Building The Bonfire Moment: A Global Leadership Journey With Martin Gonzalez

Sometimes, overconfidence is necessary just to get started—because if you knew the cost upfront, you might never begin. In this episode, Tony Martignetti sits down with Martin Gonzalez, co-author of The Bonfire Moment and the mind behind Google’s The Effective Founders Project, to explore the pivotal moments that ignited his journey from the Philippines to the Silicon Valley tech scene. Martin opens up about growing up in a community-driven environment, the early fascination with leadership, and how his global experiences shaped his approach to organizational design and startup success. With anecdotes from Google’s acquisition of HTC and his personal reflections on leadership and resilience, this episode is a masterclass in navigating both personal and professional challenges.

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Building The Bonfire Moment: A Global Leadership Journey With Martin Gonzalez

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest, Martin Gonzalez. Martin is the co-author of the international bestseller The Bonfire Moment, and he's the creator of Google's Effective Founders Project. This global research program decodes the factors that enable startup founders to succeed. He works closely with Google's AI engineering and research leaders on organizational design, leadership, and culture challenges.

Martin is a frequent lecturer at Stanford, Wharton, and Seattle, and he advises leaders across the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. He has been recognized as a fellow by the Aspen Institute's First Movers Program and as a Thinkers50 Radar awardee for his contributions to sharpening the future of management and leadership. He studied organizational psychology and behavioral science at Columbia University and the London School of Economics. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Bea, and his three kids, Noel, Jaime, and Andy. Hopefully, I pronounced those names correctly.

That was perfect.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. It is truly a pleasure to welcome you into the virtual campfire, Martin.

Thanks for having me, Tony. I've been looking forward to this.

Me too. I loved your book. It was such a brilliant piece of work, and I will have to say, co-authored obviously, both of you did a great job of putting this together. I will say that I am looking forward to learning the journey that got you to do this work, and that's what we do on the show. We uncover the flashpoints, the points in your journey that have ignited your gifts into the world. We are going to dive deep into that but also talk about the book and some of the insights in it that will help other people to thrive in their business.

That all sounds great.

I want to turn it over to you in a minute and ask you to share what are the flashpoint moments that you can think of that have made you who you are. You can start wherever you like and share what you call the share.

Growing Up In The Philippines

It's probably useful to talk about where I first learned about this work and why it's taken on a bit of a vocation almost like a mission or calling. I was born and raised in the Philippines, and for those of you readers who aren't familiar, the Philippines is in Southeast Asia. It's right next to Singapore and Indonesia. It's a poor country. It has a good amount of corruption, as you can imagine in a lot of these kinds of countries.

I grew up in a neighborhood that had an active youth group. A lot of the youth groups were socially oriented. We would go and spend time with people who had less in life and help them, but it was also about bringing a community together. I recall at a very young age, around 15, I joined this youth group, and by about 16, I was taking on these leadership positions. At that time, it was like, “What is leadership? What is it to be a leader?”

I remember going to the local bookstore and trying to find leadership books, picking them up, and reading them. I found myself so drawn into that body of literature and the work of the leader. Why is it that some teams, org, or clubs thrive and do a lot of cool things in the world, while others devolve into conflict and all that?

It was an early interest, and at some point, this was the naive young Martin who knew nothing. At some point, I was leading a bunch of other leaders who then headed the different groups that they were leading. What if I bring together the leaders and run a weekend workshop? It was me spending nights and reading through these books, creating these weekend workshops and who knows if any of that was useful or correct, I should say. It was so much fun.

I did that through high school and college, and then I woke up to a real job, which was to do marketing. I was, at some point, the brand manager developing a bar soap that we then launched in the Philippine market. I thought surely life maybe has more to offer and I was very clear early on. I wanted to be a brand manager and I had this little thing cooking up on the side like a little hobby. It reached the point where I had a chance to go back to school. The natural path, the expectation, was to do an MBA. My father and brother did an MBA and I thought, “What if I attempt and try to turn this little hobby into a profitable passion?” That's how it all began.

I love what you shared, but there are so many things that I'm curious about now because you shared that here you are in this place where there's a lot of corruption and challenges, but you have this confidence that somehow I don't know, maybe you think of it differently. It seems like you have a lot of confidence to go out and try things and not think of the consequences. Is that something that is the Filipino way or is it more about you being able to try things out? Like, "I can try this and see what happens?"

There is an element of when you grow up in a place like the Philippines, where there's a lot of traffic and things are slow, you need to be resourceful. You can't rely on some higher body that's going to solve your problems for you. There's an element of that. There's also a personality element to this. I grew up as a second child, and my whole childhood, I was trying to differentiate from my older brother and. I joked with people. He was in the basketball first team, and I started our stamp club in school. Anything that could go as far away from him as possible was my life's mission as a young kid and that sense of rebellion has also come into my professional life.

I like trying out new things. I like to be at the edge of possibility on many things. I have been very much open to trying, and it's not confidence. Part of it is also an itch to do something new, and maybe a little bit of ignorance about what the real consequences are.

I'm sure we're going to hear a little more about some of the challenges you faced along the way that got in the way, but I love hearing that sense of, "Go get it and see what happens." It is an important aspect of making things happen. Sometimes, you have to be a little bit like, "Who cares? Let's see what happens."

We will talk about the book later on but in some ways, the journey of an entrepreneur's overconfidence is almost a requirement to get started because if you knew exactly what it would take the pain and the cost you'd never start.

On To Bigger Things

Tell me what happens next. Now you decide to go for an MBA. You've got this sense of bigger things on the horizon. What happens next?

I explicitly do not do an MBA. I do, instead, a Master's in Organizational Psychology. This is my YOLO moment in life, let's try and I didn't have an ambition. I was more like, "It would be so cool. It'd be so fun to do this." In the Philippines, a lot of the people who were doing the work I wanted to do were either celebrities or they were in that world, and I was more of a businessperson. I wasn't on the clear path to do this work. I thought, "I will try, and if not, I can go back to marketing. My job would take me back if they wanted me."

I went to this program, and I loved every minute of it. In college, maybe 50% of classes you find interesting, and 50% you have to suffer through. This had 0% of those insufferable classes. Everything was so interesting. It was exactly the space. We were learning about human psychology and what that means when these humans come together as teams. You know, what have the best thinkers in this space thought about this from the early 1900s through the early '50s, post-World War II? How has that evolved? A lot of this was so interesting to me. Part of me told myself, "I'm coming back to academia." There was something about this place that was intoxicating in the most dorky but also enjoyable way possible.

Then I took a detour. I became a strategy consultant at Boston Consulting, which was a helpful detour. It taught me a ton of things. Over time, I was able to move my way into what BCG called the "Org & People Practice," and so it allowed me to go deep into this space. It's been fun. At some point, I moved to Google, and I do this. We're going to be talking more deeply about that. But you know, there was a crucible there was a moment, a facepalm, a crap moment during my time doing that consulting job.

The people in org practice, at the time. There was a lot of work around what we euphemistically called "delayering," which is companies that are a bit too inefficient. You could take out layers of management, and nothing will break. You might get a better bottom line. We come in and do some work with this company. In the process of doing that. I don't know if you've seen the movie Up in the Air. Part of my job was to write the scripts on how to fire people. I didn't fire them directly, but I trained the managers to fire them. We had targets for each department, and each department had to meet those headcount targets that they would lay off. At some point, the core team started to use my name as the verb for getting laid off. They would say, "Have you been Martinized?" Which was not the best way to do it.

At some point, our clients selected the people who got laid off. In the process of that whole exercise, two individuals passed away. One of them went into a rage because apparently, he had relied on his income to support his daughter's leukemia treatment. Another was already bedridden and was already at 50% of his wages, and they thought they would cut him off. He died in his sleep.

I thought at that moment like, “This isn't the people org work I want to do. Like, I want to be building people up and not taking them down. That was a good moment where I thought, "It's time for a change." I then had the good fortune of joining Google in Singapore several years ago, and that's the journey that got me to that point. Place. Eventually, we can talk about all the work I do with entrepreneurs but that's where the journey takes me up to that point.

To give me a little bit of a lay of the land, when you were working at BCG, were you located in Asia at the time? I was located in Asia. I was in Jakarta. One thing that I have more recently started to call myself is a seal immigrant. I grew up in the Philippines, I moved to New York for school and then, straight out of grad school to Jakarta. They moved me to Singapore, and that's where I joined Google.

I did two more hops at Google from Singapore to Taiwan and then from Taiwan to the US, and back to the US.

Fears ago. That's remarkable. That's a lot of jumping around. At this time, were you married, or were you

By the time I got to Jakarta, I had married my then-girlfriend, and we settled down in Jakarta. We had three kids in the process. I remember when my wife and I hit our ten-year anniversary. We had moved to five countries and maybe 9 or 10 homes in those 10 years. It was a crazy rollercoaster and very enjoyable.

I tell people who ask me about moving to another country. I always tell them,  “In some ways, being an immigrant is like living a second lifetime.” Most people will only experience living in one country, and if you get to do it in another, it's like experiencing a whole different life. I enjoyed it. I encourage people to do it. I'm good at the moment to settle down in the Bay Area for now.

In some ways, being an immigrant is like living a second lifetime.

It's such a great insight you shared because there's this sense of being a foreigner in a different place and having this immigrant mindset. You work hard to not only understand the place but also to find your place in that place.

That's so well said. Something I thought was interesting in that whole journey was, that when you immigrate to a place like Indonesia, Singapore, or Taiwan, they don't call you an immigrant, they call you an expat. When you come to the US, they don't call you an expat, they call you an immigrant. In the choice of words, you get a sense of a power dynamic. I have embraced the subculture of immigrants here in America. It's a subculture of resilience, of identity crisis, of finding your way. It's both good and bad. It’s both, for good or for bad but it's a wonderful community.

I love that you shared that because it's something you don't often think about the way that different cultures experience people coming from outside, but it's very true. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about what happens next. You've landed at Google, initially in Asia in Singapore, and eventually, you find yourself moving to the Bay Area. What prompted the move to the Bay Area?

Moving To The Bay Area

When I finished grad school, I graduated with my master's degree in 2011. The economy was still trying to get back on track. I got an early offer from BCG in Jakarta. Very late, maybe almost a week before graduation, I got an offer to stay in New York. I had originally wanted to stay in the US, but it was a little too late. I thought, "I'm already bought into this whole idea of going back to Asia." I always had the idea to come back.  The idea was that I would do two years in Asia. The two years became two more years, and then two more years.

At some point, I was ready to move to the US. I was part of a fun team in Google Singapore, where we eventually built what we call the org development practice. Part of that work was to do things like a post-merger integration exercise. One of the first big projects I did when we built that department was helping Google with the acquisition of HTC, which then got built into our pixel business unit that builds our phones.

I was helping from Singapore because this acquisition happened in Taiwan. I told my manager, Gita, "The best way to support this is by hiring someone who can speak Mandarin and be based on the ground in Taiwan." We often go about this work of trying to hire someone with the right skill set, but we can't find someone.

After this, I can then pursue my dreams of going back to the US and coming to the Bay Area. Gita, in a one-on-one, said, "Martin, why don't you do it? Take your family. Think of it as a two-year adventure and go." At that moment, I had never thought of living in Taiwan. At that moment I was talking to myself.  There's no way in hell I'm going to do this." Martin said, "He'll think about it." I said I would think about it. That week, I spoke to some career mentors. I spoke to my wife, and my wife was like, "We should do it." I was completely shocked. A few other career mentors of mine were like, "This is a chance of a lifetime. Go. You'll contribute something important to the company, and the US will always be there.

At the end of that week, I said, "Okay, we're going to do this." We moved. At this point, we had three kids already. That was incredible. Then the pandemic hit. The Vice President of Taiwan is an epidemiologist. They ran the whole pandemic exercise. They shut down Taiwan and shut down the schools for two weeks. That's it. After two weeks, everyone goes back.

At some point, we were moving back to the US. I had a chance to come to the US to support the Fitbit acquisition. There were rumors that the border was going to close because of all that was going on, the part was going to get close to my Visa class. I told my wife, “I have a sense that the government's going to close this in about six days.” If we want to attempt and make it, we should go now.

We had to give back our car, which was on a lease. We had to say goodbye. We had to pull out the kids early from school. We had to sell a bunch of stuff. At some point, we were giving out stuff. Some of our fellow expat friends were like, "We are going to come with a crate. We are going to take whatever's in your fridge because what are you going to do with that?"

And then, we had 3 plane tickets because the other 2 tickets got canceled. We go into the airport, and, It feels like an end of the world scenario. It's like those boards with all the flights. Everything was canceled, and the only thing that was in green was our flight. Everything else was in red. We were like the only people in the airport. We go through immigration. We found land here in San Francisco and then the day after true enough they closed the border to our Visa. Part of me was like, "Thank God, they crossed the border because I got my wife and my kids to go through all this pain." That's been the journey. It's been a crazy immigrant journey to the US.

I will start by saying I have heard a lot of pandemic stories, but none compared to that one. That is remarkable. You'll never forget that.

July 20th was the day we crossed the border.

That is wild. Now you are like, "I'm good with staying here."

When you move countries, usually it takes about six months to prepare for a move and six months to settle in. It's a year's exercise. It took us a week to do the move. It didn't take another year to get settled and feel like we can resume normal operations as a family.

One thing I can imagine is I’m not trying to make this focus on your kids but your kids must be the most resilient kids ever because, to imagine all the things they have been through, the experiences, and now to be able to settle in the US, it’s wild what they have been through.

The kids are so amazing. They are more resilient than adults.

The Bonfire Moment

Tell me now what's leading up to the book. Was the program that you were heading up at Google that started when you came to the US, or was it already the plan?

That started about a year after I joined Google. Google has this program called the 20% Project. They allow Googlers to put in time on passion projects.

Josh, at this time, was building out Google's first accelerator program. They were looking for 20% volunteers, and I wanted to volunteer because, at that point, a lot of my colleagues at BCG were now founding companies. I was getting phone calls left and right, asking, "How do I do this part of the people stuff?"

In the accelerator program they were building, there was a lot of content around tech, design thinking, marketing.” Nothing about people and culture. I thought, "That's interesting. Let me write up a proposal." In the process of writing a proposal to Josh, I found this classic study out of Harvard that looks into the top reasons why companies fail and why startups fail. It found that 65% of startups fail because of people's issues. That's co-founder conflict, not setting the right culture in the team, not hiring the right people, not letting go of people fast enough, and tolerating a toxic environment in the team.

65% of startups fail because of people issues.

I wrote up this proposal and said, "Try piloting something small. Give me a small budget, and I will run something with the first cohort of accelerator participants in Jakarta." We built this very no-frills workshop based on what we know works within Google. We tailored it a little bit and tried it out in Jakarta.

Among all the different workshops this accelerator offered, this workshop was rated the most useful and the most valuable part of it. We thought, "This is an anomaly because this is something super basic." We tried it again in Bangalore with another cohort of accelerator participants, and again, it rose to the top as the most useful, memorable, and valuable thing. At some point, it took on a life of its own. We brought it to Sao Paulo, Warsaw, and Johannesburg. Over a few years of running it and training people to run it, the program reached something like 70 countries around the world. There are two moments that start us on this journey to write the book. Firstly, I should say, that in that Bangla run that second run that's where Josh and I met for the first time. At that moment, he's like, "There isn't a book about, specifically, startup leadership. We should write it."

I thought, "There's nothing here. This is so basic. There's nothing new to say. We're giving something pretty generic." We learned a ton about how to support founders, specifically, but also found that a lot of founders don't come into the work of starting a company thinking, "I want to lead people." They come in obsessing over the product and spend no time thinking about the people. Elements of this are when you give them protected space and structured time to think about this.  By the way, some of this is the most emotionally difficult part of the job they grab at it. Josh is convincing me that we should write a book. I'm like, "I'm pushing him away and saying, 'Look, let's see, let's see.'" At some point, he's like, "Speak to this author, speak to this agent." He's trying to warm me up to the idea.

We get serious about the book when two things happen. One is we go back to Sao Paulo in Brazil. A bunch of founders, who we met the year before when we ran the program the first time, said, "I hope you don't mind, but when you were running your workshop, we were taking photos of the slides, and we ran our bootleg version with a bunch of these startups."

I thought, "First of all, don't apologize. That's great.” I might as well give you the slides. You don't have to use your picture version of it. Here's all the material you can do for yourself. I realized we should probably put something out to help people because they want to pass this along. Another moment came when we saw the program in Johannesburg. One of the founders, after I walked them through all that we had now learned, said, "Where's the book? I want to share this with a bunch of other founders." That's when we thought we should probably take this seriously and write the book on it.

One of the things that's resonating with me about this is, first of all, how we often think it has to be complicated. This over-orchestrated situation, or that everything has been said and done. When you come back and say, "Wait a minute. Maybe it hasn't been." Maybe we are missing the most obvious things. We get simplistic about the things people are missing. Your zone of genius and bring that zone of genius to a place where people are like, "We don't see this very often because we are focused on our zone of genius." Bringing that simplistic form of, "Here's what we need to hear," into the world helps us focus on what matters. Don't make it harder than it needs to be.

One thing we did discover in working with these founders because I am not a founder, and I wrote the book for founders very clearly to us early on. A lot of founders were coming to say, "A lot of these conferences we go to, a lot of these accelerators, you have founders who've succeeded, but they succeeded in a time and place that's different from my own."

They are doling out advice, and it's usually the top 5 or 10 things they have learned. That's all valuable up to a point because, at some point, in my specific context, when I hear five different people tell me their top ten things, at some point, they contradict each other. That's where, in some ways, the work we do at Google, and Google is the place where people analytics was born and popularized. We thought, "We should take seriously the task of seeing what we can learn if we looked at patterns across many successful founders, as opposed to the 1, 2, or 3 that are on stage right now. The work we did was using people analytics to uncover the real success factors that helped these founders do well.

It's brilliant because people get afraid of digging into the data and figuring out what it is that's making things happen. They want a simple solution, but they don't want to do the work to get there. It's great that when you point that out, oftentimes, we do need to spend a little time looking at what the data is telling us that allows us to see beyond the edges.

It's so true because in this space. I'm a person. I'm sure I can figure out the people's issues, or they usually say HR, like these people. This is not rocket science, and we write in the book. How ironic is that even this? As a society, we are so good at rocket science. We are not that good at the people things. The book provides language. It provides research on all the many reasons why startups fail.

Lessons From Book Writing

Two things about the book I want to ask. First of all, what did you learn about yourself in the process of writing this book? I asked her that first and then, if you could follow that on with what is one thing about the book that you haven't mentioned that you want people to know about?

The first one I would say is the imposter syndrome that struck me in writing this book was so crazy and dense. It's funny because we do write a chapter on the confidence issues that founders face and I feel like as I was writing this book, it felt meta that I was writing a book on this and feeling going through the whole experience all at once.

I learned that was part of my process. I learned that I had to feel that this was all crap on a page and no one was going to read this, and I needed that. I needed that level of doubt and insecurity to push hard and think, "How do I make this a lot more readable, a lot more interesting? What are the best stories to tell here? How do I capture and captivate the reader?" It revealed to me what we eventually wrote in that chapter on confidence, which is this imposter syndrome. It might not always be a bad thing. There's research by a researcher at Wharton, Wasima Tewfik, who looked deeply into the upside of imposter syndrome. She finds that you tend to ask for help more, and you tend to ask for feedback more. She studied this in the context of the healthcare environment with nurses. Nurses had better customer satisfaction ratings the more insecure they were about doing well in the job because they were constantly asking for feedback and adjusting their approach. There are some positives around that.

On your second question, what I wish people knew about the book is one of the things that,  back to maybe imposter syndrome, is the theme of my professional career. Part of when we first wrote up this book, or when I first agreed that we should write the book, I wanted to make sure that this wouldn't be another generic team-building book or a team dynamics book, because there's a lot that's been written about this, and a lot that's been said.

When we shopped around the proposal to a few publishers, a few of them said, "We’d rather that you write a book that's for all teams." I thought, "No, this is not the right book for me. I don’t want there to be much more to say about generic teams. I wanted to speak to the teams that were under startup-like pressures, which are like impossible goals and tight constraints. It’s the team's intensity that I want to speak to. We met Hollis, our publisher, and our editor at Harper. We asked her, "Do you think that Harper’s the second largest publisher of business books?"

We asked her, "Do you think we should write a book that's for all teams?" She's like, "Don't write a boring team book." He thought, Yes, that's exactly the vision. In some ways, what I want people to know is that this book does speak to many teams beyond the startup world. But there's something so fascinating and useful to learn when you look at the team experience in a tech startup because they face extreme amounts of pressure. They are such big dreamers, and you put all of that combined, and you get almost an extreme version of the toxicity you might find in a regular team and there's something to learn there for all of us.

One of the things that's coming to mind around this is that, as you started our conversation, to begin about how the "second children syndrome," or whatever you want to call it, where you felt like you needed to break out and be a rebel and do things differently it's exactly why you've done a lot of the things the way you've done them because you want to be different and create this sense of, like, “I don't want to create another boring project or another boring workshop. I want to say something different here and in many ways, sticking to your guns and being able to do that is part of your nature.

That's so well captured and it's so like, I love how you tied this red thread across my life in this short conversation so far. You are so gifted in that sense.

Perfectionism

Thank you. What I want to now dig into a little bit is ask you, what are some things that you've learned about yourself in this journey to getting here that you haven't shared? Like, maybe there's an element of, like, I don't know, a quality or a lesson you've learned about yourself that you haven't shared. Tough questions. Here we have tough questions.

I have an ugly there's an ugly side to my perfectionism that I only actually learned when working on this book. I never thought of myself as a perfectionist until one of my editors said, "In some ways, you are. You are revising this chapter for the twentieth time. I know there's a perfectionist in all of us." I thought, “I never thought I had that in me. This isn't like the interview question that asks, “What's your weakness?” Your answer is, It's perfectionism. No. In some ways, I have learned that when I focus on something and I go so deep in, like, there are a lot of things that I end up giving up that are overall important in life.

After the book launched, I told myself there's been a lot of deferred maintenance around my health, around my relationships with my you know, with my wife and my kids, that I need to rebalance now and in some ways, this intensity that startups create for themselves I had created for myself in this project.

Finding the right balance point and making it feel like the grand project of life isn't a book, or it's not even a series of books, but it's all these things, including raising kids and having a loving relationship with my wife. That's been painful learning here like, it was so great. It was so fun, and exhilarating. People applauded me for the achievement of writing a book and hitting bestseller lists. At the end of it, like, I realized I need to balance needs to be reset here somehow.

Impactful Books

It's such a great insight. I love what you shared because it shows that self-leadership is the true journey that we are after here. You can do all the remarkable things that you do, which you have, but there's also a sense of like, making sure that you have that self-leadership to know, "What do I need to thrive personally?" That means balancing out all the things that are needed. We are going to get easier questions here. At least to help, the final question of the day is, "What are 1 or 2 books that have had an impact on you and why?"

The first one, which may maybe on many people's lists, is Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. That, by far, I have read it maybe three times in my life. Far, it's one of those books that I probably will pick up again every five years or so. I have a few books in that category of read and re-read. Some books on Stoicism are also on that list, but Man's Search for Meaning I felt like it was 1) We should never forget what happened during the holiday, during World War II, during the Holocaust. 2) The thought of the extreme resilience that the book talks about, and if you can anchor your life on something meaningful, you can surprise yourself and get through the most painful of experiences.

The second one is a book called Agent of Change, and this one, this book is out of print. You'll struggle to find it, you can probably find it in some old library. Agent of Change is the biography of Richard Becker. Richard Becker is the father of my field of organizational development. He was an MIT professor, maybe post-World War II. A lot of psychology flourished, post-World War II. It was a moment where there was a lot to study in terms of, "How did Germany go about this whole horrible thing, and how do we support veterans who are coming home with all these issues, PTSD and whatnot?"

There was also a field of psychology that was flourishing around, "Let's go beyond what's broken about humanity and let's talk about how do we seek higher levels of performance and see what's great about humanity?" What I found useful about this biography and I read it in grad school was less about my field in particular, but about the entrepreneurship Richard had and the startup mindset he had in starting a whole new field that has impacted my life personally. One of my favorite anecdotes I have of that was he had stumbled upon this idea that if we bring people together, we need to figure out a way to get them to have productive conversations.

My field might be sophisticated around doing post-merger integration and whatnot, but back then it was all about, "We have a shareholders' meeting. How do we make it more participative for everyone to be able to ask questions of the management team, the board?" Very humble beginnings, and he had very basic solutions. Put microphones in the audience areas. That whole setup where you have microphones in audience areas in advance like that's Richard Becker, and that's the humble beginnings of organizational development. He has this idea of, "I need to bring this out of MIT and create a company around it," and he said something in his biography where he said it was an autobiography, I should say he said, "If you name the company after the thing you want to invent." The new de facto became the expert in it. He names his companies like Org Development Solutions or something like that, and that's the beginning of the field. I thought this was fantastic. This is so great.

If we bring people together, we need to figure out a way to get them to have productive conversations.

It’s simplistic in its way.

It's the whole idea that like you might be planting the seed and the tree that comes out of it, you might not benefit from its shade. That's like an African proverb that was said once. "Plant the seed.”

It's like dreaming up the future you want. Maybe start with naming it now and claiming it so that the future can be a possibility. It starts to come from that one seed you plant. I'm going to try to find that book. I'm so thrilled with the way he described it. It sounds so brilliant. Thank you for sharing both of those. I will start by just, as we come to a close, I will say, "Martin, this was so awesome, so amazing to have you share your stories, your insights, and hearing your journey. It's been remarkable, but also it's been humbling moments. There's a lot of moments that you like." Thank you for coming on and sharing your insights.

Thank you for having me, Tony. This was fun.

Thank you. Before I let you go, I want to make sure people know where to learn more about you. They are going to go find your book and where books are sold. The Bonfire Moment. Where can I find out more about you?

BonfireMoment.com has a lot of information. There are a few videos in there that give you an overview of this workshop. Josh and I are also active on LinkedIn. You can please come and connect. If you have questions, we are happy to also connect there and help support you in your journey.

Thanks again and thanks to readers for coming on the journey. I know you are leaving inspired and ready to go on your journey and make sure you take care of yourself as you look at your journey to become a founder or to found an organization of your own. Thanks for coming on the journey, and that's a wrap.

Important Links

• Martin Gonzalez's LinkedIn

• The Bonfire Moment

• Man's Search for Meaning

• Agent of Change
  

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