He Sold For Over $40M. Here’s His Exact Cut.

**Jesse Pujji** (0:00)
I actually walked away from a pretty lucrative job at Goldman Sachs.

**Daniel Berk** (0:04)
I would love for you to introduce yourself and really tell the story about Ampush.

**Jesse Pujji** (0:08)
We pulled together 33 grand each and some Amex cards and said we're gonna bootstrap this thing. And in one month, we did 2 million in revenue, 800,000 in gross profit, and 600,000 in EBITDA. So within two years, when we cracked the Facebook channel, it was like minting money. Money and success were the number one priorities for me, and they were far less fulfilling than I expected them to be.

**Daniel Berk** (0:30)
All right, Jesse, thanks so much for joining us today on Moneywise. Quick thing before we start, my guest today made his money arbitraging ads. Buy a click for a dollar, sell it for 50 Subscribing to this show is the same trade, except it costs you zero dollars and pays out an episode like this every week. He would tell you to take that deal, and so I'm asking you to take that deal as well. Please subscribe to Moneywise wherever you're listening. Okay, now today's guest, Jesse Pujji. At 25, he was at Goldman Sachs, making half a million dollars a year, and he walked away. He started the company with his college roommates, 33 grand each and some Amex cards, and he never raised a dime of outside money. In this episode, he tells me about the day the first life-changing wire hit his account, and why the next day was one of the most disappointing days of his life. He walks me through exactly where his money sits, down to the percentages, and he tells me the number he turned down at 27 that most people would have grabbed with both hands. There's also a game he makes his kids play at Starbucks. We'll get into that. I get to talk to founders just like Jesse inside of Hampton, a private network for high growth founders who are doing 25 million a year on average. If that's you, you need to check it out at joinhampton.com.
Now, let's get into the show. I'm Daniel Berk. Here is Jesse Pujji on Moneywise. How are you doing?

**Jesse Pujji** (1:43)
I'm doing great, Daniel. How are you?

**Daniel Berk** (1:44)
I'm doing well. Technical difficulties are always fun, but we got through it together.
I would love for you to introduce yourself and really tell the story about Ampush. I'm most interested in the bootstrapped angle of Ampush. From day one, I know you started with an Amex credit card and some co-founders. Tell me the story about how all that came to be.

**Jesse Pujji** (2:04)
Yeah. Quick story.
I was born and raised in St. Louis. I grew up in an immigrant household. I think early on that shapes your perspectives on money. I think I kind of saw my dad as a classic. I came here when he was 17 with a dollar in his pocket and grinded, and he was a small business owner. So I got to work inside those businesses early. But really early on, understood entrepreneurship and business and probably shaped my perspective on bootstrapping, which is like a business is one where your revenues are higher than your expenses and you generate a profit. But I was a kid who had a snow shoveling business in middle school. I had a DJing business in high school. I had a t-shirt business in college. I spent a few years working consulting and a few years on Wall Street. I actually walked away from a pretty lucrative job at Goldman Sachs. I can talk about that decision a bit as it relates to money. I started Ampush with my college roommates.
We really wanted to bootstrap. I think we looked around like what are industries and markets that you can make a dollar, you can get in, realized digital marketing was similar to Wall Street. There's number crunching and data.
Learned about, okay, there's performance marketing where someone pays you a $50 CPA. If you could buy an ad on Google for a dollar per click and it had a 5% conversion rate, that's $20 cost and a $50 revenue. You can arbitrage ads and we're like, hey, we know that word arbitrage. Let's try it. Now, it was way harder than we thought. It took us a year to even get to kind of make any money, but we pulled together 33 grand each and some Amex cards and said we're gonna bootstrap this thing. And our real break came in the first year when we actually started running ads on Facebook and what was barely basically 0% margin on Google ads, we started making like 70% margin on Facebook ads. And I actually remember this very distinctly. Our revenue and profits in June of 2010 pre-trying Facebook were $100,000 in gross revenue, maybe like $30,000 or $40,000 in gross profit and basically break even, maybe made $5,000 or $10,000. The following August, 14 months later, we did in one month, we did $2 million in revenue, $800,000 in gross profit and $600,000 in EBITDA. So within like two years when we cracked the Facebook channel, it was like minting money and that kind of got us off to this bootstrap direction.