Ayden Syal - Founder & CEO at MOGL: NIL Dynamics, Startup Scaling, and Influencer Impact

Ayden Syal  00:00

I still remember the day vividly. It was October 1, 2019, when I came up with the business idea. My brother works in investment banking as well. Neither of us at the time were extremely thrilled about our day-to-day tasks and responsibilities in finance. The early years in a high-functioning financial services role are quite grueling and challenging on your mental health and everything else. And I wrote this massive text message to him, which was really the first rendition of the business plan.

Callan Harrington  00:33

You're listening to That Worked, a show that breaks down the careers of top founders and executives and pulls out those key items that led to their success. I'm your host, Callan Harrington, founder of Flashgrowth, and I couldn't be more excited that you're here. Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of That Worked. This week, I'm joined by Ayden Syal. Ayden is the co-founder and CEO of MOGL. MOGL is a leading athlete influencer marketplace and NIS software provider, which streamlines partnerships between brands and athlete influencers. Prior to starting MOGL, Ayden worked at Morgan Stanley, Lexington Partners, and IHS Market. Ayden has been named to the Sports Business Journal New Voices Under 30 list, the Marquee Who's Who in America list, and won the 2022 South by Southwest Pitch competition on behalf of MOGL. I really enjoyed this conversation. We dove into the actual tactics that MOGL uses to fundraise, which are all very actionable for your own business. We talked about how to distribute thought leadership. I thought Ayden gave a great playbook for how to do this, but I gotta tell you, the part of the conversation that I love the most was talking about NIL and influencer marketing. For those of you that are unfamiliar with the term NIL, it stands for Name, Image, and Likeness, and it allows college athletes to receive compensation when their name, image, and likeness are used. This opens up a whole new world for marketing, and I love diving into the details of how brands can leverage influencers because this is an area where I think there's a huge opportunity, and I've seen companies really struggle to do this. And I felt that Ayden gave great examples of how you can succeed with this strategy. When companies can pull this off, it is an excellent way to target your ideal customers. So with that, let's get to the show. So Ayden, I've been super excited to have you on here for a while, and I'm really excited to dive into all of the NIL and everything that you guys are doing at MOGL before we hop there. Tell us about the story of the South by Southwest pitch competition. 

Ayden Syal  03:03

South by Southwest is a major technology, film, and music festival that occurs every year in Austin, Texas. Every year now, over the past few years, they've hosted a massive pitch competition in which thousands of startups apply every year and about 50 startups each year are invited to ultimately participate in the pitch competition in Austin. So in March of 2022, MOGL had the opportunity to participate and pitch in the South by Southwest pitch competition in front of an audience of investors and a panel of judges that are primarily VCs, and more than anything else, from a company standpoint, this experience was actually really a coming out party for us. So the company obviously launched and became commercial on July 1 of 2021, when college athletes began being able to monetize their name, image, and likeness. But the opportunity to get in front of this huge audience of potential investors and customers, and tell our story and walk through the value that we ultimately delivered to brands was really, really great. We ended up winning the South by Southwest pitch competition. It was also when we received our first term sheet from a VC. And more than anything else, it really validated our approach to this space for those that aren't aware, MOGL's an AI-enabled influencer marketing platform that matches brands to athlete influencers and the ability to kind of communicate to brands the value and the impact that these athlete influencers have in helping their brands build awareness was exceptional for us. We then also received backing from the Penske Media Corporation, which runs South by Southwest as well, and it was just such a monumental milestone for our company.

Callan Harrington  04:51

What impact did that have specifically? I mean, of course, South by Southwest is a gigantic name, I have to assume that almost kind of gave you instant validation.

Ayden Syal  05:00

It really did more than anything else. The audience was major national brands and some of the largest VCs in the ecosystem that had come in, you know, both from the Bay Area and New York and throughout the country, to watch the startup pitch competition. So obviously we knew, and our thesis coming into the landscape was that athletes drive the social fabric within an undergraduate collegiate body and have incredible engagement rates and audience that brands would benefit from. But the opportunity to tell that story and showcase some of the case studies that we had already just in our nascent few months of existing at that point, and to have it be received so well by the judges, was incredible. We received a number of new customers following the opportunity to pitch. We obviously received additional financing as well. And more than anything else, I think it was a great cultural and team opportunity. We had a number of early-stage employees at that time, and it really kind of communicated and validated our overall mission to our team.

Callan Harrington  06:09

You guys started way before anybody else into the NIL, and took a big risk, in my opinion, in doing that before we get there. You had a really successful career. You were in private equity, you were living the highest levels of finance or on that track to really, really, really take that to the next level. But why leave that?

Ayden Syal  06:29

It's a great question, Callan, and when I think back to my early career, it was certainly a risk. So I started my career at Morgan Stanley. I completed the two-year analyst program, and then eventually, as you mentioned, went and worked in private equity at Lexington Partners. I had built a lot of the technical and operational skills necessary to then found a company later on, but I was never truly passionate about what I was doing on a daily basis, and I always felt like I could really deliver a greater impact to those around me by doing something different. I've always grown up an avid sports fan. I obviously attended the University of Notre Dame, where I witnessed this problem firsthand, and also witnessed the opportunity given how much a community like South Bend revolves around an athletic program like Notre Dame. So in August of 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom put protocols in place that would enable California athletes the ability to start monetizing their name, image, and likeness in 2023, so I knew that this was coming, but I also knew, having befriended a number of student athletes across a variety of sports, while at Notre Dame, that there was going to need to be a technology solution that would match these athletes to these opportunities. They have really challenging schedules, both academically and athletically, and they would need direct access to sponsors and fans in order to monetize. And then on the flip side, the thesis was that brands would really benefit from being able to access a network of thousands of athlete influencers at their fingertips, rather than going the traditional route, one to one through whether it be an agency partner or direct connectivity.

Callan Harrington  08:21

So, you started doing this well before this was formally approved. What gave you the confidence to take that big of a swing?

Ayden Syal  08:29

If anything, maybe you could make it sound like is blind confidence, or even blind luck. Ultimately, I certainly didn't necessarily see us achieving all of the heights that we've achieved to date, at the beginning, it was really more of a passion project, more than anything else. It was a funny story. Actually, I still remember the day vividly. It was October 1, 2019, when I came up with the business idea. My brother works in investment banking as well. Neither of us at the time were extremely thrilled about our day-to-day tasks and responsibilities in finance, the early years in a high functioning financial services role are quite grueling and challenging on your mental health and everything else. And I wrote this massive text message to him, which was really the first rendition of the business plan, detailing why marketplace was going to be required here, what features and functionality my thinking was around, and how it would deliver value. And then from there, continued to work in private equity, but started to have as many conversations as I could with startup founders, influencer marketing managers, digital marketing executives, and people on the brand sponsorship side, to really understand what goes into a traditional sponsorship and influencer marketing campaigns. What are some of the major pain points associated with that overall process, whether it be. Talent sourcing, contract generation, verification of the fulfillment of tasks, performance tracking, all of these different pieces I really started to learn more about. And then over the course of the next year, my co-founder eventually joined the team, so he played quarterback at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Central Florida. And really understands this problem, because he lived it. Tens of thousands of the number seven jersey were sold while we were at Notre Dame, but he was not able to monetize his NIL. Despite starting 13 games for the Irish and winning 10 of them and being a massive five-star recruit. So what we did was we actually executed traditional sponsorship campaigns with professional athletes and former collegiate athletes on behalf of some major brands like Essential Water, for example, to really understand what goes into this whole process. I had no experience in marketing, very limited experience and expertise within social media in general. I'm by no means an influencer on social media, so we actually went through the motions of truly acting almost like an agency, and creating and executing campaigns to understand those pain points ourselves. And after we did that, we then conducted a number of focus groups and user surveys and testing, and then in March of 2020, right? Actually, as the pandemic started to rear its head, we began building the actual product that is now MOGL.

Callan Harrington  11:38

Well, one of the things I'd love to dive into, in particular, is, and you talked about this a little bit, because you guys are, you're both helping the athlete and you're helping the brand find athletes. So you have these two sides to that. That's a tough business, really, to get that early traction. Once you get it, it can have a bit of a flywheel effect. But what did you do to get that early traction there?

Ayden Syal  12:03

Yeah, so it was a lot of it was really marketing focused and really awareness for the mission in the early days. So we built a really compelling website telling the story of NIL is coming. This is what this platform is going to be able to deliver to both parties of the marketplace. And then we started to generate basically a wait list for access to that marketplace. We started running newsletters. We built a really strong social media presence as well. We were hosting Instagram lives. We were appearing in clubhouse rooms as well to talk about the opportunity and why this was going to deliver so much value to both parties. And then, as we started to build the actual formal product upon launch date of July 1 of 2021, we already had effectively a user base of, I would say, about 500 interested brands and a few thousand college athletes that all we had to do was simply transition over to profiles and send them their login instructions right from the get go. But we were really lucky in a way that my co-founder has tens of thousands of Instagram followers and followers across each of his social platforms, and has built such an incredible following in this space in general. So that was super beneficial for us as we started to get going and build awareness for what we were building.

Callan Harrington  13:35

Well, what's interesting about that is that you're essentially were dogfooding or using your own product, what I'm hearing you say is that, because your co-founder had a ton of followers, you used influencer marketing to get that early traction. Is that right?

Ayden Syal  13:51

Oh, yeah, 100% and in many ways, we actually learned a ton about influencer marketing through leveraging his audience and his reach. Actually, the first campaign that we ever did was we went back to Notre Dame. It was in October during the football season, and the local regional commerce was hosting what they called Football Fridays. It's effectively a community vitalization event downtown in South Bend, live music vendors, basically a pep rally for the game and recognizing his stardom and celebrity within the South Bend community, we actually tested out our first campaign with him, which was promoting the event on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce and then hosting an autograph signing and meet and greet while at the event in South Bend, and it really showed us just how incredibly impactful this opportunity could be once it rolled out, because he hadn't competed for Notre Dame for a couple years at this point, and still had so much impact and notoriety within the space, and then we basically replicated that across a variety of different geographic locations before NIL went into effect with former collegiate athletes.

Callan Harrington  15:11

I love that story, and it brings up a topic that came up a few times on the show, and I hear people talk about it quite a bit. What are the best practices? That was a great example. But what are some more of those best practices on how a brand can maximize their partnership with through influencer marketing or with an influencer in general.

Ayden Syal  15:32

The number one thing that a brand needs to understand prior to even sourcing influencers and beginning the overall influencer marketing campaign process is they need to really understand who their target customer is and what that persona looks like, so across an audience, demographics, right? So it's their age, what some of their habits are, what other like products they are using that fit into their overall personal portfolio of consumer-based products that they're using. And then obviously, if a brand has strategic geographic locations that they want to focus on, that's obviously very important as well. So ultimately, with any influencer marketing campaign, they work best if your influencers actually use the product and enjoy using it and would use it in their daily lives if they were not being compensated to promote your product across their social channels or at an event. And it's extremely important for us and our brands in our discovery process, to really work with these brands and identify who is your customer. So we really want to understand that first, prior to even identifying what influencers make sense and how many.

Callan Harrington  16:54

Gotcha. So it's about understanding the ideal customer profile, who are the personas within that ideal customer profile. And then also, one of the things that you said, I think is really interesting, is that the influencers have a familiarity with your product, either they're already using it, or how if they're not already using it, how would you do that? Would it be, "Hey, test this out." Let's see if it's a good fit. Or what does that look like?

Ayden Syal  17:19

As a broad generalization? Yes, right? So we do a lot of product seeding in which companies like Liquid IV, for example. So Liquid IV is a hydration supplement, electrolyte packet. If an athlete's not already using Liquid IV, Liquid IV will send them and distribute product to them and get feedback from them, which is obviously valuable from a customer success standpoint, and then they will engage with the influencer for campaigns. But we are unique from a MOGL perspective, in that we already know, generally speaking, what types of products and in what niches these college athlete influencers are going to resonate strongly with, and then ultimately, the audience that their platforms enable these brands to reach is generally somewhat consistent as well, which is Gen Z consumers, undergraduate college students, primarily in college towns. So we provide these brands with really direct access to these Gen Z consumers, which, from a strategic standpoint, is what every brand is currently focusing on achieving right now, given the influence that Gen Z consumers have, their pricing, their price sensitivity, right? They have really strong purchasing power compared to other groups and college athlete influencers provides them with the direct avenue to reach those audiences, given the fact that they are in class with them every day, they're engaging with them on campus, and they're followed by their peers on social.

Callan Harrington  18:57

Yeah, I wouldn't even realize that it is kind of a perfect way in with Gen Z, just in general. That's such a good point. I want to switch gears a little bit. You gave a talk at South by Southwest about fundraising in a down market, and I thought it was excellent. And I would encourage any of our listeners to check out that talk. We can add a link in the show notes as well, but you brought up a couple things in there that I thought were really interesting points. I'd love to dive into one of those specifically. Was you mentioned that investors are looking for founders who are going to make the right moves when their back is against the wall. I'm curious, what were some of those times as you're building MOGL, what were some of those times you had your back against the wall? And I'm curious, how did you fight your way out of it?

Ayden Syal  19:38

 Yeah, absolutely. And I appreciate the kind words on the talk. The real goal of the talk, more than anything else, was to truly provide the support to founders that you know I and I know a number of my peers wish that we had, in really a No BS forum, right? Founder to founder. This is what worked for for us, and this is how we can help some. The other areas where we definitely found like we were pushing a rock up a really steep hill, was that there's been a lot of regulatory noise within the NIL landscape. The first year of NIL did not go nearly as smoothly as we thought it was going to go from a company standpoint, we thought that, all right, we've built this incredible platform. We have a strong and growing network of influencers. Why wouldn't brands just come on, start engaging with it and use it in a self-service manner? What we didn't anticipate, or know as much heading into the landscape was that brands are generally very accustomed to working with their agencies of record and other partners on delivering this value from influencer marketing and other digital advertising offerings. So there was a ton of education that had to happen with brands about why they should use the platform and why college athlete influencers deliver value, and why this is important, and why Gen Z is very important demographic to focus on as well. So for the first year, it was a struggle to be completely candid, right, not only acquiring new brands, but also the overall sales cycles were really long because we needed to really communicate to them why this delivers value at a time where we didn't have that many case studies and landmark campaigns that we could point To to these potential prospects. So throughout the first year, year and a half, that was really a challenge, and then secondarily as well, because of all the headlines that you see within the media around the space, it was an area that a lot of brands were very hesitant to engage with, because of they thought that there was going to be regulatory changes or potential legal action against them if they worked with athletes. So that was really hard for us. And I think in many ways, if we were to have started the company today, it would have been a lot easier sledding to start because now it's so well regarded as a great opportunity. You saw it in March Madness, both on the women's and the men's side. How many sponsorships are going to college athletes with major, major national brands? And that was not the case for the first, really, 18 months of the company.

Callan Harrington  22:36

I could tell you, as an Ohio State fan, NIL is the best thing that has ever happened besides potentially saving,  retiring.

Ayden Syal  22:46

And Harbaugh leaving as well, I would just, I would assume.

Callan Harrington  22:49

All of those were great. And here's one of the things I'm curious about, is in, and I could be totally wrong on this. Of course, I know there's very big brands that are investing in NIL, but I feel like a lot of it as well are brands that are very hyper local to the college to the area. Am I right on that? Or how do you manage that?

Ayden Syal  23:14

Yeah, you absolutely are, for a background. My parents actually live in Columbus as well, so extremely familiar with the Ohio State landscape and the overall support that goes to Buckeyes everywhere, right there are a ton of local businesses. Riker auto, for example, is a great example in the Columbus area that have really dove headfirst into this landscape and derived a ton of value from the influence that these athletes have. But when you think about our business and the overall value of the marketplace, we obviously work with a lot of local businesses and can source influencers and talent for them in local markets throughout the country. We've got nearly 20,000 athletes on the platform today from over 800 schools. So we have really great access at the local level, and that's one of the things that really differentiates us. But the broader value of the platform is actually mass scale influencer marketing campaigns throughout the country or throughout a geographic region. So that's what really enables us to deliver exceptional amount of value to large national brands that are looking to do mass scale campaigns, largely to replace their traditional paid advertising efforts that are no longer yielding the historical marketing results due to privacy policy changes on Meta and Google. So the short answer of it is local businesses drive a ton of value in this space, and we work with thousands of them, but the broader value of the platform is actually for these large national brands, for mass scale campaigns.

Callan Harrington  24:57

I have to assume a big part of that is that you are. Re aggregated all of these athletes, where, if they were to do this on their own, they would have to individually reach out to all these athletes. Is that right or by way off on that?

Ayden Syal  25:10

Yes, that's probably more than anything else. The number one value that we provide to brands and ultimately athletes as well, is that the overall time spent to source these influencers on a one-by-one basis would be incredibly arduous for them. And then they would also be responsible for managing the communications with the athletes in a way that's efficient, disclosing the activity to the schools in a way that's NCAA compliant, facilitating payments to athletes in a way that they want to be paid. So all of these different dynamics within a broader influencer campaign is what our platform streamlines. So we not only save the brands an exceptional amount of time, but we also save them a ton of money. Because, as you know, time is money.

Callan Harrington  26:01

Walk us through your process for fundraising. I thought you gave a lot of great points on this in that talk. But if you could talk about that quickly, what is your approach to fundraising?

Ayden Syal  26:11

I would say a number one takeaway that I would hope founders took from my talk on the fundraising side is that number one, it's an absolute numbers game. Don't be naive in that you've built this great product or this great offering, and you're going to get that first VC, your gold VC, to fund you immediately. It is a numbers game. And then number two, as well as just being absolutely relentless and turning over every rock. So from a MOGL perspective, we were really lucky and had the benefit of initially raising our pre-seed round in a time where the overall fundraising environment was very rich. Right in 2021 we were at the peak of the market. We raised our pre-seed round very quickly, from primarily friends and family, but then also we had some angel groups and VCs participate in the round as well. And NIL was such a new and exciting opportunity, and we were really the only ones doing it at that time. Since then, though, the overall startup fundraising environment has changed drastically, largely because of the overall macroeconomic climate, and it's been much more challenging than you know, we had ever anticipated, despite the exceptional amount of growth that we've had as a company. So we've sourced capital from, you know, individuals and family offices, Angel groups as well, and then VCs, we were very lucky and fortunate to have raised our seed round of financing, which was led by Magarac Venture Partners, a VC out of Pittsburgh, part of the Draper triangle network. And they really validated, you know, our offering, and gave us our first term sheet that we agreed to, and since then, we've been off to the races. We're raising a bridge round of financing. Right now we're about halfway through it, really excited about some of our new VC partners that are participating in that round, but it's about meeting the VCs where they are. It's about really building a thought leadership forum and following across social media and with regular investor updates, and then sourcing those potential investor prospects on a regular basis, I think I mentioned in the talk that I gave at South by Southwest, but we've got a prospecting list of thousands of prospective investors that we keep updated on our progress on a bi-weekly basis, and that, I think, is very, very important for fundraising.

Callan Harrington  28:47

If you don't mind, I'd love to dive into that thought leadership piece. What does that look like? Do you have some examples of that on what you're doing there?

Ayden Syal  28:54

Yeah, absolutely. So we've approached thought leadership really in four separate buckets. So number one is our overall social strategy. So on Instagram, we promote all of the campaigns that we've executed with some of the details around the return on the investment for the brands the athletes that we are able to connect them to what their desired outcomes were and what we were able to achieve for them, and we showcase the incredible content that these athletes are providing at scale across primarily our Instagram and YouTube channels. And then from more from, like an investor and business development standpoint, me personally, and then our company as a whole does a lot of promotion of the campaigns and case studies on LinkedIn as well. So that's our social piece to thought leadership. The second piece is we've done a lot within the PR and advertising public relations space. So we've been featured in all of the largest publications in the world to date. And we talk about the value that we're delivering to brands, the value of the product. What? Mission is the impact that we're having. We've luckily built a really good network of journalists that are happy and excited to tell our story. The third piece is email marketing. So we do a lot of regular email marketing to brands. So we showcase a lot of these campaigns. We talk about the ROI and what that experience was like. So email marketing. And then that goes hand in hand with the investor updates as well. So that's social email marketing, PR. And then the last piece is on our website itself. So we manage a blog in which we talk about what we're seeing in the landscape, both from a regulatory standpoint and from an influencer marketing standpoint. And we're regularly updating the blog to talk about that experience as well, and then enjoying time with people like yourself on podcasts to tell the story.

Callan Harrington  30:54

Yeah. So if I'm summarizing that, you have a piece going out that's promoting the product, what you're doing the campaigns, and that's geared more towards, you know, driving more brands and just driving awareness in general, on what you guys are doing. You have things, whether that's coming from you and LinkedIn posts or emails and things like that, that are more mogul related, that more investor type related, that they would be interested in. And then you have the PR that, I'm assuming that's there to really provide that validation, right? If you're in Wall Street, journal, TechCrunch, some of these well-respected organizations that provides that third party validation, is that right? Or did I misinterpret any of that?

Ayden Syal  31:33

No, you're spot on. And there's a variety of other different things that we've done in the past, right? We do a lot of on-campus activations and visits to student athletes and athletic departments, talking to them about the offering and the software and helping educate athletes on brand building and content creation and best practices within the space. And then we speak at a lot of conferences. I've had the pleasure of speaking at South by Southwest in Ventures, the Rally Innovation Conference, the ESPN Sports Business Symposium, and a variety of other conferences over the past year or so as well.

Callan Harrington  32:07

Of all of those, which one's moved the needle the most for you guys, from a conference standpoint, I would say, of all of the thought leadership pieces that you're doing, which one of those has moved the needle the most?

Ayden Syal  32:17

Oh, it's a great question. So I would say from an athlete standpoint. So athlete awareness, athlete acquisition, the biggest piece is our social presence. We've really built a strong social presence across Instagram, and it showcases just how easy it is for athletes, and that this is something that all athletes can do. So that's really helped on the athlete side, and then on the brand side, I would say the area that we've done the best and has delivered the most value is on the email marketing front. So we do a really great job of prospecting and generating leads from a sales perspective. And then all of those leads get added into our email marketing sequences so that we can keep continuously reengage with those prospects and showcase the impact that we ultimately drive for their companies.

Callan Harrington  33:07

Are these inbound leads that you're then putting in a nurture sequence, or is this also you're using email marketing to drive cold, outbound leads that are then getting put into a nurture sequence? Or both?

Ayden Syal  33:19

On the email marketing side, it's more of the former. So anytime that we add a lead, so we host a meeting with someone, or they come in through our paid advertising channels or our website forms, they get added into the nurture sequence, and that's automated through HubSpot, which is our CRM and then on the direct sales outbound leads. This is more just like cold outbound email prospecting. It's less of an email marketing initiative and more of a traditional sales outbound tactic.

Callan Harrington  33:53

What do those nurture campaigns look like?

Ayden Syal  33:55

So when a brand comes into our sequences initially, you know, it's a welcome sequence that welcomes them to the platform. Talk to them about some of the features and functionality available with mogul and at a high level, the value that we deliver for customers that engage and activate on the platform. And then throughout the rest of the sequence, we'll provide onboarding materials. So we'll say, hey, you know, we noticed you haven't posted a job yet. This is how you can get started. We're available to speak with you, to help you get started, if you like that as well. The next piece of the sequence is providing case studies, showing them on a regular cadence, some of the campaigns that are being done on the platform, so that it excites them from the content that they can generate. And then after that, it's just more of a regular cadence of product updates and check ins, more than anything else, if they haven't engaged, if they've engaged, then it's less of a nurture sequence, because generally speaking, the brands who engage on the platform continue to engage on a regular. Basis, then they've already built a rapport with our team.

Callan Harrington  35:03

And that's the area where I see a lot of companies miss out. And you know, you spend so much money to generate these leads, and then they fall to the wayside, and a good nurture campaign can be an absolute gold mine. You own those for life once you once they're in there. So I love that. I love that breakdown. What comes next for MOGL and what comes next for yourself personally?

Ayden Syal  35:26

Yeah, I can start with the MOGL side of things, right? So, more than anything else, we work on a regular basis with our subscribing brand partners to really identify what remaining pain points and obstacles remain in the product, and then also, ultimately opportunities, both from a product standpoint, but also a sales standpoint, to really scale the initiatives and campaigns that they've already managed on the platform. So for us, MOGL, we're really focused on removing any additional friction in the product that still remains, so that we can automate and streamline the process even further. We think that even from July 1 of 2021 we had a really streamlined process with automatic contract generation, talent sourcing, integrated messaging and tracking. But now we're really taking all of the data that we have and all of this vast campaign experience that we have to really build within the platform and optimize for social performance, because now we know what actually works and what types of campaigns deliver the most value for brands. For me personally, I'm just really, really excited about our progress as a company. We've grown 5x over the last less than a year, and we've finally really identified the appropriate pricing model that works well for brands and delivers value to them and keeps them coming back. So I'm extremely excited just being at the helm of this incredible team. All of our success is kudos to the team and the impact and efforts that they've put forward. We want to continue to establish formal partnerships with larger groups that need our help, a lot of media networks and agencies are looking for incremental ways to deliver value to their clients and reach Gen Z consumers, and we have a really turnkey and seamless way for them to do that. So that's really important for us as a company. Myself, I'm actually making a move. So I've been in New York now for the last eight years, and I was raised in New Jersey, so I've really been here for over 20 years now, and I'm making the move actually to Los Angeles in July, more of a personal move, more than anything else, for me. But I'm excited about the additional opportunity that will bring to MOGL because of all the agencies that are in the Los Angeles, Southern California area.

Callan Harrington  38:04

Well, that makes complete sense. There is something that it can't be understated, how important it is to be where the density of people in around your kind of interest industry are. You don't have to be there forever. But there's a huge advantage to that. Just the pure networking that you're not even trying to do just happens a lot more when you're in those areas.

Ayden Syal  38:29

What's really exciting, too, is my co-founder and I are both currently based in New York, so we'll have both coasts kind of covered at this point, and our VP of sales is based in Dallas. So as a result, from a geographic distribution perspective, MOGL really is well situated heading into the summer.

Callan Harrington  38:48

So Ayden, last question I have for you, if you could have a conversation with your younger self, age, totally up to you. What would that conversation be? What advice would you give them?

Ayden Syal  38:58

Oh, man, that's a tough question. I would say that the number one thing, and not looking back on my early career with any degree of regret, right? I think a lot of what we've been able to accomplish was because of, you know, the foundation that I was able to lay and build within financial services. But the one thing that I would say going throughout high school and college was that I never considered that a career in sports or sports tangential was even an option. I think that, you know, going to a school like Notre Dame, a lot of people go the traditional finance, accounting, and law routes, and I always assumed that that was really the only opportunities available to me. I really didn't explore the broader tech and startup ecosystem at all while I was in school. And I think the the number one thing that I would say to my younger self is to, you know, have a little bit more of an open mind and explore. And participate in a lot of those different experiences prior to actually identifying what I wanted to do with my professional career.

Callan Harrington  40:08

I can empathize with that to the team, and I went to Ohio State, and I was a finance major, and everything was pushing you towards corporate finance, and I would have been bored out of my mind. I just got lucky that I got pushed into more entrepreneurial type of careers. But I think that's such good advice. And I hope colleges it seems like they are, it seems like colleges now are, or it's a little bit more broad than that, because I think, you know, the tech space has gotten so large, but I think that's such such good advice. But Ayden, thanks for coming on, man. This was a lot of fun, and I appreciate coming on, taking the time.

Ayden Syal  40:45

Absolutely, Callan, I really appreciate the time. It's always great spending time with someone from Columbus. I hope to see you in Columbus. You know, in the coming months, I'll be there over the summer, and wish you all the best, and thank you for everything.

Callan Harrington  40:58

Absolutely, looking forward to it, brother. All right, talk soon. I hope you enjoyed Ayden and I's conversation. I thought Ayden gave an excellent breakdown of how to work with influencers. And if you want to learn more about Ayden, you can find him on LinkedIn in the show notes. Also, if you liked this episode, you could find me on LinkedIn to let me know, and if you really want to support the show, our review on Apple Podcast or Spotify is very much appreciated. Thanks for listening, everybody, and see you next week.