The Founder of Ancestry.com Reveals the Future of AI Coaching | Paul Allen

Summary

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The Entrepreneur DNA – Episode Summary

Episode: The Founder of Ancestry.com Reveals the Future of AI Coaching
Guest: Paul Allen (Founder of Ancestry.com, Soar Studio)
Host: Justin Colby
Date: March 27, 2026

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Overview:

In this episode, Justin Colby sits down with Paul Allen, visionary founder of Ancestry.com and current founder of Soar Studio, to discuss entrepreneurship, pivotal career decisions, the explosive potential of AI in coaching and business, and lessons learned from building and scaling companies. Paul reveals the story behind Ancestry.com, his approach to entrepreneurship, and how his new ventures are set to revolutionize the way we learn, grow, and succeed through the use of AI-powered feedback and coaching.

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Key Topics & Insights:

1. Paul Allen’s Unlikely Path to Entrepreneurship

• Academic Roots, Business Skepticism (02:34)

  • Paul grew up in a family where business was seen as “bad,” and “education was the only noble calling.”
  • He initially wanted to be a professor in Russian history but found his knack for entrepreneurship through an early start-up digitizing books onto CD-ROMs.

• Unexpected Entrepreneurial Spark (05:31)

  • Conferences and networking (Inc. 500) transformed his perception: “These are the coolest people I have met in my entire life... Entrepreneurship. This is the calling that I want to pursue for my whole life.”

• Fateful Decision: Start Ancestry or Attend Harvard (05:35)

  • Turned down Harvard Business School on advice it wouldn’t fit his action-oriented nature: “If I had gone to Harvard Business School, I would have missed the dot com bubble completely... You will hate your first year at Harvard.”

2. The Ancestry.com Story & Lessons Learned

• Building & Scaling (07:16)

  • Early ventures in CD-ROM publishing provided both the capital and preparation for Ancestry.com.
  • The mission-driven approach: “It was a mission in life to organize all the world's knowledge and truth and put it at people’s fingertips.” (09:13)

• The Untapped Social Vision: MyFamily.com (09:22)

  • Built a family-centric social network, “grew to 20 million users in two years.”
  • Mistakes and missed opportunities: “Myfamily.com should have a billion users today. It should have connected and strengthened families at all.”
  • Lessons on product focus, monetization, and the critical importance of being CEO at the right growth stage (12:04).

• Exit Reflections & Ownership (15:08)

  • Paul did not plan for an exit—“Smart entrepreneurs do have an exit in mind when they get started, and I never did.”
  • The importance of ownership, governance, and strategic exits: “Future investors in Ancestry have made a lot more... Maybe one guy, I think, made a hundred times more than the founders did.”

3. Tactical Advice for Entrepreneurs

• The Power of Specificity in Business (16:51)

  • “On the Internet, generalities fail, specificity rules.”
  • Example: Targeted ads get better traction—use specifics and personalization to drive engagement.

• Community & Relationships Matter (19:42)

  • “All business starts with relationships. People you like and trust, you want to do business with them. It's not transactional, it's relationship.”

• Networking & Learning (16:51, 19:07)

  • Attend conferences and events.
  • Build entrepreneurial communities for knowledge, support, and scalable impact.

4. The Future: AI-Powered Coaching and Human Development

• Bridging Knowledge and Action (21:58)

  • “There’s a huge, huge gap between knowing something and doing it.”
  • Most corporate training is ineffective—application and feedback are the missing pieces.

• Soar AI Studio: Bringing Persistent, Personalized AI Coaching (24:06)

  • Developing a suite of AI platforms in every vertical (family, leadership, sales, health, finance) to close the knowledge-action gap.
  • Coaching feedback modeled after elite athletic training—“All the world's greatest athletes get to watch game film.”

• Level 6 Humans: Codifying Legendary Expertise (29:17)

  • Soar’s AI is trained on the highest-level experts—those with 100,000+ hours and a lifetime of wisdom.
  • Example: Integration with Jeremy Miner’s sales expertise, Gallup’s StrengthsFinder (Don Clifton), and Stephen Covey’s leadership frameworks.

• Private Label AI Coaching (30:21)

  • Soar enables experts, coaches, and organizations to deploy AI trained on their methods: “Our partners...will private label our engine...and they ship their product to their customers with their expertise—powered by our AI ingredients.”

5. The Next Decade: AI, Abundance, and Entrepreneurial Success

• Democratizing Success with AI (38:43)
  • “Why don't 90% of startups succeed? I think in the coming decade, with knowledge and expertise combined with AI feedback and agents, I don't see any reason why 90% of startups can't succeed.”
  • Vision for leveraging AI to unlock prosperity, abundance, and continuous improvement for all entrepreneurs.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Early Entrepreneurial Ignorance:
  “It was naive, but fun and thrilling...” – Paul Allen (02:31)

• On Making the Leap Rather than Learning to Leap:
  “Are you a patient person? ...You will hate your first year at Harvard Business School.” – Harvard Dean to Paul Allen (05:35)

• On Specificity in Marketing:
  “On the Internet, generalities fail, specificity rules.” – Unnamed marketing expert, cited by Paul (16:51)

• On Community:
  “All business starts with relationships. People you like and trust...” – Paul Allen (19:42)

• On the Knowledge-Action Gap:
  “I don’t think knowledge is power anymore. I think action is power and knowledgeable action is super powerful.” – Paul Allen (23:58)

• On Coaching and Feedback Loops:
  “Soar AI Studio is a series of AI companies...the goal is to learn things and do them.” – Paul Allen (24:06)

• On the Democratization of Coaching:
  “You can't afford the world's best coaches to shadow you every day... But if they can coach you every week or month and then supplement that with their trained AI, there's no limit...” – Paul Allen (26:19)

• On Feedback Without Judgment:
  “To have a non-judgmental AI that's trained by the expert to give you positive feedback… it's so exciting.” – Paul Allen (33:56)

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Timestamps for Key Segments:

• Paul’s Academic Family & Early Business Skepticism – 02:34-03:52
• Choosing Entrepreneurship over Harvard – 05:31-06:58
• CD-ROM Publishing Origins & First Exit – 07:16-09:10
• The Story & Demise of MyFamily.com – 09:22-13:09
• Exit Lessons: Planning, Ownership & Missing the IPO – 15:08-16:22
• Tactical Advice: Power of Specificity in Growth – 16:51-19:07
• The Gold Standard for Learning: Community, Application, Feedback – 19:42-23:09
• Introduction to Soar AI Studio & the Future of AI Coaching – 24:06-27:49
• Defining Level 6 Human Experts & Their Value in AI – 29:17-30:19
• How Soar’s Private Label AI Works for Coaches/Businesses – 30:21-32:22
• Feedback Loops & Removing Judgment from Growth – 33:56-34:29
• The Future: Potential for 90% Startup Success via AI – 38:28-40:14

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Final Thoughts:

This episode is a roadmap for entrepreneurs not only to learn from the successes and mistakes of a tech visionary but also to glimpse the future of personal and business growth—where AI captures the wisdom of the world’s greatest minds and delivers it as always-available, non-judgmental, personalized coaching for anyone, anywhere. Paul Allen’s journey, from digitizing encyclopedias to building the next generation of AI learning platforms, underscores a powerful message: Success is no longer just about what you know—it’s what you do, how you apply feedback, and the communities you build along the way.

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For those looking to build, scale, or simply not be left behind by the AI revolution in entrepreneurship and coaching, this conversation is essential listening.

Transcript

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[Paul Allen]

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[Justin Colby]

What is up, entrepreneur? DNA, Family. I have a good one for you. This is an individual who is a visionary founder of this little small company called Ancestry.com. maybe you heard of it. Now he has had an exit and he has started and is a visionary founder again at Soar Studio. And I'm super excited to have Paul Allen here, man.

[Paul Allen]

Thank you for having me. Any show that has DNA in the title, I should probably be in.

[Justin Colby]

You should probably. You should. You should go search them all out now. This is just a circumstance again. It's always the people. You know. We have a mutual friend, Andy. She's like, you got to have Paul on. I'm like, okay. And here we are. And so let's talk a little bit. Everyone, I think on the planet probably knows ancestry.com, at least in the United States. And you were the visionary founder. As we were talking off, it was a fun ride. It was naive, but fun and thrilling and. And so talk us the background of Ancestry.com just to start, and then we'll kind of get into the bigger vision of soar and entrepreneurship. But how did that all come about?

[Paul Allen]

You know, it's so funny. I grew up in a home. My dad was a professor. My mom was a teacher. And there was kind of an unspoken business is bad vibe in my family. Education was like the only noble calling, like my mom teaching. My dad professor for 40 years, incredible innovator in manufacturing technology. But I grew up kind of with a very poor opinion of anyone that did business. My dad consulted and sold software to Boeing, Caterpillar, Westinghouse, Lockheed Martin. All the biggest manufacturers in the US Used his software.

[Justin Colby]

So you're from Missouri?

[Paul Allen]

I'm from Utah originally. My father was an engineering professor at BYU and set up the Computer Aided Manufacturing laboratory in the 70s. Okay. So I grew up with a visionary father, but he actually thought that big business was kind of greedy or corrupt or whatever. Anyway, that was unspoken. So I was a political science major in college, switched to international relations, and then I majored in Russian. And I love the Russian language. The Russian history and culture is fascinating. And I wanted to be a PhD. I wanted to be a Kremlin ologist. So my background was all learning and academia. Academia. And I wanted to be a professor like my dad.

[Justin Colby]

Okay.

[Paul Allen]

And then I heard a talk from a University professor in 1988 that said, you know, all the truth and all the knowledge in the world is gathered to libraries and universities. And he actually said, what the world needs more than ever before is access to all the knowledge and truth. And I'm like, my brother had started a search engine technology company. I was working there as a peon scanner. I was running. Ray Kurzweil invented a $40,000 OCR optical characteristics recognition scanner. And my job was like $8 an hour scanning books so that people could have knowledge at their fingertips. This was 88, 89, 90, many years before Google. So my brother had started the world's best search engine company. I was working there, and I'm like, wait, all the world's best books could be put on CD rom? Knowledge is power, right? So let's put all the best books in the world. And so I started a company, licensed the Folio engineering, and started putting the best books in the world on CD Rom. And we made the Inc. 500. So in 96, I go to Philadelphia, and I'm there with hundreds of the fastest growing companies in the United States. And I'm like, these are the coolest people I have met in my entire life. Whatever impression I had of business people was wrong. Yeah, these are founders with vision. They're creating jobs for everybody. Entrepreneurship. This is the calling that I want to pursue for my whole life. So then I almost went to Harvard Business School. I was counseling with one of my greatest mentors about do I start ancestry.com in 96 or do I go to Harvard Business School and learn how to do business? And he said, and I agreed. Start Ancestry.

[Justin Colby]

Okay, so now looking back at that dot, do you still agree?

[Paul Allen]

Oh, 100%.

[Justin Colby]

Okay. Okay.

[Paul Allen]

If I had gone to Harvard Business School, I would have missed the dot com bubble completely. Two years at Harvard now and actually had a call with Kim Clark. He was the dean of the Harvard Business School. A friend of mine connected me to Kim B. Clark and he gave me a half hour of his time, interviewed me. I was trying to wrestle with, do I go to Harvard and learn how to be a good business person? He's like, paul, are you a patient person? I'm like, no, I just like to take action. He's like, you will hate your first year at Harvard Business School. It's all required courses. He said, if you make it through your first year, you will have all electives your second year, you will love your second year at Harvard Business School. But he's like, you've been a CEO for six or seven years already. Six or seven. I shouldn't have said that, Said it that way. That's not what I meant. The, the young kids in the audience are all.

[Justin Colby]

But by the way, even my five year old daughter comes home and goes, six, seven. And I still, this second, right now, I don't know what it means. What is it?

[Paul Allen]

It doesn't mean anything. It's just a meme. Do you remember the, the thing I lost the game. Did you ever hear people saying that? No. Like 20 years ago, all the kids, all the teenagers, if anyone thought the. The phrase, they would say, I lost the game. And everyone else a few minutes later would say, I lost the game and it didn't mean anything. Six, seven started out nothing. It came lyrics from a song about somebody's height or something, but it turned out to be a meme that everybody laughs. Six, seven.

[Justin Colby]

Like I don't even know. Literally she comes home and she does. And I'm like, you're five. And you know, I don't even know anyways.

[Paul Allen]

But anyway, he said, paul, you've been a CEO for six years and that's what we want. Our Harvard graduates To become. He's like, you will not enjoy that first year. Just. Just do your ancestors.

[Justin Colby]

There's so much to unpack to that. First of all, let's go back to the six or seven years that you were doing this.

[Paul Allen]

CD ROM publishing.

[Justin Colby]

Yeah. What was that about? What did that.

[Paul Allen]

Man, that was so much fun. My best friend and I started this company. We wanted to put all the world's best books on CD rom. Religious books, educational books, history, science. We were going to branch into every field. And so I started a master's degree in library science. I thought, if I'm going to put all the world's best books on CD rom, I better understand the discipline of libraries and library science fair. You got Dewey decimal classification. You've got Library of Congress classification. And I'm like, I want to understand how knowledge is organized and compiled.

[Justin Colby]

You just said Dewey decimal. I haven't heard that in 30 years.

[Paul Allen]

Do you know it's more than that? It's so funny. We've now outsourced our information retrieval skills to Google. Yeah, I don't think there's probably 99% of the people in the audience probably haven't been to a library card catalog now, looking at a taxonomy of topics to go find the topics and the related topics. And when you go through a card catalog, you stumble across phenomenal books written by the smartphone.

[Justin Colby]

You pull out the little drawer and you're doing like. Anyways, we're probably blowing, like, some of these kids are like, what are you guys talking about?

[Paul Allen]

Well, nobody uses phone books anymore, but that's how we used to look up businesses, you know, Yellow pages, white pages.

[Justin Colby]

Yeah.

[Paul Allen]

It's so funny. Now we just go to the device and expect it to do it for us, and you get some good answers, but you miss the context and the adjacency and so. So having studied retrieval theory, library science, I feel like I was prepared to put all the world's knowledge on computer. Well, Google shows up a few years later, right. And they did the. They did the best.

[Justin Colby]

I was going to say, did you. When. So where did you get that company to? Was there an exit for you?

[Paul Allen]

Yeah, we had an exit. So the founder of Word Perfect.

[Justin Colby]

Yeah.

[Paul Allen]

Bought it and then he bought a big religious publishing company and combined it into another company. So that was the exit that allowed me and my best friend to fund Ancestry.com in the first two years.

[Justin Colby]

Now, you did, by our start that business with a thought of an exit, correct?

[Paul Allen]

No, no, no. It was a mission in life to organize all the World's knowledge and truth and put it at people's fingertips.

[Justin Colby]

And did you start ancestry.com with an exit?

[Paul Allen]

No. I just thought, look, everybody in the world, everyone in the world needs to like. I didn't think about an exit. At the, at the early days, I knew about IPOs and I learned a little bit about venture capital along the way, but I just assumed that I would build a company and then build another company and then build another and just grow. We launched a company inside of ancestry.com it was actually not a company. It was part of Ancestry.com that was the most exciting project I've ever worked on in my life until now. And that was called myfamily.com okay. So if you think about in the 90s, you got Yahoo showing up and, and then GeoCities comes along and says, hey, anybody in the world can build a webpage, join a neighborhood. And geocities became a community kind of web page building neighborhood. You would join you. It was social networking online. Kind of an early. Not Facebook, not MySpace, but it was pretty early. Yahoo paid $5 billion for GeoCities. So inside of Ancestry, we thought, well, what are the most important relationships in the world? Your family, your parents, your siblings, your spouse, your kids. So we built a website called myfamily.com that allowed every family in the world to connect, to share files, to have a calendar, to have reminders, to have recipe boards like a family social network. It grew to 20 million users in two years.

[Justin Colby]

No way.

[Paul Allen]

Two and a half years. And all the venture, all the venture capital, I'm not kidding, all the venture capital that came into Ancestry.com invested because of my family.com. they could care less about genealogy. They knew that living family connections was everything.

[Justin Colby]

Community it was, we need to talk

[Paul Allen]

about your live your own flesh and blood community and the love that parents and children have. Like, I actually think the greatest motivating force in the entire world is the love of parents for their children and the love of children, of grandparents for their grandchildren. Nothing is more selfless and self sacrificing than parental and grandparent love. I've got six grandkids now and I'm telling you, I'm telling you, a lot of people live their life around making life better for their children and their posterity. And so that force, that power, that love, it's all kind of scattered. There's no organizing entity. MyFamily.com could have been Facebook scale.

[Justin Colby]

Wow.

[Paul Allen]

The sad reality is that Ancestry.com lived through the biggest bubble burst in Internet history and our series E investors saved the company financially but didn't understand myfamily.com they. They defunded it. They took all the engineers off of it. Thirteen engineers. And it stopped growing from, you know, 30,000 new users a day to zero. And then it lost audience. So they shut down my family.com in 2013.

[Justin Colby]

Thousand new users a day. And they say, I don't see the value in it.

[Paul Allen]

Yep. That isn't because it wasn't monetizing very well. 2000, 2001, Google AdWords hadn't even launched yet, so you could have a boatload of traffic on your site and not monetize it. We hired a guy from Disney, an EIR from or he had been a Disney imagineer to run our E commerce division. So families buy a lot of gifts for each other. And we were so early in the process. The bubble burst. We hit the wall, and everyone panicked and abandoned the social thing. I was no longer CEO. I'd stepped down. So one of my early mistakes was stepping down as CEO because I like to build and scale and market, and I didn't like growing the company and having all these meetings, wasting all my time in meetings when I could be, like, building and marketing stuff. So I made a bunch of mist mistakes along the way. But myfamily.com should have a billion users today, and it should have connected and

[Justin Colby]

strengthened families at all.

[Paul Allen]

I hired a guy who worked on it for 23 years and was the last operator of it in 2015, before Ancestry pulled the plug and he rebuilt it as Family Portal.

[Justin Colby]

Okay.

[Paul Allen]

But Nobody cares because 25 years ago, nobody had a place to connect with their family online. Now everybody does. You have multiple places. So Family Portal AI hasn't made a splash, but we're launching something later this year. You know how Trump Savings Accounts will provide a thousand dollars for every child born in the United States from January 1, 2025-28? We'll try to build something called Family Fund, where you can take that savings account. Michael Dell's 250, Ray Dalio's money, all the billionaires that are putting money towards the kids having a savings account and ending their childhood with 50,000 in the bank. Maybe. Rather than student debts that frighten them for life. Like we. We shouldn't cause our children to inherit a debt load. Yeah. They should end up 18 or 21 with a savings account. Okay. So I don't think it's constitutional what President Trump is doing there. I don't know how that kind of thing gets approved, but I guess the Congress has to vote for it or whatever. I don't know. But point is, parents and grandparents should have a place to donate money every birthday, every milestone. I'd like to contribute to my six grandkids, and that could be thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for each one of them. There needs to be a fund that is managed by all the. So we're actually, we're going to keep Family Portal alive and try to grow it. We'll turn it into a financial vehicle for focusing your love of your children and grandchildren on their financial future love. So, so that's coming.

[Justin Colby]

So that's cool. So you have this visionary startup called Ancestry. Everyone knows it at this point. I believe you personally have been able to exit, so that must have been a fun, crazy journey. Talk to us about. I'm sure you learned a lot. Give us 1, 2, or 3. Like really being able to look back and say, man, that was a lesson I could have saved myself. What are a couple things that people could be.

[Paul Allen]

I think smart entrepreneurs do have an exit in mind when they get started, and I never did. So we, we just thought we were going to grow this. Maybe we thought it would IPO and, and it eventually did in 2009, but our exit was in 2006. A. A private equity fund bought the entire company, and I didn't want to sell then. I wanted to own my shares all the way through the ipo because that's kind of the dream, like ring the bell at the NASDAQ or be a part of that celebration. My friends at Angel Studios just did a SPAC merger and did an IPO a few months ago, and all of them and their spouses and their top investors were there celebrating. That's what I dreamed of. It didn't happen. By the time ancestry had its IPO, of the 20 people on the stand, only one of them had been part of the early team. Mike Wolfgram. My. My childhood friend was the cto, so I did a lot right in building it, but I didn't think through the ownership, the governance, the structure, the future exit. So when I exited, it was really because we were able to pay for our dream home. I've got eight kids. We were able to pay for their college. And so it was a good exit. And. But future investors in, in. In Ancestry have made a lot more. A lot more. Maybe one guy, I think, made a hundred times more than the founders did.

[Justin Colby]

Oh, my goodness. Well, and listen, let's maybe talk to some of the lessons on that Journey without the exit part. But the things that you can maybe make an impact on people who are in the business, growing businesses, scaling businesses. When you take Ancestry and you have the vision and then you get it to where you were able to exit, not let alone everything else, there's so many lessons in there that were learned. Give us a couple of those lessons on the growth or scale trajectory that you'd say. Here are some things I try to preach to other entrepreneurs.

[Paul Allen]

So I remember going to my first Internet conference in 95 in San Francisco and that's where the idea for Ancestry hit me. I was a CD ROM publisher. So my first lesson is go to conferences and events. Network, network, go find the experts. So I remember one concept that someone, a branding marketing expert taught at the second Internet conference I went to. And here's what he said. I don't even remember his name. I think his first name was Jim. He said, on the Internet, generalities fail specificity rules. Okay, what does that mean? Well, if you're, if you're Amazon and you're saying, hey, come and buy books here. Okay, that's general. If you take the best selling book right now, that is on the New York Times and you start advertising that book, specificities rule, you'll get a 10 times bigger click through rate. So specifics matter. If we were doing Ancestry.com marketing, we could say, you know, find your family history. Or we could say, you know, hey, there are 27 Colbys in the Massachusetts birth records. Are you related to those Colbys? Guess what, your name, where you lived, you're going to get 10 times higher click through rate. So we were the biggest bidder of keywords when, when, when the pay per click model was invented, we had the largest list of surnames in the United States, 150,000 surnames. And we bid 2 cents a click on every surname. So any search engine search for your name or your ancestor's name would result in a link to ancestry.com. so the specificities rule mantra really colored everything we did in marketing. It really made a difference. Specifics, not generalities.

[Justin Colby]

Yeah. So that just leans into who's your avatar. Right. So be very specific. Who's your avatar? So like we just talked about the community that's about to be launched. Right. My avatar is rather wide. Frankly, it isn't specific to any genre, vertical, subject matter. It is if you are entrepreneurial or an aspiring entrepreneur. What does it take to do this? Yep. And to me, while very broad, rather rather than specific. I believe it'll just help touch More people, reach more people and then individuals like yourself can come in and make a much more hyper specific impact on them. Around certain specific.

[Paul Allen]

I love that you're inviting people to not only learn about entrepreneurship and adopt that mindset, but also to build community. I think the world is going to need more entrepreneurial mindsets and more high agency people. With AI and robots doing tons of productive work and creating massive amounts of wealth, more and more humans will be displaced from their normal jobs. They'll have to have ideas and lean into them and take entrepreneurial action. So number one, you're addressing one of the most important needs in the world today is having that entrepreneur mindset and learning from others how to do it. And then the community is everything.

[Justin Colby]

Yeah.

[Paul Allen]

All business starts with relationships. People you like and trust, you want to do business with them. It's not transactional, it's relationship. And so you're going to crush that too with your upcoming communities. I would say on the specificities rule concept, my business partner and friend, Jeremy Miner, who you know and who Andy also works with, he does a great job in sales training. He trains in 163 verticals. If you're selling cement and you go and learn how to sell cement from Jeremy Miner using his nepq, that's very specific. Sales is very general. Cement sales is very. So he's, he and his coaches have trained sales experts in 163 verticals. Like every vertical that you can sell in, he's got specific material just for you. Yeah. So when we built his AI, his Ask Jeremy AI, it was literally trained on 30,000 hours, 33,000 hours of coaching and training on all 163 verticals. So now AI has been trained on what Jeremy and his team knows. And if you're in cement sales or H Vac sales or financial services, your coaching from Ask Jeremy or from his 7Q AI product will be very, very specific to your niche or to your category. So specificity matters a lot in sales and in entrepreneurship. You might want to have sub communities in your, in your entrepreneurial community where the different types of business models. If you're a franchise owner and you want to own 50 franchises, that's a totally different business model than inventing a tech product.

[Justin Colby]

100%. Yeah, yeah. And there's going to be different verticals and subject matters. I mean AI plays a big role in all this kind of stuff. Right. We just talked about off camera. Like listen, it is coming, it is here. Human resources IQ versus EQ and EQ is being more Expensive and. Or more valuable by the second, where IQ is like dropping in value by the second. And so, you know, there are some things that I think in the entrepreneur DNA that, that will be launched around the AI component as well, which will be super cool because I, I'm leaning into it. Every entrepreneur should lean into it. I know you are in a big way. Jeremy is. And so on. Let's. Let's jump over to what you're currently doing.

[Paul Allen]

Yeah. So a few years ago, after having done a lot with search engines, with billions of records, with retrieval of information, hoping to give people knowledge so that that knowledge could be empowering, I've realized that there's a huge, huge gap between knowing something and doing it. There's a global budget of workforce training, Justin, that's like $400 billion a year. Human leaders in corporations spend $400 billion a year training leaders, managers, salespeople on all kinds of things. That is a wild 400 billion number. And the percentage of training that leaders say was effective is really low. Why? Well, we've been through K through 12. We just sit and we're taught stuff. We're taught to learn things and regurgitate it or in college, we learn, we learn, we learn. We take tests. How much of the knowledge that you are given do you immediately go out and apply? Little. Very little. So it's all about cognitive knowledge when

[Justin Colby]

you're talked at through schooling. Right. I always felt like I was just getting talked at to like you're talking at me like, are you really teaching me and helping me and being. So anyways, I.

[Paul Allen]

One of greatest entrepreneurs and philanthropists, Alan hall, he taught sales. There's only, I don't know, 50 colleges in the United States that have a degree in sales. Sales makes the world go round. Right. And only, what, 50 out of thousands of universities have a degree in sales. Well, he taught sales and rather than teaching them how to sell, he. He would challenge them to go, how many bottles of water can you sell in the next seven days?

[Justin Colby]

Yeah.

[Paul Allen]

And some people come back, zero. They couldn't sell a single bottle of water. They didn't have the. I don't know. They didn't know how to do it. They were afraid they didn't. One kid, I think sold 10,000 bottles of water in one week.

[Justin Colby]

Wow.

[Paul Allen]

So how do you learn how to do something? By doing it.

[Justin Colby]

Yeah.

[Paul Allen]

Not by learning about it. You got to learn and then do. But, but. So the gap between knowledge and action. I don't think knowledge is power anymore.

[Ryan Reynolds]

No.

[Paul Allen]

I would agree I think action is power and knowledgeable action is super powerful.

[Justin Colby]

So implied knowledge, applying knowledge is the key.

[Paul Allen]

All the fruits that you want to harvest, all the benefits you want to obtain requires action, not just knowing something. So soar AI Studio is a series of AI companies. We've started eight so far. We're going to end up with 12 or 15 in every vertical of life that matters. So family, faith, friendship and then work, leadership, sales, every single part of life, health and finance, all the things that woven together make a life well lived. Like you're living your best life. It's so crazy how fulfilled you are, how much human flourishing you're experiencing. So we're building a company for every part of the life experience, but the goal is to learn things and do them. So the AI platforms that are being built through partners like Jeremy Miner, he trains the AI on every sales technique he's ever taught, every word he's spoken, every vertical he's trained in the AI. The Jeremy AI is now kind of a digital twin of him and can watch your sales calls and coach you after every call.

[Justin Colby]

Wow.

[Paul Allen]

So all the world's greatest athletes get to watch game film, they study game film, they have coaching and feedback and

[Justin Colby]

every day onto the field and they go reproduce what they repetition, feedback loops.

[Paul Allen]

How many people in entrepreneurship ever get that?

[Justin Colby]

None.

[Paul Allen]

Most knowledge workers never get real time feedback or good coaching after actual performance. So with the Soar AI Studio and a lot of partnerships including Franklin Covey. Franklin Covey teaches people about leadership. They've taught millions of people the principles of leadership. And how many people get a feedback loop on how am I showing up? Stephen M. Arcovy might have 12 principles of a trust and inspire leader. How do I know if I'm doing it right? Well, guess what? Record your calls, record your meetings, look at your emails and we'll tell you what. You're crushing on those 12 principles and maybe you got to work on this one.

[Justin Colby]

I thought I was going to change the coaching industry, but you are literally going to just.

[Paul Allen]

We are not going to change it. You're going to change it using our platform so you can partner with us and all the experts. So I think about the humans that have so much knowledge because they earned it.

[Justin Colby]

Yep.

[Paul Allen]

They learned it, they earned that knowledge and now they want to help, they want to pay it forward, they want to invite other people to take the same, same steps that I take, I took to get the outcome that I got. And yet there's a need for a persistent AI that captures what you know and helps coach people on what? Like you can't afford the world's best coaches to shadow you every day. Yeah. But if they can coach you every week or month and then supplement that with their trained AI, there's no limit to the prosperity that humans can experience. If we get the right knowledge and act on it properly with that kind

[Justin Colby]

of a feedback loop, it's, man, this is going to be so important in life moving forward. The biggest thing I see, especially with the podcast and the community and I've been coaching now for 13 years, the reason why I see people don't get started is their uncertainty of whether they're doing it right. You layer that on with fear and criticism and you know, if I fail and the judgment, but it really, because the uncertainty soar is giving you the certainty, are you doing it right or not? Well, you'll get some feedback. They will tell you, hey, say this, tweak this, do this, here's how you do this. Is this going to be for most all verticals? Like you just said, this is going to be. I mean, this isn't going to be vertical specific. It is literally going to be whatever business you're doing in, whatever you're trying to focus on, whether it be leadership or sales or marketing or, you name

[Paul Allen]

it, the entrepreneur or the student or the learner has to pick a framework or a methodology, a playbook. Like, what entrepreneur do you admire? Okay. And our goal is to find all the, what I call level six humans. So a level one human, let's say, might be an Instagram influencer with millions of followers. They spend one hour learning a topic, they post about it, and they get millions of people paying attention. Well, one hour of study is not enough to make you an expert. Level two is ten hours. Level three is a hundred hours. Level four is like, maybe you minored in this in college, you spent a thousand hours learning it. I'd pay attention to someone, a friend, who had level four knowledge on something. Level five is 10,000 hours on one subject. So Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10 hours concept. If someone's a level five expert on health or startups, that's good. Level six is what we're looking for. Who has spent a hundred thousand hours, fifty years of their life deeply studying a subject and teaching it or writing about it. If you can find level 6 humans like Peter Drucker, greatest management consultant in the history of the 20th century. Peter Drucker was a level six human. Don Clifton, we named the company that I run Soar, after Don Clifton. I Think the greatest psychologist in the history of the world. He invented Strength Finder. Gallup has provided the StrengthsFinder assessment to 35 million people.

[Justin Colby]

That book is a great book. And Then Strength Fighter 2.0 and the whole thing.

[Paul Allen]

Exactly. Strengths based leadership, strengths based selling. I was the global evangelist for Gallup for five years popularizing Strengthsfinder, and it's now called CliftonStrengths After Dawn. But his first book was called Soar with youh Strengths. If I could advise any person in the world, what's a one book that I would read to give me a blueprint for success in life? It's Don Clifton's first book because it was after 40 years of interviewing hundreds of thousands of successful people to find their natural talent. And then he puts together this blueprint of eight chapters that says, here's how you become a successful human being. And it's about relationships, it's about knowledge, it's about celebration. It's a great book. So I named the company Soar in his honor. We hope to work with Gallup to bring StrengthsFinder to all of our users in all of our verticals. But the point is level six humans. Or find a role model or a set of role models that you admire, figure out what tactics did they use and then how do those apply to my personal strengths?

[Justin Colby]

So you put that into Soar.

[Paul Allen]

It'll all be. All those ingredients will be in Soar. And then our partners who have content and customers will private label our engine. We do not go to market with our own products. We find Franklin Covey or Jeremy Miner, seventh level in sales, and they ship their product to their customers with their expertise, powered by our AI ingredients. So it will have dozens of partners in all these verticals. The goal is help humans get the best knowledge they can and apply it with AI giving them feedback along the way. Why can't every human being be financially prosperous? Why can't almost every human being be physically healthy and emotionally well off? They need to know what to do and then they need to do it. And so we have to find those level six humans or those subject matter experts who really have found the keys to success in parenting, in marriage, in entrepreneurship, in fundraising. There are experts out there. Find the ones that you resonate with, find their advice that plays to your strengths, and then jettison all the advice that doesn't match you. Yeah, that's kind of the key theory is all the world's knowledge, wisdom, advice is out there. And YouTube exists now and podcasts exist now, and in the 90s in the mid-90s, when I was starting my first companies, I'm like, had to go to a monthly get together with a few entrepreneurs in Utah Valley to learn anything. Like, I didn't go to business school. I didn't have any professors or mentors. So I had this group of Utah Valley entrepreneurs. But today you got millions of episodes. You can go find those influencers and those thought leaders that you want to be like, learn how they did it, and then go do it. But you have to have AI, I think, to help you do it right nowadays.

[Justin Colby]

I mean, you will be smoked if you don't, because others will.

[Paul Allen]

Right.

[Justin Colby]

That's the point is if you don't and he does, you're going to get smoked. And so, so can I bring this into my community?

[Paul Allen]

100%. So, Justin, everything we do is private labelable. I'm honored that this week Franklin Covey announced their trust and inspire AI. I was in a Sunday school class with Stephen Covey, the 7 Habits author, for four months.

[Justin Colby]

Nice.

[Paul Allen]

He was going to Mexico every week to train Vicente Fox, the president of Mexico, on 7 Habits. And then on Sundays, he was teaching a small group of like 15 people in Sunday school the same principles. Yeah. And I'm like, he was being paid, I don't know, $25,000 a day by the president of Mexico. And every Sunday, my wife and I got to sit through with him and Sandra Covey. I became really good friends with his son, Stephen. Mr. Covey. Our kids went to school together and are very close friends. And so when Stephen, Mr. Covey wrote his first book, Trust or Speed of Trust?

[Justin Colby]

Yeah.

[Paul Allen]

He came to my house and gave me a signed copy. Nice. So I've been friends with the Coveys for a long time. For Franklin Covey to see that AI can reinforce the leadership training, the world needs great leadership more than ever before. So millions of people read the books, go to the workshops, but how do you know if you're doing it right?

[Justin Colby]

And then they get scared to implement. And the reason being is because they don't know if they're doing it right. Exactly. That's kind of that circle loop that I'm talking about is God, they're learning from the best. And now, like, as a coach, I will literally put the bait on the hook. I will put the hook and the bait in the water for you. All you have to do is reel, reel the real. Right.

[Paul Allen]

Yeah.

[Justin Colby]

And people are scared to do it because they're like, am I going to do this right?

[Paul Allen]

You know, but to have a non Judgmental AI that's trained by the expert to give you positive feedback. You do it right.

[Justin Colby]

I want to, I want to.

[Paul Allen]

A little bit of nudge. Like, hey, of the four steps that you were supposed to do in the sales call, you skipped step four. Can you see how that happened 14 minutes into the call, like game film of how you showed up where you're not being judged, you're just being coached and encouraged. Oh, it's so exciting.

[Justin Colby]

That word is the key word. There's no judgment in the AI, just giving black and white objective feedback. You didn't do this, right? Do this instead. Go.

[Paul Allen]

Can I get a brief story?

[Justin Colby]

Yeah.

[Paul Allen]

So my friend, I have a lot of friends in the, in the, in the publishing industry. Eric Reese, the author of Lean Startup, is one of my advisory board members. I get to have a call with Eric every month or two. And I got to meet with Kim Scott, the author of Radical Candor. And this was at her home in Palo Alto. And we, we met and I was saying, Kim, your Radical Candor concept is so cool. Giving direct feedback in a caring way to all your people, rather than sitting in what she calls the ruinous empathy quadrant, where you dance around the elephant in the room. You kind of are fuzzy, you don't really communicate anything, and you're pretending to be caring. Yeah, that's the opposite of caring. You're being a horrible leader.

[Justin Colby]

You're not being a good friend. Like if you have something in your teeth and I allow you to walk around this room and say hi to everyone that's in this room with something in your teeth. I'm not actually not being a good friend.

[Paul Allen]

Exactly, exactly. So Radical Candor is a powerful concept. I said, kim, millions of people love your stuff. How do you know if they're doing it right? And she laughed and said, there's no way to know. So my team, my AI team built a Radical Candor AI. We've never shipped it because we don't have a partnership yet with her, but with Franklin Covey and Jeremy Minor and others, hopefully she'll say yes. And Eric Reese, will has already verbally said yes. A Lean Startup AI that coaches you on how to do Lean. Right. That could be amazing. Right? So Kim laughed and said, I don't know how to do it. So my team built a Radical Candor AI. I applied it on one of my calls. I had a father son duo in 10 in Texas that had promised me that they would talk to me about a million dollar contract. Like, they said, you guys have all the capabilities to do this. It was like a history search engine. And they're like, hey, we're going to talk to you. So that was in November. And then in February, I had a call with them and they told me they'd already awarded the contract to another vendor. A million dollar contract. I didn't even get to bid on it.

[Justin Colby]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Allen]

And I talked to him for like 20 minutes. At the end of the call, the radical Candor AI said, paul, you were in the ruinous empathy quadrant the entire call. I didn't ask a single direct question about why they had announced or awarded it to a vendor without letting us bid. Does that vendor have all the capabilities that our team has? Because you've. You've praised our team for our Ancestry.com search engine experience. Could I have been introduced to the vendor and maybe gotten a subcontract?

[Justin Colby]

So you didn't do any of this and it gave you the feedback.

[Paul Allen]

It said, paul, you were in the Ruinous. Here's what you could have done. And it was like, game changer.

[Justin Colby]

And you have no one judging you. Say, hi. You're not feeling bad about your sub?

[Liberty Mutual Companion]

No.

[Justin Colby]

No one else. This is Paul. I am so excited about this, brother.

[Paul Allen]

Thank you. I got a Peter Drucker AI that we haven't shipped either. But Global Peter Drucker forum is a partner of ours. They've shipped some products, but I actually mocked up a Peter Drucker AI. How would Peter Drucker grade my leadership? And you know what? The first meeting that Peter Drucker evaluated, me running a company meeting, I got a C for having an unclear agenda. And I was mad.

[Justin Colby]

I'm like, sure. I was gonna say, I'm like, peter,

[Paul Allen]

I know you're on the other side. I've been a successful entrepreneur for 35 years. Don't tell me what to do. Because that was my initial reaction. Defensive, of course. And then I'm like, wait, Paul, why do you have an unclear agenda? You're just lazy.

[Justin Colby]

Yeah.

[Paul Allen]

Like, that's not good for your people. You don't care about having an agenda because you've never needed one or thought you need. But your team would benefit if they knew upfront what we're going to talk about today. From that point on, my team has had an agenda every single meeting that I.

[Justin Colby]

And again, this was an AI giving you feedback.

[Paul Allen]

It was a Peter Drucker AI.

[Justin Colby]

Incredible. For all of you out there, this is Paul Allen, by the way. This is going to be. I'm going to be talking about this a lot because I'm about to put him in a headlock and he won't be able to leave my side for the next couple hours. But dude, this is, I am literally creating community that every entrepreneur is going to need this. Especially when you start talking about lean start, like in all these different utilities, dude. Yeah, Nice little exit on this.

[Paul Allen]

I, I think, I think, Justin, you know, it's a kind of a common knowledge that, you know, 90 of startups fail. You know, people say 80, 90, I don't know what the real number is, sure. But why don't 90% of startups succeed?

[Justin Colby]

Yeah, that's right.

[Paul Allen]

I think that's doable. I think in the coming decade, with knowledge and Expertise Combined with AI feedback and AI agents, I don't see any reason why 90% of startups can't succeed. And many of them succeed wildly, beyond the imagination of the founder. Because AI just will help you get better and better and better. And the world economy is going to grow so big and so fast with AI and robots and productivity increases and energy being unlocked for the first time in a long time. Did you see the governor of New York announced that she's going to do like more nuclear energy in New York than the United States has produced in the last 30 years. Like nuclear. And then Elon collecting solar energy from space and then inference being done in outer space with GPUs that don't have to have cooling, like Jensen Wang and Elon Musk are kind of blowing my mind. Okay, so imagine a world where many scarce resources are now abundant. Well, why not get your fair share of that by taking knowledge and applying it and having AI help you apply it. Right. Why can't 90% of startups, or even 99% of startups succeed? There will always be some exceptions, but our goal would be help your communities learn what they need to learn and do it right. And those feedback loops, just like you look at athletes, college and professional athletes, it's incredible how much better they get from freshman to sophomore or rookie season to second year. Like they're continually improving. Why can't we all do that too, as entrepreneurs?

[Justin Colby]

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Paul Allen. We're talking about Source Studios. You're going to see it in entrepreneur DNA, there's no doubt about it. Thank you so much. Thanks, Jeff, for coming out of this pod. This has been, this has been a blessing. We're going to do some cool stuff together.

[Paul Allen]

I'm going to run. You're bigger than me. And that headlock has kind of got me intact. I'm going to jet and I'll probably escape your headlock.

[Justin Colby]

I appreciate look this man up. He's easy to talk to. He's amazing. And we are going to be talking a lot more about this AI. I'm Justin Colby. This is the entrepreneur DNA. If this was helpful. If you think someone needs some of this AI and Paul Allen's intellect and all this stuff, share this with two of your friends. I'd really appreciate it. Talk soon.

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[Paul Allen]

And

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[Justin Colby]

Oh, no.

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[Paul Allen]

Hey, good morning.

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[Paul Allen]

Yep, they sure are.

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It's all right.

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[Paul Allen]

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[Justin Colby]

Get a commercial auto insurance quote [e-mail]

[Paul Allen]

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[Justin Colby]

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