How to Build & Implement Systems to Grow Your Business w/ Francis Pedraza | EP #106

28:41Companies called Fountain Life and it's company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day when you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician and they burn to your room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on. And you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time, but because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers.

29:20We have four across the US today and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI -nabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, dexascan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AI's and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning. When it's solvable, you're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life.

30:04And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife .com, backslashpeter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller For life force, we had 30 ,000 people who reached out to us for fountain life memberships. If you go to fountainlife .com, backslashpeter, we'll put you to the top of the list. It really is something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends, it's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy life spans. Go to fountainlife .com, backslash, Peter.

30:47It's one of the most important things I can offer to you is one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. At every entrepreneur, at early stages during an entrepreneurial journey, an entrepreneur is gonna have to figure out how much money they're gonna raise. And there is this tendency to say, listen, I'm going to raise more than I think I need because I want the cushion. I want the money in case things turn down things don't work out. How do you think about that? I think one of the most important things is living long enough to live forever. It's like getting to get into profitability as soon as you can and then being able to have control of your own fate.

31:33But I know of companies, I've been inside of ventures where it's like, We need 20 million, but let's raise 40 just to have the extra cushion. You didn't fall into that trap. Sun Soo said, don't worry about victory. Remove the possibility of defeat. Then afterwards, look for victory. We used to talk about bunker mode. Sometimes people call it cockroach mode. Do you have a company culture where the resolve, the commitment to the mission is so high that if everyone had to enter ramen mode, if you couldn't pay them and they just had to go on the equity and you were just giving them stock, the stock that you would otherwise give investors, how many people at your team would stay?

32:23How many people would keep going and keep working towards the mission? In the early days, that was 100 % of our company. Today, it's less than 100%. Maybe it's only 10 or 20 % of our company. It's an abnormally large percentage of our company that still has that company culture. But I think that the capital scarcity is a form of forcing you to become efficient, right? Like when you can't solve problems by hiring people and you can't solve problems by throwing money at the problem. You actually have to innovate your way through the problem. And so you end up changing your relationship to the adversity or the scarcity that is the capital scarcity.

33:15And you end up increasing productivity per person, right? It goes up and up and up and up. And it might start really slowly. You might not even see that it's happening. But over time, you look back and you realize, wow, you know, like we thought we needed so much capital, but we didn't because we ended up solving all these problems along the way and having these bright ideas. We wouldn't have had those bright ideas if our backs weren't up against a wall, so to speak. And this is something they teach in martial arts and also in a lot of philosophical traditions, sort of love your enemy, you know, because your being, your enemy is teaching you.

33:57And the enemy here is capital scarcity. You're like, oh, I don't have enough money. And you can be in this very negative mindset about it, but actually, you can be the greatest gift to your creative process at the company. Talk to me a second. I'm going to go into hiring and the type of employees, but before we get there, talk about span of control and empowering individual employees to solve problems versus have large organizational structures and span of control and such. So I ended up realizing my span was larger than I thought it was. The traditional span of control is like, you don't wanna exceed 12.

34:36You don't wanna have 12 people working for you. Anything more than that is like unmanageable. And actually the sweet spot is usually three to seven and anything above seven is like danger zone and anything above 12 is impossible, something's wrong. But if you have less than three people working for you, then there's not enough. And in the creation of a hierarchy, this sort of creates some rules of thumb. Those rules of thumb are true if you're operating in what I call an army mindset. If you're operating in a special forces mindset, you can sort of do these very strange uh... dances uh... for example uh...

35:27we hired a ceo ben uh... he started about eighteen months ago and at one point he had a span of control of seventeen and i was cool with it uh... because i felt like hit he was such a uh... a capable manager that he was actually able to empower that many people uh... there was a medium -term strategy to to to hire some key people that are actually now condensing the span of control. So his span of control is rationalizing now. But for this sprint, this particular period of time, he was capable and it was necessary to do that. Why was it possible? It was possible because I had a dotted line to most of those people and I was co -managing and I was helping him manage it.

36:15And we also were able to surround ourselves with the right advisors and board members that were helping him. And there were enough veterans in the business that their veterans he was able to sort of upgrade the new people we were hiring pretty fast. And so it held together. And so I think that in an army mindset, you kind of look for a job description with clear check boxes and you're done when you're done checking those boxes. But in more of a special forces mindset, that everyone is capable of doing more than they think they can. And the combinations, the ways in which you can combine people, it's much more like soccer than baseball, right?

36:59It's much more fluid. And you can only move into that fluidity when everyone is really committed to excellence and everyone is in an open -minded state. But I just think that, you know, I want to go someplace different with this, because I think the kind of company you've been building is one in which. So backing up a second, going to a company like Lockheed, I remember reading about Lockheed's Gunc Works and the way it worked, the level of agility was such that in the center of the massive hanger when they were building their aircraft, they had a single blueprint and anyone could go and make a change to that blueprint.

37:41They were empowered to do that, but they had to write their name next to the change. In other words, as long as they felt we're clear and responsible, they didn't have to go through layers of approvals to go and make that edit. So how do you create a culture in which, because you've got owner partners and people care deeply about it, that there isn't layers of red tape to encourage people to optimize and solve, right? Because when you have so much structure and you have all these approval processes, you crush an organization's agility. Do you agree with that? I totally agree with that. One is just shifting the emphasis from sense of commission to sense of omission.

38:36So you're less going to get punished for making mistakes and you're more going to get punished for not doing stuff. So one way to see if a company is becoming more political, which we have to fight against right now, is people are afraid of putting their name on things. You talked about putting your name on the blueprint, but even putting your name on an email and writing an email and saying, for example, I woke up this morning, somebody on the team said, you know, who's, he said, we don't have a day one mindset on this part of our sales team. And he listed out a whole bunch of problems and he had escalated it.

39:14And he could have, you know, by causing a stink, you know, maybe you're putting yourself at risk, maybe you're putting your job at risk. We really don't punish that. We reward that. That's somebody who's taking ownership and responsibility and calling out a problem. So I think we just generally reward people who take on more responsibility and who are willing to identify problems and not just identify problems but suggest solutions and give the solutions a try. Even when the solutions don't work, I'd rather have that person who's taking risks, running things, then the person who's not taking risks.

39:56And it's the person who's not saying stuff, who's quiet, who doesn't put their neck out there. That's the person who's like basically bureaucratic and political and probably just a follower. Yeah. Hiring people. How do you hire people? How do you find them? You said you have 3 ,000 individuals now as part of the team. That's great. It's crazy. It's amazing. How do you talk about culture and hiring and what your thoughts are? What have you learned there? Yeah, we learn a lot of things. The structure of the organization is we have partners at the top and they have equity in the business. We started the year with about 120 partners.

40:35We're going to end the year with nearly 300. So we're more than doubling headcount this year, which is very scary in the sense that it's a test of the culture if the veterans can bring in the new people. And then there's specialists. The specialists are partners in training and they haven't made partner yet. They don't have equity yet, but they're working on both the partners and the specialists are building the company. And then the agents are doing the work for the clients on the digital assembly line. And that could be advanced AI training work. It could be building spreadsheets. It could be running insurance claims.

41:16It could be any form of work that our clients need. And these are contractors. And they're in over 100 countries around the world. And the ability to scalably hire people, train them, manage them, they can sort of set up their shift schedule. And then our system will automatically route them work that they're qualified to do. And we create an interface for them to do it. and we have a quality system to check the work, and then they get paid in their local currency. Some of them get paid in Bitcoin. And that, and so those are the contractors. Amazingly, even in the contractor, even in the agent workforce that we have, the companies, the partnerships values have spread down.

42:02And so I'd say actually a lot of our agents have that partner ethos even though they're not partner yet and a lot of them dream of becoming a partner someday and we try to create paths for them upwards. The, you know, will be it probably over 5 ,000 by the end of the year Peter. Just give you a sense of how the organization is growing quickly when you count the agents. But the partners are the ones I really watch and one of the key evolutions that I'm thinking about now is in the early days it was possible for a new partner to earn more than 1 % of invisible. Now, if we hit our targets over the next five years, 1 % of invisible, we were worth $100 million.

42:49And so people are chasing basis points. And you have people that are shooting to earn 10 basis points because they believe that'll be worth $10 million in five years. It's life -changing amount of money. I worried that that would change the shareholder investor, you know, invest owner operator, the investor operator culture that we have. So far it's holding and I'm I'm every time I meet a new partner I'm thinking the back of my mind. Does this person think like an entrepreneur? Do they take risks? Can they understand how one puzzle piece of the tactics they're working on in a day -to -day business, a day -to -day basis, fit into the overall strategic puzzle of the business.

43:35Do they understand the strategy? And so far, I'm incredibly blown away. And I think the secret has been, Peter, we built a hiring team as if it was its own separate business. So if invisible is operations as a service, our hiring team is hiring as a service. And, you know, the head of hiring, Mark Gray, is this half Turkish, half Irish guy who lives in Copenhagen, he married a Danish lady, and he had been a scale up head of hiring, and we gave him an opportunity to say, hey, come here, you'll be our head of hiring, but instead of just running a cost center, we're going to treat you like you're a CEO, And we're going to give you an actual path to become a CEO of your own business.

44:21And your first client will be invisible. And invisible needs a hiring factory that can produce higher and higher quantity and higher and higher quality of all these types of people. We need to do everything from hiring engineers to hiring executives to hiring managers to hiring agents who do work for clients that are operational. And we need to do all of that. That is a full agency effectively that we need to build. And so the only way to do it is through incredible amounts of automation and innovation. And you need to have your small team not think like they're a small part of a big thing, but think like they're a big part of a small thing.

45:01Can you do it? And he was up for the mission. It was the most entrepreneurial person we interviewed. I turned down five other candidates. because I knew that a good head of hiring is a good hire that makes good hires. It's like an extra good hire. And a bad head of hiring is like a bad hire that makes bad hires. And so you'd tank your culture. So when we hired Mark Gray, it really was a huge piece of leverage for the company. Last year we had over 100 ,000 people apply. We only hired 1 ,000. And so that's like 1%. And our cost per hiring in agent was only $87. And our cost per hiring of partner was about 150.

45:37And we were able to do that because they automated so much of the outbound and of the full in our applicant tracking system greenhouse They automated like every single process in greenhouse And they used a bunch of psyche valves to like basically, you know Use data from all the interviews that we were getting and and and and and use that to accelerate the process My friend you have opened up a thousand conversational doors here and just in the past two minutes I mean, so first of all, you built a completely virtualized organization with individuals and how many countries? Over 100. I can't talk.

46:15It was 96 when we were at about in 360 and it's over 100 now. Amazing. Amazing. And I will come back to your nomadic lifestyle in a little bit because you're circumnavigating the globe on a constant basis. But at the same time, what you just said was turning what was a cost center into a potential significant profit center. And you're looking at iterating on that over and over again. I mean, you have this tree structure of what invisible. Can you describe your vision of where invisible is going in terms of the baby companies that you're spawning in the process? Yes. So, well, let's just complete the story with Mark and then we'll go to the demo I want to give it a bun is 360.

46:59So he's starting zero hiring. We own zerohiring .com. We're getting ready to launch. And I met this guy about a year ago, this guy named Sam Gibson, who is a British guy, and he had built and sold an RPO company, a recruitment process outsourcing company. And he had made about, you know, he'd made meaningful, you know, return on that business, but he was an entrepreneur that still felt like the industry should be disrupted. So I introduced him to Mark Gray and Mark hired him to basically build our external revenue. So by the end of the year, I think we're going to do $3 million run rate from our hiring as a service business from external clients.

47:46So invisible is no longer the only client of Mark and his team. They have revenue and it's already profitable. And so I'm pushing them to scale that business. Because next year by the end of the year, they could be at 10 million plus revenue. And then they should be able to grow at 100 plus growth rates for many years until they're over 100 mil run rate. And so the demo I want to give at a bun in 360, and I don't know if we'll be ready by next year, but if not, it'll be the year after. I want to go on stage and take Sam Altman's thing that he talks about, which I've been talking about for a decade, too, is the one person unicorn.

48:28Could you have one person or a very, very small team build a billion dollar business without having to hire a huge finance team, a huge sales team, a huge operations team, a huge marketing team, a huge people team, and I would love to be able to build a business in an hour on stage. And you know, we can source the idea from the audience by the domain and then basically create, you know, delegate all the operations to invisible and we'll have hiring as a service run by zero. and we have a basically a consulting business called Dessendancy that's our McKinsey Bay and BCG competitor. So that'll run all the strategy and the advisor program and cheerholder relations.

49:15We're building a marketing and design agency called Rad. So Rad will do all, it will be our marketing team and our design team. And we have a few more that we're incubating. You know, eventually we'll have sales as a service and finance as a service. Unlimited financial services will be the name of we just hired the CEO for that. And so, and that'll be our KPMG, you know, PWC, Deloitte, and EY competitor. And so you'll basically have all the functions of your business outsourced and you won't need to hire anyone other than the core team generating the core IP that are truly asymmetric nonlinear high leverage founders.

49:56and I think this will create a new era in entrepreneurship because it will change the idea of what it means to be on a team. So right now the assumption is if you're only on a team, if you are a full -time W2 employee. But what if we hold this as our standard of excellence as a vendor is when our clients forget that were not on their team. When they were so integrated in their company and their processes, when we're so aware of their strategy and their goals and their OKRs, when we're able to add that kind of nonlinear value that they're like, yeah, there are invisible on the team. That's I think how Grace feels at OpenAI, like she's on the team.

50:48So that's the goal is like, what if the majority of your team members are actually vendors and you don't even care, it's just osmotic. Right now, only 10 % of work is outsourced. By the end of the century, I think it could be 50 to 90%. It's the speed of innovation, the speed of creation, the speed of problem solving, the agility. If you're going to go back in time to the Francis, I met 15 years ago, you're just getting started on Everest and give yourself the most distilled advice you could do. What would that be?

51:43Oh, you're like, I can't tell you. I mean, some time to think, have you asked yourself this question? Like, what would you give young Peter? Would you ask the whole diverse, like, would you, would you, would you, create a consequence? Let me answer that question. So, I think, first of all, young Peter went after medicine to make his parents happy versus what I wanted to do, right, early on, which was space. I want to jokingly say, you know, by Apple and Amazon and Google early on, but I think I think it was really focused on the core business and building something that is profitable and generating value and create something that's real versus building pie in the sky.

52:45My early ventures in space were such, you know, insert $100 million here and work on something for a long time and eventually build it versus start generating real business and revving you on day one and then build upon a profitable ongoing business. It's one of the biggest challenges in the space business, the amount of capital required to get to a point where you're actually able to achieve orbital velocity, so to speak. That was a very different. So how do you balance that moonshot desire at the same time that you want to build a real business early? In that juxtapositioning, for me, I finally got clarity about you need to get to revving you early, start a team that's working together in generating capital and generating profits and then get a clear roadmap from there to your moonshot.

53:44but don't start at the full moon shot level. For me, that was an important insight. How about you? What was it? What failed your lessons? What lessons would you bring back? I mentor and invest in, we started an investing program, and we'll get to that in a second. Visionary Ventures is the name of our investment arm. As we're starting to invest in other entrepreneurs, and I'm starting to mentor young entrepreneurs, I'm finding myself in this strange position of giving advice. But I still think of myself as a white belt and as a beginner. I hope I never lose that. You want to be in a beginner state of mind all the time to really perceive the world and learn the lessons that are all around us all the time.

54:33And then, like a good college essay, I'm going to challenge the premise of the question, which is, you know, if I had, even if I gave myself a, almost like, I know Kung Fu matrix download and I somehow download all the things I've learned in the last 15 years, that would kick off another branch in the multiverse, right? It would be a parallel universe where that Francis would go off to do different things. And there's something beautiful about the adversities, the tragedies, the things that I thought were so, were so terrible at the time, like my first business failing, right? You know, like I was really beat up about that, but actually it was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

55:14And or us, invisible failing to raise a series A because VCs thought it could never become a scalable company. That was also one of the best things that could have ever happened to business. No way that we'd be 70 % owned by the team. And so you sort of mess up the, the, you know, the butterfly and the cocoon, you know, needs to struggle to become the butterflies. It's cliche, but it's true. That being said, I have three books that I recommend entrepreneurs read. These are like our three business bibles. The first is outsiders by Will Thorndyke. He was the last investor in our company. And he studied Berkshire Hathaway.

55:51He studied seven other companies, General Dynamics, Washington Post, a company called Teladine. And these are companies most people have never heard of. And the first page is a stock chart comparing their collective performance to the S &P 500 over time and to the most famous CEO that everyone had heard of Jack Welsh and his performance over time. And it's just like a hands down no contest, crush fest. Like they absolutely crushed it. And he says the way they did it is they understood how to generate capital and increase capital generation in their businesses over time. And they understood how to allocate capital.

56:29and he doesn't call it the sovereignty game, but basically most of the principles of what we've codified as the sovereignty game are in that book, right? And so I think from reading that book and from our other experiences, we were trying to sort of extend it and write the sequel, so to speak, and that's why we have more and more clarity on what the sovereignty game looks like. But none of the businesses that he talks about in that book are technology companies. And so when I was first introduced to Mr. Thorndyke, Like, that was my pitch. It's like, I want to build the first sovereignty game business in the technology industry.

57:06And so that's the first book. The second book is Seven Powers by Hamilton Helmer. And this is a book about how to defend a business from competition. And the seven powers are scale economies, network effects, switching costs, cornered resources, counter -positioning, process power, and branding. A business can, in theory, develop all the powers, but what really matters is which one you're going to be able to get to first. If you can phase into power before your competitors, you have a barrier. He makes you very aware that we usually talk about benefits, like there's so many benefits to using invisible.

57:49But what actually matters is barriers, which is why can't people solve that problem themselves or use some other company to solve that problem? Why do they need to use you? Why are you the only source of that supply? And those barriers end up creating the enterprise value over time. And he tells some great stories. And the Netflix blockbuster story is one of the main ones that really stuck with me. And then the third is innovators dilemma, like by Clayton, Christianson. And the innovator's dilemma is of the three books, it's actually the most subtle and nuanced of the books because the innovator's dilemma shows up in a whole bunch of different ways.

58:29And a really good example is actually infinity. So you asked me earlier, what does our corporate structure look like? Our corporate structure is basically my sort of PhD thesis about how to solve the innovator's dilemma. That is the challenge that we're trying to solve as a company. Because we don't want to lose the entrepreneurial magic and we don't want to stop doing zero to one innovation as we scale, but scale is the enemy of innovation in most companies. And so you can understand how this works from a numbers perspective actually. If by the end of the year we hit our targets and we do, you know, we're at a 250 to 300 run rate.

59:12And these new businesses, I started an incubator called Infinity last January. And they're, you know, the incubator is a business and there's seven businesses inside of it. And each of them has CEOs. And by the end of this year, collectively, they're tracking for $10 million to run rate. But that's only one, you know, that is a, that is like 3 % of the overall group revenues or less. It's just such a small percentage of the overall revenue, seemingly it doesn't matter. But every year you play out the story, this incredible dynamic occurs. So invisible's growth rate because of physics will slow down, even though even if we continue growing at an incredible rate.

59:59Because let's just say next year we grow to 500 million of revenue in the year after that, we grow to 850 in the year after that. We go to 1 .2, the year after that, we go to 1 .6 and then 1 .9. Eventually, you slow down your growth rate over time. As long as you, like last year, we were at 300 percent this year, 150 was the goal. Next year, 100 is the goal. Then it becomes 80 and 70 and 60 and 50 and 40 and 30. As long as you stay above 25, you're actually in legendary performance territory. If you can maintain that over 20 years, right? That's what Apple did, Amazon did, Berkshire did, all the companies that you've heard of as legendary businesses, they stayed at 25 % plus compounding over decades.

1:00:43And that's why my favorite website is mathisfun .com slash compound interest calculator. If you really play with the compound interest calculator, it's mind blowing what 25 % does over 20 years. But these new infinity companies, even though they're only like 2 % of our revenues this year, next year they're going to grow it over 100%. And they're going to stay at over 100%, a lot longer as the big business matures and the growth rate slows down. The small businesses will be able to stay at hyper growth, super high growth rates, and will be able to piggyback on the success of the big business, which will lift the group average.

1:01:21But the only way you can do that zero to one innovation is you have to have separate structures. You have to put people in separate boxes. You have to ring fence them and create these separate businesses with separate cap tables. And so the way we've done it is the CEO of a new company inside of our incubator gets a path to owning 25 % of that business. The team, the Employee Stack Option Pool has a path to 25 % and we for the first 5 million of the business are getting 50 % of the business and control over the business and we're networking all these businesses together. So there are AirPods, iPhone, iPad, Macbook, it's operations as a service, hiring as a service, strategy as a service, sales as a service, finances as a service.

1:02:08That's what we're doing. But that structure allows those, that board, that CEO, that team to focus on, growing that business without too much interference or distraction from this big company, and it gives them the resources they need. If we try to do that sort of innovation inside of the big company, they would be crushed. They would not get any time, any attention, any energy, any money, and what a waste, you know, what a missed opportunity. So when you're dealing with, you know, too much opportunity, there's one solution which I think is the sort of amateur solution which is focus. Just pick one, one of the many opportunities and just focus on that because it's big enough.

1:02:54But the real promo which Christians and Getzat is set up separate businesses and each one of those businesses should focus. But that actually allows you to achieve the meta goal of going after the entire opportunity. Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs, that they spent billions on biodefense weapons, the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA? Well, a company called Viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome in the RNA in your blood.

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1:05:15I wanna talk about your lifestyle, Francis. It's pretty extraordinary. share with folks what it's like to be. You're taking the role of founder and chairman and Ben Plummer has taken the role of CEO. It was that easy to pull a CEO in, but before that, I'll speak to you one moment you're in Southeast Asia, a next moment you're in Europe, now you're up in Vancouver. Do you own a home? No, I don't. I was living in New York and then I put all my stuff in storage and I became a nomad about a year ago. And I'm in a new city almost every week and I'm going where the business is, which is everywhere. So there are opportunities in all these places.

1:06:08Like there are so many great companies in Vancouver, Lulu Lemons in Vancouver, Arcterix is in Vancouver, Slack is in Vancouver, Hootsuite is in Vancouver. There's some new unicorns here. And so if you come here and you get introduced to the right people and you host a dinner, like we had a wonderful dinner on Sunday night with deep conversations I'll never forget and I'm now going to be friends with these people for hopefully for the rest of my life. And then I'll keep coming back and over time a community forms and we've been building these communities on WhatsApp. We call them Mafias. So we have our Vancouver Mafia now.

1:06:47We have our New York City Mafia as like 300 people in it. And it's like a private social network. We've built on WhatsApp. And we also have been adding our friends to, you know, business syndicate. So we added all of our investor friends to our investor syndicate and they share deals. We add all our entrepreneur friends to our entrepreneur syndicate. We have a longevity syndicate. We have a AI syndicate and these are networks that we're building over time. And it's a way of creating culture when you have a fully remote company with no office. If you think about what it would have been like to build a business like this in the 1980s, I would be probably on Wall Street or something with an actual office.

1:07:30And the way you know that you're making progress is that you're upgrading to a fancier and fancier office and you have more and more floors in the building. and you can actually meet all the people and shake their hands. And the way I know this is real is I'm in Buenos Aires and we have 111 people and I've never been in Buenos Aires before but all these people share our value, share the mission, I talk to them, I hear their stories and that's how I know it's real is because I get dinner with them in person and not just on Zoom. And so yeah, we have partners in all these places, agents in all these places, clients in all these places, and then advisors, and board members, and friends, and allies in all these places.

1:08:12So I think of it as sort of like a global, you know, remote work phenomenon, this new pneumatic, you know, lifestyle as possible. And then I'm also having fun adventures like I went scuba diving in Costa Rica, I invited my parents like, you know, if you don't live anywhere, the people that you love, your friends, your family, they come to you. And then you take your mom and dad scuba diving for the first time. Or, you know, somebody, one of our board members and one of our clients are big mountaineers. And they took me to go climb Mount Rainier a couple of weekends ago. So that was exciting. So it's a challenging lifestyle because every variable in your life is changing except for you.

1:08:59So it forces you to get really deep into certain routines that you can take with you everywhere. for me, those are yoga and meditation and reading the classics, reading books by dead people. And I can do that anywhere, even in an airport. And then in terms of bringing in Ben as CEO and then Ben as CEO of Invisible and he's doing a great job, I'm so delighted and he's doing a better job than I would and that's why I hired him. And I think that these four roles get confused. Founder, CEO, president, and chairman. These are very different roles. The founder is often the sole of business, the cultural and creative strategic force.

1:09:47And founders are usually kind of wild. And I'm certainly wild. And it's actually tough for a founder to be both a revolutionary and a fiduciary. It's a very different yin yang parts and sometimes you mature into it, but usually you start as a revolutionary and become a fiduciary over time. The CEO is a person running the business. For years, I was basically stuck in my apartment in New York grinding away, endless amounts of calls and emails and Zoom calls and meetings. and you're like a doctor that's on call 24, 7, 365. And because you're building the business brick by brick. And so your Monday meetings are like, show me your OKR, show me your bank charge, show me your budgets.

1:10:33Where are we out on this? Where are we out on that? And it's the E in CEO that's the hard part. It's execution, right? It's always executing. Then there's the president. The president is like on planes, kissing babies, and building political alliances all around the world. And those relationships can turn, they start as friendships and they can turn into all kinds of things. They can become an advisor or a board member. They can become a client. They can become, you can do a joint venture with them. You can start a company with them. They can become co -founders. You can hire them. They can, you know, you can invest in them.

1:11:06There's so many things you can do with these relationships, but that's what the president is doing is holding the social capital, of the organization and the loyalty and continuing to orient people towards the long -term vision. The Chairman is sort of on the mountaintop, so to speak, and the Chairman is focused on capital allocation, big decisions like should we buy a company or should we raise money or what have you. Governance, running boards and making sure there's accountability, it's a very adult role being a Chairman. You know, holding people accountable to results, you're responsible for hiring and firing all the way up to the CEO level.

1:11:45And you're responsible for incentives and pricing and compensation and for the sequencing of the roadmap of the business. And so, you know, in the beginning, when you start a company and there's only one person and you and your dog, right, you're all four of those roles and you're the janitor, right? Like you're all this. And then over time, you sort of slowly unbundle. So, maybe now we're unbundling the CEO role. We have a Shah Brumand as CEO of Infinity. He's doing a great job. Almost three decades of tech enabled services, executive and entrepreneurial experience at ABB and Arriba and other companies.

1:12:24And then under him we have seven or eight CEOs that are all amazing. And a lot of these are early invisible people who've been with the company for in one case has been with me from the beginning, but others six years or something. And they've already earned their stock and invisible and now they want to do the zero to one journey again. And so they're there. And then over time, I'm probably going to hire more presidents because I don't know if this lifestyle is sustainable forever. I'm young. I'm turning 35 in two weeks. So I will, you know, I can do this for probably until I'm 40. But then at some point, we'll probably need to hire probably not just one president, but there might be 12 presidents that are super high trust, high loyalty people that are doing this lifestyle and then I'll be chairman and then I'll have to figure out how to escape out of that job.

1:13:12And it kind of is, it is the art of abstraction. We talk about this. Most people, if you're in an employee mindset, you don't want someone else to take your job. But if you're in an entrepreneurial mindset, you're actually trying to work yourself out of a job. You do it once, you do it 10 times, you do it 100 times, you master it or you get as good as you can be at it, even if you're working on your weakness. And then you hire someone who's going to do it better than you. You train them, you manage them, and then you're abstracted. And then you do another job. But when you're in that abstracted place for a short period of time, you're sitting in the void.

1:13:49You don't know your job is anymore. You're staring at the ceiling. That void place is actually where all the ideas come from and all the values created. You're then doing the zero to one thing of doing, you know, you created a new job for yourself. and you're doing it again and then you hire someone to do it and then you manage them and abstract up. And then you're managing a whole bunch of people and you hire someone to manage them. And then you're managing managers and then you're managing executives and then you're trying to hire chairman. And there was a political theorist in the last century you said the sovereign governs in the state of exception.

1:14:28So, as long as you're in a position to fire, which is something we don't like talking about, it's the brutal reality, though, of a hierarchy in business, then you are in control of the structure. And so, I've been paying special attention to board governance. And so, we have four directors in theory, a majority of them could fire me. But these are people that are incredible people. and they're so accomplished. One of them was the head of corporate development for under Bill Gates and Steve Balmer for decades at Microsoft, Charlie Songhurst. He's my vice chairman. And I've been on a call with him like every week for seven years.

1:15:07And I trust him. And so you surround yourself with people that correct your blind spots. And those are the people that you ultimately trust to put a sword to your neck if you've lost your mind and you're doing the wrong thing. But that same accountability works downwards as well. So if I ever got to the point where we were hiring presidents and hiring chairman, there would have to be the similar accountability and that sort of your way out. And eventually, hopefully you just have the title of human, you know, you're just Peter or you're just Francis and you dropped all the titles. And in your judge for the value you brought to world, your life, the life of those that you touched, and the dreams that you have going forward.

1:15:55Francis, you've built an amazing company, and I'm so proud of you as a friend and thank you for the time that you gave us on stage at the abundance summit this year. I know we had a huge number of our members interested in invisible as a potential platform to help them operationalize their lives efficiently. I want to go there for our last few minutes here. If someone is thinking about, well, how do I use invisible to automate and to operationalize? What's your advice to them? How did they get started? Well, everyone quotes you now, Peter, and calls invisible the easy button. So most businesses are hearing about all these advances in AI and automation and they struggle to figure out how to actually use that in their business.

1:16:46So invisibles the easy button for figuring out how do I use automation? How do I use AI? How do I use, you know, sort of sci -fi operations, the best practices and operations in 2024? How do I use that to run this business or how do I, you know, use it to create a new capability or create a massive efficiency? And usually, I'm sure everyone in the audience is thinking about some specific problem right now in your business that you're stuck on and you're trying to solve and it's coming up in meetings. That's the problem we want you to give us. We want you to give us the hard problems. And you can reach out sales at invisible .co.

1:17:22Just send us an email or go to the website and you can fill out a form and reach out. And we're pretty reachable. Like, you can reach out to me, some folks reach out to me on LinkedIn. and I try to check that inbox and respond. Usually I'll just say email me, I'm also accessible, Francis at invisible .co. Oops, I just gave out my email on a podcast and what am I gonna do, drown in email? And you are and your team is amazing. Just really responsive. I'm sort of like, there's gotta be 1 ,000 AI agents that are actually your team instead of the humans out there. But they come with a passion of hope and service.

1:18:07Again, if you don't mind just rattle off the clients that you've served over the last two or three years so people understand the scope and quality of who you're serving. Well, first, you know, the first big enterprise contract where you got this doordash and then that turn into Uber, GrubHub, delivery here, a bold, rocky, Walmart .com, and then OpenAI, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, CoHear, AI21, Character AI, Proplexity. And then now we're working with some big names in the finance industry, some of which I can't say, they're like tier one private equity firms and others that I can. We've done work with NASDAQ and our convest and others.

1:18:55So it's been an incredible journey. It's just also the dawn of time for AI and automation and for our business. Amazing. Amazing. And again, on social, they find you where? If I'm in LinkedIn, probably the best place. Francis Pedraza, F -R -A -N -C -I -S, P -E -D -R -A -Z -A. Or otherwise, look out the window if you happen to be, you know, in Costa Rica or in Indonesia or someplace in climbing some mountain, you might find Francis there. You're a virtualized probability function on planet Earth for the moment. I'm like a ghost. We have 150 people in Katmandu and I'm going to Nepal for my first time this July.

1:19:43So there you go. I'll be anywhere. Incredible. Thank you for the work that you do. Thank you for your friendship. Thank you. I'm honored. I'm truly honored by your friendship and by your loyalty over time. You saw me through not just one failure, but like a long journey and you continued to believe in me and that. I think is why so many entrepreneurs trust you. Thank you, buddy. Thank you.

1:20:18And Doug, here we have the Lemo Emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their core insurance and save hundreds with liberty mutual. Fascinating, it's accompanied by His natural ally Doug! Uh, Lemoo? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera! They see us! Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual .com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and Affiliates Excludes Massachusetts.