Triller CEO Mike Lu sits down with Yahoo Finance's Melody Hahm to talk about the company's push to differentiate itself from Facebook (FB), Instagram, and Tik Tok. Lu has been named an honoree on Yahoo Finance's exclusive list THE NEXT: 21 to watch in 2021.

Video Transcript

MIKE LU: Hi, I'm Mike Lu. I'm the founder and CEO of Triller. I'm most excited about 2021 as we're building a large audience and tools that will help our creators build the best content to an audience that's ever reaching for the Triller platform.

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MELODY HAHM: Tell us where you are on the road map of Triller. You know, you have really conquered the music scene. You are dabbling in TV, in sports. You know, if you were to map it out right now, where about are you on the journey?

MIKE LU: There's never been a better time to be a content creator than in 2020 and 2021. You just have to have your phone, have something to say, and there's an audience that you can find out there for you. And we're just getting started. I mean, for us, where we see ourselves as a pretty young company that is often compared to a massive giant that's worth $180 billion. And we're just keeping our heads down and trying to build great products for our users.

MELODY HAHM: Yeah, of course, that company that you did not name is TikTok. You have-- you know, you've been around since 2017. As you have seen last year, which a lot of it was shadowed by TikTok and the threat of a ban, right, from then President Donald Trump, tell me how, you know, in retrospect, that really buoyed Triller?

MIKE LU: Sure, no, that's a great question. So, for us, you know, I'll use a very old, like, Wayne Gretzky quote, which is like, "we like to skate where the puck is going to be," right? And what we build from a product and a positioning perspective was, you know, a platform that was similar to TikTok, but also very different in a lot of ways, which is why we attract our own audience.

So it was more of the world and our audience that really saw us as the successor to TikTok, and it was something that we were trying to build our own unique voice, but I think from a product position perspective, we were the closest than anyone else. It wasn't Facebook, it wasn't SnapChat, it wasn't Instagram. It was Triller, this very small young company that, you know, is grabbing a worldwide voice.

MELODY HAHM: And then when it comes to the revenue side of things, can you give us sort of an update on how much you were able to make in 2020, and even looking ahead for the rest of this year?

MIKE LU: Sure. So, you know, this is a little bit sensitive, but I'm happy to share that, you know, for 2020, we actually did perform over $100 million for 2020. And right now, we're on track to make a minimum of 2x that this year. So, again, if you think about our company, it's not just about a user base that's growing, it's being able to monetize that user base, that's ultimately what's most important for our company. And for, you know, a company that has never done it before and only a three-year-old company, but we put together the Mike Tyson fight last year, which became the eighth largest pay-per-view fight in history.

So that goes to show how well we can leverage our audience. And we hope to do that with more and more events, concerts, sports, live TV. And I think that's-- the future is very, very bright for us.

MELODY HAHM: If you had to distill in one sentence who is the Triller user, how would you describe him or her, they?

MIKE LU: I mean, the data shows the majority of our users are-- are Gen Z's, between the ages of 16 to about 26, I would say is about 80%, 70% our user base. But you know, there is obviously, like, outliers from that. But from that perspective, what we're showcasing is, even within that segment, there are people that are interested in things that traditionally maybe they weren't marketed to.

Like, the reason we're-- the Jake Paul, you know, he actually got more hits as a meme when he knocked out Nate Robinson than Tyson did, right? And that's attracting a new audience of younger boxers, right? And you know, people who are training physically to accomplish something.

MELODY HAHM: Yeah, and as you look ahead, you are expected to go public via SPAC in the coming months at a valuation, I think, has been reported between $3 billion and $6 billion. Can you speak to that potential exit that's in the works now?

MIKE LU: So, unfortunately, I cannot talk about that due to a lot of legal reasons. You know, we are a company that is really primed for, you know, a potential public offering, given that we're generating revenue, given that we have tremendous growth, given that our closest competition is, you know, even at those numbers, 50x in terms of valuation of where we are.

So, if I was an investor and I look at those metrics, right, a company that's generating revenue, huge upside potential. Would I want to invest in that company? And I think a lot of the investors will say, yes.

MELODY HAHM: If you were to define Triller in 2021 in a couple of sentences, what are you most looking forward to with the company?

MIKE LU: Yeah, we want to entertain you. We want to find content that you can find really compelling. And we want the next superstar to come out on Triller. We want that next superstar, the next Justin Bieber or the next Chris Brown, to be discovered through Triller. That's our model since day one.