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 then I said, I got an idea. And I had this idea for a while, which was, and this is really interesting too, because there was a notebook found from Mark Zuckerberg. And one of the, I forget what he called it, but one of the ideas he had was basically WikiU. It was one of these things like we might do this. And the idea was he wanted to get more adoption for the social network. In the early days, it was hard to get people to join these things. They didn't join like they do today because there was a stigma about it. It sounds like dating. This is like early 2000s. The idea was if you don't want to be on there, Preston, I'll just create your profile. And then you'll claim it. It's like a Wikipedia page, right? Yeah.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. Which came through Raj. And this is what I found. So the first time around, I have traction and I shun all the VCs and I go down with these entrepreneurs and do I go down and it didn't work out.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was like again, YouTube sold for $1.5 billion. We did the back of the napkin, Preston. We're like, well, if we have this much traffic and they have that much divided, oh my God, we're worth a few hundred million dollars and then worth nothing, right? But in between those two companies was a company called WikiU. So on the heels of this, this was going to be shut down, a guy named Raj Kapoor, who was just a guest on my show recently, the founder of Snapfish. At that time, he was at Mayfield Fun. So he had one of his investors was Mayfield for Snapfish. He sold Snapfish for...”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was actually happy to see that. I was like, we would have never been able to do that. We would try to go the distance eventually. It's inevitable.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we did that because we're like, if you're not going to work with us, we're not going to give you the right to just use this lawsuit and a verdict as a precedent for everybody else. So we took one for the team being the whole internet. And what ended up happening was Viacom sued Google. It's like war stories. Viacom sued Google for YouTube. And Google ended up beating them. And I remember it was like maybe a couple years after we were done and I was moved on to the next thing. And I remember reaching back after like Instant Messenger back then for like Aaron or Lou. And I was like, look at this. It was like a 10K filing. They ended up spending a hundred million dollars defending it at Google.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was insane that they wanted to shut it down. I was like, why don't you just bring it in? And then we can make this. In a whole different direction They had no interest in even giving an offer. I will say this though when you, yeah, no, not even an offer. It was just like, no, they wanted precedent, going back to my pre-law degree. They wanted that precedent. And we didn't want to give it to them. We ended up shutting the company down through an ABC, an assignment for the benefit of creditors. We didn't actually file bankruptcy. We liquidated and whatever was left, everybody got whatever they got.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did try to do that. So, what they ended up doing, you might remember, and I can't remember the website. Let me just look real fast, Justin. So what they ended up doing was building vivo.com. So it was a consortium of all the labels. And just like you saw Hulu, right? They all got together and they did Hulu. I think they did Vivo, if I'm not mistaken. So they were like, we don't need you, right? Yeah. And that's they thought we own, we own the content. We don't need these guys. We have the content. I'm like, but we have the scale, dude. Well, you're not going to just get 40 million people like that.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's unfortunate, or like, well, yeah, but like, can't we just work something out? He goes, Well, unfortunately, we're not dropping a lawsuit. You might be a casualty at war here. I'm sorry. I didn't really mean to do that to a private company. He's like, apologetic about it. He's like, but, you know, unfortunately, we're not dropping the lawsuit over this. He hit mute whenever he heard his voice over again.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they were running out of money after the dot-com crash in 2000, about 2002 or 3 or 4. I forget exactly when. They recapped the company. It was about to go bankrupt. They ran out of money and everything was dying in the internet back in the early 2000s. But Lew and Aaron said, we'll buy it back. And the VC said, sure, if you want to buy it back. So I think they bought it back for like a half a million dollars after they've raised 60 million. Totally recapped the company. The investors are not involved anymore. So when Universal sued us, they were like, oh, and they did the research lawyers. They were like, and they said it on a call with us. They're like, didn't you? It was like we were going back and forth negotiating. We'll try to find a buyer and this. And Doug comes off a mute once. He's like, this is Doug. Don't you guys have like $60 million raised? Can't we just do a settle? What the hell's going on here? He's in Highland. You're a VCs. We're like, no, we recapped the company. You can hear pin drop. We're like, hello. 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
“May have. They thought Universal Doug Moore, CEO of Universal, he said to us on a conference call with the lawyers once, if you Googled Bolt back then, I don't know if you can find it now. They had previously raised $60 million for venture capitalists. I think Highland Capital was the main VC. But they recapped the company before they bought me like a year or two before.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he basically came back and he's like, It's 75%. And it's almost like he said it was a blank check. He's like, whatever it takes, I'm obviously going to put the money in. And then if it keeps growing, then we'll raise money from VC and stuff. And I was like, I went back to Lou and Aaron. I couldn't sell it. They were like 75%. This is 25% between the three of us. And they were like, no, we'll take our chances. And it was a bad decision in the end.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he sold for $5 billion, and YouTube was like, you know, this didn't sell yet when he was talking on his blog all the time. And he's like, there's no model here. And he just didn't like what they were doing. He thought that they were building the business on the backs of, I think, copyrighted content. He was a copyright owner because he owned the HD, I think HDNet was the name of it. Remember he had the TV thing and the movie business. He had the movie business with Wagner. Anyway, I think he was a little, frankly, I think it was a little salty in hindsight. I didn't think that at the time. But thank God at the time because he was like, but I can help you guys. I know Doug Morris from Universal. I was like, really? And he's like, I could get rid of this, right? And then his offer to me was, he goes, but I need to, I got to invest. I got to do this for free. And I was like, sure. And he's like, but I got to invest. I want 75%. I'm like, how much are you investing? This is what I want. And it was almost like a blank check the way he was going back and forth and email. We never spoke to him on the phone. This is like weeks and weeks with Mark on emails, like every five minutes. It was like crazy.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mark Cuban, I reached out to Mark on his blog Maverick website. He has like his email. Anybody could email him. He'll probably write you back 10 minutes. He's pretty cool like that. But I went back and forth and he was writing a lot about YouTube, which I think he was a little salty, to be honest, because he did broadcast.com. Yeah.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They filed a lawsuit like a year or so later. And then we fought it for a while, and we were just draining and draining. It was taking all the profitability out of the business. Then we raised a little bit of money from some angel investors.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Said, guys, you can't just not write the check. Like, what are we doing? Because weighing it down maybe, but like, you can't just cold turkey. And within like a year, they filed a lawsuit against us. My space, really Fox, because they bought MySpace. So they sued us, Fox, and Sony, their competitor. Sony owned what is now Crackle. Then it was called Grouper, Group with an Arm. So they sued us, the three of them might have a fourth one in there, but they sued the three of us for sure. I mean, if you just Google like Bolt.com, Universal Lawsuit, there's all kinds of articles in the Times and Financial Times, New York Times. It was everywhere. Wall Street Journal. It was a big deal. If I'm not mistaken, I want to say it was $150,000 fine per occurrence based on their way they would have done it with the lawsuit. And that's, I think it was like a billion dollar plus if we had to pay the fines at the end. It was nothing possible to pay.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I got you. They were happy to get their $20,000 a month or whatever these numbers were, right? So they were like, whoa, this is crazy, right? So they were getting that from any video company, right? For video, music videos. So when I sold it to Bolt, I told Lou and Aaron, I had this licensing agreement. It's in place, we got to keep this. They threw it away. They sunset my website. They merged the traffic into bolt.com. In the two month period, I was the one that ran the product for them because I was the product developer guy, kind of, you know, my role in the beginning of the company, I think, was like VP product when I first came in. Eventually, I became the president of the company. But I came in and I basically reshaped the entire social network into a video sharing site.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But nowhere else They said, we'll deal with that later. We'll make them pay for the licensing when your video gets embedded. They're going to have to contact all these buses. I go, Oh, that's fine. So I'm thinking it's way bigger off my site than on my site, right? I was paying them thousands. I don't know, $10,000, $20,000 a month at some point. It was crazy just from the licensing on our website. Not virally.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're saying for the I knew exactly what we had, but I was like, I don't really know that. But I know it's on my website because I could track it with a pixel on the page. But if the video gets taken somewhere else, and they were like, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So we signed a contract. I had an agreement with them that I only pay for the licensing on a CPM basis on the website, on my website, right?”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I didn't even think it was necessarily legal because I couldn't find anywhere that there's licensing. There's no one. But at some point before I even sold the company, Universal reached out to me. We don't have a licensing agreement for this, but we need to put one that we need to put one in place with you because the scale of it, right? And I was like, that doesn't make sense. If you don't have it, and they were like, yeah, well, we need to define something. So they gave me a license agreement. I said, well, how am I going to pay licensing fees for all the stuff that's on other websites? The stuff that's on my website I can track, but I don't kind of lied. I was like, I don't really know how many views those are.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yay, can't find music video licensing agreements anywhere. They didn't exist in 2004 and 2005. So I thought, is it promotional value? Because they do call them promotional videos. And the interesting part was you have labels that are major labels. You have the universals and the Sony's and the EMIs and the largest, the big four. And they have smaller labels underneath each of those. And those smaller labels found out who we were too. And they would send, it was so funny. There's like old school stuff. They would send you CDs of their new artists. And they would give you on the CDs their music videos. Please put this on your website. Meanwhile, a few years later, their parent label suing me. They're giving me the stuff and saying, please put it on the website. So they're not even communicating left hand, right? Wow.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So two things. Number one, I actually wasn't so sure that I was breaking any copyright laws because I looked into this, and we'll fast forward from what I'm saying. About two years later, I sat down with Wendy McGrath, the CEO of MTV Networks. And so what I suspected was actually true because I Googled and did all these searches and I talked to lawyers and I couldn't find a license agreement for video music videos. I could find it for audio music, but I couldn't find it for music, right?”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were getting like five to ten thousand uploads of videos a day in 2005. It was crazy. And I think at some point it peaked at like maybe 50,000 plus there, son. And the number of people viewing the videos throughout the web, like virally, right? was 40 million a day.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I pissed them off the other day. I was like, you always ask so many questions. And I was like, isn't that why we're here? I'm not here to listen to you do a dietrap and then not question what you're saying. He was saying something and I was like, explain why. And he's like, well, it's because of this. I go, but you didn't really explain it. Can you go in a little deeper? And then he tried to say something very high level. And then I go, no, no, no. Because I'm not like everybody else that just listens to him. I'm like. I'm really just trying to understand what you're saying. In Twitter, he would tweet it, and you can ask him, and he could just ignore it. But on Clubhouse, you're pressed. I want to ask you, and you got it. And so that's why I love the audio. Because we'd have a conversation, you could really learn from people.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100%, which is why, to your question, what's next is why I really love the audio because it's more context. It's not a tweet and a meme. You could send it out. And then if you say something like Bitcoin Tina, right? Let's talk about Tina, right? So Tina comes on Clubhouse and he says these inflammatory crazy things and he does the same thing on Twitter. He acts the same way on Clubhouse, but nobody actually does the follow-up question with him. They love how he acts, right? Because he's like a character.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then I was like, ah, I get it. This is a broadcasting platform for famous people. This is not a communication tool for the average person. Although most, we're on here and you see all like the Bitcoin plebs and stuff and they have like 50 followers and they're adding you and you hit them back. But like it can't be as enjoyable for you who has like 250,000 followers. You put out, you get great feedback right away.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was just telling me, yes, I didn't use the problem. And literally, if you look at my account, I think I joined a few months after he, I didn't even join that day, right? So if you look at my account, I think it was like March of 07 or something like that. I met him in December of 2006 So early, early days, I was like, oh, really interesting. But I stopped you. I wasn't even using it that much. But then, you know what I thought Twitter was like, what it is today when I saw Ashton Kutcher join.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which I did with online video desktop, right, when I was doing the video sharing site. Everybody was like, oh, most people don't have broadband. I'm like, but the penetration growth numbers are going up when you look at Forrester and stuff.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had to leave, right? I walk over to Read. I think I was reading Josh Compliment. I walk over and they're like, what did you think? I think you should just take your money back. Worst advice ever. Things like a 15, 20 billion dollar company, right? But how could you know without this is the difference between great entrepreneurs as obviously great entrepreneur and I'm a good entrepreneur, right? But he's unbelievable. And they can see that vision in the future. And I could see it. I've been good at that several times. We can go through a couple of those, like social network, online video sharing, video ad networks, things like that. But he's been hitting it every time and every one of these companies are like billion dollar companies. So he was able to envision that it's probably going to envision it's going to go to mobile in the future. And I couldn't understand that, you know. I mean, he was talking about mobile, but he's talking about it from a text message perspective. And I think in his mind, it's like we think about Bitcoin. It's only going to get better. This isn't the end of the road. He's envisioning like the growth story in the future.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, isn't this like? I said this to my go, isn't this kind of like almost like a group test message? And he goes, yeah, I guess it is like group texting. I was like, okay, so why do I need to use Twitter? I was so confused, right? And he's like, well, maybe you don't. I was like, okay, you're giving all the money back for rodeo to your investors because one of the investors told me. I think he came out of pocket to make them whole on what he spent, if I'm not mistaken. You're giving all the money back and then you're saying if you want to invest in this other thing, you obviously see something here. What are you seeing that I'm not hearing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's like, he goes, I don't know. Maybe we're just drinking the Kool-Aid or something like that. And I was like, so that's when you want to ask you.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Describe this to me, and this is 06, pre iPhone. Imagine understanding that Twitter's going to scale before an app. It's like a web-based product, right? And his description of it was really interesting. And he was kind of, you know, like a typical programmery tech guy. He was a little awkward, you know? And he's like, well, you go to Twitter, you sign up, create an account. It's like, okay. He goes, and then, you know, you go on your phone and you go on your contacts and you add a shortcode. I was like, what's a shortcode? He's like, it's like this, I forget how many digits, but five or six digits, like 404040. I was like, okay. He goes, name it, Twitter. I'm like, whoa, there's a lot of friction here. Like, who's doing all this? But I'd say that to him. I'm like, okay. And then when you do that, every time somebody that you follow on, once you go back to the website, you start following your friends or people you like and they follow you and you just when you send something out to that short code they'll receive the text message and i'm like”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I met you on Clubhouse. And I think audio, I don't know if it's going to be Clubhouse, but I think drop in audio, whether it's going to be on Twitter for spaces or something, I think that's the next movement. It's surprising in many ways. I had the opportunity to meet Ev Williams, the founder of Blogger.com, Medium, and Twitter, co-founder Twitter, back in 2006, December of 2006, introduced at a party. And somebody said, go ask him about this Twitter thing. He was running a podcasting platform called Odio. He started Blogger, sold it to Google, pre-IPO. I think he sold it to them. pre-IPO Google, obviously. He starts Odio next. And then he goes with his investors and says, I'm going to return the capital because it's not working out. And I don't think the world's quite ready for audio. But I actually think we have something else we built, which they used internally to communicate, which I guess was Jack Dorsey. I think we created it for him because he was working for audio. I remember the story correctly. So he creates this and they were communicating internally using it, I guess. And they were like, we like this. So I talked to Ev at this party and I said, well.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not like you had that one thing, and then it was like there's a lot oversimplifying things. It took months and months for us to get to a product market fit before I even know what product market fit was, you know, and Eric Rise and his book and, you know, lean startup, none of that even existed back then. You kind of just figured, I was in his generation. This is all of us figuring this out on the fly. So for those listening to try to figure it out, you got to be able to see what's happening in the market, see what's happening in your life, understand the way people work from a psychological perspective when you're doing social, because it is all about the mind. And then you have to be able to build a product around that.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say that some of its luck. I would say to people, I think success is a function of, in my opinion, having opportunities available. A lot of people don't have opportunities. Like if I was born in Kenya, I wouldn't have been able to do any of this, right? So opportunities are important, right? And even if you're in the US, there's different opportunities in different parts of the country, different socioeconomic backgrounds, all this kind of stuff. So opportunities are available to a lot of people that I had, very similar opportunities that I've had to probably millions of people, right? So it wasn't very unique in that sense. It was like I was born with a silver spoon. But then you got to make the right choices, Preston. And that's a function of having pattern recognition, in my opinion, and good instincts and intuition, which is based through your experiences growing up. And so for me, I think there was just, and I call that a little bit of luck. You sprinkle a lot right there. You got opportunities making the choices. And then you need a little bit of luck. I think the lightning in the bottle is a good way to describe music video codes. But then from there, you have to then be able to have that pattern recognition to know the adapt and evolve and the iteration of building a product to scale.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I built a network through these guys too. I didn't think that at the time I'd build a network, but I built a network very quickly, credibility, authority, network. That's what I did. And so I sold to them. We kept scaling. YouTube eventually surpassed us. They beat us, right? They came out of nowhere and they kind of beat us. That's a whole different story. And then we got sued by Universal Music. And because of the earlier days of music video codes, right? It came back to haunt us and it killed the company.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, my dad, who's a carpenter, my stepdad, he said at the time, he's like, what are you crazy? There's a guy offering you $2 million in cash. Take the cash. And I'm going with Lou and Aaron. I'm like, I'm not taking the cash. I'm going with these guys. He's like, you're crazy. Like, you know, my dad's not rich. And he's like, take the money. And I'm like, if I take that $2 million, I'm going to pay taxes. I'm left with a million dollars. I could buy a house. I got to go find a job? No, I don't think so. I'd rather go to, I'd rather go to school. And for me, I wanted to go become a student of Aaron and Lou. And I did. And I built. Yeah.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, everybody contacted me. And I just didn't understand venture capital from a very young kid, like didn't, I didn't go to school for economics or finance. I was like, it sounded like they wanted something out of me and I was going to get the run to that deal because I didn't have a negotiator. But when the guys came in with offers to buy it, that was a different story, right? It was like, okay, sense of ownership, control. These guys were talking about board seats, two to one. And it was crazy. And like preferred dividends. And there was all kinds of terms I didn't understand. And again, like I said earlier. The Navs of the world didn't exist on these blogs like Venture Hacks to teach anybody this stuff.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I didn't know, I know now, but they were using ComScore Nielsen. And so I was showing up number one for music and number one for entertainment and video and stuff. I was like, number one in ComScore. Who is this site? We never heard of these guys. So everybody wants to invest in this thing that comes out of nowhere and it's really fast.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't realize, but like, and I was a young kid in my mid early to mid 20s, everybody started calling me like benchmark capital Sequoia, like all these venture capitalists. I didn't even know venture capital was. So I'm like, who are these? They're analysts that work there, you know? And they're all like, we'd love to get a meeting with you. I'm like, how do they even know who we are? Where are they finding me? Like, are they on these websites? And they found my website and they. But we don't have a phone number. How do they even get my phone number? It was really weird, right? But they know what they're doing. So I was really afraid. And then companies started to call. We'd like to buy you.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I just took the bet and it scaled really fast. And then I ended up selling that company to a company in New York City because once I hit scale, this is Bolt that bought it. Once I hit scale like tens of millions of people.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And my thing was this at the beginning, I was very nervous, and I thought to myself before I pulled the trigger, I said, What's the worst that could happen? The worst that could happen is these server bills go crazy, which is not a bad thing. Means you have scale and you have traction. People care, right? The worst thing is that the advertising networks don't pay me and I go bankrupt. But then I thought about it and I was like, but I am bankrupt. When you really think about it, everybody listening to this. You're already bankrupt for the most part, right? Unless you're already rich, right? But most people, they just don't know they are. You have a job, right? You have income and you have expenses like a mortgage and a car payment. But like you're effectively, you owe everything to the bank. They own everything. You don't own anything, right? So take a risk. Worst can happen is you wipe it out seven years from now you start over, right? And I got over that really quick. I was like, if it doesn't work out, I'm so young. I was like early 20s. What's the worst that could happen before me even 30? I'll be back to fine, you know?”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For the first like month or two, because you're waiting on checks from ad networks and stuff, I was really worried. I maxed out credit cards. I started getting credit cards and like applying for 2000 here, 5,000. And I was just like paying for all the servers and stuff at SoftLayer and the planet. And I was racking up. I had like $65,000, $75,000 in debt before any checks came in.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so Reed told me that those guys squatted in the offices of LinkedIn because they used to work for him when he worked at PayPal. They were junior guys, right? They were like graphic designers and programmers. And so they came over and they were like, can we use some space? And they had like a dating thing first. Sounds familiar, right? Dating thing for YouTube. And then it kind of converted over and became a video. They had the technology, but they converted over to video sharing. And in the very early days, I was the only one to allow you to upload the video, give you a code, and then take that code and embed it on a third party site. It was the first one to do that. It wasn't very long after that that people started to say, well, if he can do it, it must not be not profitable. So there's got to be a way to monetize this. How is he able to do that? So that's what we were doing. So we kind of like showed everybody. And I got to tell you, I sat down with a spreadsheet, dude, and I modeled this out for like days and days and days. And I was like, I was worried that like this would scale. And then I would just like rack up server bills and be out of business real quick, right? Like I'm not going to be able to pay this stuff. And it was a little worse.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is before YouTube existed, right? And the story goes, and I'll tell you the inside story, and I'd love to hear Chat or Steve tell me something different. Copy me. Because I was out first and I know it's true because one of my investors, another company I have was Reed Hoffman, the founder.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what ended up happening is we started to bring people in, and using video codes just took off, and nobody ever clicked the other link to go to social training. It just was going, like within a couple days, it was thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and then millions. We ended up getting over 40 million views a day in 2005.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So I gave everybody every music video that's ever been created. We created a directory. Everything's there. And I thought, well, this will help SocialTree become really popular. We'll have the two sister sites and you speed people in and we'll get them coming from my space. But then we're like cross promote my social net. That was my master plan was to be like what Facebook is today. I was like, oh, you know, I never thought it would be that big. But I thought it would be a big thing.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way he did it, he had the that's right, and then when we first did it, by the way, that website that I'm about to tell you about that was called music video codes. This is not rocket science here at Preston, right? So I'm looking at the HTML code and I'm like, it's a music video. Let's call it music video codes And if you go to like Google They call it trends, I think, where you can see like search terms and stuff Music video codes is like flat, and then there was a moment in time like flying way up, and then it came down. It was like insanely popular in the mid-2000s. That led me to building a video sharing site because when I put all the music videos uploaded to the site and gave everybody the codes so they can embed that code.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Equals from a video file that he found somewhere else and pulled it into the video player. And I said, Wow, it's really smart. And my programmer, yeah, he embedded it in, right? And just like you could do for an image, right? And he sourced it in with the video. And I was like, that's really cool how he did it because he had like a Windows media player and he sourced in the source equals file. I was like, it's really genius. And my program was like, we should take it down because of copyright. And I was like, no, obviously this is cool. We're fascinated by it. I'm looking at his video. I thought it was kind of cool.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The early days of AOL chat rooms, I do think people want to just hang out and communicate. I think generally people are kind of bored and looking for community and connection. I saw that early on. And so I built SocialTree. We built a little audience and I was trying to compete with Friendster. Then Friendster got beat by MySpace, as we all know, because we hear it all the time in Bitcoin. Is Bitcoin the next MySpace, right? But it's not. We can get into that. But the long story short is that I saw that there was a there, there with Raider Day. I created social tree. And with SocialTree, it actually introduced me to the biggest idea I've ever had. So we were now competing with Friendster and moving towards competing with MySpace. And MySpace allowed, if you remember, you to customize the CSS, the style sheets and stuff of your page. You can change the colors and embed things. So we said, well, that's cool. We should do that too. If that's what kids want to do, we should do that. I was a kid too then. And so we did it. And a kid took a video and he embedded it into his profile and he sourced the source.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the industry. And I said, you know, that's a good idea. Let me see if I list it. And if there's, and all of a sudden, like this big company reaches out and they were like, they didn't even know about me, right? And they're like, how are these guys getting these numbers? And they verify the numbers and we negotiate and we sold it. I didn't get rich or anything off of it, but it did show me that there's a there there. Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, holy cow, I got to run with this, you know. And so then I built another social network, which was socialtree.com. People never heard of this, but socialtree.com was competing with like friends stir back in the day, right?”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“World and I'll compete and siphon off some of their customer base, right? And that's what I did. And so I got to like maybe 100,000 members and I sold it to MatchNet PLC, which I think is now Spark Networks. They own AmericanSingles.com, JD, and a bunch of these dating sites. So there's a guy named HUD. That's his nickname, PUD.com is his blog. Philip Kaplan. He started Adbright and he now runs the largest music distribution service on the web, which is called DistroKid. And in the early days, he created before like even Instagram was around, I think it was called Mobog. He had like this mobile before it had iPhone apps and stuff, right? Before the even iPhone, he had like a mobile app uploading site for photos, believe it or not, right? Really cool. And he sold a site through eBay, which was like, I was like, oh, that's a great idea. So I listed it on eBay within days. Yeah, but I didn't sell it on eBay. I listed it. I got all this inbound. I took the listing down and then I negotiated and I sold it. So I saw what he did. This guy's a smart guy. I was always tracking some of the guys.”
2021-08-04 · We Study Billionaires · BTC037: Tech Entrepreneur To Bitcoin Investor w/ Jay Gould (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT