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You're listening to the Radcast, a top 25 worldwide business podcast. If it's radical, we cover it.

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Here's your host, Ryan Alford. We're talking growth today. We're talking success engineering. We're talking to Alex Morton. Now we've got Brad Lee, founder and CEO of Lightspeed VT, entrepreneur, mentor, investor, author.

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Mark Randolph, both an actor and a writer and a speaker and all those things. He's also the founder of a bad-ass platform called Stage 32, Richard R. B. Bottow. I'm really excited to be joined today by Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Whoop. You know, we have a lot of CEO types who are aspiring entrepreneurs and things like that for the podcast. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, building the company, you know, some of the nuts and bolts of the realities of being an entrepreneur, a young entrepreneur?

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and having an idea, bringing it to life. Because I think a lot of people think that stuff happens overnight, but whoops, what, eight, nine years in the making now. And now you're seeing the fruits of this and that's been building. Starting a company and building a business is much harder than you think it'll end up being. But it's not nearly as hard as probably most people in your life will tell you.

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which is that it's impossible. I think that the hardest thing for me in building WU was less so the actual business side of it, but more so me being comfortable growing into running today what is now a business valued over a billion dollars, right? Like, how do you grow into that? How are you making sure that you personally are advancing as a leader? And how do you deal with

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criticism along the way, self-doubt along the way. Everybody was looking to me to come out to LA to say, can you help me get a job? Can you help me, help me? And you realize that while all businesses are tribal and all businesses run on relationships, the entertainment business is the, I mean legitimately the most tribal business in the world. And that got me thinking about what was the embryonic idea of stage 32.

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When things catch on a broad level, there will only be so many companies that can compete in that space. And we've seen that borne out over the last 12, 15 years where you have your Facebooks and you have your Twitters and you have your TikToks now and every once in a while one will pop up Instagram and so on and so forth. But I figured that what would happen was these things would filter down to niche levels. And so what I wanted to have was the first platform.

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for film, television and digital content creators and professionals worldwide dedicated to the business. The lesson is epiphanies aren't real. That company formation is sloppy. It involves lots of people, lots of fall dead ends and false starts. And Netflix was certainly no different. In fact, before we even got anywhere close to an idea for video, I pitched my co-founder, Reed Hastings,

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dozens, if not hundreds of ideas that were, you know, generations removed from what Netflix was. My book is called That Will Never Work. My podcast is called That Will Never Work. And that's because that is what everyone told me when I pitched the idea for Netflix. It's what employees told me. It was what investors told me. I mean, my wife told me that. And I persevered anyway, but

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Lo and behold, we launched this crazy idea and you know what? Well, they were all right. It didn't work. It was a terrible idea. And it took us 18 months before we finally stumbled on the crazy business model twist that unexpectedly it did work. So yes, there was a long period where we were struggling, running out of money in a tiny office, sitting at card tables on beach chairs we had bought from home.

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That's the story that people don't hear in the entrepreneur world of what's not the not sexy. You know, it's all sexy now. Like the the the the beauty and the pageantry of entrepreneurship. There's been a lot of moments. There's also been some major downfalls. Right. I went from almost two million bucks down to less than 90K in my savings account. Thirty pounds overweight, pretty much depressed and anxiety. Cry myself to sleep, freaking out. So there's been a lot of moments of.

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pinnacles of success. And there's been a lot of moments of, dude, this is like if this is a rock bottom, I don't know what the hell it is. But I feel like all of those moments make me and make us who we are at the end of that. It builds our character and it builds our, you know, builds our passion for what we're doing. 100 percent, 100 percent right. That the journey is everything. But anyone that tells you the journey is one straight line is both full of it and never really had a true journey.

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that

05:41
So that was the challenge there. Interesting. Is, let's, I want to explain for people, because if you're not in the entertainment industry, I think it can be overwhelming and also some ignorance just because there's not.

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You're not in it. There are no overnight successes. Everybody believes that. This is a very much a brick by brick business and a marathon business and a, like I said earlier, relationship and tribal business. But the way that you can shorten your path is if you can get your material or your talents in front of those decision makers. And really, before this platform existed, the only way to do that was sometimes through a contest or sometimes through...

06:29
really it was through your champions. It was through people that, you know, if I come up to you and you know, you're a manager and I say, man, my, you know, my writing's fantastic. That manager's getting in, you know, just inundated with material day after day. They're like, yeah, sure, you and everybody else. But one of their clients or one of their peers or somebody comes and says, no, no, no, you gotta read RB's stuff, it's really good, goes to the top.

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That used to be the way, the only way it really worked. When you look back, who's, who are those influencers in your life? You know, I don't really say that I have a mentor or I had one. I think I was mentored by everyone. Right. You know, things not to do, things to do. You know, my dad, my grandpa, my fricking friends, their dads, you know, their moms, TV shows.

07:24
You know, Tony Robbins, Grant Cardone, Damon John, Zig Ziglar, Tom Hopkins. Like I've learned a lot from everybody. And I believe in learning something new every day because a lot of times we get in these ruts where, you know, we're just kind of feeling stuck. And mainly it's because we're doing the same things. And in order to do something different, you have to think something different.

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So if you're not getting any new information, you kind of just get stuck. So I seek new information on a daily basis and I realize everybody I meet knows something I don't. So I believe relationships are the new currency. I believe the more hands you shake, the more money you make. And I'm not concerned if someone doesn't necessarily like who I am because I like who I am. So I think that's a combination that just comes across, you know, confident to some and arrogant to some.

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others, you never know. But at the end of the day, I think that's the key is just learning from everyone, letting everyone be your mentor, your children, your employers, your employees, your friends, your relatives, everyone. I learned from everyone. You can always tell someone that maybe made 100 grand one time in a month or even a year, and everything's gotta be super formulated and organized, all this kind of stuff. And one of my good friends and mentors, Grant Cardone, which a lot of people know,

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I love the guy so much, not just because he's a good dude, but he's so raw and real. And he's like, I'm gonna tell you the way it is because I've done it. And I feel at my age, are there people that have made more money than me? Absolutely. But being able to earn, you know, dozens of millions of dollars in your low thirties, you learn a lot of stuff. And I feel like I know how to just give people the truth. So why mess around with all the marshmallows and rainbows? Just tell people how it is. And if some people like you,

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love you or hate you, that's not even my business. My business is to give people the formula to go out there and win, and that's that. There's this thing that happens, at least it happened to me, where you start a company and you start immediately comparing yourself to the best entrepreneurs. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, whatever, right? These people wouldn't be struggling with this thing. And here I am, I've got

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you know, four people on my team and two of them are co-founders and I'm struggling to get the fifth person. Like, gosh, like they would just never would have had to deal with this. And I think that's a really unhealthy mindset and one that I overcame as well, where you're trying to compare yourself to other executives, other leaders, other entrepreneurs, and really you just have to focus on how can you become a better version of yourself in this role. And I'll bet you

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that when those heroes that we think of today as entrepreneurs were first starting a company, they didn't know that much more than you did. I mean, I really believe that. I think the key thing though that they did much faster than everyone else is how they got better themselves. And it's why if you look at what they've been able to accomplish later in their careers,

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It's so powerful and it's why many of the best entrepreneurs also have these sort of like failed early startups in their careers too or things that weren't nearly as successful as what they did later. So again, I come back to this idea that you have to keep comparing yourself to yourself on that growth journey. I like that and you know.

11:03
You didn't say it, but again, I've read enough about, you know, your process and that notion of a lot of those you just named the ambition in the idea and making sure that's grand enough so that, you know, you're you're kind of beating your competition ahead of the game, which I really like, because I think a lot of people box themselves into the limits of the idea because it may seem easier. But while you're at it, what you're going to all these links be ambitious.

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And in fact, I'll just say broadly, I think that the more ambitious your idea is, the more potential it is, that's obvious, but it has all these lists, it has all these other benefits that you sort of don't fully appreciate in the moment. The first is, for example, that you end up being able to recruit insanely good talent, like the best talent by far. You know, today, whoop has a 96%...

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job offer acceptance rate, which in the world of engineering is kind of unheard of. The reason we have such a high job acceptance rate is that what we're doing is so hard that it attracts these insanely competent people because they want to work on the hardest problems. It's why SpaceX and Tesla, for example, also have, I'm sure, amazing engineers because they're doing stuff that's on the cutting edge.

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So if you're doing stuff on the cutting edge, I think you inherently have these advantages of being able to attract really great talent. You also have the opportunity to work with other very cool brands, because those brands want to associate themselves with the next thing. You know, I know you're doing stuff with personal development and mentoring and all those things. We hear it a lot. The ideas are 1% and the execution is everything. And I think...

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it's becoming such common vernacular that it's kind of like glossed over a little bit. But I'd love for her to know your perspective of like how you, how people like yourself or others, are they just wired like to get it done? Like, because you all execution is just, it is everything. I mean, I think probably the single biggest personal trait for a successful entrepreneur is simply this predisposition to action. You know, they

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do more and they think less. They immediately, when they have an idea, they're not all of a sudden spinning off into this fantasy land of, oh, how amazing this idea will be. Just imagine what will happen when they immediately go, how can I figure out a way to quickly and cheaply and easily try something? And the other reason for this whole, you know, ideas 1% and executions 99% is that your idea is almost inevitably wrong.

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It's always wrong. You know, I don't know whether you're, yeah, absolutely. In fact, you come from a, a, a, a industry where brainstorming sessions are like, uh, you know, that's your daily meals. And for those of you who don't, if you've, you know, there's brainstorming sessions and there's always the moderator up there and goes, okay, some ground rules, folks, number one, there's no such thing as a bad idea. And I call bullshit on that.

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There are tons of bad ideas. In fact, the rules of a brainstorm session, these are all bad ideas, because they are. And your job is not to come up with a good idea. Your idea is to figure out why your idea is bad, because that's the process. That's what entrepreneurs do. They start with an idea and don't say, this is what it's gonna be. Again, there's no epiphany moment, but they start. And they realize by colliding it with real people, with a real market, with real problems, what the flaw was.

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I've heard every single possible reason there is for people having an idea and then not wanting to start. And one of the most tragic ones that I hear is I don't want to tell anyone my idea because I don't want someone to steal my idea. And the reason that is so tragic, besides the obvious, which is no one's going to steal your idea, but by the very act of you not being willing to make your idea public,

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You're protecting the 1% and you're then not enabling yourself to do the 99%, which is figure out why your idea is a bad one. You're protecting something, which is a bad idea. You've got to get out and figure it out. It's the execution. It's the doing, it's the doing, it's the doing. I love that notion that all, all ideas are bad because the notion, because all ideas are bad because of how hard it will be to execute them.

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and how much you have to overcome to make them happen. No, that's not what I mean. What I mean is that idea that you have in your mind is not going to work. It's a creation. The evolution. It's a fiction. The evolution is the really hard part. I tell people, the most successful people in this business or in general are naturally curious. Because I think if you don't have a natural curiosity, either it...

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You're both uninteresting, number one, I think. And then number two, I don't think you can have, it's something that comes, I think, with driven people. This is a good insight for any entrepreneurs listening to this. I would encourage you to ask your customers what their problems are, not necessarily ask them what solutions they think you should build. It's your responsibility as an entrepreneur, as a business leader, to figure out what the solution should be to their problems.

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And often customers are phenomenal at describing problems and less capable at describing solutions. And so that's what I realized, you know, I realized this years later, but in that moment in time, I was just recognizing a better way to solve their problems. You have more control than you realize you have. And you can control the process, but you can't control the process without champions and without an audience, you know what I mean? So,

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This teaches you how to build that audience, how to make sure you're not wasting time trying to just make everyone your audience because that's not the way the world works. You gotta identify your audiences, engage them in the proper way by bringing them value, like you said earlier, being selfless. I have a rule of three, which is I give three times before I ever ask for anything. So you're building that trust and you're building that community. And then once you've built that trust,

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you get them to go, then you go for your ask. Then you ask them to go move on your behalf. And you know, we've seen this throughout history that this is how businesses are built. And especially in this day and age, we've seen how brands all across the world are asking their communities to move on their behalf and to grow and to help them grow. If you have more opportunities today.

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especially given the fact that you're basically carrying around a connector all day long. And you have so many opportunities in a given day to be able to give and to be selfless and to be empathetic in a manner that allows you to build your brand and build your audience and to get you to really where you want to be.

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And I'm not saying that in a manipulative sense, like with being Machiavellian, like let's make these connections, and then oh my God, I'm gonna come back behind you, and I'm gonna be like, okay, now, now you gotta give me what I'm asking for. No, it's not that. It's building relationships in a community that last over time, so that you're able to accomplish your goals, but you're able to help other people on their path and on their journey as well, which of course is the priority, really, or it should be the priority in audience building. When you're ignorant about something,

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It doesn't mean you're stupid. It means you just don't understand it. Right. So I kind of dove into it and I had these different conversations and these different, I was shaking hands with people that were really doing this. And I'm like, you know what? This truly is the future. So knowing what you want, your vision, finding your vehicle and opportunity, finding the right people to listen and listen to. And then I think there's a beautiful balance of working on yourself spiritually. And they're working hard in the physical. I'm not one of these, these guys.

19:30
These gurus that say, Oh, just think about money and a million dollars is going to hit you in the side of your head. I don't think that's, I don't think that's real, but I think you need the law of attraction and to learn what that actually is and how to manifest. But you also, you got to also move your ass and get to work. You know, I was doing 17 hours a day for probably six years straight. So it's, it's, it's hard work. It's persistence, it's consistency. It's the ability to block out negative people. Some of them may have your same last name.

20:00
They may love you very, very much. And they may say, you know what? I don't think you should start that business. You shouldn't go start an ad agency because it's going to cost too much money, it's not going to work. Right. So it's the ability to grow yourself personally, learn leadership, sales, marketing, all those skills, but also learn how to use your imagination. Uh, learn how to build a really positive self image, learn how to go out there and build solid relationships. But at the end of it for like momentum, I truly believe it's desire vision.

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Um, and it's work ethic, man. I, I, I, I talk all over the world and I tell people, you can't find me one athlete. Musician, actor, business owner that didn't have to work their butt off to get where they are. You know, people can look you up and we'll get to the book and other things that, you know, like some core principles, but is there like a number one skill set that maybe people overlook or as often or two or three, you know, there's a specific number here, but like.

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things that really make people great at sales? Well, when it comes to just sales, you know, there's, there's quite a few, I think people overlook empathy. They overlook the, you know, empathy being number one. I mean, a lot of times if you just put yourself in your customer's shoes, say to them what you would want to be told, you know, treat them like you'd want to be treated, you know.

21:23
you're going to go a lot farther in sales. I think if you really want to learn to sell, learn to stop selling. Right? We're learning to sell incorrectly. We're being taught to close deals and sell people so we can get a commission or we can make a sale. When if you just stop doing that, man, instead of being a salesperson, try to be a help person. You know, stop selling.

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and just start asking some questions, being interested in your customer, and then lo and behold, you'll find information that totally correlates with your product or service, and all of a sudden now, that enthusiasm and that passion kinda gets transferred to the other person, and they buy your product and service. So the way to sell is to not sell. Look to help people, man. Took me 30 years to learn three valuable life lessons. Number one, be real. Number two, be ethical.

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And number three, help other people, man. You never know, there's a scripture, Hebrews 13 two. Look it up. That's why I say, man, you just, more hands you shake, the more money you make. Go out there and introduce yourself. Just because you're having a hard time raising that first 250 grand or that first million dollars or whatever it is, it doesn't mean you can't go on to raise an enormous amount of capital. It's just learning.

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It's learning the fundraising process. The other thing I'll say that I feel fortunate about is I have, I've raised capital from investors that I've built great relationships with over time. And I will say that, you know, when you take capital from someone, it's like a marriage, except that you can't get divorced.

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I mean, it's, it's, I mean, it's, there's a real bond that could, that happens there. You're now both on the cap table. And so, you know, you need to just be pretty thoughtful about that. And I would also say that you don't want to, you don't want to take any capital. You want to make sure that there's some real alignment around what your, what the vision is for that capital. And that's, that's been another thing that I think has boded well for whoop and being very ambitious.

23:38
You know, it self-selected out investors who were maybe at the early stage scared of losing their money. They knew that there were some real technology risks and so they said, like, let's take it on. Whereas now at a later stage, you know, it's more of a business model story. You have to think about these things relative to the stage as well. People just started inviting, you know, community and their communities in droves and they were becoming champions of the platform.

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So to be quite honestly, we went from that 100 to 800,000 mostly through crowdsourcing, mostly through word of mouth. Now over the last couple of years, have we done some Facebook advertising, stuff like that? Of course. We have partnerships with Netflix. We did a gigantic global how to pitch to Netflix, how to do a TV pitch deck for Netflix. That of course brought in a ton of people as well. But

24:33
most of our community has been built through word of mouth and through crowdsourcing. I think it has a lot to do with just telling the truth. In 2022, I feel like there's so much overhyped nonsense. And when you just tell a prospect, whether it's car sales, insurance, network marketing, ad agency, when you just tell people the deal, this is what it is. This is what it costs. I feel like you're going to close more deals instead of running around the, the Bush all the time and overhyping.

25:02
under delivering. So I think telling the truth, being transparent, but I think it has a lot to do with confidence and how the salesperson sees themselves, literally their self image of who they are. I think that's a, that's, that's a big factor when it comes to closing small deals or, you know, multimillion dollar deals. Is there two, three, four ingredients call them that are common in that, in any kind of company's growth? I mean, like

25:31
Are there things that are like, you absolutely have to have these two or three things that are this, that you see as you watch either businesses you've grown or others you've been invested in or help? You know, I'm glad I did what I did, but you know, if anybody wants to build a personal brand in my opinion, you got to think about just content flow. So you just figure out what your sources are, then the sources lead to the creative. Someone has to chop up, drop, edit, you know, hashtag, etc. That's your creative.

26:01
Then you gotta figure out what your outlets are. And then you have frequency, right? How often are you doing that? And then you have what I call boost, which means how much money are you investing into it? A lot of times people just post, but they're not investing any money to be seen. Folks, that's the key is if you literally paid whatever it took to get everybody that logged into Facebook every day to see your face for a month, you'd be famous.

26:29
You may not be liked by everybody, but you'd be famous and you'd have a ton of opportunity coming your way. I think people overstate the risks to starting a company or overstate the risks associated with being an entrepreneur because the process for becoming an entrepreneur, for starting something reveals so much about who you are as a business leader, what your strengths are, your character, where your holes are, what you need to improve.

26:57
I mean, it reveals that so rapidly and so effectively that regardless of whether the business ends up being a success, you as an individual have learned so much about yourself and what it actually takes that you will go on most likely to do incredibly great things afterwards. Wanted, it's knowing exactly what people want. And it sounds so cliche and it sounds so kindergarten level.

27:27
eight year old men and women in America or the United Kingdom or where I've been in Poland and Russia, whatever, most people don't even know what they want. So I think getting super clear on what you want, you know, the vision you have for you in your life. And then number two, very, very fast there, you've got to find your vehicle. So I think knowing what you want, finding the vehicle and opportunity, knowing who your quote mentors or mentors going to be, that's going to guide you. Like at 21, I had a guy making 40 grand a month at 25.

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And I said, dude, tell me what to do. I'm going to go do it. He told me what to do. I went and did it. And then I got the 40 grand a month. If you could just take steps every day, you know what I mean? And if you could just put out good stuff, put out good vibes, you know, like I always say to introverts, like here's three ways that you could step out today. Because a lot of people are like, I'm afraid that, you know, it's imposter syndrome. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm new. How do I thank people for posting great content? You know, just thank them. That's value.

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share things if you read something this morning you know that that is intriguing or something that you found really interesting to share it and never be afraid to ask people questions never be afraid to say why did you try that why did you do that people are going to respond to maybe not everybody but just dip your toe in and for you know you'll be swimming and really it's so vital that you can that you do that today

28:51
in this world. It's so vital that if you're looking to accomplish something that you're using, utilizing those tools and that you're making a part of your action plan on a daily basis. It just has to be. I think the media has pumped up the wrong aspects of entrepreneurship. They've pumped it up as this path to becoming wealthy or famous. They've pumped it up that it's all about pitching, that it's all about raising money, that it's all about the parties.

29:18
And in reality, that's a tiny, tiny, tiny piece of what an entrepreneur actually does. And in terms of the wealth part, it's a tiny, tiny fraction of entrepreneurs for whom that actually happens to. But listen, if you love creating characters, if you love performing, if you love influencing, if you love the emotion of it, all power to you should be an actor in the same thing with entrepreneurship. If you love the challenge of starting something, of figuring things out of, as I said before,

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sitting around the table with super smart people, solving really interesting problems. It is the best career in the world. Hey guys, you know where to find us. We're at theradcast.com. You can find all the highlight clips from this episode, everything online. You know where to find me. I'm at Ryan Alford on TikTok. That's a fad. And Instagram. You know where to get us. We'll see you next time.

30:08
on the Radcast. To listen or watch full episodes, visit us on the web at theradcast.com or follow us on social media at our Instagram account, the.rad.cast or at Ryan Alford. Stay radical.