From $75 to a $1.2B Public Company: How Payam Zamani Built His Business Empire | Entrepreneurship | How We Profit | E10

After taking his business public at a $1.2 billion valuation, Payam Zamani learned that chasing rapid growth can weaken a company when profitability gets ignored. That lesson shaped his holding company, One Planet, which he built around profit, discipline, and purpose. Today, One Planet owns, operates, and invests in companies with a focus on improving margins, cutting unnecessary costs, and building businesses that can stand on their own. In this episode, Payam shares how entrepreneurs can turn around struggling companies, protect profit margins, and grow while embracing his philosophy of spiritual capitalism. In this episode, Hala and Payam will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (00:00) What Is Private Equity Exactly? (02:00) From Refugee to Billion-Dollar Founder (13:48) Inside One Planet’s Profit Model (21:17) How One Planet Turns Companies Around (29:06) Payam’s Approach to People and Leadership (39:42) Customer Acquisition and Unit Economics (45:51) Cutting Hidden Business Costs and Overhead (47:35) How Payam Builds and Buys Businesses (51:26) The Principles of Spiritual Capitalism (1:00:07) Building for Profit From Day One Payam Zamani is the founder, chairman, and CEO of One Planet Group, a closely held private equity firm that owns technology and media businesses and invests in early-stage companies. He co-founded AutoWeb in 1994 and helped take the company public in 1999, reaching a $1.2 billion valuation. Since then, he has built and owned multiple companies and invested in more than 50 businesses. He is also the author of the USA Today bestseller Crossing the Desert and an advocate for his philosophy of spiritual capitalism. Sponsored By: Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/profiting Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/profiting. Northwest Registered Agent - Get a complete business identity with Northwest. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/YAPFree and start using free resources to build something amazing. Mindstone - Master practical AI skills without the complexity with Mindstone’s AI Competency Programme. Head to experience.mindstone.com/yap and get 10% off. AT&T Business - Stay connected with reliable, secure internet built for entrepreneurs. Switch to AT&T Business at business.att.com. HoneyLove - Treat yourself to the most advanced bras and shapewear on the market. Save 20% off Honeylove by going to honeylove.com/PROFITING! #honeylovepod Freshbooks - Manage all your business finances in one place. Right now, my listeners can get FreshBooks for less than $3 a month for your first four months — that's 90% off. Head to FreshBooks.com/podcast to get started. Walmart Marketplace - Reach millions of active online shoppers and get ready for holiday demand. Apply to sell today at marketplace.walmart.com/yap. AG1 - Get a daily health drink that helps maintain energy, support gut health, and support immune health, all in one simple scoop. And for a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro at DRINKAG1.com/PROFITING. Resources Mentioned: Payam's Website: oneplanetgroup.com/meetpayam Payam's Book, Crossing the Desert: bit.ly/CrosingDesert Payam's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/payamzamani Payam's X: x.com/PayamZamani Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Newsletter - youngandprofiting.co/newsletter LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Startup, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Passive Income, Online Business, Solopreneur, Networking

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hala Taha?

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• 0:45Hala Taha?

  As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or at YoungandProfiting.com/deals.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Profitability to me is not optional. If you talk to my executives, they will tell you that I often don't know the revenue of their businesses, but I know their margins.

• 1:01Hala Taha?

  Because you don't care about the top line revenue.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  I don't care about top line. I'm not running a publicly traded company. If you give me a business that has revenue, I'm able to make it profitable.

• 1:11Hala Taha?

  Payam Zamaney is the founder and CEO of One Planet Group. He previously co-founded AutoWeb and took it public at a $1.2 billion valuation before turning 30.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Our biggest company is called Buyerlink. Buyerlink is a $130 million a year business. 10% of all new cars sold in the US are sold through Buyerlink.

• 1:32Hala Taha?

  What is your guidance on customer acquisition costs?

• 1:35Speaker 01

  In my business, I don't want to spend more than 50% on acquiring a customer. Often people come to me and they say that, you know what?

• 1:44Hala Taha?

  So how did you like first start One Planet?

• 1:47Speaker 01

  I got a call from my company, Reply.com. They said that, can you come back? We're dealing with a disaster and our bank loan is being called and the company will go away. And I decided I'm going to buy the company. So I made an offer to the board that was bigger than anyone else's offer. Truth be told, I did not have the cash at that moment in time, but.

• 2:10Hala Taha?

  Payam, welcome to How We Profit.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me, Hala.

• 2:14Hala Taha?

  I'm so excited for this interview. And actually, I'm thinking about this interview as like a hybrid regular Yap episode and a How We Profit episode because you are just so accomplished. And you've actually achieved things that many entrepreneurs don't achieve in their whole lives. At 28, you had a company go public. It was valued at $1.2 billion, which is absolutely incredible. And now you've got a company, One Planet, which essentially buys and sells and invests in companies, which is just so cool. And a lot of us entrepreneurs, we're newbies. You know, we probably, many of us listening, haven't even exited a company yet. And maybe we want to have a holding company or a private equity company in the future. So I want to kind of start with the basics. Does that sound good?

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Let's do it.

• 3:00Hala Taha?

  So let's start with like private equity. What is private equity exactly?

• 3:04Speaker 01

  You know, I've got my own definition of it. And frankly, I don't even know what I'm running, if it is private equity. It's my company and I don't have any LPs. I don't have any outside investors.

• 3:14Hala Taha?

  Okay.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  So I manage my own money. And like you said, that, you know, we do own a few companies, but most companies that we own, we founded. So I have been the founder of those businesses.

• 3:27Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  But we have also invested in, I think, 45, 50 companies to date.

• 3:33Hala Taha?

  Really cool. So when I was researching you, it's kind of like a hybrid between a private equity company, a holding company and an operating company.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  It makes sense out of my chaos. That's the truth. You know, I always tell people that if you look at One Planet logo, there's a, there's that pale blue dot, which is the earth. But to me, my, my brain is full of dots and that one dot kind of forces me to focus a little bit.

• 3:57Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  You know, recently I made a movie.

• 3:59Hala Taha?

  Oh, cool.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  I wrote a book and, you know, I operate a bunch of different businesses. So a little bit of a chaotic life and I enjoy it, but I try to also remind myself, focus.

• 4:10Hala Taha?

  Yeah. So let's actually talk about your story because it's so powerful. It's very inspiring. And you actually, your, your world kind of started like very chaotically. Talk to us about how you grew up and how you ended up in America.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  I was born in Iran.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  I was born in a Baha'i family. That's my religion. And then the revolution happened in 1979 and the new government did not think highly of a lot of people, including the, the Baha'is of Iran. And so the 1980s became very difficult. They killed a lot of Baha'is. They imprisoned a lot of Baha'is and all of it because different religion, they were fanatics. And they also expelled Baha'is from many schools. They, even today, 47 years later, Baha'is don't have the right to attend universities in Iran.

• 5:08Hala Taha?

  Wow.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  So when I was 11, I was expelled from school in, in a most horrific way. They basically, the religious leader of the school got a mob of over 50 students to kill me. That was his plan to get rid of me, to exterminate me. That was their plan. Luckily I survived, but think of it as a march of death for one mile. Kids spitting on you, beating you, throwing rocks at you, kicking you. And, you know, I talk about there are two times in my life I did not think I'm going to get out of that situation alive. That was the first one. I survived that, but I was never able to go back to that school.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  But you fast forward about six years later, my parents decided that it's time for me to leave the country.

• 6:00Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  And good law-abiding citizens, they had to find a smuggler to get me out of the country.

• 6:07Hala Taha?

  That's so crazy. And so your parents basically saved up to allow you and your brother to go to Pakistan. Is that right?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  That's right. My brother left first a year before me. And then I left in 1987. They paid a smuggler and, you know, it was a, it was a very, like, it's one of those journeys that you don't want anyone to ever go through. It, it leaves its mark on you forever.

• 6:34Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  The way you say goodbye is the, the way that you're going through a desert that you don't know if you're going to survive. You have no idea where you're headed.

• 6:43Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  And I was just a child at the time and by myself, no family member with me as I was going through that. No, he had left a year before me. And so it was a, it was a very, you could call it terrifying experience. And it was, the second time I thought I'm not going to survive was during an incident that happened during that journey. But again, you know, I look back and I feel that these difficult journeys in life, they end up defining who we become. And, you know.

• 7:19Hala Taha?

  Makes business really seem easy after all that.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  A bad quarter is nothing.

• 7:23Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  So.

• 7:25Hala Taha?

  Okay. So how did you make your way to America? Because that's really where you got your education, you started building businesses.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  So in 1987, when I made it to Pakistan, after getting my, basically what is called temporary asylum from the United Nations, I found my way to the US Embassy in Islamabad. And I talk about this quite often, that that was a moment when for the first time I experienced human rights, that my life is worth something.

• 7:57Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  The US treated me with respect. The embassy in fact hired a lawyer to make sense out of my case.

• 8:05Hala Taha?

  Wow.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  To present it to the ambassador. That was done and ultimately I received a residency and asylum from the US. And then a charity out of New York bought my ticket. So I was able to make it to the US. And my brother and I, we ended up landing in the US together at the same time in June of 1988. And, you know, there are many headlines about, about this journey that, that I've done and many interviews I've done. And the headline is always that we landed in the US with 75 bucks in our pocket.

• 8:37Hala Taha?

  I love that. It reminds, so something, we were talking earlier before this interview and I was telling you that like, I feel very like relatable to your story because of my father. And I remember my dad passed away, but when he was alive, he loved America. He'd always be like, this is the best country in the world. America is the best. Like he was so proud to be American because for him, he was able to make all his dreams come true by living in America. And he really, really appreciated the freedom, the freedom to, to build businesses, to be successful. And, you know, there's not much oppression. It's like everybody is equal in America.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, clearly we have our problems in the US.

• 9:18Hala Taha?

  We have our problems, of course, but.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  But I think, and then also, I would also say, and, American dream is an invitation. It's not a guarantee.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  The US is a platform that was built over 250 years, at times unjustly.

• 9:34Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  But it was built over 250 years and this foundation is what we entrepreneurs take advantage of to build. And I think that's also important because we need to keep in mind that it's not just me building or you building. Many people sacrificed for this foundation that we are able to take advantage of and build our businesses. And we need to be grateful for that.

• 9:55Hala Taha?

  I totally agree. So let's talk about how you put yourself through college because I think this is really inspirational. A lot of people who are listening right now, I think everybody's coming from all walks of life. Some of us are successful entrepreneurs, some of us are just starting out. And a lot of us are starting from zero. We don't have wealthy parents. We, we feel like we're, we're behind a lot of our peers because of that. Talk to us about your journey of putting yourself through school and how you kind of like built your wealth initially.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I had one year of high school left when I came to the US. And so let's get past that.

• 10:31Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  And then I went to UC Davis and I painted homes. And, and I, and that was actually a great experience for me because the idea was to paint homes, but I wanted to run a business.

• 10:47Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  So I would hire other students to paint homes. And I was the manager giving estimates and doing the, you know, getting your jobs booked and so on. So I did paint homes, but I had three job sites going on at the same time, at any given time during the summer.

• 11:03Hala Taha?

  That's great.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  And the idea was to make as much money as I could so I could pay for my, for my college years. And that was the primary way I was able to, to pay for school. But also I think that, you know, it's interesting when I think back to those days. School wasn't doing it for me. It wasn't exactly getting me all excited and joyful. But I felt that, you know what? As a behind Iran, I would not have had the right to go to university.

• 11:32Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  I have to finish college. So that was something that I wasn't willing to negotiate with myself. I went to college, but you think back, I studied environmental toxicology. I'm not doing anything with it. But they did give me the discipline, I guess, the commitment and the background that allowed me to do other things.

• 11:49Hala Taha?

  And then was AutoWeb the first like real company that? Well, I guess the pain company was a real company, but it was auto. Like, how did you start AutoWeb?

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. So in 1994, when I graduated from Davis, my brother also graduated from university and he got a job in Microsoft. And one day he called me and he said that I want to buy Honda. Honda doesn't own a website, doesn't have honda.com. What do you think about building a website for cars? Now, up to that point, I was 24 or 23. I owned 16 different cars. I loved cars, cheap cars, but I would buy and sell cars. And I thought that if there's a way for me to get even with car dealers, I'm in. I would love to do that. But I didn't know anything about the internet. So he became the technologist and I was a sales and marketing guy.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  So we founded that business in November of 1994. And if you think about back then, you know, there were only 5,000 domains that were registered total. There was no Google. Yahoo had just started.

• 12:57Hala Taha?

  Wow, that's so early.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Early on. I mean, to sign up somebody for our program, we had to first define, describe what is the internet? Because they had never been online.

• 13:08Hala Taha?

  It's crazy.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  So really early days.

• 13:13Hala Taha?

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• 13:56Hala Taha?

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• 14:11Hala Taha?

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• 15:19Hala Taha?

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• 16:00Hala Taha?

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• 16:26Speaker 01

  There's money.

• 16:26Hala Taha?

  There's more brown people in Fortland.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, probably. And then ultimately, for the third round, we raised money from Technology Crossover Ventures, DCV in Palo Alto. But it took a while for us to get them interested in investing in us. We built the business, but we did not raise a whole lot of money because we couldn't.

• 16:47Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Which was a good thing. Meant we held on to a lot more ownership. We were forced to hold on to a lot more ownership. So we took the company public in March of 1999. But we, I was a CEO until January of that year. And the board was insistent that we bring somebody from the outside. We did, unfortunately. Great guy, but just that wasn't his passion. Just because the company was going public, it did not mean it was no longer startup. And a startup requires, I think, the soul of the founder.

• 17:22Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  And so many wrong decisions were made, which, you know, you look back, you know, you wish that that wasn't the case.

• 17:31Hala Taha?

  And you ended up buying the company back like 30 years later, right?

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Four years ago. The company had a challenging few quarters. And the company had a going concern issued by the auditors. And so I made an offer and I bought the company and took it private. So it definitely was a sweet moment to be able to buy the company back. And the company had accumulated $350 million in losses over all these years. We made the company profitable in one month.

• 18:08Hala Taha?

  I'm going to ask you about that. We're going to talk all about turnarounds and how to turn around companies. But let's focus on One Planet. How does One Planet, like, really break it down for us? Like, what do you do in this company? How do you guys make money?

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. So One Planet itself is really a holding company. So One Planet does not, you know, it does not have much of a P and L. But the companies within One Planet have operations. Our biggest company is called Buyerlink.

• 18:42Hala Taha?

  Okay.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  And Buyerlink, actually, AutoWeb is also owned by Buyerlink. And Buyerlink is $130 million a year business, very profitable. And it is basically a significant company that really impacts a lot of things, but you probably have never heard of. It's the largest generator of consumer demand for new cars in the US. 10% of all new cars sold in the US are sold through Buyerlink.

• 19:14Hala Taha?

  Interesting.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  And Buyerlink's businesses, websites. We also own assets like usedcars.com. We own autoweb.com. We own contractors.com. We own california.com. We own a lot of assets. But all of these assets are designed to generate consumer demand for different verticals that they're sold in, I would say, the digital format, that the buyer of that consumer demand can monetize. Sometimes that's a lead, sometimes that's a click, sometimes that's a call. But all of the traffic that we generate, all the consumer demand that we generate, is sold in a perfectly matched way to an end advertiser

• 19:57Speaker 01

  who never had to learn anything about online marketing.

• 20:02Hala Taha?

  Okay.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  GM is a big client, you know, Nissan, Kia, Hyundai. All the, like, for example, carmakers are partners. We send the OEMs in the country about 1 million car buyer leads on a monthly basis that really fuels their internet sales departments.

• 20:25Hala Taha?

  Interesting. So how did you, like, first start One Planet? Like, where did it all start? How did you, I guess, like, you got some money from your, like, going public? Or like, how did it all start? And then how did you, like, keep building on top of it where eventually it was a holding company?

• 20:46Speaker 01

  It's actually a bit less interesting than that. I wish that was the case. What happened was, until about 2014, I was running a company called Reply.com.

• 20:57Hala Taha?

  Okay.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  And I had raised VC money and Reply.com pretty much did what Buyerlink does.

• 21:03Hala Taha?

  Okay.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  But then in 2014, I personally, as an entrepreneur, hit a bit of a roadblock. I decided that I'm kind of like tired of this game. And the game I'm talking about was dealing with five VCs on my board and trying to grow a company all the time, regardless of, you know, if that company should grow at that moment in time or not. Because sometimes unnatural growth leaves a carnage behind. But that's the name of the game. If you're at a VC-backed company, you have to keep growing.

• 21:36Hala Taha?

  Yep.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  So I went to my board and I said that I'm done. I'm quitting. They said, you're the founder, you're the chairman, you're the largest shareholder. I said, yeah, but I can no longer do this. So I recommended that they make a CMO, the CEO, and I left. And I remember that was July 16, 2014. My wife and I, two daughters, we got in the car and we just went on a road trip. It was the best time of my life to just completely, like, not have to worry about that business at that moment in time. During that time, I was, I went to a conference. It was a Bahai-inspired conference. And I saw this woman give a speech who runs an organization called Tahera Justice Center

• 22:21Speaker 01

  that deals with women who are seeking legal representation because of the difficult situation they're in. And I thought, I turned to my wife and I said, you know what? I'm jealous that her daily life is service.

• 22:39Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  I wish that was my life.

• 22:41Hala Taha?

  Hmm.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Then I thought, who says that nonprofits should be for betterment of the world? For profits should be for greed. Why can't we combine the two? And I'm not like my social impact. Because a lot of bad businesses, they put a banner, social impact. They go like, okay, the reason we are not that profitable is because of social impact business. Anyhow, at about that time, I got a call from my company, Reply.com. They said that, can you come back? We are dealing with a disaster and our bank loan is being called and the company will go away. I went back with the idea of spending three months to sell the company and move on. During one of those meetings, there was a Chinese buyer who was interested from China.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  And I stopped showing much interest in that conversation because he was a bottom feeder. And I decided, I'm going to buy the company. I'm going to buy the company. This will be the beginning of the platform I want to build. That will be what I thought in my mind, spiritual capitalism.

• 23:46Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  And so I made an offer to the board that was bigger than anyone else's offer. Truth be told, I did not have the cash at that moment in time, but we owed a lot of money to our lender. And the lender was in a tough position to be able to get paid, get their money paid back. I told them that if you finance me to buy the company, I will make sure you get all your money back. They trusted me. Our lender, who wanted to foreclose on the business, funded me to buy the company from the investors. And I was able to get back in there, build that company and build One Planet.

• 24:24Hala Taha?

  Nice. So that was basically the foundation.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Sorry, very long answer.

• 24:27Hala Taha?

  No, so basically you bought back that company.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:30Hala Taha?

  And then through the profits of that company, you were able to start buying other companies and like acquiring?

• 24:36Speaker 01

  So I'm big on profits. I feel like building for the future, that at some point I'll sell the company. Overwhelming majority of startups never get to that point.

• 24:46Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  I want to win today.

• 24:47Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  So if there's a tomorrow, that I can win tomorrow also, that's awesome. But I want to win today. So as a result, profitability to me is not optional. And in fact, if you talk to my executives, they will tell you that I often don't know the revenue of their businesses, but I know their margins.

• 25:05Hala Taha?

  Hmm.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Because to me.

• 25:06Hala Taha?

  Because you don't care about the top line revenue.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  I don't care about top line. I'm not running a publicly traded company. I only care, and even if I was running a publicly traded company, which I did till seven months ago, I do care still about the margins. Because even then, public companies should ultimately be judged based on their cash flow.

• 25:22Hala Taha?

  Hmm.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  But yeah, that's what matters to me the most. And to me, if you give me a business that has revenue, I'm able to make it profitable. Because if you're not committed and married to the revenue of a company.

• 25:36Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  You're able to manage a business in a manner that can generate cash flow.

• 25:41Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I feel like this is a perfect transition to just talk about turning around companies. So essentially, what you do at One Planet is, do you buy a portion of companies or you buy the, all of the company? I just want to start there.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  So buyer link, being our biggest business, we fully own it. I own it. I don't have any outside shareholders, so I own that business.

• 26:00Hala Taha?

  Okay.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  But there are businesses that we don't own fully. Like an example would be about a year and a half ago, we agreed to turn around the company called Inspirado. Inspirado, a publicly traded company, was dealing with a disastrous situation. They were a few days from bankruptcy. So in that case, we bought about half the company.

• 26:19Hala Taha?

  Got it. Okay, so you buy whole companies, you buy, and your, your goal is to optimize those companies, make them better, make them more profitable and grow your stake in that company? That's your goal as a holding company, correct?

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Grow my stake or just make my, the value of my stake, not necessarily the percent ownership.

• 26:37Hala Taha?

  The value of your stake, yeah.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 26:38Hala Taha?

  Okay.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  And, and of course, you cannot, you know.

• 26:45Hala Taha?

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• 27:27Hala Taha?

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• 27:44Hala Taha?

  What's up, Yap fam? You guys know we love reading on this show, so I'm always excited when I find a book I genuinely think is worth sharing. Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love by Mark Pincus is one of those books. Mark is a legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor. And this fast-paced 170-page book is his playbook for testing ideas quickly, navigating uncertainty, and figuring out what's actually worth pursuing. One of my favorite concepts is what he calls the abyss. Those moments when you feel stuck or unsure of what's next. Instead of fearing uncertainty, he shows you how to use it as a tool for discovery. Right now, Mark is doing a buy one, get one offer for Yap listeners.

• 28:29Hala Taha?

  Go to GetMark'sBook.com/Yap, buy one copy for $32 and get a second copy free. So you can keep one for yourself and give the second to a friend, future co-founder, or someone who needs a little push.

• 28:44Hala Taha?

  What's up, Yap gang? I recently had Gary Vee on the podcast and he told me something that really stuck with me. If you've got sales DNA, you've got to be paying attention to live selling because it's one of the biggest opportunities right now online. And that really got me curious, so I checked out an app that he told me about called Whatnot. I jumped into a live show and I instantly got it. The seller was showing products in real time, answering questions in the chat, and building a real relationship with the buyers. It didn't feel like boring shopping. It felt like a community. Whatnot is the largest live shopping marketplace in the country. And for entrepreneurs, the results are really hard to ignore. Sellers on Whatnot can sell up to 10 times more than traditional marketplaces. And the number of sellers making over a million dollars a year on the platform has doubled.

• 29:29Hala Taha?

  So if you've got products to sell and you're looking for a new way to reach customers, search Whatnot, W-H-A-T-N-O-T in the App Store. Download it and you can start selling right away. That's Whatnot in the App Store. Laying off the HR team, laying off the finance team, laying off the marketing team because you're going to take all that in-house.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:48Hala Taha?

  Is that typically what happens?

• 29:49Speaker 01

  That's actually very interesting. I have, I really, it goes back to my spiritual beliefs. I think that a business has to be stable, profitable, number one, because the employees of that business should be able to count on that business.

• 30:05Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  For the long term, for their livelihood. So the idea of laying off is something that I really have a major problem with.

• 30:14Hala Taha?

  Great, I love, I love that you, you feel that way.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  And, you know, so this doesn't mean that a business should remain, in a sense, should have bloated expense structure when you can no longer afford it because that company cannot remain in existence for, for its employees anyways. But with that in mind, we try very hard to not ever have layoffs. In the case of, in the case of Inspirado, when we invested in that company and I was going to also act as a CEO for a period of time, I told them in advance that I will not join unless a few things are done. And I almost did not care how they would get there, but I wanted to make sure that

• 31:01Speaker 01

  their expenses have already been reduced to a specific amount before I would get there. I got there at the beginning of August of 2014. And even though the company was going through very difficult days for a year and a half, we no longer had any layoffs during that period.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  The challenge with layoffs is that you will also end up losing a lot of good people.

• 31:27Hala Taha?

  Yes.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Uh, who decide that this is no longer a stable environment for me.

• 31:31Hala Taha?

  Mm hmm. And also, when you have a growing company, like, for example, with my company, I have fifty five employees all over the world. And if for some reason, we need to like downsize one part of the company, there's usually always a place where I can put good employees somewhere else. And they can just learn something else and kind of thrive in like some sort of lateral move or some sort of promotion. So what are you doing when you're acquiring a company and there's like, let's say, duplicate roles that you don't need? What are you exactly doing?

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Typically, over time, you're able to address that. So, you know, I'll give you an example. Right now, we have a few hundred employees. But we know that AI is making us a lot more effective and efficient.

• 32:13Hala Taha?

  Mm hmm.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  So we have a goal. The goal is that our employee base will be down by about ten percent in the next twelve months. But that will not happen uh through layoffs. People leave the company on their own. Uh, that that's just how it is.

• 32:26Hala Taha?

  Yep.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  And that's a target. Now, if you're off that target, if it turns out that we're off by seven, we're down by seven percent, not ten percent. That's okay. It's not set in stone. Uh, and if you're down by twelve percent, it is what it is. But you can give yourself that as a target, but not as as something that you have to get to now.

• 32:48Hala Taha?

  Mm hmm.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Now, if your sustainability and your existence relies on you reducing your costs today, well, you have to do what you have to do. Otherwise, the company will go bankrupt for all employees.

• 32:59Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  And that is not, there's no benevolence in that.

• 33:02Hala Taha?

  Hmm. I actually had a recent conversation. Do you know who Gary Vee is?

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:06Hala Taha?

  Um, so I just sat down with him last week and we were talking about headcount and AI. And like, there's lots of discussions around, a lot of companies are doing these mass layoffs because of AI. And Gary had like a really great analogy. He thinks of his employees as armies and AI as just better weapons. And he's like, so if my competitor has a thousand employees and I have a thousand employees, and, you know, I uh cut my employees down to five hundred with better weapons, but they keep a thousand employees with the better weapons, who's gonna win? The thousand employees that also have the better weapons?

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 33:40Hala Taha?

  So he doesn't think of it as like he he needs to cut headcount. He more thinks of it as it's just my employees have better weapons and we're just gonna keep growing the way that we are. So.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  There's there's truth to that.

• 33:52Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  But also, I think that the challenge can be that where those weapons

• 33:59Hala Taha?

  Mm hmm.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  come to play, uh, maybe in different departments.

• 34:03Hala Taha?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, that's true.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  So what do you do then? I mean, it is a bit more complicated in reality.

• 34:08Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Uh, but yeah, I mean, at some level, you know, there's something interesting that Elon Musk said recently. He said that you think about an economy and we think about per capita. What's the size of an economy? Well, if we have a lot of robots and AI agents, well, then you can have an unlimited economy, uh, the size of an economy. And you can also think of it, you know, but from a business perspective. If a business, let's say, if my goal was to have a million dollars of revenue per employee, now if I have, I don't know, two hundred AI agents also, then my revenue can grow much more rapidly without needing to grow the employee base at the same pace. And I think that is, that will be more often the case than laying off.

• 34:50Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Uh, that you will grow.

• 34:52Hala Taha?

  You're able to scale, but not the headcount.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  You're hiring.

• 34:55Hala Taha?

  Yes.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Uh, so we will see that. And and what that will do to the future jobs, I really don't know. But my guess is that, um, there will be a bit of a pressure, at least in the short run, uh, on jobs for recent grads.

• 35:08Hala Taha?

  Totally, because they just don't have the experience that they need. Totally. Um, okay, I want to go into a little game that I'm calling like turnaround quickfire.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  All right.

• 35:20Hala Taha?

  And since you've got so much experience turning around companies and making them more profitable and increasing your stake in them, I'm gonna just rattle off some categories. And you tell me like, what are the first things that you look for in terms of something that's bad practice? What is good practice? Um, and like how you suggest to like improve things? So people and leadership.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Hmm. So I have a tendency, uh, and a commitment to promote people who are one layer below the executive team to executive roles.

• 35:56Hala Taha?

  Hmm.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  I think that they're the people who are on their way up.

• 35:59Hala Taha?

  Yep.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  They are doing things for the first time. They're by far more likely to want to prove themselves. They're gonna work hard, uh, and I probably cannot afford them ten years from now.

• 36:09Hala Taha?

  Hmm.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  So I love putting those people in leadership roles. Um, uh, without mentioning names, there was a gentleman, I recently made him in charge of uh, one of my uh business units, a sizable business unit. He's twenty eight years old. If he hears this, he'll know who I'm talking about. And uh, he's doing a phenomenal job.

• 36:29Hala Taha?

  Nice.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  He's never been an executive before. Now he runs a business, he's doing a phenomenal job. But that's what I look for.

• 36:35Hala Taha?

  And what happens to the existing leadership team when you do that?

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Often, existing leadership team, when I buy a business or they've been with me for ten years, fifteen years, uh, or be with a company for that long, they have packages. And and they're able to get that package and move on. Sometimes they wanna move on, or sometimes I wait till they move on. And then I promote from within and and have uh have uh new talent take over those roles.

• 37:00Hala Taha?

  How do you evaluate, like, let's say, there's leadership executives that want to stay? How do you evaluate who stays and who goes?

• 37:07Speaker 01

  You know, I rarely ask people to leave. So, uh, but the, you know, so like, you know, this gentleman who took on that role, the person who had the role before, chose to leave on her own.

• 37:17Hala Taha?

  Hmm.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Um, but uh, the way that that decision is made is just pretty easy. Uh, these days, if you are an executive and you are not choosing to embrace AI, uh, it is very hard to know how I'm gonna be able to work with you. Uh, because it's kind of like, you know, being around thirty years from, thirty years ago and saying that the internet is not for me.

• 37:38Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  I'm like, well, I I don't know what to do. Uh, so so that's a must. And I've had that situation recently, uh, that there's some people who just have a bit of a negative reaction, that they don't want to have anything to do with AI.

• 37:48Hala Taha?

  Okay, this one's a big one. So customer and revenue quality.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. So I fundamentally believe that if you treat everybody, and by that I mean everybody, your employees, uh, your, uh, if you have shareholders, your shareholders, your customers, even your competitors, as noble creations, spiritual beings

• 38:12Hala Taha?

  Hmm.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  that you're not going to take advantage of, you're not just looking at them as tokens of economic value.

• 38:17Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  But you're looking at them as other spiritual beings that, like you, are having this experience, this life as we know it. If you treat them in that manner, the chances are your business was all will also prosper. Because the chances are, the way you treat them, few businesses are treating them in that manner. If you look at our business, Birling being our biggest business.

• 38:37Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Um, we almost, if you look at, if you look at the large accounts that account for ninety five percent of our revenue,

• 38:46Hala Taha?

  Mm hmm.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  we almost have no, ever, none, zero cancellations.

• 38:50Hala Taha?

  Hmm.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  And um, I think that's because of the way that uh our team chooses to treat them.

• 38:57Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Even with competition, we have a thing we say at my company. If our success relies on someone else's demise, we're gonna get out of that business.

• 39:06Hala Taha?

  Yes, it's treat your customers right. You said something at the beginning of our conversation that you don't care about top line.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  I don't.

• 39:13Hala Taha?

  So, and how are you evaluating like what product lines to keep or services to keep versus which ones to cut?

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, propensity for profitability. Though, how likely is it that that business will become profitable and will sustain? Uh, it's profit margins. Um, you know, businesses can be under pressure, but can can that be resolved?

• 39:32Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Some businesses can't.

• 39:34Hala Taha?

  Do you have any examples of a business where you were able to kind of shift the focus in terms of what they should focus on for revenue and not help the profitability?

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I'll give you an example. When I bought AutoWeb, uh, AutoWeb has seventeen percent margin.

• 39:50Hala Taha?

  Hmm.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  And when I talk about margin in my business, I really uh talk about revenue minus TAC, uh, traffic acquisition cost, so cost of marketing. And seventy percent, so so the company would spend, um,

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Contental Airlines, he says something beautiful. They asked him, they said that how did you make Contental Airlines profitable so quickly? He said, it was easy. Airlines, they have many routes. They fly to cities with a plane full, they make money. They fly to cities where the plane is always half empty, they lose money. I stopped flying to cities where we lost money, we became profitable. It was as simple as that.

• 40:30Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs, you start out with one service and then you sell another thing and another thing and another thing. And then eventually, you're just looking at how much revenue is coming in and you're not realizing that there's one service that takes a bunch of people, you're actually losing money, or there's one client who got a big discount, you're actually losing money. So it's really smart for people who have like lots of things that they're selling lots of clients to go client by client, service by service, and really break down like, how much do the tools cost? How much do the employees cost? And what is really your profit margin per business unit or per service?

• 41:04Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 41:05Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  That's right. So one of the things that's a must for me is that any business I run, by 10 a.m. every morning, I want to have a report that gives me the financials for the day before for that specific business, basically includes revenue, margins, bottom line for that business, not profits, it's basically just margins, compares that to the last three days, same day last week, same day last month, and compares the pace for this one to prior months for the last 13 months. And those reports cannot be automated, meaning that I want to receive a report that the business, that the executive in charge put together and sent it to me by 10 a.m. every morning.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  The reason for that is, when people start putting those reports together, they pay a lot more attention because things stand out. Oh, my God.

• 41:57Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  You know, I missed these three things. And I've seen that when they do that, the business starts improving almost immediately. So when I buy a business, that's the first thing I do. I want a daily report.

• 42:09Hala Taha?

  I love that.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  And that daily report changes everything.

• 42:12Hala Taha?

  And are you also, are you looking at the whole business as a whole? Or are you looking at the different product lines or services also, so that you can recommend how to optimize them?

• 42:21Speaker 01

  So I look at every business in that manner. And then there's one person in charge who aggregate them all and send it to me before noon every day. And, you know, we have a, we have an office in Armenia, so they start working earlier given the time difference. So I start getting reports when I wake up in the morning, they start coming in. And, and I love that because that allows me to very quickly, just on my phone, take a look at the report and see how we're doing.

• 42:47Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  And they also know that if yesterday was really good, they need to say why?

• 42:54Speaker 01

  And what are they doing to sustain it? If yesterday was really bad, why? And what are they doing to fix it?

• 43:01Hala Taha?

  Since you own all the companies, or at least have a stake in all of them, if some company is doing like really, really well, and one company has a lot of potential, do you ever like take money from one company and fund the other company? Or do you keep them all separate?

• 43:16Speaker 01

  I mean, when they're owned by one planet, then absolutely. I mean, we, we, we do that all the time. Yeah. I mean, because again, we don't have any outside shareholders, so, so the money that, that is made by these businesses, you know, can be shared to not just invest back, invest back in the businesses that we own, but could also invest in other startups, which we do that also.

• 43:41Hala Taha?

  So does the executive teams on the companies that you own also have equity or no?

• 43:46Speaker 01

  They do have what I call distribution rights, that if the company is sold while they are, or goes public, while they are a part of the business, they get that portion. And they also, we also profit share. So executives often don't control the, the profits or the EBITDA of the business, but they control the contribution margin of their own business. So they get a percentage of the contribution margin that they earn.

• 44:15Hala Taha?

  Oh, very cool. Okay, how about pricing and product mix? Do you ever look at like how companies are pricing their services and products? Or do you not get into that detail?

• 44:25Speaker 01

  I don't get into that. I feel like, you know, the pricing is a maximum a buyer is willing to pay. So negotiate and the best you can, and don't try to take every dollar out of it, let them be happy.

• 44:37Hala Taha?

  Yeah. Okay, this next one, I know that you have a really good case study for it. Marketing and customer acquisition. So you actually started a company, I believe it was called Purple Tie?

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Oh, God, yes.

• 44:49Hala Taha?

  Talk to us about that company and unit economics and what went wrong?

• 44:54Speaker 01

  So Purple Tie was a bad idea.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  In the late 90s, I had some, made some money from AutoWeb, so you can imagine, I probably had bought a few nice suits, you know, spent money on, on a nicer wardrobe. And then the dry cleaners were really bugging me because they would often mess up the stuff that I would take to them. And at the same time, I'm really dating myself, I had heard Wayne Hozenga, who's the founder of AutoNation, he had also founded Blockbuster Video, which I don't think anyone who's watching or listening has heard of Blockbuster Video.

• 45:31Hala Taha?

  I'm sure they have.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  But movie nights, you used to be Blockbuster Video. You go Blockbuster Video and you rent a video. And until Blockbuster Video, there were mom and pops that owned the video shops.

• 45:43Hala Taha?

  Yep.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Blockbuster opened up one store every eight hours for eight years and ended up owning that, that market, became a huge multi-billion dollar business. So I saw Wayne Hozenga speak a few times during my AutoWeb days because he founded AutoNation and AutoNation was a big client of ours and so on. And I thought, I love that story. And I'm like 28 years old, I feel like I got a Midas touch by now, I took a company public, I can keep doing this. So I decided I want to fix the dry cleaning business. And I started building these hundreds, thousand square feet facilities for environmentally clean, dry cleaning, high quality, dry cleaning and laundry and so on, massive, massive operation.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  And we build this spoken hub model to have our trucks connect to a neighborhood so we could pick up from your home, deliver to your office and vice versa. Anyhow, we built that.

• 46:37Hala Taha?

  Yeah, you raised, also you raised like what, 13 million?

• 46:40Speaker 01

  We raised a ton of money. I needed 400 million.

• 46:43Hala Taha?

  Oh, my God.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  I raised, and this is 1999.

• 46:46Hala Taha?

  Crazy.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  I, I did not raise 400 million. But we raised, and I had made money from AutoWeb, I pure, I put my own money into that business. But anyhow, the bottom line is that ultimately, 2001 came about and the dot com crash happened. And I could no longer raise more money. And we ended up shutting down that business. But what really caused that business, I think, to not prosper? Number one, the dot com crash. So we could not raise money. So, so that was it. But number two, I think that the economies of scale for us did not exist. We introduced too many expense layers to the business. If I could do it all over again, not that I would, but if we could, every dry cleaning

• 47:31Speaker 01

  shop uses their dry cleaning equipment only for a couple of hours a day. There's a lot of, in a sense, unused potential at existing annuity business. How often people change their dry cleaners? They usually switch when they move. And in this case, if moving did not mean you have to stop working with us because we were, we were everywhere.

• 47:55Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  But, so it is expensive to acquire, but I think that that can be, that can be made up for. I think the bigger issue is really the idea of building density, that if you have a service that relies on delivery, on, on trucks, on the road, you need to have a lot of density so the trucks are not driving half an hour from one drop off to the next. If you have a neighborhood where you can do all your drop offs, then the margins can be good.

• 48:27Hala Taha?

  So sticking on customer acquisition costs and things like that, Buyerlink is like a lead gen company.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 48:35Hala Taha?

  So how are you, like, what is your guidance on how much to spend on customers and, and just any sort of guidance you have about customer acquisition costs?

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, in my business, I don't want to spend more than 50% on acquiring a customer. But if it's 50%, then to me, I, I don't have a marketing budget. Spend as much as you can, as long as you're able to maintain margin. Often people come to me and they say that, you know what, if I reduce the margin from 50% to 30%, I'm able to get access to more customers and in aggregate will end up with more margins. My answer is no. I want to hold on to margins that are significant enough that if the market sneezes, we don't catch a cold, we don't go out of business. So, so that's my rule. But every business has a, you know, should have their own rule that what's the, what's the right margin for them?

• 49:28Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Clearly, if you're selling a car, you cannot spend half the value of that car, you know, in marketing. But, you know, you decide what is the amount that you're willing to spend.

• 49:39Hala Taha?

  That's good advice. Okay, how about contracts, vendors, overhead? Where does bloat tend to hide in companies in this way?

• 49:48Speaker 01

  You know, it's interesting. Most companies that have been around for more than I would say five years, and they have had at least a few executives who are no longer there. The chances are that they have layers of expense that nobody knows about. And so I think that there's a bit of a cleaning that needs to happen every few years, that you literally want to have someone, and I call that person the transformation officer, that goes through everything to make sure that everything you have, you need. There are no two different vendors that one of them could do the job of both. There is no preferred vendor that an executive who's no longer with you,

• 50:29Speaker 01

  signed up, but nobody cares about, nobody really uses that solution anymore. I saw a lot of that when I took over Inspirado, that the company literally had tens of millions of dollars of accumulated expenses that were not having any impact on the business. And we cut forty five million dollars.

• 50:47Hala Taha?

  Wow.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Within a couple of months.

• 50:49Hala Taha?

  Really interesting. And how about like leases? Sometimes leases need to be cut, right?

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Well, Inspirado, we had, because one of the ways we made money was that we had all these luxury homes all over the place, that we had leases, ten year leases. And many of these homes did not have enough occupancy through our platform to ever make money. So getting rid of leases can be complicated because usually there's a contract associated with them. But leases can be very problematic because not only they make your P and L look very ugly, they make your balance sheet look very ugly.

• 51:24Hala Taha?

  Okay, let's go through, I really want to get to spiritual capitalism. But first, I want to see if there's any other case studies that we need to go through. I feel like we actually went through most of them. I do want to talk about, Ring Partner was an example of when you bought a capability. Help us understand when you decide to build something internally and when you just decide to acquire a company that just does it. And like, what's your decision making around that?

• 51:55Speaker 01

  I feel like I'm getting too old to build stuff new. So I like to acquire. I like to acquire because I love the way that young talent, young entrepreneurs, think about, you know, the new tools, the new things that can be built. The vision that I could have had thirty years ago, I just don't have today. So as a result, buying companies is very, can be very interesting. But there are also companies that we can buy, that we can make them better because we have the infrastructure that they just don't have. We have the technology resources, we have online marketing capabilities that they, or now AI, that they simply may not have. So that could be another reason to buy a company.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  Now, having said that, I still am, I am an entrepreneur. I like to build stuff. Right now, we're building a new company called Quite Remarkable.

• 52:46Hala Taha?

  Yes.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  And Quite Remarkable will be a luxury travel company. And I love that industry. I fell in love with it when I took over Inspirado, then I sold it, and I felt that there's a better business model that we can employ.

• 53:00Hala Taha?

  Yeah, so now you're starting that business from scratch. Now that you've been a founder for so many, you were a founder previously. You've had these companies for so many years. What are some of the top things that you're going to do differently with Quite Remarkable, since you're building this one from scratch?

• 53:14Speaker 01

  Now, of course, I come from a place of privilege. As an entrepreneur today, I'm not the same person who was, you know, just eating potatoes and had nothing else back then. You know, I'm able to invest in my business. That makes life a lot easier. I have an infrastructure, I have a CFO, I've got a head of marketing, and I got a head of product from day one, that they can help me navigate things. So I have the vision, but there are a lot of amazing people who are building that. And so, so I don't want to compare me to the hard work of first time entrepreneurs. They're fundamentally different, and they are putting their blood and sweat and everything into building those businesses. So I'm not that, and we need to really have a, I have a soft heart, you know,

• 53:58Speaker 01

  a soft spot for that. But what I do differently is that, like I said, I really think about profitability from day one. I don't think about building to sell, because I'm not building to sell. And so as a result, I'm not thinking about multiples. I'm not thinking about, how do I build so VCs will fund? I don't care about that, I don't want funding. So that gives me a bit of a freedom to build, I think, in a better manner, in a more lasting manner. Like, I'll give you an example. We have decided that Quite Remarkable, when it will launch, it will sign, it will, we'll do marketing, we'll bring onboard one hundred travelers, then we'll stop all marketing.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  We'll make sure those one hundred travelers will become fanatics about our business. We'll rave about the business. We fully take care of them. Once we know that we accomplish that, then we open up. We'll keep doing that until we get to one thousand travelers. We want to make sure we have one thousand ambassadors out there because they love the business. Now, that will slow us down, that will slow down growth, but that will allow us to build a brand that I think we'll be proud of.

• 55:08Hala Taha?

  That's really awesome. I feel like that's such a good strategy. Why don't we move on to spiritual capitalism? I know that's very important to you. So how would you define this philosophy?

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, you know, living in the US and having my background as a refugee, coming to this country because of religious persecution and so on, and finding the goodness that America had and let me in. I've thought often about the challenges also in the US, racism. And to me, racism, for example, is probably the most challenging issue in America. You think about political issues in this country, the extremes of left and right. I call, you know, to me, there is like these alliances that they're designed for greed and for power, but they don't really help anybody.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  You look at Wall Street and how greed has been really, you know, it's the Milton Friedman version of capitalism that's all about maximization and accumulation of one's ability to consume more and more and more. And when enough is enough. Now, I got to be careful because when I talk about these things, extreme right wants to call me a socialist, which I'm not, I'm a capitalist.

• 56:31Hala Taha?

  Yeah, obviously.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  And then extreme left calls me a capitalist because I built a company, taken it public, it was a unicorn and so on. So I'm like, no, I'm just somebody who wants to show that it is possible to build good businesses that their ripple effect leaves the world ever so slightly a better place. So the first thing is that, as I mentioned that earlier, looking at every human as a noble spiritual being, I'm not going to look at you as a token of economic value. If I stop doing that, then the whole idea of greed at any cost, maximization of my wealth at any cost kind of goes away

• 57:17Speaker 01

  because my relationship with the person sitting across from me is way beyond this physical experience that we're all having in, you know, in this world. And I want to treat you differently. But I think that it is about the betterment of the world, that we all want to be an agent for that. And I think when we employ the right practices in our businesses, the chances are that we'll be a lot more fulfilled, we'll be a lot more joyful as we build our businesses.

• 57:48Hala Taha?

  You talked about how to treat our customers. What are the ways that you employ this with your employees?

• 57:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so our culture is very important to us, and there are a few values that we have that are non-negotiable. One is that our executives are expected to lead with love. And a lot of people have questions about the love part, that that's a very strong word. But I think that is actually a very important word that we need to have. And when we say lead with love, it includes leading internally and externally with that. The other one is truthfulness. I find truthfulness to be a spiritual value, and truthfulness at any cost. And hundred percent truthful at all time. Imagine you're fighting a legal case. Truthfulness could cause you to lose that case. That's okay, be truthful all the way.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  And don't embellish things. So that is an important part of our business. No gossip ever in our business about anyone. We just don't want to have that. You know, I think that the tongue can be a smoldering fire, and we want to be careful what we say and the ripple effect of that. We want to make sure as a company, we are giving, we're giving sacrificially. So so much that it affects our cash position so much, it affects our financial decisions for our company. And I think that automatically also puts a cap on how big a company can get.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Who said that global domination for a business is a good thing for humanity? I don't necessarily believe that. I think that if I'm building a great business that's taking care of its community, its employees, its customers, who says that just because I can, I have to keep making it bigger and bigger and bigger till I have built a monopoly?

• 59:39Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  But I think that all of those things we do, as humanity does, because we have kind of lost our connection with what truly matters. And I do believe that we all collectively need a bit of a spiritual transformation to realize that all of this will end, you know, at any moment. And what will remain is how we feel about what we accomplished and how we left the world.

• 1:00:04Hala Taha?

  Yeah. Can you give us a concrete example of a way that you lost money in a business to actually do better for the employees or do better for the world? And then similarly, how doing better for your employees or your customers or society helped you gain profits?

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I have lost a lot over the years. The biggest loss I ever had was when I took all the web public, when my brother and I, we took all the web public, I, on paper, had made a few hundred million dollars, and I end up losing almost all of it.

• 1:00:42Hala Taha?

  Wow.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  And if it wasn't for my faith, the chances are I would have felt that as a seen as a big loss that would have probably affected my psyche. Maybe I would have been depressed.

• 1:00:57Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  I didn't feel that way ever at all. I felt like I was grateful because I was still better off than the situation I was at prior to it.

• 1:01:08Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Even though a lot of VCs would ask me, oh, how do you feel? Are you okay? I'm like, yes, I'm totally fine. It's all good.

• 1:01:14Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  But, but I think that the key is if you think about the businesses that we have built, even when they were suffering, my employees have always known that X percentage of our profits always go to our nonprofit causes. So we have, um, we have a nonprofit called One Planet, One People, uh, at One Planet. And the primary focus of One Planet, One People are two things. One is education with the focus on education of girls and women all over the world. And the second is racial healing in the U.S. And so a portion of our profits every month goes to that foundation. And we spend it everywhere from Montgomery, Alabama,

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  on some of the efforts of Bryan Stevenson, uh, like the building of the monument for, um, I think it's called Peace and Justice, uh, as well as, you know, in the Gambia, where we have after school, uh, uh, education programs for, for girls that we support. And when I say these things, it's not just sending money. With the Gambia operation, our employees go there. They spend time there. We, we kind of like adopted. We want, we want that to become part of who we are. We don't know how to do it. We don't know how to do anything in Africa, but someone is doing good work and we want to be a part of that.

• 1:02:33Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  Um, and we're grateful that allows to be, to be a part of that because that brings a lot of meaning to our everyday, uh, jobs as well. But again, the employees knowing that these causes matter and the company is willing to give sacrificially to these causes.

• 1:02:49Hala Taha?

  And so is it One Planet's employees and like One Planet's part of your profit goes to philanthropy? Or all the companies underneath you also are associated with your charity organizations?

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the businesses that we own, if I don't own something, I cannot control it.

• 1:03:07Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  But if we own them, uh, they all collectively, when I say One Planet, I'm including them all.

• 1:03:13Hala Taha?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  And, um, but businesses that we invest in, uh, we ask the founders, if we're investing early on, so the business is still shaping, we ask the founders to sign a document called For the Betterment of the World. And this document basically communicates with them that we're investing in you, but we believe you have a love for humanity. And because of your love for humanity, there are certain things that we hope you will do. Not because of contractual obligation, you're gonna do because you want to leave a positive mark behind. And all of our founders need to sign that.

• 1:03:49Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  Um, otherwise we will not invest.

• 1:03:52Hala Taha?

  So as we close out this interview, what is the message that you want to share with the thousands of entrepreneurs that are going to be tuning into this episode in terms of how they should be building their companies?

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, there are a few things I would say. One is that make sure that what you're doing is meaningful from day one. Don't wait till your business is successful and then you say, now I'm going to spend my weekends, go do good work in the world. Do it today because guess what? Overwhelming majority of businesses never have an exit, never have that big payday. So unless you make that part of your life today, a coherent part of your life, then you're, you're waiting for, for some date in the future to have that joy and fulfillment. So that's number one. Number two, the road is never blocked, ever. I don't care if you're an immigrant. I don't care if you're black.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  I don't care, uh, if you're a woman, whatever are the challenges that you're dealing with? Because the market has never been kind to you. None of that means that the road is blocked. So don't let those who have made life difficult for you to win.

• 1:05:03Hala Taha?

  Yep.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  Find a way around it.

• 1:05:05Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  There's always a way around it. Absolutely.

• 1:05:08Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, woman, uh, as you, as you probably know, only 2% of the, uh, investment money in Silicon Valley goes to women.

• 1:05:15Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  And actually in our company, over half of our money is invested in women entrepreneurs. Because also women are great entrepreneurs.

• 1:05:24Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  Uh, anyhow, but, but that is a second thing that I highly, highly recommend, uh, to any entrepreneur. And the, the third one is, uh, think about profits, not exit.

• 1:05:35Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  The chances are if you're building a successful, profitable company, A, you'll always be in business. You will be in charge of your own destiny, but you will also have an opportunity to exit if you choose to. Uh, so, you know, why not go down that path?

• 1:05:51Hala Taha?

  And the last question that I want to ask you actually goes back to profit because this is how we profit. You mentioned earlier, when you have a business, you want it to be profitable by day one.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:01Hala Taha?

  Profitable day one. So what are some of your principles? Or what are some of the things that we need to think about that you want to leave us with in terms of how we can be more profitable?

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now, of course, it takes a little bit, a little bit of time to get to profits.

• 1:06:13Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  But how you become profitable from day one should be part of your strategy, not something for the future. So I would never, ever want to invest in a company or build a business with the idea that has to keep raising money. I want to know the path for profitability for that business from day one. So the number one thing that I will look at is how disciplined you are when you're hiring. Because at the beginning, uh, people cost is a big part of that. Uh, and number two, how you are, uh, basically signing up for resources and how frugal you are with the way that you're spending money. I like to invest in, in, in founders who are frugal and they just don't think that money will always be cheap.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  I can always raise money and that VCs will always love me somehow and they'll give me more cash.

• 1:07:00Hala Taha?

  Yeah. Well, Payam, this was such an awesome interview. I feel like we learned so much. Thank you so much for your time and your wisdom. Where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? I know that you also have a book if you want to shout out your book.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, you can find me on all social media platforms, Payam's Money. And my book is called Crossing the Desert, Embracing Life's Difficult Journeys. Uh, and, uh, message me. I, I, I typically respond. I may be late at times, but I do respond.

• 1:07:28Hala Taha?

  Amazing. Well, thank you so much.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:07:31Hala Taha?

  And that Young and Profiteers is how Payam and One Planet Group profit. Today's big lesson, don't just chase revenue, chase profitable growth. Know your margins, cut what's dragging down the business and put your money where it can create the most value, both economically and for society. Because the goal isn't just to grow, it's to grow in a way that makes your business stronger and healthier for yourself and your community. Thanks for listening to How We Profit, the Young and Profiting series where real entrepreneurs share real numbers, real margins, and the real story of how their businesses actually work. I'm Hala Taha and I'll see you next time.