Dan Martell - June 12, 2023


How Billionaires Think About Business


Episode Stats

Length

17 minutes

Words per Minute

197.31339

Word Count

3,491

Sentence Count

188


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.640 Five life-changing lessons that my mentors taught me
00:00:03.960 that you won't believe.
00:00:05.200 You know, one of my first mentors,
00:00:06.760 this guy named Ken Nickerson,
00:00:08.560 and just an amazing human being.
00:00:10.120 And I remember I was deciding,
00:00:11.160 should I move to San Francisco, to Silicon Valley,
00:00:13.600 to the home of the technology people,
00:00:16.240 the place that eventually made me a multimillionaire?
00:00:19.400 And in that fear, I almost didn't make the decision,
00:00:22.840 but the advice he gave me, which is beautiful,
00:00:24.880 which led me to discovering my other mentors
00:00:27.640 that changed everything for me.
00:00:29.360 advice was simple. Get around the smartest people that you meet. So as soon as you meet somebody
00:00:34.320 without being creepy, try to spend time with them. And it sounds crazy, but literally when I went down
00:00:40.580 to the valley, I ended up getting a desk in this co-working space and meeting some really cool
00:00:44.660 entrepreneurs. I would offer to help out the marketing, with the PR, whatever you need,
00:00:49.920 recruiting engineers. It was just what I did. But I share that with you because mentors have the
00:00:55.660 ability to fundamentally shift your perspective, your paradigm. So I want to share with you what
00:01:00.280 my five technology mentors taught me and how it's impacted my life.
00:01:08.600 My first mentor is a guy named Naval Ravikant. You might've seen him on Joe Rogan. He's written
00:01:13.640 books. I mean, he's a prolific tweeter and he shared with me these things called the four
00:01:18.260 master skills. Now those are my words. I call them the four master skills because when I think of
00:01:22.820 and a lot of people know me as the author
00:01:24.920 of Buy Back Your Time.
00:01:26.620 Naval set the foundation to really think about
00:01:29.580 how do you scale, but do it in the fastest way possible
00:01:33.500 by looking for leverage.
00:01:34.780 And he calls them the four C's of leverage, okay?
00:01:38.000 And the concept is if time's a constant
00:01:40.700 and we wanna increase our output,
00:01:43.200 then we have to focus on these four master skills
00:01:45.800 to become world-class entrepreneurs.
00:01:47.300 The first one is code.
00:01:49.200 Think about software, automation.
00:01:51.180 today would be AI, incredibly powerful.
00:01:54.580 That concept of just, and for me as a technologist,
00:01:57.360 just being better at software and understanding
00:01:59.740 the capabilities and the APIs, it's called,
00:02:02.340 changed the game for me.
00:02:03.300 The second one was capital.
00:02:04.900 Understanding how do you leverage other people's money,
00:02:08.040 OPM, a powerful thing, to fund your dreams, to create more.
00:02:12.360 It takes money sometimes to make more money.
00:02:14.820 So understanding how to raise venture capital.
00:02:17.620 And AngelLess is what a lot of people know Naval for,
00:02:20.160 angel.co, I was one of the first Canadian angel investors
00:02:24.000 to use that platform.
00:02:25.580 It's why I was named one of the top angel investors
00:02:27.620 in Canada is because of the deal flow
00:02:29.280 that came from that network.
00:02:30.960 So not only did I understand how capital was used
00:02:33.480 for leverage, but I also got access to people,
00:02:35.560 which is a powerful concept.
00:02:37.320 The third C is content.
00:02:39.220 Think Joe Rogan, think Oprah, think pretty much any person,
00:02:43.540 including yours truly, that you're aware of,
00:02:46.680 it's because they've produced content.
00:02:48.400 But the cool part is, is that if you watch this
00:02:50.560 or a bazillion people watch it,
00:02:52.700 it takes zero extra of my time.
00:02:55.260 Isn't that a cool concept?
00:02:56.620 I can have a million people read my book
00:02:58.720 or only 10 people read it,
00:02:59.900 but it doesn't take anything more.
00:03:01.860 It's like a standard operating procedure in your business.
00:03:04.400 That is a concept of content, a podcast, a training video.
00:03:08.520 And to understand how to create content,
00:03:11.460 tell stories, communicate, change, transformation,
00:03:15.000 whatever it is, content is a huge form of leverage.
00:03:18.180 And then the fourth C is collaboration.
00:03:21.000 It's people, it's understanding how do I hire people
00:03:25.140 to buy back my time, to get more leverage,
00:03:27.220 to reinvest it in things that obviously light me up,
00:03:30.280 that make our company more money.
00:03:32.240 That lesson, not only did I learn from Naval
00:03:35.100 and allowed me to build two venture-backed companies
00:03:37.360 that I've exited, it also became the basis
00:03:40.180 and the foundation for the book
00:03:42.060 that's made me a Wall Street Journal bestseller,
00:03:43.800 Buy Back Your Time.
00:03:44.640 So I mean, to say he had a little impact on my life
00:03:47.440 would be an understatement.
00:03:48.520 He's had an incredible, even from afar,
00:03:51.320 watching how he thinks, how he executed,
00:03:53.760 listening to him negotiate, talk with other entrepreneurs.
00:03:56.800 It's been incredibly invaluable
00:03:58.560 and that's why I think mentors are fundamental
00:04:01.020 to any entrepreneur's growth.
00:04:02.660 Number two is Dharmesh Shah.
00:04:04.440 Now Dharmesh is the CTO and co-founder of HubSpot.
00:04:07.280 You may have heard the product.
00:04:08.280 They're a publicly traded company,
00:04:10.140 multi-billion dollar company.
00:04:11.740 I think Dharmesh today is a billionaire.
00:04:14.220 But I met him probably in 2010, about 13 years ago,
00:04:19.220 in Toronto, and we were both speaking at this event.
00:04:21.840 And you can just tell, once you meet Dharmesh,
00:04:25.320 his brain thinks completely different.
00:04:27.180 He's just such what I call a blue flame thinker.
00:04:30.060 He's very thoughtful, he slows down,
00:04:32.400 and when he speaks, it's intentional.
00:04:34.840 Every word matters.
00:04:36.020 He doesn't just give you an off-the-cuff answer,
00:04:38.640 he's actually thought through it,
00:04:40.820 debated the different options, and given to you.
00:04:42.720 And one day he came to our office in San Francisco
00:04:45.620 and I was building my company Flowtown
00:04:47.300 and he was talking to us about strategy, right?
00:04:49.700 And I had the privilege of like spending time
00:04:51.380 with him at different events.
00:04:52.460 And, you know, he talked to me about how he thought
00:04:54.220 about the future of marketing and the product side.
00:04:57.280 But for me, it was this one conversation
00:04:59.760 where we're talking about their strategy
00:05:01.840 to get to the next level of growth at HubSpot.
00:05:03.600 This was before they were ever public.
00:05:05.540 And they had just bought this company
00:05:07.340 and they were making a bet.
00:05:09.300 and the bet required them to take a pause
00:05:13.580 to essentially build new features, new innovation.
00:05:15.940 The whole idea of the concept I would say,
00:05:18.060 my words, not his, was we had to slow down to go fast.
00:05:22.360 Because it doesn't matter if you can build
00:05:24.520 a marketing and sales engine,
00:05:26.000 if the product doesn't deliver on the promise
00:05:28.840 that your marketing team is making to the customer,
00:05:32.140 then you'll just have a high churn.
00:05:34.300 And he knew this.
00:05:35.460 And I'll tell you, the amount of courage I thought
00:05:37.760 at the time for them to decide to slow down
00:05:40.580 when they were growing like at a crazy clip
00:05:42.920 to say, no, we have to get the product right.
00:05:44.940 We need to re-engineer it, redesign it
00:05:47.100 so that we can deliver not only our current customers' needs
00:05:50.600 but on the future where they saw this was going
00:05:53.180 and they didn't have the product at that point.
00:05:55.160 And it was an 18-month pause, give or take a couple months
00:05:58.720 to essentially rewrite, redesign, replatform the whole thing
00:06:01.600 to allow them to continue to march.
00:06:02.980 That lesson has showed up in my life so many times
00:06:06.760 Because if there's problems with the business, it's product.
00:06:09.640 If there's challenges with how the customer's responding,
00:06:13.240 it's a product thing.
00:06:14.240 It's sure marketing and sales are involved,
00:06:16.440 but at the end of the day,
00:06:17.260 once the customer comes into your world,
00:06:19.260 agency or software or services, it doesn't really matter.
00:06:23.120 You have to ask yourself,
00:06:24.160 how does a customer feel about your company?
00:06:26.880 And how do they perceive the value they're receiving?
00:06:29.300 And if you're falling short,
00:06:30.320 you're never gonna work your way out of that.
00:06:32.160 And Dharmesh taught me that at the highest level.
00:06:34.720 Number three is Mark Cuban.
00:06:36.040 See, you might know him as the shark on Shark Tank,
00:06:38.660 but I know him as the investor in my company, Clarity.
00:06:41.280 And what's bananas is, you know,
00:06:43.520 I'd known Mark for a long time.
00:06:45.120 I knew of him.
00:06:46.080 I'm not gonna misplace like we're not buddies or anything.
00:06:49.040 When I was 17, I cold emailed him and he replied, okay?
00:06:53.500 So I've been a fan of his ethos and his business strategies
00:06:57.860 and just the way he shows up as a person.
00:06:59.380 He's willing to be out there and bold and bet on himself,
00:07:03.700 which I absolutely love.
00:07:05.280 Well, when we were building Clarity,
00:07:07.160 we were raising a round of funding,
00:07:09.140 and we'd launch on AngelList, you know, Naval's company,
00:07:12.400 and somehow Mark signed up for the product, okay?
00:07:15.880 And I found out later what happened,
00:07:17.200 but essentially, as soon as he signed up,
00:07:18.720 somebody on my team's like,
00:07:19.560 hey, I think Mark Cuban just signed up for a product.
00:07:21.520 I was like, what?
00:07:22.360 And I checked the account and looked to see if is it,
00:07:24.660 like, somebody impersonating him,
00:07:26.680 but you had to connect your Facebook account,
00:07:28.240 we checked it out, and it was literally his account.
00:07:30.320 So I emailed him, hey, Mark,
00:07:31.480 saw you sign up for a product, curious what you think,
00:07:34.240 And that kicked off an email exchange, okay?
00:07:36.940 13 emails later, Mark says, I'm in.
00:07:40.980 He CCs his lawyer and he writes a check
00:07:42.980 for about quarter million dollars.
00:07:44.720 Now, here's what I've learned,
00:07:46.720 because Mark was an investor
00:07:47.900 and I got to interact with him through email,
00:07:50.920 is he's designed his life where he understands
00:07:54.180 the most valuable asset he has is his time.
00:07:56.680 And he refuses.
00:07:58.900 I literally cannot see many circumstance where he's ever,
00:08:02.180 I don't think he's ever sat on a board,
00:08:04.340 maybe of his own companies where he owns 100%,
00:08:06.900 but he's literally the first person to always respond back.
00:08:10.300 Every email is sent out to investor updates, boom,
00:08:12.720 he always replied back.
00:08:13.600 And that taught me the idea of velocity, right?
00:08:16.480 Communication velocity.
00:08:17.940 Oftentimes, as a CEO,
00:08:20.620 our job is just routing to the right people.
00:08:23.300 And too many people that create bottlenecks
00:08:26.120 in their business, the reason why it's called a bottleneck
00:08:27.980 is because it's at the top.
00:08:29.100 Who's at the top?
00:08:30.040 You're at the top.
00:08:31.120 You're the bottleneck.
00:08:32.560 So Mark's very good at saying,
00:08:34.440 I literally, when we went to announce the deal a year later,
00:08:37.880 okay, and Mark had been on the investor updates,
00:08:39.880 I was like, hey Mark, is it okay?
00:08:41.320 I emailed, is it okay if I add you
00:08:42.880 to the press release and use your name?
00:08:45.800 And his reply was like, as long as the deal closed,
00:08:48.460 then yeah, for sure.
00:08:49.400 As in like, he didn't even really remember
00:08:51.400 if the lawyer finalized the paperwork
00:08:53.160 to get his involvement.
00:08:54.140 That's how many deals he does.
00:08:56.000 But again, he's routing the communication.
00:08:58.680 He's increasing his velocity.
00:09:00.660 That principle in my world,
00:09:02.740 and you'll also read about it in this great book
00:09:04.600 called The Billion Dollar Coach, right?
00:09:06.940 Where Eric Schmidt talks about as a CEO,
00:09:09.040 my job is to route.
00:09:10.340 It's not to be the bottleneck.
00:09:11.680 It's not to say, hey, let's get on a call.
00:09:13.100 It's not to say, send me that information.
00:09:15.040 It's talk to my team.
00:09:17.580 And that lesson from Mark Cuban
00:09:19.220 is one of the most powerful that I've seen him
00:09:21.600 execute flawlessly and continues
00:09:23.560 just the amount of stuff he does,
00:09:25.340 but he knows where he adds value and where he doesn't.
00:09:27.240 He pulls people in to get things moving forward
00:09:29.140 and it's beautiful.
00:09:30.340 Number four is Richard Branson.
00:09:31.900 And this one is something that it took me years
00:09:35.260 to truly understand the significance of what he said.
00:09:39.800 About eight years ago, I get invited.
00:09:41.460 I don't even know how I got on the invite list,
00:09:43.040 but I got to spend a week at his house in Switzerland.
00:09:45.820 And I mean, we're talking the who's who at the time.
00:09:48.760 We had Tim Ferriss, Brian Johnson.
00:09:51.480 You guys all know him as like the biohacker guy
00:09:53.560 where he's trying to live, I don't know,
00:09:55.200 he's trying to live to 100 but look like he's 20, right?
00:09:58.020 He just sold his company Braintree.
00:09:59.820 He's on, I think he was my roommate on this trip, right?
00:10:02.480 Cause they had like these two beds in these rooms.
00:10:05.480 And we got to spend a week with Richard Branson,
00:10:07.580 watching how he operated and interacted with his staff.
00:10:10.860 And he is the billionaire other billionaires
00:10:12.740 wanna be like, okay?
00:10:13.980 And it turns out that his life is that cool.
00:10:16.560 Like literally he wakes up every day and it's like,
00:10:19.720 I wanna go skiing, I wanna go work on this crazy idea
00:10:23.160 to send things into space, whatever he wants.
00:10:25.880 And what I learned because I get to have dinner with him
00:10:28.700 and lunch and hang out on the ski hill,
00:10:30.940 I remember asking him once,
00:10:31.940 I said, what's the one thing?
00:10:33.840 You know, Rich, I know a lot of people ask,
00:10:35.700 what's the one thing?
00:10:37.080 But for you, if you had to think about business,
00:10:38.840 what's the one thing you would focus on?
00:10:40.840 And he didn't even skip a beat
00:10:42.440 and he immediately answered and he said, brand.
00:10:45.320 He said, brand, it's the most valuable thing.
00:10:48.080 Your brand precedes you.
00:10:49.460 Your brand is something that you crave value.
00:10:51.320 Now, I'm filling in the blanks
00:10:52.860 because he didn't share this stuff.
00:10:54.760 I want you to understand why it's so valuable.
00:10:57.020 Your brand, your business's brand is a valuable asset.
00:11:00.940 There's a reason why, you may not know this,
00:11:02.520 Donald Trump gets paid tens of millions of dollars
00:11:05.420 every year to put his name on buildings.
00:11:08.260 You see his name on a lot of these high rises
00:11:10.500 in different cities, those are licensing deals.
00:11:13.060 He gets paid tens of millions of dollars per year
00:11:16.160 to put his logo on the top of these buildings, why?
00:11:19.380 Because his brand stands for luxury,
00:11:21.480 it stands for opulence, it stands for the most valuable,
00:11:26.400 like the best, right?
00:11:27.640 Whatever you think of his brand, it doesn't matter.
00:11:29.140 Virgin, same thing.
00:11:31.020 And all of the Virgin group of companies,
00:11:32.860 the most of them are licensing deals of the brand.
00:11:36.080 See, Richard, I don't know if he got lucky
00:11:38.280 or it's just always in his DNA and he understood this,
00:11:40.420 but he just kept building.
00:11:41.920 A lot of the PR stunts is to create the brand.
00:11:44.660 So I wanna ask you, what does your brand stand for?
00:11:47.200 The brand of you, because that's why people are like,
00:11:48.960 why do you put out all this content?
00:11:50.940 Why are you doing social media?
00:11:52.100 Why are you investing with videographers and stuff?
00:11:54.960 At the end of the day, it is way easier
00:11:57.620 for me to do anything in this world
00:11:59.700 if I have something that's out there ahead of me.
00:12:02.600 If I have an opportunity for people to go to my LinkedIn,
00:12:05.500 to go to my Twitter, to go to my Instagram,
00:12:07.320 to see it happen this morning.
00:12:08.720 Some guy's like, oh, you're on Instagram?
00:12:10.300 What's your handle?
00:12:11.140 I gave it to him.
00:12:11.960 He's like, holy crap, you have a lot of followers.
00:12:15.020 Instantly, I knew what that created.
00:12:16.780 Credibility, trust, intrigue.
00:12:19.780 What do you do?
00:12:21.020 How did you do that?
00:12:22.840 Why would people follow you?
00:12:24.520 That's your opportunity, but it's true for your business.
00:12:27.180 It's true for the way you show up.
00:12:29.400 And that was what I learned from Richard Branson.
00:12:31.240 I underestimated, I didn't really get it
00:12:33.760 to the degree that I do today
00:12:35.440 for literally the last eight years.
00:12:37.520 And now, everybody talks about it.
00:12:40.220 From Alex Hermozzi to Gary Vaynerchuk to you name it,
00:12:43.480 they understand the power of a brand
00:12:45.640 is one of the most valuable assets that you can create
00:12:48.140 that will unlock every other dream, goals, and desires.
00:12:51.360 Number five is Victor Martell, my dad,
00:12:54.120 and the advice he gave me, I absolutely ignored it,
00:12:58.940 didn't really trust it.
00:13:00.460 I mean, maybe it's because it was my dad,
00:13:02.440 but his, and it seemed kind of like obvious,
00:13:05.080 but I didn't get this component,
00:13:06.740 which was you have to find the thing
00:13:08.560 you're passionate about, right?
00:13:09.960 And growing up, if you don't know my story,
00:13:11.680 I got in a little bit of trouble, okay?
00:13:13.800 With the law, doing bad things, making bad decisions.
00:13:17.240 And for a long time, in my teenage years,
00:13:19.340 my dad used to just beg, he's like,
00:13:20.980 if you could just find something you're passionate about
00:13:22.980 It's not illegal.
00:13:23.820 I think you do okay with your life.
00:13:26.100 Turned out he was kind of right in a major way.
00:13:28.480 You know, I look around at the life I live today,
00:13:30.660 knowing where we came from, it's kind of magical.
00:13:33.480 Like it kind of makes me have to stop
00:13:36.280 and really think like, why me and what happened?
00:13:39.280 And what my dad taught me, and I didn't realize this,
00:13:41.920 by being a kid in the car while he was on these old,
00:13:45.820 like car phones, you should have seen it as like a brick.
00:13:47.820 It was plugged in, hard plugged in,
00:13:50.300 like cables to the battery of the car, not in the lighter.
00:13:54.060 I'm talking like you brought it to the car dealership
00:13:56.720 and they built it into the car and he would do deals
00:13:59.940 and he would talk with customers.
00:14:01.460 And I watched at the time,
00:14:03.200 not understanding what I was learning,
00:14:05.300 how to be passionate about your work.
00:14:06.800 My dad would like do a deal and then hang up
00:14:09.000 and then be like, okay, here's what I did.
00:14:10.760 You know, this guy needed this and this guy had this
00:14:13.020 and I put this together and I told him this
00:14:14.760 and then now we've got this deal
00:14:15.920 and he's gonna get what he needs.
00:14:16.900 He's gonna get what he needs.
00:14:17.940 We got what we need.
00:14:18.780 we hit our numbers for the quarter.
00:14:20.300 I was like, wow, I kind of don't understand it,
00:14:23.440 but again, it didn't matter.
00:14:24.540 I got my MBA watching my dad be passionate about his work.
00:14:28.680 To this day, the Martell language,
00:14:31.140 we don't watch sports, we're crazy.
00:14:32.720 We literally, I'm Canadian, I don't watch hockey,
00:14:35.480 I don't watch football, I don't watch,
00:14:37.040 I probably lost half of you guys right now.
00:14:38.440 I don't watch those things
00:14:39.700 because our sport has always been business.
00:14:43.160 And the reason why is because for me,
00:14:45.920 I'm an Olympic athlete in that game.
00:14:48.540 That's the game that I talk with my dad on.
00:14:50.660 It's the game that me and my brothers talk about.
00:14:52.960 It's just our passion.
00:14:54.940 And man, and Steve Jobs said it best,
00:14:57.380 the reason why you wanna be passionate
00:14:59.140 is not because it's easier and it pushes you forward.
00:15:01.580 It's because when things get so hard
00:15:04.840 and every other person out there,
00:15:06.620 any rational person would easily give up,
00:15:09.880 you decide not.
00:15:11.200 You decide to give forward.
00:15:12.700 You decide to keep going.
00:15:14.140 You decide to execute.
00:15:15.600 You decide to be the person.
00:15:17.080 and every other person's looking at you like you're crazy,
00:15:19.540 but it's the crazy ones that create the future
00:15:22.220 because it's creating opportunities from nothing.
00:15:24.680 If there was an obvious opportunity,
00:15:27.040 then most people would have already done it,
00:15:28.620 but if you've got the desire and the vision
00:15:31.100 to create something, that was the passion was required,
00:15:33.960 and my dad, Victor Martell, taught me that,
00:15:36.460 showed me that, and supported me
00:15:38.400 as I built my companies in my life,
00:15:40.320 and it was one of the biggest gifts he could ever give me.
00:15:42.320 Now, those are only five mentors that shaped my life
00:15:45.080 and introduced me to new concepts or just by their behavior
00:15:49.120 impacted the way that I wanted to operate.
00:15:51.920 The man I wanted to become, but there's hundreds of others.
00:15:55.820 I am built by community.
00:15:57.220 I'm built by conversations.
00:15:58.680 I'm built by being around the right people
00:16:00.940 in the right rooms.
00:16:01.780 Now here's my question for you.
00:16:04.060 Are you going to upgrade the rooms
00:16:05.940 that you're spending time in?
00:16:07.440 Are you going to look for another level mentor
00:16:09.940 who's going to challenge your beliefs
00:16:11.640 and your view around how the world is
00:16:13.740 so that you can do more?
00:16:15.440 Are you gonna stop being the smartest person on your street
00:16:18.740 and go find a new street?
00:16:21.080 Because I know some of you guys know in your heart
00:16:23.860 that you can do more, but you're playing smaller,
00:16:26.740 playing safe, because as soon as you put 100%
00:16:29.480 of yourself out there and you fail, that really hurts.
00:16:32.800 And what I wanna tell you is that the right mentor,
00:16:36.040 my mentors in my life today,
00:16:37.900 refuse to allow me to play small.
00:16:39.560 They refuse to allow me to use small language.
00:16:41.580 They refuse to allow me to set goals and have dreams
00:16:44.640 that aren't at the world game-changing level.
00:16:46.940 And I appreciate for them.
00:16:48.340 It's scary, but man, I'm grateful for them.
00:16:51.420 So I wanna challenge you,
00:16:52.740 not only to build a bigger business and a bigger life,
00:16:55.740 but go find the next room, go find the next street,
00:16:59.020 go find the next city that you're gonna find your mentors in
00:17:02.080 that's gonna propel your life forward.
00:17:03.720 With that, I'll see you next Monday.
00:17:11.580 Thank you.