There is a man in the business world whose name pops up with increasing frequency among founders who feel like they are drowning. His name is Dan Martell, and he is the kind of person whose biography sounds like a movie pitch that a studio executive might reject for being too implausible. He is a Canadian entrepreneur, a bestselling author, a prolific angel investor, and the founder of a coaching empire that has helped thousands of software founders scale their companies . But before any of that, he was a teenager in a stolen car, leading the police on a high-speed chase with a gun in his pocket and no expectation of living to see the morning .
That moment of reckoning came when he was just sixteen years old. Growing up in Moncton, New Brunswick, Martell had fallen into a world of drugs and crime. The chase ended with him crashing into the side of a house, and when he reached for the handgun, it jammed . The police pulled him from the wreckage, and he woke up the next morning in a jail cell. He spent the next six months in a youth detention facility, followed by eleven months in a rehabilitation program called Portage . It was there, in an old church camp, that his life took its first sharp turn toward the light. While helping a maintenance worker clean out a cabin, he found a dusty book on the Java programming language. He taught himself to code on an old computer, and for the first time, he found something that quieted the chaos in his mind .
After rehab, Martell channeled the relentless energy he had once used for self-destruction into building businesses. His first ventures, a vacation rental website and a web hosting company, failed, teaching him hard lessons about market fit and competing on price . But he kept going. He moved west, worked as a consultant, and eventually founded Spheric Technologies, a software consulting firm that he grew and sold for eight figures in 2008 . He then went on to co-found Flowtown, a social media marketing platform that was acquired by Demandforce, and Clarity.fm, a mentorship platform that connected entrepreneurs with experts, which was acquired by Fundable . By his early thirties, he had built and sold multiple companies and established himself as a respected figure in the tech world, even being named Canadian Angel of the Year after investing in over sixty startups, including now-household names like Intercom, Udemy, and Hootsuite .Yet, by his own admission, he was miserable. At twenty-seven, he had achieved the financial success he had dreamed of, but his personal life was in shambles. His fiancée, Renée, placed her engagement ring on the kitchen counter and walked out, telling him that she felt like a single woman . He was physically present but mentally absent, a slave to his own ambition. That moment became the catalyst for his deepest work. He realized that he had mastered the art of building businesses but had failed entirely at building a life. This realization gave birth to what he calls the “Buyback Principle,” the idea that you should hire people not just to grow your business, but to buy back your time so you can focus on what truly matters .
In 2016, he founded SaaS Academy, a coaching program designed specifically for B2B software founders . Through a combination of proven playbooks, group coaching, and a powerful community, he helps entrepreneurs scale their companies while avoiding the burnout that nearly destroyed him . He distilled his philosophy into a book, Buy Back Your Time, which debuted at number two on The Wall Street Journal bestseller list, followed by Software as a Science . Today, he lives in Kelowna, British Columbia, with Renée, who is now his wife, and their two sons. He structures his calendar around “board meetings” with his boys and moments of genuine presence with his family, proving that the ultimate success is not just building an empire, but being awake enough to enjoy it .
