INTERVIEW: Dawn Dickson Talks PopCom Controversy; Entrepreneurship, Investing, Owning A Business, Automated Retail + More

0:00This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human I survived nine months in captivity and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the survivor files. Every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with the Elizabeth Smart on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering the ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B. I'm Julie Pinero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility.

1:02Listen to Solita on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a bookshelf and you're a for-you-page or equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet and pop culture. With your favorite writers, book talk creators and plenty of overthought opinions. Yeah, I'm just so obsessed. Listen to Pro Society on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Our hometown is not a test tube. 90 miles northeast of Nashville, a battle for the future of America plays out in one small town. Developers with right wing ties have purchased hundreds of acres of land. We need cities on a shining hill. This is our town. A podcast about what happens when a small town becomes the site of a social experiment and fights back.

2:05I guess you didn't move in on a bunch of dumb hillbillies now, did you? Listen to our town on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. All of you every day a week come wake your ass up breakfast club. You're a finished or y'all done? Yeah, it's the world most dangerous one in short of breakfast club DJ NB Jess hilarious. Shalima in the God Lauren LaRosa is here. NB and Jess had to run, but we have a special guest in the building. Miss Don Dixon. Good morning, Don. How are you? I'm doing great. How's your energy today? I'm feeling good. I'm so happy to see you and I be here today. Where? What are we here to talk about that you got so much going on always? I think just catching up. Okay. Okay. Obviously last time I was here five years ago, I think in so much has changed. Definitely being on this show changed my life with my crowdfunding campaign out with what? Big shares ago. So, you know, a lot of change. I think just catching up.

3:05You know, I'm an African now. Yeah, I saw that you have the real estate development based in a crowd. It's to call pop. Pop times the business that I raised money for when I came. The crowdfunding campaign went crazy. Okay. You know, thank y'all. And things happened, you know, with that business. A lot of people invested and over 10,000 investors. This platform was catalyst for that. You know, it was a, I did that. I raised over a million dollars for the first time. I was the first female founded to do that. And a lot of that came from just being here and reaching the platform that you reached. And, you know, business, things happened in business. And a lot of things that it goes planned with that business. So, that's something we definitely could touch on. And then I ended up moving to Ghana and starting a real estate business just out of me trying to find my way. So, it's so much happened in five years. I don't even know where to start, you guys. Let's start with, I mean, you mentioned that there was a lot that happened with the PopCon business.

4:07Yeah. So, let's start there. Like, when you said there was a lot that happened, walk us through. So, you're here, crowdfunding campaign, there's $6 million, right? Yes. It's made $6 million. And then from that, after that step, then what begins to happen for Dawn? What started to happen was we took that money and went right into action and started to scale and started to play so really quick back story. PopCon makes software for vending machines that make them smarter. Essentially, it's the operating system that allows the vending machines to collect data. Since vending machines are standalone sales units, it collects the data about customers walking by, it collects data about sales. It was something new in the market. So, we had to be a market maker. So, I raised the money to develop the platform, raise the money to build the machines, put them in the market, hire a whole staff. And as we're growing so fast, things are happening as far as we're taking off. We're blown up. We have all these customers. But to continue to grow, you still need more money.

5:07I was following that playbook of what they teach us as entrepreneurs in the venture capital world. I raised over $7 million. I raised $1.3 million from venture capital and then $6 million from crowdfunding, which gave everybody a chance to invest. Right. So, when it's time to go raise that next round, because after we met all of our milestones with the crowdfunding campaign, that next round was a series A through VC, and that next round collapsed. And that was unexpected, shocking, devastating, because I had an investor commit to funding that round for $2.5 million as a lead. And then they didn't raise their fund. And a lot of people don't understand how this thing works. Venture capitalists raised money from limited partners, from other people, from family offices. So, when they don't close their money, entrepreneurs don't get their money. And so, out of nowhere, basically in two months, I go from a business that's booming, we're generating revenue, we're growing to out of money, and you need to fire your team, lay off your team.

6:07It's like Friday, the board tells me, you gotta lay off these people on Monday. It was devastating. It was never, I never saw that coming. Now, when you say that there's a lot of things that people don't understand when it comes to, like just the different rounds and the reason the money and who gets what and what goes where I was reading an article, watch article, and they quoted some of the different things that concerned people that are looking at your journey from the outside. And they talk about minimal revenue, vanishing assets, assets, not really understanding your operations and the fact that you relocated overseas. So, when it comes to those things that people from the outside are flagging, explain to us from the inside, like what happens, so when a revenue didn't work out. Yeah, I mean, we were generating revenue, but in the early stage, start up, in the beginning, all the money is going into building the product. So, we spent millions on building software, millions on hardware, millions on staffing over six years. And when you start to get into your revenue flow, it takes a few years to really break even, to really get into the red, I mean, into the black out of the red.

7:13So, people just did not understand that all the development costs that go into building a software platform and hiring staff. So, we did have assets, which was crazy because that watchdog article came out and it made me go under investigation. I had a full SEC investigation on me because I said, okay, everything you said, and I was cleared. But what did actually happen is the assets didn't get reported on the balance sheet. Like, I'll take that one. That was my fault. Because this is the assets weren't on the balance sheet at all. When I'm so busy raising money and when we went to get our financials updated with the SEC, we left out over 800,000 worth of assets that are on the book. So, it was actually being updated right now after me going through eight months of investigation. We did have revenue. We were doing over 35,000 a month in revenue. But of course, that's not enough to cover operations when your payroll burn and expenses are over 120,000. But when you're building a business to scale, you know you're going to spend more in the early days as you're ramping up.

8:15And so, we just didn't get a chance to break that threshold of where revenue caught up to expenses. We didn't get to make it. So, why did you say the audited financial filing to a zero dollar? Because, no, the audit, so the audit it wasn't zero dollars. We did get audited and our financials and our revenue did match up to what we said. So, we were doing about 35,000 a month. So, that's an MRR. We launched a product only six months. So, the product only been launched for six months, like ready for market and ready to go out. A real product, or not a prototype. We had 15 vending machines around the US and even one in Qatar and Vendomall. So, the real products were working with real brands, real partners, were generating revenue for six months. But then it's time to really ramp it up. So, that's when the next round would have come in and allowed us to continue to scale, put more vending machines in the market, make more revenue and then catch that revenue number up. But no, the revenue never covered our monthly expenses. So, that's where we're burning investment money as we're ramping up.

9:16The error that I made was overlooking the assets on the balance sheet. They just got left off. But, there was nothing fraudulent that happened. There was, the revenue was reported. But many investors did complain because they believe there was supposed to get a return in two years. They were looking at this investment, like it's the stock market. You can't look at no investment. The early stage private equity investment usually takes eight to ten years to get a ROI. But at this time, when I started crowdfunding, it was also the time when everybody started to be able to trade crypto on apps and use apps for like Robinhood. People were confusing investing in my company with investing in Tesla. They're asking me, okay, I invested $250 in your business, why can't I cash out right now or why can I cash out in two years? And I'm like, we're not publicly traded. We're using the money you gave us to build a business. The early investors in Uber, in Apple, and Microsoft, it took them seven to twelve years to get a return.

10:17So, why do I have to return your money in two years? And that was just because the education around difference between publicly traded stock and privately held shares, it wasn't there. All of this happened so quickly with the jobs acting with me being the first to do it. I'm out here promoting my business and showing what I'm doing. But I didn't properly educate people publicly on what it meant to invest in a private company. It didn't mean you're getting your money right back. What do you say to people who like just at a basic scale because I end the article, they also talk about the fact that people that there was complaining that there was like no third party verification, like there were no photos, there were no contractors or different things being provided in the public filing. So, it appeared as if you had no paying customers at scale and no visible deployment or like actual footprint of the company. So, we said to people that bring that up because that's not true. And I contacted up people with the watchdog article and I provided all proof and verification that I have been sending updates that I did have pictures that I did have those things in the filings.

11:21And they said, they're like a clickbait kind of website because they said we don't talk to founders, we don't give you a chance to tell your child of the story, and we go off of investors. And there was like three investors that, you know, not to diminish them, I'm grateful for their investment, but no one invested over $500 and they're complaining and said, I stole their money when I have investors who literally put in a half a million. And they are understanding like this is what happened with the company. We're still working on it, but the ones that maybe didn't have as much understanding of how the system works, they were saying, oh, you didn't update this. But I have a private Facebook group that I started in 2019. I have over 2800 investors in there and I send regular updates. I also have an email list of over 8600 investors that get an email from me, but 2000 unsubscribed. So I'm like, okay, of my 10,000 plus investors, some of you guys aren't getting updates. Some of you guys may legitimately feel that you don't know what's going on, but it's out there. We have a group. I have a private of YouTube page. Why do live town halls let them ask me questions. So all this is documented. I share this with the watch talk article, but you said something that's interesting, right?

12:32Because you know, you said 10,000 everyday people did invest in popcorn. When you take money from just, I guess regular everyday people out of the polls, the venture capitalists, do you believe you owe them a different level of accountability? Absolutely. And that's why I send these updates. That's why I get on these platforms like now explaining. That's why I wrote a whole response. It's on my sub stack and pulled documents and showed everything as evidence to show them that, you know, I was a good steward and I am a good steward of their capital. Did things go different than I planned? Yes. You know, what I do some things a little bit differently, especially when it comes to my staffing, yes. But was anything done illegally fraudulent or misleading? No, but the expectation of a return and even two to five years, it just wasn't realistic. But I do have a, I do have a responsibility. So I try to do as much as I can to educate them. But if I can't force them to read these things, yeah, at least once a year, I send a whole breakdown of like where the business is at, explaining their stocks and their shares. And even yesterday on my IG live, somebody got in my IG live and said, so where's my shares in popcorn?

13:41It's like I can't do enough. Yeah, I mean, you know, I didn't know we were going to get right to it. I was trying to ease into it. She said so they told me that you was a pro. You can't bring that one. I'm like, I'm not sure. That's what I think is the thing of two is like when you're a woman in text space and especially a black woman in text space, it's a lot of things that like I remember hearing your story and it was like she raised this money and like it was exciting to hear. And I know even what you did right where you did wrong, you know, whatever, if you're in that space and you are like figuring out and trying to turn the light on, trying to reach that light switch. There's a lot that you're going to learn. And I think that it's something that like people don't want to admit when it happens. But the criticism is valid. And I think the thing that sounds the worst is when you think about, well, the six, how much was really six point from the public six million and from overall seven point three. Okay. But then it is to that watch the report Lawrence reading there is a 2003 filing that shows zero dollars in revenue zero dollars in cash and only seven hundred and fifty dollars in total assets.

14:45When somebody hears those numbers, what aren't they understanding about where that money went? That was that is a mistake. That is wrong. Those those filings are incorrect. And they're being updated right now. I will take four responsibility for that. Those filings got put in in 2025 when I went to refile to be able to relaunch the company. I decided to relaunch because so many brands are reaching out to me. I said, okay, it's time to relaunch. I'm just hurriedly trying to relaunch. So I'm pulling financials and pulling files from 2022 and 20, 30 to re giving them to these guys to do an audit. I will take responsibility that I overlooked that the balance sheet was wrong. The balance sheet is where all the business lies. That is my fault. I'm just moving too fast. Nobody caught it either. The crowdfunding platform didn't catch it. The accountants didn't catch it. I didn't catch it because there's so many movement parts. We just we just didn't put the right balance sheet on there. The assets are over a hundred thousand. That's going to be refiled is happening right now. The revenue is negative. We are in the red as a company that's been in business. What it's seven years at this point. We had not broke even for cash flow for us to have positive on the balance sheet.

15:55So there's going to show negative cash flow, but there's positive assets. The software still in GitHub is protected. All of the machines we built, which are assets are still stored in their safe. But guess the SEC documents do look bad. It does look bad and it's getting fixed. Can you take some of this time to walk us through like the biggest buckets of spending? So an investor can understand how that money was spent with producing the profitable company. Yes, it takes time. Like I said, we launched only six months. So we built the product over five years where the money went over two million in the software development. This is documented. It's on the on the on the PNLs over two million software development. We didn't have AI like we do now that can build software. I was paying coders and developers every month to build this. Then over a million dollars went into hardware development because we had to build the hardware in order to deliver the software now fast forward 2026. We don't have to build hardware anymore because now other companies are now building hardware that can accommodate the software. Then I have a staff of 25 people, then not all full time. I have 13 full time and then I have all these contractors in part time.

17:06My payroll burn is $120,000 a month. Did I want to do that? Yes. Did I want to do that? No. But I had to follow what my board said to do. And when your venture backed the expectation is everybody's in house. They don't want you to have a team of contractors that to bring my CTO in house. This is a six figure employee person have to employ. I have to bring in operations person ahead of sales ahead of product. So I have four or five people making over $100,000 that I'm paying me. My salary is 10,000 a month. I'm the CEO. I'm running the business. But all the salaries are approved by the board. So people even get a misconception that I'm just spending the money and I get the money and it's mine and I'm just allocating it. No, we raise the money. We have board meetings every month. There's minutes for every board meeting. We decide what are we going to spend on this? What are we going to focus on? What's everybody's salary? And the board just is over the governance. So I wasn't spending more than any startup would spend, but in hindsight, I realized I can't run my business like the startup model. I should have resisted when they told me hire these people and do these things. And I should have said, no, we got to conserve this cash.

18:20Like I have a responsibility to not burn through this cash like venture capital back companies do because I might not get anymore. But in my mind, I believe that I was. But you had about 4.4 right now. Yeah. So we're, because you know, the people will be watching. Yeah, we're going to do it. Fine. We'll come. Okay. So you have marketing. So I mean, listen, you guys. It's all out there. So even the spreadsheets with line for line dollar for dollar. But you know, you have marketing. You have trade shows. You have travel. You have everything you see. We have office writ. We have, I mean, every little experience. Yeah, I mean, we're paying legal. Every contract we do has to be review again. We didn't have AI. So we're paying about $5,000 a month for just legal bills. We're paying HR agency. You know, there's just so much involved. You have all these employees. We're paying benefit packages taxes taxes or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even if you're not generating the money, I got to still pay taxes. So you're forgetting about that payroll taxes, employment taxes, Social Security, I have full time employees. So I'm paying constantly, you know, electricity, Wi-Fi, cell phone bills stipends.

19:30There's just so much involved in running a business to keep in mind this money was raised over. This is, this is what $7 million that was being used from 2017 to 2023. It's not all burned in a year. My number one competitor I had in 2020, they raised $45 million and within two years, all the money was gone. They shut down. $45 million. I've raised seven in six years and produced a product, got a patent, put 15 machines in the market, had a really great team. And honestly, if the series A1 have fell through, this would be a different conversation. But I couldn't go back to crowdfunding to raise $5 million. I didn't have the, honestly, it's hard mentally to deal with that. You know, to deal with, I didn't know what I was up against managing 10,000 people and 10,000 people's expectations. I just was raising money to build a product, but then I became like spinning most of my time, having calls with them, explaining things to them, trying to clean up this misunderstanding or that misunderstanding about your shares, hiring a community manager to just answer their questions all the time.

20:42It just became to the point where I said I wouldn't crowdfund again. I mean, my friend Isaac Hayes is raised so much, you know, from for his company. And I just realized after that last round, mentally, I can't deal with the constant pressure from the people. I needed to be able to be heads down, but I couldn't, I couldn't be heads down. I saw you say that a popcorn built 20 fully engineered pop shop machines, four demo test machines and two pop boxes. Yeah. And a lot of critics were questioning whether there was ever a meaningful deployment footprint. Well, they want to know what happened. Yeah, we had 17 machines out. We sold of those two. So we sold one to a company called a redo, which is like the horizon of the Middle East. So it's in Qatar right now. We sold another one to a man that lives in Hawaii, the other ones we deployed in pop shop local program. We had them all over the country. This is well documented in photographs. If you just Google it, they're there. We were running a program where we allowed local businesses to lease space in the machines because this will happen. COVID set us back like two years. Our deployment was scheduled for 2019. That's when we were launching.

21:51And then we launched in 2020 in the beginning of the year. The first machine came out. It was in Dallas, Texas. And then in March 2020, the world shut down. We had a alcohol company called Inja, gallery that signed a contract paid us. We built a machine to start selling alcohol and Vinnie machines and movie theaters will movie theater shut down. We were talking a proctor and gamble and Apple about doing machines for them. Well, those companies stop doing any type of new things. COVID made the world change. So we had to pivot very fast. So even when I came to meet you guys and talk about my business, pop shop local and this us deploying Vinnie machines was never the topic. We were always going to deploy the software. But then we built all these machines and had to get them out in the world. So we said, OK, now that's a local focusing economy. Everybody's talking about the flight chains mess up because of COVID. Small businesses are now within the forefront. We're going to put our vending machines in hotels, college campuses. We had them in the airport. We had them in all over and selling local products. 17.

22:52Yes, 17 in 2022, early 2023, I literally went and took them all out of the market. I had to break all of the contracts, all of the leases because operating these machines every month. Like I said, we're making about 33,000 to 35,000 a month of everybody paid that wasn't enough to pay for all of my staff and everything. When we didn't get the money, I couldn't even afford to keep those machines out to let them even keep going. So I pulled them out the market, but they were out. They were out. They were growing. We did the first NFTs and vending machines when NFTs were really popping. We did it at NFT NYC week. I mean, we were just really in our flow, but it takes money to innovate. It takes money to scale and to go out and acquire customers. There's three big shows a year that you have to exhibit at to really get the customers and the vending industry. And those shows are like $20,000 or more to exhibit. That's how I get my customers. So when those shows are shut down and then when we're out of money, it's not the kind of business you're going to go online and do an ad for. These are in person businesses.

23:57So it's just a lot of things happen that I didn't expect. And I had to close the business down really quickly when the rounded and close like literally Friday. The words like hey, we're running out of cash, which I've been telling y'all for 11 months, but now we're down. You got to get ready your team on Monday. Keep what's left. And it just, you know, I made it work my own self. I funded it myself for about five months out of my own pocket just to try to keep my staff paid. And then I had to be like, you know what? I got to pause this, but I didn't shut it down because it's too valuable to shut down. And first of all, it's too hard to shut down. I have all this software and all this hardware. What how do you shut that down? It doesn't dissolve. It's not an e-commerce business. The stuff is still in the storage to store it to this day. So over the time when I was figuring my life out, why didn't I move in a gunna? My business shut down. I was devastated. I mean, one day I'm working and having calls with big companies and two weeks later, we're trying to get out of office.

24:57My life is like, you know, so I'm like, okay, well, I'm going to go to that December and gunna and just kick it. I didn't come back. That happens to a lot of black. Well, I wasn't. I went to Ghana. That was a AJ. She was there. She was as you saw me like a lot of women come in that time. It's so freeing that like they just stay. But in the time that you're there and even now that you're there and what's being freeing like looking back on that time, like, I know you work a lot around exit strategies, right? And it seems like you didn't have time to really strategize your exit just happened. So what do you do now? Because you have the storage unit. You ain't got any piece of mind like what happens? I did try for the six months while we still had revenue on the books where I could say, okay, well, we just shut down a few months ago. We did have 35,000. You know, and I had acquisition on the books, a company, a big, a big, a vending company, the biggest, they were going to acquire us. We went through everything, do diligence, everything, all the meetings, they were going to acquire what they were going to hire me to come run the marketing.

25:57They were going to hire people on my team. We went through everything. It was there at the end of it. They ghosted me and they then copied the platform. They tried, but they couldn't because we have the sauce. But they definitely tried to copy. And that's when I realized like, wow, this happened. And I know a lot of entrepreneurs that Amazon stole their business. So it happens when you let people into your IP. So I tried to, you know, sell it. Then I realized after they go to me and it didn't work out and they tried to do it. I said, you know what? Let me recenter myself. So I put it on a hiatus, but I didn't shut it down. I kept paying the bills to keep it going kept the code saved, kept the machine safe. And I just was sitting in Ghana actually trying to raise money in Ghana and see if there would be a market for popcom in Africa. But I realized that they're not ready for automated retail. They're not, they're not advanced. US just got caught up. So Africa, honestly, as a continent's not ready yet from that technology. So then I just, I said, okay, be still. I'm going to just be still and see what I'm supposed to do. While I'm being still, I'm just trying to settle my life, you know, doing things in Ghana.

27:03Brands are emailing me home depot email me and found my cell phone number and called me. So for a found my cell phone number and called me interested in my product. And that made me be like, you know what? You can't let this die too many brand. And then when I finally got my heart to go and look at the inboxes, because you know, I just kind of, y'all, I had tapped out for a minute. It just burnt me out for like six months. I was like, this thing's going to kill me. I was bleeding my own money. So I just said six months. I'm just, I need to breathe. When I finally checked email box, there was like 50 different companies at an email to saying, can we get a machine? We're interested in your software. Some big brands. And I said, okay, it's time. So 2025 is when I said, okay, I'm going to bring it back. But people thought all this time I took the pop come money. Spins in Africa, moved Africa. It, you know, I sold their money, whatever they believed. So when I relaunch it and said, okay, I'm relaunch. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and health captive for nine months. I survived. And I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm a Elizabeth smart. And these are the survivor files.

28:15You just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up. Don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who lived through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. Their stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with the Elizabeth smart on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is pros society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse.

29:18I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is the Trojan horse, whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to pros society on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. On the new podcast solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B. I'm Julie Beniero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first.

30:21I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone I kept meeting people and they were like, you smiled at us not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind or wake up to a new version of yourself. Whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to solita on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Our town is small taters by most standards right but to the people who grew up here it's everything. What happens when a quiet Tennessee town becomes the front line in a battle over the future of America. The developers with right wing ties have purchased hundreds of acres of land in the area. The first thing you see when it pops up is high nears and apple etchum but they weren't just planning houses.

31:23We need cities on a shining hill that exemplify and embody the Christian way of life. Stop right there, is that normal? A podcast about what happens when a small town becomes the site of a social experiment. Got me Beniero and decides to fight back. Do not use my hard work to sell your bulls. They're not just opposing what's being planned for here. Our hometown is not a test tube. They feel like they're standing in opposition to an entire administration. I guess you didn't move in on a bunch of dumb hillbillies now did you? Listen to our town on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I went out and acquired a few customers. Got a deal signed. Document signed. They take a machine. That's when all the investigations started because people were looking at it like, Here she come again. Oh, she must have ran out of money in Africa. She's coming to raise money to steal from us again. And they started then reporting me to the SEC thinking that I'm coming back to take money to do.

32:26You know, whatever. Fun your lifestyle, bitch. Yeah, fun my lifestyle. Instead of relaunch the business. Why do you think people connected those things in the first place? Was there a transparency problem that allowed that situation? No, but if they don't check the emails and read the pop-com investor, Facebook group, they don't know what's going on. And it could look like to the public that that's exactly what happened because I never told the story. I'm first of all very private about these things. And second, it's hard to process. It could be embarrassing. It could be like, what did I do wrong? It could be like, you know, I'm a big success story. I'm on this show. I'm on cover for magazines. I'm in ink and all these. And then it's like, oh, now it's shut down so quick. I had to process that. So maybe I wasn't being that transparent to the public. But I was transparent to my investors. They knew if they don't read the updates, I can't force them. But I never, ever was quiet on them. I always told them everything that I was doing. So I'm actually, I feel that the investigation was a blessing.

33:26Because during that time from 2020 to 2023, a lot of us got rich. You know, I got a lot of money from online something. Selling something online, of course, having a company invested in and raising money. And which, by the way, I want to say raising money is not what is important. It's making money. I was raising money to get to revenue. I'm not raising money to just say I raised all this money. You got to give it back. So it's not like I'm a success because I raised money. But it's because I built something. That's the time a lot of us were just getting money. And a lot of people were scamming and getting scam. A lot of things happened. Now we're seeing this. And I appreciate that I got investigated. They find tooth comb forensically searched to the penny. Everything that I did. It was very challenging. But I saved all my records. And I was cleared up everything. And that is a blessing. Because I now can stand on something like, hey, yeah, it does, it does look crazy. that you raise seven million in the business out of business and all these people are like, what happened?

34:26And you're like, okay, where's all the money? But they, I had to account for every penny of that money. Because this is a serious business. Taking people's money under the SEC, you know what it is, we've seen people go to jail for the past couple of years. And they loved the block of the block. We've seen it. So it's like, hey, investigate me, yes, yes. Show, let me show you all of my, all of my everything. And that's what we really found. What happened? The balance sheet from 2023, there was no depreciation recorded over the years. The balance sheet from 2022 and 23rd, and three didn't get translated to 2025 for the filings and it set zero. They didn't pull over the numbers. And it looked crazy. And I know people are gonna listen to this right now. They're gonna say, okay, I hear Don Blamin' COVID. She's blamin' supply chain problems, manufacturing costs, right, disputes with manufacturers. Those are a lot of the setbacks. But at what point does a founder have to stop saying these things happened to us and say, regardless of what happened, I made decisions that didn't work.

35:27What's the part you personally got wrong? Two things happened at the same time. All those things happened, COVID happened, supply chains, issues happened, series A fall through, and also I could have done things differently. Also, you learn as you go, like you said Lauren. I was the first to do this. When you do first, you don't know what's happening. You're learning every day what's happening. Would I have changed some things? Absolutely. Like somebody brought it to my attention, because I'm like, why would you say that I misled people? Cause I really wanna know. I would even know how can be better. And a fellow founder said, you sent out a customer list that didn't have real customers. I said, when? When did I send out a customer list that don't have real customers? He said, you sent out an email to all of your investors that had a list of people on that that were not your customers. I said, it was a prospect list. It's a pipeline. There are either people that reached out to me that wanna do business or people that we wanna do business with. But if you didn't read the context behind that, it looks like I'm straight scamming. Send an out a list of people saying, these are who I'm working with.

36:28I'm not working with none of them. So what I've done that? No, because I realized I was being overly transparent, but without education and explanation, it all matter how much you say. If they don't understand what you're talking about and get it, it doesn't matter. So I take full responsibility for every single thing that happened. It's on me. I'm the founder, I'm the CEO. I hired everybody that was there. I brought on the board members that was there. And there's things that I would do differently and I am gonna do differently moving forward. No matter what happens in a business, the founder must take responsibility. I take full responsibility. But I'm not shutting down and I'm not giving up. I'm gonna, you know, I'm rebuilding it, which I spent money last year getting all the code updated and integrating new AI into it. So where now it has the most modern technology that's in the system. And it's way cheaper. So now I can take one million and do what it would have cost me 10 million to do in the past, which I appreciate AI. I appreciate the AI agents and everything that I can now do and build with today.

37:31Popcom was building with AI in 2017. It was called machine learning. It wasn't even called AI. Nobody understood fully what we built. So now it's an opportunity to come back into the market where the marketplace is ready. So yeah, we had some bumpy years. And I can name several companies that are now big companies that had these bumpy years. All I can do is take what I learned and move forward and do the best that I can to let my investors who are invested the 10,000 plus people know like your investment is still safe. You're on my cap table. Your money is, it was spent, to build the business, the business has value or valued over 12 million. Yes, the valuation is less because valuations of companies go up and down. So those investors are still technically invested into your company. They are investor. Until they get returned. So until I shut this whole thing down, it's gone, which is still a company. It's not dissolved. So it's a company until I have acquisition or a merger or be publicly traded. I don't intend to go to the public trade route. I intend to build to exit as an acquisition.

38:32And that's still the strategy. And I'm just really excited that after these years being out of the market three years, being just, there's no competitor. No one has built anything that is like Pop Com is far operating system for automated retail, not out there. That's why these brands still are emailing us. So being a success in business comes from like the right timing and the right product. I had a good product, probably not the ideal market timing. Now the timing is better. Where are you going to get the capital from now? Because I mean, it's going to be hard. Now I'm getting the capital from private angel investors. Okay, okay. Private angels, minimum checks, I have 25,000 accredited investors, definitely more one-on-one working with the investors so that they are understanding. It was hard to talk to and communicate with 10,000 people and that everybody understands. Of my 10,000, probably 100 of them, they think I stole their money. And the other ones, they're very supportive. And they talk to me in the Facebook group. They send me emails. They're like, we believe in you. We know the product is good.

39:35So I want everybody to be happy. I don't want anybody to think I stole their money. But in reality, I only can do so much. Another thing I saw, another criticism was it was concerning governance. So a lot of crowdfunding investors, I guess they had non-voting shares and you had full voting. That's not true. No, that's not true. No, everybody on my cap table, so all investors have common stock. Which common stock means we all have equal voting as far as common shares in the cap table, no preferred shares. The board vote, so the governance of pop-com was always through the board. The way that a corporate structure works is the shareholders own the company. Then the board manages the company. The board hires and fires a CEO. Then the CEO can hire and fire the staff. The board set my salary. The board set the budgets. The board determined every move that I was allowed to do. That's even why I couldn't raise any more capital. At the end, my board kept saying I couldn't raise anymore. My board of directors would not authorize me

40:37to raise an aim to try to save the business, which is that I don't understand. But the governance was absolutely put in place. They controlled me. So the shareholders vote about things that happen like the board? No. But if you go on Robinhood and invest in Tesla, you're not getting an invitation to the shareholders, meaning you're not voting anything. Only preferred voters, I mean preferred stockholders vote in publicly traded companies. So no, none of the crowdfunding investors are ever going to vote. But they have common stock, which is the same stock that I have, and the same stock that everybody has. So nobody's stock has more power than others. But we also can't be having 10,000 people that don't clearly understand the business, having a say-so in the operations. That's why we have a board of directors that is not connected to me. My main investor, my largest investor,

41:38was on the board, and then a woman that's just a tech expert, completely not attached to me that I met through tech stars. She was on the board, because I knew she would be very unbiased. She would just go straight by the book. I want to those investors thought they were supposed to have some say-so in the company. I don't think so. I saw class A shares, class B shares. So class B shares, or the report was that they had no voting control within that share. And then class A, that's like the board members and some of the larger investors that can actually influence the operations of the company. Again, everybody has common stock. Class A was like the first ones we ever have. So the class A, class B, class C. Class C was issued. We put class C all together for crowdfunding, because crowdfunding, you can't have 10,000 individuals on a cap table. We had to package all those investors into a syndicate.

42:38So they're all represented under like one category. So we just put them in the call class C. They just came later. They're non-voting. Also class B is non-voting. Class A is voting. My board members have class A that are also my investors. But I am still the majority owner of the class A shares. I set up my company very similar to how Mark Zuckerberg did, where you can't vote him out of the business, because I'm not going to allow you to vote me out of my business. It's never going to happen. I won't allow that. The me having that voting rights is actually would save the business from completely being shut down. I had to fire my board, because they were not letting me raise money. And I was able to fire my board because I was a majority voting shareholder. But people don't understand, I don't think when they complain about this, is that what does voting mean? Do you want me to come ask you to approve my budgets? And you don't have any understanding of the business? We're never going to do that. No company does that. But am I the only one that can decisions? No.

43:39It cannot be that way. When I decided to go to the public and take all this money, I immediately put a board in directors in place. I immediately got directors and officers insurance. I immediately got key managers in case I died or I can't work. Somebody's going to come in and take this. So I put all the structures in place to protect the business and to protect their investment. So there was nothing done that was mismanaged. The great error was sending in an incorrect, balanced sheet to the SEC. That was bad. In this time around, that's an accounting error. But at some point, I think most people at a basic level would have been like to have $6 million invested in zero. How did you hire an accountant? You got all these people that did the error. Because there was not zero. That's why. I mean, it was just the balance she didn't get rolled over. The cash flow, the cash went to zero. Yeah, when the business closes down, there's no more money coming in. There's no more money going out. It was at zero. But at the time we shut down, it was not at zero. But the assets were at like $750. That's wrong.

44:40That's OK. The assets are over $800,000. It's in the earlier. But the assets on the 2022 audit and balance sheet, when I got it redone, it did not roll over. They just reported nothing. Because keep in mind, 2023 was our last year of bringing in checks from sales. 2024, we had no activity. So 2024 is actually zero on a P&L. No profit, no loss, nothing's happening. The last balance sheet was 2023. So when I went to have the financials updated to file, they did not roll over all of the assets. They just said, oh, you weren't in business of 2024? Everything's zero. Not thinking balance sheet doesn't change. Assets don't change unless you sold them. They're still in the storage. This is an accounting firm. This is an accounting firm. Accounting firm. I hired the accounting firm. They ended up giving my money back three months ago. Because I'm like, I'll take responsibility as CEO. I should have read it thoroughly myself. I should have checked it. I should not have authorized it to go out.

45:40I'll take it. But I hired somebody to do it. And then I had the platform also check it. So we all missed this. Because again, moving too fast. I went to them and I said, I'm under investigation because of these balance sheets because these filings, I hired you to do it. They gave me a refund on my money. What happens to the accounting firm now? Nothing. There's going to be a lot of crowd people that participated in the crowd fund. And they're going to be like, well, you're saying, we shouldn't have had to say, because we don't know business. But then I said, you didn't even know how to file our paperwork. So maybe you don't know business either. Yeah, well, maybe I didn't know that and I learned now. I don't know everything. I'm not going to pretend that I do. Had I ever done SCC filings before 2020? No. Had I ever been audited before 2022? No. A lot of things I've never done in my life. Have I ever handled this much cash from investors never in my life? My 25 years of entrepreneurship, I never done these things before. It was all for one. So I learned. It's overwhelming. It's so many things to learn. I'm in charge of everything. At the end of the day, it's all on me. Everything's on me. Taking the trash out, showing me, and getting

46:40the code lives on me. And you worked with our salary, right? I worked with our salary from 2022 until we start. I just stopped giving myself a salary so I could preserve cash. Because luckily, I have multiple streams of income. I make good investments. I also make great money speaking and other things. So I said, listen, there's no need for me to keep taking money. I had a popcorn for a salary. I don't have to have it. And as a shareholder, I'll get my money on the back end when I sell the business. I'm not. It's fine. So I just was able to prolong us not shutting down. I was just using my salary to pay other things, which a lot of us do. And another thing that I had to do was be a personal guarantor for so many things for popcorn. I had to. You wanted the personal debt too. Oh, everybody suit me. Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. I went into this credit 800, Commodity's credit 500. Because they sued me for everything. And that's another thing. That's a point of realization. Yeah. Like when you're a CEO of a company,

47:41and you're going out and getting your lines of credit, getting an office building, getting all these things, I'm signing my name next to it. Because I'm CEO. Even though I'm not even the majority shareholder because I have all these investors now and I only own like 30%. It's a big company now. It's still on me. So when popcorn had to suddenly leave our office, who got sued for two years rent? Me. When popcorn couldn't pay the cash flow American Express, because we're doing the thing. Using American Express to run through all of our bills through it and then getting the points and using that for, we had the game down. Everybody would play in the game. What happened when you don't pay that bill? They sued me. SBA loan from Paycheck Protection. They sued me. Like me, myself. And so that's something people don't realize as well. When you're doing these businesses, and I even thought I'm independent of the business. I'm the CEO, but I'm not responsible for this debt. When the company shut down, they have,

48:42they get looking for somebody. And all people want to know is you're not a scammer. Yeah, exactly. So how do you separate your intentions from your result? Because I'm listening and I'm like, I don't think you're intention would to try to get over on people. Yeah, and I didn't get over on anybody. I even sold $50,000 of my crypto in 2020, 2022 and put it into the business to keep the business going. Do you remember that the jail money? The scammer wouldn't do that. Yes, I'm investment. I have paid all the pop comms bills since 2023 myself. Important contact. Yeah, I've paid the storage bills. I've paid the server bills. I've paid all of the G Suite bills to keep all of our documents stored. I've paid the bills to store the documents in a drop box. That's a bill. I pay Google to store all of our files. I paid that out of my pocket. A scammer would have took their money and went. But I believe in this business. And it's a great business. It's a great product. And people still want it. And I did everything I said I was going to do with the money. But we didn't go to the next step because we still were going.

49:43I did not consider how expensive it was going to be to launch that pop shop local program. I didn't budget for it. This is what happened. We didn't budget. It cost us $100,000 that we never planned to spend. And that's what really took it over there. But how is dawn the person right now? Dawn the person coming up out of all of that. Obviously because you're getting back out here. Yeah. This is my first time out here. Yeah. So how? I mean, that's a lot to have that. I need a person to go through some of it. It's especially when getting caught a scammer. It was hard for me because I never experienced anything like that. I knew that when I opened up my company to let everybody invest, my intentions were so pure. Like now, my people can invest. My community can invest. I was so excited on this show talking about how we can create wealth together. So I was hurt to let them down. You know, like that hurt me so deep. Because I'm like, we get so disappointed in our community.

50:44We always let each other down. We can't trust each other. I don't want to be another person where they like, see, I gave her money and I can't trust her. But I'm also a public lesson, right? So I'm like, okay, I put myself out there. Now they can see what this process looks like. And I just continue to tell the store and tell the truth. Dawn the person is good. Now that I've been investigated and cleared by like, I know you can't say I didn't have the wrong, because I know I didn't. You know, like even me, I did things wrong. I was sad that things wrong as far as I could have made better hearts and better decisions. But as far as fiscally, as far as legally, as far as like anything that could be in the scam, adjacent category, no. But did things go left at times? Yes. So me, after now four years of this, I feel great. Yeah, I feel good. I feel really positive and optimistic also because I was kind of nervous like, what if I can't bring this back? But the fact that customers still want it,

51:44I just was ahead of my time. So I feel really encouraged. And then the fact that like, honestly, God just gave me this amazing business in Ghana to let me be able to support myself more, to pay pop com bills, you know? I'm just grateful that life goes on. And I also have so many other streams of income that I built for myself over the years that I'm not defined by one thing. And the best thing is a risk. I mean, you know, sometimes you lose money, sometimes you break even, sometimes you win. But that is all the risk you take when you make an investment. I invested in 25 startups and half of them are out of business. A couple of them could be a unicorn and could go public. But I've definitely lost six figures and invested myself. But I've also come up. And it's just a part of the game. You have to take risks to get on the other side of things. I want to see this be successful. But if nothing else, I'm totally fine with like being

52:46transparent, being open so that people see what it's like. And now they can learn from me what to do, what not to do. If you don't like what I did if I was wrong, just don't do it. Take my lesson and say, listen, Dawn could have did this better. And now I know that's what we do. I'm having a book come out. I'm really going to lay it out in the book. So I'm just letting it be a lesson. I'm building in public. It's so uncomfortable to build anything when everybody's watching because everything is documented. And everything is out there. So. Popcom was a symbol for crowdfunding. Do you think now it's become an argument against the crowdfunding movement that you did against really? I think that it is both, right? Because people are so crowdfunding, but again, it's saturated now. The market has changed. People's risk adversity has changed. Them being comfortable giving money to entrepreneurs has changed. Our community, you get one chance. That's unfortunate because in other communities,

53:47you get a lot of chances. I was literally saying here thinking out. Yeah, you get one chance in our community. Did I miss up a lot of people's? I'm going to be, yeah, did I see in me that that affect and impact people's the way they see crowdfunding? Yeah, it could have, yes. But people are still invested in campaigns or seeing these campaigns go crazy. But also, they don't trust us. We don't trust each other. We don't give each other grace. I was even reading about Tesla. And they said Elon Musk was about to go bankrupt. The business shut down in 2008. And on Christmas Eve, he sold some things and kept Tesla alive. It happens everybody. But we don't get to do that. We don't get to mess up. But we do mess up. So I'm just hoping that people continue to invest in companies that are early, that are of our people. But this lesson should be, read everything. Do your due diligence deeply.

54:47Really understand how long it's going to take that founder to become profitable. I never said we were going to get money and get profitable overnight. It always is going to take us three to four years from launch to be very, very profitable. We only made it seven months after launch. There's no way I was going to be profitable yet. So understanding that business, pop-com not a cash flow business. If you want to invest in something with returns, you should probably get a business that's a cash flow business. So there's just a lot of things that I think people have learned over the past three, four, five years about investing that hopefully they won't take it out on everybody. I think you're right. But I also think the founders have to make sure they're ready as well. I think you have people that have great ideas. They might even have great ways to explain those ideas. And they get in front of these microphones and they say these things and people believe in them. And they invest. And they may not be ready for, you know, like I said. I wasn't ready for that. And I'm a visionary. I'm just speaking as a visionary.

55:49And yeah, we just talking our big vision. But how would you have known you weren't ready but for you to get in it and not be ready for that? I was the first person to do it. A real question. There's no way I wouldn't know. Who was your community through that piece of it, too? Like who were you going to because you were figuring things out? Like who were the business tech people that, like you were picking up the phone? So at the time when I crowdfunded, nobody agreed with me doing that. I was the first to do it. It was very taboo because you were supposed to raise money from DC. I went through tech stars. I was in this elite class. You don't go to crowdfunding or to retail investors. So they kind of turned their back on me in a way. If you're going to go this route, we'll not want nothing to do with that. They looked down on that. But when I succeeded, it became a thing. So a lot of people started doing it. So who's my community? Not a lot of people. Hey. No, I'm just thinking of believing it. OK, because they're looking at you do it. But you don't have anybody. You can call the time you're going to see it. But even on the scaling of it, because it sounds like the scaling of your business to get the profit is where you got way into. Yes. You didn't have anybody. No, I had a board.

56:49No. So at this point, once I raised the money, I had a team. I hired experts. So I had people on my team that a lot of experience and I bought a director's. So we were in our flow. Like, we were doing really good before we ran out of money. It wasn't that we ran out of money because we ran out of money because we're burning cash to fat. We're growing fast. It's a growing pain. So I had a good community after I raised the money. I did. But they didn't. They were good to help me grow the business. I didn't have good grasp on managing all these people. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not. I only got one more question because I don't want to overwhelm the people. I want them to hear. No, they're the, because you know, I want them to hear you. I want them to actually listen and understand what it is you're saying. But if I'm one of those early pop calm investors, and I'm sitting across from you right now, and I say, Don, I believe in you. Tell me why I shouldn't feel like you failed me. What do you say out of me? Say to me if I if I if I didn't watch the whole interview and all I'm seeing is just clip. What do you say to that person? The company's not shut down.

57:51The the code that we pay to build is safe. The machines are safe. We still have customers that are interested. And I didn't give up on it. I'm still going. I didn't fail you. I'm still going. I'm still working on it. I need more time. It doesn't take two or three years to build what we're trying to build. Let me have more time to really get my product out there to market at scale. So just be patient. I don't need nothing else from you. Just hold tight to those shares. Because keep in mind too, my life tied up into this too. I want to cash out too. I'll get the biggest check. So why do I want to see this through? We and this together. Is there any money left from the original? No. Wow. There's can't be no. All the money that I raise, I use it to pay the bills, to pay the staff, to build a product. I'm coming out of my pocket. I pay money out of my bank account every month to keep Pop Com alive right now today. I mean, I don't have no reason not to believe you. But people will say, well, how do you afford to move the gun in?

58:51How do you afford to live if all the money is gone? It's unfortunate because Pop Com money is gone, but not Don Dixon's money. I'm a 47-year-old adult that's been working since I was 20 years old. I make good investment decisions. I save money. I also get six figures a year from speaking and doing influencer work for tech products. Like, people just, I don't talk too much about that. I also have other businesses. I have my real estate business in Ghana, which is under my D1 consulting. So I've had D1 consultants since 2005. It's been my own personal business. And I've been generating money for that for years. That's how I could afford to stop paying myself a salary for Pop Com. So I think the lesson is also have multiple strings of income and build them over time. Plan for, you know, I have a daughter. She was in college. I could not go broke. I have to support her. So knowing this, I've been investing. I got my first whole life policy when she was a baby. If anybody knows about whole life insurance, it gains cash value over years.

59:51My daughter's 22. So if nothing else, that's one place where money's at. So it's just that I didn't need to use Pop Com money to make money. I make money myself. Yeah. Well, it's Don Dixon. If people want to complain to you directly, who today? What did they do, Doc? What is it? Hey, when they go to the website, don't follow my Instagram. You know, Pop Com.ai is still a business is there. Don Dixon.me, come find me. And don at popcom.shop, email me, investors. If y'all think you haven't heard from me in years, that's my email. I just want to say too, you getting back on the horse, like, is I commend you for that. Cause I watched a couple of businesses last year. Take a break because they couldn't scale. And I know that your lives be tied to your businesses. So I wish you the best of luck. And what you're trying to figure out in this new world. Aren't you been doing shit with nighties? It's not. It is not. It is not at all. Well, thank you, Don. Thanks for having me. I just appreciate the opportunity to just clear the air too, y'all. Cause y'all put me out there. So I at least owe it to even your audience to be like, hey, this will happen.

1:00:52Are you showing up with first steps? Some people didn't show up to do that. I'm here. And I'm open. You got my email. So hit me up. Absolutely. It's Don Dixon, it's the Breakfast Club. Oh no. Everyday I wake up. Like your ass up. The Breakfast Club. You're finally so young, Don. I survived nine months in captivity. And I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart. And these are the survivor files. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with the Elizabeth Smart on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle.

1:01:53I choose option B. I'm Julie Pinero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a bookshelf and you're for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love Island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet and pop culture. With your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of over thought opinions. Yeah, I'm on set. So on set. Listen to pro society on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Our hometown is not a test tube. 90 miles northeast of Nashville, a battle for the future of America plays out in one small town.

1:02:55The developers with right wing ties have purchased hundreds of acres of land. We need cities on a shining hill. This is our town. A podcast about what happens when a small town becomes the site of a social experiment and fights back. Guess you didn't move in on a bunch of dumb hillbillies and I'll dig you. Listen to our town on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed human.