Rafael Gonçalves  00:56

Hello everybody. Hello. So again, this is the 20th edition of KoreTalkX, KoreConX’s podcast of education on private capital markets. My name is Rafael Gonclaves. I’m a KoreConX communication coordinator. And my weapon of choice today is coffee, freshly brewed coffee with caffeine, please. She was confessing backstage that she likes some decaf and some green tea. I disagree, but it’s okay.

 

Mona DeFrawi 01:24

I like Caffeine.

 

Rafael Gonçalves  01:28

Yeah, it’s true green tea also has got caffeine. But today, we’re very happy to be here with Mona DeFrawi, CEO and founder of Radivision. They are a great KorePartner. And I believe it’s going to be extremely exciting to follow the show today. Mona, very happy to have you here. Welcome. Please tell us who you are.

 

Mona DeFrawi 01:50

Thank you. Great to be here with you. I’ve really enjoyed all my interactions with KoreConX and your client companies. So I have been an entrepreneur in the entrepreneurial ecosystem for three decades. Been part of 12 startup teams, the last four as CEO and founder. And I’ve had two prior exits, including having pioneered the private market. So back in 2007, the top VC leaders came to me and said, We’ve got to fix this IPO crisis, I came up with the concept of the private markets. And that’s what started the whole unicorn trend and where we are today. And now I’m back with Radivision today. My fourth startup. So Radivision is a startup network, like a television network. Radivision–it’s television for the radical visionary. So we’re really here as a PR, IR marketing branding platform for amazing startups to help get the word out. Because in the private markets, you’re not public, yet. It’s much harder for people to find you and see you. And we’re here to support your fundraising to support your recruiting, to support your sales, and to support your success. And I’m happy to answer more questions.

 

Rafael Gonçalves  03:01

That’s wonderful. And what’s impressive is that it’s the fourth startup, you’re running, right?

 

Mona DeFrawi 03:08

Yeah, I’m crazy certifiable.

 

Rafael Gonçalves  03:13

We all have to be a little bit. But yeah, that’s definitely that experience and background and how you view things. That’s probably fantastic and extremely valuable to all our listeners, our clients or partners, and whoever is whoever can hear us. We are on LinkedIn, and we are on YouTube. And we will be on Spotify later on. So it’s really a pleasure to have you here and to be able to hear your stories and your sharing with us about your startups. So Radivision, you just said it’s a network like a TV network. Can you just explain a little bit more about how it works and what it is exactly?

 

Mona DeFrawi 04:00

Sure. I’d love to like, you know, would you kind of share the screen so people can see it? Sure. Did share. Okay. Yeah, so I created this to be like, let me share my screen here. Oh, my goodness, that’s making me pick the window. Here it is. Okay, so this is Radivision.com. So it’s like television for radical visionaries. Radivision. And you can see has a very similar user interface like Netflix, or, like Disney plus very high quality. You can watch videos, you can learn, you can invest so you can find companies who are fundraising who are just telling their stories. We’re not a broker-dealer. We’re not a crowdfunding platform. We are here to support you as a media, streaming, and community platform. We also have a marketplace we have the ecosystem where you can learn about who the players are and who the unicorns are, with a top investment there’s our and more. And then we have pages here. So you can see about Radivision. You know our story, there’s a video from Ariel revolution on Radivision found here, I’m Mona DeFrawi, the founder and CEO of Radivision of the new streaming and community platform for the startup world.

 

Mona DeFrawi 05:24

Radivision believes entrepreneurship and equity creation are the most powerful ways to grow wealth. And at the same time, we’re innovating and improving the quality of our world. We’ve created several communities, and radical visionaries, which is basically any new member of the platform that gets featured in our top carousel. So this gets 50% of all traffic on the site. And you can vary quickly from you know, each, you know, video or each company, you can get to your company pages, your founder pages, we also have the pitch planet community, which has floating now, so all of these companies including Radivision, most of these are crowdfunding, but some of them are just doing, you know, other types of funding. They’re just collecting investor data, it’s also just a great marketing tool. And so pitch planet is a show where people can come in and watch the 99-second trailer, after the next and get a very quick view. So the average person comes in and watches eight videos. And then when they find one that they like, they can go in and get more information if the company is fundraising. So the video follows your picture in pictures, so you don’t miss a beat. And then if there’s an investment opportunity, there’ll be a URL to get more information, or we collect information and give it to the company. So if the viewer is interested, so with crowdfunding, you’re talking to consumers to a retail audience. So this is a little bit of the site here. Maybe. So if you go down the page, by the way, so here’s our shoe economics series, it’s eight very high quality produced videos done with tryna our partner, we have research showing that, you know, a couple dozen studies about women and diversity. We created a show driven like carpool karaoke, for entrepreneurship. So it’s basically a mentoring session in the back of a car. And it’s, you know, people in the backseat, they’re driven. And very quickly, you can go to Shivani. Paige, who’s the CEO of Talla, you can get some of her information about her connect to her company right away, get their information, the company websites, everything is just a click away. 

 

Rafael Gonçalves  07:50

How many pieces do you have online right now?

 

Mona DeFrawi 07:53

So we have over 50,000 pieces of content. A lot of those are video. Yeah, but we have 49 original videos that we’ve created through She-economics, black is the new green, which is a live interview series driven the visionaries, COVID printers. And then these are other shows, so many of these are produced, but like how to not get F’ed the show. That research showed us would bring 5 million viewers and 700,000 new subscribers to Netflix, for example. So we’re working on getting through to them, and we’re talking to producers who work with them and Disney and so on. And then we also have other shows, like parachutes, like Anthony Bourdain, for startups, like going all over the world and showing what different cultures are like to be an entrepreneur. Silicon Valley Safari does the opposite. It shows things here in Silicon Valley. So a lot of people before COVID used to come regularly. And they you know, it’s kind of like a safari, they want to see how, you know, the animals do it here in the valley, you have nearly

 

Rafael Gonçalves  08:57

50,000 pieces of content. Do you have a lot of how many hours of wages you have that have been played?

 

Mona DeFrawi 09:07

You know, I don’t have that off the top of my head. I’m sorry, but I’m sure our engineers could tell you that.

 

Rafael Gonçalves  09:13

Amazing, amazing, just 50,000 is a very, is a very impressive number, right? Yeah,

 

Mona DeFrawi 09:21

Well, we’ve created we also created like all profiles for every unicorn, and for all of the Midas list of VCs, we have the top lists, and then now we’re also working to get all the startups and as you know, there are 100 million new startups started every year all over the world. The ones that are venture bankable, 90% of those don’t get funding. So we have a really big problem because we’ve left the Industrial Revolution, we’re in the entrepreneurial revolution. But 90% of all companies can’t get funded and 90% of all investors who are not, you know, institutional or 100 million plus they can’t even get into the ecosystem. So there’s a bifurcation of tremendous wealth created here and relative wealth dropping, dropping, dropping, because these folks up here who are creating, you know, gaining all the equity or taking all the prices up. And data shows us that over 20 years, the last 20 years, the private markets have delivered 70% higher returns than the public markets. There’s half the number of public companies, and most of them are staying private. And it’s just the private world is, it’s private. It’s complicated. It’s fragmented. It’s opaque, you can’t see it. So now Radivision makes it all visible, makes it easy to get to people, and has created a whole bunch of shows that are entertaining for consumers to come in and watch. Because otherwise, they just have Shark Tank. 

 

Rafael Gonçalves  10:42

And so yeah, we wanted to get to that. We believe at KoreConX in the democratization of capital. That’s the first step. The democratizing is important. And that’s why you have to broadcast we need to put mass and messages out, we need messages across and we need to create different types of media because if you go to Tik Tok, you have, you’re competing for attention with an influencer, if you go to Instagram, we’re competing for attention with recipes with cute cat, then I do believe that right now we have, we are in the middle of the economy of attention. 

 

Mona DeFrawi 11:23

You have to call it absolutely. And so and I wanted to cast a wide net because very few people know about crowdfunding, very few people might say, Okay, today I’m gonna go, you know, check out interest for investment. But everybody wants to be entertained, you know, you have time that you feel, you know, checking out your phone, and 90% of that traffic is video nowadays. So we wanted people to be entertained. And every startup story is a hero story. You know, it’s part of the human spirit, you know, to overcome challenges, you know, was from Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology has been part of humanity forever. And it’s the essence of entrepreneurship is really bringing that for I see, you know, a much bigger picture than just it’s a job and money. And all of that 60% of college graduates today, don’t want to work for a large corporation, they want to be entrepreneurs, and 17% graduate with a company already. So you know, the statistics are very high. And yet they come out with all this passion and enthusiasm. And the system is really stacked against them. And there’s, it’s very difficult to fundraise, it’s very difficult to get the word out, everybody has to struggle, everybody has to figure it out on their own. So, you know, we’re here to help with that. And 90% of everything on our platform is free. So everybody can join, and everybody can create a free profile page, just like LinkedIn, or Facebook or anything. And then our goal is to get people in who want to be entertained, just like Shark Tank is an entertainment. It’s a game show, right? And people click like crazy. We know 14 seasons, Shark Tank effect, they buy millions of dollars of products overnight, and they download apps by the millions. So we want to do that for our companies. And we want to activate a third click, which is a click to their URLs for fundraising. Which Shark Tank doesn’t allow you to do you know, so now everybody can be a shark via Radivision. And so we’re here to just facilitate make it easier and help you get the story out. And soon we want people to start doing, you know, 30 seconds, 60 seconds TikTok like videos, hey, we just hired this amazing new person who’s going to do this, we just signed this amazing client, we just released this product feature, we just hit this milestone. And people, the viewers can follow and keep up. So maybe they don’t click to invest the first time. But after they follow the company, they get excited because it is exciting. And so that’s our goal. And I’ve been fundraising for most of the 30 years of my career in investor relations. So it’s really about telling the story. So I’ve been telling stories my whole career. Now Radivision can tell stories at scale.

 

Rafael Gonçalves  13:51

That’s, that’s really fantastic. And it’s very powerful when you think about it, that everybody can be a shark. That’s really what a democratization of capital really is. When you’re talking about online capital formation, we’re talking exactly about that. You are one click away from investing in a company you believe in a product like you’re literally one click away. And that’s the beauty of Radivision. That’s the beauty of KoreConX. We help connect the dots like Steve Jobs once said, and that’s brilliant speech. Right? And you are not in LinkedIn, you are not Facebook, you are not charting, but you have a little bit of social media. You have a little bit of broadcasting, you have a little bit of advertising, of fundraising. How did this idea come up? I mean, you have a lot of experience, of course. 

 

Mona DeFrawi 14:50

Well, you know, I was traveling a lot internationally in from 2014 through 16. And I spent about a quarter of my year traveling living abroad. And I was shocked at what I saw, you know because I picked my head up, I normally, you know, working with startups, you know, 100-hour weeks and, and I suddenly looked up, and I saw this boom everywhere. And I was in the Middle East where I was born originally and came to the US when I was seven and a half. But I was shocked that it was the last place that I thought would be innovating at this level. And it was massive. And everywhere I went, I was keynote speaker, you know, meeting Crown Princes, they were so excited to have people from Silicon Valley there because they were on first-generation entrepreneurship. Here we are in the sixth generation of entrepreneurship. So the scale just like a bacterial infection, you know, it doubles every couple of hours, and then all of a sudden, you have this massive infection. So we’re very infected with entrepreneurship here, and the world is just beginning, but in just a few years since, so back then, and 14 through 16 90%, of the unicorns, were in Silicon Valley now 60% are in Silicon Valley. So, you know, there’s another 30%, and just like five years, six years that are global, so you can learn very quickly, but I realized that we can use mass media as a way to connect the world and connect the wisdom of the six generations. You know, multiplying wisdom here in Silicon Valley in the US so that the whole world could share. And so that was where the driven show came out. Because the information you really need to succeed isn’t in books, and it’s usually not on sites, or it’s very difficult to read. It’s usually from an advisor to you directly. So I thought if we can get all these real advisor conversations, so these aren’t manufacturers, this is a real investor in a real company. And they talk all the time, I have my advisors who I talk to all the time, and I have different ones for, you know, different bullets and different guns for different needs. And you know, we have silver bullets, and I wanted to create driven as a way to share this wisdom and college students went nuts over it, they loved it, they wanted to watch it, and they were consuming it like Shark Tank. And when I did focus groups, I had the two-minute visionaries, the seven-minute which is going to be 10 minutes and driven now. And I thought, Oh, the college students, they’re going to want to see the short attention you no one and no, they made me play the long one, all three episodes, and they couldn’t get enough. And even if it wasn’t a question they wanted to be answered, they felt like they got smarter, being in the car with these really brilliant people solving real problems real-time. And so that’s what I was trying to capture. And I also saw, like, so many venture firms and universities and Y Combinator and other accelerators creating all this wonderful content. And yet, it’s very difficult to find if you’re coming in for the first time. So my thought was to create the central hub for entrepreneurship. So just like Bloomberg is a destination you go to for financial information, Disney for children, and family programming, ESPN for sports and for sports data. And also so you can place your bets. So my thinking was let’s create Radivision. And actually, if I can share slides again, I think a picture’s worth 1000 words,

 

Rafael Gonçalves  18:01

Disney plus for enterpreneurs. That’s an interesting idea.

 

Mona DeFrawi18:06

Or like ESPN, because ESPN also has the data. And I don’t think it’s gonna allow me to share a PowerPoint should right? But I had a really good picture here that I was hoping to share with you guys. Okay, here it is. Can you see it now? The PowerPoint? Yes, yes. Okay, great. And then let me see if I can go. So this is when you’re asking me how did I do this. Well, this is what I saw as these macro forces, right? So everywhere I went all over the world, there’s this massive trend. And I realized that entrepreneurship isn’t just the biggest trend in the world, we’re no longer in the industrial revolution, we’re in the entrepreneurial revolution. And equity is the new money. Okay, so it’s not just about you know, like, crypto is a currency, it’s still currency equity is a whole other level of wealth creation. You know, college students are moving this way entrepreneurs are celebrities. Now even I was becoming a celebrity just because of, you know, being affiliated, and then you only have one show, which didn’t make sense. So the problem that we’re solving is there’s this massive demand for entrepreneurial content, and you have all of these different networks that help to reach consumers and crowdfunding is with consumers. Right? 

 

So there’s nothing created really to reach them. And the sites are transactional, which are great, but everybody has to struggle and spend a lot of money to market separately. So I wanted to create a network effect. So my solution was to create this entrepreneurship network that would create a network effect and we showed that actually so. So, when we created pitch planet and put 30 companies on the pilot program, people came in and watched videos and people doubled everybody allocated a small budget, usually the sponsors allocated brought in some companies, and then for that same budget on social media. They got double the number of video views because of the network effects people came in and watch, you got seven extra views from everybody else’s budget networking together. So that was my goal, not just in pitch planet, but in the whole network that people will be coming on regularly. And of course, our staff is on TikTok, and we’re just starting TikTok actually now. But it’s all over social media, so people can discover us there and then come and then our goal for you and the community is to grow a large community of several 100 million people coming on a regular basis. So we always have fresh programming we have people who can follow your company, they can follow a show, and they’re going to constantly be learning. And with our next round of funding, our plan is to have live linear TV like this also, like we can broadcast co-broadcast with you the wonderful content that you’re creating, so that even more of the community can come in and access what you can help them with.

 

Rafael Gonçalves  21:00

That’s, that’s very nice. But you really have a fantastic tool there with great options with great potential. But who is it for? is like, do you have any recommendations for which stage? My company should be in order to have it to have an efficient profile. Can they just start in? Do you have any idea what should be?

 

Mona DeFrawi 21:32

Well, I mean, honestly, I think any stage can come in, I mean, it’s hard to just be just an idea. Without anything built, everybody wants you to have something built. And I know that counterintuitive, you know that you need the funding to get it built, but you know.

 

Rafael Gonçalves  21:49

Thats really struggling.

 

Mona DeFrawi 21:51

I know. And even though I’ve done a lot, you know, we also had the exact same issue. So everybody has this, you know, 98% of funding goes to non-women-led teams, for example. I had done so much. But I also took on $100 million funding business. So when Hulu got started, they had 100 million from day one for 10% of the company. So you don’t see media networks usually being started. But I believe that with online streaming we could do this, we built a very large product, it’s very sophisticated. It’s not just Netflix, it also has LinkedIn built-in with the profile pages. Because we wanted every single, you know, video to be connected to a company. So people get excited about the company, and can connect to it right away. So it doesn’t take much, you don’t have to have a lot of PR and a lot of you can create posts, and social posts telling your story. But it is good to have a product that people can see. But if you if you’re crowdfunding, you should also have a profile on Radivision so that you’re building community and that you’re drawing from our community for your own startup as well. So we kind of support each other with that. And then my goal, as I mentioned, we want to be doing live TV broadcasting several hours a day like Bloomberg TV does, like cheddar TV, when they got started also, and everything. It’s not news, it’s really entertainment, it’s meant for retail audiences, but we know the data is going to be very valuable. And VCs are starting to use crowdfunding as validation, you know, used to be they were scared of it, and they didn’t want to do it. And the cap tables had too many people now with, you know, as the industry has progressed, and the amount you can raise is much higher VCs are beginning to realize that this is competition. So they’re starting to incorporate it also into their raises. And so when they see that crowdfunding is being validated, that makes them even more interested in the companies now. And it puts pressure also having a crowdfunding campaign puts pressure on other investors, you know, to get it moving because in 2022, we saw very little moved. So I hope that answers that question of who it’s for. So it’s for the startups really at any stage, and we bring the viewers to you.

 

Rafael Gonçalves  24:12

It’s always better to show not tell right and show themselves. So if you have a problem, of course, it’s easier. And you mentioned that 90% of the site Radivision is free. We’re gonna have a free profile. But what do I have to pay for? I believe it will be valuable tricks to explain. 

 

Mona DeFrawi 24:33

Yeah. Yeah, the only thing that people can do, it’s optional, in the pitch planet show is to allocate a marketing budget to it because when you allocate a budget. Then, you know, it builds everybody who allocates builds on the other because you get eight video views and then the next person brings in their eight and so you’re getting some of their views and so on. It really creates an exponential effect. It’s not just additive. So because we’re not yet Bloomberg, you know, we are market launching in a big way. Now, we’ve been building, developing, creating all this content, loading 50,000 items, you know, producing 49 original episodes singing award-winning clients. And the clients are large companies, brands, and media networks, who are paying for all of this so that everybody can have it for free. But if that was our way, so we basically crowdfunded the pitch planet show from the companies who are their, participants, they can spend as little as $300 a month. And it’s a way to just get a network effect. So if they’re going to be spending money on social media anyway, you’re gonna get double the number of views with pitch planet, and you are on the social media. So that’s what our test results showed last year. And it doesn’t really make sense to spend the money to get half the results, right?

 

Rafael Gonçalves  26:02

Yeah, social media, just like social media, your numbers are gonna get better, right?

 

Mona DeFrawi 26:07

Because the community will be there, and it’ll keep growing. We’re now going after the college community in a very big way. Because they’re extremely sticky, but they may not have a lot of money. But it’s funny, I had, you know, college students have come in and invest or testing the waters campaign, or not live with crowdfunding yet. But young people did it. Yeah. I mean, I had a woman in the industry who’s never invested in crowdfunding, she came and she’s very conservative, ask questions, and I answered the questions. I invited her to call me if she wanted, and we spent an hour on the phone zooming on Saturday, and she invested, you know, and it was, or she put in a reservation to invest, I guess, was the correct term for tested water. And it was very exciting because she, you know, she knew she’s been working hard, her whole career. She’s like, you know, senior mid-level to lower senior level, you know, so she’s pretty advanced in her career, not at the very top yet, because she’s still younger. And, but she also like, you know, wants to invest for her future. And she could see what the markets they where they are now, you know, the public markets are kind of dead. And she lives in the San Francisco Bay area. So she sees startups and her friends and where the wealth has been created, but most of the world, it’s invisible to them. My parents are college professors, you know, brilliant neuroscientists, and PhDs from Berkeley, Cornell University, and the University of Maryland School of medicine, and my father still doesn’t understand how a convertible note works. He, you know, wants to have a share in his hand, which is fine, you know, we’re doing an equity round next, and, you know, in our near future, and, but it’s a whole new language, just like when we went from the agricultural revolution to the industrial revolution, it was, again, a whole new language. And it took a while, right, you know, you know, when people started those who had access, and we know the names, right, the Carnegie’s the Stanford’s the Morgans and financed it. Mellon. And then today, we have those same, you know, robber barons, you know, the Zuckerberg, the Bezos, the Musk’s, you know, there’s a few at the top. And just like when they started with factories, there were a lot of issues. It took a while for the industry to mature. But we’ve been doing this now since the 1960s. And tell came out in the late 60s, Fairchild industries before that, until went public in the early 70s, Apple and Microsoft went public in the early 80s. Now remember that 1984 commercial you probably don’t you’re probably you know, not even in diapers yet, but I remember it. I was in college,

 

Rafael Gonçalves  28:41

So I will remember sorry. I was graduating college in 83.

 

Mona DeFrawi 28:45

Thank you very much. And Apple went public in like 82 or 83. And the 1984 commercial came out of Super Bowl from the book, George Orwell. And now they’re, you know, they’re the big corporate brand. You know, so the world has transformed, but it’s very important for us, just like when you went from agriculture to industrial people had to have reading and writing and, you know, the school had to become more formalized and the agricultural revolution people dropped out early, you know, you just had the absolute basics. So you could make money and write invoices. So people have to become a lot more educated. And then today’s world you have to get seriously educated, you know, and you have to have no data. But now you also have to understand finance, legal, you know, all sorts of expert entrepreneurial terminology, how equity works. Exactly. So we’re here to help expose people to the industries but also help them learn equity, equity is the new money. This is a convertible note. This is a safe, this is how they work. Here’s a glossary of terms. We have a whole Tiktok campaign coming out with an equity glossary, for example, I won’t be dancing, so don’t worry.

 

Rafael Gonçalves  29:54

But there’s something you mentioned before that I would really like to get back to you about how some productions have in house production. She-economics, I believe COVID printers, black is the new green. Can you tell us how it is produced? And how do you guys decide on the topic of the theme and how do you guys go ahead on that? Because I really, really is great. She-economics is also great. They’re very relevant moments we have we are right now, that’s at least to tell us a little bit more about them.

 

Mona DeFrawi  30:35

Yeah, so thank you very much. So I’m basically the creative director for the company. And I just this is something that I’ve been doing finance my whole career, right? So this is I’m having my fun. Now, this is the creativity that’s been pent up inside me for 30 years, I actually have a second major also in art. So, and I worked in an advertising agency, I was a suit, you know, managing accounts, but still, you know, around creative people. And so this is an opportunity to express that creativity, I’ve been in this industry for three decades. So I know where the bodies are buried, and I have a few of my own limbs and organs out there, you know, I’ve earned my stripes. I know how this works, you know, the ugly side, as well as the that’s why we have a show called How to not get Fd. Because it’s very real, you know, 90% of companies fail. And we don’t want you stepping into those potholes, you know, over and over and over again, like learn from other people’s mistakes so that you can come in at a much higher level and succeed. So it’s really a show about success. And so all these shows were created because I saw Shark Tank. And most of us in the industry cringe when we think about Shark Tank, because it’s not at all that we do. But it’s still a very successful game show on TV. And people. Most people in America and the world think that it’s actually what entrepreneurship is. And there are three shows that people watch globally. The World Cup, you know, in soccer, you know, football, the Oscars, people tend to watch that all over the world and Shark Tank. 

 

So there’s there’s a phenomenon, you know, there’s There’s more than meets the eye with that. And I wanted to create a whole like a whole network that if Shark Tank wanted to be a network that could be on the Radivision, it would fit in the theme. But I wanted a real show. So like the driven for carpool karaoke, black is the new green, you know, black founders, it’s a real issue, diversity. But we wanted black population, you know, black and brown citizens in America to have mentors and examples, you know, have great success. And there are many, many, many that have succeeded. And so really, it was a show, it’s a live interview show. So that one COVID printers, the renovation live, general umbrella, those are all live shows we produce similar to what you’re producing here. And we do seasons of them. And so we you know, cast people, we invite guests to come in, we present their show. And then also while they’re talking, the audience can also click on their profile pages. If they have a live crowdfunding campaign, the URL is right there, they can look at the company pages. And they can keep coming back, they can follow the company, when there’s new information being uploaded by the company or the founder is automatically sent to their inbox. And they can continue to follow the company. So maybe they don’t invest today, maybe they invest in the future, maybe they get so excited, they want to join the company, recruiting is always challenging. Maybe they want to collaborate. So there are four ways to connect on the opportunities page. All of those are one click away. For viewers and then a show like Xi economics. We actually worked with triad their CMO, the Chief Marketing Officer, it was the President of Disney Studios, and EVP Executive Vice President of Disney global marketing, like one of the top positions of the company. He’s very famous and brilliant. And he saw Radivision and loved it and really loved she economics and licensed different he CO produced it with us. So we came to a deal he already had built, you know, built-in studio and a huge budget. So they basically invested half a million dollars into producing the show with us. I was a creative director, I had creative control with my partner trying it. They wanted to bring on Emily Chang from Bloomberg to be the host and to leave the interviews. I agree. She’s wonderful. And we did eight very highly produced beautiful interviews. And that was season one. And now we can go to Season Two and do more. And we want to create an editorial production so that in March for Women’s History Month, the whole month is themed with women’s content. So we’re working towards that now where we’ve identified all these terrific organizations helping women entrepreneurs, and they’re all going to be interviewed live. They will be throughout our social media so that you know people can come in and connect to their portfolio companies, to their organizations and So that’s like the future if she cannot mix, we think this is going to be $100 million brand and this massive community. And we’re here to support that. Driven.

 

Rafael Gonçalves  35:10

Right, so we have in a second season. So that’s a spoiler. You’re getting.

 

Mona DeFrawi  35:16

We’re talking to big sponsors for that now. And then we’re organizing, we’re actually going to work to commission new research studies, I showed that earlier, there are so many studies, and every single one of them shows that when there’s a woman involved in the team. You know, even if there are three, four founders, if just one of them is a woman, it counts as you know, female-founded. And they use it before COVID, it was 2.2% of all funds. That means 98% of all funds don’t go to even having one woman on the team. After COVID. The new study was just announced a couple of weeks ago, 1.9%, we’ve sunk to a new low, you know, so it’s even harder for women founders to raise money. And so we wanted to create a brand around that. And we launched last year in February, Black History Month, we launched black is the new green. And so we’re looking for the right sponsor now for season two and to create a whole community around that. And we have a new community, we’re growing around equity as the new money and equity IQ. So I’ve been tweeting on this for eight, nine years. And so soon in the upper navbar, you’re going to see equity IQ as its own destination. And equity is the new money the campaign that’s coming out with the tiktoks and everything else. And then we hired producers because we hadn’t yet built out Radivision studios from the beginning from 2016 After I saw this global booming, I said, Let me test the concept. Will people consume entrepreneurship content as entertainment? Like we knew Shark Tank did it but would they do it with reality-based live? You know? And I thought Yes, it’s the internet. People are like more raw YouTube, you know, influencer, like so we hired an incredible producer Emmy award-winning, who had a lot of reality experience. And she did the three episodes of driven sorry. And she did the nine episodes, the first episodes of the visionaries and they went bonkers. We had a million video views in the first month. And for every view that we paid for, we only spent $5,000 in ADS. And we got like 20 More that were shared. So people virally shared it like crazy, especially globally. And because they’re hungrier, right, they have fewer options out there. They can’t like in Silicon Valley, like every night of the week, you could be at a live event before. And they’re coming back. Yeah. And then now, you know, you have webinars and stuff all the time because of COVID. So thankfully, that’s another way of spreading it, but they’re all over the place. There’s no one central place, you can come and find it all. And we want it to be that central hub. So eventually, we will have renovation studios eventually will produce in house but for a large production like how to not get asked, you know, that’s a multimillion-dollar show. And that, that we’re talking to several very top-notch producers now we’re very excited. And also for She-economics, we have some of the biggest names in Hollywood.

 

Rafael Gonçalves  38:10

But yeah, I really, really liked the I really liked both, both of them were in great shape and omics and black, the new green, they’re, they’re just fantastic. They’re just fantastic. So Mona, we are reaching 40 minutes, I believe we have to wrap it up. Unfortunately, we got to wrap it up, because we ran out of time. So just to close our core talks today, please, would you like to invite our audience to follow your pages to join your sites to subscribe, please, please?

 

Mona DeFrawi  38:44

We would love that. And the more like, if you like the idea, please join. So you can join as a founder as a company as an investor and also as an entrepreneur. So as a viewer, and so come in and join, it’s free, create your pages, and let us know who you are and what you like, you know, we’re still in the early stages. So we can, you know, be influenced to produce more of what you want. And every company I feel should have their visionaries episode which we can help to produce and their pitch planet, which is user-generated content. So it’s your 99-second pitch, and it’s your three to 10-minute pitch, you know, the trailer and the full episodes, everyone can have that you can create that and just upload it and have that available and we can start to push it for you. And as we grow our audience, they’ll come and see you. And so we’d love for that. And certainly, you can follow us on social media as well. But if you join us, we can put it right in your inbox and make it super easy for you to hear about new shows and new opportunities.

 

Rafael Gonçalves  39:46

Yeah, I would advise everyone to subscribe to the site because there’s great content there. Great entrepreneurs it’s a very it’s a great experience of browsing and watching and I want to thank everyone who has been watching us and who has been listening to us either on LinkedIn YouTube or Spotify. Don’t forget to follow our channels on all social media. Don’t forget to subscribe to Spotify. And we’ll be here on a bi-weekly basis with more content, more entrepreneurs, and more stories. Thank you, Mona. Thank you everyone. Goodbye. Thank you