Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today is Matt Pohlson, Co-Founder and CEO of Omaze – l love the name – an online fundraising platform supporting causes by offering once in a lifetime experiences. After attending an exclusive charity auction where a $15,000 bid won the chance to play basketball with star player, Magic Johnson, Matt and his friend Ryan Cummins wondered if they could fix the broken auction model by allowing more people to participate online and with equal opportunity. Omaze was launched in 2012 with initial slow growth changing forever as they said when they raised almost $1.8 having raffled off an experience with Breaking Bad stars, Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul. In 2018 Matt survived a heart attack and was clinically dead for more than four minutes. This experience, he says, changed his approach fundamentally to both life and his business. And Matt will tell us about the impact this had very shortly. Omaze has now raised more than $175 million to support more than 400 charitable organisations and having launched in the UK in 2020, they have raised over £11 million in just three years in partnership with charities such as Teenage Cancer Trust, British Hearth Foundation and NSPCC’s Childline.
Hello, Matt. Firstly, it’s nice to have you here.
Matthew Pohlson
Thanks for having me, Elliot. I’m excited to be here.
Elliot Moss
And me too. Tell me what Omaze is, in your own words. I’ve explained it in mine but what does Matt say about Omaze?
Matthew Pohlson
We offer the chance to win dream houses to benefit charities. And we used to offer the chance to win experiences for celebrities and cars and trips to benefit charities. And now we’re focussed on houses.
Elliot Moss
And why are you focussed on houses? I mean I like the other thing as well but what’s the thinking behind the house rather than the celebrity moment?
Matthew Pohlson
It’s just proving to be very effective. For the same amount of work as working with talent, we can raise ten, almost twenty times as much. We think it’s much more scalable and spreadable, we think we can have much bigger global charitable impact and create a much better business as a result.
Elliot Moss
And you’ve been in business now, as I said, thir…, where are we eleven years.
Matthew Pohlson
Eleven years.
Elliot Moss
You learn a lot in eleven years.
Matthew Pohlson
Yeah. I mean, I had no idea what I was doing when I started so there is a lot to learn.
Elliot Moss
Well I was going to say because you’re obviously, for those of you who’ve spotted, Matt is not British, he’s American, I know it’s a hard one to do. My American accent, as Matt was discovering just before, is phenomenal but not as good as his. You’ve dabbled in acting; you were in the world of production. How does it happen that you pivot at some point in your life to say just a second, what about this. Where did that little spark come from?
Matthew Pohlson
Yeah, I started acting right out of college and discovered that I wasn’t very good at it and then I started writing, and I was pretty good at that and started writing and producing and then got really into doing stuff that was basically cause content, like using storytelling to inspire action, felt like we were actually giving back and did a bunch of different projects. We were the first directors on this thing called Live Earth which was the biggest concert ever thrown, if you remember that, it was on seven continents in one night and you know we had kind of global superstars from Bon Jovi to Beyonce and then did a bunch of other stuff with Oprah and Bono and Jay-Z and all these really influential people, big concerts, documentaries, all these things and then we just realised that we were working with people who authentically wanted to do good and we just realised we weren’t doing that much good, we were creating a lot of awareness but we weren’t creating a lot of impact and it was kind endemic to the space so decided to go to Business School, tried to surround myself people smarter than me, I’d never even opened Excel before…
Elliot Moss
This is your MBA? This is Wharton? The Wharton School.
Matthew Pohlson
Yeah, and then when we were in school, we had that event that you talked about with Magic Johnson and so that’s how we kind of transitioned to Omaze.
Elliot Moss
And the big break, as I heard it, it involved quite a lot of hutzpah, this is where you, if I’m right, you gate-crashed Bryan Cranston’s charity event and you basically said to him, I know that these people here are saying they can raise X, we can raise more than that.
Matthew Pohlson
Yeah, that’s, that is mostly true, yeah, I mean it was…
Elliot Moss
Mostly.
Matthew Pohlson
Yeah, I like it.
Elliot Moss
You’re so polite.
Matthew Pohlson
Well no, no, the…
Elliot Moss
Which is the true bit?
Matthew Pohlson
We did gate-crash an event, it wasn’t his event but he was at the event.
Elliot Moss
I see.
Matthew Pohlson
So, yeah basically what had happened is he was, we were like a month left of cash, we had not proven yet that this model was very effective, the most we had raised with an experience was $18,000 and there was another company that came out and did an experience with Samuel L Jackson that raised $180,000 and so we said okay, you know our last chance to prove that we can do that is with Bryan and Breaking Bad and we had that all set up and then we got a call from the woman who runs this charity and saying, ‘hey look, you know we apologise but Bryan has decided to work with this other company instead just because they raise so much more money’ and we were like, ‘no, you can’t do that, like this is, like this is our last chance’ and she was like, ‘I’m sorry’ and we said, ‘you know, like where is he right now’ and she said, ‘what are you talking about’ and I said, ‘well like I want to meet him right now’ and she said, ‘he’s at a charity event, you can’t’, you know, and we were friends so she told me what charity event, so me and my Co-Founder Ryan went and snuck into the charity event and then we went up to Bryan and we said, ‘hey, we’re the guys at Omaze, we were going to work together but you decided to work with this other company’ and he said, ‘look, it’s nothing personal, I’m just trying to make as much money as possible for the charity and these guys said they would raise 200,000’ and I said, ‘we’ll raise 250,000’.
Elliot Moss
Just like that.
Matthew Pohlson
Yeah, and he was like, ‘what’s the most you’ve ever raised?’ And I said, ‘18,000’. And he was like, ‘how are you going to do that’ and I was like, ‘remember when you were a beginning actor and you knew in your heart this is what you should do but it wasn’t working out and you were willing to do whatever it took to get there? Like, that’s where we are. We will do whatever it takes to make this happen, we’ll create content, we will make this so creative, it’ll go everywhere, just give us this chance’. And I think more out of like annoyance, he finally said, ‘okay, I’ll do it’. And then that experience ended up raising 300,000 and then he introduced us to Aaron Paul and we did one around the – who was Jessie in Breaking Bad – and we did one around the last episode of Breaking Bad that raised the 1.8 million. And that saved our company.
Elliot Moss
So, there you go. Never give up. The passion that you kept going with up until you know the mid-2010s, how was the business going and what was going on for you at that time? And I’m talking pre your brush with death, which we will come to. What was actually happening then, if you can recall, up to about 2017?
Matthew Pohlson
So, 2017, so after we did the Breaking Bad experience, we then, that created a kind of a nice domino effect for a while, we got Star Wars, you got to be in Star Wars when it came back with Phantom Menace and that became kind of like a global thing, we did a date with George Clooney before he was married Amal, we did this crazy thing where you got to ride in a tank with Arnold Schwarzenegger and crush things, and all these things became like, they spread really virally.
Elliot Moss
I bet, yeah great things. What fun.
Matthew Pohlson
Yeah, really fun. Then but by 2017, you know with just the reality of how hard it is to scale something with talent became really clear and what I mean by that is just you know, we, if Arnold decided he was going to get his hair cut with Sylvester Stallone on a Saturday instead of film with us, which actually really happened to us once, then like it hurt our sales for a month, you know, and then in 2017 we were just, we’d been at it for a while and the growth was slowing down dramatically and then we actually went through a opportunity where we almost, we almost sold the company and then that fell through, right actually on my birthday and after that we were like wow we might be in trouble because the celebrity thing isn’t really necessarily scaling how we hoped and it’s just going to be hard for us to continue to get investment.
Elliot Moss
And you had to let people go as well at one point, I think.
Matthew Pohlson
We did, yeah, we did have to do that. We did that a little earlier in ’17 but yeah, we had to let people go.
Elliot Moss
In that period though, 2015. And so at that point there’s a nervousness that this thing is drying up.
Matthew Pohlson
Absolutely.
Elliot Moss
And then you get ill.
Matthew Pohlson
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
So, let’s just give me the brief sketch of what happened.
Matthew Pohlson
Yeah, so this was in 2018, it wasn’t related to the company but it did happen right around that same time, which was basically what happened was, I was born with my stomach twisted and I was supposed to die when I was born and the scar tissue from that surgery where they saved me, broke off all these years later, they removed two-thirds of my intestine in that surgery and it triggered a bowel obstruction and the pain was so extraordinary from the bowel obstruction, it triggered this thing called takotsubo. Which is basically, it happens sometimes on the battlefield, you know a soldier will get a shrapnel wound to the leg and the heart’s perfectly fine but the pain is so intense that the heart sends blood to the pain centre. If it sends too much blood, the body sends back adrenalin. If the body sends back too much adrenalin, it will stop the heart. So, mine was triggered by this bowel obstruction and basically it stopped my heart.
Elliot Moss
It stopped your heart. You’re like four minutes technically dead, basically, and then you come back.
Matthew Pohlson
Yeah, I was, it was a while, four minutes, I mean basically my mum, my family was at the hospital when it happened and so my mum and dad had gone downstairs to get my dad and my brother and she came back up, the loud speaker, heard over the loudspeaker as she was coming up the elevator, “Code Blue in Room 437” and my mum works in a hospital so she knows Code Blue means flatlining and she knew that was my room. So she got out of the elevator, she rushed down the hall, she got to the door and the nurse said, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t come in, this is really serious’ and my mum said, ‘look, I was there when he came in this world, if he’s leaving this world right now, I’m going to be in that room’. So they let her in the room and they were doing the compressions and the paddles, they were like you see on TV and my body was bouncing up and down but I wasn’t responding and my mum started to crumble, you know it's one thing to lose a child, it’s something to be there in the room when it’s happening. At the same time, my dad was outside with my brother and this doctor said to another doctor in front of my brother, not knowing he was my brother, like ‘hey, I think we’ve lost this guy, I think he’s gone’. So, my brother pushed my dad in the room and my dad was crying so loud when he came in that my mum turned away from me to him just to go shut up or they’re going to kick us out of this room and when she did that, she said she saw something that she’d never seen before in a hospital, she said every nurse and every staff member and every doctor in the ICU had just gravitated outside the window and there was like forty of them and they looked like this silent church choir, just sending in this positive energy and she was so moved by these people that were sending love to this person that they didn’t even know, it was just like spiritual experience for her, like transformative, and she took a deep breath, she gathered the strength and she turned back and she started coaching me, she just said, ‘Matthew David Pohlson, these people are fighting to save your life but you’re not fighting hard enough. You need to fight to come back. You need to fight to come back to us, Matthew David Pohlson’ and they said it was a surreal experience because I mean we’ve all seen like Grey’s Anatomy or I assume everyone here has seen it too but like if there’s ever a 65 year old mum in the room during you know an emergency situation like this and you know the flat line, as you said, went on for four and a half minutes and they don’t usually fight that long but because she kept fighting, they kept fighting and then at one point the doctor, main doctor, kind of shook his head as if to say this was done and he pulled away and she grabbed his arm and she said, ‘no, please don’t call it yet’ and then right as she did that, he turned back to the table and said, ‘wait a second, I think we might have a pulse’ and then they all start looking at the monitor for the flat line just expecting it to kind of go up and they were watching and watching but instead of it going up, all of a sudden I just popped up and then looked up and I have this room of people looking back at me with their mouth open because they’ve never seen a flat line patient pop up before and they still don’t know why that happened, I don’t know why that happened, and then I sort of see all these shocked people and then I look over and say like where am I and then I see my mum and then I see my dad and I was kind of on my side and I gave them a, like a thumbs up.
Elliot Moss
Well that’s a boring story, isn’t it, I mean there’s not much in that to talk about. I wouldn’t come back after the break at all to listen to what Matt Pohlson took from that experience. He is my Business Shaper today, he’s the Co-Founder and he is very much alive and very much in the room and you’ll be hearing a lot more from him very shortly. But before that, we’ve got a clip from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions, they can be found on all the major podcast platforms. MDRxTech’s CEO, Tom Grogan, part of the Mishcon de Reya Group, talks about the metaverse, what it is, why companies would wish to explore it and the potential risks we should be aware of.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and indeed you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today, as you’ve been I’m sure you are aware of, is Matt Pohlson, Co-Founder and CEO of Omaze, an online fundraising platform supporting causes by offering once in a lifetime experiences and of course that’s now become once in a lifetime experience opportunity to win a house. Right, the story that you recounted so eloquently just before is obviously, you know, not one, one hears very often. The thing that, obviously I’ve been thinking about is what impact that has on you because it’s one thing being in it and in a way, people watching that happen, your family, it’s almost not that it impacts them more but it’s a different impact to you being the person experiencing it because in a way you’re not there for four minutes and then you come back but what did that teach you about life and about what you were going to do with the rest of your life, which was I imagine feeling a lot more precious than it had done before you got ill?
Matthew Pohlson
Yeah. You know, I’ve been asked this question a lot now, I wish I had better answers but I think the first thing I would say is just that it helped me get over a lot of fears, like I realised how ego driven I was, not in like I was never like a jerk but I was, I always was thinking about what other people thought of me, I was comparing myself to others in a way that I think was unhealthy and it just helped me get past some of that, like it just, it clarified a lot of things, helped me like just learn to kind of love myself for who I am, as cheesy as that might sound, like you hear what that means but I didn’t really understand that and so that was a big part of it and then I also like I believe that love and optimism are super powers now, in a way where I think you can tap into those frequencies, you can, you can really like create a reality in the future through like focus and energy in ways that I just did not think was possible before. I mean like they said there was less than a one in billion chance of saving me and they did it like by, and I think it was part of the force of my mum, it was part of the force of these doctors, it was part of the force of my friends sending love and optimism, like I experienced that when I was on the other side, like I saw that. If I would have heard these words said before this happened, I would not have believed any of them but then I lived it and I really do believe that, and there’s a physicist there starting to prove this, like if you put out certain energies, certain frequencies in the world, if you spread that like it does change the course of events and it doesn’t mean you can just like, you know, there’s a book in the US called The Secret, where it’s just like you think about something and it happens, like that that’s, I don’t subscribe to that theory…
Elliot Moss
What a polite way of putting that.
Matthew Pohlson
Yeah, exactly. But I do think that if you say like I really want this thing to happen and you sort of go here’s all the obstacles and you’re really real about what it takes to overcome those and you don’t try to shy away from those, I do think that you can help create that in ways that I just, I just did not believe before.
Elliot Moss
And just a question about, and I’ll get more into some other impacts it’s had directly on the business in a moment, but just a kind of an interest point of view, do you remember any of those four minutes and what was going on because I, my father almost passed away a few years ago but miraculously didn’t and he talked about that moment where it was like he was dead but it was, he’s sort of calm about it, I mean he talks about it in really, really, really relaxed way, like no, it was kind of alright, I was, it was kind of comforting and I don’t remember he talked about light or something but he didn’t, he wasn’t stressed at all. Were you not, is that, was that…?
Matthew Pohlson
That was my experience too. I didn’t really believe in much afterlife stuff before this happened. My experience was, it wasn’t like the go down the tunnel towards the light thing that like people talk about on TV but my experience, and again every time I explain this, I feel like a do an inadequate job but it was if you’re deep under water, like in a movie, like a submarine movie, and you are looking up at the surface of the ocean and you can see just like a little bit of light coming through and the water felt like this kind of cosmic energy water where, like they say in some traditions, you become nothing and everything, you are a drop in the ocean but also the entire ocean and it was like your father, father-in-law or father?
Elliot Moss
Father. My dad.
Matthew Pohlson
Yeah, like your father said where you feel it was total peace and love, it was amazing, it was really amazing and I think that’s love, I think like that’s all connection of energy but I could hear from the light, I could hear my mum saying Matthew David Pohlson, you need to fight, you need to fight, I remember thinking like okay…
Elliot Moss
Pull it together, Matt!
Matthew Pohlson
I could stay here or I could go back and then honestly, I think I’m like really just scared of my mum still so, like, so…
Elliot Moss
You see, we always come back to Freud. This is so easy, Matt.
Matthew Pohlson
It really was, I was like, I’m going to be in real trouble if I don’t go back. So, then I remember like deciding but you hear all these stories of people at the end of their life and something crazy happens and they come back or they don’t, you know, and I think you do, to a degree, get choices sometimes and that’s not always obviously but there is this kind of like awareness and others that I’ve talked to had similar experiences, it’s remarkable how similar they are, so.
Elliot Moss
The impact on your business, tell me, what happened, was there suddenly a clarity of focus? Was there something about your energy in the way you applied yourself to the business? Because obviously since then things have shifted, Matt, things are in a much better place. I don’t believe that’s coincidence.
Matthew Pohlson
I agree with you.
Elliot Moss
But I’m intrigued to know, what are the behaviours that you have now changed, if you like, that have changed the course of this business, which is now rocking?
Matthew Pohlson
Yeah, there is, I mean I think there’s kind of like an overall strategic thing that came out of it but then there’s also just the way you approach the business. The strategic thing was like before that happened we had, we had just done celebrity stuff and then right before I left, we’d done this campaign with Daniel Craig where you got to go to New York, you got to the Aston Martin track, you got to ride around one kind of Aston Martin, you got to keep the Aston Martin and it was supposed to raised $300,000 for the United Nations and it raised $2.1 million and half way through we tested what if there’s no Daniel Craig, what if it’s just a car and it did well, so then I’d gone to our CFO at the time, Neil, and I said, ‘hey I think we should go buy a $250,000 Maclaren, offer it with just Omaze distribution, no talent, and see if we could raise $500,000 on our own’. That car coincidentally launched the day that I unexpectedly went into the hospital, so when I came back all those months later and I assumed and I was just like gosh, I just, we’re never going to be truly world changing if we do celebrity stuff and life is just so short like and I said you know, ‘by the way, whatever happened with the Maclaren, did it raise the $500,000’? And she said, ‘it raised $1.9 million’ and I was like that changes everything. So that spurred us to go cars and then eventually into houses and testing that first in the UK and I don’t know if I would have had, that was hard to do, it required a lot of people changing their jobs, a lot of like strategic shift and when you’re just in every single day, it’s really hard to like rise above the problem and see what’s going on.
Elliot Moss
So, immediately had perspective and immediately you had the focus came because of a mini pivot and a thing?
Matthew Pohlson
Yeah, exactly.
Elliot Moss
And then the funding, I mean you’ve been funded significantly and a lot of that happened around ‘20/21, the last big round. When you were describing the conversation you had with Bryan Cranston, I was kind of there with you, which is I mean yeah, I told him that I got $18,000, it wasn’t anywhere near the thing, I told him I was like you, I’m the upcoming actor, remember that moment. Was that the game face or the conversation you had with putative investors, is that why they bought into the vision?
Matthew Pohlson
Yeah, I think, look, I think all these investors are incredibly analytical in looking at the numbers but at the end of the day like they’re all human beings, right and human beings connect to stories and human beings connect to like a version of the future that you believe that you can create and they have incredible capacity to detect how deeply you are connected to that and so, especially in your early years, like fundraising is about storytelling. I mean, this is a music station, I read this quote once that really resonates, which is you know “words are to stories, as noise is to music”. Right, music is just noise but if you arrange it in a certain way it goes from this thing that’s incredibly kind of like disconcerting and disorienting of noise to something that creates an emotional resonance, creates these memories, makes you feel connected to other people. Similarly like words, if you just kind of organise, just kind of put them out there and don’t do anything, they don’t have much resonance but if you create it in a story, like it can have an emotional connection and we all understood the world through stories so, I think they believed the story where we’re going but we also were showing the math of it at that point, increasingly so, but still had a long way to go and I just think they felt like they would do anything to make this happen.
Elliot Moss
And they were right. Final chat coming up with my guest today, it’s Matt Pohlson and we’ve got some pioneering soul from Solomon Burke, that’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Just for a few more minutes, my Business Shaper is with me today, he’s Matt Pohlson and he’s the CEO and Co-Founder of Omaze and we’ve had some extraordinary moments talking about literally life and death. You’re a challenger, it strikes me, in terms of the way that you have turned the charity model upside down and there is a profit element to your business and there’s also the ability to raise money and this democratisation if you like of the auction that usually happens that’s starting what was, there’s a hundred people in a room, why couldn’t you have a million or ten million people. Do you get flack for the fact that it’s a business that makes money but it’s also a business that raises lots of money for charity? And if so, do you care?
Matthew Pohlson
People definitely have questions about for profit and non-profit mixing together. For example, you know when we first started in the US, Bono said he would never work with a for profit company that was also doing a charity but then we did an experience with him and it raised 10x what it would do at auction and now Bono is one of our investors. And I think the reason that he came around and so many others is they realised that what really matters is how much money ends up in the charity’s pocket and the reason we have a massive wait list with our charities is because it’s really hard for them to fundraise in any time but especially over the last couple of years and so if we can provide them a new sets of donors then that is huge for them, right, and we really view ourself as an entertainment company that also gives money to charity but we really also embrace this notion that like our society makes people choose, like you’re either going to do good or your going to make money and we just think that’s crazy, that’s a false choice, like we’re fine with people doing bad and making money, we’ve no problem with that but if people can create value and also make money, like why is that a bad thing? We actually think it’s really important that we take that criticism and we talk about it so that other social entrepreneurs will come along and say like I’m not going to choose, I’m going to try to do both.
Elliot Moss
Have you taken that not having to choose mentality into your life further than this? Has it kind of occurred to you that often we’re having to make binary choices about things that don’t need to be viewed in a binary way?
Matthew Pohlson
Absolutely. We can all fall into like what’s called a scarcity mindset, like we still very much as humans live in the zero subworld and we’re not in a zero subworld anymore, you know survival of the fittest comes from a world where there’s a, you know there’s a limited amount of resources and therefore whoever is fittest at acquiring them, gets to survive, that’s not the world anymore, like, so we actually have to change our mindset in that way and that’s hard to do, I fall into it all the time of like oh, you know, I can only have this or that, I can’t be this happy, I can’t do that thing and so Omaze is like a reflection of that, it’s a win-win, like no one loses in this, in this scenario, like someone wins a new house and someone, and a charity gets a lot of money and everyone else gets to participate, like, so people think that’s too good to be true or that’s, there must be a catch or there must be a scam or whatever because that’s what we’re trained in order to feel like we’re surviving, so you have to break through that and I think that’s what we need to do as human beings in order to kind of perpetuate the, I mean now I’m getting way too philosophical but I think that like, you know, an abundant of like we are all in this together and there’s enough to go round and so we can have all these things, like it’s actually scientifically true now, we just have to get our minds around it as human beings.
Elliot Moss
And that’s what everyone needs to do right now. Matt, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you. What a journey and good luck for the next chapter and the chapter after that too and I think it’s good to get too philosophical, you know, I don’t think you can be ever philosophical enough actually so it’s good stuff. Just before I let you go, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Matthew Pohlson
I chose What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong, which I know is a very, you know, common, on the nose but it’s not only my favourite jazz song, it’s probably my favourite song and the reason is, is because it really helped me when I was going through difficult times and I think that’s what art’s about if it can help you transcend those moments and remind you, I had a very dark outlook going through these hard times and it just brought me back to like what’s possible and somehow it’s uplifting as the song as it is, it’s not like false in its optimism and I think that’s kind of the greatest form of art, music.
Elliot Moss
That was Louis Armstrong with What a Wonderful World, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Matt Pohlson. He talked about love and optimism as the things that really came through from his own near-death experience. He talked about the importance of stories and how human beings connect with them and how that makes a difference to whatever business you are in. And he talked about the fact that you don’t need to choose between doing good and making money, absolutely fundamental to his business but more broadly to the way that we all conduct ourselves. Great stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds of more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to Mishcon.com/JazzShapers.