710: (Solo) I Asked 10 Billionaires The Same Question - Here's What They Said

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1:03Welcome back to another episode of the Founder Solo to Solo podcast. I share my lessons building founder for the past 10 years. I get so many questions. This is the number one thing that people ask me like, what are the pearls of wisdom that you have learned from interviewing so many successful people? I've interviewed over 100 billionaires and I've been doing this for 12 years. People like Richard Branson, Mark Cuban, Drew Houston, Kendra Scott, people who've built billion dollar companies from absolutely nothing. And at some point during one of these conversations, I start asking the same question.

1:38If you lost everything tomorrow, the money, the brand, the team, and you had to start completely from scratch, what would you do first? So I'm going to share with you 10 billionaires, 10 different industries, 10 different personalities and their exact answers. wildly different on the surface but underneath every single one of them was the exact same theme it's probably not what you think so this is what they told me hear the stories learn the proven

1:59Nathan Chan:methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship welcome to the founder podcast with nathan chan all right so let's kick it off number one richard branson the first person I asked this question too. And I'll never forget, this was one of our most earliest cover stories at Founder. I was literally working at my parents' house in their basement in Melbourne. No credibility, no connections, no audience. And I somehow got Richard Branson. So his answer was instant. Didn't even think about it. He said, I'd find the right people. That's it. Just got to give people a go. Let them go.

2:38Have fun with it. No talk about strategy. No talk about a business plan. No market research. he's always starting with people and he's an incredible leader he runs like a hundred different companies right and he's got one assistant you see he lives on his island and he leaves other people to run this stuff it's incredible how he thinks about people management people leadership and when you think about it that's how virgin was built every time branson entered a new industry airlines, music, space, the first thing he did was find someone brilliant and back them. He didn't try to become an expert in every field.

3:17He found the experts and got out of their way. And to be honest, this is something that I need to do a better job at. In my history and my career, I could do a better job at stop trying to micromanage, let go. And this is something I need to keep reminding myself because I've got an amazing team and sometimes I just get two hands on because I've got a passion and it's something that I'm still working through as a leader. All right, number two, Drew Houston, the founder and CEO of Dropbox. He built Dropbox into a company worth billions and billions of dollars, listed on the NASDAQ. It's one of the most visited and used tools on the internet.

3:53And he gave me a completely different answer. He said the first thing you do is learn. He used this phrase that stuck with me. Founders have to be learning machines. The moment you stop learning, the business starts dying. and he didn't mean take a course or read a book he meant develop the habits of relentless curiosity study what's working study what's not talk to customers reverse engineer the competition make learning your operating system and what i took from that is the gap between where you are and where you want to be almost always is a knowledge gap a knowledge and a wisdom gap and the fastest founders close that gap faster than anyone else all right number three john Paul DeGioria, JP.

4:36He's built two separate billion dollar brands, Paul Mitchell hair products and Patron Tequila. And this guy was a guy who was homeless. He's been a shark on Shark Tank. He was homeless twice before any of it happened. And his answer, I'd learned to sell door to door if I had to. And he told me the story of starting Paul Mitchell with$700,$700. He went door to door to hair salons getting rejected over and over. And he said, the thing that changed everything wasn't the product, it was learning how to handle rejection without taking it personally. He didn't say I'd find a great product or I'd build a brand.

5:13He said sell, because if you can sell, you can eat. Everything else comes after. All right, number four, Kendra Scott. So Kendra turned$500 into a billion dollar jewelry empire. $500, that's less than most people spend on their first batch of Facebook ads. When I asked her what she'd do first, she didn't hesitate. I'd go talk to my customer, not build a website, not design a logo, talk to the customer. She told me that when she started, she'd set up local markets and flea markets and just watch people interact with her jewelry. She wasn't just selling. She was studying. What do they pick up first?

5:49What do they put down? What questions do they ask? That real-time feedback loop is what shaped the entire brand. And this one hit me because this is something that almost every founder skips. certainly in the early days they build in isolation they think their product is super perfect and they tattoo it to their arm like it's something with such pride that they can't get rid of and then they wonder why nobody buys so Kendra didn't guess what people wanted she watched them tell her number five is Mark Cuban so Mark Cuban's answer surprised me the most because everyone expects him to say something about hustle or deal making or being a shark but he didn't he said I'd follow my effort not my passion and that distinction is everything his point was passion is what people talk about effort is what people actually do if you look at where you naturally spend your time where you lose track of the hours where you find yourself going deeper without anyone telling you to that's the signal not what sounds good at a dinner party he said most people chase what they think they should be passionate about and the billionaires that he knows they just followed what they couldn't stop doing.

6:58And that's a massive difference. Number six, Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins was one of the most memorable interviews I've done. I've interviewed him twice, both times, incredible. Early days, I interviewed him on Skype in my parents' basement. Real quick, before we jump in, I want to shout out one of our sponsors, Zero. I've used Zero from day one of Founder, 13 years now, and it's still how we run the business today. It's cloud accounting software built for founders exactly like us. And it automates all the admin that I used to do when I first started founder invoicing, chasing payments, expenses, all the accounting, it really helps me get paid faster and keep an eye on cash flow.

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7:59Years later, I saw him again in person and he remembered that conversation. And this is a guy who meets thousands of people every week. He remembered. And that tells you everything about how present he is. And his answer is, I'd master psychology before I touch strategy. He said 80 % of success is psychology, 20 % is mechanics. Most founders fail not because they don't know what to do, it's because of fear, self-doubt, emotional reactions knock them off course before the strategy ever gets a chance to work. And I've seen this play out a hundred times, the tactical stuff, the marketing funnels, the product.

8:38You can learn all of that. There are courses for everything, But if you can't focus on your mindset, manage your own head, none of it matters. Your mindset is either your engine or your handbrake. And this is something that I've personally struggled with as well around feeling like an imposter, self-doubt, not believing in myself, not feeling worthy. All of these different things have held me back over the years. And I'm sharing this with you guys because we all feel it, right? I just want to be vulnerable. All right, number seven, Jamie Kern-Lima. she built it cosmetics from nothing she was about to go bankrupt and sold it to l 'oreal for 1.2 billion she became the first female ceo in l 'oreal's history and the whole thing started because she had rosacea and couldn't find a single product that actually worked for her skin her answer i'd bet on the thing about me that everyone else sees as a weakness she told me the story of her first qvc segment she spent two years pitching QVC to get that shot two years of hearing no and the moment before going on air she threw out the script instead of doing the polish beauty presenter thing that everyone told her to do she wiped off her makeup on live television and showed her rosacea the producers were panicking but the phones lit up everyone in the beauty industry had told her she didn't look the part she wasn't a supermodel she had a skin condition and the exact thing the thing she said was her weakness became the reason that customers trusted her the floor was the brand and her point the thing that you're probably trying to hide is most likely your biggest competitive advantage so stop polishing it away number eight scooter brawn so scooter built a billion dollar entertainment empire he discovered justin bieber on youtube when he was 13 years old He managed Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, Usher.

10:35And when I interviewed him for the show, it was one of the most vulnerable, unexpectedly incredible interviews. His answer, what he shared with me was, I'd find one person I believed in more than they believed in themselves. And I'd go all in on them. That's literally how it started for him. He saw a kid singing cover songs on YouTube, flew to his hometown in Canada and convinced his mother to let a complete stranger manage her son's career. No track record, no label backing, just conviction. And what struck me about the interview that I did with Scooter, he didn't talk about strategy or deal making.

11:10He talked about belief. He said the most valuable skill in business is not negotiation. It's the ability to see someone's potential before they see it in themselves and make them feel it. And this connects right back to the pattern, right? You can see the theme. It's about people. Scooter didn't start with a business plan. He started with a person. Number nine, Radek Sali. He went from cleaning movie theaters as a teenager to leading Swiss wellness to a$1.6 billion exit. And his answer connected directly to something I've experienced building founder. He said, I'd invest in trust with my team, with my customers, with my partners.

11:52High trust is the fastest accelerator in business. And I've seen this firsthand. When you have a high trust team, decisions happen fast. There's no friction, no second guessing, no office politics. Everyone moves in the same direction. Low trust, everything slows to a crawl. Every decision takes three meetings and a slack thread. Trust isn't a soft skill. It's a speed multiplier. And Raddick said if he had to start from zero, he'd build trust before he built anything else. And then number 10, Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn. And he said something that changed how I think about business entirely.

12:30He said, if you're playing a solo game, you always lose out to a team. And his version of starting over, he'd build his network before he needed it. Not after he had something to sell, not after he had a product or a pitch deck before. And that hit me personally because that's literally the founder story. Like the magazine was my excuse to build relationships with incredible people. The interviews weren't the product. They were the network and everything else. The courses, the membership, the coaching side of the business, all of it grew from those relationships. I didn't plan it that way. But looking back, this network is what came first and the business followed.

13:04So here's what I noticed, guys. 10 billionaires,$10 billion exits, 10 different answers. But look at what none of them said. Nobody said I'd write a business plan. Nobody said I'd build a website. I'd raise money. Nobody said I'd find a co-working space or register an LLC or I'd set up my social media. Every single answer came back to people. Find the right team, talk to the right customer, build the right network, master your own psychology, bet on someone before anyone else will and invest in trust. Billionaires don't think about business the way most people think about business. They don't start with the product.

13:39They don't start with the brand. They don't start with the strategy. They start with human connection. And businesses are built by people, whether that's a customer, a hire, a mentor or themselves. Every answer I got was about a human being connecting with another human being. And that's it. That's the whole game. It's all leadership. It's all about leadership of yourself. It's all about self-development. So if you're stuck right now, you're spinning your wheels on tactics, the funnels, the shiny object. I want you to ask yourself this. Who is the one person I should be talking to that I've been avoiding?

14:12Maybe it's a customer. Maybe it's a potential hire. Maybe it's a mentor who's where you want to be. Call them. That's your starting line. Because if I've learned anything from doing this for 12 years, is that the answer is almost never another tool. It's always another person. I've got three things for you guys I'd love you to do. First and foremost, please subscribe to the show. The more subscribers we get, the better the quality of the guests. Second thing is share this with one friend. The more people that you can share this with, the better. It just helps us grow the show and really, really help them grow their business or their brand or whatever they're doing right now to start or grow or scale their brand and then the third one is just leave us a review it helps more than you can imagine all right thank you so much i'll speak to you soon