EP#76: Your Network Has a Revenue Problem with Kyle Kane.

like between someone building a relationship and someone extracting from one, right? And if you're keeping score in every interaction, you've already lost the long game. And AI can't do that in the same way that we can. Like, you know, you have to, like, you can't fake generosity. I can do it with my fingers talking to an AI agent, right? Or with a voice agent, but you can't do that in person in the same way. You can't fake generosity as a tactic and expect it to compound.

Welcome to Startups Decoded. The show that gets real about what it takes to build a successful startup. I'm Andy Walsh, 2x exited founder, strategist, and your host. Each week I talk with top founders, investors, and operators to unpack the plays that drive real traction, not just headlines. If you're building something bold, this is where you'll get the honest insights to scale with clarity and confidence. Let's keep growing together. Hit subscribe and share with your community. It would mean the world to me. Hello and welcome back to Startup TV. Decoded. Partnerships for a startup can mean a lot of different things. It can be money in, it can be leads in, it can be collaboration. And for most founders, my impression is that not enough of them leverage it in a way that actually drives this compounding value. So today I'm so excited to have Kyle Kane from OnSpark on the show to help bring this to life. Kyle, welcome, man.

Thank you, Andy. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Let's go back a step. We met 2 years ago and I love that we've got this parallel life in a background in music that spawned a curiosity into a bigger corporate world that's led us to where we are now in startups. But the thing that separates us is that you can actually compose and produce and you've had great success as a musician where my one-liner is that I am a failed musician. Who somehow managed to create a business in music around it. It's, it's fun. And I love the music industry, but I'm no longer involved directly. I'd love to give people a bit of a taste. I, you're a composer. You've had pretty good success. Just, just give us a little anecdote about music because I, I always like to nerd out on people's success in music careers. Andy Walsh: Yeah, sure.

Well, uh, yeah, I was signed as a songwriter to Universal Music Group when I was 17 years old. And, uh, Been blessed to work with some of my favorite artists on the planet. I was on tour opening for Shakira, 28 cities. There were more horror stories, though, than there were success stories. I was robbed and held at gunpoint in my underwear overnight on a venue trip in a third-world country. I got my passport stolen one time. And I would say one of the most exciting things turned out to be the most depressing, where I was in Dubai, actually. I was singing to a group of people who knew the words to my lyrics, which— to me was just shocking, you know? And the energy that you feel from, you know, 10,000 people singing back at you, that's the kind of energy that you'd spend a whole career chasing. But the interesting thing is that after that show, I went up to my suite at the Burj Al Arab, and I remember feeling so depressed. Like, I looked around the room and I'm like, "Not one person in this room gives a crap about me." Like, it's just— I felt so lonely being surrounded by these people. And that was the first— that was the beginning of the end of my career. My music career, put it that way.

It's pretty confronting, and I've got a lot of friends that are musicians, managers, and work holistically in the music industry, and you hear these stories all the time. It's not for the faint-hearted. It's brutal. And I did an episode right back in the day, first 10 episodes I would say, with a gentleman called Joel Connolly. He and I met in the music industry in Australia, and he's now a creative director of Blackbird VC out of Australia, hugely successful fund. And we were having a conversation about the intersection of musicians and bands with the world of startups. And we're— the metaphor we were going is that the musician is the CEO of a company, the manager is the COO, and then you have a whole bunch of people around it. Because today, to be a musician, you have to be so innovative in creating stories, connections way beyond the music that you create. And that breeding ground for me, I feel, is so fertile in creating great founders. And I would say is part of your success, which we'll unpack a little bit today. Coming out of the music industry and the focus for today's episode, as we set up at the start, is around partnerships. You came out of the music industry and then started having a creative lens with the commercial side of music. Take us into that step that you took, or big step potentially, to then step outside composing and put a business hat on?

Yeah, it actually, interestingly enough, it kind of segues into the way that we built the deal room and how we attracted Martell Ventures and that whole process. So yeah, when I decided to really focus on the entrepreneurial side of the business, I mean, as you mentioned, you know, I'm an artist today, creator today. You've got to be a CEO, but unfortunately most creators and artists don't have the acumen to be a CEO. So I really wanted to learn that side of the business. So I became an A&R, I worked my way up to Andy Walsh, VP of A&R. And the hard realization that I had to, to, to really come to terms with is that, you know, I had to fight so hard to open budgets and resources for the artists that I really believed in while other less talented and less impactful artists waltzed right up to the top of the priority card simply because they had a brand deal or they had some sort of partner that convinced the label that this was worthwhile. It had nothing to do with the music or the talent or the impact. So that led me to leave the music biz and move to New York City and start my own brand agency. We had a historical run, ranked number 13 fastest growing on the Inc. 500 list, number 24 in global marketing and advertising. We closed major deals with Katy Perry and Samsung, Rihanna and Vita Coco, Kylie Jenner and Daniel Wellington. We drove $2 billion in partnerships, and I got to watch the market move from literal ground zero. But that experience really underscored the power of partnerships to me. But it didn't really take hold until last year. I mean, when, when the AI fog really started to hit critical mass and, you know, founders who had real products and services they couldn't find a way to reach their intended audiences in the same way of, you know, what I experienced in music with, with these artists. And so, you know, cold outreach was getting ignored. Inboxes became more intuitive. Paid ads didn't convert the way they should, and they stopped working the second that you stopped paying. So partnerships became the primary growth driver. And so, um, last year I started a community around this idea and I launched a series of masterclasses and, and one of Dan Martell's right-hand mans joined the, the community, introduced me to a few other folks in Dan's ecosystem, and eventually I got to meet the man himself. And in true Martell Mafia fashion, you know, he showed me that what I was doing inside of this, this Deal Room community was, was inefficient. And, uh, I was burning the candle at both ends and personal introductions to partners within my network just wasn't scalable. So I learned a, a way to reach more people and to do it in a way that also protects my own needs and boundaries as a human. So the Deal Room, which we started last year, is a space where, you know, serious founders and operators could come together to trade actual value instead of just swapping business cards and contributing to the networking noise that we all have to fight through It ran on one rule, which was that you actually had to lead by giving before you ever ask for something. And that philosophy really helped to deepen not only my relationship with Dan, but my understanding about the market. Because, you know, we all share the same conviction that partnerships need to be infrastructure rather than luck. And when it was time to turn that philosophy into a product, Martell Ventures backed it and co-owns it with me. And OnSpark became the productized version of everything the deal room stood for. But it all started with Dan the music industry and my parallels with fighting for artists in a way that now we fight for founders.

It's such a natural crossover and, and you articulated it there very elegantly. As a musician, you're telling a story and various stakeholders buy into that story and, and connect in different ways. And it could be your label for distribution, publishing to get you like radio deals, whatever it looks like. There's ways that you make money. And a founder, you need to be able to manage the same stakeholders around the who play quite often a broader role in connecting you with the right people, bringing in revenue directly, and finding ways to compound and scale what you're already doing. So for me, there's a really natural synergy that happens there. And your observation, when you start to see brand partners come into the world of music and what they're looking to achieve, you have this two-sided coin, but the outcome is the same. And what you're ultimately doing is understanding a partner's objective, understanding in this instance, an artist's objective. And now for you with the two-sided marketplace, from a partnership perspective, it's what does that sweet spot look like in the intersection? And you lived and breathed it on the artist side and you've now scaled and evolved into something that helps founders. And I'm really curious to go into it today and to get it started. Let's go into a little bit of 101 because if you were to say to a founder today, like what a partnership is and what a partnership engine looks like, I think you would get a very vague answer or maybe even not an answer at all. What, what, how would you set up a, a partnership today as far as a contemporary version of what that looks like?

I think it's important to differentiate networking from partnerships. You know, to me, networking, which we all know has sort of been this necessary evil in building a founder ecosystem. To me, it's, it's a, and maybe it's part of the, my introverted nature, but To me, it's just like this noisy activity that feels productive while producing almost nothing measurable. Like, you know, you're collecting handshakes and high fives and, and contacts and trading business cards and, and telling yourself that the room mattered. And then 6 months later, you can't pinpoint a single dollar that moved, right? Versus, you know, conversely, strategic partnership flow is the total opposite discipline where every relationship is mapped to a value exchange and a revenue path before you ever pour any energy into it. You know, I see networkers that are like optimizing for the feeling of connection and the gut and the energy and, hey, this, this guy was great. It just felt good. And oftentimes that falls flat on its face where I see real partners who can actually produce, they're optimizing for predictable outcomes. And that gap is sort of the entire reason why OnSpark exists because, you know, most founders have the right relationships already. They just have no system to convert them into predictable revenue. And when I think about like sourcing, that's part of the problem. It's like, you know, our, our deal flow is scattered across LinkedIn and emails and DMs and groups and events and referrals. So the right opportunity is almost always somewhere that you're not looking the moment it matters. And that sustaining problem is that, you know, nobody owns the relationship after the handshake because the follow-up, the structure of the deal, the nurturing of the partner, like that's the real labor that founders seem to not have time for. And historically, the only fix was to hire a partnership team or hire a business development rep, right? And that's gonna cost you $75K to $150K plus commissions, plus 6 months of ramping up a pipeline, and still with no guarantee of actually producing successful partnerships. Most founders simply cannot afford that ticket. So, you know, the partnerships that would've changed their business quietly die in a thread that nobody ever returns to.

Couple of threads I want to pick up in there. One, just as a comment, I'm going to call your bluff that you're an introvert. Every time I speak to you, you give me so much energy with your enthusiasm and passion. So I just want to put that out there as well.

That's a choice, Andy, because, you know, AI is doing so much else for me. Like, what do I really choose? I choose how I show up every time. So that's why I'm chanting names and singing songs and throwing my fist in the air because I'm pumped up about being able to connect to humans. I spend 90% of my time now talking to my AI agents.

And it's such a fascinating world that we live in where the shift into voice and in the sense of having conversations as prompts and action and progress with these platforms rather than typing and just different ways that we're interacting now. And for me, human connection is critical in the sense of understanding who you're talking to, the personality type, what they care about, what they don't is really important. And I know that's part of the mix of what you've created. The, the second part I really want to tap into there is around the structure. And it's so interesting that partnerships have been around for a long, long time. Yet it feels like every time I walk into a conversation where someone is looking at a partnership, it feels like they're reinventing the wheel every time they do it. It's like, oh, this is our version that we're doing rather than lean into history of success of people that have done it well, structure, workflow. And that's ultimately what OnSpark is. And you've taken me through a great demo and I'll be joining and giving OnSpark a spin as part of this as well, which I'm super excited about. Like really important for me with Startups Decoded to have this functionality. So from a structural perspective, that foundation is really interesting because there's direct and there's indirect revenue. So let's start on the revenue streams from a partnership side of things. Like let's go direct revenue first. If you're a startup, What are, what are some of the upsides on the commercial part of your business that a partnership can offer you?

The word partnership means so many different things to so many different people, but I think the most important thing is that it moves the needle for your business. So if you're looking for a co-founder or a key hire, right, that's a partnership. If you're looking for technology or data or content or distribution, if you're looking for stronger inbound, if you're looking for higher ticket clients, you know, whatever it is, media, PR, more stages, speaking opportunities, whatever connects your product or service to its intended audience where you can borrow trust. In a way that's scalable, that to me is, is partnership. And, you know, you said it best, OnSpark is a partnership operating system. We're built on a results-as-a-service model. So we're tied to the outcomes that the clients actually care about. So through that intake process, we're, we're really digging down into, you know, it's, it's a multi-layer assessment stack of like, how do we understand what kind of partner you can be and how do we understand what part— what kind of partnerships can move the needle? And, you know, we're serving founders and revenue operators who already have a proven offer., but whose real bottleneck has shifted from product to distribution because, you know, the old growth channels have stopped working the way they used to. Distribution has proven to be more difficult today because, you know, most of the entrepreneurs I work with anyway, they don't have a war chest of capital to drop on the ads to cut through the digital jungle. So many of them have lost their shirts trying to find a way to reach that audience in a world growing faker by the day where everyone looks good on paper. How do you quickly build the trust you need to win the partners at scale? So that to me is like the real question for any founder with a product that could genuinely change the world is brutally simple. Like, how do you actually reach the audience you're built to serve? The answer that keeps proving itself is partnerships, because getting in front of someone who already has the trust and the audience beats shouting into a feed every single time, right? The timing matters because now AI finally has made it possible to systematize the relationship intelligence that used to live only in the heads of a few elite dealmakers, right? So, you know, we're taking what the best partnership operators do instinctively and we're turning it into an operating system that anyone can run.

The trust element is such a fascinating topic right now in the, the volume of content. It is just compounded and scaled exponentially for the, not for the betterment, for the worse of us too. And we would all have our own experience of inbound that is so overwhelming as people finding your email address, spamming you with all sorts of things they're trying to reach through. So it's a very noisy, cluttered market and finding your right target audience is one challenge. And we look at Clay as a good example where they've automated a sequence where they're trying to ultimately get you a shortlist of people that are your target client that have given some kind of signal that they're the right person. They've acted upon outbound in a way. And, but what happens is, and I've, my example that I like to share is around programmatic advertising. Is that we went from like TV, print, radio ads into digital media across websites. And that was targeted to a certain segment like you could in a magazine. But then we went into hyper-targeted IP-based activity where you could put an ad in front of a person and you would know who they are and that you're, you're ideal target. But programmatic has basically disappeared because again, it got so cluttered that the effectiveness declined really significantly. And we're at that I'm at that same point now with outbound, like cold outbound is tough. You called it out. Advertising in the paid side, it's harder to convert now because it is much noisier. So for me, it comes back to human relationships and what you've done is productized a workflow and a system to be able to understand me, who my network is, who I can reach out to, who they're connected to, but then putting a system underneath that that allows me to automate that because right now it's, it's complex to automate what you're doing. So I, I see OnSpark solving two problems. It's understanding your own network and where there's opportunity, but two, having a system that allows you to stay on top of things in what is a chaotic world that we operate in as a founder.

And there's a couple of hard truths around, you know, I think even the founders that are successful at partnerships, they've had to, to come to terms with, you know, without getting too deep into the psychology, there seems to be these two childhood wounds that, uh, that keep popping up. And unfortunately it pops up at like the worst time in a partnership development, like in the 11th hour after you've already spent money on contracts and, and, and one partner ghosts and you're like, why did this person disappear? This looked great on paper. And the first childhood wound is a lack of self-worth. You know, I think especially we see this with early-stage founders that either they don't believe they're worthy of the partnership, or they believe that their value is self-evident. So they describe what they do instead of what the other side gets, and that message dead on arrival. So the person across the table is, is running a silent calculation all the time, right? About like how you make their lives easier, their numbers bigger, their risks smaller. And, and if your pitch does not answer that in the language you use, then you sound like noise. I've watched brilliant operators lose deals that they should have owned because they led with their product or their features instead of what the outcome would be of the 1 1 11 equation. And the fix of that is to translate everything you offer into the currency that the other partner can understand, something that they already care about, which means doing the work to understand their world before you ever ask for anything. And then the second wound that I see popping up is, no surprise, a lack of trust. And, uh, it's harder to diagnose that early on because, you know, you don't know if this person gets the short end of the stick every time they're with a partner, or maybe this person's on their third divorce, right? And it's just not a good time trust another human for them right now. You don't know that information when you're sitting down with someone or when you're on a Google Meet or a Zoom. So that's one of the reasons why we built our intake process in a unique way, in that going back to that multi-layer assessment stack, right? On one side, it's like your traditional personality assessments like HBDI and Myers-Briggs and Enneagram and DiSC. But the AI is listening for a step deeper. It's listening for linguistic styles, communication preferences, emotional markers, behavior patterns, things that could surface those red flags early on so that our partners are not pouring into the wrong strong people.

So fascinating because right now the AI automation is typically pushing out something that is the path of least resistance but not factoring that human element. And that's the piece that I see surfacing now everywhere is what does the hybrid combination look like of human and AI together? Because AI has a ceiling and people are starting to see the ceiling that it has right now as far as what you can and you can't do with it. So having your own personality come through, looking at the right match for you as a human being, as far as your values, your philosophy, not just the service or product that you're providing. And that gives me some sense of happiness and joy that the humanity can come back to a certain degree because it started getting really ugly there as far as just having agents or things operate on our behalf and we're not even talking to each other anymore, which is a scary place to be.

That's right. Yeah. And you know, I think people generally, like, we can feel the difference, right? Like between someone building a relationship and someone extracting from one, right? And if you're keeping score in every interaction, you've already lost the long game. And AI can't do that in the same way that we can. Like, you know, you have to, like, you can't fake generosity. I can do it with my fingers talking to an AI agent, right? Or with a voice agent, but you can't do that in person in the same way. You can't fake generosity as a tactic and expect it to compound.

It's the art of conversation and the ability to be human, listen, be curious, asking questions, and know the person that you're talking to. And it's not a transaction, it's a relationship. And, and that humanity is critical. And, and looking at OnSpark off the back of that, the way that you're matching, you have founders, creators, operators, and you're looking at different people they can collaborate with. What are some of the signals you said there as far as the red flags that come out. Can you take us through that onboarding process and how you start to filter who a person is, not just what the company or service is? Quick word from our friends at Deel. Founders, if you're hiring, whether that's your first person or your 50th, you've probably already hit the moment where the best candidate isn't even in your city, let alone your country. That used to mean so much paperwork. Deel removes all of that. That one platform that lets you hire in days. They handle payroll, compliance, contracts, and benefits. Plus they're across 150 countries. Don't lose good people because logistics were too hard. Deel solves that problem. Check it out. startupsdecoded.com/deel. That's D-E-E-L startupsdecoded.com/deel.

Yeah, that's it. It's, it's, you know, the personality side, the communication side, the emotional markers, behavior patterns, you know, that's what we're listening for inside the intake call. So you may be asked a very plain question about your business or about yourself, but we're able to ascertain over 8 million data points from one 5-minute conversation. So that's what's going into the matches. And, you know, we really had to look at more than just the match, right? Because the match is just where the journey begins and I mean, there's no shortage of AI tools that, that can match or automate outreach, right? I mean, most AI tools are aimed at making dead channels slightly less dead, right? So they help you send more cold emails or run more ads to a market that's already tuning both of those out, like you said. So, you know, the fact that there's no shortage of these tools that claim to help you manage existing channels better. I mean, if you look at platforms that match like Bordy and LinkedIn, I mean, they do a great job of introducing people. But then what? Then we're left to our own devices to try to figure out how to turn that into revenue. And there's a ton of— there's this whole category of tools called, uh, PRMs. I don't know if you've heard of that, like partnership, uh, relationship management platforms. And they do a great job of managing your existing partner pipelines, but most of our subscribers, they don't have any issue meeting people or managing existing business. Where they have trouble is at, you know, turning those relationships that they've got from networking events or DMs or referrals, like turning that into predictable revenue. OnSpark handles that.

The through line is critical. And for me personally, I'm doing sales motions in different capacities. And I'm fortunate that over many years of my career, being a, let's call myself a veteran of the industry. Wouldn't say I'm old. I've just been around the traps and I've always focused on personal relationships, even with competitors. There's a lot you can glean from competitors if you're building allies and we're in a pretty big market. And for me, I'm all about not necessarily transparency, but at least sharing some open conversations about how you can collaborate together and elevate an industry. And for me, what I'm seeing with OnSpark is the ability to do that in a more structured way with a level of information and data that you're getting, but the outcome, because I can meet a lot of people, I'm great at closing deals. The part for me that I find unenjoyable and I'm probably not great at is just that active follow-up process. What is the right balance of how much you follow someone up? When do you give up? When do you double down? And there's a lot of that nuance that happens and understanding the person that's on the other side of the table is the art of what you're doing.

And the attribution is an age-old marketing problem, right? And so that comes into play heavily with partnerships because You've got the contacts, you've got the opportunity to turn that into revenue for your business, but can you really attribute the amount you spent on this event versus the lift in your business from the exposure and the visibility? A lot of founders can do it in, in, in different scales, right? I mean, you can start by mapping what you already have because most founders have no idea how much doormat value they have sitting in their existing network. And, you know, if you pick a handful of relationships where you can deliver real value first, then you go give it without asking anything in return, that's gonna build trust faster than anything else. If you get very specific about the exchange, so both sides understand what they bring, what they get, and you treat that as clarity as the foundation, right? This is where the attribution comes in, is you wanna make sure that there's some sort of MVP, there's a, a minimal viable partnership that can be proved, and that's where you're building trust. You don't have to come out and swing for the fences, right? You just gotta come out and do a couple of things that you said do them well, and that's where the win comes into play. The founders who win are not the ones with the biggest networks. They're the ones who turn the network that they have into a system that produces revenue.

Love that because it's so simple. And if you were to basically take that same model and apply it to the way that they would do go-to-market from a straight sales perspective, like you could target 1,000 people and spend a lot of money and be ineffective, or you could sharpen the pencil and target 100 people and know that there's a higher chance of conversion. They're your likely customers and it's more personalized. And it feels counterintuitive for most. I see it with people fundraising. I see it with people doing sales and it's the same like metaphor and logic in the sense of how you do partnerships.

That's right.

Yeah.

And we use the term, uh, borrowed gravity, you know, it's the idea that the fastest way to grow is to attach your offer to a partner who already has the audience to trust and the credibility that you're trying to build. Built. And, you know, I mean, I've lived this firsthand going back to, you know, the music industry. I mean, you know, I closed a deal that put Samsung inside of Katy Perry's birthday video because they were getting crushed by Beats headphones. They were losing 3% market share a month and they didn't know how to fight it. And that was the brand borrowing the gravity of one of the biggest artists in the world to land in front of an audience with no ad spend. No ad spend could buy that level of authenticity. You see the same mechanic with Daniel Wellington. They scaled from $15,000 to $200 million by borrowing the gravity of creators instead of buying ads, or, you know, when we helped Rihanna join as an investor in the face of Vita Coco. None of those wins came from a better funnel or, you know, standing next to the right partner at the right moment. It came from the system of borrowing trust, borrowed gravity. And that's the leverage that OnSpark is built to give founders who don't happen to have a celebrity on speed dial.

And I love that term, borrowing gravity, because it goes back to what you said earlier, which is around outcome. In that conversation, a, a great partnership in very simple terms is mutually beneficial.

Period.

That's right.

That's right.

You don't need to overthink that. And so many people go into it with a biased point of view in the negotiation that they feel like they need to represent their own interests, whereas the best negotiation is not one, it's actually how do you collaborate and find something where you both win together.

That's right.

Yeah.

And the outcomes so far have been phenomenal. I mean, just last week we got a million dollar pipeline for one of our subscribers. Shout out to Chris Seidman, generated $160,000. $160K this morning in new business from one partnership sourced through OnSpark, you know, and the details that matter, it's like Chris didn't, he didn't have an audience. Like he started with nothing. So the platform helped him define his value, package it like a pro, and connect him to the people who actually cared rather than the ones pretending to care. You know, that's the whole thesis in one story. It requires getting in front of the right person at the right time with a clear value proposition. And the decision he made was simply to, you know, go pro, turn the partnerships from a scattered process that he hoped would work into a repeatable revenue stream. And that's what any of us can do if we just put our mind to it.

I love that elegance. And it goes back to a common analogy in the startup world, which is all around noise versus signal. And if you're a natural networker and you're having lots of conversations, handshakes, maybe you're doing an ad buy, you see lots of impressions and clicks, you can get a false positive. Ultimately, you feel like you're making progress., but ultimately you get 3 months down the road and you're not seeing any upside on the bottom line. So it's like, what is the metric that you're using? And one of the terms that you talk about is around this strategic partnership flow. And that example that you just gave is around that. It's outcome focused. It's like, where are you at on that journey? What's converting? And how do you optimize around that even without a network? And that's the part that is the biggest opportunity that I see.

Yeah, I agree. And that signal-noise thing, man, I mean, I've been struggling with that my whole career. It, it's one of the things that, that this Martell Ventures partnership has helped me to really see more clearly, you know, building this from zero over the past 6 months. It's been, I would say, equal parts conviction and correction, you know, I mean, we committed hard to this direction, but we also needed to stay humble enough to adjust when the market teaches you something. So to be able to filter out that noise and really focus on the signal and, you know, having Dan and Marcel Ventures behind us raises the standards on everything because, you know, those resources come with a level of operational rigor that forces you to build the real thing and deliver real value rather than a, a fancy dance around a shiny demo. You know, the hardest part is to me, it's like, you know, the, a mix of clichés of, you know, building the plane while flying it, trying not to boil the ocean, solve every problem at once, carrying the weight of the vision when the proof is still being built in real time. But, uh, you know, what keeps me going is, you know, there's a huge payoff every single day in watching a system that you sketched on a whiteboard producing real revenue for someone else's company when you can stay focused on that signal.

And let's double-click on Dan Martell for a minute. And I'd encourage anyone who's listening, watching right now to follow Dan on LinkedIn and his social channels. His story and backstory, his, his life went south for a few years there. And he took that as an opportunity rather than as a negative, didn't let him define him in the sense of what he did next. And that's not my story to tell, so I would encourage you to look him up. But what he's created now is the ability to use authenticity, strength of character, vulnerability, things that make him human to build what is a hugely successful business. And Martel Ventures, from what I've observed, and I want to know more from you, is finding like-minded people. And the fact that he's now a partner in OnSpark speaks volumes to what you're doing. You talked a little bit about connecting with Dan through the network effect of what you're doing, which again, just is a testament to the product itself. Like getting Dan on board, talk us through that conversation because from what I've gathered, he's one of the most effective with his time. Like he can be a 15-minute window guy and still knock it out of the park. Yeah.

Ruthless discipline. I mean, you know, just, just being around the guy has absolutely changed my life. You know, his fingerprints is, is all, all over the way that OnSpark was built. But the gratitude that I have goes deeper than the cap table. I mean, you know, when I, when I first came out of my reset and started mapping what OnSpark could be, Dan was the first one who reflected the vision back to me at full size, like in a, you know, bigger than I, than I could imagine. And, you know, he showed me that the addressable market market that partnerships represent is massive. And he showed me that what I was doing could be scaled faster and more efficiently through his Buy Back Your Time frameworks, which is a, a book that I highly recommend. He's actually working on a, a new book now. So definitely stay tuned for that. But, you know, Dan helped me step into a better version of myself as both a leader and a human being. You know, most people will validate a smaller version of your idea. It's safer. Dan does the total opposite. I mean, he consistently pushes the frame larger and then he holds you accountable to that bigger version. There are very specific conversations that I think about often, you know, early in the build, I was describing OnSpark as a matchmaking service, like a, a Tinder for founders. And Dan stopped me mid-sentence and he is like, this is not a service, it's an infrastructure, you know? And, and that partnership operating system came out of those conversations. And you know, that one reframe really changed how we designed the product, how we priced it, how we sold it with this results-as-a-service model with $100,000 performance guarantee for our subscribers where we're gonna make sure that you are deriving the value, or we're just gonna refund you your subscription fees. I mean, you know, that stuff all came from just this one reframe of Dan showing me exactly what this could be bigger than I could have imagined.

I see it in the way that he communicates with what he's doing himself. I don't know Dan, but Dan, if you're listening, we had a bit of a chat there. I was courting you to join me on the podcast, but it hasn't come to life yet, but I know you're busy. But what I love with him is that I see him almost as a fortune teller. He's got this amazing pragmatism in the sense of observing what's happening in the market. You talk about signal versus noise. He seems to find the one signal in 99 noises and just focus on it. And it's like he can see around the corner and that's a rare gift for a founder.

Nothing to say about that, man. That's, I have, I can count on one hand how many people I know that, that have that, that level of, of, yeah, of focus.

So good. Well, to continue on the thread here, we've gone through what's happening in the market, set up what the onboarding looks like for OnSpark. Let's get into the detail a little bit around a partnership. And you've done a lot of autopsies of partnerships, not dead people, but within that partnership autopsy, like you've sold great deals. I know both of us have had some terrible deals, ones that we've lost that we should have closed, ones that we closed. That actually turned into a hot mess. How have some of those things become a filter for that structure? Because the operating system is reliant upon breadth and depth of an experience to how you, one, close a deal, but then how you make sure that both parties are actually coming out of that successfully.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, we reverse engineered all the partnerships that looked great on paper but failed. And, and that's where we uncovered some of those insights about the the childhood wounds. I mean, we had to go way back into human psychology to really understand, you know, why aren't humans predictable? And a lot of it is trauma-based, a lot of it is action-based, a lot of it is based on limiting beliefs. And those things are really hard to surface without some sort of intelligence systems. And yeah, that, that all informed the way that, that we build our intake, the way that we built our roadmap, our partnership readiness score attempts to address some of that, but, you know, of course this will be a living and breathing thing as we learn more and we ingest those learnings into the—

You need to be an adult to play this game. And I use that as a metaphor. You need to park your ego, leave it at the door. You need to forget all the things that you think you know and use this almost as a quality control tool is how I would take someone into OnSpark and how they use it because what you're doing is ultimately going through a filter to understand who you are and what what you need, and you're getting coaching as part of the workflow, right? And that's the strength of what you're doing. It's not just a way to track, it's actually a way to proactively think about what you need to do next.

Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

And, and, you know, really just showing people that, you know, stop confusing enthusiasm with alignment. You know, there, that's, that's really where the gap comes into play. We get so excited about things without ever having an actual trust and fit scoring mechanism, without having a, a clear path to revenue. And not to say that every partnership has to result in revenue, right? But we have to be able to quantify as a business leader, I'm pouring my time and energy into this particular channel for what, right? What is the outcome that I'm hoping to achieve? And, and, you know, I think that you can apply that to, to many aspects of life, not just business, but misaligned incentives, unclear value exchange, no defined ownership through the bits and pieces that come with the, the, the observable challenges and nuances of partnerships and trust erosion from, from small breaches, right? Like a missed intro here, a credit grab on a shared win. Like these things are rarely addressed directly, but they teach each side to protect rather than to invest. And when you start to protect, that's the beginning of the end of the partnership. And so all these things that we've learned through the diagnosis and postmortems, and you mentioned like the, the, the, the partnership autopsies, you know, that's, those patterns are what we're using to fuel the next partnership intelligence.

It's amazing. And that is a dynamic learning process, right? Things evolve, the market changes, objectives change, outcome and what success looks like is changing. So that is something too that you need that active dynamism to be able to bring it to life in a way that's most relevant for you in that moment. To step aside, I'd, I love to hear things about where you got We both work in music and partnerships back in the day, and, and I'm sure we've both got stories for days of the things that went wrong. Going back to '80s stars, I had probably one of the worst partnership experiences of my life with Tommy Lee, you know, a great drummer that turned into a pop star. And then my great story was with my man Rob Van Winkle, otherwise known as Vanilla Ice, who turned out to be one of the nicest people that I've ever collaborated with. And had a great story of a night out with Vanilla Ice back in Australia. And I look at both of those partnerships now with a lot of experience behind me about where it went right and where it went wrong. And, and the one with Rob was mutually beneficial. The one with Tommy was basically just a pay-to-play. It was as simple as that. And those things are things that I put forward, but you're getting the breadth of all this information. I, I'd love to hear a little story. You talked about some of the success there, Katy Perry and Samsung. Can you remember a good one where you got buried and eaten alive?

Quite a few. To pick one, so there was a famous tour called October's Very Own. It was a Drake tour. And I bought the rights to that show at MetLife Stadium. MetLife was one of our partners at the time, the highest-grossing venue in the United States. You know, they've got two professional football teams. They've got, you know, some of the biggest, you know, World Cup events and some of the biggest concerts. And so we purchased those rights from a promoter promoter. Long story short, Drake twisted his ankle and AEG Live Nation canceled that event. Now, you know, we had spent, I don't know, $8 or $9 million on the promotions and the billboards and the ticketing and the after parties, the hospitality riders. None of those things were refundable. So when Live Nation canceled the event, they refunded the promoter who was our partner, who we purchased the rights from. Well, the promoter took that money, disappeared, and we were left with trying to figure out how to refund 26,000 presold tickets. Now, if, if, if you sell tickets and the event doesn't happen and you don't refund, you're faced with a class action lawsuit. And that's, you know, now you're talking Bernie Madoff level of, of, of promotions, right? So in that instance, in hindsight, right, we didn't do a good enough job of vetting that promoter. Turns out that they had some other experiences with Nas and Jay-Z and a few other events that they were involved in that, that went left, and they didn't do the right thing when those events went left. So if we had, if, if we had not been so overcome by enthusiasm with a, you know, a small company getting the rights to one of the, the most, uh, you know, at least the highest projecting revenue show, we would've done our work ahead of time. And, uh, we may have seen some of these things, but because we didn't, didn't, I had to go and raise some investment dollars to refund the tickets that were sold. We lost millions of dollars from unrecoverable marketing assets that were running for a show that didn't happen. And, uh, yeah, that almost killed me. Literally.

It's a brutal industry and music is that. It's one of these industries that still exists and quite often with a lot of old school legacy from contracts and workflows. Et cetera. And it's a very much eyes wide open type situation. But I know that we all have to be open and vulnerable around sharing these stories because it allows us to feel like that when we step into something, if it doesn't work out, that it's, you know, financial outcome aside, it's okay and facing forwards. But that's ultimately what you're building. So to finish up today, I would love to hear from you a little bit around OnSpark for people listening. Mainly founders, early stage, what are the things that founders should be thinking about when they jump onto OnSpark.com and take a look and listen and where they'll get benefit from that?

Well, the partner operating system aside, you know, I think that coming into a partnership with the right mind frame, I think is really going to be the difference between the subscriber that gets the value from the platform versus versus it's just another tool. And I think the most important thing to think about is, is the purpose, right? Like if your purpose is bigger than your own gain from a particular transaction, then that's when your success is guaranteed. And, and I mean that as an operating principle rather than a, just a, a feel-good line. You know, when your reason for building, your reason for partnering, it serves more than just yourself. You make decisions on a longer time horizon that way, and you can attract partners who want you to win, and you stop optimizing for the short short term. And that orientation is what makes partnerships work because the whole model collapses the moment the other side senses you're only in it for yourself. And, you know, we do our best to vet high-intent opportunities, but purpose is not the soft part of the business. It's the thing that makes the hard parts sustainable. So things happen in partnerships, things go left, but that purpose is what serves the true north. So yes, you subscribe to OnSpark, you take a 3 to 5 minute intake, we give you a partnership-ready a scorecard that maps everything you need to know about yourself. We give you up to 8 million potential partners in our ecosystem that you can match to. We'll map out the mutual value exchange. We'll build out the deal points for our concierge clients. We even go as far as handling the outreach and the communication and the contracts and the assets. Everything that you need to build and sustain a partnership pipeline, you'll find inside of OnSpark. But at the end of the day, if you're showing up to a partner partnership, only in it for yourself, there's no operating system in the world that's going to fix that for you.

Karl Cain, you had me at purpose. You had me at purpose. I, you're speaking my language and ultimately as a founder and as an operator of a startup, you need to go into that with purpose. People see it, they smell it, that it's a magnet for the right people. And I love that that's where your focus is. So it's been such a treat to listen and learn. I'm going to be talking about my experience on OnSpark as well with what I'm doing to grow Startups Decoded. So fascinating to see how it plays out. But Carl Cain, founder, CMO of OnSpark, thank you.

Thank you, Andy. I really appreciate everything you're doing for the community. Us entrepreneurs, I think we're underserved when it comes to the real talk behind what's really going on. Everything's always glitzed up and glamorous. And you and I both know that's not the way the tree falls.

We've got dirty faces being in the trenches and I, I like it that way. And, but it's nice to poke your head up and clean your face just for a minute.

That's right. That's right. Appreciate your time, Andy. Thanks everybody for listening.

Thanks for listening to Startups Decoded. If today's conversation helped you think differently, share it with the founder in your your network. And don't forget to subscribe for real-world startup insights every week. We really value your support. If you're interested in partnering with us, email hello@startupsdecoded.com. I'm Andy Walsh. I'll see you next week.