Entrepreneur Jake Millar On Inspiration Behind Unfiltered [VIDEO EXCLUSIVE]

Jake Millar is the twenty-one-year-old New Zealand entrepreneur behind Unfiltered, an online business media platform designed to educate companies through videos with some of the top businessmen and women around the world. In the midst of moving his successful company to the United States, Millar sat down with uInterview to look back on his past successes, what drove him to create Unfiltered, and what makes for a good business video.

JAKE MILLAR ON BUSINESS MEDIA PLATFORM UNFILTERED

This is not Millar’s first company. The son of a skydiver who tragically died in a plane crash while Millar was still in high school, he inherited his father’s entrepreneurial spirit, if not his passion for flying (which Millar still regularly does). Interestingly, this is not what propelled him into business education. After reading Richard Branson’s autobiography, he was inspired to start his own company. “Something sparked in me that made me want to start my own business, so I started my first company, Oompher in 2014, which was a careers-focused online video journal,” he said. “We talked to them about how they got started, and how other young people who were seventeen, eighteen years old could get started in their field today.” Millar eventually sold that company in 2015, to the New Zealand government, an unusual feat for someone his age. “As far as I know, I don’t think any teenagers had ever sold a business to the government of New Zealand, so that was quite unique,” he said.

While Oompher focused on connecting the top leaders in the fields of art, business, and more, “Unfiltered” is a subscription-based platform designed to attract other major businesses. “Our target for that [our education videos] is not students like Oompher was, but more established and inspiring entrepreneurs, executives and investors,” he revealed. “So there are a lot of companies that subscribe to our content, like PWC or McKinsey who pay and all of their staff gets free access to our content.” So why do these established companies subscribe? Millar offers that in a now extremely unpredictable and rapidly changing business environment, “Unfiltered” offers a way for top companies to keep pace with emerging startups. “We talk to people like the president of General Motors and he was talking about… how ride-sharing and autonomous driving technologies are colliding, and I think companies like PWC and The Bank of America can really learn about how these big companies are thinking about the future and how technology will impact their industries.”

So what makes for an effective Unfiltered interview? Millar says his platform covers approximately 21 different sections, from more abstract ideas like leadership to covering the fundamentals of raising capital and exit strategies. “And we go into a lot of detail and go really deep into these sections with those [business] people,” he said. Millar insists that these videos go beyond the often superficial phrases of “don’t give up” or “take risks.””What’s more interesting than that is the specific gems of knowledge in specific industries that you wouldn’t otherwise have access to.” And the experts are varied. Millar recounted one interview with a business leader who is currently the single biggest dealer of legal cannabis in the United States. “To hear about that industry is fascinating. So I think we are more about bringing specialized knowledge,” he said.

Millar currently has plans to bring Unfiltered to the United States.