How To Become A Billionaire With Jeff Hoffman

Foreign.

Hey, everybody.

Ryan Daniel Moran here. Welcome back to Freedom Fast Lane. We are in the middle of a Freedom Fast Lane Live binge. We have released never before released recordings from last year's F2L2 conference to kick off our promotion for Freedom fast lane live 2016. And today you are going to hear the most popular talk from last year. Billionaire and price founder Jeff Hoffman spoke on the first day of the conference, and he really set the tone for the entire event. Jeff has a list of accomplishments too far to go into, most famously being involved with NSync, Priceline.com, ubid.com and a host of other startups. And even I believe it's a Grammy that he's won for, for a movie that he was a part of. So, I mean, Jeff is just incredibly accomplished, but most importantly, he is an incredible human being. Jeff has sat down with me over breakfasts and dinners just to help me out, have conversations and foster a relationship. He is just a genuine human being that wants to help and wants to leave an impact in the world. Now, some of the things that were really impactful about his talk at Freedom Fastlane Live were about winning a gold medal in one thing that was probably the highlight of his talk. Now, in our crazy entrepreneurial world, we're all chasing shiny objects. We want to do a thousand things. And Jeff put it kind of in a way that I had never heard of before. And he said, once you win the gold medal, it's easier for you to come back and complete everything else. Meaning once you have a gold medal, once you have accomplished something, you have the credibility, you have the reputation, you have the relationships, you have the capital to go ahead and be turned loose to everything else. So if you're working on a bunch of different projects, build one and sell one, use that capital into other projects, complete the loop, get something done, and then you are freed up. Then you are empowered to go and complete whatever the other things that you want to do are. Second, he talked about the power of people around being and empowering other people around you who can help you build out the visions that you have. I asked him a really interesting question in the Q and A, which was, how did you accomplish so many things? And he said, a, I did one at a time. And two, I surrounded myself with really strong people. Now, we released a Q and A with Jeff previously on the podcast. You can find that in the archives@freedomfastlane.com or you can find it on itunes. But this is the meat of what he had to say. Now we're doing this because I know that when you hear what we did last year, you're really going to want to come to Austin this December for Freedom Fastlane Live. Our lineup has been released. It is spectacular and I'd encourage you to grab a spot. Our tickets go on sale at the end of September, or if you are a subscriber to freedomfastlane.com, you got an early bird link, but that ends at the end of August. So you can either go into your email box and grab a ticket now or you can wait for the general opening in September. Hope to see you there. Until then, enjoy this presentation from billionaire.

Jeff Hoffman, our next speaker. I'm very thrilled and humbled at the same time to present to you because we all have certain levels that we're comfortable with and certain things that make us uncomfortable. And when I met Jeff.

It was good that I didn't know who he was at first, because if I had read his resume ahead of time, I probably would have been a little bit nervous or a little bit taken aback. But I met him and then he introduced himself and it was like he was so accessible and so helpful and it challenged my paradigms a bit because all of a sudden the level of success that I intend to accomplish was real to me. And that's why I asked him to be here. He is one of the founders of Priceline.com and he has done this idea of taking some idea and bringing it to the marketplace on such a global level that probably most of us have used it, all of us are familiar with it. And that's a level of success that I intend to have that most of us usually just dream of. And he's done that, brought something that he thought, well, there's an interesting idea and brought it into the marketplace on a universal scale. And I wanted to download how does that become reality? And how do we demystify that level of success? He is also at least part of the year, based in Cleveland, Ohio, so we're working on his excitement and passion for the Cleveland Indians. In fact, he said to me, kind of tongue in cheek, he said, that sounds fun. Call me when you're ready to own the team. Maybe it's something I'd be interested in investing in.

And now I'm putting it out to.

All 400 of you so we can all hold Jeff Hoffman accountable for investing in the Cleveland Indians. Please join me in welcoming Mr. Jeff Hoffman.

I don't know the Indians were the victims of the Sports Illustrated curse last year. I'm sure, Ryan was quite happy to see them on the COVID But unfortunately the curse held true again. So before I get into the. Well, you know what, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to give you guys, we're going to share a lot of lessons today, lessons learned from our own companies, lessons learned from a lot of people that I've been very blessed to spend time with and learn from along the way, from a lot of other events I do and other work that I do. And I kind of put these together to share with you guys as the things you got to get right to build a world class company. And there's sort of two themes here. What I'm going to talk about today. One is building a world class company and the other is scale is being able to grow a company. You know, if you have a million dollar company and you want to grow it one day into a hundred million dollar company, these things we're going to talk about today are the things you got to get right to scale and grow at those kind of rates as well. So let me just quickly give you a little bit of a background. I've been an entrepreneur doing startups my whole life. I briefly had. I'm a software engineer by trade. That's what I studied in school. I got a job when I got out of school, but only because my parents and everybody else told me to. I hated it. Corporate America did not work for me. It's not right or wrong, it's a DNA thing. The problem is that I have like 27 DNA strands of sarcasm and Corporate America fails to value that the same way that I do. So it didn't go real well. So I only did that a couple years and I literally quit cold turkey one day. I said, I just can't do this anymore. And I'm going to talk about that a little bit. And I've been doing startups ever since. So as it says here, I've done eight of them. Did the slides go away? Okay.

We sold to. We've taken two of them public. Two failed miserably, two are still going. This is the one people know, they know the most. But just to set context, Priceline was started by a small group of people. It was a little startup like everyone else, with a little group of people with some good ideas not funded at the beginning and a lot of hard work and big dreams, et cetera. To give you an idea where it wound up, because some of these lessons along the way, this company, the Priceline group today does business in 190 countries. These are just fun facts. They're kind of stupid because it's sort of all relative. This was an Internet company launched at the right time, but this was the fastest company in history to $10 billion in value. From zero to $10 billion in valuation was like two and a half years. That's the fastest any company's ever done that. It was the first stock, even though they predicted Google or Apple. Priceline was the first stock in SP market history to hit $1,000 a share. Three or four years ago, it was at $300 a share. The company's at $1,300 a share today, so. So it's a company that performs. It's been profitable from the beginning. Today it's worth about $65 billion. But it was started from scratch by a small group of people, like any other startup, but employed a lot of the things we're going to talk about today to be able to achieve that kind of thing. Like I said, I've been launching companies my whole life. After eight of them in 2012, I was kind of done. I literally. Actually, the end of 2011, I had another public company. It was a company called ubid.com, we were the fifth largest auction site on the Internet at the time. It was public, and I was flying. Well, I'll tell you the actual story. I was.

A bump woke me up. Womp. And I looked up and I was on a plane. And the guy next to me laughed, and he said, welcome to New York. And I looked out the window. He said, you just flew to New York. Did you not know where you flew to? And I said, of course I know where I'm going. And he said, what are you doing in New York? And I paused for a minute and I said, can you excuse me a minute? And I called my assistant and I said, what am I doing in New York? And she said, it's a public company. You're the CEO and you have to do quarterly earnings reports. I said, I'm here for quarterlies. And he said, you don't even know what you were doing here. I got to tell you guys something. I didn't. I don't remember. I was wearing a suit. I don't remember getting up, showering, putting on a suit, driving, or getting on a plane. I just woke up New York, and I realized that day was over. No more flame, no more fire. It wasn't doing anything for me. That was the end of 2011. So after eight startups and being a CEO since I was 24 years old. I told the board, look, replace me by the end of the year because I'm going to leave this year. So for 2012, I did this experiment. I made this commitment to giving back. And I said that what I'm going to do is I'm going to give back by helping. I've been very blessed to live a lot of dreams that I never thought I was going to get to achieve. So I said, look, now I'm going to spend the rest of my life helping other people achieve whatever their dreams are. So my give back was I'm going to take time off to give back by mentoring, mentoring entrepreneurs, business owners. Like, two of the groups that I focus on a lot are youth and women in business. Those are groups that I work with a lot. But I did this grand social experiment. I just didn't tell anybody. The experiment was in 2012, I'm not going to do any work all year. What I'm going to do is my big social experiment is I'm going to try not to say no to anybody that asked me for help for an entire year. So anybody that calls, wherever they are, the next call, I'm gone. Which means I don't know where I'm going to be on any given week. One week I was standing in a village with goats in West Africa because some young guy there sent me a note and said, things are tough in the village here in Senegal. Could you help? So I hopped a plane to Senegal. Well, when I started doing this, I started discovering amazing people all over the planet. So I decided to turn it into an intentional world tour. Let's go meet entrepreneurs all over the world and see what we can learn from them, see how we can help them. But the truth is, even though I'm supposed to be the teacher, I learn way more than I ever mentor. So I said, I'm going to go on this world tour. I'm going to go continent to continent, and I'm just going to meet entrepreneurs all over the world and see what they're doing and how they're doing it and what they dream about and how they're chasing those dreams. I thought it would take. The world doesn't look that big on this little map that I have here.

But it turns out it's a lot bigger than that. It took me three and a half years, so I just finished this month. I just came back from the. You might have seen it on tv. We did this event with Obama in Malaysia, and I just came back from that. So I'M just finishing up a three and a half year world tour of entrepreneurs. So I'm going to share some things that I learned along the way for that. That as well, some of the things that we did. Also, I'm just sharing this because it was kind of a cool thing we did along the way. We had this grand experiment idea. So I'm part of something that I'm on the board of and a partner in called the Unreasonable Group that runs something called the Unreasonable Institute. It's just a thing where we teach people to think outside the box. But we, you know, we believe in big and crazy, right? So this was a big crazy idea. What if we sailed. What if we charted a ship and that picture is the actual ship in the harbor? What if we charted a ship, filled it with entrepreneurs and literally sailed it around the world to expose entrepreneurs to the world's real problems and see what solutions they could create and what startups they would launch to fix it. So we did that two summers ago. It took four months. We sailed that ship with entrepreneurs. And on the fifth level, we had a big startup lad, an accelerator in there that we mentored people and we exposed people like you to problems all over the world and let you guys launch solutions to fix them. It was amazing. So that's what I've been doing the last few years. I have no idea what I'm going to do after Christmas in 2016. I'll figure out a new plan when it starts. My experience with startups really started as a college student. So I went. I grew up out west, but I wanted to go to this school for a specific program. So I worked hard enough to get in and when I got there, they kicked me out because it turns out you have to pay the entire bill, not some percentage of it. That's like eating dinner and saying, you know, I didn't like the potatoes. So I'm just going to pay part of my bill at a restaurant. I paid all that I could and I went there on the first day of classes. They kicked me out, said, pretty much, hey, poor kid, you didn't pay enough, you can't go here. So I called my parents and they said, well, just come home. And I called my friends and they said, well, just come home. And I remember thinking that I'm 18 years old, first problem I've ever encountered in my life, and everyone's advice is quit. And I thought, what a way to start. I'm not going to do that. So I started my first startup the second day of freshman Year of college, which was a software company, which would have been fine, except I don't know how to write software, anything about it. It just sounded like you could make good money doing that. And I'll solve that problem when I get to it. So I funded my college education with a software startup. Here's the thing, it was never about money per se, although money is what I needed. It was about the single minded goal. All I wanted was that degree. So the startup was a means to an end. The driver every day was not the check. It was, I'm not leaving here without this degree, whatever it takes. So what I learned from doing this was that, was that if you want something bad enough, if you have a goal that really drives you, you can figure out a way. It turns out that entrepreneurship Today I support the White House, President Obama's entrepreneurship program, the State Department, the United Nations. And I was on a State Department trip and they asked me one day, you know, what have you learned traveling around the world about entrepreneurship? And I said, I learned that entrepreneurship is just the tool. In fact, I'll see what I wrote on the wall at the State Department. I wrote, entrepreneurship is the shovel you use to dig a path to a brighter future. It's not about being an entrepreneur. It's about achieving something important to you. Entrepreneurship is just the tool you use to get there. That's what I learned from this experience, was that if I really had a big goal and was willing to work hard, starting a business was a way I could actually achieve things that everyone else said were not achievable. So keeping that in mind, I want to start with this, that entrepreneurship is not just about making money. Right? In fact, one of the things that I do as I travel and meet successful people is I try to profile them. Here's what I've been wondering for years. What are the similar things about the world's most successful people? There must be something they're all doing that everybody else isn't. And if I could figure out what those people do that everyone else doesn't, that might be the gold to mind out of that. So I do this all the time. And I've done events like Will be Do. We do this thing called the Extreme Tech Challenge that I do with Richard Branson. I did an event recently that I did with Jack Welch from ge. I mean, there's a long list of people that I've spent time with. I did an event that we call the Tibetan Innovation Challenge that I actually did with the Dalai Lama and spent time with him personally. So everywhere I go, I try to learn from people what is the thing that makes them what they are. And I learned a really important lesson. My favorite people, the most successful people in the world that I've spent time with, not one of their story starts with, I was just trying to get rich. Their story starts with some deeper purpose that they got paid for doing, but it never starts with, I didn't care about anything except the next dollar. Okay, so really important lesson. The reason to be an entrepreneur is to have the opportunity or business owner is because we are the people that get to design our own future. You got two choices, right? You can wait and see what the future brings, or you can just make the future right. So I want to talk about that, but I changed. Yeah, I do have that here. I added something to the front of this presentation. I'm going to tell you why. We're going to talk a little bit about your dreams. And it wasn't in my presentation when I headed out here, but I stopped in Phoenix on the way here and I need to share this with you guys. So that's where I flew here from Phoenix to Austin yesterday. And when I got to Phoenix, I got in a rental car and I picked up the rental car, went to the gate, showed my ID and took off out the gate. One minute I was driving. This just happened. One minute I was driving, and the next minute I was blinking and didn't know where I was. I'll tell you what happened just the other day. I. I'm flying out the exit, there's no cars anywhere. And all of a sudden, like I said, I'm blinking and I look up and there's just glass and blood. I have no idea where I am or what just happened to me. What happened was the woman at the airport accidentally pushed the button to make the metal security wall come up. Well, it came up from under me. So first of all, since it came up from under the car, airbags are designed for front impact, so no sensors went off. Second, I never saw it. Third, it sheared off the front of the car and my head went right through the windshield. This just happened to me like 48 hours ago. And I am standing here now. I lost a lot of blood. There's some bad cuts in the top of my head. I had a big fat lip that I've been icing for 48 hours so I could see you guys, but I woke up in glass and blood. I looked at the windshield and said, my head did that and my neck's not Broken. My. No bones in my face are broken. When the paramedics came, they said, you don't really even have a concussion. Your pupils are fine. I have no idea how I survived that. But I'll tell you what I was thinking once again, in one push of the button by a stranger I never saw, that could have been the end right there. I was driving along, and the next thing I know, I was sitting there in blood and glass on the way to you guys, and I was thinking about the fact that if it had ended right there in the rental car facility and that was it, what did I get done, right? What did I achieve? So I've been thinking a lot, and this is a topic I think about a lot of. I speak to kids a lot. I love doing that. And I go speak in schools. And I notice when I ask visit kids, I ask them what they want to be when they grow up. So what that question means in parentheses is, what are your dreams? Right? So I started thinking about us. When you talk to adults when you were kids, every one of us had dreams, things we were going to do when we grew up, right? And so then I started asking adults, when you were a kid, what did you dream of? What were you going to do? And everybody has one or two or three. And I ask them what happened? And they always tell me this. Well, Jeff, reality, you're an adult, right? You grow up and you grow up and you got bills to pay and mortgages and families to raise. And somehow that was an excuse to just throw the dreams away because you got to have a job and you got to pay the bills. And I started thinking to myself, people kept saying, you got to grow up. And I kept thinking, it's not growing up, it's giving up. These people aren't growing up, they're giving up. And using that. An excuse. An excuse. So I want to tell you my story of that dreams. The beauty of being an entrepreneur is that you can design a future. That is the things you dream about. And I'm going to show you how I did that instead of crossing off your childhood dreams, because you have to grow up now and be responsible. You have the privilege of being an entrepreneur that enables you to design a life and a business that actually achieves those things. The first thing you got to do, though, is dust them off again. What are the things you've always dreamed of doing? Because if mine had ended In a windshield 48 hours ago, I would hope I didn't have a long list of stuff I never got around to doing because I was too busy being an adult and running a business, okay? So I write mine down. But it occurred to me, and I want to share with you guys the story, that the whole point of being a business owner is designing the life you always dreamed you were going to have. So let me give you an example of that. This was one of my dreams when I was a kid. I always dreamed of seeing the world. I'm going to travel the planet Earth. That was something I always wanted to do. When I would have a bad day as a kid, I would spin the globe, close my eyes, and just pick a country. Actually, it turns out that 75% of the Earth is water. So I had to spin four times. But eventually I would get a country and I would look up that country. And I remember one time, it was the far off, exotic land of Morocco. And just eight weeks ago, I was sitting in the dirt in Casablanca in Morocco with a bunch of Moroccan entrepreneurs talking about their lives and their futures. That is what I always dreamed about doing. So I wrote that down. And my dreams, I keep them visible. I write them on these little index cards. And you know where that visit 50 countries in my life is? It's on my bathroom mirror. So let me tell you a story. When I got out of school, I got the engineering job like I told you, because everybody told me to do that. And I'm sitting in my engineering cue book. Obviously, that's not me. That's a dude with hair. And what is he eating, though? It could be me if he's having cheesecake for breakfast, which is what it looks like. I'm sitting in my cubicle. It's lunchtime. I finally get to lunchtime, and I'm thinking about the fact that Americans say, thank God it's Friday. You know why we say that? Because we hate our job. And I kept thinking, why isn't it can't wait till Monday? Why don't you just have a job you love going to? Right? I love my weekend. But I can't wait to get back to what I do on Monday. I don't have to go to work. I get to go to work. That's what I kept thinking was possible. So I'm sitting in my cubicle and I go to lunch. And it's like the lunch bell on the Flintstones or something, right? The horn. And we all jump up like herd and go to lunch. I'm in the elevator and I see this guy Brian that I know. I said, brian, you work here? He said, jeff, you work Here. I said, how do we both work here and I've never seen you. I said, where do you work? He said, I work on the sixth floor in marketing. I said, oh, that explains that. I work on four in engineering. There's no reason I would ever go up to six. I'm an engineer. I don't go to marketing. So that night I went home and I was brushing my teeth and my little sign, visit 50 countries. My dream, visit 50 countries in my life, was stuck on my mirror. And I looked at that and it was mocking me. You know, I remember thinking, visit 50 countries. I don't even visit the sixth floor, okay? I ain't going to Morocco unless it's on the eighth floor. Maybe I'll check the elevator sometime. So I thought myself the same thing. I want to ask you, what am I doing? What are you doing? What are the things you've always dreamed of and what are you doing to achieve them? So instead of saying, I got my dreams and my hobbies and things over here, but I got to go to work all day, why don't you find a way to make those one right? And I started thinking, am I doing. Am I designing a life that will ever achieve my dreams? And the answer is no. So guess what? The very first company I started, even Priceline, later, how did I. Is it a coincidence that I wound up in the travel business? No. My very first company, when I quit my engineering job was a travel company. The reason I'm showing you this picture is one of the far off countries I always dreamed of was going to Holland to see windmills and tulips. That's a picture in Amsterdam. And one day my friends call, so I quit my job. I started a company in the travel business. And my buddy called, said, hey, are you coming over to watch the game Saturday? I said, I won't be here. They said, where will you be? I said, I'll be in the Netherlands. He said, how are you doing that? I said, check this out. This is the coolest thing ever. It's my job. My job, because I sell stuff to airlines, is to fly to a different country every week and have a sales call with an airline. What I realized was if I looked at my job's dreams, looked at my career, why don't you design a future that allows you to do that? So I was in the travel business because my job is to fly country to country, visiting airlines and living my dream as a business. That's my actual assignment. I'll tell you another one. I'll Just make this one really quick. But I love the entertainment, biz, music and movies. And I had always said that those were big dreams, by the way. They were big dreams that when I would tell people, everybody would just laugh at me, right? Because, you know, people would say, oh, really? You're going to go be a movie producer or a music producer? Well, you know, it's a dream that because of everybody else's disdain, you could easily say, no, of course not. I'm just an engineer. Right? And you could just bag it. Everyone else wants you to fail because it makes them feel better for not trying, right? You know that people don't want you to succeed. They want you to fail so they can say, phew. Now, I know I would have wasted my time by even trying. It makes it okay. But I'll tell you something. I'm not going to get into the stories here, because I want to give you guys the real meat of the presentation. But I did later start a music company, and I remember telling people kind of big dreams. I dreamed one day I producing concerts, right? My sister had been at an Elton John concert. And I made this joke. There's a little bit we're going to talk about attitude today, too. They were so excited that they went and saw him live. And again, with my DNA problem, my sarcasm problem, I said, you know what? One day when Elton and I are friends, I'll tell him you like his music. And everybody laughed. And I remember whipping around and saying, why is that funny? And my sister said, in a million alternate universes, you're never going to be friends with Elton John. So I just want to show you. I took this picture one night backstage when he and I were doing a concert. And my sister called me right then. That's why I put this picture up. And I had to tell her, I got to go. I got to go introduce Elton on stage. He and I are doing this concert together. I had always dreamed, told my friends someday, that I would go on tour in the music business. But I'll tell you what, doing nothing about it wasn't the answer. So I started a touring company. The same company started a music company. And again, I won't get into it here, but this is a picture of when I was on tour with NSync, when we were working with him. That's Justin Timberlake standing right next to me. We started. I had another dream on the window. So I was taking these little cards down, as you do each of them, and we're going to talk about what it takes to get to that level that you can achieve the things you're trying to do. But one of the other ones I had was to go to Hollywood and make a movie. So this is actually the first movie that we ever made. But I have to tell you, entrepreneurial thinking and attitude. All of my friends said, Jeff, 97% of all independent films fail, right? And I said, I understand that. And I kept walking figuratively towards Hollywood. And they said, jeff, what part of 97% of the people fail are you not hearing? And I can tell you what I remember thinking. I remember thinking, can you get me the phone numbers of those other three people? Because apparently there's three ways to do this. And I thought there was only one. Okay. Entrepreneurs look for the way to get through, not the reasons not to, right? So if I had believed that kind of thinking, we never would have had that moment. If you can put that. That image back up there, that's first movie. That's me being killed in the movie. But that's the guy operating the camera in the brown shirt. That's my partner in the film business, a guy named Eli Roth. And Eli and I, this is the first movie either of us ever made. We made this movie using entrepreneurial principles that we put this whole thing together. This startup production company, our team wrote, shot, directed, produced. We're all even in the film. But again, just for relevance, we made the movie for maybe $1.3 million, and it's made about 80 million bucks. So it was funny because my friends would come up and say, how'd your little movie thing work out? You know what? I would say it was fine and just leave it at that. People that think that way. But what I'm telling you is entrepreneurship was the tool that enabled me to design businesses to do the things I always dreamed of doing. There's no guarantee that they'll work, but there was a guarantee that if I never went to the sixth floor, I was never going to see the Netherlands or Morocco sitting in my cubicle all day. This was probably the craziest moment ever. This year, I won a Grammy. That is me. At the Grammys on the red carpet. We produced a jazz album that won best jazz album. So you can see I'm taking pictures of all the paparazzi because the moment is so ridiculous. And they're all screaming at me, you can't take pictures. We take pictures. And you can see. I really listened to that. I just kept taking them. But this was a moment I just remember. Somebody said to me, somebody said to me, well, they said, well, how does it feel? And I said, this is the dream of software engineers everywhere, right? What the hell am I doing here? But I do remember, even though a Grammy wasn't on my list, I remember something saying, and it was kind of a mind numbing experience. I remember somebody saying, in your wildest dreams, did you ever dream this could happen? And the answer is, yeah, kind of, right? Because there's no door that I slam closed if you're willing to. On my wall, I have this wall where I write things that are important to me. On my wall it says, dream big, work hard, create value. And I fundamentally believed that if you have big dreams and you work as hard as your dreams are big and you create value, we're going to talk about that a little bit. If that mantra of dream big, work hard, create value, the sky should be the limit. I should be able to do whatever I want to do or at least have a shot at doing it. So I want to. I'll close out this part and then we'll get into the real meat here of the lessons I want to share. But I just want to close with this importance of attitude by telling you guys a story. I thought it was funny that Ryan talked about Bruce.

His car. So I am not a car person, okay? But this started when I was 10 years old. And I want to share this because I think attitude is important. And it was important looking back. So this poster right here, I went to my neighbor's house, I was 10. I went to my buddy's house, all the boys, everyone was gathered around a poster. The poster was a Ferrari. Actually, the real poster had a hot chick in a bikini sitting on the car. But we were 10. In fact, I remember one of my buddies saying, that is so gross. That girl's butt is touching that fine car, okay? So we thought the girl with her butt hanging out should get off of the car and walk away. But I went back to my mom and I said, mom, can I ask you a question? And she said, what? And I said, what's the fascination? Why is all my friends fascinated with this poster? My mom said, what was the poster? I said, it was this car, this thing called a Ferrari. I've never even heard of a Ferrari. I'm not a car guy. And she said, oh, that explains it. And I said, what do you mean? And my mom said, they're fascinated because it's unattainable, right? It's like dreaming about what you can do with a lottery ticket. I said, my bad. I thought those Things were real. My mom said, no, no, Ferrari is a real car. And I said, then I don't get it. She said, it's just that neither you nor anyone you know will ever drive that car. And I said, mom, why? And she said, jeff, it's a million dollar car. 001% of the population will ever drive that car. So. So don't worry about it. And I said, no, no, wait, but does somebody drive this car? My mom said, yes, but it'll never be you. And I was 10 years old and I remember thinking, why is that never? My mom's like, forget it already. Now, in her defense, she said, I just was protecting my child from unrealistic expectations. But I remember thinking, if somebody somewhere gets to do that, why can't that somebody be any of you, right? And I started thinking. So I went to school and I told everybody, just as an experiment, when I grow up, I'm going to drive a Ferrari. And everybody laughed. I said, why does everybody. Why do you guys think that's funny? And like, dude, it's never going to happen. And I said, well, it's never going to happen with that attitude, right? And so I went to the mall and I bought the poster and I took this poster and I wrote some things on the back of it. And what I wrote was, if I know this isn't a story of cars or money, I don't care about cars. I'm not a material guy. I don't care about money. But what I wrote on the back was, if my belief in dream big, work hard, create value. I made a list of things and I said, if I can actually dream big enough and work hard enough and create value in the world and achieve these things, I'm gonna buy this car just to show that it's possible. I don't even want the car. I just want to go buy it to close the loop. That was when I was a kid. So I kept that poster. I'll tell you something funny. In high school, I was 17, and I was looking for something in my closet before practice, and I found the poster, and I unrolled the poster and I was looking at it. My mom walks in and she says, oh, I see you found that car again. And I'm staring at the poster and staring at the poster, and I said, wait, what car? Okay. At 17, I found the girl. And my mom said, son. And I said, yes, mom. And she said, you ain't getting that either.

And I said, mom. And she said, yes. And I said, suppose I had that car. My mom said, fine, that chick will show up.

Okay?

I said, all right, we're good. Now, I know how the world works. But that attitude of you believing and when somebody says 0.0, whatever percent of people will ever do whatever, your first question should be, why can't that be me? Because as soon as you slam that door, it's over. As soon as you accept, I thought, why is the world the one? Why does everybody else put a ceiling over you? And I just was never willing to accept that. I'm going to go do my thing, not your thing, and I'm going to decide where my ceiling is. Not what everybody else says. Because as long as it's true that somebody drives that car, then it's also true that that could be you, right? So it was never a story about cars or money. It was a story about saying that your work ethic and your dreams should be the only thing that decide where you wind up, not anybody else's opinion. So to do that, I mentioned that the way you get there is by creating value in the world, right? You know, having a big dream. I'm challenging you guys to go back and dust off your dreams and write them down and ask yourself this question. What am I doing every day in my job that's going to ever take me to those dreams? And if your plan is to see Morocco and you don't go to the sixth floor either, you better make some changes, right? Because what I learned in that parking garage the other day is it could be over that fast. I literally, when I was blinking my eyes and didn't know where I was and looked at the glass and the blood, I didn't know how badly injured I was, right? For a moment I thought, I hope my whole head isn't broken open and I'm about to die here because I got things left that I want to do. So building a world class company is the way to get there. So I'm going to go through and share a series of tips. I think the things that, looking back, the things that maybe we got right or other people got right. So here's the first one. Now, I see people pitch me ideas every day of the week, all the time, business plans and ideas. And I'm amazed at how many people have a business or an idea that is a solution, looking for a problem, something you think is cool, some product or service that you create, then you go out to the market and hope somebody else thinks it's cool and will pay for it. And what I've noticed is that one of the ways to create value and to build something that's globally scalable and profitable, if that's what you care about, is to solve a real problem that lots of people care about, and they're all around you. You know what the difference between successful entrepreneurs and everyone else is? It's this. One of the things when you. We all encounter problems in our life. So you get home and someone says, how was your day, dear? And you say, horrible. I had to stand in line for three hours because those people are idiots, okay? And when you go out and tweet and update your status, horrible day. Those idiots made me wait for three hours in line. When you encounter a problem which are all around you every day. One of my other DNA problems is inefficiency. Makes me nuts, right? I can't walk away. I can't just let it go. When something that takes three hours, it should have taken 10 minutes. So what entrepreneurs do when everyone else goes home and complains? Entrepreneurs stop right there and they ask this question, does this problem that I'm experiencing right now bother anyone else? And if the answer is yes, lots of people. Entrepreneurs go on to the second question, which is, is there already a solution and I just don't know about it? They do the research, and if the answer to that is no, entrepreneurs do a third thing that everyone else doesn't. They say, you guys go home without me. I ain't leaving here until this is fixed. So I'll tell you my story. I told you, I quit my job. You know, I was 24 years old. I had a good job with a good paycheck. I quit the whole thing, right? Because I wanted to be in charge of my own future. So I'm standing in a line at an airport, and I'm waiting to get my boarding pass. It takes 58 minutes. When I get up there, I look at my watch. I was like an hour, right? And she says, id. She looks at my ID and hits one button, print, and a boarding pass printed. And I remember saying, are you kidding me? You made me stand here for an hour so you could print something? And she said, sir, you need a boarding pass to get on a plane. I said, I get that. But I stood here for an hour, and all you did was hit print. And she said, sir, you need a boarding pass to get on a plane. I said, it's a printer. Just put it over there. She said, sir, that ain't gonna happen. Next, please. So I turned to the people in line, and people looking like that, it was Mostly business people. And I said, am I the only one here that's annoyed that we're standing here for an hour to get a piece of paper out of a printer? And everybody groaned. And I said, let me ask you guys something. I was holding up the whole line. I said, would you people give me five bucks if I could just hand you a boarding pass now and you could get out of line. In the back of the line, people were yelling, 10, 15, 20. And then I said, stay here, I'll be back. Okay? So you know what my first startup was? We started a company that Friday. We designed, patented, and started selling in airports all over the world. These things you use today to get your boarding pass out of.

Thank you. I still get. People still send me texts from airports somewhere, say, hey, thanks, man. I just grabbed my boarding pass and ran to security. This company solved a real problem that lots of people had that people were willing to pay for. It met all the criteria, but it was a problem that we encountered in the world. So solving a problem that a lot of people care about, that people would actually pay you to solve. I'm amazed at how many people are trying to convince a market to pay them to solve it. And it wasn't a problem anybody really had. They're all around you every day. Next time you encounter a problem, stop and say, hey, does this bother everybody? Is everyone complaining about it? Because maybe we could solve this one Again, I told you, I'm not a money person. But, you know, three years later, we sold this company for over $100 million. Now, it's not Internet money, but when you're 20 something years old and it's your first startup and someone wants to buy it for a hundred million dollars, that ain't bad either. So solving real problems. If you want to tweet anything today, the most important thing I can teach you is this. Don't chase money, chase excellence, okay? Money follows excellence. So many people are focused on the money, and like in the startup world, they say, what's your exit strategy? You know what I say? What's your entrance strategy? You don't even have anything to exit, right? The only thing you can exit is excellence. It's the only thing that matters. So you know what I told my guys? Don't worry about an exit strategy until we have created excellence in the world. Worry about creating excellence if you go out and build something amazing. Why did someone want to pay $100 million for those printers? Because they're a pretty good idea, right? They solve an airline problem and A consumer problem Focus heads down on excellence. And the money will come. The money always shows up. So the companies I sold, not one did I ever have to market. I was busy at work creating excellence. And each time the doorbell would ring. Can I help you? Yes, we'd like to write a check and buy your company because our products were excellent. Even in the early days of Priceline, which I told you is today a $65 billion company, our whole focus was, let's just build excellence and not worry about all the rest of that stuff. There's nothing to exit until you've created excellence in the world. Harvest ideas. I noticed that the most successful entrepreneurs take in a broader funnel than everybody else. And I want to explain it to you. This is a word I made up, infosponging. I want to tell you a technique that I do and show you an example of it that I think helps you get there. So I started to notice that if you work in healthcare, and I came over and said, what are you working on every day? It'd be healthcare. That's what your company does. You have a healthcare company. If I said to you, hey, I'm going to the banking conference, you want to go? You would say, we're in healthcare. I don't really care what they're doing in banking. If I said, do you want to read this magazine? It's called Retail Malls Illustrated, you would say, they don't do health care. I'm not interested. We do healthcare. Heads down. Here's what the world's most successful people do. They take a few minutes of their day, every day. Well, I'll tell you what I do, the method of it. They take in a broader filter of the world and then try to apply those things to what they're doing. So let me. Let me explain the concept of infosponging. I do this five minutes every day, 10 minutes. If you can't do it every day, do it once a week. But here's what I do the first five minutes of the morning. I did that this morning in this hotel in the first five minutes of the morning, no text, no emails, no phone, no nothing. But here's the more important part. For those first five or 10 minutes, you're not in your. You're not in your industry, and you're not in your company. You cannot look at anything healthcare or anything related to your company. What is the challenge of infosponging? Learn one new thing every day. Ten minutes. That's it. So you know what I do every day? I read some Story that I have no idea why I'm reading it. I have no reason to read it. I'm going to give you an example. It has nothing to do with healthcare. What do I do then? I shrug and I write down one sentence about what I learned. I'll give you an example. Each of these things you read outside of your industry. Some great idea in the banking industry, some great idea, some new legislation, some company that just went bankrupt. Each of these things are a puzzle piece. If I give you one piece of a puzzle and said, what is this thing? You would say, I don't know, it's a piece of something green. If I gave you two or three pieces of a puzzle, you won't know. But what happens one day when you collect enough puzzle pieces and you move them around the table? One day you're going to say, I know what it is. It's going to be a castle in Ireland. That's what you're trying to do in your business life, is collect these pieces. You know, it's one of the ones I do every day, twice a day. I go to the Yahoo homepage. I don't use Yahoo for anything, but on the Yahoo homepage it lists the top 10 things that people in the world are researching right now. Why do I look at that? I have no idea. But I look at it every day, twice a day. One day a customer calls me and she says, why do you always know what we're thinking before we do? And I said, I don't know. But you know what, maybe it's not a coincidence. I'm just looking to see what's on everybody's minds every day. What are people in the world researching? Because maybe it will lead me somewhere when I assemble those puzzle pieces. Let me give you an example. And this is what I do. I read this one new thing every day and then I write it down. And then I look at all these things that I've learned and I ask this question every day. I know it sounds silly, but I do this every day. Is there something I could do today that didn't even exist yesterday? Is there a new technology that I'll be the first person in my industry to see? Is there new legislation? Is there new markets or geography? Every day when you wake up, something happened in the world. Your job is to find those pieces, put them together before anyone else in your industry does. That's how you build world changing companies. You know, we like to think that Priceline was one of those that we helped redefine an industry. But Let me give you an example. So one of the days when I was infosponging up in the upper left, my infosponge for the day. I follow my curiosity. No plan. There was a story about selling distressed inventory. I wasn't in a distressed inventory business. What it said was when you're selling all your products at full price, you have some leftover, you can't sell those at a discount to the same market through the same mechanism because you just piss off all your platinum customers. So you need a completely channel shielded price shielded distribution system for distress inventory. I have no idea what that means. I wrote it down, right? But then I was looking at other stuff in my infosponges and one day there had been a story. I had watched this one I'd watched on the news, and my infosponge for the day was ABC News said every day, 600,000 airplane seats fly around the United States empty. So, you know, these two puzzle pieces fit. Distress inventory, Empty airplane seats. In the lower left, perishable commodities. On that day, I read a story about how to sell fruit. Okay, I'm not planning to sell fruit. So all of you would say, who cares? I'm not going to read that. I read it anyway. What it said was when you sell a perishable commodity, you have to have a completely different marketing system, right? It was talking about selling bananas. And it said that, you know, if I sell these things, clickers, it can sit in my showroom for two years. But if I sell a banana, I have to sell it this week or it's over. The goods are spoiled. So I wrote down that you need a completely different style of sales technique to sell a perishable commodity. And meant nothing to me then selling fruit. But guess what I was thinking after that? What's more perishable than a banana? An airplane seat. Guess what? A banana lasts all week. But an airplane seat, as soon as you close the door, all the goods are spoiled. So you can already see where this is heading. I remember one day sitting with, in Connecticut with a guy named Jay Walker who had this initial intellectual property that became Priceline, pushing these things all around the table. And what came out of it was that what came out of it was $65 billion worth of value because a group of people sat down and said, can we mix and match? You know what this thing is? It's a dynamically priced distressed inventory, perishable commodity distribution system. What a surprise, right? And it came from people looking at how you sell fruit, how you sell distressed inventory. How you manage dynamic pricing answers are in the world all around you. I'll close really fast with one more story in this area that really inspired me. I was reading a story about infosponging about looking at the world around you. I was reading a story. This is a true story. It was a guy that worked for a fast food company. They were not growing. The boss said, do something different because we're not distinguished among other fast food companies. He said, I can't make french fries faster because you can't heat grease any hotter than that. I can't fill Diet Cokes faster because they splatter. So he left. He said, I'm going to take the day off and go visit banks. Everybody said, banks, they don't serve french fries and Diet Cokes. You're wasting your time. He went to the first few banks, learned nothing. The fourth bank he got to. Let me tell you what happened. He couldn't park because the parking lot was full of trucks, piles of wood, hammers, nails and carpenters. He said, what are you guys doing? And they said, oh, we thought up this really cool new idea. We're building it to test it. He said, what do you call it? They said, we call it the drive through lane. He got in his car and flew back to his fast food place. The first drive through window in fast food history came from a bank. Not one fast food company thought of it. The guy that went to see if banks had done anything clever was the guy that thought of it. That company was later acquired by McDonald's very successful exit so that they can implement drive through lanes. So that's why we do info sponging. Learn something new every day about something you don't know why you're learning and assemble the puzzle pieces. Next win a gold medal at one thing. And I really want to emphasize this. So many people come to me and they say, I have six ideas. What should I. I'm working on them and I say, get rid of five and pick one. And they say, if I get rid of five, someone will steal them. I said, doing 16 of 6 things will never lead to excellence. Excellence is hard. Winning a gold medal is hard. Do you think if she won a gold medal in soccer that she comes home every day, shoots some hoop, plays a little hockey, kicks the soccer ball for 10 minutes, then plays tennis, watches TV? No, she's on the soccer field all week long sweating out there six hours a day. That's what it takes to win a gold medal in anything. You're not going to win One in six things anyway, so quit trying. People say, well, people will steal my ideas. Let them. You'll have six more and you'll never achieve excellence doing six. One. Six of six things. Let me give you some examples here. I like to do my research everywhere I am. I just talk to people everywhere. So I'm standing in line at the grocery store and there's some kids in front of me, teenagers. And I said, you guys shop at Amazon? And they said, everyone shops at Amazon. And I said, what do they sell? And the guy said, Amazon sells everything you can think of. And I said, how about a book? And the kid said, this is a quote. I kid you not, books are lame. Amazon doesn't sell those. And I said, pretty sure they sell books. And the kid said, pretty sure they don't. Old guy who still reads books, right? And I was laughing because at the beginning of the Internet, there were not many of us launching companies. So, like back in the early days, I would talk to Jeff and Pierre when they created ebay, and I would talk to Bezos when he was launching Amazon, and Steve Case when he was creating AOL and stuff, we all talked. So I remember a conversation with Amazon, with Bezos, where the goal was always for Amazon to be the marketplace of everything. But did he start that way? No, he wanted to sell everything. What he said was, quote, we're going to be the best damn bookseller on the planet. He won a gold medal in books first. When you win a gold medal in anything, it doesn't matter what it is. The whole world's perception of you changes. Most people, I don't have a name. They just say, aren't you that one of those Priceline guys? I'm that price line guy. That's what people remember. That's not a bad metal to wear around your neck because we did something that worked. So he won a gold medal at books. And you know what you. And I said, damn, it was only a book. But that was the greatest e commerce experience I've ever had. What else can you sell me? I. Another friend of mine that I travel with sometimes in the speaking circuit is a guy named Tony Hsieh. Tony created this company, Zappos. Tony now has a marketplace. Zappos sells a lot of stuff. But how did he get there? He said, we're going to be the best damn shoe seller on the planet. Pick something that you can win a gold medal in. It ain't going to be six things. Even if you have four products now, four services, and you have four Revenue streams if you want it. This is the question. You can have a very good life and a successful business, but if you want to achieve that level, Ryan talks about that next level of excellence, of global scale. Of all those things, you need to pick one thing, you can win a gold medal at it and forget the rest. It's hard to do that. I get it. But it is the method for getting there. If you think about our business, Priceline, you know what we do? We sell hotels. That's pretty much it. Along the way, we became the gold medal place to go get a cheap discount hotel. Along the way people said you should sell insurance, travel insurance, you should sell luggage, you should sell all these things. The goal was, let's just be the best damn hotel source in the world. Today, Priceline is literally the largest, the biggest hotel discount sales site in the world. 270 million hotel rooms a year are sold on this. We never had to sell insurance or luggage because it turns out we were so good at this thing that people signed up in 190 different countries to buy hotels from the Gold Medal Company. It doesn't mean there won't be other competition. It just means when you win a gold medal in one thing by focusing on something you can do better than anybody else, that's the key to growth, to brand or recognition, et cetera. Speaking of brand, once you find that Gold Medal talent, so many companies, when I see their branding, their branding is we're fast, we're cheap, we're easy. It's all these things that don't differentiate you in any way. All of the market research ever has said that when people make a buying decision, there was always one overriding reason they chose you. So quit trying to sell 10 benefits. No one can remember that. And it's not distinguishable from everybody around you. When you find your Gold Medal talent, that's your brand asset, right? That's the thing. You do better than everybody and ride that horse all the way. A brand's job, by the way, is not to close sales. A brand's job is to get people to notice you. And brands gets people to pull up a chair and say, wait, what? Tell me more. Then you can tell them about the other things you do. But quit trying to market all these different things you do because you become a blur that looks like everyone else. Pick a horse and ride it. Your brand asset, your gold medal talent. Market the crap out of that. What people say is, well then that cuts off some customers because they wanted one of these other smaller services. You don't build scale by doing a bunch of things in an average way for a bunch of people. You build scale by zeroing in on a target group and selling one thing better than anyone else can do. And you grow outward from there. I'm not telling you don't grow into it. I'm telling you how you get there. Your brand. So here's the reason that's so important. What does a brand do? A brand is a tipping point. People ask how we ever scale a company, you know, to 190 countries. Here's the thing, if you have to keep selling every customer, you'll never scale at that rate. So imagine in the early days we have people at Priceline driving out to hotel chains. You know, he'd speak to your head of sales, giving a pitch about the company to salespeople to every hotel chain. That's expensive, right? You can't keep visiting every hotel chain or mark spending marketing dollars on every one. The tipping point is this day, and I remember this too. It's the day you're sitting in your office, you haven't made one sales call. You haven't posted one ad that day. And the phone rings and someone says, yeah, I heard about your company. I'd like to sign up. And you say, wait, customer, I've never spoken to and never marketed. You just want to sign up. That, that comes from your brand. Your brand being alive in the market. When someone said, if I wanted to buy a book, what's the best place in the world to buy a book? And everyone says, Amazon. If I wanted to sign up for hotel system, where do I want to go? Your brand is when people start to recognize you're the gold medalist in this specific thing and they start calling you. So when you can grow with no sales calls and no sales collateral, that's when you hit the tipping point of global scale. I was recently visiting some of the people, like the guys that created Instagram, the guys that created Pinterest. You've never seen an ad dollar spent by any of those companies. There was no Pinterest TV commercials or ads or anything, right? They grew by building a brand and their customers grew for them, right? In a social media world, if you have a strong brand and it's obvious what you're good at, everybody sends everybody else there. Here's a little thing you can do to find out what is your brand asset. This always amazes me when people do it. I want you to text, email, or call 10 customers and ask only one question. Ask them. Give me the one, only one most important reason you chose us. You will have your brand asset in 10 minutes because 8 out of 10 people will say, you know, I know you guys do A, B and C, but the real reason I picked you was this. And the 8020 rule always applies. You'll find out that the reason people are coming to do business with you might not be the one you thought, but it's your brand asset. So do that test next. I'm going to spend a few minutes on team, on building a great team because this is really, really important. You are never as smart as you think you are, and you can't do this yourself anyway, okay? And if you're successful, you didn't do it yourself, right? And so the fallacy we get is that when you start a company, you have to do 11 jobs because there's one person and 11 people's worth of work. The mistake we make is we get used to doing that. What I'm going to tell you is on day one or starting tomorrow, your job is to find people smarter than you in every area that you're not the best at, that you're not a gold medalist, and get out of the way. Let those people do that. When people say, what do growing businesses need? What's the most important thing? People always say, funding. Hell no, it ain't funding. It's human capital. Talent is the scarcest thing on this planet. I can find money far faster than I can find amazing people to build companies around. Talent is where you should spend all your time looking for, not money. Attracting and retaining talent is the most important job that you have. That's what your job is as a leader. So I'm going to tell you a story. Because I was a CEO my whole life, I thought my job was to run the company. And one day I learned that my job is to find people smarter than me for every functional area and let them run the company. So where do I spend my time? Running the business? No, Your job is to build a place where the best people in the world who could work anywhere they want, all want to work for you. When I realized that was my job description, I stopped running the company. I started spending all my time on building places that no one ever wanted to leave. By the way, that first company I told you I sold, I was doing a news story, okay? The time just dramatically. Either I was in a coma for 10 minutes or the clock just completely changed. So I don't know what that means. I'm going to finish anyway.

Anyway, I was, well Let me cut to this part first. I'll keep moving on here. Traditional employment is really a one way street. Here's what you do. You go out and when you hire people, I was going to tell you that story. When I sold that company. I was doing a television, a news interview, and the woman on the news said to me, she was reading stats, our revenues, our profits, our margins. She said, these are great accomplishments. What are you most proud of? And on the way to that interview, the girl that ran HR for me called me and she said, jeff, this is really cool. I just figured this out. And I said, what? And she said, in all the years since you started this company, to the day you sold it, not one person that worked here has ever quit. And I said, that is the single most important thing I've ever done, right? Because if I build a place where the best people never want to leave, all the success just happens, right? But here's the problem. When we hire people, this is what we do in traditional employment. We say, here's a job description. Convince me you can do that. And if you do, I'll give you money for doing that. It's very one way. You should be lucky to work here, and you'll be lucky. I'll only pay you if you, if I approve of your work. And you can't get the best people that way. So I'm going to tell you a little bit of a different story. The reason I had that picture was one time this guy was trying to hire me and he finished his spiel, what he needed me to do for him. And at the end I said, let me get this straight. You want me to work eight hours a day so that one day you can buy a bigger boat? I mean, eight days a week. And he said, well, kind of. And I said, dude, I was joking, right? That isn't very motivating. You want me to work around the clocks for your dream of buying a big boat or whatever? And I said, good luck with that. So I came up with a new idea. I don't start an interview ever with a resume anymore. My first question is, tell me some dream in your life that you have to achieve before you die. So the very first person I told that to, he said, I grew up in an Airstream trailer that was rusted out and snow came in every day. It was just me, my mom and my sister, we had one blanket. And he said, while I shivered in the cold and covered my mom with the blanket and the snow came in the rusted out mobile home. Onto me. He said, I dreamed every day that before I die, I will buy my mom a house in Florida. So you know what I did? I went and printed a picture of that house in Florida, and I stuck it outside of his office, and I asked every single employee to put a picture of something you need to do in your life. And you know what I told them? My job is to do that for you. My job. One day, everybody was leaving the office, and I said, see you guys tomorrow. And they said, what are you doing? And I said, I'm working on the hallway outside of Kris mother's bedroom. And everybody got it. And everybody kind of came back in. I said, guys, you can go home. They said, Jeff, 30 of us can build his mom a house faster than one. And I have to tell you, the day we sold that company and I gave everybody their cut and we went immediately to Florida and bought this guy's mom a house. After all that hard work and the day we flew her down there, it still makes me emotional. We took her into the house and we played her a little bit. She was mad. She said, you flew me down here to show me to her son that your boss bought another house in Florida. She said, I want to leave now. And I said, I'll tell you what, I'll take you to the airport, but you just do me a favor. And she said, what? And I said, just come and look in my bedroom. And she said, okay, this is already weird enough. I'm not going in your bedroom. My son is standing right there. And I said, just humor me and I'll take you to the airport. She said, fine. Well, we bought all new furniture, but we'd moved her bedroom exactly as it was. So when we opened the door to the bedroom and she looked and she turned and said, this is making me emotional now. She said, this is my house. I could not wait. It's not even my mom. And I was crying. I could not wait to get back to work, to build another great company, to create more value, to help more people achieve whatever they dreamed of. When you consider yourself a partner with your employees to help them achieve something, your whole attitude changes and so does theirs. Your job is to be a servant leader and to work. Your job is to build that place that nobody ever wants to leave. One more quick story. I used to write the column on innovation and entrepreneurship for inc. Magazine. And one day they said, talk to us about talent. And I wrote a story and the headline was hire the best and then go pick up their laundry. And they said, Wait, what does that mean? I'll just tell you this very quick story. I was on the road, the team called me and they said, hey, we met this 20 year old whiz kid programmer. I said, hire him, don't wait for me. So I come back in town, the 20 year old programmer, is developer is in the IS. They're all in the conference room working. I walk down the hall and the kid doesn't know me. He doesn't know I'm the CEO or the owner. I don't know him. I go in there and I say, hey, can I get you guys anything? Now I'm talking about pizza and Diet Coke. That's what fuels all of our companies. But this 20 year old kid who doesn't know who I am says, yeah, could you go pick up my dry cleaning? Now everyone, all my employees are looking at me like the 20 year old. You can't ask the CEO to go get your dry cleaning. And they're all waiting to see what I was going to say. And I said this, sure, where's the ticket? The kid said, it's on my desk. And I said, I'll see you guys in 20 minutes. And I went out and my VPs, both vice presidents, ran after me, said, you're picking up that kid's laundry. And I said, let me tell you something. That kid is the most brilliant designer I've ever seen. That kid is designing products that are going to win us every industry award. That kid is going to make everybody in this building rich and famous, if that's what you care about. So I said, so not only am I going to pick up his dry cleaning, but when I get back, I'll be outside washing his car. Okay? Your job is entirely based on finding the best and then doing everything you can to build a place where they feel valued. I've had people that work for me for four companies and that's the most important thing I can ever do. I'm going to skip those in the interest of time. Focus on operational excellence is our next point. Making sure that everything you do aligns with your goals. And let me tell you the story of where I learned this. I was on the speaking tour with this guy, Jim McCann, whose company, 800 Flowers, is the world's biggest volume florist. But when he started, there were 25,000 FTD florists in this country and he was number 24,000. He had one little shop in New York. How did you go from that to the world's biggest florist? And he Said, come visit. And one of the things that he taught me was he said, jeff, everything we do designed to achieve a specific goal or we don't do it. So written on his wall is what this slide says, sell more flowers. So he said, watch this. We walked down the hall and he stopped somebody and he said, what are you doing? And she answered us. And he said, how does that sell more flowers? And she answered, and here's what he told me. All over my walls, every day is written what we have to get done to make this company work. You should be doing that too. All over your walls, your employees. Every day should be something that says, whatever you're doing now, either you can tell me how it sells more flowers or put it down and go do something else, right? You can never get everything done priority wise. So figure out the things that drive your business. So we go in the garage and there's a mechanic underneath a truck, all greasy, and he wheels out on the little board and the guy says, jeff, watch this. And he goes, what are you doing? He says, I'm installing fuel filters on delivery trucks. And he says, how does that sell more flowers? And the mechanic blew me away. He said, well, I was doing some research. I found these fuel filters that save $13 on every tank of gas for a delivery truck. They cost five. So I ordered them for every truck, I installed them and paid the 5 that left $8 left over. I gave $3 of the 8 back to the company and I turned the other 5 into $5 off shipping coupons for every flower order. He said, I'm pretty sure if I can pass out $5 off shipping coupons that will sell more flowers. That is operational brilliance. Your job every day is to ask everyone who works for you, what are you doing and how does it sell more flowers? And if you can't answer that, put it down and do something that does. And you know what happens? Nobody ever calls the things you stop doing. I had people just stop and waited for some. The other shoe to fall. It never did. Focus all your energy. And by the way, this is why. This is another thing that's written on my board. Ideas are welcome, but execution is worshiped. Everybody has an idea, nobody executes it. Your job again is to figure out, execution wise, what things do we have to do at this company to achieve growth and make sure no one's doing anything but those things. I think I just have two more topics and then we'll stop and we'll do some Q and A here. The next one is get out of the office. And I'll tell you why that is, being in the office. So I was doing another TV show with these CEOs. And the reporter said, the host said, when you have a good idea, what do you do? And all these people said, I get my team and I go to the conference room. And I said, I get my car keys and I go to the parking lot. And everyone said, what? I'm going to tell you guys the story I was meeting. So many people design their product. Where do you work? Your office. Where do you design your products? Your office, right? And then you push your products out into the world and try to convince customers. But the best companies start on day one in the marketplace. And let me explain. I was spending the day with this older gentleman. He was in the retail business, and his retail stores were working, but they were counterintuitive. Everyone in the industry said, you can't build retail that way. Wall Street. And the experts said, you can't build retail that way. He did it anyway, and it worked. So in this day, we were spending together, I said to this man, how did you know it worked? And he said, jeff, a farmer in a John Deere hat told me. I said, okay, I got to hear this story. So we sat down to lunch, and he said this. I need that. Slide back. He said, this is my conference room. Those are my employees. Mba, smart people. And I said, okay, I don't see a problem. He said, these are my customers. They wear John Deere hats and overalls. They work across town. They sit in a cat diner eating apple pie. And I said, okay. And he said, the problem is these people don't know these people. These people don't live near these people. They don't shop near these people. They don't ever interact. So if those are your employees, how on earth are they building a product for them? So I asked the man, I said, so what did you do? And he said, every other Friday, I change into my jeans, I put on a John Deere hat, I go to the diner, and I just hang out all day buying people apple pie. He said, the farmers told me exactly what to build, because they're the people I was selling to, by the way, the guy I spent the day with was a guy named Sam Walton, and those stores were called Walmart. And I asked Sam, what was the key to success? And he said, listen to farmers. If that's your customer, not Wall Street. So you know what I do now? Every other Friday, I take off, and this isn't a sales call. It's hanging out, pizza and beer, talking sports, right? It's hanging out in the market, wherever your customer is. We're working on some stuff for college. Like, one of the things I'm working on in Cleveland right now is this college education program, something I'm working on with LeBron James. So you know where it was last week, I was on campuses with students hanging out in the student union, in jeans, at the Starbucks, trying to listen to them and just chatting about their futures in college so that LeBron and I can understand, what do these kids want and how do we deliver it to them? Get out of your office. By the way. One of the things that we do is we have these cardboard cutouts that we make of our customers that are all over the office. The reason we do that is my customer is always in my office with me. People walk up to me and say, I have a good idea. And I say, tell it to Jane if she's the customer. And they say, she's a housewife. She won't understand this. I say, then I'm not interested. Come back when you can explain it to Jane. We keep the customer presence everywhere. This is the last piece. I know I'm a little bit over, but I'm gonna do this last piece, and then we'll stop for some Q and A. And it's about delivering the right message to the right customer and understanding what your customers are really thinking about. So this is the last story that I will share with you. I mentioned before that we did this tour with NSync. So this happened while we were on tour with NSync. We were in Madison, we were in Times Square, and we were at the world's biggest music distributor. And because it was NSync, and at that time, they were the biggest fan in the world, Everybody was there, and we were sitting up in their, like, VIP room before the guys went down, looking down, and I was watching all the customers. And because it was NSync at the time, the owners of the world's biggest music distribution system flew in to join us from London. And I said the following question that I want you to think about. I said, why do people come here? Why do they do business with you? The question I'm gonna ask you guys, why do people come to you? Why do they do business with you? And he said, they come here to buy CDs. That's what we sell. And I said, I don't think so. And he said, jeff, they come in here to buy CDs. Look. And I said, I don't think so. And he looked at me like, you're nitted. He said, you know how many million CDs a year we sell? And I said, nice, but no one actually wants a cd. And he said, just looked at me like I was crazy. He said, I don't get it. And I said, no one wakes up in the morning, says, geez, I wish I had a round piece of plastic with a hole in it in my hand. No one wakes up in the morning and says, I really want to drive to the store, and I want to walk through the aisles and I want to find that music, and I want to stand in line and wait and pay for it. And he said, then what do they think? So the question is, what does your customer think when they wake up? When these people wake up, all they're thinking is, I want to hear that song now. No one wants a cd. They just want to hear a song. And he said, what's the difference? Guess what the difference is. The music industry failed to invent the ipod or itunes. They failed to invent electronic music. If they had been thinking, all people want to do is hear that song now, they wouldn't have overlooked this, would they? So I went back to my company and I asked all my employees, and I want you to do this. I said, why does anybody come here and do business with us? And people said, they come here to buy an airline ticket. And I thought, oh, right, because the truth is no one wakes up in the morning and. And says, if you put that slide back, no one wakes up in the morning and says, geez, I wish I could drive to the airport, go through security, get frisked, sit behind that guy, get no food. No one wants an airline ticket. So the question is, what do people want when they wake up in the morning? They want only one thing. They want to go to their sister's wedding. So let me ask you this question. If you thought your job was to help people get to their sister's wedding, would you run your company differently? Would you market differently? Our ads changed from, if you need an airline ticket, good news, we sell them. Two stressing about your sister's wedding. We'll get you there. Guess which one resonated. It's when we understood when your customers. So I want you to ask your employees, ask 10 people, why do you think people do business with us? And if they say that, why do they come here? They say they come here to buy your service. No one wants to buy your service. No one wants to buy your product. They have some other goal in mind they're trying to achieve. Some state, like an airplane flies me to a wedding and. But I don't want to go on a plane. I just want to be at the wedding. Think about that. Because the best company's messaging zeroes in. When we understood that, we became very different. And somebody said to me, that's nice, Jeff, but you're an Internet guy. That doesn't apply to my business. I sell sand, okay? I said, you know what? I'm going to go spend the day with you. So I drove out to the lot that day in the Midwest and trucks came in. What did you come here for? Sand. And he turned to me and said, see, smart guy, they just want to buy sand. And I said, all right, give me a minute. And so I said, you want to buy sand because you love sand. You go home and play with it. He said, no. You build forts. He said, no. I said, you just like sand. He said, no. I said, why are you buying sand? He said, I have to build a bridge. And sand is just one of the pieces of it. It goes in the concrete. Turns out nine of the first 10 customers were building roads and bridges. I said, when you woke up, did you just wish you had sand? They said, no, I got to build a bridge. Sand is just part of it. All day long, all he did was say, if you want to buy sand, come here. Once we had that day, he changed all his advertising to, need help building a bridge? We can help you. He has four product lines now. Sand is now the smallest one. All of his product lines are, we can help you build bridges. Because no one woke up in the morning wishing they had sand. They just want to build a bridge. So I'm going to end with that. The first takeaway turned out to be true. I over talked my stay here. I just want to summarize that.

Solve real problems in the world. They're all around you. Harvest ideas by infosponging. Learn things you don't need to learn, and then think about how to apply them to your industry. Find one thing you can win a gold medal in. Build a culture. Build a company where the best people in the industry want to work. And no, never want to leave. Your job is to find them and retain them, not to run the business. They can run it better than you ever could. And the last thing we just talked about was to invest in customer intimacy by hanging out with them and by understanding the real reason anybody does business with you. Thank you guys very much for listening today.

If you don't feel jazzed after listening to Jeff talk. Check your pulse. But here's the even cooler part. After Jeff got off stage, he spent an incredible amount of time in the hallway speaking to people who had questions. There was no judgment. There was no filtering of anything that he said or of anyone he talked to. Anyone who needed help, he was there to help them. There were groups around him. He couldn't go anywhere. And he sat there telling stories, inspiring people and giving them help exactly where they needed it. Jeff has this giving attitude, this giving heart, and it left everyone at the conference feeling empowered and inspired. And he just raised the level at which everyone played at Freedom Fast Lane Live. That is the environment that we encourage at Freedom Fast Lane Live. It's the environment where you step in and you level up. We're bringing in millionaires and billionaires. We're bringing in panels of people who sit on the boards of companies and they grow hundred million dollar businesses and they're getting together to grow new companies. How the heck do they they plan to do that? How are they all leveraging each other's specialties? You're going to find out. At Freedom Fast Lane Live, we're doing an investor roundtable with people who own apartment buildings, investment funds, huge stock accounts are considered investment advisors and experts. And they're coming in to do a roundtable about what they're all working on. We're bringing in people who are involved in billion dollar companies, people who are changing the world. We're bringing in Peter Diamandis who sees where all of the trends are going. This is the place where you naturally level up because you can't help it based on who is in the room. Tickets go on sale at the end of September. If you're a freedomfastlane.com subscriber, you got an early bird link. You can go there and get it or you can wait till they go on sale to the public at the end of September. But join us in Austin this December for Freedom Fast Lane Live 2016. Thank you as always for listening to Freedom Fast Lane. If you found value in this chat with Jeff Hoffman, how could you not please share it with an entrepreneur who would find value in it? And I'll see you this December.