This Week in Startups - E1050: PlayVS CEO & Founder Delane Parnell shares his incredible journey from the projects to raising almost $100M to build the esports platform of the future, breaking through as an outsider in tech, using leverage & partnerships to create a moat, his top 5 entrepreneurs & more!

Episode Date: April 28, 2020

0:42 Jason intros PlayVS CEO & Founder Delane Parnell 2:59 What is PlayVS, how do they make money & how fast are they growing? 5:37 Attracting investors, leveraging an exclusive contract to scale across US high schools & average hours spent on the platform by players 13:26 Delane shares his backstory, from flipping shoes to owning cell phone stores in high school to getting tickets to the LAUNCH Festival in SF 26:38 How Delane turned LAUNCH Festival networking to deal flow & a job in venture capital 32:52 Meeting Peter Pham at SXSW, moving to LA to start PlayVS 38:16 Delane on his relationship with Michael Ovitz 40:20 PlayVS' go-to-market strategy & relationship with game publishers 45:51 PlayVS being co-ed & giving female gamers a safe environment to play in 51:08 Race in tech & Delane's advice on breaking into the industry as an outsider 55:57 Not taking any checks from firms who hadn't previously backed black founders 59:05 Does Darnell's intentionality about diversity create a talent advantage for PlayVS? 1:06:06 Relief of hiring high-level operators 1:11:41 LA restaurant scene discussion 1:13:39 Bird vs. Lime vs. Uber, pricing model discussion, thought on Travis Kalanick 1:23:10 Top 5 Tech entrepreneurs of all-time 1:33:40 What's going on at Airbnb?

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have no choice. They need to make a living. Yeah. And so to those people, you know, I call you a hero, but you have no choice but to be there. So in a way, I understand, you're a victim, you're a victim of circumstance, but it doesn't take away from the respect we all have for you delivering the Uber Eats, delivering the DoorDash, security, janitors, doctors, interns, nurses, everybody on the front lines. Thank you for what you're doing for us. And as we sit here thinking about all the lives that got saved for this incredible effort, It's a tragedy that 50,000 people at the taping of this, I think we're at 50,000 today. And this is just a real tragedy.

But it could have been 500,000. And so we have to sort of thank ourselves for doing a good job of staying home, wear your masks, social distance. It's working, obviously, and better days are coming. With that, now that we've gotten people's lives and addressed that issue, livelihoods matter too. 26 million people are unemployed. This week is some scary stuff. And we're going to talk about one of the emerging jobs in the world. And that job is playing video games.

Now, if I had known this in the 80s when I had my Atari and my PC Jr., this, I never thought anybody would play video games for a living. I knew people made them for a living. But my guest today is Delane Parnell. He is Delane on the Twitter, D-E-L-A-N-E. and he's the CEO founder of PlayV-V-S-V-S-com. You can check it out. Delane, welcome to the program.

Hey, thank you for having me. Now, your company, from what I understand, is designed or was designed with the idea of creating sports leagues. We call them e-sports leagues, I guess, and e-sports leagues and maybe trying to tap into the high school player. So maybe you could explain right up front, what is PlayVersus.com? And how did it get started? Yes.

So our vision at PlayV versus is to build, you know, a single competitive community for people who want to play video games competitively or otherwise known as e-sports online. You know, we started our business by building out the competitive league around high school e-sports in a way that's... very similar and sanctioned like high school football, basketball, baseball, et cetera. And, you know, the way that we operate that is that we not only provide the league infrastructure, but we handle scheduling. We provide the sort of general foundational infrastructure by, you know, working directly

with the game publishers, building out the technical integration to make the, to enable that play, partner with the state associations to sanction the sport. And so we sort of provide that opportunity for high schools to build teams and players to compete. And we also do that for college now, too. So started the business two years ago. While we have obviously greater ambitions, right now, we're known as the company that builds the official high school and collegiate e-sports leagues. How do you make money? Do the high schools or individuals just pay a $10 a month per person, like a Netflix subscription, consumer subscriptions, or is it enterprise where the school pays to put their students on it? How do you make money?

Sure. Yeah. So we offer multiple seasons every year, every school year, two seasons. within two four-month seasons every school year, and we charge $64 per player that participates per season. Wow. And so that's generally paid for by the school. Anecdotally, we do know that, like, you know, parents will give the money to the school and then the school will make a one-time payment to. And just ballpark, I know you guys have raised a lot of money I've laid. Is this something that, you know, thousands of people, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are participating in now? Yeah. Look, we're, we're, we're, We've operated the business now for 21 months.

I started the business in January, 2018. But the product's been live since October 2018. We're in 47 states. 20 of those states are sanctioned, meaning, you know, e-sports is treated with the same respect and recognition as basketball, football, baseball, et cetera. We have, you know, tons of schools, thousands of schools participate in. We have tens of thousands of players participated in over 100,000 players on our wait list.

100,000 on the wait list. So at 60 bucks a pop, yeah, so this business is doing millions of dollars a year. It's a real business. How many people work at the company now? Yeah, we're pretty small company. Not by design, but we're 50-something people today. Wow. And so how did schools decide to make this and recognize it as a sport? That seems to me to be one of those hurdles that would stop investors from wanting to invest in the company because I thought the schools looked at this as a distraction and something that was keeping kids up and actually a negative. And am I right in that assessment? And how did you overcome that objection? Because if half the schools have embraced it, does that mean the other half have either are indifferent or are they actually against this as an activity that schools should support? Because when I was in school, they hated the idea that we were wasting time playing computer

and playing video games. Sure, yeah. So on the investor holder, just to answer that first, look, we'd already had the deal with the NFHS, which is the National Federation of State High School Athletic Associations. They're essentially the NCAA of high schools. They're in the same office as the NCAA based in Indianapolis. And they've written a rules and governed high school sports and activities for the past 100 years. And so what that means is they have these local offices, otherwise known as state associations, one in each state, that they work with to sanction. or recognize certain sports and activities, write the rules for them, create the structures for them, and then the states then deploy them into their markets, and they operate state leagues, otherwise known as state championships for these different sports and activities. We partner with the NFHS in January of 2018

to be their exclusive provider for e-sports, everything online, offline, tournament, exhibition, season, competitions. and, you know, we sort of leverage that to go out and raise our first run to fund in because that gave us exclusive access to 93% of the schools in the country. And in terms of, you know, how, you know, any objective objections, excuse me, to e-sports, look, the reality is there's 60 million kids in high school today, but only 8 million actually participate in sports. It's not necessarily an interest or a capability thing is that sports aren't scalable, right?

So 50% of the population are unable to compete within these communities because there's only so many roster spots, right? That never made sense to me. I didn't understand that. In high school, I was like, if you could only have 15 people on the basketball team, why don't you just start five basketball teams and have five teams within the school and then run your own tournaments in the school? And you could have people move up and down through them. I mean, it makes no sense. I think we had two, right, JV. Yeah, so there's freshman JV varsity across boys and girls.

Yeah, look, I think that's certainly a fair point. But that's just tradition. You know, schools, schools in high school sports specifically, youth sports, and just, you know, the sports community in general, they make decisions based on legacy and tradition. And so, you know, wow, the only way today to, like, add more sports teams to a sport, especially at sort of peak scale, is just to add more schools. And we know that that's not a trend that's happening. And so, you know, we look at e-sports as an opportunity to engage, not only those 8 million who play sports, but more importantly engaged that 8 million who doesn't give them an opportunity to find community within the school, to compete in something that they care about, to be recognized

for their talents. And educators, they want that. Like that, you know, they're like they're very motivated to give kids opportunity to put kids on an improved life test. Does anybody like any school say, no, this isn't for us? I'm just curious if they, or if that's just totally flipped, because everybody's got kids at home and they recognize that this takes some level of skill. And it does have some level of mastery. Some of these games are like playing chess. I mean, other ones, the shooters, I'm not sure if I have an analogy for that, but some of them are very strategic. Yeah, many of them are strategic and multiplayer and team focus and require a deep level of understanding of the game and a lot of tactical ability to be able to execute well.

We, you know, early on, I think there was an education barrier. We've certainly started to remove that barrier and build confidence around e-sports and its impact over the last 21 months of just operating our product live. But yeah, there's actually not that many objections to our business. We haven't had people sort of step up and say, we don't want this in our school or we don't want this in our state. You know, if anything, the educators that we work with through the NFHS and the state associations and the districts and schools that were activated in, they're all about how can we help you get this to more schools and reach more kids because you know they recognize the impact that this has on kids and the reality is like look kids are already spending eight hours a week if not more playing video games at home obviously

but you said eight hours i was waiting for you to say a day i mean no i mean so so certainly there's some outliers there but i think the average is 72 percent of american high school teens you know spend eight eight and a half hours that's the average what is somebody who's competitive spend. I got to think they spend at least five hours a day. Certainly, they're probably playing five to eight hours a day easily. Wow. If not more. Yeah. If you're a professional, I'd imagine it could be eight to 12 hours. So you get done with school at 233, get on your rig three till, I don't know, midnight, get nine hours in. Hopefully, our kids are one doing their homework first, getting some physical exercise in, and then maybe they're spending a few hours a day after, after all of that is

said and done with parental consent to, you know, plan at home. But the way that e-sports is operated in the high school environment is very similar to basketball and football and other sports. And so there's a, there's a coach or multiple coaches at a school who oversee the program. There's support from administration. There's a dedicated facility within the campus, which could just be a room, right, with a bunch of computer set up. Kids often have their own dedicated setup with their own peripherals. And so they practice through play versus against other schools. And they also play their league matches. You know, one play versus competing against other schools.

And they do that all within the confinement of their respective school campuses. All right. When we get back from this quick break, I want you to explain how a kid from Detroit who was working in cell phone stores, as I understand it, wound up meeting one of the top incubators and got funded and has now raised tens of millions of dollars for this and moved to Los Angeles, which is kind of the heart of the sports movement when we get back on the state startups. As we navigate unprecedented times, Silicon Valley Bank believes that collective action is the best way to overcome the challenges we're up against.

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problems require extraordinary solutions. And I believe that as well. And I use Silicon Valley Bank, and I love working with them. So here is your call to action to learn more about Silicon Valley Bank's COVID-19 global impact at Innovation Fund and find out how you can donate, please visit SVB.com slash impact. Once again, please go donate. I'm going to go donate right now. SVB.com slash impact. I am P-A-C-T. Thanks again, Silicon Valley Bank for providing amazing support to founders and helping them to get through this incredible crisis that we're suffered through. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, Delane Parnel is here, D-E-L-A-N-E on the Twitter, CEO and

founder of PlayVerses. You can go visit at Playversus.com if you want to play video games as your after school activity or maybe in college. Yeah, get your school to sign up. So how did this whole thing start? I know that you're from Detroit, which has actually got a little bit of a startup town going on there, just getting started. But you eventually met somebody very famous in the industry and then you wound up collaborating with them and moving to Los Angeles, which is where I think e-sports is kind of centered these days, SoCal. So tell me the story. How did this all get started? Yeah. So just briefly, I think background is super important. Born and raised in Detroit, grew up in the Jeffries Projects, then the west side of Detroit, raised by a single mother,

because my father was murdered before I was born. And look, you know, my mom and my aunt and some other, you know, family members, they, I guess, you know, assumed that I had a natural knack for business and entrepreneurship. And they would buy me magazines, like business magazines, Forbes, Inc, you know, so on and so forth. And they would make me read them and they would sort of quiz me on them. And they would just expose me to opportunities outside of, you know, the streets or, you know, being an athlete. And it was, it was very unusual, I think, in our family because they didn't do that with anyone else. Like, they certainly, you know, identify what other people's passions were and tried to double down on that. But for me, in particular, like, it was business.

And so they sort of really double down on, you know, this snack that I have for entrepreneurship and the hustle that came with that. And my mom got me a job at the cell phone store when I was 13. And this guy, Sam, who owned the cell phone store, just took me under his wing. I taught me everything about business, taught me about management, sales, et cetera. And, and, yeah, eventually I went on to own some Metro PCS stores when I was in high school. And I would basically go to school, you know, get out at like 215, you know, before I had a car, you know, a friend would take me or I would take this bus and sort of walk a mile, get to the store, get there maybe about 3 o'clock or 315.

I got to stop you for one second there. You just dropped that you owned a cell phone store when you were in high school. Just pause for a second there. How does a high school person wind up getting a cell phone store? Did your rich uncle gift it to you? How did you get a cell phone store? Yeah, I wish I had a rich uncle. Me too.

Yeah, you know, it'd be. I'd probably be billionaire already today. No, I think, no, look, I was, you know, I was, first off, I was working extremely hard. I basically stopped playing sports, stopped doing anything outside of business and work. 13 onward, saved, you know, mostly every penny that I had. You know, reinvested that money into different, you know, other hustles, whether it be my homies who worked at shoe stores, you know, I would give them money to buy shoes and then we would resell them and I would take a healthy margin. My brother. Yeah, we were doing everything. Flipping. Yo, we, uh, my, my, my, my, my step

Pops owned, he still owns an auto repair shop. And, you know, his customers would want to sell their cars, but they weren't savvy with the internet. And so I would go take pictures of the cars, get him cleaned up, fixed up. And I would invest my own capital into that. And then I put them on Craigslist and sell it for, you know, a thousand, $2,000 profit beyond what they wanted to sell it for. And so, yeah, I was doing just a bunch of different hustles and, you know, stacking as

much money as possible. That money was initially intended for me to go to college. and I realized that, you know, that wasn't necessarily the path that I wanted to take early on. I knew I wanted to go to college, but I didn't want to use that money for college. Like, I wanted to use that money to make more money. And so, you know, I worked at a Sprint Nextel store and Metro PCS started to move into the market. I worked with this lady who ended up going to get a job at Metro PCS, basically approved franchise licenses and managing that market.

She, I reached out to, I was the first thing I did actually, which, you know, was, everyone turned me down. I basically went to all of the neighboring stores in my area within like maybe a five to 10 mile radius. They knew who I was because like our store was like one of the biggest, you know, stores for the services that we sold. And they knew that I ran the store by this time. And I'm 16. And so I'm running a phone store at 16. You're the best salesperson. Yeah. And then you go to the other stores in the neighborhood. So what I went there to, to tell the owners like, look, I want to, I have some money saved. I want to become an owner of the store. And I can help you increase yourselves and I can teach you strategies that we implement it to grow Sam's empire

from one store to many stores. And a lot of them said no to me. A lot of them then take me seriously, even if they knew my background and knew my track record and we ran into each other. In fairness, they were adults and you were 16 years old and you offered to buy their store. It's kind of a bold gambit. I mean, in fairness. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, well, I didn't think about it in that context. And I guess did you have a bank account at this point or just like a brief So I went to Southville High School. I had cash in a bank account. I went to Southville High School.

And we had a Michigan First Credit Union in our high school. And you actually got like $10 for starting an accountant. So I wanted to get the $10. So I can, yeah. So I could get the account. And now I would just deposit money there. And then I had a shoe box, you know, a few thousand bucks. So none of them took you up in the offer to buy them out.

Yeah. Yeah, we'll buy into it. I wanted to become partners. And so none of them took me, took me up. that offer. But, you know, one day, you know, this my former colleague, she reached out to me and said, hey, look, I had these two guys, their parents own some real estate and they're looking for a partner who is experienced, who knows about the market, who can sell, you know, phones, who knows all the wholesalers, et cetera. And they, they, you know, want to meet you because I mentioned

you to them. Now, I haven't told them how old you are, but, like, you know, I'll do so right before the meeting. Anyway, she sets the meeting up. They're pretty young, too. They're like early 20s. But they're like, look, if you can do what you say, you can do. And, you know, And we trust her and have confidence in her. Then we'll give you a shot. And so they let me buy into this partnership. And we went from opening one store to- And they own the real estate?

They own the- Their parents do. Yeah. Their parents- And their parents and family members did. So you couldn't get the people who had the stores. So you went to the people who they paid rent to. And then-

I mean, yeah. That's a smart way to do it. Yeah. I didn't even, you know, try to go that path. Like that wasn't, I didn't have visibility into that pathway. I didn't know people who own real estate at the time. But, you know, luckily I just built a really strong reputation. people knew me to work hard, people knew me to be an expert in this area and have just deep

competency and, you know, people like me. And so, you know, I think that the universe sort of paid me back on that karma and I luckily found some people who didn't, you know, discriminate or care about my age or, you know, what color my skin, you know, is and just wanted to give me an opportunity because they recognize that if, you know, if I won, they won. And, you know, luckily that paid off. We went from one store to three stores. We sold those stores. End up, you know, leveraging that opportunity. And through my mom. I'm again, end up going to build this car rental with this guy named Mark. We ended up building a pretty big car rental business together, went to school for a semester,

dropped out. And it was actually the story of Groupon that really inspired me to get into tech. And that, that, you know, learnings and research around Groupon led me to meet in his guy named John Treese at Lutlow, who gave me a ticket with the up to now Stockex guys to go to the launch festival. And that blew my mind. I was. I run the launch festival.

Yeah. So it's a full circle moment. here. So you're in Detroit. You meet my friend Jonathan Trees. Jonathan Trees would sponsor the, when I started lunch, he would sponsor it. I'd give him like 20 tickets. Yeah. You got one of the golden tickets. So I sent them this super long email. I don't know, I don't know how many times we met in person prior to this moment, but I sent them this long email. I was just like, look, I pay for myself to get out there, but, you know, I need the ticket. The tickets were decently expensive. Yeah. And I guess I could have probably just bought one of my own, but like, why not?

I did, you know, what I did was I made them free eventually because I realized there was more people like you out there who needed the opportunity. So I used to give all the sponsors like 20, 50 tickets. They just invited somebody who could do it. But then we wound up giving 15,000 tickets away for free in the peak year. That's amazing. Yeah. No, look. So John, John gives me this ticket and it changes my life.

Was that the first time you came to San Francisco? First time I ever left Detroit on my own. First time I taken a flight. First time I booked a hotel. This is like 10 years ago, I bet, or nine years ago? I think 11 or 12, 2000 or 12. Wow.

Yeah. So this is super early. You come out. I actually saw Uber for the first time, you know, when I was out there. That was when they were black cars still. Yeah. And you get to the launch festival and you see me on stage interviewing people. Yeah. And, you know, crazy inspirational moment for me.

I met Thomas Court there actually. So anyway, I come to the launch festival. I stayed at a holiday and express by the airport because that was the only place that would let me book, given my age. That's about $89. $129. I don't even remember how much it was, but I had to talk to the general manager to convince him to let me even stay.

And I didn't recognize how far it was, right? And so I would take caps to like get everywhere. And so, yeah, so I go to the launch festival. The first thing I did was I watched you talk and interview a few people. And then I, you know, walk the demo pit. And I talk to every single person in that demo pit.

I guarantee you no one sent more follow-up emails after that to me. And every time I would get a card, I would kind of write after we stopped talking a couple points down. like from like talking points down from our conversation and just sort of go to the next and uh and you know what i'm going to start the launch festival back up in the in san francisco i put it in you know at san francisco was just breaking my chops too much like they they were shaking me down and making me pay for extra video people who were no show jobs like the unions here they literally were protesting they're like you have they're like we need to have like four more video camera operators so i'm like

yeah no i got my own team and they're like yeah you need four of our people i'm like no no i actually don't i got look one two three four these for robotic cameras, these I got this. They're like, yeah, no, you need four of ours, so we're going to protest. Oh, wow. Oh, my God. Yeah.

Just non-stop. And I just got exhausted from them, like, literally shaking me down. And I was like, I just can't do it here anymore because I'm trying to do it for free. Yeah. And the demo pit was my other idea for making it free, which was the demo pit. I gave 100 people a free table each day, and it was three days. So 300 people. And I said, here's a round table.

If you need Ethernet. High top. Exactly. Cocktail table. high top. It's free. If you need an Ethernet connection, you can use the Wi-Fi, but that'll be down. If you need a cable, it's like 500 bucks to get a cable there. That'll help pay for the Ethernet. But I suggest you just bring your LTE or have a cam presentation that you don't need to pay anything. And if you need power, I suggest you bring a laptop and a extra battery pack. But if you want power,

you got to pay like $100, too, to pay for this electrician. So I just passed on those two costs to them. And man, so many people were like, I can't believe this is free. And I'm like, but it doesn't doesn't really cost me anything. I just, the event costs a million bucks. We break even and changes lives. So when we get back from here, I want to know, um, who was the best speaker at that event and then how you flipped the event, because we heard how you flipped the cars into the job and, uh, the Metro PCS into the stores, the Metro PS into the, uh, car rental, into meeting Jonathan Trees, into getting into the demo pit and meeting all those people and sent emails, but I need to know the next connection of how the how play versus started when we get back at this quick break.

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Visit LinkedIn.com. Slendcom. You got that in your URL already. Just add slash twist. TWIST and you get that $50 for your first job post terms and conditions, of course, apply because they're giving you $50. Okay, let's get back. This is amazing episode. All right, Delane Parnell is on the podcast, CEO and founder of PlayV versus. I had no idea that I was in.

anyway part of the story. But I do think, you know, if you're out there and you're trying to make a name for yourself as an investor, what I always thought was this guy, um, uh, O'Reilly, Tim O'Reilly. And he had this idea about networks. He said, you just give more than you take. You did, if you give more than you take, you'll just get this incredible reputation and you'll, you just have to siphon off like five percent of whatever good well you're putting out in the world. And boy, has that worked for me in the, and in some of these investments I've made. So you came to that. That's great. Awesome. And then what happens next? Yes. So, so yes. So I'm like, you know, going through this demo pit, you know, meeting everyone,

following up with everyone. And then one day I run into Thomas Court. And I think he was, he was speaking. And then I sort of hunted him down. Angel investor. Yeah. Great guy. And this was before Angel, but this was like, him and his wife, I believe, were starting AngelPad, but they hadn't run a cohort. And he was like, look, I got to, he's like, you can walk and talk with me, go to the, I don't have to go through the demo pit. And he had this like no pen. And I was like, look, I've already seen every company. So let me take you to some that we're really interesting. And so we basically do that. And right after, by the way, he was like, man, I should tell Jason that he should do this for everyone. Like every speaker and investors should have a person who,

like a VIP concierge, like an analyst. Yeah, exactly. You were an analyst. And so. Yeah, exactly. And so Thomas says to me, hey, you should come work at, like, you should work at this thing. Like, you should move here and, you know, work at this thing that I'm doing. And it was ancient. And it was. Pat and he's like, I can't pay you, like he was very upfront. But, and, you know, because of that, I was like, ah, you know, I'm this kid from Detroit. I'm, you know, money is a, you know, super important resource for me as it is for everyone, but certainly given, you know, how, you know, we were in poverty, you know, and so like I needed to make money to be able to take care of myself to help my family out. And so I didn't, I didn't factor in how big of an opportunity that was at the time,

because one, just lack of knowledge in the space and understanding. But then, too, you know, just given that, I equated opportunity to money, like whatever allowed me to make money versus, you know, gain experience. So either way, like, you know, nothing ever happened there, but we sort of, you know, followed up and sort of stayed in touch. And there was another thing that happened. I ended up made in David Cohen from tech stars through because of Minbox. So Alex, Mineran, who won Best Design from Minbox, him and I.

We were investors. Menbox. Okay, yeah. And so him and I basically end up linking up somehow. And we end up basically like just being together a lot. during the event. And we ended up catching an Uber together to like, I think it was like a W hotel or something like that.

And every, like, everyone was ringing his phone when after they won and like on our way to like find whatever this thing called Uber was. And yeah, I was just like blown away. And, you know, him and I were just kind of talking about some of the decisions that he wanted to make around. Because I think the prize was like a spot in tech stars or something like that. And so like what he wanted to do? And yeah, it was just like, man, it was just such an eye open and experience.

for me, you know, I left there, went back to Detroit, and a couple of things happened for me. One, from seeing you do those interviews, I recognize that that's like a format, right, a fireside chat. So I start hosting my own events in Detroit. And this is before Dan had bought a building, before any really big venture funds. And these, these events become really popular. You talk about Dan Gilbert? Yeah, this is, yeah, before Dan Gilbert had purchased the building. Cleveland Cavaliers. I mean, he owns the city of Detroit and the Cleveland Cavaliers in Quicken loans, which is, you know, one of the biggest private companies in the world. And so, yeah, before he'd done any of his investments in the city, like, you know, I was basically doing a lot of grassroots stuff with a handful of people in an entrepreneurship community around these events.

And I would call them 50 founders. That was the initial name. And the concept was I was going to convince my favorite 50 founders to come to Detroit, do a fireside chat. That's a brilliant idea. I like the branding. You got a thing for the branding. 50 founders, pretty good. And so initially I end up like changing it.

I mean, eventually I end up changing the name to, to, gosh, gosh, Starter Talks. Yeah, because Jason Freed from Chicago from, you know, Base Camp. 37 signals. Yeah, 37 signals. He basically talked about like the concept of a starter, basically, instead of like replacing the word entrepreneur. And I was like, oh, I like that.

I like that concept. Like I'm going to change the name of Starter Talks. And we end up bringing guys like Alexis O'Hanian and Charles Zalier from Kickstarter and tons of other folks to Detroit. And it became like this thing, you know. And Dan eventually, you know, his team ended up supported it pretty heavily. And yeah, it was just this big thing. And I sort of leveraged that opportunity and up because I had all these relationships

with entrepreneurs. And I wanted to like events, you know, you mentioned this, you know, about like, even the city of San Francisco. Like, we know that like events are a very difficult business to monetize. And I had this, I had great empathy for entrepreneurs and I wanted to find a way to support them, but I also needed to be able to monetize the time I was spending there. And, you know, I end up basically deciding to go try to find a job at a venture fund. It had a few offers because like that was sort of the best way.

Like, I have these relationships. I had good deal flow. You know, people in Detroit lack relationships on the coast between San Francisco, L.A, and New York. And I had decent, decent Rolodex of people who liked me from those places because of my relationships through the events. And so Tom Lassorter, who was the CEO of Chrysler, end up doing one of my events and end up offering me a job at this venture fund that him and Roger Pinsky and Dieter's Edge from

Mercedes-Benz was starting. And, you know, I went and did that, left there, went to go work at this. startup that did it put 30 million into, called Rocket Fiber on the early team. And then it was there where I got really deep into e-sports. And fast forward, you know, sort of meet Peter Pham, just by happenstance in Austin, Texas, at South By. So you go to Southby, and you literally run into my man, Peter Fam. Yeah, yeah, Peter. Where? I didn't necessarily run into it. And we were at this house party called the Culture House. And I was walking by to find my boy Marcus Carey, who's a phenomenal entrepreneur that Dan actually just recently back in Detroit, from Detroit.

And yeah, and Susie from, I guess their fund is called cross-culture, but I think they partner with Macro, so it might be a different name. But she works with Troy Carter. She grabs me and say, hey, do you know, you know, Peter is dancing. If anyone knows to your family, they know his whole thing. If Peter's out, he's dancing, yes. Probably with his shirt off. Shirt on or shirt off? Shirt on or shirt off.

And he had a speaker. Like, there's a DJ. And he was right next to the DJ, but he had a speaker on his belt. which was super weird. Shirt on, shirt off. Peter Fam shirt was on. Oh, shirt was on. Shirt on.

Okay, so it was early. I've seen him with, it was super early. It was like seven. Two o'clock. Yeah, it was, it was super early in the party. After seven,

30th. Shirts off. Shirts off. By the way, Peter's ripped. You know, people are sleeping. I know,

that's why he shirts off. I mean, it's ridiculous. So, yeah, so anyway, and he can dance. He can dance too. I mean,

sometimes a little provocative, but like he can dance, sure. No, trust me because my wife likes to dance and then like every time we go like we've been on vacation a couple times we've gone out a couple times and it's just like I need a break I'm not like some big dancer you know I'll just get on the dance full I'll bounce a little bit to the beat or whatever but I just want to sit and chill and pop a bottle or something and then like he's grabbing my wife and spinning her around on the dancer and I'm like Peter okay enough put your shirt back on and put my wife back to me yeah I've taken Peter to some rap parties like rappers parties uh like recently we went to meek meals party and uh it got so crazy they caught Peter onto the stage and Peter was dancing with my homie PJ Kev who's you know really big in hip hop and culture you know part of the dream chaser family and so uh it was it was insane and celebrities were like tweeting about Peter the next day you know following them online it was pretty

insane. It's a bit much you know what thing is Peter's got a little bit of the OCD and so like his brisket game is also getting very tight and you know I'm smoking my brisket I'm pretty famous for my brisket out here in the valley and then I wake up and I just see this guy with the butcher paper and he's got bark on that brisket that's just like it literally is i don't want to even say it but he's got better bark on his brisket than i do and i'm just like i got up my bark game here listen peter has you know he uses a lot of gadgets so to take it with a green no i know it's just ridiculous it's peter fam's just so focused and yeah so peter i'm a better investor but he's definitely better body better dancing and better bark i mean i'm better at investing than him but that's the

only thing. Like in terms of our careers, I'm better at our careers. But the, you know, the extracurricular stuff, he's definitely better at. Hey, well, look, both of you guys have amazing careers. I'm just one to be envious of out. I'm not. I know. I haven't had Peter on the pot. I know. I got Peter on the pot. So wait, you meet him and you pitch him on what? I don't pitch him at all. And so, you know, we're just talking about e-sports because Susie's like, hey, you know, you just talked to Dlan. He's thinking about e-sports. And yeah, Peter and I, we're talking about how do you think about the space, et cetera? And so he's like, yo, we're talking for like 30 minutes and just high-level e-sports.

And he's like, yo, give me your info. I'm, you know, I'm going to call you. And so I give him my phone number. I don't really think anything of it. And the next day he calls me, he's like, hey, I've been thinking about what you've been thinking about, but you should think about that from a go-to-market around high school, given some of the challenges that I laid out. And so, you know, he asked me to come to L.A., spend a bunch of time with his partners,

Mike, Tom, Greg, and the rest of their team. And over a few months period of time, I do so. And then, you know, I was dragging my feet truthfully. And Peter reaches out to me and was like, look, you could be a millionaire in Detroit or a billionaire in L.A. But like, don't waste my time. And literally got off the phone with him, called my brother, packed everything that I own in my place, gave it away. You know, took my car city dealership, found the place in Playa Vista and moved to L.A. Like, I was in L.A. by that weekend, like Saturday.

Did you have the idea totally hashed out or you just had this idea that e-sports was a thing? And then how much of the idea was like Peters? yours or you just riffed on and had the idea actually manifest itself. Yeah. So like my, my vision and it sort of still remains the same is look, we want to build the competition infrastructure around amateur e-sports. We want to be the single place where every single person who wants to play e-sports, whether it's in a hit-to-hit match, a tournament or a season on behalf of your school or otherwise, we want to be that place where you do so. And we want to monetize that through subscription. We essentially want to build a hundred million plus user subscription business

around Eastport. Did you realize that only five people have done that in the history of humanity? Sure. Verizon. Netflix. Netflix. Spotify. Amazon. Amazon.

Correct Prime. Yeah. It's all good. Wait, there's somebody else. AT&T get there? No, Comcast never got there. AT&T never got there. Disney's going to get there.

Disney will be. Yeah. And play versus. And play versus. Yeah. So, you know, look, look, the reality is like no one, no one's, no one's done that. Gaming is like one of the biggest entertainment, you know, consumptions and behaviors where no one's aggregated all of that.

There's no Amazon Prime or Netflix, for sure. I mean, yeah, but like the, like you could say that like maybe Twitch or Discord, like these different platforms, 100 million people, but they're not subscription. They're a different model. And beyond that, they're only, their aspects of gaming. And so they're sort of this emerging platform attached to a specific aspect of gaming. So broadcast, communication, even if you think about Steam from Valve, that's distribution, the essence of why people game is competition.

No one's built a competition platform that has aggregated this behavior. And the reason is because you need to work with game publishers. And publishers similar to like record labels are, you know, Hollywood Studios like they're very wall garden. They don't build for third party connection. They don't care about ecosystem. If they could be the only company that does that or do what they do, like they would, you know, they wouldn't work with anyone. You read the Mike Ovitz book? It's incredible.

He's supposed to come on the pod. I'm like three or four emails into it with him. But now that's virtual. There's no reason for him not to come on the pod. You know, I haven't read the book, but I know Ovis. he's he's one of my two CEO coaches him and dick caselo um and i mean he's just a legend man you know i was actually so i can't get him can you can you do me a favor i mean i helped you out with the launch festival can you put in a good word with me with mr ovis i'll text them right after this

and i'll say look man you have to do this week in startups i just did it's a big deal thank you i appreciate delin 100% it's my producers can't get it done every every time i've ever went out to eat with ovis we've never looked at a menu and we've never paid um we just go did you go to place? I've been there too. Yeah, that's pretty tight. Yeah, that's actually fire. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, they don't even let you park if he's coming. You know, I'm like, yeah, I need to valet too. So he's a cool cat. All my friends are very good friends with him. I met him like two or three times. And the book is incredible. I can't believe you haven't read the book yet. Now, I'll read it. Listen to it. It's a great listen. It goes by real quick. I want to talk to him about the Travis Callenick story. I was a, I was, I was, watching an interview from like 2011 or 12. Yeah, that's crazy story. Yeah, Kalanick was talking about how, you know, Ovis had basically sued him. Listen, there were a couple things that, you know,

in the Ovid's history of like, you know, dead fish on a hood of a car for a journalist kind of situation. Wow. That was settled. There was a guy, Anthony Pelicano or something. Anyway, it got rough and tumble. There were some people doing some crazy stuff in the 90s. But I think Mr. Rovitz had nothing to do with that. He's like the godfather. I think, listen, Mr. Ovis has always acted in the highest moral and ethical way. That's my position. 100. Mike, if you need any character witnesses, you have both me and Jason. Absolutely. Absolutely. Listen, it's not like I haven't dug a ditch in my day. Listen, I've had to do some things in Brooklyn when I grew up. All right. So how do you interface with

the publishers because my understanding was they see the community aspects as a big part of their game. I know, especially with Fortnite and League of Legends,

I think they run their own stuff, don't they or not? Explain to me how this all works. Can you run? I mean, is there any reason you can't run

competitions through your platform if you're just, people are subscribing to you as a way to do matchmaking? Sure. Can they stop you from using it? So that's a, there's a lot to unpack there. I'll just briefly say too. So, you know, didn't have the idea when I first moved to LA. Spent six months really working again. Said Matt Mazzio from Koto, prior lowercase gave Peter Pham, the idea around going to marketing high school. Peter never disclosed that. But Mazzio ended up investing in. So that's how I found out. You know, we started a company in January to your point around publishers. Like, you know, I do that, you know, six months in 2017 from like June or July through December. You know, I spent a lot of time. You know, I'm not only thinking about like, like,

the broader vision, but specifically how we're going to go to market around high school, how we're going to add value back to this community and give them incentive to play, how we're going to do so in a legitimate way and find kind of this effective distribution channel. We end up discovering that through our relationship with the NFHS, just given that's how all sports, you know, essentially operate or, you know, scale within our country through the NFHS and state associations. And, you know, initially, like I was hoping, like, signed publishers first and then leverage the publishers to get the NFHS.

But what I found this is like, you're right, like IP holders don't like if you don't have any leverage or you don't have any value for them, you know, them working with you to build something is like doesn't help them create new content and sell that content, you know, and create more jobs and revenue, et cetera for their business. And so they're unlikely to work with you. However, at this time, like, e-sports is this like growing thing. Publishers are starting to develop their competency. They, a lot of them, as you mentioned, like they run their own events. Those events are at the pro level. So all of the publishers have sort of decided that like pro is where they're competency will fall and they'll build their infrastructure internally around pro events. A lot of those events are live, so they're not online play. Everything in amateur, which is, you know, the 2.4 billion gamers in a row besides the 1,000 pro players, like that's sort of up for grabs. But the only way that you could actually build a big company there is to have relationship with the publisher because you need to integrate with them both operationally and technically, and you obviously need the rights, commercialization rights, to be able to

monetize when their game and to be able to operate on their game. And many people in e-sports actually don't do that. Like, they just try to, they act as if this is, you know, basketball and you can go to Dick Sporting Goods and start your own league. And many investors have, like, lost money because they just invest in these companies without talking to, you know, the publishers and asking about the status of their relationship or lack of relationship. And, you know, journalists are no better, right? Like, they write about these companies without taking into account that they might be doing things that they can actually do because they don't have the proper rights. And so, you know, I end up basically, you know, doing that deal with the NFHS. secure distribution into a unique own audience, right, of high school kids in our country

and leveraging that to go out and get the publishers. Because if you're a publisher and you want to have a professional league, you're spending millions or hundreds of millions of dollars into the development of that, then at some point you're going to need a sustained ecosystem around talent. So whether it be coaches or players. Why would they rebuild it if you have it? They could just let you. It's just a significant risk for them, right? Because they would have to build that infrastructure to support every high school for every IP. And many publishers, have, you know, a bunch of different games, and a lot of their games are e-sports and their separate teams. Like, they're, maybe they have some shared resources, but they're standalone

teams. And so if they wanted to be, like, Activision Blizzard, where Bobby Kodick wanted to build high school, then he would need to build it for Harfstone, for StarCraft, for, you know, Overwatch for, for... Shout out StarCraft, too. That's what I've done. Whatever game, right? Whatever Eastports. So that could end up being five or six or seven different teams doing the exact same thing. How much... How far behind the times am I as a, uh, Star-Tor's not really scalable? How far behind the times am I as a StarCraft 2 is the only game I play? Yeah, you're square, you're super far behind. Super far. Super square. Yeah, we got, you're not a square. I mean, people still play StarCraft 2 and start like people love StarCraft in general as a as a series. But like,

yo, you got to catch up, man. There's tons of games out here. I tried this League of Legends. It's a difficult game. I suck at League of Legends. I'm the worst League of Legends player, known to men. Explain to me, because they kind of broke my brain. there are so many characters and so many abilities and it keeps changing. Like in order to just have a base level of knowledge of League of Legends, to get a base level of knowledge, it's got to be like 500 hours. Yeah, easy. I mean, I don't know the exact amount of hours, but I could totally see 500 hours.

But look, kids have time to do that. Like people, people who enjoy anything have time to do that. Yeah, you know, there's, there's, there, there, there, my daughter to start playing League of Legends with me because there's no, the only way I'm ever going to get good at this is if I can, because I have to spend time with her. Maybe I get her to do it with me. She's been watching. You know who does that by the way? Mike Jones, um, from, uh, science. Him, his daughter and his daughter, they have, like, he's basically a dad of, uh, two League of Legends clubs between his, his son and his daughter. And he didn't, you know, organize his competitions for them. And, uh, and, uh, he obviously coaches, like their soccer teams and, and, uh, and, and, uh, he obviously coaches, like their soccer teams and, and, stuff like that. But like that's one of his favorite activities to do with his kids. It's like, you know, set up league matches between their friends. One of the cool aspects of this is that there, gender doesn't even play into this. Are there girl leagues versus boy leagues? Or is it just all one league? Yeah. No. So, I mean, the beauty of, at least what we do is that it's co-ed. So boys and girls on the same team also compete against each other. Because they're like an actual physical,

in-school environment is actually less toxic too, right? Girls who play online, they often get harassed. get harassed, yeah. And, you know, when they're playing in an environment with people that they know and trust, and that's a safe environment because there's adult supervision is actually a really safe environment for them to do something they love. And we've actually realized that because, you know, many of our championship teams at the state level have women players or women coaches. And they love it. They absolutely love the fact that they can do something that they enjoy and, you know, build genuine friendships. Well, one of the things I would never do is let my kids play on those services because I know. the adults on those services, predators on those services, there's, people are saying crazy stuff. I mean, you've heard the, you know, clip transcripts from like Xbox streams where people are just saying every bad word you could imagine and just really brutal. Like, and then there's 12-year-olds and 14-year-olds on those services. But what's great about this is if it's in a school setting,

there's a code of conduct and there's a ramification. If you were to say certain words on the stream, you would get kicked off the team. Yeah. And we also limit the communication player to player in general. So, you know, players, like, because school A plays school B, they don't travel to each other. So, like, players are generally not communicating against the other teams. There's no, like, chat functionality built into our product for players, but coaches can communicate. And you'd be surprised. There are, there are some instances where one coach is too passionate and are more passionate than another, not necessarily too passionate. And they might, you know, jump out the window and say some things that are against, you know, our coaches might lose.

Yeah. I mean, would they do what the Patriots do and, like, just be all out cheaters? Have you found people like the New England Patriots who just cheat? No, our leagues have- No Patriot cheaters? And an incredibly high competitive integrity. Like we all take it very seriously at the company and obviously our community as well. And so, yeah, we haven't, you know, knock on wood.

We haven't, you know, found anyone cheating within this environment. So nobody like the New England Patriots cheating? These are coaches that are faculty members at a school who recognize that they're consequence to those sort of actions, including their job. So, yeah, so they don't cheat like the Patriots is what you're saying. Well, I don't know if the Patriots cheated. In fact, the Patriots have been really great to us. Yeah, listen, yo, the Patriots and Robert Kraft have given us their facility for our Massachusetts State Championship.

Okay, okay, so I can't. So listen, we're big fans of the Patriots. Absolutely. We appreciate you guys. I take it all back. Thank you for all your support. I'm just saying that even with all the alleged cheating by Bill Belichick, they still didn't beat the Giants, though. which is interesting, you know, Nick,

they tried to beat the Giants, but they lost in the Super Bowl to the Giants, right? If I remember correctly. That one lucky catch from Plaxico, Burris, or whatever his name is. It's 2012, you know? And the cheaters lost. As much cheating as they allegedly do,

they still couldn't beat my Giants. Hmm, that's interesting. New England fans, come at me, at Jason, Twitter, at Jason. Tumblr, at Jason on... Talk about SACON's quats. It's insane. It's the size of it.

table. So the road, you've raised $97 million for this. And I just want to take a moment because you talked about like, hey, some people maybe don't invest in people who are my color and, you know, from where I'm from, when you look back at this incredible journey and you're assessing diversity and tech and the ability of somebody who's a nobody who's flipping car. and working at Metro PCS to break into this industry. You did it.

What do people who assume you cannot break into this industry? And you got Mike Ovitz as a coach. Don't forget him up with Dick Coslow. What's that? And Dick Haslo, respect. Dick, Dick's amazing. Dick's great guy. He's a great guy.

He just invested in a company, a density that was one of the launch festival companies. I don't remember density, the people counter? I actually hung out with Andrew, the CEO at dinner not long ago. Love that company. Lutlo was an investor in that company. That's how I found out about it. I introduced him to Jonathan.

Okay, cool. Yeah. So here you are. You broke into it, just like I broke into it, a kid from Brooklyn, kid from Detroit. The tech industry seemed to me as somebody who broke into it. It wasn't in, there was an infer. I had a hard time figuring out all this information because I had to get it from magazines, then it all went online. What I used to do to try to get into events is I couldn't

get into the events either, and the events were $4,000 back then. So what I would do is I would lobby crash. So you got in through Jonathan, but I would just hang out in the lobby and then eventually Esther Dyson or Kara Swisher or Tim O'Reilly would literally hand me a badge and be like, Jason, just go in. Like they would literally just, you know, give me the miracle. But what do you think about race and tech and, you know, people sort of look at tech and say, hey, this is like a bunch of Stanford, white guys, whatever, and an African-American is going to have the deck stacked against them. What's true?

What's not true? How has it changed? What can you tell other people who maybe feel like it's hard to get into this business and break into it as somebody who not only broke into it but took over? Yeah, sure. Look, this is a big topic of discussion and there's a lot to unpack there. But yeah, look, the deck is totally stacked against, you know, people of color. And just because I've had success doesn't mean that, you know, the industry, you know, has found a new appreciation for people of color and, you know, black entrepreneurs specifically.

Look, you know, I'm an outlier, you know, of whatever 40, 50, 60, 70 years of venture capital to, you know, be a solo founder, to be this young, to go out and raise this much capital with such a short period of time from top investors. But there's tons of other founders who look just like me who deserve those opportunities, who may. even further along than we are today or war when we raised that capital. And they don't get that opportunity. I don't know if I got that opportunity if it wasn't for a guy like Peter Pham, you know, truthfully supported me and backing me and leveraging his, you know, recognition and credibility in the space to give me, give me an edge. And so, yeah, look, you know, VCs need to start hiring people of color on their teams and in meaningful positions beyond the assistant or the person who does, you know,

diversity and inclusion events, or, you know, just having one person in a room just to say they do. So what you're saying there is a lot of this VC hiring is, they're hiring hiring, hiring marginalized people and marginalizing them inside the organization.

Yeah, look, they're just trying to, they're just inventory. They're like, oh, we need a diversity person. Yeah, we need a number here.

Yeah, let's go get that person. Yeah. Yeah, let's put, you know what the move is too, then they alpha, I always, I can always tell when they're doing this too, because they alpha-bitize the,

uh, page for the team. Because you used to put the team like the people, the founders up top, then the next year, then the next year, then the support team. Which makes sense. Like if you were coming to a website, you would want to know who's in charge here. They're just like, you know what? Let's put it alphabetical so that we can have the diversity.

And that's so lame. I mean, listen, it's something. But I agree with you. It's kind of lame. Like you have to check writing ability at some point. I mean, yeah, check writing abilities. We need, you know, you need to have locations. and places where people of color are present,

like, or at least travel there, right? Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago, um, you know,

I mean, there's, there's, there's even communities here in L.A., Inglewood, you know, um, any,

like, Englewood, I spent a lot of time in Englewood when I lived in L.A. You know why? Why? Hollywood Park. I've never been there.

Hollywood Park is, uh, a casino and race track, and I used to go down there play poker. Oh, okay, cool. Yeah. I don't,

I don't, play poker. from 10 p.m. I'll finish up at 5 or 6 a.m. go home, take a shower, a breakfast, and then go to work. That's how degenerate I was with my friends guy dating. We would go play overnight. That sounds like a whole Molly's game type of. I was invited to Molly's game over and over again. I didn't go because I was, they'd be like Molly would text me, hey, Leo's here and Toby's here and they really want to see you. I was like, they want to see me lose 50 grand. They don't want to see me. These guys are sharks like

Toby McGuire is a great poker player. I play with Toby many times, and he is a great poker player who likes to inflict pain on people. Yeah. No, that's crazy. If you were giving advice to a founder who is underrepresented,

and you said, hey, listen, here's the straight dope. Let me just give you five bullet points of how I did it. Or you were writing your book, and you had to just write a summary of it for the book publisher. Here's the five things. Do this, this, this, and this.

this is the best way to get in. I mean, I have my own thoughts just hearing your story, but I want to hear what you think you did right and what you would tell, you know, the next person coming up who couldn't get in. Yeah. Yeah, look, I haven't thought about this. So I'll give you things that come sort of top to mind.

But even then, too, I just want to make note that, you know, even if they do all five of these things and more, you know, it's likely that, you know, they still don't get the opportunity, certainly not this grant. you know, just because, look, the, you know, the way that this industry is set up, it's designed, and, I mean, this country even, you know, is designed to, you know, suppress black people or people of color to not give us opportunity.

And, you know, I think there's a number of things that we can do to change that. Obviously, we should put pressure on our VCs to do that. I didn't even take a check, by the way, from a founder, I mean, an investor who hadn't already supported another black person. That was a very, you know, consistent question that I asked every fund. You know, I remember walking into Sequoia. And there was interest from Sequoia. And, you know, they have that wall with all of the logos up there of, like,

their successful companies. And I asked the person I'm sitting across. I'm like, hey, how many of those founders are black? And they were like, none that I believe, you know, you could be the first. And I was like, look, you know, I don't want to be the first. Like, I want to go to and be in partnership with a group of people who already support people like me, who understand me. And so, you know, luckily I found that at NEA.

They're amazing. Another big thing for me was that, you know, we're going to have a board, the independents, on the board had to be a woman. And, you know, NIA also believed in that and they doubled down on that through the term sheet. And so, yeah, I think, you know, all of those things were, you know, diversity in general and inclusion in general are super important to me. And I think in tech specifically on the VC side, like there's a number of things that we can do on the company side. Look, I think one of the, certainly like, you know, we want more people of color engineers in these sort of higher or highest paid positions at the company. We want more people

of color executives. But we also need people of color and HR positions. That's actually something that a lot of people don't talk about. Why is that important? I mean, I can read into it, but you explain. Sure, yeah. Look, I mean, HR is how you get your foot in the door. HR is, you know, the people who understand who you are and make the decisions about if you stay or not, if some sort of dispute comes up.

Or, you know, maybe if you imagine being, I had a friend who worked in private equity and he was the only black person on an white male team mostly. And, you know, like they just didn't understand them. They were like very basic things like, you know, the way. his hair would like get too long, they would make comments about it. And, you know, oftentimes they would even report these things to HR as if he made them uncomfortable. And if you have people of color in HR positions, like they're able to course correct that because they're able to educate people who lack education around interactions or knowledge of people of color,

even something as simple as your hair. And, and so yeah, we need to, we need to have more people of color in HR to open up the doors to like get us in, to train us, to give us grace when we make mistakes to give us to invest in us from like a professional skill set development. And yeah, and like that's a, that's a super important, you know, role that a lot of people don't talk about. And, you know, at Play versus, by the way, the last thing I hear before I let you speak, sorry, Jason. No, no, go.

It's that, you know, at Play versus, we, you know, we were looking for ahead of a talent. And, you know, my team interviewed a bunch of people. And we were even going to put an offer out on someone, but I believe it is so much. I was like, look, I'm going to go find the best person to color to represent, you know, our company in this position. And we luckily found this guy named Charles who was at Airbnb and then Facebook before sort of brought him on as a head of talent. And I know a lot of, you know, founders in the, in the black community saw it. And it was like, wow, a black CEO, a black head of talent at, you know, a hot startup. You know, like, you know, like we should make this a trend.

Like we should, we should intentionally try to make that. It's pretty clever. I got to be honest. It's super clever. How has it been for you since you have that in. intentionality to find the talent you need because African-Americans might be underrepresented in certain job roles. And do you have to work harder to draw people or do people look at it and say, oh, black CEO, black HR director, I can feel comfortable coming to this company. And you get this

advantage, a diversity advantage because you're showing people, just like you said, hey, maybe this venture firm hasn't done a lot of investment in people who look like me. Maybe I need to go find another venture firm. People are going to do the opposite. They're going to come to your firm, right? Sure. Yeah. Look, there's certainly people who are interested in working at PlayVERS because, you know,

I'm a young black CEO and I've done stuff that no one other, no, no other person has done that, you know, represents our community. And that's certainly amazing. And we obviously love that sort of influx of volume that we get. because of that. But, you know, I really would say that we have probably one of the most diverse companies ever, even at this stage, you walk into PlayVeversus and you see all sorts of shades, you see a good balance of men and women, you see, you know, people who work the education, people who work only in tech, you know, people who found the companies before. So just across

the board, like, it's a very diverse group of people, even at the executive level. And the only reason that that exists and our company looks like that relative to even, you know, other portfolios for some of our investors, you know, all of these companies are all white men or all white men and women. It's because we are intentional. And sure, it takes, it takes more time to make hires. It requires tons of hard work and effort. It requires you to go to places to find talent that you normally wouldn't go to. It may even require you, require you to have a decent relocation budget to, to move people to whatever market you're in. But like, it's important. Because our company is super beautiful, you know, like, it has all these incredible people. Like, we have

qualities within our innovation stack that other people don't. Like, we know things that other people don't. And we're able to make better decisions because we're able to relate to more people and more circumstances and backgrounds. And so, yo, it's certainly hard work, but recruiting this hard work in general. And so you should be intentional about that. And one way to solve for that, by the way, as a founder or an executive at a company, is to say, look, you know, my HR and my recruiting team should be very diverse. And those people will be really intentional about, you know, going and hire people that look like them. And then you won't see, you know, companies that have, you know, one to three percent, you know, African Americans or other people of color, you know,

within these 10, 20, 50,000, you know, person. Yeah, I think it's you got to get it right in the first 10, 20 hires. And if you don't, it just steers in whatever direction you started because a job comes up and people tell their friends about it and their circles might not be diverse. And so I've seen this with companies founded by Indian founders or, you know, Asian founders or African American founders or white founders or Stanford founders. It just, you just started getting this click where it's like, oh, yeah, we went to Stanford together. All of a sudden, you got six Stanford people in one company like PayPal, right?

And it's just like, yeah, we were all in the same. I know somebody from the computer science class, whatever, or we all worked at this company prior. We all worked at, you know, Microsoft before this. And before you know it, the whole company has bended in a certain direction. and it's very hard to then reverse it, right? Because then the next person coming in is like, oh, this is a bunch of, you know, white guys from Stanford or Asian guys from Harvard or Indian guys who are Microsoft folks.

I'm not part of the culture, right? Yeah. And I'm not saying, you know, too, don't hire people of color. I mean, are higher people of color just because, right? Just to have inventory of those people. Like, you go out and you get the most qualified and quality person. But be intentional about making sure that you're interviewing a, you know, you know, at least 50% people of color, 50% women for each job.

We try to do that internally. And then we make the best hire, best cultural hire, best skill hire. You know, and we always try to optimize also for leadership. The big unlock for us was we have something called Founder University, which we realized like the launch festival got so big that we couldn't actually enjoy it or get to meet anybody because we're so busy, you know, shuffling in the beginning, two or three thousand people and then eventually 15,000 people from stage to stage and lots of moving parts and unions shaking us down in San Francisco, the corrupt unions of San Francisco

shaking us down. It was brutal. And then we started founding university, which were 60 founders pre-selected, who were all right before we would invest. Like, maybe they're finishing their product. They maybe have one or two customers, but, you know, they're right before our entry point as an investor. And we did one for women. And then we started doing one for underrepresented founders, and we let them self-select. So, you know, we would get some like, well, I'm gay or I'm trans. or, you know, it could be a white woman and a white woman might consider herself underrepresented. That might be true.

I mean, some people will debate it. And we didn't want to be in the debate of if you consider yourself underrepresented. So we let yourself select that. And that's how we wound up having like literally two or three times the number of qualified founders who were in our investment thesis, right? And it was a very interesting lesson for me

because I gave away all those tickets and you came. But still in the audience, even with the, free tickets, we didn't see a crazy diversity. Yeah. No, listen, I was, I was one of very few black people at that conference. And, and, you know, the ones that were there, we all really linked up and sort of, you know, stay close to each other. But look, you know, in general, look, I appreciate, you know, the effort that you put in even that early when no one was having this conversation. And that obviously led to, you know, me, you know, learning more about tech, being inspired by the

industry and being motivated to go do something in this space. And like, look, you know, if, you know, a few years later, you know, I've raised the most money in the shortest amount of time as a solo founder of any other black person and without lunch. Like that doesn't happen. And I'm so happy that like before the show you said you were going to hook me up with 50 basis points and I was going to be an official advisor to the company. Look at that make good. I got some shares in this. I don't I don't pay for dinner when people have more money to me and I don't give wealthier people to me free things. Well, you know, we can talk. You're only about eight at this pace. or 18 months about being the person who's buying me dinner.

So you're about 18 months away from that. Hopefully, hopefully. I think so, actually. I'm doing a little math right now. I know how Series C's work. It's about 20% of the company. Yeah, I think you're doing okay. Listen, this has been amazing.

Hey, would you do me a favor? I don't know if you're up for this, but we started a Slack room. It's called This Weekend Startups.com slash Slack. 14,000 people in it. And I want to start doing AMAs with the guests after their episode drops. Do you think you can spend an hour with the founders in there? Yeah, we'll love that. Whatever you need.

Really? Okay, that's great. All right, we're going to do an AMA. You're hiring. I know that because you just raised a bunch of money. What positions are you hiring for and where can people peruse those jobs or hear about it? What's the most pressing need right now? Yeah, so we just hired a C.O.

I'm super excited about that. We haven't announced it yet, but that'll be a big list for the company. For you to get your job done. Yeah, no, for sure. And, you know, we found somebody that I have a lot of. faith and confidence in. And so I can't wait to just, you know, operations people,

let me tell you something. When you get the right operations people, then all you do is just keep adding more and more incredible operators to your business as the CEO, your life becomes amazing. Yeah. Because shit that was taking, annoying shit that was taking an hour or two of your day, it just comes to you in like a little slack message.

This is done. you're like, oh, that was 10 hours of my week, and it's done. You know, we already, I've already realized that, look, when I started this company, I was like, look, one, I think the opportunity is inevitable. So like someone's going to build this. Like we get, we have a head start, right? So hopefully it's us. But, you know, from all of the other, you know, things that I've been a part of,

the one and single most important thing, I think the misconception is that it's the idea, but it's really the talent, it's the team. So I was like, look, I'm going to, I'm going to hire the most talented people the most extraordinary leaders in every function that I can find, and I'm going to bet on talent. And if I get this amazing collection of people together, like, there's no reason we should fail. And I went out and getting guys like Neil or CTO who was at Hespace, was a YC founder before. I mean, he alone maybe, you know, recruited 10 or 12 people to the company. You know, Hetspace has some amazing talent.

I don't know of Rich. The founder loves me, given how many key people on his team works at our company. I've never met him before. I mean, listen, they've been added for like, they've been out of six or seven years. People are fully vested. And people want to go on to the next. People want new challenges. Yeah.

Talent, you know, is to get fully vested. And maybe you want to, it's reasonable for somebody who is fully vested and spent five years at a company to want to then go diversify their holdings by having a four or five years. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we have an incredible culture. You know, to your point, too, about, you know, adding incredible operators, there was this one. moment where Neil joined, and there was this guy that we've been interviewing, and we mentioned it to

him, and this guy runs data. He's over at Fair on their growth team, a big part of it. He worked at headspace before. His name is Ryan Lee. And, you know, I was sort of dragging my feet because I didn't really understand what he would do, how he would add value to the company at that time. And Neil's like, look, man, you have to just pull the trigger. Trust me now and pull the trigger on this guy, and he's going to make our life incredibly easier. He's going to add value that you can't even quantify. and we added him and man, Ryan Lee is just amazing.

We literally call him our data guy. He set up our data infrastructure. He gives us insight into everything to help us make better decisions. He does the same for our publishing partners. He's just an amazing leader and spirit on our team. This is why you got to read Ovid's book. I mean, you could tell that you got the Ovitz influence

because he talks a lot. What Ovitz did really well is he would bundle the talent. And then he gave him leverage over the movie studio. So he'd be like, listen, I have Spielberg and I got Michael Crichton and dinosaurs. And I got this actor and this actor and here's your package. And he would bundle the talent together, right?

And it was really hard for, it was really easy for the studio to say, okay. And then he got a piece of all five of those people's project. And then they, when they package things like this, they got a piece of ownership in the overall project and my understanding was Jurassic Park, that franchise kept giving CAA, you know, like tens of millions of dollars a year just for having packaged that one franchise, right? Wow. And that's the power of like talent. And when you get those operations people, what I've worked on this year with last two years

is having all the operations people duplexed, which is a term for putting two hard drives and two hard drive control is at a PC when I was an IT guy. But every single function has two high-performing people doing the same function. And so they can alternate and they can take on other projects. And if a person's on vacation or a person where to leave, it just, the system just keeps running. Yeah. Just full capacity. And when those people, when their, when their processors are not burning at 110%,

when you put two of them on and their processors go down to 60%, they don't break. Yeah. The processors don't overheat. So they're actually running cooler, which, means they enjoy the job more, which means they stay longer, which means they have more cycles to think about how to optimize this better. Yeah. And that's that duplexing thing. I always tell founders like, I love that. Yeah, just try to, and then you, I just tell people explicitly, like your goal here is whatever job function you have is to have somebody who can do it as well as

you or better. And then you both can then work on what's the next phase of leveling all the shit up. Yeah, it's that, is that, oh, saying A's higher A's, you know, B's higher C's. Yeah. Always, always, you know, optimized to find A people to hire. they're hiring for product and engineering. Obviously, you know, some biz ops roles, a couple other operational roles. You can go to PlayViracys.com slash careers. You see some of the open roles and we'll love to have you join. We're in West L.A.

So we're on South Barrington and Exposition, right around a corner from Riot and Activision, actually. And so you can walk to either of their offices. South Barrington, I know that. So you can go up. What is that little Tokyo areas on South Barrington? Oh, a Sautel. Sautel. Oh, my Lord.

You know, Sautele has some amazing restaurants. You get that Plancheck burger. Is that still there? Plan Check is there. So I don't get the burger, but that's amazing that you know that. And I do get the chili cheese fries because that reminds me of Detroit. They don't taste as good and they also have beans, but like, you know, as close as I can get here. I like the Detroit pizza.

You guys got, you got some legit piece in Detroit. Yeah, no, there's some amazing. That's actually the one thing I miss, you know, being here, the piece is not that great in LA. But, you know, we have Jets and Buddies and Bob's piece back in Detroit. All of those places are amazing deep dish pizza. Yeah, there's no, I'm trying to think of any pizza in L.A. That's worth going to, like, to drive to it. And I think the answer is no.

So I've been eating Lucifer's. I don't know if you've eaten that on Melrose and Weho. And that's like the best. Like when I first moved here, you know, before eating. Cross or medium crossed? Sting crust, yeah. Sting crust, yeah. So thin crust, you can do well outside of like some places.

Just the medium crust or thick crust, they can't do well. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think they have medium crust options. too, but yeah, everyone loves Fresh Brothers here, too. I'm not a big Fresh Brothers fan. No, no, not. Fresh Brothers is not good. Yeah. I like, you know what I like is this High Ho Burger? Did you try that in Santa Monica yet? Oh, of course. Yo, listen, I used to, I used to, I was probably one of the first customers because we were in science's office for, you know, wow, actually, like, I started, I started in like a closet next to Mike Jones's assistant with like five or six other

companies. And then, you know, now we're in a 17,000 square foot building, really beautiful. and when highhoe first opened like I would go there take a bird scooter down there and just like you know like literally living that Santa Monica lifestyle burger on the on the lime scooter a bird scooter no are you an investor in Wovo is also very good the pasta place the pasta I think it's the same owner about the same owner it is yeah there's the same as sugarfish and the the Nizawa sugarfish is right across the street too yeah are you are you an investor in bird or line I'm not investor in either of those. I'm investor in Uber. Okay, cool. Well, that's even

better. Yeah, I think Uber is going to run over those, so to speak. No, I think that Uber winds up buying Bird eventually. My friends are all the investors in Bird. I think Bird wins. Yeah. I think Bird is a great business. I think it should be a subscription business. I think this consumption base is the wrong model.

But I think they built like that 3.0 scooter, so they build their own hardware now. Yeah. So it doesn't break in three months. It's not like off the shelf. And the batteries work better. And I think if they just made it a subscription where people paid, you know, 20, 30, 40, or 50 for, you know, unlimited, whatever, or you can keep the scooter at your house. Yeah. Then I think they could get, you know, man, I, I, just like you're doing subscriptions where people don't have to think about consigne. One of the things I love about subscription businesses, because we invested in Com, Steasy, the dance company, which is in downtown LA and FitBod. Those are, I think, three biggest right now in subscriptions. And you can charge a low, price and give massive value and still build a really sustainable business. Yeah.

It becomes very sustainable because if your people are getting value, you can keep adding to the product but keep the price the same. Yeah. That's the magic to me. Like if you're charging $64 for a season, they do two seasons, that's $130. If you just made it $99 a year, unlimited seasons, and then you added like special weekend events or one-offs or whatever, mini-seasons, brackets. And it's just the same price.

People are like, these people are idiots. It's $99. and it keeps getting better, which is what's happening with Disney. You think about the Disney Library. Every time they do Clone Wars, every time they do Mandalorian, the archive gets richer and richer, but it's the same goddamn price. Yeah. I mean, we're experimenting with our business model. I think we want to go to a sort of school site fee, so find a way to drive enough value between

$5,000 and $10,000 on average per school. And I think the comp there is a company called Huddle, HUDL. Yeah. They're a video analysis platform. And they're 99% of the high schools. I think their average, you know, I would also just let people off the street, just buy it for $100 a month. Yeah, so we're going to do that too.

So we're moving. We want to move. Then you get the bottom up, right? Like if I want to do it in my school, we just all do $100 and you set it up for them, boom. So we want to do, so essentially how we think about it is like different product solutions. And so our scholastic business between high school and college, you plan on behalf of these schools, let the schools pay for that. And then as a consumer or player, you can do other forms of competition, you know, for some sort of Amazon prime type subscription and maybe you bundle that with different IPs and like, you know, that drives

to cost down for those additional IPs. But, but, but, but yeah, we're looking into a bunch of different ideas there. There's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, it's a lot of value already packed into that $64, beyond just being able to compete for state championship, but you end up getting neither the game or the contents of the game for free. So in our deals with the publishers, you know, something that might cost all of the contents of the game that might cost you five thousand hours or, or a thousand bucks to purchase. You get all of that for free when you play. So that's a lot of value. Yeah, so a ton of value.

I mean, or you get the game, right, that costs $60 for free. So, and it's only $64. And so we don't pay the publishers anything for that value because we're driving so much value back to their esports programming. Do these kids use email or just their mobile phone? Like, do you have their email addresses? Are they starting to get its email? Yeah, so email, email mobile phone, yeah. Yeah.

See, I think this SMS communication is, I've been thinking about it with Inside. I built a little gateway. And I'm thinking, like, just getting your news, like, five times a day on SMS could be a thing. Yeah, oh, no, for sure. Kids are, they certainly are way more engaged on SMS or Discord than email, but, you know, obviously we have to also have a Discord server with like, there's Discord servers with like 50 to 100,000 people. Oh, easily. Yo, Discord. Have you had Jason on the show yet? No. Somebody locked that up? I'll introduce you if you want. Yeah, yeah, please. I was just talking to him earlier this week through email. He, uh, man, Jason's an amazing dude.

Runs an incredible company. They're probably 250, 300 million users within the last few years. and they're there they're there i don't know who's going to buy them but i know it's going to be for a lot of money and so it's got to be amazon it's got to be amazon no so amazon brought curse so the budget you know they probably couldn't twitch probably couldn't unlock that much budget for discord it probably cost them a couple billion dollars so they end up buying uh you know the original sort of discord for just probably a few hundred million um but yeah like is it growing or no since they bought it i think they've i think they've sunsetted it if i'm not mistaken i got to just go by they got to bite the bullet and buy Discord and then just bundle it with Twitch, right?

Yeah, Discord. Yeah. I mean, that'd be an incredible, you know, family of companies. Yeah. It's like Disney buying Marvel and Pixar and Star Wars. She's putting these things together. Oh, yeah. I think our Facebook, like, you know, the guy who, one of the former heads of Discord.

Facebook's not allowed. They're in the penalty box. Okay, that's fair. I mean, look, Facebook has been trying to build. Trump might let them go because, you know, they love Trump. Hey, look, I have no comment on that. I didn't take money from investors who were public. support is a Trump, to be honest, which you, you know, I was, uh, no, I mean, you have to stand for

something or you fall for anything. Like you get, I mean, there's people who can't come out and be like, I am for this person. Like, Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg were supporting Hillary. Yeah. Peter Till is supporting Trump. Okay, fine. Peter Till speaks at the convention. Yeah. Cheryl Samberg and Zuckerberg say nothing. They wouldn't even do it all behind the scenes. They were not publicly coming out in a major way for Hillary. Because they're so scared of losing any users on their platform. Yeah.

It's just like pathetic. It's like stand for something. Like pick your candidate. It's America. You can have a candidate. Why are you so scared for money? Well, the challenges, like you can't separate the identity of the person or the entrepreneur from the company, you know, especially a guy like Zucker or even Charles

Sandberg, even though she's not the founder. And so, yeah, look, I get it. That's a challenge. I mean, that's a challenge for me too. or you and anybody else. I make my feelings known. I'd rather have like 20% less audience. If some people are going to judge me because I want to participate in the American

process of elections and tell you about it and state my position, like we should be able to state our positions in America and not have people be like, well, then I'm not going to ever use your service. Like, I'm not going to listen to this week in startups because you're pro Bloomberg. I got so much blowback when I made Bloomberg my avatar on Twitter. And I was like, listen, I want Bloomberg in there. I know, Mike, he's super qualified. We need somebody who can operate us out of this mess.

Did you think he had a really good, I mean, did you think he had a fair shot to even win? I think if he started earlier, he would have. He got, you know, he was up at 20% at one point. Yeah, he started earlier, he would have. He started too late. Yeah. But he's the most qualified out of the group. I mean, look, I'm not really not excited about any of the politicians that have,

that have thrown their hat in the arena be president. You know, if I could, if we could just go back to Obama, that would work for me and let him groom a cabinet of young leaders like I think that'd be our best bet yeah I'm just it's so weird that after all of this

we're left with like a 78 year old guy who doesn't feel super sharp can this guy even do a second term like this should be something I almost feel like there should be an upper age limit or a mental acuity test like maybe 75 is the limit yeah I mean look I think we should

We should probably try to optimize for youth and our presidents because they're closer and more relatable to just what society looks like today. So, you know, that's what we have to flip. I agree. 40 to 60, you know, something like that. Yeah, I think it's super difficult to be, you know, electing people who are 75, 78, 80 years old to be president. Like surely have some. 50 to 60, 50 to 65, you're still sharp.

You've got enough wisdom. Yeah. And you know who you are. You've had enough life behind you. That seems that 50 to 65 seems like a real good. window to me. Yeah, look, I think above that is just super challenging. Like, you know, we're concerned about, especially in, you know, look at this pandemic. Like, we have to be concerned about our president's health. Yeah. And so that's why, you know, whom their vice president is becomes

even more important and who the other leaders surrounding them are become super important. And so, you know, I certainly think that we should start going in the, you know, in the direction of trying to, you know, optimize for younger, more savier, more relatable leaders. This could be the move for Biden. Biden should say, listen, I'm going to serve out as much as a term as I can, and I got this incredible number two. And think of us as partners. At some point, I may retire. At some point, you know, for the second term, maybe I just hand it off, whatever it is. But, you know, this is going to be a collaboration. He should just name his entire cabinet now. And just about to be like, look at the all stars. Here's an all-star team. That's why I think Bob Eiger should be in there. Yeah, that'd be interesting. Do you read Bob Eager's book yet? I haven't. I haven't. Look, Bob Eiger is a legend. Yeah, no, deep respect. I was actually very surprised. Super surprised when he stepped down.

And I was also surprised. He's done it all. He's done it all, man. You've got to read this book. His bio is incredible. He's done it all. What are your thoughts on, on Travis Calanan? You know, I know he's very polarizing.

It's my guy. That's my guy. Yeah, I love. He's going to be one of the greatest, he'll go down as the greatest CEOs of our generation of all time. He sees it five years before everybody. And he is relentlessly focused. and he can solve every problem. And he's not afraid to mix it up if he needs to. Give me your top five, top five entrepreneurs. Travis and Elon, right up there up top. I mean, those guys just are

unstoppable, the forces of nature. After that, I think Alex and Michael from Calm are just an incredible team. You know, the Robin Hood team, Vlad, it's pretty amazing. I'm talking my own book here for those two. But who else on that list? You know, you have to appreciate what Zuckerberg did, but I don't like the way he did it. So I can't put him on my list. I don't think he's all that creative or bright. I'll be totally honest. I think he just copies people real well. So I don't give me any credit for that, but he's really good of copy. I like Kevin Sistram from Instagram. I think he got that. He figured it out really well. So too early, man. Yeah, way. Classic story. Way too early. Yeah. I guess it's on your

hard, right? Because he could have been Kevin Rose, right, who didn't sell early enough. So, yeah, it's hard. Timing is just hard. You know, here's the thing. If you know it's working and you love doing it, don't stop. Kevin Rose, people got in his head and it was too much pressure for him, I think. And he couldn't just stay focused on iterating. And if you look at Reddit, Reddit just kept going. They didn't like do some like huge thing and try to be what they weren't, they just kept going. And sometimes if you don't quit, it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and compounding interest, you know, it just something becomes very big.

Even without the founders, it just kept growing. And then the founders took it back over and it kept going. Yeah. Reddit's kind of like this like juggernaut. It won't go away and it just keeps baking and growing. Who's in your, I pick top five of like current CEOs. I could go back. You know, obviously I would pick, you know, some other people if I was going backwards.

But who's in your top five right now? Store Butterfield, Slack. Stock's a jet. Yeah, big, big Stewart fan. Travis, obviously. I actually, I'm in my office. I hadn't used my home office until, you know, the last few weeks because our office is so close to my home. And so I'm designing it and like decorating it.

Yeah. And I have some art coming. And Travis is going to be on the wall right behind me, him and a handful of other entrepreneurs. Love it. But because big, big Travis. Do you know Travis or no? No, I don't. I saw him at Soho House once.

But I'll set it up. a beast man yeah he's a beast mode he's he's beast mode he right now he just not doing any press he just head down working yeah on cloud kitchens yeah and talk about timing he sold all of his uber shares everybody's like oh well that was a stupid trade and then the market collapses so he looks smart now he's going to deploy all that cash yeah yeah it's gonna be like one of the most brilliant trades of all time yeah i mean look i think the the one thing from reading super pump from talking to people and even hiring people you know who were early at uber it's like if he could have got culture and HR right, investor relations right, you know, probably, he's probably not,

he's probably still even at Uber today. Don't be surprised. That's all I'm saying. Don't be surprised. I wouldn't. I wouldn't, but I'd say Travis. Steve Jobs did it. Why can't Travis? That's true. I guess interest. He has to be interested in it. No, I think what's going to happen is I think at some point the board's going to be like, okay, Darrow took this this far. Yeah. And it's a, it's, you know, it's growing. But we need to own cloud. kitchens and we need that guy back in the seat. Yeah. And then they'll be like, Darrow was a good steward of the brand and he got it, you know,

to whatever, 60 bucks a share and it's stable and he got it through this weather storm, but let's get that guy back. And when the board flips over a couple times, it's going to kind of be like Steve Jobs back and they're like, you know what? There was some magic here because look at Uber now. They're like, people are like, okay, they're managing the business. They're not even aggressive anymore. There's no aggressiveness.

They're just like, you know what? Let's just get to profitability. We don't need to launch new products. Let's just make these products great, which I understand. That's what the public stock market wants. But if Travis was there, he'd be like, what can we buy? What can we build? How do we get this going more aggressive?

And I think Dara is like just a great operator. So it reduces the downside risk, which is important because people thought that Uber was going to be a zero and fly off the rails. There's no way Dara's going to let that happen. He's going to run the business properly. So you remove the downside risk, but you cap the upside. Yeah. Yeah, I know for sure. I'm super long on Uber.

Super long. Good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. So Travis Stewart, Jayzee, obviously, like, so many parallels. One of the best entrepreneurs ever, especially given just the circumstances. He hasn't obviously done a lot in tech, but just, you know, a brilliant mind.

Don't think he needs to. Yeah. Well, you know, hopefully he does, though, because it'd be good to see, you know, black culture and hip-hop. We always, you know, talk about and promote entrepreneurship, but we're not actually supporting and standing next to the people who are built in this sort of next wave of companies leveraging technology, which is really the future. It's been like a lot of false starts.

Carmelo started his thing. Nas started, Nas started his thing. Yeah. Everybody's kind of dabbled a little bit. But I think, like, if you just look at Instagram and who the top users are, like Instagram is black culture.

Yeah, no, for sure. Yeah. And Twitter is black culture. Twitter was black culture so much that they had to change how trending topics works. I don't know if you know that's, story. Oh, I didn't know that. I've told the story before. This is like inside information that the African American community was having so much of fun trending shit on Twitter

that the rest of Twitter would see all these trends and not understand them. Oh, wow. And they're like, okay, I don't understand what's trending. And I click on and I still kind of don't understand it. Yeah. So then they were like, okay, we're going to customize trending topics to your location and to who you follow. Oh, wow. And they rebooted it because, and it happens to me sometimes. Like, I don't know if you have this happen

where K-pop just takes over your trending topics. No, that never happens to me. So I have, because I'm in San Francisco, I think K-pop's very big here. And like, all of a sudden, I get all these K-pop stuff. And I'm like, oh, my God, who are these people? Like, I don't, is there a turn boy band off? Because all these fans of the boy bands,

and there's five members of the band, and there's three or four songs, and then there's the three or four people they're dating. So all of a sudden, of this, your top 20, 15. And I'm like, you can't ban. I'd have to know each of that. What is the name of the, what is it, BTS? Oh, yeah, yeah.

I've heard of that group. I've never listened to any of them. I think it's BTS is the big group. Yeah, yeah. And I'm like, I got to, I'm literally thinking of looking up the names of each of the people to mute. Oh, just to mute that keyword. Yeah, no, for sure.

I definitely am a mute profiles from certain people of mute keywords. Mutes the best because you know, like people are like, oh, you're following me? It's like, absolutely. Look, I'm a massive Twitter fan. I'm so disappointed. And, you know, just where they are today, I think they should have been a lot bigger and certainly more impactful and influential in today's society, you know, given the influence of the product. Some of that is obviously the back and forth full management. Obviously, Dick came in and really helped, you know, grow that company.

They sort of lost a lot of product vision after that. They haven't really iterated on the product that much. They haven't, you know, necessarily figured out how to. You know, Jack is too, like cerebral, I think. I think he's great at like architecting and conceiving of the product. Yeah. But I don't think he has that aggressive Zuckerberg or Travis or Elon ambition. Yeah.

And so I think his ambition is to not break it and to maybe do other things. Yeah. And I like Jack a lot. And it's fine. That's running. It's his company. So he started it. Yeah.

He should have, well, he needs to get whomever at Square. Like he needs to find his equivalent from Square because I mean, Square's super aggressive on the product front. Yeah. And they, they're just,

they're just, you know, I love Square as a company. You know, Disney almost bought Twitter. And in the book, Bob Iger explains why he backed out. They literally had a deal. It was approved on both sides. And like days before they were going to announce it, he was like, I don't want to deal with all of the hate speech, policing speech, bots.

And the political ramifications was like the straw that broke the back, like this thing swinging elections. I don't want to be the person who has to just because remember he had Roseanne Barr say this, like, crazy offensive shit. and then you had Trump, you know, his shit. And he's like, this is the antithesis of the Disney brand. Yeah. And he had to just get out. Like social media does not work for the Disney brand. It's just not controllable and family friendly.

No, I know Twitter was supposed about Twitch before Amazon or Google did. Yeah. And they had a product. They hired a head of product. And I don't know who he is, but didn't believe in it. Well, look how they fucked up Vine too. Yeah, they should, they sunset at Vine because of course. Unbelievable.

And look at TikTok today. Look at Twitter today. TikTok is Vine. Yeah. No. I mean, even if you think about like behaviors on Instagram, like Vine and all of the biggest, the people who help popularize Instagram were a lot of original Vine stars. Yes.

And then you look at Melvin Gray, all those guys. Yeah. Now Instagram Live is totally a periscope. Yeah. And that could have been, that could have also been house party too, you know, even though like the Mirkat guys went on the final house party. But like they were on to a good trend with like social media. in broadcasting.

See, this is having a house of brands is what Twitter should do. And then to have a house of brands, you need a leader slightly different than Jack. You need somebody who can manage eight personalities who are running eight distinct businesses that share a common architecture, which is the ad handle. Yeah. I would run the shit out of that because I would just be like, I put eight people in charge. I'd bring them in for quarterly meetings. They would pitch to each other, what they're doing, what their performance is.

And then I would just fire whoever the bottom person was. I would give more money to the top two people. Yeah. And I would just run it like Lord of the Flies, like Game of Thrones. I mean, in some ways, you know, Facebook has done a little bit of that. Of course, yeah. Less connectivity across the brands. But, but yeah, for sure, I think, you know, Zuck has done a good job at, you know,

picking, picking early winners. Best acquirer. Yeah, and putting resources behind them and integrated them within the Facebook ecosystem and then leveraging all of the, you know, growth network that he has to grow up. I actually think Jeff Bezos is maybe the best entrepreneur of this time. Dude, I was about to say, so my fourth. So my fourth is Jeff Bezos. He's probably my number one in general.

He's definitely my Rushmore, yeah. Yeah, and my fifth is probably a toss between Drew at Dropboxer or Brian and Airbnb. Yeah. Love both of those guys. I love both of those guys. Brian is just the back channel on Airbnb right now. It's tough. They were too scared to go public and they're too scared to do the layoffs.

Yeah. And that loan that he took, man. a lot of a lot of, there's a heavy interest rate. Well, I mean, why wouldn't you lay off half the team if the business is going to be demolished? Like he just, I mean, there's, there's loyalty to your team. Yeah. And then there's running the company off the cliff. And how does this thing go public now? Well, brand. Yeah, he's, uh, I think, I think, you know, that's a, it'd be a terrible brand hit. And that's just not like the Airbnb way. Like, they don't believe in that. Yeah. It's just, it's, I think it's going to be the back channel from people I know who are

shareholders in that company is like a massive high level of frustration that they didn't get the company out public. Yeah. They didn't get that and they could have easily. So they were scared to go public is what somebody told me on the inside. Yeah. They didn't want to be under the scrutiny or whatever. And then now all these options have to be regranted. You got these crazy loans.

Like it is a really dicey situation there. Yeah. Yeah. You think there's room for a startup to come in and disrupt them when things go back? 100. 100. I actually have the idea. Oh, well.

It's a really simple idea, I think. Instead of taking a carry fee, you know how it's a membership fee? Yeah. I'm sorry, a percentage fee. I make it a membership fee. So you pay, depending on the price of your Airbnb. If your Airbnb's $100 or less than night, you pay $100 a month. You pay $100 a month.

If your Airbnb is between $100 and $300, you pay $250, basically one night a month. This is to the host, right? To the host. Yeah. And the host pay a subscription fee? and there's no other fees. Oh, yeah. I mean, I wonder how many hosts they have.

So the number of properties they have probably depends. I mean, do you think about your subscription business you're talking about? Yeah. You want to hit $100 million. Well, this would be a million. But instead of paying, you know, you having $100 million paying $100 a year would be $10 billion. This is a million people a year paying $2,000 or $1,000 a year on average or $2,000 a year on average. Yeah.

You know, you get to a lot of money. That would be a very disruptive way to do it. And then you can figure out other ways to add services on. Yeah. No, it's probably just a little bit smaller than their current vision. But I definitely see that as an opportunity to have predictable revenue. Or maybe they make that even as an option to start to say, look, you can either do transactions or you can do this subscription, just give them some consistent predictable revenue,

especially during downturns like this. I think Twitch has like one of the most robust business models, right, between like advertise the subscription tips, like all of those things that they've based. like then, even Twitch Prime, like their business model is just so great. I'm also surprised that like Instagram has not, you know, monetized or built creator tools right now. Like people should be monetized in their like Instagram lives. Absolutely.

It should be YouTube. They should just go heads up against YouTube. They should give everybody who's doing live should be able to put ads in their stream. So when they need to take a bathroom break, they do an ad. And they should just give 100% of the advertising in streams to people. That's what I was running Instagram. I'd say all the ad revenue you get 80, 90% goes to you when you're running streams. How many streams would there be?

Yo, I think there's like, so I've been watching versus. I don't know if you've seen these, but these are like, yeah, the two artists kind of battle it out. You know, like four million people tuned in to Teddy Riley and maybe. I was also watching the other one where people were dancing. Oh, yeah. So that was the first one. That was crazy. Yeah.

No, there's a big opportunity around that. I mean, like if you, if it was just behind a paywall like pay-per-view style, like, That's big revenue. People right now, especially would have, like, you know, did that, you know. I imagine like David Dobrick. Like, he's not, he's not even making YouTube videos. But if he got on live and, like, just talked, he had a, he could do advertising or put a paywall for, like, some sort of subscription to that content. Like, millions of kids will be included myself.

Advertising just is so hard to do. Yeah. If you get to scale, like, people are like, oh, you should make this week in startups subscription. And, like, it's like, well, I'm doing something different. I'm using this podcast to get deal flow. because I'm interested in doing it, and it makes seven figures in revenue, so that's fine.

It pays for everything. So it's kind of hard to go backwards once you hit scale. Like Joe Rogan can't go backwards. But for new stuff, like the athletic, it's like if you build it from the bottom up paid, love that.

And it's like, well, do I want to read? The information too. The information. But you want to read like some dipshit writing about the Knicks or do you want somebody who's actually like getting paid a lot of money or a decent amount to just obsess over the Knicks. Yeah.

You know, and R.J. Barrett or whatever. Yeah, no, that's a, oh, I know you're a big Nick. You're going to be a future owner to Knicks. Listen, Knicks are undefeated during coronavirus. So this is the one silver lining for me. We're undefeated. Yeah.

I mean, and I hope James Dolan is okay, by the way. A lot of Nick fans were cracking jokes, and I know it's like, it's funny. I hope they hash it out with Spike Lee, too, because that's kind of ridiculous. I mean, the whole thing with Oakley to me, like, Oakley should, when Oakley comes to the garden, everybody should bow their heads and give him a standing ovation and when when he gets up to take a leak there should be a standing ovation that's how I feel about Charles Oakley

yeah him and Lee Spike Lee I think both of them deserve apologies and they deserve free tickets I've gone in that entrance by the way I know the entrance he goes in I've gone through there with people like when I knew Alan Houston when he was a Nick and I became friends with Alan Houston he would take me through that entrance

It's just basically like there's the VIP entrance and then there's just like, you know, service. It's a service entrance. Yeah. And Spike Lee used to go through the service entrance until like the guys had court side seats. You know how much money he's paid for those seats, man, $5,000 a pop? Yeah. It's expensive. He's got two of them.

It's $10,000 a game. It's $400,000 a year. And if the Knicks ever made the playoffs, it would be even more. Yeah. Yo, last thing too, Collison brothers, man. Like, they're phenomenal. They have to be, they're going to end up on a game. that list.

And so maybe I'll throw them in. I know that's more than five, but like shout out to those guys. I actually wish that me and my brother could have built a company like that one day, which is a big company. I think you got the right thing right now. I think you'll make it work. I think just anybody being able to come up and participate, like I love the idea of the foothold of where you are.

Yeah. And then I love the idea of anybody else who wants to participate can participate because some people don't have schools that are big enough. They only have seven kids in the school who want to do it. They don't have enough critical mass. or then kids graduate too, right? Yeah, and then they want to continue to play. Hey, so surprisingly, though, right now we're just three games live.

We're going to add we'll probably be six or seven games this fall. But 30 to 50 kids will try out for those three games. Wow. And, you know, the coach will build teams around that. If you think about that relative to other sports, you know, only on average, 30 kids play baseball and basketball per school, 27 play ice hockey. So this could be like triple 10 times? Football list, 74.

Look, football is 1.1 million kids a year who play across 14,000 schools. And it's dangerous. Yeah, and it's dangerous. And obviously, like, particularly this of all, like, they're, like, East sports is the safest option. I mean, I understand why people love the sport and it's exciting to watch, but I would never let my child play. I would do everything I could to stop them from playing,

knowing what I saw in that frontline documentary about the brain lesions. Yeah. Look, I think there's, I think that, you know, it's going to, it's trending down. it'll probably still be one of the more popular sports in high school for, you know, at least the next few decades. They've got to reconfigure it. Yeah, but e-sports is going to be just as dominant. I think we'll be two to three million kids at some point in high school and probably

in every high school similarly to like how basketball. Basketball, most people would assume football is in every high school. Basketball actually has the most adoption at that sort of per school level. And I think e-sports has an opportunity to follow that. And then we'll, you know, it's important that we nail Scholastic because Nell and Scalastic gives us those relationships with the publishers and we're added value back to their strategic plan and then we can leverage that to go do other things, build new businesses with the publishers, with integration, with relationship, you know, and have better margins, you know,

on whatever that refsure looks like on those new products we build together. And because of that relationship, though, we'll just like funnel users from their client or their, like their platform directly to play versus and we don't have to, you know, spin up, you know, a $100 million pay that campaign and get those users. And so, look, I think, you know, our strategy is working. We're super grateful to have raised, you know, almost $100 million and 13 months to be only, you know, over a little bit over two years old and be as successful as we are. And, you know, again, just thank you for, you know, doing the lunch festival for giving me opportunity. I mean, I literally was not even in the show notes and nobody knew that that was part of the story.

But listen, congratulations. Everybody go work at Play versus. Sounds like a dope company to work at. You're probably getting it on the ground level. continued success and thanks for helping me get Mr. Ovitz on the pod. Yeah, 100%. And Jason from Discord. And Jason from Discord. Okay. All right,

we'll see you all next time. Stay safe, everybody.