This story as discussed is based on an interview with Sabba Keynejad, co-founder with Tim Mamedov of the AI-powered video editing platform. Veed. The piece is edited for length and clarity.
In 2013, my roommate Virgil and I were obsessed with him Breaking Bad. Around mid-October, the season finale was coming, and we would finally know what happened to Jesse Pinkman and Walter White. We loved you. It was our favorite thing to watch and do as an apartment when I was at university.
I was sitting in my room one Friday night, and we were both in art school, and Virgil had a gas mask for spray painting, and he walks into my room and he’s like, “BAD! I went, “Oh my god, we can sell it!” He’s like, “What?” and I was like, “We can sell it! We can sell it as Halloween costumes!” That’s how it started. It was that easy.
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“This was not my first experience as an entrepreneur.”
This was not my first experience as an entrepreneur. I previously had another business when I was 17, selling American style red mugs in the UK, which surprisingly was a very neglected business, it turns out. After that, I moved on to beer pong kits. But selling Halloween costumes was a lot of fun; it was like a little side project.
Later that night, around 11:00, my roommate and I set up a page on eBay to sell this Halloween costume. We got the materials: green gloves, DuPont chemical-grade suits and gas masks. We didn’t order anything but made sure everything was available for next day delivery. We have listed Halloween costumes on eBay with a five day lead time to give us enough time to order everything we need. If we have made an auction, we can pack and ship it.
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“We’re like, ‘Wait a minute, we’re on to something.’
We got everything together, and in the morning, we had our first two commercials, so we were like, “Cool.” We sold it, and it was amazing. That day, we got four more orders, and we’re like, “Wait a minute, we’re on to something.”
The good thing is, we got competition, and the way we dealt with the competition was to send them messages Breaking Bad quotes. They were joining in the fun; everything was not easy at all. But for the competition, we also thought, How can we add more value here? So we made this fake meth, which was basically sugar and blue food coloring, and we cut it up and put it in a bag.
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We also thought about expanding to other platforms like Etsy, but Etsy didn’t want us to sell there because it wasn’t done right, so it was a lot of trying to figure out how to do all this quickly.
Another challenge was that we had hundreds of orders. So, our flat became a shared space, and we got our roommates to help us. It was so much fun.
After one week, we had converted $14,000 and made $3,500 per person.
“I use those skills to inform the business I run today.”
It got to the point where the UK ran out of chemical grade hazmat suits, and that’s how we had to stop. Because these DuPont suits are for proper laboratory testing, there’s a huge demand for them, and obviously we’ve driven the demand for that.
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My flatmate Virgil is now a very successful commercial film director based in Madrid. I run a technology startup called Veed, which is an AI-powered video editing platform. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, which invested $35 million last year. The company has about 200 people. We have about 10 million monthly users, and those users create about three million videos every month.
It’s really good that I learned business in art school and used those skills to inform the business I do today.
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