Creating A Startup That Lasts

Dan Sullivan: Hi, everybody. This is Dan Sullivan and this is our next episode of the Free Zone Frontier with my great conversational partner, Steve Krein.
 
Steve Krein: Hi, Dan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Steve is in Upper West Side of Manhattan and I'm in Toronto in a basement. Probably both of us, it's fitting for us where we are.
 
Steve Krein: Exactly.
 
Dan Sullivan: But Steve, I thought we'd do a catch up because we're about four or five years into the Free Zone program in Strategic Coach. But the interesting thing is the Free Zone is where entrepreneurs have a Unique Ability in their company and they spot other companies that have Unique Ability that might be entrepreneurial companies or other type of companies. And you do a collaboration where the whole point isn't the money that's exchanged. It's the capability that's combined to create a greater capability. You have created an amazing global organization and I'm just wondering. And I haven't caught up with you because we've had guests in most of our shows where we're zeroing in on other Free Zone entrepreneurs, but I'm just wondering just as a first statement of a significant area where you've noticed this idea of collaboration actually bypasses a lot of normal problems that entrepreneurs think about in terms of "everything is competitive" and "you have to watch out for your competitors." And just take StartUp Health and say, "What is the essence of StartUp Health that would actually qualify not as competition, but as collaboration?"
 
Steve Krein: First of all, Dan, it's interesting even framing the look back in five-year increments. I think back a couple of decades now, 20-something years ago when I started Coach and how tuning into and becoming self-aware of your mindset and how you think about things, how you think about your thinking, was a novel concept. And I think for me, when I look back five years to the beginning of Free Zone, I think this self-awareness you opened up my eyes to at least was around the idea of collaboration as a way of living, the way of building, the way of creating new breakthroughs. And there's probably not an industry on the planet that had less collaboration, I think, than healthcare that requires collaboration to have any real meaningful success. It's incredible to me how siloed everyone is in healthcare.
 
When we launched StartUp Health in 2011, we said we want to inspire and educate and invest in a global army of entrepreneurs and innovators who are solving the biggest health challenges of our time. I didn't realize how unwelcome that concept would be in so many of the typical conversations in healthcare: when you talk to pharmaceutical companies, when you talk to insurance companies, when you talk to healthcare systems, when you talk to doctors, when you talk to even entrepreneurs that had spent any time building companies in the health space because it was almost laughable to think about people just putting down their sword, so to speak, or breaking down the way they had operated in the past and actually think about collaborating with other people.
 
It just seemed as though everybody was very secretive. Everything was protecting intellectual property, not sharing the common mission that they're on. Everyone was working in their own little silo. And we started talking about the idea of health moonshots as a way to catalyze that collaboration. And people thought, "Oh, that's just a big goal, a moonshot." It's saying you're going to land a man on the moon and bring him safely back. But when I started bringing in the concept to people around, "It's actually about collaboration." The moon landing was actually not just about a big goal. It was about a 400,000-person, 20,000-company collaboration where everybody's Unique Ability, every organization's Unique Ability could contribute to that one goal and that no one could do it alone. It, I think, broke open a decades-long view of health innovation, which is certain people, certain organizations, certain regions, certain countries had a monopoly on that innovation and the breakthrough, and it was going to come from a certain place. And they hadn't almost ever allowed themselves to think about what would happen if.
 
We talked about type 1 diabetes and we said, "How can we globally collaborate to prevent, manage, and cure type 1 diabetes?" We have one goal. We all share a common goal. Everybody's Unique Ability, whether you're an entrepreneur, whether you're an investor, whether you're a philanthropist, whether you're academia, whether you're an industry leader, whether at the industry you're on the payer side, or the provider side, or the pharmaceutical company side, everybody has a role in that one goal. Can we all just align and put that goal in the middle and figure out how we can contribute in our own unique way to doing that one thing? And by the way, give it enough time to get there. In other words, let us iterate our way there. But that idea of collaboration, it was novel, and that's batshit crazy that that was a novel concept to just have everybody—everybody—look at how they can contribute to that one goal. And it just wasn't happening.
 
It's now, I think as we're 10, 11, I guess 12 years into building StartUp Health where I think we've gotten enough momentum, traction. We have got 450 companies in 28 different countries. We've got partners, and funders, and collaborators now growing in this direction. And type 1 diabetes was really the newest moonshot we launched where I can say honestly we brought together people that have never worked together before to talk about a day where we can look back and say, "We actually cured type 1 diabetes. We prevented it. And if you have it already, it's managed in a way that was not even possible when everybody was working alone."
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I know that your brother is a doctor. You had a legal background. I mean, you went to law school. We had our fourth workshop yesterday in the Lifetime Extender, so we had people in. And it was interesting to just notice that in relationship to the healthcare system, it was just my observation both as patients, but also as the professionals who work in the healthcare system. There's three qualities that I've noticed over the years. One of them, they feel very isolated.
 
Patients feel very isolated, but what I've noticed is doctors feel very, very isolated. Number two, they're ignorant because there are new things happening at such a speeded up rate that the most knowledgeable person really only knows how ignorant they are. Steven Palter, who we know both, he's an IVF doctor from Long Island. And he said, "It's very, very exciting of the new things that are revealed to you each year as a specialist." But he said, "There's a counter side to it. The amount that you don't know goes up about 10 times every time there's a breakthrough." Okay. So they feel very ignorant. And the third thing is, they feel very insecure because it's an industry that gets whiplashed by, first of all, government, it gets whiplashed by lesser regulatory bodies. You have the professional medical organizations. You're operating in 28 different countries, and the government attitude toward the healthcare system is very, very different in the 28. And so there's legal, there's ethical issues, there's moral issues, and then there's financial.
 
No matter how big the budget is, it's not sufficient. It's not sufficient. There's always new things that you could spend on that you don't have the money to do it. So just reflect on that, I wonder if the whiplash effect doesn't even give them time to think about things like collaboration.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. All three of those contribute to this notion that it's hard to keep a transformative mindset. When you wake up every day, whether you're a physician, whether you're a researcher, whether you're in the industry, whether you're working in government. It's hard to keep the transformative mindset when you're surrounded by so much both molasses in terms of being able to make forward progress, but also this constant barrage of people that, quite frankly, the best way to describe it is "batteries not included" people who are draining any attempt at those breakthroughs that ultimately can help people. And I'm just going to come back to type 1 diabetes. We have an Alzheimer's moonshot, a type 1 diabetes moonshot, we also launched a health equity moonshot. When you start to have conversations about this, there is this incredible frustration that all the stakeholders have. And by the way, stakeholders, starting with the patients and the families and the people that are impacted the most. But also when you start to talk to funders, when you start to talk to entrepreneurs, everybody feels the weight of the three items you just mentioned: the isolation, the ignorance—blissful ignorance sometimes, and the insecurity. But it's hard to maintain that mindset, day in and day out, and protect yourself from that gravitational pull of what makes some people feel like it's impossible to truly make any impact.
 
So this idea that you could link arms with other people and other organizations only looking out maybe a couple decades now. Maybe it's a generational thing. A full generation is going to have to go through the change that we're not going to notice until we look back like 20 years from now or 25 years from now that it began with this sea swell of a mind shift change in how people are making sure that we break that isolation and start talking, bringing other people in who are like-minded and not letting those "batteries not included" people pull you down or stop you. Educate. I think education is a very big, very big part of the solution because the complexity, whether it's about the business models and how the money flows, or how the regulatory ... there's so much complexity. I don't think it's intended. Everyone thinks it's like an intended [inaudible]. It's just incredibly complex and complicated in a way that is exhausting. And so that drives that insecurity one that you mentioned, which is like it's hard to stay confident, and ambitious, and transformative when this is not just a bunch of people saying, "We're going to make a difference. You'll notice it tomorrow." You need to have a long-term view in order to actually feel good about waking up every day. And through impact-aligned collaboration, you can make that difference.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I just wonder. If you look at 12 years ago, you were starting to approach and enroll startup companies in your network, the startup network, and you were approaching funding sources to provide the capital to fund yourself and then also fund the coaching program. And what I'd like to do is, I'd like to apply, if you would measure progress of how people were isolated before they came into StartUp Health and what you notice now that they don't feel isolated. And then go on to ignorance and insecurity. Just measure the progress of what you've achieved in 12 years with a completely ... StartUp Health is a startup. You've created a startup. So if I took somebody, and you might think of an individual who felt very isolated and now is fully collaborative, who was ignorant and now feels very, very confident, and someone who's ... well, feels knowledgeable, and the person who felt very insecure and now they feel that there's a path that they're running on, there's a method to do it. Could you just describe the 12-year progress of StartUp Health using those three measurements?
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. Interestingly enough, the one thing that everybody is always inspired by is that the survivability of the startups, the ones that join StartUp Health and the ones that don't, are night and day. In other words, more companies navigate through the valleys of death of typical startups, which by the way, as you know, they're mostly, when you start up a company from scratch with very little capital and an idea in this sector, most companies don't make it. Those that join StartUp Health have the best chance and an increased chance, and it's visible in our numbers of surviving long enough to be able to figure out, gather the data, get the traction, and actually get to market. Commercialize and scale their innovation. And that valley of death that a lot of startups face is that transition from R&D, where they're just researching or they're learning and they have an idea, and getting into something that's becoming backable that can attract the capital and the customers and the people around it. So the survivability rate is over, at last count, 80-something percent. 82%. The survivability rate is off the charts. It's hard to wrap your head around.
 
Dan Sullivan: I don't know what the industry average is, but 8% would probably be high, right?
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. Oh, my God. Out of our first 100 companies ...We're now 450. Out of our first 100 companies, because we're investors in them as well. So we have a stake in the outcome here that's financial, not just the impact that we're trying to make. We call it the double bottom line where we're really trying to help them make the impact that they're trying to with their mission and what they're trying to help people, families, organizations do. But there's a financial stake. So we think there's a lot of alignment of incentives in a very positive way. In that first 100 companies, there have been two dozen acquisitions of those companies that now live in another organization that's bigger, that took the innovation and technology, acquired the talent, the technology, the IP, and it was a very good return for our investors and have, I believe, have measurable impact as a result of this.
 
Take two dozen off the table, and there's another 35 of our companies, 34 of our companies still active and growing in our portfolio. So now you're at over 50% are active and growing. And then there's about let's call it another 10 or 20% that haven't made it and didn't make it, but we learned a lot, they learned a lot. In some cases, became part of other companies in our portfolio. The talent moved around. But it's extraordinary when you look back and see such a strong sense of confidence that if you come into StartUp Health, you have an increased likelihood because you're not isolated, because you have access to resources, and people, and information, and wisdom, and even just peer support that you don't get if you're not part of it. We believe is a big reason why there's 80% of the companies over the last 12 years are still active in StartUp Health and have, I think in many cases, overcome the typical story of a startup, which is, "I started, I get funded" or "I started, I get funded for a little bit and then we die, and we shut it down and we move on." Because we do look at the long-term commitment of an entrepreneur, of a team as the single most important first question: "Are you all in, willing to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes, or are you kind of in a little bit, or are you half in and half out?" And what's interesting is we just see time and time again that that question about why they're starting that company, if it doesn't tie back to something personal that's happened to them—their mother, their father, their sister, their brother, their child—or an experience they've had that they can relate to, they're not going to be able to weather the storm of what they're up against. And that connection with other entrepreneurs, that connection to community, and then layer in the coaching and layer in the access and layer in those things. And we just think we can get more opportunities to bring innovation to people if they're joining a community and they're part of an ecosystem that other people have a shared ambition and a shared mindset. It's impossible to look at together or alone and not see that together is going to give you a much better chance of succeeding and the impact you're trying to...
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. That's the isolation. So let's go on to the ignorance. I've been a startup myself, and there's many different territories of ignorance that you go through. But what would you say typically is the ignorance that falls away quickest as they're in your community and that you're creating a community-wide capability that they never had when they were isolated. But where's the area of ignorance that they have that is most crucial that they get rid of it if they're going to be successful?
 
Steve Krein: I think I learned this, Dan, from you early on, which is there's entrepreneurs who are coachable and open to learning and understand the idea of lifelong learning and then there are those that are not yet there. And I always say "yet there" because I think some entrepreneurs it takes time and they get there. I'm an optimist. I believe that whether you want to do it now, you want to do it later, if you're not willing to learn and by the way, be coached, coachable, and be open to what you can learn by talking to other people, by participating in workshops, and peer circles, and office hours, and those things, then that very simple question of, "Are you coachable or are you not?" is a very, I think, important one. If you're coachable, the idea that we have laid out a road map, the three levels that you need to achieve a moonshot, that you need to, at the very early stage, go just from that idea into building a seed foundation and become backable.
 
It's all about the team—small team—and the founders. It's that laying the groundwork of a pathway to just going and saying, "We can help you get started. And organize your thinking and make sure that your mission is a long-term vision, but yet you have short-term goals. Make sure that you understand the power of your mindset and attracting the resources that you need. Make sure that you're setting up the company and are going to be able to have something that's backable." And I say backable by investors, by philanthropists, by customers. I mean, there's an idea that you— Because I do think in healthcare, they want to make sure they're getting involved with an organization that's going to be there and that has the right team. So building that foundational team is step one of achieving the moonshot, and getting to that next level is a ceiling a lot of entrepreneurs don't even know how to approach.
 
So we've kind of said step one is becoming backable at the seed stage and then you need to stay backable. And at the next level, it's about building a company and a brand that's credible, that people trust, that people want to work with, that people want to collaborate with. And giving them that framework that there's one level that's just about your team and your founders, and another level about your company and your brand is the pathway to that third level, which is about growth. And that's where you're really scaling and making the impact that you're trying to make. And so just laying out a framework of three levels and showing them that not only ... First of all, we've done it ourselves. We know—
 
Dan Sullivan: The interesting thing is that you have the experience of completing the journey from startup back in the 1990s with the dot-com, your advertising platform. And one of the few people I knew that had a sense of timing when to sell. It funded your investigations of all sorts of other things. But the StartUp Health itself is a startup.
 
Steve Krein: Absolutely.
 
Dan Sullivan: So you yourself are going through the three stages.
 
Steve Krein: From the very beginning, we knew that we wanted to build two things. One is this academy for educating entrepreneurs and connecting them together in a community-driven experience that leveraged the power of the network of information, of relationships, of experiences. And then we wanted to put a fund next to it so that we could back the companies at the seed stage and then beyond to really connect the dots because there is a real lack of those two things together where investors will roll up their sleeves and not say, "I'm going to sit on your board and control your company." We don't sit on boards, we don't lead rounds or [inaudible]. We're just collaborating and educating. We'll put skin in the game with you because we want to help bring other investors in our network and our partners in. And the idea that we are operators ourselves, we are entrepreneurs ourselves, our team is made up of a lot of entrepreneurs and people involved in the entire journey that entrepreneurs go through, but we've been there, done that.
 
So we lay out this three-part framework of seed stage, early stage, and growth stage, and we're with you along the entire journey. And that's a big confidence boost. That you are not only not isolated anymore, but we're going to help educate and bring together. Not educate like pass this knowledge down to you. It's a community-driven education. People are helping each other, teaching each other, learning together in that. And that's pretty big. To say we're all trying to achieve this moonshot, but we all might be at different stages of the journey. Some might be at the very beginning, some might be in the middle, some might be really at scale. But the fact that we've got a single global community where there are seed stage companies, early stage companies, growth stage companies. We've got companies not generating revenue and companies doing a billion dollars in sales. So think of that wide community and saying, "We're not isolating everybody. These are bringing everybody together to talk about what is working, what is not working, or what worked and what didn't work, who's helpful and who's not helpful." Again, we're in it long-term and we're not taking a transactional approach to this. And so that idea of removing ignorance or lack of education or lack of understanding about everything from business models, to journeys, to mindset, to [inaudible] is a game changer.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I'd like to complete the insecurity stage first, but I've got a example that I haven't shared with you. It's someone new who's come into the Program at the Signature level and he's in the Mayo Clinic network. He's very, very innovative and in his 40s, name is Tim Nelson. And I met him on the Longevity Trip with Peter Diamandis in August. We were going from San Francisco down to San Diego. It was sort of an instant connection when I met him. So he has just gotten FDA approval, final stage approval to take a breakthrough in pediatric cardiology actually. And it has to do with one out of 100 babies are born with not enough muscle strength in their heart to actually survive. The prognosis is about five years, that they'll be dead within five years after they're born. It's a very, very interesting thing. He's got a very interesting model. And I think it's the only case I've ever come that he's actually Free Zone from the beginning. I've never seen anyone who's got a Free Zone model right from the beginning. And I told him this and I had put him in touch with Keegan Caldwell. And we've had Keegan on our podcast series.
 
Keegan and Strategic Coach are creating a brand new collaborative program of very, very quickly identifying every bit of intellectual property you have, getting it protected government-wise, and then getting it assessed as actual financial assets that go into your company. But I'd like to bring that up in episode number two this morning as we're doing this because it seems to me that you're doing on a large scale what Tim had to do on his own. That you're actually creating a learning community. And more and more, I believe that intelligence, real intelligence among human beings isn't what your individual brain does. It's how your individual brain accesses the brains of other people.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. And when I go back to the beginning of my commentary, this idea that we build a global army of entrepreneurs and innovators that are collaborating to solve the world's biggest health problems or solve the biggest health challenges of our time. The idea that nobody has all of the things that are needed to make the impact we're trying to make. People are like, "Someone is going to cure cancer." And the reality is— You could look at the vaccine, although it's, I know, a politically-charged topic, but that was the ultimate of collaborations. It was 30 years in research and development in academia, and by the way, had many, many valleys of death that it survived and navigated through. And it wasn't until about 12 years ago or 13 years ago that venture capitalists looked at this and this mRNA idea of, "Can we?" and "Is there something here to fund and back?" And so it transitions into something where it becomes a backable company now. But after decades of research and collaboration and lots of different researchers and institutions working on the technology that would be the underpinning of it.
 
And then it becomes this startup, a couple of startups, but it goes through another decade of collaboration, and navigation, and testing, and all kinds of things until this alignment of you've got startups like biotech and Moderna, you've got big pharma like Pfizer getting involved. You've got government getting invol— And it was this idea that everybody had to participate to make that seemingly one thing happened. But you have to realize nothing in healthcare can happen with one type of player, or one person, or one organization. So it requires that. And therefore, what kind of security can you have if you're siloed? And what kind of confidence can you have if you're ignorant about what you don't know? And so this idea that you need to break through that isolation with collaboration, you need to get educated so you're not ignorant. Especially when, as you mentioned, breakthrough innovations coming so fast. And the last piece is making sure that that whiplash that you talk about is kind of settled down and that it's not whiplash. It's actually just becoming confident that you know where all the gotchas are, where all the problems are. And we all talk about how over maybe years, maybe decades, we're going to get to that place where there is collaboration, there is education, and there's confidence about the things that are needed to cure diabetes, type 1 diabetes, and isolate it down to that.
 
Dan Sullivan: If I can just recap, it seems to me that what's lacking in the education for ... And I would say this is the difference between academic knowledge and marketplace knowledge. This is a little side note, but I was recounting because an incident happened that I found very unusual in one of the classes that somebody, an entrepreneur, very, very successful entrepreneur, but makes a point about where they went to university. I was trying to recount if I had ever come across that before in 33 years of having the Program. And I'm sure there are Harvard graduates in the Program or MIT graduates in the Program and everything else, but they never state this as being important to their entrepreneurial success. So they don't bring it up as a topic. But this person goes on and constantly brings up that they had experience at a particular university and—
 
Steve Krein: Insecurity.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, yeah. And I think that the knowledge, if we're taking the isolation that in fact in the academic world, you're very, very isolated because it was incredibly competitive. You ... Starting 12 years before you get to graduate school, you had to compete at each stage of the way. So it tends to drive people toward rugged individualism isolation. And you're always wondering, "Is that person getting ahead of me? Is it going to come down to that person and me for the next thing?" And I think entrepreneurism, even at its most competitive stage, they're learning street smarts from each other. And it seems to me that what you've supplied to a very significant innovative sector of the medical ... And I started calling it regenerative medicine because I think the goal for everything now is regenerative medicine, and regenerative related to diabetes, regenerative related to cancer, regenerative related to Alzheimer's and everything. Regenerative seems to be the meme that's out there right now. But even at their most fiercely competitive, I think entrepreneurs are more collaborative than people who aren't in the entrepreneurial marketplace. Even the person we're competing most, we value what that person has gone through.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. I do think there's a subset of entrepreneurs that aren't and don't. They're screened out from the beginning. It's interesting. I've seen entrepreneurs negatively impacted mindset-wise by operating in the healthcare space because of the ... there's "batteries not included" energy forces, people and organizations that they work with. So the idea that we bring entrepreneurs back every quarter. I learn that from you, Dan. The idea of quarterly workshops. The idea that we have monthly peer circles, like YPO forums. We have weekly office hours. It's coming back and recharging and recalibrating. I knew that was important, but I think I didn't appreciate even until recently how there is a distinct difference between those entrepreneurs that plug in to the community, to the network, to the program on a regular basis, almost habitually. Quarterly, monthly, weekly. Not every week, but every month and every quarter so that they can recalibrate and learn.
 
Sometimes it's just learning that you're off. Your thinking is off. You've been affected or impacted. And I don't think it's that different than the charging stations. I was going to pick up my car the other day from the parking lot, and they've added a few more of the electric plugins for the Teslas and the electric vehicles. And it pulses green. And when you plug it in, red when you first plug it in. It's like charging your car.
 
But what's fascinating, and I think this is just metaphorically interesting, is we know more about our cars—not just through the software, but through this idea that you got to plug it in because how much time you have—than we do about ourselves. And it's almost like we should have an alert system to say, "You got to plug in to StartUp Health in the community or your peers or whatever." Because I do think that one of the things that literally defines success and failure in the healthcare space ... It does across all sectors, but in healthcare, it's like the difference between if we're going to cure diabetes or Alzheimer's disease or youth mental health, which is one of the big new challenges I think COVID accelerated the impact of, it's going to require entrepreneurs to lead by example that we need to plug in. But we need to be a part of those conversations. And I think forcing our way into the conversations with payers, providers, pharmaceutical companies, industry, academia, it wasn't like we were a welcome guest. They didn't look at entrepreneurs that way. But I do believe that entrepreneurial spirit, that entrepreneurial mindset, that entrepreneurial collaboration is the game-changing ingredient in all of this.
 
Dan Sullivan: But it seems to me that you've added the street smart. Something I always said to people who were in the professions ... I noticed that entrepreneurs who were in a particular type of product industry or service industry were easier to coach than the people who came through the professions. They were doctors, they were lawyers, they were accountants, engineers, architects. And I said, "The truth is, you're just a highly paid industrial worker." And I would say to them, "You're just paid above average, but you're actually an industrial worker." So I said, "One of the big breakthroughs you have to have is that you're actually an entrepreneur with a specialty in law. You're an entrepreneur with a specialty in medicine. You're an entrepreneur with a specialty in architecture." And I said, "That goes for every other entrepreneur. They're an entrepreneur with a specialty in renovating garages. They're an entrepreneur with a specialty of any other entrepreneurial specialty. But the key thing is that you're an entrepreneur." And I think what you've done is you've pioneered entrepreneurism on a scale as part of the education of people who are entrepreneurs and have a specialty in medicine. That's what I think you've pulled off here. There's never been an entrepreneurial approach to medicine.
 
Steve Krein: It's actually the opposite, Dan. It's almost like if they had any entrepreneurial ambition, it was stripped out in medical school, or in residency, or in fellowship.
 
Dan Sullivan: Or they became chiropractors or acupuncturists.
 
Steve Krein: One of the most exciting parts of our community is that about a third of the founding teams have doctors—we call them "doctrepreneurs" or "clinical entrepreneurs" that have defied that gravitational pull. That being in this industry and being in this sector and operating with this kind of engine running, if you will, kind of strips out of them. And I don't think they go backwards. I think once you become an entrepreneur and you're a doctor or in any clinical capacity serving patients, there's actually a pretty Unique Ability there because you kind of have the knowledge of medicine, you have the knowledge of science. But if you can successfully wear the hat of an entrepreneur—and like you said, being an entrepreneur who happens to practice medicine—you have a greater likelihood of building a team around you or being a part of a team, I should say, that makes the most progress because I also see, by the way, on the flip side, where there is no representation on the clinical side or the academic side by those kinds of people. Sometimes they ... Entrepreneurs are blissfully ignorant about things that may get stopped along the way because they lack that skillset and Unique Ability on their team.
 
Dan Sullivan: Okay. So what have you learned from our discussion? It hadn't occurred to you or lined it up in your head in the way that you're seeing it now?
 
Steve Krein: I always love your questions that make me appreciate the novelty and how unique this approach is. I get up every day and ... We're in a world where we're immersed in these conversations with all these different people. And so it's a great step back and reflect on the progress. The Gap And The Gain comes to mind when you think about ... we have made a lot of progress. We've got a long way to go, but we've made a lot of progress. And not every day feels that way, but I think it's a great reminder, just your questions that this needs to be explained and articulated and identify that the building blocks of a model that is going to transform medicine and healthcare and impact people's lives because we're doing this in a very thoughtful way and in a very informed way, and most importantly, doing it together. So it's great to step back. What'd you learn?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, the big thing that I learned—because I'm looking at the impact that Free Zone entrepreneurs seem to be having on their respective industries—what I'm seeing is that all industries after a while become very calcified. They become very bureaucratic. And that this actually lowers the value creation of a particular industry. And as a single entrepreneur, you can't buck up against that. You're a speedboat trying to cut off an ocean liner. There's just a lot of momentum and inertia that's going in a particular direction. But the thing is that if you create a community of speedboats, then it's a different story. The thing about it is that you can't really be an effective entrepreneur until you give up the solitariness of your life path. Okay. There's a wonderful set of books. He's really interesting. His name is Joe Henrich. He's tenured at four universities. Two of them are Harvard and Notre Dame, and his two main specialties were aeronautical engineering and anthropology. You put those two together and you say, "Oh, yes. The secret of our success." Yeah. So the thing about him is, he said that why humans, who aren't the strongest creature, they're not the fastest creature, we can't fly naturally, we can't swim very well, and yet we dominate all the other species. Why is it?
 
And he said, "There was a crossover." And he gives a timeline to it, which is ... I've not heard it before. He says, "We can see evidence of the crossover starting about a million years ago in what looked like human creatures back then." And he said, at some point, somebody got the idea that intelligence is not an individual thing. Intelligence is a group thing. And that the moment you start down that path, there's no obstacles to growth. It just scales really, really fast once a community gets the idea that we're incredibly smarter together than we are individually.
 
Steve Krein: Love it.
 
Dan Sullivan: And so what I'm saying is, you've caught the spirit and you're doing it in your particular way. I've caught the spirit and I'm doing it in a particular other way. And what I notice is the unease of a lot of entrepreneurs, who are very successful entrepreneurs, to come into the Free Zone. They've gone through Signature, they've gone through 10x, they have a Self-Managing Company, they have a Self-Multiplying Company. And what I notice is that we're kind of drug dealers here, Steve. And that is, we only have to get them to take the first free sample. Then the drug itself does all the selling from then on. That once people get that taste of what it's like to actually use your intelligence to access someone else's intelligence, I think there's no going back.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. You're either a collaborator or you're not. And once you get the taste, it is close to impossible to unsee or unfeel what you experience when you attend a workshop, a session, a call where you realize that you can accelerate in your knowledge, your thinking, and your experience. And that it is, I think, impossible— It was impossible to land the man on the moon and bring him safely back if it was just one organization doing it all.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Which it was with the competitor, really.
 
Steve Krein: Yep. Exactly. Well, this was great, Dan. We'll wrap up and do another session?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I would love to do that. But I want to bring a simple case to you and have you take it apart. And then I'm going to introduce him because he's not even started in the Signature level yet. He starts on December 13. But it's an interesting story and I spotted him right away. Your eyes only see and your ears only hear what your brain is looking for. I got talking to him, and I basically told him his future. And he said, "You're the first person I've ever talked to who totally understands what I'm trying to do." And I said, "Well, there's a lot of help out there if you get clear about what you're actually doing." So we'll do that in the next session of Free Zone Frontier.
 
Steve Krein: Excellent. I always love my time with you, Dan. Speak soon.