Jeffery: Welcome to the Supporters Fund Ask An Angel. I’m your host Jeffery Potvin. today please welcome Julien Smith. How are you today sir?
Smith: Hey, thanks for having me dude. It’s great, having a good day.
Jeffery: Awesome. Well we’re super excited to have you today because there’s a few reasons. But the biggest one is that of all of the investors that I’ve gotten the opportunity to chat with, I’m going to say, you’ve probably raised the most money. So, there’s going to be a lot to talk about and I’m pretty excited to jump in and discuss all this. So, the way we like to start our show off is that we want to hear a bit about your background. So, if you can talk about some of the past experiences, your startups that you’ve built, even from your New York Times, way back YouTubing it, all these great things that you’ve been doing. I’d love to hear a bit of that and then one thing about you that nobody would know.
Smith: Oh man. Well I’ll give you the thing that nobody would know about. I’ll get to that. It will come to me but I’ll give you a sense of my history. a lot of people in startups come from certain schools or whatever, and that doesn’t apply to me. My father was an executive coach. It’s one of the reasons I run a coaching software company today. So, I grew up in an environment where you could do whatever you want with your life because that is what he would tell his clients. And they would be going through a career transition or something like that and he would bring tools to bear to be able to help that. So, one good thing about that is I felt that I could do anything. But the bad thing about it is, I didn’t feel that I had a path that was set for me and sometimes me and my fiancé talk about how envious we are of people that just become doctors, and they just know they’re always going to be doctors because it’s just set for them. And I never had that. So, my path to, let’s call it tech, it’s actually really circuitous and weird. It actually doesn’t begin with me really starting companies. It begins with me starting a podcast which is one of the first podcasts that ever existed and maybe the first of two or something like that Canadian podcast that ever existed and certainly the first hip hop podcast in the world which is a funny thing to say. But that’s in 2004. There were no podcasts and I started one because I had like a weird distinct unique voice. I was younger than most people that were podcasting. I was doing a bunch of things. I got picked up by Syria satellite radio. So, I ended up having that. It was the first time that I ever switched from having a regular office job that had nothing to do with tech like at all to working online and I was the only person that I knew that worked online like this. So, it was transformative for me. All of a sudden, my peers weren’t like people I sat next to in a regular office but they were other podcasters and other media producers. And I hadn’t really learned how to do that and just having a radio voice is what I get told that I used to do in radio commercials. So, someone agreed. So, that maybe was one angle of how I got there and then from there, social media was just coming in to start to exist. And my podcast was starting to pay me like a little bit of money. So, we ended up writing about social media and through writing eBooks about social media there. keep in mind, this is 2008 to 2007 type of thing. someone comes to us or to me and a co-author and goes, you should write a real book about this and we’re like okay. And we think that’s a super exciting opportunity because I’m 25 or 27 or something years old at the time. And I’m like I got to you know. I just want to do this and my co-author likewise we had big audiences. So, in the first week that the book came out, it was called Trust Agents published in 2009. It was considered by Amazon to be one of the best business books of the year and it was a New York Times bestseller. So, there’s a gigantic crazy transformation from being a dude that worked in some random call center really to a media personality that ended up on Sirius to a New York Times best-selling author and speaker. So, that happens in an arc that’s about four years which is a crazy arc now. I’m running internet businesses. Like a little bit at this time, I started a blog and the blog ended up being super popular. It’s about self-development and about a bunch of other things. And after about three books, I’m like maybe I’m done here. not really sure but I had an idea to start a business which ultimately became a business breather that probably most or anybody of the people that know of the things that I’ve done, even though I’ve written a lot of books that have turned out well, breather is probably the thing that is most commonly known by people that I talked to, raised 150 million dollars while I was CEO and raised more after I was no longer CEO. And I ended up at around 250 employees at the height of it with locations in 10 cities and all these things. And it was originally a meeting room business and later it became a commercial real estate tech business where you could slice up spaces using technology and open them using electronic locks with your phone. So, this business is like I had never started a venture business. before I didn’t know how to raise any money at all and I had made some cash a little bit in previous internet businesses. a little that this is the first time that I was like dealing with employees and dealing with a board and dealing with all these things. And in this crazy world, I was able to get that to the size that I got it to tens of millions of revenues so on and so forth. So, after that, I realized I was in the real estate business which is not a business I intended to be in right but a business I ended up as a result then. So, we gave that to another CEO. Meaning, we hired a CEO at the board level to be able to operate the business and that went on. And then I started this company, Practice, that I run today and that has been funded to the tune of 10 million bucks by Andersen Horowitz, Tony Robbins and a few other people and that’s my trajectory as far as tech goes. And oh, something that nobody knows about me, I would say one of the things that not many people know about me is that I have really loud Tinnitus. So, I have super really loud ringing in my ears all the time. people in my life know this. people on the internet typically do not. So, it’s actually a thing that I and lots of lots of people deal with but it’s a thing that I’ve been dealing with for like at least maybe 15 years or something like that.
Jeffery: Well, the entire story is amazing but I will have to ask. This ringing noise that you hear, does it distract you? Do you notice it or is it now becoming something that just becomes air you’re just plowing?
Smith: Okay. It becomes background noise not for all, not for everybody. But for some people, it becomes background noise. But you hear it all the time. It’s like you can look this up. It’s like a well-known thing.
Jeffery: Well, thank god, it’s background noise. Because I would think that having that gnawing noise bouncing around your mind would eventually either drive you crazy or you would come up with something to fix it. So, somebody’s working on that, I’m sure. But Julien, that’s fantastic. Understanding, but the biggest thing that I want to dive into and you’ve talked about it multiple times is this money and how all of this unfolded. But before we jump into how the money thing started, I’m a huge fan of the podcasting side as you can imagine. Back in the 2005’s, I was working with a creative artist in Toronto and we had this big discussion on how we wanted to jump in and create this podcast and build all the stuff out. And we had more discussions than action. And because you were the first person to put this together, what was the driving force behind it? because this really proves to me that one, you’re an entrepreneur and that you stepped into it. You talked about the hip-hop side but what got you into the space there was a few notables back in the day that were working obviously on the YouTube side. today they’re making millions. they’re doing a lot of fruitful things on the web. What steered you into it and what were the few learnings that you got from this early stage before you got picked up from Sirius?
Smith: Yeah. So, I will say that it really is what taught me about internet marketing more than anything. So, as a first, really foraying into internet marketing was having to market my own podcast. And I will say