Dan Martell - How Billionaires Think About Business

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. 0.60

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. 0.97

00:12:11.960 He's like, holy crap, you have a lot of followers. 0.96

00:12:15.020 Instantly, I knew what that created. 0.97

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. 0.98

00:15:14.140 You decide to execute.

00:15:15.600 You decide to be the person. 0.99

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.

Dan Martell - June 12, 2023

How Billionaires Think About Business

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