20VC: The Science of Storytelling: Three Steps to Master the Perfect Story | From Near Death Experience to Unicorn Startup: The Untold Story of Omaze with Matt Pohlson | The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

She says, look, I was there when he came in this world.

If he's leaving this world right now, I'm going to be in that room.

I did flatline for four and a half minutes.

The opposite of love isn't hate, it's fear, right?

But you're actually smarter when you're in that expansive place.

Focus is the price of greatness.

Did you ever lose focus?

Yes.

Where?

This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings.

Now, what an incredible show we have in store for you today.

Matt Paulson, founder and CEO at Omaze, joins us in the hot seat today.

Now, Matt has the most insane story.

This is a man... who died for four minutes.

I've never had someone die for four minutes in their founding journey on 20 BC.

They then built a product that included selling experiences with Cristiano Ronaldo, the Pope and a Lamborghini, Arnold Schwarzenegger and a tank, before pivoting to a model giving away houses and making hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

It is an incredible beast of a business that people don't know about.

And it's a travesty.

The story is incredible.

And Matt is one of the most kind, brilliant storytellers in this business.

And so doing this show and bringing the Omaze story to life was incredible.

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You have now arrived at your destination.

Matt, I am so excited for this, dude.

Listen, I think the Omaze story respectfully, is one of the most untold but incredible stories in startups.

So thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you for having me, man.

I love the show.

Oh, dude, that's very kind.

Now, I was talking to some of your investors before and they told me that the Genesis was actually a Magic Johnson moment.

And so I want to start with Magic Johnson moment to the founding of Omaze.

What's the correlation?

Yeah, we were at an event that Magic was hosting for the Boys and Girls Club where he was auctioning off the chance to play basketball with him and go to a Lakers game.

But it was one of those things that was only available to the high net worth individuals sitting in the room.

And me and my buddy were in the room, but not high net worth individuals.

We were like the guys who get invited last minute to fill the table and come for the free drinks.

And so we sat there and watched as the auction went up to 15,000.

We were in grad school.

We couldn't afford to participate, but magic was our childhood hero.

Like there's nothing to this day that I would rather do than play basketball with magic.

And so we were driving home, like, that makes no sense.

Magic has fans around the world, not just in that room.

And celebrities weren't really on social media yet, but we're like they're going to be and they're going to reach their fans in a whole new way.

So if we make it so anybody can donate 10 for the chance to win, you could raise so much more money, so much more awareness, open up a whole new donor base.

Okay, so we start with that realization.

Hey, we open it up and everyone can do $10.

Kind of the crowdfunding-esque style thought.

What happens next then?

You have that Magic Johnson event.

What do you do as your first?

How do you launch?

So I was still in grad school at the time and I basically get rid of all my classes and just focus on doing this figuring out the legal contract, all that.

And then we start trying to convince different celebrities to do this.

I had been a filmmaker before Omaze, like doing cause content, working on storytelling.

And you have no subscribers at this point.

Zero.

So there's like no one waiting.

No one waiting for us.

We got nothing.

Okay.

Our first experience was to be a guest judge on Cupcake Wars.

Oh, I read about this.

That raised $780.

$780?

Yeah, so it was very innocent.

We spent like six months on that.

Okay, so that brings in 780 and starts the flywheel.

What happens to those?

The next year, things continue to go not well.

The most we raise in any experience is 18,000, and we're almost out of money.

Did you raise any money?

We had raised a million seed round before we ever launched.

We almost had a cash-in.

We don't have a case study to show that this model works.

And then what happened was we got a deal with Bryan Cranston for Breaking Brad.

You're a Breaking Bad fan?

You know the show?

Yeah, yeah, of course.

And so this is the end of Breaking Bad when it was massive.

And we think, okay, that's going to be our breakthrough.

We're going to do this with him.

And then we get a call from the person who runs this charity saying I'm sorry, but Bryan is going to go work with this other company.

And we found out this other company had came along and they had done a campaign with Samuel L Jackson and it had raised money.

180 000, so 10x what we had done, which is it might as well have been a billion, like it just seems so impossible to us.

And so she tells us okay, he's brian's out.

And we're like no, i mean, that's literally, that's it, that's our, that's the company.

And i was like he's gotta, you gotta, get us like a meeting with him, you know.

And she's like, i'm sorry, but like tomorrow he's got a charity event, and then sunday he's going out of town for a shoot.

And We're like okay well, where's the charity event?

And she was friends with us, so she told us where it is.

We went to the charity event, snuck in the charity event.

We found Brian, walked up to him and said look Brian, one of the guys from Amaze.

We never met, but we were going to do this campaign together.

And then you changed your mind.

And he's like look, it's nothing personal guys, but these guys just seems like they're going to raise a lot more for the charity.

They promised they could raise $200,000.

And I said, well, we'll raise you $250,000.

He said, what's the most you've ever raised?

I said, $18,000.

And he's like, what?

What are you talking about?

And I said, look, our whole company depends on this.

You remember when you were at the beginning of your career and you knew that you had it inside of you.

You believed in yourself, but no one else did.

And you just would fight away.

It's like, we will find a way to make this work.

We will do everything we can.

And so then over the next couple of days, he finally agrees to do it.

And then that campaign raised $300,000.

Wow.

And then he introduced us to Aaron Paul.

And we did a thing around the finale of Breaking Bad where you got to ride in a Winnebago with them.

You got to cook meth.

You got to cook eggs in hazmat suits and watch the very last episode of Breaking Bad with those two the rest of the cast.

Warren Buffett was randomly there.

Fuck, I'll pay for this.

And that one raised 1.7 million.

Whoa, whoa.

And they had done it at auction and they had done 40,000 auctions.

So it kind of proved the model.

But just pause.

We went from 18K to 300K.

And so just take me to that chasm where you get Brian and then you put it on Instagram at the time on Twitter.

How do you make that jump from 18 to 300?

Storytelling, content.

We did a Reddit AMA with him where we seeded the opportunity in the Reddit.

Back then there wasn't even paid advertising on Facebook and Twitter.

We got him on Facebook, we got him on Twitter.

We started pushing stuff out and it would just fly.

We did a bunch of short viral videos with him.

And then with Aaron, we took it to the next level.

And we got AMC to be part of it and Netflix to be part of it, because they realized it was starting to promote their show and became this huge thing.

It just spread.

And we would do these funny little videos with Aaron.

The top 10 reasons you should enter all this little content that hadn't really been done on social in this way.

And it just, it went crazy.

Okay, so sorry, it was a million with Aaron?

1.7.

So we got two between those two events.

Yeah.

What happens then?

Is it, yeah, take me to that.

Then we kind of started to take off.

We did a thing like riding a tank with Arnold Schwarzenegger and crushed things.

Then we got- Did all of these people just agree at this point?

They're like, okay, you've killed it with Brian.

You've killed it with Breaking Bad.

Saw that.

Yeah, the next big thing was Star Wars.

Star Wars was about to relaunch Star Wars The Force Awakens after it had been dormant for 10 years.

We did an opportunity where you got to be in Star Wars.

And it was hugely like we were meeting with Disney and Bob Iger.

They didn't know that we were only six people and like we didn't really even have the tech stack to support that kind of traffic, But it ended up working out.

So yeah, then how much did that raise that raised?

44 million.

When you say these numbers 44 and we've got the two from the others, that is, Subscribers sign up to a monthly recurring payment for omaze.

What did that look like?

We didn't even have subscribers back then.

We didn't do subscribers till we launched houses like years later.

So this was just individuals putting in 10 bucks.

Like a raffle ticket.

Yes.

And so we're super profitable on each of these.

Yes.

At that point we are.

Okay.

So we're super profitable there.

And so we do 4 million there.

What happens then?

Are you having investors just like throw money at you at this point?

We're definitely starting to get inbound investors at that point.

And then from there, it's just like years of just doing crazy celebrity stuff, riding a tank with Arnold and crushed things to win a Lamborghini where Pope Francis hands you the keys.

That was probably the craziest one.

Does that raise a lot?

It did.

I think it raised like 3.1 million, something like that.

What did you think would raise a lot that didn't?

We thought being Call of Duty, you got to have a character in Call of Duty would raise a lot.

That did not.

We thought Ronaldo, get your haircut and play football with Ronaldo would raise a lot.

That did not.

Wow.

You realize like not all followers are created equal.

Some were so totally surprising.

What do you mean by not all followers created equal?

Well, someone like Ronaldo has a massive you know.

At that point I think he had the most followers on social, but they're actually not incredibly engaged.

Whereas like a guy named Sam Heughan who's on a show called Outlander, which is a kind of a sci-fi romantic show set in Scotland.

He's our highest grossing talent of all time.

More than George Clooney or Brad Pitt or Matt Damon, or you name it, because he has this community, mostly of women who find him very attractive and have this dream of wanting to go on a date with him, and we made it available.

And he's really good at storytelling and engaging his community.

And so his follower base was a fraction of those others, but got the greatest outcome.

I have a similar following.

I sympathize with him.

Yeah, we've noticed.

Yeah, pipe down.

Good.

So we keep this rolling and we're just crushing it.

Talk to me about then what happens next because there is a massive business model pivot.

Which one should we go first, the business model pivot or the accident?

They're connected.

So we did celebrities for a long time and they were starting to see a little bit of limits on scale of just how many of these you can do and how many people.

Were you seeing it wane in terms of like, do people keep coming back for the same ones?

They did.

But the problem is we couldn't give a consistent inventory of similar things, because you can only do Star Wars so many times or Game of Thrones so many times a year.

And we didn't build a great subscription product to make that work, so we hadn't cracked that.

So we were incredible at storytelling and acquisition, but not great at retention at that point.

And which part led to the business model change later.

But in terms of the thing that really changed, it was that I had this personal experience where I had a near-death experience.

And then the result of that is what changed my perspective.

What was the near-death experience?

I hear you were almost dead for like four minutes or dead for four minutes.

Yeah, I did flatline for four and a half minutes.

And yeah, I was on the other, you know, I had a whole experience of being on the other side.

The way it happened was when I was born, my stomach was twisted and not I was supposed to die.

They saved me about this crazy surgery then.

And then all these years later the scar tissue from that surgery kind of fully broke off and created a bowel obstruction.

And I didn't know it at the time.

I just saw that my stomach was getting bigger kind of each day.

I went from like three months pregnant to six months pregnant to nine months pregnant.

And you're getting really worried.

Yeah, my stomach could always hurt.

And I was a psycho worker anyway, so I'd always work through whatever ailment.

So I was kind of just ignore these things.

But then after like I got to a certain point where I called my buddy.

I was like, hey, it looks like I'm nine months pregnant.

Like what's going on?

He's like, you should go to the hospital.

Your appendix might be bursting.

I was like, I'm throwing a party tonight.

I can't go.

He's like, you should go.

So I went and they did all these tests.

They couldn't figure out what was going on.

And then my parents came and our COO at the time came.

And they said, after a while, like it's 10 p.m. at this point, they're like, you guys go home.

We're going to keep Matt overnight.

And if he's not better in the morning, then we'll figure out some kind of surgery to do then.

They start to go home and the CO her name is Helen she drives back to her house and she gets there.

It's maybe almost midnight at this point.

She's exhausted.

She's been in the hospital all day.

And she's going to get out of her car and something tells her to drive back to the hospital.

And Helen is British.

She's a COO.

She's not like a Venice Beach, like listen to the cosmos type person.

You know, this is like very out of character for her.

But the voice was undeniable.

So she drove back.

And if she hadn't driven back, I would have probably died 45 minutes later.

Why?

Because you were already there, no?

I was there, but my blood pressure had plummeted and the machines had not alerted the nurse.

And so she came in and she'd been in the hospital with her grandmother so she kind of knew how to read them and she saw how low my blood pressure was.

So she went and grabbed the nurse, said, look, this looks really bad.

And the nurse was like, this can't be right.

He wouldn't be getting oxygen to his brain.

So they did another test, got the same results.

Finally, she's like, fuck this, like I need to go.

Am I allowed to say that on the show?

Yeah, yeah.

I grabbed a doctor.

She grabbed the doctor.

The doctor came in, took one look and called in the crash team.

They rushed me down to surgery.

I came out of surgery and they said to my mom, the good news is we figured out what it is.

It's a bowel obstruction.

The bad news is he's in critical condition.

His heart rate is continuing to plummet and we don't know why.

Then a couple hours pass.

My mom goes downstairs to get my dad and my brother.

And she's coming back up the elevator.

And she hears over the loudspeaker code blue in room 437.

And my mom works in a hospital.

So she knows that means flatline.

And she knows that's my room.

So she gets out of the elevator.

She runs down the door.

She gets to the door of the operating room.

And the nurse says, I'm sorry, you can't come in.

This is really serious.

And she says, look, I was there when he came in this world.

If he's leaving this world right now, I'm going to be in that room.

So she lets her in the room, and I'm on a table kind of like this one right here, and I'm flatlined.

And they're doing the compressions, and they're doing the defibrillators, the electric paddles.

My body is bouncing up and down, but I'm not responding.

So my mom starts to crumble.

It's one thing to lose a child.

It's another thing if you're in the room when it's happening.

And at the same time my dad was outside with my brother and this doctor came out and said to another doctor in front of my brother not knowing was my brother hey, i think we lost this guy, i think he's gone.

And so my brother pushed my dad in the room.

My mom's kind of faced this way towards me and my dad comes from the other side and he was crying so loud.

My mom turned for me to my dad to say like hey, you gotta like shut the up or they're gonna kick us out of this room.

And she said when she did that, she said she saw something that she had never seen before in a hospital.

She said that every nurse and every staff member and every doctor had gravitated outside the window.

And there was like 40 of them.

And she said they look like this silent church choir just sending in this positive energy.

And she was so moved by these people that were sending in love to her son that they didn't even know that it was like this spiritual experience for her.

And it was kind of transformative.

She just kind of like took a deep breath and she turned back and she started coaching me, almost talking shit to me.

And she was like Matthew David Poulsen these people are fighting to save your life, but you're not fighting hard enough.

You need to show them you're a fighter.

You need to fight to come back to us.

You know, and they said it was surreal to watch because here's this 65 year old mom in a room.

If you watch Grey's Anatomy there's never a mom in that room.

But because she kept fighting, they kept fighting.

They don't usually fight that long, you don't usually let it go for four and a half minutes, but but they did because of her.

But then at one point she started to think like this has gone on too long and i'm gonna lose my son.

You know, if i lose my son, like my husband's gonna die of a broken heart.

And right as she went there, the main doctor kind of like almost like shook his head, as if to say like this is over.

And she said, no, please, like, don't call it.

She grabbed his arm and he kind of turned back to the table and he said, wait a second.

I think we might have a pull.

And all of a sudden they're all just kind of looking at that machine, that flat line, just looking for it to tick up.

Instead of it ticking up, all of a sudden I just pop up.

And I look up and there's this whole room of people looking at me with their mouth like eyes open, mouth open, because the patient doesn't usually do that.

And then all of a sudden I look over and I see my mom.

Do you remember this?

Yeah.

And you see your mom?

I see my mom and then I see my dad and I was kind of on my side and I kind of lifted my right arm and gave him a thumbs up.

So cheesy.

Oh, my God, god.

My brother's just had his first baby and seeing the love that a parent has so kind of viscerally for their child and I see it in him with his daughter it kind of it really gives me goosebumps.

Thinking of like a mother standing there watching in that way what happens.

Then you give the thumbs up and then the recovery process starts like No, there was like a couple more days of crazy stuff that happened.

After that, like the doctors, kind of rushed down and they have these models like to assess probability of survival.

And they looked at me and it was like well below 1%.

And so he turns to my mom to basically say like hey, I know this just happened, but you got to understand.

And she says, I understand.

He says, you don't understand.

His organs are shutting down.

And she said, I understand.

But two minutes ago, we didn't have a pulse.

And now we have a pulse.

So what are we going to do about that?

And he says, okay, well, there's this thing called an ECMO machine.

It's not a great option, but it's our only option.

But only about half the people who touch this machine live to tell a story.

But the problem is, is we only have one of these things.

And then we were at UCLA Santa Monica, and this machine is at UCLA Westwood.

And we've never transported it before it's ever been done.

The other problem is there's only two doctors who do this surgery and neither of them are on call, and it's Father's Day.

And then randomly, the guy that I had like initially reached out to the doctor happened to be at a bachelor party in Vegas.

And he was with the head of cardiology at UCLA.

And he said, hey, can you check your phone to see how my buddy's doing?

I sent him to the hospital with the stomach thing yesterday and they can see the real time records.

So the guy pulls it up and he said, dude, your buddy's going to die any minute.

And so they got a hold of the head of UCLA.

They got him to sign off and sending this ECMO machine to the patient.

First time in the history of the United States, maybe the world.

They send this thing to me in like a Jerry Rigg duct tape ambulance.

They do the surgery, then attach me back, send me back to the hospital.

And that's where they ended up saving me.

There's so many things where it's like, if this hadn't have happened, respectfully that you wouldn't have been there.

Absolutely.

It took me a long time to process that.

When did you kind of regain consciousness in this process?

The first time was when I came back, like in that room after they'd done like the defibrillators and all that, I was conscious again.

Then I went back into a coma and then I didn't become conscious again for like three days after that.

How does going through this unbelievable shitstorm of pain death life, how does that change one's relationship to fear?

Yeah, I mean, it fundamentally changed my relationship to fear.

What I realized that I was a lot more fear driven fear of what other people thought, fear of not being enough, fear of not being liked or loved.

And I used to let that drive a lot of my decision making.

Even what quote unquote like brave choices I would make were really made out of fear, like trying to avoid something happening.

And if you really deconstruct what fear is, in most cases it's very rarely like you're running from actual life threat.

It's really mostly just a story of some kind of imagined consequences that really only exist in your own brain.

And when you realize, when you go through something like that, is that the actual thing is never as bad as the fear of the thing death is is most people's greatest fear, like i experienced some version of that, i was like oh, that wasn't actually that bad.

I've met a lot of people who've been through trauma or lost everything you know, lived their greatest fear, and then realize oh, i'm okay, like i can bounce back from that.

So so what that means now is, i think, fear is you still useful a lot.

It can be very motivating and a lot of people lead by fear and that can work in the short term.

If you study the teams or the groups that have done something that is enduring, that is truly world changing over time, they're also able to make decisions out of a place of love, out of a place of expansion, because the opposite of love isn't hate, it's fear.

Right, and that may sound too like hippy dippy for a vc podcast no no, i like it.

But you're actually smarter when you're in that expansive place right, you're making decisions from your prefrontal cortex instead of your amygdala.

You're taking in more information.

You're more creative.

What do you mean on?

The opposite of love isn't hate, it's fair.

I've always been brought up to be told that there's love and there's hate.

Hate is actually closer to love than you think, right?

We've all experienced some version of that.

Love is, you can define love a bunch of different ways, but in its greatest form, it is expansive.

It is opening.

It makes you take in all sorts of information around you that you might not otherwise.

Fear constricts you, makes you focus on things that you think are threatening you, spikes your cortisol levels.

Again, it can be very motivating, but over time, it makes you make worse decisions.

So it's not like I stopped feeling the fear, but I think I've just developed techniques to get past it faster.

What did you do out of fear that you now no longer do, having been through this experience?

Oh man, how much time do we have?

There were some big decisions I made about Omaze that I allowed others to influence me me, make me go against my gut because of my fear of being criticized, my fear of the group not liking me, being unpopular investors not thinking i'm experienced enough, like i allowed the noise to come in when i actually knew the better answer, Which is most seminal, do you think?

Which decision?

Yeah.

I made the decision, after I came back from near-death experience, to change from being a business that was focused on celebrities to a business that offered prizes.

That may sound obvious now, but that was a huge change for us.

How did that realization come about?

That is a big shift.

We had done a campaign with Daniel Craig where you got to go to New York, you got to ride around in a one-of-a-kind Aston Martin and you got to keep the Aston Martin.

And it was the first time we'd offered a prize.

We thought it would raise $300,000, and it raised $2.1 million.

And so then I went to our CFO, Nina, and I said, hey, I think we should offer a car.

We should go buy a $250,000 McLaren, offer it with just omaze, no talent.

Because if we could do that on our own, that we would control our own destiny, we would really have something.

If we could raise $500,000, let's say.

The problem is we only had like 900,000 in the bank at that time.

So it was a big bet for us.

But we took the bet.

And then that car coincidentally launched the day before I unexpectedly went into a hospital.

Oh, bugger.

Yeah.

Bad timing.

Well, yeah.

But it turned out to be great because when I came back I was sitting down with her and I had all this distance and all this perspective and said, by the way, whatever happened with the McLaren?

Did it raise the 500000?

And she said it raised $1.9 million.

And I was like, that changes everything.

So I went to the board and the team and like, we're going all in on this.

There was huge resistance.

Why was that resistance?

This is what we were known for.

This was our magic.

This is why people came and joined.

We were a well-known brand in this space.

We were featured on The Tonight Show.

We'd have dedicated HBO specials.

All this stuff, like Omaze was kind of a thing.

And you're like, you're getting rid of the thing that makes it the thing.

Like, what are you after this?

For people internally that was part of their identity, that they were doing this cool stuff that everyone would look at and be like you get to do riding a tank with Arnold.

That's so cool.

Like giving away a Aston Martin is not as cool.

So that's where a lot of it was, where I may have caved to that before I did not in this situation.

I was okay with people not liking the decision.

Did we move to the subscription model straight away with this transition?

No, that didn't come until we'd launched the houses.

So yeah, so basically we did that transition.

Then we started we started doing holidays that did well.

We started doing cars that did well.

And then we said okay, where this is really at is houses.

A car changes someone's lifestyle.

A house changes someone's life.

We launched that here in the uk because we had a great operator here named james oakes and smaller country, less expensive houses and we also had a really good business going.

The us business was going really well at that time.

When you say really well, what sort of revenues did they?

Really well?

I guess it's an overstatement for this podcast.

For us it was really well.

It was like 100 million.

You know, it wasn't nothing pretty freaking great, yeah.

But we felt that if we made it just about houses and made it a monthly draw, then we could start offering subscriptions and we could still create this sense of life change.

We could use our storytelling, but there would be much more natural retention, and so that was the thesis in launching it here.

And then Yeah, it just took off.

So we launched it here with this wonderful James Oakes.

Yeah.

And we're doing houses and we're doing subscription.

What happens then?

So we do houses for subscriptions.

It doesn't come until we get to a house a month.

Okay.

Because it took us a while to get to that.

What happens with the first house?

The first house was amazing.

It was a million pound house in Cheshire.

So now we do five million pound house.

So it was quite, it was pretty far from where we are for now, but it was great.

I mean, like- You're nervous buying this house.

This is a big- Yeah, it was a big deal.

Yeah.

For sure.

Yeah.

But the first house, like right from the beginning, you're like, oh, people are into this.

And so straight away you saw the numbers being really positive.

Yes, we did.

Now we made that first house go for six months.

Right now we do for months because we were nervous about it.

But yeah, then we had a big thing.

Okay, do we go up for the second house?

Do we get a three million pound house?

Like, will that work?

That was a huge decision.

People went both ways, decided to do it.

And then it was like, all right, we got to get so we can offer a house every month.

But that's expensive, right?

You have to buy seven, eight houses out in front in order to do that.

Because you got to, we renovate them, we design them, we do all that stuff.

And we produce and create all the content.

You have to buy seven houses up front?

We have to be seven houses ahead in our purchasing.

Fuck.

That's a complex process.

Yeah.

It's hard.

You also have to be buying five million pound houses.

Yes.

And we build them now.

So you're spending 35 million on houses.

Yes.

Wow.

But it's very profitable.

Yeah.

No, I know it is.

Does the value of the house correlate to the acquisition of subscribers?

If you have a £1 million house and a £5 million house, do you get 5x more acquired subscribers with the £5 million or is it not directly correlated?

It's not that cleanly correlated.

We've had.

Some of our best houses have been three million pounds and others that were five, not as good.

It's really just.

There's a threshold where you can make something really stand out or that really catches your attention, whether it's on Instagram or on television.

It has certain, we know the features that really matter.

Like we've tested, you know, we've had over 10 million different performance marketing ads.

We see what people click through on.

We see what kind of design.

We're now building towards those designs.

So we know what matters to people.

We know what matters in a kitchen.

We know what matters in an office.

We know some of the things that punch above its weight class.

And so we create the houses accordingly.

Creating the house is accordingly.

It requires storytelling.

You're very good at storytelling.

And we chatted before and you said to me and a lot of people throw around storytelling as this kind of you know it's so important.

But there's not really much substance to it when you actually dig deeper.

You said to me before, there's a science to storytelling that all businesses need to understand.

What do you think that is?

Yeah, I think there's a science and then there's a fundamental principle.

So the science is really simple, which is that our brain is constantly scanning for information that helps us survive or thrive.

And so your brand has to very clearly communicate how you will do that for that customer.

That can take many forms, right?

Saving money is a form of survival to our brain.

Saving time, increasing your status so that you can be part of a tribe, whatever it is.

But you've got to very clearly communicate that.

And if you confuse, you lose.

The other thing our brain is doing is constantly trying to conserve calories.

So if your message is not super clear, if the brain has to work really hard to figure out why like how you're actually contributing to that, it will just tune you out.

So that's the very basic science of it.

And I can talk through the principles of how you do that if it's helpful.

Yeah, I'd love to understand the principles before I dig in there.

So a lot of this is driven by this guy named Donald Miller, who wrote a book called Building a Story Brand.

And he deconstructs the seven steps that every story follows.

And so we study those.

But the main principles that would hopefully be relevant to people who are listening is the first thing is make the customer the hero.

So many brands make themselves the hero.

What does it mean to make a customer a hero?

So here's a good example.

You remember Tidal?

Tidal?

Yeah.

The Jay-Z Spotify competitor.

Yeah, exactly.

So they had all the celebrities in the world, all the top musicians, Jay-Z, Beyonce, you name it.

They were part of this thing.

The technology was just as good as Spotify's at the time.

And they ended up losing when they should have won, because they made all their marketing about.

Jay-Z and Beyonce are overcoming the music industry.

And this is the new thing where they are the hero that is going to conquer.

Whereas Spotify is giving you your rap and saying, this is what you did this year, Harry.

This is what you listen to.

And we know this about you.

That subtle difference is massive in terms of what a customer sees.

So title for a customer's perspective was not participating in their status and their survival and anything that was meaningful to them.

It was about they made them the heroes.

Your job as a brand is being the guide.

And so you've got to communicate with empathy and authority to become a trusted guide.

I'm listening to you and I'm thinking, did we completely do the branding for Project Europe wrong?

And the reason I say that is because very similar to Tide or Tidal, whatever one it is, I can't remember, which is terrible.

It shows how bad it was, bluntly.

But we made the seasoned entrepreneur the microphone, the amplifier, the hero, the one that you look up to.

What we didn't do and what i'm thinking is and this, i think, the reason the show success was, because i'm always very open what we didn't do was go and film an incredible entrepreneur at eth in a lab, or an incredible entrepreneur in kth in a dorm room, or an incredible entrepreneur in a town hall in imperial, and show what everyone wants was, which is just that little person starting something with a dream, Exactly.

Those entrepreneurs are the heroes.

The ones investing in the fund are the guides.

And I think you did it the other way around.

Fuck.

Well, you know, it's not too late.

That's a really interesting one.

How important is a launch?

I mean, it can be huge for a company.

Dollar Shave Club is a great example.

Insane.

But that's storytelling, right?

They were the guide.

They used empathy communicate through laughter to show you they're going to guide you in your journey to be more manly.

That was huge.

I mean, our launch was terrible.

We did Cupcake Wars.

So you can't survive it.

Okay, so the first one is make them the hero.

What's the second one?

You are the guide, so communicate with empathy and authority.

What does that mean?

So empathy means show your customer that you see them, right?

So by the language that you use, laughter is the best version of this.

You can make a customer laugh Laughter is like a neurological shortcut to connection.

It's a dopamine release.

It brings down your defenses.

It builds trust.

Like the Gecko.

The Geico Gecko is a great example of that as a guide.

They had grown at like a 2% CAGR for like 40 years until they launched the Gecko in 1999.

At that point, they had 21% brand awareness.

10 years later, they had 90% brand awareness.

They went from $4 billion in premiums to $15.6 billion.

They doubled their market share because it was like a very accessible funny thing that made auto insurance like less intimidating to people.

So it was like a trusted guide.

It was funny.

Do you lose authority by being humorous?

Not if you do it in the right way.

You can like if you just show like a bunch of like jackass videos and you know like it might not work.

But if you speak to people in the right way it'll work.

That's why like Can you imagine being in the boardroom of Geico when they came in?

They're like hey, our new spokesperson is going to be a six inch lizard, like at an auto insurance company.

They must have been like, are you kidding?

But now they all do it.

All those like, at least in the US, like all the insurance companies do that.

Yeah, we have compare the meerkat in the UK.

There's two other kind of principles that are key.

One is that you need to show the customer how you're going to participate in their transformation.

Almost every consumer brand is selling transformation.

Nike is saying put on this rubber and leather on your feet and you will transform into an athlete.

Gatorade is saying drink the sugar water and you will transform into Michael Jordan.

And so you've got to be very clear about that.

And then you've got to use the principle of story gaps, right?

Every form of entertainment that is interesting is created by a gap in the story.

Is the hero going to make it across the bridge?

Is the cake in the cooking show going to turn out okay?

Am I going to make it to the next level of the game?

Our whole business is a story gap.

People subscribe every month waiting to see if they're going to transform their life by winning a house.

That gap keeps them entertained and they stick as a result of that.

Does it matter if the conclusion is known?

No, it's not.

It does matter.

It's not a gap, it has to be an unknown.

Yeah, but you know titanic is gonna sink, but you still fucking watch the movie, right?

You don't know how and you don't.

Yeah, i mean there's a lot of, but there's there's a ton of mini gaps along the way.

Yeah, a rose and jack can end up together, like there was room for two on that door.

That is true, it's just here's what they do.

The aerial shot yeah, and it's like she's luxuriating.

I know there's a lot of criticism for rose over time.

I mean, like she's.

I'm not going to say anything about Rose because I'm going to get some hate.

I probably am too, but there's a lot she could have done to help him out there.

It didn't have to end that way.

So can I ask you, when you look at this hero guide transformation story gap, do you sit down with the team and literally map out how Omaze plays into those four?

Yeah.

We teach class to everybody at Omaze, no matter what your role is.

Why?

About storytelling.

It serves every part of the business.

Obviously marketing, that's an obvious place.

Product is maybe an obvious place understanding the customer psychology.

But fundraising, you know, if you think about it like what's evaluation?

Evaluation is just metrics plus the story equals valuation, right?

So we teach it to our finance team.

We teach it to our analytics team so they can be better storytellers to the rest of the company, so they can make their analysis actually usable for their customers, which is the rest of the company.

We've all had analytics people that think they're the heroes and they do this.

Incredible like complicated analysis and no one has to do it.

No one knows what to do with it.

To what extent is marketing today losing the art and becoming science with the increased analytics data?

The science is really critical.

We believe deeply in the science.

We test each of these things within an inch of their life, on every moment of what we're showing in a house, or the call to action, or whatever it is.

So that stuff is very important.

But the real gains, the real differentiation now is coming from creative.

A lot of people, these algorithms are reaching efficiency frontiers.

So that's really how you differentiate.

So we have this beautiful framework for storytelling.

We now need a distribution channel.

When we were chatting before, you said TV was so impactful for you.

I can't quite remember the stats.

So talk to me about TV and the lessons around TV.

Yeah, it's crazy.

It really works for us.

Is it your number one channel?

It used to be.

It's not anymore, but it's number two.

Commercials that work best on TV are 90 Seconds.

90 seconds.

I think that's another misnomer around storytelling is that shorter is always better.

It's not the case.

If the story is well told, you can keep them engaged for a longer time.

But yeah, 90 second commercials work really well for us.

How much does that cost average?

Oh, it really depends.

But I mean, we're investing significant amounts.

What sort of shows do you pay for?

Is this like?

We're everywhere.

We're in the Premier League.

We're Love Island.

Does Love Island do well for you?

Love Island does do well.

Love Island is very highly educated audience.

High household income, high educated.

Serious?

Serious.

Same in the U.S.

Like The Bachelor, the highest educated audience in the U.S. is The Bachelor.

I'm so worried for society.

You want to escape?

Yeah, they do.

So 35, 40 million a year on TV.

Okay, great.

What's number one then?

What's replaced it?

Social.

Meta.

And that's Instagram.

Facebook itself still hits.

It really does.

It still works.

What's the split between Facebook and Insta?

Probably 80-20.

On Insta?

Yeah.

Wow.

And you have, like celebrities, do the Instagrams, because this is where I've seen it, where you have, like you know, Love Island stars, or you name it.

What have been lessons in terms of using like, I don't know how to say it, like D-list celebrities?

How does that work?

Yeah, we put them in categories.

We have our celebrities.

Like you know, we've had David Beckham or Prince William or those people promote houses.

You've had Prince William?

We did the London Air Ambulance, and he's a patron of that charity.

So we partnered with him to fund the London Air Ambulance.

For people who don't live in London.

These are these red helicopter ambulances that come and save people.

But that's not government-funded.

It's charitably funded.

And the ambulances were 25 years old this year and so by law they had to retire them and they needed to raise 20 million for new ambulances, and they were 5 million short.

And so we did a campaign and raised that money for them.

Wow.

Okay, so we have Insta and Facebook with now number one.

Yeah.

How do we think about what it takes to do that well?

What are some big lessons from doing that as well as you have done?

Again, remembering what people care about.

I mean we're lucky in that the product that we're offering a new house hits all of these principles that we're talking about.

It's all of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

It's safety, it's security, it's status, it's relationships, it's self-actualization.

So when someone looks at their Insta and sees a new house that could change their life, that is engaging.

So we're working with a pretty strong story to begin with.

Does it not get boring?

And what I mean, do you worry about that?

Like a house is amazing, but you know, after five houses, it's kind of another house.

How do you think about that?

And I like Seth Godin.

I'm sure you know Seth Godin.

He says about the power of the purple cow, which is like something you've never seen before, which is why you like the Pope and a Lamborghini.

Huh?

Never seen that before.

But each house is different.

Each month there's a new house.

40 of all television in the world is about houses, like some kind of house transformation show, some kind of DIY.

60% of all TV is reality, and two-thirds of that is about houses.

HGTV in the U.S. is third only to ESPN and Fox News, and it's just about houses.

And that network has worked all around the world.

The Food Network only worked in three countries because food culture really changes.

HGTV has worked in 83 countries.

I mean, 40% is houses.

Yeah.

Nuts.

Talk to me.

I'm always thinking about CACs going up over time as you saturate the core initial market, or going down, as my mother now was super excited that you were coming on the show.

And the brand of Omaze is much more known.

Does CAC go up or down over time?

I think the general law of physics of CAC is that it goes up over time.

You can mitigate that the natural course of things by spreading your brand.

You know, we're lucky in that this is a pretty broadly appealing product.

You know, age wise, gender wise, household income wise.

And so we're able to find new pockets of kind of untapped audiences.

But we expect it, you know, we model it to continue to go up over time.

I think a lot of people assume that you sign up, the house that you want goes and then you churn.

That's not the case.

When we went for a walk around the park.

You gave me some pretty insane kind of numbers facts about retention for this model.

How does this model look in terms of retention?

It's right up there with the top consumer subscription companies in the world.

I mean, it's comparable to Netflix, Spotify.

Nuts.

Yeah.

It's the story gap.

Do you mind being put in the lottery basket?

We're not that.

We're a prize draw.

So it's not technically what we do.

It is an entertainment product like others in that space are.

But we're not kind of fussed either way.

To what extent could and should you be more of a continuous content company?

And what I mean by that is actually should Omaze not have a property show which details the transformation of a home that you buy?

And then, instead of having these static two days or three day windows where you have this peak of subscriber acquisition, you actually have this continuous following on of the story of turning the house around.

You're a good strategist, Harry.

We're talking about this stuff right now.

Wouldn't that be great? yeah we think there's endless amounts of content but omaze tv follow the journey of turning this into the best house in cheshire cool yeah we think there's a lot of opportunity there especially as we expand into different markets we're going to start doing kind of transformation for different people in the uk we say we have a house that's going to be in liverpool right we would go find someone in liverpool who's been doing great things in the community guy named harry is he's mentoring entrepreneurs and he's doing out of kind of a dilapidated kind of community center we come up in the amazed dream mobile we say harry we've heard you've done great things we're gonna help make your dream come true we're gonna use our design team to redo this for you another show of transformation so it's just like different stories of transformation do you think content is easier or harder than ever today The channels are constantly changing, but your capacity to produce it is easier than ever.

You have so many tools.

And so I think to get attention is harder than ever, but to produce content is easier than ever.

Would it have worked if you were starting Omaze today?

I think so.

I don't know if the talent would have worked as well.

I think we would have a harder time breaking through.

And do you think it would have been as interesting?

Like we spoke earlier about news cycles being much faster today.

If you have a Breaking Bad, that's amazing.

But we also have like Trump's buying a Tesla and, you know, a war.

And like it just takes so much more to cut through the news cycle that, like a Breaking Bad prize draw.

Yeah, I think we would have had a hard time today.

We were constantly onboarding talent onto social to say hey, here's a way to reach your audience and raise money for a cause that you care about.

Now everybody does that, right?

Influencers wasn't even a thing back then.

I don't think the talent version would have, if we launched today, would have done as well.

I think the house part is very enduring for all the reasons we talked about.

And so I think that still would.

What do people think they know or get wrong about micro-influencers?

I think they underestimate their power and sometimes overestimate their power depending on where they are.

I think they underestimate the power of small communities and engaged communities.

Gymshark is such a good example.

Yeah, they do.

But clean talk.

There's a whole TikTok of people who love cleaning.

That community is rabid.

They buy crazy amounts of products.

Plant talk, same thing.

People who talk about how you optimize the plants in your house.

You can do real business through those things.

Sometimes I wonder why I'm single.

And then I look at those and I'm like, well fuck, if they can get married.

If you can run plant talk and get married, there's got to be hope for me.

What do you think people get wrong about micro-influencers?

I think people to your point.

I think they underestimate them and I think they think it's harder to get them and find them than they think.

But most of them are actually still very much hand to mouth needing money respectfully.

And so you can message them and say, I want to do a partnership with you.

This is my brand and this is what I'd pay you.

And I think it's much easier to acquire them than you think.

I think you can also use UTM links and a lot more attributable tools to get clearer ROI back on your campaigns.

I don't think they are just brand marketing in a way that, sorry, TV might more be so.

Does that make sense?

But I think heavy specialization, super important to your point of like plant talk, clean talk.

So totally agree.

I mean, Canva, you know, Canva.

Canva talk has been one of the biggest breakthroughs for them.

And the notion templates on TikTok has also been unbelievably successful for them.

How's TikTok been for you?

It's great.

It's emerging for us, but we have big plans for it.

We look at the house as a surface area to be able to do all these things, so we're going to start allowing influencers to go to the houses and do something around the gym in the house, something around the plants in the house, something around the food in the house, something you know.

It just creates an opportunity for all those communities to make sense.

You pay the influencers.

Now, correct The influencers.

We pay the celebrities.

Do not because they're doing it.

It's for their charity.

What if you commissioned the influencers, not paid them?

So what if you said, whatever we take, I'll give you 10%.

Yeah, we've done all sorts of different affiliate deals.

And paid works best?

We do a variety of stuff.

It's like kind of different relationships with different people.

Okay.

No, I mean, it's performance.

It's typically performance driven, but there's some that have different depending on the reach less micro influencers but some bigger influencers.

Was there ever a house that just totally tanked?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, we almost went out of business there.

How did you almost go out of business?

Because this was seeming so good.

I know.

We've almost gone out of business so many times.

How come?

Because we missed that in this.

How come we almost went out of business?

Yeah, like what happened?

In the old 1.0, the celebrities were starting to plateau.

We saw that and we got, and so we started to think about okay, what new products do we need to create to combat that?

We then got an inbound acquisition offer from a really famous CEO with a famous company.

And so then we had the choice of, okay, we really don't have the resources to do both of these well.

Which one are we going to focus on?

So we just had to go for the offer.

Spent six months on that.

How much was the offer?

Um, I'm not going to share that, but, uh, I'm glad we didn't do it.

Um, but it was at the time it was, it'd been a great outcome for us.

And we, so it's been six months just focused on that.

It's all I thought about.

And then it fell through on my actual birthday.

Okay. when I was hosting a whole thing.

And so then we're like, oh man, okay, now we've just wasted six months, not solved this problem.

Then I had the actual near-death experience.

So then I'm out for many more months.

So when I came back, we were like really just skating by.

Then we flipped to the prize model, started to take off again.

And we wanted to go towards the houses.

And we felt confident we were going to be able to raise a round.

So we started making some investments in the houses.

And then we were supposed to close the round on March 13th 2020, which is not a great week to close the round.

If you remember that week, like March 11th is when Tom Hanks got coronavirus.

And then the NBA player got coronavirus.

The number two investor in the round was an NBA owner.

March 12th, the stock, the us stock market, went down like 30 percent.

Um, and then on the friday, like they pulled out of the round understandably, like the world.

It felt like the world was melting and we were done.

Then that was.

That was a death now for us.

So like i went to him and said look, this was a competitive round.

We brought you in because of your reputation for supporting entrepreneurs.

You've got to give us a chance to show you how we're going to make it through this um.

And he's like all right, like let's meet next week.

I was like like let's be monday you, Because you're running out of cash.

Yeah, we're running out of cash, and this is not going to get better.

It's one of those moments where you're trying to say yeah, we need it now, the meeting today, but you don't want to say I'm out on Wednesday.

Yeah, exactly.

And also we had enough to get through that, but each new piece of information was not going to be good.

That was clear.

And so people are not going to get more bullish over the next couple of weeks.

So we said Monday, and then we, literally our team, spent 48 hours totally redoing our deck.

That had taken us however long to put together in the first place.

And we did research on the growth of e-commerce during SARS in 2003, all this research about it.

The bubonic plague from 1917.

There was this explosion of commerce in the streets of London.

You would not believe.

TikTok during the Spanish flu was huge.

And then Sheen came into London in 1918 and short form went to the moon.

They're like, this seems made up.

That's hilarious.

Yeah, we did.

We showed all this stuff and why we thought people were going to be in their houses and they were going to care more about winning stuff.

They need entertainment and like all this stuff.

Did that prove out?

It did.

We didn't really know that at the time.

Obviously, no one did.

So then we presented to them on that Monday.

How did it go?

And then he called me on the Tuesday and said, all right, we're in.

How big a check did they run?

It was a $10 million check.

But they were the number two in the round.

Rick Heitzman and First Mark was leading the round.

But if they would have fallen out, it just would have made the rest of the round.

Not Rick, but the other check would have made the rest of it really difficult.

And I remember getting that call and literally I just collapsed.

Like I fell to the ground.

I just started like wailing.

I mean cause it had been three years of crazy stuff.

You know, like I thought like each one of those was like the thing that we had to overcome.

And then so when it finally came through, it was like, I mean, it was just like such a release, you know.

Daniel from UiPath said it was one of the most powerful moments I've had on a show.

He said you know, I think everyone thinks they want to be me, but I spend a lot of time alone in my head and it's quite lonely.

And I think I felt very seen, which is why I see a therapist.

When I think to that moment, it can also be kind of a lonely moment, even in success sometimes.

How do you think about, and again, my advice, I hope you're a friend.

How would you advise me on the loneliness that comes with being a CEO, having been so much more successful than me?

I would argue with that.

You're incredibly successful.

What you built is amazing.

It's a great question.

I would say I probably even spend more alone time now than I did, but feel less alone.

And I think back to that moment, I was totally alone.

And like one of the biggest moments of my life, I'm crying on the ground by myself.

I'm probably the only one who really could even understand it, you know?

But I think I've learned to create a better relationship with myself.

I used to be horrible to myself.

Like I used to beat myself up.

I used to say stuff to meet myself that if a friend said it to me, I would no longer be friends with that person.

And it took me a long time, took me going through what I did.

Do you not tell yourself that's what's needed?

Like I beat myself up, but I tell myself that that's what kicks me in the ass and makes me better.

Is that wrong?

I don't think it's wrong, but I think it evolves.

And so I think you have to decide if it's still serving you in the way.

And it was no longer serving me in the way that it once did.

I thought the only way to be motivated was to beat myself up and be better.

And you have to be more and you're bad.

And then I just learned to be a better friend to myself and recognize that actually supporting through these things is going to make me work even harder.

It's going to make me waste less time on repetitive thoughts, and I read some study the other day from the NSF that said the average person has 30000 thoughts a day.

80% of them are negative and 95% of them are repetitive.

And I would have bet you I was higher than 80 and 95% on those things.

And that's just not that useful.

Is there anything you do though to stop yourself?

Yeah, absolutely.

So I have a very regimented kind of meditation working out sleep food, all those things are like, designed to create that space.

You meditate?

I have to work really hard to do it.

What do you do?

Help me.

I meditate twice a day.

I have a protocol that I use that I learned from this teacher who I think is incredibly valuable.

It's a guy named Jim George.

How long do you meditate for each time?

20 minutes.

20 minutes a time?

Yeah.

You could listen to one of my podcasts.

I listen to a lot of your podcasts.

I listen to a lot.

Okay, so we have the meditation.

I have the meditation twice a day.

Very serious, like you are, about fitness and health, maybe not as serious as you.

You do two marathons a weekend, which is absolutely insane.

But that's a part of it.

Sleep's obviously a part of it.

I do journals around intentions.

I think that stuff really matters if done the right way.

So yeah, I just have created kind of like a sequence of how to do this stuff.

The other thing I did is I did this thing called the Hoffman Process. you heard of that i have we had scooter braun on the show oh really and he said that hoffman changed his life it definitely changed my life how so it is a work of genius that whole process is true genius and action but it fundamentally changes your relation it changed my relationship to me it made me understand what it actually what self-love actually means and every time i hear that term it sounds like i don't know so cheesy i don't know how to avoid that but like there was a point in the process where someone said hey do you ever hold grudges and i said no i don't i always forget people and they're like yeah but you ever hold grudges against yourself sure i was like there's stuff i did like 10 years ago i haven't figured myself for you know it's like is that still serving me i actually don't think it is um so i've like i still get these moments these fears all these things but then i can just process through them like hoffman teaches you how to kind of rewire your brain to process through that much faster Did it make you a much better leader?

I hope so.

I don't think I would have been able to make the decisions I made around switching the business going from US to UK.

I think how I show up in meetings, how I receive bad news has fundamentally changed.

On decisions, you said before about above the line and below the line.

What's the difference?

It's similar to what we were saying before of like are you making a decision from a place of fear or expansion?

You can make the same decision from two different places.

You still make very hard decisions.

I've still done massive layoffs, like let people go, given tough feedback.

Is layoffs the hardest decision you've made?

Yeah, it was.

You know, we shut down our whole US team because to focus on the house model in the UK.

As awful as this sounds, was that kind of easier than traditional layoffs where you leave people there?

And what I mean by that is layoffs suck often because you've got to retain them.

That hope, the optimism in a team that's still there.

They've said goodbye to their friends.

Here it's like, you're amazing.

You're great.

We're shutting down the whole thing.

It's not you.

It really is us.

And that's because we're closing everything here.

Yeah, it might have been.

I've done both of those.

Keeping the morale of people after others have left can be challenging, but it can also be galvanizing.

I think letting that go was just, you know, it's like so much part of your identity.

It's also like you developed a real bond.

A lot of those people had been there 10, 12 years, you know, since the very beginning.

Do you tie the performance of the company to your happiness?

I used to, like 100%.

I don't I'm much better now.

I can't say I'm totally that I totally separate those things.

I think of it is so much more than just like a business.

I think for all of us who work at Omaze, I think we feel like we're part of something that is bigger than us individually.

Like that, we're able to make a real ripple effect.

And then it's not about any of us individually.

And so I care about like serving that mission in a really deep way.

But I am better now at separating my identity from it.

Everyone says building a business in the UK is shit.

We did Project Europe.

You're an American in London.

What do people think about building in the UK that isn't how it is?

I didn't have a ton of preconceived notions coming.

I've loved building in the UK.

I think there's great talent here.

I think there's great educational institutions that create great talent.

People are very motivated by the collective.

You get a lot of immigrant talent, so you get a lot of different ways of thinking.

So I think it's a great place to run a business.

I think it's a very dynamic, London is incredibly dynamic city.

You know, it's the only city in the world where you have a relevant center for politics, a relevant center for entertainment, a relevant center for finance that are within a mile of each other.

And so that creates a dynamism.

I know all the narratives now about you know UK and Europe are sinking into the ocean, but like I just don't, I don't experience that.

If you were to advise the prime minister today on stimulating startup growth optimism, you were advising him to say.

What would you advise him?

I feel like you're better poised to answer that.

What would your advice be?

You have to make the UK a magnet for the best talent to build here.

One of the best things about the startup team 10 years ago well 12, 13 years ago was Revolut, Monzo TransferWise.

What is the commonality there?

Fintechs that really benefited from a financial services hub that London was, and a very open regulatory stance towards financial data that allowed them to build those businesses better than they would have been elsewhere.

That enabled the birth of those businesses.

We need to make the UK an unbelievably friendly place for the best developers to build.

I totally agree.

I think also a lot of the things coming out of universities are really hard to commercialize.

A lot of the biotech, a lot of the AI advancements.

That commercializes way faster and there's a lot less impediments.

So there should be ways of inflecting that too.

I always ask this.

Did you always know that you would be successful?

No.

I think deep down, I believe I had the potential.

There were so many times along this journey where I was like, we are fucked.

If you would have told the 10-year-ago me or the five-year-ago me we were here right now, he would have been like what are you talking about?

The best way to think about our business is like a third, a third, a third.

So a third goes to VAT and charity.

So 16% to VAT, 17% to charity.

Spend about a third on prizing.

So the house plus the taxes, we cover all the taxes for the winter.

We cover all the furniture.

We give them £250,000 to move in.

And then we have a bunch of sub-prizes like cars and other cash and that kind of stuff.

And then a third is marketing and operating expenses.

And out of that comes our profit.

And so, you know, at scale, this will be roughly a 30% EBITDA margin business.

We're not there now.

Okay.

And we're just in the UK.

Just in the UK.

Where do we go next?

We've announced Australia, which we're really excited about.

Why did you choose Australia?

There's obviously a lot of reasons that it's not the obvious choice.

Not very close, it's not the biggest market.

But this has been such an extraordinary success here that we wanted to remove as many variables as possible.

So language, obsession with property, regulatory, population density.

Even though Australia is a much larger country, 83% of the population lives on the East Coast.

The distance from Melbourne to Brisbane is almost identical from London to Edinburgh, so and there's been proof that that's really working there.

So that's the other thing that's really helpful if you're doing something and it's not working is if you know that other people have done it.

You at least know that it's your execution, not some kind of fundamental lack of demand in the market.

So we'd rather have competitive risk than demand risk.

That's why we chose that and i think kind of consumer, as you said, consumer reception towards uh, property very, very similar.

I'd actually say the australians much more in love with property than the uk.

Oh, absolutely.

It's an obsession.

I mean, it's the way their tax system is set up.

It's the most efficient way to build wealth.

And so that's why you have that.

At your size, you could go public today.

Why don't you?

I think being bigger when you go public is really important now.

I've watched a lot of companies that were in relatively small market caps.

You're better set up to weather the increased volatility of the world and that volatility is only going to increase and the nature of the markets leads.

You know, with retail investors everything else leads to increased volatility.

The question i'm asking now is why would you go public and i'm not saying specifically, but i'm saying any private company we have incredibly large amounts of capital that's willing to go into private markets in this kind of extended privatization window?

You're seeing companies like stripe very publicly say listen, if you need a 28 year old analyst at a bank to say increase your margins, you probably are not a great business anyway.

The idea that you get better discipline is actually just a sign of a poorly managed company.

The question then becomes, why go public?

There's a lot of reasons to not go public.

You don't have to deal with the volatility of the yen carry trade, reducing morale in your business.

And if you're Stripe or you're SpaceX, then you have access to liquidity in ways that are pretty similar to being public.

Not every company, though, is Stripe or SpaceX.

It's still the most efficient way and most impactful way for most companies to get liquidity for their investors and their shareholders.

It still, on the margin, brings down the cost of capital.

It still can be a branding moment for some companies that is important in terms of their international expansion.

It's more of a question than it once was, but not everybody are those companies.

Would you go public in the UK?

We're going to keep all our options open.

I had Nick on the show and there are some shows where you kind of have to be a journalist because if you're not it will discredit the entire show.

You have to ask Nick, are you going to go public, and why are you going to go public?

And I was like I'm not going to get an answer, but I'm just going to ask it anyway, because then at least no one can shit on me.

So I ask, and he's like, it is not a rational decision.

And I'm like, wow, that was incredibly direct.

Yeah.

Okay, well, great.

Thanks, Nick.

And the team's like, yeah, sure.

Nick keeps it real, man.

Yeah, sure, you can keep it.

I'm like, wow, fuck, okay.

That got syndicated everywhere.

I remember reading that.

That was from your show?

Yeah.

That's hilarious.

Yeah, yeah.

That came up at our board meeting.

That's funny.

So, Matt, would you go public in the UK?

Keeping our options open.

My honest question is, and you don't need to answer this, but why would you?

When you can go public in the US, especially when you have a brand like Omaze.

Does you go public, especially here, if you really don't have a US consumer brand?

That's hard.

But Omaze does have a public-facing brand.

It is a very clear story that you could tell US investors easily.

For elevator door closures in Sheffield...

It's difficult to make that a sexy story.

So niche.

Trust me, there's some really big businesses.

I bet you there are.

I love those businesses.

But it's really tough to make that a US success story.

Yes.

Can I ask you a weird one?

Please.

The bigger we get, the more I seem to doubt myself, ironically.

It's just more people telling me that I'm shit and that I'm useless and I have my mother to do that.

So where do you doubt yourself most today?

You know, I think it's mostly around people decisions because people are just hard.

There's never kind of a right way or wrong way to do things.

So I'm constantly adjusting.

You know, we have our virtues that we're very serious about living that we reinforce.

And one of them is seeking out for feedback.

Another was raise the bar.

And so I'm constantly trying to figure out the right cadence of that.

I could give feedback every day to every single person if I wanted to, but that would probably be overkill.

And so how do you continue to raise the bar by also understanding when people are like maxed out?

We're a very small team.

We're only 57 full-time people at that revenue.

So it's like- 57?

Yeah.

We have another like almost 52 contractors that are doing production.

So you could say our company is really 109 people, but it's pretty-

That's like 7 million a head.

Yeah, it's an efficient business.

But we're bringing on more people, but, you know, more senior people.

But, you know, we're still like a pretty tight group in terms of how we operate.

And so that... 7 million a head.

That's nuts.

Yeah.

I'm sure there's much higher.

We analyze like the per head revenue and that's... Right.

Wow. well done thank you i mean it's we have a really good team really smart people really efficient we've made mistakes on over hiring before but on people you doubt yourself most in terms of the hiring in terms of retention in terms of the motivation it's just like knowing the right amount it's not i i think i'm generally pretty good at it because i really care about the people who work and i care about their development and i push towards that but like finding the right amount is a constant evolution that's where i probably spend the most time calibrating What's been the biggest change in the way that you manage people?

So for me, I used to have this like, I will lead this way, blanket.

And I've changed to understand that some people require a carrot and some a stick.

And I will change the type of leader that I am for the individual that's receiving it, to get the most out of them.

I would say that's also been my lesson.

There's this guy named General Anthony Zinni.

He's a four-star general in the U.S.

We did an experience with him at the very beginning.

We would do stuff like play chess with a four-star general and stuff like that.

We didn't get a lot of celebrities.

But anyway, he ran all of troops for NATO.

And so basically, he had, you know, the Army, the Marines, the Navy, plus whatever how many different countries as part of that.

So just think about all the different cultures that you're having to navigate.

I was like, that feels like the most intense leadership challenge ever.

How did you do that?

And he's like.

You realize that all relationships are just between two people and each person is different.

So you have to constantly kind of adjust that.

Now you create your systemic kind of messaging that you know is true to you, but then you have to adjust to the people.

I used to think that everyone was wanting to operate the same way that I did.

That's wrong.

I think the other thing I learned too, is what leadership is is much more about.

I used to make myself the hero, and my job is actually to make my team the hero and set them up for success.

And then actually I would try to do more things because I thought it would help them, but actually I was getting in the way of what they could do.

And so creating the right guardrails to allow them to flourish.

I know you've railed against on your show against the word empowerment.

I rail against it because empowerment and alignment are two words that are used by execs and they just fluffy bullshit.

I disagree.

I think alignment.

In most cases.

I'm smart enough to know there's a caveat.

Why do you disagree though?

Because alignment saves time.

We're really clear.

Okay, this is our moonshot, this is our North Star, this is how we're getting there.

And then everybody needs to be able to articulate what their role is in getting to that place.

So we have them all right out on a Google Doc.

So everyone's like, my role connects to the strategy, connects to the North Star in this way.

And by doing that, then that should enable them to say So what's the doc that has alignment baked into it.

What does it have?

It has North Star metrics?

We have our yearly North Star metric.

We have our five pillars of our strategy.

And we have our OKRs.

So it's like, how are we going to get where we want to go, which is a strategy.

Where are we going this year, which is our North Star.

What are you going to do next, which are your OKRs.

And then your job as an individual on the team is to write about how your work connects to each of those things.

By doing that you create a coherence within an organization, where then people can say no, don't do that.

And we try to celebrate that.

Tell us about a time that you said no to something.

Strategy is a lot of times about what you say no to.

And so they should constantly be on the lookout for things that they should not do.

That saves them time.

What did you say no to that you should have said yes to?

Oh, man.

Do you have a good answer to that?

The deal precede round.

Yeah.

The van to seed round oh I said no to SpaceX early.

I'm more saying about operating for you with them.

Yeah, I said no to video super early.

I mean, we have we have ten times bigger audience on audio than we do on video.

Why?

Purely because I've been doing audio for ten years and I thought actually that video people wouldn't open up as much.

They felt much more comfortable on audio.

Wrong, completely wrong.

I initially said no to subscriptions before we got to house a month.

James, who I mentioned, Amit Prem, the leaders on our team.

They thought we could do subscriptions with a house every other month.

I was like, no, you got to wait till this comes.

People won't want it.

They were right.

I was wrong.

And they changed the business faster.

Final one.

What did you do that you wish you hadn't done?

Man, I just made so many mistakes in my life, it's really hard to narrow it down.

It's a series of failures.

I was an actor for a while.

I was really bad at it.

Did it help you to become a better CEO?

I think so.

Yeah.

I think so.

If I want to justify.

It does help you storytell.

I think it helps you to see the world through the eyes of another, which I think helps with marketing and product.

Do you agree with vulnerability and leadership?

I do.

Do you not think sometimes you need to put on a mask, a facade to say to everyone, it's okay.

And deep down, you're really not that sure think you need to do that too.

Yeah, i don't think vulnerability is about just being totally open every time you feel any fear.

You know like you gotta.

Like you gotta pick your your moments.

But i think i think the old school image of a leader which was like you know, general patton, jack welsh, like i know everything at all times and we're gonna take that hill and nothing's getting in our way, like it's not real, it doesn't work anymore, and so i think you have to be candid about when You're not sure what the answer is.

And when you do have concerns, you know as a leader you also have to be able to work past those, because people can clue off your energy.

That's why we practice laughter within our company.

We invest in it.

We hire for it.

So when you get in those like difficult situations, like I'm always working to be as lighthearted as possible and have as much fun as possible in the really shit times you know, some of our biggest laughs is when we're like we might go out of business next week and like, because then you're, you can come to a solution faster that way, because you get a little distance from the problem.

I mean, with 400 million in revenue, i don't think you've got that moment so much anymore.

We don't have anymore.

No, but uh, we used to have it a lot.

You kind of normalize it as well, though it's like i've been here before.

Yes yeah, like yeah, the first time sucks.

Yeah, the fifth lawsuit.

You're like, oh yeah, how'd that tts?

Did you ever have lawsuits?

We did.

What was the worst lawsuit?

Oh man.

We had these guys who basically were recruiting plaintiffs on Facebook to sue Omaze.

These guys had also recently before that had sued Ginger Ale for not having enough ginger in the ginger, like a ginger ale company for not having enough ginger.

These guys were like Harvard and Yale lawyers that were just farming for some kind of tort that they could do like exploiting the US system.

Anyway, they had people suing us or they gathered these people, they brought a lawsuit that one said both, that people didn't really understand the odds.

Some people thought that they automatically won and therefore we were misleading.

We're like, at no point are we communicating that everybody wins this thing.

That's crazy.

That the fact that people could interfere it was a sweepstakes in the US.

The fact that people could interfere for free was a problem that was following the law.

There's just all this crazy stuff, ended up winning it, but it was like so crazy that's nuts.

There's so much of that in the us like it's just so value destroying.

Oh my god, the lead, your approach to legals in the us is like lawsuit lawsuit, lawsuit.

Really be a lawyer in the us is the takeaway.

It's really not great for society.

Dude, i want to do a quick fire round, so i say a short statement.

You give me your immediate thoughts that sound okay, sounds good.

What do you believe that most around you disbelieve?

I think people are more alike than different.

Biggest mistake you see early stage founders make?

They try to do too much.

Focus is the price of greatness.

Did you ever lose focus?

Yes.

Where?

In the beginning we were doing a whole content series alongside all the celebrities and t-shirts, and we did all sorts of stuff.

What do most people think they know about content that they actually don't?

That shorter is necessarily better.

Funny now that it's just the prevailing conventional wisdom.

Like, no one has the attention span.

Yeah, but i think longer requires more skill.

Yeah, they don't have the attention for boring stuff.

Longer requires you have to get it faster than you once did, but it can still work.

What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

I think the back to the people are more alike than different.

I thought going into new markets, we were going to have to wildly customize for that market.

I've actually heard people talk about this on your show.

The Revoluth growth guy talked about this.

But I think, especially when you're talking about a product like they have or we have, which is like core to survival in a customer's mind, a lot of the way you communicate with people can be the same from market to market.

What consumer brand do you most admire and respect?

I love Yeti.

Why?

It's a great product.

They're incredible storytellers.

They totally understand this at a fundamental level.

You'll see an ad for them that says, be the guy with the story about the bear.

That's genius.

Why is that genius?

Because it makes the customer the hero.

It shows a transformation for them.

You go from someone...

No one is reading that going, I'm already that guy.

So it creates a sense of adventure.

Yeti is a perfect guide for that experience.

Their products are great to go out and do that.

It hits all of it in a really visceral way.

You can be CEO of any other company for a day.

Which one?

Netflix.

Why?

Because I think it's the perfect blend of science and art.

Obviously, I love storytelling.

I love content.

They do that incredibly well.

But the way they do, it understands these principles but also uses, you know, best in class technology to do these things.

What concerns you most in the world today? inequality of opportunity.

There's much differences that are seen in the world.

I think we all, most humans, would agree in the power of competition or the importance of competition.

And that if smart people work hard, they should be able to go up the ladder in society.

And I think that we are making that harder and harder to do.

Do you?

Yeah.

When you look at social and you can DM someone and get in 20 minutes in their calendar if you do it really well.

When you look at lovable and you're able to build websites simply with words and the democratization of development skills.

I think it is easier than ever to build products, distribute them, sell services.

I think we have more quality of opportunity than ever.

I would agree with you.

There are more tools and there's more access to information than ever before.

I think there are a lot of structural impediments built into societies value capture, regulatory capture at the top, especially in the US.

That makes it harder for people to get started and to move up.

That's why you build in Europe.

I love the US.

We're headed back there.

You can tell your graduating self any advice.

What do you say?

Everyone is scared.

Are you still scared?

Yeah, of course.

The point is just like I used to think, like the fear made it like, so I didn't have the constitution to be an entrepreneur.

I would look at you know, these famous people like Richard Branson or Oprah, a different kind of entrepreneur, and be like oh wow, they must have always, at all times, knew exactly what they're doing and felt courage.

And then I've met these people or others that we think that of, and you realize like oh, they feel the same fear.

They just process through it fast.

And so, like it's okay, have to ask this one.

It's not who was the most amazing person you met that really left a mark?

John stewart, the actor.

Yeah, the daily had the daily show.

Yeah, because i think he used humor.

I said this before, but we believe laughter is the shortest distance between two people.

I think he he used humor to raise consciousness and awareness around societal issues in a way that like if he didn't have the humor, he couldn't.

I think he's incredibly articulate and balanced in the way that he looks at things, But also like we didn't experience where you got to be in his writer's room for a day.

And so I watched him lead and, like the camaraderie and the fun that they had, producing like a very stressful show day in, day out.

Like that's really hard.

That had to react to the news and then write comedy about the news that had happened that day.

Like think how hard that is.

And the organizational setup that they had and the creative machine that they had.

Like we modeled, like I learned a lot from that to model our creative machine.

And I thought that was really impressive.

How did you model your creative machine on his?

What did you change or do the process with which they ideate that then goes to a room where they beat up the ideation and like stress, test it and then like the testing and how they learn from the episodes before.

At one point we were producing 400 celebrity videos a year, you know, and our team like figured out that process, was really good at learning from that process, like that's why we like, that's why we were the only ones who did a celebrity that made it.

We've committed wme tried to do it, ca tried to do it, even airbnb and groupon at the time tried to do it, but that machine is why we were able to beat them.

Um, and so we learned watching that from him.

A final one for you what question are you not ever asked by employees, by media, by investors that you find strange that you're not asked?

Can you reach up and grab that thing for me?

I'm short.

That I'm thought it's strange that I'm not asked.

What's the best answer you've heard of this one?

One for me is like, you know, I've done a lot quite early in my life.

What has allowed you to achieve quite a lot that you're maybe not proud of?

Oh, that's a great question.

What's the answer to that?

Addiction.

You're addicted to work?

I'm an alcoholic.

I'm bulimic.

I'm a workaholic.

I literally have the ability to get addicted to almost anything in a very unhealthy way.

And you see that in psoriasis and heart palpitations.

And it allows me to, I think, be one of the best at what I do.

But it's not something I'm particularly proud of.

Is that your neurology or is that because something happened in your childhood that has made you that way?

I don't know.

Do you think you can be great without being obsessed?

Absolutely not.

And there's definitions of great.

Yeah, it really depends on how you find that.

Which is like you can make a lot of money, but do you want to be number one in a category and reshape how a generation experiences a large product?

No, you can't be.

Do you feel fulfilled by what you've achieved?

No, do you think less fulfilled with every day, really less fulfilled every day?

Do you think feeling fulfilled will make you less ambitious?

Yeah i, you know.

I don't know if you've ever had a dog, but like yeah, they're always hungry.

You never want to be content.

Do you think being fulfilled and hungry are mutually exclusive?

I almost do.

Yeah, I've changed my mind on that.

I know, but that's why I need to go to Hoffman.

You should go to Hoffman.

I should.

You'll be just as hungry, but you'll enjoy it more.

Are you hungry and enjoy it?

Yes.

What do you not enjoy that you would most like to remove?

Some of the administrative things tasks i don't love.

I mean i would do a lot of them but if i have to do any of them, i'm fairly impatient for them.

Like there's a lot of things through this journey.

Like i used to write site copy and contract partnerships and like all these things.

I didn't love all that stuff when i was doing it but i felt like it was the best thing i could do to serve what we were doing.

Final one where is omaze in 10 years?

We mentioned the australia plans.

We mentioned the 400 million revenue run rate.

It's not our 10-year vision, but it's our 15-year vision.

Is Fortune 500 impact number one?

The Fortune 500 right now is $8 billion in revenue to be on that list.

Impact number one means the number one source of charitable funds in the world outside of government.

Right now that's the Gates Foundation.

We think the math is on our side to be able to do both those things.

That requires expansion into 14 markets.

We think we can do that.

Matt, listen, I think it's the most incredible story.

I have so much respect admiration for you.

Thank you so much for doing this with me, for telling the story so well, for letting me interrupt you continuously.

And I've just loved having you on.

That was a lot of fun.

Thank you, man.

As always, I so appreciate your support.

Let me know what you think of the show.

You can find it on Spotify or you can ping me on harry at 20vc.com.

I always love to hear your thoughts.

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Now let's switch gears to the future of mobile and how one company is turning your screen into real returns.

We spend nearly half our waking hours glued to our phones, upwards of 50 hours every week.

Recently, one company transforming this reality stood out so much I personally became a shareholder Mode Mobile.

Mode Mobile created the Earn Phone, the smartphone that pays you for daily activities.

Instead of big tech profiting billions from our attention Mode returns over 325 million directly to users through earnings and savings.

Mode's revenues surged an incredible 32481 in three years, recognized by Deloitte as 2023's fastest growing software company in North America.

And here's why I'm excited.

Mode's equity offerings have raised over 30 million from 20000 plus retail investors one of 2025's standout public raises.

And you can now join me as a shareholder with as little as $1,000 at invest.modemobile.com.

[The Art of Storytelling and Near-Death Resilience: Matt Paulson’s Omaze Journey]-[20VC: The Science of Storytelling: Three Steps to Master the Perfect Story | From Near Death Experience to Unicorn Startup: The Untold Story of Omaze with Matt Pohlson]

📋 Summary

From Near-Death Experience to Business Transformation

The Evolution of Omaze: From Celebrity Auctions to Housing Prizes

The Science of Storytelling

Leading Through Crisis and Loneliness

The Future and Strategic Vision

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Art of Storytelling and Near-Death Resilience: Matt Paulson’s Omaze Journey]-[20VC: The Science of Storytelling: Three Steps to Master the Perfect Story | From Near Death Experience to Unicorn Startup: The Untold Story of Omaze with Matt Pohlson]

📋 Summary

From Near-Death Experience to Business Transformation

The Evolution of Omaze: From Celebrity Auctions to Housing Prizes

The Science of Storytelling

Leading Through Crisis and Loneliness

The Future and Strategic Vision

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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