Ashkan Karbasfrooshan

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan

A winner of the 2015 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for in the media category, Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of WatchMojo, one of the most successful producers of premium video content.

The company’s catalog of 10,000 videos on pop culture and infotainment and are seen 300 million times each month by nearly 50 million consumers. With 7 billion all-time views and 13 million subscribers on YouTube, WatchMojo operates the tenth largest YouTube channel of all time.

A finance graduate from one of the top colleges in the nation, Ashkan started his career as in-house finance analyst at one of the original meta-search engines on the Web, Mamma. From there he worked in the online publishing industry where he headed up advertising sales for AskMen. After its sale to News Corp., he launched WatchMojo, which to this day has never raised financing and is profitable since 2011.

He left News Corp. and established Mojo Supreme in 2006 as an incubator which spawned multiple projects, including WatchMojo.com, which took off and today counts media companies and marketers as clients.

A prolific writer, he has written thousands of articles on business, sports, entertainment, lifestyle, pop culture, travel and much more. His articles have been published on MSN, AOL, Yahoo!, MediaPost, PaidContent, GigaOm and Tech Crunch and he and has been quoted in Forbes, the BBC, Business Week, CNET, etc.

He is the author of Course to Success: Everything You Need to Succeed Beyond School, The Confessions of Alexander the Great: 33 Lessons in Greatness, and the 10-Year Overnight Success: An Entrepreneur’s Manifesto – How WatchMojo Built the Most Successful Media Brand on YouTube.

He holds a degree in Commerce, lives in Montreal and is married with two children.

The Latest from Ashkan Karbasfrooshan

If Financing is Marriage, is M&A Death?

Not a week goes by where I don’t get an email that goes like this: “I wanted to reconnect, as I've recently left [the company that bought my startup].  Long story, but suffice it to say their exe

CEO Bloggers: To Blog or Not to Blog

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan
“Where do you get the time to write so much as a company CEO, and more importantly, shouldn’t you be closing deals or doing something more useful?” Fair enough. <strong>Do What Comes Natur

The Future Of Content: Content Is The Future

Today, the Web’s infrastructure is built, the platforms have emerged; we’re now filling the pipes with content; mainly free, ad-supported content. Anyone who’s worked in user-generated/approp

Is Technology A Zero-Sum Game?

In last week’s <a href="https://beta.techcrunch.com/2012/03/24/get-rich-or-die-trying/">Get Rich or Die Trying</a> article, I mentioned that “tech is a zero-sum, winner takes all game”.  A read

Get Rich or Die Trying

<em>“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Ed

Why Entrepreneurs Fail And Most Startups Are DOA

This isn’t an anti-entrepreneur rant. It’s also not a piece to discourage anyone from launching their own business. It’s a warning for those who seek to launch their startup to understand some o

Entrepreneurs Are Difficult At Best And Abrasive at Worst — Get Over It

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan
The greatest entrepreneurs follow their gut and as a result are perceived as difficult at best and abrasive at worst. Most people who know me say I’m too diplomatic, but last week my advisor told

What A Love Doctor Taught Me About Fundraising

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan
Oprah Winfrey recently <a href="http://www.oprah.com/own-oprahs-next-chapter/How-Youre-Defined-By-the-Stories-You-Tell-Yourself-Video">interviewed</a> Anthony Robbins, who talked about “how we're de

How To Get People To Do What You Want

Leadership in management is the art and science of getting others to do what they don’t necessarily want – or don't understand why they’re being asked – to do. Doing it at a startup is accompl

Seize Your Opportunities Like Jeremy Lin

Last week, Forbes contributor Eric Jackson published a <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/02/11/9-lessons-jeremy-lin-can-teach-us-before-we-go-to-work-monday-morning/">list</a> on t

Patience is a Virtue, for Losers

Patience is one of the seven virtues, the lesser-known cousins of the seven sins.  And indeed, “patience <em>is</em> a virtue” – or so goes the saying.  But another saying states that “fortu

Mark Zuckerberg’s 6 Ingredients For Success

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan
Leadership guru Warren Bennis asked whether leaders are born or made. When asked if Wall Street would accept a young <a href="http://watchmojo.com/index.php?id=8709">Mark Zuckerberg</a> in his early 2

To Pivot or Not to Pivot

Ah, the internet – how you hijack our vocabulary.  A few years ago, “embedded” had connotations of journalists following soldiers.  Today, it’s most associated with YouTube clips.  Similarl