A Toolset for Building an Epic Life | Priceline Executive , Jeff Hoffman @ Draper University

Hey everyone, you're about to watch Jeff Hoffman, a serial entrepreneur with a very inspiring message. If you want to be one of the founders sitting here in our campus learning from world-class experts like Jeff, make sure that you apply today at draperuniversity.com. Enjoy the video.

So since entrepreneurship enabled me to live all these moments here, to go see the world, to make money, which wasn't even my goal. We obviously did well. 2 of these companies became multi-billion-dollar companies. We got moments like the Grammy red carpet or the Emmys or whatever. I made a pledge to go teach the skill set of entrepreneurship to as many people as I can around the world so that everybody has a chance. In fact, I'll share with you guys. After that Grammy, I was standing on the red carpet and it was like surreal. I literally closed my eyes and I said, Through what crazy course of life am I standing on the red carpet at the Grammys, and we just won one, for a software engineer from a single mother from a poor home in the middle of nowhere? How did I ever get here? The way I was feeling at that moment, I had a thought then. I thought every human being deserves their red carpet moment. Whatever yours is, what is some moment in your life that if you could close your eyes and say, I can't believe I'm standing right here right now, would make your life amazingly epic. Whatever that is, I just want to help people get there. I realized the reason I got there was because I developed this skill set called entrepreneurship. I quit in 2011, stopped building companies, and I said, I'm going to take a year off and I'm going to go— I'll tell you guys what I did. I said, I'm going to do— I told nobody this at the time. I'm going to take 1 year off to give back to the field of entrepreneurship by mentoring people for a year. And in this year, I am going to— no one knew this— I'm going to say yes to anyone in the world that asks me to help with anything for 1 year. I don't— I won't go to work. I won't go to my office. I won't make a dime. I won't do any business. I will just— You might be a little late. I will just say yes to people for a year to give back by teaching them this. And I did this for the last— well, I started in 2012 and I just finished it in 2018. So my 12 months turned into 6 years. So I have been traveling around the world doing this. The reason I have this picture up is we also came up with an absolutely crazy idea. We said, why don't we test the next generation of entrepreneurs? And our crazy idea was, what if we chartered a ship full of entrepreneurs— that's actually it, it's a research ship— sailed around the world, showed you guys all the world's problems. The 5th deck of this ship is an accelerator. just like here, and gave you guys a chance to fix them, what would you do? We actually did it. We'll probably do it again next summer. You have my email address if you're interested. We sailed this ship, literally circumnavigated the Earth with a ship full of entrepreneurs building companies to solve the world's problems. It was one of the coolest things I've ever done in my life. So, I'll end and then I wanna move into the meat of this. And what I'm doing now, I'm gonna— I'm going to— I kinda stopped the tour. My other, besides entertainment and creative arts, I have one other passion which is sports. So I decided to do the same thing again. Last year we created a sports, so now we have a sports company that we just launched last year. Guess what? Using these skills of entrepreneurship that we're about to go through, that I'm about to teach. Last year, the first deal I was involved in, that's my friend Derek Jeter. We did a deal last year to buy the Miami Marlins, to buy a baseball team. And right now I'm in the process personally of trying to buy an NFL football team. I will keep you guys posted on that. That has been eating my lunch. But it's been a lot of fun, and hopefully within the next couple months we'll be able to announce that we just bought an NFL football team. So let's get to the reason that we're here, except we're not in this room. Where is that? That's across the street. Okay, that's the one across the street. I was trying to figure out what room we might be in so I'd have the right picture. So now let's go through this. What I'm going to do today is I'm going to share with you guys the things you got to get right. And what I'm going to tell you is this is a mix of my own learnings, right? I think I have about 7 things in here. It's the things that we've learned by building our own multibillion-dollar entities, but it's also the lessons I've learned from being blessed enough to spend time around people that achieve, that were successful. Like I just did an event yesterday before I flew out here with a guy named Jack McCauley, who's the guy that created Oculus VR and sold it to Facebook for $2 billion. A lot of people that I've been blessed enough to spend time with, whether it was Richard Branson or Steve Wozniak's a friend, or even time that I spent with Tim Draper, whenever I'm around people that have achieved something I respect, I am a sponge. I try to learn as much as I can about how they did it. So I'm going to share with you something like 7 things that are the things that I was not smart enough to know any of this when I was where you guys are. It's looking back. I can say what actually worked. So I'm not actually a professional speaker. I'm not an educator or an academic. I'm an engineer that just built stuff and some of it worked and I'm going to tell you how. Okay, fair enough. But I want to be clear, the reason I think it's so important is I don't want you to work on stuff for the sake of working on it or try to make money because you're missing an opportunity. The opportunity is why don't you build a startup doing something that you always wanted to do. What I want you to do, and I'm going to tell you before I go into the meat, my definition of success changed. Because when we are brought up in any country, we are brought up to believe that success is a combination of these 3 things: money, fame, and power. When somebody makes money, we call them successful when they drive by in their Bentley, right? And yet I have billionaire friends who are miserable. When somebody is famous, we call them, they made it, they're successful. And I have famous friends that are miserable. I mean, think about Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain, Robin Williams, rich and famous people all committed suicide. That isn't it. And so I'll tell you what my definition is. Anybody you meet at any time, they might have no money, no fame, no power. They might have those things. It doesn't matter. The definition is this. Anybody you can meet who can look back at their life right now, even with all their mistakes, and say, wow, what a ride. I want you to look back and say, don't touch my life, I like it exactly how it is. If you like your life and stop wishing you were somebody else, that is success. That's all it is. It's to be able to look back and say, what a ride. My best friend in the whole world, one day I said to him, his name was Michael, I said, Michael, I said, man, you just live all out. And he said, I said, you live on the edge. And he said, this is a quote, he said, Jeff, He said, I'd rather live, I'd rather take 40 years of my life the way I live it than 90 years of the way everybody else is living. Michael died at 36 in a tragic drowning accident, my best friend. But I'll tell you what the lesson was, right? Michael didn't leave anything left behind him. He lived the life he wanted to live. That's what I want you to do. What I'm here to tell you today is the best way to do that is entrepreneurship. That is how I was able to design the life that I actually wanted to live.