Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / The Shame of Firing 20 People: Graeme Barlow's Entrepreneurial Journey

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The Shame of Firing 20 People: Graeme Barlow's Entrepreneurial Journey · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:00
  I have so much shame and I cannot be seen and I'm a fuck up and I'll just spend
• 0:05
  the rest of my life from now on trying to redeem all of this.
• 0:09
  It's one thing if you ever have to like let go of staff or change your team because
• 0:14
  of performance of how they're showing up.
• 0:15
  It's a very different thing when you have those conversations 'cause you fucked up.
• 0:19
  That sits with you.
• 0:19
  Wow. Okay.
• 0:25
  All right, Graham Barlow, welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
• 0:29
  Thanks, Dave. Excited to be here.
• 0:31
  Yes, sir. Excited to have you on the show.
• 0:34
  So, Graham, you are a serial entrepreneur and you have been for the last twenty plus
• 0:40
  years. You've you've sold four companies ~ and started and invested in many others.
• 0:46
  And and your first exit happened just after you got your driver's license,
• 0:50
  which is way earlier than most.
• 0:53
  ~ so just just to set the stage for our listeners,
• 0:57
  can you talk about your backstory and how you became an entrepreneur?
• 1:01
  Yeah, absolutely. I I got into entrepreneurship before I knew what that word meant
• 1:06
  or what it was even to build a company.
• 1:09
  We we got into it early, early days in 2000 when I was trying to justify playing
• 1:14
  way more video games as a kid.
• 1:16
  And so started selling items from different games we were playing on eBay.
• 1:20
  That led us to learning how to write basic bots,
• 1:23
  to building more bots, to ultimately in 2006,
• 1:27
  I think we were one of the largest.
• 1:29
  bot networks in the world, farming currency in every game imaginable at the time,
• 1:33
  from Neopets to Diablo 1, Diablo 2,
• 1:35
  World of Warcraft. And then yeah,
• 1:38
  managed to ~ squeeze an exit out of that near the end of 2006 for just under
• 1:44
  a million dollars. ~ split between the group of us was a pretty pretty crazy
• 1:48
  introduction into the world of entrepreneurship and building companies.
• 1:53
  And then from there
• 1:56
  Tried to go to school, tried to be an adult,
• 1:58
  kind of sucked at that. So started a bunch of things that didn't really go anywhere,
• 2:02
  and then ended up co-founding a company called Rocket Owl.
• 2:05
  We built games on Facebook at the height of Zynga and Farmville,
• 2:09
  and went through, I think, every extreme version of highs
• 2:14
  and lows of entrepreneurship you can imagine in a three-year period.
• 2:17
  We raised capital, that went crazy fast,
• 2:20
  struggled to get the game launched,
• 2:22
  that was a challenge.
• 2:23
  Then got launched, got featured by Facebook,
• 2:25
  got on the home page, our player base like 10X in 48 hours,
• 2:30
  which blew up every server we had,
• 2:31
  and we went down for a week. then went through the whole journey of like scaling
• 2:35
  the team up to about forty, ~ over a million players using the game,
• 2:39
  and then weren't able to sustain the growth that we wanted.
• 2:43
  So scaled the team from forty back to six,
• 2:45
  and then got an exit to private equity for a lot of the underlying technology that
• 2:49
  we had. So that was that
• 2:50
  was the
• 2:50
  A wild ride and ~ pretty good ego check.
• 2:54
  From there, spent a few years working with private equity to ~ run their early stage
• 2:59
  investment fund, co-founded a company called Pro Pet Software in the pet industry.
• 3:03
  I think dog walkers, daycares,
• 3:05
  groomers, that kind of stuff. ~ we've scaled that company to over five million
• 3:09
  customers globally. ~ and then about 10 years ago,
• 3:13
  joined as a partner in a custom software development company,
• 3:16
  scaled that to eight figures, doing everything from
• 3:20
  mobile healthcare solutions to augmented reality tooling for the NFL.
• 3:24
  It was pretty crazy ride. About three years ago,
• 3:28
  I got super frustrated with the state of entrepreneurial communities
• 3:32
  and loving the paid ones had been in all of them,
• 3:34
  hating the free ones. And so we started a free founder community called Founder
• 3:38
  Link. We host dinners all over the world every month to bring founders together
• 3:42
  to connect, share stories, and learn from each other.
• 3:45
  And around the same time, got super frustrated with all the kids I've seen
• 3:48
  pop up on TikTok offering coaching that had never built a company in their lives.
• 3:52
  So got involved a little bit in founder coaching.
• 3:55
  So today I split my time.
• 3:59
  I work very closely with Dan Martell at Martell Ventures.
• 4:02
  We oversee their AI portfolio for growth.
• 4:05
  I spend a day a week coaching high-growth founders in the kind of zero
• 4:09
  to a million and a million to ten million range.
• 4:12
  And then a day a week is focused on community building and board work.
• 4:16
  Okay. Wow. So ~ appreciate the high level intro there,
• 4:20
  and there's a whole lot to unpack.
• 4:22
  so let's just go go back to the beginning.
• 4:24
  So you you said that you became an entrepreneur before you even knew what it meant.
• 4:28
  And and you first started kind of selling products from video games
• 4:32
  to to justify all the the time that you spent gaming.
• 4:36
  So I mean you're like a a young kid,
• 4:39
  adolescent, right? Playing video games like many,
• 4:41
  and you just have this this desire to
• 4:45
  do some business, start a business,
• 4:46
  start selling stuff. So when that actually starts to take off,
• 4:49
  and right, you're you're doing this is like in the early days of eBay,
• 4:53
  sounds like, right? We're kind of th
• 4:53
  Yep. Yep. Early days of eBay,
• 4:56
  early early days of PayPal, early days of online where the concept that
• 5:01
  you would sell a digital thing of pixels and then like arrange a time
• 5:04
  to meet in game and hand it off was insane.
• 5:09
  Yeah. I mean so so when you start doing that and you're actually making
• 5:12
  now real money, I mean, what what's that like as a young kid that just
• 5:15
  had this crazy idea and just took action?
• 5:18
  a lot less like glamorous than it kind of feels like it should have been looking
• 5:22
  back on it, right? At the time,
• 5:25
  it was entirely a justification to play way more video games.
• 5:29
  And there really weren't particularly good rails,
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  especially if you were underage,
• 5:37
  to be able to move money from the internet to
• 5:41
  banks, especially in Canada. So like we had a bunch of money on the internet
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  and we were super rich internet money,
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  but it felt very constrained because there wasn't a whole lot we could
• 5:52
  do with it outside of that. And none of us were old enough to like actually
• 5:54
  tie it to bank accounts to pull it out.
• 5:57
  So it was a it was a weird time where we just got to be like super rich millionaires
• 6:01
  in every game that we were playing.
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  Like we were top of the charts for everything and got to bankroll guilds
• 6:06
  and things like that. But
• 6:09
  I would say it was not kind of the same as if you were killing it in
• 6:13
  e commerce or other things today.
• 6:16
  'Cause everyone is still figuring this stuff out.
• 6:18
  Okay. Wow. So I mean and at that time too,
• 6:20
  so you have the money, it's it's on it's in the platform,
• 6:23
  It's in different
• 6:23
  you can't really
• 6:24
  weird PayPal accounts that yeah,
• 6:27
  are not authenticated properly.
• 6:28
  It was it was there was there was a lot of shenanigans that goes into like thirteen
• 6:32
  year olds setting up PayPal on the internet at that time.
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  I mean, d did you tell your parents?
• 6:40
  They were aware we were doing stuff online and like I was able to show some
• 6:43
  of the value for it, but honestly it was spit a split across a group
• 6:47
  of like seven of us that were doing it together.
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  So like at any given one time,
• 6:51
  most of us were just using it to pump money back into buy other stuff
• 6:55
  we wanted in the games or buy more bots or buy more hardware.
• 6:58
  And so it was all consuming and that I spent all my time and all my life that
• 7:03
  I could online and dealing with this stuff,
• 7:06
  but it was not a huge
• 7:08
  Day to day thing.
• 7:09
  right. And so eventually that turns into building bots and that that ultimately
• 7:14
  resulted in your first exit. How did that all unfold?
• 7:17
  fun sequence of events in that around the same time there's a
• 7:22
  lot of change happening in the US around what cyber law was
• 7:25
  and what constituted cybercrime versus didn't.
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  And there's some gray area around like terms of service violations.
• 7:34
  There were a couple groups at the time that were selling bots from some
• 7:38
  of the big games. This was
• 7:39
  Starting to pop up in 2006 became a bigger thing in 07-08.
• 7:42
  And then and some question of like,
• 7:44
  could you face prison time for those things?
• 7:47
  Could the could there be criminal charges for doing this stuff?
• 7:49
  And so we were doing enough volume that we got a notice.
• 7:54
  We had enough accounts getting banned on a regular basis.
• 7:56
  We got notice that there was a cease and desist and they were looking
• 7:59
  at other actions that they could take against us.
• 8:02
  And we'd had a partnership with a Chinese company for
• 8:06
  Probably about a year at the time that was selling currency back into
• 8:09
  the North American market. And so we ended up reaching out and just been like,
• 8:12
  Hey, we think we're gonna shut everything down.
• 8:14
  Do you want our accounts? Do you want our code?
• 8:15
  Do you want our currency? We need out one transaction.
• 8:18
  Let's go. And cut a deal that way.
• 8:20
  And that was kind of the the extent of the exit was essentially a liquidation
• 8:23
  of the assets and moving on.
• 8:25
  All right. And so even even with that,
• 8:27
  you kinda get in some cease and desists and it looks like you could get
• 8:30
  in some real trouble. So you guys all decide to jump ship.
• 8:31
  Yeah. Run away.
• 8:35
  But but even liquidating what you had,
• 8:37
  right? You walked away with a nice chunk of money for a teenager.
• 8:41
  yeah. It was again, it was good money,
• 8:44
  but it was still tied to PayPal accounts that were questionably set up at the time.
• 8:49
  And so access to capital,
• 8:53
  access to the ability to do much with it other than just like keep cycling
• 8:57
  it and spending it on the internet,
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  ~ not super helpful. And like none of us knew anything about taxes or CRA
• 9:04
  or the IRS or any of that. So like
• 9:06
  It was run exactly how you expect a bunch of kids to run something that
• 9:10
  did not know they were doing a company or were doing anything.
• 9:12
  We were just doing stupid stuff on the internet.
• 9:14
  So it was it was great for building infinite confidence and infinite foundation
• 9:20
  for like this is cool. I literally did not know the word entrepreneurship until
• 9:25
  I got to university, got involved in an entrepreneurship group called Impact
• 9:29
  out of Waterloo, met other founders,
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  and I was like, ~ these are my people.
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  This is what I want to do.
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  This is literally up until that point,
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  I was like going into political science and I was gonna go get a
• 9:39
  job at the government. Like it was it had not landed at all that this
• 9:45
  was a thing you could actually do like long term.
• 10:23
  Yeah. So that's interesting, right?
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  Because you have this innate entrepreneurial spirit inside of you and
• 10:29
  you don't even know what it is,
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  but you're just acting out based,
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  you know, d following your your gut.
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  Yeah.
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  you do the college thing like so many are conditioned to do,
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  right? You're going down the political science route and then
• 10:41
  you meet other founders in university and then it dawns on you that this is a thing.
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  and and then you mentioned too,
• 10:47
  right, you started a bunch of things that didn't go anywhere before
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  you found your next success.
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  Yeah, so I had a bunch of ideas once I started meeting other people,
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  like what I wanted to build as the next unicorn.
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  And so ended up dropping out in my second semester to go found
• 11:02
  a company called Viewin'. And there was this whole plan behind it
• 11:05
  of like people would watch ads and every ad you watch got you a lottery ticket
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  and we do a million dollar lottery every month and like it was this whole thing.
• 11:12
  That kind of went nowhere after I spent a bunch of money trying to build it.
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  And because I'd never built software in any meaningful way.
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  pivoted that into a marketing company.
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  The marketing company got me a bunch of introductions.
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  Those introductions ultimately led to the group that founded Rocket Owl together.
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  And that was kind of the first time I was like,
• 11:29
  okay, this is a thing. I I think I was 20 when we raised our seed pre seed round
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  for Rocket Owl. ~ I was the youngest in the founding group by 20 years,
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  which is pretty cool. I get to learn from a bunch of incredible people.
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  And Rocket Owl the first real like adult company that we did that had
• 11:48
  incorporation and proper structure and cap table and employees
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  and learned so much. I would say the first year and a half,
• 11:57
  two years of that, I think I was fairly insufferable as a like cocky twenty
• 12:01
  something who had never lost. And then realizing that not everything goes
• 12:06
  up into the right forever was incredibly valuable.
• 12:08
  All right. So ev even before you get to Rocket Owl right,
• 12:11
  when you had that that first startup that it did it didn't work out,
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  right? Even at that
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  Yeah.
• 12:15
  time, right, were you discouraged?
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  do you ever think about giving up or were you just straight on to the next thing?
• 12:21
  ~ at that time, straight on to the next thing.
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  I would say around the end of Rocket Owl was a very,
• 12:29
  very, very dark period for me where I almost walked away from everything.
• 12:33
  There there have been a few phases in the entrepreneurial ~ journey where we've made
• 12:40
  either big bets or or just gone through very hard times where
• 12:44
  Part of me has been like, it would be so much easier to just like
• 12:47
  put blinders on and go have a job somewhere.
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  But yeah,
• 12:52
  it's never never been where I've landed.
• 12:55
  Okay. All right. so Rocket Owl is the one where you said you experienced
• 12:58
  all ends of the spectrum within a short period of time,
• 13:01
  right?
• 13:01
  The highs, the lows, right? Raised
• 13:01
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 13:03
  a bunch of money and then so w you said you realize not everything goes
• 13:07
  up and to the right forever. So when was the first time where things
• 13:10
  re like like shit really hit the fan?
• 13:13
  Yeah. Well, so we were kind of gaming,
• 13:17
  darling. Everything was going super well.
• 13:20
  We had a game that people were starting to really like,
• 13:23
  but the revenue from the game wasn't moving as fast as we wanted.
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  We refused to run ads, which in hindsight was stupid.
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  so to support that, we set up what was what would have been kind of
• 13:34
  a series A investment with a group of investors.
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  It had tranches to the investment that were coming in.
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  we bet heavily on like this investment's gonna make us give us everything
• 13:44
  we need to go forward. So like keep pushing high momentum,
• 13:47
  hire the people we need to do,
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  spend what we need to on ads. And then ultimately that investment fell through.
• 13:51
  they missed the first tranche payment,
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  but it just said they would double up on the second.
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  When it came to the second one,
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  they said ultimately their fund wasn't just placing money anymore
• 14:00
  and they were walking away. At that point.
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  I think we had all put in everything we possibly could from our own personal amount.
• 14:07
  We had asked staff to take pay reductions.
• 14:09
  We had skipped a payroll. We had done like all the things to extend
• 14:13
  and bridge and push that we could possibly do because we said this
• 14:17
  was coming and that was going to unlock the next step of growth.
• 14:19
  Standing in front of an entire team and sharing that you fucked up.
• 14:26
  And because of that, a lot of people are going to lose their jobs and
• 14:30
  you have to re-pivot.
• 14:32
  was a pretty humbling experience at 23.
• 14:35
  I think one of the hardest parts of that for me was at the time,
• 14:40
  my entire identity, my entire sense of self and who I was and what
• 14:46
  I was was tied directly to the balance sheet and the growth of Rocket
• 14:51
  Owl And so going through that and then having to reshape the narrative and then
• 14:56
  Figure how we could like find an exit for the technology that we
• 14:59
  had created and part of the game at a time when we had kind of crest
• 15:03
  it and mobile gaming was taking off and Facebook gaming wasn't,
• 15:06
  and we had built our whole stack on action script and flash.
• 15:09
  There's just a lot of things that landed at once.
• 15:10
  There was just like, my god, I am not who I thought I was,
• 15:16
  and this is not going the way I thought it would go.
• 15:19
  That was probably one of the most challenging experiences I've been through from
• 15:24
  a business perspective. And like we've done more like that since.
• 15:27
  we had a pretty rough experience in the Iversoft growth phase too,
• 15:32
  where we had gone really broad,
• 15:34
  we'd acquired a bunch of companies,
• 15:35
  we had a vision of like we were going to be the digital agency for everything,
• 15:39
  and then got a year into it. And
• 15:42
  realized we'd gone way too broad,
• 15:44
  we'd spread ourselves way too thin.
• 15:46
  And the right thing to do is gonna be refocus,
• 15:50
  get more disciplined, but as a result,
• 15:52
  we had to let go of 20 people and fire a bunch of clients and get leaner
• 15:57
  and more focused. Ultimately that was a great decision that ended up
• 16:00
  to like triple the business in 24 months.
• 16:03
  But those moments live with you forever when you make those decisions
• 16:08
  and it impacts people and
• 16:09
  It's one thing if you ever have to like let go of staff or change your team because
• 16:13
  of performance of how they're showing up.
• 16:16
  It's a very different thing when you have those conversations 'cause you fucked up.
• 16:19
  That sits with you.
• 16:20
  Wow. Okay.
• 16:21
  Yeah. So let's dig into that because that's ~ that's heavy.
• 16:25
  so first of all, you have this commitment from this this fund that they're gonna
• 16:29
  invest
• 16:30
  and you guys
• 16:30
  Yeah.
• 16:31
  are like tripling down, like this is gonna be it,
• 16:33
  this is what it's gonna do. So you you commit to more ads and and
• 16:37
  all those other expenses, and the the fund tells you the money's coming
• 16:42
  and the money doesn't come. ~
• 16:44
  Yeah.
• 16:44
  and then you guys put in everything you have.
• 16:47
  You like you say, you skip a payroll,
• 16:49
  which that's you know, you never like and how big was the staff at this time?
• 16:54
  Yeah.
• 16:55
  just under forty.
• 16:57
  Okay. All right. And then so even within the company,
• 17:00
  right? When that happens, they have to know like something is not right.
• 17:03
  we we we
• 17:04
  did it on all hands, we said, and like what the crazy and crushing part is
• 17:08
  we we had the conversation, we're like,
• 17:10
  Hey, here's here's where it is.
• 17:11
  If this doesn't make sense for you guys,
• 17:14
  like walk away. Like I we don't have an answer,
• 17:16
  but here's here's what we're planning to do.
• 17:18
  Every single person stayed. Every single person doubled down on the bet.
• 17:23
  right. So yeah.
• 17:23
  Which was hard when it doesn't work.
• 17:25
  Yeah. And then it still doesn't work.
• 17:27
  The money doesn't come. And then like you said,
• 17:30
  you're you're sitting in front of that whole group as a twenty three year old.
• 17:33
  So talk about like trial by fire and really gr growing up quick in business,
• 17:37
  right? Having
• 17:38
  Yeah.
• 17:38
  to tell all these you're probably younger than most of these people too,
• 17:41
  having to tell all them that, ~ yeah,
• 17:44
  I fucked up and that therefore you were you you were gonna have to let you go.
• 17:47
  So when that's happen like you said,
• 17:49
  your whole identity was tied to this business success and the balance sheet
• 17:53
  and this kind of what you had done previously.
• 17:55
  You said you're kinda cocky. Like when something like that happens and humbles you,
• 17:59
  like what's what's the mental conversation like?
• 18:03
  It's pretty dark to be honest.
• 18:05
  prior to that, so like say six months before that,
• 18:08
  I was on stages all the time, I was on panels all the time,
• 18:10
  I was talking to people, we were doing media stuff nonstop.
• 18:13
  After that conversation,
• 18:17
  I don't think I got on another stage for three years.
• 18:19
  I just disappeared from community events and everything,
• 18:25
  because it was just like
• 18:26
  I have so much shame and I cannot be seen and I'm a fuck up and I'll just spend
• 18:32
  the rest of my life from now on trying to redeem all of this.
• 18:36
  And like it was a rough ride navigating that.
• 18:41
  Even after getting to a outcome that was positive.
• 18:47
  The path back is rough. And a lot of the mental narrative is just like
• 18:52
  you should have made di different decisions.
• 18:54
  This is all on you. it's crazy because like one of my favorite things about Silicon
• 18:58
  Valley and the whole ecosystem around SF and the tech community there,
• 19:04
  which I've now been fortunate to spend a lot of time around,
• 19:06
  is like failure is celebrated,
• 19:08
  right? Failure is
• 19:10
  A positive because it moves you forward.
• 19:11
  You learn a lot more from your failures than you do from your successes.
• 19:14
  Having lived through a lot of failure,
• 19:16
  I can absolutely say that is true.
• 19:17
  I don't think we have a great version of that culture in Canada.
• 19:20
  And it's one of the things that we see in a lot of the tech ecosystems here
• 19:25
  is like if you miss your shot,
• 19:28
  there's kind of a sign of like,
• 19:29
  meh, you had you had a pass, you're kind of done.
• 19:32
  On to the next batch. And trying to reconcile
• 19:36
  that.
• 19:37
  in Ottawa at the time was hard.
• 19:39
  There's standouts and there's people that will still bet and believe,
• 19:42
  but as a as a culture and as a community,
• 19:46
  we're not great at it. We like to kind of paint people with a brush.
• 19:50
  Whereas like now, looking back,
• 19:52
  I infinitely prefer investing in second,
• 19:56
  third, fourth time founders because you've already spent the pain,
• 20:00
  misery, and suffering learning the
• 20:02
  Easy lessons the first few times around.
• 20:03
  So like the odds of success go up dramatically and the data backs us
• 20:08
  up of like second and third time founders are just better,
• 20:11
  well rounded founders than first time founders.
• 20:13
  There's always the like unicorn exceptions,
• 20:15
  but what you learn through that process is huge.
• 20:59
  All right. So look looking back at that whole process too,
• 21:02
  and like you said, it was a long road back and even when you got to like
• 21:06
  a positive state,
• 21:07
  right, almost the embarrassment
• 21:07
  Yeah.
• 21:08
  of what happened, right, really just kind of kept you kept you from getting
• 21:12
  on stages and wanting to be out there public.
• 21:14
  But when you look back at that whole experience,
• 21:16
  what's the most important lesson you you take from?
• 21:19
  Ooh, there are so many. and there's so many that I've pulled forward
• 21:24
  in how we operate companies today.
• 21:26
  One thing I'm really proud that we did is defaulting to transparency across
• 21:31
  the company. Like there are very few surprises for people in companies
• 21:36
  we get involved in because I I truly believe you built better teams with just open
• 21:40
  transparency. Where are financials at?
• 21:41
  Where's growth at? What's our cash at?
• 21:44
  Things like that, I think, go a very,
• 21:45
  very, very long way to building resilient teams that can weather crazy shit.
• 21:50
  One of the lessons that I pulled forward though is I run the financials
• 21:55
  of our companies very differently today.
• 21:57
  Probably not a surprise, but like much,
• 22:00
  much stronger discipline on how we run our P&L,
• 22:04
  how we monitor our cash flow. We went almost a year of operating Rocket
• 22:09
  Owl whereas like if we did not
• 22:11
  find enough revenue or grants or other things on a bi-weekly basis.
• 22:17
  Like we would meet payroll and we would immediately start the hunt of
• 22:20
  how do we close enough money or how do we find enough money to meet payroll
• 22:23
  in two weeks. And it was like a 10-day shot clock every single time.
• 22:26
  We did that for almost a year.
• 22:28
  And so a lot of what I took away from that is just how to better manage cash
• 22:35
  in companies, how to better manage ~ monetization.
• 22:39
  really quickly got over a lot of the hangups I'd had
• 22:41
  on different monetization models like display ads and interstitials
• 22:44
  in the gaming and mobile space are huge and undervalued.
• 22:48
  So it's a lot of the discipline,
• 22:51
  the communication, and how you choose whether or not a company
• 22:59
  should continue to bet. I'm I'm way better today and I've lived through
• 23:03
  way more experiences of like being more proactive that you don't overextend.
• 23:07
  You always have you can push pretty hard to the limit,
• 23:10
  but there's a point where you also reevaluate and restructure
• 23:13
  the company proactively that gives you more runway,
• 23:15
  more opportunity to kind of make big bets.
• 23:18
  And I say it often, but like when you're in fundraising mode
• 23:21
  The deal is not done until the cash is in the account.
• 23:23
  I don't care what's been signed.
• 23:24
  I don't care what people have promised you.
• 23:26
  Like you don't stop fundraising.
• 23:27
  You don't stop talking to your new investors.
• 23:29
  You don't stop taking term sheets until the actual cash is cleared.
• 23:31
  Because too often now, in 20 years since that or 15 years since then,
• 23:37
  I have seen companies die on payment terms and transfers and other things that just
• 23:41
  didn't happen. And I would love to say it's rare,
• 23:44
  but it's not as rare as it should be.
• 23:46
  Wow. Okay. Very, very important lesson.
• 23:48
  okay, and then you said you're an angel in what it was it fifty fifty plus
• 23:53
  companies?
• 23:55
  something between forty and fifty,
• 23:56
  yeah.
• 23:57
  Okay. How how important like 'cause you went through some some crazy stuff very
• 24:01
  early on in a business career,
• 24:03
  how important do you think that is to your success as an angel investor?
• 24:07
  so it's interesting. there's kind of two generations of angel stuff that
• 24:11
  I can look at in my own world and like one is like pre-coaching
• 24:14
  and one is post-coaching. Pre-coaching felt a lot more like gambling
• 24:18
  in the standard stuff like try and bet on the person.
• 24:22
  we've had a few that have gone super,
• 24:24
  super well. ~ the vast majority go nowhere.
• 24:28
  Once I started getting into more building community and more of the active coaching,
• 24:32
  I think almost every investment we've made in last 18 months,
• 24:35
  24 months has been into a company that we're actively involved in
• 24:38
  on a coaching side. And maybe not surprisingly,
• 24:41
  but like those have performed a lot better than everything else we've done
• 24:44
  in the past. And I think that's largely just due to having way deeper insight into
• 24:49
  the state of the business, the customers,
• 24:51
  the founders, the team.
• 24:52
  And making more informed decisions than what you can get to in
• 24:56
  a typical diligence cycle of like two to four weeks.
• 24:59
  and what's been helpful is when you have a bit more of an active relationship
• 25:04
  is like being able to share lessons learned and share here are the land mines
• 25:09
  to watch out for. Here's what I've learned.
• 25:11
  scaling a product company, selling a services company,
• 25:13
  scaling a SaaS company. Like there's a there's a lot of things that we have
• 25:17
  run face first into that is helpful to be able to help others avoid at this point.
• 25:21
  Okay. Wow. So that's that's interesting.
• 25:23
  So now since you've been doing the coaching,
• 25:25
  vast majority of your investments are to companies that you're actively involved
• 25:29
  in coaching. So therefore, not only do you have much deeper insight into
• 25:34
  who the founder is, what the real challenges are,
• 25:37
  what the real state of the company is,
• 25:38
  but then you actually can pull these different levers and and use your
• 25:43
  own expertise to impact the success of the company through your coaching.
• 25:49
  Okay. And then I I take it you've seen a dramatic ~ increase in
• 25:53
  the results since since that switching that model?
• 25:56
  Yeah, it's been like keep on the timeline on a lot a lot of this stuff
• 26:00
  is like seven to ten years. So it's hard it's hard to call the shots on
• 26:03
  all of this at this point, but like for where the state of the investments are at,
• 26:08
  where the state of the companies are at,
• 26:09
  it is noticeably improved since we we shifted
• 26:14
  to primarily investing in companies that were kind of actively involved
• 26:18
  in in coaching and supporting.
• 26:20
  All right. So as you mentioned,
• 26:21
  you've been an entrepreneur and in this space and active in business
• 26:24
  for twenty it was it twenty seven years,
• 26:27
  some something like that. Okay.
• 26:28
  Unfortunately, yes.
• 26:30
  So
• 26:30
  so if at this point in your career,
• 26:32
  right, with with this the successes that you've had and and what you've built
• 26:36
  and and kind of what you're doing now,
• 26:38
  what excites you most about being in business today?
• 26:41
  I think right now is one of the most exciting times we've ever seen
• 26:45
  to build a company. Like the amount of impact you can have and the speed
• 26:47
  you can do it is absolutely insane.
• 26:50
  I also think entrepreneurship and business is kind of the
• 26:53
  the single greatest personal development path you can go on in life,
• 26:57
  because nothing will be more humbling than trying to scale a company
• 27:01
  or a product against the whole planet.
• 27:03
  I love the community. I love being able to work with people who
• 27:07
  are ambitious and exciting. I mean
• 27:09
  through the community, there's something we do a couple of times a month.
• 27:11
  We open our whole home to founder drop in and we just have people come here
• 27:16
  and co work. We've got one going on today.
• 27:17
  I'm just seeing people ~ come by and drop in.
• 27:21
  But like the community and the ambition of people that want to build
• 27:24
  is probably the most fun I have in this space.
• 27:27
  We set a pretty ambitious goal when we launched Founderlink as the community,
• 27:32
  which was to help a thousand founders hit their first million in revenue.
• 27:35
  And we're actively tracking it,
• 27:37
  we're pushing towards that metric.
• 27:38
  And the idea there is if we do that,
• 27:41
  the community will have helped generate a billion dollars of economic activity
• 27:44
  for people. And I think that would be a pretty cool story,
• 27:49
  legacy impact to be a major contributing factor for.
• 27:53
  And how'd you get involved in working with Dan Martell?
• 27:55
  so many different paths. When we launched ProPet Software 15 years ago,
• 28:00
  my team applied for a social media contest that Dan was running
• 28:05
  on Clarity.fm when he launched that.
• 28:07
  We won. And that got us time with Dan as a growth advisor way back when.
• 28:13
  since then, we've kind of been in and out of each other's world at different times.
• 28:17
  When he launched his elite coaching program.
• 28:20
  four years ago, I was in a stage where I was really looking
• 28:23
  for some different support on how to scale and what we could do at Hiversoft
• 28:28
  at the time to kind of go to the next level.
• 28:30
  We got connected through that.
• 28:31
  He was the one that pushed me to get into the coaching because
• 28:34
  I was complaining about how stupid the coaches were on the internet.
• 28:36
  and so kind of just re-ignited a lot of the like friendship and back and forth then.
• 28:42
  And then he reached out a couple months ago when they've been running like crazy
• 28:46
  at this Martel Ventures portfolio of companies and said,
• 28:49
  Hey, we're looking for some support.
• 28:51
  We got a lot of companies going fast.
• 28:52
  They need some they need more hands on support for helping scale their teams,
• 28:58
  helping scale their go to market and figure stuff out.
• 29:00
  Are you interested in coming to partner?
• 29:01
  I said, We'll see. Ended up spending a bunch of time in Kelowna and yeah,
• 29:05
  been building together since, which has been awesome.
• 29:07
  Okay. Awesome. All right. And so Graham,
• 29:10
  when you look back at kind of this whole journey from starting as a kid,
• 29:13
  not even knowing what you're doing,
• 29:15
  just just that you're doing it and this whole evolution of you as a founder,
• 29:19
  as an entrepreneur, and all these crazy ups and downs you've had
• 29:22
  and and then winding up where you are with so much success.
• 29:25
  ~ looking back at your whole journey,
• 29:27
  what's been the best part of it for you?
• 29:29
  This will be kind of the cheesy answer,
• 29:31
  but like the best part is the community,
• 29:35
  friends, and social ecosystem we've created along the way.
• 29:38
  it's kind of insane to look back on,
• 29:41
  but after doing this for two and a half decades,
• 29:43
  like the amount of friends that I have that have done insane things,
• 29:47
  that have done unicorn companies,
• 29:49
  that have created products and things that have genuinely like changed
• 29:54
  the world in some way. And
• 29:57
  being able to on any given weekday hang out with a room full of people that
• 30:02
  are all inspiring and all challenging each other to do the next thing
• 30:05
  and have a bigger impact and supportive kind of no matter what has been incredible.
• 30:12
  it's a little bit like seeing behind the matrix,
• 30:15
  right? once you understand what's possible for scale,
• 30:17
  for ambition, for kind of finance
• 30:21
  it really, really, really changes how you view the world.
• 30:25
  just consider it such a like privilege and cool opportunity to be able
• 30:30
  to get to hang out with people that inspire me every day and be part
• 30:35
  of a community that is building better stuff for the future.
• 30:38
  Love that. Okay. And Graham, if people want to find out more about your coaching,
• 30:42
  about your your founders group or or the other work that you're doing,
• 30:45
  what's the best way people can find you online?
• 30:48
  Yeah, ~ everything is at Graham Barlow dot com,
• 30:51
  G-R-A-E-M-E, Barlow.com or Founderlink.com.
• 30:55
  ~ I'm Graham Barlow on every single social platform ~ and honestly just spend
• 31:00
  a lot of my time connecting with incredible people.
• 31:03
  So would love to connect with more people.
• 31:06
  We have a incredible bank of free resources inside of Founderlink.
• 31:12
  Literally every financial template,
• 31:14
  growth template, go to market template we have created for any one
• 31:17
  of our companies is accessible there for anyone in the community.
• 31:20
  We host a open coaching call every single month for all community members.
• 31:26
  So if you're stuck, if you're struggling,
• 31:28
  if you have big questions on what you want to do next and you're scaling anywhere
• 31:31
  from zero to ten million in revenue,
• 31:33
  would love to see people in the community.
• 31:35
  ~ application is pretty straightforward at founderlink.com.
• 31:39
  And we will link all that in the show notes for everyone.
• 31:40
  All right. Well, Graham,
• 31:41
  Amazing.
• 31:42
  thank you so much for taking the time to be here and sharing
• 31:45
  all this incredible wisdom from your journey with our listeners.
• 31:48
  We greatly appreciate it.
• 31:49
  Thanks, Dave.