#42 Jake Millar - business success at just 22

Welcome to the message pod, I'm Nicole Hark. As a business owner, I was intrigued by a next-guess story of streamlined success. I really wanted to find out just what it is that sets him apart from the many other young people trying to forge an entrepreneurial career. By the end of our chat, I think you'll have figured out just what it is. Kiwi Jake Miller was just 15 when his father was tragically killed in a plane crash at the family's skydiving business in Fox Glacier. This led to Jake making contact with New Zealand's Prime Minister John Key, who had also lost his father at a young age, which in turn taught Jake the importance of surrounding himself with mentors and role models. Some of whom, such as Richard Branson, at that stage didn't even know he existed, although Jake would go on later to interview him. Jake turned down a $40,000 law scholarship straight out of school and instead found it offer an online video platform that features interviews with prominent individuals with a view to helping people his own age navigate their lives and their careers. And just 10 months later, he became the first teenager to sell a company to the New Zealand government when they boarded off him for an undisclosed sum. Now at the ripe old age of 22, Jake is fully immersed in his new role as the co-founder of Unfiltered, which is currently expanding into the US. It follows similar lines to one foot, but a host interviews solely focused on entrepreneurs and business leaders. Who have tasted so much success at such an early age means that he must think as fast as he speaks about a million miles an hour, but I was taken aback by the sense of perspective and purpose that's present in such a young mind. Enjoy. What Jake, thanks so much for joining us in the pod today. No worries, thank you so much for having me. 22 years of age, am I right? 22, yep. So at 22 years of age, you've absolutely tasted success, but I'm going to ask you, where do you see yourself in 30 years' time? And you're going to say to me, why 30 years' time? I'll tell you why, because I read an article about you where you said it was really important for you to have a 30 year plan. So I'm saying, well, if he's got a 30 year plan, he must have an idea of where he wants to be in 30 years. Absolutely, it's a great question. I think in 30 years from now, it's a long time at 22 at the moment. It's hard to imagine 30, 52 years old. But I think at that age, I would love to have a global company that has a holding company that has different companies and brands all over the world in different industries and different markets, doing different things. And I know that's a very broad answer, but I've gained a lot of inspiration over the years from Sir Richard Branson, and I love his model of Harry's developed one of the world's most powerful brands and has kind of applied that to different industries and different markets around the world. And I'm definitely an infinitely curious person. I love starting new things. I love getting involved in new things. And I certainly have so many different ideas and industries that I'd love to get into. So for me in 30 years, if I were across a range of different industries and a range of different countries, working with different people who I really love and respect around the world, that would be pretty awesome. But as well as that, I think as well, I definitely want to continue to interview people all around the world. Maybe not through unfiltered in 30 years from now, but certainly through some platform. I love interviewing people. I love telling stories and that's certainly something I want to continue to grow around the world as well. It's interesting as a business model because on the one hand, you're obviously giving learnings to people and clearly making money from it. But on the other hand, you're learning at the same time. I mean, it bested both worlds I would have thought. Absolutely. I often forget how lucky I am. Some days I wake up and I'm like, man, this is pretty cool. When we were in San Francisco recently, we spent a lot of time, most of our time interviewing in the US now. And we were interviewing about 12 people over two weeks. And some incredible entrepreneurs, the co-founder of Slack, the chairman of Doc, you sign, the founder of Lavongo, about $5 billion companies in two weeks. And the opportunity to go and talk to some of these phenomenal entrepreneurs and business leaders and learn their stories and learn about different industries and different strategies of building billion dollar companies in one of the greatest markets in the world is one of the coolest things to ever be able to do. And of course, anyone can go and watch these interviews and other interviews on YouTube. But to be actually there in front of people and asking the questions and truly learning, like you soak up a huge amount of knowledge. And yeah, it's definitely something I feel really like I'd be able to do. So why do they talk to Jake Miller? I mean, these are people who have hundreds, thousands of requests for interviews from journalists, from media, from podcasters, from people all across the globe. Why do they say yes to you? It's a good question. I think there's a combination of things. I think firstly, track record is probably the most important thing. And once you start doing great interviews and filming of a lot of different people, that starts to get momentum and the snowball starts to build. So Richard Branson was certainly a huge tipping point for us. Once we interviewed Richard, it definitely opened up a lot of doors around the world. Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia Capital, was another big one, Jordan Balfour, the kind of wolf of wolf straight character. So these people who have huge profiles, when they say yes, these are people who get hit up the most in the world. So if they're prepared to put their time and give you an interview, obviously the platform has got reach, it's got distribution. And I think people will be more willing to say yes to that. But I think as well, we have a model where we would never release something, interview with themselves is not proud of. So we're very learning focus, we're in the education market, we know the media company, we would never publish something that was to get a headline or to drop some other under the bus as such. So we will always work with our interview with you to make sure that they're really proud of the product that we're putting out. And I think people like that. They have an unfiltered platform where they can come on, they can say what they want, we don't chop and change their answers, but we do make sure that they're comfortable and that positions them in a really nice way. So what do you say? What's your elevator pitch? Because of course, once you've got a Richard Branson, that changes everything because then you can use that to leverage the next and the one after. But what do you say that makes you stand out from the crowd because there's got to be something that makes you get noticed? Yeah, I think the other point is probably age, right? At 22 people want to help young people and that's certainly something that when I was 18 years old. Who's your advantage? Exactly. When I was 18 just getting started, that was a major factor. And then over time, age probably became less of a factor because the track record and the platform itself started to get traction, which kind of, I think, outweighs that factor. But my elevator pitch is very much like, hey, this is who I am, this is the company I founded. I would love to interview you for these reasons. Here's the people we've interviewed. Here's some examples. Would you like to be a part of it? It's a very simple email. But then the other factor is we follow up persistently and ruthlessly. I will follow someone up 20, 30 times until I give up. And when I give up, I'll find another way to go back to them, you know? We've got people who we have emailed maybe 16, 17 times, never heard back then they come back and they're like, sure, I'd love to do it. And maybe they haven't even seen that before. Maybe they're a system. Sure. So it's deleting them. Maybe they were going to the spam folder. Who knows? Persistence is the most important thing in the most underrated thing in the world. We talked before about wanting to have a whole range of different companies, a whole range of different things going on. How do you keep yourself slow enough, but still fast enough to achieve that? I mean, achieving the balance between that, doing something and continuing to do it well and knowing when is the right time to move on to the next thing. Because for an entrepreneur, that can be a challenge. Yeah, absolutely. And it's a very good question. I'm on my second company now. So my first company I started when I was 18, sold that to the government when I was 19 a year later. And that was a very quick start to exit. That was a year, less than a year, from actually launching this business to selling it. It was about 10 months, actually. Some people probably said that was too fast. But I saw an opportunity. I saw a way to give the business greater distribution and allow it to have a greater impact. And I was excited about new things. So that, when that opportunity came about, I kind of went for it. So I think in business, it's about being open to opportunity at any time. But not, I think it's wrong to go into something and say, I'm doing this for a year and I'm going to sell it. And this is my exit strategy. And I'm going to make this amount of money. Like, I think it's about building something that's great and building something that's valuable. And then people want to buy that. If it, if it's a problem, it's valuable, it's making some money. And I think as long as you focus on those critical things, other opportunities will come up. So I would just say, it's important to focus. It's important to build value, not move on too soon. You know, there's a lot of people in the world who start and move on really quickly before actually kind of achieving anything substantial with the business. And I certainly don't want to do that. But over time, like, I'd love to have a budget company that I'm still involved if I don't necessarily sell, but maybe I'm not the guy running it. And I think that would be really cool because as I say, I'm really curious. And I want to be involved in different industries, but obviously it's impossible to be running kind of 20 companies at once. Do you remind yourself to slow down? Remind yourself that you are only 22 because even the pace at which you talk seems like, oh my god, I'm in such a rush. There's so much to do in this life and I can't wait to do it. Yeah, I think so, but I think, you know, the old saying that you surround the 10 people you kind of surround yourself with become your average, I think it is. And I'm really lucky to be surrounded by some pretty phenomenal people. And I judged myself in so many ways of, you know, people who have just achieved phenomenal things who are my age, other than the world achieving building massive companies. And again, we're really lucky because we're surrounded just by so many high achievers. So I think, you know, yeah, I often have to remind myself that for 22 when I'm doing is pretty cool and I'm pretty lucky and you know, it's great to go back to places like my hometown and where I went to school in Christchurch and use it. and then go back to Auckland and kind of immerse myself a little bit in the start up scene and see that what we're doing is pretty cool. But in New York as well, when you're in San Francisco, you're in New York City, there's heaps of other people doing much more amazing things at similar ages. And you can just look at yourself and go, "Shit, I need to work faster." So I think it's a balance. For me, it's like, "Man, I'm probably often thinking I'm not being fast enough to be honest." You talked about the fact that in entrepreneurship, what you're doing is solving a problem. What problem are you solving? The problem we're solving is that there's so much information in the world and there's so many videos and there's so many articles and blogs and things and places people can go to learn about business and learn about success. But it's all very much, it's not very organised, it's not very curated. So our platform is a place where entrepreneurs and business leaders can go to learn about something really specific and a really created format from some of the world's top business leaders. So if you're a startup and you want to learn about raising capital or building culture or expanding into a new market or going into fashion or technology or whatever it may be, you can come to unfiltered and find really targeted advice from some of the top business leaders really fast. So we help entrepreneurs learn business fast from the top business people in the world. There's plenty of advice on YouTube, there's plenty of podcasts out there which are really great. But it can be hard to find the exact advice you need. So we want to become more of a tool that every entrepreneur would use when they have a really specific question that they want answered. You know, they may be trying to hire their first CEO or fire their first person or whatever it may be and they would come to unfiltered, they would search by that question, find the exact answer and it would give them the, I guess, the confidence to go and start making some decisions based off some advice from some pretty phenomenal people. So is that really the point of difference then it's really getting down to a niche market because there are many, many books. There are many podcasts as we've indicated, a number of TV programs that are all around talking to business success stories. You can find them everywhere. Is your point of difference being able to really niche that and find the answers to very specific questions within those interviews? Increasingly so. That's absolutely what we want to become. And I think at the moment we are, we're getting there, but there's still so much more we want to do. As well as that, so it is very much the curation of that knowledge so that you can really find what you want to know about startups and about business fast. But as well as that, I mentioned how it is a very unfiltered format. And there's a lot of companies that do that, fireside chat kind of format. But for us I'd say we are really learning focus. So in our interviews we will go in and like here's the five areas we're going to focus on. It might be culture, it might be hiring, it might be raising capital and it might be expanding into China as an example. And we will just obsess about those five areas. And it's not about it, as I said, it's not about a headline, it's not about what's going on today, it's not about the latest capital raise you've done. It's all about really targeted questions that can help the people watching it actually go out and do something of that knowledge. And so how much of that has been evolution versus actual planning? Yeah, great question. It's a combination, you know. I think when we started the unfiltered we always wanted to become a, we always had a vision to become a, you know, one of the world's great business learning platforms. But in saying that it was much more story focused. So we might focus for half an hour or 40 minutes of the one hour interview on the story. You know, when you're young, when you're getting started and you know, the advice your parents gave you and the impact they had on you and all of that. Which we still do. But now that's probably, you know, 10, 15 minutes then the rest of the hour is learning focused. So it's kind of evolved over time. I would say when I started my first company, it was mostly story focused. But you know, it kind of evolved and evolved and evolved. And I'm certainly passionate about education and about learning and about learning myself as you rightly say. I'm in the chair learning that, learning myself, but as well as that helping kind of inspire and educate the next generation as well. And the evolution of that as a product, how much of that comes from feedback that you receive? I mean, are you tweaking and changing all the time? And who are you going to to find out what changes need to be made to make a meat market demand? Yeah, we're certainly, I hope we're quite a customer centric company. We definitely listen to our people and our community a lot. Like we just ran our big unfiltered live event down in Auckland about a week ago today. We had 700 people there. It was an amazing high impact day with some of, you know, multiple, there are about 10 speakers, many of whom had founded, you know, $800 million, $1 billion companies. And it was received incredibly well. And we've seen how to, you know, an intensive feedback form with, you know, a great prize, you know, a couple of days after or have already had a couple of hundred people come back and give their feedback. And we read every single bit of feedback. We look at what we can do better. And then we make decisions based on that. So absolutely, we listen a lot to our audience. But at the moment as well, we're developing a new platform altogether, which is going to be an unfiltered platform, but focused on rapidly scaling companies in America. So unfiltered.tv, our main platform is very entrepreneurs, very startup focused for founders, for people growing companies. But we see a huge opportunity to create a completely new content stream for teams of rapidly scaling companies. So companies growing from 10 to 100 to 200 to 1000 staff, you know, the culture might not be keeping up as the founder expects. The sales might not be going as well as like the brand and the marketing might not quite be where they want it to be. And that platform, we're doing a huge amount of research at the moment. So I interviewed a guy called Keith Krakku, I was the co-founder of a company called Areba. He's the current chairman of DocuSign. And he talked to me about when he started Areba, which was acquired for $4.7 billion, I believe. When he started Areba, he went in our 60 companies, two questions. What are you doing now and what would be the best solution? And it's simple, simple questions like that. But going to the market and actually finding out like what do people want and what are they going to pay for and what how are they currently doing it? What sucks? What's great? What's a painful problem and then creating a solution to actually fix people's problems? I think is again very underrated. Most people create a product, take it to market and find out that most of the world doesn't actually want it. A lot of companies start and fail that way. Whereas what we've learned interviewing some of the greatest companies in the world is so many of these founders have actually gone out and actually spoken to the market. They've gone to the cul face. They've been most of their time with their customers actually finding out what they want. And we're certainly not perfect, but we're certainly trying to do a lot more of that going forward. It's interesting too, because I would imagine that potentially people who are older in that entrepreneurial space or in the business space rather, perhaps have too much pride to go and ask because they think I should know. Or I want to appear as if I know rather than going out and saying, "Hey, actually, I'd like you to tell me." And you've got that advantage because you can go out and say, "I'm still learning. I want to meet the demands that you have." I mean, I would certainly hope that I never lose that. I think if you don't, if you, if you, there's always people out there that are better than you, that know more than you, that can give you a better understanding of the market. And remaining humble enough to go and have those conversations, I think, in businesses, one of the most important things. And yet, would you say that in the people that you meet and talk to that you don't always say that? Or is that one of the elements of their success, do you think? Yeah, it's a good question. I would say most of the founders we've interviewed are very customer focused. They realize that in today's world that's changing so fast and there's so many companies coming out of nowhere and disrupting total industries and destroying massively-gissied companies that if you're not customer focused and if you're not prepared to have those conversations and remain humble and open to the advice that your customers or the knowledge you can get from them, I think people are more and more people are realizing or more and more business people are realizing that you're probably going to get screwed. So I think most of the people we interview realize that and talk a lot to their customers. But in saying that, I think it's more the, probably the first time founders and the people who are more early on who sometimes miss that, because it's so easy to come up with an idea that's so exciting and you're like, "Man, this is the greatest idea. It's going to be the next Facebook and I come out of it this morning in the shower and it's going to change the world." And you get like blinded by your own passion. And I've certainly done that numerous times. Even my current business, I didn't research the market nearly as much as I would today. In saying that, when we started unfiltered, we went out and we got about 12 paying customers prior to launch. So we got them to sign up, pay and agree to become subscribers. Companies like McKinsey, PWC, Ray White, Phontera, Bank of New Zealand, New Zealand trade and enterprise, the government in New Zealand. They were paying companies either very early on or pre-launch. And that gave us the confidence to actually go out and do it. So I think actually going out and having those conversations early on is underrated. Not enough people do that. In a future company, I'll certainly do a lot more of those early conversations. So at that starting party, going out to those big businesses and pricing it at a price that's really palatable for them, getting some big name brands alongside, which of course then elevates your brand and what you're doing. And then you look to scale that up. Yep, absolutely. And I think pricing research is, I wouldn't say I'm a guru at that. I haven't been through that too many times. But part of that market validation process you do in the early days is very much working out what the markets prepared to pay for it and getting really clear on that and then getting paying customers early on. Maybe you'll give those first customers a bit of a discount to get them on board. But I wouldn't recommend giving it to them for free because then there's an expectation that that's how it works. You know, you want them to see an unvalue that they're happy to pay for it. So I know we're unfiltered when we went out of the start, we priced our product too high. So we were pitching to companies to sponsor us at like 200, 300,000 dollars for a one-year sponsorship contract, which was a bit high. So when we, because we were pre-launched, we had no audience, we had, we're in a 4 million person country. and we're 18, 19 years old. (laughing) - Hi, I'm Hi. - Exactly, so I think it's important to kind of go in somewhere, but also be prepared to take that feedback. And we certainly took that feedback, we adjusted our pricing, and now we've got a pretty good package that we sell. - And so what is the business model that you work to? - So we just took our paid wall down on unfiltered.tv about a week and a half ago. - Yeah, so yeah, we were a B2C, sorry, paid platform for entrepreneurs for startups. But we made a decision that going into America, one of the biggest markets in the world, also one of the most competitive at a time when almost every major publisher is putting out paywalls. When you turn up to a place like that, and you say, hey, I want you to pay for my product before you can watch the content. And no one knows who you are or what your brand is. It's a pretty hard ask. So we've decided that going into America, just getting millions of people watching our product, loving it, engaging with it, is going to be much more powerful in the long term than actually turning up with a paywall. But in saying that, we definitely do have a model, funding and backing what we do at the moment. So we do our live event series, our unfiltered live series, and we're growing that in New Zealand, in particular. We did the 700 person event last week. We've got a big party we're hosting this Friday night for 400 people that's all about connections and facilitating kind of relationships and bringing people together. We've also got our commercial partnership network about 20 partners now, PWC, BMW, the government in New Zealand, big law firms who subscribe, and also we co-create content with them that we distribute through our platform, so a content marketing model. And they obviously get exposure across all of our content, our event, all of our kind of marketing as well. And then I mentioned we're building this new platform that's going to be sold B to B in America. And we see that as a major part of the future model. But if we can get millions of people watching, engaging and loving our unfiltered.tv product, then that will be really valuable in itself. So there's a combination of things. It's a very interesting time for us, but a very exciting time is we're kind of a just and transition from an older model to a much newer one for us. So effectively at the moment, you've got several streams in terms of your revenue streams. The biggest one by far for us is our content marketing. So we'll create content with 20 or so companies or industry exclusive where, for example, PWCs won our partners and will go and produce an amount of videos with their partners executives talking on camera about text structuring and estate planning and exit strategies and your name it. And then we distribute that content through the unfiltered platform that gets kind of, is organically kind of amongst the content that we create ourselves. So kind of sponsored content, which I was doing in interview last week with Published Down in New Zealand. And they were giving me quite a hard time about that. And they said a row mixing, "Advatorial of editorials." Not good. And I was like, "Wait a minute. There's a company in America called BuzzFeech that is a billion dollar company. There's another one called Business Insider and a huge amount of their revenue. BuzzFeech was built off the back of sponsors - Absolutely. - Content. - And that's just how we're not a media company, but that's how media education works. And this is the other point. Since we're not a media company, we're an education company. The content we create without partners, sorry, is education focus. So who cares if it's paid for by PWC or if it's paid for by BMW? It doesn't matter. It's about teaching people. It's about education. It's about learning. So whoever's funding that to me is totally irrelevant. - And as you say, as long as you have a quality filter there that says, well, actually this makes our quality. - Absolutely. - It's giving something to our customer. - Exactly. Yeah. It's not biased content. It's not the type of content that's like, don't go with EY because we're PDO. It's not about that. It's about quality education, quality learning to help entrepreneurs start up spasnously just create this gross, sustainable valuable companies. Whoever's sponsoring paying for that to me, it's not really relevant. - So with your audience now, obviously seeking a global audience and America being a prime target for you, how much of a carrot audience is split between New Zealand specifically and how much of a disclobal? - Great question. At the moment, it's mainly New Zealand. We're very early stage expanding into the US and we've got, when I say mainly, we've had about 28 million video views since launch. We've had millions of video views in America. However, it's early stage of the expansion journey over there but in saying that having taken the paywall down and now we're releasing mainly US content, that's rapidly growing. We've still got a great lawyer who engaged growing following in New Zealand. But the US following is definitely growing pretty fast. - Do you use a sales funnel? - Specifically in regards to. - So do you have people who, when you did have your firewall, for example, who will come in and access content initially for free, they'll then take a paid content and then eventually you value out it and value out and then you recruit them into something that's bigger and more longer term. - Absolutely. We definitely had a sales funnel for our BBC model. With our partnership model, not so much because we're only working with a very select group of companies so those relationships are much more personal and like an individual sales person or myself actually working with these companies. But yeah, with the beta C model, we certainly did them without you being to be platformy will as well. - What does success look like for you? How do you measure success? What makes you happy? - For personally or unfiltered? - For you. - For me, I think it's so. For me, it's about, there's a number of things that I call the my macro objectives that I follow and I've got about nine of them and I probably can't remember them all off the top of my head but most of them start with F. So like family, friends, fitness, fun, fortune, meaning good luck, energy, et cetera, finances, influence, love, freedom, spirituality, that sort of thing. So I've got about 10 or 11 of them that I kind of follow and I go set by those and for me, they are the things I try and keep in balance. I try and have a couple of really powerful goals per year for each of those things. I try and split my time between fun outside of business, traveling, skydiving, bungee jumping, doing crazy stuff, running half-marathons with business itself, starting growing companies, also with charitable philanthropic stuff. So raising $100,000 a year for lifeline, New Zealand, and ambassador for Eat My Lunch, just launched a $50,000 scholarship for my old school. So I try and split my time between fun, between family, between friends, between all of these different things. Friendships certainly really important to me. I dedicate a lot of time to my friends and freedom as well was like the biggest, probably macro thing that I strive for. Like I need to feel like I can do anything at any time and have no kind of restrictions around me. And I know that seems a bit naive 'cause you always do in a certain way but if I wake up by morning and decide that I wanna go on a holiday for a week to Fiji, I like to be able to do that pretty fast. I don't really want to have to ask anyone for permission to do anything. And when you raise money and stuff, obviously there's greater expectations upon you and you have to obviously be responsible. But if someone tries to take away my freedom, that's probably like the biggest, biggest offensive thing anyone can do to me. - You just had me in that movie line, what is it? You can take my, but you can't take my freedom. - Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I like to be very free. And I like to feel like nobody's really telling me what to do or like how to live my life. - I mean, that sounds brilliant of course, but to achieve it is tremendously difficult. And I wonder how often you get caught in that whirlwind. I mean, within business quite often we end up down in the crunch, you know? We're kind of in the battle. - Yes. - And it's really hard to force yourself to take the time out to rise above and to do the planning. How do you do that? And how do you achieve that? And how disciplined are you? Because it requires a lot of discipline to do that. And that is to not just be in the day to day chaos, but to say in fact, I'm going to be not as useful down here as I am up here planning the future. - Absolutely, as a really good question. I would say just schedule really far in advance. I schedule, I think my schedule is mapped out to about January next year, like where I'm gonna be in the world, what country I'm in, not specific meetings, but I know where I'm gonna be and I map out my holidays really far in advance. And I use that time really wisely to reflect, to read, to learn and to plan. Every year at Christmas I take a few weeks off and it's part of that in that time. I do all my goals, setting all my planning, all my review of the year macro goals for myself, personally, philanthropically. Kind of everything in that period and then I take quarterly vacations. So every quarter I take a week off and go somewhere crazy. So first one was to the UK. I went in, it's been a week at the Soho Farmhouse. I'm just about to go to Fiji in about four or five days, then the next one's Mexico, then the next one's Hong Kong. So I have these weeks kind of mapped out around the world. And I honor them as much as I'd honor a board meeting. You know, I've got one of my directors at the moment, trying to get in the middle of my holiday in Fiji and I said sorry sir, I'm in Fiji that week. We'll have to have the board meeting when I get back. And you know, because it's important, because I, my personality type, I'm an INFJ. And INFJ's no one to burn out quite fast. We work really hard and quite intense kind of doses, but we can burn out really fast. And I know for me, if I can work really hard, but I also need to take time out regularly and play really hard as well. Otherwise, I can burn out really fast. Like last week I nearly fainted because I was just so exhausted. It's happened twice in the past month, where I just like, when there's like laying down on the floor at the mall because I was just so exhausted. when that sort of stuff happens, you're like, "I actually need to take care of my health as well." You said the mall, not the mall, didn't you? Ah, yeah. Yeah, just check it. Yeah, good question. That was San Francisco mall in AOL. It's the axis. Yeah. I mean, those things can be juxtaposed in so much as you talk about planning and how that important that is. And you immediately prior to that, you talked about freedom. And some people would say that, in fact, those two are going to be at loggerheads all the time. Yeah, yeah. Again, a really good point. And for me, yeah, very fair, I would say, as long as the plan is what you want, then you are free. So for me, if I've got something to look forward to, if I love to know what I'm doing, but in saying that, my schedule changes all the time. Like, I have learned the lesson not to book my return flight anywhere because I'll go on holiday and quite often I'll book a week and I'll leave after two days. I just changed my mind. Like, I might want to be somewhere else, I might want to be with someone else. You know, I do change my mind a lot when it comes to my schedule. So I've learned just to kind of play it by ear. Of course, if you've got meetings and stuff, you obviously have to be respectful of other people's time. But I like to remain pretty free, but at the same time, if I schedule foreign advance knowing that that stuff I'm going to want to do, I'll never schedule foreign advance to do something that I'm like, I don't really want to do that. So for example, the past three weeks in New Zealand have been three of the most intense weeks of my life. It's been absolutely crazy. But I was so excited about that intensity. And then New York like two months ago and we started booking in our conferences, now events, and all the speaking engagements and everything. I was like, man, I'm excited about this. And I get excited about, I like one of the reasons I like scheduling is because I, part of the fun is actually the excitement of looking forward to something. So for example, if I've got my holiday book to Hong Kong in November, which I do, we're already planning. We've got to WhatsApp group with my two friends who are going with me. We're talking about where we're saying what we're going to do, what restaurants we're going to go do. And it's part of the fun of actually getting ready for it. - Absolutely. - Just as fun to plan as it is to be there sometimes. - Yeah, exactly. - So it sounds like it's all about what your perspective of freedom is. - Absolutely. - Yeah. What shaped you as a human being? - For me, my father died when I was 15 and the plane crash, that certainly had a big impact. Because before that, I had wanted to be an airline pilot. I'd wanted to, you know, I was obsessed about flying planes. I thought about maybe becoming a commercial kind of businessman, a lawyer, getting into politics maybe. And when that happened, I kind of changed my perspective a lot. I read Sir Richard Branson's autobiography quite soon after and that was probably the single biggest defining factor or thing that changed my life, I would say. From a trajectory perspective, I always struggle with that. - That's a great idea. - You know, prior to reading that book, I was absolutely going to college studying law, you know, going to become a commercial lawyer, you know, then trying to get into politics. I read Branson's book, I was like, screw politics. I'm probably never, and I'd still say to this say, ever going to get into politics. But I really want to go and start like companies and have heaps of fun and like have freedom and travel around the world and do new things. And for me, after I read that book, it changed everything. - And you said screw university too, didn't you? - I did, yeah, I had a $40,000 law scholarship, which I said to use a Branson quote, screw it, let's do it. And turned it down and I'm going to start on my first company. And that was, you know, four and a half years ago. And honestly, I've never ever, ever once regretted that decision. I couldn't imagine ever going to college today. I've got a lot of friends who are studying and I take my head off to them. I certainly couldn't do it, to be honest. I just, again, I talk about freedom. The idea of having to turn up for an exam and actually sit down and be quiet for three hours without my computer. And just like, fill out a bit of paper. Seems so wrong to me. And I could never, ever, ever do that now. And I kind of worry sometimes. I'm like, man, have I lost my ability to like, because I was quite a good, I was a pretty good student. But I don't think I could ever do that now, to be honest. If you could have a conversation now with your dad, what would you say, having learnt what you've learnt since your dad passed away? I think if I were to have a conversation with him now, it would probably be more about life itself as opposed to like business as such. Like, what are the most important things to get out of life? Like, what was, you know, what did you kind of regret? I'm not regret, but what did you think you put too much time into another enough time and two? And probably just more around that. So the stuff, some of the big more fundamental questions that we kind of ask ourselves. I think for me, like, I think I've got that balance pretty good. Like, I've talked about today a lot about these holidays and spending time with friends and family. But over the past couple of years, a lot of these things have developed. So like, if I look back to when I was like 16, 17, 18, like friendship wasn't really a big thing in my life at all. It's really only been over the past couple of years. I've developed like a really strong group of friends all over the world that, you know, that are really important to me now. So I think if I had to have a conversation with him, it would be less about my journey and more about some of those big questions. But it's quite interesting because like, the past five years have been pretty intense. Well, the past four and a half years in business that, yeah, I mean, it's one of those things that like, when I was like, I'm doing stuff today and I'm, you know, investing in things and going on vacations and doing really cool things around the world that we did as a family. But, you know, my dad and my mom had worked like all their life to do those things. And then here I am at 22 and, you know, just getting started and like living a pretty epic life in many ways. And sometimes I wouldn't say I feel guilty, but you just feel like, I don't know. I just think, you know, my, the finish line is always moving, it would probably be what I'd say. It's like, when I was that age, what the life we had as a family was like, all I would have ever wanted in life was like, you know, great vacations as a holiday, sorry, as a family, you know, spending time together, going out for nice meals together, you know, doing cool things. And I think I always would have aspired to do that in the future and that would have been like the definition of success, whereas now that is my life, you know, I am doing all that stuff now, you know, I've achieved some success when I've been young, I've been really lucky in many ways, but now the finish line is just so different. And I think that's a dangerous game sometimes, because like the finish line is always moving and that's a good thing because you're always striving for new goals, but at the same time, you do need to realise sometimes that what you've got is pretty, pretty cool. And if you can like, when I look at my life and what I do, and you know, how I get to talk to, and the opportunities I've gotten, everything, it's like, it's about as good as you and ever. Like, it's about as good as you could reasonably realistically ever expect. It's like you don't need a jet or a super yacht or anything. Like if you're traveling around the world, money's not really an object for the life that you want to live. You've got plenty of really good friends, you're healthy, you've got good fitness and you're eating at all the restaurants that you want to and you're not restricted by anything, which I'm not really, it's like, that's pretty good. So I think just, I talked to him about that and about the moving line, the finish line moving, and how you kind of, yeah, just how you monitor that. That's a hard one, isn't it? When is enough enough? Because in our heads, we can often answer that. But our behaviours don't always match what we say in our heads. Absolutely, absolutely. And I think for me, one of the things that balance is that is just spending time with people who are from different backgrounds and have different passions to you. Like 99% of the people I surround myself with are other founders, other entrepreneurs, other investors, people who have started companies, who are building companies, who are ambitious, maybe they're making quite a bit of money or they're certainly aspire to. And I think that can be quite limiting. So I try and surround myself as well with people who, the top of their field, because I love being surrounded by people who are passionate and successful. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but in a different area. Like I just came back from Queenstown a couple of days ago and I was with a friend of mine down there who's like a world champion skier. And it was just so cool because the conversation you have is so different to all my other friends if you're talking about startups and the latest idea and the next to greatest business. It's like that conversation just is like, you're having that so often that it's quite cool to have friends and hang out with people that are from completely different backgrounds, have completely different goals than you. And just have fun with those people as well, because it definitely expands your horizon, gives you greater perspective on the world. And it's really fun as well. And it's interesting, isn't it, because it's about saying what one person's success looks like is completely different from another person's success and it's respecting that. - Absolutely. And as well as respecting it, learning from it. Because for me, it's like when I hang out with my friend from Queenstown, I'm like, man, I want to do more of this stuff. I want to do more skiing, more bungee jumping, more skydiving. And you know, you don't necessarily need to make a billion dollars. Like if you were living your life where you had total freedom to like go to all the places in the world you wanted and go skiing and skydiving and base jumping and doing fun stuff, like wouldn't that be just as much fun and just as rewarding as sitting on a superhero in Monaco? Like, I know that's a crazy comparison, but I'm just using it as an example. It's like, I think when you're like in business, like everybody's driving for more and for excess and for everything, but you know, more money, a bigger house, a bigger boat, like everything like that. But it's like, is that really going to make you happier? I mean, we all know the answer is no. I think you need enough money that you feel like you have the freedom that you want. I think freedom is happiness. I'm talked about that a lot. I think for everybody it is, or for most people, nobody likes not feeling free. So freedom is happiness. And it's not a huge amount of money you need to actually be, to have like good freedom in your life. Again, after a certain point, there's like diminishing returns, right? You don't necessarily need another few million dollars like just to get a nicer watch. Like it's not going to make you happy. - It's a conundrum I suspect you're going to experience throughout your life. Is that challenge of what is enough and how far do I want to continue to push myself? - Yeah. - It's, I don't know if you know the fisherman's story, but it kind of reminds me of the fisherman's story, the guy who loved fishing and took so much pleasure for him. So eventually he was so successful at fishing that he bought a boat and then he bought a boat and then he realized he could give up his job because he was catching so many fish and then he started hiring other fishermen to come on his boat and before he knew he had 10 boats. And then one day, why a company said all I want to do is go fishing. - Yeah, yeah, exactly. - Exactly. - It's a great example of that. - Yeah. - I think impact is another thing, right? I haven't talked a huge amount about that yet, but impact is a big one. It's like, you know, one of the things that's addictive about success and about starting companies is the, I guess the, the greater track record and traction you get, the bigger impact you can have. And that's more addictive in many ways than like the money you can make. And I've certainly found that it's like, you know, doing this work of lifeline and with eat my lunch and now with the school and the scholarship, like I want to do a lot more of that. And if you have greater resource, you can certainly make a much bigger difference. If you look at some of the stuff Bill Gates is doing and Warren Buffett and Richard Branson Sarah Blakely, you know, that, that doing some pretty big, like philanthropic things. And they can do that because of the resource they have. And that is addictive. But again, to a similar thing to what I mentioned, like, when is enough enough? Like, I mean, you can always do more. You can always be having a bigger impact. Donating more of your time, starting something new, you know, helping more people. At some point, that kind of excess kind of attitude of like more, more, more, more, more, you need to, I think, yeah, I think you need to just realize that things are pretty good. I've got to say, your energy is absolutely infectious. As I said earlier, you speak at such a rapid pace as if that, you know, this world is running out of time. My mum's been telling me off about that for my whole life. Also, that's scary now. I say, I'm not your mother. If you were to leave a message with our audience, so we ask everybody this question, what would it be? Probably the greatest message I would leave would just be, yeah, would probably just be to take big risks and realize that the worst case scenario, work out what the worst case scenario is, realize that you'll be happy or okay, you can live with that and then make a massive crazy decision and actually go and do it, because it's making the decision itself that's the hardest part. So I remember when I first moved to the US to expand my business. I was down in Queensland on something called Think Week, which was invented by Bill Gates. And I was down there just like thinking for a week. I reread Richard Branson's autobiography and it's actually had two major tipping points. The first was to turn down the scholarship and start my first business. The second time was to move to the US, naturally expand the business into America. Because reading that book was just like holy shit, this guy takes massive, massive risks. And has really put himself on the line at points where he's done things that have just seemed absolutely crazy. But those risks have paid off, sure some of them haven't, you fail sometimes, but you have success. But I think the greater the risks you take and the more you're prepared to put yourself on the line to achieve something, the bigger the opportunity. And I though for me I went back to Auckland, I packed my bag, I had to Skype call the mentor in Africa and I jumped on the plane a month later, moved to the US. When I say moved, I sort of my immigration out, I got an IVs for foreign media visa and now we're up there on the IVs are living in New York doing our business up there. And I would have never ever done, and to be in New York at 22, like living in one of the greatest cities in the world, like expand your horizons so much and you learn so much just by being immersed in that. And I think not enough people take those risks, not enough people pack their bags and get on the plane. And from failure comes learnings. If I could ask you at this point in time, what's being your greatest failure, has there been one? Yeah, I mean unfiltered so far has been a business that we've worked insanely hard on. And I would say like we interview 70 people in America and so many of these companies have been runaway success stories where they start and the only real direction is up. You know, they raise some early money, then they go out and raised 10 million, 20 million, 200 million in their IPO, and it's a billion dollar company like this is the who we're surrounded by, right? And our business so far we've we've certainly gone in the right direction, but there has been downs and there has been ups and there's been a couple of times in this business that's been quite hard, you know, one time a year and before we raised any money, we nearly ran out of money. And I remember sitting there one day thinking about shutting the business down, I was like look, or selling it for cheap, I was like you know, it was at a time when we had done some great things, I just lost my passion, my excitement. I remember I had a CEO at the time from Australia actually, and we was having a conversation. Actually thanks to him, he said, he said, let's go out and let's give it a go, let's raise some money, let's properly back this, let's grow it. And I remember sitting there and I was so close to saying I'm done, I just want to don't want to do this and he said, let's do it and I said, okay, we went out, we raised our first million dollars and then, you know, grew the business into the US. So you know, there's been certainly downs. I wouldn't say I've had like a massive failure in terms of like an idea itself yet, but unfiltered hasn't been this kind of runaway zero to a hundred million dollar success story in like three years that so many of the companies I've interviewed have been. We've had learnings, we've had ups, we've had downs and sure we still back ourselves and believe that we can become what we want to become. But there's been times in the journey where I've nearly considered giving up, you just have to keep going, realise that, you know, nothing's easy. You know, it's a simple, simple phrase, but it's very good. If it didn't come easy, you wouldn't, if it came easy, you wouldn't enjoy it. Yeah, exactly. It's got to be hard, it's got to be challenging. It's always, yeah, it's always challenging. That's, you know, the more challenging it is and many ways and more stimulating it as well. Jacob, absolutely night out, we are going to be hearing more about you and your businesses for many, many years to come. It's been a real pleasure to have the opportunity to have a chat. Great, thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity as well. An old head on young shoulders or just a hugely energetic, intelligent, persistent and determined individual with a strong vision and the hard work and determination to see it through. A bit of both, I reckon. You can check out all of Jake's interviews on unfiltered.tv and all of our podcasts with inspiring individuals like Jake on the messagepod.com.au or Apple Podcasts. And if you like what you hear, please do leave us a review. Thanks for listening. Till next time.