← Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Paul Allen - Ancestry.com Founder | The Ultimate Competitive Advantage
01:37:26
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- [00:00]
Paul Allen
I grew up admiring academics. I loved high school and college. I just love learning and I just thought learning is noble. I actually think liberty and freedom and human rights are pretty important part of the world fabric.
- [00:12]
Scott Clary
He built one of the most iconic tech companies of the Internet age, set out to build a better future for humanity. 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.
- [00:28]
Paul Allen
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. 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 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.
- [00:50]
Scott Clary
He's a leader who believes that artificial intelligence should be personalized, uplifting, responsible and ethical, and that technology should elevate people, not replace them.
- [00:59]
Paul Allen
I think entrepreneurship is generally the best path forward for almost solving all the world problems. Within every industry, it's the entrepreneurs, the innovators that actually change everything. Nobody's a failure unless they stop trying. As long as you pick yourself up and keep going, you are not a failure. You're learning. You still have a story to finish.
- [01:26]
Scott Clary
Paul, you were Russian major who thought business was corrupt. And then you walked into a room with 500 entrepreneurs and everything changed. What happened?
- [01:34]
Paul Allen
Yeah, I basically thought growing up that academia was the noble calling. My mom was a school teacher. My dad was a professor for decades. Very successful in manufacturing engineering and using computers and. And so I grew up admiring academics. I loved high school and college. I wanted to major in every subject that I took. I just love learning and I just thought learning is noble. Business is kind of, you know, lower tier. It's a different cast. And I didn't admire any people in business. And I think my dad had a negative perception of some of the huge corporations that he consulted for, so I just had a negative vibe. And Russian literature, Russian history, Russian language. I. I wanted to get a PhD and be a Sovietologist. I wanted to study the Kremlin and why Bureau.
- [02:21]
Scott Clary
Why? And it just.
- [02:22]
Paul Allen
Well, my favorite subject of all my favorite subjects was US history, The Founding Fathers, the unique experiment that the United States is. How different it is. The words in the Declaration of Independence, the limited enumerated powers of the federal government, federalism, where most of the power goes to the states and the People, fantastic model for self government, individual rights, not collectivism, not central planning. And so the contrast between Soviet Union in its, you know, 70, 80 year history and the United States of America is. So it couldn't be more different. And although the US has become more and more centralized and more and more centrally planned and less and less free and creeping socialism is not creeping anymore. It's celebrating and getting loud applause. And it never works. It never will. It never. It never has, and it never will. So that contrast was fascinating to me. And learning the Russian language and studying the Soviet Union and reading Pravda and learning about propaganda and stuff, it was just fascinating. So I want to do that for a career.
- [03:29]
Scott Clary
So my fiance, she grew up in Uzbekistan.
- [03:31]
Paul Allen
Are you serious? Yeah.
- [03:33]
Scott Clary
Yeah. So she, like when it was a republic, a Soviet Republic. She's 38, so yes, it was. And then she obviously moved to Canada. But it was a wildly different.
- [03:45]
Paul Allen
Yeah, I've been to Russia. I've also been to Yugoslavia before, before it changed into Croatia. And the contrast, when I flew back from my trip to Yugoslavia, which was in the late 80s, and it was a very, like, weird week, I was trying to talk to people in English and also in Russian. They hated speaking Russian. They were kind of an independent. They weren't west, they weren't Easter. And so just having conversations. Striking was very hard, and the economy was stagnant and there seemed to be no light in anybody's faces. It was just drab. You know, think about Soviet architecture. It's drab. It's centrally planned, it's concrete, it's ugly. And the west and other cultures are very much different and creative and beautiful and very varied. But I remember getting on a flight, went to Frankfurt, then I went to Atlanta. I wanted to kiss the ground in the Atlanta airport. Just the people at the ticket counter. The friendliness, the light in people's eyes, it was alive. And I just come back from a former Soviet bloc country, and it wasn't alive. And I read Solzhenitsyn a lot and Sakharov, Andrey Sakharov. These great Russian dissidents who had the courage to. To basically risk their life every time they wrote or spoke. Do you know why? Solzhenitsyn, he won the Nobel Prize for Gulag Archipelago, but he was a military, an army captain, celebrated 1941, 1945, defended the motherland. He writes a private letter to a friend saying some critical things about Stalin. Well, they intercepted it, they read it, and they imprisoned him in the Gulag for years, like, years. A private Letter like, okay, I do not like the violence of centrally planned coercive government.
- [05:41]
Scott Clary
Of course not.
- [05:42]
Paul Allen
I love freedom. And entrepreneurship kind of is like the ultimate freedom. Like you go, you don't work for anyone else. I mean, you work for your customers, but you can do whatever you want. There's so much agency in being a.
- [05:53]
Scott Clary
Startup, ownership over the, of your own outcome.
- [05:55]
Paul Allen
And imagine if, yeah. You know, more and more and more percentage of people choose that path.
- [06:00]
Scott Clary
So I was, but, but do you realize this now?
- [06:04]
Paul Allen
I do.
- [06:05]
Scott Clary
Now you realize this. So you were almost like romanticized at the time and not to like dwell because that's you. I know you now. Talking to you for like five minutes, I could tell that we could have a four hour conversation about Russia and the Soviet Union. I didn't realize that you're so well versed in it. But now you now through just like lived experience, you realize it. Romanticization, Romanticization of, of, of these, of this part of the world. It doesn't play out in reality at all.
- [06:31]
Paul Allen
It sounds so good.
- [06:33]
Scott Clary
It does.
- [06:33]
Paul Allen
It's a siren song that is so appealing, especially as, as Peter Thiel and Shamath and others have said, like when young people, when there's an affordability crisis and they can't afford, they get student debt and they can't afford a house and the average home buyer is now 40, not 29. When they're not getting married young, they're not having kids, they, they're been locked out of the western capitalist world because of greed and because of corruption and because of over government regulation. I'm reading a book by Neil Gorsuch, one of the Supreme Court judges called Overruled the toll of the toll on humans of having too many laws and regulations. And his stories in that book that go back, you know, 70, 80 years are incredibly demoralizing. Like some fisherman gets arrested and put in prison for six years for breaking a federal law that he didn't even know existed. He was a fish. And there was a something in the financial laws like the SEC related federal laws about not destroying evidence. He threw some fish overboard and the federal guy viewed the fish as evidence of his crime. Locked up and he gets locked up for a law that was intended to stop CFOs from shredding paperwork.
- [07:45]
Scott Clary
Of course.
- [07:46]
Paul Allen
Okay, so. But there's thousands or maybe millions. I met a guy in Canada who protested a law about not being able to walk in the forest in Nova Scotia.
- [07:54]
Scott Clary
Saw this law. I saw this viral clip.
- [07:57]
Paul Allen
Yeah, I met him in Canada. I went to Calgary and Spoke at a freedom conference. And I'm like, this guy intentionally walked in the forest because I should have freedom to do that. He gets arrested now he's going through the courts, but overruled. Too many laws, too many regulations, way too much taxation.
- [08:12]
Scott Clary
Well, this is why, this is why I left. Because when we, we were already planning on moving to the US pre Covid for completely other reasons, it was like, oh, you know, it's good for career and it's, and most of the business I do is down in the US anyways. And at the end of COVID I remember New York was open and California was open, which were two of the most restrictive states during COVID And I couldn't even go to the park or get a haircut yet. And I'm like, that seems weird. That seems off. Because like, if California is fully open, like what are we doing here really? And then I was telling you about like the COVID hotels and the quarantine hotels and shit. And I'm like, you know what I'm talking. Tired of this, I'm tired of this. So then we move down, down to Miami.
- [08:54]
Paul Allen
I actually think liberty and freedom and human rights are pretty important part of, of the world fabric. And anything that's threatening to freedom and liberty and human agency, you know, you can't over act and you can't, you can't do things to harm other people. That's, that's what laws are for, is to protect individual rights. So there are major reasons why government exists. The police, the military, is to protect human rights. But the more the government decides to plan everything, you know, think about the U.S. economy in the last few decades. The only unregulated or less regulated area that allows for almost any entrepreneur to almost anything they want is tech. Yes, financial industry, banking. Oh my gosh, talk about regulation. How about energy? How about health care? Like there are so many great entrepreneurs with awesome ideas in energy, finance, education, healthcare that can't do anything about it unless they get massive government approvals. Six months, one year, five years of waiting around for bureaucrats to decide, oh yeah, you can do that.
- [10:00]
Scott Clary
Kills innovation.
- [10:01]
Paul Allen
Kills innovation. And it kills the growth of the pie that could usher in an era of abundance for almost everybody.
- [10:07]
Scott Clary
You mentioned that socialism is an attractive concept for people that don't quite understand it because they feel like they don't have a way out, a way to win, a way to afford a home, a way to have a family because everything's too expensive. I think entrepreneurship is the way. I truly believe that entrepreneurship is the way I think that being able to build and to be and being able to create something where nothing existed before is the way to every 100% agree.
- [10:32]
Paul Allen
The future of your personal life and prosperity hinges on how much agency you exercise. And there are millions or I would say billions of ways to make a living. You told me that you love podcasting. You get paid to do something that you enjoy. All these guests, all these conversations, you had an interesting tech background in or selling sales, selling tech to broadcasters. And so 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. But with AI and robots starting to do tons of productive work, almost all kinds of blue collar and white collar human work, more of us, I'd say maybe even a billion or more people, are going to have to be an entrepreneur. You have to figure out your own path and you'll have more tools and knowledge at your fingertips than ever before. So it's not going to be that challenging. So yeah, I love what you do. I think entrepreneurship is generally the best path forward for almost solving almost all the world problems. There are some government things that they have to tackle. There's education, there's other industries, but within every industry it's the entrepreneurs, the innovators that actually change everything.
- [11:48]
Scott Clary
When was the last time the government solved a big problem?
- [11:51]
Paul Allen
Well, I mean if you look back decades with DARPA and with military and the Apollo mission and I would go to the Boston airport and you see posters everywhere about all the scientific achievements from NASA's Apollo missions and the day to day products that we all use because of that. So R and D, I think the satellites, the GPS system, you know, from the 80s and 90s, I think weather forecast, there's, there are some big investments that the government has done. I think Eisenhower, when he did the interstate highway system in the United States, brilliant.
- [12:23]
Scott Clary
And was that because the barrier to entry for entrepreneurship was too high. So at that time the only one that could accomplish these things was the government.
- [12:30]
Paul Allen
Yeah, I mean under the US Constitution there was a setup of the post office. So that was a. Benjamin Franklin was the first Postmaster General. So having a postal system to deliver mail and then having interstate commerce was enabled by an interstate highway system. So I think there are some really big infrastructure things that government has to do. But most of the time you're going to waste, you know, 90% of the budget or in case of California high speed rail, 100% of the budget is wasted, $24 billion. Like there are a lot of reasons not to put lots of big projects.
- [13:06]
Scott Clary
But if I think about the replacements for all of those things that you just mentioned, it's moving away from government, the next iteration of postal email, it goes to entrepreneurs. And it's interesting. It seems like the government becomes less relevant at solving big problems, like the more we progress as a civilization.
- [13:24]
Paul Allen
I mean, I think that's largely true. And I don't think the US Constitution ever imagined that the US government would start a sovereign wealth fund and start buying 10% of intel and picking and choosing winners and tech companies to invest in. So I, I think there's so many people in both parties that overreach. They do things the government isn't designed to do and literally has no legal authority to do. But no one's going to stop them because the parties are in power and they're kind of, you know, what Charlie Kirk called a two party cartel. They're just in charge and they just fight each other. But there's no alternative to the two parties. And so people go this way and then they go that way and they take their turns in power and spending trillions of dollars we don't have. So both parties have been kind of, I think, unsuccessful in having a stable, limited government that follows the Constitution. But yeah, I think that, you know, think about the space issue.
- [14:24]
Scott Clary
Yeah, of course.
- [14:24]
Paul Allen
Elon Musk, I know single handedly, well, not single handedly, but all the Space X engineers and all the funders and all the backers of it, way more effective at reusable rockets and in doing things that the government never thought of doing. I just think, yeah, I would put my bet on entrepreneurs. Now I'm a little concerned that multitrillion dollar companies could turn into companies worth tens of trillions of dollars, have all of our data and have billions of users of their hardware or their software. That's a lot of power to put in the hands of a private, private citizen.
- [14:57]
Scott Clary
Yeah. And that is the way we're going.
- [14:59]
Paul Allen
That's the way we're going. There's a fascinating book. It changed my life when I think about big corporations and you know, I don't trust big government, I don't trust big tech. But you have to kind of coexist with both and kind of figure out, well, what would be a better way to go forward. Well, there was a journalist from the uk, he wrote for the Economist and he wrote a book called the Company. It's a history of corporations. So in the 1600s, you had the East Indies, the Hudson Bay Company, the Dutch. There were these corporations. They were only created by the parliament or a monarch. Private citizens could not start a corporation.
- [15:36]
Scott Clary
Until the 1850s because the East Indian Trading Company, that was one of it.
- [15:40]
Paul Allen
Was a monopoly granted by the Crown.
- [15:42]
Scott Clary
And if you actually looked at like their, their, their, their total market cap, it would have been the largest company in the world today.
- [15:48]
Paul Allen
I think at one point the Hudson bay Co. Owned 10% of the land on planet Earth and had had monopoly power on trading on fur trapping and logging and all the mineral rights and everything else. So yeah, the, the crown used to grant the ability to have a corporation. When my great grandfather was born in 1841 in Illinois, there was no such thing as a private citizen setting up a company that could outlive them. You had sole proprietorships and then your children would inherit stuff. But now we have corporations that have been viewed to have human rights, which is weird. And they have endless ability to own assets and to control parts of the economy. And so they're de facto monopolies. And so I actually think there's an interesting possibility for legislators, you know what daos are distributed, decentralized, autonomous organizations and kind of blockchain could allow some really interesting, you know, ownership and voting rights. So there's some new technologies that are interesting to contemplate. But imagine if we, the people, through our elected representatives decided to change what corp? Well, we have C Corps, we have S Corps, we have LLCs, and we have B Corps. I met Governor Martin O' Malley who in 2009 was the governor of Maryland when a benefit corporation was first legislated. And now there's thousands of B Corps and a lot of them are fine, mission driven companies that want to be able to donate some of their profits to philanthropy and not get sued for it. Maximizing profits is not the ultimate goal of a B Corp. They want to be profitable, but they also want to give 1% to this cause or whatever. I have a really strange concept that entrepreneurs should be able to pick a different kind of corporation which I call a D Corp. Now, it's not been, it's not been invented yet. No state legislature has passed a D Corp law. They've, they've got Dow Corporation law in Wyoming and, and Utah and part Puerto Rico. But imagine a D Corp where you go through, just like a C Corp or an S Corp, you go through a risk stage where you raise capital, you hire people, everyone's taking risks and at some point you're worth A billion dollars or five or ten billion dollars and you have an exit, post exit. The company transforms into a massively distributed corporation with a cap table that has hundreds of thousands minimum investors. I call it a D Corp. It could be, it could be an algorithm that prevents concentrated ownership. So you get an economic engine that's just prosperous. You're, you've got, you know, huge audience, massive revenue, recurring revenue, great value. And a lot of times corporations will hire people and pay them $50 million to be the CEO of an already successful company. And, and then a few, you know, private equity funds or institutional investors own 90% of the company. So the wealthy get into that deal and then they become ultra wealthy.
- [18:45]
Scott Clary
So there's like this, this shared ownership, this joint ownership across hundreds of thousands of people. And everybody has participation in the upside.
- [18:52]
Paul Allen
Exactly. So imagine when, when a guy in the UK, John Spedden Lewis, in the 1940s, he was running one of the UK's most profitable retail companies. His father started it, ran it for decades. John Spedden Lewis started running it and I think he got sick. And he had 14,000 employees in the 1940s, one of the most popular retail chains in the, in the UK. He gave his ownership to all of his 14,000 employees and made them partners. And it's called the John Lewis Partnership.
- [19:22]
Scott Clary
And what happened?
- [19:23]
Paul Allen
It's incredibly successful. Yeah, it has like 80,000 or 90,000 employees. They're all owners. They're now doing 8 or 10 billion dollars a year in revenue. They've gotten into modern tech, their retail, their E commerce. It's a fantastic shared ownership model. And I've never heard of anyone, no one in the United States that I've told about John Lewis Partners has ever even heard of.
- [19:43]
Scott Clary
I haven't, no.
- [19:44]
Paul Allen
We all want to be Zuckerberg or Gates or, or Michael Dell or a founder that becomes a billionaire instead of a founder that creates 80,000 very prosperous households that for decades to come will get profit sharing every year. Employee ownership widely seen, could be really cool. Now I don't think you should force any founder to do that, but I think there could be incredible tax benefits or you know, the state legislatures will give a 10 billion dollar tax break to a trillion dollar company that locates headquarters two or headquarters three in our backyard. They don't need the tax break.
- [20:22]
Scott Clary
I love this.
- [20:22]
Paul Allen
But if you had thousands of entrepreneurs that say, I'm going to start a company, I think it's going to be worth a billion or more dollars, I'm going to metamorphize it to a D corporation post exit. So I don't know all the rules.
- [20:35]
Scott Clary
And things, but you've already made as much money as you're ever going to.
- [20:37]
Paul Allen
Need in your life.
- [20:38]
Scott Clary
Exactly.
- [20:38]
Paul Allen
You have your exit, you get paid for taking risk. And that economic engine now starts to give benefit to all your employees, to all your customers, to everyone who wants to buy shares. And lots of people are invited to buy shares because there's an algorithm that prevents concentrated ownership. So you get the best of free market and the redistribution of wealth engine that isn't forced, it's not social, it's by choice. Me, the entrepreneur. I want my company to be a D corp. Because I'd rather have 88,000 employees benefiting their families with a high income and profit sharing than to become a billionaire or a deca billionaire or even worse, a trillionaire. And what's going to happen to your children? They're going to go off the rails? Or your grandchildren? Almost all super high net worth people have serious family problems and family dysfunction in the second or third or fourth generation. It's almost inevitable. If you're raised with, hey, you've got $12 billion that you're going to inherit, you know, when you're 21, like, how can you make real friends?
- [21:41]
Scott Clary
No, your, your view of life is skewed. Like you don't, you, you can't, like you don't even, you don't even comprehend how to manage that. There's no, there's no way to properly prepare somebody for that amount of wealth.
- [21:55]
Paul Allen
Why would you, worse, why would you wish that on your worst enemy, let alone your own children and grandchildren?
- [21:59]
Scott Clary
Yeah, because if you think about the person who made that wealth, their life was radically different. That allowed them to be the person that take the risk, build, persevere.
- [22:07]
Paul Allen
One of the finest people I've ever met was a big investor in Ancestry.com early on. He's famous because he, he took, he was the CEO of Blockbuster when it was in its heyday. He took Boston Market public.
- [22:20]
Scott Clary
Was it James Scott Beck? Oh, no, I know. Okay, so James Keys was another CEO of Blockbuster, but I don't think it was around.
- [22:26]
Paul Allen
Scott Beck was a huge franchisee. They, they got him to be the CEO, he took it public and then he took Boston Market public. He's a phenomenal man. I think he's a devout Christian. I think he's got four kids. He sat down with me and my brother when we thought we were going to, you know, build this billion dollar ancestry company. And some of our really Good investors and friends and advisors were even coaching us about don't let wealth ruin you and your family. Like, early on, we had, you know, kind people that were willing to share advice with us. And he said, and I hope, hope this is okay, that I'm revealing his plan, but he's like, you know, my wife and I are going to give all of our wealth to charity, mostly to Christian causes, except we need about $5 million probably to live on. So, you know, he probably had hundreds of millions, but he's like, we'll give away charity, but we'll keep about five for living on. And then when our kids turn 25, they get $250,000. When they're 35, they get $250,000. And when they're 45, they get $250,000.$ so pay off your loans, get a house, pay for your kids, get them to College. You know, 750 out over three decades, and that's it. And I thought, that is so smart and kind to not, you know, burden your kids with massive debt, but to give them something, to give them something that you worked really hard for.
- [23:47]
Scott Clary
They get a leg up. They don't have to struggle. I mean, they get all their major expenses covered. They got to still work. They got to figure out something that they want to take on as a job. But life is a little bit easier. But it's not like you're going to be ruined by the wealth.
- [24:00]
Paul Allen
Exactly. Now President Trump has announced Trump savings accounts. Have you heard about this?
- [24:05]
Scott Clary
I don't know these. No.
- [24:06]
Paul Allen
Like in a month or so ago, I don't remember which department it came. Maybe Secretary of Treasury. But they're like every child born in the United States.
- [24:13]
Scott Clary
I didn't hear about this.
- [24:14]
Paul Allen
From January 1, 2025, till the end of 2028, we're going to give them $1,000 savings account. And I think the rules are being written right now, and I think it'll go into effect on July 1st. Like, okay, thousand dollars over 18 years. If it's in fiat currency, you'll be able to buy a whopper by the time you're 18. Okay, maybe if it's invested wisely. And it will, you know, take the rule of 72 and say, well, at a 12% interest rate, it would double every six years. So 1 to 2 to 4 to 8, you get $8,000 when you turn 18. Okay. That's better than having 50 or $100,000 of student debt. So it's kind of interesting. I thought Michael Dell's Jumping in saying, I'm going to add $250 to it was awesome. Michael Dell and his wife said, yeah.
- [24:58]
Scott Clary
I, I, now I remember this. I think that, I mean that's, that's something that I think most parents set up for the children anyways. Just some sort of investment.
- [25:05]
Paul Allen
A 529 educational savings account. Or what if all the parents and grandparents of every child in the United States who had any money at all could give money into this savings account every time there's a birthday, every time there's a milestone, maybe every month, maybe when the kids do their chores, the parents pay them $5 cash for doing their weekly chores and the grandparents match it, but put it into the savings account. That would be, what if everybody turns 18 and has $50,000 or $100,000? And then the big philanthropic foundations could provide money to disadvantaged people that don't have mothers and fathers or grandparents that could put in the money. Like, I think it's kind of a cool concept. I don't think it's constitutional necessarily. I don't know if the Congress is going to have to pass laws, but I don't think the United States Constitution says the president shall set up a fund to let people invest.
- [25:55]
Scott Clary
But it would people in a better situation. And again, it would let people take ownership over their own life. That's the thing, right?
- [26:02]
Paul Allen
Like, what if you got to be 18 and you thought, I can go to college and get some student debt or I can start a business. I got $50,000 capital to start a business. And what if I had AI to help me every step of the way from idea to exit? Like you could unleash a generation of tens of millions of entrepreneurs who have seed capital. They ought to know what their passion is, what their strengths are, what their interests are, and then they get AI to coach them day by day. All the guests you have on your show have keys to success, right? Everybody knows, well, what did I, what mistakes did I make along the way? And what were the three most important things I ever did as you collect those data points and I know you like ideas that are actionable. You don't want just people to learn something, learn it and do it. So the better the idea is packaged and shared and matched to the right person, the more people will be able to take action and get customers, build product, ship something, support it. I just think there is a unlimited, possible bright future for billions of people with entrepreneurship powered by AI and maybe seed funded with these savings accounts or some other kind of a capital Quick question.
- [27:12]
Scott Clary
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- [29:50]
Paul Allen
No, but I've been tracking some leaderboards where one person or if two person companies are getting like 2 million or 10 million.
- [29:57]
Scott Clary
This is so this chart about, it's saying like in the 1950s, I'm making these numbers, I can't remember, but it was like, say you need like 50 or 60 people to get to a million dollars in annual and then you fast forward to, I mean now in, in 2026, you need one person to get to a million dollars. And they're saying one person can now be a billion dollar company.
- [30:15]
Paul Allen
I believe that will happen a lot. I know AI coding, AI agents, AI go to market strategies, AI video, just all the things that AI can do. Now you could have a one person company and all these AI. Now I'd prefer to work with people.
- [30:30]
Scott Clary
Me too.
- [30:31]
Paul Allen
I actually don't mind having every employee learn to vibe code and vibe market and have five or 10 agents working around the clock. But I don't want to lose my people. Actually find great joy in working with people and seeing them grow and, and accomplishing things together is awesome. So I don't really want to be that loner entrepreneur that becomes a billion dollar company with me and my agents, you know, all my AI companions that I can chat with and well, like.
- [30:55]
Scott Clary
Listen because you, you want, you want to be a successful entrepreneur. Well, you are a successful entrepreneur, but your version of entrepreneurship is the person should be a successful entrepreneur and lift other people up with them 100%. That's the goal.
- [31:05]
Paul Allen
That's the joy in it all.
- [31:07]
Scott Clary
Yes.
- [31:07]
Paul Allen
If you get all this wealth and die with the most toys, you're a lonely, miserable person. But if you can help build people along the way. Oh my gosh. I had dinner last night with two guys in a venture backed company. Fantastic young sales guy, head of partnerships. At the end of this wonderful 90 minute conversation, they said, what's the most important advice you'd give to us? And I spent like three or four minutes talking about people, relationships. Treasure every conversation. Keep track of people, stay in touch with people. I was just sharing a couple of stories. In 2000, I gave a lecture about entrepreneurship. The guy in the audience was getting his master's degree and he thought, wow, Paul's life and entrepreneurship sounds a lot more fun than me getting a master's degree in instructional design and going working for somebody. So he quit academia and started a little company called familylearn. He reached out to me and asked me to be an advisor. And I was for about six months. We tried to build familylearn.com into something. Well, fast forward. He's started a few other things since then. He's now the CEO of Angel Studios, a billion dollar movie production company, the most successful anti Hollywood movie company ever formed. His brother Jeffrey was an intern for me in 2008. So I have deep friendships with Neil and Jeffrey Harmon. And who would have known in 2000 or 2008 that these guys would go on to run a company? I think it'll be worth tens of billions of dollars. I think it's the net. Next Netflix. Do you know Angel Studios? They have 1.6 million guild members paying $20 a month to be able to crowd vote on what films and streaming shows to do next. There's participation from everyone who loves movies and films. You get a vote on which pilots should get funded and end up being movies.
- [32:51]
Scott Clary
I'm going to produce some pretty good stuff too.
- [32:53]
Paul Allen
I could imagine. I could imagine someday they have tens of millions of people paying $20 a month for the joy of participating in the creation process and then getting access to the movies when they're released. Like this is a big business model and my relationship with those guys, I treasure it. And guess what? My oldest son went to work for them a few years ago and got a really good career in Internet marketing and analytics. And then one of the Harmon brothers clients hired him away and she just had a huge nine figure exit. And he got to watch this entrepreneur create a product. Market it like crazy. And their celebration dinner for the company party, they had Steve Martin and Martin Short as the entertainment. They had Bobby Flay and Guy Fierro as the chefs, and they had James Taylor as the entertainment. My son got to sit next to James Taylor at dinner. So because of my friendship with Neil and Jeffrey, my oldest son got hired by the Harmon Brothers, hired away by one of their clients and then he got this kind of most beautiful two day celebration of a company exit. And my other son was the first intern for Angel Studios. He was learning how to code and now he works for Google in London.
- [34:10]
Scott Clary
People are everything.
- [34:11]
Paul Allen
People are everything. You can trace every success in your life to people this is why I.
- [34:17]
Scott Clary
Hate the idea of self made.
- [34:19]
Paul Allen
I hate getting, oh, there's no such thing.
- [34:21]
Scott Clary
Because there's no such thing. It could be customers, it could be friends, it could be mentors, it could be. There's no such thing.
- [34:27]
Paul Allen
Certainly your parents who created parents, but also a teacher who spotted something good about you and said something and you've never forgotten it. Yeah. And like, yeah, it's. We are none of us self made.
- [34:38]
Scott Clary
Okay, so I need to understand. So just back up for a quick second. When you went into that room of entrepreneurs, what was the thing that happened that turned you from somebody who's studying Russia into this?
- [34:53]
Paul Allen
Okay. Yeah, good question. So it was Philadelphia, it was May of 1996. My CD Rom publishing company that my best friend and I had started made the Inc. 500. So it was an Inc 500 two or three day event celebrating the 500 fastest growing companies in the United States. And in the course of that two or three days, I heard some brilliant lectures and I talked to dozens of people as we were going from tables, dinners, lunches. And I just thought, these are the coolest people I've ever been around. They are creating jobs for everybody else. They all have passion, they have a vision and a mission and they're doing stuff. And I was like electrified by entrepreneurship. So the next year I called Harvard Business School. I got a scheduled half hour with the dean of the Harvard Business School. I'm like, okay. I've been running a company for, for six years. I've had so many mistakes. Every year we lay off people at Christmas time because we ship a product, it goes really big, we hire a bunch of people. I didn't know about life cycle of products. I didn't know about forecasting. I was a Russian major, I knew nothing about business and I was self taught in technology. So I said, I really think I need to go to Harvard Business School and learn how to be a good entrepreneur and a good CEO. And Kim Clark said to me, are you a patient person? I said, no, I like to just jump in and do stuff. He's like, you will hate your first year at Harvard Business School. It's all required courses and you've already been doing CEO work for six years. You will hate your first year. If you get through the first year, you will love your second year because it's all elective. You'll pick and choose from the greatest faculty. And he kind of talked me out of wanting to go there. And so Instead I started Ancestry.com the next.
- [36:33]
Scott Clary
That was it.
- [36:34]
Paul Allen
That was it.
- [36:35]
Scott Clary
That was it. Do, do you think that going to business school would have helped?
- [36:39]
Paul Allen
Oh, my gosh. I would have learned so many things about venture capital and, and term sheets and, you know, I don't know. I would have learned a lot.
- [36:48]
Scott Clary
People say, like, just go into it and learn by doing.
- [36:51]
Paul Allen
Oh, yeah. And I, I did that instead.
- [36:53]
Scott Clary
I know.
- [36:53]
Paul Allen
But when I took our first, when, when we took $13 million in venture capital in December of 98 for Ancestry.com I didn't understand the terms and what we were getting into. Preferred shares, board control, all those things. And I didn't realize as the founder that we were kind of ceding control to our investors. So that didn't end well. In 2006, the Board of directors decided to sell Ancestry to a private equity fund. So there's a good exit, but there could have been a 20 times bigger exit if we had been able to hold onto our shares all the way through.
- [37:27]
Scott Clary
So I didn't realize. So that was, that was what the education would have helped you with.
- [37:32]
Paul Allen
Yes. So maybe it was expensive, but if I had gone to Harvard, I wouldn't have launched Ancestry.com so, yeah, you never know what's gonna. I like, I like what I did and I like the learning. The painful lessons I've learned have now prepared me to run a soar AI studio where we're churning out company after company after company. We have super voting rights. We've raised, you know, almost $15 million across our portfolio. And we have some pretty big exciting partnerships and likely exits. And this time, all my employees own shares. They have options.
- [38:03]
Scott Clary
You're living this model.
- [38:03]
Paul Allen
Yeah, so I'm doing it right now. I haven't done the D corp yet because there's no legal entity. But my plan is to build is to get legislators somewhere to adopt a new type of corporation called a D corp. Massively distributed, or even you could call it democratic corporation. And then like I said, post harvest. Now, not very many people have heard of the new stock exchange that's being built in the United States. There's the nasdaq, there's the nyse. A lot of really good companies, when they go public, become not so good. Quarterly earnings pressures cause CEOs to do really bad things. Lay off 5 or 10% of your workforce, cut R and D. Short term thinking is disastrous, which is not the.
- [38:47]
Scott Clary
Same everywhere else in the world really. I know from what I understand, like, I think that other parts of the world, they don't focus on quarterly as much as the U. S. Quarterly is a very U S, very U S Focused metric. I think that other stock exchanges, other companies, of course they have to have quarterly but they focus on the longer play. I, I just remember I, I'd have to do some research to figure it out. But I'm pretty sure that across Europe there's just like a longer.
- [39:13]
Paul Allen
It's hard to look at Europe as a good model for entrepreneurship though. If you look at. There's a whole other set of problem like the mindset and the regulatory.
- [39:22]
Scott Clary
But I did like that.
- [39:23]
Paul Allen
Okay, so that's one good thing. You pick and choose the good ideas. Well, I have a friend who was a CFO for 40 years in Silicon Valley. He said he worked for eight companies. Every single one of the CEOs came to him at one point or other said can you change our quarterly earnings? Can you like postpone the expense or move up the rep eight times? He was kind of cajoled and he said I refused to do it one time, I refused to do it. The CEO was fired the next day and they put me in as the CEO. The pressure on CEOs and CFOs to fudge the numbers is really high. But the pressure to lay off workforce or cut R and D or shut down a product, it's like really stupid short term thinking. So good companies get way less good when they go public. Eric Reese, the super famous author of Lean Startup who's one of our advisory board members, I get to talk to him every couple months. He's writing a new book, he's funded, he's raised $300 million to build the Long term stock exchange which will have all the benefits of IPOs.
- [40:21]
Scott Clary
This is what they're doing.
- [40:22]
Paul Allen
This is what they're doing. Long term stock exchange and we'll have. The quarterly earnings pressures will be somehow minimized. I even heard that the SEC is now considering in the US stock markets, even the two that are high pressure right now of going to six month reporting instead of three months. There's a proposal, but Eric's is better. Eric is going to let people go public on the long term stock exchange and recruit institutional investors who have a five year investment thesis. Long term holding.
- [40:52]
Scott Clary
You know, I don't think it's. I think it's Asia. I'm just thinking, I think it's Asia that focuses on longer term, longer time horizon. I want to research this. You should ask Eric Reese about this because I'm sure he's done a lot of research.
- [41:02]
Paul Allen
Yeah, I've talked to some of the people that he's hired for long term stock exchange. I really admire his vision to take the best parts of capitalism and to minimize the problems with it with greed and, and with short term thinking. And then I actually think it would be fascinating if the long term stock exchange could be the place where D corps go public. I've got a founder portal, an AI company that I've got a guy that's going to start running it. We're going to build cap table management software for crowdfunded companies. My company, Citizen portal, we raised $1.3 million from 1850 people on a crowdfunding campaign. Glenn Bec heard about Citizen Portal, had me come to his studio in Dallas, interviewed me for 33 minutes. 560,000 people saw that interview about how Citizen Portal was going to use AI to empower citizens to know what's going on in your local, state and federal government. And Citizen Portal had millions of people use it last year. This year it could be 10 or 20 million. But we crowdfunded it. There's no good cap table management software for crowdfunding companies. What if you have 10,000 investors on your cap table? What a mess.
- [42:08]
Scott Clary
That's a nightmare for the average car to house.
- [42:10]
Paul Allen
Carta pays, makes you pay for every seat.
- [42:12]
Scott Clary
Yeah.
- [42:13]
Paul Allen
Okay, so if we launch a cap table management software for crowdfunded companies, and crowdfunded companies have raised $5 billion in the last few years, but they could raise tens of billions. So you get a big cap table going public and then you go D Corp. Now you have a massively big cap table with an algorithm that prevents concentrated ownership and then maybe a Dow voting mechanism so shareholders can win.
- [42:34]
Scott Clary
Not just into like technology, you're into like optimizing capitalism.
- [42:38]
Paul Allen
Well, I think you have to change capitalism because it's really crony capitalism. And, and that's put, that's why so many young people are embracing socialism, is because they think capitalism is corrupt to the degree that capitalism is corrupt. Let's fix it. Let's allow volunteer entrepreneurs to say, I'm going to build a great company and I'm going to be totally employee owned. An ESOP or a D Corp. Where.
- [43:01]
Scott Clary
Did this come from? I mean, with ancestry, you, you played into the existing system.
- [43:06]
Paul Allen
We, we played by the rules.
- [43:08]
Scott Clary
Eventually by the rules, you, you raised money. You, you did a bad deal. I mean objectively, a bad deal. Not the worst outcome, but still like not the best deal. You lost control. Like, I mean like, I don't think that, I don't think anything from what I've Researched with your Ancestry journey. Like you, you really tried to do anything innovative in terms of like, structuring. No, no Employees share. We were playing by vanilla rules 100% so.
- [43:33]
Paul Allen
And a few people have made hundreds of millions of dollars. And the hundreds of millions of people that have used Ancestry.com, their data is now behind the paywall. When I started Ancestry with my best friend and we decided to put all the world's genealogy records together, we allowed any genealogist to upload their, their connected family tree. They were using Family Tree Maker or Family Origins or Ancestral Quest. So, you know, millions of genealogists had been working on their software, local software hard drive for decades to put together their family tree. We wanted all of those to be uploaded to Ancestry.com so we created the Ancestry World tree and I made a promise to millions of people. When you upload your data to us, it will always belong to you. You can delete it whenever you want. It'll be indexed so that it'll be searchable by everyone else so you can find all your distant cousins, but it will always be outside of our paywall.
- [44:27]
Scott Clary
After I left, I was going to ask was your 43.
- [44:31]
Paul Allen
43 of our traffic was in the Ancestry World Tree. So after I left, the CEO and the chief Marketing officer decided to put it behind the paywall. So I had intended to let all the user generated content belong to the users. That was my goal. And then later executives broke that promise.
- [44:52]
Scott Clary
Yeah.
- [44:52]
Paul Allen
And they enriched themselves. That's fine. But at the cost of violating my promise to millions of people that your data belonged to you.
- [45:00]
Scott Clary
I was wondering if the experience that you had with Ancestry was so bad that this is what prompted you to want to build something that just sort of looked at.
- [45:08]
Paul Allen
Make it bulletproof against takeover.
- [45:10]
Scott Clary
Exactly.
- [45:11]
Paul Allen
Yeah. Yeah. It didn't. It didn't fulfill its mission. The goal that the founders had was not only Ancestry.com but we launched a website called MyFamily.com which tens of millions of people signed up for. It was a collaborative website, you know, years, six years before Facebook. Everyone could share a calendar, upload photos, share recipes, have message boards, make free phone calls to any relative in the world using a service called Lipstream out of Silicon Valley. In 99, we had free voiceover IP six years before Skype was invented. We had the best technology platform for strengthening families all around the world and connecting families across geography. It was awesome. Mary Meeker with the top Internet analyst in the world. She was at Morgan stanley. She saw ancestry.com and my family.com. and she says it's game over in the family space. She ranked us with Amazon and ebay like we were going to define online community.
- [46:04]
Scott Clary
Yeah.
- [46:05]
Paul Allen
And then our investors pulled the plug on it because it wasn't monetizing very well. So then Facebook emerges years later. You know, MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, and Facebook's worth, you know, a trillion dollars. MyFamily.com had the possibility of having a billion users right now. So I think I learned some painful lessons about structure. Now I'm like, oh, over these years, these ideas, these books that I've read about the company, and you know what? Warren Buffett, I used to go to his shareholder meeting all the time and like, I'm trying to learn and like, okay, civilization depends on capitalism. Prosperity depends on that. But if it's. If it's broken, what if we adjust it?
- [46:45]
Scott Clary
Indeed is a success story, partner. Now, if you're hiring, Indeed is all you need. Let me give you an example. If I needed to hire a new editor for this show, I'd go to Indeed and be super specific. Not just can you edit audio. I'd say I need someone who's edited a conversational podcast for at least three years, gets our style and knows our software. Someone who's done this before. And here's the thing. With Indeed sponsored Jobs, I'd get people who fit that description. I'm not digging through resumes from people who've edited one YouTube video. I'm getting actual podcast editors who know what they're doing, people who worked on shows like ours and can prove it. That's what makes a difference. You get people who actually are what you're looking for. According to Indeed data, Sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed are 90% more likely to report a higher than non sponsored jobs. And people are finding quality hires right now. In the minute that I've been speaking to you, companies like yours have made 27 hires on Indeed. According to Indeed Data Worldwide. Spend more time interviewing candidates who check all the boxes. Less stress, less time, and more results. Now with Indeed sponsored Jobs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help you get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/clary. Just go to indeed.comclary right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com Clary terms and conditions apply. Hiring do it the right way with Indeed. HubSpot is a success story, partner. And if you're into this show, you're probably someone who likes learning from People who've actually done the thing. That's why I want to put Create like the Greats on your radar. It's a great show. It's hosted by Ross Simmons, part of the HubSpot podcast network. Ro breaks down some of the greatest creations and creators of all time. What they built, how they thought, the actual process behind it. And he's not just talking theory, he's been doing this stuff for over a decade. What I appreciate is that he makes it practical. Like how do you actually systematize creativity so you're productive but you're not burning out. So if you like learning from history, understanding how great work gets made, and you want something that's easy to listen to, check it out, listen to Create like the Greats wherever you get your podcast. Yes. So with Soar, let's talk about, let's talk about what you're doing for founders and entrepreneurs now. So what do you, what we're talking about sort of evolving capitalism, evolving ownership of companies. If you were going to, if you were going to set up like the perfect structure and environment for entrepreneurship to thrive, what is it in your mind?
- [48:57]
Paul Allen
Yeah. So what's the success rate of startups over a five or ten year period? People say it's like 80 to 90% fail. Right. That's kind of the, the common wisdom. And I don't know if there's any actual data on that, but I think it's a very high failure, probably pretty close. And even venture backed companies often fail. So the thing is that what you want is to flip that so that 90 of startups succeed. Well, what do founders not know when they're get getting started? They don't know hardly anything. Everything they you don't know anything about. How do you build a product, how do you get your first customer, how do you hire people? What about legal? Like there's so much you don't know. Well, what if an AI is trained on the thousands of super important keys to success that you have interviewed people and you found and so you go back to all the origin stories. My dad was a classification engineer and a taxonomy builder. And the software that my dad built in the 70s was licensed to Boeing, Westinghouse, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar. Over 100 of the largest manufacturing companies in the world used my father's software for classifying all their parts and processes and materials and optimizing their factory layout to create efficiency. So my father's life work was to take raw material and turn it into valuable finished goods in the fastest possible way. So I grew up hearing about decision trees, expert systems, and taxonomies, and none of it really sunk in until later. And then I'm like, entrepreneurship could have a taxonomy and a decision tree and an expert system, and every entrepreneur in the world could have a 90% success rate because the AI would coach you every day from idea to exit. Like, that's a beautiful world that we could all live in.
- [50:34]
Scott Clary
If the answer is entrepreneurship, which I'm on the same page, I agree, it is. Then, yes.
- [50:38]
Paul Allen
So our go to market, we have a product called Source Scribe. We have a workplace subsidiary that takes that technology into large corporations. So for sales training, we have a product that competes with Gong. Gong isn't tied to any one training methodology, but Jeremy Miner from Scottsdale, Arizona, has run a company called 7th Level. He's invented a methodology for selling. Very, very good.
- [51:05]
Scott Clary
He's been on here too, called nepq. Yeah.
- [51:08]
Paul Allen
And so Jeremy's stuff is awesome. So over the last six months together, we've partnered and we've launched 7Q AI, which is his version of Gong. And it records all your calls and meetings, and it coaches you and grades you every call on how well did you follow his methodology? And then there's an Ask Jeremy feature that has his voice and 33,000 hours of his content. And it will coach you every day until you're expert. Okay, imagine so that for sales and every entrepreneur needs to be learn how to sell. So you could have that kind of Jeremy expertise in your Startup Scribe, and then you could have Eric Reese's Lean Startup. We're in conversations with him about that. And so all the keys that people have found worked, you can actually use those and the AI can guide you every step of the way. I think there's a world where almost every startup succeeds.
- [51:56]
Scott Clary
I think the barrier to entry and the access to information is great. Like, the barrier to entry is lower than ever before, and the access to information is greater than ever before.
- [52:04]
Paul Allen
It is overwhelming.
- [52:05]
Scott Clary
It is if you.
- [52:07]
Paul Allen
Especially if you're afraid to act, if you're afraid to fail. So if you can help people kind of burst through that barrier of like, psychologically, like, I don't dare get started. Like, if you sit down with.
- [52:19]
Scott Clary
By the way, that is. That is most people, though, like, the 90 who fail are already outliers because they've actually taken a chance.
- [52:25]
Paul Allen
Good point.
- [52:26]
Scott Clary
Yeah, good point.
- [52:27]
Paul Allen
Well, and I grew up thinking business was a lower cast, and. And so why would I ever aspire to that? But, you know, there's a lot of great entrepreneurs who've become philanthropists or thought leaders. So we actually can pick and choose role models. One of the things I've vibe coded in the last 60 days, I'm super excited about it is kind of the company Soar. The name Soar came from a book published in 1992 by the person I think is the greatest psychologist in the history of the world, Dr. Donald O. Clifton. He invented the StrengthsFinder assessment. He spent 50 years of his life in the field of psychology, mostly industrial psychology, trying to figure out what natural talents does every person have that if they lean into it, they can become excellent at something. So we're not born a blank piece of paper that you can write anything on. You have DNA, you have nature, you. You have parents, you have an environment. You are wired in a certain way. Your neurological pathways, you know, become defined. And by the time you're 26, you're. You're quite well known. Like, you are a unique human being. But if Don Clifton interviewed hundreds of thousands of successful people in hundreds of occupations, and he asked them questions for 90 minutes to find out what made them tick, what were they born with that allowed them to succeed in this role? And he built a taxonomy of human talent that resonated with me because of my dad's work. So the concept of Soar is to build AI that takes the world's knowledge, wisdom, and advice from all the best experts and role models and then translates it through your prism of your own natural wiring. So I might give you advice, and it works perfectly for you. I might give someone else the exact same advice, and it completely. It fails. Like, it is not the path for them. If you have ideation, which is one of my top strengths, if you have learner, which is one of my top strengths, people with learner and ideation are probably going to resonate with the things that I share. If someone has connectedness, relator maximizer, restorative, all these other words that Don Clifton came up with, my advice will almost never work for them. It will go into their like, think about my brain as a CPU and your brain as a CPU and think about my words as an instruction set. And it goes into your ear, goes into your cpu, and it doesn't process. Your neurological pathways are so different than mine that my advice, it actually backfires because you're like, oh, I want to be like Paul. He's successful. Here's the three things he told me to do. I can't do it. It's worse to get advice from the wrong person than to not get advice at all. It actually demoralizes people. So I think a lot of loving parents, teachers, counselors, and friends give advice freely all the time because they want.
- [55:17]
Scott Clary
To be helpful, but they have no.
- [55:19]
Paul Allen
Idea how to communicate, no idea how to what the prism that that person needs to hear it through is. And so if AI can build that prism and block out the advice, that will not work for you because of lots of things. Your values, your goals, your wiring your strengths, and then help you find the stuff that is not only good advice, but it's easy and fun for you. It's like, oh, that plays to my strengths. I'm going to lean into that. And now you're successful. I just think the world could be full of successful people.
- [55:47]
Scott Clary
Does that mean that anybody can be an entrepreneur? If they get the advice that's actually sort of given to them in the way that they understand it, they can internalize it. They play to their strengths. Can anybody be successful?
- [55:59]
Paul Allen
I think 100% of people could be a successful entrepreneur. Necessity is the mother of invention. And if somebody had to find a way to make a living on their own, I think they could all find a way. I'm not saying they could all be millionaires, but I think everyone who can speak, who can persuade, who can communicate, who can ideate or have an idea for a product or service. There are so many millions of ways to make a living. And you don't have to work for someone else to get a salary. You can work for yourself. You just find a client. You know, anyone who hires you has clients. They have people paying them.
- [56:33]
Scott Clary
So the biggest issue is they're. They're getting, they're getting their information in a way that doesn't. Doesn't process for them. Yeah, and that's why they're stuck, because a lot of people listen to the show, are trying to build something, be entrepreneurs, and it doesn't always work out right. So.
- [56:47]
Paul Allen
Oh, no, no, we're all going to have lots of failures along the way. But in today's world, the knowledge, wisdom, and advice can be your fingertips. AI can, can selectively tell you which ideas are good for you personally and which ones you should not pursue. So I, I think there's a future world where AI is helping almost every startup succeed. You know, it's kind of exciting to have AI that can build your web page, do your emails, do your videos, slice and dice your content. It all starts with you and your thinking and your speaking. I actually think the future belongs to those who can articulate clearly and precisely exactly what they want to have happen. The more you can clearly articulate your vision, the more the AI will listen and start spinning up agents to do what, what you tell it to do. And of course people along the way, you want them to hear clearly and precisely what the vision is, what the goal, the mission is. So I think articulation and precision is really critical skill for all of us to get.
- [57:48]
Scott Clary
But I don't think many people have it.
- [57:49]
Paul Allen
I think most people don't.
- [57:50]
Scott Clary
So when I was, when I was, I was thinking, because I've interviewed a few people just speaking about AI and we were talking several of them, like they all sort of speak about why like large enterprise AI implementations fail because a lot of companies, they wanted to jump on the bandwagon. They put a lot of money towards, you know, training people on using AI, just even laying off departments because they think that AI is going to replace them. And in some cases people who are using AI, they realize that the results are getting, are taking them longer than if they just did the work themselves. And I think it's because we forgot that for AI to work properly, we have to understand how to communicate with it properly. Because when you give a prompt to AI, there's an unlimited amount of possible outcomes that has to choose from in terms of how it interprets the prompt that you give it. And if we can't communicate what we want properly, then AI can't interpret that properly and then it ends up with a poor result. Right. And this is I think why a lot of large scale enterprise implementations didn't work out. Because we just said to every single person on this team or in this business unit, hey, use AI even though you've never really properly communicated what you actually want to somebody in a clear and precise way. And then we expect to AI to just understand it and it doesn't. So I think that this is something that is actually highlighting how people have massive communication problems. And this is probably what actually stops from being good leaders as well with other people. But it's just like, I guess with people over time you can kind of like massage the, the, you know, if you, if you're working with somebody on your team, they'll start to get what you want, even if you aren't the best at communicating it. But with AI, it's like it's not getting it because it hasn't had that experience working with you.
- [59:38]
Paul Allen
That's right. That's very true. I think that's very well said. There was a researcher, I think a Wall street researcher, I think she was a PhD in Wisconsin or Michigan, and she published a book. She had a thesis that when CEOs communicated in what she called foggy language, factless, obfuscating generalities, she created a FOG index for CEO communications from publicly traded companies. She's like, you know, if you have really good news, you're going to share the facts, the details, you'll be very specific. So she created with a bunch of researchers, they hand coded all the CEO communications from all the public companies and she graded it on the FOG index. And guess what? Foggy communication predicted lower stock price in 12 months. Very clear, factual, you know, specific news was, was predictive of higher stock prices in the future. So one of the things we've thought about doing for our investor portal, we haven't launched it yet, but we're like, you know, wouldn't it be cool if you could analyze the fogginess in real time of every company in the world? Like especially publicly traded companies where you could buy and sell stocks. Like, that thesis played out well for her. Well, every one of us could have an AI that's analyzing, you know, how foggy are the CEO pronouncements from all these companies, then buy and sell.
- [61:00]
Scott Clary
So interesting.
- [61:00]
Paul Allen
But then think about political leaders. Like, the world needs great leadership. Cities, counties, states, international leaders. We, we really need honest, high integrity people who have real ideas. They don't just spout topic talking points. So I think there's a potential FOG index for the political arena. Would you want to vote for a governor who only just like repeats trite phrases and generalities?
- [61:25]
Scott Clary
This is how most people in politics communicate.
- [61:28]
Paul Allen
Wouldn't it be cool if you could grade and score people based on, like Andrew Yang, when he ran for president, he wrote a book called the War on Normal people. He had 107 ideas. Is he was an entrepreneur trying to get into politics. And I think he's been discouraged because, you know, that the race, he got kind of pegged with just UBI as like his only issue. But that guy was super smart, super well researched. He quoted Gallup polls throughout his book, which I used to work for Gallup. So I was like, go, Andrew. But he had so many ideas and he's like, I'm not left, I'm not right, I'm forward. Okay? Innovation, even in government, in, in providing services to our citizens is really important. So wouldn't it be cool if you could score people based on how innovative their communication is? Like how many ideas, especially if those ideas have been tried somewhere else and proven to work so now you're promoting successful ideas. So bad policies never work and they have bad outcomes. Good ideas and good policies can work and have really good outcomes. So why don't we find all the good, discard all the bad? But AI can help grade and score our communication, our leadership style. And then people could start voting for people that are not, you know, just dull, repetitive, you know, machines in word salads. Word salad. But a word salad index. Oh, word salad.
- [62:47]
Scott Clary
But if you think about like you're building AI, that helps entrepreneurs, but on the flip side of it, what are the skill sets that entrepreneurs have to learn to communicate well with AI? And that's. And meeting in the middle will be where somebody can use AI to be successful. So this is where I'm talking about prompting and communicating. And I think that something that you are, it sounds like you're working on is making AI better at interpreting so that the entrepreneur doesn't have to put as much work in communicating. Not that it's good to be lazy, but I mean, if you give AI to an entrepreneur and the AI can interpret how that person likes to communicate and how that person thinks and their strengths and their weaknesses, then all of a sudden the person isn't depending on their sort of, you know, haphazard communication style to get the best possible outcome or information from the AI.
- [63:33]
Paul Allen
Let me give you one example. And again, my dad's work in taxonomies and decision trees affects how I think. So my favorite book in marketing, and I've read hundreds of books, I love marketing. I was the head of marketing for Ancestry for several years. Had a $7 million budget. We tried every single possible channel. I wanted to write a book on marketing. Well, the guys who started DuckDuckGo and someone else I think from Google Ventures wrote a book called Traction. It's a blue cover and it's like 19 ways to get customers. And that's a taxonomy. And I've tried every one of those 19. I could actually write a supplemental book that says my experience with those 19 channels. Like, hey, buy the book, it's awesome. And then buy Paul's addendum to it. Like, we've tried this and this and this and this. Okay. My favorite of the 19 is engineering as marketing. You use your engineers to build something awesome that spreads. And it's a product. It's. It's something you use.
- [64:26]
Scott Clary
So this is product led growth, basically.
- [64:28]
Paul Allen
Yeah, yeah, kind of. But that was, you know, 10, 15 years before product led growth. My friend Dave Boyce just wrote the book on product led growth. Okay, but yeah, so, so 19. So if, if the AI is in the middle between you as a startup founder and you're trying to get going, you have to do something about what my product or service is, what will my pricing be, how will I communicate that? But there's 19 ways to attract customers. What if the AI shows you those 19, looks at your strengths. Look at, looks at your past history and says based on your talents and strengths and based on what you know and what you've tried, we recommend this one first and then maybe this one. And then you do the bullseye thing. Or you spend 250 and you try it out with the help of AI and you're like, measure, would that channel work for my product or my service, given my brand?
- [65:13]
Scott Clary
And so it solves the communication breakdown that stopped people from effectively using AI.
- [65:17]
Paul Allen
Exactly. But the choice of 19, it's nice to have an exhaustive list of the things you could do. You have to know, what are my options when I'm incorporating? What are my options? Llc, Escort, dow, You know, what are my fundraising options? Angel investors fund 20 or 30 times more companies than VCS. But almost all the entrepreneurs go for VCs. Crowdfunding is new. 2016, it was finally legalized with like over 20 SEC approved platforms. And now $5 billion has been raised. So you have a little decision table, like you need a hundred thousand dollars to build this company. Here are your five options, seven options. And then AI will go help you find the right investors. And all of a sudden, like most of the time you spend fumbling around wasting like, you know, now the AI helps you get there really fast, test it out and if it works, good. If it doesn't work, go to the next one. Yeah, so AI could like be the kind of decision tree so, so, so.
- [66:15]
Scott Clary
SOAR is building like the fundamental components to use AI properly. And then you're layering on sales with Jeremy and then, and then you'll have another, whatever piece that will be another investor, will be another thing or, or marketing or what in your leadership.
- [66:31]
Paul Allen
Franklin Covey just shipped a product this week that is AI you're leading and compares it to their paradigm of trust and inspire leadership versus command and control leadership. And so they now have an AI. There's millions of people that have learned about trust and inspire leadership. Now Franklin Covey can say, do you want to see how you're doing week by week? You know, are you actually living these principles and inspiring your team and engage them, or are you a command and control and you don't even know it. And so if you invest in the training, you also need to invest in the AI that pairs with the training that helps you level up until you have expertise and mastery in that field. But yeah, we'll do workplace founder portal, investor portal, family portal, faith portal for people of faith where all your favorite pastors sermons will be transcribed and integrated into the Bible. So as you're reading the Bible every morning and praying you'll say oh my pastor explained this verse 12 years ago. Here's a three minute clip like Bible study could be enhanced with clips from your favorite religious teacher. So that's coming from our faith portal.
- [67:37]
Scott Clary
But I love it. So it's all marrying up. The information available, easily accessible with how you can learn it. Whether or not it's faith, family, business.
- [67:44]
Paul Allen
Entrepreneurship and how you can learn it is the most important ingredient. But then also the prompt engineering you've talked about, like how does the person prompt AI? And we can up level them on clarifying their prompt. Like we can intercept a bad prompt and turn it into a great prompt and then context, huge context engineering I think is extremely important and that is how much does the AI know about you and your past. So Google just launched Gemini is going to now have access to your Gmail history and so they're going to have a lot of context, all your photos on your phone or whatever. But, but if you're trying to live your best life and you want AI to help you be a founder and to make more money and to be successful at work and to hire the right people and to be a good leader and to be a good salesperson and to pitch investors really effectively. AI can easily do all that but you want to also be healthy. And now there's a lot of content about longevity and biohacking and you know, living, eating nutritiously, sleeping well all these protocols, AI could kind of guide you based on your DNA based. There's personalized medicine, right. There needs to be personalized AI health advice.
- [68:52]
Scott Clary
I had Naveen Jane on from Viome.
- [68:55]
Paul Allen
I met Naveen in 98 when he.
- [68:58]
Scott Clary
Was at Infospace and now he's doing personalized probiotics. That's his.
- [69:01]
Paul Allen
Oh yeah.
- [69:01]
Scott Clary
I mean he's on a couple different things but that's his, that's one of his latest companies.
- [69:05]
Paul Allen
Yeah, so there's all these incredible products. My, my brother in law had a 22 pound tumor removed in his stomach like 20 years ago and it was, it was going to be fatal and it turned out that his genetic makeup allowed him to take a medicine. I think only 2% of people could be healed with this medication that came from Scandinavia. And his DNA matched. It saved his life.
- [69:28]
Scott Clary
Wow.
- [69:28]
Paul Allen
Okay.
- [69:28]
Scott Clary
And that was 20 years ago.
- [69:30]
Paul Allen
That was like 20 or maybe even 30 years ago. And so personalized medicine is like, does this pharmaceutical work with your, you know, DNA or your microbiome? Like, we all have differences, and so some things work and some things don't. So just take that concept and apply that to your health, to your financial decisions. Maybe you follow Dave Ramsey and you want an AI to coach you day by day and all these things. Knowledge is out there. Everyone says knowledge is power. It is not. Knowledge applied properly is power. And you get the results of all these good ideas if you do them right. But most of us are constantly learning. I probably learned thousands of things I've never even tried.
- [70:20]
Scott Clary
Like, I learned overwhelm. And I think there is. I think especially. Especially in, like, this audience and probably some of our peers, we just love the idea of knowledge accumulation. It makes us feel good. Right? We're like, learning we're listening to a new podcast or reading a new book. It's like, in and out. But I read a book.
- [70:45]
Paul Allen
That's right. We all say that, don't we? Oh, I read a book on that. Yeah.
- [70:48]
Scott Clary
But, like, how much do you remember?
- [70:49]
Paul Allen
Yeah, I did a deep dive on sequoia trees in California. Like, 90% of the sequoias have been cut down. But a 100-year-old sequoia tree will provide 1 point million lumber feet, 1.5 million lumber feet for home building. That's why the sequoias were all cut down and they were used for decades to build California homes. Well, I know about sequoias. I've never planted a sequoia tree. And If I did, 70 years from now, it would be worth a million dollars of lumber. Okay? So knowing something and not doing anything about it doesn't let you reap the fruits.
- [71:21]
Scott Clary
The first thing I want to talk about is my experience with ChatGPT and Claude and perplexity. And I feel like as much as I train it on my personal history and what I like to learn and talk about and things that are sort of very personal to me, I feel like it always seems to bleed in external information and, like, I'm not deep in a. I'm not building an AI company. It's just like, me just using it and trying to train it, and then, you know, two weeks later, it'll bring in a piece of information. Which is definitely completely incorrect. And I'm like, where did that come from? And I'm assuming just because it's this like crowdsourced information.
- [72:04]
Paul Allen
Well, it's trained on trillions of words and phrases.
- [72:07]
Scott Clary
Perfect, right?
- [72:08]
Paul Allen
So, yeah, so you can try to fine tune it based, but it's still built on top of that large language model which is trained on all known written and spoken words.
- [72:16]
Scott Clary
And I noticed that it's very good, but it's not perfect it. And I think that that's something that if you're trying to get very specific information on the type of strategy to market a company that, that will suit my expertise. Like having all the information in the world is actually not beneficial to you.
- [72:35]
Paul Allen
That's right.
- [72:35]
Scott Clary
And I'm sure this is probably what you found when you try and use some of these LLMs that are not soar and a soar. Is it an LLM?
- [72:42]
Paul Allen
No, no, we, we use all those LLMs. We, we have APIs.
- [72:45]
Scott Clary
How do you make it so that. Yeah, like the marketing.
- [72:48]
Paul Allen
It's a great question. So our vision is to not just have AI generate stuff because it knows all words and phrases and it's a probability engine that can just produce any kind of output. But it hallucinates a lot, doesn't know facts from. From fiction. And our vision, because of my background for seven years in CD ROM publishing, trying to find the best books ever written in every field and know word for word what did the human rights. And so we have this concept of what we call level six humans. We find people that have spent 100,000 hours of their life studying a topic Don Clifton in psychology, studying human talent and potential and creating strengths. That's it for 50 years. And he gifted the world this assessment, which in 30 minutes he can tell you your top five strengths. And if you know what your top five strengths are and lean into them, your chances of succeeding in every part of life goes way, way up. If you're trying to fix your weaknesses all the time, you're obsessed with what you're not good at and you forget that you have incredible gifts that nature gave you or that God gave you, and you forget about doing anything about them, you're just going to be lost. So lean into your strengths. That's what Don would say. So the thing we try to do is we want to find millions of pages of speeches and writings by all the world's greatest human thinkers. And then we use retrieval augmented generation so that we force the AI to quote the human word for word when we give you advice from Gary Vaynerchuk. Not that we do, but, but if, but if we did, if we had a Gary V. AI, like we have a Jeremy Minor AI trained on 33,000 hours of what he and his coaches have said. We. And then we'll not only find the quote, we'll play the clip for you. So our goal is to prioritize, like with a decision table and an expert system. Like, here are all the options you could do, here's who you are, here's what this expert said. That will work beautifully for you. That's a high probability statement. Let's try that first before we do the next thing.
- [74:49]
Scott Clary
Understood.
- [74:50]
Paul Allen
And if you can just stop thinking about the overload of all the millions of things you could do and find the one thing you could do to improve your health, the one thing you could do to improve your finances, the one thing you could do to get your first customer or build a product and do that thing. And then when you do that thing, the next thing is become more obvious with, with AI help and with experts, you know, oh yeah, after this, I did this. You've interviewed so many people and if you have a taxonomy of all the things they've said, that would be a powerful tool for an AI. And by the way, all of our go to market strategies for our products is through private label partners. You can talk, you, you could launch a startup scribe.
- [75:28]
Scott Clary
Yeah.
- [75:28]
Paul Allen
Powered by all the knowledge that you and your interviewees have given in a taxonomy and you could have the AI emphasize certain things that you believe really strongly in and of everyone who subscribes to it could have the benefit of that knowledge and applying that knowledge.
- [75:44]
Scott Clary
I understand. So it's hyper focused. So it removes a lot. It removes like the unlimited amount of information everybody has access to, which is actually hurting more than helping.
- [75:52]
Paul Allen
That's right.
- [75:52]
Scott Clary
Pivot a little bit. Going back to entrepreneurship, when everybody has these tools you mentioned, it's very important to, if you are a founder, if you are an entrepreneur, to lift other people up. You don't want to be a solo founder building a great company with just agents and no real people. What happens to people's jobs when you have all these tools and everybody can be an entrepreneur? I guess that's the biggest question.
- [76:15]
Paul Allen
I think everyone could be an entrepreneur, but I don't think everyone will be an entrepreneur. I think a lot of people want to work for someone else. They might like the vision or mission. So I think there will still be lots of organizations that are growing and dynamic and attracting a lot of people think about Elon Musk and all the, the world changing things he's doing. Tons of people work for him and his company, of course, and it's probably the time of their life to roll up their sleeves and work day and night and send a rocket to Mars or whatever. Like, so I, I think there will be lots of people drawn to, you know, go work for the growing companies or the big companies or go work for the public sector and be an educator. Like, there will be so many jobs. Still, even when lots of people or anyone could be an entrepreneur doesn't mean everyone should be an entrepreneur.
- [76:59]
Scott Clary
I also think that some of the smartest people that I've ever worked with, they have been entrepreneurs in certain seasons of their life and they don't want that anymore. And I think that that's the one thing I want people to really take away from this conversation when they think about AI and entrepreneurship and is it going to replace jobs? I'm like, no, it'll replace your job if you don't upskill yourself. You should be able, as any person on this earth, given they have the resources and especially in a country like the US should be able to go start something, make a dollar themselves from just whatever they're competent at, sell their services to the market in some way and and truly build their own business. They should be able to do that. They should learn all the ancillary and adjacent skills to be able to do that, because that makes you highly employable. So even if you don't want to do that, I think that's the bar you should aim for.
- [77:53]
Paul Allen
I love that.
- [77:53]
Scott Clary
I think that's it. And that's great advice because then it, then it removes the stress of you worrying about AI taking your job. If you could build a company and you just choose not to. No, AI is taking your job.
- [78:04]
Paul Allen
What a great advice for anybody who's afraid or anxious. And now they like, shore up your own potential ability and now you're more employable. Employable, but it doesn't matter. You could start your own thing if you needed to. Now, a few months ago, I was giving a speech at a university and I kind of like to think about, you know, I am a person of faith. I believe in a creator. And I think this world is incredible. It's rich in resources and people. I think there's a lot of gratitude that you can have for even being alive in this amazing world. And I said, I've been a parent, I've got eight kids now. And so I've been able to help bring eight children into this world. And there's nothing more miraculous and powerful than seeing a child born that was yours. This powerful instant feeling of love, like it's divine. And I'm like, wow, we get to procreate. That's an incredible gift. And it changes everything to have a child. And so then there's another power that God has. Where he said in scripture, God said, let there be light, and there was light. He spoke things into existence. Sense. He gives us a chance to procreate. Not everyone, unfortunately, can. I have a family member missing a chromosome, and she won't be able to be a mother, although she could adopt. And so we hope that that will happen. But she's creating lots of other things. She's a famous author, and she's bringing things to life that are affecting a lot of people. But all of us can create. And you can now speak things into existence. So I've been talking about that phrase for about a year, almost a year. And I saw that Y Combinator has a new company funded, called Adam, and their tagline is speak things into existence. And I, like, my mind was blown. I'm like, what do they do? They let you design, describe anything, and they'll 3D print it. They'll take whatever you described and they'll do a CAD CAM drawing, and then they'll 3D print it. Yeah. So whatever you have words to describe is now being brought into existence. But the phrase.
- [80:17]
Scott Clary
But that's what an entrepreneur does. Big things exist. They have an idea in their mind, and they. They bring it into existence.
- [80:21]
Paul Allen
Well, it used to take a long time.
- [80:23]
Scott Clary
Yeah.
- [80:23]
Paul Allen
You know, it used to take many years and lots of people. And now you just speak it and the AI can understand it and design it and say, is this what you had in mind? Okay, we're going to go mass produce these in China. Yeah. Like, it's crazy. You could invent something just. Just with words. But all of us could experience that, and some of us have.
- [80:42]
Scott Clary
You've said that entrepreneurs are the most alive people. Why?
- [80:46]
Paul Allen
I had a friend who said that it's the highest, the most agentic occupation. And like, that was like a couple years ago. He's a PhD, and I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, you have to use your agency all the time. Like, you're in charge. You own it. This is it. You do it or you don't do it. Like, whenever you're employed by someone else, there's a job description or some kind of an expectation and that externality is really determining what you do with your time and with your talents. But when you're an entrepreneur, you make something up out of nothing. And so, yeah, I, I think that the word alive is a pretty good description of people that aren't just being acted upon. There are two things, two kinds of things in the universe. Things to act and things to be acted upon. And if you're being acted upon all the time, I don't think you're very alive, you know.
- [81:41]
Scott Clary
You ever heard the, the, the, the concept of locus of control?
- [81:44]
Paul Allen
Yes.
- [81:45]
Scott Clary
Yeah. So the internal locus of control, which I feel like is similar to having agency. Like you just take responsibility for everything in your life and you happen to the world versus external locus of control, where the world happens.
- [81:55]
Paul Allen
That's it. That's really it.
- [81:57]
Scott Clary
I love, I love this idea so much. It's just take absolute responsibility for everything, for absolutely everything, good or bad. You just have to, you know, Jaco Willink will tell, talk about extreme ownership or whatnot, but that's really, that's the life of an entrepreneur. It's taking extreme ownership. And I think that when you believe that you happen to the world, the world doesn't happen to you. I think that ironically, like, you end up living a much better and happier, more fulfilled life. I genuinely believe that even if bad things happen, I mean, these are very cliche sayings, but like, it's not what happens, it's how you respond.
- [82:32]
Paul Allen
Yeah, that's right.
- [82:33]
Scott Clary
And it's true. The most horrific, whatever happens to you, and you could get up tomorrow and keep moving forward or you could not and let it derail your whole life. And at the end of the day, like, it's really up to you to a degree at which life you want to live in, entrepreneurship or otherwise. Right. Obviously there's some pretty bad things that happen to people.
- [82:58]
Paul Allen
And yeah, this morning, in my personal devotional, I listened to a woman give a religious talk in 2004 called Finishing youg Story. And she talked about one of her ancestors who was going across the plains and lost his wife and a child on the same day. The child died many hours later and he had to go back to the grave, dug up and then buried the child with his wife and then kept moving on. It was a thousand mile walking journey from Illinois to Utah. And she just said, how did he finish? How did he keep moving? And she admired that. And then she told two or three other stories about people that had finished something that after a huge obstacle or a big setback, they Just keep going. And I think the concept that, that nobody's a failure unless they stop trying. As long as you pick yourself up and keep going, you are not a failure. You're learning, you're adapting, you still have a story to finish.
- [83:59]
Scott Clary
Do you believe this is true? Obviously you're religious. Do you believe this line is true? God helps those who help themselves.
- [84:05]
Paul Allen
Yes, I do. I do. He's so abundant. He's given us all our life, our body, our breath, our. Our agency, our freedom, opportunity. Like, you know, there's so much resource in the world. And I think he wants us to grow and learn and to become something.
- [84:24]
Scott Clary
Yeah, I believe.
- [84:26]
Paul Allen
And none of us are self made. I love how you said that every single person can trace every success to somebody else. Giving you the idea, giving you encouragement, providing resource. I had a friend, I don't even know if he's very religious, but he said when. I think he was excommunicated from some sect when he was 11 and it was like a really. I don't know if it's cultish or something, but he's like they blacklisted him and kicked him out and labeled him like a heretic or something at age 11 or something. But he's one of the smartest people I've ever met. And he said, when you decide to do something, the universe provisions your journey.
- [85:06]
Scott Clary
I love this.
- [85:06]
Paul Allen
It was really powerful.
- [85:07]
Scott Clary
It's a, it's a similar quote to the Marc Andreessen quote. I'm gonna, I'm gonna look it up. But basically he says something along the lines that if you put enough energy and time towards something, you will find that the universe is very malleable and it starts to bend to your world.
- [85:27]
Paul Allen
I love that.
- [85:28]
Scott Clary
Yeah.
- [85:28]
Paul Allen
Yep.
- [85:28]
Scott Clary
It's one of the most powerful ideas. And I think that, that. But that all stems back to having high agency, having an internal looks of control, having belief in the fact that the future that you want is totally dependent on you and that's it. And the actions you take. Because if you do pursue something for a long enough period of time, for a long enough time horizon, maybe it's just a bias because I interview successful people, but I don't think it is. Because if there's not many people who, I know they're not even famous, who have been doing something for 20 years and aren't highly successful at it. Truly not. Truly not like I know people that have quit, but if you have found a way, and this is also why maybe going all in on entrepreneurship when you're still working a job. Maybe we'll give yourself a little bit of Runway. Maybe build your 5 to 9 while you're working your 9 to 5, whatever it is. Or maybe build it on the weekends until you've found a way to find product, market fit and for it to be successful or for it to replace your income that you're pulling from your job. Like, find a way to architect your business and your entrepreneurial journey so that you can stay in it for an extended amount of time. And then I think that you find a way that's another way, in my opinion at least, to switch and flip that 90% failure rate into like, 100% success rate.
- [86:47]
Paul Allen
I think as time goes by, there's a compounding effect when you continue to focus on something.
- [86:51]
Scott Clary
I agree with that.
- [86:52]
Paul Allen
There's like, just, like interest, just. It compounds over time. Then you just got that hockey stick. I think that's true for persisting with almost anything. Yeah. So, yeah, I really love that.
- [87:00]
Scott Clary
I think that's. That's. I think that's one of the most powerful ideas. You have eight kids.
- [87:04]
Paul Allen
I do. You have eight kids, six grandkids now.
- [87:06]
Scott Clary
Oh, my God.
- [87:07]
Paul Allen
If I could advise anyone to skip the parenting stage. I loved parenting, but, man, being a grandparent is just so fantastic.
- [87:15]
Scott Clary
What would be. What would be one thing that you want them to take away from your journey?
- [87:19]
Paul Allen
My kids and grandkids.
- [87:20]
Scott Clary
Yeah.
- [87:21]
Paul Allen
Well, my wife never really wanted my kids and grandkids to be entrepreneurial because.
- [87:26]
Scott Clary
Why not?
- [87:26]
Paul Allen
Because the journey for her was probably like a roller coaster. Like, really. She stuck with me, and now she's on the board of Soar AI Studio. She's a Gallup coach, and so she coaches all my employees. She's got such a skill with people. She understands people after one hour more than I do after working with them for 10 years.
- [87:45]
Scott Clary
Years.
- [87:45]
Paul Allen
I'm not kidding. Like, I'm an ideas guy. I'm in my brain all the time. I'm thinking, reading, learning, strategizing, visioning all the time. People strengths, if you look at Don Clifton's taxonomy, are way down the list for me now. I love people and. But I don't understand them. I don't get them. I don't see what makes them tick. So I. I hire the wrong people a lot. And so she's come in as, like, my human resources. Like, she's going to vet everybody. She's going to Kosha. She told me, paul, this woman overseas is so talented, so capable, and she's got this kind of minor role, and as soon as she told me that we elevated her and now she's crushing her leadership role like I never would have noticed.
- [88:27]
Scott Clary
So my better avgina, she's the same. She's so good, in two seconds she can tell me if I should be working with the person or not. And I don't know, I just don't see it the same way she does. And she's been a hundred, like when I say 100 success rate, hit rate on who I should work with and who I shouldn't. She's never missed. She's never missed. Yeah, she's so good.
- [88:49]
Paul Allen
Fantastic thing to have a complimentary partner like that. So the advice that I want my kids and grandkids is just to, to, you know, figure out who you are, what did, what were you created to do? Like understand your talents, your strengths, your potential and then be yourself and lean into your talents, your gifts, your strengths and find your way through life being grateful for what you have and not envious that you don't have this or that or somebody else has this. Just be grateful for what you have and know that there is a path to amazing fulfillment for you when you do what you were created to do and when you become what you were created to become, the fulfillment, the joy, the thriving, just the feeling is unmatchable. And I think a lot of people, Andrew Yang in his book pointed out that 75% of the highly academic successful people in the United States go to the same colleges, end up in the same six jobs in the six largest cities in the United States. They're going down a well defined rut that pays well. So they go through and check the boxes and after 10 years in their career, they're all miserable. 75% of the highest, very high academic performers in the United States. Six cities, six jobs, probably not very much life satisfaction.
- [90:12]
Scott Clary
That's where, that's where, that's where your midlife crisis comes in for sure. So how do you know, how do you know when you are doing the right thing?
- [90:18]
Paul Allen
My son thinks that the purpose of life is to out see how many, how many times can you experience flow state? So the Czech Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, this psychologist from Europe, he created the concept of flow. And when you, you know, I don't know if video games put you in flow state. Maybe it does.
- [90:38]
Scott Clary
Maybe you can go on Twitch.
- [90:39]
Paul Allen
Yeah, there you go. Make a living on Twitch. You know, I had a, my son had surgery on his wrist the other day. He broke both of his wrists sprinting after A basketball practice and running into the wall. He's the coach. And so he just had massive surgery on his wrist. There's all this, you know, metal plating and wiring and stuff, but the surgeon actually showed us when he was putting in a block for the pain on his shoulder, he showed us, he said, my video game skills have become. He was the anesthesiologist, so he's a, he's an MD anesthesiologist. He had to go in and put in a block and it was perfect. And he's like, it's like playing a video game. Like, I really learned a lot about being a doctor by playing video games. He wasn't joking. So, yeah, I think find out what gives you that feeling of flow where you lose track of time. You do great work and do that as often as you can.
- [91:30]
Scott Clary
I love it. If you were going to tell yourself your younger self, 20 year old self, one lesson, what would that be?
- [91:36]
Paul Allen
Just keep going. And all the setbacks and the moments where you just wanted to curl up in a fetal position and, and, and let, let everything disappear and like, stop and like, just end. Don't worry, just pick yourself back up. It's all going to work out in the end. And yeah, I, I, I just never give up. Just, you know, take that next step. Finish your story. I think if I hadn't learned those painful lessons from ancestry, I wouldn't be advocating for a new form of capitalism.
- [92:06]
Scott Clary
I can tell. Yeah.
- [92:07]
Paul Allen
And I'm like, okay, well, was that an expensive lesson? Yes. Was it worth it? Yes. Now it's got to work. Like, I have to try this. I, like, I'm not done until it's legislated and there are decorporations out there.
- [92:19]
Scott Clary
Yeah, but if you stick with it.
- [92:20]
Paul Allen
Long enough, I'm gonna, I mean, God willing.
- [92:23]
Scott Clary
Where do you want to send people for Soar? Where do you want to send?
- [92:26]
Paul Allen
They can go to soar.com and sign up. They can follow me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, but I'm really excited that my daughter, who's an author, is going to help me with my Paulallen AI. So I blogged under Paulallen.net for like 10 years. All the advice and all the entrepreneurship. I taught entrepreneurship for four years, Internet marketing. So I used to write a lot and teach a lot and I used to blog a lot. And then I stopped like 15 years ago. But now I own Paulallen AI. I'm going to launch a substack, I'm going to start a podcast. So My advice is go to Paulallen AI, sign up for my newsletter and then you'll start getting weekly ideas about how AI can help you as an entrepreneur and how AI can help you in the rest of your life.
- [93:08]
Scott Clary
And for somebody who's listening to this, there's. There's probably people that will be interested in the other things that are built on top of Soar sales, for sure, because a lot of the audience are entrepreneurs or people that want to be entrepreneurs. And I'm pretty sure at this point they've realized that they have to learn how to sell to be successful at anything. Whether or not it's customers, investors, selling your company to an employee, it's very important. And I know Jeremy does a great job. He's one of my favorite sales trainers because he's awesome. Listen, I come from a sales background, so I have strong opinions about some. About some, you know, influencer sales trainers. So Jeremy's a great one. He's very good and we did a good podcast. But if people want to go into your ecosystem, they want to learn from Jeremy or they want to take part in anything that's built on top of Soar. What's your advice? Like, where should they start, how should they be thinking? Just like tee it up for them so they get how to start with you.
- [94:01]
Paul Allen
Go to soar.com and we can hub and spoke out to all of our startup entities. We'll actually start doing competitions and we'll try to do hackathons and we'll provide some of our AI building blocks for entrepreneurs. So sign up at Paul Allen AI for my newsletter. But go to soar.com and just check it out. Every couple weeks, new products are launching, new partnerships are launching.
- [94:24]
Scott Clary
They can use some of these tools now.
- [94:26]
Paul Allen
They can use some of these tools right now.
- [94:27]
Scott Clary
Okay.
- [94:28]
Paul Allen
Yeah.
- [94:28]
Scott Clary
Okay, good.
- [94:29]
Paul Allen
FounderPortal AI will soon allow you, in fact it does right now, to start recording all your calls and meetings even before you've launched a product. You know, Eric Rees and others say do a hundred customer development interviews with your target customer. Record every one of those. You got 100 hours of very media intelligence from your target market. And then AI can help you build your MVP roadmap. Like, it's really fast. If you start recording all your calls and all your meetings.
- [94:56]
Scott Clary
I'm curious, after, you know, you've had an incredible career, what was your definition of success when you started and what does success mean to you now?
- [95:03]
Paul Allen
I probably never thought about what is success and how, when will I have achieved it? And you know, what, how do you measure that? I actually going back to how every human being is unique and Don Clifton identified 34 patterns of thinking, feeling, behaving, and then he gives you your top five. The chance that you'll have the same top five strengths as anyone else is 1 in 33.8 million.
- [95:27]
Scott Clary
So very rare.
- [95:28]
Paul Allen
So the chance that you'll have the same top 10 as anyone else is almost impossible. So you are unique, just like your pupil and your fingerprint and all that. You're a unique human being. But I think each person was created uniquely on purpose because there's beauty in diversity and we all need each other. In the New Testament, Paul talks about how the church is a body and it has a need of every member. The head, the hand, the foot, all need each other. And so because we're all different and we have strengths and weaknesses, we need other people. So I think that's by design. But I also think that that flow state is indicative that you are on the right track. When you are doing what you're designed to do. That's an amazing feeling. When you feel like the work you're pursuing, the purpose, the mission you have is approved by the universe. That's an incredible feeling. So I think my definition of success now is are you filling the measure of your creation? Are you doing what you were designed and placed on earth to do? And that includes learning how to love, learning how to create, learning how to get along serving and giving and building others. And so you want to overcome the day to day obstacles of failure and you want to be successful financially, you want to be physically well off and take care of your body. But it's relationships, it's people, it's lessons learned. And so at the end of the day when you look back and like, did I do what I was designed to do? Did I discover my potential and reach some portion of it? And I don't think anyone will ever say 100%, no regrets or I did it all, I'm perfect, nobody's even close to that. But if you're directionally going in the right direction, it's exhilarating.