Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Paul Allen - Ancestry.com Founder | The Ultimate Competitive Advantage

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Paul Allen - Ancestry.com Founder | The Ultimate Competitive Advantage · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  I grew up admiring academics. I loved high school and college. I just love learning and I just thought learning is noble.
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  I actually think liberty and freedom and human rights are a pretty important part of the world fabric.
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  He built one of the most iconic tech companies of the internet age set out to build a better future for humanity.
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  Paul Allen is the founder and CEO of SOAR.com. SOAR's AI tools are designed to help people learn, grow, and make better decisions in work, life, and community.
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  The future of your personal life and prosperity hinges on how much agency you exercise and there are billions of ways to make a living.
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  How cool is it that you could do something you love? You're good at it. It's scaling really fast and you're going to have financial prosperity because of it.
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  With AI and robots, a billion or more people are going to have to be an entrepreneur. You have to figure out your own path.
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  He's a leader who believes that artificial intelligence should be personalized, uplifting, responsible, and ethical.
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  And that technology should elevate people, not replace them.
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  I think entrepreneurship is generally the best path forward for almost solving all the world problems.
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  Within every industry, it's the entrepreneurs, the innovators, that actually change everything.
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  Nobody's a failure unless they stop trying. As long as you pick yourself up and keep going, you're not a failure.
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  You're learning, you still have a story to finish.
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  Paul, you were Russian major. You thought business was corrupt.
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  Then you walked into a room with 500 entrepreneurs and everything changed. What happened?
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  Yeah, I basically thought growing up that academia was the noble calling. My mom was a school teacher.
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  My dad was a professor for decades, very successful in manufacturing, engineering, and using computers.
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  And so I grew up admiring academics. I loved high school and college.
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  I wanted to major in every subject that I took. I just loved learning.
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  And I just thought learning is noble. Business has kind of lowered tier. It's a different cast.
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  And I didn't admire any people in business.
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  And I think my dad had a negative perception of some of the huge corporations that he consulted for.
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  So I just had a negative vibe and Russian literature, Russian history, Russian language.
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  I wanted to get a PhD and be a sociatologist. I wanted to study the Kremlin and all of Bureau.
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  Why?
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  Well, my favorite subject of all my favorite subjects was US history. The founding fathers,
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  the unique experiment that the United States is, how different it is, the words in the Declaration
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  of Independence, the limited enumerated powers of the federal government,
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  federalism where most of the power goes to the states and the people.
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  Fantastic model for self-government, individual rights, not collectivism, not central planning.
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  And so the contrast between Soviet Union in its 70, 80 year history and the United States of America
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  is so it couldn't be more different. And although the US has become more and more centralized and more
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  centrally planned and less and less free and creeping socialism is not creeping anymore.
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  It's celebrating and getting loud applause and it never works. It never will. It never has
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  and it never will. So that contrast was fascinating to me and learning the Russian language and
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  studying the Soviet Union and reading Pravda and learning about propaganda and so it was just
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  fascinating. So I want to do that for a career. So my fiance, she grew up in his back as Sam.
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  Are you serious? Yeah. So she, like, when it was a Republican Soviet republic, she's 38. So yes,
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  it was. And then she obviously moved to Canada, but it was a wildly different.
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  Yeah. I've been to Russia. I've also been to Yugoslavia before it changed into Croatia.
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  And the contrast when I flew back from my trip to Yugoslavia, which was in the late 80s,
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  and it was a very like weird week. I was trying to talk to people in English and also in Russian,
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  they hated speaking Russian. They were kind of an independent. They weren't West. They weren't East
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  there. And so just having conversations striking was very hard. And the economy was stagnant
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  and there seemed to be no light in anybody's faces. It was just drab, you know, think about Soviet
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  architecture. It's drab. It's centrally planned. It's concrete. It's ugly. And the West and other
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  cultures are very much different and creative and beautiful and very varied. But I remember
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  getting on a flight, went to Frankfurt and then I went to Atlanta. I wanted to kiss the ground
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  in the Atlanta airport. Just the people at the ticket counter, the friendliness, the light in
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  people's eyes, it was alive. And I just come back from a, you know, former Soviet block country
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  and it wasn't alive. And I read social needs in a lot and I and Sakharov, Andrii Sakharov,
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  these great Russian dissidents who had the courage to basically risk their life every time they
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  wrote or spoke. Do you know why soldier needs and he won the Nobel Prize for Gulag Archipelago?
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  But he was a military, an army captain celebrated 1941, 1945, defended the motherland.
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  He writes a private letter to a friend saying some critical things about Stalin.
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  Will they intercepted it? They read it and they imprisoned him in the Gulag. For years,
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  like a private letter. Like, okay, I do not like the violence of centrally planned coercive
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  government. Of course not. I love freedom. And entrepreneurship kind of is like the ultimate freedom.
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  Like, you don't, you don't work for anyone else. I mean, you work for your customers, but you can do
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  whatever you want. There's so much agency in being a start of ownership over the of your own
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  outcome. It's an imaginative, you know, more and more and more percentage of people choose that path.
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  So I was, but do you realize this now? I do now. You realize that so you were almost like
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  romanticized at the time and not to like do well because I know you now talking to you for like
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  five minutes. I could tell that we could have a four-hour conversation about Russia and the Soviet
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  Union. I didn't realize that you're so well-versed in it. But now you're now through just like lived
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  experience. You realize that romanticization, romanticization of these, of this part of the world,
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  it doesn't play out in reality. No, at all. It sounds so good. It does. It's a siren song
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  that is so appealing, especially as as Peter teal and Shamath and others have said, like when young
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  people, when there's an affordability crisis and they can't afford, they get student debt and they
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  can't afford a house and the average homebuyers now 40, not 29 when they're not getting married,
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  young, they're not having kids. They're been locked out of the Western capitalist world because of
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  greed and because of corruption and because of over government regulation. I'm reading a book by
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  Neil Gorsuch, one of the Supreme Court judges, called Overruled, the toll on humans of having
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  too many laws and regulations. And his stories in that book go back, you know, 70, 80 years are
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  incredibly demoralizing. Like some fisherman gets arrested and put in prison for six years
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  for breaking a federal law that he didn't even know existed. He was a fisherman and there was
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  something in the financial laws like the SEC related federal laws about not destroying evidence.
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  He threw some fish overboard and the federal guy viewed the fish as evidence of his crime and he
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  gets locked up for a law that was intended to stop CFOs from shredding paperwork. Okay, so
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  but there's thousands or maybe millions of I met a guy in Canada who protested a law about not
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  being able to walk in the forest in Nova Scotia. I saw this law. I saw this viral clip. Yeah,
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  I met him in Canada. I went to Calgary and spoke at a freedom conference and I'm like this guy
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  intentionally walked in the forest because I should have freedom to do that. He gets arrested.
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  Now he's going through the courts, but overruled too many laws, too many regulations, way too much
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  taxation. Well, this is why this is why I left because when we we were already planning on moving to
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  the US pre-COVID for completely other reasons, it was like, oh, you know, it's good for career and
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  it's and most of the business I do is down in the US anyways. And at the end of COVID, I remember
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  New York was open and California was open, which were two of the most restrictive states during COVID
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  and I couldn't even go to the park or get a haircut yet. And I'm like, that seems weird.
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  That seems off because like if California is fully open, like, what are we doing here? Really?
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  And then I was telling you about like the COVID hotels and the quarantine hotels and shit.
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  And I'm like, you know what? I'm tired of this. I'm tired of this. So then we move down
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  out of Miami. I actually think liberty and freedom and human rights are a pretty important part
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  of the world fabric and anything that's threatening to freedom and liberty and human agency.
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  You know, you can't over act and you can't you can't do things to harm other people. That's
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  that's what laws are for is to protect individual rights. So there are major reasons why
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  government exists. The police, the military is to protect human rights. But the more the government
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  decides to plan everything, you know, think about the US economy in the last few decades.
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  The only unregulated or less regulated area that allows for almost any entrepreneur to
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  almost anything they want is tech. Yes. Financial industry banking. Oh my gosh. Talk about regulation.
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  How about energy? How about healthcare? Like, there are so many great entrepreneurs with
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  awesome ideas in energy, finance, education, healthcare that can't do anything about it. Unless
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  they get massive government approvals six months, one year, five years of waiting around for
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  bureaucrats to decide, oh, yeah, you can do that. Kills innovation. Kills innovation. And it kills
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  the growth of the pie that could usher in an era of abundance for almost everybody.
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  You mentioned that socialism is an attractive concept. People that don't quite understand it
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  because they feel like they don't have a way out a way to win a way to afford a home a way to
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  have a family because everything is too expensive. I think entrepreneurship is the way. I truly
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  believe that entrepreneurship is a way. I think that being able to build and to be and being able to
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  create something where nothing existed before is the way to every 100 percent agree. The future
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  of your personal life and prosperity hinges on how much agency you exercise. And there are millions
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  or I would say billions of ways to make a living. You told me that you love broadcasting. You get
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  paid to do something that you enjoy all these guests, all these conversations. You had an interesting
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  tech background in selling sales selling tech to broadcasters. And so how cool is it that you could
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  do something you love. You're good at it. It's scaling really fast and you're going to have
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  financial prosperity because of it. But with AI and robots starting to do tons of productive work,
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  almost all kinds of blue collar and white collar human work. More of us, I'd say maybe even a billion
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  or more people are going to have to be an entrepreneur. You have to figure out your own path. And you'll
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  have more tools and knowledge at your fingertips than ever before. So it's not going to be like
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  that challenging. So yeah, I love what you do. I think entrepreneurship is generally the best
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  path forward for almost solving almost all the world problems. There are some government things
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  that they have to tackle. There's education. There's there's other industries. But within every
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  industry, it's the entrepreneurs, the innovators that actually change everything. Well, it was the
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  last time the government solved a big problem. Well, I mean, if you look back decades with DARPA
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  and with military and the Apollo mission and I wouldn't go to the Boston Airport and you see
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  posters everywhere about all the scientific achievements from NASA's Apollo missions and the
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  day-to-day products that we all use because of that. So R&D, I think the satellites, the GPS system,
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  you know, from the 80s and 90s, I think, weather forecast. There's there are some big investments
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  that the government has done. I think Eisenhower, when you did the interstate highway system in the
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  United States, brilliant. And was that because the barrier to entry for entrepreneurship was too high?
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  So at that time, the only one that could accomplish these things was enough. Yeah, I mean, under the U.S.
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  Constitution, there was a setup of the post office. So that was a Benjamin Franklin was the first
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  postmaster general. So having a postal system to deliver mail and then having interstate commerce
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  was enabled by an interstate highway system. So I think there are some really big infrastructure
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  things that government has to do. But most of the time, you're going to waste, you know, 90 percent
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  of the budget or in the case of California high-speed rail, 100 percent of the budget is wasted,
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  24 billion dollars. Like there are a lot of reasons not to put lots of big projects. But if I think
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  about the replacements for all of those things that you just mentioned, it's moving away from
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  government. The next iteration of postal email, it goes to entrepreneurs. And it's interesting,
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  it seems like the government becomes less relevant at solving big problems, like the Mori progress
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  as a civilization. I mean, I think that's largely true. And I don't think the U.S. Constitution ever
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  imagined that the U.S. government would start a sovereign wealth fund and start buying 10 percent
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  of Intel and picking and choosing winners and tech companies to invest. And so I think there's
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  so many people in both parties that overreach. They do things the government isn't designed to do
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  and literally has no legal authority to do. But no one's going to stop them because the parties
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  are in power and they're kind of, you know, what Charlie Kirk called a two-party cartel.
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  They're just in charge and they just fight each other. But there's no alternative to the
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  two parties. And so people go this way and then they go that way and they take their turns in
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  power and spending trillions of dollars we don't have. So both parties have been kind of I think
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  unsuccessful in, you know, having a stable limited government that follows the Constitution.
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  But yeah, I think, you know, think about the space issue. Yeah, of course.
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  Elon Musk. I know. I think he'll handedly. Well, not singly, but all the space X engineers and
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  all the funders and all the backers of it. Way more effective at reusable rockets and in doing
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  things that the government never thought of doing, I just think, yeah, I would put my bet on entrepreneurs.
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  Now, I'm a little concerned that multi-trillion dollar companies could turn into companies worth
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  tens of trillions of dollars have all of our data and have billions of users of their hardware
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  or their software. That's a lot of power to put in the hands of a private citizen. Yeah,
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  and that is the way we're going. That's the way we're going. There's a fascinating book. It changed
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  my life when I think about big corporations and, you know, I don't trust big government. I don't
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  trust big tech. But you have to kind of coexist with both and kind of figure out, well, what would
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  be a better way to go forward? Well, there was a journalist from the UK. He wrote for the economist
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  and he wrote a book called The Company. It's a history of corporations. So in the 1600s,
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  you had the East Indies, the Hudson Bay Company, the Dutch. There were these corporations. They
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  were only created by the parliament or a monarch. Private citizens could not start a corporation
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  until the 1850s. Because the East Indian Trading Company, that was one of— It was a monopoly
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  granted by the Crown. If you actually looked at their total market cap, it would have been the
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  largest company in the world today. I think at one point, the Hudson Bay Company owned 10% of
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  the land on planet earth and had had monopoly power on trading, on fur, a trapping, and logging,
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  and all the mineral rights and everything else. So yeah, the Crown used to grant the ability to
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  have a corporation. When my great-grandfather was born in 1841 in Illinois, there was no such thing
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  as a private citizen setting up a company that could outlive them. You had sole proprietorships,
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  and then your children would inherit stuff. But now we have corporations that have been viewed
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  to have human rights, which is weird, and they have endless ability to own assets and to control
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  parts of the economy. So they're de facto monopolies. I actually think there's an interesting
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  possibility for legislators. You know what dows are? Distributed, decentralized autonomous
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  organizations and kind of blockchain could allow some really interesting ownership and voting rights.
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  So there's some new technologies that are interesting to contemplate. But imagine if we the people
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  through our elected representatives decided to change what court... Well, we have C-corps, we have S-corps,
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  we have LLCs, and we have B-corps. I met Governor Martin O'Malley who in 2009 was the
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  Governor of Maryland when a benefit corporation was first legislated. And now there's thousands
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  of B-corps, and a lot of them are fine, mission-driven companies that want to be able to donate some of
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  their profits to philanthropy and not get sued for it. Maximizing profits is not the ultimate goal
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  of a B-corp. They want to be profitable, but they also want to give 1% to this cause or whatever.
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  I have a really strange concept that entrepreneurs should be able to pick a different kind of
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  corporation, which I call a D-corp. Now it's not been invented yet. No state legislature has passed
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  a D-corp law. They've got Dow Corporation law in Wyoming and Utah and Puerto Rico, but
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  imagine a D-corp where you go through just like a C-corp or an S-corp, you go through a risk stage
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  where you raise capital, you hire people, everyone's taking risks, and at some point you're worth a
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  billion dollars or five or ten billion dollars, and you have an exit. Post-exit, the company transforms
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  into a massively distributed corporation with a cap table that has hundreds of thousands
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  minimum investors. I call it a D-corp. It could be an algorithm that prevents concentrated
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  ownership. You get an economic engine that's just prosperous. You've got a huge audience, massive
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  revenue, recurring revenue, great value, and a lot of times corporations will hire people and
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  pay them $50 million to be the CEO of an already successful company. Then a few private equity
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  funds or institutional investors own 90% of the company. The wealthy get into that deal,
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  and then they become ultra wealthy. There you have this shared ownership. There's
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  joint ownership across hundreds of thousands of people, and everybody has participation in the
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  upside. Exactly. Imagine when a guy in the UK, John Spett and Lewis in the 1940s,
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  he was running one of the UK's most profitable retail companies. His father started it,
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  ran it for decades. John Spett and Lewis started running it, and I think he got sick, and he had
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  14,000 employees in the 1940s, one of the most popular retail chains in the UK. He gave his
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  ownership to all of his 14,000 employees and made them partners, and it's called the John Lewis
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  partnership. You know what happened? It's incredibly successful. It has like 80,000 or 90,000
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  employees. They're all owners. They're now doing $8 or $10 billion a year in revenue. They've
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  gotten into a modern tech, their retail, their e-commerce. It's a fantastic, shared ownership
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  model, and I've never heard of anyone, no one in the United States that I've told about John
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  those partners has ever even heard of. I haven't, no. We all want to be Zuckerberg or Gates or
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  or Michael Dell or a founder that becomes a billionaire, instead of a founder that creates 80,000
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  very prosperous households that for decades to come will get profit sharing every year.
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  Employee ownership widely seen could be really cool. Now I don't think you should force any
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  founder to do that, but I think there could be incredible tax benefits or the state legislatures
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  will give a $10 billion tax break to a trillion dollar company that locates headquarters
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  two or headquarters three in our backyard. They don't need the tax break. I love this. But if you
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  had thousands of entrepreneurs that say, I'm going to start a company, I think it's going to be
• 20:26
  worth a billion or more dollars. I'm going to metamorphize it to a decorporation post exit.
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  So I don't know all the rules and things that you've already made as much money as you're
• 20:37
  ever going to need in your life. Exactly. You have your exit. You get paid for a taking risk,
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  and that economic engine now starts to give benefit to all your employees, to all your customers,
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  to everyone who wants to buy shares, and lots of people are invited to buy shares because there's
• 20:52
  an algorithm that prevents concentrated ownership. So you get the best of free market and the redistribution
• 20:59
  of wealth engine that isn't forced. It's not social. It's by choice. Me, the entrepreneur,
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  I want my company to be a decorp because I'd rather have 88,000 employees benefiting their families
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  with a high income and profit sharing than to become a billionaire or a multi a decade billionaire
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  or even worse a trillionaire. And what's going to happen to your children? They're going to go
• 21:21
  off the rails or your grandchildren. Almost all super high net worth people have serious family
• 21:26
  problems and family dysfunction in the second or third or fourth generation. It's almost inevitable.
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  If you're raised with, hey, you've got $12 billion that you're going to inherit when you're
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  21, how can you make real friends? No, your view of life is skewed. You don't even comprehend
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  how to manage that. There's no way to properly prepare somebody for that amount of wealth.
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  Why would you wish that on your worst enemy, let alone your own children and grandchildren?
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  Yeah, because if you think about the person who made that wealth, their life was radically
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  different that allowed them to be the person that take the risk, build, persevere.
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  One of the finest people I've ever met was a big investor in ancestry.com early on. He's famous
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  because he took, he was the CEO of Blockbuster when it was in its heyday. He took Boston Market
• 22:19
  public. Was it James Kees? Scott Beck. Oh, no. Okay. So James Kees was another CEO of Blockbuster,
• 22:25
  but I don't think it was around. Scott Beck was a huge franchisee. They got him to be the CEO. He
• 22:29
  took a public and they took Boston Market Public. He's a phenomenal man. I think he's devout Christian.
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  I think he's got four kids. He sat down with me and my brother when we thought we were going to
• 22:39
  build this billion dollar ancestry company and some of our really good investors and friends
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  and advisors were even coaching us about don't let wealth ruin you and your family. Early on,
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  we had kind people that were willing to share advice with us. He said, I hope this is okay that I'm
• 22:59
  revealing his plan, but he's like, my wife and I are going to give all of our wealth to charity,
• 23:04
  mostly to Christian causes, except we need about five million dollars probably to live on. He
• 23:10
  probably had hundreds of millions. We'll give away charity, but we'll keep about five for
• 23:15
  living on. And then when our kids turn 25, they get $250,000. When they're 35, they get $250,000
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  and when they're 45, they get $250,000. So pay off your loans, get a house, pay for your kids,
• 23:30
  get them to college, you know, 750 out over three decades. And that's it. And I thought that is so
• 23:37
  smart and kind to not burden your kids with massive debt, but to give them something,
• 23:44
  to give them something that you worked really hard for. They get a leg up. They don't have
• 23:47
  to struggle. I mean, they get all their major expenses covered. They got to still work.
• 23:51
  They've got to figure out something that they want to take on as a job, but life is a little
• 23:56
  bit easier, but it's not like you're going to be ruined by the wealth. Exactly. Now,
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  President Trump has announced Trump savings accounts. Have you heard about this? I don't know
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  these know. Like in a month or so ago, I don't remember which department it came, maybe secretary
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  of treasury, but they are like every child born in the United States. I can hear about this from
• 24:14
  January 1st, 2025 till the end of 2028. I'm going to give them a thousand dollars savings account.
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  And I think the rules are being written right now, and I think it'll go into effect on July 1st.
• 24:24
  Look, okay, a thousand dollars over 18 years. If it's in fiat currency, you'll be able to buy a
• 24:30
  whopper by the time you're 18. Okay. Maybe if it's invested wisely, and it will take the rule
• 24:37
  of 72 and say, well, at a 12% interest rate, it would double every six years. So one to two to four
• 24:44
  to eight, you get $8,000 when you turn 18. Okay. That's better than having $50,000 or $100,000 of
• 24:49
  student debt. So it's kind of interesting. I thought Michael Dell's jumping in and saying,
• 24:54
  I'm going to add $250 to it was awesome. Michael Dell and his wife said, yeah, I now I remember this.
• 24:58
  I think that I mean, that's that's something that I think most parents set up for the children
• 25:02
  anyways, just some sort of a 529 educational savings count. Or what if all the parents and grandparents
• 25:09
  of every child in the United States who had any money at all could give money into this savings
• 25:15
  account every time there's a birthday, every time there's a milestone, maybe every month,
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  maybe when the kids do their chores, the parents pay them $5 cash for doing their weekly chores,
• 25:26
  and the grandparents match it, but put it into the savings account. That would be what everybody
• 25:30
  turns 18 and has $50,000 or $100,000. And then the big philanthropic foundations could provide money
• 25:37
  to disadvantaged people that don't have mothers and fathers or grandparents that could put in the money.
• 25:42
  Like I think it's kind of a cool concept. I don't think it's constitutional necessarily. I don't
• 25:46
  know if the Congress is going to have to pass laws, but I don't think the United States Constitution
• 25:52
  says the president shall set up a fund to let people invest, but it would children in a better
• 25:56
  situation. And again, it would let people take almost like ownership over their own life.
• 26:01
  That's the thing, right? Like, what if you got to be 18 and you thought I can go to college and
• 26:05
  get some student debt or I can start a business, I got $50,000 a 100% capital to start a business.
• 26:11
  And what if I had AI to help me every step of the way from idea to exit? Like you could unleash
• 26:16
  a generation of tens of millions of entrepreneurs who have seed capital. They ought to know what
• 26:22
  their passion is, what their strengths are, what their interests are. And then they get AI to
• 26:27
  coach them day by day. All the guests you have on your show have keys to success, right? Everybody
• 26:34
  knows, well, what did I, what mistakes did I make along the way? And what were the three most
• 26:37
  important things I ever did? As you collect those data points, and I know you like ideas that are
• 26:44
  actionable. You don't want just people to learn something, learn it and do it. So the better the
• 26:49
  idea is packaged and shared and matched to the right person, the more people will be able to take
• 26:54
  action, get customers, build product, ship something, support it. I just think there is a
• 27:01
  unlimited possible bright future for billions of people with entrepreneurship powered by AI
• 27:07
  and maybe seed funded with these savings accounts or some other kind of a capital.
• 27:11
  Quick question. What's your go to when you got 10 minutes before a meeting or a workout?
• 27:16
  For me, it just used to be whatever I could grab, which usually meant skipping meals entirely,
• 27:20
  or just grabbing something that left me crashing an hour later because it was just full of garbage.
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  That's why I'm partnering with Hule. This black edition ready to drink is a complete meal. So it has
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  And this one's new for me. It's Hule's daily greens. I had the blueberry this morning,
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  free business guide demystifying AI at NetSuite.com slash Scott Clary. The guide is free to you at NetSuite.com
• 29:39
  slash Scott Clary. That's NetSuite.com slash Scott Clary. Have you ever seen this chart
• 29:45
  that shows the amount of people required to build a million dollar company over time?
• 29:50
  No, but I've been tracking some leaderboards where one person or two person companies are getting
• 29:55
  to a million or 10 million ARRs. So this chart, it's saying like in the 1950s, I'm making these numbers
• 30:00
  I can't remember, but it was like say you need like 50 or 60 people to get to a million dollars
• 30:04
  in annual. And then you fast forward to, I mean, now in 2026, you need one person to get to a
• 30:10
  million dollars. And they're saying one person can now be a billion dollar company. I believe that
• 30:14
  will happen a lot. I know AI coding, AI agents, AI go-to-market strategies, AI video. Just all
• 30:23
  the things that AI can do now, you can have a one person company and all these, now I'd prefer to
• 30:29
  work with people. I actually don't mind having every employee learn to vibe code and vibe market
• 30:34
  and have five or 10 agents working around the clock, but I don't want to lose my people.
• 30:38
  I actually find great joy in working with people and seeing them grow and accomplishing things
• 30:43
  together is awesome. So I don't really want to be that loner entrepreneur that becomes a billion
• 30:49
  dollar company. With me and my agents, you know, all my AI companions that I can chat with and
• 30:54
  well, I like listen, because you want, you want to be successful entrepreneur, you are a successful
• 30:58
  entrepreneur, but your version of entrepreneur is the person should be successful entrepreneur and
• 31:02
  lift other people up with them. That's the goal. That's the joy in it all. Yes. If you get all
• 31:07
  this wealth and die with the most toys, you're a lonely, miserable person. But if you can help
• 31:12
  build people along the way, oh my gosh, I had dinner last night with two guys in a venture-backed
• 31:17
  company, fantastic young sales guy head of partnerships. At the end of this wonderful 90 minute
• 31:22
  conversation, they said, what's the most important advice you'd give to us? And I spent like three or
• 31:28
  four minutes talking about people relationships, treasure every conversation, keep track of people,
• 31:34
  stay in touch with people. I was just sharing a couple of stories in 20, in 2000, I gave a lecture
• 31:41
  about entrepreneurship. The guy in the audience was getting his master's degree and he thought, wow,
• 31:46
  Paul's life and entrepreneurship sounds a lot more fun than me getting a master's degree and
• 31:51
  instructional design and going working for somebody. So he quit academia and started a little company
• 31:57
  called Family Learn. He reached out to me and asked me to be an advisor and I was for about six
• 32:01
  months. We tried to build FamilyLearn.com into something. Well, fast forward, he started a few other
• 32:06
  things since then. He's now the CEO of Angel Studios, a billion dollar movie production company.
• 32:11
  The most successful anti-Hollywood movie company ever formed. His brother Jeffrey was an intern
• 32:17
  for me in 2008. So I have deep friendships with Neil and Jeffrey Harmon. And who would have known
• 32:25
  in 2000 or 2008 that these guys would go on to run a company? I think it'll be worth tens of
• 32:29
  billions of dollars. I think it's the next Netflix. Do you know Angel Studios? They have 1.6
• 32:35
  million guild members paying $20 a month to be able to crowd vote on what films and streaming shows
• 32:41
  to do next. There's participation from everyone who loves movies and films. You get a vote on
• 32:47
  which pilots should get funded and end up being movies. I'll be going to produce some pretty
• 32:51
  good stuff too. I could imagine, I could imagine someday they have tens of millions of people
• 32:55
  paying $20 a month for the joy of participating in the creation process and then getting access
• 33:00
  to the movies when they're released. Like, this is a big business model. And my relationship with
• 33:05
  those guys, I treasure it. And guess what? My oldest son went to work for them a few years ago.
• 33:12
  And got a really good career in internet marketing and analytics. And then one of the
• 33:17
  Harmon brothers clients hired him away and she just had a huge nine figure exit. And he got to
• 33:24
  watch this entrepreneur create a product, market it like crazy. And their celebration dinner
• 33:30
  for the company party. They had Steve Martin and Martin short as the entertainment. They had
• 33:36
  Bobby Flay and Guy Fiero as the chefs. And they had James Taylor as the entertainment. My son
• 33:46
  got to sit next to James Taylor at dinner. So because of my friendship with Neil and Jeffrey,
• 33:51
  my oldest son got hired by the Harmon brothers hired away by one of their clients and then he got
• 33:57
  this kind of most beautiful two day celebration of a company exit. And my other son was the first
• 34:04
  intern for angel studios. He was learning how to code. And now he works for Google in London.
• 34:10
  People are everything. People are everything. You can trace every success in your life to people.
• 34:16
  This is why I hate the idea of self made. I hate it. There's no such thing because there's no such thing.
• 34:22
  It could be customers. It could be friends. It could be mentors. It could be who's no such thing.
• 34:26
  Certainly your parents who created parents, but also a teacher who spotted something good about
• 34:31
  you and said something and you've never forgotten it. And like yeah, we are none of us self made.
• 34:37
  Okay, so I need to understand. So just back up for a quick second. When you went into that room
• 34:44
  of entrepreneurs, what was the thing that happened that turned you from somebody who's studying
• 34:50
  Russia into this? Okay. Yeah. Good question. So it was Philadelphia. It was May of 1996. My
• 34:58
  CD Ron publishing company that my best friend that I had started made the Inc 500. So it was an Inc 500,
• 35:04
  you know, two or three day event celebrating the 500 fastest growing companies in the United States.
• 35:08
  And in the course of that two or three days, I heard some brilliant lectures and I talked to
• 35:13
  dozens of people as we were going from tables, dinners, lunches. And I just thought these are
• 35:19
  the coolest people I've ever been around. They are creating jobs for everybody else. They all have
• 35:25
  passion. They have a vision and a mission. And they're doing stuff. And I was like electrified by
• 35:32
  entrepreneurship. So the next year I called Harvard Business School. I got a scheduled half hour with
• 35:38
  the dean of the Harvard Business School. I'm like, okay, I've been running a company for six years.
• 35:42
  I've had so many mistakes. I every year we lay off people at Christmas time because we ship a
• 35:48
  product. It goes really big. We hire a bunch of people. I didn't know about life cycle of
• 35:53
  products. I didn't know about forecasting. I was a Russian major. I knew nothing about business
• 35:59
  and I was self-taught in technology. So I said, I really think I need to go to Harvard Business School
• 36:04
  and learn how to be a good entrepreneur and a good CEO. And Kim Clark said to me, are you a patient
• 36:10
  person? I said, no, I like to just jump in and do stuff. He's like, you will hate your first year
• 36:14
  at Harvard Business School. It's all required courses. And you've already been doing CEO work for
• 36:19
  six years. You will hate your first year. If you get through the first year, you will love your
• 36:23
  second year because it's all elective. You'll pick and choose from the greatest faculty. And
• 36:28
  and he kind of talked to me out of wanting to go there. And so instead I started ancestry.com.
• 36:32
  That was it. That was it. That was it. Do you do you think that going to business school would have
• 36:38
  helped? Oh my gosh. I would have learned so many things about venture capital and and term
• 36:43
  sheets. And you know, I don't know. I would have learned a lot because instead people say like,
• 36:48
  just go into it and learn by doing. Oh, yeah. And I did that instead. I know. But when I took our
• 36:54
  first, when we took $13 million in venture capital in December of 98 for ancestry.com, I didn't
• 37:00
  understand the terms and what we were getting into preferred shares, board control, all those things.
• 37:07
  And I didn't realize as the founder that we were kind of seeding control to our investors.
• 37:12
  So that didn't end well. In 2006, the board of directors decided to sell ancestry to a private
• 37:18
  equity fund. So there was a good exit. But there could have been a 20 times bigger exit. If we had
• 37:23
  been able to hold on to our shares all the way through. So I didn't realize. So that was that
• 37:29
  was what the education would have helped you with. Yes. So maybe it was expensive. But if I had
• 37:35
  gone to Harvard, I wouldn't have launched ancestry. So yeah, you never know what's gonna. I like,
• 37:39
  I like what I did. And I like the learning, the painful lessons I've learned have now prepared me
• 37:43
  to run a sort of AI studio where we're a bit turning out company after company after company.
• 37:48
  We have super voting rights. We've raised, you know, almost $15 million across our portfolio.
• 37:54
  And we have some pretty big, exciting partnerships and likely exits. And this time all my employees
• 38:00
  own shares, they have options. You're living this model. Yeah. So I'm doing it right now.
• 38:05
  I haven't done the decorp yet because there's no legal entity. But my plan is to build,
• 38:10
  is to get legislators somewhere to adopt a new type of corporation called a decorp, massively
• 38:17
  distributed, or even you could call it democratic corporation. And then like I said, post-harvest.
• 38:22
  Now, not very many people have heard of the new stock exchange that's being built in the United
• 38:27
  States. There's the NASDAQ, there's the NYSE. A lot of really good companies when they go public
• 38:33
  become not so good. Quarterly earnings pressures cause CEOs to do really bad things.
• 38:40
  Yeah. Lay off five or 10% of your workforce, cut R&D. Short term thinking is disastrous.
• 38:45
  Which is not the same everywhere else in the world. Really? No, from what I understood,
• 38:50
  like I think that other parts of the world, they don't focus on quarterly as much as you,
• 38:54
  quarterly is a very US cent, a very US focused metric. I think that other stock exchange and other
• 39:01
  companies, of course, they have to have quarterly, but they focus on the longer play. I just remember,
• 39:06
  I'd have to do some research to figure it out, but I'm pretty sure that across Europe,
• 39:11
  there's just like a longer time. It's hard to look at Europe as a good model for entrepreneurship,
• 39:15
  though. If you look at that, there's a whole other set of problems with like the mindset and
• 39:20
  the regulatory. Okay, so that's one good thing. You pick and choose the good ideas. Well,
• 39:26
  I have a friend who was a CFO for 40 years in Silicon Valley. He said he worked for eight companies.
• 39:31
  Every single one of the CEOs came to him at one point in the other said, can you change our
• 39:36
  quarterly earnings? Can you like postpone the expense or move up the route eight times? He was
• 39:42
  kind of cajoled and he said, I refuse to do it. One time I refused to do it, the CEO was fired
• 39:46
  the next day and they put me in as the CEO. The pressure on CEOs and CFOs to fudge the numbers
• 39:53
  is really high, but the pressure to lay off workforce or cut R&D or shut down a product,
• 40:00
  it's like really stupid, short-term thinking. So good companies get way less good when they go
• 40:05
  public. Eric Reese, the super famous author of Lean Startup, who's one of our advisory board members,
• 40:10
  I get to talk to him every couple months. He's writing a new book. He's funded. He's raised
• 40:14
  $300 million to build the long-term stock exchange, which will have all the benefits of IPOs.
• 40:21
  This is what they're doing. This is what they're doing. Long-term stock exchange and we'll have
• 40:24
  the quarterly earnings pressures will be somehow minimized. I even heard that the SEC is now
• 40:31
  considering in the US stock markets, even the two that are high pressure right now,
• 40:36
  of going to six month reporting instead of three months. There's a proposal. But Eric's is better.
• 40:41
  Eric is going to let people go public on the long-term stock exchange
• 40:45
  and recruit institutional investors who have a five-year investment thesis. Long-term holding.
• 40:52
  You know, I don't think it's there. I think it's Asia. I'm just thinking I think it's Asia that
• 40:55
  focuses on longer-term horizon. I want to research this. You should ask Eric Reese about this because
• 40:59
  I'm sure he's got a lot of research here. Yeah, I've talked to some of the people that he's hired
• 41:04
  for long-term stock exchange. I really admire his vision to take the best parts of capitalism
• 41:10
  and to minimize the problems with it, with greed and with short-term thinking. And then
• 41:16
  I actually think it would be fascinating if the long-term stock exchange could be the place
• 41:20
  where decorps go public. I've got a founder portal, an AI company that I've got a guy that's
• 41:25
  going to start running it. We're going to build cap table management software for crowdfunded
• 41:30
  companies. My company citizen portal, we raised $1.3 million from 1,850 people on a crowdfunding
• 41:39
  campaign. Glenn Beck heard about citizen portal had me come to his studio in Dallas,
• 41:43
  interviewed me for 33 minutes. 560,000 people saw that interview about how citizen portal was going
• 41:49
  to use AI to empower citizens to know what's going on in your local state and federal government.
• 41:54
  And citizen portal had millions of people use it last year. This year it could be 10 or 20 million.
• 41:58
  But we crowdfunded it. There's no good cap table management software for crowdfunded companies.
• 42:04
  What if you have 10,000 investors on your cap table? What a mess.
• 42:07
  That's a nightmare for the average.
• 42:08
  Carter has, Carter makes you pay for every seat.
• 42:11
  Yeah.
• 42:12
  Okay, so if we launch a cap table management software for crowdfunded companies and crowdfunded
• 42:18
  companies have raised $5 billion in the last few years, but they could raise tens of billions.
• 42:22
  So you get a big cap table going public and then you go decorp.
• 42:26
  Now you have a massively big cap table with an algorithm that prevents concentrated ownership.
• 42:31
  And then maybe a Dow voting mechanism so shareholders can weigh in.
• 42:34
  Not just into like technology. You're like optimizing capitalism.
• 42:38
  Well, I think you have to change capitalism because it's really crony capitalism.
• 42:42
  And that's put that's why so many young people are embracing socialism is because they think
• 42:47
  capitalism is corrupt. To the degree that capitalism is corrupt, let's fix it.
• 42:52
  Let's allow volunteer entrepreneurs to say I'm going to build a great company and I'm going to
• 42:56
  be totally employed owned. An ESOP or a decorp. Where did this come from? I mean with ancestry,
• 43:03
  you played into the existing system. We played by the rules. You played by the rules.
• 43:08
  You raised money. You did a bad deal. I mean, objectively a bad deal. Not the worst outcome,
• 43:14
  but still not the best deal. You lost control. I mean, I don't think that anything from what I've
• 43:21
  researched with your ancestry journey, you really tried to do anything innovative in terms of
• 43:28
  structuring employees share. We were playing by vanilla rules.
• 43:31
  100% and a few people have made hundreds of millions of dollars.
• 43:35
  And the hundreds of millions of people that have used ancestry.com, their data is now behind the
• 43:41
  paywall. When I started ancestry with my best friend and we decided to put all the world's
• 43:46
  genealogy records together, we allowed any genealogists to upload their connected family tree.
• 43:53
  They were using family tree maker or family origins or ancestral quest.
• 43:57
  So millions of genealogists had been working on their local software hard drive for decades
• 44:04
  to put together their family tree. We wanted all of those to be uploaded to ancestry.com.
• 44:08
  So we created the ancestry world tree and I made a promise to millions of people. When you upload
• 44:13
  your data to us, it will always belong to you. You can delete it whenever you want. It'll be indexed
• 44:19
  so that it'll be searchable by everyone else so you can find all your distant cousins,
• 44:23
  but it will always be outside of our paywall. After I left, I was going to ask, was 43% of our
• 44:32
  traffic was in the ancestry world tree. So after I left, the CEO and the chief marketing officer
• 44:38
  decided to put it behind the paywall. So I had intended to let all the user generated content
• 44:45
  belong to the users. That was my goal. And then later executives broke that promise.
• 44:52
  And they enriched themselves. That's fine. But at the cost of violating my promise to millions
• 44:57
  of people that your data belonged to you. I was wondering if the experience that you had with
• 45:01
  ancestry was so bad that this is what prompted you to want to build something that just sort of
• 45:07
  looked at. Make a bullet proof against takeover. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It didn't fulfill its mission.
• 45:13
  The goal that the founders had was not only ancestry.com, but we launched a website called MyFamily.com,
• 45:19
  which tens of millions of people signed up for. It was a collaborative website. You know,
• 45:24
  years, six years before Facebook, everyone could share a calendar, upload photos, share recipes,
• 45:29
  have message boards, make free phone calls to any relative in the world using a service called
• 45:35
  lipstream out of Silicon Valley. In 99, we had free voice over IP six years before Skype was
• 45:40
  invented. We had the best technology platform for strengthening families all around the world
• 45:45
  and connecting families across geography. It was awesome. Mary Meeker with the top
• 45:50
  Internet analyst in the world. She was at Morgan Stanley. She saw ancestry.com and MyFamily.com.
• 45:55
  And she says it's game over in the family space. She ranked us with Amazon and eBay. Like we were
• 46:01
  going to define online community. Yeah. And then our investors pulled the plug on it because it
• 46:08
  wasn't monetizing very well. So then Facebook emerges years later. You know, MySpace,
• 46:13
  Friends to Facebook, and Facebook's worth, you know, a trillion dollars. MyFamily.com had
• 46:18
  the possibility of having a billion users right now. So I think I learned some painful lessons
• 46:24
  about structure. I'm understanding why. And I'm like, oh, over these years, these ideas,
• 46:29
  these books that I've read about the company and, you know, what Warren Buffett, I used to go to his
• 46:33
  shareholder meeting all the time and like, I'm trying to learn. And like, okay, civilization depends
• 46:38
  on capitalism. Prosperity depends on that. But if it's if it's broken, what if we adjust it?
• 46:44
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• 47:02
  with indeed sponsor jobs. I'd get people who fit that description. I'm not digging through resumes
• 47:06
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• 48:01
  If you're into this show, you're probably someone who likes running for people who've actually
• 48:04
  done the thing. That's why I want to put create like the greats on your radar. It's a great show.
• 48:08
  It's hosted by Ross Simmons, part of the Hobbspot podcast network. Ross breaks down some of the greatest
• 48:12
  creations and creators of all time. What they built, how they thought the actual process behind it,
• 48:18
  and he's not just talking theory. He's been doing this stuff for over a decade. What I appreciate is
• 48:22
  that he makes it practical. Like how do you actually systematize creativity? So you're productive,
• 48:27
  but you're not burning out. So if you like learning from history, understanding how great work gets
• 48:31
  made, and you want something that's easy to listen to, check it out. Listen to create like the
• 48:35
  greats wherever you get your podcasts. So with soar, let's talk about let's talk about what you're
• 48:40
  doing for founders and entrepreneurs now. So what are you what we're talking about sort of evolving
• 48:45
  capitalism, evolving ownership of companies. If you were going to if you were going to set up like
• 48:51
  the perfect structure and environment for entrepreneurship to thrive, what is it in your mind?
• 48:56
  Yeah. So what's the success rate of startups over a five or 10 year period? People say it's like
• 49:01
  80 to 90% fail, right? That's kind of the the common wisdom. And I don't know if there's any
• 49:07
  actual data on that, but I think it's a very high failure. Probably pretty close. And even venture
• 49:11
  back companies often fail. So the thing is that what you want is to flip that so that 90% of startups
• 49:18
  succeed. Well, what do founders not know when their get getting started? They don't know hardly
• 49:23
  anything. Everything maybe you don't know anything about how do you build a product? How do you get
• 49:27
  your first customer? How do you hire people? What about legal? Like there's so much you don't know.
• 49:31
  Well, what if an AI is trained on the thousands of super important keys to success that you
• 49:37
  have interviewed people and you found? And so you go back to all the origin stories. My dad was a
• 49:42
  classification engineer and a taxonomy builder and the software that my dad built in the 70s
• 49:48
  was licensed to Boeing, Westinghouse, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, over a hundred of the largest
• 49:53
  manufacturing companies in the world used my father's software for classifying all their parts
• 49:59
  and processes and materials and optimizing their factory layout to create efficiency. So my father's
• 50:05
  life work was to take raw material and turn it into valuable finished goods in the fastest
• 50:10
  possible way. So I grew up hearing about decision trees, expert systems and taxonomies and none of
• 50:17
  it really sunk in until later. And then I'm like entrepreneurship could have a taxonomy and a decision
• 50:21
  tree and an expert system and every entrepreneur in the world could have a 90% success rate because
• 50:27
  the AI would coach you every day from idea to exit. Like that's a beautiful world that we could
• 50:33
  all live in. If the answer is entrepreneurship, which I am on the same page that you agree it is,
• 50:37
  then yes. So our go to market, we have a product called source scribe. We have a workplace
• 50:44
  subsidiary that takes that technology into large corporations. So for sales training, we have a
• 50:49
  product that competes with Gong. Gong isn't tied to anyone training methodology, but Jeremy
• 50:57
  Minor from Scottsdale, Arizona has run a company called seventh level. He's invented a methodology
• 51:03
  for selling very, very good. He's been on here too. Called any big queue. Yeah. And so Jeremy's
• 51:08
  stuff is awesome. So over the last six months together, we've partnered and we've launched seven
• 51:13
  q dot AI, which is his version of Gong. And it records all your calls and meetings and it coaches
• 51:18
  you and grades you every call on how well did you follow his methodology. And then there's an
• 51:23
  asked Jeremy feature that has his voice and 33,000 hours of his content. And it will coach you every
• 51:29
  day until you're expert. Okay. Imagine. So that for sales and every entrepreneur needs to be
• 51:35
  learn how to sell. So you could have that kind of Jeremy expertise in your startup scribe.
• 51:40
  And then you can have Eric Reese's lean startup where in conversations with him about that. And so
• 51:45
  all the keys that people have found worked, you can actually use those and the AI can guide you
• 51:51
  every step of the way. I think there's a world where almost every startup succeeds.
• 51:55
  I think the barrier to entry and the access to information is great. Like the barrier
• 52:00
  enters lower than ever before. And the access to information is greater than ever before.
• 52:04
  It is overwhelming. It is. If you, especially if you're afraid to act, if you're afraid to fail.
• 52:10
  So if you can help people kind of burst through that barrier of like psychologically,
• 52:14
  like, I don't dare get started. Like if you sit down, by the way, that is that is most people though.
• 52:20
  Like the 90% who fail are already outliers because they've actually taken a chance.
• 52:25
  Good point. Good. Well, and I grew up thinking business was a lower cast. And so why would I ever
• 52:31
  aspire to that? But you know, there's a lot of great entrepreneurs who've become philanthropists
• 52:35
  or thought leaders. So we actually can pick and choose role models. One of the things I've
• 52:39
  vibed coded in the last 60 days. I'm super excited about it is kind of the company. Sore,
• 52:45
  the name Sore came from a book published in 1992 by the person I think is the greatest
• 52:52
  psychologist in the history of the world. Dr. Donald O. Clifton, he invented the strength
• 52:57
  finder assessment. He spent 50 years of his life in the field of psychology, mostly industrial
• 53:03
  psychology, trying to figure out what natural talents does every person have that if they lean
• 53:09
  into it, they can become excellent at something. So we're not born a blank piece of paper that you
• 53:14
  can write anything on. You have DNA, you have nature, you have parents, you have an environment,
• 53:21
  you are wired in a certain way. Your neurological pathways, you know, become defined. And by the time
• 53:27
  you're 26, you're quite well known like you are a unique human being. But if Don Clifton interviewed
• 53:34
  hundreds of thousands of successful people in hundreds of occupations and he asked them questions
• 53:39
  for 90 minutes to find out what made them tick. What were they born with that allowed them to
• 53:46
  succeed in this role? And he he built a taxonomy of human talent that resonated with me because
• 53:52
  my dad's work. So the concept of Sore is to build AI that takes the world's knowledge wisdom
• 53:59
  and advice from all the best experts and role models and then translates it through your prism
• 54:05
  of your own natural wiring. So I might give you advice and it works perfectly for you. I might
• 54:12
  give someone else the exact same advice and it completely it fails like it is not the path for them.
• 54:20
  If you have ideation, which is one of my top strengths, if you have learner, which is one of my
• 54:25
  top strengths, people with learner and ideation are probably going to resonate with the things that I
• 54:30
  share. If someone has connectedness, related, maximizer, restorative, all these other words
• 54:36
  that Don Clifton came up with, my advice will almost never work for them. It will go into there like
• 54:43
  think about my brain as a CPU and your brain as a CPU and think about my words as an instruction set
• 54:48
  and it goes into your ear, goes into your CPU and it doesn't process. Your neurological pathways
• 54:54
  are so different than mine that my advice, it actually backfires because you're like, oh, I want to
• 54:59
  be like Paul, he's successful. Here's the three things he told me to do. I can't do it. It's worse
• 55:05
  to get advice from the wrong person than to not get advice at all. It actually demoralizes people.
• 55:11
  So I think a lot of loving parents, teachers, counselors, and friends give advice freely all the time
• 55:16
  because they want to be helpful. They have no idea how to communicate. No idea what the prism
• 55:20
  that that person needs to hear it through is and so if AI can build that prism and block out the
• 55:28
  advice that will not work for you because of lots of things, your values, your goals,
• 55:33
  your wiring, your strengths, and then help you find the stuff that is not only good advice,
• 55:38
  but it's easy and fun for you. It's like, oh, that place to my strengths. I'm going to lean into that.
• 55:42
  And now you're successful. I just think the world could be full of successful people.
• 55:46
  Does that mean that anybody can be an entrepreneur if they get the advice that's actually sort of
• 55:54
  and you know, given to them in the way that they understand it, they can internalize it,
• 55:57
  they play to the strengths. Can anybody be successful? I think 100% of people could be a successful
• 56:01
  entrepreneur. Necessity is the mother of invention. And if somebody had to find a way to make a living
• 56:06
  on their own, I think they could all find a way. I'm not saying they could all be, you know,
• 56:11
  millionaires, but I think everyone can who can speak, who can persuade, who can communicate,
• 56:17
  who can ideate or have an idea for a product or a service. There are so many millions of ways
• 56:22
  to make a living and you don't have to work for someone else to get a salary. You can work for
• 56:27
  yourself. You just find a client. You know, anyone who hires you has clients. They have people
• 56:32
  paying them. So the biggest issue is they're getting, they're getting their information in a way
• 56:36
  that doesn't, doesn't process for them. And that's why they're stuck. Because a lot of people listen
• 56:41
  to the show are trying to build something beyond the panors and it doesn't always work out, right?
• 56:46
  So no, no, no, we're all going to have lots of failures along the way. But in today's world,
• 56:50
  the knowledge, wisdom and advice can be your fingertips. AI can, can selectively tell you
• 56:57
  which ideas are good for you personally and which ones you should not pursue. So I think there's
• 57:03
  a future world where AI is helping almost every startup succeed. You know, it's kind of exciting
• 57:10
  to have AI that can build your web page, do your emails, do your videos, slice and dice your
• 57:15
  content. It all starts with you and your thinking and your speaking. I actually think the future
• 57:22
  belongs to those who can articulate clearly and precisely exactly what they want to have happened.
• 57:27
  The more you can clearly articulate your vision, the more the AI will listen and start spinning up
• 57:33
  agents to do what what you tell it to do. And of course, people along the way, you want them to hear
• 57:38
  clearly and precisely what the vision is, what the goal, the mission is. So I think articulation
• 57:44
  and precision is really critical skill for all of us to get out of it. I don't think many people
• 57:48
  have it. I think most people don't. So when I was, when I was, I was thinking because I've interviewed
• 57:53
  a few people just speaking about AI and we were talking several of them, like they all sort of speak
• 57:58
  about why like large enterprise AI implementation fail. Because a lot of companies, they wanted to jump
• 58:05
  on the bandwagon, they put a lot of money towards, you know, training people on using AI, just
• 58:10
  even laying off departments because they think that AI is going to replace them. And in some cases,
• 58:16
  people who are using AI, they realize that the results are getting or taking them longer than if
• 58:20
  they just did the work themselves. And I think it's because we forgot that for AI to work properly,
• 58:26
  we have to understand how to communicate with it properly. Because when you give a prompt to AI,
• 58:30
  there's an unlimited amount of possible outcomes that has to choose from in terms of how it
• 58:35
  interprets the prompt that you give it. And if we can't communicate what we want properly,
• 58:41
  then AI can't interpret that properly. And then it ends up with a poor result, right? And this
• 58:46
  is I think why a lot of large scale enterprise implementations didn't work out because we just
• 58:49
  said to every single person on this team or in this business unit, hey, use AI, even though you've
• 58:55
  never really properly communicated what you actually want to somebody in a clear and precise way.
• 59:02
  And then we expect to AI to just understand it and it doesn't. So I think that this is something
• 59:08
  that is actually highlighting how people have massive communication problems. And this is probably
• 59:12
  what actually stops from being good leaders as well with other people. But it's just like I guess
• 59:17
  with people over time, you can kind of like a massage. If you're working with somebody on your
• 59:25
  team, they'll start to get what you want, even if you aren't the best at communicating it. But with
• 59:33
  AI, it's like it's not getting it because it hasn't had that experience working with you.
• 59:37
  That's right. That's very true. I think that's what very well said. There was a researcher,
• 59:42
  I think a Wall Street researcher, I think she was a PhD and Wisconsin or Michigan. And she
• 59:47
  published a book. She had a thesis that when CEOs communicated in what she called foggy language,
• 59:57
  factless obtuse obfuscating generalities, she created a fog index for CEO communications from
• 1:00:04
  publicly traded companies. She's like, you know, if you have really good news, you're going to share
• 1:00:08
  the facts, the details, you'll be very specific. So she created with a bunch of researchers,
• 1:00:13
  they hand coded all the CEO communications from all the public companies. And she graded it on
• 1:00:18
  the fog index. And guess what? Foggy communication predicted lower stock price in 12 months,
• 1:00:25
  very clear, factual, you know, specific news was predictive of higher stock prices in the future.
• 1:00:34
  So one of the things we've thought about doing for our investor portal, we haven't launched it yet,
• 1:00:38
  but we're like, you know, wouldn't it be cool if you could analyze the fogginess in real time of
• 1:00:43
  every company in the world, like especially publicly traded companies where you could buy and sell
• 1:00:47
  stocks. Like that thesis played out well for her. Well, everyone of us could have an AI that's
• 1:00:52
  analyzing, you know, how foggy are the CEO pronouncements from all these companies and then buy
• 1:00:59
  and sell. But then think about political leaders, like the world needs great leadership, cities,
• 1:01:04
  counties, states, international leaders, we really need honest high integrity people who have
• 1:01:10
  real ideas. They don't just spout topping talking points. So I think there's a potential fog
• 1:01:16
  indexed for the political arena. Would you want to vote for a governor who only just like repeats
• 1:01:23
  trite phrases and generality? This is how most people in politics communicate. Wouldn't it be cool
• 1:01:28
  if you could grade and score people based on like Andrew Yang, when he ran for president, he wrote
• 1:01:32
  a book called the war on normal people. He had 107 ideas. He was an entrepreneur trying to get
• 1:01:39
  into politics. And I think he's been discouraged because, you know, that the race, he got kind of
• 1:01:44
  pegged with just UBI as like his only issue. But that guy was super smart, super well researched.
• 1:01:49
  He quoted Gallup polls throughout his book, which I used to work for Gallup. So I was like, go
• 1:01:53
  Andrew. But he had so many ideas and he's like, I'm not left. I'm not right. I'm forward. Okay.
• 1:01:58
  Innovation, even in government and in providing services to our citizens is really important.
• 1:02:03
  So wouldn't it be cool if you could score people based on how innovative their communication is?
• 1:02:09
  Like how many ideas, especially if those ideas have been tried somewhere else and proven to work.
• 1:02:14
  So now you're promoting successful ideas. So bad policies never work. And they have bad outcomes.
• 1:02:22
  Good ideas and good policies can work and have really good outcomes. So why don't we find all the
• 1:02:27
  good, discard all the bad, but AI can help grade and score our communication, our leadership style.
• 1:02:34
  And then people could start voting for people that are not, you know, just dull, repetitive,
• 1:02:39
  you know, machines. Word salads. Word salad.
• 1:02:44
  But a word salad index. Word salad. But if you think about like your building AI that helps
• 1:02:50
  entrepreneurs, but on the flip side of it, what are the skill sets that entrepreneurs have to learn
• 1:02:54
  to communicate well with AI? And that's, and meeting in the middle will be where somebody can use AI
• 1:02:59
  to be successful. So this is where I'm talking about prompting and communicating. And I think that
• 1:03:04
  something that you are, it sounds like you're working on is making AI better at interpreting
• 1:03:09
  so that the entrepreneur doesn't have to put as much work in communicating. Not that it's good to be
• 1:03:13
  lazy, but I mean, if you give AI to an entrepreneur and the AI can interpret how that person
• 1:03:19
  likes to communicate and how that person thinks and their strengths and their weaknesses, then all
• 1:03:24
  of a sudden, the person isn't depending on their sort of, you know, haphazard communication
• 1:03:30
  style to get the best possible outcome or information from the AI. Let me give you one example.
• 1:03:34
  And again, my dad's work in taxonomies and decision trees affects how I think. So my favorite
• 1:03:39
  book in marketing, and I've read hundreds of books. I love marketing. I was the head of marketing
• 1:03:43
  for Ancestry for several years, had a $7 million budget. We tried every single possible channel.
• 1:03:50
  I wanted to write a book on marketing. Well, the guys who started Duck Duck Go and someone else,
• 1:03:56
  I think, from Google Ventures wrote a book called Traction. It's a blue cover and it's like 19
• 1:04:01
  ways to get customers. And that, like, that's a taxonomy. And I've tried every one of those 19.
• 1:04:05
  I could actually write a supplemental book that says, my experience with those 19 channels, like,
• 1:04:10
  hey, buy the book. It's awesome. And then buy Paul's, you know, addendum to it. Like,
• 1:04:14
  we've tried this and this and this and this. Okay, my favorite of the 19 is engineering as marketing.
• 1:04:20
  You use your engineers to build something awesome that spreads. And it's a product. It's
• 1:04:24
  something you use. So this is product-led growth, basically? Yeah, yeah, kind of. But that was,
• 1:04:28
  you know, 10, 15 years before product-led growth. My friend Dave Boyce just wrote the book on product-led
• 1:04:34
  growth. Okay, but yeah, so 19. So if the AI is in the middle between you as a startup founder
• 1:04:41
  and you're trying to get going, you have to do something about what my product or service is,
• 1:04:45
  what one by pricing be, how will I communicate that? But there's 19 ways to attract customers.
• 1:04:50
  What if the AI shows you those 19, looks at your strengths, looks at your past history and says,
• 1:04:56
  based on your talents and strengths and based on what you know and what you've tried,
• 1:05:01
  we recommend this one first and then maybe this one. And then you do the bull's eye thing or you
• 1:05:05
  spend $250 and you try it out with the help of AI. And you're like, measure, would that channel work
• 1:05:10
  for my product or my service given my brand? So it solves the communication breakdown that's
• 1:05:15
  stopping people from effectively using AI. Exactly. But the choice of 19, it's nice to have an exhaustive
• 1:05:20
  list of the things you could do. You have to know, what are my options? What I'm incorporating?
• 1:05:25
  What are my options? LLC, escort, Dow, you know, what are my fund raising options, angel investors,
• 1:05:32
  fund 20 or 30 times more companies than VCs, but almost all the entrepreneurs go for VCs.
• 1:05:37
  Crowdfunding is new. 2016, it was finally legalized with like over 20 SEC approved platforms.
• 1:05:45
  And now $5 billion has been raised. So you have a little decision table. Like you need $100,000
• 1:05:51
  to build this company. Here are your five options, seven options. And then AI will go help you find
• 1:05:56
  the right investors. And all of a sudden, like most of the time you spend fumbling around,
• 1:06:02
  wasting, like, you know, now the AI helps you get there really fast, test it out. And if it works
• 1:06:07
  good, if it doesn't work, go to the next one. So AI could like be the kind of decision tree.
• 1:06:14
  So so so is building like the fundamental components to use AI properly. And then you're layering
• 1:06:21
  on sales with Jeremy. And then you'll have another whatever piece that will be another investor,
• 1:06:27
  will be another thing or marketing or what in your leadership. Franklin Cubby just shipped a
• 1:06:31
  product this week that is AI that measures how you're leading and compares it to their paradigm of
• 1:06:38
  trust and inspire leadership versus commands and control leadership. And so they now have an AI.
• 1:06:44
  There's millions of people that have learned about trust and inspire leadership. Now Franklin Covey
• 1:06:47
  can say, do you want to see how you're doing week by week? You know, are you actually living
• 1:06:53
  these principles and inspiring your team and engage them? Or are you a command and control?
• 1:06:58
  And you don't even know it. And so if you invest in the training, you also need to invest in the AI
• 1:07:03
  that pairs with the training that helps you level up and to have expertise and mastery in that field.
• 1:07:08
  But yeah, we'll do workplace, founder portal, investor portal, family portal, faith portal for
• 1:07:15
  people of faith where all your favorite pastors, sermons will be transcribed and integrated into
• 1:07:20
  the Bible. So as you're reading the Bible every morning and praying, you'll say, Oh, my pastor
• 1:07:25
  explained this verse 12 years ago. Here's a three minute clip. Like Bible study could be enhanced
• 1:07:32
  with clips from your favorite religious teacher. So that's coming from our faith portal. So,
• 1:07:36
  but I love it. So it's all marrying up the information available, easily accessible with how you
• 1:07:41
  can learn it, whether or not it's faith, family, business, entrepreneurship. And how you can learn
• 1:07:45
  it is the most important ingredient. But then also the prompt engineering you've talked about like how
• 1:07:50
  does that the person prompt AI and we can up level them on clarifying their prompt. Like we can
• 1:07:57
  intercept a bad prompt and turn it into a great prompt. And then context, context engineering I think
• 1:08:02
  is extremely important. And that is how much does the AI know about you and your past. So Google
• 1:08:09
  just launched Gemini is going to now have access to your Gmail history and so they're going to have
• 1:08:14
  a lot of context all your photos on your phone or whatever. But but if you're trying to live your
• 1:08:19
  best life and you want AI to help you be a founder and to make more money and to be successful at work
• 1:08:26
  and to hire the right people and to be a good leader and to be a good salesperson and to pitch
• 1:08:30
  investors really effectively AI can easily do all that. But you want to also be healthy. And now
• 1:08:35
  there's a lot of content about longevity and biohacking and and you know, living, eating
• 1:08:40
  nutritiously, sleeping well, all these protocols AI could kind of guide you based on your DNA.
• 1:08:47
  There's personalized medicine, right? There needs to be personalized AI health advice.
• 1:08:52
  I had a Naveen Jane on from Vial. I've met Naveen in 98 when he was at Infospace. And now he's doing
• 1:08:58
  personalized probiotics. That's a couple of different things. But that's one of his latest companies.
• 1:09:04
  Yeah. So there's all these incredible products. My brother-in-law had a 22 pound tumor removed
• 1:09:10
  in his stomach like 20 years ago. And it was it was going to be fatal. And it turned out that
• 1:09:16
  his genetic makeup allowed him to take a medicine. I think only 2% of people could be healed with
• 1:09:22
  this medication that came from Scandinavia and his DNA matched it saved his life. Wow. Okay. And
• 1:09:28
  that was 20 or maybe even 30 years ago. And so personalized medicine is like, does this
• 1:09:35
  pharmaceutical work with your DNA or your microbiome? Like we all have differences. And so some things
• 1:09:44
  work and some things don't. So just take that concept and apply that to your health, to your
• 1:09:49
  financial decisions. Maybe you follow Dave Ramsey and you like one in AI to coach you day by day.
• 1:09:57
  And all these things like knowledge is out there. Everyone says knowledge is power. It is not.
• 1:10:03
  Knowledge applied properly is power. And you get the results of all these good ideas if you do them
• 1:10:11
  right. But most of us are constantly learning. I probably learned thousands of things I've never
• 1:10:18
  even tried. I learned it. And I think there is I think especially in like this audience and
• 1:10:28
  probably some of our peers, we just love the idea of knowledge accumulation. It makes us feel good.
• 1:10:35
  Right. We're like learning. We're listening to a new podcast or reading a new book. It's like
• 1:10:40
  in and out. But I read a book. That's right. We all say that. Don't we? Oh, I read a book on that.
• 1:10:47
  Yeah. But like how much do you remember? Yeah. I did a deep dive on Sequoia trees in California.
• 1:10:52
  Like 90% of the Sequoias have been cut down. But a hundred year old Sequoia tree will provide 1.
• 1:10:57
  million lumber feet, 1.5 million lumber feet for home building. That's why the Sequoias were all
• 1:11:03
  cut down and they were used for decades to build California homes. Well, I know about Sequoias.
• 1:11:08
  I've never planned that a Sequoia tree. And if I did 70 years from now, it would be worth a million
• 1:11:13
  dollars of lumber. Okay. So knowing something and not doing anything about it doesn't let you reap
• 1:11:20
  the fruits. The first thing I want to talk about is my experience with chat GPT and Claude and perplexity.
• 1:11:28
  And I feel like as much as I train it on my personal history and what I what I like to learn and
• 1:11:38
  talk about and things that are sort of very personal to me, I feel like it always seems to bleed in
• 1:11:44
  external information. And I like I'm not deep in a I'm not building an AI company is just like
• 1:11:50
  me just using it and trying to train it. And then you know, two weeks later, it'll bring in a
• 1:11:57
  piece of information, which is definitely completely incorrect. And I'm like, where did that come
• 1:12:01
  from? And I'm assuming just because it's this like crowdsourced information. It was trained on
• 1:12:05
  trillions of words and phrases. Right. So yeah. So you can try to fine tune it based on, but it's
• 1:12:10
  still built on top of that large language model, which is trained on all known written and spoken
• 1:12:15
  words. And I notice that it's very good, but it's not perfect. And I think that that's something that
• 1:12:19
  if you're trying to get very specific information on the type of strategy to market a company that
• 1:12:26
  will suit my expertise. Like having all the information in the world is actually not beneficial to
• 1:12:34
  you. That's right. And I'm sure this is probably what you found when you try and use some of these
• 1:12:38
  LLMs that are not sore. And a sore on, is it an LL? No, no, we we use all those LLMs. We have a
• 1:12:44
  big how do you make it so that yeah, like the marketing. It's a great question. Yeah. So our vision
• 1:12:50
  is to not just have AI generate stuff because it knows all words and phrases and it's a probability
• 1:12:56
  engine that can just produce any kind of output, but it hallucinates a lot doesn't know facts
• 1:13:01
  from from fiction. And our vision, because of my background for seven years in CD-ROM publishing,
• 1:13:08
  trying to find the best books ever written in every field and no word for word, what did the human
• 1:13:12
  write? And so we have this concept of what we call level six humans. We find people that have
• 1:13:18
  spent a hundred thousand hours of their life studying a topic, Don Clifton in psychology,
• 1:13:24
  studying human talent and potential and creating strengths. That's it for 50 years. And he gifted
• 1:13:29
  the world this assessment, which in 30 minutes, he can tell you your top five strengths. And if you
• 1:13:35
  know what your top five strengths are and lean into them, your chances of succeeding in every part
• 1:13:39
  of life goes way, way up. If you're trying to fix your weaknesses all the time, you're obsessed with
• 1:13:45
  what you're not good at. And you forget that you have incredible gifts that nature gave you or
• 1:13:50
  that God gave you. And you forget about doing anything about them, you're just going to be lost.
• 1:13:56
  So lean into your strengths. That's what Don would say. So the thing we try to do is we want to
• 1:14:03
  find millions of pages of speeches and writings by all the world's greatest human thinkers. And then
• 1:14:10
  we use retrieval augmented generation so that we force the AI to quote the human word for word.
• 1:14:16
  When we give you advice from Gary Vaynerchuk, not that we do, but if we did, if we had a Gary V AI,
• 1:14:22
  like we have a Jeremy Minor AI trained on 33,000 hours of what he and his coaches have said,
• 1:14:27
  we, and then we'll not only find the quote, we'll play the clip for you. So our goal is to prioritize
• 1:14:35
  like with a decision table and an expert system, like here are all the options you could do.
• 1:14:40
  Here's who you are. Here's what this expert said that will work beautifully for you. That's a
• 1:14:45
  high probability statement. Let's try that first before we do the next thing. Understood.
• 1:14:49
  And if you can just stop thinking about the overload of all the millions of things you could do
• 1:14:54
  and find the one thing you could do to improve your health, the one thing you could do to improve
• 1:14:58
  your finances, the one thing you could do to get your first customer or build a product and do that
• 1:15:03
  thing. And then when you do that thing, the next thing is become more obvious with AI help and with
• 1:15:10
  experts, you know, oh yeah, after this, I did this. You've interviewed so many people and if you
• 1:15:14
  have a taxonomy of all the things they've said, that would be a powerful tool for an AI. And by the
• 1:15:19
  way, all of our go-to-market strategies for our products is through private label partners. You
• 1:15:24
  could talk. You could launch a startup scribe powered by all the knowledge that you and your
• 1:15:30
  interviewees have given in a taxonomy. And you could have the AI emphasize certain things that
• 1:15:37
  you believe really strongly in and of everyone who subscribes to it could have the benefit of that
• 1:15:42
  knowledge and applying that knowledge. I understand. So it's hyper focused. So it removes a lot.
• 1:15:47
  It removes like the unlimited amount of information that everybody has access to, which is
• 1:15:50
  actually hurting more than helping. That's right. Pivot a little bit going back to entrepreneurship.
• 1:15:55
  When everybody has these tools, you mentioned it's very important to if you are a founder, if you
• 1:15:59
  are an entrepreneur to lift other people up, you don't want to be a solo founder building a great
• 1:16:02
  company with just agents and and no real people. What happens to people's jobs when you have all
• 1:16:10
  these tools and everybody can be an entrepreneur? I guess that's the biggest question. I think
• 1:16:14
  everyone could be an entrepreneur, but I don't think everyone will be an entrepreneur. I think
• 1:16:17
  a lot of people want to work for someone else. They might like the vision or mission. So I think
• 1:16:23
  there will still be lots of organizations that are growing and dynamic and attracting a lot of people.
• 1:16:29
  Think about Elon Musk and all the world changing things he's doing. Tons of people work for him
• 1:16:33
  in his company. Of course. And it's probably the time of their life to roll up their sleeves and
• 1:16:38
  work day and night and send a rocket to Mars or whatever. So I think there will be lots of people
• 1:16:44
  drawn to go work for the growing companies or the big companies or go work for the public sector
• 1:16:50
  and be an educator. Like there will be so many jobs still even when lots of people or anyone
• 1:16:56
  could be an entrepreneur. It doesn't mean everyone should be an entrepreneur. I also think that some
• 1:16:59
  of the smartest people that I've ever worked with, they have been entrepreneurs in certain seasons
• 1:17:04
  of their life and they don't want that anymore. And I think that that's the one thing I want
• 1:17:10
  people to really take away from this conversation when they think about AI and entrepreneurship and
• 1:17:14
  is it going to replace jobs? I mean, no, it'll replace your job if you don't upskill yourself.
• 1:17:20
  You should be able, as any person on this earth, given they have the resources and, you know,
• 1:17:27
  especially in a country like the US, should be able to go start something, make a dollar themselves
• 1:17:34
  from just whatever they're competent at. Sell their services to the market in some way and
• 1:17:39
  truly build their own business. They should be able to do that. They should learn all the
• 1:17:43
  insulery and adjacent skills to be able to do that because that makes you highly employable.
• 1:17:48
  So even if you don't want to do that, I think that's the bar you should
• 1:17:52
  think. I love that. I think that's it. That's great advice.
• 1:17:55
  Because then it then removes the stress of you worrying about AI taking your job.
• 1:17:59
  If you could build a company and you just choose not to, no, AI taking your job.
• 1:18:03
  What a great advice for anybody who's afraid or anxious and now they like
• 1:18:08
  shore up your own potential ability and now you're more employable but it doesn't matter.
• 1:18:14
  You could start your own thing if you needed to. Now a few months ago, I was giving a speech
• 1:18:18
  at a university and I kind of like to think about, you know, I'm a person of faith. I believe
• 1:18:24
  in a creator and, you know, I think this world is incredible. It's rich in resources and people and
• 1:18:30
  so I think there's a lot of gratitude that you can have for even being alive in this amazing
• 1:18:36
  world. And I said, you know, I've been a parent. I've got eight kids now. And so I've been
• 1:18:43
  able to help bring eight children into this world. And there's nothing more miraculous and powerful
• 1:18:50
  than seeing a child born that was yours. This powerful, instant feeling of love, like it's
• 1:18:56
  it's divine. And I'm like, wow, we get to procreate. That's an incredible gift. And it changes
• 1:19:05
  everything to have a child. And so then there's another power that God has where he said in
• 1:19:10
  scripture, God said, let there be light and there was light. He spoke things into existence. He
• 1:19:16
  gives us a chance to procreate. Not everyone unfortunately can. I have a family member missing
• 1:19:22
  a chromosome and she won't be able to be a mother, although she could adopt. And so we hope
• 1:19:27
  that that will happen. But she's creating lots of other things. She's a famous author and she's,
• 1:19:34
  you know, bringing things to life that are affecting a lot of people. So, but all of us can create.
• 1:19:40
  And you can now speak things into existence. So I've been talking about that phrase for about a
• 1:19:45
  year, almost a year. And I saw that why combinator has a new company funded called Adam. And their
• 1:19:51
  tagline is speak things into existence. And I like my mind was blown. I'm like, what did they do?
• 1:19:58
  They let you design, describe anything and they'll 3D print it. They'll they'll say take whatever
• 1:20:05
  you described and they'll do a CAD CAM drawing and then they'll 3D print it. So whatever you have
• 1:20:11
  words to describe is now being brought into existence. But the phrase that's what an entrepreneur does.
• 1:20:17
  They have an idea in their mind and they bring it into existence. Well, it used to take a long time.
• 1:20:22
  You know, it used to take many years and lots of people. And now you just speak it. And the AI
• 1:20:28
  can understand it and design it and say, is this what you had in mind? Okay, we're going to go mass
• 1:20:32
  produce these in China. Like, it's crazy. You could invent something just with words. But all of us
• 1:20:38
  could experience that and some of us have. You've said that entrepreneurs are the most alive people.
• 1:20:44
  Why? I had a friend who said that it's the highest, the most agentic occupation. And like,
• 1:20:51
  that was like a couple years ago. He's a PhD and I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, you
• 1:20:55
  have to use your agency all the time. Like you're in charge. You own it. This is it. You do it or
• 1:21:00
  you don't do it. Like, whenever you're employed by someone else, there's a job description or
• 1:21:05
  some kind of an expectation. And that externality is really determining what you do with your time
• 1:21:12
  and with your talents. But when you're an entrepreneur, you make something up out of nothing.
• 1:21:19
  And so yeah, I think that the word alive is a pretty good description of people that aren't
• 1:21:26
  just being acted upon. There are two things, two kinds of things in the universe, things to act
• 1:21:34
  and things to be acted upon. And if you're being acted upon all the time, I don't think you're
• 1:21:39
  very alive. You never heard the the the concept of locus of control. Yes. Yeah. So the internal
• 1:21:45
  locus of control, which I feel like is similar to having agency. Like you just take responsibility
• 1:21:50
  for everything in your life and you happen to the world versus external locus of control where
• 1:21:54
  the world happens. That's it. That's really it. I love I love this idea so much. It's just take
• 1:21:59
  absolute responsibility for everything for absolutely everything good or bad. You just have to,
• 1:22:05
  you know, y'all go willing, we'll talk about extreme ownership or whatnot. But that's really that's
• 1:22:10
  the life of an entrepreneur is taking extreme ownership. And I think that when you believe that you
• 1:22:15
  happen to the world, the world doesn't happen to you, I think that ironically, like you end up
• 1:22:21
  living a much better and happier, more fulfilled life. I genuinely believe that even if bad things
• 1:22:26
  happen, I mean, these are very cliche sayings, but like it's not what happens. It's how you respond.
• 1:22:32
  Yeah. That's right. And it's true. The most horrific
• 1:22:35
  thing. Whatever happens to you and you could get up tomorrow and keep moving forward or you could
• 1:22:44
  not and let it derail your whole life. And at the end of the day, like it's really up to you to a
• 1:22:52
  degree, which life you want to live in entrepreneurship or otherwise, right? Obviously, there's some pretty
• 1:22:57
  bad things that happen to people and yeah, this morning in my personal devotional, I listened to a
• 1:23:02
  woman give a religious talk in 2004 called finishing your story. And she talked about one of her
• 1:23:09
  ancestors who was going across the plains and lost his wife and a child on the same day. The child
• 1:23:16
  died many hours later and he had to go back to the grave, dug up and and then buried the child
• 1:23:23
  with his wife and then kept moving on. It was a thousand mile walking journey from like Illinois
• 1:23:29
  to Utah. And she just said, how did he finish? How did he keep moving? And she admired that. And
• 1:23:37
  then she told two or three other stories about people that had finished something that after a
• 1:23:41
  huge obstacle or a big setback, they just keep going. And you know, no, I think that's the concept
• 1:23:47
  that nobody's a failure unless they stop trying. As long as you pick yourself up and keep going,
• 1:23:52
  you're not a failure. You're learning, you're adapting, you still have a story to finish. Do you
• 1:23:58
  do you believe this is true? Obviously, you're you're religious. Do you believe this line is true?
• 1:24:03
  God helps those who help themselves. I do. I do. He's so abundant. He's given us all, you know,
• 1:24:10
  our life, our body, our breath, our our agency, our freedom, opportunity, like, you know, there's
• 1:24:17
  so much resource in the world. And I think he wants us to to grow and learn and and to become
• 1:24:23
  something. Yeah. And so I believe that none of us are self-made. I love how you said that.
• 1:24:28
  Every single person can trace every success to somebody else, giving you the idea,
• 1:24:34
  giving you encouragement, providing resource. I had a friend. I don't even know if he's
• 1:24:38
  very religious, but he said when I think he was ex-communicated from some sect when he was 11.
• 1:24:45
  And he was like a really like, I don't know if it's cultish or something, but he's like, they like
• 1:24:52
  blacklisted him and and kicked him out and labeled him like a heretic or something at age 11 or
• 1:24:57
  something. But he's one of the smartest people I've ever met. And he said, when you decide to do
• 1:25:01
  something, the universe provisions your journey. I love this. It was really powerful. It's a it's a
• 1:25:07
  similar quote to the Mark Andreessen quote. I'm going to I'm going to look it up. But basically,
• 1:25:15
  he says something on the lines that you put enough energy and time towards something you will find
• 1:25:22
  that the universe is very malleable. And it starts to bend to your way. I love that. Yeah.
• 1:25:28
  It's one of the most powerful ideas. And I think that that that all stems back to having high
• 1:25:33
  agency, having an eternal looks of control, having belief in the fact that the future that you
• 1:25:40
  want is totally dependent on you. And that's it. And the actions you take, because if you if you
• 1:25:46
  do pursue something for a long enough period of time, for a long enough time horizon, I like I
• 1:25:52
  maybe it's just a bias because I interview successful people. But I don't think it is because
• 1:25:57
  if there's not many people who I know, they're not even famous who have been doing something for 20
• 1:26:02
  years and aren't highly successful at it. It's truly not truly not like I know people that have quit.
• 1:26:08
  But if you have found a way and this is also why maybe going all in on entrepreneurship when
• 1:26:14
  you're still working the job, maybe we'll give yourself a little bit of runway, maybe build your five
• 1:26:18
  to nine while you're working your nine to five, whatever it is, or maybe build it on the weekends
• 1:26:22
  until you found a way to find product market fit and for it to be successful or for it to replace
• 1:26:27
  your income that you're pulling from your job, like find a way to architect your business and your
• 1:26:31
  entrepreneurial journey so that you can stay in it for an extended amount of time. And then I think
• 1:26:38
  that you find a way that's another way in my opinion, at least to switch and flip that 90% failure
• 1:26:44
  rate into like a hundred percent success. Yeah. I think as time goes by, there's a compounding effect
• 1:26:49
  when you continue to focus on something. I agree with that. There's like just like interest
• 1:26:53
  in compounds over time, then you just get that hockey stick. I think that's true for persisting
• 1:26:57
  with almost anything. Yeah. So yeah, I really love that. I think that's I think it's one of the
• 1:27:01
  most powerful ideas. You have eight kids. I do. You have eight kids. Six grandkids now. Oh my god.
• 1:27:06
  If I could advise anyone to skip the parenting stage, I loved parenting, but man,
• 1:27:11
  being a grandparent is just so fantastic. What would be what would be one thing that you want
• 1:27:17
  them to take away from your journey? My kids and grandkids? Yeah. Well, my wife never really wanted
• 1:27:22
  my kids and grandkids to be entrepreneurial because why not? Because the journey for her was
• 1:27:27
  probably like a roller coaster like really. She stuck with you. She stuck with me. And now she's
• 1:27:32
  on the board of sore AI studio. She's a gallop coach. And so she coaches all my employees.
• 1:27:38
  She's got such a skill with people. She understands people after one hour more than I do after working
• 1:27:43
  with them for 10 years. I'm not kidding. Like I'm an ideas guy. I'm in my brain all the time. I'm
• 1:27:49
  thinking, reading, learning, strategizing, visioning all the time. People, strengths. If you look
• 1:27:54
  at Don Clifton's taxonomy, a way down the list for me. Oh, I love people. And but I don't understand
• 1:28:00
  them. I don't get them. I don't see what makes them tick. So I hire the wrong people a lot.
• 1:28:05
  And so she's come in as like my human resources. Like she's going to vet everybody. She's
• 1:28:10
  going to coach. She told me, Paul, this woman overseas is so talented, so capable. And she's
• 1:28:17
  got this kind of minor role. And as soon as she told me that, we elevated her. And now she's
• 1:28:22
  crushing her leadership role. Like I never would have noticed. So my better Abjena, she's the same.
• 1:28:28
  She's so good. She's in two seconds. She can tell me if I should be working with a person or not.
• 1:28:34
  And I don't know. I just don't see it the same way she does. And she's been 100. Like when I say
• 1:28:41
  100% success rate, hit rate on who I should work with and who I shouldn't. She's never missed.
• 1:28:47
  She's so great. Yeah. She's so fantastic thing to have a complimentary partner like that.
• 1:28:52
  So the advice that I want my kids and grandkids is just to figure out who you are.
• 1:28:58
  What did, what were you created to do? Like understand your talents, your strengths,
• 1:29:03
  your potential. And then be yourself. And lean into your talents, your gifts, your strengths.
• 1:29:12
  And you know, find your way through life being grateful for what you have and not
• 1:29:17
  envious that you don't have this or that or somebody else has that. Like just be grateful for what
• 1:29:21
  you have and know that there is a path to amazing fulfillment for you. When you do what you were
• 1:29:26
  created to do and when you become what you were created to become, the fulfillment, the joy,
• 1:29:33
  the thriving, the just the feeling is unmatchable. And I think a lot of people, Andrew Yang,
• 1:29:40
  in his book pointed out that 75% of the highly academic successful people in the United States go
• 1:29:45
  to the same colleges end up in the same six jobs in the six largest cities in the United States.
• 1:29:51
  They're going down a well-defined rut that pays well. So they go through and check the boxes
• 1:29:58
  and after 10 years in their career, they're all miserable. It's 75% of the highest academic
• 1:30:04
  performers in the United States. Six cities, six jobs, probably not very much life satisfaction.
• 1:30:11
  That's where that's where your middle-life crisis comes from.
• 1:30:13
  For sure. So how do you know? How do you know when you are doing the right thing?
• 1:30:17
  My son thinks that the purpose of life is to see how many, how many times can you experience
• 1:30:23
  flow state? So the Czech Mihaičik sent me high, this psychologist from Europe. He created the concept
• 1:30:33
  of flow. And when you, you know, I don't know, video games put you in flow state, maybe it does.
• 1:30:38
  Maybe you can go on Twitch. Yeah, there you go. Nika living on Twitch. You know, I had my son had
• 1:30:43
  surgery on his wrist the other day. He broke both of his wrists sprinting after a basketball practice
• 1:30:49
  and running into the wall. He's the coach. And so he just had massive surgery on his wrist. There's
• 1:30:54
  all this, you know, metal plating and wiring and stuff. But the surgeon actually showed us
• 1:30:59
  when he was putting in a block for the pain on his shoulder. He showed us, he said, my video game
• 1:31:05
  skills have become, he was the anesthesiologist. So he's an MD, anesthesiologist. He had to go in
• 1:31:11
  and put in a block and it was perfect. And he's like, it's like playing a video game. Like, I really
• 1:31:16
  learned a lot about being a doctor by playing video games. He wasn't joking. So yeah, I think,
• 1:31:22
  find out what gives you that feeling of flow where you lose track of time. You do great work
• 1:31:28
  and do that as often as you can. I love it. If you were going to tell yourself you're younger
• 1:31:32
  self, 20 year old self, one lesson, what would that be? Just keep going. And all the setbacks and
• 1:31:39
  the moments where you just want to curl up in a fetal position and and and let everything disappear
• 1:31:46
  and like, stop like just end. Don't worry. Just pick yourself back up. It's all going to work out
• 1:31:51
  in the end. And yeah, I just never give up. Just take that next step, finish your story.
• 1:32:01
  I think if I hadn't learned those painful lessons from ancestry, I wouldn't be advocating for
• 1:32:05
  a new form of capitalism. I can tell. Yeah. And I'm like, okay, well, was that an expensive lesson?
• 1:32:09
  Yes. Was it worth it? Yes. Now, it's got to work. I have to try this. I'm not done until it's
• 1:32:16
  legislated. And there are decorporations out there. Yeah, but if you sit with it long enough,
• 1:32:20
  I'm going to. I mean, God willing. Where do you want to send people for sore? Where do you want to
• 1:32:25
  send them? They can go to sore.com and sign up. They can follow me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active
• 1:32:30
  on LinkedIn. But I'm really excited that my daughter who's an author is going to help me with my
• 1:32:35
  Paul Allen dot AI. So I blogged under Paul Allen dot net for like 10 years, all the advice and
• 1:32:41
  all the entrepreneurs I taught entrepreneurship for four years, internet marketing. So I used to
• 1:32:45
  write a lot and teach a lot. And I used to blog a lot. And then I stopped like 15 years ago.
• 1:32:51
  But now I own Paul Allen dot AI. I'm going to launch a sub stack. I'm going to start a podcast. So
• 1:32:57
  my advice is go to Paul Allen dot AI, sign up for my newsletter. And then you'll start getting
• 1:33:02
  weekly ideas about how AI can help you as an entrepreneur and how AI can help you in the rest of your
• 1:33:07
  life. And for somebody who's listening to this, there's there's probably people that will be
• 1:33:11
  interested in the other things that are built on top of sore sales for sure because a lot of the
• 1:33:16
  audience are entrepreneurs are people that want to be entrepreneurs and I'm pretty sure at this
• 1:33:20
  point, they've realized that they have to learn how to sell to be successful at anything. Whether
• 1:33:24
  or not it's customers, investors selling your company to an employee, it's very important. And I
• 1:33:28
  know Jeremy is a great job. He's one of my favorite sales trainers because he's awesome. They're
• 1:33:33
  listen, I come from a sales background. So I've strong opinions about some about some, you know,
• 1:33:40
  influencer sales trainers. So Jeremy's a great one. He's very good. And we did a good podcast. But
• 1:33:48
  if people want to go into your ecosystem, they want to learn from Jeremy or they want to take part
• 1:33:52
  in anything that's built on top of sore, what's your advice? Like where should they start? How should
• 1:33:57
  they be thinking just like tee it up for them so they get how to start with you? Go to sore.com
• 1:34:02
  and we can hub and spoke out to all of our startup entities. We'll actually start doing competitions
• 1:34:09
  and we'll try to do hackathons and we'll provide some of our AI building blocks for entrepreneurs.
• 1:34:15
  So sign up at paulaland.ai for my newsletter, but go to sore.com and just check it out every
• 1:34:21
  couple weeks. New products are launching, new partnerships are launching. They can use some of
• 1:34:24
  these tools now. They can use some of these tools right now. Yeah. Okay. Founder portal.ai
• 1:34:30
  will soon allow you. In fact, it does right now to start recording all your calls and meetings
• 1:34:35
  even before you've launched a product. You know, Eric Reese and others say do 100 customer
• 1:34:40
  development interviews with your target customer. Record every one of those. You got 100 hours of
• 1:34:46
  very meeting intelligence from your target market. And then AI can help you build your MVP,
• 1:34:50
  Roadmap. Like, it's really fast. If you start recording all your calls and all your meetings.
• 1:34:55
  I'm curious after, you know, you've had an incredible career. What was your definition of success
• 1:35:00
  when you started and what does success mean to you now? I probably never thought about what is
• 1:35:04
  success and how, when and will I have achieved it and, you know, what, how do you measure that?
• 1:35:10
  I actually going back to how every human being is unique and Don Clifton identified, you know,
• 1:35:17
  34 patterns of thinking, feeling, behaving and then he gives you your top five. The chance that
• 1:35:22
  you'll have the same top five strengths as anyone else is one in 33.8 million. So very rare.
• 1:35:27
  So the chance that you'll have the same top 10 as anyone else is almost impossible. So you are
• 1:35:32
  unique, just like your pupil and your finger print and all that. You're a unique human being.
• 1:35:38
  But I think each person was created uniquely on purpose because there's beauty and diversity.
• 1:35:46
  And we all need each other in the New Testament. Paul talks about how the church is a body and
• 1:35:53
  it has a need of every member, the head, the hand, the foot, all need each other. And so because
• 1:35:58
  we're all different and we have strengths and weaknesses, we need other people. So I think that's
• 1:36:01
  by design. But I also think that that flow state is indicative that you are on the right track.
• 1:36:10
  When you are doing what you're designed to do, that's an amazing feeling. When you feel like the
• 1:36:15
  work you're pursuing, the purpose, the mission you have is approved by the universe. That's an
• 1:36:21
  incredible feeling. So I think my definition of success now is, are you filling the measure of
• 1:36:27
  your creation? Are you doing what you were designed and placed on earth to do? And that includes
• 1:36:32
  learning how to love, learning how to create, learning how to get along, serving and giving and
• 1:36:37
  building others? And so you want to overcome the day-to-day obstacles of failure and you want to
• 1:36:44
  be successful financially, you want to be physically well off and take care of your body,
• 1:36:49
  but its relationships, its people, its lessons learned. And so you know, at the end of the day when
• 1:36:55
  you look back and like, did I do what I was designed to do? Did I discover my potential and reach
• 1:37:03
  some portion of it? And I don't think anyone will ever say 100% no regrets or you know, I did it
• 1:37:11
  all, I'm perfect, like nobody's even close to that. But if you're like directionally going in
• 1:37:16
  the right direction, like, it's exhilarating.