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Daniel's first business was a consulting business. At the age of fourteen, he started this firm, and at sixteen the business was named Damage Inc.

The beauty of opening the consulting agency was there were very few expenses.

The major expense for Damage Inc. was getting a domain. In 2001, domains were expensive, costing upwards of $250.



Daniel and his partner would go to work in the morning, four days out of the week, on the fifth day they'd be meeting with CEOs and executives and meeting with all these important people, and they'd start scaling back their hours at the convenience store. Daniel's partner worked at McDonalds.

Next time you go to a McDonalds or gas station, remember that everyone had to start somewhere.
Mr. Karpantschof said, "it wasn't good money, one day's work in a convenience store would be equivalent to one hour of work as a consultant, so if they could get one hour of work [as consultants] a week, they didn't have to go to work."

Daniel and his partner asked themselves, "How much work would it take for us to do what we do in consulting instead of what we do now?"

The pair calculated that in order to reduce the number of hours worked at shitty minimum wage jobs. They would have to find one well-paying client who would want to buy 20 hrs that would be enough for us to be tied to a specific gig. Daniel insists, "40hrs a month or 50hrs a month is not a lot of work for two people." The two would be making more doing less work in consulting.

After a while, the consulting jobs started to "not appeal to him." Daniel was working and literally had no time off. Although he began his career in consulting, Mr. Karpantschof realized that the gig did not "suit him and wasn't what he wanted either."

After this realization, Daniel took time off and went on vacation for a week. Daniel thought that he should start from scratch. During the vacation, the consulting work kept coming and Daniel's partner really enjoyed the work, but Daniel's interest in keeping the agency alive continually waned. Mr. Karpantschof didn't want to work on Saturdays either.


One of his clients at the time was a marketing director of a cell phone service provider, it may have been owned by the government at the time, the market was heavily regulated ---this was all in Denmark---everything was monopolized and then the market was privatized, Mr. Karpantschof contacted the client and said that we should start a cell phone business. Consulting was selling how young people interact with products and the pair made decisions based mostly on intuition and what they felt young people wanted from technology products.



Neither one of the pair knew anything about ownership structures back then, Daniel and his partner were expecting to be hired as consultants and that was it, everything was based on retention for every new customer you get. The retention model had its flaws.

For example, customers would buy a phone from you, or whatever you get, at the time the philosophy was to acquire new customers.

The bulk of the revenue would come from new customers and hardly ever from old ones, Daniel's partner and him knew that the market would be saturated and that people would be competing for retention, saw this trend that at some point retention would be more important than new customers.

The problem with retention is if you get new customers you run out of money, for every new customer you get you have an expense for $10, in a year they might provide you with a revenue of $12, the first year you have that customer, you’re not making money, when it comes down to budgeting with that, that’s $100, 000 you will lose the first year, but you’ll get the same back the next year, you’ll break even.


The third partner was the money or financial guy, he was sitting with operations, he was very displeased, but it was a positive sign that within a year they’d get new customers, it was a pre-paid platform, rather than have when their account run out, rather than cutting off service, they would go into negative, people would call in asking why their phone was in the negative


At one point, there were twenty in line waiting asking why their phones weren't working, everything was done manually and didn’t scale, this was a start-up in which we knew nothing about, everything was learning and definitely learning by doing.


Daniel didn’t know anything about cell phones, only thing they knew was how to put together a product that was appealing to young people.

The philosophy behind that endeavor was at that price it doesn’t matter what kind of bullshit you’re coming off with. The boys were very cheap, did not use the existing concept of evening, day, or other mins.

It was the same price for all calls and all texts, the customer could recharge cards online which was new and you could go to the store and buy the scratch-off phone cards. It was akin to a family plan, but not entirely.

If you had a soccer team or just classmates all texts within that club would be free, you could spend whatever you saved [surplus] on whatever you wanted.

Daniel explains, "That was part of your retention strategy, with a selling point that is based on price and simplicity, it’s only a matter of time before the competition comes looming."


When you ran out of money, the company could not pay the pair anymore, the third partner handed out stocks in the company as a sort of consolation; however, the two were displeased because they found themselves to be shareholders in the largest-growing cell phone service company in Europe.


The venture went from being just the three of us in a bedroom to being a real company, head-hunted by AT&T and other major companies.

The larger companies saw a market on gaming, something that Daniel knew absolutely nothing about, hell, he wasn't even interested in gaming, but was interested in feature film development ,was hired as a consultant with a small studio, while running a company full time he could read a script and start coming off with a narrative that didn’t involve working full time with the service provider and part-time as a consultant with the film development company.


The project was no longer very appealing to him. Daniel didn’t have very much fun, the cell phone company was scaling and he wasn't particularly interested in the company at all anymore.

Right after his lack of interest, he began working on feature-film development, and Daniel, like most of us, had this idea since he was young that he could do anything that he wanted.

The only question was, what did he want?

Many old and young people feel the exact same way, asking meaningful questions such as, what do I want from life?

Daniel tells how his dad worked with the same company for thirty-five years. The concept of following in his footsteps seemed completely absurd. Daniel figured he wouldn't even try, it was then that he figured out he was not going to get a college education.


"Education," Daniel says, "becomes part of your identity, and so should it, but when you come out on the other side, your identity is specific to something, if you study medicine you will be perceived as a doctor, you are targeted as something specific."

Mr. Karpantschof adds, "For better or worse you can go to med school or law school and actually come out and not be a good doctor or lawyer, because while in school you don't really know whether you’ll even enjoy doing these things."

Daniel adds, "People wake up after 40 years and have epiphanies that they don’t actually want to do those things, they want to sail the world instead or do something completely different."


Daniel and I understood this concept very well, his whole life Daniel was the type of person that after "doing something for six months would start getting bored with it."

Daniel didn't want any label on him, feature film was fun for some time, still fascinated by it, but it’s just a whole thing, it requires you to stay active in the industry.

Daniel, like many, didn't know exactly what his calling was, but his partner figured that even if Daniel was still figuring out his life, he should get an education.

Daniel's partner was from a lower-class family, and never knew his father. While the two worked together his mom was retired early because of disability, she was living in a different city, and his partner only met her ten times in the past fifteen years, getting an education for him was extremely important, that was completely fair, but Dan just didn’t want to get one.


Daniel's partner started an Econ/Math track and six months into it, he was offered a job at Accenture, but he declined in order to finish the degree. Dan's business partner started working at a local competitor and is now head of that company’s new branch in Vietnam. He opened that branch and it grew from that branch around 2008 to 2009 (moved out) of Copenhagen and the branch has 75 employees, which is rapid growth in roughly two to three years.

His partner is doing very well for himself, in the meantime Dan was working on feature film development and AT&T of Denmark wanted to go into gaming, partner and him were asked to head a company called Boom Town, which was marketed to high-end gaming cafes where you could go and play Counter-Strike, it was a global online community, at some time computers would be so cheap, why would you want to do something like that when you could do it at home?

Microsoft bought them out because of something that had happened at the company, you could play Counter-Strike at the Boom Town servers, you could with people who were perhaps sitting at home, and usually you would have to go in and enter one of the homes to do it, there were still pieces of that entered into it, he was furious about Microsoft buying it, people loved those cafes, these were high-end, you went in and you knew that the machine you went on was new and stuff would work. People loved that and people loved the brand.

Microsoft ended all that.


While working in the feature-film development place, Daniel started a small consulting gig, called the Ministry of Storytelling, developing role plays and conflict scenarios.


Daniel had a lot of fun doing that, his daytime job disappeared completely, the original reason why his partner and he started the consulting gig is when he started the getting work, and people would inquire how to pay them, Daniel wouldn't lie about age, but would like people to believe they were older than they were.

If the venture became incorporated, Daniel wouldn't have to disclose social security numbers. Furthermore, when Boom Town was sold, he went back to the feature-film development company and that scaled up, rather than going back into new business development, at some point he developed a scenario.



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