Billionaire Jeff Hoffman: What Makes A Breakthrough Business?

Foreigners. Ryan Daniel Moran here. Welcome to Freedom Fast Lane and today it's an honor and it's a privilege to be featuring and highlighting Jeff Hoffman on the show. Jeff is one of the founders of Priceline.com he was also involved in UBID and a host of other really successful startups. He has a very long list of credentials, including a B next to his name for billionaire. And Jeff spoke at Freedom Fast Lane Live and was far and away the the most popular and most appreciated speaker at the conference, even more so than Gary Vaynerchuk, Robert Herjavec. They were very popular as well. But half of our respondents said that Jeff Hoffman was the most impactful person they met there. And he spent hours in the hallway speaking with entrepreneurs and inspiring them and giving them the strategies that led him to the place that he is. Jeff has a very servant attitude where he is just all in on inspiring entrepreneurs to make a difference, to solve inefficiencies, to solve the world's greatest problems. So I asked Jeff to come onto the show to share with those of you who did not get to meet him at Freedom Fast Lane Live and also to go deeper into some of the ideas and strategies that he shared from the stage. For example, he talked about winning a gold medal in one thing and I wanted to ask him, where does that apply? Does that apply in today's crazy, confusing, fast paced world? Is there an extreme to that? How focused should you really be? My favorite part of the show, and it's worth listening just for this part, is at the end when he talks about the three skills or the three things that all entrepreneurs need to be absolutely efficient in if they want to have a breakthrough company. And by breakthrough company, I mean something that is bigger than oneself, growing beyond just the solo entrepreneur. His answer was not what I expected and it surprised me, but it was better than what I hoped for. And it's worth just listening for that piece. You're really gonna love this chat with Jeff Hoffman. Hey everybody. Ryan Daniel Moran here with Freedom Fast Lane. And today I am honored and privileged to be joined by Jeff Hoffman. Jeff, thanks for hanging out with us at Freedom Fastlane.

Excellent, Ryan, thanks for having me.

Well, Jeff, you know I told you before we started recording that you were far and away voted the most popular and appreciated speaker at Freedom Fastlane Live. You pretty much couldn't go anywhere. You were surrounded by people the whole time. So thank you for mentoring some of the people that were there and sharing some of your insight. I want to talk a little bit about the Talk that you gave at Freedom Fast Lane Live, but for the 20,000 people or so that weren't at Freedom Fastland Live that listened to the show. Would you take a minute or so and just share a little bit about your background and your extensive list of credentials?

Sure. I'll make it quick. Since we live in a Google world, I have started very brief. I'm an engineer by trade, started very briefly in corporate America. I have this big problem. I know that's a tolerance issue, but inefficiency makes me nuts. Anywhere I am, when I see inefficiency, I just can't sit still. So part of the reason, really the driving reason, two reasons, I guess, that I became an entrepreneur. I quit corporate America after a very short stint as an engineer in a big engineering company because it was making me nuts. I've been doing startups ever since. But that's a big part of the reason is that a lot of the problems that we see around us every day, most people just complain and go home. And I said, look, I'm just going to start fixing stuff as I find stuff, see a problem, solve a problem. So that's a big part of the reason I became an entrepreneur. And the other part was freedom. Money wasn't the driver. Money is one of the variables in the freedom equation, but money alone wasn't the driver. I just wanted the freedom to make logical decisions, to do things that mattered, to be able to help other people, to focus more on customers than on corporate policies.

So I've done eight startups just real quick. Two required two IPOs, two went public, two failed, and two are still going. So we've had a little mix of everything. A lot of focus on consumer related commerce. Our most successful startup was Priceline.com, which today does business all over the world. And then I've done outside of tech, I've done some entrepreneuring in the media and entertainment space. Today I spend my time mentoring other entrepreneurs. I've been very blessed, Ryan, to achieve a lot of the things I never even dreamed about. So my focus now is making sure that all of you guys listening that we do everything we can to help you achieve your dreams as well.

Now it's my perception that you do a lot of that because you perceive entrepreneurship as the ultimate solution to a lot of the world's greatest problems. Would that be fair and accurate for me to say?

Absolutely. As a matter of fact, what I always say is if you want to make the world a better place, just unleash armies of entrepreneurs because they'll fix things faster, more cost effectively in a more focused manage Entrepreneurs by their very DNA are people that want to make things better, want to fix problems, can't stand inefficiencies. I really do fundamentally believe that the key to making the world a better place is unleashing armies of entrepreneurs.

So you made a statement in your talk at Freedom Fast Lane Live that became one of the pillars of the topic. And the way that I remember you saying it was, encouraging the audience to get a gold medal in one thing. And in today's world of the Internet and entrepreneurial ADD and the Google world, as you put it, we're all over the place. We are distracted by a great number of things, more so than in history. All of us have multiple things going on and you come in and you say get a gold medal in one thing and then move on. And I asked you in our time together, how did you do all these things? And you said one at a time. I was never doing any of them at the same time. So I'm curious, in today's crazy world, what does that look like to have a gold medal in one thing? Does that mean only having one project? Does that mean stripping out the noise? How do you define that in today's fast paced world?

Sure, I think that's a great question. And let's talk about the why first. Again, let's just reiterate that and then we'll talk about the sort of how, because the why is really important. It is, as you just said, a very noisy world. I don't know if you know, I don't remember this, but I saw that stat the other day about how much the average citizen, how many marketing messages a day you're bombarded with, from radio to television to online to your mobile device to billboards to whatever, the total number of marketing messages. So standing out, rising above the noise for any one of us in anything we do is really, really hard today in this crazy, noisy world. So given that the task is that hard to stand out anyway, you know, and building a brand and getting attention, it's even that much harder to do it in six different ways. Right? I'm going to try to get your attention on six different things. I'm trying to tell you that's not six times harder, that's six million times harder. So standing rising above the noise is one problem that people are trying to solve. And that's, you know, in building a brand, getting recognized for something, having somebody know you for something, so that when somebody says, oh, I Need a solution to this, they immediately think of you. Because that's all of our goal in branding is to say, whenever you need, you know our case, go back to the Priceline days. If you need a discount hotel, we want you to think the first thing you should think of is priceline.com, come here to get your hotel. Every business needs to achieve that.

In order to do that, you have to be excellent at that thing you do. You really have to deliver. You've got to be the best at that thing that you do. You don't have to be the only one. You just have to be really, really good at the service that you are providing or the product that you are building. And so that's where the gold medal comes in. In order to achieve excellence. Excellence is really, really hard. And I use the gold medal example because if you think of a gymnast, let's say a women's gymnast, she doesn't win a gold medal in the Olympics by coming home, shooting some hoops, laying on the couch, watching some TV, eating a bowl of cereal, 20 minutes of gymnastics, then I'm going to talk on the phone with my friends and then swim in the pool. She does gymnastics eight hours a day, every day of her life, until she wins a gold medal. There's no path to excellence that does not require immense dedication and focus. So if you're going to achieve excellence in anything, achieving it in six things is impossible. That same woman did not also win a gold medal in women's basketball and sword fighting and wrestling. She's a gymnast. So I use that example because what is the importance of winning a gold medal? And I just got to tell you a really, really quick story. I had a friend that won a gold medal in London in the London Games. And we went to an event where, just a party where I introduced him to people and they just said, hey. They didn't know him, just walked away. Hey, this is my friend. Hey, Jeff, how's your friend? Everybody leaves. I asked him one time, just as an experiment, just to show this point, I said, do me a favor, wear your gold medal. We're going over to someone's house for dinner. He's like, I don't want to do that. I said, just put on your gold medal and watch what happens. So we go over in the introduction to saying, hi, hey, Jeff. All my friends, how are you? Good. This is my friend. Everybody says hello to my friend, but then they do a double take and they say, wait a minute, what is that? And he said, oh, it's a Gold medal. I won it. And like, what do you. Wait, wait, wait, wait. You won a gold medal? He said, I won a gold medal in the London Olympics. It was track and field. And everybody stops. And they looked at him a thousand percent different. And I said, what do you see now that you didn't see yesterday with a gold medal around his neck? They said, we see commitment, we see hard work, we see the ability to compete under pressure. We see this dedication. We see you as a human in a completely different light. You are clearly someone able to perform at the highest level under pressure, committed, works hard, trains hard. You see all that because he had a gold medal. It doesn't matter that it was track and field. It changes your definition of him as a human being that he won a gold medal in anything. Business is the same. When you as a business owner or an entrepreneur win a gold medal at anything, people turn and look at you completely different. Investors do, customers do, media does. So you want to have that gold medal where something amazing you did in the world, people say, wait, you're the girl who built that. And as soon as you say yes, their entire perception of you changes. So that's why, I'm sorry for the long answer, but that's why I tell people it's so hard to win a gold medal in anything that you can't win it in six things. But pick something in the world you can be the best at and do it so well that somebody says, wait, you're the girl that built that. You're the girl that won that gold medal. And that as soon as you do, everything else in your life comes easier. People come to you, they trust you, they finance you.

It's kind of like when I became a millionaire. All of a sudden the perception both of myself, just because I had, I achieved M status a couple of years ago, big deal. But in my brain it was, I gave myself more credibility and other people did the same thing. I imagine the same. The same happens and you become a billionaire. It's. I actually haven't announced this publicly yet, so spoiler alert. We just acquired capitalism.com for the exact reason of just standing out and showing that we're world class at something. But let me ask you this.

Sure.

Is just being an entrepreneur enough of a focus to qualify for that? I mean, could, could I say I'm just going to be a world class, I'm going to be a gold medal entrepreneur? Or do you mean more on a project basis? And I ask because most of us have multiple projects going on or at least multiple clients or multiple ideas. How specific do you allocate that focus?

So I mean it more on a product or service idea. There's something right. So I recently spent some time doing an event with Tony Hsieh. He created and he's the CEO of Zappos. Theirs is customer service. They won a gold medal in customer service. So when people talk about customer service or talk about Zappos.

You can see the sort of glow in their eyes because they're so amazed at this customer service gold medal. They won't. So whether it's a product or service, but I'm saying something more tangible than a product. There's something you do in the world or you've done that people say, wow, that was just amazing that you did that, that you provided that, that you designed or invented that. You know, one of my early products that I mentioned at Freedom Fast Lane was when we did design and patenting of the ticketing kiosks. And now people, when they go to the airport, they get their boarding pass from kiosks that we invented. So when somebody says, I love these kiosks, they're a really cool thing. And you're the one that says, actually I invented those, I created those. That's the kind of gold medal. It's an accomplishment that people look at and say, wow, you did that. So it's more specific, a skill. If you were a great author and you had a best selling book, somebody say, wow, you wrote that book. It's some tangible.

Demonstration of your skills and abilities that people can recognize and they want to know who did it.

We just had Jeff woods on the podcast, the CEO of one of Gary Keller's company. We had an interesting conversation where when I read the One Thing by Gary Keller for the first time, I assumed it meant strip out everything else and just do one thing at a time. But what I've kind of come to realize is that it really means what's getting 80% of your focus? What? What is that 80? Where are you putting 80% of your focus on that next domino, that next gold medal that will move the needle and establish more credibility and more production in your business. I've discovered it with me that, you know, I can't do that unless I have a winning team around me. And one of the things that has been a focus of mine in the last 18 months or so is really surrounding myself with a high caliber team. It's not just about me anymore. I can only do so much as one person and I hallucinate that Building something like Priceline or ubid or any other projects that you've been involved in, you know, they've grown beyond the Jeff Hoffman show. So could you share with us? You know, you, you, I think you came up with the idea for Priceline. That's my perception. Anyway, I, there had to be a process to saying, oh, here's an interesting idea, here's an inefficiency in a market. We could fill this. But we all have crazy ideas in our brain. What was the process for taking it out of Idealand, starting to build the team and move it into reality, taking it from brain and idea into the marketplace.

Okay, and by the way, before I do that, let me say I'll use two examples, Priceline and another one. But really for our case, the intellectual property was a guy named Jay Walker. Jay, who I'd known for years, had the idea for this buyer driven consumer demand harvesting system. So the intellectual property, the basic business idea, was Jay's. But then a team of us got together to actually build this into a business. So the difference, you know, the giant Grand Canyon between good idea and functioning business took a team of people to do. But he had the concept before anybody else and he brought the team together. Now when you're, you know, if you think about it back then, and I use the sports analogies because it's absolutely no different. If I got a team, a baseball team where I have 11.

Right fielders and no one can pitch and no one can catch and no one can field at shortstop, I'm not going to win a game, right? I've got to round out. I need pitchers, I need catchers, I need infielders, I need outfielders, I need long ball hitters. On any team, there's a whole complement of different skills you need to succeed. So a smart thing for entrepreneurs to do. I wish I had done this early on, by the time we got to Priceline, which was for me the fifth startup, so we did sort of know to do this, it's to make a list. Here's an exercise. Make a list of all the things that have to happen right, for your business to succeed. Then from that list of things that have to happen right, make a list of the skills that it takes for each of those individual things to actually get done. Then you take that list of skills and then you build your team. Your team is built around a set of tasks that are needed to get a specific. Excuse me, a set of skills needed to get a specific set of tasks done. So back in the Priceline Days, for example, we're talking about airline pricing and hotel pricing. How do they set the price and who determines it and who sells it. So one of the things we said was we're going to have to understand airline and hotel pricing and yield management systems in order to be able to hook into them and price into them. So there's one you write down. There's a center fielder. You write down, we need somebody that knows airline revenue management and pricing systems. So there's a skill set and a person you need on the team. Then you start talking about, in our case, using that example, we're going to have to convince consumers on the Internet, where we can't talk to them to buy an airline ticket or a hotel from this company. So what skill does that require? That requires somebody that knows how to basically steer and modify consumer behavior online. So you write that down. Now, we need a user experience online expert. So you build a list of teammates you need to have based on skills they need to have based on the tasks that have to get done right for your company to be successful. That is a process. We did well at Priceline. We made a list of all the kind of people we needed based on those tasks to pull it off. Then we went out and found those very specific individuals with those skill sets and rounded our team out.

That can sound like an overwhelming process. I can see that. And I've experienced this where I start to list out all that's going to be necessary, and all of a sudden I become scared of the vision rather than excited by the vision. You've done this many times. Has that ever come up for you? Have you ever had that flinch where, I'm not sure I can do this? And if you have, how did you overcome that? And if you haven't, don't tell me, because I'll feel bad about myself?

That's funny. Yes. Everybody has that. Everybody has. You know, in Austin, I quoted that poster. I don't know whose poster it is. The one that says, being an entrepreneur is like jumping off a cliff and trying to build an airplane on the way down. That feeling is just part of entrepreneurship, where you jump off and you say, oh, my God, I didn't even bring a wrench. Now there's no way I'm going to be able to assemble an airplane. Everybody goes through those moments, but part of the DNA is the thrill. Uncertainty is equal parts scary and thrilling. It's exhilarating to not know the answer. It is always scary. But, you know, entrepreneurs sort of thrive on the challenge. So A lot of times when I look at that, you have those moments where you are afraid. You say, I don't know if I can do this. But then you say, you know, the alternative could be sitting in a cubicle where there's no uncertainty, where you know what every day of the next 20 years of your life is going to look like. So the challenge of taking on a hard problem with variables that are completely unsolved and things you don't know and you don't know if you can solve them, that's part of that entrepreneurial DNA. Big challenge is that you don't know the answer and you don't know if there is one. But it keeps you. It makes you feel alive. Every single day where I'm tackling some hard problem. And by the way, the money's in the hard problems. Because everybody else says, wow, this looks too scary and too hard. I'll find something else to do. The people that tackle the hard problems are the ones. I'll give you a quick example. A friend of mine, Chuck Templeton, his company was OpenTable. And when Chuck went to do OpenTable, the first thing all the restaurants said was, we don't have any hardware to run your crap on anyway, so don't bring it in here. So other people said, getting restaurants to ever install hardware to run OpenTable on any kind of device is way too hard, way too big, and let's just skip it. And Chuck said, you know, it is a hard problem and everyone else is afraid of it, so I'm going to be the only person hopefully solving it. And he was. And you know, OpenTable was ultimately acquired, I think, for a couple billion dollars. But Chuck solved the hard problem that everyone else was afraid of. So, yes, everybody has those moments where you have no idea and where you're frightened, but some people feed on those and other people run away from them.

Do you think that growth requires different levels of uncertainty? Because many entrepreneurs start out kind of small. One man shows they have a couple clients, they sell some product, but then if they want to get bigger, there requires a different level of investment or a different level of uncertainty in order to create something that's really breakthrough, that's. That's bigger than them. I've experienced that myself, where I'm doing okay by myself, but if I want to grow this thing, all of a sudden there's risk. It didn't feel like risk before because I just was producing cash flow. But when I start to bring on other people or tackle bigger problems now all of a sudden I don't feel, quote, safe anymore. So do you think that that type of growth requires an exercise of different levels of uncertainty, or do you think it's more about just jumping in and creating something big and being okay with that amount of uncertainty from the get go?

So, Ryan, that's an excellent question. Let's break that down into a couple of parts. The first part that I see now that I spend all my time mentoring entrepreneurs is asking this question, why am I doing this? What is the end game? Okay. Because some people. First of all, the answer to your question is yes, it requires a much bigger, scarier risk profile. You're absolutely right about that. So therefore, it merits the first question, which is, why am I even doing this? And a lot of times when I ask people, they jumped in and they're not really sure what the end game is, as opposed to somebody saying. I had somebody say to me the other day, he said, look, I just want to make half a million a year, have a nice steady income and not have to worry about this. I'm not trying to, you know, that'll make my life happy. I said, then don't take all this risk. Don't take on additional debt or financing and hire more people. Don't try to go to Europe. If that's your goal is just to live a comfortable life and have a lifestyle business, then you're good. Stop here. So answering that question of the goal, clearly in the Priceline case, we were going to try to.

I'm going to jokingly say world dominance. We wanted to do this thing and scale it and grow it, and today it does business in 190 countries. We had a big goal. So if you do have a big goal like that, then there's no way around taking on that additional risk and like you said, taking on additional people and it grows bigger than you. And one day that really hit me hard. This was pre price time when I was growing one of my other companies that I later sold to American Express. When I was building the company one day, things were tough and we were running out of money and revenue was growing slowly at the early days. And one of my guys who works really hard, his young wife and young little kids came in to pick him up after work, and the family was all hugging and walking out. And I sort of heard him say something to his wife. Well, you know, things. She said, how's the business going? And not great. He said, but I'm sure Jeff will fix it. So I stood there and had a realization when it was just You, Ryan, you can do whatever you want because you can live with the risk. But now I realize I just dragged that wife and those two young kids and this family into it. And even though they're adults and they would never let me say that, they would say, no, no, no, we made our own decision. I felt responsible. Those young kids that mortgage their groceries, that family is now dependent on my ability to lead and to run this company well. So it changes your risk, it changes your responsibility. Everything is different if you're going to scale and you got to make sure that it's worth taking that on. If you do that, you are correct. You're going to take on a whole new risk profile and a whole new set of responsibilities. And if you don't want that, then you shouldn't go down that path.

I didn't expect to ask this question, but based on that, I know that growing bigger does not necessarily mean more happiness for the entrepreneur. In fact, I'd argue it might even be quite the opposite because it takes a whole lot more sacrifice and a bigger risk profile to be able to to grow beyond that level. Do you know of examples of people that have been able to take that large amount of a project on and go for the big B, the billion dollar level, but still maintain their happiness? And if so, what was different about them than the perception that we have of the person who is just wire to wire burning themselves out and running at full tilt in expense of their happiness?

All right, so let me break that one into two parts too. One of the first is how you getting to that big B. And the second is the happiness when you get there, because I think that's equally important. There is a perception, there's this entrepreneurial badge of honor that you know about working 24 7. Yeah, people are proud, man. I'm never. All I ever do is work. I'm so into this. And there's this badge of honor and expectation that entrepreneurs are people that work around the clock. Here's where I think that's misleading. The part where it's right is unlike a 9 to 5 person who doesn't own the company and just works for a company and isn't that bested.

Unlike those people, when it's go time, when you have a competitive influence in the market or you committed to delivering this product by May 1st or whatever it is, when it's go time, entrepreneurs do whatever it takes. I have slept on the floor of my office. I've slept with my head on the desk. You put in a level of effort that 9-5ers never would. That part is true. The fallacy is that that's the life. People say, that's the entrepreneuring life. Now that's the entrepreneur life of inefficient people. The goal should be, when it's go time, I will do anything I have to do to succeed. But in between those times, all I'm trying to do is to design a business that in fact doesn't need me. Right. I remember in the early Internet days, even pre Priceline, saying the goal is to design a business that's an electronic cash register. You can go sit on the beach, you've automated everything. You've made it so efficient that you can go sit on the beach. And while you're on the beach, your business is just going ka ching, ka ching. And every time somebody buys a product from you or does business with you, you're getting paid even though nobody's in the office. So the real goal is to design a company that's so efficient that you don't keep getting more people, that you suddenly start getting less. Outsourcing non critical functions, automating everything that could be automated. I'm hiring people smarter than you to do all the stuff that you're not great at anyway. So by the end of the day, there comes a day where if you just walk out of the building, no one even calls you because no one needs anything, because everybody knows what they're doing. The goal is to design a business that needs you less, not more. And that's the fallacy of entrepreneurship. So I wanted to cover that first because you will work like a dog when you have to. But all that time you should be designing a system that enables you to go golf and nothing shuts down. That makes sense, Ryan.

Yeah, it makes sense. It also sounds kind of pie in the sky in the sense of I think everybody wants that. Everybody wants the thing that, that makes money. Whether you're on the beach or playing golf. I want you to finish your thought, but I'd like for you to also comment on what certain leverage points you think are necessary in order to make that type of a dream reality.

Okay, well, and again, you're right. Achieving that 100% is the part that's the dream. What I'm saying is have that as your target. And even if you only got halfway there, you're out of the office half the time more than people that just work 247 because they haven't automated anything and they haven't outsourced anything. So it's a design goal is to say, I'm not trying to work 24 7. I'm trying to find things to do that get me that don't require me all the time. So the other part I was going to say, which you talked, you know, you were saying the happiness part of getting there. And I think, you know, even though that's very, very individualized, we certainly talked about that in Austin, which is having a. You know, it's thinking about your legacy early on. And I don't think I told the story then, but because it's hard for me. But my best friend in the whole world, Michael, drowned a couple summers ago. And I can't remember if I talked about this in Austin, but no, I've never heard this. That was my best friend in the world.

When I went to Michael's funeral, I was milling around and I was listening to people talk about Michael, and I was sitting there thinking, no, no, and no. You guys completely missed his point. You misunderstood him that none of that is what he was about. And he'd be horrified if he heard this was the summary of his life. So I started thinking, and I'll challenge all our listeners today. Ryan, take out a pen and write this down. If today was your funeral, how would people summarize you and your life? So I did that for myself standing at my best friend's funeral, and I hated the answer. Jeff made a lot of money, did some transactions, had cool cars, whatever. I was like, that's it. Because I think that's what people would say about me. So then I took the second challenge, which I'll challenge all our listeners to do. Next to you, writing down what you think people would say about you if you died today. Write down what you wish people would say about you the day you finally do move on. So I wrote that down. What I wrote down was that I wanted to be judged by the number of other people's lives I made better, not the number of dollars I made. And I wanted people to walk by my casket and say, man, that guy really helped me out. And so then I thought, if that's the design, if that's your goal, if that's your legacy, then what are you doing to achieve that? So when I started to do that, it gave me a lot more focus. So when we started building things like a multibillion dollar company, it became clear that we should be using our success from day one to achieve the goals we wanted for our life anyway, Right? So we funded.

Over the years, a lot of charitable efforts from Building houses to working in the inner city. We started at day one saying that we have to put a lot of effort, we have to work really hard on our company. But as we achieve success, we have to be putting visible effort into our legacy goals as well, or making a difference. So I think the fulfillment doesn't really come from making a billion dollars. The fulfillment comes from looking behind you and saying, look how many other people's lives I made better because of my success and my hard work. So people that think about that now instead of the people that say, one day when I'm older and I get, you know, I'm going to retire, then I'll figure out my legacy and what I. Who I'm going to, who I'm going to help. I think you should be thinking about that every day.

Yeah. And building your businesses around that and building your life to support that. You spend most of your time, I think, anyway, really investing in entrepreneurs. And even I know you have some political influence in the sense of your. You travel around the world and work with government organizations in order to inspire entrepreneurship, inspire leadership to solve our greatest problems. Forgive me for getting political, but. But here I go there. There seems to be, in my perception, a. It feels like entrepreneurship or capitalism is kind of in the crosshairs right now. It's almost like being successful is now a bad thing. Or that in some. In some circuits, it's put down as an idea rather than elevated. And I see it as the solution to all of our problems. You spend a lot of your time working on developing new entrepreneurs and trying to change the conversation that we have. So what's your perception of the global trend of entrepreneurship and the perception of it in today's world that seems to be so polarized?

Okay. So I would say there's two parts of that. One is the. Which I think you actually nailed, which is a little bit of a disservice. All of a sudden it's cool to be an entrepreneur. So there's all these people that don't know what it is, don't know what it means, but it sounds cool, so I want to do that too. So there's a lot of sort of disillusionment. And these people, you know, just see the. See the one off stories of somebody achieving success and getting wealthy or whatever, and they just want. It's a little bit like the American Idol nation. The old way was you did vocal. You know, you did your vocal training for hours every day. You sat in a basement or a garage studio playing music and singing and performing and playing in a smoky empty bar and whatever, you worked your way up. And now the thing is, I'll just stand in line at an American Idol audition without ever having done anything the day before that, and maybe someone will pick me out of the line. So the entrepreneurship has gotten a little bit of that disservice. They see the Social Network, you know, the Facebook movie, and so a lot of people want to be an entrepreneur because it sounds cool and apparently it isn't that hard to get rich. All a bunch of crap, as you know, and unfortunately bringing in people who aren't really committed. The flip side, though, is that the numbers tell the truth. So the White House a couple years ago released a study. They released the numbers, the White House study said that 80% of all new job growth in the United States in the last five years.

Was created. 80% of all new jobs were created by companies less than 5 years old. Startups then that was the total job growth when they did it by net job growth, meaning if you netted out the jobs, lost 100% of all the net new jobs were created by startups in the United States in a five year period. So that reality of the fact that startups and entrepreneurs are the ones creating jobs now, not major corporations, the rest of the world has picked up on that. So the reason that over these last few years I've been having meetings with prime ministers and presidents and people like that is because they have said we need economic stimulation, we need job growth. And after all these years, we finally realized that entrepreneurs and startups are the ones creating that. How do we build an environment that creates and supports more entrepreneurs? And I think that is a fantastic development that governments are saying, we just want to help.

Yeah, that's great. That's actually not what I expected you to say. So that's. I consider that very, very good news.

In today's environment. And to wrap up, what would you say are three core skills or three key areas that a breakthrough entrepreneur, meaning somebody who's building something bigger than themselves, something that isn't just about being. Having enough cash flow to be free, but building something that really makes an impact and solves an inefficiency? What would you say are three key areas or skill sets that entrepreneurs should focus on to put themselves in the best situation in order to have that breakthrough success?

All right, Ryan, I think that's a great note to end on an excellent question. The first one, which may not be one people were expecting to hear, but it's storytelling. I meet so Many entrepreneurs, and you know, I go around the world meeting them all the time and across the US that fail. And later in the aftermath, you're talking to them and you say, wait a minute, this was brilliant. This was an amazing idea. They didn't fail because they didn't have the right product or the right market. They failed because they were unable to tell the story in a convincing and motivating way. You got to convince investors, you got to convince media, you got to convince potential employees, you got to convince customers. If somebody has amazing storytelling skills, you can get people to buy into even a mediocre idea and help you fix it. But if you're storing, storytelling skills are weak. You might have the best idea in the history of man and no one will ever know it. So storytelling skills, develop them. Practice, find ways. If you're not the one on your team that's good at it, let the person who's better at it speak, even if you're the founder, get out of the way and let the storyteller tell the story. So I think that's a big one. The other one we already hit on, which was team building. Recognizing that as smart as you think you are, you're never as smart, you're never as smart as you think you are. And you can't play every position at an all star gold medal level, so you should be networking every time. Right? That's what I told your attendees at Fast Lane in Austin, that if you leave this room without introducing yourself to at least a handful of people that you did not know when you walked into the room, you may have just missed the best opportunity of your life. That person that you didn't, that you just walk right by without saying hello, might have been that financial co founder you need, might have been an investor, might have been a potential customer. So building your network to enable you to build teams, let alone build your customer base, etc. Is really, really important. And that team building thing is not everybody's skill. They just sort of get used to. When you start a company, you're the only person. So by definition, you're doing 11 tasks. So they get used to doing it. They don't make the transition to say, I have to do 11 now, but I want to find over time and money, 10 other people to do these things.

So that you're constantly looking for those 10 other people. So I would say that's the second skill, is the team building skill and the networking skill. And I would say we can end on this on the third piece. I would probably say there's a bunch, but I'm going to pick one and I'm going to pick customer intimacy. It's that people build their companies. Where do you build your products? In your office? Because guess what, that's where you work. You work at your company, in your office. That's where you're all day doing stuff. Again, I talked about this some in Austin, but the most successful entrepreneurs schedule intentional time out of their office to go immerse themselves in a non sales mode in their market. People say I talk to customers all the time. Well, you talk to customers in a formal survey or in a sales mode and it changes all the dynamics. What I'm talking about is hanging out. If your product. I'll give you a made up example. If your product was for college students, then you should be hanging out in the. I recently did that. I recently sat in the student union in the coffee shop of a university, just sitting in the middle of a zillion college students listening to the conversation. Immerse yourself in in the customer base in a non sales way so that you develop a level of customer intimacy that you start to just know what they care about, what they think, what they worry about. Customer intimacy is something people guess at and put a product out and hope the customers like it. The smart ones actually go out on the marketplace and spend time immersed in the customer.

Jeff, that is beautiful. Thank you for sharing that.

Ryan. Thanks for having me today.

Yeah, of course. Thank you for being here. Keep on changing the world. Is there any place that people should know about where they could follow you or dive deeper into the times that you share publicly?

Well, you know, I obviously keep my LinkedIn updated and I tweet pretty regularly where I am. My Twitter handle is SpeakerJeff. So I use LinkedIn and Twitter most for social media to keep connected to people about what I'm up to and where I am. Probably those the most. I do have a website, jeffhoffman.com but it's updated less frequently than those two social media sites.

Jeff, thanks for hanging out with us here on Freedom Fast.

Thanks Ryan. Happy 2016.

You know, one of the reasons I wanted to have Jeff on was because I wanted to really dive into what makes a breakthrough company, what makes a breakthrough business. What is it that separates those who are entrepreneurs as a way of paying for their life versus those who are really building something much bigger that impacts your life and those around you on a much greater scale, but also impacts the world. You know, that's what we set out to do and what we set out to train people to do inside of the new training that's in the tribe. It's called the Breakthrough Business Boot Camp. And it is a boot camp that's put together by our mastermind partners, our most successful tribe members, members of our team, myself included, to go through what those biggest leverage points were to really creating a breakthrough business. We talk about customer acquisition. We talk about team building. We talk about moving your company and your business beyond just one channel and getting plugged into other channels and by taking a message and a story about your company and bringing that to the masses. We talk about what makes a business stand out to investors, to retail providers, to those who have audiences in big channels like YouTube and Instagram, what attracts and how do you attract those type of people to be your brand ambassadors, to share your company mission and products and services? How do we move from a cash flow business to more of a disruption company? And we cover all of that inside of the Breakthrough Business Bootcamp. There's details for that on the freedomfastlane.com website and also the materials that we've been sending out about the tribe. You can find out about it over@freedomfastlane.com tribe or by just checking your email box for the announcement we're sending out through the newsletter. We'd love to have you inside of the tribe. The point is to create. Create as many breakthrough businesses as possible because I believe that's how we make the biggest difference in the world. We get you partnered with people who can finance and fund your companies, people who can help spread your message. Partnerships have grown out of the tribe. Plus we give you the training in order to make it happen. And we have coaching available. We've got local meetups of tribe members getting together and actually sharing their experiences and their. Their networks. Some incredible things are happening inside of the tribe this year, and we want you aboard so you can check it out at your leisure. But we're opening it for a short window before we close it so that we can get all the kinks out and get our systems in place before we open it up publicly later this year. So we'd love to have you in this iteration of the tribe so you can head over to freedomfastlane.com for more details on the tribe. We'd love to have you inside. Thank you for listening. Hey, if you got value out of this, chat with Jeff Hoffman and you know an entrepreneur who is building their company and would benefit from hearing the founder of Priceline talk about what makes a breakthrough entrepreneur, please share this episode with them. As always, we appreciate your support with reviews and subscriptions over at itunes. It helps us spread our message and we will see you on the next show.