#57: Choose Rich’s Nick O’Neill on Cancer, Crypto, Going Viral & Building a Million-Dollar Brand

**Nick O'Neill** (0:00)
I went down a rabbit hole of figuring out statistics on cancer basically, and my cancer, and you start going down like all these, well, what's the worst thing that could happen and all this other stuff, and what's the next level of treatment, and if this and if that. And then I realized, I was like, oh, when it comes to all this stuff, I'm basically a statistic.
So like, your only choice is to have like a mental decision of like where you're at basically. And I was like, yeah, I'm gonna wake up and just be like, go ahead with whatever direction that the wind blows. Like, I'm just gonna go and make the best of each day.

**Derek Andersen** (0:42)
Divot. This episode is brought to you by Google for Startups.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:49)
Today we're in Aventura, Florida with Nick O'Neill, the entrepreneur, crypto enthusiast, and internet celebrity behind Choose Rich. I first met Nick more than a decade ago when he was building products in Silicon Valley.
Long before crypto became culture, Nick was studying where the internet was moving. In 2007, he built AllFacebook around the rise of Facebook and grew to more than a million monthly visitors, eventually selling it to social times. But Nick's story is much bigger than one early win. From social media to NFTs to crypto entertainment, he kept spotting the next wave, building Choose Rich to more than 250,000 followers and driving his brand to the forefront of marketing, content, and influencers. Hope you enjoy our conversation.

**Derek Andersen** (1:30)
I called you this morning just to confirm what time you're coming, and you told me that you threw up this morning in the car on the way over. And it was not the most obvious reason why you threw up, but I feel like this is where we should start talking about your cancer and your treatment and diagnosis.
Tell me what's going on and wear things out.

**Nick O'Neill** (1:58)
Well, I'm just going through chemotherapy. I got Hodgkin lymphoma, which is actually the, there's a Larry David joke which calls it the good lymphoma.
And basically, throughout that entire conversation, they're like, well, it's still cancer. But I've spent like two years basically, two years ago, I started having like weird skin symptoms that I was feeling. And I was like on the hunt, they called it eczema, essentially. And that's kind of like a catch-all that dermatologists use for all of it. I ended up on medication for eczema, but I was like, I'm not gonna keep injecting myself every two weeks for something like there has to be some, this had to have come from somewhere. And I ended up getting, randomly I started getting blood tests, all these other different things. And eventually, long story short, end of last year, I went in for a CT scan. They were checking my blood if I had plaque in my blood.
I didn't. But the technician was like, do you have lymphoma? And I was like, excuse me? And he was like, you should get that checked out.

**Derek Andersen** (3:08)
So randomly, he just said that.

**Nick O'Neill** (3:09)
It was an incidental finding. He shouldn't have probably said that. But the radiologist gave their report, basically. It was like, yeah, there's an unidentified mass. That wasn't the exact terminology. It was radiologist terms. And they basically suggested further testing and imaging. And it took, I got that last September or October. Kind of panicked at that moment in time. And then went through this process. In order to get to a conclusion, you eventually need to get a biopsy.
If the testing is sufficient enough, it goes through different images, whatever I got to test up. I flew up to New York to Sloan Kettering to get a needle biopsy. They're like, yeah, this should work 75% of the time.
They gave me a very confident stat. The guy down here was like, no, you need to get a surgical biopsy, which is something you don't wanna get cut open. I had a mess in my chest. Anyways, long story short, eventually the needle biopsy didn't work. I got a surgical biopsy down here. They found out it's Hodgkin lymphoma. So I got diagnosed with that two and a half months ago. And within two weeks, I was getting chemo basically.
And so now I've, well, a week from now, I have gone through a full two months of treatment. You get chemo every two weeks.
And I get imaging next week to find out whether or not it's gone or like what the status is. And that dictates what the remaining treatment is like.

**Derek Andersen** (4:40)
I mean, thank goodness you kept searching for answers. Because it sounds like if you just sort of taken, and face value what you're being told, it would have been much longer till you had identified it.