Matt Gray
speaker
160 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard May 2025
Matt Gray’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
This is the Russell Brunson Show.
in your world travelers we'll talk about more but um yeah just curious the trip you're on right now why you're swinging by boise yeah so uh was yeah on a bit of a journey twice a year we run different events and experiences for founder os and we just ran one in austin and i figured well i'm in the country might as well make an epic trip out of it so took my parents to wyoming to yellowstone and uh grand teton for some hikes and then yeah we were talking and it was like why not make the trip out to boise you
A couple of connections later, you're in Boise even though it's next door and you make it happen.
Yeah, exactly. So yeah, no, it's great to be here.
How long ago? So yeah, a little background. When I was 20, I started a technology bootcamp in Canada, the first of its kind where we trained full stack.
software engineers and then got them jobs at tech companies like shopify facebook uh google and over the course of a few years we trained 2 000 software engineers um one month after graduation they'd go through these like three months of intensive training and we'd train them up get them jobs 90 of them were getting jobs one month after graduating and uh did really well we ended up exiting the business to general assembly uh they bought us uh you know when they were coming north to canada
After that, I was like, okay, a lot of things were great about this business, but I hated the fact that I was just stuck in Toronto running this in-person thing. And I knew the next business that I created, I wanted to have location freedom. So I picked up my bags, got rid of everything, and started traveling.
Went to New Zealand, Peru, came across this random website of all things called the Stoner's Cookbook. Some guys I had met when I was in New Zealand. I ended up buying the website off them and rebranding it to Herb.
I kind of saw the writing on the wall of where the cannabis industry was going over the next decade and saw an opportunity to, yeah, like transform it into something much more tasteful, curated. And there was no platform that was really reliable and trustworthy around that niche. And sure enough, 10 years later, we kind of grew it into an audience of over 14 million people.
And, yeah, so that's kind of a bit of the journey there. Did you sell that business? You still have that business? Yeah, really just passionate about helping founders, you know, kind of make the founder journey much more joyful. I think we're both kind of aligned around that. I think it can be lonely and difficult and yeah, overwhelming at times.
And I think when I set out to build FounderOS, I set out to build a business that worked. was kind of in my icky guy, like what I love to do, what I'm good at, what I could be paid for, and what the world needs. And sought out to build something that would feel like everyday retirement, like working on the stuff that even if I was retired, this is the kind of stuff I'd be doing every single day.
And I feel like you're also in that element. You can see it just when you're running different events or you're in the room with founders. You're just there because you genuinely... you wake up and you live this shit. And so, you know, I can feel that. I think others can feel that. And I wanted that for my own life to be able to wake up every day and just work on my calling.
And so that's what founder us is kind of the manifestation of that. That's cool.
Yeah, so for me, I think that things like entrepreneur, founder, business owner, these are all synonymous. Founder to me is just, yeah, someone that's running a business around a thing that they love to do and looking to scale it. The typical person that we work with is someone that's doing generally about 50K per month.
Yeah, they definitely consider themselves entrepreneurs. I think, if anything, the bridge that's going on in terms of maybe their identity is I think more and more founders these days are merging with the creator economy. Stuff that you've been talking about for a decade or more now. So this idea that between the two. Yeah. Yeah.
This idea that, you know, people follow people, then they follow brands. And, you know, I think that when you have a personal brand, what I call a founder led brand, you know, you're able to go and make sure that you have. People like really understanding the story behind what you're building and they can really follow you, follow your journey.
And that makes the brand that much more impactful and it allows you to grow it a lot faster. And so this importance as a founder to really be thinking about building your audience day one. You know, there's that whole saying like first time founders focus on tech, second time founders focus on distribution.
And I think more and more people are waking up to like the quicker you can build that distribution, build that personal brand and an audience around yourself. It sets you up.
for, you know, having this amazing kind of media moat around your business for the next decade to come, whether you're still building that business or maybe it's sold and you're onto the next one and you still have that brand and audience around yourself. A hundred percent.
I learned, you know, the benefits of that, but also the struggle of, you know, you maybe have an idea that comes into your head of something you want to create. And then you have to kind of brief it and delegate it and follow up on it and quality control it. Whereas for me, like building a personal brand or building a founder led brand around yourself.
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