Our buddy sold his app for $200M in just 6 weeks?!

Shaan Puri

I tweeted this out a long time ago. I said, "I have a new hero, and his name is Dan Porter." You're here, and today you're going to show people why that is true.

Dan Porter

Listen, I wasn't a gamer, and I made a pretty popular game. I didn't know a lot about ticketing, and I started the first live event ticketing company. I like sports, but I'm not a sports wizard. I don't know, you just do shit.

Sam Parr

You're fun as shit.

Dan Porter

As I talk to...

Shaan Puri

Can you talk about a couple of the things that you did intentionally that you think helped build the cult brand?

Dan Porter

The one second piece of advice I would give is that.

Shaan Puri

I'll start with a few facts. Number one: this is a guest I have been waiting for to come on the podcast for years. The reason why is because, Dan, you don't know this, but I've had all these fantasies—these entrepreneurial fantasies—in my life. There's a part of me that's like, "You know what? One day I'm gonna make a hit social app, and 100 million people are gonna use it. I'm gonna sell it for $100 million." You've done that. I have this other fantasy that, no, no, no, I'm gonna go change education. I'm gonna start a big nonprofit. I'm gonna be the leader of that. I'm gonna help grow that thing. I'm gonna help change the way that education works in America. You've done that. Part of me wants to go to Hollywood and work with the power brokers, the people who are in that world. You've done that. Part of me wants to create a brand that's, you know, part of the culture that takes off in the world of sports. You've done that. Part of me wants to own a sports league. You've done that. You have done basically all the things that I've ever wanted to do. I tweeted this out a long time ago: "I have a new hero, and his name is Dan Porter." Nobody knew who the hell I was talking about. Nobody knew why I was saying that. I didn't give any context. But you're here, and today you're gonna explain to the people. You're gonna show people why that is true.

Dan Porter

That's an amazing intro, especially for somebody whose Twitter game is as lame as mine. I appreciate that. I would subtext that with "clearly jack of all trades, master of none."

Shaan Puri

Well, I want to start with the story because your stories are legendary. You came to our basketball camp, Camp FFM, and you didn't even play basketball, which is the best part. You were my favorite person there, and you didn't even play basketball, which is the funniest part. Can you tell the story of "OMG Pop" and what happened there?

Dan Porter

Yeah, so, OMG Pop was a gaming website built entirely in Flash. It started with this incredibly creative guy, Charles Forman, who grew up playing Game Boys in his garage. I was like, "I wish the internet could connect us to play together." We made a ton of really fun games and we actually had success. It's a weird story because, in some ways, we imagine that businesses either succeed or fail. But what happens if you're in the middle? We had millions of people who played our games. The problem is that FarmVille came out and they had 100 million people who played their games. All of a sudden, millions of people who played our games was kind of way lamer than 100 million people who played their game on Facebook. We did our thing, but then the world changed. It was Facebook games and all these other things. So at what point do you come back to the board and you're just like, "Well, we're kind of running out of money," and they're like, "Well, why do we want to invest in something that is good but not great?" I remember we went back and we were like, "Okay, so let's say that we cut all the snacks. How much runway would that increase for us?" And the answer was one day.

Dan Porter

You're just like, "Well, am I in the runway extending business? Am I in the business of taking something that is good but not great and just continually taking money over and over over time?" At that point, you kind of have that realization. The board is sitting around, and they're like, "Oh, we can raise money, we can borrow money." And you're just like, "Well, what happens if we did some cool stuff, but it just wasn't cool enough?" So, yeah, I just said, "Maybe this is just kind of the end. We're just going to make some more games and see what happens. Maybe we're going to go out of business, and a couple million people will be sad, but you know, not 100 million." That's kind of what we did. In that process, I thought, "Let's make one or two more games." We had this one very big game that everybody in the company was working on, a more complicated game. I said, "I'd like to at least try to make the last game that we make." Even though I'm not a game designer, I think I've worked here long enough to have kind of internalized it. One of the cool things about working in the gaming space is that it changes your mindset. You're always one game away from something changing the trajectory of the company. If you're in a website, app, or product business, that's dangerous because you always believe, "Oh my god, I'm just one feature away. If I just enable push notifications, if I just add this other thing, then my app is going to be gigantic." That can be an illusion, which is challenging. In a portfolio theory kind of way, a games company is almost like a portfolio of a bunch of smaller startups. Even if you look at it over time, we have basketball, we have football, we have a media company, and they all kind of roll up to some big vision. But they're also a portfolio of different types of bets in some way. So, I think that definitely impacted my thinking. I was just thinking, "Okay, we're going to make one or two more games. Let's see what happens."

Shaan Puri

How much time did you have?

Dan Porter

4 months... 5 months left. Damn.

Shaan Puri

And did you believe? Where was the belief? Because, you know, startups are a roller coaster. You have the initial surge where "this is gonna be awesome." Then, you have the trough of despair, the trough of sorrow, where it feels like nothing's working. It sounds like you were at the end. Where was the morale at the time?

Dan Porter

I didn't get up on a podium and say, "Hey y'all, we're gonna be out of business in 5 months, so polish up that resume." We had millions of users. I mean, our average time on-site was like 4 and a half hours, and people loved us. It's just that the scale at which they loved us was not the scale that was happening when Facebook transformed the gaming business. Of course, all the money is focused on you, and then they're like, "Oh shit, bright shiny objects! Zynga, Farmville, anything that ends in 'ville.'" And they all ran over there, and you're like, "Hey, what's up? I got a couple million users." And they're like, "Cool, cool."

Sam Parr

Alright guys, really quick. Back when I was running The Hustle, we had this premium newsletter called **Trends**. The way it worked was we hired a ton of analysts and created a sort of playbook for researching different companies, ideas, and emerging trends to help you make money and build businesses. Well, HubSpot did something kind of cool. They took this playbook that we developed and gave to our analysts, and they turned it into an actionable guide and a resource that anyone can download. It breaks down all the different methods that we use for spotting upcoming trends and identifying different companies that are going to explode and grow really quickly. So, if you want to stay ahead of the game and find cool business ideas or different niches that most people have no idea exist, this is the ultimate guide. If you want to check it out, you can see the link down below in the description. Now, back to the show.

Dan Porter

And so we're like, "Wow, we made these web-based games." But it's about social games and mobile games. You know, you have 4 to 6 months left, and at some point, I think you hit this wall where you're just like, "Maybe it is just going to go out of business." You know, whatever they say in Wall Street, "Don't fight the tape." All we're going to do is our best. We're not going to mortgage the house or do all these other things just to stay in business for the sake of staying in business. We got a couple of shots. We have this big game everyone's working on, and I think, "I'd like to make a game." Maybe I can make a game. Maybe I'm super arrogant, really deluded, or completely out of touch. But we have this kind of fun drawing and guessing game that we've been making on the internet, and maybe we could make it as a social game off in the corner. So, everybody in this 50-person company is making a game, and I'm in the corner with an outsourced developer and two people on my team. I don't know a ton about making games, but the game seems fun. I just have this instinct that, "Wow, the phone is a communications device," and yet every game that's popular on the phone is basically a single-player game. So we're back in this mindset: okay, everybody is a Game Boy, but they're actually connected in some way. Could we do something social? I start trying to make a version of this game, which was called "Draw My Thing" at that time. I think it might have been a little intentionally racy. Basically, every Friday, we would make a version of it, and I would try to play it. I'm really not good at games, and I can't read instructions. I have a lot of limitations in that space. Obviously, I clearly can't even hoop really. So I just play the game and think, "How can this game be simpler? I don't really understand it." I recognize every Friday when I played it on the subway home, "Wow, this is really fun, and I get it." And so we kind of get to that.

Dan Porter

We renamed it "Draw Something," and it was kind of the last gasp of the company. We tried to promote it to our audience, you know, to our couple of million people. We said, "Hey, we got this new game. It's based on this other thing." In my mind, it was kind of a hail Mary, but you can't run a company and say, "Hey guys, we're going to be out of business in four months, and by the way, this is our hail Mary." Otherwise, literally everybody in the entire company would have a psychic breakdown. So, they were working on this other game with fighting and all this other stuff. We released this game and gave a lot of promotions so everybody knew about it. The game kind of climbed the charts, right? On day one, like 30 or 40 thousand people downloaded it because we gave them free coins on our website to do that. It blipped up a little bit, and then it blipped up a little bit more, and then it kind of crashed down. You're just like, "Okay, so what have we learned?" Dan Porter is definitely not as smart as he thought he was, probably not a real game designer, and it looks like it's not going to save the company. That's the nature of it. We tried some other promotions, and before the weekend, like a week out, one of the back-end developers came to me and said, "I think there's something broken in the game because there are all of these calls being made in the game, and they're not going through." He said, "I think Chris and I—his name was Jason—are going to stay all weekend to try to fix the back end of the game." I said, "Cool, what's the downside of that?" So, they stayed and rewrote the entire back end of the game over the weekend. But then we had to submit it to the app store, and at that time, you'd submit it to the app store, and it might take a week or two for it to get approved. I called a famous investor, who everybody knows, who had written a seed check-in for us and wrote a lot of seed checks. I said, "Listen, I just need this one favor. If they could actually review the game and put it up in a day or two, it might be huge for us." He said, "I can help you, but a) you never get to ask me another favor, and b) one day in 12 years when you're on Sam and Sean's podcast, you can't use my name so that other people don't ask me." I said, "Blank, blank, I'm not using your name, and I'll see what I can do." He did it, it went in the app store, and he used his clout. All of a sudden, it was updated. What had been happening was that the game was actually spreading like wildfire, but nobody could download it, or they couldn't play it once they had downloaded it, or they downloaded it and it didn't work. So, they fixed it, and the thing just blew up. It just went through the roof, and all of a sudden, it was the number one game in Sweden. The colors were blue and yellow, so people were like, "Oh, they must be confused about the Swedish flag." I was like, "I think there are smart people, or maybe they just like the game." It started getting really big there, and then weirdly, it started getting really big in small liberal arts colleges and in Minnesota and all these other places. I think what happened was that we were really successful at two things: making a game that was really simple to understand and play—ultimately, like grandmas played it; it was super broad—and the second thing was making a game that had just insanely powerful word-of-mouth. But word-of-mouth works in a very small, tight-knit community. So, it works in a liberal arts college of 5,000 people; it works in a country like Sweden, you know, at a giant university or somewhere else. It doesn't, and so it just starts to grow.

Sam Parr

Well, what's the time frame of this?

Dan Porter

I would say literally day by day. In the first 9 days, we got to 1,000,000 downloads. Then, in the first 50 days, we reached 50,000,000 downloads. The only app that was in front of us was the flashlight because, at that time, the iPhone didn't have a flashlight. When somebody made a flashlight app, I was like, "Oh, we need to kill the flashlight app. We gotta be more popular than the flashlight!"

Sam Parr

And this is like in 2010 or something.

Dan Porter

It's 2012.

Sam Parr

Of course, I played. I mean, everyone played that game, right? How many users did you end up having?

Dan Porter

So, it just blows up. It becomes the number one game in like every country in the world for six months straight. I would say on a daily active user (DAU) basis, we had at least 25,000,000 people playing every day, which was gigantic at that time. We ultimately were downloaded 250,000,000 times, and all of a sudden, it was just everywhere. Then everyone came to me and said, "We need influencers to make this big." Someone mentioned, "I know Cristiano Ronaldo's manager," and I thought, "That's really random, but I'll do whatever." A week later, they came in and said, "Miley Cyrus is tweeting about it," and like all these celebrities were tweeting about it. It had nothing to do with me. It's like if you make something that's popular in culture, everybody does it. I remember I ended up making a game show with Ryan Seacrest, and I asked him, "How did you find out about this game?" He said, "All the people who sat in the front of the studio—like secretaries, assistants, and bookers—were just playing it all day and laughing their asses off." I kept coming over and asking, "What are you guys laughing at?" and they replied, "This game." So, in this weird way, especially in this influencer world, there's this level of traction that you get where people just participate in it because it's part of culture.

Shaan Puri

You were like the hack to a girl before she was around. Exactly.

Dan Porter

You just managed to stay around for six months as opposed to like three days on Twitter. But you can tell by watching on Twitter. I actually think that we were one of the first games that ever kind of broke on Instagram because it was so visual. If you Google "Draw Something" and look at Google Images, there are 1,000,000,000 images around it. There were all these funny things about it. Number one, we didn't put any sharing capability in it, so there was just no way to share. That was like the antithesis of what everyone did. What happened was people just took screenshots of their drawings, and they texted and posted them. In this weird way, because you didn't ask celebrities to talk about it, they talked about it. Because you didn't ask people to share, they shared it. I remember at some point, I was walking through Zynga's headquarters, and they eventually bought the game. There were a bunch of developers trying to figure out the game and map it so they could copy it. One of them said to me, "Why didn't you put XP in this game? I mean, every good game has XP." I thought, "Oh, fuck, you're right! I meant to do that, but I hadn't done it." So it ended up just being this kind of organic game that we knew a lot about but that was built by a regular person and then played by regular people. I'll tell you one kind of geeky game thing about it: I understood from our site that if you came on to our site and played a game, if you and Sam played and Sam won 50% of the time, you would never come back to the site again. Let's say it was even checkers. The first time you lose at checkers, you're like, "F this site! This isn't fun!" So what does that say about running a gaming site where literally somebody's going to lose, and then you're going to lose them as basically a customer? In my head, I was like, "I need to figure out a way that you could have a game where nobody loses." That's like one of those riddles: Which is the door you knock on to get into heaven or hell? What is the game that has no winners and losers? One day, I was in Prospect Park with my son, my younger son Miles, and his friend. They were throwing the football, and I said, "Listen, if you guys can throw and catch it 50 times in a row, I'll take you for ice cream." Basically, I was just trying to get them to collaborate. They were like, "Oh, it's like a streak! We're going to keep doing it!" And I was like, "Oh my god, there's no winner and loser! They're both winners in this game!" So I thought, "Oh, you're going to have streaks in 'Draw Something.' The more you can go back and forth, everybody's a winner, and all this other stuff, so it's fun for everyone involved." There are all these kind of non-game moments in life. Subsequently, somebody at Snap told me, "Oh yeah, we took that idea of streaks from what you guys had done in that game." It's not like I was in some lab cooking up amazing ideas about the internet and the future of gaming. I was just a regular person observing, trying to answer some of these existential questions and looking around me. I wasn't a gamer, so I didn't really use XP. I was looking for the ways that made people laugh and smile. The biggest thing is, listen, if the first game was called "Draw My Thing," what do you think people draw in the game? This is not hard.

Sam Parr

Well, that's something you and Sean actually have in common. You have both owned social apps where drawing penises was one of the main features.

Dan Porter

Yeah, I remember this very long board meeting where they were like, "You know, we're gonna use optical character recognition, and we're gonna recognize every dick in the game, and then we're gonna blank it out." This other board member was like, "It doesn't matter whether it goes to the left or the right, we're gonna figure it out, and we're gonna just get out." I just thought, "Wow, that sounds really hard." It's like, "Here lies Dan Porter. He figured out how to use early artificial intelligence to spot, you know, d-i-c-k-s, the memes and stuff like that." Ultimately, I just made this change where it's like you could only play with your friends. I figured, "Okay, whatever you send your friends, they either laugh or they're like, 'Dude, come on, just send me a real drawing.'" It's just kind of one of those moments where you're trying to solve this problem, and the reality is that the solution for the problem is actually something that's bigger in a way. Like, I'll tell you a really dumb story. I had terrible knee pain, and it's like at some...

Dan Porter

I was climbing stairs and I started wearing pads on my knees. Finally, I went to a doctor; I went to an NFL doctor. I thought he was going to tell me I needed knee surgery. He did all these things to me and then said, "Listen, lie on the table. I'm going to touch your heels to your butt." I was like, "It really hurts." He replied, "Yeah, your quads are so freaking tight. It has nothing to do with your knee. What you think is the problem is completely not the problem. You just need to stretch out your quads." I was like, "Oh my God!" I just avoided knee surgery and learned one of the greater lessons in life. You think it's this input-output, but there are all of these things around it. It's not about recognizing, you know, the issues in your game; it's about changing some other structure around you. It's about figuring out how to stretch out your quads.

Shaan Puri

I think we found your biography title. It's not about fixing the game exactly.

Dan Porter

Hey, Gabe. Yeah.

Sam Parr

Were you financially successful before starting this company? I know you had a business before this, but was it like, "This has to work, otherwise I'm broke and I gotta start over?"

Dan Porter

I was kind of like us. I wasn't like... I mean, my parents were college professors, so I didn't have a ton of money. I had been a public school teacher and worked in nonprofit education before this, so I didn't really have a massively lucrative career. I was average. I mean, I couldn't stop working, but you know, I didn't have to eat ramen every day. But yeah, this game and this company was the chance to completely change the trajectory of my life and my family's life from a financial perspective, without a doubt.

Shaan Puri

I think the insight about people and why they stop playing my game is interesting. You sort of invert the question: instead of asking why everyone should play my game, you ask why someone wouldn't play a game. Well, it’s often because they lose and feel bad. So, can you make a game where people don’t lose and feel bad? The beautiful thing about the streak is that, let’s say we lost. Well, we’re playing together; we’re collaborating. I almost feel like I owe it to you to play again. Instead of churning out because I lost, I think, "No, no, no! I’ve got to make up for that. My bad, I dropped the ball. Let’s start the streak again." I definitely have to play because I’m the one who cost us the streak. That was the first thing I loved. I mean, this game was amazing! Dude, this was like my flirt game. You were basically my wingman. I didn’t even know you at the time, but I got a girlfriend through "Draw Something" because it was such a simple game. You download it, and immediately it’s like, "Draw this." The beauty of it was that it would show the other person almost like a playback of you drawing it. For those who didn’t play this game, I don’t remember the exact mechanics, but you have to draw what it tells you to draw. The other person doesn’t know what you had to draw; they have to guess. It would show you starting, stopping, erasing, and it was really funny to see people’s mistakes as they were drawing. You could only be so good; nobody could really be that great unless you were really talented because it’s just a finger on a little iPhone screen. So, the expectations were low too. I remember the first time I saw that it lets you watch the other person draw. That makes you laugh, and then it makes you feel connected with this person because it’s like both sides are a little vulnerable in a way. You’re embarrassing yourself; it’s like playing charades. It makes you like each other more. I remember thinking, "This is genius!" This game is so simple. There have been so many people come on this podcast to say the same thing: "Well, my back was against the wall. We didn’t really have another choice. I wasn’t an expert at this thing, but I just wanted to make a game that would be really fun to play." Every week, we would make it, and every Friday, I would playtest it. I’d just try to figure out what I could do to make it a little bit better than it was just that Friday. I’d try to make one tweak, and I just did that one tweak at a time. Sure enough, that actually resulted in a great product. It’s not this highly complex, convoluted grand theory approach to making things successful.

Dan Porter

No, totally! I mean, people used to say to me, "I love that game, but I'm not really that good at drawing." I was like, that's kind of the point of the game. There were people who had pens and iPads who could draw great things, but it should be accessible to everyone. Weirdly, we released a game, and within a week, there were five games that were released that were similar. But we were the only game that had the playback feature. You know how people always say, like, "The greatest thing about the iPhone is when they text you that code, and it lets you hit that little thing and it puts the code in anything you're filling out"? Sometimes there's some aspect of the product that doesn't seem like the core aspect, but it's so great. To your point, it wasn't just the drawing; it was the erasing. It made you feel like there was a live person on the other side of it, and that really was the essence of it. Then there were a lot of other just really totally random goofy things. I don't think I've ever said this before, but in the beginning, there'd be a little scream, and these letters would make a word. The word it made was "Manchul" (M-A-N-C-H-U-L). Manchul, aka Tool, was one of our developers, and we just punked him and put his name in the beginning of the game. Nobody ever said anything, and after Zynga bought it, for like two years, they left it up there. You'd open it, and it wouldn't say "Draw Something" or whatever; it would just say "Manchul." It was just like, we put these weird things in there just because... because you can! And listen, you could say from a strategy perspective, "If I'm not having fun, how can I make sure that the people who are doing the drawings are having fun?"

Sam Parr

And you sold it for... you sold it for like what, $200,000,000 to Zynga? Yes, and that was when Zynga was at its peak.

Dan Porter

That was like 5 to 6 weeks after the game really kind of came out and burst. We sold that; it happened so fast.

Sam Parr

No way, 6 weeks?

Dan Porter

Yeah, so that was like the crazy turnaround. They hired two law firms: one worked the first 12 hours of the day on the deal, and then the other one worked the second 12 hours of the day on the deal. The whole deal got done in 9 days. I'm like, how? All this paperwork, and I'm trying to run around and figure it out.

Shaan Puri

How did it happen? So, the game's blowing up. Did you get an email from Mark Pincus, or how did it go?

Dan Porter

I is blowing up, and not only is it so big, it's literally sucking the user base out of every single other game on the market. Zynga, EA, it's like everybody else who's about to report earnings and talk about their DAU and MAU. I have these videos of the download numbers, and the counter is just broken because there are a million drawings happening every 5 seconds. So, you know, Mark knew somebody on my board. They invited me to the headquarters. I was a joker, so I entered my name as "Doctor Dre" from the company N.W.A. I thought maybe somebody would know I was there or whatever. Ultimately, there were 5 or 6 companies that were really interested in buying it because the trajectory was so big. I think they were playing offense; they clearly were like, "These guys are some mobile game savants." I think they were playing defense because they were bleeding all of their users across everywhere.

Sam Parr

And the deal closed six weeks after the draw something went live. That's gotta be one of the fastest launch-to-close times ever.

Dan Porter

It was insanely fast. The funny thing is that I went to GDC, which is a Game Developer Conference. The year before, I went and nobody knew who I was. It just so happened that it occurred at the peak moment of the game, and I went and everybody knew who I was. In just two days, I could meet with seriously every buyer because everybody was in San Francisco for that conference. We also got a term sheet for $50,000,000, which I had folded up and put in my pocket. I went to an event and dropped it, and I couldn't find it. I only had the printout, so I had a rough idea of what the terms were, but it was on the floor of some party somewhere. I came back and asked the OGs who had been there for 4 or 5 years. There were only 7 of us, and we were working above a combination Taco Bell and Dunkin' Donuts, where the smell was different depending on which side of the room you were on. I asked them, "Do you guys want to raise money and build something really big, or do you want to sell the company?" They were like, "Sell the company." I get it. They had put 5 years of their life into it, and it was a pivotal time in their lives. It was life-changing for them. I think that was a decision point. People ask me a lot of times, "Listen, we were really, really good at making games. We made a really popular game, and we were good at community management and social media around it." But you take $50,000,000 and spend a lot of that on building a legal team, building a sales team, and building all these commodity things that I didn't think we were necessarily going to be better than anyone else at. So, we just wanted to be in a place where we could make games.

Shaan Puri

How did you negotiate the price?

Dan Porter

The buyers came back and they were like, "$120-150 million." The board was ecstatic.

Sam Parr

Well, where did they come up with that number?

Dan Porter

I think they were looking at it like we were making a ton of money because we had so many screens in the game. When you go back and forth, you're treading out of advertising revenue. You're looking at roughly how much is an MAU (Monthly Active User) or a DAU (Daily Active User) interesting to you. So, we bring it to the board, and the board is ecstatic because we go from being like, "Oh, should we essentially wind this thing down?" to now we have this thing that's popular and somebody wants to buy it. They're like, "Great! Like $120,000,000." I was like, "This thing is worth $250,000,000," because, like anyone, I'm extremely high on my own supply at that time. There's this moment where basically the message they're saying to me is, "You're the CEO, but it's not your company; it's our company. You don't control this thing." There's kind of a subtle message from me to them being like, "Well, fine, fucking sell this thing without me because this thing is worth so much money." That's 50% complete delusion, arrogance, and adrenaline, and all the other things that happen when you're in the desert and you have a couple million users, and now you have hundreds of millions of users. Part of me is thinking, "Maybe I actually am right, and maybe it is worth more." So they give me this small window, and I go back, bluster, draw something. Somebody tweets like, "You know, Y Combinator pitch that draw something of X," and that matters to all of those people. I go back and I'm like, "I need this, and I need that, and I need this." It's a gamble, but it was right. We got way more money and a way better deal because a segment of the buyers really, really needed it. They were telling results that this hit to their stock was bad. You know, somebody like EA was invested in sports games, and somebody like Zynga was over-invested in FarmVille. You have strategic imperatives for people. So sure, you're super valuable, but they're all playing a much bigger game. If you can understand that, that's where your leverage is. Then boom! All of a sudden, we do that. I come back, and I'm like, "The company sold," and it's this whole crazy kind of episode. The funniest thing to me is that I start reading all of these things like, "Why Draw Something Succeeded," and then these other articles, "Why Draw Something Failed." When you're an entrepreneur, you read a ton of these, and you come back and you're like, "Did you see this? You tell your team, 'You see this article? We need to be doing this.'" The reality was that every single article was wrong. Their analysis was completely wrong. There was this whole thing about why we failed, but they were analyzing our iPad app, and we didn't have an iPad app. We just had a stretched-out mobile app for iPad. Then all of a sudden, you just realize, "Oh shit! I've been reading these articles as an entrepreneur about why things succeed and fail. I've been making decisions, and they were probably wrong there. Now when it's happening to me, they're really fucking wrong." But it was this crazy ride, and then all of a sudden, you know, we're part of Zynga, and then a year later, I'm not working there. It was an amazing rise and fall. It totally turned around the company, saved us, and we did a whole bunch of things. There were a bunch of employees who I had to let go, and I just made the decision on my own to rehire them like the day before the deal closed so that their options would still vest. There were people who had taken more cash than stock because they had little kids, and I got a cash component that I could use at my discretion. So I just gave them the money that they would have made. This was a chance to do all this insanely non-capitalist but super cool shit to change people's lives. After the deal closed, they had a debt-free club where all the employees who had college loans paid off their college loans. There's a moment when you have a little bit of money left in your bank account, and that's going to go to the other company. So I ran to the Apple Store in Soho; they used to love me. I bought $100,000 worth of iPads and all this stuff, and I just gave it out to everybody who worked at the company. Every now and then, somebody will text me, "I still have that iPad from 2012." All of a sudden, you just do all the cool fun shit that they would never teach you to do in business school. They'd teach you to do the opposite, but you can do it because you have this superpower. Not only does somebody want your company, but you have this ability to impact the lives of all these people who've given you their all for the last five years. To me, that was the coolest part of it.

Shaan Puri

Sam, you know one of the things I love about Dan is we meet a lot of founders and entrepreneurs, and almost all of them - I would actually say 80-90% of them - will say, "It's not about the money. Money's not the biggest thing for me." I would say most people *want* that to be true, and then you go look at their actions and it's like... those people are the most transactional. They're the people that want the money the most, and they... they want to *not* want the money, but they want the money. I'm guilty of that too. Dan is one of the few people I've met [who seems genuinely different in this regard].

Sam Parr

I believe him.

Shaan Puri

Who plays a game with money? It's not that money doesn't matter to you, but he's told me a bunch of stories where it wasn't about the money. He made a decision that was actively not money-driven or even logical, but he just does it for the fun and for the kicks. It's like the Joker in Batman, right? Most people want to be Batman. Dan, I feel like you want to be the Joker, where you're just like, "I just want to see what happens."

Sam Parr

Well.

Shaan Puri

If I do this, what if I tie up this person you love over here and this person you love me? Who are you gonna go get? I can't wait to find out.

Sam Parr

Have you read his LinkedIn? His LinkedIn's pretty hilarious. So it starts with, I think you were the president of Teach for America. When I think of Teach for America, I think of like, kind of a hippie-ish, do-good-for-the-world type of vibe. Then you go to gaming, which, in my opinion, the gamers are typically like the hardcore capitalists. It's just like you're practically working on an Excel sheet on how to change things. But then, you've got this weird hippie side, but you're also this capitalist. Then his late date is Sean. After selling "Draw Something," he goes to work for Ari Emanuel at Endeavor. Sean and I love reading about Ari. Listen to what he says: "I told Ari to pass on 5 companies for investing that he ignored me on, and he invested in them anyway. All of them are now out of business." You know what? My guy's got this like shithead vibe that I love. I love that he's also doing good stuff for America and is also this greedy capitalist. He's the perfect combination of being a holistic, balanced human being. I love it.

Dan Porter

I appreciate those nice words. I will say I understand what it's like to be average or not have any money, but not have any spectacular upside. There are two things that really motivated me. One was something someone once said to me. He was kind of Oprah's manager and helped her become really big. When I was in my twenties, he said to me, "The most powerful people are the people who know how to give up power." Not a lot of people say things to me that I either remember or have an impact, but I always thought, "Wow, that's so interesting." It's not hard to be powerful and consolidate power. It's way harder to be powerful and somehow let go of power. I think there's some aspect where you could substitute money or anything else for that. Sure, like Zynga said, "Here's $5,000,000 in cash." I could have put that whole thing in my own bank account if I wanted to. And sure, I wish I had that money today. Who doesn't? But to be able to release that and give it to other people and change their lives is just... it's just fucking cool. The number one thing that motivated me was every day I rode the subway and saw people playing games on their iPhone. I thought, "I want to make a game that people play on their iPhone." I remember there was a...

Dan Porter

At which the game was so big, it was like everybody I knew was playing it. It was everywhere. I was walking my dog with one of my kids in Prospect Park, and there was this couple canoodling on a bench. They were laughing, and I thought, "Oh my God, I wonder if they're playing Draw Something. I gotta go check it out." So I kind of walked behind the bench and looked over, and they were playing it. In that moment, I thought, "Cool." But, of course, I couldn't help myself. I tapped them on the shoulder and said, "I made that game." They looked at me like I was a stalker and said, "Oh, cool," then went back to what they were doing. But to me, it's the same thing. I walk through an airport and see some kid wearing an Overtime shirt, and I just think, "That's fucking cool. I made that." Everyone I work with, we made that. The fact that you can create something that's out in the world that people love, and they don't even know you have anything to do with it, is amazing. I did a whole music festival when I was at Virgin. I remember standing on stage next to Richard Branson and Roger Daltrey, and The Who were screaming. Dads had their kids on their shoulders, and there were like 80,000 people there. I was thinking, "I was a spark that made this happen." I'm not interested in these people ever knowing who I am; that's not the point.

Dan Porter

The... You made something and it existed in the world, and it touched people who have no idea who you are. I just can't tell you how **fucking existentially cool** that is.

Sam Parr

Can I ask you a little bit about Branson and Ari? So, yeah, Sean and I have been on this Ari Emanuel kick because he's not probably like us at all. He's significantly more intense—go, go, go, take over the world. Sean and I care a little bit more about just having our ideal lifestyle. But then you've got Branson. You talked about how the guy was like, "It's more about who can release power." Branson seems like a guy where it's decentralized, while Ari's more like a guy where he's the boss, and it's a little bit more dictatorship. This is just an outsider's observation, but what can you say about the difference between the two of them? What attributes did each person have that made him kick ass?

Dan Porter

Yeah, so let me say, Ari is an amazing guy, and I learned a ton working for him. Richard is also an amazing guy. I would say, in Ari's case, when I worked at WME before they bought IMG and before they bought UFC, three months into it, people were like, "What is it like to work there?" I was like, "It's the greatest fucking Jewish family dinner you've ever been to." You just sit around the table, and everybody's screaming at each other at the top of their lungs, but they actually love each other. I had just never worked in an environment like that. Like, you walk into somebody's office, and they say, "Listen, you fucking schmo, what about this to that?" And they're like, "That's not true." I'm like, "Wait, they're yelling at each other, but they love each other?" It was actually wild. I think that Ari is an example of somebody in a number of ways. One is he's relentlessly curious. He reads, he consumes information; there's nothing he doesn't want to learn about. I think that is this incredible spark for him and within the company. Clearly, Richard has that too, but in a different way. He has an incredible amount of personal charisma, and he uses his personality to his advantage. The person he actually reminded me the most of, who I worked with later, was actually David Stern, the former NBA commissioner. Because, like, I'd be in a room with David, and we'd be talking about basketball. He'd look at me and say, "Listen, Dan, I get it, you're good at raising money, but are you fucking good at anything else? Because clearly, it doesn't seem like you are." So, it's almost like this Catskill comedian style of using humor in your personality that's probably rooted in some Jewish humor. It says to you, "Hey, maybe you should turn left instead of going straight here," but I'm going to say it in a way that is funny. You get what I'm saying? And this is going to make you love me in the end too. I think that Ari is very, very funny and was very good at that by strength of personality. Also, he could call you every single day.

Shaan Puri

That’s how he recruited you, right? What was the story of how he recruited you?

Dan Porter

When he wanted me to work there, he just decided he wanted me to work there. He called me every single day for four months.

Shaan Puri

And what did he say?

Dan Porter

He would just be like, "You know, we have all this IP. We need to do this. We should come here." Then I'd go to talk and I'd realize he wasn't there anymore. That's the problem with cell phones. Is... wait.

Sam Parr

Did he... did he hang up without saying bye? Yeah, that's awesome.

Dan Porter

That's what the agents do. They roll calls. He had a list of 300 people. "Hey, hey, how are you doing, Larry David?" "Good, but whatever." And then he's on to the next one. They understood it, and I was an idiot. I just wasn't from that environment, so I didn't really understand it. I'd be talking, and I'd look at my phone and see the time because he'd have hung up and moved on to the next call. I just think there's this incredible personal force and momentum that he has. Sometimes I think for some people, they have that, but it can lead to a really toxic work environment. There are all kinds of exposures. I think he loves life; he enjoys everything. He's very funny, and I think he could have both of those in a way. He was good at understanding what made you tick and connecting with that. I think Richard is really different. Richard is very laid back but very cool. I remember going to this meeting at Virgin Mobile in Canada. He wanted to talk to all the people in the phone room, the customer support people. People just don't do that. He basically tells them this story about when he lost his virginity—like no pun intended. It's a very funny story where he humanizes himself. He's just this regular guy, and he's not talking to the C-suite; he's talking to all the people who answer the phone. They leave that meeting thinking, "I fucking love Richard Branson. He is like the man." It's just charisma; it's different for each of them. It's very rooted in what their brand is. Their brand is extremely clear and articulated, but they've clearly understood how to make who they are. They're not trying to be anyone they aren't, but they've rooted that. In this world where people become very studied, they read articles, hire coaches, and do all these other things, both Richard and Ari had the superpower of knowing exactly who they were. They tapped into that, and that was their brand. Maybe you make some comment about my LinkedIn. It's not like I wake up in the day and think, "I just want to fucking troll everyone who reads my LinkedIn." I just think, "Maybe this would be actually funny." I think there's some self-realization, and it helps to be charismatic. That's really hard to learn otherwise. But I think in a way, they both tap into it. They are both relentless, but not in this grindset way that everybody reads on Reddit about how they're supposed to go and grind and grind and be relentless. They just have the zest to do something that matters, something that's bigger. Where does that come from? That's for the psychiatrist's couch. But again, it's authentic and unique to them. It's not studied, and I think that's part of what makes it so powerful.

Sam Parr

The internet community, or industry, or whatever you want to call it, we need more of that. My father is a small business owner, and he does all of his business via phone. I used to sit in his office, and he'd be like, "I remember he just like would call someone and be like, 'Hey sweetheart, look, it's money amongst friends, right? It's just money. We gotta make some, we gotta make something work here.'" He had this charm, this sweet talk. I remember hearing him say little things like, "Look, it's a little early for you to be busting my balls this morning. Let's make something." Just this gift of gab. Yeah, we don't have that in our industry. It's significantly more formal. Calls are scheduled; every call is like the default calendar length of Google Calendar, which is 30 minutes. It's just different, and I actually love that type of stuff.

Dan Porter

It's the in-between stuff that makes those things happen. Look, Ari was an agent—maybe like the most super super agent of all time—and he definitely understood that. David understood that he was not a basketball player; he didn't play basketball in college. Jewish or Stern, he came into a situation where he was dealing with basketball players and coaches in China and internationally. There's a human connection, there's humor, there's charisma—there are all those things that kind of fit into it. I remember something that someone else said to me at some point. This guy, Dick Parsons, who had run a big bank and at one time was the chairman of Time Warner, was very influential. He said, "Listen, whenever I do a deal with somebody, I always just leave a little bit extra on the table because you never know when you're going to come back. I want to do another deal with them." The internet is filled with advice on how to extract maximum value from the other person, how to "win" in negotiation. The reality is, maybe there is enough to go around. Maybe I'm going to let you have a little win because I care about our relationship, and maybe we're going to do business in the future. So, I think, per your dad's story and otherwise, there is a bunch of that. Sometimes it makes it easier. They just sent me this thing asking, "What do you think about all these things we're proposing?" I wrote back and said, "These are seriously mid," and that was in front of 15 people. So we have this meeting, and the guy says to me, "Listen, my only goal in this meeting is how can we not be so mid?" So I'm like, "Okay, you get my point."

Dan Porter

And yet I haven't crossed some crazy HR line, and you've given it back to me. So what is the goal? The goal is to actually make something that's slightly better, but it requires, you know, trust and humor. Maybe there is a lost art in Catskills humor in business, and maybe that's going to be my next company after this.

Sam Parr

How old are you?

Dan Porter

I'm 58 years old.

Sam Parr

So, you started over time when you were, what, 50 years old? And your partner, did I read that your partner was 24?

Dan Porter

Yeah, when we started, Zach was 22.

Shaan Puri

That's some Leonardo DiCaprio shit. I like it, so you...

Dan Porter

I would only doubt date founders under 25.

Shaan Puri

So, by the way, the hilarious thing is I saw Overtime and I was like, "Man, this brand is awesome." Sam, I don't think your eyes are into kind of like the hoops mixtape culture of...

Dan Porter

Sam's not about the culture. Yeah, it's... you know, like you are, Sean.

Shaan Puri

Exactly! I've been waiting for somebody to call Sam out.

Sam Parr

Look more than you know. More than you know. Come on.

Shaan Puri

We're... it's all good. So, we see Overtime, and Overtime just takes off among basically like the young black market in America. It's the coolest brand; it's the shirt everybody's wearing. It's the Instagram page people are following. I'm looking for the founder of this thing. I remember when I first saw it, I'm looking for the founder, and I have an image in my head of what I think the founder of Overtime looks like.

Sam Parr

What was the image in your head?

Shaan Puri

Oh man, it's some guy, maybe 28 years old. He's gotta have some business savvy to him. I figured it was like a 28-year-old black guy who used to play basketball or still plays basketball. Maybe he comes from the music scene as some sort of music promoter or record label executive. There was definitely a culture crossover aspect to this where it was not just prospect rankings or stuff like that. It was not just like a database of athletes; it was not done that way. Then I see it's Dan Porter. I meet Dan, and Dan actually really helped us out with Milk Road. Sam, I don't know if I ever told you this, but no...

Sam Parr

I didn't know that.

Shaan Puri

He was... I don't know how we got connected. He was reading The Milk Road early on. We hit him up, "Yo, big fan of what you did! Can we just get on the phone for an hour?" Dan's like, "You gotta do this." And he's like, "This is working." I think the instinct when something is working is to kind of button it up and grow up. But he's like, "No, no, no. That's exactly the thing that's great about this. It's that it's not as buttoned up." I think there was a big Bitcoin conference going on, and he's like, "You should host the anti-conference. It's like, you know, just PBRs in people's backyards or something like that. Just like, what's the counter-programming you could do against the traditional thing?" I started asking him about the brand that he built with Overtime. Dan, you told me you studied soccer clubs, bands, and cults. You wanted to figure out what they did differently, and you shared with me two or three things that we used at The Milk Road to help grow that brand.

Dan Porter

So, I definitely learned a lot about branding while working for Richard. He really understood the idea of a **challenger brand**. For me, I was really interested in community, especially coming from gaming. I was curious about the challenges of being in the media space, particularly in relation to digital media. It's all about content and views. You're looking on your phone or somewhere else, and it's funny, but it could come from anywhere. I thought, maybe what the audience wants is a sense of community—a sense of belonging to something. I think that was clearly a growth hack for religion thousands of years ago: "Let's create a place where people can get together and feel part of something." I believe people wanted that. So, to me, you start from that standpoint and begin to observe the world around you. For example, you go to a British soccer game and you realize they're singing "Sweet Caroline." You think, "What does Neil Diamond have to do with soccer?"

Sam Parr

I never understood that.

Dan Porter

It's just such a good sing-along song. And then all of a sudden, you're just like, where else can grown men—aside from church—go someplace and sing at the top of their lungs? And like, why are people fanning them? Why do they paint their faces? I remember I went to a little baby birthday concert at State Farm, and everyone was holding up their phones. I was trying to make a video to put on my story to show that I was valid. Then, all of a sudden, I realized they were all filming themselves. I was one of the only people actually filming the concert. They were all content creators; they went to a concert as a platform to make content about themselves. I was like, I'm not that way, but to me, it was so fascinating. There's some anthropological understanding about, you know, you ask people which way they hold their camera. At a certain age, you're filming other people, and at a certain age, you're filming yourself. I just think I've had this relentless curiosity about that. To me, you can Google "brand," and you can read a lot of stuff that has a high ranking on Google about how to do this and that. But the passion of a soccer team or the passion that you feel for a sports team—think about things like the Grateful Dead, who just gave away their music and let people record it. When I was a kid, all that would happen at a concert is you'd get frisked to make sure you didn't have a recording device on you. They understood, like, "Well, shit, I could let my fans be the distribution, and it could grow 10 times bigger than anything else." All of a sudden, it's not about your song; it's like, "Well, I have that song at, you know, this show at NASA Coliseum, and I have this show at Hampton, and I have this song, this version of that." So I think, in a way, all of those examples exist out there. I remember I watched the Travis Scott documentary that's on Netflix, and it's so interesting to me that his audience is so much more passionate about him. They literally cry when they're coming out of the show, and he dives into the stage. You just ask, "There are 100 rappers out there; why is Travis Scott over here and they're all the way over there?" Do people go to a Lil Uzi Vert show and cry? I don't know, maybe they do, but I don't think in the same way.

Sam Parr

Well, what's that answer?

Dan Porter

I spend hours of brain power trying to figure out what that is and reverse engineer it. Why is this person or this brand so much more beloved than the other? Why is Ari so much more effective in his business than other people? I think for Travis Scott, it's something about the music, but it is also about the fact that he cares so much more about his fans. He is literally able to jump in the middle and be there with them. When you magnify that, the symbolism around that, the storytelling... I think even for me, it's about connection. Sure, I'm a guy who is not the same as the people who follow my account, but I am willing to get in there, answer DMs, talk to them, and connect with them without music. I ask them a hundred questions. They always say, "If you give respect, you can get respect." I don't walk into a room thinking that anyone will ever respect me or care about me based on who I am unless I am the first one to give respect. I know that every single person in that room, whether they're a 16-year-old hooper, a talent agent, or a YouTuber, has something incredibly deserving of respect. My job is to figure out what that is, honor that, and learn about that.

Shaan Puri

So, over time, Instagram has like, I don't know, 11,000,000 followers and probably around 1,000,000,000 views over the years. It's one thing to say, "I learned a lot from Branson," or "I've watched how other brands work," and I noticed these two or three things. It's like me watching jujitsu versus going in there and rolling with, you know, Hoist Gracie. You've gone there and you've rolled with the Gracies, which means you actually then went and did it. Can you talk about a couple of the things that you did intentionally that you think helped build more of a cult brand? For example, the hand symbol.

Sam Parr

Yeah, tell me, what's the hand signal?

Dan Porter

Every great gang in the world has a hand sign, you know? And so I was like, "We need a hand sign." I suggested "O-O-T," and they were like, "Simplify it, make the 'O'... throw up the 'O'."

Shaan Puri

Which is hilarious! Just imagine your CEO sitting in an office and he's just throwing up symbols. He's like, "I'm really working on something today, guys. It's gonna be big." Okay, what do you guys think? Do you think the "O" should be oval or more circular? It sounds silly, but I think you even told your people, "If you go to this event and you record every video, you gotta get them at the end to be like, 'Put up the O' and say, 'Shout out to Overtime.'" The same thing happened because I remember I saw it once, forgettable. I saw it twice, forgettable. But once you see it like 25 times and you got the cool high school athletes to do it, it was like, "Now it's a thing."

Dan Porter

I've had people do it to me at TSA, actually, when they see my shirt and stuff like that. I think it comes back to just, if you want there to be community and you care about community, and that was a premise, you have to give community a way to interact and to share what makes that special with them. Right? So, I'm a Philadelphia Eagles fan. I live in New York, which is clearly not Philadelphia. I'm walking down the street and I see somebody in an Eagles baseball hat. I say, "Go Birds!" and they're like, "Go Birds!" You've given us this common language to say, "I don't know who you are. We may have nothing in common, but we got one thing for sure in common." So, being maybe nerdy or cerebral on that thing, I'm like, what are those things that are gonna give our community? They're not just gonna be like, "Hey, my good fellow, I enjoy the content on Overtime," and he says, "Thus, I do too. Do you prefer TikTok or Snapchat or Instagram?" Instead, you give them this little shout-out to Overtime or this hand sign as a way to say, "Yeah, we're part of this community." You know, this kind of "if you know, you know" vibe. It's not unlike the secrets, right? It's like my father-in-law is always like, "I'm gonna tell you the secret handshake for our fraternity," but he never gives you the secret handshake. He just like tickles your finger or something like that. "Oh, sorry, I can't really tell you." I'm like, "You're 100 years old! Who cares about the secret handshake?" "Oh, we're sworn to secrecy," right? You know, and so you have these things: the secret handshake, knock on the door, what's the password? You know, "I can't tell you. I can't let you in." I think you create, you understand, in consuming culture and even pop culture, that there are these things that bind people together. Sometimes you've gotta strong-arm them into existence using the superpower of social media as a customer relations platform, like a CRM, as opposed to a publisher. Every single DM to Overtime and even to me starts out the same: "Yo!" I don't know why, but that is apparently a very popular thing for people to DM large accounts. "Yo!" And you go back and they're like, "Yo!" And the next thing is, "Oh shit, I didn't think Overtime responded." I mean, I was talking to this 21-year-old kid who works for me, and we were talking about going and doing something. He's like, "Listen, you all understand, like when I was like 15, I DM'd Overtime. I just was like, 'Yo!' and they DM'd me back." And I'm thinking, "Not they, you work here, we!" But he's saying "they." So, I think just figuring out how to connect with people, how to use those superpowers. What are the things that are around religion, around cults? Their songs, their hand signs, their things that you wear. You know, part of the reason that I created this shirt with the "O" that, you know, eventually all the talented people who work for me made way better and bigger, was that people used to steal our content all the time. So, we'd go and we'd cover somebody and they'd just rip our video. Then I'd make a watermark, and then they zoom the video out of the watermark to crop it. So I was like, "You know what? If we just made a shirt with our 'O' on it, then we have like a permanent watermark in our thing." And if they rip our video, then that's fine. Our "O" is actually everywhere. We've turned our biggest challenge into our biggest opportunity. All of a sudden, there were people with shirts with "O's" everywhere because people were ripping those videos. And you know, everyone would say, "Oh shit, how do I get one of those? Because it must mean you're famous." So, the biggest thing we did is for two years, we refused to sell it. "Well, you can't buy one of those shirts. You have to be on Overtime to have that." And then eventually, you create so much pent-up demand. I can't say that was in the deck or the business plan, but as you start to get into a dance and a romance with culture, you start to observe what's happening and you make some kind of audibles around that. You figure that out, but like to be part of culture is to be part of community, to be what's relevant to happening around you. And you know, listen, we start a basketball league. Every single startup sports league in America has failed pretty much. You know, and by the way, the NBA, the NFL, these are 50, 75 years old. You can think about all these startup football leagues that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars. It's like, why is OTE, Overtime, a startup basketball league in its fourth season and every other league has gone out of business? Well, it's because we're focused on the audience. We weren't focused on just playing the sport. It's like, you know what people want? They want more football, they want more basketball, they want more baseball. So it's another league. And it's like, well, they just want to know, like, why should I care about this? Why is this league about me? Who is playing? What are the hopes and the dreams of the people who are playing there? Instead, it's like, well, we got a field and we had a bunch of city-based teams and we said, "Here America, you'll like more football." But like, if you can't appeal to the aspects of culture and community and emotion to them, why should they care? And listen, I wasn't a gamer and I made a pretty popular game. I didn't know a lot about ticketing and I started the first live event ticketing company. I like sports. I'm not a sports wizard. I would come in last on a sports quiz show. But it's like, I am more like the consumer in that I don't wanna get sucked in so deep. So it's like, what is resonating? Oh shit, there's a simple story about that. I'll tell you one side thing that made Overtime big. When we started, I was like, "Here's Sean. He's like 62. He has an 8-foot wingspan. He plays for George Washington High School." He's a...

Dan Porter

Guard, he shoots 50% for three [point shots], and like, we'd put the video up there because that's what sports is about: stats and all those things. Every single time I removed one piece of metadata, it got bigger, down to the fact that it was like, "Sean is fucking dope." Boom! Everyone can love that because as soon as you tell me...

Shaan Puri

Sean

Dan Porter

I went to George Washington High School. I'm like, I don't know where that high school is. I don't care anymore. You know, as soon as you tell me he shoots X from 3, I'm like, is that good or is that bad? I don't care anymore. So, in this weird way, similar to the Draw Something game, the more you can simplify it, the more it's available to everyone. The more you tell me this wine is from this country with this, that, and it's DOC and it's this grape or whatever, I just think like, "Fuck it, maybe I'm just gonna drink tequila."

Sam Parr

Can you do this stuff with nerdy products or B2B products? Or do you think that it's much harder and only possible for pop culture or consumer products?

Dan Porter

I think everything has a story at its core. I always think of this dumb example from a business book that I read 30 years ago. You know, where they used to do door-to-door selling of vacuum cleaners? The guy would go around and tell the person who answers the door, "You know, the suction is so strong, and it's got these features." He sold all the features of the product and managed to sell 10 vacuum cleaners. Then the next guy comes around, knocks on the door, and he just sells you the dream of a clean house. Every time I see salespeople, they're focused on how many views we have and why our product is so great. I'm always thinking, "You just gotta sell them the dream of the clean house." In a way, there is some abstract simplification of the core of what makes everything great. The more you know about it, the worse you get, and the further away you get from telling that story. So, we have this basketball league. We have the number 2 pick in last week's NBA draft, the number 8 pick, and we have 4 lottery picks in 2 years. X number of people watched it here, and all these players are playing professionally. At the end of the day, when someone from the NBA asks, "Why do people care about your basketball league?" I say, "Because it's their shit. The NBA? That's your shit. That's old people's shit. This is their shit." I can never forget that. I can't get distracted by the fact that Alex went number 2 and Rob went number 8, and now they're on these max contracts and went to OTE. If you can keep that fundamental core aspect of why it matters in mind at all times and not get sucked down the vortex, I think that's the key.

Sam Parr

It's like nearly impossible, the bigger you get, not to do that stuff. Sean and I both love the UFC, and the reason we like R. Emanuele is in part because he owns the UFC. What Dana White has done there, we love. Because like when Sean Strickland fights, you're like, "Well, this guy, he's a crazy person who just says wildly offensive stuff." And it's really fun because he's insane. Or this guy's from Brazil, and he's really scary looking. He doesn't even speak English, and he wears a red painting on his face, and it's really intimidating looking. They do such a good job of telling a story, even though they're a massive company now and they have a lot of...

Dan Porter

Well, you know what? You know what's like... I remember I was a fan at the core of the UFC. The core of the UFC was every martial art against each other. Right? This guy's a stand-up guy, this guy's going to take him to the ground, this guy's a college wrestler, this guy's a judo guy. That is the easiest *fucking* story to tell in the world. You could even look at the NBA Finals or the Super Bowl or whatever. Ultimately, we're in these rivalries: this city versus that city, this boxer versus that boxer. But if you could abstract to tell me this is actually a story about passing versus running, or this is a story about something else, then you're just like, "Oh, I want to know how that's going to play out." That's so interesting. I was trying to tell people I went to the EuroLeague Championship with all these kind of young people, and Greece was playing Turkey in the semifinals. They're like, "Wow, these fans are really passionate." And I was like, "Yeah, let's talk about the history of two countries: Greece and Turkey." It's not clear to them, but I'm like, "Yeah, there's something so elemental at the core of the passion." I think the NBA Finals are amazing, but I'm not quite sure that Boston and Dallas have existential beef against each other that goes back hundreds of years. So you've got to find some other core elemental story in it. Like, these guys bought their team, and these guys drafted their team. Your master says, "Your karate is better than my kung fu." If you can stay to that in all the stories, that's clearly a huge aspect of what the UFC had in the beginning that was so powerful. I think that's part of Ari's genius. He does understand at its core what makes you like Mark Wahlberg when he signs him as an actor. What makes these stories kind of simple in a way? Because as soon as you find yourself having to oversell, you've lost the cause. As soon as you're talking about the third switch on the vacuum cleaner that has seven HEPA air filters, you've lost the whole thing.

Shaan Puri

That's a great story.

Sam Parr

You're fun as shit to talk to. You have stories that I could listen to all day.

Dan Porter

I'm just trying to figure out how all of this works.

Shaan Puri

Can I ask you for some life advice? So, you know, if you were my dad... You did a bunch of things right. You were a teacher in schools, then you did Teach for America. You worked for these high-powered organizations like Virgin and, you know, Endeavor with Ari Emanuel. You started your own company in the gaming space and another in the media space. If you meet a 24-year-old, you know, an ambitious person who just wants to have an interesting life and a great life but doesn't really know exactly what they want, what's your approach? What does Dan think they should be doing in their twenties? And what do you think they should be doing in their thirties? How do you... what is like the nutshell of your career advice?

Dan Porter

First of all, there are a lot of ways you can learn about the world. I learned about the world by being a public school teacher. I learned about the world by giving guitar lessons. There are so many different ways to gain knowledge and experience. I have this thing where I really don't like to hire people who went to business school. I'm kind of anti-MBA because, to me, if there's a funnel that starts when you're about five years old and you ask, "Why is the sky blue? Why do people walk on two legs?" that funnel goes through the education system and then it gets to business school. At that point, it narrows and closes, and they just say, "This is the way you do things." You've lost all that imaginative thinking. So, I kind of say to young people, your twenties are the time for you to get fired from a job, the time for you to stay out way too late and go to a club, the time for you to take a year off and backpack across England. It's the time for your friend to say, "I'm going to do this crazy thing," and for you to say, "Yes!" It's the time to just say yes and do all those things, to ingest and experience as much of the world as possible. All of those experiences shape you in some way. If I hadn't gone to a concert or sung at a soccer show, I don't think I would have ever understood those experiences. The world is so big and vast. If you haven't hitchhiked through another country, stayed in a hammock somewhere, or done anything like that, you just have no context or appreciation for it. You might think your job is to graduate, then get a job, then be the analyst, then the associate, then the managing director, and now you're on this pipeline. But you've failed to do all these other things. I have a master's degree in 19th-century Mexican history that I earned while I was working. My focus was the Caste War of the Yucatán. People would ask me, "Why are you doing that? How does that help you in your career?" And I would say, "It doesn't. It just seemed interesting." If you look at my LinkedIn, you'll see it never had any impact. Nobody ever asked me about it. I never got ahead by having a master's degree. I don't do business in 19th-century Mexico. You just need to do things when you're young because that's the time to explore and learn about the world. You experience things, you laugh, you cry, and you get out there. If you think it's all about climbing a ladder to get to some other thing, it really isn't. Every single one of those things you do that seems to have no rationale is actually about opening a door to something else. That's kind of my advice.

Sam Parr

You have to go to your Rate My Professor profile and check your top tag.

Shaan Puri

Oh, nice.

Sam Parr

Your top tag is "inspirational," okay? I would... to which I agree, you are inspirational. "Gives good feedback," just like with your coworkers. You said, "Mid." You're inspirational, you love... Do you love group projects? And "get ready to read." Those are your tags for Rate My Professor.

Dan Porter

That listen, I like... there is so much from business you can learn from *The Wire* and *Breaking Bad*. You know, all the conference rooms in my last company were named after characters in *The Wire*. I just think I learned stuff from books, I learned stuff from fiction movies, and I learned stuff from listening to a song. I remember the first time one of my kids' friends said, "I went to Irving Plaza and I saw this artist, Billie Eilish." I was like, "Who is Billie Eilish?" And he's like, "I would do anything for Billie Eilish." I was like, "Whoa!" I look, and she has like one Spotify stream, and I'm like, "Holy shit! What is going on here?" You know, the thing is, whatever... she was not marketed; she was discovered. The audience was the one saying, "She is Billie Eilish." No executive in a high tower somewhere said, "You're gonna take Billie Eilish now." So, if you unpack why things work in the world and you're willing to get out there and experience them, then I think that’s the opportunity. The one second piece of advice I would give is that a lot of times you think it's about adapting to your environment. I had a student of mine, and she went to work in consulting. She was the only one who didn't get a job offer. You know, you get your offer to come back, and she's like, "I don't know what's wrong with me. I messed up, and I gotta figure out how to change." They told her she should stop talking so much in meetings or whatever. I said, "You just shouldn't work in consulting. You are just... you. You are the best version of you; you're just in the wrong situation." She goes to a startup, and they're like, "You can't talk enough!" They love her, and she's so happy. I'm like, "You're the same exact person. You just gotta find the place that celebrates you for who you are." By the way, you are you, and you gotta do your best to be the best you can. But you gotta put yourself in the best place, and you gotta think about your inputs. Your inputs aren't necessarily like the things you think they are. They might be going to the Sri Lankan restaurant in Staten Island and having a life-changing roti, and just rethinking everything you ever knew about the world.

Sam Parr

There's some episodes where in the YouTube comments people are being like, "Well, I saw Sean put his chin on his hand and just stare into the screen," or "Sam just sat back, crossed his arms, and kind of had his mouth open and he was just staring at the guest." These guys have a new man crush. I would say this is one of those episodes where I definitely do.

Shaan Puri

I appreciate you coming on. Thank you for not only this episode but also for helping us when we were doing The Milk Road. It's not even one specific piece of advice you had, but after we talked to you, we came away with a very strong sense of, "Okay, cool, we're just going to do this our way." We don't need to conform in any way. If anything, let's double down into all of the quirks, weirdness, and fun versions of what this could become. Let's just play that out and see what happens. That was the one thing we took away from hanging out with you, and I hope other people do that too because I don't think you get that advice. I don't think you get that vibe from most people.

Dan Porter

I get that. Listen, I just play the long game. If I could be helpful to you and then you're successful and then you buy an NBA team, and then it's the playoffs and I want my feet on the hardwood... then I'm hoping it pays off.

Shaan Puri

I got you, Dan. Thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate you.

Dan Porter

I appreciate you guys for having me. See you soon.