Chase Excellence, Not Money | 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.

Um, here is one of the most important things I'm going to share with you guys that I could ever teach you. Don't chase money. Chase excellence. Everybody that's out there chasing money is so distracted by the pursuit of money that they don't do the only thing that's ever gonna get you paid, which is to create amazing in the world. Heads down, we were focused on excellence in every business I've ever been in, and that is why we got paid. Money always— quit worrying about the money. If you go out in the world and create something amazing, money will find you. I was sitting in my office when that $100 million just walked in the front door. I was like, my company's not for sale. And they're like, we have this much. I said, you know what, my company might be for sale now. If you think about a company like Priceline, Priceline's a company that was never sold, never acquired. And you know why? Because it's a company that today does probably, I'm going to guess last year's sales were something like $19, $20 billion. But the net profit, not the gross, the net profit of the company was $3.3 billion last year. So if you create excellence and you have a company that spits off billions in profits, you don't need to worry about things like exit strategy. In fact, I'm gonna say this, which a lot of times when I'm in this town, people get upset about. Everybody, I go to these startup pitches. People are pitching a startup and they say, what's your exit strategy? And you know what I sit there and think? Exit strategy, guys, what's your entrance strategy? Why don't we talk about that? Because we exiting your PowerPoint? Seriously? Only one guy in history ever exited a PowerPoint and that's Mark Cuban. And I can only say that because he's a friend of mine. He never built the company. He wrote a PowerPoint and someone bought the company from him. Short of one guy, the whole rest of the planet actually has to build something. Focus on excellence. Focus on your entrance strategy. The exit strategy will never happen unless you create something amazing in the world. Even today, I get people around the world that send me a picture of them standing in an airport somewhere holding a boarding card and they just text thanks. If we hadn't created something that worked, that solved a real problem, that had a value equation, I would have never gotten paid anyway. So, don't chase money, chase excellence. Next, win a gold medal at one thing. This is a friend of mine. I don't know if you're swimming fans, but that's Michael Phelps.

Yes.

He's 29 gold medals later. We talk about focus and commitment a lot. To win a gold medal at anything in life is extremely difficult, and the reason that I use that analogy There is no gold medalist that won a gold medal in swimming and a gold medal in volleyball and a gold medal in basketball. It doesn't happen. Winning a gold medal at anything in life is so hard that you've got to be really focused. Yet here's what I hear all the time. People in the early days, people start— when you're building a company, by the way, people say to me all the time, they say, Jeff, you've done all these different things. Here's the important part. Never at the same time. Every company I showed you, I exited one or hired people to run it and left. I've never built more than one thing at a time. People show me, and they think it's risk aversion. I'm spreading the risk. We're trying 5 different things. No, you are now doing— spreading your time 1/5 of 5 different things, and that is not the key to excellence. What you need to do is win a gold medal at one thing. So what I want you to think about is, What is my gold medal? What is the one thing I can do at a gold medal talent and stop doing everything else? There are times people come to me and they say, I want to scale my business, and I say, okay, fine, because I'm going to cut it into small pieces first. We're going to shrink what you're doing before we can grow it. Some examples people forget. This company, I knew Bezos way back at the beginning. At the early internet days, it was interesting because there were not very many of us building internet companies at the start. And so I used to talk to Jeff and Pierre, Jeff Skoll and Pierre Omidyar, they were doing eBay, and the other Jeff was doing Amazon, back when we were at the beginning stages of Priceline. It's funny, because I was doing this TV interview, and they said, what was the key to success in the internet business? And I said, apparently you just gotta be named Jeff, because that seems to be going pretty well for all the Jeffs somehow. Do you remember how many years they sold only books? But you know what Jeff said back then? I want to be the best damn bookseller on the planet. And it was only because he won a gold medal at books by staying focused. You know what you and I said? Man, it's only a book, but that's my favorite e-commerce company. We begged them to sell us something else. How would you like to have that problem? Most people have a push strategy. I'm going to start selling another product. I'm going to push it into the world, and I'm going to see if anybody wants it. This is a pull strategy. You win a gold medal at something. People love your company so much. that they say, please sell me other things. So for scale, someday, Jeff said Amazon will sell everything. But for years he had the discipline to only sell books. Sometimes I go out on the speaking with Tony Hsieh. Tony's company is Zappos. What Tony said early on, what they said was, we're going to be the best damn shoe seller on the planet. They were disciplined enough to win at one thing to establish that they are a gold medal talented company. before they sold anything else. So that's what I want you to think about. Again, if you think about the pricing of— Priceline or Booking.com example, today the company— people would always say, why don't you guys sell baggage, luggage? Why don't you sell trip insurance? Why don't you sell cruises? Today the company has a— had a gold medal in hotel rooms. Today it's the world's largest seller of hotel rooms. Out of that $20 billion a year, I think 94% of that is only one thing, hotel rooms. Hotel rooms in 200 countries for $20 billion a year. If you are a gold medalist at something, that is how you scale. Stop trying to solve too many problems or be all things to all people in your early days. Grow into that. I see that too much. Thank you.