In this fascinating interview, Robert Steven Kramarz (Rob) interviews Mark McNally of Nobody Studios. He starts with Mark’s background (unique is an understatement). What also interested Rob is Mark’s skills and an entrepreneurial Vision Master as well as an initial investor.
Mark truly understands both parts of the Vision Master “formula.”
You will learn a ton from this gentleman! Don’t miss out.
Please enjoy the video below and the transcript that follows and be sure to catch the video about Nobody Studios at the end of this interview page.
Hi! All you Vision Masters out there. Robert Steven Kramarz, executive director of Intelliversity, here, and this is your Vision Master podcast. Today, I’m happy, proud, and somewhat interested, as well as curious to be interviewing Mark McNally, CEO of Nobody Studios; we’ll learn what he’s all about.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
Mark is a fascinating guy, as you’ll see, with a background in psych ops in the U.S. Army, and he wears both hats as an entrepreneur. Many times, over and now working with many companies that are part of the studio. So, he must have the entrepreneurial hat. As the first investor in these companies, he also wears the investor’s hat. So, you will hear the point of view of both a very experienced entrepreneur with an independent mind like yours and the investor guy in one. This combination will be fascinating.
So, no more introduction. This is Mark McNally. Mark, briefly tell our audience, who are all Vision Masters themselves, or Vision Master wannabes, innovators, and business, what Nobody Studio does.
Mark McNally:
First, Rob, thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to the conversation.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
Sure.
Mark McNally:
Nobody Studios is a venture studio. The way to think of that is as a mix between an early-stage investor and just a crazy entrepreneur. So, we’re builders. We build our own companies. We have a full suite of talent and resources inside the studio, from technologists to strategists to marketers.
Many folks look like some version of my background, which is that I’ve been a serial entrepreneur my whole career. I’ve done 14 startups and seen their multi-billion-dollar IPO. I’ve seen a bunch of exits. I’ve seen bankruptcies. So, I’ve got the scars, and I’ve got everything along the way.
Yes, we’re just ultimately builders. We’re passionate builders and love attracting other builders to the journey. Sometimes we’re inspired by people who walk in the front door and go, “Hey, I have an idea.” And we know we have the capital, the people to turn that into something quick. We always say that we’re zero to 18 months. We’re masters at taking something from the whiteboard and having it in the market in 12 to 18 months. People are using it, and it’s got metrics and revenue. That’s where we focus.
There’s a whole other ecosystem in the venture capital world that takes companies to scale, and we have all the respect for that. There’s nothing for us to innovate there. That’s what other people do. So, if we’re building good early-stage companies, our brethren in the venture capital community will help us take it to the next stage.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
So, Mark, how many companies as a percentage come to you with an idea, and you say, “Let’s do it,” versus ideas that you and your team have, and you go out and find founders to run them?
Mark McNally:
Great question. It’s probably a ratio that’ll change. We started with an idea board of almost 200 ideas ourselves. So, many of the companies we’re building today were internally conceived. So, I would expect the ratio to be somewhere more like a third internal, a third external being founder, and the other third a category is what we call corporate inspired.
So, we work with publicly traded and private equity firms that know the kinds of companies they’re looking to add, but they work with us to help them build what they need. We have a short cycle, a more midterm exit on those companies. We’ve been accelerating the founder-led stuff because we find some fantastic companies. We made our first micro acquisition, a company that already existed, and had a little investment into it, so we could come to terms and bring them into the studio.
With the downturn these last 12 weeks, I think we will see more and more of those opportunities. So, I believe it’s somewhere between a third, and a half of our portfolio will be founders walking in the front door with an idea. And we make a meaningful argument for people coming into the studio.
So, aside from being a part of the rest of the studio, they get instant founders. We’re not accelerators. We’re not mentors giving you an hour a week or an hour a month. So, if they’re in the studio, I lose sleep over every company, and so do all my founders. Their early-stage capital is taken care of; they need to scale in the first 12 months.
But as a studio building many companies, we got a BHAG to do a hundred companies in five years. Anyone who’s a part of any one of our companies earns equity across the whole portfolio. So, we’re doing something unique regarding startup and employee risk scenarios. Generally, you pick the next startup if it doesn’t work in three or four years. If that doesn’t work two or three startups in a row, that was a rough career.
Investors are used to thinking about the portfolio approach. One goes well, two or three decent, the rest fail, and they can still make it pencil out. We’re trying to bring that portfolio approach to the upside to all startup employees. It’s bringing us some compelling folks, but it gives us a lot to work with when we’re bringing in people who already have ideas. So don’t just think about what you get from your own company. Think about everything you could be involved in within the studio that you get upside on.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
Interesting. So, it gives everyone a chance to play on the other companies and brings a lot of cross-fertilization between the company.
Mark McNally:
Exactly.
I call it a keiretsu of talent. All these people want to help each other out. So, if I need to grab my Fintech expert from the blockchain team and have them come over to the health and wellness team because they’re trying to figure out how to secure health records, you’re getting the best and brightest working together. So, they’re all cross incentivized, and deep down inside, they also enjoy the intellectual stimulation.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
You are an intellectual guy. What’s interesting about Mark is he looks like a military guy. But I’ve discovered in my time with you that you’re a very original thinker. Original thinking is scarce, especially nowadays. One out of a hundred, one out of a thousand are original. Galileo was under house arrest for almost 15 years because he said the sun does not revolve around the earth.
I was talking to my two-year-old niece, and it’s evident to her that the sun revolves around the earth. So far, be it for me to explain, well, it’s not how it works. I’ll wait a couple of years for that one, along with Santa Claus.
You’re constantly having to deal with seeing things differently than just the average person. So, what is your strategy for maintaining your sanity in a world with which you don’t always agree?
Mark McNally:
A long time ago, I gave up on debating facts because whatever I thought the points were was just what I believed. Then early in my career, I felt it was about having strong opinions and being ready to defend them to the death. Right? Now I have strong opinions loosely held.
So, I like to challenge my thinking. I can think of at least a half-dozen or more critical topics I was wrong about going back 10, 15, or 20 years. So, that’s the first sign of brilliant, original thinking. My answer to your question is when I have conversations with folks; I tend to spend less time on the misalignment of facts than on the way of thinking. Challenging to say, okay, we’re at least open to where we might be wrong. Okay, let’s just for a second. Assume that we are wrong. What would be the alternative answer?
People say, “That’s impossible.” Now you can change the rules. How do you make it possible? I enjoy stretching people’s thinking because I think they all have it deep down inside. Everyone has a different capacity for problem-solving than others. But more often, we aren’t taught to process that way. I enjoy it because I’ve seen it unlock brilliant people who have spent a whole career in their boxes and rules. But the minute you start talking and thinking this way, they find it just refreshing. So, you can unlock some of the most original thinkers ever.
So, I find it trivial if we’re arguing passionately about facts or what one person thinks facts are. It’s fascinating to figure out how we get to the right way of thinking. And especially in the studio. One of the things that are defined by anytime you say you’re going to do a hundred companies in five years. One of the reasons why we said that is because we knew it defined speed, the rate at which you’d have to make decisions, and the speed at which you’d have to have gut and instinct, which I think we beat out of our culture the last 20, 30 years, and I think it’s more important than ever.
By setting that goal, we weren’t going to allow people to come into the system and say, okay, if I had said five companies in five years, people say, “Ooh, that’s a lot.” But we can work a little bit harder. We can hire a few more people. We can throw more money at it. Okay?
If I say 10 in five years, people like, “Ooh, okay, that’s a few more people. That’s a few more Saturdays.” If you say 20, people get uncomfortable. The minute you say a hundred, people say, “Whoa, we got to do something different.” So, we’re inventing a new way of thinking. And how to say directionally we’re going that way, but we’re going to trust our ability to learn along the way constantly. Right?
And I think that at least the way I was trained early on as a classic product person and a market marketing person, you spent months and months, if not a year, building a product requirement document or a marketing campaign document. And I think today, with the speed of technology, learning systems, and data, it’s more important to say, “Go in that direction and revise it in two weeks.” And so, for me, that’s fundamentally a way of thinking and a way of acting.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
There are two sayings about decision-making. One is we should make decisions quickly but change them slowly. And the other is we should make decisions slowly and carefully, but we would be willing to change them quickly. Now both are contradictory and undoubtedly dependent on the situation. But what’s your thought on decision-making for the CEO and Vision Master? Because pivoting is essential and inevitable, right?
Mark McNally:
When I say, “Make a decision and be ready to change it quickly.” Because I think that it’s data-driven, you must figure out your hypotheses. I think when people say, “I just believe we should go that way.” Okay, great. But you must extract that yourself. If you’re right, you believe you’ll see flowers on the ground in three weeks if you plant flower seeds. Great. If you don’t see flowers on the ground three weeks from now, you’re forced to revisit that assumption. So, it’s not about being right or wrong. It’s about a thesis. And I think it’s about training people to think a little bit more scientific with the experiments and the choices they make. When you think of a decision, again, this is how we trained ourselves 20, 30 years ago, that leadership was about getting it right, and people would trust you the more you got it right. And they just had faith in your leadership.
But it’s like, at least in the organization we’re building, it’s about faith and a safe environment to fail. Leadership is about coaxing the best out of people who might typically be quiet and say, “But what if this?” Because usually, it’s that best idea will come from that person who’s not naturally going to raise their hand or speak up or doesn’t look like a 49-year-old white guy. I mean, the reality is that there are people with amazing voices and ideas. Environments you create let those rise to the top, at least in the organization we’re trying to create, and the speed of innovation and the spinoffs of ideas.
There are lots of correct answers. When we get to decision-making, people screw it up when they believe there’s only one correct answer. I’ve found that saying there are many right answers is quite liberating. And even so much so that in the studio, if we think there might be two or three valid answers, we have the liberty to pursue them all. They might be different companies. There might be three other companies that come after something, or we might do three experiments and go with the one that works.
With the speed and agility with which innovation and technology are going in the next few decades, some people adapt to that level of evolution, and some don’t. It coincides with the fact that it happens to be a skillset easy to replace by technology and AI. On the other hand, dynamic thinking, rapid learning, and gut instincts will be harder to replace, at least in my lifetime.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
One question that comes to mind is the distinction between a decision about direction and a decision about tactics, or strategy versus tactics. So, you may be willing to change your tactics at a moment’s notice as the battlefield changes or facts change. But at least, in my opinion, I don’t want leaders just to be attracted to the next shiny object when I’m talking about direction.
Mark McNally:
Yes.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
The broad strategies should change slowly unless you have a disaster coming.
Mark McNally:
Yes, and I agree, it’s a crucial qualifier. Because when you say, “How do you make decisions?” That’s different. That’s a big, broad statement. Right?
Robert Steven Kramarz:
Yes, correct.
Mark McNally:
I always say with strategy, and I go back to Norman Schwarzkopf, and this quote has always gotten me out of whenever I felt like people weren’t in alignment. Right? The first Desert Storm where he is like, “How did you get 500,000 people halfway around the world, half of which were dentists and mechanics two months earlier, to land halfway around the world and pull off this masterpiece of war in 90 days?”
Robert Steven Kramarz:
It was, yes.
Mark McNally:
He said, “Well, it’s basic leadership. Anyone who doesn’t get it doesn’t deserve to be a leader. Everybody knew what we were trying to accomplish and their role in getting there.” It’s just that simple.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
I see.
Mark McNally:
The situation was a thousand tanks going 42 miles an hour across the desert, and if you don’t show up with gas at that point, they will be sitting ducks stopped in the desert, hundreds of guys will lose their lives, and we’ll lose the war. So, you had your role. You understood the importance of what you’re doing, the interdependencies. Nobody let each other down. They had to make it happen, war as war. There are a ton of things that could go wrong.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
We could talk all night.
Mark McNally:
At the end of the day, it’s the master plan that happened. Everybody knew what we were trying to accomplish, and everyone was there where they needed to be. There are redundancies. But, enough of the right things happened. It looked masterful.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
Were you there? Were you in Desert Storm?
Mark McNally:
No, I joined after that.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
Although I’m an Army brat, I worked for the Air Force but never was in the military. Thank you for your service.
Mark McNally:
Thank you. I’ve got friends that were in 10 times longer than I was and had ten deployments to my two. So, my respects to the people who have. They always say that some gave all and all gave some.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
Yes.
Mark McNally:
And it’s like I have a lot of respect for some of the sacrifices people have made, especially in the last 10 or 15 years. And I at least have respect for it and appreciation for it, and I did my part. I usually could have spent an entire life on it. I loved what I was doing. But for me, it was a very conscious choice. I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur.
I got a chance to do the service thing first. It was important to me. My grandfather was a full bird Air Force colonel, and I grew up with all those stories. And it was important to me that I did it, and I’m proud of what I did and my experiences there. But when I got out, it was a fork in the road because you don’t re-up after six years and then get out in 10 or 12. If you re-up after six, you’re in for 30, at least in what I did for a living.
I was cognizant of going, and maybe I had my chance to do the boy thing and jump out of planes, be deployed and do some of the fun stuff and check the box for service that meant a lot to me. And it was a very conscious choice to build my career.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
I don’t think I mentioned to the audience of Vision Masters that Mark was in psych ops, psychological operations, for the U.S. Army. And that’s relevant to what we’re doing here. Because I know as a Vision Master myself and Mark is what we do: we crave, hunger for knowledge, take our ideas and make them real. Make a difference in the world, so they’re no longer just an idea in our head or a small team.
Mark specializes in that, and I know it’s in his genes. Otherwise, He wouldn’t be doing this. So, when you contact Mark, talk about how Nobody Studios make somebody out of you if you don’t mind me saying that. And by the way, explain to me, given that kind of contradiction, why do you call it Nobody Studios?
Mark McNally:
Well, you can get into it and have a lot of fun. Right? You start to see some more marketing that’ll be coming out. And it’s like we always say, be the entrepreneur that nobody believed you could be. But there are a couple of different threads in the backstory. But the easiest one to explain is I knew from the very beginning this would be bigger than any one ego and personality.
So, it’s not McNally studios. We knew that. And because we knew early on that we had a massive global vision, hundreds of companies, and a presence worldwide; we just knew that we would be defined by the people we attract to the journey. So, I knew we needed entire world-class marketing, technology, legal, and finance team.
So, when you start thinking that way, you’re painting a risky vision of dozens of some of the best people you could attract, which is a complex challenge. And I think that one of the things we knew was that I didn’t realize it honestly until we started getting into this. What was tied into spec ops and my military background; everyone’s cross-trained. I got a chance to be deployed with a Green Beret team of six months and saw how they lived and breathed. So, I realized I had never spent a day of my life looking over your shoulder. Everyone on the team was someone you trusted with your life, and they were brothers, and they were there to have you at your worst of times and cover your back when you were down, and they expected you to be up most of the time and vice versa. But I just realized that in that culture, the ego is being checked at the door, and we’re here to do a job, and we’re here to have each other’s back was important.
I also knew I wanted to be in a spot that could attract the best and brightest. I’ve learned that the more you talk to somebody, and they spend 45 minutes talking about their background, the less they’re a Nobody. I mean, we all must do a certain amount of that. Right? That’s part of the discovery of who we are. But I don’t know. I realized a specific humbleness would be the glue of our culture.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
I see.
Mark McNally:
So, “Nobody” just embodied that.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
Interesting.
Mark McNally:
I think the other thing is that I’ve lived a crazy career and life and had exposure to lots of stories, something that most people dream of. But I’m not trending on Instagram anywhere, and I’m not written up on Wikipedia with a 20-page story about my life. And I’ve come across so many people in my journey that is just brilliant, fascinating people that I affectionately call nobodies. Not everyone’s Elon Musk. But some of the best stories you could ever want to learn from are flying just below the radar. And yeah, just kind of a tongue-in-cheek humbleness about it that resonates with who we are in our culture.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
Well, speaking about Elon Musk, who’s a hero to me. I’m not saying I like everything he does or says, by the way. But he has a knack for making original thinking big in the real world. He loves that camera; indeed, he loves being somebody. It’s obvious.
Mark McNally:
Yes.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
If you can give our Vision Master wannabes and Vision Masters in the audience one tip you don’t think they’ve heard before about making their visions real in the real world through entrepreneurship, what would that be? Something that maybe they haven’t heard before.
Mark McNally:
Well, at the risk of this sounding obvious, being a mentor and a small angel for 25 years, every time I tell an entrepreneur this, it always seems like, oh, is that what I’m supposed to do? So, I believe that most entrepreneurs fail by locking themselves in a room to get it perfect before they tell their stories.
I’m a huge, huge believer. So, I can get militant on it when I’m coaching people to tell their stories. I don’t care how bad it is. Tell your story five times a day, and then tell it 10 tomorrow, and then tell it 20 next week. Because the more you tell your story, the more you realize what you believe in. Your story gets a little crisper. But you get critical feedback along the way.
But I truly believe that if you’re onto something of any form, you’re not going to get through a hundred conversations without somebody saying, “Oh my God, you know whom you need to talk to?” Or someone else saying, “Hey, are you raising money?” Or someone else saying, “Hey, can I join you? I love this.” So those data points and signals are what you’re looking for.
It also embodies a whole bunch of things that, if you’re asking me, what I look for in an entrepreneur. I genuinely believe an entrepreneur must be able to tell a story. They must be able to tell a story in a compelling way that attracts people to their journey. You could be an entrepreneur that’s a technologist that needs to hire a storyteller. There are a couple of different personalities in a startup co-founding team. But if you’re the original person trying to bring it to life from nothing, you’d better get comfortable telling a story.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
You, of course, know I teach story pitching, right? Story pitching.
Mark McNally:
You’ll hear people say, “Yeah, I know. I’m just waiting for my mockups to be done. I’m waiting for the artists to get it back to me in two weeks. And I got some prototypes that will be ready in four weeks. So that’ll be the perfect time to tell a story.” So, I say, “Call your grandma right now. Tell the story. Call your best friend from college and tell him the story. Ask your neighbor; he’s got 10 minutes. Tell him your story.” It’s like a muscle that needs to be worked to get stronger. One of the most significant differences between the companies that may have had a good idea, technology, and people, but didn’t escape velocity, almost always it’s people not being able to tell their story. I’m about to do a post, and I think it’s going out today or tomorrow, which is how we did Nobody Studios.
I downloaded my database from LinkedIn. It’s got 4,000 now or so. But I identified a hundred people that I thought were the right mix of people who would be fans, good friends, naysayers, people who barely liked me or didn’t like me before, and I just said, “Okay, I’m going to get through these a hundred people in 90 days.” And I started telling the story.
And I was still in my garage, and my dog was eating food next to me on my feet. And I just started going through the calls. And we didn’t get through 20 or 30 before I was convicted. My story is almost the same one I tell now two-and-a-half years later. But people were offering to invest, wanting to work with me, and introducing me to people, which lit a fire.
And I believe that that’s what you’re looking for in anything. If you’re onto something, that’s the thing that is the rocket fuel. The rocket fuel isn’t hey, congratulations. You convinced somebody to give you money.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
All right.
Mark McNally:
That’s what it was. The startup graveyard is full of people that tell you that’s not true.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
I wish we could take more time. So, Vision Masters, if you want to hear Mark McNally some more on this channel, send me an email or remark on LinkedIn. If you wish to contact Mark directly, what’s the email? How do we do it?
Mark McNally:
Yeah. I love interacting with folks. So, very simple. Mark@nobodystudios.com, or you can ping me on LinkedIn.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
That’s great. And especially if you have a great idea that you want to bring to Nobody Studios, then do that. And to reach out to me, as usual, make an appointment on my calendar of by email, robk@intelliversity.org, or contact me on LinkedIn either way.
So, in the interest of time, we’ll call this a day. But boy, I would love to continue this conversation in the future. This is Robert Steven Kramarz, Intelliversity. This is your Vision Master podcast signing off because that’s the way it will be. Thank you, Mark.
Mark McNally:
Thanks, Rob.
Robert Steven Kramarz:
Take care.