Welcome to the Growth Stacking Podcast. This is Dan Martel.

I spent over 100 hours with four billionaires and here's what I learned.

The first one is Mark Cubit. I first met Mark, long story, but I decided to cold email a bunch of billionaires when I was in my 20s.

And I was asking these questions like, you know, should you focus on your network, what you know or your grit? Obviously, most of them didn't reply. But Mark actually replied back then and he said, doing all three, well, everybody's trying to pick one. And I remember just how like, that's crazy. A billionaire replied to me. And it wasn't until a decade later, I was building a company called Clarity, and we were on a site called Angelis, and Naval, the founder, pushed it to all of the

members. And Mark was obviously on there. We started an email exchange. He asked questions about the

product and the vision and the roadmap and the team and all these things. And after about 13 or 14

email replies,

he said, I'm in for a quarter million bucks. So a few things I want to share. Number one, he loves

the art of the deal. If you've seen him on Shark Tank, you can tell that he loves the entrepreneurial

journey, the spirit. He also absolutely loves the entrepreneurial game, the strategy, the tactics, the different ways you can

enter a market. How can you position the product? 100% of the time, when I sent an investor

update email, he always replied. And then finally, you have to have the drive. You've got to

want to grow. You have to have a desire. You have to be engaged in the game of business and have that level of drive. That's what Mark taught me. The second billionaire is Richard Branson. This is such a crazy story. I want you to understand. I grew up in a small town in Eastern Canada. The fact that I got an opportunity to spend a week with him at his home in Switzerland still blows my mind. A few years prior,

I helped this guy out who had a startup and he appreciated so much that he ended up raising from

Richard and Richard was going on vacation to his place in Switzerland and asked him to invite

people that he thought Richard might find interesting. And I got the email. And honestly, I was

looking at this. Like, is this an April Fool's joke? Like, is this this real and it wasn't until I was sitting in the living room and richard walked out

that my brain allowed me to believe oh my gosh this is happening tim ferris was there Brian johnson

from the biohacker blueprint the co-founder of stripe so many incredible entrepreneurs and then then me, Dan Martel. I was like,

okay, I better show up, ask great questions, and just be generally helpful to everybody there.

Three core things. One was watching him interact with his executive assistant, Helen. I've talked

about this several times. I wrote about him in my book, Buy Back Your Time, but there was just something

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