{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Moneywise","title":"This Guy Built a $90M Company on YouTube in 2006","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3249,"description":"We're still surprised people did this but... 50+ founders worth $10M to $4B reveal their personal finances. Here it is: https://joinhampton.com/mw-wr\nWhy do we do this? Because if you're an aspirational person or someone who runs a business and is making money, it's incredibly challenging to figure out what to do. Information is impossible to find — and that's what we put together: the net worth reveal and why we do this podcast, Moneywise.\nHe took a second mortgage to keep WatchMojo alive. Today he's worth over $100M and is trying to buy a baseball team.\nAshkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo, one of the largest media companies ever built on YouTube. He started it in 2006 with a $282,500 check from the AskMen sale, racked up roughly $1M in losses by 2011, sold his retirement savings, took a second mortgage, and paid himself $32,000 a year for the first five years. Then the top-10 format hit, revenue went from $1M to $10M+ in a few years with EBITDA margins as high as 80%, and he turned down offers at $75M, $80M, and $90M valuations. In 2020 he sold 25% to Star Mountain Capital at a $90M CAD valuation. He still owns most of the company, and puts his net worth between $100M and $250M.\nThis episode gets into what it's like to sign a second mortgage at a notary with no idea if you'll end up homeless, why he moved payroll to twice a month just to have two fewer panic attacks a year, the real reason he walked away from an $80M offer (it wasn't greed), and how saying yes to everything cut his EBITDA in half. We also go deep on how he actually invests now — $5M across 15 startups, two-thirds of his stock portfolio self-managed — why he still takes the $40-cheaper flight, and his current mission to bring the Montreal Expos back to MLB.\nAlso, this podcast is made by Hampton, which is a community for founders doing on average $20 million a year in revenue. We saw a lot of these money conversations happening privately behind closed doors and we thought,...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/vCvB-0dtzg339Iof9Uhri-E5Cu1YvE_goNcKch75CeI/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS83ZTZj/OWRiMTI3NjI1YWUy/MWY4ZWJkOTU2YzFl/NzE0Mi5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}