This well-told story is based on an interview with Sabba Keynejad, co-founder with Tim Mamedov of an artificial intelligence-based video editing platform Waves. This piece has been edited for length and clarity.
Back in 2013, my then-roommate Virgil and I were obsessed with one of these thing Bada fracture. Around mid-October, the season finale was approaching and we finally discovered what happened to Jesse Pinkman and Walter White. We liked it very much. When I used to be at university, this was our favourite thing to see and do in the apartment.
One Friday night I used to be sitting in my bedroom and we were each at art school and Virgil had a gas mask for spray painting and he comes into my room and says, “BREAKING EVIL!” And I assumed, “Oh my God, we can sell this!” He said, “What?” and I said, “We can sell it! We can sell these as Halloween costumes!” And that is the way it began. It was that straightforward.
“It wasn’t my first experience as an entrepreneur.”
This was not my first experience as an entrepreneur. When I used to be 17, I had previously run one other business, selling American-style red cups in the UK, which surprisingly turned out to be a very undervalued business. Then I began making beer pong sets. But selling Halloween costumes was just fun; it was like a little side project.
Later that evening, around 11 p.m., my roommate and I arrange an eBay page to sell this Halloween costume. We obtained materials: blue gloves, DuPont chemical suits and gas masks. We didn’t order anything but made sure every part was available for next day delivery. We list Halloween costumes on eBay with a five-day turnaround time, giving us enough time to order every part we’d like. If we made a sale, we could package it and ship it.
“We say, ‘Wait a minute, we’ve got an idea.'”
We photoshopped every part together and by the morning we had our first two sales, so we thought, “Great.” We sold it and it was great. We received 4 more orders that day and thought, “Wait a minute, we’ve got something.”
Funnily enough, we actually have competition, and the way we deal with it is by messaging it Bada fracture quotations. They joined in the fun; every part was quite carefree. But given the competition, we also thought How can we add more value here? So we made this fake meth, which was principally sugar and blue food coloring, cut it up and put it in a bag.
We also considered expanding to other platforms like Etsy, but Etsy didn’t want us to sell there because it wasn’t responsive enough, so we needed to work a very long time to determine learn how to do all of it quickly.
Another challenge was that we had tons of of orders. And so our apartment became a warehouse, and our roommates helped us. It was great fun.
A week later we had turned over $14,000 and made $3,500 each.
“I use these skills to inform the company I run today.”
It got to the point where there was a shortage of chemical protective suits in the UK and we needed to stop it. Since these DuPont suits are intended for proper laboratory testing, they are in short supply, and in fact we have increased demand like crazy.
My roommate Virgil is currently a successful industrial film director living in Madrid. I run a tech startup called Veed, which is an AI-powered video editing platform. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, which invested $35 million last yr. The company employs roughly 200 people. We have about 10 million monthly users, and these users create about three million videos every month.
It’s pretty cool that I learned about entrepreneurship in art school and have used those skills to reinforce the business I run today.