Twenty years building companies. One question ran underneath all of them:Can you build real wealth without losing your soul?
Homeless to a multi-brand operator. Early to AI, years before anybody was talking about ChatGPT. And the work that makes him useful to founders is the work he did on himself.
Your business is not stuck. You are. He names the thing you cannot see.
You are standing too close to it. Every founder is. Seeing it takes an outsider who has stood where you stand, and he has spent twenty years there, building his own companies. His Innovators Table in Salt Lake City seats at least twelve entrepreneurs at a time, and he has set it about a dozen times now. More than 140 founders at his own table, before you count the entrepreneur groups he works inside, the incubator teams out of Portland, or the owners he sits with on-site, in the real weeds of the business: the marketing, the branding, the margins, the staff, the structure.
The job is almost always the same. Find what is stuck. Say the thing nobody in your room will say. Get the business moving again.
An operator's read, not theory from someone who never carried a payroll. It cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours with coaches, consultants, and teachers, plus the inner work that lets him hand you the truth without flinching.
“Healed people heal people. Hurt people hurt people. And that's why it's so crucial to impact those who have influence. If we can help a leader heal, they'll become a beacon for those around them.”
Dalton Locke
Why he can see it
The awards came later. His story starts in a car.
He tells this part first, and he tells it flat.
Twenty years ago he was homeless and living in his car. Evicted, broke, starting over with nothing but the next decision in front of him.
He rebuilt from there, one company at a time, into a multi-brand operator. Payroll, hard calls, rooms it would have been easier to leave. He stayed.
Then the harder rebuild. He spent years on himself. The fear, the scarcity, the need to prove. He does not sell that story, and he does not hide it. It is why he can stand in your business and spot the decision fear is making. He has been the founder making it.
The flagship brand he co-founded. Kratom extracts, botanical plant medicine, and he says the word plainly, because that is his life and he stands behind all of it. Named the 5th fastest-growing company in Utah on the 2023 Utah 100. Inc. 5000 honoree in 2024.
The parent company he co-founded in 2012, and the place his plant-over-medicine conviction became real product. Four consumer brands built on botanical plant medicine, MIT45, Golden Monk, Uprising, and KAVAA, all aimed at the same thing: putting nature's remedies in people's hands, made to a standard he would take himself. He sits on the board today.
A private table he sets in Salt Lake City. Founders and visionaries, a small room, real conversation, no stage and no pitch. People first, business second. That is the whole way he operates.
By invitation
The question every founder brings him
Every founder wants AI in their business. Almost nobody is doing it right.
You already know AI belongs in your business. The problem: most of the people selling it to you learned it last year. He did not. His own words: “I've been building an AI platform for 2 1/2 years, long before even anybody was talking about ChatGPT.” He put millions of his own dollars behind that read and thousands of hours into learning it, building with developer teams whose software saves real businesses real time and money.
So when a founder asks him about AI, he is not guessing. He has watched the wasted spend up close: tools bought in a panic, half-installed, quietly abandoned. He is building Pono to pull founders out of that.
01 The mistake that makes smart people call AI stupid
His partner once woke up furious at ChatGPT. Her words: “I hate ChatGPT. This thing is so stupid. It won't make me a logo.” He asked her one question. Do you think it's ChatGPT, or the way you're asking it?
Then the lesson, in his words: “You wouldn't hire an employee and throw them in the deep end without direction, right? You'd give them a role, a brief, examples, and clarity. AI is no different.”
They reframed the prompt together. Gave the model a role, fed it real examples of what she wanted. “Within minutes, the output was 10x better.” Most people never learn that move. They expect the machine to just know, get a weak answer, and write the tool off. If that is where your business sits with AI right now, the tool is probably not the problem. The direction is. The ones who win learn to direct it.
02 The work most people selling AI have never done
He was writing advanced prompts before most people had heard the term prompt engineering. Since then the work has gone deeper: memory systems that keep an AI from forgetting who you are, MCPs (the connective tissue that lets an AI remember things and use real tools), command-line tooling, teaching models how to learn. All of it aimed at one thing: skills everyday people can pick up and use, so you never have to learn prompting at all.
And the honest part, which almost nobody selling AI will say: nobody knows yet how much AI is truly going to be able to help us. It is too soon to call. What he can stand on is what he watches happen daily in his own research and development, his own dev teams, his own build of Pono. No lab coats. Just the work.
03 Where he is convinced this is going: somewhere old-fashioned
He is not starry-eyed about the machine. His read: “It's not just going to take people's jobs, it's going to divert their attention.” As real and fake get harder to tell apart, he believes the thing that sells your product gets very old-fashioned.
“Authenticity will become the true currency. So what's going to be the way to sell your product? It's going to be the same thing your grandfather did: face-to-face relationships and a handshake.”
Dalton Locke, 2024
04 One rule decides whether AI belongs in your business
Machine intelligence with human oversight. Never one replacing the other. That is the position he took in SUCCESS, and it is the standard he holds every build to: the tool hands you back your time and your energy, or it does not belong in your business.
Which is why prompting was never the point. In his words: “It's not about prompting. It's about being able to sit down and work on your goals, your dreams, your passions.” Getting people back to their families and their community. The things that truly matter.
“The most exciting time in human history.”
Dalton Locke, featured in SUCCESS
Raw and uncut
You want to know who he really is? Do not read about him. Watch him.
Forty-nine unedited conversations. Long-form, no script, soul and capital in the same breath. If the man on this page is not real, an hour of the show will tell you fast.
The point was never the money. It was the medicine.
Movement one · People over profit
He is not here to build another company. He is here for the people. The team that eats because the business works. The founder who gets his life back. The customer who is not being sold a lie.
He has built companies that make real money. That is what earns him the rest of this page: you can do it right and still win.
“It's about merging spirituality and capitalism in a way that prioritizes impact over profit, people over profit, and purpose over profit.”
Dalton Locke
Movement two · The inner work
Then he started the work most founders never touch. The inner work. Sitting with the parts of himself that had been quietly making his decisions for him.
He has sat with plant medicines and with psychedelics, not as a talking point, as his own healing. And it changed how he sees people.
“I began to see people differently, not as transactions, but as fellow souls on this wild journey we're all on.”
Dalton Locke
In his own words
“What medicines like ayahuasca do is burn away the parts of your ego that are built on scarcity, on insecurity, on fear. And what's left is a drive to create, not from a place of lack, but from a place of abundance.”
Dalton Locke
None of this is a detour from the business. A founder operating from fear makes fear-based decisions, and everyone downstream pays for them. A founder who has done the work builds cleaner, hires better, and sleeps at night. He has been both. That is why he believes what he does about who gets to lead next.
“It's time for a new breed of leaders, ones who've done the inner work, who lead from a place of authenticity and compassion.”
Dalton Locke
Movement three · Plant over medicine
He built his career in botanical plant medicine and watched it change real lives. He also watched a system that would rather crush the plant than let it compete. The natural remedy gets buried. The pharmacy gets the megaphone.
Plant over medicine. Nature first, the pharmacy second, and only when you actually need it.
Most businessmen will not touch the psychedelics conversation. He will, because he has lived it. He believes these are some of the most important tools we have for healing people.
Healed people heal people. That is the whole thesis, in four words.
He carries this fight on three fronts. The companies he built in botanical plant medicine. The Spiritual Capitalist podcast, putting these conversations on the record. The rooms where he refuses to stay quiet.
He also backed and partnered on Rhino World, a Utah digital-art conservation effort whose 2022 gala raised more than thirty thousand dollars for Warriors 4 Rhinos, a rhino sanctuary in South Africa.
Featured in & recognized by
The door
If you are building something real, this is the door.
He takes on a small number of founders and operators. If yours is stuck on something you cannot quite see, or you know AI belongs in it and you are tired of guessing, that is the conversation he is best at.
Fair warning before you knock.
Working with him means going deep. He will look at your business from more angles than you knew it had: the offer, the margins, the people, the structure, and the founder running it. Then he will confront you with what he finds. Some of what he finds will be you.
He is not everyone's cup of tea, and he does not mean to be. You either love the way he works or you don't, and both answers save you time. The one rule he holds you to, he tells you himself on the other side of this door.
