Episode 58: The Secret To Building And Scaling Multiple Businesses With Michael Peres

Podcast

Nov 1

Would you like to know the secrets of success from an entrepreneur that has successfully launched 5 startups, and travels the world full-time so he does what he wants when he wants? Creating a life of limitless choices is possible, and our guest today will give us an insight into how he did it.

Michael Peres (Mikey Peres) is a serial entrepreneur, software engineer, journalist, author, and radio host best known for founding various technology, media, and news startups.

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The Secret To Building And Scaling Multiple Businesses With Michael Peres

Would you like to know the secrets of success from an entrepreneur that has successfully launched five startups and travels the world full-time so he can do what he wants when he wants? Creating a life of limitless choice is possible. Our guest will give us an insight into how he did it at such a young age. Michael Peres or as his friends call him, Mikey, is a serial entrepreneur, software engineer, journalist, author and radio host, best known for founding various technology, media and news startups.

As a regular contributor to reputable news publications such as Entrepreneur and Times of Israel, Peres leverages his experience to advise inspiring entrepreneurs in developing the mindset to build, grow and scale successful businesses. With respect to corporations, Peres has developed a reputation for building and preparing news publications for early-stage funding. Peres resides in Seattle, Washington, and is the Chief Editor of Peres Daily, breaking 9:00 to 5:00 and Israel Now News. Welcome to the show, Michael. How are you doing?

Thank you, Anand. It's a pleasure to be on your show. Thank you for having me and I'm doing great.

I'm so excited to get into learning about you and having our audience learn everything they can from such an accomplished entrepreneur. We were introduced by a mutual friend. I don't know too much about your story, but I’m excited to dig deep into it. To start off, usually, I ask my guest, what does living a limitless life mean to you?

To me, at least, it means that there's a constant lack of complacency. I know limitless sounds like amazing but at the same time, you also never want to get comfortable because there's always something beyond your current horizon. What it means to me today is likely going to be very different from what it means to me tomorrow.

Living in the present moment is so valuable. On a much higher level, it's a spiritual way of living but I know you have so many different things you're working on that you have to be present. You can't be single-focused. Let's get into your background and tell me a little bit about how you became Michael Peres in this day and age, and all the things you've accomplished.

Honestly, the more I get asked these questions and the more I do retrospection, the more I come to realize that my defining moments are out of the toughest ones. You don't even realize it once you go through it or even once you're out of it. When you try to dig deeper into your own psyche and figure out where some of these characteristics or traits that you have come from or where did they develop, they likely developed from childhood. To answer your question, a lot of my mentality in terms of my grit, my persistence, and my lack of complacency did come from my early days, as early as elementary school.

Tell us a little bit about that.

In my very early days, I was diagnosed with ADHD, alongside other learning disabilities. It came with a whole bunch of stuff, so I had to take Ritalin, the slow-release and strongest dose at the time. I'm not sure but it was either 120 or 90 milligrams. For some people, it worked well. For me, it didn't. I had heart palpitations. I felt cold. There was depression. My body would be dying for food. My brain would be like, "You're fine." You'd almost be in this zombie-like state. At first, my school thought and my parents also thought that I was making it up to come home.

My mom slipped it into my food one morning. She said, "You're not taking it today." She put it in my food and I came home that very day not feeling well. She's like, “I got to start taking this guy seriously.” In any regard, as much as I went through a lot of troubles, the silver lining was significant. It superseded all the problems that I had experienced. The silver lining was that when it worked, it gave me a frame of reference. It's like shooting a dart in the dark. You'd miss all the time, but when you hit, you hit.

Whatever variables that it was affecting just all lined properly. I was focused like never before. To be honest, that understanding of what it means where nothing else matters and all this background noise that for some people is truly subconscious, for ADHD folks, it's a little more conscious. To have that dissipate and be aware of it was a true epiphany when I experienced it. It's hard for us to realize what we should be when we don't have that experience. Once I got that experience, I'm like, “I have a milestone I want to work toward.”

As I started to progress in my education and I left the childhood structure of having everything spoon-fed to me, I started to do things more or less. That's how it works. When you're in elementary school, you're forced to do a very standardized curriculum but as you progress, you start to hone in on your very specific areas of interest. As I started doing that, I started seeing this very interesting version where I wasn't designed for the schooling system at all. The things that the schooling system at the very onset would reward you for were things I wasn't very good at. I wasn't organized. I didn't come on time. I didn't have that inherent structure that teachers looked for.

Even more so, I had very strong learning disabilities in English and Mathematics. When the teacher would come in, I had to go to the stupid room, where the kids would have to get private attention in Math and English. There was almost a sense of humiliation that came with having ADHD, let alone having a learning disability. I would have to go to the office to take my pill. The teacher would have to put it in my mouth, and it was right in the hallway where all the students would see. Every time this Math teacher would come in, I'd have to go upstairs to a program called Gemm. This was in a Montreal Jewish upbringing school.

The stigma that came with it coupled with the fact that I wasn't getting a standard secular education like your average child was, I was going through this very religious process, put me at a whole bunch of setbacks. When I started to progress forward into college, I realized that I am so behind. It was crazy. It was all these problems of having learning disabilities, being in this very non-secular upbringing, and then coming to college being miles behind everyone else, that would break people down. Even in elementary school and towards high school, I started realizing that the things I'm told don't always work best for me, but I do see those work well for other people.

People with learning disabilities have a problem with being in this non-secular upbringing. Coming to college and being miles behind everyone else actually breaks them down.

I then tried taking these tiny divergencies where I would do something slightly different than I should. I'd be like, “This works for me better than it works for this guy.” I would then double down and double down. To answer your question in a bigger picture, when you zoom out, that's what being an entrepreneur is all about. It's about taking very strong risks for a sustained period of time, and having the ability to weather that process. It comes with an element of confidence to know that you'll get through. When we segue into talking about serial entrepreneurship, you'll see how that even translates to another level. This is a recursive concept.

When I started taking these at a very early age, I started taking these tiny risks and then getting confidence. When you look back and you see this track record that these things work out, then you take bigger risks. It took me years to put this in perspective. Now, when I come to college and we are supposed to do Calculus 1 and I can barely do Algebra, I'm at a huge setback. I got to start being extremely creative in a very short period of time in order for me to catch up because it was just a few months before my grades come in. I was in a program where you couldn't fail any courses. My first degree was in Computer Science. If you failed a single course, you’re out of the program.

The fail rate inherently was extremely high. For the first semester, it was about 75%. I wouldn't make it until the next semester. That was a very tough time for me. That was the first time where I had to suffer. It was a lot of work but eventually, you fall in love with that pain. You almost miss it when you look back and you're like, "It is crazy how much I can do in such a short period of time.” I had to teach myself Algebra, Trigonometry, and all these complex concepts that I didn't necessarily have any exposure to before, and then I had a private tutor. I would get familiar with all the concepts of Calculus and whatnot. Getting a decent grade on my first exam was very uplifting. I think that's where my deep confidence comes from. It's a very long answer.

There are so many things to unpack here. First of all, in our school system, Math and English are our SATs essentially. I think they've changed it since I was in school. Basically, if you take this SAT, it would be the same thing, and you have two different scores, Math and English scores. If you weren't good at either or one, then you wouldn't get a high SAT score. You couldn't get into a good college. Just because you weren't good at two certain skills where there are thousands of skill sets out there in the world, you are labeled in such a way that you're not intelligent or we're not good enough for this particular system.

Secondly, the fact that you understood, “I'm a little bit different and let me diverge and take a different path,” takes a lot of courage, especially at a young age and with your upbringing because you had an ADHD diagnosis. You were taking medicine, and then you were at a non-secular school. You had to go through a lot of fires in your life, and that's what led you to become this strong confident person. It is because those things didn't break you down.

Any one of those things could have turned off a kid from learning or from even trying to be ambitious in life. A lot of people will then understand, “I have a problem. I'm going to play small. That's going to be my safe zone.” The fact that you pulled out of that, that's the magic of who you are. As you were saying at the beginning, the biggest obstacles in your life turned out to be the biggest blessings.

Necessity is the mother of all invention. I can't even take credit for this behavior. I didn't have a choice in order for me to survive within the system I was given. Back to your point about SATs, it's true because we live in an economy where having generalized skills doesn't get you very far. Having specialized skills is crucial for your success. The problem with these standardized tests is that they put you on this very broad benchmark where you don't necessarily have to be a good writer to be an amazing rocket scientist.

If your math skills are exceptional but your writing isn't exceptional, that shouldn't be something that's seen in isolation. I agree with that. I took my SAT. I have to say that the things that scared me the most, writing and mathematics, were the things I fell in love with and I majored in. I didn't major in writing but I do write now quite a bit. I majored in Mathematics as well. In fact, it was that structured thinking that held me back.

When I got to college, I realized that listening to a teacher talk for an hour and a half wasn't working for me. After ten minutes, I go crazy. This is another example where I got nothing against the schooling system. If you ask me, did the schooling system work for me? It’s a flat-out no. That's fine. I got a critique of it but I don't know how I would make it better because it does work for a lot of people.

That all being said, I learned how to work with it. Instead of going to class, I would make good friends who are in my courses. I would take their notes and essentially reverse engineer the course at each time. The thing about smart teachers is that they make their course load very much connected in terms of weight to how they created an exam.

Secrets Of Success: The thing about really smart teachers is that they make their course load very much connected in terms of weight to how they create an exam.

Smart teachers as well have deeper meanings in every question they ask. In mathematics, you'll have the same concept but they will just do some slight variation. There's a mechanic in there they want you to pick up on. The point I'm trying to make here is when I started looking at my friends' notes and learning the courses, I moved away from all the noise and all the wasted time that comes with being in a classroom setting. I ended up getting a lot more output for my time.

As the courses got harder, there was less of this structure that held me back in my early days. When you're doing advanced courses in Math, teachers don't have time to lecture and talk about your day and tell you to come on time. They don't care about that. They've got their grad students that they're working with. They send you the syllabus the exam is coming from.

As the courses got harder, my colleagues were complaining that the courses were becoming harder. They were complaining about the teachers. I'm like, “I don't care. For me, this feels easier and easier.” At some point, I had a strong sense of mastery of education coming out of all of it because I ended up focusing on what was the most important.

When you were younger, you had a lot of love for software engineering and stuff. Did you find that helped you and gave you the bones of your method for learning technologies or different subjects?

My room was my sanctuary very much so. We lived in a big house in Montreal, fortunately. I lived on the top floor, so I was very much isolated. I grew up in a family of nine siblings. I was one of nine. Even then, my mom would put my dinner by my door and I would come to pick it up. I would build computers in my room. I would learn how to do all this stuff. I found what I loved and I stayed there. That's that part of me that may be what has created this very introverted personality. It was because I was very happy in my alone space.

Although I didn't enjoy the very much religious upbringing, I had a place where I felt I can grow and do science on my own because my community didn't necessarily reward this way of thinking too much. I held onto it now. I certainly wanted to become a software engineer. In a way, I was lucky because I knew exactly what I wanted to do very early on. The funny thing is that I came to discover what I love about computer science is it’s more a subset of something great.

I don't even consider myself a programmer now as much as I spend over a decade programming. I would consider myself someone who enjoys leveraging computer science to express himself effectively in science. I do think that computer science was the greatest tool, but what I love is far deeper. I'm sure we'll get into that.

Now coming out of college, did you know immediately you wanted to be an entrepreneur or did you find maybe you wanted to go a different route, a safer route?

I already knew that I do not work within these old-age systems of working for a company from 9:00 to 5:00 in a cubicle, coming to class and the structure. Very early on, there was no illusion of an option. I knew that I would have to make my own path. Especially, since I already was. I was building computers for everyone in my community. I was fixing 150 computers every term for my entire high school for the boy's division and a completely different school for the girls’ division. I already had this entrepreneurial spirit as a technician.

What was your first entryway into business ownership?

As early as elementary school, I had set up my house to become a computer shop where everyone would drop off their computers. I'd be like, "Give me a week," and then they'd come to pick it up. I would remove the virus. I would fix the computer. I would do the data recovery. I did try to do the 9:00 to 5:00. I worked for a company called Chabad.org, where I built their mobile apps. I loved it. It was a very good time. It's the biggest Jewish organization out there.

It was a great experience but it consolidated my mindset that building your own situation is where you're happier. To reach out to the audience, I will say that I've created the model breaking 9:00 to 5:00. I don't necessarily think that's a better model. It comes down to the person. I would never convince someone who enjoys that structure to get out of it. There are people out there who truly enjoy working from 9:00 to 5:00.

Do you know those guys you message on a Friday afternoon and they go, "I don't have my work email with me. I'll respond to you Monday morning?” That is a foreign concept to me. I don't understand it. It doesn't make any sense to me, but people like that structure. They like to know that from 9:00 to 5:00, they work. They come home and kick it back. They've got that stability, vacations, wine, watch the game, and enjoy their life. This is where I don't take credit, good or bad, for my personality. I do think deep down, it's how we're wired. There's no reason why I wake up every morning and I'm willing to engage with this process because it's a very long-term investment.

If that lifestyle doesn't make you happy, there's no reason for it. You don't enjoy pursuing someone else's dream. You almost feel like getting a job is like a price to sell your own aspirations. People who do feel that way, then I go, “We got a whole lot to talk about,” but it truly is not one that's better than the other. It's truly not a choice. You might not be happy with what you're in but it isn't a choice to me.

If a lifestyle doesn't make you happy, there’s no reason for you to do it. You can’t enjoy pursuing someone else's dream.

I love the way that you say you're selling your ambitions for the safety of having that comfort of the job. Let's speak to the ones that do want to exit that 9:00 to 5:00 and go into entrepreneurship or going towards their purpose. What can you offer them in terms of your experience and how they can go about that?

I enjoy this conversation. First and foremost, if you do find yourself stuck in a job you don't truly love, it's extremely hard to get out of it. You've been structured where there's no survival mechanism to leave the job. A lot of us are month-to-month. Also, it can take you 4 or 5 years to start getting real income. It’s generally less but it could take you that long. There's no platform where you can just quit your job and move forward.

I argue there is. I call it the survival cost problem. I talk about it in some of my columns. I think the first thing to do is to realize that when you graduate college, you've been sold into a trap essentially, where you're lured in with all these benefits to work for these big tech companies. I'm assuming you're in computer science or software engineering but it applies to truly anything. You look at what the economy's offering. This engineering job is offering this much money. It almost makes no sense when you have a starting salary of $120,000 to go and make $25,000 for your first year while you're working four times harder than everyone else.

It's about the model you subscribe to. When you subscribe to linear models, for example, when you work for Google, as good a job and as smart as you have to be to work at Google, you grow with the company but you grow in a linear fashion. Eventually, you hit this tenure and you taper off. If you're trying to make millions and millions of dollars, there are very few people at Google who do that. You'll have a very comfortable salary of $450,000 or $500,000 but after that, it goes flat. When you're subscribing to an exponential model, you make very little with a lot of energy, but you got to have that grit.

We're talking about entrepreneurship earlier on. You got to be able to weather that storm because you want to hit that inflection point. When that inflection point happens, you look back and go, “I get it.” That could take a few years. The first thing you want to do is remove your dependency on your current job. These are very simple questions you need to ask yourself. How much do you want success? How much do you want to have a job you truly love? Do you love it more than your current department? Do you love it more than parting on the weekends? Do you love it more than going to a restaurant five times a week? These are artificial costs.

Even if you think about it, when you move to Silicon Valley, your rent is ten times more than it should be. You've artificially propped up all these costs you need to survive. Now, you're trapped to keep a job you don't want to. If you want to take control of your own future and start your own company, are you willing to move back into your mom's for a year? You don't look very cool with your friends and your girlfriend. What are you willing to give up to get it?

Secrets Of Success: We all want to be successful, but that's not the right question to ask. The right question is, what are you willing to give up to get it?

We all want to be successful. That's not the right question to ask. The right question to ask is, what are you willing to give up to get it? If you're willing to move back into your parents for a year, if you're willing to learn, finish your job at 5:30, and come home at 6:30, you have five solid hours to start honing a new skill. You have the world at your fingertips with the internet. You have no excuse anymore. You can become a programmer in six months. You can take a bootcamp session. You can spend two hours a night. You can give up your weekends.

You can also remove your costs of survival. You can move in with your parents, and save a ton on rent. You can start making your own food, and save a ton on food. This way, you can create savings that give you more headway once you quit your job. You can also remove what's keeping you a prisoner essentially in your current job.

Let's say your survival costs now are $2,000 a month which you need to sustain your lifestyle. You can likely move that down than a few hundred. Plus your savings, you give yourself a good six months gap where you could quit your job and have a very rough time, but then you head down to a place where you're much happy. In the long run, you're getting a lot more energy. That's a lot more return on your energy. That's how I look at it. Even when you're in the scaling space, it's all about how much you get back for what you put in. When you do have your scope calibrated correctly, you do start to focus on endeavors that give you a whole lot of ROI.

It's all about the commitment and how badly you want to live that next phase of the chapter rather than staying where you are. You have to reduce your costs and make a detailed analysis because even just buying coffee every single day drains your wallet over time. The other aspect is time efficiency. You don't realize how much time we spend on social media, how much we scroll, how much we watch TV or whatever. In order to have that commitment to living a better life, you have to think about, “Where is my time going?” That's on the side of, “I need to eliminate stuff,” but then also there's the phenomenon of net time.

When you're driving or commuting to work, you can be listening to podcasts in the fields that you want to get into or reading. You don't have to listen to music or listen to podcasts about celebrity gossip or whatever. There are so many ways to do it. Gary Vee talks about this. Start a side hustle and learn your lessons then. Make the mistakes that you need to while you have the security of the 9:00 to 5:00 pay.

At some point, it's like two acrobats. They are on a perch then they have to jump. They have to catch each other. At some point, you have to let go of the previous rod, and then get onto the next one. There's always going to be that risk factor that you're going to hit, but if you can minimize the risks, that's when you can do it in the most efficient positive way.

I want to add to what you said about going to work and stuff like that. You don't even think that's a problem. It comes back to my ADHD, where I stopped fighting my problems. I started to learn how to weaponize them to my advantage. If I can't focus on one task, that's fine. I try to master the art of multitasking. Instead of listening to music, I listen to a podcast while I code two different sites, and while I check emails. I find that healthy middle ground where I don't fight the stream but I work with it. I agree that there's so much we can do. We have so much more time than we believe we do. I couldn't agree more.

There's so much we can do, and we have so much more time than we believe we do.

During weekends, instead of watching eight hours of football that most people do, it's important to be a little bit more mindful of that. I want to get into learning a little bit about you own several different businesses. The first time you were able to build a company and hit that inflection point, what did you learn from that experience? How did you apply it to the next businesses that you started?

The problem with humans is that they like to stick with what they're comfortable with. You find this area of expertise and you've mastered a certain set of skills. It becomes very hard to venture outwards because you're back to a student again. People generally don't like putting on that student cap. I think you become very comfortable putting on that student cap. This especially applies to the world of intangibles of zeros and ones.

When you're in computer science, you'll spend six months learning a language. You're learning PHP. You finally get some mastery of that. Before you know it, all these frameworks are now running JavaScript, and you got to start chasing JavaScript. You learn this specific JavaScript framework, then you have this new JavaScript framework. The moment you get complacent and comfortable, that's the moment you start to fall behind.

It's this perfect art of not doing too much of everything, honing in and mastering a set of skills, and then when you see these patterns repeating, you push outwards. You take these surrounding services, and then you push outwards. You look back and you realize you have all these isolated services you now offer. To get specific here, I started doing web development and building websites. I wasn't even a designer. I was just a developer, then I started realizing, “Why don't I start doing better designs in CSS? I don't need to have someone.”

Back at the time when Photoshop was what you would first do. You'd Photoshop the site. You'd slice it and then you develop it. I started realizing sometimes I'm correcting the designer and I'm giving him design tips. Maybe I'm not as bad as a designer as I thought I was, but then I realized I'm a good designer. I said, “I can do full. I'm full stack. I can do full-out websites.” Every time I had a client, they go, “What about digital marketing? What about hosting?” I go, “I don't do that stuff. You can use this hosting provider and you can use this marketing team.”

I'm looking down on these problems. Although I'm a computer scientist, why don't I learn data communication? I have a data communication junior degree from college, why don't I leverage that? I then started building my own servers. The way I try to work here is that I oscillate between 80% work, and 20% R&D, research and development. I go through phases where I'm 80% R&D and 20% working to keep things sustainable.

When I'm in learning mode, I am down in the bunker and I am completely learning a new set of skills. That can go on from between 1 to 4 to 5 months, depending on the situation. I have these sets of skills that I've mastered, and then I move them back and create internal infrastructure for them. We have team members and I find all the hires. In everything we do as a company, I have to have a very strong understanding so that I can deal with emergency situations effectively, but I can also operate as an effective leader.

I know we're broadening the conversation here but the underlying secret here is even if you see a lot of monetary success in a specific area, SOP it. Find out where you're truly exceptional and needed within the system and delegate everything else. Usually, it's a very small amount of work that you cannot be replaced in and with everything else, you can. Find team members who are good and match the culture of your company, and delegate.

You realize you have all this capital. Go to the research phase, learn new skills, and bring them back into the system. Before you know it, you are engaging in serial entrepreneurship. The way it works is that you isolate these services and you broaden them out. It's more of an inevitable byproduct of how I function as a person. One thing I cannot do is whenever I see myself doing the same thing over and over again, I get very uncomfortable. Do you know why? It’s because I remember how much I used to learn in college when I felt so behind, and I had so much to do in such a short period of time.

That gave me a huge amount of introspection of what I'm truly capable of. The second I don't get that spark that I'm maximizing that or that I'm utilizing that potential whatsoever, I realize that I'm losing out. It's not all about money. It's about skills because I look at money as a byproduct of doing something exceptional. Money is a byproduct of stellar service. When you focus too much on money, that's a trap for college students. We go out and look at, “What's the economy paying?” These are your most important years where you have to master an exceptional set of skills. When you do something truly unique that you truly love, money is inevitable.

Secrets Of Success: It's not about money; it's about skills. Money is a byproduct of doing something exceptional.

It's a byproduct of success and phenomenal service. Thank you for that insight because as a small business owner, in the past, I spent so much time trying to wear all the hats in the company and not being able to be good at delegation. At the time, I was running around feeling completely drained and not doing any particular aspect of the business phenomenally well. As I started realizing that you can't do everything yourself, you're going to burn yourself out, and you're not going to be passionate about what you do, then you have to start delegating.

That's a trap a lot of small business owners start with. In order to scale into a big business owner, you cannot do everything yourself. It's impossible for you to do that. It’s finding the right team members to run the operations of the business that you don't have an interest in or are willing to learn the skillsets to do. How do you go about finding a great team? What is your process for delegation?

To add to what you're saying, it comes down to that scalability factor where a lot of things creep up on you in a very interesting way. You feel like you do have some grip on scalability when you bring your company up from 1 employee to 5 employees. Even when you go from 5 employees to 7, 8 or 9 employees. It doesn't feel that different. You can still use your current system and everything works fine.

You get this weird place where you start adding a few more employees, and you get a few more clients. You realize your whole system is collapsing. You're like, “How did this happen? This is crazy.” You have this exponential effect where you have these tiny little inefficiencies that you can easily work around, that you can easily brute force your way through them in the onset.

When you have a bigger team, these things become exponentially more compounded. You have this question, do I optimize this current infrastructure? Which is so much easier than the other option of completely tearing it down and rebuilding. In order to see real success, you have to remove that inherent bias to want to do less work to continue. I call it digital pyromania. It’s completely being okay with ripping everything down in your online infrastructure and rebuilding.

Hiring talent is one thing and we'll talk about that in a moment. Also, your internal infrastructure is equally important. When you start realizing that there are patterns to what you do, everything that I do now, I SOP it. I put it in a 1, 2 or 3 set of skills. Anytime I try to explain something to one person, I create it in a way that I can repurpose it because I don't know if this employee is going to come for a week or a month or two years. At the same time, I'm going to have to tell it to someone again. I want to make sure the time I take to explain information or to onboard an employee has the least amount of work that goes wasted on that specific employee, and the most amount of work that I can repurpose and reuse.

This takes months to figure out. You want to set up your internal infrastructure. Do you want to use Slack? Do you want to use Notion? Do you want to use Monday? There are tons of project management tools. Finding the one that's perfect for you can be very annoying because you can find yourself invested. I used Click Up. Everyone said Click Up is the best and it's great.

I spend a ton of time building our initial company on Click Up, and then I realized, "There's a ceiling here," and I find myself preferring not to use Click Up. I realized Notion is the absolute king for us. It took me a month to move everything over. I spent two months building our Click Up. It’s a waste of time, but not really. It's about growth. Click Up worked at the time. It clearly had its limitations within our current culture. Internal infrastructure and getting the right tools take a lot of time. Start watching YouTube videos where they compare one project management tool to another. You get a credible amount of insight in a few minutes. That's the first thing.

The second thing here is to SOP your stuff. Create tasks that are very actionable and clear so you can easily start hiring new people and you can scale your hiring process because hiring is a real pain. Now, find talent but there are twofold here. It's the talent that's crucial but it's also someone that maps your internal company culture. If you've got a very soft-spoken internal process where everyone is super polite, I call it a bit of fluffiness in my opinion. For many people, I see companies thrive under that condition.

In our company, we're a lot more pragmatic. We're a lot more blunt. We're a lot more business-oriented. We're not super emotional. We love each other and we respect each other but at the same time, we're blunt when we see a problem. That's the mentality we have. I don't want you to care about my feelings if I'm not doing something right. I don't want you to intentionally try to hurt my feelings, but I do want you to tell me in a way that sends the message in the most effective way possible. I want to find employees who have that mentality because then my communication with them can be super-efficient.

I don't want you to try to hurt my feelings intentionally, but I do want you to tell me in a way that sends the message in the most effective way possible.

Also, here's the thing. I'm in the digital world. Companies work from 9:00 to 5:00. We designed our system to work 24 hours a day. When I go to sleep, my team members know where to pick up from. They know how to continue communication. Not only am I efficient but at the same time, I'm doing three times more. People work eight hours a day. We work 24 hours a day and we get a whole lot more time. We've got this edge over our competitors, which is very interesting.

To come back to this survival point here, what I find interesting is people run away from being poor. No one wants to be poor, but I think being poor is the best optimizing tool. When I was starting out and couldn't afford anything, I had to be super efficient with the people I work with. I look at it this way with the battle between Intel and the new Apple chips where Intel is falling behind significantly so. They're not able to compete in the processing space where they've been only involved in it for years and you have Apple completely taking over.

Why? Intel started with a very brute force, super high power, and then said, "How do we optimize from here?" Apple said, "I want to come up with something extremely lightweight.” Our phone or the processors that power my MacBook is an optimized version of a processor that is used to power my phone. They've taken these extremely lightweight. They've become extremely efficient with them, then they built on that very efficient foundation.

I look at that very similar to business. When you have no resources and you have someone who brute forces you with a whole lot of funding, you're not likely going to get the same yield with that money then you would if you have almost no money, and you need to find the best talent at the best price. You don't want to be starving too much because you might end up dying instead of breaking out. It's about eventually pushing up to that middle ground.

That all being said, starting off very small and learning how to get the most yield with the least amount of resources is a very good carving point. When you hire, you got to be patient. This is the key to hiring. I can't tell you how many people we go through until we find a single good hire. It is so difficult. I put all these tripwires in our job applications. I ask questions that give me insight that almost seem meaningless, but they mean a lot to me.

I'll give you an example. When I'm hiring abroad, one of the biggest issues is communication. I can find software engineers all over the world. Even if they're fluent in English, they're not necessarily fluent in American English. I know that sounds weird but it translates. The countries, for example, like the Philippines. When you find someone fluent in English, there's an element that fits well because their English has almost an American touch. They use the same lingo. You understand each other very well. You can speak English in a country like Pakistan. You can speak fluent English in Pakistan. However, the way you word things is slightly different and that can sometimes create miscommunication.

It's not about being a good software engineer. It's also about having good communication skills. I can teach programming on the job. It's not a big problem. What I can't teach is communication. It's very hard for me to teach communication. When I'm looking to hire, I would 10X hire someone with good communication skills who's a bit of an amateur, than hire a ten-year veteran who I'm going to have all these communications with because I'll be scared to send them clients. Clients are not going to understand each other. There's going to be friction. They're going to want me to come in.

The real value that the people you hire offer, if you think of this a little more abstractly, is not that they do services for you. It's that they allow you to only focus on what you truly do that's valuable. At the highest level, I want to be using all my time to do things that are irreplaceable in terms of what makes me unique and why my company thrives as a very specific vision. I'm extremely fond of letting people do their own work. I respect the technical process. I give people their work and I also people to let me do the way I do things at a very high level too.

All that being said, to circle back here, you have to be extremely patient. You don't want to find someone who fits it, but you've gone through three applicants and no one was that good. You got to be willing to spend 2 to 3 months even finding one right person for that position. There are some crucial things for hiring that you can't vet on paper. It's hard, the flakiness factor. You're abroad. People don't come into the office every morning where after a few days, you get to figure them out. Sometimes they disappear. Their grandmother, their this, their that. They're not here every day and their resume looks super good.

There are some people who their resumes didn't look that good and I was about to let them go. They were persistent and they had so much heart. They ended up being the best employees that I cannot imagine passing them today. There's an element of surprise that comes with this stuff. For example, I would put in the job application where you have to rate your English from 1 to 10. I would define what 1 is and what 10 is. Right away, anyone who gives themselves 10 is usually like a red flag. I'll give myself a 10 and I'm a native English speaker. That to me is you're telling me what maybe I want to hear or you've got a delusional sense.

I then ask them to write a paragraph about their services. If their English is articulate and they're good English, “I'm sorry, you are 10,” but if I'm seeing all these 101 grammar mistakes and they're giving themselves 10 everything down to the rate of their PHP skills, English skills, and client communication skills. If everything is 10, 10, 10, I'm usually out the door. I'm done. Real talent comes with a sense of humility, where they see flaws and they see improvement all the time. Those are the people who are very good. Generally, the people who are great give themselves a 7 and 8.5 even on stuff they're very good at.

That's an example of a tripwire I would put in the job application. One of the most important things is how people handle stress. I can't vet that. I can tell them how you handle stress, but sometimes people are emotional. They don't have a good frame of reference for how they are. I would sometimes artificially create a little bit of a stressful environment in the company. I would be a little reactive when I'm not that upset. I see how they double down. Do they take it emotionally or do they focus on the solution, and then they explain themselves? I know it's a very long answer but these are things that I look for. To me, the hiring process doesn't stop when I let them in the door. I give them a good 2 to 3 weeks, then I get a more comfortable feel if they are a fit.

Secrets Of Success: Sometimes people are emotional, and they don't really have a good frame of reference for how they are.

It's a genius move to basically put them in situations that push them out of their comfort zones. Maybe even setting up unrealistic tasks so that you could see how they deal with them. Not just from a work perspective but emotionally because you don't want anyone folding under pressure when the real stress comes. You're eliminating people from the job application by having them do the elimination based on the questions that you ask.

You’re then left with the job and it's a mess. It's the worst. It happens though. Recruiting is a job of its own. It took me a long time to refine the recruiting process but to also develop the discipline to not give in to people that are mediocre. I'm generally very willing. When I see a lot of heart and commitment, I'm willing to try. If you ask me what's the number one thing that I cannot compromise on, it is communication. If the communication skills are not there, it's not going to scale. If you have to step in and you're scared that there are communication gaps, you're not solving any problems. The whole idea is you want to completely remove yourself from the process so you can fully invest your energy somewhere else.

Thank you for sharing that. That was insightful. Let's switch over to things that you're passionate about. I know you are a full-time traveler. Every time I talk to you, you're in a different city. Tell me about how you utilize your travels. Is it mostly from work? Are you doing it for pleasure? What are your goals in traveling?

To be very frank, I don't care very much about traveling. It's easy for me to say because I have the luxury of moving around. Whether I'm in Thailand or I'm here, I'm working all the time. I'm not partying and clubbing or sipping margaritas by the beach every night because I don't want that life. Maybe I do deep down, but I see so much more enjoyment in building right now. I'm so much more excited to reach these milestones in my life, to reach financial goals, and to reach certain successful goals in my life that I look at all that as time wasted.

There's probably a flaw in and of itself that I need to push back and still enjoy being human to some extent and enjoy the moment more than I should. I'm coming around to that. It does slip up on me because as an entrepreneur, you're always trying to optimize and be more efficient and cut things out so you can get more done. You're always cutting these corners. Before you know it, you've cut out so much that you have no personal life and you're working all the time

Sometimes we need to push back, enjoy being human to some extent, and enjoy the moment more than we should.

Now onto traveling, I truly do enjoy it. It gives me a very good mental state when I'm constantly exposed to new environments. I like to not have that pattern. It's not that expensive. It isn't. When you do it for long enough, you understand how it works, you get the right credit cards, and you build up those points very nicely. You find good deals. You also build a good network around the place. I have friends and people who have big places and I make a deal with them. When I come in, I can rent out their place and they live at their own place for free

. It costs much less than hotels. Over time, I've become a little pickier about my travel stay. I used to be truly minimalist. At this point, I'm very minimalist. I try to focus on growing my bank account and the virtual world. I try to keep my physical belongings as minimal as possible. It's all a means to an end. I do want significant stability and I do want to build a place that's beautiful that I call home. To me, it's not just my time yet.

I'm in building mode. I'm probably going to be in that mode for another year or two. I'm now traveling way more than I normally do. I've been to 6 or 7 different places in the past two months. Generally, I'll stick in a place for 2 to 3 months and get some stability. I'm not constantly hopping around. In a way, this is part of the process of finding something that's truly stable. I want to be able to experience different areas. I want to be able to experience different opportunities then I become very confident where I want to invest all my money into building.

I enjoy traveling but here's what I'll say for the audience, it's a byproduct of this way of functioning. It's not the main perk. If you want to travel all day and have fun, I promise you this is the worst decision. Following this work ethic is the worst thing you'll ever do because you're not going to travel. You’re not going to be partying all the time. You're just going to be working.

What I see about you is you're so focused on efficiency in creating the space where you could relieve yourself of these duties. Once you create, the whole slate is completely self-sufficient with the businesses and you create that time. Are you going to go into building more stuff or is there ever a point where you want to be like, “I'm happy and satisfied with where I am. Now maybe I want to do some more stuff personally. I want to get involved in other things outside of the business nature." Do you have those goals or are you still into building?

I'm always going to be building. I can see myself constantly building. Do you remember I told you about that 80/20? I'm always going to have an element in my life where I'm doing R&D. What you asked is good. It brings up a deeper philosophy of how I function. I try to create these structures that I leverage, and I have these milestones. I'll build all these independent companies. I'll build a hosting company and web development company. I scale my publication, a startup that builds news publications. I scale my podcasts, which were in development, a startup that does podcast management, and book services where we write books. These are all independent services.

It's weird where this is going. To be honest, my next major milestone is VC. I want to jump into the venture capital space. I have all this experience in internal flow optimization, software engineering as a developer, and learning how to scale and grow companies. I do feel like now when I enter VC, I'll have a unique advantage point in that space. Not only will I be able to vet technical companies or tech startups and whatnot, and be in a good place with having years of experience, but at the same time, I'll be able to reduce their costs by giving them access to incredible resources that manage all of their online works.

It's on a much more macro scale. These startups are going to be leveraged from the next step. If I were to get super philosophical here, I would say that once I do make a strong footprint in the VC world and I meet incredible founders who have extremely innovative ideas, I think I'm going to start touching into something much deeper in terms of what I'm deeply passionate about. That's human aging and biology. It's not my time. I spent nothing but science. I spend nothing but doing science for 10 to 15 years.

Now I'm completely in the finance world. In the past 3 to 4 years, I've done very little science. It doesn't mean that I'm moving away from it but now I'm focused on building infrastructure and finding financial success, then I'm going to start working and building an Angel network or a VC network of extremely high-functioning talented individual people.

I'm not sure where this will go but I'm sure I'll find someone doing something interesting in biology, and then I want to make a deeper move and focus on something for the next 10 or 15 years of my life. It's like you work in these pockets where you create these systems, then you move to this completely new ecosystem and you leverage your success there. This has this iterative process. When you look at it, the relationship seems weird at the outset but everything truly is connected.

What do you think in terms of the biohacking space, as well as wellness and optimizing human performance and human aging? Where do you see the future of human aging? What technologies do you see as most promising?

If you were to go back a few hundred years relative to the existence of humans, then I would tell you that you would have these boxes that transport you from one place in the world to another in a few hours, and you have these things you hold in your hand and you're able to send a message to someone across the world. You would have the witches of your time tell you that you're crazy.

You going to get burned alive.

Here we are, we get text messages and we're not blown away every time a text message comes in. It’s even the framework of conversations that significantly changes. We're not evolving anymore in a Darwinian phase, we're evolving at a Morse phase of exponential growth. I think the timeframe of those conversations is becoming shorter where even 4 or 5 years from now when you can look at my phone. A few years ago, this was the coolest thing because it played music but it was a phone.

Now it's like, “By the way, this is a phone. It literally does everything else.” We're not talking witches here. We were talking about my childhood less than ten years ago. I do think we're going to come to realize that in terms of the human problem and the aging problem, we focus a lot of our time buying bigger buckets to stop the flood. We need to start coming to the heart of the issue and stop the flood itself.

We've evolved to become okay with aging and dying. We found these very strange ways to live on. We found ways to live by living in the minds of other people. We're not talking about John Doe from 1932 who was a blacksmith. We are talking about Albert Einstein every single day. That's how he found a way to live on. It’s by living in the minds of other people. It's also why we evolve and we see such value in building a family. It is because we pass on our genes, and that's one way to live on.

We've never entertained the idea that we can live on because there were no options for it. It's almost like cognitive dissonance. Our mind founds ways to cope with it in other ways. I do think that we need to start asking a very serious question. How do we extend human life at a core level? I'm not talking about modern science where we start eating healthier and running more. I'm talking about we understand how cells age.

Secrets Of Success: We need to start asking a very serious question: How do we extend human life at a core level?

We see death and dying as more of aging as an actual disease, not as something that happens. We're all human and no one can escape death. I'm sure you hear this a lot in the biohacking world, but I do believe humans alive will pass the 500-year mark. We still have some real core issues we need to understand. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to age? Biological systems are great but they're not very fault tolerant. It's the way we look at a bird flying in the sky and we say, "Let's look at this a little more abstractly and rebuild it with ideal mechanics.” Not only can we go across the world, but now we can go to different planets.

I think we need to look at this body the same way. Zyborgism sounds like stuff that weird people talk about or nerds or geeks discuss or comic books. I do think that's going to enter the mainstream conversation very soon. We're going to realize that our heart is not the ideal biological system to pump our blood. We can create mechanized systems that are extremely fault-tolerant that can do a much better job than our biological heart, and then we're going to start replacing it. We're going to start replacing our arm, then we're going to start coming to core questions. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be alive?

Many years ago, we thought that a heart is what makes us unique, and that uniqueness factor. We say, “No, it's the brain.” You can't get a brain transplant, but then you can start breaking that down into isolated compartmentalization. You have your prefrontal cortex. If I took someone and I removed their prefrontal cortex, will they still be them? Most of us would say yes. I went through every amygdala. I went through every single compartment of the brain, then I removed just that one part. You would still say that person is that person

It's our collective experiences to some extent, and I'm not a professional in this area to give deeper thoughts but I strongly believe the question of consciousness will help us get more of a grip on what direction we want to be headed. I think when we understand what makes us, then we'll start focusing on this is the process we want to conserve, replicate or transfer on. We're going to realize maybe our body is a great limitation of who we are as a person. That's the first point.

Secrets Of Success: When we understand what makes us “us,” we'll start focusing on “this is the process we want to conserve and replicate or transfer on,” we're going to realize that our body is a great limitation of who we are as a person.

Moving it more to something more tangible, when you're talking about biohacking, I was telling you how zyborgism is going to play a more prominent role in the future. Technology is going to be fusing it. It's this amazing relationship where everything we see in life that we've created was inspired by biology. We see a bird, we make an airplane. What are computers? A computer emulates a person. It's got input-output devices, a speaker, an ear, a brain, and a CPU. Even how computers function is slightly more optimized on a base-two system, where you have binary zeros and ones. We as human beings operate on a base-four system. We're looking at our DNA.

You're seeing this weird flip where now we're using technology to inspire biology. The real question here does become whether we're going to get a lot more output by optimizing our current biological structure or whether we're going to get more output by recreating these structures with more ideal materials. I personally believe that we're advancing so quickly that we're quickly going to start realizing that we get much more output and much more long-term sustained value by rebuilding systems ideally.

Having a metal arm or replacing your heart with something that's not biological whatsoever is probably going to take a very big market in the near future. I do think like the best medical professionals will be people who are highly qualified software developers or technical people. It's a very weird concept now. It's not something that people might resonate with, but the playing field changes very quickly. You have to realize that we're entering a chaotic phase. We're accelerating technologically at a very fast pace and we don't have as much predictive power of where we're going as we used to.

That's why I do think that we need to diversify our skillsets even economically speaking because you have stuff like COVID that are great stress tests in terms of how we've carved ourselves for survival. When you have a very narrow set of skills and a very narrow domain, you have COVID that can be extremely disruptive. The future belongs to those who innovate. It’s those people who do have a wider set or a career portfolio where they've got multiple streams of revenue, and they've got the types of skills that have multiple degrees of freedom.

For example, as a software developer, you can go into gaming or finance. There’s a whole lot to do as opposed to being someone who has a brick-and-mortar store. COVID comes, and then they are reliant on their client base within their community and they're in trouble. To bring all this back down to earth, I think having a healthy ground of long-term projection, and then preparing with many degrees of freedom with a lot of diversified skills and planning ahead is truly important.

What an answer. There's so much to think about when it comes to technology, man and consciousness. At some point, we're going to optimize every aspect of our biology in order to become technology. We're left with maybe the brain as the last thing, but you look at Neural Net and what Musk is doing and several other companies that are working on the brain, helping paralysis, and all that stuff.

At some point, we have to ask the question, what is it to be human? If you look at it from a spiritual perspective, what does consciousness and as conscious, do we have a soul? If we become machines, then what happens to our souls when that machine ends? There is so much to think about. It's a little overwhelming but I think that everything is going to happen so fast. I would say in the next ten years, we're going to be different in terms of our long-term approach to what health and biology are. It could be the best time and the worst at times. It depends.

To bring Web3 and blockchain into all this, forgetting about what specific opportunities it will present. To me, what the blockchain is, it’s a system that removes bureaucratic structures which removes inefficiencies. It removes the need for people to trust, verify, and be passed through different systems. You have all these different auditing processes. Blockchain is a way of ensuring integrity within a system. This will allow companies to grow a lot quicker. This will allow for innovation.

Secrets Of Success: Blockchain is a way of ensuring integrity within a system. This will allow for innovation and for companies to grow a lot quicker.

The second companies can grow quicker, we're getting more advanced. I do think that it's spiraling out of control. People who are planning for 10 or 15 years from now are the ones who might be very successful in the future. It's all quite exciting. Honestly, I think the conversation will shift based on some core questions of who we are, what makes us, what makes us unique, consciousness, and all this weird stuff. One thing I am unsure about is how long it'll take us to answer the question of consciousness. I feel like that's a very deep question.

Have you ever done psychedelics?

No, I haven't but I should probably entertain the idea at some point.

You might get some answers.

As far as I've gone is listening to Sam Harris for longer than I should.

That’s very interesting. Thank you so much for coming on, Mikey. Why do you think you came here to planet Earth? What did you want to experience in this life of yours?

I don’t know. I deeply want to leverage my success to make a profound impact on humanity. I hope to make a contribution to human aging or to be involved in that ecosystem or in that space to some extent. In terms of what I envision, I envision my house in 5 to 10 years from now to be someplace by the beach where I get to relax in the mountain with a beautiful view. What I envision is having this second floor that's completely glass. I have down the center all my technical infrastructure, and then all my biological infrastructure.

I live like a hermit. It’s like in the movies where these guys live in the forest in the middle of nowhere and they do their own stuff. That's where I see myself being happy. I do see myself working with incredible people who are not working with DARPA's hard problems. Have you ever heard of DARPA? DARPA is a US military facility or company.

They create those robotic dogs and robotic machines.

They're not interested in problems. Even if they're very complex and innovative solutions, they're not interested in them. They're interested in disruptive, completely weird, crazy ideas that no one wants to touch. That's the stuff they're interested in. The problem is called DARPA hard. I want to focus on DARPA's hard problems in the next 15 years and 10 years of my life. I want to have a great family too. Finding the middle ground between those two would be interesting.

You're such an inspirational guy and I learned so much. We have to do this again and maybe go a little bit deeper into the blockchain, futurism, and all this stuff. There's so much to talk about in this amazing world we live in. It's like a limitless possibility and it all depends on what mark we make on the world. Talking to someone like you, it's clear that you have an amazing vision of how you want to contribute. I see you growing and expanding. We do share the same birthday, I believe. I think I saw it somewhere. Is January 13th your birthday?

Yes.

Me too.

That's incredible. Also, thank you so much for having me on your show. I truly appreciate it. I feel like I've learned so much by talking to you. Even before we got on the show and we got on a phone call, I was truly inspired by how succinct you were, how great you were communicating, and all your successes. I felt like I learned a lot here. Thank you so much for your time.

How can we learn more about you? What's the best way to find you?

For the most part, I'm on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Everything is @MikeyPeres, that's my username. My website is MichaelPeres.com.

Fantastic. Thank you so much.

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About Michael Peres

Michael Peres (Mikey Peres) is a serial-entrepreneur, software engineer, journalist, author, and radio host best known for founding various technology, media, and news startups.

As a regular contributor to reputable news publications such as Entrepreneur and Times of Israel, Peres leverages his experience to advise aspiring entrepreneurs in developing the mindset to build, grow and scale successful businesses. With respect to corporations, Peres has developed a reputation for building and preparing news publications for early-stage funding.

Peres resides in Seattle, Washington, and is currently the Chief Editor of Peres Daily, Breaking 9-5, and Israel Now News.

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