[Greatest Hits] The Secret To Surviving A New Responsibility with Steven Hoffman

Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on ready. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

There is a point to this trail of dominoes and just madness.

Right?

Yeah.

Rambling on it.

The pattern is so much of this is what life is. You know, if you're a CEO, if you're trying to get things that you're in charge, yet so many times you get put in situations where you have incomplete information, you're not really trained for it, but you got to get it done, you know, there's no other options. You got to come up with something. But unlike your father's world, most of these things to get through the day, you know, all you got to do is get through the day and know you in the right direction. And to get through the day usually, even if it's totally unknown, it's not rocket science. You can ask like you asked the other writers, you know, they knew where the scripts were, whatever, Exactly. You know, all you needed to do was find out where the scripts were for that day, you know, to get through that part.

Right. Or ask my friend advice on which.

Person can't do another thing. Somebody outside the company, you know, your friend. And because everybody, there's always somebody who knows there's nothing, you know, it's Ecclesiastes. There's nothing new under the sun. And if you ask, you can get answers. And so being thrown into that situation where you're super uncomfortable, you're on the hot seat, but you got to get an answer. You don't have to get the answer for the rest of your life. You don't have to solve all the world's problems. You got to get through today and set yourself up for success tomorrow. But that, it's amazing how that can domino into success just by making right choices. And you were figuring that out as you move forward. And then you can find out, you get established, this is survival mode. But if you take survival mode seriously like you did, then you work your way in a position where other options start to show up. They're not going to fall in your lap, but they'll show up and opportunities will come where you can go pursue them and you can start moving into. I equate it to like, you have a dart and you're throwing your dart at the target on the wall and there's rings, you know, just get the, just get the dart on the wall and then you can always move it in closer the next time, you know, you can move it a little closer, a little closer and get closer to the bullseye.

Exactly what was happening. And you know, when I went to the chairman of Sega, what he said is, I want to bring you over to our Japanese headquarters because we've been looking for to bring somebody from Hollywood over to Japan. So that job led directly to the next job. I wouldn't have had that opportunity if I hadn't taken the chance. And I was always pushing myself, right, like asking for more than I thought I could even handle, but not being afraid to do it because I knew you'll either sink or swim, and if you don't swim, you're never going to make it in this industry. And I think that's true for any entrepreneur, any business person, and anybody who wants a great career.

And that was the benefit of you putting together all of those plays and everything growing up as a youngster because you, you know, you faced all kinds of challenges there and learned how to solve problems and come up with solutions. So in a sense, you were training yourself for the real world. You know, that was probably the best part of your education you had growing.

Up, you know, and I am a firm believer that, you know, when I look to hire people, and I do that a lot now, you know, I run founder space, a global startup incubator and accelerator. I work with startups all over the world. This is what I do, very different from what I did in the past. But when I hire people now, I want to see that they've done exceptional things, that they have gone out and really pushed themselves to try to do something that's out of the ordinary. Because the people who do that, they end up more often than not doing exceptional things for your company because that's the type of person they are at their core.

Yeah, and it's kind of like if you get somebody who's had a little opportunity and not given much of a chance, but they swole up to the limits of what that position did you look for the patterns? Do they maximize the opportunities they've had in the past? Not really how high they went, but did they maximize the opportunity they had? Because if you. Then that's their tendency. So if I can get them into a bigger opportunity, their tendency is going to be to continue to grow on up and mushroom and not be stall out for lack of motivation.

Because that's how it's. I will tell you, there's two types of people in the world speaking of motivation, there Are people who you have to motivate to make them work. Like it. And there are people who are totally self driven and self motivated. And honestly, for key positions in your company, for leadership positions, for positions that are going to make a difference, you have to hire people who are self motivated, self driven, will push themselves because you, honestly, you can motivate people for a short time. But if you spend all your time hoping to motivate your employees, you have the wrong employees. Right. You need employees who are going to take it on themselves, do it, and do it better than you could ever do it, because that's their focus.

Absolutely. And of course, as a leader, you got to create that environment where they feel like it's worthwhile to, to them, they feel value and that they'll be appreciated, taken care of for doing that. They're not going to just, they're not just being used, you know?

No, no. Because look, if you let, if you give them the freedom and give them the direction that they need to go and they are totally motivated because in their mind, their success on the job is their win. It's not a win for you. They're not just doing it for the money. They're doing it because it's, it's who they are at their core. Then they will. All you have to do is point them in the right direction. They're going to get it done, they're going to figure it out.

And the appreciation and approval of the higher up is critical. But also there's got to be some kind, it's got to be some financial incentive in there. They've got to feel, they got to be rewarded.

Well, whatever their reward. So different people have different motivating factors. For me, my big reward at that time, and it changes over time, was I wanted to do something creative, right. I wanted to make my name in Hollywood. That was my reward. The money didn't matter to me as much because I was at the beginning of my career. I just wanted to break in. I wanted to make a name for myself. You know, other people, you know, the cash like you get a salesperson, a great salesperson, you, they, they might be, they're like, you know, great salespeople are like cash registers, right? They, they tally up their worth by how much they're pulling in, right? What their commissions are. So different people, different things. But you need that person who does have that oversized motivation that's aligned with what you need them to do.

Absolutely. And so you go. And that's a big change going over into a different Industry and you had to reestablish yourself all again in the game.

Yeah. So I'll finish up the story and I'll make it quick because so basically I said yes, this would be awesome to go to Japan, be like an amazing experience. Video games, you know, they're up there with films and my passion and I haven't tried that industry, I'll learn an enormous amount. And my assumption, remember this is the early 90s. My assumption was that games are going to be bigger than movies. Everybody thought I was crazy, but I was like, no, no, no, no, I know games, they're going to be bigger than movies. Sure enough, they are. They gross more. So I went back to Chuck and I'm like, chuck, I'm going to quit. I'm going off to Japan to make games. He looked at me, this is the early 90s. He was like, Hoffman, are you crazy? I gave you a huge opportunity. What are you talking about? You know, he just couldn't believe it. And I was like, no, no, I'm going to do this. I really believe the games are going to be bigger than movies. Hoffman, what are we going to do without you? And that was a real compliment because I always thought I'd get fired. And I was like, oh, you know, and I started to think, I was like, you could hire my brother. And my brother was in Hollywood at the time, you know, he wanted to be a music producer, but he was working at a record store. He had a dead end job, he had nothing. And he's a smart guy, but it's hard to break into these industries. Here I was, I was broken in and I go, you could hire my brother. And he looked, your brother, of course we'll hire your brother. We want another Hoffman. So he walked right into my job and I flew off to Japan. I worked in Japan for another year. I'm very restless guy, right? So only like another year. After another year I was like, this is a Japanese company, right? I never going to make the type of games I want to make. I'm more like a consultant telling them, what do Americans think of this? What do Americans think of that? And I was like, I have to start my own game company. And that was the beginning of my entrepreneurial career. I left Sega, went back to basically San Francisco and I launched my own game company. And literally I thought, well, what game could I make that would be really cool and is also within my budget because I had no money. I was an indie, right? Like I had just the money I'd saved from these Two jobs and I was like. And I'd only worked two years since college, so it wasn't a lot of money. I was like, I'm going to make a game that teaches people how to be entrepreneurs. Which is ironic because it's what I do today, running a startup accelerator and I'm going to call it Gazillionaire and I'm going to make it the most fun game anybody ever played. But they're also going to learn to be entrepreneur. And I literally sat down, coded that whole game myself because I went to engineering school, I got, you know, did a lot of the art, hired some independent artists, put that game out there, like just put that game out there in these days. It was early, early, early days of the Internet. You literally. People weren't even surfing the web. I put them out there on BBS's bulletin boards and lo and behold, the QA testers, the quality assurance guys at the largest game PC game company in the world downloaded that game and got hooked to it. I got invited in by the president and I cut a deal and he put that game out worldwide and Gazillionaire became a huge hit for me personally. And literally that game that I made is still going today. It's on Steam, the big game site, PC game site. And then I made a series of games after that. Then I got together with an old film school friend and we launched a company called Spider Dance, which is interactive television combining games and technology. And I just kept going from there. Being an entrepreneur, I founded three venture funded startups in Silicon Valley and then I launched the company. I currently work at Founder Space, which is a global startup accelerator.

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