Andrew (CEO of Creators Inc.)

Freshman year.

So I go out to the nightclub.

I didn't realize you needed money for a cover charge.

I had no money.

So I had to sneak.

Yeah, I had to sneak in so I didn't have to pay $20.

And when I get downstairs, there's a club called Aria.

I'm watching these kids pop Cristal freshman year of college and they've got black cards and it's just this that wrestler like competitive rush took over for me and I just started building building and failing businesses after that from from that moment on.

I wouldn't say I found my mentor, but, um, I, I found some really smart kids at Babson who, you know, were like, came from, you know, pretty poor backgrounds who were there on scholarship, who were like great coders and programmers.

Um, and we built a business together.

That was one of the first behavioral ad networks, which exploded.

We were the number three, uh,

buyer of banner ads on the internet behind Google and Yahoo.

And we figured out pretty early on that we could sell mobile offers on the internet because like not everyone had a credit card, but everyone had a cell phone and kids had their parents, you know, would get a parent's cell phone and they could subscribe to stupid things like ringtones, horoscopes, IQ quizzes,

We made a million dollars for our dorm room and thought it was a big deal through a party.

Carriers thought we were pains in the ass as we were just creating all these customer service chargeback bullshit issues.

And then in 2008, when there was a flash crash, I'm in my mid-20s, I'm getting these phone calls from the CEO of AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, hey, Andrew, how do we do more revenue together?

This is a great stream of income.

They gave us an API into their backend and do a billion dollars in transactions.

Wow.