Is creating a successful startup more about the product or the connection with your customers? This intriguing question sets the stage for a highly informative episode where we unpack the complex relationship between startups, customer engagement, and the transformative impact of purpose-driven branding with guest expert Brian Mac Mahon. Brian, with a wealth of experience from nurturing nearly 300 startups at ExpertDojo, shares his foresight on overcoming the biases that plague the startup ecosystem. His global perspective and involvement in the early stages of startup development provide a unique lens through which we can examine the keys to building a sustainable and emotionally resonant business. This episode is a condensed guide for both budding and established entrepreneurs on the vitality of customer relationships, the strategic use of outreach tools, and the untapped potential of blockchain technology. Brian's wisdom is not just theoretical; it's backed by stories of real-world successes and failures, making it an essential listen for anyone looking to fine-tune their entrepreneurial approach and secure a competitive edge in the marketplace.
Is creating a successful startup more about the product or the connection with your customers? This intriguing question sets the stage for a highly informative episode where we unpack the complex relationship between startups, customer engagement, and the transformative impact of purpose-driven branding with guest expert Brian Mac Mahon.
Brian, with a wealth of experience from nurturing nearly 300 startups at ExpertDojo, shares his foresight on overcoming the biases that plague the startup ecosystem. His global perspective and involvement in the early stages of startup development provide a unique lens through which we can examine the keys to building a sustainable and emotionally resonant business.
This episode is a condensed guide for both budding and established entrepreneurs on the vitality of customer relationships, the strategic use of outreach tools, and the untapped potential of blockchain technology. Brian's wisdom is not just theoretical; it's backed by stories of real-world successes and failures, making it an essential listen for anyone looking to fine-tune their entrepreneurial approach and secure a competitive edge in the marketplace.
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Marcia Dawood
Well, Brian, welcome to the show. So glad to have you here.
Brian Mac Mahon
It is my pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Marcia Dawood
So we met a couple of months ago, I guess, now at the TiE event in LA, and I was just fascinated by some of the comments that you made in that meeting about all the work you've done with accelerators and startups. And I would love for you to tell our audience a little bit about your background, how you even learned about helping startups and where that kind of all began.
Brian Mac Mahon
That is a big, big, big story. First of all, big shout out to TiE. I love the TiE organization, and I think some of my best friends are there, and I find them to be some of the smartest investors that I know. So over the years, I found myself at more and more TiE events, and I think maybe it's probably directly contributory to why we're actually opening in India later on this year, but I'll circle back to that later. So my story is, I was a young boy in Ireland. How long do we have? Yeah. And I've had, look, I've had a property development company, I've had a tech company, I've had another startup company. I worked with Regis, with Mark Dixon over there, one of the biggest workplace providers in the world.
Brian Mac Mahon
Became quite the expert in just new ways of working. Before COVID honestly, COVID kind of killed everything that I had learned for like a gazillion years. But prior to that, I was quite the expert on hot desking and outsourcing. And how do you create, like, the perfect work environment with efficiency meets work of place and all those wonderful things? And then, of course, COVID killed it all. And I would say, after living in Spain and London and China and Russia and like Norway and Sweden and Finland and Denmark and like, tons, Latvia and Lithuania and Mexico and Peru and a ton of places outside the US, probably 15 more. And then inside the US, being in New York and being in Chicago and being in Dallas and Houston and San Antonio and Austin and Carlsbad. God, so many places. And now I'm in LA.
Brian Mac Mahon
But having been in all these places, I felt my cup was kind of full and I was relatively happy. And I found myself going to just a lot of events with startups. And then. And I noticed something I hadn't noticed before, which is weird. I'm not sure why I never noticed it before, but I noticed it with like a big punch in my face at the time, and that's that everybody seemed to be failing. Like, everybody. I would meet these startups and there would be 100 startups in a room and they would all have the same gusto in what they're building. I'm going to build the greatest this, the most incredible that, the fastest that you've ever seen, and they would all just disappear.
Brian Mac Mahon
It was like, and this is kind of an age comment, but it was like the old movie children of the corn, if, if you ever saw that movie, yes, people are going to be like, I actually said the other day, I said, you know, we're going to do an event at Don Johnson's house, and somebody said to me, who? I'm like, okay, fine, okay. I'm of a certain age. So children of a corn is a similar reference because it was an epic movie years ago where they went into a town and there was nobody in the town over the age of 18, because at the age of 18, you walk into a field and you never come back. And I kind of see that analogy with startups. They are, we're going to build, it's going to be great. We're going to make loads of money. We're going to have a unicorn. And then they've gone, and where's the corn? I don't know.
Brian Mac Mahon
Is it like an uber job or going back to Ohio or Detroit or wherever they came from, but, like, they're gone and they're no longer there. And I just thought this was very sad. And then the more I looked at the companies who are making it, and definitely not all of the companies, and I'm, like, super generalizing when I say this, but a lot of people were extremely connected and had either. They were extremely connected. What can I say? Like, if you just look at the Y combinator mantra of you just have to go to a nice school, and then we're going to make sure you can build a unicorn. Like, it's just, it's, it's not that they're wrong. What they're doing is fine, but it's so wrong that, that, like, the vast majority of founders can break through just because of that. And I'm all for a little bit of unfairness.
Brian Mac Mahon
I think a little bit of unfairness is what my boy should get. A bit of unfairness because I worked harder than the guy next door or his mom worked harder than anybody else. But I just think when the unfairness goes to extremes, you got a bit of a problem and it's a societal problem, and it's a national problem. And I just had this, I just really had this, this vision of America facing one of the greatest calamities that we've ever faced before, because America is the beginning of startup, the center of startup in the world. There's never been another nation which was founded on everybody being a startup, like none. And now we're just withering away. And if you look at, like, Bloomberg results for where we are in the world, based on their measurement, it's just embarrassing. And I truly believe that the amount of venture money in the world in America is absolutely, absolutely directory contributory to our downfall.
Brian Mac Mahon
So anyway, that was my view. And then I thought to myself, okay, so if the problem is bias, and the problem, that bias is so heavily and directly impactful to who gets to have a unicorn for their birthday and who does not, then how do you overcome bias? Well, the only way to overcome bias is aligned greed. And aligned greed is actually a beautiful thing. I love aligned greed because everybody gets to win. Greed is great. It's only bad if you're greedy to the detriment of other people or other things. But if you have aligned greed within a period of time, that can make you and everybody around you successful, then God bless you. And so I thought to myself, I want to be impactful here.
Brian Mac Mahon
And at the beginning, I just brought people together, just really smart people who got to know other smart people. And then I built out a venture studio because, you know, life conspired in a good way. And as you start to meet and get engaged with better people, those people start to open up opportunities you wouldn't have normally had. And then I met my partner and we started to invest. And that was about four or maybe five years ago. And since that time, we've invested in almost 300 startups in Africa, all over the world. So it's been a really, a really beautiful journey. And I get to, I love this early stage of the accelerator stage that I'm in, because it's, when you have that beautiful creativity, it's like a kid before it hits a teenager.
Brian Mac Mahon
It's really nice. And anyway, and so here I am today at expertdojo on top of the mall in Santa Monica with a bunch of startups and everybody looking to grow to really good things. And because of, like, our view on, like, what overcomes bias, which is aligned greed, we gathered and pulled together some of the best growth hackers in the world. And now we are really a growth hacking organization masquerading as a venture capital firm because we make our money from venture capital.
Marcia Dawood
Interesting. Okay, so let's dissect that a little. That whole thing you just said a little bit about with the. Everybody was failing. So are you saying you think that everybody was failing because of the biases that they weren't getting the funding that they needed?
Brian Mac Mahon
Yeah, I mean, there's loads of examples. So let's just take. Let's take a. Let's look at Wework as a great example. Right? Just the story of wework. Let's look at it in two levels. I didn't like Adam. I knew Adam personally back in the time.
Brian Mac Mahon
As a person, I didn't like him, but as a business person, I thought he was one of the best entrepreneurs America has ever had. Truly, I think the guy is an absolute entrepreneurial genius who got destroyed by Softbank, and he got destroyed because he was given too much money. And what he was told was, hey, here's the thing. You don't need to work on basic business fundamentals. Here's what you should do. You should charge free rent for, like, three to five years to destroy every piece of incredible competition who would otherwise be bringing out amazing, incredible businesses to the world. And you can do it for as long as you want. You know, actually, while you're doing that, why don't you sign leases which are twice the price that you would normally pay and that you can never, ever make a profit on? Why don't you do that? Like, it's just.
Brian Mac Mahon
It's just is awful. And then look at other companies that are still alive, like compass real estate. Like, they're a real estate company. It's not a tech company or peloton. Like, come on. And so, for me, there's just too many of these. There's too many. Even Lyft, which is seen as a success.
Brian Mac Mahon
Right? A success that had $36 billion raised to be worth $36 billion. Like, congratulations. It's a great job. And who loses? The founder loses because the founder has got less than 1% in their own company. And so do they really want to go through all of the b's that they went through for ten phase? So I don't want to rant about it. I think there's some wonderful things that happen in entrepreneurship. There's some incredible entrepreneurs who break through. I have stories all the time, like Nacho over at B Devventures, who was previously Blair's Dev, who built a multi billion dollar company with zero money, raised, our clickfunnels, who got to $100 million in valuations with zero money raised.
Brian Mac Mahon
And I'm not saying, like, don't raise money, do raise money. What I'm saying is when the principal objective on day one is to raise money. Two things happen, right? The first thing that happens is we lose sight of the customer. It's not about the customer anymore. It's just about a glorified ponzi scheme of who can raise more money and for how long? Until the market collapses and the customer loses massively, which means we lose as a nation massively. The second thing that happens is other people building great companies get unfairly put out of business because they're suddenly competing with someone now who's got $20 million in their bank account. That's not fair. And so it's not fair, and so those other people now won't be able to raise money.
Brian Mac Mahon
They're competing against somebody better. So better products lose. And we can see this playing out, by the way, with OpenAI and what Elon is doing and everything. It's an embarrassment when you see this happening. It's just big boys with their toys who want to show who's bigger. I'm stronger and better, and I feel like I'm kind of an old man. I really want us to get back to a stage where we move away from minimum viable product. We move to lovable product.
Brian Mac Mahon
We move away from raising money, being the sign of who a great entrepreneur is, and moving towards who are the ones whose customers absolutely adore them.
Marcia Dawood
I like that. Move away from the minimum viable product and toward the lovable product. That's great. So tell me more about the aligned greed.
Brian Mac Mahon
So, one of the greatest travesties for all of us is nobody teaches us entrepreneurship. Right? And I just find that really sad. And me neither. Like, I didn't know anything. I came out of school, I knew how to do math, and I knew how to do English, and I knew how to do, like, history and stuff, but nobody taught me. Like, how do I build a proper business plan to be able to start, build, and grow an incredible company? It doesn't have to be a multi billion dollar company. It could be a, you know, it could be a $10 million company, but it should be something that can relieve me from financial slavery. It should be something that can enable me and my family to be able to do the things I want to do.
Brian Mac Mahon
And if I want to be a rock star and go all the way, I should be able to do that. And so I think a lot of. I use one of the challenges, which I think is a symptom rather than a problem, which is the fact that, like, other people get so much money. But the real problem is that the people who could execute really well the people who could build really good products have never, ever been taught what starting building and growing a business is like. And so, look, it's taken us ages to get to this place. This wasn't a. I didn't wake up in the morning and say, I've got the formula, but we wake up every single morning wanting to find out the formula. And now we kind of look and say, okay, there's only four reasons why a company will fail.
Brian Mac Mahon
Only four. And one of them is not money. Right? The four reasons are, one, you're not outreaching enough are to the right people. Number two, you're not emotionally resonating with your customer. Like, search engine optimization is a waste of time. It's all emotional engine optimization. You have to build trust. You have to build awareness, you have to build personal brand, you've got to build your own brand.
Brian Mac Mahon
You got to make sure that there's belief in what you're doing, and you have to emotionally resonate. And I can give you some, like, really cool examples of companies that we have that do that. But, like, in. In short, you have to build a cult. So conversion is, like, super important systems. Really important. Like, nobody teaches us, hey, here's the 25 most used and powerful systems that in startup. And then the final piece is, I keep always saying, lovable product.
Brian Mac Mahon
I think it's a beautiful term. And it speaks to, like, this obsession with your customer. I even see the companies we invest in as our customers, and I'm constantly saying to them, I don't say to them, are you happy? Do you think we're good? Like, they're kind of B's questions. I say to them, tell me how many people you were outreaching to the day before you came into expertdojo and how many people you're outreaching to today? Because whatever you say to me about, like, how you feel, it is not going to speak to the transformative nature of what I want our impact to be. So it's just those four areas. Like, if you build a beautiful product, if you outreach to enough people, if you say it in a way that your customer understands the value benefit to them, and you have really good systems to be able to capture and track what you're doing, you're going to build a great company. Like, just period. Right? You've all the fellow six there.
Brian Mac Mahon
So now we know that we're like, okay, cool. Inside that, how many layers do we have? And there's probably 20 to 30 individual different sprints that we see as really important. Like, if you get an outreach? Is it LinkedIn outreach? Which is amazing, too. Is it using Apollo to do email outreach? Is it like social outreach? Is it like direct messaging? Is it like, you have so many things you can go after? So, yeah, we. I think that that education, I believe somebody will come out and start to provide it to kids in school. And the moment that happens, we're going to see a transformation in the world.
Marcia Dawood
That's incredible. So tell us more then about these four things, because it's super interesting. So with outreach and systems. So I'm imagining that they sometimes go together because you have to have the right systems in order to do the outreach that.
Brian Mac Mahon
Yeah, 100%. I remember, look, we have a beautiful space on top of. On expert Dojo, on top of the mall in Santa Monica. We've about like 10,000. We randomly got this old restaurant ten years ago, which was a pop up for a month, and for some reason, ten years later, we're still here. And the outcome is that we do so many events. Like during tech week, I think we had. I think we had like 1000 or 1500 people go through expert dojo over a three day period.
Brian Mac Mahon
So we have this huge space with these huge events. And there was one day when I had this group of people, about 200, 300 people, and we had all these investors who were up at the front, which honestly, is part of the problem in itself. And I asked everyone who here believes they should get investment? And everybody put up their hand, and then I said, who here is outreaching more than ten times to new people every single day? It was like 70% of the hands. And I said, well, what about more than 25 people? And there was like 20 or 25 people had their hands up. And then I said, well, what about over 50 people? And then once I got to 100, then it was down to like about seven or eight hands. And then once I was like more than 100, it was two. And then I was like 500. There's two.
Brian Mac Mahon
And then there's like 1000. There's two. And there's like 2000 a day. There's two. And they're both our companies, right? And so everybody else, all I could hear people say was, well, that's not true. It's B's. I'm like, well, first of all, how do you think you're going to build a unicorn if you're outreaching ten times a day? Like, how do you think you're going to do that? Like, average conversion ratios are like two to 3%, which means that you would need to be outreaching for ten days. To be able to get two to three customers, average, like, sales cycles are a month to six weeks, unless it's enterprise.
Brian Mac Mahon
And that means that you got to sell it and, like, average, like, stuff that you're going to sell on a monthly basis, maybe three, $400 a month. So for you to get to your serious a, just with the outreach that you're doing right now, is going to take you somewhere between eight and twelve years, which means nobody's going to invest in you. So let me tell you the truth. You don't deserve investment. None of you deserve investment. What are you doing? Like, what are you, you making your pitch decks beautiful. You're pitching to investors to make up for the fact that you don't have any ability whatsoever to actually go out there and find real customers. So, yeah, I'm just sick and tired.
Brian Mac Mahon
Like, I think it's. So I think venture makes great entrepreneurs soft. I think the availability of money for really great founders is the saddest thing ever. Because what happens is it becomes this just extremely toxic relationship, and it doesn't allow you to build that truly special relationship with the customer. So the outreach is really important. Everything is a number. And look, my heroes for real marketers, with the Internet guys, the Tony Robbins guys, not because of what they do, because I think it's probably pretty terrible, but the way they market is a thing of beauty. I won't watch it in Netflix series.
Brian Mac Mahon
Sometimes I'll watch Tony Robbins latest landing page, and I'll watch like, the sequences that they have built in within their emails, whereby they have multiple momentous sequences which are tied into the psychological profile. And then I'll watch on the page and the multiple things happening. Like, John from, you know, Ohio has just signed up a minute ago. I'm like, oh, what does John know that I don't know? I should sign up straight away. Oh, it's only $1,400 reduced from like 1,755,000. So they try, right? And I just feel like we stopped trying at some stage in the last, you know, whatever, because it got replaced by like tons of. So I love great founders building things that really matter in a way which is extremely authentic. And then afterwards, when it's working, when you've got past your initial growth action and you've moved from growth fit to growth product loop fit, and then you're at that stage, then take tons of venture money.
Brian Mac Mahon
Like, God bless you, at that stage, you do it. But you should not be practicing on some poor bugger's money who's like, worked their ass off to deserve it. Just so you can say, well, it's just trying an error. I'm just seeing where I'm going. It's not like, no, dude, get your mom's money. Do that. Okay. And then come back anyway.
Marcia Dawood
So what are some of the systems that you're seeing people use in order to get 2000 outreaches a day that would actually convert?
Brian Mac Mahon
So if it's different thing, different strokes for folks. Like I mentioned clinic funnels earlier, I love clickfunnels because you can just create multiple landing pages and really good sequences for emails internally. And look, we know that nobody buys the average time for somebody to receive a message to buy these days is 16. Let's say that's just scare mongering. Yeah, let's say it's less. Let's say even if it's nine or ten, I don't buy. I had LinkedIn free for ages, but then after so long, I'm like, okay, even I need to go there, but let's say it's even ten. But that's a lot.
Brian Mac Mahon
And the average 90% of all salespeople don't outreach more than twice. And so you have this, like, crazy thing happening that people don't understand. And then those folks who do get it, like the email sequences, are so emotionally unresonant with their customers, and they spend so little time actually engaging with what's transformative for them. And so I love, I think, you know, I'm in the privilege of being in LA is. I'm like home to the greatest storytelling city on the planet, like, period. This is the best. People come here to create these incredible constructions of human emotion, which is just a beautiful thing. And so we should use that.
Brian Mac Mahon
We should create that. And so, and I think a lot of that is being lost. You either have people who do no ongoing outbound communication, they might do one email or one whatever, or one tweet or one direct message. Are you have people who are so emotionally autistic in their communication that people are like, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. You know, like, in the morning, I have 180 emails in there, but I don't mind because I just go into my little tick and I'm going, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, delete. And then suddenly I'm like, oh, this is good. I'm down to, like, 76. And so you just don't want to be there, right? You want to be in the place where you get.
Brian Mac Mahon
You go through, and this is a study. You can't expect to just be good at marketing, and marketing isn't one thing. So, like clickfunnels, I said, Apollo is really good. Apollo allows me to scrape 250 emails every single day, and I can write to those people every day. That means every week I'm out reaching to thousands. We use multiple Apollo accounts cleverly is a LinkedIn outreach tool that allows me to reach out again to hundreds of people with built in email sequences. That allows for me to be able to. And at the beginning I'm just trying to connect.
Brian Mac Mahon
And then once we connect, there's another automated message that's coming through that said, oh, we've connected. I didn't tell you about such and such. And then, look, even basic stuff like LinkedIn navigator works really well. And we use Hunter IO as a great tool to be able to source email addresses and telephone numbers. And for those brave souls out there who actually realize that you have to call people, you have to actually pick up. Like that thing that people used to.
Marcia Dawood
Use years ago used to be hanging on the wall.
Brian Mac Mahon
Yeah, like talking. Like, there's great tools. Like Kixie is a super tool that allows you to do power dialing, which is, which predictably will check the people who are most likely to pick up their phones. Everybody should have an hour of power dialing in the morning. Like, why wouldn't you do that? One of my founders doesn't start his day until he's had a thousand paradise gone out to people, left messages, a lot of stuff. That's his best growth loop. And so that's what we try and encourage people to do. And then the money from venture becomes fuel on top of the fire to help people grow.
Marcia Dawood
Right. So tell us a little bit more about. You said earlier that you have some really cool stories of people who did the branding and the emotional piece.
Brian Mac Mahon
Yeah. Of. So there are a, when you're building a startup so nobody ever runs out of money is never a reason why startup fails. Like, it's never a reason. Right? It's always because your race against time lost. Like, you lost. And that race against time is something very simple. It's to make sure that you have that relationship with the customer where they want what you have more than you want to give it to them.
Brian Mac Mahon
And there are multiple tactics to get there. Like, I'll mention, like, even outside expert dojo, people who I highly respect, like the guys in science who did liquid death, like super interesting, like fastest growing CPG brand on the history of the world. And it's just water. I can't even give my opinion of the water because just in case. But, like, it's just water, let me say it nicely. It's not Fiji water. Okay? And Fiji water grows slower. Right? Fiji water is actually really good.
Brian Mac Mahon
I think they do make that stuff in glaciers and have it, like, coming down a beautiful mountain as, like, people are washing their hair on the side of the mountain. Like, I'm pretty sure they do it, but they don't grow as fast as liquid death, which is a heavy metal alternative type thing. Why? Because they emotionally resonated with their consumer. They really understood their ideal customer profile and they spoke to those people. And even though some people think now that ideal customer profile is housewives and the kids, because love plastic and also because moms want their boys and girls to drink water, right? But if you give them a standard thing of water, they were like, oh, I don't even drink that. But you give them this thing which is liquid death, and it's got snakes going through it and everything. They're like, oh, this stuff is great. And so you have, like, all kinds of stuff.
Brian Mac Mahon
But at the beginning, the message was for middle aged men who were bored with their lives. They sent all this stuff to board meetings. People who are sitting in the board meetings, not so much women, because women are smarter than this, right? But it was just really is a men thing. We're super easy to be manipulated. And it's like, do you remember the time when you used to watch AC DC and life was fun and you didn't do this stupid stuff? And I'm like, yeah, I want liquid death. And so suddenly you're only going to have liquid death because it's a powerful resonance. I think. I think actually bird did a similar thing.
Brian Mac Mahon
Possibly one of the worst products ever made. Like, literally, there was never a chance of it ever not losing money. There was no model that could ever be invented that was going to make that. Not a terrible product. But they raised a billion dollars. Why did they raise a billion dollars? Because they got a bunch of VC's who were like, on these things with the wind going through what was left of their hair, and then they're like, oh, my God, this is the best product in the whole world. I need to invest because they're emotional. Okay, so I'll give you one example of one of our companies, which I really liked.
Brian Mac Mahon
So it's a company called Credit Kredete, and they are diaspora. It's an app. Think of it as Zelle from diaspora to Africans, so to african people. And we invested in them, like, I don't know, like six months or so ago. And he's been, he's on a tear. He's gone from like zero to $120,000 a month. I think they'll hit like seven, $800,000 a month by the end of this year. And what we were trying to do is the brand messaging was a really big problem.
Brian Mac Mahon
And as we looked at it, we're like, so we transfer money faster. And the thing with the brand, Pyramid brand is a beautiful thing. Actually, the name brand kind of does a disservice, but the essence of what it represents is a really beautiful thing because it has to evoke emotion and it has to be transformative. If it is not transformative and if it doesn't evoke commotion, you didn't build a brand, right? And so brand starts with mission, purpose and vision, and then it crosses over to values. And then on top of that, on the next level, this is mine, by the way. There might be branding people who say, this is incorrect, Brian. Yeah, but it's mine, so it can't be incorrect. Right, because my truth.
Brian Mac Mahon
And then, so on the next level, then you have product attributes. And the product attributes is normally the elephant's graveyard for early stage startup, right? Everything is just, you know, we help. We have a AI and ML driven algorithm that allows Bleh, right? And so everybody's objective is to try and go from that product attribute to emotional resonance, which is a really big step. If you can make it to emotional resonance, you're doing great. And then you go to transformative impact, which is the ultimate place. Once you can show transformative impact, then you can really start playing with user generated content that you can push in there. And the user generated content is super important because nobody trusts everybody. It is an absolute guarantee that every single person who owns every single company is lying, including me.
Brian Mac Mahon
I don't even know, like, I have to be lying because just that, like, have you ever heard a VC saying, you know, I've been thinking about what I do. I really suck as a VC. You know, I just. No, it's like, it's been really hard, but it's because of me. It's not the market, actually. There is no vintage because it's not wine. It's like, it's me. I'm just a really bad investor or a startup saying this whole failure thing within the company, actually, it was totally on me.
Brian Mac Mahon
I failed as the leader of the organization. No, nobody. So we all lie. And the thing about consumers are consumers have already assumed everybody's going to lie, which means there's no trust. So this user generated content thing is super important because it's the only thing that generates trust in a company. Anyway, I don't want to digress, but this company credit, he's like, Brian, we can transfer money to Africa in two or 3 seconds, and we can do it for a cost of $1. How cool is that, right? Just $1. Amazing.
Brian Mac Mahon
And the FX, we don't even screw over the african people on FX. And I mean. Oh, what do you mean, screw over the african people? And he's like, well, if you go to, like, a large transfer place, which I shouldn't say here, and they will hit you real hard with the FX, and the cost of sending $100 might be as much as, like, $10 to send that stuff over. So you might be hit for like, $20 in total. And you have to walk there. You go in, you got to give them the money. They're going to transfer it over. Like, it sucks.
Brian Mac Mahon
I'm like, so let me just think about this for a second. So what you're saying is that, like, this organization have been stealing from the african people for literally decades. Like, stealing. Stealing their money, like, is taking 20% or 25% of the money that gets sent is daylight robbery, period. And they're not the first people to steal from the african people. Come on, let's face it. Like, they're a long line of people who've been stealing from the african people for thousands of years. So that doesn't make it okay.
Brian Mac Mahon
It's not okay. And so then we look at. Because now what I'm doing is I'm moving away from product attributes, and I'm going down to purpose, which is the place you have to go to to be able to build really good transformative impact. So then he's like, okay, so the problem is these guys have been stealing money from the african people. It's really bad. So really what you're doing is you're recovering over a billion dollars of stolen money from the african people through the world's first ever fair payment transfer system. Damn, that's pretty cool. Like, I want to work for that company.
Brian Mac Mahon
I don't want to work for the payment company over there. I'm prepared to take half the salary to work for this company, because this is a mission. This is a manifesto. This is powerful. And then when you get to that, what happens is, first of all, you don't need. Like, seriously, you don't need to. It changes everything, because you create your organization and a place which is unparalleled with people around you. People want to give you money because they feel that, like, you're building a cult.
Brian Mac Mahon
And when you build a cult like, following because everybody wants to do it, then that becomes infectious towards the organization. So suddenly now your values change from, like, b's values of customer first. Like, who cares? Are my staff are important to, like, who cares? You start moving to, we will only work with organizations who put african people first. That's powerful. And then we start moving and we're like, hey, but we're building this on blockchain, which means that actually we can create a token in here, which means that if we create a token, actually we can now start creating an entire financial services thing. And so anyway, we ended up getting to a place where we literally worked out within four years and nine months and a couple of days, we could get the billion dollars back for the african people, you know? And so that is, that is very powerful when you have that, because suddenly, like, your off sites, your everything, you're no longer the leader who has to distill information through. Everybody has their place now. And if they don't do what they're supposed to do, they haven't failed you.
Brian Mac Mahon
They failed, like a billion people.
Marcia Dawood
Incredible. Wow. And that's all done on the blockchain?
Brian Mac Mahon
Yeah, the blockchain. I actually find everybody is talking about AI. I find what's happening in the blockchain right now way more exciting. I think what's happening within AI is fine. It's going to make us more productive. Thank you very much. It's going to mean that I can get more done. Thank you very much.
Brian Mac Mahon
It's going to mean other people can get more done. Thank you very much. And it's going to mean I'm going working a heck of a lot more to do the more stuff that I'm doing, which is competing with the more stuff that they're doing outside. But actually, what's happening in blockchain is super interesting because they are this decentralized world, first of all, like, whether it's the blockchain people, the crypto people, like, leaving aside meme coins and like, the distractions and focusing just on the intention of what they were creating, it is truly incredible that that group of people are still alive because every government tried to massacre them. Every financial institution tried to massacre them. Absolutely nobody wants a decentralized system which takes the power away from the few. So, like, this mission is just, I don't know, it's something to be applauded that they moved from that place of everybody feeling that they were useless, waste of time, not worth the conversation to trying to sue them out of existence, regulate them out of existence, to suddenly Blackrock saying, oh, I think, well have an ETF please. And theyre like, okay, no problem, suddenly its institutionalized.
Brian Mac Mahon
So I think that is a beautiful thing. I think within decentralization itself, which is really the ability to fractionalize things and the ability to be extremely transparent with everything that has happened without anybody having any ability to lie, at least at this stage, until maybe, hopefully, hopefully it'll stay like this. But like let's be optimistic is really an incredible thing. And it means that like there's an entire new Internet being built and that Internet is being built on new structure that is going to change the world and a lot of people are missing it and they're focusing on the things that are adding the productivity and the bits and pieces and AI is important, but blockchain for me is more important because that is the foundational pillars of the next like 50 years in my mind.
Marcia Dawood
Wow. Well that's incredible. So last question, how do people find expert Dojo and who, what types of companies are you looking for to come through expertdojo.
Brian Mac Mahon
So I love founders who are building that love affair with their customer and that they, it has to be, we're VC's, right? So it's always better if we don't lose money. So it needs to be a company that can grow to $100 million in valuation or more like we would like a billion dollars. But the truth is, if a company gets to $100 million, that's done just fine for us, we'll do great. And that means that you have to be able to take your revenue up to two or $3 million a month in revenue. But if you can do a million, 2 million, $3 million a month in revenue, you have a market that can take you there. You have a team that you believe can execute and actually get you to that place. You have a will to work with people who are a pain in the ass, like us on the growth side of it, and you want to really build out a beautiful product that your customers are going to love. We love those companies.
Brian Mac Mahon
To me it's super simple to be able to see where they're based. We don't mind where in the world they are. We have as many companies in Africa and India and we're starting to do a ton in Latin America now, which we find interesting. We don't really watch the trends of what's a hot market or not a hot market, because we don't care what the other VC's are doing, we just care what their customers are doing. And especially in a market like this. And then the final thing is, look, because the nature of venture capital means saying no to 99% of people that come through, which kind of goes against our ethos of what we invest in and who we invest in. We built out this growth community on our website where we have tons of resources now. So you can come in.
Brian Mac Mahon
Even if you're not ready for an investment yet, you can come in there. We have a dojo, live tv. We have perks and discounts we give to people from other people's services, same as our accelerator companies. We have a ton of training videos that we give to people that help them build trust and other things as well. And all of those things are free. So yeah, just brianxpertdojo.com or just go onto our website and get engaged.
Marcia Dawood
Excellent. I love that. And we will make sure to put all of these things in the show. Notes Brian, thank you so much for being on. I've learned a ton and I know our listeners are going to love hearing all of your thoughts on this.
Brian Mac Mahon
My pleasure. Thank you so much.