The Biology of Scaling: How to Grow Faster, Make Your Company Healthier | Dave Asprey

Remember when you were in high school and you had a biology class? How many of you had a biology class? Okay, good. Yeah, it sure wasn't one of my favorites. And as you know, biology means the science is studying the life of living organisms, their physical and chemical structure, function, development and evolution. Your business is a living organism, and if you study its biology, you can keep it growing faster, keep it healthier, and it can become so much more profitable. That's not only what Dave Asprey believes, it's what Dave has done with his unique brand, Bulletproof. Bulletproof includes coffee, energy drinks, snacks, and supplements to power your life. Today, Bulletproof has dozens of products, employs more than 50 people, has raised 30 million in venture capital and angels, including people in this room. Bulletproof reaches more than 10 million people a month. His two New York Times bestsellers, including a best selling science book on the brain called Headstrong and more than 500,000 copies of the book sold in 14 languages. And his award winning podcast with more than 50 million downloads. His products are distributed in thousands of locations, including all Whole foods markets, plus 14 locations, including two stores in LA, one in Seattle, two at StubHub Pavilion, and eight at one of the largest tech companies in the world. Dave's title is the biology of scaling your company. Give it up for Dave Aspie.

What I'm going to talk with you about now is about the willpower of biology. And I'm hoping most of you had a chance to try some of the supplements and bulletproof coffee and things like that. I'll tell you, everyone on my team gets about $250 worth of bulletproof mitochondrial enhancing supplements every month. I spend more on that than I do on my insurance policy for employees because frankly, they need the insurance policy a lot less. When you get that stuff right, they also are happier and they perform better, which is kind of cool. In fact, they're nicer to each other. But when you are growing your company, especially when it's young, you're relying on willpower. But what they never teach you in school or in business school is that willpower actually comes from the same electrons that power your cell phone. Literally. Your body's job is to take food and air and a little bit of sunlight and convert those into electrons that make your heart beat, make your lungs take air in and out, make thoughts happen, cause you to grow new neurons. And if that system is jacked, you will be jacked, because you won't have the willpower you wanted to have. And this is something that affected me greatly. Because I used to weigh 300 pounds and I was having cognitive dysfunction in my mid-20s. I was the first guy to sell anything over the Internet. It was a T shirt that said caffeine. My drug of choice was the first product before there was a name for E commerce, that was sold before there was a web browser. And I made $6 million at the company that held Google's first servers when it was two guys in a server, which was an amazing time. Until I'm like, I can't remember what's going on in meetings. And I ran into that. The accelerator's pushed all the way to the floor and I'm slowing down. Most entrepreneurs that I know have hit that, especially in the first couple years of growing their company. Like, I'm staying up all night, I'm flying everywhere, I'm doing everything I can, and I got nothing left. But I still have a family. I still have kids. And when that happens, I'm going to go into, like, the metaphysical thing, like this. How many of you have kids in the room? I'm guessing, okay, the majority. So that first year you have a kid, even if you're a dad, there's something that kids do. They kind of suck on your energy. Like they're part of you, right? And it's not just because they keep you up all night. It's because there's something happening. And the same thing happens when you form a company. It's the same thing that happens when cells divide. It's like you're making a new thing that has its own life. In order to do that, you gotta bring it at a level that takes a lot of willpower. It takes a lot of biological energy. And if you're running along and you're not making the magnetic field around your body, you're not making the electrical stuff that you need to execute, but also to create, which are different activities. But what happens is that your company doesn't grow the way it's supposed to grow. In fact, I'll tell you right now, your company is a representation of the state of your own physical energy. We are wired at a subcellular level to do exactly what a bacteria floating in the ocean does. And it's just these three things. The first thing we're wired to do is run away from, kill, or hide from scary things. The second thing we're wired to do is to eat everything to make sure the battery's always charged. The third thing we're wired to do is to fuck everything else to make sure the species survives right? Now, that all happens before you have a chance to think about it because you got a quadrillion bacteria in your body straining to do that right now. They're called your mitochondria, and there's more of them than there are cells in your body, more of them than there are even bacteria in your gut, which is what you should test with. Naveen's viome test. So what's going on with all that stuff is that if you're not taking care of that, your company, which is powered by this, doesn't work very well. If you're overreacting to one of those three behaviors, especially the run away from or kill scary things. What you end up doing is you yelling at your executive team or your employees. Or you end up avoiding a hard decision because you're wired to hide from scary things. And what I found was the most impactful thing for me was to simply say, all right, of those three behaviors, wanting to eat things all the time sucks a huge amount of energy. And if when you eat things all the time, they don't even give you the energy that you're supposed to have to build your company, then you have a problem going on here. So if you can change that one behavior where you're spending a third of your energy saying, what's for lunch? And you take that energy and you put it into what's next for my company, massive things happen. And if you can turn down the trauma, the stuff you heard from Gabor the other day, Every single entrepreneur who's ever been through my brain training stuff in Seattle, it's always the same stuff. There's an old thing that happened, someone yelled at you when you were two years old, and it affects the way you interact with your board of directors. You don't know it does that because you're not supposed to know. It happens before you can think about it. It's designed to keep your meat operating system alive. So if you want to scale your company, there's two things you do. One, eat right so your cells will make enough energy. And I have some recommendations for you. Hopefully you all got a free copy of Head Strong that's here. If not, you should go get it wherever you like to get books. But that is a user's guide to turning on energy in your brain so that you can make this stuff. You can turn off the cravings, because when the cravings are gone, all the energy that went into those goes into building things. And then you must do a personal development practice. I don't care if you Want to meditate? I don't care. If you want to do neurofeedback, heart rate variability, go sit and do Vipassana for 10 days. Find a guru. Whatever turns you on. Actually, that's the other behavior. Sorry, don't do that. But what you want to do is continuously be on that path, because if you are not, you will hit walls that you cannot see because the wiring in your body is set up. So those ancient bacteria, like, what's going to keep my petri dish alive? Your body is a petri dish to bacteria that run your power systems. I'll also tell you 48% of people under age 40 and everyone over age 40 has mitochondrial dysfunction. It means you put X amount of fuel in, you get X minus something out. It's not supposed to be that way. So anything you can do to have a little bit more energy and to have less cravings and less trauma equals a better you. You become a better parent, a better spouse, a better human being. You're nicer to your people. But the most important thing is that your ability to make quality decisions from a that is both intuitive, conscious and rational at the same time, and do it quickly and to do it without struggle goes through the roof. And that's how I've been able to grow bulletproof the way I've been able to grow it. Because I spent four months of my life with a lie detector glued to my head doing neurofeedback, telling me every single lie I've ever told myself. Yeah, I might have thrown up a couple times when I learned some of those lies. They weren't that pleasant. But every single person in this room, including the very most successful people here, all have trauma that's causing them to expend huge amounts of energy that does nothing for them. And if you recognize that this is the state of human affairs and that everyone has it, not just you, all of the shame, all of the guilt, all the addictive behaviors that come from those things, you're like, oh, wait, this is just normal. It's actually not me. It's a distributed network of ancient bacteria causing me to run an operating system to keep an animal alive. You can just lose the guilt and shame. Oh, that's it. You can hack that, but you cannot hack that if you're walking around eating raw kale and garbanzo beans and nothing else. That's not a good diet. Okay, maybe you like raw kale. Actually, no one likes raw kale. Sorry. You just eat it because it makes you a good person, right? I got news for you. It doesn't. But here's the deal. Maybe it doesn't make you feel good. I don't really care. But you must find the right foods that work for you and, and the stuff that works for the guy next to you probably aren't the right ones for you because we're wired individually and this is one of the reasons I'll tell you, do the VIOME test, because this is the most promising technology I know of right now. To help you know what foods will work, download the bulletproof diet roadmap for free, which is an algorithmic approach. It's a one page thing that goes in your fridge. We were giving them away at the booth the last couple days. Hopefully you got one. Read one of the books, do whatever it takes. Go see a functional medicine doctor. But I'm telling you, if you are not spending a substantial amount of your time every week making your hardware work better, your software will not run very well. And then you won't be able to do what it takes. Now, I want to shift gears for a minute because we still have a couple minutes left. And talk about not just scaling yourself, because I talked about these things that get in your way. Where I'm going to die. You feel like you're going to die because of an old thing that you're not even thinking about. But your body reacts to something like that. When a cell divides when parents have children, you share an energy field. And if you read any of the meditative traditions from whatever meditative, historical stuff, acupuncture, Chinese medicine, Hinduism, ancient Christianity, they all say something like this. And yes, we can get out our crystals and chakras and hum to each other and things like that. I've tried all that stuff. But the deal is the active creation of a company. You can sabotage that. But if you don't sabotage that with these ancient behaviors like that, there's still something that happens. How many of you in the room have kids who are out of the house? So less than before. So what happens as children age is they actually separate from you energetically. And you ever see the overbearing mom who won't separate from her kids? A lot of entrepreneurs in the room are overbearing moms to your companies. What's going on here is as a company scales up through its levels of scale, it goes from 1 million to 5 million. It's like going from a younger child to a child who can actually do a few things like tie its own shoes and you get to the next level and the next level. And your job is to not feel like you're going to die as the company develops its own personality and develops its own ability to go out and execute in the world. The place where I see the most entrepreneurs get stuck on scaling their companies is that they're like the mom who won't let their kids go out and fall off a tree and do something that's dangerous because they feel like they're going to die. And that's why parents do that. Because I got to make sure the species survives. I can't let my kids out of my thing because it's fear. You actually have fear that's keeping you from hiring the best EA on the planet. You have fear that's stopping you from saying, you know what? That great friend and partner who helped grow the company to 5 million has never grown a company beyond $5 million. And I'm not going to be the person to fund their education by letting them fail at that three times. I'm going to hire a new person who's failed at it three times and succeeded at it three times and bring that person in. And I'll tell you how I've been successful in continuing to scale. Bulletproof is that dear friends and people I care about who reach their scale point. Either we move them to a place in the company where they're comfortable and able to function and focus at the level where they're comfortable, or they decide they're going to go do something else at another company. One of the great pieces of advice that I received here at Genius Network is this idea. In fact, it was from Cameron Herold, and it said, look, when someone's not happy at your company, and you know they're not happy, a lot of us, there's a sense of loyalty. There's a sense of, I can't lose this person. So what you end up doing is you end up saying, wait a minute, I'm gonna keep them around. But what you don't understand is they know that they hit their scale point. They know they're struggling, so they're miserable, too. And they're making everyone around them miserable, including your other high performers. And they're making you miserable. And it's not because they're a bad person. It's because they hit their scale point. The kindest thing you can do for that person is to help them find the job that's right for them that may not be with you. And there will be potentially anger, but usually a sense of relief and gratitude when they leave, especially if you put, if they perform for you for three years, give them a nice package when they leave. It's okay to do that, right? And send them off into the world to do the right thing. That's one of the biggest secrets to scaling your company. And when you do that, your job is to continuously step back and to allow the company to grow its own personality. And then what does your job become? It becomes culture and leadership, not doing. And where people get stuck is they get stuck on continuously doing and micromanaging and controlling, just like the overbearing mom. What you gotta do is step back. All right? You're gonna do this, and then you inject your culture into that. The things that have helped Bulletproof hit its recent scale points. I recruited the general manager of Amazon prime away from Amazon to come run operations for Bulletproof. She's run multiple businesses with more than a billion dollars in revenue, including two businesses at Microsoft. I don't know how to do that. Are you kidding me? I haven't done that. But I've got a team of people who've done stuff like that because our culture was strong. And I've done a lot of personal work to step back and allow the company to have its own personality with my values and the things that I believe are important to it. This idea that we do everything, everyone at the company does something every day that makes them better. Because when you are a better person, you're nicer to people around you. That's one of the reasons we make our products the way we do. Same kind of thing. So I can take a few questions. So we have about four minutes for questions. Anyone want to ask anything about scaling a company? I will answer it.

Hey, Dave, it's Kathy. How do you actually assess and reassess if you have someone that's taken you to that level? How long are you reassessing and what are you reassessing to go, you've reached your end point. Love you lots. Let me help you move on so that we can move on. What are you using to reassess that process?

When you get your gut out of the way and you get your fear of dying from all sorts of things that won't kill you out of the way, we have this thing left over called intuition. And the first time you feel the intuitive thing in your gut that says, oh, my God, I need to get rid of this person, you're right. The first time doesn't mean you want to take action on that right away. But that's your radar signal that says, all right, where's the data? Show me your performance metrics. Something's not right here. And start making plans. Doesn't mean you have to execute on the plans. You start the plans right then and you start paying attention. And you can also talk to them. Hey, I'm feeling like something's not right here. But that first twinge, the one that we're all trained to ignore, because then we might die if we lose this person we've relied on for so long. That's when you start paying attention.

All right, fair second question. Since y' all harass me so much. I've taken a company from 0 or 1 to level 4. I want to know that I could take a company beyond that. What would you utilize as? I want to know that I have it in me. So what would you recommend for studying, learning, growing? What does it take to know you can. I don't want to just do another company to that level. I want to know I have potential. What would you recommend? Resources, et cetera.

I'm a huge fan of Vern Hanisch's Scaling up book. It's a powerful book. At the same time, I would encourage you to get really good at leadership and hiring because it's unlikely that you are going to do it by yourself.

Right.

So it comes down to being good at letting go and leading. And if you bring the world's best people in to do that, you want to take someone, you take your company to level 10 instead of level 4. Great. Hire someone who's done a level 10 company three times and pay them really well and they'll come in and they will kick ass and they will teach you everything you need to know. Right. I learn from my people all the time. Like, I'm a computer hacker by training and I'm running a coffee supplements, grocery, e commerce company. Like, what? Seriously? I'm completely from a different industry. It's because I hired people who know 10 times more than I do. So you learn from the best people you hire. Perfect.

Thank you.

Hey, Dave. Jeff Peoples from Cambridge, Mass. Near MIT. And we met at Peter Diamandis Abundance 360 and the AAI put us together and I asked you about three years ago, what's the most important thing? And you said cold therapy. And ever since then, I've done cold showers every day. And I love it, by the way, because I can't implement everything. You got a bazillion things. I'm going to get your list. I've already emailed you. Hopefully got it right. But I'm wondering Of all the things, if you could advise, okay, what's the next best thing like to really get the energy all day? Because I need it, man. I need it.

Here's the deal. Ketones, which come from being in fat burning mode. Fat has these things called calories in it. Guess how we measure energy? We measure energy in calories. The idea you're going to eat food with fewer calories to get more energy violates laws of physics and things like that. So eating the right kinds of fat is critically important to have endurance and sustainability cognitively. And ketones is when your body kicks into fat burning mode. I'll teach you how to do it in both my books. Or you can do that brain octane oil that I've been pushing on all of you the whole time. Brain octane oil puts you in ketosis as if you've been fasting for three or four days without having to do that. That's why you see me, if you've had dinner with me, I open little packets of it and I pour it on my food three times a day or I put it in my coffee. Coffee that's non negotiable for me. I'm not going to stop. And I don't have to stop. I have more energy than I did when I was 25. More energy than a lot of the guys 20 years younger than me working for me do because I manage my biology. But ketones are the number one thing that matter. You don't have to be in like I never eat carbs again kind of land. That's extremist. You just need to have some present. And I get that from a lot of the stuff I make. That's just a really low hanging fruit for you.

So my question returns to the previous. If you have the courage to make the move and terminate someone if necessary, or help them find a better place, but you're unsure of like whether a better move might be to bring somebody on top and take that journey. How would you distinguish when it's better? Like how would you. Which fork to take in the road? How would. Any tips on whether or not this person. You should bring somebody on top or leave them?

There are a lot of people where you say you've done a great job getting us from 1 to 3 million, but I want to bring in someone who's more experienced on top of you. And you had a VP title and you actually weren't really qualified for a director's title at a company at this scale. Well, you can say, I'm going to Bust your title down. And if they're the kind of person to say, look, I'm going to bring someone who you're going to learn a ton from them, and they really are an open individual, you'll find a few of those who are like, you know what? All right, I can do this. Look, I'll give you a raise. I value you. I'll give you more stock, whatever it is. So you want to do this, and are you in? Because if you're not in, here's your exit package. And you let them choose, right? I would say 75, 80% of people are going to take the exit package because it just. It hurts too much. My identity is my job title. And if you have that going on, especially in younger employees, that just happens. So then it's better to give them a choice than it is to have them do this. And you also got to ask yourself, look, if this employee got hit by a bus tomorrow, what would I do? Would I die? And most of us feel like we would die until we ask ourselves that question, and you're like, actually, no, we would survive. And then, okay, at that point, now you set yourself free to really make a consideration that says, all right, what's the best place for this person? Is it at my company, and where in my company is it? And if it's not here, how do I help them find it somewhere else? And that's a very different thing, that I'm going to kick their ass out of here because I'm so pissed off at them. If you've gotten to that stage, you're doing it wrong. Right? Okay, Joe. Thanks, man. Thank you. That's fantastic.

You know what's great is if you pay attention to how Dave names things and how he packages things and how he presents things, because the greatest thing in the world is useless if no one is enrolled into it. Right? I mean, you're a fucking genius for.

Coming up with fat water. Fat water.

Seriously, it's so good. So you are really good at doing relationships. I mean, I think you're an awesome dude, and you have been such a great contributor to Genius Network, advice for people on how to get the most out of this community.

The number one thing you can do is something that you presented at the opening session. It was that slide. I put it on my Instagram. Dave Aspirant Instagram. It's a slide where there's givers, there's matchers, and there's takers. Be a giver. So, literally, I am giving this knowledge, this stuff to you. Guys, I'm expecting zero back in return. Genuinely expecting. This is not transactional for me. And every interaction I have with people, it's like, look, I believe in business karma. And so it's like, look, I'm going to help someone out and maybe help someone else out, but eventually it all comes around. And if that's truly the way you teach yourself to be wired, rather than. I'm grasping, I'm needing, like, I don't have enough. If I give this person, are they gonna owe me a favor? Like, I don't keep bank accounts like that. It takes too much work. Like, I would forget it. Right. So that's how to do this. Like, how can I help this guy? How can I help this woman? What can I do? And if that's what you do, you'll get the most out of this you can ever do. And if you go, what's in it for me? You'll probably get your ass kicked out of here, because Joe's good at that. Awesome. Thank you, Sam.