Martin Varsavsky - Saving time and having a life as entrepreneur

So I mainly run phone, which is the largest WI fi network in the world. Now in the UK is known as BTPhone and we're in many countries around the world. We have 6.2 million hotspots. We grew by a million last year. And I also do a lot of angel investing. And here's a set of companies that I've invested in. I also invested, as you see, in Index Ventures, who then invested with me. Okay, so it's a nice circle. I teach at the Instituto Empresa, I speak at conferences, I'll be teaching at Columbia University in the fall. And I run my foundation as well. And I also have, this is my family, I have five children. So the question that I used to get asked a lot by journalists is how do you do it and how do you manage to do all these things? And I never really explained until today that not only I do these things, but I also take 12 week vacations and work only in the morning. Okay, so I'm going to share with you some of the things I do that that allowed me to work very little. And these are some of the things you may do that you may not be realizing how much time you're wasting doing them. So the average person spends 14 years watching television. And I don't watch television, okay? I only watch YouTube and Netflix. Sometimes I watch videos like the one that the great violinist who just perform. I watch short things that catch my attention and I watch Netflix. I also, I'm into practicing sports, but I'm not at all into watching sports. I'm not even watching the Euro Cup. Now I watch a little maybe, but it's not. And if you don't watch sports on TV and you're a guy, it's like you have half of your life free. Then there's an issue about reading and writing. I used to read a lot, now I write a lot. So when you see me in all the social media and all the posts, my whatever, blah, blah, blah, but I cut on my reading. I mean, when you read you have to say, well, am I willing to give 20 hours of my life to this person, you know, the person who wrote the book? And sometimes it is worthwhile to give 20 hours of your life or 30 hours of your life to a person who wrote a book. But many times I feel that books are the wrong format, that books are 300 pages long when they say the same thing in 50 and don't make me waste my time unless it's literature. And you just enjoy it because you love reading. You know, I know you guys are all here fans of Harry Potter, and I'm not going to argue with that, okay? Now this is something I found that I thought it was crazy that guys spend an average of 83 minutes grooming themselves. So I spend 10 minutes, and I look like this. I don't look like that guy, but I spend 10 minutes. I save an hour every day over him, okay? So shower, shave, I do these things, but I mean, I don't do them like that, okay? And now, now it gets elitist. So you can hate me for it, but because I've done well building my companies, I fly my own plane, and I have a driver, okay? And this is, this is. I know that I get a lot of shit for that, but I don't care. The thing is that it does save you a lot of time to have a driver. Like a lot of the. When you. When you don't have a driver. And sometimes I drive myself, but when you drive yourself, it's like a lot of time that you're just not doing everything else, right? So this talk is for entrepreneurs, okay? It's for entrepreneurs. And so entrepreneurs, many of them, can afford to have a driver, and I think that helps. And having a plane also helps. I was at a conference in Munich this morning. I'm here now. And that makes me save a lot of time, okay? This is the hateful part of the presentation now, envy part. Talking on the phone, okay? My company is called Phone, but not Phone, okay? And I don't almost never speak on the phone, okay? Unless it's something with somebody I care about. I really think there's two reasons to speak on the phone. One is to get something out of somebody, and the other one is just because you love this person. Well, I tend to speak on the phone with people I love, but I rarely speak on the phone to get something out of somebody, because for that, I use Gmail, I use Messenger, I use Skype, I use WhatsApp. I use, like, when all these things appeared, I was, like, just waiting for them. I just wanted to communicate in writing and whatever the hell I wanted to communicate. What I hate about the phone is that the last person who wants to contact you is the first one who gets to contact you, right? It's like it interrupts everything else that happens in your life. So I just don't answer the phone. I don't drink, okay? And there's an incredible amount of time that people spend drinking, right? And I don't have anything against drugs or anything against alcohol and Many of my friends consume drugs and alcohol. Some even smoke, but. And I don't care. I just don't like these things. I tried. I tried probably all sorts of drugs, and I tried drinking, and I just want to throw up, okay? So I don't know. It doesn't work for me. And then the other thing I don't do, that a lot of people do is business meals. And in Spain, where I live, business, they have the church and the business meal. Okay? I hate those very long business meals where you meet an awkward person about some weird thing. The business could be done in 10 minutes, and you're like, there with a stranger forever. I have short meetings at the office, and the meals are for my family and my friends, okay? So that's how I get to. Then the other thing I do is I show up on time and I expect other people to show up on time. And that saves a lot of. I mean, just waiting for other people and having other people wait for you is something that doesn't work well. Now, social media, because a lot of people say, well, why do you waste so much time on social media? Why are you on Twitter and all this? And the thing is that Twitter works for me and social media works for me. Like, I use Google. My best search engine is Twitter. Like, when I have a question, I put it on Twitter. How can I get from here to there? How can I. I hire over Twitter? Because when you have a lot of followers on Twitter, Twitter starts working for you. You work for Twitter, but Twitter works for you. Okay? So I ask for anything because my followers tend to be people like me. That's why they follow me. And when I ask for a restaurant, I get a good one when I ask for. It just really works for me. And I ended up hiring a lot of people over Twitter. Now we have a little baby. And this is something I found that is the Kama Sutra of sleeping with your baby, right? And so sleeping. So we do co sleeping, right? My wife and I, and we have our little baby, Mia, in all these different poses that you can see here. I like the one of, like the little angel there, like, taking our bed away. But sleeping is a very important time. Sleeping with the people you love especially. And I always hear about my fellow entrepreneurs. Oh, I didn't sleep last night. Oh, I didn't get any sleep. Oh, I haven't slept for three days. I mean, sleeping. Okay, I agree that nobody has figured out why we need to sleep, but I think we can all agree that when we don't sleep we're in a terrible mood, and life kind of sucks, and it's kind of depressing when you don't sleep well. So I think sleeping is a very important part of the day. And I get eight or nine hours of sleeping, and I'm happy. Then I go to conferences. But I also say no to a lot of conferences, and I say no to a lot of things because that's something that if you want to manage your time, saying no is a huge part of managing your time. Saying no to people you wouldn't like to be with, or sometimes you even want to be with them, or you want to go to conference, or you want to do this thing, but there's just not enough time. So it is important to go to conferences. It's also important just not to go. And this applies to anything else. Absolutely anything else that you may want to do. Now. I spent a lot of time doing things that you would call philanthropy, and I kind of hate the word because it kind of philanthropy. It makes you feel like. Well, I kind of dislike all the words. Angel investing is kind of weird. You're like this angel investor. I don't know. Like, there's something wrong about angel. You're not an angel. You're just trying to make money. But whatever. And then philanthropy, you know, philanthropy, this thing that. But whatever it is, I do like to spend time helping other people achieve certain things that have happened to me in my life. So I work a lot on entrepreneurship. I work a lot on education. My foundation has given around $12 million to start this project Eduardo, in Argentina. 11 million initially, then some more funds to connect the schools to the Internet. And I think it is good to spend a lot of time doing things that maybe don't make you money. So I do spend a lot of time doing these things, which sometimes I get criticized for, like, oh, what do you get out of that? Well, I don't know what I get out of that, but it feels good, and that's why I do it. And then vacations. So I spend, like, maybe eight weeks a year sailing. And when I sail, there's not a lot to do, right? You're there with your family. You go to nice places. But it is so special, you know, to be with my family and my friends. It is such an important part of my life that I decided, you know, to stop lying and tell people that I'm working all the time. I used to go on the sailboat and take everything and never tell anybody I was on the sailboat, you know, kind of Like a closet sailor, you know? But then I said, you know, why should people have to lie about doing things that they love with the people they love? You know, what is the lie here? But then there's something else that's super important about entrepreneurs. What do entrepreneurs get paid for? I know what lawyers get paid for. I know what engineers get paid for. I know what architects get paid for. I know what doctors get paid for. I know what computer scientists get paid for and engineers get paid for. But what do we get paid for? We get paid for solving problems, coming up with creative ideas. We get paid for the thing that nobody else in the company knows how to do. In the case of phone, I had the ideal phone. I'm the patent holder of the idea of this global federation of WI fi, of routers. Share a little WI fi at home, roam the world for free. I had the idea, had the patent, built a company around it. I don't get. And I had that idea while I was on vacation. I was in Paris looking for WI fi myself, and it was all locked. And I said, well, why should all be locked? Why don't we make all routers both private and public? So I think vacation is an abstract concept for an entrepreneur, because when you're an entrepreneur and you're on vacation, you're still an entrepreneur and you're trying to solve the problems that you brought to the vacation on the back of your mind. And sometimes you're not even thinking, you're not even looking, and you're there with your children, or you're there and you have that epiphany. You just get it, you come up with a solution. I don't think vacations are the enemies of entrepreneurs. They are the enemies of lawyers who build by the hour. And then there's the issue of the people who work with me. I think I owe it to them. I have time because I have such amazing people who work for me. It is a talent to be able to recruit amazing people, but it's their credit. They are amazing, and I have to be thankful to them every day of my life. All the people who work at phone, the people who work at my holding company, the people who work and enable me to be able to take time off for my family, for my friends, and to think about what I have to think. So without them, I just can't be myself. Okay? So I think the gratitude to them is also a very important thing. And the last thing I wanted to say is that this advice that I just given is not for everyone. And it's not for everyone. As this child you see who's about to. Or whatever guy is about to fall. It's not for everyone because not everyone can delegate. Delegate means that things will never be done exactly the way you thought they were going to be done. When you delegate, you say goodbye to your own decision making. But delegating is one of the. Is the only way to buy your own time. It's like if you want to be involved with everything, you be a slave of your wishes and desires and whatever it is that you do. And delegating is this scary moment when you're going to let someone else do that thing that you really think you know how to do very well. But delegating is something that I have applied at every aspect of my life. And I'll finish with an anecdote. When I started being a professor, I hated grading students. I thought grading students was agonizing. I felt it was always unfair, and they felt it was always unfair, and they would come and complain about their grades. And that was something very similar I felt to compensation companies. So what I decided to do is I invented a game, and my entrepreneurship class is a game. But the original idea of the game was to find a way not to have to grade students. So when I teach at Columbia University, what I do is I give all my students a million dollars of virtual money. I used to give euros in Europe, now I'll give dollars. It's all virtual. And I tell them they have to invest in 10 out of the best 30 projects they see in the class. And they build a portfolio in the pitches and the presentations of their classmates. And when they are done with investing, the ones who raise the most money get the A. I give them 1 million, but they need 5 million for their projects, which is this shortage of as in the university. I kind of figured out there was a shortage of as when I was a student, and I rarely got there right. And so I said, why don't I mimic the shortage of A's that exists in real life with a game? And I've been teaching my class without ever having to grade a student again. Another professor said, but you lost all your power. You're not a professor anymore. You've delegated grading the students to themselves. But I am very, very happy that I did that, and I'm very glad about delegating a lot of things in my life that allow me to have a lot of freedom. That's what I had to say. Thank you.