How to be successful with EVERY IDEA you have l Martin Warner

In this interview, Martin Warner reveals how an entrepreneur can launch numerous startups and succeed at all of them. Martin has founded 5+ startups across 4 different industries, and now he is teaching more than 250,000 entrepreneurs around the world! First of all, to be successful with every idea, you need to know if it's a good one! Martin will guide you on how to evaluate it. He also explains how to develop your company without losing control due to financial equity.

My name is Martin Warner. I'm British, I've lived in the US for about 25 years. I'm an entrepreneur, I'm an inventor, I'm an occational film producer, and I do a variety of different things. These days, I am predominantly an entrepreneur and I teach entrepreneurship.


I'll tell you what most people tell you: if you don't have something, you better go out and do something. But I would argue that as a somewhat slightly introverted character, I wanted to lead myself, take control of my destiny. I knew as a kid the things I did were important, or at least in my head I believed so much. If I built something, I thought, well, I could sell that. I thought to myself, let's find something that I really wanted to do.

Prescreening/ideation is a kind of buzzword for idea creation, validating everything before you start wasting time, money, and resources. This is a big part of the early startup.

Let's talk about the inspiration bit. Some people are born creative, some aren't. We can all get there. We get there by using our brain to say, look, I love this space. Let me jump into a community of other people talking about AI, and together we'll co-found something together. We come from the bottom with skills. This is great, there's nothing wrong with that. There are other ways to nurture rather than bring nature to get to the idea, but we must find a big idea to attach to it.

Recently, I was talking to a friend about generative AI, and I was thinking about the different applications of AI. I have a research lab, just about AI, and it happens in my eVTOL business. eVTOL, I believe, is one of the three main technologies over the next 20 years that are going to explode. Thinking about parcel delivery by air, what Walmart, Amazon, Google, and DHL are doing, it moved into the passenger vehicle market. Hence the industry has been called urban air mobility, the ability to be able to commute by air, to humanize travel. The idea is to imagine that New York, Paris, or London could put 2 million commuters in the air.

The next stage when I come up with those ideas, I decide if I'm going to pursue them. I journal a lot, so I have an ideas list. It's 1268. I try to cull them.

I think in pyramids, if you think about ideas, just three simple ways. One is it's broken, because you can't see the whole scope of the idea. You can't see the end, you know there's something there. Get rid of it, don't commit your mind to it, because if it's important, it will come back to me. If I've got an idea where I can see scope, I can see the end, the top of the pyramid, and I can see the foundation, but I can't see the middle, I write that down and then I categorize that idea.

Over time they interconnect. They form a life of their own in a particular category, like aviation, or AI, or entertainment, sports, or film. I'll decide I'm going to do something with the Cannes Film Festival, and then realize it affects a movie and a PR venture I'm going to do during the Cannes Film Festival. They started out as three different ideas. The whole goal is to invite people to appreciate and understand more of a diverse range of content for cinema. Indeed, I would argue the face of cinema is held in the independent film market, not the studio market.

What we do is we take award winning independent movies from film festivals around the world, and we acquire those licenses over five, seven, or ten years, just like Netflix or Hulu or Amazon would do. Then we place them on our streaming platform, Flix Premiere. That's the second one, I call them good ideas.

If it's a great idea, it means you must execute it straight away. You know where to start, you know the kind of resources it's going to take. You can see the end, and you are telling yourself, with a view of everything else that you have, that you must do that idea. This is very important in startups.

There's a lot you can do in fundraising. There's a lot of tricks, and then there's the way you engage with the investor. As you look at their portfolio, you look at the general competencies of that area, and you tell them why yours is better than someone else's for a particular reason. You take the meeting for a one-on-one sell, identify with something that's already there, and tell them you can improve it. That's what gets you in the door.

Today we've got something new in the industry: BotObjects ProDesk 3D. This is the world's first desktop sized full color 3D printer. BotObjects was not my greatest financial opportunity, but it's by far the most impressive in terms of what was happening. The Bot for robotics and Objects because you create something. We said Pro for professional, Desk because the 3D printer sat on the desk, and 3D. The product became the ProDesk 3D. In 17 months we proceeded on the basis that we thought that every home one day would have a 3D printer. It'd be like a microwave, you'd press a button and you'd create something that you want, you thought had utility.

We were creating a Lamborghini for a Mercedes price. The complexity of this: it was harder than building a PC. That 17 months had everything from aggressive competitors to distrusting media to a frenzied approach towards innovation.

In today's world, you can't build a business in 17 months and sell it for $50 million as easy as you could over 8 to 10 years amass a $1 billion valuation. There are a few reasons, but two big ones. One is that there are unproven scaling triggers, too early. The other is you have to accept that you are going to correct your decision making, either through trial and iteration or through failure, because of the speed you're moving at. That means you're going to take on an awful lot of risk and some very complex decisions, and it's likely to be a fast paced journey. That's what we did at BotObjects, where we invented full color 3D printing.

Most people build a great product, monetize it, get some good numbers, and they're a dynamic young entrepreneur learning, getting schooled by the venture capitalist or maybe an angel syndicate or whatever. But it's a little more complicated than that. I prefer to have as much control as possible. Do I want to take all the risk? No, no way.

I think very carefully: A, about the number of rounds. B, how much can I do in the beginning in terms of value creation, or what we might call asset accretion. How do I build and accrete the value of assets so that I get to a proof of concept or to the first round of monetization before then raising capital?

You have to try and do that for as little as possible, and you also have to do that even if that means saving up your money or using friends and family or whatever you're doing, without going and diluting your company too quick. The world is full of too many founders who dilute themselves out of a company, and even if it was to grow well, they're not going to have much of that company at the end.

As for the size, it's a very important question. Whether I just go and stay with a company? I think the company all depends on the initiative. Do I think I'm going to put aircraft in the air, or collaborate with Airbus or someone else? We'll have to wait and see, but those opportunities come. I think there's a lot of reward along the way.

Stay small as long as you can, don't give away as much of your company as you need to. Do as much as you can with as little resource, and reuse your assets.

There are different ways to develop a startup, and perhaps I would separate this as the construct of being two very different things in definition. One is what are the motivations for creating a company, and then what are the economic levers for doing that? These are routes to scale, but not to different kinds of businesses necessarily.

Perhaps the question is more interesting from a motivation perspective. What is a founder trying to do with a company, so we can create companies that change the world that are not about capital? That's why we have social capital, and intellectual property companies where we want to build. I focus on this: how do we build intellectual property that's valuable, that has a cause, has a reason to exist in life? There are good causes, there are organizations that have other economic levers that don't need to make profits, or they can be for-profit and doing good causes.

Companies that are less about the traditional idea of let's make it big or go home, because that doesn't change the world. It may be that someone develops something great about water salinization. These are great businesses that require a different set of resources to perform a worthwhile task.

There are connecting businesses, network businesses. These network businesses can be the biggest companies in the world, like Facebook, or they can be network businesses while being smaller companies. The film business, we can use Flix Premiere as an example of networking: what is a broken market of distribution, in order to ensure that all these movies get aggregated and therefore could be placed onto streaming platforms.

It's great we find founders that have all these different opportunities, and by doing that, they can achieve an economic lever that's different. They can save up with their own money, they can invite sweat capital, the idea that I ask you to come and work with me and I give you a piece of the outcome, the product or equity in the company for your skills. It may well be you'll take a bank loan, it might well be that you'll take donations, or you'll use another type of ancillary business advertising to fund content creation.

Entrepreneur seminar, just over 22.5 years, conveys my obsession with entrepreneurship and to teach students that want to learn from others. This gets me to a point: part of me is that I'm a teacher, I like to teach, and I've trained in different ways over the years. I have hugely fulfilled from teaching entrepreneurs, and I've also collaborated with a lot of those entrepreneurs. It's a great network.

I tell all entrepreneurs it's better to have tried than to have not tried at all. In other words, stop talking, start doing. That does not mean that everyone is going to be in business for themselves, but everyone deserves the right to try. That's the beauty of entrepreneurship.

I tell them this up front on the program: it's important that they do training with me, with someone else. I don't like a lot of the training out there, not because I won't put any training down, but it wasn't sufficient. It's why I built my program. People think they can learn just from things like YouTube.

I think YouTube is fantastic, but there's more substance in what I coach young people. I was already getting old, I already had a lot of success and a lot of challenges. We still need substance, we still need to know what underpins the theory of selling, what underpins marketing, what underpins fundraising. Because that never changes.

I teach my team the step diagram. How do you set up your company and stop? How do you set it up ready to exit? That could be five years away, and then do no more.

Now start building. How do you monetize customers? How do you reuse your assets? How do you stop when you know you've solved the problem, and go on to solve another one? This is really important.

If I can empower more entrepreneurs, I can empower more innovations. Therefore, I think the world can become a better place.