Episode Summary
This episode is a deep-dive interview with Brian Wong, the founder of Kiip, an innovative mobile advertising platform that pioneered rewarding users for achievement moments in mobile apps. The conversation explores Brian’s entrepreneurial journey—starting from building Kiip at the dawn of the mobile app era, to his observations and investments in new tech trends such as AI, Web3, and meme coins. Brian also shares insights about investing philosophies, public speaking expertise, and career advice for aspiring founders.
Transcript
Manav [00:00:00]:
Hello, everyone. On this episode of Emerging Founders with Manav, we have Brian Wong. Brian is the founder of Keep, a mobile advertising platform that focuses on rewarding users during achievement moments in mobile apps. At the age of 18, Brian graduated from college and he skipped four grades. That means he went to college at the age of 14. Brian has attracted major clients like Kellogg, Kellogg's, McDonald's, Coca Cola while he was working at Keep. And over the years, he also authored a book called the Cheat Code where he revealed all these secrets for other entrepreneurs. He's also had a venture called the Next Stage where he teaches people about public speaking. And the reason I got Brian on the pod today, because I am really tunnel vision focused on mobile apps right now. And then when I was researching other entrepreneurs in mobile apps, I came across Brian and I was like, I have to talk to Brian. So I'm really excited to have you on the pod. Brian, how are you doing today? Awesome. Yeah. I want to start from the inception of. I know you started company when you were like 18 or 19, but what was the, the thing that sparked the idea and essentially what was the platform you were building? I know there are other companies like Vongle as well that were trying to do something similar, but yeah, what was the inception of the idea and then what exactly was the thing that you built?
Brian Wong [00:01:20]:
Keith was one of the types of companies you would think about. Now is not even a question mark on whether or not it should exist, which was this idea of rewarding people in mobile apps for interacting with brands. Today, the idea of being rewarded by a brand for watching a video, for interacting with an ad, for completing a task, for buying a product. Rewards is so innate now in day to day interactions with brands. It's not even a question, but in the early days, brands being like, wait, I'm rewarding a user for interacting with me? That doesn't make a lot of sense. Where does that reward come from? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we had to excel through this concept of incentivized advertising. Right. Was the category that we were in. And mobile apps at the time when we started the company were just beginning to start getting traction. This was 2010. Apple just opened up iOS for developers.
Manav [00:02:14]:
Okay, I want to dive a little deeper into that. So for a little bit of context for people watching and listening, this is year 2010 when Brian launched this company. And I want to understand from the mindset of the brand, like, how can I plug and play this reward program into the app? And how did you guys make sure, like it was More targeted towards the right consumer.
Brian Wong [00:02:35]:
The fact that you're in a fitness app and you're working out matters a lot more than your profile. The fact that you're in that behavior of that activity and let's say you're playing a game, the fact that you're in that moment, you're receptive, could matter. And then obviously, the thing about advertising in mobile, if you just ate lunch, it doesn't matter if I'm giving you a completely free burger from McDonald's because you're not hungry anymore. So we realized that timing mattered a ton. And then also in the app, when you were finishing a level in a game or finishing a workout, then you're receptive to messaging. You could be in the middle of a workout and be in the middle of playing a game and you could show any ad. I could even show you free. It could be a free dinner and people wouldn't care. Because it matters when you're actually interacting with the brand and in that flow that you're in that sequence that you're in with the apps you're using.
Manav [00:03:25]:
I like how you found something useless when you're playing a game on an app and they show you some random ads that majority, 99.9% people don't click on. It's such a useless thing. And then you just found some value in it and then converted it into, into a company. Let's talk about the cycle. I wanted to double click on the cycles because it's good to know the past, predict the Future. So in 2000s, we had the bubble, whatever. Then 2008, iPhone comes and the mobile app bubble happens, but not the bubble, but it was like a thing that was heavily invested into. Then we have Web3 and now we're seeing AI. And I think what I predict the next thing would be like humanoid robots. So how do you predict, like, the next wave? And are you, like, involved in AI? Are you, are you curious about AI agents? Are you funding those? Are you investing in those? Or do you feel like every company is just a GPT rapper? Like, how do you think about that? This wave that's going on right now?
Brian Wong [00:04:22]:
So you skipped over a couple more vectors of growth, which I know we don't have a lot of time to talk about them, but obviously there was, like you said, there was dot com, there was mobile apps, the sharing economy, if you recall, with the Ubers, the Lyfts, the Airbnbs. Yeah, exactly. So there was the gig economy as well. Whatever you want to call them. Doordash. All these guys came out then you had, I would argue like a mini kind of AI wave as well back then too. It was like some of these chatbots started to come out from there. Then you had web three, right? You had crypto and NFTs and that wave. And then there was a bit of a data wave actually, if I recall, there's a lot of like big data and CDPs and cloud computing. Cloud was a big one. So there's a bunch of different, one of these hype cycles, basically. I'm not speaking of all of them in sequence, but you get what I mean. And then AI. The way I like to remind folks, there's a mini AI boom before AI. AI has been a boom multiple times. Like it's not like it wasn't the first time. People are like, oh my God, AI is amazing. And I think the thing that finally brought AI to the hype level that it is today is ChatGPT because there was something that your mom could use and understand and it was actually intelligent enough to get us there. But I have to remind people it was only not so long ago that you could barely ask Siri for the weather and it can't even perform. And Siri, even today with Apple intelligence is still a trash product. So there's still ways to go in terms of chatgpt. Perplexity, anthropic, all these hyped up companies today, the use cases are still, I would argue, clear enough that ChatGPT has built a enormous subscription business for what they have. But from a true day to day impact, I'm waiting for verticalized AI businesses that have either cleverly leveraged wrapper or not, I don't really care. Right? Like you can argue that every company is an ABS wrapper and we're all built on aws. So it's like at the end of the day, irrelevant. It's more the data sources that are being leveraged, the way they guard rail and the use cases, let's double click on that. The guard railing is how can I bring in my own models, my own data sources, train these engines and build something that's going to lead to a use case. So one of our fund's most recent investments and is public is by then which is creating AI agents. So we're doing AI agents but with 3D avatars linked to it with IP. So the whole point is, yes, AI agents are great, but what if it's a messy AI agent, right? What if it's a. I'm like, we don't have Messi's license, but let Messi's team could come in easily and build an AI agent, right? What if it's Olivia Rodrigo as an AI agent? What if it's Selena Gomez, whatever it is. So the idea is IP matters in AI agent land for consumers in that use case in either a virtual world or not. And that's the bet that we made. And the founder behind that company is extremely well known. He's at an exit before. I've known him for eight years and he's based in Asia. And launching IP in Asia generally has had a better track record because of the affinity towards characters and celebrities in Asia more so than in the west, which is why we made that bet there. That's a long winded way of answering your questions. But I don't look at this AI agent thing as oh my God, I have to go to AI agents. It's what's the vertical use case of AI that we think is going to have an outsized return? And frankly, that's the sexiest example to give you. The types of companies we're looking at right now are like vertical AI in terms of summarizing discovery in lawsuits, vertical AI in interpreting medical records that doctors use for treatment. Just basic boring things that AI can be leveraged for tax return prep, you name it. We those are the use cases. And I'm waiting to see some of these things emerge. And then once we see a pattern, then we're going to start to make our investment thesis more robust. But for now, it's just learning frankly through some of these investments as to whether or not the legal vertical use case or the customer service vertical use case or the healthcare vertical use case is the way to go. And also as an investor, the last thing I'll say is you're optimizing for returns, right? So in general, I don't think you're going to get the returns that you want because the buyer is still vague in vertical AI who the buyer is. There's already an incumbent that you're attempting to displace. If you can displace an incumbent, you have a buyer immediately who has cash to spend on you. And as a vc, I want you to have someone to buy you within three to five years.
Manav [00:09:04]:
And three things that I'm seeing right now, AI and AI agents are making the company leaner. Higher education, like Harvard MBAs not being able to find a job, entrepreneurs more confused about what to work on because I feel like every idea has already been done before and people are more and More confused. As an investor, what do you look to fund? Where do you think the value is happening? I'm not just talking about AI. I know you invest in boring tech and other verticals as well. What basically catches your attention in a second when you're like, oh my God, this is what I want to fund. This is what I'm excited about. This is going to be massive.
Brian Wong [00:09:38]:
The three things you mentioned before, a collection of things that you've observed that are important to you, that I think is helpful and heuristic of explaining the world. Like MBAs are finding it hard to get a job and ideas that are dime a dozen and everything's been done before. But it's not like that was the same sentiment 10 years ago, 15 years ago as well, right? You come up with an idea. Every VC is, can't Google just build this or they've already built this or whatever. Ten years ago, MBAs had problems getting jobs too because of the Internet. MBAs will always have problems finding jobs, frankly, because it's the wrong way to go, to be honest. Like you need to go find a adult babysitting situation, then MBA is a great place to go. But if you want to find a job, MBA is not the way to go. You want to find a job, you should make your own job. And that's why being a founder is great. Or at least finding companies with gaps and actually practically going in there and solving a problem than just generally solving your own problem, which was you didn't know what you were going to do with your life in the first place. But in terms of what actually I am like interested in the fundamentals always still matter. Good team, strong conviction in their market, Great experts in the market have an unfair advantage in their market. Right? I love the pitches that I've had recently and I won't mention the founders, but the first thing they said is reason why we have unfair advantage is because my father, my uncle, is the CEO of the largest national backed bank in this country in Africa. Could have sounded like a scam, winded up not investing in them. But he was very at least honest. He was like, we have nepotism. That is the unfair advantage. I was like great. Another guy came to me the other day and was like, my unfair advantage is that I've built company is a music licensing. I was the head of music license for this massive company and we did billions of dollars worth of licensing transactions. And I know this better than anybody inside and out. So people with unfair advantages are obviously very appealing and again strong Teams, strong conviction. The market size is irrelevant because market size, by the time it's big enough, it's already too late. Because the ideal companies and ideal founders make their markets right. If you were to go to Sam Altman and say, oh, what's the market for? Chatbot usages for doing my homework and writing essays for me, be like, that's not the right question. Right. The right question is, can we convince the public that by using ChatGPT their life is going to improve? And this whole new wave of AI apps being built on this could be life changing for many. And that was very difficult for people to put finger on at least value until after the fact. Market size is always great for the people who look at it after the fact. It's not in the moment. If everyone had that perspective, then everyone would be a billionaire by now. So that's not relevant. And then I would say the most important thing are delusional people. Is the founder kind of borderline delusional? Do they think and have usually some mental problem? Either they're autistic Asperger, just flat out crazy. Because you have to be a little delusional in order to want to devote your entire life to a particular thing and only one thing. Like as a founder, you're committed to one thing. I was delusional about the fact that the next wave of ads that would take over every other TV ad and every other digital ad in the world was this idea of like reciprocal advertising is what we called it. And that was delusional. It was like, did it take over everything? No. But is there a decent percentage of ads today that are based on incentives and the way you interact with the brand and being incentivized for doing it? Yeah. So in a way my delusion was right, but the form in which I was communicating it was actually delusional. But those are the things we look at. And that's just to be able to put a punctuation on. This is based on early stage investing. Right. Like I want people to understand this is all about early stage. This is talking about the companies that don't have revenue yet. The company that just are really primarily an idea, a seedling. That's the lens in which investing in early stage has the potential to give you the highest possible success rate. But investing in late stage or mid stage companies is a totally different philosophy. And I'm not saying that my formula is perfect, but it really is for early stage in art, not a science. It's based on your pattern recognition as a founder. And as an investor and having done 32 angel investments and having founded a few companies myself and having been in the trenches, I know and can see what I believe are patterns that could lead to a higher likelihood of success.
Manav [00:14:07]:
How do you feel about the Web3 market right now with the meme coins? Trump releasing meme coins, countries releasing their meme coins, even companies now. Like, I'm seeing a lot of AI agents, these companies using meme coins to fund. It's like crowdfunding a little bit. I know you're a little bit in web3world as well, so I would love to have your take on how meme coins are like, transforming attention into. It's like a new form of gambling casino trading based on the news cycle. I don't know. It's interesting how a president can release a meme coin. Just do that.
Brian Wong [00:14:42]:
Yeah. Like, again, I try also not to take specific verticals and run at them. I think that's why we called it boring tech, because it's like anything that's generally boring, that powers a lot of stuff, that's the basic ingredient and has emotes and can be something that in our thesis we talk about is, are you capable of overcharging for the product because you're the only one who can do it. There's certain things that we look at as well as part of the philosophy, but I don't really go in there and say I'm only investing in AI, only investing in Web3, because then I look at that as like trend chasing. And you can only lose from that because by the time an investor has been like, oh my God, AI agents are a thing now, you're already too late, to be honest. Right. Like the AI agent stuff, if you weren't in on it in early December, before AI 16z or virtuals or the Rebro, all these things became a thing, you were already too late. And right now, if you're trying to buy into AI tokens, it's just pure degenerate gambling. Right. Because none of these things are real products until you see the real use cases that come out of AI agents. Most of them, you look at the actual volume of use cases. Yes, we have some Twitter bots like AI xpt and a few of these things you can tweet at, and some trading agents that people are making money off of. But really, if your agent was really that good, we'd have multiple millionaires many times over, every single day, which, again, the markets just don't support. Back to the meme tokens. Meme tokens have been around forever, and that's in the form of penny stocks, speculation and degenerate gambling. And ideas and companies have always existed. You want to go find something that you think is going to pop at half a penny, go to pink sheets, go to the otc. You can easily do those things. Meme coins exposing that kind of gambling on pure speculative ideas or just memes and a different marketplace. And memes are representative, frankly of cultural movements rather than just idea movements. And now you have a base of money that's been created from the previous meme coins that Gen Z's and now Gen Alphas are using to continue gambling through these tokens. More and more, the meme coin movement is a kind of a generational wealth signal from those folks, right? They know that millennials even like me or even baby boomers, they're not going to trade this stuff. They've already created their wealth from real estate, which was their meme coin, right? There are many meme coins that if a Gen V or Gen Alpha wanted to screw, everybody bought in. They can rip out and rug everybody from below. And some of it's criminal, some of it's not. And we're seeing all this reckoning. The noise you're seeing right now is the kind of asset class figuring itself out. You can't tell me that during the real estate bubbles that have existed over the last 10 to 20 years, that type of criminal activity regulated and obviously threw away and derivatives and any other products that came out of that with the banks, structured credit products, these types of things all got regulated after all the wildness happened. Right now, just weirdly, the president and his wife and a country are contributing to it, but this too will even out at some point. And during the craziness, there will be people who want to get in and there will be people who will get hurt and there will be people who make a ton of money. And it's just like any of these frothy markets. But like my philosophy is you can have fun in there, but just don't expect to make any money, right? Do it as a way to learn. We've invested in meme coin as frankly a way to learn, not as a way to make money. You make money on the picks and shovels that lead to these meme coins. So this could be marketplaces like hyper, like pump fun before they even happen. And I want to skate to where the puck is going. So after land, what's after that, right? And we're still seeing companies come to us with ideas after that. So, like, once millennials and Gen Z's are holding in the Meme coins, is this using Meme coins for loyalty? Meme coins for payments. Meme Coins for representing real world assets. What's the future rendition of a Meme Coin as well? That's where we're trying to go right today. It's fun to watch, it's hilarious. But notice that a lot of these people are just going to lose a ton of money. And it looks like they made millions of dollars on paper, but there's no liquidity.
Manav [00:18:31]:
Right.
Brian Wong [00:18:32]:
You can have $8 million meme coin, but if there's no liquidity, you can't take any of that out. Or things like 90% slippage, 95% slippage, 100% slippage. You're just going to make nothing. So you might be worth $4 million in paper, but you can only get four grand out of it. That's happening every day. The news is really appealing, which is why it's so viral on Twitter and people are talking about it, but in reality, there aren't that many millionaires coming out of this. And you're also being outgunned by a lot of these people that already know how to play this from the last cycle. And they're the ones with running away with all the money. And a lot of them are in jurisdictions where they can't get arrested, they can't get caught. And who knows, it might even come out that most of these guys that are launching these Meme coins are in communist countries like North Korea or dictatorships. And for real, actually, Cuba, like, there isn't a more obvious signal than an actual communist country launching a token and rugging you three times to get money out. It's just. It's hilarious. It's really entertaining to watch.
Manav [00:19:26]:
It is amazing. I participate too, just for fun. But, yeah. Know for a fact that I can lose everything. I was interviewing Adam Draper. He was the early investor in Coinbase. Yeah. So one thing I do want to talk about is, like, the time cycle it takes for these investments to, like, come to fruition. Like 8 to 10 years in angel investment. How do you feel about that? Does it make you anxious, like, to not see returns per year?
Brian Wong [00:19:50]:
The beauty of venture is that you insulate your assets to market fluctuation. Right. So the fact that the S and P went down or up doesn't matter when you put your money into a startup because they're executing, you get lagged response. Right. And again, you get lagged response that could go to zero, right? Or lagging response that could go to 1000x. But the game of an investor is to actually make sure that your downside protection is not. And the way you do that, and I could give away my secret sauce because otherwise I wouldn't be effective as an investor. But a little hint is to make sure that the company at the very least has a use case to be acquired at a 1x or even a 0.7 or 0.5x. So let's say you invested in a company at like. We don't invest in anything over 20 million. Let's look at the 20 million cap. Okay. I myself the question if this company were to completely fail at the business that it's in, would the assets still be worth at least 10 million to the right buyer? And if the answer is yes, I'm not losing 100% of my money, I might only lose 50% of my money, max. And if I'm exposing myself in a 200k investment or 100k investment, that means 50,000 or a hundred thousand of it is at risk. But the upside could be 10 million, right? Because if my a hundred thousand goes up a hundred x, then that's actually very possible if this company goes from 10 million to a billion in terms of valuation, which again, if they play their cards, is very possible as well. So there's all this math you look at, and that's the exciting part of early stage, is that you can actually contribute to their success. So one of the main pieces of our fund that we try to highlight is this kind of double equity model where let's say we invest 200k for 2% of the company, we'll ask for another 2%. And the way that plays out is that, and I'm legally told not to say that we promised this because it's not a legal obligation, but we would be as a firm, extremely helpful in your future round, your next round. As an investor, you want to make sure that you are creating upside with your existing investments, which means markups, right? So markups usually view it as the founder just going out there and finding the next round. As a vc, you can actually influence by helping them vet the next investors, introducing them to new investors that, let's say they raise a 20 million that you're in, that the next round would be at 40 million or 60 million. And we want to help with that. And again, legally, I can't promise you that I'll do it, but we can do things that will get you as close as possible to that and the goal is to help the founder be successful in raising that next round or again getting acquired. And that's a concept of earning your own markup in return for that additional 2% that we ask for. So it actually costs 4% to sell 200,000 worth of of equity instead of the 2%. But I think founders see it as a great exchange because it's aligning incentives like I'll they give you another 2% of the company, you earn it. If you end up being influential on us raising this other round, that also is downside protection because now you own more in the company.
Manav [00:22:36]:
Oh, sorry to interrupt. The VCs usually make money when the company get acquired or they go public. What about the secondary market? How do people sell their secondary shares? Through private equity people and secondaries are.
Brian Wong [00:22:47]:
A huge business, right? You have marketplaces like Reforge and then you have secondary funds that just specialize in taking out your secondary stakes in companies. And a lot of PE actually buy into that too and usually at a discount. So secondary is a big part of this now and it's a lot more mature than it was 10 years ago. So that's why I feel like there is potential for shorter timeframes, especially if a company gets big enough and is in critical mass and scale that a fund is willing to buy your state at a markup. So that's definitely a big part of the market today. And in fact part of ASCII is we are willing to buy secondaries in other funds and from early employees at bigger companies because that is a shorter term potential return timeframe. Right. If I'm buying a Series D startup CTO, former CTO's seed round stock at a whatever markup right before the ipo, I see a six month timeframe for return versus me waiting eight years. So I think a good P strategy is always to balance out assets that have different timeline of returns. Like we call ourselves Pre Seed and Seed but we also have, like I said, Almost 10 million of the 60 million we have in the fund allocated towards these alts. And no one's going to question me if I have a Pre Seed stake in Perplexity. Right? No one's going to question that. They're going to go oh my God, your strategy sucks. So there's definitely some stuff that's okay to do that isn't just early stage. And that's how we see it.
Manav [00:24:19]:
How do you. Okay, I feel like your thesis is similar to Constellation software where they're investing in. Are you investing in a Lot of boring vertical SaaS companies. The follow up question after that is what's the. Okay, we're talking about AI and AI agents as well, but are you heavily focused on AI SaaS or no? Like, where do you find the, like the sticky, boring businesses?
Brian Wong [00:24:40]:
So vertical AI is really where I've personally seen interest in investing. We have yet to deploy an AI because the fund is brand new, but the idea would be platforms that lead to the launching of new AI products. I don't know exactly what that is just yet, but it's usually the picks and shovels is the best framework to describe it as. And again, chasing chatbots and LLMs and computer vision and visualization software and all that is you're too late, right? Unless you're investing in a company that you know for sure is going to get acquired by OpenAI in the next year, it's just you're too late. And so trying to find the next thing is really the challenge here. The one of the areas that's of interest, that is sticks and shovels and is software driven, is ethics. So with the blowing up of AI, you have the policing. So imagine things like is this AI being racially fair? Is it doing illegal things? Is it destabilizing legal regulatory requirements? Is it serving people properly? And it requires, funnily enough, AI to police AI, as one and the other would be people policing AI and the companies that can help facilitate that and even make the rules is going to be, I think, a really big industry. I don't know exactly how big it is, but that's an area that's been of huge interest, is ethics. There's a company that unfortunately we didn't invest in, but I can talk about publicly that I know quite well, called Reality Defender, which is the type of company that would be of interest here where they detect deep fakes and they're really big now. They've raised like 60, I think 60, 70 million, not more. And breakneck speed, they raise that within a year of launching and announcing the rounds or their seed rounds. So it's definitely companies like that that I think are one flavor of what I mean by getting ahead of the curve. But again, trying to find a OpenAI perplexity anthropic competitor is not the way to go.
Manav [00:26:41]:
All right, I think I want to segue now a little bit outside of the investing world and into you. And I know we're running out of time, but I want to talk a little bit about the public speaking. And I love this because I was reading your Blog about the public speaking tips. And it had some really good points in there. First of all, I want to ask you, like, how did you become a good public speaker? And I personally also took a lot of accent reduction classes on Fiverr because I grew up in India. Like, I had to come to here, reduce my accent. So I want to, I want you to give me like some tips. Like in public speaking, for example, I want to give a TED talk tomorrow. Tell me, right, what should I do? How should I control my nerves?
Brian Wong [00:27:19]:
Sure, I think so. Public speaking, you asked how did I get good at.
Manav [00:27:23]:
I.
Brian Wong [00:27:23]:
First of all, I don't even know if I'm good at it. I just got lucky through a lot of practice. So when I was running a company, I was invited to do a lot of panels, keynotes. I wrote a book. And when you write a book, people want you to speak about the book. They want to hear what you have to say. So through a lot of practice, I got a chance to really see what I'm good at and test myself in front of audiences. People don't really know this as well, but when I was younger, I did what they call speech arts training, which is essentially reciting poetry in competitions. Poetry, monologues, dualogues, you know, Shakespearean sonnets, type of thing in public. And that gave me a lot of confidence in being able to grasp my words, be a visible minority in front of a primarily white audience, speak at a pace that sounded native to North Americans, which, as you can tell, English is my native language, even though I look like I'm Chinese, and succeed in doing that. And then that's why I would argue that public speaking was less of a challenge because I was already comfortable in front of audiences. And then to be professionally trained because I was put in front of crowds where I was paid to speak in front of them, which is a totally different ball game, became a part of my career as well. So I was a paid speaker for, you know, good six, seven years during my book and then afterwards, so what.
Manav [00:28:54]:
I know realize you would be great at debating. I can feel that energy, that stuff.
Brian Wong [00:28:58]:
Young, when I was younger. So I think they all go hand in hand. But most importantly, public speaking is less about the view that people have. Like the Steve Jobs giving a keynote. Public speaking translates in your ability to communicate one to many. So that means even in a conference call, small presentations, pitches, everyday settings, at a friend's birthday, dinner, at a wedding, just anywhere you'll speak in front of a group of two, three or more people is where Public speaking is really important. And I noticed that other visible minorities were like you, wanting to take accident reduction classes, wanting to be better at this because they knew that it would be helpful for their careers and to be more successful at what they do. So I noticed this was a need. So I launched this program called the Next Stage. And the idea was to help founders and executives and just career people be better at public speaking and help them accelerate in their career. So I started this program in November. We've now gone through 10 folks in the program where we've trained. A lot of it comes through in person and virtual sessions, both in New York. I held a couple seminars in person in New York just to train some of these folks. And the idea is to get people more effective at, at, at this skill. So to, to give you a little teaser. And again, you'd have to go through the program to get the full benefit or look out for some of the upcoming sessions I'm doing in New York. And we'll be making some announcements on that soon. And you ask about going to a TED Talk tomorrow. Everyone's gonna have nerves. You, there's not a single person, no matter how verse they are. It could be Trump, it could be Biden, it could be Tony Robbins, it could be Bill Clinton, it could be anybody. You're always going to have nerves. The question is, how obvious is it that you have those nerves? And how do you translate the energy of those nerves into an effective session where you're communicating what you want? At the end of the day, public speaking is, can you communicate the points you wanted to communicate effectively? Are people going to find you trustworthy and ultimately take away what you're saying and remember it? Are you going to have an impact on them? And is the personality that you project true to who you are? Because you might have had people who, you've heard stories of this, where in public they speak a certain way, but in private they're assholes or whatever. And you have this cognitive dissonance or personality dissonance. But people who align, you've heard this too, like the founder that sounds like this on stage and in private is exactly the same. Those are the ones that are really the most authentic and can generate the most impact. So the tactical tip I'll give you is always have your final point rehearsed in your head time and time again, meaning at the end of the talk, what are people walking away with? And you work backwards from that. You have an arc to your talk, you have an outline that you write, but the Number one rule I share with folks is to never recite. Always work off of an outline. Because if you're reading word for word, people will know immediately and you'll feel you're droning on and they're going to shut off. But having an outline, like, here are the four things I want to say. Tell them I got four things. I'm going to go through these four things and work your way through those four things. And then applying your own personality to those four things, including stories and anecdotes and examples. Those things make it a more easy conversation to have because you're essentially conversing with the audience. And that's how in general, you can be an effective public speaker. But the final point to it is practice and repetition. It's doing this so many fucking times that you don't feel any. Like the anxiety is there, but you can power through it and it just feels natural. Everyone's had their first time doing anything, but at some point, because you've done it so many times, you know what's going to go wrong potentially. Like, skiing is a perfect example. I'm a big skier. I know when I'm hitting a patch of ice how bad it's going to turn out, right? Am I going to flip out from underneath? Am I going to fall my ass? Am I going to keep my edge? Am I going to swivel to the other side? Am I going to hit powder again? I know all these different outcomes because I've skied so many times that I've pretty much hit every possible outcome I would get by sliding on an ice patch. And you have this with anything you do as a human being, through practice. And so public speaking, same thing. That's why take every opportunity you can. If it's speaking at a family function, if it's going to your school reunion and doing a little talk, doing a talk in front of kids. There's no better feedback you can get from kids because they'll never hold back on you. They'll always give you the most honest feedback possible. So practice is really important and realizing that you're not perfect and you will screw up and being self deprecating and that's the last thing too you can tell people. Listen, yeah, I look Indian, I look Asian. Of course, I'm an to have some English issues. You're not expected to be a native speaker the way you look. And I'm not saying that in a racial way. It's just, it is what it is. Like you, you can't prevent that People are going to have their idea in their head of what you sound like. And then for me, I'm completely opposite. Most people look at me, they go, this guy's supposed to be like an accountant behind a screen doing my tax return. And I'm like, no surprise, I'm not one of those guys. I'm actually a really bombastic, loud Asian dude. And people get surprised by that. But I take advantage of it and it's a great way to be memorable. Right? So there's always ways to convert what you think are disadvantages into strengths, which I also talk about quite a bit in my book extensively as well.
Manav [00:34:00]:
Love it. For people watching, I'm going to put a blog by Brian on Tips for Public Speaking in the show notes and in the description on YouTube because it has four really good tips that I want people to read. Brian is amazing because he can articulate very complex things into a very simple manner that people can quickly get it right away. Last phase of the podcast is a quick rapid fire round where I ask you five questions and they're very simple. Let's start. Question number one is, I can tell by the way you talk you read a lot. So what is a book that you've given most as a gift to other people? And what are like one to three books that have influenced your life?
Brian Wong [00:34:40]:
The most common book that I've gifted is Predictably Irrational by Danny Reilly. And I've talked about this many times. Even my own book is a very good one on behavioral economics, but a lesson on decision making by humans and how it really isn't rational how we make decisions. It's not the most expensive thing I'm going to buy less, or the cheapest thing I'm going to buy more, or the smartest person I'm going to work with, or the dumbest person I'm not, or I'm going to hire the most loyal and not loyal. There's all these different decisions that you think you would make decisions on a certain way, but the masses actually don't. That's a great book for that. I've read a lot recently. I'm actually in the middle of. I read a book on Genghis Khan recently that was very influential in my view, on Genghis Khan. Let me see if I can try to pull it up, but I can even send you the links later. I recently read a book on the theories of consciousness. If I remember the title, it's the Origins of Consciousness and I forgot the author's name, that it was an incredible Book on where human consciousness. He theorizes where it came from. I'm reading a book on children and how they learn called Becoming Brilliant right here. Divine Might, which is about Greek goddesses specifically, not Greek gods. And then Rogues, which is about criminals and what they bring to society. These are books that I'm going through now. I can't tell you how good they are yet.
Manav [00:36:04]:
I'm curious about the Genghis Khan book because I don't know if it's fact, but I heard that Genghis Khan had more than 400 kids and one out of five or one out of seven people in the world are descendants of Genghis Khan. I don't know if this is true.
Brian Wong [00:36:17]:
So the book is called Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford. There's obviously thousands of books about Genghis Khan, but the lens that this book takes is not of the one that everyone thinks of, which is like the savage conqueror that went around pillaging villages and wrecking countries and ruining things. But in reality, there's a lot of things that the Mongolian empire did for the world. Simple things. I'm not giving away the whole book, but like hooray. The word hooray is a Mongolian word for celebration, by the way. The Mongols were the first to put women in leadership positions. The Mongols were the first to create tax abatement for religions and the clergy so you could. Churches had tax benefits. They were the first to create a protected trade route called the Silk Road. So they were first acknowledged that if you don't get blown up trying to bring goods around, that would actually help create more economic activity, which they were a hundred percent correct, and ended up making them one of the most economically dominant empires of all time. The list is endless of the innovations that they came up with. And so when you read through this book, you're like, wow, like, there must be a reason why there are so many misconceptions about the Mongol. And the book also addresses that too. I really love reading these types of things that kind of make you go, huh? And that book was a big one. Now I also look at these things with a grain of salt. This was Jack's perspective of. Of the Khan empire and how the Mongols went through with it. And I'm sure there's plenty of other books to argue with against him as well. But that's why I love reading this stuff. Like, I. I don't really come to. I'm not saying all the things that I read about Genghis Khan is 100% true or 100% accurate, because I wasn't alive at the time. I can't tell you exactly what it was, but we can learn something from that perspective of that person or that empire at that time. And the same with every other book.
Manav [00:38:05]:
Yeah, I'm really curious why Mongolia is the way it is now. So, yeah, I'm going to read that book. I'm going to order it right now.
Brian Wong [00:38:10]:
It explains why Mongolia is drawn out the way it is on the map and what's so amazing about it. Everything gets explained, at least in Jack's terms. But, yeah, 100% worth reading. Origins of Consciousness. Definitely worth reading. The classic ones that I'm sure that you've heard of are this 48 laws of power. I'm sure you've heard by Robert Greene. That one was very influential. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, or at least the summaries of it was really influential. The Alchemist was a big one.
Manav [00:38:41]:
I'm gonna. Yeah, people, please order all these books because they're all, like, good recommendations. Okay, next question. What purchase of a hundred dollars or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months? Could be anything. It could be a tech gadget. It could be a small course you bought. It could be anything. But it has to be something $100 or less. Something cheap like you bought from Amazon. It could be all, let's do a thousand.
Brian Wong [00:39:03]:
One thing in my life that's really made a huge difference. That's not how I designed my life. I would say maybe, like, what's a big one? Not even golfing aids. I got a big golfer and I bought a couple golfing aids, but none of those things helped. Maybe a gym membership. That's a big one.
Manav [00:39:20]:
Cool. Next question. How would you summarize your like, like, daily or like a typical workday? Is it you? Eight hours on a computer? Do you have deep work scheduled? Like, how do you make sure? Because you seem like a really high IQ person. I want to know, how do you optimize your days? Again, I'm not trying to give people a whole morning routine here, but I'm.
Brian Wong [00:39:40]:
Actually working out for two hours and climbing a mountain and helping starving children and meditating and doing an ice bath all before nine. I think that's, first of all, completely unrealistic. These people are just out of their minds and they're selling a dream and they want you to buy their book or their course or watch their YouTube channel. That's just for people to know. That's not realistic. But I think what's important for your day, and I will use this one point, is leading yourself time to think. Many people have this misconception that they have to fill up their day, which is raw. You don't. In fact, a luxury would be to have at least two hours a day, to actually have unstructured time, to take care of lingering tasks, to build something new, to ideate on something new, to solve complex problems. You can't possibly tell me that as a person doing a job that requires a lot of intellectual horsepower by having meeting after meeting after meeting that you will be productive in making good decisions, because the ultimate high performers are the ones that are constantly making good decisions at the end of the day, you want. And that's why AI is really interesting. You can use AI to do the things that don't require you to make the decisions, which are the grunt work, getting things processed. But telling your team or your employees or whoever works with you to do these things based on the decision you're making, and the right one is critical. But you can only make good decisions if you have the time to do it. So I think having two hours of unstructured time per day is extremely important.
Manav [00:41:16]:
And I love that last question. I know we've been talking about like a highlight reel of your life, but I do want to talk about failure as well. What was a failure that set you up for later? Success, but it felt like a failure in that moment. It could be some story from your company, or it could be something from your personal life, but I feel like people will relate with hearing about your failures as well.
Brian Wong [00:41:37]:
Not only your successes in the moment, you're always going to make a big deal out of it because you care. And if you didn't, that would be actually a bad thing and you'd be numb and you would have no sense of being alive, which would suck as being a human. But in the moment, if something is bad, you're going to go, oh my, this is shitty. I think. I don't even know if we're going to get out of this. But know that pretty much everything always works itself out. And the only way it will is if you keep yourself healthy. I always tell folks you can be the richest person in the world with the most amazing environment set up for you, with the most amazing people around you. But if you're sick, it doesn't matter. All you want to do is get healthy again. So if you're healthy, then you live another day to play this game that we're in. We're in a game, right? And if you can't finish the level, it doesn't matter how bad or good the level becomes, you can't even finish it. The point is to finish and play again and being able to go to the next level and do all these things. And it all comes down to health, both physical and mental health. And that actually is another part of our fund where we actually fund people's gym memberships, vacations, mental health, therapy. We go through all that in our philosophy because it's a marathon, not a sprint. And our asset is the founder. And if the founder is not healthy enough, it doesn't matter. They could be gone. And I've just invested in a shell of a company without the human being behind it. And that's why I think sustainability of the person is more critical than anything else.
Manav [00:43:02]:
I think the biggest takeaway for me is Lee Esto against Brian. And for people like watching, where can they go find you? I know you're on LinkedIn. You have your own website. Can you please guide people in the right direction on how to find you.
Brian Wong [00:43:16]:
Easy this Brian Wong co. You can apply for the program for the next stage through there. You can reach out to me through there.
Manav [00:43:23]:
Amazing, Brian. Oh, my God, that's amazing. Thank you everyone for watching. That's another episode of Emerging Founders. And Brian, thank you for coming on the show. I had a lot of fun talking to you.
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