[00:02] all in on AI in 2026 and the truth is you should, too. I recently put on an event where I invited dozens of AI CEOs to discuss where is everybody going to be disrupted, what's working now. And I thought to myself, why don't I just
[00:15] invite the world? Why don't I show you? >> There's so many people out there that talk about that they've never done. We're doing it. plan to build a billion dollar company
[00:27] he says, >> We are going to build an AI venture >> We are going to build an AI venture studio that generates 25 billion dollars >> The last few years have been exponential and parabolic.
[00:40] >> This is not easy, as you all know, but man is a fun.
[00:52] companies and businesses and industries called magazines and newspapers. And there was people that that made paper products for that industry. And everybody lost their jobs. And then what they didn't realize is it created a new
[01:05] It didn't exist. It literally before the >> Yeah. >> And now there's web designers. And then there's security people and system analysts and network engineers and all
[01:17] these new jobs that were created only because of the internet. The ones that saw the internet come and said, okay, we have a newspaper, but we also have the internet and we're going to slowly as the memberships die off, we're just
[01:29] going to become a digital online platform and make money. always been. It doesn't matter if you're Blockbuster, Kodak, or paper company, your job is to look at where things are going and get ahead of it.
[01:44] >> So, the role right now for everybody, honestly, if you want my opinion, teach >> I just got out of a meeting with a guy that said, we have 50 people on the staff and we taught everybody cloud code including the HR people, including the
[01:56] and they all took all their workload and their workflows and they automated into new dashboards that they're all coded. Here's what people don't get. If you don't do this, your team will see what the world's doing and go find a company
[02:09] that is doing this cuz they don't want to become irrelevant. That's a fact. You worried to lose your people, you're going to lose them because they're going realize you're a sinking ship. There's this framework that I teach often called
[02:22] understanding what are the things that'll never change. So, it's like from a leadership point of view, I felt like I had to pour into the people, even the world's smartest AI folks, just on understanding how they need to show up
[02:35] in this new world. And then, also show them how AI is going to completely them how AI is going to completely change everything they're building. Most of the people in the world are That is a technical term.
[02:49] And when I say they're they're okay? Because they are still acting like this is the internet, they're acting like this is mobile, innovations that have happened, they think it's going to be similar so they
[03:05] to be buildings full of people in New York City that calculated interest rates And then the spreadsheet came out and those people went away and all of a managing spreadsheets. There's always been a de-skill and an up-skill of every
[03:21] lot of jobs and it already has. It didn't exist before AI that will give people opportunity. Right off the bat, if you don't think AI primitive, AI native, AI first, whatever you're building right now, pointless. If you
[03:36] don't go to AI and say, "Here is my goal, tell me how to accomplish it." before you start a task, you are doing it to yourself. You are acting like you that it could ever imagine you could ever learn. It's got PhDs in
[03:50] every discipline of human mankind and you still pretend like you know better. While everybody else is stuck here, this room is going to elevate. Does that make >> Yes. >> The one thing I would take away at that
[04:03] event is there there's another level and there's another level with AI. level. >> There's so many people out there that talk about it that they've never done. We're doing it. Yeah, whether it's AI or
[04:19] media company or leading teams or holding high standards, we're doing it and I want to have the ability to show that. completely changed. Okay? Where it used to be zeros and
[04:33] ones, then hexadecimal, then assembler, then C, then C++, Visual Basic, today it's English. Can you speak English? Say yes. >> Yes. >> Okay, so you guys can do this. I'm here
[04:47] to be honest with you. Cuz I understand that the rest of the world filters what it says to people cuz the truth. The news says this, the reality is this. Why would they say
[05:00] reality is this. Why would they say that? I've never been that guy cuz I would feel so shitty to have somebody feel surprised by learning something that I knew about a year and a half ago. So, are you guys down to be exposed to
[05:15] >> Yes. >> All right, it's on you. >> We had demos done by a lot of different people in my companies. Those talks blew they're in my companies like I know them. I had my CTO Etienne go up there
[05:30] and talk about how language models actually work and use a very physical understand it for once. A lot of people use these AIs, but they don't actually >> It's like I'm telling you write Anton a message, okay?
[05:46] With the LLM, what do you think that next word needs to be? As quickly as possible, group yourself with someone who picked the same word. with someone who picked the same word. Okay, 60 seconds.
[06:06] To get to sure in GPU land, you know, GPUs, Nvidia chips, half a billion to a trillion mathematical transactions to get to the word sure. Essentially, every
[06:19] single word gets tokenized. Now, it's once your very precious prompt has been tokenized, let's say this is the index number 12 let's say this is the index number 12 200 500 80 whatever. This is all sorts
[06:34] of index indices that points to an embedding table. The embedding table essentially is a table of vectors, a list of numbers, and
[06:48] every token points to one of these long rows of numbers. And then they go through this thing called the LLM. And the LLM is really a transformer, where all these vectors are calculated against a bunch of
[07:03] pre-trained vectors. And this is the thing that happens 500 billion times. thing that happens 500 billion times. Out pops another vector. And this vector is a token ID that points to the same table
[07:17] that then is a word, which apparently is sure. >> And he broke it down, man. He even built his own freaking agentic CTO that he uses, he talks to it to code stuff, and it hired people.
[07:32] >> Hello, this is Tony. >> Hey Tony, that LLM pipeline thing we did, what was the URL to that? >> Hey Essien, let me check the LLM pipeline project for you. The LLM pipeline demo is live
[07:44] at https:// pipeline demo.hellotron.com. handy. Sent you the link. >> For those who don't know, Tony is my new best friend. It's the result of a call that Dan and I had about a week ago.
[07:59] This is literally like a couple days old. So, think of Tony as like your CTO that you activate by just talking to it. You watched him do it. But, I want you to understand is the future of building apps is voice. Anybody in the
[08:13] development world already knows that. But, tools like Tony, aka Tron, are the kind of tools we're building at Martel Ventures to support the portfolio >> When I think of some of the people in the room, I think the philosophy that
[08:26] level is the idea of being a director, not a doer. Right? Cuz those tasks is where AI's going to disrupt them. But, learning how to direct the code cuz that
[08:38] Most programmers today don't write code anymore. They direct the code, shape the code. The big thing is they don't realize that the tasks that they all do as professions are going away. AI's going to do all that. And what they
[08:51] should try to remind themselves of is what's the purpose of my role. If you look objectively to a CEO without knowing what they are saying or doing, typist cuz they're always typing on their phone or they're typing on their
[09:03] laptop cuz they're communicating. But, what is their purpose? My purpose is not to type. My purpose is to lead and vision cast and inspire and coach up. If you have expertise in a industry, cool. Let's get rid of 90% of the task stuff
[09:19] that actually doesn't enable the purpose. They think because they're craftsmen at that thing, AI can't disrupt me. Oh, no, it's already disrupted you. You just don't know it. Let me show you that. Okay, now that you
[09:32] know that, let's let's lead the innovation. Don't allow yourself to be disruption that supports you in the real purpose of what you're supposed to do in life anyway. I made a decision a long time ago to be
[09:46] the example for people that don't have positive examples. That shows up in the helping people create things for themselves. So, Martel Ventures had to be created because I had so many incredible people that I'd coached,
[10:01] worked with, supported, know of, done life with, but I didn't have a playground, a place that was efficient playground, a place that was efficient and fun. I needed a Roddy to run it, and
[10:14] that's why we did the Builder Summit was to then broadcast that to the world and to then broadcast that to the world and show other people how it can be done. it was snowing, and I knew he was going to call.
[10:29] I just didn't know when he was going to call. Bam, I get the call. He shares three profound things with me that day. Number one, we are going to that day. Number one, we are going to build an AI Venture Studio that
[10:42] build an AI Venture Studio that generates 25 billion dollars in enterprise value by helping founders win. Number two, we have an unfair advantage. 28 years of building businesses, helping founders. We have
[10:58] businesses, helping founders. We have playbooks. We have 350 plus playbooks on playbooks. We have 350 plus playbooks on how to build businesses. Number three, he said, and I remember this vividly, Roddy, you will never have to be on
[11:11] stage ever. >> I am responsible for the operations and the execution of our vision at Martel Ventures as the managing partner. I of the room, and that was really the basis of the relationship with Dan and
[11:26] journey of growth and being pushed. It's more than a push, it's usually a kick. So, that's probably the biggest growth for me is to get the chance to MC, being the glue and the orchestrator of the event.
[11:45] We become the global leader in AI-powered SMB innovation, period. That's our that as small medium-sized businesses is our It's my passion, man. First off, everybody's been asked to leave because they're all
[11:58] downstairs at the event. This is a fraction of the people that's part of of the companies, there's actually five more that we've added. Martell Ventures only started 13 months ago. And in 13 months, we've launched, deployed, and
[12:12] companies. >> Yeah, it's wild, man. So, it's funny cuz when we started, I challenged Roddy. I said, "Roddy, we need a plan to build a Originally, it was five. Yeah. So, I figured I'd give him the goal to do
[12:26] three so that we had some slack. Well, he comes back and he says, "That's Well, he comes back and he says, "That's cool. Why don't we go for 25 and 10?" I was like, "Bro." But at the same time, I'm like, "Mhm, dream bigger." I can't
[12:38] ask him to to trim it down, but he also presented me a plan that actually made sense. As an example, the blue ocean, the red ocean. The red ocean is thinking I have a software company, AI is a big thing, I got to add AI to it. So, then
[12:53] and an interface, and you add AI-powered features to the interface. The blue ocean, Martell Ventures, is let's start with an AI-first approach, and in that mental model of AI-first, how would you build this solution? Every one of those
[13:09] companies are AI-first companies. They're not a product that we added AI to, we start with the premise of AI. So, for example, Hero, a recruiting platform, there's no interface. You make a phone call. You don't have an account,
[13:22] the link to the job post. It runs the ad. It does all this agentic automation for you behind the scenes. Why do I need to log into a software? So, that's what makes this a blue ocean strategy because we flipped the whole concept of software
[13:37] >> There's definitely power in a community like ours and the portfolio companies and the founders that they're all sharing so you don't have to spend as much time to get the same input back in. >> The reason why I chose Roddy to run
[13:49] Martell Ventures is A, I've known him for 20 plus years. He built and exited a software company. At that level, I'm always asking myself who if I put a 100 million on a USB key and gave it to him full of Bitcoin, when I
[14:03] it would be there. It may not be worth 100 million anymore. It might be worth a billion. But I know he would be there and he's got the technical background. He's got the EQ level off the charts. He's a people guy. The things that
[14:16] qualify him the most are not the technical skills because that's my nerdy than anybody else, which you know, AI can never take is he knows how to talk and manage people. He's my fixer. I'm like, "Hey bro, I got a problem here."
[14:29] >> This is not easy as you all know, but man is it fun. I'll do this every day. I man is it fun. I'll do this every day. I do this every day.
[14:41] >> What I'm doing at Martell Ventures is building a platform where we can partner with individuals. It doesn't matter if you're technical or business and we can co-create. We literally come up with ideas based on the audience that we know
[14:53] have. >> And we try to find product founder fit. We try to think of innovation that doesn't exist yet. >> This is the heartbeat, man. We have about 16 of these whiteboards.
[15:07] We're drawing diagrams, architectures, database structures, and enrichment >> The team here is about 15 people. That's at the Martell Ventures operating side and there's a hundreds of people up below us. Default to action. This is my
[15:24] heart, do something with it right now. Don't wait, don't over analyze, don't if it's there, you feel it. If you feel it, go. You feel it, move. Anyways, we just had a big meeting here, but essentially, this is where I spend 97%
[15:38] of my time, man. I got my car down there that I get to to vibe on and look at all got the two books I wrote. I got the skateboard I created. Most people don't all the cars and the stories of the cars and the logos and just the clean clean
[15:54] environment. And this is like built custom into the desk. This is the mountain Martell mountain logo. And I created this really cool thing with the cars. Those are three of my favorite cars.
[16:06] next to me. Always getting in trouble with her. companies. I've got, you know, one guy runs the finance departments of over 12
[16:20] companies. One guy. People have probably 13 people for this one guy's role. And then we've got um a lot of go-to-market people, growth um a lot of go-to-market people, growth assistants, sales, software tech CTO,
[16:34] >> And why do you think it's important to have them all in one space? >> The speed we're moving, you have to be in proximity. I always say, get on a Let's In Just come and you'll get it. Just sit here for the day, come talk,
[16:48] come play, come strategize, come look. Be in this building, right? Martell Media is in this building. Go be around the caliber of people. Yeah, man, it's just it's it's one part inspiration, another part execution. You can't escape
[17:00] downstairs, and that's what they've been saying is like, I need to be in this >> I know, that's why I brought them here. Every one of them. I told them all, something with you. The hardest part for any company, man, it's it's it's knowing
[17:14] what to push on, how much, and when. And that's what I'm great at. It's my happy place, but how do I scale that? >> We've got more results in last 2 years than we had in the last eight. Which is essentially what how media works, right?
[17:27] Is you invest ton at the start. You just get the engine going, but then start double down. That's when you start to actually get results. Sam, you know, because he's been in my life. We built Martel Media together.
[17:40] He's my partner in that in crime. I wanted him to share how we've built the brand side of things. Because as much as I love the innovation and AI is 100% going to replace a lot of the work being done. The thing that makes
[17:56] any person valuable is the brand that precedes them before they ever walk into >> I started working with Dan almost eight years ago. I was a team of one doing all the media. And since then I've
[18:09] been able to scale that team from me to over 15 people full-time. So the thesis of my talk was essentially going from bottleneck to builder. Essentially step business cuz a lot of leaders actually bottleneck their team because they're
[18:22] trust their team to take action. And so I break it down to three Ds. One that guy. I used to edit videos. I used to, you know, review my own videos and then post them. I did all this stuff. Then you move into a director role where
[18:36] people to actually do the work. So you have a bunch a ton of editors. You have telling everybody what to do. That scales up to about seven people. But when you scale past seven people and you want to go to, you know, 15, 20, 25
[18:49] back and be the designer. And what a designer is is someone who designs a that doesn't need that. Right? Where their presence feels additive, not needed. That's a big idea. Cuz I thought that, you know, I had to
[19:04] be involved in every single area of the process in the business for it to grow. And so I wanted Sam to teach that to these AI nerds because guess what? Especially the software guys, they know
[19:16] that their jobs are getting disrupted. But everybody's got the potential to and that's what Sam delivered. >> Being a leader at 19 years old, leading my age, I had to earn that respect through these five rules, and the first
[19:31] of the soul train for the role, right? myself. First question is, can they do the work? The second question is, do they care about the work? That's a bigger one. The
[19:44] they a good person? Rule number two, default to trust. Rule number two, default to trust. We give an irresponsible amount of trust ownership, but then inspect what you expect. Rule number three,
[20:01] train no tell. I can't expect somebody to be a high performer and not show them number four, measure what matters. You have to actually matter. And have, you know, North Star metrics. For us at Martel
[20:17] Super simple. And then we have a quality measure, which is just the first number divided by the second, right? And what that does for us, it gives us clarity, a North Star, somewhere to go. Rule number five,
[20:32] very important, lighthouse not tugboat. For example, I wanted my team to start understand the algorithm better, but I wasn't doing it myself. And 65 days ago, I decided I'm going to do daily content. And that was 100% decision to stop
[20:46] being, sorry for like lack of a better term, but a little and start posting content. When people say, oh, in the next 5 years the people that are going to win are the people that are going to adopt AI, I think to myself, yes, and
[20:58] people that are going to adopt attention, right? Because in a world where you can spin up HubSpot, Dropbox, Slack, those tools in seconds, right? distribution. How many people can you make see that product? And I think a lot
[21:12] importance of media and building attention in the new age because it system. >> So, I also had Todd speak at the event, who's the CEO of Martel Media. And Todd's an impressive guy, and I'll tell
[21:26] I used to joke all the time, is like he's got two daughters and he writes He doesn't like that I say that, but it does explain like Todd, if you look at does explain like Todd, if you look at him, he's like Iron Man, type A, driven,
[21:40] value standards, and he's got a heart of gold, man. Like, I would just trust him to take care of my family. And and he does that. And in many ways, the team at Media are family, and he's an operational genius.
[21:53] >> So, I'm going to share a framework that I call, and again, it's new. It's called I call, and again, it's new. It's called the Builders Pyramid, and it stacks four things. When I was asked to present at the Builders Summit,
[22:06] stuff that I'm doing, right? I'm not going to talk about something I'm not doing. So, when I was thinking about how I would approach it, I just thought I would approach it, I just thought about how I operate as a business, how I
[22:18] do things, and I I thought there's got to be something in there that's going to be valuable. There's a big business lie that's out there. I believed it for a long time. And the lie is that people are your greatest
[22:32] asset. I don't think that's true. Standards are your greatest asset. The people that you have in your world are the evidence you have in your world are the evidence of your standards. Next one is talent.
[22:46] The way I view talent is two things. Number one is, um, hire better than you, and build those people up. The next one is strategy. Strategies are not a to-do list. In strategies, you're giving clarity to
[23:00] So, another way to think about it is strategies are a sacrifice. And the last one is dreams. So, your dreams are the inspiration all your people need to fit within there.
[23:14] you want to get people to come in your world and you can't pay them what you maybe think they're worth, what gets them to come into your world? Your dreams and your story. That's what makes them come. Right? Think about Apple or
[23:28] they didn't have the money back then, but they actually got people to come in were trying to do. Sam talked about some of the rhythms that we do inside. This is the framework that how you pull
[23:43] Cuz that is the difference. Fix your standards and everything else will flow. Thank you and everything else will flow. Thank you very much.
[23:57] describe the whole event, it's back to my core thesis, which is no small plans. >> I mean, I love when people come into our events or come to the studio and why anything quite frankly even myself is cuz once you see something you can't
[24:12] >> I would say the Builder's Summit first version was a test. Hey, can we bring cool people together and do cool stuff? I believe we accomplished that test team that we've built, the culture that we've built, and everybody that that
[24:26] that same breath like if we've gotten to this point after 3 years of taking it years, right? >> Even the space of AI in 8 months from
[24:38] now will be so completely different that when we bring people together, there's going to be a good reason. And because good people want to be with good people, there's never going to be a shortage of uh the right people want to who want to
[24:52] get together and talk about the front edge and cliff of AI, quite frankly. edge and cliff of AI, quite frankly. >> Everything I do is asking myself if I'm And and and that's why it has to be expansive cuz every time I get to the
[25:07] edge of an idea or thought, I'm like, "What else?" The number one thing that's going to change your life is the environment that you spend time in. And if on your heart you think to yourself, "I got to move. I
[25:20] thing." I don't care if it's a community or company. If you know that you feel that, default to action. Like just do it. Don't let this be a moment where you just get inspired. No. If you want to work with me, want to partner with me,
[25:34] community, want to join my community, reach out. This is the moment to act.