Daniel Goddard, CEO of the AI networking app, Dysko and an actor with over 30 years of experience examines the parallels between entertainment and entrepreneurship, recounts the crazy reaction when daytime TV messed with his fan base, pinpoints the business that oversees ALL business, recalls disappointing a date in bed (for a really noble reason), and shares his first-of-its-kind product and the lesson he learned from it, and how his new app is coming to the rescue at universities and conventions across the country.

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Well it is super nice to meet you.

It's lovely to meet you. It's lovely to meet

you.

I know your background, and what I kind of

want to focus on, that I think is really interesting and neat,

is how you went from this career and background that was very

much in the entertainment side of business, and now you're in

this entrepreneurial side.

Life is a sequence of experiences that are

basically sort of a extrapolation of transitions

from the time you're born. Everything's a transition. What

happens is we go on a path. We make decisions when we're young.

We think this is what makes us happy, or we do what we think

will make us our parents happy. In my situation, I ended up

going to universities study Business and Economics in

Australia and Sydney. I had six months left on my degree, and I

dropped out. I dropped out because I'd reached a place in

my life where I realized that you get one life. If you're not

making yourself happy, what is the life you're living? So to

the great detriment of my father in particular, who was a man who

grew up very poor, didn't have a college degree, he's I want my

son to have everything I never had. I dropped out, and I

actually decided to pivot into acting. I'd always dabbled in it

as a kid with school plays, etc, my mom was more encouraging

because she understood in her life she wanted to do law, but

she couldn't do it because her parents couldn't afford to

support her, so she had to do a degree, which is basically a

Bachelor of Arts, which allowed her to work part time and go to

school part time, but law was a full time degree. So I think my

mother was more sympathetic to the understanding of you have

dreams and ambitions in life and things like that kind of

supersede, you know, expectations. It was a big deal.

But I think what happens as you move forward and you you take on

the path of hopefully choosing where you think you're meant to

be, you understand that everything is business. It

doesn't matter whether you're a model, an actor, an

entrepreneur, whatever, everything follows the path of

expectations, in a sense that behaviors you do determine your

outcome and your success. So if you want to be a model or an

actor, you have to be a business person first. You can't just

say, I look a certain way, or I believe I've got this role now,

therefore I can be a drama queen. So for me, the hardest

shift I had was moving from acting into entrepreneurial

side, where I was no longer perceived as a person who was an

actor and I was now perceived as a business person. Took five

years, basically, to start being taken seriously, but all of it

is part of the journey of life, as long as you follow a certain

set of paradigms, which is, always be objective, always be

gracious, always be respectful, and work your butt off as hard

as you can, I think those transitions can be easier, but

They'll never be completely without pain. You look at anyone

who succeed in anything in life, pain is what makes you stronger.

Pain is what makes you more successful. Because anyone who

lives in a space of pleasure, comfort never grows.

I love the way that you liken business to

everything. And I would imagine, again, coming from this

entertainment side of the house that had to set you up for

tremendous success, knowing, hey, again, you have to have

talent. You've got to have skill, but approaching it with a

business mindset that alone sets you apart from your competition,

your peers, so forth and so on, and then also the rejection you

had to face. But how did those help you set you apart?

Sure, I think the first thing that we have to

have in all aspects of our life, no matter what we do, is there's

never a sense of entitlement rejection. It permeates every

aspect of our life, from the time we're little, whether we go

to kindergarten the first day we want to be friends with someone,

and they ignore us and they laugh at us, we're rejected.

Moving that through our teenage years, into our first career

journey, there's always going to be rejection that said in acting

and modeling, for the rejection is greater, I think, than most

others, because you're being objectified. It's got nothing to

do with your internal block, your internal characteristics,

although you could argue, you know, there are some people that

have that they had that it factor that's an internal thing,

that's not an external thing. That's endogenous, not

exogenous. You'll find generally, it's the person who

had has more substance. You know, they went through a harder

childhood. They went through. Harder obstacle, or whatever it

was that builds character. When it comes to acting, it's a

different kettle of fish, because it's not just how you

look. I've had auditions in the past where I'd say the character

breakdown, you really go, it's me, looks like me, sounds like

me. So you think all you need to do now is get the dialog right,

and then you'll see who they cast. And they cast someone

looks nothing like it. And you'll think, what happened? I

don't understand it. It's me. It must be me. There's something

wrong with me, but it's not. The more you do it, the more you

start to start to understand is that the people in positions of

power, I would say, eight times out of 10, have no idea what

they want until it walks in the room. They just don't know,

because you're dealing with too many X factors. Of you don't

know where styles and trends are going. You don't know what the

audience wants. So generally, you're just kind of like, you

know, throwing stuff at the walls to see what sticks. You'll

see so many artists who will get released, and then they don't

get a fan base, and then every now and then, you'll get a few

that break out. And generally they're the ones that don't,

don't conform to the ideology of this is what you're meant to be

when you stepped into that role, and they make it their own. Like

my soap career, I did like 1100 episodes or so when I first

started that the character was a blank slate, and you had writers

writing a character that they thought was going to be this

character over here, I read that character and I interpret to be

a character that's going to be over here. I can't go in the

room and say, Hey guys, I've got an idea it should be like this,

like I could never write a soap opera. I can never produce that

amount of content. But what I can do is take the content I'm

given and interpret it in a way that I believe will make that

content and myself mesh in a way that I believe it can be

delivered to an audience that will make them have a more

entertaining experience. It's like being a bull in a china

shop, but not breaking the China, but letting them know

that there is something different about you that makes

you interesting to see. Oh, my God, he's going to break the

China all of a sudden. No, he didn't, because you're a

professional. And I think if you tally all these things up, you

end up forging your own career. And once you do that, then it's

another fine line between not letting it go to your head and

thinking you now have the power, because you never have the

power. So you have to, at all times, be grateful for what you

have. You can never outshine the master. You can never bite the

hand that feeds you. It's a dance. You will never be leading

the dance. As an entertainer, as an entrepreneur, you have the

capacity to lead the dance.

So when did it stop being so personal, and when

did that business mindset come through to say, Hey, this is

business. I got to learn to play the game. I got to learn to

dance the dance, and walk that fine line.

It probably happened around my character on

young and the restless in 2011 was killed off by the head

writer, and I couldn't understand it at this point in

my life. I was a business person first, and to me, everything was

good business. It's either good business or it's bad business.

And the head writer at the time decided they wanted to kill off

my character because my character was popular, and they

thought it'd be this big story moment, it would be a burst in

the ratings and whatever. I was completely gobsmacked, because

they went against the grain of what I believe to be true. If

you are an executive and you work for a multi billion dollar

company, you have the best interest of that company, which

means that you want to make that company as much money as

possible. I'd always kind of thought that I was in the hands

of people that knew what they were doing. So when I was killed

off, I went they don't know what they're doing because the fans

instantly went ballistic. They rented an airplane, flew it

above CBS, where the banner saying, Bring Daniel Goddard

back as Kane. So at that point, I got a call from Sony, and the

head writer ended up being fired, not because of me, but

just it was a combination of moments that took place. So I

think for me at that point, it was concreted in my mind that

you can have multi tiered businesses, but at the end of

the day, the business that oversees all the business

generally, has one thing on mind, which is the stock price

the shareholder respect and value for that company. So as

long as you stay within your lane, and you keep your head

down, hopefully the incompetence along the way that tries to

derail you will be corrected by the system, because the system

will always want to drive towards, you know, economic

success. So does that mean I was, I was killed off in the

first time around, because I thought I could reinvent the

wheel and change things and move the character in the direction I

wanted. Possibly. Was it because it was a successful character,

and they thought that it, by killing me off, would push the

ratings up for a certain amount of time, and advertising for

that period would do well, possibly. But for me, it was

just a learning curve where I really just saw with just

clarity, the way the machine operates and the way that we are

just cogs in the machine. And once you accept it, it's not

personal, then you can put that to rest, and then say, how do I

be the most efficient cog in the machine? And then the next

question is. Is, if this machine is not as efficient as I choose,

or would want to be part of, how do I either create the machine

or become part of the machine that is going to be the

efficient machine that I can be that cog in.

Super powerful. So let's take that. What got you

to the point, and what was the process of you saying, Okay, I

now want to lead the dance?

I've always been an entrepreneur at heart,

because to me, acting was not some form of, like, emotional

escape or some form of deep seeking process where I had to

discover myself. I mean, I did all that work. I've read all the

books. Greatest book ever written, though, by the way, is

augmentino, the greatest salesman, the salesman in the

world. I'll tell you about that book. I was reading that book,

and to read it properly. It takes like 200 something days,

because, you know, you have to read every scrolling, new to

night, right? I just met a new girl. We had ended up after this

date going back to her place. Very first time she makes

dinner, we have dinner, we get into bed. I didn't have the book

with me, and I basically said to her, I said, Listen, I'm sorry.

I gotta go. I gotta go. I thought to myself, I'm going to

explain why I have to go, because I don't want to give her

anything. I don't want to give her a complex going, well, I did

all this. I did all that. We had such a great time. I made this

what I do wrong? I thought, you need to know why. And I said,

here's why I got to go. It's a book. You have to read it three

times a day. I don't have it with me. I have to go and read

the book. I was fortunate enough to have her go. I totally

understand that. I respect that. That was great. I think being an

entrepreneur allowed me to have more control over the business

process. But once again, you're dealing with rejection in 2021 I

created a product called SeePay. SeePay was the world's first

visual payment system. Basically, you hold up your

phone, I can look at you through my camera, and then, if you have

SeePay, right above where you're standing, an avatar appears on

the phone. Generally, you use your face, because the goal is

to correlate the avatar to the person. You would touch the

avatar. And then I could send you money. So I could send you

money with Apple, Pay, Google, pay, direct deposit, credit

card, whatever. Soft launched March 2021, now I thought, I've

now created technology. It's never been done. Everyone's

using Venmo. Everyone's using cash app. The biggest problem I

had with payments is, I would say, for example, you know, meet

you Stephanie, and your last name is spell M, double A S,

right? Let's say, for example, I thought it was m, a s, s, or I'm

typing it in, I type, I spell it wrong. Send the money the wrong,

Stephanie Maas, and I can't get the money back. So I'm like,

I've created a system now where I can hold up my phone, see you

pay you, I know you get the money. There's no error. I built

it, launched it within three weeks. It did $80,000 in

transactions. Didn't put a cent or a second into marketing. So I

want to be purely organic. And I get this meeting with this mega

investor, one of the people that basically was early into Google.

The guy in the room says to me, after I did the pitch I showed

in the product, we demoed it. So why would someone use it? And

the first thing I thought was, am I being tested? So I'm

thinking, How do you respond to that in a way where you pass the

test, you don't seem conceited, you don't seem obnoxious or

condescending or any of these things, and because no one wants

to work with someone like that. So I said to the guy, that's a

great question. I said, Do you use Venmo? He goes, Yeah, I use

Venmo every day. I said, Okay, let's, let's pretend right now

we're going back in time 10 years, and I'm walking in right

now, and I'm not, I'm not showing you SeePay. I'm showing

you Venmo. What are you using before Venmo to transfer money,

Ach, direct deposit, debit transactions, right? I've

created this peer to peer payment app where I can enter

your name just send you money. What would you say? Didn't he

didn't really say anything. Days like, Okay, I said, See, we

know, based upon what I pitched you, that if you travel forward

in time 10 years, that you would be using it. He thought about

it, and then he said to me, but why would anybody use SeePay

when they can use Venmo? And at that point, I realized it wasn't

a test. It's like a boxer, and they fight their way out of the

streets, and they get to the top, and next thing you know,

they got the money. They got the cars. They never have to worry

about money again. They eat the lobster every day. They don't do

the training. They lose their title, and that's what happens

to entrepreneurs, they lose that hunger and that drive and that

entrepreneurial spirit. And I realized at that point, this is

almost the same thing as entertainment, where you're

dealing with people that just because they've sold the

company, just because they have the position, that doesn't mean

they know what they're talking about. So how do you overcome

that rejection? And that's when you have to say to yourself,

what is it I want in life? Do I want to be the happy guy that

sits on a farm somewhere and just just enjoys his day and one

day that's my life? Or do you want to be the person that's

prepared to say, Okay, now I understand the rules of

engagement. Let's play you still. Can't control the

machine. You still can't dictate what machines going to purchase,

but what you can do is weather the storm and commit to

something because at the end of the day, that's who you are, and

that's all you want to do. So you have to find a way to push

forward through the through the storm. But that, to me, was a

phenomenal learning curve. So it just turned out that that was

not the guy, that was not the time, and it allowed me then to

start to move to other entrepreneurial endeavors, which

I believe now is the time for those to come into fruition.

Wow.

So I ended up launching in 2020 a digital

marketing company. It's called under the in short for under the

influence, I took my understanding of branding and

everything is a brand. You're a brand. Young and the Restless is

a brand. Anything that is consumed is a brand. I think the

difficult thing for social media. Social media has made

everybody think it's easy to be a brand. It's like everyone on

Instagram is a model. No, you're not. The number one thing you

have to do is remove subjective delusion from your mindset. I

went into marketing, and my first client was a girl who had

a home fitness workout, and she said, I want to kind of launch

my thing, and I don't know what to do. And I said to me, tell me

what it is you do. Tell me what you do. She goes, Well, I go to

people's backyards and we do workouts. I said, So what's the

workout? Who's your demographic? Well, it's predominantly women

with young kids who want to get back in shape, and they want to

go like, you know, get tight, and they want to do this, and

they want to have, like, cute butts. I said, Okay, so it's

backyard booty club. Backyard booty club. So next thing, you

know, I go, I film all her stuff, I cut it together. I'm

just doing this myself at this time, creating her social doing

this. And then from there I went, Okay, that made sense.

It's got to first of all, have an interesting sort of Title, an

interesting brand. Then it's got to have a message that makes me

want to check it out. Then it's got to have a product that I

think is actually has some substance or has some value to

it. So we moved through a bunch of different brands, created a

bunch of different brands, launched the brands. They do

well, get more clients, etc. And I realized I'm decent at this.

My business partner and I got to this point where we talk about

how when we were doing so, when I was doing soap opera, you

would go to fan events. So you go to appearances or

conventions, and you would meet all these people that would say

they're getting lined to do a photo in a meet and greet, and

you'd sign autograph and have a chat and take a photo. And the

amount of people that I met that said the girl I'm with, or the

guy I'm with, or the group of girls, or whatever it was, would

say, because of your character and your show. We met, we have

things to talk about. We talk about this, we talk about that,

and I we never knew how much we had in common once we started

talking we love the same teens, the same movies, the same

hobbies. So it got me thinking, How many people do we walk by

every day that we just pass that have so much in common with us

that we would never know. We'd never know there must be someone

right now on the other side of the planet, whether it be in

Finland, Tokyo, Botswana, it doesn't matter that has the same

things in common that I do. So I'm like, how do you find those

people? And then how do you streamline the process so that

you can universally pass it out to people, so that people no

longer have to be a stranger again, we came up with the idea

of Dysko, and Dysko basically is where my heart and soul lies at

the moment. And Dysko is an AI networking application. It

allows people to create a profile, choose from 100 social

tags that are preset and 100 work tags. You can also add your

own tags if you want, but generally we have it like 100

every job, every occupation, every hobby, whatever you

choose. Just click, click, click, click, click, click,

click. You make your profile. Then when you walk out of the

house and walk around, you can set your radius to be half a

mile, point two mile, up to 10 miles, if anyone enters that geo

fence radius. As you walk, it follows you around. You match.

The app notifies you that person's in your area. It'll say

you have say 10 tags in common, five tags in common, 20 tags in

common. You then see the person's profile. You see the

tags you have in common. You tack the tags that you want to

talk that person about and send an AI message. And the AI

message will be an icebreaker for Hey, we're in this

proximity. We have all these things in common. It's good to

meet you. So it initially began in the idea with the idea of

bringing just strangers together, but then we started

approaching universities, because I have a son in college

at the moment. I have another son who's 16, and one of the

things that we notice is that kids are leaving going to

colleges, and the first year is hell. They don't know anybody

they they are struggling to get this social life kicked off and

going, which they've heard about in the college experience. But

they've got to get their grades, whatever. So I'm like, they

must, I say them all the time. There must be kids walking

around that have the same thing in common with you. He goes,

Dad, you don't understand. You can't even go up to them and

like, they're in a group and put your head in be like, Hey guys,

what are you talking about? There's look at you and you

realize these kids have lost that in place, in person, skill

set that we had going to school. And they hide behind their phone

and their screen. And so I'm like, how do we create this

technology that make the human experience greater. And then we

went to these colleges, from Syracuse to Kentucky University

to Southern University, and we pitched them. We would say them,

what are you finding? Is the most prominent obstacle that new

students are facing? And they'll tell you, well, they don't find

friends easily. They don't communicate with their

professors correctly. Then Okay, so what if I told you that we

have a piece of technology that can help a student and faculty

streamline the way that they connect about things that

actually need to connect about. Now I'm listening. Southern

University was really interesting because it's an HBCU

school. It's the largest one in the country, and Southern

University said to us, the biggest problem we have is that

a lot of the kids who come here come from very small, rural

towns. It's not that they don't make friends easily. They have

this culture shock, and when they get to the big city in the

school, they shut down, and most of them shut down to the point

where their grades start to fall apart, and then they drop out.

We said, Okay, so here's our solution. Disco will allow a

kid, before he gets to college, on the very first day, to place

his Dysko profile at the school. We call it Dysko billboards. So

you can place your profile on campus. Every kid can do it. So

let's say I know I'm going to go to that school in September, and

we're now in June, I can just place it there, and every kid

who's going to go to that school can instantly start connecting

with other kids before they get there, make friends. So on day

one, they've already got their friends. The professors can put

their profile as a Dysko billboard there and use all the

hashtags of what they're starting. It could be like, you

know, Professor Smith's econ 101, class. It doesn't matter.

So you know, if I'm going to go in these classes here, all the

tags that I should be following, you can then streamline the

whole process, create study groups, but if anything, then

the first day you walk on campus, I can look around me and

see all the people that match with me. And as a dad with kids

going through this, this meant a lot to me, but then to hear from

the colleges that this will change the college experience

with the kids. We knew we were on the right path. The next

thing we're going, Okay, how do you use it for a business

application? So we pitched HPE Hewlett Packard enterprises, and

they said to us that convention spaces for them took, say, 120

people to fly there, you know, the carbon footprint and all the

sustainability stuff. But outside of that, they would go

there and say, we have a list of 10 deals we want to try and

close. If we have one of these meetings set up where we think

post convention, we can close it. It's successful. And we

said, so here's what our technology does. Anyone can be

anywhere in the world and attend a convention without having to

be there. So you place your profile there, you have all the

hashtags that define you. So now you don't have to go to the

convention. I could be on the beach in Hawaii with my kids, or

I can attend 10 conventions in a day. Place my Dysko billboard

profile at any convention I want. And when people are either

there walking around in person, we Match AI takes over, or

everyone can just drop in and start connecting and doing it

that way. The response to that has been very, very strong. So

all of the rejection allowed me to start saying I wasn't meant

to do that. I was meant to do this. And I think as long as

what you're doing has a social conscious, and the goal is to

create a creative society where we grow, as long as you adhere

to that understanding and you realize that you're on a path of

creation, and you have a greater purpose for that creation that

will basically allow people to have a greater experience. It'll

bear the fruit. So for me now, Dysko and what it does that's

kind of where my journeys led me. At the moment, I'm extremely

excited to see where it goes from here. Fingers crossed, incredible.

Yeah, I've got older kids, and most of my

nieces and nephews are at either going to college or and just

that side of it, that humanitarian side of it...

And think about dating too. Like it's my goal to

put Tinder out of business. Because right now you go on like

I hear, I hear from, ironically, the same girl who did the

fitness one. When I was talking to her about this, I said she

was single. And I said, So do you use dating app? She goes,

yeah. I said, which one? She goes, all of them. I said, What

do you mean all of them? She goes, Well, that's what you do.

Oh, and I said, So what's that experience like? She goes, Well,

you see the same people on every app because everyone's doing the

same thing. I said, So what's the number one problem? She

goes, you don't find people on the level of depth you want,

because it's like, I like pets. You like pets. I don't smoke. I

don't smoke. We allow you to have specificity with who you

are and what you do. You could have hashtag underwater basket

weaving, right? We give you that specificity. You could have

hashtag Tom. Brady sucks. Tom Brady is the goat. So you can

really narrow it down, so you realize there is a need for

people to create their own systems in order to match and

connect. And we give people that. So I think we have three

lanes between schools, conventions and dating. And

ironically, we had a had a meeting with a very large VC

company, and they said, You need to stay in one lane. And this

harken back to SeePay. I'm like, oh my god, I can't believe these

people saying this to me. And my response to them was, I said, I

absolutely, absolutely agreed. I said, What Lane Do you think we

should be in? And they stopped because I gave them three

scenarios, yeah. And they go the convention space. I said, You

know what? I said, I completely understand why you said that.

But let me ask you this question, if we launched the app

and people who are not convention space, people start

using it, and people start using it for dating, would you mind

then if we became a two lane company, not just a one lane

company, and they said, Yeah, you can do that. So once again,

they don't know, theaters, going past experience states, the man

who chases two rabbits catches neither.

Yes.

And that's what their point is. You can't be

like, Oh, we're over here. Oh, we're over here. So I'm like,

No, we're very focused on one lane. But when you drive along

in a highway and it's two lanes, and it opens up to four, you're

allowed to change lanes. You don't have to stay in the two

you're in. And they got that. So I think, if anything, it's more

of a test to see if you're going to, like, go off the deep end

and, like, start like, chasing rabbits, or you're going to stay

focused,

Super cool. Can't wait to see that launch.

You've been so generous with your time.

I just I appreciate your time very much,

and I appreciate your listeners listening. For me, I just

reached that point where I sort of found peace in so many

different aspects of my life, where before it was just

turmoil. And I would just want listeners to who are out of

crossroads in their life, or even if they haven't reached a

crossroad, they're in the big, open wide parking lot, and they

don't know what direction to get out of the parking lot. You

know, just to realize that as long as you have a passion, it

doesn't matter if it's repairing old shoes or or trimming the

roses in a garden, as long as you have a passion for

something, you're so far in front of everybody else, because

most people are just automatons who are just like just

robotically grinding their way through life up until they die,

and the goal in life is to do more than that.

That is awesome. Thank you so much.

My pleasure, Steph, take care. Love to talk

to you. I wish you all the best.