The creator hosted 20 ecom founders for poker on his NYC rooftop with Andrea, a CPG connector. Wind and rain forced them inside, but he used the night to draw parallels between poker reads and deal-making. His company is near profitability, and he has a boxing match November 6 in Manhattan.
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People have a misconception of what it means to do networking. You have to do cool shit with cool people. This is how you get it done. This is fucking problem solving right here. Welcome back to another episode of the vlog. We are T-minus 60 minutes away from hosting a rooftop poker event. It's a little bit windy. I hope that stops, but we are hosting a bunch of consumer brand founders on the rooftop to to do some poker. So we're basically transforming the apartment into a venue for us to be able to host a poker event game tonight. You guys are going to be a fly on the wall to watch the next 4 hours unfold on my rooftop with a bunch of amazing brand founders. Poker table is here. This entire rooftop just went through a beautiful transformation. I'm gonna take you guys up here right now. Look at this. Actually turned out pretty awesome, I'm not gonna lie. I know! We have 10 minutes until showtime. This is my friend Andrea. Andrea is the CPG super connector in New York City. I run a newsletter called CPGD, and today we're gonna be playing some poker with CPG founders. So if you run a CPG brand in New York and you don't know Andrea, you're not running a real brand yet. He's the guy to pay attention to at the table. He'll go to Vegas by himself for 3 days. Oh, I'll do that for you too. And then be out of money in like 3 hours and I'm like, what am I going to do for the next 2 and a half days? Yeah, because the other side of it, you're like, all right, I'm going to do it incrementally so I can make it through 3 days and just get carried away on the first day. This is what it means to actually do a networking event. You bring cool people together and do cool experiences. You don't just put 200 people in a bar having drinks. It's the cost of doing business, I guess, right? Cost of doing business. It was such a vibe. I was just starting to win and we were playing and someone's like, I felt the raindrop. And now we're all standing in the flipping room. For the business, it's getting to profitability, which we're not far off, which is exciting. Exciting, so we should be by the end of the year. And then personally, I'm doing a boxing fight in November. No fucking way, seriously? Yeah, 180. Oh shit, that's like here. Yeah, it's in Manhattan. It's on November 6th. Do we have enough people? We do. All right, we're back. Let's do it. This is fucking problem solving right here. This is what execution is all about. You just got to adapt and you gotta zig and zag. Poker is the same muscle that you're using every day when you're negotiating, because most of the time when closing a deal, you're reading the person sitting across from you and you're trying to figure out how to either take from them or give them what they want. 100%. Here you're just trying to take from them. I'm trying to close him. Go for it. All right, ready? Yeah. All right, I think that's a scoop. You went on both. That's a knockout from the knockout artist. I'm going to sleep. Why? I'm tired. Anyway, it was a good time. Yeah, it was really good. The last person finally just left from the event. I just finished cleaning up the kitchen and I was sitting here thinking about it. It's just so obvious to me that building intimate relationships just gives you so much more depth and opportunity. I can't emphasize it enough. When you think about how you should be spending your time, if your goal is to just build a larger network, curating super cool experiences, people won't remember your name, but they will remember how you made them feel. Tonight we had 20 brand founders here. We were playing poker upstairs and then it just started raining and we all walked downstairs and I was like, oh, this night's fucked. It was wet, there was no room. You know what, let's open up the poker table. We opened it and then honestly the night was better when we were inside. I think that's a function of just the people that you bring together. I made some real new friends tonight that are building badass brands and I think that is why I love what I'm doing and what I get to do every day because it's to basically just make sure that everyone in the ecosystem knows who you are and what building. Figure out a way to meet as many people as you can and add value to them and be a good person, and one day they will probably come back to you and figure out a way to work together. If you guys can, I would appreciate if you like, comment, and subscribe. I hope you enjoyed this video. I'm excited to keep releasing. If you have any ideas of videos that you would want to see, please drop them in the comments below. Peace!
