YouSaid · the spoken record

Jay Gould

lines on the record: 155
first: 2021-08-04
most recent: 2021-08-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And he's like, you can't quit, dude. I was like, What do you mean I can't quit? Are you going to sue me? I'm not going to sue you. I'm just telling you from an integrity perspective, you said I'll give you two years. I was like, oh, God. And I have integrity. I was like, you're right. I'm sorry. I just don't want to deal with this. Can I step down? Are you smart, right? That's why he's the CEO of a $5 billion company. I'm not, right? I was like.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First purchase was 2016, right? So I sold the company 2015 January. Now I'm just sitting around just chilling, right? The first I was supposed to work for Next Star for two years, six months in from the buyer who bought Yashi. I called up the CEO and I was like, I want to quit. And the guy's like Perry Zook, the CEO. He's like, what are you talking about? You can't quit. I was like, yeah, I can. I don't want to do the same. You told me you would work for two years. I don't know anything about Yashi. I go, but my guys, they know it. No one's going to screw you. Like everyone's going to stay. I could be an advisor, whatever you want, you know, but I don't want to do this anymore. He goes, why? Go because you have, you've taken over two of my conference rooms with auditors every day. I got people bringing me and my executives in nonstop asking me questions about revenue recognition. I go, I can't do this. He goes, but you have to go. No, I don't. I sold. I'm done.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What else did they invent or create? Yes. Like they saw it so early, and I My hat is off to all these guys. I have all respect in the world for anybody that saw it way earlier than me because I've seen things early like social network, online video sharing, ad networks, a lot of the investments that I've done in Angeling and stuff. I totally missed this one in the beginning. And I was like, when I finally click, it was like around 2015.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kudos to them, I didn't. And I don't know how they saw that because they don't, when you look at some of these guys, I don't know Max's background necessarily, but a lot of the others, what else have they seen? Nothing from what I can say. Like they got this.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, but that's my missing of Bitcoin's story. When I got it was a couple years later. So running Yashi for a while, Bitcoin's definitely coming on a radar more and more. People are asking me, I even have an email from a friend that worked for me. And he's like, what do you think of this Bitcoin? And I had those stories, you know, and I'm like, it's a scam. I have this email. I have like a screenshot of it on my desktop. It's a scam for me to him. I'm like, oh my God, I'm such an idiot. And I didn't think it was actually a scam. I was just like, it's speculat”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Man, do I regret that? Because I probably collected by 250 to 350,000 dollars from him that year and probably 60% of that was profitable. That could have just remained in Bitcoin on the treasury. I would have never done it. I have no regret. Of course, of course.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm like, I'm like, you wire me the money now. And he's just looking at me like, get at it. But he did, and every month he would convert his Bitcoin to fiat and he would send you the fiat money.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Leave, we go to lunch, come back an hour or so later. He's like, I got it like, you know, a little bit of it, but not all of it. I go, What are you talking about? It's not so easy to go, you want me to take this shit and you can't sell that fast? No way. You wire this when I go home. And I'm like staying at his desk. And I'm like, you know, trying to be like a tough guy. And my wife's going like this. She's like, and she's doing this. And I'm like, her eyes are moving around looking at the back wall. And he's talking. He's all happening. He's leaning his back and checking, this is no big a deal. I sell out a Bitcoin. I give you the money. Don't worry about it. I get calmed down. And I'm like, and what's she looking at? And on his wall, all these plaques and trophies for taekwondo, bro. And he's all relaxed, President, because he's thinking, I will this dude's ass.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“didn't notice there was there was all this stuff on his wall but i walk in and i was like there was like 100 plus people it was it was a content business it was like a news website almost i go to the i go into the office like where's francesco oh he's in the back i'll bring you like a nago i walked her house so pissed i was like this guy owes me 50 000 i want my money so i go in his office and i was like hey he goes hey how you doing i go i'm doing great where's my money he goes i give you the bitcoin i go there's no bitcoin i want you to wire me the money right now i'm not so easy i have to sell it first i go okay i sat down i go sell it he goes no no it doesn't work like that i go we're going to go to lunch when i come back i want my money”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Funny story. I went to his office once after the first payment didn't come in. And he's like, no, no, he was Italian. He's like, you just take the payment. I give you Bitcoin. I transfer it. I go, no, no, no, no. You have to send me a wire. No, no, no. You take it. It's okay. You take it. He's like trying to convince me by just saying, yes, I'll take Bitcoin. I was like, I'm going to come up to your office today. I'm not that far from New York, right? I go up there with my wife and go, let's go. We're going to go get to the city. We're going to eat lunch and then we're going to go hang out with this guy. He's going to wire me the money. You see me. I'm not a small guy. He's going to wire me to fucking money. I go in his office. This is no joke. And he's like sitting at his office. And on the back wall.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So he's getting like traffic for free, essentially, electricity costs, which was low. And right back then, and driving the traffic to him. And then in the end, if I feel bad about not taking it, he's got to feel like an idiot that he was spending it as fast as he made it.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The market cap was too small. It's like, this is nothing. This could go away, right? Now, I say that to people like Bitcoin Dina. And he's like, no, it can't. I'm like, I know it can't now. In 2012, we could have. Okay, so don't tell me you can't, right? Because it didn't, he's right, right? So I'll give him that. But I just didn't believe it. So I was an idiot, right? I just didn't say it. So then in 2013, running Gamers Media Yashi, we had a customer, this guy Francesco. He kept asking me every month, will you accept Bitcoin for payment? I'm like, I don't know about that. Let me look into it. So I start looking around. I'm like, well, how do you even sell it? didn't even make any sense, right? How's this guy even getting this Bitcoin? Right. Nothing registered after like a month or so, I figured out what he was doing. He was buying traffic from us. We were driving visitors to his site through his advertising that he was buying from us, right? To push to his site. And then he was working with other ad networks and he was selling ads. So he's arbitraging. And I'm like, why is he paying me? Why is he insisting to want to pay me in Bitcoin? I never accepted the Bitcoin, but he kept asking, he was mining it. And back then, you can mine GPU. So he was making a lot of money, I think.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't get it, right? I just didn't get it right for people in 2021, it's easier to get because you have places like Clubhouse to learn. You have the blogs, you have Twitter, you have Max Kaiser, you have Preston, you have all these people teaching you about Bitcoin. Nobody was teaching anybody about Bitcoin in 2012. It was this magic internet money, right? And it was like this. The fairest thing that it felt like. And not only that, the market cap was so small, it just didn't seem stable. It just didn't seem that the price per the I don't care about price per because I understand stocks, right? So that doesn't matter. So it's all about what it divides into and stuff, right?”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Happened, it's always going to happen, it's going to get worse as the price keeps going higher. I mean, I'm saying this in 2012. Look at those prices, right? And at that time, there were two things that prevented me from wanting to get in. Number one thing was I thought I'm not in the inside club of what's really going on here, right? So I just, that's how I felt. I was like,”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's like BlockFi, right? It's like it's all this other stuff, right? Like, what, and that didn't exist then, but I was like, there's got to be an ecosystem that they're hoping develops and they're going to invest in the ecosystem around this coin. So I'm going to buy the coin like the sucker and they're going to invest in the company, make all the money. I'm not buying this coin so that you could go and create your companies, pump it and then dump it into an IPO or an exit. I was like, that doesn't better”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fred Wilson's blog. He was talking about it maybe in 2012, probably the first time I really read about it, but I was very skeptical because, again, I'm very skeptical of venture capitalism. So I was like, well, why are they talking about this? What is the nefarious angle that they have? Like, are they, right? Like, are they pumping and dumping? And I can't imagine it's the Bitcoin itself that they're pumping and dumping. They want Bitcoin to grow because how are they going to make money? They're not going to just, as a venture capitalist, just buy Bitcoin and hold it for their LPs because the LPs could do that.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He doesn't want to tell me, right? I was like, okay, it's fine. I got you. You know, I said, is it because you just haven't sold it? And it keeps growing? He goes, yeah, basically. He's like, I bought a small amount a while ago. And it's becoming a larger. He's like, I probably should sell some of it. I was like, no, no, no. Don't sell it. Just leave it alone, right? You did great. I go, but what's your favorite book on Bitcoin? Like Bitcoin Standard, hard money you can't fog with. What do you like? I never read a book on Bitcoin. I was like, what do you mean you never read? What do you know about Bitcoin? Tell me what do you love? What are your attributes? He goes, eh. Fred Wilson told me to buy it, so I bought it. I swear to God, I was like, how did I learn about Bitcoin? Fred Wilson. Not personally.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first time I heard of it's actually funny I interviewed Howard Lindzen, first investor in Robin Hood, put a million in. They went IPO today for $100 million. I retweeted my interview with him today. Like, good for him, bro. You know, it's just unbelievable. He learned about Bitcoin, and on an interview, I asked him, it reminded him of my story because it's so related. It's crazy. I said, how did you learn about Bitcoin? No, no, this is the question I asked him. I said, what percentage of your net worth is in Bitcoin today? First, I said the audience said, yes, which percentage of net worth? He says, too much.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I saw that early on. I was like, this video thing, I don't think it's going anywhere. And a lot of websites and blogs and everything are going to want to monetize this. So we just got to lock them up, started in gaming. We moved outside of gaming. And we went from like services to more automation by the time we sold it.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These platforms, and we started to get connected with these platforms. We started to build technology with the profits. We hired programmers, and we built out a real platform. And then we changed the name to Yashi because it kind of had like a game-y Asian, it's an Asian name in India, female name. And I was like, it's got that Asian game-y ring to it. Almost sounds like Yoshi from the video game of Mario and stuff. And so the gaming community accepted the name. And then it was kind of like this just ambiguous name that didn't mean anything. It was like Yahoo, you know. And what people didn't realize is that Yashi was owned by Yahoo at one time. 1995, they owned the domain name. So who knows? Might have been Yashi. So we started that business and in 2008 we did like 750,000 revenue. By the time we sold it, we were doing like 36 million in revenue. So we just kept scaling and scaling and scaling. And then it starts to scale a little bit faster as we started to kind of automate things a little bit.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doing. It was great. We're making a lot of money, right? It was very profitable. Day one, we were profitable the whole time we ran that company. And the revenues were growing really fast. I thought year one we'd do like 3 million in sales based off of what we did previously and the relationships. But what I didn't see happening, we started the company in July, I think it was August or July of 2007. By December, we had no sales, right? I was like, this isn't working out. We finally get a sale in January of 2008. And in that first year of 2008, we only did $750,000 in sales. So it was basically me, Kate, and a couple contractors remotely, you know, and I was like, this isn't working where I thought it was going to go, but it's an income and I'm making a lot of money. And that's cool, but I don't see, hold on, I got a thing here. I don't see how this is going to scale the way we're doing it. I was like, we have to get to more automation. And this is before RTB, real-time bidding, and all this kind of stuff, right? Before you saw the programmatic buying. But I knew that that's where it was going to lead to. And about a year or so later, like PubMatic and Rubicon Project came out and some of.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For them at bolt for U.S. sales. We also wrapped RuneScape and a bunch of other gaming with large gaming sites. So I said, well, you know, this is getting shut down, Bolt, right? It's going away. And WikiU is gone, right? That's not going to work out. Let's just reach out to all the gaming sites and sign contracts with these guys, rep the inventory, and then we're basically an agency. I go, this is not that complicated. We have the relationships. We know all the advertisers, and we just got to build a business around it. We did that initially. Very services agency-like in the beginning. We would do homepage takeover banners and things like they call them adver games where you make a game. We did one called Oscar Meyer Deli Creations, which is a thing they sell in the store, right? And it was like the hands putting sandwiches together, you know, as you're playing, you know, you click, grab the bread and you get, you know, this whole, and it gets faster and faster round by round, you know. And it was all branded Oscar Mar. So we did a lot of that kind of stuff, craft, Disney, under Ruse, the underwear. Like we did all these games. And I was like, this is terrible what we're doing.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, Julia, whoever her name was, that you went to high school with, she works at Google. I can reach out to her. I still keep in touch. And they're always hiring. And I was like, hello. What are we talking about? I was like, Bob, are you saying you don't want to do it? He goes, I'm just, it's up to her. And I was like, okay, you guys talk about this. I know I'm doing this. It's either going to be with one of the guys, Aaron or Lou, or it's going to be with you. I'd rather be with you because I knew I wanted to marry her. So I was like, so either way, like we're going to be together. You know, it's not like this girl and, you know, you break up in the middle of it. I knew I was going to marry her. I just didn't want to propose and get married in the middle of all this happening. Like you said, it was stressful time. And so we did. We went down that path. We built it. And my way to get into what I believe that it would grow into Preston, which it did. I didn't know where it would end because that's the iteration of adapting and evolving in technology. But I knew that we needed to start in a niche market that we can own. And so we at Bolt had that social network slash video sharing site. We also had a good sales team there. And so we rep miniclip.com if you ever heard of that gaming site, the largest gaming site in the world. We were the exclusive sales force.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very, very different. Yeah. Totally different mindset. And he wanted, I think he wanted his daughters to be teachers. Kate was in English. My wife was an English major, you know, when she went to Boston College. And so I think that was the plan, at least. Obviously, she has a different outcome than she would have been a teacher because she did this. But I said, I go, the opportunity, it's an asymmetric risk thing, right? I was like, the opportunity on the upside is worth what the opportunity what it is on the downside. Worst case scenario, Bob, is it doesn't work out and we just get jobs. That would have never happened for me. But for her, she just got another job. So he leans over and he's like, no eye contact to me, right? At this point, he looks at his daughter and he's like,”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he's like, what this guy about to say? I've only been taking his daughter for like eight months or something. And I'm like And he's like, in business, what are we talking about? And Kate was here at the table. I said, I want to go in business with your daughter. And I was like, and I don't want to do that without the consent. I don't need your consent, obviously, but we're dating. I'm close with the mom and dad and this and that. And aunts and uncles that go to Christmas and all that stuff. And I was like, I've had two failures back to back. I can't guarantee a success. I will guarantee I'll give everything I got. That's how I am. And I'll work as hard as I can. I will work 24 hours a day. I will tell you there's going to be good times. There's going to be a lot of bad rough times. And I'm saying this to her as much as I was saying it to him that day. I said, so if you think this is because he was a teacher and his wife was a teacher and I think that in their mind, they're like, go to work and put in your, they put in 38 years and have a pension from their.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that we can be supported, and there's no more subscriptions. Doesn't that make sense? And she's like, okay. And she was doing like six million in sales at Bolt. I was like, let's go. Let's rock. So I went to her father, my now father-in-law, and I said, will you meet me in Soho for lunch? So we go into the city. I sit down with him. I said, I would like to ask for your hand in business.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, what's the idea? I go, so I kind of popularize video sharing. And it's happening on YouTube, but it's not going to be the only destination for video. You have to remember, back in the early 2000s, if you went to cnn.com or fox.com, they had subscriptions to watch the videos. I don't know if you remember that. Yeah. It's crazy. Like, I'm going to pay you to watch the video content because they didn't have a lot of video advertising to support it. I said, why don't we build a video advertising network?”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is a one shot deal in anything I've ever done. That's just the way my mindset was, and I don't know where that comes from, but I was never afraid of that. I'm still not afraid. If I lost it all, I know I can make money back. I'm not worried about that. Anyway, long story short, that failed. And I go to my girlfriend who I met at Bolt. She's now my wife with four kids, right? And I said to Kate, I said, I got an idea. She was our number one salesperson at Bolt. And nobody knew we were dating for a while when I was there, you know, trying to be as professional as I can in front of everyone. But this is all unwinding. The business is getting shut down the first one and the next one's not working out. We're not getting any funding. And I said, I got an idea.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They make more money all the time. I could just get more of it. It's not like it's a zero sum. It's not like the money goes here and I can't get it. There's going to be more to make. And there's always opportunities. You can create new things. I was never afraid.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As we know, they just keep printing more of it. So I always thought that before I even thought about inflation, I was like,”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was stressful, but I was young and I didn't have kids. And, you know, I had a house and a mortgage and all that kind of stuff. But I didn't really, like I said earlier, I didn't care if I went to zero. I was never afraid of losing all my money. That wasn't a thing to me.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I talked to Josh, and Josh says for first round capital. He's like, I don't really know if that'll work or not, but the way his mindset was, at least then, he's like, fail fast. You tried it, you iterated, you built it, you had a couple changes. And let's just move on. I was like, really? So I had two failures back to back, right? So bolt goes under sued, bankrupt, you know, ABC. And then I try WikiU. And within like eight months, I run out of money. I'm a loser. But I had this idea.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have an adverse selection problem here. Why isn't Reed just antiing it up right now? The guy's a millionaire. If it's that good of an idea, like it's almost like they know something we don't know. And I was like, there's nothing that they know. He's maintaining his pro rata rights. They go, yeah, it's not enough for us. What they got for the last percentage and the amount they put in, they should just do the whole next round. And the fact that they're not, I would syndicate, I'd be a syndicate on that round, but they got to lead it. Because if you convince them to lead it, I'm in. But if you can't, you're not getting money from anybody. So I'm back and talk to them. And they were like,”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just so you know, I've gotten 10 phone calls over the last day that you're meeting with everybody. This is how it works. I was like, what do you mean? He goes, all the VCs talk. Like, oh, did you guys meet with WikiU yet? And it's like, no, well, it reads introducing us. Yay, I meet with them tomorrow. It's like such an insider thing, right? A lot of entrepreneurs don't know this that aren't in the circle. They all are friends, all these VCs. They co-invest in Syndicate, you know. And he told me straight up, he's like, I'm just going to be honest with you. You're not getting any money. You should stop embarrassing yourselves going around the street because it ain't going to happen. I go, why isn't it happening? I don't understand. And I told him the strategy. He goes, I love the strategy.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we went to the Sandhill Road thing. We met with Sequoia and Light Speed Ventures and, you know, Kleiner, everybody. And Jeremy Liu at Light Speed, it was a friend of mine. He said, when we finally got his office, he's like, it's great to see you guys here. He's like, I'm just, we walk into the office, sit down. He goes, you're not getting any money. I was like, he's like,”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You would think Was thinking the problem we had was duplication and then the lying right like so I create a hundred profiles of Preston and we don't know what's real or not I have a solution for that it's called Facebook Connect. I don't know what they call it now, but when you log in with your Facebook so we can we could set it up that a profile goes public when you create your own profile to be created to be edited and created and you do it through Facebook Connect so essentially once you have the profile up there it can be edited by people either that you approve people that are connected to you or something like that that you that you follow something like that so you have your family and friends creating your profile for you so that your biography lives on for your descendants or whoever else for the rest of the time but we didn't get there and I went back to reading them and I was like it told them then 2007 Preston I was like this is how we got to fix it I see it now I couldn't see it before the iPhone and the Facebook apps and the connect and all that was there but it was then and I was like let's I need a little bit more money because we're running out of we're running low we had like 50 grand left I was like and we were trying to raise money as it was”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Product to make it an app. And at the same time, that summer, Facebook launched the apps that they called them, right, on Facebook. So I was like, we need to make it so that it's a Facebook app and an iPhone app. And on the Facebook thing, and I think anybody can do this, by the way, if you get program out there, I think you should create WikiU. I think I would invest actually if they did it the right way because I think it's a great idea and it still hasn't been executed properly. But the way to solve the issue that we had was we couldn't solve for duplicate profiles. I can create 100 precedents famous people like you, by the way, and Zay, right? I'll tell you, I just interviewed Zay the other day, Isaiah Jackson. A lot of you guys that have like hundreds of thousand followers, you end up having all these fake accounts. Actually, Jason Williams does too, right? So I was talking to him about this. He's like, they won't verify me on Twitter. He's like, it's so annoying.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, anyway, he passed based on valuation. He's like, I'm not doing that with you guys. So we raised the money. It's a half a million dollars roughly and never scaled it. It just didn't work out. We were cross-promoting it off the bolt, trying to migrate users over. And it was getting there. We had like tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. I don't even know how it was, but it was thousands of people, not millions, you know. And it just didn't get there in time. And I went back. And we raised the money in like late 06 going into 07 by the summer of 07, the iPhone comes out and we already built a product and we're live and we had a tech crunch article and this and that. And they were comparing us to another former PayPal mafia guy who created genie.com, G-E-N-I, genealogy kind of thing. And so, and I think it was David Sachs, if I'm not mistaken. So we were competing with his site in the article, but we really didn't think of ourselves as competing with them. But that's how Michael Irene wrote the article. Because it's like not good with other investors and stuff, you know. The long and the short of the story was we didn't get to scale. I went back to them and I said, I think we have to reshape this.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's so dumb. He goes, he goes, in the end, what matters in venture is getting it right. Because if it's right, it's multi-billions, right? And the only reason this didn't remain private is because of all the labels, right? That's why they had to sell too. Same issue that I had. You had to get out or you had to deal with lawsuits. Because once you sell to the buyer, YouTube had to deal with it anyway. I'm sorry, Google had to deal with it anyway, right? They just couldn't sustain as a private company that plus all the server bills and everything, right? It's just an unprofitable venture.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make the investment. I think they up the valuation and when it went back to Reed, they said, we're really excited. They said, yes, they'll do it. And here, but they want to increase the value. They want to increase the amount of capital going in, but without diluting us, they're just going to increase the valuation. And Reid was like, oh, okay, I don't like that valuation. I think I'm going to pass, but don't worry. They won't not invest. I'll talk to Roloff. It's not a big deal, right? You don't need me, you know. He goes, I ain't making that mistake twice. Great entrepreneurs. There was actually a third co-founder people to talk about, Jawed Karim, right? So there's the three co-founders of YouTube like them. He liked the market. He liked that it was starting to scale a little bit. But he didn't like the valuation. He didn't like the valuation.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, I idolized the guy, you know. I was like, how did you do that so quickly? Like, like, this is crazy. You're just spraying and praying. Like, what's happening? When the YouTube guys came into my office, I knew who you guys were already because you already knew the competitors, right? And they asked me to invest in YouTube. And I said, sure, I'll invest. Why don't you go meet with Roloff Botha over at Sequoia Capital? It used to be a PayPal. It's this whole PayPal mafia thing. Yeah, PayPal. So they send the former PayPal junior level guys who are running a scaling product called YouTube from LinkedIn over to Sequoia and they say, yeah, it's interesting.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said, no, I gotta just want to know how you've been able to, because he was an investor in Facebook and Dig and all these big things. He had like 100 plus investments. And”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was like, wait a second. And then they start talking because they've been in the 90s and they're like, oh, PayPal, I know this guy. I know that BC. And I'm doing all this crap. And I'm sitting there like this and Reid's looking over. He goes, what's wrong? Aren't you happy? You got the investment. And I was like, I don't understand how, and Aaron's like, dude, enough I don't understand. Just take the money and shut up.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had my laptop there, and I was like, I went to open. I go, but I have a deck. Aaron goes, You don't sell someone who sold exactly. I was like, I'm a young kid. I was like,”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fly out there, told my pitch, but then literally, I'm not even kidding, I give that analogy thing. And I said, it's a biography of every person on earth and reads like this. I'm in. How much? I swear to God.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I can tell you that's probably not going to happen as you probably know. He said this to me was because I created a profile for Preston Pish and I can do that because there's notable articles about you and all this stuff. So it has to be a notable person to remain there or the editors will take you down. So you just can't create profiles of people that there's no record of if it's true or not. And he's like, how are you guys going to manage the truth? I was like, yeah, we don't know about that. We never figured that part out. That's why it failed. But Raj liked it when it got blessed that it's not going to be copied. You don't have to worry about a threat of competition from Wikipedia. At least we didn't think we did. It made sense to see if we can get some money. And then build it. And then he's like, I want you to meet with Josh Koppelman, the founder of Half.com. So meet with Josh. And Josh sold half.com to eBay. And I guess PayPal sold to eBay. So there's like a fraternity of these guys. So he knew Reed. And he's like, I like it. I want you to fly out to meet Reed if you don't mind. Go to the LinkedIn office. And if he invests, then I'm in. Convince him, you got me. Okay.”
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“Why is it that my mother, there's no record of her, and in 25 or 35 years or 50 years, her descendants, great-grandkids and stuff, they'll never even know what she did or who she was other than oral history. I think that's crazy. Like we live in a world where they have Wikipedia. So Raj says to me, he's like, I like it. I want you to go meet with a guy who might know a thing or two about this. And I'm like, all right. He goes, let me set it up. So we fly back out to San Francisco and we meet with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia and Gil Panchina, who was the CEO. And the real thing was, number one, will you invest? And Jimmy's like, no, I can't. I was like, okay, are you guys going to do this if we do it? Because I mean, they had the scale, right? It was just, there's no point in trying if these guys are just going to copy it. And I was like, and he goes, we don't control Wikipedia. It's like Bitcoin. It's decentralized, right? He's like, so at this point, it's open source. Like everybody else is controlling it. So the community may do that.”
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“Should invest in people, not ideas, right? And so So we were great entrepreneurs at scaled businesses. We demonstrated that we had the ability to do that. He wasn't execution wise. He wasn't worried about our ability to execute. There's a little bit of light in a bottle with every idea you have. Not everything works. But anyway, I tell me the idea I said, this is my pitch. If MySpace is your autobiography, then WikiU is your unauthorized biography. And he was like, wow, I really like that. And then I explained how this would work. We will get into the details. When you're raising money, by the way, I think everybody needs that. They call that a high concept pitch. You need a 10 words or less, like an analogy of some sort that clicks. And they're like, I get it. And you want them to put the pieces together because they feel smart, right? Like, oh, I got that. And if I got it, then everybody else would get it. And it has to be digestible and easily be repeatable to their other partners. So it was easy. We said WikiU is the biography of every person on the internet. Everybody creates everybody else's biography. And in a world in which everything is digital and we can keep a record of everything.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was 26 years old. I knew Aaron Carrick Aaron's been running bolts since 1996, right? And this is like 2006. So 10 years he put into his life into this thing, right? I said, Who's going to be the boss? And Greg's like, he looks over at John. Aaron looks at me. And I'm just like, what are they all going to say? And I just knew that Aaron would never not be the boss because he is like a great CEO. He was that kind of guy. And they were like, I go, this isn't going to work, is it? And he's like, everybody at the same time, like, probably not. We wasted our time flying up. So we come back to New York. Raj comes back the next week for another meeting and he's like, do you mind if I stop by? I want to talk about the meeting. He already heard from Greg. He's like, I heard it's not going to work out. I was like, no, I don't think it's going to work out. I was like, we flew out to give it a shot, you know, the good old, you know, how it's dry. I go, but I don't think that was going to work out. Egos and stuff, you know? And he's like, but you got nothing. I was like, Aaron's like, Jay, tell him your idea. I was like, what? The wiki thing. And I was like, oh, why would I tell him that? And he was like, well, tell him the idea. I like you guys. Maybe I can invest in the next idea. I was like, really? Like he was new into venture capital. And so he was trying to make investments, I think. And you really.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was my idea. I had this idea. I always talked about it. And when I was a bolt. And then Raj Kapoor knocks on the door, calls Sub says, yeah, I'm going to be in a city. You mind if I come by the office? Comes by the office. He says, I'm an investor in a social network called TAG, T-A-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-E-D. And I think it's called Niwei now or something like that. But anyway, so he comes in. He's like, I'd like to merge you guys. So he was seeing an opportunity of distressed company merge these guys in, bring the founders in, merge the assets in, bankrupt the liabilities kind of thing, you know, is a common thing that you see when a company has problems. We weren't open to that. I happily flew out to San Francisco, met with Greg and John, his co-founder, and we sat down at a coffee shop. They were real great guys and really smart guys, I think went to Harvard. And I was like, you know, I got one question for you guys. When we merge in, if this happens, who's the boss?”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT