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8 ESSENTIAL Things To Run A Successful Business w/Marcus Whitney
Chris Do and venture capitalist Marcus Whitney dissect the 8 essential concepts every founder must master to build a sustainable, successful business.
Chris Do
Founder, The Futur™ · August 20, 2020
Your Idea Is Not Enough
Most entrepreneurs fail. They start with a brilliant idea, a burning passion, and a certainty that they can bring something new into the world. They pour their savings, their time, and their heart into the venture. And then, it falls apart.
Why? Because passion is not a business plan. An idea is not a company.
Marcus Whitney knows this firsthand. A college dropout, self-taught entrepreneur, and now a venture capitalist and co-owner of Nashville's Major League Soccer team, Whitney spent a decade failing. “I failed over and over because of what I did not know,” he admits. After co-founding and exiting multiple companies, including a successful tech startup, a venture firm, and a professional sports team, he identified the silent killer of most new businesses: a fundamental misunderstanding of what a business actually is.
Most founders turn to celebrated books like The Lean Startup or Business Model Generation. Whitney acknowledges their value. “These are incredible, incredible books,” he says. “They help you to figure out how to get product market fit...but they don't tell you what you have to do day in and day out to run the business every day.”
They don't provide a crystal-clear order of operations. They don't tell you what matters most when you only have 16 hours in a day. They offer theories on finding a business, not a universal template for running one. This gap is where most entrepreneurs get lost.
A Coder's Blueprint for Business
Before he was a venture capitalist, Whitney was a software developer. This background gave him a unique lens through which to view his failures. “Software developers are always like taking things and putting it in the software developer frame of mind,” he explains. To avoid re-solving the same problems for every new application, developers create frameworks like Ruby on Rails or React.
Frameworks handle the universal, repetitive tasks so developers can focus on what makes their specific application unique. Whitney realized he needed the same thing for business. He was tired of learning the same painful lessons with every failed venture. He needed a business framework.
He reverse-engineered the logic of software development and applied it to entrepreneurship. Any good framework, he reasoned, must have a few key properties:
- Concepts and Contexts: A set of universal components (like authentication or navigation in an app) that apply within a specific situation (like a social network versus a financial app).
- Order of Operations: A clear hierarchy. You can't access an app’s features before you are authenticated. Some things must happen before others.
- Logical Connections: The concepts must flow into one another. Data moves between different parts of the system in a predictable way.
Tired of failing, Whitney set out to build this system for himself. “How can I make a framework that I can build any business on?” he asked. The answer became the foundation of his success and the core of his book, Create & Orchestrate.
The 8 Core Concepts of Every Business
Through a decade of trial and error, a series of dissolved partnerships, and millions of dollars burned, Whitney distilled the essence of every business into a simple, powerful system: the 8 Core Concepts. These are not revolutionary ideas. Their power is not in their novelty but in their organization and prioritization.
“Every single business has these eight core concepts within them,” Whitney states. “And every successful business is led by a team who understands these concepts.”
This is the universal template. It applies to a one-person freelance operation just as much as it applies to a multi-billion dollar corporation.
- Leadership: This is about creating a culture where a business can thrive. It encompasses vision, values, management, and most importantly, communication. Even as a solopreneur, you must lead yourself, manage your time, and communicate clearly with vendors and clients.
- Finance: This is about ensuring the sustainability of the business. “Look, if you don't make a profit, you don't have a business,” Whitney warns. “You have a front piece of art.” This concept covers revenue, expenses, profit, assets, liabilities, and the often-ignored beast of taxes. Neglecting finance is a fatal mistake many creatives make.
- Operations: This is about minimizing risk. It’s the structural integrity of your company. This includes your legal structure (LLC, sole proprietor), insurance, contracts, and human resources. Getting this wrong can kill a profitable company through lawsuits or compliance failures.
- Growth: This is about optimizing the business for a dynamic market. The market is never static. Growth isn't just about making more money; it's about strategic reinvestment, innovation, and anticipating change so you can drive it instead of being crushed by it.
- Product: This is simply “a predictable unit of value.” It’s what a customer understands they are getting from you in exchange for money. The discipline of product involves research, development, design, quality control, and pricing. It must be predictable.
- Service: This is about maximizing customer satisfaction. Service is not a type of business; it is a function within every business. Something will always go wrong. Service is how you fix it, honor your guarantees, and invest in the customer relationship.
- Sales: This is about generating revenue. It’s the mechanics of the transaction. What is your point of sale? What is your method? What is your model? It is the direct engine of your finances.
- Marketing: This is about identifying, understanding, and generating demand. It defines your brand, your reach, your content, and the channels you use to connect with potential customers before they are ready to buy.
These eight concepts form the complete anatomy of a business. Knowing them is not enough. You must understand how they relate and, crucially, which ones to prioritize.
The Unbreakable Order of Operations
The most common mistake entrepreneurs make is focusing on the concepts they enjoy while ignoring the ones they don't. A designer loves product. A writer loves marketing. Almost no one loves thinking about taxes or corporate structure.
This is why Whitney’s framework is not just a list; it's a hierarchy. There is a strict order of operations, and violating it leads to instability and collapse.
First, Whitney divides the concepts into two contexts.
The “inside the building” concepts are about the health of the organization itself: Leadership, Finance, Operations, and Growth.
The “outside the building” concepts are focused on the customer experience: Product, Service, Sales, and Marketing.
The critical insight? “You can't actually deliver the stuff to the customer if your house isn't in order,” Whitney explains. The internal concepts must take precedence.
This leads to the formal priority order:
1. Leadership
2. Finance
3. Operations
4. Growth
5. Product
6. Service
7. Sales
8. Marketing
Whitney borrows another concept from computer science to explain how they connect: inheritance. Each concept inherits the properties of the ones above it. Finance includes Leadership. Operations includes Leadership and Finance. And so on.
This makes Marketing the most comprehensive concept of all. “If you're in marketing, you have to understand every aspect of the business,” Whitney notes. Marketers must communicate authentically about the company's leadership, financial stability, product quality, and service guarantees. This is why Chief Marketing Officers are increasingly becoming key strategic leaders, second only to the CEO.
For creatives, the most jarring part of this hierarchy is seeing Finance at number two, far above Product and Marketing. “This is where a lot of creatives get it wrong,” he says. “We love our idea...we don't pay attention to our P&L, we don't pay attention to our taxes, and we get totally screwed up.”
Your financial literacy directly impacts your product decisions. A poor understanding of your finances will lead to disastrous choices about pricing, features, and quality. You cannot delegate this understanding away.
The Price of a Real-World MBA
Whitney’s framework isn't academic. It was forged in the fires of failure. His journey gives the 8 Core Concepts their weight and authority. He wasn't born with a silver spoon; he built his world from scratch.
Originally from Brooklyn, Whitney enrolled in architecture school before dropping out. He was more interested in the golden era of hip-hop. “I was rapping and rolling blunts,” he says with a laugh. Life, however, came at him fast. Soon he had a young family, a second child on the way, and found himself in Nashville, Tennessee, waiting tables. “We were living in a week-to-week motel,” he recalls. “My back was totally against the wall.”
In that moment of desperation, he leaned on a skill he’d picked up as a kid: basic programming. With the dot-com boom in full swing, he decided to teach himself to code professionally. For eight months, he worked his waiting job and spent every other waking moment studying, practicing, and attending programmer user groups. He got his first tech job just as the bubble was bursting but managed to land at a stable company.
He eventually joined Emma, an email marketing startup, as the fifth or sixth employee. There, he rose to become Director of Technology and a partner, earning a 7.5% equity stake. “I didn't even know what equity was,” he admits. In 2007, he sold his shares back to the company, giving him the capital to leap into entrepreneurship.
He thought he knew how to run a business. He was wrong. For the better part of a decade, from 2007 to 2015, Whitney made a series of costly mistakes. “Those realities honestly slapped me in the face for 10 years,” he says. He burned through his own money and other people's. Asked to estimate the cost of his education in failure, he ranges it from half a million of his own money to 15 million including venture funds that backed failed projects.
One of his earliest mistakes was not understanding payroll taxes. He hired ten employees and paid them with handwritten checks, not realizing he owed an additional 15% to the government. He spent that money on computers and culture-building perks, nearly running afoul of the state and jeopardizing the entire company. It was a painful, direct lesson in why Operations and Finance precede everything else. This kind of hard-won wisdom is what separates true entrepreneurs, a journey detailed by others like Ryan Blair in his own story of overcoming adversity.
It was through these failures that the 8 Core Concepts took shape. He wasn't just building businesses; he was building a system to stop the bleeding. That system is what eventually led him to co-found Jumpstart Health Investors, a successful healthcare venture capital firm, and become a minority owner of the Nashville SC Major League Soccer team.
Are You an Ambitious Creative Rebel?
So, is entrepreneurship for everyone? Whitney believes the capacity is there, but it resonates most with a specific personality type he calls the Ambitious Creative Rebel.
He breaks down the archetype:
- Ambitious: You want more than what you currently have, and you are willing to actively pursue it. You have a drive for growth and achievement.
- Creative: You are energized by bringing new things into the world. Whitney uses an inclusive definition of creativity. It's not just for painters and designers. “Everything we use and everything we see that was not created by nature was created by somebody,” he argues. Creating a new legal term or a new operational process is a creative act. It's the universal human mode of making things better.
- Rebel: You instinctively buck against the status quo. You see a better way and are frustrated by the inefficiencies and illogical constraints of the world as it is.
If this combination resonates with you, then entrepreneurship is likely a set of activities you will find deeply fulfilling. “Entrepreneurship is really something that you do,” Whitney stresses. He sees it less as a fixed identity and more as a learnable craft. The more you do it, the better you get. Just like any other skill, your first attempt will not be as good as your tenth.
The key is having the right mindset to persevere through the inevitable setbacks. Whitney frames his own struggles through the lens of Joseph Campbell's monomyth, or the hero's journey. When he was waiting tables in a motel, he didn't see himself as a victim. He saw himself as the protagonist in a story that was just getting interesting.
“I am the hero of my own story,” he says, recalling his mindset. “And I'm just not going out like that...it's just because it's gonna make my story that much better when I win.”
This is not about deluding yourself. It’s about writing your own narrative. The hardship is not the end of the story; it is the conflict that makes the eventual victory meaningful. Understanding how to frame your own narrative is a powerful tool, a theme explored in how the words we use shape our reality.
The Mechanics of Reinvention
For anyone stuck in a job they hate, dreaming of a new career or starting a business, Whitney offers a simple, two-step framework for reinvention. It is the same process he used to go from waiter to professional programmer in eight months.
First, you have to truly believe you are the thing you want to become. Not that you aspire to be it. You are it, and you're just waiting for the external world to catch up. “It's really important to not like qualify that,” he warns. “To not say like, I am an aspiring this. Because then that's what you are.”
You are a programmer. You are a business owner. You are an author. State it as a fact.
Second, you must make your environment resonate with that belief. Your actions have to align with your new identity. When Whitney decided he was a programmer, he started acting like one. He knew programmers went to user group meetings, so he went too. He knew programmers went home after their day job and hacked on side projects for fun, so he did that too. This alignment of identity and action is crucial for building the skills and network in your chosen field, a concept similar to building a powerful personal brand that attracts opportunity.
He was still waiting tables, but that was just the job that paid the bills. His identity was already in the future. “I had to live that,” he says. The external validation, the job offer, was simply the lagging indicator of a transformation that had already happened internally.
The 8 Core Concepts provide the map for what to do once you've made that leap. They are the guardrails that keep you from driving your dream off a cliff. They transform the chaotic, terrifying act of entrepreneurship into a deliberate, manageable process.
The path from idea to sustainable business is not a mystery. It is a system. It requires discipline, a grasp of the fundamentals, and an unwavering belief in your own story.
The framework is here. The path is clear. The only variable left is you.
TRANSCRIPT
what's up beautiful people happy thursday on today's episode we're back first of all with a live stream with a couple of new tricks as you can see and more to be revealed in a second but today we're going to be talking about how to run a successful business i think you're going to
be super pumped for our guest today and we're going to talk about these eight core concepts the eight core concepts you need to know to run a successful business there's gonna be a short presentation and we're gonna talk a little bit about how to claim your creative power through entrepreneurship this channel is
all about that so when i was reading this this is good it's going to be good for all of us and potentially how to move from your side hustle to your full-time hustle okay so my next guess my next guest everybody he's a college dropout self-taught entrepreneur a family man a best-selling author
of the book create and orchestrate he's a co-founder venture capitalist public speaker a black belt in haqquito and he is currently residing nashville tennessee everybody please help me welcome marcus whitney yeah you guys you're missing the beat okay okay we're back we're back there we are so now you can hear some other
voices and we're trying to bring some of the energy and some of the love joining me today is a very select group of people i trust from the pro family they'll be listening in potentially feeding me some questions but marcus welcome to the show chris thank you for having me and the pro
family is a lot of love there's a lot of good energy [Music] we're rolling out the red carpet treatment for you today so i don't want to talk too much now i have a bunch of questions but i really want to get into the presentation we know people drop off really quickly if
we don't give them the value right up front so i'm going to turn it over to you and i'll be listening in and potentially asking you a few questions while you're going through your deck thank you so much man all right uh so everyone welcome um i'm here to talk to you about
the eight things you have to know in order to run a successful business uh this is a channel for creatives i'm a creative got this big create shirt on um and so i think that this will be very useful for you because i think for creatives we like to do what we like
to do not necessarily what we have to do and this is a little bit about like what we have to do if we want to run a successful business so chris gave you a couple of just uh pointers about me what i think is important here college dropout i'm self-taught so everything i'm
going to talk to you about today is stuff i basically came up with through experience not in a classroom um my prob probably the highlights of my career i was a director of technology and a partner at emma email marketing uh i am a founding partner of jumpstart health investors it's a healthcare
venture capital firm and i co-founded and a minority owner of national soccer club which is a major league soccer team what's important about that is that there are three very different types of businesses and so what i'm about to teach you works across all of these types of businesses and every kind of
business that's out there including the one you're trying to work on so i started a lot of businesses because i had an idea that i was passionate about and i was just like i want to do this i want to bring this thing into the world and even though i gave you three
examples of things that went well i failed over and over because of what i not know this is like super super important um maybe like you i jumped into a lot of these books right so the four steps to epiphany by steve blank all about customer development business model generation the lean startup
who hasn't heard of the lean startup right right right um these are incredible incredible books they help you to figure out how to like get product market fit or how to think through a business and be able to tell somebody else about it but they don't tell you what you have to do
day in and day out to run the business every day right not just like figure out if it's a real business you should go after and the other thing they don't tell me is like what is the priority if i'm if i'm getting a good night's sleep eight hours a day there's only
16 hours i got family i got to eat i got to get exercise in i don't have unlimited time so what is my priority on a day-to-day basis so in this presentation we're going to go through three key things that you're going to learn one you're going to learn a universal template for
any business that you're thinking of starting it's a template you'll be able to plug things in two you're going to understand the priorities that every successful business runs on and i do mean every one and three you're going to find your strong points and weak points quickly so that you can fill gaps
and avoid failure so i'm a software developer who became an entrepreneur and that's important to this because the way i think about things is as a software developer i don't know that anyone else out there can relate but software developers are always like taking things and putting it in the software developer frame
of mind and so software developers have developed something to that always will cover all the needed aspects of building and maintaining applications because we're lazy we don't like to do the same thing over and over again so we're like okay i do this thing in the last three apps i need to like
write something that'll do it every single time and these things have evolved over time into what's called frameworks so i'm sure you've heard of ruby on rails or maybe react or express you know maybe you you've used the framework wordpress is even a framework right you don't need to kind of rewrite the
blog every single time and what's awesome about frameworks is they handle the things that you need every single time that you're creating a new application and they let you focus on what's unique about your application right so that's why people like to have frameworks so let me tell you how frameworks are created
they there is a rule a set of rules about frameworks that you would only know if you've actually like tried to build a framework and i've done this before so the first thing is that frameworks are made up of concepts and contexts concepts and contexts okay so in an application framework for software
here are some of the concepts authentication every app needs authentication navigation i got to get from one place to another sessions when you're in the application you do things you want to like keep up with the things that have happened security you always need security data storage these are common concepts but then
furthermore you need these concepts to be presented in a certain context so one context might be a social networking context another one might be financial application so the context really matters as well frameworks have an order of operations so there is a first thing that happens before i even let you have access
to anything i need to check and make sure you're authenticated so that comes first right so authentication is always super important security always super important so there's an order everything can't happen at the same time there is an order of operations and the final thing is that these concepts are connected to each
other logically there's a way that that data flows in and out of these different concepts in an application so these are things i knew as a software developer about app frameworks finally the simpler the better right you don't want it to be incomplete but you want it to be very very simple so
i i just got to the point where i was tired of failing and i wanted to stop failing and i was learning a new lesson through every failure and i was like how can i make a framework that i can build any business on and i just needed to use the same rules
of app framework but just make it for business so i needed concepts and i needed context i needed an order of operations and i needed to connect these concepts logically and that is where i came up with as chris said earlier the eight core concepts now these are really really straightforward there's no
magic to this you know a lot of times when you do these presentations they'll try to tell you like come up with three things well three wouldn't be enough okay so they're eight but they're simple enough that you can remember them and so i'm just gonna go forth and tell you these eight
things you have to know okay here they are leadership finance operations growth product service sales and marketing that's it every single business has these eight core concepts within them and every successful business is led by a team who understands these concepts okay now i'm going to run through them really really quickly and
then leave some time for us to talk through them first leadership leadership is about creating a culture in which a business can thrive so things that leaders do they create vision and values they focus on management they focus on communication communication is basically the number one role of leadership and this is what
true whether you're in a one-person business and you're just sort of running it yourself you need to be really clear about what you're doing you need to manage your own time and you need to communicate with the partners that you're working with because even in the one-person business you're going to have different
vendors or or you're gonna still have to communicate so leadership is always about creating the culture whether you're a one-person business or a ten thousand person business finance you have to ensure the sustainability of the business i know a lot of us like to say product first or everything is about marketing or
service take care of the customer look if you don't make a profit you don't have a business you have a front piece of art so finance is super super important revenue expenses profit assets liabilities capital taxes taxes are not like at all like a normal thing you know what i mean it's like
an entirely different thing but trust me if you don't understand your taxes you could do everything else right and completely go out of business so this is super super important operations operations are about minimizing the risk in your business what form of company do you set up as sole proprietor llc corporation there's
all different types of forms of business insurance do you have a adequate insurance coverage contracts are your contracts drafted correctly human resources are you employing people if you are you got a lot of risk on your hands so you got to be able to handle that correctly process technology measurement that's everything that's
inside of operations and it's all ultimately about minimizing risk growth optimizing the business growth is about the understanding that when you enter the market the market is not static the market is dynamic it's always changing what you have today that works really well might be a totally saturated market full of knockoff copycats
in two months right or something drastic can change in the market and you have to you have to really shift so you can never get lazy growth doesn't mean you have to like make more money all the time but you do have to think about how to optimize your business you have to
be thinking about reinvestment you have to think about developing a point of view you have to be thinking about innovation and you have to accept the changes happen and drive the change as opposed to being impacted by the change product so there's so much out there about product silicon valley has really taken
this world with this word product and made it to mean a bazillion different things that i don't think it was ever intended to mean product is quite simply a predictable unit of value it is the thing that your customer understands they're getting for you they want it to be predictable when they get
it for you and they're going to exchange money for it that's all a product is but the but the discipline of product is about research development design production quality control pricing and more things so you have to understand product service service is about maximizing customer satisfaction i think some people think that if
you're in a consulting business that that's a service-based business i would say it's not i would say most people who think that they're in a service-based business in terms of what they're selling miss the fact that they have to deliver a predictable unit of value i think no matter what business you're in
you have to deliver service because things are going to go wrong so you have to fix those things you have to be willing to stand up to some kind of guarantee and you have to understand that when you have a customer that's a relationship and so just like you would not invest in
a relationship with a loved one or a family member or a friend you have to invest in that customer relationship as well and that's what the service concept is all about sales you have to generate revenue this should be the simplest thing ever what's your point of sale what's your method of sale
what's your model for selling that's all sales is it's just about generating revenue and then finally marketing which is which is uh my favorite one which is about identifying understanding and generating demand what is your brand what is your reach what is what is the content that you're going to use what are
the channels that you're going to use to try to reach your customers so that's marketing so those are the contexts i mean the concepts okay the context of those are basically i organize them into two different categories one is inside of the building so you got four of these concepts that really mostly
belong inside of the building with your team with your company leadership finance operations and growth okay those are all the things that you really on a day-to-day basis when you're talking to your co-workers your colleagues you know your boss or whatever this is what you're talking about you're talking about the leadership the
finance the operations and the growth the outside of the building is the customer focused stuff so that's the product the service the sales and the marketing that's everything around the customer experience it's not that you're not dealing with it in the company but the focus is almost entirely on the customer as opposed
to an employee or a boss now there is an order of operations and there's a way to connect these concepts logically and so i'm going to walk you through the priority order of these concepts but i want to first say that the lower the priority the more comprehensive and this is a concept
kind of from computer science called inheritance uh so it basically means that the highest concept which is leadership surprise uh basically can be found in all of the other concepts okay you can find it in all of the other concepts so they're not separate they're all actually embedded in one another in this
order i'm about to present to you leadership is at the top finance is absolutely the second most important thing and this is where a lot of creatives get it wrong because we love our idea and we love to create and we love to get out there with the customer we don't pay attention
to our p l we don't pay attention to our taxes and we get totally screwed up and we look up in two years and we're like i thought i was having fun but now i'm broke i've spent all my savings and it's because we didn't really really really understand how important the finance
aspect was to our business operations growth so you can see i've prioritized everything internal everything inside takes precedent over the customer focus stuff and that's because you can't actually deliver the stuff to the customer if your house isn't in order okay so you've got to have that leadership that finance that operation and
that growth mindset really really locked in so that you can create a great product so that you can serve your customer well so that those things can lead to great sales and so that your marketing is really really effective i've talked about the inheritance that means it includes all of the properties and
the methods of the other concepts and so this is just me explicitly saying finance includes leadership operations includes leadership and finance and so forth and so on marketing which is the last one is the most comprehensive that's why people are seeing marketing officers being risen up to the top of the company right
next to the ceo and so many leading companies it's because if you're in marketing you have to understand every aspect of the business right because you're out there in the market communicating with the customers before they become customers and you have to be able to talk about every aspect of the business in
a way that's authentic and true so that when they come in you haven't oversold you haven't over delivered you've effectively communicated the reality and hopefully everything beyond what you've said actually stands up and meets what the customer is expecting of you so uh this slide didn't work out right but a hundred percent
of successful businesses use the acore concepts um you are probably great at some of the concepts and not so great at others because you're just a human um but you have to understand all of the great of the core concepts that's just something you can't ever delegate this is what a team might
look like behind the acor concept so obviously leadership will be the ceo the board the entire management team finance everyone would imagine the cfo the bookkeeper the tax accountant operations ceo who's your lawyer who's your insurance broker project manager your technology information and technology folks your tech partner your human resources team all
of that fits inside of operations in growth who's your chief strategist who's your head of innovation you have analysts or consultants they will all sort of fit into the growth space helping you think about what's next product chief product officer product development team service your chief customer officer and on and on so
you can see how over time you sort of when you start a business you're the whole thing but if you're successful you're gonna start to backfill different people this is kind of what the people you're going to need on your team look like so start figuring out what areas you need to get
out of your bucket as quickly as possible because either you don't love them or you're just not good at them and this is what a fully built out team around the core concepts looks like so many entrepreneurs fail because they don't know these concepts um i know i did over and over and
over again i remember the very first time that i had 10 employees and i didn't know that i actually had to pay payroll taxes on them so like i was like writing checks out of a checkbook every every week and then at the end of the the quarter i got this really big
nasty email from my accountant that was like dude you're way in the hole right now because you're supposed to be paying something like an extra 15 percent uh on top of what you've written to these to these to the for the payroll tax for these employees and you've been spending it on computers
and other like really nice culture things for them meanwhile you're gonna run afoul of of the state so you have to know these things you have to know these things or inadvertently you will kill your own company because you just didn't know them so just don't be that entrepreneur take the time to
learn the core concepts i wrote about them in my book create and orchestrate uh it was an amazon number one bestseller there's a lot of narrative in here this book is mostly about my failures i talk about a couple of successes at the end but the spine of the book that has no
narrative is a full explanation of the acor concepts and much more so that's it and chris i'll hand it back to you and we can chop it up a little bit all right awesome thank you for doing that i'm watching the comments online and whoa this is straight fire it's just facts dropping
it there's a lot there to unpack for sure so i got a question for you yeah you sound like somebody who's been through a business school but i know that you're a college dropout and you even wait a table so how does one get from there to here but more specifically what did
you study in school and why did you stop going to school yeah so i started studying architecture and i stopped going because i was i was into hip-hop and and uh smoking weed so i was it was 1993 it was the golden era of hip-hop and oz and uh and biggie and wu-tang
were uh poppin and that's what i was about man i was rapping and rolling blunts so yeah that's what that's the reality um and i like went and chose like tried to like live that life for a while and then you know man things life happens to you you know um it didn't
it didn't work out and the next thing i knew i had a small family that was that was uh you know being developed i had a one-year-old my wife at the time was pregnant and i found myself in nashville tennessee and it was like waiting tables you know what i mean like life
comes out fast when you're young and you're having fun and so um at that point i realized i needed to really i needed to really rethink my life um and i and how i started that was i taught myself uh coding i taught myself how to be a software developer that was my
first like self-taught you know mission and over eight yeah i thought myself code and i got my first coding job which was a massive socio-economic shift for me and uh and i did that for seven years four of those years was at this company emma email marketing and it was a startup it
was kind of like a rocket ship and that's where i i got the entrepreneurial bug so many different questions here so nashville is not exactly the hip-hop center of the universe what takes what brings you to nashville of all places that you can land i believe you grew up in new york right
yeah i grew up in brooklyn i grew up in brooklyn i went to uva um and then i went back to brooklyn and then i went down to atlanta and that's where my family started and the reason why we ended up in nashville was because uh my wife at the time she spent
her high school years in nashville and her best friend lived here so you know like we just took a flyer and got in the car you know when you're young you just you know those kind of things are enough to make a decision like that right okay that makes sense so you get
into coding which isn't like architecture and it seems really super technical and you're getting into this uh what what made you drawn to to coding and what made you so good at it so two things one i was super lucky my uncle was a programmer at ibm and when i was like nine
or ten years old for christmas he gave me this uh ibm pc junior which you know like back then computers didn't do anything that you didn't program them to do they were so right you know so um so i learned like basic programming you know and it's one of those things where when
you learn something like that that young you know it kind of like gets baked into you and you can you at least understand it conceptually and you feel like you have a level of confidence that you can take it on the other thing was this all i moved to nashville in the back
half of 2000 and so it was the com boom it was you know i didn't know it because i wasn't in new york i wasn't in the middle of it it was kind of like the end of it but i just remember seeing these high school kids riding around on skateboards and offices
making a hundred thousand dollars and i was like if they're doing that i can do that right um so so legit man i got my job like right when the bust happened so that must happen okay i slipped in the door um with one of the last companies to go public before the
bus but they already had the money and you know we're building the company and so you know i was able to retain my job i see so it's kind of interesting i i believed when i was checking out your profile like you're the you became the chief architect which when you studied architecture
of emma email marketing which i know of and did you make uh if this is too personal let me know is this how you made your wealth like you were there at the right time and you got shares or options or things like that yeah yeah yeah i i was i was the
fifth or sixth employee depending on how you slice it and i earned 7.5 equity in the company holy cow yeah yeah big chunk okay and dude like i don't even i didn't even know what equity was you know what i mean like sure yeah i mean the the founder of emma clint smith
wrote the forward to my book he's uh you know i still look up to him and he hasn't run a company since i mean he's like been you know on vacation with his family ever since uh you know he left that company but you know i learned so much from him and will
weaver um co-founders of the company and uh they were just incredible they gave the early employees pretty big slugs of equity and i was able to sell that back to the company to start my first business wow okay so what year is this that you're selling the stock back to you to the
company when 2007 2007 okay all right so is this the the beginning of you launching a lot of these businesses and some of which you said it didn't work out because you you weren't aware of these eight core concepts yeah okay yeah because because the thing is like you know i was because
i was so close to the founders right and i and i i rose from just like a programmer to chief architect and head of technology and a partner and i had a team under me and all this other kind of stuff i thought i understood how to run a business you know but
there's a big difference between being like a head of technology at a company or a head of marketing or head of sales or ahead of anything and like actually being the boss it's just a huge difference so when i got out in the world and i started realizing oh i never dealt with
this hr stuff oh and like i started realizing all these things that i had no idea about i never paid the taxes for the company you know what i mean like i all these things i never had to have to put put down the budget and make really hard decisions um that those
those realities honestly slapped me in the face for 10 years chris i mean i you know i was making really bad i look i don't make really bad mistakes anymore but i was making really bad mistakes i would say from 2007 through 2015 okay um it was it was it was uh you
know and just through sheer you know grit and determination i sort of didn't totally succumb to the failures but you know i i i had a good a good exit with uh with a tech marketing company that i built i i was able to build this venture capital firm which which you know
worked out well but look i i had a lot of partnerships dissolve over that period of time a lot of ideas that went up bust um i poured money into dumb things uh and and it was always because i lacked an understanding of the fundamental structures of a business where my priorities needed
to be and how to make decisions like the thing that's important about the concepts is that you you make decisions about product based on your understanding of the finance so if you're understanding that the finance is poor you make bad product decisions you know what i mean that's probably a wake-up call for
a lot of people that are tuning in right now because we don't like finances i mean i'm gonna be honest i'm gonna disclose with you when you're going through the eight core things it's like oh shoot i don't know how many of these things i actually have mastery over or am that interested
in and maybe i paid the price over the years but i want to just also put in context because when i learned about you in terms of you're you're you're a minority owner and a co-founder of the major league soccer team in nashville you you are co-founder of a venture capital fund that
invests in innovative health technologies i was thinking okay marcus has money because that doesn't come from just grinding you know we usually don't hit those kinds of revenue streams where we have an a surplus of capital and what what i i've seem to to notice a pattern is people that are in tech
that exit out with a healthy chunk they become venture capitalists themselves they want to make their money work for them you spent that money for a good portion of like 10 years or so building up businesses and probably just burning through a lot of it at some point right yeah i i mean
i i when when i make money i i reinvest it um into ventures so like i you know i have i have my home with my wife and we have you know emergency funds and things like that but i'm still really in the game like in in my businesses you know what i'm
saying that's like you know i mean look i i self-published my book i mean i had to i had to invest in that so i'm still because because ultimately i believe this kind of goes back to claiming your creative power through entrepreneurship i really do believe entrepreneurship is is is the way at
the end of the day and and i and i don't believe it's easy and it's and i also know that it's very competitive and so it's like anything else it's a craft you have to get really good at it and you get good at it by like putting in the reps so yeah
i mean i could i've had enough money over the course of my career that i could have bought really nice cars or things like that but i've just always reinvested it into businesses that's just always been you know it's nice some of it's been lost but some of it is has appreciated you
know really nicely and um right yeah okay a couple of things just really quickly by your estimation how much money did you burn in these failures from 2007 and from whenever you started to figure out the game i'm i want to point this out because the game of entrepreneurship is one filled with
risk and a lot of times we just look at the success we forget about the hard work the failures and the money that you actually just wind up burning to educate yourself so by your estimation do you kind of have a ballpark figure yeah i mean um you're asking a really interesting question
and i i think it's it's probably hard for me to exactly say and also you know there's a little bit of attribution here because there was one business that i was in um from 2009 to 2014 that it wasn't like i wasn't the only person in the business but it was a venture
back business and it didn't work and it burned millions of dollars so you know depending on how you slice it probably the range is something like half million dollars if it's 100 like personally attributed to 15 million of other people's money including yours yeah yeah okay that's the price i mean that's the
game that you play as a venture capitalist right like now you're a venture capitalist and when you look at investing uh what percentage of success are you considering like because people don't understand too there's a lot of guessing a lot of putting money in the wrong horse but you only need one of
them to work out what's the percentage in which you think you know people are guessing as a venture capitalist uh different firms have different philosophies on this so because i'm an entrepreneur my partner vic is also really an entrepreneur at heart one of our principles is we we shoot for hit rate which
means we're looking for as many wins as possible of course reason is not just about the money because actually there's a case to be made that you shouldn't care about that you should care about multiples and not care about hit rate the reason why we care about hit rate is because there are
people inside of these companies and these failures are really really hard and we don't want to be a part of a of an unnecessary failure because they they're hard so when we invest we we intend to like we expect every company we put money into to be successful that's irrational but we say
it in the spirit of we're not going to put money into a company we don't believe in and we're going to do everything we can as investors try to help that entrepreneur be as successful as they possibly can so that's that's like that's our hit rate mantra we're six years in so that's
a little early for a venture firm to kind of tell but this year we've had um you know three really strong realization events which you would call it where we've been able to get money back and return it to our investors um i our internal rate of return on those investments has been
way above industry average average we're in the healthcare industry and and i think that's an industry that's only going to be more um valuable from a right opposition's perspective as we go forward obviously everyone's realizing how important healthcare is this year so um you know i i we're doing really well things are
going really well we're continuing to raise funds we're having exits at a really healthy good clip comp people founders are making lots of money from these events so right now it's a good time um you know but but you know but i'll say this in all honesty our very first year of investments
was kind of a bust because we did like we didn't really understand what we were doing so 2000 right that class um it like it will be i would imagine the the least successful of like all the investments we've made our 2016 classes out of this world so good sure that was like
your freshman year so or your rookie year it's fine okay now there are you have a very interesting story of highs and lows and we'll get into that if if time permits but i want to give i'm going to swing the conversation back to kind of where we start at the beginning of
the show i said one of your ideas is to say like we want to reclaim our creator power through entrepreneurship and there are a lot of people who are watching who are probably solo practitioners how do they know if they're an entrepreneur what does that even mean can you help give us maybe
some kind of internal questions that we can ask ourselves if entrepreneurship is right for us yeah so and you just asked uh sort of the million dollar question people i i mean i wrote my book because i believe less that an entrepreneur is something that you're born as and more as an activity
that you can teach yourself to do that's that's how i see it um i do believe there's a certain personality type that is predisposed to that activity and i call that personality group uh ambitious creative rebels so like people who like have strong sense of self belief like to create they they get
energized by creating and they're kind of always bucking against the status quo if that combination resonates with you and entrepreneurship is likely to be a really great set of activities for you um but entrepreneurship is really something that you do it's an action at the end of the day and the acor concepts
are the foundation of that action it's you're running a business if you're an entrepreneur you run a business so you know how well you run that business to me is going to be based on you know your pure talent like anything else any activity there is an element of talent that plays into
it but there's also like just how long do you keep doing it you know i think a lot of people don't think about entrepreneurship as a career when you start you're not as good as you're gonna be if you stick with it right so um i'm a career entrepreneur i'm better than i'm
ever that i've ever been and you know god willing i'll be much better than i am right now in five years uh because i'm i'm in this for the sport you know it's um i want to win and winning means making money and having a successful business but but i'm in it like
i'm in it for the competitiveness of it okay so you you said three key words here so let's dissect them ambitious creative rebel so ambitious means i think you want more than what you have and you're willing to go for it right rebel means i think you're gonna take some chances and go
against the flow and and look for new things i think i get that why did you choose the word creative what does creative mean to you because i think our audience thinks of that word maybe a little bit differently than you can can you help shed some light on that yeah so i
you know i am on this mission as somebody who was a software developer right so if you're a software developer here's what that means that means you're often around quote-unquote creatives like you're definitely going to be around uh graphic designers a lot and just like product has been sort of bastardized by the
by silicon valley creative has also been co-opted to mean uh something that only a subset of of people can relate to when in reality like create creative is just the default human mode everything we use and everything we see that was not created by nature was created by somebody right and so this
is what we do you know we create we create money we create language we create music we create food we create technology we create this is what we do um and you can be in operations and look if you if if you're a lawyer and you come up with this really cool term
that was a creative act you know you don't have to be really great with with a pen or or a pencil to to be a creative you don't have to be a painter or a photographer to be a creative um anything that you do that is bringing something new to the world something
novel to the world something innovative that's creative so uh to me i'm always trying to like broaden people's understanding of the creative power they have within them it's a universal power we all have it um we just have different ways of expressing it in different passions through which we're likely to express it
awesome i think that's one that's a really great inclusive definition of what it means to be a creative so we're bringing everybody into the conversation now i want to add to that in a little bit but before i do marcus can you stop to share the people on the zoom call they want
to see your face i think your screen share is uh yeah so while you're doing that now in in marty newmar's book he i forget who he quoted but he in in they they use the word design and not not creative but okay so anyone is a designer if you devise a solution
that moves us from an existing situation to a preferred one so i believe those definitions what you just shared with us overlaps okay we're looking to move from the way things are to the way things should be all right now rodrigo i know you're like checking your phone right now i can see
your face i think he has a question for you so we're gonna bring rodrigo on and uh have him ask this question and then i'm gonna get to rachel black in one second you ready how do we go i am ready actually two questions we gotta look up what i wrote here um
where was it where it is i could see it if you want me to ask it for you yeah do that yeah yeah he said rodrigo's question was marcus if you would start a new business today knowing what you know what would it be would it be and that's that's a that's a
fantastic question so i can tell you the space that i'm i'm you know honestly i am starting a new business right now i'm always starting a new business it's like what i'm always doing um i'm really fascinated right now around media you know i think if you look at everything that chris has
done it's it's just incredible um i'm spending a lot of time thinking about the newsletter space um i think the newsletter space is a fantastic one-person business i'm really excited about one-person businesses right where the risk is sort of low um you can start for free like that that's the the crazy thing
right now is you legitimately can start a business completely for free and that's not like hyperbole i mean literally you could go down the concepts you could like go get wave apps for free to handle your accounting and your invoicing literally not pay anything you know you could like do all your stuff
with a gmail account and and with all the google apps you can find some way to sort of send out your newsletter for free it's like run all this stuff for free so i would say any business that i can completely run for free and where it's just about me putting in time
and effort and it's a disruption of media where i have to sort of earn every single customer by executing great content is some that is something i'm currently very very passionate about because i think there's there's very sticky results in it that are portable that you get to take with you from into
other ventures that you're doing which is really really cool um and i feel like that is where things are definitely going right now so that's the that's the space i'm personally really passionate about it sounds like you're you're trying to leverage your knowledge skill talent and using widely available publicly uh accessible platforms
like social media or the g suite or whatever it is that you're talking about and figuring out a way to make something more efficient it was really interesting at the beginning of our conversation you talked about your your the rules of coding and developing software and i thought you were going to make
this whole one-on-one map just to make an analogy i've not heard before it's pretty close you're super analytical in the way that you think and and very clear and focused like what do you attribute that to is it just those early days playing with that ibm pc junior or something else was it
something in your parents your schooling your upbringing that like people ask me this question all the time why are you so analytical so i'm going to throw it to you because i don't ever know how to answer it so the the period of time that i worked at emma was really really pivotal
for me i would say two things one having to teach myself code was difficult because it you know you have to understand in 2000 2001 uh code was a very different thing than it is today so there were no iphones there was no cloud computing and when i say cloud i mean like
there was no amazon web services like if you were gonna do something you you had to buy a server and like go to a data house you know a data storage place and like stick it in the rack and all that kind of stuff and so i when i was learning code and
i was on the internet code i had to learn tcp and http i don't mean to be speaking over anybody's head but i had to learn the fundamentals of how the internet works okay and so i think that just kicked me into this like when i learn things i want to understand everything
that's underneath it right i want to understand the core principles of it so i think that's a big part of it the other thing i'll say is when i was at emma um we had to we had to totally reverse engineer the business into software ruby on rails didn't exist yet in 2003.
there was no there was no great framework yet so we we literally wrote our own framework though i had to go through the process of thinking about what are the what are the consistent concepts that are going to be in this application i had to create my own ruby on rails that never
you know nobody's ever heard of it it never like got to that level but i had to go through that exercise and so after that i was i started to just sort of see things as frameworks you know what i mean i started to always sort of see what are the systems underneath
the thing that i see that i'm experiencing i never want to just sit at the surface level i want to understand what is the underlying system because then i can engineer it as opposed to i can engineer and create with it as opposed to being a consumer of it you know i basically
hate being a consumer you know when you're describing that i just see you as the the black neil with with dreads or whatever and the code is like streaming in front of you you know and and you there's something about you where you were talking about before you're really into hip-hop and that
was your creative expression so there's this creative lyrical imaginative illogical side to you and then there's this super logical coder guy and you being able to i guess traverse in the real world and in the construct of the matrix which makes you really really powerful yeah um i that much well thank you
and you know at a certain point you have to stop and just sort of say given certain talents everyone has their own set of talents that make them really powerful i would just say lean into your strengths and bet on yourself you know what i mean you know there's only one you and
you have your own set of superpowers you know i think i think that when when i was so when i moved to nashville and i was waiting tables six and a half days a week we were living in a week-to-week motel okay and i didn't know anyone in town and like the clock
was taken the second kid was going to be born and my back was totally against the wall you know what i mean like my back was totally against the wall and i feel like everyone can relate to a moment in your life where you weren't you didn't have the luxury to think about
anything superfluous like what was going to work you know and so that that exercise in that moment and then the success i saw from that you know going from waiting tables to getting like that 45 000 a year job and benefits and it totally changing my my life i just learned the value
of playing to my strengths and not dealing with all the extraneous stuff so um i just think that's the thing i know i have my my own uh strengths but i'm no better than anyone else it's just i've had i've had this 20-year window because of my back being against the wall of
playing to him what i mean yeah okay so i i want to get into the mindset here a little bit it's easy to feel that pressure and collapse like you're waiting tables and you're you're doing basically a skillless job like and that's why people don't get paid a lot doing that because you're
easily replaceable i think david c baker who i think you know who introduced us to uh to one another he said the rate of interchangeability the the how easy it is for somebody to swap you out with another person really determines how valuable you can be to the marketplace not the only way
but just one way so you're there and i've i've done like low labor i mean low-skilled labor jobs which i just feel like i i want to die because the human mind and the human spirit is made for more than just moving a thing from part uh from position a to position b
and and it's kind of what you're doing so how is it that you can say okay six and a half days a week you you must be toast at the end of that week thinking like i and this is what a lot of people do i just need to relax i want to
drink some beer i want to watch some tv because i need to prepare for the next week what is it that got you through that and then i have a follow-up question to that uh so that's a mindset issue right you know what i mean um two people can be in the same
circumstance and the mindset will be the the difference in how they respond to it um i i am a big big big joseph campbell monomyth heroes journey person really big and um i you know whenever i'm talking to somebody else i'm there to try to be a guide for them but for me
i am the hero of my own story you know what i mean and i'm just not going out like that it's just not happening you know what i mean like if i'm in those situations it's just so it's just because it's gonna make my story that much better when i win you know
what i mean like i don't look at it like somehow oh my god what was me it's just more like right you know what i mean like this is going to be really dope when i like actually i love that you know it's going to be really really dope when i get that
soccer team what i mean are you not thinking that back when you're waiting tables come on no no i'm not all right i understand back there what's up jack what's up brother what's up what's up all right you know some people here okay i love it okay okay so this is really fascinating
to me that even in this position you are kind of writing your narrative and you're looking at the hardship as the thing that's gonna make the victory that much sweeter that's incredible like mastery of your mind and self-awareness that in your thinking those things and look again i'm a visual guy i love
cinema right so not that this is what you're doing but i can visualize a young man like sweeping the floors or wiping down the tables but in his mind he's like i'm capable and i'm destined to be great and there's a lot more for this or for this person and this narrative is
that what you think about yeah definitely i mean i i mean like it would i i saw myself as a programmer and then i just so um i talk like i i have a whole chapter about this in the book about reinvention but you know basically it is if you want to become
something you have to basically believe that you are that thing and it's really important to not like qualify that like so to not say like i am an aspiring this you know what i mean because then that's what you are you're inspiring that like you just need to be that and then you
need to make your environment resonate with that belief so what i ended up having to do was go to all these different um like it was totally cool that i waited tables i could wait tables and still be a programmer at the same time that's that wasn't but i couldn't just wait tables
so i had to start going to user group meetings where a bunch of other programmers were and hanging out with programmers that's what programmers would do right so you know and also programmers would at the end of the day they would go home and they would hack for like another two hours because
that's what programmers do so i had to like i had to live that right and yes i was not thinking dude the soccer thing was like mind blowing i never thought that would happen like oh my mind was completely focused on i'm going to be a professional programmer and get paid for it
that that was right you know what i mean it took eight months to um to realize that externally but like i was i was there i love that i love what you're saying here i'm just i'm eating this stuff up so let me let me just uh kind of restate what you just
said there so first you have to believe that you're capable of doing something and saying i want to be that like you aspire to be is not good enough you just are and then you said you have to align your environment to match who you see yourself as becoming or who you are
so you're the programmer and programmers aren't wiping down tables they hang out with other geeky programmers now not to get into this part but this is a tangent here but you are not built like a programmer you don't look and act like a programmer so this is quite interesting so you are into
this other world programmers and then externally you're just waiting for that to catch up with the reality that's already in your mind yeah some powerful stuff yeah right it's like you see yourself winning the race you're just waiting for the race for the gun to go off and for you to be across
the finish line because you already see yourself there now it took a while to get there but you did it yeah and i'm not the only one just i mean this is like glorious how many humans have done this very same thing this is like this is our power yeah you know what
i mean this is our we just gotta like hold it in our mind's eye and then like actually move in accordance with it okay it's we have to move in accordance with it that's the that's the trick so i'm gonna put you on the spot if you don't mind i'm gonna ask you
what is the framework what is the framework your whatever how many steps process here i am i'm a young person or maybe i'm not so young i'm doing something i do not love and i want to escape this thing can you break it down for us just the way you've done it before
what i need to do to set my mind right and the steps i need to take to get to a place where i want to be yeah so so you have to start with an idea okay and then you have to believe the idea okay this is where most people fall you haven't
i can't do it i'm gonna i'm gonna inhabit some of the people that are watching right now all 500 people on youtube and 20 plus people on the pro pro group but i can't it's not for people like me the country i'm in or you know my my parents uh i didn't get
enough love i got too much love i got too much attention i didn't get enough attention whatever it was i just can't yeah and so it is all right i mean i can't i know i agree yeah i can't overcome the narrative you're telling yourself you you you're you're you are the most
powerful even if you don't think you are so so if you don't understand that that thing you're telling yourself is what will be like there's nothing i as an external person can do about this i can't i can't change that for you i can only tell you you're the most powerful person in
your world without a doubt and and whatever whatever you're telling yourself is exactly what it is exactly what you're going to be so if someone is saying i hear you but i hear you but you know if if that's where they are then and so it is you know sometimes like sometimes the
most important thing is to just put it back to the person you know what i mean like like not try to struggle with them but just sort of like let them say all that stuff and then say you know what you're exactly right you know and then where do we where do we
go from there because it's like then they then then they realize oh you mean you're not gonna like try to like convince me of something different no i'm not going to convince you of anything different i can't you're the boss right boss you must like this you must really no i don't like
this marcus i don't like this at all no no you do keep saying it dude you know and that's and that's it look i mean time after time if you ask anyone who's had a major shift in your life you know they'll tell you like either i hit a bottom and i knew
this was it or i heard something and i was finally ready to hear it yeah the way that it would resonate but it's never really about the external thing it's always about the person's readiness like when they're ready you know and um yeah that's that's that's kind of the thing you know what
i mean but that's okay that's the other thing that's okay these are all that's that's also why i like the hero's journey the hero's journey is not perfect right the beginning of the hero's journey is the guide says hey i want to i want to show you something like something really incredible and
the hero refuses that's the thing is the refusal of the call right so it's part of it like that's why i like i i don't want to demonize it i want to make it seem like i'm like i'm trying to uh say this person is less than you're still a hero even if
you refuse to call you'll eventually answer it you know like if like if it is to be you are eventually going to answer the call yeah so for the uninitiated what marcus is referring to is called the hero's journey or the monomyth the the hero with a thousand faces and it's written by
joseph campbell it's a concept that he he popularized many many years ago he perhaps i know his most famous student is george lucas and if you if you map this the story of star wars there's someone who there's a call to adventure and there's always the reviews of the call and i think
what marx is talking about right now is you want to be this thing and there are people all around you there are books and videos and people like marcus who are saying are you ready for the next step and you say no i don't believe that that's ready and that's just part of
the arc the struggle some people take a lot longer to jump on the starship and go into outer space and learn the force and some people just take a really really long time to get there but eventually you'll get there right yes eventually you'll get your journey yeah if if i'm if i'm
the guide i'm not supposed to try to like shake you into it you know i'm just supposed to be there when you're ready that's it now if you now recently become aware of this story structure you'll notice next time you watch a movie it's almost always the way there's there's some reason why
they changed their mind and marcus is like i can't find that reason for you you're going to find it yourself something i like to tell people too is that if you do think of your life as a story the beginning of your story was written and up into the certain point it was
kind of set in place how it ends is entirely up to you like we can't control who we're born to what we look like how tall or short we are with the skin color that we were born with and even the city in which we grew up in but the minute that you
have agency over your life the ability to say like i want to do this and i can manifest that into becoming that's the point in which your story is now penned by you and some of us feel like uh we're we're in this place and people don't like to hear this but they
they play the role the victim like i have no choice this is it so you're not ready to write that chapter just yet but you ultimately get to determine who you are and who you become okay now rachel black had this wonderful question which was uh marcus sounds crazy resilient so she's like
what inspires him now you guys may or may not know this about marcus but despite this wonderful kind of maybe like rags to riches story of overcoming some seemingly impossible odds you actually had a bout of depression in 2017 so i think her question maps that i would love for you for you
to share part of that story in your art yeah so i mean for for me the the connection to resilience is is purpose um you know and you you can go down a really really dark hole um and that's okay you know we we are are we we are we are resilient the
human body i mean you know is is a very resilient thing um and so ultimately the question is is your purpose big enough you know is your purpose you know great enough um my my children i was so lucky uh to be the dad of my two boys who are now 21 and
19. um but they have saved my life so many times over the last 20 years you know because they are largely my purpose and it's like even when i wanted to like really give up and just feel like it would be just a lot easier to do that it just really wasn't an
option you know um i had i had to do things for them so i was very fortunate that i had this like built-in purpose but i you know i would say it doesn't have to be children and you know there's so many things you can have as a purpose for for living and
for striving and for not giving up um purpose is is fuel you know what i mean it's uh it's like super fuel it really helps you get get through really difficult times i think having something else to live for besides yourself is really important not not always necessary but really important and i
notice the transformation that i had on my own journey when my sons were born and i was thinking whatever i used to say if i don't live that then that's what really these kids will see of me and i i try my best to set an example for them on how to live
and i tell them what to do so you watch dad and children are great observers of these things and if it's not in alignment with the things that i say what i do and say then you're sending them mixed signals and they can see the truth pretty quickly yes okay so rachel do
you have a follow-up question before i i call on um andrew to ask his question are you good with that great no yeah yeah that's perfect cool it's good to see you okay all right so um let's see here you you also mention um having some therapy work done in 2018 to deal
with some deep-seated trauma and and you talk about self-sabotaging and people don't realize this is and and i know you're familiar with these concepts everybody where you see somebody who has everything that they need to be successful the the talent the brains everything but for some reason they just keep sabotaging their own
success they show up late to meeting and and the the characters since we're talking about a lot of stories i think the character don draper and in mad men that series on amc good one he was fantastic at doing this this guy was riding to the top and then he got the biggest
deal ever and then he would just leave and not tell anybody so can you can you shed some light on that yeah um you know i think i think that trauma is a um trauma is always there always happening and really no no human being escapes it i think we're we're lucky to
live in this era where we have a much better understanding and respect of it you know um i think people in in past generations didn't really understand that the things that happened to you when you were small you know if they are dealt with can you know have a huge impact on how
you show up in the world for the rest of your life so we're really lucky and then i think also within within one's life if you're living in this time where you're lucky enough for trauma to be something that's that's better understood you don't really pay attention to trauma when you're young right
you know you're kind of just like muscling through things and hormones and you know i'm i'm 44 right so i mean uh you know when you talk about the depression and the therapy like i probably was like depressed before that you know but i was just like self-medicating because i just didn't you
know i wasn't mature enough you know once i hit 40 i've really just i can't really explain it but like just all this self-awareness started to settle in and and really more of a curiosity than anything where i would look at my tendencies like like before i would do something really stupid i
would like look at it and i would feel like so interesting that i want to do that thing you know whether i chose to do it or not i would just start looking at it and just be curious about like why do i want to do that it's really interesting like why do
i want to do that you know and and eventually you know i just started hitting these bottoms which were just they were they were self-determined bottoms like i probably could have kept going drinking i've been i've been sober for 19 months but like you know i probably could have just kept on going
drinking i probably just could have kept on going without therapy i probably could have kept on going without meditating that's just like just sucks just you know what i mean like i'm just like just miserable you know and like i'm miserable with like everything in the world you know i got like great
wife great kids cool businesses fun stuff you know like both my parents are alive like what am i complaining about but like still like thing you know things weren't right and it was all this internal stuff you know what i mean and then i started realizing oh yeah there was that thing that
happened to me you know what i mean like happened to me and nobody ever asked me if i was okay you know what i mean and have you shared what this trauma is or what i mean there's a bunch of different stuff but you know um i mean i so one of the
things i like decided when i decided like i was gonna like be healthy was that for the most part as long as it didn't hurt someone else i'm totally cool with being an open book there are some things i won't talk about because they would hurt other people and that's just not okay
but like you know in terms of like childhood stuff no i had to explain to some friends of mine the other day you know we were just talking about like racism stuff and i was just like you know i was a ten-year-old kid at my friend's house in canarsie you know maybe the
first time that like a grown man like called me the n-word and like yelled it at me and like scared me to death and like i had to like run to my friend's house and like i still like when i bring it up even though i've been through therapy like i still can
like replay it i mean um you know it's not the only thing but there are things like that you know what i mean there are things like that that that that happen um that happen to you like you didn't do anything and it just sort of happened to you and then it's like
on you like you have to like go through the forgiveness you have to break the cycle of like you know that trauma and not like relive it or not like play it out on somebody else but those are those are mature things like before you get there you're likely to like pass the
trauma on in some really unfortunate way to somebody else it's just like you know it's the human condition so you know again i feel like we're very fortunate to be living in this this time where as difficult as things are thank god we respect mental health and thank god we you know we've
mystified therapy and um you know it's just a better time it's a it's a time where where people can actually be healthy like unbelievable you know right and i i appreciate you doing that because there's a couple things i mean if you if you look at marcus and how he's built and he
seems like he's very fit as as what i can perceive to be as a powerful athletic man who's got a black belt in aikido and i i think you're doing bjj as well that for you as a healthy man to be able to talk about things like depression and therapy i i want
to be a champion for that because i want this to be the normal and not to be abnormal so that's that's why i went there okay so i i think we're going to take an opportunity here to bring on somebody else andrew um andrew you have a question hey how's it going hey
what's up andrew um you know on the related topic of like discipline and things like that uh what is something we can do every day to work towards being a great entrepreneur oh that's that's that's a great great question um you know honestly it's it's uh i mean the the answer is you
know show up and do your work every day right so so there's nothing really prescribed i i gave you the eight different concepts if you're if you're working on a business you know you may not get to all of them every single day but you know over the course of two weeks i
bet you you'll end up touching every aspect of them right you know what i mean you'll you'll be fine tuning what your purpose is in business you'll go through your financials you know you'll do your bookkeeping you'll run through your processes and and make sure that you've got good processes or you know
check your insurance you know you'll you'll be looking at the market doing competitive analysis that's your growth aspect you think about your your product um you know i think at the end of the day you're going to touch all of the aspects of your business and the only way you can get to
all of them is to like show up every day and like work on your business every single day so you know it's just cycles it's like anything else it's like how did i become a black belt in in hopkido i kept going to class you know what i mean like that there literally
is no other thing more important than showing up to class two to three times a week to becoming a black belt nothing because if you don't show up forget it you can't do the rolls you can't do the kicks you can't do that like you know i mean like if you don't show
up you can't do any of it so the best way to be a great entrepreneur is just keep doing it every single day show up work on your business every single day perfect okay i know you are familiar with jack so i'm gonna ask this question for him i know you guys can
have a private conversation after this based on your reaction to cena's face but he wanted to ask you what parallels do you see in sports and athletics to business because you're an investor and major league soccer team in nashville so real quick what do you what do you see there yeah okay that's
a fantastic question so um that's a fantastic question because i i see martial arts and intermittent fasting and working out every day as part of what makes me better than my competition in business so i see business as a sport i see the human body as being a machine that will perform at
anything you ask it to do at the level that you prepare it to do that for you and so the reality is that if you are in the free market you are competing end of story anyone who says they're they're in a business and they're not competing is completely delusional even if you're
competing with apathy or someone not caring enough about this thing to spend money on it you're competing right so to me i work out so that when i sit here and do this i'm clear-headed i've got the right energy i'm feeling good my dopamine is firing off you know what i mean and
i can and i can deliver the best possible presentation for you you know if i was like you know not working out you'd be able to tell you know what i mean it'd be like sluggish you know what i mean like i wouldn't feel powerful so um i think look i see business
as a sport i think if you want to be great at it you should take care of yourself you should sleep well you should eat well you should work out you should do whatever mindfulness practice you can do simply so that you can better control the thoughts as they come in and out
of your head um and then you have to practice back to andrew's question like how do you be a great entrepreneur how do you be a great soccer player well you show up to practice all the time right you know what i mean you kick a thousand you know goal kicks you know
what i mean like that's that's how you get good at that that one thing right so you know you send a thousand sales emails that's how you get at that one thing right fantastic okay we have one other person here that's gonna ask the question it's riyadh riyada you ready your mic's hot
yeah i'm ready can you hear me yes far away perfect um i'm gonna try to go back and take this discussion and challenge the state of mind that you guys have been discussing for the last few minutes which is being in the right place at the right time is a concept we cannot
totally factor out so do you imagine becoming who you are today if you didn't land that job and if not how would you elevate your chances so the whole being at the right place at the right time thing is a hindsight thing that you don't have any control over um and so i
basically see it as a total waste of time now now having having said that um generally speaking you don't want to be in a market where the thing you're trying to do is impossible okay you don't want to do that so you know you need to be in a place where it's possible
to get a technology job meaning there have to be technology companies there hiring people okay so there is there are some aspects of right place right time that are just market analysis right but in terms of like me knowing that i was waiting tables on the frist family that actually happened to be
related to the owner of healthstream which is the company that i got my job at and probably because i did a good job waiting tables on them that somehow factored into me getting that first job i had no idea you know but i'll tell you this i waited on every table like they
mattered i didn't do it so that somebody would say something cool behind the scenes that i'd end up getting a job i didn't do it for that reason but that's you never know what the moment's going to be so like it's your job to show up in every moment that you can ready
to give your absolute best performance i i do think people don't know how much of the right time stuff they can actually control you know what i mean um simply by showing up being focused and executing well like a lot of times people will say oh well if this hadn't happened like this
hadn't happened yet but the main ingredient was you you know what i mean and and how much you brought it and i'll tell you and i'll tell you why i kind of believe believe this because over the last 20 years i haven't done this one time i'm now going on like five times
doing this thing now like i'm about to do something else really big right now and it's not related to the other things that i've done you know what i'm saying and someone might look and say oh okay this but look let me just tell you right now like nobody when when i was
at emma nobody in nashville knew who i was nobody would have looked and been like oh that's going to be the guy that's going to help figure out how to you know launch the first tech accelerator in the southeast or that's the you know that's the guy's going to figure out how to
partner with some people and bring professional soccer to nashville nobody was going to say that about that guy you know what i mean and so and they're not even related things so that's why you really wouldn't say it nobody was going to say this computer programmer guy was going to do that thing
like you are more of an x factor than you know that's why i just kind of keep going back to the hero's journey it's like you gotta really don't underestimate the power of the mind uh you know it's it's pretty powerful when people want to lean in a negative direction it's like you
just give negative power power and that's you know that's and that is your power it is your power to do that so i will you know what i mean yeah you know whatever you're doing marcus whatever you're eating however you're practicing i like your energy it's like really good vibes right now because
usually at this point when somebody asks me that question i snap i'm like all right let me set you straight so i'm gonna play my old classic role here all right to show you the contrast between somebody who takes good care of their body their mind their spirit and their soul and some
degenerate like myself so here we go riyadh generally speaking i'm not saying you specifically but generally speaking when somebody asks that question about well you got to be at the right place the right time generally speaking what they're trying to do is attribute success to luck which is completely out of your control
and that's a theme that marcus was talking about is what's in your control and what's out of your control and you have to be wise enough to say the weather is out of your control this virus that's spreading is out of your control what happens in the marketplace generally speaking unless you're a
trillionaire or whatever is out of your control but everything else that is in your domain and what you have agency over is in your control and being at the right place at the right time in front of the right person is more the byproduct of your preparation than it is just luck from
the outside it's going to look like luck and allow me to take some liberties with mark as the story and he'll correct me if i'm wrong here but while he's waiting tables as the tech industry is just starting to take root especially of all places like nashville he had to prepare i don't
know six seven eight months of learning coding so that when that opportunity appeared he would be ready to answer the call you see when the herald comes and says marcus are you ready to go on this journey with me his bags were packed he already wrote his goodbye notes and he was ready
to go and i i i just one of these things and i have a strong allergic reaction to is you have to take ownership man at some point in your life when you're ready you got to just take ownership and say i'm going to be ready and you can see that most successful
people not all when that call came they were on it or they found the calling themselves and they said you know what i'm just gonna pack my bags there's no calling i'm just gonna go out into the unknown world and i'm just gonna explore something and who knows if anybody even needs it
so if he doesn't pick up the books if he doesn't start teaching himself if he quits halfway through when that job opening is there he tries to apply he's not qualified and it's just like that so if anything today if you guys can walk away with something from either one of us is
to walk away with this i this message of hope and to feel empowered to control or take control of the things that you have agency over and just take that step sooner than later hopefully because it gets a lot harder later yes okay all right here we go i'm almost out of time
with you marcus but you talked about this briefly and i think it's a good way for us to kind of wrap this up okay which is you you mentioned before about content creation and that's kind of the space that we're in so my ears parked up like right why double down on content
creation as a tech entrepreneur as an investor like that seems a little odd for somebody of your stature tell us about what content creation means for you and why you're double doubling down on it so i i i always try to frame up for people that technology has moved so fast that we
don't really appreciate what we have right um i was a friend of mine just said uh on on instagram it was the 13th anniversary of this like event that we threw in nashville called bar camp nashville where it was like the first time we bought like brought like the digital community together 13-year
anniversary and i had to remind like a couple of people you realize we threw that event and the iphone had only been around for two months the iphone is not 15 years old y'all okay so like why create content because this is unbelievable like are you kidding me have you seen the studio
that chris is building impossible 15 years ago you could have never ever ever done that you could you just couldn't do it just couldn't do it i have i have i have my own show monday through friday 12 central like the reason why my camera and my mic look good is because like
i just got a itty bitty studio i don't have a future studio but like i can this is unbelievable i pay 60 for att fiber and i get a gig up and down and i can broadcast to the world are you kidding me this is unbelievable like of course you should do it
of course you should do it like this is this is this is asset creation this is a way to use your time to create an asset that like will not it's not going to go down in value you're creating it out of thin air this is alchemy that that you know what we're
doing here like just if you're here just look at what the future is doing like this is really going to happen there's really going to be a billion people like educated on this platform and like that's incredible and there's no way the amount of money invested like is is is relative to to
that impact there's just no way so i just feel like uh we have these incredible tools and we don't value it and we're spending so much time consuming and not enough time creating on it and creating content if nothing else is just a wonderful practice to appreciate the capabilities that the internet has
has enabled for us and you can change people's lives with this stuff you know like you can change people's lives with this uh and what better thing to do in the middle of a global pandemic like help another person right your piece of content through a podcast through a video through a tweet
even i mean goodness gracious i just i i just struggle to think of a better thing to do right now than like put out incredible content thank you for saying that thank you so much okay uh jonah's not totally on the edit today because as you may have noticed i've been wiping my
face a couple of times jonah thank you very much it's like if you guys are noticing there's this natural sheen it's not because i'm hot and sweaty where i'm at because i've turned off the ac for this call it's it's like this new foundation glow that uh they're they've made for men no
i'm super sweaty right now so it's this episode is hot literally and figuratively you're getting a ton of love on in the chat there marcus so after the show is over you may want to peruse what they're saying uh to you on youtube some people are saying this is the best live stream
ever and i i want to thank you uh for for bringing it to straight fire i it's not realistic ladies and gentlemen that you could sit through marx's presentation and and absorb all that that's just too much so i highly recommend you guys go out and pick up his book it's called oh
what is it called again i don't even you know i'm a bad sales person hold on yeah hold up the bug please and tell people where they can get it create an orchestrate you can get it on amazon uh kindle paperback and i'm also selling signed copies at creativepower.com so yeah a shopify
store cause yeah the internet's incredible and you can like set up your own store and do your own thing like y'all wake up wake up you can do anything i published this book no publisher was gonna pay me to do this i just did it myself like you can do anything you want
it's like the world's incredible serious you know what i know you're you're 44 but you speak like a 22 year old i love it love the energy i love that you're pushing things and you're just finding boundaries and you're still what on your sixth venture and who knows what else is in store
for you so thank you very much for being on the show i also want to thank everybody all 512 of you that are here in the live stream and especially my future fam a little over 20 people made it through the live stream i hope you guys enjoy this okay so i'm gonna
cut to the slide now his name is marcus whitney and you guys can reach out to him on twitter at marcus whitney follow him there and on other social media channels you can go to marcuswhitney.com and find out everything else about him and the different things that he's doing jonah you got the
music ready did it give you enough time to get ready for this okay here we go guys don't forget to like comment and subscribe and hit the bell for notifications we'll see you around on the other side and also check it check out marcus on youtube he has a youtube channel he's done
ted talks and all that stuff thank you everybody for being part of our one billion mission to teach a billion people how to make a living doing what they love one b minus one thank you very much everybody that's it for me i'm out of here peace i blasted my ears oh my
god jonah on the timing and the volume on that are we still live unfortunately [Music] [Music]
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