This narrated story is based on an interview with Sabba Keynejad, co-founder of the AI-powered video editing platform along with Tim Mamedov waters. The piece has been edited for length and clarity.
In 2013, my then-roommate Virgil and I became obsessed with it breaking Bad. Around mid-October the season finale would be upon us and we would finally find out what happened to Jesse Pinkman and Walter White. We loved it. When I was at university, it was what we enjoyed seeing and doing most as a shared apartment.
One Friday night I was sitting in my bedroom, we were both in art school, and Virgil had a gas mask for spray painting, and he came into my room and said, “BREAKING BAD!” And I said, “Oh my God, we can sell it.” !” He asks, “What?” and I thought, “We can sell it! We can sell it as Halloween costumes!” And that’s how it started. It was that simple.
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“That wasn’t my first experience as an entrepreneur.”
This was not my first experience as an entrepreneur. By the time I was 17 I already had another business selling red American style mugs in the UK, which surprisingly was a very low profile business as it turned out. After that, I turned to the beer pong sets. But selling the Halloween costumes was just more fun; It was like a little side project.
Later that evening, around 11 p.m., my roommate and I set up a page on eBay to sell this Halloween costume. We acquired the materials: blue gloves, DuPont chemical suits and gas masks. We didn’t order anything but made sure everything was available for next day delivery. We posted the Halloween costume sale on eBay with a five day lead time to give us enough time to order everything we needed. If we were to sell something, we could package it and ship it.
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“We say, ‘Wait a minute, we’re on the trail.'”
We Photoshopped everything together and that morning we had our first two sales, so we thought, ‘Cool.’ We sold it and it was great. We got four more orders that day and said, “Wait a minute, we’re on to something.”
Funnily enough, we actually got competition, and we dealt with the competition by sending them messages breaking Bad Quotes. They joined in and had fun; it was all pretty carefree. But when it comes to the competition, we also thought: How can we create more added value here? So we made this fake meth that was basically just sugar and blue food coloring, 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 resell there because it wasn’t customized properly, so it was just a lot of trying to figure out how to do it all quickly.
The other challenge was that we had hundreds of orders. So our apartment became a storage room and we got help from our roommates. It was a lot of fun.
A week later we had turned over $14,000 and each of us earned $3,500.
“I use these skills to inform the company I run today.”
It got to the point where the UK was running out of chemical protective suits and so we had to put a stop to it. Since these DuPont suits are intended for proper lab testing, there is limited demand for them, and we’ve obviously driven up demand like crazy.
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My roommate Virgil is now a very successful commercial film director based in Madrid. I run a technology startup called Veed, an AI-powered video editing platform. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, which invested $35 million last year. The company employs around 200 people. We have about 10 million monthly users and those users create about three million videos every month.
It’s pretty cool that I learned about entrepreneurship in art school and used those skills to shape the company I run today.