Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - EP #33 The Entrepreneur Mindset w/ Dan Sullivan

Episode Date: March 16, 2023

In this episode, Dan and Peter discuss their own entrepreneurial journey, how to be a successful entrepreneur, and the process of building a business. You will learn about: 14:57 | Cash Flow Is Critical 31:56 | Follow Your Interests When Investing 51:07 | Entrepreneurship Is One Of The Highest Forms Of Creativity Dan Sullivan is the Founder & President of Strategic Coach Inc. He has over 40 years of experience as a highly regarded speaker, consultant, strategic planner, and coach to entrepreneurial individuals and groups. Learn more about Strategic Coach. _____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are,  please support this podcast by checking out our sponsor: Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter  _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now:  Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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And then share what you find in one central place. Visit Ancestry.ca and start discovering your family story today. I talk to people as if it's a career choice. It's not a career choice. It's a lifetime choice. And I said, you have to understand that if you've been at it for five or ten years, this is a life sentence. And a massive transform to purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am, this is what I'm going to do. This is the dent I'm going to make in the universe. Everybody, welcome to Moonshots and Mindsets. I am here with Dan Sullivan,

and we're going to be talking about what it takes to be an entrepreneur. What are the most important attributes of an entrepreneur? What does it take to succeed? How do you know if you're an entrepreneur? And what does it mean once you become an entrepreneur? What does it take to succeed? How do you know if you're an entrepreneur? And what does it mean once you become an entrepreneur? So stay tuned for an extraordinary conversation with the head of Strategic Coach, the founder, a dear friend, the man who inspired me to create Abundance360, my coach, Dan Sullivan. Everybody, Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to our next episode of Exponential Wisdom. I'm here with my dear friend, Dan Sullivan. And today we're gonna talk about something

that is near and dear to both of our hearts and it's the entrepreneurial journey. We haven't had a chance to talk about this, Dan, but like what makes an entrepreneur? What are the highs and lows, the pros, the cons of being an entrepreneur? What does it mean to be an entrepreneur? How do you succeed at it?

And how do you know if it's right for you? So this is a subject that both you and I exude from our pores and excited to jump in. Well, it's a very recent concept because if you go back and check the dictionary, the best definition was 1804. And that was a Frenchman by the name of John Baptiste Say and he said entrepreneurs are someone who take who takes resources from a lower level lower level of productivity to a higher level of productivity so entrepreneurs improve things they they take they take existing things they create new things, but they take resources. And he was asked, what kind of resource?

And he said, any kind of resource. And just a little note, and then I'll pass it on to you, whether you've heard other definitions. But he was asked, and there was no such thing as entrepreneur was a really new term as we use it today. And his whole belief was that it was the Industrial Revolution that really created a whole new class of individuals who could literally come from nowhere and become major economic players, unlike anything that had happened before. And so he was the, I think that technically the industrial revolution starts in 1776,

in March of 1776, and it's when James Watt introduced an improved steam engine that got a 25% energy return, which was phenomenal. It'd probably still be phenomenal in some centers, but it was that sudden where almost any individual who was ambitious, who was enterprising, who was ingenious, could now use a new technology to massively transform productivity in all existing industries, starting with basically the fabric industry was where it was first used. And I mean, as a real productive, it was used to get water out of coal mines in Great Britain. That was the main purpose. But it created two classes. It created the entrepreneurs who were the people who could come from nowhere

and create great enterprises and great fortunes. And it created the intellectual class. There was no class called intellectual class. And these are the people who hated entrepreneurs because they didn't deserve their status. They weren't educated. They weren't, you know, they didn't have aristocracy. They hadn't come up the normal way. So and I think it starts there. And then you see the 19th century was a phenomenal entrepreneurial decade. And of course, it's gotten exponentially larger. You know, I define an entrepreneur as someone who finds a juicy problem and solves it. That's my definition. And I think today more than ever, especially during this exponential age, the ability for a single individual to make a dent in the universe, to find a problem, solve a problem is greater than ever before.

Yeah, if you think about what it takes to become an entrepreneur, and I'm curious for those who are entrepreneurs, you know it, you thrive on it. I'm on my 26th or 27th company, some really good ones, some spectacular failures and everything in between. But I think if I were to rattle off the list of things, first of all, it requires passion or obsession with a subject because it's not easy. It's much easier to just get a job and do what you're told. So that's the first thing. I think it requires a reasonably high risk tolerance, because if you're really doing something on your own that

hasn't been done before, and you could lose it all, and you're not sure where your next paycheck is coming, which is some part of the early entrepreneurial journey, risk is there. So risk is there. And then I think there's a certain amount of self-confidence, I would say, having an understanding of the problem you want to solve and possibly not required an expertise you're bringing to the table because a true entrepreneur will not ask how, but who, right? As you famously said, they'll pull together a team. What are the other elements that you think of an entrepreneur needs to have? Well, I think the one that I've noticed, because I am fascinated in people's history. So whenever I meet an entrepreneur, I said, you know, when you think about the entrepreneurial path, which is definitely a fork in the road from, you know, from the way that most people think about the entrepreneurial path, which is definitely a fork in the road from, you know, from the way that most people think about their future, when did you notice it showing up? If you had to go back to the earliest age that you were doing things different than your peer group was

doing, you were doing something different than them. And you were, you wanted to have a direct relationship with the marketplace. OK, you didn't want a buffer of someone who guaranteed you income, didn't guarantee you security. You wanted to hit the marketplace. So do you remember? I mean, I do. I do. I remember I was in high school. I started a snow removal service in in uh between my house and my

friend's house a few miles away we went door to door and sold snow removal for 20 bucks a shot wow that was good because that would that would have been the late 70s yeah the problem was we had a record three foot snowfall on one day and destroyed the business because I couldn't take care of it. But, you know, that was my first effort. But my real entrepreneurial journey was my first year at MIT when I started a national international student space organization called Students with Exploration and Development of Space. And it was this bold, crazy vision that actually came true. And I was like, wow, this is cool. And there's like this element of surprise and delight

when you start a business and people, and it was a nonprofit, but, and I got it, I got hooked. I got addicted on the idea of an idea and creating something that people would participate how about you dan what was yours well i grew up on a farm so uh farming is a very risky entrepreneurial business and our farm failed and um my father recreated himself at age 60 as a landscaper and had his best he worked right till he was 82 and he had his best business here. And he left, you know, my mother, he died at 83, but he worked full time when he was 82.

And then he packed it in. He packed it in. He said, I can't do it anymore. And my feeling is that the day my father wasn't doing business, he didn't know who he was. And he just said, I'm out of here, you know. And that joy that you talk about, the excitement, and a lot of it is just the applause. I think applause really keeps people in the game. Teamwork, deadlines, you know, having to create new solutions. But you're doing it face to face with the marketplace. So, you know, you're really getting the best kind of research for the development of what you're doing. And it's check writers. Check writers are crucial. And you want to be paid directly, you don't want to go through a

third party, you don't want to have five levels of money coming down to you. And what I noticed just to finish this topic, that it shows up very early. I mean, the the instinct for it shows up it where it's chosen, I think there are people who are forced into it because of the failure of a large employer and that happens. But I noticed the ones who started early tend to create new things more than the people who are forced into it. And yeah, and yeah, and you had a very divided, not only postgraduate, but you had you were already added in undergraduate because you have your famous getting your medical degree.

Because it received your medical school received the least amount of your passion. Yes, very true. Yes, very true. I mean, when you're hooked as an entrepreneur, you love what you're doing and you're excited to jump out of bed in the morning and go and see what are add, of what don't people realize about entrepreneurship? Like, what are some of the surprises that if you haven't been an entrepreneur and you become an entrepreneur, what are the surprises that most people don't know about? No, go ahead. I have one I'm going to say. The surprise is you're going to spend more time with your co-workers and your co-founders than you will your family or

kids. The reality is starting a company is never easy. Most companies are, you know, overnight successes after 10 years of hard work. And so pick your co-founder and your employee team that you're working with carefully because they're going to be as close to you and sometimes closer than family. What about you, Dan? What else? Yeah, I think the biggest thing I often said if there's a God in the entrepreneurial heaven, the name of that God is cash flow. Yeah, yeah, the getting the cash flow routine because you're, you have to market and you have to create in other words, and it takes a while for you to get these two together that you can't just create and solve problems and then start marketing.

You have to do both of them at the same time. And I think that's the hardest thing. I see more bankruptcies. I see more failed businesses just because they didn't get cash flow down. I went bankrupt twice in the late 70s and early 80s. And it was strictly receivables that killed me you know so in 84 we made a decision that we me talking to myself that I would never have another receivable that what I was doing would get paid for

upfront and and people said well people just won't do that and I was doing would get paid for up front. And people said, well, people just won't do that. And I said, well, I'm just going to find the check writers who would be willing to do it. But there you really have to be thinking in terms of their goals. You have to really be thinking. And I think that's the next thing, that you have to understand that all of your money is in the aspirational future of your best clients.

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levels.link slash Peter. I'll give you two additional months of membership. And it's something that I think everyone should be doing. Eventually this stuff is going to be in your body, on your body, part of our future of medicine today. It's a product that I think I'm going to be using for the years ahead and hope you'll consider as well. You said something really important about cashflow being critical. You know, as an entrepreneur, you're going to make a decision early on on if you're going to use your own money and your own blood, sweat, and tear to get the company going. Are you planning at the end of this to own 100% of your own company? Or are you going to go out there and raise money from friends, families, angel investors, venture capitalists, and slowly dilute yourself from 100% ownership down to many times it

may be down to 20% or 10%. And I've done both. And some of the crazy moonshot ideas require massive amounts of outside capital. But the companies that I've started and owned myself, and I started the company based upon making the first sales and building it on cash flow, have been the most fulfilling. Do you want to speak to that, Dan? Well, I can remember when we started collaborating and A360 got created and it was at the first really big one we did a sample version and-

At SU's in Silicon Valley, right? Yeah, yeah. And that's when I became fully human in your eyes because... You brought check writers. I put butts in seats, you know. And I said, I don't think you... I think I was more of an abstraction or a theory before that. distraction or a theory before that. And I remember the day before we did that first event, which was incredibly successful and has been ever since, all the money was already in. You

hadn't put any, you hadn't put the presentation on. And I said, he said, boy, all the money, I haven't, I haven't actually presented anything yet. Everybody bought the tickets in advance. Everybody bought the tickets. And so I've just stuck with that one model for our own life. And we're up, you know, the real program, strategic coach program. I had 15 years of one-on-one.

And then we went to a workshop for him. And the reason was that Babs and I are Americans who live in Canada. And when we moved to Canada, they said that the tax system is voluntary. And I thought it meant optional. And I thought it meant optional. And then I had this true Canadian called me up with a distinctly Indian voice and said, Oh, Mr. Sullivan, you've been a very, very naughty boy. You do not want to own the government money because we'll tax you on the money you pay us for. And so the one-on-one

career was over. And I said, we're going to have to do a workshop to pay our taxes. And I say that because there's the story that entrepreneurs tell about how their business, you know, they were very systematic. They were very strategic. And then there's the actual story they were very systematic, they were very strategic. And then there's the actual story that actually got you started. And we were scared silly, because we didn't think we could coach a room full of people. And we had six people in the first group. And we weren't charging same as if I was charging for a whole year for a single individual, but it was 80% times six. So it was five times bigger. Yes. And I died and went to heaven on that day. I tell you, and I mean, when you get entrepreneurs, and they're

talking to each other, they love the failure stories. Yes. And about entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs are the only people who thrive on failure stories. Corporate execs, you can never get people to talk about that. You know, government bureaucrats, nobody talks about their failures because they're swimming among sharks and it's blood in the water. For sure. For sure. So other truisms about being an entrepreneur, if you step into that lifestyle, the first, you know, the result is

the buck stops with you and everybody looks to you. Something that we talked about in conversation before this podcast was the notion that, and it's a distinction people need to realize is entrepreneurs don't need to be the CEO of the company. Entrepreneurs hire CEOs many times. And there are different phases of a company, right? In the beginning, it is end of one. It's you. And you're responsible for everything.

And you'll bring in a team. Ultimately, you know, the thing I love is taking a role as founder and chairman or founder and executive chairman and hiring a great CEO to run all the day to day operations. The stuff that I don't love doing. I love the creative. I love the teaching. I love the strategy. I love all of that. You want to speak about the idea of entrepreneurs hiring CEOs? Yeah. Well, in my case, I married my CEO. Or she married me. I'm not quite sure how it went. But Babs, who's my lifetime partner in personal life and business life, she was really great at creating teams and to this day as a real gift for putting teams together okay and she just looked at me and she says you're just

doing so much one that you're no good at and and the other thing is some of the things that you're no good at you just don't do like filing with the government and, you know, paying attention to that. And so from probably the year before we actually started the program, she was just freeing me up. And there's one rule that she has in the company, and this goes back 34 years, and it's free up Dan. You free up Dan to what he's doing. And you don't have Dan like, we have business meetings to run the company. And if there's more than three per year,

I asked for an investigation. Why am I sitting? Why am I in more meetings, but I'm the way we look at it. It's like a live theater. If you think about the business of a live theater, there's the whole business of the theater, which is all the backstage that has to go in to fill up an audience. And I'm responsible for what goes on stage. I'm the front stage guy, and it's all my creativity that constitutes the front stage, but everything backstage I have no part of. So is a concept and coach. What I say there, there's no rule for this. There's no rule

for this. It's how you want to have it. I mean, you create you created your entrepreneurial business for freedom, you want to be freed up to just do what you're passionate about, what you started the podcast with. It's about passion, but I think it's passion for freedom. Yes. I mean, I think a true entrepreneur loves to do what they love to do. I would say if it's just about making money, you picked the wrong topic. Money comes as a result of doing what you love to do and what people need. But I was going to get to the idea that

you speak about in coach, which I love, which is unique ability. And as an entrepreneur, it's understanding what your unique ability is. It could be that you're a coder. It could be that you're a coach. It could be that you're a coach. It could be that you're a writer. It could be anything. You can build businesses around any unique abilities. And it's also knowing what you don't love doing and finding people, the who's, to partner with to do those things you don't love doing. Yeah, I mean, unique ability is really the concept, the cornerstone concept for what we've done. And my whole point is there that everybody's born, and I think this is factory installed. People are born with a particular passionate interest in some sort of activity. And I think we've talked before about the school system.

The school system, I think, tries to educate you out of a passion and wants you to be a generalist you know that you have to take everything and it's very very interesting and we've had about 22,000 entrepreneurs who have on average spent three years three years in the coaching program. And I can remember on one hand, the number of entrepreneurs in 34 years, well, actually, 48 years, because I started working with entrepreneurs in 1974. And I can't remember any of them saying that their formal education had really anything to do with their entrepreneurism. It's not that they're opposed to it or they're a thing. They just don't see it as a crucial factor to who they

are as an entrepreneur. Yeah, no, it's, if it does have something to do with you, it, you became an entrepreneur during school and then school became a distraction for you along the way. So I have like a, one of the speakers at abundance 360 this year, Alexander Wang, who's the CEO of scale AI, which is a multi-billion dollar company. He became the youngest self-made billionaire. And he tells the story that he was at MIT. And over the summer, he went to go work on AI. And he told his parents it was going to be just a summer thing.

And he never went back. That was the end of school. That was the end of school. I mean, I think it's so it's so happened so frequently, certainly during the microchip revolution. It happens so frequently that it's almost become a cliche. You know, I think it was, you know, she's in prison now. But, you know, Elizabeth Holmes, her big thing was that she followed, you know, she went to Stanford and, you know, got everything she needed. And I think not even a year.

And then she went out. But that had become sort of a model that Steve Jobs built. It was a badge of honor to drop out of school. Oh, yeah, yeah. You obviously didn't have what it took to. I mean, she had some other interesting issues with her whole presentation. issues with her whole presentation. But the thing was that she was following something that had been very, very dominant, especially in the 70s, I think it was. But, you know, I mean,

it's, it's an interesting thing, but it's almost like folklore, you know, well, if you go to university, then you have to drop out at a certain point or start your business and everything else. And you know, but the vast majority of people do get an education, but it just, they got an education because it was what you had to do, but it, it didn't figure prominently in the crucial center of why they're a successful entrepreneur. It wasn't like going to medical school to be a doctor or going to law school to become a lawyer. And, you know, I don't actually know whether getting an MBA is that, you know, there's one reason to go to get your business degree is to meet a lot of other people. It's like the network that you get. I would say network is the crucial crucial yeah but i i've written some blogs about the idea instead of going and

spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and getting your mba find a great network and plug into it or become an apprentice for someone you want to apprentice for let me mention how that worked for you i mean if you go back to your Harvard and your MIT days, I mean- I didn't- But it seems to me that you were making your network outside of both of them. Yeah, it was all outside. I built my space network through that first group I met. I started and founded Students for Exploration and Development Space. Jeff Bezos was the president of the Princeton chapter. And I met a lot of amazing people, but outside of school. And same thing for medical school.

I was checking the boxes and surviving in medical school to get that diploma and send it to my parents at the end. But my network was outside. Here's another attribute I think is important for entrepreneurs. And I'm curious your thoughts. I think to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to be a great communicator. You need to be effectively a salesman, a saleswoman. You need to be able to compel your idea and get people to get it, believe it, because you're in the beginning, you're selling yourself and you're selling your idea.

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great salesperson but from your experience because you you've really been heavily into the venture capital community for a lot of your different ventures. And what are they betting on? Are they betting on the idea or are they betting on the person? So I think about funding in phases, right? In the beginning, there's the friends and family round. When you have an idea and you're going out and pitching to get some capital and the friends and family around of any capitalization, if you're raising capital, they're only betting on you. And because you don't really have a track record yet, you really don't have a fundamental idea. And what you want is people putting small amounts of money on you and then following how you succeed. And if you are able to succeed and you keep that community of investors informed, then as they see you succeed

or fail and learn something and then succeed, they're going to be willing to put additional money in. And then there's the jockey or the horse, obviously, is the conversation. But at the end of the day, a great entrepreneur with a mediocre business will reinvent it into a great business. You know, a great business with a mediocre entrepreneur will fail. And so it needs to have that level of a great person. But people in the early days are investing in you and the promise of the idea. Well, it's the only thing real. Yeah, it's the only thing real.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Another question about that is really the failure, because failure has a totally different meaning in the entrepreneurial world than it does in all other worlds. I mean, I can't think of another world. Maybe even where, like in the entertainment industry, it's still the same model.

Babs and I are, I think you may know him or have met him, Jeff Madoff. Yes, I know him. And Jeff, at age 73, decided to write a Broadway play, a Broadway musical play. It started five years ago, and it opens in Chicago. It's gone through the first route to open outside of New York City. They had workshops in New York and then started in Philadelphia. And they had a three-week run. And it was spectacular. I mean, they got rave reviews

and sell-out audiences. And now they've gone. But at each level, who was doing the funding moved up a level. You started off with people you knew when you began and now it's big big money coming in and they have a 12-week run in Chicago right in the center of the it's called personality and it's1 1952 and so Babs Babs and I just invested because my first thought in life is I wanted to go into theater you know and I've got good skills I've got good theater skills but I don't have the passion you know I wouldn't stick with I wouldn't stick with it. And I said, Jeff, we'll pay for the coffee. We'll pay for the coffee. And we put in, we're on our third round. We put in, not insignificant, but certainly not the top investor.

But now you're talking about millions have to come in. And it's coming in from foundations. It's coming in from people who are strangers. There's also a different world today as an entrepreneur where capital, you know, capital goes through cycles of being restrictive and hard to get. And capital becomes open and available. know in the late dot-com revolution you know there was like i remember a friend of mine describing silicon valley as rivers of gold flowing all you do is put your ladle and pick it up and then all of a sudden it shut off instantly um and so it's i i when i think about you know guidance to an entrepreneur it's okay to have a big, passionate moonshot where you want to impact, you know, millions or billions of people. But I think it's really important to have a business

plan that delivers dollar one to a customer in the beginning, like you say, check writers, right? Because you learn a lot when you actually have to generate revenue at the start versus versus you know theory how do you think about that what's your advice to entrepreneurs who are getting started now well i think the faster you can uh one i mean dollar one for the customer for the investor but dollar one for yourself so babs and i put in a policy right from the beginning that 15% of gross was ours, right off the top every year. And we've done that since, well, since we started. Okay. And we've, you know, I mean, we started off with two employees and now we have 130.

We were just in Toronto and now we're in three countries and I have 16 other coaches and we've just had that constant model. The other thing, and this is a trick of borders, is that we're Americans and Canadians for the most part don't know there's another country south of Canada. There's this big space on the map. And being an American in Toronto is like being a shark at a beach party.

I mean, there's an aggressiveness to the American marketplace. I mean, you can freeze to death up here, and I think it has something to do up there. But we've arranged it so that 80% of our revenue is always in American dollars, but repatriated to Toronto. I mean, there's a certain amount of money that we have to keep in our American company in Chicago, you know, but it just satisfies the requirements to have a company and same thing in the UK, but it comes back, but we pay almost all of our expenses with Canadian dollars. And for 34 years, it's been $1.26 difference. So we're getting 26 cents on every dollar. So one of the things I'm always saying that is that every entrepreneur works out unique formulas,

you know, that that's a unique formula. And people say, Well, why do you live in Canada, it's so expensive up there. And there's some hedges, you know, there's, there's some offsets, it's also easier to put a team together in Canada than the United States, because Canadians are not nearly as mobile as people in the States. There's about 20 big centers that you could find opportunity. And Toronto, it's Toronto. Canada, it's basically Toronto or maybe Calgary. It means people stick around for the job for a little bit longer. Yeah. So we have 70 who have been more than 10 years.

We have 25 that are more than 20 years. And the payoff for that, if they're good people and you're operating according to unique ability and unique ability teamwork, there's an enormous institutional wisdom that grows up in the company. Hey, everybody. This is Peter. A quick break from the episode. Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week, I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity,

age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to dmandus.com backslash blog and learn more. Now back to the episode. Dan, when you're hearing the pitch from a young entrepreneur, whether they're joining Coach or they're at Abundance 360 or you just meet them someplace, are there elements that you say, well, this guy or gal is going to be a great entrepreneur or this person's dreaming.

Is there a way that elements that make you put them in one or the other bucket? The pitch is totally how the check writers benefit from this new idea, that there's problems that the customer has that are not being solved or there's problems that the customer has that are not being solved, or there's better ways to solve the dangers they have, the opportunities they have, the strengths they have. And you've got a unique take on how they're immediately going to experience benefit.

And if they don't have a handle on who the customer is, then they're making up fancy you know they're they're making up fancy futures yeah that's a real important point i would i would say it a slightly different way if you've got someone who's got a neat technology that's searching for a problem uh that's a failure mode over and over again versus yeah and you've seen that i mean i think probably the you know the microchip i i i think this all starts when Gordon Moore put together a prediction line in 1965. It wasn't even called microchips. I think 73 is when the term hit on.

And it was very, very clear that this was a historic game changer that there was going to be something and um i think there was a lot of uh people throwing solutions at non-problems because people were throwing money at uh new solutions but i suspect if you go back to any other um you know since the industrial revolution that was the case you people, there are a lot of people have money that they don't need, and they just want to throw it at somebody, you know, or at some at some problem to learn about, if you go back, you know, into late 1800s, and early 1900s, when electricity first became viable, the entrepreneur du jour

or the invention du jour was taking a mechanical thing and adding electricity to it. Oh, yeah. You know, the electric dishwasher. In 1910, there were 3,000 car companies in the United States. Crazy. And 40% of them were electric cars. Yeah, that's even crazier and and now of course we're in the midst of the generative ai revolution where everybody's throwing generative

ai at their favorite their favorite problem it's uh i mean it's it's new but it's class there's a classical classic pattern on what happens during the early days people are betting on the bet they're not actually betting on the you know know, in some ways they're not even betting on the thing. They just want to see, you know, I mean, there was the recent example, not naming names here of you know, the, in the crypto, crypto world and the guy got 220 million and he was in shorts. And somebody said, I love the founder. I love the founder. 220, I just want to give him 220 million. I could not imagine who that could possibly be. So I want to maybe wrap with a rapid fire session on this podcast of advice to someone who wants to be an entrepreneur

or thinks they might want to be an entrepreneur. It's like, what do you need to think about? I'm going to throw out the first one. Choose your co-founders wisely. You're going to live with them, spend time with them, make sure they bring a different unique ability than you do. And that you talk about, you're talking all the time and sharing your ideas and your challenges and you have respect for their person. What's another piece of advice? Yeah, I would say the other thing is make your first hire an artist. Really? That's unusual. Tell me about that. Yeah, because they can take your ideas and put them into graphic form. And can it be Dolly 2 or a stable diffusion? Well, I mean, my rule is I always keep a smart

human between me and the technology. Okay. And so, but my first hire was an artist. He was 16 years old and he had he was into computers, you know, so this was 1987, 1988. And I promised him a Mac 2 if he came aboard. The Mac 2, no, it was the little Mac to start with, you know, the little box like Mac. Yeah, the Mac 2. It was the little Mac to start with, the little box like Mac. When the Mac 2 came in, he'd get the... He was a dream. But I have artistic skills.

I was a layout artist in the advertising world, so I knew the basics. He said, how come we always use Helvetica? I said, because everybody uses Helvetica. I know, but we should be different. I said, there's a reason why everybody uses Helvetica. I hired an artist because we had fantastic slides in those days. You could tell your whole story. Dan, you're dating yourself way back where?

Late 1980s. I was old in 1980s i mean i'm i'm timeless now yes you are you are you're only halfway done with life at uh at least halfway at 78. uh uh the next oh that was my first and i people said well why not a secretary and i said of all, you can hire them by the hour. But a topic for your business your company that you're is you're passionate about you're obsessed by and it's not a passing fancy it's a passion for or a passion against no well it could be a passion for or passion against right it could be it could be a problem that you refuse to let go on any further. I'm going to solve this no matter what it takes, or I'm going to create this because what's another piece of advice? Mine is talented, successful, ambitious entrepreneurs who don't have any lifestyle

goals that they're heading towards and don't have any status goals they just have growth goals okay uh i i i buy that um uh understand your unique ability um and uh and do that which you're great at and you love doing and then bring in partners or employees who do the other stuff for you and support you yeah oh another one you mentioned we mentioned earlier uh generate dollars on day one if you can get to check writers get a fast turnaround on your first um so i have a 90-day turnaround on anything new that i create it's all it's in the profit after 90 days. And mind you, I'm dealing with ideas. It's not with stuff, so I can do that. But I remember when A360 got created and I said, you're going to have an enormous amount of money before the first day of this.

you're going to have an enormous amount of money before the first day of this and uh and we did we did and you were able to grow your team from that and uh and you know for for sure I mean the equivalent here is build a min a minimally viable product an MVP you can prototype it you can start selling it you can start taking out Google AdWords and testing it you can throw selling it you can start taking out google adwords and testing it you can throw up a shopify page and see if anybody wants it you can go to uh you know a variety of platforms and and get hey yeah today get customer feedback get customer feedback yeah and there's only um the only person who can tell you it's a good idea is somebody who would write a check for it. Nobody else's, your friends, your family, especially not your staff, you're paying them. They don't think any new idea is that good.

Well, it's interesting, right? On the flip side, sometimes your staff will tell you it is a good idea when it isn't. I remember I was interviewing Elon Musk on a Goldman Sachs stage, and he said something I'll never forget. He said, your friends tell you how great everything is. Your best friends tell you what sucks. So make sure you've got people. Yeah, but check writers will just tell you that they wouldn't pay for it the way it is. But if you've made some adjustments, and that's great market research, you know, and I think you mentioned Elon, and I think Elon

is the, from my perspective, you know, which is not close, like yours is, he is of all the big tech people. I think he's the truest entrepreneur of them all. Yeah, for sure. Se sure sees a problem jumps on it well not only that but he continually takes big risks okay yes and the other thing he's got a very interesting which i totally agree with is fail as fast as you can and as often as you can and pretty soon you're going to get to something that nobody else could possibly have created yeah it's amazing i mean he uh he's got a different kind of nervous system i think he does he's also one of the most extraordinarily intelligent individuals i've ever met in my life uh who has a first principle

thinking mindset yeah he read and almost memorized whole encyclopedias when he was a kid and you know no I mean uh his understanding of geopolitics and uh everything I mean when Elon makes a big decisions like a 10 million dollar factory in Mexico 10 billion right yeah 10 billion 10 million yeah you can't round off with 10 million 10 million. Yeah, you can't round off with 10 million. But $10 billion factory, he's sensing something in the wind. And the thing is that, you know, that there's a shift on and where, you know, North America, the United States, Canada and Mexico have just tested out, you know, supply chains from all over the world that aren't dependable. And he said, one of the things everybody's decided, it can be in Mexico, but it has to be on the continent. You can do it by truck, you can do it by train, you can do, you know, and everything. But the other thing, the pay scales in Mexico are about one sixth the pay scales in the

United States. At almost every level, the US is six times the pay scale. And you have to have that with high technology. You got to have this spectrum of pay scales for it. I just think, I mean, he bought Twitter and everybody says, you know, he's just fooling around. It's like buying somebody buying a baseball team. And I said, no, no, no, no. I said, I mean, it's really dangerous to second guess Elon Musk. Yeah, no, my guess is that when he takes it public again, it'll be at least 5x what he bought it for with a number of revenue streams.

Okay, my last thought on entrepreneurship here to close out our podcast here, buddy, is it is one of the highest forms of artistic creativity. You're creating something that can change the world. artistic creativity. You're creating something that can change the world. If you've got a bent for it, if you're interested in it, I could not commend it more than a way of life. It is extraordinary. I love being an entrepreneur and I love hanging out with entrepreneurs. And I think they're the most important forces of making the world a better place. Yeah the i talk to people as if it's a career choice it's not a career choice it's a lifetime choice okay and i said you have to understand that if you've been at it for five or ten years this is a life sentence there's no going back they won't have you back and what are you going to show them for the 10 years?

Who did you work for? Who withheld your tax at source and everything like that? You become unemployable after a year or two. I would say that that's the actual decision that takes the greatest commitment. This is for life. Certainly mine. I mean, the day I quit will be the day after I die. Yes. For sure.

All right, buddy. As always, a pleasure to spend time with you. That was a good riff. That was fun. All right. See you soon. See you next time. Okay.

Thank you, Peter. was that was fun all right see you see you soon see you next time okay thank you peter