Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign welcome to the Victory Show.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Hey victors. Welcome to this episode of the Victory Show. If this is your first time joining us, I'm Travis Cody, bestselling author of 16 books and the creator of bestseller By Design. I've had the privilege of helping hundreds of business consultants, founders and entrepreneurs write and publish their own best selling book. And along that journey discovered a really fascinating pattern. A lot of businesses hit a revenue plateau, usually around a million dollars a year, and they struggle to break through it. So on this show, we sit down with some of the world's most successful founders, CEOs, leaders and business owners to uncover the strategies they use to overcome those plateaus and scale their businesses to new heights so that you can do the same. So get ready for some deep insights and actionable takeaways so that you can implement in your business and life, starting now. My guest today is a bold thinker and builder who's dedicated his life to advancing freedom, purpose driven business and transformational leadership. Ale Sander McCobin is the founder and CEO of Liberty Ventures and previously served as the CEO of Conscious Capitalism, helping shape a global movement around ethical, high impact entrepreneurship. He first stepped into the spotlight as the founder and president of Students for Liberty, a worldwide network empowering young people to champion individual liberty and free markets. Originally, he was on the path to becoming a philosophy professor, and he earned his BA and MA from the University of Pennsylvania and another MA from Georgetown. But instead of academia, he chose to build institutions that turn ideas into action. He currently splits his time between the world and his roots, living out of two suitcases when he's not on his family farm in Sullivan County, Pennsylvania. Alexander, thanks so much for being here.
[00:01:45] Speaker A: Thank you, Travis. That's one of the best introductions I've, I've ever had.
[00:01:48] Speaker B: All right, well, that's good. And now I know we're here for business stuff, but I got to ask, why is it two suitcases and not just one?
[00:01:54] Speaker A: It's important to always have some extra room to get gifts for family members and random parts of the world. I, I don't fill them up. I need to have space to bring stuff back.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: See, that is the, the wisdom of a world traveler right there. One with the clothes and one for the gifts.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: Bingo.
[00:02:10] Speaker B: That's funny. All right, so you started off wanting to go into philosophy. So is there, what's the history? What was it about philosophy that you thought that that's what you wanted to do?
[00:02:20] Speaker A: Well, I was raised in a family that really believed in debate and the importance of education and Ideas. And I joined the debate team in high school and loved it. It was a philosophical debate structure. Lincoln Douglas. And so when I decided I wasn't going to be an attorney, I thought, okay, philosophy. I'm just going to live in that day in and day out for the rest of my life. And I still absolutely love reading philosophical works. I stay in touch with some of my old professors and I even sometimes think about going back to finish the degree. But while I was in grad school, as much as I love philosophy as we'll get into, I was still volunteering and running other, other organizations that I had started when I was in undergrad just for the fun of it, and realized if I wanted to see these really scale and I needed to dedicate myself fully to them, and honestly, I was better at that than I was at academic philosophy.
[00:03:17] Speaker B: That seems to be the case sometimes. All right, so when you were in school, you, you created Students for Liberty. Let's talk about that. What was that? And where did the a spark for that idea?
[00:03:26] Speaker A: So it goes back to when I joined the debate team in high school, actually 14. And for my birthday, I had asked for a number of books from my dad, like John Locke's second treatise, John Rawls, Theory of Justice.
[00:03:38] Speaker B: Light reading for a teenager.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: Exactly. And my dad said, well, if you're going to read these books, you also need to read this. It gave me a copy of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, which took me a month to read over the summer. But by the time I finished, I was hooked. I spent the rest of high school studying political philosophy as. As I possibly could, believing in the principles of liberty and free markets. And when I went off to college, I thought, I'm going to be surrounded by so many incredibly smart people. I'm going to finally meet others who think the same way as me. This is going to be amazing.
[00:04:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:10] Speaker A: And for the first two years, I didn't meet a single other person who shared my views. I began to feel so isolated and alone. I thought to myself, alexander, maybe you should just give up and become a socialist to make your life easier just to fit in. I seriously thought that. But instead, thankfully decided to start a group on campus to, to see if there were others out there. And within two years, we had over 200 members in the organization.
Students, even professors, came out of the woodworks. And I realized we needed an organization to bring us all together. And so after that, I was interning in Washington D.C. before my senior year, met students running their own pro liberty clubs at other campuses. And what was supposed to be a one time 12 person roundtable discussion that I organized to learn from each other turned into 100 person conference, turned into a volunteer entity, turned into a multimillion dollar nonprofit by the time that I left with thousands of volunteer student leaders in over 100 countries. Unlike anything I ever expected when we started. But it was just an incredible ride and journey and opportunity to be a part of.
[00:05:17] Speaker B: So what I love about this part of your story though too is, I mean launching something like that in a, in an environment where there's so many people that are polar opposite of your viewpoints. But you also got a four year track record in debate. I mean it was like life was just like setting you up perfectly to take on that challenge. When you started expanding your, your group. Being able to just have debates about ideas and the merits of the logic of how, how we think. Right. If there's a pastime in America, sitting down and having debates with, with people that we, you know, are polar opposite with is, is I think kind of a hallmark of, and I should say peaceful debates for the most part.
[00:05:56] Speaker A: So 100%. And it's not just about debates about philosophy or political philosophy. I've found this to be incredibly useful for thinking about how to build organizations and businesses because the only way that we arrive at the best ideas and figure out the best strategies to grow is by having robust debates. It's a really bad sign if a company is not having people push hard against each other and having different views about what should be done. Now when a decision is made, you need to move forward in lockstep, but there need to be serious debates and considerations of what to do in order to figure out the path forward. And I brought that into every, every organization and business that I've run and have seen a pattern. If there are robust debates on the team about what to do in making a decision that's that helps lead to growth and success versus organizations. I've been a part of and seen where people don't have those strong disagreements with each other, where it actually seems like they may not like each other when they really do. They love each other actually, but they're willing to just get down into it to figure out how to push the company forward.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: Well, if you've read anything with Steve Jobs, I mean that was kind of his philosophy, right? Just like just find all the stuff that doesn't work now. Now granted, he may have been a little more angry in his younger years, but still was part of the process for him. So what Was the ride like, for you? Be like, you just start this organization because you're like, I want to find people that, you know, build my own tribe. I can't find my Trib me, build my own tribe. And then, you know, this was a couple of year process that you went from a 12 person to a hundred person to a thousand volunteers. That was about a two year period.
[00:07:35] Speaker A: It was more than two years to build it. I was, I was president, CEO there for about 10 years in total, but we were pretty much doubling every year. Starting out, starting out with a small group and then growing and growing and growing until we were four and a half million dollars when I left.
[00:07:51] Speaker B: So you basically created your own job before you even got out of college.
[00:07:54] Speaker A: But I, and I never planned on it being a job. We were hiring full time staff when I was, when I was president of the organization and I was working for free. Like, people wanted me to take a salary and I said, no, I am committed to this and I'd rather pay someone else to do this, to work on this than pay myself.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: Wow. All right, so let's go back. That's your first experience then, as running CEO. What, what are, what are three of the biggest lessons you learned from building that organization?
[00:08:18] Speaker A: Number one, you have to ask. And so many people don't do that. Not only in sales, where you've got to make the ask, or fundraising as it was at Students for Liberty, but you've got to make the ask of people to do things. And you'd be surprised how often people are willing to help. Partners are willing to give you deals. They're willing to come up with a better structure for how to help you grow because everyone can win, but you have to ask. Second thing is to try things out and to start small and then go big. We made a couple of mistakes early on trying to go really big with things when we didn't know what we were doing. And instead if we would actually run experiments and then build up from there, we could move a lot faster and then go really big. But the third, the third big lesson is that it's all about the people. You hear this a lot from any successful leader. They focus on getting the, on getting the right people, providing them with the right training and the right structure. And we learned that too. One of the big pivots at Students for Liberty was in the early years we focused on supporting student groups and that became overly bureaucratic. It didn't actually help us out. And then we said, no, we're going to focus on Individual student leaders and identifying, training and empowering them. And that's when things really took off because it all came down to having the right people building the movement with us and that we were able to work with.
[00:09:36] Speaker B: What a great insight. Why do you think it's so hard for people to ask?
[00:09:39] Speaker A: I think people are scared for a number of reasons. We build fear up in our own minds. And this may be on the top of my mind because we just did a webinar with one of our members, John Hagel, who wrote a book that Journey Beyond Fear. But I think it's a fear of being told no or seeming weak for needing, for needing help or feeling like you don't have everything together when it's actually the case that most people want to help others out. Mentioned Steve Jobs and he would say that when he was a kid, he wrote, I think, to Michael Dell or someone and asked for help in getting started and got it. And there's a great story from Benjamin Franklin that when he had an enemy in the Continental Congress that he was trying to bring over to his side, he went to this person and asked if he could borrow a book from that person's personal library that he wanted to read. This was surprising. But Franklin took it, gave it back later on, and by asking for that favor, he actually made a friend out of an enemy. Because that you do a favor for someone, surely you must like them and can do other things for them. And so it's something that I think gets in most people's heads too much when just asking is. Is an easy, cost free thing to do that builds relationships and creates opportunities.
[00:10:57] Speaker B: Well, I think my experience of working with people in sales, especially of, well, salespeople under a certain age, there's a weird sort of belief that if you say if I ask and you say no, you're not saying no to the product or the opportunity thing. You're saying no to me. Right. This is a weird sort of existential crisis thing of like, oh no, they rejected me when has nothing to do with that at all. Right. But I think that's a good insight.
[00:11:20] Speaker A: And to build on that, it's also a no means not right now unless they're swearing at you or you've really offended them. What they're saying is, I haven't been persuaded yet or something else is going on in life and this isn't the right opportunity. There are so many times that I can think of where I made an ask and they told me no, but I kept building the relationship. I would give them updates on what we're doing. I would ask what. How they're doing. I would follow up with them and one, two, sometimes five years later, they would say, okay, yes, now this makes sense for me. This works. So that, I think is a really helpful mentality to overcome the fear, to be willing to make the ask that even if you get a no, it's really a not right now.
[00:12:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I love it. I know Jeffrey Katzenberg. Somebody asked him about his advice in Hollywood one time, and he said, if you go to the front door and they won't let you in, go to the window. And if you try to crawl through the window and they won't let you go, climb over the fence. And if you go over the fence and it'll go down the chimney. He's like, the point is just get in the room. Right?
And that was the whole point. Like, just don't take no for an answer. They say, no, you just what are. Okay, that, that, that angle didn't work. What's a different angle that I could go with there?
[00:12:29] Speaker A: Nope. It directly led to conscious Capitalism. Because the way that happened is John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, had written his book Conscious Capitalism, and I invited him to come and speak at a Students for Liberty conference, then got him to become a donor to the organization. And then he became a mentor and a friend. And after writing the book or while writing the book, he had started a nonprofit to spread the philosophy. And because we had gotten close over the years, when they decided they needed a CEO, a new CEO to take over, John wanted me to be that CEO, to come on in. And so it was very much a direct link or next step from Students for Liberty to Conscious Capitalism.
[00:13:10] Speaker B: So for. For people who are listening to this, this episode, or reading this chapter in the book and they're not familiar with conscious Capitalism, can you give us a summary of what it is, like what that philosophy is?
[00:13:19] Speaker A: And it's based on four tenets of how to run a business.
Second, stakeholder orientation. Not prioritizing just shareholders over every other stakeholder for the business and saying that customers, employees, suppliers are just means to achieve shareholder ends make. Third, is conscious leadership really thinking about how you lead as a company not just by making smart decisions on a case by case basis, but thinking about beyond analytic intelligence to emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence, and even systemic intelligence to see the implications of every decision made that you want others to embody? And that leads to the fourth tenet of conscious culture and really thinking about not just the strategy of a business but the culture in the business when.
[00:14:06] Speaker B: You left in terms of like, revenue and employee size.
[00:14:09] Speaker A: So when I joined, I was the third employee and it was about one and a half million dollars. Most of that coming from two conferences that ran each year and then a handful of donations. And it took some. It took experimentation to figure out a good model for how to really grow this and start to expand. And by the time that I left, it was nearly $4 million with a team, I think, of about 20 staffers and much more extensive line of activities. Well beyond those two events really, to creating a structure for members to support one another or at least to be a platform to share what they think about elevating humanity through business and elevate their thought leadership.
[00:14:54] Speaker B: What a remarkable opportunity to come on board. You know, essentially the pet project of a very successful entrepreneur.
[00:15:00] Speaker A: I have the utmost respect and appreciation for John. And we're still close, we're still friends even after I left. The best way I can describe it is that John is incredibly determined. He is very committed to what he believes in and very insightful. And what was amazing about Conscious Capitalism, beyond just John, is that worked with a lot of other incredible business leaders there as well.
When I left, we had a board of over 30 individuals. Individuals, almost all CEOs and CEOs of incredible companies. Other other board members included Ron Shake, the founder of Panera Bread, Kip Tindall, the founder of the Container Store, David Gardner, one of the founders of the Motley Fool. The list went on and on, and it was absolutely remarkable. But I will also say could be really challenging because when you're talking about a group of 30 CEOs who are all successful, all used to getting their way and used to being the smartest person in the room, the one who makes the right decisions, it's a situation not of hurting cats, but hurting tigers. And that was very challenging and taught me a whole lot about navigating challenging politics.
[00:16:09] Speaker B: Wow. Yeah. See, that's the thing you never think of. Right. But you're dealing with outsized egos in that scenario. Were there two or three things that you learned from John himself, just from being around him and watching how he, you know, did business?
[00:16:23] Speaker A: Yeah, The. The two big three, I'll say, three things that really stand out. Number one is to not give up. John does not give up. And you might not get that from reading Conscious Capitalism or. Or from the outside, but that is actually very core to who he is. He does not like to lose. He. But he also is just when he believes in something, he is going to the map for it, period. But while also doing that, the second big thing I learned from him is to get creative, to really work to find the win, win, win solution. It may take time and no matter, no matter what, he would keep trying to figure it out and try to figure out ways to resolve things between people who had conflicts. And that's really admirable. But the third thing then actually came from just late evening one time where someone was asking John about what he was going to do after Whole Foods, how he was going to feel about it. And John responded interestingly, that, you know, he was ready for it when the time, when the time comes. And they asked, well, don't you feel like you'd lose a bit of yourself? And he said, no, Whole Foods is, is not who I am. Whole Foods is one of the hats that I wear. It's one of the articles of clothing I have. Just like I have other pieces of clothing that I wear. The animal, my animal ethics advocacy, my libertarianism, my, the fact that I'm a husband, all of these are different parts of my identity. But no, none of them are me. And I think that's a really important lesson for founders especially. Yeah, we often do identify with our company. We identify with what we've started. And a failure with the business is a reflection on ourselves. It's a failure of us personally and we just get so tied up in it, it can be unhealthy. But he had such a healthy relationship with, with Whole Foods in every and all of his different aspects of life.
[00:18:16] Speaker B: That's a great insight. So for you as a CEO, what were the challenges of going from you and two employees to 20.
[00:18:23] Speaker A: Well, honestly, the biggest challenge was coming in as a 29 year old, as the CEO, into an organization with a board of 50, 60 year olds and needing to prove myself because it's a.
[00:18:36] Speaker B: Little bit of pressure, A little bit of pressure there.
[00:18:39] Speaker A: You know, being, being the young guy who is coming in and has a ready, fire, aim attitude from all, from all of their perspectives and wanting to try things out and experiment, it could be a little tough. And really trying new things out was the tough thing to get buy in and be able to move forward with that. But once we were able to experiment, we really started to pick up momentum. But then the, the other challenge was then really helping a, an organization that had been around for a long time with stakeholders who were used to things being a certain way changing as well and bringing new stakeholders in, new community members that hadn't Been there before. And getting community members to think of the organization as more than just an event once a year that they would come out to. And that takes time. It takes getting to know people. It takes delivering new value that they didn't know they should expect from the organization before. And that that's what we had to go through.
[00:19:36] Speaker B: It's so interesting how businesses and industries just after a certain point get to that this is what we are. And. And. And not just this is what we are. Like, people will fight to keep it that way. I know this is a little off topic, but I just saw it and so it's top of mind for me. I've been watching this docu series called Light and Magic, and it's all about what George Lucas did with Industrial Light and Magic. And. And it all came about because he did Star wars and he was so mad that only like 25% of what he saw in his head could he get on the screen because he was limited by tech. Most people don't realize, like, that is what started George Lucas doing the Industrial Light Magic. He's like, I need something to create the technology.
And so it took him 25 years, but then he did it. And then he was the first director to go, I'm gonna shoot entirely digital, no film. And, like, part of the docuseries, like, half of this episode is talk is showing, like, the massive blowback that the entire filmmaking industry worldwide had from him going, film is going away and digital is the future. And how they. And he even said, he's like, it was like five years. He was like, I was Persona non grata. People would invite me to parties. I didn't get award shows. No one would work with me because they were like, they hated him so much. Now, like, all Hollywood uses digital, right? But just like that period of, like, we gotta try something new. And the resistance that is from that again, across businesses, across industries, it's so interesting how I guess we as humans just sort of get into the, you know, the status quo, and that's comfortable and, like, don't rock the boat and let's just, you know, things are good. Let's stay here.
[00:21:06] Speaker A: So we always seek comfort as human beings. That. And there's an evolutionary reason for that. Because we're able to store calories, we're able to be safe if we're. We're safe if we're comfortable. And that's what we. That's what we naturally seek. But that's not where growth comes from. That's not even where survival comes from because the world is always changing around us. We have to become uncomfortable in order to push ourselves to be healthier, to accomplish more. So but, but that really is fighting our evolutionary instincts in a lot of ways.
[00:21:35] Speaker B: So how far into the journey with Conscious Capitalism were you when the, the spark for Liberty Ventures started to kind of formulate in your, in your mind?
[00:21:44] Speaker A: So I was, I was at Conscious Capitalism for a while really in the last year that I was there, the idea of Liberty Ventures started to percolate in the back of my mind. And when I left after six years, it was something that really was driving me because Conscious capitalism as a philosophy I think is absolutely on point still. And I wanted to make the jump from being the head of Conscious Capitalism, the nonprofit, to a conscious capitalist in the for profit space. But I also kept hearing something from the members in Conscious Capitalism that that couldn't be resolved with its non profit structure. Didn't just want to talk about elevating humanity through business. They didn't want to just go to events to pat each other on the back about how great their already doing. They wanted to go out and actually build conscious businesses that are making a positive impact in the world. So that required taking the next step to actually helping them do business, which a nonprofit can't do. And that was the motivation for me to launch Liberty Ventures to take this to the next level. So to have a network to actually help great purpose driven, values aligned business leaders access capital, to bring advisors in, to help their company scale, to find the talent they need in order to grow and to build relationships. Relationships not just to talk about this or avoid doing business. As so many business networks out there make a requirement for joining. They discourage business between their members. No, I wanted to make sure that we're making the right connections for the right people to do business with each other, to support each other in making an impact in the world.
[00:23:17] Speaker B: So walk me through that first year. So now we're, we're on starting. So you start something as a side thing, becomes this pretty big thing. Then you kind of start over three people get it up to 4 million and now you're starting over again. So what was that first year? Now I sent, I guess essentially being back on your own. What was that like?
[00:23:34] Speaker A: It really was starting out my own. I had, I had a couple of people who believed in me early on and so were willing, willing to help me get this going which was absolutely critical both on the team side and on the investing side. Because I started off by developing an angel investor Syndicate to start sourcing deals from early stage startups that were run by Values Line founders and to learn the ropes of investing, because I had no experience with that, really wanted to begin by learning that and starting to syndicate deals and help with referrals to for startups to grow and test things out. And to be perfectly honest, I kind of shied away from doing the stuff I had been successful at before in building networks, running events and developing memberships and movements because I wanted to learn investing. But while I was learning that, I also learning the investing side, I also found I was still getting drawn into and I was realizing all of the benefits that come from developing communities and networks and for people being bought in to the relationship side of things, like I had done with both Conscious Capitalism and Students for Liberty. I got invited to organize an event at Sir Richard Branson's home, Necker island, and so put a summit on there. That wasn't part of the plan. It just came up and I said yes to the opportunity.
[00:24:54] Speaker B: Hard to say no to that one too. Yep.
[00:24:57] Speaker A: And that reminded me how powerful events can be. And so, so we started to organize more events. And in organizing those events we started to realize, well, there are things that companies need other than just capital. They need advisors who are able to not just tell them what to do, but help make connections themselves, who are able to get them into the right distributors, who can find the right suppliers and things like that for them, and that they needed to recruit the right talent to build out their teams, whether at the C suite or associate level, or even interns, and that we were developing a following so that we could help with that. And so as we were starting with the investing side, all these other things started to come up that we were being asked to do by members of the network and that we wanted to do to help them out. And so now we've really leaned into the membership model and providing support at each of those levels, the capital, the advisory and the talent side, because those are the three things you really need in order to build a business.
[00:25:57] Speaker B: Wow, that's remarkable. So somebody's listening to the show, they're reading the chapter of the book, like, who's. Who's the ideal fit for Liberty Ventures? Who's somebody that like, you look at and go, you're perfect for us?
[00:26:08] Speaker A: You know, I'll be honest that one of the things that I continue to work on as a leader is focus. And what I'm about to say really reveals that in some ways we are really focused. In some ways we're perhaps a little spread thin because we don't have a single ideal customer profile. We have three. We are looking the but what unifies all of them is a commitment to the idea that capitalism is the greatest force for good in the world and that there are certain principles that underlie capitalism like respect for individual agency, real value creation, win, win win. Collaboration between all parties, things like that. And we want to find investors, executives and entrepreneurs who share those commitments. And we've got different support structures for each of them. For investors who are looking to deploy capital, we provide opportunities to back values aligned founders and still, and not only still get but by using this strategy, get an outsized return from investing in incredible companies or investing through opportunities that we're able to present. For executives at mid market or large cap companies, we have a peer network of other executives that they're able to collaborate with to figure out how to advance their career, how to help build their company, learning from luminaries like the John Mackeys or the Richard Branson's of course the world and be able to be able to think about what comes next in their journey. And for founders we have a variety of programs ranging from a free accelerator to just learn how to get started to a fellowship for them to get a mentor to get a team of mentors and peers to help with them and of course access to capital advisors and talent in scaling. So we have different programs and ways of supporting each one of those profiles but we actually see a real benefit of bringing all them together because they can work with each other and add value to each other. So it's values aligned investors, executives and founders.
[00:28:06] Speaker B: I love it because I've heard about organizations that are just for one. Right. And you've sort of brought all these three together which is pretty fantastic. What, what companies you've worked with with Liberty that you just get excited about the sort of the results you've achieved with them that you could. That you can share publicly.
[00:28:21] Speaker A: Absolutely. So. So one example of an early stage company is something called Supply Pay out of Texas. It's a fintech platform that actually helps facilitate financial transactions for agricultural producers south of the border who are shipping their product up to the United States. And there are a lot of challenges with that. And the founder, William Steel is just one of the founders. William, who's their CEO is such a go getter who first came out to our New York principal business Summ. It went through our accelerator program, then came out to necker with us and we're now backing supply pay what is amazing is that he's leveraged coming out to that first event to learning about how to scale the business, to closing his first funding round, including with connections that we made for him there. In addition to us backing them to getting new mentors and advisors to help the company grow and finding partners and really thinking about how the principles of capitalism apply to what they're building at Supply Pay. They're still early on in their journey, but it is just such a great illustration of what we're able to do and what we want to do to help companies out now.
[00:29:31] Speaker B: That's fantastic. So you're just getting started. What's the next three to five years for Liberty Ventures look like for you? What's your vision?
[00:29:38] Speaker A: So next three to five years we're still going to be experimenting and building things up in the short term. I'll set. I can say here that we are leaning into the events side of things because virtual connections, like what we're doing here with the podcast Amazing, couldn't do this 10 years ago. This is incredible, but it still doesn't replace what we get from being together in person, not just from the building relationships, but the spontaneous ideas and collaboration that come from. There have been so many connections made at our events that we've held over the last year that I could not have predicted, I would not have predicted people coming up with new business ideas that I didn't know they were interested in, or investors saying yes to startups that I thought they would have hated from the get go. But putting people who share the same values in the same room just leads to incredible things. So we're ramping that up. We're going to be doing investor summits, executive summits and founder summits. We're going to be doing things that bring them, bring members of each of those cohorts across each other and we're just going to facilitate more of those connections. But long term, our ultimate vision and purpose here is to build a movement of a million capitalists for capitalism. We're at 20,000 right now. It's a good start after two years, but we're going for that million movement and that's our 10 year goal. That's our BHAG we're going after.
[00:30:56] Speaker B: Love it. So any final advice for let's just back it down to founders. They're just getting started. You've been through the founding round a few times now. What, what are two pieces of pieces of advice and what are two mistakes that you see founders make that they should avoid?
[00:31:12] Speaker A: The first Mistake to avoid is going too big too quickly. It means don't put it all on the line with something that you don't. You don't know if it's going to work or not. Test things out and then grow. And then once you see it's got traction, then go big with it. And that's how you really go past the 1 million, $2 million mark. You do go big, but it's once you've figured out what works, what works and lean into that. The other big mistake is to keep trying to do everything yourself. You've got to bring other people on who are able to do this. And honestly, if you can't teach someone else to do what you do, then you don't know what you're doing. That's right, that's. And that's going to stop you from scaling the. The two things to do then I would say is to have, is to be open to opportunities, find ways to say yes and try things out. Got to stay focused. But you also got to say yes to opportunities to figure out the. Where you really have, where you're able to take. And the second thing then is focus on, focus on relationships. Find the right people to work with at every level. Not just with the team, but your investors, your backers, your suppliers, your customers. Lean into that and get everyone as excited as possible about what you're doing so that they're the ones out there really building this.
[00:32:21] Speaker B: Yeah, those are great pieces of advice. So how does someone get involved with Liberty Ventures or maybe they want to hire you to be a keynote? First off, how do they find you? And then secondly, how they find and connect with Liberty Ventures Ventures.
[00:32:34] Speaker A: Well, those are one in the same. Go to Liberty Ventures XYZ to learn more about us on our website. And we've got a freemium model for the network. We can. I encourage everyone to just sign up for the network right there, become a general member, and then if you want, in order to get updates, invited to public events and get connections to some people. But if you want to take the next step and really get support in scaling your business through the right connections, coming to more exclusive events, accessing more resources, apply for what we call our leadership circles so that we're able to talk about how we might be able to help you and how you might be able to add value to this network, I love it.
[00:33:08] Speaker B: Alexander, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day. Go grab a Guinness and you know, we'll, we'll, we'll chat with you soon.
[00:33:17] Speaker A: Thank you, Travis.
