The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - He Built a Simple App and Sold It for $200 Million⏐Ep. #242

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

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You can either live somebody else's story or you can write your own story. Sometimes you're one tweak away from $200 million, right? Yeah. If they don't say that, the app doesn't blow up and the company goes out of business. It's shot to number one to say there every single day for six months. 25 million people a day were playing it. It was the number one game in 60 countries in the world. And what did you end up selling it for?

$200 million. I mean, I was a high school teacher. It is all of those little things that make a different. but they all have to come together. Okay. Well, why don't you start by just telling us who you are and what you do, Dan? My name is Dan Porter. I was on an episode of The Career Ladder on TikTok.

And I am the CEO and co-founder of Overtime, which is a big sports platform that we started in 2016. Okay. And what would you say makes you different from your peers, your contemporaries? There are a lot of answers to that. I'd say number one, the nature of my career. Like I've been a public school teacher. I've worked in a music business.

I run a gaming company. I'm in sports. I've just done a lot of different things. And so everything that I do is almost like a combination of all those different experiences. It's really not a straight path. It's probably number one. I'd say number two, I'm very relentless and focused. I don't give up. I don't play a lot of games, but I try to only play games that I can win.

And I think number three is that you could say that maybe I'm an out of the box or disruptive thinker, and I'm not trying to compliment myself in that, but more just like, I don't know the way that I think of things. Maybe I don't understand the way things are supposed to be done. So I come up with my own ideas, but I tend to approach problems probably a different way than other people do. So probably those three things. Plus, occasionally I'm very funny. Do you think you approach problems differently because of your breadth of expertise? Are they correlated? It's a good question. I'd say half of it is that. Like I just have so many different experiences I draw from. And half of it is probably like, I'm just really stupid and I don't know the right way to do it. So I just come up with my own way to do it. And sometimes, like, you see people who, like, play some musical instrument in a really weird way.

They play, like, the guitar with both their hands or something like that. And they create entirely new music. And maybe they just never learned the other way or that felt natural to them. But I think in general, I don't know if through school and college, we do enough collectively to promote. remote kind of creative and different thinking. I think we tend to optimize towards people who think alike. That's why we have tests in school. Tests are like, tell me what the right answer is.

That's the right answer. Everyone is like, they're like going right towards the tip of a triangle. I love music. I was a musician. I focused on improvisation. I took a lot of creative writing. I think just taking inspiration from writing and music and arts and all the different way that people.

have thought about, you know, recreating all kinds of music and even writing and stuff like that is probably part of it. But I don't think we do ourselves any favors as a system in this country and promoting people who are either think creatively or out of the box. And I think most people in college, I took painting, I took photography, I took poetry, of which I was truly terrible at. And luckily none of those poems survived. And I took either two or three semesters of creative writing. And I just think learning those things, if I ask kids today, they take computer science and economics. And there's nothing wrong with those.

That's what I think. Yeah. Well, creativity, it's more important than it's ever been and it's more rare than it's ever been. It's a differentiator. I think about like, you know, when people apply for jobs, sometimes you interview for a job, you interview people. you're interviewing a salesperson. And it's like everybody worked at a similar company. They all have the same title.

They've all sold a number of big deals. How are you going to differentiate like 10 people who come in and have an interview with you or Zoom in an interview with? And I think there's some element where like a lot of times I'll ask questions. When I was in the gaming business, when I ran Omjipop and I used to hire game designers and builders, software developers. I really only ask one question. And the question I asked is like,

what is your favorite game? You tell me final fantasy or whatever. And then I would say, why is that a great game? And people would say it's fun or whatever. And one out of every five people would say something like, oh, the way that like this mechanic works and they describe some intricate part of the game.

And you just think, oh, those people really think deeply about games and game design. those with people that I hired. Someone that looks at it differently than everyone else. Yeah. Or really can understand why things are the way they are. Yeah. And is a thinker. And some of that is creativity and some of that is thinking. But I feel like those people, they can have an impact on you and your company, but you can appeal to them to try to make something bigger and better versus people who do less so. And I think that even though some of that is natural, we can all always be better at learning how to do that. Yeah.

How did you get into the gaming business? I was working for Richard Branson, who's a very successful and famous entrepreneur. And part of my job was kind of helping him make the Virgin brand relevant to a whole new kind of generation. And I just thought, let's go to the roots and do music. So we did music festivals and other stuff like that. And I kept reading at that time maybe 20 years ago, like the gaming business is bigger than the movie business. It's bigger than the music business.

And in fact, funny enough, I have two sons and I took them to an outdoor concert that I put on. And they spent the whole time playing the Nintendo DS backstage. And I just kind of was like, wow, gaming is kind of, relevant to culture in a way that music probably was in the 80s and 90s. Not that music isn't, but it's gaming is so, it's so widely played and it's so pervasive. I don't know, 90% of kids play, Roblox or anything else like that. I just kept thinking about it. One day this investor said to me, oh, I know this guy, he's starting a gaming company,

could use some help. So I met with him and I honestly didn't understand anything that he was. he said to me. I didn't understand his website. It literally made no sense to me whatsoever. And so I quit my job and took an 80% pay cut and became the CEO of the gaming company. That's a big leap. Yeah. You just thought this is a title wave that I want to be writing. So it's worth taking this big pay cut to write it. Yeah. And also I was like there's so much I don't understand about this. Like I want to figure it out. And I'm like, I was like, this is hard. They know a lot about something I don't know a lot about.

I clearly get where gaming is going. And it was it was before we had digital goods and everything else. But he understood that stuff was going to come from China and from other places in terms of a business model and come here. So I just jumped and took a risk. And what happened after that point? How did you get from that point to draw something? He was a really cool guy. And everybody worked at a company was super cool.

and lived in New York and Williamsburg and went to coffee shops and made like really cool games for people like them. And it was a really multiplayer game site. It was one of the first chances of people could really play online with each other as opposed to by themselves. There was no iPhone or anything else like that. And I said, who are the users, who are the customers? And they said people like us, because that's what we make games for. Got deep into Google analytics and so forth. And I realized that the customers were actually almost entirely 14-year-old girls in California. They were just assumed.

Yeah. And they were wrong. That's who was playing the games for four and five hours a day. And I was like, well, maybe that's our customer. And then the name of the company was I'm in like with you, which is really funny. And I well, that matches with a 14-year-old girl. I mean. Well, I realized that when people typed it into Google, they misspelled it and we were

losing traffic. Okay. So to change the name, we understood who the audience was. And we started to grow. and we added more and more games and built just kind of like a gaming site where people came and played with each other. And the guy who started was enormously creative and just visually talented. Like everything about the games were really great. I remember once we did a talk at a conference and he got up and he just said,

my goal is to make a game that's so good that some kid mows lawns to make money to pay for it. It was good. And then we were successful with millions of users. Average time on site was four and a half to five hours. And then Farm Bill came out and Farmville was built on top of Facebook. All of a sudden, they had 100 million users. We had like 3 million users. All of a sudden we were big and then we were small. And the whole world was playing Farmville and other Facebook games. And the iPhone had just come out. I was like, wow, we missed. Facebook. We didn't make angry birds. You know, sometimes you wonder if it's too late. Sometimes it is, but sometimes you feel like it's too late, but it's not. We started to make some iPhone games and then it's like there's a hard part where you don't fail, but you don't succeed. So you're somewhere in the middle. Like it's not like you have no users, but it's not like you have a zillion users. It's kind of like the messy middle. Like the valley of death or something like that. Or worse, yeah. Long story short, we had a drawing and guessing game that we had tried to

make for Facebook and we had made for our site. And I decided to try to be the game designer and work with a couple of people in the company. And we just made it as an iPhone game. And we released it. And it did okay. And then it kind of bombed. And then some of our developers were like, I think there's a lot of people trying to play it. I think there's a technical problem. And they worked at a weekend. They fixed it. And it's shot to number one to say there every single. day for six months, 25 million people a day were playing it. It's the number one game in 60 countries in the world and a quarter of a billion people downloaded it. Oh, okay. All right. I want to get to that. Before we get there, I find it so interesting that,

you know, Facebook releases games and you suddenly feel like a very small company. And you are compared to Farmville. It made me think, like a lot of times we talk about platform risk, like platform risk. Don't watch out for those platforms, you know, don't want to be relying on one platform. But that same platform risk can put like non-platform businesses out of business because that platform is so big and strong and scary, right? It's the other side of the argument. You know, I'm trying to reach young people. So I built this website and I was like, who goes to a website? Like you think they're going to your website? Like, have you ever seen a young person open a browser on their phone? Only to do homework. Yeah, exactly. Why didn't draw something for as a Facebook game work? Do you think?

I know exactly why it didn't work. It's kind of not working inspired the thing that made it work. So basically on Facebook, it's like picture narrows, like a drawing guessing game. So it's open. You go into a lobby and there's three other people there. And all of a sudden, the word comes up and you draw it and people guess. Well, if you put people in a lobby with three strangers, they're either going to draw anatomical body parts or they're just going to be rude. And what could be really fun was basically kind of toxic most of the time.

Not all the time, but most of the time. And so when we made it for the phone, we only let you play your friends because we were like, we can't stop people from drawing funny things or being annoying. Fallic things. Yeah. But if you know that they're with their friends, their friends are either going to say knock it off or they're going to think it's funny. And so I think what didn't work is kind of like a wide open space worked,

amazing on a friend basis. It's almost like a version of niching down, like preventing other people from playing it. Kind of like Facebook in the early days, right? Like you have to be a Harvard student. It's like you couldn't solve changing people's bad behavior on the internet. So it wasn't like you could then penalize people and they could report them and everything else like that. But you could solve just not having it open to everyone on the internet. So it was easier to solve that than it was to solve the former.

Yeah. And then you have a built-in virality because you can invite all your friends in your contact list, right? Yeah. I remember somebody told me, I'm getting invites for draw something on like people that I was on Instant Messenger with that I haven't even talked to in five years. Yeah. What aside from like the built-in virality of it from a base principle perspective, why do you think it resonated so well? I think it was really simple. I'm not a game designer. So I made something that was so. easy to understand the play, number one. I think it was very collaborative. It was funny. It was the first thing to use your finger on the phone.

It was tactile. It was what the phone was meant to do, not be a joystick replacement. We didn't make it based on winners or losers. You tried to have a streak with the person that you were playing with. That made people feel like they weren't competing with each other, but it just was like a little more social.

It was actually, in a weird way, it was just very, very, It was social at a time when most games were not social. Yeah. Do you think at the time there was less competition for people's attention on the phone? At that time, I would say that maybe seven of the top 10 apps were games. I'd say now zero are. They're mostly either Uber or Instagram or TikTok.

Short form video. Yeah, short form videos. So that was a moment from 2010 to 2015 when games just died. dominated the phone. That's what you did. And then I think social media really knocked that out. And game discovery was like, people would be like, what are the new games all the time? And there's not a lot of games. There's not a lot of mobile games that like since then, like people still play. They might play that. They play words with friends or Candy Crush or whatever. But in the last five years, I'm not sure there's been a mobile game that I can think of. It's just like taken over and

everybody's done it because both of their attention is on social endeavors. I'm just continually amazed at how innovative and addicting short form video is. Not just the medium, but the algorithms that drive it and just how accurate it is. It's showing me what I want to watch. It's scary. Yeah. I mean, you know, technology is good. And it knows you.

I uploaded 50 essays that I had written into chat, GBT. And I said, I want you to reverse engineer my writing style. and then I'm going to give you a prompt and I want you to write it like I write it. And I'd say it was like 90% that literally sound like I wrote it. Oh, man. In your story, I think you glossed over something quickly and let me make sure I get this right. You were running the company initially, right? Yeah, I was a CEO.

You were not a developer by any means. I'm not a software developer. Yeah. And you had this idea and for some reason you said, I want to build this one. Is that because you just wanted to learn how to build games or you, you were so passionate about it, like you just wanted to own it. In the movie version, it's because I'm so passionate. But in reality, I just think like we were starting to be like, we didn't make angry

birds and we didn't make Farmville. Like, are we effed? Like, what's going to happen to us? I was like, maybe we're going to fail. Like, if we're going to fail, at least maybe I could try to make a game. Yeah. So it wasn't like, this is the best idea I've ever had. This is going to save the company.

Let me go on the front lines and do it. It's more like 90% of the company was working on other games. Yeah. So you're like, all right, we're kind of in flight mode. We're in survival mode right now. I have this idea. And you weren't thinking like, this is genius. This is for sure going to work.

I'm fully confident. But it was kind of like, I think there's something to it. But I don't want to distract my team. They're just trying to keep their head above water. So why don't I try to build it? I had no idea if it would work. Also just was like, I don't know. I just want to try to make a game.

I do overthink some things. in this case, I didn't really overthink that. I just was like, I think I can make something that it's funny because the company that bought us was called Zinga and they were the makers of Farmville, ironically. I went to the offices in San Francisco when we were in the process of contemplating an acquisition and they had all this stuff on the wall and all these game designers were reverse engineering the game and trying to figure it out, why was it successful. And I went over and looked and they were like, oh, you made the game.

And he's like, I just have this question for you. Like, why didn't you use XP in the game experience points? And that moment I thought, I forgot. I didn't use it. But it's just like totally slipped my mind and how whatever. Like that is like, and they just couldn't believe that that was the case. Yeah. And that was the honest answer.

So it's like, I don't know, sometimes things are. just work themselves out or it's good enough as is. And sometimes you have people who are from outside of an industry who are good at making something. I had, I met up with a friend of mine. I had been the internet business. And then he was in the fashion business outside of the United States. And he came back to the United States. And he's like, I said, oh, what are you up to? He's like, let's catch up. He said, I'm making like a sparkling water, like a soap. to stream competitor. I was like, you worked in internet and fashion. What do you know about sparkling water? Like, and he goes, I don't know anything about it, but I'm an entrepreneur.

That's what I do. I learn about stuff. Yeah. It's pretty powerful. Outsiders are powerful. Like, you could have gotten hung up on adding XP and that could have like held up the whole project and then you move on to something else and maybe it ever happens. Or maybe you add it last fun. It could have made it less fun. Could have changed the whole dynamic of the game. The whole culture of the game. 80 year olds played my game. It was so simple. Yeah. I say this all the time, but people get so hung up on researching and doing market research and talking to people and what features do I add when like the building of the thing is the best research you can do. Yeah. Building is the research, right? I think that everything is like, it's like an idea. Like I'm going to

make a brand new toothbrush. I have an idea. But it's just a premise. And it's just an excuse to get started. Sometimes your assumptions are wrong or sometimes you discover something else, but you need something to get started. You need an idea and a premise. People like, I'm pivoting. I'm like, pivoting is like, you know, when you start out in the internet business and all of a sudden you're in the underwear business. Like, that's a pivot. But like everything else is just, you're testing, you're learning, you're getting visibility into what's happening. People are giving you feedback on your idea and telling you what works and doesn't work or you're serving that and you know, you're building it going forward. And I don't think that's a pivot.

I just think you need that first premise and you just need to pay attention. Yeah. What first gave you the idea for draw something? What was that moment? It was the third iteration of the game that we had made for ourselves and for Facebook. So I had thought a lot about why it didn't work. And then the inspiration really was I went to park with my son and his friend and they were playing catch and I was like if you guys can catch the ball back and forth 50 times I'll buy you an ice cream and then I was like oh it's like a streak and then I was like oh a streak is a way that two people won't play a game and be on the same team and not be competitive and that was like part of the core and say so the like the triggering event for the idea was the feature

of the idea and then you built the actual core idea on top of the feature it was fixing something that Other people had built and designed, but I had thought a lot about. And it was that. And then there was one thing that I didn't have anything to do with, but one of the developers, Will Chen did, which was he figured out how to play back the drawing. So if I drew a picture of a house and I sent it to you to guess, you watched me draw it. It felt live. You could see me erase, funny versus me just sending you a picture of something.

And that aspect of it, which I didn't create at all, it just made it feel so alive and so different. And I think that a great game, a great car, a great product, a great jacket, whatever it is that you experience, like, it has to make you, it has to feel amazing. Like, I own one suit that I've owned for 12 years. somehow I still fit into it. And when I put it on, I'm like, this suit makes me feel amazing. Yeah. I look good.

I feel like it's a great suit. The cut so works. I have a car with a really nice steering wheel. It makes me feel amazing. And that aspect of the game just made it feel great. First question. How successful do you think draw something becomes if you never incorporate that feature of like seeing it drawn live?

Do you think that was a core part of it? A hundred percent. I think it does not become as successful with. out there. Yeah. All of those things, streaks, lack of competition, solving the toxic part and that, that everything came together to make it work. And what did you end up selling it for? $200 million. And I feel like if you don't have all of those ingredients, right? It's not like take away the streaks, we sell it for 160. Take away the live feature. We sell it for 120. It's kind of like if you miss one of those, it doesn't go up. Yeah. If you take one of them,

away. It's kind of like your bacon bread. You take the yeast away. You're like, it'll just be a little smaller because there's only one percent of this is yeast. It's like, no, now you have flat bread and it sucks. You take one of those four key ingredients away, then it's a nothing burger. You never get off the ground, right? I agree. The pessimistic way of looking at that is like, well, that's kind of depressing. I have to like put all these ingredients together and I don't know what to work. And I look at that. It's like, that's freaking amazing. You're a chemist in a lab. You're that easy to make a great product, everybody would make a great product, but you've got to assemble all those things. It's like you asked me about myself and my career. I assembled all of those different things from my different

experiences. I mean, I was a high school teacher. Every single thing, you put something together, like great products feel great, even around the edges. Like when you buy a shirt or you buy like a really beautiful shirt, you'll notice the stitching on the beautiful shirt and everything else like that. It is all of those little things that make a difference, but they all have to come together. I mean, you said too, like your developers are like, damn, I think people are trying to play this, but something's broken. What if that conversation never happens? The optimistic way that I look at your story is that all these little tweaks make such a difference. And sometimes you're one tweak away from $200 million, right? One tweak away. If they don't say that, the app doesn't

blow up and the company goes out of business. I feel like it's never been that critical little tweaks and changes since before the age of the internet. Like if I'm running a Facebook ad campaign with a big budget and I check a box that says optimize for conversions, optimize for ad to cart, that could be the difference between me spending $10 to acquire a customer and $100. That could be all the difference. So in this internet connected age, these little tweaks are everything. And so we don't want to over-optimize everything and tweak everything to death, but we want to just keep testing everything, right? Yeah, it's kind of like yoga or if you work out. Like most of us end up doing it wrong. So you're doing some pose and then the instructor comes over and they say, actually,

your hips have to be forward. And you're like, oh, I was just wasting two weeks. I was stretching when I wasn't really doing anything. Yeah. Yeah. So you sell for 200 million. What do you do after that. What's next? So I work for the company that bought my company for a year because that's how those things go. And then I end up meeting Sky Ari Emanuel, who's the founder of Endeavor, William Morris Endeavor, famous talent agent. And long story short, he pitches me and I say no and he keeps fishing me and I end up joining WME as it's called, which is the biggest talent agency in the world, their head of digital and I build the foundation of the modern creator economy by signing building signing 20 agents and 250 YouTubers and you know everything that we think about creators

now was doing 2013 to 2016 and a lot of people who I worked with who worked for me and all those are now run digital for companies all over the US. What's an accessible version of that business today? If you were to keep all your skills, you're 20 years old. And you're you're, you want to make money in that way, kind of, in that industry, how would you go about it? Like, I would try to be a creator in a niche that I could own. So either you're broadly popular or there's creators whose specialty is talking about how to be successful on YouTube. There's finance. There's cooking. There's health. There's exercise. I mean, they're all crowded. But there's always room for people who are creative. And a lot of people under the age of 30 rely on other people

to help them filter information. So if I'm walking down the street and I see some restaurant or coffee shop and there's a massive line, pretty much 100% of the time, someone's like, oh yeah, it just blew up on TikTok. This one person went there and talked about it. Now everyone's gone there. So I would think about that. I mean, listen, what do they say? 40% of Gen Z wants to be a YouTuber. So it's just a different form of being an entrepreneur. How do you think AI plays into that with AI generated content? Do you think that makes like unique creators even more valuable because they stand out even more or less valuable? I don't have a perfect answer for that because a lot of what we see now is probably only the tip of the sword. I do think that humans are able to make

connections about what resonates with people and what's different and what's distinctly human better than AI, but I think AI can accelerate their ability to create it. I think I'll teach a book in my class. Let's say I've picked a book. I've assigned it. And now we talk about it and whatever. The reality is I could also just go to chat GPT and say, hey, I just read this book. What do you think it's about? It does this ask me some questions. I can talk to over two hours and have a really in-depth conversation about the book.

But does anyone want to go and just talk to ChatGPT to learn books all day? Or do they want to go to class with the professor and other students and feel different way and body language and everything else like that? So I think there's a role for both. Yeah. And as you're reading that book, you're thinking, oh, this character reminds me of my mother or in Chatupiti doesn't know that. And your students, they want to know from you, without even knowing it, they want to know from you, like, how that book ties into your life experience, right?

And you're able to deliver a unique experience there, whereas anyone could just regurgitate the chat GPT summary, just like SparkNotes, right? Yeah, it's, I'm going to be more likely to have an opinion, which they might agree or disagree. I'm more likely to say, hey, in my life, when I made this game or I signed this YouTuber, I was really. reading this book and it made me think about X, Y, and Z. So I think we are trained to think in this world that B is going to replace A and C is going to replace B. But I think there are ways that it is additive in a lot of different ways. So I think that human creativity is still going to be important. I think there's a lot of AI creativity. I mean, sometimes we'll be working on a project at work and we're like, we just don't have a good name for this competition we're doing.

And sometimes the names that come out through AI are amazing. And everyone's like, that's perfect. And sometimes they suck. But it's just like it's a tool. But I don't think we're all going to just be sitting at home. Yeah. Because AI is making amazing YouTube videos and other content. But I think it's, you know, it's going to work together.

Tell me about the genesis of overtime and what overtime is. overtime is a sports platform, sports brand for next generation of sports fans. I was working in sports at my job at the talent agency. I heard from a lot of sports leagues that young people weren't watching live sports. And I'm like, they're all watching all the YouTubers that I work with, but they're not watching live sports. I wonder if there's an opportunity. So again, I just quit my job and I was like, let's see if we can start a company to figure out how to get every. young person to care about us. Oh, by the way, we have no highlights, no live rights. We can't

cover any pro sports, but still we're going to figure it out. And that's ultimately what we did. So today, every week, a quarter of a billion people watch a video that we make. We have over 110 million followers. We have a basketball league that kicks off on Halloween this Friday of 31st. We have a football league. We have a girls basketball league. We're in a bunch of different league and event businesses, media businesses, and we've created a really dominant brand and maybe the largest kind of creator in sports. Tell me about the crowdsourcing side of that. How does a kid with an iPhone play into your business model? Yeah. Honestly, it doesn't. I think it's a misconception about our business and I don't know how to get people to stop writing that. But I think the perception was we just

used UGC videos, but we did it. What we did was we built our own camera technology for the iPhone. And then we paid people $20 to go to certain games and film stuff that we then published. So it was actually an end-to-end network where we had a deployed army of maybe 800 iPhone filmmakers. We used our software, tagged it and did it. But for some reason, people thought that that was UGC and that part. Look, I'm answering your question. And I haven't even published a UGC video like that for nine years.

Over time of these 800 kids, are you able to find ones that are just like a spectacular? and you're paying them more, you're giving them more roles. I feel like there's a lot of surface area for finding rock stars. Yeah. Some of them work for us now, like full time. And they started when they were 16, just like filming games for us. But over time, we also ended up starting our own league. So I didn't need to have 800 people.

But there's definitely people work at the company and that's how we know them. What kind of business ideas or other opportunities has working within overtime showing you that you're too focused on to chase after? I think TikTok shop is super interesting. I think that a lot of products are to be driven by creators. I think that product categories are going to change over time. I think we're in a like a food product world where functionality is a huge aspect of that. So I think that's pretty big. I think that second college is.

which engage NIL name image likeness to play a part in attracting athletes. There's just going to be a lot of change in that space. I mean, you know, Reggie Bush lost his Heisman trophy. And then four or five years ago, now people are making millions of dollars in college playing sports. I think it's an incredibly growing and disruptive space. So those are two that I would think about where I sat on exactly for the business. But I think there's the opportunity. there. What about the genesis of 6-7 water? How did that come about and where is it at today?

Similarly, I, oh, there it is. You know, we built a water brand off of a meme. I picked water because it was just easy to make. We didn't have to do testing and tasting and stuff like that. We turned around the whole thing in eight weeks. We've sold tens of thousands of them. We have 41,000 people on our wait list were one of the most followed water brands in the world. But right now, we have a couple interns who go to gas stations and bodegas in New York, and they just talk to people. And they're coming back and they're saying, you know what, I think we need a flavor. And this is why. So like, it starts as this kind of instinct. We're sitting in a room and we're like, this would be crazy. Let's do it. But now a lot of the decisions are being made because people on the street are spending,

time with bodega owners and talking to kids in middle school who come in to buy a drink and seeing what they're buying and asking them why. So I wouldn't call market research, but I'd call it like customer development and a deep understanding there. And that's going to drive the product innovation as it should. Yeah. Are you still looking for distributors and you're still trying to scale that? I'm really focused on distributing it in Kentucky, where Taylin Kenny, who is the main athlete who started this and started saying, 67 and everything else like that lives. A, because he's from there and B, because I feel like everyone who makes a product

tries to launch it in L.A., San Francisco, or New York, which is a really hard place to get traction. So I just somehow feel like maybe Kentucky's a right place to launch it. Yeah. It's so funny. Like, I thought that thing was going to die. The 6-7 was going to die a month ago, five months ago. Like a month after it came out, I have four kids between the ages of nine. and 15. And so when I heard you on MFN, like explaining to them what it was and what I'm in,

I'm like, doesn't everyone know this? Like I hear it 10 times a day. It's everywhere. Yeah. I mean, you know, I always think like culture is at its peak and then it gets to a higher peak and a higher peak. Definitely when it's in the Wall Street Journal and on the Today Show, we might be towards the end. But when we started this, we were not there at all. And I also think there's aspects of culture that are exclusionary, if you know, you know, and there are aspects that are inclusionary. And I actually watched this TikTok from this mom. And she was saying, like, the thing about six, seven is everyone can say it and everyone is in on the joke. And there's actually not a lot of things that are really inclusionary, like on a broad level where if you're cool or you're not cool,

if you sit in the front of the class or the back of the class, if you're a jock, if you're not a jock. So I think that in a way, looking back at it, there's a deep understanding that there was some power to it that just, it was just funny. And I think, you know, the idea of like monoculture, like we're all watching the same thing or everyone's going to see Taylor Swift or whatever, those things or the Super Bowl, like those things are less and less than I think when we were kids. but when they happen, I think it's just funny. I mean, my grandparents were still alive. They would probably think it was funny to say that. I don't know, those types of things on a participation basis. Like, people are too obsessed with the fact it doesn't mean anything.

Nothing means everything. Everything is a little. A word is just a symbol with an arbitrary meaning attached to it. So, like, that's not the point of it. The point of it is it's fun. It's funny. It gives people a way to be included. I wrote this on LinkedIn,

in, but I'm forgetting that it like comes with the hand gesture, like I can say what's up, but there's no hand gesture. So sometimes you watch like a baseball game or a football game. People are doing this in the background. You know exactly what they're doing. You want the sound off. It just, it was meme, so to speak, that just was built for video, audio, social, school, camp, everything.

Well, it doesn't hurt that the two numbers are right next to each other. so we're going to be hearing them together forever. And it's going to be hard to, like, untrain our brain to not hear it in that tone. How many students have you taught, give or take, roughly? Probably 400 to 450. When you talk to a student, your five sentences into the conversation, what's something that you hear or notice that just signals to you, this kid's got it.

He's going to make it. He's going to be okay. Interesting. I thought you were going to ask me a different question, which is like what are all the misconceptions about life they have? I'd like to hear that too, but it's hard to know that unless you're talking about like a specific assignment or anything else like that. If you look at a class, most people don't ask any questions. Some people ask bad questions and other people ask really, really good questions. People ask good

questions. You get it. They're just people who. They think differently. They operate at a different level. Like they're confident about the knowledge. They're engaged. They're not asking you if it's going to be on the. test. It's an in-person class, so I'm biased because people with interpersonal charisma. I make, I run out of time every year, but I try to make every student stand up and tell a personal story about something that happened to them in their first year in New York City. And sometimes you just realize, like, some people are just really gifted and or some people are just really fearless. And the rest of them are just like, is it going to be on the test? Or I go to do the grading and

I'm thinking like, I don't even know who this person is. What's a category or an industry that you have no experience in, but just kind of you're obsessed over for some reason? Something you find interesting. I pay a lot of attention to skin care and beauty. I don't really know anything about it. On the influencer side, it was the first business that influencers were really, really successful in.

It feels like cut through competition, like this is the brand. Now it's not the brand. I really like packaging and like visual communication information. It's fascinating to go into a Sephora and look at all the design stuff. I like functionality and health, so trying to understand what's functional and what's not functional. And then I like the idea of products that make, like clothing or makeup or that, you know,

they'll be like skinny leg, wide leg. Like it's not trends. It's like, what are we all doing? together to express who we are or who we aren't. And I think those things are super interesting. You mentioned early on that you, you're very focused. Like you focus on things. You also have a broad array of knowledge. You've been in different industries. How does that balance? What are your thoughts on focus? When is the right time to focus? When is the right time to chase the shiny object? I'm very obsessive. So I have a mesh network in my house and I'm like a D link in the basement

with like 18 different Ethernet cords that came in from when I renovated my house and put jacks and everything. And everybody complains. The Internet sucks in our house. It's too slow. And this isn't working or whatever. So I have this week probably spent 12 hours like so deep. I just got one of those tools.

You stick in the wall and you measure the eight pins and whatever. And my son says to me, yesterday, he's 24. or he's like, why don't you just hire someone? Like you're spending so much time on like trying to figure out why these are like full gigabit and these are not. And I was just like, I'm not giving up. Like I just will not give up. And then last night, he's like, wow, the internet. My room is really fast.

Everywhere else it's slow, but at least in his room is fast. And I was like, no, I haven't figured out the other eight rooms in the house. and I know I can always hire someone and then I'll give up, but I'm like crimping and cutting the ends off and all things and whatever. And I'll probably never use. I'm just like, I will figure this out. Yeah. Well, and you're going to appreciate the internet even more when it's your internet, right? That part too, I just don't, I don't want to lose.

Like, I have like hundreds of chats with chat, GPT, where I take pictures of the back of the thing. And I'm going with this wiring. Is it this end or that end or the other thing? I walk around on my laptop. So it's like it's like starting a company or something like that. You just get so obsessed that you have to figure it out and make it work. And that's what it requires. When people are like, oh, I own four businesses.

I'm like, well, you own them maybe. But like, I don't know how they can be great because like for me, I just got to be obsessed and all in and thinking about it, nonstop to make it great. Yeah, regardless of the industry. You don't care. Regardless. I mean, I care about like there's a limit. I'm not going to do anything in like chemistry, for example. Like I will never understand it. And there are things that I tap out on, but other things, especially things that are consumer oriented or culture. Like I always say like, I learn so much like a lot of what I learn about business I learned from culture. Like I was a big watch of the fire and breaking bad. And it's not like, oh, I learned tactics about how to start my own lab or how to sell drugs and projects.

But I'm like, what is compelling about these stories and why do they resonate with people and what are they have in common? And even if you look at now, like K-pop demon hunters and stranger things are actually the same story. They both have an underworld. They both have kids who alert adults to what's going on in the world. They have all of these things that are very similar, even if they didn't watch each other's shows. So it says to me like, oh, we live in this time of anxiety where young people don't trust that grownups are going to be able to figure that out. And when was that true also in the early 80s like war games with Matthew Broderick? Like those themes don't always exist. But they come and go at times when young people are like, I don't really feel that. And I tie that to like my overall thing about like why a lot of young people really into wired headphones right now versus AirPods. Like I love AirPods. Well, I think to some extent, they're just like, how long am I going to trust that technology is better for me? Like, what if I just have a bunch of headphones I don't need to charge and one doesn't fall

out when I'm riding my bike and like, I'm good? And so those to me are cultural indicators that I pay a lot of attention to and I try to feed back into what I'm creating or working on. Yeah. Was there something that I should have asked you that I didn't? Anything you want to get out there to the world or anything interesting? What are the things that your students ask to you that are misconceptions or whatever? I'd be curious to hear that as well.

Whatever you major in does not matter. Your grades do not matter. And whatever your parents tell you, you should probably not listen to them because it's your life. And I also say that saying that most people's parents still have probably had one or two jobs their whole life. And most young people are going to have 10 jobs given everything else. Like when you're 21 or 22 or you're graduating, like, you can either live somebody else's story or you can write your own story. And it's way scarier to write your own story.

And it's way easier to do what everyone else is doing because the rules are really explicit and you know exactly how to do that. And it's way more risky to try to write your own story. But if you are connected enough to the world, it can be also way more rewarding. And I think like the beginning part of our conversation, school and education and a lot of, you know, functional things that we experience growing up, they tend to go like this. We tend to, like, like five-year-olds are crazy creative and into dinosaurs and trains

and I don't know what your kids were into, but like it's all that stuff. And it's just kind of all goes like this. We beat it out of all in this little realm where we want to do this. We want to do that. And I'm just like, if you can break out of that, there's. so much crazy potential in the world. Yeah. Beautifully said.

That inspires me to get my kids to do more weird things, honestly. Yeah. 100%. Or just, I mean, you probably do it, but it's like we all do as parents. You indulge them. I mean, I used to know the name of every Thomas the Tank Engine, train and whatever else. I can barely remember them. But like the passion of like a five-year-old who's so emphatic over something.

It's like, it's incredible. Yeah. So with that in mind, my final question, passion or profit? Follow your passion, follow the profit. There's two aspects of passion. One aspect is like, I'm into poetry. I'm into music. I like sports.

I don't think you have to follow your passion for that. Your passion may not correlate with a high likelihood of gainful employment. You might love poetry, but there's no job. You might love books, but you're not going to be a writer and that industry is small. But I think you can have passion for things that you do, accounting. marketing, talking to people, sales, live events. Like, as you get out in the world, you're just like, and you know what drives that passion a lot of times?

You're good at it. Yeah. I know people who have changed careers in their emergency room doctors, and they're just, you know, they're so good at it that that's what the passion is. And I just think separating that idea that the passion has to be your interest versus the thing that you might actually be really good at because we're all really good at. something and it's just a process of unpacking that. Dan, thank you. That was amazing. Where can people find you if they want to reach out or sell some water? TFADP on Twitter and on pretty

much every social platform. All right, what do you think? Please share it with a friend and we'll see you next time on the Kerner office.