Show Notes
Every time you unlock your phone, somebody makes money. It just isn't you.
Forty to sixty hours a week. That is what the average person spends on a smartphone, which works out to somewhere between a third and half of your waking life. Big tech built trillion dollar fortunes on that time. You signed up for exactly none of it.
Dan Novaes wants to change the math.
He is the co-founder and CEO of Mode.Inc, the company behind Mode Mobile, the EarnPhone, and EarnOS. He has raised over $110 million, all of it from retail investors, not a single traditional venture round in the mix. He has 65,000 shareholders who own a piece of the thing they use. He built a physical smartphone, got it into Walmart and Best Buy, then looked at the P&L and walked away from hardware entirely. He now buys "dead" consumer apps that nobody else wants and turns them into first-party data assets for AI labs.
Oh, and he lost 35 pounds and ran a marathon while doing it. The best ideas, he says, come in the float tank.
This conversation moves fast. Ryan and Dan get into the Anthropic settlement, the Cloudflare crawler wall going up September 15, why hedge funds are buying your Amazon receipts, why the 55-plus demographic funded a company built for budget-conscious app users, and why a QR code reader was one of the smartest acquisitions Dan ever made.
Mode.Inc: https://mode.inc Youngstown Community Food Center: https://www.ycfoodcenter.org Dan Novaes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielnovaes/
Ryan Estes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/
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