Jeremy Weisz 12:54
Are there any there we can plug? I want to talk a little bit about the venture side too. So like the talent are basically able to produce their own products and business essentially out a consumer-based business. It sounds like out of this.
Joe Gagliese 14:14
Right. So each of these divisions I’m talking about has basically a leader or someone who’s overseeing it, and they have a team. So it’s basically like think about it, like a creator comes in, they get an assessment done based on that assessment, and I’ll tell them how many of those doors they can unlock. Based on the doors they unlock those guys show up with all the assets and all the teams necessary to get it done. So if I’m a creator and I come and sign in the Viral Nation hemisphere, I might, in my first week end up on a couple-hour call with the podcast division a couple-hour call with the venture division, some OTT, etc. And it’s really just about taking advantage of what they’ve created. If you look at traditional media companies and what they’re pulling in for the eyeballs they have, we have one talent who does all of CBS per week, so I think it’s a tidal wave that’s on its way in and we were really aggressive in making sure that we have it the global world’s only single source solution for greater truly, we’re the only company on earth that kind of has that entire setup at max volume. So,wrapping around the talent in that way became a huge value proposition. And we talked about earlier assigning that parking lot attendant now, Viral Nation will receive anywhere between 100 and 300 applications a day from creators around the world, we’ve developed a really succinct rubric on how we’re choosing which graders we’re working with, because we don’t want to, you don’t want to have 50 folks who do the exact same thing you don’t want, you start to learn from our data, who performs well, and what divisions. So we’re very succinct and purposeful in how we’re onboarding folks into that world. And the things growing like, yeah, it’s exciting, it is truly exciting. And I’ll cap that off with and Mat can kind of go into more of the detail. But the goal of that company, again, was not to be a talent agency, it was to become a sophisticated, almost consulting, backed by tech operation. And people thought we were nuts. Jeremy, when we said, we were going to do that three, four years ago. And we’re here. And now we’re revered across all of these different spaces. And we didn’t just stop there, we actually made custom tech to bring the talent company into a true tech-led business, which was also something people thought we were nuts. Me and Mat used to say, we’re going to have the first tech talent company, and people were like, okay, and they thought we would make just some call it a marketplace feature or something that could display the talent. But what Mat ended up creating, and I’ll let them talk a little bit more about it was, he created an infrastructure technology that allows us to have visibility across that whole business. So we’re able to, it’s our own CRM, it’s how we manage our teams, it’s how we manage the agents, it’s how we manage the talent, it’s how we get visibility on pipeline, it’s how we ultimately track and make sure that all the talent is getting what they need when they need it. So we keep folks on the rail, because the traditional talent world is still BlackBerry’s in meetings, right? And deep prioritizing people based off of them not getting this right attention. And our goal was to take away the bias by putting in an incredible system that allows our agents to become business leaders, and they’re now working as a steward for the talent, not a talent agent. And then Mat took it a step further from that technology. And he actually created a product called Creator Plus, and we just started rolling that out about three or 400 of our talents are already enrolled. And basically, it’s an app that the creators get when they sign with Viral Nation that’s exclusive to us. And within there, they can kind of see their p&l, they can see where they’re at month to month, they can see their finances, they can see how they’re doing across, how their agents doing, how many proposals of my aunt, how many discovery calls is this person, it’s all about transparency, but also giving the creator tools to be able to understand and capitalize on their business. So that was a really interesting global first in terms of like that connectivity of turning a talent company into a tech company. And all of this will serve the greater purpose we’ll get to and where we’re going. But started as a talent agency was talent agency for a long time had to grow it that way. And then one day said, okay, it’s time to bring the noise and flip this thing upside down and make it something truly differentiated. But Mat, if you want to touch on creator operating system.
Jeremy Weisz 18:45
Yeah, Mat, I want you to touch on tech-led, what that means. But after that, I want to circle back to the parking lot attendant, because I want to hear the manual stuff that you had to do. Because like you said, you’re running around in the background, making it easy.
Joe Gagliese 18:45
I can knock that one out for you basically, Mat, you have two options. One is you wait for a brand to reach out for them. And then you broker that relationship to fruition. And you basically gain your value by increasing that opportunity or exfoliating it and etc. Or you got to use the data of the audience you have in terms of their audience, find the brands that align with it. And me and Mat used to go on LinkedIn, we got tools to find emails and we would just blast these brands and say, hey, did you know that this guy we represent is speaking to eight nine people in your audience on a weekly basis like that maybe you want to get in on that action type thing and really just evolved from there. We’re just managing it on a spreadsheet and in my workbook for a number of years and unfortunately that’s how a lot of organizations still operate today.
Jeremy Weisz 19:55
Who was a good fit for the parking lot attendant?
Joe Gagliese 19:59
Oh, actually. His first deal was with a post-cereal Baron. So sugar Krispies cereal. I think the second one we got a Mat was that with Samsung, no the Samsung. Remember you went to that camp festival thing?
Mat Micheli 20:14
Yeah and tic tac. So rebate for brands within six months.
Joe Gagliese 20:19
Yeah, TikTok, and then Samsung paid for him and his friends to come to an event and paid him to post. And yeah, I remember that like it was yesterday, I haven’t thought about that in a long time.
Jeremy Weisz 20:30
That’s wild. So I mean, in that in those days, like you were mentioned, kind of like those seven things that people can monetize. It was really brand deals. And like over that was all there was right over time, now you have the Creator studios, the original productions and everything else that you’re bringing in. But it also sounds like you’re kind of creating like an all-in-one solution for these creators to manage their p&l, it’s almost like a CRM also, because they can see where things are at so that they could just worry about creating and then you’ve kind of taken all these other pieces off of their plate.
Joe Gagliese 21:03
The problem was they were operating in a vacuum before with very little oversight and no direction of who’s good and who’s not. So you would have a creator like let’s just roleplay this out for a second Jeremy’s like, I’m a guy who all of a sudden has a million followers on YouTube. And basically what that does is it signals the attack. So now what happens is the podcast companies that just do podcasts, the venture companies that just do venture, the brand deal companies that just do brand deals start going after these guys. And what they end up with after the first year is not a lot of efficiency in them, they have a lifeline. Sorry, they have a lifespan, right. And that first part is actually their biggest opportunity not only to grow, but to monetize. So they waste about a year fragmenting this, and now someone who doesn’t understand any of those pieces intrinsically, is now dealing with seven or eight or nine different companies and contacts. And it just it’s broken. And it’s predatorial in a way, because the talent doesn’t understand how to properly vet those opportunities. So our goal was almost like equal parts revenue-driving, obviously, because we’re running a business, but it was also like, how do you safeguard these folks to just get what they need, as opposed to them trying to go out in the wild with no map and no guidance and no acumen and try to piece it all together. It’s too hard. And unlike celebrities, and unlike athletes, they don’t get the formal training, they don’t go through, I was in college, then I went to the NFL, they don’t go through, you know, I audition in LA for six years got that first part as like a backup and got to see the space unfold. These guys go from my son to all of a sudden, speaking to hundreds of millions of people. So if the space needs Viral Nation talent run the way we’re running it. And we saw that, and my hope is, is that there’s lots of room in this space for competition. So my hope is that, other organizations start to adopt this model over the next five or 10 years. And because there’s space for us, right? There’s millions of creators. But something’s got to change. And we got to get pretty serious about how we’re helping these guys and girls, basically take advantage of the biggest opportunity of their lives.
Jeremy Weisz 23:22
Yeah, talk about tech-led and what that means.
Mat Micheli 23:26
Yeah, I think one of the biggest problems, you know, traditionally in the talent business, historically dating back to when it was just celebrities, actors, athletes is brands will do these endorsement deals, and there is no data or quantification as it relates to the impact of these endorsement deals. So we saw that very early on. And really, our mission with being tech-led is to be able to quantify impact on every single one of the pieces of work that we do for our brands. So it’s not just because we have a marketing agency, and that’s our mandate as marketers as talent. As a talent organization, our main goal is to be able to also prove the value back to the brands that are buying talent. So really being tech lead in that sense of being able to have enterprise-level data that we go back to the brands and say, hey, Jimmy generated a million dollars in sales for you, and then going backwards and saying, hey, Jimmy is a great fit for your brand because of x, y and Zed. And the only way we can do that is with technology. So and then as we scale the business we know like as Joe said, traditional talent, business, our blackberries and notebooks. Traditionally, and we know that it’s impossible because influencers in the game of creators it changes every single day, the following size on one of our creators on every single one of our 950-ish creators changes today versus yesterday. And the only way to do that and really follow that and be able to report back to the brand’s on success is being tech lead. And that’s what we really focus on for our infrastructure and be able to support our agents and generate even more revenue for our talent. And that’s really scale.
Joe Gagliese 25:15
Jeremy, the thing I would add to what Matt saying, too, is that people don’t understand, this is big business. And it’s still being treated like a hobby. Because the world hasn’t caught up to the magnitude of what’s happened. So, I’ll give you an example.
Jeremy Weisz 25:30
I mean, it’s amazing because like, even if you look at shows, like Dancing with the Stars, right? I mean, it’s social media influencer, right. And so it’s starting to hit the mainstream, right?
Joe Gagliese 25:47
Not even that, Jeremy, think about this, right? Like, we have a young woman on YouTube, who has 115 million subscribers. And she does hundreds and hundreds of millions of views of kids every single week. And she out punches the amount of people who watch Disney releases, and we’re still working on getting brands to understand that value. That’s where we’re at. But you might see Disney show on the Disney Channel monetizing at 300,000, an episode and 400,000 people watched it. And she might be monetizing at two or 5000, or 10,000, or 20,000 an episode 65 million people are seeing, this is big business, it just hasn’t caught up yet. Which is why this kind of tech lead multipronged enterprise setup that we’ve kind of motioned into over the last three years because it’s not easy, this took like pain, like you wouldn’t even believe to get it to this right spot. But we’re almost like, not building for now we’re building for when the world figures out what’s going on over here, there’s going to be an expectation that no one’s going to be able to meet it, but us as it relates to how this scales?
Jeremy Weisz 26:59
Yeah. Would you say like right now, you were mentioning like Disney versus this creator, and they may get more views? Is it cheaper for brands, like is now a time for brands to like really get in because they’re getting it kind of on the cheap at this point until people figure this out?
Joe Gagliese 27:19
So it was even cheaper? Think about this was 90% cheaper than what where it is today? And it’s still cheaper? So yes, the issue is, and this is a good segue into Viral Nation marketing is these large organizations. So, to caveat into the Viral Nation marketing side of the business, Jeremy. Huge organizations are what we call media lead, right? So Viral Nation specializes in enterprise clients, it’s just where we play scale is our biggest advantage. So when you think about these big, big organizations, Coke, Disney, Walmart, whomever, right, they’re traditionally very much media-led organizations. So if they have a billion-dollar pot, 90% of that is going to traditional media and other that would be in those buckets, even to this day, right? So what Viral Nation marketing is really taking on is how do you help these large organizations around the world adapt to the change that’s happened in culture. And that change is magnificent. So now you have organizations like the one you see on the screen, shifting from media-led to social media-led, and that is a massive undertaking and Viral Nations, kind of the global leader as it relates to helping folks make that transition. And that transition means social, social content, social strategy, influencer marketing, employee advocacy, and employee marketing, exponential, it’s just a brand new world and we’re taking this message into that new world through these new pipelines.
Mat Micheli 29:02
And you know what, to add to that, I think some examples that really resonate with people is now how media, traditional media is, people are using traditional media in order to grow on social media. The best example that I always use is all the reality shows you see on Netflix, which are the number one shows in the world and how every single individual goes on one of those shows, honestly, to become Instagram famous, like that’s pretty well what the majority of them do. And then you’ve seen conversely, where now Netflix is also using the influencer stories as their number one call it you know, viewed programming, we see what the polls have done. We don’t need to go into that but it just shows the scale and the quantum of how these things are really transforming.
Joe Gagliese 29:49
Oh, well Mat to bring that all the way home Jeremy, like look at what happened with the Taylor Swift and Kelsey thing over the last couple of weeks. That is what we call a social media storm. The NFL could have spent a billion dollars in media and wouldn’t have created what they created in those four days ever again. Right? And this is what these big organizations this is what we’re helping big organizations figure out is that the people aren’t where you think they are. They’re here now. And Viral Nation has a three 400-person world-class team that knows how to derive those outcomes at scale. And which is the reason for our technologies. Right? So you’ll see here on your screen, right Jeremy’s like secure Empower creator, alas, people are like, what are you doing? What we’re actually doing and our big vision is create the social media stack of large enterprises of the future. So if this is truly becoming the most important part of an organization, Viral Nation in the background visit two Canadian guys with a crazy idea, have now figured out how to bring it all together, understanding that cokes going to need to move that billion dollars, they’re spending over time into this arena. And that’s not going to work on spreadsheets and communications agencies. So we’ve spent the last three years developing that stack to be able to go to a Disney, a Walmart, an Amazon, whoever it may be, and say to them, there is a solution for this, and we can get you there. But we also understand the importance of managed service as a component and helping you to get there. So we’ve really mixed tech and managed services, because that’s truly what this industry needs to be successful in the short term. And we lost the quite frankly, we’d never had the Silicon Valley SaaS bug where we thought everything we did needed to be pure SAS, we understand that we’re in a people business. And these large organizations want our help. So we’ve done a, I feel like a miraculous job at developing technology to support human intervention at scale. And we’re seeing the results of that now in spades.
Jeremy Weisz 31:50
I want to talk about hiring, right? So if you’re listening to the audio that we’re looking at the video too. So you can check out the video as well, on the podcast, but at viralnation.com we are showing some of their the brands here and we’ll walk through a few examples. So you can understand that, but we’re also looking at Viral Nation. And what’s interesting, the talent group, the marketing group. And what was interesting is you’ve created these other tech products because of need, right? And the secure is people’s profiles, people who are duplicating people’s profiles and acting as someone else. Right. So talk about how you have created these solutions based on these issues that you were seeing with your creators.
Mat Micheli 32:37
Yeah, Jeremy, it was and secure, it really does a lot of that. And it started off as a need. Because some of our enterprise clients who are incredibly brand sensitive, I won’t go into names as to who they were, had tasked us with saying before you hire, before you hire any influencer, any celebrity for my brand, I need you to prove that they’re brand safe. And it was a problem statement, where one of them said is right now our lawyers are watching every minute of YouTube content of a creator before proceeding with any active engagement. So we knew that was completely unscalable and that would never happen. So we double down on this whole problem statement and we invented patent pending full service solution around being able to do automated social media checks and ongoing monitoring at scale and this year alone will process over a million social media background checks.
Jeremy Weisz 33:44
So can a creator actually I’m curious purchase a separately from you or they have to be under your umbrella.
Mat Micheli 33:53
Right now. Every creator within our ecosystem gets it as part of their engagement with us. Right now we’re only enterprise face him.
Jeremy Weisz 34:02
Yeah. Which is interesting because I was on one of the channels yesterday and I was looking for someone specific and it had their name and had their name two, and it had some other name with like an underscore and like I don’t even know which one the real one is. And that person probably doesn’t even know there’s three other profiles out there that’s mimicking their profile. Right.
Joe Gagliese 34:23
Mimicking the profile thing actually is just the tip of the iceberg. It came out maybe like I think about eight weeks ago, that tools mean ability, Jeremy is it does full social media background checks across all of social in real time and it monitors folks so think of it like we created the Norton Antivirus and social media. How do you protect from identity theft copyright people’s backgrounds because what we don’t want to do right is have a company like Disney align themselves with a celebrity or creator only to find out that maybe they made a horrific anti-semitic post a year ago or their cultural values are so misaligned from the company because we’ve seen the result of that. So when we thought about what that social stack for the future looked like, and we thought about the future of our business, we said, well, if we can’t figure out how to protect the brands against our space, how the hell can we ask them to invest in it? So Secure was really that base layer. And then from there, we went in the influencer technology. So we built tech, world-leading tech on the influencer side, then we built on social tech, then we built employee social tech. And basically, these large organizations, Jeremy socials becomes so important so quickly, that organizations, bumbled it, so when Instagram was important for Pepsi, they hired some junior 20-something-year-old marketer and we’re like, go do that. And then they bought a HootSuite or some community management tool built for that person. And then it was like, oh, influencer, go get this technology. And they ended up with this fragmented design. And then all of a sudden, at some point, especially during COVID, they went, “Holy crap, our whole business is going this way. And we need to backtrack and figure out how we scale all this.” And while that was going on, we were already kind of working on that solution.
Jeremy Weisz 36:02
How do you stay focused guys, because like, with this, I see, there’s so many use cases. For us, I see a hiring use case, like when we’re hiring people will look at their social. I mean, big companies could be like, hey, guys, like I want a membership. I want to sign up for this SaaS for this just so I can look at hiring or even a software that helps people with hiring wants to integrate with their hiring software. So there’s so many avenues you could take here. How do you stay focused? And maybe you do explore some of those opportunities? I don’t know.
Joe Gagliese 36:37
Yeah, so Jeremy, it’s like, what we’ve done is we’ve created almost like a COE model instead of Viral Nation where each tech product, each division has a leader. And those leaders are tasked with working together with the larger vision. But if there’s opportunity within their centers of excellence, let’s say secure as one of them to get into government and HR, etc. They have the teams and the bandwidth. And they’re set up to do that on their own. It’s not a distraction from the main ship. So what we kind of did was we align the priorities align the teams from the grand vision perspective, but gave them their own teams that play into that, but also allow them to kind of go outside of those bounds and flex in the different areas where they think they can grow. And what that’s resulted in is like, we have this big brand vision that it coming together creates massive value for the business. But we also have about nine different areas where you have independent businesses that can become big businesses, right? So it works extraordinarily well together as a team, but also, each one of them has their own unique ability to rise up and do incredible things. So it’s working well, because we have the right leaders across these different things. And we’ve set it up kind of cohesively from the beginning. And we did it in a non-distracted state, if that makes sense.
Jeremy Weisz 37:52
Yeah. Talk about the evolution of hiring. First. It’s the two of you. It’s the two of you, pounding the phones, right? Yeah, talk about the first key hire because now I imagine you were like, we got to get some technology folks in here, because you have some major technology software that you’re having to build. So walk me through a little bit of an evolution of okay, it’s the two of us. And then some of the key positions you put in place along the way.
Mat Micheli 38:22
Yeah, I think it was funny because it was the two of us. But we also had an imaginary assistant for a good six months where we would pretend to be our own assistant, because that’s all we could ultimately afford. And Jeremy, our approach was, Joe and I, we describe ourselves best as pharma entrepreneurs. were our first business that we started together when we were teenagers, we literally our office was a barn. So we do not know the Silicon Valley playbook, the only playbook that we know is, once you make enough money, you can hire somebody. And that’s literally to this day, the playbook that we’ve created. And it started off with actually someone that we went to school with that was in our class, in college, he was employee number one. Because we knew that we started getting way too busy for the two of us where we needed some support. And we hired our first brand that wanted to work with us. And we needed somebody to really project manage that for us. And then it just kept going on helping us project manage where Joe and I remain the agents, literally for three years until we launched the brand division. And then it went with hey, we have to build a sales team. And then once we built the sales team, we realized hey, this is so new that there’s so much education that needs to happen. So we learned the hard way with that one. And then came really stacking up the different competencies of marketing. So we started building all the different marketing disciplines, social media management, performance marketing content. events, but really, for us, it was always everyone just has to be ambidextrous. And everyone’s got to know every discipline and be able to step in, where that comes. So we went from the two of us. And pre-COVID, we were 65-75 people-ish. And that’s when, during the pandemic was really, when we started doubling down on this concept that, we’re going to become really technology-focused and also increase our talent business. So that one, too, we started building our own internal tech team. And we’ve scaled that over the years. So fast forward to today 420 people, about 100 total in the technology division, almost about 75 in talent. And then the rest of that is the marketing company, and then shared services. So the evolution has been very, it’s been interesting for us because we’ve had to balance you know, three different hats running a startup like engineering infrastructure, where we’re building world-class SaaS products with, we have a talent agency, where people’s only goals are to do deals all day and help talent very much, a very different culture. And then we have sophisticated marketers, who are helping brands, highly creative, being really good partner. So it’s been an incredible balance to balance because those three cultures are so fundamentally different when you look at them separately, but they all come together in this concept that we call one nation. So yeah, it’s been fun. It’s been a…
Jeremy Weisz 41:42
What do you do for culture, right? Especially growing so quickly, you have 400. And I wanna encourage people to check out viralnation.com. There’s so many directions, we could take this, we only have a couple more minutes. But it’s pretty crazy what you guys have created in a good way. And there’s so many questions on, you can go to viralnation.com, if you’re looking for talent, you could find talent, if you are talent, I think you guys get 300 applications a day. But how do you maintain culture across the company?
Joe Gagliese 42:22
It’s been one of the hardest challenges, because I’ll tell you, Jeremy, going into COVID, we had probably, and I don’t even think I’m overstating this one of the coolest cultures in all of Canada. And it was highly driven from folks working together. And then boom, here comes no office, here comes no one in the office, and here comes 180 new strangers. And for us, that was a dramatic change, and quite frankly, obviously unprecedented. And so we’ve done a number of different things, I think, our core principle that prevails against anything is me and Mat’s willingness and desire to kind of lead by example. So we’re not that CEOs type who kind of just sit there and hope things go, well, we’re not the type were disengaged, or just do the big meetings, meeting this guy, roll up our sleeves and get in there with our teams doesn’t really matter what part of the division they’re in. And that’s done us so well, Jeremy is that leading by example, and just being, “keep up with me, and we’re good” type thing. And that’s been a big secret of success for us. And then the other thing is, like, we’ve been learning from guys like John Ruffalo and Todd Bully, and folks who mentored me and Mat to start implementing different things that just allow people access to information. I think that was one of my biggest learnings this year. Jeremy’s like, people can cultivate some pretty crazy shit if they don’t know the real shit that’s going on. And over-communicating what’s going on across the company with our teams. And, you know, making sure people are heard and having conversations as a group and letting people in on what’s going on has made a dramatic impact. I think we still have a long way to go to get back to where we were and find the balance between the work from home and now we have people working all over the States and in Europe. And I think that there’s a big challenge that we’re on top of them. We’re tracking, I don’t know if anyone has the perfect answer. If they have it, Jeremy, and they give it to you, please send it to me. But we’re working hard on it every single day. And we’re being pretty transparent with the company that we are and they really liked that as well. So yeah, we’ve been just really over-communicating and making sure that everyone’s feeling like they’re equal, and everyone can kind of see that all of our leaders are digging in. And that’s been our magic to kind of success up to date.
Jeremy Weisz 44:41
Can you mention a few, we talked about one of the monetization for the talent is the venture, the ventures and there’s over 100 there. What are a few examples? You mentioned the yogurt. What are some of the other ones that people have created?
Joe Gagliese 44:57
Yeah, I don’t know. Mat, do you have that list there? So yeah, one of them was the yogurt. One of them went live this morning, or yesterday afternoon, it was a salad bowl. She’s one of the largest salad influencers on TikTok. And we actually worked with her to make her own salad bowls. And I found out this morning by, in her first, they sold over 70% of her inventory in the first five hours of her being live, which was good, because it’s amazing. So that’s an example.
Mat Micheli 45:28
We have the laundry, organic and best-in-class laundry sheet that one of our mom creators, who does fold laundry with her followers on the live stream once a week. And that’s been incredible, really, the success in this is really, when making it part of their content and something that they do, and it highly resonates with their followers. I mean, everyone has a merchandise line, there’s only so many T-shirts that people are going to want to buy. But when it’s a cooking creator that launches their own salad bowl, because that’s part of their day-to-day videos. That’s where we’ve seen great success.
Joe Gagliese 46:09
Actually, there’s, there’s one Jeremy I think you’ll really like, which is there’s a guy on TikTok we represented he’s called the Ranch King. And he’s built this massive audience testing different ranch dressing.
Jeremy Weisz 46:21
Before I was lactose intolerant, I’d be all over that. Right?
Joe Gagliese 46:24
And so our head of ventures went to him and be like, dude, we’re making ranch dipping sauce Smith. And the guy’s like, I’d love to do that. Can I really do that? And next thing you know, we’re selling ranch. So yeah, like, it’s really about architecting and engineering, the entrepreneurship into these creators, a lot of them will want to sell things they like. But it’s not necessarily aligned to the audience. So what we did was we made just a pretty simple formula and rubric that we follow that, goes data first and gives them options as opposed to letting them be free rein. So how do you utilize the data we’re accessing in terms of their audience demographics, behaviors, what they buy today, what they search, comment, you name it, like we get all the data, we can, then we even put on a third party data layer, which is like, what products are selling in general, what’s doing the best on Amazon walmart.com, what if we use real data to kind of shrink the pool of things to do down. And then we find the ones that relate to the audience really well. And we go to the creator and say, these are the three opportunities that we think have the highest propensity to succeed for you because of these reasons, and that’s why I think our creator venture programs do so well is because there’s 100 venture companies for creators, but the creator just says what they want to do, and they do it, but they’re not really taking the acumen, business and data approach to the entrepreneurial side of it. They’re just trying to one and done these things. And we’re trying to utilize data to create something sustainable for these creators, again, with the purpose of creating that stability revenue stream for the creator, so they can kind of dictate their lives on their terms.
Jeremy Weisz 48:00
Guys, I know we’re at time here. So I have one last question. Before I ask it. Where should people contact you? Brands or creators, I imagined and I was gonna be huge for you guys. Right? Like, people in NIL. We’ve got lots of followers now they can actually monetize this. So where can people find you? Where should people go?
Joe Gagliese 48:23
Listen, viralnation.com is probably the easiest one. I know we’ve mentioned it a few times. Obviously Mat and I are both accessible through social, whether that be LinkedIn or Instagram for me, but we’re not hard to find.
Jeremy Weisz 48:35
You must be salivating when NIL stuff came up.
Joe Gagliese 48:38
You know what yes or no, Jeremy unfortunately. So Viral Nation talent has a sports division. And within there were one of the larger NIL talent firms. So we have 100 athletes or something like that. And what I was really surprised that was brands rushed into the space to buy up the top players and not all the players. So, although it’s a really big, momentous thing for college sports, unfortunately, there hasn’t been enough investment into really spread that across the actual, there’s a lot of NCAA athletes. So we’ve been working really closely with teams and organized schools, to figure out different ways that we can motivate brands to want to support these young people. It’s definitely something that we’re on, but it’s not something that I’m seeing massive momentum in today,
Jeremy Weisz 49:27
It will be I’m sure, it will be. So last quick question is just a mentor. And a couple I know you have a board of directors, I don’t know if you want to talk about how you chose your board of directors and who’s on the board directors.
Joe Gagliese 49:43
Well, listen, our board of directors is made up by the folks who have invested in our business right, so John Ruffalo and Todd Bulli and Jeff, and Manny Costas, Jeff Wilbur, sorry. These are all folks that are incredibly inspirational and mentored us for a long time. Manny Costas is the former CMO of HP and Symantec out of the US and has been with me, man, for seven years, as I’d say, our lead mentor. And then outside of that, more recently, we’ve built a really serious and magical relationship with Jim Balsillie over at Blackberry, the founder of blackberry, and he’s been instrumental in some of the decisions we’ve made over the last couple of quarters. And it’s just something that we’ve always embraced is we’re fortunate enough to have hit territories of growth where these mentors are a lot more open to working with you because they can affect change, right. And that’s been really special, because we’ve leveraged the crap out of that, you know, me and Matt are 32 years old. This is our first kicking the can, me and hammer varies almost zero ego, guys. So, we know what we know and we don’t know what we don’t know. So, a lot of this has been drinking from a firehose for me and him and trying to understand what the best decisions are for the Oregon how do we not have mentorship like we’ve had, I can’t even imagine achieving what we’ve achieved. So yeah, we rely on our mentorship from folks like that to help us through these innings were quite frankly, no one in our whole orbit has ever been through them. So they become a really, really important.
Jeremy Weisz 51:20
I want to be the first one to thank you both. Fantastic learning about your journey, your stories, I will check out viralnation.com And thanks, everyone.
Joe Gagliese 51:30
Thank you Jeremy.
Mat Micheli 51:31
Thanks.
Jeremy Weisz 51:31
Thanks, Mat. Thanks, Joe.
