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

“See my mom, and then I see my dad, and I was kind of on my side, and I kind of lifted my right arm and gave him a thumbs up. So Jeezy.”
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
“Like, shook his head as it to say, like, this is over. And she said, No, please don't call it. She grabbed his arm. And they kind of turned back to the table and he said, wait a second, I think we might have a pull. And then all of a sudden, they're all just kind of looking at that machine, that flat line, just looking for it to tick up. Instead of it ticking up, all of a sudden I just pop up and I look up and there's this whole room of people looking at me with their mouth like eyes open, mouth open because the patient doesn't usually do that. And then all of a sudden I look over and I see my mom.”
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
“And she said, they look like this silent church choir just sending in this positive energy. And she was so moved by these people that were sending in love to her son that they didn't even know that it was like this spiritual experience for her. And it was kind of transformative. She just kind of like took a deep breath and she turned back and she started coaching me, almost talking shit to me. And she was like, Matthew, David Poulsen, these people are fighting to save your life, but you're not fighting hard enough. You need to show them you're a fighter. You need to fight to come back to us. You know, and they said it was surreal to watch because here's this 65 year old mom in a room. If you've watched Gray's Anatomy, there's never a mom in that room. But because she kept fighting, they kept fighting. They don't usually fight that long. They don't usually let it go for four and a half minutes, but they did because of her. But then at one point, she started to think like this has gone on too long and I'm going to lose my son. You know, if I lose my son, like my husband's going to die of a broken heart. And right as she went there, the main doctor kind of almost.”
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 was there, but my blood pressure had plummeted and the machines had not alerted the nurse. And so she came in and she'd been in the hospital to her grandmother, so she kind of knew how to read them. And she saw how low my blood pressure was. So she went and grabbed the nurse. So look, this looks really bad. And the nurse was like, this can't be right. He wouldn't be getting oxygen to his brain. So they did another test, got the same results. Finally, she's like, fuck this. Like, I need to go. Am I allowed to say that on the show? Yeah. Grab a doctor. She grabbed the doctor. The doctor came in”
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
“She's not like a Venice beach. Listen to the cosmos type person. You know, this is like very out of character to her character for her. But the voice was undeniable. So she drove back. And if she hadn't driven back, I would have probably died 45 minutes later.”
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, my stomach could always hurt, and I was a psycho worker anyway, so I'd always work through whatever ailment. So I was kind of just ignore these things. But then after like, I got to a certain point where I called my buddy. I was like, hey, it looks like I'm nine months pregnant. Like, what's going on? He's like, you should go to the hospital. Your appendix might be bursting. I was like, I'm throwing a party tonight. I can't go. He's like, you should go. So I went and they did all these tests. They couldn't figure out what was going on. And then my parents came and our COO at the time came. And they said after a while, like 10 p.m. at this point. They're like, are you guys go home? We're going to keep Matt overnight. And if he's not better in the morning, then we'll figure out some kind of surgery to do then. They start to go at home. And the CO, her name is Helen. She drives back to her house and she gets there. It's maybe almost midnight at this point. She's exhausted. She spends a hospital all day. And she's going to get out of her car and something tells her to drive back to the hospital. And Helen is British. She's a COO.”
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 did flatline for four and a half minutes and yeah, was on the other, you know, had a whole experience of being on the other side. The way it happened was when I was born, my stomach was twisted and not. I was supposed to die when I was born. They saved me about this crazy surgery then. And then all these years later, the scar tissue from that surgery kind of freely broke off and created a bowel obstruction. And I didn't know it at the time. I just saw that my stomach was getting bigger kind of each day. I went from like three months pregnant to six months pregnant to nine months pregnant.”
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 did, but the problem is we couldn't give a consistent inventory of similar things because like you can only do Star Wars so many times or Game of Thrones so many times a year. And so and we didn't build a great subscription product to make that work. So we hadn't cracked that. So we were incredible at storytelling and acquisition, but not greater retention at that point. Which part led to the business model change later. But in terms of the thing that really changed it was that I had this personal experience where I had a near-death experience. And then the result of that is what changed my perspective.”
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
“Pipe down. They're connected. So we did celebrities for a long time, and they were starting to see a little bit of limits on scale of just how many of these you can do and how many people.”
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
“Well, someone like Ronaldo has a massive, you know, at that point, I think he had the most followers on social, but they're actually not incredibly engaged. Whereas a guy named Sam Hewan, who's on a show called Outlander, which is a kind of a sci-fi romantic show set in Scotland. He's our highest-grossing talent of all time, more than George Clooney or Brad Pitt or Matt Damon, or you name it, because he has this community mostly of women who find him very attractive and have this dream of wanting to go on a date with him. And we made it available. And he's really good at storytelling and engaging his community. And so his follower base was a fraction of those others, but got the greatest outcome.”
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 thought be in Call of Duty you got to have a character in Call of Duty would raise a lot that did not. We thought Ronaldo get your haircut and play football with Ronaldo would raise a lot that did not. Realize not all followers are created equal. Some were so totally surprising.”
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
“Definitely starting to get inbound investors at that point. And then from there, it's just like years of just doing crazy celebrity stuff, riding a tank with Arnold and crush things to win a Lamborghini where Pope Francis hands you the keys. That was probably the craziest one.”
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 didn't even have subscribers back then. We didn't do subscribers till we launched houses like years later. So this was just individuals putting in 10.”
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
“Like Breaking bad, so that. Yeah, the next big thing was Star Wars, like Star Wars was about to relaunch Star Wars The Force Awakens after it had been dormant for 10 years. We did an opportunity where you got to be in Star Wars. And it was huge. We were meeting with Disney and Bob Eiger. They didn't know that we were only six people and like we didn't really even have the tech stack to support that kind of traffic, but it ended up working out. How”
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
“Then we started to take off. We did a thing like ride in a tank with Arnold Schwarzenegger and crush things. Then we got all of these.”
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
“Storytelling, content. We did a Reddit AMA with him where we seeded the opportunity in the Reddit back then, like there wasn't even paid advertising on Facebook and Twitter. We got him on Facebook. We got him on Twitter. We started pushing stuff out and it would just fly. We did a bunch of like short viral videos with him. And then with Aaron, we took it to the next level and we got AMC to be part of it and Netflix to be part of it because they realized it was starting to promote show and became this huge thing. It just spread and we would do these funny little videos with Aaron, the top 10 reasons you should enter all this little content that hadn't really been done on social in this way. And it just, it went crazy.”
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 nothing personal, guys, but these guys just seem like they're going to raise a lot more for the charity. They promised they could raise $200,000. And I said, well, we'll raise you $250,000. He said, what's the most you've ever raised? I said, $18,000. And he's like, And then he introduces us to Aaron Paul, and we did a thing around the finale of Breaking Bad, where you got to ride into Winnebago with them, you got to cook meth, you got to cook eggs in hazmat suits and watch the very last episode of Breaking Bad with those two, the rest of the cast. Warren Buffett was randomly there.”
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
“And so, this is the end of Breaking Bad when it was massive. And we think, okay, that's going to be our breakthrough. We're going to do this with him. And then we get a call from the person who runs his charity saying, I'm sorry, but Brian is going to go work with this other company. And we had found that out this other company had came along and they had done a campaign with Samuel Jackson and it erased $180,000. So 10x what we had done, which is it might as well have been a billion. Like it just seems so impossible to us. And so she tells us, okay, he's Brian's out. And we're like, no, I mean, that's literally, that's it. That's our, that's the company. And I was like, you got to get us like at a meeting with him, you know, and she's like, I'm sorry, but like tomorrow he's got a charity event and then Sunday he's going out of town for a shoot and we're like, okay, well, where's the charity event? And she was friends with us. So she told us where it is. We went to the charity event. She snuck in the charity event. We found Brian walked up to him and said, look, Brian, we're the guys from Amaz. We never met, but we were going to do this campaign together. And then you changed your mind. And he's like, look.”
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 raised a million seed round before we ever launched. We almost had a caching. We don't have a case study to show that this model works. And then what happened was we got a deal with Brian Cranston for breaking Brad. You're a Breaking Bad fan. You know the show?”
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 next year things continue to go not well, we the most we raise in any experience is eighteen thousand and we're almost out of money”
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 it was still in grad school at the time, and I basically get rid of all my classes and just focus on doing this, figuring out the legal construct, all that. And then we start trying to convince different celebrities to do this. I had been a filmmaker before Ome is like doing cause content, working on storytelling.”
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 were at an event that magic was hosting for the Boys and Girls Club where he was auctioning off the chance to play basketball with him and go to a Lakers game, but it was one of those things that was only available to the high net worth individuals sitting in the room. And me and my buddy were in the room, but not high net worth individuals. We were like the guys get invited last minute to fill the table and come for the free drinks. And so we sat there and watched as the auction went up to 15,000. We were in grad school. We couldn't afford to participate, but magic was our childhood hero. Like there's nothing to this day that I would rather do than play basketball with magic. And so we were driving home. Like, that makes no sense. Magic has fans around the world, not just in that room. And celebrities weren't really on social media yet, but we're like, they're going to be and they're going to be able to reach their fans in a whole new way. So if we make it so anybody can donate $10 for the chance to win, you could raise so much more money, so much more awareness, open up a whole new donor base.”
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
“In revenue. It is an incredible beast of a business that people don't know about and is the travesty, the story is incredible, and Matt is one of the most kind, brilliant storytellers in this business, and so doing this show and bringing the Omaz story to life was incredible.”
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
“She says, Look, I was there when he came in this world. If he's leaving this world right now, I'm going to be in that room. I did flatline for four and a half minutes. The opposite of love isn't hate, it's fear, right? But you're actually smarter when you're in that expansive place. Focus is the price of greatness. Did you ever lose focus? Yes. Where? This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, what an incredible show we have in store for you today. Matt Paulson, found and CEO at Omaze, joins us in the hot seats day. Now, Matt has the most insane story. This is a man who died for four minutes. I've never had someone die for four minutes in their founding journey on 20 BC. They then built a product that included selling experiences with Christiana, Ronaldo, the Pope and Alamborghini, Arnold Schwarzenegger and a tank before pivoting to a model giving away houses and making hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars.”
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