Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Ronnen Harary - Spin Master Co-Founder & Chairman | How Two Friends With Zero Business Experience Built a $2.2B Toy Empire

Transcript

Ronnen Harary - Spin Master Co-Founder & Chairman | How Two Friends With Zero Business Experience Built a $2.2B Toy Empire · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  Advice for people that are young and feel like taking risk, it's something completely against what their parents wanted them to do. So how do you get over that well-meaning but limiting sort of belief system? It's easier to game out the downside than it is to imagine the upside. We all know the negative, what could happen when you're taking a risk. Question is, do you want to miss out on the screenplay of your life by not taking that step?
• 0:21
  As long as you're enjoying what you're failing at, it's okay. And you're still building up a whole body of knowledge at the same time. Today's guest is Ronan Harari, co-founder of Spin Master. He started the company with two friends and $10,000 with no prior experience in business or toys. Spin Master grew into a publicly traded company, generating billions of dollars in sales. Harari's new book, No Experience Necessary, outlines his approach to building a business without relying on market research or industry background.
• 0:49
  The entrepreneurs that I look up to, I could find stories like that in almost every single entrepreneur's journey. Really, really not great stuff in the moment happened. Gone the rebound from that, the learning, the lesson, it turned into something exceptionally positive. Learning luck, actually. You need to look at it as a lucky thing that's happened to you. You're lucky that you had the experience and you're going to do something with the experience afterwards. And so you're lucky to get something imprinted in you. You're going to grow from the imprint.
• 1:15
  My fitness pal is a success story partner. Now here's something I've noticed after interviewing hundreds of founders, the ones that are performing at the highest level, the ones that are truly winning, they aren't just optimizing their business or their calendar or their team, they're paying attention to what they eat. And the ones who aren't paying attention, they're usually the first ones to burn out. And that pattern is consistent enough that it got me thinking about my own nutrition,
• 1:35
  Not whether I was eating well, but whether I actually knew what the big picture looked like. That's why I started using the MyFitnessPal app. I wanted to see what I was actually eating, not what I assumed I was eating, but the real numbers, what my protein intake looked like, what my macronutrient breakdown was, where my calories were actually going throughout the day. And the app gives you all of that. Now, what kept me using it is that there's zero friction.
• 1:57
  If I eat something, I scan the barcode, it pulls everything up. I can also verbally log what I eat. And it remembers my regular meals. So most days I'm logging my food in under a minute. See, food is a foundation for your energy, your sleep, your recovery, and your performance. It's not one of many inputs. It is the one input. So go to podcast.myfitnesspal.com and use code Scott. All uppercades for 15% off MyFitnessPal Premium. That's podcast.myfitnesspal.com, code Scott.
• 2:29
  Renan, why is inexperience an asset? No experience? Is that what you're saying? No experience. No experience. I think that there's a wonderful thing in sometimes the power of not knowing. And sometimes we over-intellectualize things. And when you don't know so much, but you're... When you don't know, you actually defer more to your body and to your intuition and your own internal knowing that it feels right. And when something feels right, it's like...
• 2:57
  It's an amazing source of energy to draw on. And you can actually do amazing things and bring amazing things into the world. I find it interesting. The title of the book is No Experience Necessary.
• 3:13
  Every investor is looking for the second time founder or what are they teaching in business school? You've got to go and do the thing and learn how to do it and break a few things before you can actually become successful at it. What made this such an important idea for you in your journey? The no experience is the X factor or the advantage.
• 3:33
  Well, you know, when I hit middle age and I started to reflect back on my 20s, and so we started our business when we were 23 years old, and I was really thinking about what that decade was like for me and all the magical things that occurred. And with hindsight and being able to look back, I was like, there were so many amazing things that happened. Everybody was rooting for us. People gave us better payment terms. When we started our first year of business, our payment terms were receivables were net 20,
• 4:02
  And our payables were net 90. So we had like 70 days of free cash flow. And the only reason why we had it was because we were super young and everybody wanted us to succeed.
• 4:11
  We were like sponges back in the day. We'd ask people for tons of meetings, and we'd go to every trade show. And any time we got an audience, we would take it. I remember the late Alan Hassenfeld, who was one of the founders of Hasbro. We'd call him up, and we'd ask him questions. And he was so gracious with his time. And we were 25 years old. And I think if I called him when I was 35 or 40, he probably wouldn't have given us as much time.
• 4:36
  But he was like, these guys are 25 years old and I love the toy industry and these guys are going into the toy industry and I want to help them. And he didn't see us as competition. And so, you know, when you're, so looking back, I was like, what are the things that helped us get the plane off the ground? And a lot of it was being in our 20s and being super passionate and wanting to birth something and bring something out into the world. And people just recognized our passion. Yeah.
• 5:04
  So do you think people, you know, you work with a ton of founders, and I'm sure they all ask for advice, and they are the inexperienced 20 to 25 year old. Do you feel like people wait too long to get started? Are they sort of hesitant because they haven't done it yet? They feel like they need to do something and validate their own skill set before they build a business, for example.
• 5:26
  I think it's personal to everybody. And everybody's got their own path. Everybody's got their own journey. And everybody's got their own time. I think that I'm just passionate about if you...
• 5:36
  If you have an idea, not if you have an idea, if you want to do something. Like for us, we didn't have the idea for our first product, but we decided that we wanted to be in business for ourselves. So we made that decision, and then the idea came to us afterwards. So I encourage people, if you have a certain career path or a certain pursuit that you want to do, especially around opening a business, then...
• 5:59
  and you have that internal knowing, then try to listen to yourself. And the challenge in society that we live in is your parents tell you to do certain things, society tells you to do certain things, and then you end up doubting yourself. And doubt is the anti-luck. And then you start to freeze. And then once you freeze, then that energy dissipates. And then you take a different track.
• 6:20
  And so I think that internal knowing could come in different points in your life. It could come in your 20s, it could come in your 30s, it could come in your 40s. But if you do have it in your 20s, it's such an incredible decade to seize on it because you have so much energy that you have to apply to it. You have like three times the amount of energy that you have than a person in middle age. And then you're going to allocate this incredible decade. Do you want it to accrue to you or do you want it to accrue to someone else?
• 6:47
  Do you want the equity? Do you want, you have a moment in time where you want to do something. And then do you want that equity to be, do you want to rent your time or do you want to own your time? And so it's all around taking advantages of those things.
• 7:02
  insights and opportunities that come to you in that moment and not letting them pass you by. There's so much wisdom there. One idea that you touched on that I wanted to ask how you sort of wrestled with this idea. When you're young, you have the most energy and this is the time for you to build and try and fail, et cetera, et cetera.
• 7:21
  But a lot of your belief system is tied to what your parents believed or what your teachers believed. And this is the biggest issue is that this is like implanted in your subconscious from like a very young age. And as you get older, hopefully you can figure out like what life you want to live. So the opportunity when you're young, usually that's clouded by the fact that all these different opinions about how you should live your life are so recent and so new and so strongly embedded.
• 7:47
  So maybe speak a little bit about how you gravitated towards building your own thing, but also just advice for people that are young and feel like building the business, taking risk. It's something completely against what their parents wanted them to do. Because I'm speaking from even personal experience, right? My parents always wanted the best for me, but they didn't know entrepreneurship. Worked for the government in Ottawa. So how do you get over that issue?
• 8:12
  Well-meaning but limiting sort of belief system that your parents deploy into you. It is, I keep on coming back to your own internal knowing. And, you know, I wrote this book to be a supportive parent.
• 8:27
  to people that are asking themselves that question and to create discussion with your parents or create discussion with people around you around these types of topics. So you can actually toss it out. And it's funny, because in so many families, there's so many unsaid. So it's better to not have the unsaid. And I encourage people to just use the book to create conversation and dialogue around these different things. And then you'll be able to
• 8:54
  figure things out. But I think for myself, you know, I was...
• 8:59
  you know, fortunate and unfortunate, I knew from a very early age that I wanted to be in business for myself. And when I was 10 years old, I got identified with a learning disability called dysgraphia. And dysgraphia is the inability to get your thoughts out through your hands. And so my handwriting is like atrocious. And people are like, oh, you know, you write like a doctor. And I'm like, no, it's not like a doctor at all, okay? This is something completely different. And it took me
• 9:25
  two hours to do an exam that took people one hour to do. Took me eight hours when I was in, you know, doing some undergrad business classes. When I took my classmates four hours. And as a result of that, I felt that my options were limited.
• 9:42
  And I knew that I wouldn't grow up to be a doctor or a lawyer because I just didn't have the academics. So I kind of set my sights on business from a very young age. Plus, I was a very curious child, and I loved reading the business section. And my parents were entrepreneurs. And that was my discussion in the house was business. And my parents took lots of risks as being immigrants to Canada and having to find their way and not being able to take the conventional route. So...
• 10:10
  It's funny that you bring it up. It's like, it is a lot about your environment. And my environment definitely... It's conducive to entrepreneurship. It was conducive to entrepreneurship because it didn't have a lot of options. And sometimes having less options gives you a clearer path because you don't have the other ones. But I think that there's a lot of people that do have the options. And having too many options sometimes makes it difficult to make a decision. So...
• 10:39
  I don't necessarily have the direct answer to your question other than at the end of the day, it's your decision to make and it's your life to live. And it's easier, you know, I write in the book about a chapter called the inverse risk. It's easier to game out the downside
• 10:57
  than it is to imagine the upside. We all know the negative, what could happen when you're taking a risk, right? You started your podcasting, and no one's going to watch it, no one's going to listen to you, you know, like, and you're going to get bad reviews, et cetera, et cetera. But I bet you didn't imagine, you probably couldn't imagine what has happened to you since you've actually started in the last five years. And so I don't think we're built to actually...
• 11:20
  let our imagination run wild like that. With the upside. With the upside. Yeah. So the question is, do you want to miss out on the screenplay of your life by not taking that step? And even if you fail, you know, you'll learn along the way. And then you'll learn, you know, I think a lot about like...
• 11:40
  You know, as long as you're enjoying what you're failing at, it's okay. And you're still building up a whole body of knowledge at the same time. Were there any moments when you were first starting out? And I'm sure it's a silly question because there's always moments. But think about moments when you really doubted what you were doing.
• 11:57
  Because that's the hurdle that people have to go sort of get over, right? It's easy to say, it's very easy to say, you know, imagine the potential, imagine the upside. Hindsight's always 20-20 looking back. It's so obvious. You can see all the different things you've done to get to where you are. But when you're first starting out at anything with no experience, with no role models who are entrepreneurs for the majority of people,
• 12:23
  it's very easy to see the downside. It's very easy to get hung up on things that don't work out. It's very easy to, you know, call it quits when you're year two or year three into this thing and you're not making the money that you want to be making. So just for that person who's starting out with no experience, they took a bet on themselves. How do they get over the mental hurdles of like shitty stuff that is inevitably going to happen to them on the road to building an incredible company?
• 12:49
  Well, building an incredible company is not easy. It's not an easy path. It's a long path. And I encourage people to look over a 10-year period of time, a 20-year period of time, a long arc. And especially when you look at, like, your earning potential, you'll earn much more in year 15, 20 than you do at the beginning. And so you kind of have to divide your earnings backwards. But I think that's...
• 13:16
  Again, as long as you're passionate about what you're doing, and even if you're not getting there as fast as you want, you're accruing a body of knowledge, and it's going to happen for you. You're in the doing, and you're making your own luck. I would say that for us, we've missed on opportunities, and...
• 13:40
  And then good things happen afterwards. So I'll never forget, I started going to Japan. And Japan's the second biggest toy market in the world. And so we started going to Japan looking for ideas. And I got presented Beyblade. I don't know if you remember Beyblade when you were a kid. I got presented Beyblade when I was a kid. I mean, when you were a kid.
• 14:06
  And Takara Tomi showed it to me and I took it back to the guys. And they were like, spinning top, yeah, spinning tops, they're old, they're not going to do really well. So I called up Takara Tomi, I told them, you know, we're going to pass on it. I came back to Japan six months later. I said, what's happening with it? I'm just curious, how's it going? They said, it's going great, we're creating a whole TV show around it. And I was like, wow, that's unbelievable. Like, can we do it? And they're like, no, we just signed a deal with Hasbro. And I'm like,
• 14:32
  Well, why don't you call me and tell me you're doing a TV show? Because, like, selling a car without tires, like, there's this whole other aspect to it. And they were like, we did the deal with Hasbro. It's done. And that went on to become this multibillion-dollar franchise. Yeah.
• 14:47
  And that was really hard for us to, like, miss that opportunity. I was like, wow, we missed hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of toy sales. And then six years later, we had our own opportunity to do our version of Beyblade, which we call Bakugan. Mm-hmm.
• 15:03
  which was brought to us by this 23-year-old toy inventor. It was his first invention ever in his life, and he had this idea to put this action figure in a marble. And we developed it to certain points, and our development was like so-so. So I went back to Japan, and I pitched all these toy companies. And Mr. Kokobun, who didn't speak a stitch of English, and he was running Sega Toys at the time, he said, I see it.
• 15:28
  We'll partner with you. Come back in three months. Came back in three months, and he added this whole magical pop-open transformation element to the ball. And so it would transform different characters, different monsters. And you'd roll it onto a card, and you would battle together. You'd land it on the card. I'd land it on the card. Then you'd flip the card over, and it had the whole point-scoring system. And it was the most magical toy. It had the incredible feedback. It was the most magical toy.
• 15:54
  And then I said to him, how about doing a TV show? And he said, it's going to cost $12 million. Do you have six? And I was like, that's a lot of money. I'll get back to you. I took three months, and then I came back to him. And I came back to him like, OK, we're in. And we created the show together. We sold to Cartoon Network. And it went on to air in 150 countries around the world. We had four seasons, and Bakugan became a billion-dollar franchise.
• 16:24
  And so, you know, if we would have stopped and really gotten down on ourselves, we'd
• 16:32
  then we would have never gotten to Bakugan. So we learned a lot about, you know, we became students in terms of, like, how TV shows get made. We started going to MIPCOM in France, and we started to really go up the learning curve of children's TV shows. But it was that big missed opportunity that...
• 16:56
  gave us the energy to like make it ourselves the next time. So it was the opportunity that you missed that was actually the silver lining that allowed you to learn about it and then do it successfully. Correct. And it worked out better because, you know, Buckle Gun's owned by Spin Master. And Dayblade, we would have been the toy licensee, even though I would have liked to have both. But I don't think Buckle Gun would have ever been born.
• 17:18
  Without the miss, without the passing. I think that that's, you know, all the negative things that have sort of happened in my career and my building this podcast, they've all been positives in the long run. Like every time, you know, an interview hasn't gone as well as I'd wanted it to, like teaches me how to be a better interviewer every time.
• 17:38
  you know, um, an episode doesn't go as well, you know, doesn't get the, the reach or the viewership. You're like, now it's something to study and to figure out, right? Everything is a, everything is a lesson. And I think that that's something that if I look at, um,
• 17:52
  the entrepreneurs that I look up to, the people that are the most successful, like yourself included, like that story, I could find stories like that in almost every single entrepreneur's journey of like really, really not great stuff in the moment happened. But then like on the rebound from that, the learning, like the learning, the lesson, it turned into something exceptionally positive. Yeah. It's learning luck, actually. You need to look at it as a lucky thing that's happened to you. Explain learning luck. It doesn't seem lucky because you're, because you're,
• 18:21
  you're lucky that you had the experience and you're going to do something with the experience afterwards. Right. And so you, it's, it's not an intellectual pursuit. You didn't read in a book, you'd read in a magazine, you didn't even hear it on a podcast. Like it happened to you. And, and that, that visceral feeling like of passing on something that became so big, like that was, that was imprinted in me. And so you're lucky to get something imprinted in you. Right. Because you're going to like, you're, you're going to grow from the imprint. Right.
• 18:48
  It's in the body. It's deep inside you. Yeah, you don't make the mistake again. Yeah, and you're constantly like, you'll make different mistakes. But that particular one, you're going to get redemption if you stay in the game long enough. My business partner, Ben, there's three of us. And Ben has a saying. He's like, don't bet the farm, stay in the game. And if you stay in the game long enough, good things happen. And that's been our whole mantra. Our company probably, it could have been 10x the size.
• 19:17
  if we would have taken more risks, but we were very measured and calculative in terms of what we did along the way. We never bet the farm. And that was very intentional for us. It's interesting. Now that we're sort of unpacking this idea of needing to experience
• 19:34
  you know, wins and losses to build anything great. Experience the way that most people describe it, like experience like, you know, reading from a book or working in a company and experience almost means nothing. That type of experience when it comes to building a business or taking, like, because if you think about,
• 19:55
  like a Stanford MBA. Well, they can learn every single case study and business scenario ever, but they didn't live it. They didn't go through it themselves. So they just spent years and years and years preparing, but then they're still gonna make the same mistakes and they're still gonna have to experience it themselves to actually learn the lesson. So...
• 20:15
  no experience necessary, it's almost like, well, that's the only way you'll ever start. Whether or not you think you have experience, you actually don't until you actually do the thing. Correct. The no experience is actually permission. It's permission to start. It's giving yourself the permission. Yeah. So just the point is like, just don't delay. Don't wait. You'll never be, you'll never have the level of skill or aptitude or whatever that you think you need to have. So why not just start when you're 20? For sure.
• 20:44
  When you started Spin Master, you did no research. You didn't run any focus groups. So your core thesis was toys are a feel industry, not a data industry. You can't consult yourself in a creative business. Does this idea... I want you to unpack that idea a little bit. Does this idea...
• 21:05
  only work in creative industries, or does this idea work in other industries? This idea of getting into it, doing things, taking action, and that's sort of like your feedback loop. Yeah, I think instinct is applicable to all industries, right, and having an instinct and a sense for what's happening in your industry and what's happening around you, and being able to triangulate a lot of data points is relevant and common to a lot of industries.
• 21:35
  When a creative industry like toys or TV shows, I think goes even a little bit deeper because everything we make, we don't finish the product and then show it to the kids. Right? We have a rough prototype. The prototype doesn't necessarily work. And so you can't get really good feedback from kids from that. So you have to use...
• 21:58
  your intuition and, and you have to use another form of knowing. So I consider our business like an art and science together. And the science part is, you know, you need to know the history of the toys that have come in the past, how well they done, what do they do, how they sell, why didn't they do well, you have to know currently what's in the marketplace from a competition perspective. And then you have to have an understanding of like the zeitgeist and what's, what's out there. And what's the white space, you know, in terms of like,
• 22:26
  What's going unattended to? And then marry that with
• 22:32
  Is there some piece of magic or pixie dust in the product? Is there something there that just gives you this excited feeling I'll share with you? Our third product was the Air Hogs, which is an air pressure plane. And we brought it out in the 90s. You pump it up and you get a flight for 45 seconds. And back in the day, you'd only have Balsa wind-up planes in the 90s. It's not like today when you have these incredible drones. It's more fun growing up today.
• 22:56
  And you or you'd have a gas power plane, like a Cox plane, and it would fly once and usually break or take your finger off. Those were the options. And so we got presented the Sky Shark. It came to us by the two British inventors, John Dixon and Peter Manning. And we went to the park. We flew it.
• 23:17
  And all I wanted to do was run like a seven-year-old kid, pick up the plane, and fly it again. It was like, it was wonder, just watching the circle going around and around and around and around. And then like, where is it going to land? And I was, and then I go chase it. And I just wanted to do it again. Then Ben wanted to do it again. Then the inventors got up. They were like, listen, this prototype, take it easy, guys. So I'm thinking to myself, okay, if a 25-year-old guy is getting excited, could you imagine a 10-year-old kid or a seven-year-old kid?
• 23:45
  And so that's what it was. You're looking for that feeling.
• 23:49
  And there was just that magical feeling of wonder and wow in that particular product. And that's what you're looking for all the time to the difference maker. I was gonna, no, because for somebody who's in like a creative field, where a lot of creatives start, like television, podcasting, whatever it is, they copy what exists already. And I think that that's, I don't know, maybe it's a safe place to start, but I don't know if it builds a business that really stands out.
• 24:19
  Yeah, so you conjured up two thoughts in my mind. One is the toy business is actually a very iterative process. So it's building on what's come before it. But you're always looking to add something new and different. And the craziest thing is kids, they always know if there's something new or different that was added.
• 24:38
  Okay, even if they're new to the world and a product from five years ago is new to them, they still know it's old. It's the strangest thing ever. I don't know how that works. But the kids just have incredible antennas. And so there's that aspect to it. And I lost my train of thought.
• 25:02
  No, you're good. So I was just saying, as a creative, like a lot of us, we just copy what exists already. But then you're saying— What I was going to say to you is one of the mantras that we—thank you—was that we made a decision in our company is that we want to design and develop our own products from scratch. We want to own the IP. We want to own the intellectual property for them. And we want to make history.
• 25:25
  So that was our driving motto with everything that we decided to allocate capital to and bring into the world. And that was the thesis? That was our thesis, yeah. It was just a very broad thesis. We also said we want to stay in kids and we want to grow the company as big as possible. And that was it. We didn't box ourselves in. We didn't make any claims. And whatever we could fill it in with, we did.
• 25:47
  Bringing it back to when you first started Spin Master, you said you wanted to be an entrepreneur always. That was sort of like what was ingrained in you. What was the inflection point that got you so excited about toys? And it was like, this is what I gotta commit my life to. The irony is that if you were asked me in university, if I ever thought about going into the toy business, it never crossed my mind once.
• 26:18
  And maybe it was the fact that he didn't grow up with a lot of toys. I'm trying to fulfill, uh, you know, a lost childhood in a way, but, um, no, we, our second product was devil sticks. And, um,
• 26:33
  we had distribution into 2,000 retailers. And then Ben, who was living with Jen Irwin, which was daughter of the most famous Canadian toy company at the time, they gave us this list of toy inventors and said, here, here's 200 inventors. Go at it and see what ideas you can get from them. And so we just kind of put it together. It was like...
• 26:58
  Devil Six sold a million and a half pieces. We had distribution of Toys R Us and KB Toys. And then we had this inventor list. And we were like, well, let's just go down this road for a little bit longer and see what we can do. And then we got the Air Hogs, and that did really well for us. And both my business partners are...
• 27:14
  students of Ivy Business School. And at business school, they teach you, stick to your knitting when it's working, stick to your core competency. And that was becoming our core competency, and it was working for us. And the irony of the whole thing is, I grew up when the internet was starting, and it was like dial up and.
• 27:33
  And I could feel the tech was the direction to go in. Like that's where the zeitgeist was really moving. But toys were working for us, and we stayed with what was working. And it was also very... It was very commensurate to our skill set and where we were in our journey as entrepreneurs. And it was very age-appropriate for us at that moment in time. And I think that's an important thing. It's like...
• 27:59
  We were able to build the company one product at a time, and we weren't thinking like, we need to be this big company straight away. No, you were like, next win and next win. One at a time.
• 28:15
  It enabled us to not overthink things and almost do it as projects while we were actually building out a foundation for a business. Air Hogs, that was $35 million in 1998. Was that the first mass market success? We were super lucky. Our first product was called Earth Buddies, and we did $3.5 million in sales that year. Out of the gate first product? Out of the gate first product, yeah.
• 28:39
  I mean, it's like for context, it's very rare to have like the first thing that you ever launched be incredibly successful. But I mean, like sometimes I'll say this too. Early wins can sometimes make you think that you are better than you are. And that can actually hurt you long term if you don't understand sort of your own like not deficiencies, but like.
• 29:01
  If there's a little bit of luck involved in that, and you can make your own luck, but a little bit of luck involved, and you had this home run right out of the gate, maybe the next time it doesn't work as well. You're 100% right. When we did Bakugan, we went from $450 million in sales to $900 million in sales in two years. And then two years later, we went back to $450 million in sales. And we had to let go of 350 people in the business for restructuring, restructures, restructures.
• 29:31
  put capital back into the business. We lost money for 24 months. I saw brackets for the first time, okay? And for 16 years, we had growth, and we were profitable as a company. And then for years 17 and 18, I call it the teenage years. It was like basically when our kids were like out getting high, smoking pot, and not managing the business. But to your point, it's like we...
• 29:56
  In all seriousness, we believed that everything we did was going to turn to gold. And we had so much hubris at that moment in time. Like all the product we put out, we were like putting out so many products and we thought they'd all be successful. And it didn't happen. And so when Bakugan went down in sales, all the new products that were coming to the market, they didn't hit. And so there was nothing to reinforce the sales. What was the thing that now looking back you should have paid attention to that you didn't? Well, one is don't grow so fast.
• 30:26
  Don't hire into your sales when the sales are spiking like this. Two is be as judicious as you were before about the products that you were actually putting into the marketplace. And make sure that you have a super wide funnel of options. Because the more narrow your options are in terms of products, then you let –
• 30:47
  You need the revenue, so then you're not being as discerning. And you can be much more discerning when you're looking at 3,000 items a year versus like 1,000 items a year. So it was a combination of all those things happening at the same time. It was like, you know, we have a saying. It was, when really bad things happen...
• 31:03
  It's not usually one thing. It's a perfect storm. It's everything happening at the same time. And that's tough too, because when things don't go right at that level, like it's a bigger issue, like putting it lightly than if things don't work out with the first product launch and okay, fine. Like, you know, we don't draw a salary for the next six months, but we're not having to lay people off. And when you're, when you're letting go 350 people and their lives, uh, yeah.
• 31:30
  I can tell you for myself, it was the hardest time period in my business career by far. With the most amount of learnings at the same time. What was the way that you got out of that, that relatively dark period, year 17, 18? Well, after we stopped fighting, because growth hides a multitude of sins. All the sins came out. So after we stopped fighting and after we...
• 31:59
  basically decided to recommit because, you know, in those dark times, you have thoughts like, should I sell the business? Should we call it quits? All that type of stuff.
• 32:07
  We got back to the basics, which was being much more judicious about the products we're bringing to market, giving the products way more time and attention and care. Everything's about the details. If I look back in my history, it's like the products that have done the best are the ones that we've paid the most amount of attention to detail to. And we weren't really thinking about how big they would become. We were just focused on the product and the consumer at that moment in time.
• 32:36
  And then we did things like we opened up the funnel. So we started looking at a lot more stuff. And...
• 32:44
  And then crazy thing happened. Like our biggest success, it was Paw Patrol. And Paw Patrol was born in our lowest moment. You're going back to basics at this point. Obviously, incredibly stressful environment. You're being more judicious, excuse me, about the products that you're bringing to market. What was the idea behind Paw Patrol? Because at this point, what you don't want to have happen when things are not going in the right direction is to sort of have like this knee-jerk reaction and try and bring a product that is...
• 33:13
  It's almost like you can compound the issue if you weren't careful at this point. Yeah.
• 33:19
  I don't know if you compound the issue, but it was. I mean, if you rush a decision or if you rush a new product launch to sort of compensate for like lost revenue, declining revenue. Correct. For sure. I think for us, the learning was really slow down. Let's slow down because we were like we were riding really high. We were riding really high at that moment in time. And it was really time to just take a beat and really focus on the product at the end of the day.
• 33:48
  And, you know, in our industry, we have a saying called product is king. Brands are king. Franchises are king. But let's focus on the product. So this was four years of restructuring. You called this... No, two years of restructuring. Oh, two years of restructuring. Four years would be a disaster. What I'm thinking about is you had, like, these two, like, sort of, like, MBAs and whatnot. And you had all these great successes. Yeah.
• 34:12
  I guess if there was something that you, at that point in the company, you pivoted how you thought about product or you pivoted or you went back to your roots. Because you mentioned there was too much hubris and too much repeated success. Was there something like sort of a mental model or a way that you looked at the company at that point?
• 34:33
  that you felt like, you know what, we've sort of lost ourselves at this point. We have to go back to basics. Was there any moment like that? I mean, if there isn't, then it's not a fair question. No, no, no. That is what happened. We need to go back to what got us to where we were before, and that was basics. And that was, again, just focusing on the product, not believing in our own stuff, and having humility.
• 34:59
  It was actually rooted in humility. Just have humility and just focus and don't think that, you know, you're going to have this big company. You know, it suddenly became about having a big company. And it's not about, you can't just have a big company. It doesn't work like that, right? You need to have all the products and the franchises that support having a big company. But just because you have a big HR department and a big finance department and all this type of stuff,
• 35:23
  The focus went into the wrong areas. And we expand our international too fast. I'm trying to figure out for entrepreneurs that are scaling, it's exciting. It's a super exciting thing to be hitting those revenue levels and whatnot. What's your advice to somebody who's scaling at that level? How do they...
• 35:43
  How do they keep up with momentum but not lose track of who they are as an entrepreneur? Like what got them to be successful in the first place? I think for every industry, it's very different, right? Like our industry, like inventory, you got to watch your inventory. Like that can really take down a company. But I think a lot of it is overheads and bloat. And just watch your overheads, watch your bloat. I'll tell you this much. When you're having people that are like, you know,
• 36:13
  when you stop doing things internally and then you have people that are managing people from the outside and they're just becoming managers and they're not doing anymore. And the pace of operation goes down. Um,
• 36:25
  You feel like you're growing, but in a sense, like, you have to have managed growth, especially around people. And if you have too many people coming in too fast, then your culture starts to break down. And that's not a really good thing. The most important thing is to protect culture. Culture is king.
• 36:43
  That's your moat. That's what makes your business different. And so if you have an influx of people to support your growth and your culture is getting diluted and then that's going to cause certain problems. And so I would say it's all around watching the people. So at that level, because obviously now you- Because even managing larger teams, it takes time to learn that skill.
• 37:09
  A thousand percent. It's nothing you learn out of the gate when you start. Yeah. So if you're like doubling your people in a year, like that's a lot.
• 37:18
  That's just a lot, right? I think that we just like don't, like when we think about building a company, we always think about, okay, we just want to get it off the ground, find product market fit. We want to, you know, great revenues moving up and to the right. We're not an abject failure yet. But then you think about the things like, okay, how do we hire at scale? How do we maintain culture? I don't think these are things that people think about more often than not until it's too late. I would say like this is, I would not let...
• 37:49
  It doesn't matter how fast you're growing. I would not let anybody in the door without making sure that they match your culture. And I would not delegate out the hiring process to other people that don't really understand the culture and have lived the culture in your business. Do not go to HR professionals or anything like that. No despairing HR professionals. They're great. But if you're definitely starting your business and you're in the early years, you need to do it yourself.
• 38:19
  And you may not feel like you have the time, but you will lose the time in the future as a result of not doing it.
• 38:24
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• 38:54
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• 39:17
  My fitness pal is a success story partner. On this show, I speak to tons of high performers and the people that sustain that high performance, not just sprint and crash and burn, but they actually sustain, they all treat nutrition like a system, not an afterthought. The same way they treat revenue or hiring or product, it is key to their business. They pay attention. They look at the data.
• 39:39
  And that really stuck with me. And it's how I started thinking about my own health and wellness and what I put into my own body, not in like a restrictive diet way, but in a data way. See, most people take a look at daily calorie total and they think they have the full picture. That's just one number. The MyFitnessPal app premium, it shows me macros. That means proteins, carbs, fats.
• 40:01
  broken down by meal. So I can see, am I getting enough protein at breakfast versus dinner? And it also shows me how my food is distributed across the day because of course, I can take a look at my total calorie number, but to see everything broken down by meal, those are two completely different things. Even if your daily total looks fine and you're gonna feel the difference. If you eat proper nutrition across your entire day and you track it, your energy is gonna allow you to sustain that high performance.
• 40:29
  Also, the food analysis picks up trends over the week that I'd miss just going by feel. See, this information makes good food choices automatic. See, food is a foundation, right? Energy, focus, performance, recovery, it all starts with food. So do yourself a favor, go visit podcast.myfitnesspal.com and use code Scott, all uppercase letters, for 15% off MyFitnessPal Premium. That's podcast.myfitnesspal.com, code Scott. Scott.
• 40:56
  One of the most important jobs that I've seen the most successful founders take on is just the recruiter. Like the person who's always like even at a high level, you have eight figure company, nine figure company, publicly traded company. Like it seems like the founder, if they're still part of the company, they're still involved in recruiting at some level. Totally. You want to attract and retain the best talent. And a lot of times they're coming there because of the founder.
• 41:20
  They want to be close to the founder. When you are at that level, you said it's a really common issue that culture starts to break down if you're not careful. How do you maintain a culture across a couple hundred person or a couple thousand person org?
• 41:37
  I think that it's all with being very judicious on the people you bring into the company and then giving people the opportunities to grow within your company and giving them opportunities to stay. It's funny. It's like in Spin Master, if you start in shipping, you had a direct track to a VP job.
• 41:57
  I say it slightly in jest, but there's countless stories. It's been massive where people started shipping, and they ended up as VPs or SVPs. And, you know, our company, it's a metocracy. We don't care about what's your background, where you come from. It's all about what you can actually do and what you can contribute, and it's diversity of thought. It's those two things happening at the same time, and that's our culture, and we're looking for those types of people. Right.
• 42:19
  But it's really, if you want to preserve a culture and a business, it's all about promoting within and the people that are staying there for long periods of time and giving them different opportunities to grow within the organization. And then they just get this wealth of diversity of knowledge. I mean, just going back to Paw Patrol, I mean,
• 42:37
  One of our gentlemen that helped create Paw Patrol, his name is Matt Wexler, he started working in our factory when we were making Earth Buddies when he was 18 years old. And he came into the entertainment division, we started to go to MIP together, learned the business together. Adam Beter was there, we learned the business, it was like the three of us, and they'd never done it before. They'd never been in licensing, they'd never been in entertainment, never produced any shows.
• 43:03
  I worked so well with them and they just got me and I got them and they were spin master and we were able to do things together and we had that shorthand. And so that's something that you never want to lose that shorthand with people in your business, right? Because you can go so much quicker. This is a theme that I've picked up on as I've interviewed like a ton of founders. It seems like what you're describing, how you're just hiring from internal and like with people that have worked with you for years.
• 43:29
  That, from what I understand, is the best way to preserve culture and to build a successful business. It seems like that is the requirement.
• 43:36
  Yeah, I will take loyalty and determination and passion and smarts over experience. Really? You're looking at me with a surprise, babe. I am. It makes sense, though. It makes a lot of sense because that's, like you said, if you just bring in experience, then it's not like they know what's going on in the company. They maybe bring experience or a way things have already been...
• 44:01
  If they bring in the quote-unquote way things have always been done from a different industry, that could hurt how they perform. That too. Listen, you need a balance of everything.
• 44:12
  But you do need a core of individuals that are holding the culture together. And what that number is, I've never really thought about what the right mix is. But I would say probably 60% of the business, 70%, needs people that are diehard into the culture if you don't want the culture to erode. So your book, No Experience Necessary, that is built around 11 core principles. Right.
• 44:38
  When you went through this gray hair moment in your career, what was the principle that you learned during this time? Or the one that stands out the most that was like, this is something that is very applicable to what I'm going through right now? Well, always keep on pushing the envelope. Don't stop. You know, as I said before.
• 44:59
  Paw Patrol was born in the lowest point. And we'd never done a preschool show before. We'd never done one. And we were like, let's try. And I can share with you the story around it. But that was the real lesson, was just keep on pushing forward. Even though you're at your lowest point, keep on pushing and do things differently and take on things that were different.
• 45:27
  If you look at, you know, going back to these principles as well, for somebody who is, I mean, they're all obviously quite important. But out of the 11, just looking at yourself, like what was the principle that had the most impact on your life? I think a lot of it was the power of not knowing. The power of not knowing, just like that ignorance. What you don't know serves you well. So just back to the air hogs, you know, when Ben and I, when we took that product,
• 45:56
  We spent two years of our life engineering and developing it. We never engineered and developed a product like that. We figured it out. But what we found out after a year and a half was that Hasbro and Mattel both passed on the product. And we thought we were super lucky. Like we were the first people to see this product. But Hasbro and Mattel passed on it. And they passed on it for good reason, really good reasons. You know, it's an airplane. It crashes. It's going to break. There's a propeller. There's safety issues.
• 46:23
  There's going to be high returns, and the returns will probably take out your profits. And then they were like, we're out.
• 46:28
  And for us, we were like, yeah, we know there's a propeller, but we'll figure it out. And we did. We put on these soft plastic tips, and we had this beautiful soft nose cone. And we figured out this way for the wings to pop off on impact, and you'd be able to put them back on. And we made a super durable product that can drop out of the air from 100 feet. And we thought about it for like, we knew inherently there was these issues, but we gave it literally like five minutes of thought, and we knew we'd be able to figure it out. And we did.
• 46:58
  And the other competitors, they used their intellect and they were right, but they didn't let their passion drive them. You know, I think for us back in the day, like the biggest lesson is passion delevers risk. And so this was a risky product to do. Air Hogs was 100% a risky product, but we were super passionate about it and naive at the same time.
• 47:21
  And you put those two things together, and it was a great recipe, great cocktail. And we got through it, and we delivered the product, and it went on to become this big success. And we were making flying toys for 10 years, 15 years, actually. We built up a brand. We probably did over 100...
• 47:34
  over a billion dollars in revenue over the 15 years in terms of flying toys. And that was rooted in the power of just not knowing and being curious at the same time. So I think for me, a lot of it is that. And then also, everybody's rooting for you. I mean, I had a situation when we started with the Earth Buddies, which was a small little potato head you put in water, grows grass for hair.
• 47:56
  And I found out about it from my mother. And she was reading this Israeli newspaper called the Iritat Akronat. And inside there were six different people manufacturing their products. And when I added up the total that they had sold, because they all basically gave their numbers away, it totaled 300,000 pieces. So I'm like 300,000 pieces in a country of 10 million, and no one's selling it in North America. It's a big market.
• 48:21
  So I convinced Anton to make the product, and we decided we're going to make 5,000 pieces for Mother's Day. And...
• 48:32
  Three months later, okay, we had an opportunity to go having a meeting at Kmart Corporation. And Kmart back in the 90s was like Walmart today. They were the biggest retailer in the world. And it came from Anton was traveling the summer before, and he met this guy, and he was based in Michigan, and he called him. He said to him, do you have any connections at Kmart?
• 48:56
  And he said, sure, I can get you a meeting. He charged us 10%, which was outrageous, but it should have been 5% back in the day. But we paid it anyways. And the most lucky thing happened. And this is rooted in everybody's rooting for you. Everybody wants you to win when you're younger. So, Scott, I wake up in the morning. I drive from Toronto to Detroit, four-hour drive.
• 49:21
  I don't even think about staying in a hotel, OK, because we're trying to save money. So I woke up early. And I go to the meeting. I get there at 9 o'clock. And I'm sitting in front of the buyer. And I do a 30-minute presentation. And the buyer looks at me completely deadpan. And he says, I'm not the buyer for this product. So I'm thinking to myself, he's not telling me the truth. So I pitch him for another 15 minutes. And then he looks at me. He says, I'm not the buyer for this product.
• 49:49
  Of which I said to him, you know, we'll give you the product on consigned sales. We'll give it to you. If it sells, you pass. And he said, I'm not the buyer for the product. So at that point, I said, you know, I'm giving him basically the product for free. He's not taking it. So he's not the buyer. So I said, who's the buyer? So he went to his office and he came back with a piece of paper and it said Adrian Zacks on it. So I said, thank you very much. And I start walking around Kmart Corporation looking for this lady.
• 50:17
  And I'm super lucky, okay? I find her, she's sitting at her desk, and I pitch her for 30 minutes, sorry, 30 seconds. 30 minutes would have been, you know, a little aggressive, just sit in, just get in the chair and sit in her office. I was standing in the hallway. I actually didn't even, she didn't even walk into her office. I was standing at the door. So I was standing at the door, and I told her about the EarthBuddy for 30 seconds, and she said, I'll give you an appointment at 3.30 today.
• 50:47
  I go downstairs, the guy that got me the appointment was downstairs, he's like, let's go for lunch. I'm like, I'm not going anywhere. You go for lunch, I'm staying right here. I was so nervous, I was like, maybe you should call me earlier, or maybe I won't get let back into the building. I'm like, I'm staying right here. I didn't eat any lunch, okay? I stayed in situ, 3.30 came, I went upstairs. I walk in again, now I get inside our office, and on the left side of our shelf, okay, is seven other competitor products.
• 51:13
  Okay? Seven other versions of this grass head. So I'm like, okay, good. I'm in the right office. She is the buyer. She is the buyer. I found the buyer. And... But then I was like, I got a lot of competition. I got to lower the price. So I was... Originally, I had in my mind, my whole time driving to Kmart, I was going to charge $265. The other thing I'll share is that I never prepared for this meeting. At all. I had no PowerPoint. I've never done a PowerPoint presentation in my whole life. I still haven't done one today. Okay? And...
• 51:43
  I was like, okay, 265, I gotta drop in a buck. So I went to 165. And I sat down and literally this far away from her on the other side of her desk, tiny office. And I pitch her and she stays silent for like 15 minutes. So she does the most magical thing. She basically, she turns around.
• 52:01
  And she puts this big book in front of me, and it was the vendor book. And she said, you're going to become a vendor of Kmart. I'm ordering 48,000 pieces from you. And if the 48,000 pieces goes well, I'm ordering half a million for Christmas. And this was June. Christmas was in, like, you know, we had to deliver in September. And...
• 52:20
  That's what happened. And we ended up shipping her half a million pieces for that Christmas. We got it out. We ramped up our factory. We were producing 17,500 pieces a day. We had 200 workers working in downtown Toronto. Over the course of like two years, we sold her a million and a half Earth Buddies. And four years later, she called me. She said, Renan, could you come to Detroit? I want you to speak to some inner city youth that I'm working with.
• 52:44
  And that was, for me, confirmed that she was... She had seven other people that she could have given the business to. She gave the business to us and to me when I was 23 years old because she wanted to help a younger person, 100%.
• 53:02
  That had been in business for three months. Did she know that? Yeah. Yeah. I told her everything. It was transparent. You could see it on my face. My shirt was crinkled. I was telling the story. I told her the story. I told her how we got the idea. I told her the story about, you know, selling on the streets of Toronto. Okay. I told her about our factory. I told her about everything.
• 53:20
  Yeah, I never make up a story. You always got to tell the truth. But she thought that you could do it. She believed in the fact we can get it done, for sure. Because before this, like, your factory was what? Like, your kitchen counter and table and... No, that was in the prototyping stage.
• 53:36
  No, at this point, we were ready out into another factory. But when we got this order for the 48 and then the half mil, we moved factories. We ramped up again. But we were ready out of my mom's house. Because when you first started, it was, what, $10,000 in credit cards? The factory was every flat surface in your mom's place? All the prototyping. She was very generous. She opened up the house to me. She gave me her car. She had a Celica. There's still sawdust in the Celica today. Oh, my goodness. That's funny.
• 54:04
  And this is taking the advantage of being young. Correct. Being young and understanding that things accrue to you. If I was 35, if I was 35 with the EarthBuddy walking around Kmart Corporation, they probably would have kicked me out. But you see this young kid. Now I'm thinking back. They probably thought that I was someone's kid.
• 54:27
  who work there. They work there. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like, I've never even thought, I've never thought about it until we actually had this discussion, right? That's probably what they were thinking. They were like, that's probably why they didn't kick me out. Like, I didn't ask for any permission. I didn't go to the lobby and call the buyer. I didn't drive home and say, I'm going to call the buyer afterwards and come see her. I literally took my box of EarthBuddies and I'm walking around KMRO Corporation. It was an octagon building, asking no permission.
• 54:50
  Right? So amazing things happen to you when you're, everybody wants to root for you when you're young. Everybody wants to be around you when you're young. You don't even realize it when you're in your 20s. You have this incredible energy. You have this, like, it's just this wonderful energy. And then you get to middle age, and you're like, where's that energy? Like, you know, like I want to be around it. And then you're doing a favor,
• 55:11
  for people that are older because they have all this accrued wisdom and they wanna share it. It's a way of their, it's their way to give back in real time. It's like a real time charity, even though it's not charity, but it's like, that's the way society- Because everybody wants to help, like an ambitious kid that's full of life and just trying to figure out the world. Like who doesn't wanna help that kid? Correct. You'd be kinda mean if you don't. Yeah, you're an asshole. You are an asshole if you don't. And you know what? The world does reward audacity.
• 55:40
  But I will tell you we've had flip sides. I mean, we had someone who would only distribute our devil's dicks if we gave him equity in our business. That wasn't nice. We said no. Okay. We had another person, you know, scam us for some money with some sweatshirts in the early days. That wasn't nice. Yeah.
• 56:01
  You know, we had a factory in Mexico when we were producing the devil sticks. We would supply in the raw materials. They would put in the labor content. And the factory owner didn't pay his workers. And the factory workers took over the factory. They hung a black flag. Okay. And we couldn't get the product and we couldn't get our inventory.
• 56:23
  So not everybody's rooting for you, but there are enough good people out there that will make the difference in your journey. And Adrian Zacks, without that,
• 56:34
  There was so much energy got unleashed as a result of that order for half a million pieces. It was everything. It set the company completely in motion. When that order came in, what were you feeling? Were you scared, nervous, excited? Well, before the order came in, I'll tell you a very strange thing. And I'm like, I feel strange sharing the story, you know, now that I'm doing these podcasts and stuff. But, you know, I got to be vulnerable. I did the strangest thing when she said, I'm going to give you the order when I was in her office.
• 57:04
  because she was the buyer of horticulture. So she had these garden gnomes in her office. So she had one sitting on the top shelf and I'm looking at them like, I said, Adrian, can I have that garden gnome?
• 57:20
  It's just random things. It's just like, I don't know. I don't know what's going through my head at the time. Well, no, probably a million things are going through your head at this point. It was such a surreal thing. I didn't believe that it was real. So actually, I think I wanted just like a tangible representation that this really happened. Like it's not a dream. It's not a dream. So I drove back to Toronto with the garden gnome. Did you have like a moment where you thought...
• 57:41
  This is a good idea. We've made it. Like at this point, were you like, that's my question. Were you excited? Were you scared? Were you like, holy shit, this is going to turn into a real business? We just took it.
• 57:53
  One product at a time. All we were focused on was getting the EarthBuddy orders out the door for that year. That was the most important thing. Plus, we were cognizant of the fact that EarthBuddy's was a novelty product, and novelty products have a lifespan to them. So we were looking for a second product, and at the end of that year, we found the Devil Sticks. So we were doing both at the same time, but we weren't thinking, like, too far out.
• 58:19
  We really weren't. But I will tell you one interesting story about being scared. We were never scared, and I don't think I have the scared gene in me for a lot of reasons. But there was one moment probably in our third year, and we had about $400,000 in the bank. And this was before Air Hogs hit. And I turned to Anton, I said to him,
• 58:39
  You know, we each got $200,000 here. Why don't we just call it a day? It was a lot of money. It was a lot of money. And he looked at me, and he looked at me, Scott, and he didn't say anything. He gave me the weirdest look. Like, he gave me the look like, are you crazy? And that was the only, and I didn't say anything in return, because I knew where he was at.
• 59:00
  And after that, I was like, okay, let's keep on moving forward. And it was the only moment of doubt that I've ever had in 32 years. It's because it's more money than you'd ever seen up to that point. Totally. It was a lot of money. And you don't know if you're going to lose it or if it's going to continue. When you're starting to build a company, kind of like what you were doing there, it's interesting because you were just focused on the next product. And that's actually how you were successful. Like, let's just do the next product and the next product and the next product.
• 59:28
  Do you think that more founders should think of the end in mind thinking like, what do I want this business to turn into? Like, do I want this to be a million dollar per year business, a $10 million per year business, pass it over to my kids, IPO it? Or should they not worry about that? I would encourage people to make broad statements and not box themselves in and
• 59:53
  things like IPOs, like we IPO at our company after 21 years, right? It took us 21 years to get to an IPO. So we made the statement,
• 1:00:05
  We want to be open to ideas from wherever they come from. We want to build the company as big as we can. We've never put a number on it. So I think it's personal, but I keep the statements quite broad and things will happen along the way and you can start to pivot and do what you need to do as your business grows. But sometimes if you think too big, then you're like too hard on yourself and then you're frustrating yourself and you're not going fast enough. And I think all that stuff is counterproductive at the end of the day.
• 1:00:31
  Because it sounds like you had like a great co-founder relationship and you were always, always aligned and there was no disagreements and no arguments. But listen, there was arguments all the time. We micromanaged each other. OK, there was crazy arguments, you know. But what there was was what I can tell you about our partnership was that there was.
• 1:00:52
  We were always aligned in terms of our values, which is the most important thing. We were aligned in terms of our work ethic. We were aligned in terms of honesty. We were aligned with recognizing the best idea
• 1:01:09
  When it showed up, we were aligned with not blaming. We've never done a summary of a failed product in our whole history in Spin Master. We never look backwards, because everybody kind of knows the score. But I'll tell you a funny story about partners. So in our second or third year of business,
• 1:01:32
  I got to really learn my partners. Okay? Like, you don't know at the beginning until you get into it. So you don't know until you get into it. But a buyer from one of the large accounts, one of the reps, called Anton and said, you know, if you give this buyer something nice for his backyard, a.k.a. like a whirlpool, it could really grow your business.
• 1:01:59
  This is what happened. It was back in the 90s. Could still happen today. I'm sure it still happens. So he called Anton. Anton came to my office. He's like, we're in. We could really grow this account. It's just a whirlpool.
• 1:02:15
  And I think I looked at him the way he looked at me with the $200,000. And I was like, we talked about it for 30 minutes or something like this. And I'm like, that's just not, we can't do that. And we're completely aligned. And then we, you know, we've never ever done anything like that.
• 1:02:30
  But I knew in that moment that I had the right partner, right? I have another funny story about Anton. Anton's like, he's like watered off a duck's back and nothing bothers him. Really nothing bothers him. So there was a...
• 1:02:52
  When we were selling the Devil 6, we had an opportunity to work with these reps that were going to represent us in southern United States, and especially with Walmart. And we're at their apartment. This is the middle of a toy fair, and we're consummating the deal, and everything's going great. And then their late father walks in the room, and Anton says something, and he gets super upset. And next thing I know, my girlfriend Anton and myself are out on the streets of New York in the middle of the winter. We just got kicked out of the apartment. Next morning,
• 1:03:19
  Oh, that night I said to Anton, I'm like, we are never doing business with these people ever again. Okay. Not our people. Next morning I go to the show. I see Anton. He's with the guys. They're laughing. They're having a good time. I go, Anton, what are you doing with them? Like, why are you meeting with them? He's like, I got the deal done. This is great. We're working together. I'm like, what do you mean? I thought we talked about this. I thought we said we're not working with them. And he was able to look through the...
• 1:03:44
  the the ego in the moment right and there was something more there than like maybe there was something more than more to the reason why we got kicked out of the apartment and he was 100% right because their late father was drinking and it was really the alcohol talking and the sons were actually you know that wasn't the way that they wanted to actually do the business and um
• 1:04:09
  So I got to learn a lot about my business partner at that moment in time. Keep focused on the goal and don't let the ego get involved because the ego holds you back. Always. I think that...
• 1:04:30
  when people get into these business partnerships. I've always sort of had a tough time telling people to go into them because I think it's really hard for people to find the right business partners. I think that more often than not what happens is you have two or more people just super excited about an idea.
• 1:04:47
  And they're like, oh, let's just do it together. And you don't know if you have shared values, shared whatever. Don't know if your skill sets complement. And then like fast forward a year, two years, you have a huge falling out because nothing was ever aligned. We were very lucky. So, I mean, that's another benefit of starting young. Anton and I met when we were 12 years old at summer camp. So we knew each other since we were super young. And we started a business together at university called Campus Faces.
• 1:05:12
  So we had really worked together for three years. And then Anton went to business school with Ben. And they were best friends at business school. Anton basically loved Ben because he had great notes. And so they were in the same class. But then if you don't have that...
• 1:05:28
  I'm going to ask you for now advice for people that haven't gone through like their 20s, are a little bit older, don't have these childhood friendships. Because a lot of this book is about, okay, take risk when you're young, do business with people that you know well.
• 1:05:43
  But people that are listening to this, not all of them fit that category. So what's the advice for them? Let's start with the advice for like a business partner when you don't have a childhood friend. Like how would you get into a new relationship with somebody and build something new if you don't know them for the past, you know, 10 years?
• 1:06:01
  I think it's very difficult. I think it's very difficult. I think it's seat time. You've got to spend time with them, get to know them, get to know them in different environments, know their history. The one advantage you do have is people have a track record at that point in time, and I think you use a track record for making that decision. And don't be lazy about it and don't be...
• 1:06:28
  not a shame, but like I go back and actually see what, how has this person affected everybody in the last 15 years that they've touched? What's their reputation? What have they done? Et cetera, et cetera. And if there's stuff, flags that come up, don't negate them.
• 1:06:44
  because they're probably real at the end of the day. So I would use the track record to your advantage at that moment in time. And then I don't want this to be a depressing podcast for somebody who's in their 30s. So betting on yourself in your 20s, that's the best decision you'll ever make. You're in your 30s now or your 40s.
• 1:07:01
  you don't have that young kid advantage anymore. What's the advice to that person? Well, first of all, the average age of an entrepreneur in the United States is 38 years old. Really? Yeah, by the Kauffman Foundation. So you're not too young, okay? It's still time's on your side. I'm just an advocate of starting younger because I bet you if more people started, I bet you there's more people in their 30s that have decided not to pursue it that has kept that average at 38.
• 1:07:31
  And if people would have started younger, probably the average would be lower. But I'd say the same things apply. And in some industries, it's actually better to wait. Certain industries, it is better to accrue a body of knowledge. Some industries take more capital. And to acquire that capital, maybe you need more connections, more relationships.
• 1:07:51
  So I think that you could do it at any age at the end of the day. Listen, you may not have the luck of running around Kmart without security. Let me tell you, okay, I'm 55. 35 is still super young, and you still have a super amount of energy. 45 is still super young, right? So there's lots of things. It's still a great time. I mean, I think the risk quotient
• 1:08:19
  Goes up in that time. That's the biggest. I think you have all the capabilities to go and do what you want to do. You maybe have to be a little more professional than a 23-year-old running around Kmart. But...
• 1:08:34
  But when you're doing your pros and cons list, your risk quotient, the cons list will go down even, it's gonna be a longer list. NetSuite Next is a success story partner. So they say that every day your business is late to using AI, you fall two days behind.
• 1:08:54
  and the competition is only moving faster. So how do you keep up? Well, fortunately there is NetSuite next. Now you probably already know NetSuite. NetSuite is the AI powered business management suite. It's trusted by over 43,000 customers. It securely connects all of your data, financials, inventory, commerce, HR, CRM, into one single source of truth.
• 1:09:14
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• 1:09:39
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• 1:10:05
  It's built for every industry. It's ready for every boardroom. netsuite.ai.scottclary. MyFitnessPal is a success story partner. Now, here's something I've noticed after interviewing hundreds of founders on the show. The ones performing at the highest level, the ones that are consistently winning. They aren't just optimizing their business and their calendar and their team. They're paying attention to what they eat.
• 1:10:26
  And the ones who aren't, they're usually the first ones to burn out. And this pattern is consistent enough that it actually got me thinking about my own nutrition, not whether I was eating well, but whether I actually knew what the big picture looked like, what's going into my body and how is it fueling me. That's why I started using the MyFitnessPal app. I wanted to see what I was actually eating, not what I assumed I was eating throughout the day, but the real numbers, what my protein looked like,
• 1:10:52
  how my macros, macronutrients were broken down, where my calories were actually going throughout the day. And the app gives you all of that. Now, what kept me using it is that there's zero friction. I can scan a barcode on something I eat and it pulls everything up. I can also voice log what I ate.
• 1:11:07
  It also remembers my regular meal. So most days I'm logging everything I ate in under a minute. It's very, very easy. Food is a foundation for your energy, your sleep, your recovery. It's not one of many inputs. It is the one input that matters. So go to podcast.myfitnesspal.com and use code Scott, all uppercase, for 15% off MyFitnessPal premium. That's podcasts.myfitnesspal.com, code Scott.
• 1:11:33
  So there's this concept that I love of two mountains. It's not my concept, but basically the first mountain is like building an achievement and you're sort of, this is what led you to build Spin Master into a very successful business. But then the second mountain is when
• 1:11:51
  you've achieved, and then you're trying to figure out like what's next in life. And I mean, the book is one part of that, but you also work on, so when I was researching, you do Mead, you have a documentary called Dancing Through about three girls in war zones. You do a lot of really interesting things. So I guess my question to you is, now you're speaking to somebody who's in the second half of their career, they're climbing that second mountain, they've already achieved and they have, you know, they've succeeded by whatever metric was important to them.
• 1:12:20
  Um, how do you find what to work on next? And I ask that because when somebody has spent so much time building something, a lot of it becomes their identity. So you step down as CEO, you're working on all these different projects. How do you manage that transition? And how do you do it so that you actually enjoy, have energy for the next few things you take on?
• 1:12:40
  You know, I follow my curiosity. I follow my curiosity, things that I'm curious about and I want to learn and that I'm passionate about. You know, when it comes to the film, it's a film about three displaced girls. I'm very passionate about displacement and the knock-on effects that...
• 1:12:58
  that accrue as a result of displacement. There's been a lot of displacement in my family's history as a result of both my parents from Bulgaria, and they had to leave as a result of the communists coming in and taking all their possessions and moving to Israel and then going to South Africa and luckily ending in Canada. But I've seen all the effects of...
• 1:13:25
  micro trauma that gets passed down, right, as a result of having to, like, be uprooted from a place that you've been living for hundreds of years. And so that led me to my passion to produce this documentary, which is about these three amazing girls. One's from Venezuela that moves to Colombia. Another one's from Syria that moves to Germany. Another one's from South Sudan that moves to Uganda, and...
• 1:13:47
  And it's a coming-of-age story of these four girls from 10 years old to 15 or to 14. And Mika Orr, who's the director, she basically lived with them for years. And she's been able to amass this beautiful documentary documentary.
• 1:14:06
  of their lives. And when you watch it, it's like you actually feel like you're in their living room. It's actually like you feel like a bit like too much of a voyeur because they just they lost the camera. It's kind of like doing these podcasts. Eventually, you lose the camera. And it's just this wonderful story. And so to be able to share what it's like for girls growing up that are displaced and how they battle through it and how resilient they are in the relationship with their mother,
• 1:14:37
  was something I was passionate about doing. I didn't know exactly what it was going to turn out to be. I just, I called Amika. I'm like, let's do something around displacement. And you know, this was, this was born. So I just follow a lot of times I do a lot of things based on my curiosity and my passion. But I think that's super important. I genuinely believe that's very important because I think that there's a lot of people that preach about how to build and how to start from scratch. But
• 1:15:02
  less people talk to you about after you've done the thing you want to accomplish in life. Okay. How do you like, how do you live a good life after? What I wanted to say is, is like, if that film can, could change one person being displaced, I will be happy because I know that the knock on effects myself, I live them, I experienced them. They're in me, they're in my body.
• 1:15:27
  And they're not pleasant. Say a 22-year-old walked into, say you walked into this room today when you're 22 years old. You're fresh at a Western. What's the most important lesson that you tell that 22-year-old? You know, I'd have to ask a lot of questions. I'd have to ask a lot of questions. I think everybody's so different. I think everybody's so different. I would say lean into your difference. Lean into your difference and your difference is your superpower at the end of the day.
• 1:15:54
  Right. Don't don't conform. Do what you want to do. Right. And ask why. Like, why are you leaning in this direction? Like, what is it? Right. And so really parse out that that question. Ask yourself that. And at the end of the day, it's your life to live. It's your life. It's your decisions. And that's the most important thing is don't I would say this. Don't whatever your decision is, don't outsource it.
• 1:16:23
  Don't outsource your decisions. Like, meet with certain people. Be selective on who you're getting advice from, who you're surrounding yourself with, because people influence you in many different ways, right? Talk about it.
• 1:16:39
  Don't just sit in your head. I think that's a big thing. Like a lot of us, you know, we have ideas, stuff like this. We just ruminate in our head about it, and we just never get anywhere, right? So it's hard to suss out things in your own head. So you need to engage with certain people. But don't engage with so many people, and then make the decision. It's your decision to make. It's your life.
• 1:16:59
  You're responsible for your own life. No one else's. For that super ambitious 22-year-old as well, what's the biggest misconception about success and achievement? Like what's the thing that they think is going to happen when they make it big that doesn't happen? Well, first of all, I think the pace, right? How fast. It's like look at it. If success doesn't happen just overnight, right?
• 1:17:24
  It takes a long time to get there. Think about all great musicians. They played in shitty venues for years, and they were just honing in their craft. So give yourself time to hone in your craft, whatever you want your craft to be. And then have your own definition of success. What do you deem as successful? What you deem as successful may not be for someone else. So don't sign up for someone else's mental model of what success is.
• 1:17:51
  Because it could be something completely different to you. Your success could be, I want to have a B&B bed and breakfast place in Italy for the next 20 years. And I want to have a permaculture farm. And I want to have the best food and the best wine. And I want to have a 12-room place. And I want it to be busy all the time. And that, for me, is success. And I want to be able to live in nature and host people.
• 1:18:20
  And your parents might be thinking like, what do you mean? Like, you can't make a lot of money doing that. Like, you're not even Italian. You're not even Italian. Like, why are you even thinking about Italy? But like, that's personal to you. Like, maybe you grew up dreaming about Italy your whole life and you were reading about it.
• 1:18:36
  So, I mean, like, maybe that's success for you. We all have different versions of success. You know the Jeff Bezos regret minimization framework. I do not. It's a very powerful idea that sort of prompts you to take more risk and do what you want in life. But basically how he made the decision to leave Wall Street and to go build Amazon was he would—
• 1:18:56
  imagine he was a 90-year-old on his deathbed looking back at his life and he asked himself, would I regret or not regret making this decision? And if he regretted not choosing a path, that's what he leaned into. So he would have regretted looking back over his life, not starting Amazon. And that's because he was getting paid a lot on Wall Street. He was very successful before Amazon.
• 1:19:18
  So, like, whatever the framework is that pushes you in the direction, like, I think that that, you intuit it. We know what we want to do. We know what we want our life to look like. I think the issue is that we question our own.
• 1:19:35
  our own intuition too much because of what parents say or what friends say. And we're like, oh, being an entrepreneur or living in a small little villa in Italy, which sounds absolutely beautiful. First of all, it sounds great. I was thinking of the same thing. Like, sign me up. Yeah, I'll do that. I'll sign up or like, yeah. But if I said that to my parents growing up, they'd look at me like I have three heads. Like, what are you talking about, Scott? Like, we live in Ottawa. Like, how are you going to get to Italy? How are you going to...
• 1:20:01
  Yeah, listen, I've never heard Jeff Bezos' framework, and I think it's a smart one. And obviously works for him and probably can work for a lot of people. It's just a way to, like, move. It's, like, follow... I mean, like, it's cliche, but, like, follow your passion, follow your heart, follow what you feel like you should do. And I think the most important... I come at it from, like...
• 1:20:22
  Rather than looking back, looking forward, right, mantra. So I think you can take Jepson and you can take a looking forward one too. And I just think that I think the one thing we all have to acknowledge is that your kids grew up in a different time with a different outlook and they get to see the world differently. And I think that's one of the most powerful things for entrepreneurs is to realize that you are seeing the world differently. And when you see the world differently, you see the opportunities, you see the white space.
• 1:20:52
  And that's because you've been sheltered in the nest of your parents' home for 20 years. Then you go to potentially college or start working. And then you have agency. For the first time in your life, you have agency. So you're seeing the world differently. You have agency. And then it's like, okay, go do. But then you're like, no, hold on, hold on a second here. Okay.
• 1:21:13
  But the way you're seeing the world is like, it's the right way. If you think about all the most famous artists in history, okay, musicians, painters, writers, okay? I write about it in my book, I can't remember the whole list here.
• 1:21:27
  The majority were in their 20s. Their best work happened in their 20s. And I write in the book in the last chapter called Painting Your Masterpiece, I think business is an art. And the only reason why, the only difference in business versus being a painter or musician is that people are the materials of which you're creating your masterpiece with. And so...
• 1:21:49
  People think about business as profit and loss and numbers and greed and this and that. And it's like, no, it's how you organize yourself together and how you create a culture. And whatever culture you want to create, how much equity you want to give away, how you want people to be in the workplace. So it's this really creative. I think business is one of the most creative endeavors ever. And creativity, if you look at the arc of creativity, the most creative stuff is happening in the 20s.
• 1:22:20
  I encourage everybody to do the research at ChatGBT. Go ahead and whatever your place is to go get information. But you will see in the 20s, okay, it is the place for the greatest burst of creativity because you are new into the world and you're seeing it with such fresh eyes. So don't miss out on that fresh eye moment.
• 1:22:41
  So you don't know my origin story or why. I mentioned that my dad worked for the government, very risk-adverse, nine to five. So I lived in Ottawa. But my origin story is exactly what you described, but I've never heard anyone else describe it. So I see the playbook that my parents lived by, and I saw my dad buy his first house cash in Toronto at like 25 years old, which you know you cannot do anymore. And I was like, that playbook doesn't work for me.
• 1:23:10
  If I do the same work, go to the same, you know, get the same job, get the same income, like my quality of life is gonna be significantly less than my parents had. So then I'm like, okay, how do I figure out a new way to live life? And that's what prompted me to go a complete 180. And if I just take one second to be a podcast host for a second, how did you make that happen for yourself? I moved towards things that excited me. I took more risk knowing that I could always
• 1:23:39
  find my way back. How I actually did it is I started working in tech, which for me was a big leap. I mean, for most people working for a tech company, it was Bell Canada. So that was tech to me. That was risky. Private industry was like, well, yeah. Bell for the listeners is like, it's like the most monopolistic company out there. But for me, it wasn't government. So that was like a huge move away from what I knew. No, but how did you know intuitively that your father's path wasn't your path?
• 1:24:06
  It also seemed like, well, because my dad worked for CSIS his whole career. So it's like Canadian security intelligence. Like he does, you know, now he's retired, but he used to do investigations and whatnot. And I couldn't imagine myself walking into an office because I knew where the office was. I couldn't imagine myself walking into that office at 25 and doing that until I was 60.
• 1:24:33
  But also living a less good life than him. So being able to afford a home probably 10 years after he could at his age, right? Being able to afford a family. All these things that for me that was like – because I think most of your worldview –
• 1:24:50
  comes from your parents. Like what a good life is, whatever that means, good life. It's like, I want to just live at least the life of what my parents lived, if you had a good, comfortable upbringing. And I realized that I couldn't do that. And I also thought, not only can I not do that, going on the same journey as what he did, but also it just doesn't seem fun and exciting to me.
• 1:25:09
  So let me sort of two birds, one stone this. Let me take more risk, live a more exciting life, and hopefully land in a better financial situation earlier than if I just followed him. And that's what made me work for Bell, which I thought was like, oh, that's so cool. I'm working for like a Canadian tech company. It's like not, but like whatever.
• 1:25:29
  And then after that, I worked for a smaller telecom startup that was acquired by private equity. And now I started learning, okay, well, this is interesting. The guy who built this company was a founder, built it from 1990 to today, sold it for tens of millions of dollars. And that's okay. Now I understand the entrepreneurship game. So then I sort of progressively moved more towards ownership away from corporate. And that was my path. Nice.
• 1:25:56
  Yeah, that was it. So it was, but it was, it was really, it was really, and I was in my 20s. And it was just me understanding that the way my parents built their life, it wasn't for me. But what gave you the courage? I've tried to figure that out a lot. I think that, I think the courage was, it was beautiful.
• 1:26:19
  I've taken a lot of bets on myself. And even when they didn't work out, eventually they did, if that makes sense. And then you develop pattern recognition. Learning luck. That's it. That's really, like everything you're talking about is like what I've lived. I've never really put words to it, but that's what I've lived. Right, beautiful. You speak about the difference between luck versus chance. What is the difference? I think that's,
• 1:26:45
  Chance is when something just happens to you, and luck is when you're out there doing, like you just described. And then in the doing, right, the universe will meet you halfway, and the opportunities will start to show up for you. Like you just said in your example, when you went to the private equity firm, and you wouldn't have gotten there if you didn't go to Bell.
• 1:27:06
  You kept yourself moving. And I think it's the luck is all in the momentum. It's always in the staying and the doing. And if we seize up and we get doubt, doubt is the anti-luck. All right. So I would say don't stay in the doubt mode. It may not be perfect. Like Bell wasn't perfect for you. But you kept on moving. And as a result of it, the universe starts to open up and align for you. Even when I moved into Bell, I'll tell you one more thing. I've always looked at the people that I worked around. And I've been like, I don't want that. I want more than this. Right.
• 1:27:35
  And I saw people leaving that bell.
• 1:27:36
  But look how lucky you were to actually get that experience and that knowing. 100%. And they were working there for like, again, 30 years. And I'm like, no, I can't do that. That wasn't right for you. Nothing wrong. It was right for them, but it wasn't right for you. So the same thing. It's in the doing. And we got super lucky with this product called Flicktricks. Back to the Sky Shark, taking that chance with that product, and we got this product called Flicktricks, which is this BMX bike, a small replica of BMX bike.
• 1:28:05
  I know all these products, by the way. I grew up with all of them. And the only reason why we got the product was because we were developing the Sky Shark with the Ray Kempers in Chicago. And I was traveling back and forth and back and forth developing it. And one day I came to check up on the development. And Jeff was like, hey, Renan, I got this cool product to show you. And I'm like, oh, cool. What is it? And he showed me the BMX bike. And I'm like, that's awesome. I started fiddling with it. I had that magical feeling. OK, like there's something that's this fiddle factor here.
• 1:28:34
  And I said to him, well, can we option it from you? He's like, sure, it's $5,000. No problem. I took it home, and we developed it. We brought it to market. We got licenses from Hoffman, Mongoose, Redline, etc., etc. Went on to be like a $100 million business.
• 1:28:49
  The universe opened up to us because we were in the motion doing the development on the air hogs. And luckily for us, toy inventors are like kids. And whenever they invent something, they just want to show it straight away. It's kind of like when you get engaged and you get the diamond ring and you think you're going to propose in two months. But it's like burning a hole and like it happens the next week. Same thing with toy inventors.
• 1:29:10
  I was just lucky to be in the room at that moment in time. But it was all a result of doing all the schlepping. And I didn't dial it in. I didn't call Jeff and, like, say, Jeff, like, how's it going? Like, I showed up. I purposely went to Chicago all the time to make sure that they were getting the work done that we needed to get done. And so I'm a big believer in, like, you don't go, you don't get. You need to be out there. And if you're out there and you're going and you're getting, the luck will accrue to you. I think the key thing, and I call it uber luck, is, like,
• 1:29:41
  When you've generated the opportunity, you're able to identify it and then seize on it at the moment. So like in this example with Jeff Raykamper,
• 1:29:50
  Maybe I would have said, yeah, maybe it could have been like the baby story. You know, I don't think it's that cool. So I was able to recognize it. And that's like the Uber luck that you get. But you don't get the chance for the Uber luck unless you're in motion. Well, that's where the pattern recognition comes in over a period of time, right? And then that's why you could start five more companies tomorrow and they'd all be pretty successful. Not just because, like, you could put them, forget the money that you could put into a company. Start, like, you take the action. You recognize the opportunity.
• 1:30:22
  10s, 20 years plus years of experience. And then all of a sudden, like, it's not that hard. It's not that complicated to figure it out, the next thing that you want to work on. Like, so the—go ahead. No, I was going to say, like, if you're listening to this and you're like, well, I'm not 20 anymore. I'm, like, 45. And you said, well, that's fine because the average age of entrepreneurs are 38 anyways. But what you do have at 45—
• 1:30:46
  is the most well-connected, well-resourced, most pattern-recognized, aware version of yourself. So yeah, you don't have the ability to run around Kmart, but you have all these other things that are sort of in your corner and a huge, huge asset. For sure, I totally agree. The last thing I wanna bring out, and I think it's an important thought because a lot of people sort of shy away from their weaknesses,
• 1:31:13
  And everybody's going to have weaknesses, and I don't want those weaknesses to get into their head about why they shouldn't build the thing or shouldn't take the risk. So you said that your particular weakness, dysgraphia, it forced you to rely on your empathy and your intuition.
• 1:31:28
  So just speak to an entrepreneur out there that has a weakness. Obviously, there's a million different things that they could be scared of or stressed about or they could come up with a reason why they don't want to take a risk and build a company. How do you leverage a weakness into a strength? I would not call my learning disability a weakness. I'd call it actually a gift because it actually taught me so many things as a result of living a life in academics that was quite difficult for me.
• 1:31:56
  I think my weaknesses were more in the area of self-control, emotional control. I was very—I grew up—as a result of having a learning disability, I grew up with a lot of shame because we never talked about it in the house. I was always the kid writing in a separate room. All my friends were like, hey, where were you? I was like, you know, like I just make up a story. I was the king of storytelling because you were ashamed. And so as a result of being ashamed, like you—
• 1:32:26
  I grew up not being a very talkative person and I wouldn't ask for help. I felt like I got to do everything myself. And, and, and those things give you low self-esteem. Right. And so I had to,
• 1:32:48
  work with lower self-esteem for many years. And I think my biggest weakness was I was very defensive. And so I would take things very personally. And when you're defensive and you take things very personally, then you become, you get into an argument, and you debate, and you expend a lot of energy that didn't need to be expended as a result of
• 1:33:15
  taking something personally when it's really not and so I had to work through uh not being defensive at the end of the day and really being open to conversations and discussions and and and different ways at things even though like I do pride myself on our company like diversity of thought but I was very fortunate because my two business partners are
• 1:33:40
  The complete opposite. So they are verbally gifted, or Ben's verbally gifted. Anton is very verbal. He has no filter, so he'll express himself all the time. Ben will express himself all the time. So they landed up with a business partner that was defensive and not so talkative, but they drew me out.
• 1:33:58
  And it created really robust discussions. And they were able to reflect back to me some of my weaknesses over my journey. And it's one of the greatest things about having business partners is they can reflect back those weaknesses to you. And they're kind of like a mirror. And they stayed with me.
• 1:34:14
  And what allowed you to reframe dysgraphia as not a weakness but as a gift? Well, because I get to see the world differently. And so, you know, you talk, you like, you discuss mental models and repetition. So since I was a small kid, like, because the school system is not built for people with learning disabilities. And I was super fortunate to get the accommodations, like extra time to make it through. But the way they were teaching me was not the way that my brain needed to input the information.
• 1:34:43
  And the way it was outputting was very difficult. So I had to get so many workarounds. And I use my intuition way more. I read body language. I can read body language at any moment in time. I can come into a room. So I would have to do things like read rooms, read body languages, just go on intuition in school.
• 1:35:06
  a whole bunch of different things that led me to probably use the more creative side of my brain. It made you able to read people better and probably build relationships better because you can understand the non-verbal communication. My EQ got developed as a, I think my EQ is higher as a result of having the learning disability which turned into a learning gift and
• 1:35:30
  EQ can serve you in different ways. It didn't serve me in the confines of school, but once I got out of school, it was able to serve me better. I love that though. I think that, and that's the lesson that I wanted to pull out. Like whatever the thing is that you think is the disability, usually is the gift if you lean into it. Correct. You don't know it at necessarily time. The one thing I would say is like,
• 1:35:53
  It would have been greater to understand the gift earlier. And the only thing I would say, if there's anybody out there that has any learning disabilities that's listening to this, I would say that the one thing that's important to know, and I wish someone would have told me, is that having a learning disability is not a lack of a sign of intelligence. And it's a really important thing to know. And I would also say this, is that do whatever you can to get identified.
• 1:36:19
  and it's a shitty system because it costs $6,000, which is a fortune of money.
• 1:36:23
  But if you have a child or if you have a feeling and you're a teenager listening to this, do whatever you can so you can get the accommodations. Because I can tell you the fastest way to being a criminal is kids that don't get identified with a learning disability and they drop out of school. And I would have been the exact same. If I didn't get identified and get the accommodations, I would have dropped out of school and I would have been doing something gray in my life and could have ended up in jail. That's incredible.
• 1:36:50
  That's sad. Yeah, and society is a lot worse for it because people aren't getting identified and getting the supports. And they're like super creative and super amazing. And they're having to work outside the system. The system is not supporting them. A couple rapid fire just to close this out. When a founder is starting out, should they rely more on intuition or data? I would go more on instinct and intuition. It's better to start a company on your own than with co-founders.
• 1:37:16
  I think it's better with co-founders than by yourself. I think it's a lonely journey. And I think the people that can... I think you have to be an exceptionally, exceptionally, exceptionally, exceptionally talented human to do it by yourself. And I think part of it is just like you having to...
• 1:37:32
  And I also say it depends on how big you want to build it. I think you could build a bigger company with co-founders. With co-founders. I was also going to say when things aren't going well, having somebody who understands what you're going through is huge. Huge. Because I think half of entrepreneurship is just finding a way to not let yourself self-sabotage half the time. For sure. And I think the other thing that I call it mind-melding.
• 1:37:58
  Between me and my two business partners, we mind melded and all the best ideas came out of the result of the mind meld. True or false? The second act in life is harder than the first. True. True or false? Nobody actually retires. They just change what they're obsessed with. False. I think some people do retire and they just retire and they give up on their passions. Where can people connect with you?
• 1:38:22
  Well, right now I don't have any socials, but they're coming. But I would say on LinkedIn. You can connect with me on LinkedIn and on No Experience Necessary, Instagram and TikTok. And then obviously No Experience Necessary, that's out July 14th, wherever you can buy books, Amazon, et cetera. Yep, widely distributed.
• 1:38:43
  Now, out of all the sort of wisdom that you've accrued over your life, say you could only pass on one lesson, the most important lesson. It could be about business. It could be about life, whatever it is. What would that lesson be and why? Enjoy the journey. It's the most important thing. Take the time. I'll never forget the early days I was going to. I went to the south of France to MIPCOM, and I met this girl there, and we developed this relationship over a week. And then I was like, I rushed back to get back to Toronto.
• 1:39:13
  And I had this opportunity to rent a car and drive in the south of France with her. And I was obsessed with coming back to Toronto for a bunch of meetings. And I should have stayed. And I never gave that relationship opportunity to Blasma. She was an incredible, incredible woman. And so it's like, enjoy the journey. Life is longer than you think.
• 1:39:35
  It's really longer than you think. And so take those beats when those beats come up for you and just lean into them and just treat yourself along the way. Make sure you take care of yourself first. That's what I would say. You need to take care of yourself first before the business, before anything else. You have to put yourself first. And I would say it took me.
• 1:39:56
  maybe 30 years, no, maybe 28 years to start putting myself first, right? And I think that was way too long. And if someone would have, I wish someone would have sat me down and said, Renan, make sure you take care of yourself first and foremost because you have more to give to the business, your family, your relationships, everything like that. Don't give everything to the business. It's not everything.