E39: Magnus Grimeland - The Genius VC who invests in 2 start ups every day

33:24It's the opposite effect of kind of studying an exam where a lot of people tend to not study so much throughout the year. And then just before the exam, you crunch for a few days, right? But for a business, you got to think exactly the opposite way around. Because right now, you know, now we're five and a half, six years into Antler. My time just don't matter that much anymore. Yes, sure. I can help drive the business forward. But now the business would be perfectly okay without me. Obviously, this is a very business way to justify all the hours you put in towards your family. You can then tell them, oh, look, if I do that now in three years, we're more likely to have, I'm more likely to have time for you guys.

34:04And we're more likely to have a better life quality. But it's still a very, very business way. And the problem, I'd say, is not a problem, but people who are inclined to put that much effort earlier on into the business, today they have less effort to put in, probably are going to do something else and repeat the same process over and over again. Yeah, for sure. So I think, you know, I guess what I'm not saying that you should, if you are a trillion, you should spend some time with them. That's incredibly important. And I try to do that in the morning and between 6 to 7.30 every night and then during the weekends while they're awake.

34:47I think that's incredibly important. You need to train. You need to sleep. You need to do these things that keep you effective. You should maintain a great group of friends and value your family. But you should take away all the other waste out there and focus all of that into your business over the first kind of year or two. Can you give examples of what you mean by waste? Like

35:19Netflix

35:23Soling off lying around on the sofa

35:31Drinking Partying Partying no but i understand it completely like makes the massive difference if you remove these useless things you're going to compound so much in time this time that you yeah and it's not only i have more time to do something productive and useful it's also most of these things are actually detrimental to my health and therefore i'm going to be even less good at what i'm doing during the day yep yep and then you can choose and then you can choose to do it for a select period of time like you can choose to do it for two to three years until you You have a great team in place and then you can work a little bit less.

36:05But I think, and some people do that, right? So take Sergio Brin and a couple of the Google guys. You know, they chose to build a company, work incredibly hard for a long period of time, build one of the most amazing companies in the world. And then they decided to kind of do less, right? And then you have other people like Elon Musk who will always be in that front-loading phase, right? Like things never change. And then you have everything in between. But at least at that point in time, you have a choice, right? So, you know, three to four years into your business, five years, six years, seven years into your business, you have a choice if you built a good business.

36:42If you don't put it in upfront, you don't have a choice because you'll never get there, right? So, front-loading is a necessity as a founder, I think, to succeed in building a great business. You talked about your kids quite a lot since the beginning of this podcast. how much do you think I mean how much does or did have your first kid change your definition of success in life also I mean for me it was different because I had my first kid before college so you know it's kind of always well in my adult life it's always been a part of my life but But, you know, I do think that obviously meant that, you know, that part of your life has been a little bit different, right?

37:37So, for example, when, you know, my friends in college went for a spring break, I went home and changed diapers. So, you know. Probably made you much more mature, much faster. But the incredible thing with this, and, you know, my greatest learning was, it's such an amazing thing to have kids early on in your life right you know imagine i was i was 22 uh you know he's now 19 i'm 43 we go and runs together we go and watch the same movies we read the same books uh there's been like a long period of our life where we literally had the same interests um you know i find what he studies for his ib and physics and math like fascinating to go back and do these things together right you know so so you get to kind of and then obviously um so there's this kind of bad part of getting kind of kids early but the good part is just so much greater um uh you know because we got to live that young life together right uh you understand each other basically you understand him you're not disconnected as someone who is much older and I'm not curious.

38:48If you get, I mean, there's not, everyone should have kids whenever they want to have them. I don't think when is, but again, that's entrepreneurship. I think the earlier, the better.

39:01And now it's different. We have now a two and a half and a two and a half year old and a six pounds old. And obviously now it's a whole completely different environment. You know, when my first son was born, we didn't have any money, hadn't built anything. still a college student now obviously we have different economic environment you have more help so you get to spend more quality time but at the same time obviously you think about the future right you know when they are the same age as as Leo is my son I'll be you know in my 60s right so I'll be a different type of parent maybe still running an Ironman at 60 plus.

39:48Hopefully. What would you say to the potential entrepreneur out there who is not starting because she's afraid of failing? Yeah, I don't think anyone should not start because of that fear because

40:15it's almost any founder out there has failed at some point in time and and you learn a lot from it and the worst case scenario you try one more time so I wouldn't go in and be afraid of that what I think is more important is

40:36you got to change that mindset when you get started because Because the most important thing to do first is decide to do it. Don't let that fare hold you back. And then once you decided to do it, get rid of the fare.

40:53Because if you have this mindset that you might fail, if you have this mindset that failure might be an option when you're building a business, that will seep in when you hit very difficult moments in building and it might convince you to stop. And a lot of great businesses didn't succeed because their founders gave up on the way. Like very often, it's not the best team that wins, but it's the most resilient team. And you need to build that mindset going into building something, because if you go into building something, being afraid of failing and thinking that you might fail, the likelihood of failing will just be much, much higher.

41:30How do you get rid of this fear?

41:35So I think it depends from every individual. like i've had a couple of different experiences but it's a one is obviously when i was doing the military stuff because you know when in in in the SEAL training there's you know i think there's 700 to 1 ,000 people who want to try and do it every year and in norway there's eight to ten people who get through so the likelihood of failure is you know 99.2 percent or something like this so so my mindset there was just thinking that there you know I put myself in the box where there's no other option right like you it's like I almost thought if you're in jail you can't just wake up one morning and decide that I don't want to be in jail anymore you can't be in there right so like if you build this mindset okay there is no other alternative I think in building a business this doesn't work as well I think this works better towards like a singular achievement in a way.

42:32But for building a business, what helped me a ton is just like building a lot of social pressure, right? So if you look about Antler, if you look at my Facebook, if you look at Instagram, if you look at LinkedIn, Twitter, if you go to dinner with me or whatever there's very seldom very long time in between me talking about what i'm doing to literally everyone and pulling everyone in right that's pulling you in in our advisory network well you know most of my friends have a little bit of money has invested into our funds and um you know so very quickly failure doesn't become an option right and you know there's a lot of studies on this when it comes to like quitting smoking and all these types of stuff as well right you know the most important way the best way to stop smoking is just to tell everyone that just stop smoking that's the only thing you really need to do it doesn't always work but it works apparently better than any other way and this thing tends to work for me i think for other founders it works differently right but figure out what that is right whether it's watching motivational movies with alonor swachnagher every morning or you know uh meditating or doing yoga or doing sports whatever it is but you gotta get rid of that mindset that failure might be an option because i think very often people end up giving up too early just because of that so set up big goals and overshare them with people so you don't have an excuse to abandon them that's very smart actually what are the most common mistakes that you've seen entrepreneurs make and what advice would you give them to not make those so front loading I spoke about earlier so not spending enough time up front I think there are when I spoke about the kind of mindset of failure, I think one other thing, a mistake I see very often in founders is they don't get comfortable with hustling, right?

44:49So if you're a university student or you work for someone in a company, you're in an environment where people always tell you what to do, right? And you get a task, you have an exam you got to read these books whatever it is as an entrepreneur there is no one there to tell you what to do and nobody will automatically come to you and say hey can I invest in your business nobody will automatically come to you and say hey can I work for you nobody will automatically come to you and say hey can I please be your customer yes at some point in time that will happen right you know once you build an incredibly successful product and your company is growing, that will happen.

45:33But it takes a long time for you to get there. And this was obviously a grand awakening for me building something. You kind of feel like if you just have a great idea and you're a great team, these things will kind of magically come together, but they just don't, right? You got to learn to hustle. You got to learn to convince people. You got to get comfortable getting no's and getting a lot of them. you got to be comfortable getting 10 no's from the same person and converting it to 11th yes um you got to be very get very comfortable with rejection um and a lot of people are naturally not born that way because we're societal right like we live for affirmation in a way right so you don't want to make people around you uncomfortable you don't want to and I think in Asia there's some kind of culture like this in Norway it's definitely a culture like this you should never you don't want to bother people exactly like you don't want to so yeah but if you read about the very best founders like still today you know there are you know stories of Elon Musk calling up people asking for advice about specific things with no hesitance right Take the Nike founder, he was a student on vacation in Japan, and he pretended to be a sports company in the US and went to the big companies there selling sneakers and said, hey, we're the biggest distributor of shoes in the US.

47:11We want to sign an agreement. And he didn't have anything. Or Bill Gates went to IBM to sell the first version of Microsoft DOS. They hadn't even built the code. or you read every entrepreneur story like this and people have been able to build that hustling gene. Take Spotify. They went to 23 investors before the first investor said yes. Everyone said no. And as a founder, you'll get a ton of no's all the time. And people just are uncomfortable with that. Maybe one way to feel better about that because most of the humans, First, we're fearful of rejection. But second, there is also the cultural influence on I don't want to bother people.

47:55One way to think about that as an aspiring entrepreneur is other entrepreneurs who've made it actually love that because they understand. And even if they don't answer directly, it doesn't mean they don't care or they ignore you. It's just they're so busy. They receive, for example, yesterday I sent you the email. I said, hey, are you coming tomorrow? I know you probably have 500 or 1 ,000 emails per day. So if you, it's actually, if you're hustling and you're chasing, chasing, chasing, chasing, except if you do, no, I'm not interested, right? As long as you don't have a no, and even if you have a no, the no is just a moment in time, but it could change in the future.

48:35Therefore, you never, if you don't abandon, you're never losing. It's impossible. The whole game, maybe you just need to build more momentum or have more customers or have an introduction from the right people to that person and then you can turn that into a personal game and like you don't want me now actually with some podcast I have that I'll get you I'll get you and I even had for example I went to have the co-founder of BitMEX Arthur Hyatt and I know a girl who knows him really well and I was like can I have an intro I'll give you the deck guest to see all the previous guests everything And she answered directly and probably she didn't even ask him because she was like, oh, he's very busy, you know?

49:17And I answered and I was like, okay, I'll get him. Like, I'll get him and I'll get him through another way. And then in my mind, I was like, that day I'll get him. I'm going to freaking stick it to your face. I don't want to say bitch, but like, you know, it's just a personal game and it's very healthy. And the people who are there, the people you're trying to reach, they love that because they can recognize themselves and like this person is actually different and so you're never bothering if you're trying really hard yeah and if you turn as you said if you turn that rejection into positive energy right so um okay i'm gonna i'm gonna convert this person sometime in the future or uh i'm gonna show that i can still do this uh so i think if you can turn constructive feedback negative feedback rejection into a ton of positive energy it's very very helpful but at the beginning it's tough right because we're taught very often to say okay if you don't get an answer you or people say no you're just supposed to move on but as a founder you can't do that because you're trying to break through the wall and solve a very important problem so what i encourage a lot of i've learned um i think it's it's worth practicing as a founder right like so you can do that in any situation that you're in right if you're listening to this right now you know the next time you're in the room with five people go up to them and talk about something highly personal or ask for a favor or um you know if you're in uh walking through a shopping mall go up to a stranger like whatever it's like you can you literally practice this stuff all the time um and then uh don't be hesitant right learn learn how to hustle and then look at people around you who are naturally like that almost everyone knows someone like that right who walks into an elevator with 12 strangers elevator hits the bottom floor they're friends with everyone they're going out for drinks with two of them they're going to you know one of the guys bachelor party next friday whatever it's like there are people who are naturally like this and you can learn a lot from just observing them and spending time with them and so on yeah and worst case this person is i mean if you're really chasing i'm just thinking my our first company we built a data analytics one at this meeting with this woman who had like a really good job in a very big luxury company and we do the meeting and i'm literally 23 years old or 22 and a half and in the meeting she's super enthusiastic she's like oh yeah, this is solving all my problems, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

52:01So I'm like, and we started the company three months before. So I'm there like, I'm going to get the freaking second largest luxury group as a client after three months. Woo! This is just before Christmas. So I send a follow-up email the day after. She doesn't answer. It's Christmas, it's fine. Early Jan. I send an email, follow-up email. No answer. I'm like, okay, I'm going to wait another two days. I say, follow a follow-up email. No answer. Then I started to take it as, I'm like, what is she doing? And because she sold me so much dreams, you know, like because there's so many people who are just, they're very enthusiastic, but like don't follow up.

52:37Kind of goes to, also in the real world, friendships, dating, everything happens a lot. And professional world, so much, especially as an entrepreneur trying to get business. So I'm like, I'm going to turn this into a game, but I almost became a bit crazy. I was like, okay, she doesn't want to answer to my email. I'm going to call her. The day after I call her once, no answer. The following day, I called her twice. No answer. The following day, I called her five times. At some point, I ended up calling her like 10 times in one day. It was crazy. But like, at the end of the day, what happened? Like, she came back to me.

53:09She said, oh, I'm sorry, blah, blah, blah. You know, I had so many things to do. Obviously, she never became a client because she probably thought like, this guy is completely crazy. But like, that's it. There is another 7 billion potential customers out there or people you can talk to. and if one person doesn't like you, it's not the end of the day. I don't know. Here we go. And then you keep a list of them and then you keep them updated and at some point in time, you'll convert someone up, right? That's a very smart way to go. We have customers, people I hired that we tried to hire for three, four, five years.

53:47There are people I tried to hire that I couldn't hire in my last business. I could hire in my next business. There are investors that you wanted previously you didn't get to get them five years later. I have a great example. It was a guy I emailed about a scholarship, private scholarship to Harvard, and I was there back in 2006. Didn't end up happening. I responded to my last email to him in 2018 when we started Antlers. That's what 12 years later and said, hey, you know, you remember this? I recently built this e-commerce company called Solora. we sold it we're now building a venture capital company this is our thesis I'd love to meet and talk to you about it and he responded and we met up with him and it's one of us one of the very first investors in our business put in 10 million dollars and you know that was a no from 2006 that covered in 2018 yeah so like you know keep at it that's an amazing example and he's just like that for everything like literally literally if you can you don't fail if you don't stop basically

55:02Antler has invested in more than 600 startups and your plan by 2030 is 6 ,000 startups that's about more or less 1 ,000 startups investment per year for the next 6 years or 2 or 3 per day how the hell How are you going to do that? Yeah, so we back founders who are building companies from day zero. And we like to find people and not companies. So we like to start working with people before they got started on building their business or teams that are about to start their business. We get now about 120 ,000 applicants per year of founders who want to work with us. So 120 ,000 applicants. Compared to Harvard College, they get 60 ,000.

55:59I think Wycombe gets about 40 ,000. So we have a tremendous funnel of founders. We'd love to back more of them. But, you know, we bring in cohorts of 60 to 100 people who want to build something twice a year across now 28 locations across six continents globally. And then we end up investing in about a third to a half of them as they're building their business, coming in with their first money. And then we contribute access to other capital, big networks of talent, big network of advisors. We have offices all across the globe that can help with expansion and so on. So that's kind of the process of what we do.

56:47Now, how can we make this level of investments? Well, this year, I think we'll make about 400 investments, which sounds like a lot. But we're 300 full-time people in Antler. So it's one and a half investments per person per year. It's 20 to 30 investments in London, 20 to 30 investments in Singapore, 20 to 30 investments in other places. So it's a smaller share of the total. but you know PitchBook just came out with their their their Q2 report last quarter apparently we're now the world's most active early stage investor I saw that yeah and I think if you're a highly centralized operation that ends up becoming too much but for us you know it's highly highly selective right we in the first half of this year we backed we made 2.4 investments per thousand applicants so that's 0.1 and there's 2 founders 2.1 founders per team so we backed 0.5 % or so of the founders that applied and our team is working very hands on with those founders and those teams and you know that equated to I think 101 investments or so in Q2 this year but you know again that's one investments per three people in the company so it's very very hands on now how do we scale that towards 2030 well we're setting up a few more locations we are increasing the size of our funds in some locations so we're slightly increasing our investment pace our founder applicants is growing 2.5x per year so So, you know, I don't think we'll grow our investment pace as fast as we will at the founder applicants, but obviously we got to take some more of these opportunities of great people who want to work with us.

58:54And, you know, we're really building technology on a platform where we believe we'll be a very, very valuable early stage investor. You're focusing on pre-seeds. You said we back founders, right? We don't back companies, we back founders. So it's basically the absolute riskiest part of the investing game. Why?

59:23So when we built Solora, we had this tremendous opportunity to work with some really amazing people that have built the next generation of great companies here in the regions. For example, Nadim and Kevin who built Gojek was part of the Solora team. Chris Fenge built Shoppe was part of the slower team. The Shopback crew was part of the slower team. Michele Ferrario was a guest of yours prior as part of the slower team. Aura, Shopback, lots of great companies. And you start to realize that there's a community and networks where you can find a lot of these great people. And if you have the opportunity to work with them early, you can ensure that we have an outsized impact on the business because the earlier days are more important than the later days, as we spoke about many times in this podcast so far.

1:00:14So you can have outsized impact on the business. The reason why more people are not doing it is because, as you said, the risk goes up considerably the earlier you're coming. So the way we've set up Antler is we want to contribute a lot of value in terms of access to co-founders, validating business models. We have offices that host all these founders for the first four to six months. but through doing that we get to spend real time together before we invest because if you already have a business and you come to me and you ask for an investment i can't ask you to come can you come to my office and work with me for three months before i decide where i'm going to invest of course you can't because you're running your own business but prior we actually get to spend real time together work together like i get spend when i'm in singapore i'm you know i'm in the office every day, spending time with all the founders that are here.

1:01:06And if we spend three months together, and if you were going to decide if you want to invest in my business and I decide if I want to spend in your business, like the conviction in which you can make that decision is just incredibly higher, right? So I think it's outsized impact. And at the same time, we can remove a lot of the risk by spending real time together. Absolutely. So you lower the risk that way, obviously. And another key point that's really interesting is one of the only skills that you can, there's almost no data. I mean, maybe the person found another company before, right? But at this stage of the investing process, there is almost no data.

1:01:47Therefore, your only skills that you can make your decision on is judgment. How do you develop judgment? so

1:01:59well I think the judgment is around the quality of the founder and the founding team and basically we believe there are two or three traits that are insanely important in the founder one is that there's a spike like is there something about you is there a skill set that you've developed or something about you that a strength that where you're better than most other people in the world right i'd rather identify one thing that you're really great at than eight things you're better than average at and if i have this if i can see this one great thing that you're incredible at i care less about two or three things you're terrible at that's one incredible founder trade founders are typically quite quite spiky individuals so that's kind of one thing we're looking for we're looking for that that string.

1:02:56The second thing we're looking for is drive. So...

1:03:05drive is a combination of passion and ambition and having shown the ability to execute, right? So there's a lot of passionate founders out there, but passion itself doesn't create drive. But passion and ambition combined with being able to execute and having shown that in the past is incredibly important. That's kind of the engine of the founder. And the third thing is this last thing we spoke about earlier around failure, that people need to be gritty. They need to have a very strong mindset and conviction that they're not going to give up on building something. Because building a startup is a high contact sport, right?

1:03:49You need to have a tremendous amount of staying power. So those are the three things we're really looking for. And the great things with all three of them is you're not born with it. If you don't have it today, you can develop all three. so it means that the playing field is kind of wide open for people who want to pursue that but a lot of people won't have it right now right they they might not have developed that strength yet they might actually not have the drive they might want to become a founder because it's cool to be a founder or the friends are founders or they read some story that's not because they're actually driven and they might not have built true grit yet i think you know you build grit in different ways but definitely one's one of the ways to do it is to have have gone through some difficult moments in life what's the most difficult moment you've been through life that you think helps you with grit first in business yeah and then personal yeah uh i mean on the business side

1:04:57I think the hardest moment was in the Solora days we had a few of those moments where you kind of met the wall which seemed very difficult to get through. Is there actually a way around it? And sometimes in your business, you hit this problem that seems insolvable. So let me come with an example. So with Solora, when we launched in Indonesia, which is the most important market in Southeast Asia, there was 2 % to 3 % credit card penetration. And the way people used to pay online in Europe and the US is obviously through cards. That's how people mostly pay these days. so how did we solve that we solve that through something called bank transfer so that meant that you can go onto our website order something you get a code you take that code you go to your bank you pay with cash you get another code from the bank you go back and you check out so you know that means that your checkout process might be half an hour two hours three hours four hours depends how long it is to the bank yeah so you can imagine that can what do you think the cancellation rate was on something like that huge yeah like usually because the friction is ridiculous yeah in the 80s right and if you combine that with low basket sizes high customer acquisition costs because your assortment is not there yet it can it's unprofitable and it can really feel like a problem that is unsolvable right now how do you do that so we thought okay well can we get people more bank cards well you know you can't really become a bank like it was before go pay and all this type of stuff so we decided to launch this cash and delivery thing so basically that instead of the customer going to the bank they could pay our delivery person but then you think about the country of 200 million people and you know tens of thousands of islands and pretty rough infrastructure sending a dress from one place to another to another to another onto a truck onto a boat onto a car to a motorcycle driver and then that customer is going to pay you in cash and you know 20 20 dollars in cash and then the person is not going to keep the cash for themselves yeah then you gotta bring it all the way back right so then then you have a whole new problem right so like so so there were a few moments like this this is one of them where you feel that everything is at risk because the fundamentals of why this business model worked in europe and worked in the us just weren't in place to make it work here but then we managed to tune this cash delivery system we managed to build out infrastructure for our delivery providers we built tech for them basically where we could track this so that we could reconcile the money once it was paid and not once the money made it all the way back and then you handed over the responsibility for collecting the money to the disk provider instead yourself so a lot of the things you can work on right but but that was a tough moment because you know all of us that could get to our job we were you know 100 % in on this thing we you know we didn't take much salary we were staying in you know the cheapest hotels flying online there across the region working 100 hour weeks and uh uh and you don't know whether it was and then you hired i guess at the time we hired a thousand people or something like so you're responsible for a bunch of people as well so it's it's it's it's and i think every startup unless one who's been very very lucky has moments like this where you're like man what i do now and then everything yeah here is feeling things feels black right but then you find a way around typically if you're solving a problem that should be solved there is typically a way around you just sometimes don't see it yeah if there is if there is problems there is solutions otherwise the problem would not even exist initially because you want to get back to this kind of equilibrium point more of a spiritual way to look at it but like there is a solution to every problem otherwise the problem would not exist yeah it's just about how do you look at the thing differently yeah just how obviously like it's not just how but like uh the the perspective by which you look at that.

1:09:47Iterating, trying solutions. And the most important thing is not to be there in the headlights, right? And freeze, which on occasion happens and can be the death of companies. What about personal life? In personal life, it's, you know, it's been multiple, you know, difficult situations through life. I think the hardest period from a mental and physical perspective was definitely the military training. Obviously, you can watch how the selection processes are online,

1:10:35and you can mentally prepare and you can physically prepare, but once you're in the middle of it, it's pretty rough, and it changes you but i think it changes you in a good way um um so it's one of those things where i think you know since it was more of a physical when it comes to kind of physical pain and physical experiences like this it's quite incredible how the human psyche is set up to forget the bad stuff and remember the good stuff um uh but that was definitely uh a rough period because it's also just such a big change of environments right i've been to you know boarding school in the uk um you know living in a castle studying talking about peace and love and you know singing songs in the evening and back back to real life everyone was very understanding and then you have some people standing on top of you pushing into them are hitting you with sticks and calling all types of bad things and giving you a little bit extra shit because you then knew you come from boarding school in the UK.

1:11:48Yeah obviously.

1:11:52Have you ever struggled with mental health throughout this process or building a business or other things that happen?

1:12:04The main reason I ask that is because a lot of people were super successful in other people's minds, in normal people's minds. This person doesn't have a problem. They're stronger than everyone else. They're different. They're built different, right? I don't think I had kind of an issue with that. But, you know, sometimes you wake up, there are periods where you're more energized than others and for me and I kind of learned to kind of realize what those signals are and for me it's very tied to the ability to just work out and do some physical activity regularly so there are periods of time where you know i end up traveling a bunch um uh just prioritize work uh family kids all that type of stuff and there might be now it happens very seldom but you know during slow days it happened where there was like weeks where i didn't get to to to work out but i'm just more conscious about it now where um you just wake up in the morning and things are less exciting and you feel a little bit slower um and uh um so i think for me having the ability to be physically active on a regular basis is insanely important to just maintain mental sharpness uh um but uh these periods are kind of quite quite short and now i recognize them rather rapidly um uh i do think that's i do think it's very important to to try to learn these things about yourself because you know this thing works for me but it doesn't work for some other people especially especially again for entrepreneurs because burnout is a is a big one yeah and like how do you learn to recognize the signs before it's too late and you're not able to work for months or years anymore it happens it happens much more than we it's not talked about much but the entrepreneur burnout actual it's not just i'm tired today i'm a bit depressed it's like i'm actually completely burned out from the inside and i can't work anymore for i don't know how long you experience it when you're building a business actually so um i think if you haven't had the people in your company that have experienced um this then uh you know either you build such a magical culture that it doesn't happen or your company is not growing fast enough but you know It's like, I've seen it in Solora, I've seen it in Antler.

1:15:07There are people who, you know, when you go at it 100 % of the time, there will be now and then people who have that burnout and then they take a bit of a break. How do you think you can help prevent that? Because everybody's different. Some people will react differently to these things. some people will become depressed and start to be sick more often. Some people will, you won't realize it, but they start to drink and become, for example, could become alcoholic or take drugs, or some people could become very aggressive and angry. And at the end of the day, you also, as an entrepreneur, the culture is everything and very important, but you also, at some point when you hire people, you hire them, and you trust them to be able to take care of themselves because you have a mission to, I mean, you have to execute on your mission and you can't become the father or the mother of everyone, right?

1:16:05Yeah, so quite interesting. I don't think at all it's correlated to how much people work, right? I think it's completely uncorrelated to how much people work. I think it's correlated to the culture one has created and the conversations that are being had, right? So also if you look at statistics of this globally, actually, like sweden is one of the countries in the world with the highest amount of burnout but it's also one of the countries in the world with the lowest amount of working hours so i don't think it's it's it's correlated to how much people are working i think it's correlated to the conversations you have in the team and the culture you build as a leadership team that then perforates throughout the company so i think it's very important to a regular basis to sit down with all the people that report directly into me and that I work with on a regular basis and some of the people reporting into them and just have a conversation about how are things going, how are we working together, what are things we can do better as a company, what can I do better to make this a better company and spend real time doing it, like an hour or one and a half hours.

1:17:21And by doing that, And if the whole company does that on a regular basis, you will start to discover warning signs. And then you tell people, hey, perhaps it's about time to take a break or perhaps it's about time to get a coach or do you want to talk more about this or perhaps you discuss this with this and this person. But I think very often when these things, when no conversations are being had about it, and you can't talk to anyone about what no one experienced and then people just run straight into a wall. But I don't think it's correlated at all to how much people work.

1:18:04So I found, so we talk about all these, you know, building businesses and hopefully a successful business and people's definition of what success is in life, right? especially more and more with like all the media and social media and the actually the Facebook Instagram the tech years have been shaping this entire way of people of people seeing success you know these overnight successes and and so one thing I personally experienced and I've obviously been much, much less successful than you or all these other people that we talk about is that the moment I felt the loneliest in my life were actually in those moments that people define as success.

1:19:03So I felt lonely during my 20s when I was building businesses where, I mean, not like multi-billion companies, but like doing well, which building a profitable company is actually very hard. But I was so lonely. Like I was, I don't even think I was that happy, you know? Then another moment was doing this last crypto bull run, like making so much money, like where people, you know, people, they have this goal. I want 1 million, I want 10 million, I want that. They think that the day they reach that goal, they're going to be so happy and they're going to change everything. I felt so lonely. First, because I had no one to share this with, almost no one, because no one really understood my age.

1:19:40And I mean, obviously there's a lot of people who do that, but like, you don't necessarily know them. Second, I felt like an imposter. had this imposter syndrome. And another moment I felt really lonely was during also COVID that this digital nomad lifestyle because my company, we could do everything remotely because it's data analytics. And because of COVID, obviously you would not go see your clients. So I had this dream for, especially the Gen Z and a lot of millennials. I want to have digital nomad lifestyle. I want to be able to go travel there and move there and work from there. And I was super lonely.

1:20:13Basically all these moments that are classified as success by normal people. So my question is, given your achievements are much bigger than mine, you probably also one way or another felt that way. You know, it's kind of lonely at the top or people don't really understand you. And especially when you reach these achievements, why are the achievements that most people could only dream of actually the loneliest moments for high achiever people who achieve those goals? um yeah i think um um so so so the way i think about this whole thing is actually um is um i think it's useful for me personally to on on occasion um try to be a little bit more lonely okay so you know so i'm just gonna switch it around right so like um because and i don't know where this comes from or so on because i definitely have friends and so on they very much can kind of recognize what you're talking about but i actually never really felt this way and i think that i wonder whether it's because i had like a kid at a young age or uh you know i was at boarding school and then i lived in like military barracks with like 24 people in it or and we did they become very close friends and you know um or whatever it is i just always feel i've been lucky to be surrounded by by kind of people I have a strong kind of meaningful relationship with so I've never really been lonely but on occasion what I I am I feel though is that I should on purpose take a little bit of time just on my own which is hard to do because you know I really enjoy spending time amongst other people but you know i i tried to for for at least um a while once a year just take a week in summer and go on vacation on my own okay um after slora before antler i spent a week up in the mountains with the goal to not see any other people um and um now and then i when i travel i try to set off a little bit of because at home i can't do it but when i travel i try set up a couple of hours you know in the hotel where i'm just lonely and i think it's it's important to for me it's important to now and then embrace some loneliness um uh interesting so you know it's it it might just be uh i i kind of get get get get get where you're coming from and i know a lot of people feel that way but it just for me it's somehow kind of kind of strive into on occasion do a little bit the opposite

1:23:07you talked about so you feel great with people and you have a lot of these people probably became friends along the way you have a lot of friends so yeah I mean different type of friends right so you know you have your friends from from the kind of Norwegian days from boarding school who are all across the globe um um from military which was a very different experience um and um uh i think one thing the one thing that um i do think is is a little bit tough with the type of lives you and i are living and and i think a lot of people in the world today is that a lot of your really meaningful relationships are spread out across the globe right now what that has led to to me though is that the moments where you have kind of real time together becomes even more special but i think it's very important to to to take that time on occasion right so for example there's a very good friend of mine in the US.

1:24:28We built a number. We built a lot of good companies. We were roommates together in college. And we tried to make an effort to see each other once or twice a year in the US. So I go there for business on occasion, but he lives in Atlanta so he will fly into New York or fly into San Francisco and so on. And we go out for a two to three hour breakfast or you know you have a dinner together and you just end up having a completely different conversation right because there's there's nothing in between right you know there's someone you're doing business with or there's someone who hasn't seen you through kind of a larger part of your life you lose a little bit of that special connection so I think it's very important to in this digital nobile lifestyle or expat lifestyle that you and I are living we need to cherish some of those relationships because otherwise life becomes a little bit fleeting you always have the family there but I think the friend aspect is different

1:25:50so how has So there is these people who are spread out everywhere. And obviously now living in Singapore, your friends here are probably more the type of people who are... I mean, everybody is brilliant in one way or another, right? But in terms of business and life achievements, probably here, it's the places that attract those kind of people, right? Singapore is great. We have a great community of friends through the kids, greater community of friends through workouts. We have this group of people we work out with every Saturday morning and Sunday morning. We have the people we get to meet through business.

1:26:42I think what is great about a place like Singapore is we get to meet a lot of really amazing Singaporeans, a lot of people from all across Asia, a lot of people from the rest all across the world. It becomes a very kind of multifaceted group of friends, right? And I've, you know, all since Atlantic College or United World College, I've been quite attracted to that because it's so fascinating. We were, you know, we were, in my class, we were 165 students from 82 nations, right? There's two from each nation. And we had people from Palestine and Israel. We had black South Africans, white South Africans.

1:27:23You had people from Albania and from Serbia. You had people who grew up in very poor conditions in Africa. And you had the son of the richest person in the Netherlands. So you had all of these, which just created really interesting conversations and really, really strong relationships. And Singapore, you have all of that. You can meet so many interesting people from so many different locations who have so many different types of backgrounds. and so I think Singapore very much for me becomes I think over time wherever you live in the world becomes very quickly around the collection of people that you know and you spend time with What's the most important thing for your for your own happiness because I mean again you said you had a child young so maybe it probably helped you see things differently from a young age.

1:28:35But like the typical, I'd say, you know, 18, 20 years old, like we'll see social media success or I want to be a big YouTuber or I want to be a big entrepreneur or I want to make a lot of money. These are like the big goals you have like early on in life. And then at some point, it might work out or not. If it works out, you might realize that you're going to end up in circles with other people who are kind of similar in terms of, I'd say, material achievement, right? But you're going to realize that a lot of these people are normal people. They have their own personal struggles. Some have mental health issues or divorce or problem with kids.

1:29:21And then you realize almost all this stuff that I was caring about or that I thought was the actual definition of success and my own future happiness doesn't matter that much. And you start to go back to the complete basics, which is my friends. As you said before, I'm just having like a fun time where we don't talk about business or anything with this person. and it makes me so happy. Or I'm with my girlfriend or my wife and we just talk about some random shit and I'm happy. And you realize like the happiness is found in those small things, right? So what's the most, like how much have you been able to dissociate both?

1:30:03And how much is for you, you know, antler mission and the next business and the next investment and the next successful 100X or 1000X contributing to your happiness? I think so. It's probably different for anyone, but for me, purposefulness is insanely feeling like I have a purpose and that what I do has a real impact makes me very happy. and and I think you know these things always changes through life but I always probably you know it might be a weird way to look at it but for me it works very well as I I try to regularly think about where I want to be a decade from now which changes slowly right so you know it might be different for people but i think for most people you don't wake up one day and you want to be a different place 10 years from now than you were the other day unless there's something major that happened that changed your direction but so this this thing kind of keeps changing and shifting and then i tried to think a lot about like and i have a five-year plan a three-year plan a one-year plan and then a one-month plan and you know the one-month plan will affect where i am a year from now the one-year plan will affect where i'm from years from now and the five-year plan will affect where i'm 10 years from now and the one-month plan keeps changing right like what what do i want to kind of achieve over the next over the next month um but it should be connected to where you want to be 10 years ago because if what you're doing in the next month is uh is completely disconnected to where you want to be in the future then you will never get there um and i think a lot of unhappiness in the world is created around um either people not having that purpose or not being inspired about where they want to be or not having a direction to just kind of jump on some wave when that wave pulls them somewhere um or they have some major goal but what they're doing today is not tied to it in any way so that you never get closer right so and then that plan is pretty simple it's it's kind of split in three it's it's business it's family and friends and it's health right um and uh you know i'm don't live very religiously about it but i think just just by thinking about it on a regular basis you end up being happier and you end up being on a better trajectory than you would have been by not doing it and it's fun right like the end of each month beginning of each month you think well what happened last month okay there's you know this is anything changed about where i want to be a year from now is anything changed about where i want to be 10 years from now what did i do well didn't didn't work so well um and you also feel like you have some direction and influence on your life right because you're making real decisions right i think when i've been uh i don't think it happened for a very long period of time because it's kind of been pretty pretty you know it's it's been pretty full on but i think there's there's been like small periods of my life where I didn't feel like I had this direction right and I think when you don't have a direction when you don't have a purposefulness if you're not inspired about something and you're kind of driven and you're moving towards that I think that can create a lot of unhappiness at least for me it would do how much time do you spend on this kind of personal planning and goal setting every month not much so i i do i try to do it once a month when i'm on the plane right so you're on the plane you're flying somewhere uh you you know it's a great time to reflect right and i've written up like i also write a little diary so well i think since like 1997 i have like this is like two three hundred pages now of notes it's quite interesting to go back and look at how you thought about the future when you're 18 19 20 25 um so so there's a little log and then there's uh there's like one one month one year three year five year ten year um so once a month on the plane and then once a year around new year christmas you spend time thinking a little bit more deeply around it and then uh recently I also started having those conversations together with with my son which is quite interesting because then you get to have the conversation about what does he think about next month the next you know year the next 10 years and I've been doing it with friends we do it now and then with some some business partners it's a it's a meaningful conversation and you definitely feel better after than before, even if you're just talking to yourself.

1:35:40And that's how actually people can turn dreams into reality. Yeah. Because when you're dreaming about something, it might seem like a dream, but like Craig Raid said, a dream written down with a date becomes a goal. A goal broken down into steps becomes a plan. Yeah. And a plan backed by action makes your dreams come true. Yeah. So you're not that far off from actually reaching your dreams if you have a more specific approach to long-term planning and goal setting. And perhaps you never get there, but you get close. And then throughout your life, you have purpose, right? So it's, you know, and if you don't do it, then you'll never get there.

1:36:35you talk about purpose quite a lot in the last 15 minutes have you found your purpose your life purpose yet or is it something that's kind of ever moving and ever changing or you feel like you're kind of closer and closer to it or with all the self-reflection that you've done or you're able to say this is my life purpose and I'm actually doing exactly what I should be doing yeah no um i think it's throughout life um i feel i've becoming i've come closer and closer to my purpose so you know um i i love the atlantic college but i didn't want to be a high school student forever i love the military and the special forces but i didn't want to be in special force forever um i loved harvard but i didn't want to be an academic forever i thought mckinsey was exciting but i didn't want to make it give advice forever i thought so laura got even closer because we were building a business we were hiring people we were solving a problem but i didn't want to make people better dressed forever so it's like and now with antler you know what do i do like i spend my entire time when i work on supporting incredible people in solving important problems uh back in the capital resources and and and the platform yes i mean i really found the purpose it's very similar to Antler's mission make progress inevitable I believe the world will only move forward if great people spend time innovating and I'm spending all of my work time supporting great people in innovating and moving the world forward so definitely for the first time my entire life where I spend most of my time is 100 % aligned with my purpose and passion and that's extremely exciting and I really hope everyone gets to feel that at some point of their life because it's so incredible to spend your time on what they absolutely want to do and then the second part of the equation is children it's an incredible it's incredibly purposeful and very very meaningful and I think a part of life that just becomes more and more important the older you get, I think.

1:38:59So except from having children earlier, how can younger men and women discover their purpose as fast as possible to move on to the next dimension in terms of spiritual life and career? So seek opportunities in which you can be inspired, right? And you never know where that would be. So like get out of the box, experience something new, whether that's travel, going to museums, reading, listening, meeting people in your community. Try to as early as possible, get as much exposure as possible to new and interesting things. And then, so that I think is one, get exposed to more things. Two, be prepared to take some of those opportunities when they come up.

1:39:57And how can you be better prepared? Well, find your strength and develop and hone that. Build mental resilience. Build drive and ability to execute. And then third is ensure that you spend real time thinking about where you want to go and make real decisions. I think a lot of people and I think parts of my life where things haven't moved as fast as I wanted to is where I didn't make decisions. And I think a lot of people, unfortunately, don't make real decisions about their own life. they end up on some sort of journey based on where the wave will take them, right? So something might have happened in high school that led them to choose some specific subjects and that led to them choosing a specific program in university.

1:41:00And that program means they got this specific job. And then - And things will take care of themselves, like by magic. And you wake up when you're 62 years old and you never made a real decision on what you wanted to do in your life, right? And I spoke to a lot of older people that I know and this is one of the biggest regrets you sometimes hear is like, why not making decisions and just following whatever way they ended up riding, right? And if you don't take control of your own life and make real decisions, the world is going to take you somewhere and most likely it's not going to be where you want to go.

1:41:43Yeah, so kind of to sum up this, I mean, if you can't find your purpose because it's a very difficult thing, obviously you're just going to be thinking and like, oh, this is my purpose. Try to find your passion because your passion is most likely to lead you right into your purpose. Yeah, in time. And the more things you get exposed to, the more likely you are to find that thing, right? What's something that you believe in and your belief gets stronger every day?

1:42:23I believe stronger and stronger that we need more great people in the world to spend real time working on solving large problems. I think the world is facing some pretty big challenges going forward, whether it's within climate change, within education. Education, I think, is insanely important to avoid the world moving towards mass populism or dictatorship. um health care yeah it's incredible how how much the the the population around the world is aging and it's also incredible that there are billion plus people in the world who don't have basic access to health care where you can fix i remember after after harvard i did a small development project in in zambia and people were dying from small cuts where they got an infection and we We could save these people with soap, literally with soap.

1:43:35So we built small soap factories there. And we had told people how to clean wounds and dress wounds. And it's incredible that in today's world, we live in a situation where we're kind of facing all of these major issues. And the only ones that are going to solve them are by great people innovating. and if they don't get sold I think we end up in a world where politics will get more and more extreme we've seen parts of the world where dictatorships are getting stronger and dictatorship works incredibly well if you have an amazing person leading the country but once that person starts making major mistakes there are all types of issues for the world like we're seeing now in Ukraine and then you have the democracy of the world that is going more and more towards, you know, populism, where you have two extreme sides and can't agree.

1:44:35So, you know, unless some of the world's smartest people work on these kind of big problems, upon which when they sold some of them, they enter into politics. it's you know it's not certain that things will continue to improve as quickly as they have over the last 100 years because the improvement the world has seen over the last 100 years is insane so if we can continue on that path going forward

1:45:07it's incredible and I believe more and more strongly that the only way that will happen is if more great people choose to spend their time solving these problems One of these really huge thing that people have been working on for a while now and that recently has been more at this kind of like aha moment is AI. And you mentioned education.

1:45:33What are the ways you think AI will most significantly impact education or change education? I mean, AI done well in education means that you can get way more personalized education, which means that it's easier for you to reach your maximum potential. Right. So, you know, and this doesn't matter whether you're, you know, you're a great student or a bad student, it will help you. I remember one of the things I thought was quite tough with the last few years in Norwegian school was that there was at least in some subjects, it just became kind of boring because you couldn't, it was just too easy.

1:46:23Some of the stuff, not all of it. Some other stuff was difficult, but in some subjects. And then others, it was more difficult. But if I could get a personalized experience of that training, I could get further in some areas and I would have better understandings of the areas that I thought was very difficult. And, you know, so personalized education, personalized training, AI will have a tremendous effect. on a whole other aspect it's just access and there the world is unfortunately far behind where it should be because technology today now the internet should be the great democratization of education whether you have a$20 handset or a$1 ,000 handset you're technically able to access the same amount of information.

1:47:29The issue has been that accessing information is not the same as being educated. So there needs to be a delivery method where I think AI will just be better than a one-size-fits-all to ensure that the great democratization of entrepreneurship will lead to more equality of opportunity, right? So if today's Einstein... is born in a tiny, very poor part of a tiny village in Africa, that person through the day and the great democratization of education will have the same opportunity to change the world as Einstein did growing up in the heydays of German science and technology. Absolutely. what's the best piece of advice you've ever been given

1:48:28it's a tough one I think one great piece of advice was while I was in the Navy SEALs there was one of my teachers from high school who taught peace and conflict studies and he was my house father so I lived in his house basically I had about 40 kids living in his house and and he was part of the special special air service the sas and in the uk and uh i asked him uh you know what do you think about me continuing on on my military journey in the navy seals versus going out there and getting an education and doing something different and And he said, you know, well, you know, you can do an incredible, meaningful job as an operator or a surgeon.

1:49:24You can have immediate impact on a specific person's life, right? So if I'm operating on your heart right now, if you have a heart failure and I operate in your heart and I save you, I immediately have an impact on your life. So there are certain roles in life where you have that immediate impact. And there are other roles in life where you have impact through hundreds or millions of people. Let's say you're a teacher, you have impact through 40 people a year that you teach in your class. Or if you're an author, anyone who leads your book. Or if you're a business leader, everyone uses your product.

1:50:05Or in my case, supporting a bunch of founders building really great companies. So you've got to make a choice. on whether you want that immediate impact on a smaller amount of people, but much more meaningful impact, right? If I save your life right now, that relationship and that impact is very concrete versus having that more direct impact on a larger amount of people. And that's how I ended up kind of going to Harvard and pursuing kind of this part of my life. So, you know, that was definitely very meaningful advice and a meaningful conversation. And I had tons of those in the way. Thank you so much for this, Magnus.

1:50:53That was amazing. Yeah. Where can people follow you or learn more about you? Yeah, so you can go on LinkedIn, Magnus Grimlin. You can go on Instagram, Magnus Antler, Twitter. I think it's also Magnus Antler. and then check out Antler antler.co we'd love to support you if you want to build a business amazing thank you so much thank you