April 7, 2025 • 46 mins
This is the $200M deal no one saw coming. Dan Porter was days from bankruptcy when a side project, Draw My Thing, became the #1 game in the world. Six weeks later, he sold his company for $200M. Then he did it again — founding Overtime, now valued at half a billion. This is how he changed his life in 12 months… and built a media empire from scratch.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
If you wanna change your life, you have tounderstand Dan Porter is a multi million dollar
(00:05):
entrepreneur.
He sold his first company for $200,000,000 injust six weeks.
And his second company is valued at over a
half a billion dollars.
Today, I sat down with him and asked him toshare me his secrets to how anyone could build
a multi million dollar business from theirlaptop.
You start running out of money.
As a person, you start to think, am I gonnamortgage my house?
(00:26):
I remember I had an advisor and he had said tome, just lay off everyone but five people.
You changed the trajectory of your life in thetime span of twelve months.
We had made this very fun game called Draw MyThing in the corner with two people out of a 40
person company.
We released the game and the game justabsolutely exploded.
It went to the number one game in the world forsix months.
(00:48):
And what do you think is the number one traitthat makes a great entrepreneur?
Is in general a massive superpower.
Like, it's so simple and it's so easy tofollow.
Quick one.
If you enjoy listening to interviews like this,would love it if you could hit the subscribe
button down below.
It's the easiest way to tell me you actuallyenjoy this without mailing me a check.
Thank you very much and onto the interview.
(01:09):
Dan, I wanna start with the business that yousold for $200,000,000 in six weeks.
Take me back to that moment in time.
What was going on behind the scenes and whatwas so unique about what you were building that
garnered the attention of tens of millions ofpeople?
At that time I got very focused on this ideathat the phone wasn't like a gaming device, it
(01:29):
was a communications device.
And if you think back twelve years ago, thinkabout having a Game Boy, having a phone, and
you're just playing games on your phone.
And it's Angry Birds, a Fruit Ninja, SubwaySurfer, Candy Crush.
A lot of these games are still around now.
But none of those games were about connectingwith other people.
And, like, what do you mostly do on your phone?
(01:49):
Text, read, email, connect with other people.
One of the most interesting things about beingin the games business is in a way you're in a
portfolio business.
Every new game is a chance to like the companyto go to the moon.
And we had made this very fun game called DrawMy Thing.
It let people on our website or people onFacebook come together and just draw and guess.
(02:12):
It's, you know, Pictionary.
And I think in the games business, you thinkabout evergreen games, Scrabble, crossword
puzzle, poker, tic tac toe.
Like, nobody's like, remember when tic tac toewas peaked and then nobody played it?
Like, there's there are evergreen games.
Like, you can play them forever.
Other games you might have played when you werea kid or growing up, you're just like, that was
fun, then I moved on.
(02:34):
And so, you know, we were at this weird momentwhere made the game in the corner with two
people out of a 40 person company.
It was kind of like a side project a littlebit.
And, you know, you start running out of moneybasically.
Every day you spend money on rent, on people,and so forth.
And so as a person you start to think, okay, solike what happens if we don't raise money?
(02:58):
Like maybe we'll just run out of money.
Like, am I okay with that?
Am I gonna mortgage my house?
Am I gonna do everything possible?
You know, does everything happen for a reason?
Am I supposed to run out of money?
Like You're
a few months away from bankruptcy.
Right?
Yeah.
And, you know, at that point, you know, Iremember I had an an adviser and he had said to
me, just lay off everyone by five people andyou'll just make it through.
(03:22):
And so through this kind of like process ofiteration and simplification, I started to tap
into this game.
And as a kind of a second aside, I honestlyfeel like simplification is in general a
massive superpower that is very hard to dobecause it's hard to resist doing the opposite
of that.
If you think about when Google came out and itwas just a search box and everything was out.
(03:46):
If you think about sports where I spent a lotof my time, everyone is jealous of the NFL.
The NFL mostly plays games on Sunday.
You know, know they play Monday night and nowthey play Thursday and so forth, but it's
mostly on Sunday is when there's a game.
Every other sports league in the world, they'relike, when are they playing?
Tuesday, Wednesday, whatever?
Like, it's so simple and it's so easy tofollow, and attention is so diverted and so
(04:07):
scarce and so all over the place.
It's kinda like if you were to launch aclothing brand, like, you should have a hero
hoodie and like you should focus everyone'sattention on that.
Not like, I got these, I got pants, I gotshorts, I got t shirts, I got all these other
things like that when you first start.
And so like my only skill was simplificationand not being that good at games.
So by default I had to make the game that wasreally simple.
(04:28):
Long story short, we run we're kinda runningout of money.
We're thinking about, okay, so what happenswhen we close the door?
Like what happens to our lease?
Do we sell our office furniture?
And all this stuff.
We released the game.
We finally get to a point, and the game justabsolutely exploded.
And from that point, it went to the number onegame in the world for six months every single
(04:52):
day in over 50 countries, maybe even a hundredcountries.
It was downloaded 250,000,000 times, saved thecompany.
I end up selling the company for $200,000,000,and basically changed my life.
User retention is one of the most difficultthings to solve in SaaS.
You mastered it.
(05:12):
How are you able to master user retention?
At that time, the goal was like 5040.
You had to have 50% day one retention.
You had to have 30% day seven retention, andyou had to had 10% day 30 retention.
And if you couldn't hit those numbers, youbasically shouldn't release your game until you
do that.
And so a lot of people tested their game inCanada.
(05:33):
I was way too, like, bootleggy to be, like,sophisticated enough to be able to even know
how to test the game in Canada.
But the first was day one retention.
And I and and I've always thought of of that.
And even if people pitch me their business, thefirst thing I wanna do is look at the retention
chart.
The only time that's not true is if it's autility.
(05:53):
If it's a banking utility, like, as long as youhave their money in your bank account, you
don't they're gonna come back.
And so I think you really think aboutoptimizing that.
How much do you let them do on day one?
You know, it's it's kinda why in the classicsim game, whether you're playing a tower
defense game or a farming game, it's kindalike, oh, you built your tower and you planted.
(06:19):
Come back in thirty minutes and it's gonna beready and you can do this.
They they have a very in that kind of growingbuilding style of game, they literally think
about the clock and how to get to come back.
And all of a sudden, you have a push note of itit says, all your crops are ready.
Come back and harvest.
And once you've come back, you cross that 50%threshold and you're more likely to be engaged
in that game.
(06:39):
That's that's your best chance.
It's almost like that idea that the mostimportant retention number on YouTube is either
first thirty seconds or first three minutes.
And like everyone who's excellent at YouTubefocuses on optimizing that and if you can't get
70% retention in the first thirty to sixtyseconds, your video is just not gonna do well.
So who cares what the happens in minute ten,like you have to optimize to that.
(07:03):
Eric Alabes is one of our
guests from chess.com.
He said one of the things that he tried tofigure out with chess is he tried to make sure
that users could win their first game
Yes.
Because it was essential for getting people tocome back again and again and again.
You mentioned the Fortnite example, you lostpretty quickly but you still went back.
How do you create a balance between there whereyou might lose in the beginning, you might not,
(07:26):
but you still get users to come back and
Yeah.
Wanna
try That
that's actually a great question.
Eric is great.
We work with Chess.com.
That was a great episode.
He's a % correct in one v one games.
We found the same thing.
If if you lost your first game, whether it wascheckers, chess, whatever game you were
playing, 50% chance you wouldn't come back.
(07:50):
And in some of those games, it's easy to do.
You match you with somebody who's worse thanyou or some a a version of a person who you
think is live but actually is not live.
In the case of Fortnite, it wasn't a one v onegame.
I was thrown into essentially a sandbox or aworld experience.
(08:12):
And I'd say that's similar to like, I inviteyou over my house, we get in the driveway, and
I say I'll give you $10 if you can make a freethrow and you miss it, you don't give up,
you're just like oh shit, I should have stoodtwo things to the left.
Give me another chance, double or nothing,double or nothing.
And so I think in those cases, you're somotivated by what you could have done better.
(08:36):
Like I've never seen anyone miss one free throwand walk away from playing basketball.
Right?
Because you're just like, I shot too hard.
I shot too soft.
That's why people love golf.
Like, it's just that over and over again andagain.
So I just think each game has a differentrealm.
Now if if I was shooting a free throw and thenhoop was moving all the time and I wasn't
really able to calculate, I'd be like, this islike kind of some bullshit.
(08:59):
This is rigged.
I'm not gonna do it.
But you know, one v one game, you versusyourself or you thrown into, you know, a giant
battle.
If you play tag in second grade with all yourfriends, everyone's running around the field
and you're out, you're like put me back in.
You're not like I give up.
But there's something about the one v one whereyou lose and you're just like, I
guess I'm not good at this.
(09:19):
There was something about that game that endedup popping off.
It did really well, and it saved the company.
How did you end up selling the business fromstart to finish in six weeks for $200,000,000?
Okay.
A playbook.
So first of all, I would have sold the businessfor, like, at any time in the two years prior.
(09:41):
And I tried and I tried to take some meetings,but, you know, I think people may have said on
your podcast, other places, businesses are notsold.
They're bought.
So you as the business owner, you don't get tosell a business.
You are in a world where one day somebodyknocks on your door.
You know, you can try to accelerate that.
(10:02):
People who work for me say, when are we gonnasell overtime?
I said, when somebody wants to buy it.
Like, I don't control that.
Like, one day someone wakes up and says, fuck.
I need this thing.
And, like, you could have press articles andyou can put a for sale sticker on your
forehead, but it it doesn't really matter.
In this case, it was kind of like one big thingand several small things.
(10:27):
The big thing was clearly we just had a massivegame.
Right?
It's like, how do you sell Instagram?
You're the number one app.
Like, how do you sell WhatsApp?
A lot of fucking people use it all of a sudden.
How do you sell OMG pop?
You've got a game that's so big.
It's bigger than the next nine games in the AppStore combined.
And it was just this weird moment where thathappened at the same time as GDC, the game
(10:54):
developers conference.
So I spent years going to GDC.
Nobody cares who I am.
No one knows who OMG Pop is.
All of a sudden, I go, and they're nine gamingcompanies.
I can meet with them all in two hours.
We're all in San Francisco for the same thing.
I don't even go to the convention.
I go to this guy.
I go to this restaurant, this bar, this hotellobby.
So it's like, oh shit.
(11:15):
What's happening with this thing?
Oh, I can talk to this guy in twenty fourhours.
So that was just dumb luck.
You know, and listen, in that, there was acompany in Japan that offered tentatively far
more money than we sold it for, But they saidit'll take you twenty four hours to get to
Japan, and it'll take you twenty four hours toget back.
(11:35):
And if that deal doesn't work out, you're gonnalose all your other momentum.
And so that's a case in which, like, I couldhave gone there.
They could have been like, I don't really fuckwith Dan Porter.
And I could have lost a deal, could have comeback and I could have lost all the other deals.
So there's a timing, there's a just everythingcoming together, there's, you know, nobody buys
(11:56):
you because they meet with you the first time.
It's kind of like funding.
Everyone's like, I watched the Facebook movie.
He goes in, he says, it's Facebook, he comesout with a big check.
It never works.
I never got money from anybody I ever met thefirst time.
You know, they want to meet you again, theywant to see, they want to do this and that, and
so you have to have a little bit of thatprocess.
All the gaming companies were in California, Iwas in New York.
(12:18):
So luckily I was there, but then I would haveto fly back a lot.
And I'd say there was like, the other littlething is that at the end of the day, like,
companies don't buy other companies.
People make decisions who work at companies tobuy other companies.
I've been in a in an instance where I was aboutto sell my company and the person leading it at
(12:43):
the buyer all of a sudden quit or changed theirjob and the deal went away.
And you're just like, that doesn't make anysense if it's strategic for company a to buy
company b, but then the guy leading it leaves.
Like, that has nothing to do with it.
But the fact is it does.
It, like, completely has to do it.
You're totally at the whim of that.
I mean, I I like to you know, I you know, had acrazy experience at Overtime where I flew to
(13:09):
California, I met this guy who I was trying tomeet for like two years.
I was like if I can meet this guy, he's gonnatake everything I do in basketball to the next
level.
I met him with this like incredible meeting.
He had researched me, he knew everything aboutit.
We dapped up, he wants to be my partner.
(13:31):
I get on a plane home like three days later andKobe gets in a helicopter crash and dies.
And there's no deal.
And so like it was one person.
And so in the case Dan, how does this story sadstory relate to OMG Pop?
I had board members who had relationships withguys like Mark Pincus at Zynga and other guys
(13:56):
because they had invested in their companies,and they were able to accelerate behind the
scenes.
If I met a buyer and that buyer is like, Dan'skind of a dick, one of my board members could
go, he's under a lot of pressure.
He's not a dick.
He actually loves you and he wants to do thisdeal.
So, you know, like physical proximity, likeboard members who can go behind the scenes,
(14:17):
those things don't exist in a business schoolclass, but and the impact of people, but they
all make a difference.
A deal never gets done unless there's achampion at a company for a deal.
A company doesn't buy it.
A person buys it.
And you have to have a champion.
You have to know who that is.
You have to have enough of a relationship.
There's a lot of times people sell companiesbecause the company that bought them invested
(14:38):
four years ago and owned 10%.
Company really got to know the people.
And so it ends up as this whirlwind process.
We end up the beneficiary because when we aredoing good, everyone else is doing bad because
we steal all their users.
Like we don't steal their users, they just stopplaying all the other games.
So now you're, you know, EA or GRI, which isthe Japanese company or something else like
(15:03):
that or you're Zynga and all of a sudden you'reZynga and you're in your first quarter as a
public company and all you wanna do is tell howmany DAU you have and now it's 10% lower than
you were gonna say because they're all playingfucking damn Porter's game, there's an easy way
to solve that.
Like, who's this guy
that's taking all of her money?
Yeah.
And so, you you know, people will buy companiesbecause they think it will make their company
(15:26):
better, but they will also buy companiesbecause it solves problems for them.
So you need a lot of things to fall into placefrom location to people to defense to offense.
And in our case, all of those things fell intoplace really quickly, so quickly and so
urgently for the buyer that, as I've saidbefore, we had two law firms.
(15:47):
One worked, you know, hours one through twelveof the day, and the other worked hours thirteen
through twenty four of the day to get the dealdone.
And the deal got done in nine days.
Yeah.
The deal got done in nine days.
It was so crazy.
I remember I went to my lawyer's office and Isaid, can you just explain to me what these
terms mean as if I'm a child?
Because I'll be able to understand them.
(16:08):
I'll be able to give you an answer.
But I'm really tired and I'm not good at legalstuff.
And if you start talking about the rofer,cofer, this thing other thing like that, I'm
just gonna blank out.
And he's like, Dan, imagine, you know, that youhad a toy and somebody wanted your toy.
I was like, oh, yeah.
Fuck them.
They don't get that hard on my toys.
Like, Good.
Good.
Good.
It's all about simplification.
Yeah.
Exactly.
(16:28):
Exactly.
At the game developer conference, you said theyear after Draw Something went really viral.
Everybody knew you.
The year before, nobody knew you.
Yeah.
You changed the trajectory of your life in thetime span of twelve months.
Yeah.
For somebody listening to this who might bewanting to do the same and change the
trajectory of their life in 2025 in just ayear, what would be your advice to them on how
(16:49):
they should start doing it?
I'm gonna give you an answer that is an answer,but you're not gonna feel like it's an answer
until I get to the end of it.
Okay.
So I'm a professor at NYU, and I have lots ofdifferent kids with different majors in my
class, including a lot of Stern, which is theirbusiness school majors.
(17:10):
Student comes into my class and he says,professor, I'm really stressed.
And I say, oh, why are you so stressed?
Midterms, whatever.
He goes, no, it's it's interview season.
And, you know, I I wanna I wanna interview forthis finance job.
And, you know, they ask you, like, how manymarbles would fit in a plane?
Or like, people before TikTok, nobodyunderstood these questions.
(17:33):
Now these questions are all over TikTok orwhatever.
And he's like, I just feel like I feel like Ihave the answer to all of these questions.
And I think I'm gonna do well, but I'm notsure, but I'm nervous.
And I said to him, here's a problem, it's likeI'm actually gonna make it worse for you
because your perception of this whole scenariois wrong.
(17:55):
Because your idea is that if you are able toanswer the questions, you're gonna get the job.
So let me give you a a bigger picture.
Number one, have you taken all the same coursesas the other 30 people who are interviewing?
Yeah.
I mean, we all take the same courses at CERN.
That's what we do.
Do you have the same GPA as they do?
Yeah.
More or less, we all get As.
(18:17):
Can you all answer the question?
He's like, yeah.
I'm like, then why are they choosing you?
And he's like, oh fuck.
I just assumed that if I got the a and Ianswered the question, I'd get the job.
I was like, there's nothing different than you.
You're focused on the wrong thing aboutdifferentiation.
Right?
(18:37):
There's no different.
They're like today I interviewed 10 guys whoare 19 years old who all gave me the same
answer.
Right?
So who are they going to hire?
And he's like I don't know.
Who are they going to hire?
I said they're going to hire the one they likebetter because just like in my example of you
know who buys you not a company but a personwho hires you, you're to walk in a room in the
(19:02):
first thirty seconds they're gonna kind of belike I kind of fuck with this guy or like this
guy's kind of fucking annoying even though hecan answer the questions or what.
It's not a meritocracy like people are biased.
So your job rather than focusing on that is twothings.
Number one, try to figure out who yourinterviewer is and try to connect with them.
I heard a story about one of my students whowas a B student but after the interview he's
(19:28):
waiting with the guy from Goldman and it'sraining He says to the guy, hey, I have an
umbrella.
Can I walk you to Subway?
And he gets the job.
Is that fair?
Did he study more?
Whatever.
But people make those decisions.
I said, number two, give me something about youthat makes you interesting or different and
don't give it to me as a fact, give it to me asa story.
(19:49):
Right?
And so, you know, I always say this is like youput on like your skills section on your like
resume like proficient in Microsoft Word.
I'm like, you and every fucking person on theplat like you just wasted 20 letters telling me
that.
It's like proficient in Google Docs.
Yeah.
You, my grandmother, and everybody else.
Who the fuck cares?
You put something like heliskiing on there orwhatever and somebody's like, you heli ski?
(20:14):
And you're like, yeah.
What's the craziest thing that ever happened toyou?
Bro, one time a helicopter dropped me and Iwent face down.
I thought I was gonna die.
And you're like, that guy's a fucking killer.
I wanna hire him.
It's like, give me something and then tell me astory around that because people remember
stories.
It's like, why do you want to work at Goldman?
Well shit.
(20:34):
One day I, you know, I was walking by thisbuilding and I looked up and I saw these people
coming out and I said to this guy, what is thisand where do you work?
And I went home and I read the whole story andI just like in my head, I was like, in four
years, that's where I'm gonna work.
And they'd be like, holy shit.
Like and the next guy comes in and he says, Ihave an a.
I took intro to Black Scholes option theory,and I can answer your questions.
(20:56):
What's the difference?
You just told him a story and you had that.
So if you wanna change your life, you have tounderstand it's just not about answering the
same questions everyone else is.
And that differentiation also, if you can wrapthat into an insanely compelling story, even if
you rehearse that or whatever, that's gonnamake a difference.
And like you said with stories, the best onesare the most shareable.
Like even at looking at Instagram's Instagramreels
(21:19):
Yeah.
The most popular one has the most popularstories have the most shares.
Yeah.
So people like to stare stories that theyresonate with and others resonate with.
I like to say like in the nineties, I built theadmissions system for Teach for America where
where I worked.
And eventually, became the president of Teachfor America when I was 27 years old.
(21:40):
And so I probably interviewed 3,000 people overthe course of several years.
Like, how do you do that?
You go to a college campus, you interview 12people a day every single day.
Now the first person, you're like, this personis amazing.
I'm always gonna remember this person.
I think they're gonna get in.
I I have to tell you, by the time you get toeleventh person, you have no idea who the fuck
the first person was.
(22:01):
You're kinda sitting there with your partnerand you're like, don't want the glasses?
I kinda remember.
12 people come in, one person tells you a storea story about being locked out of their car in
the middle of the night or whatever.
You get to the end, all 12 people are blur, andtheir your partner goes, you know that kid who
got locked out of his car?
(22:21):
You're like, that kid's a fucking killer.
We're taking that kid.
Like, that that's that's how you remember.
So after you sold the business
Yeah.
You could have kept a bunch of money foryourself, but you didn't.
You actually went to the Apple store in Sohoand bought a hundred thousand dollars worth of
iPads.
Why'd you do that?
Well, were a couple things I did.
I'm a bad capitalist.
(22:41):
I'm not like you're never gonna, like no one'sever gonna listen to podcasts with me about how
to make a lot of money because I'm interestedin, like, making things.
Like, short, I like money.
Like, if you were to give me a million dollarsnow, I'd say yes.
But it's not I'm not about optimizing myreturns over other people.
So three things happened.
Number one, when you close when you close atransaction, the company that buys you gets the
(23:08):
money in the bank account.
I was like, let's fucking spend the money inthe bank account.
So I went and I bought every single person aniPad.
We somehow over the course of several creditcards and everything else, we spent all the
money in our bank account.
Why?
Because it's just irresponsible and recklessand why the fuck not?
Like, if you can't have a wild time, why do it?
(23:31):
I was like, this credit card would get turneddown.
This credit they used to love me at the SohoApple store when I used to come in all the
time.
And I think somebody told me last year theywere like, yo, still have that iPad from 2012.
The second thing that I did was there were abunch of people who as we were kind of winding
(23:53):
down, I furloughed or I laid off, and theywould have gotten nothing from the deal.
I hired them back without necessarily companyor board approval in the last seventy two hours
before the deal so that they would be employeesand they would make all the money from their
stock options.
And the third is that the buyer gave me severalmillion dollars of cash in the deal as like a
(24:22):
plus up that I could have kept all for myself.
And instead, I gave it to all the people,including some of the people who had taken cash
over stock options because they had kids orother things like that.
Because to me in that moment when you havewhatever that is, juice, power, influence, it's
(24:44):
way more life changing to give it to otherpeople and to change their life than to just
stick it in your bank account.
And you've worked with somebody knew.
Like, I never told anybody about this, but oneperson found out and told some reporter and
wrote an article about it.
So I would have been cool if nobody had everknown that.
Like, to me, it was just it was just like Iwould have wanted somebody to do that for me.
(25:09):
Like, it just
Different than filming yourself and be like,hey, I'm giving this cashew
a thousand was just I don't know.
It was like the right thing to do, but it Ijust didn't think
about it.
It was just instinct.
And you've also worked with some of the mostaccomplished business leaders in the world, two
of which are Richard Branson and R.
Emanuel from Endeavor.
(25:30):
What are some of the key things that youlearned from them that you took with you when
founding Overtime?
They're both interpersonally extremelycharismatic individuals.
Like like, you just know.
I I remember at some point when I worked atTeach for America, I met Bill Clinton in the
nineties.
Maybe he was president at that point, think.
(25:52):
Some event or whatever.
And I remember I shook his hand, and I waslike, wow.
That was the best sex I ever had.
Like, it was just like you shook his hand andyou're like, this guy's a fucking rock star.
Like, I know subsequently he's definitely not.
But he's just you know, personally, he'sincredibly charismatic, and both of them are in
different ways.
And I will say that it's a lot it's a lot moreeffective and fun to work for a company that's
(26:20):
led by a guy who's got a lot of charismabecause you look at that guy and you go, yeah.
There's a reason that guy's a fucking CEO.
Not like that guy was next up and he got thejob.
I would say from from Richard, he just had avery articulated sense of brand, and he created
really this very powerful idea of challengerbrand.
And it was like, my brand is always the onethat kind of pokes in the eye of the big
(26:47):
company.
Everything we do that defines our brand isabout being a challenger brand.
If we're gonna be an airline, we're gonnaposition British Airways as super stuffy and
we're gonna be rock and roll.
If we're a record company, we're gonna do crazywild stunts and position everyone else as
corporate.
And people talk about brand all the time, butin a way, if you're really good at brand you
(27:11):
should have an adjective in front of it, andfor that it was challenger brand.
And it was so effective that the mentality ofpeople every time Virgin would start a new
business everyone would be like, let's go,we're gonna fucking take them down.
So it worked not just for the consumer, but itworked for the people in the company.
In terms of Ari, if Ari reads an article if Arilistens to a podcast and somebody's interesting
(27:38):
on that podcast, he will literally call them upand say, come in the office.
I'd love to meet you, and I'll ask them ahundred questions.
Like, I I learn by listening to podcasts,watching YouTube videos.
I read a lot of books.
Ari is, like, not just charismatic, but he he'salways learning about the world.
But he's an agent, so in a way he does itthrough people.
(27:59):
And so his network is huge, but he might callsomebody up who works for him and says, I wanna
talk to that person and I wanna know aboutthis.
And I think most people are in a box in theirlane, and I'd say he's really not.
And I'd say the second thing about Ari andDavid Stern, the former NBA commissioner who I
(28:22):
had the great honor with of working with fortwo years was very similar.
He's just very funny, and so he just disarmsyou.
So Stern would say to me, I'd come to ameeting, I'd tell commissioner, we're thinking
about doing this, we're gonna do that andwhatever.
And he'd look at me and say, listen Dan, I knowyou're really good at fundraising, but are you
(28:44):
actually good at anything else?
But it was funny and like Ari was in that sameway and it's like sometimes you can communicate
a point in this kind of very shticky humorthat's very effective and he's very very
talented at that.
While you were in meetings with Ari, you wouldalso be in meetings with professional sports
leagues.
(29:04):
And they would
tell you things behind closed doors that a lotof people didn't know about the industry.
What were they telling you and how did thatlead to the creation of Overtime?
Endeavor worked with a lot of the differentsports leagues.
I didn't work in Hollywood.
I worked in New York where I lived and where mykids went to school.
And all the sports leagues headquarters are inNew York.
(29:25):
So I I would go there and we would havestrategy meetings or they'd be like, we want
more female fans.
And I was like, I have a plan for you.
Twelve years in the future, have a tight end.
Date Taylor Swift, and you'll get female fans.
And put it on the camera on the big screenevery single team lead.
And then crazy enough, twelve years later, ithappened.
Travis Kelce was only in middle school at thattime.
(29:49):
And so basically at that time, you know, and Iappreciate the layup and the setup for my
answer.
I mean they basically all told me in 2014,like, we're just worried that, like, people
aren't watching TV anymore and that, like, thenext generation of sports fans isn't gonna
consume sports on TV.
And you think about that now ten years later,and it's like they're beyond right.
(30:14):
Right?
First of all, less than 50% of people inAmerica have cable, and at some point that was
80% to 90%.
You know, the amount of know, the number onestreaming platform in the world on connected TV
by hours spent is YouTube.
This is not television.
You know, Jake Paul, Mike Tyson fought onNetflix, you know, which is a streamer.
(30:40):
And so they were massively, massively right.
And for them, the sports business went throughthree stages.
One stage, it's a live event business.
That's why there's 30 teams in 30 markets.
You know?
You made all your money because people parkedand they bought hot dogs and they bought beer
and they bought tickets and it was a live eventbusiness.
(31:02):
All of a sudden, football and basketball andbaseball over time with cable television and
the Internet became media businesses.
And you could watch any game anywhere.
I mean, when I was a kid, if I was a I'm aPhiladelphia Eagles fan.
If I wasn't at home in Philadelphia, I didn'twatch the game.
Like, this just wasn't possible.
I'd be like, could you put a VCR tape?
(31:22):
And when I come home, I'll watch it.
And once they became media businesses, it waymore mattered the number you're making way more
money based on people who watched than peoplewho came to the game.
And if you're about to say a whole generationof people are either on their phones, you know,
(31:43):
playing video games, they're not watching TV,that's deadly.
And still today, as big as professional sportsare and as successful and run by highly, highly
smart people, you know, the average age ofevery sports league in America is 40 to 50
years old.
And the the the kind of wrinkle is that youmight be like, come on, Dan.
(32:07):
I love sports.
Every day I meet somebody who's 20 years oldand they're like, I love sports.
I love LeBron.
I love this.
I love that.
I was like, do you watch the games?
No.
No.
No.
I don't watch the games.
So you're a fan, but you're actually not acustomer.
You're not watching.
You're not paying.
You're not buying.
You're not doing anything else like that.
And that was kind of the overall existentialproblem.
And I kinda walked out of those rooms and Ithought, fuck.
(32:30):
Somebody's gonna go out and capture the nextgeneration of sports fans.
Like, I just spent three years representingsome of the biggest YouTubers and talent in the
world where all these people's attention are.
Like, that's a business opportunity.
Maybe it'll be me.
And it turned out to be me.
Me, meaning my company and everyone who worksthere.
And you and over time are a master atstorytelling.
(32:54):
What have you learned about what makes storiesgo viral?
One of the key rules of storytelling is figureout what the end of the story is and work
backwards from there as know as opposed to likelet me start, let me set the setting, let me do
all these other things like that because allstories are trying to get to an moment, right?
(33:16):
And that moment is the moment where you say oh,shit.
I learned something, changed my life, I feltsomething.
And everything else is about mowing the lawn,so to speak, to be able to get there.
And if you wait too long, nobody gets there.
And if you give too much away in the beginning,but it's about the reveal or the moment and
(33:40):
it's about understanding curiosity in thebeginning.
And it's also understanding that people cyclethrough that.
The best writers of books, especially ones youbuy in the airport, every single the last three
sentences on every page are literally designedbased on the physical page to make you turn the
next page.
(34:00):
And then she opened the door.
I'm gonna put the book down see what I
what what what you know?
You mentioned skipping the starting with thebackground to just getting straight to the
endpoint.
Yeah.
I noticed Not straight to the endpoint, butworking backwards from the endpoint instead of
forwards from what you think the beginning is.
So we noticed something similar with our shows.
(34:22):
We used to be start with the early context ofthe guest, so maybe we would jump straight into
their childhood and then like twenty minutesinto the conversation we're like, hey, let's
get into what you're doing now.
But people clicked to get into what they'redoing now and you can get to the background but
you should Yeah.
Always start to with that first.
A story is not a paper that you write in highschool where you're like, before I talk about
(34:45):
the Declaration of Independence, let's talkabout the Boston Tea Party.
Because you're and I always say to my studentswhen they do presentations or whatever, I'm
like, this isn't a fucking book report.
Like, just get like, get to the shit.
Like, you're not required to do all that otherstuff.
If it's a paper about the declaration ofindependence, maybe you are.
(35:06):
One non consensus thing that you do at overtimeis you won't hire anyone who has an MBA.
Why is that?
There's a couple reasons.
Number one, most people who get an MBA are riskaverse, that's why they're getting the MBA.
I don't want risk averse people who are tryingto max minimize the things that can go wrong
and maximize that.
Number two, most people who study for an MBAare trained in a very narrow thought pattern.
(35:35):
There's never there are no nobody goes tobusiness school and walks out a divergent
thinker or like a a totally against the grainthinker.
Right?
It's like you take a bunch of courses and youthink about, you know, kind of road that gets
an hour and hour and hour until you get yourdegree and you come out.
(35:56):
Businesses succeed because MBAs train peoplefor conventional businesses.
So if I'm in a conventional business of sellinghammers and nails, I need really good operators
who are gonna expand my margin and do all thoseother things.
I'm not in those businesses.
I'm in the business like, oh fuck, we gottamake something out of nothing.
Like I don't need an operator for that, I needsomebody who's like, I got a crazy idea.
(36:16):
Nobody comes out of business school and islike, I got a crazy idea.
And I think number three, and this is one thatI found more, is that people who go to business
school and graduate become obsessed with howmuch money their classmates are making and what
titles their classmates have, and so they'reconstantly optimizing around that.
So the only employees I've ever had who areconstantly, like, interviewing for other jobs
(36:41):
and do whatever are only MBAs.
I think if you do have something that you'rereally passionate about and like, yes, I really
wanna do this, you just go do it because itdrives you crazy and you wouldn't be able to
sleep and you wouldn't get the MBA.
Yeah.
It's the same thing as saying, like, if youlook at the hundred most successful YouTubers,
none of them went to film school.
But you might say, oh, logically, well, youshould go study video and film if you wanna be
(37:05):
successful on YouTube.
But the whole point of YouTube is you're makingexactly the opposite of television, so you
actually need crazy out of the box thinking.
And the whole thing about startups is you needcrazy out of the box thinking, so why would you
hire somebody who literally was just all aboutcrazy in the box thinking?
Now listen, there are always exceptions tothat.
You can't paint a broad brush stroke.
(37:25):
But if you're trying to optimize on the wholefor risk takers and creative thinking and
people are gonna be focused on what they do, myrecommendation would be don't hire MBAs.
And all the time, like, investors will say, oh,I've got this great guy for you.
He's got a Harvard MBA.
He worked at McKinsey.
He worked at this big corporate job.
And I'm like, this is literally the opposite ofanyone I would ever ever hire.
(37:48):
You should be like, I got this guy for you.
He lives in a box under a bridge, but he's sofucking creative and he's got a massive chip on
his shoulder because he felt like he got passedover.
I'm like, oh, that's the guy I gotta talk to.
The chips on the shoulder are the big one.
Couple of closing questions before we wrap itup here.
One, what's the best piece of advice you'veever received?
(38:08):
I had like a mentor of mine when I was in mytwenties and I worked in nonprofit and he was a
high level investment guy.
And he said to me, Dan, they always say yougotta crawl before you walk, and you gotta walk
(38:28):
before you run.
And if you do that and you listen to thatadvice, you spend your whole fucking life
crawling.
And I always thought about that, but it's adangerous piece of advice because in certain
circumstances or certain people, you shouldcrawl before you walk.
If you said to me, Dan, I have a hundredmillion dollars, you look like you're smart at
(38:51):
investments, will you manage them?
It'd be a bad idea if I just ran.
I'd probably lose all your money in Nvidia inlike five minutes.
And so it's not a universal truth, but thereare moments when you just have to run.
And I can give you one specific example.
When Teach for America was started by WendyKopp and then who started and then I joined.
(39:16):
All of, you know, and it was this program thatrecruited people to teach in public schools.
All of the, I would say investors, but donors,you know, funding people said, Wendy, you
should take 50 people.
Like, you'll figure out how the program works.
You'll be able to serve them or whatever.
And Wendy said, if I take 50 people, no onewill ever care about Teach for America.
(39:38):
So we took 500 people.
Disaster.
Like, disaster.
But in two years, we're on the front page ofNew York Times.
She's like, I don't wanna crawl.
I wanna run.
So in in the right circumstance with the rightperson, fuck crawling.
Which one rule you live by that most peopledon't?
(39:58):
I got this one from a guy who just passed away,Dick Parsons, and he said to me, you know, in a
negotiation, you always think there's a winnerand there's a loser, and, you know, there's
this whole kind of joke if you don't know whothe fool is in a deal, it's you.
But he said, to me, doing a deal, whether it'shiring someone or whether it's doing a billion
(40:25):
dollar deal, you always should leave a littlebit on the table because you never know who
you're gonna do business with again.
And everything that we do from buying a houseto negotiating a salary in crisis, you're just
like conventional wisdom is maximize, maximize,fuck over the other side, here's how you get
(40:45):
what you want and whatever.
And I think if you can relax a little bit andjust be like, listen, sometimes they're gonna
get a little bit too, like, I'm gonna get alower price.
Like, I sometimes when I raise money, I take alower valuation because I want my investors to
be happy and also I wanna work with them atsome other company.
And so this idea that if you leave a little biton the table in the long term, it's more
(41:09):
advantageous to you, I think is a nonconventional idea.
That's one of the things I've noticed fromstudying a lot of really successful people is
that most successful people are not highlytransactional.
They're not like, okay, what am I gonna get inexchange for this intro or what am I gonna get
in exchange for giving you this?
They're just like, okay, let me just help youas much as I possibly can and whatever comes
(41:31):
back on me comes back on me.
Yeah.
So And then last question
Is this another new one that you're gonna popon?
No, one this one's good, this one's normal.
Okay.
If I slid you over a phone and you could callyour 18, 20 year old self, would you call?
And if so, what would you say?
I definitely wouldn't call because, a, when Iwas 18 years old, I didn't wanna fucking listen
(41:56):
to advice from other people, especially oldversions of me.
Second of all, it like, the best advice is whatyou learn by living life.
Like, I could tell you, bro, always leave alittle bit on the table.
You're like, oh, got you, my guy, whatever.
But that doesn't mean anything.
And then one day you're just like, you dosomething and you're just like, oh, shit.
(42:19):
I get it.
Like, advice is just words.
Action and how you do that.
And I think third is like I don't know.
I hate that question.
Like, as a personal against you, I just alwaysthink like I mean, who the fuck knows?
What the fuck do I know now?
What the fuck did I know then?
It's just kind of like like my advice is alwaysthe same, just get out there and fucking live
(42:44):
life and try shit and figure it out.
And like that's kinda what I was doing, sothat's kinda what I was saying.
And it's not like I learned so much in the lastforty years.
I did things that were right.
I made mistakes.
Maybe my 18 year old self should call my 58year old self and say, bro, what are you doing?
Like, you should be on an island.
(43:06):
You should be like
fucking acting.
So to me, I think that people look at thatquestion as if there's an answer and they can
use that answer.
And my answer is don't fucking make the phonecall.
We've had a I thought you
were gonna ask me, like, call the most famousperson on your phone and we're gonna make a
(43:28):
viral TikTok.
Do you wanna do it?
No.
Who is the most famous person on your phone?
Question.
I don't know.
There's a lot of different people.
I'll do mine and then you can do yours.
Probably MrBeast.
MrBeast?
Followed by maybe Quavo, followed by maybe abunch of NBA players.
He's big.
Mine's probably Mark Cuban.
(43:50):
Oh, that's good.
Yeah.
He was on our show a while back.
But, you know, the other thing is, is there any18 year old in the world that wants to listen
to advice?
I know you're, like, a freak of nature
and I'm probably the worst person to studybecause I'm, like, an n equals one.
I'm probably the outlier in the
data problem.
If every day you do a podcast and everyonegives you advice, how can you process all that
(44:10):
different advice?
You're like, well, Cuban told me to do this,but Porter told me to do that, but fucking
chess guy told me to do this.
I'm, oh, I'm paralyzed.
Part of it is that it does really well on juston retention.
Like, I'll I'll look at the retention graphfrom like the most viewed podcast which you can
now see from other videos.
And anytime it gets to the life advice portion,it always spikes every single time.
(44:32):
Because people think that you're gonna givethem an easy path to being successful by giving
them something and they're just gonna do it.
And you know what?
Because I'm a good storyteller, it comes back.
It's the same thing as I said.
It's just like, so what?
You can answer the banker questions, but itdoesn't mean you get the gig.
That's true.
The advice that you should get is the advicethat no one else gets because your whole job is
(44:56):
to stick out and to be different, and that'show you get ahead.
And if a million people are listening to myadvice and they all do the same thing, then
they're all just a bunch of robots interviewingfor the same jobs with the same answers.
I had the same thing.
I told a friend of mine who works with us who'salso at NYU, he's trying to get a job in
finance, banking.
(45:16):
He's like, hey, I'm applying to all these jobsand like nobody's I'm getting a couple
interviews here and there but nobody's sayingyes.
I'm like, because you look like everybody else.
Like, you have the same resume.
You're you're doing the exact same thingeverybody else is doing.
He's like, well, because everyone else is doingit.
Like, that's the problem.
Like Do
you know at at at NYU, they tell you to wear ablue blazer and a white open collared shirt
(45:39):
in your LinkedIn picture.
Okay.
I didn't know that.
So I said to somebody, why is all your LinkedInpictures the same?
They're like, that's what they told us to do.
I said, and you fucking listened to them?
You just walked off the cliff like a bunch ofsheep?
Because my other example of that is, I'll neverforget, like ten years ago you know when it was
like Infatuation and Eater and all these likewebsites, I went to Paris and I researched this
(46:00):
fucking cool restaurant and I went and therestaurant was amazing and I looked around and
I realized every single person in therestaurant was from New York and they all read
the same review.
And I was like, oh, if we're all reading thesame review going to the same restaurant, none
of us are getting an authentic experience.
That's true.
I wanna test my my question, the 20 year oldself question.
You wanna call mister beast and see what hewould say?
(46:22):
Mister beast, I think, is in Mexico right now.
Oh, he is?
For what
time is games or
whatever else like that.
What is he is he gonna
You probably say that was only five years ago.
Oh, that's true.
Right?
He's like in his mid twenties now?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, sounds good.
Well, thanks Dan for taking the time to jointhe show.
Appreciate it.
For having me.
We'll have a link to overtime.
I'm sure everyone knows it.
But it's in the episode description just incase.
(46:45):
For joining Dan.
Appreciate it.
If you wanna change your life, you have tounderstand Dan Porter is a multi million dollar
(00:05):
entrepreneur.
He sold his first company for $200,000,000 injust six weeks.
And his second company is valued at over a
half a billion dollars.
Today, I sat down with him and asked him toshare me his secrets to how anyone could build
a multi million dollar business from theirlaptop.
You start running out of money.
As a person, you start to think, am I gonnamortgage my house?
(00:26):
I remember I had an advisor and he had said tome, just lay off everyone but five people.
You changed the trajectory of your life in thetime span of twelve months.
We had made this very fun game called Draw MyThing in the corner with two people out of a 40
person company.
We released the game and the game justabsolutely exploded.
It went to the number one game in the world forsix months.
(00:48):
And what do you think is the number one traitthat makes a great entrepreneur?
Is in general a massive superpower.
Like, it's so simple and it's so easy tofollow.
Quick one.
If you enjoy listening to interviews like this,would love it if you could hit the subscribe
button down below.
It's the easiest way to tell me you actuallyenjoy this without mailing me a check.
Thank you very much and onto the interview.
(01:09):
Dan, I wanna start with the business that yousold for $200,000,000 in six weeks.
Take me back to that moment in time.
What was going on behind the scenes and whatwas so unique about what you were building that
garnered the attention of tens of millions ofpeople?
At that time I got very focused on this ideathat the phone wasn't like a gaming device, it
(01:29):
was a communications device.
And if you think back twelve years ago, thinkabout having a Game Boy, having a phone, and
you're just playing games on your phone.
And it's Angry Birds, a Fruit Ninja, SubwaySurfer, Candy Crush.
A lot of these games are still around now.
But none of those games were about connectingwith other people.
And, like, what do you mostly do on your phone?
(01:49):
Text, read, email, connect with other people.
One of the most interesting things about beingin the games business is in a way you're in a
portfolio business.
Every new game is a chance to like the companyto go to the moon.
And we had made this very fun game called DrawMy Thing.
It let people on our website or people onFacebook come together and just draw and guess.
(02:12):
It's, you know, Pictionary.
And I think in the games business, you thinkabout evergreen games, Scrabble, crossword
puzzle, poker, tic tac toe.
Like, nobody's like, remember when tic tac toewas peaked and then nobody played it?
Like, there's there are evergreen games.
Like, you can play them forever.
Other games you might have played when you werea kid or growing up, you're just like, that was
fun, then I moved on.
(02:34):
And so, you know, we were at this weird momentwhere made the game in the corner with two
people out of a 40 person company.
It was kind of like a side project a littlebit.
And, you know, you start running out of moneybasically.
Every day you spend money on rent, on people,and so forth.
And so as a person you start to think, okay, solike what happens if we don't raise money?
(02:58):
Like maybe we'll just run out of money.
Like, am I okay with that?
Am I gonna mortgage my house?
Am I gonna do everything possible?
You know, does everything happen for a reason?
Am I supposed to run out of money?
Like You're
a few months away from bankruptcy.
Right?
Yeah.
And, you know, at that point, you know, Iremember I had an an adviser and he had said to
me, just lay off everyone by five people andyou'll just make it through.
(03:22):
And so through this kind of like process ofiteration and simplification, I started to tap
into this game.
And as a kind of a second aside, I honestlyfeel like simplification is in general a
massive superpower that is very hard to dobecause it's hard to resist doing the opposite
of that.
If you think about when Google came out and itwas just a search box and everything was out.
(03:46):
If you think about sports where I spent a lotof my time, everyone is jealous of the NFL.
The NFL mostly plays games on Sunday.
You know, know they play Monday night and nowthey play Thursday and so forth, but it's
mostly on Sunday is when there's a game.
Every other sports league in the world, they'relike, when are they playing?
Tuesday, Wednesday, whatever?
Like, it's so simple and it's so easy tofollow, and attention is so diverted and so
(04:07):
scarce and so all over the place.
It's kinda like if you were to launch aclothing brand, like, you should have a hero
hoodie and like you should focus everyone'sattention on that.
Not like, I got these, I got pants, I gotshorts, I got t shirts, I got all these other
things like that when you first start.
And so like my only skill was simplificationand not being that good at games.
So by default I had to make the game that wasreally simple.
(04:28):
Long story short, we run we're kinda runningout of money.
We're thinking about, okay, so what happenswhen we close the door?
Like what happens to our lease?
Do we sell our office furniture?
And all this stuff.
We released the game.
We finally get to a point, and the game justabsolutely exploded.
And from that point, it went to the number onegame in the world for six months every single
(04:52):
day in over 50 countries, maybe even a hundredcountries.
It was downloaded 250,000,000 times, saved thecompany.
I end up selling the company for $200,000,000,and basically changed my life.
User retention is one of the most difficultthings to solve in SaaS.
You mastered it.
(05:12):
How are you able to master user retention?
At that time, the goal was like 5040.
You had to have 50% day one retention.
You had to have 30% day seven retention, andyou had to had 10% day 30 retention.
And if you couldn't hit those numbers, youbasically shouldn't release your game until you
do that.
And so a lot of people tested their game inCanada.
(05:33):
I was way too, like, bootleggy to be, like,sophisticated enough to be able to even know
how to test the game in Canada.
But the first was day one retention.
And I and and I've always thought of of that.
And even if people pitch me their business, thefirst thing I wanna do is look at the retention
chart.
The only time that's not true is if it's autility.
(05:53):
If it's a banking utility, like, as long as youhave their money in your bank account, you
don't they're gonna come back.
And so I think you really think aboutoptimizing that.
How much do you let them do on day one?
You know, it's it's kinda why in the classicsim game, whether you're playing a tower
defense game or a farming game, it's kindalike, oh, you built your tower and you planted.
(06:19):
Come back in thirty minutes and it's gonna beready and you can do this.
They they have a very in that kind of growingbuilding style of game, they literally think
about the clock and how to get to come back.
And all of a sudden, you have a push note of itit says, all your crops are ready.
Come back and harvest.
And once you've come back, you cross that 50%threshold and you're more likely to be engaged
in that game.
(06:39):
That's that's your best chance.
It's almost like that idea that the mostimportant retention number on YouTube is either
first thirty seconds or first three minutes.
And like everyone who's excellent at YouTubefocuses on optimizing that and if you can't get
70% retention in the first thirty to sixtyseconds, your video is just not gonna do well.
So who cares what the happens in minute ten,like you have to optimize to that.
(07:03):
Eric Alabes is one of our
guests from chess.com.
He said one of the things that he tried tofigure out with chess is he tried to make sure
that users could win their first game
Yes.
Because it was essential for getting people tocome back again and again and again.
You mentioned the Fortnite example, you lostpretty quickly but you still went back.
How do you create a balance between there whereyou might lose in the beginning, you might not,
(07:26):
but you still get users to come back and
Yeah.
Wanna
try That
that's actually a great question.
Eric is great.
We work with Chess.com.
That was a great episode.
He's a % correct in one v one games.
We found the same thing.
If if you lost your first game, whether it wascheckers, chess, whatever game you were
playing, 50% chance you wouldn't come back.
(07:50):
And in some of those games, it's easy to do.
You match you with somebody who's worse thanyou or some a a version of a person who you
think is live but actually is not live.
In the case of Fortnite, it wasn't a one v onegame.
I was thrown into essentially a sandbox or aworld experience.
(08:12):
And I'd say that's similar to like, I inviteyou over my house, we get in the driveway, and
I say I'll give you $10 if you can make a freethrow and you miss it, you don't give up,
you're just like oh shit, I should have stoodtwo things to the left.
Give me another chance, double or nothing,double or nothing.
And so I think in those cases, you're somotivated by what you could have done better.
(08:36):
Like I've never seen anyone miss one free throwand walk away from playing basketball.
Right?
Because you're just like, I shot too hard.
I shot too soft.
That's why people love golf.
Like, it's just that over and over again andagain.
So I just think each game has a differentrealm.
Now if if I was shooting a free throw and thenhoop was moving all the time and I wasn't
really able to calculate, I'd be like, this islike kind of some bullshit.
(08:59):
This is rigged.
I'm not gonna do it.
But you know, one v one game, you versusyourself or you thrown into, you know, a giant
battle.
If you play tag in second grade with all yourfriends, everyone's running around the field
and you're out, you're like put me back in.
You're not like I give up.
But there's something about the one v one whereyou lose and you're just like, I
guess I'm not good at this.
(09:19):
There was something about that game that endedup popping off.
It did really well, and it saved the company.
How did you end up selling the business fromstart to finish in six weeks for $200,000,000?
Okay.
A playbook.
So first of all, I would have sold the businessfor, like, at any time in the two years prior.
(09:41):
And I tried and I tried to take some meetings,but, you know, I think people may have said on
your podcast, other places, businesses are notsold.
They're bought.
So you as the business owner, you don't get tosell a business.
You are in a world where one day somebodyknocks on your door.
You know, you can try to accelerate that.
(10:02):
People who work for me say, when are we gonnasell overtime?
I said, when somebody wants to buy it.
Like, I don't control that.
Like, one day someone wakes up and says, fuck.
I need this thing.
And, like, you could have press articles andyou can put a for sale sticker on your
forehead, but it it doesn't really matter.
In this case, it was kind of like one big thingand several small things.
(10:27):
The big thing was clearly we just had a massivegame.
Right?
It's like, how do you sell Instagram?
You're the number one app.
Like, how do you sell WhatsApp?
A lot of fucking people use it all of a sudden.
How do you sell OMG pop?
You've got a game that's so big.
It's bigger than the next nine games in the AppStore combined.
And it was just this weird moment where thathappened at the same time as GDC, the game
(10:54):
developers conference.
So I spent years going to GDC.
Nobody cares who I am.
No one knows who OMG Pop is.
All of a sudden, I go, and they're nine gamingcompanies.
I can meet with them all in two hours.
We're all in San Francisco for the same thing.
I don't even go to the convention.
I go to this guy.
I go to this restaurant, this bar, this hotellobby.
So it's like, oh shit.
(11:15):
What's happening with this thing?
Oh, I can talk to this guy in twenty fourhours.
So that was just dumb luck.
You know, and listen, in that, there was acompany in Japan that offered tentatively far
more money than we sold it for, But they saidit'll take you twenty four hours to get to
Japan, and it'll take you twenty four hours toget back.
(11:35):
And if that deal doesn't work out, you're gonnalose all your other momentum.
And so that's a case in which, like, I couldhave gone there.
They could have been like, I don't really fuckwith Dan Porter.
And I could have lost a deal, could have comeback and I could have lost all the other deals.
So there's a timing, there's a just everythingcoming together, there's, you know, nobody buys
(11:56):
you because they meet with you the first time.
It's kind of like funding.
Everyone's like, I watched the Facebook movie.
He goes in, he says, it's Facebook, he comesout with a big check.
It never works.
I never got money from anybody I ever met thefirst time.
You know, they want to meet you again, theywant to see, they want to do this and that, and
so you have to have a little bit of thatprocess.
All the gaming companies were in California, Iwas in New York.
(12:18):
So luckily I was there, but then I would haveto fly back a lot.
And I'd say there was like, the other littlething is that at the end of the day, like,
companies don't buy other companies.
People make decisions who work at companies tobuy other companies.
I've been in a in an instance where I was aboutto sell my company and the person leading it at
(12:43):
the buyer all of a sudden quit or changed theirjob and the deal went away.
And you're just like, that doesn't make anysense if it's strategic for company a to buy
company b, but then the guy leading it leaves.
Like, that has nothing to do with it.
But the fact is it does.
It, like, completely has to do it.
You're totally at the whim of that.
I mean, I I like to you know, I you know, had acrazy experience at Overtime where I flew to
(13:09):
California, I met this guy who I was trying tomeet for like two years.
I was like if I can meet this guy, he's gonnatake everything I do in basketball to the next
level.
I met him with this like incredible meeting.
He had researched me, he knew everything aboutit.
We dapped up, he wants to be my partner.
(13:31):
I get on a plane home like three days later andKobe gets in a helicopter crash and dies.
And there's no deal.
And so like it was one person.
And so in the case Dan, how does this story sadstory relate to OMG Pop?
I had board members who had relationships withguys like Mark Pincus at Zynga and other guys
(13:56):
because they had invested in their companies,and they were able to accelerate behind the
scenes.
If I met a buyer and that buyer is like, Dan'skind of a dick, one of my board members could
go, he's under a lot of pressure.
He's not a dick.
He actually loves you and he wants to do thisdeal.
So, you know, like physical proximity, likeboard members who can go behind the scenes,
(14:17):
those things don't exist in a business schoolclass, but and the impact of people, but they
all make a difference.
A deal never gets done unless there's achampion at a company for a deal.
A company doesn't buy it.
A person buys it.
And you have to have a champion.
You have to know who that is.
You have to have enough of a relationship.
There's a lot of times people sell companiesbecause the company that bought them invested
(14:38):
four years ago and owned 10%.
Company really got to know the people.
And so it ends up as this whirlwind process.
We end up the beneficiary because when we aredoing good, everyone else is doing bad because
we steal all their users.
Like we don't steal their users, they just stopplaying all the other games.
So now you're, you know, EA or GRI, which isthe Japanese company or something else like
(15:03):
that or you're Zynga and all of a sudden you'reZynga and you're in your first quarter as a
public company and all you wanna do is tell howmany DAU you have and now it's 10% lower than
you were gonna say because they're all playingfucking damn Porter's game, there's an easy way
to solve that.
Like, who's this guy
that's taking all of her money?
Yeah.
And so, you you know, people will buy companiesbecause they think it will make their company
(15:26):
better, but they will also buy companiesbecause it solves problems for them.
So you need a lot of things to fall into placefrom location to people to defense to offense.
And in our case, all of those things fell intoplace really quickly, so quickly and so
urgently for the buyer that, as I've saidbefore, we had two law firms.
(15:47):
One worked, you know, hours one through twelveof the day, and the other worked hours thirteen
through twenty four of the day to get the dealdone.
And the deal got done in nine days.
Yeah.
The deal got done in nine days.
It was so crazy.
I remember I went to my lawyer's office and Isaid, can you just explain to me what these
terms mean as if I'm a child?
Because I'll be able to understand them.
(16:08):
I'll be able to give you an answer.
But I'm really tired and I'm not good at legalstuff.
And if you start talking about the rofer,cofer, this thing other thing like that, I'm
just gonna blank out.
And he's like, Dan, imagine, you know, that youhad a toy and somebody wanted your toy.
I was like, oh, yeah.
Fuck them.
They don't get that hard on my toys.
Like, Good.
Good.
Good.
It's all about simplification.
Yeah.
Exactly.
(16:28):
Exactly.
At the game developer conference, you said theyear after Draw Something went really viral.
Everybody knew you.
The year before, nobody knew you.
Yeah.
You changed the trajectory of your life in thetime span of twelve months.
Yeah.
For somebody listening to this who might bewanting to do the same and change the
trajectory of their life in 2025 in just ayear, what would be your advice to them on how
(16:49):
they should start doing it?
I'm gonna give you an answer that is an answer,but you're not gonna feel like it's an answer
until I get to the end of it.
Okay.
So I'm a professor at NYU, and I have lots ofdifferent kids with different majors in my
class, including a lot of Stern, which is theirbusiness school majors.
(17:10):
Student comes into my class and he says,professor, I'm really stressed.
And I say, oh, why are you so stressed?
Midterms, whatever.
He goes, no, it's it's interview season.
And, you know, I I wanna I wanna interview forthis finance job.
And, you know, they ask you, like, how manymarbles would fit in a plane?
Or like, people before TikTok, nobodyunderstood these questions.
(17:33):
Now these questions are all over TikTok orwhatever.
And he's like, I just feel like I feel like Ihave the answer to all of these questions.
And I think I'm gonna do well, but I'm notsure, but I'm nervous.
And I said to him, here's a problem, it's likeI'm actually gonna make it worse for you
because your perception of this whole scenariois wrong.
(17:55):
Because your idea is that if you are able toanswer the questions, you're gonna get the job.
So let me give you a a bigger picture.
Number one, have you taken all the same coursesas the other 30 people who are interviewing?
Yeah.
I mean, we all take the same courses at CERN.
That's what we do.
Do you have the same GPA as they do?
Yeah.
More or less, we all get As.
(18:17):
Can you all answer the question?
He's like, yeah.
I'm like, then why are they choosing you?
And he's like, oh fuck.
I just assumed that if I got the a and Ianswered the question, I'd get the job.
I was like, there's nothing different than you.
You're focused on the wrong thing aboutdifferentiation.
Right?
(18:37):
There's no different.
They're like today I interviewed 10 guys whoare 19 years old who all gave me the same
answer.
Right?
So who are they going to hire?
And he's like I don't know.
Who are they going to hire?
I said they're going to hire the one they likebetter because just like in my example of you
know who buys you not a company but a personwho hires you, you're to walk in a room in the
(19:02):
first thirty seconds they're gonna kind of belike I kind of fuck with this guy or like this
guy's kind of fucking annoying even though hecan answer the questions or what.
It's not a meritocracy like people are biased.
So your job rather than focusing on that is twothings.
Number one, try to figure out who yourinterviewer is and try to connect with them.
I heard a story about one of my students whowas a B student but after the interview he's
(19:28):
waiting with the guy from Goldman and it'sraining He says to the guy, hey, I have an
umbrella.
Can I walk you to Subway?
And he gets the job.
Is that fair?
Did he study more?
Whatever.
But people make those decisions.
I said, number two, give me something about youthat makes you interesting or different and
don't give it to me as a fact, give it to me asa story.
(19:49):
Right?
And so, you know, I always say this is like youput on like your skills section on your like
resume like proficient in Microsoft Word.
I'm like, you and every fucking person on theplat like you just wasted 20 letters telling me
that.
It's like proficient in Google Docs.
Yeah.
You, my grandmother, and everybody else.
Who the fuck cares?
You put something like heliskiing on there orwhatever and somebody's like, you heli ski?
(20:14):
And you're like, yeah.
What's the craziest thing that ever happened toyou?
Bro, one time a helicopter dropped me and Iwent face down.
I thought I was gonna die.
And you're like, that guy's a fucking killer.
I wanna hire him.
It's like, give me something and then tell me astory around that because people remember
stories.
It's like, why do you want to work at Goldman?
Well shit.
(20:34):
One day I, you know, I was walking by thisbuilding and I looked up and I saw these people
coming out and I said to this guy, what is thisand where do you work?
And I went home and I read the whole story andI just like in my head, I was like, in four
years, that's where I'm gonna work.
And they'd be like, holy shit.
Like and the next guy comes in and he says, Ihave an a.
I took intro to Black Scholes option theory,and I can answer your questions.
(20:56):
What's the difference?
You just told him a story and you had that.
So if you wanna change your life, you have tounderstand it's just not about answering the
same questions everyone else is.
And that differentiation also, if you can wrapthat into an insanely compelling story, even if
you rehearse that or whatever, that's gonnamake a difference.
And like you said with stories, the best onesare the most shareable.
Like even at looking at Instagram's Instagramreels
(21:19):
Yeah.
The most popular one has the most popularstories have the most shares.
Yeah.
So people like to stare stories that theyresonate with and others resonate with.
I like to say like in the nineties, I built theadmissions system for Teach for America where
where I worked.
And eventually, became the president of Teachfor America when I was 27 years old.
(21:40):
And so I probably interviewed 3,000 people overthe course of several years.
Like, how do you do that?
You go to a college campus, you interview 12people a day every single day.
Now the first person, you're like, this personis amazing.
I'm always gonna remember this person.
I think they're gonna get in.
I I have to tell you, by the time you get toeleventh person, you have no idea who the fuck
the first person was.
(22:01):
You're kinda sitting there with your partnerand you're like, don't want the glasses?
I kinda remember.
12 people come in, one person tells you a storea story about being locked out of their car in
the middle of the night or whatever.
You get to the end, all 12 people are blur, andtheir your partner goes, you know that kid who
got locked out of his car?
(22:21):
You're like, that kid's a fucking killer.
We're taking that kid.
Like, that that's that's how you remember.
So after you sold the business
Yeah.
You could have kept a bunch of money foryourself, but you didn't.
You actually went to the Apple store in Sohoand bought a hundred thousand dollars worth of
iPads.
Why'd you do that?
Well, were a couple things I did.
I'm a bad capitalist.
(22:41):
I'm not like you're never gonna, like no one'sever gonna listen to podcasts with me about how
to make a lot of money because I'm interestedin, like, making things.
Like, short, I like money.
Like, if you were to give me a million dollarsnow, I'd say yes.
But it's not I'm not about optimizing myreturns over other people.
So three things happened.
Number one, when you close when you close atransaction, the company that buys you gets the
(23:08):
money in the bank account.
I was like, let's fucking spend the money inthe bank account.
So I went and I bought every single person aniPad.
We somehow over the course of several creditcards and everything else, we spent all the
money in our bank account.
Why?
Because it's just irresponsible and recklessand why the fuck not?
Like, if you can't have a wild time, why do it?
(23:31):
I was like, this credit card would get turneddown.
This credit they used to love me at the SohoApple store when I used to come in all the
time.
And I think somebody told me last year theywere like, yo, still have that iPad from 2012.
The second thing that I did was there were abunch of people who as we were kind of winding
(23:53):
down, I furloughed or I laid off, and theywould have gotten nothing from the deal.
I hired them back without necessarily companyor board approval in the last seventy two hours
before the deal so that they would be employeesand they would make all the money from their
stock options.
And the third is that the buyer gave me severalmillion dollars of cash in the deal as like a
(24:22):
plus up that I could have kept all for myself.
And instead, I gave it to all the people,including some of the people who had taken cash
over stock options because they had kids orother things like that.
Because to me in that moment when you havewhatever that is, juice, power, influence, it's
(24:44):
way more life changing to give it to otherpeople and to change their life than to just
stick it in your bank account.
And you've worked with somebody knew.
Like, I never told anybody about this, but oneperson found out and told some reporter and
wrote an article about it.
So I would have been cool if nobody had everknown that.
Like, to me, it was just it was just like Iwould have wanted somebody to do that for me.
(25:09):
Like, it just
Different than filming yourself and be like,hey, I'm giving this cashew
a thousand was just I don't know.
It was like the right thing to do, but it Ijust didn't think
about it.
It was just instinct.
And you've also worked with some of the mostaccomplished business leaders in the world, two
of which are Richard Branson and R.
Emanuel from Endeavor.
(25:30):
What are some of the key things that youlearned from them that you took with you when
founding Overtime?
They're both interpersonally extremelycharismatic individuals.
Like like, you just know.
I I remember at some point when I worked atTeach for America, I met Bill Clinton in the
nineties.
Maybe he was president at that point, think.
(25:52):
Some event or whatever.
And I remember I shook his hand, and I waslike, wow.
That was the best sex I ever had.
Like, it was just like you shook his hand andyou're like, this guy's a fucking rock star.
Like, I know subsequently he's definitely not.
But he's just you know, personally, he'sincredibly charismatic, and both of them are in
different ways.
And I will say that it's a lot it's a lot moreeffective and fun to work for a company that's
(26:20):
led by a guy who's got a lot of charismabecause you look at that guy and you go, yeah.
There's a reason that guy's a fucking CEO.
Not like that guy was next up and he got thejob.
I would say from from Richard, he just had avery articulated sense of brand, and he created
really this very powerful idea of challengerbrand.
And it was like, my brand is always the onethat kind of pokes in the eye of the big
(26:47):
company.
Everything we do that defines our brand isabout being a challenger brand.
If we're gonna be an airline, we're gonnaposition British Airways as super stuffy and
we're gonna be rock and roll.
If we're a record company, we're gonna do crazywild stunts and position everyone else as
corporate.
And people talk about brand all the time, butin a way, if you're really good at brand you
(27:11):
should have an adjective in front of it, andfor that it was challenger brand.
And it was so effective that the mentality ofpeople every time Virgin would start a new
business everyone would be like, let's go,we're gonna fucking take them down.
So it worked not just for the consumer, but itworked for the people in the company.
In terms of Ari, if Ari reads an article if Arilistens to a podcast and somebody's interesting
(27:38):
on that podcast, he will literally call them upand say, come in the office.
I'd love to meet you, and I'll ask them ahundred questions.
Like, I I learn by listening to podcasts,watching YouTube videos.
I read a lot of books.
Ari is, like, not just charismatic, but he he'salways learning about the world.
But he's an agent, so in a way he does itthrough people.
(27:59):
And so his network is huge, but he might callsomebody up who works for him and says, I wanna
talk to that person and I wanna know aboutthis.
And I think most people are in a box in theirlane, and I'd say he's really not.
And I'd say the second thing about Ari andDavid Stern, the former NBA commissioner who I
(28:22):
had the great honor with of working with fortwo years was very similar.
He's just very funny, and so he just disarmsyou.
So Stern would say to me, I'd come to ameeting, I'd tell commissioner, we're thinking
about doing this, we're gonna do that andwhatever.
And he'd look at me and say, listen Dan, I knowyou're really good at fundraising, but are you
(28:44):
actually good at anything else?
But it was funny and like Ari was in that sameway and it's like sometimes you can communicate
a point in this kind of very shticky humorthat's very effective and he's very very
talented at that.
While you were in meetings with Ari, you wouldalso be in meetings with professional sports
leagues.
(29:04):
And they would
tell you things behind closed doors that a lotof people didn't know about the industry.
What were they telling you and how did thatlead to the creation of Overtime?
Endeavor worked with a lot of the differentsports leagues.
I didn't work in Hollywood.
I worked in New York where I lived and where mykids went to school.
And all the sports leagues headquarters are inNew York.
(29:25):
So I I would go there and we would havestrategy meetings or they'd be like, we want
more female fans.
And I was like, I have a plan for you.
Twelve years in the future, have a tight end.
Date Taylor Swift, and you'll get female fans.
And put it on the camera on the big screenevery single team lead.
And then crazy enough, twelve years later, ithappened.
Travis Kelce was only in middle school at thattime.
(29:49):
And so basically at that time, you know, and Iappreciate the layup and the setup for my
answer.
I mean they basically all told me in 2014,like, we're just worried that, like, people
aren't watching TV anymore and that, like, thenext generation of sports fans isn't gonna
consume sports on TV.
And you think about that now ten years later,and it's like they're beyond right.
(30:14):
Right?
First of all, less than 50% of people inAmerica have cable, and at some point that was
80% to 90%.
You know, the amount of know, the number onestreaming platform in the world on connected TV
by hours spent is YouTube.
This is not television.
You know, Jake Paul, Mike Tyson fought onNetflix, you know, which is a streamer.
(30:40):
And so they were massively, massively right.
And for them, the sports business went throughthree stages.
One stage, it's a live event business.
That's why there's 30 teams in 30 markets.
You know?
You made all your money because people parkedand they bought hot dogs and they bought beer
and they bought tickets and it was a live eventbusiness.
(31:02):
All of a sudden, football and basketball andbaseball over time with cable television and
the Internet became media businesses.
And you could watch any game anywhere.
I mean, when I was a kid, if I was a I'm aPhiladelphia Eagles fan.
If I wasn't at home in Philadelphia, I didn'twatch the game.
Like, this just wasn't possible.
I'd be like, could you put a VCR tape?
(31:22):
And when I come home, I'll watch it.
And once they became media businesses, it waymore mattered the number you're making way more
money based on people who watched than peoplewho came to the game.
And if you're about to say a whole generationof people are either on their phones, you know,
(31:43):
playing video games, they're not watching TV,that's deadly.
And still today, as big as professional sportsare and as successful and run by highly, highly
smart people, you know, the average age ofevery sports league in America is 40 to 50
years old.
And the the the kind of wrinkle is that youmight be like, come on, Dan.
(32:07):
I love sports.
Every day I meet somebody who's 20 years oldand they're like, I love sports.
I love LeBron.
I love this.
I love that.
I was like, do you watch the games?
No.
No.
No.
I don't watch the games.
So you're a fan, but you're actually not acustomer.
You're not watching.
You're not paying.
You're not buying.
You're not doing anything else like that.
And that was kind of the overall existentialproblem.
And I kinda walked out of those rooms and Ithought, fuck.
(32:30):
Somebody's gonna go out and capture the nextgeneration of sports fans.
Like, I just spent three years representingsome of the biggest YouTubers and talent in the
world where all these people's attention are.
Like, that's a business opportunity.
Maybe it'll be me.
And it turned out to be me.
Me, meaning my company and everyone who worksthere.
And you and over time are a master atstorytelling.
(32:54):
What have you learned about what makes storiesgo viral?
One of the key rules of storytelling is figureout what the end of the story is and work
backwards from there as know as opposed to likelet me start, let me set the setting, let me do
all these other things like that because allstories are trying to get to an moment, right?
(33:16):
And that moment is the moment where you say oh,shit.
I learned something, changed my life, I feltsomething.
And everything else is about mowing the lawn,so to speak, to be able to get there.
And if you wait too long, nobody gets there.
And if you give too much away in the beginning,but it's about the reveal or the moment and
(33:40):
it's about understanding curiosity in thebeginning.
And it's also understanding that people cyclethrough that.
The best writers of books, especially ones youbuy in the airport, every single the last three
sentences on every page are literally designedbased on the physical page to make you turn the
next page.
(34:00):
And then she opened the door.
I'm gonna put the book down see what I
what what what you know?
You mentioned skipping the starting with thebackground to just getting straight to the
endpoint.
Yeah.
I noticed Not straight to the endpoint, butworking backwards from the endpoint instead of
forwards from what you think the beginning is.
So we noticed something similar with our shows.
(34:22):
We used to be start with the early context ofthe guest, so maybe we would jump straight into
their childhood and then like twenty minutesinto the conversation we're like, hey, let's
get into what you're doing now.
But people clicked to get into what they'redoing now and you can get to the background but
you should Yeah.
Always start to with that first.
A story is not a paper that you write in highschool where you're like, before I talk about
(34:45):
the Declaration of Independence, let's talkabout the Boston Tea Party.
Because you're and I always say to my studentswhen they do presentations or whatever, I'm
like, this isn't a fucking book report.
Like, just get like, get to the shit.
Like, you're not required to do all that otherstuff.
If it's a paper about the declaration ofindependence, maybe you are.
(35:06):
One non consensus thing that you do at overtimeis you won't hire anyone who has an MBA.
Why is that?
There's a couple reasons.
Number one, most people who get an MBA are riskaverse, that's why they're getting the MBA.
I don't want risk averse people who are tryingto max minimize the things that can go wrong
and maximize that.
Number two, most people who study for an MBAare trained in a very narrow thought pattern.
(35:35):
There's never there are no nobody goes tobusiness school and walks out a divergent
thinker or like a a totally against the grainthinker.
Right?
It's like you take a bunch of courses and youthink about, you know, kind of road that gets
an hour and hour and hour until you get yourdegree and you come out.
(35:56):
Businesses succeed because MBAs train peoplefor conventional businesses.
So if I'm in a conventional business of sellinghammers and nails, I need really good operators
who are gonna expand my margin and do all thoseother things.
I'm not in those businesses.
I'm in the business like, oh fuck, we gottamake something out of nothing.
Like I don't need an operator for that, I needsomebody who's like, I got a crazy idea.
(36:16):
Nobody comes out of business school and islike, I got a crazy idea.
And I think number three, and this is one thatI found more, is that people who go to business
school and graduate become obsessed with howmuch money their classmates are making and what
titles their classmates have, and so they'reconstantly optimizing around that.
So the only employees I've ever had who areconstantly, like, interviewing for other jobs
(36:41):
and do whatever are only MBAs.
I think if you do have something that you'rereally passionate about and like, yes, I really
wanna do this, you just go do it because itdrives you crazy and you wouldn't be able to
sleep and you wouldn't get the MBA.
Yeah.
It's the same thing as saying, like, if youlook at the hundred most successful YouTubers,
none of them went to film school.
But you might say, oh, logically, well, youshould go study video and film if you wanna be
(37:05):
successful on YouTube.
But the whole point of YouTube is you're makingexactly the opposite of television, so you
actually need crazy out of the box thinking.
And the whole thing about startups is you needcrazy out of the box thinking, so why would you
hire somebody who literally was just all aboutcrazy in the box thinking?
Now listen, there are always exceptions tothat.
You can't paint a broad brush stroke.
(37:25):
But if you're trying to optimize on the wholefor risk takers and creative thinking and
people are gonna be focused on what they do, myrecommendation would be don't hire MBAs.
And all the time, like, investors will say, oh,I've got this great guy for you.
He's got a Harvard MBA.
He worked at McKinsey.
He worked at this big corporate job.
And I'm like, this is literally the opposite ofanyone I would ever ever hire.
(37:48):
You should be like, I got this guy for you.
He lives in a box under a bridge, but he's sofucking creative and he's got a massive chip on
his shoulder because he felt like he got passedover.
I'm like, oh, that's the guy I gotta talk to.
The chips on the shoulder are the big one.
Couple of closing questions before we wrap itup here.
One, what's the best piece of advice you'veever received?
(38:08):
I had like a mentor of mine when I was in mytwenties and I worked in nonprofit and he was a
high level investment guy.
And he said to me, Dan, they always say yougotta crawl before you walk, and you gotta walk
(38:28):
before you run.
And if you do that and you listen to thatadvice, you spend your whole fucking life
crawling.
And I always thought about that, but it's adangerous piece of advice because in certain
circumstances or certain people, you shouldcrawl before you walk.
If you said to me, Dan, I have a hundredmillion dollars, you look like you're smart at
(38:51):
investments, will you manage them?
It'd be a bad idea if I just ran.
I'd probably lose all your money in Nvidia inlike five minutes.
And so it's not a universal truth, but thereare moments when you just have to run.
And I can give you one specific example.
When Teach for America was started by WendyKopp and then who started and then I joined.
(39:16):
All of, you know, and it was this program thatrecruited people to teach in public schools.
All of the, I would say investors, but donors,you know, funding people said, Wendy, you
should take 50 people.
Like, you'll figure out how the program works.
You'll be able to serve them or whatever.
And Wendy said, if I take 50 people, no onewill ever care about Teach for America.
(39:38):
So we took 500 people.
Disaster.
Like, disaster.
But in two years, we're on the front page ofNew York Times.
She's like, I don't wanna crawl.
I wanna run.
So in in the right circumstance with the rightperson, fuck crawling.
Which one rule you live by that most peopledon't?
(39:58):
I got this one from a guy who just passed away,Dick Parsons, and he said to me, you know, in a
negotiation, you always think there's a winnerand there's a loser, and, you know, there's
this whole kind of joke if you don't know whothe fool is in a deal, it's you.
But he said, to me, doing a deal, whether it'shiring someone or whether it's doing a billion
(40:25):
dollar deal, you always should leave a littlebit on the table because you never know who
you're gonna do business with again.
And everything that we do from buying a houseto negotiating a salary in crisis, you're just
like conventional wisdom is maximize, maximize,fuck over the other side, here's how you get
(40:45):
what you want and whatever.
And I think if you can relax a little bit andjust be like, listen, sometimes they're gonna
get a little bit too, like, I'm gonna get alower price.
Like, I sometimes when I raise money, I take alower valuation because I want my investors to
be happy and also I wanna work with them atsome other company.
And so this idea that if you leave a little biton the table in the long term, it's more
(41:09):
advantageous to you, I think is a nonconventional idea.
That's one of the things I've noticed fromstudying a lot of really successful people is
that most successful people are not highlytransactional.
They're not like, okay, what am I gonna get inexchange for this intro or what am I gonna get
in exchange for giving you this?
They're just like, okay, let me just help youas much as I possibly can and whatever comes
(41:31):
back on me comes back on me.
Yeah.
So And then last question
Is this another new one that you're gonna popon?
No, one this one's good, this one's normal.
Okay.
If I slid you over a phone and you could callyour 18, 20 year old self, would you call?
And if so, what would you say?
I definitely wouldn't call because, a, when Iwas 18 years old, I didn't wanna fucking listen
(41:56):
to advice from other people, especially oldversions of me.
Second of all, it like, the best advice is whatyou learn by living life.
Like, I could tell you, bro, always leave alittle bit on the table.
You're like, oh, got you, my guy, whatever.
But that doesn't mean anything.
And then one day you're just like, you dosomething and you're just like, oh, shit.
(42:19):
I get it.
Like, advice is just words.
Action and how you do that.
And I think third is like I don't know.
I hate that question.
Like, as a personal against you, I just alwaysthink like I mean, who the fuck knows?
What the fuck do I know now?
What the fuck did I know then?
It's just kind of like like my advice is alwaysthe same, just get out there and fucking live
(42:44):
life and try shit and figure it out.
And like that's kinda what I was doing, sothat's kinda what I was saying.
And it's not like I learned so much in the lastforty years.
I did things that were right.
I made mistakes.
Maybe my 18 year old self should call my 58year old self and say, bro, what are you doing?
Like, you should be on an island.
(43:06):
You should be like
fucking acting.
So to me, I think that people look at thatquestion as if there's an answer and they can
use that answer.
And my answer is don't fucking make the phonecall.
We've had a I thought you
were gonna ask me, like, call the most famousperson on your phone and we're gonna make a
(43:28):
viral TikTok.
Do you wanna do it?
No.
Who is the most famous person on your phone?
Question.
I don't know.
There's a lot of different people.
I'll do mine and then you can do yours.
Probably MrBeast.
MrBeast?
Followed by maybe Quavo, followed by maybe abunch of NBA players.
He's big.
Mine's probably Mark Cuban.
(43:50):
Oh, that's good.
Yeah.
He was on our show a while back.
But, you know, the other thing is, is there any18 year old in the world that wants to listen
to advice?
I know you're, like, a freak of nature
and I'm probably the worst person to studybecause I'm, like, an n equals one.
I'm probably the outlier in the
data problem.
If every day you do a podcast and everyonegives you advice, how can you process all that
(44:10):
different advice?
You're like, well, Cuban told me to do this,but Porter told me to do that, but fucking
chess guy told me to do this.
I'm, oh, I'm paralyzed.
Part of it is that it does really well on juston retention.
Like, I'll I'll look at the retention graphfrom like the most viewed podcast which you can
now see from other videos.
And anytime it gets to the life advice portion,it always spikes every single time.
(44:32):
Because people think that you're gonna givethem an easy path to being successful by giving
them something and they're just gonna do it.
And you know what?
Because I'm a good storyteller, it comes back.
It's the same thing as I said.
It's just like, so what?
You can answer the banker questions, but itdoesn't mean you get the gig.
That's true.
The advice that you should get is the advicethat no one else gets because your whole job is
(44:56):
to stick out and to be different, and that'show you get ahead.
And if a million people are listening to myadvice and they all do the same thing, then
they're all just a bunch of robots interviewingfor the same jobs with the same answers.
I had the same thing.
I told a friend of mine who works with us who'salso at NYU, he's trying to get a job in
finance, banking.
(45:16):
He's like, hey, I'm applying to all these jobsand like nobody's I'm getting a couple
interviews here and there but nobody's sayingyes.
I'm like, because you look like everybody else.
Like, you have the same resume.
You're you're doing the exact same thingeverybody else is doing.
He's like, well, because everyone else is doingit.
Like, that's the problem.
Like Do
you know at at at NYU, they tell you to wear ablue blazer and a white open collared shirt
(45:39):
in your LinkedIn picture.
Okay.
I didn't know that.
So I said to somebody, why is all your LinkedInpictures the same?
They're like, that's what they told us to do.
I said, and you fucking listened to them?
You just walked off the cliff like a bunch ofsheep?
Because my other example of that is, I'll neverforget, like ten years ago you know when it was
like Infatuation and Eater and all these likewebsites, I went to Paris and I researched this
(46:00):
fucking cool restaurant and I went and therestaurant was amazing and I looked around and
I realized every single person in therestaurant was from New York and they all read
the same review.
And I was like, oh, if we're all reading thesame review going to the same restaurant, none
of us are getting an authentic experience.
That's true.
I wanna test my my question, the 20 year oldself question.
You wanna call mister beast and see what hewould say?
(46:22):
Mister beast, I think, is in Mexico right now.
Oh, he is?
For what
time is games or
whatever else like that.
What is he is he gonna
You probably say that was only five years ago.
Oh, that's true.
Right?
He's like in his mid twenties now?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, sounds good.
Well, thanks Dan for taking the time to jointhe show.
Appreciate it.
For having me.
We'll have a link to overtime.
I'm sure everyone knows it.
But it's in the episode description just incase.
(46:45):
For joining Dan.
Appreciate it.
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.