This Guy Built a $90M Company on YouTube in 2006

Daniel Berk (0:00)

Ash built one of the biggest channels on YouTube, almost 26 million subscribers, and he did it without raising a dollar for almost 15 years. Then the offers started showing up. One of them was $64 million in cash. He said no. By the end of this episode, you'll know what that cost him and what he's worth now. And I'm not really sure if he knows whether saying no was the right call. I'm Daniel Berk, and this is Moneywise. Every episode, I sit down with one founder or exited founder and go through their actual money. What they made, what they spend, what they own, and the stuff they'd never post about online. Some quick context on why people even tell me this stuff. Moneywise is a Hampton show. Hampton is a private community for founders, and it's full of people who already talk real numbers with each other behind closed doors. So when they sit down here on Moneywise, they'll say that number out loud with me on the show. And that's the whole deal. You come to the show, you talk about your spend, your net worth, all the ways that you really have your personal finance broken down. We know that personal finance is so much more personal than it is finance. That's what this show is about. My guest today is Ashkan Karbasfrooshan. He goes by Ash. He was born in Iran and his dad worked for the Spanish embassy there. And after the revolution, the family went to Spain, then Montreal. He graduated with a finance degree in 1999, which he'll tell us a little bit more. It is the worst timing possible for a finance degree for Ash. And so then he ended up working a bunch of jobs, bank customer service, early search engine called Mama, then a men's site called AskMen where he wrote, sold and did interviews. Really whatever needed to be done. He owned about 2% of AskMen when it sold, and that check became his whole starting bankroll. He tells you the exact number. In 2006, he put roughly $250,000 of his own dollars into WatchMojo. If you've ever watched a top 10 video on YouTube, there's a decent chance it was theirs. Today, it's close to 26 million subscribers and something like 18 billion views. The reason I wanted Ash on the show is to figure out how he paid for all of this. There was no investors, and six years before the company made actual money, he was in the red. A second mortgage on his house, he paid himself $32,000 a year. Then around 2017, with a company worth something like $80 million on paper, he started turning down offers. Today, he's trying to bring Major League Baseball back to Montreal with the Montreal Expos. Ash goes over a lot of the details of his story. He'll get through Hurst, Hugh Hefner, Donald Rumsfeld in about 90 seconds. I'm going to jump in a few times with context because I think it's just going to help you understand some of the story, some of the complexities and understand a little bit more about what makes Ash Ash. Welcome back to another episode of Moneywise. Today, I have a very special guest, Ashkan. He goes by Ash and he told me I can say Ash to introduce him. So I'm going to do that. Thanks so much for joining Moneywise today, Ash.

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan (2:35)

Thank you for having me.

Daniel Berk (2:36)

Can you for just 60 seconds give me a quick rundown of what you're trying to do with the Montreal Expos?

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan (2:40)

Sure. So in today's era of sports ownership, it's no longer just one like multi-billionaire that writes a check. It is usually like, yeah, there is an anchor investor and then you have like a private equity or two. You might have like a strategic.

So I've spent the last 298 days lining up all of the ingredients, and after 100 days, we address capital. Then the second thing that MLB cares about is a stadium. So right now, I'm just literally like looking around for land that is fair to everybody, that is like close to downtown, that could fit a stadium and like a district for entertainment. Then MLB, to wrap it up, MLB ultimately cares about the size of the market, and Montreal given its history legacy and all that.

Daniel Berk (3:21)

Well, in the Expos, we're in the MLB up until 2006, if I'm not mistaken, so it's not an unheard of idea. It's really bringing back what already existed.

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan (3:32)

Yeah. I think what they just want to see is you have the ownership and you have a stadium that befits baseball.