My dream that I would announce to everyone was I wanted to be a professional basketball player.
Deep down inside, I mean, you could tell by this joke book, that I wanted to be a stand-up comedian.
And I wouldn't tell anyone because I couldn't imagine what my Asian mother would think if I told her I wanted to be a
stand-up comedian.
My name is Jay Wey, I'm thirty-one years
old. I live in Sunnyvale, California.
I'm a social media personality and also an entrepreneur, and I make about $120,000 a
year. I upgraded my wife's headphones to AirPods with scissors.
She told me to do the dishes.
Done.
Well, I was born and raised in Sunnyvale, California, grew up with my mom and my dad and my older
brother. I grew up not far from this house, but this house we're sitting here right now is where
I spent my high school years.
I started playing competitive basketball at the age of 12.
I went on to play at a very elite high school baseball team.
From high school, I played Division Two Basketball and after two years I transferred to
play Division One Basketball at USF.
From college, I was able to play professionally in Taiwan.
Yeah, I guess there is some negativity around the word cheap, but I feel
like cheap to me has always meant smart and
smart with your money and not buying things that are unnecessary.
Expenses-wise, we take the money we earn from social media and we cover all the living
expenses, which is basically food and entertainment
and utilities, internet, et cetera.
From 12 a.m. to three p.m., that's the cheapest electricity.
Feel free to use our outlets.
Charge your phone your laptops.
But after 3 p.m., make sure you unplug it.
Seriously. Make sure you guys unplug it.
We're very blessed that my mom lets me live here for free.
Rent-free. She's a great landlord.
So one of the drawbacks of living with your landlord is that she gets to put up random photos of her family.
Good looking guy, heard he's pretty successful, too.
There are some stigmas around living with your parents that I think are more
bound to American culture, but I think in the Asian cultures, it is so common
for sons and daughters to live with their moms and dads.
And it's not from an aspect of like mooching off them.
It's an aspect of, Oh, we want to take care of our parents.
On paper, in college, I majored in business administration, but
honestly, I just played basketball, so I majored in basketball.
My senior year of college, I got a random email from a basketball agent, and given that I wasn't
a big fan of school and jumping into the real world, I just hopped on a plane and decided to
sign a contract to play professional basketball for two years.
I felt a little bit burnt out.
It was just so physically demanding, and I didn't think, I didn't feel like my body was
holding up. My knees were starting to hurt.
The transition away from basketball was mainly just motivated by find something that was
more long-term and potentially more lucrative.
My wife has a full-time job in biotech.
She earns a salary and she sends a good portion back to Taiwan to take
care of her family and the rest she saves up.
So I'm not taking on a salary right now from my startup company, and I'm just going to be compensated in
equity.
I found out that nearby my house, just like a 10 to 15-minute walk, a
seven-minute scooter ride, is some free EV charging stations.
So the majority of time I drive over to these free charging stations, I plug it in and then I
scooter back home.
Make around $10,000 a month from brand deals and these brand deals.
It's either one a month or two a month.
The first time we ever got a brand deal was with this random night vision camera company.
When they threw an offer at us for six hundred dollars, we were just in shock.
Like, Wow, people will actually pay us money to make creative videos.
And the thing is that we, throughout the whole process of making that ad, we
really had a lot of fun.
We've done promotion videos with brands like Ford, Xiaomi, eBay,
just to name a few. Being at a startup is a complete grind.
So I leave this type of social media stuff to the weekends on my free
time. Sometimes I can go a month or two months without posting or touching any social media, and that's just
because running a startup is just so demanding.
We have brands reaching out to us daily, usually three to five a day,
and because we have full-time jobs and
we live such a simple life that we have the luxury to kind of pick and choose who we want to work with.
The most lucrative single brand deal we've done is around $20,000 for a
weekend's work of shooting and editing.
But the brainstorming process took around three to four weeks to come up with a bunch of
scripts and storyboards to share it with the brand.
I don't think I invest in a traditional way.
I put all my excess money in cryptocurrency.
I buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, every month I tuck away like $5,000 and invest
that in cryptocurrency.
After you.
I think I've just been brainwashed by the community here in Silicon Valley.
I think I'm just under the influence of these, these peers of mine, that crypto is going to take
off. And to be honest, it has had some healthy returns.
So I'm not complaining.
A big part of me, being proud of being cheap has to do with my high school experience, I
went to a private high school.
I distinguished very early on that I wasn't going to be able to flaunt the way they were
flaunting money, drive the cars they were driving, wear the brands they were wearing.
So I would just decided to put myself on the opposite end of the spectrum and make being
cheap and frugal and utilitarian cool.
I've never been one to buy like name-brand stuff.
I'm not willing to spend a premium for just a logo or a brand.
We're not frugal about dining out, so every time we want to go to a restaurant or try some new place, we
just go and we're not very conscious about what budget we spend on food.
You have like a small chunk of our monthly income that just goes to
entertainment, whether that goes to a little bit of travel or just doing some activities with friends.
If you were to tell me two years ago that I was going to be a social media
personality with millions of viewers doing brand ads,
I'd be in disbelief.
And here we are.
We found out that my wife is pregnant.
It hasn't really settled in yet because I've only seen these like black and white photos.
It doesn't even look human, so it hasn't really settled in with me, and I haven't really changed any
of my spending habits or saving habits.
Yeah we decided to have this baby because we wanted a new character in our content, and
that was the cheapest way is to make your own character for your content.
And we did it.
We don't know whether it's a boy or girl yet.
Judging by the photos, I mean, we're sure it's human.
Are you sure? Yeah, I dunno.
It looks a little... I think that where I'm at in my career, I'm kind of in limbo where I'm still
very, very personally invested emotionally and financially, in my startup and I
really want that to succeed.
But yeah, I mean, everyone I talk to about where I'm at right now is always trying to encourage me to
just pursue this, this social media and creative
passion. But I'm still quite firm that I really want to see this
startup through.