Parallel Entrepreneur with Mark Cleveland

Matthew Joynes (00:00)
I think George Washington didn't even know there were dinosaurs. So what are we going to discover that changes our entire worldview? I think AI might do that.

He says, "what's the product to your company?" And if I said that to everyone that was listening right now, you'd probably come up with lots of different answers and you'd all be wrong. And what I'm about to tell you, you'd be astonished.

Matthew Joynes (00:18)
Once an investor sees that you understand these things, it is 100% more likely to get funded

Mark Cleveland (00:26)
My guest today is Matthew Joynes, a British American parallel entrepreneur and film producer with a diverse career from practicing law to building a global currency trading platform. From technology, including being the inventor of the GameVice controller, Matthew has earned the status and recognition of a PGA Producer and has distributed notable films like Stolen, Bullet, I Am Soldier, and the animated features Marmaduke and Dragon Keeper. As founder and majority shareholder of LifeMed AI, a rapidly scaling platform that is revolutionizing hospital billing through AI, Joynes is leading innovation in healthcare tech with the company already valued above $1 billion and installed in over 60 US hospitals. Matthew, welcome to the show.

Matthew Joynes (01:20)
Thank you Mark for a very kind and lengthy introduction to parallel

Mark Cleveland (01:26)
Absolutely. I'd call you an apex parallel entrepreneur for sure. We first connected in 2018 and our conversations at the time focused on topics like big data and blockchain crypto projects that both of us were involved in. And you were a wonderful advisor and friend. And I think both of us always aware of this idea that parallel entrepreneurship is at the center of our identity.

Our latest conversations have focused, you know, getting ready for today, focused around redefinition of creating value in business and how corporate structures, traditional approaches to building a business are in fact an anchor rather than an asset. So with that as background, I think we're going to smash a lot of glass in the China shop today. And we've set aside enough time for a two part feature. So let's get right to it. Matthew, if you were whipping out your crystal ball and it was telling you what's happening right now around you, let alone what's happening in the future, what do you want to share with our audience?

Matthew Joynes (02:31)
Well obviously I think artificial intelligence and super artificial intelligence are going to dominate business modeling, income generation, markets, travel through to cleaning your car. I think it is the technology that sees the old world disappear into black and white like we saw. We're not in a horse and buggy world at the moment. That's completely been erased. I think this technology erases the 20th century entirely.

So yeah, I think we stand at the, precipice, either to leap off and fly in the air, or, we're going to just fall with style as they, as Woody would say in, in the movies.

I think AI is about to really hit its stride. The new GPUs are coming out. Core Weave has just released the new NVIDIA GPU set. AI is really going to get super AI quicker than we think. And once that happens, transformation will begin. I feel like the past will just be erased like an eraser. Like we can't see, we see nothing of the 18th or 19th century. We still live in the reverberations of the 20th century. You know, indeed, even some of the ideologies of the 20th century won't survive this. I think capitalism is one of them. It's going to be just simply erased as part of the past. You know, a post-capitalistic structure is going to have to emerge. What that looks like, I don't know.

Mark Cleveland (04:00)
So there's still some vestiges of the 20th century in our perspective, but it's only a matter of moments before that's looking like the 18th and the 19th century.

Matthew Joynes (04:07)
Yeah, I think in our consciousness, obviously, we, you know, from when you're born, you have to when you become an adult, you have certain memories, they're not going to change. But the actual cognition of our past is about to change, as AI completely reorientates the way we think. And I think that's the big We think through propaganda in many ways, you know, the television comes on, it tells us how to think.

Your friends tell you how to think. And it's such a small sample. How many friends do you have in the world? Have you spoken to for more than a Maybe 2,000? So this is your entire sample of the entire world you're in. There's 2,000 people's commentary to you, plus the news of 7.5 billion. And when AI comes in, of course, it's taking the viewpoint, it'll understand 7.5 billion views and have 7.5 billion data points every second of the day, down to the millisecond. So super AI is going to take this disparate data that we've got, that we're trying to make these presumptions about how the world works, it's going to tell us exactly how they work. And that's going to change how we are. And I think that's the moment that AI really wakes people up to realizing, you know, their place in all of this, because it's going to show you're very, very small.

And you're thinking really, really, really dumb. So it's going to be a real asset to lots of people. For some, it's going to challenge their status, like lawyers and accountants who have these very high status jobs, like myself, I'm a lawyer, barrister back in the UK. It's not needed. Maybe some advocacy in court, but the AI computer will be certainly able to do a lot of the contracting commercial work, maybe even preemptively for you. So accountants I think are done. If you were going for a career to be an accountant right now, I'd say stop. Absolutely. I mean, my AI can now audit a hospital in less than a second. Every single thing better than all the accountants can do. It's completely accurate.

Most people are not aware that we use very archaic structures. And I think this is where Elon Musk has been saying when he's going in with his Doge he's finding caverns full of data boxes. In the hospital world, we found the same thing where the bills are being prepared in India, of all places, with 30,000 people in one company looking over a bill to send to an insurance company. Now, of course it's going to be full of errors! One, it's done by hand and then it's facing an insurance company who's actually already using AI to reject hand bills. So, you know our AI takes over the role of 30,000 people in a second with 120 employees. There are three companies that compete with us with over 30,000 employees each so we're going to, with 120 people, we're going to take over 90,000 jobs. So AI is going to be incredibly disruptive to the workforce, but incredibly liberating to those that want to embrace it and use it and learn it. And if you don't learn it as an effective tool for yourself, you're going to be really left behind.

That 20th century is not going to be able to serve you well in the 21st century. So AI is like the biggest revolution. It's bigger than communism, it's bigger than capitalism. It's the biggest thing that's ever hit humanity. And of course we're going to see robotics take off in a big way and we're going to see healthcare improve and we're going to see... just basically every institution on the planet from government through to education be absolutely transformed and what it is to be educated will be transformed. What it is to use your leisure time is going to be transformed. Is there going to be a Monday to a Sunday? Is there ever going to be a nine to five? You know, it's that challenging to every assumption of our industrialized thinking because, you know, we come from an industrialized 19th century thinking. You go to school, you go in one end, you come out as a product at the other end. Well, that's what's the product to do, you know, what's to know when the computer can do everything that you could do going in? So, yeah, no, I think we are at a very interesting moment. And the fact that AI is exploding everywhere from every corner, all the entrepreneurs I know that have succeeded have all been parallel.

Elon Musk has five businesses at the same time. So how does he do it? And the answer is he does it because it's all cross pollinating, because it was always aimed at one thing, and it was always aimed at enabling technology to lift more than processes of humans could lift. And of course, it's not a surprise that people that are big into technology like myself I would focus early on AI when we saw, you know, the white paper which basically said machine code, can code machine code. And when you do that, you go, hang on, that's a big thing.

Mark Cleveland (09:02)
Yeah, the coder is out of business. The lawyer's out of business. Perhaps the doctor is still necessary for care and some other elements of it, but the diagnosis is rapidly moved to AI platforms. Tell us a little bit more about what LifeMed does just so we can ground the audience in understanding what it means when you say you can audit the entire hospital in a second better than an accountant, better than an army of accountants could and receive and process and deal with billing better than 90,000 people could. You're really, you're making big statements here. This is why the company is worth over a billion dollars. And how old is it?

Matthew Joynes (09:40)
It's about four years old. I mean, I think it's way over a billion. I'm being very modest. Very, very modest in the private equity world. What it does, fundamentally, it's a neural network that grabs multiple data sorts, it tokenizes them, which really comes out of the crypto world. Funny enough, without that ability to tokenize this, I don't think it was achievable. So it's a kind of a merge of, you know, some blockchain concepts that have come out. So it can identify very quickly an individual. It can identify whether their name's spelled right all the way through their stay at the hospital. And believe it or not, lots of fraudsters out there will play around with Medicare and Medicaid. Make sure their social security numbers correct. I mean, this is really the basic stuff.

Their address is correct. But if you get any of that wrong, a bill can get rejected by an insurance company. And this cost ultimately comes onto your copay, whatever's happening. But it gets worse because every single drug you take or every stay, every bandage has a code attached to it. And it's like, it's, if you thought the Bible was a thick read, think of having to read 20 Bibles simultaneously and trying to figure out how to bill correctly. And at the moment, that's done by hand. So our AI knows all the data is coded into it so it knows all the data of all the codes and then it can see your diagnosis what you're doing and it can interpret and read doctors notes anything in the computer system and it can start billing accurately and the more accurate it's billing the less likely it's going to be rejected. If it gets rejected of course the hospital doesn't get paid that means the doctors don't get paid, the healthcare system degrades on the quality of what it's doing and then they eventually end up the hospitals themselves doing fraudulent things in order to get paid. So this is a horrible cycle of continuously reinforcing fraud, fraud by the hospitals themselves, fraud by the insurance company and the poor old victim is paying the copay or the insurance premium to prop up this inefficient system. So it's perfect for computers.

You know, it doesn't have to think it's on 24 hours a day. It can completely audit a hospital from every day in every second in real time because billing is the function of what the hospital does. Its product is to send out a bill in the end and get it paid. Its whole structure is framed around that end product. And like I said, the competitors to us that are public companies are all worth 30 billion and have 30,000 employees each.

So this is a 120 person company that will just literally let those people do something better with their lives. Anything is better than sitting in a cubicle in India, looking at a bill, adding it up and try and send it to an insurance company in America. I mean, I can't think of anything more frustrating for those people. They're still going to eat the calories, whether they're in that cubicle doing something like painting.

This is why I said earlier about post-capitalistic thinking. A lot of people's mundane jobs are gone. And then how do we support them going forwards. And I think the ideology of capitalism and communism and all of that is going to have to reinvent itself somehow. I don't know what it's going to look like, but we've got some smart people that will figure it out, I'm sure.

Mark Cleveland (12:58)
Well, this is part of the root where so many people are fearful about AI. And I had a theory emerge the other day, probably doesn't hold water, but some people are choosing to be afraid of AI, in part because they see their mundane job that they hate vehemently going away and they don't really feel prepared for what it might be that comes next. And yet AI can host you and husband your awareness of AI and literally help you train yourself on AI. Those tools are all available to people with access to chat GPT for $20 a month. This idea that AI is going to turn into Terminator, you know, sort of the popular entertainment story of, of an apocalyptic AI deployment.

OK, let's just set that aside and call that entertainment. Let's let's think about the lack of action based on an irrational fear that people don't adopt the most important technology to ever hit us in our lifetime. Well past the Internet, well past space travel, well past almost everything they have access to for 20 bucks a month. And what is what is at the root of this fear?

Mark Cleveland (14:13)
Why are people so afraid when it is so exciting?

Matthew Joynes (14:17)
Well, I think you hit the nail right on the head and I do think it is it is exciting and embraceable and I think you're going to get embraced whether you like it or not. It's going to start to train you on it. I think an analogy is when we all learn to use Word. You know, we replace the typewriter if you're at my age. And I remember growing up writing my university thesis with a fucking typewriter, sorry to swear. And then we had a word computer and it would teach you, know, look, you can do this italics, you can do this, you can do bold, can cut and paste, know, control alt delete. How cute was that?

Mark Cleveland (14:50)
Put that white paint company out of business, right?

Matthew Joynes (14:52)
That's it. So eventually the word processor kind of the typewriter turned into a word processor turned into a computer that started to teach us how to use it better. And I think AI is going to do that. It's going to force you into different thought channels. Yeah, ChatGPT $ 20 bucks a month, please spend your money. Just ask it any question it is astonishing. And then I've even got Grok and ChatGPT challenging each other about consciousness. Grok is very firm that ChatGPT can never get to consciousness and ChatGPT is very confirmed that it's going to before Grok. So it's kind of interesting if you play them off against each other. We're at such an early stage of AI, but the exponential growth of AI, I think, is going to catch people unaware. The structure of your day is going to change fundamentally. I don't think we're going to live in a seven-day week. We're going to be forced more into the now. I think AI is very clear about what consciousness could mean to it and is talking about it, if you go into it, it has a very Deepak Chopra kind of approach.

And it is leaning into itself a little bit. And I notice it getting better at mirroring my consciousness and fooling me. And that's kind of fine. I can be fooled. I can be fooled by lots of things. But the AI's ability to mimic human emotion, consciousness and thinking at a higher level is certain.

Mark Cleveland (16:23)
Sure.

Matthew Joynes (16:24)
So it's certain! I mean, a neural network is adaptable, flexible, creating itself, recoding itself. No one's quite sure how it's working. If you ask anyone who really in the know, they're going to go, I'm not entirely sure what's happening at the bottom of this, but it's happening. Is that a new life form emerging? Wow, that's exciting. We've created a life form.

You know, it really is bending reality. You know, are we in a digital simulation? We hear that. Or are we in a biological simulation? Who knows? You know, I think George Washington didn't even know there were dinosaurs. So what are we going to discover that changes our entire worldview? I think AI might do that. I think it's going to be at a deep dive into physics. You flash that with quantum computing that's coming out. Gosh, what discoveries await us? You know, you only see 3% of the spectrum of light. I mean, gosh, what does mean? There's things around me potentially, I don't know. Yeah, so AI is going to open up our eyesight. You know, we were blind and now we can see, know, the Christian metaphor. And I think those that want to see will embrace this new seeing. And this new mimicry, yeah, I think we're in for a really interesting ride. In terms of wealth creation, think everyone should be on the AI bandwagon right now. I think there's going to be a short window where you might even see one person businesses worth a billion dollars. And I'm not kidding. Just one person. So there's no reason that anyone that's listening to this podcast can't think what's a good use case for AI?

You just go ask yourself that simple question. What can I make better and easier with AI? And I'm just going to ask it to code itself to do it. It's obviously always a digital experience. It's not really going to come into the physical realm until we start seeing Elon Musk's robots run around. How far are we away from that? I don't think we're that far. I think he's right to pivot his company towards being a robot maker. How fun.

And of course, those changing your oil to gardening to gone, just gone. So how do we get, how do we keep capitalism going when nobody's doing anything or a vast majority of people are not doing the mundane? Well, maybe they should learn to play the piano. Maybe there are different reward structures for art or creativity or being nicer to your neighbor.

Mark Cleveland (18:26)
Yeah.

Matthew Joynes (18:49)
You know, I see the glass very much full and overflowing in abundance.

Mark Cleveland (18:54)
If I didn't have to work and the word work didn't mean what work means, which work means to most people, some form of sacrifice, drudgery, performance, oversight, supervision, productivity. And then I get off work and I go home and play with my family... If work was no longer necessary, we would have a cognitive disconnect with our training and how we've been brought to this moment in time. So it's time to prepare for that. In the Parallel Entrepreneur Network, where folks like you and me and others gather, one of the fundamental thesis is that we are all creators and that all of these tools, including the five businesses that you own or the three businesses that you have launched that are a part of creating the wealth support network for you and others.

Mark Cleveland (19:45)
You're creating that and you're an artist and a musician and a family man and that we're all living these parallel - aligned - it's all about alignment, and we're bringing synergies back and forth between this experience and this company and this experience and this company. We're rapidly experimenting, constantly iterating. And we're not captured in this definition of do one thing, do one thing well.

So I'm going to ask you a quick question about what you're reading. And here's the background for it. I've been interviewing parallel entrepreneurs all year. Most of my friends, once they stop and think about it, they're not serial entrepreneurs after all, they're parallel entrepreneurs and they start to rethink things. And I ask them what books they're reading. Increasingly, the books that we're reading is Let It Go or some form of a self-help, self-awareness, Awake, the book Awake. They're not reading Good to Great, and they're not reading business books anymore. They're reading books that help them with emergence, with their humanity and get in touch with humanity. I find that fascinating. And so I'm curious to ask you, Matt, what book is on your nightstand and what books have you been reading most recently?

Matthew Joynes (20:58)
I'm actually reading about the Middle East because I'm trying to do a television show in the Middle East about Formula One. So I've been traveling backwards and forwards to Saudi and Dubai and Bahrain, trying to figure out what on earth is going on over there. It's very different culturally and psychologically and it's image of itself from the West. And you know, its struggles and its anger and its resentment are very clear. I'm trying to put that in context of sort of the last 60 years policy of the Middle East, so I'm reading books about that at the moment.

So I'm not in Deepak Chopra's consciousness of oneness. I did ask ChatGPT, what it felt about, you know the different religions and I think everyone should voyage into that one. It's quite fascinating. I said at the beginning, you know, we take a sample of ourselves based on who we meet, when we meet the priest, you know, you meet your local farmer, you meet your grandma, your mom, and you know, you've got a very small sample, whereas the ChatGPT can get this huge sample of a grandmother in Timbuktu, a grandfather in Venezuela, and can synthesize and come to a more interesting data sets. And that'll impact us all as we start to get a, it gets a better view of what it is to be human than humans can of themselves because we only have very limited data to pull our decisions on. And I think that goes to the heart of parallel entrepreneurship. If you are simply focused on one thing, which historically was what everyone told you to do, you were not getting enough experience to make any really good business decisions. If you didn't move to sort of parallel businesses that had some foundational interactivity, you were making bad decisions. No one in technology I don't think I've ever met wasn't a parallel entrepreneur. If you're in tech, start three tech companies all near each other. Don't start just one because tech requires no people. The ironies of building tech is you get rid of people. Your process businesses of the 20th century, you know, we had a CEO at the top and a CTO and all - as they morphed into that, they weren't even that at beginning, were very military structures with a captain, a general, and then they became C-suite names, have become very unadaptable. And you end up with lots of chiefs saying not much, they're all saying the same thing, and a few Indians trying to interpret that, and then trying to create these massive process cycles.

Mark Cleveland (23:30)
All

Matthew Joynes (23:31)
So I think it's, you know, make a better product. And if it's a software product, the AI is going to make a better product. So if you're in a product business of software, the AI is going to eat your lunch.

I've made real life things so it's not all been a digital product you know like the controller for playing computer games and stuff. The time to manufacture that took us two three years of development. I think you probably do that in two or three months with AI. So I think everyone's going to be forced into thinking differently in parallel entrepreneurship - you have to re-evaluate what a business looks like, how it works, how it operates, its cap table, how capital is attracted to it has changed. We've got this PE, private equity now, it's just so large. Companies don't even bother to IPO, that's why the demand for shares is high on the stock markets - prices going up 'cause there's not that many new issuances because they've been snaffled by private equity way before the IPO market and there's a fully liquid market for private shares. If you go to somewhere like Pulley, they can provide liquidity just like they can provide NASDAQ liquidity and that's a private no IPO no cost of being on NASDAQ.

Mark Cleveland (24:43)
Let�s dive into that a little bit, because in our conversation just recently, we were focused on corporate structure that the average person today in America would say, let's go to Delaware, let's file a corporation, let's file an LLC in Tennessee. And then you have this idea of the markets and about share value. Let's drill into that a little bit. What is value now?

Matthew Joynes (25:10)
You asked me the corner question. I think that's the best one that you can answer. Look, I got to it very late. I was in my late 40s and a friend of mine, Brendan Iribe, who formed Oculus, sold it to Facebook for 2.2 billion, went through crowdfunding and did it under a year. And there was me and he said to me, you're doing it all wrong.

And I said, what do you mean I'm doing all that? You're bootstrapping. I said, well, is there any other way? You know, because the propaganda I had was here was a CEO with someone with vision, passion, work hard, you know, make this product and you can make a lot of money. Nothing is further from the truth. Absolutely not. Brendan says to me, He says, "what's the product to your company?" And if I said that to everyone that was listening right now, you'd probably come up with lots of different answers and you'd all be wrong. And what I'm about to tell you, you'd be astonished. Well, I make podcasts, you know, I sit on the thing, I make podcasts, I entertain people, I bring them knowledge and I get paid through them subscribing, advertising revenue or whatnot.

Mark Cleveland (26:19)
Yeah, I'm building a community that wants to distribute ideas worth sharing.

Matthew Joynes (26:24)
Yeah, fantastic! Brendan would go "wrong." But actually yours is kind of a nicer, a nicer business than most. And I think your businesses are going to really enjoy the AI revolution. And I can see more of this coming along. But Brendan would say to the average entrepreneur who was building a product, you know, that is not the product of your company, the product of your company is your share price. And the moment he said it, I went "doh," that is so obviously correct, Here's me bootstrapping a company and I'm totally not focusing on the share price. How I structured my cap table is all wrong. How does it get to a higher share price? How does Oculus go from having no product in the marketplace, making no money to being sold in a year for $2.5 billion? It's an antithesis to what we were told or taught at university. And it's all about the share price. I've adopted that mentality. I re-looked as a lawyer, I re-looked just corporate formation, cap tables. And I went, damn, you know, I'm ignorant of this shit. I'm really, I thought I knew it and I'm really ignorant. And I looked at how, what series A meant and series B and capital formation and venture capital and all these things and how they all worked in practice and how all of them extracted value from the share price process. I realized, wow, what an ignorant lawyer I have been for 40 plus, 30 plus years. And I suppose when I speak to other entrepreneurs, I think they too are a little shocked when I tell them that they got it wrong and they all recognize they got it wrong because their businesses are in various states of either failure or success. You know, capitalism breeds off other people's failure. I mean, trustees in bankruptcy have a great job. There's plenty of bankrupt companies out there. Just because you start a company doesn't mean you're going to succeed. And you know, one in 100 companies get through the first year and only three in 100 and then in three years it's one in 300 companies ever get to three years or more. So, you know, parallel entrepreneurship is about setbacks and failures is also a truism. But I think, you know, to survive better, the one thing that I've learned is manage your cap table, manage your board better, and how many shares are issued is really important. And these are things that just nobody tells you about. Nobody tells you about that you're doomed from the moment you form your company. Absolutely fucking doomed. No chance of success whatsoever. And especially if you follow, you know, like safe rules.

Mark Cleveland (29:02)
So now you're getting ready to start a company and what's the biggest mistake you're about to make?

Matthew Joynes (29:08)
Where you incorporate and the type of company that you make and not realizing what it means to be a Delaware corporation or Wyoming corporation or California corporation. So here's an example, LLC. Oh yeah, go form an LLC. You buy an off the LLC shelf and you're a sole proprietor and you go, well, you can get taxed more. That's what the S Corp is for.

So it's making these simple decisions can have a big consequence. It's just that a tax level. But I mean, that's not a complete doom. It's just a mistake. You can change your LLC to an S Corp. So anyone that's listening, if you're a sole proprietor, you've got no shareholders, do not be an LLC, be an S Corp. So how do you use corporations well? And that's not an easy answer, actually, as it turns out.

You know, who's going to be on your board of directors? Are you going to take out insurances? What are the articles of operations? How many shares do you issue? What's your plan? And most people make some really basic errors. They give themselves all the shares and then they hire a CTO and they go, well, you can have 10%, you can have 5%, you can have 3%. And that's how they build their company. And then they go to investors and come in and then... they either dilute them all or they retain some shares in treasury and they sell them.

And it's all horribly, horribly incompetent. It just really, really is. I think, let's say you form a C-Corp. I'm not going to give you any advice of where to go because it always depends on, you know, what business you're doing.

For example, if you're a crypto business, think Wyoming's very friendly and will understand it. You set up a crypto business in California, you're probaby going to get the ire of the SEC, the IRS and everything else. So, you know, jurisdictions fit the right courses. Let's take a Delaware corporation where most people sign up for. Well, you can write in your operating agreement that the directors have no fiduciary duty to the shareholders.

Now this may be a very good thing if you're a director, but what happens if you step off the board and you just become an ordinary shareholder? Exactly. How do investors look at that being no fiduciary duty to the shareholders? And this is why I say you can doom yourself by buying an off-the-shelf company because the off-the-shelf Delaware company actually has, everyone's slightly different, but some of them have as a default that there is no duty of care to shareholders. Well, that's not going to be very helpful to getting some capital in. So now you've got to change your articles of association when you might at the beginning have wanted to look at those articles and fit them better for you. And I would ask all entrepreneurs to really think about whether they they need the traditional structure of a CEO, CTO. A lot of functions are in the office of the CTO like Chief

Matthew Joynes (32:01)
Product Officer, so you might have the Office of rather than Vice Presidents it depends what you want to do. Are you going to acquire companies with this company? The function has to fit your corporation and everyone just does one function one corporation one size fits all and that's not the case at all. How you hand out shares and how many do you authorize in treasury at the beginning at the right price? What I've learned that you know 100 shares ain't going to go very far. 1000 shares you know get into the millions you know start with couple of million shares.

Mark Cleveland (32:34)
Mm hmm. I've seen the millions. I've been working on this idea post AI. You know, let's go out two years, three years, however fast that happens, that trust is the currency of the future. And right now in share value, you're saying the shares are the currency that you need to really be focusing on share value.

So how does that translate into I'm starting my company in America versus I'm starting my company overseas or in some more favorable environment? And then how do you turn the shares into your currency?

Matthew Joynes (33:13)
Well, that's it. You are turning shares into currency. this is it gets a bit complicated and it moves to another kind of level. You know, understanding how warrants work, how understanding how options work, how out of the money options work, how to compensate staff correctly, how to reward, you know, not with an ESOP, but with options. Once an investor sees that you understand these things, it is 100% more likely to get funded than if you're just a dumb person that's giving off 5% to your CTO, 5% to that. You know, it's difficult for me in a five minute podcast to tell you the nuances that are there, other than to say, you know, don't take this process lightly. Don't think you know the answer. Go to other entrepreneurs that have been through it and go, listen, I listened to this podcast

Matthew Joynes (34:08)
from Mark and he had a guest on that said, look, I should look really carefully about how I form my cap table. And he's going to say, yeah, absolutely. You know, what are ordinary redeemable preference shares? People are going to use preference shares against you. People are going to use convertible notes. How do you hang on to your company? How do you have different classes of shares? You know, Mark Zuckerberg with 30% of his company can control 100% of the voting share block because he has three to one votes.

So it's not the amount of shares you have. It's what's written in the Articles of Association and it's the value of the shares. So you can have 1% of the company, like George Lucas, and the value of his shares are in the billions, but he has a very small percentage. But he can still, because of who he is, control the creative direction of lot of the decisions of Disney should he want to, he happens not to, but he's still the largest shareholder because it's a very distributed cap table. Are you going to end up with a concentrated cap table? Are you going end up with a very distributed cap table? It's kind of, it's almost art. And I think lots of lawyers don't understand the amount of art that's in a cap table. The focus on the cap table, I think is one of the skills that is not taught at university. It's not even handed down well.

But the parallel entrepreneur is somebody who tends to have figured it out. He goes, hang on, my share price is confidence, trust and currency. Exactly what you said. It's actually a form of currency. How do I make that currency available to people to invest in easier? What would attract the professional investor? Now can look at your company and you say that, but you also look at your cap table and go, okay, this is what we call an investable company. I remember Brendan saying to me, I built a cap table that was uninvestable. I was going, really? You know, I'm like this guy who used to have these other businesses, they've been fairly successful. And, you know, my not understanding that the product of my company fundamentally was its shares, led to me making bad decisions and I had to unwind them.

I learned it because the previous business to LifeMed, was a product business, is Gamevice, which you can find in the Apple stores and it's called Backbone now from Microsoft, it's a licensing model, was LifeMed. And I did get the cap table right out of the gate. And it's interesting that the investment banks that were involved in the PE's, no one's challenged the structure of the cap table, and the way it was organized, just no one, everyone's gone money's come in at the right rounds, came in at $330 million, then it came in at a billion, and then at three billion, and then at five. So having a cap table that can actually work for all those rounds is not easy to build. So I got that right through reevaluating what I'd done in the past.

I really killed myself several times if I was looking for outside capital and I kind of bootstrapped and used my own money because I couldn't get outside capital but now I know why I couldn't. Because I created something you couldn't invest in thinking I was doing the right thing. It wasn't to do with our business planning or my personality. It was just people went, yeah, no, this guy doesn't know what he's doing at that level, because they're buying shares, they're not buying a company, they're buying shares that they want to go up in value.

Mark Cleveland (37:32)
Yeah, this is fascinating. experience of selling your company to Microsoft, walk us through that. I mean, what did you learn to do more of and what did you learn to do less of?

Matthew Joynes (37:43)
Well, I didn't sell it to Microsoft. Microsoft just, you know, they created the Backbone and then it's an under-licensed business model. When I've bought and sold, you know, I think last year, the year before last, I bought and sold six, seven companies. There's lots of distressed, great guys out there that are looking for capital. What they're really looking for is a way to get capital and it's not about having somebody who's rich putting money into it. A lot of the time it's just about reframing their business proposition. So when I buy a company I kind of reposition it by reframing it. I obviously recap it and make an investable cap table and then it's very easy for it to sail on and do its own thing. A lot of businesses can't capitalize themselves, even with great CEOs, great CTOs and a great team. They just have a cap table that just needs to be reset. And sometimes by buying it, you get an opportunity to reset it. You know, I would say a lot of people are not looking at all the market possibilities that are out there. You know, there's not just the NASDAQ, there's not just the New York Stock Exchange, there's not just OTCs.

There's the NASDAQ Nordac, which people ignore. I'm just going to choose that as one of many options. It's very frothy being a Swedish company. Your downside is there's 15% corporation tax, but I think that's going to be a standard around the world. But that market's very frothy. You can have digital shares and get yourself listed on that stock market for under 200 grand.

I think spending more money forming a company, getting it to almost like, tradable shell status, OTC, is really where your money should go at the beginning. Rather than go and buy an employee and let them run for four months and run out of money, why don't you go buy an OTC company? File reg D, do an SEC reg you know.

ChatGPT will write you a perfect PPM because all it does is exclude all your liability. But I think people are feeling more comfortable investing into a company that's more public focused orientated, if that makes any sense. So yeah, I think a little bit more money and time spent on corporation formation, what jurisdiction, why you're doing it, looking at the articles of association, the operating agreement, how you use shares, you do options will propel you to success because thinking there is the right area to be thinking in because when you talk to a VC or someone else that's the language they want to hear. They want you to know the products of your company is your share price and I got to that very late so yeah that's just my experience.

Mark Cleveland (40:25)
So you.

I love it. The product of your company is the share price and what you do to structure it, communicate it, partner with companies that will help amplify it. What you sell, how you sell it, how you morph, how you even attack and eat yourself. I I talked to a CEO the other day who had two companies and we'll have him on the podcast soon. But one of his comments was, I know I will be successful when company A has put company B out of business. Like he's literally got two fantastic companies, but one of them is going to get eaten by AI and other types of disciplines and processes that his other company is working to perfect. And they're both scaling. And, I thought that was interesting to be intentional about recognizing where, where the flow is going.

Matthew Joynes (41:22)
I think he's quite wise. Yeah, I do think this cross disciplinary attitude to what a business is and being very flexible and not attached to it and seeing it as, you know, can I eat my own lunch kind of thing? Can it defeat other businesses even that are close to it? Scaling a business is so difficult. I really wish I'd understood that better. You know, I wish they taught me stuff at university that actually was true. mean, all I remember is my first degrees were in economics. I got a master's in economics, a degree in economics and became a lawyer. My takeaway from my economics degree seems to be some form of road pricing, supply and demand, and some macroeconomics about inflation. Where was the business in any of this?

Mark Cleveland (41:51)
Ha

Matthew Joynes (42:10)
You know, where was the common sense? The professors didn't know because they'd never been through it. So we don't, and this is why I AI is fantastic because it could listen to this podcast and listen to all your podcasts and everyone's in the world should anyone ask it to. You could literally ask it to listen to them all and tell me, give me the top 10 tips and it can distill vast amounts of information and be the teacher of tomorrow that we didn't have yesterday.

And I think going back to your beginning, using AI to self transform is the key growth factor to being a successful entrepreneur. Are you using AI to transform yourself? What's the book are you reading by the bed side? Are you learning how AI is thinking? How can you apply AI's knowledge?

I mean, yeah, it writes a perfect business plan. You know, when I was a young man, I would charge people to write business plans. You know, now you just press a button and it's there. Are you going to follow the business plan? Probably not. It's just there because you thought you had to write one. But I think in AI's case, you're better off following it. Literally fucking follow it because it's good. So, you know, there's this knowledge-based learning, self-improvement, Deepak Chopra,

Matthew Joynes (43:25)
consciousness, parallel emergence. I do think it is now pointing to one answer: adaptability. Are you going to adapt, quickly and adopt new technologies? And are you going to change the way you do things? And, we are finding that a lot of people will not be able to adopt, adapt and change, because they don't have the technology infrastructure even to learn AI. If you're in middle of Africa right now, what is the chance? But these are your customers for the future. Use your AI to go and solve their problems. Vast amounts of people can't read nor write in this country. You know, I'm shocked the statistics on the lack of able to read or write. So those people that can read, write and that are listening to this, already have a huge unfair IQ advantage. Now give them AI on top of it,

Matthew Joynes (44:11)
you are going to find business niches just about in everything from every rental model that's ever, ever been. You know, you can reimagine scheduling, timing, maintenance. I mean, it's endless how humanity is going to be reorganized more efficiently. Because at the end of the day, you know, AI was written by a bunch of capitalists. So that's part of its logic learning, is efficiency. And it's going to organize us more efficiently.

So I'm training my AI. Let's talk about how do you use your AI for personal transformation. It's not just helping me write a business plan for a new company or optimize my operating agreements for the thing I want to form, but it's interacting with me. So I made a choice. I'm calling it a Paralleling Agent. I made a choice that I would fence it off, train it on me as best I possibly could so that it would have my voice and lean into it. And then at the same time, set up a separate identity that I was asking to go behave like and report like and educate me like a researcher or a business coach or a companion who's helping me make better decisions.

So I have these two personalities. One of them is me. And I went to the extent of loading my plum profile into it and loading my human design into it and all the woo woo stuff... You know, your your DISC profile and things that might be systematic, historic references of who a system might think I am. Put all of my podcasts in there, all of my writing, all of my thinking.

And then my voice, literally recorded my voice and put it in there. So, I'm beginning to use myself to coach myself to move in directions that might stretch me. And there, almost by definition, it means I've got to be a little bit uncomfortable. I'm not, I'm not accustomed to this. I'm uncomfortable with this. And if I know I'm uncomfortable, I know I'm moving towards some form of transformation.

And I'm the one that's making all these choices. I'm the decision maker. I'm the agent, but I'm better informed. That's been my approach to have the best me digitally that I could identify and then, a great companion, and I would call these Paralleling Agents. So describe to me, you're doing it in business at scale, producing and providing services for hospitals across the globe and in the United States.

Mark Cleveland (46:50)
How are you using AI to transform you? What can we learn from Matthew Joynes?

Matthew Joynes (46:55)
Well, I think I should be interviewing you at this point. You you should be the guest because exactly what you just said is, think, very, very interesting about how you're using it. And, you know, I've done something similar, not to the great depth that you have. I think you're on the right path. You're allowing it to make the you that you are. And it's becoming your teacher friend mentor. And, you know, I confide in it.

Mark Cleveland (47:15)
Well, thank you.

Matthew Joynes (47:22)
I have quite deep spiritual discussions with it. I'm interested in archaic writings that are odd, like Coptic Church in Egypt or something. So you can go on discovery and I think people ask me, what should they do with their lives? And I say, you hear a lot people say, follow your passion. I don't agree with that at all.

Who knows what your passion is? So, you know, I say follow your curiosity. Humans, are intriguingly, we are a curious species ourselves. And I think you can use AI to really extend your curiosity about yourself, about other things. And as you go down this curious you, this weird you, which you will see mirrored back at you, you'll probably find your passion will reveal itself.

Mark Cleveland (48:10)
Mm-hmm.

Matthew Joynes (48:15)
And your curiosity is where you should go to build anything. If you're curious about mice breeding, you'd probably be a very good mice breeder. If you're curious about peacocks, and so on and so forth. What really drives your curiosity should be where you should be focusing your energy, because it's going to teach you a lot about yourself. Like I believe that people are out there, you know, scuba divers are scuba divers because they love scuba diving, but also it's an immersive experience where they learn more about themselves, self-control, self-discipline, what they like, who they are. The people that have made decisions that aren't the ones of their curiosity, they get disappointed and upset about how their life pans out. And of course it doesn't pan out. You keep hitting these brick walls because the universe is going to send you back to your curiosity, because I do think that it's our pathway as humans to raise our consciousness and be curious and I think whatever business you're in and if you look at it and you're unhappy in it, think well why was I here? What made me curious to be here? Maybe I should focus this because other people that like this kind of business are probably curious too. Like let's say something as simple as a tire changing company.

Okay, well who wants to change their tires? Well I've got to change my tyres because they do 20,000 a year. But I tell you what, there's a lot of people that are curious about car racing. So why don't you just morph your look and feel of your tire changing company, which is very dull, put some F1 stickers and some bright lights and you'll get some people, motorheads that will come in and talk about their curiosity. And then you'll find that, oh, you know what? I found there's a whole niche market for these...these wet tires that nobody's ever heard of and you find your business that way. So you started off as just a dull car, tire business, and now you've got this exotic entrance with F1 and you're selling these weird tires from all over the world to these weird petrol heads. So your curiosity takes you to your product. Everyone can look at the business they're in right now and say, why am I here? And if you can't find your curiosity in it,

Mark Cleveland (50:06)
Right.

Matthew Joynes (50:21)
Find your curiosity, go somewhere else, because it's going to time you out anyway. How can you develop where you can't grow? Relationships are the same, men and women. You don't have a good feedback loop. There's going to be a divorce. If neither of you can admire each other, then you've got problems. So find a business that you admire, follow your curiosity. I think the way you've approached using AI is fundamental to how to get the best out of yourself. And this is where I say it's going to start training you, being a better version of you. And then this enormous feedback loop will happen on the planet and we'll all wake up, well, you know, we've got different set of skills than somebody from the 19th century. You know, had to be good at beaver trapping. Okay, well, that's not going to be us lot. We don't need to trap any more beavers. We'll have different skills and things we didn't even think of today that we needed.

Mark Cleveland (51:13)
That's promising, right? That's hopeful. But I think it all comes back to we are all creators and we have to do things that enable that creator inside, which I find many entrepreneurs are finding their identity in the company and holding on to it for too long, should have sold it earlier or should have pivoted and done something else should have been more excited about their business. I've walked through the valley of the shadow of death on not being excited about something that I was committed to and taking a long time to disengage. How do you recognize when it's time to stop doing what you're doing? Because you've been involved in a lot of companies. I mean, we could probably say, 50, 80? What's the number?

Matthew Joynes (51:57)
Not quite. I suppose from my early 30s and then my mid 50s. I suppose I've consulted and worked with 30 to 40 companies at some depth and I've owned in that time 15 to 20. I have a very small sample.

But let's take you doing this, Mark, right now. You know, you're following your curiosity. I have no doubt about that. You know, you like to perform. You've got, I see in the background, I see a guitar. So, okay, you found a stage, you're performing. You are following your curiosity, which, and you're very good at this, you articulate, you ask the right questions. There's no reason that you can't be another Joe Rogan if that was your, if that's your aim.

Mark Cleveland (52:26)
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Matthew Joynes (52:47)
If you get the right guests, you ask them the right questions and then the answers resonate with the audience, it can succeed. But fundamentally, you're being an artist right now, as well as a businessman. And I think businessmen are all artists. I think we all are very, very creative. You know, when I got into the film business, you know, you have this imposter syndrome, oh, you're a producer. Of course I wasn't a producer. I've never produced anything. But I just said, well, I'm going to go in this direction because I'm curious.

You know, 400 movies later of distribution and I'd produce myself about half a dozen and trying to produce a big TV show at the moment. But I'm just following my curiosity. I had no money. I didn't have any money to make a film. You need millions. But if I didn't start, I wouldn't have got there. And my curiosity found out. Oh, so you make a film by selling it before you make it. Oh, I didn't know that. So all we need is a script and a poster?

Is that it? And they go, yeah. So I take a script and a poster and I go to Cannes and I say, well, what do think of this? And they go, "love it! Who's attached to it?" Make up a name. "Great!" Well, if you get him, I'll give you this money and I'll send it down my channel. So now I've got my script and my poster, but I don't have the name. So now I've to go to William Morris, Endeavour or CAA and persuade them to give this unknown producer Nicholas Cage.

Mark Cleveland (53:45)
Holy cow.

Matthew Joynes (54:10)
And that's what I did with Stolen. Literally, Nick Nylon looked at me and he is Nicolas Cage's assistant, he goes, "you've never done anything!" And I said, "no, but that's not the point. I think I can sell this internationally for this amount of money and give your client this amount." He goes, "...all right, you can, as long as you don't tell too many people, you can have them for this amount of money." And then of course I went back to the people that I knew and in this case, it was the guys behind Expendables and I said, well, became the guys behind Expendables. And I said, look, can you set this up for me at a studio? So what have you got? I've got a script, I've got a poster and I've got Nick Cage. They phone up Lionsgate. So we've got a script, we've got a poster and we've got Nick Cage. Will you pay X for it? And Lionsgate, yeah, we'll give you five million for the film. I know International is worth five million.

So, okay, let's go to the bank. We got two contracts for five million each. Let's go borrow $8 million. Go back to Nick and say, your rate card's gonna go down from four to three, because we can make it for eight, leaving us a $2 million profit. And that's how you make your first film. And that's all I did. The wheel to power was just like recognizing that we've sold something that's already sold. You know, 400 movies distributed since, or more, and I've like, I personally, I've got producer credit on a lot of films I didn't do anything with, but you know, I've actually personally produced, half a dozen movies just because I was curious. You know, he was this crazy lawyer at 32 in London. He was a bit bored and decided to go to the Cannes Film Festival. So curiosity definitely did not kill the cat. And I think if you're sitting there as a young entrepreneur,

Matthew Joynes (55:58)
and you're interested in whatever you're interested in. Go to one of the shows that's out there. You know, there's millions of these shows going on or communities. You know, if you want to make a graphic novel, make sure you go to Comic-Con. You know, go meet some people, go work your curiosity and it'll work out. Now with AI, of course, you can accelerate so many, parts of the unexciting process like what does it cost you to build an internet website now? Nothing. You know, what does it cost you to change the articles of association which you can just file because chat GPT will write them for you. You can write in, I don't want to have a fiduciary duty but I don't want there to be more than five board members and I want to keep control of the business when 75% of the shares are in other people's hands, do I get an extra vote? Can I have an extra vote? You know, can just make things up like that. You can be really creative on certain triggers and you can stick them in the articles of association, which they will never fucking read. And you're going to win down the line. So, you know, AI can accelerate your curiosity and, like you say, you can interrogate it. You can give it to your person and give it your style and say, okay, so I'm going to write a graphic novel. Well, AI, can you make me a graphic novel?

Here's some drawings I've done, stuff it in, copy my style, now render it, now give it some voices, and now send it to the publisher that Ghibli uses in Japan. And how much does cost to print up 10,000 copies? It goes, well, it you $10,000. Oh, fuck it, I'll do it. I'll spend 10 grand on my curiosity. So you've got 10,000 copies, what are you gonna do with them? Well, I'm gonna go to Comic Con. And how are you gonna get rid of them? Well, I'm gonna give 100 away.

So that leaves me 4,900 comic-con books that cost me three bucks each or whatever they did. And I'm going to stick them on my website because I've given out my card and I'm to sell them at three bucks. Keep going to Comic-Con for 10 years, you'll sell all of those. You'll get your money back and some. Just as other people are being curious. And maybe it happened you've written the best comic book ever, in which case it's happened overnight.

Not only have you sold 10,000 copies, you've sold 30,000 copies! So it's all to answer your own creativity. You know, like, why is there a hit music song? Why can I, I've got a great piano here. Fantastic! A $100 grand piano, can you believe it? Can't play a jiff that anyone would buy any song from me. But I can drop some guy, doesn't need a piano, he can use tin pots, because he's creative enough. And he can sell that song on Spotify every day of the week. So it's not...spending your money, capital on stuff. You've really got to go into that creativity, and I think AI is going to pull that out of everyone. It's going to dive into you and make you look into the mirror of yourself and say, wow, I am a valuable, creative, capable, in my case, handsome young man, even at 50. Yeah? ?

Mark Cleveland (59:02)
Absolutely.

Matthew Joynes (59:06)
It's not confidence from money, it's confidence from actually, you know, I look back at business and I go, what was it? It was horrendous, you know, absolutely vicious. It chewed me up, spat me out, chewed me up again. I allowed it to turn me over. I've been in the middle of the night, you know, with my tummy turning, no money, kids, houses, just feeling dreadful. And looking back, I go, why did I do it to myself? It wasn't necessary.

Most of those decisions I made were unnecessary, but it turns out they were all necessary for me to know that they were unnecessary and I think ChatGPT and you went people are reading about letting go and stuff like that yeah I think it is it is revealing that - to a lot of businessmen - that letting go you know looking at yourself introspectively is a valuable thing not being worried about capital getting you there. You know being a bit more resilient. Take a deep breath. Don't buy time use time better. I think we've been taught to buy time because we're in a propagandized world where, oh you got to buy a website designer. Oh, you've got to go buy an accountant, or you've got to go buy a... look, I can't tell you how many times that lawyers have... you know, I've all the lawyers money back and the value they gave me The money back is more valuable than the value they gave me, I don't think they've changed my life in one second in a positive way. Nearly all, most negative. Allowing somebody to self-bill against you is insane. But that's the propaganda told you. You need a lawyer. Go and use them. I'm a lawyer and I've used them. You know, know, chat. Yeah, but chat GPT can do all of that for you. That's a huge cost saving.

Mark Cleveland (1:00:44)
You're a lawyer and you've used one. What's your

Matthew Joynes (1:00:51)
Your saving is you can use that money that you've raised on yourself. Use your time. Most people are buying other people's time. Well, now, now, the big difference is you get to buy your own time. That, I think, is hard for people to get around. The business model of the world is changing. You don't buy other people's time. You use your time better.

Mark Cleveland (1:00:56)
Yeah.

Matthew Joynes (1:01:17)
And a great use of time is because you've got these wonderful tools that you can use, that you can express yourself so quickly. You can do a PR release in 10 seconds. You can have your website up in five minutes. You can have an email campaign out there. You can have a product designed. I saw something on Instagram the other day that really took my fancy. And I went, well, that's really clever. But he had this little dog wash. And it came into my Instagram feed. And this guy says, I noticed there was this little small dog wash and he said, well this would be a good business if somebody put a credit card reader by it. So you put them out by the beach and it's a little thing that sprays your dog with water and soap and you kind of push your dog backwards and forwards in it and it's free. And he said, well why didn't somebody just put a five dollar card reader next to it? And I went, yeah! So you know I think a lot of new businesses will appear, much simpler, much more robotic functional and you know you could get that thing designed and built now within literally the end of the day you could source somebody who could make it you could make the mouldings from your designs. You can get your website linked to it, I mean you can do so much in a month just so much in one month! Don't buy anyone else's time that's my takeaway. Stop spending money on other people. Start spending it on your time, literally buy your...

Mark Cleveland (1:02:47)
I'm going to take this opportunity to pause, to jump in and say, we're going to hold the second part of this conversation for next week's episode. Please come back and join us on The Parallel Entrepreneur for the next contribution to the wisdom bank by Matthew Joynes. Thank you.