Jonathan Ng Sposato on Building the First Asian American TV Channel, JoySauce

Anthony Codispoti (00:00)
Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codaspote and today’s guest is Jonathan Sposato, a serial entrepreneur with a mission to create meaningful media platforms. As the founder of Geekwire, he established a pivotal gathering point for the Seattle tech community.

And now he’s pioneering JoySauce, a groundbreaking TV channel on Amazon Prime Video dedicated to Asian American content. Through his media ventures, Jonathan consistently seeks to change conversations and encourage solution-oriented thinking. His latest project aims to increase visibility for the Asian American community, showcasing stories that are vibrant, joyful, and move beyond historical narratives of trauma.

a versatile entrepreneur, Jonathan has owned restaurants, invested in commercial real estate, and published Seattle Magazine and Seattle Business Magazine. His work is driven by a belief that media can be a powerful tool for community building and social change. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Adback Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line.

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All right, back to our guest today, the founder of JoySauce, Seattle Mag, Geekwire, Jonathan Spizzato. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Jonathan Ng Sposato (02:02)
Hey, thanks for having me here, Anthony. I’m already having a lot of fun ⁓ here, so.

Anthony Codispoti (02:08)
Let’s do it. So, maybe start with telling us a little bit about your family background and how that has shaped your entrepreneurial journey.

Jonathan Ng Sposato (02:18)
Yeah, I appreciate you asking that. So I’m half Chinese, half Korean.

And I’m going to bookmark the fact that I didn’t realize I was Korean, half Korean until much later in life. I thought I was full Chinese. ⁓ I do have an Italian American last name because ⁓ my mother married a lovely Italian American man when I was about nine years old. So I was actually born originally to a single mother. My mother was not married precisely because my Korean American father and her being Chinese American, they were not allowed to get married in the late 60s.

So this was in 1966. I was born in 67. She had me out of wedlock and ⁓ and then at some point she really couldn’t afford to keep me or to raise me and so she sent me to Hong Kong. I was born in London. We were in Brooklyn, New York and then she sent me to Hong Kong to live with my maternal grandparents and so they raised me until I was about nine years old until such time I came back.

the United States and so I sort of grew up all over and with a bunch of different cultural influences I guess you could say.

Anthony Codispoti (03:27)
And so as you look back at that time, what are memories like? Are they stressed? Are they strained? Are they longing for your mother? What do you kind of remember about that time?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (03:39)
Yeah, that’s a great question. I’ve actually never been asked that. I would honestly say that I was not stressed. I don’t have negative memories. I really do think that children are very resilient and you don’t know any better as a child. And so I have actually very fond memories of, remember, I don’t remember London, but I remember Brooklyn. I remember this studio walkup that we had. I remember…

⁓ warm ⁓ emotions around my mother and how she was very tender and loving towards me. I remember actually guys coming over with a bouquet of flowers in their hand and in a suit at the front door, you know, picking my mom up for a date. ⁓ I remember, I actually remember slamming the door on someone and saying at a young age, I think I was like three, three and a half, get the hell out of here, you know.

So my mother at that point ⁓ discovered that I was picking up all kinds of language that I wasn’t supposed to be using from…

this chain smoking babysitter ⁓ down the street. And so that was maybe a cue that she needed to start to consider other childcare options. I have mostly warm memories. And then Hong Kong, my memories were frankly wonderful. My grandparents were amazing. And ⁓ I love the city. And I think that infused me with a lot of different cultural influences. As you know, Hong Kong’s very cosmopolitan. Lots of expats, lots of different people of different ethnicities.

⁓ and very vibrant of a city. Everybody’s hustling. And so I really appreciated that and ⁓ have very fond memories of my childhood. And I’ve frankly tried to examine that. I’m like, why, you when people talk about childhood trauma, I’m like, do I have some and somehow I buried them or do I really not have any? And I think it’s the latter case.

Anthony Codispoti (05:39)
What was it like to be reunited with your mother after all those years when you came back to the States?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (05:44)
Yeah, like, yeah.

So it was odd in a sense that we didn’t really know each other. And she was sort of foreign to me. And I do remember my first few days ⁓ back in the United States, when we came to Seattle. There was a suburb, a wonderful suburb called Edmonds. And I remember that she showed me my room, and it was the biggest room.

I’m like, wow, I get this entire room. I don’t have to share it with anybody. I’m not on a cot. I have a real bed. And I remember that there was a Snoopy stuffed animal on the bed. And I recognized that Snoopy right away because I had it in Brooklyn. And so that was comforting. But my mother herself was sort of a foreigner to me. And in retrospect, I think ⁓ there were some things endemic to her personality that ⁓

maybe made ⁓ me feel that way. ⁓ so we had to sort of learn to be reacquainted with each other over time. Well, ⁓ I would be honest to say that my mother and I have, as I’m sure most people do, a complicated relationship. She currently has ⁓ dementia and ⁓ very moderate memory loss, but…

Anthony Codispoti (06:47)
And how does it feel today?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (07:06)
The silver lining is that that.

that can sometimes cause people to be angry. They can be kind of angry. They can have dementia and be angry, or they can sort of be happy. And she’s more the happy version. And it makes me wonder if anger, resentment, frustrations, being somewhat of a malcontent, that that’s somewhat of a function of hanging onto past wrongs or past frustrations. And if you don’t remember them,

If they’re non-existent in your mind, you’re happier. So I’m happy to report that she’s in fact ⁓ in a really good place. Other than a memory loss, she’s actually very happy, cheerful. I’ve never seen her smile so much. ⁓ Whereas I think that throughout most of her adult life that we’ve known her, ⁓ that my family and I have known her, she hasn’t been like that. And so, yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (08:07)
Interesting. Okay.

All right. Let’s get on to the entrepreneurial track here. What was your first entrepreneurial venture?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (08:11)
Yeah.

Yeah, well, I have to go back to when I was about 13, 14 years old and I wrote my first computer game on the Apple II. So that dates me. ⁓ Anthony, do you even remember what an Apple II was? Okay, so there was an Apple II, Apple II Plus, Apple II Plus had 48K, another memory card and you had 64K and that was like, then you were in the big time. So I wrote my first Apple, first computer game and sold it professionally

Anthony Codispoti (08:31)
Hahaha.

Jonathan Ng Sposato (08:44)
through a users group that that that just was back at a time when Computer games were it was not obviously the big industry that it is now. It was very nascent. It was literally maybe the same weird ⁓ grown-ups Playing Dungeons and Dragons in the back room of a hobby store were the same guys that you might meet at a users group or like a meetup ⁓

also in a similar back room somewhere. ⁓ But the beauty of it was that it was so small that you would get to know some of the chief players. And so I got to know ⁓ Bob Clardy, who was the founder and CEO of Synergistic Software. And that was a big, big publisher. They were doing tens of millions of dollars in revenue every year.

at a time when the industry was still fairly small and they were located in Renton, which is a suburb of Seattle. And I got to know them and that was really sort of working ⁓ for them, even though it was not my company that I founded, it was small and very entrepreneurial. would characterize that experience as opening my eyes to the fact that you can take an unconventional path. You can do something different that isn’t necessarily going to med school or law school or being

an engineer. Nothing wrong with those professions, it was just so unusual and different that it normalized me to doing ⁓ unusual things as a career.

Anthony Codispoti (10:13)
How did you get connected with them? How did that door open?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (10:16)
⁓ that was through, like I said, through the meetups and users groups. Yeah, yeah, it was a very small community. As I recall, I had a friend whom I ended up doing a bunch of projects with ⁓ who was already pretty well steeped ⁓ with them. And then I got introduced and then, like I said, there were not, there were not a lot of people. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (10:20)
Okay, that’s how you found them.

Jonathan Ng Sposato (10:41)
wanting to get into the industry. were not a lot of people in the industry. It was not like the cool thing that, you know, like my son who’s 16 right now, he and his friends, they all talked about, we want to be video game designers. We want to…

get into doing graphics for computer games. Back then it was not like that. It was more like this hidden thing. was like being, I don’t know, like working for some sort of indie, independent, weird, fringe comic book publisher. It wasn’t something that you were very proud of.

Anthony Codispoti (11:14)
I wonder if you could look into your crystal ball now. Do you think there is an example industry now that sort of fits that mold that tomorrow, you know, down the road might be.

Jonathan Ng Sposato (11:27)
That’s a great question.

Anthony Codispoti (11:28)
much bigger.

Jonathan Ng Sposato (11:33)
That’s a great question.

The only examples I can think of are not quite as benign or nice as… Because at the end of the game, the people in the games industry were nice people who were just weird and quirky. ⁓ Now kind of the more shadowy fringe industries seem to be more associated with sort of sordid things. So I’m going have to think about that one. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (12:04)
Fair enough. We’ve got lots of other things to talk about here, including,

and I want to get to, to joy sauce and more of what you’re doing today, but I want to lay a little bit of a foundation for people. ⁓ you sold two different companies to Google. You sold one to Shutterstock. Sorry.

Jonathan Ng Sposato (12:19)
I’m so sorry, I can think of something. I think that there are, what feels culturally aligned is when you’re at a coffee shop, there’s an open mic and there are these young people and they’re doing their own independent music thing, right? That feels ⁓ kind of the same.

as you don’t know you’re gonna make it or you don’t know if these people are gonna make it, the people doing it, they don’t know exactly what their headroom is, but they’re gonna do it because they’re passionate about creating something unusual and different. So I think that’s one thing. I think another one, although this has become a cool thing that people wanna do, a lot of people wanna do, is being a creator on TikTok.

or Instagram where you’re just, but where you’re making things that nobody else is doing ⁓ and your parents may be doubting you like, this really a, can you really make a living doing it? And some people end up doing it and some people never quite make it. So perhaps I’d compare it to those two. Yeah, anyway, I’m sorry to interrupt.

Anthony Codispoti (13:21)
Hmm, interesting.

No, no, it’s good. Because, you know, there’s, as you listen to different speakers, different gurus, different thought leaders out there, there’s different schools of thought. And some people say pursue the thing that you love. And some people say, well, the thing that you love may just be a hobby, what you really need to do is put food on the table. And so you need to get a job and make money. Where do you sort of fall into that spectrum of the conversation?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (13:45)
Yeah,

I know exactly and sometimes I’ll switch sides. I have to say…

There are three, really three, there’s a third answer. If you can find the intersection of what you love and something commercially viable, that’s the way to do it. I swear to you, is not revisionist history, but I felt that that was what I did. When ⁓ I…

When my parents got divorced right before I graduated from ⁓ senior year of college and I was supposed to go to law school, where I went to undergrad, had a really wonderful 3-3 program that I was tracking. ⁓

to, ⁓ and you could do four three as well. There was just a great relationship between the undergrad with it it was a Columbia law school. And so at the time, you know, one of the top law schools in the country, I think still is. So it was this plumb chance to, knew that you could see your future. You knew that you would, you know, make a lot of money as an associate, you know, and then, and then go on and,

prestigious firm, perhaps. And I walked away from all of that ⁓ precisely on the bet that

I knew that I may not love being a lawyer. It wasn’t for me. So the intersection of something that I would love doing, but where there was a lot of potential ⁓ commercial viability was in gaming. And so that was my first startup was I basically started a ⁓ games company. We developed games for the Nintendo, the Sega Genesis, even an NEC Turbo graphics. ⁓

⁓ I think they sold 11 of those ⁓ console units. ⁓ But that was, I had a hunch that that was gonna be pretty big. And this would have been back in 8990. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (15:52)
Okay. And did

you wind that business down? Did you sell it? Did you? How did it conclude?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (15:56)
Yeah, it was actually

sold to Electronic Arts. So for years, ⁓ when you heard of a company or game development company called EA Seattle, that was my old company. And so that was pre-internet, very pre-internet. And so valuations were not ⁓ as, you didn’t get the kind of multiples that people were getting later. So. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (16:21)
You went on

to work at Microsoft for a number of years, then Google for a little bit. And then how did the idea to start your first, ⁓ well, not first, but ⁓ I think FatBets was a company that you eventually sold to Google.

Jonathan Ng Sposato (16:24)
Yeah

Yeah,

yeah, so I’m a big believer in the fact that wherever you are, learn as much as you can. And so I learned a lot at Microsoft. Sometimes you were not conscious of it and it was just kind of this fire hose coming at you and then you have to like a couple of years later take a step back when you launch that product and say,

wow, what did I learn? And you kind of try to enumerate the things. But sometimes ⁓ I found that towards the end of my 12 year run at Microsoft, which included, you know, working in Microsoft research and the consumer division, the first Xbox and Halo and ⁓ what was then called MSN ⁓ and ⁓ Windows Live.

towards the end, I did get a little bit bored with, and no disrespect to whomever, I loved the people I was working with, but the projects themselves were a little, just slightly less interesting, which gave me a little bit more cognitive headroom to proactively ask myself.

how much do I want to learn as I’m sort of maybe winding down here? I had some belief that, you know, I don’t know if I’m here for another year, two years, whatever. And so, ⁓ Fat Bits really came out of that time where I was paying a lot of attention to ⁓ where the world might be going, where technology might be going. There was a sense that ⁓ with the internet, the famous Bill Gates internet memo came about in 97 where he wrote an email there.

everybody saying we need to embrace the internet. We may already be a little late. And so think about how the internet can be a part of your product strategy, whatever product you’re working on, whether you’re in ⁓ games or in windows or office and all of that stuff. So that was an important memo that we all paid attention to. ⁓ There was a belief on Microsoft’s part that

They still wanted to keep people on the desktop and to keep them from spending too much of their time out in the cloud. ⁓

Google, on the other hand, I was noticing this, and this would have been in the early 2000s when I was kind of thinking about this stuff and what I was gonna do after Microsoft. Google, on the other hand, was trying to do the opposite. They were trying to have people spend as little time on desktop applications within a Windows shell and as much time as possible out in the cloud using their apps, obviously, right?

So ⁓ the thought occurred to me that during that transition time, as people are moving from the desktop to the cloud, that there needed to be bridging functions, bridging applications that could sort of marry two. And so Fatbits was born out of that thinking, like, what can we create that could exist on a desktop, but be connected to the cloud always and constantly? And that was also the dimension of time

from a UI UX perspective was always something that I thought about. It’s like, sometimes it’s not enough to on occasion be connected to the cloud. It can be more useful if you’re constantly connected to the cloud, which back in 2002 was not always a common thing. so, fat bits was, which was a…

⁓ an XML platform for the very, very quick creation of these XML applications or widgets or gadgets that could live on your desktop, but be always connected to the cloud to pull in information and create various services for you on the desktop. That was a newish concept. And so that’s what that was.

Anthony Codispoti (20:29)
And I don’t want to spend too much time on some of the other ventures because I really want to spend the bulk on what you’re doing now. But I think it’s worth people understanding that you founded a picnic picnic.com hugely popular photo editor online, sold it to Google, and then turn right around and built another photo editor, hugely successful pick monkey and sold that one to shutter stock.

Jonathan Ng Sposato (20:43)
Mm-hmm.

Anthony Codispoti (20:58)
My big question there is how did you get around to non-compete in between the two of those?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (21:02)
yeah, good question. ⁓

Well, so first of all, the products are sufficiently different. It’s all about verbs. ⁓ Is something more about photo editing, or is it more about collaging and storage and graphic design, for example? So ⁓ there’s that. ⁓ And then second of all, ⁓ I think from, again, time factors in.

And I, you know, without maybe getting into the detail of how I negotiated my deal with Google when I sold Picnic, of course, this is now what that was in like 2010, 2012, I think it was.

It’s been long enough that I don’t remember the detail, I would say I’m within 90 % confidence that there was also, ⁓ that I operated within the bounds of my agreement, ⁓ my sale agreement.

Anthony Codispoti (22:11)
sure that you

did. Yeah, it’s just impressive that you did sort of two in the same relative space back to back and had, you know, very nice exits from them. So the last one I’m going to talk about before we get to JoySauce is Geekwire. Lots of people know this platform. When you first cooked up the idea, where was it coming from? What was the problem we were trying to solve?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (22:16)
Yeah.

huh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah,

I tell the story all the time and I want to be clear that I’m one of the, ⁓ with respect to my two other business partners, ⁓ there are two other co-founders. But the idea came from a dinner that I was having with Mike Arrington. So he came up to Seattle. In fact, this is Mike Arrington of TechCrunch.

who started a very popular tech news site in the Bay Area. And he was oddly, because he loved the Pacific Northwest, he bought a house up here near Seattle and he’s kind of retired here. But during that transition time, he was having dinner up here with ⁓ just a handful of CEOs. And I think it was the CEO at the time of ⁓ Expedia, my friend, Rich Barton, think Glenn Kalman of Redfin was there.

⁓ There were just like four or five of us and having a nice time. ⁓ And John Cook, ⁓ who was a reporter for TechCrunch, which is part of the Puget Sound Business Journal, he was at the dinner as well. He was the only reporter. And Mike Arrington started giving John a really hard time saying, John, you know, how can you call yourself ⁓ a co-founder of TechFlash when you’re just a salary man? You’re just an employee.

at the Puget Sound Business Journal. And plus, you know, plus it’s not any good and you guys don’t write enough. And, you he was just really giving John a hard time. And, and I felt so bad. And it was just a small dinner. It was really only like six or seven of us that I literally turned to John between the main course and dessert. said, John, let’s you and I start something. Let’s start a platform.

focus on the Pacific Northwest and you’re one of the, you’re my co-founder and we can do this. We can create, I think that what we need in this community is to fill that gap. And I was personally a little unhappy with the way in which Mike Arrington was doing his coverage. I mean, as a CEO, I remember sitting in the office as a picnic.

I’d get a call from him and, ⁓ you know, can you call me? And I’m like, you know, I’m in a meeting. So 15 minutes later, I call him back and somebody in the office says, Jonathan, it looks like it’s already too late. He already, you know, propped a story about us and half the facts are wrong. And so I’d have to try to get him back and say like, okay, Mike, know, here’s the, here were the answers that you were seeking. And so I took issue with the way that I think Mike was,

conducting business and I thought that there was a better way, more sort of, yeah, and that’s his thing. hope I don’t cause, if Mike’s listening to this, I hope I don’t cause him any offense. think that he’s just, I think he would be very proud of the kind of the bombastic sort of style that he had and people were, and I think that was part of that Bay Area tech bro culture at the time or contributed to a culture where, you know,

Anthony Codispoti (25:09)
So like he was really antagonistic, it sounds like.

Jonathan Ng Sposato (25:33)
you gotta be a tough guy to put up with this stuff. And so, ⁓ and I, sort of being a nice Catholic school boy that I was, ⁓ wanted to do it differently. And so that’s how Geekwire was born. And John at first was reluctant. He was like, ⁓ well, I don’t know. And that’s the thing that I wanna say about entrepreneurship. Not everyone is naturally an entrepreneur.

they can learn to become entrepreneurs or sometimes if you completely de-risk things for people, it makes it easier for them. so what I did was I, John and Todd had salaries from day one. said to, in fact, so what John did was he called me like a couple of months later, goes, are you serious about this? Cause I think maybe there’s something there.

But Jonathan, you and I can’t do it because you’re not a reporter and I need a second person who is a reporter. And that person I think is Todd Bishop and that way.

I can cover startups and Todd can cover the big companies like Microsoft and et cetera. So I go, that’s great. And so from day one, and then I had to go meet with everyone’s wives. We all had kids that about the same time coincidentally, we’re all the same age and all of our wives were literally everyone was pregnant at the same time. And so I was more cavalier, I think as ⁓ an entrepreneur that had normalized to taking risks and not knowing where the next paycheck was coming from.

they were not quite there. And so I had to take people out to dinner and assure everyone that we can figure out health insurance. We’ve got this and I can allocate enough money to. ⁓

keep us going for three years. And in fact, I think I gave them raises from what they were making at the Puget Sound Business Journal. So it was a situation where it was fairly de-risked. And ⁓ then I’m proud of what they’ve done ⁓ since then. They are absolutely bona fide entrepreneurs now. ⁓ But it took some convincing. And sometimes when you start ventures, that’s not uncommon.

Anthony Codispoti (27:44)
And so the idea was you wanted something that was still in the tech space, whether it’s startups or the big firms like Microsoft and Google, but that had a little bit of a different energy to it.

Jonathan Ng Sposato (27:56)
Yeah, yeah, and I think there were maybe two or three things. One was ⁓ I didn’t like the tech events that I was going to. They were kind of stuffy events. A lot of people in suits, ⁓ you know, now that I’m older, forgive me, but they seemed like they were old, old, kind of an older crowd. And the tech entrepreneurial crowd that I was…

⁓ that I knew and loved were ⁓ younger and they had a lot of new ideas, fresh thinking. And so I wanted to create that community. ⁓ And I felt that we did do that in the first seven or eight years of GeekWire, but then everybody gets a little, we age up and the industry gets bigger and the average age kind of goes up for various reasons. And so, ⁓

So that was one problem we were trying to solve. And I think the second one was that I did feel like that the kinds of tech companies being founded, being started in the Northwest were a little bit different from the kinds of companies that were in the Bay Area. At the time, I felt that the companies that were in the Northwest were a little bit more honestly substantive.

you would lead first, maybe your first slide to pitch to a VC was, here’s the business model, here’s how we’re gonna make money. Whereas in the Bay Area, I think it was just so frothy and there was, volume wise, dollar value wise, everything was higher. And so entrepreneurs could get away with just raising $30 million on vision only.

And we’ll figure out how to make money later. I don’t think that’s news to anybody, but there was a pretty big cultural contrast in terms of how we pitched, how we communicated with each other. And so I wanted to honor that, honor the way that we did it here, which was also more my style.

Anthony Codispoti (30:00)
Jonathan, what inspired you to start JoySauce and why specifically now?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (30:05)
Yeah, yeah, so it was something that I was thinking about for a long time and I also credit my wife. So my wife is non-Asian and ⁓ so this anecdote is at the intersection of several key things that I felt very strongly about. So.

I feel that my Asian American sisters have had a much easier time ⁓ sort of

being a more welcomed part of the American cultural fabric than ⁓ my Asian American brothers. And that’s a thing. ⁓ Asian American men are often ⁓ sort of emasculated in society. There’s ⁓ many, examples of this is like, know, ⁓ Asian American men are the least promoted in upper management. ⁓

⁓ even less so than white women and Asian American women. ⁓ There are some groups that are below them, ⁓ but for men, it’s their last group. ⁓ The Asian American men are the least, or at least they were as of a few years ago, the least swiped. ⁓

swipe right? Like on Tinder if you like someone you swipe right, right? If you don’t like someone you swipe left, I’ve never used those apps. But Asian American men are the least swiped right ⁓ precisely because of this unconscious bias that’s been kind of steeped in society that historically has come from a lot of different sources that has marginalized Asian American men. ⁓ Now this isn’t just about

the stature of Asian American men. ⁓ is also about, so my wife is ⁓ white. And ⁓ when we were young, we never saw other couples that looked like us. You would see an Asian American woman with a white man, which is great, just like my own mother and my Italian American father, but you never saw the reverse.

And so when we were first dating, anytime out in the wild at a restaurant, if we saw just rare occasion, like maybe once a year, you would see another couple and it’s like, oh, the dude is Asian and the woman is white. We’d be like, oh, what are they ordering? Oh, look what they’re wearing.

Okay, now they’re leaving. Well, let’s see what car they drive. I mean, we would have followed them home if we could. So because we were so curious about like, there’s such a rarity. so Joy saw us to answer your question comes out of what I felt, oh, that there was not an honest conversation about those things. Right.

I felt that there needed to be a platform where we leaned in really hard and spoke honestly about issues like that and also a lot of other related things, right? ⁓ And in doing so, I think the conversation can broaden to include family members and allies and friends and neighbors, right? So, JoySauce,

not unlike Geekwire where it was meant to do it a little bit differently than other antecedents. JoySauce is not meant to be this insular, hey this is for Asian Americans only or this is for Koreans only.

or Japanese only or Chinese only. is for, let’s include the entirety of the Asian American diaspora because that’s how we related to each other. When I was in school, if I saw another Asian kid, it didn’t matter that that person was Filipino instead of what I was. It’s like, oh, hey, I wanna, I’m curious about you. What’s your background, right? And so that energy I think is still there on the part of a lot of people. And so,

⁓ I wanted to also then broaden out to family members, allies, acknowledging that they exist in our experience as well and vice versa. so, ⁓ and again, just like picnic and pick monkey and geek wire, I think that if you can forge an emotional connection with the viewer or the user, this is classic Don Norman emotional design. If you can reach them through ⁓

wow, love and delight, you can make a stronger connection and engender greater brand loyalty. And so joy sauce is meant to invoke those same feelings, right? ⁓ It’s like soy sauce, which is an ingredient common to a lot of Asian cuisines, but happy. ⁓ Geek wire is the same. Like let’s celebrate being a geek. That was something that was kind of doubted at first. It’s like, wait a minute, I can’t imagine calling Steve Bomber and, hey, I’m Jonathan Spasado from Geek Wire or whatever.

But it’s like, no, no, no, that can be very cool. That can be, let’s flip it on its head and make being a geek very cool. ⁓ Pick monkey, same thing. Do our users identify with monkeys? Well, actually monkeys are usually in every culture revered for their intelligence. And so let’s lean into that aspect.

Anthony Codispoti (35:39)
So a couple of things I want to dig into. You you mentioned you’d be someplace and at school or something, you see another Asian kid, you’re like, oh, like I want to better. Even like they’re Filipino. They’re from a different background. How what what’s a good way for us to be curious about each other’s backgrounds without making people feel like they’re outsiders? You know, there’s sort of this conversation that’s often had. I’m sure you’ve been on the receiving end of it. Well, Jonathan, where are you from?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (35:51)
Yeah.

That’s right. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (36:09)
Right. And how would you

answer that question? Jonathan, where are you from?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (36:13)
I would say, hey, I’m from Seattle.

Anthony Codispoti (36:15)
Yeah, but I mean, where are you from from like, where are you really from? You know?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (36:19)
Well,

I was originally born in London, lived in New York. And then at some point, just to kind of, I’ve learned to ⁓ short circuit the awkwardness and be like, but if what you mean is, where my family is from originally, or what my ethnicity is, then I’m half Korean, half Chinese. Like I’ll say it that way. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (36:40)
And

so what’s the better way to sort of pose that question?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (36:43)
Yeah, I

appreciate that, Anthony. Yet you’re right that ⁓ for most Asian Americans in particular, getting that question is a little bit uncomfortable because it does other them. It does have this feeling that… ⁓

well, I was born and raised here. mean, what do mean? Where am I from? And so you’re always perpetually feeling that you’re made to feel un-American. And that has to do with the history of ⁓ whether we fought against Japan in World War II and then Japanese Americans were Americans born and raised, were interned, things like that. So there’s that history. I think to answer your question, the best way to be curious about someone’s background or their ethnicity

without sort of these triggering things is to just to get to know them first. I would recommend, hey, I’m curious about you. Just kind of leave it at that. Let’s have coffee or what do you do for a living? Yeah, where do you live? ⁓ And kind of just start there. And then as you get to know the person, it will inevitably be naturally revealed what that person is. I was just having a conversation with my Korean father. He was so annoyed at me for blah, blah, blah.

Anthony Codispoti (37:56)
So where can people find joy sauce in the content?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (37:59)
Yeah,

so we are live, JoySauce, as a TV channel on Amazon Prime Video. So the easiest way, it’s pretty easy, is to go to your Amazon Prime Video and up at the very top it says Movies, TV Shows, Sports, I think is the third one. And then at the fourth one on the upper right.

is live TV. Go to live TV and depending on your preferences or how the algorithms, what they think of you as a viewer, ⁓ JoySauce will be ⁓ in the top half of the electronic program guide. Once you go to live TV, then you see all the different channels like CNN and ESPN and… ⁓

you know, a murder mystery channel, things like that, and you should be able to find JoySauce. If it’s not in the top, if you’re scrolling a lot and you don’t see it, ⁓ then another easy way to find it is after you click on live TV, then go to the entertainment option, entertainment category, and usually ⁓ JoySauce is near the top of that list.

And you just click on it and watch it. And it’s a live, what’s called a FAST channel. FAST stands for free advertising supported TV, which is the way that most people, greater than 50 % of the country who have cut their ties with a lot of subscription fees and who are no longer using, watching conventional cable like the way that we grew up, Anthony, that’s how they’re watching TV now is they’re watching a fast digital stream. That’s a linear and always on, and they just kind of leave it on.

all day.

Anthony Codispoti (39:41)
talk to me about the potential ⁓ target audience here. Are there enough folks to eventually support this kind of a channel?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (39:45)
Yeah.

Absolutely, so I’ll start ⁓ with the smaller group and then go large. So there’s a group that whom we call the Slasians. The Slasians are young 18 to 35 Asian Americans born and raised here.

They speak English, they don’t really speak the other languages of their culture, and they are very aesthetically driven. They’re very style conscious. ⁓ They are ⁓ into all kinds of, know, the newest music. And in the traditional, there’s a company that studied how trends start called the Cheskin. ⁓

company, they were based in New York. I’m not sure if they exist anymore, but this is maybe 20 years ago. They created a trend adoption model on their trend adoption model. think that people can look this up. The Slasians would be those early adopters ⁓ that are explorers. I think the term was they’re explorers. They try a lot of different things and it becomes a part of their identity.

their fringy style or the indie music that they’re listening to is part of who they are. So that’s the Slayzians, a younger cohort.

Anthony Codispoti (41:02)
Why slay Asians? What’s this? ⁓

Jonathan Ng Sposato (41:06)
that’s a fun way for us to say that because they slay, you know, because they’re still cool. So get this, the next group is an older group ⁓ who are 35 to 55. ⁓ They maybe include myself. ⁓ And they are the rising suns. And the rising suns are much more

Anthony Codispoti (41:09)
Okay, okay.

Jonathan Ng Sposato (41:27)
socially conscious and sort of mission driven. Like they care very much to raise the visibility of Asian Americans in this country. They are ⁓ rightfully angry about, you know, anti-Asian hate that happens or, you know, the rhetoric of certain groups that are disparaging of Asians. And so ⁓ they’re motivated by wanting to create change and they have the economic power to

make an impact and so we call them the rising suns. The third group that we’re going after that JoySauce appeals to is general market. So I probably don’t have to tell you that there are a lot of people who are non-Asian who are into K-dramas, ⁓ Chinese action movies starring Chow Yun-fat or know Tony Leong and you know old you know kind of ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (42:14)
they’re huge, right?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (42:26)
stored ⁓ fantasy epics with Takeshi Kenishiro or another category is the Japanese ⁓ tokusatsu genre.

and Tokusatsu is Ultraman and any of the kaiju stuff. That’s the stuff that I loved watching ⁓ on reruns here in the States when I was growing up, agnostic with the fact that I was Asian American, but it was just like, my God, that’s so cool. ⁓ so ⁓ anime is another big category. And so there’s a lot of general market appeal to…

Asian content that we’re ⁓ very cognizant of and want to make it as part of our mission is to appeal to general market. So a great example is I was not particularly a music aficionado or music lover per se. ⁓ I wasn’t into Bruce Springsteen or Michael Jackson or Sammy but watching MTV

I’m getting all of it and I loved it. Same with BET. I’m not African-American, but I loved watching BET because it’d be like a really great show ⁓ at the time with ⁓ Will Smith or Queen Latifah.

Anthony Codispoti (43:49)
Okay, so are you guys licensing a lot of content? you creating your own original stuff?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (43:55)
Both, yeah, so we created a lot of our own content, which is what differentiates us. And that allows us to sort of set the stage for how this is not your grandfather’s Asian American TV. So they include things ⁓ like that really push into the issues that I discussed. So there’s a show called Mixed Six that my wife and I ⁓ co-produce, which is all about couples who are mixed, where one person is Asian and the other person is not. The other person could be white, the other person could be black.

or it could be two different kinds of Asians, or it could be like a gay or a lesbian couple where again, there’s something, you know, not monolithic about the couple. And so we’ve created that. We’ve created also another unscripted reality series about a 26 year old.

Chinese-American professional race car driver who drives for BMW and she’s racing against Mario Andretti’s grandson and she’s probably one of the few She is one of the few few like one out of three thousand ⁓ Race car drivers is is a woman and she’s probably the only Asian American female pro race car driver at that level and So the a story is about how she’s winning races, but the B story is about how you know her mother

is doubtful of her career choice and still just really wants her to go to med school, right? So ⁓ that’s something that a lot of Asian Americans can relate to. We have our own ⁓ JoySauce late night talk show, which I’m the host of. I threw myself in there because I couldn’t, I was too cheap to pay somebody else at the time in leveraging my experience ⁓ on stage with the GeekWire events. But we have all manner of guests come on and we’re to cold open comedy sketches, the musical act.

the co-host, the guests, everybody is Asian American and that’s kind of neat to see we’ve created this parallel universe. So then of course we also have a lot of content that is licensed or second windowed and the magic here is that we’ve curated thoughtfully what those should be. So we’re not obviously taking in everything ⁓ but we are picking. ⁓

indie film festival, you know, festival winners ⁓ or things that have like an amazing cult following, but you know that they may not get more airtime on a major network ⁓ or films and TV shows produced by, you know, some really successful big time directors and writers, but maybe their first or second film just as good, just didn’t get that

big open that their latest film got. lots of stuff.

Anthony Codispoti (46:42)
So let

me see if I’ve got my numbers right here. Asian Americans, and it’s a place like Seattle, about 18 % of the population, right? But only represent less than 3 % of speaking roles in TV and movies. It occurs to me that part of what you’re trying to do is not only increase that ratio so that there’s more speaking parts on TV shows, movies, et cetera, all kinds of media.

Jonathan Ng Sposato (46:51)
That’s right.

That’s right.

Anthony Codispoti (47:12)
for Asian Americans, but also help all Asian Americans sort of feel better about and celebrate themselves and their culture.

Jonathan Ng Sposato (47:22)
That’s right, that’s right. I’m actually just, number one, trying to make up a gap, make up for the gap that exists between those numbers that you saw, between your number of Asian Americans that are actually in this country and our contributions to the ⁓ culture and the society. But.

we seldom see ourselves represented. lately it’s been getting better, but there’s a belief that it’s kind of peaked a little bit and it’s kind of dipped back down because precisely because of that stat that it’s less than 3 % of the speaking roles despite ⁓ being proportionately much higher percentage of the population. So making up that gap is the first step. The second one is though,

to sort of more from an emotional standpoint to make it so that I think a lot of Asian Americans are less apologetic and that we stand with more stature and walk with more swagger and to dance with more joy, I like to say. because for so long, I think some people, some of us feel that we’ve been a little beat up. We’re literally still, old grandmas are still getting pushed. ⁓

in subways, ⁓ still getting attacked. There are still restaurants in even progressive places like Los Angeles that are, ⁓ you know, either not seating or seating Asian Americans in a back corner of the restaurant. There are still, there’s still a lot going on that ⁓ is wrong. And so I think pushing back on that and ultimately,

normalizing ⁓ Asian Americans as being just as American as ⁓ whites, Latinos, blacks, etc. That’s the goal.

Anthony Codispoti (49:09)
You know, and it strikes me that, ⁓ because I’ve seen, I’ve seen sort of sexist and racist patterns before, as I’m sure that you have. And I think sometimes what happens when a minority group tries to raise up and celebrate themselves and their culture, other people get to feel threatened by that. And I think what can be helpful, people are listening and they’re like, well, I’m not Asian. Why do I care about that?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (49:31)
Yeah, yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (49:38)
this joy sauce channel, know, you know, where’s my channel kind of a thing. And I think what can help, and I’ve seen this actually play out in some conversations, is people understanding that celebrating one group does not mean denigrating another. So I can be here as a white American, Italian American, if you want to get more specific, and not feel threatened by an Asian American channel.

Jonathan Ng Sposato (49:56)
That’s right.

Anthony Codispoti (50:08)
⁓ media channel that is, you know, supporting and, and celebrating the Asian community because, hey, good for you. So celebrate the elements that make you a little bit different than me. Why not? Right?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (50:22)
That’s exactly right. really appreciate that, Anthony. You’ve put it beautifully. I have a very strong belief that it is not zero sum. It is not a pi that is stagnant and somehow more for one group is less for another group. I really do not believe that. I believe that it is sort of infinitely sized and that it’s about…

⁓ everyone feeling like they’re on an equal footing, that they deserve to be on an equal footing, that they deserve to be treated the same way and fairly, ⁓ and where there’s a deficit, you know, let’s do something about that. And I also would argue that…

if you’re not Asian American, to care about something like joy sauce is to ultimately care about this country and what makes us incredibly special, which is that I do believe that we still live in one of the best countries in the world. ⁓ There are things happening right now that are maybe tarnishing that a little bit, but ⁓ to keep it special, to keep it vibrant, I think we need to have that.

⁓ diversity of opinion, we need to have different influences. That’s why we are so entrepreneurial, right? We are one of the most entrepreneurial countries. People who are entrepreneurs, when they move to the EU or the UK or to Japan, they will talk about how, ⁓

Boy, it’s harder to do things there, right? And so in order to preserve that spirit of innovation, we have to have multiple inputs and multiple influences. So keeping or making stronger one community does not come at the expense of other communities, but in fact makes us all stronger.

Anthony Codispoti (52:09)
So I think you’ve got a history of building ideas that become enormously popular, right? We’ve talked about picnic, we’ve talked about pick monkey. We’ve talked about geek wire in very crowded spaces. Excuse me, you found a way to rise above the noise. ⁓

It seems like it’s even noisier now in terms of the amount of content and media that there is to consume. How do you hope to promote joy sauce? How do you hope to get a lot of extra traction with this idea?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (52:40)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I think that’s a very astute question. There is in fact a lot of noise and that is the biggest challenge that we have is to cut through. But I have a belief that in fact we are currently the only

Asian American channel in existence. So ⁓ African Americans have a very respectable, I think one and a half trillion in annual spending power. ⁓ And there are 20 somewhat digital ⁓ or ⁓ cable channels focused on that community. With Spanish speaking Americans, it’s something like over 40 of those channels. Also like a very respectable, I 1.6 or 1.7 trillion in spending power. With Asian Americans, there’s like 2.7

$2

trillion in annual spending power and up until joy sauce zero. So I think that that in itself, there’s a little bit of a, I wouldn’t say first mover advantage per se. I don’t actually believe there’s such a thing as first mover advantage, but there’s sort of ⁓ scarcity ⁓ advantage there. So I think that.

helps us. The second way, like I said, is to win with by connecting with people emotionally. I think if we were to call ourselves and to brand ourselves and have the art direction and the programming be sort of safe and be, well, here’s kind of like the bell curve in the middle of what everybody might want to see in our community. I think that that wouldn’t necessarily win. I think that we have to have a very

strong POV, even sometimes a controversial POV, sometimes maybe things that people don’t like. ⁓ Maybe they might turn it on. It’s like, that’s an element of the Asian American community I hadn’t thought about. That, think, is what will sort of ⁓ move the needle in terms of cutting above the noise.

Anthony Codispoti (54:45)
As you look forward to the future, do you see JoySauce ever becoming like a traditional cable channel or distributing its content on YouTube or other platforms?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (54:55)
Yeah, absolutely. So I hadn’t talked about that. So we’re launching first on fast free advertising support TV. The next step is video on demand. And so that’s also happening. that’s also so that’s ⁓ then going sort of horizontally. We’re going across multiple carriers. And so right now it’s Amazon Prime Video, which is one of the largest tier ones and will soon be launching on other tier one and tier two carriers. And we’re excited about that. Eventually.

we would consider a traditional cable down the line ⁓ if the terms are right. The business model

will work wonderfully even without. So that’s kind of like an extra. Not unlike when we were doing ⁓ games, ⁓ oftentimes you would go with two or like one lead platform. You’re gonna do it first on the Nintendo, then do your Sega Genesis port and then do your other ⁓ platforms. So similar strategy.

Anthony Codispoti (55:58)
Hmm. You know, Jonathan, I’m guessing as a lot of people from the outside look at you, they’re like, wow, look at all he’s accomplished. Life just comes easy for that guy. Right. Like, yeah. Like a man who sold all those companies to, you know, you know, giant, you know, fortune 50 companies, ⁓ you know, geek wire, like everything you, you touch turns to gold. Life is, is, is easy, but hardly.

Jonathan Ng Sposato (56:07)
More luxury than today.

Hardly.

Anthony Codispoti (56:25)
We all have challenges, all have struggles, and I’d like to hear about a big serious challenge that you’ve overcome in your life.

Jonathan Ng Sposato (56:32)
Yeah, there have been many and I don’t want to, there are people who, you

I don’t want to overplay ⁓ how much I’ve suffered because in general, we’re all very lucky being, ⁓ living here in this country and getting to do what we do. But there have been a lot of challenges. I would actually characterize that with every single one of these startups, every single one, there’s a near death experience or multiple near death experiences. JoySauce has been a four year plus journey where…

⁓ there has been multiple challenges, whether it’s in the way that we’re capitalized, and I put a lot of my own funds into it, whether it’s in…

deals that got consummated, ⁓ contracts that were signed, agreements that were made, and then they somehow blew apart because of some reason that we could not control. Maybe somebody on the other side, that company got bought and they’re going in a different direction, or the decision maker, the senior vice president got laid off and there’s a new person in charge. So there’ve been a lot of setbacks, but I would generally say that probably,

One of the biggest setbacks that I could remember was ⁓

my very first startup and that I remember when my parents, ⁓ when my mother told me that I could not come home ⁓ when I graduated, she wasn’t gonna come up for graduation, dad wasn’t gonna come up because he already moved out and the reason was because they were getting divorced. And so, you don’t bother coming home ⁓ after you pack up your stuff, find a storage unit, I gotta sell the house. So when you hear that,

when you’re 21, just turn 22, it kickstarts you ⁓ into ⁓ a different place. And for me, that began a probably like a four year journey where, know, on the one hand, I had nothing to lose. So instead of going to law school, I started this games company. But on the other hand, this was my trial by fire of learning, OK, how do I make payroll? ⁓

our client, know, Nintendo, or Electronic Arts, they pay and they’re net 60 days from submitting a milestone to getting, sending you that check. And so I’m going to not be able to make payroll. So what do do? I’m not taking a home and paycheck. So getting a line of credit, ⁓ having an employee or two on occasion, just out of a population that was 40 plus employees, having someone…

who had a substance abuse problem. Okay, how do you deal with that? Do we fire the guy or do we help the guy? Is there like an outpatient program? it better to be, you know, just learning all of that at the age of 22, 23, 24 was pretty incredible for me. And at the same time, I was, I think already starting to support my parents financially, kind of independent of each other. think that my

parents needed some help and I remember giving them what I could each. ⁓ And ⁓ so that was something that ⁓ was very difficult. In retrospect, I would never wish it on my own child someday when he’s in his twenties. But at the same time, I think it, I needed that kind of hardship because up until that point, I don’t think I had very much of it.

And so knowing that you can survive that. ⁓

beans that you can survive anything. mean, there were days when I literally like here I was the owner of like a, you know, a successful game development company. we had contracts with Nintendo and Sega and electronic arts and NEC big, big fortune 500 companies. And I, there were days when I had $26 in my bank account and that was it. And I was doing a cliche thing, eating top ramen or like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you know, and asking my landlord if I could be late on

rent like that it’s gonna you know maybe in a week right so ⁓ so you know that’s not uncommon I don’t think with early entrepreneurs and so the point there to answer your question is that there are each one of those has its share of those things and I think the older you get the more quote-unquote successful you get and again I’ve been more lucky than good

I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I’m always the dumbest guy in the room. don’t, I’m not always the best UI UX designer. I’m not, I’m not a great engineer or coder. ⁓ it’s, it’s, it’s usually the synthesis of great teamwork that has led me to do the things that I’ve done. Almost always a synthesis of great teamwork. ⁓ but

The point is that it doesn’t matter how experienced you are, how old you are, your problems and your challenges have, if you’re doing it right, your challenges have a way of scaling to where you are. So each time things feel just as bad, right? A more recent example was JoySauce a few years ago, the team…

insisted on creating an about us page. And I’m one of those where I’m superstitious. Like if you haven’t launched a product, if you’re not close to launching.

Don’t start making a cool t-shirt for the team. Don’t, you know, come up with a clever code name, you know, ⁓ to, to delight yourself, just hunker down, get your product shipped, then, then ordered a cool t-shirts, right? So I was reluctant to create an about us page, but some of the young folks on the team were very eager to do that. And so they made one. And this was at a time, I would say a few years ago when I think different communities were figuring out what does it really mean to lean into.

⁓ your identity and to make progress as a community. so…

people took issue with the fact that not 100 % of the team was Asian American, right? My wife was a part of it and there she is, know, blonde and, you know, and there was another fellow, Ben, who was a super agent at CAA. And of course I needed him to help us with, you know, lining up the various celebrities. He was not Asian, ⁓ white man. And so people focus on that and really beat us up for it. And then thread just kept being pulled.

Anthony Codispoti (1:02:59)
Yeah.

Jonathan Ng Sposato (1:03:23)
like they beat us up for the fact that we used the color yellow on the page. Don’t you know that the color yellow is racist? You’re kind of Asian American, are you? And here I am the founder, nearly very responsible and like, my God, that I do. But then you realize, no, my earliest influences, Bruce Lee, right? Game of death, he’s in that yellow jumpsuit, right?

Or in 1969, the very first time that the term Asian American was coined was by a UCLA student movement and they called themselves Yellow Power, Kind of as a reference to what African-American students were doing with Black Power. So there’s just a lot of noise out there on the internet, but that kind of…

pushback from my own community was deeply challenging for me. I think it changed me forever as a person. I think it’s changed me in ways both good and bad probably.

Anthony Codispoti (1:04:31)
I mean, it’s got to be frustrating. You know, you’re putting all this effort in to advance a cause and then the very people that you’re trying to help are now attacking you. Trolls.

Jonathan Ng Sposato (1:04:35)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Now I open

that’s exactly right. Trolls, I think there’s a lot of trollish behavior on social media or people just wanting to up their follower count by…

by inciting ⁓ anger. I now openly, and thanks to allies like you, whenever I have speaking engagements and get asked a question like this, I now openly use it as an opportunity to say to ourselves, let’s reflect on things like that. Let’s be kinder to each other ⁓ as a community. ⁓ Not everybody’s gonna do it or say it in exactly the way that you want it said and done, right?

We all have our truths. I have my Asian American identity and vision for where we could be. And that includes being more provocative and more unapologetic and to stand with more stature and walk with more swagger. And so if you’re not okay with that, you can, you can, you can, don’t have to go to joy sauce.com. You don’t have to go to the RTV channel, right?

Anthony Codispoti (1:05:48)
Jonathan, I’ve just got one more question for you today. But before I ask it, I want to do a few things. First of all, to get in touch with our guest, ⁓ best places Instagram at Jonathan Spasado. And ⁓ we’ll include a link to that in the show notes. Sorry, Jonathan, was there another place you wanted them to go?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (1:05:58)
you

No, I interrupted you actually, Anthony. My apologies. No, that’s the best. Instagram is probably the best.

Anthony Codispoti (1:06:09)
Okay.

Great. And again, we’ll have a link to that in the show notes. Also, as a reminder, if you want to get more employees access to benefits that won’t hurt them financially and carries a financial upside for the company, reach out to addbackbenefits.com. Finally, if you take just a moment to leave us a comment or a review on your favorite podcast app, we will be forever grateful. So last question for you, Jonathan, what is your superpower?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (1:06:38)
I don’t know that I have any, Anthony. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (1:06:42)
Let me rephrase it. Setting aside all modesty, what is your superpower?

Jonathan Ng Sposato (1:06:49)
No, I’m serious. don’t know what I can think of one. I think something is happening. I think it’s, ⁓ I guess the marketplaces is saying, ⁓ I’m a decent entrepreneur. So I think maybe I would say this, I would say that I think a strength is that oftentimes, whether it’s, it was something in gaming or in consumer software or in internet SaaS or in media.

is distilling something complicated and chaotic down to its bare essence and communicating that, right? Geek wire, let’s celebrate those of us who are super, super geeky and shout it out to the world, right? ⁓ Picnic, taking something complicated like Photoshop and making it fun.

Like it’s a picnic. Joy sauce, right? Taking Asian American culture and making it joyous. It’s not about intergenerational trauma and pain and strife and, you know, issues with our mother. It’s about fun. Yeah, what’s the fun part of being Asian American?

Anthony Codispoti (1:08:09)
Jonathan Sposato from Joy Sauce. want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Jonathan Ng Sposato (1:08:17)
Anthony, thank you so much. You are a great podcast interviewer. It was lovely to be here with you. I had a lot of fun. So hopefully this, we delivered some value to your listeners.

Anthony Codispoti (1:08:27)
I know that we did. Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the inspired stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.