Shawn Porat is Telling Your Fortune and Making a Lot of Money Doing It

Nearly everyone has had the pleasure of opening—and eating—a fortune cookie. Imagine you open one. One side says love will find you. That’s great. But the other encourages you to find that love at the movies with the latest romantic comedy coming to theaters. Or your fortune is a reminder about the importance of diligence in all your pursuits followed by a nudge to keep your language-learning streak on Duolingo going.

These scenarios are not made up. This is happening now because of our guest Shawn Porat and his company OpenFortune. They’re putting very timely, sometimes irreverent, ads inside fortune cookies, working with big brands like Coca-Cola, Cars.com, and many, many others you’ve heard of.

How does anyone think to even do that? How long did it take Shawn and team to broker the deals and build out the infrastructure? And what are the chances your next fortune will be one that Shawn’s company wrote?

Episode Guide

1:40 “I write people’s futures”

3:00 The spark for the business was envy

3:50 The eight-year process of getting all the necessary deals in place

6:55 OpenFortune has advertising rights for 99% of all fortune cookies in the world.

7:20 The Capital One campaign that went viral

11:15 Funding the business with investors like Henry Silverman, Shaquille O’Neal, Sylvester Stallone, and Gary Vaynerchuk.

13:55 Why Shawn did not become a lawyer and his out-of-the-box thinking

20:50 Fortune cookies create a unique emotional moment that makes brand engagement more powerful.

22:40 Making sure people don’t get sick of OpenFortune’s ads

25:35 Becoming part of experiences like F1 races, Madison Square Garden events, and the US Open

26:40 Designing ads for fortune cookies is not simple.

27:55 Getting customer ad spend right

29:55 International expansion opportunities

36:55 Using storytelling and real examples — like people winning lotteries from lucky numbers — to make fortunes feel authentic in places outside the US, where the tradition is new