Blake: [00:00:00] The hustle means to me the ability to focus in directionally on a destination.
Being nimble in your path. To get there because whatever you think the path is gonna be, it's gonna be completely different. The persistence to keep going when it gets uncomfortable and it will get uncomfortable. The fortitude to make mistakes, not get permanently knocked down from those mistakes. Get up, adjust, and keep on moving.
Hanna: Today I am sitting down with Blake Johnson, a Los Angeles based entrepreneur, whose name now carries weight $1.1 billion In Business Valuations, Inc. 500 Honors LA's best places to work awards and leadership as past YPO Los Angeles Chairman. But behind those accolades is a kid from El Central California up at 3:00 AM sweating through brutal farm work in 120 degree heat.
Desperate to break free from dusty field. From Outsmarting rivals in a legendary four H pig deal. He built and sold companies like Currency, capital, and Byte. Fetching over a billion dollars in under four years, and he's [00:01:00] still charging forward. I'll uncover what drives his relentless hustle from surviving near financial ruin to giving back through Big Brothers, big Sisters, boy Scouts, and moca.
Expect practical tips from building from nothing, and insights on persistence. Failure in navigating an AI driven world. This is a story of a kid who's never stopped fighting. Let's dive in.
Blake: Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, specifically in that region of California, El Centro is, most noted for having that highest end of employment rate in the nation and having been reared in that community. You get exposure to a lot of different things
you had a huge farming community and all the things that came along with that, it just had a pretty broad array of attributes that you were forced to encounter on a daily basis. we had. Horses. We had cattle, we had dirt roads, we had water that came from the canals.
We had, a very heavily Hispanic population. The schooling system was questionable. People largely didn't have exposure to [00:02:00] a lot of the nice things we commonly have exposure to today. From a very young age, we were accustomed to working from kindergarten on, I had chores I came home to every day that were horrible to deal with, from dealing with animals to, gathering , what it seemed to be insurmountable sums of wood to burn.
We had the liberties of jumping on our bikes and getting lost and access to motorized vehicles and horses and. All these different things they had to persist through, but really it was in eighth grade I was sent to work more formally on a day-to-day basis. And my first job, I filed a tax return, at a pretty young age, and I was showing up to work in the debt of summer
consistently had to start work at four o'clock in the morning, which meant I had to get up at 3:05 AM every day. I was too young to drive and hauled off down the road. To work with cattle and arriving at the feedlot at nighttime, effectively being given an assignment.
My first years were relegated [00:03:00] to the worst of worst jobs. I was the low man on the totem pole which meant my first two years working, I was given a five gallon paint bucket and told, to clean out cattle troughs, About 25% water, 50% urine, and 25% manure.
it was a thick sludge. I scooped it out all day, every day. There was 117 troughs. it took me from Monday morning, , roughly through Friday morning to get through all 117 talk about, having to persist. Hating every day of it, but I was more fearful of disappointing my dad and God forbid, having somebody say that this Johnson kid didn't work that hard.
So I just kept my head down and I shoveled and shoveled and shoveled. It's a thing that we constantly talked about in my family,just keep shoveling. I was the only one with blue eyes I think to ever work on the speed lot. And it was a good environment, I learned a lot
looking back, there was a key handful of fundamentals that were instilled early on that I later drew from and really, you know, kind of grew from those [00:04:00] base elements later in life.
Hanna: What was your first. Success that you had within that environment that made you want more later on?
Blake: Yeah. It's funny because a few things stick out in my mind. One tradition in my family during that time was Sundays specifically Sunday afternoons, we didn't work and my dad would barbecue Ada and 60 Minutes was on, I just always remember 60 minutes was tradition.
But more importantly, after 60 minutes, I. There was a program in the eighties, lifestyles of the Rich and Famous with Robin Leach at Champagne Wishes and Caviar Dreams, and it was really fun for me to see that because you would get a glimpse granted it, it was on tv, how different life was for other people.
And something resonated with me on that. My dad always would make fun of me Early on, he said, boy, you have champagne taste on a beer budget. ' cause I was always really intrigued with this other lifestyle. But that community as a whole down there is largely focused on work ethic and hustle. And [00:05:00] so somebody's always bartering something.
Everything is negotiated. And when you're reared in an environment like that, you get a really high comfort to BS with people, to negotiate, to always try to get a better deal, it's extremely cultural and one that has stuck with me throughout my career. Much of the time frustrating others, but one of my biggest successes early on, I was in four H, which in four H for those that don't understand it or never heard of it, you buy an animal at its infancy, you are tasked over the course of.
Six plus months to raise the animal. So you're buying the feed, you're housing it. In this case, I was prone to raising pigs and walking the pigs, conditioning the pigs. the big event at the end of it is you take your animal to the county fair and sell that animal. one of the best successes I had was selling a pig.
Ethically twice. So I sold [00:06:00] 50% of the pig for effectively a hundred percent of the price, and I got two guys to double the price. It was , a finely scripted negotiation. I'll still run into people from that area who have, will reference me selling one pick two times.
and I actually, really made a lot of money probably around the sixth grade or so. And that stuck with me ever since.
Hanna: Well, you've created a name for yourself outside of El Centro, and a reputation that has far achieved what the people around you in four H saw and what they know of you.
What was the first business that you really created, the reputation that went beyond what you believed in yourself even?
Blake: . I've had a number of businesses, i've started everything from scratch. , I've grown them, I've successfully exited , all the ones I've started or in the process of trying to exit the last two.
Each one got progressively bigger. So where in the life cycle did one grow beyond me? I think in really most cases, all of them did [00:07:00] because it was really at the core base of it. It was the team that, alongside myself, were able to achieve these outsized results, in the collective effort and brain power of everybody working together.
Hanna: What were the core components of that team that you. Built around you to really find success.
Blake: They were different and I've learned along the way. The first company I had was a financial services equipment leasing company called Catnet Financial Services. we did small to medium sized business lending
many people have heard me say this, but I always equate that business to, on the exterior, it was a beautiful Ferrari, and then you open up the hood and there was two sick mice and a hamster wheel in the engine compartment, I had a lot of lessons from that company because in 2005 when I started to build that company, we had really to no credit of our own wild success.
It was Gale Force wins at our back. It was the right place in the in time in the economy. Foolishly, I really thought a lot of the success was due to our [00:08:00] own efforts not realizing we were caught up in a tide. Fast forward 2008, after we had two historic years of building what was one of the fastest growing businesses in California.
The financial crisis hit I went from having, a hundred plus employees down to a few in a matter of three months. I did not have everybody fully aligned with a defined outcome.
When things got really rough and we went from the luxury of having a strong wind at our back to walking into a tornado people were quick to jump ship I realized that had I.
another opportunity to do that again in the future. I was gonna be more thoughtful about aligning people's interests and making them all think like owners making sure to incent and align people's interests and define a clear goal. That was not a far long goal that would be achieved in decades to come, but rather. A few short years to come.
Hanna: Maybe you can walk through how close you really were to that happening and [00:09:00] why you never wanna get to that place again.
Blake: I always say I've done thousands of things right, and hundreds of thousands of things wrong I fail every day. There are failures that you can pick yourself up from and keep going, and there are failures that wipe you out.
I was at the doorstep , of a failure that was going to wipe me out pretty bad, and I got as close to it as you could ever imagine. Down to my last payroll, I had $7,000 to my name. No access to credit, no access to bank lines, no access to investors, I had a payroll due and I remember it like it was yesterday, about $43,000
And I had $7,000. I got to the point where I was pretty unemotional about it because I was either gonna make payroll or not. I made $62,000 in that two weeks plus my seven, up to 69 minus my 43 had a balance, after payroll of $16,000. It was double the money.
I was feeling pretty good and incrementally, I dug out of that hole every month. I didn't take a day off of work for three and a [00:10:00] half years and got , a fundamental education that was the core. Basis of what I've been able to do since then. So when we talk about failure, I was gonna lose my house.
I was gonna lose my car. In fact, I did lose my car. One of my friends reminded me that he took over my car lease. I didn't actually remember that or had flushed it outta my memory. he reminded me, a month ago and he was proud in all the things that, good friends say, but it was quite humbling and borderline embarrassing.
when you get to that point where the next alternative for me at that point was probably to move back home after having achieved all this success and not knowing what I was gonna do. As crazy as it sounds, I thought the feedlot might be my only option, because that failure would've come with a bankruptcy that would've come with black eyes of financial failure.
And I didn't know how the world was gonna react to that. in those moments it's really sobering and incredibly scary because you can quickly surmise how you [00:11:00] might be put down indefinitely
Hanna: and you had to take the risk to make it through.
You had to take other risks after that to build new businesses. What was next after that
Blake: I had started two business simultaneous to that, we were dealing with tens of thousands of business owners, had thousand business owners in my database that we had pulled credit on.
during 2009, the average FICO score was dropping tremendously. Specifically with small to medium sized business owners whose personal credit largely constituted. Business credit, it was one and the same. Businesses get bigger and they can stand behind their financial statements.
These businesses were small mom and pops and the business owner was largely tied to their personal FICO score. we had a substantial drop on average in our. Database of 88,000 business owners, we knew a lot about FICO scores and what constituted good F ICOs and bad F ICOs and the ratios around that, to be blunt, the tricks [00:12:00] of the trade to maintain high FICO scores.
So we proactively started a service for these business owners to help them with their credit. We did it for free and it was a wild success. It was almost shocking to me at the time I got more thank you letters from doing this for six months than I had in the previous 10 years of lending out billions of dollars.
And it didn't take too long before we thought, okay, this is a bigger need so we started a credit repair company I went to the Department of Justice after, failing to get a good. Understanding from the law firms that had this purported expertise in it, the DOJ in California was tremendously helpful.
This attorney, this woman, really stepped in and helped me constitute and create the business. She even went so far as to redline contracts. We had a great run. We did help thousands of business owners. Then later went to consumers and helped a lot of consumers who were looking at that time to buy homes and that was something that I was quite proud of.
I [00:13:00] ended up putting the business up for sale. It got bought by the private equity group in Menlo Park right next to Stanford. Ironically, all Harvard Business School guys, despite the proximity to Stanford, they are opinionated against Stanford to this day. But I had a fairly meaningful win with that company.
Hanna: What do you think made you stand out against the Harvards and the Stanford students that you were excelling and they were maybe eventually working for you?
Blake: , It was interesting 'cause there was a point in my time where I had planned to go to business school to learn all the traits I was forced to learn.
That three and a half years of destitute. and I always say, when the first business was on the rocks, we did go to New York to try to raise money from a VC fund. To their credit, they should not have touched that business at all and nor did they. one of the blessings in life is that I was forced to get through it without any external help.
And then once I got through it, I realized I don't need any external help in the future. and with the disciplined [00:14:00] approach and being very calculated around business models and metrics I was then propelled into a different category. when you're forced to do things on your own and when you're forced, either it's gonna be your successor or failure, you learn things different.
It has a different impression than sitting in the classroom and reading about other case studies of companies that had gone through that my financial modeling skills on Excel are amazing, but I'm all self-taught I've actually, I. Quite enjoyed my own version in later life.
Comparing to the traditional means of learning it through business school. I like my style, the painting, and of creating those better. I think they're more efficient. I look at cashflow differently. I look at accounting differently. I look at unit economics cogs sg and a differently.
you have to go through all those hard learnings to weather the storm and to really make an impression, which will give you the complete holistic view of a business. Those learnings that were [00:15:00] constituted in, very uncomfortable circumstances, I think are ultimately the things that will.
Enable a business to grow profitably and mitigate risk and bullets that might get shot at any given company in any time that would knock it off track or kill it in order to build a sustainable and scalable foundation, which in turn have a high likelihood of selling.
Hanna: As someone who's gone to business school, we did a lot of talking, but there's not much action and you had a lot of action and then your reputation created itself. You sold bite for over a billion dollars. How'd you do it?
Blake: They always kinda marvel at that. Forbes Magazine pointed out that Byte was the fastest growing company ever to sell for over a billion dollars in any industry, in less than four years,
I kind of feel guilty in a sense being asked that question because while Bite start to finish was less than four years, it was a 15-year-old startup. I took all the [00:16:00] learnings and my team took all the learnings, and certainly didn't do it by myself. I had some amazing people alongside this that are magical in their lanes that all contribute, but the core economics and business model were a function of our successes and failures in the past.
Okay, we tried this before it worked. We tried those six things, it didn't work And it is often, when you're in these moments, there are a lot of distractions. There's a lot of things that can come into your view that are nice, shiny objects.
I remember having numerous conversations about. Our competitors are doing X, Y, and Z, so we should and adamantly saying, no, this is who we are. This is our business model. Don't get distracted. We're gonna figure out the metrics, we're gonna figure out our acquisition costs and get everything solidified.
And when we're able to sell the product, one product whereby our revenue exceeds our expenses. We're just gonna hit that button time and time again as many times during the [00:17:00] day as possible until our fingers bleed. We're gonna put blinders on and when that math breaks, and it'll eventually break because you dry up your lead source.
You go to the next lead source and you go to the next one As long as you have. the adequate cost per acquisition. You just keep doing that. we've always maintained a discipline to do one thing and one thing well, and we will occasionally do the next thing, but so many people want to be so many different things as opposed to just doing it well and farming what's in your view and scaling that as quickly and as profitably as possible.
Hanna: And what's your role within the team
Blake: I tend to sit in the back, and I will follow the group from the back. I think my job today is the invisible hands. I am the one that will always be watching. Very seldom interact. Half my team thinks I'm checked out half the time.
It's quite the contrary. I am serving like a hawk in the back and I know exactly based upon [00:18:00] the numbers and our metrics when something is going off. a lot of people can see trends and data. But there's a fine balance too, where you gotta be able to be good at the math and spot the trends, but also bleed in common sense salesmanship and the EQ part of that
I know why things are getting off track and fixing those problems and putting out those fires before they do damage. My job now is to constantly walk around the machine, listening to every part, anticipating where things are gonna break and when they're not working, providing direction or some guidance or pooling resources.
Of people and of other assets to fix those issues.
Hanna: You definitely have an eye for that and everyone in your network would agree with that. It's something that you've created no matter where you go. How do you think your team has changed over the years
and how do you know as a founder or as an entrepreneur when to sell or move on?
Blake: My team has obviously [00:19:00] gotten pretty seasoned. I remember my work wife, CEPI. At the start a bite, she was spending money, which I didn't think was appropriate to spend and keep in mind, we had, at that point, four companies under our belt.
And We used to bicker a lot. I'm like, why the heck are you spending money on that? I didn't use the word heck, and she snapped back at me. She goes, because I'm gonna be asked about this in three years from now when we're going through a sale process. And so you see the team maturing, ?
And I always like to think about teams, with the same analogy as sports teams. during the NCAA tournament, March Madness, you would see some of The most talented teams by far coming from the big schools, Kansas, Kentucky, duke, et cetera, Arizona, and more times than not, would lose to a more experienced, less talented team.
And it always struck me that, those seniors playing together for four years were able to communicate without speaking. They knew what each other were gonna do, and they worked really well as a collective team. My team as a whole, I kind of more equate now to you know, are we the best?
No, we're not the smartest in the room. , But we are probably the best at communicating [00:20:00] without speaking. And it's just a really seasoned team. when you see that maturing it lends itself to efficiency We all have a very specific goal every day where we wake up, where we know we're building something to scale and to be in the position of selling.
So when do you sell? What's the right time? Everybody's like, oh my God, you time that so perfectly. I think the timing thing is bs You sell when you can, not when you want to, and you have to understand why a company gets bought. Who's gonna buy your company, It's either gonna be a private equity group or strategic in the industry.
And why are they buying you? They're buying you so they can take your asset, fold it into their efforts, and grow that asset. So they make money, right? They need meat on the bone. You need to build a business and then pass the baton to a bigger institution where they can take all their resources, know-how, expertise, knowledge, and build upon that. Get an [00:21:00] exponential return for themselves.
That's your job. We always give the analogy of the four by 100, it's my favorite Olympic race. The baton the person runs like hell. First lap passes the baton, the second person runs like hell. you always remember the last two athletes? Usain Bolt, Noah those are the stars. You never remember the first two guys.
We're the first two guys. I love being the first two guys and I love taking it from the garage. An idea in my head, getting out of the garage, getting revenue, getting profitability, running the first lap, running the second lap. What makes you good at running the first two laps can often make you bad at running.
Third in the fourth lap. to be understanding and sober of that, I think is very powerful because we all see entrepreneurs work so hard create a company and they're doing well, and their family's patting them on the back. Their community's patting them on the back. they're being admired by employees and they just sit there and can't.
really grow past a point. I came to the conclusion in [00:22:00] 2009 that businesses really only end up in one of two places. They either succeed and sell and you could say going public, a form of selling or they fail. It's really binary. after having gotten down to my last $7,000 and being faced with what I believe is gonna be utter.
Failure that would have killed me. I decided one's good and the other one is not so good.
Hanna: Not going there.
Blake: We're not going there. it becomes fun to build a business whereby somebody else can take that creation and capitalize it beyond your capability.
Hanna: I think that's something people forget while they're building their business and the founder becomes too attached to that business and ultimately down with it. Can you talk a little bit more about sacrifice and grit? Because people will say, it must be nice to be Blake Johnson. What do you say to them?
Blake: Right. I normally swear, you know, and it's exacerbated now with TikTok and with Instagram and these fictitious profiles that exist online at the [00:23:00] grandeur of people's lives, specifically geared to almost brag.
And show off something that we all know is not really concrete it's a huge disadvantage I think, in most cases because people only see a version of the truth and they only want this result, that there's no story behind how you get to that result. And if that result is a real, or B, even worth it.
These great accomplishments, anything is so difficult to accomplish, but yet we culturally, have not celebrated the path and the grind and all the struggles and difficulties and. All, all the tough times that go along with these end results, people just think, oh, I deserve them because so and so on Instagram, who I follow has them and I should be getting them to,
Hanna: and they try to replicate that past and they try
Blake: to replicate it.
And there's no way to replicate these great outcomes without putting in the work, without learning, without spending many times, years, upon years cultivating a specific [00:24:00] skillset, a specific knowledge. And a specific mindset in order to show up every day, chipping away until eventually you have accumulated the product of tens of thousands of hours that you could potentially actually monetize or, capitalize on to get you these things that are just seen on paper.
Hanna: It's a, It's a great piece of advice and you've given a lot of great advice. I think one aspect that we haven't touched is philanthropy and philanthropy.
Plays a huge role in your life.
Blake: , It's always been top of mind since I , I was young, I'm obviously a big advocate of the Boy Scouts
that was a big part of my life growing up in El Centro. being mindful about your community and, paying it back. I've been blessed with, a lot of people in my life stepping in at tender times and giving me direction and a lot of people helping me at times where I really needed it As you know, you kind of got beaten up through [00:25:00] business and life and, come around the corner and started to experience a little success and a little bit more, and you now find yourself in the position to get back.
not only just from a monetary standpoint. As important, if not more important from a time standpoint. And it was just one of these things right when I got outta college, I signed up to be a big brother, still have my first little brother to this day was texting me earlier today and have maintained those relationships, but have consistently looked and scrutinized where both time and money are best placed.
for me specifically, I believe in getting the concrete, when it's still wet, I want to hit, somebody from when they're 12 years old to 20, I believe that's the most impressionable period of a person's life and done right. Your efforts in, in your time can have a much more profound impact on that age bracket, which will send in place.
Good behavior and the right examples and maybe a better trajectory for later life, which can then [00:26:00] impact the masses on a greater scale. So we tend to focus more on kid space, charities grounded in leadership and cultivating those skill sets, personalities, and behavior that can go beyond just what we're instilling at the time and perhaps impact.
People later.
Hanna: You obviously worked through the tough times, but is there anything you'd tell your younger self?
Blake: You keep going, you keep shoveling. What I would tell my younger self is, just do the hard work. Show up every day. Keep shoveling, right? You'll hear, me say that a lot.
Just keep shoveling. And today with, arguably, you know, a lot more assets more knowledge, a higher skillset. It's still so difficult. I have two businesses right now that I wake up shaking my head. I'm like, why am I doing this again? Recognizing that, I just shake my head sometimes.
I'm like, it can't be this hard, but it is. It is always that hard, and you need to accept that, and you need to get [00:27:00] into the mind frame of, I'm going to keep going every day despite what challenges I face and what obstacles are thrown at my head. You just gotta keep going.
Hanna: You could keep going like you were doing, or you could go sit on a beach.
Live in retirement, what keeps you going?
Blake: I think everybody's built different and what keeps me going is a combination of things. I've always been pretty sober about the stage of life that I'm at, and recognizing that, in a number of years, I will probably not have, not only the legs to run at the pace I am, the game also changes considerably.
New technologies come about new skill sets. a lot of this is a younger man's game in so many respects. I believe, like for men specifically in these entrepreneurial endeavors, you're kinda worthless before 33 and,, you know, should be put out to pasture your, by the time you're hitting 50, you're getting
close
most of the 15 or so years.
You know, you've gotta really understand this is the time to make [00:28:00] hay while the sun shines. I have that in the back of my head. I also have a chip on my shoulder. It's a function of childhood environment, insecurity, passion, desire, wanting to prove to the world that a worthy enough. And , there's a combination of all these things that are.
Not so romantic. At the end of the day, they're oftentimes a little cringe-worthy. when I think about my own insecurities and my ability to, keep pushing and, where that came from it's not romantic , it was cultivated and harsher environments and, , there's all these little things and also there are some really great things that, why do you keep pushing?
I. Come on one side of, the equation and you know, why do you give away a lot? A really great place of just being appreciative of the help that I got and wanting to do those things for others. And there's also times where I really wanted help and needed help and nobody was there.
And so part of the reason I give back is to fulfill for somebody else's life what I so desperately wanted. At key moments where I fell [00:29:00] short and didn't get that. it's a nice blend and combination of the two and recognizing I'm not gonna be able to play this game forever and I want to see how far we can take it.
Hanna: Exactly. And you've talked a little bit about entrepreneurship from the beginning and where you are today. Can you talk a little bit about the trends that are changing the industry?
Blake: I truly believe, and people are thinking I'm somewhat crazy, but I think I'm very right.
I believe that we are in the last era of the true entrepreneur, the advent and the speed of which AI is evolving and consolidating common. Tasks and common jobs is mind boggling for me. I wrote an article in 2018 about doing today what computers can't replace or software can't replace in a few years
Hanna: way ahead.
Blake: I was way ahead of that game and way ahead of that conversation, and [00:30:00] I've been very closely watching it for the last. few years just blown away by the speed which things are evolving. I feel like 80% of the population you know, you hear that frog in the boiling pot of water scenario their skill sets or their lack of skill sets will be completely obsolescent.
And what happens when everybody is, is. Commoditized. Replaced and replaced. I don't think that, people are going to have the necessary advantages or training, which led to the creation of new businesses you need some kind of, imbalance. To create a business,
you need to learn certain traits. You need to learn a skillset. You need to learn how to have an advantage in the marketplace. You need to spot an advantage due to an imbalance in your industry or in a position or whatever it may be. I can quickly surmise that the vast majority of [00:31:00] entrepreneurs that I know, and I know their stories very well, and the steps that they needed to take at the beginning.
In order to then later be in a position to start a business or go off on their own are going to be gone. Those steps are gone. Completely gone. And so when you're, void of all the necessary steps at the beginning, it's like rungs on a ladder. you need to take the first step, the second step, the third step, the fourth step.
The first six steps and the first six rungs are now gone. And when they're gone, it's impossible. It's too difficult to jump to the sixth step. It takes capital. It takes institutional know-how from a ground level it takes, unique, understanding of business that is now common to everybody.
But Mark, my words, we're in the last era.
Hanna: Well, it's a warning signal for any common job, but the people who are going to create that margin to make it an even bigger success. Don't have that margin anymore. Correct. And the jobs that exist today are slowly diminishing. And in the future, [00:32:00] that's gonna be the norm.
Blake: That will be the norm. business owners and people who own companies today are heavily incented to.
To replace human beings. Two of my friends are well-known actresses and I constantly pepper them with articles about how AI is quickly consolidating and replacing people. I fear for them, equally with other jobs, , like.
No, there's a human interaction that's needed. Humans wanna feel connected to other humans. I don't believe that to be true. You will see business owners. Quickly gravitate towards replacing a human being for all the obvious reasons, from a cost standpoint, from a headache standpoint, from a liability standpoint, as quickly as they can to make bigger profits in their business.
A business owner, a studio head, any big corporation, any small business will always say, I need to make more money, and if I can replace. A person with a piece of software for 10% of the cost, and it does the job 20 [00:33:00] times better, that business owner or the head of that company will selfishly do the thing that replaces the human being.
And we're seeing this consolidation happen at such a rapid pace. I don't even think half the people. 90% of the people are paying attention and the vast majority don't understand what's really happening around them.
Hanna: It's hard to differentiate between what's real and what's AI , but it's gonna be impossible in the future.
it's only getting better, and I think the rate at which it gets better is exponential beyond anyone's comprehension.
Blake: I actually sent a text to a friend of mine yesterday giving an example of AI and how well this is, and I said, this is the model T. First of all, it was mind blowingly impressive, right?
in this one circumstance, AI was flawless, but I said. mark my words as crazy impressive as this is.
Hanna: This is the beginning
Blake: As crazy, As impressive as the Model T was in the early 19 [00:34:00] hundreds, right? It changed travel, and it changed people's perception and everything.
It was still a Model T. And look where we're at today. This is the Model T. What we're seeing right now in this first wave of ai. From robots to pieces of software that are researching cures for diseases and financial models and everything else, we're the Model T version and it's going to quickly outpace us as a race to whereby, it'll be doing laps around us to no fault of our own.
Hanna: Assuming you don't retire, what's next for you that you can share with everybody else? I'm definitely not retiring. I thought I was, but I'm not. And I'm more thoughtful now about doing things that will not be replaced by ai. Some of the companies that I recently worked on have publicly stated this dozens of times I wouldn't have been able to start this company 10 years from now.
Blake: There is no competitive advantage that wouldn't be commoditized by something greater. So I've gravitated to [00:35:00] challenge myself to say, okay, what's gonna be around in 10 years What's gonna be around in 15, 20 years from now? I do believe it is fundamentally rooted in companies that will provide services and goods to human beings.
You look at our base needs, we all need clothing, we all need food. We all need medical care. So of those categories, where are you gonna, stake your flag
I've been spending a lot of time modeling out clothing and goods that, we can deliver on a mass scale to the people in societies. What about in health? I currently have a health company that I hope to sell by the end of 2026, I actually think health is questionable because. When you are diagnosing people and providing solutions to their ailments, whether it be heart disease, obesity, the common cold or flu, or arthritis, you'll find that.
What I believe the bigger players in the space own all the landscape That will give them an unfair competitive advantage to [00:36:00] providing these solutions very quickly because the know-how and the capital needed to create products and solutions for human beings in the medical industry. Unlike constructing a t-shirt or a pair of shorts, these are big initiatives with really high dollar requirements.
Only a few can really participate in, and I think health will largely be consolidated down to a few providers , at the end of the day, leaving out new entrants into the market.
Hanna: Well, it seems like people are taking control of their health even more now, and they want the data and they wanna make decisions that help them live longer.
But beyond what you're doing, it's always interesting to end with a few quickfire questions.
Blake: Okay.
Hanna: Early mornings or late nights.
Blake: Early mornings,
Hanna: What's the worst advice you've ever gotten?
Blake: Pass.
Hanna: What's your biggest deal breaker in a business partner? Dishonesty. What's the most underrated trait in an entrepreneur? Nimbleness. What's the best trait?
Blake: Persistence.
Hanna: What keeps you grounded?
Blake: A [00:37:00] fear of losing everything.
Hanna: What's something you always have in your bag?
Blake: Cash.
Hanna: If you lost it all tomorrow, what's the first thing you would do?
Blake: Go to China.
Hanna: What? What would you do this wasn't your job?
Blake: Our dealer would be
Hanna: right up my alley. Well, that goes into what are you passionate about?
Blake: My favorite piece of art right now is a Richard Prince Cowboy.
Hanna: Who is your mentor or somebody you look up
Blake: My dad, who's an old school kind of guy, cattleman obviously had a big impact. I've had some teachers along the way that I'm still in touch with.
I've come across interesting people that in small time periods have had a pretty profound impact on me. A guy, Richie being one of 'em. I have a borderline man crush on the guy from his ability to understand human nature at its core and in brief moments, he's said a few things that have changed the trajectory in my life and how I view human beings.
Hanna: What are some of your hobbies?
Blake: I love fly fishing. I love to bird hunt. I like getting on the road and traveling. meeting [00:38:00] new people that are interesting in learning something new.
Hanna: And what does the hustle mean to you?
Blake: The hustle means to me the ability to focus in directionally on a destination.
Being nimble in your path. To get there because whatever you think the path is gonna be, it's gonna be completely different. The persistence to keep going when it gets uncomfortable and it will get uncomfortable. The fortitude to make mistakes, not get permanently knocked down from those mistakes. Get up, adjust, and keep on moving.
Hanna: That's a great piece of advice. Thank you for coming to the hustle. Bye Hannah.