What 2025 Taught Me About Business, Hiring, and Leadership

Many people have been in business for 20 years, but in reality, they've relived the same year 20 times over. On the other hand, people have been in business for 5 years, but they've leveled up every year for 5 years and have more experience in 5 years than someone else does in 20 years of business. So every year in business, I like to review what are specific unique things that I learned from the previous year. And honestly, 2025 was a year of some Some successes, but mostly challenges for me in business. One of the hardest years I've had in business. So these are the top 12 business lessons that I learned in 2025. Number 1, it always takes twice as long and twice as much money than you think. This year I learned this lesson twice the hard way. We were building Funnel Launch AI. It has probably taken us 4 times as long and 4 times as much money to do than you think. We also just renovated our house and it took about twice as much time and twice as much money as we thought. What's funny is it's still worth it. When I'm underwriting opportunities now, I understand this. Whatever we think it is, it's probably going to be twice as long and twice as hard, but is it still worth it even with that scenario? And the answer should be an overwhelming yes. Otherwise, the opportunity probably isn't worth pursuing. Lesson number 2, vision unites a team more than anything else. There's a lot of things you can do to unite a team, team bonding, who you work with, how much money you pay somebody. All those things this year I've learned are dwarfed by the vision of what we're doing. Most people, if not all people, want to do something great with their life. They want to work on something compelling, something great, something that's going to change the world. Heck, I want to work on something great and it's going to change the world. This year, our vision drastically changed at Funnel Launch of what we're building with Funnel Launch AI. Our first iteration of the platform called Athena, then Hermes, then Ares, this massive platform that we're looking to build here. I'm teasing a little bit. It'll come out hopefully soon. It's been twice as long as I thought, but this mass vision across the company is palpable. How people show up to work, how they hire, how we fire has been very amazing around this vision. I take a sports team. Yeah, people get paid money, but some sports teams don't unite. People hang out together and they don't unite. When there's a strong vision, a clear goal, and a feeling of accomplishment towards that goal, it unites your company like crazy. And for a long time at Funnel Launch, we had an okay vision. It was fine. But now I feel like we're really pursuing something great, and you can feel it amongst our whole team and really going after something big, you know, a multi or even a deca billion dollar company. If this works, if Funnel Launch AI works, We think we could be a $10 billion company in the next few years. That's how big of a market we're going after, and it's been very uniting of our entire team. Alright, number 3, high performers don't like low performers and low performers don't like high performers. This is stolen from Nick Saban, one of the best coaches ever in college football. High performers hate hanging out with low performers because they bring the average down. And by the way, low performers hate high performers because they remind them of the laziness that they have. It's a great quote from Steve Jobs. He says, A players will hire other A players and B players will hire C players. B players want to hide, and so they hire people even worse than them so they look better than their peers. A players will just— they want to work with high performers, so they hire other high performers. I've heard this before. This year it became evidently true at Funnel Launch and Ugly Unicorn about the people we hire, we work with, the litmus test of who we're bringing onto our team, the bar has risen significantly. This year, we implemented a new thing called the Keepers Test. If you haven't heard of this, there are 2 main questions. The Keeper Test is this. You go through your entire staff and employees. This is what Netflix rolled out, a bunch of other Silicon Valley companies this last year. Question number 1 is, would you hire them again today knowing everything you know now about this person? Would you, if they applied again to work for the same job, would you hire them again today? Question number two: If this person quit today, would you fight to keep them? If the answer is nah, if that person quit, actually it'd be kind of nice because they're just a pain in my neck. Or you knowing everything, I probably wouldn't have hired them again today, but they're already here. They're already trained up. If the answer is no to either one of these questions, you should fire the person immediately. Now that's a hard thing to do because you're like, well, these people are trained. They're fine. You know, they're already here. This is the keeper test. We started implementing this at Funnel Launch and we did multiple rounds of letting people go that just, you know, for whatever reason, they did not fall under one of these categories and we said, well, we got to move on. This is what the keeper test is because we are just a collection of the people that are at our business. The next one I'm going to add, I guess I'm adding 3 bullet points in one all around people. This was a big year for people for me. How— who do we work with? How do we hire? Bullet point number 3. Spend significantly amount more time hiring to really find A+ people. I used to think I was hiring A+ people, and now I have a full new bar of what an A+ person is in my organization. I'll give you an example. We were hiring a CTO for Fun Launch AI. Me and Mason sat down and said, "This is probably one of the most important hires in Fun Launch's history. Let's not take this lightly." So we put out job applications. I asked around. We put out LinkedIn posts. We did Instagram advertising. We put We reached out to our entire network. Do you know anybody that could fit this CTO role? We want a player coach. We want someone who's really good on multiple fronts here. Me and Mason, the 2 co-founders, spent over 100 hours interviewing, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th interviews with people to get down to candidate after candidate after candidate. We finally gave an offer to Corey, who accepted the offer. The guy's amazing. Got a PhD in computer science, was on Google DeepMind for years. Very incredible technologist along with a great programmer, along with a great people person. I mean, he's a very dynamic individual, the right motivation, the right stage of the career. 100 hours, like I'm not joking. People say like, oh, we did like— actually 100 hours of time went into this hire. As of recent, we've hired more people and this is back to a Steve Jobs quote that I absolutely love. He's like, my number 1 responsibility at Apple is to hire Amazing talent. That is top priority for Steve Jobs and it is for us and I didn't do that for a long time period. I'm like now you'd be surprised how much time I spend every day just on LinkedIn sending cold messages to people like hey, you should leave your job and come work for us. Like I, the founder Bridger, I'm headhunting people all the time. I'm sitting like we need the sharpest, brightest, best people to work for us. If we're gonna make this huge vision happen of what we're building with Funnel Launch AI, this full platform to help people launch funds, build an entire fund in a day or a weekend, we need to have phenomenal people in These were big, I guess, 3 lessons in 1 around hiring people for 2025. All right. I'm going to shift gears a little bit on this next one and talk some business lessons around what I learned in running my funds this year, especially in my crypto fund. So as you know, I run 2 funds. Fund Launch Partners has had a phenomenal year, did great, crushed it. Ugly Unicorn, on the other hand, is a crypto fund. We had high expectations for 2025. If you follow crypto or me, 2025 was supposed to be the year. We had the crypto president, the new SEC chair, all the regulations, the 4-year halving cycle. I mean, it was, everything was lined up. And what happened was crypto took a dump. Most alternative coins in crypto were down 40% to 60% this year. That was a tough year. We had a lot of new money come in because of the hype and the excitement, the new Trump administration, everything. And with that, it's a very public market. With private funds like Fund Launch Partners, you know, we send reports every 6 months out or every quarter, and we kind of mark things as we go. It's a long-term fund. In a crypto fund, anybody can just pull up their phone And look up the crypto market. Oh my gosh, Ethereum's crashing or XRP's all like they can know the price right now. So this year we had a Terra four that nuked markets during that Terra four most crypto fell about thirty percent. I think Ethereum fell at one point fifty five percent. And so with that, we have a lot of investors calling us, and I had I'll just I won't sugarcoat. I had investors call me up, Bridger, what's going on? Why is the fund down? And like. I mean, the market is down significantly. We are riding this wave because we could see a huge upturn. We're riding with it right now, and I'm managing the emotions. Now, managing your own crypto emotions is hard, like if anybody owns crypto, and then managing 110 investors' emotions around crypto is a full nother gambit. I can't tell you the countless calls I've had with investors that started out just stressed, worried. Ah, Bridger, what's going on? And by the end of the call, I go, hold on, we're gonna be good. Look at this, look at all the data. We have JP Morgan that just joined, we have Vanguard that just joined, Bank of America just gave an allocation of to 4% for all their clients. We have the Clarity Act looking to get it passed. The Genius Act just passed. Scott Beston is making stablecoins standard around the globe. I mean, look at the institutional adoption right now. Like, oh yeah. And so business lesson number— I don't know what number we're on, but is seeing the forest through the trees. The trees being the day-to-day crypto movements. We had October 10th, the largest crypto liquidation in history. With no real seemingly crazy news, bigger than FTX collapse, bigger than Luna Terra, bigger than Genesis Global, bigger than COVID happened October 10th, 2025. Multiple funds firms got completely wiped out on this day. Anyone with thankfully we have no leverage in our fund, but still the market dropped significantly. And stepping back and saying see the forest through the trees. And again, a lot of our investors they don't watch the market every day. They just see a statement or a little news headline and they freak out and they call us up and go hold on just be. Be cool. Dovetailed with this business lesson was one of my favorite quotes from Marcus Aurelius. You think of Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome, all the Senate, the politics in Rome, and he says this: Be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea still falls around it. I think of Marcus Aurelius with the Senate, all the politics around Rome. And all the craziness he must have lived through to say this: be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. This year in crypto, I mean, we got beat up in crypto. We've had some great years, and this year we thought it was going to be amazing and really flopped. And we had a lot of people not so happy. They'd call us up, and again, by the end of the call, almost all these investors like, oh yeah, okay, we're staying for this. We're seeing the forest through the trees. We're gonna stay long-term on this. Great. Because we're a long-term fund. We're not a day trading fund. But being unmovable on our conviction of what we are doing. And that would lead me to my next business principle. I guess I'm putting little packages together, but the conviction of what you are doing is massive. That was a huge lesson for me of stepping back and saying, okay, take the fund, for example, what our investments are, where we're placing our capital. We are fundamental investors in crypto. We try to find things that are being adopted in blockchain and go like, is this thesis good? The tokens we're looking at, are they still valuable companies and assets? Even though the price is down, what conviction do we still have? And we were like, yes, these are all still great projects and companies and tokens that we were in. We have strong conviction on what we were doing. And that's what helped make me like a rock that the waves keep crashing over and help me see the forest through the trees. Because there were some stressful moments. I'm like, sometimes I doubt myself. I'm like, man, did we just do this all wrong? Did we just think about this whole entire market wrong? I go, no, I go back to this. I talk to my partners. We go through all the data. Maybe we're missing something drastic, but all the data that's presented to us that we can see that we pulled from all corners of the world, gives us incredible conviction on what we're doing. Furthermore, I dovetail that to Funnel Launch. You know, I'm a somewhat public figure, I have a YouTube channel, and with that we run ads. You get a lot of hate comments, you get people that say you're an idiot, you're a scam, you're stupid, you didn't say that right, you messed up on your word. And I this year have really learned to go, what am I actually doing and am I convicted on that? Every word that I say, will I go to the mat on that? Phrase or comment or thing. And I've tried to be more selective with what I share and don't share. I was telling my team behind the scenes before this, we've changed a lot of our content. I no longer tell people what to do. I used to make content and say, this is what— this is my advice or what I would do if I was in your shoes. To be frank, I have no clue what I would do in your shoes because I don't know your shoes. I haven't stood in your shoes. I just know what's worked for me. And so I've changed my content drastically over the last 18 months to say, frankly, I have no clue if this will work for you, but this is what worked for me. This is how I launched 3 funds in my 20s, how we exited a fund, how we hit the Inc. 5000. This is how we grew a team. This is how— this is what worked for me. Take whatever you want from that, but it might not work for you. A couple things with that. Number 1, it's an immense amount of conviction because it worked. It is actually working real time for me. Number 2, it's very compliant actually because I'm not guaranteeing anything. I have no idea if it'll work for you. But number 3, it helps you stand on a very firm foundation of what you are doing. And even if a client or someone on Instagram like sends you a hate message, you're just like, it just rolls off you. You're like, well, they have no clue 'cause I'm just sharing what worked for me. You're an idiot. It's like, okay, well, maybe I'm an idiot, but it's working well for me. So I'm sharing it with you. It's helped me be a person on content. It's helped me run a fund. It's been amazing. So 3 business lessons there in one. One more I'll dovetail with that. If we go to our next lesson here, I think of business as a very spiritual So this next one is being yoked with Christ on my business. Now you might not be Christian, that's okay. I'm just sharing what worked for me, okay? Funnel Launch, if you know our story, was started on a prayer. I had multiple— I take prayer notes— multiple times I felt prompted during prayer to launch a business around investment funds or to help people launch funds or do an online something. I didn't know quite what it was called or what it would be, but I just kept feeling this nudge, this push to do this. Since then, I've had multiple experiences where God has saved me from huge pitfalls. I had 2 people looking to partner with us that were seemingly incredible people. I prayed about both of them, felt like I shouldn't partner with them. I told them no. They were kind of sour about it. They took off. There was 2 separate individuals. Both of them had— one of them had a huge Ponzi scheme. The other one got investigated by the FBI. Huge Big blowup, 5 years down the road after the fact. Multiple times God has preserved and helped and saved our business. Now, the reason I put yoked on here, yoked is a term with like oxen. You put 2 oxen together and they're supposed to be equally yoked. And what Christ has told us in the scriptures is, my yoke is easy and my burden is light. And I think about this a lot of being yoked with Christ. Now, this doesn't mean you just have a business, whatever business you're doing, just pray and God will just give you money. That's not what this means. That's not what this means. This means being yoked with Christ on my business. I pray quite a bit, actually this last year, of like, Heavenly Father, am I even doing the right thing here? What would you have me do? These are your businesses. Should we just shut them down? Should we go in a different direction? Do you need me to just— what do you need me to do? What is, what, what is the best and highest use of my time in all this capacity? And how do I run a business that hopefully does more than just make money? It changes people's lives, helps our clients, our employees, myself. I think running a business is one of the best self-development courses on earth. And so I actively ask this question all the time, like, what would— you know, let's be business partners together. What would you have me do? And all this money that I'm making or whatever, like, it's all back to you. What do you need me to do? Do you need to donate to a charity or an organization or a family? Like, Do we need to hire this person? Because maybe they're not the right fit, but for whatever reason, we don't know the reasons, but they need to be in this company because it's going to change them. That's an interesting way to run a business. And this year, I think, I think a little bit with the hardship of the year, I was like, Heavenly Father, I can't do this on my own. I need some help. And let's be equally yoked on this. And Heavenly Father, you're my business partner. You're the chief chair, board of directors, whatever. You tell me what you need to do. Now, does God direct me in every little decision? No. But there have been moments. I think most of the time God's like, just you do it, whatever you think is best. But there are moments where God goes, hold on, don't do that, do this. And don't do that over here, do this. And it's drastically changed how I've ran a business and I've approached business and what we're doing here. And I'm trying to get better at this, by the way. This is something I've— maybe the end of 2025, I've leaned into even more, and I want to continue into 2026 being equally yoked with Christ because Christ says my yoke is easy, my burden is light. And by the way, this gives me— when I do this, it gives me an immense amount of conviction on what we're doing. All my business partners that I partner with, I've prayed over, and I've actually felt extremely good about partnering with them. I've had multiple people I've prayed over and I didn't feel good about them, I didn't partner with them. I try to be a pretty faith-based person on this because you never know. And by the way, God cares about the details of the details of the details of our lives. Whether you believe in God or not, he cares about the details of our lives and loves us immensely. And business, faith, church, they're all intertwined. Everything affects everything else. What we do matters. And so I think involving God, Christ, in your business is, uh, is massive. All right, next one. Let's go down to business lessons. This year, something I did immensely of was focus on high-leverage activities. Now, I've heard this before, I've learned this lesson, but this year I had to learn it again because all of us are like, oh yeah, I'm doing high-leverage activities. There are 4 levers in business. There's only 4. They are finance or money. Money, having money gives you a lot of leverage in a business. Number 2 is media. You can make one piece of content and millions of people can view it, that's lots of leverage in a business. The next one is labor. You can have an army of people go out and sell your product for you or refer people in, that gives you an immense amount of leverage, okay? And the last one is what people call tech or code. You can write a line of code and it can be repeated millions of times over and over and over again, it gives you an immense amount of leverage or having New technology or new machinery or whatever can give you immense amount of leverage in business. These are the only 4 levers in business, by the way. There's multiple books written about this. These are the levers of business. So I have looked at my schedule and what we were doing to make sure we are maximizing what we are doing in high leverage activities. Right now, I'm— we're doing a YouTube video. That is on media. Okay, check. That works on a high leverage activity. We just raised last year, Just over $30 million for Funnel Launch Partners. This year we're gonna raise another $75 million in our fund. It gives immense amount of leverage. Labor, to be honest, we haven't done a lot with labor. Like we haven't set up this big MLM program or affiliate program, you know, building an army of people to go out there. We do have a referral program, things like that, but that's been a little weaker for us. This year we heavily leaned into tech and code to build out Funnel Launch AI. Now this should be out hopefully soon, but we have pivoted our whole company to a tech business. Now I'll go back to this. I used to think our events were labor. Oh, we're like, we're, you know, we have 2,000 people at Funnel Launch Live, we're gonna make some media from it and this would be a high leverage activity. We did 3 Funnel Launch Lives with multiple thousand people coming to these events. This year we did not do a Funnel Launch Live. One of the reasons was this: it is a low leverage activity. It's actually not a leverage activity. You throw an event once and it's done. Yes, you can get some media assets from it that maybe would help you on the media side but you're really only working with 2, maybe 1,000 people, 2,000 people. Now, if the goal of that is to build an army of people that are gonna go then promote your product and sell and what— yes, there can be a lot there but the way we were doing it wasn't getting that result and so we decided to not do an event this year, take all the money we would have spent on an event which I think last Funnel Hacks Live was about $1.3 million we spent on that event What if we put that into Fun Launch AI or here or here? Could we get a higher levered result? And so far we've seen a lot of progress here with Fun Launch AI. Now we'll see if it all pays off. Cross our fingers it works. But that was a strategic pivot that we made in 2025. And I love events. I think they're so fun. But we said this is not taking us where we want to go. We need to take that same amount of capital and put it to Specifically, right, this year was Funnel Launch AI to make that thing go. My next business principle for 2025, this could have been a little bit 2024 as well, but millionaires focus on marketing, billionaires focus on product. We've become, I've become a millionaire focusing on marketing. We actually have very good marketing. We have pretty good products, but we haven't put the amount. When I go listen to these billionaire founders, I do, I love to listen to podcasts, anything I can from these huge billionaire founders, they have a crazy amount of emphasis on building world-class products. Now for a long time, we had good products. But we have sat here and said, can we build Funnel Launch AI, you can see up here, into a world-class product? And at this point, we're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars developing this, making a huge foundation layer to make a huge product. Now you couple that with good marketing, which we already have, we have great marketing at Funnel Launch. We couple a new platform like Fun Launch AI. We could be running a multi-billion, even deca-billion-dollar company here in a very short period of time. And this has been a major shift because it's not fun to focus on all this R&D investment. You know, millions of dollars into products isn't fun until the product starts making money and people like it. There's a chance you put all this money into product and it doesn't do anything. And that's why, you know, a lot of people starting out focus on marketing. We've done this. I think it's a fine way to start if you're starting out. It's not a bad way to start but we have done this to the nth degree. We now need— we're like we want to play extremely bigger. Back to one of my business— my earlier principles was vision. We need to be like this. Yes, keep marketing, keep doing well but let's build a world-class product that leads to PLG which is product-led growth. The product is so good it sells itself. A great lesson I learned this year from actually a mentor who sold his company for multiple billions of We hopped on a phone call with him. He says, marketing and sales are a tax on a bad product. And I was like, huh, I've thought about that quote like 100 times. Marketing and sales are a tax on a bad product. Every dollar you have to spend on marketing and sales to sell something is because the product wasn't good enough that every human already using it isn't just on social media telling everyone they know about the product. The perfect product, you sell one of them and that person is so compelled to tell everyone they know about it that the product just sells itself forever. Man, this one hit home because we spend a lot of money on marketing and sales, which I think coupled with a good product can help make that growth even more. But focusing on product-led growth, when we launch Funnel Launch AI, our actually current plan is to not do some big marketing promotion. When Funnel Launch AI is ready to go, we could do a webinar and I bet we could get 10,000 signups. In, you know, a week or 2. But who cares? If the product's bad, 10,000 people will show up and hate it and then never come back. And we'll have a lot of AI companies are doing this right now. They go, they have a big spike, they have a cool video, and then they go back to this. What we want to do is actually save that quiver, that arrow in our quiver, not do marketing and sales, and just slowly roll it out with beta test users. We'll just start here with a little bit of users, and we're going to watch how those users respond. Do they refer friends? Do they get people on the platform by themselves? If they do, we'll start seeing user count grow up and those people will then refer more people and that will confirm that we have PLG. But there's a chance that they come on and they don't really like it. And then we have to keep fixing features and fixing problems on the product and we keep fixing, fixing, fixing, fixing until people start referring more members. This is how OpenAI launched. Do you remember that one weekend when Chat 3, I think, blew up? Well, guess what? They had Chat 1 and 2 and all the— and they just did this. And then Chat 3 came out and it was like, whoa, I gotta tell somebody about this. And all they— I think they did 100 million users in 7 days. Am I correct on that? Because they spent, I don't know, 18 months, 2 years, 5 years, however long it took them for that moment. We plan to launch Follow Up AI that way. And then once we see an inflection point, yeah, we'll turn on our marketing and sales, do a big webinar. I'm sure we'll do lots of fun stuff, but we wait for this inflection point where users are referring friends, just because it's awesome. And we, by the way, we're going to make this free at the beginning. It'll just be free to use, which is kind of fun. So people can just come use it. We're going to have beta test users on it to get feedback. That was a huge lesson for me in business. All right, drop in the comments down below what were your top business lessons from 2025. We'll probably do this next year. Comment your favorite one that I shared down below. Share this with somebody if it's useful for you and maybe insightful to a business partner or friend. Share this with them and we'll see you in the next one. Bye-bye.