i started i i got kind of curious so there's two extensions that caught my caught my attention the first and they're basically the same thing with almost exactly the same name the first is this thing called ad block i think that's the one i use the second one is called adbot ad block plus so that's why it's a little confusing and so adblock was created by one guy in georgia named michael gundlach and he uh uh he just kind of built this thing in 2009 and he's been the only employee the whole time and i went to his personal website to learn about him and he only has 55 followers on uh twitter his website is called sorryrobot.com that's his personal website and he has like python projects a unity game that he built called asteroids and he even has an mp3 of him singing a christmas song at church during christmas time this is like by the way his linkedin his job description is just a guy uh he is in duluth georgia and it says i am not available for work please do not contact me about job opportunities i created adblock the most popular chrome extension for google chrome extension and for safari with around 20 million users it's neat before that i did some other neat things and he was the only employee and then i did some research on his competitor called ad block plus now this company they have a few few more employees i think they've got 20 or 30 people and because they're based in europe when you're a european company oftentimes at least in england and i know it's a lot of the k uh a lot of cases in different european countries if you make over 20 million dollars in revenue you basically have to file a report that reveals your revenue and profit and so i went and looked at this company called io it's called io they own ad blocker plus in 2017 they did 44 million dollars in revenue and 26 million dollars in profit which is astounding and they had at least a hundred million users however if you look in the group the the chrome plug-in store uh ad block plus has around 150 000 reviews and it says they've got over 10 million users if you look at ad block which is the one founded by this one guy they've got something like 300 000 reviews and uh also it says 10 million users and so there's potential that this one guy had a business making all of this money tens of millions of dollars a year very likely tens of millions of dollars a year in profit just off a chrome extension is that amazing this is amazing i'm i'm still on this guy michael gunlock's uh website sorry robot.com resume um dot pdf and i i think you said this but i was reading while you were talking so he was an engineer at google working on google ads and google adsense did you already say that part no and he worked on google and basically he goes nah that i hate these ads so his job was he goes at google i kept the global at google ads and adsense networks alive and kicking um in my spare time i built this other thing and i built this other thing uh you know like because google has that 20 times like i built this javascript framework blah blah so basically he goes from working at google and google adwords and ad sets to creating adblock and and makes 20 million dollars it makes more than that uh off 20 million users who who love this thing and what year did you work at google i believe like 0.5 2005 yeah so which is like right after the ipo basically yeah so he probably made 30 million dollars at google like collectively it's pro that's what it's worth now yeah if he held it so it made tens of millions of dollars off of that and then reportedly now the thing about this guy is everything's very quiet about this guy he's hard to find everything's impossible however i think in 2015 an anonymous buyer bought adblock interesting there's a world where it could have been sold for like two or three hundred million dollars i mean there's a world where that exists uh maybe it was lower but it was it's a it's a huge problem he stopped he he stopped working on ad block or you know it sold probably 2015 which is kind of scary because these chrome extensions are a giant security hole for people because chrome extensions can like read and write all the data on your as you browse the web so that's all every email you're writing the text is can be picked up by these chrome extensions and even if they start off safe because you know just a guy from duluth georgia built it and he's an engineer who has the right intentions somebody who buys it with the wrong intentions can really like uh do some dirty stuff you know with the data and even modifying it and things like that so you got to be careful with chrome extensions i try to install the minimum amount of chrome extensions as possible yeah they are pretty scary and um yeah they're nuts and but it's a wild business i think that what here's here so i love these extension style businesses