Chase Jarvis: I am prepared to light it on fire.

John Lee Dumas: Chase is an award winning photographer and the founder and CEO of CreativeLive, an online education platform with more than 1,000 teachers of which I’m one of, 1,500 classes in 2 billion minutes consumed. He shot campaigns for Apple, Samsung, Nike, and Red Bull, and he lives in Seattle and San Fran where he oversees CreativeLive, the world’s largest livestreaming education platform. Chase take a minute, fill in some gaps from that intro, and give us just a little glimpse of your personal life.

Chase Jarvis: Sure. Well, I think you hit on the highlights of the professional stuff. Personally, my background is as a creator. I was a creator at a very young age and didn’t know what that was to be that or didn’t know how to call myself or identify that. I sent a lot of my youth being really active in sports. I went to college on a soccer scholarship where I was essentially repressing my creative side.

And then that came out as sort of a young adult, I started pursuing my passions as a photographer and a director. And that parlayed into some of the career things that you just hit on. I split time between Seattle and San Francisco. Disproportionately in San Francisco right now. I have an amazing wife who has been my partner in life for 20 years now and my partner in business for almost the same amount of time.

She was very critical for my career as a photographer and a director. She ran the business side. She’s incredible and helped really influential in the early days of CreativeLive. Now I’m focused a lot on CreativeLive. I find as much or more valuable instead of just creating in helping others create as well.

And instead of, I guess, the analogy is instead of giving people a fish, if the gift of my creativity would be a fish, instead of giving them a fish, I also want to help them understand how to fish for themselves to lead a career and a life that aligns with their dreams and hopes and passions.

And yeah, I consider myself a hardworking, affable guy who likes to go with the flow. And there’s plenty of stubborn little bits in there that will come out and I’m sure in your Entrepreneur On Fire interview here, but ultimately, very happy and excited about adding value to the world specifically around creativity and the future of it.

John Lee Dumas: Affable is a word, Fire Nation, I will say. I got to hang out with Chase in person a few times and not too long ago. Well, actually, now that we look at it, it was a little while ago. A couple years ago.

Chase Jarvis: I know.

John Lee Dumas: Whoa.

Chase Jarvis: The time flies.

John Lee Dumas: In his San Fran office, and guys, they’re studios. Everything that CreativeLive does is just first class. I mean, we went down there, took the tour. We had a full walkthrough day before we went, and then we got on stage the next day. And everything was just, like, through the roof as far as quality. I mean, Alex Bloomberg was there, and now, I’m actually an investor with Gimlet because of that meeting. So things came out of that Chase which was really cool. So there’s a lot of fun things happen –

Chase Jarvis: I love it.

John Lee Dumas: – when you put creative minds together. And Chase EOFire we’re really focused on the journey of the entrepreneur. I mean, you’re an entrepreneur on fire literally. Like, let’s talk about your revenue first and foremost. Like, what ways do you generate money in your businesses today?

Chase Jarvis: I have several businesses, but I’d say 99 percent of my focus and what I really want to concentrate on I want to be sort of known for in this particular moment is really the focus on CreativeLive. So if we can focus on that, the business model behind CreativeLive is really simple. It’s a freemium model, and what that means is that we allow anyone in the world to come participate in the learning platform here.

And a couple of key differences are we have the world’s top experts, not just anyone who’s good. We have Pulitzer Prize winners, Time’s best sellers, Grammy Award winners, really the best and the best, some of the best entrepreneurs of our time. People like Richard Branson, Mark Cuban, Tim Ferriss on the platform, and we give the world access to that content for free 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

But that’s on a schedule that we promote, so if we’re showing certain things at certain times, if you want to control what you watch or you want to watch something over and over on your own schedule, then you have to buy access to it. So yeah, that freemium model is the only education model on the internet that really provides that open access and yet has a very sustainable, powerful business model behind it. So that’s where our revenues come from. A certain percentage of people they want to own the class, watch it at their own time, and that’s where we make the bucks.

John Lee Dumas: Yeah, sustainable and powerful are two words I would use. I mean, it just seems to work for everybody. I mean, again, like, you have these great studios. You bring in topnotch presenters. I mean, you named the people. I mean, I know that –

Chase Jarvis: Sure.

John Lee Dumas: – to this day – so two years later I’m getting these big checks from CreativeLive from my course that I did two years ago that took me –

Chase Jarvis: Yeah.

John Lee Dumas: – a day to have a blast in San Francisco. So it works for everybody Fire Nation. It works for CreativeLive. It works for people like me to take time out and create a full day of a presentation or multiple days, whatever it might be. So it’s really cool what Chase has created here. We’re gonna kinda dive more into that. But first and foremost Chase one of the things that we really focus on with an Entrepreneur On Fire is not just the good, which we’ve been talking about so far. But we talk about the bad. We talk about –

Chase Jarvis: Ooh.

John Lee Dumas: – the struggles.

Chase Jarvis: How long do you got?

John Lee Dumas: I know, right?

Chase Jarvis: There’s so many struggles.

John Lee Dumas: Take me to your worst struggle though. I want to hear your worst entrepreneurial moment to date.

Chase Jarvis: Ooh, of course, you mentioned earlier the thing that I’m building. I want to first say that there’s more than 100 people that go to work at CreativeLive every day, so it is a team effort. We’re all in this together, and without the world-class content and the creators that we bring on the platform, we’d be nothing. So I want to acknowledge that for sure. But I think part of what made a lot of CreativeLive possible was some earlier and one particular massive failure on my part, and as many things do, they sort of pave a way for what’s to come.

You apply that learning, and the learning for me was around an app that I created in 2009 called best camera. And best camera was the first photo app to allow you to take pictures, add cool effects, and share it to social. So yeah, so it was long before Instagram and Path and all of those things, and it basically was a key lever in kicking off the global photo sharing craze that we all know so well.

And it’s very hard to go wait a minute. There was a time when we weren’t sharing a trillion images every quarter. And the reality is yeah, and it wasn’t all that long ago. So the short back story is that my career as a photographer and a director I was carrying phones around with me all the time. And when they first started to have a camera – this was actually pre iPhone – I started taking pictures.

And remember at this time, I’m at the peak of the photography industry traveling to say New Zealand for a month with 60 people to take five pictures. Huge budgets for the Nikes and some of the names that you dropped earlier, and yet, I was deriving a huge amount, maybe more joy, from taking pictures with my then half a megapixel phone.

But the problem was it was very early in the internet that the social networks were just getting started, and there was no way to really share that work. So I was going through many leaps and problems and hoops to enter it to try and share these photographs that I was taking on my crappy little – remember, I have access to hundreds of thousands of dollar camera, and this, like, $400.00 phone – well, the iPhone first came out.

And I started trying to share that. And ultimately, I ended up scratching my own itch. I created that iPhone app called Best Camera, which went to No. 1 in the App Store. We developed it through 2008 and 9 and launched it in the fall of 2009. It went to No. 1 in the App Store. It was App of the Year. Phil Shiller, who’s the marketing guru at Apple stood on stage and said it was his favorite app with CNN and Facebook.

So needless to say, that was also back when you paid for apps. They were 3 bucks. So it did well on that, but it’s not the Instagram of today. And short story long I got in a legal snafu with my developer around what the – we had a contract that said that his shop needed to develop 12 different iterations over the course of the next year, and it was a revenue split.

And at some point when they were paid back for the work that they’d done, the revenue split would flip. And ultimately, we thought it was gonna take about a year to pan back. Well, the app was so successful; we had them paid back in six days.

John Lee Dumas: Wow!

Chase Jarvis: So yeah, and that sounds amazing. But the challenges that that –

John Lee Dumas: Right.

Chase Jarvis: – demotivated their desire to do ongoing –

John Lee Dumas: Totally.

Chase Jarvis: – work in spite of the contracts we had in place. Ultimately, by every measure, it was insanely successful. But this legal bind created a paradigm for me where I was stuck because I knew that these were gonna be billion dollar, multi-billion dollar companies. And when you have the amount of head start that we have, I ultimately was paralyzed with choice. I could have sold it to publically traded companies.

I could have fought this in a legal battle and won, and then continued rapidly developing the next versions which were way, way ahead of Instagram and anything else of that kind. And so I went in and sold for a billion bucks. Let’s just say my phone rang a lot. But it was massive. I mean, it’s like literally a billion dollar mistake, and there were so many conflicts in me personally.

Like, I decide not to sell it to these publically traded companies because I had really spent my whole life trying to wrap my identity around being an artist, an entrepreneur and artist. And then at that point, the concept of an entrepreneur was still fuzzy. Like, is that a business guy that will, like, just –?

John Lee Dumas: Right.

Chase Jarvis: – is all about the money. And so, I was conflicted, and that conflict ultimately sidelined me from certainly a hundred million, maybe hundreds of million and on the upper-end literally billions. So painful, painful lesson. But as we will get to I’m sure a little bit later, I was able to put that knowledge and that experience to good use, which is really what being an entrepreneur is all about.

John Lee Dumas: That’s a gripping story, and it’s something that you can definitely say wow! Like, what if I had turned that into a hundred billion – a hundred million, a billion dollar company? But, like, what would that have potentially turned you into? I mean, you know who you are. I mean, are you the type of person that would have taken that, moved to Bali, and just spent the rest of your days on your beach not creating anything, or would you have tried to leverage that into something amazing?

Well, what happened was you created something amazing, which is now impacting the world literally. I mean, 2 billion minutes consumed. I mean, you’re employing 100 people. I mean, you’re impacting so many people around the world through this. So when you look at these things Fire Nation, you can just kinda shake your head and be like oh, what if. You can just say well, what happened as a result? I know that’s what we’re gonna be moving into Chase which is gonna be really inspiring. But to just stay here for one more second –

Chase Jarvis: Sure.

John Lee Dumas: – what’s one sentence that you just want to make sure that Fire Nation gets from your story if you could just sum that up?

Chase Jarvis: What you look at right now as a failure will be a key tool in your toolbox going forward.

John Lee Dumas: Oh, love that. So let’s now move forward into one of your greatest ah-ha moments. I mean, of course that app was a great ah-ha moment. You’ve had a ton, but what’ one thing you want to share with the Fire Nation today that’s a story that you think is gonna resonate with our listeners?

Chase Jarvis: I guess in line with that learn from your mistakes comment is what I did with that, what I chose to do with that are those experiences around Best Camera. And I wish I could say that I inherently was aware that all of those lessons were gonna play directly into my next adventure, but the reality was there actually was an ah-ha moment. And I remember it super well. I was at my studio very, very late, like 2:00, 3:00 in the morning. And I was on the backside of the fru – still in the frustration around Best Camera because that took probably almost two years to play out. And it was fairly early in that gap, maybe six months after launch. And it was when we were developing the idea for CreativeLive.

And it was an ah-ha moment where wait a minute. All this stuff that’s going so wrong right now it’s like what is this supposed to tell me? And then I thought of all the paradigms and the people I’d met through the Best Camera experience. These were the publically traded, the MNA people from big, public companies, the venture capitalists that had come out of the woodwork when I had an app of the year.

And it was wait a minute. This CreativeLive, the concept that we’re building right now; it has the opportunity to be so much bigger than anything that I’m thinking about right now. If I can think about how to leverage those lessons, what are those lessons? Well, gosh, I didn’t bring any venture in, and I didn’t bring any partners. I had a cap table of one person on it with my photo app. And well, what would that be like if I had a partner and some peers and other smart people?

What if it didn’t have my name on the door? What if we brought in venture and had venture partners and advisors? And I’m pretty sure this online education thing I think there’s gonna be something there. I’m pretty sure that creativity, the value and perception of what it means to be a creative thinker and an entrepreneur that’s at an all-time high and rising. And I’m pretty sure that the future of work looks a lot different than it looks now.

And gosh maybe CreativeLive can be all of those things, and low and behold capow. Like, that’s exactly what I’m staring at right now. And it was an ah-ha moment, and I’ve worked very hard to manufacture that ah-ha moment into CreativeLive along with the 100 or so folks that go to work here every day.

John Lee Dumas: Yeah, I mean, if there’s one thing that’s just a consistent theme when people talk about Chase is, of course, the word affable that we talked about earlier. But it’s hard worker. I mean, this is a guy that puts his nose to the grindstone, and he just gets stuff done. So just like you kind of did Chase for your worst moments, like, you summed it up nicely, what do you want to make sure our listeners get?
Chase Jarvis: I believe that in every person the answers to our biggest questions are inside us, and I call that intuition. You can call it whatever you want, but there’s so many competing factors for your attention. If you focus first and foremost on your instincts, it’ll always work out. Even if you get sidelined along the way, that intuition is there for a reason. And following it is very, very powerful.

John Lee Dumas: What’s your biggest weakness as an entrepreneur?

Chase Jarvis: You just cited it as a strength. That totally brick headed, stubborn will work through anything. No, the irony is I’m on a sleep kick right now.

John Lee Dumas: Yes, I love sleep.

Chase Jarvis: Ariana has just beaten it into my brain with her new book. And –

John Lee Dumas: Yeah.

Chase Jarvis: – she was on my show. I spent years and years wearing my lack of the need or my ability not to sleep on my shoulder like a badge of honor and ultimately realized that I was kneecapping myself in some way, shape, or form. So I think it’s not uncommon that your biggest strength and all can also be a real weakness.

And sort of my stubbornness, my ability to just grind is – sometimes I do so at my own detriment without looking up. And I can be a degree off but work for ten days straight with my head down and realize that instead of a degree off or 5’ off, I’m now five miles off of where I should be.

John Lee Dumas: If you could just get detailed for a second about one thing that you’re fired up about and not go broad but just go really niche, what would that one thing be?

Chase Jarvis: My life’s work around creativity is now for the first time, I think, at scale being celebrated and valued. And it only looks to be growing in value. The ability to think critically and creatively works like innovation. I’m so pumped. It could have been the other way around. Like, as bots get more prevalent, the flipside of that same coin the ability to be an independent, critical thinker with the unique spin is a very, very high priced item.

And it could have been that my life’s work the last six or seven years would have gone to something that was going to just get smashed to pieces. But I’m incredibly grateful and psyched, fired up – to use the name of the –

John Lee Dumas: Right?

Chase Jarvis: – podcast in the sentence. It’s just awesome for me to just – and I feel very, very lucky and fortunate that it’s turned out that way but that my life’s work is finally, sort of, getting its day in the sun. And it looks only to be continuing to grow and be seen as more and more valuable as words like innovation and stuff actually get their fair share of the mindshare of culture now.

John Lee Dumas: Well, Chase is fired up. I’m fired up. And Fire Nation I hope you’re fired up for the lightening round. So don’t you go –?

Chase Jarvis: Oh God.

John Lee Dumas: – anywhere. We’re gonna take a quick minute to thank our sponsors. Chase, are you prepared for the lightning rounds?

Chase Jarvis: I am prepared. I don’t know what to expect. I am prepared to be unprepared.

John Lee Dumas: Yes.

Chase Jarvis: I just bent my knees a little bit. If you could see me, I’m standing here in my studio with my knees bent. No one is looking at me. I’m solo in this room here, but I’m ready. Into position.

John Lee Dumas: I love that visual. What was holding you back from becoming an entrepreneur?

Chase Jarvis: I think the social construct of what an entrepreneur stood for. Go back to my earlier concept of reconciling my identity. I worked so hard to escape being a jock. I was an artist. I’ve always been an artist, but I was trapped in a jock’s body and went to college on a soccer scholarship but knew I had this creative soul.

And as you work so hard to define that, and then the idea of entrepreneur, like, to be able to sell my app for tens or a $100 million and being actually staring that option in the face and think of changing who you were labeled as, like, being an artist because artists don’t do that. Artists don’t make $100 million, or artists aren’t rewarded for their work in our culture.

So reconciling with that was a huge hurdle for me identifying as an entrepreneur. And then I just, for some reason – oh, you mentioned ah-ha moments. It was like wait a minute. What would Andy Warhol be doing? Absolutely he would be taking advantage of this. And artists in fact are the same thing, and in the future, artists and entrepreneur will be indistinguishable.

John Lee Dumas: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Chase Jarvis: Mitigate the downside. What can you do to protect the downside and still take huge risks? That was advice from Richard Branson who is an investor in CreativeLive.

John Lee Dumas: Yeah, and I love, like, one of his mitigations was he was just like hey, I’m just gonna rent these airplanes. And if it doesn’t work, I’m just gonna give them back to Boeing. Like, that was a huge mitigation, but then it worked. And so –

Chase Jarvis: Yeah.

John Lee Dumas: – he kept them.

Chase Jarvis: Yeah.

John Lee Dumas: What’s a personal habit that contributes to your success?

Chase Jarvis: Personal hab – I’m a big habit guy. I think that I love this question. A big one? I would say meditation. I’ve been meditating for several years, and it feels trendy right now to say –

John Lee Dumas: Yeah, it does.

Chase Jarvis: – that. But I employ transcendental meditation, and I think it’s –

John Lee Dumas: Oh, TM.

Chase Jarvis: – been huge. Yeah, TM. It’s been huge for me to be able to – just clarity of thought is on a different level for me personally.

John Lee Dumas: So can you share an internet resource with our listeners?

Chase Jarvis: Oh, I’m gonna say Snapchat, and the reason I’m gonna say Snapchat is because most people don’t think of it as a tool. I actually think of it as a really powerful storytelling tool to build personal narrative, to build personal connection. And it’s the most lightweight, creative outlet that I think exists on the phone. And to be able to shoot video, write words, type words, share little stores and still photos all in one little package is very powerful. So it is –

John Lee Dumas: Right.

Chase Jarvis: – a tool for me. I use it as a tool as a creator. I’ll go with that one unless you reject that.

John Lee Dumas: No, no, I love it. I’m obsessed with Snapchat. I use it every single day. I’m gonna start following you on Snapchat. What’s your snaphandle?

Chase Jarvis: Thanks. I’m Chase Jarvis. Actually on everything, I’m Chase Jarvis.

[Crosstalk]

Chase Jarvis: And specifically I do spend a – I really, really like Snapchat. So –

John Lee Dumas: Killer.

Chase Jarvis: – I’d love to see some of your little listeners there and you as well. What’s your handle hum?

John Lee Dumas: Johnny Dumas.

Chase Jarvis: All right. I got that.

John Lee Dumas: And just like you I’m Johnny Dumas on everything. So lucky us.

Chase Jarvis: All right. I will see you on the platform a little later.

John Lee Dumas: Killer. Chase if you could recommend one book for our listeners, what would it be and why?

Chase Jarvis: The War of Art, Stephen Pressfield.

John Lee Dumas: So good. I’ve read every one of his books. Like, even his fiction books are amazing.

Chase Jarvis: Really? I have not read his fiction.

John Lee Dumas: Oh, they’re some of the best ones. Like, there’s this one on Alexander the Great that follows his campaign. It’s mind blowing how good it is. Like, I might have just ruined your next three days. Like, you won’t get to stop reading it. All right, Chase you’re a creative, so I came up with a creative question for you.

Chase Jarvis: All right. Bring it.

John Lee Dumas: Imagine you woke up tomorrow morning in a brand new world identical to earth, but you knew no one. You still have all the experience and knowledge that you currently have. Your food and shelter is taken care of, but all you have is this laptop and $500.00. What would you do in the next seven days?

Chase Jarvis: How did you come up with this? I love it.

John Lee Dumas: You’re creative man. I love it.

Chase Jarvis: I love it. All right. So I think first and foremost is I like to connect. I think that’s the definition of creativity, right, is to connect to things that weren’t likely to have been connected prior to your thinking about them. So I would want to become really aware of where I was in the world and the people that I was around.

So I’m more of a, like, talk to the man on the ground. Talk to the woman next to you. Who’s in need? Where the hell am I, and I’d use that to get my bearings. I would then probably juxtapose all the information that I had with the people that were around me because you’ve said it’s identical to earth.

John Lee Dumas: Identical.

Chase Jarvis: But when you say earth, do you mean, like, the dirt in the buildings? Because what if –

John Lee Dumas: I mean –

Chase Jarvis: – it’s in the future? You know what –

John Lee Dumas: – Snapchat’s –

Chase Jarvis: – I mean?

John Lee Dumas: – there. It’s everything. Yeah, Snapchat’s there.

Chase Jarvis: I’m thinking I’m not very practical. I think a lot of people would run after clothing or food or whatever.
[Crosstalk]

John Lee Dumas: Well, your food and shelter’s taken care of.

Chase Jarvis: Oh, okay, cool. Clothing included. I’m much more of an idealist. I would try and figure out why did this happen to me, and what I can make of this weird thing that’s happened to me. The fact that I’m the new kid on the block. Like, what is –?

[Crosstalk]

John Lee Dumas: You’re just gonna be that naked guy walking around asking –

Chase Jarvis: Yeah –

John Lee Dumas: – people questions.

Chase Jarvis: – who’s this naked guy? Yeah, I guess I wish I had a more interesting answer. But I’m trying to find what would I really do?

John Lee Dumas: Right.

Chase Jarvis: I’m sort of a gatherer, and I would try and kinda gather for a while. I think maybe the lesson we can extract from here is I believe in two modes of operating. There’s the experience and sort of the gathering of experiences and information and data. And then there’s the synthesis, and you can’t do both of those things at the same time.

I mean, you’re doing it all the time in real time but on a very low level. I think the biggest thinking requires a bunch of input and then sort of this processing. And think about, like, days, and there’s so many cycles in the world. The seasons, the day and the night, periods of productivity and lack of productivity, elements of health of wellness and then illness.

So very sort of cyclical in nature, and I think that’s really what I’m looking at. I would gather a bunch of information, and then try and figure out well, what can I do with this new found freedom and this 500 bucks?

John Lee Dumas: Chase I love it. That was great. Now, let’s end of Fire with a parting piece of guidance, the best way that we can connect with you, and then we’ll say goodbye.

Chase Jarvis: The best way to connect with me I said earlier in the show is really focus on CreativeLive. I believe it is the world’s greatest resource to learn about creativity and entrepreneurship. We have ten million students. We reach every country on the planet every month. Folks like Mark Cuban, Richard Branson, Ariana Huffington, Jared Leto, some of literally the top creators in the world go there like yourself.

John Lee Dumas: I was just gonna say I’m waiting for Johnny Dumas.

Chase Jarvis: Johnny Dumas. Learn from him. And the fact that you can go there and learn for free, to me that is what I would ask your audience to check out. And again, I don’t want to be a selly guy, but this is a cellular conviction that I think it’s an amazing resource. There’s more than 10,000 hours of content from the world’s best teachers and thinkers.

And as a little gift, I set up a special – a code, a special landing page and code for Fire listeners here. So if you go to Creativelive.com/fire, and there’s a little welcome message there. And I made some recommendations on some classes from folks that would know you and your audience where there’d be a lot of symbiosis there.

And then if on checkout or if you decide you see something, you can always watch a lot of that stuff for free. But if you want to own something and watch it on your own time, then you checkout with the code Chaser, which is, like, my name with an R. You’ll get 25 percent off. And the average price is probably about 100 bucks or 75 bucks. So I hope that that’s interesting for your listeners.

John Lee Dumas: It definitely will be, and Fire Nation you know this. You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You’ve been hanging out with CJ and JLD today, so keep up the heat. And of course, you can head over to EOFire.com. If you just type Chase in the search bar, his whole show and his page will come up with all the links that we’ve been talking about all day long.

And again, go directly to Creativelive.com/fire just because it’s awesome and you want to check it out. My course is there. So many other great courses are there. When you’re checking out, use Chaser. That’s gonna get you 25 percent off. And by the way Chase, it looks like your podcast sucks. I mean, your first six episodes you have Mark Cuban, Seth Gordan, Marie Folio, Tim Ferriss, Ariana Huffington. I’ve never heard of these people, so you should start getting some people who others might recognize on your show. That might be a little helpful. But guys check out the Chase Jarvis Live Show. I’m a subscriber. It’s killer, and apparently, I’m now gonna be watching Chase’s Snapchats every day because I’m gonna be obsessed with that. So, all of these things are happening in my world. I love it. And Chase I want to say thank you brother for sharing your journey with Fire Nation today. For that we salute you, and we’ll catch you on the flipside.

Chase Jarvis: Thanks man. I really appreciate it. Love the show.