Design the World You Want to Live in | 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. Well, I'm going to give you guys kind of— I'm going to start by giving you guys kind of a quick background to put things into perspective. I'll do my background in like 90 seconds or something so that we can get into the meat of this. And I'll tell you some of the things I built. I'm an engineer by trade, got a software engineering degree, but honestly, I got a degree in engineering because my parents told me to go get something I could get a good job in and a good salary, which I did. I had a good job and a good salary at a good company, and I had everything but a good life because I actually hated it every single day. So I did that a couple of years and I quit, and I've been a serial entrepreneur ever since, and I'm going to explain why a little bit. So I'll give you my entrepreneurial background. The first thing I wanted to do— I grew up in Arizona in a little desert town where nobody ever left, single mom, no money. Nobody wanted to do anything, and I had big plans, lots of things on the list I wanted to do with my life. So I knew that it started with education, and I wanted to study this new thing at the time called AI, which is kind of ironic now since everything's artificial intelligence. But there are only 3 universities in the country that really had programs in it, and one interested me, which was that one, which is a little tough for a poor kid from a public school. So I actually managed to get into Yale. I went there. On the first day, I got kicked out because we hadn't paid. I paid all I could. We just didn't have enough money. They said, you didn't pay enough to go to Yale. You got to go home. I wasn't going home because I wanted this degree, so I started my first startup on my second day of college, 18-year-old. I started a software company, which would have been great except I don't know how to write software because I can't go to class. So I started it anyway and I managed to run a company for 4 years and fund my whole Yale education by myself and graduate. That was my taste of entrepreneurship. Thanks. But the concept was this, big dream, big goal, Hard work, figure it out yourself. That's kind of what we do as entrepreneurs. That was my first proof that I could actually do it with using a set of skills that coincidentally turned out to be the skills of entrepreneurship. What I understand was big goal, work hard, create— well, actually, I'll tell you what I wrote down then. I wrote down this on my wall: dream big, work hard, create value. I said, if I can dream big, work as hard as my dreams are big, and create value in the world, Nobody should be able to stop me from doing anything I want to do, including getting that diploma. So I tried it, and at least at this point it worked. Since then, I've been out building companies my whole life. The first thing I ever built, I'll tell you guys quickly. When I quit that job, I was 20-something years old, unemployed, broke, everybody was mad at me. My parents were telling people, we thought you were smart, but apparently you're an idiot, because you had a good engineering job that you worked really hard to get, and you just walked out and quit. I did, because I didn't want a good salary, I wanted a good life. I had a big goal. One of my goals was, I'll tell you guys, one of my goals was before I die, I want to see 50 countries in my lifetime. I'm going to tell you guys really quickly where that came from. I read a book by Mark Twain in school. Mark Twain has a famous quote that I saw in 6th grade that said, travel is the fatal enemy of prejudice. I totally got that. I said, the only way I can be the human being, the quality of person I want to be, is I need to stop spending all my time with people like me, and I need to go to other countries, other cultures, other ethnicities. You guys know the examples, like in this country where there's people that have never met a Muslim person but claim they don't like them. My first thing was, how am I saying that until I've broken bread in a Muslim family's house in their country, not where I live? The same thing went with, for touring Africa, wherever. So my goal was see 50 countries before I die, and I didn't have a job to do that, so I created one because that's what we do in this room, don't we? We go create our own future. The beauty of entrepreneurship is not money, it's the ability to design your own future, design the life, create the job. Instead of finding a company to work for, make the company you always wished you worked for. So I did. My first product was standing in an airport line waiting for an hour to check in, missed a flight when I was 20-something years old, broke and unemployed. And I went home and said, this is ridiculous, there's got to be a better way. So if you've ever checked yourself in on a kiosk in an airport anywhere in the country, that was my first invention. Thanks. Created a kiosk, Prototype number 3 burst into flames. I almost died. Eventually it worked, and it turned out everybody, every airport in the world wanted them. We sold these everywhere. We installed them. I have no idea how to build a company or run one. Now I'm going to show you what I learned looking backwards, all the stuff I wish someone had told me when I was starting. And then later we— now you're probably less surprised that I was involved in something like this. For those of you, I know you're 56 people from 25 countries, If you don't know us under that name, Booking.com is the same company. In fact, the parent company is now called Booking Holdings. But Booking and Priceline are one company. But this was a startup by people that wanted to travel, that had a tech background, some, some didn't. It was a scratch startup as small as anybody's in this room or anywhere else. I just wanna make that clear. Today, this little startup does business in 200 countries, and I always feel almost embarrassed saying this, it's about an $80 billion company and it was started on a table like right in there from scratch by some people who wanted to travel. Thanks. I then took— some of these pictures are embarrassing. I did tech companies for a number of years. Obviously we had some big successes. We had some that failed along the way. I've done 8 startups. I took a break from tech and said I'm going to apply the same concepts of entrepreneurial skills to other things I want to do. So I told you entrepreneurship is about designing the world you want to live in, the future. So I love music. I wanted to produce a concert. All my friends said, you're crazy, you're a software engineer. I said, actually, what I am is a problem solver. I organize teams around specific goals and we go attack that thing, and using all these skills that I didn't know were called entrepreneurship at the time. So I started a music company Later, it worked that way. We did concerts with Elton John. Then I started a tour company and a lot of other artists. We did— that picture is more embarrassing. We did tours with NSYNC. That's Justin Timberlake standing right next to me. We did tours with Britney Spears. We did tours with Backstreet Boys. We did a Beyoncé tour. Same skills that I applied to a tech company, apply to every problem you solve in your life. Part of my message today is, why don't you solve ones in areas you're interested in? If you love travel, travel startup's really good. So it worked. I said, that's a pretty good formula. Find a problem to solve in an industry you want to be in. By the way, the real rule is become valuable to the people in an industry that you want to be around. I can sort of tell you how that looks today, because now I'm working on projects with people like— that have become friends. Like Pitbull, Christina Aguilera. These are the people that are friends of mine now that originally reached out because I was somebody that knew their industry but could solve problems that they had. It's a pretty simple formula. By the way, we— this was kind of a funny moment. A couple years ago, I won a Grammy. That's me on the Grammy red carpet taking pictures of all them. But the funny part I wanted to share with you guys was standing on this Grammy red carpet with all these paparazzi, Somebody said, Jeff, how does this feel? And I was like, this is the dream of software engineers everywhere. And the guy next to me is like, dude, you're killing the vibe on the red carpet, shut up. And I was like, how do I explain this? I'm a software engineer. Everybody will always tell you what you can't do because they label you. You're an engineer, you're an accountant, you're a finance person. You're none of those things. That's just one of the skills you learned. So by the same token that I learned software or you learned finance, Why can't you go learn music? So that worked, and I said, you know what else is on my list I'd love to do someday? I love creative people and the creative process. Before I die, besides traveling to 50 countries in my life— by the way, I just— I'm up to 94 countries so far of the 50 I wanted to do. I was like, I'm going to try applying entrepreneurial skills to the next thing I really want to do with my life, which was make a film. Everybody told me the same thing. You're not an artist, you're an engineer. The second thing they said was— well, that was the main thing. You're not an artist. But the other thing people told me is independent films, 97% of them will never see the light of day and lose all their money. You know what my thought was? 2 things. When somebody says to you 97% failure rate, the rest of the world says, wow, let's not try it. Entrepreneurs say what I said. I said, can you get me the phone numbers of those other 3 people? Because apparently there's 3 ways to do this, and I thought I had one shot. Okay, so we launched the thing, and the other part was applying entrepreneurial discipline, which is what the meat of my talk in a few minutes here, to everything you do. So we launched our own production company. That was the first movie that I ever made. We made this movie. It's on Netflix right now. This is me dying in the movie. My buddy, who's my business partner, had never made a film either. Neither of us ever had. His name is Eli Roth. He just finished doing a film with Spielberg called House with a Clock in Its Walls. If you guys might have heard of that. But we made a little movie. It's like a startup, but I ran it like a startup. We made it for $1.3 million. We gave people equity instead of cash like the movie business does. We did everything entrepreneurial. That movie grossed, out of a $1.3 million investment, about $100 million in 47 different countries. Apparently, entrepreneurial skills can be applied to everything, even if you are an engineer. We started a TV company as well and just last year won an Emmy. So, so far it's working. I went back to tech after that and started a company, you can't see the logo. We had a company called uBid.com, another startup. It grew to the 5th largest auction site in the world. It became a multi-billion dollar company. We took that one public as well. And then I quit. I said, I made a, it's the reason I'm here today, I made a commitment to giving back. The skill set, this will be really clear, the skill set of entrepreneurship is the skill set of an epic life. It is what enables you to design your own future, to build the company you always wanted to work for. I worked for a boss that I don't think respected any, I'm just being honest with you guys, in my one corporate job, anybody that wasn't a white male. I said, I wish I worked at a company that has no gender, no ethnicity, no race, no age. All that matters is your contribution, your merits, what kind of person you are, your values. And I thought, you know what, I don't know if I'll ever find that company, so I'm just gonna build it. And every company I've built lives by our value set. Go create the future.