Dan Martell - $100M Investor Explains： How to Invest in 2026

00:00:00.000 I'm gonna show you how to invest your money

00:00:01.560 to turn cash into more cash.

00:00:03.520 And it doesn't matter how much experience you have,

00:00:05.800 the rules are the same.

00:00:07.000 After building and exiting three companies,

00:00:09.040 becoming a multimillionaire at 28,

00:00:10.960 and voted number one angel investor in Canada,

00:00:13.280 here's what I've learned.

00:00:14.320 Rich people don't start with stocks.

00:00:16.120 There's actually two more stages before that

00:00:18.400 that most people completely skip,

00:00:20.040 and that's what keeps them broke.

00:00:21.600 Starting with stage one, trade your time.

00:00:24.200 There's only two things you can trade to get more money,

00:00:27.280 time and money.

00:00:28.680 you're young you invest your time you got all the time in the world you get around mentors you show

00:00:33.560 up you work late you stack skills you build reps essentially use your time to invest in you to get

00:00:40.120 a return time is the first resource you ever have you can waste it or you can invest it dude when i

00:00:45.880 didn't have all the money i used my drive time to learn listen to audiobooks i got around other

00:00:51.160 people that were smarter and i got curious and quiet and i executed so they'd want to pour more

00:00:55.800 into me. I took on projects where I didn't necessarily get paid a lot so that I could

00:01:00.180 get exposed to bigger ideas. I took my time and I put myself in a place where the time got me a

00:01:05.340 return. You can make decent money trading your time, but eventually you're going to hit a wall

00:01:09.680 because you won't have a shortage of money. That'll start to pile up, but you will have a

00:01:12.900 shortage of time. Stage two, buy back your time. Think about it. When I hire a stock broker to

00:01:18.640 invest for me, I'm buying their expertise to invest in a market that I don't have to go learn

00:01:24.420 so that I can get the return without doing the time.

00:01:27.720 Warren Buffett is literally deploying

00:01:29.760 billions of dollars into companies

00:01:32.180 and he's buying all that time it took

00:01:34.760 to build that company using his money.

00:01:37.400 One of the best ways to figure out

00:01:39.400 where to buy back your time

00:01:40.580 is using a process I call the buyback loop.

00:01:42.840 The first thing we have to do is audit our calendar.

00:01:46.060 We have to look at everything we've done

00:01:47.620 over the last two weeks and really write it down.

00:01:49.780 Then you highlight everything in green that lights you up,

00:01:52.500 everything in red that takes your energy,

00:01:54.100 and then yellow is kind of mediocre.

00:01:55.800 And right next to it, I write down,

00:01:57.360 is this a $1 sign cheap to pay somebody else to do for me?

00:02:00.540 Or is it a $4 sign if I had to pay somebody

00:02:02.740 to do things at my level?

00:02:04.200 Then you grab everything that is a $1 or $2 sign in cost

00:02:07.720 that's red or yellow and you make a bucket

00:02:10.620 and you put it in a bucket.

00:02:12.500 What you do with that bucket is to transfer your tasks,

00:02:16.060 delegate the red stuff, the yellow stuff,

00:02:18.220 the low value stuff to anybody else.

00:02:20.680 You wanna invest your money to get all those things

00:02:23.140 out of your calendar to other people

00:02:25.140 so that you can go to three,

00:02:26.620 which is fill your time with high leverage work.

00:02:29.040 These are the things that light you up,

00:02:31.180 that make you a ton of money.

00:02:32.680 For most people, these are revenue generating activities.

00:02:35.720 Things when you're out there talking to people,

00:02:37.560 talking to customers,

00:02:38.520 understanding the product, the innovation.

00:02:40.400 It's not getting bogged down in emails and scheduling

00:02:42.280 and purchasing stuff that other people

00:02:43.940 could easily do for you.

00:02:45.160 You see, in business,

00:02:46.240 you don't wanna just hire people to grow your business.

00:02:48.680 You wanna hire people to buy back your time

00:02:50.820 so that you end up not overwhelming yourself

00:02:52.900 and you can make more money.

00:02:54.300 I have two incredible people in my life.

00:02:56.360 Anne, who is my executive assistant, now chief of staff,

00:02:58.700 she handles everything, my calendar, my appointments,

00:03:01.840 my emails, all the interactions

00:03:03.680 with different people in my life.

00:03:05.000 She essentially manages the professional side.

00:03:07.740 Then I have Betty, who manages our house, 0.98

00:03:09.840 all my real estate, all my vehicles,

00:03:11.620 and she reports to Anne.

00:03:13.220 Those two people buy me literally 100 hours a week

00:03:16.880 that allows me to invest my time

00:03:18.760 in things that make me millions of dollars.

00:03:20.600 And look, if you're hiring an executive assistant

00:03:22.360 but have no idea how to work with them,

00:03:24.240 I have a complete EA playbook that teaches everything.

00:03:27.380 It's what I use with my assistant,

00:03:28.740 every template, every workflow,

00:03:30.640 everything my EA uses daily.

00:03:32.700 If you want it, just go to Instagram,

00:03:34.320 at Dan Martell and DM me the word YouTube EA

00:03:36.840 and I'll send it right over.

00:03:38.260 People will say to me like,

00:03:39.240 Dan, I can just do this better myself.

00:03:40.940 I say, of course you can.

00:03:42.520 The problem is that you'll always be stuck

00:03:44.460 being the person that can do this.

00:03:45.960 You never learn how to work through somebody.

00:03:48.900 The next level for most people

00:03:50.720 is actually learning to let go.

00:03:52.780 See, most people like to spend time to save money.

00:03:55.060 I will drive 20 minutes all the way

00:03:56.520 to save three cents on gas.

00:03:58.100 I like to spend money to save time.

00:04:00.460 And because I'm a good time trader,

00:04:02.080 it's why I've been able to create the wealth in my life.

00:04:04.560 So now that you bought back your time,

00:04:06.240 we can move on to stage three,

00:04:07.680 let your money work for you.

00:04:09.440 I just learned this simple concept when I was young

00:04:11.560 that I need to get my money to do the work

00:04:14.180 where it makes me enough money where I don't have to work.

00:04:16.700 See, most people start here

00:04:18.200 because they think that's what they're supposed to do.

00:04:19.560 and that's why they stay stuck they start investing in funds and stocks and real estate because they

00:04:25.000 got a little extra money and they want to feel rich and i'm investing the problem is is they're

00:04:29.000 not good enough yet and even if they're good enough they haven't learned how to buy back their

00:04:32.120 time and that's why they stay stuck now we're ready to have our money make money for us see

00:04:37.320 the one percent don't get rich from stocks they got rich from stage two they got rich from

00:04:42.440 understanding how to buy back their time so they can make more money so they have a lot of money

00:04:47.160 to invest in things where they have equity,

00:04:49.200 where they own things.

00:04:50.520 When I was in my mid-20s and I started to pile up my cash,

00:04:53.440 I realized that I had enough money

00:04:54.980 to invest in other businesses.

00:04:56.580 And that's when I became an angel investor.

00:04:58.360 One of those deals, for example,

00:05:00.140 was a company called Intercom.

00:05:01.760 So the founder shows up at our office.

00:05:03.660 I'd met him at an event.

00:05:04.980 He shows me this new product.

00:05:06.560 I think it's cool.

00:05:07.800 I've got money saved up to make those kinds of investments.

00:05:10.380 He's telling me he's going to meet

00:05:11.400 with Marissa Mayer from Google and Jack from Twitter.

00:05:14.380 So I invest.

00:05:15.060 that company became a multi-billion dollar company.

00:05:18.200 And when you ask me how much time I put in,

00:05:20.660 the answer is none.

00:05:22.060 I deployed my money, my money grew

00:05:24.080 and I got really good at making those investments.

00:05:26.920 That's why I became the number one angel investor in Canada

00:05:29.160 because I bought back my time to learn the skills

00:05:32.540 to find the entrepreneurs to invest in

00:05:34.780 that allowed me to have my money work for me.

00:05:37.420 I've learned that having money in a bank account

00:05:40.140 doing nothing for me is not how I get my money

00:05:42.860 to work for me.

00:05:43.640 and what my job is, is being a professional capital allocator.

00:05:47.820 I got money, I wanna allocate it.

00:05:50.120 What do you got?

00:05:51.200 Here's my portfolio, here's what I know,

00:05:53.460 I stick to what I know, and I put my money to work.

00:05:56.260 To me, dollars are like little potential workers

00:05:58.940 that need to be put to work.

00:06:00.440 If you leave them in your bank account

00:06:01.900 because you're like, oh, this feels safe,

00:06:04.000 they're not working for you.

00:06:05.580 There should not be money just sitting around waiting,

00:06:08.600 waiting, yes, to be put to work,

00:06:10.260 but not just like lazily hoarding it up.

00:06:12.760 When you get to this stage,

00:06:14.300 here's a few things that I think about

00:06:15.940 to make sure I know where to put my money.

00:06:17.760 First, I like to invest in what I know.

00:06:20.280 My new philosophy is,

00:06:21.800 unless I have an unfair advantage,

00:06:23.800 investing in something

00:06:24.880 because of my background experience,

00:06:26.540 I'm not gonna do it.

00:06:27.700 I either put my money into boring investments

00:06:29.880 like the SMP through an index fund with low fees,

00:06:32.440 or I invest in software and technology

00:06:34.840 because that's what I know.

00:06:36.020 I remember one of my mentors said to me,

00:06:37.340 he said, Dan, making money is easy,

00:06:38.980 keeping it is hard.

00:06:40.020 When you get a lot of money, take half,

00:06:41.880 put that in the don't lose it pile and the rest of it that's what you get to reinvest in yourself

00:06:46.980 in your business in growing things you know you want to hear a good story this is hilarious i'm

00:06:51.740 not an idiot but sometimes i can act like one guy comes to me and he's like hey i got this investment

00:06:56.840 where if you invest in medical supplies through this non-profit we can give you a triple return 0.88

00:07:02.420 receipt on your money to write off on your taxes and i was like i hate taxes tell me all about it

00:07:07.860 And he even brought me to a seminar and I went to the seminar and there's a hundred people in the

00:07:12.160 room and they're talking about this investment strategy and here's how it works. And then we

00:07:16.400 give you this. So we did it. Seven years later, I ended up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars

00:07:21.080 in back taxes because I listened to somebody explain something I couldn't explain. So make

00:07:25.880 sure that you can explain your investments in one simple sentence to somebody that doesn't know a

00:07:30.720 lot. If it's too complicated, stay away from it. The second is the investment has to always be true.

00:07:36.480 See, if you're always chasing fads,

00:07:38.400 you will get burned by the fads

00:07:39.900 because essentially all you're doing

00:07:41.180 is playing a lottery game.

00:07:42.940 I'm a software guy.

00:07:44.200 I'm an innovation guy.

00:07:45.560 I look for where the future is going.

00:07:47.720 But in my decisions to invest,

00:07:49.080 I'm still following the human part of it.

00:07:51.820 Not to sit in here going like,

00:07:53.500 oh, I think in the future,

00:07:54.640 humans won't talk to each other.

00:07:55.960 I think they'll just beam things through their brain.

00:07:58.280 That might happen.

00:07:59.220 But if I'm investing today,

00:08:00.940 I'm not investing at that level.

00:08:02.600 I'm investing in things that are aligned, right?

00:08:04.440 what will humans always need they'll always need housing they'll always need food they'll always

00:08:08.600 need experiences they'll always need clothing these are things that will always be true they

00:08:12.760 might change in the vehicle that it's delivered right it used to be delivered on a horse then a

00:08:17.880 car and now it's over the internet but humans will always buy stuff those are like the fundamentals

00:08:23.960 and then the third is play the long game if somebody came to me and said hey man i can make

00:08:28.120 you 10x on your money in the next six months i say cool no thanks they're like but don't you

00:08:32.600 you wanna know how to get rich?

00:08:33.920 Good news is I'm already rich 1.00

00:08:35.160 by not playing that fucking game. 1.00

00:08:36.780 I like to play long games. 1.00

00:08:38.580 If I'm gonna invest my money,

00:08:39.860 I want it to make me a lot of money

00:08:41.160 over a long period of time.

00:08:42.540 Why?

00:08:43.120 Because then I'm saving my time.

00:08:44.920 I know some people that actively manage their portfolio 0.99

00:08:47.900 that do worse than shitty managers 0.99

00:08:50.480 and they lie to themselves 0.99

00:08:52.080 and they're spending all their times,

00:08:53.760 refreshing, checking the stock, doing this.

00:08:55.820 I'm like, bro, why don't you go do the thing

00:08:57.920 that makes you the most money

00:08:58.900 and put your money in this thing

00:09:00.260 that averages 10, 12% a year

00:09:02.100 and has for a hundred years

00:09:03.500 and go stock more cash into the vehicle.

00:09:07.320 Don't play short-term games, especially with short-term people.

00:09:10.380 All right, stage one is where you got your money.

00:09:12.740 Stage two is where you bought back your time.

00:09:14.940 Stage three is where you put your money to work.

00:09:17.180 And stage four is where you build real wealth.

00:09:19.940 Stage four, own the thing.

00:09:22.080 One of my early mentors, when I moved to San Francisco,

00:09:25.160 this guy named Naval Ravikant, told me this and was very clear.

00:09:29.140 Wealth is created by owning things.

00:09:32.020 Wealth is not created by working.

00:09:34.260 You can't work enough hours to create the kind of wealth

00:09:37.300 that anybody in Silicon Valley was talking about.

00:09:39.820 You have to get there by owning equity.

00:09:42.420 Now you either own equity in the business that you built

00:09:44.560 or you own equity in other companies

00:09:46.500 like we talked about in the last stage.

00:09:48.500 The stock market may get you 10% a year

00:09:51.340 and it may even make you a millionaire,

00:09:53.500 but it's not gonna get you to the point

00:09:55.020 where you can do anything with anybody at any time.

00:09:57.780 That is rarefied error and that's what I'm talking about.

00:10:00.340 How many people do you know that invested in the stock market and still aren't rich,

00:10:04.100 aren't free, and many of them had to go back to work because the market went like this right when

00:10:07.940 they're about to retire? I know a lot of 70-year-old people that are still working because

00:10:12.460 they thought the market was going to solve the problem for them. You can become a millionaire

00:10:16.140 investing in the stock market. Cool. But if you want to get to a place where you have millions

00:10:21.860 of dollars being generated every month when you're not working, you have to own your own thing. You

00:10:27.540 You have to own equity and other people's things.

00:10:29.840 See, rich people don't rent wealth, they own it.

00:10:32.360 If you look at the Forbes list,

00:10:33.840 100% of them made that money

00:10:36.260 because they own the business they were in,

00:10:38.160 and then they took the cash

00:10:39.260 and they invested in other businesses that they also own.

00:10:42.300 Because equity is the only asset where the upside is uncapped.

00:10:46.160 Even in real estate, when people buy a building,

00:10:48.000 they're like, hey, I bought a 32 unit multifamily building.

00:10:50.500 Cool, guess what?

00:10:51.680 You can't make it do more.

00:10:52.920 Sure, you can do some value add.

00:10:54.300 Sure, you can get some rezoning.

00:10:55.420 Sure, you can try to squeeze as much as you can.

00:10:57.300 Sure, there's some tax benefit,

00:10:58.680 but at the end of the day,

00:10:59.860 a business that's growing without you there

00:11:02.800 can grow as big as it possibly can.

00:11:05.140 My dad doesn't understand why I still do what I do

00:11:08.220 because his perspective is that if you show up, you work.

00:11:11.240 He doesn't know how I work.

00:11:13.020 So every time I've sold a company, he thought,

00:11:15.140 okay, you're gonna retire.

00:11:16.220 Okay, you're gonna retire.

00:11:17.060 Okay, why are you still creating?

00:11:19.160 Because he doesn't understand what I just shared

00:11:20.960 with you guys is that I've used my money to invest in people

00:11:23.580 so the companies I'm involved in, I don't operate them.

00:11:26.060 I've taken my money to invest it in things I know

00:11:29.380 because I will bet on me every day, all day, 0.99

00:11:32.240 more than some fucking money manager in the market. 0.99

00:11:35.200 So yes, 50% of my money. 1.00

00:11:37.400 Don't fucking lose it. 0.99

00:11:38.400 I have a great team. 0.99

00:11:39.420 They battle-tested legal insurance and infrastructure

00:11:42.460 and all that stuff, tax, capital gains, awesome. 0.99

00:11:45.420 Don't fucking lose my money. 0.91

00:11:47.300 Over here, I invest in me. 0.99

00:11:49.500 I invest in the people.

00:11:50.660 I invest in my companies.

00:11:51.880 I invest in things that I own

00:11:53.720 where the equity continues to roll in

00:11:55.400 and grow a lot faster.

00:11:56.720 So if you're good at something

00:11:58.420 and you know how to do something,

00:12:00.900 not investing in that more,

00:12:03.700 align other people around it,

00:12:05.400 that ecosystem is a huge missed opportunity.

00:12:08.040 And that's why I've built Martell Ventures.

00:12:10.280 Essentially, it's a studio for me to build tools like Apex

00:12:14.160 that helps me build other tools within Martell Ventures

00:12:17.480 and the whole ecosystem of talent and people in my world,

00:12:21.740 I get a place to go create with them.

00:12:23.960 For me, that is my empire.

00:12:26.260 When I wrote in my book, Buy Back Your Time,

00:12:28.780 Build Your Empire, that's what I meant.

00:12:31.020 There's a world where you could create for yourself

00:12:34.160 that you almost feel guilty for how you interact

00:12:38.140 and work with the people,

00:12:39.120 because everybody's amazing, everybody's building something,

00:12:41.520 and from an equity point of view,

00:12:43.340 you have big pieces in each one of those.

00:12:45.400 If you haven't watched my video

00:12:46.720 on how I'm building a billion dollar company,

00:12:48.620 go check it out.

00:12:49.660 I show you the people, the process, the whole thing.

00:12:51.680 I'm building it in public.

00:12:52.820 The best investment I've ever made wasn't a stock.

00:12:55.560 It wasn't real estate.

00:12:56.880 It was building a company I could sell.

00:12:59.080 Even if I never wanted to sell it,

00:13:01.080 a company that I could sell is a great company to run.

00:13:03.940 And maybe your next stage is hiring that person

00:13:06.680 to help you run it so that you can go work on bigger things.

00:13:09.760 So don't just graduate from one stage

00:13:11.620 and get really good at making money

00:13:12.680 or the next stage and buy back your time

00:13:14.220 and then chilling out on a beach.

00:13:15.780 Stack all four.

00:13:16.980 Each stage feeds the next one.

00:13:19.500 And the higher you go, the bigger the swings.

00:13:23.660 Now, if you're still trying to make some money,

00:13:26.280 let me share this with you.

00:13:27.740 Your bank account is a lagging indicator of who you are,

00:13:31.640 what you believe you're capable of,

00:13:33.520 what you believe you're worth, right?

00:13:35.540 And you'll never get what you want, you get who you are.

00:13:38.360 And if you don't realize

00:13:39.440 that you gotta become the person first,

00:13:40.980 the person that believes it,

00:13:42.340 then the money will never catch up.

00:13:43.960 So understand, these are tactics and strategies,

00:13:46.880 but the best way to invest

00:13:48.700 is by looking at the person in the mirror.

00:13:50.600 So just leave me a comment below and let me know

00:13:52.820 what you needed to hear most what resonated with you most today that you can take with you to

00:13:57.060 elevate to the next stage and remember if you want my full executive assistant playbook that i use

00:14:01.300 with my own eas just dm me the word youtube ea on instagram and i'll send it right over now if

00:14:06.180 you've ever wondered why dumb people make more money than you click here and i'll see you on the

00:14:10.420 the other side. 0.99

Dan Martell - June 18, 2026

$100M Investor Explains： How to Invest in 2026

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