Jack Smith on How r/WallStreetBets is Beating Wall Street - From the Archive

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
Hello, MFM fans. It's me, the artist formerly known as Producer Ben. This week, we had a scheduling conflict, so the episode is going to come out a day late. It's coming out tomorrow.
In the meantime, we wanted to keep you tidied over with something from the archives. So today, we're playing an episode with Jack Smith. Jack is a founder. He sold an ad tech startup for hundreds of millions of dollars.
He's really successful. He's one of these wild indie hacker types who's always got some interesting kind of weird project going on. So on this episode, he talked about his big payday, Wall Street bets, oh yeah, remember that, VCs in the media game and much more. It's a great episode. Jack's a really interesting and thoughtful guy and he's coming back on the show next week. So we thought it might be helpful to catch up on what he said last time.
So please enjoy this episode from two years ago with Jack Smith.

**Shaan Puri** (1:09)
What's up, we got Jack here, Jack Smith. How are you, man?

**Jack Smith** (1:13)
I'm good, how are you guys?

**Sam Parr** (1:14)
So, spoke at House of Khan, where I met him years ago. Started this company called Vungle, which sold for like what, $750 million, it was like an ad thing, which we're actually gonna talk about today.
Started SHIP, which raised a lot of money, got a lot of hype, and what happened to that?

**Jack Smith** (1:30)
Went to zero.

**Sam Parr** (1:31)
Went to zero. So you win some, you lose some, but you won a major one.
The reason why you are here is because we wanna talk about Taboola, at least I do for a second. But before we get into that, Shaan, you invited me to this thing called Apex, right?

**Shaan Puri** (1:45)
That's right, and you did it all wrong.

**Sam Parr** (1:47)
Yeah.

**Shaan Puri** (1:49)
So, okay, we talked about it on the podcast. Apex is supposed to be like a digital masquerade party.
So you're supposed to show up, you pick a new name, that's your mask, nobody knows who you really are, and then you come in and it's kind of like, it's a private group, but nobody has a real name, so you can kind of, the idea is you speak more freely. But of course, Sam first joins the thing like two weeks late, then he's like, what's Apex? As if we didn't talk about it.

**Sam Parr** (2:15)
No, why I knew we talked about it, but I hadn't used it before.

**Shaan Puri** (2:18)
So he joins and then he uses his real name and then he goes on and says, hey guys, it's Sam, what's up? I'd love to hear your feedback, like it's a fucking Facebook group, which we already also have.

**Sam Parr** (2:28)
The reason I did it was I was browsing it, because I didn't bother to actually look, but I was looking now, there's only like 500 members.
People were saying like, nice stuff, that's great. Some people were saying really mean stuff. Is that crazy?

**Shaan Puri** (2:40)
Yeah, dude, that's what it's supposed to be. That's the juiciness of a pseudonymous platformer. You let them say what they want.

**Sam Parr** (2:48)
Someone said a thread, who do you like better, Sean or Sam? And they just shit on both of us for like the stupidest stuff.

**Shaan Puri** (2:54)
Both of us, yeah.

**Sam Parr** (2:56)
It's okay getting negative feedback. They did like some mean stuff, where I'm like, why does that even matter?

**Shaan Puri** (3:01)
But don't you just wanna know what's actually in people's minds? Like I love knowing what's actually in people's minds, even if it is like it's some random point or it's really mean. It's like, that's the stuff you never hear. Like there's positive, there's compliments, there's constructive feedback, and then there's just the shit people really think about you. So this is the way to see the shit people really think about you.

**Sam Parr** (3:20)
Do I tell a story about using a pogo stick a lot?

**Shaan Puri** (3:24)
You did it once.
I think it's cause you have all these like random skills slash hobbies. And so each time it's a different one, it'll be like, I can dunk, I can skateboard, I can ride a pogo stick, I used to run track. Like you always have like a thing like that. So that's what they were making fun of.

**Sam Parr** (3:40)
Someone made fun of me for like, he's like, I get it. You sell hot dogs and you're good at the pogo stick.