Talent is Your Scarcest Resource | 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. Build a great team. Look, when— this is, this is what's important. When— and then I'm going to end on a One last story. When people ask startups in the media, I get this all the time when we're doing interviews, they say, what is the one thing startups need most to succeed? You know what everybody says? Funding. I'm gonna tell you something. Financial capital is not the scarcest resource in the world. Human capital is. It is not a money game. It is a talent game. I've learned that over and over. Giving a lot of money to average people yields nothing. Giving a little bit of money to passionate, motivated, resourceful people gets amazing results. In the early days, I can tell you a story even when we were just beginning in the early Priceline days. One of the offices, we opened an office and I had a lot of stuff to do to get the office, it was the development office where we were writing the code. And I had a lot of stuff to do. When we got there that morning, the group met me there, I'm putting the key in, we're going in, we're starting a new company, it's a brand new office. In the back of my mind, I felt like I forgot something. I opened the door, we all step in, everybody laughs. I said, what? And they said, uh, you forgot to buy furniture. There's no desks, no chairs, no nothing. I forgot. I knew I forgot something. It was furniture. I say to the guys, look, let me figure out what I can do. Scrap some money together, maybe I can buy some used furniture. Let me work on it. I stopped, I left. I said, guys, just go home. I'll call you when we can start working. Later, I was driving back by and all the cars were still there. So I was like, why did they not leave the empty office? I went in there. You know what they did? Somebody had a screwdriver. They unscrewed all the doors off of all— took all the hinges off, took all the doors off. They found basically boxes in the trash. They laid them on either end. They laid the doors sideways. They sat on the carpet using the sideways doors on trash boxes, and they were writing code. I said, what are you doing? They said, working. What are you doing? I said, you just built an office out of trash? They said, we got code to write, man. We'll worry about that later. Resourceful, passionate people are the hardest thing to find. It is a talent game. Here's what I'm going to tell you about talent. Talent doesn't wander up to you, right? As your company grows, people use— and I like these websites like Indeed, right? There's a lot of great job websites. But you know who answers job postings? People who lost theirs. Do you know where the most talented people are? They don't need a job. They already have one and they're getting offered 5 a week. So here's what else I'm going to tell you. When you start building your team, talent is not going to wander in. Go find them. So you know what else I do? I schedule one day every month where I'm out of the office looking for you guys. I literally spend a day hunting talent, and I do it different. Really quickly, one time I needed someone to run HR for me. Running a job is going to get me the HR people that lost their job if I posted it. They're not going to wander in my office. So you know what I did? I started asking people, Friday is my talent day, I want to do HR, where do HR people hang out? Somebody said SHRM. I said, what is SHRM? They said Society of Human Resources Managers. So I went to shrm.com and the first thing that came up was, don't forget to register for our annual conference. So I registered. I went to the conference, there were 1,000 HR people and me. People looked at my name tag and they said, do you do HR? I said, no, I'm a founder of a company. And they're like, what are you doing here? I said, shooting fish in a barrel. I said, there's 1,000 of you and 1 of me, and I need an HR person. And you know what else happens? You know what happened at that conference? I was thinking, who are the best HR people in the world? You know who they are? They're the speakers. So I circled the 12 speakers, and the woman that gave the keynote was the woman that won HR Person of the Year for the United States. Guess who ran HR for me for my next 4 companies? I went and hunted her down, hired her. And brought her back. Talent will not find you. Schedule time to go hunt for people smarter than you. I'm gonna close. This is my last slide, and then we're gonna do questions here. I'm ending with this for a reason. This is a friend of mine I was talking about earlier. Oh, that was over at the other, at the boxing demo across the street. His name's Evander Holyfield. We've been friends for 25 years. If you don't know who he is, knocking out Mike Tyson there. After he knocked out Mike, in the next fight, Mike Tyson. Mike Tyson bit my friend's ear off. Probably most of you know that story because that was a big story around the world when Mike bit my buddy's ear off. So Evander is training for a fight, and this is not a sports lesson, this is the last thing I'm going to share with you, it is a life lesson. And he'd do this exercise that he would do 300 times a day, and it was insane. I would look at him and I was like, why do you have to do this 300 times? He already looks like that, why do you have to do this 300 times a day? And so he's getting ready to train for the World Heavyweight Championship in Vegas, we're getting ready to leave and he's doing this exercise and I'm spotting him and counting. And I'm counting and I said 299, 300. And Evander stopped and he looked at me and he said, Jeff, was that 299 or 300? I said it was 300. And he goes, wait, are you sure, was it 299 or 300? I'm thinking, you do this freaking thing 300 times a day, what's, you got to be kidding me. And he said, I need to be sure. Was that 299 or 300? I said it was 300. And he looked at me for a minute like that, and then he went back and did one more rep with all the muscles rippling in the sweat, and he said, I think it was only 299. And then this was the mistake I made, I rolled my eyes of how absurd that was. Evander sits up and he goes, Jeff, look at me. And I'll tell you guys, I remember thinking, well, that was a short life, I should notify my next of kin, right? And I looked at him, made eye contact, and he said something that changed my whole life. He said, the difference between 299 and 300 is the difference between the heavyweight champion of the world and every other fighter. And he walked out in dead silence and I closed my eyes, I had goosebumps. Guys, I didn't move for 10 minutes because I wanted that to soak into my soul. So I went, oh, you know why? Because 299, if that's good enough for you today, guess what's good enough for you tomorrow? 298. The next day, 297, and she's doing 300 and she's going to kick your butt. So I went back to my office and I wrote, I made this poster, I made a big 299 and I put a red circle around it and drew a slash, no 299s, and that's in my office. And every day, every one of those companies I showed you from the Grammy to the Emmy to a company that scaled to billions of dollars, every day everything I do, when I finish the day, I look up at that thing and I say, did I give it 299 or 300 today? Because the difference in that level of effort is the difference between being the best and everybody else. All right? And I want to leave that with you guys. By the way, I love it now because people all over the world— the most recent one I got was from Bulgaria. They sent me a picture of a 299, a no 299 thing on their wall, just saying that they get it. Your level of effort— finish strong everything you ever do. And you know why that is? Because everybody wants to be successful just until they find out what it actually takes. Thank you, guys. Thank you.