Episode 306: 7 of Top 10 Best Selling Video Games with Executive Chairman Jay Samit

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weddell. And before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and again, go to Wydell on winning.com webinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode.

Of Million Dollar Mastermind. I am talking here with Jay Samet and Jay is the president founder of Greenfield Robotics. We haven't got into now.

I'm chairman of Greenfield.

You're chairman, Chairman of Greenfield. And I haven't explored how he got into that, but he's worked with many of the companies that you have heard. We hear about every day. And I want to get into his experiences with Sony, Universal Studios and other things. Talk about you got started, you started. How did you get Jasmine Multimedia up to a revenue? I think it shows it here. Started 82, went into 96. Is that about right?

Yeah, I sold it to Universal. Ebay became a billion dollar company. LinkedIn became a billion dollar company. My last company that we sold after 18 months, News Corp. Bought for 200 million. I've taken companies public for 600 million that were just started in a room with no revenue.

Yeah. Okay, well, how did you go then? So you sold to Universal Studio. Is that what I was hearing?

Yeah. So again, as I said, you either want to be the best at what you do or the only one doing it. So I was doing video games before people knew what video games were. One point, I had seven of the top ten selling games. Universal wanted to get into games, so that's a pattern. CEOs nowadays are like a piece of cheese with an expiration date. And public CEOs don't have the time to build new records, revenue streams from scratch because why they're building it, that means it's costing them capital, which means that they're drawing down their earnings and they're not getting their bonuses. I've been a NASDAQ CEO, so they'd rather overpay for an acquisition. So you can actually create a startup, knowing which most likely companies will be the ones acquiring it and dovetail it to that. When everybody was skipping through TV commercials, I knew all the broadcasters would be in trouble. They need a new ad unit. So I created a new ad unit and next thing you know, it solves a problem for News Corp. So that's the way to look at these things. My mistake with my first company is I knew nothing about business. I turned down because I didn't understand things. I was young in my 20s, another software company offered me a third of their company for all of mine. That company is known as Activision. And that was a $9 billion mistake. That was with the B billion.

Wow. And talk about experiences with. So you, you were acquired. And a lot of the acquisitions is not just to get the company, but to get the talent that's there or the, you know, patents or.

Yeah, no, yeah. I've been the intrapreneur and three times in my life trying to change giant companies. When the world's largest music company brought me in, Napster was around. Music sales went from 40 billion to 20 billion. The industry was over. So I had to come up with new ways of making money. So that's what you do. Yeah.

And we're talking about Sony Corporation right now. So what were some of the things. Let's say you get in. How do you take the lay of the land and a company as big as Sony? Because it comes. The thing that I want people listening to this to understand is companies, no matter how big they are, come down to people. And most companies are run with just a handful of people at the core. And they're either making dumb decisions and the company goes down, or they're making good decisions, clever decisions, insightful decisions. And company grows where they're afraid to.

Make decisions and they slowly die.

Slowly die?

Yeah. Grow or die.

Probably the most influential book that I read at the beginning while I was in school was a book called the Peter Principle. And the central core of the book is everybody rises to their level of incompetence. So if you're a great teacher and all the kids love you, they make you principal. Well, principals don't deal with students. They deal with. With teachers and parents. If you're good at that, they move you to school board. My school board doesn't deal with teachers or parents. It deals with budgets and politicians. If you suck at any of these things, you stay in that job forever. So in giant corporations, pretty much top to bottom till you get to the very top, they're filled with people that are stuck in a job that they're not qualified for. And you can use this to your advantage in selling to these people because they have a horrible fear of losing that job. And self preservation is the number one motivation in the corporate world.

And so how long did it take you to realize that?

I remember the exact moment. I would always prepare for these meetings and know everything top to bottom. And I realized the person at the other side really didn't care. And so the first time I used this technique is I had a rare chance to have a meeting with the CEO of Pepsi. I had a brilliant idea for Pepsi. I worked at six ways from Tuesday. And when I got there, this was the most important meeting up until that stage of my life. To the CEO, I was the only thing between him and going to lunch. So I thanked him when I walked in and I also thanked him for making it on this day. Because tomorrow I'm in Atlanta, Georgia. Wait, he's thinking, he's in Atlanta, Georgia. He's going to see Coke tomorrow. If Coke does this idea and I don't and the board finds out, I could lose my job. Now he's leaning in and paying attention. And I've done that again and again. And that's how you propel people to make decisions.

Now, going back again when you got to Sony, how did you get familiar with the lay of the land where your instincts could kick in and you could know who you're going to keep, who you're going to let go, what projects you were going to let go, what new things you were going to do? You probably had a pretty good idea of that going in.

So in each of the times that I come in, I don't bother to take lay of the land. I'm brought in for change and I just go like a bull in a China closet and just go forward. So I know that they'll give you a certain amount of latitude, 60 days, 90 days, whatever it is. And so if I can just go headstrong in and create new revenue streams, when emi, that's the home of the Beatles and Pink Floyd and, and Beach Boys and Capitol Records and Virgin, when I came in as president of that, I remember somebody coming in that wanted our business for getting more radio play and getting us into stores and everything. And I threw him out of the office. I said, I don't have time for this. He goes, then we'll make sure you're never on radio. I said, I don't care. We've been on radio for 50 years and the business is going out. I'm focused on things that we haven't done before. So that's what you have to do. You really have to find a new piece of turf to go in and surgically figure out, save this one tweak, that you'll never do a seismic change, you'll do an incremental. No one hires me to increase profits by 2%.

Hey, listen, there's a lot of information online, but there aren't a lot of people who have actually done something. In my case, I've actually built a successful business, has accrued over $5 billion.

In assets under management, and has done.

Well even during trying times. Now, if you want to know exactly how I've done this, go to Whiteellumwinning.com webinar Now, I've compressed a decade of learning into five short weeks. Just for those of you who want to give yourself an incredible advantage and are tired of waiting and watching others move.

Now, how did you. It sounds like this idea of disrupting yourself had a lot to do with your strategy when you went into these companies.

Would that be Absolutely.

You were taking the disrupt yourself message with every company that you went into.

Oh, absolutely. So, I mean, that's where the book came out of is first you have to change your attitude. Once you realize you can change that voice in your head that says you're not good enough, you're not smart enough enough, you can't do it, you realize changing an organization is the same process. Organizations feel like they can't do what they can't achieve. I had to go head to head with launching a Sony digital music business against itunes, which had a three year head start, had the Apple ipod, had Steve Jobs. I mean, you have to be crazy to go up against that. So I said to myself, I need to do what I call OPM other people's money. How can I get somebody else that will fund everything that way, whatever I do is in profits and it doesn't cost Sony anything. So I looked at who else was in trouble, and that was the year that Spurlock did the movie supersize me. McDonald's sales were down for the first time in their history. I said, okay, there's one. And then United Airlines was in bankruptcy. I said, there's two. Now all that I have to figure out is how do I get McDonald's and United to spend millions of dollars promoting my digital music business. So I went to McDonald's and I said, I can save you. I can turn your sales around. Why don't you do buy a Big Mac, get a free track, put a code on each Big Mac. You guys have the best marketing machine in the world. You do the TV commercials, you do the tray liners, put up signs in every store. They spent $60 million launching my store and delivered me 20 million paying customers the first week. For that, they got zero dollars from me and they paid us millions. United. I said, united, I can get people thinking about you again. I know you're coming out of bankruptcy. What if you do the first ever rock concert in the sky, we'll fill a plane with press. We'll have Sheryl Crowe do a concert on the plane and tell people that they can now use their frequent flyer miles to buy digital music. Not only did we do that, but did it lead all three evening news, played on every United flight for a month and generated millions more customers. Again, didn't cost me a penny. So OPM, whether I was a three person company or 100 person company, if you're a small company, there's some other business that wants the same audience as you, not a competitor, same demographic. You sell old people socks or somebody that sells old people shirts. So how can you come up with an idea that helps the big guy and carries you along? And you'll find that the bigger the companies, the less innovative ideas that they have. So if you have one, you'll move right to the top and take it over.

And did you find.

I mean, do.

You think that's a valid excuse when a millennial. I know it triggered you to write the book, but when anybody says to you that's great for you, but, you know, I can't relate, you know, I got offended when you told me a millennial told you your book was nothing but stories that they couldn't relate to or they could never do. Because I know, I haven't even read your book and I know that's not true. And so the thing is, was, do you take those excuses seriously or is it just people making an excuse for themselves? I don't care if it's a generation making an excuse.

No, it's not generational. It's cultural. It's most countries, most people. The farther you get from Silicon Valley, the less people have a knowledge of people that have done it. So the idea of making a billion dollars just seems unattainable. The idea of becoming a millionaire seems unattainable because they're not shown a path. There's tons of kids in the Dominican Republic that spend every waking spare minute playing baseball because they've seen that as a path of how people got out of poverty. You can make it into the major leagues. Had those same young people been shown the tools how to do this, they'd have a greater success rate of making it out of poverty. I was shocked when my book went to number one in Vietnam. I was shocked that it's coming out in Urdu this year, in Icelandic, in Polish. People were thirsting for this knowledge to change.

And.

When I saw what happened at our nation's capital in January. What I saw were thousands of people feeling left out, left behind, fighting over leftovers. The bottom 140 million Americans don't even own 1% of this country. Most have a negative net worth. Most college kids are graduating with a mortgage, but not a house. And all of these things stop people from trying. So the more that I can work with governments to make their tax situation more friendly to venture capital, more friendly to innovation, the more we create jobs, the more we have a middle class. The middle class got wiped out. And there's never been a war between two countries that have a McDonald's. So this is what I'm spending. Whatever time I have left, people go to my website, jsammit.com, there's free workbooks so you can start changing your life today. And again, there's no. I'm not trying to make a dime off of this.

And by the way, Jay, how old are you?

Good Lord.

I mean, how much time you have left?

None of us know how much time we have left. I'm 60.

Okay, you got a lot of years left, Jeff. I mean, Jay, you never know. You never know. But you got the right attitude.

If you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works in the real world, I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years and put them into something for you to watch. Go to whiteellawinning.com webinar now in order to move up as fast as possible. I'm Larry Wydell, and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go, go, go.