Bootstrapping to $27 Million from Arizona: Jeremy Young, CEO of Tanga (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about your involvement in that company and how long you were involved in that company.

Jeremy Young: I was involved for probably a couple of years. I ended up selling my interest back to them.

Sramana Mitra: In what capacity?

Jeremy Young: I came to them with the idea. They did the programming. I did the marketing. We had terms of service not to allow certain types of websites. Everyday, I’d go in there and find certain websites that were breaking the rules. It was just the three of us. We had our hands in everything at that time.

Sramana Mitra: This brings us up to what? 2001 to 2011 timeframe?

Jeremy Young: About that time. At that point, I had to work for a year with Micron. After that, I got involved in several different offline businesses. One business was a franchise business called Plato’s Closet. My brother and I opened up Plato’s Closet stores in Utah. We still own and operate those today. I also started two different board game companies.

At that time, a lot of the Internet entrepreneurs were trying to become more creative and went offline with their business models and started some board games companies. You had Cranium that was funded by Maveron. You have Wizards of the Coast that did some amazing things with Pokemon. There were quite a few different board game companies being created at that time by tech entrepreneurs. A friend of mine introduced me to a game called Settlers of Catan. This is a very popular German board game. Even now, it’s still amazingly popular especially with certain communities. Tech geeks love Settlers of Catan.

It’s a game that has probably sold 20 million copies in Germany. It’s like the Monopoly of Germany. After I played it, I couldn’t believe that Americans don’t know about this game. I actually flew to Germany and met all of the big board game designers. Think of board game designer as book authors where they create a manuscript or they create a game, and they pitch it to people. You can buy the rights to that game. You create the graphics and the printing. You pay them a royalty. That’s how the model works with board games.

I met all the printers, publishers, and game designers, and tried to be really good friends with these guys. I created two different companies. One was called SimplyFun. This company still exists today. It’s operated out of Washington. It’s a venture-funded company. It’s probably raised about $6 million by now. You bring on independent consultants who buy a kit of products from you. They go in and have in-home parties where they play games. You would try to recruit other people to work under you and you create this downline. It’s a multi-level marketing. We always figured, “That’s how games are sold anyway.” If I told you about Settlers of Catan, there’s no way you would go into a Barnes & Noble, see it on the shelf, and buy it without knowing anything about it.

You probably have to have someone like me tell you, “Hey, this is the best game I’ve ever played.” We were thinking this is the perfect way of distributing games. We created that company. It didn’t scale very quickly at all. The investor ended up cramming out all the initial founders. Eventually, I ended up leaving that company. It still exists, but I’m not exactly sure how well it’s doing.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping to $27 Million from Arizona: Jeremy Young, CEO of Tanga
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