#166 - Moiz Ali - Quitting the perfect job to become an entrepreneur (re-up)

This week we've got a re-up from the Smarter Destiny archives. I am so excited to bring this to you again. This was such a good episode with Moiz Ali. He's a Harvard lawyer turned entrepreneur, and he grew one of the fastest eco-friendly deodorant brands in the universe, right? His brand is called Native, and he sold it for $100 million in November 2017. An incredible accomplishment. And in this episode, we go through exactly how he grew the brand so quickly, the massive $100,000+ mistakes that he hit, and just how he felt emotionally during the period where he's negotiating this massive $100 million sale. It went over many months. Oh my goodness, the emotion he must have felt. We go deep into it in this episode. This is well worth a listen. Lock in and enjoy.

Like the businesses that you work with, you know, have to be small enough that they're willing to work with you early on, and then hungry enough and courageous enough and brave enough to grow with you and not leave you in the lurch when your business gets too big. We're on a mission. We're going to find and uncover.

Discover the smartest, most successful entrepreneurs on the planet. Explore their highs, their lows, and how they ultimately mastered the game. I'm Martin Cook, and I'm excited to welcome you to the Smarter Destiny Podcast. I'm grateful for you and your time. Now let's level up together. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another expert interview where this time we have Moiz Ali, and I am beyond excited to introduce you to him. This guy runs an amazing company. You might have heard of it. They've got like a million customers and what. It's called Native, nativecos.com. He is the CEO of that company. He's working with Procter and Gamble. You might have heard of them as well. This guy has a colorful past which we are about to go deep into. We've been speaking a little bit offline and we have some absolute gems to share. The reason we're speaking with Moiz Ali today is he is one of our special guest speakers for our upcoming Luxury Mastermind in Koh Samui, Thailand, which you can check out at cartelsmastermind.com. And we're going to get into that as well. Moiz is a phenomenal dude, and I think without further ado, I think we're just going to let him prove that to you. Moiz, thank you so much for joining us today.

Super excited to be here. How the hell are you? Super excited to be here, super excited to hang out with you guys in Thailand as well.

Fantastic. And so just to let everybody in on a little stage secret, right now Moiz's camera is balanced between 2 bottles of Purell, like on this side of the camera.

That's right, yeah. If I move one, the phone will fall. So I would show you, but I can't do that.

So Moiz, what we tend to do in these interviews is we tend to go back to a point of essential conflict, a point of story that often entrepreneurs have in their life. And we're gonna go from there through to the present, and then we're gonna hit some quickfire questions, some fun questions which I'm sure you're gonna love. And you haven't even seen them. Normally I give my guests, like, the questions just before, but you haven't even seen them.

No worries. So we're gonna ad-lib.

No worries, no worries. So, going back to just before you were an entrepreneur, just before you were an entrepreneur, just before you made the jump, Where was this? When was this? And what were you doing?

Definitely. So this was back in 2012. That was the last time I had a job that was working— I was working for somebody else. And I was a lawyer in New York City working at this law firm called Simpson Thatcher Bartlett. And what we did is— or like Simpson Thatcher is a law firm that has 1,000 employees, offices across the world. I was a corporate associate there, meaning like I helped large companies either buy smaller companies or rather large companies, or I represented companies in some sort of corporate security transaction. So the biggest clients at Simpson were PE firms who were Blackstone and KKR, and investment banks like JP Morgan, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs. And so whenever, you know, one of those PE firms was buying a company or selling a company or IPOing the company, Simpson was involved doing a bunch of the legal And I remember I was there for about 2 and a half years. The last big deal I did was representing one of the nation's largest check cashers in the United States. And I remember what happened was, you know, they gave me a blank sheet of paper and they're like, go find out everything about this business because they're going to do some sort of securities work and we're going to need to write down— we're basically going to need to write a management presentation with respect to the business. And so I interviewed like their COO, their CFO, a bunch of their C-suite execs. And I was like, tell me everything about your business. And it turned out that like, you know, they were starting to make a lot more money through prepaid debit cards and a lot less money through check cashing. And it was super interesting and fascinating. And for 2 months, I just delved into this industry and I was like, man, I would rather be on the business side of things than the legal side of things. And I'm positive that that's the case at the end of these 2 months. And so that was back in around, you know, December, I think it was September or November of 2011, and then I gave notice in February 2012, and like, you know, I haven't had a real job since then.

So, wow.

Or a traditional job, at least.

A traditional job. I think most of the listeners and viewers were probably in the same boat here. So you literally found yourself in a boat where you're interviewing all of the decision makers and they're obliged to tell you all the inner workings Of this company. And so you've gone, wow, I've got to be— I'd rather be on the business end than the legal end. What did you do next?

That's exactly right. And I'll tell you 2 other things, actually. Like, my father was an entrepreneur, and he thinks that working for anybody but yourself is absolutely crazy. So I went to law school for 3 years. It cost me a fortune. I had all these student loans. I graduated law school, and every day he'd call me in my office and be like, why are you still working as a lawyer? You need to quit today. Um, and I was like, you know, and my mom, my mom would be like, you know, my, I talked to my mom and my mom would be like, why would you ever quit this job? It's amazing. You get to wear a suit every day. You're really well paid. Um, you know, it's a really prestigious job. You're gonna find an amazing wife because you're this lawyer. Why would you ever quit doing any of that stuff? Um, and so that was really funny.

It's like the team on your shoulders, I guess, isn't it? It's like the, the—

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the yin and the yang. My dad being like, you need to quit every day. And my mom being like, don't ever quit. This is the best thing that's ever happened to this family. Anyway, so quit, and one of my law school classmates and I started an online alcohol business called Caskers. This was back in New York. I remember we launched on— we launched in June 2012. I remember it was June 18th, actually. So it's almost exactly 7 years ago. And what happened was we got this big article in a news publication in New York City called Urban Daddy being like, oh yeah, these 2 law school— like these 2 ex-lawyers stopping lawyers to start selling alcohol online. Um, and the first day, like this was pre-Facebook ads. This was pre, like pre-Amazon being what it is today. This was pre the world of e-commerce as it is today. And, um, you know, uh, we launched and we did something like $6,000 in revenue the first day. We had like 2 products to sell. And I still remember my co-founder and I were like high-fiving each other, uh, because we'd launched this business and done like $5K the first day. And we're like, wow, this is going to be a real, this is going to be a real business. And so that was like the first taste of entrepreneurship I got as an adult, I guess. That was in June 2012. We ran the business for a year and a half, and we sold it in October 2013 to a family office based in Atlanta. And then I left about a year later in 2014.

Wow.

And then I ended up starting—

Go on.

Sorry, go ahead.

I think there's a slight delay in our connection. And did your partner stay on with the company, or did both of you Yeah, he stayed on.

No, no, he stayed on for another year. Um, and then he exited, uh, I think in like 2015 or 2016. I'm not sure what, yeah, probably 2016. Um, I left in 20— I, uh, like, uh, you know, I moved, uh, you know, we sold in 2013. I officially left in 2014 or I guess 2015. Um, and no, in 2014, I started Native in 2015.

Okay. And so, um, what sort of revenue did this, uh, company do and what was your reason for leaving?

Yeah. So we got to like, I mean, it was a year and a half. We were bootstrapped. We spent $0 in marketing the entire lifetime of the business. So we, like, our marketing was entirely based on the idea that we'd get press, like we'd get PR publications to write about us. So we got things like the New York Post and Urban Daddy and Thrillist and TechCrunch and Bloomberg and all these places where we thought that like, you know, above average income alcohol drinkers would hang out. They would write about us. We required an email address when you got onto our website, and then we'd— it was a flash sale site. We'd email you every day with new alcohols, like new hard liquor that we were offering. And so, we got to, I want to say, a $5, $6 million run rate, definitely profitable, but not incredibly profitable just because alcohol has lower margins, super expensive to ship. Not only is it heavy, you need an adult signature. There's all these regulations around shipping these types of products. And so we had low margins, probably in the high teens, low 20s, depending on the month. And so we got to maybe $5, $6 million run rate. And then we sold the business. And believe it or not, the best customer of the business called us up one day and was like, I love this business. I'm an investor. It was the head of a family office. He's like, I own a bunch of alcohol businesses myself. I think this could be real. I could leverage the type of business that you have called Caskers. I could leverage Caskers to help grow my own alcohol businesses. That is where the synergy made sense. Then we ended up doing a deal in October 2013.

Wow. That is an incredible story, and even more impressive that this was done with no paid advertising, which I think is an alien concept to many of the people watching this. So, you breezed through it. You said, oh, just getting in Bloomberg and Mashable and TechCrunch and so on. Can you talk a little bit about how? How do you get into these kind of publications?

Literally brute force. It was definitely the days before paid advertising. We did not use paid advertising, but it was the days before paid advertising. Paid advertising barely existed. On Facebook, if you were doing any type of paid advertising, You were boosting posts with the hopes that people would like your post, which today I think everyone acknowledges is completely useless. You're not advertising in order to get more likes on your Facebook page or get more likes on a post. You're advertising to get revenue, and there's a clear funnel, and you build funnels around these things. Back then, there were none of these concepts. Back then, first, I likened Facebook advertising to shooting a Revolutionary War cannon. Sometimes the cannon went in the direction that you were aiming it at, and sometimes it just blew up in your face and killed everyone manning the crew. And now Facebook ads are like sniper rifles where you're like, I want that customer that's 300 miles away. And I only want a mother who's 39 years old, drives a Cadillac Escalade with a white exterior, and has a golden poodle. Those are the only women I'm advertising to. In 2012, that capacity did not exist. And so what we did is we just contacted all these PR organizations. We, and like, you know, we contacted Urban Daddy and we're like, look, the two, like, you know, we had a good story. We're like, we both went to Harvard Law School. We were both lawyers at prestigious law firms in New York. We both quit to start this business. And that sort of got the ball rolling. And I remember we were really aggressive about it. We'd follow like writers. And whenever a writer wrote something that was anywhere alcohol related, like on TechCrunch, some, some writer wrote about a distillery, which didn't make any sense to me. But I was like, well, if you're writing about this distillery, You should write about us. We're like, we have some tech component to our alcohol business. He ended up writing about us. That got us Bloomberg. That got us Inc. Magazine. Inc. Magazine got us Bloomberg Law. Bloomberg Law got us on like New York Post. It sort of was like this cascading effect. Um, and that's like what we did. But in reality, it was like us emailing editors at news publications all the time. Um, we didn't have a PR agency. We didn't have any of that kind of stuff. We were just like Basically, fingers crossed, had no idea what we were doing, and driving 80 miles an hour into a brick wall, hoping that something good would happen.

When you say that TechCrunch got you Inc. Magazine and so on, how do you mean that Inc. got you? Did they reach out to you then?

Sure. Once we gave it to TechCrunch, Bloomberg reached out to us, and they're like, hey, we— they weren't like, yeah, we read this in TechCrunch. They were like, We've heard more about your brand and this company that you're starting. We think it'd be a good fit for viewers of Bloomberg. And it absolutely was because you just have a bunch of above average income, generally male demographic people who enjoy hard alcohol. And that's who we're targeting. And so right after TechCrunch, Bloomberg reached out to us and they're like, hey, we'd love to feature you on Bloomberg TV. After we were on Bloomberg TV, someone from Inc. magazine wrote to us and they're like, we've read about you in a few different places now. We'd love to profile you guys in Inc. magazine. Then like the New York Post guy would find— I remember the New York Post guy, we reached out to him in like 2012, you know, it wasn't a good story. Then he's like, I got this new editor. And the new editor is like, has anyone heard of the brand Caspers? And he's like, these guys have been reaching out to me once a month for 14 months now. And the editor was like, okay, let's like write something about them. Um, and so, you know, it was just like dominoes would fall. But even then, I mean, look, back then it was, we built a $5 million a year business. It was pretty cyclical. We had, you know, it was decent business because we were bootstrapped and we had like some margins and were profitable, but we weren't raking in cash. It's not like this business was generating millions of dollars in EBITDA. We had a good business for the time and a good business. It was a great way to get your feet wet in e-commerce, particularly for me. And so I thought it was a great launching pad. We both did well, we both made a bunch of money. So in all the ways, it was a great launching pad to launch my career in e-commerce, for lack of a better term. But at the same time, it was also a business that more of a lifestyle business, you know, $5 million, $6 million in revenue, a couple co-founders, you know, maybe, I don't know, a couple hundred K or $300K to $400K in EBITDA a year. And so it was a good business, but nothing, like nothing where people would be like, yeah, you know, my son started Amazon. Like nobody was making that type of brag. Like my parents were not that, like, we're not making those brags to their friends.

Well, I imagine your mum was still getting over the fact that you'd quit as a lawyer by this time as well.

Yeah, yeah, she was unhappy with it. In fact, look, we sold in October. I remember we sold like on a Tuesday, and on Friday I called, like, you know, I was talking to my mom, and my mom's like, I think you should just stop doing this business. Like, this business isn't going anywhere. And I'm like, how could you say that? We literally have a buyer and we're trying to close 4 days from now. You think I should shut down the business 4 days before we might sell the business? That makes no sense, Mum. She's like, okay, well, if you don't sell in 4 days, then you should shut this down and work on something else. Fortunately, we sold, so we never had to get there, but it was insane advice.

Yes, insane advice. Sorry, Moiz's mom. Yeah, insane crazy. Right. Talk me through the process. Was it just a case of you got an amazing offer from this long-term customer and you were like, do you know what? Actually, that fits really well with me, or were you ready for a change for some reason?

Yeah, I think a little bit of both. One is that I had no idea how much regulation was involved in the alcohol business until we'd been operating it for 6 months or 8 months. I was like, wow, this is daunting and it's really hard to build a much larger business in this space just based on regulation. Some of that regulation is being torn down today, including last month. And so that's been helpful for the industry. And then 2, I think that like, you know, at some point my co-founder and I were going to like— we weren't doing this at the time, but I think like, you know, we just wanted to build slightly different businesses. And like both of us were equal owners in the business. And so, you know, he'd want to go in one direction and I'd want to go in another direction. And there was no clear decision maker in the business because we were both equal partners. And so I think that was like It wasn't frustrating, it was just tough for both of us because what we'd end up doing is compromising and going down the middle. And neither of us wanted to own that solution because I wanted to go towards the right, he wanted to go towards the left. We ended up going straight and neither of us owned that solution. And so we were both kind of happy about it, but not really owning it, owning that decision. And so I think that was a little bit difficult. I also wanted to build just a much larger business, and I thought I couldn't do that in the alcohol space. And so I was like, this has been great in terms of getting our feet wet here, but it's not something that I want to pursue over the course of the next 10 years of my life. Um, and then, yeah, the offer was pretty great. Like we both became millionaires. Um, and we were both like, you know, I don't know, we were under the age of 30 and we were both like, um, you know, we didn't know what would happen with this business. We'd paid off our student loans. And so we didn't have a lot of, we didn't have any debt, or at least I don't think we had any debt, but, um, you know, we didn't have a ton of money. It's not like we were like, yeah, let's, let's go to John George for lunch or let's go to these, 3 Michelin-star restaurants for lunch. We were both like, we're getting by. It'd be nice to have a little bit of a cushion in our bank accounts, especially not knowing how long we're going to be running this.

Sure. Makes perfect sense. And so, at this point, you've now exited the alcohol business and you're finding yourself with a bunch of time and a bunch of money. What do you do next?

Yeah. So one is like, that's a bunch of time. I was gonna say that's a dangerous combination, but I don't think that's true. It's just a bunch of time is dangerous. I think it was like Peter Thiel who told me, like Peter Thiel, I read rather, he like got depressed after he sold PayPal because he was like, I used to get 200 really important urgent emails every day that I had to respond to and make these incredible decisions. And now like, you know, the only emails I get are from J.Crew offering me 40% off jeans every day. And that's what it was like. For me, I was just like, okay, I opened up every J.Crew email, every Gilt email, every Groupon email, because I was like, I got nothing to do here. And so I ended up moving out to San Francisco because my brother lived out there, and he was running a mobile gaming company called TinyCo. And it was blowing up. They had raised tens of millions of dollars from Andreessen Horowitz, which is one of the best venture capital funds in the world, certainly. Mark Andreessen sat on his board. He had 100 employees. I walked into his office and I was like, how is the brother that I— I saw this guy picking his nose 5 years ago, and now he's running this company with 100 people. How is that possible? And so I was like, I got to see what's going on in San Francisco. I want to start another business. I don't know what it is, but let's see if San Francisco is the right place to do this. And I told myself that I was ready to move anywhere I thought I could start a business. If I thought my next business was going to be in shale oil, I would move to North Dakota or Oklahoma. I was like, I will move wherever I have to move. I want to be one of those 49ers that moves when the here of the Gold Rush in California. So moved out here, really didn't know what to do. Worked on, like, you know, like started doing customer service. Like I still had access to a bunch of Casper stuff. So I was like, let me start doing some customer service again, just because this gives me something to do. Like for some, I have to get up at 9, I have to get up by 9 in the morning because I like, there's some customer service emails to answer and I'm happy to do it. And it'll be fun. It'll give me a reason to like take a shower and put on clothing. And so did that for a while and then finally like stumbled into Native. What happened was my sister got pregnant and, you know, she was having a kid. She was using like, I think it was like Dove deodorant. I'd been using Axe deodorant. I was unhappy with, like, I remember buying Axe deodorant and being like, what the fuck are the ingredients in this deodorant? I cannot, I was a lawyer. I went to Harvard Law School. I was a lawyer for 2 and a half years. I'm not, I'm not the smartest guy in the room, but I'm certainly not the dumbest guy in the room. And I cannot pronounce one of these words and that cannot be good for me. And that's sort of how the idea of Native was born. It was just like, look at the back of your Dove deodorant or your Axe deodorant and you're like, wow, I need— I should be able to read one of the ingredients on the back of this thing. And if I can't, that's probably not a good thing for something that's going to stay on my body all day, every day for the rest of my life.

And so obviously, as we started this interview, we talked about Native and how it's a phenomenal company. But for the viewers that aren't necessarily familiar with what Native is and what it stands for, what is it?

Yeah, great. Yeah, absolutely. We make safe, effective, nontoxic products that adults use in the bathroom every day. So, basically, our goal is to say you're using a ton of products at home. I think the average guy applies something like 40 chemicals to his body before he leaves, before he walks out the door to work every day. The average woman applies 160 chemicals before she walks out of her door every day. We want to make the ingredients that you use on your personal care products, whether it be your deodorant or your toothpaste or your soap or your body wash, We want to make those same products as effective as they are today, but with ingredients that are going to be safer for you, with ingredients that you're going to understand. So, rather than use some PEG polymer that nobody knows what the hell it means, we'll use something like coconut oil. And, we don't have any artificial dye. Whenever I think of some of these body washes, I'm like, how do you have this green color? What sewer did you get this from that it looks this green? And, it's obviously just dyes that they put in, right?

Yeah.

Yellow 5, Red 1, Blue 4. I don't even know what they are. But like, we've decided to make a company that makes those same personal care products that are as effective as those chemical ones, but without any of the— without any of those nasty ingredients that people are afraid of.

So did you have any prior knowledge on how to make eco-friendly, natural ingredient cosmetics?

No, no.

So how did you do that?

None at all. And like, yeah, sure. I remember like one of my law school friends, we were like getting like coffee one day and I was telling her about this business and her husband was there and her husband was like, what the hell do you know about deodorant? Like, how are you going to be able to make a deodorant? And I was like, I know nothing about it, but in the next 12 months I'll become one of the top 10 experts in this industry. And so like what happened is that we made a deodorant. deodorant and we started selling it. And we're like, you know, like, look, we made a bunch of deodorants and we tried them and we're like, this sucks and this is good. And like, let's try and balance these things because you want effectiveness, you want good ingredients, and you want like good application. And, you know, it's like, you know, someone likened it to holding a basketball on your finger constantly. Like, you got to be able to balance all of those things on your finger without moving, like, you know, without making that basketball roll in one direction or the other. And so we started selling deodorant online after we thought we had a pretty good product. And it turned out that we had a mediocre product. Like, customers would email us and they'd be like, look, your deodorant works, but the application is really bad. Or they'd be like, hey, why are you using— why are you using beeswax? We don't really like beeswax as an ingredient. And so what we did is we kept reformulating our deodorant based on customer feedback for months on end. In fact, it's still something that we do. I should say years on end. But like, there were significant reformulations in the first 9 months of the business where We'd take customer feedback, we'd produce new samples, and we'd send them out to customers and say, hey, understood about the feedback. You hated the application. We've changed some of the ingredients. Do you think this one's better than the one we sold you, or do you think this is worse? And, if it's worse, tell us because we want to make the best product possible. And, this is a free sample. And, the more you communicate with us, one, the better our deodorant is going to be, and two, the more we're going to send you free samples because you're giving us good feedback. So, we kept reformulating our deodorant. And then, We thought we had a really good formula and we'd sent out all these samples. And then what happened once was in May, all of the deodorant, like we were making it, we were making it and then shipping it to our distribution facility. All the deodorant that we made, like this was the first summer that we'd been operating. All of the deodorant that we made melted en route between our manufacturing facility and our distribution facility. And we were like, oh fuck, our deodorant melts in the summer. It turns into like lotion or water. We can't sell this. And so, um, you know, what we decided to do was switch to the better, to the formula that we thought would be better immediately with very little feedback. But like, you know, we thought we had been going in the right direction. We'd gotten some feedback about previous iterations, but like it was either sell people water in a, like basically sell people lotion in a deodorant container and it would be absolute garbage or switch formulas because we have to. So we, and at that point I remember thinking about the business. I was like, maybe this business is over. I'm not sure the business can stomach the formula not working. The formula is everything and it melted and ruined. It's not going to work. But, we switched formulas and I was like, you know what? Let's try this and see if we can make it better. We think we're onto something. And so, we started sending out this new formula. Sorry, go ahead.

Well, so I was just really, really curious. Rewinding back, so you said, so we started making deodorant. Okay.

Yeah.

I mean, so I'm gonna fill in the gap and assume that you've done a bunch of research online, you've looked up kind of ingredients, you found some people wearing hemp on YouTube who are describing ingredients or something. Sure, that's right. But how did you then find someone to make it for you, but not just make it for you, but work with you on very, very low minimum order quantities, allow you to keep creating different samples? Where's the cash flow for this?

That's a great question. So, 2 things. One is that we had another problem much earlier on in the business where in the 3rd month, the first manufacturer that we were working with was basically like, you guys are getting too big for us. We can't keep supporting you. And at that point, I was also like, okay, this business is over. We're selling something like 10 units a day or something. Our manufacturer can't work with us. How are we going to find a new manufacturer? Get like, you know, do all this kind of stuff right away. And luckily enough, we found a manufacturer who was really small. Their minimum order quantities were tiny. I think in like several dozen units is all you had to order. You had to pay a lot for the several dozen units because like, you know, it took them a lot of effort to make 50 units instead of like today we'll order, you know, 250,000. But back then we were ordering 50 units. And so it was really tough. But like, they were great. We like, we're like, you know, we continued to scale slightly as we had this, you know, okay formula that we were selling. And so we were scaling slightly and they're like, look, we understand that, you know, you guys aren't doing a huge volume now. You could be doing a huge volume and you're growing every month. And we're going to buy into the concept that you guys are going to become a much larger business than you are today. And that, look, you know, they grew with us. They went from a 4-person, I think it was like 1,200-square-foot manufacturing facility because they were small themselves. to a 32,000-square-foot facility with hundreds of employees. Like, they grew with us as we continued to grow. Um, and that was really helpful for our business. Um, and like, you know, it's not just from manufacturing facilities, from a fulfillment facility. We used a 3PL in Oakland called Fulfillio, and they had like 8 employees, which was enough when we started working with them. We only needed half of an employee, like half the time of an employee, uh, to all of a sudden they had like 100 employees because we were growing so fast. Like the businesses that you work with, you know, have to be small enough that they're willing to work with you early on and then hungry enough and courageous enough and brave enough to grow with you, um, and not leave you in the lurch when your business gets too big. Um, uh, they, they can't be like, you know what, we can't keep doing this. They have to grow with you and they have to be committed to doing that. And they like, you know, the guys who are running those businesses have to be entrepreneurs themselves. And, uh, we ended up working with a bunch of great entrepreneurs in that respect. Fulfillco grew and had so many employees. When we had problems with that, or like, you know, we had problems because they were shipping the wrong things, we're like, hey, we want you to change this. And they're like, okay, give us 2 days, we're going to re-engineer this line so this problem never happens again. Like, they were great working, and without them, we would not have been able to build the business that we had.

Wow. And so presumably you put a fair amount of time into finding these partners. Did you have any kind of process for finding these things? Did you know those were the kind of people you wanted to work with back then?

No, I think it was a lot of luck. I'd say a couple of things. One is I really wish somebody had started a Yelp for small businesses where we could find great 3PLs or great fulfillment providers or great credit card processors. All of that would help ecommerce entrepreneurs being like, yeah, you know what? I sell CBD products. What are the credit card processors that are work with CBD products versus the ones that are not allowed to, that are not willing to work with CBD products. And so that would be really helpful. But what happened for us was, one, we would ask for referrals and call up people. And then 2, we'd make really quick decisions. If like something wasn't working out, we were just like, you know what, this isn't working out. It's partly our fault. You know, it's probably all our fault. Like we didn't clear, you know, we weren't clear with you. We weren't clear about our expectations with this, with whoever you are, whether you're a fulfillment provider or a manufacturer or somebody else. We weren't clear about our expectations and our needs. And like, it's clear that this isn't working out. And like, you know, you don't want me to call you every day and yell at you and you don't want to call me every day and be like, yeah, we fucked all these things up. Sorry about that. Um, and so we can part, we can part and go separate ways and do our own thing and like still have successful businesses. And so we were quick to be like, you know what, this isn't working out. Let's go find another solution. And I think we were like really rational about it and not very like, you know, not emotional about it. We weren't like, fuck this guy, he didn't do what he— like, we were like, you know what, we should have clear— we were— we should have been clear with our expectations. They would've told us that they couldn't meet those expectations and we should go somewhere else. And that was really helpful. And when we wanted things to change, we gave people time and worked with them. Like, you know, we wanted the Fafilco guys to start scanning everything. So they're like, great, how should we do that? And we're like, Here's this software platform, here's a scanner that your team can implement this. And they're like, great, let's implement it. And that was really helpful for our business. They were entrepreneurs willing to grow and learn, and they weren't wedded to the dogmas of the past. They were like, look, we can do better. And so if there's a way that we can do better, let's do that.

Amazing. And so it sounds like despite the constant changes and the formulation changes and the feedback from customers and so on, you were still growing Pretty damn quickly. And so, 2 questions. One, what sort of revenue number did you hit in your first year, or number of orders, or however you want to quantify that kind of size that you got to after 12 months? And 2, what were the main catalysts in getting that, going from zero to that, getting the word out and getting those sales, those initial sales?

Yeah, sure. So, I don't remember exactly how many we did, our revenue our first year, but I remember in January 2016, which was about 4 months or 5 months into the business, we were doing like $50K a year. I'm sorry, $50K a month. So January 2016, we were doing $50K. By November 2016, so 10 or 11 months later, we were doing about $1 million a month. So we'd grown about 20x, you know, it's 11 months. What drove us there was a couple of things. One is like maniacal focus on product. We were like, you know what? Nobody cares about anything. Like when we talk about deodorant, Does this work and is it made of good ingredients? That's what we cared about. Like, if it works, great. Is it made of good ingredients? Great. Those are the boxes that we have to check. Everything else will work themselves out. And so, you know, we did constant product iteration and we were constantly reaching out to consumers being like, hey, is this better or is this not better? And so we got a repeat purchase rate up from something like 20%, close to 50%, you know, in those first—

Wow.

11 months. And like that created a massive snowball effect. I remember in 2017, I was like, I want to do the beginning of 2017 where, you know, we were doing about like, like $1 million a month. And I was like, I really want to do $1 million in repeat purchase revenue by December 2017. So a year from then, and we did $1 million in repeat purchase revenue in like March or April '16. Like, you know, I was off by 8 months. We hit it 4 months later. Like I thought the goal would take us a year and it took us 4 months. That's how bad I was at projecting our revenue and our understanding our business. And it was just because consumers love the product. So they were telling friends about it. Moms, you know, I always thought it would be moms telling daughters, but it was daughters telling moms being like, hey, look, I found this deodorant. You know, you don't want to be— you want to be using safer products as well. Let's go, let's switch to a natural deodorant as opposed to using something like Dove. And so like word of mouth was huge for us. And but in reality, like focusing on product and getting our repeat purchase rate up was the number one thing that we could have done. And it was the number one, it was the thing that we spent the most time on, which was how do we make this product better?

And so—

And we even went so far as to like go to our manufacturing facilities and try and like, you know, I had no manufacturing background at all. And like we'd go there and try and like help them. And we hired like a, we hired like an engineer from one of these large cosmetics companies to fly down there and be like, hey, these are the 5 things that you could improve in order to make a more consistent and better product. We were hands-on everywhere. We'd be like, yeah, we have no manufacturing experience. Let's go down and see what we can do. And then we'd hire some random— we hired somebody whose job it was to do that at large CPG companies, but we're like, hey, can you do this for a weekend? We'll pay you a bunch of money. We won't tell anybody that you're doing this. Let's go down there and see what happens. And that was really helpful for us.

Wow. And so, I can see that. I mean, word of mouth is absolutely huge in that and also so powerful when it It's coming from a trusted source and so on. But you must've been doing something within the mix to stoke the fire, if you like. Were you paying for traffic or anything at this point?

Or PR? Oh yeah, absolutely. We weren't paying for PR. We were like, we were running paid ads on Facebook, on Pinterest, on Google. Like there's no question that without paid advertising, this brand would not have grown as fast as it did. Like it's just the nature of the world, right? Like if you're on Amazon, that advertising is coming to you and you can pay Amazon to get like, you know, higher rankings. If you're not on Amazon, You have to drive your own traffic from the— like, the way I think about it is like the movie Inception. People don't even know that they need your product and you have to, like, you know, you have to convince them that they need your product from not even knowing who you are. And for us, we had a bunch of things going for us. One is that we were in the right industry. Like, you know, deodorant is a product that you apply to your— like, on your body every day and it stays on your body for 23 hours and 45 minutes. The only time you wipe it off is when you shower. And so that was really good for us. And two, we were like, you know, it was the right trend. Like the entire personal care and beauty category, like, you know, Whole Foods may have gotten there first, which was you should really start caring about what products you consume because this, you're, you know, you only have one place to live and that's your body. So like you better eat better, like you better eat healthier products and stop having like, you know, 4 gallons of Coca-Cola every day. And then the next trend after, you know, food was you know, personal care and beauty. It was, okay, now that you're, you know, watching what you eat, you should watch what products you put on your body. And so, like, you know, makeup has been, like, you know, natural makeup has been growing hand over fist, certainly the largest part, largest segment of that category that's growing. And so, we were part of that trend of shifting away from, like, the traditional antiperspirants and Coca-Colas of the world To drinking bottled water and using natural deodorant.

Yeah.

And so that was super helpful.

Yeah, absolutely. So you're riding— so just to get this clear in my head, so you're riding a phenomenally uptrending trend. You've got an amazing product which you are obsessive about improving and blessed with manufacturers that are willing to improve with you and grow with you. And then you're accelerating it with— did you say Pinterest was your main traffic source?

It was probably— well, it actually— Pinterest was for a bit, Facebook was for a bit, or Facebook was for longer. Google was never a main traffic source, but we advertised on Google. So yeah, I guess our main paid advertising sources were probably Facebook, Pinterest, and Google in that order. Sometimes Pinterest beat Facebook, but it was generally Facebook, Pinterest, Google.

Nice. And you said, um, that it was a— it was like the movie Inception. And, and so these people didn't know about you, and, and now you've got to get to that point where there's no awareness to they're actually repurchasing your, your products. So how, how did you get that message across? Like, what tools did you use to, to achieve that?

Sure, sure, sure. Uh, it was generally like a couple things. One is like endorsements, uh, tons of, tons of reviews. We have more than 10,000 reviews on our website today. Like constantly asking people for reviews and saying, hey, what do you think about this deodorant? The first year of the business, I was the only employee and I emailed every single person that bought from us and I said, hey, you bought Native. If you like it, please leave a review. If you don't, write back to this email and tell me why you don't like it so I can go improve it. So constantly asking people to endorse Native was really helpful for us. The other thing that we did, like once we got people to purchase, we could get them to repeat purchase just based on product efficacy. So really, It was like the first moment of truth, which is, can I get you to purchase this once you hit our site? So, reviews were super helpful because a lot of people who had tried natural— a lot of people had tried natural deodorant and then been burned by it and been like, you know what? This stuff doesn't work. I have to still use Dove or Secret because I've tried natural deodorants and it's garbage. So, our biggest barrier was to get you to be like, you know what? Maybe I should try another natural deodorant again because I tried Tom's in the 1990s and yeah, it sucked, but 2 decades have passed since then and maybe somebody's come out with something better. And so reviews were super helpful. Endorsements from different publications like Women's Health or BuzzFeed were super helpful in getting people over that hump. So it was our policy in terms of free shipping and free returns. If you didn't like your first order after you ordered Native, we'd send you a return label. You can send it back to us and we'll give you a full refund. And if you didn't like your scent, we'll just exchange our scent for you. We're like, we had good customer service policies and we continue to because we're like, look, We understand, like, we sell a deodorant for more expensive than traditional deodorants, right? Like, our product sells for $12 and the traditional product probably sells for $4. So we, we like, you know, we really have to stand behind our products because it's more expensive and it's something new. And, you know, you've been using the same deodorant you've been using for 15 years. And so, so for us, like, the free shipping and free returns was also super helpful.

And was it predominantly US or were you selling worldwide?

No, it was only United States for the first like 2 and a half, maybe even 3 years. And then what happened is that there were so many people from Canada that emailed us and they're like, do you ship to Canada? Do you ship to Canada? Do you ship to Canada? I think we had a customer service agent whose sole job it was to be like, no, we don't ship to Canada. We'll let you know when we do. And so then we're like, You know what? Let's just figure out how to ship to Canada because that's a lot easier than responding to 80 tickets, like 80 customer service inquiries a day saying, do you ship to Canada? So we literally figured that out so that we'd get fewer of those tickets. And then we got the same thing from like Australia and the UK. And then we started shipping to Australia and the UK, and then it was like France and Germany. And so now I think we ship to like 5 countries, but in reality, it's just because people pounded on the door so hard. We're like, You guys were so intense about your desire to get Native deodorant. It is— we have to figure out how to get it there so that we don't constantly get bombarded with those emails being like, why can't I order to France? People would email us weekly. They'd be like, have you started shipping to France yet? And we're like, nothing has changed in the last 3 days. It was Friday, today's Monday, nothing has changed. But then we're like, we better get this because one, we don't want to disappoint these customers. And 2, we actually do want to get them the product. And 3, it'll make our customer service bots much lighter.

What an amazing problem to have.

Yeah, it was an insane problem where we're like, okay, we are going to sell you product because it makes our life easier because you are hounding us so much. It's an insane problem. And in reality, it's not a problem. And we're incredibly grateful to have those people as customers and to have their their belief in our product. But it was a real eye-opener. We were like, wow, we're gonna do this just because they're hounding us so much. Wow.

Okay, and so recently a fairly large event happened for Native, right? In the form of an acquisition by a company that people are probably aware of. Could you talk us through when that happened, how that happened, how did they approach you? who it is. Maybe they've got a story as well.

Sure. Yeah, it was Procter Gamble. The deal happened in November 2017, so about a year and a half ago they purchased us. So we were only like, our business existed for, you know, 2 years and 5 months or something like that, 2 years, 4 months. So not that long, you know, uh, before they purchased our business. Um, the process started hap— the process happened in, or started rather, in something like February or March of 2017 where someone came knocking on our door saying, hey, we want to purchase Native. And that got our, you know, that got us in gear to see, hey, you know, are people interested in this business? Is an acquisition reasonable and on the time horizon? What do we think of that? And so that sort of got our gear going. And then we hired a banker. We, you know, talked to a bunch of interested parties, a bunch of other CPG companies that were interested, a bunch of other private equity companies that were interested in the business. You know, P&G hadn't done a deal in something like 10 years before they bought us. Like, we were their first acquisition in nearly 10 years, which was pretty great. And I remember like talking to our banker about the deal and like, um, you know, the banker had had experience working with everybody else. And so he's like, this is how these people are going to behave. This is how, you know, Andy at Company X is going to behave. But he's like, nobody knows how P&G is going to behave because they haven't done a deal in 10 years. So we have no idea who, like, what they're going to do here. And I remember he told me, he's like, I had a conversation with P&G and P&G was like, look, we want to be really clear. We love this business and we're interested in this business. We're not just here to do like some sort of brain drain. We wouldn't be at the table if we weren't interested. We don't have that type of time to waste, which was really reassuring. And then like every step of the process, P&G was fantastic. Like they consistently were like honest and transparent about what they wanted to see from us. I remember they wanted to see our formula and we're like, you know, it was early on in the process and we're like, you know what, we'll show you our formula, but only a little later in the process because, you know, we don't know if you're just trying to take our formula and run and create a competitive deodorant. And they're like, we understand exactly where you're coming from with that concern. We would have those same concerns. No problem. Let's like, we'll show you, like, we'll show you that we're more committed every stage. And at some point you're going to be like, yeah, okay. P&G is not just like out here for no reason. They're out here to do a real deal. And you're going to be like, okay, great. Here, it's time for us to show you our formula. And that's exactly what happened. We talked to them and they're like, you know, they came out here, they flew out here like 3 or 4 times. I had dinner with them. They're like, this is how things are gonna work post-acquisition. This is how the reporting structure is gonna work. This is how budgets are gonna work. This is how we think you're gonna be integrated into P&G, which is very lightly. Like all of these things in a way where I was like, these guys aren't here to like, these guys want to do this deal. It's very clear. And so we're like, Yeah, we understand where you're coming from now in terms of wanting to see our formula. We believe that you're genuinely interested. Here's our formula. And they're like, yeah, okay, your formula checks out. None of these ingredients are scary to us. We're ready to go.

Nice. And how long did that process take?

So, I mean, technically, we started the process trying to hire a banker probably in February 2017 and sold the business in November. So 9 months. How long we were actually negotiating with P&G, it probably got serious in June, Or July, and then we sold the business in November. So, you know, 5 months, 4 to 5 months when things were like serious, 9 months in terms of like, you know, start to finish.

And how did you feel during that? I mean, were emotions quite high? Were you sort of daydreaming about that, or were you precarious about giving up any kind of control in your baby? Or like, talk about that.

Yeah, I guess It's really hard because you feel like, one, you're trying to build your business because if the deal doesn't go through, you still have a business that you need to operate. And everyone walks into the conversation thinking, okay, you know what? I'm going to build my business and I'm going to do this on the side. If something comes of it, great. If not, no worries. I'm still focused on my business. That is not possible. That's like going to be like, oh, maybe I'll have a wedding on Friday. Maybe I won't. I'll see how much time I have. Like this thing requires planning and time and seriousness and attention and focus. And so that's what we gave to it basically. So it's scary. And like, you know, there were, I remember like, you know, there were a bunch of people making insane, like a lot of requests from us. You know, people would launch public surveys with like PwC to see, hey, how is Native? Like what is Native's NPS score? Do people like this brand? Do they not? What's the repeat purchase rate? What's the brand awareness among the general population of the United States? So we were sort of involved in all of these things. And it was hard to like get right all the, like, you know, it was hard to balance that with doing work with like, you know, people being like, you know what? Like everyone wants to come in and be like, hey Moiz, let me tell you why Native sucks so I can lowball you with a price. And so you're constantly defending your actions or they'll be like, why haven't you done this? And you're like, look, I'm trying to build this business. I haven't done this 'cause I haven't gotten around to it. We have 8 people here when we're trying to sell the business. And so it was really tough. And I remember being angry and disappointed in myself all the time. And I was like, I can't imagine I was very pleasant to be around. I remember going home and eating dinner and watching Netflix and I'd be like, nobody talk to me. Nobody, I don't want to talk about work. I want to sit here and zone out because these are the 4 hours I have to not think about M&A. And I'd get home at 10:00 PM and I'd have to start working again at 3:00 AM. And it was really time-consuming as well. So look, it's stressful, but at the same time, it's also one of the greatest experiences in your life. There were 12 interested parties, I think, or maybe 14 when we were selling the business. We spoke to all of them. It's so interesting to be like, you care about this stuff, and this other guy who's trying to buy me and who also is in the same industry cares about this stuff. And so it was really a balancing act in terms of getting like, you know, making sure that we, uh, we were selling the company. We were telling the people not what they wanted to hear, but we were like pitching the company based on their needs. Do you need a direct-to-consumer business that understands e-commerce and online acquisition? That's us. Do you need a natural deodorant business? That could be us. Do you need something that you can put in brick-and-mortar stores that has a higher price point? That could be us. Do you need a deodorant to sell, uh, internationally that hasn't existed but has good traction in the United States? That could be us. And it all depends on who the buyer is in terms of what you're pitching. And so that was a real balancing act. It was both the stressful and most exciting and like greatest thing I've ever done. You know, it was like, like nobody can walk out of there and be like, I didn't learn a lot. You learned a lot. And anyone who's like, I was not stressed out, and I've heard some people say that, I'm like, how could you? Either are a Vulcan and have no emotions or are lying. I don't know which one.

And I cannot believe Sorry, I believe all of that. The coping mechanism and the sheer willpower to get through that must have been completely amazing. But the question that I have no doubt everybody wants to know the answer to is, what did your mum think of the deal?

Fair enough. That was the one thing that got her excited. And so afterwards she's like, you know, I told you to quit. I told you not to be quitting a lawyer That was a mistake. I told you not to quit. Like, I told you, like, quit your last business, but after you sold it, I didn't want you to quit because you were getting a salary. It turns out that was a mistake. So she's like, now I don't know advice to give you any longer because you're not listening to it. And it seems to be good that you're not listening to it. That's something that she'll admit today. Like, she's like, I don't know how to give you advice anymore. All of my advice has turned out to be wrong, so don't listen to me. But, you know, everyone was super ecstatic. Like, it was a great transaction. You know, everyone was like, you know, my family was really proud. They all flew out here. When we closed the deal, we all went out to a nice dinner and that was a lot of fun. But like at the same time, I don't know, I think like from a personal perspective, it like one, I'd say when you're building your business, it really depends on what business you want to build. Are you looking to build something that you're going to work at for 20 years and it's going to be, you know, a lifetime worth of fulfilling work? Are you looking to build a business in a shorter period of time and like you're just doing this for the money? Where are you on that spectrum? And you should really build the business that you want to work at, whether it's a short-term business that you sell quickly or whether you work there for a really long time and it's a lifetime business. But like looking back on it, like, you know, very few things have changed in my lifetime, like in my life as a result of the acquisition. It's not like I'm going home to a yacht and like, you know, have 4 houses. I rent an apartment that's a 1-bedroom and have no car. Like, like looking back on it, it's so much easier to say this and it's so trite because everyone said this before I'd sold a company and I was like, this asshole is telling me this, but he sold his company so I don't believe him. It's like the journey was so much more valuable than like the transaction, like, you know, building a business. We went from $50,000 to $1 million in revenue in 11 months. By the time we sold our business, we were generating millions of dollars of net profit a year, maybe north of $10 million. We didn't bootstrap the business, but we only raised about $500,000 over the life of this business. By the time we sold the business, I think we had $12 million in cash on hand. It was profitable. It was growing. You know, employees loved the business. Everyone ran to work. There was so much work to do. Everything you did was a monumental change to the business. Like nobody was like, oh, should we change this little copy here? Like nobody cared about that because if the change you made was not gonna generate $100K in revenue next month, it wasn't worth it. Like there were too much, so much low-hanging fruit in terms of making the business better. And it was such a close-knit team. Like I loved everybody and I continue to love everybody that works at the company. Like we had 8 people when we sold the business. We have less than 20 people today. Like, it's really fun to have such a close, like, family when I come to work. Like, I know that we celebrate birthdays, we got to happy hours, you know, we've been jet skiing, like, we've been, like, you know, paddleboarding and kayaking and stayed at hotels and been to Hawaii together. Like, that team camaraderie is so, so valuable. And, like, that journey of building the business was incredible. And that's, like, the valuable experiences that I take away from it.

Wow. Um, wow. Okay, so I could pull at this thread for, um, a lot longer, um, but I'm being conscious of your time, so let's, let's pivot real quick, um, and let's, let's jump into the, um, the quickfire question round. Um, so I'm gonna ask the questions quickly. You have no idea what I'm gonna ask, which is super fun for me.

Let's do it.

But, uh, you can take as long as you want to to answer. Game, you up for this? I'm gonna take a water as well.

Let's do it.

Sweet. All right, question 1: Are there any unusual things you eat or drink regularly and why?

Are there any unusual things I eat or drink regularly and why? Um, no, I don't think so. I eat, uh, I drink Vega protein shakes pretty often in the morning, and I actually started drinking— well, I'm gonna pull it out. It's this brand called Après. They make these like vegan coffee protein shakes that are like— I met the founders and they're basically like, look, if you don't want a big thick neck, like if you're lifting weights and you don't want a big thick neck, you should drink Myprotein instead of like Muscle Milk. And I was like, yeesh, I do not want a thick neck. So I started drinking theirs. That really worked on me. It's like after a Barry's class or something like that, I'll have one of these, but nothing unusual.

Okay. Are you a vegan?

No, I'm not a vegan. I'm trying to be vegetarian because I watch a bunch of— Netflix has all these health documentaries and you watch them and you're like, I should be vegan. And you try it for 30 days and you're like, this is too hard. But I'm trying to be a vegetarian and eat less meat.

Okay, nice. How do you get yourself into a state of flow?

Into a state of flow? I think for me it's like I work best early In the morning. And so I wake up pretty early. I will work out. I work out every morning. And then I get in before any— like, I try and get in before other people get in, or work from home when, like, people are not up. Like, this is what it— this harkens back to my days as an attorney. Like, you'd be on calls all day, and then when everyone went to bed, you worked and did all the legal docs. Because that was the only time you could actually get work done. Otherwise, you were on calls all day. That's what it's like here too. You might be on calls all day or you might be in meetings and have people walking into conference rooms. I try and get into a flow before everybody gets up or everyone's into the office because that's when I can be productive and don't have a bunch of phone calls going on.

So what time do you wake up in the morning and what does your first 30 to 60 minutes look like?

I wake up at 6 and the first 30 to 60 minutes will be a workout. And then after that, it'll be answering a couple hours of emails or doing a couple hours of work before hitting the shower.

Do you do any kind of mindfulness practices or journaling or anything like that?

I don't. I feel like I need to. I follow Justin Kahn on Twitter, which is like having a philosopher. He's like a modern-day philosopher. He's like my own guru, except he just tweets about things I should be paying attention to. So whenever I see him on Twitter, I'm like, oh yeah, I need to take a moment to enjoy my life.

Do you?

Yeah, definitely. Uh, he's great. Like, uh, do you follow— he's like the founder of Twitch on Twitter. He's always like, he sold Twitch and he's constantly talking about how like, you know, he takes moments out of his day where he is like, why am I trying to rush through life instead of enjoying this moment? Um, every moment of my life should be about joy. He said he cycled through like a dozen therapists before he found one that he really enjoyed. Um, He's really trying to live a happier life. And I take inspiration from it. I think I'm not in the position where I follow a bunch of his practices yet the way I should be, but I certainly take inspiration from it.

Nice. What habit or opinion do you have that other people tend to disagree with?

One is, I think that— well, I'd say a few things. One, especially in Silicon Valley, I love bootstrapping businesses. It's so great. And I guess that's not contrarian, but it is different than what happens here. When people raise money and they're in TechCrunch, or they tell me they have a team of 150 employees, I'm always like, that's a lot harder. That's not necessarily good. Why do you need 150 employees to do all this stuff? And so that might be one of them. The other one is maybe the value. Well, I guess this goes to that same point, which is just the value of a single individual. I was the only employee at the company for the first year. where, um, you know, I did all the customer service operations and marketing and got us to like, you know, a $3 million run rate before we hired anyone. And I think that was one of the best— like, founders give up doing customer service way too early. Uh, the customer service, especially for e-commerce businesses, it's like how we understand our product, like why our product works and what customers like about our product and what they don't. Um, these DNVBs, like the reason that the, uh, vertical brands are great is that you have direct line of communication to your customers. Don't disintermediate yourself from the direct line of communication with customers by hiring a bunch of people that do customer service and only they tell you what customers say. You got to do it all the time so you understand what customers care about. And so I think that like, that may be a little bit contrarian where people think, hey, look, founders should separate themselves from customer service as fast as possible. I think that's the exact opposite. I think founders should do customer service for as Nice.

If you ran a school but could only teach one non-traditional lesson, what would that be?

Non-traditional lesson. I would— well, I guess if it was a middle school or high school, I would teach income tax. Okay. Because there's so many things happen as a result of taxes. And there's so many decisions that are made as a result of taxes. And no one in middle school or high school or even undergrad teaches you about taxes. It doesn't make any sense.

Nice. Do you know what? I actually get that answer so much, like that or finances. Is that right? I think if you're looking for your next niche, like, you know, you found it there.

Gotcha.

What book or books had the biggest impact on your life?

Great question. I think one is probably Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Like, when I was in law school and like my first few years in under— my first few years graduating, I was like, wow, only thing that matters is like, you know, efficiency in people's work and nothing else matters.

What's it called? Atlas Shrugged?

It's called Atlas Shrugged.

Atlas Shrugged.

Yeah, it's this book. Ayn Rand is this woman known for like a philosophy about objectivism where she's basically like, how well you do your work is the only thing that matters in life. And I remember there's like one paragraph where like this guy's like, when I die, I want to go to heaven and I want to be able to afford the price of admission. And this guy's like, virtue is the price of admission to get into heaven. And he's like, the response is, and I want to be able to claim the greatest virtue of all, that I'm a man who made money. And you're just like, wow, making money is really important. I think everyone goes through that, like Atlas Shrugged. Anyone who reads the book goes through that Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand phase. And then graduates out of it. I think today I've graduated out of it and I'm much more like, okay, people's work is not the only thing that matters in life. I think How to Win Friends and Influence People is also great. I think I used to be really shy and not personable, and now I've done a little bit of a better job understanding where people are coming from, from that book.

Nice. Nice. And would you say you're an introvert or an extrovert?

I would say I'm an introvert, except when I'm talking to people about e-commerce, then I'm an extrovert. Like, I love everything in the community. I love everyone doing every— like, you know, I used to be really afraid. Like, one of the hardest parts about being a founder and maybe the scariest, but also the best, is that like when you don't understand something, you realize it's not your fault. It's that somebody else isn't explaining it well. Like, and that's the same thing. Like when someone else doesn't understand something on my team, the fault lies with me because I'm not explaining it well. I'm not teaching brain surgery here and talking about like neurons and like neurotransmitters. I'm talking about e-commerce. And like, if I can't explain something such that everyone on my team can understand it, I've done a bad job talking about it. And like, you know, having the courage when someone's talking to you about something and saying, I don't understand what this acronym means, I don't understand, or like stands for, I don't understand what we're talking about, I don't understand why we're doing this, or I think these decisions are wrong, or like, you know, explain this to me again because like I'm 5 years old because I don't understand a single word you said. It's really hard to say that, like, especially early on in your career where you just feel like, oh, maybe everyone else understands and I I'm the idiot. But the older I get, the more I realize, hey, look, I got to be able to ask that question because if I don't understand it, it's a problem and probably other people probably don't as well. And so I think working in e-commerce has made me more extroverted, but I think generally I'm an introvert. When I'm around e-commerce guys, I'm an extrovert. I want to hear everything. You want to talk about Facebook CACs? Let's go for it. I'm willing to talk to any stranger. There's a conference about Facebook CACs.

I want to go to that conference and network with Oh, well, I'm looking forward to hearing your Facebook hacks in Thailand.

Yeah, sure.

Any advice for your previous boss?

Any advice for my previous boss? I would say, like, you know, like, play— let people benefit from their strengths and, like, and let people play to their strengths. Like, I think one of the toughest challenges I have is that, like, when I was a lawyer, at least, it was that If you were a 3rd-year associate, no matter how hard you worked, you could come in on the weekends and work your ass off to make sure that you were doing everything that you could to be, to like help the team. They'd be like, great, we really appreciate this, but you're a 3rd-year associate. So no matter what, you're gonna be relegated to doing these tasks. And that really sucked. It wasn't a meritocracy. And then when, like, you know, as I got older and sold Caspers and I sold Native, I think the best advice I could, like, if people were managing me, I'd say, let me do what I'm good at and take off my plate what I'm bad at, but don't get in my way from what I'm good at because then I'm self-destructive. And I think that's good advice for managing me. I'm not sure if that's good advice for managing other people.

Nice. And what are you good at?

I think I'm really good at marketing and thinking outside the box. And so from a user acquisition standpoint, I think I'm really good at that. I think from a branding perspective, I'm not the best. I'm not ready antler, but I can get you 80% of the way there in, you know, 2 days. Like the native website took 2 days to build. And then I think I'm like good at motivating teams. Like when I wanna get something done, I sort of get like, I get everyone bought in, I get really excited about it myself. And like that enthusiasm is contagious and people are not like, oh man, I wanna go home and do nothing. They get really excited and they're like, how do we get this? How do we like accomplish this? Nice.

Where do you go or what do you do to get inspired?

I'll travel a lot. So I'll go down to Napa or go to Monterey or Half Moon Bay or Sonoma or outside of California to get inspired and try not to think about work. I think that's one of the ways I get inspired. The other way I get inspired, and this sounds stupid, is infomercials. Like, I'm the guy who watches infomercials from beginning to end. And my brother's like, what the hell are we doing? Like, I remember growing up, I'd be like, oh great, we're gonna watch this infomercial. My brother's like, we're not ordering a cooking— we don't need this cooking utensil. So what the hell are we doing watching this? And, but it really like taught me how people sell products to individuals. And so I remember watching like Ron Popeil's, you know, like rotisserie chicken cooker or whatever it was called.

Rotisserie.

I've seen that infomercial like 50 times and I'm like, this is how he's like, I wasn't like, oh, this is how he's selling product. But like now looking back on it, I'm like, oh, this is how he's selling product and this is how I got good at selling products.

Nice. That's amazing. If I gave you $5,000, how would you double it in 24 hours?

How would I double $5,000 in 24 hours? Wow, that's tough. It depends. One, I might be able to sell something through Facebook ads and get you $10,000 or sell services through Facebook and get you $10,000 or I'd go to Vegas. So there'd be a 48% chance I actually double it and a 52% chance I lose it all.

I like those odds. So other than your mum, what's the best advice ever given to you?

I think both my dad and my brother are entrepreneurs and are ruthless entrepreneurs where they're like, this is what matters and this is what doesn't. And I think As we grew Native, I was like, all these people have raised all this money. They're in headlines. Look at Brandless today. Brandless raised $240 million from SoftBank and imploding. But when they raised $240 million, everyone's like, wow, this company knows something and nobody else does. And I realized that none of that stuff matters. The only thing that matters is how good your business is and everything else is just bullshit noise. noise that gets in the way. Don't let the dogma of other people or media publications sway you from the mission that you have. And I'd say build a business that you want to work at. Don't build a business that is going to make— that's going to get TechCrunch headlines because you think that's going to be fun. At some point, you're going to have to spend years at that business, and that one TechCrunch headline is not going to motivate you for those years. Go build a business that you really enjoy. Working at. And that means from a team perspective, make sure you have the right people around you, make sure that you have the right mission and sell something that you really enjoy selling, and make sure that you're building the business in a way that you want to work at, whether that's for the short term or the long term.

Wow. I like that. What silly thing should people do more of?

They should dance or they should sing in the shower. Both of those things are fantastic. Just being a 4-year-old, and I'm a 4-year-old every day, makes life so much easier to get through.

Nice.

I'm a terrible singer and a terrible dancer, and I do them all the time at home. I don't do them in public because I'd be ashamed, but I do them all the time at home. If people saw me, they'd be like, you suck at these things. And I'm like, yeah, they're fun though.

I love that. Would you rather fight 1 horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?

Yeah, I've been asking myself that question since I joined Reddit like a decade ago. I think I'd fight 100 Duck-sized horses, uh, but I don't have a good reason as to why. I feel like it'd be easier to kick them if you're fighting them, but no good reason why. I would not do either of those.

You'd be— but, but if you had the choice, neither?

Yeah, it would be 100 duck-sized horses. Do you know what?

You're the first guest who's actually said, or secret option number 3, neither. Everyone actually does pick a lane typically.

Sure. Yeah, yeah, I would not want to do either of those, but if I had to, the 100 How would you convince someone to do something good that they didn't want to do? I guess it really depends on what it is, but I think it's the most obvious thing, which is showing them why it's good. Whether it's good for them personally, whether it's good for the world, whether it's good for the business. I'd say, here's why it's good, and here's how your role will contribute to making yourself a better person, this company a better place to work at, or the world a better place to live in? And usually, when you can motivate people by telling them how their actions are going to make something better and make that very clear, they're much more inclined to do it. I like that.

And then the final question, what makes you the happiest?

What makes me happiest? I think spending time with friends and family makes me incredibly happy. I remember going to this e-commerce conference recently in the Midwest and it was like not a fun conference to go to. But during dinner, like 5 ecommerce entrepreneurs got together for dinner and we went out and we talked about family and we talked about ecommerce and we talked about like where we were in our lives and I was like, I wasted 3 days at this conference. I didn't waste 3 days. I didn't have the greatest time at 3 days of this conference, but this dinner made the entire thing worth it. It's one of those rare moments where you get to be an adult and you get to connect with people over dinner in a very intimate experience. Those types of connections, I feel like, get fewer and farther in between when you get older, just because you have more responsibilities to significant others or children or to parents or siblings. Those times that you can have those deep, intimate connections over dinner with people that you're in the same community with are really special. And so, you know, if someone asked me, would you go to that conference again? Just as a result of that dinner, I'd be like, absolutely yes. If those people are there and we're going to have another dinner, absolutely yes. I don't care where it is, I'll go.

Nice. And what are you looking forward to most about the COSME Mastermind?

I think it's the exact same thing, which is finding that same community of people who are, you know, tangentially in the same industry that I'm in, who are sharing the same life experiences and seeing if we can form that connection with people that I haven't met yet.

Well, you absolutely will. The culture at our events is absolutely phenomenal. And what are you going to pledge in return? What are you going to bring to the party?

Yeah, I'll certainly pledge that I'll be present. I think a lot of people go to conferences and they're working all day or doing something else. I'll be present and I'll listen and like I'll go in with like an open heart to form those connections. Because like when you go in with that and if you can find other people and you're both striving for that, that's the only way to get those like meaningful connections. If people are closed off or sort of reserved, it's much harder to do that. I've been to a couple other conferences where people wouldn't even tell, like they'd be like, I sell products on Amazon. I'm not willing to tell you anything else in case you compete with me. And I'm like, dude, I got my own business and I got my own things going on. So like I appreciate, like I understand where you're coming from. I'm happy to tell you about my business. Let's talk about my business then, because maybe you'll tell me something about my business that I can learn from. Um, like I pledge to come within that, with that open heart.

I like that. And do you, um, are you a drinker? And if so, what do you drink?

Uh, I'm a drinker. I'm trying to be better at drinking less because I just turned 35. Um, but I drink everything. Uh, I, I mean, I used to drink, I guess bourbon was my drink of choice, but trying to stop doing any of that kind of stuff. I don't know. I'm also, I'm reading one of these books called like How Not to die. And they're like, eat vegetables, give up meat, don't even eat cheese or milk. You need to eat 4 almond nuts a day. It's very specific. And so I don't know, I feel like I'm in one of those phases in my life where I'm like, okay, I gotta live a much healthier life because I'm getting to be middle-aged pretty soon.

Well, I reckon that diet can start the Monday after or something like that.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Every time I go on vacation, I'm like, okay, forget about that book. Let's go have fun.

And we are absolutely going to do that. Moiz, you've been phenomenal. You've been an absolute pleasure to interview. You've brought the goods, you've brought the value, you've taught so many incredible things in such a short space of time. I'm absolutely excited and looking forward to hanging out with you in Koh Samui. I'm not a bourbon drinker, but, you know, if my arm's twisted, I'll have a drink. Yeah, I'm not a bourbon drinker either. I'm sure we can find some kind of beautiful location.

If you drink it, you'll become a bourbon drinker. If you're a tequila drinker, 3 tequila shots later, you'll be a bourbon drinker.

I think they say that about olives, don't they? Like 12 olives or something, you're an olive eater. No, I get it. But man, thank you so much for taking the time today out of your busy schedule to speak to us, and I can't wait to hang out with you.

Likewise.

Talk to you soon.

Bye.

Hey, Martin here again with an audio goodie bag of a bonus before you head off. First up, I hope you enjoyed this episode, and if you did, please subscribe and follow Smarter Destiny across iTunes, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. It really helps spread our message and you'll get valuable content along the way too. Secondly, if you have an ecommerce business or are thinking of starting one, grab a copy of my new book 1% Secret, recommended by Kevin Harrington and a host of other elite guys. Even better, it's free. Just help out with the shipping costs. So head to smarterdestiny.com/book to grab your free copy. Thanks so much, and I'll see you on the next episode.