Our buddy sold his app for $200M in just 6 weeks?!

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
I tweeted this out a long time ago. I said, I have a new hero, and his name is Dan Porter. Nobody knew who the hell I was talking about. Nobody knew why I was saying that. I didn't give any context, but you're here, and today, you're gonna explain to the people, you're gonna show people why that is true.
Let's travel. I'll start with a few facts. Number one, this is a guest I have been waiting for to come on the podcast for years.
And the reason why is because I have, Dan, you don't know this, but I've had all these fantasies, these entrepreneurial fantasies in my life.
There's a part of me that's like, you know what? One day I'm gonna make a hit social app and 100 million people are gonna use it. I'm gonna sell it for hundreds of millions of dollars.
You've done that. I have this other fantasy that, no, no, no, I'm gonna go change education. I'm gonna start a big nonprofit. I'm gonna be the leader of that. I'm gonna help grow that thing. I'm gonna help change the way that education works in America.
You've done that.
Part of me wants to go to Hollywood and work with the power brokers, the people who are in that world. You've done that. Part of me wants to create a brand that's like part of the culture that in the world of sports takes off. You've done that. Part of me wants to own a sports league. You've done that. You have done basically all the things that I've ever wanted to do.

**Dan Porter** (1:19)
That's an amazing intro, especially for somebody whose Twitter game is as lame as mine.
I appreciate that. I would some text that with clearly Jack of All Trades, Master of None.

**Sam Parr** (1:30)
Well, I want to start with the story because your stories are legendary. You came to our basketball camp, Camp FFM, and you didn't even play basketball, which is the best part. You were my favorite person there and you didn't even play basketball, which is the funniest part. Can you tell the story of OMGPop and what happened there?

**Dan Porter** (1:46)
Yeah, so OMGPop was a gaming website built entirely in Flash.
Started with this incredibly creative guy, Charles Forman, who grew up playing Game Boys in his garage. It was like, I wish the internet could connect us to play together. And we made a ton of really fun games and we actually had success. And it's a weird story because in some ways, like we imagine that businesses either succeed or fail, but what happens like if you're in the middle? And we had millions of people who played our games. The problem is that Farmville came out and they had a hundred million people who played their games. And all of a sudden, millions of people who played your games was kind of way lamer than a hundred million people who played your game on Facebook. And we did our thing, but then the world changed and it was Facebook games and it was all these other things. And so at what point do you come back to the board and you're just like, well, we're kind of running out of money and they're like, well, why do we want to invest in something that is good, but not great?
And so I remember we went back and we were like, okay, so let's say that we cut all the snacks, like how much runway would that increase for us?
And the answer was one day.
And at some point you're just like, well, am I in the runway extending business? Am I in the business of taking something that is good, but not great and just continually taking money over and over over time? And so I think at that point, you kind of have that realization and the board is sitting around. They're like, oh, we can take, we can raise money, we can borrow money. And you're just like, well, what happens if like we did some cool shit? It just wasn't cool enough. And so yeah, we're kind of, I just said like, maybe this is just kind of the end and we're just gonna make some more games and see what happens. And maybe we're gonna go out of business and a couple million people will be sad, but you know, not 100 million.
And so it's kind of what we did. And in that process, I just thought like, let's make one or two more games. And we had this one very big game that everybody in the company that was working on a more kind of complicated game. And so I said, I'd like to at least try to make the last game that we make, even though I'm not a game designer. I think I've worked here and I've kind of like internalized it. And I think that the cool, as a sidebar, one of the cool things about working in the gaming space is it change your mindset so that you're kind of one game always, you're always one game away from something changing the trajectory of the company. And if you're in a website or an app or a product business, that's dangerous because you always believe like, oh my God, I'm just one feature away. If I just enable push notives, if I just add this other thing, then my app is going to be gigantic. And that can be an illusion, which is challenging. But in a portfolio theory, kind of a games company is almost like a portfolio of a bunch of smaller startups in some ways. And even if you look at overtime, we have basketball, we have football, we have a media company, and they all kind of roll up to some big vision, but they're also a portfolio of different types of bets in some way. And so I think that definitely impacted my thinking. But I was just thinking, okay, like, we're gonna make one or two more games. Let's see what happens.