Landing On Your Feet with Sam Morris
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
When one’s sense of identity gets challenged, the whole foundation becomes loose. Even people who are ambitious and are making things happen in the world cannot predict when something is going to come along that is going to completely derail that direction. You have otherwise confident people who have been very successful in their lives suddenly questioning everything and going, “How did I end up here?” Zen Warrior Sam Morris talks about landing on your feet and knowing how to come back to building that foundation in a fresh way. Sam met an accident and became paraplegic due to a drunk driver. From that point on, he has been consistently working on reestablishing the foundation that he lost when his accident occurred. Sam says sometimes that building can come crashing down and you’re left having to find out how to build a new foundation. He now helps people to create that foundation and finding that inner strength that they didn’t even know they had before.
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Listen to the podcast here
Landing On Your Feet with Sam Morris
I have a guest that I’ve been fortunate enough to have on before, Sam Morris, the Zen Warrior. Sam was on my show before and I’ve had the privilege of working with him one-on-one. When he told me, he had some new insights to share with us, I couldn’t wait to have him back on the show. For those of you who haven’t heard Sam’s other episode, his story is in 1999, he was leading a bike trip for nine teenagers across the US when he was in a car accident caused by a drunk driver, which has left him paralyzed from the waist down. He’s had to deal with surgeries and literally lying down for over three years. Two of those years were in the hospital, but Sam has an ability to not let anything stop him, including being paralyzed from the waist down. As he said to me when I first met him, “My legs might be paralyzed, but my brain and my mind is not.” Sam, welcome back to the show.
Thanks, John. It’s great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Your topic that’s very close to your heart and it needed more than ever is how can high performers and entrepreneurs recreate themselves after they’ve experienced some disruption, whether it’s personal like you went through or professional like I went through after being laid off. What is it that made you think, “I have something to say about this topic?”
I have encountered this particular thing over and over again with people who are ambitious, who were making things happen in the world, but you cannot predict when something is going to come along that is going to completely derail that direction. You have otherwise confident people who have been very successful in their lives suddenly questioning everything and going, “How did I end up here? I was on this track here and now I’m in this situation here,” whether that is a being laid off or whether that is getting a divorce or going through something that challenges one’s sense of identity. When one’s sense of identity gets challenged, it’s like the whole foundation becomes loose and people need to know how to come back to building that foundation in a fresh way.
[bctt tweet=”Disruption is a natural process, don’t take it personally.” username=”John_Livesay”]
When my injury happened, my accident happened shortly after finishing my bike trip when a drunk driver caused my paraplegia. From that point in 1999 to this point in 2018, I have been consistently working on reestablishing the foundation that I lost when my accident occurred. I’ve put in so many countless hours, days, months and years into working on sensing the core essence of who I am and the value that I offer that is independent of any circumstance. I happened to have a lot of practice in this area where most people, unfortunately, don’t have as much practice. It’s quite good that they don’t have that practice. I’m trying to make it easier for high performers and entrepreneurs to make that pivot. When something happens in their lives to make that pivot because that foundational identity that we build up over the course of years or decades can get compromised very easily.
It tends to happen periodically throughout people’s lives in some major way. It’s so easy to get trapped in the mindset of linear success where if I am X degrees successful now, then I should be X plus one tomorrow and then I should be X plus two next week. There’s this expectation that people put on themselves to keep on building on what they have already done. Sometimes that building can come crashing down and you’re left having to find out how to build a new foundation. That new foundation is what I help people to create. What I discover is that when people create that new foundation, they actually find an inner strength that they didn’t even know they had before.
What I’m hearing you say is that our foundation and our identity get tied up together and when we lose the foundation, either through a job loss, a divorce or a health situation, we also somehow feel we’ve lost our identity. That’s part of the challenge when the foundation goes away. Even if you just lose your house in a fire, that’s equally traumatic and that’s literally your foundation. In your case, your legs are your foundation. “It’s who am I without that foundation,” is what I’m hearing is the big challenge for most of us.
It’s exactly that. The “Who am I?” makes it very challenging to build a new foundation when you’re constantly questioning who you are and what your role is in the world because the way that you learn to function before simply no longer works. These things are very common. In general, I would say people experience this at least once in their lives past the age of maturity where something occurs that totally makes them question everything.
You said about this expectation that everything is going to consistently be a linear, straight line up. The minute it becomes a roller coaster, it makes us mad and angry in addition to scared because having been in the corporate world at Conde Nast for over fifteen years where every year was a quota and that quota was consistently set higher than the year before and you were expected to meet it. The following year, it was just endless, “We need growth, growth, growth.” Startups have the same thing. Anybody who’s in any accelerator, it’s the whole thing is, “How fast are you growing? Are you growing faster than the other startup that’s in here? Whoever grows the fastest gets the funding.”
Landing On Your Feet: Honor both what you can do and what you can’t do.
This fear of things never being fast enough. You better hurry up and get your funding before the economy tanks again or the bottom falls out of the XYZ stock market, home market, fill in the blank. What are some of your suggestions for everyone and the clients that work with you on, “I definitely either experienced losing my foundation and my identity along with it and I don’t know what to do because the things I’ve been doing aren’t going to work anymore?” How do we let go of expecting things to continue to be linear?
The first place to start is getting that the process is natural, that this is a human process. That it is not a personal thing so much as it is a human condition. A lot of people compare themselves to an idea of how other people are doing and think, “Their lives are so much easier. They are so much more successful, or they have so much more money or whatever than I do this and that,” but rarely do they get a chance to look under the hood and see what’s occurring in that person’s life. Even with the most successful people out there, there are massive disruptive circumstances that occur in their lives, which create the exact same challenge for one’s sense of identity and self-esteem and everything.
It doesn’t matter how successful you are. Those moments can happen. and they can throw you off for months or years, depending on how you process that situation. How you process your circumstances and how you move forward from there, a lot of people will stay in a state of paralysis for a long time. My physical paralysis has given me a lot of insights into the nature of paralysis because my physical paralysis for a number of years, created this emotional-psychological paralysis inside of myself that was actually a lot harder to deal with than the actual physical paralysis. I understand this very deeply from the inside out. Getting that this is just a natural process, that there’s nothing personal, it’s not saying anything about who you are, what you can do or not do or whatever it is, a time for reassessment.
It’s a time to get grounded and look at, “What can I do and what can’t I do?” Get clear about that and honor both what you can do and what you can’t do. A lot of people get caught in the trap of thinking they should be able to do more than they’re actually able to do. That’s a very unhealthy mindset if you get and it’s humbling. It’s very humbling to get clear on what you can do and what you can’t do. The vast majority of what there is to do, none of us can do. The vast majority of what there is that I could potentially do, I cannot do. I have to get clear on the very limited range of things that I can do and then commit my focus to those things without getting caught up in what I can’t do and think that I should be able to do.
The big takeaway for me on that is this process of being disrupted is natural and not something that you should sit around feeling sorry for yourself. “Why did this happen to me? Why am I in a wheelchair or why did I get laid off? Why did I get divorced? That must mean I’m a failure as a spouse. That must mean I’m a failure as an employee,” and this whole internal paralysis. You’re really big on paralysis or movement and using breathing, which is something everyone can do to not stay in the state of paralysis. Can you talk a little bit about that?
The breath is our most important tool that we have. I am constantly amazed by the power of the breath. The breath is a way of being able to access your whole system and get out of your head. When disruption occurs, the hardest thing is for people to get out of their heads. It’s the identity, identifying with what went wrong essentially. “What the hell went wrong? What does that say about me?” All that negativity comes in and it’s a very natural thing for people to have all of this self-judgment occur as a result of disruption. You can’t get away from that judgment at the level of just trying to think new thoughts. You have to actually have a tool to work through that self-judgment that actually puts you in touch with something deeper than those thoughts.
[bctt tweet=”Get out of your head by getting into your body.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Those thoughts are just projections. They’re not real, the what ifs. People get way too caught up in their thoughts. The breath is the way that you can process thoughts and feelings in the moment and stay in contact with yourself, essentially maintaining a relationship with yourself that is more holistic than your thoughts that you have about yourself or any temporary feeling that you may be having. By connecting to your breath and connecting to your body, it helps to still the mind. It also helps to process feelings and process thoughts so that the feelings that one is having don’t turn into this back and forth between thoughts and feelings.
It’s a common thing for people to get caught, essentially tripping out on themselves where they’re having some feeling and then they’re having some thought about the feeling which is inaccurate. The feeling just gets worse because the feeling doesn’t feel like it’s been listened to, which then creates another inaccurate thought. It goes back and forth like a feedback loop between thoughts and feelings. In the meantime, we’re not present the whole time that’s happening. We’re getting caught in our feelings and then thinking about the past or worrying about the future and we lose track of our presence. The breath is here to bring us back into presence. There’s a reason why every Zen master and every Yogi all emphasize the importance of the breath. There is a very specific reason why. That is because it actually helps you to contact yourself in such a way that it transcends any thought-based identification with one’s feelings.
If we lose our identity, when we get disrupted, and then we start identifying with our thoughts as being real, then it sounds to me like that’s a total recipe for paralysis.
It’s an absolute recipe for paralysis. I cannot tell you how many people that I have met and worked with who have or are experiencing that exact recipe for paralysis.
If the thoughts aren’t real, you’re catastrophizing the future or for separating and reliving the past. “I can’t believe he said or she said this to me and did that or this,” and you just get angrier about it the more that you think about it. Meanwhile, you’re not in the moment at all. You don’t have any tools to release that. Then you’re missing what’s happening in the moment, which may be great, but you’re still stuck on what somebody said or did to you. Whether it’s a divorce or getting fired or being mad at the person who hit you who was drunk back in 1999. You were clearly not in the present, if that’s what you’re thinking about all the time.
Not only is it key for anyone who’s gone through some personal or professional disruption, this is also key as well for productivity. People frequently talk about how they wish they were more productive or they wish they had more time in the day. How much time do you have where you’re actually present? What percentage of most people’s time are they actually present and not thinking about the past or thinking about the future? If you looked at that where people are truly present, it would be a tiny fraction of any given day. As they are thinking about the past and as they are concerned about the future, they are actively wasting time. They’re not truly focused on what is occurring right here in the present moment. That bouncing back and forth between past and future, not being connected to yourself, not being connected to your breath, bouncing back and forth, creates mental exhaustion, which then creates the feeling of, “I have to go home and pass out or watch TV for three hours, tune out somehow.” What they’re trying to tune out from is their own thoughts and their own feelings. If you breathed and stay present, then you can sustain your energy. You can sustain your focus throughout the day without feeling the burden of your own mental data crunching.
Landing On Your Feet: The focus of attention means everything in terms of the quality of work that you can do and achieve.
Those are two big things there. The reason we’re so tired at the end of a workday is not because the work was particularly grueling or even mentally taking its toll on us because we had to think so hard, it’s because our thoughts drain the energy out of us because we weren’t in the moment.
When you’re not in the moment, that automatically means you’re not connected to your breath. If you’re caught in your head thinking about past and future, you can be guaranteed that you’re not going to be sensing your breath and your breath is how you stay connected to your fuel source in your body because your body is the fuel source for your energy. As you’re breathing, you’re constantly recycling that fuel source into your body.
You’re bringing more life into your body. When we’re just breathing in our normal habitual way and we’re not paying attention to it, we have enough breath to stay alive. We have breath for our organs to keep functioning, and for our minds to keep functioning somewhat throughout the day. When we consciously breathe, then we’re consciously connected to the fuel source, that is our body. That is creating the energy that we need to be able to move through any kind of situation and not get caught up in our head and losing touch with what’s actually occurring in the present moment.
That element of productivity is also very interesting because the more present you are, the less you’re trying to multitask. Do you want to speak to that a little bit?
We can’t multitask and anyone who tries to, I don’t think is doing it at any given moment. You can only focus on one thing at one time. That’s not to say that you can’t have multiple things occurring at any given time, but the quality of your focus can only be looking at one thing at one time. We tend to convince ourselves that we can multitask or that we need to multitask, and ultimately, we end up putting less quality focus into the things that we’re doing because we were trying to focus on too many things at once. Nothing ends up going as well as it could if we were to choose to stay connected to ourselves. Focus on the one thing that’s right in front of us. Know that there are other things happening simultaneously that are going to require our focus but choosing where you are placing your focus of attention. For most people, they’re not choosing where to put their focus of attention. They’re bouncing back and forth between things, but the focus of attention means everything in terms of the quality of work that you can do and the productivity that you can achieve.
It sounds like you’ve got this idea that you’re turning into a book about landing on your feet from someone who can’t even feel his is the working title.
That was a catchy title that I thought it would be good for the podcast. My working title right now for the book, and this may change, is Why Not Me? which is like the antidote to the “Why me?” mentality. That’s our biggest problem. The biggest challenge that people face is having this underlying sense of why me? Why do I have to go through this? Why is it me who has to go through divorce? Why is it me who has to go through a job loss? Why is it me who has to deal with this god damn spreadsheet? All of the things that we, “Why me?” about all day every day, it’s, “Why not me?” puts it in perspective. As many times as I asked the question, why me following my paralysis, the only answer I ever got was why not me? Why shouldn’t it be me who goes through paralysis?
There are different forms of deep suffering that are occurring around the world. There are seven billion forms of suffering going on. Why shouldn’t I go through this particular form? There’s no reason why. Buddha said, “Life is suffering,” but it didn’t end there. You said that life is suffering and it’s that suffering that can serve as the catalyst for freedom. You have to first embrace the suffering before experiencing the freedom. The freedom that we are seeking is on the other side of the suffering.
[bctt tweet=”Your thoughts are not real.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Most people feel like if I can avoid the suffering, then I’ll feel free. You’re saying and so is Buddha, that you’ve personally had to embrace the suffering, figure out what you can and can’t do and make the best of that situation and that’s how you land on your feet.
People are constantly trying to avoid suffering and I’ll include myself. I’m oftentimes totally trying to avoid suffering. Then I realized, “I’m already suffering, but I might as well just embrace it.” There’s nothing to avoid. It’s just a matter of welcoming the experience because once you welcome the experience, once you truly do that, it neutralizes the energy of the situation. You’re no longer in a state of judgment where it’s wrong or right or good or bad that you’re experiencing what you’re experiencing. There is no longer an attachment to a label about the experience. It’s just the experience is what it is.
Do you have any last thoughts about how we can land on our feet, embrace disruption, whether it’s happened to us or hasn’t happened yet?
Trust your process, connect to your breath, connect to your body, connect to your energy source. Get out of your head not by thinking other thoughts or trying to think other thoughts but get out of your head by getting into your body, into your energy source because it is inside. They say the power is within. It truly is within. It’s not within our thoughts, it’s within our physical body and our energetic resources that we have available to us.
Get out of your head by getting into your body. So many of us think the answer’s in our head, “If I can just think about this enough, I’ll come up with an answer,” and that’s probably not where it is.
That’s trying to find an easy way out. When you’re trying to find this logical answer. It’s just like, “What’s the easy way out? How can I just get out of this situation?” You can’t get out of the situation. You have to go through the situation as opposed to get out of the situation. Otherwise, the situation will just keep repeating itself in new ways.
Landing On Your Feet: A lot of people compare themselves to an idea of how other people are doing.
Sam, how can people follow you? Give us your twitter handle, your website, all that good stuff.
My Twitter handle is @ZWTraining. Instagram is @ZenWarriorTraining as is Facebook. I do have a few spots open for private clients who are very committed to working through their own disruptive experience in their lives and using the challenge as a catalyst for growth into their next level of potential. They can contact me and apply through ZenWarriorTraining.com.
I was fortunate enough to get accepted and it changed my life. I can’t recommend that enough. Thanks again, Sam.
It’s been a pleasure, John.
Important Links
- Sam Morris
- Sam’s other episode – Sam Morris’ previous episode
- @ZWTraining – Twitter
- @ZenWarriorTraining – Instagram
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Awakening Your Inner Guru with Dr. Erin Fall Haskell
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
What we energize, we magnetize. That is what Doctor of Divinity and thought leader Dr. Erin Fall Haskell always tell people during her speaking engagements and when she’s broadcasting her podcast, Good Morning Lala Land. Erin is a self-made millionaire and an active philanthropist. Growing up, she always believed that finding the right relationship, getting the right job, and marrying the right person would make her whole life work out. A personal tragedy sent her on what’s been now a 24-year track of seeking her own healing and self-discovery. Her book, Awakening: A 30-Day Guide to Unleashing Your Inner Guru, is a collection of fun stories that takes you through your health, your wealth, and your creative expression and bring it to life to not only know the truth but live the truth as well. Erin shares her journey of becoming a self-made millionaire by the time she was 30.
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My guest is Dr. Erin Fall Haskell. She said, “Complaining is praying for crap.” She said, “What we energize, we magnetize.” She tells this amazing story becoming a self-made millionaire by the time she was 30 and how she likes to invest in green tech and real estate. She is the CEO and co-host of a live streaming show called Good Morning Lala Land and the author of a book Awakening: A 40-Day Guide to Unleashing Your Spiritual Powers, Life’s Purpose and Manifesting Your Dreams where you unleash your inner guru. She said, “Success doesn’t taste good unless you have the barriers to overcome to get there.” She describes what it takes to be a good guest on her show or any show. I think you’ll enjoy this episode on entrepreneurial mindset.
Listen To The Episode Here
Awakening Your Inner Guru with Dr. Erin Fall Haskell
I’m honored to have my dear friend of many years, Dr. Erin Fall Haskell, who’s a Doctor of Divinity, a new thought leader, a transformational author and speaker. She’s a global peace leader, award winner, a mother lover of life. She is the CEO and co-host of a wonderful show called Good Morning Lala Land. Erin has quite a journey that she’s going to share with us of becoming a self-made millionaire by the time she was 30 in real estate. She invests in green tech and real estate while she’s writing this book called Awakening: A 40-Day Guide to Unleashing Your Spiritual Powers, Life’s Purpose and Manifesting Your Dreams. Erin, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much, John. I just adore you and I’m so honored because I love your podcast. What a brilliant idea to bring storytelling and the heart to the finances that we all must claim is our birthright.
Awakening: A 40-Day Guide to Unleashing Your Spiritual Powers, Life’s Purpose and Manifesting Your Dreams!
I always ask my guests to tell their own story of origin and you can decide how far back you want to take us. You can take us back to your childhood. You can take us back to when you made the decision that you were not going to work for someone else and become an entrepreneur wherever you want to start.
All day long, I listen to other people’s stories these days, so it’s always fun when we get to get back into our remembrance of the whole thing for us. I grew up in a hippie commune, basically on the hilltop of Santa Barbara. It’s like the residual leftover of the ’60s when it was super cool and quite dysfunctional at the same time. My parents got divorced when I was two years old. My dad went and had another family and I was confused and sad and all the above thinking that families had to be a particular way when the reality is that they are all unique and expressions. Anyways, I grew up in the mountains of Santa Barbara and I basically didn’t have any rules or regulation, no religion.
In fact, my mom was anti all that. I came to high school and everyone started trying some drugs and alcohol and all that kind of stuff. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I thought, “If I just found the right relationship, got the right job and marry the right person, my whole life would work out.” Lo and behold, I got married for all the wrong reasons, basically just because it was a thing to do. I found myself pregnant at the age of 21 and I had a stillborn son at the age of 22. I was nine months pregnant and I was in nursing school and I realized that my baby had stopped moving inside of me. I went down to the doctor right about 5:00 PM and the doctor was gone. A nurse lubed up my belly. We took a look and saw there was no heartbeat. We rushed over to the hospital and realized that my baby had died inside of me and I had to give birth to my baby, which was a bizarre twist at that point in my life.
It was one of those moments, John. It was actually the next day after I’d given birth to his body and bathe your baby, take pictures with your baby and go home with your dead baby. Next day I was a little at coo-coo and I thought I didn’t get the right pictures with my baby. I went down to the mortician’s house alone. I don’t know where my parents were, I don’t know where my husband was but I went alone and it was literally a scene out of the movie. The mortician was like, “Sweetheart, I’m so sorry. Your baby’s been in formaldehyde for 24 hours and you’ve got the room all prepared.”
It got me down. I just had one of those moments. It was a moment with God and my higher-self saying, “How could you be so cruel?” It was one of those moments just looking down at my baby’s body, realizing he was gone but he was here. I realized he’s not his body and I’m not this body and what the hell are we doing here? It sent me on what’s been now 24-year track of seeking my own healing, seeking my own discovery. I had bulimia when I was in high school. I had been date-raped in high school. I got divorced and all that typical human beingness. I finally have arrived at an amazing, extraordinary life beyond my wildest dreams.
Just to give a little bit of coda to the story. You do have a very healthy son now.
Thank you for saying that because I always forget to say that and some people are like, “It’s so sad.” I got pregnant a month after my stillborn. He’s watched me bloom going through my own healing and consciousness and becoming an author and practitioner and doctor and all those things and watching the show bloom. It’s super cool for any of those parents out there who are young parents, it’s cool to have your children witness you grow up. You can see the woman that I am now, that I always want to be, which is super cool.
Your Inner Guru: The cool thing about entrepreneurship is the more you work, the more you have residual income, the more your workload goes down and you have more freedom.
You’ve painted a picture, you’re a single mom in your early twenties and that’s usually very difficult to figure out a way to pay the bills, let alone become a self-made millionaire. How did you go from those circumstances to saying, “I’m not going to go back to nursing school, I’m going to dabble in real estate or become an expert in real estate?” Was it commercial? Is it residential? How did that happen?
I actually dropped out of nursing school when I had my son because I left him one day at the nanny would have been caught and it just broke my heart. I couldn’t do it. I just thought I have to figure out something as a mom to make money and be able to do both. I immediately went into real estate school and which was for any people out there want to get into real estate, one of the hardest industries to do traditional real estate. I found a way of buying and fixing up homes and that was a modality for me. I was doing my spiritual work, part of the day and then I do my real estate.
It was literally reading the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad and things like that. Realizing how to build assets and how to leverage and all those basic 101 things that everybody needs to know. I should become financially literate. I highly recommend Rich Dad, Poor Dad. The book I highly recommend some of the basic books that are just simple distinctions that make you realize when you’re buying a liability, when you’re buying an asset, how to leverage things like that. I started buying and fixing up homes. I was so broke on literally I could not. I can barely put much more than pasta on the table. It was not a fun track. I saved every penny I could ever make.
I never touched a principal. One of the secrets to growing wealth in my opinion is to never touch a principal. Have income come in but don’t touch your principal. If you have an asset like a home or business, let that business grow and don’t touch into tapping all your money there. Then what happened is I began to have more residual income from real estate, I was able to have more time, not only to spend time with my son, but also to develop my spiritual work. Because I’ve been doing it and doing all my healing work, it became my obsession. I became so involved and just obsessed with the work. I loved it so much and I became so fulfilled. That’s a cool thing about entrepreneurship is the more you work, the more you have residual income, the more your workload goes down and you have more freedom, more passive income or things like that. What I did in real estate was I bought and fix up homes and I had rentals so I wasn’t doing traditional agency work.
Let’s go to the birth of your book, Awakening: A 40-Day Guide to Unleashing Your Spiritual Powers, Life’s Purpose and Manifesting Your Dreams. This is the part I love, unleashing your inner guru. A lot of people think, “I’ve got to find a guru and follow their steps to success.” You’ve flipped that on its head, which is about, “No, wake up and find your inner guru.” Can you share something with us about how you came up with that concept?
Awakening: A 40-Day Guide to Unleashing Your Spiritual Powers, Life’s Purpose and Manifesting Your Dreams. What happened was I didn’t plan on writing a book. In fact, English was my worst subject in school. I didn’t ever understand what was so hard for me. What happened was, as I began to do my subconscious work, as I began to meditate for 22 years, I go in my closet for three hours a day at times when my son was at school late at night. Of course, you see through the veil. Over time things happened in there that people will think you’re crazy. For me, deities came, all kinds of things happen. You’ve tracked through your whole DNA if you want to go there, let’s go there. What happened was, I can’t just take notes for myself. I had said that was such a blissful in how I needed to write them down. I began to keep my online journal around things. Of course, one day I had this stupid idea of writing a book. I thought, “I got to put all this stuff into a book.”
It was a disaster, quite frankly. I rearranged the book five times. I had to get two different editors. It not easy. What happened was as I was getting my doctorate also all the wisdom, all the truth, I thought, “How do I organize this into a book where I’ve taken the epiphanies that I’ve had and the distinctions from the great minds like Emerson, Troward, Louise Hay, Ernest Holmes. All these people that have come and taught us such great wisdom. How do I put it into what I would say is that into a book that it has fun stories that also takes you through your health, your wealth, your creative expression, relationships, all of the above into those four legs of life?” I just basically put it into a 42-guide because I like little chunks. I don’t think we learn in huge chunks. I want to take a book and break it down into 40 days so people could take little chunks, bring it into the life and actually not know the truth but live the truth.
[Tweet “Complaining is pretty much like praying for crap because we know how the universal law works.”]
How great not just knowing it but live it. One of the things you talk about the book is complaining. What are your insights on complaining?
I think the complaining is pretty much like praying for crap because we know how the universal law works. That’s pretty much what it is. I’m spiritual, I’m not religious I like to say I think that there’s great of truth and all of the great teachings. “Fear thy Lord.” is what it says and what the Lord refers to the law of the universe, the universal law of cause and effect. What that means is we should be afraid because every word we speak, every thought we think, every action we take is heard in profound ways for the universe and reflects back to us in ways that we could never even imagine. If we complain, literally think about what you’re doing. If I complain I am speaking all negative things into my mind, into my subconscious, into the world, and what we energize magnifies. If I complain, I’m literally saying to the universe, please give me more of what I don’t want.
Those are two great tweets right there. Complaining is praying for crap and what we energize, we magnetize because I talk about the power of a good story, become magnetic and pull people in. Let’s double click on another focus that you have on one of these 40 things, which is the scarcity mentality. So many entrepreneurs think there’s never enough time, there’s never enough funding, there’s never enough clients, there’s never enough of team to do everything enough hours in the day. I hear a lot of scarcity mentality and mindset of a lot of entrepreneurs, even at advanced stages. You think it’s just that initial bootstrapping startup where there’s scarcity. If you have that at the beginning, you’re going to continue to have it, even if you become a hugely successful company. What are your insights and thoughts on that?
I still struggle with this myself. I’m not going to lie. I think it’s between allowing managers flow and building because we’re caught up in building wealth and building assets. It’s a really fine dance in my opinion. One of the things I’ve noticed for people that are truly expressed because I think when we shift our mind think our business is not about growing, like collecting things. It’s about developing ourselves. That’s the whole point in why we do our business is to have a full life with people we love and develop ourselves, our consciousness, our spiritual selves. When I think about that, when I think about people that I admire, there was a common denominator and it is people spend money to make money. If you witness people who are successful, they generally spend a lot of money to make money.
Oftentimes people who are very wealthy are very miserable, it’s not always the case, but I would say there are definitely some huge leaders in the world that have abundance of money that are very fulfilled. If you look at the stats, there are more people that are not, that are not that happy. They have a lot of wealth in their assets, a lot of money in the bank, a lot of investments. They can’t figure out why they’re still not fulfilled. I think it’s a real fine dance to have a flow. I think that abundance mentality comes down to one thing and it is a flow knowing that what we put out has to come back, abundantly and multiplied as we know.
I love that concept of a lot of people I know who have substantial amount of money that may or may not be happy at certain points. The part of what I’m seeing and hearing from them was they had the illusion that as soon as I have this much money in the bank, as soon as I have these many homes, as soon as I have this many private jets or whatever it is, I’ll be happy. Then when you get those things and you’re still not happy, that’s even more depressing than not having them. Because on the goal to achieving them, you have some hope that you’re going to be happy at XYZ achievement, and then you read the illusion completely burst when you realize it wasn’t.
Don’t get me wrong, I like money, I like abundance. Somewhere I think it’s around $250,000 beyond that, your lifestyle doesn’t change that much. Then you’re just stacking money, like let’s just get into flow abundant. I think there’s a way of doing both for sure.
Your Inner Guru: We do our business to have a full life with people we love and develop ourselves, our consciousness, our spiritual selves.
The other thing you talk about is this concept of perfectionism and I’m always fascinated by that. It’s one of my challenges is to let go of having everything to be perfect. Especially in the startup world, it’s sometimes challenging for founders to let go of trying to control every little thing a. Obviously if you’re going to be pitching and having slides and your website and your branding, all that needs to be as perfect and have as many people check it as possible. The concept of perfectionism that I want to ask you about is I see sometimes people hitting these milestones that are quite significant and not even taking a minute to celebrate them. They’re onto the next thing because there are ten other things that still needed to be done and are perfect. Do you see that? Do you have any thoughts on that?
I’m still guilty of that. I had an eating disorder when I was seventeen to twenty. I was a total perfectionist. In this world with the filters, we see highly; highly produced things, whether it be an online or in the movies or in magazine. We see such highly produced things that it’s hard to not compare ourselves. The reality is this is that the perfection, a good example is doing lives online. I remember doing live streams and when I first started was it was like a joke. I was a disaster, not going to lie and I’d have people come in and they put comments and I get all sidetrack. I couldn’t remember what I was talking about. The only way that I broke through is to just keep doing it. It’s not like you’re not going to come online in your business or in your product or in no matter if you’re an author or a writer or you’re starting to pod cast or whatever. There’s no way you can be the top of the top. You didn’t know it started at the top there. You have to be somewhere and I think that the mistake is not just doing it.
In this world, we live in the most abundant. Going back to money, I just want to stay because I never was able to say this. Scarcity mentality versus abundant mentality comes down to one thing. You’re either giving yourself to life or you’re taking from life. The extent to which we assign money more powerful than ourselves is the extent to which we will feel dis-empowered when it comes to money. Having a scarcity mentality is you’re, again, you are informing law and informing life that you are their scarcity, there’s not abundance and you literally are that powerful and the moment you even consider yourself to not have all abundance, you literally informed instantaneously the universe to deliver and so it is.
What I hear is you’re saying it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy one way or the other.
100% you can use it either way. Works the same regardless of what directions of perfection. It’s like you’ve got to love yourself or someone else to love you. It’s the same thing. Got to love yourself.
Let’s talk about how you went from doing live feeds from your home to being on a live network streaming five days a week called Good Morning Lala Land. How did that come about?
It’s so funny how the universe delivers stuff to us. You can never plan it out and then we know this that we can’t outline. We call it outlining when you try and figure out and plan out exactly how something’s going to manifest. It happened with a complete twist. What happened was I was doing lives and I was committed to delivering truth. I didn’t know where, when, how, I just thought I’m just going to do it. Whether it be live streams on Facebook, Periscope, wherever I’m going to be with clients. I’m going to do one on ones. Whatever is I’m going to give, give, give, and I’m going to develop myself because that’s what we know. This work is not about what comes of it, it’s who we become out of it. I just kept doing it. Lo and behold, you put yourself out there, you develop yourself and you embody the wisdom human body being the expert in whatever your field is, it doesn’t matter what your field is. Soon enough as they say, you can’t get lucky unless you’re in the game.
[Tweet “What we energize, we magnetize.”]
I actually had a girlfriend asked me, she wanted to interview me on her show. I went into the studio and we did an interview and at the end I said, “Spirit just keeps saying that I need to have a show. There’s something that bringing this consciousness. Mainstreaming is what feels like my calling.” She said, “We’ll talk to the producer.” Sure enough, right after the show, I gathered the producer for a while and he’s like, “Just come on and start shooting your show.” I went in, I started shooting some one on one interviews and I just thought, what’s being inspired is a morning show. I felt this for a long time. I felt there should be multiple hosts. I feel like this is something that is all about good news, positivity and inspiration. Within a month time we found two other hosts and I had no idea how it was going to go. I just structured it, I thought of the name, I thought of the different segments. Lo and behold, we now have like two to five guests a day. We’ve had almost 250 guests. We are being looked at by so many huge producers and we’ve got a few studios that are looking to take us on. Also, if we want to move up in our production and we’ve got a whole platform.
I was fortunate enough to be a guest on your show. It’s so well-organized and you created a space where all the guests feel instantly welcomed and relaxed. It’s very clear this energy between you and your two co-hosts. I’m interested to hear that process because The Successful Pitch includes everything from pitching your idea to get funded to pitching your idea, to get on the air too. What were you looking for when you were interviewing co-host? What was it that they said or did in their pitch to you? Why they should be your co-host that you said, “These are my people.”
Rob Mack, I’d known him for twelve years. It goes to show you that the relationships that you have in your life, how we treat people every day, how we show up every day. You have no idea, you may already have the person that’s going to fund your project in your life. In fact, you most likely do. When I have a new project coming up, for instance, I’m having a multiple women events for entrepreneur, empowering that bringing spirituality, who do you call, who do you look to? The people that you already know. The people that you’ve already been watching doing their show online or they already have books already have up because you’ve been watching them.
The same person that when you do real estate, all of a sudden, you’ve known somebody, you’ve witnessed them doing real estate for years because they’re showing consistent marketing; who they are. When you happen to go, “It’s time to move, honey. Let’s sell this house and buy another one.” You just call them up. It’s not like you go searching out there. You already know somebody. When you go to angel funding or you go to any of the startups, they want you to actually have raised some capital from your friends and family because they know. If your friends and family have not been watching you and they don’t believe in you, then the likelihood is that you need an expert or somebody to step into that field.
You’ve had so many guests who typically have three guests per show per day, five days a week. What is it that makes a good guest? Because the guest coming on, whether it’s a podcast or a television show or anything to give good content versus somebody trying to get people to buy their book or buy their program or whatever it might be.
It’s all about the story. I think it’s like a good movie. or whatever you want either. The ideal thing is to have somebody that has a story that people cry, laugh or inspire all the above. We want to touch on people’s emotions. I think that’s the point of it is that we are human beings. We’re spiritual beings having a human experience. We’re here because we want to experience the happiness, the sadness, the joy, the hardship. Success doesn’t taste good unless you’ve experienced barriers and blocks. That’s life. The best guest is somebody that just become so vulnerable tells their deepest, darkest trials and tribulations and has an inspiration outcome.
Your Inner Guru: Success doesn’t taste good unless you’ve experienced barriers and blocks.
The concept of a good story is that it does take us on emotions like a good movie does or a good book. I think that’s what people forget when they’re co-telling their story, whether it’s about themselves or about what their product does or how it’s inspiring people to, to make a difference. I think that all comes down to telling people something that’s unexpected. For example, you had Rob Kessler and his wife, Linda, on your show and they happen to have a product called Million Dollar Collar. On the surface you might think, “Is that a TV segment? What is that? How is that interesting to the viewers?” Yet through the lens of this company, this is a love story. You take people on the picture of the wedding, pictures of the beach that didn’t come up because the collar was sloppy.
That gave him the idea to create a way to make the collars constantly look sharp and how they’ve to risk their whole future and quit their safe jobs to move to LA to live their vision and their dream and all the obstacles they’ve had to overcome and. Suddenly, it’s a couple whose love for each other and trust and belief in each other and the outcome is just this company’s product. That’s not the story on the show. The story is this love story. I think giving people a specific example on this episode of what makes a good guest and so if you ever want to get publicity for your startup or your company or yourself as a brand, keeping those elements of good story in mind. Even if you have what it might be perceived as the most mundane product in the world. Not what the Million Dollar Collar is but no matter what it is, a good story can make almost anything compelling.
On the show, we had these three gentlemen that came on and it was about a clothing line. I thought, “We just make the best. That’s my commitment every day. No matter what we’re going to find a story out of it.” After the interview with these three gentlemen, they talked about their struggles, they talked about their friendship and how having a business together has made them commit to communication, how to commit to finding their own strengths and weaknesses and all that kind of stuff. They talked about how they ride motorcycles together and how this is a bonding thing and how the clothing line was a part of them having their own expression and how they didn’t want to buy things from China anymore. How they wanted to support the people in the community.
Authenticity, you’re so authentic. Your story is authentic, your show’s authentic. Everything you touch and do is authentic and you just described a company of two guys that are literally on the road riding motorcycles and out of that a fashion brand evolves because it’s authentic and people can feel it and see it and hear it. You’ve had to launch your own brand and not only as an expert one-on-one, a person who works with people’s subconscious, but you’re also running a mastermind where people, you help people build a brand. Tell us your thoughts on the importance of authenticity and how to get it.
It’s easy to go, “Just be authentic or just be yourself or whatever.” Most people don’t even know who they are. That’s the reality that I think this is my authentic self. They don’t even know what their authentic self is like. That’s cool. It’s like a hip thing to say right now, but I don’t think most people even have gotten in touch with their authentic self. I’m a true believer, I help people want working with finding their purpose and calling which authentically is finding their authentic self. Their authentic and their unique swing in life. It always comes down to say in formula every time. Maybe someone has a different formula. I’m more open to it, but finding someone’s trials and tribulations, what they had to have triumph over their passions and their skills equals their purpose and calling. I truly think that being authentic is a great concept. It’s almost like the human factor, until you’ve gone through some hard stuff, you may not even know what is authentic for yourself. That’s the beauty of it.
Let’s just recap what you just said so that everybody can digest it. Write it down, look at it. When you get in touch with your authentic self, you’re taking down the mask, the veil, you’re expressing your own vulnerabilities, have some challenge you had to overcome that was difficult. You add that to your passion and skills, voila you’ve now got your purpose. I so relate to this because as I was working on my TEDx Talk, that was exactly the formula that I needed to use in order to even get a yes to get on that stage. For me it was overcoming being laid off after fifteen years of working and feeling like I’d lost my identity because I had somehow allowed it to get so connected to where I was working and what was my identity. I felt scared and sad and nervous about the future and remembering that losing my job doesn’t mean I’m losing my identity.
[Tweet “It’s going to sell as the story. People want to invest in personalities.”]
When I realized that my passion is about helping as many people on the planet as possible become storytellers so that that will then allow me to live my purpose, which is to help as many people as possible. Get off the self-esteem rollercoaster of only feeling good when things are going well in bad, when they’re not, or however many views or clicks or whatever your measurement is. That once you get off of that self-esteem roller coaster, you’re truly free to be the best version of yourself. I think hearing that formula and then giving the listeners the example of how I follow that formula to get my TEDx Talk should inspire everyone to want to track you down to hire you for one on one or the book or be part of your mastermind.
I just want to say that what you’re doing is so important because helping people find an entrepreneurial movement like a lot of the world is moving towards entrepreneurship. You’re helping people find their story because I’m telling you, people out there, you’ve got whatever your product is, it’s never going to sell, you’re never going to raise money if you don’t get your story together because people don’t care. They don’t care about the product. Do you know any people I see they’re bringing that are creating the next facial products like come on? What is important is the story behind it. Of course, the product has to be excellent because we’ve got so much competition in today’s marketplace.
Beyond it being a good product, it’s going to sell as the story. People want to invest in personalities. People will watch shows, but if there’s not a person that they connect with and that presented, they will not. They won’t do it. I work with people. I love to do subconscious work with people. It’s one of the most rewarding. It’s not easy to do one on ones anymore because I’m very busy, but it’s so rewarding to watch people when their chains of their past and their limiting beliefs come. They get out of their own shackles and there’s nothing more rewarding than that. Masterminds are so rewarding as you are doing a twelve-week mastermind with people and watching their lives transform in all areas is so incredibly rewarding.
The thing I want to leave people with is how people can find you. If people want to join your mastermind, where can people find Good Morning Lala Land?
Good Morning Lala Land is GoodMorningLalaLand.com. They can find us on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, all under Good Morning Lala Land. Good Morning Lala Land, John, was helping us work on our branding. It’s a state of mind. It’s a world movement around people doing good, about dreamers and people up to incredible things in. You can find me at DrErin.tv. On there you can download my free app. You can get my podcast that actually has a show on my app also, which is all free, 30 guided meditations all on there for you. I have a mastermind. I have a 30-day prosperity course and I do one-on-one, so all the above. You can just reach out and email me and I’ll talk to anybody anytime.
We’re so gracious of you. I can’t thank you enough for sharing your wisdom, your passion and your purpose. Inspiring us to live our purpose.
I just want to say thank you. Anyone out there, please share this podcast. I do believe in raising capital and getting people interested, whether it be they’re being your partner, whether they are one of voluntary. You’d be surprised when you just ask for advice about your pitch, I think it’s the best advice ever. Go to them just asking for their advice. Everybody wants to give advice and when you do that people want to get involved. Whether it is that they just want to watch you succeed, they want to volunteer, they want to give you money, whatever that is. You want to just have a community and the communities and most important thing.
Thanks, Erin.
Thanks so much, John. I love you so much.
Links Mentioned
- Dr. Erin Fall Haskell
- Good Morning Lala Land
- Awakening: A 40-Day Guide to Unleashing Your Spiritual Powers, Life’s Purpose and Manifesting Your Dreams
- Rich Dad, Poor Dad
- show – John Livesay on Good Morning Lala Land
- Rob Mack
- Rob Kessler on Good Morning Lala Land
- GoodMorningLalaLand.com
- Instagram – Good Morning Lala Land
- Facebook – Good Morning Lala Land
- YouTube – Good Morning Lala Land
- DrErin.tv
- Good Morning Lala Land’s email
- www.erinfallhaskell.com
- https://vimeo.com/271354054
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Angel Investor Secrets With Jim Brandt
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
Let’s say you’re a brilliant founder of a startup company, looking to make a difference in technology with all the plans and blueprints for success laid out – except for an investor. You’ve met with dozens of angel investors but none of your pitches have impressed them. How do you get investors to say yes when you pitch for funding? Jim Brandt, who has raised funds for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and who has invested in hundreds of companies including Slack and Skopenow, opens the secret world of angel investors. Learn more about the exact factors they’re going to look for in a potential investment.
Listen To The Episode Here
Angel Investor Secrets With Jim Brandt
Our guest is Jim Brandt, who is involved with the Tech Coast Angels both as an investor and sitting on their executive committee. He has invested on over a hundred companies, including Slack. He goes into the details on what he looks for when he has a pitch, why the team is just as important as location is to real estate, how to stand out and be extraordinary when you pitch or meet investors like Jim. He is really all about showing you’re smart, you’re passionate, and you have people skills. That winning combination is what gets you a yes when you pitch for funding. Jim, welcome to the show. I always like to ask my guest to take us back to the story of origin of when you decided along your career you wanted to be an angel investor.
Back in 2007, I got involved in the then Senator Obama’s campaign for president. In connection with the fundraising for President Obama, I met a boutique venture capitalist focused on healthcare and environment in an event called Opportunity Green at UCLA. It was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday event. It was full of startup entrepreneurs and angel investors and I had no idea that that world existed. By Saturday, I knew I was hooked.
What has been one of the best pitches you’ve ever heard and what made it so great?
Let me start with the second question first. What I look at primarily is the quality of the team. It’s like real estate. The three most important things are location, location, location. As far as I’m concerned, the three most important things with the angel investing is the team. The person who pitched me was absolutely exceptional. He was actually a serial entrepreneur. It wasn’t his first startup and he seemed to have all of the right qualities. He was clearly very bright. He had a very interesting idea and obvious people skills. That’s very important to me as well because the majority of startups fail for any number of reasons, but the leading cause is that the team implodes, which means that the founders got to have very strong people skills. This particular founder did indeed impress with that.
What is the mistake when you say the team or the founders implode? I’ve heard lots of stories. Is there one or two things that you see happening over and over again? Is it a fighting over equity? Is it disagreeing on the vision? What is it that causes founders to implode?
There are so many different challenges that founding teams face when they launch a startup. I would liken it to getting married. You really in for the long haul with a lot of very, very substantial challenges. The relationships are profoundly stressed again and again. It’s really is a matter of how well the founders can handle those stresses. It’s also interesting because many founders understandably found with family or friends is statistically the least stable startup team. The most stable startup teams are the ones that have worked together in the past. In between is a team made up of a relatively recent and acquaintances.
When you hear a serial entrepreneur pitch, obviously they’ve got confidence and experience under their belt and that comes through in the pitch, I’m assuming. Yes?
Yes, absolutely.
They’ve been able to express a vision, I would imagine, that caused them to assemble a great team. Ideally what I’ve heard a lot, and I’d love your opinion on this, is you give bonus points in your head going, “This team has actually worked together before on another company or another startup.”
Yes. The most stable teams are ones that have worked together previously.
Angel Investor: The most stable teams are ones that have worked together previously.
Yes. Let’s talk about one of your more famous companies. You’re an investor in Slack. How did you come to hear about them and what was that pitch like?
I think everybody has heard about them.
At one time, everyone’s invisible. You’re a seed investor, so I’m guessing you got in before it was a household name or did you come in after?
It actually is an outlier in my portfolio of Angel investments. Typically, I invested in the Angel level and I didn’t really invest in Slack up until recently. I got in at a Unicorn valuation. The reason I decided to get was is the team is extremely impressive and I’m confident. I think the set of collaboration tools are exceptional, the team leading the company is exceptional, and even though it’s already valued now at about $5 billion, I’m confident that there’s a lot of room for growth and that’s why I made that investment.
What Jim means by exceptional, because that word means a lot of different things to other people, exceptional means you’ve worked well together before. Maybe you’ve had other successful exits and you can handle high stress things happening multiple times. Is there anything else you can give us more specifically about what makes the Slack team so exceptional, so that someone listening could say, “That’s what I need to do to become exceptional?”
That’s a great question. I think the fact that they’ve grown it as quickly and as large as they have really speaks for itself.
The ability to show fast traction. Can you tell from looking at the team what is it in their skillset that allows them to grow that fast? Is it good marketing? Is it some kind of tech advantage? Is it creating brand ambassadors? Anything you can share that you think is the key to their success that made you want to invest in them would be helpful.
I think they really got all those skills across the board. How many companies launch and within a matter of few years after launch becomes so large? Statistically, it’s an exceptional success. It’s breathtaking and it’s rare that you’ll find a team. Even a team with a great business model and a great vision, execution is really everything. It’s clear that the Slack team excels in all the necessary ways.
Is barrier to entry for a competitor one of the key criteria that you look for whether someone like Slack that’s at the Unicorn level or a seed investor?
Yes. A sustainable competitive advantage is really important. Back in the 1990s when the Internet was just beginning to warm up, being first to market was a great advantage. It’s very difficult to come up with a truly original, creative idea that will afford a company a sustainable competitive advantage and a meaningful barrier to entry, the larger, much better capitalized companies. Yes, to the extent that you can identify a startup at angel investment opportunity that comes with a competitive advantage, that’s really desirable.
Can you give us an example, either from Slack or one of your other investments, that had a competitive advantage so the listeners could have an example in their head to go, “Now I see what that is?”
The first company that comes to mind is a company by the name of Neural Analytics. They’re developing software and hardware that will revolutionize brain health. They’re working in the space of stroke, concussion, and Alzheimer’s. They develop cutting edge or leading edge hardware and software. There’s a lot of intellectual property. They’ve got some very meaningful patents. There’s also a substantial amount of trade secrets that they’ve got so it’s enjoying a fair amount of success and it’s looking very promising. They’ve been doing it for quite a while. I would think that any large pharmaceutical company, if they like what this company is doing, I don’t think it would be a question because Neural Analytics is such a meaningful barrier to entry that it really would leave any potential acquirer to just buy it. It’s would be just a question of how much are they willing to pay for it.
Let’s talk about one of your many seed investors. What made you decide to say yes to them at the startup phase?
Usually, when someone comes to me with an idea, it’s pre-mature. I like to see something much further developed in an idea. Ideally, I’d like to see some traction which implies product market fit. I’ll go back to the company that I was talking about earlier or rather, the entrepreneur. His name is Eric Futoran and he founded a company called Embrace.io. He had been a founding partner of Scopely, which just raised a six figure round and the valuation is close to a billion dollars at this point. Eric is a very dynamic guy. I think what happened was after being at Scopely for five or six years, he saw that there was a good place when it comes to mobile user experience. I’m sure you experienced it from time to time, an app that freezes or abruptly closes or slow to navigate or of course, the dreaded endless spinner.
Yes, you have to shut down your whole computer and you can’t even figure out how to do that because everything is spinning.
It’s very frustrating. I’ve gotten to know Eric while he was still at Scopely and I was so impressed with him that I said to him, “If you ever decided to leave Scopely and start your own company, please let me know. I’d love an opportunity to consider investing.”
That does not happen very often. If it does, know that you’re doing something right. I’m just going to take a guess, Jim, that of all the founders you meet and all the pitches you hear, maybe you say that to less than five percent or even smaller people. Would that be accurate?
I would say a smaller percentage of founders. I don’t work a lot. I’m out probably at least two nights a week in West LA at different events, meeting entrepreneurs. Once in a while, I’ll meet an entrepreneur that is so impressive that I will invite him or her to reach out to me if and when they’re ready.
If you put yourself in the shoes of the audience, Jim, and they want to be in that one percent of people that you’re so impressed with. Anything you can do to describe what those characteristics are, either as a business person or a characteristic of that person as a person that makes you sit up and take notice and want to work with them would be so helpful.
Again, I would liken it to getting married, because when you invest in a startup, there’s no liquidity and it’s really a long-term relationship. I guess chemistry plays a part in it. You meet somebody and as you speak with him or her, you get a sense of how intelligent, how driven, how committed they are, and also how strong their people skills are. Of course, if they’ve got a vision, how compelling that vision is. I would say most often, I’ve only said that to a handful of people in the last ten years. Each of the person I was talking to is a serial entrepreneur, someone had proven his or her ability in the past. It’s very rare.
[Tweet “Passion, vision and people skills are key”]
You come across smart, you come across passionate, and you come across as someone who’s got great people skills. That’s where the unique magic is from my observations of all the people I’ve met, is if someone’s really technical, smart, and maybe even can articulate a vision, then nine times out of ten they don’t have really great people skills and vice versa. You can have really charismatic people that have this great vision, but they don’t have the technical expertise or don’t have people on their team to execute it. When you have that combination in one person, it’s almost left brain, right brain combo. That’s what people are attracted to. I think so many people, when they pitch an Angel investor like you, get confused and think, “I’m going to wow him with my demo,” and don’t even think about the people skills aspect of it. “I just want to have them hear it from the horse’s mouth,” so to speak, you, that the people skills are just as important if not more important than whatever your product demo is.
The bottom line is not one thing is more important than another. It’s that it’s so difficult to birth a company, nurture it, grow it, build it large enough and make it interesting enough to be acquired or to go public that really you need it all, and that’s rare.
The majority of exits seem to be getting bought versus IPO. Is that still the case today for you that you see?
I think it’s the case not only for me but generally. When I was growing up, it was like the go go 1960s, where all you needed was an idea to go public. Today things have changed dramatically. In fact, a really diligent angel investor will be just as focused on what’s the potential exit and who would buy this company as he would or she would be with the other considerations because the odds of a company of this startup going public are extremely remote. Of course, the odds are most startups are going to fail and the startups that succeed hopefully will fly. You want to know who are the natural acquirers and why would they acquire your company instead of some other company.
I don’t want to discourage your listeners who are aspiring entrepreneurs. I think it’s really exceptional for anybody to be an aspiring entrepreneur and make the leap and make the commitment to launch a company, but you really need a lot going for you in order for it to succeed. Not the least of which is good luck and absence of bad luck. We’ve all seen enough startups and enough really gigantic startups grow into something very dramatic and world-changing, and so that brass ring is worth reaching for.
It’s also the awareness that when you’re pitching someone like you, it’s really important if someone can put their empathy head on and realize that what’s important to someone like you is that you’re going to get your money back. There’s going to be a good chance of some kind of strategy for an ROI, that you’ve done some thinking on who could possibly buy your company that would make your initial seed round worthwhile.
Private startup companies, there’s no liquidity and the only reason that an investor invests is in the hopes of getting a return on investment. Although I will say that I made investment where the likelihood of return is less than I would generally make and that’s in the area of environmental, because I care about those things. I want to tolerate more risk, the biggest of which is I won’t get a return or if I do get a return, it will be more modest than what I’m generally looking for.
When you’re looking at your overall portfolio, do you allocate a certain percentage? Do you say to yourself, “10%, 20%, I’ll have some social impact influence in my yes or no decision?”
You would think I would do that, but I don’t. The reason I don’t is that it’s very difficult to identify a startup that I think is investment worthy. I only consider the issue when I get very excited about a company and I decide with each possible opportunity, “is this is one that I want to write a check for?”
A lot of research says that angel investors like you tend to invest within 50 miles or less of where you’re based. But when I look at your portfolio, I see LA and New York. Is that fair or is the majority here in LA?
Angel Investor: When a company is in your back yard, you can be much more effective with your diligence efforts.
The vast majority are, almost the lion’s share. Virtually all of them are in LA and there’s a reason for that. Number one, when a company is in your back yard, you can be much more effective with your diligence efforts. You can spend more time with the team, you can meet customers. Then once you write a check, these startups run into trouble for one reason or another. As I said earlier, there really are so many existential threats along the journey. When the company is in your backyard, it’s a lot easier and you can be more effective in terms of helping your portfolio company to overcome whatever challenges. When your’re distant, we do live in an information age so it’s not impossible but it’s not as efficient or effective when companies are in your backyard.
Jim, how important is a warm introduction? I know you’re out two nights a week to different events, but if you don’t come across somebody at that point and they’re just submitting and going through the Tech Coast Angel’s applications standpoint versus someone you know a little bit or trust a little bit or have some kind of relationship where they could say, “I think you might want to meet this person or at least take a look at their pitch deck.” How much does that weigh in for you?
A lot. At this point I’ve been Angel investing for about a decade. I have at least a hundred portfolio of companies. I’m on LinkedIn. I’m on AngelList. There’s a reasonable amount of awareness about me as an Angel investor. As a result, I get countless inbound solicitations and candidly, I just don’t have enough time to seriously consider each and every one of them on its merits, so a warm introduction from one of my Tech Coast Angel’s colleagues or someone who’s not a member but a colleague of mine who I respect then makes a big difference, then I will have a very close look at a company.
If you could give the listeners one big piece of advice when they pitch. It could be, “Don’t have too many words on your slide, don’t talk too fast, be sure you know your numbers, have a good story,” those are just some things I’ve heard in the past. If you have one piece of advice for people in order to get a yes when they hear a pitch, what would that be?
The first thing that investors typically see is a deck. I would make sure that if I’m going to be doing it, that my deck would be a very compelling presentation. Because investors like myself and other active investors, we get so many inbound decks that the deck has to be really, really well put together. The problems got to be set forth right up front, the solution has to be clearly spelled out, the team. It’s funny because in terms of frustrations with the deck, sometimes there’s too much information on a slide. Sometimes there’s too little information. I think in an entrepreneurial zeal to communicate how fabulous their vision is, they use fonts that’s so small that you really can’t read it. When I come to a slide where I see a couple of pictures, not sure exactly, there’s always an iPhone display and then they’ve got font that’s so small, I can’t read it.
[Tweet “The problems got to be set forth right up front, the solution has to be clearly spelled out, the team.”]
I just go to the next slide and then what I find is there’s not usually enough information about the team. There have probably sixteen members on a single slide. They’ll say college and the most recent company, but it really doesn’t give a lot of information. It doesn’t say what their position was at the prior company or prior companies. I think I’m not alone when I talk about how important the team is. If you’ve got five people on your team, make two slides so that you can have enough text under each picture, so the person looking at the deck and the slide can get a real sense of who the team members are and what they’ve done.
That’s great advice. Do you like certain areas, artificial intelligence, mobile, virtual reality, that you like to invest in, so the people know that, “What I’m doing isn’t the kind of thing he typically invests in,” or “I’m a good fit, I should figure out how to get in front of him.”
That’s a great question. Let me talk a little bit about Tech Coast Angels. We’re really vertical agnostic. We’re one of the largest and most active angel investment organizations in the country. We’ve got over 300 members across five regional networks. We invest in internet, software, life sciences, consumer products, hardware, really across the board. We don’t invest in movies, but we’re pretty diversified in the nature of our investments. We don’t just write checks, we bring experience mentoring, operational assistance. We bring valuable connections, and many of our portfolio companies have gone on to raise lots of money. Collectively, our portfolio has raised at least a couple of billion dollars in funding.
Jim, how can people follow you on social media? What’s the best way to keep in touch with what you’re doing and what your Angel Group is doing.
Look at my LinkedIn profile, my AngelList profile. Candidly, I’m not that active on social media. I think I’m a little bit older to navigate on social media on a daily basis.
We’ll definitely look at your LinkedIn profile and see what your next big unicorn might be that you’re going to be part of, because that’s certainly an indication for people that you’ve done your due diligence on them. Jim, thanks again for being on the show. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for sharing your insights and wisdom.
Thank you, John for having me. I appreciate your giving me the opportunity to share my experiences and my thoughts.
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