Leading With Passion—The Art and Value of Creativity

Pamela Rucker: Hello everyone and welcome to all of you joining us on site and online for TriNet PeopleForce 2022.

My entire life has been a study in purpose, passion and perseverance. And I'm so happy to be joined by a colleague today that can say the same thing from questioning his path in college to building the world's leading platform for human creativity. His story is about the value of perseverance. Please join me in welcoming to the stage CEO of VidMob, Alex Collmer.

Hey, Alex. Good to see you.

Alex Collmer: Great to see you as well, Pam.

Pamela: So when we were talking before you gave me a great story about your childhood that I'd love to start with and it is all about you and college and what happened in your second year. Can you talk to us about that?

Alex: Sure. It certainly didn't feel like a great story at the time, I'll tell you that much. But I, like probably many people in the world, was not a terribly good college student. I went to college when I was 17. I was pretty immature. I did what I guess probably a lot of young boys did. I drank beer, tried to meet girls.

Pamela: No.

Alex: Went to college and basically pursued those passions. That didn't seem to lead to success in my engineering degree and I was essentially floating by. My parents, who are both college professors, and have been literally filled with a thirst for knowledge their whole lives, were unimpressed. And so we had a conversation and they came to me and they said, “Is this the best that you could do?” And I said…

Pamela: I have to stop you right there. So wait, college parents are professors.

Alex: Yes.

Pamela: You’re partying and drinking beer.

Alex: Yes.

Pamela: They want you to fulfill a quest for knowledge and you have not. “Is this the best you can do?” What are you thinking in that moment?

Alex: Well, I thought about it and I said, “No, I could definitely do a good amount better.” And that was the wrong answer. They then said, “Well, we're not terribly wealthy people. Does it seem like a good use of our life savings to pay for you to go to college, if you're not going to take it seriously?” So that definitely framed it in a pretty different perspective and we agreed that if I didn't get a certain grade point average, that I would leave. And then, pay my way through school.

And so I committed to doing better for about 10 minutes. And then went back and sort of did the same thing and ended up having a pretty poor second semester, sophomore year. And before the university got around to kicking me out, I sort of walked up...

Pamela: You just left?

Alex: ...took a leave of absence.

Pamela: Yeah, I have to stop there and just ask the audience: How many of you could have that conversation with your child? That, “You're not doing that well with the money I've invested and sending you to college, so I think you might want to stop.” How many of you could do that? I don't know that I could. Could you?

Alex: No, I don't. I've now thought about this many times over the 30 years or so since then, and it always strikes me how kind of risky...

Pamela: Yes.

Alex: ...and sort of confident, or whatever the right words are. I don't know that I would the same faith, to get through something like that. So anyway, they took a gamble that I would be able to figure it out. And to be honest, I had no skills that were useful to the world, but I was driven. I sort of knew that I could be better than that.

And so I started working and shortly thereafter, I ended up taking over a business on campus. Ended up then running a larger business as part of that. Ran a bar and other things. And within probably six months, I had a couple of hundred people working for me on campus. And I worked literally for 365 days straight every day, every week, including Christmas, et cetera. And had no costs, so I went to the bank every week and deposited a few thousand dollars.

And I went back. And when I went back, I was writing what seemed pretty significant checks and so I went to class. And when I went to class, they taught me what was needed on the tests. And so I aced the tests and had these two very, very different college experiences.

Pamela: So let me go back for a minute, because I'm looking at the response from the audience. It looks like about 75% of them said, “Look, I could not tell my child that you need to stop.” But was there something that you think that your parents knew about you, or maybe you knew about yourself, that helped them to make that decision? Because clearly once you left, you found the drive to start companies, to become an entrepreneur. To your point, have 200 people working for you in the space of a year, basically.

Alex: I think they probably knew I was fairly stubborn.

Pamela: Now was this from history, or was this...

Alex: No. And I think some people just perform better when they're challenged. And this was definitely a sort of throwing down the gauntlet challenge, and that worked in my case. It definitely was one of the better things that ever happened to me—was not being allowed to skate through life. And then at a fairly early age, now all of a sudden I was sort of forced to take on a great deal of responsibility, many people working for me. And frankly, just grow up. And maybe more to the point of this type of conversation is that it started to teach me what it felt like to be an entrepreneur.

Pamela: And is this something that you felt from the time that you were young, this entrepreneurial capability in you? Or is it something that you discovered as a result of being forced into having to be responsible at a young age?

Alex: I think it was something that I discovered. I was pretty certain I was going to be either a professional soccer player, or the third baseman for the Yankees.

Pamela: Even in college?

Alex: Yeah, and I don't think I had the skills to do either, but hadn't learned that lesson yet either.

Pamela: And this is something that I find interesting too, because I was just talking to my niece about this recently. She said, “I have to figure out what I want to do for the rest of my life, and I'm only 19. How would I possibly know that?” And I think a lot of people probably struggle with what you struggled with, just finding that sense of direction. Maybe they don't always think that they're going to play for the Yankees, but there is this idea that, “I don't know what I need to be doing yet.” So getting this pressure put on you at this formative part of your life clearly brought out some type of entrepreneurial capability. So how do you go from being average, or low in performance in college, to getting into the intersection of technology and culture, later on? How does that happen?

Alex: Well, I think once I tasted basically the day-to-day challenge of running a business, that's a hard thing to go away from. It's almost kind of like a drug, endorphins and dopamine injections, you get from that sort of high and low. So I went and tried a, quote, unquote, “real job” right out of college. Working for a software consultancy and it just didn't stick. And so I knew pretty much immediately that I was, for better or for worse, destined to be an entrepreneur.

Pamela: And that’s an interesting distinction you draw, that there was something that gave you a high about being an entrepreneur, that just working at a desk or doing a regular job could not. What were some of those things that you saw really resonating with you?

Alex: I think ultimately, it was about being faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges. And just knowing that if you’re unwilling to take no for an answer, pretty much everything is solvable in the end. And it sort of gets to this theme of perseverance, because frankly, nothing in my life has come terribly easy. I was an entrepreneur for many years before I had any degree of any kind of success. Luckily for me, I had a very wealthy wife who is a teacher. So we were living off of a teacher's salary and that was sort of good enough. But for literally years, every single one of my friends had a more successful career than I did.

Pamela: See, I'm picking up on some themes here, though. One of them is this idea of passion. There's something that you loved about the challenge. A lot of people run away from challenges. They run away from problems, but you were running toward them and trying to figure out how to solve them. And there is no way you could not have passion and perseverance, if you are trying to run your company off of a teacher's salary with two people. You have to have that. You have to believe in what it is that you're doing.

Alex: Yeah. I believed in myself enough and there were a handful of other people that believed in me, as well. And then once that sort of snowball gets rolling, you want to live up to what that small handful of people expect to be the result. And so that ultimately led to my initial entrepreneurial endeavors, building a company called Autumn Games and sort of eventually led to this.

Pamela: Before we get to that, I want to pick up on something that you said, about having someone in your network that believed in you, because this is something that I talk to people a lot in programs about. It’s really important when you are going to look at who you want to be. or to work on your own personal brand, or develop yourself into something in the future, that you have somebody in your corner that’s cheering you on, that tells you, “I see that in you, too.” Because it’s a lonely thing to try to figure that out about yourself, to see it for yourself. And it can get a little daunting every day to get up and keep yourself encouraged. So you need a cheerleader sometimes, telling you that they see it too. And clearly that was valuable for you.

Alex: Yeah. One of our board members, a gentleman named Antonio Lucio, used to be the CMO of Facebook, and before that CMO of Visa. And he now has sort of dedicated his career to helping to educate and mentor and build diversity in the marketing industry. And we were talking last week and one of the things he was talking about is how important, basically, community, mentorship and sponsorship are, in the development of a career. And they're all sort of different things.

Pamela: Yes.

Alex: But I think what I sort of found fairly early on, was that a surprising number of people were willing to talk to you. People who frankly you wouldn't... Like, “Why would they be willing to talk to 24-year-old me or 26-year-old me?” And if you just call them up or email them, or figure out some engaging way to reach out to them, generally don't start with an ask. Maybe start with a give. I was amazed early on that I was able to start developing relationships with people who started to play those mentorship and sponsorship roles that over the course of many years helped sort of teach me.

Pamela: And everybody needs that, right?

Alex: Everybody.

Pamela: That somebody that can actually speak into their lives and tell them who they are, what they see in them. But also someone that can open doors and can introduce them to people. And you're right, you'd be surprised that people that'll be willing to talk to you. I tell people all of the time, if you can't get that in your current company, get it in the industry. Go find people who are doing great things in the industry and offer yourself as a resource to help them. You'd be surprised at the people who'll give you a yes. And all you need is one yes. So clearly, you found yours. So how do you transition then, from doing these entrepreneurial activities, working at this organization, to now working at your first startup?

Alex: So it was, like most things, probably on most entrepreneurial journeys, it was kind of a windy road. But I started what was ostensibly a film finance business with no real experience in film or anything.

Pamela: Film and finance?

Alex: Yeah. Movies have to be funded somehow and this was in the early days when studios were starting to outsource financing to hedge funds and private equity firms and things like that. And I got matched up with some folks who knew a bit about that. And I was curious, started working with them. And eventually realized that actually, this was more interesting, as applied to the video game space. Because the film world, now already being sexier, bigger, had already kind of attracted a fair number of solutions, but the game space was still operating in a fairly immature way.

So this was kind of mid-2000s and we felt like there was an opportunity to build a vehicle to help sort of top game developers who were essentially kind of nameless, faceless employees of big companies like EA or Activision, help them break out in much the same way that Bruckheimer or Pixar or Imagine, or all of the great creator-led film production companies we know, followed sort of a similar path. And so we started building a company called Autumn Games to help top talent build their own studios and start making new and interesting game franchises.

Pamela: Interesting. So now you're combining multiple things that you see going on in the culture. What were you drawing from, to help you decide what to work on?

Alex: Well, and this is definitely a thread for me, but what really was interesting to me was this intersection of creativity and technology. Video games are really interesting in that they live at the precipice of high-end art risk and high-end technology risk. Or at least, when you're talking about AAA, you have console and PC, and those types of games. So our first big property, we met and befriended people at Def Jam, Kevin Liles and Lyor Cohen, and those folks.

Pamela: I'll have to ask you to stop. So you go from, “I'm not going finish school,” to, “I start this bar,” then it gets 200 people. To, “I go to work at this place and then I go start this company. I'm working on film and finance, but now I'll do video games. And let me now also just bring in Def Jam,” one of the biggest groups out there. How does that happen?

Alex: I think it was just a mutual respect. I don't know about mutual, but I certainly respected them. And we had an idea and were willing to work tirelessly to go about that. We got matched up with a really incredible game development studio. And when we talked to Kevin, primarily, he was interested in making another game franchise around the Def Jam brand. Wanted to use it. They'd made some games previously around sort of fighting, but they wanted to make something about music. They really kind of celebrated hip hop and looked at basically the greatest hip hop songs ever.

And so we set out to build. This was when Rock Band and Guitar Hero had kind of paved the way for music games as a big genre and we set out to build that.

Pamela: So Alex, I see it, so you've got this hip hop culture. You've got Def Jam. You've got the video game culture. You've got the film industry. You've got the financing. So why are we not sitting here talking to you about Autumn Games instead of VidMob? What happened with that?

Alex: Yeah, I think now, years later it’s a good story, but it wasn't a good story at the time. And this actually, it sort of encapsulates so many things about what it is like to be an entrepreneur, but as we started working on that, we had the Great Recession, I believe it’s called. 2008, 2009, when literally around us, we were initially working with the Royal Bank of Scotland and they sort of got essentially nationalized by the Bank of England. And we were working with Merrill Lynch and they got absorbed into Bank of America.

All of the world around us was essentially falling apart, but we were already making games. We had a couple of hundred people working on this game. We had, I don't even know, a million dollars a month in payroll.

Pamela: Oh my god.

Alex: And essentially, figured out our way through funding to completion that initial game, Def Jam Rapstar. We also started other games with Jimmie Johnson, the greatest NASCAR driver ever, and other properties.

Pamela: Let me stop you. Okay. Hip hop, finance, film, all of... Now, NASCAR, too?

Alex: Now NASCAR, yeah. Yeah, Jimmie was a good guy, and he had seen Tony Hawk had a great skating franchise, and John Madden and football, and he's sort of like, “Hey, I'm the best NASCAR driver. I think I should.” So I met him through a friend and we started making a video game together.

Pamela: You're touching on something that I think happens with entrepreneurs and business people alike, which is the idea of, ideas themselves. What might be possible, the art of the possible, constantly coming up. And being able to take that risk to go after those things, because it might turn out to be something good.

Alex: Well, and just being passionate and enjoying the process of it. Meeting and talking to Jimmie, and meeting and talking to Kevin. I think ultimately what we drew us together was just a passion for creation. I didn't know anything about NASCAR and I was just a casual fan of hip hop. But what I think they both hopefully knew was that there was going to be nothing that I wouldn't do, to basically help their vision sort of come to be. And so that then formed the foundation for our relationships to be successful.

Pamela: It's interesting. I see the thread though. I see the thread of creativity in terms of the video game, in terms of creating music. Even the NASCAR driver, when he creates the curve as he's going around driving, I can see the art of the human in there, in terms of creating something beautiful.

Alex: Absolutely. And so to sort of finish your question though, about why we're not here talking about video games, ultimately we launched the Rapstar game and it ended up in sort of a story as old as Nick Hollywood, where there was a dispute over capital. The large multi-billion dollar publisher who sort of collected the capital didn't actually pay that capital to us, ended up being a multi-party, multi-year lawsuit, that essentially destroyed this company that I'd sort of built with my colleague, Jason Donald, from nothing to a hundred million dollar valuation.

Pamela: Wow.

Alex: And essentially, it was sort of stolen from us. And so really for the second time in my life, college being the first and again, I had failed. So we let go of all the employees, because we had no way to pay them. We were beginning what was going to be a multi-year litigation. And I think for at least two years, maybe more, I worked for free, didn't make a penny. And we went all the way to essentially a trial. One, got our games back and started rebuilding from scratch.

Pamela: So before I go on from that story, which is amazing to me, that you've found a way to take all of these discrete ideas, bring them together into something that's beautiful. And then you lose it. That reminds me of the fact that these vicissitudes that you go through as a leader, this constant up and down, up and down, can really be taxing on you as you're trying to run a company every day. How did you deal with that? To go from, you drop out of school, that's a low, to “I start a company and get 200 employees,” that's a high. To, I go to this place that I don't feel in, that's a low. I start this new business and create all of this valuation, that's a high. To someone steals it, that's a low. How do you maintain some sense of balance in that?

Alex: I think, over years, I worked to essentially just clamp to just compress the emotional amplitude. To a point where, I think where I am now, where I am able to in the moment realize that really nothing is ever as good as it seems. And at the same time, and probably more importantly, nothing is ever as bad as it seems. So I think I am able to be a fairly calm leader of the people around me and the people I work with. And what you hope is that you don't compress it so much that you can't experience any joy. That's not a good end state.

Pamela: Right, because that will be a problem. But I have to ask you, how did you that? How did you figure that out? Because to hear you say, sitting on top of valuations that are so high, “Nothing is ever good as it seems.” And then sitting on a loss that's so low, “Nothing is ever as bad as it seems.” How do you get to that place? Because I'm sure there are other people out there that are leading companies or leading organizations, who are completely traumatized by the things that they’re going through. Or the things we've come through over the past couple of years, or completely elated over things they might be looking forward to. How do you balance that out? Because that's a big part of being able to be a trusted leader.

Alex: I think it gets back to what we were talking about earlier, at some level, it was through sort of community and mentorship. As I talked to other very successful people, it seemed like they all had similar stories, almost every one of them. And as I sort of heard, again and again and again from these people that I really respected, that they'd been through similar things. It sort of made my experiences feel less unique.

And then maybe more importantly, just through your own personal experience. Once you've been through these things multiple times, you start to realize, “All right, this is just another one of those moments. This too will pass.” And I think also what I realized along the way is that oftentimes those moments that seemed like the low points, were actually sort of high points. So during the college moment, when I was out of school, that’s when I met my wife.

Pamela: Wow. Just breeze right by there. When you're out of school, that's when you meet your wife?

Alex: Yeah, she was in school. She was a much better student than I was. So she helped sort of show me what a more successful person could be. And then again, during the first business, that's ultimately what sort of led to VidMob. And so, I now have this really steady thought in the back of my head that it just does no good to keep score in the middle of the game.

Pamela: Well, more importantly, to know that you're in the middle of the game, right? That it’s not over.

Alex: Yeah.

Pamela: So tell us about how you get to VidMob, but before you do that, it seems to me I'm seeing a theme already, Alex. And we haven't talked about this, which is the comeback kid, that this idea of perseverance is something that you really believe in. Is it something that you knew in your formative years, when you were young, that was a big part of you? Or was it something that grew because of the things that you went through?

Alex: It's a good question. Again, I think I've always been pretty stubborn and also fairly confident. And incredibly competitive. I just don't like losing. And I think that combination of things, I'm willing to... Basically, if you refuse to lose, then hopefully you don't do it very often. And so I think that was my pathway to perseverance, was through sort of competitiveness and just probably stubbornness.

Pamela: Never wanting to give up.

Alex: Never. Yeah, exactly. And I think this is a danger and a challenge for entrepreneurs, because there is this sort of struggle porn idea, this idea of really glorifying the struggle. And my story, in a sense, at least right now in this moment, seems to be that struggle led to success. But I'm definitely cognizant of the fact that that didn't have to be that way. So I don't know how one should know when they should give up, because you could definitely stay on a path way too long, really. But I felt like I was seeing enough positive movement and enough indications that we were actually heading towards something good, that it was worth continuing on the path.

Pamela: You're actually going toward a question I would’ve had, which is, as a leader, when you see yourself go through this battle, you get your songs back, you're going onto the next thing. How do you position yourself for the next move, for the next success that's going to happen? Because to your point, some people can hold onto things too long. They could’ve gone back and just said, “I'm going to go back to that business.” And you didn't. You turned.

Alex: It's such a good point. I think that in many ways, that experience sort of soured my view of the games industry. And along the way, we would get, literally, fan mail. People would send drawings of our characters and things. They'd want to come see the studio. And what I realized was, first of all, they weren't fans of me. They were fans of the games or the characters. But what I realized was that this was peoples’ dream job, running a game studio. But it wasn't mine.

Pamela: Wow.

Alex: And so I started to realize that I felt like I personally had more to offer the world than just spending my life trying to entertain 14-year-olds.

Pamela: I had to stop you there. I've heard you say this before and you said it so well. That, “I had so much more to offer than what I was giving to those 14-year-olds.” But how did you know, in that moment, that you had that hidden talent? Because clearly it was there and we can see it now in retrospect, working its way out in your career, working its way out as you do different things. What was going on in your head at the moment to know that, “There's more to me than what I'm giving right now?”

Alex: And I want to be clear, games are incredible. And you think about the amount of joy that they bring to people. You're talking about, I don't know, billions of hours of entertainment.

Pamela: Absolutely.

Alex: I'm not going to knock that.

Pamela: Absolutely.

Alex: But it just wasn't what I wanted to do. So I think it was probably fairly simple at some level. I wanted to build a company that when I talked to my mother or father about it at Thanksgiving, I was proud of it. And so I think it was just sort of like, “All right, well, I want to build a business that is somehow more meaningful, somehow more purposeful.”

And that sort of led in a variety of ways to VidMob where we said, “Well, hey, the world's about to transition from text and images as the way we communicate, to video. That’s going to lead to an enormous amount of creative struggle.” I felt like there was always going to be a role for the human creator, in areas where we wanted to develop emotional resonance and connection. And so I was like, “All right, well if these things are true, then someone’s going to have to build a platform that can scale and make that creativity more accessible. And if it’s our platform, we can set it up in such a way that the jobs it creates are good jobs, not bad jobs.” You won't be able to sort by cheapest editor. You won't be able to...

So that kind of led me to a point where I was like, "All right, well, if AI and automation and all these things are going to put negative labor pressure on most areas of the economy, here's a space, creativity, that’s somewhat protected. And if jobs are the root of human dignity, then if I can build a platform that is one of the few areas of net job growth in the next decade or so, then that would be a good thing.” And so ultimately, that was essentially the business plan of VidMob. There wasn't... That was it. It was just like, “Hey, we're going to build, we're going to create a million quality jobs.”

Pamela: A million quality jobs.

Alex: And then over the years, we…

Pamela: Aim low, there.

Alex: Yeah, exactly. And over the years, we've now figured out how to build a business around that. But that was basically the pitch.

Pamela: It's so interesting to me that you figured out a way to also tap into creativity again, because one of the things I see with organizations, and we talk about this in class as well, is that it’s really important to have the right capability when it counts. And you made a comment a moment ago about the fact that you could see that the world was transitioning from more text to imagery. You could see that things were shifting and changing. Clearly you were paying attention to the right sets of things. Is that an acumen you developed or is that something that was natural to you? How did you know that that was where we were going?

Alex: It's a really astute point. Like, I wasn't good enough to be the third baseman for the Yankees. Most of the things in my life I'm actually not that good at. But I think I am actually fairly good at being able to feel culture, sort of feel where things are going. And so yeah, I had a fairly innate sense that these things were happening and this was essentially a pretty tectonic shift. Moving from a static communication world to a more dynamic video communication world, it was basically—there have been three communication epochs: we’re sort of oral, as a culture, pre Guttenberg. We spent 550-plus years or so using the written word and now we're going into a new world. I knew that that was going to be a really big thing and was able then to build a business around that.

Pamela: I have to say here that, I am loving your own self-awareness. Because you made the comment that, “I wasn't good enough to be the third baseman of the Yankees and there are a lot of things I'm not good at. But I am good at this.” And this is one of the things we want people to know. That it doesn't mean that you have to have this illusion of your own dominance and be great at everything, but what is the one great thing that you do? And how do you focus and hone in on that and turn that into a plan for value, for someone else? And that value that you created was clearly something people perceived in VidMob. Right?

Alex: Yeah, it's a really good point. I think oftentimes people kind of miss… they think about early in their careers, “I want to do something that I'm passionate about,” but maybe they should think about, “I'm going to do something that I'm good at.” Because people usually develop passion for the things that they're good at. And chances are, in high school you may be passionate about being a DJ or something else, that might not be the best career decision.

Pamela: And the things that you do that you're good at, don't even always feel like work. You might actually be working but you actually, I find I can work longer. You can be autonomously motivated to succeed. I don't necessarily have to get someone else to try to motivate me. I work when people don't expect me to when I do things that I'm good at and I enjoy doing.

Alex: Absolutely. And ultimately this leads, I think, to a happier life. Like, I haven't for a long time felt like I actually have a job. I love what I do and so ultimately that seems like one of the things that certainly I've always aspired to.

Pamela: So talk to me about VidMob now. So you're standing there at the courtroom. You got your games back. You decide, “I don't want to go in that direction anymore. I'm going to go in this other direction, where I see the world changing and we need more creative capabilities.”

How do we get to VidMob? What do you do and how did you get there?

Alex: There's a step in between where we then wanted to rebuild the business. We didn't have any money, and if I raised new capital, it would’ve kind of essentially wiped out the original equity investors in the games business. So we decided to do a crowdfunded campaign and the people who were running Indiegogo were actually leasing space from me in my office. So I knew them, really. And so rather than using Kickstarter, we did an Indiegogo campaign and we tried to raise it.

Pamela: The people who were running Indiegogo were leasing space from you?

Alex: Because we had signed, early in the games business days, we'd signed a 10-year lease. I'd personally guaranteed it and my company went away. So I had to figure out how to pay the rent, basically. So I ran probably the world's worst WeWork.

Pamela: But this is that comeback kid again, right?

Alex: Yeah.

Pamela: Because you open up your doors. I'm trying to make it a refuse to fail. I try to make money by renting out space. And who rents one of my spaces but Indiegogo who's known for raising capital. What do you need? Capital. So you have to say something here about this idea of success also having a bit of luck associated with it as well. And positioning yourself to take advantage of that luck when it occurs.

Alex: Yeah. Listen, every entrepreneur, probably every person in life, has to credit almost all their success to luck. And I would say we, and the people around me, work really hard. And through that, we put ourselves in a position to be lucky. And so with the Indiegogo thing, I mean, we were building a good business. I treated him fairly and so that led to a relationship. So it wasn't like I just walked down the street and we bumped shoulders crossing, and we go like, "Hey, you want to..."

So we decided to try and raise $150,000 to make one more character for this game Skullgirls, because that’s how much it costs, because it was all hand-drawn art. And we had no idea. We assumed it probably wouldn't be successful, but ended up raising that in 20 hours and went on to become the most successful Indiegogo games campaign ever. Completely revitalized the franchise.

Pamela: Amazing.

Alex: And today, Skullgirls has literally millions of players, every month. So that kind of put that business back on a path. And this is how VidMob comes about. So I was now building VidMob, this is years later, and in the sort of capital raise phase, I meet a venture capitalist at Foundation Capital, a guy named Jonathan Ehrlich, who used to be the CMO of Facebook.

And I pitch him on this business—the business plan of, “We're going to create a million jobs.” He was uninterested, for a variety of reasons. But 30 minutes later, he calls me back. He says, “Hey, I was just reading online about this lawsuit. What’s this deal with the Rapstar game?” And this and that. And I told him the story. I said, “Well, we had this business and we grew it up, and it essentially got stolen from us. And we worked for free for two years and we won. Then we just did this Indiegogo campaign.” And he's just like, “All right, stop. Enough.” He's like, “Just send me the wire information.”

Pamela: Wow. So you go from a hard no to a yes?

Alex: Yeah. He's like, “I don't like your business plan, but I believe in you. I'm going to send a quarter million dollars.” And that was it. And that was the start of VidMob.

Pamela: How do you feel in that moment when that happens? When you've held on for so long. Because now, I'm seeing not only comeback kid at play, but busy as a beaver too. You're continuing to work, that never give up, that stick-to-it-iveness is playing out, as well.

Alex: I think how I felt was, it was time to get to work. Now we had someone who had basically taken a risk on us that he didn't really believe in and that made it all the more important that we made it work out.

Pamela: So how did you then get to where you are now? I think I read that you were voted as one of the best apps of the year by Apple. How do you go from that initial hard no to now one of the best apps of the year?

Alex: Yeah. Ultimately, I think we were right that the transition to a video-based internet was going to create an enormous amount of friction. And now, as you think about a marketer's challenge as they look at not just Facebook and Google, but TikTok and Amazon and Reddit and Hulu and LinkedIn, and literally dozens of platforms all with many different formats. We were absolutely right that that was going to be really challenging. And the technology we built was good.

And as we started to succeed and then partner with first Snapchat and then Facebook, and now everyone, that led us to a point where we saw that there was a way to actually use computer vision to unpack the creative elements that were happening inside these things and help people understand not just which ads are working, but why. Like, “Why did this ad work last week, but it's not working this week? What sort of changed in culture that it isn't resonating anymore?” And so, we essentially invented this idea of creative analytics where you’re looking at not, “How do I change my audience segmentation,” or those things, but actually, “How do I bring data to bear for creative decision-making?”

And it turns out that’s actually really impactful, creates a lot of value for marketers. And we've been able to build a pretty good business around it.

Pamela: How did people respond to the fact that you were using analytics and computer vision and a lot of the machine part of that human-plus-machine equation to solve what had traditionally been more of a creative problem?

Alex: They reacted with varying elements of revulsion, terror, hatred. And I would say that most people, most creators originally were quite scared that we were coming for their jobs. And I think this is where the fact that the original mission was around protecting creativity, my sort of career, and similar with my partner Jason, this is sort of who we are. We are equal parts and left brain. And so I think we were able to earn the trust of the creator community and really show up with this idea that, people often mistakenly think that AI and data systems are going to take their jobs. And for the most part, that’s not true.

Pamela: I agree.

Alex: But, someone who uses it better than you will.

Pamela: Say that again.

Alex: And you have to understand that. And it doesn’t mean these are not in conflict. Data and creativity are not in conflict. And you can be more creative with more information.

Pamela: Yeah, I love what you're saying that it’s not that the AI, the machine learning is going to take your job, but someone who uses it better than you will. And so, I really believe in this idea of humans plus machines working together, where the machine does the heavy lifting and the human figures out where to pivot, in the face of change. The human figures out what they need to change. And I think that's the future of our work, even in a creative space, I think it's the future of the world.

Alex: Even in the creative space and this is more relevant now this week than ever. Major area of innovation have been AI creators that, for those of you in the audience, if you haven't played around with DALL-E-2 or Midjourney or any of these, please do. They're incredible. We are at the beginning of a massive, massive change where any thought can be turned into art. And we certainly haven't even scratched the surface of the implications of that. But there's always going to need to be a human element understanding, coming up with the ideas to put into that machine. So again, it changes, it moves the goalposts, but this isn't going to get to a world where there's no creativity.

Pamela: Well, it sounds to me too, that this is an opportunity for companies to compete on something other than the “what” of what they do, but the “why” of what they do. And I know a big part of your organization is the “why” of what you do and operating with purpose. Can you talk a little bit about that? And then I'll take an audience question.

Alex: Well, this was probably the single biggest unlock for us in terms of activating the people of our business, but that original idea of creating a million quality jobs. It was a pebble rolling down the hill of purpose. And so that gave us a way to talk about how we were on the side of humans versus robots. And we kind of realized then that it wasn’t quite enough, this quantitative goal. And so then we started talking about it in terms of evolving creativity for the better and we set diversity benchmarks for our creator community and committed to having more than 50% diversity in our creator community.

And then we realized, “Oh wow. Actually, this is even more interesting.” And then we woke up and realized, “You know what? We need to be a truly stakeholder-driven company, not just a shareholder-driven company.” And that then led to the foundation of our foundation, VidMob Gives. We started a 501(c)(3) when we were 20 people, which I think our lawyers laughed at me. But the idea was just that we had to be more than a company or else the idea of just resetting every quarter... Hit the goal, reset. I felt like a hamster. And so, we have to be more.

Pamela: You have to be more than that.

Alex: And so ultimately, all these things, what they did was they just started attracting better and better people. We started realizing that we could take people from Amazon, from Google, from Facebook, who could make far more money in these places, but they wanted to be somewhere where they were proud and that they would tell their parents.

**Pamela:**Work with purpose. They can work with purpose. We see that with all of the graduates coming out now, that they have their choice of places to work. But they want to work with purpose. Let me get to a couple of audience questions. One question was that, it sounds like one of the biggest things that’s important for your journey has been confidence. Is that the case?

Alex: Yeah, I think it probably has to be, at some level. I think it’s probably very difficult to be an entrepreneur, if you don't believe in yourself. And I try to not come across as being overly confident, because that’s generally fairly off putting. But deep down, I believe in myself and through that I believe in my team and the people around us. And I just believe in us over anyone else. And that may or may not be right, but I think you have to feel that way in order to be competitive.

Pamela: You have to and it's one of my biggest pieces of advice to people—is, not just believe in yourself, but invest in yourself too. That you have to be the investor of who you are and what you want to be.

There’s another question here. What do you wish that you knew when you first started out as an entrepreneur? What’s one thing you wish you knew that you know now?

Alex: It’s a good question. It’s one of these things where the learnings were so important that I almost wouldn’t want to know anything ahead of it, because it would sort of take away from the power of the learning. Maybe some element of just, “Things will be okay.”

Pamela: Yes. The idea that it’s not over. I have had so many days when I thought, when it looked like it was over and the idea of my failure becoming the foundation of my success is only something that I was able to pivot and see afterwards. Would you agree?

Alex: Yeah. And I think it’s probably also, and definitely here now, but I think when you’re younger, you have probably more material goals. As I started thinking about entrepreneurship in the late '90s, I probably thought about it in terms of IPOs and this or that. And it’s definitely not how I think about it now. So I think ultimately, what I’ve realized and what I talk to our team about a lot, is this very clear understanding that the process, the journey, the struggle, all these things. Those are actually sort of the victories and the things that we read about in the press, the ringing of the NASDAQ bell or stuff like that, I don't think that those are actually ultimately all that exciting.

So if those are the goals, then you're probably teeing yourself up for an unhappy life. So I think maybe potentially realizing that a little earlier would've been a good thing to know.

Pamela: Yeah, I think that’s a lovely thought to leave everyone with, too. That the vicissitudes of life would leave an entrepreneur to struggle, but to your point, there's victory in that.

Alex, thank you for sharing your story.

Alex: Yeah, my pleasure. It's great talking to you, Pam.