#6 - How This Silicon Valley Outsider Hustled His Way to $750M Exit - Meet Vungle's Jack Smith

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Jack Smith** (0:32)
Basically, he stood up during the pitch, and he's like banged on the table, and he's like, you guys don't know anything about advertising. There's people with like 20 years experience at Google working on this, and you just looked this up on the internet like five minutes ago, and you think you could come up with a better advertising company.
You will never raise a single dollar of funding.

**Shaan Puri** (0:52)
That's my friend Jack, co-founder of Vungle, describing his first investor pitch. It's not exactly how you want it to go.
So how's the company doing today?

**SPEAKER_4** (1:02)
Private equity firm Blackstone is set to acquire Vungle for an undisclosed sum that is hotly rumored to be 750 million US dollars in cash.

**Shaan Puri** (1:25)
Is it rolling, guys?
Okay, cool. Jack, man, I appreciate you coming on the show. I've been excited to have you on because every time I meet you, you are up to some new company, some new experiment, some new clever thing. I would call you the most clever guy I know in Silicon Valley. I asked some friends the other day, I was saying, if we had to nominate one of us to go on a game show, and you don't even know what the game show is, but you want, you're going to need some set of skills to win it. You're going to have to, maybe you have to be good socially, physically, you have to be clever, solve puzzles, whatever.
And you know what? I feel like you would be my pick because you are very clever, and it seems like whatever system gets put in front of you, you end up cracking the code. And is that fair? I mean, is that surprising to you when I say that?

**Jack Smith** (2:14)
No, I'd like to think along those lines that just like trying to have whatever system is in front of me. I do think about game shows and stuff as well. How could you reverse engineer the rules to them type thing?

**Shaan Puri** (2:26)
Yeah, exactly. So we're going to talk about a couple of the things that you've built. So for people who are listening, this is Jack Smith. He is an entrepreneur and a friend of mine. He started a bunch of different things, like sort of called the Jack of All Trades because he's got his hand in all different types of projects, either starting the company, advising companies, investing in companies, that sort of thing. The biggest success is a company called Vungle, which is an ad network that's doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, despite only raising, by Silicon Valley terms, a small amount of money, about 25 million they raised and they're doing north of 300 million in revenue. So very impressive company, but I'm going to talk a little bit less about that, not just because it's an ad network and ad networks are not the most fun thing to talk about, but mostly because I think Jack does a lot of other interesting stuff. So Jack, when I was growing up, I thought that if you had a million bucks, that meant you had like infinite money, you had all the money.
And so that number of million was always top of mind for me. And so my goal is to find out from people all the different crazy things that they get up to in order to make a million bucks. And what I want to actually know from you is, you know, I want to rewind the clock. So before Vungle, you're 15, 16 years old and you start your entrepreneurial journey. What was some of the early days things you tried to do to make money? And was that even a was that even a priority of yours? Were you trying to make money or were you trying to do something else?

**Jack Smith** (3:50)
Yeah, I mean, I never actually obsessed about money very much. But what I do value is freedom. And I think that money and I also like to try and be like successful. And I feel that just like money is just kind of the barometer by which we measure success. But if I was a sprinter, then I'd be trying to get the best time in the hundred meters.