Tzakhi (00:02.147)
I done.
Dom Einhorn (00:03.31)
Hey Taki, how are ya?
Tzakhi (00:04.995)
Great. Thanks so much for coming. We're at the Meet .Capital startup podcast with Dom Einhorn, founder of Intelligent Games, but also of so many other companies and startups in the past. I think you've sold your first company 30 years ago.
Dom Einhorn (00:23.886)
28 years ago, yeah, 1996, yeah.
Tzakhi (00:27.875)
Yeah, and since then you've done so much, invested in a lot of companies and had many adventures. We've known each other for a few years now and I'm so happy to have you with us.
Dom Einhorn (00:41.582)
Thank you so much. Yeah. I don't think we've spoken since COVID or it was right at the tail end of the COVID last time we had a conversation. Aside from a few sentences here and there on LinkedIn, it went so well.
Tzakhi (00:47.139)
Yeah.
Tzakhi (00:51.363)
Right, right. So it's good to catch up. Maybe could you give us a bit of a background on yourself beyond what I said?
Dom Einhorn (01:01.294)
Sure, grew up in France, where I'm at right now actually, but I spent the bulk of my career in the US on the West Coast in Los Angeles, not in Silicon Valley, even though I was in the technology sector very early on in the early to mid 90s primarily. Started as a digital marketing consultant in 1993, 1994.
sold, built and sold an art auction in 1996, continued in the same space in the digital marketing space and was acquired by a public company in 2001. Had a number of lives, number of missteps along the way, like most successful people that, fail so many times that there's no other choice but to succeed at the end of the day.
And that's one of the first objectives, because I have a lot of start -upers still listen to you. Failure is a necessary stepping stone to success. And I'm sure they've heard that many times before. But the idea is to fail as quickly as possible, because it's a lot cheaper if you fail quickly. And I think today you have all the tools and metrics necessary to measure your missteps and to make them a lot less painful than they used to be.
What I mean by that is that I recently went through an old box of mine in my storage place and I came across a bandwidth invoice from September of 1996. And I first had to decipher what that bandwidth, my usage actually meant because I could not correlate to anything today. But I was spending $7 ,000 US on monthly bandwidth bill. Today, probably using...
500 times more bandwidth and it's basically free. I remember launching a new venture in the late 1990s around the 2000 mark where we had to purchase Oracle licenses for $32 ,000 US per instance. Those are free today, not the Oracle licenses, but the open source equivalent of what we had.
Dom Einhorn (03:26.542)
You know, what you've had is you've had a trend in the technology sector that's still ongoing, maybe even accelerating of demonetization, decentralization, and as a result, demobilization. You know, obviously as things become cheaper, the adoption rate becomes more significant. More and more people join the game because they can actually afford it. It gets decentralized because
You don't have to rely on a central power anymore. You can, I mean, the old adage has always been, you know, the startup was started in a garage today. It's probably started not no longer in the garage, but in a corner of your bedroom, in a coffee shop, in a co -working space, wherever that may be. And ultimately, you know, democratization, both you and I remember the times where the great startups were launched.
Tzakhi (04:08.547)
coffee shop yeah
Dom Einhorn (04:23.694)
in the US in places like your home country Israel, some of them in Europe to a lesser extent already. And today it's no longer the case. I mean, one of the core things that made me move to the US in 1993, 1994 was the lack of local calling plans, flat fee local calling plans. In the time where to get online, you had to use dial -up internet. And that was costing me a fortune.
in France because I was being metered by the minute to dial up and first listen to the what we call back then the national hymn, which we all listen to 500 times a day because the connection broke and it cost a fortune. And like every new technology, initially is extremely expensive. Nobody uses it. Nobody can afford it. Then it gets less costly.
Tzakhi (05:04.163)
Yeah.
Dom Einhorn (05:20.078)
Performance improves more people use it eventually trends down to free in terms of pricing and everybody is using it so if you go back 67 years a poor person Had no AC a poor person was starving and hence skinny today a poor person Depending on how you define him depending what the country is obviously I'm aware of that
But if you take a look at the developed country like the US, the poor person is more likely to be obese, has AC freely available, freely in brackets, has access to a fridge, has access to education, at least online, the equivalent of a Harvard MIT education. None of that existed. And we've kind of like lost, you know, we've lost control over what that actually meant.
to be poor, to be unindicated, et cetera, et cetera. All I'm saying is that today, the opportunities are boundless. As a result of technology becoming rapidly demonetized and democratized, everybody has access to education, maybe not the actual physical degree, but I'm not sure too many employers care about that. And start -upers, people who want to launch their own business certainly don't.
It's a great time to be alive. It's a great time to start your business.
Tzakhi (06:45.795)
It is. And I think one of the greatest challenges now is that because there's so much opportunity, it's hard to decide on what to focus on and how to find something that actually works. It's fairly easy to start. You have a lot of tools that are just free to get started with. You have a lot of education for free, but it's hard to find a niche that works and something that can really differentiate you.
Is there a framework that you use when you start new businesses? Because you've started a lot.
Dom Einhorn (07:21.454)
Yeah, so first and foremost, I couldn't agree with you more, but let's think a little bit about human psychology. If everything is free or close to free and is being handed to you, it automatically loses value. There's a million experiments that have been done. If you offer something of value to someone for free, the person on the receiving end will look at it as quote unquote free and with little tangible value.
to your point about a lot of businesses being created today, they're not being created because they actually resolve a problem. I think that's where the primary framework should be. Don't invent problems that don't exist and build a business around it. There's plenty of problems that still exist today that you can build a business around. And as a result of these tools becoming cheaper and cheaper and anybody being able to launch for close to free,
A lot of businesses get started that never should get started in the first place. Right. That is, that is my belief. I think we see it all the time. That's also where you see a sky high failure rates in startups, right? Aside from all of the other problems that a startup may encounter, lack of funding, lack of interest, no MVP, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, no MVP, I think still remains the core. Unless you're addressing.
with your product or service, a problem that people encounter, number one, and that people encounter are willing to pay to get rid of it. You don't have a business model. So the right framework, what should it be? Look, I don't have a crystal ball, but I can tell you what's worked for me, and it may be working for you. Rather than jumping head first into a business and saying, look, we're going to be resolving this problem at scale.
Try to do it in a very, very tiny, very, very small scale at first. It's a lot cheaper. You immediately get validation or rejection. Can you solve whatever the problem is? It could be global warming, climate change. Well, can you solve it in your neighborhood first? Can you do something that actually has a net positive impact in your neighborhood? Can you add value number two? And if yes to number one and number two, a willing
Dom Einhorn (09:47.47)
Are people willing to pay for that incremental value that your product or service will provide to them? And last but not least, is this going to be economically sustainable? Which goes back to some business basics. Is it profitable enough? Am I going to be able to generate enough profit to pay for my costs and then some? If the answers to these four questions are no, you're probably going to fail. And chances are that
people, investors that you're looking to get secure funding from have been there and done that. And will, for some of them will just, if they're from New York, they're going to tell you hell no. You're going to be very direct. If they're from the West coast in the U S they're going to dance around the topic and say, maybe another time I'm too busy right now, what not. But that's like back in the days before the internet existed, when people were telling you, send me a fax when you were pitching them on something, which meant translated into French. I have zero interest in what you're pitching me.
Right. So you always go back also to this equation between IQ and EQ. I think that IQ is anywhere between overrated and sometimes vastly overrated. And EQ on the other side is often underrated and sometimes vastly underrated. What I mean by that is that
Tzakhi (10:48.163)
Yeah.
Dom Einhorn (11:16.014)
I'd rather have an idea that's a good idea versus an excellent idea with tremendous execution and the tremendous execution always unequivocally requires very, very high EQ.
Tzakhi (11:34.659)
So your E is execution or your E is emotion.
Dom Einhorn (11:39.054)
I think in order to be an excellent on the execution side, you have to have strong emotion. You have to have strong involvement. You have to have extreme resilience because you're going to be failing so many times. You're going to have so many setbacks from which you have to recover. And unless you have that, unless you have thick skin or the ability to build thick skin,
the ability to build thick skin. We're not born with it. We're all born pretty much the same way where our moms are just like doing everything to protect us from anything, any kind of disease holding us, or the wind is blowing too hard. Okay, turn down the AC, the baby's gonna get the sniffles, et cetera, et cetera, right? That's not resilience. So once we cross that stage, the babysitting stage, and we're left on our own account,
We have to build that resilience against the elements, right? At some point in time, you're old enough, whether that's at age five or at age 15, to go out by yourself. You're gonna take off your training wheels off your bicycle. Well, if you take off the training fields and you fall and you bleed a little bit on your knee and you decide to never get on the bike because you're afraid to get hurt, you don't have the makeup for an entrepreneur. You're never gonna make it as an entrepreneur.
But if you just say, heck, I'm gonna do whatever I can right now, it hurt, but I'm gonna go back. I may fall one or two more times, maybe 10 more times, but eventually I'm gonna drive without falling. There's something there. But you're building that resilience as you go, as you fail, as you get back up, as you continue to push forward.
Tzakhi (13:28.835)
Yeah, I think all these things are, you know, they're almost built into whatever you're building or whenever you're aspiring to do something which is beyond average, you just have to expect a lot of pushback. And if there's no pushback, you're probably going in the wrong direction.
Dom Einhorn (13:49.422)
I think certainly, I'm not saying that you cannot have an average business. There are plenty of average businesses that are sustainable, meaning, you know, I go shop at average businesses every day, some of which have been around for 50 or 100 years, especially in my neck of the woods in Northeastern France. In Germany, you have a lot of average or average plus businesses that have been around for 300 years. Germany is known for that, right?
which also has a downside, right? So if you're looking, for example, one of the big things with my German friends, I have some German friends in the AI space is like, my God, we're falling so far behind because of the lack of initiative that's being taken. The government doesn't take any initiative from this space. The entrepreneurs are afraid of holding back. They're okay with the status quo, right? There's nothing wrong with having an average business and making your living for yourself.
for your friends, for your family, for your stakeholders. But you cannot build an extraordinary business by remaining ordinary by definition. It sounds stupid, but that's just the way it is. If you have a moonshot business idea and you don't want to be average, you have to do things differently, right? The old saying in the US, especially in the PR space and the communication space is that
A dog, dog bites man is not news, but man bites dog is news. So you need to be in that, in that case, in that scenario, you need to be the man that bites the dog to stand out from the crowd.
Tzakhi (15:29.603)
Yeah. Okay. I think this brings us to a topic that you spend a lot of your life and also your current venture on, which is how to promote yourself and how to market yourself when you're just getting started and you don't have maybe a budget for paying for ads. How do you stand out?
Dom Einhorn (15:54.894)
It's the million dollar question. Today's probably the billion dollar question. How do you stand out? Right? Rule number one to stand out is be different. We all have different personalities. Let them come out. So rule number one. Rule number two, while being different, be authentic. And that's the biggest challenge. Because what a lot of people in businesses do is they arbitrarily in a non -organic way,
try to make a stance to be different, but it's not them. They're putting on an act. And as a result of putting on an act, they lose their core. They lose their core belief. They lose their core persona. So what you should do instead is figure out what truly makes you different, right? In my case, what makes me different is I grew up with five, six different languages, right? Because the shared nature of where I'm living within 150 mile radius, there are six different countries.
And they all speak different languages. So you have no choice, right? So you've immersed in this field, but that can become a competitive advantage. You can basically discern yourself from the general crowd. Some people have red hair, turn that to your advantage. I know a local politician that does that very well and makes fun of himself. Bono has his classes on by design. That's his brand. Everybody recognizes him. Everybody would probably recognize an avatar of Elton John if they saw it.
It didn't happen by accident. That's all by design. A big mistake that I see a lot of early stage startups do is advertise in the old sense of the world, meaning paying for attention way too early before they've actually defined that persona. It's a loser's game. You're going to be blowing money or investors' money, your money or investors' money. In the near scenario, it's no good.
before you actually know who you are. And before you know who you are, you don't know what you can and what you should accomplish. So first, you should drill down to the very lowest common denominator, trying to figure out who am I? What do I want to accomplish in life? And how am I going to get there as a person, first and foremost, as an organization with its stakeholders, with its employees, with its investors? Second,
Dom Einhorn (18:18.606)
and making sure everything is 100 % authentic, everything is 100 % alive.
Tzakhi (18:25.027)
And what do you think about creating content for early companies or for early startups?
Dom Einhorn (18:29.742)
So I think content is the expression of what we just discussed. Because what you're seeing on the content side, the mistakes that you're seeing on the content side are almost identical to the mistakes that you're seeing when someone wants to be someone other than themselves. They want to create content for the sake of creating content. As a result, that content will never resonate. Because that content has to describe your persona. That content has to be a th -
Tzakhi (18:35.139)
Okay.
Dom Einhorn (18:58.766)
as authentic as you are. I give you one example to illustrate what I'm saying. In the early 90s, as I told you, I moved from France to Southern California, Los Angeles in particular. Los Angeles is obviously known as Hollywood, more so back then than today because obviously the industry, thanks to the Netflixes and the primaries of the world is much more sporadic today. I go to the restaurant, the waiter comes and
Nice guy, engaging, smiley, tries to do a little bit of comedy and whatnot, as they quite often do in Los Angeles. I finally get my meal and he asks me, what do you do? So I'm telling him about my business, digital marketing business, and it's respectful. You ask him, what do you do? He says, I'm an actor.
And I was brass -tax, half French, half German. I'm looking at the guy you're after, then what are you doing here as a server? Shouldn't you be acting? But he was so shocked and so offended by what I said, I didn't mean any harm. For me, it was just brass -tax, right? I mean, if that's what you, if that's your trade, why aren't you exercising your trade? Only later did I realize, right? But again, he was putting on an act. He was...
maybe being himself or thinking that he was acting while engaging or while making the buck, which, you know, hats down, right? And congratulations. But that's some of the dissonance that you get with a lot of people, in particular with content. So when you're creating content,
First thing that comes to mind when I say content for a lot of people that are a little bit older is blog, social media, and then LinkedIn, Facebook, right? Because that's how they relate to content. But there is no guiding theme. There's no glue to any and all of it. They just believe that somehow they have to create a lot of content to get attention. And in fact, what they're doing is they're diluting.
Dom Einhorn (21:03.246)
the value of their brand, of their persona, whether that's the, if you're an influencer, it's you yourself, right? A stand -up comedian is not gonna market himself the same way as a Fortune 500 company or even as a startup. But at the end of the day, you have to drill down as to what makes you unique, what makes you authentic, and then when it comes to creating content, create content that resonates with that difference, with that authenticity. Otherwise, you're gonna fail.
Tzakhi (21:34.467)
And do you think startups should consult with experts on that? Should they spend? Because early stage startups, they consult about fundraising, they consult about product market fit, a lot of things. Should they spend as much energy on learning to promote themselves and their startup and creating content that will give them their first traction?
Dom Einhorn (22:01.198)
Look, if you probably took, let's say LinkedIn, and if you use a scraping tool on LinkedIn, and you type in expert, you're probably gonna get 200 million matches. Because everybody believes they're an expert, number one. Number two, keep in mind, they're basically tooting their own horn. When you're writing your LinkedIn profile, you're writing it. So if you're calling yourself an expert in anything,
In my book, you're not an expert. I know a lot of things, but a lot of stuff. But I would never call myself an expert in any field. The expert on you is you. Nobody will know you as well as you do. Again, sounds stupid, but think about that. Take a step back. So you are your own expert. I would go as far as say I'm not an expert on myself, but I'm nothing else.
Okay, so take that to your advantage. You don't have to spend any money. You don't have to consult anybody else. Maybe your close family, because they may be able to give you a different perspective. If you want to be a standup comedian and people think you're funny, ask your friends, ask your family, what does make me funny? What are the things that I've said that were funny to you and to everybody else? And then think this way, how can I leverage this? If you're building a product or service,
Use your immediate vicinity, not the people that pat you in the back. But if you're building a product or service that solves a problem, ask the people, ideally someone you don't know, how did this solve your problem? And what benefit did you get out of it? Start, you know, again, with the lowest common denominator, one person, one business, et cetera, et cetera, and then go to three, five, 10, et cetera. What a lot of start -upers want to do, they want to go to a million immediately. It doesn't work that way. Even if you do have a million, you have
one million different use cases one at a time.
Tzakhi (24:00.515)
Okay, Dom, I think this was really a very interesting conversation and we touched on a lot of points. Before we go, I want if you can give us five tips for startup founders for our audience.
Dom Einhorn (24:17.166)
Tip number one, I would say, I'm not sure if I arbitrarily can come up with five, but number one, I would say, listen to your inner voice. Very often, your inner voice, meaning your gut, is right. I cannot tell you how many times in my career, which is now 32 years that I've been in this space, and hopefully going for another 50 or so, how many times in retrospect I've told myself, if only I had listened to my gut.
We're all wired a certain way and that's why EQ and IQ obviously always have that discussion. I think your EQ, your emotion is much better at discerning right from wrong than your IQ. Why? Because your IQ, your mind is always trying to justify, justify whatever you've done one way or another, right? You're always seeking to validate the reason why you think this is bad or why this is good, why you should be doing something, why not doing.
and you're not listening enough to your gut. And over the last 250 ,000 years, we've evolved to make our gut a very good barometer when it comes to right or wrong, whether you're on the right track, whether you're on the wrong track. So I think that is vastly underutilized and we all have this gut that we can rely on. Number two, always start small. The bigger you start, the larger the risk.
the larger capital requirement and the larger and more costly the failure. And I don't know anyone or very few people that have succeeded the very first time. So if you blow your wad at the first shot and you make a mistake and you have to go back to the drawing board, raise more capital, you know how difficult it was raising the capital the first time around. Imagine the second time after you fail.
So again, I'm not saying don't fail. Fail as small as possible. Try little things first because you want to fail as quickly as possible and as cheaply as possible. Number three, don't hesitate to throw in the towel when you're realizing you're going nowhere. A lot of start -uppers, especially the ones with high EQ this time around, not IQ.
Dom Einhorn (26:40.206)
The IQ guy has a tendency of throwing in towel earlier, maybe too early. The EQ guy's got, I'm gonna do this thick or thin, et cetera, et cetera. Well, take a step back, again, listen to your gut and also use your brain and say, am I just compounding this problem? Am I just setting myself up for a bigger failure? Should I not pivot? Should I not do something else? Should I not stop this altogether to stop the bleed? Because if you're going down the round track and you're scaling at the same time,
Scaling bad behaviors, scaling failure is certainly not recommended. Everybody would agree. Now before, I'd say, and this is a mistake that I made for many years, I was working myself into the ground seven days a week, 16 hours a day, still to a certain extent I do. Little bit older, 54 now. At 7 .30 p everything is turned off.
I don't have a phone in my bedroom anymore. I do something completely different. I either play a game, I read, I may watch a Netflix series. Don't listen to the people that tell you, you know, that's bad for you. Your brain needs a break from what you're doing every single day. And then I'm doing something for the last year and a half. I'm walking at least 15 ,000 steps every morning. I get up very early, right? Five, 15 or so in the morning.
And I have my headset on, not this one, the other one. And I'm listening to two hours of podcasts while I'm walking every single morning. That's made a dramatic impact on my life. I'm listening to podcasts about a variety of subject matter, business related, non -business. Yes, at least probably 45 minutes for an hour of AI every morning. I guess in our space you can have two right now, but also about health, spirituality.
I vary the languages if you're multilingual speaker, that way you keep your skills sharp. You know, so I listened to my podcasts in French, German, English, Spanish, a little bit of Vietnamese. My wife is Vietnamese, Alsatian, which is our local language here. They do exist, the podcasts. And yeah, that's about it. Don't believe much in work -life balance because if you're an entrepreneur or start -upper, by definition,
Dom Einhorn (29:02.478)
You're not a work life balance guy. Come on. Right. You're building, you're building something that you think is going to be dramatically improving the lives of a lot of people on this planet. How can you be normal? You know, we're the crazies by definition, we're the crazies. So don't let people, if you feel comfortable doing it, why, why change? Right. So people are talking to me, for example, I'm not even 55 years old. So, you know, when are you going to retire? I'm like,
Tzakhi (29:17.027)
Yeah.
Dom Einhorn (29:32.526)
What a misnomer. Retiring. By definition, retiring means to step away from something. Why would I step away from something I love doing? That makes no sense to me whatsoever. I hope I'll never retire. But again, I'm partly crazy.
Tzakhi (29:48.355)
Did we get five?
Dom Einhorn (29:50.542)
Four and a half, you think. It's the last one.
Tzakhi (29:52.067)
Okay. Okay. All good. Thanks a lot. Who should reach out to you and where should people find you?
Dom Einhorn (30:03.278)
The easiest way is kind of like how we originally connected is on LinkedIn. I believe I'm the only Dom Einhorn. It's not Don, it's D -O -E -I -N -H -O -R -N. From there, I mean, obviously I'm running Masters of Trivia, which is my lifelong passion. So going back to doing what you love, turning, quizzing.
Tzakhi (30:11.011)
Yeah.
Dom Einhorn (30:27.694)
turning questions, quizzes into an actual business model that's been a driving force behind what we do. Everybody likes to play games. In our case, they're intelligent games that are meant to engage large user bases on very, very granular topics while at the same time, resolving a huge problem for the appetizer who's always trying to reach the most targeted person ever. And nothing allows them to do better than quizzes because you can create.
quizzes on any topic in any language on the design.
Tzakhi (31:01.795)
Awesome, awesome. Before we go, whoever's made it so far, subscribe on YouTube or wherever you're listening to this. And if you haven't done so yet, come to Meet .Capitol, subscribe to our newsletter, and you'll get awesome content about startups like a summary of Dom's tips for startups, which you'll get in a few weeks. So, thank you. Thanks.
Dom Einhorn (31:27.63)
I agree, I agree and subscribe too.
Tzakhi (31:31.971)
Bye now, this was great. Bye bye.
Dom Einhorn (31:33.39)
Take care.
