Dan Martell - January 05, 2024


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

Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Travis Kalanick Mark Kubik Toby Luca Richard Dan Martel Red Swoosh Shopify Helen
How can I have the best relationship？ What I Learned From 4 Billionaires

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

212.82

Word count

1,612

Sentence count

64

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about what I learned from spending over 100 hours with four billionaires and how they have shaped my life. 1. Mark Cuban 2. Richard Branson 3. Travis Kalanick 4. Bill Gates

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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. 0.76
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.