TrueLife - Lloyed Lobo - 13 Rules to Build Iconic Brands

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/Get Lloyed’s new book, 'From Grassroots To Greatness: 13 Rules to Build Iconic Brands with Community Led Growth' at FromGrassrootstoGreatness.com (Top New Release on Amazon)https://www.lloyedlobo.com/http://linkedin.com/in/lloyedlobohttps://www.tractionconf.io/podcasthttp://boast.aiTwitter:9lloyedloboLloyed LoboCofounded and helped bootstrap Boast.Al to 8 figures ARR. Boast is a fintech platform that provides businesses with R&D and Innovation funding.Cofounded and helped bootstrap Traction to more than 100,000 entrepreneurs and innovators. Traction is a global community that brings leaders behind the fastest-growing companies such as Shopify, Atlassian, Twilio, MailChimp, Github, intercom, Calendly, Zapier, and more to share learnings on how to build and scale companies via podcasts, meetups, retreats, and conferences.Prior to Boast.Al and Traction, I ran product and go-to-market for a number of early stage startups.I've been involved in the US and Canadian startup ecosystem for more than 15 years as an entrepreneur, community builder, and angel investor.I'm a software engineer by education, community builder by passion.I love taking things from 0 to 1.My purpose in life is to bring people together to create a big impact One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Fearist through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Cool. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. It's Friday. It looks like we made it. So stoked to be here today.

I have an incredible guest, an incredible show. You know, one of my favorite movies is the movie Gladiator, and it tells like this hero's journey of like, you know, the emperor who became a slave, who became an emperor. It's just this beautiful story. And in some ways, my guest today, Lloyd Lobo, he has a similar story. It's the story of a refugee who became an entrepreneur,

an entrepreneur who realized their dreams and found the pinnacle of success. And in this journey from refugee to entrepreneur, pinnacle of success. He found and understood the idea that more than money comes the positive, more than money is the powerful idea that community and people have a bigger impact than more money. Lloyd Lobo, the author of the new book, bestseller in a few categories already, grassroots to greatness, 13 rules to build iconic brands with community and growth. Lloyd, thanks for being here today, man. How are you?

I am stoked, my man. Like, you bring this energy that I haven't seen in any other host. And so, you know, there's a saying that you bring out the energy you give out, right? And so I'm going to have to keep up with you. And this is going to be a lot of fun. And it's Friday night here. So I'm in Dubai currently. And so it's 9 o'clock.

So I'm going to have to match your energy and it's going to be a lot of fun. Man, first off, thank you for those kind words. I care, man. Like I, when I saw what you're doing, when I saw this path that you're on that you've taken, it blows my mind. And I think it's so inspiring for people to understand that. And beyond that, Lloyd, I think that you represent the intersection between technology, finance, and community. So I was wondering, like, what, as someone who's on the cusp of this, like, what is happening between this intersection between technology, finance, and community?

Where are we going from here, man? You know, the way I look at it, right? If you look at every piece of technology, yesterday's innovation is always tomorrow's commodity. Right. Every, look at every piece of innovation from yesterday becomes an option today and becomes a commodity tomorrow. And if you look at like with generative AI and chat GPT, it's commoditizing like content and a lot of things, right? And so in the sea of sameness and in the sea of commodities, how you, you're going to stand out. The only thing that matters is people. Success lies not in technology

or products, but it's people. People build technologies, people build companies, people create categories, people change worlds. And that's what I think about. And as I was writing this book, and I looked at hundreds of communities, hundreds of companies, religions, I studied everything. And I realized, from Christ to CrossFit, right? From Christianity and Christ to CrossFit, there's four very common elements. It might surprise you, it might shock you, but it is from Christ to CrossFit,

every obscure idea that went to become mainstream, that went to become iconic, that went to become cult-like, has four common things. you have people listening to you, you have an audience, people listen to you, they buy your products, you have an audience. You have something to say to people who are interested, you have an audience. You bring that audience together to interact with one another. You have a community.

Now the kicker is when you bring that community together to create impact, it turns into a movement. And then when that movement comes together around rituals and undying beliefs in its purpose, it becomes a cult or a religion. So now let that sink in. Think about that for a second. Christ to CrossFit. That's the journey of obscure to iconic. Man, I do have to let that sink in for a minute. That is deep from the ideas, from the sea of sameness to the...

It is fascinating to think about the ideas that that makes. What? Maybe we can unpack that a little bit more. Like, if we go through the idea of impact, like, what does it mean impact? Like, when you bring these people together, is the impact the ritual? Or maybe you can unpack what, like, what are the rituals that go into that? So let's start with an audience, right? So right now you have a podcast, okay?

Yeah. And you're building this audience, you're posting content on YouTube, you're posting content on TikTok, on Insta, LinkedIn, wherever you are. People are listening. They're starting to develop this audience. And I don't want to go religious mode, but that's a lot of religious leaders did that. They started preaching and people started listening. Now, when people started interacting with one another around the purpose of this community,

around this idea, it starts. becoming a community, right? When people start coming together. So you start hosting events, you're in Hawaii. You start bringing people together around like pizza and drinks or tacos or whatever, right? And people start coming together to discuss this purpose of true life, right? What is the purpose of true life? You start coming together.

Now, you've got this congregation of people who are coming together on a cadence. And let's say you pick a purpose that transcends the prophet. or your product transcends your podcast. What is your forever? What is the purpose? So a purpose is something that exists beyond your existence. What is the forever, right? And your vision is what the world will be as a function of your existence.

And your mission is how you get there and your values or how you behave. So what is the greater purpose of true life, right? And so when your community comes together to create impact, to drive that purpose, it becomes a movement. Example, everyone has heard of Mr. Beast, iconic, right? He is one of the biggest influencers on the planet. Now, he started creating content several years ago, I think like maybe seven, eight years ago. And he never, ever, ever stopped, right?

He was just creating content and content. He started to develop an audience. And then he started to make money, and he didn't take this money and buy a mansion or Ferraris or a private jet. He started using that money to bring people together and then eventually create impact. Cure a thousand blind people. Raise 20 million to plant 20 million trees. Raise 30 million to pull out 30 million pounds of plastic from the ocean.

That's how you become a movement when you go beyond the purpose of your product or your service into the greater purpose or the aspiration. I truly believe there's no good or bad people. There's shades of gray, right? Everyone is well-intentioned and want to do good. The unfortunate thing is life happens. We're in this Western dream, American dream. And this is life.

When I was in the Bay Area, this was life. If you have kids particularly, you can't afford to live in the city because it's very expensive. So you live in the suburbs. Now, because you live in the suburbs, you're always waking up a few hours earlier to get your kids ready, pack them up, drop them to school, get into work early. Now, you don't want to get to work just in time because society has told you be the first one to get in and be the last one to leave. So you're going a half hour early anyway. You're leaving late.

You're running back home, taking your kids to classes. Your whole week has gone chasing up and down, commute. You have to prep for an hour commute at least, at least an hour, if not two hours, both ways. Weekend rolls around, you have just enough energy to have a nice meal, okay? Your pay is entirely consumed by federal tax, state tax, property tax, if you have car payments, that, and you're left with very little. So you have just enough energy to have a nice dinner. Sundays, I still have Sunday PTSD, because Sunday is planning. for the next week, right?

And you're spending that day in like Costco, if you belong to a religious congregation, maybe you're going to church or the temple or whatever. So that whole day is like you're thinking about the next week after, like whatever you've done, right? And then you have just enough money left to take one or two week vacation a year. And that's why they give you two weeks vacation a year minimum, right?

Unlike other countries. And what happens? you're doing this day and day out because you've been told that you've got to work, you got to work, you got to work, you got to run around, you got to run around. And then you retire at 65, and I don't know what the average life expectancy today is, but let's say it's somewhere in the 70s. So you basically have 10, 12 years to live. And those 10, 12 years consuming the Western diet is not functional, right? Like it's highly processed food, high carbohydrate, um, advertising. has normalized garbage in your bodies.

And so you consume this stuff and you're not functional at 65, right? And they want you out of the system. But then you're in the hospital system. And that is the hamster wheel. And you've got to think about if I'm in this, no matter how much impact I need to create or want to create or how much social good I want to do, I can't. I don't have the time.

So how do you bring people, how do you turn your community into a movement, is you provide a greater purpose and give people something small to do? And as a function of them contributing something small, they feel like they're contributing they're part of the bigger purpose, they're driving the bigger purpose.

An example, and I don't know if this is an urban legend, but back in the day when President Kennedy was walking the halls of NASA at midnight he sees the janitor swooping the floor. And he asked him, what are you doing up this late? And the janitor says, sir, I'm putting a man on the moon.

Now let's think about that. Great leaders cascade purpose. Great cultures, great communities, cascade purpose to the point where even the person with the smallest role feels their part of creating the biggest impact. They don't feel like they're a cog in the wheel, right? And that's how

you go from a community to a movement. You provide a purpose that's beyond the profits or the products, and you help people align with that and give them the mechanisms and the autonomy to participate and drive that. That's like how Mr. Beast raised $30 million to take out 30 million pounds of plastic from the ocean. That's how a company like Harley Davidson, who almost went bankrupt in the 80s because the Japanese manufacturers were coming in and commoditizing, right? This is a perfect example. If you build a community, you won't become a commodity.

Japanese manufacturers commoditized electronics and people are buying these Japanese motorbikes, right? The Honda CBRs and all of that stuff. And Harley Davidson's leadership stood up and said, we're going to restructure the company on the ethos of community. Most people think community is a marketing strategy. They hire a marketing manager and they dump it inside marketing. Community is not a marketing strategy. It's a company strategy.

It's a business strategy. So when you see what Harley Davidson did, it had oversight from the president, of the company, employees management were encouraged to go out there and create rider clubs. Employees became writers, writers became employees. They built the company around the ethos of community and the camaraderie of bikers. That community came together to create the Save Harley movement, which saved this company from bankruptcy.

But then over time, they have now created rallies to donate to cancer. and autism and so many other causes that transcends the purpose and transcends the profits of Harley. If you look at it today, Harley is a cult. It's an iconic brand. You can recognize a Harley fan as a function of what they're wearing, right? You can't, there's very few brands where you recognize that that person is a fan.

Look at Harley. Just by what they're wearing, you know that's a Harley fan. And that's what a big purpose does. When people come together around a purpose that drives impact and it's beyond your product, they want to keep showing up. They want to do good because everyone wants to play a small part. If I can ride a Harley on the weekend for two, three hours with my brotherhood and create impact, I feel like, you know what?

I'm donating to breast cancer. I may not be leading that effort by my part of it. It's always we did it, right? It's a team. If you want to go far, you go together. Yeah, right. And, and, and, and, you know, it's, it's never about, we've glorified the rock stars. But in reality, when, when time passes, you always say, it's this team that won.

It's the people, right? It's the country. You don't necessarily, yes, one or two people get glorified. But on the plaques, you see, you see the name of the team. and the people. And so that's the way to look at it is how do you create impact beyond your product? Like fall in love with your people,

your community, your tribe, and make them successful beyond your product or service. And then over time, when your core actions of your community turn into rituals, get elevated into rituals, and they go from being extrinsic drivers to being intrinsic drivers,

then you start becoming, becoming a cult-like phenomenal. Right? Like, so for example, maybe somebody needs to invite you every weekend to show up for the Harley ride. But eventually it becomes such a habit that you don't need an external trigger.

You internally wake up and be like, tomorrow I got to be there. That's it. Like, nobody needs to remind me, I'm there. I'm the first one to show up. So when I was a kid, eight or nine-year-old,

I was in Kuwait, and the Gulf War had hit. And, you know, I had this disgusting habit where I would just procrastinate for everything. And I study for a math exam and I go and end up being a geography exam. Okay. And I knew I was going to fail. I'm like, it's over. So summer rolls around maybe a month before back to school.

My mom wakes me up and says, hey, I don't think you can go to school anymore. So my first reaction is, yes, you're never going to find out. I failed fourth grade. But then, but when reality started to sink in, I started to see. worry on my parents' faces, and I'm like, okay, something's up. This is a time where there were no phones, there was no internet. So I go down my building with my dad, and I see a number of concerned faces. And they understood the reality of the situation, the magnitude, because the security in Kuwait had lapsed. There was looting, we could hear bombings. And people very quickly

stopped belaboring on the problem, right? We live in a society today where negative news perpetuated, and people belabor more on the problem than the solution. But there I saw in this building a group of people, they stopped belaboring on the problem almost immediately. And they were like, listen, I'm going to guard the building from 8 to 12. And somebody else is like, fine, I'm going to come watch it from 12 to 4. And somebody else is like, I'm going to organize food supplies. And I'm going to organize ration.

And then somebody else is like, hey, we got family members who've been displaced from homes. So the other person is like, okay, I have a friend who works in the school and there's no school. so we're going to coordinate. And every building became a sub-community. And the word of mouth from building to building to building spread as these sub-communities came together as a grassroots movement to evacuate the people to safety. They coordinated with embassies. They coordinated with the countries and evacuate the people to safety.

And we were taken in these refugee buses from Kuwait, had to go through Baghdad, stay in refugee camps, go to Jordan, stay in refugee. G-cams. And as I was going on this bus from Kuwait to Baghdad to Jordan on the highway of death, and you can Google a picture of highway of death. You'll see buses were bombed, things were burnt. And I was a kid, right? I was maybe nine or something. And as I looked around the bus, I should have seen like people crying and distressed. But as I look at my dad and my uncles and people in that bus, they were smiling. They were singing. They were playing the guitar. And I realized that day that it's neither the destination nor the journey, but the companions that matter the most.

You could be on a crappy journey on the way to hell, but great companions make it memorable. Or you could be sipping champagne and eating caviar in Paris in a chateau, and you might feel suffocated. Now, prior to that, my experience with community was that my mom grew up in the slums of Mumbai in India. and my dad and her for better prospects moved to Kuwait. It was just better money and safer. And so every summer would go visit my grandparents and they lived in this little shack-like thing. I don't even know what it was made of,

but maybe some sort of raw cement and aluminum roof. And they had 10 kids. And there was barely place for the kids, but every time I'd see some random stranger passed by and they'd give them shelter because Mumbai is like the New York City of India. And I'd ask like, why do you have this stranger staying here? And I'd hear some version of the only way to create abundance in life

is to help others without expecting anything in turn. Now, growing up as a kid, every time I went to Mumbai for that summer were my fondest memories. Now, think about it. No video games, no consoles, no entertainment. I'm in the slum with a whole bunch of kids. It's raining and puddles are turning into ponds and we're swimming in the ponds. Probably every six, seven homes have a, have a, and a home is the wrong word, but regardless,

as home is where people are. There was a TV and we'd like collaboratively, I guess community or a community-led TV watching, right? Everyone would get together and watch TV and the people who couldn't get in the house would watch it from the window outside. And there was a barn, a cow barn. and we'd get our milk from there. And I used to love animals. And every time I'd go and spend time there with the cows, and one day I dragged this cough home.

And the guy who owned the barn, let me have it. But my grandparents are like, where are you going to keep them? Right? Where are you going to keep this calf? So that was the camaraderie around the people. Now, as you look, right, some 40 years later or 30 years later, 40 years later One of my grandparents' kids

are in that slum, of course. They're all well off. And I feel the karma that we gathered was derived directly from that experience of giving and giving and giving and giving, right? And they would always say, the people who you give to

may not give you back, but it's going to come around. And then what happened was after the Gulf War, number of years later, end up moving to Canada. I moved to Canada and finish engineering, very quickly moved to the United States. Although I finished engineering, I took a job in sales. And there's a reason behind that I was inspired by a few people in business, family members, that I asked, what is the best skill I could learn if I wanted to be a business person like you? And they said, selling.

sales is everything, right? And so I only started applying to sales jobs everywhere. And what ended up happening was nobody would give me a sales job. He was like, awkward engineer. Why would we give you a job in sales? So I begged my way, literally begged and fought my way into getting a job cold calling, making peanuts for a small company. And my parents who are now from like Indian heritage, they're ashamed.

They're like, our son is making cold calls when our friends, kids are at Microsoft. often that, right? But fast forward today, that was the skill that served me the most. Because if you, think about it, we talked about audience, community, movement, religion. What is the rails that this whole thing is based on? It's communication, right? Without communication, you have nothing. You have an empty room. If you can't communicate, you can't get an audience, let alone build a community or a movement or a cult. So communication is the rails for everything. And as an awkward engineer, I felt like I really needed that skill. Now, there's two ways to learn a skill.

In my view, this is the best way to jump right into it. If you want to learn a skill, put yourself in a position where you have to consistently perform that skill. What other job requires you to consistently communicate? polish your messaging, pivot on the fly, negotiate, and adapt. No other job. Right. But when you go into entrepreneurship, everything from convincing your spouse that you're not going to bring any money home.

Right? To convincing early employees that, hey, man, I can't afford to pay you that much, to convincing customers that I have nothing but believe in my vision that I'll drive you the outcome you're looking for, to convincing the media, to convincing investors is all selling. It's all communication. Communication is the rails behind audiences, communities, movements called communication is the rails of connection. If you cannot communicate, you cannot connect with people.

That's the reality. And so I said, I could do any number of things. I can go for public speaking classes. and I can learn to pitch and I can, you know, do all of these things. But nothing will put me in the position of practicing to communicate better than learning to sell. And what's the first step then? Cold call. And I still remember my first cold call.

I practiced for four hours and I finally get to the connect on the phone and I hang up right away. But it didn't stop, right? And the same thing with writing. A lot of people say, I hate writing. I can't write. But if you can't do something and you never do it, then you'll never be able to do it. So take the first step, do it, keep doing it, doing it, it's volume, volume, volume. And then like a chopping block, right?

Like you chisel like a sculpture. You start heavy and then you refine it and you refine it. And so that's what you do. And so I pretty sure I had a reading or learning disability when I was a kid because I hated reading. I've never, I've very rarely read a book cover to cover. It's mostly audiobooks. And I would procrastinate to the end to read and write. And so writing this book was a big challenge for me and in itself because I had to listen,

I had to read, I had to do a whole bunch of things over and over again. And it took me two years, right? For most people who would probably take maybe a lot less. And so that was the key learning there is. Everything great is on the other side of risk and pain. Pain is the precondition for growth. First off, that is amazing, man. Thank you for that.

There's a lot of wisdom in there. And I'm hopeful, let me ask you this. Do you think with what you're doing and people like Mr. Bees that we are on the cusp of changing the way in which the world does business? Because it seems to me that individuals are able to build iconic. brands. But the large multinational, their strategy is just to like, let's squash these guys and just buy them out.

Do you see the tide turning where we're looking to community, where we're looking to relationships as the new currency versus the old system? Is there something new being born here? I don't think there's something new being born because if you, if you look at it, right, in 2023, marketing is taking a blood bath.

CPA is like, you know, CPMs are higher. Facebook, TikTok, right? Everything is costing twice as much almost. And generative AI has created a sea of sameness. If you just copy pasting from chat GBT, now people can tell that it's from chat GBT.

Consumers are fed up, right? Of being spammed, of being ad bombed, of being pop-up, of providing personal data to access crappy white papers. They're saying no to the old marketing. If you look at it, you're a consumer, and business consumers are no different than non-business consumers. When you consume content, are you consuming content from people or from brands?

I try to consume from people. We all consume content from people. And that is the reality coming out of COVID is people want to be connected with people, not with faceless brands. And so Mr. Beast being the icon of the creator economy, but the reality is one of the fastest growing segments in this creator economy is the micro-influencers,

people with 10 to 100,000 followers. People are listening to them, right? powered by tooling like the platforms like TikTok and Instagram, YouTube shorts, the consumption of short content is on the rise, powered by other tooling like creating WhatsApp groups and Discord groups, powered by newsletter tools like Substack, where people can subscribe and people are able to monetize your audience. I mean, you're living off the podcast, right? If you could call it that.

That's what I'm doing. Yeah. Yeah. This is all I do. And it's one of the most amazing things. It's liberating and there's risk involved. But yeah, it is. And it's an amazing time to be alive because it matters. I think that the individual reaches the other individuals. And if you have a message, I would much rather hear from myself or you or plenty of people just like us because I think that that's a better message than that. and some all-out brand that just wants to sell me something that I don't even really want or I can't afford or tries to tell me I need this because I'm thin or I need this to be important. I'd much rather talk to somebody like I would at the water cooler or like I would at the field or like I would at the beach. Like it's a way better conversation than a conversation is forced to me from a brand. Exactly. And that's what it takes, right? Because I started by saying yesterday's innovation is always tomorrow's commodity.

if you build a community, you will not become a commodity, right? From Harley Davidson, from Christ to CrossFit, that is the truth of the situation. People want to do business with people. Yeah. And, you know, once you have this audience, I kid you not, man. I didn't even think I had much of an audience, right? Through our traction community, we have 120,000 subscribers. I didn't even push the new book because it's on pre-sale. It's not fully ready for sale in the sense Amazon hasn't tied the paperbacks with the digital. It's all separate links. So I didn't want to push it out.

But I made a LinkedIn post and I made an Instagram post. And in hours, it became number one new release on startup section of Amazon, on the business section, in the Internet marketing section in the four or five categories. I was blown away that I couldn't sleep. And I'm like, this is a fraction of my subscribers. And that's the love. And that's what people do for people. Now, imagine you can amplify that. You can scale that, right?

Every brand out there that is putting content from their personal accounts and not building up their people are missing an opportunity. Build an audience. Empower your people to build audiences and add value. and empower them to go out there and build communities and turn those communities into movements. This is what Harley Davidson did, right?

This is what CrossFit does. It builds its people, right? And then formulate rituals around your greater purpose. You know, you talked about how this sort of American dream holds us back, right?

Yeah. You moved. to Hawaii. What made you move to Hawaii? Like in 2007? The, the, the siren call, the idea that there's a better out there, the idea that there's more to life than just living in this, in this environment around you. If you take some chances, the world will reward you. And I believed in my heart that there was a girl out there with love in her eyes and a flower in her hair. And that took place. You wielded into existence.

Yeah, I did. It happened, man. The law of attraction. You know, I'll tell you something really funny. And I truly believe in these, in these karmic things, right? So years ago in 2008, me and my wife have known each other since our teens.

I was her prom date. And she got into medical school in second year of undergrad without MCATS, bright. And I was a bumbling idiot. it, right? Finished engineering, doing sales at startups, jumping from small company, small company. And her parents, Indian parents, too, didn't want us to get married. So my wedding was called off two days before the wedding in India, of all places. And what I heard was like, I'm not good enough,

right? And my mom asked me only one thing. Did I not raise you right? Are you not good enough kind of thing? And that drove me for a very long time, right? And this is the one common thing I find amongst people who are driven is there there's some spite, some burning anger to change the status quo or prove the naysayers wrong. Yeah. But that drove me. And since I was in my late 20s, I told my wife, because we did end up getting married nine months later.

And I take a positive thing from every negative experience. Because that wedding was called off, my wife didn't want to plan the wedding. And I planned our dream wedding as a function of. that, I learned to host events because I put together Excel sheets. I coordinated with vendors. I knew logistics. I knew how to do the stage setup. I learned everything. And on my wedding, I was actually coordinating vendors and trying to make sure everything was aligned. I was the event manager because I was so freaked out that I didn't buy that incident. Fast forward a few years, we built this big community and didn't have the resources. So I needed to learn how to do events.

It was another great skill, right? And so, you know, you know, don't ever let rejection rule you. Let it fuel you, right? Use that as a power and use it to do something with it, right? You can always mope and say, oh, this is bad and this didn't work out. But, you know, use it, use the learnings from it because pain is the precondition for growth. It's like working out. You will never grow or get stronger if you don't lift heavier weights.

And as a function of lifting a heavier weight, you get stronger. And that's the same thing that goes for your mind. When you try to learn a new language, when you try to learn something new, take on a new challenge. When you transcend your boundaries, you get stronger. You get better, right?

Everything that's great is in the other side of pain and difficulty. Nothing worth doing comes easy. It's a long slog. And so as a function of that, I learned to build, learn to host events. And events is all about orchestrating and communicating so people can congregate. Without that, you have no community if you can't bring people together.

And every other day, I told my wife I'd retire at 40, okay? I only then circle through startups that failed, startups that failed, startups that failed. Then me and my co-founder, who were friends since university, worked on a couple other projects. They also failed. Ben did an events company where we hosted a conference and the third partner ran away with all the profits and we had to sue him. And it's like you can never freaking catch a break. And then boast,

the company, we founded, we bootstrap, we didn't take any investor money. That ended up doing well. But you never know, right? The pandemic hit.

We're in the middle of a pandemic. And we were a largely event-driven company, meaning when we started the company, the product we sell is we help entrepreneurs and innovators get money from the government for product development.

Nice. And we take their technical, financial data, and we automate the process of lying for these government incentives, tax credits. When we started, we're two guys working out of a bedroom. Nobody wanted to talk to us, because think about it. Would you give me your sensitive intellectual property? Probably not, right? When there's big four accounting firms and you trust your account. So we started by building community because we couldn't get a whole. Nobody would talk to us. The bigger companies wouldn't talk to us. we tried reaching out to manufacturing, different industries, high tech, nobody talked to us.

Then we started going out there in the community and going to events. And we realized that, you know, we're founders or self. We resonate more with other tech founders versus like manufacturing or like some other industries where it doesn't feel like your tribe. And as we ran around the events, this was back in 2012 or so, all of the events were like high-level platitudes from CEOs, nothing that was beneficial to a founder. So we said we have an opportunity here. We know as a function of running around startups,

we know we can bring some interesting speakers who would share tactical advice on how to do X or Y, get my first customers, get my first investor, build my first product, which nobody talks about. Everyone is high-level platitudes. And the reason why the events back then were that way is because not a lot of founders were not organizing events.

It was just event organizers. And so we started hosting these meetups and our messaging went from, hey buy my stuff to hey I'm hosting an event bringing X speaker to talk about Y topic would you be interested in joining we're just going to have some pizza 10 people

and they came and more people came and more people came every time we hosted these on a cadence and at the end we found not at the end but over time we hosted an event and there were 200 people that showed up to a co-working space and the guys of the co-working space are like this is not a pizza night this is a conference Now you've got to get out of here.

And that evolved into a big community. And we didn't call that community, the boast community. We called it traction because it was centered around the outcome our customers, our ideal customers looking for. I talked about fall in love with your customer and make them successful beyond your product or service. Yes, we got them R&D credits. But what did they want?

What are the aspirations to become successful to change the world? They wanted to drive impact. But what was stopping them from driving that impact? money and knowledge. And so we said, we'll get you the money and we'll get you the know-how to make you successful. And so we built this community and we called it traction because that is the word that every entrepreneur is looking for is to get traction. And that as that community grew, the word of mouth grew.

And we met partners from there because, you know, once you understand your ideal customer, then you can draw their circle of influence, meaning who do they follow? Who are the people they respect? so you can invite them as speakers. Who are the other service providers they need so you can invite them as sponsors or partners? And where do they hang out? Like what magazines they read, what blogs they read,

what channels do they participate on? So you can then be prevalent there. And so it became such that we would invite successful tech entrepreneurs as speakers, as partners and sponsors would be people who'd sell other service to them. And then we would invite journalists from TechCrunch and VentureBeed and Forbes,

to participate and run interviews with these speakers. And so they felt like I'm around my tribe, right? Yeah. And so that built the community. But anyway, every week I told my wife that I'm going to retire at 40. And one thing failed. The other failed. And like the boast just started to, you know, started to pick up steam.

And I tell her I'm retired 40, retired 40. And then the pandemic hit. When the pandemic hit, we had to cancel a conference. And I was heartbroken because we had like 50 some odd speakers. And it was a big thing for us. conference once a year we did in August. Very quickly, though, reached out to all the speakers and asked them if they would, you know, I didn't have the heart to do a virtual summit.

So ask the speakers if they'll do, if they'll hop on a webinar, live, ask me anything. So a podcast like this, but live open to the audience every week. And if they'll do that. And one hour was more palatable to me. I can't sit through a two-day virtual summit. So one hour was more palatable to me, to them. And so they started coming on these webinars. And people would join initially.

It was a small group of people. But then it started getting to a point where four, 500 people would show up to these webinars. Wow. It went from once a week to twice a week. And over a span of two years, you'll see our email database went from like 30,000 to close to 100,000 to now almost 120,000.

So the audience started growing, this started growing. And then, you know, of course, it's the, pandemic. You're afraid, like, you know, is business going to go well? What's going to happen? It was craziness. And there was one window of opening where they said, you know, you can host events again. And so we hosted an event. And now this is July of 2020. Okay. And you see, I've been telling my wife now for almost 12 years that I'm going to retire at 40. This is three months, four months before my 40th birthday. And I'm telling her like, we'd argue a lot, right? My wife's a physician, she's paying the bills at home for the most, right? You live in San Francisco. It's

expensive. She's paying the bills, startup, startup. And I'm like, I'm a retired 40, retire 40. And I kid you not, this is why the community I owe so much has done everything for me. And through this journey, I'm explaining also why I wrote the book. And these investors, they come to a community event. I didn't even know these investors. They became recommended to me by another friend who was a community builder who I partnered with to host the event. And a partner from this fund, Growth Equity Fund, Radiant Capital, they attended.

Then they reached out and said, hey, who organized this event? I'd like to talk to them. So I get on the phone, and they asked me to join their network of venture partners and in exchange for sending them startups to invest in, they'll give me some carry, some commission. And I said, listen,

this is a community that I do for social good on the side, but I actually have a business. and so I don't have the time to do this. And they asked me, like, what is your business? And I explained, like, hey, we help companies get money from the government and we take a cut out of it and we don't get paid until they get paid and we automate the process and it's been going really well. And they asked me like, hey, how do you do marketing? How do you get customers? And I'm like, through this community.

We don't have a marketing team. And they were so interested. They're like, can we invest? Now when they said, can we invest? Like, few things went off in my head. One, my co-founder, Alex. he always about like controlling your own destiny and not because because bringing on investors is a lifelong marriage and and not bringing on taking on unnecessary capital when you know when you can

own the whole thing like own your company right control it the other thing was you know it just tells you the odds of startups since university i've only worked at small business of startups and they've all failed and unfortunately unfortunately they were all venture back companies they all raise money. So they all failed. And so my wife on the other end is like, you've never worked for a successful startup that's raised venture capital. So what makes you think that you'll go and raise venture capital and it'll become successful? She's like, if you do this boom-bust thing again, then I want you to get a job because I can't keep paying the bills at the house. So these two things were ringing as I was talking to the radiant capital guys. And they said, hey, listen, we're not venture capitalists. And I'm like,

what are you, private equity, because private equity has this reputation for like hustling you and long process and earnouts and all of this stuff. And they're like, no, we're this thing called growth equity. I'm like, what is that? They're like, we'll let you, we'll buy a portion of your company and you can cash out with that money and you'll still have enough stake in your company to play the long game. So you do risk while playing the long game. And I'm like, what? That sounds like, you know, the dollar signs went off and I'm like, wow, that sounds like magic. So I talked to Alex and Alex is like, yeah, this is legit. Let's talk to them.

Alex is the CEO. I was the president of the company and we then went on this journey. And, you know, it's beautiful because if you've bootstrapped a company and not take an investor money, a lot of options open up to you, especially if you're north of $5 million reaching $10 million. And I kid you not, man. I kept saying that and this so happened that the wire hit my bank account. account the week of my 40th birthday. Okay?

I have been saying this for, geez, what, since 2008, that I will retire at 40. And the wire hit my bank account the week of my 40th birthday. And my parents and my wife and everyone, their minds were blown. And they were like, what the hell just happened? Like you literally wielded into existence. You've said it for so long. You kept saying it and saying it and saying it and saying it and saying it. And I don't know if what this is, this law of attraction, because I never believed in it until this.

You keep saying it and saying it and saying it and you put it out there and in some way it happens. Yeah. And it was the most interesting phenomenon. But what happened thereafter changed my life. Because all my life, I chased that somebody else's definition of success. My mother-in-law didn't want us to get married. and so I had to build this definition of success and finally reached this point

where I had more money than either side of the family had seen and my wife would always say the kids never see you they don't spend enough time with you right and I'm like listen so busy the pandemic is on we're doing this due diligence for this deal it's crazy we'll sell it we'll take everyone to Bora Bora

when the deal goes through and she's like nobody cares about your Bora Bora Stop and smell the roses. Just like we care about having dinner with you. The compound interest in having dinner with you phones down every day far exceeds like one freaking trip a year. But I didn't listen. The deal went through. It booked everyone to Bora Bora.

Two days before Bora Bora, wake up unable to breathe, I got hospitalized for COVID. I had bilateral COVID pneumonia. My lungs were shot. I was in horrible shape. I couldn't breathe. my wife calls my co-founder, she's crying, and she's an ER physician really strong.

I rarely seen her cry. I'm sitting in the hospital with so much pain, and I'm thinking in my head, geez, if I could go back in time, I wish I would have spent more time with the kids if I died today. I realized that day that it's not the money in your bank, but it's the people around your tombstone

that matter the most. And I promised myself that I would change after that incident. And we came out of the hospital a couple weeks later. And I promised that change. And maybe I was good for a couple weeks. But the company went from 30, 40-ish people to started scaling and growing and adding more and more people. And there was this chaos, right, in the environment. And I got worse, actually.

I didn't get better. I got worse. And August rolls around of the year. This was January. August rolls around. And my daughter, who. was, I think, seven or eight at the time, says, dad, you've gotten worse. I don't even see you anymore.

At least before we'd see you. Now you just like disappear all the time. And I said, sweetie, like the company has so many more people. We got to make sure that we make them whole because they put their faith in us. And she says, dad, why don't you go work for somebody who thinks like you so I can have my dad back? This is like, this is August. Wow. She was, she was almost a.

A couple weeks later, I still didn't take the lesson from that. A couple weeks later, my wife goes into labor for a third kid, and I'm not at home. I'm at an offsite in Austin. My phone is down. I pick up the phone, and there's like 20 missed calls. I call back, and my wife's friends, like, you're such an asshole. This is like stuff you do all the time. Whenever she's in labor, you're not there.

So I hop on the morning flight because the flights have all done back to San Francisco. and I barely made it to the birth of my third kid. And, you know, through this journey, I was just like, I think something was eating me. I became insufferable. I was just getting depressed. And the company had progressed from a startup pirate, you know, startups are pirates, right? You get, you poke elbows, you know, you do anything possible. And the company had scaled to a point where now we had a professional CTO from a big company,

CMO, CFO, all these people. and I was still this pirate. I hadn't made the transition. So I was at loggerheads with these people and I go into a board meeting and said like, oh, you got to fire all these people. And then they're like, listen, you need to chill. You've had a stressful year.

Why don't you take a paternity leave and we'll figure out when you come back? And that day I go home and I hugged my wife and I literally cried for 10 minutes. And I said, man, you know, I'm sorry for all the times you needed me and I wasn't there. Today the company doesn't need me, and you're the only person standing. And what happened after was very interesting.

I had come into money, so I should have been happier because now I'm not in the day-to-day of the business. I transitioned to a board role. I should have been much happier. But what happened to me was this guy from hanging out with kids in the slums of Mumbai to the streets of Kuwait to, you know, the traction community. all of a sudden I felt I lost my tribe. I felt I lost my identity.

I felt I lost my people. So I started getting depressed because I felt disconnected from the people around me. I felt completely disconnected. I was like this community person and you took the one thing away that I cared about is like the people. And so I went a bit crazy. I started calling random friends saying, you know what, meet me in Dominican or meet me in Miami or meet me in Europe and I'll come and I'll fly you there. and I'll pay for the hotel and let's just go party. And I kept doing that and my wife said,

you know what, this guy needs to grieve. So let's go. I went to Dubai. I went to like, you name it. I went to so many places, just traveling, hopping one place to the other, nomadic.

I still remember went to Miami, then didn't have fun and didn't like Miami. So went over to Dominican, then like went over to Austin. That was the craziness, right? The craziest thing was I was speaking at a conference in Romania. And after the, the conference, they had a sort of retreat for speakers in the boonies somewhere, which is like,

I think a four-hour drive from the Bucharest airport. And at two in the morning, everyone's hanging out in the pool, and I'm frantically calling an Uber. And they're all watching me, like, what is this guy doing? I can't get an Uber, can't get an Uber, can't get an Uber. Finally, 30, 40 minutes later, and Uber comes. And the Uber shows up, and I'm like, can you hold on a second? I go, I pack my bags, I bring it down. I pop the laptop, I booked my ticket to Costa Rica. And I tell everyone, guys, I'm leaving. I'm going to Costa Rica. I had a couple of friends called me a couple hours ago saying they're in Costa Rica. And I literally on the fly booked a ticket and went to Costa Rica. The flight was, I think,

at that's 630 or 7. And this was 2 o'clock. And we made the three hour trip to the airport. That's how crazy I got. And then one day when I'm back, my wife looks at me and she's like, look at you. I let you grieve. But you, you become this insufferable character, latching on to something you don't have, forgetting what you have. You have the opportunity to go and live and do anything, and you have this family that you never spend time with.

But you're latching onto the tribe you lost, and you're giving up your first tribe, and you're destroying your health. And she said, after COVID, you got a second chance, but look at your health. You've like, out of overweight, like, you're drunk, you're insufferable. She's like, you might not get a.

third chance. You might not get a third chance. That day, I sat on the bed and just thoughts were just coursing through my head. And I look across the room and I see the Peloton bike. And I'm like, you know what? It's turned into a makeshift towel rack for like now, now two, three years, right? And I said, what the hell? I'm going to hop on it. I dust off the clothes, hop on it. And I pick an instructor randomly and she was coming off maternity leave and she brought her vulnerable self

and said, you know, I don't feel as strong, I can't ride, you know, I feel weak. And then she yells out, self-pity is toxic. One crank, one shift, one ride around the block. I am, I can. And I felt jolted and the eye of the tiger from Rocky was playing.

Great song. And that one ride turned into two, into four, and like I felt the sense of camaraderie with peloton. I would hop on the politon, high five with the people. I had the instructor. And over time, what happened was, you know, my wife's saying of the glasses half full became my morning ritual. Thanks something great that happened the day before, a people, place, or a thing, bang out

as many push-ups to Eye of the Tiger, hop on the politon. And so eventually we decided to move to Dubai. We have a place in San Francisco. We spend the summers there, but wanted to disconnect. We were both born in Kuwait. our friends and family are in Dubai. And Dubai is a very community-oriented vibe. Live on the beach.

Service is very inexpensive. It's a place that's designed to give you convenience in your day. Everything from your doctor to gasoline comes home, and it's not like inaccessible. It's accessible to everyone. And so when I came upon all this free time and I started reflecting, I realized that, you know what, I got to do something, right? The common thread through my journey has been community.

The common thread from Christ to CrossFit has been community. But in a generation where so much emphasis is placed on technology and marketing, nobody's sharing this message is that the biggest successes on the planet are built on people, on communities. There was this recent study or article I was reading on the Blue Zones. Have you heard of the Blue Zones? Right. Have everyone seemed to live a long time?

Yeah, where you functionally live until 100. Functionally is the key, right? Longevity has no meaning if there is no functionality, right? Like, what's the point? You retire at 65 with a lot of money, but you can't operate. So functionally until 60, until almost 100, those five places. Now, if you look at their nine common traits, four or five of them are in some shape or form related to communities, social connection, belonging to a spiritual,

organization, eating together, walking together, those kinds of things. And that tells you that humans were built on connection, not on isolation. And when people come together, great things happen. And that's why I wanted to write this book and bring out what was eating me alive outside. And in that process, I talked to thousands of people. I rewatched all our content. I joined a lot of communities on the back end. And, you know, as I released this book, those community people will think that. It's funny that Lloyd actually was, like,

we were always wondering, like, why was he there like a fly on the wall kind of thing, but not really like, you know, not super involved. And that was why, as I was studying those communities. And I looked at 100 plus community-led businesses. And I chanced upon, you know,

when you ask the same questions over and over, you get a pattern. And that pattern led me to 13 common rules. to build iconic brands and cult-like followings. And so I put this book together. And it's really like not a book for the sake of putting a book, but it's a book that comes from deep purpose to encourage the world that there's a life beyond commerce.

Right? And if you want to build something lasting, I'll tell you, if you focus on money, you make short-term decisions. If you focus on power, you destroy relationships. The only way to build something lasting is to focus on impact.

And you can't create impact without community. Man. It seems so spiritual in nature to me. Like the whole story you told, even though you may have brought up the idea of spirituality a few times, it sounds like a spiritual journey, like almost like Siddhartha in a way. You know what I mean where like you you move through your life

and you see this one dimensional avenue of commerce because if you chase money and power, you think that'll make everything happy. You don't realize it's kind of like, you know, if I use a Wizard of Oz reference, like Dorothy's Ruby Red Slipper, she had the power to go home anytime. Like you had your family there the whole time.

But yet focusing on building this thing outside of your family and achieving a tremendous amount of success is what brought you back to your family. Like, you know what I mean? I can say it's so spiritual in nature. And it just in some ways it seems to me that business is trying to fill a spiritual void. Because these relationships we have, the relationships with nature, the relationships with people, the relationships with family, that's what's lacking in the entire Western business model. And it sounds to me that this book, grassroots to great.

is encompassing that, right? Is that a fair statement? Is there a spiritual avenue in this in this book that you've written? I didn't think about it that way from a, from a spiritual avenue perspective. But, you know, it comes from purpose and great, great deep meaning. Yeah. And that's how I thought about it. I really didn't think about spirituality or anything like that.

But it came from a sense of purpose. It came from a place of pain. And everything, I said everything great is on the other side of pain. It came from a lot of pain. It came from a lot of purpose. And I poured my heart into it. What about sacrifice? Sacrifice seems to be something that is a cornerstone there too, right?

Yeah, you know, I don't know if I have. anything to say on sacrifice. I mean, like, really, what have I sacrificed? There's, like, somebody else is always going through something worse than you are. So, like, what have I really sacrificed? Didn't you give up, like, 40 years of, like, not being with your family to, like, chase business? Like, that's kind of a sacrifice. You know, like your wife had told you about, like, what about Bora Bora? Who cares about Bora? Like, that was like 40 years of, of, no, it's, I mean, I'm 40. I'm 40. So that's that that was maybe, like, 12 years. Okay. 12 years. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, you know, you know,

that's true, but I never thought, the one thing I'll tell you is I never, it's the first time I've been asked this question. I never felt like I was sacrificing anything ever. Because the thing is this, whenever, when we were building the business, we were building a community-led business. That was my people. That's why I got depressed when I left the business, right? I hit rock bottom. It's because I felt I lost my people. I felt I lost my tribe. I was out there. I was out there. in front of the people. And I felt lost my tribe. So I never felt I was sacrificing anything. I actually felt like I had the greatest time, even when we made no money. We would take the company every year

to like Cabo, Costa Rica, Hawaii, and there were years where we couldn't even take money for ourselves. But it felt great. So it never felt like a sacrifice. That's the thing, right? It's never the money in your bank is the people around your tombstone that matter. It's not the destination or the journey.

It's the companions. And so if you're surrounded by great companions, even though the burden is hard, it doesn't feel like a sacrifice. I genuinely, this is the first time somebody has asked me the question, did you sacrifice? It never felt like a sacrifice.

And I don't think I sacrificed. And now that if you think about it, it's more like my wife sacrificed. She lost. I mean, I did a disservice to my family, but it didn't feel like I was sacrificing something. I, you know, to do something that I didn't draw joy from.

I drew great joy in building the business and surrounding by those people, right? Yeah. You know, there's this, there's an interesting question that, I wrote it somewhere right. So what does it feel like? And how does it change your, like achieving financial freedom is something that a lot of people strive to do? And I'm curious, how does achieving financial freedom change your perspective of time and home and family? You know, I set this at the beginning, right?

All my life, I chase success looking for happiness. And when success came, I ended up depressed. Right. And then I realized success is the ability to do what you want, where you want, with whom you want, when you want, in your prime. In your prime is key. Yes. In your time.

Not like at 65 where you're, if you're consuming this processed Western diet, you can't function and you don't work out. You don't have the time for yourself. Right. And that's when I realize that. Like, you know, so again, you got to figure out what your personal definition of success is and how much money is needed to support that. Figure out the life you want to live and build the work.

around it. Like in 2023, you have the opportunity. It's easy for me to say because, you know, the company did well. But if I had to change things and do it again, I'd probably do things I find joy in because, you know, life is too short to do things you don't find joy in, right? And whatever that is for you. Now, fortunately, while I was doing the business, I found great joy in it because I said it was a community. It was a community that kept me joy. It never felt like a sacrifice, right? Yeah. And so, you know, if I would to do it again, although I didn't, I didn't start the company seeking joy. I would be more deliberate about seeking joy. And so then I would write down what my, you know, a lot of what we do is start with negotiables. Oh, you know what,

I don't want to live in the city. It's too expensive. So maybe we'll live in the suburbs and we'll live bigger. But then we'll commute every day for an hour, one way, two ways, and we'll sit in traffic and we'll blow our brains out and the compound interest on that day over day. So basically we'll compromise on quality of life, right, to eventually maybe at 65 have a quality of life. So those were the things I would change.

The work I found great joy in because it was a community-led business and that's my pride. But the thing is some of the things that I didn't focus on that could have given me a better mental fortitude or health. was exercise. And now, see, systems eat motivation for breakfast, right?

And what that mean is you can have all the motivation in the world, but life happens. Yeah. And I told you this, right, earlier, people are well-intentioned, but life happens, mortgage, car payments, commuting, dropping, picking kids. And so then you don't end up working out, right? You don't end up. So then how do you create a system? Well, live in the city then.

Live close to work and walk to work. Be in an environment where you're surrounded by people and you're going to walk to everything. Those are the things I would change if I would go back where I would institute in my life, not a big house, but proximity to the environment, proximity to walkability. I love the beach. Now in Dubai, I live on the beach. I would proximity to the beach. I would institute things that. brought me joy and happiness, right, everything, not just the work side of things. Oh, I'm happy.

I'm doing great. But then it's like, okay, compound interest on walking like 20 minutes, 15 minutes to work every day and back is huge. It's good health over a year, right? Yeah. See, you know, Jason Lemkin, great leader, entrepreneur, investor, did the Ford on my book. And he wrote one of the quotes was, compound interest. consistency on small actions lead to big outcomes over time, right? And that is a key thing to keep in mind is what you do consistently is what you become. It's so true. I remember reading Steve Jobs' biography not too long ago.

And in there there there's this quote that really rang home to me. And he says that when the visionary leaves the company and the marketing team takes over, that's the beginning of the end. And I liken it to when the instrument becomes institutionalized, then begins the corruption. You know, and if you look at it from like a business point of view, when the cult, the iconic brand that has a cult following begins to treat their employees like numbers and care for more about profit, then the company begins to fail. Is there a certain point where that happens? Does that seem like that happens when the founder leaves? Or is that a boardroom decision or is that a profit decision? Or is that something that most companies follow?

It's like a natural trajectory. And if so, is there a way to stop that? You know, great companies and great cultures are built on great alignment. This is what I thought. That's what we'll say. Great companies, great cultures are built on great alignment. If the ethos of impact is intact, then your culture will not erode. The other thing is employees don't watch your lips or what's written on the wall.

They watch your behaviors. Culture is the leading indicator of growth. And what is the leading indicator of culture is your behaviors matching your values. If your behaviors don't match your values, then your culture is going to erode. If you say one thing and you do another thing. And this is what happens is when the visionary leaders leave the company typically new people bring come in, right? They come in with a different set of values, but if there is misalignment with the values with what the company was built, then their action will be different than what's written on the wall and the culture will start to erode. And I think that's what Jobs was saying. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting.

I love the idea of language and culture and actions speak louder than words. And in some ways, those are all powerful symbols. It are all forms of communication like you had mentioned earlier. communication being one of the most important things we can do. And I love like the symbols that you're using, like grassroots to greatness. And I think that that is aligned with your story. Is that something you consciously do is try to find like the symbolic meaning that aligns with your story? Is that just or is that just something that has happened because that's the way you live?

I didn't have a title for the book for the longest time. My brother, my brother, Brian Sachin Mendonza, who is a, a great brand marketer. I fondly call him the grandfather. He's won a words at cons. The grandfather. He's won awards at cons. He fought me on putting community-led growth as a title and he said, you cannot do it. I will not allow you to do it. And he came up with, from grassroots to greatness. He also came up with the design of the book. He's like, every book looks exactly the same on the shelf.

And this book has to be like a collectible in the sense. And you'll see it on the website from grassroots to greatness. Like the pages inside are deliberately designed. It's full color. And there's a lot of love that went into it, but I had nothing to do with it. He was the inspiration behind it. And in many ways, he was the inspiration to help me realize my purpose in life because he told me, he's like, you have something that you don't realize.

And he said, every time you're somewhere, you naturally bring people together, people congregate around you. wherever we go. You seem to know people and they come to. He's like, even our family, we would never socialize until you came and moved to Dubai, things like that. And he made me realize that my purpose in life is to bring people together.

Like, I draw joy from it, truly. And he said, I want you to have, you know, I want that to come out. I want your personality to come out. I want that to come out in the book. And it's not coming through in whatever you're doing with this 99 designs. and your community-led growth. And it doesn't bring out the emotion.

Community-led growth is dry. And then he came up from grassroots to greatness. And it stuck and really, really loved it. That, you know, it brought out the emotion. And the colors and the vibrancy, it brings out that emotion of grassroots to greatness. Yeah. I love a lot of things. but I love the way in which you talked about your family and your wife and the grandfather.

But in the LinkedIn post I was reading in other particular avenues, your sister's played a big part in your life. Maybe you can talk about your relationship with her. Definitely, a very, very close relationship with all my family, right? With my parents, my sister. Like, we're extremely, extremely, extremely close. You know, it's like one unit. We travel together.

We would live together if possible. but they're in they're in Toronto it's it's one unit man there's there's no it's like it's like a joint family that doesn't live together in the sense we we we feel each other's pain my parents spent like three months of the year with us my sister spends a Christmas with us it is that is that is how it is our family and the extended family is more like a community in the sense so you know what's funny is in in Dubai now because I have a lot of family as a function of growing up in Kuwait. We host dinners every weekend, okay?

And just family get-together dinners, man. Nothing crazy, okay? And every week somebody nominates a spot, whether it's a restaurant or somebody's house, we nominate a spot, right? And every week that dinner, now the summer no one's here, but every week that dinner would go from like, you know, the five family members, which is me, my brother, my other cousin, and his wife.

And it expand to like 10, 15 people. Because somebody's in town or whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever, and that table. So, you know, always extend your table, not your fence, right? I think that's a very important lesson to learn. Is that one of the 13 rules in the book? It's not, but it comes through. I don't even talk very deliberately about audience community movement religion. I don't know because it all comes through in the book.

I didn't want to, you know, overdo it. But that's a very powerful, strong statement in my view, audience community, movement, religion. What do you think? Yeah, I think it's beautiful. And when you were talking about the ritual of a family dinner on Sundays or family dinners individual, it made me start thinking like, oh yeah, maybe the rituals in our lives and the rituals in our communities that seem to be absent in the Western world, and especially in business, maybe these rituals start in the home. And I was, can I share with you a little ritual that me

and my family do on dinner? Yeah, definitely, man. Thank you. So we just started doing this one. And I highly recommend everybody listening. You try to implement this. It's worked really well for us. So my daughter's nine. And my wife, my daughter and I, at dinner time, we'll have our dinner and we'll talk, but then we write down, each of us writes down a little question, and it can be anything. There's a freedom, whatever question you want. We put it in a hat, and then at the end of dinner, we each draw, and then we stand in front of each other, and we do like a one-minute speech or a three-minute speech on whatever that question was.

And it really helps people, you know, work with your eye contact, stop your fidgeting, and it really helps people engage in the family. And I've noticed that since we've been doing it, my daughter has been using it as a way to ask questions like, what are the changes that happen when you become a teenager? So she's able to ask these questions in a different setting that maybe she would feel nervous about or something like that, you know? And I've noticed that she's much more comfortable talking in front of people. And it's a really fun activity.

But more than that, it's a ritual that people can begin implementing in their life that just underscores the importance of family. And I think when you have these rituals, like they make your life richer. They make your life better. And so thanks for letting me share that, man. But I really liked hearing about dinners and families and stuff like that. You know, when your core actions get elevated to rituals, you know, things just explode, right? Especially in a, you build unstoppable bonds when you do rituals.

Think about it. Think about that for a second. You become unbreakable. That's why, like, you know, if you argue with the Crossfitter about. their fitness regime, they will cut you, right, for the most because they have a ritual that they perform every day, which is workout out of the day, and it brings people together around the world to strengthen around that. And that becomes their belief. Rituals lead to undying faith in beliefs and purpose. When rituals are done repeatedly over time, it compounds.

So we talk about rituals. What about rights of passage? That seems to be something that's absent in the world today. We don't have rights of passage. Is there something that you implement in Boost AI? Or is there some sort of model that you use in the business world that are equivalent to rights of passage? Give me an example on how you've seen it work.

Well, I think that the Western world is devoid of rights of passage. but there's echoes of them like a bar mitzvah or a kinsignera you know maybe some ritual maybe some rites of passage that we have today is somebody getting their their first Porsche or their first car or prom you know but even though those are rights of passage they're devoid of meaning but that's the real meaning good you know in many ways that is a ritual right so if you see harley when somebody buys a new harley they do a right of passage in a way right because because The whole- Yeah, they come together.

The Harley group comes together and they chair them on and they do the first ride together. That's a part of a ritual, right? Like, it's all about building community is right-of-passage rituals, things you do to initiate people. Things you do.

Yeah, initiate people and then things you do to bring them together repeatedly. If there are no rituals, people don't come together, right? Yeah. because then it's like rituals hold you accountable don't they they do

they do they hold you accountable but there's also like there's also shame involved with rituals you know that's kind of the dark side of rituals like oh this person doesn't do it anymore like if the crossfitters they cut people they're like oh you do that now

so there's also I think and I think it's worth noting like what role does shame play in in shaping these things I think, you know, there's a bad side to everything. And everything done to its extreme can turn to negative, right? Yeah. And I think shaming, unfortunately, it happens like, you know, we can do. There's a whole slew of topics to go into with shaming, which, you know, I got to hop off.

I know, I'm sorry. Running, running late for nothing. But, you know, we're living in the world. where like cancel culture is so prevalent, right? Yeah. Yeah. Lloyd, this has been amazing, man. And I thank you for being gracious with your time.

And I truly, truly appreciate it. And before I let you go, where can people find you? What do you have coming up besides the incredible new book from grassroots to greatness 13 rules to build iconic brands of community and growth? Where can people find you? And what's the best place to get a hold of you? Follow me on LinkedIn. It's Lloyd Lobo.

Now, there's an E in my name, and growing up I got made fun of a lot. And so I asked, like, why did you put an E in Lloyd? And my mom would always say that if you ever became an entrepreneur, businessman is the word she used. You'd never able to be able to trademark your name because Lloyd's a very common English name. So I put an E in there. I guess E strands for entrepreneur, but she wielded it into existence. Awesome. So Lloyd with an E Lobo on LinkedIn.

then from grassroots to greatness or Lloydlobo.com is where you'll find the book. I'll start adding more and more content there. If you want to learn anything about building a tech business, then search for traction conf on podcast, Spotify or YouTube. And if you want to get government money for tax credits for your business, then check out B-O-A-S-T.a-I. This was such a great conversation, man. I enjoyed it a ton. You have full of energy. Dude, it's 1030 here, but I got another podcast recording and running for true life, love and peace, brother.

Let's do this again sometime. Fantastic. Thank you for everything, man. I truly, truly appreciate it. Go check out all of his links in the show notes. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you have a beautiful weekend and realize that if you search for the authenticity

and yourself, the world will reward you. That's all we got for today. Aloha. Aloha, my friend. Love and peace, brother. Take care. Yep.