The entrepreneur who raised $300m for charity after cheating death - Matt Pohlson, Omaze

0:28Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. didn't you about seven years ago i did so i had this crazy near-death experience where my mom like saved my life and um you know changed my life it changed our business everything but but someone compared it they're like the the power she unlocked to be able to save you is similar what like a founder can unlock to save their company you know like there's this like they feel like it's their child and they like they will they will fight through existential crisis to to make it continue it's a really crazy story I was like I flatlined for four and a half minutes like they declared me dead they brought me back to life and yeah and then when I came back from that it was like very clear like when I was leaving the hospital the doctor sat at the edge of my bed and he said look when I finish my career 30 years from now and I'm talking about the most extraordinary case I've ever seen.

1:22This is going to be it. You know, we had you at less than 0.1 % chance of survival. 0.1? Yeah, and the fact that we have you going home with your full faculties, we have no medical explanation for that. What happened to you? What was the... I was born with my stomach twisted in a knot, and then I was supposed to die when I was born, and then the scar tissue from that surgery freakishly broke off all these years later, created a bowel obstruction, which led to my heart stopping. And then like literally my mom was at the hospital and burst into the operating room as I was being resuscitated and helped coach me back to life.

2:01There's all this other crazy stuff that happened too, but it's like a wild story. Wow. Yeah. And that changed your business. Yeah, because when I came back from that, I was like, the doctor said to me, he was like, look, we have no medical explanation for this. And I said, do you have any explanation for this? And he said, we were inspired by your mom. And she had also, before the second surgery, she was grabbing the doctors by the cheeks, like looking into their eyes, saying, this is my son. But today, this is your son and your brother. And their company is trying to do good. You need to help them.

2:37But he said, but outside of that, there's larger forces at play. And I said, well, how do you define larger forces? And he said, it was love that brought you back. and then I really like I really believe that so when I came back I was like we're never gonna like truly make an impact at a global scale by just doing celebrities and so that was like the motivation to switch the business and so I came back and said to the whole company the board we're switching business to prizes and got a lot of resistance but we did it and then it changed everything that's amazing yeah I mean going through something like that must fundamentally change who you are and how you see life you know yeah it really has changed me fundamentally but not in the way that i expect it wasn't immediate it wasn't like hollywood-esque you know it was actually like in some ways i was almost i was incredibly elated for a while and kind of depressed for a while not knowing like why that had happened and why why did i get to keep going and then this kind of you felt this pressure of like you know people saying you you're here for a reason and all this stuff.

3:43Yeah, I've got to make it count. Yeah, there's a lot of that, you know, and you're like, wow, that's a lot. You know, I think it's really changing my relationship to fear. I used to be really fear-driven, you know, fear of failing, fear of not being enough, fear of comparing myself to others. And so that was like my motivation in some ways. Like that's where I kind of operated from. and now I have learned that like fear is just a story right and that is nothing is as bad as the fear of the thing right when you face death which is supposed to be the scariest thing and you realize okay that was actually not that bad then it helps you kind of move past the fear faster right and so I try to operate more from a place of love like you can make the same two decisions right out of a fear or love right you can you can fire people out of fear or you can fire people out of love like um and so i try to make it much more from that place expansive relaxed place so that's one you know and i really try to practice that on a daily basis the second is like i like i i believe a lot of things i didn't believe before um but i really believe that I see how interconnected we all are in ways that I didn't.

5:02And I think that like optimism and love is kind of woo-woo as that might sound, like our frequencies that you can push out. And if you continue to like tap into those things, like they can change the trajectory of events. And so I like work to get in the mindset to be in this place as much as possible. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. You know, how the stories we tell ourselves are incredibly powerful. I mean, he talks about fear. I mean, I think fear is one of the biggest inhibitors in life and business, isn't it? But, you know, we're perpetually worried about what might happen if this goes wrong.

5:37What, you know, I'm not good enough to do this. You know, and I think that the internal dialogue is very profound. And if you can find a way of resetting that, I mean, you had to go through a big experience to get there. But I mean, you know, if you can do that without going through that big experience. I mean, I think so much of success or happiness in life is down to how we think about it, you know, and how we view. Absolutely. Success. Yeah. You know, you don't have to go through that, right? Like that just became a trigger for me to become curious. Like I didn't get any actual knowledge from the actual experience, you know, it was just a reason to think about things.

6:14But yeah, I think, especially for an entrepreneurship or business building, you know, a lot of people who get success, it's because they kind of drive themselves and they maybe have this voice that says, you got to go harder, you're not enough. Like, and that's useful to a point. But I think what I've learned from this, especially on the entrepreneurship path, is you have to be a best friend of yourself, right? Like, you got to be really, like, I used to say stuff to myself that I would never let anyone else say to me, you know, and I thought that was helpful. and then you realize that's not actually helping me like it's much better to like kind of support yourself um through the journey you know still hold yourself to a high standard but just say okay right you know you're human you made some mistakes let's like move on yeah now this event happened after you'd set up a maze hadn't you so describe to me what was the origin story for a maze and why did you set it up in the first place yeah so before a maze i was a filmmaker and my passion was using storytelling to inspire action and had done a bunch of different projects along those lines.

7:18Me and my buddy were the first directors on this thing called Live Earth, which was the biggest concert ever thrown, Seven Continents in One Night with everybody from Beyonce to Rolling Stones. Did a documentary series called Girl Rising that was funded by Oprah, Queen Ronnie of Jordan, Meryl Streep was the narrator, a bunch of other big projects like those with really fancy people and we were working with these incredibly influential people who really wanted to do good and just realized we were not doing that much good. You know, we were creating awareness around these projects but not a lot of impact.

7:51So I decided to go to business school and surround myself with new ways of thinking. I had never even opened Excel before I went to Wharton. I was purely on the creative side. And then when I was in school, I went to this event that Magic Johnson, the basketball player, was hosting 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 I was in the room, but not a high net worth individual. I was like the guy who gets invited at the last minute to fill the table and comes for the free drinks.

8:24You know, I was that guy. Still am that guy, I feel like. And so, you know, sat and watched the auction, went up to$15 ,000. And Magic was our childhood hero. There's nothing we'd rather do than play basketball with Magic, but we couldn't afford to participate. And so when me and my buddy were driving home, we said, that makes no sense. Magic has fans around the world, not just in that room. And celebrities weren't really on social media yet, but we said they're going to be, and they're going to be able to reach their fans in a whole new way. So if we make it so anybody can donate$10 for the chance to win, you could raise so much more money, so much more awareness, open up a whole new donor base.

9:02And what was the format? so that people would buy tickets effectively with a chance of winning the Magic Johnson Prize. Is that how it works? Exactly, yeah. So for the first seven years, we just did celebrity experiences. And it was exactly that format. You put in$10 for the chance to win, like a charity raffle. Yeah. And we did crazy stuff. You know, we did ride in a tank with Arnold Schwarzenegger and crush things. We did win a Lamborghini where Pope Francis hands you the keys. He's, you know, we did, we did sit with Jon Stewart underneath Stephen Colbert's desk while he's performing and like mess with him.

9:38You know, we just did all these like really kind of fun stuff. And we would create really funny videos about what it would look like to ride in a tank with Arnold and crush things. Or Matt Damon and Ben Affleck would like talk shit to each other about who you'd rather hang out with. And that, those stuff would spread virally. And so that's, our whole business was built on making, you know, fun little stories about what the experience would look like. Yeah. And as I understand it, part of the purpose of this was then to raise money for charity. Oh, yes. Alongside doing it, wasn't it? Yeah. As well as getting access to prizes.

10:09You're also, you know. Yes. So the charity raffle was for the charity of the celebrity. So they would choose it. Yeah. Now you made a big pivot, didn't you? because you're now in the UK. And as far as my social media feed goes, you're giving away a lot of very nice properties in the Cotswolds. Yes. That's certainly what I get in my feed, dream homes coming up. So why did you make the move from US celebrity experiences to UK win your dream home kind of thing? How did that happen? Yeah, it happened after I came back from the near-death experience. It just changed my perspective. It's really helpful to step back and you see some things that's hard to when you're in the day-to-day, you know?

10:51And it just became clear that we were never going to be truly world-changing, just doing celebrity experiences, because we were totally reliant on someone else for our supply. And before I left, we had done this campaign with Daniel Craig, where you got to go to New York, you got to go to the Aston Martin track, you got to ride around in a one-of-a-kind Aston Martin, and you got to keep the Aston Martin. Wow. Yeah, and it was supposed to raise$300 ,000 for the United Nations, and it raised$2.1 million. Wow. And so then I went to our CFO, Nina, and said, hey, I think we should try doing a car on our own.

11:25No talent, just a maze. We should buy a$250 ,000 McLaren. We'll offer it with our own distribution. If we can raise$500 ,000 on our own, then we would really have something. But it was a big bet because we only had$900 ,000 in the bank at the time. So it was like more than a quarter of the company was on this bet. But we decided to go for it. And then that car coincidentally launched the day before I unexpectedly went into the hospital. And so when I came back all those months later, I was sitting down with Nina and said, hey, you know, by the way, whatever happened with the McLaren? Did it raise the$500 ,000 and we out of business?

12:04What's the deal? And she said it raised$1.9 million. Wow. Amazing. Yeah. So it was like that changes everything. Yeah. You know, because I had the fresh perspective. and so I was like we are going all in on prizes so I went to the team and the board and said instead of doing these celebrities we're going to stuff we control with the prizes there was some resistance to that but we pushed through and we started doing holidays and then we did like bags and watches and jewelry and then we started doing more cars and then we started doing supercars all those did progressively better and then we finally said you know where to really add is houses.

12:41A car changes someone's lifestyle, but a house changes someone's life. Yeah. And it's an incredibly visual medium. And, you know, we could create a subscription product if we just did a house every month and really focused it. So we decided to launch that in the UK because the US celebrity car business was a good business. I mean, it was, you know, it was a nine-figure revenue business. It was real business, but we wanted to test it here, not disturb that business, but also thought because the UK is a more densely populated country, all the houses are relevant, they're a little bit less expensive.

13:16We had a great operator here named James Oaks, and we thought, okay, let's test it here. And then it just took off. It was wild. Amazing. And do you have to buy the houses? Because I mean, we're talking four or five million pound dream homes here we're not you know they're quite they're pretty expensive do you do you actually have to presume you can only give it away if you own the houses you've got to put a big big outlay yeah we buy all the houses we sometimes we're building the houses now um but in all cases we renovate the houses or put in you know pretty pretty significant changes but yeah we buy them all out so we're buying because we offer a house every month we've got to buy eight houses out in front.

13:58All of which are multi-million pound houses, right? Yeah, exactly. Anywhere from three to six million pounds. Yeah, that's quite a cash flow investment, presumably, isn't it? It is, it is. You lose money in a market until you get up your subscription. You know, we had raised money from venture, so I helped fund that. But then, you know, we built up a subscription business and the subscription revenue is really strong and really sticky. And so that's, so therefore there's no risk in the houses anymore. So with subscription, does that mean people are automatically entering every drawer? Yes. Is that effectively how much would that be, for example?

14:32£10 is the minimum. You can go up to£50. And that just auto-renews every month, and then you automatically get entered into the drawer. Exactly. Yeah. So how many houses have you given away to date? 40. Wow. So roughly around, call it£180 million worth of houses, probably£250 million worth of prizes. And on the other side of the coin, how much have you given to charity off the back of that? We've raised£90 million in the UK for charity. In the US, before we moved here, we had raised£200 million for charity. So, you know, globally, we're over£300 million that we've given to charity. That's amazing, isn't it?

15:14And what's the relationship between the kind of charity and, I guess, the lottery or game, however you describe it? because it seems to be quite common thing to do, put those two things together. I was just wondering what the psychology of that is. Is it that like people like to feel, do people play more if they know that they're also gonna, you know, make some good? Is there some psychology behind that? Or is it, what's the thinking behind the charity element? Or is it driven more by your personal desire to do good and leave a legacy? Yeah, it really started with, that was you know i was in that space for a decade before i started omaze you know like that goes way back to my childhood and like what my parents instilled with in me um you know i grew up in laguna niguel california which is like a upper middle class we're you know area but i was i joined a basketball team when i was really young that was based out of compton which is like a well-known, you know, if you know the movie Straight Outta Compton, like very challenge area.

16:18And so being on that basketball team as a kid, I got to see like what my friends environment. So I spent like half my time in between these two very different worlds. And then just again, like the service that my parents instilled, you know, I always wanted to do something that had a purpose, but I also wanted to do something where we could create economic opportunity. And I, and I really believe that that's a false choice. Like too often we're told like you can either make money or you can help people, but you don't get to do both you know and we're fine paying people a lot of money if they do bad we're totally good with that but not if they want to do good and i just think that makes no sense in the world we're in now we need business to be a force for good like governments are getting funded at every level and so that's where really it came from um and that became a natural way to to do it but yes it also from a like pure business perspective customers like to know that they're having an impact when they have this one game it's a form of entertainment that they can also feel good about and i suppose most people won't win right because i don't know what the odds are on winning but at least you know your subscription is is funding a good course you're getting something aren't you you're getting a charity donation or you may yeah end up winning a house at some point that's right we have a bunch of smaller prizes and stuff like that that people win but yeah most people are not going to win yeah a house um but yes they do the community the Omaze community really does care about like these tangible projects that they do.

17:45And oftentimes it benefits in their community, right? We fund, we did a house in Victoria Park last year to fund the London air ambulance, London air ambulance or these helicopter ambulances to pick up 3 ,000 Londoners a year. So we Omaze funded that service, right? It wouldn't be here without the money from the Omaze community. And so like, that's also like, you know, a nice loop. You mentioned something earlier, which struck me about, you know, the power of storytelling. And I believe you even take that as far as actually training people in the organization, don't you, around how to tell stories.

18:22Why is that so important? Because, I mean, it strikes me that, you know, pretty much anybody in their career needs the ability to be able to create a vision and communicate to people, whether it's internally, externally. And I think it's probably something that we don't train enough of. So how do you go about it in a maze and what kind of insights do you have on the importance of how you tell stories? I totally agree with you, first of all. I mean, I think it's the most important and underrated skill in entrepreneurship. You know, people like it's obvious to see the impact on marketing, but it really like impacts everything you do.

18:58Right. The ability to tell a good story matters a ton for fundraising from investors. right that's mostly about story people think it's mostly you know metrics matter but like story really matters um it's huge for setting a vision for your team it's huge for recruiting um it's huge for product development being able to see the world through the eyes of another right it's like it has massive impacts throughout the business it's important from a cfo to be a good storyteller to be able to and people on the finance team like it it touches everybody In terms of how we teach it, we have our principles of storytelling.

19:34We're inspired by this book called Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller. And so we take some of his principles, mix it with ours, and then we go through and we look at the brands that have won and beat their competitors over time and explain through their storytelling why that worked or why that didn't. So we'll look at like why did Spotify beat Tidal that had Jay-Z and Beyonce and Madonna and everybody. It wasn't the technology. It wasn't the distribution. It was the way that they did their storytelling. And so there's lots of principles, but the three that really matter is make the customer the hero.

20:11It's understanding the classic hero's journey that we all go through. A character wants something. They have a problem. They need a guide. They face some jeopardy. They have a transformation at the end. you want people to understand that. Clarity is key, right? People too often overcomplicate their message. And the human brain just wants to preserve calories. If you make it use a lot of calories to understand what you're doing, you'll lose. Like if you confuse, you'll lose. And that your brand is the guide, right? And the way you are a great guide is you show empathy and you show authority. So that's why it really is powerful if a brand can make someone laugh, right?

20:56Or cry. But like that, like that is a neurological shortcut to connection that shows empathy. If your brain can make you laugh like that, you feel a connection, you remember that. And then authority is social proof, statistics, endorsements, all those things. So those are the three principles that we really focus on is like, make the customer the hero. Clarity is key. We are the guide, not the hero, right? And then we have a bunch of principles underneath that. No, they're really good. It's funny, actually, our finance team at System One asked me to go and do a talk for them the other day about how to communicate.

21:33And it's really interesting because, I mean, if you're in a function like finance, sometimes people see you as kind of like the police or telling you what you can't do or controlling your costs. It was really fun because they were like, how do we present, how do we pivot that and present ourselves as a support for the organization, helping people do their jobs better? It's really really good fun actually for me to try and unpack i suppose what i comes naturally to me or what i instinctively do and break it down but i found that very interesting but some of the things that it made me think were i mean i know this is a classic one but people remember how they feel more than you know so feelings over facts for example if you make people feel something they're far more likely to remember you know years later or the element of surprise as well always you know So we lock on to, it's why behavioral science, I think, is fascinating, isn't it?

22:21Because you go, you think that's how it works, but actually it works like this. So, you know, turning things on their head and surprising people, I think, is really powerful. And one of the other things that struck me as well that I've noticed in my career is sometimes it's better to let other people tell your story. Absolutely. If you can get someone else to tell your story, people will believe it because people expect you to, you know, sell yourself, you know. Whereas if you can kind of get other people, a bit like having a podcast, you see, great thing about a podcast is other people are telling your story rather than you as well.

22:52So it can be quite powerful. Absolutely. We also teach the principles of influence in terms of like, at the beginning we had to get the most famous people in the world to do stuff with this brand of like, you know, these young kids that didn't know what they're doing. And so whenever we would face an objection, you know, would say George Clooney's team was concerned about doing content in this way we'd say yeah Bono's team had the same concern and the reason that Bono made this decision was because xyz and so therefore Bono is endorsing without you know versus us just saying oh yeah we we get it we can do this like that has no credibility right and so yeah that's that it is like getting others to tell your story is really critical totally I mean find the most influential person in your in your markets Yes.

23:40The most influential person to your target audience and then get that person to basically endorse what you do. I think it's one of those powerful kind of tactics that people just don't do that enough. You know, it's a kind of earned media. Yeah. I mean, it goes down to, you know, if you look at first principles of why storytelling really matters, like you just got to understand, like our brains are constantly looking for ways to survive and thrive. Like it's constantly scanning, right? And so the reason like a lot of brands, like consumer brands sell status is because we associate status with survival.

24:17Because if you didn't have status 150 ,000 years ago, you got left behind as a snack, right? And so that's really powerful in our neurology now. And so we're constantly looking for things that we think, okay, this is going to help me gain status or conserve financial resources or whatever. And so, but it's exhausting to constantly be searching for that. Our brain doesn't want to use many calories. And so if you have someone you can trust, that's like a shortcut. It's like, oh, that takes the work off me. That person seems to be surviving and thriving. I will therefore listen to them, you know, and that's why it works so powerfully.

24:53Yeah, that makes sense. I had a look at your advertising. You've done quite a lot of advertising and not just in my feed as well. I mean, it might be just because I'm aware of what you do, perhaps. But I swear I probably get more advertising from you than pretty much anyone else. Or it might be just how beautiful those Cotswold homes look in the feed. But I did actually, because I got the benefit of the system on database, I did actually go and pull out the numbers, which were really interesting, actually. The first thing I thought was interesting is you've made more new ads than Apple over the last five years, which I thought was wild.

25:31So we've got 620 different versions of your advertising on our database. I don't know if you realize you've made so much. No. Wow. But you've got a busy team out there. I would imagine Apple would be at the top of the heap too, right? You didn't quite match Nike. So Nike have done 849 different ads. These are audiovisual. So we basically measure every new ad that breaks. And we define a new ad. It has to be different enough to what's gone before, you know, in terms of time length or style or whatever. But every breaking new ad, every 24 hours, we test on our database and measure the emotional response to it.

26:10so we've we've automatically done that in the uk for about six years now so we've got six years of data hence why i know going back to 2012 2020 rather how your advertising is done the other interesting thing as well and credit to you by the way on this is that you've steadily improved your scores over those six years which is great so as i was mentioning before we kind of measure things in terms of emotional response and also have people recognize the brand so on a on a five star scale, six years ago, you're averaging 1.6, you're averaging 2.8. So getting close to double in terms of the emotion that people feel towards what you do.

26:46And then fluency is our version of branding. How many people can remember who you are at the end of the ad? The average in 2020 was 52 % and now it's 81%. Wow. Is 2.8 good or is it just better? 2.8 is above average. The average for a lottery and casino in the lottery and casino category the average would be 2.4 okay so 2.8 so you've gone from behind the category to a little bit ahead of the category on average and what's like who's the best in general like what well the best in you you have the number five ad of all time in that category so there's your top scoring individual ad is 4.7 oh wow yeah out of five so you've got out of what 5.9 technically it goes it goes up to almost six so yeah you've got the fifth uh best and i'll have to look up who's number one i should do that which uk brand is we'll set you the target of uh take over number one but the but the interesting point about the data which i was going to draw to your attention is obviously emotion matters and the way you tell the story because um i think the ad with 4.7 it's 90 seconds and you see the reaction to people at the moment they realize they've won and you also see the chat the people responding to the charity donation so you tie in those two things together the kind of surprise and emotion when people realize something life-changing is happening and then you contrast that with the emotion of the the charities that are being helped so you've got double whammy in terms of emotions you've got surprise and happiness coming through together but the interesting thing i think about the data was your consistency and this is this is where i wonder whether this is a conscious thing you made as a founder or not because over the last six years you've been very consistent in how you've shown up and we did some research last year called compound creativity where we actually looked at brands that are consistent in the way they execute their advertising over time what happens is it's the old phrase familiarity breeds contentment not contempt so actually the more back to your behavioral science about recognizing signs and social proof we like things that are familiar because we trust what we know, right?

28:54And so what you see is over years, the gap between brands that are consistent and brands that change their creativity every year gets bigger and bigger. So, yeah. I mean, that's a credit to, if you don't mind me shouting out, Anushka, Mike, and Kat on our team have been there since the beginning and they're really, really diligent about quality control. Like they really sweat it. And I think a lot of people make mistakes mistakes internally where they think, oh, this is getting boring. Like, and be they assume because they're seeing it every day that it's, that it hasn't changed. But like the audience doesn't, like no one's thinking about you as much as you're thinking about you, right?

29:34And so our team is good at recognizing like small, like consistent iterations. So they, they have, they definitely deserve credit and they are intentional about that. Well, kudos to them. And actually that, I'm not surprised you said that, that you've got the same team working on it. That is exactly what I'd expect looking at results because one of the predictors of success is the same team being in place. I mean, really good example in the UK would be Yorkshire Tea, which has just done a phenomenal job over the last 10 years going from, I think, 16 % market share to 40 % market share in the tea category.