So it's like scarcity, right? I'm fundraising right now for Ohm and you know, I've asked friends because I didn't fundraise for Malka, we bootstrapped the business, so I didn't go through this understanding of it is a process to fundraise, just like negotiation. And those two things are really the same, which was what is going to get the other side to take action, right. Sometimes if someone asks for just something so ridiculous, don't try and negotiate. Just be like, okay, hey, it's not going to work out if they know where your line is. And their line is sometimes if you just take your hands and just throw them up and just wait, the person that really wanted it, it will come back. Right? And time can accelerate urgency to action. If you're too far apart and if you're really close, you got to create some momentum that will drive the other person to take it now or not. Right? And sometimes, like I do a lot of celebrity negotiations and creator notifications, I always say you have to talk to two people, just like you have to hire two people. I would say if you're gonna hire one person, hire two. Right. Why do I hire two? Right. Is because one will drive the other. And if one doesn't work out, I already have my backup. So the best case scenario is both work out and I couldn't afford them. But because they're both doing the job, they've created the value, and now I can. And if one doesn't work out, I'm not three months behind. Right? And no matter what, knowing that they're both in the same role, competing with one another creates urgency and creates more action. And so when I have two deals that we're negotiating, we always are working on two people, right? Because honestly, you need to know what the market value is. And if you're just negotiating with one person, you don't know what other people would take, right? So hopefully those are some tactics that could be helpful.
- [58:35]
E
So, like own Explain the platform. Like for people like you go in, you're a creator, like walk us through from A to Z, the benefits on the creator side and also on somebody that has a company that's trying to attract the creator.
- [58:50]
B
Yeah, let's, let's talk about it as for a founder or for a creator. So for a founder, if you're starting a business and you want to use equity as a currency to drive growth, use on. We want to be the infrastructure to turn your equity, which is your most valuable currency, into something that actually creates value and doesn't just sit in one of these static, better spreadsheet ledger tools that have existed for the last decade. Right. As a founder, you're actually not looking for creators. I think you're looking for customers. And so what I did was I looked at all of these other influencer marketing platforms out there and they all have 10 million, 5 million, we have 30 million creators on the platform. And you go in there and they're like, who are you looking for? And I go, I don't know. But I can tell you that my Customer is a 25 to 35 year old female who lives in the middle of the country, who shops at Alo, makes $50,000 a year and really likes taking good care of herself. If that's your customer, then tell me who your customer is and let me go find who influences that person. Because at the end of the day, someone might be great for your brand, but their audience isn't your customer. So you should first reverse engineer who is my customer? Tell om that. So when you go into our platform, we ask one question, who's your customer? I want to know who is your icp? Who is your ideal customer profile? Right. Then we want to run similarity search across our network of creators to say, okay, who influences that customer? And then run AI scraping against all of their content based on context of your brand, your tone of voice, your competitors, your go to market, who's a good fit for my brand, Right? So who influences my customer and who's a good fit for my brand? So that's the marketplace. So as a founder, we want to be able to provide you the infrastructure to manage your investors, your advisors, your creators, and we want to be able to find you those people who influence your customers who want to be invested in someone's success and put them on your cap table and let them earn some skin in the game by helping drive your business growth. For a creator, right. When you come on the platform, our job is to find you more brand deals Right. And we want to know very simply, what is the dream company that you'd love to start or invest in? Because we have two pieces of signal. One is, once you come on board, we run a ton of agents to look at who engages with your content, who watches, what do they look like. Build these really rich audience Personas so that we can find the right brands that are looking for a person, a creator who talks to that customer. But then separately, if you tell us that you've always wanted to build a blank, well, maybe we don't have that person on our platform today, but we will go out and find them on your behalf. So our job is to facilitate for creators more matches, more revenue, more brand opportunities. Whether you do want to rent that audience in the beginning, it's great to go on a few dates, see if it works, test the waters, you know, you know, get the first or second base, whatever it is, and then you go, you know what? I want to work with this person. I want to build this thing. I think this could be the next home run, or if at a bare minimum, right? I know that I can help make it grow. Right? And I've talked to so many creators that lived in that what if scenario, man. Like, you know, Magic Mind came to me and they couldn't afford me, but they offered me equity and I was like, what's equity? You know, and then they sold for $700 million, you know, or like Notion and Gamma came at the early stages and, you know, I was one of the main people that helped them grow to the first thousand users. And, man, if I only asked them for a quarter point, you know, like, if sequoia is putting $15 million into a business, so that 40 cents of every dollar that they put in as a VC across the industry goes to market, and then that money is going to go 90% to creators, because that's where the eyeballs are, right? VC is basically investing in the creator economy, right? So as creators, my thesis is, if you believe in it, ask for ownership. And one other thing which I think is really important is I called it om because ownership is not just equity. You have to know if a business is going to be built to exit, some businesses are going to just print seven and eight figures, you know, and like, it's really important to understand, like, if you're going to take some skin in the game, what does skin in the game look like? You know, like, most businesses fail. I think most of them fail is because the people that bet on those businesses weren't really able to help those businesses. I think community. Like I've got a bunch of investors, most founders, if you interview them, they do a really shitty job of activating their community. And if I gave you know, a founder, this Avengers level team, are they really going to take advantage of them? Are they going to know how to activate them, you know, or are they going to be heads down building a product, trying to figure out product, market fit, scaling operations, solving all the other problems. And so we want to put a reasoning agent AI. Imagine if you had the best business coach in the world sitting inside your business who knew who your investors were, knew who your advisors were, knew who those creators were that could help you build, right? So for me OHM needs to be the operating system for the attention first business of the future. Give people the tools that were previously reserved for the 1%, unlock the middle class of both the businesses and the creator economy so they can build the millions of seven and eight figure businesses in the future and then help them both drive growth by activating them, teaching them, allowing them to understand that like you know, you can't just today expect people to find you. You've got to figure out how to cut through the noise. And that's why we've been building this. This brand is a subscription. It's a subscription. Yeah, it's really inexpensive. You know, again, I want a million brands to be able to build seven and eight figures on this. You know, it's 99 bucks a month for founders that are just starting and trying to figure out the who and the why. Right? You just, maybe you have been working at a job, you know, for 10 years and you've always had this dream, you're an incredible operator. Maybe there's someone out there who's got a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand followers that's been dreaming of building the same thing. We want you to be discoverable, right? And then for 299 we give you everything. We give you the infrastructure to be able to use equity. We're the equity management platform. We give you access to the marketplace, you can do research. The best thing I always found is like people are like, you know, my cousin Susan, she's got 500,000 followers, you know, would she be great for my brand? I don't know. Look her up on our system and contextualize her to your brand. Right? Context is the most valuable asset. It's like when she talks to the people that buy my product, Listen, that's what you want to answer. She might have 500,000 followers, don't look at vanity metrics. They're useless. Right. When you guys talk, do you know who your audience is? Like, do you actually know, like if I said who right now? If you could describe your audience, who is he or she? Do you know?
- [66:10]
D
Yeah. Who our audience is? Between the ages of 25 to 37, 60% male, 40% female, probably making an average of anywhere between 75 to 85,000. Most have at least a bachelor's degree. How many more metrics do you want?
- [66:34]
B
I think that's pretty good. Let me ask you a different question.
- [66:37]
D
Yeah.
- [66:39]
B
What product or three products do you think they would love for you to provide them? What would they buy that you could offer them? What are they hungry for? What problem could you solve for them?
- [66:52]
D
Education around finance. Our audience loves events, live events around education, finance, obviously Invest Fest. Being that and then having a community, how can they be a part of a community that can discuss more about ways to better their life and their community inside of the world of business, entrepreneurship, finance, investing.
- [67:15]
B
I love that you guys know that because, you know, I talk to 2050 founders and creators a week and most people either don't know who their customer is and don't know who their audience is. I'll ask you the same question I ask creators who come onto the platform, which is what's the dream company that you'd love to start or invest in?
- [67:36]
E
To start or invest in? Yeah, I think there's a few. I think a company that is dedicated towards like how to make stock trading easy through AI, that's something that I think is revolutionary. Like if somebody could just pick stocks for you in a dream world. Right. If the dream world, if you could just wake up and just have chatbot that literally is just trading stocks for you, that's obviously going to change everything. Right. So whoever really fine tunes that idea, I mean that's, that's going to be revolutionary.
- [68:19]
D
I'll go with a company that currently exists. I think Meta would be incredible. Owning Meta or having some partnership in equity stake inside of that because of the user base. How many companies have access to 3 billion people?
- [68:35]
B
Yeah. I think two things. One is on that I think there's massive disruption to create a humans only platform. I think we are hungry to go back to what Facebook started as, which was human to human connection of friends. Right. I think LinkedIn and Meta, we've created these advertising machines and I think if you watch the Social Dilemma, the documentary which came out a few years ago, I think it will remind you that ultimately the data that we collect and why we don't pay for Facebook and why we don't pay for these social platforms. Because you're worth way more to the algorithm and to the companies than you could ever pay as a subscription to. Never see an ad to the marketers who are willing to sell you a profit product. And so I think there's massive disruption there. I also think, like, with what you want to build, like if I found an operator out there who's dreaming of building it, would you guys be the co founders of a new finance app that helps your community do AI trading? Yeah, why not?
- [69:33]
D
Yeah, it's aligned.
- [69:35]
B
Okay, then that's my commitment. I will find you someone who is building this already because that's what our platform does is I think that idea, knowing you guys, knowing your audience is perfectly aligned. And I think that will, if it doesn't already exist. And I think you guys will have some skin in the game for that.
- [69:56]
D
I heard it here.
- [69:58]
B
Keep me to my word. I told you before, I only got two things left. I got no money. You guys know that. You know, I got no money. You know, maybe, you know, I, I, you know, with this situation with the lawsuit, you know, you can have a glass half full or a glass half empty view of life, right? And I've had to come to the conclusion that what should happen will happen, right? You just have to believe that, you know, And I think if you believe wholeheartedly that you are destined to do something bigger and you have a passion or you feel like you're stuck in this life and you know that you're not living up to your potential, then just believe that what should happen will happen. But on the other side of that, don't think that it will happen to you. You have to go out and get it done. Right? And so, you know, I believe that what happened to me and what I'm going through was a lesson that I, I would have never learned. And I feel like in the last five years, I've grown more than I could have ever imagined over the next 20, right? And the question is now, am I just going to let this happen to me or am I going to take this learning lesson, am I going to go out there and do something with it? You know, and I think everyone should think about that when they go through trials and tribulations or a death of a family or a failure, whatever it is, it's just like, it's like that old saying, just like, get up one foot in front of the other, just take another step Forward.
- [71:23]
E
So how can the people find you? Like, what's the website, what's the. All the information, Instagram, everything like that?
- [71:28]
B
Yeah, listen. Owm. AI. Om. You know, I called it OM because I want more people to be owners. And we built an ownership management platform. You know, I think the American dream is no longer about owning a home. I think it is about being an owner. And much like what you guys preach about the idea that you should be able to get out in life what you earn, right? If you are coming up as this next generation and the World Economic Forum thinks that you will lease your car, you'll rent your home home, you'll own nothing and you'll be happy. I say F that, right? But if you don't have money or experience or influence, you don't have a business where you can invest service, what else could you get access to to this new American dream? It's sweat. Can I. Can I work for it? Can you let me work for ownership? Right? Because, you know, you. If you rent a house on your street, you know, maybe you don't take as much care of it as possible. You know, the people that own it live in that community. And I want more people to have that feeling if they don't have all the other things that maybe the next generation won't. And listen, you know, for what I've gone through, you know, follow on LinkedIn and if you want to send me an email, I'm just. Jeffwm. AI. You know, I wind up giving away my time for free very often, and it's mostly because I think I'll get it back and because I just enjoy helping and being useful. So here to help. Check us out. Own that AI. We want to make more owners. We want to help every business and founder be successful. And I guarantee you that there is someone out there, whether you're a creator or a founder, that is looking for you. And they are eager and hungry to partner and build something great together.
- [73:09]
E
There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you guys for rocking with us. We'll see you next week. Peace.
- [73:12]
B
Thank you for the peace.
- [73:14]
A
Hey, everyone, it's Emily Simpson and Shane Simpson from the Legally Brunette podcast.
- [73:19]
C
Each week, we're bringing you true crime through a legal lens.
- [73:23]
A
Whether you want all the facts on the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie or you still need to wrap your head around the Diddy verdict, we're breaking it all down step by step.
- [73:32]
B
And we're not just lawyers. We're also husband and wife. It makes for some pretty entertaining episodes.
- [73:37]
A
Listen to Legally Brunette on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [73:44]
C
Saturday, May 2, country's biggest stars will be in Austin, Texas at our 2026 I Heart Country Festival presented by Capital One. See Kane Brown, Parker McCollum, Riley Greene, Shaboozy Dylan Scott, Russell Dickerson, Gretchen Wilson, Chase, Matthew Lauren Elena. Tickets are on sale now. Get yours before they sell out@ticketmaster.com when
- [74:16]
A
segregation was a law, one mysterious black club owner Charlie Fitzgerald had his own rules.
- [74:22]
B
Segregation in the day, integration at night. It was like stepping in another world.
- [74:27]
A
Was he a businessman, a criminal, a hero?
- [74:31]
B
Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him.
- [74:36]
A
Charlie's Place from Atlas Obscura and visit Myrtle Beach. Listen to Charlie's place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. When segregation was a law, one mysterious black club owner Charlie Fitzgerald had his own rul.
- [74:51]
B
Segregation in the day, integration at night. It was like stepping in another world.
- [74:57]
A
Was he a businessman, a criminal, a hero?
- [75:01]
B
Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him.
- [75:05]
A
Charlie's Place from Atlas Obscura and visit Myrtle Beach. Listen to Charlie's place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [75:14]
B
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [75:17]
A
Guaranteed Human.