Ep 141. Investing In China With A Seasoned Advisor And Investor In The Chinese Market

Welcome to the ScaleUp Valley podcast, where we bring the best of the best to help you scale your business from $1 million to $1 trillion. Today we have a very special guest. His name is Rich Robinson, CISO advisor, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, professor, and investor. based in China. Richard, welcome to the show.

Great to be here. Thanks, Mike.

So we are living very special times, this pandemic crisis. You are in the epicenter where it all started, and you are kind of 12 weeks ahead of the rest of the world. I know that today you have moved for Happy New Year to Bali, so you are not still in China, but you have been living in China and you are living in China for the last 24 years. So we can't wait to get to know a lot about your experience for the Chinese markets and also your career as an entrepreneur and giving some insights on how to face this pandemic across the world. So, but first, let's get to know who is Rich Robinson. So who is Rich?

Rich Robinson. I'm indeed, uh, Rich Robinson, and I am a, uh, a China addict. I've been there for most of my, um, adult life. I grew up in Boston, studied at USC in Los Angeles, and then spent 5 years in Europe, uh, studied at Cambridge University, got my MBA there. But then in '93, I took the train, I went overland from Switzerland Through Moscow, Siberia, Mongolia, Beijing, and then out to Hong Kong. And I fell in love with China, and I ended up going back to Europe, getting my MBA, fell in love with the internet, and then I rode a bicycle through Africa. That's a whole different story. But now I've been in China for 24 years, 4 in Hong Kong, my 20th year in Beijing, despite the fact that I'm now 30. months Shanghaied in Bali from Beijing. But these days, it's a nice place to be in Groundhog Day. And yeah, I've been part of 8 startups during that time in China, 3 as an executive in private companies that went public. And then I started 5 companies and I exited 3 to publicly listed companies. 2 were solidly in the loss column. But I've been involved with 50 other companies, a little bit more than 4 or 5 dozen companies in the war room as a board member, angel, and hundreds of others as a mentor. I'm a mentor at China Accelerator and also Stanford Ignite and The 500 startups and hacks down in Shenzhen hardware accelerator. So I really am all about the art of the start, and I teach at the top 2 universities in China, Tsinghua and Peking University. Teach entrepreneurship in China, and I teach innovation. And I've also started teaching at Alibaba University. Jack Ma has a big, hairy, audacious goal to teach 1 million entrepreneurs. around the world in the next 5 years. And I teach a spirit of entrepreneurship there. And yeah, I just love the art of the start and all of the messiness around that.

I think that we have one of your peers in the show recently. Geoffrey Townsend has been on the show as well. I think he's—

Oh, Peking University professor. Yeah, that guy is a sharp cookie.

Amazing, amazing. So the world is really small. Amazing career, and just to give some context to the audience, we have started at the Scale-Up Valley podcast covering the journey from $1 million to $100 million. We have also expanded this horizon or this kind of scale from $100 million to $1B, having examples of Dropbox, Qualtrics, ServiceNow on the show, and recently we have been discussing how to go from 1B to 1T with companies as Bayer, Covestro, etc. Right, so very different kinds of scale. We are super obsessed about scale. What I love about having you on the show is that you have been covering different stages of this scale as an operator, also as an investor, as an angel investor. You also are in love with advisory, with teaching, so you have a very eclectic profile to share your experience about scaling companies.

Master of none. And if I may get it out of the way, I have failed in all of those pursuits. Many, many times, probably more than all of your listeners combined. So I get that going.

I will massage a little bit your ego, your egos. Some of the most successful people in the world always say that they have failed like hell and they had luck.

Sugarcoat it anymore. I don't even try to. Yes, it's all just On my sleeve, messy. It's all— yeah, yeah, it's a badge. It's like a coat of armor.

Got it.

It's like calluses and scar tissue, like armor. Now I just help other people go into battle, more or less.

Got it. Let's just share practical issues. You told me in previous conversations that you have lived through the previous virus crisis in in China, so you have more experience with this kind of issues than, for instance, in Europe or in the US we have. And you also have a lot of understanding about that context. So what can you share for— with business leaders, with entrepreneurs, with founders that are trying to prepare and get ready to scale up during this crisis, but are to prepare to scale after the post-war period? What happens on a daily basis and what are the trends that you see when a virus like this emerges?

Yeah, so I'll say a few things about that. I was in China during the SARS epidemic, '02-'03, really flared up in March and then by June it was gone. But everything was shut down. Hong Kong up to Beijing. I think the bordering countries also had a bit of a shock and a scare. Less than 2,000 people died, tragic, but it was under control. And I think now these countries in this part of the world, they understand it much more fundamentally than I think countries in the West. And that is very evident in the responses. that we've seen and the fact that the US now is the biggest debtor, right? It's such a tragedy. I think things are getting back to abnormal in China, but that's because China's fully locked down, nobody's allowed in anymore, and they have— the entire society was locked down and they were totally aligned and people wear masks and they do social distancing. And there's a WeChat app, so you have a barcode, green, yellow, or red, depending on your status. And I think that the West is not going to be able to replicate that. I think just as there are going to be some people that are like, you know what, I've had this already, I have an immunity to it. I get back to work. There's going to be some countries that are like, we got this and now we're getting back to work. But there's going to be some that are not really able to. And I don't know. I only play an epidemiologist on TV. I'm not— who knows? 谁知道, as they say in Chinese. Who really knows? Nobody knows anything. But I'm planning. On 2022, that's when things get back to normal. I think it starts to get back to abnormal. I just don't see any other way out with any sort of treatment. I hope I'm totally wrong, but my personal planning for what I'm doing is I'm working remotely until 2022. It doesn't mean that there's no business or— I believe there's Plenty of opportunity to scale up. And I'm actually advising and coaching an edtech company right now. I know the founder and he came to me and he's like, you know what, we're kind of drowning. We're 4x because of this.

Amazing.

And I have another buddy, also edtech. You know, the company that I'm helping out is called iUKOS. It's a, a tutoring and pathway company based in the UK, but they have great growth in China, where people pay 3x what the West does on their kids for education. Then another company called PikaTail, where they have 1,000 books online, started in China by a terrific Norwegian entrepreneur, and they are also getting pull from the market, and e-commerce and gaming the same. There's plenty of companies now that are going to be buoyed up by this. The companies that aren't, but that have cash in the bank, I mean, I love that article by Marc Andreessen this week, talking about it's time to build. This is the time to build product, product, product. There have been amazing companies that have been built in a downturn. There's a lot of opportunity around that. Then on the personal level, I have to say, I've been in the future in a way because I was heavily hit. My businesses in China— I have a number of different investments and also other businesses that I run around entrepreneurship and learning. So I have these learning journeys where I bring out experts, uh, to China to do deep dives in special industries, and I curate and run those and bring in amazing experts, um, you know, boards of companies and family offices, billionaire family offices from South America, wherever, and they have a very high impact, high value, 3 to 7 days. Those are all dead. And those are probably dead till the end of next year. And then I also bring in experts to teach people and train people because I love exchanging knowledge. That business is dead. And I also do professional public speaking. And I consider that to be dead unless I can really make it work online, but that's not going to be quite the same. So I've had to recalibrate how I'm personally generating revenue and what I'm investing in and what I'm getting involved with. So I went through this denial and grieving period. But now, my wife and I are both committed to the fact that we are going to emerge from this crisis. Absolutely better versions of ourselves on every axis, every metric, like our sleep, diet, exercise, meditation, journaling, even connecting with friends. In some ways, I've been more connected with people through this isolation because I'm being very deliberate in reaching out to people. Hey, old college friend. Hey, old, you know, colleague. Hey, old childhood friend. And then also to other entrepreneurs and people and just saying, hey, how can I help? So I'm also really focusing on how I can be best in class at doing stuff remotely and being helpful to people remotely. So I think, you know, that's really the only way forward through this crisis. And the one thing that I would love to teach my students is the philosophy of stoicism. And Stoicism is not— philosophy is kind of inaccessible and very theoretical, but I think Stoicism is sort of a handbook for life. And the, the really the fundamental core concept that I like to focus on is that nothing is in your control. Nothing is in your control except for 2 things. There's so little that is in your control. You know, the, the market is not in your control, your competitors are not in your control, you're even— even your employees, they're not in your control. Outcomes are not under your control. The only 2 things you control is your effort and your attitude, your action and your reaction. Those are the only things you control, and you control them 1,000%. So therefore, if those are the only 2 things that you can control, then what are you doing every day to make yourself 1% better in those 2 areas? to sharpen the axe, so to speak, so that you're much better at intentionally acting and being in control of your reaction. And I think that it's really about a lot of self-care, both physical and mental and social, to be able to be the best version of yourself. Because I see, you know, I've been part of this entrepreneurs organization and I've been part of so many startups, you know, either loosely or directly. And startup is a beautiful, beautiful crucible in which to test oneself. And it's very easy to become the shittiest, worst version of yourself. Just destroy your sleep, destroy your body, have the— you know, I remember talking to a guy once and he's like, what? I'm not gonna— Acquire users that way, that's all just horrific empty calories. Those users, I might acquire them, but they're just going to jump away. While he was just jamming on a triple burger that was like with stuff running down his face, I was like, have you gained 30 kilos since I first knew you? It's like, why are you jamming such horrible calories? If you take care of yourself first, put on your air mask first. Before you take care of other people. So I'll stop there. But what I, what I really am talking to people now is about like, you can, you really can control how you react to this. And you can control how you intentionally act. You know, after that, you can control your output, and then the outcome takes care of itself. You can't control it, but you can just learn from it and then rinse, repeat and try to be better.

I love it. We always discuss the 3 critical ingredients that we keep curating with our guests on the show, like you, Rich, which is first one, radical focus, number 2, world-class leadership, and number 3, culture of execution. And it's curious that you have covered almost the 3 in just our first comments, and I love the way you painted it. So, entrepreneurship or leading a company, the first thing we need to do is leading ourselves. And leading ourselves is the most difficult job that we have in our lives, getting to know ourselves, talking to ourselves. So if we are not able, as you said, to take care of ourselves, we can't help others to do the same. So I love that concept.

I may shameless self-plug, like, that's the I'm starting a podcast around that specifically and also writing my first book around that, around that mental— because it all starts up here, the mental challenge. We think that we're fighting a war out there, like Game of Thrones, the finale. Like we're up in the mountain and we have dragons and giants and, you know, all the troops and we're trying to like, oh, there's some competitors and there's You know, storm clouds or, you know, but really there's also a battle between these 2 holes. And that's the other— we're fighting 2 battles at the same time. And this battle in this arena doesn't get talked about as much. I talk to young entrepreneurs like, how's it going? How's it going? It's, oh wow, I mean, it's just up into the right. It's just great, right? But no, but like, really, how's it going? Oh, I mean, you know, it could be going better, but it's pretty, pretty good.

Exactly.

No, but really, really, how's it, how's it really going, buddy? It's—

this is me.

I knew you from— how's it really going, Rich? Mommy! Mama! I didn't know it could suck so all-encompassingly. I didn't know. I thought it was supposed to be awesome.

Everywhere.

Just sucks everywhere. And I don't know what to do, right? And like, that doesn't— like, the crazy thing is like, that doesn't go away. It's, you know, I got to know Phil Libin, the founder of Evernote, when they were coming into China and, you know, a little bit in their China strategy. And he raised a whole bunch of money. And I was like, how's that? How's that feel? And he's like, how's that? How's that feel? He's like, now I made my backpack heavier and they're like, run faster, right? So, oh, now it's okay, right? And then, you know, and a lot of people say, well, okay, you sell the company, then, then you can— and I'm just like, are you kidding me? Most people that I know that become the most depressed is after they've sold the company. Look at him. That was— that was— I'm gonna do that again, or like, I don't even know. So it's like, it just, it just never— so it's that whole battle in your brain. It's not just like, oh my God, I'm failing. It's like, oh my God, I'm succeeding and I just raised all this money. I, I have a buddy who's like, I raised all this money and I— the reason I raised this money is because I know that I have to hire people better than myself. And I did that, right? But now I raised so much money and the expectations are so high that now I have to hire people that are so good that they're gonna go, oh, we're working for this shithead? Like, I don't even— they're gonna actually really see me for what I am, right?

Right.

Just a complete fraud. And like, he's like, now I'm like, I have no choice. I have to like, I have to hire people that are just gonna understand that I don't really understand cash flow. accounting, or that I'm not so great at the tech side, or I don't really know much about marketing. I'm just making this up as I go. And well, it happens, right?

Absolutely. That's 2 very good points. First one is we have all been facing, or we might be facing this in our lives, is that sometimes our businesses are a way of distracting ourselves with something about something that we want to solve within ourselves. So it's a, it's a distraction. So that's when we feel this kind of lack of fulfillment, right? Almost everything. So, so when, when you say we exit the company and now who I am, what do I do? Because I don't want to talk to myself. I don't want to see myself in the mirror. I don't want to know, to not know what to do tomorrow, to make a decision about my future, about my purpose. And the second thing that you talk about that is critical, that you have been discussing a lot on the show, is that the most important muscle to startup is sales, but the most important muscle to scale up is recruiting, is having the right people on the right seats and much better than ourselves. And that's another issue.

Right, which is really also selling. Yeah, sales cures everything.

Correct.

Amazing how much of a— how much dysfunction it can sort of COVID over as well too. But yeah, I think the recruiting side, like that's really something that is so core that I've seen, especially for companies to be able to pop through past those barriers, right? And one of the toughest parts about that is not having the people that got you to that point who can't, you just can't go any farther, you know, moving them to a different position or out of the company or keeping them where they are while other people go above them, right? And that's a really tough thing to do. It's almost like you're leaving somebody behind, you know, when you're, when you're on a trek somewhere. And you're kind of abandoning them, but that's not the case. You're not doing anybody any favors if you're bringing them, you know, to the top of the mountain, but they can't— they're gonna die on the way up or they're gonna die on the way down, right? So much better to leave them at base camp.

I love it. And there are 2 main goals for the conversation, as we said when we started, is Leveraging your experience of being 12 weeks ahead and also your experience with the previous crisis in China regarding with virus, the '02-'03 SARS. And the second one is also to explore, I would say free, to explore all your journey. I love this conversation about dealing with ourselves and understanding that entrepreneurship is all about a relationship with ourselves and it goes to the limit. And number 3 is what you have already touched several times in this show, is your experience all over the world and in China. So you understand the mindset of the majority of the entrepreneurs globally. And going to the point of radical focus, everyone, even in Southeast Asia or India, discussing what is the right timing to go to China. Is it distracting me? Is it the right— do I have the resources? Should I go to China? So explore a little bit more your thoughts on founders and leaders that are considering from any part of the world, even Southeast Asia, considering to move into China, what they need to know in order to see if it is the timing or not for them to explore China.

It's a fantastically attractive market. There are approaching 900 million users. The e-commerce market is the biggest in the world, and the biggest gaming company and music companies in the world are there in China under Tencent. And there's so many superlatives, and there's so much innovation happening there. However, China market is kind of like that cave in Indiana Jones in the first movie where he's going in, he's trying to get that gold idol. Everybody wants the gold idol, right? I could sell one tube of toothpaste to every Chinese person, I'd be a bazillionaire, right? Wow, the China market. And so he goes into the cave and he sees skeletons and just fresh corpses. And that's kind of like foreign companies going into China. There's the skeletons of old like Yahoo and MSN and AOL and even Google and LinkedIn, so many other big, big players that have just been crushed in the China market. And even if you can get to the gold idol and you get the gold idol, then the big rock comes and that's pretty much the market. you know, trying to kill you. And then if you actually do make it past that, you get out of the cave and then, and then the locals just take it away from you, right? And then basically you're, you're on the plane on the way back home with, with snakes, but those snakes are actually the demons going around in your head because you're like, I'm gonna find my board that I lost in China, right? And there's very few, um, examples of success in China. There are some, there's certainly some, and there's a number of reasons for that. The main reasons people think is that, you know, it's a giant copycat culture and also Big Brother makes it, you know, difficult or impossible to win. Both of those are partially true. There are 7,000 Groupon clones. that came out of China. 7,000, not 70 or 100, right?

Wow.

And of course, you know, there's the Great Firewall of China. So Twitter and Facebook and, you know, many other Googles is all blocked in China. So it's a non-starter for those companies. But even the companies that do have access, it doesn't mean that they have an easy street to success. The 2 threads that I have seen in China, especially over the last half decade, you know, Big Brother, copycat, yes, that is there, it is true, but it is gladiatorial, insane competition, and true innovation. The innovation is oftentimes not necessarily technological innovation, but business model innovation. Even companies that have done that— eBay, for instance, bought the number one player in China back during the SARS epidemic, and they paid a couple hundred million for this one company, Eachnet. Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, richest man in China, famously said, eBay is a shark in the ocean, but we, Alibaba, we are a crocodile in the Yangtze. So a shark swims into the Yangtze River, a crocodile will just, you know, make lunch out of it, right? It doesn't— it can't navigate. And there are so many cultural and just societal challenges of of doing things in China. It's not to say that it can't be done. I was actually impressed. I met Travis, the founder of Uber, when he first came to China looking around, and he kind of seemed like a Chinese entrepreneur to me because he said something while he was walking around the boardroom table in my little tiny startup office. He's like, what if we get sued? Because we've been sued 101 times and we've only lost once. If we get sued, it's good PR. And I was like, wow, I hear all the Chinese entrepreneurs are like, how do I get Tencent or Baidu or, you know, Alibaba or, you know, one of these other big players to like to sue me? Because it's like, then I'm like, you know, in the press with these big guys, right? And we raised $2 billion for China and they ended up having to leave, but they left with a stake in Indeed. And there's no way that the Chinese government was ever going to allow a company controlling travel to— even if it was, you know, just consumer travel to urban travel— to be successful. But that's a win, right? Another win is Yahoo put $1 billion into Alibaba, and they gave all their assets, which is probably worth $200, $300, $400 million that they had built. They gave up on China. And then that turned into $17 billion because they basically were just folded into a bigger player. And there's other examples of gaming companies that have been successful in China, World of Warcraft and others, because they had a moat, because they had this really defensible position. And there's also other examples of some technology companies. Like if you go into China, you have to really think, can somebody else do this? without, without you. And if they can, then you might as well just, you know, have some really good food and go visit the Great Wall and the Forbidden City and go home, right? You have to have an unfair— and entrepreneurship in general, you have to have an unfair advantage. It's not a fair fight. And especially in China, if there's a, if there's a way for somebody to, you know, uh, either reduce the feature set and then just launch with a really simple feature set, but do it freemium, or there's a way to do it so that they can copy it and then, you know, just launch it in a shittier but like, you know, still feasible way, they'll do that. Or if there's a way to, you know, just outright, you know, replicate it, sometimes unfortunately through IP theft, then that will happen. But if you're able to actually create something that is really defensible and follows the number one rule of entrepreneurship, make something that people want, then certainly— Then there are examples, especially now kind of in some enterprise software, you know, that's happening, but that might shut down because of more political than technical reasons. But, you know, there still are possibilities. You're like, education is one, there's a, you know, and gaming is another where you're bringing in like Western sensibilities or, or some kind of forms of entertainment. But, you know, um, you always have to, uh, you always have to stay, stay fresh. Um, you know, I, I know that, uh, the, um, CEO of Audi and, um Daimler was saying that, yeah, China is a copycat place, but it is also one of the most— probably the most important crucible of innovation right now. We are going to be in China, we are going to invest in China, and we are going to innovate in China, and then that can inform the rest of the world. People want to copy us, then great, then they will be a year behind. Otherwise, if we are just like, we are not going to go to China because then we are just going to get copied, we're also not going to engage in that market because it's really challenging and difficult, then you're really losing a step. I think the one thing that could be really learned from China is the speed. The speed and the pace of China is just unbelievably relentless. Pace and pulse of change, and that's something I think within innovation cycles, You know, within recruitment, you know, I love— you know, your users should Google this one presentation by this terrific entrepreneur named Mike Cassidy. He's had 4 exits and he was at Google and he has a presentation. It's about a decade old, but it's about speed, but it's still so relevant. And he talks about even when you're recruiting to have this sense of deep urgency. You know, I often show this video from this movie where Brad Pitt plays— oh my God, I'm zoning— the guy with the feathers on the feet. He's a Greek god.

I never know the names, but I'm following you.

And he— there's a scene where there's 2 armies and he is Achilles, Achilles, super fast. And then he's fighting against a guy named Boagrius, played by the mountain guy from, you know, Game of Thrones. And the 2 heads of the army say, all right, your best guy against our best guy. Whoever wins, we all go home to our wives and we get drunk. And this guy is gigantic. He's impossible to beat. this gigantic warrior. But Brad Pitt, as Achilles, runs directly at him. He throws a spear into his shield, throws it away, throws a spear at his head. He dodges it, and then he puts his sword right here through his, through his heart, and the guy dies, and it's over. And the point there is that if you're fighting a much bigger foe, speed is the one thing you have against all other existing large incumbent players or even your competitors who are also startups. And to be able to infuse that sense of speed, because I've seen so many companies die just because their development cycle or the recruitment cycle or the fundraising cycle, they were just— I was just, oh, I just need one more. I was almost— oh. Like there's this Jerry Seinfeld bit where he's like, how about the guys that train for their entire life, they go to the Olympics, and they lose in 1/10 of a second. They're like, oh, I couldn't put my belt on, right?

Yeah.

And like, when you're done, you could think like, wow, what could I have done to just be a little bit speedier and to really just have this better sense of urgency to make things move just a little bit faster? And sometimes that, you know, that is the one thing that just unlocks a lot of other things in the future. So that can really be learned I think, from China is sort of like piecing how things are done.

Love it. We had David Hartman on the show as well, Senior VP of Growth Ventures at Covestro, former Bayer Materials Science. And when I asked him, so how to go from a wartime mindset to a peacetime mindset and how to prepare? And he said, you know what, when I've been thinking about this question, I thought that We have always been in wartime in China. So, and that's what you have just explained in the previous minutes. So there is no wartime and peacetime in China. So this is so competitive, so brutal.

Like, I go to Silicon Valley and I love it. But there I feel like the competition is definitely intense. But there's also this element of like, let's change the world or let's do something cool or let's, you know, coopetition. In China, it's not enough that I must win, you must lose as well too, right? It is just absolutely just intense. And I think that's something that really needs to be understood about that market. Up to now, China has been very focused on its domestic growth because every year I was there, when I got there in '96, there was more internet users in Hong Kong than there were in China. It was less than a million. There were no ISPs, it was government and academic networks. In the last 24 years, every year, they just added tens and tens of millions. There has been plenty to bite off and chew there now. The challenge is they are still adding another couple hundred million users, but those are the users on the lower rung of the earning capacity. They are going outside. I will give you an example. Jin'er Toutiao, and they're the parent of TikTok. I was there in 2018. 2,500 employees. Pretty, pretty, pretty good-sized company. The company was 5 years old. Um, I have a friend who's a laowai, like a foreigner, the first foreigner. Uh, she was hired. I went to visit her. Um, they had 2, 3 offices in China. It was 2018. Today, 100,000 employees, 200 offices.

Wow.

And everybody knows TikTok. Like, that's, that's what's coming at, at you, rest of the world. And a lot of people don't have any idea that TikTok is Chinese. And the founder is a very, um, introverted, you know, just sort of heads-down engineer type. He couldn't get arrested, he couldn't get funded 7 years ago. Nobody believed— they started doing an AI product for news. That's what Juniper Totale means. It means like daily hot headlines or whatever. He knew that a lot of people were reading news, but nobody had optimized news reading with AI. Being able to recommend articles like you use recommendation engines for most other things, he was able to increase people's time reading news from an hour to 2 to 3 to 4 hours a day. And then use AI also to write articles for the last Olympics. And they were publishing articles 7 seconds after the event ended with full articles that were grammatically correct and totally fine. And they were all written by AI. And they have 40 other products right now. Their development cycle Speed and churning of development. That's what's behind TikTok. And then they've allowed TikTok to be totally localized in all these different markets. They've learned from all the pain of foreign companies coming into China about how they can best go into other markets, even though it's more— here's the main mistake people make. Oh, I want somebody who's, you know, maybe from my office who can go to that country. Or I want to be any guy with a good haircut and the handshake who studied in the West. Um, but you need local, local, local people who have had their whole career there who are just like gonna chew through barbed wire to make stuff happen, right? And it's so much nicer and easier to communicate with country heads when they're acculturized and they speak your language. They have people that don't— most people don't even speak Chinese in that company now. And it's just around the world and they deal with that messiness because that's much better to deal with that messiness to scale up than it is to actually, you know, have a controlled, comfortable environment that's just not working, failing locally, right?

Absolutely. This is amazing. This is Rich Robinson. And you're talking about a podcast and the book that you are working on. Can you share a little bit more about that before we close the show?

I haven't really— I just started talking about it this month, but if I don't launch it during this COVID crisis, then how can I ever look myself in the mirror again? I gotta use this as some, you know, interesting time to start new things. It's called Impostorpreneur. So, love it. Imposter syndrome that people have is, is normal, right? Nobody doesn't really have it unless you're maybe running America, then maybe you don't have it, right?

Right.

The one guy that doesn't have it, maybe. But, um, uh, I think especially as an entrepreneur, and I'm talking about, you know, There's, there's entrepreneurship, but there's also innovation-driven entrepreneurship, IDE, which is really I'm doing something that is by definition never been done before, and most likely outcome is failure. So that means it probably can't be done, right? But yet, yet, not only do I have normal imposter syndrome that everybody else has, not only do I have all the normal challenges of being an entrepreneur, Now I have this third level of like, ah, yeah, this can work. Like, let's go, let's do this, right? You're just like losing your mind, right? I, I, I, I, I just know I'm 53 this year. I'm on the wrong side of 50.

Congratulations.

I'm basing this book, and I'm writing the book through the podcast to get— I'm basing the book on the fact that this incredible Dichotomy, incredible kind of, um, uh, just, you know, it's, it's just night and day. These young entrepreneurs that I meet and they're just like, oh, it's so— I follow my passion and everything is awesome. And I'm riding my unicorn to work to my cool coworking space and the unicorn is farting rainbows of glitter. And I don't have— I can wear flip-flops and bring my dog to work. We're changing the world, yay! Right? And then I meet people who are like year 7, you know, they have 3 kids and they're, you know, a little bit fatter and just not sleeping well and, you know, their spouse, their husband is not so happy with them not being around as much and, you know, they kind of wish that they were in a different place or, you know, in the level of their company or their company's going so great. They're like, oh man, I didn't know it was going to be this long. Now I have to travel even more and put more time into it. Or kind of mental challenge of like, or I'm a first-time entrepreneur and like now I've been through the trough of sorrow, the trough of sorrow, and now I'm like, wow, I'm really struggling. Like, am I really doing the right thing? And like my uncle who I just saw at Thanksgiving invested a quarter of a million of his savings into this and I don't know now if it's going to work. And my college roommates Just quit. And wow, I've never failed before ever in my life. I've been like a, you know, Ivy League, you know, whatever. And now it's like all-encompassing failure, right? So it's like that imposterpreneur is really not— it's not just about failure. It's about really dealing with like your mindset through the good and the bad and how normal that is. how that's really the default setting, but people don't talk about that that much. And I just want to have raw, authentic conversations about people really suffering through that, that FUD, that fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and how they dealt with it, or how they didn't deal with it, or how they wish they had dealt with it, you know. And, uh, now they're doing it a different way, right? So I mean, that, that's sort of like real Not just failure porn about like, I raised $80 million and I blew the whole thing up, right? It's like learning around that, although there may be, right? But like, I really want to get into this whole sort of, you know, just lift this off and like look inside. So if you have any listeners who are interested to bare their soul or share some tips, you know, you can put my contact in the show notes. And I'll send you a link to that, that video as well, that speed video, and also the link that Mike Cassidy—

That's awesome. That's awesome. And Richard, we came to the last question of the show, and we expanded the length of the show because it was so much interesting stuff that I was not able to resist the temptation. So let's go for the final question, which is Which is, if you would have the opportunity to meet yourself 24 years ago when you traveled to China, what advice would you offer to your younger self?

Meditate.

Perfect.

My 24-year-old self was like from the bitter soil of Boston. I don't know if you've ever seen Good Will Hunting. Like, I went to high school in like South Dorchester, right? Where like really like, you know, when Matt Damon is being psychoanalyzed and he's just playing, you know, my grandparents from Ireland, I grew up Irish, you know, Irish Catholic Bostonian kid. And like, I think Freud said the only people that are immune to psychoanalysis are the Irish. I have dual citizenship with Ireland, but like, I know, I know in my bone marrow that meditation is an absolute superpower. Um, but I would not have been receptive in my 20s to that. I would have go— I would have told this bald loser to go fuck himself, right? Um, so that's the thing is that you got to be ready for the message. Um, Transcendental Meditation, tm.org. I did a Vipassana 10-day retreat, the kind of retreats that Jack from— Jack Dorsey from Twitter has done. Amazing 10 days, no phone, no computer, no reading, no writing, no eye contact, no talking, no body language, no gestures. You're just in your head for 10.5 hours a day of meditation. That's great, but that's Certainly not sustainable. But TM, Transcendental Meditation, absolute superpower to unlock the best version of yourself. You know, I love the book Principles by Ray Dalio.

Yep, very good.

You know, the book— the TV show Billions, there's a big meditation, uh, component. There's a meditation room there, and it's based on him because he's the biggest proponent. He runs the biggest hedge fund in the world. $160 billion. There's 11,000 of them. It's the most successful hedge fund in the world. He's one of the top 50 most richest men on the planet, and he spends 40 minutes a day meditating. That guy's probably got better things to do with his time if he doesn't feel that that's giving him— and he directly attributes his success, you know, meditation is one of those things. And it just gives clarity, it gives focus, it allows me to I think for me, best of all, as a mood regulator, because I see, you know, if you're doing, you know, anything that you're scaling something up, you're just gonna lose your mind. Like, there's just, there's just no, there's just no way that you're not gonna just be like sleep deprived or just really pissed off about something because things just spiral out of control, right? And your ability to To control your reaction is so powerful because I see one of the biggest problems with startups is they don't get killed, they don't get murdered, they die from suicide because people usually blow up and have founder conflict. And I'm like, put that time in, put that time in to be centered, get the clarity, get the focus, but also to be able to like when your amygdala just goes What? Like, I want to murder— what? Like, anger is never good, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever in a startup. Ever, ever. Like, nobody's ever like, I'm so glad that guy got angry. Like, well, Steve Jobs got angry. You're not Steve Jobs. Nobody's Steve Jobs, right? Like, if you're really an asshole and you get angry, like, your people are really rooting for you to, like, Fail. And you need all the help you can get to get people on your side. Meditation is an insanely powerful tool. 20 minutes as soon as you get up, 20 minutes in the afternoon. And I, you know, you can get certified in 4 days, and it's like 2 hours day 1, 1 hour day 2 and 3, 30 minutes day 4. You are officially handed a mantra, and it's up to you to put your butt in that cushion. And it is the Best investment that I make in my life.

Love it. And just hats off to our team that is working so hard during this 130+ episodes, and I've never praised them in public. So for Alex, Charlie, and Mary, and Sarah as well, thank you, Rich. I would love to see this quote of of Rich when we released the podcast about the majority of scale-ups don't die by murder, they die because they commit suicide. I love it, that's a very good one. Rich, thank you so much for joining us on the show, it was really a pleasure to host you, and you are always welcome because there is so much more to talk and to share.

That's right, hey, I'm gonna start doing some— 2022, I'm gonna do like entrepreneur retreats in Bali so people can come here and refresh and do deep dives. So maybe I'll see you here then.

Absolutely, absolutely. Perfect. And to our community, thanks for being there. We keep bringing you the best of the best so you can have the best tools possible to scale up during the crisis or to be even better prepared with the best version of yourself to scale up after the crisis. Stay healthy and keep scaling.