Adam Torres and Jason Kolker discuss building businesses.
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Show Notes:
Nobody Studios is a venture studio that brings ideas to reality. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Jason Kolker, Dragon Slayer at Nobody Studios, explore the Nobody Studios model and plans for the future.
About Nobody Studios
Nobody Studios, is a startup artisans and serial entrepreneurs who curate the best ideas, expedite company creation, and craft successful ventures in succession. They are proud to be crowd first and people first. They aim to create 100 compelling companies in the next five years, guiding them from ideation through MVP to full-scale company validation.
The close-knit powerhouse team of talent at Nobody Studios is stacked with industry experts in the areas of marketing innovation, e-commerce business strategy, wellness, RE tech, fin-tech, data science, product innovation, and beyond. They are larger than any one personality, and unified by our principles of rapid and frugal innovation, a ‘people first’ mentality, crowd first execution in everything, and transparency to their core. They embarked on their first significant crowdfunding campaign at the end of 2022, inviting 900+ investors from 55 countries to come along on their journey to build companies that resonate with the crowd.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today I have Jason Colker on the line, and he’s a dragon slayer over at Nobody Studios.
Jason, welcome to the show. Thanks, Adam. Appreciate appreciate being here. Oh, man. Well, good to have you on the line. And Jason, we’ll start this episode the way that we start them all with our Mission Matters Minute. So Jason, at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts.
That’s what we do. Jason, what mission matters to you? The mission that matters to me the most is actually just really building long lasting, abundant relationships. You know, business really. You know, real relationships are built on trust and, and value and, you know, the thing that matters to me in my mission is build, building long lasting relationships that are abundant and we’re both people, you know, creating win, win situations, whether it’s personal or in the business aspect.
Awesome. Love bringing mission based individuals on the line to share, you know, they do what they do, how they’re doing it, and what we can all learn from that as we grow together. So great to have you on, and I guess just to get us kicked off here, Jason, so you’re in Bali today, I think you said, in the warm up, yeah?
Yeah, I’m in Bali, Indonesia. Yeah, beautiful other side of the world, but just a different view of the world. What’s going on out there? Work or pleasure or both? I’m being nosy. Come on, we’re on the podcast. Yeah. Oh, no, it’s, it’s a little bit of both. It’s just by, I have two young kids. I got married here and just you know, , while they’re young and just the experience that , you can’t buy experience and, and just the experience, the people here are just so beautiful.
It’s very spiritual here. There’s a thousand year old energy. So just, and the, and the lifestyle here, you know, I just Just got a massage earlier today. It cost, I believe it cost about 11. So at a very high quality massage. So now demand is lifestyle, the cost of living people, everything about it.
Other than the traffic, it could take an hour to go, you know, three miles. But other than that you know I could take my battles. It’s not a bad place to be. Amazing. Hour to go three miles. Got L. A. beat just a little bit on that one. It could take an hour, but normally you get at least ten, like, or five, or seven, but not three.
Maybe an hour to go five miles, but yeah, it’s, slow to get anywhere on here, but it just, you know, you have nice scenery as you go. Amazing. Well, Jason, let’s, let’s get into let’s get into Nobody Studios and what you’re up to. So , maybe start with telling us a little bit more about your company.
Yeah, Nobody Studios is a venture studio. So if you’re unfamiliar with the venture studio, it’s actually a type of asset class, which is essentially a, we’re essentially a startup to build other startups. So our, our hairy audacious goal is to build a hundred companies in the next five years. I could give you a couple of our kind of a couple of our kind of DNA points.
One of the point, one of our points or one of our pieces of DNA that is core to us is that we have a actually a proprietary process called progressive, which is a combination of aggressive and frugal. And that means that we build companies you know, Adam and Jason putting money on our credit cards, asking grandma for money, actually building something.
We talk about that. We’re. Yeah. We’re crowd infused as well as, we’re crowd first and we’re people first. So about a year, year and a half ago, we did a a crowd fund. And the reason we did that was that the, kind of the, towards the bottom of the of the list was the actual funding. You know, the getting 100 at a time, which was our minimum.
Is not a very efficient way to raise capital, but we did do is we brought out almost 1000 new investors, people from, you know, all walks of life, millions of followers and tick tock C suite executives and what that really built up our, our bench of people, but as we go out to different verticals and build companies, we have an amazing bench of people to turn to for situational knowledge, for relationships, for the capital.
The idea is, as most entrepreneurs know, the idea part is easy. The execution part is hard. And so that goes into our. You talk about people first. Our investors include everyone from the former CEO of Coca Cola, the former head of Facebook gaming, half a dozen New York Times best selling authors, executives from Twilio, Twitch, Expedia.
So people with the, you know, the experience and the, you know, the gray hairs and the no hairs who’ve actually have a lot of losses and that’s where a lot of the You know, that’s where a lot of the knowledge comes the most or the learning comes the most in the in the failures and just one of the other dna points is what we’re we call ourselves irrationally global.
So we have investors in almost 60 countries we feel that you know, if we’re going Into a new market we want to have boots on the ground and having That type of diversity in our, in our investor base gives us really , an advantage when we’re ideating companies and especially if we’re going into different markets.
So this idea for Nobody Studios, where, where’d that come from? And like this big goal you have a hundred, companies, like where’d that idea come from? Was that one of those you’re getting at a restaurant kind of idea or like, where’d that come from? No, that’s , our CEO, Mark McNally.
Mark is a , 14 times CEO of entrepreneur. You know, Mark’s about a third of Mark companies have, have been exits and Mark talks about Mark always had wanted to be able to build things you know, simultaneous at the same time. So in other words, you know, For a venture studio is a parallel startup studio.
So you’re able to build companies in parallel and that allows you to start You know there’s a lot of sort of similar things that all companies go through in the beginning that you need to be able to execute upon to build successful companies that if you can do that at scale you can you know build 100 companies in five years and we think you know, we think you kind of laugh if you think where we thought we could do in the next 20 years You But really, it really gives us a way of doing, you know, high velocity company creation and you know, at the end of the day, it also gives a lot of, like I mentioned with the crowdfunders, you know, the crowdfunders and the investors are not just the capital, know, they’re ideas for us.
know, talent, their influence, their obviously at the Capitol as well. But but yeah, the idea itself came from Mark who was I know he was at a, you know, sort of a inflection point in his life and he was looking for the best way to make an impact on the world. And he, he did, he’d been a big he’d be a big fan of the venture studio model for a while, which was, you know, it’s still pretty, you know, most people don’t know much about it, but yeah, was all you know, to see where he wanted to have the biggest impact on his life.
Man, , what an interesting idea, what an interesting concept. Any standouts in terms of companies or otherwise that you guys have been working on? I would say the one of the companies, which I think is probably one of the most exciting ones and for me personally is Mm-Hmm.
or I should say , one of the most important ones is, is a company called Valify. Valify. Mm-Hmm. is, is essentially like a. Carfax for, for IP. We met a few brilliant data scientists and inventors from IBM who had heard, actually heard Mark on a podcast not too long ago. Probably now it’s probably going on a couple of years ago and they really resonated with the idea of adventure studio.
And as we talked about before, the, you know, the idea part is, is the easy part of the execution part of the hard part of company, of company creation. And And these guys, you know, really brilliant guys, great idea, , you know, they just lack the, the team and the skills to get it to another level.
And so they brought it to the studio. , we’re taking very early stage ideas from zero to one and building and validating an MVP. So yeah, we met these guys very early on. An idea around IP and, technology. And so essentially what, Valify does is it searches.
It’s an IP platform that takes your startup decks, plugs it into a database in 170 jurisdictions and 200 million patents, and essentially gives you , a report. So whether you’re a whether you’re a VC and you’re looking at thousands of decks a year, or you’re a startup. You know, you’re a startup yourself and you want to basically mitigate risk and de risk the company, you know, just to see the, you know, down the road that certain technology, there could be a problem with the Samsung’s or the IBM’s of the world.
Instead of having to pay an attorney, you know, thousands of dollars potentially for a 200 report, you’re able to do a very high quality report on, evalify and kind of, like I said No, what, no, in terms of reporting what some kind of obstacles could be down the road if you already go with the ideas.
But yeah, that’s just a good idea of the, you know, the ideation and just some of the ideas we’re getting from the crowd. And yeah, that’s what kind of niches or industries are you? Are you looking for, like, companies from, like, and is it specific or agnostic or maybe give a flavor of that?
Well, oh, yeah, so we’re we think we’re equal opportunity innovators. So I like that. I like that. Equal opportunity innovators. I’m in. Go ahead. Yeah, as long as, as long as it doesn’t drive a lot of E and enterprise level sales, you know, we’re there. So we have a, for example, we have a big focus on health and wellness, whether it’s precision medicine, sleep and dreams, biohacking.
One of our first companies actually to market is a company in the plant medicine and psychedelic space called WebMD. It’s essentially the WebMD of plant medicine and it’s an education company around plant medicine. The space is, it’s obviously federally, you know, it’s murky right now with the plant medicine space.
We see this as if you win the trust and the eyeballs and you’re early to market, you can really build relationships with folks. And we, you 5 percent pod, podcast. Where we bring on, you know, professional athletes, PhDs, neuroscientists, and just really delve into, you know, people, you know not a centenarian, but we had a, a woman in her 90s come on, talk about end of life issues and how she’s been benefited through, yeah, through plant medicine, but yeah, you know FinTech, Agritech Education.
Yeah, we have right now we have 15 companies in development. We have we have four in the marketplace. We’re actually doing a series a right now. So we expect to speed up the, creation of companies as we start to get more, more more capitalized. But, yeah, like I said, if you like that, , we’re definitely equal opportunity innovators.
Talk to me a little bit about the just about the type of founders that you’re looking for. Like, is there anything specific? Do they have to like have some exits before, or like, is there any specific criteria? Are you looking solely at kind of like the idea and the structure and the business they’re pitching?
Yeah, so we’re not, we’re not like a accelerator or like a anything like that. What we do is we, we’re, we’re actually build and create companies ourselves. So we’re looking for, we’re looking for founders who want to come into the, ecosystem, right? Into our ecosystem. So as I mentioned, the case of Evalify.
It’s really we’re looking for early stage ideas, you know, we’re coming in as a studio we’re taking a You know a majority of the cap table. So it’s definitely not for for everyone for sure. So But at the same time if you’re part of any individual company within the studio or you’re an investor You automatically get equity across the entire portfolio.
So as you start to exit companies we think of it almost like a dividend model You know, as the exits start to stack up in year two and three, it becomes again, essentially like a dividend model, but we’re looking for people that, you know, at the end of the day, with our progressive model, we’re looking for people who want to roll up your sleeves work with other amazing folks , and build and people who are focused on more, you know, I guess that that, that progressive process really encapsulates everything we do.
You’re not going to see any. Okay. You know, any exorbitantly paid executives every, you know, all decisions we made are go through that kind of lens of the progressive process and you know, we’re not, we’re not worried about the color of our lobby and the You know, things that don’t matter in terms of building companies.
No, that’s awesome. I love it. I love it. I think it’s a great story too. And I think what it also does is it just kind of, I wanted to make sure that that was like everybody listening was aware of exactly how that worked. Because I mean, there’s just, Different ways to go about getting your idea out there and, being an entrepreneur and you know, seeing your dream realized and whatever that particular idea was.
And this is one that I don’t feel like you said in the beginning I don’t think a lot of people know about it. Actually. I think that a lot of times you think it has to be one way, but there’s, but there’s options, right? Yeah, we can, and we don’t, you know, I don’t know any entrepreneurs who have one idea.
So this is almost like the a playground for entrepreneurs. They can, you know, we’re able to kill ideas, swap, we’re able to pause ideas, we’re able to merge companies, split companies, because we, you know, it’s really incumbent upon us that we do these things. And so, you know, people who are interested in maybe plant medicine, and even though they’re part of another company, are able to kind of, you know, To roll up their sleeves and take part in those other companies and, and, and not only make an impact, but also be part of the upside as those companies flourishing and exit.
Now, you mentioned investors and you mentioned a raise how do people get involved, like, from the investor side or otherwise? So, we’re, we’re right now, we’re actually closing out an angel rounds. We’re launching a series a here in the next few weeks. So, yeah it’s either through the series, the angel, which again is closing out here as soon as we get in the the 1st checks for the series a, then the angel actually closes, but it’s right now it’s, it’s through those 2 different series that is, you know, if anyone’s interested, certainly happy to I can get my information later, but we could set up a call and send them that information.
And we’re doing a 20M dollar raise. Awesome. Well, Jason, it has been great having you on the show today and getting to know a little bit more about what you’re doing over at Nobody Studios and excited to watch this thing keep on growing. And in terms of the Rays or even just following Nobody Studios how do people connect?
How do they follow up? Yeah, you know, Nobody Studios, I would just say the easiest way to get involved is I could certainly give up my information. Jason K. J S O N K. Nobody studios.com. The company website is nobody studios, N-O-B-O-D-Y studios.com. And you’ll see on the website there’s a way that people could get involved if there’s a join the journey.
Link on the website whether people are interested as far as. You know, being part of the talent pool or the investor pool, there’s, there’s ways to get involved you know, both of those are equally as important to us the talent, the influence, and the, and the capital are all, all three of those are are equally important for us at this time.
So. Yeah, fantastic. Perfect. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll put the links , in the show notes so that you can just click on them and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe button.
This is a daily show each and every day we’re releasing new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Jason, thanks again for coming on the show. Thank you, Adam. Much appreciated. Appreciate it.