From deathbed to boardroom: Omaze CEO reveals how flatlining changed him forever
Matt Pohlson “was supposed to die” when he was born and certainly not hang around long enough to found Omaze, the global juggernaut aiming to revolutionise the high-end property market.
Born with a stomach twisted into a knot, Pohlson underwent surgery to save his life – an experience he thought was supposed to happen once in a lifetime.
But the US native faced the prospect of his own mortality again just seven years ago when a “freakish” event led him to flatline for 4.5 minutes.
Speaking on an upcoming episode of CityAM‘s Boardroom Uncovered show, the Omaze co-founder recounted what happened to him but also delves into how the experience changed him forever.
‘She’s not one of us kooky Californians’
Pohlson said: “I was supposed to die when I was born – my stomach was twisted in a knot. They did this surgery then to save me.
“Then the scar tissue from the surgery freakishly broke off 40 years later and created this obstruction. We didn’t know what was happening.
“My stomach just over the course of a couple days went from looking like it was normal to three months pregnant to six months pregnant to nine months pregnant.”
He went to the hospital and underwent a series of tests and was kept in overnight with the possibility of surgery waiting in the morning if his condition didn’t improve.
The Omaze boss said: “So Helen our COO drives home to her house. It’s probably midnight at this point.
“She’s been in the hospital all day with me and she pulls into her driveway and she goes to get out of her car and something tells her to go back to the hospital. Some kind of voice really.
“That’s very out of character. She’s not one of us kooky Californians. But the voice is undeniable, she said.
“So she drove back and if she hadn’t, I would have probably died 45 minutes later.
“She saw that my blood pressure plummeted. She went and got the nurse and said, look at this. This looks really bad.
“The nurse says that can’t be right. He wouldn’t be getting oxygen to his brain.”
‘If he’s leaving this world right now, I’m going to be in that room’
Pohlson said the doctor then same in and immediately calls in a crash team.
He added: “He rushed me down to surgery. I come out of surgery and they say to my mum, the good news is we figured out what it was. It’s a bowel obstruction, and we removed it.
“The bad news is his heart rate is continuing to plummet and we don’t know why. He’s in critical condition.
“A couple hours passed. My mum goes downstairs to get my dad, my brother, and she’s coming back up the elevator and she hears of the loudspeaker code blue in room 437.
“My mom works in a hospital so she knows that means flatline and she knows that’s my room.
“She gets out of the door and starts running down the hall and gets to the door of the operating room and the nurse says she can’t come in.
“Mum says ‘look, I was there when he came into this world. If he’s leaving this world right now, I’m going to be in that room’.
“They were doing the compressions and doing the defibrillator and my body was bouncing up and down but I wasn’t responding.
“She started to crumble in that moment. It’s one thing to lose a child, it’s another thing if it’s right there in front of you when it’s happening.”
Omaze CEO: ‘Fear is just a story’
Pholson added: “I don’t think there’s a day that has gone by when I didn’t think about it. It took me a long time to wrap my head around it all.
“It changes you. It changes your perspective in pretty fundamental ways.”
When asked how it has changed him, the CEO added: “Before this happened I was really fear driven.
“It was a lot of fear of not being enough. Fear of comparing myself to others, fear of failure.
“Then you realise, when you encounter something like that, that nothing is as bad as the fear of the thing.
“For many people, death is their ultimate fear. I experienced some version of that. And it was okay.
“What I saw on the other side made me excited for the next chapter of this. Whatever it is.
“Then you realise fear is just a story. In most cases, very rarely are we in actual life threatening situations.
“Most of our fears are just stories that we’ve created and you can learn to reframe those stories. That opens up a whole new world.
“That was a big thing and so therefore you become a much better friend to yourself.
“I used to, what I thought was motivational to myself was a lot of just saying pretty mean things to myself or self-criticism or that negative rumination loop that a lot of people can go through and a lot of the world conspires to push us into via socials and other things.
“I’m way better at getting past that. It still comes, but I just process through it much more quickly.
“Because at the end of the day the opposite of fear isn’t hate. The opposite of fear is love. And so I love myself more.
“I know this is a funny thing to talk about on a business podcast, but that’s really true.”