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

We're still surprised people did this but... 50+ founders worth $10M to $4B reveal their personal finances. Here it is: https://joinhampton.com/mw-wr

Why do we do this? Because if you're an aspirational person or someone who runs a business and is making money, it's incredibly challenging to figure out what to do. Information is impossible to find — and that's what we put together: the net worth reveal and why we do this podcast, Moneywise.

He took a second mortgage to keep WatchMojo alive. Today he's worth over $100M and is trying to buy a baseball team.

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo, one of the largest media companies ever built on YouTube. He started it in 2006 with a $282,500 check from the AskMen sale, racked up roughly $1M in losses by 2011, sold his retirement savings, took a second mortgage, and paid himself $32,000 a year for the first five years. Then the top-10 format hit, revenue went from $1M to $10M+ in a few years with EBITDA margins as high as 80%, and he turned down offers at $75M, $80M, and $90M valuations. In 2020 he sold 25% to Star Mountain Capital at a $90M CAD valuation. He still owns most of the company, and puts his net worth between $100M and $250M.

This episode gets into what it's like to sign a second mortgage at a notary with no idea if you'll end up homeless, why he moved payroll to twice a month just to have two fewer panic attacks a year, the real reason he walked away from an $80M offer (it wasn't greed), and how saying yes to everything cut his EBITDA in half. We also go deep on how he actually invests now — $5M across 15 startups, two-thirds of his stock portfolio self-managed — why he still takes the $40-cheaper flight, and his current mission to bring the Montreal Expos back to MLB.

Also, this podcast is made by Hampton, which is a community for founders doing on average $20 million a year in revenue. We saw a lot of these money conversations happening privately behind closed doors and we thought, "What the heck, let's make it public." If you are a founder, apply here: http://joinhampton.com/mw

Timestamps:

00:00 — Ash's background: born in Iran, raised in Montreal, and why "the self-made man is a myth"

02:50 — 31 jobs and the reluctant entrepreneur: "Wall Street is not rolling out the carpet for anybody named Ashkan"

07:03 — The AskMen exit: a $282,500 check at 27, plus ~$150K when News Corp bought IGN

09:18 — Why he bet on YouTube in 2006: "You don't go to war with the army you want, you go