134: Top 20 Countdown

Innovation City Top 20: Week 14

Welcome to Innovation City—powered by Venture Cafe—where Tyler Kelley and Michael Johnson, Co-Founders of SLAM! Agency, interview innovators, creators, and disruptors to discover how business is changing in the modern world.

Created and produced by SLAM! Agency in cooperation with Venture Cafe St. Louis and Venture Cafe Miami, Innovation City gives you an inside look at how rapidly business and culture are changing thanks to increasing diversity and inclusion, heightened creativity, and a stronger and better-connected business community. Venture Cafe is the largest combined gathering of entrepreneurs and innovators anywhere in the world. Events are held every Thursday in St. Louis, Miami, and other leading innovation cities around the globe.

Today’s episode is the fourteenth of several highlight shows where we are taking a look back at our top 20 favorite interviews and conversations of all time. Today’s featured guest is Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, CEO at WatchMojo. WatchMojo is one of the largest YouTube channels in the world when measured by all-time views (13 Billion) and subscribers (22 Million). Ashkan has a track record of launching, building and scaling content companies with advertising supported models. After his previous company, AskMen, sold to News Corp, he bootstrapped WatchMojo to profitability as a leader in the online video market.

Some key points from Ashkan at WatchMojo:

• Finding Balance between personal life and work life
• No such thing as an overnight success
• Sacrifice
• Building something sustainable
• Importance of hard work and persistence
• Putting yourself in a position to succeed
• You need thick skin for YouTube
• Listen or watch Ashkan’s full episode here