Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - How to Build & Implement Systems to Grow Your Business w/ Francis Pedraza | EP #106

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

In this episode, Peter and Francis discuss the making of Invisible Technologies, how leadership philosophies can change the outcome, and worldwide talent acquisition.  03:34 | The Rise of Invisible Companies 24:59 | A Fairer Model for Companies 54:40 | Essential Books for Entrepreneurs Francis Pedraza is an entrepreneur and thought leader, best known as the co-founder and CEO of Invisible Technologies, which leverages human and artificial intelligence to provide scalable business solutions. Under his leadership, Invisible has raised significant funding ($6.6M) with an annual revenue of $336M. Before Invisible, he held internships at Google, served as an advisor at Numeria, and founded Everest, a startup focused on helping people achieve their personal goals through social network platforms.  Learn more about Invisible here: https://www.invisible.co/  ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:  Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter  _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://bit.ly/48Hv1j6  I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The world is run by these 20th century services giants and for whatever reason venture capitalists Silicon Valley the technology industry is not counter positioning against them. If you're getting ready to start your company if you're the CEO of an existing company if you're looking at scaling I want you to hear what Francis has to say because it will have you pause on what you're doing and look at your company and your vision and your plan in a completely different way. Do you have a company culture where the resolve, the commitments, the mission is so high

that everyone had to enter ramen mode if you couldn't pay them and they just had to go on the equity and you were just giving them stock, the stock that you would otherwise give investors? How many people at your team would stay? Welcome to Moonshots. We're about to dive into an extraordinary conversation with Francis Pedreza. He is the CEO of Invisible Technologies. Invisible has gone from near zero revenue to almost $300 million in just four years, an extraordinary growth and

Francis's customers none other than open AI the top banks door- extraordinary companies that are using invisible to help scale their processes if you're at the beginning of your journey and you want a mechanism to operationalize use AI use automation invisible as a company for you, but what we're going to be discussing here is Francis's philosophy as a founder CEO. The decisions he made on where to raise capital and not raise capital, how to hire amazing people and make them partners. This is a master class on a different way of being an entrepreneur

and succeeding in the process at extraordinary speed. Please take notes, listen up. Excited for you to use these approaches in your moonshots. All right, let's dive into Francis Pedresa, the CEO of Invisible Technologies. Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with a friend now for the last 15 years, Francis Pedrezza. Francis, good to see you buddy. Peter, thanks for taking the time. Yeah, we're in for a conversation around a different level of entrepreneurship. I think a master class in being a Moonshot entrepreneur and if you're getting ready to start your company, if you're the CEO of an existing company, if you're looking at scaling, I want you to hear what Francis has to say because it will have you pause on what you're doing and look

at your company and your vision and your plan in a completely different way. Now, Francis, I hope I'm not over promising here, but I love what you're doing and you've taken a completely different strategy than most entrepreneurs. And perhaps it has to do with your background as a philosopher. I'm gonna call you not a philosopher king, but a philosopher entrepreneur.

Let's kick it off first with at the top level, what is Invisible? And then I want to dive into how it's different, how your philosophy of building this moonshot company is different than most everybody else out there and the lessons you've learned because they're worth writing down if you're taking notes during this podcast. So kick it off. Tell us about what Invisible is. Invisible is operations as a service. So we make it easy for companies to delegate core business processes that they use to run

their business. And the biggest company in the world that does this is Accenture. They have almost a million people, Peter. They're a third the size of the US military, which is the biggest organization on the planet. And they do $63 billion of annual revenue. And the industry is called business process outsourcing, BPO, business process outsourcing. And Accenture is not a technology company. They do not run all of their operations on a single platform

and they bill by the hour. So their incentive is to bill as many hours as possible without getting fired. And so they're the blockbuster that we're trying to Netflix. They're the Lockheed Martin that we're trying to SpaceX. And there's a three prong disruption. The first is pricing. We do results based or or value-based pricing wherever we can. So I'll tell you some examples. Insurance company came to us, was one of our first big clients, and they said, hey, can you run our claims processing? Can you run underwriting checks?

And it was price per claim process, price per check passed. Then DoorDash came to us during the pandemic and had said, hey, can you digitize every restaurant menu in the United States and help us launch in Germany and Japan? And it was a price per menu digitized. And OpenAI came to us the beginning of 2022 saying, hey, you know, we have swallowed the entire internet, but GPT is hallucinating.

How do we improve quality? And we came up with ways of hiring PhDs and masters to train GPT to do that, and it was a price per conversation train. And that alignment of incentives means that better, faster, and cheaper is good. It's in everybody's interest. It's a win-win. And that creates the alignment with the client and the alignment with technology itself. And then the second prong of disruption is technology. So reusable processes are reusable rockets. So SpaceX was able to disrupt Lockheed Martin because Lockheed Martin was billing, you know,

cost plus. And so their incentive was to just build NASA and the Air Force a ton of hours. And SpaceX said, what if we charge for the launch itself and price per launch, results based pricing? And they were, they then had to vertically integrate. And I just toured, you know, in LA, they have 38 hangar bays and they're actually manufacturing starships in Los Angeles. That approach gave them a series of technological advantages. We have built a similar thing. We call it our digital assembly line. You got to imagine Henry Ford about 100 years ago was thinking about how to do mass production to make the first automotives. That is the same approach we're doing for knowledge work.

So we break down our clients' processes into steps, like Legos. And we've integrated 300 third-party AI and automation tools into a process builder. So when we take our clients' processes and we break them into these steps, we can automate as much of those processes as possible with all the tools that are out there.

We have our own AI and automation team, but you can't automate every single step in a process. To do complex work, you got to be able to plug in humans to do the stuff computers still can't do. So we have over 3,000 people now in over 100 countries around the world, including PhDs and masters that we can plug in to do the remaining steps. And that allows us to deliver an end-to-end solution that is like ops as a service. And that's the technology advantage.

And then the final advantage, Peter, is culture. That's the third prong of the disruption, which is that we're 70% owned by our team. And so in our company culture, we don't act like employees. We act like partners, and we call each other partners. And at the end of every month, we're looking at the income statement, the balance sheet, the cash flows. Everyone is able to ask each other, what's the strategy? What's the ROI?

How do we do better? And that creates a kind of sense of urgency about how to move the needle on the stock price, how to make the company better all the time. That sense of camaraderie is often missing in mega corporations. It's a rebel alliance culture versus the galactic empire of 20th century services companies. I love it. It's it it's been extraordinary growth Right. You started the company in 2015 is that correct? That's right

I've known you for a bit of time and it wasn't really I mean you iterated a little bit and it's been you hit a formula That's been extraordinarily successful. When did you hit that stride you think? Yeah Well, one of the things I, one of the reasons I trust you so much, Peter, is that, you know, your loyalty saw me through my first business failure. I started a company right out of college, you were an advisor to it, it was called Everest. And we had a half a million people download it, it was an iPhone app to help people achieve personal goals. Apple

featured it a lot. It was a beautiful pure software product, but it didn't have a business model that was profitable. And so the company ultimately failed and I learned a lesson. And then I started Invisible. And the first version of Invisible, there was a ton of clients and they were willing to pay us a lot, but we weren't able to supply that demand efficiently. And so that version failed. And we had to evolve through that. And then we built the first version of the digital assembly line. We relaunched in 2017 with that.

And then we had our first small businesses as clients. And we got our first medium-sized businesses as clients. We got our first enterprise contract in January, 2020 with DoorDash. And then at that point, I was, I don't know how old I was at the time, maybe 30 years old, right? So I'd been through a decade of pain. I call it the journey through hell. It really is a test of fate. And then since then, since January 2020, we grew from a one mil run rate to about a three mil run rate that year, we grew from a one mil run rate to about a three mil

run rate that year. We grew from a three mil run rate to about a 10 mil run rate the following year. We grew from that to a 25 mil run rate the following year, then a hundred mil run rate the end of last year. And we're shooting for 200 by June next month. And by the end of the year, we could be at 300. So that is just- That's epic.

It is kind of deeply humbling. And to see, first of all, it's several things, right? I personally, and I don't think anyone at the company would say, you know, we did this through our own genius and our own strength. I think that that's the sort of hubris and arrogance that gets you punished, right? But certainly there was a ton of perseverance and team building and great values that went into it. There was also, when you have a strong strategic thesis that you've worked out in writing

and you've asked the smartest minds you know to tear it apart and you know all the ways in which it might not be true, but you still take a big bet. It's incredible to see when you're right how right you can be and how that plays out. And then there is this element of luck, which is kind of miraculous. Some of our biggest clients came to us through seemingly random circumstances. There was one story where I went through a breakup, I was staying in a friend's, with a friend in his guest room, and then the next

person, he ended up listening to me on Zoom calls and investing, and then the next person who stayed in that guest room was a product manager at OpenAI, and then they became a client. So those things, nobody can take credit for it. They're miraculous. But then what do you do with the luck? Are you prepared for it? First of all, I think any entrepreneur listening to this is saying, wow, I mean, that is epic growth.

I mean, you hit your stride in the 2020 and this last four years has been extraordinary. And I want to break it down. I want to talk about what Invisible does because it's an amazing asset for companies out there. But I think the lessons that you can teach are really what I want to deliver to this community here. A lot of them. So let's begin with number one, capitalize in company. You have a different philosophy on raising money. I mean, most, you know, listen, I'm in the venture capital

business through Bold and Expensial Ventures and I have raised a ton of money but my experience in a lot of the big companies that I've gone out to raise money for is I raise capital, raise capital, raise capital, and I end up with, you know, single digit percent of the company I started and owned 100% of. And it's brutal at the end of that. There's one exception with one company that I just, you know, I maintained 100% and I built it based upon revenue. It's like sold first and then built based upon the revenue I had. Can you talk about your philosophy on raising capital and what you've done with Invisible? We call our philosophy the sovereignty game and it's the venture game versus the sovereignty

game. So the venture game, which most people in Silicon Valley are familiar with, is you raise a Series A, then a Series B, then a Series C, and you try to IPO or sell the company in five to eight years. With all that capital, you try to grow as fast as possible. You're losing money to grow and take market share, and it's a winner-take-all strategy. Your favorite website is TechCrunch.com. The company culture is very caffeinated, right?

It's like, how do we do this as quickly as possible? And you're shooting for this big exit. And you know that if you don't raise the next round, you might actually go bust because it's a loss-making company. So it's very fragile. You really need to kind of get very lucky. You're dependent on capital markets to agree with you. And you pretty quickly lose control of your board because these people writing big checks are taking board seats. And so usually by the series A or B, you no longer have real control of your company. That's the venture game. The sovereignty game is raise as little capital as possible to get to profitability at scale. We call that escape velocity. And escape velocity

as different levels. So level negative one, you're losing money, you're burning money. Zero is break even. One is you're making money, but not enough money to really optimally reinvest in the company. Level two is you're making enough money to optimally reinvest in the company and it's compounding and growing. Level three is you're generating capital, but not enough to allocate meaningfully. And level four is you actually are now generating enough capital to allocate, and you're a capital allocator and you're compounding.

And the time horizon is very long in the sovereignty game. You're shooting for 20 plus years. And so because you've done it capital efficiently, in our case, with $6 million in six years, we got to an $11 million revenue run rate generating a million dollars of profit. And after that, we were able to just use that profit to keep growing the business.

And we're now at 25% EBITDA margins. So we're shooting for, you know, at least a 60 million EBITDA exit run rate for the year, if not higher. So that means that we're, you know, and next year, if we hit our targets, we'll generate over 100 million of EBITDA. So we're making a lot of profit per month.

And that allows us to fuel innovation in the business, to reinvest in the business, to start new companies, to invest in companies, and someday it allows us to buy companies. And that's what capital allocators do. There's eight buckets in capital allocation. You can either keep the cash on balance sheet as insurance for a rainy day.

You can pay off any debt that you've raised. You can reinvest in your business. capital allocation, you can either keep the cash on balance sheet as insurance for a rainy day. You can pay off any debt that you've raised. You can reinvest in your business. You can start new businesses. You can invest in businesses. You can buy businesses. You can do buybacks or dividends. And those are the eight buckets.

And so the sovereignty game ends up with a very different exit mechanism. So there's five ways equity turns into money. Equity turns into money through an IPO, through an M&A, through a dividend, through a buyback, or through a secondary. The first two are associated with the venture game, IPO and M&A. Sell the company or IPO the company. The other three are associated with the sovereignty game. Either buy back stock, the company is buying back stock from shareholders.

They see what SpaceX is doing, right? Right. Or secondary, find new investors that want to own shares in the company and you're facilitating a transaction so one of your shareholders is selling to a new shareholder. And so it's just a transfer of wealth between shareholders. And then the third is dividend. The company's generating profits and dividends some of it back to shareholders. Now it's interesting, capitalism would be less efficient with any one of the five mechanisms,

but shareholder capitalism would break without dividends. Like, you know, it becomes illogical to have shareholder capitalism if there's not some mechanism of taking profits and distributing them to shareholders. That's what makes companies, that's what gives them their intrinsic value, their intrinsic financial value. And so we are building for that sort of an outcome.

We've already done, we raised 8 million of primary, we've done 20 million of buybacks so far. We are about to do another $15 million of buybacks, and we're working on a $50 million secondary. And so, over time, that's our scorecard for realized returns, and we're going to realize more and more returns through buybacks and secondaries. And then probably over the next five to 15 years, we might shrink the number of shares by 25% to 50% through buybacks.

And then at some point, we'll just dividend. And that will be the ultimate return for the company. But the unrealized return is the inherent value of the business over time. And so in the sovereignty game, you really have to think through defensibility of the business. So if your time horizon is longer, how do you know that the business is even going to be around in ten years? You need a moat and there's a whole theory for how to how to build a moat around a company And that's the sovereignty game take me back to the beginning of this company you had exited

Everest It didn't work out and you what was the inception of of invisible and then how did you early capitalize it? What was your what did you die back in to raise capital for a new, you know, ten page business plan? Yeah necessities the mother of invention. I you know had raised some angel capital for Everest and you know, I Was blessed with the generosity of these individuals.

But when you raise money from individuals, it's their money. And so it really hurts to lose it. And so we'd raised almost $3 million for Everest, and it was from people that I really admired, like Peter Thiel, Bono from U2 invested, and other great, great individuals. And I lost our money and I had to write them a letter and say, I'm sorry, I tried my absolute best and the company failed. And so when I started this company the second time around, I still was very much kind of brainwashed by,

sort of like peer pressure, sort of the collective mindset of technology. It's the thing you do. Yeah, it's just the thing you do. And the thing is that I got much better at fundraising. And so, my decks were better, my pitch was better, and people still didn't want to invest. And it was not because they didn't want to invest in me because my first company failed. That was not an issue. We were able to raise angel money again pretty quickly, but it was because it was a services company. And so I ended up realizing that there was a belief, a dogmatic

belief in my opinion, that the institutional investors, the venture capitalists had, that you could not build a true technology company that was a services company. And what they wanted to invest in was SaaS, was software as a service. Because software companies that just sell software, they have almost like 92% margins, very high margins, and they're very scalable. And so the assumption was, this would be a low margin business,

it would not be scalable. And you wouldn't be able to build a moat around it. And so as a result, I had to take that feedback really seriously, Peter. And the act of fundraising was actually helpful in getting that feedback from smart people. And I had to think, first of all, if the capital markets are going to disagree with me, how do I fund the business? And then, why do I think I'm right? And then, if I am right, then I'm really right, because it's not just Accenture.

It's McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Ernst & Young, KPMG, Deloitte, PwC, WPP, Omnicom, Publisys. The world is run by these 20th century services giants. And for whatever reason, venture capitalists, Silicon Valley, the technology industry is not counter positioning against them. There's no rebel alliance against that galactic empire. They're not being disrupted. Silicon Valley is just mass producing tools. There's an app for everything, so why isn't everything perfect yet? And Invisible's whole idea was

customers don't really want to buy more software. They don't really want to figure out how to use more tools in their business. They just want operations to run. It's complex. They want someone else to do that for them. They want someone operations to run. It's complex. They want someone else to do that for them. They want someone else to like run all these apps, stitch them all together and deliver the outcome. And so I had to get really confident that I was right. And then I had to solve the, okay, well now what do I do? How do I finance it?

And that's when the backward planning began. Where it's like, okay, how much money do I need to get to profitability? Because once I'm profitable, I don't need anyone else's money. And that's when it was like, okay, $6 million. All right, that's something I can work with. And so that's probably something I'm not going to raise all at once. I'm probably going to raise it one check at a time, and I'm going to go to angel investors

and I'm going to to angel investors and I'm gonna, you know, tell them the story and maybe I'm gonna find a few Contrarian institutional investors and get lucky and we were able to find those people about a little more than half our money came from angels And then the rest came from some seed stage investors. How much did you bring in at that point? And it was not all at once. So there was like an initial 500K and then there was another about 500K from angels and then there was three million that came from some seed investors and then there was a weird million dollar round that half of it came from insiders and half from outsiders. And then there was a final million at the very end over a span of years. But the other way that I raised money, Peter, was actually I raised money from my own team.

Not actually through them investing and writing a check, but because I gave them my equity. I created a partnership, and we created a partner pay model with different tiers and tier one would get a certain amount of equity every year and tier two would get a certain amount of equity and tier three would get a certain amount of equity, et cetera. I convinced everyone who joined the company to take a huge discount to whatever their market rate was. If they were previously making $200,000 a year, I got people to take even 50 or 70K a year in order to value the equity. Now, this was an instant filter. The vast majority of people

were not interested in taking a huge bet on the equity. But when I explained it to some people, they're like, wow, this is very, very generous. If this works, this equity is going to be worth millions. And today it is. And those people are happy they did the trade. And so there was a period of time when I was paying, like basically everyone was in full ramen noodle mode. We were paying each other like $1,000 a month.

That was the average salary of an invisible partner. But even to this day, when we're paying closer and closer to market, equity is still the biggest portion of compensation. Our philosophy is there's cash, your salary for short-term alignment, bonuses and performance milestone pay for medium term. Every six months, we do a big bonus round. And then there's equity. That's the real wealth building exercise at the company Do you think the structure can work for any company out there? Software services medical educational

Is this something that can I mean it seems like you're aligning interest in an extraordinary fashion and and people are there by doing what they think is best for the company. Everybody has a say in its success. In any company in which the alpha is coming from labor, not capital, then this model can and should work and will be deployed and someone will disrupt that industry. Then the question is, how many situations is it purely about capital and not about labor? And while I'm sure there

are some, I think labor is becoming more important, not less important. And the assumption has been that actually it's capital that should own most of the stock in the company. And labor should maybe own 10% or 20% of the business, and capital should own 80%. And my realization over time was, wait a second. My partners are the best investors I have, because they are the people in the business thinking

about how to upgrade the business. And yet, they're thinking like shareholders. They're reading. And we did these finance 101 classes where we teach everyone, here's how an income statement works. Here's how a balance sheet works. Here's how cash flow works.

But it forced us to be really transparent. And actually, it created a kind of internal accountability where it's like, I had to answer tough questions. What's our 12-month plan? What's our long-term plan? How are we going to fix these problems in the business model? And it created that sort of internal culture. And we call it an owner-operator or an ownership culture.

We call each other partners, not employees. And I think that can work in pretty much any services business, certainly. But then, you know, why aren't most venture-backed businesses like this? And I think the assumption is, well, you know, the software is doing most of the work, the people are kind of commodities. What really matters is having the capital to scale it. But actually, like, I think most of the time it's because the board doesn't want to share the pie and this is where, you know me, I'm a capitalist.

I sound a little bit like I'm not right now, but I think it's possible to be both a revolutionary and a good fiduciary. It's through this alignment of incentives around equity value creation. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. The company is called Fountain Life. And it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented

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At every entrepreneur, at early stages during an entrepreneurial journey, an entrepreneur is going to have to figure out how much money they're going to raise. And there is this tendency to say, listen, I'm going to raise more than I think I need because I want the cushion. I want the money in case things turn down or things don't work out. How do you think about that? You know, I think one of the most important things is living long enough to live forever. It's how it's like getting to getting to profitability as soon as you can and then being able to have control over your own fate

But I know of companies I've been inside of ventures where it's like, you know, we we need 20 million But let's read let's raise 40 just to have the extra cushion You didn't fall into that trap. Yeah Sun Tzu said don't worry about victory Remove the possibility of defeat. And then afterwards, look for victory. And we used to talk about bunker mode. Sometimes people call it cockroach mode.

Do you have a company culture where the resolve, the commitment to the mission is so high that if everyone had to enter ramen mode, if you couldn't pay them and they just had to go on the equity and you were just giving them stock, the stock that you would otherwise give investors, how many people at your team would stay? How many people would keep going and keep working towards the mission? In the early days, that was 100% of our company. Today, it's less than 100%. Maybe it's only 10% or 100% of our company. Today, it's less than 100%. Maybe it's only

10 or 20% of our company. It's an abnormally large percentage of our company that still has that company culture. But I think that the capital scarcity is a form of forcing you to become efficient, right? Like when you can't solve problems by hiring people and you can't solve problems by throwing money at the problem, you actually have to innovate your way through the problem. And so you end up changing your relationship to the adversity or the scarcity, that is the capital scarcity. And you end up increasing productivity per person, right? It goes up and up and up and up.

And it might start really slowly. You might not even see that it's happening. But over time, you look back and you realize, wow, we thought we needed so much capital, but we didn't because we ended up solving all these problems along the way and having these bright ideas. We wouldn't have had those bright ideas if our backs weren't up against a wall, so to speak. And this is something they teach in martial arts and also in a lot of philosophical traditions, to sort of love your enemy because your enemy is teaching you and the enemy here is capital scarcity. You're like, oh, I don't have enough money and you can be in this very negative mindset

about it, but actually it can be the greatest gift to your creative process at the company. Talk to me a second. I'm going to go into hiring and the type of employees, but before we get there, talk about span of control and empowering individual employees to solve problems versus have large organizational structures and span of control and such. I ended up realizing my span was larger than I thought it was. The traditional span of control is like you don't want to exceed 12. You don't want to have 12 people working for you. Anything more than that is like unmanageable.

And actually the sweet spot is usually three to seven and anything above seven is like danger zone and anything above 12 is impossible, something's wrong. But if you have less than three people working for you, then there's not enough. And in the creation of a hierarchy, this sort of creates some rules of thumb. Those rules of thumb are true if you're operating in what I call an army mindset.

If you're operating in a special forces mindset, you can sort of do these very strange dances. For example, we hired a CEO, Ben. He started about 18 months ago. At one point, he had a span of control of 17. And I was cool with it because I felt like he was such a capable manager that he was actually able to empower that many people. There was a medium term strategy to hire some key people

that are actually now condensing the span of control. So his span of control is rationalizing now. But for this sprint, this particular period of time, he was capable and it was necessary to do that. And why was it possible? It was possible because I had a dotted line to most of those people and I was co-managing and I was helping him manage it. And we also were able to surround ourselves with the right advisors and board members

that were helping him. And there were enough veterans in the business that their veterancy was able to sort of upgrade the new people we were hiring pretty fast. And so it held together. And so I think that in an army mindset, you kind of look for a job description with clear check boxes, and you're done when you're done checking those boxes. But in more of a special forces mindset, everyone is capable of doing more than they think they can. And the combinations, the ways in which you can combine

people, it's much more like soccer than baseball. It's much more fluid. And you can only move into that fluidity when everyone is really committed to excellence and everyone is in an open-minded state. But I just think that there's this. I want to go someplace different with this. because I think the kind of company you've been building is one in which...

So backing up a second, going to a company like Lockheed, I remember reading about Lockheed Skunk Works and the way it worked, the level of agility was such that in the center of the massive hanger when they were building their aircraft, they had a single blueprint and anyone could go and make a change to that blueprint. They were empowered to do that, but they had to write their name next to the change. In other words, as long as they felt were clear and responsible, they didn't have to go through layers of red tape to encourage people to optimize and solve right because when you have so much structure and you have all these approval processes you crush an organization's agility do you agree with

that I totally agree with that one is just shifting the emphasis from sins of omission to sins of commission to sins of omission. You're less going to get punished for making mistakes and you're more going to get punished for not doing stuff. One way to see if a company is becoming more political, which we have to fight against right now, is people are afraid of putting their name on things. You talked about putting your name on the blueprint, but even putting your name on an email

and writing an email and saying, for example, I woke up this morning, somebody on the team said, we don't have a day one mindset on this part of our sales team. And he listed out a whole bunch of problems and he had escalated it. And he could have, you know, by causing a stink, you know, maybe you're putting yourself at risk,

maybe you're putting your job at risk. We really don't punish that, we reward that. That's somebody who's taking ownership and responsibility and calling out a problem. So I think we just generally reward people who take on more responsibility and who are willing to identify problems and not just identify problems but suggest solutions and give the solutions a try. Even when the solutions don't work, I'd rather have that person who's taking risks running things

than the person who's not taking risks. And it's the person who's not saying stuff, who's quiet, who doesn't put their neck out there. That's the person who's like basically bureaucratic and political and probably just a follower. Yeah. Hiring people. How do you hire people? How do you find them?

You said you have 3,000 individuals now as part of the team That's that's crazy. It's crazy. It's amazing How do you talk about culture and hiring and what your thoughts are what have you learned there? Yeah, we've learned a lot of things the structure of the organization is we have Partners at the top and they have equity in the business. We started the year with about 120 partners. We're going to end the year with nearly 300, so we're more than doubling headcount this

year, which is very scary in the sense that it's a test of the culture if the veterans can bring in the new people. And then there's specialists. The specialists are partners in training and they haven't made partner yet. They don't have equity yet, but they're working on, both the partners and the specialists are building the company. And then the agents are doing the work for the clients on the digital assembly line. And that could be advanced AI training work. It could be building spreadsheets. It could be running insurance claims.

It could be any form of work that our clients need. And these are contractors, and they're in over 100 countries around the world. And the ability to scalably hire people, train them, manage them, route, you know, they can sort of set up their shift schedule, and then our system will automatically route them work that they're qualified to do, and we create an interface for them to do it, and we have a quality system to check the work, and then they get paid in their local currency. Some of them get paid in Bitcoin.

And so those are the contractors. Amazingly, even in the contractor, even in the agent workforce that we have, the company's, the partnership's values have spread down. And so I'd say actually a lot of our agents have that partner ethos, even though they're not partner yet. And a lot of them dream of becoming a partner someday, and we try to create paths for them upwards. We'll be at probably over 5,000 by the end of the year, Peter, just to give you a sense of how the organization is growing quickly when you count the agents. But the partners are the ones I really watch.

And one of the key evolutions that I'm thinking about now is in the early days, it was possible for a new partner to earn more than 1% of Invisible. Now if we hit our targets over the next five years, 1% of Invisible, we were worth $100 million. And so people are chasing basis points. And you have people that are shooting to earn 10 basis points because they believe that will be worth $10 million in five years.

It's a life-changing amount of money. I worry that that would change the shareholder, owner-operator, the investor-operator culture that we have. So far, it's holding. And I'm, I'm every time I meet a new partner, I'm thinking in the back of my mind, does this person think like an entrepreneur? Do they take risks? Can they understand how one puzzle piece of the tactics they're working on in a day toto-day business, a day-to-day basis, fit into the overall strategic puzzle of the business. Do they understand the strategy?

So far, I'm incredibly blown away. I think the secret has been, Peter, we built a hiring team as if it was its own separate business. If Invisible is operations as a service, our hiring team is hiring as a service. And the head of hiring, Mark Gray, is this half Turkish, half Irish guy who lives in Copenhagen. He married a Danish lady.

And he had been a scale-up head of hiring. And we gave him an opportunity to say, hey, come here. You'll be our head of hiring. But instead of just running a cost center, we're gonna treat you like you're a CEO. We're gonna give you an actual path to become a CEO of your own business. And your first client will be Invisible.

And Invisible needs a hiring factory that can produce higher and higher quantity and higher and higher quality of all these types of people. We need to do everything from hiring engineers to hiring executives, to hiring managers, to hiring agents who do work for clients that are operational. And we need to do all of that.

That is a full agency effectively that we need to build. And so the only way to do it is through incredible amounts of automation and innovation. And you need to build. And so the only way to do it is through incredible amounts of automation and innovation. And you need to have your small team not think like they're a small part of a big thing, but think like they're a big part of a small thing. Can you do it? And he was up for the mission.

He was the most entrepreneurial person we interviewed. I turned down five other candidates because I knew that a good head of hiring is a good hire that makes good hires. It's like an extra good hire and a bad head of hiring is like a bad hire that makes bad hires and you tank your culture. So when we hired Mark Gray, it really was a huge piece of leverage for the company. Last year we had over a hundred thousand people apply. We only hired a thousand. And so that's like 1%.%. Our cost per hiring an agent was only $87, and our cost per hiring a partner was about $150. We were able to do that because

they automated so much of the outbound and of the full in our applicant tracking system, Greenhouse. They automated every single process in Greenhouse. They used a bunch of psyche valves to basically use data from all the interviews that we were getting and use that to accelerate the process. My friend, you have opened up a thousand conversational doors here in just the last two minutes. First of all, you built a completely virtualized organization with individuals in how many countries? Over 100. I can't keep track. It was 96 when we were at abundance 360 and it's over 100 now. Amazing, amazing. And we'll come back to your nomadic lifestyle in a little bit because you're circumnavigating the globe on a constant basis. But at the same time, what you just said was turning what was a cost center into a potential

significant profit center. And you're looking at iterating on that over and over again. I mean, you have this tree structure of what Invisible... Can you describe your vision of where Invisible is going in terms of the baby companies that you're spawning in the process? Yes. So well, let's just complete the story with Mark, and then we'll go to the demo. I want to give it Abundance 360.

So, he's starting Zero Hiring. We own zerohiring.com. We're getting ready to launch. And I met this guy about a year ago, this guy named Sam Gibson, who is a British guy, and he had built and sold an RPO company, a recruitment process outsourcing company. And he had made about, you know, he'd made meaningful, you know, return on that business,

but he was an entrepreneur that still felt like the industry should be disrupted. So I introduced him to Mark Gray, and Mark hired him to basically build our external revenue. So by the end of the year, I think we're going to do $3 million run rate from our hiring as a service business from external clients. So Invisible is no longer the only client of Mark and his team. They have revenue and it's already profitable. And so I'm pushing them to scale that business because next year, by the end of the year, they could be at 10 million plus revenue and then they should be able to grow at 100% plus

growth rates for many years until they're over 100 mil run rate. And so the demo I want to give at Abundance 360 and I don't know if we'll be ready by next year, but if not, it'll be the year after. I want to go on stage and take Sam Altman's thing that he talks about, which I've been talking about for a decade too, is the one-person unicorn. Could you have one person or a very, very small team build a billion-dollar business without having to hire a huge finance team, a huge sales team, a huge operations team, a huge marketing team, a huge people team? I would love to be able to build a business in an hour on stage. We can source the idea from the audience by the domain, and then basically delegate

all the operations to Invisible. And we'll have hiring as a service run by zero. And we have basically a consulting business called Descendancy that's our McKinsey, Bain, BCG competitor. So that'll run all the strategy in the advisor program and shareholder relations. We're building a marketing and design agency called RAD. So RAD will be our marketing team and our design team. And we have a few more that we're incubating. Eventually we'll have sales as a service and finance as a service. Unlimited

financial services will be the name of, we just hired the CEO for that. And so, and that'll be our KPMG, you know, PWC, Deloitte, and EY competitor. And so you'll basically have all the functions of your business outsourced, and you won't need to hire anyone other than the core team generating the core IP that are truly asymmetric nonlinear high leverage founders and

I think this will create a new era in entrepreneurship because it will it will change You know the the idea of what it means to be on a team so right now the assumption is if you're only on a team if you are a full-time W2 employee. But what if we hold this as our standard of excellence as a vendor is when our clients forget that we're not on their team. When we're so integrated in their company, in their processes, when we're so aware of their strategy and their goals and their OKRs, when we're able to add that kind of nonlinear value that they're like, yeah, Invisible's on the team. That's I think how Grace feels at OpenAI, like she's on the team.

So that's the goal is like, what if the majority of your team members are actually vendors and you don't even care? It's just osmotic. Right now, only 10% of work is outsourced. By the end of the century, I think it could be 50 to 90%. It's the speed of innovation, the speed of creation, the speed of problem-solving the agility If you're gonna go back in time to

The Francis I met 15 years ago You're just getting started on Everest and give yourself the most You know distilled advice you could do What would that be? Well You're like Find me some time to think have you asked yourself this question? Like what would you give young Peter? Yeah

this question like what would you give young peter yeah Like would you would you create a consequence let me answer that question so um, I think uh first of all young peter went after Medicine to make his parents happy versus what I wanted to do right early on Uh, which was space I Want to jokingly say, you know buy Apple and Amazon and Google when it's but I I think

It was really focus on the core business and building something that is profitable and generating value and create something that's real versus building pie in the sky. My early ventures in space were such, you know, insert a hundred million dollars here and work on something for a long time and eventually build it versus start generating real business and revenue on day one and then build upon a profitable ongoing business.

It's one of the biggest challenges in the space business, the amount of capital required to get to a point where you're actually able to achieve orbital velocity, so to speak. And that was a very, very different. So how do you balance that moonshot desire at the same time that you want to build a real business early? In that juxtapositioning, for me, I finally got clarity about You need to get you know get to revenue early Start a team that's working together and generating capital and generating profits and then get a clear Roadmap from there to your to your moonshot, but don't don't start don't start it at the full moonshot level

Yeah for me. That that was an important insight. How about you? What was it, what failure lessons, what lessons would you bring back? So I mentor and invest in, we started an investing program, and we'll get to that in a second, Visionary Ventures is the name of our investment arm.

And as we're starting to invest in other entrepreneurs and I'm starting to mentor younger entrepreneurs, I'm finding myself in this strange position of giving advice. But I still think of myself as a white belt and as a beginner. And I hope I never lose that. You want to be in a beginner state of mind all the time to really perceive the world and learn the lessons that are all around us all the time to really perceive the world and learn the lessons that are all around us all the time. And then, you know, like a good college essayist,

I'm gonna challenge the premise of the question, which is, you know, if I had, even if I gave myself a almost like a I know Kung Fu matrix download, and I could somehow download all the things I've learned in the last 15 years, that would kick off another branch in the multiverse, right? It would create a parallel universe where that Francis would go off to do different things.

And there's something beautiful about the adversities, the tragedies, the things that I thought were so terrible at the time, like my first business failing, right? Ah, you know, like I was really beat up about that. But actually it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. And, or us, Invisible failing to raise a Series A because VCs thought it could never become

a scalable company. That was also one of the best things that could have ever happened to business. No way that we'd be 70% owned by the team. And so you sort of mess up the, you know, the butterfly and the cocoon the cocoon, needs to struggle to become the butterfly. It's cliche, but it's true. That being said, I have three books that I recommend entrepreneurs read. These are like our three business Bibles.

The first is Outsiders by Will Thorndyke. And he was the last investor in our company. And he studied Berkshire Hathaway. He studied seven other companies, General Dynamics, Washington Post, a company called Teledyne. And these are companies most people have never heard of. And the first page is a stock chart comparing their collective performance to the S&P 500 over time and to the most famous CEO that everyone had heard of, Jack Welsh, and his performance over time. And it's just like a hands down, no contest, crush fest. Like they absolutely crushed it.

And he says the way they did it is they understood how to generate capital and increase capital generation in their businesses over time. And they understood how to allocate capital. And he doesn't call it the sovereignty game, but basically most of the principles of what we've codified as the sovereignty game are in that book, right? And so I think from reading that book and from our other experiences, we're trying to sort of extend it

and write the sequel, so to speak. And that's why we have more and more clarity on what the sovereignty game looks like. But none of the businesses that he talks about in that book are technology companies. And so, you know, when I was first introduced to Mr. Thorndyke, like that was my pitch. It's like I want to build the first sovereignty game business in the technology industry, you know.

And so that's the first book. The second book is Seven Powers by Hamilton Helmer. And this is a book about how to defend a business from competition. And the seven powers are scale economies, network effects, switching costs, cornered resources, counter positioning, process power, and branding. And a business can, in theory theory develop all the powers but what

really matters is which one you're gonna be able to get to first and if you can phase into power before your competitors you have a barrier and he makes you very aware that like we usually talk about benefits like there's so many benefits to using invisible but what actually matters is barriers, which is why can't people solve that problem themselves or use some other company to solve that problem? Why do they need to use you? Are you the only source of that supply? And those barriers end up creating the enterprise value over time.

And he tells some great stories. And the Netflix blockbuster story is one of the main ones that really stuck with me. And then the third is Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. And the Innovator's Dilemma is of the three books. It's actually the most subtle and nuanced of the books because the Innovator's Dilemma shows up in a whole bunch of different ways. And a really good example is actually infinity. You asked me earlier, what does our corporate structure look like?

Our corporate structure is basically my PhD thesis about how to solve the innovator's dilemma. That is the challenge that we're trying to solve as a company because we don't want to lose the entrepreneurial magic and we don't want to lose the entrepreneurial magic and we don't want to stop doing zero to one innovation as we scale, but scale is the enemy of innovation in most companies. And so you can understand how this works

from a numbers perspective actually. If by the end of the year we hit our targets and we do, you know, we're at a 250 to 300 mil run rate and these new businesses, and we're at a 250 to 300 mil run rate. And these new businesses, I started an incubator called Infinity last January, and the incubator's a business, and there's seven businesses inside of it. And each of them has CEOs.

And by the end of this year, collectively, they're tracking for $10 million run rate. But that's only one, you know, that is like 3% of the overall group revenues or less. It's just, it's such a small percentage of the overall revenue, seemingly it doesn't matter. But every year you play out the story, this incredible dynamic occurs.

So Invisible's growth rate because of physics Every year you play out the story, this incredible dynamic occurs. Invisible's growth rate, because of physics, will slow down even if we continue growing at an incredible rate. Let's just say next year we grow to 500 million of revenue, and the year after that we grow to 850, and the year after that we go to 1.2, the year after that we go to 1.6, and then 1.9. Eventually you slow down your growth rate over time. As long as you, like last year we were at 300%, this year 150 was the goal.

Next year 100 is the goal, then it becomes 80 and 70 and 60 and 50 and 40 and 30. As long as you stay above 25, you're actually in legendary performance territory if you can maintain that over 20 years, right? That's what Apple did, Amazon did, Berkshire did, all the companies that you've heard of as legendary businesses, they stayed at 25% plus compounding over decades. And that's why my favorite website is mathisfun.com slash compound interest calculator. If you really play with the compound interest calculator, it's mind blowing what 25% does over 20 years.

But these new infinity companies, even though they're only like 2% of our revenues this year, next year they're going to grow at over 100%. And they're going to stay at over 100% a lot longer. As the big business matures and the growth rate slows down, the small businesses will be able to stay at hyper growth, super high growth rates, and we'll be able to piggyback on the success of the big business, which will lift the group average. But the only way you can do that zero to one innovation is you have to have separate structures. You have to put people in separate boxes. You have to ring fence them and create

these separate businesses with separate cap tables. And so the way we've done it is the CEO of a new company inside of our incubator gets a path to owning 25% of that business. The team, the employee stock option pool has a path to 25%. And we, for the first 5 million into the business, are getting 50% for the first five million into the business, are getting 50% of the business and control over the business. And we're networking all these businesses together. So there are AirPods, iPhone, iPad, MacBook.

It's operations as a service, hiring as a service, strategy as a service, sales as a service, finance as a service. That's what we're doing. But that structure allows those, that board, that CEO, that team to focus on growing that business without too much interference or distraction from this big company,

and it gives them the resources they need. If we try to do that sort of innovation inside of the big company, they would be crushed. They would not get any time, any attention, any energy, any money, and what a waste, what a missed opportunity. So when you're dealing with too much opportunity, there's one solution which I think is the sort of amateur solution, which is focus. Just pick one of the many opportunities and just focus on that because it's big enough.

But the real pro move, which Christianson gets at, is set up separate businesses, and each one of those businesses should focus. But that actually allows you to achieve the meta goal of going after the entire opportunity. Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs,

that they spent billions on bio-defense weapons, the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA? Well, a company called Viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood. Viome has a product that I've personally used for years called Full Body Intelligence,

which collects a few drops of your blood, spit, and stool and can tell you so much about your health. They've tested over 700,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members critical health guidance. Like what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, as well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age, and other deep health insights. And the results of the recommendations are nothing short of stellar. You know, as reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, after just six months of following Viom's recommendations, members reported the following. A 36% reduction in depression, a 40% reduction in anxiety, a 30% reduction in diabetes, and a 48% reduction in IBS.

Listen, I've been using Viom for three years. I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities. Best of all, Viome is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to viome.com slash Peter. I've asked Naveen Jain, a friend of mine who's the founder and CEO of Viome, to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it at viome.com slash Peter. Amazing. I love that. And it's true. And for a entrepreneur who is itching to be creative and to generate, it's a way of scratching that itch

on your part, but having someone who's absolutely focused on the success of that core business. I wanna talk about your lifestyle, Francis. It's pretty extraordinary. Share with folks what it's like to be your, you're taking the role of founder and chairman, and Ben Plummer has taken the role of CEO. Was that easy to pull a CEO in? But before that, I'll speak to you. One moment you're in Southeast Asia, the next moment you're in Europe, now you're up in Vancouver. Do you own a home?

No, I don't. I was living in New York and then I put all my stuff in storage and I became a Nomad about a year ago. And I'm in a new city almost every week. And I'm going where the business is, which is everywhere. So there are opportunities in all these places. Like there are so many great companies in Vancouver. Lululemon's in Vancouver, Arc'teryx is in Vancouver, Slack is in Vancouver, so many great companies in Vancouver. Lululemon's in Vancouver, Arcteryx is in Vancouver, Slack is in Vancouver, Hootsuite is in Vancouver. There's some new unicorns here. And so if you come here and you get introduced to the right people and

you host a dinner, like we had a wonderful dinner on Sunday night with deep conversations I'll never forget, and now I'm going to be friends with these people for hopefully for the rest of my life. And then I'll keep coming back and over time a community forms and we've been building these communities on WhatsApp. We call them mafias. So we have our Vancouver mafia now. We have our New York City mafia has like 300 people in it. And it's like a private social network we've built on WhatsApp. And we also have been adding our friends to business syndicates. So we added all of our investor friends to our investor syndicate and they share deals. We add all our entrepreneur friends to our entrepreneur syndicate. We have a longevity

syndicate. We have an AI syndicate. And these are networks that we're building over time. It's a way of creating culture when you have a fully remote company with no office. If you think about what it would have been like to build a business like this in the 1980s, I would be probably on Wall Street or something with an actual office. The way you know that you're making progress is that you're upgrading to a fancier and fancier office and you have more and more floors in the building. You can actually meet all the people and shake their hands. The way I know this is real is I'm in Buenos Aires and we have 111 people and I've never

been to Buenos Aires before, but all these people share our value, share the mission. I talk to them, I hear their stories, and that's how I know it's real, is because I get dinner with them in person and not just on Zoom. And so, yeah, we have partners in all these places, agents in all these places, clients in all these places, and then advisors and board members and friends and allies in all these places, and then advisors and board members and friends and allies in all these places. So I think of it as sort of like a global, you know, remote work phenomenon, this new, new nomadic, you know, lifestyle as possible. And then I'm also having fun adventures. Like,

I, you know, went scuba diving in Costa Rica. I invited my parents. If you don't live anywhere, the people that you love, your friends, your family, they come to you. And then you take your mom and dad scuba diving for the first time. Or somebody, one of our board members and one of our clients are big mountaineers. And they took me to go climb Mount Rainier a couple of weekends ago, so that was exciting.

So it's a challenging lifestyle big mountaineers and they took me to go climb Mount Rainier a couple weekends ago, so that was exciting. So it's a challenging lifestyle because every variable in your life is changing except for you. So it forces you to get really deep into certain routines that you can take with you everywhere. For me, those are yoga and meditation and reading the classics, reading books by dead people. And I can do that anywhere, even in an airport. And then in terms of bringing in Ben as CEO,

and then Ben is CEO of Invisible, and he's doing a great job, I'm so delighted, and he's doing a better job than I would, and that's why I hired him. And I think that these four roles get confused, founder, CEO, President, and Chairman. These are very different roles. The founder is often the soul of the business, the cultural and creative strategic force.

Founders are usually kind of wild, and I'm certainly wild. It's actually tough for a founder to be both a revolutionary and a fiduciary. It's a very, very different yin yang, you know, parts and sometimes, you know, you mature into it, but usually you start as a revolutionary, you become a fiduciary over time. The CEO is a person running the business. And so for years, I was basically stuck in my apartment in New York grinding away endless amounts of calls and emails and Zoom calls and meetings. You're like a doctor that's on call 24-7-365 because you're building the business brick by brick. Your Monday meetings are like, show me your OKR, show me your Gantt chart, show me your budgets.

Where are we out on this? Where are we out on that? And it's the E in CEO that's the hard part. It's execution, right? It's always executing. Then there's the president. The president is like on planes kissing babies and building political alliances all around the world.

And those relationships can turn, they start as friendships and they can turn into all kinds of things. They could become an advisor or a board member. They could become a client. They could become, you could do a joint venture with them. You could start a company with them. They could become co-founders.

You could hire them. They could, you know, you can invest in them. There's so many things you can do with these relationships, but that's what the president is doing, is holding the social capital of the organization and the loyalty and continuing to orient people towards the long-term vision. The chairman is sort of on the mountaintop, so to speak, and the chairman is focused on capital allocation, big decisions, like should we buy a company or should we raise money or what have you,

governance, running boards and making sure there's accountability. It's a very adult role being a chairman, holding people accountable to results. You're responsible for hiring and firing all the way up to the CEO level. And you're responsible for incentives and pricing and compensation

and for the sequencing of the roadmap of the business. And so, you know, in the beginning, when you start a company and there's only one person and you and your dog, right, you're all four of those roles and you're the janitor, right? Like you're all those. And then over time, you sort of slowly unbundle. And so, you know, maybe now we're unbundling the CEO role. We have Shar Brumond is CEO of Infinity. He's doing a great job, almost three decades of tech enabled services, executive and entrepreneurial

experience at ABB and Ariba and other companies. And then under him, we have seven or eight CEOs that are all amazing. And a lot of these are early invisible people who've been with the company for, in one case has been with me from the beginning, but others, six years or something. And they've already earned their stock in Invisible and now they want to do the zero to one journey again. And so they're there. And then over time, I'm probably going to hire more presidents because I don't know if this lifestyle is sustainable forever. I'm young, I'm turning 35 in two weeks. So I can do this for probably until I'm 40.

But then at some point, we'll probably need to hire probably not just one president, but there might be 12 presidents that are super high trust, high loyalty people that are doing this lifestyle. And then I'll be chairman and then I'll have to figure out how to escape out of that job. And it kind of is, it is the art of abstraction. We talk about this. Most people, if you're in an employee mindset, you don't want someone else to take your job.

But if you're in an entrepreneurial mindset, you're actually trying to work yourself out of a job. You do it once, you do it 10 times, you do it 100 times, you master it, or you get as good as you can be at it, even if you're working on your weakness. And then you hire someone who's gonna do it better than you. You train them, you manage them,

and then you're abstracted. And then you do another job. But when you're in that abstracted place, for a short period of time, you're sitting in the void. You don't know what your job is anymore. You're staring in the void. You don't know what your job is anymore. You're staring at the ceiling. That void place is actually where all the ideas come from and all the values created.

You're then doing the zero to one thing of doing, you created a new job for yourself and you're doing it again and then you hire someone to do it and then you manage them and abstract up. And then you're managing a whole bunch of people and you hire someone to manage them. And then you're managing managers and then you're managing executives and then you're trying to hire a chairman. And there was a political theorist in the last century who said, the sovereign governs in the state of exception. So as long as you're in a position to fire, which is something we don't like talking about,

it's the brutal reality though of a hierarchy in business, then you are in control of the structure. And so I've been paying special attention to board governance. And so we have four directors. In theory, you know, a majority of them could fire me. But these are people that are incredible people. And they're so accomplished. One of them was the head of corporate development under Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer for decades at Microsoft, Charlie Songhurst. He's my vice chairman.

And I've been on a call with him like every week for seven years. And I trust him. And so you surround yourself with people that correct your blind spots. And those are the people that you ultimately trust to put a sword to your neck if you've lost your mind and you're doing the wrong thing. But that same accountability works downwards as well. So if I ever got to the point where we were hiring presidents and hiring chairman, there would have to be the similar accountability and that's sort of your way out and eventually Hopefully you just have the title of human, you know

you're just you're just Peter or you're just Francis and you dropped all the titles and And you're judged for the value you brought to world your life the life of those that you touched your life, the life of those that you touched, and the dreams that you have going forward. Francis, you built an amazing company and I'm so proud of you as a friend and thank you for the time that you gave us on stage at abundance at the Abundance Summit this year. And I know we had a huge number of our members interested in Invisible as a potential platform to help them operationalize their lives efficiently. I wanna go there for our last few minutes here.

If someone is thinking about, well, how do I use Invisible to automate and to operationalize? What's your advice to them? How did they get started? Well, everyone quotes you now, Peter, and calls Invisible the easy button. So, most businesses are hearing about all these advances

in AI and automation, and they struggle to figure out how to actually use that in their business. So, Invisible is the easy button for figuring out, how do I use automation? How do I use AI? How do I use, you know, I use AI, how do I use sci-fi operations, the best practices and operations in 2024, how do I use that to run this business, or how do I use it to create a new capability or create a massive efficiency.

And usually, I'm sure everyone in the audience is thinking about some specific problem right now in your business that you're stuck on and you're trying to solve and it's coming up in meetings. That's the problem we want you to give us. We want you to give us the hard problems. You can reach out, sales at invisible.co. Just send us an email or go to the website and you can fill out a form and reach out. We're pretty reachable. You can reach out to me.

Some folks reach out to me on LinkedIn, and I try to check that inbox and respond. Usually I'll just say, email me, I'm also accessible, frances.invisible.co. Oops, I just gave out my email on a podcast, what am I gonna do? You're on email. And you are, and your team is amazing,

just really responsive. I'm sort of like, you know, there's got to be a thousand AI agents that are actually your team instead of the humans out there. But they come with a passion of hope and service. And again, if you don't mind, just rattle off the clients that you've served over the last two or three years So people understand the scope and quality of who you're serving. Yeah Well first, you know the first big enterprise contract we got was door-dash and then that turned into uber grub hub delivery hero bolt Roppy

Walmart calm and then OpenAI, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Cohere, AI21, Character AI, Perplexity. And then, you know, now we're working with some, you know, big names in the finance industry, some of which I can't say, they're like tier one private equity firms and others that I can, like we've done work with NASDAQ and ARK Invest and others. So it's been an incredible journey. It's just also the dawn of time for AI and automation and for our

business. Amazing. Amazing. And again on social, they find you where Find me on LinkedIn probably the best place Francis Pedraza FRA and CIS PED RAZA or otherwise, you know, look out the window if you happen to be you know in Costa Rica or or in Indonesia or someplace in Climbing some mountain you might find Francis there is you You're a virtualized probability function on planet Earth for the most part. I'm like a ghost. We have 150 people in Kathmandu and I'm going to Nepal for my first time this July. So there you go.

I'll be anywhere. Incredible. Thank you for the work that you do. Thank you for your friendship. Thank you. I'm honored. I'm truly honored by our friendship and by your loyalty over time. You saw me through not just one failure, but like a long journey and you continue to believe

in me and that, I think, is why so many entrepreneurs trust you. Thank you, buddy. Thank you.