By Laura King
Dan Martell, a YouTuber, spent over 100 hours with four billionaires, and here’s what he learned. The first one is Mark Cuban. He first met Mark – long story, but he decided to cold email a bunch of billionaires when he was in his 20s, asking them questions like, ‘Should you focus on your network, what you know, or your grit?’
Obviously, most of them didn’t reply, but Mark actually replied back.
He said, ‘Doing all three while everybody’s trying to pick one.’
In the below mentioned text you will read what Dan Martell is saying.
I remember just how crazy it was that a billionaire replied to me. It wasn’t until a decade later when I was building a company called Clarity. We were on a site called AngelList, and Naval Ravikant, the founder, pushed it to all the members.
Mark was there, and we started an email exchange. He asked questions about the product, the vision, the roadmap, and the team. After about 13 or 14 email replies, he said, ‘I’m in for a quarter million bucks.’ A few things I want to share: number one, he loves the art of the deal.
If you’ve seen him on Shark Tank, you can tell that he loves the entrepreneurial journey, the spirit. He also absolutely loves the entrepreneur game – the strategy, the tactics, the different ways you can enter a market, how you can position the product.
When I sent an investor update email, he always replied. And finally, you have to have the drive. You’ve got to want to grow. You have to have a desire. You have to be engaged in the game of business and have that level of drive. That’s what Mark taught me.
The second billionaire is Richard Branson
This is such a crazy story. I want you to understand; I grew up in a small town in Eastern Canada. The fact that I got an opportunity to spend a week with him at his home in Switzerland still blows my mind.
A few years prior, I helped this guy out who had a startup, and he appreciated it so much that he ended up raising from Richard.
Richard was going on vacation to his place in Switzerland and asked him to invite people that he thought Richard might find interesting. I got the email, and honestly, I was looking at this like, ‘Is this an April Fool’s joke? Is this real?’
It wasn’t until I was sitting in the living room, and Richard walked out that my brain allowed me to believe, ‘Oh my gosh, this is happening.’
Tim Ferris was there, Brian Johnson from the Biohacker Blueprint, the co-founder of Stripe, so many incredible entrepreneurs, and then me. I was like, ‘Okay, I better show up, ask great questions, and just be generally helpful to everybody there.’ Three core things: one was watching him interact with his executive assistant, Helen.
I’ve talked about this several times; I wrote about him in my book, ‘Buyback Your Time.’
There was just something magical about watching him work through her to move all of the businesses forward. Once that meeting in the morning was done, he had the rest of his day to pursue his passions.
The other thing that was interesting about Richard is watching how curious he was to learn from other people. In many ways, that’s how he lives his life. If you’ve seen Necker Island and many of his other properties, they’re all boutique hotels, and that’s probably because he likes to have people around that he can learn from.
The most powerful thing he ever said to me – we were having dinner one night, and I asked him, I said, ‘Hey, when it comes to business, what’s the skill, what’s the strategy, what’s the one thing people should focus on?’
And he replied, ‘Brand.’ I’ll be honest with you, at the time, I didn’t really understand it. I build companies and exit them. Like, why would I invest in a brand?
What’s crazy is I wish I would have really focused on it because what I’ve discovered today is your reputation is your brand. My brand is Dan Martell.
Had I done it sooner, I would have been able to do 10 or 100 times more than what I currently do today. So understanding that was such a huge unlock. It took me years to figure it out, and I learned it from Richard.
The third billionaire is Travis Kalanick
He was the founder and CEO of Uber. Now, the way I met Travis is kind of interesting because Travis had just sold his company, Red Swoosh, to Akamai, this old CDN company.
There was an event called the TechCrunch 50. My friend Steve Poland was coming to San Francisco for the event.
Travis posted on Twitter back in the day, ‘If anybody needs a place to sleep, let me know. You can crash at my jam pad.’
Steve was one of those people, and it wasn’t until I was raising money for Flowtown that I reached back out to him because he was an investor.
He invited us to the jam pad, and then I realized who Travis was. There are some serious lessons that I learned by spending a lot of time with Travis that I want to share with you, which I know is the reason why Uber became what it became.
One is when you decide to build a business, go laser-focused. I mean, it was pretty much like a light switch. The moment that Travis took over as CEO of Uber, every relationship, every conversation, any other extracurricular activity, it all went to zero. I mean, he was an adviser to our company, but it went from almost daily, weekly communication to ‘We can’t get a hold of Travis.’
He dealt with the New York City mafia; he dealt with the politicians.
I mean, whether you agree or disagree with some of the tactics they used, the thing that I learned from Travis is that if you want to change the world, you have to be so freaking focused on one singular outcome that you have to be willing to sacrifice everything else.
Some people are just not willing to do that. Remember, I ran into him at an event at that point, probably four years after the start date of Uber. They had hired over 5,000 people, and I remember going, ‘Dude, how do you even do that?’ And he gave me some great advice.
He said, ‘Well, the truth is, I only have five direct reports, and I work through those five direct reports to execute. I just have to ask myself, do I have management bandwidth, and then my job is to make sure I have the right people. If I don’t, I’ve got to coach them up.’
To the degree that I learn to work through them, I can do things like hire 5,000 people. At one point, he was facing 50 years in jail; he was essentially violating all the taxi laws or whatever transportation laws. But he kept pushing.
When you asked him about it, he said, ‘I’m going to raise so much money that by the time I have to go to court, I’ll just hire the best lawyers to get me out of it and even change the laws to make sure that I don’t go to jail.’ That’s how creative and intense he was.
The fourth billionaire is Tobias Lütke.
He’s the founder of Shopify, an incredible story of growth and determination competing against one of the biggest companies in the world, Amazon. I met Toby online because he had built a product called Active Merchant.
We all used that, and we ran into each other through different circles. At one point, he actually invited me up to Ottawa to speak at one of their Fresh Founders events. I got to see Shopify go from a small team of 25-35 people to thousands of employees in their HQ.
This is the one thing that I got from Toby that every entrepreneur needs to hear that can transform their whole business. He applied software development principles to people development within a company.
Big companies on the tech side have a thing called DevOps, a department that’s dedicated to improving the efficiency of the engineering team, the developers.
What he did is he created engines of growth not only on the engineering side, which is world-class, but also in the HR side, the marketing side, the customer success side, and all these different departments within the business.
I mean, they were one of the first companies to hire executive coaches for their leadership team because he just felt like if everybody’s hiring the same people, the company that has the ability to support and unlock the creative and execution of their team is going to win.
That was such a huge idea that I’ve applied in every one of my companies.
Why do I keep telling people: we build the people, the people build the business. And if you apply that to your business, you’re going to unlock your talent. That’s what I learned from 100 hours with four billionaires.