Colin and Samir pulled up to the Vanity Fair Young Hollywood Party at 8:20 p.m. and immediately knew they had miscalculated. There was no line for the red carpet, which, as Samir noted, is exactly when you know you have arrived too early. The two creators, both pushing 40, had been invited to a party named for the young, and what they found inside was a room full of people who make videos for the internet, just like them. On the responsible ride home at what they called a ‘responsible 10:00 p.m.’, they opened a notes app and started writing down every painful truth they wished someone had handed them in their 20s.
The story nobody cares about is the one worth telling
The first lesson began inside a fashion warehouse in Los Angeles, where Samir’s father had cleared space for their earliest office. They were building a lacrosse media network when Samir proposed covering a major trade in professional lacrosse. Colin pushed back: nobody was talking about it. Samir’s reply reframed everything. ‘It’s our job as storytellers to make people care,’ he said. Colin left and spent a month living with athlete Paul Rabel, documenting his life in close detail. What started as a trade story became a deeply personal portrait of someone who would go to extraordinary lengths to win. The series became one of the most successful on their channel and, more importantly, defined who they would become as storytellers.
The second lesson arrived at a Mexican grill near a film editing suite in 2011, where Colin had landed his first real industry job as an assistant editor on a major feature film. The lead editor, Steven Marion, who had cut films including the Ocean’s trilogy and won an Academy Award for Traffic, took him to lunch and asked why he was frustrated. Colin described missing the creative velocity of film school, where an idea could become an uploaded piece of work in a week. Marion’s response was direct: stay on the assistant editor path and you will keep getting hired as an assistant editor, possibly forever. ‘Success in our industry is just the opportunity to do more of what you’re currently doing,’ Marion told him. Colin left the job and started uploading to YouTube.
The meeting is never the answer, and a 10 out of 10 always hurts
In 2018, Colin and Samir pitched a documentary television show inside a building that also housed a meeting with Scooter Braun, producer JD Roth, and Justin Bieber. After the pitch, Bieber turned to a collaborator and said, simply, ‘Chills, bro.’ The room felt electric. Then Roth leveled with them: they would not be making the show. ‘You need them more than they need you,’ he said. The project would go to a director with an established relationship and track record. The lesson, which landed hard at the time, was that no single meeting is going to lift you out of the work. The work is the answer.
Failure, they found, tends to be worse in the imagination than in reality, but caring about it never goes away. A recent piece they produced about a golf outing tanked on release. Colin’s wife texted to check in. He told her the golf piece was not performing. She was managing a crying infant. The gap between those two problems was its own lesson. As Colin put it: ‘There’s nothing like being just a 37-year-old dad just moping around the house when you get a 10 out of 10.’
Two quieter lessons closed out the list. Not all views are equal: the first video Colin ever made got around 500 views, and one of those viewers was Samir, a total stranger who sent an email that eventually moved Colin to Los Angeles and changed the direction of his life. And the career of a creator is, by default, a solitary one. The solution they found was physical proximity to other people doing the same work, whether that is a full creative campus or a coffee shop table shared with one other person who cares about the same things.
A small dog named Aussie who had strong opinions about the camera
Mid-lesson, a dog named Aussie wandered into the frame during the segment on clarity and patience. Someone off-camera told Aussie not to eat whatever he had found nearby, adding: ‘We need that for business.’
The last lesson, the one Colin called the most important, is also the hardest to hold: everything you want to happen will likely happen, just not how or when you expect it. At 37, looking back at a childhood in Los Angeles where all he wanted was a career spent coming up with ideas and filming and editing, Colin found that it had, in fact, arrived. It arrived through a warehouse, a lunch at a Mexican grill, a lacrosse athlete’s living room, and a red carpet with no line. The ship got there. It just took its own route.
