Adam Torres and Annemarie Penny discuss startup success.
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Show Notes:
How can you predict the possible success of your startup, just based on personality? In this episode, Adam Torres and Annemarie Penny, Founder & Advisor at Dreamore, explore Dreamore and how it’s helping startups succeed.
About Dreamore
Formerly Apex Direct Search, a top ranked executive search firm catering to tech startups and guided by a leadership team representing diverse perspectives. Transformed into a dynamic recruiting and advisory entity, Dreamore is dedicated to serving purpose-driven clients.
Nestled on a picturesque 10-acre expanse along the coastal beauty of California, Dreamore isn’t just a workplace; it’s a lifestyle. Here, amidst the tranquility of nature, the team lives, works, and collaborates to foster innovation and forge meaningful connections.
At the core of the company’s philosophy lies a single word: “Elevate.” It embodies their relentless pursuit of excellence, their commitment to pushing boundaries, and their unwavering dedication to raising themselves and others to greater heights. With “Elevate” as their guiding principle, the team inspires each other to aspire to loftier goals and ideals, both personally and professionally, propelling themselves and their clients toward success and fulfillment.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today’s guest is Anne Marie Penny, and she’s founder at DreamMore.
Anne Marie, welcome to the show. Hello, glad to be here. All right, so you’re obviously a founder, you’re obviously in marketing because when I heard this title predicting startup success based on founder personality, I was like, man, who wrote that hook? I wish I thought of that one. It’s a great topic and one that I haven’t covered exactly.
So I’m excited to get into it. But before we do that, Anne Marie, we’re going to start this episode the way we start them all with what we call our Mission Matters Minute. All right. So at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s what we do.
And Marie, what mission matters to you? I am a founder who’s been helping founders for 25 years intersection of nerds, creatives, and entrepreneurial stories. Spirit sings very closely to my soul, and in this iteration, we did rebrand as Dream More starting last year because we particularly want to focus on purpose driven companies.
Anything that elevates women and underserved groups, does something good for the world and the people in it, that’s what motivates us. And I don’t want to meet the soulless person who can’t agree that’s a beautiful cause. I will say this. I’m not trying to be soulless, but working with founders isn’t easy.
Working with me is not easy. I’m a founder and we can be needy. Sometimes we can be like, we got all these emotions, just not an easy path. You’ve been doing it for 25 years. I’ve been working with founders for maybe. Eight. And only at the capacity of media, by the way, when I say that, like an interview and things like that.
And I just see there’s so many personalities. What keeps you in the game? A lot of things you could do. You’re super talented. Lots of different paths. What keeps you in the game working and helping and putting your heart into founders? Like what keeps you in it? Well, there’s two things, and I’m going to go universal, and then I’m going to go slightly less universal.
Every human needs a purpose. We need to understand our why, and that could change regularly. think that you should wake up every day and ask yourself, Why am I doing this? And not to be hard on yourself, but just to reset. Sometimes we get in kind of a groove and we keep repeating ourselves and reacting to what’s in front of us.
And if we really can recognize that part of what keeps us motivated as people is having a purpose and it almost doesn’t matter what that purpose is. So long as you have some clarity on it. Like, you know, a lot of my friends that have families, they know that the reason they’re working so hard and trying to be a better person is because of their partner or because of their children.
other people might have had some sort of trauma or tragedy in their life, and now they’re very motivated to help the kind of people that have also suffered in that way. So whatever that purpose is, I mean, if your goal is to make a hundred million dollars, I mean, that’s a purpose. don’t know if that should be your only purpose, but, you know, there are a lot of people that what drives them.
Now, in terms of founder personality, which is ultimately what we’ll talk about today. That’s that’s what I mean by, like, how you There’s lots of personalities. I’ll pick up mine. Like I said, like, you know, we’re entrepreneurs, man. It’s not easy though. What keeps you dealing with personality?
Well, you know, somewhere it’s just accepting who you are. You know, I’m a math nerd and we have partnered exclusively with 10 years of academic data that’s done extensive research on On founders and recognize that there are certain key personality traits that just makes us who we are. And it doesn’t mean that we can’t go and be employees see that through, but it means that it’s not as natural a fit.
And what you’ll find with most intrinsic founder personalities, which we can now measure is even on your worst day as a founder, you’re still going to do it because it’s who you are. And if you can actually, however, you can find the acceptance, whether it’s experience or running the survey and seeing it in data, or just, you know, seeing your track record.
You know, if that’s who you are, that’s who you are, and you can’t help yourself. It’s like cats might scratch the furniture. It’s who they are so other than being an amazing hook to get people to listen to this episode Which i’m very happy that they are listening you can actually think about personality and otherwise and have some level of predictability for like success for a startup Like like this is like it’s fascinating to me like Tell me more.
Absolutely. I mean, everybody loves a good survey, right? It’s like, you know, the cosmopolitan, you know, 10 ways you can be a better boyfriend. There’s always some math behind it. And the reason why I point out that this particular success survey is 10 years of academic research is just recognizing that.
This 20 minute survey may seem like questions that, you know, are not that complex, but by the time you map it out and use the AI tools that we have now, you can draw some pretty impressive correlations that if you have the right co founder team by personality, not skillset, just by intrinsic personality, there could be as much as a 64 percent uptick in your likelihood of success for your startup.
That’s a big number. That’s a big number. That’s a huge number. So if you want, we can get into, you know, again, this is going to be oversimplified because the full data usually ends up being a 2 hour deep dive of what does it really mean? And then how do you turn it into action? But there are certain key aspects such as drive.
You know, founders don’t always do well in employment situation, because they’re going to go in and try to fix everything and do everything. And, you know, that doesn’t always play well with other people that are in more of a structured
Marker
environment. Now, let me give you a personal story just as an indicator that there might be somebody out there thinking I am too scared to be a founder and I don’t have the skills. skills and I don’t have the personality traits.
So, you know, I’m just not going to bother. I was a nerdy, nerdy, smart child that, you know, just read books and hit in the corner, super shy, all of that being said, you would go, well, that personality is not a founder personality. That same person built her own business in third grade. I had my own suite of products that were holiday themed gift items, and I made 28 from my classmates until the school shut me down because it couldn’t sell stuff on campus.
The foreshadowing of even the nerdy, nerdy, shy kid who had a lot of fear still couldn’t help herself that she had this entrepreneurial streak. And wanted to have her own business. So it’s okay to be scared. That’s not a personality type. That’s just Managing, you know what everybody has inside of them But that drive and that ego was very much a part of my little business coupled with the frustration that they shut me down and then I had to figure out what to do next What excites you right now in the startup world in general, like, what keeps you not the people or the going, like, I mean, , like whether it’s industries tech, like, I don’t want to put word in your mouth.
I just want to say in the founder world in general right now. You’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve been doing this a long time. And for a long time, you know, we’ve built many venture backed startups and PE backed startups that became unicorns and were acquired by major brands. What’s exciting me right now and why we chose to focus on purpose driven companies and why we’re so excited to align with mission media, the purpose driven aspect.
Doesn’t necessarily have to be a certain kind of technology or a tool doesn’t have to be education. It’s it’s often not even a nonprofit structure, but having that purpose and then translating that into what can we do better for our climate? What can we do better for women’s health or women’s education or underserved groups that don’t have the same opportunities as other kinds of groups?
You know, what can we do to bring people together and community and align and values in ways that, you know, we didn’t before, because we didn’t have the kind of technology that we have today. So all of those kind of themes that are being expressed in so many different ways, that’s just super exciting. the Dream More project, like, tell me more, how does this tie into it?
Absolutely. So the last company was called Apex Direct Search. Apex is the highest point of something. And so, you know, coming out of KPMG Finance and starting out Fortune 500 the values back then and, and ongoing were very much about. Moving up a ladder growing bigger, growing faster. And yes, it is dream more now, so there’s a more in it.
But in this journey was realizing, you know, sometimes less is more. And you don’t necessarily have to be a rapid growth startup that blows up as big as you possibly can. And you’re burned out. And even if you end up with a lot of money in the bank, like, was that really what it was all about? So Dreamore is, it’s three things actually.
So it is the rebranding of the recruiting and advisory firm. You know, we’re still very much working with startups and middle market companies. And now we’re working closely with founders, even at the earlier stages, because I wanted to make sure that we were purposeful to help all of these parts of the ecosystem and not just, you know, come back when you got money.
So that’s, that’s the services part of Dreamore. DreamWare is also a physical location. I’m developing 10 acres of land at the top of Malibu, Topanga by the coast. We have always been community builders that had a physical space to share with our ecosystem and you know, connect in ways that are business and fun and creativity.
And so this 10 acres of land for real estate development is very much DreamWare as well. And then the last part is that DreamWare is a way of thinking. say imagine the possibilities, and that doesn’t mean you have to do more because that’s where burnout can happen. It just means dream more and open up your way of thinking, basically a growth mindset.
If you’ve gone through a lot of challenges, or you’re uncertain about the economy, or as a founder, you’re just, you know, feeling defeated if an investor turns you down, or there’s not enough time in the day. In all of that kind of energy, Dream More is just the opportunity to say, look, I can imagine. This greater thing and just stretch for it and just open up my mindset.
So I’m not just feeling limited all the time. Yeah, I love it. I love the concept. I love the idea. And I think what makes it interesting is that It’s this idea of even the community component of what you’re going to be doing and how you’re going to be bringing people together. Let’s dream we’re entrepreneurs in the here. And what’s your vision, like in your wildest dreams, where this thing goes, like, do you see this planned out? Like what, what would be your.
Dream, like we bring you back in the show and you know, five years and we’re like, Oh my gosh, we had that conversation. Like, what’s the dream here. What’s the vision. 100 percent and I am willing to say this in writing assuming that there’s a transcript. That’s the writing of it. So, in 5 years, the land, the 10 acres that we’re breaking ground this year, it’s been 5 years of navigating the California Coastal Commission.
Anybody that ever wanted to develop in Malibu, this is a huge, like, big deal. I just wanted to give you some signage. It’s not easy. It is exhausting process. And, you know, I’m answering your question, but just quick backstory. The Malibu Dreamhouse was the other location we had, and it did burn to the ground in 2018 in the Woolsey fire.
That was the same year that Apex Direct Search was on the Forbes list of America’s best professional recruiting firms. it was the same year that I bought this 10 acre parcel thinking. All right, we are bootstrapped. And now we’re in the 1 percent and we’re sharing it and doing good things and building startups.
So we’ll have this 1 place and then we’ll take our time to have this other place. And the fire said, no, you know, what? Maybe your ego is a little too big and you need to knock it down a peg and decide what you really want to do. So when the pandemic happened and I was feeling very low, I had lost my purpose.
And that was the moment that I decided I’m going to keep this land. I’m going to develop it. I’m going to relaunch the company. We’re going to call everything dream more. And it is going to be coming out of this sad, purposeless energy because I want to help startups. I want to help women. There are so many opportunities with the gardens and nature up there.
It’s surrounded by the conservancy. I’ve done a lot of off grid sustainable development there already and will continue to do so. So, answering your question with the five years, in five years, there will be roughly a 6, 500 square foot set of you know, homes and buildings that can nurture our three Cs, which is commerce, community, and creativity.
And they all come together on this physical space, and whether we’re helping people with PTSD, or we’re supporting content creators to be inspired in their art, or, you know, fostering wellness, or just helping founders, you know, keep a good mindset and grow the kind of businesses that they want to grow.
That’s where the services company comes in, but that’s also where the physical location is coming in together. It’s amazing. Well, Anne Marie, I just have to say this has been so much fun having you on the show and getting to know more about you, your project dream more. I can’t wait to see more on, on this one and develop and visit.
I know you were doing some. Correct me if I’m wrong. I think you were doing some hikes or you, there’s some other things that you were doing in the past that match up on that. I gotta get out there. So you got to remember, you are, you are absolutely correct on that. There is a monthly dream or hike and picnic.
The hike is optional, but we did cut some private hiking trails down into the conservancy, so you can only get there through moi. And so this is a monthly nature time and salon style conversation with Founders, business leaders, investors, and creatives. So anyone in the LA area that wants to participate, see what we’re building, and see how we can all work together just let us know, because you’ll be invited into that.
Fantastic. And if somebody wants to connect, how do they do that? So you can go to the Dreamorse site, that’s D R E A M O R E. There’s a little Easter egg at Dreamore, because it only has one M instead of two, and that Easter egg is amore. So if anybody speaks Italian, there is love buried in Dreamore. Oh, my gosh, I didn’t even know that.
You’re right. There sure is. I’ve read it so many times. Thank you for that. Oh, that’s so good. You know, I’m in. Absolutely. Well, you know, we play a lot of video games and we make big gardens and I love Easter eggs in the garden that you might only see from a certain angle. And so, yeah, there’s an Easter egg in the name as well.
, you can contact me through that site. You can also contact me directly. My first name, Ann Marie, is spelled A N N E M A R I E at 3more. io. And find me on LinkedIn. everybody listening, we’ll put all those links in the show notes, so you can just click on the link and head right on over.
And speaking to the audience, if this is your 1st time with us, and you haven’t left us a review yet, hey, what are you waiting for? Leave that review. Hit that subscribe button. Like get it done. We’re, we’re so thankful for your attention. And if you didn’t hit that subscribe button, this is a daily show.
Each and every day we’re releasing new episodes. So we don’t want you to miss anything. And Anne Marie, thank you so much. And I can’t wait to go see go, go see the property in Malibu. So thanks for coming. Let’s make some magic.