What is the origin of that?

The origin of Paw Patrol is that it was born when our company went back to $450 million in sales.

So it was born actually in a dark moment in Spin Master's history.

And We had to back up a little bit when we did Bakugan, which was these marbles that you roll into cards and they pop up in the transform.

They're kind of like Transformers meets Beyblade.

That took our company up to a billion dollars of sales, and that taught us the whole entertainment industry, how to produce shows.

That was on Cartoon Network for four years, played all around the world.

Like where does your family come from?

come?

There's full transparency.

The balance sheet, the income statement, the cash flow, everything is transparent.

It's transparent to the outside world.

And transparency to the outside world for licensors, like people like Monster Jam and Disney, that means a lot.

They want to know, are you a stable company? Are you sound? You're taking their IP, especially if you're a master toy licensee.

You're taking their IP and you're bringing it out into the world.

Do you think that that is easier for you to say now? with all the success that you've had and with the world that has changed dramatically since the 90s? Do you think that still applies today? Do you think it's more true today? What are your general thoughts on me saying that?

What was the kind of big breakthrough with that product?

Yeah.

There was, there was two inflection points for us.

One was, uh, I took a meeting with this closeout toy company, and I showed them the product, and they were such nice guys.

They said, "Yeah, sure, we'll sell it for you." Uh, and they called three weeks later and they said, "When can you deliver us 26,000 pieces?" And I write about that in the book about everybody's rooting for you.

It's the most wonderful thing when you're young.

Everybody wants you to win.

Oh, me- [laughs]

What's your observation about how the industry's changed in the last 20 years, really 30 years? What is the proper role of technology? Do you think there's a bit of a like, are we overly concerned about screen time or under concerned about screen time? Do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, definitely.

I would say that the industry has changed in terms of age compression.

So kids have gone out of toys younger.

That's been a change.

The other change to the industry is that adults have not gone out of toys.

So this whole category called Cadult.

But I think we're a little bit more risk-averse, and I don't know exactly why, but I think it is a cultural difference between us and America, and I'm wondering how we shift that.

So I'm asking, and you don't have to get...

No, I'm not.

You know, I'm an open book.

You know, my family is actually more classic immigrants.

My family is originally Bulgarian, and they were displaced in the Second World War.

Okay.

And our family was there for generations.

I want to know what was the biggest or most important no you gave or received that led to the biggest yes?

What was it?

First of all, the 90s, the good old 90s.

I love the 90s.

Basically, we just graduated from university.

My mom was reading this newspaper.

This is really a newspaper.

And in it, it was talking about these six different individuals that were manufacturing this product called the Earth Buddy.

I

Like, how did you do this?

That's a great question.

First of all, that's very purposeful because we're very focused on telling the stories to the kids.

And the kids don't really care to hear my story.

You know what I mean? They just want to be inspired and they want something that's brought to them that inspires their imagination, brings some magic, and something new and different that they've never seen before.

Characters that they love.

But we had humble beginnings.

It's not just a saying.

So do you see a difference between your 20s as a generation and the 20s today? And how does your book fit in to trying to wake up that generation, which is I mean, they could be billionaires in their 20s, I mean, or millionaires more quickly than you and I did.

Yeah, I definitely think every generation has their own pros and cons to it.

But I don't think anybody should let the time period define them and define who they are and what they want to do in the world and what they want to put out into the world.

And so, you know, when I wrote this book, I hit about 50.

I started to look back and say to myself, you know, what happened in my 20s? and how did it all unfold to itself? And I started to realize that there's so many gifts that you have in your twenties.

Like for example, everybody's rooting for you or the power of not knowing or being close to the zeitgeist and your ability to tap into those things gives you an incredible amount of runway and energy to put things out into the world.

And I think that the principles of the book, to me, it doesn't matter what time it is.

And I think that's another component that people can have in their mind from day one while building the life they want.

Just, like, that, that ignorance.

What you don't know serves you well.

So just back to the Air Hogs, uh, you know, when Ben and I, when we took that product, we spent two years of our life engineering and developing it.

We never en- engineered and developed a product like that.

We figured it out.

But what we found out after a year and a half was that Hasbro and Mattel both passed on the product, okay? And [laughs] we, we thought we were super lucky, like we were the first people to see this product.

But Hasbro, Mattel passed on it, and they passed on it for good reason, really good reasons.

I'm sure it still happens [laughs] some places.

So just to clarify, I, I asked him was the initial business something that they were passionate about in particular, or were they passionate about just starting a business, any kind of business?

It was, we wanna be in business.

If you would've asked me in university if I'd end up in the children's entertainment business and in the toy business and producing TV shows, never came into my consciousness, ever.

Not in my consciousness at all.

The idea of being in business was, and when we started with the Earth Buddies and our second product was Devil Sticks, which broke us into the toy category, we made a decision that we wanted to focus on toys and kids, and we made a broad mission statement, which was, we want to design and develop our own toys.

We're open to ideas from wherever they come from.

We wanna partner with a lot of people, and we'll grow the company as big as we possibly can.

Now, obviously, things have gone pretty well for him in the business world, but he did share a wonderful story of things not going perfectly that haunts him in an oh-so-delightful way so many years later.

How do toys even get invented in the first place?

place?Well, first thing you need to know is once you enter the toy business, you never leave.

[both laughing] It's amazing how many people are still in the business.

Um, it's actually got a rich, rich history of invention.

So there's about 200 inventors around the globe that their full-time job is coming up with ideas, and they don't commercialize them, but they'll come, they'll come to companies like Spin Master, Hasbro, Mattel, um, Jakks Pacific, et cetera, and they'll present the idea.

And if you like it, then you will do the commercialization and marketing, manufacturing, and you'll pay them a 5% royalty in perpetuity.

And so the great thing for us, especially starting as a, uh, company from scratch, was we had this brain trust of toy inventors, and they weren't on our payroll, and we just shared the upside with them, which is a great model, especially when you're starting out as an entrepreneur.

So what does the freedom of entrepreneurship mean, and, and what should attract people in their 20s to it?

Can you talk to us about how those instances in your childhood Helped shape the businessmen that you are today?

Yeah.

I mean, my parents were, my parents are, I'm very lucky my parents are still living.

Um, and, you know, classic, you know, from that generation, it was all about food on the table, shelter.

It was all about the physical things, less about the emotional stuff.

Um, so I, I grew up with a, what I would call a lot of emotional neglect.

Um, and it really manifested itself in, uh, when I got identified at 10 years old with a learning disability.

Mm.

[laughs]

It's not great when it goes down to $450 million within two years.

And so we had this, like, incredible run-up, and then we had this incredible rundown, and it was a very humbling experience because the hardest thing that we had to do in that time period was we had to rewrite the ship from an overhead perspective, and so we had four restructurings that happened in two years.

We had to unfortunately let go of 35% of the people that worked in the company.

We had to, um...

And because we weren't that experienced, we did it four times, so it just jerked the company so m- a lot over the course of 24 months.

And, uh, and then we, and then the biggest lesson we got was, you know, be much more judicious with what we're actually applying capital to, what we're bringing to market.

Yes.

I mean, this is crazy.

But, like, he ran the factory, but amazing things happened.

Okay, can I tell you, we, the first people we went to hire in terms of workers were people from a homeless shelter, okay? It didn't work out that well, but two of the people, okay, that we hired from the homeless shelter stayed in our company for five years, and one of the gentlemen was a manufacturing savant.

And he came into Ben's office, okay, after, like, one or two months of being in production, and he's like, "You guys can go way quicker if you do things this way." And one morning Ben came in, and he had all these Gantt charts already all figured out.

The guy figured out, like, the whole line flow.

This is a man from a homeless shelter.

So the, just the universe just kinda, like, coalesced to, to bring the right people to us to make it happen, and we worked really hard.

You missed that? Oh, you would've loved it.

For those who don't know what it is, s- tell us what Bakugan is.

Bakugan is, it's a cross between, um, Transformers and Bey Ba- Beyblade, and it's basically, it's a round marble that you roll onto a card, and in the marble, there's a magnet and a little spring.

And when the marble hits the card, it pops open and transforms, and there's just this magical feedback that you just get pr- and surprise and, like, it opens up to, into this character, and we made hundreds of different types of characters.

Um, and then you would roll yours onto the card, and we would battle, and in each character had a points, point number, and then you flip the card open, and then there were sigils that matched up to, uh, there were signs that matched up to what was in your Bakugan, and we would start the battle.

So that was the, the toy, and actually it started, it started, it was invented by a 23-year-old inventor who had the idea of putting an action figure inside a marble.

And so Bandai at the time we were looking for, um...

We're always looking for ideas from wherever they came from.

What does that mean to you? What, what does it mean to, to be good at-- What is a good meeting to you?

I'm curious, what was your definition of success the day before you started Spin Master? And what is it today if it's changed?

Yeah, there is two definitions of success.

I was very fortunate.

I knew when I was 10 years old what I wanted to do.

And a lot of it came from the fact that I got identified with a learning disability called dysgraphia when I was 10 years old.

And it's the inability to get your thoughts out through your hands.

And my handwriting is like terrible.

don't know

So did you kinda have like a method behind, you know, testing out different formats and concepts and stuff like that before you would move on to the next thing?

Well, it's interesting.

In the, in the toy business, there is really no testing.

Okay? The only testing is actually getting the product to market, and then you know.

And so I, I'll never forget, we, we did this product called Don't Free Freddy, and it was basically this, this monster that's [laughs] his, his arms were, were closed like this, and then you'd press the button, and he'd go like, "Rawr," he'd start roaring.

And I'll never forget, you know, we brought it to market, and, um, I saw a kid watching the commercial, and I saw the look on his face, and he was just so...

He was like deadpan, like, like there was no, no reaction.

We'll make it happen.

Wow.

And so like, that was a real moment where I deepened my relationship with Anton and we were like, okay, now we're really synced up with our values.

Like we're never going to do anything like this.

You didn't consider it? 30 minutes.

And then you both came out the other side saying, we're not, yeah, we're not, we're not, listen, it's a slippery slope.

Like once you do a whirlpool, like the next thing you're doing, you know, you're doing a sauna.

Exactly.

On earth did you decide to write a book? What was the idea behind this? And what was the focus of betting on yourself in your twenties that you wanted the world to see?