I Talk To The $500M Man About How He Finds Hit After Hit

- August 15, 2025 (7 months ago) • 01:19:11

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Dan Porter	So, this is like a canned water brand, a high school basketball player, and a TikTok meme walk into a bar — and out comes this. This is the story of that.
00:17	Shaan Puri	Can I just hype you up like I'm Dana White in the UFC? Because we have here the most entertaining man in business — the guy with the most illustrious career. He started Teach For America. He created the viral hit game Draw Something and sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars. He worked with our Emmanuel in the talent world. Then he built the best amateur basketball league on the planet and affected culture. Now he's here today telling us about his new ventures, his new brands, and new things that he's building along the way — and how to do it. So, Dan, welcome. You are the reigning, defending, undefeated, most entertaining man in business.
00:57	Dan Porter	I appreciate that... sometimes people go 19–0 and then they don't win the Super Bowl. So I gotta keep winning until, I guess, I'm in the grave.
01:06	Shaan Puri	So, you are a teacher/professor at NYU, and so is Scott Galloway. Who's the better professor?
01:11	Dan Porter	"And who has more street cred on campus? Who's got bigger pull? He's richer and more famous, and I'm humbler. So I guess that's— that's how it goes."
01:25	Shaan Puri	Okay, so, dude, I wanted to talk to you because you texted us something and confused me. You're building a water brand now? Well, you've done this crazy water brand thing — can you... you gotta tell this story. I don't think anyone even knows the story.
01:40	Dan Porter	Yeah, kind of. So this is the unlikely story of the fourth-most-followed water brand in the world on social media. To take a step back: I don't know if everybody knows what NIL is. NIL is name, image, likeness — it's a revolution in college sports. For years, players could not make any money. Reggie Bush lost his Heisman Trophy; people would lose their eligibility. Then, a year after we started our business and started paying players, the Supreme Court ruled, and all of a sudden there was NIL. Now every college — and many high school — players in America can make money. The difference is they can't get paid to play the sport, but they can get endorsement deals and so forth. If you think about it: you're in school, your roommate is a rapper and has a song, another roommate is a YouTuber and makes money, but if you hoop or play football you couldn't make money. It doesn't really make any sense.
02:42	Shaan Puri	"Right, especially when the schools are making a lot of money off those sports. So, players today—give a sense of the scale of this. How much is NIL [name, image, likeness] paying top players? Top basketball players, top football players... maybe... I don't know what Cooper Flagg was making last year, or a SEC quarterback. Give me a range: are they making tens of thousands of dollars a year, hundreds of thousands, millions, or tens of millions? What are the best players making through this NIL stuff?"
03:07	Dan Porter	So, if you look at a top Power Five quarterback — SEC, whatever — $7 to $10 million a year. Why a year? A year, right? To play for one season. Wide receivers, running backs, and the best defenders: $1 million to $3 million. A guy on the bench: $250,000. </FormattedResponse>
03:27	Shaan Puri	And like the NFL salary for a first-round pick as a quarterback: if you're a first-round pick—Caleb Williams in 2024 was the number one overall pick—he signed a four-year $39,000,000 deal. So he signed a deal that paid him $10,000,000 a year. And you're saying that college guys are making, sort of, that same range—$7 to $10 million—while they're still in college?
03:51	Dan Porter	They can absolutely make that same.
03:53	Shaan Puri	And by the way, does this trickle down? Like, if I'm a women's lacrosse player somewhere—or a soccer player—and we're not with a powerhouse SEC football program… am I still, you know, making hundreds of dollars a month doing local stuff with the car wash nearby? Like, is everybody getting paid, or is it only the people at the top right now?
04:12	Dan Porter	It's really the people at the top—top—top. Basketball players, one to three million. I have about four or five players who played in my league who are making over $1 million in college, and it's kind of a waterfall. There is a softball player in Texas who makes $1 million, but it definitely falls off a cliff because those are the sports—March Madness on television, football on television—that generate a tremendous amount of money for the schools. Those are the sports they want to win at the highest level. In fact, a lot of NIL legislation says you have to still support all of the other sports: the Olympic sports, the women's sports, the less popular men's sports, and so forth. In women's college basketball, when you think about NIL, there aren't a large number of WNBA teams. In fact, there are only three rounds to the WNBA draft, and if you're in the second or third round you usually don't actually make it onto a team. So, from the women's side, college basketball is a much more lucrative opportunity for them than the WNBA because the path to the WNBA is just so small—it's a numbers game. There are not enough [WNBA roster spots]. But are swimmers and lacrosse players making hundreds of thousands of dollars? Currently, they are not.
05:35	Shaan Puri	Right. Okay. So NIL—good thing for the athletes overall: they're getting some money. So now, how does this take us to you building this water brand and, in a very short amount of time, getting it to go viral, making it one of the most followed water brands in the world?
05:52	Dan Porter	Yeah, so this is like a canned water brand, a high school basketball player, and a TikTok meme walk into a bar—and out comes this. This is the story of that. To take it back: with this basketball league, Overtime Elite, it's the second most-followed basketball league in the world, behind the NBA. It has over 12 million followers and many, many fans. A lot of people watch the games. There’s a player in this league, Taelyn Kinney. They call him "TK"—his initials. He’s going to be a senior this year. He’s being recruited by Louisville, Kentucky, and UConn [University of Connecticut], among other schools. He’s a great player and actually a great guy—really level-headed, funny, works hard, no drama. Great kid. Last year, one of our teams was on a beach somewhere. He and another player were joking around. The other player asked him a question, and his answer was "six, seven," and he moves his hands like that. It’s a line from a rap song by Skrillo. About two months later, somebody from our team texts me: "There are like millions of views on TikTok where they've taken his voice and made it 'six, seven'." I’m like, "What?" He hadn't done anything, and we hadn't done anything. This one-off comment basically exploded all over TikTok. You get into the spring and the fall part of last year—Paige Becker’s "How are you training?" "Six, seven." They're asking Cooper Flagg, "How many hours of sleep do you get a night?" He goes, "I don't know, six, seven." It becomes one of those things. It’s like New York real estate—you think it’s so expensive it can’t get any more expensive, and then a year later it’s even higher. Or like Palantir stock: you think it’s so expensive, it can’t get any more expensive, and then it just keeps going up. This meme kept moving. Now on TikTok, middle schoolers are going up to their teachers and saying, "What's 23 + 54?" The teacher says, "67," and the kids say, "Oh—six, seven." It’s this thing. Explain it to anyone over the age of 21 and they’re like, "What does it mean?" And you’re like, "It doesn’t mean anything."
08:30	Shaan Puri	No, it's literally a week. So... hold it up — you drink from it. You have one there; hold it up real quick. Alright, so you told me about this. You were like, "Dude, we have this water brand that's exploding." You sent me some of the stats about the growth of it, so I looked up the brand Six Seven. I just... and you were like, "Yeah, this player Taylan Kinney or whatever," so I assumed he's six foot seven. I didn't even think about it. That was like two weeks ago. Then last night, I'm sort of preparing for this and I realized the kid's six one. So I'm like, why is this called Six Seven? I'm 37 years old — I'm clueless to this trend, right? I don't leave my house, let alone talk to a lot of, like, 11-year-olds to figure out what the memes of the day are. So last night, dude, I'm watching literal PowerPoint presentations explaining the origin of the meme: how it started and why the hand motion. Then the song — the song's called "Boot Toot" or something like that. I don't even know where the song is from; some rapper I've never heard. Then the kids are going crazy with it. There are handshakes, and it's going viral. Famous people are saying it, and they're tricking their teachers into saying it. There's a whole world on TikTok where the teachers are like, "Okay guys, if a student comes in and asks you a question and the answer's gonna be '6' or '7,' be ready. They're gonna say this and you're gonna wonder what it means." It doesn't mean anything, but that's why they love it — because it doesn't mean anything. There's no meaning behind it. They just want you to ask and wonder, and they just find it funny. So it's like this meme where there's not even a satisfying backstory to it. That's kinda what makes it cool, you know? This is like so out of my realm.
10:03	Dan Porter	I mean, if you think about it, at the core—first of all—it's the definition of postmodernism, right? Nothing means anything in and of itself; it's the meaning that we ascribe to it. That's obviously the generalized postmodern condition in art and literature. But also, what it really says is that young people have an ability to impact culture. Things can mean whatever they mean. That's all about their power in their media, as opposed to this idea of top-down culture that we create. They both exist. Stranger Things exists as top-down culture, and Six Seven exists as something else. I get them both: every summer camp, every grown-up saying, "I don't know what this means." So TK is like, "I want to take advantage of this. I should sell T‑shirts." I'm like, there's gotta be something in life beyond selling T‑shirts. He's trying to figure it out, and we're trying to support him because it's really him—he's the young entrepreneur, the creator of it, the face of the brand. We're kind of like the back office in this. We just started talking about water. Why do we talk about water? Because water's just not that complicated. I've tried to make a lot of products; a lot of people have tried to make a lot of products. Five years ago I tried to make protein Rice Krispie treats—too chewy, not chewy enough, the flavor wasn't right. I'm just thinking, memes and trends don't last forever. "TK, what about you making water?" He's like, "Oh, I wanted to make an energy drink and I wanted to make something else." But the thing about water is it's just water. Let's go tomorrow—you could be making this thing. You don't need a formulator or anything. He gets totally jazzed: "I want to make water." He said it has to say "You Hackin Family" on it because that's my other phrase. I'm like, I don't know what that means—that is not hard to do. So we try to find a water manufacturer for him and the designers, by the way, because for... [transcript cuts off]
12:20	Shaan Puri	"People who are just listening on audio can't see you, because, you know, half the people watch on YouTube and half are on audio. Could you just—I'm not going to profile you, but if I was a police sketch artist drawing you, and I'm thinking about this kid who's... how old is he? 15? 16 years old? Something like that. He's 17, I think. Yeah, he's 17—a 17-year-old. Could you just describe who you are—the unlikely co-founder duo, the hero duo of this?" </FormattedResponse>
12:42	Dan Porter	I am in my late fifties. I'm wearing a button-down, collared linen shirt. I don't hoop and I have no bars. I wear glasses. I'm not super athletic. But I guess my superpower is that I believe in young people, and I'm good at listening to them.
13:09	Shaan Puri	Okay, great.
13:09	Dan Porter	And Overtime is a platform for them. People are like, "Overtime has 100 million followers in that kind of demo." I always say: I don't make the posts; I don't write the captions. I just create the platform for creative young people to reach other creative young people. I love culture, I love music, and I love all these things. My job isn't to make the content—my job is to build a platform for TK to figure out how he can build the product that he wants to do, and that his family wants to do. And just be like, "KISS" — keep it simple, stupid. Just... really.
13:47	Shaan Puri	What's that Olympic sport where the puck is going, and there are people with brooms on the ice, just shaving or smoothing it? [curling]
13:54	Dan Porter	"Curling, curling. Yes, I'm the ice shaver."
13:56	Shaan Puri	"You're curling, exactly."
13:58	Sam Parr	Alright, so everyone talks about content and how you should do content marketing to get more customers. The problem is that it's really hard: how do you make something that blows up, that goes viral, that actually gets you customers? Most people make something that's completely ignored. When I ran my last company, The Hustle, I had to study this, and I eventually made content that reached tens—sometimes even hundreds—of millions of readers. We were able to dial in what works and what doesn't, and we made it fairly repeatable. With the help of HubSpot, I made a guide called "20 Ways to Craft Irresistible Content" that looks at the books I read to learn all of this, and the 20 different tactics and strategies we used at The Hustle to help things go viral. We actually got customers from the content we made. If you want to create content that people actually read, you can check it out below. There's a QR code you can scan, or you can click the link in the description. Now, back to the episode.
14:53	Dan Porter	And so I just say to our designers, "Let's make a bunch of stuff." TK is like, "I like this, I don't like this." He doesn't have to be a designer. Within eight weeks there's a water brand. There's somebody in Michigan who's pumping out cans of water and everything else. TK is like, "Here's the plan: we're gonna launch it on June 7." [launch date: June 7] So we're just like, "Oh shit, we gotta help him make this water run in eight weeks." On 06/07 it drops. He makes a launch video—it's just him messing around. He's from Lexington, Kentucky, with his friends. He and a bunch of his friends, and some are social people, just go to these basketball tournaments and they start giving it out. It just starts going crazy. Every influencer, every basketball person is picking it up. All of a sudden there are 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 followers. A dad is offering $100 in cash to buy a can of this, but you can't really buy it anywhere because he's just made it and we're just trying to figure it out. We talked to him and we're like, "Where do people want to buy this?" He's like, "At the gas station." If it were me and I'm some corporate executive, I'm like, "We got to do a deal with Publix, we got to do a deal with whatever." But the gas station is just where we go buy stuff because if you're 16 you have a car. I'm a New Yorker, so I think about the bodega—[note: bodegas are less common outside New York]—and in the rest of the country you're always being driven by your parents somewhere to go play in some sports tournament, and there's a gas station. He sneaks into a couple gas stations for the video, puts it on the shelf, and pretends that he found it there. The account just keeps growing. Kids start making their own commercials for it. People start pouring it on each other like it's holy water, and it's only been sold a couple of times. We just throw up a website. Twenty-five thousand people sign up and say, "I want to buy this." That's as far as we've gotten. We have almost 150,000 followers. Some people are like, "Oh, you made a Liquid Death for Gen Z, for the urban crowd." It's canned, it's kind of gold. I'm holding it up because you want it to look good on social media—you want to see people across the court. But all that really happened was there's a guy who's good at basketball who accidentally created a meme. We supported him to make a product that we could make fast and easy but that wasn't a T‑shirt. Everybody who's a fan went crazy about it. Every grown-up I talk to who has kids says, "Can you get my kids some of that Six Seven water? They don't know how to get it." So I don't know—we're on the 30‑yard line, I know I'm using a football metaphor, the 10‑yard line, and like, how does it go from here? Is TK selling $100,000,000 worth of water in twelve months? We haven't figured that out. He doesn't really know. We don't really know. We just made something big and now there's over 150,000 followers. If you look up most water brands they don't have that many followers—except for Liquid Death, which is hugely inspirational and very successful. All kids mess with it now. Every player is coming up to me and they're like, "Dan, Dan, I got this idea, I got this idea for this product." I think what's cool is, number one, YouTubers do this, but athletes haven't really done it. Number two, seventeen‑year‑old athletes haven't really done it. Number three, it has this whole overlap with NIL [Name, Image, Likeness]. Now if you're trying to recruit TK to come play at your school, you're gonna buy 10,000 cases of Six Seven water. You're going to make it red because that's your school colors, and you're going to tell everyone to buy this, and TK's going to commit to your school—and it all is covered by NIL. There's no eligibility issues. You've unlocked this whole creative thing. If you ask him, and you ask the people who support him from our team, they'll say, "Six Seven isn't a water brand; it's a movement. It's a feeling." It's about having fun, creating culture, and everything else. Listen—his number is zero. Maybe Six Seven water in nine months is called "double zero water" because it's really just about the concept. Maybe the meme dies but it takes other shapes and forms, or maybe he goes to the NBA and he has another thing. But you recognize the gold can and you recognize everything else. So it's really me talking to you in this process. He's figured out a little bit. We figured out a little bit. But I can't tell you how Pepsi is acquiring this for $500,000,000 yet, because everybody's making it up as they go along.
19:56	Shaan Puri	And that's what I love about this. You know, we do a lot of episodes with people after the fact. > "Oh, you sold Draw Something, right? And you'd made all this money. Can you go back and tell us what happened 15 years ago when you started that business?" And hey, by the way, everything has changed and none of that will really work anymore. But hopefully you get some inspiration—maybe a few nuggets I can steal from there. That's a typical podcast. Then the other one that we do is like: > "Here's an idea. I think it'll work. I don't really know. It's not in motion; it's not in flight. It's just an idea." And hey, it's blue-sky. This is a very unique thing. We—I'm in the middle...
20:30	Dan Porter	I'm—yeah, you're literally in.</FormattedResponse>
20:31	Shaan Puri	The middle of the middle — you're just at the... where it's not nothing, but it isn't done yet, right? I'm like, "Oh, that's interesting. I've never actually talked to somebody at this stage of building a fun brand like this." Just to give this some perspective: we're recording this on August 5, so it's been almost exactly two months since the launch. June 7 was the launch, so we're about two months in. If I'm just looking at Instagram... </FormattedResponse>
20:59	Dan Porter	You're six. You gotta look at IG and TikTok.
21:01	Shaan Puri	Oh no. But if I—if I just did TikTok and Instagram, just for simplicity here...
21:04	Dan Porter	A second.
21:05	Shaan Puri	Yeah, so the Instagram is almost at 100,000 followers for the water brand. Okay — let's just look at a few other water brands I can think of off the top of my head. Dasani: 18,000. Okay, so you have five times more followers than Dasani. Aquafina: 7,000 followers, and there are literally about 10 comments on a post — so no engagement, nobody cares. And, by the way, there's a full social media team they hire; there's like $500,000 of salary working on their social media at all times, at the minimum. Let's even think of—maybe I'm picking on the most boring brands. Let's go to Vitaminwater — big exit, owned by a big company now. 50 Cent was involved a long time ago; they certainly gotta be big: 81,000. You're bigger than Vitaminwater in literally less than two months.
22:01	Dan Porter	You know what the best part of this is? The best part is, like, TK asks this guy Tom, "What's the marketing plan? What are we doing next?" Tom's like, "Dan, what are we doing next?" I was like, "Here's the marketing plan: I'm going on MFN and I'm just gonna talk. Ben and Sean are gonna hook me up," and some listener is gonna be like, "Yeah, I own 500 gas stations — call me up and I'll put you in this." Then, when I do the third podcast, when I come back on in a year and it's like, "How I sold this; how the 17-year-old entrepreneur sold this," it'll be like, "I came on your podcast and then we went to the moon."
22:38	Shaan Puri	Yeah, exactly. You need the gas station owner, because I was going to say we don't really have the whole youth culture stuff going for us. If you want a bunch of people who, you know, work remotely and want to take a picture and put it in Slack, they can do that. But that may not be you.
22:54	Dan Porter	Probably have five listeners who know everything about the beverage business.
22:58	Shaan Puri	See — this is what you get. This is what you get about media that most people don't, right? You're like, "Cool. I'm gonna go here because there's gonna be five people that either know everything about the beverage business — they were the early distributor of this, blah blah blah — or they own a chain of like 60 gas stations. They're a huge MFM fan and they're like, 'Yeah, I'm in.'" And you're like, "That was a great hour of time for me to do that."
23:18	Dan Porter	And you know what TK is going to do: as the founder of this brand and as the basketball player, he's going to train. He's going to get buckets. He's going to commit to going to college, and he's just going to keep being himself. That will just keep growing the brand.
23:34	Shaan Puri	Which is what I love, because when I looked at the content it wasn't like some advanced brand strategy or some cool, slick thing. It was literally this kid who's—obviously he's a great basketball player—but what's even more likable about him is he's not like a LeBron, where he looks like a grown man even though he's 17. He's not some man‑child; he's a child — he looks young and he acts young.
23:56	Dan Porter	He's a great dude.</FormattedResponse>
23:57	Shaan Puri	He's not grown into his body fully yet. He can hoop; he can dunk. He can do some amazing things on the court, but he's still got a very young energy, which is cool. So... he just seems...
24:06	Dan Porter	To content: a 17-year-old out there building a billion-dollar brand — that's not vibe coding. </FormattedResponse>
24:12	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that's true. That might be true, actually. Okay, so I want to kind of steal what's replicable about this now. Let's break down a couple of the elements here. The first is: you were listening to the trends, you were listening to the memes, you were listening to the culture, and you didn't sort of just write it off or be too busy to listen, right? You run a company—how many employees do you guys have?
24:35	Dan Porter	"400. How much money have you raised for Overtime?" "$250,000,000" </FormattedResponse>
24:40	Shaan Puri	You run a big-ass business. For you to be like, "Yes" — someone on my team was talking about how one player on one of our teams said a random thing, and then some TikTok editors chopped it up and mixed it with a random song that, you know, isn't even by a huge artist. It's not like Drake doing this.
24:59	Dan Porter	Yeah.
24:59	Shaan Puri	And you were like, "That's cool. Let's—let's talk about it. Let's have a brainstorming session." That's interesting to me: is there a principle or a philosophy you have that has served you well? That's... that's like that. I might be asking, you know, Steph Curry, "How exactly do you shoot a jump shot?" He's like, "I don't know, man. I just do it."
25:16	Dan Porter	I think there's a couple things. One is, like, if I think about 2015–2016 and I'm launching Overtime as an example: we start filming some players playing basketball in New York with some iPhones or whatever and making some posts. All of a sudden I realized that there were players getting tens of thousands of views who weren't even top‑100 ranked. My understanding had been: here's high school basketball, here's the top‑ranked players, here's the people who aspire to go to Sean's alma mater, Duke, and play and hoop and everything else. But the reality was, the deeper I looked, the more I realized there were all of these networks and subcultures of young people who were connecting that had nothing to do with the grown‑up view of the world. I'd find one of them and then I'd be like, who does this person follow? Then I'd go through and look at every single person they follow, and so forth. In a way, culture is culture — it just makes things. But if you're attuned to it, social media is a cheat code for decoding it. If you start to go deep, you can just observe and find these things. If I try to explain at the most elemental level, I'll say anime. Most people in America have no idea what anime is — they're like, "cartoons, what is anime?" Once you see it, you realize it's everywhere. I remember the first time someone said "anime" years ago: I go on a trip to Rome for vacation and every T‑shirt in the store has an anime character on it. Then I'm sitting next to a kid on the plane and he's reading a graphic or manga, and I'm like, wait — I didn't see it anywhere and now I see it everywhere. It's kind of like you're digging down the earth and suddenly you find gold and oil and all of these other things. Once you see it, you assume that most people don't bother to see it, and that's where your opportunity is.
27:18	Shaan Puri	There's actually a neuroscience-nerd way of explaining this. There's a part of your brain that is made to do this; it's called the reticular activating system. Basically, when I learned about this it was pretty interesting. It said: imagine all the different inputs coming into your mind at any one time. Your eyes — in this room right now there's a whiteboard, a piano, books, a guy sitting over there, a light shining in my eyes — but I need to be focused on you. So really I'm telling my brain, "This is what matters. Don't tell me about that sticky note on the wall over there that's yellow." If I look now I see it, but most of the time my brain filters it out. Same thing with noises: there's a guy mowing the lawn and I'm telling my brain, "Not important — ignore." If you're at a cocktail party with 100 conversations going on, it just all sounds like noise to you until somebody says your name. Then suddenly it's like, whoa — my brain was actually listening because I heard my name, but I couldn't tell you the other ten things they were talking about because it was just chatter otherwise. Basically the brain has a defense system which just says, "Yo, throw away 99% of all inputs — you're not gonna need it; we'd go crazy if we tried to take it all in." There's a bouncer at the front that's checking the ID of every little thing that's coming in and saying, "Alright, you get to come in." Then the trick to life is when you tell the bouncer, "Hey, add this to the list — add anime to the list; start paying attention; let anime in." Then you start seeing anime everywhere. The same thing happens if you buy a car: you're like, "Oh, I'm looking for a BMW," and suddenly you just start seeing that BMW everywhere. It's not like it just appeared — it was always there; you just weren't paying attention to the BMWs around you until it became highly relevant.
28:54	Dan Porter	Where everyone's like, "My phone is listening to me."
28:56	Shaan Puri	Right, and...
28:58	Dan Porter	You're like, "It might be," but what you're saying might be true too. I do this thing in my class at NYU where I say, "Look around the room and find everything that's blue. I'm going to quiz you on it." Then everybody closes their eyes and I'm like, "Name me one thing that's red." You only see the thing that you look for. There are a ton of red things in the room, but nobody sees them because they're looking for something else. In a way, that's part of the reason why I've never been a massive fan of business school or hiring MBAs. I feel like what business school does is it trains everyone to look for blue. What you, as an entrepreneur building a company, want is somebody whose focus isn't narrowed but who's incredibly wide — someone who notices, "Oh, there's yellow, there's red, there are all of these other things." We tend to say, "Oh, you've got to refine your skills," but if your whole process is just seeing blue, you're never going to see the other colors, and your ability to create or add value becomes extremely limited.
30:00	Shaan Puri	So there's a great story about this in the early PayPal days. I don't know if you've ever read PayPal Wars or any of the early PayPal books. A couple of them are pretty good. One of them tells a story about Elon. His company was X — not the Twitter thing, but he had loved the idea of a company named X for a long time. He wanted to build a bank on the internet: all your financial services — mortgages, loans, checking, business accounts, credit cards — everything on the internet. He was right, he was just about twenty-five years too early. That's happening today with Ramp, Mercury, and other companies. But he wanted to do it back then. He had this top-down view of the world and he just wanted to make that thing come to fruition. It wasn't working very well, but it was a big idea and he was obviously a relentlessly driven entrepreneur. Then you had PayPal, which started as this small thing: “you could email money to a friend.” It sounded like Venmo or just some little game you could play. It didn't sound like transforming financial services using internet technology. But the key to PayPal's success was not blindly following the top-down, sounds-good-on-paper vision. It was listening to clues from the ground. I think it was David Sacks, somebody in the customer service department, who said, “Hey, we noticed all these eBay sellers are asking for a logo they can put as a badge on their listings.” Legal was like, “No, they can't use our logo.” And other people were like, “Wait, why do they want our logo?” They were actually curious: “What's red over there?” It turned out they wanted the logo because they were trying to say, “We take PayPal.” They looked at their data and realized the people who actually used PayPal were eBay sellers. That insight became their strategy. Eventually they changed the name — it became PayPal — and that became the killer app that made it a billion-dollar company. So the lesson is: start with a vision — it's hard to start without one — but don't stay blind. Look for clues about what's actually happening. Don't try to force your view of what should be happening or what is good and what is bad. Just look at what is, and try to play in that lane. Is that something you did in the past? Did you withdraw something or do anything like that? Can we connect the dots here?
32:24	Dan Porter	Yeah. I feel like a vision is really just a premise — it's just an idea of, "This is what I think the company is going to be," but I don't really know anything because I haven't done anything yet. As soon as I get out there and do something, I start to learn. It really fucking annoys me when people are like, "You pivoted, you pivoted, you did this." Pivot being a basketball term. I'm like, I'm not pivoting — I'm adapting. I see this and I see opportunity. The thing that I think people sometimes miss is: start your company and let's imagine you're on a track, you're running a race. All the other tracks next to you are what's happening in the world around you, and you can't ignore those. So you start in the gaming business — you say, "I just want to make great games." Boom: the iPhone goes by. Boom: Facebook goes by. Boom: Xbox goes by. Your job isn't to be blind to all of those things. All of those things are changing, and you have to be able to make tons of micro changes around that. I remember when we started Overtime. I went into a pitch meeting and all we were were five people who, you know, liked sports a little bit, running around with a bunch of iPhones filming basketball in New York. The guy's like, "Well, what's your distribution plan? How are you going to grow?" We were like, "Well, now we're going to go to L.A. and film some basketball, then we're going to go to Houston, then we're going to go to Oakland and film some basketball." A week later he's like, "We passed. We just don't think that's the right distribution strategy." I was like, great — because two days ago we had also given up on that distribution strategy. You just try to figure it out. The real strategy is: we're going to figure it out because we're going to try a bunch of different stuff. People judge everything as if it's this moment in time and everything the company does is an absolute certitude — "This is our decision," final. But instead you're moving in space. Think about the best basketball players — Luka, Iverson — it's like their ability to Kyrie: they just move into space. They find where there is nobody there, as opposed to somebody who comes down and says, "I'm going to run the play: you run to the corner, you go here, you give it to him."
34:47	Shaan Puri	We'll jump three times. Yeah — head fake, step through, and I'm gonna make the shot. It's like, "Yeah, we wish it worked that way. It would be nice." Yeah.
34:54	Dan Porter	It just doesn't — not to be too sporty, but it's a live-read situation. You're like, "That guy just blew his coverage."
35:02	Shaan Puri	Do you get accused of being too sporty a lot? Do people just look at you and say, "You're just too sporty," then?
35:07	Dan Porter	I mean, I do a lot of sports conferences and podcasts. So for them, they're like, "You're not at all sporty." They'd be like, "Didn't you play in college?" And I was like, "I was the—yeah, jazz DJ on the radio. Exactly. Pianos." But in the case of this, I don't want the non 40 people to be like, "Oh, this is going deep." I want you to have—I want your watch time to be really high.
35:29	Shaan Puri	I appreciate you looking out for me.
35:31	Dan Porter	You know, you're just improvising, figuring it out, and paying attention. The other thing I'll say is you don't need a massive dataset to understand where these opportunities and slight tweaks are. I always say, when I used to be in the app business, you could do a really good user test by the time you got to the sixth or seventh person — see what I did there — not the six hundredth person, but the sixth or seventh. You already knew what wasn't working. You only need one or two people to say something really deep, and you're like, "Oh, I totally got it." So, if you're very attuned to small data, it usually has some level of scale around it. You can constantly iterate to make sure your product lands. And the second it lands, all of a sudden there's a new platform, or Netflix changes their strategy, or Spotify changes theirs, and you're out there with everybody else in the ocean trying to tread water and figure out how to get to land.
36:38	Shaan Puri	Right. So—you said something else here, because I think it's amazing that in eight weeks you've built a, you know, water brand that I'll call a $10 million water brand. I don't know if it is—whatever—but the interesting thing about that number is you didn't start out by saying, "So we went out there and we put it up on Shopify, we started selling cans, we ran some Facebook ads, and then we sold some more cans and look—we've done, you know, whatever, $300,000 of revenue in the first five weeks." That's the typical success story. The reason I find what you did interesting is you said the opposite. You started by giving it away. You put some in the cooler at the gas station. You went to games. You couldn't even buy it—if I go to the website right now it just says, "join the waitlist." You can't even buy it. I've seen you do this before: this kind of grassroots, brand-building, long-game approach. It's so different from the way I play. Normally, if I start something I'm like, "Cool—let me see if people want this." I'm trying to validate my idea. I try to go sell as much as I can to get my own conviction and validation, and to let my insecurities start to melt a little bit. The more tangible, concrete proof I have that this thing is valuable—which, to me, is measured in dollars—the more confident I become. You seem to play the game differently, and I love it. I want to know more about it. Could you just describe your approach and why you think that might be interesting here?
38:03	Dan Porter	Yeah. I’ve never really thought about it or categorized it, but I agree with you. I’m just a very bottoms-up type of person in terms of creation and marketing. To use a sports example: when people were not watching as much sports, a lot of people in the sports industry said, “We need more stats on the screen—let’s show their heart rate, let’s show how far they’ve run, let’s show all this stuff.” I’d have meetings with people on the team who insisted that showing more stats was going to bring people back to TV. I always asked, “Who asked for that?” The response was, “Well, we just think that’s what people want.” But who actually knocked on the door and said, “I’m not really interested in watching sports on TV, but if you put their heart rate up, I’ll change my whole schedule and do nothing but watch sports on TV”? There’s a lot of stuff that starts up here—top-down—whereas my approach is different. My mom was a sociology professor; she loved sociology and anthropology. She’d listen and study people. Sometime in the ’90s she spent a summer in Starkville, Mississippi, just driving around listening to local people talk about economic development, their little businesses, and things like that. I could read a million business books and watch a lot of videos, but there’s some magic in the things people are actually talking about. As a CEO, I’ve always wanted to hear the opinion of every single person who works for the company, because somebody will have an insight or observation they don’t even think is that deep. They’ll say one thing and you’ll be like, “Damn, that’s true—I hadn’t thought about it.” So my approach is to be in the right place at the right time, in the room where it happens, to hear what people are saying and try to parse through it. If I can find that insight—where you think people care about X but they actually care about Y—how do I make that insight bigger? Even on the water side [beverage business], some of it was: yeah, it’d be better if young people drank water instead of drinks that have 100 grams of sugar or 100 grams of caffeine in them. Sometimes you’re wrong and sometimes you’re right, but if it doesn’t come from the bottoms-up, I don’t know who the customer is. I’ll give you a really non-sport, great example at some point.
40:55	Dan Porter	I was like, "I want to write a book and I'm going to pitch this book." I was working in the talent business, so I knew a lot of book people. This guy sat me down and, using Barnes & Noble as a visual representation, he said: > "Listen, when I go to sign an author or buy a book, I just say to them, 'What section are you in at Barnes & Noble?' I get it—you have this idea and this and that. Go to Barnes & Noble: psychology, business, whatever. Tell me what section you're in, because that's essentially the distribution. Then I know whether I want to buy this book or not. But if you're just telling me you have this idea and it's kind of self-help but it's not in any section, I can't buy it." So the ground up isn't just the idea—it's the distribution. It's all of those types of things. It requires paying attention and recognizing that, if your idea is, "I want to make a toothbrush with a removable head because why do I have to buy a whole new toothbrush every time?"—well, I've been around long enough to know that a hundred people have tried to do that and there's actually a reason that doesn't work. I think about apps: I've been pitched a million times, "let every fan monetize their fans directly," and you're like, they actually just like being on Instagram. You've seen ten of them and none of them have worked. So sometimes, if you've got a little pattern recognition and you overlay it with paying attention to culture and what people talk about, that tends to be how I do it. And maybe you and I will collaborate—because you're smarter than me—and you'll be like, "I'm going to turn this into the five-step process," and you and I will go to Barnes & Noble...
42:42	Shaan Puri	Be like, "Damn — that's the shelf your book is gonna be on." Well, one, I wanted to write with you early on when I was building The Milk Road. Me and Ben called you — you emailed us, you were like, "Hey, this is cool," or something like that. We were like, "Holy shit, that's Dan Porter." I don't think we knew each other at the time. No — and you were reading it. So we did a call with you. On that call you talked about... I had seen the rise of Overtime, but I didn't know what caused it. I had seen the outward manifestation of it. I saw it go from a brand I had never heard of to basically the most popular youth basketball brand on Instagram. That's not nothing — that's so hard to do in a crowded social media space: to build the number one brand. Not only that, players like Zion — guys who Nike is paying millions to sponsor — were voluntarily putting your shirt on, throwing your old logo up, and cameoing in your videos. Any time I would see a dunk clip it would always be from Overtime first. I didn't know how you guys were always getting there first. It turns out you had this army of volunteer, grassroots cameramen who were doing stuff. That "hand signal" was something you literally sat there and decided: we need a sign that when one person sees another, they can throw up — like a gang sign or a team sign. You started studying bands and cults. You studied people who have built these types of real, organic, tribal movements and picked out the best practices and ideas from them. You'd say, "Okay, that's interesting — in European soccer they have their songs. How do we do that?" Not every idea hits, but enough of them did that you built a real brand. You gave us advice for Milk Road. You said, "What I like about you guys is that, yeah, you're into crypto, you're a believer, but you're not super technical or overly audacious. You're not taking yourself too seriously." Everybody else is trying to overdress — they look like a kid in a big baggy, wearing his dad's suit and trying to be taken seriously. You're not. You suggested counter-programming against the uber-serious conferences. When they have their formal conference, throw a casual "two-beers" event at a bar. Give every bar, say, a $200 tab for your readers to go and enjoy. You gave us ideas like that that I really liked. There were zero people in my life that thought that way, and it was very intriguing to me — those are the types of ideas.
45:14	Dan Porter	Like a lot of things—you talk about ideation and marketing and distribution—but to me the thing I pay attention to the most, and maybe the thing I'm a little above average on, is positioning. I don't think people talk about positioning as much, but positioning is kind of like where you sit in the mind of the consumer. When people talk about "white space," it's often related to positioning. The simplest way I can explain it—once you see it you'll understand positioning forever and you won't have to watch 20 videos—is this: if you go and look at breakfast cereals in the supermarket, they have a left-to-right and a top-to-bottom organization. Usually, left to right is like least healthy to most healthy. They're not mixed up. On the left you've got the most sugary cereals, and as you start to walk to the right, at the end you have like Ezekiel—8–12 whole-grain cereals, stuff that looks like it should be refrigerated. Top to bottom is adult to kid. Kids' cereals are most often at the bottom because that's eye level for kids; adults' cereals are at the top. So if you think about it almost as this diamond—adult/kid is top/bottom and sweet/super-healthy is left/right—every cereal has to find its position in that market. Are you upper-left, lower-right, or anywhere else? That's positioning. It encompasses everything: where is the market opportunity, where is the white space. Another thing it does, as a sub-factor, is let you compete with somebody who is much bigger or better capitalized by making their success into a box—a trap they can't get out of. For example, if I go out and make a sports platform and I have to compete against maybe ESPN—the market leader with about $25 billion of revenue—what's ESPN's superpower? It appeals to everybody. It is the de facto noun for sports. If I come out and say I'm appealing to this demographic, that's massive. Forty percent of all global purchasing in five years will be Gen Z, and if all I do is focus on appealing to them, then if I'm the incumbent I can't start being like, "[unclear phrase]" because what happens to all the 50-year-olds who are following that? They... I don't get it. So you take their success and you almost make it a box or a trap that they can't get out of, and then you can own something. That can be visual language, product features, simplicity versus complexity, being harder to use. Sometimes people intentionally make things that are really hard to use because they don't want the mass audience—they want something else. Think about the classic business-school example, like the IKEA example: how do you compete with everyone else? You actually have them build the furniture themselves because it gives you pricing power and a different level of ownership. It's not scary—there are no words on any IKEA instruction manual, just pictures. In a way, a lot of those things roll up to positioning. But nobody's like, "Oh yeah, I just graduated from Wharton; I majored in positioning."
48:56	Shaan Puri	Right.
48:57	Dan Porter	You're talking marketing, finance, other things, but positioning — what your position is in the market and how you make that happen. Understand that is very visual to me; that's how I kind of think about everything. As you start to be successful, you think about going from playing offense to doing the things you want to do to protect that position. So all of a sudden I create this thing and I have this massive position in basketball and everybody's coming at me. I'm like, "We're in football also." And all the people are like, "Oh shit, we're mini overtime in basketball." Now they're just on the side of the road because half of overtime's business is in football and they're called hoop this and ball that and everything else. I have a name that could go across any type of sport. So you go from playing offense to defense to offense again in your positioning, but you're this vibrant organism that's growing and expanding all the time. That's literally just a brain dump of how I think about approaching it.
49:58	Shaan Puri	That's great. I have this ism that's very, very related: all positioning is counter-positioning. I think positioning is super underrated. Any entrepreneur knows positioning is underrated because you've gone into markets thinking you're so great—my product is so great, my team is so great, my service is so great—come visit us. And nobody wants to visit you. Why? Because you can't differentiate. Then you spend your whole life differentiating. You look at a few other people who started out figuring out the differentiations, figuring out where they live on that map that you described, and they found white space. For them, they don't even have to start with the best product or the best service. They will have time to build it and make it better because they figured it out. So this idea that all positioning is actually counter-positioning is important. The mistake people make when they think about positioning is they start naming positive attributes about themselves, like it's a self-help test in People magazine: "Oh yeah, our positioning is that we have really high-quality service, we move fast, we have great customer service." That's something every brand is trying to claim. Even if you did it, the problem is you can't claim it because everybody else has also claimed it. You're going to have to come up with some unique way to show, not tell, to even get anyone to believe you.
51:22	Dan Porter	The way I see it, I totally agree with you. I'm actually obsessed with this idea from Roger Martin [business thinker]. He says something that I'm going to butcher, but it's like: > "If the opposite of your strategy is stupid, then it's not a strategy." For example, if your strategy is, "We have the best fucking customer service out there," the opposite would be, "Our strategy is we have the worst customer service," right? Or, "We make the best products" — the opposite would be, "Our strategy is we make the worst products." If the opposite is so stupid, yours is not a strategy.
51:58	Shaan Puri	That's right, so...
51:59	Dan Porter	You can say something else like that, and then I just started to think about how it applies to everything. It's like, "Our strategy on this family vacation is, we're going to have fun." Well, who says our strategy on this family vacation is, "We're going to fight all the time and have no fun"?
52:15	Shaan Puri	"It's like once you..."
52:16	Dan Porter	Realize that the opposite is really dumb. Like, what you have is not a strategy—or, really, a... this.</FormattedResponse>
52:22	Shaan Puri	It's the same with company values. People will be like, "Oh, we make company values: high integrity, discipline, hard work." Yeah — again, nobody would agree with the opposite.
52:31	Dan Porter	Mom, I just got a job at this company out of college. Their values are: low integrity, no teamwork, and hostility. It's gonna be amazing.
52:40	Shaan Puri	Right. Actually, that actually might be interesting, because the opposite would not be stupid if I'd actually pass the...
52:45	Dan Porter	"Steps, exactly."
52:45	Shaan Puri	If they said that, Mark Zuckerberg had a good example of this. He said, "Somebody along the way taught me this," and then: "Your values are meaningless unless there's a trade-off baked into them." So if you don't acknowledge that there's a cost or a trade-off to doing the thing you say you're going to do, then it doesn't count. The famous Facebook value we all remember is "Move fast and break things." If it was just "move fast," we would not remember that. The fact that it was "move fast and break things" acknowledged the trade-off of moving fast — how fast we're going to move and that this is going to cause things to break. "We accept that trade." That's what's unique about us, where other companies are not willing to accept that trade. Their approach is "move as fast as you can, but if you make a mistake, then you shouldn't have moved that fast," which is actually how most companies operate.
53:33	Dan Porter	"That's so good."
53:34	Shaan Puri	It works at the values level and at the strategy level. Here's an example of who did it right. Who competed with Facebook was Snapchat. Snapchat's strategy was: "We’re photo sharing, but all the photos are going to self-destruct in 10 seconds." I could actually argue why that's a very stupid strategy and why the opposite would be smart—you should save the photos. People want memories. People want to go back and look at them again. If you told my mom about that she'd be like, "You're going to destroy this photo? No—that's blasphemous." But it worked for a certain use. It actually unlocked a whole other behavior and use case, which became pretty mainstream, to the point that Facebook had to try to clone it 50 times. They did the thing you talked about too, which was they intentionally made things harder. It's like, social networks are cool until all your aunts and uncles show up, right? It's not so cool to post all my photos from this weekend knowing that all my teachers and my aunts and uncles are going to see everything I post. Snapchat worked by being intentionally kind of confusing—it was grown-up proof. Like a medicine bottle with a childproof top, Snapchat had a "grown-up proof" top. For example, when you wanted to use the face mask there was no button that said "push here for face mask." You had to know to hold it on your face for four seconds and then a secret door would appear and now you could do this stuff. It could only be spread like a secret password from one kid to another, and most parents thought it was too hard, too confusing—they're never going to figure it out. That was an intentional strategy for a while and it fits your test.
55:07	Dan Porter	It's so good. What I like about the trade-off too is this: when we launched our basketball league in the first year—before NIL [name, image, likeness]—all the players essentially lost their eligibility. I always used to say, "They didn't lose it—the NCAA took it away." Every college basketball coach in the world hated us. Hated us. I got so much hate mail. I used to say, "I guess if we're not pissing people off, we're not trying hard enough." That's the trade-off. Even in the early days of Teach For America, I remember going to pitch the board in Seattle, Washington to let us come, and the teachers' union hated us. Somebody came up and punched me in the chest in the middle of my speech. I didn't even know what to do other than keep talking. But I guess if your trade-off is that you're not pissing off enough people, you're not trying to do something different enough—or revolutionary enough—in that aspect. So I like that. I'm going to put that up there with my "opposite is stupid."
56:06	Shaan Puri	You also have a thing that — when we were at our Hoop Group event and we asked everybody, "Hey, can you give a tiny version of a TED Talk? We'll put seven minutes on a shot clock here" — everybody in this room is world-class at something. "Dan, you're world-class at brand building. Can you just give us a brand-building brain dump of everything you did to make Overtime have 100,000,000 followers — or whatever many, stupid, insane number of followers you guys have?" The very first thing he said wasn't about how you went viral, how you grew the market, an algorithm, or scaled processes. He said, "In the first year we replied to a million comments," or some absurd number. He said, "We replied to a million comments," and that "we built this in a very grassroots, bottoms-up way."
56:59	Sam Parr	And I—that's stuck.
57:00	Shaan Puri	That was with me like three years ago. I still remember that "one line" because it was so counterintuitive and surprising to me. That was like a pillar for you — like, how does this empire get built? You don't really understand where the studs are, like where are the beams that this whole thing is built on, and you showed me one of the beams with that. Can you talk about that little part? Because I think that's something that more brands should do.
57:24	Dan Porter	Yeah, listen. I think everyone wants awesome growth hacks. The best way to get a lot of views on anything you write—ever on LinkedIn or whatever—is those "three secret growth hacks" or the viral growth hacks. But most of those are post facto and they're hard to replicate. To build something meaningful, you've got to build a real connection. I'll preface it by saying I've seen this a couple of times and it's taught me a couple of lessons. I remember I went to a concert at State Farm—a Lil Baby concert—and everybody had their phones up. I was going to film because I wanted to show people I was cool and that I was at a concert. Then I realized everyone was filming themselves and I was filming the stage. The concert was actually a backdrop for them to create content. It reminded me of years ago, right when the iPhone was coming out. Someone came to our office when I was at Virgin and they said, "Hold up your phone and take a video." They said, "At the end, everyone's got the camera pointing at themselves and everyone's got the camera pointing out." We looked around the room and it was true.
58:42	Dan Porter	Of view that sports media is talking to people about sports, and Overtime is about listening to people about sports. So, okay — that's a different point of view. It's kind of rooted in these anecdotal observations around me: well, how do you listen to them? The easiest way was—they're all talking to you. They're DMing you, they're in the comments. What are we gonna do that no one else is gonna do? We're gonna respond to every single one of them. Because the other thing you see in media is ten people leave a media thing, they set up and they launch a new media thing, and you imagine a bunch of men and women in front of a computer pumping out articles and videos. I think, well, who asked for that? Nobody. They just thought it was a good idea. I remember a young person told me, "Yeah, I respond to a lot of people on mine." He was a kind of smaller-version creator, and he said, "You know what? Once you respond to somebody, when you have a bigger account—over 100K—one time, they become a fan for life." I was like, okay, how are we gonna get our first million fans for life? We're gonna respond. People used to DM all the time. "Yo" literally was the whole DM: "yo." So we'd be like, "Yo, what's up?" and they'd be like, "Oh shit, I didn't think you were gonna respond," like you just jumped out of the corner and you scared them. In the early days I used to take screenshots of those conversations and post them in the story, and all of a sudden people would start to say, "Does Overtime respond?" and stuff like that. We had this kind of apex moment early on where I hired this guy who had been an Uber driver and a hooper. He was a friend of someone, but various things he had tried hadn't kind of hit yet. I realized he was just really funny. He used to make funny videos on Instagram, and we were like, "Your job is just to be funny." So he'd go in the comments, and if somebody commented he would go to their personal IG account, find a picture of them, and just make fun of them — just roast them. He'd be like, "Bro, what's up with the mom jeans? You gotta get your fashion..." and stuff like that.
01:00:53	Dan Porter	Where it hit this fevered pitch, people would just comment on every video and say, "roast me." He would go in there and roast them. All of a sudden you actually think it's about the video and about the dunk or whatever, but it's actually about the massive conversation — all these people who are like "me, me, me" who want to be picked from the audience and have you interact with them. I think it was just a really different version of media, and it put that into practice. I will say that we have community managers now who just talk to fans all day. I'm in a group chat with 250 fans of the City Reapers on Instagram, which is one of our basketball teams. About once every three weeks I hop in and answer a question and everyone's like, "Whoa, wait — who is this?" and I'm like, "Yeah, that's not happening because I run the company," and I just say so. They all go crazy or whatever, and then I'm like, "Gotta bounce," because I could get trapped in there for two hours. I just think your fans aren't just mindless, faceless people. They're about it — they're the consumers of your [content] — and you want to live with them, talk to them, and make sure that they know you care. I was looking at Sabrina Carpenter. She had different fan accounts announce the track name for her new album, and every single one of them did it, and then she announced the final ones. It's like — so many. There are so many musicians who are so good at being like, "I wouldn't be anything without you guys." Taylor Swift used to jump into comments or show up at people's weddings and stuff like that. I've always taken inspiration from that. I just wanted to have a company that could be meaningful and do stuff like that too. I have this idea where I'm going to send one of my guys out anywhere in America, and the first person he sees with an Overtime shirt is going to give him $1,000. I'm going to be like, "I'm in the Ohio airport right now," and it's like, "I'm at a playground in Oakland" or whatever — and it's just like, 'Oh shit, I literally feel seen.'
01:02:55	Shaan Puri	Right.
01:02:55	Dan Porter	You know... that's what I think. That's what everyone wants, including this generation.
01:03:00	Shaan Puri	Have you seen what The All-American Rejects are doing?</FormattedResponse>
01:03:03	Dan Porter	"I haven't—school me."
01:03:04	Shaan Puri	So, okay — I didn't prep this. I don't know much about them, but it's a band that was popular in the '90s/early 2000s. They've kind of been off the map, off the grid, not popular—whatever. For their comeback, what they did was really interesting. They started crashing actual house parties for high schoolers. They would just show up and play a set in someone's backyard, and that was their comeback tour. They're just going around America right now. If you go look—dude, it's Instagram, like liquid gold, dude. The actual content—the way it looks when they just show up at somebody's backyard, some high-school house party right before prom or whatever, and they just start playing a song, surprising everybody—looks cool, nostalgic, fun. It fits them. They're not trying to be, like, super. They're not trying to come back and pretend they're super relevant when they weren't. They're sort of building back up in a bottoms-up way and almost reinventing themselves as this band that's kind of of the people. It's amazing what they're doing from a marketing perspective.
01:04:07	Shaan Puri	Of view.
01:04:07	Dan Porter	I'm going to lock that away, and I'm going to figure out the sports version of that.
01:04:10	Shaan Puri	Yeah. Once you watch one video, you're going to be like, "I need to create that moment," because that was an amazing moment.
01:04:17	Dan Porter	I'm literally the second this podcast is done, I'm going to start tapping into that. I think, to me, it's kind of like—listen: I work in sports, which is a vertical. You can work in music, in B2B SaaS... it doesn't really matter what your vertical is. Most people only take inspiration from other companies in their vertical. I'm just like, how can sports learn from this band, right? A lot of my ideas come from watching gaming. I'm a massive consumer of Korean and Japanese non-scripted television and various forms of reality and game shows, and I always get ideas.
01:04:51	Shaan Puri	Give me a recommendation. Give me an example of a show I need to...
01:04:54	Dan Porter	Be on, man. There are so many there. There's actually... the audience is going to be like, "These shows are terrible."</FormattedResponse>
01:05:03	Shaan Puri	What is that? That's fine. See, in them, your taste is your taste, baby. We're improving. I have conviction in my taste.
01:05:08	Dan Porter	There's a Japanese one I watched this summer where they take ten Japanese people to a town in France, take away their phones, and they just have to find each other and realize they're in the same show. Some of them fall in love. It's glacially slow, and you're kind of thinking, "Okay, well, shouldn't it be that hard to find the other Japanese person in this?" Then when they say, "Let's meet up," it's like, "What time?" "In front of the bakery." "What bakery?" They can't look it up or anything. I love all those shows because it's all about the game design. What makes those shows work is the game design, and inherent in game design are the principles of marketing, distribution — all of those elements. There's another one that's a little older called 19 to 20, where it's just a bunch of Korean kids who are basically in their last year of being kids who come together. I learn so much about other cultures, I learn so much about game design, and I learn about things that the U.S. market doesn't think about. Then they go through my brain and they come out as things that we could think about. If you're looking for inspiration from the same place as everyone else, then you're just going to do the same thing everyone does. You have to look in all those little pockets. That's not unrelated to me saying I pay attention to a meme that a seventeen-year-old basketball player creates, because I'm also looking in places where other people aren't looking.
01:06:39	Shaan Puri	I love it. Speaking of—you're big on chess right now. Why are you so bullish on chess? Well, give me the pitch: why is chess the next big thing? </FormattedResponse>
01:06:50	Dan Porter	So, first of all: we talk about positioning and people are like, "Oh, Overtime is a high school sports company." I always say Overtime is about the audience. My goal is to get 100 million Gen Z fans to love Overtime. If I thought they wanted to watch grannies play three-on-three basketball, I would show grannies playing three-on-three basketball. You can't get confused about that. I've always looked for opportunities to do things that don't feel like high school sports to better explain the superpower of what we're doing. My cofounder Zach is a 2,200-rated chess player. He was a Stuyvesant chess champion and the Penn Ivy League chess champion. Chess is one of those things that's not very accessible. First of all, when you watch it, it's like "a8 to c4" [chess notation] — you have no idea what's going on. The games are like six hours; everybody is a mad genius. We were always like, if our goal at Overtime is to see things that other people can't see — to make things that feel niche mainstream — what's the most out-of-the-box thing we could do? We were always like, "Well, Zach likes chess — can we do anything in chess?" You look at it and you're like, I don't know. You start to talk to people and they're like, "Oh, you're going to do a chess championship and Magnus Carlsen's going to play and that guy's going to play," and you're just like, yeah, that's kind of already been done and it's obvious. So one day Zach comes in and goes, "Actually, you know what the biggest movers in culture for chess are?" I'm like, "Yeah — The Queen's Gambit, right?" That kind of started before that with Searching for Bobby Fischer.
01:08:27	Shaan Puri	Yep.
01:08:27	Dan Porter	"And he's like, 'Yeah, those are probably the two most relevant things in culture.' I asked, 'What do they have in common?' I said, 'They're movies and TV shows.' He's like, 'No — they feature prodigies.'"
01:08:37	Shaan Puri	Young prodigies, yeah.
01:08:38	Dan Porter	And I'm like, "Oh — prodigies." He's like, "There's something about prodigies." Then immediately I think about... because I play the piano, every eight‑year‑old I've ever watched on YouTube who plays guitar better than B.B. King, who plays the piano and everything else — and you're just like, how does that person know how to sound like Herbie Hancock when they're eight years old? I'm like, "Oh yeah, I see it in my own life." We're just like, prodigies — that's it. They're accessible. They're interesting who they are in and of themselves. I always think about this thing that my— you know, my son, who was a poker player, used to say. We used to play Texas Hold'em and he'd never look at his cards. When I get my two cards, the first thing I do is look at them. I'm like, "What are you doing?" He's like: > "I just look at the other people. I spend a lot of time watching the other people, then I look at my cards because then I know what to do." You think of this idea: you play the players, not the cards. So I'm just like, okay — you have all these prodigies. It's not actually about the chess; it's about these incredible young people with these crazy gifts. Then you start to think: six fifty [unclear number] people — or a million people — around the world play chess, and like I could have a prodigy from India and Argentina and all of this other stuff, and then you're off and running. I'm working on this thing that we're trying to pitch and create called the Prodigy Cup. It's like these chess prodigies in a one‑night live event. We have spent — actually, when I get off this podcast today we're going to do a shoot in the studio — we've spent over a hundred hours filming chess to make it so easy and fun to watch that if you and I didn't know the difference between chess and checkers, we could watch it and it'd be super entertaining. I think in there is the unlock. To me, I'm actually the perfect audience because I don't like chess and I'm not very good at it. I don't know the Sicilian opening or any...
01:10:34	Shaan Puri	Of these.
01:10:34	Dan Porter	I just watch it, then I look at my watch and I'm like, "I'm bored." We have to figure out how to fix that. It's kind of an opportunity where it does everything right. It taps into this growing trend, but it's the unexpected part — not the obvious way. It's great for the positioning of the company because Overtime is about something bigger than high school basketball, and what better way to choose it than through chess? Then it's just a lot of experimentation. Some prodigy in the middle is going to say one thing and you're going to be like, "Oh shit, that's the unlock," and you'll pivot the whole thing around it. I hope that a year from now you're watching it on a major streaming service, and three years from now I walk up to Madison Square Garden and there's a line of a thousand people and they're like, "Yeah, just bought tickets—these two prodigies playing. I'm obsessed with this kid and I can't wait to watch him." It's all this IP that just came out of something very bottoms-up and organic. </FormattedResponse>
01:11:35	Shaan Puri	I love it. I love how you keep using your weakness as your advantage. So, for example, you're like, "Okay, ESPN — the 'worldwide leader of sports'." You're like, "Oh man, I'd hate to be them. They have to cater to everybody; they're boxed in by their mainstreamness, and I could do stuff that they can't do." Right? I can have this, like, you know, Gen Z brand. We can say that things are "liddy" and there's "riz" and all this, and that's going to become our advantage: we can cater to that audience in a way that, if they did it, it'd be way too try-hard. But we could do it because we're starting fresh. Or, like, with chess — you're like, "Cool, I don't know anything about chess; that's my advantage." I couldn't watch that if I wanted to. It would be too boring for me to watch traditional chess, so of course I'm going to make something that's more accessible because I couldn't access that. I can only make something that makes sense to me, and so it would make it...
01:12:25	Dan Porter	It goes back to that thing we talked about before: if you train people to look for blue, and you tell them to close their eyes, and then you ask, "What's red?" they're like, "I don't see any of it." If you can train yourself to look for every color at every time, it's different. I love the education system, and I'm a professor, but it's not an accident that some of the best entrepreneurs dropped out—because they just saw things that were broader. It's a different way of looking at the world. I don't know why that happened to me. Maybe my brain was wired that way. Maybe that's how I learned. I never studied business, but I think, again, it's about seeing what I think other people don't see and being able to stick with it. There is a lot of herd mentality. It takes either a lot of courage or obliviousness to go and do something that's different from what everyone else is doing. That's why I always respect people who do some crazy gap year. They're like, "Yeah, everyone's going to college. I'm actually going to be a goat farmer for a year." People say, "You deferred college for a year to be a goat farmer? Why would you do that?" and they're just like, "I don't know, it just feels fucking cool." Those are the people I'm going to bet on long term. </FormattedResponse>
01:13:49	Shaan Puri	I love it. Alright, Dan — you are the madman brand builder. This is fun. I love, I love this conversation. If we fast-forward... I don't know, a year — or actually, not even a year; forget the year, that's too far. What are you most excited about for Six Seven Water next? I don't know — 90 days? What's the next play, the next move, the next experiment that you're going to try to get a bucket here with Six Seven Water?
01:14:13	Dan Porter	"Oh, get a bucket — love it. I think that, you know, TK has created Taelyn Kinney. TK has created this phenomenon with his water, and we've supported him and helped him with the infrastructure. And I think everyone's like, 'Well, six, seven is a trend — have you sold a million cans yet?' or anything else like that. So I think we all want to figure out: how do we parlay this kind of massive social media following and this kind of ground-up something — based in a kid who's just a great kid — into selling a million cans? Maybe it's going to be in the gas station, or maybe it's going to be in some place that's completely not obvious, and maybe I'm not going to know and he's not going to know what the answer is until Monday when we wake up and we're like, 'Oh my God, it's actually selling in ice cream trucks,' or something else like that. That idea — that you don't know — it's like nobody wants to play a video game where you don't know what is going to happen next. So I think that aspect, and then unlocking that, and then doing it again with one or two amazing other athletes who are super genuine and have a massive audience connection, I think is really cool: always doing it from the bottom up to something that makes sense and resonates with their brand. I think that I'm really, I'm really excited about it."
01:15:46	Shaan Puri	"I think it'd be great. I love your NIL recruitment idea, where basically, if Kentucky wants them but no one wants them more..."
01:15:53	Dan Porter	I think we're going to try to do that. Who knows how much legal and IP (intellectual property) and other stuff will lock that down. But you can imagine he's like, "I'm going to go to the school that buys the can with the color of the school and the most amount of cans."
01:16:06	Shaan Puri	No, he's just like, "Show me the love." Yeah. "Who's with it? Who—who—who?" It's the old "out of the box" — that's the most with it. Then they basically gotta figure out how to create a stunt out of it, right? How to speak the language that he wants to speak with the water brand. I think that would be really cool. I also think that would be kind of a beachhead moment. When you said that, my brain broke a little bit. I thought I knew how college recruiting works; I thought even NIL [Name, Image, Likeness] — I thought I understood what that is. Okay: great kid goes to a school, and then after they're at the school they're gonna start to get maybe some endorsement deals, and it's gonna look like endorsements but just at a younger age. And then I was like, "Oh no." So if he has this vehicle, the school could kind of pump his vehicle as part of the recruitment. That's actually pretty genius.
01:16:55	Dan Porter	So it's like, your wife is going to be like, "Sean, why are there 27 blue cases of water out?" And you're like, "I gotta give my guy TK to do."
01:17:04	Shaan Puri	Yeah, exactly. I gotta do my part. Drink up, drink up, drink up... I...
01:17:11	Dan Porter	Had this when I was in my twenties. I ran a nonprofit in education, and we eventually started some of the very first charter schools in the 1990s in New York. I had this guy on my board — he'd been a sixties activist who eventually became a successful investment banker. He was the first person in a board meeting I ever heard say "no" instead of "yes," and I didn't know you could say no. He had said this thing to me. Now he's in his eighties [he's in his eighties], and I had lunch with him. I was like, "You said the most impactful thing to me ever." He goes, "I don't remember saying that." He said: > "They say you gotta crawl before you walk, and you gotta walk before you run. And if you do that, you spend your whole fucking life crawling." I don't know... I just always — I was like, "Yeah, it's really logical. I want to spend my whole life crawling? I want to get to the running part." He's like, "I don't remember saying that." I was like, "You said that to me. I was only 27. You changed my life." That's how we think about going after all of these things. Amazing — who wants to spend their whole life crawling?
01:18:19	Shaan Puri	Alright. Well, if anyone's in the beverage industry, if anyone's got gas stations, or if anyone listening to this drinks water—drink up. "What was it? 'Drink up, you thirsty people.'" What was this other catchphrase?
01:18:32	Dan Porter	"That don't you hacking family?"
01:18:34	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that's what I— that's what I say.
01:18:36	Dan Porter	You hacking family. The best part is it says on the back. It says, "Attention: If drinking six-seven water doubles your vertical, please contact your coach immediately."
01:18:49	Shaan Puri	So good. Alright, Dan—thanks for coming on, man.
01:18:51	Dan Porter	Appreciate you, brother.

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I Talk To The $500M Man About How He Finds Hit After Hit

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