What if the secret to building wealth, scaling a business, or leading a successful team isn’t just about strategy or market timing — but about behavior? Hugh Massie, Executive Chairman and Founder of DNA Behavior, has spent decades proving that leadership traits, decision-making styles, and human behavior are the true drivers of financial success.
A Titan 100 CEO, published author, and global advisor, Hugh has transformed his own career from accountant to entrepreneur to behavioral AI pioneer. His mission: to impact over a billion lives by 2030 through his platform that personalizes leadership, money, and decision-making.
Here’s what you need to know about his journey, philosophy, and the insights he shared.
From Accountant to Behavioral Pioneer
Hugh began his career as an accountant in Sydney, Australia, but quickly realized he wanted something more entrepreneurial. After moving to Atlanta, he built a wealth management firm with the goal of providing clients with hyper-personalized experiences — something private banks lacked.
The turning point came when he discovered that financial success was less about financial literacy and more about human behavior under pressure. He realized that people revert to their hardwired behaviors in times of stress, and understanding those instincts is the key to building lasting financial and life plans.
Building DNA Behavior
This discovery led Hugh to create DNA Behavior, a behavioral science and technology platform that measures over 4,000 traits — from leadership and communication style to financial decision-making and philanthropic tendencies.
At its core, the platform answers a simple but profound question: How do people behave when money, risk, and relationships are involved?
Today, DNA Behavior uses both psychometrics and AI-driven digital scans to analyze individuals and teams. By tapping into the “digital exhaust” of leaders (interviews, statements, career histories), they can accurately predict behavioral patterns without requiring lengthy assessments.
Six Traits of High-Performing Leaders
In a groundbreaking study of Fortune 500 leadership teams, Hugh’s team identified six behavioral traits that consistently drive profitability:
Results Drive – The push for profitability and execution.
Relationship Engagement – The ability to build culture and strong people connections.
Financial Goal Drive – Building pipelines, innovating, and taking smart risks.
Innovation and Risk-Taking – Balancing creativity with calculated bets.
Fiscal Control – Managing operating costs wisely.
Financial Prudence – Making strategic decisions aligned with mission and values.
Companies whose leadership teams scored high in these areas consistently outperformed competitors.
Entrepreneurs vs. Corporate Leaders
Hugh’s research also distinguishes between startup founders and corporate executives:
Entrepreneurs thrive on resilience — the ability to push through adversity and uncertainty.
Corporate leaders excel with governance and operational discipline but may lack the same raw resilience of founders.
This insight is crucial for investors and VCs: the traits that take a company from zero to $10M often differ from those needed to scale it beyond.
The Money Energy Framework
One of Hugh’s most powerful contributions is his concept of Money Energy. He explains that money isn’t just currency — it’s:
A belief system shaped by identity and experiences.
An energy that flows with our thoughts, decisions, and relationships.
A mindset that can either attract opportunities or create blockages.
He stresses the importance of removing money anxiety, aligning purpose with identity, and focusing on human impact. In his words, when you focus on purpose and impact, “the right opportunities and wealth creation follow.”
Purpose, Identity, and Quantum Leaps
Hugh believes success comes from aligning three things:
Purpose – Why you do what you do.
Identity – How you show up in the world.
Impact – The value you bring to others.
When leaders get these right, they unlock quantum leaps — growth that’s not linear (2x) but exponential (10x).
Personal Mission: Boys Without Fathers
Hugh’s work isn’t limited to business. Having lost his father at the age of one, he has a deep passion for helping boys without fathers. He understands firsthand the challenges of identity, resilience, and boundaries that come from growing up without a father figure. Through DNA Behavior and nonprofit partnerships, he mentors and supports initiatives that give these young people hope and direction.
Key Takeaways for Leaders and Investors
Behavior makes money: Leadership traits and decision-making styles are directly tied to business performance.
Resilience is the ultimate entrepreneurial trait: Founders who thrive are those who can withstand pressure and setbacks.
AI is transforming behavior analysis: Technology now allows companies to assess leaders and teams at scale, creating hyper-personalized strategies.
Money is energy: Wealth creation is as much about mindset and beliefs as it is about financial literacy.
Purpose and identity drive impact: Aligning who you are with what you do unlocks exponential growth.
Hugh Massie’s journey is a reminder that leadership, investing, and entrepreneurship aren’t just about numbers — they’re about people. By understanding behavior, we can make better decisions, build stronger teams, and create lasting wealth.
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Chapters:
00:01 Introduction to Hugh Massie
00:47 Hugh’s Origin Story
02:55 Entering Wealth Management
05:14 Discovering Behavior as the Key Factor
07:16 Building DNA Behavior
08:32 Behavior Makes Money
10:28 Six Traits of High-Performing Leaders
14:30 Measuring Leadership Behavior
17:17 What is DNA Behavior
19:49 Success Patterns in Public and Private Companies
24:32 Entrepreneurial Resilience vs. Corporate Leadership
28:38 Using Behavior in Venture Capital
33:12 Challenges in Building DNA Behavior
35:20 AI as a Game Changer
39:19 The Money Energy Framework
46:22 Purpose, Identity, and Human Impact
53:27 Boys Without Fathers
56:27 Transition to Deeper Reflections
Transcript
Brian Bell (00:00:46): Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today, we’re thrilled to have Hugh Massey on the program. He’s the executive chairman and founder of DNA Behavior, a pioneer in behavioral AI, and one of the most original voices in the intersection of finance, identity, and decision-making. As a Titan 100 CEO, published author, and global advisor to execs and investors alike, Hugh brings decades of experience across behavioral science, wealth management, and technology. He’s on a mission to inform over a billion people annually by 2030 through his AI-driven platform that personalizes leadership, money, energy. We’ll talk about that in life decision-making. Thanks for coming on, Hugh.
Hugh Massie (00:01:20): Yeah, great to be with you, Brian. Thank you.
Brian Bell (00:01:22): So I’d love to kind of get the origin story. You know, how did it all begin? And like, how did you give us the whole like backstory?
Hugh Massie (00:01:29): So maybe if we start with the origin story, just to clear one matter up is my accent. I’m Australian from Sydney, Australia. That’s where I originally come from and where I started my working career, entrepreneurial career. Career there and I started as but I now it’s just a before I go into what I do I live in Atlanta Georgia right now so you know so part of my my journey has been switching switching countries and I suppose I would call myself a reformed accountant. So when I started my career, I was very much the numbers guy in auditing and then I became a tax specialist. And I think it’s there that in a way unbeknown to me subconsciously, I started to look at people differently, particularly the clients, and sought to give them a hyper-personalized experience as best as I could, not as scientifically as I do today. But I started to realize that if I was going to be successful, I needed to manage how tax advice was provided to an enterprise client you know there would be somebody who who was asking the question that might might be the strategic thinker but light on detail just wanted to get a diagram and what’s the answer versus a whole army of researchers and people validating what we would say out the back and they needed to see the advice in a different format and then somebody else is paying the bill and you know you don’t you don’t pay fifty thousand dollars for a one-page letter even though it might be you know you you need to provide 50 pages, right? So to learn navigating all of that game. But when I decided that I’d had enough of a corporate career at age 30 and I wanted, you know, I decided to, you know, on an entrepreneurial life. And in a way, I’d been already doing some of that on the side since I graduated from college or what we call Australia University. You know, I stepped into wealth management and set up a family office, financial services business, got all the licensing that, you know, in sort of similar terms you’d have here in America. And the goal was to provide a hyper-personalized experience that I didn’t think that private banks provided. I think it was too much, and this is 25 years ago, or more than that, was 30 years ago now, was too much one size fits all. And I thought, you know, human beings are unique. They need to be communicated with in their own way. Their life journeys are different. How do you deal with all that? And I didn’t have the solution, but I knew I was going to do that.
Hugh Massie (00:05:00): And then about four years into the business, somebody asked me, now, you don’t seem very happy. What’s your real passion and what’s your purpose? And it just flew out of my mouth. I want to help people all over the world become financially self-empowered. And I latched on to that, Brian, and that never left me. And then my next six months was figuring out, well, what does all this mean? And I knew it wasn’t financial literacy in the traditional way. It’s taught in schools, you know, what’s a stock and a bond and how does debt work and save some money today and it’ll be worth more tomorrow, that sort of stuff, which is important. It’s not to cry on that. But it came back to human behaviour and I started to look at all my business experiences and in tax, health management, and that under pressure, people behave differently. And I thought, if I’m going to help someone build a long-term life plan, financial plan, investment plan, I need to know how they’re going to behave under pressure. And as it was explained to me later on by a psychologist that I hired, this is people’s natural hardwired behavior at work. So we all got sort of two dimensions to our personality. There’s a hardwired component. And there’s a learned situational component. But under pressure, you revert back to instinctively that hardwired behavior. That’s what I wanted to know. So if I was going to help people become financially self-empowered, I needed to, one, know how they behaved under stress. I needed to know their talents because I’d soon figured out not everybody makes a lot of money from investing. You’re in the sort of the business of doing that. And you built a team, but that’s not everybody. The average person investing money is really doing it on an accumulation basis for their retirement. They’re not specialists in that. They’re making their money from use of their talents in something else. It might be chemical engineering or being a software programmer or an AI person nowadays, you know, whatever it is. But I needed to understand all of that for the person and how they relate to others, their marriage. It’s probably the biggest loss of wealth straight out there if you get a divorce. And we know money causes those issues. So that’s what got me on the path. And then I realized that I wanted to have a system. And then I went back to my boyhood dreams of I want a global business. Well, having a wealth management business in Sydney probably isn’t going to really be global. Yes, you might have a client or two that lives globally, but it’s not going to be that. And so, you know, I went on the journey of building what is today my own behavioural sciences technology platform that measured the hardwired behaviour and particularly how people deal with money, you know, what we call behavioural economics. Well, in 2001, behavioural economics was hardly a conversation. It’s become that since some people won Nobel Prizes and more consultants and whatnot. There’s university courses, you know, addressing the area. But that’s the journey I’ve been on. And in the end, when I built the platform, I had to make a decision. Do I stay in America where we built it and validated it? Or do I stay in Sydney and do this in a wealth management business? Or do I make it its own business? And I realized if I was being true to my passion and purpose, you know, the behavior had to be the central thing for me. So I got rid of the wealth management business. I don’t advise clients on portfolios or not very much because I’m not licensed to. So I really only do it, you know, within my family unit. And, you know, if people ask me questions, I’ll tell them about leaders of businesses. They can make up their own mind what to do. But that’s sort of where I’ve, that’s really where we got to. And then, you know, 20 years later, I’m talking to you. So yeah. And it’s been a journey of learning more about behavior. And I think how do you hyper-personalize experiences at scale that requires technology? And AI is a big player in that.
Brian Bell (00:08:00): Amazing. So you’ve said behavior makes money. Where did this belief start and how has it shaped your journey?
Hugh Massie (00:08:06): I always knew it did. If you say and you believe that people are the most important factor in the success of a business, starting off with its leadership, that success for a business is all about its leadership. And I think even you guys in venture capital and private equity would say, well, you know, if you’ve got the right leadership team, a lot of the right things are going to happen. And that’s what you’re backing. So that’s the, if you want to call it, that’s the intuitive belief. Now, in terms of measurement, last year, we did a project whereby we used our new digital scan products. So people had always had to, for us to get psychometric measurement on a person, understand their financial behavior, leadership behavior, talents, we’d always had to have people complete an assessment taking 10 minutes. Now we can do that digitally by digital AI power, digital scan answers the assessment. So we’re able to deploy that over all of the Fortune 500 company leadership teams. And we identified that those companies that outperformed their competitors and the Fortune 500 in general had six types of behavior. So as those behavioral talents got stronger, financial behavior talents got stronger, within the leadership team, profits were relatively higher. And so that’s why I would say that scientifically or more empirically, we’ve proven that behavior does make money. If you’ve got the right leadership team, the right mix of behaviors, that team will out, that team, that business will outperform.
Brian Bell (00:09:33): Amazing. So what were those six factors that you uncovered in your research?
Hugh Massie (00:09:37): Yeah, so one is the results drive. So the drive for profitability, that’s probably reasonably predictable, but out of the way we measure that. So that is one, the relationship engagement. So there’s got to be enough strength on building a people culture in the business. Then the big one is then what we call financial goal drive. So that’s where the biggest impact on profits is. So the team’s got to be able to, in a sense, sell a pipeline of products. But comes with that, the ability to innovate and take risk on innovation. So that’s the innovation. It’s not just that the team might be creative. They’ve got to be able to back the taking of the risks. And then the next one is the fiscal control. So the ability to manage costs, the operating costs of a business. And within that, be able to do the innovation at a reasonable cost. So what I find is that there are businesses out there, for example, that are good on financial goal drive, but then they throw up a lot of money against the wall on unnecessary operating costs. And you guys probably in the VC world are all over that in watching every penny out the door. But, you know, it’s a matter of making sure the money’s applied to the right places. And then the other one is financial prudence. So in other words, the overall strategic decisions made in the company in alignment with the mission of the company. And that’ll include spending of the money and the overall product design strategy. So you bring all those together. And then there’s also the authority bias of the CEO. So the CEO is critical to the company, I believe, because he or she will appoint their leaders, and the leaders then are driving who’s in the team below them. But the culture is set from the top. And so if the CEO’s authority bias is too strong, it can become a one-man show. Look at the type company. They’re the leader there. She was a very strong leader, but by our measurements, not a very strong team around her as a personality. So you want the person, the CEO, to be strong with a number of these behaviors. They’re not going to have all of them, but not so wildly dominant that they shut out everybody else. Looking at that rings home very true. When we looked at the companies where the founder, the Fortune 500 companies where the founder is still there, like take Mark Benioff at Salesforce, very successful company, but he is not so overly dominant behaviorally across his other team members, for example. Elon Musk got a strong pack of people. But you know that’s something to we look at but so if that gives you the idea now that the same measurements can be done with private companies too so long as we know where the people work and you can identify them we can do the measurement.
Brian Bell (00:12:33): And how do you do the measurement here? You’re outside looking in. How are you measuring these behaviors? It seems like if I go back to the six and kind of take a quick inventory, it feels like a lot of the stuff that CFOs kind of care about. And so kind of how do you measure that from the outside?
Hugh Massie (00:12:49): Yeah, so, well, hopefully the CEO cares a lot about it too. So one thing is foundationally, we built our own psychometric system over since 2001. We’ve been measuring these behaviors anyway through the active completion of our profiles, you know, with a high degree of accuracy and reliability. So the fact that we’ve had our own system has helped a lot.
Brian Bell (00:13:13): So the executives in this case have to be willing to take your assessments.
Hugh Massie (00:13:17): No, they didn’t complete the assessment. But what we’ve been able to do is because we’ve had several million people complete assessments on our platform, we’ve been able to do that, if you want to call it the backtesting and the validation by having those usages. So that when we do deploy the digital scan product, which is a new one, then we know it’s operating accurately. So then we haven’t had, that’s the whole point. We haven’t had to have these executives of the Fortune 500 complete the assessment because we’ve already got a foundationally very accurate system. It wasn’t like we just built an AI tool overnight and said, hey, presto, we’re measuring human behavior. We’ve built it out of our own psychometrics in a way. Think about it. We’ve reverse engineered our own system and we’re able to access public data sources on these people that tell us enough information to predict reliably how they would answer the assessment.
Brian Bell (00:14:11): Interesting. So it’s all the digital exhaust of their earnings calls and interviews and…
Hugh Massie (00:14:16): Statements made, reports, their YouTube videos, there is something. And you know…
Brian Bell (00:14:23): Going on some random Ignite podcast or something. Yeah.
Hugh Massie (00:14:26): There is stuff out there on all of us that goes back a long way. And yes, for some of these leaders are in the public sphere. So there’s might be more on them than, than a housewife, but even then on a housewife that once upon a time worked as a school teacher or in a local government or whatever, there’s still stuff. And once we know that and we can track their career history and then you add in other factors, we know from machine learning essentially how they’re going to answer the questionnaire.
Brian Bell (00:14:54): So let’s talk about building DNA behavior because I think that’s kind of what you’re describing here. What is, for the audience, what is DNA behavior? And I think it’s the six-factor model you’re talking about, but maybe you can give us kind of the intro and background of that.
Hugh Massie (00:15:06): DNA behavior is probably more than the six-factor model. That’s what we do distilled down to prove that leadership makes money, if you want to call it that. So the DNA behaviour is, the system is, it’s a behavioural science technology platform. So we developed our own psychometric system, which is a science-based system measurement system to measure human behavior and we measure 4,000 different traits of behavior in terms of talents, communication style, how people deal with money, what career roles they want to be in, how they give money and in philanthropic situations, you name it, that has all been measured out and that can be found, you know, that if someone completes the exercise or now online, the assessment questionnaire, we do it digitally for them. Through the system, we can measure those 4,000 behavioral insights. The question then becomes is, Brian, how they’re applied. Not everyone needs to know all of that. If you said to me, look, I want to know, I’m looking at investing in X business, we would show you the insights that you need to know about that leader. How are they going to shape up as an entrepreneurial leader? How are they going to manage their people? And then we’d look at their team. But it wouldn’t be every insight that we have in the system.
Hugh Massie (00:15:23): But on the other side, we’re working with leaders in the philanthropic space. Well, how do people give money? Well, that might be a dimension that we bring to the table. A lot of our clients are financial planners. And how do they understand their clients’ behavior? So the investors’ behavior. You might want to know that too, right? Where, you know, in your area of, okay, certain investors will want to be aligned with certain types of companies, whether it’s from a value set, the level of risk that they’re going to take, et cetera, et cetera. How do you communicate and relate to that? Well.
Brian Bell (00:16:54): I’m curious, as I kind of consider this, it sounded like from your research, when you’re able to identify the executives of a given Fortune 500 company, if they score high across these areas, it sounds like they’re more likely to have better financial performance for their company and outperform, call it the S&P 500. Is it a 10 out of 10? Or what’s the rating scale for each factor?
Hugh Massie (00:17:21): So the rating scale is population-weighted based. So we’re really doing it relative to everybody else. And it’s not population.
Brian Bell (00:17:30): Like you’re above average in this area or like you’re in the top 10 percentile, the top decile in this kind of category.
Hugh Massie (00:17:37): Yep.
Brian Bell (00:17:38): And then how does that correlate to future success in public companies? And have you done a similar study for private companies, like kind of the companies that we back, like early-stage startups? Because that would be really fascinating.
Hugh Massie (00:17:49): We’ve done it for both. So with the public companies, we’ve looked at how those companies have performed over long cycles, and you can see the outperformance. So that’s something that we’ve done with the public companies, with the private companies. We’ve been asked by other PE firms and VC firms to do assessments of the team and provide insights. I think sometimes they’ve been, you know, the results have been startling in that way because it’s not, you know, people can come and charm you into the money, right? It’s like someone can charm you into a role that they’re going to be great at sales and then you find that they’re a flop. You know, and that’s not every case, but there are traits that we know. And, you know, seven or eight years ago, we did a study of 500 entrepreneurs who built a business to at least a million dollars. And then some of them passed 10 million from scratch. And the five entrepreneurial traits got stronger and stronger.
Brian Bell (00:18:50): Interesting. So it’s not necessarily a static across these categories. You can develop these skills, these behavioral skills.
Hugh Massie (00:18:56): We would say it’s natural instinctive behavior. So to a large degree, you’re born with these behaviors. But what I would say is that with awareness, you can develop some of them. If you are a risk, let’s say that you’re naturally a cautious person. You can learn to take risks, but it’s going to take a while to get comfortable. It’s not going to be your go-to place or to be innovative. Some people are just going to be naturally, they’re an idea a minute and others are far more anchored. Doesn’t mean the anchored person can’t be creative or think creatively or back creativity when the time comes, but it’s hard to work for them. And I think from a leadership perspective, let’s say that you do tick the box on a lot of these leadership traits. You are probably going to generally be a fairly strong-minded leader. There’s no doubt about that. Your leadership challenge is going to be softening it up a bit to handle people. And that’s going to come from modifying your own behavior and bringing in the right people to build the culture. And I’m one of those that if you said I’m the results driven type person, and I’ve had to learn all through my leadership journey from being in the accounting world to an entrepreneur of having to manage people and keep reasonably good energy, show some compassion at the right times, not make every decision about the bottom line. At some point, you’ve got to make it about the people, whether it’s your employees or clients. They’re things that I’ve had to learn. They wouldn’t have been an instinctive thing for me at the start. So some of it can be learned, but you’ve got wiring in there under pressure. I go back to taking a risk when I’m in a corner, right? Others will not take a risk when they’re in a corner. That’s the difference.
Brian Bell (00:20:38): And so since you’ve run this analysis, I’d love to hear any insights or surprises from, you know, the study of entrepreneurs going zero to one and zero to 10, let’s call it zero to a million of ARR, zero to 10 million of ARR versus kind of the executives at a Fortune 500 company. Are the predictors of success the same for those two groups? Are there any surprises or differences?
Hugh Massie (00:21:02): I think that you would say that for the entrepreneurial founded company, the strongest trait is going to be resilience. And that is really got to be number one. Now, when someone’s inherited a business from their father or through the family, that will not be as strong. They might be quite a good leader, quite engaging, or they might have a creative element, but they won’t be as resilient because they haven’t had to go through the battle. Now, at the point that they do, that becomes interesting. In the corporate sense, a hired gun leader of one of these larger companies may not be as strong on the resilience levels either. They’re going to come in with more of a governance approach. Certainly, like you alluded to, CFOs of the larger company, the CFO, CEO go fairly hand in hand. A lot of the high guns are used to managing a business that’s got quite a lot of employees. The entrepreneurial founders are not, and their big challenge is learning to hand over some power and decision-making to others to let them do it. And that’s why I was alluding to with the Fortune 500 ones have got there by the leader not being so overly dominant and crushing the team at every corner. And that’s the line that you’ve got to tread. And I think that you’d see this in the VC and certainly in the PE world. We’re a leader that might’ve been very inspiring with a startup and got it going, build a market, got a following. He or she may not be the one that’s gonna be great at taking a company past a certain level.
Brian Bell (00:22:34): Right. In your model, is there a predictor? Say, okay, entrepreneur has high resilience. So that’s a good predictor for, hey, you can take something zero to 10 or zero to one. What is one of the factors where you’re like, maybe you’re not the right person to go from 10 to 100?
Hugh Massie (00:22:49): Yeah. I think that that’s when they, when, when the leader gets very spontaneous and there’s not much structure there and you’ll start to see that they’re not, and they’re not respecting those boundaries and they’re perhaps bringing too many new products to the table. They’re getting into other ventures before they’ve completed one, you know, that sort of stuff going on. That’s, that becomes problematic. I’m very, I’m very big on the focus part. I think that that, is important and that I think that that a lot of the a lot of them are good at selling ice to an Eskimo early on but there’s a point where they can’t take that further right and you know you can’t be selling vaporware for too long you’ve got to be more structured requires a different discipline but but but then a very structured person wouldn’t be able to do what they’ve done to get it to get the thing started and you know it’s a matter of everybody realizing who they are and what they’re capable of doing I think and their purpose some can reinvent themselves and I think you know back to your point of nature versus nature you can learn if you’re spontaneous to do some of these things but are you open to the coaching right the structure that you guys might bring to the table you know that that all becomes important the relationship if there’s funders like you guys with the founders what’s that relationship like that’s very important as I think as you know if that gets fractured it doesn’t work.
Brian Bell (00:24:11): So how much data, let’s imagine we want to roll this out for Team Ignite and we want to make it part of our evaluation criteria. And we have a model that obviously looks at the CEO and the team, the founders and the team. What kind of data would you need from us to give us an automatic score? Call it the, you know, unicorn founder probability score or like whatever the, yeah. Like, would it just be the transcript from the call or, yeah.
Hugh Massie (00:24:34): All we need is their full name, Brian Bell at Team Ignite, right? Give me the LinkedIn account or something like that. I don’t even need that, but you can give me that and we’ll do the rest.
Brian Bell (00:24:48): And you could just look at kind of the digital exhaust on LinkedIn. Find interviews, podcasts, statements, comments.
Hugh Massie (00:24:55): Yeah, where you’ve worked before. Like where you’ve worked before. So like if I took Tim Cook at Apple as an example of public figure, you know, he’s the CEO, but the CEO of Salesforce or Meta, you know, Zuckerberg or others have got a different working history, right? And maybe Zuckerberg’s not so good because in that sense, you know, he went from university to college to CEO, but everyone’s got, as you say, got an exhaust, but they’ve got a career exhaust that can be looked at because each CEO is different. And that’s where Tim Cook’s a different CEO than Steve Jobs. And because he had a more operational career earlier on, well, they’re all relevant traits. And then there’s other things about him that make him different. And that’s what we do. And that gives you the first leg in to start looking at these people. Then you’re going to have your other questions you want to know about them, of course. This is not the only thing you look at.
Brian Bell (00:25:49): It does give you another lens. Like as an investor, a lot of times we’re trying to size up the founders, right? And so we’re kind of asking ourselves those internal questions, the same kind of thing. Is this person likely to attract A-level talent? Is this person going to break down any brick wall, like the resiliency? Like what kind of challenges has this person overcome in the past? It’s a lot of these things that we have heuristics for as investors because we meet so many founders and see so many succeed and fail. And so we’re trying to develop that mental model.
Hugh Massie (00:26:18): Yeah, and I think you want to use what we have with that mental model that you’re building up to make the decisions as grounded as you can. And they’re not just become Brian’s whim. Okay, I think that guy’s great. We’ll invest in him because he sounded good when he was doing the roadshow. And I think part of it is that, and I don’t know how you make the decisions at Team Ignite, but I imagine there’s some kind of investment committee somewhere. There’s a consensus. If you put everybody around the table, they’re all different. And how are they viewing people? And I think you want to look at that pattern as well. Is there always somebody on your team who’s backing a certain type of person and you find that’s not working or they’re the dominant voice in your team you know there’s patterns or they someone will always back the innovator when when that’s not what’s required so this might be patterns there within the selection team too that needs to be understood so that you you can moderate that when you’re when you’re making the decision whether you’re going to write the check or not. Because it’s like in recruiting people, you can have a recruiting panel and one person’s looking at, you know, the color shoes a person’s got or whether they pick their nose. Another person’s looking at, you know, did they talk about people, you know, or were they warm and friendly, whatever it is. Everyone’s got a bias. And in a way, you want to know what everyone’s biases are, not to shut them off, but to use them the right way. And I think that’s what you also want to know about these leaders or people, teams you’re investing in. And how does the teams balance out because each one’s going to be a bit different.
Brian Bell (00:27:47): What was the hardest challenge in building out a platform like this rooted in human psychology?
Hugh Massie (00:27:51): Yeah, I think that the, it’s an interesting question. I think that the first part was identifying the right psychometric model for measuring the behavior because you can ask questions in a way in which the typical one to five questions rate this situation one to five. That gives you situational answers. As opposed to the model we use is not situational based. People are choosing most and least like between three words. So my idea was back to natural behavior will eliminate situational bias. I want to know that in person instinctively. To build that scientifically is quite hard and that took quite a long time to do. I think the next part’s been making that while we’ve been very, I always wanted to have precision measurement, Brian, not, well, this is good enough. That probably meant that we had an overload of information. So, you know, I’ve mentioned 4,000 insights. Well, that’s a lot for one person to absorb. So we’ve broken that down so that you only get the snippets that you need in your context of your situation. So I think the difficulty is then got to how do we make the information presentable? And then the third part, really the big challenge has been for mass scalability, it’s the friction of people having to complete the assessment. So we built lots of tools along the way in which it could be done in a very user-friendly way, but it still never got around 10 minutes. We took 30 minutes originally, the same questions is 10 minutes today. So technology has helped us, but you never get around that 10 minutes. So the only way was AI.
Brian Bell (00:29:29): That was going to be my next question. How has AI changed or accelerated your goals and vision at DNA behavior?
Hugh Massie (00:29:37): Have you said at the end of 2000 and I said to my team, if we wanted to have a billion people in our system that we’ve got measured behavioral insights on, what do we do? Well, simple answer comes back. We have to use AI. I knew that was the answer and we had worked on a model of that some years before and it wasn’t much for me and and our product guy to dust off what we had done and then technology advances enabled us to operationalize that fairly quickly and get it tested and I think the fact that we had done so much work in as I alluded to before in the underlying psychometrics we’re able to get a robust answer or you know product out there, out the gate. We know how to use Microsoft properly for all of that too. And so that’s the game changer because now we don’t have to have people complete the profile.
Hugh Massie (00:30:25): So if you take a client case study, we’ve got a firm here in Atlanta that we work with that probably done 3,000, 4,000 profiles over the last eight years, including in every M&A deal they’ve done, viewing teams. They’ve got the team that they’re buying to complete the profiles. They wouldn’t do the deal without it being done, but three or 4,000, but now they’ve got an ecosystem of 25,000 families, average four person per family. We can digitally scan all of those clients out the gate, which what we’re working on at the moment with them and all their prospects. So in fact, we can go from three or 4,000 profiles to 250,000 profiles overnight. And that’s a game changer because that then enables them to customize their marketing, who works with who, upselling, selling, engaging clients quicker, you name it, all that goes on. That’s the big shift. And we can do that with other organizations. It doesn’t matter how many people they’ve got. We’re working with a bank that’s got several million people in the private banking, clients in the private banking arm. They can all be digitally scanned now and give them information. Have they got a lot of information? Yes, but they haven’t got all the information that they want to put a tailor-made suit on every client. So AI allows us to do that, but also AI allows us to any person, let’s say that we’ve got X result on a person, one of your offsiders, and you wanted to know how to interpret it, you can go into our system and AI will give you a debrief and a coaching session, whatever you want to know. Whereas before, we’d have to have a facilitator do that. Now, does that eliminate the need for facilitators, coaches, consultants, advisors? No, it just means they can do their job better. That’s the way I look at it. But AI can make all that happen because we’ve built that into the system as well. So in a way, to be honest, the system is pretty close to a behavioral robot in that true sense in that profiles can be completed automatically and they can be facilitated automatically without a human doing anything. That’s a big game changer.
Brian Bell (00:32:40): So let’s talk a little bit about the money energy framework. You coined this and maybe tell us what that is and why does it matter for both operators at big companies, but also founders and investors?
Hugh Massie (00:32:50): So I think money is one of the most difficult concepts in life to actually understand. It’s something that is before us from, I suppose, the time you go to school, if not before. Some ways but it’s there the and you know it’s there as a currency but money money is a currency it’s physically what it is it you know the amount you’ve got in the bank account in your wallet that you can spend or invest but money is also what you believe money to be money is an intangible thing and you know your belief systems about money a lot of it is shaped by who you are so some people have a, you know, sort of an experiential view to money in that it can buy life experiences. It’s meant for growth. It’s meant to help entrepreneurship. For others, it’s money. They believe it’s a security blanket and that’s what money is all about. Get my kids educated, have a nice, comfortable community life. Great, but we’ll all look at it differently. And then money is also an energy. The energy of money is around us 24 by seven. And I used to joke when I first started the wealth management business, I used to say to people, money never sleeps. And put money in the bank and it’s going to grow overnight while you’re sleeping and then through your life. And that was a little bit from the Wall Street movie that was still probably a bit fresh for people, you know, at that time. But when you think about it, your thoughts and beliefs that you take to bed with you, you’ll process in your sleep. And you’ll wake up with them, and that’s probably what you’re going to manifest. So you take bad thoughts about money to bed with you, bad things around money will happen too. If you can take positive thoughts about money to bed, you’re more likely to be able to unlock good things that are going to happen in your life. So how do you bring that, you know, this is what money energy is all about, is in a way we all have unlimited potential to in the context of our own life, that’s important, to create money. And there is no limit to potentially what any of us can create in the context of who we are. So if you can understand who we are, HR, and remove blockages, negative thinking, mitigate debt, educate ourselves properly, build the right life systems, connect to the right people, you can unlock tremendous wealth. But the moment that you have fears, doubts about who you are, straddle your life with bad relationships, whether they’re at work or in business, you’re going to limit that potential. And so really what I’ve been talking about with money energy is to put yourself, your life in a place where you can create the maximum opportunity to create money. And that I think is not just being financially literate, it’s also being, it’s your mindset. So being mentally healthy, but also physically healthy and living a life without stress. I think the big thing that affects people is overall longevity, their mental condition is stress and money causes stress for people. So in a way, it’s doing everything that takes money anxiety out of your life.
Hugh Massie (00:35:48): And the fact is, is there are people below the poverty line who have a stress about money, not being able to put food on the table. That’s one level of it. But wealthy people, people are, you know, say earn more than 150,000 a year, which is not a lot, really. Maybe in well, maybe it is a lot for some who are only earning 30,000. That is the happiness line. Life gets more complicated the more you have.
Brian Bell (00:36:14): Happiness line meaning like over 150 on average, you don’t get any happier making beyond that amount of money on average in the US, call it.
Hugh Massie (00:36:22): Yep, the utility isn’t, there’s no more utility in it. And so, you know, let’s say that you and your successful founders and maybe me, the money issues turn into other issues, right? There can be relationship issues, managing your kids, spouses, what people think of you in the community, positive and negative, people taking you for a ride, whatever it is, there are issues.
Brian Bell (00:36:44): It’s really interesting. So, you know, I grew up poor, which I said right before we started broadcasting and then recording. And one of the things I realized, it was in my mid-20s, is I was too focused on making money. And in order to remove the focus of making money for my life, I tried to imagine I already had 10 million in the bank. And, you know, I got to Wall Street, worked really hard. And anybody who’s listened to this podcast heard this story like dozens of times now. But then I just kept asking myself, if I had 10 million in the bank, would I go to work tomorrow and do this job and do this career? And the answer was no. And so that was like a big crisis for me because I worked so hard to get there. And here I am, 25, 26 years old, and I had no idea what I wanted to do. But that kind of changed the relationship to money a little bit in that I wasn’t striving to make money anymore. I was striving to enjoy living, which was like a different focus.
Hugh Massie (00:37:32): And that’s what drove me to be an entrepreneur. At the end of the day, it was one of the drivers. I would say that the culture where I worked in the corporate world, accounting world, changed. I worked really hard and I was going to be a partner and that’s what I’d striven for, but everybody above me was miserable. And I thought, hmm, and other things are going on. This isn’t for me. And I’m young enough to start off with something with a clean sheet of paper, which is in a way I’d imagine, Brian, you did. And I think that’s where purpose became important. And I think that’s fundamental to the money energy part as well. You know, there is a number of elements to it. If you can think of it not as making money, but about your purpose. And I look at the other element I add to that is what’s my human impact going to be? And I design a business model around that, right? So if my human impact is, can I impact positively a billion lives between now and 2030, and I’ve built the right business model, surely I’m going to make money, right? Even if I got to a tenth, I’ve passed that tenth.
Brian Bell (00:38:34): I’m from a book, I forget which book he said, but maybe it was Never Eat Alone or one of those books. And he basically says the value that you get to take in the world, basically, or the money you get to make is basically the value you bring to other people times the number of people you bring it to.
Hugh Massie (00:38:50): Yeah, I think that, well, I know the book you’re referring to, if it’s by Keith Ferrazzi.
Brian Bell (00:38:57): That’s right.
Hugh Massie (00:38:59): And I think that principle is true. I think that you do, a lot comes to your life through relationships, but that only happens. So a lot of opportunities come, a lot of joy come, but that only happens when you’ve got your purpose right. And when you’ve got the purpose right and knowing what you’re going to go and do, sort of what your mission is going to be with that purpose. And I think the other part we don’t talk enough about is your identity, how you’re going to show up in the world. When you’ve got those things right, then it’s amazing that the right people show up at the right time.
Brian Bell (00:39:27): Right.
Hugh Massie (00:39:27): The energy flows come and that’s from where you’re going to make money. And not every time you speak to someone or do something, a cent’s going to roll in, but you’re going to be surprised or dollar’s going to roll in, but you’re going to be surprised other times. A lot comes in. So, you know, not to fall in the trap of being too transactional, but you’ve got to be transactional enough to execute, right? But I think that’s the approach and that’s what is fundamental to the money energy part. And I’d say is for people is not to be trapped with negative thinking, debt, those types of things. Have your relationship sorted out. So when the opportunity does come in the door, you can take it.
Brian Bell (00:40:04): This philosophy sounds a lot like The Secret, which I probably read, you know, 15, 20 years ago.
Brian Bell (00:40:06): Yeah. And I don’t believe all the mumbo jumbo and The Secret. But one of the things we my wife and I started doing is every time we check the mail, we’d say checks in the mail. And it was like this, like psychological, like money energy of like manifesting checks coming into our mailbox. Well, to this day, every time I check the mail, I go checks in the mail, checks in the mail. I just open up the mailbox checks in the mail. How much of your thinking or philosophy is similar or inspired by The Secret and how much did you take away from that or how do you differ?
Hugh Massie (00:40:38): I think you could say that you are what you believe.
Brian Bell (00:40:41): You are kind of what you think, right?
Hugh Massie (00:40:43): Yeah.
Brian Bell (00:40:44): Your thoughts become actions and et cetera, right?
Hugh Massie (00:40:47): And I would say that’s identity-led. If you can get your identity right and you can have that confidence in yourself, then energetically these things will show up. You’ll be able to manifest them now. You might be able to, through manifestation, accelerate it too. I think that my coach, she would say that. But you can’t always force nature on everything. You’ve got to learn. I think you’ve got to sort of read the tea leaves out there of humans and world events and what’s going on. But I do believe if you can have the positive mindset, you can draw, you can draw things in that you may, you know, that others would sort of look at in it from a linear perspective and counting type perspective, never thought possible. So that kind of thinking is good. I think that you could say that some of what’s in The Secret, the way it’s presented might’ve been a little bit hokey in some ways, but you know, in a way there is any rational sort of world there that if I put it this way, you know, that if you can think positively, you can bring things in. So it is the right consciousness. That’s hard for an accountant type person to sometimes grasp just because you think, gee, checks are going to come in and one doesn’t come tomorrow. Well, then the formula doesn’t work. Well, that’s not quite right either.
Brian Bell (00:42:06): So you’ve often spoke about, or you talk about making quantum leaps. How do you coach leaders into this kind of exponential mindset?
Hugh Massie (00:42:13): So I think the first thing is to have a very big dream, right? Be prepared to start small and finish big. And I think that plays into your world that, you know, I think that people probably come to you and want too much money too quickly. And I think that their businesses would do better with less to get started. I don’t think every market opportunity is going to run away tomorrow. If it’s a decent idea and product, I don’t think everything’s going to run away tomorrow. I think that’s actually a problem if it is. But you’ve definitely got to get going with it, right? But I think that that’s the first thing is to dream big. So I get people to think, well, how are you going to impact a billion people with this solution that you’ve got or this product, right? And you need to be thinking big about it. And is your purpose big enough? Is the dream big enough? And that’s the first thing. And then we can work backwards and say, okay, how... What are the steps, starting with baby steps, are you going to do to make that happen? And somewhere in there, if you get the purpose right, the product mix right, the execution, you’re thinking right, you’ve got the right team, all the right elements, you haven’t got loaded up with too much debt in the wrong spot, you’ve got everything right, you’re going to maybe not make 20% a year leaps in business in revenue and profits you’re going to suddenly something’s going to more than double right it’s going to go up a lot and I think that’s where I subscribe to the principles that 2x is 10x is better than 2x there is a point there you can go for 2x linear optimization of your business and you can go for 10x okay you might have to strip some things out really focus on which clients are truly producing revenue and profits shut everything else out make ruthless decisions. Go for it. But always remembering the boundaries of the human impact you’re trying to have, being a compassionate leader, et cetera, within all those frameworks, not changing who you are, but getting that model right. In there, you’re going to make a quantum leap. And I think if you look at every business that’s gone to the stars, they’ve done that some way.
Brian Bell (00:44:09): So you’ve done some nonprofit work with boys without fathers. I’d love to hear kind of the backstory and why that mission is so important to you, what that is.
Hugh Massie (00:44:16): So it’s important to me because I was a boy without a father. My father died of a brain tumor. He was 36 years old. I was one and my mom’s still pregnant with my brother. So he’s a boy without a father as well. And I think, you know, what I learned out of doing podcasts like this with some of our clients, I was doing identity conversations four years ago or so that I did six in a row. So no accident that happened. And everybody was a boy without a father, including a couple of people inside the business that I didn’t know that in the journey. And I thought the issues everyone faced.
Brian Bell (00:44:52): Yeah, I lost my dad twice. I lost him at 12. And then I lost him at 32. I could give you the story on when I lost him when I was in sixth grade. It’s a long story, but I lost contact with him. Yeah. And then I got back in touch with him as an adult, like eight years later. And then he was around for like 10 years. And then he died, unfortunately, when I was 32. I lost him twice.
Hugh Massie (00:45:13): There’s a lot in that. But, you know, I think that losing your dad or him, you know, and mine was through death, but the dad just not being there and in contact with you at that age. Critical juncture, yeah. Yeah, it has issues around setting boundaries, aggression, literacy, social fitting in, your identity, obesity, there’s a number of issues that are there that come up and you might have been challenged with some of that and that’s also what’s made you driven as well right to be doing what you’re doing today it’s not just you didn’t have money it’s these there was no security there was no emotional security either because I also lost my mom when I was 16.
Brian Bell (00:45:51): Yep so I’m a boy without without parents basically as a teenager.
Hugh Massie (00:45:58): In my mind, that’s a big wow. My mom is still alive at 94 and mentally completely with it. She’s astute as anybody out there right now, cognitively. But see, you’ve gone through a hell of a lot. And I think that what I’ve been, what I’m seeking to do, and I knew this earlier on, you know, because I sort of questioned, why am I going down this human behavioral path, coaching, mentoring people? I always liked that. Well, you know, somebody just said to me one day, it’s because you didn’t have a dad. And so I knew from then that I wanted to do something in youth development, but I could never find the right thing. And then this sort of came up and it made it more concrete for me. So I’ve been doing more, you know, we support a number of initiatives through DNA generally. I support a tennis foundation that helps kids in Africa who haven’t got parents learn to play tennis. Because the tennis coach was a boy without a father, right? The professional. And he’s, you know, an interesting story of someone that, you know, was in a bus shelter at 10 years old and suddenly becomes someone picked him up, becomes a professional tennis player. Right. So these stories are out there. And so I’m realizing that there’s, you know, my passion is here to help that. And I think that, you know, there’s a long way to go, but that’s, you know, what I want to teach people is not to be the victim, be the victor. Yeah. And it’s, it’s interesting. Right. From everything I could see.
Brian Bell (00:47:25): Yeah, I kind of had a breaking point when I was about 15. I decided I wasn’t going to be the victim. And there’s a long story there. But, you know, I think having that kind of challenge in my teenage years kind of creates the resiliency. You either succumb to it or you rise above it. Right. I don’t think there’s any in between. I don’t think I’ve met anybody with a similar background to me that’s just like either muddling along. They’re either doing really bad or they’re doing really great.
Hugh Massie (00:47:53): Yeah.
Brian Bell (00:47:55): And I had a lot of people there. I had a lot of teachers and mentors and parents of some of my best friends and stuff like that that were role models to me and showed me a different way of living. Like, hey, you could go to college and you can do something with your life. And it kind of lights a fire or it extinguishes your fire, frankly. I think there’s no in-between.
Hugh Massie (00:48:13): I think I agree with that. And I think that there’s fewer that actually really push through it because it’s so hard.
Brian Bell (00:48:20): It’s very rare.
Hugh Massie (00:48:21): Yeah, to get through, you know, if you want to call it the socioeconomic challenges of it, most people get stuck with where they’re at and where their family life’s at. And I think that’s what we’ve got to help people with. And, you know, mental health’s a big topic these days, you know, often around anxiety and, you know, pressures and whatnot. But I think this area of it could be addressed a whole lot more because really what, Brian, you’ve proven, I think, is that success is a mental game, right? Yeah, you could go to school and learn how to count and read and all that sort of stuff and be literate enough, got the instincts for business, but you had to decide that you were going to do that.
Brian Bell (00:48:59): Right. It’s a decision. And I think so many people, for whatever reason, just succumb to victimhood, I think. I’ve known a lot of people like that from my walk of life, right? And they just didn’t make it through, including family members and friends. They just did not rise above the environment.
Hugh Massie (00:49:18): I don’t want to spiritualize it too much, turn people off. But I think that if you can look at it and what happened to you and look at it in the eyes, sort of a bit like looking the tiger in the eye and say, okay, I was dealt this, you know, the cards in my hand, can’t do anything about the fact that your father left behind, or I can’t do anything about the fact that it wasn’t me that caused my father to die, right? Right. And effectively leave my life and my mother and brothers. But to rationalize it in terms of how it shaped me and the opportunity that it provided, and this is what I’ve done, is the opportunity that it’s provided me, I think that’s what’s needed to go forward rather than ignoring it and wiping all that under the table. And that’s really, I think, part of the decision. And, you know, you made that decision early. I don’t think I made that decision consciously as early other than, you know, I knew that certainly from the time I started working, I was going to realise my potential to as much as I could. I don’t think I totally understood how to do all of that, but it step-by-step happened, you know, and here we are.
Brian Bell (00:50:25): It’s funny in a strange way. It makes me a really great investor and it’s hard to explain this to people, but you’d probably understand, which is it kind of takes one to know one, meaning it takes a resilient person to really spot resiliency.
Hugh Massie (00:50:37): Yep.
Brian Bell (00:50:37): And so when I meet a founder, I can kind of just sense the vibe of their life and I’ll ask them a little, you know, a little bit about their background and, you know, and I tend to get along with people that have overcome challenges similar to my own. But they could be different. I get along, for instance, with a lot of immigrant founders because they’ve had to let everything go from their life back home in India or wherever, Bangladesh, and move to the US and risk everything and uproot their entire livelihood, their entire lives.
Hugh Massie (00:51:07): Because what people don’t realize with that is, is that you have, you know, let’s say that the founder has come from India and he or she went to a good university there in Bangalore or somewhere, Chennai, and, you know, they’ve got an engineering degree or, you know, and they’ve come here for business and now they’ve thought up an idea. They’ve left all their network behind, right? I mean, America is a culturally foreign country. Even for me, being Australian coming here, more and more I learn it’s a culturally foreign country. No network, right? You know, you don’t have… All my college buddies are back in Sydney. So you’re coming in cold. You don’t have that history. You don’t have, in a way, that same network to pull you up, right? Or to… Because I think that’s something that, you know, everybody needs is someone that’s going to believe in you and that you can ride on the journey with, right? And I think that’s eventually what I’d like to see the Boys Without Fathers be a lot more, and that’s just going to take time from me as I go along, but that there’s a network of Boys Without Fathers that have lived it who are now helping others. That’s to help maybe some of the, you know, I think that in a way you want people to have a difficult life moment to, as you say, to build resilience. But also they need, you know, everyone needs someone to give them a bit of a pull up, right?
Brian Bell (00:52:28): Right. Or a little bit like I can recall people both doing on both sides in my life, you know, people pulling me up and telling me, hey, you could be great. And I see greatness in you, but also people telling me what a piece of shit I am. And I won’t amount to anything. I’ve had, I had both. And so I had it, it was like this choice, you know?
Hugh Massie (00:52:46): And when you hear the latter, if you’re driven, you’re going to say, well, fuck you.
Brian Bell (00:52:50): Fuck you.
Hugh Massie (00:52:51): I’ll show you exactly. I mean, we get to use that word once in the podcast, but, you know, I’m going to go and prove you wrong, right? And that’s a decision, right? And for some, you know, that makes you buckle down harder and you’re going to go and do it. You know, I think that, you know, for me, I didn’t know my father, but I would want to do him proud that I’ve gone out there and made the most of the situation.
Brian Bell (00:53:16): Right. I love that. Well, let’s wrap up with a quick rapid fire. I’ll ask a question and you’ll just give a short response. Sound good? What’s the most underrated trait in a great founder?
Hugh Massie (00:53:26): Underrated trait in a great founder? I think possibly the work ethic part that people don’t talk enough about the underlying working hard drive part.
Brian Bell (00:53:39): Just grind it, basically.
Hugh Massie (00:53:41): Yep.
Brian Bell (00:53:41): What’s one behavioral blind spot that kills deal making?
Hugh Massie (00:53:44): Well, the first thought that comes into my mind, so I’m going to say it, I think that people can talk too much and say the wrong thing at the wrong time. You know, in trying to convey the message, charm people, they might say stuff that they shouldn’t make or is not necessary. That would be something that’s, you know.
Brian Bell (00:54:03): Is financial literacy overrated or misunderstood?
Hugh Massie (00:54:07): Misunderstood.
Brian Bell (00:54:08): What’s the book you’ve gifted most besides your own?
Hugh Massie (00:54:11): The book is The Power of Identity. So it’s a book called The Power of Identity by Bill Worsma, because it’s got a great process in there to discover your identity. And I think everybody needs to do that to set themselves apart from the pack and it’s that higher level that you’re going to hold yourself accountable to, which will lead to good decision-making. And from a founder’s perspective, I think you really want to have clarity of your identity. Otherwise, there will be a problem in leading the company at some point.
Brian Bell (00:54:41): AI-generated insights versus human intuition. Who wins?
Hugh Massie (00:54:45): Well, I like to think it’s both because at the end of the day, it doesn’t work without both. And intuition can be colored by what you think and can be biased. And science out there says it’s 28% accurate. So AI can help if it’s the right AI system that was built with the right foundation, right? So the right sort of data can help the intuition a lot, but neither by themselves.
Brian Bell (00:55:09): What is the best advice you’ve ever received?
Hugh Massie (00:55:12): Well, it’s going to be what I also tell others. I think that time tells you a lot of things. So give people time to show you their true colors, give situations time to really show you what is going to happen. And so therefore, pin it around patience. A level of patience is important. And I think that founders and investors often don’t have it, but it’s something that’s needed.
Brian Bell (00:55:34): A common trait that you see among successful, maybe even unicorn founders?
Hugh Massie (00:55:39): Definitely resilience. I think that they’re also going to have a certain ability to see the vision for the future and then to build the execution plan. They may not be the executor of the plan, but they’re going to be able to connect the vision to execution. And I see too many people got a great vision, but they don’t even know how it’s going to be executed. And that’s the problem.
Brian Bell (00:56:04): What’s something that you used to believe that you changed your mind on?
Hugh Massie (00:56:07): I was asked this question actually just recently. So I better give the same answer. So I would have said, you know, once upon a time, results was everything. Just look at the numbers. But as I’ve gone on my journey, understanding the people as well is important. And that if you can build the right relationships, that’s going to lead to better numbers.
Brian Bell (00:56:25): Well, thank you so much, Hugh, for coming on. Really enjoyed it.
Hugh Massie (00:56:27): Yeah, thanks, Brian. Well, it’s been great to, you know, to connect with you. I think not just talking about the business side, but also I think our life history side and, you know, where we’ve come from. That brings a lot more meaning to this. So I’ve really enjoyed it.
Brian Bell (00:56:40): Thanks so much.
