There's one Friday night where I'm in my bedroom just hacking away and I hear all my friends in the living room having a good time you know throwing back some beers uh and they go like I hear them go like where's where's Jacob where's Peter's like what's he up to and um another one like makes a joke like oh he's probably working on on Startup stuff um you know and like kind of like a dig Yeah kind of like a dig exactly those words just became like seared into my brain so on all the tough
nights you know on all the uh you know Sleepless like you know nights sleeping on couches like those words would just like you know bubble back up because my ego was like don't forget this don't forget that this is you know what they're gonna think of and it really drove me and I think uh you know I sort of was able to use this as like a positive healthy Force to to channel through I'm Tom Warden over the last couple years I've had the chance to sit down with some of the biggest celebrities and influencers
in the world what I've always found Most Fascinating the stories of the businesses that they've built behind the scenes on this show you'll get an inside look of what it takes to build a successful business from some of the biggest celebrities business people and up and coming entrepreneurs in the world This is the Tom Ward show welcome to the Tom Workshop where we talk to the biggest entrepreneurs in the world today we have Jacob Peters a very successful entrepreneur startup founder also Community Builder and he's been doing it really since he was a kid and
that's what I want to talk about first you've literally and we'll talk about it whether it's Legos Lego people or data scientists or whatever you were building communities and now it's a huge buzzword Every cpg brand talks about every brand really talks about building Community First you were way ahead of it do you think that's your superpower if you had one skill set like your best one do you think that's it well the uh you know the the secret to community building is you have to tap into somebody's true deep sense of identity right it's
some this phenomenon it's like very core to us being humans right uh like identity is is everything Um and for me as a kid like you know when I was uh you know 12 13 years old for me like my entire life and identity was that of a of a Lego builder so I uh I was that kid that never outgrew his childhood hobby of playing with you know the little plastic plastic bricks um so you know here I was like 11 12 years old like entering middle school now maybe High School school I can't
even remember the the dates um but I'm like you know during the day I try to be this cool kid in class in school but I go home and I just like have all these you know crazy amounts of Legos poured out over the floor um to this day like I still have two tons of Legos in my parents basement uh back home on the East Coast which is which is insane oh my God yeah yeah I don't think you realize this but when you're talking Legos this goes beyond like my nephews into Legos right
and you go in this room and he's got you know three really Pretty intricate huge Lego kits that he put together you this is a much higher level than that you used to go to garage sales every Saturday morning you get the whole family your dad's driving to buy Legos right and then what was the story you got like an organizing system and then this is your first entrepreneurial this is my first episode so I guess you could say this is my first business it was like 13 years old I had like a decent sized
Lego collection probably Like you know maybe decent's a generous word like uh you know like uh five or six times more than the average kid my brother and I we started an eBay store okay and we were like you know buying these Lego Lots from garage sales piecing out all the individual bricks rebuilding old sets and then selling it for like a massive you know return on on investment so that was basically the first um you know Inkling of a business right yeah but that the the that translated into communities so what we realized is
we started like um getting connected some people on these like really esoteric internet forums where other folks were basically orchestrating the same type I mean we're talking hardcore Lego nerds hardcore Lego reselling nerds yeah yeah we basically discovered this whole community and it wasn't even that many Folks it was like maybe 80 90 80 90 people were like wow these are like these are our people though like you know we've all figured something out like we're all Gonna Get Rich yes um so so we uh we started getting more deeply embedded in this in this
community and then we discovered there was actually like a bigger world of of computer Lego Community Builders so not only were there people reselling like we were but then there were also people Um on like the buying and building end of the Lego Community okay so people basically when we went and sell these sets online like who was buying them it wasn't other kids it was actually like a huge group of adults so come to find out like 10 of Lego sales and this is like a multi billion dollar company over like 10 of Lego
sales comes from adults and it's not adults buying Legos for like their kids yeah it's adults buying Legos for themselves so that they can build These like massive elaborate Creations okay so we uh we got really embedded into that Community as well because we're like okay wow like um and not only can like we get together with people that are you know selling Legos and making money but we can also like start learning the best I guess like best practice for how to build these massive elaborate Creations from from like hundreds of thousands of other
adults right and they call these People adult fans of of Legos so going back to this idea of community building and identity like anytime you can attach a label uh you know to uh to a community so these people call themselves a fulls adult fans of Legos nah are you serious yeah yeah okay uh it it goes really far wow so I was interested in your story too so you got the Lego thing going on right you go to school you know you want to be popular like I mean what who doesn't want to be
popular in middle School right everybody wants to okay but then there's another side of you that comes home and plays Legos for four to six hours every day yeah the cool kids aren't doing that right so did you feel I read somewhere that you almost kind of tried to reverse engineer how to be cool in middle school first is that true and second of all if so who thinks like that yeah or maybe a psychopath oh yeah but you have to be a little bit empathic to have you know like 1.8 tons Of Legos in
Mom and Dad's basement and take over their entire garage and you know recruitful neighborhood kids to come and like sort sort things for you um the crazy is one of the craziest Parts about that story was uh we we posted this ad on Craigslist me and my brother to try to like hire some local neighborhood hands uh to help us with like the Lego sorting operation because again what we do is we buy these Big Lots from garage sales and we'd have to Like sit there and painstakingly sort out all the individual bricks in order
to resell them later and that was a tough job for two people so we started recruiting all these neighborhood kids but one time we posted an ad on Craigslist and um we specifically said for whatever dumb reason we're like we want a 13 year old person so so somehow like the police like saw this and thought that we were like trying to child traffic you know Um so they set up this like Sting operation where they they sent us pictures of like some like 12 year old kid and they're like is this kid gonna be
good for your Lego operation like is he cute enough like is he cute enough like here's his name like what do you think um you know assuming that we were like some sort of you know pedophile like like crazy person when in reality we were just like two you know 13 14 year old kids like trying to trying to Get some help with our Legos so yeah oh my God that's hilarious yeah yeah to this day my brother's phone number is probably still in some FBI database somewhere so so did you find because I was
always thinking right you're you're you're living in Two Worlds basically right you've I mean you're kind of doing your thing and you know trying to probably date the popular girl and become popular yourself in middle school which we all try to do but then you've Got this other side of you that's kind of you keep quiet because who wants to advertise their you know way into Legos more than you know I am kind of a Lego nerd too did you find yourself feeling more comfortable in your own skin I think I know the answer to
this when you're hanging out with those Lego heads whether you're on the internet Forum with them or you're meeting in person or you're talking to somebody at Garage sale is wearing Legos do you feel more like yourself there and kind of like a phony version of yourself that you're putting out when you go to school in the morning 100 and anytime like you're you know that misaligned and you have like that that cognitive dissonance uh it creates like a huge amount of internal strife and stress you know whether you realize it it or not and
unfortunately like I felt like I was sort of living that dual Life for for you know probably the first three quarters of of my time on this planet you know I'm only 28 so it wasn't up until honestly 20 21 years old uh when I discovered another tribe of of people so I guess a different Community you could say um that really made me feel like I was I was getting closer to that that level of alignment and was this data scientist yes exactly so we'll take a step back real quick you go to college
you're Smart kid right you come out you get a job at JP Morgan now for you who don't know this I'm from New Jersey so I know these guys to work as an investment banker you make a load of money right and they give those jobs to Ivy League grads and very smart people get those jobs right so you're obviously a smart guy you get the job it's a clear path to wealth and you hate it is that correct yeah and basically the third day on the job Um we used Microsoft Outlook for our emailing
and it was the first off that sucks like um I used this for years yeah so that's when I realized I was like oh they don't have Gmail okay like this job's gonna suck but um you know I did learn a lot but but at the same time like probably was day three or four first week I was there I I basically took a look around I was like this is this is this is not me so I used Microsoft Outlook to send an Email to myself a year from that date and I was like
if I'm still here quit tomorrow basically or something something to that effect um because you can schedule emails that's about the only good feature of of the email product um so so that so that's what I did um and the uh the the kind of community that I started to entrench myself in actually wasn't you know the other data scientists or you know quantitative Investors and such at JP Morgan rather it was it was friends outside of work okay so I uh started getting together on Tuesday nights after work in coffee shops like we'd meet
up in a Starbucks with other people that weirdly enough I met on Craigslist so you can notice a pattern here yeah yeah uh I became very good at like you know leveraging that that platform to to meet interesting people when you place this ad the police didn't show exactly you weren't looking For a 13 year old boy exactly exactly no I was I was looking for like a nerdy counterpart that wanted to basically like read scientific white papers with me you know about neural networks um to build a community you know it only really starts
with with one or two right like you just need like a small core nucleus and from there things can things can build and that's basically exactly what happened so the first week it was just us two in a coffee shop you know in In Brooklyn at Starbucks reading white papers nerding out uh the next week like started texting some other friends he hit up a few people and it's four the week after that it's like 12. then the week after that we start a group text and then you know you could imagine how this type
of thing snowballs and we we were really entering the industry at this very interesting interesting time this was maybe 2016. okay where you know it's not like today where we have like Chat GPT which I'm sure all of us have seen right you can type in a prompt and it writes you like a whole college essay that stuff didn't didn't exist yet so the field was a little bit more more nascent but it was like just catching the beginning of a hype wave right so Harvard Business Review uh like a year before had posted this
article that went really viral that said data scientist is going to be the sexiest job of the 21st century so more and more like talent and Capital and excitement was was was you know jumping head first into this into this field and here we were like bringing together a community and a network of people that were all interested in making each other better learning about The Cutting Edge of what's Happening you know getting better at the math um and just generally connecting so we'll pause on that real quick yeah why you what do you have
that obviously You've got some kind of skill set at this whether like I said you know during the intro whether it's Legos or data scientists or whatever you've got some innate ability to connect that you know a lot of people would just stop hey I met a buddy the first week and that's that like I got my friend and we look at white papers and look at whatever kind of math you're talking about and life is good right you see a bigger picture and go well if There's two of us there probably could be more
what if we got two more do you just view the world differently how come other people struggle with community building so much whether it's brands or personal yeah for me I just get so being excited and passionate about certain things that like it's it's like it's like a cup that's overflowing 10x over and I'm like I need to get other cups to like you know I need to get other people involved to like you know Share this share this share this excitement you know with me or else like you know it'd probably kill me so
I I really think that's that's honestly the the secret is um you know again in order to build a successful Community like you have to tap into people's sense of deep passion identity uh and like you know truly what they're all about at their core as a as a human being and for me like you know originally that was Legos then it became Like you know the nerdier side of life well I guess Legos is still nerdy but if you can't you know it became data science and machine learning in this like really heavy engineering
stuff and I'm like gosh I just love this so much like I want to share it with other people and like I think other people should should love it this much and and just me sort of expressing that I think it becomes magnetic in a sense right and people are drawn to it and Then the reality is that once you get like a dozen or so folks to sort of seed a community or a movement or like all have the same idea planted in their heads um then it just becomes contagious right it's just like
coveted when you get in a room as a house party of 12 people and everyone's infected they go out into the world next you know 100 000 people are infected right it's just how these these you know the exponential math math Works Do you think that because because I'm looking at you and I go okay that's a really great skill set to have I can tell you're super passionate about this do you I'm guessing you're probably a pretty good leader or CEO or president or whatever your role is and you're probably pretty good at getting
funding too because you're so passionate and it's it's all about the transfer of excitement right that's what sales is basically right it's a transfer of Excitement from one person to the other and it sounds like you've got that down down do you think that's really helped you to attract employees or investors or just lead people or get them passionate about something or try to see your vision do you think that's key to everything you've kind of built in our building well I'm sure everyone's listening has heard the the adage that like everything in life is
is sales in a sense right like when you're making Friends with someone it's like you know you're selling your idea of friendship or a romantic partner you know you're selling your Fitness for oh you know right being a good mate to them uh you know same thing with fundraising business like all everything in life is is kind of salesy at the day but and I agree with that but I also think everything in life at the end of the day is is community right like just think about how we evolved as as a species you
Know hundreds of thousands of years ago it was just you know tribes of like you know a few dozen people or maybe a few hundred uh around the fire and we travel in these sort of nomadic groups um you know those groups turned into like little Villages and towns and eventually societies and we get industrialization um so it's it's core to us uh who we are what we're all about out and like we we evolved effectively to you know really resonate with people in our community And in our in our tribe um so Community is
is just core to our our social DNA yeah in effect um we all want to be a part of something we all want to be a part of something right so the best companies you know they're not selling products um you know they're making you feel like you're buying into a community and again adopting an identity you know Harley Davidson just pops into my head when you say that because I'm not a motorcycle Guy but when I think of Harley-Davidson I think a very specific customer I think of a very specific image and it's not
even necessarily the motorcycle it's kind of like the lifestyle you know right maybe it's leather jackets or whatever they're into exactly is that what you mean yeah it's exactly it's all it's all the things right and the best leaders um you know they're not necessarily like yes they're they're setting a Direction But the other day like they're building you know a community all right your team is is a community right your family is a community like if you want to be a great father a great mother like you were leading like a little community in
a sense you know like your friend group is a community so I I see you know to hammer everything's a nail like to me I see everything as sort of you know an opera continue to build community and deeper bonds with with people so perhaps That's been my I guess superpower as a leader in a business um you know Builder is that I I don't obviously you need to create value if you want to build something that's you know big and enduring but for me it's more like you know how do we kind of harness
the energy of these people and get them all you know thinking on on the same page and you know buying into the same identity uh and resonating with the same sort of like Community principles So what are people getting wrong people individuals and Brands what you're saying you're saying makes sense right we own a belong and if I'm a brand I want to build a community right because they're going to be diehards they're going to be my ride or die they're gonna buy whatever the rest of the sales Cycles like they're gonna be my core
people so I want a community there if I'm in the Legos I want to talk to other people about Legos like what do people And Brands getting wrong like it seems pretty obvious you know what you're laying down why isn't everyone successful at this yeah well the thing is it's it's it's tremendously difficult um you know to build a community it's easy to say you know we are a community we have a community or our Instagram following or Tick Tock follows is a community um but that isn't it's not it doesn't work like that you
know the reality is Um you know you can define a community you know not as like a one-to-many relationship like a follower um or an audience it's it's many to many connections right and it's all about the density of those connections the frequency and the quality of those those connections and interactions and like just mathematically like I think about all these things in that in that lens it's just really hard to build and really hard hard to do Um so yeah it's uh it's it's it's mathematically challenged sure in a way so so you you've
got that email to yourself at JPMorgan you I read you get five grand you want to get into startups and then you just quit your job but I want you to clear on so what's what was the plan what startup did you have one in place yeah do you have a co-founder like what was the idea so walk me through that you want to quit JP Morgan you want to get into startups yeah now What so surprised the startup was all about Community shocked yeah yeah so you know I've been building communities for sort of
a decade uh had like a really good idea of just how hard it is all the different little pain points and and challenges so I met a guy outside of work uh and he had come from the community building world as well so he used to run like one of the world's biggest Minecraft communities oh okay came from the video Game uh Community world and you know I came from like Lego Community Building world the data science world so uh we basically decided to put our heads together and we're like we want to build a
product that can help Community Builders everywhere okay that was the birth of the of the company it was going to be software product so the idea was we just wanted to make it soup the one liner was we want to just make it super easy for Community Builders to do their Jobs better exactly and I don't know if anyone listening is familiar with like Salesforce or like CRM I've been in sales yeah exactly so we basically wanted to build the sales force for communities so for Community teams at big companies we're like we want to
give you this system this database of all the member records of all the members of your community how they're interacting and engaging with you so that you can take You know the best types of actions to to reach your goals as a community Builder oh cool okay that's the idea so how did you get funding and how did you quit your job was there a long-term plan or there was there was no long-term plan and I generally quit my job way too way too early okay so we got our first like five grand customer contract
okay um and we thought wow this is great we're gonna go get the next 500 of these like yeah this is a rocket ship we're really onto Something so we quit our jobs and then within the first two weeks like the customer pulled out or something and like became a complete failure and we had no funding you know no savings no money uh I had like just given up the lease to my apartment and here I was now you know going from like you know 21 year old hot shot like you know On The Wall
Street world like taking things by storm I was like an entrepreneur at the bank like you know Really sort of making this reputation for myself um to down here with you know nothing but like an idea subscribes a paper um you know no customers uh and like no idea of what's next and no apartment so uh it was it was it was a big reality check so how do you um The self-doubt Creep in I mean how do you deal with you're sleeping on a couch now yeah at a buddy's place and I've been there
like and that's not a fun place to be and the Negative thoughts start coming the inner critic keeps you know keeps you know gets sinks its teeth into you how'd you fight that how did you like what was the next step how did you stay positive during that time so I've had two very dark periods in my life um this was the darkest period psychologically uh the second was a dark period physically which we can talk about okay um and you know I will say Going through that was probably one of the best things that
ever happened to me why because when you go through something as tough as you know putting it all out on the line you know just destroying your financial stability right destroying your mental stability and entering into a world where like you know you're the outsider everything's uncertain you have no idea what you're doing uh it it is like the Ultimate forcing function right what do you mean as in you have no choice you're in a Lifeboat in the middle of the ocean fighting for your life it's like that uh the Christopher Nolan Batman film where
you know Batman gets stuck in that cave and like you know Bane puts him there and he has to like you know find his way out to get back to Gotham to like save the world like that's basically how I felt I felt I was in that you know black hole Um you know where like no one was looking out for me and uh you just have to fight and fight and fight and try and try and try and I had never you know been through anything like that in my life so um you know
being homeless in New York starving an entrepreneur like trying to scrap together and make things work for nine months with no customers no funding uh it was it was grueling but there was light at the end of the tunnel because We ended up uh eventually during all this dark period you're still working on the dream of the startup still going you're not going I need a job at another Investment Bank and I'll figure this stuff out later you're going I'm Chasing the Dream yeah a key can't go back right burn the bridge I'm not going
backwards you can't go back wow only forward and sometimes you gotta take you know two steps back to take ten steps forward so I don't know I don't think a lot of People and I've been homeless I've lived in hotels I've slept on couches for a long period of time for other reasons right drugs and alcohol for other reasons right but a lot of people can't you know get through that I think most people in your situation would go this if I can go make a couple hundred grand over here tomorrow I'm gonna go do
that you know to start up and stuff forget it it didn't work you know I Think you don't you agree you have to be almost I interviewed somebody else that they said you almost have to be self-delusional yeah like there's no one in the right mind there's no evidence you're a math guy right there's no evidence there's no proof there's no data backing this up this thing's gonna work but you just somehow ignore every reality basically exactly and go I'm just gonna do that do you think you need to be a little nutty and have
that Mindset to be a successful entrepreneur or startup founder absolutely uh you have to be out of your mind I mean you know all the math tells you know all the math tells you to do something else um you know it and you just have to fight through so but things ended up working out you know so how'd you get out of it so we got we got our first angel investor okay um ten thousand dollars so finally we Could afford to pay ourselves uh you know a little bit um and we could stop exhausting
friends friends couches so we got the first Angel master um and we still weren't finding our footing with the software product so we decided to take a huge step back and do what we do best which is build community so okay here we were like trying to build a software product uh to sell to you know heads of community at all these big Companies like Google Amazon and such and we're like why are we trying to sell them software why don't we just sell them community so we got this idea to basically build a community
for our Target customer and our target audience it's very meta right like very meta to build a community for Community people wait so I'm confused to say I'm brand a yeah and my demo is 25 to 35 year old mostly female people right yeah so I just go to you and go build me a Community for my jeans brand isn't is that what you is that what you're talking about it's more like you know you are the head of community at that jeans brand company okay and you say like hey I want to learn from
the community Builder over at Banana Republic or I want to learn from the community builder at Google or I want to learn from the head of community at notion or all these other companies so we basically aggregated the supply of All of these heads of community these Community managers at companies and put them all in a group chat put them all on a newsletter we got them talking to one another we got them consuming best practices and content but how does that make money well that's the thing if I'm the angel Professor that's great but
when are the checks coming so this is this is the new way to build companies okay you don't build product first and try to figure out the marketing later You build community first and then the product takes care of itself say that again Community before products 100 yeah yeah exactly so that's what we did before we touched the line of code on the software product we had you know hundreds of people that could conceivably be future customers of whatever product we built all talking in this group chat all consuming content all making each other better
all buying into this idea that like they are Community Builders and all for free all for free yeah you know it's I interviewed this guy Ben Soffer he was a YouTuber he's a Instagram guys yeah um boy with no job anyway he founded this company Spritz Society it's like a you know alcohol carbonated brand I don't know can I don't know what it is but anyway he he had a big following and he said the same thing he went he's like I S I sent thousands of direct messages on Instagram to my core followers and
Ask them everything are you interested in this what flavors do you like what do you drink all that stuff he goes you know building that Community which I kind of already did but then going a step further and building a community around this product that's going to come out eventually he goes that was the key to success and you you know that's exactly what you did so it seems like that's the way to go absolutely and that's sort of the philosophy I've you Know applied to basically everything throughout my life since yeah yeah so how
did so how do you make money now so you can okay you got the guy from Google and Banana Republic talking cool yeah that's great you know made some great connections when is the money coming so because we had hundreds of these people in this group chat we were all talking on slack uh we had the one of the best Windows into their minds right so we saw the pain points that they were talking About every single day like we saw what was hard for them so became naturally then very easy for us to start
to build you know code and software that could like automate a lot of their pain points and make parts of their lives easier so that's when we started putting the puzzle pieces together and realized like okay there's uh you know a big software product that we could build here that basically solves a Universal Pain point for every single head of community at at All these companies uh and we were right so we put together like a you know a very basic version of the product started getting some user feedback on it the letters of intent
from bigger companies started rolling in you know we started signing deals investors started breathing down our next uh it all was going really well and then the pandemic hit and we were like okay like this is going to like fundamentally Upend you know the business climate it's going to be way harder to fundraise like a lot of economic uncertainty uh so we were scared but then the opposite thing happened the size of our Market actually 10 000 X virtually overnight because everyone needs Community what we realize is every company was like wow we were spending
millions of dollars on in-person marketing on like all these different types of you know effectively sales and Marketing channels that now were useless in a world where everyone's remote and stuck behind their their computer so like we need digital Community now more than ever so more and more companies started shifting their budgets towards this strategic priority and next thing we know like you know our customer base is really really exploding wow pause on that real quick so back to the sleeping on the couch days right you I think had a chip on your shoulder Because
I read that it was almost kind of a joke amongst maybe your old co-workers and maybe some friends that you know where is he tonight oh he's I don't know he's working on a startup stuff who knows you know I don't know he quit his job like I don't know he's working on this thing did that hit you hard and did you use that as a motivational tool to go you when you're on your couch you go I ain't I'm not letting them win you know I'm Not going back to Investment Banking whatever I was
doing I'm gonna show them was that kind of a driving force and motivation for you so ego's a bit of a weird word right it has a certain you know dirty connotation to it um and I've probably done you know enough coaching mentorship endured hardship psychedelics like you name it right to like to learn psychedelics um uh you know I might be microdosed right now You know to get get an understanding of like you know really like how how my subconscious drives me you know kind of how my my own ego works and just be
very conscious and you know able to calibrate my emotions and and such um so but at the time I'd say my ego was a bit unbridled you know unrefined uh but again it doesn't have to be a bad thing because in my case I use this as a as a positive driver so the the story that you're Referencing was gosh this is probably when I was I was 22 like you know uh just finishing up my time at JP Morgan we were working basically I was working you know 10 12 hour days at the desk
and then I'd come home and like work another four or five hours at night before you know getting very little a little sleep um and it was one Friday night where I'm in my bedroom just hacking away and I hear all my friends in the living room having a good Time you know throwing back some beers uh and they go like I hear them go like where's where's Jacob where's Peter's like what's what's he up to and um another one like makes a joke like ah he's probably working on on Startup stuff um you know
and like kind of like a dig yeah kind of like a dig exactly and then another one goes like he makes this like you know sneaky little comment he goes like what if Peter's is more successful At all of us someday like you know just and I I those words just became like seared into my brain so on all the tough nights you know on all the uh you know Sleepless like you know night sleeping on couches like those words would just like you know bubble back up because my ego was like don't forget this
don't forget that this is you know what they're gonna think of and it really drove me and I think uh you know I sort of was able to use this as like a Positive healthy Force to to channel through but the reality is I don't know how sustainable that energy source is right it can get you through like some short-term yeah hard times and it can maybe get to them it's not healthy exactly get to us to a certain level of success but like you know at a certain point you need to find a more
sustainable energy source and for me I found that um just being like able to lean into my Passions I completely agree and I had the same thing going too I had a corporate boring sales job and I started to kind of do this again totally delusional yeah no media background no journalism no nothing and I just like I can do that why couldn't I you know I just and co-workers and my boss found out about it I kept it very quiet and I found out they're all laughing behind my back and it just hit me
so hard at first it like Kind of depressed me and then I kind of was like them they don't see it I do they're wrong right and then it finally happened about two months ago I won't say his name but I saw my old boss on Instagram as trying to be like a business influencer and I started cracking up and I go see you [ __ ] I was right I was right you were laughing but you're right that can't it's if fuse it but it's almost like a fire that's burning too bright in my
Experience where you know a strong fire is good if you're really cold I can really get you warm quick but it burns out quick right it takes a lot of energy to sustain that flame and I think you're right I think kind of leaning in your passions which is almost a positive thing it is a positive thing I think whatever your passion is like I don't know what your beliefs are and stuff but there's a reason we're all here and I think it's To find your passion and whatever your superpower is and can go running
so so things that the company are really rocket shipping we end up becoming one of the fastest growing uh software products of 2020. wow and Silicon Valley yeah yeah yeah zero to half a billion in just a few years now what does that do for your pocketbook personally I'll rather confirm nor deny um well let me you're better off than you were on the couch let's say that Right yeah how good did that feel did that finally could you take a deep breath and go see it was worth it so like when it was time
to move on from the company I thought okay uh you know the big cat looks a little different and you know I'm uh I can imagine yeah I'm gonna take take a sabbatical okay right I wanted some like real deep time off uh you know how old are you at the time 25. so yeah 25 and a half so I was like all Right I'm gonna take take sabbatical um you know just reset my my life a little bit because again we talk about this idea of energy right like energy management is everything and if
like your energy source is your ego like you can burn out you can be a shooting star that you know uh so that's what I thought I wanted but on day three of my sabbatical I accidentally started a new company so I was on Twitter uh and I see this guy Tweeting that he's putting together a house in Mexico with 15 other entrepreneurs all kind of people like you know uh at my level that were doing interesting things okay let's just go live and work during the pandemic so I was like heck yeah that sounds
awesome like I've never been to Mexico like you know I want to live in a big mansion with yeah yeah with 15 other creative people like let's let's go do it um so I just like aped into this Experience basically on a complete wave was this at the time hype house and all the Tic Tac [ __ ] because I used to cover all those was this when they were all popping up and blowing up too exactly so basically the idea was like you know this this guy was putting together almost like a what you
call like a hype house with the Tekken yeah yeah so it was a it was a hype house for a nerds I've been to the hype house yeah exactly yeah yeah so it was high pass for nerds Okay here we were um you know all getting together in Mexico we put up a Twitter account we call it launch house so again as like a total meme that's funny the idea of the hype house because we're all launching Tech products yeah under under this one roof right it's it's the whole idea of the hacker house right
like the The Hacker House is like the concept is all the Silicon Valley itself yeah you know Microsoft Apple Facebook all these things were basically Like effectively incubated in garages in Palo Alto yeah you know in the 70s 80s and 90s like it's a it's a tried and true way to have to to create Magic and here we were in Mexico doing the same thing well except there was a new component which was we were going viral on social media now did you could you imagine that it's almost like you're the opposite of a Bryce
hall right you know you know you don't have great apps you know what I mean the hot girls are Coming over every day right you know so did you ever expect it was almost kind of like a spoof like a joke like totally No One's Gonna follow us why would anyone follow us exactly No One's Gonna follow us but things went viral really fast that's awesome TV producers started reaching out so we ended up going through like all the dialogues with Netflix we flew a camera crew like just like what's recording this podcast yeah down
in Mexico uh we recorded a whole Sizzle reel you know we thought now your content created exactly I thought okay damn like I'm gonna go from like you know Tech bro to TV show producer yeah yeah you know Silicon Valley Wall Street to Silicon Valley to Hollywood yeah let's go you know uh so um we tried that out um we had a lot of fun doing it but the ultimate realization was that you know the kind of feedback we started getting from the studios once we pitched the Sizzle around was that this is really cool
but you know we don't want to film a show where like people are on the computers 90 of the time I know yeah they wanted us to like storyline they want us to incite all this like artificial drama yeah that's what people exactly that's what the people want but like the reality is how can you build a company right if like things are just artificially dramatic every day and we realized the people that were best like Made for TV were not necessarily overlapping with like the best hackers in startups or people you watch the reality
shows we watch I've got a wife we watch all these they're terrible people the ones we love to watch they've got the most awful people you could imagine on it and yet we're there every week the worst thing to watch is you know when a character comes on and they're like well adjusted and happy and good people and in a good relationship And have great kids like get her off the show immediately right exactly she's really she's boring it doesn't it doesn't resonate um so so that was that was the learning um so we nixed
the reality show concept but we still decided to follow our Hollywood Ambitions so we got the idea to rent Paris Hilton's old mansion in Beverly Hills California moved the operation from Mexico back to the same crew half and half so same crew half the new crew We recruited on Twitter and got like 20 of the smartest people you know in the industry like all like you know mid-20s to come in fly to LA live in this like massive 15 000 square foot mansion that Paris Hilton had just given up the lease on uh you know
in January of 2021 so again like height of the pandemic okay yeah and so what was the plan uh the plan was to make launch house one of the biggest brand names in the tech industry Okay Now what's the business because I wasn't sure I'm like okay that's cool and all but like how do you make money like are you the funder and oh you own a little piece of these or like how does it all work yeah so we basically got the idea to match up uh something like a startup incubator like y combinator
because like the top startup accelerator for early stage companies with something like a Stanford dorm room right where people are living and working like there's a Reason why so many great companies you know come out of places like Stanford dorms you know it's because like you have this like high density of really smart people living together right so living is sort of like this ultimate form of community right think about it like you know you you see these folks every day like you're eating sleeping breathing with them like it's it's uh just again it all
comes back to the math you mathematically have like 10x more Interactions with them and they're much deeper right because you see them at all hours of the day it's not just you know you're clocking in for work from nine to five it's like no I'm seeing this person from the second I'm brushing my teeth to like the second I'm like you know going to bed at 1am so um we basically built this like really tight-knit community of people and we combined it with you know some of the the learnings from startup accelerators so we were
effectively like Helping these companies get off the ground incubating them uh and then ultimately like investing in kind of like the top few that would come through come through the program so the people you brought to the house had companies you thought could go somewhere exactly that you were interested we had a big vetting process um we had lots of cool companies come through the first few months one of the the early wins was this company called Wombo okay which uh was building like a an AI Optics of two apps both hit number one in
the App Store you can like take a picture of your face and it turns into the singing video they had another one called dream where like you could type in some words and it would AI generate some artwork uh hundreds of millions of downloads I mean you know they were printing cash every single day like uh you know so definitely like uh it was really exciting to see some like early Wins come out of the house so is this still going on um yeah so launch house is still going yeah it's still in the same
house in Paris we moved houses now we have expanded to New York like okay looking to expand at San Francisco um so yeah companies companies moving along we've helped get like 700 companies off the ground wow in the past two years seven 700. what's the average investment I mean what's the cost to get You know an app company off the ground or you know yeah what does it cost it takes a few hundred it takes a few hundred grand for each one yeah yeah so this is a significant investment in all these yeah yeah we
were investing in all of them some of them came in with existing investors but again we were kind of helping nurture these these startups um so across you know these six seven hundred like probably 1.5 to 2 billion dollars of total private market Cap was created so yeah Lord so is that what your focus is now is that so it um you know I thought I was going to be involved in launch house for the rest of my life um you know here I was like this teenager that was building communities learning about Community then
starting software products to help enable other community managers now I'm like okay I get to jump back into the community Building world and like build for like this Persona of people that I really resonate with other entrepreneurs right like I was basically building the community that I'd always wished I had to support me when I was building the first company how cool is that it's so cool uh but disaster struck what do you mean March 2021 were maybe four months into the launch House business and I get the code vaccine Okay next thing I know
I'm in a hospital bed being told sir you're 26 years old and having a heart attack from the vaccine well here's the thing you know it's it's a heart attack at 26 if you're not doing cocaine yeah exactly and you know I don't think okay so yeah I barely drink I'm a pretty sober guy so yeah so how do you have a heart attack math doesn't add up um and look uh you know it It's impossible to know the 100 causation but you know just putting two and two together sure something funky happened with you
know the spike protein and the MRNA and uh it just like overloaded my my immune system so not only did I have to deal with this heart issue um I was formerly diagnosed with like myocarditis heart inflammation effectively in the hospital for three weeks so like what does that mean you Can't do intense exercise you can't drink half anything like that nothing that's going to raise your heart exactly because they like put me on all these drugs to calm down the inflammation um and then I get hit with the second blow which is I got
diagnosed with uh sudden onset Crohn's disease good Lord at 26 26 and for those who who aren't familiar Crohn's disease is basically an autoimmune disorder where like your own body attacks your organs Specifically your stomach so my immune system thought that like my stomach which is like well obviously one of our most important organs you know we eat three times a day 2500 calories like you need that um it uh it thinks it's a foreign Invader and it starts attacking it as if it's like a cancer cell whereas if it's like some sort of bacterial
infection um and that really really knocked me on my app you know it's almost like a joke From God or something it's like here you go I mean this guy's got it I'm looking at you now and you go okay he's 25 he's got you know a couple companies under his belt he's got millions of dollars right this is the dream of everyone right you're still young enough where you can really enjoy it and really ball out and have some fun and you get hit with these two things at the same time how did you
deal with like were you resentful or Angry or you know I'd be pissed off well so I alluded to this right like going through the homeless period and like scrapping to get the first company off the ground like psychologically you know probably one of the most challenging periods of My Life um this health thing was physically the most challenging and in a Twisted sort of way like you know I basically I wouldn't have looked upon it so psychologically favorably if I hadn't Gone through the other dark time right so I basically realized okay like I've
been through some like I gotta now apply the learnings and that new lens you know through which I view the world to this health scenario and just like very mature way of looking at things that I wouldn't have been you know that evolved at 25 or 26 I don't think most people would I think people would be pissed off why me why now this you know yeah and you just took a Kind of Zen approach to this whole thing for the most part um I also decided to be you know pretty open and vulnerable about
it so this is one of the first times I've maybe talked a bit more publicly about it but what I did when I was stuck in a hospital bed you know for a month straight was I posted a few tick tocks and some tweet threads that went really viral okay so like saying about what about where you're going about what I was going Through it's like five to ten million impressions across all these these different posts um you know just sharing my my journey with the vaccine and the craziest part of all of it was
uh you know this like Army of people came after me saying that like I was spreading you know vax misinformation and like you know killing grandmas and I'm like look like okay yeah okay first of all um like you know this is my real life lived Experience like you know you yeah yeah the science now is coming out you know to support that like you know maybe potentially there is a higher risk for young uh you know healthy men getting this vaccine than there is a reward because look most statistically you're not gonna die from
covid um but if you're more statistically likely to have heart issues then you know what's what's the risk calculus here right and coming from obviously Like my mathematical background it just doesn't make sense to me so anyway that sort of um you know made all my posts go really viral um and that was what was negative about it but the positive side was it also introduced a lot of inbound Serendipity because people from all corners of the planet like as far off as like South Korea and Australia were like sending me different treatments and tips
and intros to doctors and like you know I got interested connected to like the head of the department at um like the medical department at Yale and Brown University and all these crazy places Cleveland Clinic to try and help me so pause yeah so you're actually building a Crohn's disease Community effectively maybe for your hospital bed yeah I mean you can't escape yeah so yeah because I was like you know I want to like I want to cure myself and The doctors were telling me no you have to take these drugs for the rest of
your life okay we have to like you know remove like half of your intestines and all this all this crazy stuff and I was like I I reject that you know like I want to figure out a way to cure this you know as naturally as as possible um and unfortunately you know even with with all that community building and all the you know research here I was like in my household reading white papers of Like different you know science experience I wanted to run and the doctors like no we can't do that um which
is which is really unfortunate but that's a whole other story of like you know how the medical system is very risk-averse um and consensus and you know even if the literature is 10 years ahead of the current practice they're still going to go with the current practice so I ended up losing the battle but I won the war okay you lost the Battle by not being able to do those experimental test yeah so unfortunately I had to get uh three different organs removed so I have no uh lower intestine direct and it's completely removed how
does that affect your life I don't I'm not a medical guy does that affect your day-to-day life uh the biggest negative is that it's really hard to stay hydrated because your colon your large intestine actually regulates your electrolyte production oh okay yeah so I Have to just drink like top water okay a lot of electrolyte powder a lot of coconut water so you come out of that and you know how long were you in the hospital for uh at one point I was there for like 60 days straight okay but on and off probably a
third of the year so it took it took about a hundred days or so to get healthy again where you could get out of there and live like a semi-normal life yeah but the thing is Even when I got out of the hospital you still have the heart to deal with yeah when I got out of the hospital they were still like you have to take all these drugs uh you know and like I still had some blood levels that were off and they were like you just got to deal with this and I'm like
this is crazy so during what happened to work during all this now are you still you know involved in the incubator in the house and all that are you hey I can't Deal with any of that I gotta get myself right first so I'll let that I I know I can't deal with the stress yeah I've got a heart thing too yeah I can't deal with any of that right now I gotta focus on me what happened to the business so unfortunately I had to make the tough decision to take a take a big step
back and for a while you know I was doing double duty I was running all these experiments on myself you know trying to stay healthy stay low stressed while Also like you know keeping one hand in the business and it just was not was not sustainable so I'm still involved at an arm's length I'm on the board of the company okay we have a venture investment fund where we're still like investing in some of the best startups and uh you know I'm a partner in that but beyond that um you know it takes up very
little time so I've now moved on to effectively trying to combine two of my passions community and Community and health exactly exactly to push the world forward in a different way so what does that mean so I can't share too much yet because uh you know we're still in stealth but uh you know effectively the the idea is you know something I've realized that is that health is not you know just a one-off doctor's visit or it's not a one-off supplement it's it's it's actually a lifestyle right health is all it's not about one thing
or one protocol One Magic Bullet it's it's it's about all the things people don't want to hear that people don't want to hear people want the magic pill yeah it's like no you know eat this many calories a day watch your Macros you don't avoid this that it is a whole like you said lifestyle yeah and it's but the thing is how do you get people away from the magic pill to that it's really tough and I think the secret that not many companies have Figured out yet is is really leaning into this idea of
community okay so effectively what I want to do you know for my next venture and for the rest of my life is is building um you know a community and making care about your health cool isn't it cool I think it's cool but I'm old and what do I know I mean I think it's cool don't most people think it's cool yeah it's it's I mean the final result's cool the final result's cool You know having it you're doing it but you know when you were getting there a month ago when you didn't have abs
and your friends are eating cheeseburgers and you're not that's not so cool yeah but so it's hard right yeah it's really hard to do all the things to stick to your habits uh and I I fundamentally believe that like one of the best ways to you know get our society and our culture to to have this like Consciousness shift and to change and to Be more Health First and think holistically is is to make Health like an identity you know again going back to the idea that like the strongest communities are ones where like you
have a strong sense of identity you know like religions as an example yeah they've been around for thousands of years why it's because they tap into like our deepest sense of identity and who we are it's like you know it's why we're alive it's our purpose we live toward you know Try to live a good literally be part of something bigger than you exactly being part of something bigger than you um so I think health is this really interesting thing where it has potential to be this this new religion in a sense um because if
you think academically like what is one of the uh reasons why like communities persist and endure uh is it's this idea of it's this idea of like shared struggle right like there's a reason why people that go through like You know fraternities or sororities in college and these pledging processes they're like lifelong friends with their with their their their you know pledge mates or Army buddies are friends for life exactly or like the PayPal Mafia you know or startup team or something you know yeah yeah it's because you if you go through hard together with
other people it's going to form like really deep incredible bonds and like this just like You know insatiable sense of identity uh that persists for for a very long time and in health you know what bigger struggle is there than our shared battle against our own mortality so if you apply that to this idea of community it's like Health actually has kind of the perfect you know building blocks to become like one of the strongest communities you know of all time so I think like health is effectively going to be this this new Religion um
and I want to be you know helping push the world forward in a meaningful way and getting people to change the way they they think about their health wow I think that is a very Noble thing and obviously smart I just kind of what you're describing to me you know uh it just makes me think of the popular fitness influencers right that's exactly what they do yeah to have much smaller degree than what you're talking about You know the focus of whether it's on diet or exercise or a vegetarian lifestyle or whatever their Niche is
right but isn't that kind of what they do is they build a community around hey I was Richard Simmons yeah I was fat now I'm thin and yeah I'm full of energy and he's missing or something I don't know if they found him or whatever but that was his whole thing like hey I was fat two this is how I did it this is how you can too and by the way the person next To you is overweight two in the class so they're going through the same thing you are is that kind of the
whole vibe type thing the struggle you're talking about yeah I mean look like you know veganism keto like CrossFit you know these things there are they've already developed cult like oh yeah followings right around like particular particular Health niches um same with like you know different folks that champion weight loss and all that um but I think we need A new movement that you know gets people to think about their health truly holistically right like it's it's all the things you know it's from like the second you wake up you don't check your photo in
the morning you go out you get your 15 minutes of sunlight which activates your eyes I learned recently that like our eyes are actually part of our brains you know like when the fetus is developing and like the literally the the eyes come out of the brain and it's Like it's all connected um so your eyes are literally our brains you know like so like you have to basically realize your body is just like one beautiful integrated system and that every single conversation you have every single you know product in your environment or chemical you
touch or product you use like you know all that stuff is going into your body uh you know every every choice you make every ounce of food you eat like it's food is code food is Energy like we are what we eat like as soon as you start to like you know take this almost hippie-esque approach yeah you know but it's not hippy-ass kids it's science right yeah um and understand that like you know we are a product of our inputs it makes you think differently and I want to help like I go out on
street corners and I you know you just look around and you see you know people that are putting things in their body and they just don't realize how bad It is for them they have the texting neck you know they have like it's it's really quite sad that sick has become the new normal and I was unfortunately like you know a person who had to who had to deal with that and you know I'd like to blame the vaccine but a lot of it was probably stress and it you know becomes this perfect storm like
I was not taking care of myself very well you know for my first two companies or even when I was working crazy hours on On Wall Street I would say the majority of startup Founders or entrepreneurs are not taking care of themselves either yeah they're not and it's sad because this is not a priority it's not a party but the reality is like you know startup Founders are like you know some of the biggest movers and shakers in society right now and if they're not taking care of themselves like you know how are they going
to be able to build you know world changing and impactful companies right It's all it all trickles down in a sense right like if you're not fully optimized the best like most holistic um you know version of yourself like there's ways that that's going to you know translate down into your product into your your decisions and how like you know the technology You're Building or the products You're Building are going to affect you know end users end users down the line um I mean hold on real quick so it's Easy to say right and it's
easy for me to I could say this too because I work for myself now right after this interview I can go home and I do Transcendental Meditation I can go meditate for 20 minutes right but I've had corporate jobs and stuff in your you know high stress kind of jobs if I went to my boss and said hey boss I need 20 minutes I got to meditate and get get my head right they go are you [ __ ] out of your mind if we have X Y And Z to to do today worry about
that when you go home you know or even don't worry about it at all get the work done when you go home do you have any advice for the average person who has a regular job who has limited resources you know most people to be able to take care of themselves when it's almost sometimes viewed as selfish it's selfish you're being lazy by meditating in the middle of day why Johnny's working you know how do you get how do you get over That and how do you take care of yourself without looking lazy or selfish
yeah well there's there's two things one component is is you just have to have Relentless and Shameless advocacy right what do you mean you have to advocate for yourself so it's one thing if like you know you start going off and meditating you know in the conference room while Johnny's over there working you know you don't really but if you go to your boss and say hey look like I've Done the research I have the science here's the white papers here's the podcast Clips here's like the the quotes from people like way smarter than me
that and look here's how it's going to translate into like better outcome and productivity for me and um you know better Roi for the business if I can get one percent more work and efficiency done like you can take all that available information and advocate for yourself and make a make a business case Right you have to speak speak the language um you know of your bosses of the company um so that that's number one it's like you don't be afraid to do that like you might it might sound crazy and ridiculous but like I
do types I do stuff like that and it works well maybe you're a little crazy yeah maybe I'm a little crazy but you have to be uh and then the second is you know this is not Going to be solved at like a you know a micro level by one person or one interaction it's going to be solved at a macro level societally um and culturally and that's basically you know what I seek to do with with what I'm thinking about next in the health and community building building space is like can we get employers
to think differently can we get Society to wake up and and realize that um you know Health needs to come first And you know without Health like there is not going to be any business without Health Nothing Else Matters right that's true health is wealth uh if you don't have your health literally nothing else really nothing else matters like there's that great quote I think it's by Confucius that says you know a healthy man wants a thousand things and a sick man only wants one yep 100 I think that's a good note um to end
on why don't you give us give us one tip on What we can do to improve our health today what is one thing we can all do today that we're not doing some give us a small one you know we're not changing our diet you know give us I mean what's one thing we could do to improve our health uh uh honestly the the I think the biggest thing is when you get up in the morning don't check your phone first thing and go outside and get some sunlight for 15 minutes And make that daily
practice when you go outside the sun actually you know it's basically like coating your skin you know to like wake up and um it just sends all these amazing Cascades of hormones and signals and like I'm not you know deep scientist so I can't tell you that sure you know we know it's good we know it's good for you we know it's good for you and and what it does is it it it Doesn't you know when you check your phone first thing and like you stay in your dark room and like it's just you
know you just you're setting the wrong types of hormones you're sending a Cascade of like cortisol and stress and like you're you know throw your dopamine all your brain chemicals out of whack um versus if like you you wake up and you do what nature intended um and you keep yourself at ease and and calm and I think it just like sets the Tone for the entire rest of the day it's also a win you know if you can do that and stick to that routine like you're you've already won once in the day and
it's still still 7 30 in the morning like you know why not keep winning right so um for me like the morning routine is is absolutely everything and that what I just said doesn't cost any money uh it only costs you a little bit of discipline brother I appreciate it this Was a pleasure this is one of my favorite conversations I've had in a while I learned a lot hopefully you learned a little bit too if you did if you like this if you made it this far make sure you subscribe turn on notifications new
interviews every Tuesday at 10 A.M with the biggest entrepreneurs in the world and check out my website tomword.com we do two articles a week with lessons we learn from people like you so thanks for watch It guys [Music]
