Raz Romanescu - Launching Memes.com and Building Nailboo Into The Fastest Growing Nail Brand In North America

Welcome back to the Casey Adams Show. Today we have Raz Romanescu here on the podcast. Thank you so much for coming the show, brother.

Thanks for having me, Casey. Excited to be here.

Of course. So we've been talking really on Instagram since 2018. I was looking back at our DMs, finally making this happen now almost five years later. Super stoked to have you on and I appreciate you coming out. I know, you know, you used to live in la, which is where we're filming, but you're now in Panama City. Talk to everyone. Panama City. What led to the move there? And then, more importantly, I would love for you to give a high level of what you do because you run and operate so many different brands across all things digital, social, that I think there's so much to cover and I'd love to hear it from your perspective before we dive in.

Amazing. Yeah. Five years, the charm. Happy to finally connect in person. Yeah. Started the journey about 12 years ago in the media space. So. First company ever co founded was memes.com, first dive into original domains, original usernames.

Yeah.

We built that company from zero followers to over 100 million fans across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, you name it. We were in the early days trying to sell brand deals to brands, but it was a bit premature in 2012 trying to sell, like, Gucci or Fortune 500 companies. Meme campaigns, they didn't necessarily know what audience they were getting. They invested much more in premium studio content and us telling them, hey, this meme gets 30,000 likes versus your video, that gets 800 likes. Like, engagement's a thing, whether you guys like it or not. That was, I think, the first dive I had into this is 12 years ago. This is 12 years ago. Yeah. Operating the first domain we had was memes with a Z.

Okay.

You know, so that's how you say it in Spanish. And then after we started getting a bit of success, we acquired the real domain, memes.com.

What was, you know, being someone that's always loved, like, OG usernames, OG domains, memes dot com. Like, back then when memes were, like, being originated in the form of culture, was that like a massive purchase or what was the state of the OG domain username world back then?

Definitely a massive purchase. Don't want to say the exact price. It was over a few hundred thousand dollars. Wow. We were tracking memes from memes.com.

Wow.

We were tracking the guy that we bought the domain off of, and within 36 hours, he had, like, a new audio Rate in his profile pic, it seems like he just blew through the cache instantly, you know what I mean? But the longevity and the SEO you get from that was pretty good. I would say that's the, the first shot at learning how to operate like a bigger company. The do's and don'ts. We were much younger, early 20s at that point, so had a team of about 70 at one point out in LA. You learn a lot of lessons when you move fast there, you know for sure. Then we realized that it makes a lot more sense to have like a targeted audience. So one thing we co founded was 10pm curfew which is the largest female beauty and fashion network on social. Once again, the original handles we have at girls at Style. At females Ecoup we have over 80 Snapchat shows.

Wow.

And that gets about 2 billion monthly video views. Much easier to sell into brands when you could tell them hey, you get a beauty, fashion, lifestyle audience instead of like a kind of vague bigger entertainment audience. So that's a business that we took all the lessons we learned from our previous entities and put it in a, I'd say a new organization and it's scaling pretty fast. We aspire to be the barstool sports but female focused with that company. Starting to release some ip, our own podcast to, you know, get as big as the call. Her daddies co founded another company in the gaming space and I grew up as a gamer. I spent a lot of my childhood years playing on the computer, PlayStation, etc. That was one that we saw a market that was growing pretty fast. Me and my co founder Darren we started and when again the original usernames we got gaming on every platform.

Love that.

That company was acquired in 2022 and it's publicly traded now on the Canadian stock exchange and still doing some cool things in that we were just at the Gamer Developers Conference. So yeah, we started another gaming focused media company. Growing up my whole life was always a gamer. Spent quite a few hours every day playing games from first person shooters MMORPGs. Me and my co founder Darren started Gamelancer once again. The original username strategy that we had with all of our other entities built a real laser focused community around gaming. That company is around 40 million fans right now. Also 2 billion monthly video views and was recently acquired and is publicly traded. Now we aspire to be one of the biggest companies in the gaming space.

Yep.

Then I have another one. I mean it sounds crazy but so hopped into we realized we were very good at building communities, very good at building Social audiences, running paid media for other brands and other companies we market for. And naturally the thing that was missing for us was our own product, our own, let's say, thing to distribute to the masses instead of always being just like the distribution tool for somebody else. So at the end of 2018, we started underlining beauty, which is, I would say, one of the fastest growing companies in the portfolio right now. Our hero brand is nailbu and it's the largest nail brand in North America in terms of velocity. At this moment in time, we're in retailers, we sell D2C and Amazon, and our goal there is to become one of the biggest nail brands in the world. It's what I call a sleepy category. So not too many people are innovating in the space. You have your Sally Hansen's, your SCS, your OPIs, but they've been on the shelf for a very long time and got comfortable and we're planning to be on the shelf next to them and doing the things that they might not know how to do. So I love been a fun journey, got to meet a lot of cool people and feels like just getting started even though it's been 12 years.

Very exciting. I mean, there's so much to dive into and you're the definition of a true serial entrepreneur. Right. Like you have so many different businesses, gaming to beauty to media and you know, in some way they're all intertwined in terms of like the foundational elements of what you're great at. But just so you know, to walk it back from memes.com to getting into 10pm curfew when you were getting into the media space and now fast, you know, Fast forward to 2023. What have been the biggest changes that you've identified from you know, getting into the media, social media space to nowadays where there's, there's so much interesting is happening with Elon acquiring Twitter to Meta, rolling out the paid verification system, just like the truth and then, you know, TikTok potentially being banned in the U.S. i think just the social media landscape is obviously has been thriving the past five years, but I just feel like, and I'd love to get your perspective on where do you see social going over the next five years considering the landscape is changing so quickly?

Definitely. No, that's a great question. I feel like I've seen it all in the space starting before Instagram even existed. Yeah, we subscribe to the belief that anything can happen at any time. It's just a matter of probabilities. So pretty much we expect Anything crazy to happen. I would say that there's a lot of differences happening right now. Like Elon acquiring Twitter is I think a power move on his part and I think he's going to be kind of the leader in the space with what everyone's doing since he's not necessarily scared to make changes quick. I don't know how I feel about every account being verified for 12.99. I'm not sure how that'll play out. Over.

What are your. I think this is a topic just to dive into. Quick. Pros and cons pay for verification. Twitter and Instagram, what are your thoughts on that?

I think you're going to see a lot of fraud like happening on the business side. I mean if people selling courses and companies drop shipping and that was a problem before. If you can verify now for $12. And that's what psychologically people believed was like premium. At the same time, maybe better for people's self esteem and value because everyone's viewed as like kind of equal on the platform. So I don't know. I think it's too early to tell. I think I agree, like Arfa and.

I were talking about this earlier. I think I see it from both sides. It's on the one side of influencer ego. I see like a positive ego death in a sense. You know, if you've read Ryan Holiday's book Ego is the Enemy, I think the industry can be such stigmatized 100 and I think it's great in that context. But again in the. On the flip side.

Right.

Like the people that not, I don't want to say have earned it, but just the differentiating factor from a networking perspective, whatever it may be like it, it was, it gave something. Aspiring younger creators something to quote unquote, strive for. But I think it's just, you know, it's a reframing of the industry and what's really valuable, you know, content, authenticity, community building. You see that changing so quickly. So I, I like that perspective still.

Go to people's profile and go about this account and see when they get verified.

Yeah.

So if everybody's getting verified like March 2023, you can pretty much guess if someone has the check mark before that. Yeah, but yeah, it's. It's tough to say. It's something everybody strive for. And usually it meant like you got really good at something, you got enough pressure and then you had credibility. But one thing coming up in the social space, you realize that there's a lot of moments of opportunity that if you miss they don't come around that often. Again, for example, being able to grow on TikTok, we jumped on the platform the second it launched and we got our usernames and we were growing at 100, 200,000 new followers a day. Then Instagram, to compete with TikTok, release reels. So if you posted reels, you would be growing like crazy during that short amount of time. But after TikTok gets a bit more populated with users, everyone's posting multiple times a day, that growth rate slows if you miss like the real thing on Instagram, you know. So, yeah, I would say the main thing to know about growing on Instagram and any social platform is when you can accelerate do it. Because the good times don't last forever and there's always times where you can pretty much try to do anything and like, you're not going to grow unless you put like ridiculous amount of ad spend behind it. And oftentimes that's not even worth it, you know. Yeah, you're just getting followers and they don't convert so totally.

Now that's. Love the perspective there. I want to talk about the transition from, or not even the transition yet, but the media company overall, 10pm curfew, building a company that is getting, you know, 2 billion plus impressions a month, what is, what has been not only the formula, but your experience building and sustaining a media company at that level. Because, you know, you'll see tons of different brands or maybe, you know, pages that aren't necessarily companies, get ridiculous amount of views, but the ability to monetize, to bring to advertisers, to maintain that viewership, that's the challenge. Right. To do it once is one thing. To do it and sustain it over a, you know, multi year decade period is what makes you, and you know, your team so great. How have you gone about building and sustaining a media company across social in an omnipresent way?

Yeah, I think views and likes and that thing is one thing, but ultimately understanding what businesses need is another. So when you're speaking the language and you're talking to a large agency or a large brand and you're trying to tell them like, hey, we have an account and we can do this and that for you, they hear that all the time, you know, but if they know that you actually understand what they need to succeed and you can give them a perspective that even potentially their own team and house doesn't have, or you hit it off with one of the decision makers. So I would say everything has to be packaged properly you can't just go rogue with a few pages and expect like Omnicom or publicist or WPP to be like, wow, you know.

Yeah.

You have to have a united front, a very good team. And if you do get in the door with them to, let's say, execute on a campaign, everything needs to be professional too. You have to be on time. You have to give them, like, the proper content, reiterations, rap reports. A lot of the people that operate meme pages just stay at that level and it's nothing bad. Like, they use it as like a passive kind of like hobby. They never think, like, let me build the next vice or let me build the next, like, barstool. They think, hey, I'm going to keep posting. Maybe I'll close a few brand deals here and there.

Yeah.

That's not enough to win, like the trust of like, the big spenders and the big brands. You need to have corporate website materials that are updated on a regular basis. Account managers, like, they need to feel like they put their trust in you. They're going to get a return. Because a lot of the people you deal with on those sides of the equation, they need to present something to their team after.

Yeah.

And if they take a chance on you and you just drop the ball when they go to their, like vice president of marketing and they give the results that are, it's not going to be pretty. Right. So you have to empower them and you have to give them the confidence that they can actually lean on you for anything.

Yeah, no, I love that. I want to dive into the gaming sector. I grew up gaming myself a bunch and seeing what you guys have done with gaming, Game Lancer, taking a company public, obviously I'd love to dive into that. Just to hear your experience from an acquisition perspective, considering I went through one myself last year. Where did gaming begin? I know you talked about obviously your early days of being a gamer yourself, but I want to talk about that community specifically and, and really the business journey that led to the positioning to get acquired. I think there's so much to learn in there.

A hundred percent. Yeah. We looked at the landscape and we saw everybody in gaming was an esports team. And that's not necessarily the best business model. If you've looked at some of their financials, they'll do 30 million in revenue, but they'll lose 30 million to get that. 30.

And I saw a tweet today that said faze Clan, you know, they went public last year. 0.4 billion to. To 30 million, 40 million market cap and they're trying to go private. And it's like, I saw that, wow.

Grand opening, grand closing. The model itself is skewed because you never own your own distribution. So you sign somebody, then you have to put them on payroll to pretty much wear the phase or whatever tag. And then at any point when a brand deal comes in, the player keeps 80% of it, the company keeps, let's say, 20%, and then nonstop they have other managers whispering in their ears like, you're only getting paid that much. So, yeah, we wanted to flip the script and say, hey, if we own the distribution, not only can we become call it an MCN on steroids, but when we sign gamers and we work with creators, we get to post them on our channels and help them grow and empower them. And then when we sell brand deals to brands, we don't have to chase down our gamers and have them switching prices on us. We basically can post it on our own network. And when you have the original handle, once you find a creative that works, if you run paid media through the gaming handle, everybody on the platform thinks it's like the original username by, like, gaming by Instagram, Gaming by TikTok. So conversion rates are often higher, but we get to keep 100% of that margin.

Yeah.

So how we're focused on building the business is sustainable and profitable. Been in the game long enough to realize, like, just because you post nice numbers, but you're not around here in like 18 months to talk about it, you don't get the glory in the end. You get the grand opening, grand closing effect. And for us, all of our companies have been private. And when the Canadian company Wonder Gaming was looking to acquire a game Lancer, me and Darren discussed internally and we're like, hey, we have a lot going on. I think this could be bigger if it was on an exchange and we could let retail investors come in. And now it's just sticking to the basics, building a good company, showing that over a long enough period of time, our model is more sound than the esports model. And if you look at the other players, there really isn't too many. There's ign, who's already been acquired and owned by a major, and there's. There was a white space in the industry that nobody really moved on. So we wanted to kind of fill that.

I love that man. So with. With the acquisition, what was that experience like for you in terms of, from a leadership perspective, transitioning? And what would you. Well, yeah. What was your biggest learning lesson through that process.

Yeah, I'd say the biggest learning lesson is that you always got to take care of your team in a situation like that because it's two kind of tribes uniting in a sense. So you need to make sure that you're completely on the same page with everybody when you merge the two entities. So the second that happens, there's always like a little bit of rust. You know, some personalities clash, visions clash. But when you realize, I'd say you're lucky if once a merger happens, you're 100% on the same page as the acquirer and you guys can just hit the ground running. But things always get shaken up, you know, because other people, if they obviously investing their life and looking to build the company here, they hate the uncertainty when something like that happens. So I would say it's important to really make sure who your acquirer is, especially if you're planning to stick around and build the company, which, that was our initiative. You know, we didn't want to just get a quick little cash out. We think it could be much bigger than it is now. You got to be on the same page with the people. So that's goes down to like the people you work with matters the most.

Absolutely. Where did the direct to consumer products come into place? Underlining obviously having these media companies, you know, and you see this model much more often nowadays versus obviously when you were getting started years ago. Right. Like Ben Kaplan and all the guys from Fuck Jerry. They were investors in media kits and seeing what they've done with. What do you mean? And their entire gaming business.

Tequila.

Yeah. It's like the model in terms of audience, owning the audience, creating products that could obviously fit in that like they've done that so well in my opinion. For you guys, when did that not only idea but the. The transition to say, hey, let's go launch our own products. We own the distribution now. Let's go go on the products and integrate it.

We. We started with drop shipping about six and a half, seven years ago. So the companies I'm talking about now are the ones you know about. We.

Yeah, yeah.

Did a lot of other things through the process. We drop shipped a lot. So we realized I was selling like pet products, plastic car hooks for the back of your vehicle.

Yeah.

And then we actually moved into selling some beauty products and realized like, wow, this is flying. So it goes back to the point of, you know, the products, the variable but launching something you need content, you need something that you can advertise that's appealing to People and you need the right economics. And when we started testing beauty, we're like, okay, this is cool, we were making money. But then you realize there's no IP being built here. This is pure arbitrage. At a certain point, because you made a lot of money in your Shopify account, Unilever or P and G is not going to come knocking at your door being like, you guys are wonderful, let us acquire this random thing. So we took all the knowledge of learning how to deal with customer support at scale. If you're doing volume and you're getting like 2,000 emails a day, your fulfillment center's backed up. So it was kind of like the training wheels. Before you built a real brand, you didn't care. As much. As bad as it sounds, like the customer experience when you're drop shipping, if someone took three weeks to get their package, it's like initially you felt like, I'm not expecting this person to ever come back again anyway, so whatever, right? But then you learn that's the thing that matters when you're trying to build.

A brand is repeat orders.

Yeah, repeat orders. Retention. When they talk to you about, when they talk about your brand to somebody else, are they recommending it or are they saying like, don't ever, I would never order again. Right, yeah. And, and that's how we started moving into the beauty and E commerce space. Just kind of piggybacking off like the. What's the word? Like gunslinger drop shipping approach. And we really never slowed down since. And we're a brand incubator. So we launched. Our first brand was Tapbrow, which was in the eyebrow space. We identified anything that's big in retail. So people were spending three to $500 to get their eyebrows done. And we were saying, it's a lot of money, it's booming in popularity. What if we build at home solution for it and sell it for 2999? And it took off. But one thing we realized with that product is the retention rate and the customer satisfaction wasn't as high. So even though we built a brand and we got almost a million customers on the Tapro brand, when we launched Nailbuilt, it was night and day and like it was one of those things where we actually focus like 90% of our effort on that brand now. And it's the fastest one that's growing. Every retailer is going crazy for it and the retention is huge. And one thing we realized is not all products are built the same. So we did the exact same system. We did the exact Same thing we would do with anything. But all the metrics looked so much better. So I always say, like, if you're going to put in the same amount of effort, make sure you look at what kind of results are coming out of it.

Yeah.

And for nailbu, everybody's creating endless UGC content about their nails, when for brows, people won't be posting a picture of their eyebrows every single day because it looks strange.

Right, yeah, that makes sense.

So it just took a life of its own. And then you realize real quick, what is a bit of noise versus what is like a real, like has the potential to be a unicorn, then just laser focus there.

Love that. Where do you or not, where do you. How do you spend your time on a daily basis? Right. You have all these different brands that you're incubating, starting media. As a founder, where do you spend your time? And you know, how do you build culture inside your organizations?

Yeah. So I've always been, I think my strength was making sure we focus on the things that move the needle the most. And since we started with no funding always it, everything we had to do had to work. Right. So if it didn't work, you wouldn't know there's no repair. Right. And then as you bring people on the team and they believe in the vision, etc. You can actually lead them because you know what it takes to do it. It's not just someone blindly being like, just scale more. I don't want to hear it. You know, you could be like, okay, I, I understand your pain points because I was in the trenches at one point. As crazy as it sounds, I have a notepad that's just broken down by company with top initiatives that need to be focused on. And at this point in time, like having good co founders, solid team members, you really get to focus on what your strengths are, which is like the strategy, the fundraising, the putting the pieces together, the.

In the context of direct to consumer products. If you're a brand out there, not even a brand. If you're someone out there that's looking to launch something, you might have your own audience. Right. People that have different pages or have communities. What's been your strategy to launch a brand efficiently, to go to market when you have the audience, you know, that might correlate to someone listening where they're sitting on this gold mine of attention, maybe from a creator perspective or from, you know, owning these different assets and pages. How have you gone about that successfully and what do you recommend people do if they were to want to Launch their own brand today?

Yeah, I would make sure you check off all the right boxes first. You know, make sure you can sell it for a price that you can sustain, like paid media. Because organically you can only post so much. Right. You flood your page a million times with the same post, you're not going to get significant and scalable growth. So I honestly think the hard work is done up front. Would you decide what you're going to release, what your costs are, and then it's nice to test a lot. So what I mean by that is start small, but have the ability to scale fast. But if you don't, let's say start big and risk it all on one thing, then you're not going to get crushed if it doesn't work. But I would say after launching multiple brands, selling multiple things online, I would say everything has to have like an average order value or like a lifetime built into it or you won't succeed anymore. In this space since iOS 14, kind of disrupted paid ads. But I would anything I'd launch, I would not just lean on organic. If you're trying to scale to a significant level, you know, launch something that you can test your content organically, you can get hype organically, but ultimately you need to move it to paid media and you better have a big enough cushion in your unit economics to be able to ustain. Call it 40 to $50 customer acquisition cost. And that's how you find that product where you can spend like a hundred, $200,000 a day on paid ads and you're not losing money on it. And you hope to build the brand since you're getting that much exposure. But at a certain point, if you're getting the customer in the door at like a break, even slightly profitable, then is your product good enough to make profit off that customer at a later point in time? Because a lot of the times you might get the first part right, your revenues are great. But then you realize, like, everybody's been doing this for a long time just to make money in Shopify, but your bank isn't growing. Yeah, none of the founders are getting to a point where their personal wealth is growing. Sure, you have, let's say, the confidence and like, whatever. Like, yeah, we did 50 last year, whatever it is. But ultimately you just got to build a good business that you could actually take money out of.

Yeah.

And those are the companies that get acquired. Those are the ones when you raise capital. You don't have to be like, trust us, soon we'll be profit. You know, What I mean, so I would just. And the easiest way to do it is look at somebody that's already scaling and profitable. Put your own version of it. Because if you're just throwing, like, darts and hoping you're the one that put together, like, the perfect strategy, it's totally less probable, right?

Yep, Absolutely. What. What led you to making the move to Panama City? You've lived there for a handful, I believe you said three years now. Right. And you're from Canada.

Yeah.

What? You know, inspired to move to Panama City. And how's it been the last three years?

So me and my two co founders, Darren Lopez, Elias Degrassia, we moved to LA at the same time from Canada, and we were on E2 investor visas, so we lived out here for about six years.

What does that mean that you.

You start a company in the US and then to bring over their Canadian counterparts, you need to hire one US Employee for every Canadian you want to bring over on that Visa. So I was like, the way into the US and then these are my closest friends and business partners. And it's one of those situations where I'm just fortunate to have business partners that are close friends because, yeah, like I always say, I would never do business with them if they weren't, like, good business individuals. It just happens to be, like, they're great at what they do, and we're all, like, close boys, so.

Yeah. That's awesome.

We lived out here for about six years, and we were never on the scene or anything. You know, we'd be inside, we'd be working. All we would do is just head down trying to build something great. And when the Visa was expiring, we were realizing, like, man, we're getting dinged with, like, 55% tax out here.

Yeah.

Um, I actually started the green card process, and then my close boy and co founder, he's like, let's go to Panama. Let's see what it's like for six weeks. It's zero percent tax on everything. And went out there for six weeks. And when we came back, I just paused. The green card moved there. And it was a pretty powerful message to send to the world because we're saying, like, okay, zero percent capital gain. Zero percent on any company exiting.

Yep.

And when you move out there, you're kind of like, hey, I'm gonna throw it out in the universe, and I'm gonna make a power move. And when one of these companies sell, I'm not paying a cent to government. That hasn't necessarily helped me in any way. Shape or form, like build the business, you know, so it's amazing. You gotta come out.

Yeah, no, I've heard it's beautiful. Definitely plan on coming out there soon. What's. I'm curious, like the lifestyle out there, aside from business, the 0% tax, how's it been living out there with friends from a like a day to day life experiences everything.

It's not bad. I feel like everyone focus on like wellness. Like everybody's really held focused there. So if you're doing the plunge here and doing your morning walks, so start the day with a morning walk every day right at sunrise. Since it's close to the equator, the sun rises and sets at the same time year round.

Oh wow.

So 6:15am I'm out the door. I'll walk for an hour, then I'll get a workout in and then handle things throughout the day. But it's the same thing. There's like hundreds of good restaurants, good nightlife, pretty much good spot work out, work and then go eat good and a few little islands to hop out. Yeah, nothing, nothing extravagant, but I think it's a good place to stay laser focused and just build, you know. I'm not sure if I'll be there for the rest of my life, but for the time being, until we get some of these other ones over the finish line, for sure be out there.

Panama it is 100%. What, what inspired you early on to get in the world of business? Right, like going back to memes.com like did you go to college? What was your childhood like that led you to wanting to go into this world of, of business and entrepreneurship?

I would say I saw what risk paid off like when I was young, like my dad, he moved to London right when I was born for the first five years to go work at like a geophysics company out there. And there wasn't much opportunity in like communist Romania when you.

Yeah.

Lived out there. And when he was out there, he got so good at what he did that the office was like, hey, do you want to start an office in Houston or Canada? And he picked Canada and we pretty much picked up and went. But as I grew older, I realized like that would have never even happened if he didn't just like pretty much take a wild jump, move to another country and just wing it pretty much. You know what I mean? Like he always knew. And then growing up, I feel like I always felt like I really liked freedom. Like I never really liked going to school. I never got like the best grades. And I started looking at like stock trading and future trading and was like, hold on, you could actually do this and make money, but not be somewhere for 10 hours a day? And I was in university. I was in my sixth year of my geophysics degree when I started, like, memes.com and all that and started making more money online than I didn't even. I would have never used my degree even if I finished it to pay.

So it was at a point you're six years in.

I was six years. I had like eight classes left. But it got to the point where it was like, he dropped out. I dropped out. I had.

With six, eight classes. Yeah.

Well, those eight classes would have taken me like two and a half years. I was like. I was like a crawling pace. I was like chipping away at like the most advanced classes. And it was already at the point where it's like, wow, over the head. I'm not even going to do this. So I saw right away, like, every time my alarm would ring to go to school, it'd be like the hardest thing in the world. You'd feel like there was so much resistance. You were not passionate about it. But when started working on my own thing, you couldn't tell me to stop. You couldn't tell me to, like, go to sleep. You couldn't tell me to, like, sleep in when it comes time to working on that. So you realize, like, once again, your strengths. What are you actually good at? I was not like some evil scientist destined for that. I was really good at business strategy, all these type of things, and marketing. And then when you realize every day you wake up, even if it's like. What's the word? Like, tougher than going to school, you just realize you chose it and you're so much more passionate and excited to do it. And the main thing I did at all, just to answer your original question, was freedom. Yeah. And doesn't always play out like that. You end up having way more on your plate than you would have if sometimes you just work the 9 to 5. Right. Like some people, it's not all about money. It's about quality of life.

Yeah.

And I think some people that work the 9 to 5, they can come home completely detach from what they were doing. And tomorrow is a new day. If you're a decision maker and things, you have fires to put out, you know, 24, seven, there's something on your mind, Right?

Yeah. That's a great story. So when you decided to make that decision to drop out, what were you thinking back then? What were Your parents thinking about that decision, how did that happen?

I was thinking, like, I'm ready and I know this is going to succeed. My family probably didn't. They were the first ones to go to university, so they thought, this is the only path. If you want people to respect you, you need a degree, blah, blah, blah. But in my mind, I love that risk, I love that freedom. And if I see somebody else doing something, it's like, instantly I'm like, that's achievable. It's not like, wow, they got lucky. You must be nice, you know, so from a young age, I always felt like, wanted to have something that was my own and have like. What's the word? Like a free, exciting life.

Yeah.

And by the time I told them I was going to move to la, I wasn't necessarily asking permission. I was saying, hey, I'm already doing this. I want your blessing. Not really permission, and I'm moving out there regardless. And it was the type of thing where I'm like, I don't need financial support. Got this covered. And we're going to build memes.com and in their heads, like, what the hell is a meme? Who is this guy?

Calm.

Yeah.

They're like, what is happening?

After a bit, they came out and they saw that it was real. Like, there was an office, there was a real business here. And if I finished my degree, funny story, the whole oil industry crashed right when I would have graduated. So it's one of those things where blessing in disguise. Blessing in disguise, right?

Yeah.

So, yeah, they definitely were shocked, but I felt ready. Like, I. I never felt like I was taking risk. I was like, so ready for it.

Yeah.

Just hungry, you know, ready to get in there, throw me in the ring.

I love that. So with I'm here's now we talked about at the beginning, memes.com. is that still a domain that you own?

Yeah. Wow. Company still around. It's not as active in a sense. We still have the social pages.

Yeah.

It's the largest meme generator in the App Store. But yeah, it's still around news.com that.

Is such a powerful domain.

Not bad. Especially in this day and age. Right?

It's crazy.

Elon Musk watched this.

Let's partner for sure. I want to talk about Snapchat specifically. You said you had 80 different shows on Snapchat. I've been seeing a lot. Like their whole platform is just incentivizing creators so much. I have friends that have made not only a killing on it, but they've built a massive brand on there fairly quickly. What's your thoughts on Snapchat specifically right now?

I think got to get it while it's hot, you know what I mean? Especially the Discover program. I feel like it was much more closed before. Like, when we started getting some of our shows, it was only like the Buzzfeed devices, etc. Now I'll get like eight LinkedIn messages a day, like, hey, bro, I can get you a Snapchat show. You know, So I think it's the type of thing it's smart to launch more shows there, try to get as much revenue as you can. But, yeah, I don't think they can sustain, like, the viewership on all these type of shows. Yeah, pretty much every month that passes, I feel like it's gonna get a bit harder to get views there, but can build a great brand there. And if they're sending you the traffic for free, yeah, it's worth it, right?

For sure. What, outside of the, you know, the main social channels, where do you see opportunity over the next five years? Right. Like talking about Snapchat. Get it while it's hot. TikTok. Get it while it's hot. Obviously, Twitter is going through some big changes. Do you have any ideas of, like, not what the next frontier is, but just where the next early opportunity is? Maybe it's not even clear right now, but I'd love to hear your perspective on that.

I think I'd have to say AI. And I know everybody on Twitter talks about this, everybody on social. But artificial intelligence is like the new dot com boom right now. So always looking to do something there or integrate like a tool that would empower, like, our existing companies with AI and then kind of like license that out to other companies that might have, like, a similar need or solution. But it's powerful. I think AI can write your ad copy, can write your emails, can write your headlines, can write a full book for you in a few milliseconds, to the point that I think anybody who takes stabs at that in the next two to three years and finds like, their sweet spot, it'll be the same thing as like launching like, Yahoo or something like that, you know, so spaces get crowded. And I think we're like the first four to six months of this thing, everyone's trying to build something.

Yeah, Yeah.

I want to watch and see what people are doing and who's doing it right or who's doing it wrong. And then I think once we find the product, since we're good at marketing and getting it out to scale, we're going to be the ones to like blow it up. Even though we might not have the let's say original idea. Yeah, we'll launch with like a competing product and just try to take, take the market. But that's where I'm like sitting on my laptop like chat GPT4 all night nowadays.

So have you guys rolled out any like internal company mandates around? Like hey use AI for this or hey, this is how you can use it internally.

Yeah. We're starting to see how to manage accounts with AI, how to actually learn to clip longer footage into like let's say vertical video.

Yep.

And looking how to just like first just build automation inside our organization. And if you build the right tool I think at a certain point can easily turn it into like a B2B type solution or a B2 creator instead of consumer, you know, so looking to do that and whether it's a company we start or something we find that hasn't picked up necessarily too big yet and we can just like acquire and skip like the first six months of like, you know what I mean, like building exactly like we've done that for so long that now we're just trying to scale, find good opportunities, put capital, scale the business and I don't know how many other companies I want to be in like from day one do this over and over again.

Because you guys are incubating and like creating metal wheelhouse like vertically integrated products across everything.

Yeah, it's need some time for like the physical health, other things in life, you know, I love that.

Outside of speaking of physical health, do you have any long term goals that you know are important to you that are more so just like big endeavors that you want to tackle? For me, for context, like last year I ran my first marathon. That was something that was just outside of business but life was a goal of mine. Do you have anything like that in your life?

Respect, I actually saw that. No, I always keep up to date with like your cold plunge journey, all that which is amazing for me. I'm just trying to live the rest of my life how I'm going to live the rest of my life. As crazy as that sounds, I don't want to sprint too hard in one direction. I just want to be able to say hey, like the lifestyle I'm adapting now is generally healthy, active, you eat good. I want to be moving the same when I'm 55, when I'm 70. So I'm trying to find that balance of just be Consistent, you know what I mean? I don't necessarily have any goals like a marathon in mind. Like, I used to train a lot in martial arts and I want to start doing that again once or twice a week. But other than that, just stay fit, eat clean, get good sleep, manage the stress. And I think everything else just falls into place, you know?

Absolutely. I think I always listen to the Andrew Huberman labs and talking about. I've been super into sleep data the past year. I got the eight sleep mattress, the OURA ring, that whole thing. And just seeing the days that I either don't sleep well or do. And that compounded over time. I heard this quote. It was like, instead of asking someone, like, how are you? You could ask them, how have you been sleeping lately? And you can instantly get a sense of how they are from a stress level, from a mood perspective, everything on that key indicator.

So how many hours a night are you getting?

Usually seven. Yeah.

That's good.

Yeah. Sometimes six and a half, sometimes eight. Just really depends on when I'm gonna sleep. But I try to be consistent. Go to sleep like 10, 10:30, wake up at 6.

So that's my schedule, honestly, you know, that's a good time. You know, nothing good happens after dark. No, I'm just kidding. I'm on the same boat. So I've been trying to get the seven, eight hours of sleep. And then the other thing is just limiting your screen time. You know, like, I. I was in the era where I still got to see what it was like to like, play outside as a kid, not have a cell phone in my hand 24, 7. And now if I look at my screen time, sometimes it took eight hours, you know, and that's just like your phone, that does not include your laptop, your TVs, any of that. So I know you've probably heard it a million times, but, like, deciding what you see first in the morning.

Yep.

Versus picking up your phone and seeing, like, this is bad. We need something immediately. You know, getting that, like, adrenaline spike.

And yeah.

You not choosing how to start your day versus just waiting. Like, hey, I'm going to exercise, I'm going to eat first. And then whatever's out there will still be out there. You know, the small chance of it being, like, so nuclear that you don't for sure.

It's like you could check for fires, but not for me. I. I've been in the mindset especially, like the last couple months. I try to give myself like an hour, hour and a half, no phone. I wake up at 6, I don't look at my phone till like, 7, 7:30 when I'm heading to the gym. And that has. It's given me such a clarity of my day and the morning versus, like, if you get trapped on your phone for 15 minutes in the morning, 6:30, your email, texting, and then try to get back to, like, diving into a book, then your mind's already spinning and going and thinking about things you got to respond to. Um, so that's been sort of like my. My experiment recently is like our minimum. No phone in the morning, leave it upstairs and just.

It's smart. I mean, it's just so new to, like, humans to have this much stimulation, you know, and it happened rapidly. I mean, what, the iPhone's a bit over 10 years old. Facebook's a bit over 10 years old. The Internet's 30. So I don't think anyone has the data on how bad this is. And I think in the future, being in the social space, being in this, like, there will be, like, courses and stuff, like, how to, like, detox from that. Because it truly is whatever it is. Right.

Yeah.

So I think it's important. I don't know who. Where I read it before, but, like, Tim Ferriss, I think it might have been. They were talking about, like, the power of journaling. The second you wake up and you just write whatever pops into your head first. So if you woke up and you're like, yeah, I shouldn't have ate that last night. Shouldn't have ate that last night. Like, I slept okay. Like, whatever. He's like, just get the thoughts that come into your head on paper first thing in the morning, and then you'll realize, like, patterns right away.

Yeah.

And those might be the same things that, like, if you didn't write them out, that'd be, like, haunting you the whole day, just, like, bouncing around in your mind. Right. So, been trying to do that. I've been Just trying to start the day with the walk. And then started on your own terms, basically.

Yeah. Yeah. I love that. It's so crazy. I don't know who told me this recently, but, like, speaking of AI. Right. Like, thinking about social, like, I'm. I'm 22, and I. I appreciate the fact that what you just said of, like, growing up in a world where you're not glued to your phone. Like, yeah. It's such a blessing. Looking back and to the future point. Like, in a world where our kids, in a sense, like, they won't. They won't grow up in a world that doesn't have AI like strongly implemented into everything they do. And you see that, like, I can't imagine being in middle school, high school right now and being on TikTok and then seeing ChatGPT and all the use cases and not finding ways to just accelerate, cheat, leverage your time and just automate everything in your life.

Education has to change, right? Because is somebody going to write three pages of math by hand nowadays? Probably not. They'll put it into ChatGPT and that's how they should be trained. Like, if you have new tools and resources, the education system should like catch up to that and teach you how to use those to better empower your decision making. Because can confidently say after being in university for so long, like to ask me so much of what I've learned and I don't remember a thing, you know, and I just wish I knew how to vet people better when hiring, how to do these things. And you don't ever get to learn that.

Yeah.

Instead of being thrown in the fire and just learning it in real time, you know, But I think the schools at the same time are gonna have to teach kids what, like, what an advertisement is. Like, this thing's literally trying to make you feel like, insecure. So you buy this product, this thing's trying to spike your dopamine and if it doesn't start at a young age, like, yeah, I don't know, I think they. There's a lot of influence on children nowadays and I don't know what the answer is, but whoever figures it out, it's going to be a rich, rich person.

Yeah, for sure. There's so much we could dive into there. But wrapping up here, if looking into the future, what are you excited about when it comes to all the different brands you own, media entities, just what excites you? Projects, initiatives, opportunities, Looking into the future.

Yeah, I mean, originally it was get an exit, get a lot of money and then do whatever you want with the money. And then once that happened, you realize like, the only thing you want to do anyways is stuff you never needed the money for in the first place. Like, well, I want to work out, I want to do the same basics. I just want to really become great at, like building the businesses and try to take them to the highest levels they can be. Outside of that, I want to invest in other companies and start a fund eventually where you can inspire and pretty much support like the new innovators of the world. I don't think I want to jump on the ground floor and like bootstrap something from scratch anymore. I've done that for a long time. But I would say, yeah, just build an amazing business. And at the same time, if you focus on the process, that's when a company wants to come in and buy you. But at the same time, if you don't get acquired, it's like, man, you have business that's printing money year over year and you get it to a point where it's managed in a way that it's not too stressful and take it from there. But just I love that consistency and become really good at what you do is pretty much the goal. Love that ever happens between there. I guess no one knows, you know what I mean?

Absolutely awesome. Well, Raz, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I know he's been trying to make this happen for a while now. For everyone that's watching or listening, where's the best place that they can follow you and stay up to date with everything you have going on?

I would say just Instagram. I don't really post too much on LinkedIn or Twitter or any of those. Just in the shadows building, you know what I mean? But love that we're coming.

Love that. Well, I will make sure to link that down below. Everyone tuning in, watching or listening, please make sure you subscribe. Share this episode with a friend, especially someone that is looking to get into the media space and I will talk to you guys soon. Thank you so much for listening.

Thanks a lot.