Andrew Yeung - How to build a million-dollar events company from scratch!

Networking game is that what you're trying to do is maximize the amount of loose ties you have around you. And so I think about it as like you have your core group, you have like friends, your family, and then you have like friends and acquaintances. And then in your third circle, the most outer bound of like your network, you have loose ties, which is people that, you know, you've spoken to maybe a few times and you have an idea of who they are and, and you have an idea of what they're looking for and they're someone that you can help. You know, you can lightly help. You should just be maximizing the amount of loose ties you have around you. And so what that means is like every week meet someone new and try to find a way to help them. Um, go to these events, you know, uh, maximize the idea of serendipity and reach out to new people virtually, in person.

Welcome to the Undefeated Underdogs Podcast, where I unpack and narrate stories of ambitious people who turn obstacles into opportunities. My goal for this podcast is to create a platform to narrate underdog stories and maybe play a small, teeny tiny role in inspiring you. I intend to highlight the underdog mentality and make authentic conversations with people who play the long game, take action with a chip on their shoulder, and convert obstacles into opportunities. Buckle up as I'll be bringing some authentic founders, VCs, community builders, and content creators who got underestimated their whole lives And yet they beat all the odds to become insanely successful. Now today I want to tell you a little bit about our awesome sponsor acquire.com. Selling a business is as tough as building a business. As someone who went through this process once, selling my own startup, I know the pain it takes to get to the end zone. This is where our sponsor shines. Imagine this, you're a founder who's built a solid SaaS product and acquired customers and generating consistent monthly revenue. The problem is you're not growing for, for whatever reason— lack of focus, lack of skill, or just plain lack of interest— and you feel stuck. What should you do? The story I'd like to hear is you buckle down, somehow reignited the fire, get past yourself and the clichés, and start working on your business rather than just in the business. You start building an audience, move out of your comfort zone to do sales and marketing, and in 6 months you triple your revenue. The reality isn't as simple. Situations may be different for every founder facing this crossroads, but too many times the story ends up being one of inaction and stagnation until the become business— the business becomes less valuable or worse. Worthless. If you find yourself here or your story is likely headed down a similar road, I offer you a third option. Consider selling your business on acquire.com. Capitalizing on the value of your time is a smart move. Acquire.com is free to list and they've helped hundreds of founders already. Go to try.acquire.com/sharath and see for yourself if this is the right option for you. Now let's get into today's episode. Business Insider dubbed my next guest as the Great Gatsby of startups. You know why? It's because he hosted thousands and thousands of events and brought more than 35,000 tech folks together, ranging from hosting mixer events to summits. Andrew Yang is a master at throwing incredibly well-organized parties for founders and startup operators. One thing I have to make— I have to tell you guys, I haven't been to an event Andrew hosted, but that's one of the things I have in my bucket list for 2025. Hopefully I'll make it. Andrew moved to the US as an immigrant in 2020, and briefly after a brief stint at Facebook and Google, he founded his events company, Five, generated millions of dollars in revenue, became a partner at Next Wave NYC, grew his personal brand on Twitter, LinkedIn. You know what, all this happened in the last 4 years. That's phenomenal. That's fucking phenomenal. For some reason, whenever someone talks about NYC, I don't know, Andrew, I always remember your name. He's that deep in NYC startup scene. It's going to be an interesting convo, awesome convo about community startups networking. Andrew, so glad to have you here. Welcome to the show. How are you feeling?

Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me. And thanks for doing such a kind intro.

No, you've done— see, offline, I've kind of telling you about it. It's so inspirational to see in the last 4 years, it's not a decade, it's just 4 years, you've done so much. So, you know, I had to like bring— I've been trying to bring you on the pod, like, you know, so glad it happened. 2025, kicking off the new year with this new episode. But right off the bat, I have a question. So It's a 2-part question. One, you moved to NYC in 2020. Why not Silicon Valley? If you were like into startups, why not SF versus NYC? One. Part 2 is why events out of all things in the ecosystem? You could have built products. You're a product lead, by the way. You're not like someone like, you know, in marketing or like sales. You have a deep knowledge of product, how it works. So yeah, very curiously, going back to like 4 years or even go back to like, you know, the passion of you entering into startups, like talk to me about those 2-part questions.

Yeah, so I've never, like, you know, startups wasn't always the most interesting thing for me. I didn't move to New York because I wanted to be, you know, in startups. I actually didn't even know what startups were. I didn't know what venture was. I didn't know what investing was. I didn't know what the idea of a 24-year-old VC meant. And so, my decision to move to New York was because I spent almost my entire life wanting to live in New York City. And so, I'd spent 18 years in China, in different parts of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Shanghai. And we would always just see New York City on the TV and on Broadway shows and like Frank Sinatra and like New York City just seemed like the American dream. And so, as someone who— Right. grew up in like the, you know, part of the world that could not be more different. I was aspiring. To me, moving to New York City would mean I would have made it. Mm-hmm. And so I moved here not to work in tech. I would have done anything. I would have done marketing. I would have done advertising. I used to work in advertising. So it wasn't driven, you know, by the idea of wanting to be in startups. Now I've been here for 4 years and it's like fulfilled. It's exceeded every single expectation I had, I've had of the city. And so that's why I'm so bullish on the city. And that's why I talk so much about my love for NYC and I tweet about it, which is why I think when people think about NYC, they associate my name with it. Second part of the question, why events? So I never wanted to build an events business. I never wanted even to be an entrepreneur. I started hosting meetups because I just needed to make friends and I had moved to the city. A lot of my friends had left and it was August of 2020 when everyone had left the city. There was a mass exodus. of New York City and everyone had left. And so there was nothing and all the bars and restaurants and all that stuff was shut down. And so I was like, how am I going to meet people? So I went on Reddit, I went on Twitter, I went on LinkedIn and I started messaging people to come out in person and to meet me in person outdoors at the time because of the lockdowns. And that eventually grew and, you know, over the next few years it just continued to scale and grow larger and larger. So what started as like a 15-person meetup turned into like 2,000 people at a party until there was almost like a turning point where companies were offering me money to put their logos on the wall and to be all over the event page.

Wow.

And that's when it became a business. I quit my job at Google and I just wanted to give it a shot, the entrepreneurship thing a shot. And that's how it played out.

I love that. I love the fact that it all happened by accident. It's not like you've planned or schemed. I love these stories whenever founders say about, hey, I stumbled upon out of curiosity, did something and it turned out to a business. That's, I think, the fantastic way to do entrepreneurship or chase entrepreneurship, in my opinion. So I'm so glad that that small itch of like making new friends is now looking back like that small itch has now become It's like, you know, it's a business, right? It's all not just benefiting you, but thousands of other founders and startup operators in the system. And I have one of the questions about like, let's definitely talk about events, a deep dive into like sponsorships and all, you know. But before that, one of the things that you talk a lot about as well is breaking into tech. And since you said it was never an intention even work at tech company like, you know, Facebook, the big, big tech. How did you get into, like, you know, how did you break into tech? Or what advice do you give for others to, like, do the same?

Yeah, you know, at the time I didn't have, you know, I didn't have the best pedigree. And so I didn't go to a top school necessarily. I didn't have, you know, the company I worked at before I got into tech isn't super well known within America. You know, it was a Canadian company. And so the only way I could break into tech was to do it through, they call it networking. And so what that meant is a lot of cold emailing, a lot of coffee chats, a lot of learning to speak the language of tech because I didn't come from tech and convincing the people that I could get in front of that I knew their world and I knew how to do the job. And not only did I know their world, but I could do their job better than everyone else that were applying for those jobs. And so that was my first taste of networking. It was— or sorry, my first taste of networking and brand building. It was expanding outside my sort of my inner circle at the time to build all these second and third degree networks so that I could get the job I really wanted. And I was never targeting just tech companies. I was looking at consulting and finance. Mm-hmm. I was looking at some startups, advertising, marketing. I told myself, like, I would've, you know, I think my number was like $60K. If I could make $60K a year with a job in New York City, I would be fine. And so I was going for everything under the sun that I thought I was semi-qualified to do.

Wow. Talk to me about networking. I mean, it's such a, you know, such a big topic. There've been books written about it. So what's your take on how one should approach networking in tech? Because it's, it's one of the reasons why you host parties and throw these events is to bring people together and so that they meet, they meet each other. So yeah, talk to me about what, what would you call like fundamentals of networking in your opinion?

Yeah, my perception and my approach behind networking has changed a lot in the last 4 years. I think it It means a different thing for when you're a tech professional, when you work at Google, or if you work at a startup, versus if you're building a company or if you're an investor. Networking game is different for all those people. But what is fundamentally very similar is that what you're trying to do is maximize the amount of loose ties you have around you. And so I think about it as like you have your core group, you have like friends, your family, and then you have like friends and acquaintances. And then in your third circle, the most outer bound of like your network, you have loose ties. Which is people that you've spoken to maybe a few times and you have an idea of who they are and you have an idea of what they're looking for and they're someone that you can help, you can lightly help. And I forgot what book I read, but success, early success in your career depends on the amount of loose ties you have. This is, I think, advice that generally applies to most people. Now, it doesn't apply to the 1% of founders. 1% of founders who are extraordinary and have sort of a rocket ship trajectory, guys like that, or women, men or women like that, you should focus on just building your company and your network. And as a result, you become a magnet for all the people you want to attract. But for everyone else, for most of the other people, you should just be maximizing the amount of loose ties you have around you. And so, what that means is every week, meet someone new and try to find a way to help them. Go to these events, you know, maximize the idea of serendipity and reach out to new people virtually, in person. And it's just, it's a good habit to just incorporate in your daily life.

I couldn't agree more because I think one of the things I did, partially what you said, is kind of show up and help others every week and repeat that as a consistent habit. Once you do that, people kind of know you by name. And that's one, that's where I say that You have to buy a small piece of real estate in people's mind by showing up and kind of like, you know, doing something for them. It's about them and less about you. And it's so interesting what you said about networking for founders is different from networking for operators and VCs. Yeah. Can you just like give a brief differentiation or the, even the approach, right? Like founders. Yeah. Like you said, They build, people will come, you know, kind of a thing. So yeah, I'll let you talk about how you, in the 4 years of you building network as a founder, as an operator, as like an outsider, now you're VC too. Like what's the biggest thing, biggest differentiating factor?

You know, as a founder, the whole, the entire success of your company and as a result, like your life, your life, you know, your company is your life will depend on your ability to focus on certain things. And so as a founder, You know, take away like the personal social component. Like some people network to make friends, like that's different. That's not professional relationship building. We're talking about professional relationship building. I think founders should focus purely in terms of networking, focus on meeting a few key groups of people. They should focus on meeting investors, especially if you're venture-backed, you're always fundraising. They should focus on meeting customers, talent, employees, vendors, people that can help you build your company. Maybe advisors. And so you should focus on these key groups because the success of your company and your career and almost like extrapolating that to your life will depend on your ability to focus. Now, if you're, you know, a tech professional and you work at like a company like Google, you know, the success of your career depends on other things. It doesn't purely depend on your ability to focus. You know, you could put in 30, 40 hours a week at a large corporation and do relatively well. don't have to kill yourself trying to succeed. And so what you want to do there is you want to maximize optionality and build relationships with people not only within your reporting chain, think of the higher-ups in which you report to, but also the people adjacent to that. And so the networking there is a little less focused and it's like, I want to network within the company, within my organization, but I also want to start networking with random Almost like random people around me that I think I could learn from down the road and I could potentially help and people working at companies that I find interesting. And so it's a little more like just kind of like throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. And then after the fact, you connect the dots and form a pattern versus as a founder, like you should be laser focused on the people you're spending time with.

And as a VC, any thoughts on VC networking?

VC networking—

Deal flow, be it deal flow, be it like, yeah.

Yeah, you know, I think VC networking is sort of, you know, you're just, it depends what level of VC you are. And so at the highest level, you're spending, you're trying to build relationships with your investors, which is your LPs. You are building relationships with founders. But then I think for VCs is if you work at a prominent VC, most of it is inbound. And so what you need to work on is building reputation, less so throwing stuff out into the universe and seeing what sticks. And I think it's— and there's many ways to build that reputation. Like, writing is one. You don't necessarily have to be a socialite. You have, but you do have to be— there's a word I like called a solitary socialite, which is like you're always hyperconnected digitally, but physically you could be, you know, you don't always have to be in a room with other people.

Interesting.

If you look at a lot of the legendary VCs, a lot of them are just like really prolific writers. The younger VCs, of course, are out and about and at every single event. But for VCs, it's also fairly focused. It's like meeting founders and then, you know, when it comes, you know, when the time is right, their LPs as well.

Yeah. One, yeah, I couldn't agree more because I think one of my favorite VCs who's also a founder is Ryan Hoover, who writes incredible things about startups and also like life, like personally, like how he's going through, you know, stuff and shares everything. One last question about networking. You've built such an incredible network in the last 4 years. And let's say hypothetically, if you were to start again, you just arrived to New York City 2025, first week of January, how would you build a network in this day and age?

How would I build a network? Honestly, I would do the same thing over. You know, in terms of like network building, I think I've— and I can talk about it, but I think I've done it right and I've done it quickly. In terms of building a business, Now, if I knew from day one I wanted to build a business, it would've looked very different.

Hmm.

I think we would probably be 10 times bigger. Granted, I only started 12 months ago, but if I was looking to build my network in New York and I had just moved here, I would do 2 things. One, I would reach out to people online and start doing those unscalable one-on-ones. And with every single person I meet, I would try to understand what their goals are and what is one way I can help them. And then I would take that back and find a way to provide them with some value, whether they're looking for an introduction or a resource or some advice. I would find a way to help them and keep doing that over time. And then I would go to large events and have those mini conversations with each person. And ultimately, you want to understand how you can help. You want to build as much goodwill as possible, and that's how you build your reputation. After you've done a ton of that, let's say you do that every week, you do that with one person. By the end of the year, 52 people, you would have helped 52 people. And the word of mouth extends beyond that. So if each person tells 3 people about you, then you're impacting over 150 people. And so it's sort of building that goodwill and spreading that word of mouth. And that's how you build your personal brand.

I love that. Speaking about reaching out, Kind of quickly glimpsed a post. By the way, I don't have Business Insider, so I didn't read the full thing. That's why I'm using my curiosity. You cold DM'd Mark Cuban. That's insane. And he responded. So talk to me about the way you approach cold reaching out to folks. It's kind of trying to network, trying to like how you present yourself, trying to like build a personal brand as well indoors, right? Like in these DMs. So talk to me about the philosophy of cold outreach in your opinion.

I think most people will spend their entire career and their entire life just within the boundaries of their comfort zone, their networking comfort zone. And so if you do that, you're never going to meet anyone extraordinary. You're never going to meet anyone that you otherwise never would have the chance to meet unless you cold emailed someone. And so if I think about my network is I have a lot of people in tech and consulting and finance, and then I have their extensions, which is maybe a little more tech or a little better tech or whatever. But I would have never had the chance to meet the CTO of Facebook or someone like the founder of a company like Foursquare or Duolingo. These are all companies that I admired a ton growing up. And the only way you get access to stuff like that is if you put yourself out there and you send them a note or you ask for introduction or you do something remarkable that attracts their attention. And so I guess it depends what your life goals are. For me, it was like I wanted to see how some of the most extraordinary people in the world think, and I want to learn from them and I want to be inspired by them. And so for me, it makes sense to email, send those emails. But for most people, they don't— maybe I shouldn't say most, but for a lot of people, it doesn't— they don't care. Yeah. They probably just care about getting promoted quicker or they care about making a bit more money, but there's no reason for them to reach out to, let's say, Sam Altman, for example. So it kind of depends on your goals. I think cold email makes a lot of sense. I think for most people, you should do it ahead of time. And there's this idea of career cushioning, which is you build your network before you need it. But there's no need to email the Mark Cubans of the world unless you're incredibly ambitious.

And do you have a format you want to share? You've done probably thousands of cold DMs. Did you find one of those templates that you've invented that really worked well for you you want to share with us?

Yeah, I have it on my blog. It's www.andrew.today. And so the best format goes something like this. You start with something that hooks their attention. Because every email is sent with like, hey X, right? So you start with something that hooks their attention and then you sort of like briefly introduce who you are and you try to make it as interesting and compelling as possible in relation to them. And then you share maybe like a compliment. That's the third thing, like a very genuine compliment. And then after that you have an ask. Like every cold email should come with an ask unless you just want to say thank you. But quite often that's not the case. You have an ask. And that ask is, it should be very specific. It should be 15 minutes of your time, or like, I want you to speak on my podcast, or I want you to speak at my event. And then you end with gratitude. And those 4 or 5 components is all you need. But it takes practice to nail all those things down, and it takes a lot of skill to get that down into, let's say, the LinkedIn connection request limit, which is, I think, 200 words. But really, that's all you need. It's very simple. It's also website so I can share. Feel free to share with everyone else after.

Absolutely. We'll plug it in the show notes. I kind of did the same thing with you if you see the cold DM as well. I've been cold DMing so many people. One of my Mark Cuban moments is I cold DM Naval Ravikant, like 2021, 2020-ish. I don't remember exactly when. Or 2018, I don't remember. It's like I'm building a project, exactly what you said. This is me, fan, kind words. He's been such an inspiration. How to Get Rich is phenomenal thread. And then I'm working on something for him. It's like kind of like that value component. And then like specific ask is, hey, what are your thoughts? Like, would you be interested in, you know, looking at this? It's just to my surprise, he replied back in 4 minutes. I still have that screenshot. It's insane. It's one of those insane moments, like, you know, but no, I think what you said is absolutely true. Every cold outreach kind of that strategy depends on what you really want, you know, that changes over time. And thanks for sharing, like, you know, that format and we definitely put it in the show notes. So talk to me about, let's talk about the big thing, events. Right. So it's not like you said, it's an accident. It's not something that you did intentionally, like, hey, I want to build a business around. So I'm assuming that you've already hosted some events while you're working like 9 to 5 at Facebook, Google. So one of the questions I had is, you're an immigrant, you moved to the US. When I moved, it was like a cultural shock to me. You know, I'm from India. Everything is different in India. It's quite opposite to, you know, people are more open, et cetera, et cetera. So how did you navigate that, the cultural shock, if you have any, versus— and also you're new, you haven't had any background in tech, there is nothing to show, there is no proof of work. So all this happened. How did you navigate like all of these obstacles as an immigrant and build confidence? More than confidence, I would say courage to like put yourself out. What was like your mindset back then?

I wanted to reinvent myself when I moved to America. And so I lived in Canada for about 7 years. years before this, and I was between New York and China. And I, you know, when I was in Canada, I wasn't very fulfilled, and I just wasn't very satisfied with where I was in terms of personal development and, you know, career. And so when I moved to New York, and a lot was happening at the time, it was like COVID, you know, like all that shit was happening.

Yeah. And,

you know, with that, it comes with a lot of self-reflection and like, call it reinvention. And I realized the person, the type of person I wanted to be and moving into New York City. And so, when I got the job offer to move to New York City, I decided to reinvent myself. And I decided to not have any fear and just put myself out there and do all these and try all these things. And I didn't really think twice. There was no jitters. I think when you're on a mission, just nothing else matters. And culturally, it was hard. Culturally, it's— There are things I'm still working on now, which is like how you influence people, how you speak, how you communicate, how you incentivize people. And I think back to earlier when I first moved here, it was trying to learn the game, trying to learn the way America and tech worked, and trying to fit myself into that mold. And throughout my entire life, I had I've been a great chameleon. I call it chameleon because chameleons change their colors to reflect

the

other. Yep, they adapt. They adapt. And I was doing a lot of that and I was very good at that because I lived in so many different countries, as I'm sure many other immigrants are. You're very good at like listening and observing and then adapting yourself to fit these circumstances. And I'd done that. I'd done that for like the first 2, 3 years I was in America. I'd just done that. And so I think that's why I got along with people. And that's why a lot of people— I had— I made a lot of friends and I never pissed anyone off. But that also came at a cost. You know, it came at a cost of, let's call it like self-dignity and the pride of being, you know, from, from, from the East. And, and the— and, you know, I paid the price of like losing who I authentically was. And so in the last few years, in the last year or two, I made a shift and I'm like, I'm going to stop playing everyone else's game and I'm going to do my own thing and change, just change the playbook, at least for me. And then maybe along the way I'll inspire someone else to, especially a lot of the immigrants. And you're familiar, you're very familiar with the idea of underdog, especially for the underdogs out there. Yeah. And so that's what led to me doing more, like putting myself on stage and interviewing people and speaking out about the power of building your career and your personal brand and building community. But there's never like a fear. There's never like, I'm like, I don't, you know, because there's never an option. I never felt like there was an option. Like as an immigrant in America, you don't really have options. You have to do it. You have to succeed or else. Right. If I don't build this company well, I get deported because the visa is no longer valid. If I don't do a good job at Google or Facebook, you get laid off, you get fired, and then you lose your H-1B. If you don't succeed at building a community in America, you become the loneliest person in the room. And so there's no option. You just go and there's no fear. You just go and do it.

Yeah. Necessity is the mother of invention. It's so true in every underdog's life. You've mentioned a couple of things which are very interesting. I just want to kind of follow up. One, you keep on telling me about The tech, the jargon, the mold, and you're fitting into the mold. What did you find? Like, what is that unique insight you found in the last 4 years that kind of like, it's kind of like an aha moment. Yeah, that's so weird that nobody else found.

In terms of American culture?

Culture, like tech, you kind of like, you figured out and you kind of now Riding that wave. You figured out there is a wave and you're kind of riding on top of it, right? That's how, that's how you made business. That's how you made meeting people, like building relationships. What is that unique insight that clicked in your mind? Like, yeah, I figured it out. I figured out the path to became like who you are right now from 4 years.

You know, I think I've learned that The same things drive almost every single human. And so that insight has helped me connect and helped me build relationships and helped me influence people that I never thought I would have the opportunity to influence. I think everyone, but for the most part, everyone is driven by the same things and everyone is speaking, metaphorically speaking, the same language and everyone is seeking the same things for their life and their career. And Maybe it's very intuitive to many. It wasn't to me. I thought I'd never met the— let's say I have a friend who is the co-founder of a company that today is worth over $70 billion. And I would imagine he was completely different than who I am or who I was. But no, we all want the same things and they're very simple things that everybody knows. And so once you understand those things, you understand how you can help them and you understand how you can build a relationship with them and influence them because everybody really just wants the same things. And that was an insight that unlocked everything. It helped me connect with everyone, helped me influence everybody, helped me sell, helped me help people. So yeah, it's a very simple human insight.

Yeah, what is like— I'm curious, what are those things that everybody wants? I'm just curious. What did you discover? I can't— I kind of— everybody has their own version of the same things that some people say basic needs. Everybody wants to put food on the table, have a roof, wear nice clothes. Apart from the basic necessities or the needs, I know like some people, they just crave and drive to make money, period. That's it. Like more money, more money, more money. Money is not the right word. I would say wealth. Let's make wealth, wealth, wealth. So yeah, talk to me about like, what are the commonalities that you found that you've used again and again and again to help yourself build?

You know, that's exactly it. Like everybody wants a certain amount of money. Everybody wants to be recognized. Everybody wants to be cool. Everybody wants a life partner. Everybody wants to feel important. Everyone wants to feel valued. I would say those are the universal things. And then beyond that, you start realizing, you start putting people into different buckets and categories and forming personas. And so there's a persona of person that loves being on stage, and it's incredibly easy to sell to someone like that because you know exactly what they want. They want to be in front of as many people as possible, physically or digitally. And then there's another type of persona who wants to be almost like the opposite of that. They want to be known as a niche person and they don't want to be famous. They don't want all the recognition, but they want a small amount of deep recognition from a small amount of people. They want to be the subject matter expert in a few spaces. And then you have people who want to appear incredibly smart and talented. And then you have all these other personas. And so I think I'm 29, I'd say I've met more people than the average person just from what I do. And at this point, I think I've almost formed all the buckets of people I could meet. And I understand the persona and I understand what drives them. Now, granted that these personas evolve over time, and so I don't know a large group of people that have kids and as much as I know people who are just getting started in their careers, but these mental models really easy when you're looking to connect with people. You sort of like, um, you know, put them into buckets and that helps you understand them.

I love that. It's— I think you should, you should create like a, you know, like a, like a table of these personas. You know, I would love to see someday, you know, because you're right. I feel it'd be cool to see, you know, from your perspective. You also mentioned about kind of, you know, you want to reshape yourself in You know, give an opportunity to build a playbook for people like you, immigrants who move to the US, struggle, hustle, grind, make it. So do you want to share, like on a high level, what would that playbook look like?

Hmm. I'm still working on it. I'm working on a small project to exactly that, to help underdogs succeed in America. And so it's still under wraps. I love that. I'm doing a bit of like testing this year, but it's like the, it's the service I wish I had or the product I wish I had when I first moved here. But at a really high level, you know, it's how you get attention and build, you know, get eyeballs digitally. It's how you build your community offline and build relationships, positive-sum relationships. It's how to think about your career and how to build a career, whether that is corporate or whether that is related to entrepreneurship. It is a lot of mental models that have to do with standing out and readjusting some of the beliefs you grew up with, especially coming from places like China.

Hmm.

A lot of mental models that you have to change.

Yeah,

now that you've moved to America, rewire everything.

A lot of the, you know, that's what my, that's what my journey is always the same. It's like everything I learned in the last 20 years, I had to forget about everything and kind of start from the beginning, rewire everything. It's like small nitty-gritty details about how you even speak, how you present yourself, how you dress yourself. To the larger things about being ambitious, being shameless, and kind of putting yourself mentally, physically. So there are a lot of things I would love to see that become shape and would love to participate in that in the testing phase if that's an opportunity. I'm looking forward to it, Andrew, truly. I'll be the first one to amplify

Appreciate

it.

Well, I'll definitely share with you once it's in a good place.

Yeah, for sure. So let's talk about events. Let's talk about Five. Like, you've built this gigantic business in the last 12 months. Of course, the foundation is prior to that. So talk to me about how did you build it? What is the business, actual business looks like? The sponsorships we briefly talked about before hit record. This is like a model that you kind of You know, discovered. So talk to me about that. Share the numbers if you can, though. We would love to hear, you know, the growth and everything that's happening.

Yeah, so I started this business 12 months ago. At that point, or to date, we've hosted over 40,000 people in 8 different cities, 1 international city. We've done over 200 events. The events range from conferences where we've had the co-founder So if companies like Venmo and Foursquare and Loom speak on stage to, you know, CEO dinners to parties, parties is where it all started. And so all the work I did before launching the business as a not-for-profit project was gathering people through parties. And I got really good at just bringing people together at different scales, like small rooms and massive, massive events. When I hit the switch and I turned it into a business, and I had to because I quit Google and I got the Visa to turn it into a business, I realized that a lot of the people that are coming to these events are all entrepreneurs and investors and tech professionals at companies like Google. And I realized that's a high-value group of people that is fairly hard to reach. It's hard to reach. There's very few channels where you can reach people like that. It's normally like LinkedIn or direct or outbound calls or stuff like that. You can't just run paid social ads. And I've realized within that group, the CEOs and the founders of these early-stage companies, there's thousands of them anywhere from pre-seed to Series B companies every day, or not every day, every year they spend a ton on services like law firms and recruiting companies and marketing companies and cap table management and hiring and all these different things. And so that led me to the insight that all these service providers are looking to reach my audience. And so, my first sponsorship was $500. They sponsored an event and it was, I forgot the number, but they ROI'd off that like 1.2 or 1.5x just from an event sponsorship. So, I was like, oh shit, there's something here. So, the next time I upped the stakes and I charged someone $5,000 for an event sponsorship and they 10x'd that. It was a law firm that within the first hour of the event, they had met a client that was looking for a lawyer to price their Series A and it just serendipitously happened. So I took those insights and over the next 12 months I sold about $1.1 million of sponsorships. So we did, we bootstrapped to $1.1 million in revenue this year. We're incredibly lean. Ridiculous. We're incredibly profitable. And that's the business. You know, it looks on the surface, it looks like a hospitality and events and party business, but really what we are is we are a marketplace for investors to meet founders and for service providers to meet founders. And to an extent, we're a B2B customer acquisition agency helping these companies meet founders. So that's what the business looks like today. I can go more into the stats or we can share them after. Our customers or sponsors that work with us on a recurring basis.

Love that. That's insane. That's ridiculously insane. Why do you think? Why do you think? Yeah, it's massive turnout. I would say that's also like a valuable insight. You basically are connecting or not just connecting. I think you're immediately delivering value of the money they put in and you've 10x'd, you know, in that example. That's ridiculously, you know, it's like kind of like a product. I have so many ideas. I'm kind of like popping in my mind. Do you have potentially 2025, 2026 to actually turn this into a product? It's like a search engine for people where I, as a B2B2C founder, B2B founder, I want to find my potential customers in your network. It's basically, you have over 40,000 people, their emails, their personas, their profiles, put it into a product. I'm just spitballing right there as we speak. That would be an awesome, like a search engine for people in Valley, in tech, in startups. I would definitely pay for something like that because that's kind of like a better LinkedIn. LinkedIn's the worst in terms of like sales and everything. But since you've already vetted these people and there is so much trust already installed, I would love to see that again, you know, just some, some ideas, but that's insane. But what's, what's next for Five? Like, I'm just curious, what's your future plans look like? What are you going to do next?

You know, at this point, we've, I'd like to think we found like PMF, at least at this scale. And so we have a path to like, you know, 50 to 75% growth this year. We have this big pipeline, thankfully, big pipeline of sponsors that are looking to work with us that we don't have enough events to fulfill. And so we don't have enough inventory. And so it's fine. And so as a result, like a lot of people are on the waitlist and they aren't able to sponsor our events. So, you know, I've loved doing the conferences. I think there's an opportunity there to take it to the next level. I'm very into like the healthcare space. And so we're starting to do a lot of events around wellness and healthcare, helping people, not only helping people connect with other people, which is how it initially started, but helping them get smarter so they can build their businesses and scale their businesses to new levels or scale their careers to new levels, helping them get healthier and like wiser. And, you know, beyond that, providing more thoughtful opportunities to connect beyond just like events and parties and dinners. I don't know what that looks like, but every founder, and this is especially true for founders who bootstrap their companies because they tend to own most of it, all of it. In my case, I own all of it.

Right.

Your company and your product is an extension of you. And so it just sort of follows your priorities that year. And this year it's like, I want to have more fun because the first year of business was hard. And so I want to have more fun. I want to be healthier, I want to be wiser. And so I want to help everyone in my community and everyone who's part of our events do the same thing.

I love that. Yeah, rooting for you big time, Andrew. I think 2025 is going to be incredible. A couple of things before we wrap up. I know you have like a hard stop in 6 minutes. Let's quickly talk about events. Do you have like a playbook of throwing masterful events? It's like now at this point, Hosted so many. Are there like 5 key things, 3 key things that even like— so I'm a community builder myself. I've hosted many virtual events and some in person, and there is like a servant leadership mindset I always bring to the table when it comes to events, right? So something like that. Do you have something that you offer, like, people, founders who build communities, not on a larger scale like you, but Like bringing their users together, hosting fireside chats or like AMA sessions. So any— how do, how do people host masterful events according to Andrew?

Yeah, I don't think they necessarily have to be massive. I think the one key trend this year is going to be the fact that digital channels are going to get polluted by all this AI-generated content. And I think like by the end of the year, it's not surprising to think that half the content on the internet is going to be AI generated or AI assisted in some way. And so naturally that just decreases the authenticity of some of this stuff and it's going to create more noise. And so I think what that means is the in-person channels are going to get a lot more important. And so I think every founder of a company that has a— let's say you're a Series A company or even a seed stage company with customers and users, you should find some way to bring them together in person and you should find some way to explore events as a channel of reaching new people. And I think of this framework whenever I give advice to anyone who's looking to host an event. And I haven't done this in a while, so I might be a little forgetful, but there's normally 4 things you want. One is the intention and the context has to be very clear. Why are you hosting the event and why should someone come and what's the purpose of the event? The second thing is people. Who's coming and how are you going to reach them to tell them about your event? And so this has to do with distribution and reaching people. The third one is location, and that could be a virtual location like your virtual events, or it could be in person or whatever the venue is. So you just need a place to host all these people. And then the last thing is think of it as the economics of the event. If in person, how are you gonna fund it? Is there a sponsorship arrangement? Is it ticketed? And in virtual, again, there are economics there as well. So once you think about all these 4 things, it gives you a playbook to run events repeatedly. Mm-hmm. And the reason we've been able to do over 100 events in 2024 with really what is like a 2-3 person team is like we use this playbook over and over again and it's just like we just execute and we have the playbook and we just execute.

I love that. Again, it's so fascinating to see that you did all that in the last 12 months. Nobody would believe it.

Thank you.

One of the questions from audience, now that we talk about in-person events, IRL events, So question is, as IRL events, meetups, conferences are coming back, what are some of Andrew's favorites, favorite intentionally designed sessions that make these events more valuable to attend? Workshops, facilitated sessions. Did you like, do you have like any creative ways to engage people in IRL?

I think, you know, the 8 to 12 person dinner format is always going to be my favorite, you know, like with seating charts, with like introductions, with maybe guided conversation. Like a salon-style dinner. It's always going to be my favorite type of event.

I love that. You should do more often, you know, see people do more often of such events. Andrew, we're on time. You know, loved the convo. Like I said many times, so inspirational. Love the journey.

Thank you.

2025 is definitely going to be massive for you. And appreciate you sharing all the knowledge. Any last words before we wrap up?

Well, thank you for having me. And for anyone who wants to come, you know, we'll share the What, you know, all the details in the notes below. And anyone who wants to experiment with a sponsorship, we have a waitlist, but again, feel free to reach out.

Yeah, I'll put all that in the show notes, but that's it, folks. Thank you for tuning in, listening, and, you know, paying attention. You know, we'd love to have so many other founders being on the podcast, coming on the podcast. So stay tuned. And that's a wrap for today. Cheers.

Take care.