2min chapter

BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English) cover image

Sean Ellis: Hacking Growth Unicorn Successes, Easy Money vs. Hard Times and Achieving & Scaling Product-Market Fit - 391

BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)

CHAPTER

Early Involvement in Transformative Technology Ventures

Exploring the speaker's journey into the technology world through an investment in an internet gaming company during the early to mid-90s, leading to their pivotal role in the company's success and reflection on the internet's transformative power.

00:00
Speaker 2
How did you first enter the world technology from your perspective? All the way back in a day. Yeah,
Speaker 1
it's kind of interesting. So I'm like not a techie. I don't get excited about technology. Right. And I think that's kind of helped me to some degree as a I can empathize with the masses out there that are looking for practical solutions. So I got into it because I moved to Eastern Europe right out of college. So this was the early to mid 90s. And I just didn't know what I was going to do. Just moved there but wanted to move to an interesting part of the world and got initially into into ad sales and for business journals. But a friend of mine was starting an internet company in in 1995. And I heard what he was doing. It sounded really interesting. It was in the gaming space. But you know 1995 no one was paying attention to the internet really. And so I I just said, yeah, I'm gonna I want to invest in these guys. I knew he was out raising money and trying to raise money. And so I got $20,000 together. That's great from the commissions I'd earned from ad sales and put it into the company. And and then ended up joining the company about six months later. But that investment ended up bringing in venture capital the next week. So even in one week, I went up 50% on my first ever investment in my life. And so that kind of got me excited about going in and actually helping to help the company be successful. And so after they get done building the games, I went to New York City to initially try to sell advertising in games. And then when I was talking to the world's biggest advertising agencies, they were telling me they had no interest in reaching 350 400 500 people. Yeah. And that's kind of the the audience that we had in the game. So I put my head together with the CEO and said, somebody's got to focus on this. I'm willing to do it and and kind of have a look back then. So basically I was responsible for growing the games and fast forward that story that we that became a top 10 website in the world in terms of total usage time. So for an ad supported property, that's a really important metric. And so yeah, that was that's how I got into tech. And it was not because I was necessarily particularly that interested in tech, but I saw the potential in what the internet could do in terms of transforming our lives and wanted to jump on board.

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