In this 30‑minute monologue, entrepreneur‑angel investor Dan Martell outlines a four‑stage framework for building lasting wealth. Stage 1 is "trade your time," where young people invest their abundant time in learning, skill‑building, and networking to create future earning power. Stage 2 is "buy back your time," a systematic delegation process he calls the "buyback loop" that audits one’s calendar, categorises tasks by value and cost, and outsources low‑value work to executive assistants and other staff, freeing the founder for high‑leverage activities. Stage 3 is "let your money work for you," where Martell describes his capital‑allocation mindset: invest only in areas where you have an unfair advantage or in low‑fee index funds, avoid complex or fad investments, and focus on long‑term, fundamentals‑driven returns. He shares personal anecdotes, including his early angel investment in Intercom and a costly tax mistake, to illustrate the principles. Stage 4 is "own equity," the ultimate wealth driver, emphasizing that true wealth comes from owning businesses or equity stakes rather than merely holding stocks or real‑estate. He cites mentors like Warren Buffett and Naval Ravikant, promotes an executive‑assistant playbook (available via Instagram DM), and encourages viewers to adopt a mindset of continual personal investment and ownership. The talk ends with a call to action to comment, request resources, and pursue the next stage of wealth creation.
Chapters
I'm gonna show you how to invest your money to turn cash into more cash. And it doesn't matter how much experience you have, the rules are the same. After building and exiting 3 companies, becoming a multimillionaire at 28, and voted number 1 angel investor in Canada, here's what I've learned. Rich people don't start with stocks. There's actually 2 more stages before that that most people completely skip, and that's what keeps them broke. Starting with stage 1, trade your time. There's only 2 things you can trade to get more money. Time and money. When you're young, you invest your time. You got all the time in the world. You get around mentors, you show up, you work late, you stack skills, you build reps. Essentially, you use your time to invest in you to get a return. Time is the first resource you ever have. You can waste it or you can invest it. Dude, when I didn't have all the money, I used my drive time to learn, listen to audiobooks. I got around other people that were smarter and I got curious and quiet and I executed so they'd want to pour more into me. I took on projects where I didn't necessarily get paid a lot so that I could get exposed to bigger ideas. I took my time and I put myself in a place where the time got me a return. You can make decent money trading your time, but eventually you're gonna hit a wall because you won't have a shortage of money. That'll start to pile up, but you will have a shortage of time. Stage 2, buy back your time. Think about it. When I hire a stockbroker to invest for me, I'm buying their expertise to invest in a market that I don't have to go learn so that I can get the return without doing the time. Warren Buffett is literally deploying billions of dollars into companies and he's buying all that time it took to build that company using his money. One of the best ways to figure out where to buy back your time is using a process I call the buyback loop. The first thing we have to do is audit our calendar. We have to look at everything we've done over the last 2 weeks and really write it down. Then you highlight everything in green that lights you up. Everything in red that takes your energy, and then yellow's kind of mediocre. And right next to it, I write down, is this a $1 sign, cheap to pay somebody else to do for me? Or is it a $4 sign if I had to pay somebody to do things at my level? Then you grab everything that is a $1 or $2 sign in cost that's red or yellow, and you make a bucket and you put it in a bucket. What you do with that bucket is to transfer your task, delegate the red stuff, the yellow stuff, the low value stuff to Anybody else. So you wanna invest your money to get all those things out of your calendar to other people so that you can go to 3, which is fill your time with high leverage work. These are the things that light you up, that make you a ton of money. For most people, these are revenue generating activities. Things when you're out there talking to people, talking to customers, understanding the product, the innovation. It's not getting bogged down in emails and scheduling and purchasing stuff that other people could easily do for you. You see, in business, you don't want to just hire people to grow your business. You want to hire people to buy back your time so that you end up not overwhelming yourself and you can make more money. I have two incredible people in my life. Anne, who is my executive assistant, now chief of staff. She handles everything. My calendar, my appointments, my emails, all the interactions with different people in my life. She essentially manages the professional side. Then I have Betty, who manages our house, all my real estate, all my vehicles. And she reports to Anne. Those two people buy me literally 100 hours a week that allows me to invest my time in things that make me millions of dollars. And look, if you're hiring an executive assistant but have no idea how to work with them, I have a complete EA playbook that teaches everything. It's what I use with my assistant. Every template, every workflow, everything my EA uses daily. If you want it, just go to Instagram @danmartell and DM me the word YouTube EA and I'll send it right over. People will say to me like, Dan, I can just do this better myself. I say, of course you can. The problem is, is that you'll always be stuck being the person that can do this. You never learn how to work through somebody. The next level for most people is actually learning to let go. See, most people like to spend time to save money. I will drive 20 minutes out of the way to save 3 cents on gas. I like to spend money to save time. And because I'm a good time trader, it's why I've been able to create the wealth in my life. So now that you bought back your time, we can move on to stage 3, let your money work for you. I just learned this simple concept when I was young that I need to get my money to do the work where it makes me enough money where I don't have to work. See, most people start here 'cause they think that's what they're supposed to do and that's why they stay stuck. They start investing in funds and stocks and real estate because they got a little extra money and they want to feel rich and I'm investing. The problem is, is they're not good enough yet. And even if they're good enough, they haven't learned how to buy back their time and that's why they stay stuck. Now we're ready to have our money make money for us. See, the 1% don't get rich from stocks. They got rich from stage 2. They got rich from understanding how to buy back their time so they can make more money, so they have a lot of money to invest in things where they have equity, where they own things. When I was in my mid-20s and I started to pile up my cash, I realized that I had enough money to invest in other businesses. And that's when I became an angel investor. One of those deals, for example, was a company called Intercom. So the founder shows up at our office. I'd met him at an event. He shows me this new product. I think it's cool. I've got money saved up to make those kind of investments. He's telling me he's going to meet with Marissa Mayer from Google and Jack from Twitter. So I invest. That company became a multi-billion dollar company. And when you ask me how much time I put in, the answer is none. I deployed my money, my money grew, and I got really good at making those investments. That's why I became the number one angel investor in Canada. Because I bought back my time to learn the skills to find the entrepreneurs to invest in that allowed me to have my money work for me. I've learned that having money in a bank account doing nothing for me is not how I get my money to work for me. And what my job is, is being a professional capital allocator. I got money, I want to allocate it. What do you got? Here's my portfolio. Here's what I know. I stick to what I know and I put my money to work. To me, dollars are like little potential workers that need to be put to work. If you leave them in your bank account, 'cause you're like, oh, this feels safe, they're not working for you. There should not be money just sitting around waiting. Waiting, yes, to be put to work, but not just like lazily hoarding it up. When you get to this stage, here's a few things that I think about to make sure I know where to put my money. First, I like to invest in what I know. My new philosophy is, unless I have an unfair advantage investing in something because of my background experience, I'm not gonna do it. I either put my money into boring investments like the S&P through an index fund with low fees, or I invest in software and technology 'cause that's what I know. I remember one of my mentors said to me, he said, "Dan, making money's easy, keeping it is hard. When you get a lot of money, take half, put that in the don't fucking lose it pile, and the rest of it, that's what you get to reinvest in yourself, in your business, in growing things." You know, you wanna hear a good story? This is hilarious. I'm not an idiot, but sometimes I can act like one. Guy comes to me and he's like, hey, I got this investment where if you invest in medical supplies through this nonprofit, we can give you a triple return receipt on your money to write off on your taxes. And I was like, I hate taxes. Tell me all about it. And he even brought me to a seminar and I went to the seminar and there's 100 people in the room and they're talking about this investment strategy and here's how it works. And then we give you this. So we did it. 7 years later, I end up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes. Because I listened to somebody explain something I couldn't explain. So make sure that you can explain your investments in one simple sentence to somebody that doesn't know a lot. If it's too complicated, stay away from it. The second is the investment has to always be true. See, if you're always chasing fads, you will get burned by the fads, 'cause essentially all you're doing is playing a lottery game. I'm a software guy, I'm an innovation guy. I look for where the future is going. But in my decisions to invest, I'm still following the human part of it. I'm not sitting here going like, "Oh, I think in the future humans won't talk to each other. I think they'll just beam things through their brain." That might happen. But if I'm investing today, I'm not investing at that level. I'm investing in things that are aligned, right? What will humans always need? They'll always need housing. They'll always need food. They'll always need experiences. They'll always need clothing. These are things that will always be true. They might change in the vehicle that it's delivered, right? It used to be delivered on a horse, then a car, and now it's over the internet. Net, but humans will always buy stuff. Those are like the fundamentals. And then the third is play the long game. If somebody came to me and said, hey man, I can make you 10x on your money in the next 6 months, I say, cool, no thanks. They're like, but don't you want to know how to get rich? Good news is I'm already rich by not playing that fucking game. I like to play long games. If I'm going to invest my money, I want it to make me a lot of money over a long period of time. Why? Because then I'm saving my time. I know some people that actively manage their portfolio that do worse than shitty managers and they lie to themselves and they're spending all their times refreshing, checking the stock, doing this. I'm like, bro, why don't you go do the thing that makes you the most money and put your money in this thing that averages 10, 12% a year and has for 100 years and go stock more cash into the vehicle. Don't play short-term games, especially short-term people. All right, stage 1 is where you got your money. Stage 2 is where you bought back your time. Stage 3 is where you put your money to work. And Stage 4 is where you build real wealth. Stage 4, own the thing. One of my early mentors when I moved to San Francisco, this guy named Naval Ravikant told me this and was very clear. Wealth is created by owning things. Wealth is not created by working. You can't work enough hours to create the kind of wealth that anybody in Silicon Valley was talking about. You have to get there by owning equity. Now you either own equity in the business that you built or you own equity in other companies like we talked about in the last stage. The stock market may get you 10% a year and it may even make you a millionaire, but it's not going to get you to the point where you can do anything with anybody at any time. That is rarefied air. And that's what I'm talking about. How many people do you know that invested in the stock market and still aren't rich, aren't free? And many of them had to go back to work because the market went like this right when they're about to retire. I know a lot of 70-year-old people that are still working because they thought the market was going to solve the problem for them. You can become a millionaire investing in the stock market. Cool. But if you want to get to a place where you have millions of dollars being generated every month when you're not working, you have to own your own thing. You have to own equity in other people's things. See, rich people don't rent wealth. They own it. If you look at the Forbes list, 100% of them made that money because they owned the business they were in and then they took the cash and they invested in other businesses that they also own. Because equity is the only asset where the upside is uncapped. Even in real estate, when people buy a building, they're like, hey, I bought a 32-unit multifamily building. Cool. Guess what? You can't make it do more. Sure, you can do some value-add. Sure, you can get some rezoning. Sure, you can try to squeeze as much as you can. Sure, there's some tax benefit. But at the end of the day, a business that's growing without you there can grow as big as it possibly can. My dad doesn't understand why I still do what I do. Because his perspective is that if you show up, you work. He doesn't know how I work. So every time I've sold a company, he thought, okay, you're going to retire. Okay, you're going to retire. Okay. Why are you still creating? Because he doesn't understand what I just shared with you guys is that I've used my money to invest in people. So the companies I'm involved in, I don't operate them. I've taken my money to invest it in things I know because I will bet on me every day, all day, more than some fucking money manager in the market. So yes, 50% of my money, don't fucking lose it. I have a great team. They battle-tested legal insurance and infrastructure and all that stuff. Tax, capital gains, awesome. Don't fucking lose my money. Over here, I invest in me. I invest in the people. I invest in my companies. I invest in things that I own where the equity continues to roll in and grow a lot faster. So if you're good at something and you know how to do something, not investing in that more, align other people around it, that ecosystem is a huge missed opportunity. And that's why I've built Martell Ventures. Essentially, it's a studio for me to build tools like Apex that helps me build other tools within Martell Ventures and the whole ecosystem of talent and people in my world. I get a place to go create with them. For me, that is my empire. When I wrote in my book, "Buy Back Your Time, Build Your Empire," that's what I meant. There's a world where you could create for yourself that you almost feel guilty for how you interact and work with the people, 'cause everybody's amazing, everybody's building something, and from an equity point of view, you have big pieces in each one of those. If you haven't watched my video on how I'm building a billion-dollar company, go check it out. I show you the people, the process, the whole thing. I'm building it in public. The best investment I've ever made wasn't a stock. It wasn't real estate. It was building a company I could sell. Even if I never wanted to sell it, a company that I could sell is a great company to run. And maybe your next stage is hiring that person to help you run it so that you can go work on bigger things. So don't just graduate from one stage and get really good at making money or the next stage and buying back your time and then chilling out on a beach. Stack all four. Each stage feeds the next one. And the higher you go, the bigger the swings. Pow. Now, if you're still trying to make some money, let me share this with you. Your bank account is a lagging indicator of who you are, what you believe you're capable of, what you believe you're worth, right? And you'll never get what you want, you get who you are. And if you don't realize that you gotta become the person first, the person that believes it, then the money will never catch up. So understand, these are tactics and strategies but the best way to invest is by looking at the person in the mirror. So just leave me a comment below and let me know what you needed to hear most, what resonated with you most today that you can take with you to elevate to the next stage. And remember, if you want my full executive assistant playbook that I use with my own EAs, just DM me the word YouTubeEA on Instagram and I'll send it right over. Now, if you've ever wondered why dumb people make more money than you, click here and I'll see you on the other side.
