Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You know, in the fourth quarter of like a basketball game and the game is on the line, a person who might have been shooting quite badly or maybe never been a great shooter, but it's like demanding the ball because they want to take that final shot. Like that level of confidence, you know, they might have been having terrible shooting game, but they're still like, give me the ball versus someone who's much more efficient, let's say. But they, they get the ball and they're like, they're the ones who wants to pass it away. Right?
Having that level of confidence in yourself is critical because everyone around you is saying no.
Your friends, your family, like investors, like all kinds of folks are just, you're going to get no most of the time. And, and if you don't have that confidence, you're not going to be able to get, you're not going to make it past all those no's. Right?
I like to say like a, a bad entrepreneur will hear the no's and give up.
Right? A good one will push through.
A great one will turn some of those nos into yeses. You know, when you think about, like Rotten Tomatoes, we weren't film people or like Airbnb, they're not hotel people and like Uber is not taxi people.
[00:01:07] Speaker B: Right?
[00:01:08] Speaker A: And they came in and they disrupted all these areas.
[00:01:13] Speaker C: I'm Luke Steinfeld.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: And I'm Wyatt Sarkissian.
[00:01:16] Speaker C: We made the 5050 podcast to support you on your filmmaking journey.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: 50% business, 50% creative.
[00:01:22] Speaker C: Every Tuesday, a new how guest is quite the get.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: It's Patrick Wy Lee, the co founder of Rotten Tomatoes and the current CEO of Venn. This episode lies at the intersection of tech and entertainment. We take learnings from a seasoned entrepreneur and apply them directly into our lives in the film industry.
Enjoy.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: How do you watch 450 short films?
[00:02:00] Speaker C: It's, it's my job.
[00:02:01] Speaker A: Watch all of them. Or does, I mean, does, or do you have teams that like.
[00:02:04] Speaker C: No, it's, it's me, man. It's, I started with a co founder and I was, I would basically watch all of them and then kind of give him a curated like list of the top 50 or something. And then since it's, I just have kind of, I love it. It's like my favorite piece of the actual festival is curating the selection.
But at this point, I mean, thank God it's not features, right? So like, I, I, it's insane. Once, once that happens, we'll obviously have to be adding a few interns. But for now, I love It. It's a. It's a very fun piece of the process for me.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: Yeah. Like, there's been a couple times where people have asked like, hey, can you help judge? Or whatever? And it. I think I did it once for some commercials.
[00:02:49] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:02:50] Speaker A: Oh, trailers. And even then, there's a lot of trailers. I was like, man, this takes forever.
Someone had asked about helping a judge for a film festival, and I'm like, I don't have the time.
[00:03:00] Speaker C: No, no.
[00:03:01] Speaker A: You know, I don't know what it is. 30 films. I'm like, there's no way. Like, I can't. I can't watch films normally. So. Yeah, I feel like that's actually one of the most almost like, thinkless jobs out there.
[00:03:13] Speaker C: You know, it's people. People don't really think about it, you know?
[00:03:17] Speaker B: Yeah, you don't. You don't think about when you go to a festival. I mean, even for. Think about those larger film festivals. Right. So many submissions for Sundance. Thousands each year.
[00:03:27] Speaker C: And they have a team. I mean, they have a team and they have.
[00:03:30] Speaker B: But it's all day. They're watching it.
[00:03:32] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: Even, like, it means similar for startups, too. Like when you're accelerators and they're always like, hey, we need to review all the submissions and stuff. And I think I did that once or twice, but I was just like, no, it's the same thing. It just takes so long.
[00:03:45] Speaker C: Are they sending? Because. I know, I know, like Y Combinator and stuff. They get those. Those video submissions. Right. And so you're kind of watching talent and seeing how they pitch and, like, if they're likable or.
[00:03:56] Speaker B: Which is interesting.
[00:03:57] Speaker C: Right.
[00:03:57] Speaker B: Because it's not. It's. It's has to do with personality, which sometimes, you know, on different forms of applications, it doesn't have as much to do with, you know, you seeing someone and being like, you know.
[00:04:08] Speaker A: Yeah, some of them. They do have the video submissions, and some of them, it's just an application.
[00:04:15] Speaker C: See, that, to me, I could not do.
[00:04:17] Speaker A: That's like the reading and everything.
[00:04:19] Speaker C: Oh, my God, I cannot do that. Yeah.
[00:04:22] Speaker A: Yeah. And just, like, weeding it down.
And then when it got to a smaller amount and interviews and then some level of due diligence to know. Make sure that they're actually what they are and things.
Yeah, it's similar.
And I would say judging for any of those things is. Is not a. Not a fun job. It's actually pretty hard. Yeah.
[00:04:43] Speaker C: It's funny just because of the amount of overlap there really is in film and entrepreneurship in general, whether it's in tech or really any other industry. But my sister is in finance, she's in the VC world. And like, when I talk to her about film and just how every movie really is like a company on its own, like it's on LLC and everything, she's like, oh, it's like this. Or it's like this in my sector, in my industry.
So it is really interesting to think about film in that way.
[00:05:14] Speaker B: One of, one of my favorite. We just interviewed a friend of mine yesterday whose name is Tessa, who works for a company called 21 Laps, which is Shawn Levy's company.
Um, and they made Stranger Things most recently. And they're, you know, very hot company right now. And she was talking about 5050 in terms of. She, you know, when you're a hot production company, you get submitted things from the agencies all day. Comedians to watch, you know, short films, scripts, books, every type of IP in the world. But she said to go to 5050 and have a curated selection of short films and comedians and get to not only see them see the films, you know, let's say seven films in a row, but then the second half of the night is getting to meet every single person who made the film and was a part of the film. And they get to meet reps and producers who are invited to the festival and things like that. I think that's where 5050 shines. Right. Because it's this thing that more and more production companies and agents and managers are starting to value as like, oh, this makes it easy for me to know who's hot and who's the next young filmmaker basically.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: Oh, very cool.
[00:06:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:24] Speaker C: And that, I mean it sounds like a similar community building situation that like overlaps both the creative and the business. Obviously you with. With your own with Venn is like separate industries. But I mean, do you want to talk a bit about that? Sorry.
[00:06:41] Speaker A: So the cat going by with Venn, I mean we are much more about like kind of like the intersection of tech and entertainment.
So we'll bring in tech people like founders and executives touching entertainment in some way.
And then on the entertainment side, people in entertainment touching fandom or pop culture.
And when we talk about fandom for us were thinking about things that you would cosplay at, at like San Diego Comic con, comic books, video games, anime, sci fi, fantasy, animation, horror.
[00:07:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: And then the, the thinking behind that is people like with fandom, that type of fandom, it's basically the biggest stuff out there. Right. Like every entertainment franchise is that Kind of fandom essentially. I think you look at like Disney and everything Disney, like Disney and Marvel and Star wars and Pixar and Fox and when you look at like everything Warner Brothers with like DC Comics and HBO and Looney Tunes, it's, it's all that type of fandom. And you know, it's like the biggest box office, high streaming numbers, most merchandise sales, most likely have sequels, most likely have spinoffs that we think is really interesting is also that kind of phantom. That Phantom IP is the most likely to move across mediums.
[00:08:12] Speaker B: Right.
[00:08:12] Speaker A: So it could be print, live action, animation, video game merchandise.
Start in any of those areas and when it gets big, it moves across and it's all of those areas. Yeah, when it's really, really big, it'll even have location based entertainment. Right, so like a Star wars at Disneyland or Universal Studios like Minions and Harry Potter and Mario World.
[00:08:38] Speaker B: Yeah, those are the real money makers.
Those are the things that help build fandom, as you said.
So when you are operating as ven and working to curate people who are associated with those fandoms, is that, is that the goal?
[00:09:02] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:09:02] Speaker A: So the idea is that people tend to only know folks kind of in their own industry or medium and their connections are much weaker outside of that. But then if you are getting people kind of working in fandom or at this intersection of like tech and entertainment and things that they have a high potential to work together. So it makes sense that the comic book person talks to the video game person talks to the merchandise person. You know, when we are bringing people in, we're not interested in tech people if they're like pure fintech or biotech. Right. We're interested in the ones touching entertainment. Similarly, like we're not interested in a filmmaker if all they make is like a indie art house films that will never be, never have merchandise, never be a comic book, never be a video game or anything like that. We're specifically looking for folks in comics and anime and video games and film people working in those spaces or tech people touching entertainment. And usually when they touch entertainment, a lot of times that's also kind of in those spaces. The twitches, the Crunchyrolls tomatoes of the world. Right.
And so our idea is then you're bringing together a group of people where they're definitely not going to know everyone. They'll probably only know mostly their own industry.
But then everyone has the potential to collaborate.
And then the idea is like, how do you connect them deeply with each other so that they can potentially start collaborating?
[00:10:29] Speaker C: It's Amazing.
[00:10:30] Speaker B: It's interesting. I have a question just regarding that sort of next facilitating the next ip, right? Because you can approach people who already are associated with big ip, but. But Super Mario Brothers isn't going to be as hot as it is right now in 20 years. So I'm curious, do you guys focus on trying to see and figuring out, okay, this is trending upwards, how can we get involved with it now?
Because to me that's where the sort of younger filmmakers and maybe people are starting in the indie space and then eventually start making something that catches fire and then they make sequels and things like that. So how do you sort of arrive on the ground with, with the fandom ip?
[00:11:19] Speaker A: Right now we're primarily looking for folks who have already kind of hit a certain level of achievement. So we tend to find, you know, tech founders and executives who the companies are already like, well known or, you know, or very large and same thing on, on the entertainment side. So we'll look for folks that are already involved with some hit TV show or film or franchise or video game.
Same kinds of things.
It's trickier.
Our thought is that these people who've already done it before, hopefully they're going to do it again.
And so then they may start something new, but they have the experience of working with something that's already been big and have already gotten it big.
[00:12:07] Speaker B: Right, Right.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: And we're betting on that.
We're open to the idea of, of new folks, but a lot of them, when they are younger, it's less proven. It's harder to tell if it's. If it will make it yet. And then at least what we've seen is they may be less focused on networking at that age. I mean I definitely was and may.
And generally they may not understand the value of that as much and may not want to join like a membership community in those situations. It might, you know, obviously when I was young was a long time ago, so maybe things are different, but I didn't kind of start realizing the value of a network until much later I.
[00:12:55] Speaker C: Think because networking definitely has a kind of a negative connotation for our age group for sure, where it's like, it feels very transactional. And honestly that was a massive foundational element of 5050 was how do we create a space where it's not networking, it's conversation. And like making sure that like this conversation leads to long lasting creative and collaborative relationships or even friendships.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: It's part of the message of the podcast too. Right? Like we want it to feel like we're just grabbing drinks as friends rather than, you know, doing an official networking thing.
[00:13:33] Speaker C: But what I will say is that I think on the creative side you learn that like you can have a hundred coffees and it's awesome and you're meeting people, but at the same time, and I could be totally wrong in saying this because I don't know, who knows? But like by putting, by just output in general, like putting myself, my work out there, a lot of times it's more of like that will lead to more intentional coffees or interactions or conversations. Like you'll, you'll meet kind of the, perhaps the right person that I can then create or collaborate with down the road rather than just like DMing a ton of people on LinkedIn and hoping that like, maybe we'll get along. But I think on the industry side, like it's 100% so necessary to like. We spoke to like Noah Wolfson who works at uta and he wants to talk to everyone and get coffee with everyone just so he has those touch points and is meeting as much as many people as possible in different positions.
[00:14:30] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think it has to do with what position you're in too.
[00:14:33] Speaker C: Right.
[00:14:34] Speaker B: Because if he's an agent, he, he wants to be able to, to a client provide every access point possible, you know, but if you're an artist, then as you said, it's more so about output, putting your work out there and then kind of allowing the networking to come to you based on the response with your work, things like that, or at least be able to define your creative voice before you eventually seek out specific people and curate your network. I'm curious, Patrick, about. You mentioned that networking was not of interest when you were younger because obviously you, you were a founder when you were younger.
How did you manage to found companies while not thinking about networking? Was it just like you and your friends doing things or what did your relationship with networking and founding look like back then?
[00:15:31] Speaker A: Yeah, so for me, I always liked building communities and kind of doing things with friends.
You know, when I was even in like high school, I ran a bulletin board system which was something that's very old, where you like, you have a modem and you're.
And I had a second phone line and people could dial in. So it's almost like a website for one person at a time. People could dial into this bulletin board system and stuff. And you know, we would, we would have and people all calling in pretty much local because it's long distance. If they weren't.
And we even had meetups, like, I remember meet up at my place and another time I meet up at like the Smithsonian.
And some of those people were strangers. Like, we've never met them in person.
[00:16:20] Speaker B: And they just found out about this bulletin.
[00:16:23] Speaker A: People would. Sometimes you advertise your full or you post about your bulletin board on other bulletin boards. And some people are like, oh, that looks interesting. And sometimes they come in and it just happens to be something that's interesting to them. Or. I helped to start a Chinese club at my high school.
And then when I got into college, I was really involved with a martial arts club.
And so when I started my first company, it was just friends from either the club or from the dorms.
A number of them were just down the hall from me and from freshman year of college.
And for me, it was more about starting doing something with friends and doing something that seemed interesting was why I started my companies. And the first couple, yeah, like, you end up meeting people just through the course of, like doing business and, you know, clients and things like that. But at that point in time, yes, I felt like networking.
Yeah, it had a bad connotation.
Think about like a used car salesman, you know, person around with a deck, a deck of cards. And you'll see them sometimes at events and they'll just go out and start handing cards to everyone. Not really having real conversations with them.
[00:17:36] Speaker B: Right.
[00:17:37] Speaker A: Feel very authentic or interesting. But I would say for me, my thoughts on it kind of changed later probably I would say after we sold Rotten Tomatoes, you know, I had a friend who, he was like, hey, if you just had a better network, you probably could sold for, you know, double or more.
And there was another, some other friends, they had a company that had a buyer or their VC was like trying to force them to sell because they wanted out. And so they got a buyer.
But if they sold to that buyer, they would have gotten nothing. Like the, the VCs would have gotten some money back and. And the founders would have gotten zero.
And so a couple of their friends made intros to more companies and then another company became interested and it's. It ended up selling for like 80 million. And in that situation, those, those same founders are retired.
And so like, that's the power of just that difference, you know. And even for my case, it was like, should we sell? Is it the right time to sell? You know, how to go about that process? Do we, should we bring in a bank? We didn't do that. You know, just all those things, how to negotiate, how to get more offers and A network, especially if you had a network of some other people who've done it before.
[00:19:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:10] Speaker A: Would have probably been able to help in that situation.
And I'm like, man, if I had my network now that I had back then, like now, if I back then I had this network that I have now, yes, I definitely think we could have had a much different outcome. And you know, obviously it's too late to do anything about that, but.
[00:19:31] Speaker B: I.
[00:19:31] Speaker A: Think the value of a network like kind of never goes away and similarly the value of your reputation also. And those are two very important ones that will follow you through your whole life. Right. And I'm on my seventh startup now, so it will follow you through every single startup or every single project or anything that you do.
And so it's always important to kind of build up a network and have a good reputation, maintain a good reputation.
[00:20:02] Speaker B: Absolutely. And I think our generation, specifically with the rise of social media and information everywhere, some people probably don't think they even need a network because why would you need someone to help advise you when you can just look it up or you can just search ChatGPT and figure out essentially the information you would need. But there is something to other people putting trust in you and vice versa and actually making that personal connection, which I think that's still really important. Something that we always try to do and have that touch point.
[00:20:36] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean another one related was for Rotten Tomatoes was when we were deciding to sell, we had tried reaching out to someone at Google, like a director level person that we didn't know well. But we just like tried emailing and they never wrote back.
And then when we actually were going through the whole process of selling, you know, we've been going for weeks with the company that was going to buy us. The lawyers were involved. You know, we had a couple hundred K in just like legal fees that had built up.
And then someone much higher level at Google actually had reached out and want to get on call or whatever. And they basically on the call they were like, we heard you're selling, we'd like to talk. And the problem is we had already signed a no shop agreement.
We couldn't talk to them like legally. And so we're, then we're internally, we're like, do we, you know, talk illegally?
Do we wait out or not talk or wait out the no shop and then talk? Right. And we were like, no, we don't want to do anything illegal.
But also if we wait out the no shop, which would have been another, I forgot like half A year or so we'd have to eat all these legal fees to then find out if Google was serious or not. Right. And, and if they weren't serious, we would eat like 300k, which at that time was still a lot of money for us.
Consider we had only raised a million ever. Right, Right.
[00:22:11] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:22:12] Speaker A: And so we thought it was like too risky and so we just decided to just go forward with the deal. But that's an example where it's like later on we, you know, we've heard from a number of high up Google people who were like, yeah, we love Rotten Tomatoes. Right. And so if we had just, for example, sold to Google, they were pre ipo, you know, even if it was the same price, like, you know, who knows how much of a difference that would have made? I mean, probably a pretty massive one. Right.
And so again, that's an example of like, we just didn't even know who to reach.
[00:22:47] Speaker C: Right.
[00:22:48] Speaker A: At Google that a better network would have helped there.
[00:22:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:22:54] Speaker A: And definitely, I mean, even at that time, looking back, I'm like, oh, there was definitely people in my network that knew people at Google. We just even just, we didn't even think about it because we didn't. Our brain wasn't even like in that network mode. You know, for me, looking back, like, yeah, I feel like I definitely handled a lot of stuff around the sale extremely badly, mainly because I just didn't really have a good network and didn't know how to use the network I had.
[00:23:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:24] Speaker C: Can we take it back to kind of the early days of Rotten Tomatoes and just kind of where you were at as an entrepreneur at the time and as a founder and if you felt prepared or educated or if you had the knowledge to kind of begin something like this, or if you really were just kind of feeling like you're jumping out of a plane.
[00:23:44] Speaker A: So Route to me is actually a third company. So my first company was selling computer systems and components. I convinced three other friends to drop out of school. We were all at Berkeley.
And then we just, we had an apartment. Three of us, three out of four of us got an apartment together and we got a reseller's license and we would just get on, you know, get orders, go buy the parts and then, and then resell them at like a slight markup. Wasn't a great business.
And then the Internet was getting kind of big around that time, you know, Yahoo came out, Netscape, all that kind of stuff. They were going public and we were like, oh, maybe the Internet seems like something that makes more sense.
So I started a different company and we were doing a design firm. And so we were doing, in the beginning, web Design, Print Design, 3D Design for any kind of client. And we were doing like just random mom and pop shops, dentist websites, and things like that. We, we did manage to get into like doing website for like a tech company, like a motherboard manufacturer and stuff like that, which was better.
And then over time, we realized, like, hey, we need to just focus on the web. So we got rid of print design, we got rid of 3D design, which both of those didn't make sense for different reasons.
Print, you had to kind of do color proofs, and you're working with pretty large files to make them print quality.
[00:25:18] Speaker B: And then.
[00:25:18] Speaker A: Yeah, and then so you'd always have to like, verify that the colors were right, like two weeks in advance of delivery.
And then 3D design, especially back then, the computers were so slow. You make a change, you have to render the whole night with every computer.
And so it just didn't make sense versus web design at that point, because bandwidth was so low, you had to work with small files.
Like even a 20, 30k kilobyte page was heavy. 100 was crazy heavy. Right.
And so you, because you're working with really small file sizes, those old computers could. Or those. Yeah, could still do it. Right.
[00:26:00] Speaker B: And.
[00:26:01] Speaker A: And then you, a client could request a change and you could have to change up in like five minutes. That's impossible with like 3D design or print design. Right.
And so it just made sense. That's where everything was going. We're doing that. We ended up getting in with Disney Channel and then started doing a lot more work for the entertainment industry.
We eventually are doing like Artisan, MTV, VH1, Warner Brothers, like a bunch of companies.
[00:26:30] Speaker B: So that was your first sort of segue into the entertainment industry through.
[00:26:36] Speaker A: And we became like, I want to say, like, basically like the lead developer for Disney Channel Online. For a while.
We made like 50 online flash and Shockwave games. We did a content management system for them.
[00:26:47] Speaker C: Fun.
[00:26:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:48] Speaker A: Later on for abc, we made the online Flash game for who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
And so during that time, our creative director, San Duong, came up with the idea for Rotten Tomatoes. And he was doing it on the side for fun. We were hosting it, and when it launched, we started seeing it was getting more and more traffic and more and more recognition.
And then basically after about a year of that, we were like, you know, maybe this should be the business.
So we talked to some of the, our clients that we were friendly with and we're like this is, this is kind of this other thing that we're doing. What do you think? And one of our clients was like, or relationships that we had was a VC from Taiwan. And they were like, yeah, you know, we'll put money into this.
And so they put in money. And basically most of the money we raised was from our clients.
Some of them had sold their companies and things like that. And so they all chipped in some money. We raised a million and then we essentially decided to focus on Rotten Tomatoes and we handed our design firm off to another group to take over and kind of transitioned out of that.
And then when we started running Rotten Tomatoes as a real business, this was like January 2000, you know, three months later this Internet supple will burst. And so, you know, the whole world changed at that point. Like funding basically went to zero during that time. And most websites, Internet companies were almost completely reliant on ad revenue.
Ad revenue dropped to like, you know, 99 point plus percent less revenue from the ads. Right. So it'll be like $5, $10, $20 CPM, you know, cost per thousand impressions to like pennies.
And, and so tons of companies couldn't generate revenue anymore because all the ad revenue went away and they couldn't raise more money. And so then tons and tons of companies went out of business.
Right. The ones that survived were making money from users mostly. Right. So either they were extremely lean like we were. We had a cut from 20.
I think it's 27 people down to seven over the course of like a year. Even at seven, myself and our marketing person Paul went to zero and the other five took a 30% pay cut. So we're kind of like closer to probably like three and a half in terms of salary, something like that. Right.
And either you're super lean or you're, you're making money from users. So like Netflix or like things like that, like those ones also could work. But most of the ones that are like large ad supported company, like they were completely reliant on ads. A lot of them went out business faster in that time. Yeah.
[00:29:42] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:29:43] Speaker C: You went to zero as a, you took a full pay cut.
[00:29:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:47] Speaker C: Which means you did you have the just a belief in the company as a whole. Were you afraid of oh my gosh, this.com burst like what, what's going to happen now? Is this, am I in the wrong industry or like where was your head.
[00:30:00] Speaker A: At during that With Rotten Tomatoes we could see basically Every month, Definitely every quarter.
Revenue was consistently climbing. Not like huge, but like climbing users in traffic or climbing.
The brand was getting more and more recognition and so it made it much more doable.
Even though everything else was around you was going bad. But we could see our numbers and they were, they were solid. They were just consistently growing. And again, we never ever Rotten Tomatoes has never had a hockey stick. We just had very consistent growth. You know, it may be like this, but like slightly going up forever. Right.
But that made it mentally doable.
And back then, you know, still young, like late 20s, still used to living like a college student.
And I just moved into the office because our office, it was a class A, you know, building, but we couldn't get out. The lease let go of 27 people to seven.
[00:31:09] Speaker B: Like, let's just all move into the office.
[00:31:11] Speaker A: There's a lot more space in the office for everyone. So I just took three, three cubes like that were in a, you know, in basically its own larger cube. And I just took all three cubes over and made that into like my place. And I just put my clothes into the drawers and had a little fold out futon thing that was folded up, you know, during the day and essentially at night I could just fold it out and just sleep in my little office thing. And then downstairs there was a gym with a shower. So, you know, and rent is your biggest thing. So just moving the office kind of got rid of that part.
[00:31:44] Speaker C: Where did you have like a favorite coffee shop or restaurant around there that you just kind of lived out of?
[00:31:50] Speaker A: There was a, like a sandwich shop kind of like 10 minute walk away.
And then, and then back then, like the, the food of choice was like, I think it's like shin ramen or whatever, you know, like one of those.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: I was going to guess ramen. There we go.
[00:32:08] Speaker A: I see kind of instant noodle bowl ones and then a whole bunch of those and then a whole bunch of canned tuna fish then.
[00:32:18] Speaker B: Yeah, your protein.
[00:32:20] Speaker A: Yeah, you just put the canned tuna fish in and.
And then the spiciness kind of hit all the flavor, you know, or the taste or whatever. And then you just have. And we had a hot water, you know, whatever you call it.
Water cooler. Right. Just put the hot water in and it like was. Was good enough. Yeah.
[00:32:41] Speaker C: When.
[00:32:42] Speaker A: When you were too lazy to go out for actual meal.
Yeah. So cost wise. Yeah. Once you get rid of rent, it's actually not that bad, you know, and, and the zero salary was not that long. I want to say.
Can't remember now. But maybe half a year to a year. It wasn't like forever, but it was just enough to like kind of get us, get things a little bit more stable. Because at the time when we decided we had to cut after the market crash, we were burning like 100,000amonth at that time.
And so we're like, we have to do whatever we can to get. Because when you only raise a million, that's like 10 months and 10 months run really low.
[00:33:22] Speaker C: Was that 100k just going straight to salary?
[00:33:25] Speaker A: Was that salary, you know, rent, other things.
And so yeah, when we cut down to seven and then, you know, and pay cuts on top of that, we gave people more equity in exchange.
And then, you know, we even later we subleased some of the space. Like we did every single thing we could do, right.
Get our cost down because revenue is a lot harder to control. Like we were getting revenue up, but it's slow, like it's dependent on your traffic at that time.
And so we're slowly getting revenue up. But the thing you can cut and control is your cost.
And so, and that's true for any startup these days, I would even say in a lot of ways it's, it's kind of true, I would think for film as well, like at least for me, and I don't make films myself. But when I look at it from a startup lens, I feel like the most interesting from an investment standpoint.
Not because, oh, films are cool or I'm passionate about something, but like if you actually want to make money. To me it feels like it would be the ultra low budget films that are extremely commercial. So super low cost, super high commercial viability, which tend to be, you know, genre stuff like things like that. I feel like those are the most, and, and the ones that have a potential to be franchise.
[00:34:53] Speaker B: Right.
[00:34:53] Speaker A: So I think like something like a Saw that's like made for a million, did 100 million box office.
I lost track of how many there's.
[00:35:02] Speaker C: Going to say, what are they, 10, seven or a dozen of them or whatever.
[00:35:06] Speaker A: And that franchise has done at least a billion, I think, combined box office. Right?
[00:35:10] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:35:11] Speaker A: And something like that is super interesting. And when you think about it from a cost perspective, that movie was two people trapped in a room together for like 80% of the movie. Right. So they wrote it in a way that was low cost.
And so I think there's similarities there to startups, Right?
[00:35:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:35:31] Speaker A: And how do you do a startup, you know, super cheap as well? Because that is the one thing that you really can control.
[00:35:38] Speaker B: Yeah. So when you have to let all those people go and you're now sleeping in three cubicles put together, are you in touch with your investors and the people who invested in the company? What do those conversations look like?
[00:35:53] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, we gave updates. I wouldn't say I was the best about giving updates.
I think maybe once or twice a year.
But at that point in time, everything was going bad. And I would say for most of our investors, we were a small investment relative to other things they may have invested in, and we were alive. Like, at least we were. We were scrappy enough to kind of keep going.
[00:36:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:36:23] Speaker A: A lot of the other investments that people made during that time, you know, I want to say probably like 90 plus percent went to zero and probably pretty quickly because big companies are not able to make the cuts that fast.
[00:36:39] Speaker B: They, they, they have a lot. Very heavy weight compared to you guys, who are able to be lean and float.
[00:36:44] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And. And, you know, they're not gonna be cutting to, to zero and, and cutting from 27 to 7, you know, like that level at whatever percentage that is. Right? Yeah, they're not that high of a percent. They'll cut like 10% or, you know, and cut little things here and there, and it's. That's not going to stop, like, them from dying.
And so our investors knew. I mean, when we started getting offers, I mean, there were investors who were like, you know, even we're getting, like, 10 cents on the dollar. They're like, oh, take it, take it. You know, some of them were, because everything else they have went to zero. And they're like, they can get something back. But.
But we were like, no, no, we don't want to sell unless we can at least get you your money back. And we made them some money, but not like a ton of money.
And, you know, I think looking back, we.
We definitely had the bar too low as far as. Like, we shouldn't have just been, oh, we just want to get you your money back. Like, we probably should have aimed a little bit higher. Higher than that.
[00:37:44] Speaker C: Taking a kind of a step outward for a second. Were your parents supportive of all the hustling and the entrepreneurial ventures? Just. I mean, it seems like you've been doing this forever. Like, clearly you. You have been. So did you have that support growing up as a backbone to allow you to, to take these shots?
[00:38:07] Speaker A: Yeah, I would say that, like, for my dad, he.
He was like a professor.
I think he was originally like an assistant professor at UCLA and then a Full professor at University of Maryland, which is why I grew up in Maryland and Taurus.
I think when I was like in high school and stuff, like him and a couple other professors actually left to work on like a hand handwritten pattern recognition company. So ocr, like optical character recognition. So this is like super early AI where you take like handwritten stuff and figure out and convert it to text.
And I think they had raised a little bit of money and I believe they sold as well. It wasn't like a ton, but at least was kind of entrepreneurial. And then I did have an uncle who was like a VC that you know, was investing much in store. I didn't know anything about that world at all, like zero. But at least I knew that there was someone in our family.
And he was actually like the successful one. And he was like the business one versus everyone else was like for the most part like the engineers and the doctors.
So I kind of did have a couple of points of reference. And then when I left school early, basically two years in out of, you know, what should be four.
I know my mom was like, please just finish first. And I'm like, I gotta do this.
And this was much more for my.
So for my second company because the timing of the two was pretty close.
She ended up. My co founder's uncle lent us like 20, I think she lent us like 10 so that we could kind of rent an office and stuff like that.
And yeah, so even though she wanted me to go back to school, she still like loaned me the money to be able to do the business. And you know, and the design firm actually started generating revenue really quickly. And so we were able to pay back the loan with interest. Like I think, yeah, I want to say within like a year and a half, like pretty fast.
So they were. My dad was like, cool. And my mom was like, please go back.
She still loaned us the money. And then even for me, I took another 10 years to finish the last two years worth. So I took 12 years to get my undergrad. And even after we sold rotten tomatoes, I went back to school for like a semester to finish the last couple of classes that I couldn't. I couldn't do through summer classes and other things.
And at that point it wasn't.
It was more just to finish something I started and you know, kind of for my mom and all that kind of stuff as well.
Plus I wanted to try checking out Asia. And I'm like, man, if I leave the Bay Area, I probably will never graduate because I don't know if I'm going to come back. So I'm like, I might as well just finish it.
But yeah, they were, my parents were supportive and I think the thing that they gave me, which was I think very special was they gave me a lot of the tools in terms of education and, and everything else.
The tools to be able to kind of think on my own and, and all that kind of stuff. But also like pressure wise, they weren't, you know, like a, like tiger parents or whatever. And they, they didn't force me into like, you know, as I'm growing up, oh, you're going to be a doctor or you're going to be a engineer, you're going to be a lawyer or whatever kinds of things that people do.
I never had that kind of pressure.
And so I feel like they gave me the tools and they gave me the freedom to be able to go out there and make my own choices. And I feel like there are a lot of folks out there that don't have one or both of those things. Right. Like they might not have the tools, they might not have been able to get enough education where to make it, where it's difficult for them to kind of go and do these things or the parents are too, you know, strict about stuff or even opportunity wise, like maybe, you know, if, if the family is very poor and they have to go and get a job that pays right away so that they can make money and maybe to support their family or something like that, then they might not have the choice in that situation as well. Right.
And so my parents were, I didn't have to support them, but they could support themselves right outside alone. They weren't supporting me, but, but they were independent and so I could just focus on me and focus on, on trying to do something. And I think that is super important, I would imagine. Again, I think for filmmakers it's probably kind of similar to.
[00:43:01] Speaker B: Oh, definitely. Yeah. We talk with people, you know, who you try and get a job close to entertainment just because it's, you know, maybe it'll get you in, but really you just want to be a filmmaker and you have all these great ideas and things like that. So it's, it's definitely a balance financially and, and you know, figuring out for yourself, for each person, when is the time to really branch out on your own?
[00:43:33] Speaker C: Are you sick and tired of spending months on short films that get seen by just your uncle?
Are you sad and bored of editing all the time and all that footage for just 10 views? Well, now's the Time to change that. Submissions for the 5050 Comedy Fest are open now. Get your work seen by professionals who can actually advance your filmmaking career. Not your uncle, unless your uncle happens to be at a top tier talent agency like caa, UTA or wme.
Check out the episode description for the submission link or head to filmfreeway.com and search for 5050 comedy. 5050 comedy is on May 3rd. Submitting a 5050 comedy may lead to money, fame, fast cars, boats, planes, helicopters, cybertrucks and lifelong friendships. 5050 Comedy is on May 3rd. We look forward to seeing you there at 5050 Comedy May 3rd. Your uncle is not invited unless he works at a top tier talent agency like CAA UTA. WME May 3rd. 5050 comedy May 3rd. 5050 Comedy May 3rd. We look forward to watching your comed May 3rd.
[00:44:33] Speaker B: I'm curious if you have seen any through lines between the people who are ready to go out and branch on their own or the people who maybe should stay at their J job for another year, whether it's gain a little more money or more experience or what have you.
[00:44:53] Speaker A: Yeah, I guess the two I would say is irrational confidence is number one and I'll explain that in a second. That's kind of the thing on whether or not they will actually make the jump.
And then focus is number two and that's kind of like the factor of whether or not they'll actually be successful.
And so rational confidence.
You know, I didn't come up with the term. I think it was Bill Simmons, the sports writer that I saw it where, you know, in the fourth quarter of like a basketball game and the game is on the line, a person who might have been shooting quite badly or maybe never been a great shooter, but it's like demanding the ball because they want to take that final shot. Like that level of confidence. You know, they might have been having a terrible shooting game, but they're still like give me the ball versus someone who's much more efficient, let's say. But they, they get the ball and they're like, they're the ones who wants to pass it away. Right.
Having that level of confidence in yourself is critical because everyone around you is saying no.
Your friends, your family, like investors, like all kinds of folks are just, you're going to get no most of the time. And, and if you don't have that confidence, you're not going to be able to get, you're not going to make it past all those no's. Right.
I like to say like a bad entrepreneur will hear the No's and give up, right? A good one will push through, a great one will turn some of those no's into yeses.
And that confidence, it's like, you know, when you think about like Rotten Tomatoes, we weren't film people or like Airbnb, they're not hotel people and like Uber is not taxi people, right?
And they came in and they disrupted all these areas.
When I meet, you know, usually students or students who recently graduated or about to graduate, one very easy red flag I see a lot of times is you'll have some students who come and they'll be like, yeah, I want to do a startup, but I'm thinking about getting a job first so I can kind of get experience and get some money and then I'll go do a startup. And what they're saying to me is they're too conservative and scared to actually go into a startup because the ones who have that confidence, they don't even need to graduate. Like you look at like a Zuckerberg and all these folks who leave school early, like the Google people left their PhD thing, like so many of them just leave, like they don't even have a degree. I think Steve Jobs also didn't have a degree. I think when he, when he started Apple.
I could be wrong, but like a lot of them were like that and, and they just jump in. Like they, they're so excited by their idea or about wanting to doing something on their own that they just go in and they don't worry about like, oh, I don't have a degree yet. Oh, I don't have any work experience or I don't have any money that I saved up. And also the problem is when you go and get a real job, like you're going to start getting raises, you're going to start getting promotions as you get.
[00:48:06] Speaker B: It's going to be harder and harder to leave.
[00:48:08] Speaker A: Yes, it's going to be harder to leave. The more you work in a job, the more a box forms around you. You know what I mean? Like, you start thinking in the box. You know, how do you disrupt something? It's like, don't even have the box in the first place. That's how you think outside the box, right?
And life happens too. You might get married, you might have kids, you might have car payments, you might have house payments. Every one of those things makes it harder and harder and harder to leave a real job. Like, and how do you go from a, you know, potentially, like, I don't know, six figure job, potentially back to zero. Or a lot of times zero. And putting your own money in, right? Like, that's really, really hard. But the best time, I think, to start is, you know, right out of school when you're still used to living like a college student, that you can live off of instant noodles and those kinds of things, that's the best time.
You can take the most risk. You. You have nothing to lose. You're used to living extremely cheaply. Like, once you have a. A real job with a real paycheck and a real apartment and real things, it gets harder and harder and harder. So a lot of times when people are very young, like right out of school, I'm like nine out of ten, I'm like, go for it, go for it. I mean, and the 1 out of 10, if they are really gonna do it, I say, go for it. If they say something like, I think about getting a job first, I'm like, yeah, maybe go get that job. Because in my brain they're not. They're already totally.
But if they're like 30 plus in a real job and especially married with kids, and they're like, hey, I think I want to go do a startup. I'm usually like 1 out of 10.
I'm usually at that point, I'm like, I don't know, man. Like, that's really risky because they've already kind of shown that they're. They've already gone the conservative path and also now they're, They're. Their cost is huge to, to switch into doing a startup, and they've kind of been. Already have like a decade plus of like corporate built into them, you know, and so they already kind of think corporate. So, yeah, situations. The only time I'm like, yeah, I think it actually is interesting is if they're doing a startup based around where they're like decade of expertise is in and it's leveraging their connections. They see some kind of massive thing that's missing in that space that they're in. But a lot of times they want to do a startup and it has nothing to do with anything that they've done before. And I'm just like, that seems like the worst thing to be doing. So anyways, that's.
So that's number one. And then number two, focus. I would say I do a talk on focus you can find on YouTube and everything, but basically in everywhere I've seen every profession, every type of company, the ones that focus are the ones that make it.
And the ones that are unfocused, they never make it. So when you look at Google was just simple search. Amazon only sold books, Facebook only was in. Started in Harvard. Right. Rotten Tomatoes only doing movie reviews.
Most social media, I think every social media platform started off looking like a single feature.
[00:51:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:51:15] Speaker A: Every single fast food franchise sells one type of food. Right.
Doing too many things is a way to be not successful. Right? Yeah. Even when you look at people who are like multi hyphenates, like, I don't know, Will Smith, he was a rapper first.
He was a good rapper and then he got into comedy and then he got into everything else.
[00:51:40] Speaker B: Yeah. It has to do tangentially with building that following. Right. Once you're able to establish yourself as really good at one thing and you gain a fan base, then they'll kind of follow you to other things, right?
[00:51:51] Speaker A: Yeah. And I imagine even with like most creators and stuff, at least what I've seen, they seem like they usually have one thing that they really focus. Like, oh, this person does comedy or.
[00:52:03] Speaker B: I mean, or dances.
[00:52:05] Speaker A: Yeah. Like the most specific thing, like how to repair your house or, you know, whatever they get. But I feel like if you just make videos about every random thing, I. I feel like you'll never get any kind of traction. Right. I would imagine if you just covered every random topic under the sky versus like, oh, this is specifically like, I don't know, politics, or this is tech or this is business, or this is film, or this is, you know, whatever, like murder, whatever stuff they'd like to cover.
[00:52:35] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:52:36] Speaker A: I feel like those ones make sense. But if you're like, hey, we're just a podcast and we just talk about any random thing, I feel like that would be hard too. So. Yeah, so, yeah, so those, those would be my two things is rational confidence on whether or not you make the jump. Focus on whether or not you have a chance to succeed.
[00:52:52] Speaker B: I love that.
[00:52:54] Speaker C: When's. When's the book coming out, man?
[00:52:59] Speaker A: I thought about doing a book around focus, but I'm too busy. I'm too focused.
[00:53:05] Speaker B: But you didn't have the focus.
[00:53:07] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:53:10] Speaker A: I'd have to just focus on it, but I'm always doing startups as.
[00:53:13] Speaker C: As a, like being an entrepreneur throughout your entire life, your career thus far, like, what are some skills or areas that you feel you've really seen massive growth and development with, like, in yourself? Internally.
[00:53:30] Speaker A: I think the main thing is around is around networking.
Before, my strength was my irrational confidence.
The ability for me to decide to leave school and convince multiple friends to leave school and later on to convince people to give me Money or to hire us.
Yeah, to invest in us.
People to leave their jobs, to join us, you know, people to use our products.
And you know, when I, especially when I was young, I was, if I believe very passionately in something, I could be very, very convincing. You know, I like to say I, I still can do that now, but it's not all the time. You know, it's like in spurts. Like, I like the analogy would be like, I'm like Logan, if you, if you saw that movie with Wolverine.
[00:54:25] Speaker C: Yeah, he gets tired.
[00:54:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I can pull the balls out every so often. But yeah, and, but then the, the thing I replaced it with is, is I have a much better network now than I did back then. And I developed a lot of ways to network that feel authentic to me.
So stuff like, you know, meeting friends of friends and going to events that I know people who already be there so that they can kind of help intro and then the people that seem interesting, follow up with them and be really good about following up. Because a lot of times you go to an event and you just, you meet a bunch of people and most people don't follow up with anyone. Like in the old days, you could go out, you could give 10 business cards. Maybe one or two people would actually write back to you. Like If I get 10 business cards, I'll probably write back to about eight or nine of them. And the ones I'm not writing to are the ones who are just handing it out. But if I had real conversations with you, I'll, I'll go back home, I'll take notes on like how I met you, where I met you, when I met you, and add you on LinkedIn, you know, do, and then send you a follow up and then if it was a really interesting conversation and you're nearby, you know, get a coffee or, or do a zoom or something like that. And I do that now and that's like, stuff like that I think is super important and just building a lot of strategies to network in a way that doesn't feel like a used car salesman. That feels authentic to me.
And given that I'm like actually quite introverted and so I've been able to build up, I think a pretty strong network and community around myself. I think that is like the biggest growth I've had over my career.
[00:56:25] Speaker B: What is exciting to you about the next generation?
And have you seen anything recently that you feel particularly excited about, whether it be a movie, a startup, Met someone recently? What's exciting to you.
[00:56:46] Speaker A: These days?
I mainly, I Mean, I'm very focused on my own startup and family are my top things, I would say. Actually, outside of that, I'm a little bit scared to be more than excited about lots of things happening in the world.
And, you know, I have a daughter who's four years old now, and I just. I do worry about stuff like, you know, without getting into politics or anything like that, but I do worry about things like a possible civil war, possible World War 3, or climate change or revolution or.
Or super intelligence. And actually, super intelligence is the one that's pretty frightening. I mean, it's exciting and frightening at the same time.
I study COGSCI cognitive science in college, so we. We were talking about AI, and this is like in the 90s and early 2000s, right? Like, long time ago. And even then it had been around for decades. Right. Just.
But not at this rate. And. Yeah, and I think for me these days, the thing that's kind of exciting but terrifying is AI.
I think there is, I believe that we can achieve super intelligence.
I'm not like, deeply in that space at all, but I think it's possible or I've watched enough sci fi that I can see a world where that is true.
And I feel like if AI became super intelligent and started becoming exponentially more intelligent than we are, that, you know, there's a very good chance it will decide that, you know, we're not that important. And.
And I just worry about a world where, you know, ends up like the Matrix or Terminator.
I would say the good case scenario is like a wall E where we have so much stuff that so much it solves all our needs and we just become fat and floating on little chairs and whatever.
[00:58:56] Speaker C: I would. I would love that person. That'd be so fun. Oh, my gosh.
[00:59:00] Speaker A: I think we're already kind of heading that direction. When you think about, like, social media and the reels, like, I can. I had to delete. Oh, my God, Instagram, Facebook from my phone because both of them, they all started having reels, right? Yeah, and even YouTube. I had to go in and look up how to turn off shorts, which is basically had to delete all history. Then shorts won't show up for you because all three of them were so dangerous that sometimes you just for, you know, you're like in bed, you're like, oh, I'm gonna go sleep early. And then you just start looking reels and one to. I think I've gone as high as three or four hours have gone by, and I'm like, oh, my God, what just happened? And you just don't even know because you're just.
[00:59:41] Speaker C: It's scary.
[00:59:42] Speaker B: It's complete slop too, like you do. You learned so much that you learn nothing too.
[00:59:47] Speaker A: It's crazy, but I think for me, the fear is.
When I grew up, the world was pretty stable. Like, we had the fear of the Cold War and that was about it. There was like the one enemy, the Russia and all that stuff. And now it just seems like there's so many. You know, back then, climate change wasn't an issue, and there's a lot of other things that seem more stable. And now I feel like there's so many things that potentially could go wrong that are scary to me, mainly for my daughter. And I'm just like, man, I hope she can kind of grow up in the stability that I had growing up, you know, and, and, you know, again, I'm old, so maybe I've become much more conservative about things. But like, so, like, even the Internet, you know, I made my career around that, but pre Internet, you had to, like, meet people in person and talk to people face to face and.
[01:00:41] Speaker C: Right.
[01:00:42] Speaker A: And, and then now with the Internet, there's so many people who are just anonymous and, and you go on forums and, and you look at YouTube videos and things like that, and so many messages are just like the worst messages in the world. Like, how. How are people writing this to each other? Because they're not in front of each other. And, and social media, I think the negative parts of it are, Are pretty scary too.
And.
Yeah, and, and I think with AI, like, it might be the genie that's. I don't know if we can put that genie back in the bottle, you know what I mean? And, and I just.
There is the good parts, like, potentially could solve cancer and all kinds of things like that, which would be awesome.
But I just worry about, you know, will my daughter be able to grow up in a, you know, world that's not.
That's safe, you know, and stuff, because I'm not going to be around for her whole life. Right.
[01:01:37] Speaker B: So, yeah, well, that, that is, that's very real.
And I. Maybe the answer could be you're excited about your daughter and you, you feel she inspired, maybe she inspires you. Right? Like, just sitting there and all that.
[01:01:52] Speaker A: And I, and again, like I said, like, what AI can do is already amazing and exciting in its own way, but it's exciting and scary at the same time that it can do so much stuff. I mean, it feels like magic when you see it and there's so many, like every startup is doing something around AI these days. Like that's where all the young folks, all the stuff is in AI. But at the same time, when I see it, it's also scary from like, wow, look at what it can do with generative AI. But also how many people are going to be out of a job or not be able to get a job because of it or not be able to learn because of it. Right? Like, even, even now I hear from like kids in high school and college, like they're not writing their own papers and things like that. Right? So once you, once we had mobile phones, how many phone numbers do you remember when you're growing up? You remember all these phone numbers now it's like, I know my phone number and my wife's phone number. I can't tell you a single other person's phone number.
Right. And it's just like you don't use those muscles anymore. And the least bad potential I think is going to be wall E. And we're moving towards wall E already, right? So again, I don't want to be so negative, but all the stuff that's exciting that I see that's happening now also at the same time see like the scary bad parts of it.
And yeah. So I don't know. And I think if I was younger, maybe I would only see the good parts and not see the bad.
[01:03:24] Speaker C: But at this point, yeah, I mean, yeah, being. And I, and I really appreciate the honesty because it is, and I think it is really even being like on the filmmaking side of things and you see what AI can do and how, you know, in the span of a couple years what AI was doing, you know, videos and all that compared to these videos now that you're seeing that are, I mean, I'm taking a second to be like, wait a second, is that actually.
[01:03:53] Speaker B: Right?
[01:03:53] Speaker C: And it's, that's just in a couple years.
And I think it's really easy to get super from, from our perspective like on, on the young filmmaker side of like, what am I even doing? Why am I even trying to do this?
But I think having physical touch points and community that we've built through 50, 50 and communities like that, just being able to see our age group and this younger generation, like the next generation of Hollywood having this like real interest in coming together in a phys, in a physical setting and like being interested in talking and communicating with one another and like supporting each other is, is, it's very hopeful for sure. You know, and It's. And it's almost refreshing to see that when on your phone, all you see is the opposite, you know?
[01:04:47] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I agree completely. Like, I think community is more important than ever. I think in person is more important than ever. I mean, given Internet, social media, politics, everything that's out there.
AI. Yeah. Like, meeting people in person, having real conversations, it's like probably the most important thing that we could almost be doing these days.
[01:05:12] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. It's like the one thing they can't take away from us, you know, is. Is that. At least for now.
[01:05:19] Speaker A: And I would say also as divisive as things have gotten on in. On the Internet and out there, you know, when you meet people in person, like, generally they're going to be a lot better to each other and. Yeah, potentially, like, if you have the right safe space that they could talk about topics that are divisive without having to be as negative and stuff as people tend to be online.
[01:05:48] Speaker B: Yeah. The more that we can create environments like that and the more that we can, you know, through this podcast, I feel like Luke and I try to set an example of that so that people can hear people, you know, disagree or feel mutual, passionate about things or.
Like, Luke and I, a lot of.
We talk a lot about the podcast being like an example of us actively expanding our networks. Right. We have a guest on, and then they recommend someone and then someone who represents a topic that we've been wanting a guest on for a year now. So we go and talk to them and we try to set that example of how to network in a way.
[01:06:28] Speaker C: I mean, we're talking to the founder. Freaking Rotten Tomatoes. Come on. That's like.
[01:06:33] Speaker B: I know, It's. It's weird.
[01:06:34] Speaker C: We've been. I was talking to my girlfriend this morning of just like, we've been like, Rotten Tomatoes has been in our lives forever. Like, since.
[01:06:43] Speaker B: Since we were born.
[01:06:44] Speaker C: The beginning of us loving movies. Rotten Tomatoes has always been there. Like, that's. That's.
[01:06:51] Speaker B: And it's. And it's specifically for people as tapped into film as Luke and I, and for people who, you know, just.
The only reason they'll see a movie is because of the Rotten Tomatoes score or a review they read on Rotten Tomatoes. So it's very, very influential for everybody.
[01:07:09] Speaker A: Thank you. Yeah. Super glad that you all are still using it.
[01:07:13] Speaker B: Definitely. I mean, I worked at a talent management company a couple years ago, and for our clients who they directed a movie and it got a certified fresh score, we would always reach out to Rotten Tomatoes and get them A trophy. And you guys would always send it. It was very, very nice. I don't think we even ever paid for it. You guys would just send it. It was very, very nice. So, yeah, that's just a little tidbit. But anyway, we. We do like to ask one final question to all of our guests, and it's intentionally vague, so take it how you want, but what is the dream for you.
[01:07:54] Speaker A: For my company, for the community that I'm building with Venn, to get it to a point where, you know, it's a sustainable, growing business.
We get to a point where hopefully, you know, thousands or even low tens of thousands of members eventually have a fund or funds that could invest into startups coming out of the community, into content and media, and IP coming out of the company, out of the community.
If an IP actually hit that, the community could actually take that IP and move it into different mediums, and then that fund could be shared by everyone in the community so that things could come out of community and be owned by the community. I think that would be amazing.
I would love for the community to get to a point where it could help make people better people.
It's not just like you're there to network with each other, but could we actually get to a point where you're improving professionally, but also personally, like, as a human being?
I think that would be awesome. Kind of like a church or a service fraternity. They're out there trying to actually improve themselves. Right. I think that would be awesome.
And then.
Yeah, and then for my family, you know, just hopefully having a good and safer world for my daughter.
Yeah. I think things seem a little bit scary right now, especially with things like, again, like super intelligence and stuff. And I just hope if it happens that it's. It's. It's a nice. It's a nice God or whatever, you know, will let us all stick around and help us.
[01:09:53] Speaker C: Yeah, I hope so, too.
[01:09:56] Speaker B: Me too. Me too. Well, we really appreciate having you on.
At times I found it hard to ask questions because you caused so much internal reflection on my end. So I was at the same time listening to you and thinking about, oh, my gosh, like, these are all these lessons that I need to take for my own life. I'm sure you felt the same, Luke, So absolutely. We really appreciate it.
[01:10:18] Speaker C: Thank you so much, Patrick.
[01:10:19] Speaker A: Yeah, thanks for having me.
[01:10:22] Speaker C: I wonder if Super Intelligence will use Rotten Tomatoes before they watch movies.
[01:10:28] Speaker A: No prizes. Generate their own movies if they need to.
[01:10:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:10:32] Speaker C: Give it a certified fresh.
[01:10:34] Speaker B: Yes, we appreciate it.
[01:10:35] Speaker C: These are gonna suck.
Did you learn something? I'm like your mom. Did you learn something in this episode? I hope so. Or not. That's okay. Thanks for hanging. Make sure you follow us at the 5050Fest on Instagram and give us five stars, because. Why not? Why not subscribe? Why not? You know why not. Okay, bye.
