Dar Stormson has built and sold three companies. He also thinks 9 out of 10 businesses fail. And that the ones that don't fail often end up somewhere worse: the lukewarm zone where they don't quite fail and don't quite succeed and just slowly eat away at the owner until they burn out or give up.
Dar is the founder of Størmson Consulting and Stormson Capital. He started his first company at 14, got kicked out of school for 52% absence, then ended up teaching his own class. Since then he's built, scaled and sold multiple companies including Kaplock, the encrypted coat-lock startup that scaled from an attic in Breda to millions in funding.
In this conversation we get into the actual playbook that the top 10% follow, which almost nobody else knows. We talk about why you should stay in bed instead of writing code, the "four gear wheels" that turn a startup into a self-running organization, how it actually feels to exit a company for millions, the day he chose to reinvest every single euro to save his team, and why he thinks the biggest tragedy in business is entrepreneurs who don't know when to quit.
In this episode:
- Why 9 out of 10 businesses fail (and the sadder fate of the ones that survive)
- The counterintuitive way to find a million dollar idea without writing a single line of code
- The story of getting kicked out of school at 14 and building his first company
- The 4 gear wheels of a scalable organization: goals, processes, teams, dashboards
- What "collective intelligence" is and why Silicon Valley uses it
- How it actually feels to exit a company (and why the first one didn't feel real)
- The negotiation tactics every founder should know before signing anything
- Stormson Capital: his new fund and community for entrepreneurs
- What 15 years of entrepreneurship has actually cost him
- What he'd tell 16 year old Dar if he walked in the room today
Chapters:
00:00 Why 9 out of 10 businesses fail
04:00 Inner Academy: getting kicked out of school at 14
14:00 The counterintuitive way to find a million dollar idea
19:00 Kaplock: from stolen jackets to a scaled business
28:00 The 4 gear wheels of a scalable organization
36:00 The Silicon Valley method: collective intelligence
51:00 How exiting a company actually feels
54:00 The day he chose team over cash
1:00:00 Negotiation tactics every founder should know
1:06:00 Stormson Capital: his new fund and community
1:12:00 What entrepreneurship really costs you
1:19:00 How to deal with failure and stress
1:24:00 What he'd tell 16 year old Dar
1:27:50 The final SMS: "Give it a try"
Follow Dar:
https://www.instagram.com/darstormson/
Follow Me:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themarcusengel/
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