2476 - Why Focus and Mental Fitness Are the Ultimate Business Advantages for Founders with Unicorn Coach's Cornelius Schmahl

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0:46Visit PodVerified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, it's Cornelius Schmall. Cornelius, you are an angel investor, and you were the founder of Unicorn Coach, found on the web at unicorn.coach. Cornelius, it's great to have you. Thank you for having me. Thank you. I love the name Cornelius, too. When you popped in here, I'm like, that's a badass name, man. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I'm starting to like it more than I get. Yeah, yeah. So, hey, before we get going, you know, talking about the work that you do and we'll talk about the work you're doing with Unicorn Coach.

1:31I always love hearing what leaders do for fun when they're not at work. So tell me what you've been into when you're not working. I mean, honestly, the main thing I'm into is yoga and meditation because I had a slip disc and a burnout when I was 29. And so I was forced to, I was pretty fat, like for Europeans. And it was pretty like 100 kilos, smoking a lot, drinking a lot of beer. And then I had a slip disc and needed to get myself an order. So I started off this yoga meditation. Now I started Thai boxing here in Thailand. It's really fun and humbling. Can I ask you a question? So yoga meditation often go together.

2:13how does meditation um how have you found that to assist with your overall kind of health and well-being like the health aspect of your wealth well-being yeah i think it's it's mega underestimated because it's like we have multiple bodies and this is with a physical body with a mental body in that theory and it just cleans out the mental body it's like doing exercises doing yoga doing healthy nutrition but for our brain to a certain degree i would say so it really helps especially when we're in a very fast-paced environment when i was at uber was like six seven days a week and now i realize you need to sometimes chill out because you make a lot better decisions when you're calm and centered so the meditation i think incredibly improves the quality of decision making and that is probably my i think the biggest money making skill is to a certain degree meditation because you avoid making shitty mistakes like you just avoid making dumb bad decisions that cost you a lot of money um yeah so it's very good for me but it's really shit it's hard man it's really hard it's very very very hard skill who wants it to meditate yeah i yeah i agree i you know my you know my brain yeah my brain just like hey let's think about that it's just you know it's like uh hey squirrel and you know it's starting to start things just pop in there and it's like okay and you know i know the you know the antidote or not antidote but you know the best thing to do is just kind of observe it and let it pass rather than like oh no don't think about that don't think about the statue of liberty Don't think about, you know, don't think about an elephant.

3:57Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. But it's, it's, man, it's tedious because you don't have a feedback mechanism much. It's like, you know, when you run, you see how many kilometers you've done. You see you're faster than last time. So in our competitive nature, like we want feedback mechanism that we see we're going in the right direction. Meditation, you just sit for 15 minutes and your brain is, you get, you know, reflected all the craziness in our own head back at us. And then we're like, oh, fuck. Okay. now I'll go back to work. But over time it starts to settle and then it gets calmer and calmer and calmer and calmer.

4:31And then we have, you know, very positive effects, able to just calm our mind down much more. But it's very cool. Yeah. Well, I appreciate that. Thank you. Um, any recommendation for a beginner who's like, you know, I used, I've tried it, you know, I've, I've kind of, you know, had a good spell for a while there. And then I just haven't been keeping up with the practice um and any advice i mean honestly i think doing very little each day is better than doing a lot like i think for me it was so hard to just sit for five minutes just for five minutes was really hard and i got myself took me a year to get to 10 15 minutes that i can just not run around um but honestly i think breathing these all these wim hof method this breath work is probably just a lot more accessible and easier because you have a direct like you breathe you do like the standard Huberman breath or whatever any breathing technique and it's just like physiologically your system relaxes that you get instant reward and so I I would recommend that usually to people I love it I love it thank you so much for sharing that I I am duly inspired uh let's talk about unicorn coach your website unicorn.coach your invention deserves to reach the world?

5:48Tell me more. Yeah. When I was born out of me being lucky to stumble into unicorns, basically as an employee. Basically, the companies I worked at or my longer stations were all turned into unicorns. And so I was in that environment and I started angel investing and I realized that there are so many incredible ideas out there and they don't get into society and or so uber was like i mean it's it's a pretty basic idea right like it's basically a taxi on a phone so it's pretty straightforward but like getting that into the world and seeing how even such a basically primitive idea can have quite a positive impact in terms of your millions of jobs created like safer cities and in many in many countries like positive impact through it and then i see these inventions of of some of my investments are like oh my god this is so cool this can really change the way or improve the way we live and so really helping because most of my clients are phd founders who are usually university spin-offs and help them bring their crazy ideas into the world um so that's how it started but honestly i work with so many smes it used to be more venture funded but now i work a lot with founders like people who are building a business and these these things that help a crazy innovative idea go to a market that doesn't exist yet work very well for normal business like bringing some crazy innovation into the world it's just like a lot more hard than scaling a normal functioning business that has revenue um so i know this is actually quite fun to instead of trying to pump valuations and get these It's the kind of things which build really serious businesses, basically, like cash flow, high cash flow businesses.

7:46And yeah, that's where we are right now. Yeah. So you have been able to, or the fund, or I'm not sure how it works, but like on your website, you talk about the fact that you were, or your shareholder in seven unicorn companies, including Uber, who you actually worked as an interim COO for in Moscow, Russia back in 2017, which is kind of crazy. You know, my question is, what is it that separates a unicorn from lots of other great companies? I mean, other than they have a billion dollar valuation. But I'm just saying, what are the makings of a company that has the wherewithal to go there? Yeah.

8:36I mean, honestly, I think it's like with every sport. Like business is, in a sense, a sport, right? and um like this football or basketball or swimming it's a sport and to some people go really really really hard at it and have natural predispositions um for it but what i've noticed what they have in common often is that the founder has a a certain amount of experience about this topic like these unicorns that i was involved with yes and they were some of them were phd founders some of them were you know the serial or someone starting the second or third company and these were usually people who knew some of their stuff that were not necessary 19 years that exists to mark zuckerberg but it's pretty rare uh in like the real in like when you look at the broader field of business these are the absolute exceptions um so they have some experience and then they're able to focus like zoom is a good example he worked at webex they're doing this you know basically the same thing as zoom but in a more clustered messy way he learned there he knew he had his experience and then he focused on the part of it where he felt as the biggest leverage and that brings me to the third part is then they leveraged the shit out of it and that's what usually like generally when you look at smes in most cases the experience is there but then there is often the fear of focusing because focus means you have to cut something off decision means cut and that is where i would say from like for smes usually first i was like we need to focus this business when i work with sme clients and sometimes the um the son took over from the dad and now he's willing to

10:25yeah excellent according to still there yeah okay so um so he's willing to change things up um and then often we try to focus the business we try to think what would a private equity company do when they buy it like they focus they focus they trim they see what is what is the essential part of the business because usually in most cases somehow 20 of the stuff that company does creates 50 to 70 of the value and then sometimes over 100 of the value and then the remaining 80 actually destroys value that has had i've seen that too many times like you have a business unit that's pumping money and all the other business units just feed from that business unit and kind of then companies more or less break even but you would have an incredible business if you trim it right and then the leverage part i think is where it's just it's a personality thing and i think to do to do unicorn you just need to be certain to a certain degree crazy right like you have to have you have to have some trauma and madness in you that you think 10 million is not enough like seriously now i mean i used to grow up in this business so i was always like nothing besides a billion everything is bullshit i really have to say i totally changed that because now i feel honestly if you're running a business and you own it yourself and you're making three million revenue it's amazing like just be happy and enjoy your life like you don't need to build a unicorn like if you want to make it more profitable okay and there's many ways to do it but like you need to be sort of a psycho to be be like being oh no i want to build this business I'm already rich beyond my means, but now I want to sacrifice my life and my weekends to go from 100 million to a billion.

12:11I mean, you need to do a certain effort for that. Yeah, what is it that drives them? It's trauma. Other than just a little bit of cuckoo-ness. It's trauma. It's really strange. In my experience now, I mean, I've been doing therapy for the last 10 years. So you ask about meditation, what I would even recommend more to meditation and breath work is just go to a therapist. For most people who are in business, this is a very, very helpful thing. And that's why I work. I'm not therapeutic people in my work. But generally, when I work with a client on the business side, I bring in a partner that works on the personal side.

12:45And that's where we usually then unlock the things and then we implement them in the business. Because it usually comes first. But, yeah, you need to be a bit cuckoo to want to build a unicorn. Like you need to have some certain level of nothing is ever enough for you. and you're usually suffering in your inner being. So I'm now not pushing people to build unicorns anymore as much. If I meet someone who's very ambitious and they have a great idea, it's sometimes just very possible, right? Sometimes some businesses, you get a feeling that it's just very possible and you want to bring good into the world, okay?

13:18But you've got to be crazy to build a unicorn. Yeah. So who have you, tell me more about who you've been able to work with in the past and what your experience is with that as part of, you know, I don't know if you're advising along or, you know, again, kind of your experience in being a part of that rise. Yeah. So you mean more in the way that I work or the clients? Yeah, tell us a story about your work with unicorns. Okay, so one story is when I was with Uber in Russia and that's probably a good one. It was a turnaround case, actually. We were getting beaten badly by Yandex, which is the Russian Google, because they have like a Google Maps and a Google Mail.

14:02So they have all the information in everyone's email addresses. And they're the biggest company in Russia, right, in terms of like internet. And so we're getting beaten badly, had like 15 % market share. And then what we did there was basically experience. I had a niche experience that was very important in this case. I'm very good at allocating money in this market, which I learned the years before said experience. then we focused on it I took control of the money because I had the best experience and in deploying it and then we leveraged it like mad and were able to double our market share make it really painful for them and they were public companies so they decided to spend over a billion basically to buy us um that was one thing so it was really like it was quite a business transformation situation right um and in terms of in terms of the the organization right we moved people from 16 offices into one office like it was quite a you know focused situation um another thing is how i work with clients is that sometimes there is a company 15 employees they have a cool product highly technical product usually so they're not they're technically very strong but don't have a lot of sales skills and they have like a product that they have small and now we work over a client of mine two and a half years together now and now they're in like 50 different locations right they went from one location to 50 locations in two and a half years and you know build like a sizable business out of out of this innovation that was before you know university spin-off lingering and then two years later you have just say you know across i don't know eight nine countries now um their their stuff is operating so these are the the nice stories where there's growth happening or a billion dollar exit is obviously great but honestly these days i work a lot with um founders of bootstrap founders usually so they don't have venture funding and their business now is getting squeezed a bit by ai and so we do quite a bit of um basically these three steps that i told you so i will workshop and then a program where i do with people that and we really identify like what is the cherry in the business that we can like really focus on and then we're trying to basically build that business from scratch with ai together um as a very small team and you sometimes see companies that ran a business with 100 people and now they can run a complex business now they can run the absolute cherry of that that is even more valuable with a team of six seven eight nine ten people and they feel again like the founders feel again they feel themselves again because well if you're 100 people often you're just managing hr issues you know it's not it's not as creative anymore than when you have a small team and now they pick their best people and then they they feel it energy often again and then build in a sense a new business which is very fun yeah and you work with very very good people yeah cornelius your website unicorn.coach uh to our friend that's been listening, what would you recommend they do from here?

17:03If they want to come learn more about what you do, I don't know if you have any resources that you would share. Oh, I have a lot of good resources on there. I got into that LinkedIn lead magnet thing a bit. And so there's many, many great case studies of clients of mine, of public companies where we're dissecting certain ways. So there's quite a bit of resources generally on it. And And I really feel like this three to four hour workshop that I do with people is generally absolutely mind blowing for them. So especially for founders who are alone, who don't necessarily have an extremely strong co-founder or they just, you know, they run their business themselves.

17:45And it has been, and their business now may be struggling with AI a bit. It's flatlining a bit. It's not growing as much anymore. It's maybe not as fun as anymore. And these three hours can be life changing. but I will be ugly. Like I will, I will not hold back. And I've done this many times. So I'm usually pretty straightforward with people and cut through certain beliefs, but it is very rewarding for people in my experience. So that can be fun. Nice. Unicorn.coach. Cornelius, it's been great having you as a guest. Thank you so much. Congratulations on the, the impact you have, the great companies that you've been able to be associated with over the years and also your recent move as well.

18:28Cool. Well, thank you so much also for your inspiration on, I think we all have an assignment here, just go try five minutes meditation so you make less frantic decisions and more, you know, in clarity. So Cornelius, thank you so much for the conversation. Thank you, Josh. Thank you. Such a pleasure.

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