Our guest for this episode is Mark Hevesh, father of Lily Hevesh, the #1 Domino Artist in the world.
She’s done projects for TV, film, the music industry, brand partners, and corporate partners – including Jimmy Fallon, James Corden, Katy Perry, The Today Show, Disney-Pixar, several Fortunate 100 brands, and the 2016 hit movie Collateral Beauty.
Lily holds the Guinness Book of World Record for most dominoes in a circle field and was a major contributor to the American Domino Record which included 250,000 dominoes. Her work has been viewed on social media over one billion times and she has over three million followers.
If you haven’t seen Lily’s YouTube videos, you’re really missing something special – there is no equal to the domino creations that Lily makes. And, if you’re inspired to purchase a kit of high-quality toppling dominos you can buy a set that Lily just launched called “H5 Domino Creations.” Just visit her website at: www.Hevesh5.com/buydominoes.
Lily and her siblings, Matthew & Alissa, are fortunate to have Mark Hevesh as their father. Mark is a wonderful guy and has been an important contributor to the success that Lily’s had with making a business out of her domino art.
In this episode, Mark and I cover a variety of topics, including some of the background on how Lily’s Hevesh5 grew from a small YouTube channel into the well managed and growing business that it is today, why she maintained her anonymity, and the importance of learning from your kids.
Enjoy the episode!
How to rate & review a podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://youtu.be/RWtAQ025zl4
Lilly on the web
YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/Hevesh5
Instagram: @Hevesh5
Website: www.hevesh5.com
Link to buy a set of H5 Domino Creations: www.hevesh5.com/buydominoes
Lily’s Newest Domino Record: 32,000 Dominos!!! (~5.5 min)
Making Dominos Video, Ep 1, The Full Story (~14 min)
Please forgive the errors in the transcript! Enjoy the episode!
Jonathan V.:
Well, Mark, thank you so much for joining, joining me today. I’m really excited to be talking with you. I think what Lily does is amazing. I was looking at our videos to try to get a feel for it. And then 40 minutes later, I managed to pull myself away.
Mark Hevesh:
Her stuff is pretty amazing. She’s got an interesting mix of a great artist’s eye and you know, the various technical elements that go with it, you know, physically building something that can be considered art. Yeah. Understanding physics and mechanics and math and measurements and stuff like that at the same time as being a great artist.
Jonathan V.:
Yeah. It really struck me is how much of an artistic element there is to it. I had mentioned when we were communicating previously that I had enjoyed setting up dominoes when I was a youngster, but I had not gotten, you know, obviously anywhere near what Lily does. I mean, I couldn’t have even imagined that something like what she does is possible, but it also what she does in addition to the, like the technical achievements for lack of a better word is she is creating art as well. So it’s really just incredible. It’s really impressive.
Mark Hevesh:
And it’s interesting that a lot of people who are older say “when I was a kid at set up dominoes,” and what they’re talking about are the dotted dominoes. You know, traditionally they’re made of ivory or a white ceramic bone-like material with black dots, which are centuries old, right? They’re not made for toppling. They have rounded corners and you cannot build 3D structures. You cannot build up. In other words, you’re pretty much limited to a two-dimensional field or a line, unlike toppling dominoes. You know, it’s interesting, everyone knows what they are, but you can’t go to a store and buy good quality toppling dominoes until now, because we actually are entering that market. We partnered with a toy company, Spin Master. Spin Master is a huge toy company, one and a half billion dollar 20-year-old company headquartered in Toronto, like the fifth biggest toy company they’re gigantic. And that’s who we partnered with after three years of trying to get a domino line created that’s, world-class quality, same as Lego for building bricks, you know, consistency, precision and so on.
But until now you either had to get toppling dominoes and you know, and there’s a defacto standard, you know, 24 millimeters by 48 millimeters by 7.5 grams or whatever the measurement is, super sharp corners. And historically they’d been only available from one or two vendors in Europe where domino art’s kind of been recognized and in America it’s growing. And so she was frustrated as a domino artist that she couldn’t get a really, really good quality toppling domino. And so that was her motivation, but it’s interesting, we were in Greece, in Athens, Greece at a cultural festival and Lily set up tables to do a domino workshop. And all these little kids, they’re little kids, they’ve never touched what you know to be a toppling domino. They’ve seen them on YouTube, but they’ve never actually built with them or touched them or seen them at a store. And they just immediately went over and started building stuff. So it was eye-opening, you know, it was an opportunity. Lily just wanted to see a really good quality domino out in the market at a retail level. So it could reach the broad masses as it were. But yes, it was very interesting to see that.
Jonathan V.:
That’s exciting. I had seen that checking out the website, Domino Creations, I think it’s called?
Mark Hevesh:
Yeah. H5 Domino Creations.
Jonathan V.:
H5. That’s right. That’s a Lily’s logo. Would you say? H5?
Mark Hevesh:
Right. So it’s our surname and you know, there aren’t a lot of us, so you can say I’m Hevesh one. My wife is Hevesh 2. My son, Matthew is Hevesh 3. My daughter Alissa is Hevesh 4. And then we adopted Lily in China. She’s the fifth Hevesh. So Hevesh 5. My wife actually came up with the original concept of integrating the H with the five to come up with the logo that Lily refined.
Jonathan V.:
Well, I’m glad that she came out with a kit. I think that’s fantastic. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on one. So I’m looking forward to trying to understand the Hevesh household and what things were like when Lily was young. I have to ask though first what it was like for you. I’m sure there’ve been many incredible moments. What struck me though, was her working on the film set of Collateral Beauty with some huge stars Will Smith, Helen Merrin, Kate Winslet, Keira Knightley, Ed Norton directed by Oscar and Emmy winning director, David Frankel. What is a father seeing your, what was she 17 years old at the time? What was that like for you?
Mark Hevesh:
Well, incredible. We did get a call from a producer, Mike Biederman. He actually produced Spotlight. He was nominated, I think, as a producer for Spotlight.
Jonathan V.:
Oh, that was a great movie.
Mark Hevesh:
And I mean, the thing about getting projects like that or any other project, whether it’s in the entertainment industry, you know, music stuff, Katy Perry, commercials, TV, whatever corporate stuff. The thing is I never promoted Lily ever. Not a single time. I mean, as we were kind of, you could almost say growing the business, I mean, she created a personal brand because she’s engaging in her art. But, you know, she was 14 when the inquiries started coming in and it would come in and you know, I’m a dad, so I have to go and Google and go to LinkedIn and go to all these different search engines and find out who this person is to make sure they’re not a weirdo because they’re out there.
Jonathan V.:
Right. Sure.
Mark Hevesh:
And so, you know, every single time, it was a legit producer director, studio, whatever. And as the inquiries would come in, I would just take it over. I have a sales and marketing background and I was getting really sick of the corporate world. I don’t really work well in that environment. So it gave me the opportunity to, you know, use skills I’d developed over 30 or 35 years. So an inquiry would come in like Collateral Beauty, and I’d immediately hop on the call because, you know, I look at all the emails and I go, wow, this is promising and get a call and some emails, negotiate a contract, come up with the schedule. You know, I manage the logistics. I basically, I support her as her support team her, her support person, if you want, she’s the artist, a domino artist, she’s a YouTube personality. And I basically just support whatever she does and whatever, you know, whatever efforts are required to make the project happen. And Collateral Beauty was no different.
And we did have this concept at one time, because I do have a marketing background where I said, when we go to a city and we do a project, I’ll target the three biggest ad agencies in that city. And I’ll get a meeting with them and I’ll bring my laptop and I’ll visit them and I’ll show them our media deck or our pitch deck, or a sizzle reel, whatever you want to call it. But I never did that, it never actually happened because it’s just been busy starting in the middle of 2012 and now it’s the end of 2020. And I never had a chance to like actually do promotion and promote her and try to sell her art or her skills or her, you know, whatever the deliverable might be to corporations, you know, whatever it’s always been, just responding and managing anything that was incoming.
Jonathan V.:
Yeah. That’s fantastic. That’s a great problem to have, not to have time to promote because you’re getting so much just organic interest.
Mark Hevesh:
I mean, I’m incredibly lucky to be able to do this for her. And you know, she’s lucky to have me. We’re just, you know, it was just the stars aligned, right? And a lot of young YouTubers, you know, teenagers who are content creators and whatever their niche might be, you know, health and beauty lifestyle, blah blah. And many of them don’t have a family member or a parent who happens to have the toolkit, right. The skill set to manage them. Then you have to go find a manager and, you know, you can’t really trust someone you find as opposed to the way you can trust a family member. Right. So it just, it worked out, you know, just super lucky in that sense.
Jonathan V.:
Yeah. That’s fantastic. So you’ve got three kids, right? Lily, and two others. You mentioned.
Mark Hevesh:
Yeah. Matthew he’s a professional musician and music educator. Who, he just moved to LA, but it’s a super hard time to be in that industry just because of everything that’s happening. In the gig economy, you know, entertainment, studio work. So he’s 27. My daughter is Alissa. She lives in Florida. She graduated recently with a dual major in environmental studies and economics and she’s into food science and food security, that segment of the food and nutrition, and farm industries as it were. And then we adopted Lily when she was about a year old in China and she just turned 22.
Jonathan V.:
Wow. Okay, great. What was the household like when the kids grew up? Did you guys have certain family rituals or chores, expectations, activities that you all did together?
Mark Hevesh:
You know, we just have basic values and you know, we’re traditional in many ways. So when you have, I mean the span of years, Matthew and Alissa are four years apart and Alissa is two years older than Lily. So it’s a carnival and a circus every day in our house. And honestly, a lot of the parenting expertise and insight is intuition. I mean, I really got that stuff from my wife and things like exposing your kids to a lot of things. So we never said you’re going to play soccer. No, we allowed them to be exposed to things. And music was a huge defining characteristic of our family. And all three of the kids were state-ranked musicians. And my son is a professional musician and Alissa was voice and she was all-state for voice and managed the choir. And Lily was all-state for percussion because she’s, she was really petite and there were just certain things you can and can’t do. And, you know, playing the trombone wasn’t right for her and Lily, when she was six said, I want to take piano lessons. And then everyone’s taking piano lessons. So they all play piano.
And so, Matthew was piano, guitar and violin. Alissa is piano, voice ukulele, and Lily is percussion and piano. Music was a very, very big part of our family. And you have, you know, a given week and it was just a madhouse. You look at the calendar, it’s like, okay, we have to be at the middle school for Alissa’s thing on Wednesday, but Lily has this thing on Friday and Mathew is going to be doing a recital on the violin on Tuesday. So it was really just a constant churning of just all different performances. But I’m not complaining. I mean, because music does something amazing for kids and kids who have to learn how to play music with other kids learn really, really valuable basic skills, which involve things like teamwork. And it’s not all about me. And this is your part. And everyone is really playing a supporting role. And, you know, you have to develop parts of the brain to understand music, which is the same part of the brain that processes mathematics. And, you know, and there’s a lot of data. I don’t know what the specific numbers are, but there have been studies and a very, very significant high percentage of senior managers, like 70 or 80% of them were music kids.
Jonathan V.:
Interesting. Wow. And how did they first, was it something that Matthew gravitated towards and the others followed or did you and your wife encourage that? Or are you guys musicians?
Mark Hevesh:
Cathy can read music and she was able to play guitar when she was younger and she’s able to plink things out on the piano, and I’m a drummer, and I can sing and I’m not particularly good at either one. Although people seem to think I’m okay, but I mean, I can’t read music. And it all started really with Matt when he was eight, he started playing violin and he was really good. That’s where it started. And then Alissa is just kind of, she’s always singing in her head or out loud into the room. There was just always music. I mean, we were playing Rafi, you know what I mean? When the kids were five and six, you know, and they get older and we’re listening to James Taylor and there’s, you know, basic singer songwriter type of deliverables and performances and recordings. Yeah, music was just always really huge. And the school district, we happened to be in, out of just pure 100% dumb luck, is the strongest school district in the region for music. And we were fortunate that that was the school district we ended up in.
Jonathan V.:
One thing that strikes me, Lily is at least she appears to be very confident, relaxed self-assured in all of the videos that she posts. She just seems very natural and comfortable in her own skin.
Mark Hevesh:
Yeah. She developed that, she doesn’t innately have that. There’s always this nature versus nurture thing, you know, genetic predestiny, how the person is hardwired, what’s the influence of the environment. Right. And so we’ve seen it with all of our kids and it’s not, like I said, you’re a boy, so you must like trucks. He just loved trucks. And Lily, this is before. I mean, before we get Lily, Alissa loved anything that was pink. I mean, it’s just, it’s hardwired. And yeah. So they grew up in the same environment and you hear this story and the questions asked all the time nature versus nurture and all that stuff. And Matthew and Alissa were both type A personalities – out there, social, emotional, and Lily is wired completely different. She is super serious, Always. She’s always been serious. I never said Lily, like, I don’t think the sentence “Lily, do your homework” ever took place, not even once. And she’d go home and just sit at the counter and do her homework and then go build dominoes or edit or do whatever she’s going to do. And I’d walk over to her and ask her questions. She’d look at me irritated, and go “dad, I’m working on my essay.” And she was just like, this is what you do. You don’t, there’s no question. This is what you’re supposed to do. So this is what you do. And that’s how Lily’s wired. And she learned from just observation and research on the web, you know, being a YouTube content creator and, you know, being an influencer and have a personality, you have to, you know, act a certain way and portray yourself a certain way. She’s not innately a person who’s going to go on stage and give a speech or make a really humorous video. But she actually developed those skills as her social media activity grew.
Jonathan V.:
That’s very commendable because she also comes off as somebody that does not appear to be trying to portray a certain persona, but rather just very natural.
Mark Hevesh:
She’s very genuine. She’s very genuine. And she’s very humble. You know, what you see is what you get. She’s really literal.
Jonathan V.:
When did she start developing her interest in dominoes?
Mark Hevesh:
We were camping with my in-laws, Cathy’s parents. She was, I think, nine and on Cape Cod. And they happened to have a set of dominoes that she would just set them up and knock them down. And she said, Oh, that’s cool. And then it was really very random and very organic. There was no plan, there was no strategy. She just Googled Domino’s on YouTube and saw, you know, just a lot of work that other domino artists before her had done, mostly from Europe. There was one notable guy who’s up in Winnipeg, Canada who is fantastic. And he was a huge inspiration to her and she says, one day, “can I get Domino’s from Germany for Christmas?” It’s like, okay. So we’re going to spend $200 on these little plastic rectangles from Germany that cost as much to ship as they do to just buy them because they’re heavy and you’re shipping across the ocean and we go well let’s yeah. Okay. You know, she’s not hanging out with hoodlums, you know, it’s just a, it’s like a hobby. It’s a cool thing.
Jonathan V.:
I would imagine many game systems cost that much or certainly more when you add in the cost of the headphones and everything else.
Mark Hevesh:
Oh, so we do have a thing in our family. We never had a game console
Jonathan V.:
You never had a game console. So tell me more about that. What was your thinking? How did that conversation work out with your kids?
Mark Hevesh:
We watched TV you know; we had our Saturday morning thing. We watched SpongeBob like anyone else, but we really, my wife and I just thought that the whole game console culture wasn’t good for kids. We just simply believe that. Now a friend of Matthew’s did give him an old Atari and my dad had this old Intellivision, Mattel had this game console system called Intellivision from like the eighties or nineties. It was very archaic. It was really character cell. It wasn’t vector graphics or anything sophisticated, but they had that, you know, Pong, I mean, it was, they were playing with vintage stuff like that, or the kind of game that is on the computer, like Lewis and Clark, Exploring the Oregon trail and, you know, like educational type computer games that were big for a while. Or the kind of like Tonka had a thing that you like overlaid on top of the keyboard with Velcro and it had like controls of a, like a front end loader and it’s integrated with what you’re seeing on the screen. So those were a little more interactive, but they weren’t like begging us. And we were going, no, it’s just, we just didn’t bring those kinds of things into the house. And they knew they existed because, you know, Matthew would see it as a friend’s house or Alissa would see it at her friend’s house. And we just, we just didn’t go in that direction because they did have other things. They were all, three of them very computer literate really early. And I have video of Lily at four on the computer, but she was playing like a spelling game kind of thing.
Jonathan V.:
Yeah. Yeah. Where you were restrictive in terms of what they would watch or how much TV time they got.
Mark Hevesh:
I mean, it was limited. They were so into music, all of them. And they loved music. Yeah, there were limits and everyone, everything had to be fair and equal if Lily chose the cartoons on Saturday morning, then Alissa, then she was on Sunday morning, you know, we tried to lay a foundation of, you know, sharing and, you know, equal, that kind of thing.
Jonathan V.:
Right. Right. Anything else kind of come to mind in terms of things that you felt were important in terms of how you approached parenting?
Mark Hevesh:
You know, I mean, it was just, it’s a very simple set of ideas, and that is avoiding conflict, getting along, sharing, supporting each other. It’s really that simple. It’s incredibly simple. It doesn’t, there doesn’t have to be any strategic plan, but that’s just how my wife and I are, and it worked with who our kids are. And there’s no one size fits all formula. There is a certain amount of luck involved.
Jonathan V.:
So, circling back to Lily’s request, a $200 domino kit from Germany.
Mark Hevesh:
Yeah. So she was nine years old and Lily was just really into it. But literally also displayed very broad talent in the visual arts, just in general. And Lily didn’t have a goal. Like I want to be a YouTube content creator, or I want to get this many subscribers. And none of that, she just loved Domino’s and she developed an ancillary skill that still to this day, I just find incredible. She’s developed the skills of a filmmaker. David Frankel, the director of Collateral Beauty. He’s done the Devil Wears Prada, [inaudible], he’s done some major movies, major TV stuff. And he said to me, “Lily is a great filmmaker.” And that means, you know, shot composition, lighting, editing, cuts, all the different things that go into making a final film deliverable, sound, annotation on the screen. There’s a lot to it.
Jonathan V.:
I imagine, especially with her creations to think about the different perspectives and how you want to frame it up and how you want to tell the story is that piece of art unfolds.
Mark Hevesh:
Yeah. She goes into a zone and she just builds. And if she has a specific client if there’s a commercial project, there’s a plan. But when she’s just doing her art, like the Amazing Triple Spiral, which was one of her most viral videos, she knew she wanted to make a triple spiral, but she didn’t go “I’m going to use this number of, these colors for the first three layers.” She didn’t plan it out. Although there is a lot of precision to the spacing of each arm of the spiral as it were. But like most of her stuff, she just builds. And her recent one, which went up about, I think, six weeks ago, maybe she spent a couple months on it and it was dense. I mean, it was like every square inch of the floor. And she just built an inverted, double helix, just built it. And then she built this other structure. She does not have a plan, but she will stand at the edge of the build and stare at it for like three minutes which is actually a long time. And what she’s doing is she’s planning a tracking shot. And I don’t think she builds with the idea, okay, this has to topple before that. She just goes from one end of the room to the other, doing what comes to her.
Jonathan V.:
The camera positioning and where she’s going to walk. That’s the type of thing I would think she would need to give a lot of thought to in advance.
Mark Hevesh:
Yeah. Sometimes she gets herself into a pickle and she goes, Oh, I shouldn’t have done that because now how am I going to get that shot? But she got really good at it, she shoots with like six cameras, all High-Def. And we actually have video of her directing the entire family. So, you know, she’s in high school, she’s 15 or 16 years old and she goes, “mom, I want you to stand here with the Cannon 80D, dad, you stand here with the iPhone, have it set to this, Matthew, stand over here, Alissa, I need you to be over here.” And she’s literally directing all of us. And she tells us exactly what to do. And she makes us practice. And then she sets up everything and then she goes, okay, go. And then the whole thing topples down and she’s ecstatic. And then she goes around methodically around shutting off all the cameras and taking the camera from me and taking the camera from my wife. And then she goes and disappears for four hours.
Jonathan V.:
Into her editing?
Mark Hevesh:
She’s downloading, she’s editing. She’s creating it. Yeah. So that’s what David Frankel was seeing because he saw the end result. And most people, including clients who have hired us for commercial projects, thought it was a crew, like literally thought Lily has a crew that did that. And this one client, I said, no, she does it all. So they go, well, we can save a lot of money, not having to hire crew. She actually edits the final deliverable. So I mean, you know, it’s really interesting. She started working with an editing console called Power Director, which is from a software vendor in South Korea. I think they’re called Cyber Link. And when you publish a video and put it on the web, there are little tags and the vendor, the software developer, they get this thing, a video has been posted that was edited and developed with Power Director. And so they, they saw her videos and they had no idea she was this little Chinese teenager in New Hampshire. They just knew Hevesh5. They didn’t know male, female old young. So they said, we want you to be a VIP. And they sent her all kinds of software and all these kits to give out to other people. And they had her go in and get involved in a webinar where it’s all these 50 year old gray haired men and Lily on this screen with, you know, eight really good video editors.
Jonathan V.:
Thinking that she snuck in.
Mark Hevesh:
There were two other interesting points or moments in her development, as you know, I mean, she’s the world’s number one, domino artists in terms of viewers and subs. I mean, she’s had over a billion views.
Jonathan V.:
That’s incredible.
Mark Hevesh:
And she has almost 3 million subscribers, but across her channels in different platforms has got like four to 5 million subscribers slash followers slash you know, whatever the nomenclature is for the different platform. And so in that trajectory, there have been a few moments that to us, the family were really notable. One of them was she wouldn’t reveal who she is. Like, no one knew who Hevesh5 was and people were asking for years who she is. And everyone assumed it was a he, which my wife got really pissed at, because a woman could be great at something. And all the domino artists of note were males in their late teens to early thirties. And so no one knew who she was. So she had made friends and formed relationships with these other young domino artists throughout the country. And they didn’t know who she was. They just knew it’s Hevesh5, they didn’t know it was someone named Lily. They didn’t know it was a teenager. Didn’t know it was a girl, didn’t know it was New Hampshire didn’t know anything, just knew really good domino artist. So she goes in 2012, so this is eight years ago, one of the domino artists who was big at the time hosted an event called Domination 2012. So she loads the dominoes in the car and my wife and her, they drove to New Jersey. And they pull up and all these guys are going, who is that girl? Who is that? And someone goes, is that Hevesh5? And then someone goes, Hevesh5’s a girl? It’s really funny. So that’s where she, she revealed herself to the, you know, to a bunch of the notable members of the inner domino community as it were
Jonathan V.:
So up until that point in time, all of her, her videos did not include herself in it.
Mark Hevesh:
Yeah. You’re right. You know, we’re not paranoid, but there are a lot of creeps out there and you don’t know who you’re talking to. And Lily is this petite, young teenager. And you know, she’s our kid. And we absolutely insisted that she maintain anonymity. She had to be anonymous. We just did not want the world to know who she was, where she was. So when her YouTube channel really started to grow, it became more of a topic of discussion for us as a family. But regardless of that, my wife and I were very firm in making sure that she was in fact anonymous.
Jonathan V.:
Which I think is understandable, internet security, trying to ensure that she’s not being harassed?
Mark Hevesh:
Right. Yes. I mean, she hadn’t, she’s never been harassed, but she’s aware of the way the world is. And she was at a young age. But anyway, I just want to mention this other poignant moment in time, where she became ready to let people know who she was. She’d gotten the notoriety, she’d gotten commercial projects, but she hadn’t broadly said, I’m Hevesh5. I’m Lily, I’m a girl. I’m in New Hampshire. I’m a teenager. She hadn’t done that. So there’s this thing on YouTube called Draw My Life, and draw my life videos, there’s hundreds and hundreds of draw my life videos. And basically the way the format works is a person writes out on a white board stuff about their life and who they are, and it’s played back super fast and they narrate over it. So they’ll draw something simple, stick figures, you know, whatever a timeline, erase it, and then draw the next frame if you want. And so she did a video, which is an amazing video called Draw My Life in Dominoes.
And she told her story and she, I think she was only 18 or 19 when she did it. And it’s up on her channel and she draws this thing out and, you know, you have to consider pacing and there were some parts where you have to slow it down or speed it up to match the narration. Well, the narration that she wrote and dictated was totally like TV quality, it was really, really good. Her inflection, her choice of words, the way she spoke was like a professional video. And she told her story and she said, and I’m a girl. And at the end of Draw My Life in Domino’s video, she comes on screen her face, full frame and says, Oh, and by the way, I’m Hevesh5 . And she smiles and walks off screen. And it was just dramatic. It was funny. It’s so good. It’s such a great video.
Jonathan V.:
So that was pretty much our big reveal then was that instant?
Mark Hevesh:
That was the big reveal.
Jonathan V.:
Was there a point after she gets this kit from Germany where you start to realize this is her thing that she’s spending a lot of time in it, or what were the indicators to you that this is something that she’s truly passionate about?
Mark Hevesh:
That’s an interesting question. That’s a whole story all by itself, but I can put it in a nutshell, which is, she goes to college and she applied to, you know, hard schools to get into like Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology, Wentworth, all these different schools. And she was going for mechanical engineering or product design, that sort of thing. And she ended up going to Rensselaer, one of the biggest, and the first Polytech Institute in the country, not easy to get into. And it started getting in the way of the business, like within a few months, cause I was very involved in supporting whatever she was doing. It’s like, we have, you know, we’re turning down all these projects and you know, and she’s not a quitter. She’s not about to like stop going to college after a semester. So she had a, you know, it was a major point and it’s covered in a detailed way in the documentary that’s going to be coming out in 2021 about her, the decision to be like Steve jobs and Bill Gates and be a college dropout and follow what, you know, your dream of what you want to do.
So, she goes to Rensselaer, of course she starts to domino club at Rensselaer. She gets all A’s at Rensselaer. She has a roommate that becomes her best friend. How often does that happen? But just everything worked out. She loved the college experience. She loved it, but she decided to stop going to school because the skills that she needed to develop, weren’t going to be taught in school. And she was already an experienced world traveler from all the projects. And she’d already learned, I mean, I’m there right next to her supporting her. And so teaching her and she’s learning from osmosis or through pointed conversations, like how to have a business conversation. You know what I mean? And there are all kinds of different ones of those that you have to learn how to have. And so she puts it all together.
She goes “getting a degree is not going to help me follow my dream and do what I want to do. Plus if I ever tire of this, I can always go back to school. I’ll have a full year. I’ll, you know, I’ll have finished my freshman year with straight A’s and I can always go back if I want.” And when she was in the throws of this conflict, it was a constant conversation between her and me and my wife and her friends.
Jonathan V.:
And what kind of counsel did you give her?
Mark Hevesh:
My wife wanted her stay because you know the traditional, I don’t know if you want to call it a New England mindset or tradition. You go to college, you get a degree, you get a good job at a good company and you have your career. I felt, follow your passion because she’d already had success. She already had experiences. She had more experiences when she was 20, than many people ever have when they’re 50, and she’s already done all this stuff and she, it hasn’t ruined her. She’s still as humble and gracious as ever. She hasn’t developed a big ego. She loves what she’s doing. She’s earning a living. How could I possibly dissuade her? It just didn’t make any logical sense to me at all, to press upon her. Well, if you go to college and you go work for a big company and you get a 401k and you have a million dollars or two, when you retire and you know, you have your vacations and your weekends and your nights, and that just wasn’t her, it just wasn’t her.
She, to this day, I have conversations with her where I say something like, “Hey, Lily, did you ever hear of a weekend? Lily? Did you ever hear of an evening?” Because a lot of the young YouTube content creators don’t have that, they don’t get that. It’s just constantly churning out their content. And it’s not always all about the money, but it’s just, it’s what they know. It’s what they love to do. So she has developed a certain amount of discipline and she does things like set timers. “And I’ll go to bed at 11. And after I work for four hours doing dominoes, I’ll go on the computer and do two hours of editing.” You know, she, she splits things up instead of just going by what she, what her thought of the moment or emotions are pulling her toward. She tries to put some structure into her day and her weekend, her life, and she’s gotten pretty good at it.
Jonathan V.:
And is that something that you and your wife nudged her to do that? Did you teach her, do you think that she may have seen you guys modeling that? Or is that something that she, she picked up on her own?
Mark Hevesh:
You know, she’s not your average bear. She just isn’t, you know, she may have a tendency to want to work straight through and we would point out why it may not be good to work straight through, and she’d have a conversation with us. And she has to listen to the reasoning and the logic, and she’ll go, okay, I’ll adapt in this way, that sort of thing. So she’s probably more prone to just go and march to the beat of her own drum than most people. But at the same time, she will listen to someone who can bring experience and logic and something observational. And she will make that adaptation.
Jonathan V.:
When did her videos turn into something that were monetized on YouTube? And what did that transition look like? Did you need to start helping her out at that point in time? I don’t, I know very little about YouTube. I’m not sure if you just keep posting videos and all of a sudden they start cutting you a check, or is there something you need to do to start turning that into a business?
Mark Hevesh:
Well, that’s a good question. So, there are people who are YouTube content creators, and they make a living. And many of them make millions of dollars. If they’re huge, where you get revenue from is something called AdSense. And essentially all that is, is you’ve made an agreement with YouTube, which is owned by Google that says, yes, you can put advertisements at the beginning of my video content. And there’s an explicit or implied promise. Like it won’t be a tobacco product or a company that makes guns, but something that aligns with the demographic audience of your content. So, you know, Domino’s, so eight to 15 year old boys, 28 to 36 year old women, because they’re the parents of the boys, you know, girls of a certain other, like 12 to 19, whatever. And you go, okay. And so then YouTube puts the advertisement up. They’ll work with, I don’t know, Milton Bradley or M&M Mars, or whoever it might be. And they’ll go, okay, we’re going to pay 8 cents per view or 8 cents per click through.
And then basically Google, YouTube, splits that with the content creator or there’s a 60/40 split or whatever the agreement might be. But when you have a channel where the content creators getting 10 million views per video, and there are channels that get 10 million views per video in three days. They’re millionaires. So, Google AdSense is one way you get an income and she did start getting income, but it wasn’t, you couldn’t live on it. You couldn’t make a car payment with it. You’re getting 80 bucks a month. But then as the commercial projects grew and they had their own revenue stream, everything fed every other thing. So she had multiple income streams. So she had AdSense. Then you have the entertainment industry stuff, then you have corporate events. You know, there’s all these different things, which is all the stuff I managed. And so it organically grew, you know, but again, it wasn’t, it never started out as a plan.
Jonathan V.:
It must be nice. I am going through a transition right now where my son is in his freshman year of college. And it’s really hard on me. I’m very close with my son and I miss him dearly. And I envy the close relationship that you have with your daughter. But I think through that, through your partnership within this company, having a vehicle that will continue that relationship for hopefully a long time to come, that must be a nice place to be as a parent.
Mark Hevesh:
Right. I mean, I’m close to all three of my kids, we’re all close, but I mean, both Lily and I have been very lucky, super fortunate to be able to maintain a daily relationship and conversations on the phone and email and so forth because of the business. So it’s you know, it’s a unique thing that a person could never really plan for.
Jonathan V.:
Yeah, yeah That’s nice.
Mark Hevesh:
I mean, it’s highly unusual. I mean, she, and I both recognize that it just evolved a hundred percent organically. It just, you know, she started out as a teenager getting commercial inquiries from major networks or studios. And I happened to have the skillset required to work it, to work that. And so it wasn’t like, Oh, I got to learn how to do this. I just, I just knew what to do. And that’s where the luck is. But, you know, I mean, I spent 30, 35 years in marketing and business development and sales positions. And so, you know, it’s just, you know, you develop skills and there you can adapt them and, you know, reinvent where necessary. And so it’s lucky for me, it’s lucky for her.
Jonathan V.:
Yeah. Yeah, no, that’s wonderful. I think that’s terrific. I’ve heard as well that there may be a domino TV show that she might be involved with. Oh, you mentioned Legos, in this similar structure to the TV show, Lego Masters, but with Domino’s is that for real?
Mark Hevesh:
Yeah. So this is another example of an incoming message. So we get an email from producer at a production company called Endemol Shine, which is not a household name to the average American, but Endemol Shine is a huge production company. They did Master Chef. They were involved in Black Mirror. They did Lego Masters. They did, they do some major stuff. And we got an email from Endemol Shine, and I just immediately hop on the phone and start the dialogue. And it took months, it took like six or seven months, you know, because they have a contract and they’re always looking out for their best interests because that’s of course how any production company works, but we have an attorney and we go back and forth 50 or 60 times. But finally, we came to an agreement and we’ve been shopping it to all the major networks and all the streaming services. And we expect one of them will pick it up and it’ll get produced. And, you know, at some point it will come out in 2021. But if you look at Lego Masters, which Endemol Shine produced, it’s really a super well-produced show. It’s high production value. Will Arnett brings a lot of energy and comedy to it. And we’re looking to have a host like that as well. Lily is executive producer on the project, you know, it’s just like licensing your name to a product that a toy company is going to produce. You don’t make a million bucks. It’s just so funny that’s the perception, but we don’t really care about that at the end of the day.
Jonathan V.:
Oh, it certainly will help to build the community of people that are enthusiastic about dominoes. And I think that that’s, that’s great for everybody because they’re, they’re wonderful. I think from, just helping to build your brain, there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye
Mark Hevesh:
You’re right. And that’s Lily’s goal. She’s passionate about it. And there’s one other aspect to it that we discovered sort of almost by accident. We kept on getting fan mail, coming in is a constant, and we’ve always had lots of it. And we got a lot of emails from parents and grandparents who have kids who are autistic or grandkids who are autistic. And there’s something about dominoes that helps these kids. They like to line things up or have things in order, whatever it might be. But dominoes in specific really help these kids. And they’ll get toppling dominoes from, you know, from some other company, cause it was a year or two ago and our stuff wasn’t out yet. And they go, “my kids’ scores increased and their concentration increased and their patience increased.” So we go, “what? OK.” This is one of my personal initiatives – working with autism societies and special needs societies and donating H5 domino creations and doing a workshop, that’s what the goal is. Once everything calms down, in terms of promotion of the domino line, and promoting the documentary that comes out, the goal is once per quarter going to a facility that probably will be in New England. Cause that’s where we are and doing a workshop and donating Dominoes.
Jonathan V.:
I love it. That’s fantastic. If I can grab two more minutes just to ask a couple closing questions. What are three words that you think your kids or your wife might use to describe your parenting style?
Mark Hevesh:
Well, I mean, I can give you three ideas?
Jonathan V.:
Three ideas, however you want to answer it.
Mark Hevesh:
The first idea is, you know, expose your kids to different things that are rich in cultural value.
Jonathan V.:
That’s a good one.
Mark Hevesh:
Exposure, just expose them to things that are rich in cultural value: literature, film, music, sports, design, whatever it might be. A second one would be to encourage them to follow their passion.
Jonathan V.:
You’ve certainly done quite a bit of that.
Mark Hevesh:
Share. I mean, when you have three kids sharing, that’s all I can say.
Jonathan V.:
I bet, I bet. What’s something that you would have done differently as a father with the benefit of hindsight?
Mark Hevesh:
Just always keeping in mind that words last forever. So watch your temper. Because you may have had a moment. You may have had a bad day at work and you snap and it could really hurt the kid, hurt their feelings. They’ll remember it. But that may not characterize the way you feel towards them or describe the relationship you have with them. So just remembering that words can hurt.
Jonathan V.:
Yeah. That’s so important. Is there any advice that you’d give to other fathers, other fathers who have passions like your children, or just general advice to fathers?
Mark Hevesh:
I think admitting that you can learn from your children because they are having an experience that’s unique, whatever they’re going through does not necessarily reflect your growing experience. You can learn from your kids, you know, like be open to learning things from your kids. They have insights that you don’t, you may not have.
Jonathan V.:
What’s something that you learned from your kids?
Mark Hevesh:
I think maybe open-mindedness and considering things other than your preconceived notions of things for people, you know, like things are not always the way they seem, because when you’re an adult, you have your, your script, you have your inner dialogue, you know, you have all your experiences. And in the very front of your mind, in the very front of your consciousness, you have instant reactions to things. And I think we all do that and I would just be open to different ideas.
Jonathan V.:
Yep. I like that. Mark, I think that what Lily does is incredible. And I think that what you’ve done is incredible in terms of providing an environment where she could flourish and grow and then coming alongside her to help her grow as these opportunities came in her direction.
Mark Hevesh:
Thank you. Appreciate that.
Jonathan V.:
Is there anything that you’d like to add? Any, anything that you might’ve had in mind before our conversation?
Mark Hevesh:
The main thing that I would want other fathers to recognize is that it does not do your kid any good to pressure them to fulfill your dream of what you want them to be and that nothing good could ever come from that kind of pressure. Nothing. The only other thing I would put forth is it’s not about you at all. You’ve already lived your life. And there are some people who have a different philosophy. My kid will make their own way. I had to make my own way. No, the kid needs guidance. The kid needs direction, the kid needs positive influence. If you’re going to have a kid, then you need to commit to providing what that kid needs, it has to do with relationships.
Jonathan V.:
Mark, thank you. I’ve really enjoyed talking with you. This has been a great conversation.
Mark Hevesh:
Thank you. I appreciate it. And I feel it’s an honor to be able to be involved in this.