Jeremy Greene - CEO of Mojichat

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What is going on, everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. Today we have Jeremy Green on the show. Jeremy Green is the founder and CEO of Moji Chat. In the early days of MySpace, Green was the number one musical artist on the platform and ended up receiving record deals with Sean Combs. Overall, Moji Chat, which enables users to project 3D hologram emojis via smartphones, is absolutely crushing it. And his story, from a musician to an entrepreneur entrepreneur, is absolutely inspiring. And if you are listening to this podcast, make sure you subscribe screenshot this episode, post it on your Instagram stories. Tag Jeremy. Tag myself. And that being said, enjoy the show. All right, what's going on, everyone? Kacey Evans here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. Today we have Jeremy Green here with us, the season CEO of Moji Chat. Thanks so much for coming on, man.

Thanks, brother. Appreciate you having me.

Absolutely. So your story is absolutely incredible. But before we dive into it, I'd love for you to give the audience some insight into what Moji Chat is and when you started it.

So Moji Chat is my second company basically in a nutshell. Will Google admob for live stream. That means that we monetize people's live streams through the bit donation system. So Moji Chat invented a non intrusive way to run ads through live stream. That's what we do.

Got it. Got it. And I know you said second company. Can you give the people some insight into the new company you're working on?

No, no, that was the new company. The first company that I worked on was a company called Ping Tank, which was the first overlay company ever. So filters didn't exist before us. Really. There was no filters or overlays or facial filters or any of those type of things. So I dreamed of the idea after watching the Social Network, and I had a thought, like, if me and you are on Instagram and we take a picture, we're drinking Ciroc vodka, and we happen to find, like, a Ciroc bottle animation that we could select that could, like, slide across the frame in a really cool way. Me and you think that's really cool, but what's actually happening there is you're watching a commercial, you're playing with a commercial, and then you're sending that commercial out to be shared everywhere. So, yeah, I built that, got invited into Facebook to launch that at the F8 conference, and built it into over 900 million devices. It was pretty impressive. It was pretty cool.

Yeah. That's incredible. And it's interesting because your story is so incredible. I'd love for you to take us back to, you know, when you first started that first company and why you got into entrepreneurship all along.

Well, my background goes back further than that because, you know, I have a music background. So, yeah, I'd say it started back in the day, in the MySpace day. I grew up really, really, really poor. Think kind of like 8 Mile, the movie 8 Mile.

Yep.

But, you know, I didn't want. You know, my mom was a drug addict, sister was a drug addict. The state took me away at a really young age, put me in group homes and kids shelters, and. And when I got out, I just didn't want to go down the road that they were down at all. And so I started producing music and uploading my music to MySpace. And, you know, it took me a few years to get really dope, because when I first started, I was, like, terrible. I was like, terrible. But the more time I spent on it, the better I got. And then I started uploading my music to MySpace, and it didn't do anything because, like, no one knew who I was. It was hard to grab traction. So I ended up hacking the system and driving my plays through the roof on MySpace. So I started climbing the charts a little bit, and then organically, it started happening. I started getting bigger and bigger. Finally, you know, MySpace time. Tom Anderson and Tobin Watkinson reached out to me and said, look, we know you're hacking our system, but we can't prove it. We don't know how you're doing it, but we really like your music, so we'd like to sign you. So they flew me in and I signed to MySpace Records, put out a record with Pitbull that went, like, I think platinum or I Don't know. Double platinum, one of those. And then MySpace collapsed. I actually became one of the number one artists in the world on MySpace when it existed.

Wow. Yep.

So after that, very cool. I started working with, with Puff at Bad Boy Records, signed to Puff, and I'd say I learned everything I know from marketing, from Puff, was with him a while, wrote a lot of records with him, produced a lot of stuff, and then went broke again and ended up back in the trailer park. And that's when I saw the movie the Social Network. And that's when I dreamed up the idea of the facial filter overlays and, you know, all those things that people were not thinking about at the time. And we built it so that.

Very cool.

That was really, you know, that was my first, you know, run in. But we can, we can go into the longer story if you like, you know.

Yeah, yeah. And I'd love to touch on just because I think especially in a time like this with coronavirus and it's so unpredictable and everyone, you know, it's. There's so much uncertainty. When you, you know, went from top of the world music to, like you just said, moving back into the trailer park, what was going on from a mindset perspective in your life and how did you transition out of that negative situation?

Well, first of all, it was heartbroken. Whenever you fall in your face, it's. It's really, it's. It's really hard, right? Like, but you have to remember that, you know, life goes up and down, up and down, up and down. And it's. The point is to like, stay consistently steady and then climb. Right? So I just remember, like, you know, being around Puff to doing all these amazing things that ending up back and looking at myself in the mirror one day going like, man, you're like, you're back in Waterville, Maine. You got no heat in your house, it's a middle winter, you barely got any food. You gotta do something. And that's literally when I watched that movie. And I got super inspired to be like, man, I gotta build something. Like this is. I've been using technology my entire career to get on in music. I gotta figure this out. And I went to bed that night and I dreamed up the idea of paint tank. And people thought I was crazy when I was like, oh, we're gonna. I'm gonna advertise on top of, you know, photos and videos. And no one really got it except for a guy named Tim Draper, who I. I happened to cold call and pretend I was the chairman of Google's assistant to get him on the phone. And then I pitched him the idea and I think he just thought I had like the biggest balls ever. So he, he invited me to come out and pitch to him. Flew out there.

Wow.

Like, didn't even have a product, dude. Like, nothing. Like just an idea. And he invested quarter million dollars in the spot in the room, which he never does.

Wow.

Three months later, Kylie, Jenner and Tiger and all these people started using the product and kind of getting behind us. And then we got the call from Facebook. Sheryl Sandberg made the intro to John Lagerling, who still sits on my board of advisors now, who was running Facebook messenger, and they asked us to build it inside of Facebook. And by the way, I had zero experience. So all of a sudden I'm like going from being dead broke to building into Facebook and launching at the FA conference, which was insane, right? Because, like, yeah. So now I got to spin up a team and figure out how to build this thing and do it. Right. Luckily we got it done because, you know, my co founder, Derek is a brilliant engineer and really oversaw the team and did a really good job executing that. But yeah, I mean, it was, it was incredible. I can't believe. And by the way, we made so many mistakes in that first company. So many mistakes.

Got it. What is your advice if someone's looking to, you know, build some sort of software or a new piece of tech when it comes to raising capital? What advice would you give to someone that's looking to do that with the experience you have now?

Well, raising capital, it can be a very hard thing. Look, there, there are some people who come from Silicon Valley who, you know, parents may have been in tech that allows them to go and raise $30 million and not have to work a day in their life. And then there's other people who literally have no idea how to do that and have to struggle to figure that out. So it's really about your network. It's about getting in the right network and being around the right people who can open those doors to investors that really matter. And by the way, you shouldn't just take any money. I know so many people will take a ton of celebrities monies, but they don't add any value at all, like, at all. I think it's cool to have a couple of celebrities here and there. You know, I do that. But like to base your company all around celebrities. And it's not a great idea. I would say, like, focus on people who are really, really, really brilliant and are really tied into the space that you trying to be involved in. Find the highest caliber of that person, get them to work with you, and then, and then have them intro you to some really great VCs. But as a very first, starting raising money from the seed. Look up angel investors in your town and pick up the phone, email constantly, constantly, constantly. Stay on top of it. Because you're gonna hear 100 million no's before you're gonna hear that one. Yes.

Yeah.

It's the truth.

I have a question just before that one, like seed raise, if someone's looking to, you know, before they pitch, what should they have preferred? You know, do they build out the MVP first? No, I think it's advice there.

So I don't, I don't think that's really necessary out the gate. Right. Because a lot of people, like always want to build the product and then go pitch investors. If you put together like a really good deck that tells a story and paints a picture of what you're trying to build, the right angel investors will help you put in some money to build the mvp. You know what I mean? I think.

Yep.

I think if you put a. You, you, you got to paint a picture of where you're trying to go. Like a deck is so important. You know, you gotta just, you gotta paint that vision. And that comes a product too. Like when you build a product, I've seen some of the most success, like amazing people in the world who are brilliant build terrible products because they're overly smart. Right. It's like this.

Yeah.

It's like the difference between like an Android device and an iOS device. Right. And like an Android was built most likely by a bunch of brilliant people at mit. You know what I mean? Really smart guys. But an Apple product, it's just sexy. You know what I mean?

Yep.

It's designed.

Right.

One thing that Steve Jobs is really good at doing is that he would make you pay three times the price of the competitor product. Right. He'd make you wait in line and then you would feel lucky to be spending three times the price. And that comes with a good product. The UX UI is beautiful. The design is beautiful. So I think the first thing about any product is just make sure it's beautiful and easy to use. Super important.

Got it. Very cool. How do you, how do you look at the economy right now with everything happening. Pandemic coronavirus and how it's affecting not only tech, but just, you know, these massive companies like Airbnb or.

I mean, I mean, my slack Or I mean, my heart is broken for a lot of these companies. I mean, it's completely unexpected. I think the only thing that's surviving right now, to be honest with you, is really the text in the tech space is like the gaming space, the medical space. Luckily I'm in the gaming space, so it hasn't affected us too much. Thank God for that. But I think we're going to be seeing some serious pushback on VC funding for a little while. But, you know, things will get back to normal. It's going to take a while. I can tell you that. We're never, ever, ever going back to the world we had before. And I also think, I think we did this to ourselves, you know, I think that, I think Mother Nature has a way of like stabilizing things that are happening. You know what I mean? Like, I just think, you know, if you look back. How do I put it like this? If you look back, like every hundred years something like this happens. Like the last one was like the Spanish flu, you know, this was bound to happen. Like, serious death toll will not be from like nuclear weapons or things. It's going to be from, you know, a Corona virus. It's going to be, it's going to be a pandemic, it's going to be something of that caliber. And you know, unfortunately the world was just not prepared, you know, and I think that, you know, especially the United States, like we are just caught with our pants down right now. You know, it's unfortunate but like, you know, it's. It's what it is.

You know, I want to, I want to take a step back because I know that you talked about just your humble beginnings. I want to hear your thoughts on how that really shaped you as a person. And, you know, what your, what some of your goals were going through high school and middle school and just through your upbringing, like what was your trajectory and what was that part of your life like on a daily basis?

I mean, I had a really hard life, man. I mean, you gotta remember like half my life, you know, was I didn't like have a normal life, childhood life. Like, you know how like you went to prom and did all these things. Like I didn't have the luxury of doing those type of things. You know, I was in group homes and kids shelter. So 90, you know, 90 of my childhood was just wondering why I didn't have a family who cared about me the way, you know, that I needed. So I had to figure out a way to, you know, if you saw where I come from. You would be shocked where I'm at now. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

I think my mindset was that I'm never going to become what my family is and I deserve better. And this is absolutely wrong. And I need to get myself out of Water domain. That was my main focus. Right. And so I would sit around and I would call every single record label and I would sing over the phone. I was driving people crazy. I once. This is true story. I once pretended to be an intern for a week and a half at Russell Simmons company. They didn't even know how I got in the building just so I could put a demo on Russell Simmons desk.

Wow.

Legit. Like I was an intern. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

I just. If you look at people who are successful, a lot of them have had to suffer and eat to get where they're at, right?

Yep.

I don't believe in big flashy craziness of like I don't think I'm a smart guy. Like, you know, I mean, I don't, I don't want to ever go out there. I mean Ms. Fly, like I'm the brilliantest guy in the planet. I just don't think that. I think I know product more than most people, you know, I mean, but I don't think, you know, I don't think that I'm the smartest guy in the myself with people who are absolutely brilliant, you know?

Yeah. What was your first steps to building that network? And you talked about earlier when raising capital, being in the right rooms, going from, you know, trailer park and not having this perfect upbringing like a lot of people don't. What was your step in that direction? To start talking and having conversations with those people.

I'm sorry, say it again.

Just what were the steps you took to start building that network that you now have in your life that's opened up.

What was my first step to building that network? Just getting on the phone. You know what I mean? I was constantly, constantly on the phone just harassing people and so like, you know what I mean? Like you just have to be relentless. Yeah. Your phone is the most powerful thing you have. You know what I mean? It literally is. But you gotta like constantly be on top of it non stop, you know, I didn't, I just didn't have the luxury of having all those intros. So I was just. I would watch documentaries. I would, I would see who those people were behind the scene. Who were the people with the opening indoors now would contact those people. Right. Like I would like the social network. Like, I literally tracked down all the people who invested in Facebook in the very early stage. I just did my research. You got to do your research, especially a lot of the people that are listening to your podcast don't have big mentors, so they're gonna go like, well, how do I do that? Well, you research it. Go on Angel's list. Go. Just figure out if you want an Airbnb, go Google. Who are the first investors that contact that seed investor. Reach out to them. You just got to figure it out.

Yeah, I'm fascinated by just your transition from, you know, music to tech and software. What do you recommend people to do if they're, you know, they're in that transitional period? How do you find that next thing? And how do you attach to that next product that you want to build when you know shit's not going your way and you feel like the world is just out to get you?

And first of all, stop feeling sorry for yourself. The world owes you nothing. Like, and this, like, you can do anything you put your mind to if you want to do it. That's. You know what I mean? That's the thing is, like, the 99 of the world's problem is they don't believe enough in their self that they can pull off. Right? Like, so what? It doesn't work out, but at least you tried. A lot of people don't even try. They literally don't even try.

For sure. That's real. So did you. Did you adopt that mentality just from, you know, having nothing and coming from that background of like, yo, I want nothing to. I don't want to be like my family. Like, where does one not only find that, but where did you find your internal drive? And how did you attach onto it at a young age?

I'm sorry, say it one more time.

Just finding, like, finding your drive when you were younger and, like, knowing where to spend your time.

Well, I knew.

Where did you find.

I knew I was a good singer, but I knew I had to get better, so I wanted to learn how to produce. So I kept myself in the house for, you know, 10 hours a day learning how to produce records. You know, I just. I was relentless at everything I did because, like, I was like, okay, I want to be a dope producer and a writer. Okay, I'm gonna sit in the house for the next two years until I figure out how to be extremely amazing. And then I stayed there for another two just to make sure. You know what I mean?

For sure. I. I wanted to Regarding the music industry, I love hip hop. Big hip hop fan, right? And I think a lot of people out there, they. They see all these people blowing up. And on social media in 2020, if you were to give advice to a young artist or a young producer, what do you tell them and where should they be spending their time in this current state of music? How everything's streaming and how social media is so like, vital to building that longevity. What advice do you give to someone that's looking to come up in social media? Well, just no music producing as a.

Here's my best advice. Ready? Sit your ass in the house and learn your skill. If you think you're a producer, stay there for two years, working on your craft 24 hours a day, non stop. The moment you think you're hot, stay there another two or three years just to be positive, Period. It's all about putting time into your craft. That's it. Yep. So listen, brother, I love you, you're the greatest. But I got a jump because I got to test these calls.

Totally.

I can't I so much and I'd love to see how.

Hey, absolutely. Last thing. Just where can people follow you to? Stay tuned.

Follow me at Real Jeremy Green on my Instagram.

Got it. Well, that being said, Jimmy, thanks so much for coming on, brother. I will talk to you, dude. You're the greatest.

Thanks, buddy. Appreciate you.

Monarch Legacy of Monsters An Apple Original Series the world is on fire. I decided to do something about it on November 17th. This place, it's not ours. Believe me. The most massive event of the year arrives. If you come with me, you'll know everything. I promise.

Oh my God.

Go, go, go.

Legacy of monsters streaming November 17th only on Apple TV.

Plus.