This is a replay of Jason Raznick's interview with Chad Bronstein at the Benzinga Pyschedelics Conference.

Jason and Chad talk about:

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Jason Raznick

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jasonraznick

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Transcript:

Chad Bronstein is the most energetic driven entrepreneur that I am going to say in this industry. This guy not only has Fyllo , not only Tyson 2.0 and more companies, we are pumped to introduce the man, the myth, the legend, Chad Bronstein from Fyllo.

BZ: So what time do you get up at ?

I get up about six o'clock in the morning.Five every day. Yeah. About five 30. Go for a run. Then my son wakes up, hang out with. Work pretty much until later on and then hanging out with my son and my wife. And then Jeff calls me up at nine o'clock at night, or Adam Wilks calls me up at 12, was sitting over there and I take up a phone, I pick up the phone, but how so we're going to start Philo.

Okay. And I know there's 2,600 people watching remotely, but filo, like how did you start this company? What was the problem you saw in the. So prior to starting fuel, I was running a large ad tech company and I was bored, probably the same way you dropped bill Benzinga. And I just want to do something new and we had brands like Juul and Charlotte's web come into Amobi, but it's all my Singtel, so we wouldn't touch cannabis.

And so I had to make a crucial decision. I had a bunch of offers, I was doing well. I had. I'm going to go start a cannabis company. And she's what the fuck? A cannabis company? I said, yes, canvas company. So I went at it, I hit up Aristotle, Eric, a lot of these Jeff, all these people here. I said, Hey, if I go start this, will you come?

And we started filo three years ago. We're not 300 people. And it's been a great ride. So like you say, you hit up Aristotle on a few others. Your network is immense. If you guys talk about people that are connected, they talk the six degrees of Kevin bacon. The six degrees of Chad Bronstein is in full effect.

I, you guys don't even understand from Mike Tyson to Rick Blair, he's calling me on the phone. He's Hey, I was just here with iron Mike, whatever, so how does this happen? Like you're six degrees of Chad Bronstein, I guess it just happens. It's like people, right? It's I always say when you when you are running a sales organization, you talk about champions, and people that introduced. In Bernstein, right? Ian winners going to 20 different people. How I got to Mike was filo had a guy networking for us named Bryan Spears whose Britney Spears, his brother and Daniel Carsello is a founder of a we sauna. Okay. So some Brian spheres, Brittany Spears, brother was working for Philo.

Correct. So I want to follow this throat. Okay. So keep going. So we, we talk about you it's like an conference was yesterday and cannabis. We worked on de-stigmatizing. And the better, the best people to do that are people with loud voices. So I told Daniel we needed to get in front of Mike Tyson.

So we called Brian spirit. We told Bryan Spears, Hey, can you get us in front of Mike? Cause Brian lived in Vegas. And so he got us to Mike's brother-in-law and then we brought Mike on as a strategic advisor of we sauna to really talk about traumatic brain injury and the effects of psychedelics. From there, we started to really understand Tyson his last, I'm not going to name the name, but his last cannabis.

And then the same thing we did with Philo, I hit up Adam Wilks was the CEO of Tyson 2.0, the beautiful bald head right there. Cause you know him before. Yeah. I didn't know him cause he was a client of a fellows. So he rented and Adam giveaway stand up. So people should be tight. You don't have just yet Tyson 2.0 guys who want to meet him.

He's right there. Yeah. There you go ahead. And we put it together at Tyson 2.0 together. Filo runs all the advertising for it. So you asked me how I do all these things are very sensitive. Adam works. That's the filo team right there. Adam works really closely with all of us. And we got a lot of retail scale because our relationships was female.

So we hit up Columbia catered to that partnership because Columbia care was a client of DeVos and we brought Mike. So it's, I think the, for my success, it's synergies and people like that whole table right there. And my team, I wouldn't be here without them. So it's about, who's behind you and who's helping you.

And execute. And so that's how it flows. And the guy with the yellow shoes is just a badass there's. So Aristotle ran Marcus Limonus his portfolio. He sold a sunglass company to them and he nagged me every day. And I was just like Benzing I was his biggest client. So I bought all the sunglasses.

You, oh, you did. I had my, I had to go to Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and I would do client roadshows and he would do a sunglass event for all my clients. Oh really? Yeah. And so I met him that way and then I, when I started. I was like, you should come with me and do this because he's a startup. He loves startups.

She's a hustler heel. He was carrying boxes in our small little WeWork office, doing anything he needed to do to make this successful. And he's my partner in crime. Where are your sunglasses? I there in my room. All right. So I'll lose them. So that's because his whole son that his company was, if you lose them, you can get it for 50% off.

And I lose my sunglasses all the time. Or you need to put a tracking device on, but I'm Marcus Limonus. He sold it. He worked for him. He sold his company, Marcus and and then he ran a CPG portfolio. So that's, I gotta just do a plug here. That's the power of the network that he has. That's the six degrees of tread Brodsky.

You're at dispensing a cannabis. It's a lot better than we've had in the past, but there's so many relationships here and listen to badges are sometimes the wrong way. Go to someone, turn the badge and use it as an icebreaker. Literally three years ago, I was at the Benzinga conference. I met Jason. He didn't know who I was.

I was a nobody. And in Chicago, this guy's walking. Like he said, he was a, nobody. He was a nobody, it's money he's raised since then $140 million. Yeah. So in Chicago we met and he was at our conference, probably met someone there. Yeah. I met him. We were talking about this Jeff's and other he's my chief commercial officer field is alchemy.

And he saw, he came, I made him come to the Miami conference. I was trying to hire him, which one was the last Miami conference. Jeff just sold his company to Salesforce for eight or an 80 million. How much? 880 million. Oh, so that was more than me. Yeah. So he, I had it really convinced him to come to feel.

He came to Benzing in Miami with me. Where's our like cut. We don't get, we got, we haven't sold fuel yet. We're not, we don't want to cut. We're not in your boat. We're not in your boat yet. We'd only want to come. We want to see great deals happen. You guys are all in the room. Connecting, meeting people.

After this thing, go outside, talk to people, connect with the bachelor. I'm going to be three years ago. I met this guy in Chicago and it's three years later as I just repeated three years, three. Okay. And three, whatever his company is huge. And we're going to get to how big his company is in a second. And you're not going to believe the deals that they're doing, but you met and you didn't have Tyson 2.0, you didn't have this and you didn't have we sign up right now.

We thought it was interesting. Have you guys saw Daniel Carswell speak yesterday? He's an incredible story. He reached out to me on LinkedIn. He lives in Chicago. He played for the Blackhawks two time Stanley cup champion. And he wrote to me I'm not a hockey fan and I didn't know who he was. I watched the story.

And he asked me to help him with the psychedelics with we sauna. And so we took it public. We raised about 20 million for it. And the mission is to help people with traumatic brain injury, but it happened from a LinkedIn message because he saw the success fetal was having, and he saw I was local in Chicago.

He needed a support and I love this story. And then, Eric, Jeff was my first investor. Aristotle came on and he was doing all the backend with me. Conrad helped me create the name. And so you see the theme, Nicole Cosby who's our chief legal officer did all the illegal work, looked at all the contracts.

So Philo helped with our resources with Daniel, given the resources to be a good CEO and run the company. You ha you have the core, a strong core. And by the way, your wife helped with the name too. Yeah, but my and my wife helped the name. The honest you with Lena was the reason why I started filo. Oh, really?

We've lived a nice life. And I said, I'm going to go start a cannabis company and take a huge risk and a pay cut. And she said, I support you. You do this risk because I didn't smoke weed before I started. Not much before I started feel, then I started to really learn. And Brian Kaplan who's over there. I was meeting him.

He's at timeless in Arizona telling him my ideas and now he works for filo. So it's like back to that. It's your separation, but it's also about working through, we have chemistry with you, Patrick and Elliot. You guys are a tripod that you guys have great connections. Me and my team, I have to have chemistry and trade on energy.

That's it? That's it. And so now, but the fellow in this whole story, but before we get to feel on what you guys do, I want to get to one more thing. Health is very important to you, and that's partly why these companies exist, but health is very important to you. You're very. Like, how does health made a difference in your life?

And what do you do to stay in shape and to have these guns? The interviewers usually touch the guest harms and feel their five said, I don't know. So I didn't take the interview. I have to I, right now I just cardio just to like me and Conrad were talking about his cardio is if the ellipticals tennis, Rocky running, I played tennis with Aristotle until.

Okay. It's not very good, but it's a lot of chasing his bad balls, so I'm running all the time. Okay. So that's it? Yeah. And I what about eating? Do you eat healthy? Yeah, I eat really healthy because prior to starting though, I was traveling four days a week and I was eating like entertaining it steaks all the time and I cut out red meat and to start eating healthy because red meats out still, I don't eat red meat.

Yeah. Hold on. You have a dinner a couple nights from now. What are you going to eat there? For real. Yeah. He's going to clap that up. It's going to the steak. Okay. Whatever, I won't go into that. All right. So Philo, tell us for the person who was in sixth grade, tell this audience, the worldwide audience, watching the 2000 people as well.

What filo does in the most basic terms. So think of feel is I like to say to Salesforce of cannabis, right? We have multiple. So if I use a Columbia care as an example, just to make it easy with an example, we have a compliance software. We a hyper-local and we help law firms like DLA Piper and Columbia care stay ahead of local jurisdictions.

Then we bought a company called data, all that was a loyalty software, which we bought it rebuilt the technology as to how long ago did you buy data out? And you already integrated it rebuilt the technology, the whole thing. Yeah. So in three weeks we're gonna launch the version three of the technology, but yeah we also bought Cantor rags and that's where we got to Benzinga conference to which you make them in inventing a conference.

No, but the same thing. We, you entertain, you build your relationships with the Ben thing at conferences, just lie and say you met him too. But we rebuilt that technology, which is the legal side. And then we have the largest data marketing. And in cannabis, but now in the mainstream market.

So we have brands like Dunkin donuts, buying data from us and why they do that is because they don't know that Jason wears a Rolex. He drives a nice car. He doesn't, he has shops at Nordstrom's, but they don't let Jason goes to lumen, Michigan and buys a bunch of marijuana. And there's all these different correlations you can make.

You're literally spending $200 a week on weed. Why wouldn't Nike want to target you? Because they know you can afford it. Why wouldn't a car manufacturer want to target you because you're spending $3 a week on weed because they know you can afford leasing a car pharma Pfizer data, because they don't want to lose, share shift to the cannabis industry because instead of buying ibuprofen or Aleve, you're taking cannabis medicinal products.

So they want to make sure that they have that conversation with you. So we have over 7,000. That are the very large brands buying data from us. And we're integrated into every major platform like Google trade desk, et cetera, where you can go into the platform and buy our data. So in other words, maybe this is a bad analogy.

Are you a much better Nielsen? So Nielsen is a great company. Is that ever been an analogy first off? That's amazing. You said that Nielsen discipline private for 16 billion. I know. I know. I. Nielsen is a great company. But what I like to say, and Conrad is our chief marketing officer. What we were saying is Nielsen has, the data that you can get, you know what you're getting with them feed those data of the future.

So cannabis is data that you don't, you can't attribute to that cryptocurrency is now becoming more and more talked about and trend, right? You have gaming, which is a big conversation. Those data sets are where Philo's going, and those are, so you're going to get into other sectors. Okay. And so when you're calling inspire brands or Dunkin donuts, and you're like, Hey, this was Conrad, or this was Chad, we want to, do you want data?

This helps you, your customers are growing. Is it hard to convince the customers like, Hey, right now they don't buy data. Like sometimes it's like, how do you, what's the sell process for you? Jeff, myself, everyone we add. It took two years to educate big brands.

When we get on a call with a big brand, this is called inspire. Like, why the fuck am I talking to a datas cannabis? And we would have so much fun with it because once you started to educate them and say what the data is and what they could do with it, it took us a year, but we now have very conservative.

That you would have never thought would buy our data. And I think what's important is before this, I was competing against Google trade desk. Moby all of us were in that and you can't talk about much different differentiation. People were uptight when you're going into an ad agency, they talk to a fucking a thousand vendors a day.

So for us, what was great was we talking about something different and everyone opened up like, oh, I ate edibles. Last night we're smoking me and my friends are smoking flower the day before. So it opened up the flood gates to have more of an intimate relationship with them versus that uptight vendor relationship.

So that was that was fun for us and put a lot of education, but it was always, it's still fun to have that conversation okay. So you're basically at level one with this company now in terms of revenue or scale, but you've gotten the acceptance by mainstream companies. So now it's just a question of.

Hit the numbers and go, I think the thing for us is we're going to grow, continue to grow at scale. We're 300% year over year, we did our first quarter revenue in this quarter, what we did in 2021, really? So our growth is pretty astronomical and it's done because we have a good team.

We're 300 people. Where are you guys based in, mostly in Chicago or robot. We just bought a company that. Not in cannabis, the data company we're in Porto, Armenia, Israel, Sri Lanka, Chicago, Denver, LA, and New York. What was the company about last week? Was that a secret? No, it's the, we were public with it.

Scottsdale was a data play. And the ad tech industry, we partnered with them contextual data. They have 50 people, 30 other engineers were in Porto and we engineering is hard to come. And so we look at companies that have really good engineering talent so we can continue to beef up our engineering. So engineering is what allows you to get to these other verticals and other products.

Yeah. And build what we're doing. They able to let you set a launch, the buy a company in a year ago and rebuild a whole new technology. That's great. So now guys, there's a debate here. There's a debate and people say the wrong name. The name of the company is Philo, but some people say five. So I Chad, do you want to correct them or is it fine?

Everyone says that it's actually a good starting of a conversation, but we created that name in my, when we were in literally no office space, it just in my house with a white. And so that's how it came out and Philo the way that to remember it. If you have, it's you gotta feel it, feel it feel though, that's it that's

At the end of the day, if they're talking about you you're doing all, and. It's height. Can we talk a little about Tyson 2.0, so what's this Tyson 2.0 Rick layer. I know, I think we have Rick flair tomorrow. Mike Tyson tomorrow, Chad Adam right there. So we got the whole crew.

So what's Tyson 2.0 all about Tyson 2.0 is an IP branding company. We have become, I think the, one of the most well-known brands in the space we launched and not everyone loved it, but we launched. And most people loved it, we got, you got mixed feedback, but it went viral. And we had Howard stern, Jimmy Kimmel, everyone talking about it.

And we actually are going to be creating re shots of Andrew Holyfield as well. People don't realize this, but Mike and Amanda are very good friends, so everyone's oh, it's, they're good friends. And so I think it's important Tyson, 2.0 we launched. We've grown astronomically.

We raised $8 million from some of the most strategic investors in the cannabis space. So the key was, and with Tyson 2.0, a lot of celebrity brands, we talk about this all the time with me and Adam and EV is that a lot of celebrity brands don't make it because they don't have distribution. And so the key for us, for our success was that we struck a deal that allowed us to get distribution.

And we're very good at marketing. Mike allows us to. Kevin Hart to come on hotbox scene, Paul Pierce, Scott storage, all these big names, and they all love Mike. And so Mike is an advocate for cannabis. He smokes a lot of weed every week. It helps them and he's outspoken about it. And so it's very much on brand.

When we went out to market and it's all premium cannabis, we have multiple skews. We've done a lot of collaboration. And it's going very well. And then Rick flair was my neighbor, my boat neighbor in Tampa. I told you the story and I'm a big WBE fan. Adam, a lot of people debated about Rick flair and I said, Rick flair creates the stall.

Jeff and Mike has nostalgia. What people don't understand is celebrities. Don't all have an installment value. A five-year-old knows who Mike Tyson is and your great grandfather or grandmother would know what Mike Tyson is. Same with Rick flair. Rick flair is a cultural icon. How's that gonna do right now?

to do it. He's going to do it tomorrow. I don't want to do it, but I just tried, but yeah. So Rick flair, drip, we launched and Rick also has that nostalgic factor. Now, so that's tomorrow guys don't miss it. But I know we only have a minute left. We talked about the six degrees of trad Bronstein.

You guys, if you haven't met him, literally, you should surround him to get around this guy, make TEALS. I know he's not here to sell them stuff. We met him three years ago when he was nice and small, but at least at his team, And here's a guy with yellow shoes. You'll easily be able to point him out. And that's the guy with the sunglass guy, Marcus Limonus anything Chad that I didn't say, or we didn't talk about.

So I know Javier is like looking at me, like I'm some crazy dude. So Chad, anything that we need to say about you or anything like no other than here's that at all? Six degrees Tyson, 2.0, we signed up. We got we got obviously Philo, not phylo you got a feeling that's wrong, and that's it.

I don't know. No, thanks for having me. I think I'm super impressed. Do you feel like your day started? I think we're just getting started. I was going to give you a compliment. I'm super impressed with what you guys did here. I think everyone walking around this room that was at any events. You have double the amount of people and you guys bring a lot of people in the community together, and this is how we all, what we all miss.

So you guys should be very proud of what you guys have done. And I'm monitoring.

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