YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Pohlson

lines on the record: 124
first: 2025-06-06
most recent: 2025-06-06
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

“They're like, this seems made up. That's large. Yeah, we did, but 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”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. And we'll also, you know, we had enough to get through that, but each new piece of information was not going to be good. That was clear, you know. And so people were not going to get more bullish over the next couple 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.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we started making some investments in the houses. And then we were supposed to close around on March 13th, 2020, which is not a great week to close around. 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 30%. And then on the Friday, they pulled out of the round understandably like the world, it felt like the world was melting. And we were done then. That was a death knell 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 got to give us a chance to show you how we're going to make it through this. And he's like, all right, like, let's meet next week. I was like, let's meet Monday. 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 were trying to say.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not going to share with that, but I'm glad we didn't do it. But at the time, it would have been a great outcome for us. For sure. And so it spent six months just focused on that. That's all I thought about. And then it fell through on my actual birthday when I had like, 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 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 around.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The old Amaz 1.0, the celebrities were starting to plateau, and 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 like a really famous CEO with a famous company. And so then we had the choice, okay, like we really don't have the resources to do both of these well. Which one are we going to focus on? We decided to go for the offer. Spent six months on that.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay. No, I mean, it's performant. It's typically performance driven, but there's some that have different, depending on the reach, less micro influences, but some bigger influences.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 and 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.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they do. But like, you know, like clean talk, you know, there's a whole TikTok board of people who love cleaning, like that, like that community is rabid. They buy crazy amounts of products, plant talk, same thing. Like people who talk about how you optimize the plants in your house. Like there's just, you can do real business through those things.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They underestimate their power, and sometimes overestimate their power depending on where they are. I think underestimate the power of small communities and eng”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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, a guy named Harry. He's mentoring entrepreneurs and he's doing out of kind of a dilapidated kind of community center. We come up in the Ome's Dream Mobile. We say, Harry, we've heard you've done great things. We're going to help make your dream come true. We're going to use our design team to redo this for you, another show of transformation. So it's just like different stories of transformation.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not that, you know, 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.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's right up there with the top consumer subscription companies in the world. I mean, it's comparable to Netflix, Spotify.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. We're lucky in that this is a pretty broadly appealing product, you know, age-wise, household income-wise. And so we're able to find new pockets of kind of untapped audiences. But we expect, we model it to continue to go up over time.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beach house is different. Each month there's a new house. 40% of all television in the world is about 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 US is third only to ESPN and Fox News. 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. HDTV has worked in 83 countries.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, right? It's all of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's safety, it's security, its status, its relationships, its self-actualization. So when someone looks at their Insta and sees a new house that could change their life, like that is engaging. So we're working with a pretty strong story to begin with.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did the London Air Ambulance, and he's a patron of that charity. So we partnered with him to fund the London Arizona 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 they had to, 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.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We put them in categories. We have our celebrities. We've had David Beckham or Prince William or those people promote houses.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Love Island does do well. Love Island is very highly educated audience. High household income, high educated. There is. Same in the US, like the bachelor, the highest educated audience in the US is the Bachelor.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, right? A lot of people, like these algorithms are reaching efficiency frontiers. So like that's really how you differentiate”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we teach class to everybody at Amaze, no matter what your role is About storytelling. It serves every part of the business. Obviously, marketing, that's an obvious place, product is an obvious place, understanding the customer psychology, but fundraising. You know, if you think about it, like what's a valuation? A valuation is just metrics plus a 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 with it. No one knows what to do with it.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know how, and you don't, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of, but there's a ton of mini gaps along the way. A rose and jack can end up together. That was remembering.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm sure you've seen it. Same thing. 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 in an athlete, right? 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? 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 and the cooking show going to turn out okay am i going to make it to the next level of the game you know like like our whole business is a story gap like people subscribe every month waiting to see if they're going to transform their life by winning a house it's that gap keeps them entertained and they stick as a result of that”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not if you do it the right way. You can. Like, if you just show a bunch of jackass videos and, you know, it might not work. But if you speak to people in the right way, it'll work. That's why like 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 at an auto insurance company. Are you kidding? But now they all do it. All those like, at least in the US, like all the insurance companies do that.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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% Kager 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 this was like a very accessible, funny thing that made auto insurance less intimidating to people. So it was like a trusted guide that was funny.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 in raised 780. So you can survive it.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Well,”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jay-Z Spotify competitor. Yeah, exactly. So they had all the celebrities in the world, all the, you know, the top musicians, Jay-Z Beyonce, you name it, like 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 Hair overcoming the music industry. And there, this is the new thing where they're the hero that is going to conquer. Whereas like Spotify is giving you your rapt and saying, this is what you did this year, Harry. This is what you listened to. And we know this about you. That subtle difference is massive in terms of like 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.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So a lot of this is driven by this guy named Donald Miller, who wrote a book called So many brands make themselves the hero.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not that cleanly correlated. We've had some of our best houses have been 3 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 where 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, 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 way class. And so we create the houses accordingly.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, we did. Now, we made that first house go for six months. Right now we do 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 3 million pound house? Like, will that work? That was a huge decision. Both 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.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a big deal for sure. But the first house right from the beginning, you're like, oh, people are into this. And so he started.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first house was amazing. It was a million pound house in Cheshire. So now we do five million poundhouses. So it was quite, it was pretty far from what we offer now. But it was great. I mean, like”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we do houses for a subscription, it doesn't come until we get to a house a month. Because it took us a while to get that. But eventually what happens with the”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really well. I guess it's an overstatement for this podcast. For us, it was really wild. It was like a hundred million, you know, so it wasn't nothing.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that didn't come until we'd launched the houses. So, yeah, so basically we did that transition, then 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 Oaks 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.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is what we were known for. This was our magic. This is why people came and joined. We were well known brand in this space. We were featured on the tonight show on, we'd have dedicated HBO special, all this stuff. Like Omez 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 Astor 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.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd better turn out to be great because when I came back, I was sitting down with her and I'd had all this distance and all this perspective and said, by the way, whatever happened with the McLaren, did it raise the 500,000? You said it raised 1.9 million. And I was like, that changes everything. So I went to the board and the team are like, we're going all in on this. There was huge resistance.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 kind asked to Martin and you got to keep asking Martin. And it was the first time we'd offered a prize. We thought it would raise $300,000 and raise $2.1 million. And so I 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 OMAZ, no talent. Because if we could do that on our own, then 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 hospital.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man, how much time do we have? There were some big decisions I made about OMAS that I allowed others to influence 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.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Means now is I think fear is 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? Let me sound too like hippie dippy for a VC podcast, but no.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the trying to avoid some thing of happening. And if you really like 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 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 realized, oh, I'm okay. Like I can bounce back from that.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First time was when I came back, like in that room after they had done the fibrillators 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 or three days after that.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 send 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 J-Rig duct tape ambulance. They do the surgery, then hash me back, send me back to a hospital. And that's where they ended up saving me.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 to assess probability of survival. And they looked at me and it was like well below 1%. And so he turns my mom to basically say like, hey, I know this just happened, but you got to understand like this isn't pacing to end well. 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 we only have one of these things. And then we are 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.”
2025-06-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source