I
Every Problem Is an Incentive Problem
Symptoms live at the surface — outcome, behavior. Leverage lives at the bottom — incentive, system. Elite operators diagnose the architecture underneath before they touch the outcome.
Partner File · Vol. II
Partner File · CEO, The Incentives Lab · Partner, Happy Life Labs
Rewire the incentives. Rewire medicine.
CEO of The Incentives Lab and Partner at Happy Life Labs — designing the incentive architecture that moves physicians, wellness centers, and patients from reactive sick-care to proactive, preventative medicine.
Aaron Bare · WSJ #1 Bestselling Author · Fortune 500 Keynote Speaker · Top 1% IAF Facilitator · Founder, Extraordinary Network · Host, HackerLabs LIVE
Aaron Bare
Philosophy
Show me the incentives and I'll show you the future.
Aaron Bare is a Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Amazon #1 bestselling author of Exponential Theory: The Power of Thinking BIG, and a Level 5 IAF Endorsed Facilitator — one of only a handful in the world.
Over the last two decades he has advised more than five hundred organizations, including Coca-Cola, Mercedes-Benz, Adidas, the U.S. Department of State, and a long list of family offices and founder-led companies that prefer not to be named in print. He has launched twelve companies of his own — spanning software, media, education, and behavioral science — with documented outcomes north of $4 billion in enterprise value.
Aaron has taught at Singularity University, Thunderbird School of Global Management, and Arizona State, and has led leadership expeditions in nearly one hundred countries — from a fire-side circle in Namibia to boardrooms in Tokyo, São Paulo, and Riyadh.
Underneath the resume is a single framework he calls thrivability: an exponential mindset that helps a person, team, or organization thrive in the long game rather than survive the next quarter.
"Show me the incentives and I'll show you the future."
The operating system
Key principles
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Ship, Don't Slideware
$4B+ created across Streamfish, Extraordinary, HackerLab.ai, Conceptually, and Happy Life Labs — because Aaron refuses to hand over a strategy deck. He builds the working system next to the founder.
III
Strategy + Code + Speed Compounds
From Accenture in 1998 to Buzz Mouth's 100+ shipped products, the strategy ↔ engineering loop has always been the multiplier. Hire the architect who redesigns the incentive and ships the system.
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Read the P&L Like a Story
Business acumen isn't a slide — it's the ability to read the numbers, name the tradeoff, and rewrite the ending. Every plan dies at the negotiating table unless you've trained there.
V
You Hire the Network, Too
Founder of the Extraordinary Network — 239+ members, 18 cities, nomination-only. When Aaron shows up, so does the room he's built over three decades of building alongside founders and heads of state.
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Global By Default
Semester at Sea in 1995. Thunderbird MBA. 100+ countries of facilitation. The cross-cultural lens is not a credential — it's the operating system for spotting incentives most Western frameworks miss.
Ch. 01Origin
Semester at Sea, and the seed of 'thrivability.'
In 1995, Aaron circumnavigated the globe on Semester at Sea — 100 days, 12 countries — and came home with the framework that would define the next thirty years of his work: thrivability. Not survival. Not growth for its own sake. The conditions under which humans, organizations, and systems actually thrive.
That trip seeded the Seven Universal Truths, the international lens that shaped his Thunderbird MBA (2002), and the conviction he still opens keynotes with: every dysfunctional outcome is perfectly designed by the incentives that created it.
"Every dysfunctional outcome is perfectly designed by the incentives that created it."
Ch. 02The Builder
$4B+ shipped. Not slideware.
Aaron's shipped work reads as a portfolio of ventures most consultants would rather talk about than build. Buzz Mouth — 100+ websites, apps, and platforms exited. NASP scaled to 60,000+ members before acquisition. Streamfish — a podcast operating system running across 8+ channels with 98% transcript accuracy. HackerLab.ai — AI fluency by doing, no signup. Conceptually — an AI talent accelerator averaging $209K+ per venture and $4B+ created across 5,000+ investors. Extraordinary Network — 239+ nomination-only members across 18 cities.
The through-line: strategy plus code plus speed. Aaron doesn't outsource the build. He ships the working system alongside the founder — which is exactly why Happy Life Labs brought him in.
"You don't hand over a strategy deck. You ship the system."
Ch. 03The Framework
The Incentive Intelligence Index™ — six dimensions.
As CEO of The Incentives Lab, Aaron leads the joint mandate with Happy Life Labs: engineer the best incentives on earth for physicians and wellness centers to shift from reactive sick-care to proactive, preventative medicine. The Incentive Intelligence Index™ scores six dimensions — Visible, Hidden, Perverse, Missing, AI, and Future incentives — so operators can see the architecture before it creates the outcome.
Underneath the Index sits the Human Behavior Operating System™: 12 universal behavioral laws, 12 behavioral dimensions, 8 universal decision motives, 700–1,000 named behavior elements, the Perverse Incentive Lens, and the Behavioral Redesign toolkit. It's the same rigor Aaron now brings — in partnership with Happy Life Labs — to how physicians get paid, how patients get rewarded, and how prevention finally out-earns the prescription pad.
Ch. 04On the Record
Daymond John, Rosselló, Vail Health, Rob Schneider.
"Aaron Bare will 100x many companies." — Daymond John, Shark, Shark Tank · Founder, FUBU.
"If your objective is to establish growth and build an exponential mindset and culture, Aaron is one of one." — Ricardo Rosselló, Former Governor of Puerto Rico.
"Aaron has a rare combination of vision and execution. He doesn't just talk about transformation — he architects it, then ships it with you." — Chris Lindley, CPO, Vail Health.
"Aaron is a guy that gets stuff done — with integrity, with honesty." — Rob Schneider, Actor · Comedian · Producer.
The pattern: heads of state, healthcare operators, entertainers, and Sharks all describe the same thing — an architect who redesigns the incentive and then ships the system beside you.
Ch. 05Inside Happy Life Labs
Architecting the index, the accelerator, and the editorial floor.
Brett Harmeling brought Aaron in because Happy Life Labs needed an operator who could turn a conviction — the proactive practice — into a scalable business, and Aaron is that operator.
As CEO of The Incentives Lab and Partner at Happy Life Labs, Aaron leads the work of designing the incentives that make proactive, preventative medicine the obvious choice — for the physician writing the plan, the wellness center delivering it, and the patient living it. That work powers the Happy Life Index (the rubric that ranks certified partners across sourcing, dosing, evidence, CX, founder integrity, and durability), the Founders Program (the accelerator funding the next generation of proactive-practice builders), and the editorial floor of the magazine.
"Pick the smaller list. Run it longer. Then ship the system."
Ch. 06At His Core
Architect. Facilitator. Builder. Family man.
Above the titles — WSJ #1 bestseller, Fortune 500 keynote speaker, Top 1% IAF facilitator, founder of the Extraordinary Network, host of HackerLabs LIVE — Aaron identifies first as a builder and a family man. Three decades of shipping alongside founders taught him the metric that actually matters: did the system you left behind still work six months later, without you in the room?
That's the standard Aaron brings to Happy Life Labs. Not a keynote. Not a deck. A working operating system for the proactive practice — designed to keep working long after the launch film ends.
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