Unicorn Leaders

Ep. 22 - From DNA to Millions: Scaling, Exiting, and Playing the Long Game with Adrian Salamunovic

• Unicorn Labs - Fahd Alhattab • Season 2 • Episode 2

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In this high-energy episode of the Unicorn Leaders podcast, Fahd sits down with serial entrepreneur and author Adrian Salamunovic for a raw, real, and wisdom-packed conversation on what it takes to build—and exit—category-defining companies. Adrian shares the behind-the-scenes journey from selling his first business at 21 to founding DNA11 and CanvasPop, exiting for 30x EBITDA, and now launching The Exit podcast and founder community. Together, they unpack what founders get wrong about scaling, the psychology behind great leadership, and why the smartest move isn’t always about being the smartest person in the room. From hiring to vision, from mental stamina to co-founder breakups, this episode is a tactical masterclass in how to build a business worth buying—without losing yourself along the way.

Episode Mentions

SPEAKER_02:

A weird moment for me is when I stopped chasing money. I said, you know what? If this thing fails, I can always move back into my mom's house. I won't be homeless. Like that's the mentality level. I can return the lease, the car. I'm willing to give it all up because now I'm chasing my passion. I'm chasing something that I know needs to exist in the world, right? And so it's really funny. And I've had this happen to me several times in my life is when I stopped chasing the dollars, just the dollars where the opportunity is and chase what I'm passionate about. Real magic. begins to happen. I see a lot of founders building this company. They're like, I'm going to build this, then I'm going to flip it to somebody, right? You've got to build it for the long term. But building your business so that it can be sold, which means your finances are clean, you have a clear market proposition, that you as the founder can leave the business and it can still run, those fundamentals are all critical towards building a great business anyway. For example, having SOPs, having a proper systems operating procedures and are using EOS or whatever system you choose is going to make your business run better regardless of whether you sell it. So your company from day one should be built so that it can sell, but you don't necessarily build it so that its main reason of existing is to flip it or sell it.

SPEAKER_01:

Hello and welcome back Unicorn Leaders to our Unicorn Leadership Podcast where this season we're unpacking the David versus Goliath of teams. What is it that makes these small but mighty teams overcome the odds? And I'm really excited for our guest today. Our guest today is an acquaintance, is a friend, someone I've known for a little bit of time. I've been watching their amazing work. They've been around the entrepreneurship community for a little while. Adrian, I should have asked you before this, but how do I say your last name?

SPEAKER_02:

Nobody gets it right. Don't worry. Don't even feel bad. It's Salamunavik. It's the way it looks, but

SPEAKER_01:

it's long. I love that. You've got that ambiguous look to you. Anywhere you go, they'll think you're a local. Every joke offends me, pretty much. Adrian, you're a serial entrepreneur. You've built a few companies. List them off the top a little bit. What are some of the company names?

SPEAKER_02:

I've been an entrepreneur since I was 16 years old. I started to one of the first web development companies in Canada back in 1996. I'm kind of dating myself right now, but I've been in the game for a long time. More recently, I started a company called DNA11 that was 14 years ago. It's a company that made artwork from people's DNA, one of the most personalized consumer genomics companies in the world. Spun that out to create CanvasPop. Only took 11, 12, 13 years, and we were able to sell it to a private equity firm. We had an exit a few years ago. And I've been involved with companies like MyFacts.com that I helped build the brand, create the company. That sold for$220 million. I was part of the build team, the initial team, but I was not a founder of that company. But I learned a lot in that journey. And then more recently, I'm the co-founder of Millions.co, which is a social commerce platform for professional athletes, which I co-founded with my friend Matt Whitaker and the voice of the Octagon, Bruce Buffer, as co-founders. Tremendously cool company. And now I'm working on the exit group and And that's probably what we're going to spend most of our time talking about today.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Adrian, you've got a wealth of experience and some really cool. I mean, the fact that you've worked in all of these different companies, you've lived several lifetimes through. You've been the David in a Goliath of an industry, right? What is it that allowed you to build these small but mighty teams that either eventually exited or created a huge impact? Now, in addition to that, you're also a bestselling author. So let's start at the beginning of the journey. Adrian, give me a little bit of background, who you are. We grew up in And what's your origin story, the path into entrepreneurship for you?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I mean, I started off as a D-level student and maintained D-level student status right through to high school until business classes were introduced. And then I finally found something that fascinated and interested me, which was the world of business, and then started getting A's. So just for the last couple of years of high school, I joined Junior Achievers, which is an amazing program that's still around. That's awesome. So my first business was with Junior Achievers. Junior Achievers. We learned how to set up a company, set up a cap table. I mean, it's incredible education for a 16, well, no, maybe 17-year-old to be doing in high school for credits, right, after a program. And so I'm a huge, huge advocate of Junior Achiever and a huge advocate of us introducing entrepreneurship to students as young as possible. Entrepreneurs are the backbone of every economy. We need more founders. We need more entrepreneurs in Canada, the United States, here in Mexico, where I am at the moment. Entrepreneurs are amazing for the economy. So I'll start off with that. But I wasn't being taught entrepreneurship until grade 12, where I took an entrepreneurship class. I was hooked. I did JA. I was hooked and started my first company out of high school. And that company actually ended up being acquired. At the age of 21, I ended up selling that company to Nova Networks in Ottawa, Canada, where I grew up. And so I had my first acquisition at the age of 21. What was the company? It was called MediaWave, and it was Nova Networks that acquired It's a small amount of money, but when you're 21 years old and most of your friends are working at Subway and you sell your first, it was a web development company, you know, you sell it. It wasn't, it was enough money to buy a, foolishly buy a BMW off the lot. And then there wasn't a lot of money left over. Very immature, right? When you're 21 years old. But that was the beginning of my first acquisition. I went on to build a bunch of different companies after that. And, you know, just kept building companies. jumping into consulting and advisory work, getting inspired, launching another company, had a whole bunch of failures. I started one of the first mobile app companies in 1999, 2000 called Ventrata. We raised money for it. Believe it or not, we were building apps for the research and motion BlackBerry, which is a whole other story. We were way too early in that space. And we had to shut that company down right after 9-11. And so I got a front seat to failure very early, success and failure very And so that taught me what to do and what not to do. And I vowed never to have to bankrupt another company again. And then from there, went on to build CanvasPop, DNA11, PopKey, which is one of the first GIF keyboards out there. A ton of different businesses. Some did really great and others flatlined. This is life, you know? Yeah,

SPEAKER_01:

yeah, yeah, yeah. But you continue to take shots. You continue to take shots. You continue to step up to the plate. You continue to swing. And I think that's what's really cool. Now, there's something interesting about when you start at that young of an age. I've often said that entrepreneurs have to have a level of delusion. You sort of have to be delusional enough to go, I'm going to take on the Goliath. And when you're a teenager, you sort of feel like you're invincible. So getting teenagers involved in entrepreneurship means they often have that, just the right amount of delusion to be like, I can do that. I can try that. Because what got you started? Where comes the self-belief to go, I'm going to enter this industry and I'm going to, at 21 years old, try and build this company where I've got people that have way more money, have way more experience, are better in every way, but I'm going to compete against them.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, you said it right. It's a combination of insanity, a little bit of delusion with some naivety, kind of in the perfect soup, right? And you know what? For me, it started with my parents, especially my mother, who never let me know that I wasn't a top percentile, a person on the IQ graph, right? She always told me I was a genius. She told me I'm creative. She just convinced me that I was somebody that could do anything And so that's self-belief. And to me, I get emotional when I think about it, but I want every kid to have a parent like that. Not everybody has that. A parent that can encourage. And when the school system's telling you you're low IQ, you're not smart, you need medication. They wanted to put me on ADD medication when I was a kid. My mom said, no way. We got to keep this guy on the creative and always boosting me up. So I thank my mother first and foremost for giving me that confidence to believe in myself. And then after that, you just got to almost just, you got to believe in yourself first because no one's going to do it for you. And so it's really, really important to just stay, I want to say, stay naive, stay, always see the positivity and see the possibility that if you believe in anything enough, you can do anything. And I've done it. I've seen it firsthand that when you believe in what you're doing enough, others will be attracted to it. Others will see it. And eventually the market will see it and sky's the limit.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Now, Adrian, strategically, so emotionally, I think that's important. Strategically, when you're the underdog, when you're the David and the Goliath, when you're a young startup founder trying to compete in an industry, what did you do? Where do you

SPEAKER_02:

focus? Yeah, well, there's really two parts to the strategy. The first one, and this is the one a lot of people mess up, is just think big. If you're going to do something, dream big, think big, create a big, ambitious goal, and start without and work backwards. A lot of entrepreneurs start in the comfort zone and they say, okay, well, I'm going to build a business that does a million dollars a year. Well, guess what? If that's your goal, you're going to probably maybe hit a million dollars a year. You might fall short and hit$800,000 a year. Nice little business. There's nothing wrong with that. But what if you say, I'm going to build a billion dollar company, right? Or a hundred million dollar company. If you get really uncomfortable, if you say you're going to do a hundred million dollar company and after eight years you hit 80 million, it's still an incredibly a successful company, right? So the first rule is think big, think as big as you can get, and surround yourself with people that think big, mentors, advisors, read biographies if you don't have access to those, and just expand your horizon. That's

SPEAKER_01:

number one. How do you think thinking big shifts someone's decision making? How does it change your decision making when you're actually thinking at that level versus the decisions you would make if you were thinking just a million?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, that's the second part of the equation is also think not just big, but think long term, right? Think big and long So when you combine those two forces, your decision-making is going to be more of a path towards success, right? So, for example, you're going to invest in hiring the right people that can carry you longer term. You're going to invest in the right technology that's going to reduce your costs and make your company perform better on the long term. And so just by having those two filters, thinking big and also thinking long term, you're going to be setting yourself up for a better trajectory. So in every decision, who you bank with, who your lawyer is, is, who your accountant is, who you hire, who you fire, which is also important. So those are the two main filters that a lot of early stage founders, I think, need to spend more time thinking about.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And so in your initial companies, you got some traction, you got some wins, and then DNA11 becomes the sort of really anchor moment for you in your entrepreneurial journey. Tell me a little bit about how did you come up with DNA11? What was your moments there of creation and brilliance?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I think really interesting breakthrough moment for me with DNA 11 was I had been, you know, I was in my early 30s by the time I launched that. I had spent my life as a high, high level advisor to a lot of big companies, started a few companies at that point. And I was feeling quite frankly, quite lost. And so I leaned into what my passion was at the time, which was creativity and art. And a weird moment for me is when I stopped chasing money. I said, you know what, if this thing fails, I can always move back into my mom's house. I won't be homeless. Like that's the mentality level. I can return the lease the car I can I'm willing to give it all up because now I'm chasing my passion I'm chasing something that I know I know needs to exist in the world right and so it's really funny and I've had this happen to me several times in my life is when I stopped chasing the dollars just the dollars where the opportunity is and chase what I'm passionate about real magic begins to happen so that was the first thing I did was I stopped chasing money and went after a big exciting vision something that got me up in the morning that I knew the world needed and then that was the beginning of DNA 11. That was the biggest shift that happened to me.

SPEAKER_01:

I really like that. That's interesting because, again, I keep trying to tie some of these themes back into the whole David versus Goliath. It's like the Goliaths are chasing money. They're chasing capital efficiency, return on investment, investor money. Like they're chasing this very numerical efficiency driven sort of thing. But what you're saying when you're starting off, if you don't chase the money, but you chase the idea, you chase the creativity, you chase the passion, it allows you to make different type of bets.

SPEAKER_02:

Different types of bets. And the other advantage you have as a small team is nimbleness. You know, your competitor could be the Titanic and you can be like a race boat or a jet ski, right? You can maneuver more quickly. And with the advent of AI, we all know that the efficiencies that we're going to see as startups over the next five years is going to be absolutely incredible. So it's never been a better time to be a startup ever in the history of mankind than now, right? Truly, yeah. So that's one, is you can outmaneuver the Goliaths, but yes, you can outpassion them. You're a small team, you're interacting hopefully as the founder, you're interacting with customers every day, you're able to see things in the market, change direction, innovate, launch new products at much faster speeds than your large entrenched competitors can do. And so there are some really huge advantages to being a startup and being more efficient and more nimble. Yeah. It's an amazing time to be a startup founder.

SPEAKER_01:

So, so here you are, you're willing to chase passion. How do you go to DNA art? How does that, how does that, like, where's the story that brings that up to the forefront

SPEAKER_02:

for you? I think when you hang out with different people and there's a lesson to be learned here with all sorts of founders is is hang out with scientists, hang out with artists, hang out with musicians, hang out with podcasters, hang out with authors. Because in that mix of having a community of different mindsets, that's where the real magic happens with connecting the dots and ideas that would normally never be connected. In our case, we took the idea of personalization, which was trending very much in the early 2000s, and the idea of art, and we added a layer of consumer genomics. We launched before 23andMe did. So we were very early in the space of consumer genomics. And by connecting these things that seem to have no obvious connection, we were able to create something super innovative. As Seth Godin would call it, a purple cow. Something that was so unique that people couldn't help but just talk about it. And it was the world's most personalized art made from a sample of your DNA. And that took off. That got attention. And we're still, even back then, we're in an attention economy. We've got a ton of PR, a ton of buzz, and the company took off from there. It's sometimes the craziest ideas are between the folds and connecting things that would otherwise never obviously be connected. And that happens by expanding your network and hanging out with different people that think

SPEAKER_01:

differently, right? Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I mean, in many ways you sort of said, I don't even want to fight a Goliath. I'm going to find, we're going to find something so different and so unique

SPEAKER_02:

that there's no, there was no one. There's a great book called play bigger, fantastic book, but in play bigger, it's about creating category Kings, creating your own category. Salesforce.com did this in a sense, right? There was no, they created the term, the cloud, right? CRM. They had a big thing saying no, you know, no software, no to software, yes to the cloud. And they were one of the first pioneers in the SaaS world by bringing CRM from enterprise into the cloud. They had a clear enemy at the time, which was all the other existing CRM players. And then they disrupted the space by creating their own category and becoming a category king. And that's what the book Play Biggers about ahead recommend that any startup founder read that book to understand what it's like from the gate to understand what new market you're going to create in a new position. It makes you way more powerful.

SPEAKER_01:

Definitely add that to the show notes and link out to it because I think that's a really good tool, a really good call out there. So you're building DNA11, you're having fun with it, you're doing some crazy marketing things with it, unconventional. What are some of the things that you do with it? What are some of the lessons you take away from it? Where's your journey throughout DNA11? Well,

SPEAKER_02:

D&A 11 was very, very hyper, hyper niche, right? As narrow as it gets. So something funny happened. We ramped up to a million dollars in revenue in our first year, but then we stayed at a million dollars a year. We were seven or eight people, and we were just... really hustling hard, working huge. I remember working 12, 15-hour days. No matter how hard we worked, it would only convert an X percentage, and only so many people would want to buy a piece of art from Personalized DNA. So I learned a couple lessons. One of them is TAM does matter, total addressable market. At some point, you can dominate a niche, get traction, but you need to find larger, more open markets to go after. So that was the first thing we started doing. It's like, okay, we've got this technology. We've got these printers. We've got this website. What else do we do with it. But the second thing we did is we didn't know what we didn't know. We were too deep in the forest. And so what we did, and this was a groundbreaking moment, and I think this is so critical for everybody listening to think about this, is we hired an executive coach. That man's name was Cameron Harold, which was a former CEO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK. And he helped change our lives because he was able to take myself and my co-founder at the time and get us to look in the mirror and see all the things that we were doing that we didn't know we were doing incorrectly. So he helped us scale the business. So Those two things, identifying a larger market once we already had traction and hiring an executive coach were absolute game changers for us and helping us take the company to the next level, which then we launched CanvasPop, which is the company we recently sold for over 30 times EBITDA multiples to a private equity firm. 30

SPEAKER_01:

times EBITDA multiples. Congratulations.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. An absolute outlier. They did a tremendous job in the sales process, which is one of the reasons I'm so passionate about exiting. If you exit right, you can take a business that maybe historically has three to five times EBITDA multiples, which is what we're seeing in typical e-commerce companies and especially services businesses. We were able to get 30 times multiples, and there's a lot of reasons for that. But yeah, there's a lot. to be said about having the right strategy and the right positioning before you sell your business. Yeah,

SPEAKER_01:

yeah. There's two things that come to mind here, Adrian, as you're saying this. One, I think I love that you give the call out to your executive coach because they allow you to pull you out of the day-to-day. You're so close. We're fish in water. We're so close to our own problems that we can't always see it. And sometimes you just need someone to pull you out and you go, oh my God, I know this, right? Like, oh my God, I see it. But I just couldn't get myself just away from it to look at it in the right way. I had a personal moment with that recently We hired an agency to help us with a few things. And even just like one of their executives helping us, I was like, oh my God, I know this. But the way you, yeah, you pulled me out of where I was stuck and I just needed that new insight. It was powerful. Now, Adrian, I've admired something that you've done here that I think is key for our entrepreneurs to also understand. You've also built with sale in mind, exit in mind. So when you scale leadership, a lot of founders are the bottlenecks in their own organization, their own companies. And so even if they want to one day try trying to sell their company, they're sort of too entrenched. They haven't built a scalable team or process or systems. But being the serial entrepreneur that you were, you probably learned that lesson early on, like how to build to sell. What are the elements of leadership or team and process that makes my company sellable? Any thoughts on that as you recently went through the CanvasPop shift and any thoughts that you took from DNA11 to CanvasPop that helped you understand how to make it more sellable with your executive coach?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think it's important to make a distinction that you You want to build your company so that it can be sold, but you don't want to build it to sell it. In other words, I see a lot of founders building this company. They're like, I'm going to build this, then I'm going to flip it to somebody, right? You've got to build it for the long term. But building your business so that it can be sold, which means your finances are clean, you have a clear market proposition, that you as the founder can leave the business and it can still run, those fundamentals are all critical towards building a great business anyway. For example, having SOPs, having a proper systems operating procedures and are using EOS or whatever system you choose is going to make your business run better regardless of whether you sell it. So your company from day one should be built so that it can sell, but you don't necessarily build it so that its main reason of existing is to flip it or sell it. So there's a distinction there. And so understanding that and building your company in such a way that it can be sold is just going to make your company run better regardless. And ultimately what you want to do is create a company that you don't even want to sell. It's generating so much profit. You enjoy the culture, the company is running so great that you don't even want to sell it. But if you do feel like you need to sell it, which are common reasons are burnout, you've hit a plateau, you don't know where to go with it, or the offers, your company is so great that the offers start coming in the door. Great companies are bought, not sold. So that's a great situation to be in, that you're in a position that you can sell it. And to be honest, we had to do a lot of work, especially my former co-founder, to prepare the company to be able to be sold because we had built it for so many years in operations mode and cash flow mode that when it came time to sell, we had to take a step back, we had to clean up the finances, even get rid of employees. It was a painful process. And by the way, myself included, I was fired from my own business. We had two co-founders making fairly large salaries that were replicated. And so there wasn't a need to have two co-founders doing the same thing, but it was the best thing that ever happened. So you just got to build a business so that it can be sold. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And now, you know, you touched on a few things here that I like. As a founder, some of the strengths that you have early on that allow you to be scrappy and to build are some of the same disadvantages as you scale, because you're sort of so good at being scrappy and nimble and running and have high intensity and go, go, go, that when you're building something that is more scalable, that's shifting, it's moving away from just the explore product market fits, but the scale, what were some of those lids for you? What were some areas that you hit your head a few too many times because of your own actual strength that you were so good at the early stages that near the end it was a lot harder for you. Yeah, I mean, everything.

SPEAKER_02:

So every single stage of the business was a new lid or a new ceiling. And so as a founder, you've got to decide, am I going to learn this and become good at something? Or am I going to find the right people to replace these roles? So at the beginning, if it's just you and your co-founder, you're each wearing four or five hats. And it's imperative, and this is the lesson I've learned this late in my career, is it's imperative that you bring in the people where your weaknesses are. You hire those people as soon as possible. as soon as you have market fit, of course, and bringing those people in to take over those roles so that you as a founder can focus on what you're naturally gifted at, what everybody tells you you're great at, what you feel you're great at. Because otherwise you're going to burn out. You're going to hit a bunch of ceilings. You're going to slow down your own growth. You're going to get in your own way. And so recognizing your strengths and weaknesses is absolutely paramount to any founder and replacing yourself as quickly as possible with people that are smarter than you, more experienced than you is the key to hyperscale and to growth without a doubt. And so for me, honestly, I don't love managing people. And how do you grow a company when you don't love managing people? Well, the answer is bring in a co-founder that is far into operations, understands how to hire, fire, scale. That's something I wish I did way, way, way sooner all my businesses. Myself as a founder, I recognize my strengths on the outside of the circle, promoting, marketing, raising capital, everything on the outside. On the inside, operations, finance, et cetera. It's not that I'm weak. I know how to do these things, but I don't enjoy it, and I'm not the best at it. So why not find people that want to join your team who are good at those trades?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So identify your zone of genius. Identify the things that you love, that you enjoy, and kind of double down on them because you're going to be phenomenal at those and build a team around that. Yeah. Too many people

SPEAKER_02:

try to hammer through this and say, well, I'm not good at finance, so I'm going to learn finance. I'm going to take a course at Harvard on finance. It's like, no, you're not good at numbers. Don't force yourself. There's a lot of people out there, CFAs and CFOs that would love to come work with you who will be ready that very quickly to help you scale. I've even met founders that decided to learn how to code, right? It's admirable to want to learn a new skill, but at what cost, right? Like it really depends where your priorities are. If growth is it, find people smarter than you, hire them, bring them in or partner with them as soon as possible.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think you said it at one point in in one of our pre-interview series. At 10 people, chaos is a feature. At 100, it's a liability. So as you start to scale that, where's your skill set in managing all those people? And what skill do you want to continue to actually grow? So should founders develop their management skills? You know, should they develop? What sort of, like you're saying, okay, some of them want to build projects. They want to learn to code. But what skills do they have to learn? What skills are still optional that you can replace out? Would you say every skill is hireable Or is there stuff that you say, you know what, as a founder, no matter what, you should still...

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I think as a founder, you should have the fundamentals of finance understood, right? Because you're going to come across that. You want to be able to talk to your CFO or your accountant in an intelligent way. You can't just say, I'm not a numbers guy. I don't understand finance. I'm not even going to look at it. So I think every great founder or let's talk about a CEO should definitely understand finance. A CEO definitely needs to understand hiring because all Ultimately, a CEO's job is to raise money, if you're in a venture environment, and hire people, right? And then the vision part is something you can't outsource. That's your job as a CEO. You have to have that vision, create that culture, and set your sights on your North Star and go, right? And so that's the one thing that, look, if you don't have vision and you don't have that, you can't really run a company. But other than that, I say understand finance as much as you're comfortable understanding. at least literate when it comes to finance and understand how to hire and fire because that's what you're going to be doing for the next decade. So you might as well develop those skills.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Yeah. How do you hold people to a certain standard? I think that's the hire and fire thing. It's like, you know, can you set pace and hold standard to your team, right?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Yeah. And setting pace is so critical, right? And so one of the other mistakes that I made in my career was how do you hold pace? I mean, building a business is a marathon and I would argue an ultra marathon and not a sprint. So I always talk about the marathon mentality. And the biggest thing I see founders, because I'm involved with a lot of very successful exited and pre-exited founders. The thing that I see is that founders often let go of their mental health and their physical health and push that to a later date. They're like, when I sell or when I get to this level, then I'll take care of my fitness. Then I'll take care of my mental health. The reality is if you want to run a marathon, you need to be in great shape. So it starts with physicality. taking care of your body, eating right, sleeping right. Without that, you have nothing. And then beyond that is getting your mind game right, because this is a marathon. And if you're only prepared for a sprint, you're going to burn out. I've experienced burnout. I've had business partners of mine experience chronic burnout, and it's an absolute killer. And so the first thing I would say to any founder is get ready for an ultra marathon. If you finish it in a marathon pace, great, but this is not a sprint. It's an ultra marathon, prepare your body and your mind because this is going to be a long trip.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. It's an ultra marathon. You got to pace yourself. We got to take care of our health. We got to take care of our, you know, and that's part of it. Like got to take care of the culture and the team. So sometimes when we talk about culture to some founders, you know, let's just, we're just building five. We're just building. I go, but culture is the, is the mental health of the team. Culture is the, it's the workout of the team. Does the team have relationships? Cause we've got to keep working with them for a long time. And so if we don't take care of those little things, those interactions, then, you know, I, I, We've seen a lot of founding teams fall apart and dysfunction at that level.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and if you as a founder are out of shape, you're tired, you're not present, they're looking up to you as a leader. And so it's imperative that the leader of the company lead by example. And you're not doing it out of vanity. You're doing it because you want to have the energy. You want to lead by example. And a leader needs to be there both 100% as much as they can with their health and with their mindset. And so that's what I encourage founders to do is focus on those two and the rest will take care of itself.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah,

SPEAKER_02:

I love that.

SPEAKER_01:

Good. So, Adrian, you're now DNA11 to CanvasPop. You grew the team, grew the company, fired yourself even to get ready for exiting. You established this amazing exit. And then you go off and say, I'm building millions of dollars. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. And then you also now build this network for exiting and helping founders exit. That's it. So you've gone through some crazy entrepreneurial journeys. You found some great success, but then you dive right back into the game and you play again. Tell me a little bit about what that takes, what that looks like. How are you playing the game now, the fourth or fifth time, maybe differently than the first few times you played the game?

SPEAKER_02:

That's a great question. I tried to take time off, right? And I actually took probably too much time off. A lot of my founder friends. One mistake a lot of exited founders do is they can't sit still and they get right back into the next startup within months. And I don't recommend that. If you're going to sell your business, have a significant liquidity event, I always recommend you take at least six months off. Go do some things for yourself. You know, life's long. Enjoy it. Prepare for the next thing. I took a little bit too much time off. I moved here to Tulum, Mexico, sat on the beach.

SPEAKER_01:

Your tan looks great.

SPEAKER_02:

My tan started, maybe got a little too much sun and just really just was lost for a while, but I use that time to try to figure out what's next. And so a little bit different on this is I do believe your pain is, is going to be something you want to lean into to create your, like your, your, the best way to describe it is if you have something that's created a lot of pain in your life, that could be your purpose, right? So your pain is your purpose. And in this case, when I was going through the exit process, there was very few people that I could talk to. If being a founder is lonely, being an exiting or exited founders, even lonelier, quite honestly. And And so I wanted to create something, a platform, where founders that are about to exit or thinking about exiting can join other exited founders on a peer-to-peer network and get battle-tested advice from other founders that have exited BIC, right? The way we say it is you want to identify the landmines and avoid those and find the gold mines and dig for those, right? And so sometimes advice from the right people at the right time can create not 1x, not 2x, not 5x, not 10x, but a 100x multiple And so I wanted to create a community and I wanted to create a place where we could connect post-exited founders with pre-exited founders. And that's what the exit group is. We meet with founders one-on-one. We also have a community. We also have free content with our podcast series that's launching. And so my mission is to make the exiting process as painless and as fun as possible and as profitable as possible. Founder to founder. founder.

SPEAKER_01:

And that's what we're doing.

SPEAKER_02:

That's really cool.

SPEAKER_01:

That's really cool. And how's it been going? What are some of the current successes? What are you enjoying about it? What's difficult about it?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, we're in the process of launching it right now. So what I did is I got right down to business, started recording over 14 hours of podcast content. We've interviewed Mark McCloud, former CFO of Shopify, one of the former Shopify founders, Daniel Wynan, who's a good friend of mine, Neil Patel. We have founders that have exited for over billions of dollars and some that have exited for$20 million. But what we're doing is we're getting those insights and sharing them for free with the world. The other thing we do, we have a few hundred signups even before we've launched all word of mouth. So people putting up their hand and saying, I'm interested in being part of this. And now we're in the process of just rolling it out. We're going to do a slow roll. The idea is to just create this community, one applicant at a time. It's quality over quantity. And we're really looking for founders that are looking to exit the next year to two years who are going to value being part of this now. And we know and we're extremely confident that we can create massive value for these founders at this critical time. So

SPEAKER_01:

that's our

SPEAKER_02:

mission.

SPEAKER_01:

when you're working with these founders, it's a peer-to-peer group, right? So they're learning from each other. What are some of the learnings you learned with CanvasPop as you went to 30 EBIT? What were some of the lessons you're hoping to pass on to the founders more than the like, you know, get your books right, get your lawyers right, get, you know, okay, we know that. What were some insights in going through that exit process emotionally as a founder after spending years building the company?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, we could do a two-hour podcast just on this. subject, but there's a few things that come to mind. I mean, the first one is exiting is not something you want to do in 60 days, right? You don't want to be reactive to the exit. If you think an exit is coming, it's something you want to typically start mentally and also physically as a company preparing for about two years before the actual event happens. There's a ton of stuff that can be done in that window that is going to make that exit so much more successful for you as a founder, right? The first thing we do is identify levers within the this thing business without changing anything. It's like, what are some things that we can change today that's going to have much larger impact by the time you're ready to exit, right? So those are all the technical things. You can launch new product categories. You can identify new product categories and not even launch them, but just say, look, if we did this, then we think revenue can do this. So there's a bunch of levers and those levers are absolutely critical. And so we help to identify and prioritize those. So that's one thing. The other thing is just preparing the founder himself or herself for what What's going to be on the other end? A lot of founders don't even think about what post-exit life is going to be like. What do you want to do when you exit with all that money, right? Have a clarity of what you want to do. Some people want to travel, but then what do you do after you're done traveling? So we encourage founders to start dreaming and thinking about what's next. Maybe it's a not-for-profit. Maybe it's you're going to write a book. Maybe you're going to create a foundation. Whatever it is, start dreaming and thinking about that now and even start laying down some of that early stage groundwork, not waiting until after the exit to do that. So those are some of the things that we do. And there's a whole bunch of other stuff. And the list is very long, but there's a bunch of tactical stuff around taxes, trusts. I mean, there's so much stuff. And that's why it takes two years to do it. You want to do it slowly in a fun and interactive way with people who have been there and done it.

SPEAKER_01:

It's fantastic. That's fantastic. Well, Adrian, you've shared a ton of really good insights and ideas to our founders here. Let's summarize some of it. If you were talking to your Twitter 27-year-old founder self and you go, hey, let's go for coffee. I want to share with you some of the shit that we're going to go through, some of the stuff that we're going to have. What are some wisdom you want to bestow? And what are some things that you might actually not want to tell them to let them experience it for themselves?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, that's excellent. Yeah, there are certain things that you just, I do it all the time when I go, they're going to have to see what I'm talking about to understand it, right? An example is money doesn't make you happy. That's just something you've got to do and make a lot of money and then go, see, you got five extra zeros in your account or seven extra zeros, 10 extra zeros. It doesn't make a difference. That is one of those examples of like, you hear people say it, money doesn't make you happy. And until it happens to you, you won't understand it. So, but on this- Because what's the internet response? I'll cry in my Lamborghini, right? Cry in my Lamborghini. So I understand that. But ultimately, that's one of the things you have to just experience for yourself. The other ones are fundamentals. I mean, one, be... really put a lot of thought about who you partner with, right? A co-founder, it's a marriage, man. And so you better understand who they are, like really know who they are, understand how they react when things go downhill as well as uphill, right? Because everybody's amazing when things are going this way. It's when shit hits the fan, what are they like? And that takes time to understand. So there's a bunch of rules that I have around co-founders. One of them is date for six months. Like don't just get into bed and say, okay, we're going to split 50-50. It's like spend six months building, working together, understanding your strengths before you commit equity, right? If you're going to commit equity, also use vesting schedules, like make sure you have vesting both for yourself and for your co-founder. So if one of them decides this is not for them, they don't walk away with 50% or whatever amount of equity in the business. So I see that a lot. The third one is don't try to reinvent the wheel when it comes to things like finance cap tables and founder agreements and things like that. This is not the area you want to be innovating in. There's amazing books, amazing lawyers, amazing advice. around creating cap tables and partnership agreements. Don't get cute. Don't get creative. Follow the advice that's out there. It could end up saving you, and listen carefully, hundreds of millions of dollars or millions of dollars. It could cost you millions of dollars if you do it incorrectly. So those are some of the fundamentals. I would say also that vision is very important. So with that in mind, when you find a great founder, and as you build your team, make sure you have a cohesive vision. Think big, as we talked about earlier. So have a big vision that people get excited about. Don't be afraid to think. big, bring in mentors. The number one thing I would say actually is if you're an early stage founder, even late stage founder is find advisors, find the best mentors. Don't listen to everybody. But if you find that 1% of person that knows it has been, can help you see around a corner, value that, bring that on board, having a proper advisory board, a mentor that you can lay on, that you can talk to is absolutely critical to hitting new levels, right? So those are the things I would say. I'd say find find mentors, find advisors, join a community of very like-minded people. Try to be the dumbest person in the room in those communities and grow with those communities. Those are some major cheat codes that I would tell 27-year-old Adrian. Yeah,

SPEAKER_01:

I love that. I love that. Well, folks, this was fun. Adrian, this was fun. You gave us a lot to play with. I'm taking notes and ideas. You've spurred my own inspiration here and thinking about my team too. So this has been a pleasure. Thank you for joining us on our Unicorn Leadership Podcast and any last thoughts for our audience hey you know what keep

SPEAKER_02:

building keep creating keep thinking big and just have fun it's a ultra marathon and anything is possible with the right team with the right vision so you know let's have fun with this and keep going

SPEAKER_01:

let's

SPEAKER_02:

have fun

SPEAKER_01:

let's keep playing the game and we'll run that ultra marathon that's awesome thank you Adrian and folks that's a wrap you made it to the end send us in any questions that you have any questions you might want to ask Adrian we can throw it his way Adrian where do people find you LinkedIn Instagram And what's the best way to connect with you? So I'm

SPEAKER_02:

on clarity.fm. If you go to clarity.fm, Adrian-Salmanovic, my last name, will include a link. I'm available and love giving founders advice. I've given literally hundreds and hundreds of founders advice on there. Some of them I ended up partnering with. Some I ended up investing into. And I'm always down to just connect with great founders and give advice. Come on, Clarity, and just ask me anything. I'm happy to help. Fantastic.