[Raised Undisclosed] Ep.139 - The First 100 with Aron D'Souza, the co-founder of Enhanced Games | Olympic Games Alternative

Aron D'Souza is the co-founder of Enhanced Games, a planned international sports event where the athletes will not be subject to drug testing. Enhanced Games is a vision of the future Olympics where athletes use safe and legal enhancements to improve their performance. Backed by top venture capitalists, including Peter Thiel, it aims to create a better version of the Olympic Games. In contrast to traditional drug testing, the Enhanced Games will not subject athletes to such tests. Instead, it focuses on celebrating science and making sports safer, fairer, and more inclusive. The event is planned to take place in 2025 and will feature individual efforts across five categories: athletics, aquatics, combat, gymnastics, and strength.

Where to find Bethany Stachenfeld:

• Website: Home - Enhanced Games. A Better Version of the Olympic Games.
• LinkedIn (5) Aron D'Souza | LinkedIn

Where to find Hadi Radwan:

• Newsletter: Principles Friday | Hadi Radwan | Substack
• LinkedIn: Hadi Radwan | LinkedIn

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Transcript

Let's do it. Broadcasting from around the world. You're listening to the first 100. A podcast on how founders acquired their first 100 paying customers. Here's your host, Hadi Rodwan. Good to have you on the show, Aaron. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on. Thank you for stopping by. You're doing something very interesting, which we'll talk about. Aaron D'Souza is the founder of Enhanced Games, which is a planned international sports event where athletes will not be subject to any drug testing. And I think your vision of the future Olympics is athletes can use safe and legal enhancements to improve their performance. You've been backed by top venture capitalists including Peter Thier. Aaron, what is the current issues with the current Olympics and why do you want to introduce enhanced games? 44% of Olympians, according to the Olympics own research, use banned performance enhancing drugs, yet only 1% regularly get caught. That's a problem. The Olympics are dishonest and really that situation is deeply unsafe too. At the same time, Half of all of America, Australia, and the UK's Olympians effectively live in poverty. Yet the top Olympic officials fly around the world in private jets, earn multimillion dollar salaries, and the IOC president literally lives in a palace. And so the bureaucrats are making all the money and the athletes are getting nothing. And so I've studied the International Olympic Committee for over 20 years, and I think there's something deeply wrong with the system and it's time to build something new. And I'm the kind of guy who just... decided one day, you know, I'll build the new Olympics. Can you compare how the current business model work with these Olympics and how the enhanced games would differ in that case? Yeah, so the core problem about the Olympic Games is that they exist only every four years and they build a dozen stadiums and then they throw them away after two weeks. It is literally one of the most wasteful exercises in the entirety of human history and has bankrupted countries like Greece and to a lesser degree in Brazil, wasting hundreds of billions of dollars and is effectively wasteful. So the enhanced games will have the same, if not greater, television and social media impact as the Olympics, but do this in a much more cost efficient way. And the way we'll do this is by removing the sports that no one watches. So no modern pentathlon, no curling, no bobsled and focus on the ones that matter. Track and field, swimming and diving. combat sports, weightlifting, and gymnastics. Five sports that all can be operated without specialist infrastructure and that are individual sports so they don't require massive bureaucracy of organizing teams. So we can deliver our whole event for double digit million dollars when the Olympics cost double digit billion dollars to put on and have never operated profitably. Amazing. So I believe the show's about the first 100 customers but you're not yet there. You're the first planned event 2025, walk us through how would you attract customers or users or viewers? If those are your customers and then how would you attract as well? Top athletes to play in these games, because essentially when you're talking about the Olympics, it's every five years, it's the stage where these top athletes want to be because probably of broadcasting rights, sponsorships, viewership. How would you attract the athletes and then the users in that case? That's a great question. You know, I have built nearly 10 companies and I'm a very experienced entrepreneur. I'm 38 years old and I've had at least three solid exits under my belt. So attracting the first hundred customers is something I've thought very deeply about. And really this is all just an earned media equation. The more publicity and the more attention we get, the more athletes we get. And so almost exactly one month ago, we announced that Peter Thiel led our seed round. That led to over 300 million impressions on social media, 2 million visitors to our website. And within about a week, one of Australia's greatest swimmers, James Magnuson, 16-time world and Olympic medalist, came out on national media and said he would come and compete at the Enhance Games. I had never spoken to this person, really. I did this radio show just once, and this was not planned at all. He just organically decided that he wanted to be the first athlete to come and compete at the Enhance Games. And in a few weeks time, we'll be announcing major media partnerships. And so I've been sitting here getting 500 to a thousand emails a day from broadcasters, documentary film production companies, corporate sponsors, and athletes who want to get involved in this project because it's so compelling and magnetic. And you know, I would say it was hard to get our first investor. We got one. Now we have been inbounded by every major venture fund in the world. Was apparently hard to get the first athlete. We got one, now we will get thousands. And it's just a snowball effect. And it's just that taking that first step of courage, which is so difficult about breaking out from a corrupt and broken system. Makes a lot of sense. But that means for the athlete that they cannot basically compete anymore in the Olympics because they just mentioned that they are on performance enhancing drugs, right? So how would you get the best to move from the Olympics here? You might get enough athletes. But would they be the best in that case? Well, you don't have to take performance enhancing drugs to compete at the enhanced games. You can be a natural athlete. And the Olympic bureaucrats have started to make outlandish statements suggesting that any athlete who competes at the enhanced games would be banned from competing. Lord Sebastian Koh, who is the head of the World Athletics Federation, said this in a press conference just a few days ago. We counterclaimed that his statement probably violates US antitrust law. And that was the lead news story on the BBC that night, BBC Sports at least. And so the reality is that we are challenging an incumbent bureaucracy or very afraid. And as a result, athletes are starting to see the writing on the wall. And number one, all athletes who participate in the enhanced games will be paid. And athletes who participate at the Olympics don't get paid. And so there's a strong economic motivation to participate, but there's also a fairness motivation. And we have very strong support in the athletic world, but also from the scientific community. Just last week, I had 54 of the world's top scientists, clinicians, and academics gather at the House of Lords at the British Parliament, and voicing their support for the enhancements ecosystem, because this is how we are going to build the future. And human enhancement technology is real. and it's something that is very useful for overcoming the challenges of our own biology. The compounds that make athletes jump higher and run faster are the same compounds that will allow us to have longer, healthier and happier lives. That's a great idea. Thank you for sharing this. If you were to look at your biggest roadblock or challenge and getting out there, what would that be? Well, if you asked me two months ago, I would have said it was funding. But now we have no shortage of funding. And if you asked me one month ago, I would have said it was athletes. Now we have no shortage of athletes. And so now it's really just a question of team. Can we build a really world-class team of people who can deliver upon this equation? I get hundreds of people every week applying for jobs, even though we don't publicly advertise any jobs, and to build a cohesive, high-quality, high-performance team that can deliver a world-class sporting event. and I'm very confident that we can do that. I've built lots of organizations before, and in that experience, I made a lot of mistakes in hiring and structuring, but you know, I've learned those mistakes, and I'm gonna build one of the greatest organizations in the world today. And so for all you listeners out there, go to enhance.org and click on the team page and click apply now. If you're interested in a role, particularly based full-time, in-person in central London, I'd love to hear from you. We'll put that in the show notes as well. Thank you for sharing this. What is your biggest insecurity as a leader? Well, when I was young, starting my first companies at my early 20s, I thought I knew everything. And by time I'm my age now at 38 and having 20 years of entrepreneurial experience, I know I know basically nothing. And that's a very confronting admission to make. But at the same time, It's a reality because a mega project like this is so well beyond the scope of any one individual. And so knowing that is my greatest limitation, I have to find extraordinary leaders who know their niche, whether it's broadcast rights negotiation, athlete safety, event operations, financial controls, et cetera, and bring them together and build them into a cohesive team, all going towards one goal. And one thing that is exciting about this endeavor is that our social and our scientific mission is so much greater than just the ordinary financial mission of a startup. This isn't building a better enterprise software CRM, building a better kind of mechanical widget. We're really building something to inspire all of humanity and that we hope from a scientific and the medical standpoint, will be the showcase for developing the technologies that will solve aging. And we believe that aging is a disease that we can treat, cure, and eventually solve. And that is an overarching motivation that brings together really the most extraordinary leaders. And so over the next few weeks, we'll be announcing some of our key hires, including some people I've been trying to hire for over a decade into a great many companies that I've built. Yet this one is so compelling. from a social mission perspective, that it's just attracting the very best people. And so I think that's a Sam Altman line, like if you're gonna build a company, do something that's unbelievably great, like Elon launching rockets to the moon, because that is an inspiring mission that attracts not just the top talent, but the outlier talent, the greatest geniuses of the world, the people who are the very, very top in their field. Because why would someone leave a job earning millions of dollars a year? It's like safe and comfortable. Well, they might do it to launch rockets to the moon or to cure aging. And that's really what we're here to do at the Enhance Games. And it inspires the world on such a huge level. Amazing. Is there a principle that you live by that has served you well on your journey? Many principles. The one that has been the most successful. And that's one of my core. interview tactics is inbox zero. So every day I answer every single message that is sent to me, probably multiple times a day. And so no matter how many thousands of people message me, I respond to that all. And every single person who works at the Enhance Games and works in every one of my portfolio companies and works in my family office gets to inbox zero every day because most organizations think hours or they think in weeks and months. And we think in minutes and we think in hours and the velocity matters, speed matters. And so for example, if you're going to raise a seed row from a venture capital firm, you probably have 30 or 40 back and forths, right? Scheduling meetings, follow-ups, due diligence questions, et cetera. And so if it takes you two days to schedule the meeting, it's gonna take you 80 days with 40 back and forths. But if it takes you five minutes, it might be able to get it done in a day. Right. And so velocity really does matter and responsiveness is at the very core of that. And so that's something I instill in all of my staff is that we always must get to inbox zero every day. I get inbox zero seven days a week, 365 days of the year. Yeah. I'm, I'm obsessed like you. I can't see anything next to the inbox. Like I have to. reply, make sure on a timely matter. If I'm running the operation, I also don't want to be the bottleneck because if you're receiving a lot of emails and people rely on you, you don't want to you know finish things sequentially and then make them wait doesn't make sense at all. So I think that's an important principle but also it comes with its anxiety factors because you have to get rid of your inbox quickly and then you have to reply on time. So that comes also it can be a What do you envision Enhanced Games to look like in the next 12 months? Well, we aim to be delivering our first event in 2025. So over the next 12 months, we will be building up an organization of between 30 to 50 people all in person in one office, building an ultra high performance culture to build the world's next great sporting event. But beyond that, it's so much more. We look towards pushing boundaries in terms of medical and scientific innovation. technological ones. And so I look at the incumbent sports leagues, teams, and federations, and their operations are pathetic. The amount of revenue that the Olympics actually generates, although impressive at a 4 billion plus per cycle, is actually kind of bad given how impactful that brand is on a global level. And so I always point to this figure. Facebook generates, if I can think of it off the top of my head, about $275 in revenue per user. in the United States per year. Google and all the other social platforms are in the triple digits, in the United States at least. And then even the really bad media platforms like BuzzFeed generate $3 per US user per year. And the best sports team in the best sports league is said to be Manchester United in the Premier League. How much revenue do you think they generate per user per year? I would say somewhere in the $5,000 to $7,000. Yeah, if you think, right? a brand that is so impactful and so powerful, yet they actually only generate $1.50 per user per year, which is pathetic, absolutely pathetic. And they actually don't turn a profit either. And why is this? It's because Manchester United does not have direct data connectivity with its fans. So the 60,000 ardent fans who are sitting in that stadium Manchester United doesn't know who they are because Ticketmasters sold them the tickets. The millions of fans watching on TV, Manchester United doesn't know who those people are because they're watching on Sky or on Fox. And so there's all this data disaggregation between the sports rights holders and teams and the end fan because of the infrastructure that exists of broadcasters and ticketing. And so we are building an engineering team. we look at this as a software problem, as much as we look at it as a medical and scientific one. We need to build the right technology architecture to connect with our fans and our athletes. And where does that start? It starts by having in-house engineering. And so unlike the other sports teams and leagues who build software by outsourcing it to agencies and hiring consultants like McKinsey, I'm hiring CTOs, vice presidents of engineering and software engineers, so that we can deliver technology products. We can ship in a very agile methodology, new software platforms to connect directly with our fans and our athletes and have fully integrated data. And that doesn't exist in the sporting world. You know, I challenge your listeners, go download the Olympics app from the app store. And you look at it, it's absolutely pathetic, right? Costs. I'm sure hundreds of millions of dollars develop, and it's a total joke. Look at the app for ManU or any of the other major sports properties. They're completely unusable. They have no true value proposition, and they were just designed by consultants. And most sports federations and teams do not have a CTO. They do not have a technology leader within their organization. They do not have in-house engineering. And that's going to be a core value proposition for us as we ship. technology products that are in the core of our DNA. Thank you for sharing this. I hope you know you achieve what you want to achieve. It's a great vision. How can people reach you and what roles are you hiring for? Because you mentioned you're hiring. Oh, we're hiring for all sorts of roles, particularly in the marketing and technology functions. But just go to Enhance.org, click Team. There's an Apply Now button there. Or just send us a DM on LinkedIn. Instagram or on Twitter and we'd love to hear from you. Amazing. How often will we see enhanced games after 2025? Is it a two year, a four year or a yearly event? Yearly and then soon after that more than yearly because ultimately content is king and we live in the TikTok era with shortened intention spans and running a sporting event every four years isn't very good for the athletes because they don't have an opportunity to monetize their fame. And so we're going to give athletes more opportunities. engage with their fans, more opportunities to compete on a global scale. And that's why we'll recruit the very, very best athletes. Amazing, Eero. It's a pleasure meeting you and we wish you the best of luck on your journey. Thank you for stopping by. Thank you, Richard, for having me on the show. Bye-bye. Thank you so much for listening to The First 100. We hope it inspired you in your journey. If you're enjoying the podcast, please subscribe to our podcast on Apple iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play. or Spotify and share it with a friend starting their entrepreneurship journey.