From Failures to Funding: Strategic Moves Founders Should Know with Joe Wadakethalakal, CEO of PvX

[Music] Joe vatal no no I pronounce it wrong I I had it right right Joe v no [ __ ] V Catholic Joe what Catholic perfect you forgot the case Catholic that's a hard name where does it come from it comes from kerola uh which is you know Southern India it's like the southernmost of the triangle that's what I know about Indian names the more North you get the shorter your name comes in like a um it's actually the name of my dad's house oh so the so if you go to my dad's house on the gate it says Water Catholic and so the address is Water Catholic house which is pretty cool um and yeah so everyone in that family has that has that name basically you have quite the history you're like the entrepreneur of entrepreneurs because you didn't grew up in India no so

um so my my dad actually moved to Indonesia before I was born and my parents were living in Mumbai and uh my mom was was pregnant with me and so my dad sort of went to Indonesia to scope things out and then basically was like okay all clear right and then Indonesia sounds like a place Indonesia is real this wasn't Bali this is not Bali this is Jakarta and and then so my mom you know know delivers me obviously and then 30 days after I'm like fit to fly and and then I get on a plane and I'm in Jakarta boom so Jakarta it's it's weird it's really hard for me to kind of Define where I'm from because obviously have an Indian passport yeah and I feel Indian as well but of course I feel very Indonesian I feel American candidly because Singaporean Singaporean yeah so it's it's weird yeah you're an entrepreneur I yeah I guess that's so

tell me about like uh I mean we're going to talk about like you're CEO and founder of pvx partner before that you were the president of MPL yeah what does MPL stand for it's a skill gaming company it's uh it had a fun name yeah mobile Premier League mobile Premier League exactly so you were the president of that you run through the IPO for that company kind of we didn't list we're not listed you're not listed no no no we're not list I thought it was public list no no no hopefully soon I mean who knows but um it'll list eventually I'm I'm fairly confident of that but you know um it's it's a private company all right well let's let's take on a journey and let's let's get to pvx but let's start from from Joe V cathol yeah in Jakarta yes what what was your childhood like um my childhood was was amazing I mean I you know I I had a I had a pretty good childhood um my my my mom was an

entrepreneur or is an entrepreneur actually I remember that um so you know obviously for a while it was you know sort of like my dad was a GM at a factory and then my mom also was like working for another company and then I think things started to get really interesting when like my mom started her first company at the age of seven right when I was at the age of seven sorry not obviously when she was not AG of seven like damn that's a keep up with that and uh and and so you know it was really cool because after after school I would go to the office right that's like where I would hang out with my parent I'm an only child so I didn't have any siblings so I'd go straight from the school to the office and then like my mom would make me do like random things like I help build their first website and I would like you know like sit in on random calls and she would ask my opinions on random things sort of just being a fly on the wall and absorbing things and I think that's when I

sort of got it planted in my head that like oh great one day I'm going to run this business you know and and I went to an international school where you know a lot of people were really transient and so you know people would come in and you'd have your heartbroken like every two years right cuz you'd become best friends with somebody and then they they'd leave like [ __ ] write me a letter in Uganda cuz that's where my family is going next and it was really sad actually for me like cuz like I would be close to people and then I remember I would like start crying cuz like you know I'm in like fifth grade and like my best friends have all left right um So eventually over time basically what happens is you like if you're in that school like I was like basically all the way till graduation you end up finding a click of people that are the like the constants right and um one theme was that all of them were basically entrepreneurial like kids who came from entrepreneurial families as well so those guys are the ones actually had roots in in Jakarta so

they didn't leave they didn't you know they were staying staying there and so they all became my best friends and so growing up I would like go to their you know go to their houses and obviously spend a lot of time with their parents and like you know they'd be like adoptive parents to me and they're all entrepreneurs so I was very fixed from an early age that yes I'm going to eventually become a a Founder I wanted to be a Founder yeah felt normal it felt very normal um and it didn't feel like a big risk you know um so and then after so obviously graduated high school went to college in California and then my mom sells her company um and I'm like oh [ __ ] like there goes my job cuz the plan was like now you have to now you have your own have to figure something out right um so I decided to go into banking um

and I was a banker or I mean I was not a banker I was an analyst at JP Morgan in the TMT group uh in New York so did that for about two years and then I joined a really cool private Equity Fund called uh ZM capital or zmc which is actually founded by Strauss who's the CEO of Take 2 MH um and that was really cool because we got a lot of exposure to the gaming business so zmc also you know had like um like had done a deal with with Take 2 basically zmc was running Take 2 as well right so a lot of the the management team and take two were also Partners at at zmc cool so you know got got to know those guys really really well and then obviously doing um you know TMT like buyouts um that was an amazing experience you know those are great guys um have a great relationship with all of them to this day but I sort of felt that um

you know investing is a lot of fun it's very it's very intellectually satisfying but to me it still felt like a simulation of the real thing and I wanted to get closer to the source and the other thing I also realize is that past a certain point just making money was not a motivator for me um you know obviously I think if if you do a good job in the investing World it can be a very lucrative career and you can make a good great amount of money but I think unless you're doing something on the investing side that's truly Innovative and entrepreneurial then it's hard to sort of make a I mean in my opinion it's it's hard to make like a huge impact or a huge dent you know yeah and I was more interesting in bringing something new than just making money um so so basically after you know

2 and a half 3 years I decided to move back to Indonesia cuz at that point I was like all right either go to business school try stay in PE or you know maybe go try work for a hedge fund but I was like let me I don't know let me back go back to Jakarta yeah so I had this hypothesis that um you know given the experience I had been lucky to accumulate um that that would give me a comparative advantage in in a market like Indonesia which which I think is true to an extent but if I had to do it again I think you know I wouldn't recommend starting a business in in Indonesia necessarily like I'm not sure that's the right move why it's just like you know what it's just ultimately Market size so so the benefits that you get from having a better Network are not as valuable in a small market right so so honestly today if you said all right you're going to be dropped like

you know spawned in in any market right and you can and you have some startup Capital where do you want to start and for me it would be a market like the us or China or India right these are like those are the markets to play because the markets are just so big yeah and that is more important than having a great Network in my opinion right and so I think hindsight's 2020 but attention app and game developers are you ready to unlock the secrets behind the world's top performing apps and games with sensor Tower you get the ultimate Competitive Edge whether it's breaking into new markets fine-tuning your UA strategies or boosting monetization dive into Data like never before track Global Trends across app stores analyze Market leading inap purchase and inap AD strategies and Benchmark your performance with real time insight the best part sensor Tower doesn't just

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publisher in Indonesia if you're generating like 30 40 million of Revenue okay you're like huge okay in the US you're probably like number you know number 73 you know what I mean and and that that sounds bad but it's actually really good because you know you can still build something and like you don't have to crush it and still have a decent outcome whereas like you know number 73 in Indonesia is you're generating a million dollars a year Max yeah right or maybe 500k a year like it's it's not meaningful right yeah and so that I think is is something that uh I didn't appreciate and understand MH where sure I had access I was able to meet investors I was able to get the meetings I was able to build a business but ultimately it's not interesting if the business is not big enough um and I actually think the like the the benefits of having such a great Venture ecosystem

in places like you know SF and even London and plac like it's real you know um I think I've I mean even versus a place like Singapore where I I'm today where which is relatively good um I I don't think it holds a candle to you know some of the western markets out there access to Capital Access to Human Resources access to clients access to Market access to Market that to me is the biggest thing right access to Market yeah um so anyways I moved back to Indonesia I became like a consultant um initially so I was like working with a bunch of different companies to help them start up in Indonesia so they were like oh you speak Western business and you speak Indonesian business you think it's a great market like what's the language they speak in Indonesian it's Indonesian yeah it's called Bahasa Indonesia so which just means Indonesian language but um yeah you just say Bahasa basically that means that's that's like I've only been to Bali Bali is great but there's so much more to Indo yeah you

know it's the biggest archipelago in the world uh really yes it's like 18,000 Islands it's as wide as the US yeah like from coast to coast it takes you like seven hours to get from one end to the other of Indonesia yes it's huge this it's like it's like it's like uh you know like dark matter like people like it's just like you know it's like big but no one can see it for some reason yeah I mean b PL sight yeah it's like as big as the US right population also it's like almost 300 million people it's a it's a huge market and it's a market a lot of people ignore um but a lot of the Overlook may be better yeah sure Overlook ignore whatever I mean whatever's the politically correct term for it but but um it's it's it's a market that not a lot of people you know for whatever reason get excited about sorry I got you on a Sidetrack you were in indon Indonesia being a consultant helping other companies to land in Indonesia yes and I realized that that

business wasn't really scalable M um and so I started to Pivot and I said okay what part of this is scalable and it's basically you know the company formation part and the payroll processing part and basically all the parts I didn't want to do uh were really scalable so I pivoted the business there and I asked my mom to come and help me out and so she basically came out of retirement took over that business um and she's been scaling it over the last 10 years she's done a phenomenal yeah shout out to Mom honestly like it's uh it's been a it's it's a great lifestyle business it's bought me a lot of freedom edly um yeah it's it's going to be a good outcome for for all of us um but anyways that was the first company and then I decided to start a publisher um and raised a bit of money for that and basically the idea is very simple it was like a buzz feed clone um

that was interesting that was like I would say my first sort of you know like real startup I mean it was like more kind of scaled startup experience right because that that business had so much pull um from from the audience and we you know we we became one of still are I think they still are one of the largest websites in the country we were like top five media website in the entire country nice we were doing like 30 40 million monthly uniques um you know 3 400 million page views like it was an insane uh business but um it taught me very quickly like it's not about users it's about business model MH and we can go into long we can do a whole separate podcast on the economics of publishing but I realized at that time that you know if you're selling your ad Impressions

programmatically um the the system's sort of rigged where you know right I'm making let's say $100,000 on a million impressions but when you go from a million to 2 million you think oh I should be making at least 200,000 or say 180 but like no you're making 120 you know suddenly like pricing adjusts so it's very hard to scale yeah you know so and then obviously those are so I think think the business model is different today because you have ai so maybe with like AI content Le generation the economics change but at that point like we had 100 people wow right and and like we had you know 60 70 of them were like basically content creators like I had content farms in tier 2 tier three cities in Indonesia creating content in Indonesian right um to drive up traffic but you couldn't really monetize the traffic well where it couldn't really scale and so that entire business became a B2B business actually where it's like

you're selling to agencies you're selling to Brands you're being like Hey we're doing events right or you're saying hey like do a whole kind of website takeover and pay a million dollars or $2 million for that takeover for the year and and and that's fine that's actually fairly high margin but it's very sales Le and it's non-recurring exactly not predictable it's non-recurring and that sucks because if you're like hey I've just worked so hard I've gotten to say $5 million of Revenue now when you go you need you need to show growth we were event like we were you know not VC backed but we were like institutionally backed right so we had like people who were taking Adventure bets on us and so you're like all right I need to go five to seven but when you go to seven you need to win back the five and then you need to add two yeah and so you need to create more content more this more that in order to get more space for sale and and it's uh it's not scalable very hard to scale that business and so I got very lucky I got

uh we had interest from U from another acquirer like sort of the News Corp of Indonesia if you will um actually they wanted to acquire my major shareholder M uh which is another website sort of conglomerate and so they acquired them and then they took took us out that was 2018 and that was that was great I say it was a great PR exit for me because like you know good outcomes for a sharehold ERS uh everyone made money except me basically that's uh that's that's how it is no comments yeah so but but it's fine I mean it look it was it was a good outcome I think generally and good learning experience amazing learning experience I was you know in my I was like 28 right 29 so it was like pretty amazing at that point obviously at the first business which is still kind of nicely chugging long and then I met um I met Sai from from MPL yes and we got introduced through a

mutual investor friend they had actually I met him in like October they had just Incorporated in like September started working on the company I think in like June but had amazing traction and I just saw this hockey stick growth and I was like all right like I got to find a way to work with this business I got excited by the hockey I got super excited and you know what I got really excited about is that I saw a clear role for someone like me in that business because it was such a like running a website in my opinion is not you know and not to take away from anyone else who's running a website but I don't think it's truly that Tech Le it's much more content Le yeah right it's not really Tech Le I have a website I know so um whereas whereas a gaming business is truly Tech Le and I think what I saw is that I had a clear Gap where you know at this point I had a solid kind of footing and grounding in finance I knew how to run business businesses I'd run a 100% 100% company

but I really was not I didn't know anything about tech and if I wanted to be you know a tech founder or Tech CEO eventually then I really had to know how to build and run a tech business and you know s is like an incredibly strong product Visionary type and his co-founder shub is an amazing sort of engineering type and I was like great like no matter what happens here like it doesn't matter like luckily at that point you kickass liveops need kickass tools that's where heroic Labs comes in they just released a massive update to their sator liveops platform and having done my research I can say with confidence that it's second to none in a single product you get everything you need including event capture player segmentation feature Flags remote configuration AB testing experimentation live events calendar messaging retention grafing analytics and so much more if you're serious about running live

services in a game get serious about the tools you use connect with heroic labs and make some serious cheese with your live Ops you know it didn't matter to me if even if the company imploded in two years obviously I didn't want that to happen but I was like I'm going to learn so much from these guys that it's fine like I'll I'll learn from these guys for two years and then I'll go do something else that was the initial and the fact that you had mom was running the uh the Consulting business buiness mhm and you had you know the um Corporate Services turned into corporate Serv corporate service business in Indonesia that gave you certain type of a cushioning to take risks yes exactly which is really important with any kind of a startup because if you don't have that cushioning and you've passed this your 28 29 you're like dude do you have an apartment do you have a wife like you need to like your buddies are all out of NBA they're already bought their second homes like you can't oh and man like at that point like the looking around the corner and thing is real right cuz at that point honestly like I mean you know

we're sort of glossing over the details here but like things were really rough you know for me from like 2014 to 2018 I landed in a pretty happy place yeah but you know there was a long time where like obviously at that point I you know I had a kid on the way my dad had passed away during that time the business like went through a lot of turbulence you know there was there were times when I was like man like I'm going to have to start I'm going to ask my mom to like sell her house you know like uh to just cover my bills like it was really rough you know um and that's kind of that's the thing that's the journey though yeah but we gloss over it often times and we go through like almost like a LinkedIn this job this job that job but there's no details of how hard because as an entrepreneur it is insanely hard what you go through insanely hard man it's insanely hard I mean like I also did a very stupid thing of you know trying to start multiple businesses at the same

time I got like I started a Live Events business on the side which almost took me under you know um I was trying to run two other businesses and I was helping my first business um I took on a whole bunch of debt right um a lot of hubris yeah a lot of but you know I needed the humility lesson in humility to be honest and and you know the the reality is like you don't learn any lessons like they don't come like it's not like you can just you know eat a power up and then suddenly like oh I've I've now become mature you have to go through this [ __ ] unless you have excellent mentors that but that's that's I've seen some Founders who are like firsttime Founders go into the billion sphere yeah and they just have phenomenal mentors but you know it doesn't matter how phenomenal your mentors are if you don't listen to them okay yeah of course yeah you know what I mean and I think I think ultimately and not just have phenomenal mentors of course they're incredibly cap and whatnot but they also listen to

their mentors yeah and and look I think I think um uh ridiculous startup success takes an incredible amount of effort and dedication and talent like not taking anything away from that but it's also timing right yes 100% it's also timing because you can have the best [ __ ] idea or the best concept and if the market is not there it doesn't matter right and I've seen this personally in some cases where you know you you do everything right and you're nothing's happening for six years and then suddenly the market catches up with what you saw and then the business hockey sticks right but then everyone only sees that part mhm they didn't see the fact that you're like you're living on like $3,000 a month for [ __ ] six years yeah right so so that's the thing and and that's that's the reality um and so I think and and I think it's

it's you know I think getting a lot of success early is very dangerous because it's very easy to trick yourself into thinking that you're successful because of what you did and because you're better than others because they haven't been successful and very rarely in my opinion are you truly successful because of what you did you know interestingly I we can go into this in npl later when we talk about skill and chance you can have a game that's 90% chance and 10% skill and it's still a game of skill right meaning that like if someone you play against someone and they have 0% skill like you're going to beat them like you know there's going to be a lot of volatility outcomes 10 out Le n out of 10 yeah but if you if you if you kind of play that game a 100 times you're going to have a much better record than them so there's skill involved but there's so much volatility and outcomes from chance right um so that that's that's what I think about sort of the startup you know

success is that is that it's very dangerous to trick yourself into thinking oh I was successful because of me and not because of the market or the ecosystem you know and so having that humility I think is is is really valuable um which is why I think it's there's a benefit if you've had a couple of startups where they've gone okay but they haven't been rocket successes you also understand right I I had Dennis Fong here on the podcast and he sold four I think four companies like great outcomes yeah uh and then he was on his fifth one and he said the same thing it's always [ __ ] hard like it's so hard no matter like fifth time like four exits like Google bought his company I think take two bought his company like these type of exits and and still it's like starting from the beginning even though you think you know everything with greatest Founders it's still incredibly hard and by definition in a way right because for you to do a really

good startup like that's going to create in uh asymmetrical value by definition it needs to be contrarian right it needs to be contrarian and correct and the correct thing is just timing mhm so basically it's like you know where the future is headed you have some sort of inside view onto where the future you have a version of the future you think is going to be true belief you're building for that version of the future and by definition if every thinks you're right then you're probably like either you're going to have an average outcome like it's probably not going to be a phenomenal outcome may still be okay yeah but for you to have really crazy outcomes you need everyone to disagree with you right well not everybody not everybody but but most most people should be like huh like yeah but so people are like yeah I understand but yes that's the best one it's not like this is insane why you doing this but more like here's some facts based on today's market well I don't think that's

the best way to go and you're like but I believe the Market's going to go there yeah cuz you're like you get what I'm doing but you have a different perspective than it so it's not like ludicrous but it's just not smart what other people would think correct I mean look at gaming right you could have said in the early or mid 2000s like hey Mobile's going to be huge that could be a view and you could invest against that and if you did that you you'd be a multi-billionaire at the same time you could have taken the view that hey VR is going to be big and you build against that but you're 20 years too early or or 30 years too early both are correct it's just I mean both we'll see on VR but you know it's just a matter of timing of course um but going back to sort of psychology yeah I think for human beings it's very painful because ultimately we are social animals you know whether like you know this is just the way I view the world is like ultimately I see the human being as as an as a as a as an animal right and true primates right and primates care about status they care

about what other people it's a survival skill I mean we're we've evolved that way you know you need people to validate you and like you because that was a survival skill right historically at least less over time less over time but especially when you're 20 and 30 but that programming is in us I think there's a natural programming in human beings that want social validation of course right and and I think it's an evolutionary thing because if people didn't like you like whatever 50,000 years ago your little tribe didn't like you you died right you cast it out you cast out fish yeah and you and you die right so you needed like it was important to get people to like you so because we have that programming I think it's very this is what makes entrepreneurs really interesting creatures because you have to be comfortable with everyone disagreeing with you and everyone saying you're wrong and you have to get that feedback find a way to not let it affect your

psyche and still keep moving forward and at the same time convince another subset of people that you're actually correct yeah it's a really like I think that that is the hardest problem in in entrepreneurship it's actually not the Financial Risk I think a lot of people over index on the financial difficulty of you know oh it's taking risk I actually think you know for most for a lot of people people right like people really overestimate the downside like a lot of people actually have hidden safety nets you know what I mean um but but I think the thing that's really tough is hearing other people sort of tell you that you're or failing or having that fear of failure is huge is huge yeah where you're like oh that was a [ __ ] waste of five years exactly and yeah yeah it's like nothing came out of it but but yeah I think that's even

even more I've I've literally seen companies that have sold for billions and the investors like great investors would would say to these Founders in the beginning like that's a [ __ ] stupid idea yeah yeah I can't tell you how many times I've heard that yeah and then of course like the initial idea they might be absolutely correct the initial idea was [ __ ] stupid but over time it just developed but and the and the founders yeah so I have a model about this which is that like you know how bats um like fly like they B bats can't see right but they use echol location so like they're they're blasting [ __ ] out they're like seeing and then they're getting the feedback back like that's like the early stage of a startup yeah that's true you know what I mean you can't see like so you're you're Flying Blind but you're blasting out you're blasting out information and then you're getting feedback and so like adjusting based on that yeah you're Bas get getting the feedback and then you're adjusting your direction and and the initial Capital you raise is so you can find a viable flight path right and so that's you that

that is the process so like you know when people try something and it doesn't work you know it's like what do you expect like what's the odds of the first thing you want to do working it's it's the odds are infantism like lwh mhm so it's about kind but but it's again about receiving the feedback and is it true is it true feedback is it real or is it Noise Okay is it real then if it's real let me adjust and and it requires a lot of humility yeah you know and the Paradox is as a as a Founder you need to have extreme conviction in what you're doing but at the same time you need to always be willing to be wrong how do you balance that because these are two contradicting elements so you're saying and not you're saying I've seen this like you have to have conviction in what you're doing so meaning that when people doubt you you still go forward mhm but at the same time you have to be able to adjust to

feedback that you're receiving from the outside what's the basic way to do it I've seen I've seen this happen in in like the two negative scenarios is the one where the founder does not adjust because they have such a strong conviction that it's turned into a religion and then we just don't believe any contrarian and then you have the other one where you have such a low conviction where you're just adjusting nonstop and wobbling and pivoting yeah so look it's not easy and I don't think there it's constant I think a lot of this is based on your mood you know uh and your temperament but I think the thing that I try to do is like is this an opinion like is this someone's opinion right and then if it's their opinion okay is this person believable or not you know um like if I hear from like we're doing something at the intersection of fex in gaming yeah we need to talk about that yeah but but you

know if I hear someone who is you know let's say completely not in that space let's say they were in the event space or whatever and they're like oh this this is ridiculous then you know it's fine yeah sure um but but I I wouldn't rank that opinion as very high on believability right um but I also feel like as as a Founder sometimes you over index on what investors are telling you and I think this is the wrong place to get feedback from exactly step into the future of game monetization with exola the premier partner for game developers seeking to expand their reach in Revenue exola provides a robust Suite of tools designed to enhance user acquisition maned subscriptions and streamlined Payment Solutions worldwide unlock new markets and maximize profitability through their customized secure payment architecture and dedicated support team exola powering game developers to

achieve Global [Music] success we talked about when we're walking here like there's um I feel like at least this is my own experience is in the beginning of the founder Journey literally whatever VC say to you because you haven't really interacted with Venture capitalists before and they tend to be your first investors yeah and when you're speaking to them for the first time you like I have access some knowledge some hidden knowledge that I've never seen before like these guys seem to be on the ball non-stop they have their hands on the pulse and every information that they give I should follow because I've I've never even being given and then throughout the time when you understand that a lot of the time the information proves to be wrong you understand that they give their perspective and they get their data from very changing sources and they're kind of on the on the on the on you know the Forefront of the hype so that's why what they feel and what they

see is very important but again what makes VC advice so powerful is because they themselves tend to be ex-f Founders they're very convincing they're very not always very few of them actually in my experience are ex Founders well a lot of the ones that I interact with are exf founders and and through that there's a lot of respect towards them and of course and and they're very knowledgeable and they're very good at communicating most of them and so that's why you tend to also believe because the way the message has been delivered and who it's delivered by yes so I take so just going back to your first question you know obviously when you get opinions it's it's believability but then it's also just real feedback like what is real Market feedback right are people actually buying your like when you pitch what percentage moves to the next stage like look at that objectively right and I'm not talking about VC pitches I'm talking about pitching your product that you're trying to sell or you know looking at the actual customer like that that is truth right and so that's how

you need to manage that balance between conviction and and and and being willing to change right um going to your point about VCS I actually I I um I I put founder feedback like feedback from people who have taken real risk um on a much higher pedestal right whether who regardless whether they're VC's or not but I think um it's it's like if someone has played a lot of flight simulator they'll be able to talk like a pilot act like a pilot you know they'll be able to do they'll be able to be a great pilot Avatar M but you do not want them to fly your [ __ ] plane okay like the guy you want to fly your plane is the guy who's actually put 10,000 hours on a Triple 7 not the guy who's done it on flight simulator of course but if you meet them you might not be able to tell the difference by the way and you might even say that the one from coming from flight simulator is more polished maybe right

so this is the thing but ultimately it's you need to actually get the feedback from someone who's done it and by the way I think that's I think you know when they give you feedback on your business model and stuff maybe it's you know it's interesting but it's more I think really valuable to get feedback from someone who's gone through the Journey knows the [ __ ] understands can empathize with you knows where you're sitting right um yeah and has done mistakes before and has committed yeah and has done mistakes and also knows that you know this is a place where you're going to be hyper sensitive and you know you're hyper alert you know you're in a state of vigilance because you know you're like fighting for your survival right and so people who are in that state of vigilance are going to be like different creatures to deal with that the the they have committed mistakes before and having the confidence to speak about them I think is is really important at least for me because what I noticed is

it was very hard to talk about your challenges because when when you're running a company at this is my experience it's like there are the product challenges but those tend to be a little bit like at least to me they were smaller than the challenges of just building an organization MH and the teamwork and and the soft parts and then you're almost like at least for me I was almost like ashamed of having like conflicts with people cuz it felt like like this these are not the issues that I should be even talking about where hindsight I was like this is the number one issue is the misalignment with your founding team and and the human part of it and like the the storming and forming part is actually the the biggest challenge of a startup yeah but but because the founders who I was talking to never talked about that part it was more about like you know growth product this type of stuff then I also never brought it up right so it's it's important that that the people are kind of real with with the with the only

later on they talked about like yeah actually we had the same thing and we had the co-founder problems and this and that and this is why we structured these deals in this way because it limits these type of problems to occur so anyways being open about your own challenges makes it make or about your mistakes on both the the product as well as the uh the the the qualitative side or the soft side allows the founder to open up and you create much better B yeah look vulnerability is is you know bonding is a function in my opinion of vulnerability or intense effort mhm and usually those two things go together right and so like you need to go through this is why like I I I one way I get close hacking getting close to people is like doing intense exercise with people for a while you will just naturally get close to with them yes right because you're going through difficult things together or you know I'm super close to you know the the other kids or not kids now all adults um but you know all the

all the all the guys and girls in my analyst program at at JP Morgan like I'm still very close to them cuz it was like two years of insanity right it was two years of insanity and we we did it together and so doing difficult things together with people is is um is a great way to bond um I don't know how we got into this Rabbit Hole when we're talking I know we we're I I just I'm really bad at this I just find most of the things that you say interesting and then I like chasing them and it's uh we're we're like the bat that takes too many signals it's all my fault um we we were talking about the founder feedback yeah founder feedback and and how and we ended up talking about this vulnerability part in terms of like how to make the founder feedback um but more how would I say acceptable to the founders and find that but um but yeah you were talking about opinion versus Market feedback and so forth yeah yeah this podcast is brought to you by abs flyer in today's Digital World understanding your app's Journey

from Discovery to download is more than just insightful it's essential enter apps flyer the leader in Mobile attribution and marketing analytics that allows you to measure the full potential of your marketing efforts making every ad dollar work smarter with apps flyer that's your new reality dive deep into Data driven insights that reveal exactly where your users come from and how they interact with your app apps sler where your app's potential meets performance but we can we can let's Circle back all the way cuz you're now at the beginning of MPL Journey oh right you meet you meet your two co-founders one is technical one is product yes and together you embark on this journey and you're just out of your fouryear stin with building your media company yes uh that that on the on on on the LinkedIn looks like a nice four-year journey and then when you uncover it you're you have emotional scars for days you should ask

my wife yeah and you almost saw your mama's house yeah so uh so that was a very tough Journey uh but you've uh you've you know you've wrapped it up and now you're you're going towards Tech right so so to be clear first of all I I was not I'm not a Founder at at MPL but I was one of the sort of founding employees if you will so one of the very early kind of team members and you know I think so the two Founders San sh you know I was super strong on product again like I said CH was very very very strong in engineering and I felt like there was this gap on the sort of business finance strategy side and that's essentially the like how I plugged it you know plugged the Gap I guess um and you know I think um the business had a lot of pull from the customers right and it was also a time of fairly easy money you know in terms of kind of raising money to fund growth which year that this was 2018 2018 2018

19 and we had a new angle right so ml's whole angle was hey you know India has a long history of real money gaming but there was never any platform that did that for casual games right so so ml's sort of um Vector right or or sort of uh angle of attack right into that market was to say hey let's bring real money for casual games onto one platform right so instead of just doing game by game it's one app it's like a Roblox right and that was very you know that that had a lot of customer pull right and so that gave us that sort of J curve initially it helped us to raise a lot of money behind that and then that helped us kind of build a really you know attractive business on top of it plus growing Indian market growing Indian market there was a lot of interest in India yeah moving from China a lot of companies were already looking at India in that sense yeah and in a way like it's so true like success beget success you know um Soros has this great sort of

theory where like he has many great theories yeah yeah but but this I forgot what it's called um reflexive ISM or something in the market where he's basically like you can invest I I mean I'm I'm butchering this so someone you should look it up or you know clarify it in the notes or whatever later but basically it's like Google Sor theories but but but I but I think the idea is the idea is something like um let's say let's say you know if you want let's say you want to build a billion dollar company right well the way to build like one way is obviously slowly increase your business but another way to do it is like you just put a 100 million bucks into it right and then it sort of because you've put the 100 million that that then gets you all the people that can actually build a billion dollar business you know what I mean and then and then you're you sort of like like live up to those expectations right

I think it's it's it's not always true obviously yeah but there's some of that where like candidly if we didn't I don't think if we if we didn't raise money the way we did the business could have plateaued or even gone down because it was like we rais money we leverage ex like there was a lot of excitement we use that excitement raise a bunch of money fomo fomo right and then the initial curve may have changed but now we had a ton of money to figure it out so that bought us time to figure something else out and then we raised more money and then like that allowed us to do more you know talk to me about this so this is like one of the topics that that always uh creates a lot of um conversation yeah and jealousy even is that some companies are just really good or some Founders companies and Founders are really good at raising a lot of money yeah despite and then there are companies who are like no your product has to sh go that you can raise and then there are companies that are like no we

will raise the money and then the product will come yes so I think all these things can be true I think um the challenge with you know raising money on great storytelling which is basically what you're saying yes is that it can also create bad outcomes um I think you know it's it's I mean there's many public cases right like we work and a whole bunch of these where EOS right like there's you can have a lot of fraud in there as well NT and ntx and what was FX FDX but but at the same time right like you know I think there's a strategic way of thinking about fundraising which I think we did very well at MPL um which is you know it allows you to it buys you a lot of momentum to get ahead of the pack right like for example you know when we did our series D is when we became became like a close to unicorn or unicorn the moment that

happened that unlocked massive um and we did a big I think we did a meaningful secondary at that point as well that that unlocked a brand new talent pool for us right being suddenly unicorn means you're able to get a much better press coverage you're able to like really hire the people that you want to hire you're able to get into all those meetings it become prestigious it unlocks things for you that's the reality yeah it's the financing can unlock things but ultimately if you don't have a strong business underlying it then it's just a house of cards right and so this is the challenge is you have to build a great business but you also have to have a great narrative and you can use financing very strategically um you know so so that that's you know I think you have to do both and and you this is where you come to place because you're the uh the two co-founders are good on product and Tech yeah but not on narrative and finances right no look I mean or if everybody's

good at everything everyone's good I me but that's not their but that was like your job but it's like how did we divide right I mean of course like you know Sai could definitely like he had you know he did the seed he did the series a like he could do a lot he could do that yeah but it's like hey I can also do that and this now frees up a lot of his time to do other stuff you don't have to switch your mind from because pitching and getting the deals is full it's more than fulltime job job you have to be telling the story you have to be foing you have to be playing and while you're doing that you're not doing the product exactly and I was on the road for like three years you know just pitching the company I did you know for the series D round I did like you know I don't 70 80 management meetings for the series E I did like a 100 management meetings you know and we got ended up getting like three investors at the obviously right three investors but the thing is like there's a lot of stuff you have to plow through there's no chance I would have been able to do that if I also had to be super involved on the day-to-day running

of the business right and so I think what what MPL did a really good job on is sort of dividing the responsibilities and be like you do this you do this you do this and we did it in a very low ego way where it was like you know they were you know s was totally fine with me being front and center with all the investors like I was the main point of contact you know I was you were the president at that point I was the president at that point which is which is a lot from the uh if you're a founder and you name somebody else president and they are the one talking about your company and essentially being the first point of contact for all the externals yeah so s is very confident man yeah yeah very confident a lot not a lot of Founders can do that I think you know but we had a great and we continue to have a great relationship but um I think we had a really good Business Partnership on that on that front um and it worked extremely well right it worked extremely well for us so you had the great story you had a good business underlying that this that that the combination brought you a lot of funding

yes and then a lot of funding brought you the status and the status allowed you to bring good talent good talent which help the business and allowed you to be more strategic where you didn't have to run it for the next round and allowed you to build what you wanted to build yeah yeah allowed us to do great m&a yeah like we bought uh we did a couple of smaller deals but then we bought one deal we we did one deal in Germany we bought game duel oh I did not know that yeah so we bought game Deal very transformational deal for us um like really put us on the map in Europe business is doing great we're able to really turn it around that business it's now one of the fastest growing segments of the of the company I think um so we did you know great m&a like that um and and a lot of that was just access to Capital right being able to so so I I do think capital is is it's not something a lot of Founders think about but it is a strategic advantage because at the end of the day like let's say If you think about a startup um and

and you have you know there're two companies doing something similar right and and there's let's say like six investors who really know that space right and you manage to get like five out of those six into one company and maybe the other company is able to raise other funding too but it's it's sort of this thing where like oh you this company's been able to raise more funding right then then the perception is better so so suddenly that company's able to hire better Engineers right and then that company as long as it executes then maybe it creates more uh demand yeah and then there's like more money coming in and then this company's able to sell more by the way the other company can still win in this scenario I've seen many cases where the company a in this point just squanders its lead or and I do firmly believe that raising too much money is a curse yeah of course right because it basically what it does is it allows you it it gives you an excuse to not prioritize okay do too many things at the same time because you have too much money so it's like ah let

me do these six things but the reality isqu a couple more companies the integration [ __ ] you correct the reality is you know in the in the first kind of four or five years of a business it's the founders and the management team are the ones making things happen and you know we're not Elon Musk you know what I mean like Everyone likes to think that they can do that we're not you know what I mean there's only one the only one and and you can only do one thing really well at a time actually right and so but when you only have $3 million you're like well we can't take six bets so we have to do the work to figure out what's the best [ __ ] bet and then let's do that but if you have 30 million you're like ah I'll do all and then you do none of them well enough to win so I've seen over capitalization destroy companies as well um but but I think if you can maintain that balance then you can create this like reflexis you know like where it's like oh you raise money that g buys you more momentum you actually capitalize on the momentum then you raise more then you

know then you can sort of break out and create momentum right um which is very important fascinating and then when did you leave MPL I formally left um March of this year but basically end of last year I sort of you know the company you know was already at a very kind of solid stable place and it had been you know over 5 years at that point and I was just very hungry to you know start again start again that's like your career you get to a comfortable place and you need to punish yourself H yeah you know I honestly I think it's I'm I'm very curious as a person um and I think the best way to learn something is by doing right building and doing in my opinion is the best way to actually figure something out and learn yeah um and the business that we're in is very data Le right so I'm like a huge data geek as well no [ __ ] you have uh an aura ring uh

an Apple Watch and um whoop strap um that's a lot of data for one person yeah so I I I don't I just love having access to data and like running my own queries and finding things out like for me that's really interesting yeah it's it's a natural pull for me yeah you know I wish every event in the world was logged right because then like you'd be able to figure anything out right I think that's fun um but your latest company so so you leave MPL you start pvx and that's how we get connected yes um it has changed the way I look at reporting for for games cuz like I come from product background 15 years product management Studio you know startup but always on the product side not that much on the marketing like I dabble I'm on like a a yellow belt in

marketing and then so I I I might understand thing or two yeah but I remember there was um there was a case we we're working on through deconstructor fund with uh with a mediumsized companies you know like five billion downloads till date so just uh in terms of the the context yeah uh and then they wanted to they wanted to raise Capital yeah and we came to you I was like hey let's talk to both UA Finance so pvx actually tell about pvx first and I'll I'll explain yeah so look I I I sort the the seeds of pvx got planted in me when I was in MPL okay and the thing is everyone thinks gaming is a pure hit-based business right and it's a narrative where part of it is true okay where there is a hit based El to it but you know it's it's mainly a pre-mobile

narrative yeah okay it's a console narrative right and a PC narrative but in Mobile the reality is for a certain subset of companies npl is one of them and you know because this is how we got inspired is that our our um our revenue is very saslik is incredibly predictable okay with user acquisition yes and we were basically in the business of saying okay let's if I spend x million I can say with the 95% degree of accuracy backed by real data right that I'm going to get this return over this many years right or this I'm going to get this range of return over this range of years okay and that is incredibly predictable and so I was like all right this if you have something predictable like this why aren't you able to borrow against it okay like you should be able

to borrow against that like this is not why why are we spending Equity to to to acquire something that's very predictable exactly and there isn't a single at that time there wasn't a single Bank who would do this with us and I got to know the folks at General Catalyst that have the customer value fund and they kind of realized this I think initially with uh companies in some other sectors and they're also kind of looking into gaming and I was fascinated by their product right cuz I was just like holy [ __ ] this is the right vehicle for growth like in a company early stage you have no [ __ ] clue what you're going to build okay then the stage after that you start testing it iterating the product okay but then the third stage is okay now you've iterated the product you have something that works now we just got to ramp UA yeah scale why am I giving up 30% of my company to do that yeah series A let's go we found a product Market fit we just need money to scale let me give

majority of my company away now exactly because it's like hey by the way if you crush it yeah okay the the thing to me and and you know what I wish accountants found a better way to account for cost of equity on the p&l MH all right because then everyone would wake up and understand that this is [ __ ] expensive yes but the thing is like let's say you have you know a company you're at like 50 million okay and you raised 20 bucks or 30 bucks okay so you've given up 40 to 60% of the business um to scale up because you're like we really have something here that works and then let's say it does work right and that company becomes a hundred million ebat company and you sell it for 10 times for a billion right that 30 million you raised now has cost you you you're repaying it back at 400 million in like 8 years yeah like you you know what I mean nobodys it like right and I understand why you take Equity when you

don't have something that's tested but once you have something that's tested MH you should have some sort of credit instrument but the thing is everyone is so nervous on taking credit like credit has a bad reputation I guess like you know it's like a loan is a dirty word it's expensive that's that's what because you don't have the cost for selling your own Equity yeah uh well it you don't feel like oh that was my money you're not like a percentage went up I'm not happy with my new percentage but at least we have more money in the bank exactly you gave away something that is almost like free yes so so we you know I think what was really novel about GC was they found a way to take downside risk on the cohorts and cap their upside and I was like holy [ __ ] something like this needs to be customized for gaming right because I think there's a lot lot more you can do yeah um on the gaming side not just in obviously providing the

financing but then providing eventually the you know how to optimize your marketing mix giving analytics to to gaming companies you know where you can actually look at LTV CAC by Channel you can actually look at hey where are all my high rollers coming from like my whales which channels acquired my whales right um you know easy way to kind of forecast your Revenue like there are all these other really valuable Tools around how you manage your business from a financial perspective how you think about your marketing spend and then how you optimize your LTV yeah that are also um really important for these gaming companies but there isn't anyone out there that's also taking skin in the game right so our idea was let's give these companies Capital to scale up UA so we'll obviously diligence those companies given that we now get the data because we need the data to to kind of um scale up UA let's use the data that

they're giving us to then help them to do even more with their business and that to me just felt like such a complete no-brainer um and this is like a new type of this type of financing instrument requires data yeah it's not one where you just look at PDFs of financial statements so by virtue of getting that live stream of data you're able to provide these other services as well and so that felt like a really compelling business because now you're not only telling the customer use this marketing mix and pay me 10% of your marketing spend and if it works great if it doesn't too bad right now you're saying hey use this marketing mix only pay by the way I'm giving you the money to spend here so our incentives are completely aligned and if this doesn't recoup I'm taking that risk with you right so and that that's a so that that was really interesting about the model and that CU cuz when I saw how you work and know on the flip side you're like okay so you do UA financing I've heard about UA financing so many times nothing

new yeah uh but so I you know introduced the company your way that company that I was was talking about and what impressed me and not imp impress is the wrong word what we set the way I look at product dashboards yeah is the analysis that you guys came through so they gave the data and at that point it was interesting because we were interacting with bunch of big siiz funds in terms of getting a large um large Equity infusion by by giving away uh large Capital infusion by giving away Equity yeah uh and then this was kind of like um like an option weird yeah so let's let's also look at because most of the UA financing that has been done is relatively small size it will be like a million or two a a month uh versus you basically said How however much you need we can go 10 15 let's go uh so we can really scale up the so I was like okay let's see what these guys are about but the the uh the

way the report that you guys came up with so you got all the data the same data set of the company's portfolio that all the VC firms got as well and you were the ones that came back with such a deep analytical um understanding of how to scale because you have the skin in the game yeah exactly so you need to understand it's not like yeah we can give you this XY just pay us this it was more like we are taking Tak a massive risk so we need to do a really really really good analysis yes and and um and that was very much eye openening for me and like and so what I want to ask the question is like how did you come up with these models and like the the the reports that you do um so so it's how I used to look at our business at npl okay and it's how I used to look at the companies we would you know try to buy I worked at I worked at game companies for 14 years I've never seen these type of reports the thing is like I have a my like I started in financial engineering

right like so basically the background is like heavy in finance and then business and then Tech in that order right I think a lot of people go the other direction where they start in Tech and then they move towards Finance I started in finance I mooved towards Tech and so that's just the way I thought about it um and and yeah we just took that exact same lens right and I think the other thing is that like also when we were running the MPL business right I mean we had a that business has great like Returns on adpen and and it's very uh very high retention right so it's all about how much can you spend and how effective is the spend and you know you're you're obsessing over that so that's all I thought about like at npl I was mainly thinking about Capital allocation right so raising the money and where to spend it and most of that was in UA so these are all the things we had to build I had to come up with at when I was at so I just took that here and I think one of the things that helps

us when we talk to Founders is that I've sat in that seat and I've sat in that seat from inception to massive scale like triple digit million scale right so I've I'm either at the level in most cases I'm at the level that you know I I've been at I've been to the level that these companies all aspire to get to and so because of that I know you know what I wish I would have been able to see when I was at that stage if that makes sense and that's what we try to give back to the companies we work with right so that report you know interestingly we it's our most popular um product like people come to us and you know they may not be that serious about underwriting or you just get due diligence on they want us to DD them you know and and give them that report um uh which is great you know which is I mean we want to be very like we

basically want to be we are for game companies okay like we want to help game companies in every way we can we want to start with the financing part I think you know we want to come up with Fair financing solutions that not just support the top one percentile of games right but actually work for Whole gamut the whole gamut of game developer game develop development companies out there um and then we want to support them on the LTV side and we want to do that where we also have value at risk because ultimately we think that is the winning model right like if you have a vendor who's saying here's the product if it doesn't work don't pay me mhm you know like why would you say no to that yeah you want to find ways to like I'm a very strong believer in massive long-term advantages to alignment of interests yeah yeah here's money go spend our money and if it doesn't pay

back you don't have to pay me anything yeah we take the risk with you that's pretty crazy yeah that was that was the craziest thing when I heard it like what yeah how do you make sure that this especially in the post idfa world where we say targeting is so difficult it's so difficult to run marketing uh it's all the past where you were you use able to use the value optimization effectively uh but you seem to be able to to crush that well it's early days um you know we're working with two or three companies now um which we're very happy about since we sort of came out of stealth if you will you know like in April May um but yeah the you know look the traction is is great like we do have a lot of interest so far mhm um and we just have to keep you know we have to keep innovating and yeah keep trying to add value there what kind of companies do you work with right so we mainly work with companies that are sort of at you know 2 300K a month in spends all the

way up to say a million a month and spends and these are companies that have room to grow right so the main thing that we look at is what is your incremental Rass post Payback right if you're a business that has like after payback your cours or part of your courts stay for a long time so you have strong kind of Engagement retention yeah Revenue retention yeah engagement retention actually more important for us um Revenue retention is is good too but fundamentally people forget like if you don't have users on the platform then you can't monetize them you know makes sense so you really what we really want to see are companies that you know you'll have a small group of their their users you know anywhere from 2 3% if they're doing a lot of UA all the way up to say 10% that just don't really go away or sort of degrade at a very kind of gradual rate and will last for years right yeah and and those guys are continuously spending and so if you have

a lot of that incremental Rass then basically what that gives you room to do is spend a lot more because even if your paybacks get stretched it's fine you're still going to have a lot of margin on top of that right but if you're a business that caps out at 110% Rass yeah it's very tough for us to come in and finance you because we're going to take a lot of that upside ourselves right so and so it's not it doesn't really make a lot of sense so basically you're looking at an LTV curve and an LTV curve that keeps on increasing because if if the LTV C curves keeps on increasing no matter what the velocity of increase is yeah it means that over time I you can yeah you can push back the payback time it doesn't really matter because you can see that the players are staying yes and the players are paying and they don't have to exactly and it's much better than those who kind of drop exact in the beginning a lot of money and then you can see the curve kind of not grow really and then

that means you can't really spend on it because you can extend the payback period to however long you want and the amount will not be significantly more from this point on to like a year later yeah I think um so that's that's the company profile for now yeah okay yeah it's a first year it's a first year and and we think there's a lot of room toow there mhm um but we also understand that that's a fairly small segment of the market the companies that have you know that predictability are also at you know 3 four 500k a month and want to like double or triple right but it's big enough like you can build a really attractive solid business just on that but we are also coming up with the product for companies at the very early stage right so where we say hey you've just done testing you've spent like 10K a month for the last last three months we've actually come up with a product for those guys where we'll come in and

you know we're not going to put that much money we'll maybe put like 50k 60k but like for that Game Dev 50k even if it's just 40 50% of what their budget is for the month that that will extend their Runway another year yeah right it's it's a big thing for them um and we found a way where we can sort of manage our downside risk there um and it still it sort of then gives the Game Dev uh more time to prove out their concept then go and raise their series a almost like soft launch funding yes so if you put your game in soft launch and your numbers might not be quite what the investors expect for you to raise a series a uh you can work with pvx yeah to extend your Runway so you don't have to spend your capital on user acquisition and through that increase the need to raise at a bad term exactly exactly and then we can graduate them onto the core product right and then for the late stage guys we're working on an acquisition financing product what's

that so basically a way for them to realize a lot of the value in their cohorts today and so that they can use that to go do something big and strategic right so imagine you're like a Social Casino company right I imagine that every morning and and you're not you know those companies are not really growing that fast anymore they're sort of they're EB yeah very strong on IA right but in terms of UA they're not there there's no UA const streen for that business right they're they're literally spending as much as they possibly can so going to that that type of customer and saying hey let me fund part of your UA they're like okay why you know like I don't need to spend anymore and the only reason they'd consider it is because if you can then fund 40% of their UA and you that means they throw another 30 $40 million on their balance sheet then they can build that up over a few years and then use that to do something strategic right M but we sort of took that and said okay if the goal is to do something

strategic now right because people people don't I mean people don't plan that well just in general right no one's like oh I want to do a deal in 2027 let me start let me start prudently making sure I have cash on balance sheet for the deal that might come up in 2027 like by definition people just don't do that well they're more like holy [ __ ] there's a deal coming up in four months I need money now right and so so a better way is for us to say all right look you have these cohorts they're acquired your existing cohorts are going to generate another 200 million bucks over the next four or five years here we're going to loan right now give you the money against that here's 100 million right now on that future value now you can use that 100 million and go do a big m&a deal right and so that's that's a new sort of acquisition Finance product that and we haven't we haven't done it with anybody yet um but that's something that we're starting to talk to people about because I think we have the right Financial

backers for that as well and uh and yeah like I think so we want to serve you know game devs at every stage of of the market right the the the mission of the company is to serve you know consumer app owners developers Founders that's that's we want to serve them right that's pretty cool so if I have a e a positive game does doesn't even need to be even up positive right it just needs to generate Revenue yeah Revenue generating game and I can raise Capital to expand my business through an acquisition strategic acquisition that essentially you know adds 10 20 30% to my Topline Revenue but I don't need to spend like no I would spend my Capital on it but I'm able to access that Capital through loan rather than selling Equity yeah I mean anyways selling You' need to take a need to take debt anyway yeah but you know you would need to look at taking debt um from let me give you

an example okay so let's say let's say you want to buy this company you think the company's inefficient right so the company generates $100 million of Revenue and it generates let's say 15 million of IA right and there are these companies around by the way I've looked at them and you have confidence you're like I can buy that company and either through merging it with me or you know restructuring that team I can turn that iata from 15 to 40 play a game of a private Equity yeah right so you feel like you can do that yes now when you go to lenders okay the lenders are going to say that company does 15 million of VI and let's say you you offer that that company let's say you offer $100 million okay so about six times let's say you're offering six times IA for that company the lender says you're offering six times I'm going to give you three times 45 million you have to put in 45 million

of of your Equity yeah right um but with us right you could say well we we know that 100 million of Revenue that's going to generate 300 million over the next six years here's 100 million now right we don't care about the eatat ratio okay right it's like we know because we're we're taking Security on that reue Vue mhm and so now you get all the cash you need to buy that company of course we'd still want you to put some Equity but you get the cash you need to buy that company then you can do what you need to do to fix up the Ia that's the bet you're taking I'm only taking a bet on the degradation of that 100 million bucks which is a very safe bet for me right so you don't because the ideally the lender yeah the traditional lender should if they believed you they'd be like oh this company has $40 million of via like I'll lend you two times right but they don't they're never going to they're like oh okay like sure we don't want to we don't trust it until we

see it yes and so for us we just take that out of the equation it's not relevant to us yeah yeah CU you're you're specific on this industry so basically you're allowing somebody to become an aggregator I mean we're trying to enable that yeah so I would acquire several midsize companies and become a big company Yeah by creating this approach of access to Capital through my own growing Revenue stream that I'm growing through aggregating yeah it be pretty fast scaling look I mean uh if you're able to close the deals of course there's the ability to close deal there's ability to post post acquisition integration there's ton of work that needs to go right plenty of things you can make mistakes on you can grow too fast all those elements but nevertheless nothing happens unless you have the access to Capital 100% I mean so so this is this is is more of a product like strategics or folks you know big companies who sort of want bigger checks you know I think

for this one the minimum size we do is probably like the 20s right like 20 $30 million would be the right sort of initial check that we' want to do there whereas with the other companies we're working with we can start with like two three four million it's fine damn and how so where where's pvx now so let's say you're under a year since starting uh I know you're co-founder so where where are you right now um yeah look we're just focused on building the brand right I think explaining to people who we are what we do I think we're just trying to work with more gaming companies and I think you know that to mean I mean like my first business is was a B2B business right the Corp Services business is ultimately a B2B sales business and I think my big realization there is that the best way to build that kind of business is by doing a great job for your customers of course right and so you know we we just want to make sure we're delivering value to the folks that

we work with and then you know they're they're telling their friends right they're telling you know because the game Community as you know is small right so they tell people and yeah that's how we're sort of building our book um you know I think we have a lot of ideas and and we have a lot of ideas a lot of different things we want to do you know I think the keeps expanding there is a big ridiculous Vision out there that we have um which is you know we think we can sort of be the central nervous system of the gaming industry right we want to be plugged into like thousands of gaming companies and we want to like the access to Capital without spending your Equity yeah provide them Capital but also provide them intelligence like we want to empower them right because I think the if you then do are able to do that you can sort of become a um another path right on marketing another like you can start to disrupt a lot of these

other Industries once you have access to these data feeds so one thing you said in the as in the beginning is about when you were talking about building your media business is that it wasn't scalable yeah because you needed to you know the deals and so forth is this scalable I think so you know I have to believe it is we'll see what the feedback is from the market a sash product this is not a sash product I mean it look it's a the financing business is relatively sticky it's not as sticky as a true SAS product right because obviously once companies reach a certain scale then then they will churn they don't need the financing anymore but I think where we have a lot of comfort there is that there's a lot of creative destruction in the gaming space right and so a lot of companies are getting thousands of gaming companies thousands of games are getting formed every year and unfortunately thousands of them are also dying like there there's a lot of recycling here MH and so we sort of want to be part of that life cycle Loop right um so yeah I think

I think the financing business is actually fairly sticky um and it is scalable right uh as long as you're able to meet the customers where they are right and not be super rigid about I just need you to fit this box right are you then competing again with Venture capitalists no I think we're enabling Venture capitalists I think you know where where we are is if you're a VC you know I mean you want us to work with your companies because because you you know it it limits your dilution if you're if you're an investor in that company but if you're in a VC that is trying to get into that company sure then yeah maybe but but the way that I see it is that look uh we the founder if the founder really wants to bring in um VC investor they should right that's that's their prerogative but how do you okay you've taken that Equity Capital don't use that on something that's

predictable so go raise the round go raise around but then get pvx in you know or some sort of whatever it doesn't have to be pvx but think about non-diluted financing to scale your UA no no it's it's 100% And and many other the companies even they have as I said like I think we were talking this morning um the one company called me and asked like can I help them to get VC financing to grow their game like 5 million or so right I was like why yeah what's the like if that's the goal yeah then that doesn't make any sense just talk to UA financing first yeah if there's nothing more than we just need money to grow the game yeah yeah look I I think there's a lot of value in having strong VC Partners yeah okay but once you take their money is the right place to put their money on UA no I I think look by the way initially testing sure cuz it's experimental but once you have something

that works don't use VC money to fund that right go raise the VC money build your publishing build another business yeah exactly build another arm like build a better product or iterate the product but expand to horizontally or vertically exactly that's where I think so I think we can coexist really nicely and we're seeing that Dynamic play out in fact a lot of our business is coming from VC introductions right so those relationships are really really important for us um we don't want to be competitive you know a lot of people have come to us and said why don't you do Equity right then you wouldd be a VC but then we'd be a VC yeah and I think it screws up the incentives right because I think ultimately you want to tell the company right hey I'm not in I'm not a shareholder and you're a competitor right like you want to be Switzerland you want to be neutral so we we're not going to do Equity um we just want to focus on we think there's tons of room of innovation and credit we want to do

that well I love that Joe Catholic I'm so proud did I get it right oh fourth time right God damn it so hard have an awesome name um I like what you're doing again like uh I just want to like finalize with with with the part of of you helping the game companies in the way you are not only through the capital for them them to deploy against growth without selling their equity which is highly precious and the only thing that the founders really have but also through the the due diligence that you do on the companies like if there's a company who's still listening and or you have in your portfolio and you're trying to figure out how can we grow whether they're old in the tooth portfolio or whether you have new games coming out I really suggest reaching out to uh to pvx I've had tremendous not I've the company that I work with had tremendous success with getting your analysis and they have

been eye opening where I was like I thought I knew something and I was like God damn it and and now I'm like approaching in a totally different way the way I analy it so um so you know you guys definitely know what you're doing when you when you're assessing your own risk before putting in your money and that in that particular case you actually said no for the company and it was still so incredibly valuable that the no came in here's no but here's why yeah and and it was we were able to see so many things to improve on that were outside on the product and actually inside the you know that that's the thing for us it's not like you know some I know some VCS have this like some of them not all but I've heard some VCS have a policy that they won't revisit their passes right like it's like if you pass you've passed like they're not going to really look at it again they won't spend time we yeah we're not like that at all want

we sing yeah so our approach is when we're giving them that feedback it's like no but please come back in 6 months by the way this is what we'd love to see like we by the way have a couple of companies who've said hey can you access our data like we'll give you let's can you pretend you're financing us just don't give us any money like we'll give you the feeds and then you tell us when we're ready and actually we've plugged into a couple of these guys in the summer yeah we're about to issue three new term sheets like I think ritky my partner co-founder he's he's he called me this morning he's like we're going to issue three new term sheets their cohorts have started to inflect I was like okay because they got the data now they know what to focus on exactly and that's a that's the way you you deliver no is like um there are certain VC funds that say no and they say exactly in that way yeah I'll I'll give an shout out to Makers fund I remember before I had interactions with makers fund one of my friends Anil do Gupta he they they went

through one of their you know early rounds and they received unfortunately no from makers but he said the no was so good and so constructive it was almost better than the yeses that they got because that allowed them to and so he had this sort of a super positive so he gave me a reference like this is a great fund even though they said no to him so it was like uh and that's the same it's a it's a value at it no it wasn't like ah we just we're kind of like it's like no here's here's exactly where you at and if these things get better we're in you know people forget that all the time but like when you say no to somebody is when you can build your reputation because like the people who are going to talk [ __ ] about you are the people who you made feel small yeah or feel bad no and you know this is candidly one thing I think VCS do a terrible job at a lot of VCS right um but I think you know when you say no to someone if you say it with empathy

but also this is how you get to yes then they have a great feeling right there's something constructive There's real feedback and it has to be by the way real you can't say hey if you you know you guys could use like a marketer on your team and then if that team comes back with a marketer then you give them another [ __ ] so the first one was just a distraction exactly that's even worse for very objective right it's like this this is the incremental Ras we need to see this is the target please achieve this by the way if you achieve this and even if you don't take your financing it's a great outcome for you and there's like written things that you have in your report there's the graphs and you're like hey uh it looks like X Y and Z is happening here so you might want to focus on these type of values so it was it was really it was really useful for that comp I'm really glad to hear that yeah I'm really that's that's uh I mean it obviously feels it feels great to hear that it was helpful it was a positive no well let's end up on a positive um I mean everything was positive Joe it's a pleasure talking to you I think you have a super inspirational

story I like I want I love chatting with you I want to see you go through tough times and come on top I've been through a lot of tough times but you know like yeah I mean you only sort of those are the gems right like you like every difficult thing you know what I was having a chat the other day and a guy who's like you know tried to do something didn't work and he's like I think I'm going to go back to Consulting and I was like why like because you just [ __ ] gave up four years of her life and you got this gem mhm and now you're going to just throw it away and go back to Consulting like now you have the gem yeah then now is exactly when you should do the next one yeah you know like use the gem you know it's like paying half a million bucks for an MBA and then not using it yeah vulnerability and intense effort yeah that's that's the powerful combo yeah can I end on that yeah cool Joe pleasure how can how can companies reach out to you for that sick due

diligence that you do for their product yeah yeah so they can just send me an email I guess Joe pvxp partners.com um I'm reachable on LinkedIn all right link or they can talk to you and Link in the description uh if they can type your surname into the LinkedIn they get a bonus I think I think if you just search Joe W I'm pretty sure I show up or just Joe PV joking there's a link in the description so thank you Joe thanks man thanks everybody for listening wherever the cameras are yeah all right appreciate it thank you you did it you made it to the end of the episode as a fan of the show it would help us out if You' subscribe and leave us a review on the podcast service of your choice those stars and likes while a small action on your part mean a lot to us and help to grow the show more importantly are you a member of the deconstructor of fun slack group if you have 5 years or more of games industry experience go to deconstructor of fund.com SLS slack and apply to join

Jo the games industry best professional Community fi with peers always willing to lend a hand or subscribe to our newsletter to get all the latest insights from the deconstructor of fun content creators thanks for listening [Music]