How ClassPass & Dave’s Killer Bread built success | Tony talks with the creators at Business Mastery

[Music] the first person i'm gonna introduce you to is a true unicorn if you know what i mean in business it's a person who built the company from scratch to over a billion dollar evaluation she was the first unicorn of the decade with a little company called class pass how many are familiar with class bass out there ladies and gentlemen [Applause] um this woman paella kadakia started this company in 2013 and she did it because she gave herself a very limited amount of time she worked you know she went to mit and she worked in you know bain and she also worked at warner's and while she was a warner she decided to give herself i think it was 14 days off to clarify with her to come up with a business idea and that was 2013 and now the business value over a billion dollars 100 million hours of workouts in more than 30 countries so uh let's bring it up please welcome pio [Music] [Applause] [Music] but i'd like to start a little bit early in the beginning you referenced a little bit about your heritage and how important is to you and i know you were bullied as a kid and so many people get bullied and they let it run them over and kind of maybe hid your heritage for a period of time what changed that and how much has your heritage played a role in your capacity to succeed on such a large scale you know i think when i faced that adversity it forced me to look deeper into who i was and where i came from and that led me on this beautiful journey of finding my passion which was dance and i had found this amazing teacher who started training me when i was three years old my mom's best friend and you know most indian girls actually in america are put in dance classes when they're younger too um but i found her to be a guru to me and she taught me a way of life more than just even teaching me dance and that relationship was a fundamental part of my life and i found this way to appreciate where i could where i came from the women that i was a part of from india and i found it beautiful and that's when i started expressing the layers of who i was as a human being and i started performing and i started dancing and by the time i went to college i was so proud of who i was but it took me a little bit to get there but i think it's these passions and these teachers in our life that help us really see the true part of who we are tell me what were some of the things that your guru dansker taught you that'll stay with you and guided you you know in india a guru is someone who passes down knowledge to you right and that's why you respect them so much and it was a way to show up right it was a lot about you know and i know they're like show up on time you know have your hair up and be prepared practice it's a lot of these philosophies that of course are important in the dance class but they are important to life it is about being present it is putting all your work into something she didn't want us to make excuses right if we couldn't do a step she would just simply look at us and sort of give us a side eye and that was you knowing that why didn't you practice or why didn't you go home and work hard enough and these are rules for life you can always get better at something you know if you can't do something you put in some extra hours of work and you will always figure out how to learn it and i think that's what she taught me at such a young age that everything is mine if i want it to be and everything that i ever want to achieve is within my capacity you have the responsibility and the opportunity other than the blame it's unfortunately not a current philosophy for a lot of kids today it's not their fault it's just they've been taught something different it's beautiful that you found that heritage um i find your story so exciting but what i also love about your story is it wasn't just easy didn't just instantly come together your first two approaches failed so i'd love to talk about the failure and what you learned from it because a lot of people they fail once and that's it they don't ever want to go through that again but obviously you didn't have one you had two and you just keep you know iterating it sounds like but tell me what was that like and before you tell me that what's it like to have built something that you can be so proud of that's helped so many lives around the world in 30 countries a hundred million workouts that's pretty awesome so what does that feel like and then the contrast that to the early failures and what you learn from them if you don't mind you know i am i feel humbled in the sense that i've been able and i have the honor of working on solving this problem to me it was a problem i faced in the beginning that i wanted to solve it was never about how big it was going to be what valuation we were going to get how much money we would make it really came from a mission and so to me you know i always talk about this but it's so important when we didn't when it didn't work the first time and then the second time we started getting people to get to class and my heart jumped for joy when that first person booked that class and i feel the same on the 100 millionth reservation that's beautiful and that to me is the important thing is that you don't lose that connection to your why and to be honest of you know in the beginning i think i made a mistake because i lost that or i didn't even know what that was i kind of was you know what i call false signals of success in the sense of it's really easy to get tied to how much money did you raise how much press you're getting how many followers you have we got into this amazing incubator program and all those things made me feel like i was succeeding but i forgot the most important thing was to build a product that worked yes and that was solving what i wanted to and once i realized that i threw everything else out and i went back to that and i worked hard i built a scrappy product i think in the tech world we talked about this thing called an mvp which is your minimal viable product and instead of spending a year which i did the first time and i spent a half a million dollars building a product that completely didn't work this was you know me saying that's the first product about me interrupt you because i want to know the difference yeah it was an open table for classes so there was no membership it was just like a database of classes that you could look it up and decide where and then you contacted them yourself as opposed to going through your organization is that the difference no you could actually book it on the site but it is so interesting because it's a customer behavior challenge in the sense of you know it's interesting when you list a bunch of stuff but people have fear which i know you probably think about so much time it was too many brain cycles for people to get through to book that class but when we made it a membership we made it a community we made it a value proposition and we made it about discovery so now it became i can't wait to go to these classes versus all the things that were standing in my way and you already paid you know so it sort of unleashed you to make you feel like these classes were gifts to you versus feeling like pressure and fear and we just unleashed the psychology of making you know fitness fun right people started looking forward to classes so you know back to the original question it really became about what was not working was people weren't not going to class and i realized that most people and i'll be honest i'm i'm a four foot 11 human being like i am scared of working out i am scared of weights i never felt like fitness was for me but then i started realizing i wanted to build a product that made it feel accessible that it you know it made somebody who was scared to be able to you know clip in their spin bikes in a class right or wasn't flexible feel comfortable trying a yoga class and on the flip side all these businesses wanted more people right they needed more people there was a huge surge of boutique fitness classes opening up and many of them needed new clients in the door and they were finding trying to find ways of doing it even giving away classes for free so that's when we started realizing there was this beautiful way if we could find the right pricing the right value proposition and inspire people and motivate them to actually go and what did you change that first of all they made the decision just to become a member and have access they'd have to make all these individual decisions right or wrong so i get that but what else did you do to create that inspiration in your site that made it go and what was the difference between version one version two and version three yep so version one was a simple open table for classes like i said we didn't do much research on the customer side it was literally a tech plug-in for us on the back end it was sort of a you know do-it-yourself model the second one was a one-month discovery pass where we put together these free classes studio owners had you had one month to try 10 different classes they had to be different ones that you've never been to before okay and you had one month so this gave everyone a nice timeline right to say okay i have 30 days let me go to yoga class spin class zuma class get it all done they loved it so much that people started frauding us in the sense they were buying that product over and over again with different email addresses different emails yes right so gaming the system yeah and at first you know your instinct right especially is to say no you can't do that and as people started doing this more and more i remember as an entrepreneur thinking wait a second they want to do something they want to give us more money and we're saying no and that's when we did a survey we asked them where like if you could do this monthly would you do it and 95 of them said yes and that was the bingo moment they loved variety you know that was actually what was sort of missing right if you subscribe to one gym or one studio you don't necessarily get that variety feeling that you know gets you out of your fitness routine when you need to and then most people end up falling out and so this was what sort of inspired a whole new program for everyone and that was really the differences so the third one was really the monthly membership versus the one month pass so you got convenience and variety and then you know one of the things that i try to talk to entrepreneurs and a lot of new entrepreneurs are not coming up in the tech industry they don't get incubated and so they're always trying to make the perfect product and minimum viable product is common in that tech industry but not for the general public why is that so important and how did like you said you spent a half a million dollars on which one phase one or phase two phase one phase two was me and you know three people hacking it together if someone made a reservation we were there at 4 am fulfilling it we just did not care yeah so you spent all this money didn't get the results spent less money and then eventually found by actually doing your business and talking to your clients what they really needed what they really wanted um i'm sure you now do you coach other entrepreneurs do you mentor people yeah i advise you i absolutely advise you what advice do you give entrepreneurs that are beginning the journey who are uptight about making a perfect product i consider myself and i believe most entrepreneurs who truly believe in what they're building to be mission obsessed not product obsessed i love that right do not it's not about a product it is about what you decided to solve in the world your product will change it will change many times but your mission should not right your why because your why is your true north it helps guide you through challenges through you know ups and downs that you're going to face if you don't really care about your why you will give up the first time it doesn't work and let me tell you something there's gonna be many times it doesn't work and you just have to be able to fall in love with your client not your product yeah right absolutely your ideal clients and meet their needs and the product will have to care about something right and i think you know for me i felt like every part of my life brought me to that moment to solve this problem for other people and you know that's why it's ten years later and i still love what i do because i care so deeply about the problem i set out to and i still feel like we're just getting started well you had massive momentum and then you bumped up this thing called cova just like i did and you have live classes you have my live classes and so i'd usually have 12 000 15 000 people in a stadium and all of a sudden it was illegal to have more than 10 people so you did something really beautiful and again this is why i really wanted to bring it out even more than your success because anyone can be fortunate enough to find a niche work their tail off and make it happen but it's very different to have the kind of resiliency that when all hell breaks loose and your business is now being governed in a completely different way to find the solution so tell us a little about what happened when coveted how much did like we lost 95 of our business what percentage of business did you lose and then how did you adapt ninety-five percent of our revenue within a week and you know we froze all of our accounts obviously our studios were shut down we had come off of our best month ever and our billion dollar evaluation like we literally hit that moment right before this and then covet happened so it was it was a shock to the system but you know as we were just talking about the dna of our company is about iterating and pivoting it wasn't about oh no you know what are we going to do it became how are we going to solve this we want to keep people working out and we need to keep our studios alive and all of our attention went to solving those problems right away and thankfully you know we had been experimenting with video in the past few years so we had this amazing product it wasn't perfect we just flipped the whole entire site and made it so people could use all of our digital products that we got our studios to do live you didn't have any digital action online before that correct we had a few things like in the making but it wasn't our main product it by no means was anywhere comparable to our current site but within our week like the whole team just flipped the site and i think that's what shows you what resilience and pivoting and we don't get scared you know i always think about this moment we changed our name in 2014 i started the company in 2011. okay and so we've actually changed our name three times as a company we're the first two it was dabble now then it was classivity and then it was class fast okay and you know people i remember that day when we decided to change the name to class fast it was because by the way the product was called the classivity class fest that's a mouthful so we knew we had to change it and we thankfully got the domain and all of that for class fast and it was scary right we had had a lot of branding a lot of marketing but you have to think ahead and what's going to be best in the future and i think that's what really has gotten us through the course of covid we know there's a beautiful future ahead and there's a way of keeping people still engaged and giving them something and the magic of class pass even if it's virtually now you you now have like 50 000 uh live classes that people do from their home so you know peloton obviously provided kind of a nice opportunity just like having you know zoom and technologies like this has changed the world great that it happened right before all this happened for all of us continue to serve people but how did you go about getting all those classes were the classes that already existed did you go to people and have them create classes online with them how did you go about it just out of curiosity and how did you get so many classes so rapidly well so many of our studios also very quickly went to zoom right they needed to keep their clientele they wanted to keep teaching right as a teacher you crave teaching your students right of course and so we wanted to make sure that was easier we wanted to give them more once again marketing right and being able to compile all that information it's impossible to get an email from every one of your favorite studios and know what time their classes are so once again we went back to the convenience and the variety that was the magic of the product and listed all in one place people had a subscription they had credits they could use it to book these live stream classes and our on-demand classes and so a lot of it was you know makeshift i won't say once again it wasn't a perfect product but we put up what we could to keep people engaged and what's what was the response and how how's the business doing as uh our classes i'm sorry for my ignorance but our classes more open now yeah uh around the country and around the world around the world we're seeing we're definitely seeing you know people going back to classes the really great thing is is they're working out more so for the members who have come back in places that are open they are actually working out in a more engaged way and i think it's because everyone was missing in person classes and i think we will see and we're starting to see already that there's a hybrid model of the you know the at-home workout i think this broke a lot of people's fears down on how to actually embrace working out at home but i still think and i think we know that this is the magic of it is people still love in person right and there's something that happens when you're i mean we're we're excited to get people back to experiences and working out and we even pivoted into beauty and wellness a bit so you can book things like massages and nails and beauty and other experiences that are less you know coveted intense yes um and i think that's once again it's pivoting it's you know our mission necessarily wasn't tied to fitness always it was to give people soul nurturing experiences oh i love that so that's beautiful very wide and we always knew that we would go into other experiences and to be completely honest when i started the site i had creative classes on there too like cooking and drama and music you know we just had to focus focus is important when you're starting a business so we focused and now that we had you know this time which we never had a chance to focus on a lot of those categories because we were so busy this gave us a great time to actually even change our product and do a little bit more research on how to expand into the other categories we always wanted to as covet become a gift for you then are you actually having a larger business now because you'll have both the online and the offline type of experiences what's your view of it yeah i mean like i said i think it's given us such a great time to work on learning more about our product being able to you know figure out what our customers need our partners need i think the thing that we all don't know and that you know as a company we always look at to is consumer behavior is going to change on the other end of this and none of us can predict it but what i know is we're ready for both right right um i think i read someplace you talked about how you're willing to break anything to make things better i'm probably misparaphrasing is that what you said i mean if something like that most likely like i said what have you had a break along the way in order to make your business more effective because i think that's something that is admirable most people are so afraid to fail and are afraid to break anything if it's working don't mess with it and then what i always tell people is there's two business you got to manage the business you're in the business you're becoming yeah you only work in the business you're becoming you don't manage your current business you're in trouble if you only work on this someone's going to displace you so tell me your philosophy of breaking it and where have you broken things to make it better you know i'll tell you a story uh when i was in the middle of pivoting from the passport which was a second product to uh classpass my advisor said to me he goes the passport is your is crack to you guys it'll be a chapter in your book one day and i didn't understand what he meant by that because i wanted to keep it i was too scared yeah to let it go because it was providing us reservations and revenue yeah and i mean in the halls of class past today passport is like a data field right for my my tech guys and people will be like what is that and i'll be like you know it really is a chapter in the book uh but i think what he was trying to say at the time is exactly what you're you know you're talking about is it's about focus you know and i needed it at the time to help me get over but i remember by the time we changed our name i knew i had to shut down the other products and it was time to focus and go all in and it's okay if you need to iterate just do it in a scrappy way don't be spending a lot of money you know don't do things that are bad for your team and your resources manage your business well yes i see if i read correctly i think you raised like 500 million dollars over time yeah that's amazing tell us how you went about that and what what uh was it the kind of advisors you guys was it the network you had already created what made it possible for you to raise that much capital and over what period of time did you do it well so i started the company in 2011. so that was a long time ago i didn't really in the beginning i raised friends and family and that came from my network that came from people who had seen my background whether it was dancing my bane mit sort of resume what was that first raised size just by car yeah one million dollars total over two years i raised a million dollars on a convertible note the next round was a two million dollar seed round but that took me three years to get to so five years to get to where you raised two million bucks still three years three million yeah three years until i got to two million dollars and in between there i had gone out to silicon valley twice and i had gotten a lot of notes so just want everyone to know it's not easy like i went out there i didn't have a product that was working i had these makeshift ideas right but they weren't fully working at the time and by the time i got to that two million dollar round though i knew i had built magic because plasma started working we had this hockey stick growth curve which is like for investors as gold and then it became easier to raise then it became about you know tackling competition it almost became about you know can we raise enough capital to make sure we like you know continue to be able to protect our mission protect our businesses and you know then it was just feet on the street and we moved really fast after two million dollars we raised 40 million dollars wow yep and then after 40 it went on we raised we did a bridge round of 30 and i mean over time we've raised a lot of capital but this is a capital intensive business right so to launch a city it requires our team to go in to go and get studios to be able to do marketing and we have that down we know exactly how much it takes to launch a city get it together and we're all over the world now so every single time we want to expand and grow capital raise we push it through and then the business you know we know the playbook how many employees do you have and tell me a little bit about how you create culture because we both know culture is everything in the end otherwise it's just you yeah so what what how many employees do you have how how much have you ramped that up over time and what is your culture and how do you reinforce the culture since you're working in 30 countries so you know we have over 500 employees now across the company across well across the globe and now everyone's even remote and stuff so i can't even tell you what the office situation looks like as much anymore because it's moved around quite a bit but you know it's been incredible to watch the team grow over time i think as an entrepreneur when you start you're you're not necessarily thinking about your team in the beginning you're thinking about building something and you know i had this moment where we finally had an office in new york city in 2014 it was you know what a beautiful office that we took like a year to kind of build and i remember walking in and seeing all the deaths and realizing wow like these people really made this business and i think what i realized in that moment is culture comes from the people who work for you it is about them right and at the end of the day as a leader you can't dictate what the culture is you can lead and they can be inspired from it and i think one of the things that's so magical about class fast is how much we love the product people come to work in workout clothes they go to class for lunch like and it's totally okay i think people always walk in and they're like what's going on i'm like no like we're in our leggings we're in our workout gear that person's going to their favorite bar workout i'll sometimes join them if i can but that's the culture it's because we live and breathe what we who we are and i think over time we've also learned to recruit from our from our product so there are a lot of people and members who use our product who we then ask to they're raving fans exactly they're the best people that keep us you know innovating and making sure that our product works right if people are complaining about your product you have to listen you know i think it's like you can't dictate and tell people what to do you cannot tell your customers what to do you have to hear what their problems are and try and solve it what's been one of the biggest challenges you faced over the years in this decade of building the business i mean covet obviously would have to be a pretty big one yeah is there another one and i'm curious how you dealt with it because i just love seeing the patterns of how people solve problems yeah i mean to me the whole thing was solving this this problem of really getting someone to class you know i think it feels it's nothing to sign up to show up yeah you know like like i said 100 million reservations that's 100 million hours of people's lives that wouldn't have happened before this product that's pretty incredible thank you that's awesome thank you really awesome um and it's really meaningful to know that you know that this wouldn't have existed in any way you know i remember taking class in the middle of hong kong and i was with a bunch of people we didn't even speak the same language but we were having the same human experience and i think products that change people's lives like classpass has they're they're products that last and i think for me as an entrepreneur like i've always wanted to build something timeless and those are products that will outlast you right and that's because it's got something that is about the human spirit and that was what i always strive to do i love your connection to your mission it's unfortunately rare people start out with it as you said and then they get caught up in the business of the business so it's beautiful that it's part of your soul not just your head or your heart um i'm curious so you know everybody has things they think are their limitations and the culture tries to create limitations one and for some people in business and thinking they're female or thinking they're a woman of color those things have not even slightly stopped you you just crushed it how have you taken the expectations of limitations that other people have and use it to your advantage because you clearly have you know growing up i definitely had a lot of expectations on me i think when you're the daughter of you know immigrants you want to make them proud right it was straight a's go to mit get a good are you the oldest i'm the youngest oh the youngest yeah and i think for me i knew i had to get off the train at some point right and that was sort of this journey i went through when i was at bain and i realized how much i loved to dance and i didn't want to follow the business school route and i wanted to chart my own journey and i had to get off you know but that all being said the foundation of my education is such an important reason i am who i am right the network it provided me the opportunities it gave me it made it easier for me to get some of those checks 100 and that's because my parents made took a huge risk and invested in that philosophy of making sure that education was there so that's like a very big part of it and i think the other side of it being a woman of color i think i am who i am and i've achieved what i what i have to date because i'm an indian woman yes right for that that's beautiful it's it's truly not a weakness in any way i i see someone like my mom and i know if she was given another opportunity or lived in a different time in the world she would have done what i did or even more and it's because it's in our blood to work that hard to have that sense of duty and that's what i was given by where i came from and i never will let that go and i know that's exactly why i am sitting here today it's beautiful well my wife and i go to india about once every other year we bring a lot of our platinum partners about every two years we have such a love for the culture for the very things you describe not in a connection to spirit you know it's a soul which is part of the culture to some extent and i think uh for all of you one of the great things is to understand your heritage and to find the strengths in your heritage instead of what you might perceive as the weakness in your heritage or your gender or your background or your color what the case may be last question then i'm going to ask you to stay if you mind we're going to enter a second entrepreneur and then we're going to do some questions from the group for all of you if that's okay um tell me about failure and how you look at it because almost every great entrepreneur has a radically different view of failure than the average person it's why they are who they are what's your view of failure where did you learn it how does it practically impact the quality of your business in your life failure is a data point that's all it is it's a what data point data point it's a part of the journey if you want if you want success you're going to experience failure it's they're just two points in the journey and you have to be able to deal with it if you want to be successful and you can feel that and by the way success is the moment too it's all a data point right that's true you're just on a journey to arrive somewhere else and it's going to have ups and downs and it's what you learn from that moment that's most important that's beautiful stay with us if you will but let's give a hand here to biola ladies and gentlemen give it up for us so i really like to create contrast in the journey of entrepreneurs but no matter what you'll find the journey may be different the journey was certainly different for our next entrepreneur we're going to interview amazingly successful as well but it had plenty of ups and downs like all journeys do and the mindset becomes one of the most important components so the person you're about to meet his name is dave dahl and dave created dave's killer bread which i know there are a lot of fans out there make some noise if you like gabe's killer brat out there he has a different story his entrepreneurial journey started in prison he went for four different sentences over 15 years until in 2004 he got out and changed his life and became an example of what's possible came of the new recipe went back to the family's bakery and joined his brother who gave him a second chance and he started out there on portland the farmers market and started marketing it and six years later they were one of the top fastest growing companies in the united states in ink magazine 2015 literally 11 years later he sells his business for 275 million dollars and shows people what's really possible ladies and gentlemen welcome dave dahl dave killer's bread it's such a pleasure to have you thanks for joining us we appreciate it what an honor thank you listen um i like to start in the beginning because that's where it is for people you had an interesting childhood you kind of grew up going to church being with both parents you got what three siblings is that right i have yeah three three siblings and then things went kind of sideways and yet you've turned your life around and become such an example tell us how do you go from a kid growing up in that kind of environment to addicted to selling meth to becoming a businessman to selling your business to being an art collector and a philanthropist i mean yeah you've taken on every journey you can imagine tell us a little bit about the journey if you don't quite quite a journey yeah i uh you're you know i i had such low self-esteem as a child and uh i really didn't know what i was uh i i didn't think i was cut out for anything and uh i guess essentially you know i mean my family had a bakery so i i grew up with this weird family of this weird bakery right yeah and i didn't want to do that so uh you know one thing led to another depression led to uh methamphetamine and i shot a load of methamphetamine changed everything it's my first transformation if you will yeah yeah and what happened on the other side of it though when you came down well it was it was never a good thing right i was it led to four trips to prison trust me it's not the kind of transformation you want you want to have uh i eventually did have a good one though yeah you sure did so when did this transformation happen you've been in prison four times ago 15 years i mean each time you were in what was the difference this last time that you went and did you get a vision while you're there did you just set a goal because a big part of your life is there's greatness in everybody you didn't believe that before when did that transformation start to happen in you or was it just the idea that you want to do something different for me it was uh hitting the bottom and you know i mean i hit a lot of bottoms but this particular one was uh it was you know i was definitely thinking about suicide quite a bit in there and it was my fourth trip to prison i had a seven and a half i had seven and a half years that i ended up doing it was like 118 months sentence but anyway long story short i've been on uh i'd been on uh the waiting list for like three years to get into this drafting program which you know i had no idea what i was getting into yeah uh but at the same time that i had an opportunity to get into this program i also asked for help and i think this is the most important part of my story is that i was willing to ask for help and it's the humility of that that i discovered was the most powerful thing i ever learned was it freeing was it what what did it feel like was it freeing to you was it comforting what was asking for help what what and having that humility how did it shift you emotionally that's a really good question it uh it was transformative in a way and the beginning of it was just so powerful because no longer was i you know worried about what anybody thought of me uh that's a great feeling all of a sudden you got this this moment where you just uh and from that point on you really don't need anybody to approve and and that was a big beginning for me but it also gave me medication i got medication and for me the medication helped and then i shortly afterwards got to go into a a program that changed my life what was the program it was a computer-aided drafting and what did you learn what did you experience there well i uh i've always been sort of artistic a little bit right and the bread was sort of art but this was uh a little different because you're it's very structured so you're drafting up ideas if somebody has an idea for something and i would have ideas but lots of times i would just work with other people who had ideas i would draw up this idea and then i would you know the way it's so powerful nowadays with the computers you can just you know just modify it just like that you know and come up with new ideas you know yeah and then and it lit you up to do this it sounds like you started to become a creator instead of just a manager of your life to some extent is that true right i think it's the first time in my life i was able to have a sustained happiness i uh you know it was great it was i don't know what was your question again so i was saying from a perspective of now you were creating things as opposed to kind of managing your life was that sense of creation was that the liberating factor that made you happier that's really important because if for me learning to design things has uh has a effect on everything in your life yeah the mentality that it takes to design products design your life yes it all works together it's like designing products start to make you think about designing your life yeah that's very cool it's it's all the same symbolism you know that's awesome and that was happening in prison is that correct you have this class that's why i learned it yeah that's why i began to learn it yeah so when you begin when you got out did you did you decide you're gonna go back in the bakery did you talk to your brother glenn did he invite you back did you guys have a good relationship or was he upset with you what was his never we you know what in the early days i think we i guess we did as a youngster because he's like eight years older than me so i always looked up to him as a kid but then we we became estranged more later and uh glenn's just uh a really good guy uh way different from my dad way different from me he's just a sky and but the challenge was to communicate well enough to say that we can get along and it's that humility that made it made me think i could do it you know what i mean like i'm i'm nobody right i mean i'm somebody but i'm nobody i understand i don't need to prove nothing yeah and i thought i could do it but it was a lot harder than i thought when you said you asked for help was that other people was that god or is that both uh when i say ask for help i certainly look at a higher power but i often look at uh people who you know through evidence-based knowledge yes i get it yeah uh through uh maybe uh empirical thinking yes whatever you you you go okay that this person can help me you know and it's again humility is such a big factor so glenn felt that humility he felt the change you know it sounds like i think so yeah and that made him willing to trust and say let's do this together and did you come to him with the idea of building a new recipe or did you already have that idea or did that happen after you came to work in the bakery again that's funny because he always knew that i was creative right that's right if you asked him that he'd say well that was what that was like the x factor of bringing dave back right but i'm you know whoever thinks you're gonna have that kind of success right so uh i i got back there and uh i went to work for 12 bucks an hour uh just like everybody else that's great yeah that's called humble right yeah it's a reminder to be humble so uh and i worked i lived in my mom's garage and i mean i was happy and i was working my ass off and so we had you know i got paid for 40 hours a week but i worked 70. you know what i mean yeah i get it like every entrepreneur is creating something you see pi all night in their head over there as well yeah we all know what that's like it's called life exactly and i think people need to uh remember that i mean it's a really important lesson i work ethic is crucial so i did that and my brother uh and i were talking he's like okay well we need you to fix the cookies right now we had cookies then we need you to make the cookies more modern so that they don't have all these trans fats and all this stuff but i went a little further and made them vegan you know what i mean so anyway i made the cookies and now i'm now i'm working on a bunch of new ideas and cookies and my brother comes along and goes no man this was just an assignment we want you to make bread and i'm like oh bread oh man that's a whole different ball game a lot harder actually brent is a much more difficult uh you know thing to create or to to to figure out yeah uh especially in a healthy form with consistency yeah that too yeah well i did have a head start in that sense because my dad was that guy that one uh was a healthy bread guy yeah you know what i mean and glenn was too so so i mean i i and i i have to be so part of humility is to say i couldn't have done this without those folks you know what i mean yeah that's beautiful so yeah it's hard for me to say that but you you built the muscle though that's a good thing well if none of us does it alone well tell me how so they give the assignment to the bread you obviously couldn't have known it would become as big as it was tell me about the branding how important was that brent what was the name of the old company the old bakery and and tell me of the decision and how your brother responded to it yeah how'd this come about well nature bake was the old brand but there was other brands before that i mean the thing had been around for 50 years it was yeah right around 50 years when i started doing this and uh so we were trying to brand nature big we didn't know we needed to brand something else you know just like in fact in my mind i always wanted to make bread that would be part of the family business yes but it kind of went its own way you know and it just happened by um seed of the pants i guess what happened was uh my brother wanted to call the bread dave's bread i'm like dave's breath who cares about dave's breath you know what i mean and then uh but okay but if we're gonna do that then we need to tell my story beautiful how how can we do that and not tell my story and i also felt you know in my gut i guess that telling my story mattered yeah okay yeah uh i didn't know how much it mattered but until later but you know so i wrote on the back of the bag my story it's not there anymore the story that i wrote is no longer there but you see just a little bit of it in that video you showed yeah so anyway uh this has been very personal from the beginning and i took it to the farmer's market uh well the killer part i'm the the second variety of bread i made was called killer bread and so eventually it was like people were like that's dave's killing bread and i just started rolling that way yeah and then i made like 15 varieties you know uh 16 or whatever i had a blast doing it always improving the always improving the breads as i went the best i could you know it's tough once you once you have a product that people expect yes you don't really want to change it that much they like the music they like yeah you know that's true but but notice in both cases and any great entrepreneur i know if you you know i think you look at any business it's all innovation and marketing right if you don't innovate if you don't keep finding a way to make it better and if you don't market no one's going to want to have interest and so you started there in portland and i remember at one stage when i was reading your story if it's correct you made a huge bet the two of you you and your brother you went and found a new facility it was like one and a half million bucks and you didn't have the cash flow to cover it yeah and like six years later you're doing 53 million yeah but how did you get why did you make that choice how difficult was it and you know how did you make it work because you know everybody's an entrepreneur has to take risks and everybody says they like taking risks until they do it and they lose right and i'm seeing pi all over here made in the same nod so how did you get yourself to do that why did you do it and did it make a difference if you hadn't done that would it be a different business i'm curious great question i uh originally you know we did kind of discuss it amongst ourselves like uh do we want to just be kind of famous up here in portland you know yeah but i was always like my nephew was also a partner of mine um he and i were always on the side of you got to grow or you're going to get swallowed up you know and so that's what we did but 1.5 million dollars was a hell of a lot of money in those days and we couldn't get it it was 2008 that's what we needed to move uh in order to do costco and if we hadn't grown to do costco i don't know what would have happened we we always had to take advantage of these opportunities yeah and you grabbed them no matter how scary it was it was scary it was hard it was we fought a lot man the reality is what it is man it's not easy so tell me at what point did you after that did you make it so you didn't have to worry about that at what point was cash flow no longer a concern i don't think it ever was i could get pissed that's called business right yeah like um uh in in the dave's killer brand business uh it was always growing so we were always putting the money back in the business essentially uh but we did start having money we started being able to buy houses and cars and stuff like that yeah so i have a quality of life as well yeah yeah i've got a good uh i've never been about material stuff but yeah uh it is kind of nice to have it you know and i i'm more about uh i get excited about innovation like you said uh things that are when i can actually make a difference in the world yeah i get off on that yeah you can see it in your face as you talk about same with by all right just light up every one of us every great because in the beginning of a business the rewards are not there economically it's like having a child the rewards are ownership you know this is my kid but as time goes by you start to build something has impact but you have to have that vision at the early stage or you don't get through it because the economics don't anybody gets in the business just for the money rarely makes it because yeah you won't make it through those stages right i loved it you know i love the process i love the process i was fortunate enough to be able to discover the process while i was in prison before i made any money or even knew i was going to make money i just thought wow i i'm devil i'm developing this skill and and i started believing that i could i could develop any skill i could do anything if i worked hard enough at it yes you know and that's that's really what dave's killer bred what culminated in dave's killer bread but those early years were all just they were in prison it didn't matter i was like you can be happy wherever you're at that's beautiful yeah that's a lesson that a lot of billionaires don't have right so that's awesome tell me um one of the things i loved about you did is that you were given a second chance and that you gave i think about a third of your employees a second chance meaning tell people about the program you did with people that are getting out of correctional institutions and giving them an opportunity well you know it's funny it wasn't really a program uh it is now and i'm not part of it anymore it became that way because we experimented what we did is we uh because of my success and my my experience it seemed obvious that other people could be excellent resources yes uh human resources and so we uh without even really saying oh we're gonna hire a third felons or anything like that yeah it just happened wow because what happened is they once we start doing it you got to realize we ended up hiring 300 people in a fairly you know a couple years with uh there was like a 50 there was like 50 or 100 in one year and whatever it was the early part was really tough because we didn't have an hr yeah it was just us and uh we didn't really know um how to deal with uh all this growth and these kids or these people kids these guys they're kind of kids to me yeah but uh they get out and and what they do is they go look for a job to a temp agency and this temp agency once they figured out dave's killer brad is hiring felons they started sending all their felons to it and i and i was like no no no no that's not how we roll we want the best we want the best people that's right i want you all to hear that he said we want the best people we don't care what their felons not but we want the best people and felons can be amazing yeah they really can be very resourceful they're trying to come back yeah they're trying to they're motivated yeah yeah that's wonderful and that program continues to this day i guess huh even if i yes yeah so so 11 years six years after you're in the business you're one of the fastest growing companies 11 years if i understand correctly you sell the business to the giant bakery and the company has one second biggest bakery in the world in the world yeah four billion dollars in business oh my god yeah and you sell for what 226 million or something 275 275 million i i i didn't get a whole lot of that oh how much did you get i got enough you got enough i don't remember how much i got it i was in the tens of millions well that's not a bad thing nice one buddy so tell me you know uh during that time uh before you sold the business there was a lot of stress going through you and you you shared with it on the video this is what a lot of people don't understand it's like in our we all have comfort zones right and it's like if it was if you set the thing at 69 degrees in this room and it goes to 62 61 59 heat comes up you got to do something you hit that place where you hit rock bottom you've got to do something make it better but most people don't know what happens on the other side you think you're at 69 and that's your identity and you heat up to 75 80 90 98 all sudden the brain goes who the hell you think you are right you start to sabotage your own success you went through that right right what's that bigger they get the harder they fall yeah true true so tell us a little bit about that tell us what happened after you'd become successful before you sold the business but you were really successful and some of the old patterns kind of took over what was that about and what'd you learn from it i don't know if it was so much old patterns in a way it was it was just settling and becoming you know taking you know not not putting that 100 percent with the humility the all the great lessons that i learned not putting them in front of me and remembering them more likely you know you start drinking um i went to mexico with my my now wife we we discovered tequila [Laughter] i swear to god i never stopped drinking after that anyway i don't know so uh so then we we went to um we went to uh uh we we came back from there and we you know just kept partying i mean i had a great place to party i had this my voice sounds like yours yeah it does so now i mean actually we stay we kind of stay in the same place that we had back then i ended up buying a penthouse uh and then realizing it was a really badass penthouse at the top of a building downtown portland i uh became party central we're getting rid of it now yeah and we party there too but anyway we started partying and the point is uh you know everything was cool but i don't know how to tell the story without making it long so i'm just going to say by 2012 13 i was kind of out of control but i was still handling my business you know yeah but i was drinking a lot and so i had um i don't even want to blame anybody else you know it's just like i've screwed up and uh eventually i actually quit drinking um for like six weeks or eight weeks michelle would know and driving to seattle and back from portland and where you know i decided to drink because i was going mental you know you're going so mental you gotta yeah yeah and i've never done that before you know i've never had that kind of mental takeover yeah that i couldn't handle and uh long story short i smashed into three cop cars that night wow yeah and i wasn't i wasn't looking to be a criminal my my behavior wasn't like it used to be it was different it was different that's my point interesting you know michael phelps is a friend of mine and i've interviewed a lot of people over the years of my clients or friends you know he's got more gold medals than most you know a lot of countries have to give you an eye in that area like 68 or whatever you know it's insane and you know he was depressed after all this yeah and uh several other gold medals that i've gotten to know and worked with over the years they won and it's there because people think that i'm going to get some place and then life's going to be beautiful and what they fail to understand is that life's really about serving and growing and giving right so and that humility part of you just kind of popped out for a little time but sounds like it's return for you i think so because i i value it you know i i value it so i come back to it uh but that's that's absolutely true i think uh people this is really important thing to learn in life is that you're not going to get there you know what i mean it's never going to happen no you know you got to get there you got to be there now as part of your process that's right and i learned to do that the design process of my life is is what makes me happy that's beautiful tell me you sold your business you know made tens of millions of dollars you know have kind of a cool legacy that's continuing so what's up with you now what do you do with your life now and by the way you know i have a lot of friends with solar businesses i remember one of my early friends sold his business and made over a billion dollars and he was excited for about 90 days and then i saw him getting so he was always calling me up going hey you want to go to this beach and i was like dude i got like 12 companies at that time i got to manage i i don't have the time i love you and all the time and then he tried to buy back his business and he couldn't get it back and then eventually he waited it out he starts another and then he went back and competed with his own business once his time was up but i've seen so many entrepreneurs think that boy once i have this certain amount of money or once i sell the business i'll be happy and the business actually met all other needs it you know they got to use the certainty inside they got to push themselves they got to grow they got to have variety and challenges and yeah someone to contribute to a meaning connection to people connection with the brand and then that vehicle's gone so unless you get a new vehicle which anybody can it can be non-profit it can be all kinds of things then you see this drop that's always tell people when you're getting near the top if you're going to sell it you better figure out what you're going to do next before you do that because otherwise i've seen people and i even had it myself at one stage in my career years ago there's this little dropper like what happened because your vehicle becomes such a way to meet so many of your psychological spiritual emotional needs not just financial obviously yeah so what happened first of all what when you've sold the business what did you feel what'd you think and then did it stick around did you get depressed did you get frustrated what happened afterwards and then tell us what you're doing today that you love wow that's like a book right there but when you first sold it were you excited to sell it uh i felt like it was necessary it was time you know the it had come to a point where it wasn't my company anymore the way i was passionate about it so it grown so much yeah and there was just things were going the wrong direction for me sideways if you will yeah not it wasn't going bad it just wasn't wasn't my thing you know i created this thing with logo for every variety of bread you know i mean all the fun we used to have and they just i hate to say it but they that's not their style so they're doing good things so so i'm not i don't say anything bad about it but um it was just different than what your needs were yeah by the way i see that with so many entrepreneurs and piles only 10 years into it and she's a billion business so she's not like she's she's short but she's amazing but i think you see this in businesses that in the early days very often there's this connection you know everybody and then it gets bigger and bigger and unless you can find those ways keep the mission alive sometimes you know the most exciting time is sometimes the most difficult early days like a lot of my entrepreneur friends when we all get around we talk about the times when like i showed up and supposed to be a thousand people there and seven people showed up and i called them to the front row to do a four-day seminar exactly but but it it's what made you grow right well there was a lot of growth uh aspects to from the time i mean i guess my whole life but from the time i was 38 and had that turnaround in prison yeah there was growth after growth after growth and not they weren't cancerous growth either not yet but anyway so i uh i had so much fun you know growing is the funnest thing in the world you know it's just part of what you do that makes life good right yeah uh without growing or what is there to do you know so um i was never able never willing to sit on my butt right and just well and just not have something going on so when i uh when i sold what i did is the first thing i did really was i i went on ebay and i started buying freaking african masks of all things you know that's interesting yeah why why ask why african mass what did that mean no it wasn't that they were afric african it was just they were primitive and cool uh none of them were real they were just uh you know because there's a difference you got the and i sell i have a business now where i have maybe tens of thousands of of uh african masks and stuff and figures and stitch statues uh but uh i don't promote it that much you know so it's more it's more it's a it's your passion it's a passion and uh my main passion has become more the pieces that were danced and used in ceremonies and things like that but i mean i just love the the spiritual aspect of it believe it or not it's weird but i i just do i'm weirdo so uh i did that and then um it got out of control just like everything in my life and uh it's working out pretty good you know we don't make any money but i have i employ several people so that's good and then uh i'm i'm a philanthropist so tell us about some things to do with philanthropy i'm curious uh well i'm going to talk about constructing hope it's my favorite one and the reason why it's so why i like it so much and i've helped him out a lot you know the best i can and uh the reason i like him so much is the fact that construction is really what changed my life even though i wasn't actually doing the hands-on construction yeah i was creating things that other people were constructing yeah and i was having a such a blast at it i realized the power of it to change lives yeah and so uh now i've seen it happen over and over again so i get involved with that sort of thing i mean it doesn't have to be construction but it just happens to be something i'm passionate about you must have people approach you also whenever you're a successful entrepreneur everybody wants to be coached by you as if you have all this extra time right i like the help i can but i bet you do so when you meet somebody who's got a business and they're struggling initially what advice do you give them uh well you know i'd have to hear more about it yeah what's the specific yeah because like for instance mine the struggles that we had were complicated we had struggles with just getting up and hanging out together you know we didn't we getting along we kind of hated each other right uh none of us are bad guys but we don't get along so you know we did get along once we sold the business that's nice but anyway no i say i say you're gonna struggle i say struggle is good yeah i i say without struggle you're not gonna become the person you're gonna be yeah you know so you know just own it live it uh we're not gonna enjoy every minute of it but yeah you're going to be tough you're going to get a little tougher yeah you know and i think that's important so true well you both are wonderful i'm going to ask for some questions from the audience if it's okay for both of you and i'll back into this as well so ladies and gentlemen first of all let's have it again for dave give it up for dave and payal both of them ladies and gentlemen let him hear you let him hear you let's go for some questions here first it's brian give it up for brian ladies and gentlemen so who do you have a question for him what's your question yeah so i have a question actually for for dave but also for both of you and payal uh the question is really like what was like i'm curious like what was what was like the moment where you really felt the biggest turnaround i mean especially for dave like you know i'm i'm so grateful that you shared so much of your life with us today it was so incredible it opened up so much access for me and so much for so many of us i'm sure that uh you know i'm humbled to be uh you know learning from you dave and learning from you by all and all that you're doing it's absolutely incredible and i i would just love to know like what was like the turnaround was like the moment that made that happen for you that made that shift i mean all that you shared with us i'd love to hear that and and also for paella if there was one moment it was uh when i dropped a kite in the box i was 38 years old dropped a piece of paper asking for help from the psych services psychiatric services which is a big deal you know you don't really want to show your weakness especially in prison yeah it was a big deal for me and it changed everything uh what made you do it that day because you could have done it any day and you didn't what was it about that day was it that much more pain was it something you envisioned what was it it's that bottom that you find you know that that beautiful bottom i mean that was it was that moment and uh god it was it's just a blissful and now it's not blissful it's just so blessed bless it yeah yeah but why do you think after all those years why that moment what what brought you to that moment because there were years and years what made that the bottom do you know well i always thought for for many years while i was going to prison i always because i was dumb i always thought that i could get i could be a better criminal you know i could get better at being a drug dealer and all this kind of stuff which i always got better at doing but i always got better going to prison too so i had i uh i just remember that you know i i enjoyed i actually you know started learning to be better at crying but then on the fourth time it was like this ain't gonna work you know this is not going to work dave uh you're just not good at crime or much of anything else either so but i found that i was good you know once i once i hit that bottom because i spent every night in misery it seemed like you know and then i'd have to get i mean i couldn't sleep a lot of times i sweat wake up sweating bad dreams just horrible dreams getting out of prison and coming back you know that's the kind of dreams i was having and when did you know that things had turned around when was the time you owned the turnaround well not much longer after that because it was like such a relief uh and all of a sudden i had self-esteem but it was a healthy self-esteem and i knew that i was capable once i started realizing i was capable of doing things i didn't realize i was was that during the class when you started reading things yeah pretty much yeah i think that was it when i started uh designing uh you know all different sorts of things on the computer 3d space it was very powerful first of all i didn't know something like this existed and that you could have that much power at your fingertips yes and uh but then it was like wait a minute you know these are things i never would have imagined that i could do so uh it shifted it off yeah i just started believing in myself and i in a very healthy way yeah pile your journey is very different but there was a stage for you where you were hiding who you were to some extent right and then there's the shift you told us a little bit about the guru the teacher that really made a difference for you but what was the moment for you is there a moment you can remember where that shift happened for you and what was the moment when you felt like hey you know i really have a tiger by the tail so i think for me i've dealt with this dual identity my entire life i just felt like i never fit in i think that's something all of us feel and i was going to work every day but i was so in love with something else that i was doing which was dancing yeah and i felt like i was two different people and no one wants to live like that right and i think i had done that when i was younger i split myself in two i was indian with my indian friends and i was american at school and i tried to be two different people and it's just not a happy way to live and i think you know with all the pressure i had to have a good you know be the best yeah exactly be the best but you know have a good education be at a good um job and make sure that i was stable and all of that i felt like i couldn't go after my dreams and at some point and this was a really important conversation for me i was home for thanksgiving and i didn't want to go back to work the next day i was like i had that feeling where i just didn't want to go back it didn't feel right i had had successful dance shows by that point my dance company was succeeding but i was living two lives and my mom looked at me and this was really important because it came from her she goes then quit and to have that from once again my immigrant mom who risked her entire life for me my sister to say that to me unleashed me and then i quit my job a month later i had and i said i was going to go for my dreams and i didn't actually even know i was going to build class pass at the time i didn't even know entrepreneurship was what i was going to do but i just knew i needed to give myself the space and time to be free you also gave yourself a timeline if i read correctly like like 14 days or something like that when you were were you at warner at the time and you said i'm going to find what my passion is going to be or my business is going to be what made you decide for i love a deadline like that yeah because i think some people don't give themselves a deadline so they don't make it happen right your deadline was i got to do this now right because i can't live this anymore but what what made you get that deadline and what did that do to you to have that deadline why did you come up with that i mean i was you know unmotivated at work and i knew i needed a shift i actually went out to san francisco and met a bunch of entrepreneurs because 10 years ago it wasn't the biggest thing in new york city it really was just kind of tied to silicon valley and everyone was building apps and products and i looked at myself and i was creative and i had this business background and i started thinking what if i could think of something and i know the two-week thing was interesting and everyone always asked me about it but for me it was if i can think of something this is an option for me if i can't maybe i should explore new jobs or new you know position it wasn't a commitment i'm going to have my own business it was i need to find something or i got to look for i mean if i didn't have anything i probably wasn't going to become an entrepreneur at the time i just got lucky and two days later was looking for a ballet class that changed the rest of my life wow and at what point did you feel like you got a tiger by the tail because the first two iterations didn't work right and and were you stressed at that time that they're not working or did you still feel certain it was going to work you know during the time of it once i figured out what i wanted to solve and how passionate i was i never thought i was going to fail and i think that's when you really know you're an entrepreneur is that you know you're going to work through every part of it i knew i was going to figure it out i don't know if the universe was helping me like i look back on it and it doesn't actually feel that hard because i feel like i was so in tune with the problem i was solving that i was going to do it no matter what and i think a lot of people always think that a startup is working when you have like 10 000 users and you have that hockey stick growth for me it was reading five emails i was doing customer service and it was emails i received from people that people knew they were just told me that this product changed their life and i think because for me i wanted to give people what dance meant to me my whole life i felt you know i felt lucky my whole life that i felt i found something i loved when i was three right like i found my passion when i was three and i realized that's not what most people get to do and i was enlightened with that since i was so young and i felt like my job on earth was to give that enlightenment to other people and when i got those emails i knew i had given them what dance was to me in another way that's really beautiful look i mean you think about this you said it wasn't that hard what's hard is because you hate yeah right you know what's easy is doing what you love exactly and um i missed those earlier it may be hard work but it's not hard that's absolutely right inside you don't have that inner conflict anymore both of you have found that way where there's no inner conflict i always tell people that if you look at it as a business there's only so much energy and business and life is energy and it's divided between internal marketing and external marketing if you're a great business all your energy is going to serve customers but if there's internal marketing conflicts with a team conflicts within yourself it's hard to make the job work that's the hard part but you you had that unification early stage you just brought it back it's gorgeous okay thank you so much brian let's go for another question the next person give them a hand thanks brian give it up for sarah foley ladies and gentlemen sarah foley well tell us sarah who do you want to ask a question to um my my question actually is for payal because um i have this dream of doing fitness for women that have physical disabilities and doing it on platforms such as classpaths and when i think of things like classpaths and these um companies i i see the vision come to life but it gets so big and it's so hard to know like in my living room by myself like how do i make it happen like that first step of just once that belief is there and i know it in my soul and i this whole weekend i just felt myself like one day you'll be on that stage there like you'll you'll be one of them and the beliefs there and it's just so hard to know like step one step one and a half step two and so any advice on those very early stages i want her to answer you but i'd like to plant a seed with you you're already one of them yeah it's this illusion that you're not one of them you just have a pathway that you're just beginning dave's been on the path for a long time pile's been the path for a decade i've been on the path for 43 years so when you look around you look at people i used to do this too and to go oh my god you know i'm not where they are and what i was doing is i was judging myself too soon you're judging too soon so your your passion and your caring is so evident with that anyone can get the skill yeah but i i'll let paella answer your question because she can answer it from a feminine perspective rather my masking perspective which i think is what you really need but i hope i plant a seed with you stop thinking you're going to be there someday i agree if you have that desire to serve because that's what both these people have both these people and the reason i reached out to them is their servants they really are they've learned to serve a large number of people so they've become successful in business and economics and you serve a small number of people your still life matters and it all starts small none of us i started the story i just mentioned i started with a run these ads and i think i get 500 people and i was charging nothing i just wanted to help people and i thought i'm gonna have 500 people and seven people showed up and they were all around the room in different locations like well you come down the front row and i did four days for seven people day and night now i do 920 000 people for six days in this room you know people 195 countries so you're just judging too soon but again the how is interesting the why the what and the why is the most important thing and then you can figure out the however we talked about the tyranny of how but i know you want that answer as well and i'm not going to step on it so pile i mean tony just answered that beautifully and it really comes down to just get started right teaching one person or teaching a million is the same exact thing and you have that care in your heart we can all see it it's so beautiful and you have a deep why already which is most people lack that to be honest most of the time in these situations you have that just start giving that out to the world and you will the steps will get easier but start with one person if you and set a goal right i think this is the other thing that sometimes people miss try and teach one person this month and next month make it five right start somewhere and set realistic goals and then just keep doing it and your heart is going to be so filled from the process like i said it took me three years to get these five emails right it wasn't easy and i was lost in the first few years because i had a million classes up there thinking if i got 10 000 people to sign up i was going to have a business and that didn't work i actually had to just go and get five people to class right it's very simple start with this beginning get the people to show up and you just have to get started and believe in yourself to do it you also have a niche most people are not looking to help someone with fitness who's in that physical and emotional and psychological position that you described and your caring for them will make them love you love is the real currency of business in my opinion business is a spiritual game you've heard me say it what that really means is if you can do more for others than anybody else and you do it consistently and you keep improving then your gifts will make room for you because you're here to serve something more than yourself dave what would be your point of view of this that's what i've noticed as soon as they start believing in themselves then they want to know like what else can i do what else that's right we do and that's the most beautiful part of it all but you're believing him first you know dave has done that for guys coming out of prison he did it for himself and now he's doing it for others pass it along i see the passion and that excites me i know i can't imagine her not succeeding if she stays this way yes that's what i think that's right and so the secret is not to let your disappointment destroy you but to the disappointment drive you that's a common denominator and everyone sitting in the chairs here if you say you want to be us you really want to be you but you want to be the best you and the best you is the one that will not give up because they have something they want to serve more than themself and if you have that and you keep that and you just keep improving you keep doing what's in front of you next it'll appear the gifts will make room for you that's my message to all of you but especially you because i can feel a million all three of us we're all lit up looking at you it's not how you look it's your essence that's coming through this video it's coming across electronically we're not even in your presence and we all can feel you halo yeah it's a halo exactly right yeah absolutely got all that it takes you're already one of us just go now unfold it and trust in god and do your part you're glowing give it a hand for sarah coming up for daniel cohen ladies and gentlemen daniel who do you have a question for daniel well i have a question for all three of you um i i'm standing guard protecting my experience growing with my family i'm 38 years old and i'm super ambitious i'm super driven but i know that there's sometimes a temptation to give up some of those things that matter so much in exchange for say growth or expansion in business or making more money so i'd love to hear from you guys where you felt like you were challenged where you were being distracted or pulled into something for your business and there was something that you were leaving something that you were giving up on your personal side and how did you stand guard to protect the balance beautiful question um between the expansion and you know your personal expansion and your business expansion it's a tough question but it's a good one yes we'll go with you since it's a tough question [Laughter] you know a lot of the times it comes down to your values uh your morals um if you stick with what you believe then i don't think you can go wrong you can't if you start compromising um then you know that's not dave's killer brad's way let's put it that way yeah uh i would never i was never willing to compromise there were choices i had to make that weren't you know you talk about ingredients and things like that there were choices there was like the best of two terrible choices that you had to make uh but in general i just didn't uh compromise uh who i was is that your is that was that your question kind of he's asking also i think the poll on family perhaps and other aspects of your life as well but you're right let me say that real quick because yeah because if if i had gotten out of prison and i had had a family that was like pulling on me i would have had a hard time doing what i did yes you know what i mean so it is it's tough uh i'm not saying it can't be done but man i don't know how it'll work for me it probably takes me a lot more time yeah so uh you know because me i was always willing to give all my time to my work i can say on my own case and i'll pay i'll give you from her perspective um you know i uh married a woman who had three children she'd been married twice before me and um and then i had my own child on the way so i was literally 24 years old just about turned 25 and i had a 17 year old son because she was 13 years my senior an 11 year old a five-year-old and a child on the way and i wanted to change the world i had this incredible desire to serve and i want to take people out of pain it's still what drives me i don't have to work another day in my life but i hate suffering and i love seeing people lit up and so i wanted to have those answers and i was driven but then all of a sudden my you know 24 and i got a 17 year old son and he was a drug addict so it's like instantly i had to figure out how to prioritize i can't put all the energy out there but rather than saying i'm going to compromise you know i remember i asked um um um merrick allen erdos who's uh head of jp morgan and she manages like 2.2 trillion dollars probably the single most influential woman in the financial world and she's a beautiful soul and i asked her like tell me about how do you deal with family and all these things and she goes you know tony everybody talks about life balance you know life work balance she goes it's total she you have to have life work integration and it's it's totally true for me i like i took my kids with me on the road for a period of time then after a while i realized you know the consistency so i had to leave and come back and it was it was hard uh and it's never easy but it's worth it and i i wasn't willing to compromise either one and to this day you know my kids or my kids they three of my kids now i have five kids i have a four month old now so i'm starting a journey all over again i have five grandkids but along the way all those challenges serve because i had to grow i had to grow i had to be able to help other people and i the fact that i had a deal with four kids that instantly showed up in my life it made me grow in ways i wouldn't have grown if i could have just worked on my mission per se and so i have a trust in god or the universe or whatever you want to call it we've all been created by something and there's a gift that we're here to give to the world and sometimes that gift is different than what you think it is and so i've learned to find that gift wherever i am and so when my kids showed up that was a gigantic gift it brought all kinds of challenges how do i still do the business too how do i go on the road i was torn it was painful i never want to be apart from my wife i love her every moment we travel most of the time and then she had motion sickness so it's like you know it's like i'm mr motion you know i'm going to you know an average year i'd go to like 115 cities i go to 14 countries you know and like what are we doing here but you figure it out and so i think you've got to decide that you're not going to compromise and then it won't be equal it's never equal sometimes you got to put more in one place more than the other but it's worth it and that it's going to make you a better human a better soul a better man a better husband a better business person and that people will feel that when you get up and talk people can feel when there's something deeper than the surface they feel it in a very short period of time and they're moved by it because it's real and real is not perfect and real is not oh i'm able to manage all this in a perfect balance it's you finding your way and you're young and you're on the journey and i think it's exciting how would you look at this so i would say this question which is a beautiful question really relates to two big aspects of my life the first one was my pressure of not dancing anymore once i became this founder and everyone of my investors didn't want me doing anything else obviously but run my company but i had my dance company and i loved dancing and it was the actual why behind everything i had created and i remember i actually did stop a little bit and it was the worst time for me it was probably the worst time for the business because i was not as inspired as to what i was creating and why and i remember needing to make changes on my team even in my role at my company because i didn't want to lose my why and what had enlightened me to create all of this and it took me some deep work to do that but now and i will say covet is a blessing for me personally because it gave me so much time to dance and i am so grateful for that uh because i was always traveling and moving around so with that you know i figured it out but it does take prioritization and planning um the other big aspect is i'm a woman and i built a company and i was in you know my late 20s and i had a lot of pressure from my parents to get married have kids a lot of things like that and amazing yeah and it was really hard and i remember there were times when my parents would be like hey i'd want to share that i was like in forbes and they'd be like great like who are you dating when are you getting married and it was a really hard conversation you know being an indian woman especially everyone was getting married i remember on my 30th birthday i threw a dance show because i didn't want to like put focus on my age and the fact that i was 30 and i wasn't married because to my parents that felt like they were failing in some way when i told them it would happen and i ended up getting married when i was 33 years old and i had a baby when i was 36 and i have an 18 month old son now and i remember just telling everyone thank you um i just remember telling everyone i'm going to do this on my timeline and i felt very comfortable saying that and any time someone asked me which happens especially to women you just have to say i'm going to do it when i'm ready you know instead of doing it on anyone else's timeline and the universe will work with you to make those decisions happen when they're meant to of course my mom's always like oh yeah this is always meant to be now but you know well now that you're married right yeah exactly like you know it's just always easier after but you know just let the world and let the universe take its place in those decisions in your life don't rush things and i think for women obviously with you know having kids and stuff it can feel a little bit of time pressure but it's really important to enjoy your life more than anything and what love what you do that answer your question daniel perfect give him a hand let's give it a hand to dave and vial ladies and gentlemen beautiful session [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Tony Robbins

Views: 3,911

Rating: 4.9126639 out of 5

Keywords: tony robbins, motivation, inspiration

Id: VjXxdKjq73M

Length: 80min 31sec (4831 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021