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The $100 MBA Show
MBA2587 Extended Interview: Martin Warner – The Elon Musk of The UK. How to Build and Sell a Business. Make Life Changing Money.
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- [00:00]
Host
If you're a listener of the show, you probably own a business or looking to start one. So the question is, are you ready to thrive with your business? It's time to let Intuit QuickBooks take things like unpaid invoices and tracking expenses off your plate to take things to the next level. If you're a longtime listener to the show, you know how much I bang on about how important your finances are, getting your numbers in order, making sure your incoming invoices and expenses are all taken care of. That's where QuickBooks comes in. It's an all in one business platform that can help you with day to day tasks like invoice, manage and grow your business all in one place. Intuit QuickBooks your way to Money Money movement services are provided by Intuit Payments, Inc. Licensed as a money transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services.
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Minimum of 4 lines for $25 per line per month with auto pay discount using debit or bank account. $5 more per line without up to $830 off each phone via 24 monthly bill credit plus taxes, fees and $10 device connection charge for well qualified customers. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue build credits or credit. Stop and balance on required finance agreement due bill credits and if you pay off devices early ct mobile.com Martin Warner.
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Omar Zenhom
Is a remarkable individual, an innovator, an inventor, the CEO, the founder, the man who's created the world's first true online cineplex.
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Martin Warner
He's also called UK's Elon Musk. Martin Warner I'm driven by by curiosity. I wouldn't say I'm driven by passion because I get passionate about everything and I'm ruthless with data.
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Omar Zenhom
What are some pieces of advice you'd give those who are listening that look to raise money?
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Martin Warner
The first thing I tell people about raising money is.
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Omar Zenhom
Hey, welcome back to the $100 NBA show. And today's episode is a special conversation with Martin Warner. Martin's been dubbed as UK's Elon Musk. The reason for that is because he's had success in multiple areas, in multiple markets and many different innovations, from 3D printing to film to AI. One of the reasons why I wanted to bring him on the show is that he did something I really don't see very often. He built a 3D printing company called Bot Objects. And in 17 months he exited that business for 50 years. Million start to finish, right? 17 months and an exit. That's pretty fast. And from there he parlayed that into what he's doing now. He's the CEO of Flix Premiere, a leading independent film streaming service. And he's also pioneering a lot of interesting work in AI. One of them we're going to talk about a little bit in the episode, but I'll tell you more as we wrap up the episode about where you can learn more and use his tool. But we're talking about AI that actually helps your life, actually does the work that you don't want to do. There is so much more that Marin is known for. I couldn't actually get it all into the episode. I mean, he's a best selling author of a book called the Startup Story. He's built other businesses as well that we don't get into. But what I love about him most is that he's really down to earth and really cares for sharing what he's learned along the way along his journey of entrepreneurship. So without further ado, we're going to jump into that conversation with Martin Warner. Martin Warner, great to have you here on the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us.
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Martin Warner
Thank you.
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Omar Zenhom
It's wonderful to kind of get to know you a little bit. We had a chat prior to this conversation. There's so much out there. When I googled you before we even had our first conversation. There's so much that you're known for. But I want just to take a time out and just ask you, you know, how do you describe yourself? What do you do and why do you do it?
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Martin Warner
So a high level. I think I'm just a curious kind of meanderer. Right? I mean, if I look at my, my, my path or I try and connect the dots, I'm driven by, by curiosity. I wouldn't say I'm driven by passion because I get passionate about everything and I'm ruthless with data. But I'd say I'm deeply curious about life and I tend to go down these rat holes and try and solve problems and there are certain things that definitely make me who I am. But if I was to kind of connect them, I would say that first and foremost, I'm an entrepreneur. Most of my entrepreneur is sold through inventions and along the journey. I like teaching, I like proving methods, I like to understand theory, I like to help other people I certainly love mentoring and that's been in the last kind of 20 years, a big part of my life. And so I think somewhat of a teacher, an inventor and an entrepreneur. I think that's kind of the main thing. And some other things, you know, I've built a ton of products and written a book and produce movies, but they're kind of secondary.
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Omar Zenhom
Yeah. And that's pretty much where you got that nickname. Elon Musk of the uk. They've been compared to him a lot because of the cross industry innovations that you've had. You've had a lot of innovations and a lot of products and services in different markets. Why do you feel like you like to do that? Is it, you know, most people kind of like stay in their lane. Like this is my strength. I'm just going to stay in this market. Why do you like to kind of experiment or try new things in different markets?
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Martin Warner
Not to labor the point, but, but back to this kind of curiosity. I was always someone that when I was young, I was always considered this kind of maverick, you know, someone that just would, would go and do what he wanted to do and would, would find out later on the implications or the consequences of why he did it. I think that I was certainly searching for some kind of higher meaning and that, I don't mean that in any kind of religious way. I was looking to find something that I would enjoy, be good at later on. And you know, I figured that commercial success was beginning. You know, survival was more important than broad commercial success. In the beginning. I was definitely a product of kind of my, my early beginnings when I made money and I, I got a broader perspective, I started to realize that I would focus on, on things and I'd serialize my kind of activity. And I looked at that as a hedge. That's a longer conversation. But I would hedge a lot of my kind of journey so that I could ensure myself against potential failure. It's more of a risk conversation. But, but I think that the curiosity and this idea that I kind of knew that there was a higher meaning somewhere and I was constantly looking for it, this was a great source of challenge and kind of inspiration. I don't, if I'm teaching entrepreneurship, I don't necessarily recommend that path early or indeed ever having to go there, but that's kind of been my makeup.
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Omar Zenhom
I want to dig a little in that because on a personal level, me, the reason why I do what I do in entrepreneurship is a lot of it is seeking significance. Like I want to prove it to Myself, I have this hunger of like, I got to do something that matters. I don't know where that comes from. I don't know. Maybe because my parents are immigrants and everything came hard, but. But is there anything that drives you like that? Is it. Is it this feeling of like, I need to do something important, or is it more like I want to find answers?
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Martin Warner
Yeah. So definitely this higher meaning is important to me. Right. So I don't want to solve small problems. I don't want to kind of run away or get to the journey too fast and say, you know what? That was a chapter I didn't want to do. Right. Because for me, that would be unfulfilling. So definitely looking to solve a problem that I care about, making sure that there's a journey worthwhile. I don't really slap a timeline on it, but purpose is a huge sense of satisfaction for me. The other thing is that I think that coming back to the survival point, that becoming a parent and having a family and living in different countries, there's a kind of sense of commitment. And I think I was always kind of refining the value of what I was doing as I was weighing that and trading that off against time with my family and been able to grow this kind of personal side of my life. And that was another, you know, due to your sense of purpose and meaning. And trying to balance those two had a direct effect on kind of the cause or what I was pursuing.
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Omar Zenhom
One of the things you mentioned really early, when we just got started, you said that you're ruthless about data. One of the things I find myself teaching a lot to new entrepreneurs is how important their numbers are. Like businesses, money. Like, if you don't know your cash flow, you don't know your numbers. It's very hard for you to know if you're winning. It's very hard to know if you're going to be able to survive. How much of the finances of business do you look into or track when you're starting a new idea, a new venture, and as you're building it?
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Martin Warner
So I think the numbers are. If I think of a pyramid, I think of it as three levels. Right. I always tell people that depending what industry. And you probably only need, like five metrics, right. That are out there. So we need to know our margins, right? Yeah. We need to know what our variable costs are. We need to have things that we can control. I'm less worried about other things you might graduate to CAC or the cost of acquiring a customer. What's the true genuine Cost so you can figure out some kind of delta to scale. This is very, very important to me. But back on the broader data question, I think just understanding data and relying on less assumptions is a really, really good way to measure your productivity, whether that's your financial health of the company, you know, whether that be the units of time or the way you try and get the best out of labor, whether it's working back to reverse engineer a problem. I think of being ruthless about data. I try to rely on facts so I have less assumptions when it comes to finance. I think that, you know, you need very little, but you need the measurement. You need to come back to being honest and ruthless about the data. And if you want to come back to the start of entrepreneurship, you know, I believe the basics around finance are really important only because you don't want to move the same piece twice in the venture. So successful entrepreneurs have a correlation and that's. They understand that there's a clock and they understand that there's shortcuts, but finance is not one of them. So there are certain things that you need to do in the beginning, and you have to do them right so that you don't trip up.
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Omar Zenhom
Yeah, that's so solid. I love the idea of, you know, validating your hunches, validating your ideas that you mentioned. One of the things I found is, as you know, you usually start a business because you're scratching your own itch. You're solving a problem that you have and you or something that you want to see in the world, but eventually you start serving people that are not.
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Host
You, and you're in the weeds and.
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Omar Zenhom
You are like, you know the product and service and the market so well. You are not the best avatar anymore. And you need to use external data. You need to talk to your customers. You need to figure out where you need to go next. Tell me a little bit about how you do that now with your businesses. How do you actually know where to go, what direction to move in?
- [10:22]
Martin Warner
Put it this way, I could tell you now, they always say that your gut is your first true instinct. I'm not sure that's true. Right. You know, if that was true, I'd roll out a bed a different way every, every day. Right. So, and also, I'm often looking at this vantage point from different angles. Right. So, you know, I'm an investor as well as an inventor, et cetera, on the rest of it. And I'm always got a number of ventures anytime I'm a different proximity to the problem. But I think the lens to think that through is how do you ensure that you build something of value? Is it going to be something that's going to have some kind of sustaining impact on customers? And how do you solve those two things together? And that's that there is customers and that there's value. So in other words, between that, the thing that separates that is a roadmap. And so I think long and hard about that from a product perspective or perhaps a wrap service. And then I go and create that. I go and try to validate it. There are many ways to do that. So in film, it's highly subjective, but we can look, we can vet that through audiences. We can vet that through similar scripts, similar scores, similar productions. It comes to technology, there's many ways to kind of poll the application, get that out in an alpha, get that out in a beta. I'm doing that with my AI venture. I try to not presume that I'm going to build a product that everyone wants or that I build products that I want to use myself. The great Steve Jobs quote. I'm not sure that was true. Right. Just because he wants to build products that they want to use, meaning they are the ultimate judgment that there's an everlasting sustainable view of customers. I look to validate, come back to the data again. I try to figure out, is there real value on a roadmap and can I see customers? And what's the best way to kind of test that? I'll give you an example. I'm in the film business. I've produced movies. I've financed a lot of movies. I'm in the streaming business. I remember sitting on a boat that we'd rented, and I was pitching at the Cannes film festival about 300 film producers. And I said, I've got this idea. I think I can protect independent film, which is a huge passion of mine. And I advised the film festival on how to do that as an industry. And what I found was, I told him about this particular revenue share model that could protect independent film. We could represent them better, service them better, market the independent films. And we could do that, and we could provide financing inside the world of streaming. It hadn't happened at that point, by the way. There are very few people that can do anything to solve that problem today in streaming. So I thought I had a winner. And what I found was that it's not something that ultimately I connected with. I found that actually, a lot of the things that I've done, they're inspired by completely different Approaches, it doesn't matter where I am. So where it's value or sustainable customers, you have to come back to this kind of truth around what it is you really want to do and what is the right way to approach it. On that boat, 300 film producers later, they all looked at me with long faces and I was nine months to the first licensing agreement. I thought I was going to go out of business. And when I look back, not only was I in a subjective arc and it was very difficult, but I had to figure out how was I going to get to prove to these film producers that we could license agreements and validate that there was an audience behind it. This led me to sentiment analysis, a technology solution. So looking at metadata, figuring out the script, trying to target and value an audience and then sell that back to these film producers, this was a complex way of validating was there value and was there sustainable customers? And so every path has its own approach and you kind of have to figure it out. But it isn't a gut for me, it's not a gut approach.
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Omar Zenhom
I think sometimes in business we want everything to be exciting and that's why we got into entrepreneurship. But sometimes the most important stuff like finance, like idea validation, it's a bit boring. You know, it's a slog a little bit. And especially when you're dealing with a well established industry that's had the cement poured onto it, like film, you know, with your business Flixamere, you're trying to do, you're trying to move and shake and change an industry that has kind of set its ways for a very.
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Martin Warner
Long time for sure.
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Omar Zenhom
I'm reminded of this little sound bit that's a bit viral on the Internet of Matt Damon explaining why a lot of independent films don't get made anymore because of the loss of the DVD market. There's no aftermarket anymore either is going to be a blockbuster in the cinema and it's got to generate 2,300 million dollars to cover the cost of the film and then goes into streaming. So there's not a lot of room for that independent, high dialogue drama film. Tell me a little bit about your pursuit of trying to be a champion of independent film and getting stuff done that is just being looked over these days.
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Martin Warner
For starters. Well, my turning 53, it's a 28 year journey of kind of evolving with independent film. And I've seen it from a variety of different places. I mean, the first problem is that when we think of independent film, we have to realize that, you know, most of these movies are being made for about two, you know, a few hundred thousand, a couple of million. This is where the majority of the movies are. So they don't get to 15, 20 million. They're not many, what we call mini major studio ventures. So as a result of that, most of the money goes into a dialogue centric or a character frenzy movie. They tend to be a little darker, the stories tend to be a bit cute. Acute stories have narrow audiences. They struggle with representation and foreign sales and they struggle with picking up distribution. So before the DVD market and before streaming, they had very little chance because there was very, very little space on the movie theater to go and see these movies. And they had to wait to go on the tv. And so it was hard because you now had a narrowing artery, a place where, you know, you couldn't see endless people that would watch this type of content. And this did a number of things for the industry. One is that they broadened their stories, they changed the approach of characters. And then all of a sudden, as the DVD market opened up and obviously streaming opened up, there was possible representation and distribution. The issue is that still most of the money was spent like a passion project on the production itself and not spent on marketing the movie. And the difference between fundamentally independent movies and mass market movies is wide arteries, broad lens to customers. So movies that are highly predictable, broad in appeal, tend to be franchises, family movies, things that you've seen before. So anything from, I don't know, a Toy Story to James Bond. So we knew that there was this mass market appeal and then we would spend, we would be able to justify a distribution budget. And so all this PNA or print and ad money was viable. Now you went to streaming and that kind of changed the conundrum because there was real estate, the carousel that we could push these movies out on. And without getting into a long, dark and tragic story. I, you know, I was able to buy a lot of these movies, award winning movies that had great stories, where I felt there was populace, there was a lens to see these movies. And for a lot of them, we gave them airtime, we found them audiences, and that's going strong today. But it will never be this kind of model that film has pursued for so long where you need to sell something to the widest audience to justify its marketing budget. And that's where the fissure or ultimately the large crack in the industry is. How do you solve distribution in order to bring these rich stories to life? And streaming is one long term viable answer. If people can care Enough about the stories. Today we do that through curation, we do that through film festivals.
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Omar Zenhom
Yeah, I love it. I want to shift gears a little bit, Martin. A lot of our audience, they're looking to start a business to improve their quality of life. Like they're in a 9 to 5 job and they're doing all right, but they maybe want to have a little bit more financial freedom, more time freedom. And their vision of what they're about to build is, you know, 5, 10, 15 years so they can have something that's going to be able to sustain them. But you've co founded businesses like bot objects and sold like this 3D system for $50 million in just 17 months, you decided, hey, I'm going to build this thing. And it got, you know, this is less than two years. When you go into this kind of project, do you have the mindset to exit at the start or do you plan to stick around? But then an opportunity comes and the best time to sell is when you're on the way up. Walk me a little bit through that. And just because this is a new perspective I want to share with our audience where like you can maybe fast track your 15 year plan.
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Martin Warner
Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. So whether it was from my perspective of mergers and acquisitions, which I did as part of my career, or some of the acquisitions over the years, they kind of share a few things in common. So the first thing is that most entrepreneurs should have one eye on the build and why one eye on the exit. And this is very important for a couple of reasons. One is that first of all, you never stop building until there's an exit. So you will not get it. Like if you decide you're rolling off, putting it in the drawer and saying, I'm going to go and find a buyer, that thing's collecting dusk and will never be sold. The other thing is that you have to be opportunistic and you have to spend your time thinking about the market, thinking about partnering, thinking about the hedge while doing this build. So one on the exit, one on the build is great advice. I learned it a long time ago. I don't own that statement, but I go into businesses thinking about that. The second thing is I look for accelerants and I look for value creation. So whatever business I'm in, I'm looking to ensure that I've got a fundable asset. If I don't have a fundable asset, I really don't have a business. Most businesses don't make revenue unless they're in the professional development world and they're normally one person bands, they don't make money. You've got to create value quickly. You could do that with the raising of capital, or you can do that through your own resources. But the rush to create value quickly is what sustains a business. If you want to get trajectory fast, you've got to create value, justify the value. And then you got somehow someone's got to recognize that value and buy in bot objects. Obviously it broke a bunch of records. It still holds the speed record for a tech venture in the UK bought by an American company. But the thing that was interesting about it was that in 17 months it's almost impossible that that was a unicorn 10 years early, right? I wish it was 10 years later, I would have got past inflation, it'd be worth a lot more money. But it was unique because 17 months, you can't do much. And there's two main reasons. One that you're devoid of scaling triggers, you've got nothing to scale, you're learning too quick. The other thing is you gotta really want to solve iterative problems and correct them quickly. You have no time. So if you think about it right, problem correction and being able to scale fast and not having those triggers makes the possibility of trying to go after that number. And I've been asked it, I've been asked it a thousand times, how do I build a business really fast and get out with an exit. And obviously, you know, I wrote some papers on it, I practiced this form of hyperspeed entrepreneurship or accelerated entrepreneurship. I can tell people by looking backwards what's fascinating about it. But I wouldn't ask people, I wouldn't set that as a way to think about value. When I look at say bot objects and I think of what we did there, I would say that go solve a big enough problem that's interesting, that attracts both scale and value. And then I would go look for unique selling points that are insane in as much that there's scale and value and you've got some Runway to actually go after something. And I would make sure that you're doing something that you think is extremely relevant to the place you're in. Because most people, most inventors either start too early or they start too late. For us, oh, we just hit the journey at the right time. I think of the webinar market and looking at the things that you did. At the end of the day, timing is everything. But I don't think the people that want to get out quick need to worry about the size of the venture rather than the product they want to create and that it's a big enough market, there's enough customers that they want to go after and that they have this ability to figure out what's the value. Beneath the veneer of our marketing was the fact that we solved a really big problem that was well timed. We were fascinated by engineering. I don't know, don't ask me. I don't know why we went into hardware because I made an investment in hardware, I'd never do it again. I found it extremely difficult to build software, service stack and a 3D printer and validate that in 17 months. But what we did was we made a bet that we invented full color 3D printing. We solved that problem in a miniaturized scale. We solved it at the plastics level. So we had this tech cool technology. We knew that was really valuable and we knew that the leaders in this instance, it was the world leader 3D systems that if they wanted to bring color 3D color to small apparatus, they would have to come through us. So we bet on our patents to get the exit. This was a hedge. It turned out to be a really, a really good one.
- [22:57]
Host
If you're a listener of the show, you probably own a business or looking to start one. So the question is, are you ready to thrive with your business? It's time to let Intuit QuickBooks take things like unpaid invoices and tracking expenses off your plate to take things to the next level. If you're a longtime listener of the show, you know how much I bang on about how important your finances are, getting your numbers in order, making sure your incoming invoices and expenses are all taken care of. That's where QuickBooks comes in. It's an all in one business platform that can help you with day to day tasks like invoicing and expenses, manage and grow your business all in one place. Intuit QuickBooks your way to Money. Money movement services are provided by Intuit Payments Inc. Licensed as a money transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services.
- [23:43]
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- [24:15]
Omar Zenhom
I love the fact that you emphasize value because that's really where the exit value is, like how you produce value in the marketplace. And in a lot of ways, a lot of people are just looking to generate cash flow money. They're not really thinking about the long term value of the company. And how am I going to be able to be appealing to an acquirer? How could it be appealing to even a competitor who wants to acquire us with at webinar Ninja? When we exited, yes, we had started 10 years and we were early in the game, but I thought I was late at the time. Like in 2014, I thought I was kind of late. But the funny thing is that when events that I believed were going to happen, like those bets you talked about, that people are going to want to be able to connect and be able to teach from online and be able to do it live, live and live would be, you know, the, the first port of call. But sometimes it doesn't work out, you know, like this is my first business, you know, like I failed a bunch of times. Walk me through some of the first tries at entrepreneurship in your early days. And were some moments that are not as appealing sometimes give you a stomachache thinking about it? Yeah, I can think of them myself.
- [25:22]
Martin Warner
Oh yeah, I got, I got, I got a few for you. But so I think when I think entrepreneurship I have to go right the way back to my days in the playground at school, right when the days of, you know, like I said, I'm turning 53 in February. And when I was at school, we had. Atari was a gaming console. And I was so desperate to make money and kind of have some pocket money to do things that I was renting the games in the playground. And I went to a Roman Catholic school. They did not like the idea of, you know, kids were flicking, you know, coins against the wall and playing all these games. And here I was roaming around with a whole bunch of Atari games. And then when I rented enough, I'd go and buy another one and then bring that to the school until the deputy headmaster kind of stopped me and said, look, you can't do this. It's not allowed. And he confiscated all of them. And then I found out he gave all the games to his kids to play with. And so here I am, I'm like, I've not only lost my little business, but I've lost the stock and that stock is being used. It felt like, well, it felt like theft. But I'd broke rules and I learned something about that. And then I got to my teenage years and, you know, I needed to make money. I didn't come from anything. And my dad gave me some money that he didn't have. And we're in London and we're at this market and it was the days of, I can only call as like the Ralph Lauren cowboy belt that was going through this phase where you had this big buckle and there was a time where everyone had them and. And I said, will you lend me the money so I can buy them? I think they're nine pound cheaper than this store that was around the corner. And I think I can sell them at school. And I was a real kind of trader. And he goes, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, how many did you want? I said, I want the whole stall, it was at £450. He goes, really? Because you need the whole store. I said, I think I can sell them all. And you know, God bless my dad, he gave me the money and I took all of the belts and I sold them all at the school. I was always doing this. And the other one, that was embarrassing because whilst I got this name as this kind of trader at school, it wasn't always positive, right? But you're. People would look at me as a bit odd and also people would. I like to think of myself as entirely ethical and also a little bit autistic, like I'm a black and white guy. But people looked at me like I was doing something unethical. And then came the real reminder. I then got into ticket brokering and in the days of when Michael Jackson and Madonna were really big, I was in London buying the tickets and I realized that if I bought them quickly, I could hold them and sell them for more money. And this lesson of supply, demand and volume pricing was a real example. Well, I built that to 210 ticket brokers, which we might today call ticket touting. And I was walking around with, you know, 10, 15,000 pounds of cash when I was young. And by the way, this was shut down real quick because first of all, Live Nation, Ticketmaster, these did not exist. You know, these places. There was no E commerce, there was no web or anything like that. There was no easy way to get a second market. You had to go. And I built this relationship with these shops, particularly in Soho in London. But what I found was dealing with some of the ticket brokers was a humbling experience. You know, taking the tickets from me, pushing me around. And I'm like, oh, I just don't, I just don't, you know, I don't really want to do this. I want an easier path to entrepreneurship. And I'm telling you, I went looking for an easier path. You know, crazy.
- [28:40]
Omar Zenhom
I love it. We have that in common. My kind of first entrepreneurial venture was selling my Halloween candy to my schoolmates. And, you know, I had free stock. I used to start trick or treating at like, as soon as I got out of school until like midnight and had like bushels of candy. And, and throughout the year, I would, you know, and I would bundle them. I would put like one great candy, like a Snickers with like, not so great one with a horrible one for a buck. Because, yeah, I gotta get rid of that stock. But yeah, I remember vividly, like you said, people would look at me and like, what are you doing? You know, like, why don't you just like, eat that candy yourself? Why are you doing that? And to me, I was just like, what, are you kidding me? Like, I'm making so much money. And as a kid in, you know, whenever I was 9 or 10 years old, cash in your pocket is like unheard of. You know, it's just, you feel like incredible. Speaking of cash, some of our listeners might be looking to raise some cash. Raise some money. Maybe they are pre revenue, maybe they have some traction and they're looking to raise some money from maybe an angel investor, maybe a VC fund. What are some pieces of advice you'd give those who are listening that look to raise money?
- [29:49]
Martin Warner
This is a good question. So we teach this subject and the first thing I tell people about raising money is that you've got to be able to first of all, articulate your value proposition. If you can't sell, first of all, the concept in 60 seconds, perhaps you need to refine it or think about it. If you can't describe the value in another 60 seconds, a minute or two, we've got a problem. And then the third thing is it's all about the route to market or go to market. So if you could describe your value and then you say, look, here's a path, here's a set of customers, here's the marketing, here's the kind of the roadmap of how we're going to get there. This kind of story. First of all, investors want to fall in love with the entrepreneur, the ability to solve a problem, and some belief in the business plan. They'll give you some license with the business plan. If they think you've got an awesome business plan, but you're a little quirky and they may again think you're right, they may say, you know what, I'm going to take this punt. But you need all three. The thing also about investing as a subject, whether it be angels or syndicates or your pitch shows or whatever, or institutional money from ventures, there's a few things to keep in mind. First of all, they're tiered requirements, they're generally scoured requirements. And so the level and focus or due diligence increases all the time. So does, as you will know from your own experiences, the amount you're going to give away for the company and the level of the punt and the scrutiny changes. So you have to, first of all put your feet in their shoes. You have to understand what is the level of information to go and get 100 or 150,000, you know, what are they likely to look for and what are you going to give away for that? It's going to be very different for an angel to say, a vc. As an ex vc, JP Morgan, I was astounded by the level of due diligence we would do once we'd gained trust with the entrepreneur. As a business angel, you're either got someone that's excited about the space and they're jumping in quick, or you're going to have to romance this person for a long time. But put your feet in their shoes. Something in common, the third kind of field of thinking. Once you've got your feet in their shoes, you have to understand, have they invested before? Are they going to invest? Are they in a position to invest? So VCs love to have coffee mornings and conversation, then you find out they're making one investment this year, right? And actually it's not in the direct field of where they want or there's a conflict. So have they invested in your field? Are they an active current vesta right now? Are there any conflicts? Have you got the right makeup? So they often say, can you find an investing partner that will give you anything more than dumb money, Right? So do they know something about your industry or your business? Are they going to connect you with, with people? Let me tell you, I've never met an investor that's offered me anything other than money right? Now, I may be cynical, but the idea that they're going to connect you to a whole pool of people, the best you'll get is a portfolio. And these guys don't want to talk, right? So you know, they're not Going to give you their best developer. Right. You know, so just because they're in the pool. Right, right. Or, by the way, a bunch of customers go, go wear them out of time and money. Yeah. It doesn't really happen. So. But what I do says, go figure out that they're relevant, you know, so one of the things I look for beneath the covers is who's going to do the due diligence? And I placed a question on them. Go ask some smart questions about why they want to invest in this space. Is it. Is it of interest? What are they looking for? And you can vet very quickly whether you've got someone that you can have a conversation with. The hardest thing with investing at the angel or the venture level is even though they want to talk today, we live in a real saturated web. Right. There's just too much opportunity. We've had prosperity for too long. And so now I think it's getting harder to have meaningful conversations. So you've got to go and do some of that due diligence just to.
- [33:31]
Omar Zenhom
Follow up on that. Do you agree? Because I have found that whether you're trying to sell your business, whether you're trying to raise capital, that it's so much easier to do it when they're coming to you rather than you going after them. Like, I find it that if you're asking the question like, you know, how do I find investors? How do I speak to somebody who's looking to raise interest in my company to buy it or, you know, to acquire me, is that a sign that maybe the time's out?
- [33:56]
Martin Warner
Right.
- [33:56]
Omar Zenhom
Maybe you need to add some more value to the business. Maybe you need more traction.
- [33:59]
Martin Warner
There's a couple of parts to that. I mean, first of all, you always want people coming to you, right? Yeah. It's human nature. If you were to kind of ask a girl to a dance or whatever. Right. I never had that kind of confidence. And I wouldn't want to be. I would want that person to ask me if I think about business. I would like to know there's a customer that says, I really like what you're doing, or an investor that says, this is a space I'd like to jump on board. The reality is that those aren't in front of you. Most of the time, that stuff is not happening. Right. You've got to go and force the entry a bit. You've got to turn up to the dance, you've got to go to the investor's office, or you've got to talk to partners. And so the question is, how do you do it without being in someone's face? How do you do it without sounding desperate or impetuous? And I think the answer is that the world works on this idea of qualitative measurement or this ability to share a story where someone's going to go and refer it. So social media has become this great engagement. Although I think social media, I won't call it the toilet of the web or the cloud, but what I do think is there's an opportunity to portray something. I don't mean the shiny side of your life because everyone seems to be happy and no one shows you the bad side of their life. But I think you can talk about your product, your service, what you're going to do for customers. You can show your, let's say if I was to talk about my education company, I'd probably have my candidates talk for me, talk about, and I would have that even further. Go talk about a problem that's valuable to someone else, talk about your perspective in that problem. And then you know what? Trust that that may come back to you. And by the way, that does, I mean, this has been a great candidate acquisition path for us. So I try to find ways to use the referral model and to try and convey my value without, you know, making it look like propaganda or trying to oversell over push with investors. I think the idea is figure out who you want and then draw kind of what I call the four points around them and try and get a referral to them. As you get older, that job gets easier. Right? When I was younger, I had no one. Now most people in my industry, I know them or I know someone that can at least afford me an opportunity. I still want to ensure I can pick that engagement right where we can have a constructive conversation. I don't know about you, Ahmad, but what I do now is I don't want to have a conversation where I'm having to push the agenda because if I'm doing that, it's a bit like when they say the first person to speak is losing the negotiation. I mean, it's always true, but, but I think more, more or less, you're showing your hand. And so I, I, I try to find a smarter way to feel like I'm on a healthy or an even, even kill for a conversation.
- [36:36]
Omar Zenhom
That's great. I mean, I learned those two things the hard way. Which first one is you gotta be in the arena. You have to be out there, you have to be speaking to people, you have to go to those Meetups, you have to go to those conferences. You know, I frontloaded that for years. And then eventually you're gonna get to the point where you're gonna get on the no train, where you're gonna start saying no to these opportunities because there's too many of them, because you've invested so much time. But you have to be around and meet people so other people can know about you and then. And refer you or talk about you or so that when you meet somebody, they're like, they already know about you.
- [37:06]
Martin Warner
Right.
- [37:07]
Omar Zenhom
They may have met you, but they know about you. They heard you from somewhere. I learned that throughout time and had some really good mentors. The second thing that you touched on that I learned the hard way, was best story wins.
- [37:17]
Martin Warner
Oh, yeah. Best story wins at every time. Yes.
- [37:20]
Omar Zenhom
So you have to refine your story, your narrative. And the great thing about social media, like I mentioned, is that you can control the narrative. You can. You can create this story around yourself. And you best to bet before they get on that call or when they meet you at that cafe, they're going to Google you, they're going to check out your social media, they're going to figure out what your story is. And it's so interesting. You know, we're in a highly political time right now, but that is true in politics too.
- [37:45]
Host
Best story wins.
- [37:45]
Omar Zenhom
It doesn't even matter what the reality is. It doesn't matter what is actually going to happen or what is going on or what has happened in the past. It's just whatever story that's built around the brand is what really gets remembered and resonates with people.
- [37:59]
Martin Warner
Well, in particular there, that last point you make, certainly in the beginning, so to get started, to get in the door in a perception is everything, right. So you can survive on a story to build that first engagement. I think the question about sustainability and growing a business, it changes, right. Because the rubber meets the road. The product is on the conveyor belt. It gets into the customer's hands. Right. They use it. And then that very thing that got you the opening of the door of social media, you get trashed on social media if your product's a lot of rubbish. So what you can do is you can create that story. You can get in and get your opportunity to raise money, sell to customers, hire people, all these things that you want to do, and then you have to think about really building a business so that you can start to protect the conveyor belt.
- [38:48]
Omar Zenhom
Yeah. For those who are listening or thinking about starting, you know, maybe a Tech startup, a web app, a mobile app, something that is going to require skills outside their own. You've built a lot of physical digital products, whether it's, you know, autonomous flight, you know, bot objects, you know, Flex premiere. A lot of tech in there. When you get started with these projects, you know, how much is great talent a part of your equation? How do you find this great talent? How do you even verify if they're able to pull off what you need them to do, especially when they're working on fields that maybe you're not an expert at.
- [39:23]
Martin Warner
Yeah, you have a knack, Omar, of bundling up the critical elements into a tidy package. And it's often this is not a tidy conversation. Right. So I counted four things that are really important and they are on the same cube. So I think the first one is coming back to the story. Right? So people have to be inspired by your vision, and they have to be inspired by some level of substance. Perception, as I just said, is not everything. So they don't believe my background or my capability, or more importantly, they want to take the journey that I'm espousing, then it all ends there. So people have to be inspired. And now more than ever, with technology providing an unprecedented level of transparency, we have to sell both ways. It's now no longer that you can even just pay someone for a job without inspiring them and making them understand that this is a journey they want to take. This is the first thing. I think the other thing is that forget getting them with the story. I think your question was more about acquisition, like, where do you find them? How do you. How do you engage with them? And I think more often than not, really great people, if you're picking someone immediately off the market, we've all done it. I've certainly done it. I continue to do it when necessary. Your odds of finding great people are diminished because naturally the funnel's upside down. So what happens is, you know, the people that are looking between jobs, one or two just happen to be at that moment in time on a sabbatical or whatever, or maybe you got pushed out for the right or wrong reasons and they happen to be the type of quality you want, but the majority of people on the market, probably odds on, aren't. So what does that mean? We flip it the other way up. We're going to have to go and pitch, we're going to have to go and poach, we're going to have to go and talk to competitors, we're going to have to get a little ethical. Is Fine, but cunning. Cunning about having conversations. And this starts with that word NETWORKING. Whether it's LinkedIn, talking to our peers, this means we have to be resourceful. So resourcefulness is really important. And I've done everything. So, yes, we've used headhunters, but more often than not, we've got to just talk to the community that we're in. If I'm looking for a film producer for one of my movies, well, we know the network. We talk to people, we listen to who's interested in projects. We may not know their calendar, but we kind of know who we want to talk to and we'll go and attract them with the vision. As for the other two points that I picked up on that I think would be relevant is I try to figure out what's the way to not just engage them, but retain them. So what's the incentive model? Because in the beginning, most people don't have a lot of money, particularly when they're starting out and they're going to have to look at things that they may not like. Like the sweat model, Right. Sweat equity. It's an ugly model. Right. All about the future, not the present. And that's a problem because we live life in the present. If we've got a moonlighting job, which by the way, moonlighting doesn't even exist now. Right. I mean, if that was the case, I was guilty of it 30 times over. But the reality is it's hard finding someone saying, look, can you help me at 6 o'clock at night when you finish your day job? So you have to think really hard about what's the incentivization. This comes back again to the very first point of, are you inspiring them? Do they want to take this journey? And then the last point is, and by the way, the way around that is very simple. And that's that find a, you know, find an opportunity where you can quantitatively figure out how much time can they really give you to solve a particular task. This is really complex, but we've done it. I've done it with, you know, a half of someone, a third of someone. I've done some crazy things to build that early conundrum. You know, the whole wearing multiple hats part, right. This is an important part of entrepreneurship. We are going to wear, you know, different, you know, different hats. So, yeah, I think that's the, you know, the main element, you know, the incentivization. I think the, the other thing I'd say is that when people come on board, you can have all of that but how do you really know if they're going to do the job? Which I think was your last point. And I think the answer is that you give them a test. Not just they're buying into your vision, not that they've just got something on paper and not they're just going to give you time and you're going to find some kind of incentive model for them. But you test them on the calls. This is easier with developers. Right. So we're hiring AI developers for my AI venture right now. We give them a huge coding test. We have a rule that it's an hour and a half to two hours max. That's a long time when you're just going for a job. Right. But again, we incentivize them about the future. We tell them about the vision. We want them to be attracted to the cause. But we tell them that if you're going to be attracted to cause, you've got to solve this problem. We put incentives in the test, meaning what would it mean if you could solve this problem? And so thinking cunningly about how you can test ability is really important. It takes time, but then business is all about taking time. You can take runs off the clock later, but in the beginning you're going to spend that time. So testing capability is really important. And we've done that in many different ways in technology. It's always tests often or not. We'll listen to stories, you know, if we're talking about admin functions or sales. Yeah, I mean we can normally vet that through detailed conversation and ask them whether they really did it and we can test that. But if it's something material, like they're building a product, you got to get into testing.
- [44:19]
Omar Zenhom
Yeah, I would agree.
- [44:22]
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- [45:25]
Omar Zenhom
Two things I just want to touch on, totally accurate when it comes to finding great talent and finding somebody who's willing to do something on the side. My first CTO webinar ninja. Very complex software as you can imagine. Video streaming, landing page software, email marketing software. There's so much going on I didn't know what I was getting into and that's probably why I did it. But I needed a CTO that could help hire people that understood those technologies and be able to build and be innovative. And I just literally went on upwork and I filtered for most expensive when it came to engineers. And I found one of the heads of engineering at Yahoo who's looking for something to do and he was pushing papers and he wanted to get, be part of the startup community and do something exciting. And when he saw, he's like, listen, I can only give you 10 hours, but I could help, you know, set up your infrastructure, vet your engineers that are coming in. You know, for him this is like play. And for me I was like, I'm getting somebody who's expensive, but I rather pay him 10 hours and pay somebody who's junior 40 hours. And that was big time help and I would endorse that wholeheartedly. The second point you made is when it came to, you know, just selling that vision and communicating, which is what we talked about earlier, you know, best story wins is, you know, they can work anywhere, you know, they can earn a buck, any of the jobs they're applying for. And this idea of like you're testing them, but they're testing you as well, you know, supporting them and selling them on the job, which is an amazing reminder, especially some of your experience working in so many different industries. So I want to talk a little bit about. You've built these businesses, you've built this sustainable wealth for yourself. In the big picture, when you look back, how and why did you want to do this? Like in, in terms of your life, in terms of how it's impacting yourself, your family, your, your others. Do you have like a feeling of regret? Of like, maybe I, I didn't need to do all this to feel happy? Or was it more of a, I'm trying to work towards a goal that Maybe you want to share with us.
- [47:31]
Martin Warner
Well, first of all, I think that no one's, no one's actually got any original observations of this question. But I think everyone crosses it at some point and that's the, you know, was there an opportunity cost to what you were doing? Right. Would you? And, and, and there have been many in my life. Right. You know, so I've been married a few times. I've lived in different countries, you know, America and London. I got three children, you know, I parented across the Atlantic Ocean. These are big challenges. So when you think about your time and your purpose, you have to first of all value your time because as you get older you realize actually your ability to use it slows down. Yeah. Now I would, you know, I can say it on your podcast, it doesn't really matter because I feel that where I am right now I can still offer a lot. But, but I think I don't want to challenge unnecessarily this idea that when we get older, somehow we're gonna, we're still the same person because we're not. Right. So, so therefore the value of time is really, really important. So for me, when I traded working hard, you know, business is like oxygen to me. Like it's, it's a hobby. Like I really enjoyed the tr. I've never took a job that I haven't been motivated. I, I careful not to use the word passion cause I think it means different things. But curious about a problem that I thought really needed solving. And then the other side, as I mentioned at the beginning of the conversation, this idea of this quest for not just high meaning, but survival. Right. I've got to survive. At the same time, I'm doing that for the most important thing I ever. Not even because I became successful. But I have a very narrow field of view and that's that I focus on my family. We're very busy, we're caught up with life and it's a very, it's a full time job. But I've got to also do this full time job and I'm getting older. I think this is a very complicated conundrum. Getting in is probably the easier part. But how do you get out and get out in a way that allows you to not make too many sacrifices? And I've made plenty of trade offs in my life that you know, you know, you, you, you, hindsight, you can always try and make better decisions. But, but I hope that I made a few that were, you know, that were right along the way.
- [49:44]
Omar Zenhom
I guess as we get older, we also understand who we are a little bit more and what we want, what we don't want, what we're willing to spend our time on. I know that you have been working on an AI venture recently and I know AI is, a lot of people love it, hate it. Personally I'm, I'm, I'm quite bullish on it. Tell me a little bit about why AI is so important and why is it so important to you to use your, you know, the second half of your life to work on and put into the world.
- [50:10]
Martin Warner
Well, first of all, back to this higher purpose of meaning that I think that I'm still trying to do my life's best work, right? So whether it be, you know, I wrote a book because I'm busy diarizing my life for my kids, this is one of my big goals. When I was young, it was 8 millimeter film and crazy stuff, you know, it wasn't easy. Diarize or document your life. Now I want to hopefully be very selective, but pick something that's going to have a profound impact. Well, in my long journey as a tech entrepreneur, I think that AI, not to be duplicit here or repetitive what I think a lot of people have said, but my summary is, my judgment is that the most profound effect in technology, particularly on humanity, is happening right now. It's sped up so fast to the point where speed won't matter, we won't measure speed. In fact, it'll be far more important to understand our resourcefulness as a human race and where we are in the process to receive change. And this concept is really important. So my focus in AI is on human productivity. And by the way, most of my life I've done something in the world of productivity. And what I've realized is that when you look at the architecture, not to get too technical, but this concept of taking vertical, large language models, in other words, there's going to be a contextual, let's call it real time database, a language model per industry, sub industry, discipline and function. And then we're going to have this thing that it's got a face or a UI and a workflow and a script, and we're going to call that an agent and this just going to go and run tasks for you and whatever. So we're doing that in the world of human productivity. When you think about that, this is a one way train because this concept, this overused concept of generalized intelligence, this idea that at some point it will speed up so fast that these machines will think Faster. And I think that station, we're arriving at it very, very soon. And actually the journey is whether you get on a one way train and get there with the first set of people that want to engage in this pace of change and contribute towards what these agents are discovering. And I think being in front of the agent and let's say doctors, practitioners, other skilled workers, accountants, lawyers, coders, it doesn't matter what we found as a human race and what AI and what motivates me about AI is that the agent isn't going to go and do this on their own. They're not sentient, they can't see the gray part of the world. Right. They're not feeling for us. But we need to be able to receive that information, see how it changes our life or the human condition or the work environment that we're in and contribute further requirements. And I think through this we can see some of the biggest breakthroughs that we're ever, ever going to see. Whether that be you know, solving cancer or looking at issues around aging and, or whether it be looking at new products and new technologies that can save the environment. These things are possible just because of the concatenation of context, the ability to bring data together and I think the human role. Just like in the 90s with automation when they said everyone's going to lose their job, guess what? Unemployment didn't go down, we found other jobs. If humanity kind of 1.0 was the age of information abundance, the web search, then eventually E Commerce, Remember in that day everyone said all this information, what the hell are we going to do? And then when it got to E Commerce they said there's going to be no shops on main street or on the high street. This wasn't true, right? Yes, there was replacement, but it wasn't true. And I think of the age of information, meaning is where we are today. And I think that we're still going to have jobs as long as we lean in and we get on that one way train. So what motivates me about it is I think we can do our life's best work. We can have information with massive context. So the size of that problem, I think it becomes easier in terms of being able to see the problem, how well we can implement it. I think is that next evolution behind this idea of agents and vertical LLMs which are going to be in the hundreds and millions. But what do we do when we get that? And here's the insight for me that was mind blowing and that's that today we can already Outpace, day to day human thinking. So in my company, my agent can already think 10 steps ahead of me. It can wake me up in the morning and say, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, you go to office and you take an Uber and there's traffic on your route. And because the traffic on your route, we set your alarm 30 minutes earlier, by the way. We've given you a new route and we've ordered your Uber. I'm asleep, I can't think about that. And it's doing 10 other things for me. So the question is, what do I do? I have to get in front of that agent to try and help it set those requirements. And I think down the road, the implementation of this collective requirement is a really kind of exciting change to be part of. And it's happening all over the world for AI, not just in my world of productivity.
- [55:02]
Omar Zenhom
Do you think part of the resistance to embracing AI and seeing it as one of the biggest opportunities that we've ever seen is the idea that as a species, we've been at the top of the food chain. We've been the best, we've been the best at doing certain things for so long. Our pride is being challenged, like almost, you know, like the example you gave where, you know, your automation is going through all those tasks you have to do throughout the week, ordering the Uber, making sure that it's accounting for traffic. Things that we can't do cognitively because we're human, you know, we can't do, or sleeping, you know.
- [55:36]
Martin Warner
Yeah.
- [55:36]
Omar Zenhom
So the fact that it actually is outpacing us in a lot of ways, or it's actually better at certain things than we are.
- [55:43]
Martin Warner
Yeah.
- [55:44]
Omar Zenhom
Is it a bit confronting for people and it's hard for them to embrace it?
- [55:48]
Martin Warner
That's an excellent question. Pride comes before the fall. Right. And ego. And ego has no place in the dictionary. Right. And I mean that, and I do mean that in a funny way, but. But we kind of have to leave or check our pride and ego at the door when we're looking at something that a doesn't have feelings, it can procreate. Right. Unless we want to create another version of it. By the way, AI systems, I didn't live shorter than us. They're not going to live on this earth as long as us, because machines essentially amortize and they erode or corrode quicker. So we still have a big role to play. And today we still turn that switch on and off. And. And my gut feeling is that in 10, 20 years, we'll still be switching that button on and off. So I think we have to just accept that the speed part is the scary bit. And I mean literally, like very, very soon. I just don't think it matters. The speed is less important. It's where are we, where we can still say, how do we develop practices that are safe, that are regulated when necessary, that are improving people's lives? How do we ensure we use it for a force to good, not evil? These things are really important. And I think if we lean in and are passionate about it, we can perhaps worry less about the fact that we're going to go through this great reset or replacement, right, that, hey, the world's going to end in my. I'm doing a presentation for a big, you know, known organization shortly and one of my slides is the old Star Trek. Somebody says it's worse than that, he's dead. Jim. Right. This idea somehow, right, that we're about to have this existential threat. I think that today is. You need a. You'd have put a lot of steps forward in order to reach that kind of conclusion. And I think it's a little bit of scaremongering. I tend to be a little more hopeful and optimistic about the role that I think is still pretty essential. How do you deal with this information force? And now we're going to employ all of these great ideas that we never had before and worry less that I've got to be the smartest person in the room. But I do think it's a genuine concern that people are like, do I fit in anymore? Am I relevant? And can I still have a good idea when it's being fed at me at light speed? How do I summarize all of this? But guess what? The one thing about technology is to become successful. It's a great leverer, it's a great leveler or summarization for it to be useful. That's the job of technology. If we are going to apply it, to summarize it so that people that still have these skills can still provide, you know, requirements. One thing I say to my kids is that in the world of social media is they're only too willing to throw the rule book out the window. You know, what are the principles of selling? Oh, we don't need that. How do you market a product? I can figure that out with YouTube. You know, all of a sudden these disciplines have disappeared and kids become really bullish about what they think they can achieve and they have good reason to because technology is so good. But actually I think that the skills that we've evolved are still going to be applied as we kind of figure out our future.
- [58:48]
Omar Zenhom
Let's talk a little bit about how this is going to impact wealth because I think it's one of the biggest opportunities that we've ever seen. I rather be somebody who's lower income in 2024 than a monarch 300 years ago. I'll take penicillin and the Internet, you know.
- [59:05]
Martin Warner
Right, right, right.
- [59:06]
Omar Zenhom
But, but this is another huge leap. I believe in innovation, in creation and I do believe it's going to create massive wealth creation opportunities where for all intents and purposes we are all going to feel wealthy. You know, we're all going to feel that our needs and our wants are taken care of in a lot of ways. What are some of the financial opportunities do you think we're going to see with this next boom?
- [59:33]
Martin Warner
So it's another great question, but so if we think of financial reward as something that has the effect of financial currency, in other words, we don't necessarily need, well, no one, you know, cash right now is not that great to us. Right. But if we can think about the value of that cash. So can we offer not everlasting, but can we offer a greater level of prosperity to people? Can we have them work less and spend longer with their families? So could we think smarter by using these AI systems and only go to work two days a week? Could we devote more time? Could we develop a culture of helping mankind or helping other people at the same time? Because we now have that richness. I think you know him or he was on your. Is it Ramit Sethi talks about living a. Yes, what is it? A rich life.
- [60:19]
Omar Zenhom
Your rich life.
- [60:20]
Martin Warner
When I think of that, I don't think in terms of money. I think about the choices we make. And I think AI presents that similar equation. We can create a lot of wealth in terms of value by being able to help each other, by having more time on the clock, being able to use our time more wisely. That's kind of very cool. But to the question of economic currency itself, like can we create a unit of currency that's going to be better than what we've seen before? What I think I'm willing to bet on the prospect of better ideas than the prospect of failing ideas or the idea that somehow some bad things going to happen because we've now got this technology and we've got these great ideas. But by the way, there's this massive consequence, I don't know, robots destroying the world, which is a crazy one to be Thinking about even though robotics are absolutely going to be on our roads in the next few years, you're doing jobs that humans don't want to do. This is happening today. But I tend to think that AI is going to create an enormous amount of conditions for ideas to be implemented. And it's at the idea level. We already know as entrepreneurs that products and services get created. So our ability to widen the filter and be at this right place at the right time to see an idea that could take flight, I think is absolutely possible. And here's the thing. I think those earlier building blocks for skills or the discovery of those insights will become a lot, lot easier. So the ability to create an economic currency, to be able to see other bridges in industries, to other new products and services, is going to be there for everyone. That level of prosperity, I don't know what the order of magnitude I thought about it, but I just don't know the answer. But I think it's profound, like, it's significant. And the idea that people can collaborate a lot easier with these ideas and find other ways to deliver work is this idea. I make the point to say it's not just about economic currency. I think it's about wealth in terms of if you give me back time, it's more valuable to me personally than money. And I think AI is going to be able to do that as well.
- [62:25]
Omar Zenhom
Martin, that's such a great point. And as we kind of come close to our time, one of the things I really enjoyed about our first conversation in this one is not only are you knowledgeable, experience, you know your stuff, but you generally care about helping other people. You care about getting this information out there, making people comfortable with what's ahead. And I want to ask you a little bit about how much of that is intentional. How much of that is there? Is there something behind that where it's like you want to give something that no one gave you, or is it something that you want to pass on because of your legacy? A lot of people do this on the surface and just so they look good, but I do feel like this is coming from somewhere. Like you're compelled to do this. Where is that coming from?
- [63:05]
Martin Warner
So I think a lot about this because I want it to be in my kids. I can't give it to them. They've got to find it themselves. But I remember my dad, my late father, saying to me that the best thing you can probably give is be compassionate, be empathetic. And kindness is something that you can't just expect, but you can demonstrate it. And these sound really simple. But the amount of people over the years I've often picked up on, I wish we could have delivered that more compassionately or I wish you could have understood my circumstances. So if you talk to any of my staff, the one thing that I think they would credit me for is that I care about their conditions. I care about what they're going through. I care about their circumstances in their life. I care about my fellow people. And that sounds like something that you could, you know, you could just say, but I can't tell you. I just mean it. Like, I just. For me, it's just in me. I think it's why I enjoy teaching. I like to help people. When I hear the humbling reviews, I can't tell you a bad one that I've had. And I think that's not about the advice I give. I think it's about the fact that it's warm, it's welcoming. I deeply care. I don't want to live in a society where when I was younger, I was all about skills. I was a binary person. I was young. I didn't understand. I wanted to reach out, but I was a bit of an introvert. I think my mother thought I was a little autistic as a kid because I didn't talk. It took me a while to blossom, but I really cared. My dad helped me find the lens to kind of be the person I want to be. And I don't really have any real motivation behind the fact that I think that I can live a better life. Better life. And they can be a better father and better husband and. And I can hopefully be of of interest to people that can be relevant to people. And I will tell you something else that I do it with humor. Right The. The life. I don't. Life is too serious. And I try my best with my team to. I'm not saying I'm David Brent out of the office or whatever. I'm not seeking this weird, weird comedy is the rule of everything. But I try to show that everyone's human, that making mistakes is fine and that no one's better than anyone else. I love flat structures. I love to be challenged. I love to pursue ideas. I teach people I don't really love. I don't really want too many assumptions because I'm pretty certain it'll be a path I'm going to end up where I don't want to be. And I do that and deliver it in a compassionate way. And I like to think that I would Be happy if I go and find those kind of people to, you know, to work with.
- [65:28]
Omar Zenhom
Martin, it's such a pleasure getting to know you, having this chat today. If you're ever in Sydney, dinner's on me, man. We'll. We'll definitely meet up in person sometime soon. Either side, I really appreciate. Yeah, yeah. I'm in the UK or the US sometime soon, so it'd be great to meet in person and have a meal together. But thank you so much for sharing your knowledge, sharing your experience, sharing your perspectives. I know there's so much more for you to share, so we'll be mentioning in a little bit after our conversation wraps up where people can learn more about you and your work. But thanks again, Martin. Really appreciate it.
- [66:02]
Martin Warner
My pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Omar and I look forward to catching up with you soon. Take care, brother.
- [66:07]
Omar Zenhom
Love this conversation with Marin. Such a giving person for an accomplished human being. There's so many people I've met along the way through this podcast, through my own journey in entrepreneurship that have accomplished big things, made millions and millions of dollars, but they're rarely as in touch with what we're doing every day with building businesses, with trying to build value and grow our businesses as Martin is. He's just down to earth, really knows this stuff, but at the same time still cares, which is really, really nice to see. One of the things we talked about at the end of the episode was AI and how AI can really improve your life. He gave this example of, you know, AI booking an Uber for him while he's sleeping or checking the traffic, making sure that the Uber's booked in time, you know, checking out, you know, what time his flight is by going into his inbox. If you're wondering what tool does that, well, it's his tool. It's his innovation, it's his business. It's called Warp Speed. And you could check it out. Let me go to the browser here so you could see. And the website is I am warpspeed.com. that's the letter I A M warp speed dot com. And you can check out what he's doing, what he's building, really allowing AI to make us more productive, to give us more time for our life, for our families, for our hobbies. Remember those hobbies. So it's really interesting what he's doing now with AI. So check it out if you're curious, if you want to stay ahead of the curve, if you want to, you know, optimize a little bit more of your time. Listen, if you like these extended conversations that we have once a month and you want more of them along with the lessons that we deliver three days a week? Go ahead and subscribe to the podcast right now. Whether you're listening to the podcast on Apple or Spotify or any other player, or you're watching the podcast on YouTube, subscribe so you get all the updates and our next episodes automatically. If you're watching on YouTube, don't forget to click the description below and check out all the notes and all the links that we share, including that website Warp speed iam warp speed.com so that you can check it out and you can expand upon what we discuss today in the conversation. Thanks so much for listening to the 100 RMBA show. I'll check you in the next one. I'll see you then. Take care.
- [68:23]
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