Dan Martell - January 05, 2024


I Spent 100+ Hours with 4 Billionaires (here’s what I learned)


Episode Stats

Length

7 minutes

Words per Minute

212.824

Word Count

1,612

Sentence Count

64

Misogynist Sentences

1


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 I spent over a hundred hours with four billionaires and here's what I learned.
00:00:04.560 The first one is Mark Kubik. I first met Mark, long story, but I decided to cold email a bunch
00:00:10.060 of billionaires while I was in my twenties. And I was asking these questions like, you know,
00:00:13.260 should you focus on your network, what you know, or your grit? Obviously most of them didn't reply,
00:00:16.980 but Mark actually replied back then. And he said, doing all three while everybody's trying to pick
00:00:21.960 one. And I remember just how like, that's crazy. A billionaire replied to me. And it wasn't until
00:00:26.140 a decade later i was building a company called clarity and we were on a site called angel list
00:00:31.340 and nibal the founder pushed it to all of the members and mark was obviously on there we started
00:00:37.260 an email exchange he asked questions about the product and the vision and the roadmap and the
00:00:42.220 team and all these things and after about 13 or 14 email replies he said i'm in for a quarter
00:00:47.340 million bucks so a few things i want to share number one he loves the art of the deal if you've
00:00:52.140 seen him on shark tank you can tell that he loves the entrepreneurial journey the spirit he also
00:00:57.740 absolutely loves the entrepreneurial game the strategy the tactics the different ways you can
00:01:04.300 enter a market how can you position the product 100 of the time when i sent an investor update
00:01:09.500 email he always replied and then finally you have to have the drive you got to want to grow you have
00:01:15.900 to have a desire you have to be engaged in the game of business and have that level of drive
00:01:21.340 that's what mark taught me the second billionaire is richard branson this is such a crazy story i
00:01:25.980 want you to understand i grew up in a small town in eastern canada the fact that i got an
00:01:30.540 opportunity to spend a week with him at his home in switzerland still blows my mind a few years
00:01:35.260 prior i helped this guy out who had a startup and he appreciated so much that he ended up raising
00:01:40.300 from richard and richard was going on vacation to his place in switzerland and asked him to invite
00:01:45.660 people that he thought richard might find interesting and i got the email and honestly
00:01:49.740 i was like looking at this like is this an april fool's joke like is this real and it wasn't until
00:01:53.660 i was sitting in the living room and richard walked out that my brain allowed me to believe
00:01:58.780 oh my gosh this is happening tim ferris was there brian johnson from the biohacker blueprint
00:02:03.900 the co-founder of stripe so many incredible entrepreneurs and then me dan martel i was like
00:02:10.460 okay i better show up ask great questions and just be generally helpful to everybody there
00:02:15.180 three core things. One was watching him interact with his executive assistant, Helen. I've talked
00:02:20.580 about this several times. I wrote about him in my book, Buy Back Your Time, but there was just
00:02:24.180 something magical to watch him work through her to move all of the businesses forward. And then
00:02:30.620 once that meeting in the morning was done, he had the rest of his day to pursue his passions.
00:02:34.940 The other thing that was interesting about Richard is watching how curious he was to learn
00:02:39.520 from other people. In many ways, that's kind of how he lives his life. If you've seen Necker Island
00:02:44.700 and many of his other properties,
00:02:46.400 they're all boutique hotels.
00:02:47.860 And that's probably because he likes to have people around
00:02:51.100 that he can learn from.
00:02:52.300 The most powerful thing he ever said to me,
00:02:54.440 and we were having dinner one night and I asked him,
00:02:56.180 I said, hey, when it comes to business,
00:02:57.400 what's the skill, what's the strategy,
00:02:59.120 what's the one thing people should focus on?
00:03:01.240 And he replied, brand.
00:03:02.900 And I'll be honest with you,
00:03:03.980 at the time, I didn't really understand it.
00:03:06.980 You know, I'd build companies and exit them.
00:03:08.740 Like, why would I invest in a brand?
00:03:10.340 What's crazy is I wish I would have really focused on it
00:03:12.880 because what I've discovered today
00:03:14.340 is your reputation is your brand.
00:03:17.320 My brand is Dan Martel.
00:03:19.120 Had I done it sooner,
00:03:20.540 I would have been able to do 10 or 100 times more
00:03:23.260 than what I currently do today.
00:03:24.640 So understanding that was such a huge unlock,
00:03:27.440 took me years to figure it out,
00:03:28.880 and I learned it from Richard.
00:03:30.060 The third is a guy named Travis Kalnick,
00:03:32.480 and he was the founder and CEO of Uber.
00:03:35.620 Now, the way I met Travis is kind of interesting
00:03:37.360 because Travis had just sold his company,
00:03:40.160 Red Swoosh, to Akamai, this old CDN company,
00:03:43.340 and there was an event called the TechCrunch 50.
00:03:45.760 My friend, Steve Poland,
00:03:47.880 was coming to San Francisco for the event.
00:03:50.260 And I guess Travis posted on Twitter back in the day,
00:03:52.940 if anybody needed a place to sleep,
00:03:54.620 let me know, you can crash on my jam pad.
00:03:56.360 And Steve was one of those people.
00:03:57.840 And it wasn't until I was raising money for Flowtown
00:04:00.220 that I reached back out to him
00:04:01.880 because he was an investor
00:04:02.700 and he invited us to the jam pad.
00:04:04.420 And it was in that moment that I realized who Travis was.
00:04:07.880 There are some serious lessons that I learned
00:04:10.260 by spending a lot of time with Travis
00:04:12.080 that I wanna share with you
00:04:13.120 that I know is the reason why Uber became what it became.
00:04:16.240 One is when you decide to build a business,
00:04:18.760 go laser focus.
00:04:20.380 I mean, it was pretty much like a light switch.
00:04:22.780 The moment that Travis took over CEOing of Uber,
00:04:27.400 every relationship, every conversation,
00:04:30.420 any other extracurricular activity,
00:04:32.220 it all went to zero.
00:04:33.340 I mean, he was an advisor to our company,
00:04:34.880 but it went from almost daily, weekly communication
00:04:37.360 to we can't get a hold of Travis.
00:04:40.100 He dealt with the New York City mafia.
00:04:42.420 He dealt with the politicians.
00:04:44.860 I mean, whether you know or agree
00:04:46.580 with some of the tactics they use,
00:04:48.260 the thing that I learned from Travis
00:04:49.660 is that if you want to change the world,
00:04:52.500 you have to be so frigging focused on one singular outcome
00:04:56.860 that you have to be willing to sacrifice everything else.
00:05:00.000 And some people are just not willing to do that.
00:05:01.560 Remember I ran into him at an event at that point,
00:05:03.960 probably four years after the start date of Uber,
00:05:06.260 they had hired over 5,000 people.
00:05:09.420 And I remember going like, dude, how do you even do that?
00:05:12.320 And he gave me some great advice.
00:05:13.640 He said, well, the truth is,
00:05:14.540 is I only have five direct reports.
00:05:16.220 And I work through those five direct reports
00:05:18.080 to execute that.
00:05:19.420 I just have to ask myself,
00:05:20.600 do I have management bandwidth?
00:05:21.980 And then my job is to make sure I have the right people.
00:05:24.260 If I don't, I got to coach them up.
00:05:25.420 And to the degree that I learned to work through them,
00:05:27.500 I can do things like hire 5,000 people.
00:05:29.880 At one point, he was facing 50 years in jail.
00:05:33.400 He was essentially violating all the taxi laws
00:05:35.880 or whatever transportation laws,
00:05:37.380 but he kept pushing.
00:05:38.860 He asked about it.
00:05:39.460 He said, I'm going to raise so much money
00:05:41.280 that by the time I have to go to court,
00:05:43.480 I'll just hire the best lawyers to get me out of it
00:05:45.680 and even change the laws
00:05:47.400 to make sure that he doesn't go to jail.
00:05:49.220 That's how creative and intense he was.
00:05:52.280 The fourth billionaire is Toby Luca.
00:05:54.600 He's the founder of Shopify,
00:05:56.320 an incredible story of growth and determination
00:05:59.300 competing against one of the biggest companies
00:06:01.340 in the world, Amazon.
00:06:02.200 I met Toby online because he had built a product
00:06:06.100 called Active Merchant.
00:06:07.380 We all use that.
00:06:08.600 We kind of ran into each other through different circles.
00:06:10.640 And at one point, he actually invited me up to Ottawa to speak at one of their Fresh Founders events.
00:06:16.620 I got to see Shopify go from small 25, 35 people to, you know, thousands of employees in their HQ today.
00:06:25.080 This is the one thing that I got from Toby that every entrepreneur needs to hear that can transform their whole business.
00:06:32.200 He applied software development principles to people development within a company.
00:06:37.080 In big companies on the tech side, they have a thing called DevOps.
00:06:40.640 a department that's dedicated to improving the efficiency of the engineering team, the developers.
00:06:46.320 And what he did is he created engines of growth in not only the engineering side, which is world
00:06:52.160 class, but also in the HR side and the marketing side and the customer success side and all these
00:06:57.920 different departments within the business. I mean, they were one of the first companies to hire
00:07:02.080 executive coaches for their leadership team, because he just felt like if everybody's hiring
00:07:07.200 the same people the company that has the ability to support and unlock the creative and execution
00:07:13.360 of their team is going to win that was such a huge idea that i've applied in every one of my
00:07:18.840 companies why i keep telling people we build the people the people build the business and if you
00:07:23.340 apply that to your business you're going to unlock your talent that's what i learned from 100 hours
00:07:28.500 with four billionaires now if you want to learn how ceos schedule their day click the video and
00:07:33.540 I'll see you on the other side.