Cultivate Your Charisma with Super-Connector Bryan Talebi
Bryan Talebi was born in a tiny village with no running water and no electricity in the southeastern desert of Iran. He began his career working as an Aerospace Engineer at NASA at the age of sixteen. Bryan started his first company while in college and then worked at multiple machine learning companies which went on to become unicorns.
Today, Bryan is the founder of Ahura AI, an artificial intelligence and biometric data company enabling accelerated education. Bryan also runs AB+ Ventures, an impact fund focused on transformational AI, and Digital Guardians, a non-profit he started with Richard Branson to mitigate existential risk.
Bryan has a remarkable ability to connect with people. In this conversation, we share systems and strategies for presenting yourself confidently in social settings, activating your network to maximize your opportunity surface area, and making more authentic connections.
See above for video, and below for audio, resources mentioned, and conversation transcript.
If you’ve enjoyed listening today, please take a moment and subscribe to Forcing Function Hour on your favorite podcast platform, so you’ll stay up to date on new episodes.
Love the show? Pay it forward by leaving us a review, and help us share these performance principles to impact more listeners like you.
Links and resources we mentioned during our conversation:
Additional Forcing Function links:
Experiment Without Limits (peak performance workbook, free download)
Performance Assessment (quiz to reveal your greatest opportunity for growth)
To check out our previous Forcing Function Hour episodes, click here.
Topics:
(02:23) The charisma myth
(08:11) Articulating a vision
(14:39) Fall in love with the journey, not the outcome
(31:01) Prioritizing events and conferences
(37:18) Connecting with high-value people
(01:00:42) Getting past "what do you do?"
(01:12:26) The mindset of authentic connection
Conversation Transcript:
Note: transcript slightly edited for clarity.
Chris (00:05): Welcome to Forcing Function Hour, a conversation series exploring the boundaries of peak performance. Join me, Chris Sparks, as I interview elite performers to reveal principles, systems, and strategies for achieving a competitive edge in business. If you are an executive or investor ready to take yourself to the next level, download my workbook at experimentwithoutlimits.com. For all episodes and show notes, go to forcingfunctionhour.com.
Today it is my honor to introduce Bryan Telebi. Bryan was born in a small village in Iran, but he started working at NASA at the age of sixteen. He found his way out. And then he started his first company while in college at the age of twenty. He then worked at a series of companies focused on machine learning and AI, several of which have become unicorns, very successful companies that he had a piece in accelerating.
Today Bryan is the founder of Ahura A.I. Ahura A.I. is a company creating technology enabling people to learn faster than traditional education. He runs AB+ Ventures. AB+ Ventures is an impact fund focused on transformational A.I. He also started Digital Guardians, a partnership with Richard Branson. Digital Guardians is a nonprofit for bringing together the world's top A.I. minds to mitigate existential risk.
You see, Bryan has been a busy guy for a long time, but today we're gonna learn about how Bryan cultivates charisma. As I've had the opportunity to observe Bryan over our years of friendship, one thing really stands out. Bryan has a remarkable ability to connect with people. But this is not an innate ability. He wasn't always this way. This is something that has been a systematic effort to connect and to leverage these connections. So my hope is that in our conversation today you're going to learn some techniques, how you can be more confident in social situations, how you can activate your network to maximize your opportunity surface area so that you can make deeper, more authentic connections.
With that in mind, thanks for joining us, Bryan. This is gonna be a lot of fun.
Bryan (02:19): Hey, Chris. Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be here.
Chris (02:23): So Bryan, let's start with this charisma myth. I think we have this myth that people are born introverts or born extroverts, and the way that you are is the way that you're going to be. Some people are really good at connecting, and some people not so much. We'd love to hear a little bit of what you were like when you were younger.
Bryan (02:45): Well, Chris, it's funny that you say that, because when I was young I was very quiet. When I first came to the United States at the age of six after living in a refugee camp for a couple years, I didn't really understand the culture, I didn't understand the language. I'm Asperger's, so I didn't really understand how to engage with people emotionally, either, so I had exceedingly few friends throughout elementary and middle school. I didn't go on my first real date until like my senior year in high school. I didn't kiss any girl until I think the summer after my senior year in high school. And this wasn't for lack of trying. I just didn't have any capacity or capability in that regard.
And so at some point, that really frustrated me, and I made the decision that things need to change. I'm trying to think back. I remember the first time where it really hit home—As you mentioned, I started working at NASA when I was sixteen. When I was seventeen, about seventeen and a half, they asked me to do a presentation to the Deputy White House Science Advisor, who was visiting Goddard Space Flight Center. So they put me on stage in this massive hall. The front two rows were filled with about twenty dignitaries from the White House led by the Deputy White House Science Advisor. The rest of the seats were empty. The bright lights were on me. I was on stage for an hour. I stuttered my way through an hour-long presentation. My suit (which was two sizes too big) was soaked in sweat. There was a puddle underneath me from sweat dripping off of me for over an hour.
And I stepped offstage, and my mentor at the time at NASA said, "Bryan, that was the single worst presentation I have ever seen in my life, and you may have endangered our funding." And so that was a little scary to me. And I recognized that I had these big goals of what I wanted to accomplish in life. And ultimately at the time I wanted to either be the administrator of NASA or I wanted to run a company with forty thousand engineers. And I realized that when I sat down with myself and categorized all the skill sets that I would need to be able to successfully effectuate my vision, then of course I would need to be able to understand the math and the science and be able to understand the technology component, but that I would also have to speak in public and motivate people and recruit people and create a vision that people would want to follow. And I recognized that I had literally zero of those skills. And so that was really the moment where I said, "You know, what I'm doing isn't working. I don't know how to make friends. Nobody really likes me. Nobody would follow me into anything that I created." And so I had to figure out, how do I radically transform my ability to communicate my thoughts and ideas in a way that people want to listen and follow?
Chris (05:40): So, realizing that this skillset was necessary—We talk a lot in Forcing Function about your current reality versus the vision of where you want to be, and the power that can come in recognizing the dissonance, that trajectory that you're on is not going to take you there, that something about that trajectory needs to change. But it's one thing to say, "Hey, I need to be a better speaker, I need to be more motivating." It's another to go about and do it. Was there a model, a mentor that you knew at this time that you could look to to say, "Hey, I want to be more like this person?"
Bryan (06:16): Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've looked up to Richard Branson my whole life. I made a lot of business decisions in my life, and a lot of personal decisions as well, based on things that he said in his books and his interviews. And so I always looked at him as someone who had figured out how to accomplish his goals and leave a legacy, leave a mark on the human race. And so I recall after this incident, I started looking at what's called the ten-thousand-hour rule. And of course Malcolm Gladwell popularized it in the 2000s in some of his books, but because my father was a psychologist I used to read his psychology textbooks to try to figure out what's wrong with me, and I had come across this ten thousand hour rule. And so I thought to myself, "How do I get to practice all this stuff?" And I looked at Richard Branson, who was my idol, and I was like, "Wow, he got to practice a bunch of it."
And so I applied to a whole bunch of jobs trying to manage people, how to motivate people, how to speak on stage. And it turned out that nobody wanted to hire me to do any of those jobs because I was objectively bad at it. So bad. And so I realized at that point that the only way that I would be able to practice this with any level of efficacy is if I had to start a company. And so that's what I did. I started a company where I was required to constantly go out and sell, have conversations, be persuasive, recruit and manage people, and speak on stage. That turned out to be pretty amazing.
And then I met one of my other mentors at the time, who helped me quite a bit. A gentleman by the name of Lester Crafton, who was extremely patient with me and taught me a lot of things. As I was actually getting the specific practice in this area, he could give me feedback and share ideas and demonstrate what charisma actually looks like and how to do that on a consistent basis.
Chris (08:11): Yeah. I mean, we call it "Forcing Function" for a reason. It's one thing to have an abstract goal of, "I'd like to be better at something." It's another to create a situation where you have no choice. So in this sense, by starting a company, you created a sink or swim situation that you needed to develop these skills trial by fire, if you will. When did you start to see some improvement in terms of, you know, motivating people on your team or being able to articulate a vision more widely? A big part of being a founder is being an external ambassador. When do the flywheels start to shift?
Bryan (08:49): Yeah. So that's a great question. I would be remiss if I didn't say that initially, I was really, really bad. So the first year I was selling, I didn't sell that much. It was a pretty bad year. I was definitely below average compared to my peers and other companies in the industry. And then my second year my sales, my personal sales, went up quite a bit because I started getting a lot of that practice, and I started recruiting other people to work with me. And I was, again, exceedingly bad at recruiting. I recruited three other people, and they performed exceptionally poorly.
Now, I was very fortunate that when I started this company it was under the auspices of something called Southwestern, where I started a company selling educational products to families. And they actually had a system to teach college students how to do this. So I got to see how three thousand other college students performed running their own businesses in different locations around the country. And, of course, that also enabled me to see how poorly I was performing compared to other people, and as I grew I was able to see how fast I was able to improve.
So the first group of people I hired, not only was I not able to recruit and hire that many people, but they performed really badly.
Then my third year I was able to recruit a bunch of people, but they still performed exceptionally badly. It really took about four to five years until I was both able to recruit a significant number of people and to see them perform at an incredibly high level, and then the sixth and the seventh year is when I started really seeing the money come in. I was making about a million dollars a year of revenue for the company, and that's when things started to change and I started really enjoying it. But it took some time.
Chris (10:31): When the vision is large enough and the timeline is long enough, you can invest a lot of time in figuring something out if it's important enough. And I think these days in a work from home culture, a lot of us are kind of accustomed to hiding behind the computer, and having a job that forces you to interact with people face to face or over the phone can be a really big growth experience.
For me, the job that I had through college was selling advertising for the school paper, which a lot of people didn't need to be sold on the value on it, but there was a need for picking up the phone, calling someone who was really busy, getting them to invest their intention in you, and hopefully convincing them that you had their best interests at heart. And there's a really tight feedback loop that happens when you're making several of these calls a day and you're being brushed off or hung up on or not having the right results. So having that, thinking of that as feedback opportunities to improve, it allows you to start to make these tweaks. That it's—I like to say that improvement in anything is proportional to the tightness of your feedback loops. So finding a way to just get more reps. That's the key. So thinking about trying to connect with more people, how can you get more reps at that? That's gonna be the fastest path to improvement.
Bryan (11:55): Yeah, that's exactly right. And I was very fortunate that during my summers in college I was getting thirty to forty reps a day of pitching, trying to sell a product, and then during the school year, I recruited other college students to come work with me, and so I got to get thousands of reps every year of recruiting and hiring people. Then, of course, during the summer I managed those teams and got tons of reps of learning how to effectively manage people and motivate people and inspire them to be the best version of themselves.
Chris (12:34): What did you learn about what makes a great pitch?
Bryan (12:37): Well, one of the key things, and I used to teach salespeople this in a variety of tech companies—I was VP of sales and head of growth for a number of companies—And this is something that I learned back in my Southwestern days selling educational products. The most important thing when you're pitching and selling something is to simultaneously hold two competing and completely different ideas in your head at the same time, that completely disagree with each other. On the one side, you need to absolutely believe and convey that you don't care at all whether the person sitting in front of you buys from you or not. Zero iotas of caring. On the flip side, you have to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are going to give a hundred percent effort to give the absolute best pitch every single time you're in front of a prospective buyer.
Now, those two usually don't happen simultaneously. If you're trying your best, for most people they get emotionally attached to the outcome, and if they're trying really hard they want to get that "yes." Right? They want that positive reinforcement from behavioral psychology operant conditioning classical conditioning that makes them feel better. They get that spike of dopamine and serotonin that makes them say, "Oh, I won this engagement or this interaction because they said 'yes.'" Which is definitely not the right way to think about sales, but that's often how most salespeople behave.
On the flip side, when you don't care at all what the outcome is, oftentimes that causes people to not put in the attention and the energy that's required, because they say, "Oh, I don't care, and so I'm not going to try very hard." And so the key is maintaining both of those frames simultaneously. And when you can do that it's exceedingly powerful.
Chris (14:39): How do you avoid getting emotionally attached to an interaction? Right? You're putting yourself out there, you're pulling out all the stops, but at the same time, hey, if it doesn't go your way no big deal. How have you found to avoid this attachment?
Bryan (14:54): Sure. That's a great question. So, there's a couple different ways. I'll do the high-level version, and I'll give you a specific strategy.
So, the high-level version is if you can fall in love with the journey rather than the outcome, then the outcome doesn't matter. Right? Because whether the person buys from you or not, you know that you're learning, you're growing, and the long-term is really what you're looking for. So this particular sale isn't going to make a difference. So if you're in love with the journey, it doesn't matter if it's a 'yes' or a 'no.' On a strategic side, if you work through your numbers as a salesperson, and if you can work the law of large numbers then you know, "Hey, if my sales closing percentage is twenty percent, let's say, then you know for every five people, qualified people that you pitch, one of 'em's gonna say 'yes.'" So every time someone says 'no,' it's, "Hey, I'm one step closer to a 'yes.' Because if you know you're gonna pitch twenty people and four of 'em are gonna say 'yes,' great. Does it matter which sixteen say 'no'? It could be the first sixteen, it could be the last sixteen, you could get four yeses in a row and then the rest of 'em are a 'no.' It doesn't matter, because you know that when you have large enough numbers the percentages are just going to work out. Right?
And at that point, you're just looking for the buyers. You're not saying, "Hey, I'm gonna try to convince someone." I'm gonna find the people for whom this value proposition that I'm proposing is a natural fit, and they're of course going to say 'yes' because I'm just finding the buyers. Right?
Now, with that being said, you still have to do your best. You still have to uncover the need, you still have to find the pain funnel and figure out how you're going to provide a solution. They still have to trust you, so you still have to establish a rapport. You still have to cover objections. You still have to do each of the steps in that process. You still have to qualify them. But when you do all those things, you know that your percentage is always going to work. Does that make sense?
Chris (16:52): It does. It does. So you start to see the returns, you said. Year six, year seven, things are finally coming to fruition. All of these efforts, you can see the tangible results of them. And how do you know that it was time to start a company once again? You had all this really valuable experience from working and technology organizations, doing sales, doing business development, working with engineers, working with customers—When was it time to move more back into that role of founder?
Bryan (17:26): Yeah, absolutely. So after seven years of the book company, I realized that the graph of how much I was learning was starting to whittle down a little bit. Right? Whereas initially, that graph was an X Squared graph, it then started kind of hitting that other inflection point where it started evening off, and I realized I need to take my next step, otherwise I would just get stuck in that plateau. So I decided to close that company. I started a consulting firm. And I was very fortunate, in about a year and a half I was able to sell that consulting firm for enough money that I was able to then retire. And so I retired for about four months, but it turned out that I'm really bad at retiring. I got very bored. So I decided that I needed to do something else.
And one of the experiences I had had, when I was a bit younger in my twenties, is I had the chance to go back to Iran to visit the village where I was born. And of course, Iran has a bunch of very big cities. Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, Tabriz. And they're the number nineteen GDP in the world, they have an entire tech sector, they're doing pretty well. But they also have, you know, all the tiny villages out in remote areas. So if you think of, like, rural Mississippi in the Fifties, right, with outhouses and stuff. So I got a chance to go back to the village, Zangaruiyeh, where I'm from. And you know, I have a lot of cousins that went off to the big cities and became engineers and doctors and so forth, but when I went to Zangaruiyeh, and there was also a bunch of second and third and fourth cousins who were still sheepherders and goat herders, and they spent three hours trying to convince me that the Earth is in the center of the universe.
And that really hit me like a visceral punch in the gut, because I recognized that, you know, I came from the same place, the same ethnicity, the same background, ostensibly the same IQ because we share a lot of genetic code, right? These are second, third, fourth cousins. And yet we lived these radically different lives. And so I recognized that I have to do something about it.
So after I sold my company and retired for a little while, I realized that I need to do more for the world. And I looked at the tech sector. I realized that it was growing very rapidly, that tech was taking over the world, and that tech was able to build companies in such a scalable way where they were able to impact billions of people. And I also learned that I need to learn more about business. That I had learned a bunch about a specific sector, but I needed to learn more. So I drew into a company called Zocdoc, worked my way up there and had an impact, and then I worked as the head of sales and VP of sales in a series of other companies.
And again, I learned quite a bit there working for other people, learning different structures, and so forth, but again, after four companies and you know, building them out, having a couple exits, and so forth, I retired again for a couple months, and that's when I realized, Chris, that I need to start my own project with my own vision that takes into account the things that I had learned from building my own companies, but also the things I learned being an executive at companies other people founded, learning about how to raise money, learning about how to take something to millions of users and tons of paying customers, and getting to billion dollar valuations. And so that's when I started Ahura.
And that was quite a jump for me at that point. Because we were friends at that point, we had known each other, I had my very large apartment in the financial district in Manhattan, I was living a very fun lifestyle, making really good money, and after I retired I realized that, you know, if I'm gonna found a company I'm gonna have to reduce my expenses and really kinda take this on in a different way. And I threw a lot of my own money into the company, because I truly believed in what we were doing. And so that was a really fun step, was taking that leap not knowing where I'm going to land.
Chris (21:19): So fun things that really stood out to me around this taking a leap—I get asked this often. You know, "When is the right time?" You know, "I have this startup idea, when should I leave my well-paying job?" Or, "Hey, I want to try to transition to this different vision, to this different product, to this different project." And as you said, looking for these diminishing marginal returns when that speed of growth—You're still going to be growing, but that speed, that acceleration is turning negative. THat's always a good inflection point to look for when there's better opportunities elsewhere, because the timing is never going to be perfect, but this is the type of objective sign that you'll have a hard time denying.
And in terms of how you get yourself to put yourself out there, it seems that you have found it in choosing something that's so much larger than yourself. I love this question, "What would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?" Because the implication is that doing this thing is so important that failure doesn't matter. Like, you're tackling a problem that's so much larger than yourself, that all these insecurities around, "Oh, should I email this person? Should I go talk to this person?" Well, I'm working on this problem that's so much bigger than me. Of course I'm going to do that. So it seems that that is a big part of it as well, is having a vision that's compelling that's worth being a little bit uncomfortable for.
Talk to me a little bit about your role today as a founder, as a CEO. What role does conversation connection play for Ahura right now?
Bryan (23:01): It's everything. My entire job is talking to people, making friends, getting people to trust me, and getting people to buy into the vision. Whether they're investors, customers, employees, co-founders, getting people to buy into the vision and throw themselves wholeheartedly into it. Look, about the whole advice, about whether to start a company or not and what is the appropriate time, there's two different ways you can look at it. Right? One piece of advice that Richard Branson gave in one of his interviews is, "If you are given an opportunity to do something and you don't know whether you're ready to do it or not, say 'yes' and figure out how to do it while you're doing it." Right? So I think that's a great piece of advice that I've followed my whole career. On the flip side, to give you some opposite advice from the patron saint of tech people everywhere, Elon Musk, he says that, "If you have to ask someone if you're ready to start a tech company, you're not. Don't do it." Right? He explains building a high-growth tech company is like sitting at the edge of an abyss staring into the blackness of the abyss while you're chewing glass.
And so for anybody that's listening that's thinking about starting a company and saying, "Well, should I quit my high-paying job to do this?," think about how dedicated are you to this mission and to this vision? If you have to sacrifice everything, your relationships, your partnerships, your money, and live as a homeless person because that's how important this is to you, then you shouldn't be asking that question. You're going to do it anyway, right? But unless you have that level of dedication it's foolhardy. And here's why. If you're starting a tech company right now, you're going to be competing with the top one percent of performers around the world. These are all people who have been successful, who have done well, had such a level of success in their life that they look at this extremely high-stress and difficult thing where ninety-nine percent of people fail, and they say, "I know ninety-nine percent of people fail, but I'll still succeed." Right? Now that's about a hundred percent of the people you're competing with, which is the best of the best that have done well and also have that level of ego that tells them, "Even though other people have failed, I'll succeed." And you still have to be the top one percent of those people. They're already the top one percent of the global population.
So unless you absolutely love what you're doing and you can get yourself to fall in love with the journey, it's going to be torture. Because, look, you're going to have the majority of people tell you you're crazy, or that your thesis is wrong, or the way you're going about it is wrong. People will have all sorts of ideas. And look, there's nothing like getting negative reviews from the cheap seats. Right? The people that haven't actually done anything in their lives saying, "Oh, that idea won't work." And often these will be people who at some point you respected and trusted. Look, when I started Ahura, Chris, and I had built a relatively good reputation, I'd like to think, in New York and Manhattan, I had so many of my investor friends, so many of my mentors pull me aside and say, "Bryan, why are you building an Ed Tech company? That's where people's careers go to die. What are you thinking?" Everybody told me, "This is the dumbest idea in the world." And I even had a mentor of mine who had told me, "Hey, you know, I've been following your career for a number of years. Whenever you're ready to start a tech company, I'll invest in it." So then I created a company, recruited a team, went back to him, and he said, "This idea is terrible. I'm not gonna invest in it."
And so imagine when you get hundreds of people saying no to you, both for investments and to join you as a team, or you do what I did that you build a team—And of course I had a lot of 'no's—I built a team of, you know, very successful people, including a friend of mine that was one of my if not my best friend for you know, twenty years, and over time at one point I went from a team of about like twelve to fifteen people down to a team of one. Everybody quit except me. Now, granted, we ran out of money a couple times, I just kept on putting my own money into the company. Finally the third time we ran out of money a bunch of my mentors said, "Hey, Bryan, look, you need to stop putting your own money into this because until you figure out how to make this sustainable you're just going to keep putting your own money into it until you run out of money. So what you should do is stop putting money into it, tell your team 'Hey, we ran out of money, let's tighten our belts a bit, figure out how to make this successful,' and then build it back up."
Well, I tried to do that. It turned out that nobody wanted to stay when we weren't paying them. And so now at this point I have been very fortunate. I got into Singularity University, so I was learning from some of the best people in the world, but I had also moved to San Francisco, because a lot of investors that I had been flying out to San Francisco to meet, once I was in Singularity and in San Francisco because of the program, they pulled me aside over drinks and said, "Bryan, look, you're barking up the wrong tree here. If you don't live in Silicon Valley or San Francisco, none of the Silicon Valley based investors are going to invest in your company. That's just not going to happen. You have to move here."
So I moved there. And of course, we ran out of money. And so as all my team was quitting in New York, I was living in a friend's closet on an air mattress with a hole in it that would deflate halfway through the night so at 2:00 in the morning I would wake up on a hardwood floor in the closet, like, sore. My muscles are sore. My bones are sore. I had another friend that was paying for my cell phone bill. I had another friend buying me ramen and eggs so that I didn't starve. And I did that for a couple months until finally I figured out (because necessity is the mother of all invention) I figured out what the product market fit was, how to present the idea, how to convey the value proposition in a way that investors actually wanted to invest.
And suddenly the money started coming in, and then I was able to start recruiting a new team and so forth, and now of course my entire leadership team is build with world-class individuals. So my CTO is the guy that invented Google Translate, my CMO used to write speeches for Steve Jobs and John Sculley, he worked closely with them, he was an early executive with Apple. My chief of staff was an executive at Salesforce and Google Cloud for eight years combined. My COO and co-founder won the math Olympiad in Nigeria, came to the United States, worked on the A.I. team at Goldman Sachs, was an executive at MIDiA and worked Bain, he just—He has a non-profit where he advises half a dozen African heads of state. Right? So every single person on the team is ten times smarter than me, they're all people that have achieved the pinnacle of their careers and chose to work with me either way.
So I'm very fortunate in that regard. But going back to your question, none of that would have happened, I wouldn't be where I am today with late stage negotiations with Walmart, speaking on all these stages, if I wasn't able to push through those difficult times where I was homeless, where everybody told me 'no,' where people that I trusted and respected told me my ideas were crazy and stupid and I would never be successful. You have to believe at such a deep level, and you have to want it so badly. The vision, as you say, has to be so much bigger than yourself that you can't help but wake up in the morning, pop out of bed, and be so excited about the process, to the point where even if everyone said 'no' to you all day, or all week, or all month, when you see someone you just can't help yourself but to be so enthusiastic about what you're doing that you want to share it with them in the world.
Chris (31:01): I mean, what an incredible story. And we talk about, you know, the Hero's Journey in reverse. Right? You're on your island in retirement, and you know, soon enough you're in the closet on an air mattress. And it's, "You might be wondering how I got here" type of thing. But I think it's easy to chalk something up to perseverance and self-belief, but it strikes me as if you were working on something that was larger than yourself. You believed in the vision, you believed that you were the person to work on it, and that if you stuck with it long enough you could find a way to make it work. And despite all of the, let's say, 'constructive' feedback that you were getting from people that you respected, it was these connections that allowed you to find these hires and to negotiate this pretty difficult pivot to a new business model, because you had the feedback, you had the people to make it happen in terms of the partnerships.
I know that despite, you know, the number of things that you're active in—You're a full-time founder, you have a nonprofit, you have an impact fund, you have other things that we didn't even get into in your bio that I know about, you really prioritize putting yourself out there and making connection. You host a lot of events, you go to conferences where you speak. Why have you found despite the demands on your time it takes to write a speech or to put boots on the ground for a conference that you continue to prioritize going to these things?
Bryan (32:36): Yeah, absolutely. So I can just give you the math of it. One hundred percent of my leadership team and upper-level employees I found at parties or events. About ninety percent of my investors I found and closed at events. Most of our customers came from friendships that I developed at events, whether those are the ones I hosted or other people hosted. To me, it's the single most effective and efficient way to generate leads and bring in the people into the company that you need.
Look, I came from a sales background of knocking on doors, quite literally. And then after knocking on doors and, you know, making phone calls and all that stuff, at Zocdoc I cut my teeth going door to door to medical offices. The same deal. Literally walking to a medical office to try to close a doctor. And then as a manager both at Zocdoc and as well as senior VP of sales at a series of companies, I trained entire sales teams on making sixty calls a day and working through those numbers. That used to be relatively effective, and it's still effective to this day, even though people don't really pick up the phone anymore. Like, if you call someone, it's very unlikely that they're going to pick up the phone from someone they don't know.
What I've found is a much more efficient and effective model is building your brand and talking to people face-to-face in an environment where you're able to develop friendship for—So, one of the projects that we didn't talk about is a community I have called "Oasis" where I bring together four categories of people, cohorts of people. The first is impact-driven entrepreneurs that have a proven track record of successfully operationalizing solutions to the world's biggest problems. The second group are impact investors that deploy capital to solve the world's biggest problems and solve existential risk—so whether they're VCs, angels, billionaires, family offices, and so forth. The third category are global experts that have graced some of the world's biggest stages, like the United Nations, European Commission, World Economic Forum, South by Southwest, and so forth. And the fourth category are celebrities. A-List celebrities that wanna use their influence for good in the world.
And I bring these people together in a non-solicitation environment governed by Chatham House Rules, which means if anyone walks around and pitches someone they immediately get kicked out. Now, in spite of that, members of the community have done over two hundred million dollars of transactions with each other over the past year and a half. So how does that happen?
Well, I believe that when you do business, it's much more effective to first become friends with someone over two or three days, find the areas where you align on solving real problems, so then when you do talk about working with each other (and I believe in a give before you take mentality) that when you say, "Hey, this what I'm really passionate about," and someone comes to you and says, "I love what you're passionate about, how can I help?" Or, "I really wanna help you with that, so I'm gonna introduce you to X, Y, and Z, or I wanna deploy a resource," or what have you. Right?
And so you create that vision and then people come to you. Kind of the pull versus a push marketing. That when you are already friends with someone, you can—Instead of the traditional business mindset, especially in New York, and across the world where you're sitting across the table from someone where each side has a fiduciary responsibility to their organization to get their pound of blood, right, and get the absolute best deal for themselves no matter what that means for the other side, instead of that antagonistic business negotiation I believe in both parties bringing the chair to the same side of the table and putting the challenge that they're facing on the opposite side. So they can say, "Hey, as collaborators and friends, how do we work together to bring together our resources and our capabilities to address this issue that's going to impact billions of people?"
And so suddenly you can—It enables both parties to take that hat of competition off and put on the hat of collaboration and figure out how they can create a win/win mentality to create a relationship and a negotiation that helps all parties. And this is really what—Where ESG comes from, right? ESG organizations, environment of social good or impact organizations or triple bottom line that look at not only the benefit to your shareholders and stakeholders, which is really important, but also having other bottom lines around your employees, the world as a whole, and the environment. And so once you begin to take into account all of those different factors, it's much more effective. And that only happens face to face. That only happens when you actually spend the time to develop a true friendship and relationship with someone.
Chris (37:18): Something that I've found consistently that my deepest relationships come from creating pockets of unstructured time, because there is this deconstruction process that needs to happen in order for someone to let their guard down, feel empowered to share who they are rather than their brand or what they represent. And like you said, it's discovering this alignment of passions. That, hey, if we are working towards the same outcome, this opens up opportunities for collaboration. Whether these happen immediately or you're just in the back of your mind thinking, "Hey, what can I do to move this thing that we're both working towards?" It creates this collaborative frame rather than the zero-sum negotiating frame.
And listeners, I can't help but be a little bit meta here. It's like, if you listen to the way that Bryan articulates this, you can see some of what he brings to bear in terms of connecting and inspiring people and the language that he uses. So just the way that he describes having a conversation, I think, is a really nice object lesson. Bryan, if I have your permission, I would love to try to get behind the curtain a little bit. Right? We see the final results as you talk about your vision and what you're doing. I kinda wanna know a little bit about what goes into it. So you mention the majority of your investors, your employees, your customers you met at parties and events. So maybe take us to one of these through your eyes. Let's say you're walking into a party filled with important high-value people who you wanna connect with, but you don't know any of them. What's going through your mind? What do you do first?
Bryan (39:10): Sure, absolutely. I think we were talking, down in Austin, and we were talking about a couple events. Their way was exactly that situation. I go into so many rooms where I don't know anybody at all. Now, I host a lot of parties where I know everybody. But on the flip side, you know, when you're hosting a party where you know everybody, everyone's invited by you, that's really easy to be confident and run around and talk to people. But when you walk into a room where you know zero people, how do you succeed there? Because I have the same thoughts when I walk in as probably everybody else, which is, "Oh, nobody knows me, do I belong here?" Especially when the people there are higher profile, right? "Oh, are people judging me? Everybody here knows each other, they don't know me. Oh, should I just leave? You know, oh, I don't feel comfortable." It's much easier at this point just to leave or sit in a corner or hide somewhere rather than engage.
Now, some of those events have been the most productive events for me in my career. So I'm gonna share with you my mindset, and then I'll also go into strategy, as well. Things that you can use at the very next party that you go to.
So, from a mindset perspective, I take on the same exact mindset that I took in sales and I teach sales people to do. Which is I take on two completely opposite thoughts at the very same time. The first thought is, I give zero fucks whether people there like me or not. And generally that's how I live my life, right? There's seven billion people in the world. If ninety percent of them hate me, that's still a significant number of people that I can have in my life that like me. So hey, if ninety-nine point nine percent of people hate me, I still will find the people that like me. And so generally I just don't care if people like me or not, which means that—Well, we'll get into that in a sec. So that's number one.
On the flip side, I know that I'm going to do my absolute dead-level best with every interaction. All of these specific, strategic things you can do in a conversation to engender the result that you want, I'm going to do all of those, but I'm going to be focused on the journey, not every individual interaction, if that makes sense.
So, let's be a little esoteric for a second here. So my philosophy on the world is that we're all interconnected. That we're all part of almost a mycelial network of humans, that all are part of a superorganism. And so if you convey to yourself, "Oh my god, I'm going to use this person, I'm going to get something out of them," I believe that comes across. Whether it comes across your facial expressions or the specific word usage, or it comes across psychically or through the mycelial network emotionally, people know that. Versus if you authentically have a mindset of, "I'm here to help the world, I love this person in front of me even though I don't know who they are, we're all part of the same human family, and I'm gonna figure out, because every single person can teach me something in a different way—Everybody has a significant amount of value, everybody's awesome, and I want to uncover what's awesome about this person." If that's your mindset when you're talking to people, whether or not you get a business value of talking to them or not is irrelevant.
And so to me, when I'm at a party, I'm not thinking about, "Oh, I need X, Y, and Z for my business." I'm sitting there thinking, "Who are all the cool people that are going to be my friends for the next twenty years that I'm going to meet at this party?" Because every single one of my friends, every single one of the people that are closest to me at some point were strangers that I happened to meet, and now of course they're just such an emotional part of my life.
And so that's the mindset, right, of doing my absolute dead-level best and also not caring what the outcome is of any one interaction, which creates this vibe of a lack of pressure. Right? To use an example, if you guys remember back in college, I don't know, guys or girls that were hitting on someone at a bar, you know, trying to get to know someone, if you ever remember people that were really desperate, they were like, "Please like me. I need you to like me." And then, you know, you were like—The other person makes an excuse to go to the bathroom, or what have you, to run away. Versus having the mindset of like, "Hey, I'm really cool, you're really cool. We might have fun together. I think we will. If not, no worries." And those are the people that are fun to hang out with, right, because there's no pressure. There's nothing—You don't need to fulfill something in them. You can just be yourself, and you don't feel judged. So that's the mindset piece.
So let's talk about the strategy piece. So, I look at parties in three acts, just like a play or a movie or a book. And so in the first act—And let me backup for a second here. I didn't come up with a part of this piece that I'm about to share with you. I actually learned this from this video that was actually a video about someone explaining why you don't need to drink alcohol at parties to have a good time. Now, I still drink alcohol, I drink responsibly, but I thought it was really interesting what he said, because a lot of people drink alcohol so that they feel more confident and more comfortable, and so he was providing some ideas on how to be impactful. And he said, "Look, if you put yourself in the position as if you're the host, even if you know nobody at the party, if you take on that mindset of 'I'm the host and how does the host behave?', then by definition people are going to engage with you in a different way. Right?" So it's all about frames.
And so I'm gonna share some of his ideas, and then I've added quite a bit to this idea myself. So. In the first act of the party, when I know nobody, I generally try to come right on time. Now, I know it's cool to come late, and all that stuff, but I find especially for a party of high-level individuals that might be higher than me and people that I don't know—If I know I'm going into a party where there's going to be a very limited number of people that I already know, I go in early, because a couple reasons. Number one, I want to spend some time with the host or hostess before they are totally enveloped by hundreds of people that are vying for their attention.
Now, this is impactful for a couple reasons. Number one, I don't know if you as a person that's watching have ever thrown a party. I've thrown quite a few parties. And even at a thousand parties in over twenty years, I still get those butterflies when I host a party ten minutes before it starts thinking, "Wow, is anybody going to show up? Is it just going to be me and like two people and food enough for a hundred people and all this stuff and I told everyone this party's gonna happen—Is anybody really going to show up?" Right? Everybody feels that. I don't care who you are. And so when I show up right on time, I know that it immediately makes the host of the party feel at ease, because you can start distracting them through conversation and they stop thinking about if other people are gonna come, and they can begin taking on their host duties. Right? The second thing is, I get to have some uninterrupted face time with the host of the party, which is often a very interesting person.
And so I go off, chit chat with them, get to know them. And again, my goal here is to just get to know the person. I'm not pitching, I'm not talking about myself. In the book How To Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie, that I've read over twenty times, one of the pieces of a good conversationalist is shining the spotlight on the person with whom you're speaking. If they're talking, you're a great conversationalist. If you're talking, you're a poor conversationalist.
And so, now, initially when I started practicing this, I—And still sometimes people are like, "Whoah, what's up with the interrogation?" Right? So you have to do it in a way where you give to get, you ask questions but also share a part of yourself, you do it in a way that shows that you're paying attention to the answers. You're not just letting them talk while you're thinking about something else, and then you just change the subject to something else with a completely unrelated question. They say something, and you actually ask follow-up questions. You're interested, you're listening to what they're saying. You're hearing it, understanding, remembering. And then you remember enough and learn enough about them that you can actually have a deep conversation, and ask those second, third, fourth level questions that really get to who they are as a person, what motivates them, what's their raison d'être, like their reason for living, like, what do they really care about? Right? Instead of the BS, like, "Oh, what do you do? Oh, how's the weather? Oh, where do you live? Oh, the traffic is really bad there." You're actually getting into the core of what makes them a human. Right?
So, after getting to know the host a bit, and as people start trickling in (and I don't wanna, you know, monopolize their time), so as other people come in, and they usually will come say 'hi' to the host, and then I'm talking to the host, so I say 'hello' to them as well. I chat with them a little bit, but then I excuse myself, because now this new guest needs to talk to the host. And I say, "Hey, it was a pleasure meeting you guys. I'm gonna let you guys chat." And then I walk off, maybe grab a drink, or maybe grab a snack, but I generally work my way towards a strategic location. Now, this is again all in the first third. It's in the first act of the party.
So, what's the strategic location? It's a place where everybody that's entering the party needs to walk through. Now, I'm not blocking the stairway or the door, but I'm relatively close to that area. There's a couple reasons that I do this. Now, put yourself in the position of somebody else that's coming to the party. Maybe they know a bunch of people, maybe they don't. Everybody that walks into a party, I don't care how confident you are, has that thought in the back of their mind of, "Oh, are people going to like me?" They have those butterflies, they have that nervousness. And I'm telling you this as someone who everybody thinks is the most—So confident and so like, gregarious, and I talk to everyone. I still have those feelings when I walk into a party and I don't know people, where it's like, "Oh, who am I going to talk to?" You get those sensations. It's a very human behavior. So I understand that people feel that as they're walking in. So as they walk in I greet them warmly. I'm like, "Oh, hey, how are you? Oh, I don't think I've met you yet." That's one of the lines I use. It immediately puts people at ease, and we begin chatting.
Now, what does that do? Now, some people that maybe don't know the host think I'm the host. I'm like, "Oh, no, no, no. I'm not the host." But I begin talking to them. Again, the same strategies. Learning about them. Actually caring. Now, let me backup here for a second. It's extremely challenging to pretend that you care about the person if you don't. So the first thing you have to do is actually adopt a mindset about caring about other people. That's critical. Because when you do that then you're not pretending. You're actually being authentic, which is critical in these interactions. So as people are coming in, I get to meet a significant portion of the people that are walking through the door.
Now, through these conversations, as I'm learning about them, I'm trying to figure out in every interaction not only who is this person and what do they care about, but what do they need? Everybody with the projects that they're working on in life, they need things in their life, whether they're looking for investments, looking for customers, looking for new co-founders, looking for friends, looking for partners, looking for whatever. Everybody constantly has the top two or three things in their mind that in their life if they had would make their life better. So I'm listening for those things. I'm trying to figure out what makes this person tick, what's important to them, and what is it that they need. And also what can they provide. So as a part of what's important to them, how do they help other people?
So by the end of the first act of the party, I have a pretty good idea about the landscape of the party. I would say usually sixty to eighty percent of the people at the party, I know their names, I know their backgrounds, I know what they care about and what they need.
Chris (51:06): There's just so much good stuff there in the first act, Bryan. I just want to pause to underline some of the ones that really stood out to make sure that people get them. First, I love the emphasis that you put on mindset and intentionality, that you have to come into these events with the right attitude, that you are here to meet awesome people, to find out what you can do to support them in their visions. And I like this observation that you made from this video which is subtle but powerful, of thinking of yourself like the host, where the host's responsibility is to make sure that people have a good time. That's a really good way to get out of your own head, rather than thinking about, "What do they think about me? Should I be going over here? Should I go talk to this person?" It's, "What can I be doing so that the person in front of me is having a better time?" And a timeless Dale Carnegie wisdom of, "Don't worry about whether you are interesting. Try to be interested in the other person." That that's how these connections get made.
And one of these kinds of dashboards in my mind is that when I'm at an event I think of it as a conversation possession time. If you watch a game of soccer, they have this, "Who has the ball the most?" It doesn't matter if this is an interview, you're on a panel, you're just like shooting it in front of a new friend at a party. If you're above fifty percent, you're losing. So always thinking about, "All right, what's that followup question? What's the next thing that I can ask this person to get them off script, to go deeper, to have something that is totally unexpected?" This one key thing that you said I think really deserves emphasizing, is showing, demonstrating that you are paying attention.
One thing that you shared with me that I think would be interesting to learn more about is the way that you meet sixty to eighty percent of people in this first act is that you are introducing people. And oftentimes this is someone—You are introducing one person who you've just met to someone who, as you said, "I don't think I've met you yet." And in order to introduce someone you need to have enough information about them so that you can put them in a good light. They say, "Hey, yes, actually, I know this person and that does describe me." I would love to hear, what does that look like, that level of engagement, that when you're meeting someone the first time, it's loud, like, there's a lot of things happening, it's tempting to see who else is here. Like, how are you dialed in enough so you can get who this person is enough to introduce them?
Bryan (53:50): Yeah, so I'm asking questions, right? I'm trying to figure out, when I introduce this person to somebody else, what are the one or two tidbits I say about them that are interesting—That do a couple things. Not only the person that I'm introducing feels good about themselves, because they are like, "Oh, he was listening," and yeah. Those are real things about me. And then the person that I'm introducing them to say, "Oh, this is a really cool person. I want to meet them." Right? So it has to fit both of those, and I'm constantly listening for those and digging for those and figuring out how am I introducing this person, which actually is a fantastic segue into act two. Because in act two of the party, my goal—And this what I do as a host, when I throw these events. I'm constantly looking at how do I introduce people to each other so they optimize the value of the time that they spend at my parties? Which is why when I throw parties people want to come, because they know they get a significant amount of value for being there, whether they have to fly in for the parties, what have you, it's always worth it to them.
And so when I'm at the party and I'm pretending to be the host even though I'm not, right, acting as the host, I'm constantly looking at, how do I provide value for other people? How do I make them more comfortable? Which means, you know, if I'm talking to someone and someone kind of walks over and is kind of awkwardly standing close to us, I'm always, "Hey, come on in. Jump into the conversation." This is something I learned from Mark Silvestro. He used to be a co-founder of mine and used to actually be my boss way back in the day and then joined Ahura in the early days. He would always immediately bring people in and say, "Oh, what we're talking about is this." Give a quick summary, and then go back to the conversation, rather than keep the conversation, like, exclusive and kind of tight. Right? So constantly be inclusive, be aware of the people walking around, aware of the people that feel excluded, and aren't talking to anyone, and are sitting in the corner, and kind of bring them in. Right?
And so in the, you know, in the first act as people are walking in, even if I'm in the middle of a conversation I'll bring people into the conversation as they're entering the party. But the second act is when I really ramp it up, and I'm sitting there, I'm still in conversations with folks, but I'm no longer at that strategic location. I'm making my rounds constantly. And as I get into conversations, I'm like, "Hey, I need to introduce you to someone." And I grab them. I'm like, "Come with me." And I just act fairly confidently, and when I say, "Come with me," I start walking and they usually come with me. And I walk them over to somebody else, and I say, "Hey, you two really need to meet each other." And then I do my introductions. "Hey, Person A is this person, this person, this person, this is what they've done. They're brilliant. Person B is this person, this person, this person. The reason I wanted you guys to meet is blah, blah, blah."
And this only can happen if I already understand what it is that they both want, and what they care about, what's valuable to them. Now, if it's something valuable, both people are like, "Oh, that's amazing." Now, for me I never make one-sided introductions, whether it's you know, via text introductions or WhatsApp introductions, email introductions, or at parties. I only make introductions where both parties—Where my suspicion is after I make the introduction, both parties will come to me separately and say, "Thank you so much for introducing me to this person, this is exactly who I needed to meet," rather than introducing someone where one side is like, "Oh, I really need to meet this person," the other side is like, "Bro, why did you introduce me to this person?" Right? "They just kept on asking me for money," or what have you.
And so the second act of the party, I'm constantly thinking about who needs to meet who. And as I'm in conversations, I bring them in. I will introduce them to other people at the party. People are getting to know each other that didn't know each other before. And they're having fantastic conversations. Once the conversation really gets going, I excuse myself and walk off, and I start talking to other people. Either new people I haven't met yet, or people that I had a deep conversation with before, and I just go up to them and continue the conversation from before, and after talking to them for a while I'm like, "You know what occurs to me—Have you met so-and-so yet?" And now, sometimes they're like, "Oh yeah, me and him go way back." But often enough, they're like, "No, I haven't met them yet." I'm like, "Come with me." And again, I go and introduce them to somebody else.
Now, that's the second act of the party. I'm introducing people to each other, they're enjoying the introductions, I'm having a great time, I'm you know, bouncing around talking to everybody at the party, I'm introducing and then excusing myself, just having a great time. And by forcing myself to introduce people to each other and remembering the important things about them, I also reiterate that into my own mind so that when I see them at the next event or when I text them later I remember those things about them. Right? Just like if you want to remember someone's name there's the old adage, you say their name three times within the first ten seconds of meeting them. Right? It helps you remember. Same thing about the interesting things about their lives that you want to remember so you can then repeat in introductions.
So that's the second act. The third act is the completion of this. The third act is where you find out if you did a good job in the first two acts. Right? So if people are constantly coming up to you, as they're getting ready to leave—'Cause in the third act, people start to trickle out. If people are constantly coming up to you and saying, "Hey, Bryan, we didn't exchange information. Like, let me get your contact information, I have to talk to you," or, "Hey, let's take a selfie together before I go," or if they're coming up to you and want to introduce you to other people to return the favor, or if they're coming to you and they're like, "Hey, man, like, we talked a lot but like I want to learn more about your story." Those are all indications that you were successful. That you effectively provided enough value to people's lives where they want to then spend more time with you.
Look, oftentimes when I meet people that are extremely high-level, I don't know what they do until this—Like, not what they do, but I don't often know how wealthy they are or how successful they are until either super late in the conversation or like the second or third time we hang out. Right? So there's a bunch of like NBA players and NFL players and investors VCs that I've become very close with that I did not know any of those things about them until we hung out like two, three, four times, and then I find out they're an heir or an heiress of one of the wealthiest families, or that they played in the NBA for eight years, or all this stuff—I don't follow sports, so I don't generally know this stuff, anyway. But because I'm just talking to them about what they're passionate about now. I'm talking about what drives them, what gets them out of bed in the morning. And I usually preface it with something like, "You know, outside of work." And so we don't even talk about work. We talk about what they're passionate about, what makes them go.
And so then we hang out for a while, and they're like, "Oh, by the way," and then I find out that they're this huge person. And it's like, "Oh, okay. Well, that's irrelevant to me. I don't care."
Chris (01:00:42): What questions are you asking them? You had this, you know, what's awesome about this person that your goal is to discover this? Are there questions that you find that get past the usual "what do you do" to you know, what they're about, who they are as a person?
Bryan (01:00:57): Yeah, absolutely. So I have some things like, "Hey, what are you passionate about?" "Hey, what are the things about the world that you're most concerned about these days?" "Outside of work, where do you spend most of your time?" "Outside of work, what makes you really happy?" I'm just trying to figure out, you know, what makes them happy and what makes them tick.
Chris (01:01:15): How, what level of preparation goes into this? Like, before the event are you, what type of research do you do—I have so many questions for you. Like, what do you—I'm curious about what happens before you walk into the room. Is there anything that you do—You know, they have this corny, like power pose idea. Do you do anything to kind of get yourself into state before you go in? What's that time look like right before the event?
Bryan (01:01:39): Yeah. So as far as preparation in terms of researching people, I do embarrassingly little research on people. I probably should do a lot more. It would probably be more effective for me to do research on the hosts and hostesses and people that are likely at the party. Frankly, I just don't have the time to do it. I run four companies and a nonprofit. I work a hundred and twenty hours a week. And so I don't really spend the time to research everybody I'm going to talk to. Heck, even when I'm on a panel or I'm speaking at places where they send me the guest list, I probably should send it to my team and have them research it, but I just don't. And frankly, I actually enjoy the process of finding out who someone is through conversation. To me, that's fun. And so if I do too much research about them and think too much about who they are and what I want and where I want the conversation to go, I find that it makes me more stilted, because I like to just be authentic. And if I'm authentically interested in who they are, like, then that just works out a lot more effectively for me.
So as far as power poses, I used to do power poses. I still do affirmations in the morning. I still take cold showers many days in the morning. I look in the mirror and say—You know, I have some affirmations that I say that are meaningful to me, and some that are just funny, that make me laugh but also are like, comedic, but also get across certain things. I don't really do power poses anymore, especially since oftentimes if I'm going to a, you know, a mansion, like they have cameras and I don't want to be sitting in front of their camera doing camera poses. And I'm like getting dropped off by Uber, and they usually have security there anyway, or if I'm bringing a date like I can't sit there with the date right there doing like power poses. It's a little hard to do. But in my mind, I do remind myself of what my mission is. Right? And what is my mindset of like, "Hey, I'm gonna be the host. I'm gonna be the most interesting person in the room." My goal, and I tell myself this in my head, is to act as the host to make sure everybody gets to meet other people, that everyone's having a really good time and that I'm memorable because I ask them questions and really get deep into it.
And every time I go to a party, I'm like, "Hey, is this a party where I meet a lifelong friend?" And so when I go in with that level of intention, it works out. Now, during the party every once in a while—This usually happens I would say at least once in every party. Even if I know everybody.
I was at a birthday party recently for two of my very close friends. There was a birthday party for three people in San Francisco. Two of them are extremely close friends. I knew a bunch of people that were going to be there. Some of my portfolio, some of my really good friends, other people, and even there there was a point where I was like, "Oh, I'm getting a little uncomfortable. Should I just call it a night and head home?" You know, like, "You know, I made my appearance, and dah-dah-dah." And I had to talk to myself and say, "Bryan, I knew this was gonna happen. It's okay. These are just thoughts that are coming into my head. You know what? Take a quick break. Have a drink. Go to the bathroom. This party's gonna be amazing, and you're going to meet some really cool people that are gonna be part of your life for the next twenty years." So, grab a drink, go to the bathroom, splash some water on my face. I'm like, "This is gonna be awesome. You know what, it doesn't matter if people like me or not, I'm just going to go out and have fun and meet some really cool people.
And I went back out, and I wound up staying there the rest of the time, had some amazing conversations, I met some really cool people, and then we went to the after-party, and at the after-party I met some really amazing people that I wouldn't have met otherwise, and I just had a fantastic time, so when I went home I was like, "Man, I'm so glad that I was there the whole time and I didn't just put my tail between my legs and go home because I was feeling uncomfortable for like ten seconds feeling like, "Oh, like, do I belong here?" Because like—
Chris (01:05:37): I love that reframe so much of just, "I'm just here to have fun and meet interesting people." I think we've all been in this place where we start to get uncomfortable and we create this narrative about what's going on, of, "Oh, I'm just like not connecting tonight," or, "Hey, these just aren't my people." Or all these things we start to tell ourselves to kind of avoid this discomfort. The things that happen, our work, also happen in these connections. And just needing to take a deep breath, get a little separation, remind myself "hey, why I'm here, I've already won" sort of thing, "I'm just gonna have fun, anything that happens is a bonus." That we can reframe, we can recreate this narrative so that no matter what happens the evening is a success.
And I love what you said about not over-preparing. It's something that I've seen as well, and this has been a transition for me, because I'm very much a planner, that a lot of being present in social situations is intuitive. And seeing what's there, being open to what's there, and if you have too rigid of a plan of what you're trying to do and accomplish, you can miss the amazing person right in front of you. So I find it's like you want to be the minimal amount prepared. It's like, "All right, I feel confident going in here, and let the chips fall where they may."
Now, we get back to act three, the end of the night, one that for me I know is something I'd like to improve on, where this, "Hey, this has been a great conversation," and a lot of times we have these, "All right, well, cool. Been nice talking to you. Have a nice life" sort of thing. Right? But like, how is this exchange of contact information for you? I know you've had a lot of reps here, you've had a lot of opportunities to see what works, what's smoothest, what leads to something that could continue. What are a couple things that you've found in order to take a conversation to the next step or to continue outside of the event?
Bryan (01:07:40): Yeah, for sure. So I generally try to get the phone numbers and contact information of almost everybody I talk to. The only exceptions I make to that is women who are married or dating someone, or like if I'm not asking for their number from a romantic context, like, I make it very, very clear that this is just professional. And so for that sometimes it's LinkedIn, because I don't want the appearance of impropriety, especially if they're married or their partner's there or if they're dating someone, or whatever, I just make it very clear or just don't ask for their contact info at all. But generally I try to get everybody's number. So at the end of the conversation, if the conversation has been going well, there's already areas of alignment of places where we care about the same thing, so I'm like, "Hey, I should introduce you to this person," or, "Hey, I'd love to learn more about X, Y, or Z, or whatever," so before we part ways it's like, "Hey, before we go I'd love to get your number." And so I just pull out my phone, I pull it to the contact thing and I just hand it to them.
So, it's super assumptive. It's exceedingly rare for someone to say, "No, no, I don't want to give you my number." People just say, "Yeah, sure, totally." And so they fill out their number. And then what I always do, because they, you know, hit the 'save' button, I go back, hit the edit button, I'm like, "Hey, I always do something, 'cause I meet a lot of people, do you mind if we take a picture so that I can remember you?" I literally say that. And sometimes they'll laugh. I'll pull up the picture, I'll take a selfie of me and them together. Then what I do is I save that picture to their profile, and then I immediately text message them that picture along with their name, and then I send a couple text messages about what we talked about, what we align on, and what the next conversation's going to be about.
And I tell them while I'm typing everything out, I'm like, "Hey, I'm going to send you my picture so you also remember me tomorrow, because I know you also meet a ton of people." And so now I have their picture of me and them together, they have that picture so tomorrow when they're looking through their text messages they're like, "Oh, I remember that guy." And then we also have something, 'cause, you know, I meet a hundred people at a party, or oftentimes when I'm South by Southwest, or at Art Basel, or World Economic Forum, there's party after party after party after party after party. So you go to like six parties in a day, and you meet a hundred people at each of 'em, that's a lot of people. So you get all the pictures as well as what you talked about, 'cause sometimes they blur together. And a couple just things about them and a couple things about me. So then when I walk off I have this stuff.
So then, after the party, then I know, like, hey. I'm going to follow up with these people, say, "Hey, it was great meeting you," and so forth. And so that's useful. But yeah, generally I just straight up ask, "Hey, can I get your contact information?" And then for people that I just wanna be very, very clear—Because when I'm going to these events, I'm generally not trying to date, I'm not trying to find girls, I'm not trying to do anything romantic, so I'm keeping everything super professional, which also saves me a lot of time because I'm all just meeting people in a professional context that's useful. Also I know like a lot of women that go to these professional events, they're not trying to just constantly be hit on. It's just a little inappropriate to be hitting on them there as well, because they want to be taken seriously as professionals and so forth as well. And so I generally don't use LinkedIn, so sometimes I'll just ask them for their, I'm like, "Hey, I could get your LinkedIn, but I barely ever check their messages, so you know, could we exchange Instagram or whatever?" So it's just a little bit more professional. But oftentimes they're like, "Oh, no, I'll just give you my phone number." It's like, "Okay, cool." Or, "Hey, can I get your email address?" And they'll give me the email address, and we'll save that in.
Chris (01:11:11): I've seen this in action, and it's really cool. I encourage you to try it. Where I was like, "Huh, taking a selfie with them, that seems a bit strange." But it creates this shared almost conspiracy of, "Hey, we both know we're meeting a lot of people, and if we're not careful we won't even remember that this conversation took place, so let's create a moment that's unique that we can look back on. So, "Hey, there's a lot of context that's captured in that photo." And you set yourself apart. And that little bit of extra effort of, "Hey, here's who I am, here's what I talked about, and importantly here's what we're gonna talk about in the future," it creates these expectations of a future conversation and what that future conversation is going to look like. I find that sometimes when I feel less inclined to follow up with someone is because I haven't made those expectations clear. I've got their number, I've got their email, but the reason for followup hasn't been specified. And so it all goes back to who is this person? How can I help them? What is our shared mission? And that creates this expectation of, "Here's what our future conversations are going to framed around. How can we each help each other towards the shared mission?"
Bryan (01:12:25): That's exactly right.
Chris (01:12:26): Bryan, I feel like I've learned so much today, both from seeing you work your magic in this conversation, and thank you so much for taking us behind the curtain in what happens in these events and the art of connection and how these connections create this compounding effect towards creating not only lifelong friends but opportunities, business partners, investments. Do you have any final words of wisdom, maybe around, you know, the mindset intentionality that someone should have when they're bringing to creating this sense of authentic connection?
Bryan (01:13:01): Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, I just want to remind people again that nobody's born with this. Right? And the people that we think are naturals at it, they just happened to get a lot of practice when they were really young. So oftentimes, their parents just made them very social from a very young age, and constantly introduced them to people when they were two, three, four, five, six years old. And so they just got that practice at a much younger age. But that doesn't mean if you're twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, it doesn't matter how old you are, you can still develop them. And oftentimes people overestimate what they can accomplish in one year, but they underestimate what they can accomplish in ten years. And so there is this ten thousand hour rule to achieve mastery, but it's all about dedicated practice. And so if you have a vision for what you want your life to look like, you can get there. You just have to practice at it, and you have to push through that discomfort.
One of the things my mentor, back in my early days when I was in my early twenties, Lester Grafton used to tell me is that if you're not uncomfortable, you're not growing. If your comfort zone is this and you're constantly inside your comfort zone, you're just going to be stuck there indefinitely until you get outside of your comfort zone. And once you get outside of your comfort zone and you do that enough your comfort zone expands and then includes all of the things that you were previously uncomfortable with. And then at that point you have an obligation to also get outside your comfort zone again. And so what happens if you're continuously seeking out discomfort, what you'll find is that the things that you're comfortable with in the world will continue to expand, and so when you see other people and they appear confident and they can just hop on stage and speak surreptitiously and look like they don't care what people think about them and so forth, or if they're Olympic athletes and they have this amazing talent, it's because they spent a lot of time being uncomfortable, whether it's in sports or in medicine or in math or social interactions.
You have to be uncomfortable first before you're comfortable. It's just like running a marathon, right? If you just decide to get up one day and try to run a marathon it'll be difficult. But if you first run for five miles, that will be uncomfortable, you do that enough that your body just gets accustomed to it, then you can run seven miles and ten miles and twelve miles and so forth.
And so the recommendation I would have for all your listeners is whatever it is that they're seeking, whether it's to be more comfortable at parties or more comfortable speaking to people of the opposite sex or the same sex or be able to speak in public or anything else, to find ways to put themselves in that situation, and when they have that feeling that we all do with the drawing and pulling away and going home, fight that, and push through it, and you'll find that each time you push through it will be easier to do so, and you'll be able to do it faster and more effectively.
So, Chris, I really wanna thank you for having me on your show. I know you've had some incredible guests in the past, and I know you have amazing guests coming up. You're fantastic at asking questions and really diving deep and creating serendipity, creating new conversations that haven't been had before, and I definitely experienced it here. So thank you for the amazing questions, and I appreciate the fact that you had me on. I'm honored.
Chris (01:16:22): So glad to hear that, Bryan. The honor is likewise. And, yeah, this was a lot of fun. I think both being able to demonstrate how some of these things work through examples, but also what went into those reps, the deliberate practice of making the connection, laying out that this is an opportunity that anyone can improve upon, and laying out a bit of that vision of what could change in your life if this is something that you allow yourself to be uncomfortable with, that there is a large light at the end of the tunnel.
Thank you so much for joining us, Bryan. See you all again soon.
Tasha (01:16:59): Thank you for listening to the Forcing Function Hour. At Forcing Function, we teach performance architecture. We work with a select group of twelve executives and investors to teach them how to multiply their output, perform at their peak, and design a life of freedom and purpose. Make sure to subscribe to Forcing Function Hour for more great episodes, or go to forcingfunctionhour.com to sign up for our newsletter so you can join us live.