How a near-death experience changed this founder’s approach to fear

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1:17I used to make bold choices, but they were often driven by fear. Like fear of not being enough, fear of not comparing well to my friends. feared of never being loved. And I really let that drive me. And, you know, you realize that nothing is as bad as the fear of the thing. A near-death experience forced Omay's founder and CEO, Matthew Poulsen, to face his greatest fears. It also unlocked new ways of seeing the world. This mindset shift fueled the growth of his unusual business model. The people that are maybe most in the news, they may be leading from places of fear or places of greed. And so we tend to start to think that that's the reality.

2:06But that's just getting clickbait. We know our algorithms are designed to spread that kind of stuff. But when you look around, you know, when you lift up from your phone and look out in the world, I think you see empathy and compassion everywhere.

2:26You've got to have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going home. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. Working out of a three-bedroom apartment. Stuff that just seems absolutely nut balls. 10 years later, we're like, well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made it just how you do it. This is Masters of Scale.

3:03I'm Jeff Berman, your host. This week on the show, Omaze founder Matthew Poulsen reveals how he's scaling an innovative for-profit model for fueling charitable giving. Matt, welcome to Masters of Scale. Thanks for having me, Jeff. We've known each other for two decades. You were an actor with a Stanford degree and a lot of ideas for what else you might do in life when we met. How do you go from being an actor in the mid-2000s to where you are today? How did you get started on the entrepreneurial journey? Well, you start by being not very good at acting. For anyone who wants, I mean, go check out Nats Everwood, Ron.

3:48It was epic. You know, I was doing acting. I really loved it. And then I transitioned into doing storytelling, trying to use storytelling to inspire action. So I did a bunch of different projects. Me and my buddy were the first directors on this thing called Live Earth, which was the biggest concert ever thrown. It was Seven Continents One Night. We were early producers on Girl Rising, about girls' education in the developing world. that was funded by Oprah and Queen Ronnie of Jordan. Meryl Streep was an area. And then just realized we were creating a lot of awareness around these projects, but we weren't creating a lot of impact.

4:24And so I went to business school, tried to learn new ways of thinking, surround myself with people smarter than me. And it was when I was in school, it's when we came up with the idea for Omaze. And if I remember correctly, there was a bit of a Magic Johnson moment that was part of the origin story. Will you share that with us? Yeah, Magic was hosting an auction for the Boys and Girls Club where he was auctioning off the chance to play basketball with him and go to a Lakers game. But it was one of those things that was only available to the high net worth individuals in the room. And we were in the room, but not high net worth individuals.

4:59Because the highest bidder was going to win. Exactly. Exactly. We were just like the guys who got invited to fill the table. I'm sure you've been to a lot of these rubber chicken dinners before. And so we watched as the auction went up to$15 ,000. He was a childhood year, like nothing would rather do than play basketball with Magic. But we couldn't afford to participate. And so when we were driving home that night, we said, you know, that doesn't make any sense. He has fans around the world, not just in that room. So if we make it so anybody can donate$10 for the chance to win, we could raise so much more money, so much more awareness, open up a whole new donor base.

5:30And how did that moment of inspiration driving home from the Boys and Girls Club event lead to starting OMAs? So I was in business school still at the time, and I basically went to all my professors and said, I'm working on this exclusively. And then we just started hustling and tried to get celebrities to do that with us. We started very slow. Our first experience was to be a guest judge on Cupcake Wars, and it raised$784. We now raise that in 12 seconds. That took us six months to do. First real break came with Breaking Bad. We did an experience with Brian and Aaron that really put us on the map, and that's really how it started.

6:09Brian Cranston and Aaron Paul, the stars of the hit TV show. Hi, it's Brian and Dan and Dre. They are the winners of the contest that we did through Omaze, benefiting the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. We raised$302 ,000. Thanks to all of you for joining us. Explain how it works, Matt. Is it a lottery? Is it a raffle? Is it a sweepstakes? Like, how exactly does it work? Yeah, so that depends on the country that it's in, in terms of the legal framework. But it's all the mechanic is very similar in that a bunch of people are putting in either $10 or 10 pounds for the chance to win something.

6:48We're for profit, but a percentage goes to charity, percentage goes to us. And so back in the day when we started, it was celebrities. Like with Breaking Bad, for example, Brian and Aaron offered the chance to ride in a Winnebago with them, put on the hazmat suits, if you know the show, cook blue candy, aka meth, and watch the very last episode of Breaking Bad with them, the rest of the cast. They offered that at auction, and one person bid$40 ,000, and then they did it with us, and it raised$1.7 million. So you could see the delta. Whoa. Okay, so how does the actual water flow of dollars work?

7:24Like, how does a charity benefit? How does Omaze benefit? Yeah, I mean, I think it's probably better to explain how it works today. Now we offer houses. And so every month a person can win a five to six million pound house. Matt is saying pounds because the company he runs, Omaze, now operates mostly in the UK. And basically the way it works is we go buy the houses. We fix them up. We design them. In some cases, we build them. and then we put them up and a$7 million house can raise, call it 33 million in sales. A third of that goes to charity and VAT. A third of that goes to the price and costs.

8:05In addition to the house, we cover all the taxes for the winner. We give away cash prizes. We cover all their furniture, everything so that they can, we give them 250 ,000 pounds to move in, all that kind of stuff. And then a third goes to operating expenses, marketing and our profit. Are you Are you still doing celebrities or you've moved out of celebrity entirely? We still have celebrities that partner with us to help promote the houses. So David Beckham did one. Prince William was also involved. So they'll do funny content to get the word out, but there's no celebrity experience. Now it's just transition from doing celebrity experiences all the way into just doing houses.

8:41Why have you stopped doing that? The celebrity experiences were great, but there was just limit to the scale. and you know we would have something happen like one day we were supposed to do a huge shoot with Arnold Schwarzenegger it was going to be our big experience for the next month and then he called us right before the shoot and said he can't come and I said what's the deal why can't he come they're like well he's getting his haircut with Sylvester Stallone and I was like is that a real thing and they said yes they love to get their haircut together whenever they're in town it's been a couple weeks so he can't come today and then we missed our next month so we didn't control our own destiny.

9:15And so the reason we went away from that model was, you know, there's a whole, like, I had a whole kind of personal health experience that drove that realization. Let's go there, Matt, because to say a personal health experience is a bit of an understatement. You had a near-death experience. What happened? So it was actually almost exactly seven years ago. I was seven years into the Omaze journey. the company was around probably people wise 150 people and what happened was when I was born my stomach was twisted in a knot I was supposed to die when I was born and the scar tissue from that surgery had broken off 40 years later it was 40 at the time this happened and over the course of a couple days my stomach was getting bigger I like I look like two months pregnant five months pregnant, seven months pregnant.

10:04So I called my buddy who was a doctor and said, Hey, I look like I'm seven months pregnant. Do I need to do something about this? He said, you should go to the hospital. So I go to the hospital. My parents come, our COO, Helen came because I was supposed to be meeting with her and they do all these tests and they can't figure out what's going on. So then they say to my parents, they said, Helen, you guys go home. And if Matt's not better in the morning, then we'll just do some kind of exploratory surgery then. Helen pulls into her driveway. It's probably 11 PM at night and something tells her to go back to the hospital.

10:41And Helen is very serious. She's British. She's a COO. She's not like a Venice beach, listen to the cosmos type person, but the voice was undeniable. So she drove back. And if she hadn't driven back, I may have died like 45 minutes later. What about her driving back led to the discovery that there was something existential happening? She came in the room and immediately discovered that my blood pressure had plummeted. She went and got the nurse. They called in the crash team, rushed me down into surgery, came out of surgery. And they said to my mom, the good news is we figured out what it was, what it is.

11:18It's a bowel obstruction. The bad news is that he's in critical condition. His heart rate is continuing to plummet and we don't know why. So what happened next? She got to the door and the nurse said, I'm sorry, you can't come in. This is really serious. And she said, look, I was there when he came in this world. If he's leaving this world right now, I'm going to be in that room. So they let her in the room. I was fully flatlined and they were doing the compressions and they were doing the defibrillator, the shocks, but I wasn't responding. And my mom started to crumble, as you can imagine. I mean, it's one thing to lose a child.

11:55It's another thing if it's happening immediately in front of you. She saw something that created this kind of spiritual experience for her. She said every nurse and every staff member and every doctor in the ICU had just gravitated outside the window. And there were like 40 of them. And she said, they look like this silent church choir, just sending in positive energy. And she was so moved by these people that were sending love to her son that they didn't even know that it just filled her up with strength. And she took a big breath and she started coaching me. And she said, Matthew, David Polson, these people are fighting so hard to bring you back, but you are not fighting hard enough.

12:45You need to fight harder to come back to us. You need to fight. And the flatline went on for four and a half minutes. The main doctor kind of pulled away, indicating that this was done. She said, no, no, please, please don't call it. And she grabbed his arm. And then they said they saw something that they'd never seen before in the hospital. All of a sudden, I just popped up. And I kind of was on my right side. And I lifted my right arm and gave a thumbs up. Wow. The doctor who had initially done the surgery came down and he said his organs have shut down. And she said, I understand. But two minutes ago, we didn't have a pulse.

13:24And now we have a pulse. So what are we going to do about that? And he said, well, there's this thing called an ECMO machine. It's a very rare machine. It takes over the beating of the heart and the oxygenation of the lungs. But the problem is, is we only have one of these. And we were at UCLA Santa Monica and ECMO was at UCLA Westwood. which is 20 minutes apart. And he said, he's not going to survive the ride. And we've never, we've never transported one of these. No one's ever transported one of these. The other problem is, is we only have two doctors who do this surgery and neither of them are on call and it's father's day.

13:59And so that my buddy that I called the beginning of the story, he happened to be at a bachelor party in Vegas, sitting next to the head of cardiology at UCLA. And he said to him, Hey man, can you check your phone to see how my buddy is doing. I sent him in yesterday with a stomach issue. The guy checked and he said, hey man, your buddy's in real trouble. He could pass any minute here. They got ahold of the CEO of UCLA. They got him to sign off on transporting the ECMO, the first mobile ECMO unit, definitely in the US, but maybe the world. They called the doctor, got him to leave his father's day barbecue, and they brought the ECMO machine to me and did this surgery that had never been done before, duct taping the ECMO to the ambulance.

14:39Matt, from having a buddy who's a doctor to call when you look like you're seven months pregnant, to Helen turning around and coming back to the hospital, to your mom saying, don't call it, and the silent choir of 40 outside the window, to your buddy sitting next to the head of cardiology at UCLA at a table in Vegas. I mean, it sounds like miracle, top miracle, top miracle, top miracle. How do you understand what happened? It's taken me a long time to process it. You know, it's really made me believe in things that I did not believe in before. And it just makes me believe so deeply in the power of humanity and compassion.

15:27I really think that is who we are. you know and then when I like was leaving the hospital weeks later I sat at the edge of my bed and the same doctor you know he sat me down he's like look I want you to understand something when I finish my career 30 years from now I'm talking about the most extraordinary case I've ever seen this is gonna be it you know we do a zero percent chance of survival effectively and the fact that we have you going home with your full faculties we have no medical explanation for that and I was like, do you have any explanation for that? Can you give me something? And he said, look, we're inspired by your mom.

16:03But outside of that, there were larger forces at play. And I said, well, as a man of science, like, how do you define those larger forces? And he said, it was love. It was love that brought you back. And I really believe that. Still ahead, more on how Matt's near-death experience reshaped his approach to business.

16:31Real leaders don't back down when the stakes are high. They innovate, they push forward, and then they take the stage at the Masters of Scale Summit. Join us in San Francisco, October 7th to 9th, to hear from the CEO of the New York Times, scientists using cutting-edge technology to find cures, the leader of crypto powerhouse Coinbase, a retired four-star general, and many, many more. Apply now at mastersofscale.com slash apply25. That's mastersofscale.com slash apply25. If you're ready to take your startup from idea to impact, then AWS is your launchpad. From data storage to machine learning to secure app hosting, AWS gives you the tech trusted by the world's fastest scaling startups.

17:21And here's the best part. Join AWS Activate today and you could score up to$100 ,000 in AWS credits tailored to your stage and network. Go to aws.amazon.com slash activate and start building. Expanding your business in the U.S. can feel like a maze. Every state has its own payroll, benefits, and compliance rules, which can pull your focus away from growth. That's why founders use Deal. Deal is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert plus Fortune 500 level benefits for your team. The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one.

18:05So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash MOS and get up to three months free. Welcome back to Masters of Scale. you can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel. What changed for you now that you believed in love and you had this different perspective on the world? I actually went through like a period of elation and then depression. You know, why was I here? Why did I earn it? Was all these things that I experienced, I had this whole like, you know, come back to the light experience. Was that real? All that stuff I was having a hard time with. But eventually where I got was I just have a much better relationship to fear than I used to.

18:53I used to make bold choices, but they were often driven by fear. Like fear of not being enough, fear of not comparing well to my friends, fear of never being loved. And I really let that drive me. And, you know, you realize that nothing is as bad as the fear of the thing. dying without like living my potential used to be my greatest fear. And then I went through some version of that and it was like, oh, that was okay. And so I think like the stories we tell ourselves about fear are always way worse than actually what happens. You know, in most cases, our fears are, we're not actually threatened, right?

19:31We're creating these things. I think I'm way better at processing through that faster because you realize like the opposite of love Love is not hate, it's fear. And so if you can get to the other side of fear faster, if you can process through it faster, you live a much richer life. What big decisions have you made differently because of this significantly evolved perspective on the world? You know, you can make the same decision from fear or love, like the exact same one. You can fire someone from a place of fear or from a place of love. I would say it enabled me to make some pretty bold choices against resistance when before this happened, I had caved in to criticism.

20:11It inspired me when I came back from this to change the business, being focused on celebrities to focused on prizes. That was a huge change for us. We got a lot of resistance from our board and the team, but I was not scared of what people thought of me in that decision. I felt like I was making it from a place of expansion rather from a place of fear. We made the decision to focus just on the UK, stop operations in the US because we didn't feel like we had enough money to do both markets. That was a very unpopular decision. I don't think I would have been able to do either of those decisions before this happened.

20:48Let's go back to the more analytical side of these pivotal calls that you've made in steering Omaze, the first to move away from working with celebrities. What led you to make that call? And I'm curious what the opposition from board investors, other stakeholders might have been and how you overcame that. We had done a campaign with Daniel Craig six months before I went into the hospital where you got to go to the Aston Martin track. You got to ride around in a one-of-a-kind Aston Martin, and then you got to keep the Aston Martin. And it was supposed to raise$300 ,000 for the United Nations, and it raised$2.1 million.

21:24And so I went to our CFO, Nina at the time and said, hey, I think we should take a bet. I think we should go buy a$250 ,000 McLaren, offer it with just Omaze distribution, no talent. And if we could raise$500 ,000 on our own, then we would really have something. The other thing to say though, is we only had$900 ,000 in the bank. So$250 ,000 was a big bet. It was a real bet at that point. But then the car coincidentally launched the day before I unexpectedly went in the hospital. So when I came back all those months later and I was sitting down with Nina and kind of regrounding myself, I said, or by the way, whatever happened with the McLaren, did it raise the 500 ,000?

22:02And she said it raised 1.9 million. And immediately I was like, that changes everything. We're going all in on that. But the whole team was organized around doing these crazy celebrity experiences. We were well known for that. We had been on all these shows and their friends recognized it and it was cool and all that stuff. And the board liked that too. And it was a big change. And because I had stepped away for a while, I was able to see it much faster than if I would have been there every day. And so I think the speed of the change was jolting for people. I think the most underrated skill in entrepreneurship is storytelling.

22:38And I think it's also the most important skill. And so I basically painted a vision and story of like what this would look like on the other side. And that's how we ultimately got there. It's a really important note, Matt. I think it's something that a lot of founders are naturally good at and a lot of founders don't pay a second of attention to. I mean, it's fundamental to everything that we do. I teach storytelling classes to every team member, no matter what role they're in. We go into the first principles, the fundamental neuroscience of storytelling, why stories matter, to the principles of how you tell them and how you make the customer the hero.

23:12And so we're very serious about it. And that shows up in everything you do. Think about like fundraising, right? What's evaluation? Evaluation is just metrics plus storytelling. We see wild differences in valuations because of their better storytellers. Marketing, obviously, product development, seeing the world through an eyes of the other, hiring, recruiting, setting a vision for the company, like all of that really eminence from how well you paint where you're going. What we're going to do next year is just a story. Every great social movement, every great business movement, even every great sports movement in the world has been driven by storytelling.

23:56Okay. Let's go back to the second pivotal decision that you noted, which was the decision to focus on the UK and leave the US. Not a lot of companies that have hit your scale that have gone in that direction? Why'd you do it? So we had, after the Daniel Craig and the McLaren thing, we had started doing prizes in the U.S. and we had done holidays and then sneakers and watches and then cars and supercars and all those things were going well. But we said, you know, where it's really at is houses. A car changes someone's lifestyle, a house changes someone's life. And it's the perfect product to storytell around.

24:35A house like represents all of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, It's safety, it's security, it's status, it's relationships, it's self-realization. And so we felt like from a first principles perspective, that would really work. And we had a good business going though with the celebrities and the cars. And so we decided to test that in the UK. Why the UK? Smaller market. We had a really good operator here. It's a good regulatory environment. And it was a small country with high population density. So the houses would be relevant to everybody. We didn't want to disrupt what was going on in the US. And we felt like to do it right, it had to be very simple and very clear.

25:06and just wanted to get to the point where we could do a house every month as a subscription. And it really just took off really fast. You know, we had 20 people in the UK. We passed the sales of the US, had 180 people in like 15 months. And the retention rates were off the charts. So it became very clear, like this was the model. And Matt, the model was subscription. It was, you've got a monthly 10 pound or whatever it is. And that automatically enters you into the monthly house experience. Exactly. Yeah, we've got higher tiers to get you different things and other prizes, but that's basically it.