Being a business owner is your chance to leave a legacy for your employees and community.

[48:04]

"You want to know why we had I sold that company to a Fortune 500 company, and when I sold it, I found out we had 0% voluntary turnover. In all the years from the day I started the company to the day I sold it, not one person that worked for me ever quit."

[59:10]

"I knew what they wanted. I helped them get it. He wanted to go deliver the same thing to another family that works for us. Being a business owner is your chance to leave a legacy for your employees, for your community, and for your employees."

[03:43]

"Um I grew up in the Arizona desert, in the middle of nowhere, a single mom with four kids. Uh we were broke. Uh my sister said something interesting to me over Thanksgiving. She said, "It's interesting that we didn't know we were poor.""

Full transcript

In 2009, I had the idea to buy billionaires.com. The billionaires.com mini-series is your chance to get hyper-valuable and unique takes from celebrity billionaires like Tony Robbins and many more. And this guy said, "This is great. I love it. I'll give you two and a half million." This series gives you access to exclusive insights from in-person and audio interviews hosted by none other than the founder of the Family Office Club, Richard C.

Wilson. Get started now with an official introduction to the $1 billion plus expert insights mini-series and see what these nationally renowned billionaires have to say about winning and succeeding in the game of capitalism. This guy, like like of all the power players I've had in here, he's the smartest guy we've had here. [laughter] No doubt. The next speaker uh I'm excited to introduce.

I saw him speak at a uh Collective Genius event, which is a real estate kind of mastermind group. Um and I have been to 300 plus conferences in 15 countries. I've hosted 150 events of my own. And when I saw Jeff give his talk, I told several people it's the best talk I've ever seen somebody give uh in my life.

And I was like, "Wow, I have to see how we could have him come speak at the Family Office Super Summit." Uh his name is Jeff Hoffman. He's one of the inventors of the check-in kiosk when you go to the airport. He's one of the He's a serial entrepreneur involved with priceline.com, booking.com, ubid.com. But he's not here just to talk for 45 minutes to show off all the huge things that he's done.

Um he's going to be talking about leaving leaving a legacy. And it's not the typical type talk you'd expect. Um he's also going to be talking a little bit about what led to his great success. Um but I think you'll find that this is unique from a lot of the conversations we typically have here at the Family Office Club.

Sometimes we just get in the mode of like get another family office on stage, another private investor. What are you looking for? What's the deal flow? What's the structure? We get kind of this robotic get deals done mode. So as soon as I saw Jeff speak, I said, "I have got to connect with people that know Jeff."

By chance, he's on a board with uh Kevin Harrington. And they were texting each other about when to meet up. And they're like, "Oh, I'll be in Fort Lauderdale, too." And found out they're speaking at the exact same event. Um so obviously a lot of people do work through references cuz they're in similar circles, similar boards, etc.

With all that said, without further delay, let's welcome up welcome up our headline speaker, Jeff Hoffman. Thank you. Thanks, man. Thanks for having me. All right, let me get this clicker here. So this is going to be a little bit different uh than what you guys have been talking about all day and what you're used to because uh we talked a lot about you've learned a lot of lessons from a lot of speakers today about how to make money and how to management money how to manage money.

Uh but I'm really here to talk about why are you even doing that? Uh right? Why are we working this hard? Why is it important uh for us to be profitable, to manage money well, to make money? And to tell this story about leaving a legacy. Uh when Richard and I talked about this, I'm going to kind of uh seed this with a little bit of my own story at the beginning cuz I want to take you on a little uh journey with me uh to how I got from being surrounded by everybody that's pushing me all the time to do another transaction, another deal, and make another dollar to the moment where my life kind of changed to figuring out what I should be doing with that.

And so that's what we wanted to end the day with was that discussion about leaving a legacy. So that's actually me. Um I grew up in the Arizona desert, in the middle of nowhere, a single mom with four kids. Uh we were broke. Uh my sister said something interesting to me over Thanksgiving. She said, "It's interesting that we didn't know we were poor."

Um that was not what my mom was about. We were poor and never noticed that. Never went to a restaurant, never went on a vacation, never had anything extra. Um but we didn't really care. It wasn't the value set that I was raised in. But I was a little kid in the Arizona desert that uh in a place where I'm not judging other people, but to be honest with you guys, nobody ever wanted to leave.

Everybody was okay just where we are. And the kids I grew up with, again, no right or wrong here. It's a DNA thing. None of them have ever left the same little area we grew up with. And and that was okay for them, but I had plans. And I want to kind of share with you uh sort of what the seed was for me.

I was a pretty avid reader. Um and uh especially when I got sent to my room and there was nothing else to do except read a book. Um and in sixth grade, uh we had to do a book report and I picked a book and I picked Mark Twain to do a study on. And I opened up the book and to start it for school.

And there was a quote in there by Mark Twain that I was 100% sure that even though he was dead, he wrote that in my book just for me and no one else saw it. And this is the quote that Mark It's I I paraphrase it. That's a Mark Twain quote if you don't know it. And I read that quote and I was stunned.

And I sat there in my little desert town where my mom worked three jobs just to keep us near a school that she wanted to It was a big public school, but it was the best we could do. And she was killing herself to make that happen for us. And I read this. And I was like I was sure that this what meant something to me.

And I started thinking about this particular quote as a child. And I decided that uh Mark Twain's instructions were to me were that if I ever want to become the man that I want to be someday, the human being that I want to evolve into one day, I got to get out of here. I got to go see the world. And I got the message there, right?

That that you know, hate comes from ignorance. And ignorance comes from lack of understanding. And lack of understanding comes from never spending time with anybody except people that look like you. And I decided right then, I can't spend my life that way. I I want to become something more. So I got to get out of here.

So as a kid, I came up with this plan. What I'm going to do to become again the man I want to be someday is I need to visit in my life This is when I'm six in sixth grade. I need to visit 50 different countries in my life. And even more so than visiting 50 different countries, that was my goal.

If I can get out of here and I can see the world, I can become a decent human being. And I would read things like, you know, today we still have It unfortunately hasn't changed enough. I know people that uh hate Muslims that don't even know one. Right? What do you mean Muslims? Is that Give me a name of a person that you've spent time with that you can judge.

We see that in every form of racism and and hate and those things like that. And so I got this crazy idea. I'm going to go to 50 countries over my life and I am going to break bread with 50 families in 50 cultures in 50 countries before I judge anyone. That was my crazy idea. I made the mistake of telling people that.

And they're like, "Dude, what part of your broke and your mom's broke are you not understanding? You're going nowhere and none of us are. Nobody did." I remember when people when my friends would say that, "None of us are going anywhere." I was thinking, "Yeah, not with that attitude, you're not." If you've already said that, then you're already done.

So I'll send you guys photos when I get there cuz I'm not accepting the world putting a ceiling over me. But that was the plan. Is what literally what everybody said to me is, "What's wrong with you, man? Why can't you be like everyone else? Why can't you just go get a job?" Right?

And there's this big focus. I was giving a talk in a school and talking to kids about pursuing their dream. And a teacher pulled me aside and said, "Mr. Hoffman, you do us a favor." Said, "What?" And she said, "Can you stop telling our children to pursue their passions?

It's irresponsible. They need to get a job." And I was like, "Wow." So you know what I did? I went home that day and I looked at college websites. And you know what schools rate themselves on?

Getting your kid into the right college. Because you know what the college rates itself on? Job placement rate. So we have this whole society structured around a paycheck. And not once does anybody ask if you're happy. Are we raising fulfilled kids?

Who cares as long as they're paid. And that is the structure we live in. I visit schools all the time. And I ask kids what message they're hearing from you, their parents. And they're hearing that my self-worth is based on the amount of money I'm making and how the quality of my job, not whether I'm fulfilled, not whether I'm a happy kid.

So the question is, why not both? Because when I was a kid, I was thinking, "Why can't you do both of those things? Why is your job this mutually exclusive thing from the life you want to live? Why is the weekend the time you're going to do stuff you want to do if you're not too tired and there's money left over?

Why are you waiting until you're too old to climb Mount Everest anyway cuz your knees don't work?" Right? But that's the message that we're delivering our kids. And I didn't buy it originally. So I had this dream and I wrote it down. And I'm going to tell you guys something now, the reason for that picture.

I always have my next dream, my next goal with in mind. But I do something in particular. I write them and put them on my bathroom mirror. And the reason I do that is cuz when I ask kids what they want to do, you get my response when I was in sixth grade. I'm going to go see the world.

I'm going to have dinner in 50 countries in 50 people's houses. Then I ask adults. And you know what they tell me? "Come on, man. You got to grow up. I got a mortgage.

I got a business. I got a family to raise." And I always think this, "Are you guys are we growing up or we just giving up?" Because adults don't want to talk about that anymore. I have a successful business. We're doing really well.

And I'm thinking, "Are you?" Because when you were kids, you were going to do that. And you haven't done any of it. We are not disrespecting successful businesses and making money. In fact, that's the basis for everything else that I'm going to talk about. What we're saying is it's just not enough.

If that's all you're doing in your life, I'm not sure that that's enough. So, I write these on the bathroom mirror so that I can't hide from them anymore. Where do I end every day? In the bathroom brushing my teeth. And what do I do? I look at that card and I say, "Jeff, did you do anything today to get any closer to the life you really were going to live?"

And every morning, where do I start my day? Brushing my teeth in the mirror, I look and say, "What are you going to do today that's any different?" Is this going to be another December that ends By the way, you know what else is in the mirror? You. You get to look yourself in the eyes and lie again.

This December, this is the last year. Next year, I'm really going to do the stuff I lied about last year and the year before that and the year before that. So, mine are on the mirror, but I put that on the mirror and you know what the world did? They just laughed at me. Go get a job.

Go make money. The same message all of us are telling all of our children. So, I have to say I did. I went and got a corporate job. I got an engineering degree because society said that's a good thing to get. You can make a lot of money and get a job in an engineering company.

I was in software specifically. Margins are big. Uh multiples are big when you sell tech. I listened everybody and I got a job. So, you know what? My mom was telling everybody, "I'm so proud of my boy, right?

He has a good job at a good company and a good paycheck." The only thing I didn't have was a good life cuz I actually hated this job every day even though I was the one that was well paid of everybody I knew. I had the highest salary and I had the most stable job and we were quote doing well, but I actually hated it every single day. I stared out the window and I wondered what was going on in the 50 countries that I wasn't in, what the rest of the world was doing while I was collecting more money.

And I hated it. And I'm going to tell you what changed it. You don't have to pick one or the other like we are so frequently led to believe. I can have a successful business or I can chase my dreams. No, you can do them both in the same place. That's the whole argument I came to make with you guys, but I'm sitting in this job.

I'm well paid and I hate it. And one day it's lunch and I always leave the building at lunch just to get out of there. I feel like I'm suffocating in my good job. I get in the elevator and I see a guy that I know. And I'm like, "Brian?" And he says, "Jeff?"

I said, "What are you doing here?" He said, "I work here. What are you doing here?" I said, "How do you, a friend of mine, work in the same building and I've never seen you before?" He said, "I don't know." And that's how big the engineering company was.

I worked for a huge company. And again, not judging right or wrong in here. It's a DNA thing. I'm not telling people and I don't tell kids when I go out and speak to schools all over the world not to get a a job at a big company. That's not the point. The point is to follow what you want, not what everybody's telling you to do.

That's the mistake that I made right here. And if that's what you're telling your kids, focusing on their job and their salary and not their happiness, you are leading them to the cubicle I lived in that I hated. So, I'm in the elevator and I say to Brian, "I don't get how we don't know each other." I said, "Where do you work?"

Brian said, "I'm in marketing. It's on the sixth floor." I said, "That explains it because I'm in engineering and we're on four. I come in every day and I go to my cubicle on four, right?" So, that's why I've never seen him. He comes into the building and he goes to six.

So, I go home that night and I'm brushing my teeth that night and I'm literally I have to tell you guys my toothbrush fell out of my mouth and I just stared at the mirror and I looked at that thing and I said, "How am I going to visit 50 countries in my life? I've never even visited the sixth floor of this building." I remember thinking to myself, "What's the most exotic country I've ever gone to?" You know what it was?

It was accounting on five. I hit the wrong button on the elevator one day. I got off on accounting and I said to my engineering buddy, I said, "What country is this?" He said, "I don't know, but we should run. I don't even We don't even know the language." It was like an alarm went off.

Engineers and accounting. Engineers and accounting. We just ran off and I said, "Dude, that was a weird place. Let's never go there again, okay?" That's the only trip I've ever taken in my life. So, I will tell you what I did.

I quit. That Friday was it. I said, "I can't do this because that's never going to happen. I've never even gone to the sixth floor let alone a country. I don't leave my cubicle." I didn't want that life, so I quit.

And I had this idea. How can I This is the beauty of being an entrepreneur, of being a business owner. I'm the chairman of something called the Global Entrepreneurship Network now. It's a nonprofit where we teach anyone anywhere that wants to launch a business how to start one and how to scale one. I've been blessed enough to be part of multiple startups that we started from scratch and became multi-billion dollar companies.

So, now what we do is we share everything that we have learned. And so, we're in 200 countries doing that, teaching people how to do that. But back then, the beauty of being an entrepreneur is not about making money. It's about designing the future. I don't even like calling it entrepreneurship anymore because that's too close. Everyone thinks it's a tech thing.

Right? If you ask a kid, "Do you want to be an entrepreneur?" They say, "I don't know how to build an app." Right? Build an app. What happened to agriculture?

What happened to manufacturing? All the other fields, medicine, all the other fields that need innovation and improvement. Entrepreneurship is about I want to rename it and call it self-determination. It's about designing the future you want to live in, your own and the world around you. The beauty of being an entrepreneur is instead of waiting to see what the future is, we're just going to make it.

That's what entrepreneurs do. So, I started thinking to myself, "I don't like the life that I have, but I know which one I want. How do I design that?" And I had a pretty simple formula that that I spend my time now teaching kids literally all over the world. We actually just did an event earlier this week.

I just I just flew here. I promised Richard I'd be here. I flew here from Dubai. So, I just flew 20 hours and I've coffeed up enough to make it through this, but I hope my energy level is good after coming back from an event in Dubai. Um But we did an event from Dubai to inspire inner-city kids, pretty much black and brown teenagers in the US to go pursue a career that takes them where they want to be, not where they are.

Um and we had proud to say the the two keynotes were myself. You guys may not be basketball fans, but Kyrie Irving did this with me and Kyrie and I talked to We had 20,000 kids join us the other night live because they want a better life and listen to our advice. This is the advice. This is what I built my whole life on.

If you want to live an epic life and why am I sharing this with you guys? Cuz you're already there. Because it's also what you should look for in an investment. Is this a company that is going to become valuable to the key players in an industry? Are all the key players going to be wanting this solution?

And you become valuable to key players by solving a real problem the industry hasn't solved yet. And you do that by really dissecting an industry. That's what I look for an investment, right? Have they dissected the industry? Have they found a problem to solve that actually needs solving that no one else has solved? And if they solve that problem, will everybody in the industry turn to them?

That is clearly what we did in the travel industry at the time and other places. But that was my theory way back then. I need to be I want to go see the world. What should I do? What if I was valuable to all the world's airlines? Maybe that would be my path to living my life and getting out of my cubicle.

So, my very first startup, I quit that job, guys. I was 20-something years old. I was broke. I was unemployed. My mom was calling everybody back and said, "Remember I told you we were proud of our son? We were wrong.

He's an idiot." He had a really good job and he just walked out and quit. He has no money, no health insurance, no nothing anymore. Uh yeah, you know what I do have? A chance. I may not have any health insurance right now, but I have a chance at the life I want to live which I did not have in the environment that I was in.

And that's what I gave myself, but that's the formula. I was like, I got I know what industry I want to be valuable to. I remember at the beginning of the internet talking to John Chambers, Cisco. And I said, "What are you doing?" He said, "I'm creating this thing called the router." And I said, "Why?"

He said, "Everyone will figure that out soon. No one knows what I'm building now, but pretty soon everybody's going to call me." That's the kind of deals that I like that are disrupting the way business is done in a way that people need you. So, I had this formula in mind and well, I'll tell you what happened.

I'm unemployed. I'm broke. I buy an airline ticket to go see my mentor. By the way, he does not yet know my mentor he's my mentor because I'm flying there to talk him into it. Um or so I thought. The line back then was an hour long to check in cuz you had to go wait in line at a gate at a check check-in counter, the ticket counter and get a boarding pass.

Boarding pass is a piece of paper, right? And after more than an hour in line, I missed the flight. And I got up there and I said to the woman, I said, "This is ridiculous. All you're doing is hitting print and we're standing in an hour long line to watch you use a printer. A boarding pass is a printout."

And she's like, "Next customer." And I was like, "Well, ma'am, I'm trying to talk to you." And she's looking right past me. Next customer. And I stepped out of line and I stood there and I thought, "Could this be that moment? Could this be the intersection between having a job so I can pay my bills which society keeps telling me to do, making money which we all agree has a lot of good benefits, but also living a life that's actually worth living that doesn't end with me having a a a solid gold coffin and nothing else?"

I could solve a real problem by dissecting an industry and making it more efficient right now and I'll bet I'd be valuable to everybody. Because one of the things that I don't see in a lot of investment deals that are pitched to me is a value equation. Right? A value equation is simply this. Would a lot of people in the world pay you more for the thing your business does than it cost you to do it.

Because by the way, if the answer is no, congratulations, you have a hobby, okay? A hobby is something you're spending money doing cuz you want to do it. A business is something that people keep calling you and saying, "Will you please take my credit card?" That's my sanity check for deals that I do. Is anybody calling to see if the product's ready yet?

Because if they're not, let's go do something else. And so, what happened was I went home that Friday, like I said, 20 years something years old, broken, unemployed, took out a piece of paper, and I drew those. And if you've checked in at a kiosk, probably anywhere in the world, that was my first invention. Um, solved a problem, became valuable to an industry, and you know, I put this picture up because uh it was the first phone call I ever got when I created those kiosks with KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.

There's a reason that Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam is every year rated the number one best airport by travelers, and it's because they're actually innovative and they always look for the next thing. That was the first airline that called me, and they're like, "Hey, is there any way we could talk you into coming to the Netherlands?" Uh, I actually thought it was a prank call. I was like, "Is this for real?"

And the guy is like, "I have I have a startup." They said, "Can you come to Amsterdam and show us this kiosk you built?" And I actually said, "Look, man, I got a startup. I can't really afford an airline ticket to Europe right now." And the guy is like, "What part of KLM Royal Dutch Airline did you miss?

We're the airline, just get on." And I remember saying, "Yeah, I don't know if I have the money for a hotel." And he's like, "We own half the hotels in Amsterdam." I said, "I'll see you Monday." And I flew out there, and when I was done with this trip, what was kind of cool was the guy said, "Is there any way we could talk you into staying the weekend so we could show you our beautiful country on us?"

And I'm like, "Okay, now this is a hidden camera show. My friends are pranking me." And I was like, "Sure." And the guy said, "Have you ever been to the Netherlands?" And I said, "I've never even been on the sixth floor." And they're like, "What?"

I said, "Never mind." But I had never been anywhere. That was country three on my list of 50. And when I was leaving, you know what they said, "Mr. Hoffman, don't forget your check." I said, "Pardon me?"

They said, "We like to place an order." I said, "Wait, you're paying me to take a trip through the Netherlands?" The next week it was Lufthansa, German Airlines, and then it was Latam Airlines down in South America. And guess what happened? Now I've got a business where my job is to travel around the world and deliver a solution that makes me valuable.

Again, that's the goal. Now you should be less surprised that I was part of this. What was the idea here? It was a group of people passionate about travel trying to build a business that had a value equation. And we had several with this. You know what the main value equation of this thing was?

Buyer-driven commerce. Instead of you going out and checking the price on every website, the reverse auction patent that belonged to Jay Walker, he's the actual founder of Priceline. Uh, Jay's patent was, "Just tell us what you want and how much money you have, and we'll sell supply. We'll sell demand to supply." Instead of supply sitting there passively and you as the demand hunting for the supply you want, we will harvest consumer demand, and we will sell it to the supply side.

That was the beauty of the business model. And the question was, could you pursue your dreams of travel and still be a responsible adult doing that? My goal was to to visit eat dinner with families in 50 countries. I just came back uh recently from country number 101. So, I've I've now visited and had dinner in 100 different families.

Thank you. And uh that picture was a recent trip uh to India um uh mentoring children there. We'll talk about that at the end here. Uh, but the crazy part of pursuing your dream and quitting your job is it turns out you can do both. And I I don't want to dwell on this, but I think our little startup is worth a hundred billion dollars now.

The last time I checked the market cap for a company that we weren't supposed to start cuz we were all supposed to go get a job. Um, solving a real problem that lots of people have that has a value equation. Remember our value. We will liquidate unsold industry all over the world in the travel industry. This company does it in 190 countries now with one of the most sophisticated algorithms for yield management and revenue optimization that's ever been built.

We didn't have the term AI when we built this, but it's pretty damn smart. That's why it's in 190 countries and an extremely profitable company that's valued at a hundred billion dollars now. So, just very quickly, that formula, I did other ones. I did a company called ubid.com. We were the fifth It's basically eBay, but for corporate and for retail inventory.

Instead of you buying from each other, we put together business to liquidate the warehouses of Best Buy, of Circuit City, of Hewlett-Packard, of Apple, of every major retailer. We had 7,000 retailers worldwide, and we just auctioned off to you whatever was in their invent whatever was in their warehouse that they couldn't sell. We took that company public, and it became a multi-billion dollar market cap as well. Why?

We solved a real problem that was worth money to both sides of the supply and the demand. Both sides were glad that we existed, and there were a lot of people that wanted to use this. We had obviously tens of millions of customers. So, after tech, I took a little break. I love music, but I put another sticker another index card on my mirror, and I said, "I'm going to take a little break from tech.

I'm going to try this formula again. I'm going to go solve problems, become valuable to people in a way that they'll pay me, so it's still a business. I'm going to skip the details and get to the meat of this talk, but I started a music company from scratch producing tour The pictures are embarrassing. Sorry. Tours and concerts uh down in the left, that's me on tour with NSYNC and Justin Timberlake.

Uh, above that was Elton John and I doing charity We'd give concerts that we gave 100% of the proceeds to charities. On the right is a tour I did with Beyoncé. That's my office staff with me and her. And on the lower right is my current business partner here in Florida. Everything from building schools to handing out cash during the uh uh during the pandemic uh is something that Pitbull and I do together here in Florida.

Um that company, I then started a film company. And I'm going to tell you why I'm telling you these really quick. That was the first movie we made. Um, got the same response from everybody. Why can't you just be like everyone else and go get a job and quit pursuing your stupid crazy dreams? Uh, this is pretty much like a home movie.

We made it for 1.3 million dollars. I financed it. Uh, my friend Eli uh produced and directed it. But I sold it in 49 countries. Uh, we sold it in 49 countries, and our 1.3 million dollar film gross made over a hundred million dollars. Um there's a way to live your dreams and do the things you want to do.

Then we got into television. This is a show that uh Kevin Harrington and I, who saw this morning, are the two executive producers of. Um, I don't know if Kevin told you guys this morning, but we just found out that we won our second Emmy uh for We just found out yesterday. So, Richard knows. We took some pictures.

Here Oh, by the way, really quickly, we have a new TV show coming out. I'm the executive producer of it and on the show. It's called Going Public. It's like Shark Tank, except the TV viewers will get to make the investment in the companies, not the sharks. The first phone call I got when we announced this was Mark Cuban and Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank.

I'm known them a long time, and they said, "Jeff, what exactly are you guys up to?" One of the companies on the show, so it's a Reggae Plus investment. Uh, we have something called click to invest. One of the companies on the show, NextGenT, sponsored your lunch. They're here in the room, and they have a booth outside.

You'll see them on this TV show uh with me coming up. But I I want to I want to move on to where life changed and get to the real reason that I came here here that I came here with you guys. That's the bottom line of everything I just told you. Your business should be the vehicle that takes you to the life you want to live, not the obstacle that prevents you from living it.

I didn't let the fact that I need to be a responsible, money-making adult and be profitable prevent me from designing the life that I wanted to live. I just found a way to do both in the same place. So, I'm going to say that again, your business should be the vehicle that takes you to the life you want to live, not the obstacle that keeps preventing you from living the way you want to live. That being said, I had a really crazy moment in my life, and that was this.

I also started that music company. We produced a jazz album, and as insane as this is, that's me winning a Grammy. Um, pretty crazy for a software engineer. As a matter of fact, thank you. As a matter of fact, standing on the red carpet, they were all yelling, "Jeff, how does it feel right now?" And I said, "This is the dream of software engineers everywhere."

And people are like, "What?" And I was like, "Never mind." Just a little inside joke because everybody puts you in a category. You're not an accountant. You're not an engineer. You're just a person that learned that thing.

By the same token that you were able to learn one thing, why can't you keep learning the whole rest of your life? By the way, this is the message I delivered to your children. Be a lifelong learner. They say, "Why do I have to go to school?" I tell them cuz it's not the stuff you learn, it's how to learn.

And if you learn how to learn, you can keep switching industries if you want. That's what I did. But I want to tell you where life changed. I'm standing on the Grammy red carpet after we won. My goal was never to win a Grammy. That was not on my bathroom mirror.

But I'm standing there in this like natural high, and I'm remembering back to the first picture I showed you guys when I was a kid in the desert with my broke single mom working three jobs, and I was out there hustling, mowing lawns, cleaning pools, knocking on people's doors saying, "Can I haul your trash out for five bucks?" Trying to take pressure off my mom. That's all I was trying to do was help her out a little bit. To go from there to there, I was standing there, and I thought something.

I thought, "I can't believe that this is my life." And then I thought something else that was life-changing. I think every human being deserves their own red carpet moment. Okay? A red carpet moment has nothing to do with Grammys. It has nothing to do with red carpets.

It has to do with every human being should have a moment where they look around and say, "I can't believe this is my life." So, I was visiting schools and I'm going to tell you quick story, East Cleveland, in a school that I had to go through two metal detectors. I asked to use the restroom and five of the six urinals were broken. And I said to the kids there, "Are they coming to fix these?"

And they laughed. And they said, "Mr. Hoffman, we are the invisible." They said, "No one's coming here to fix it." They said, "Where you live, they have private schools and your kids don't even need the help." They have a gorgeous private school in East Cleveland and many cities like that, our school's falling apart and nobody cares.

And I'm like, "What message are we sending them? You don't matter." Right? They're like, "We already get we don't have a chance. We've already been discarded by society." And I asked these kids, "Tell me what your red carpet moment would be.

What would be a moment that you could look at your life and say, 'I can't believe this is my life.'" And one little 16-year-old girl who was so beaten down by society that she couldn't make eye contact with me. So, I pulled her aside privately. I said, "Tell me your red carpet moment. Tell me your story. Just one-on-one.

You don't have to say it in front of the other kids." You know what she said to me? She said, "My father was murdered trying to murder someone else, so he got what he deserved." Imagine living with that. And I said, "What about your mom?" She said, "My mother tells me every single day, 'I wish you'd never been born.

You're a worthless piece of and you're ruining my life.'" That is the message she I said, "What's your red carpet moment?" She said, "Just once in my life before I die, I want my mother to say something nice to me." And I stood there right then and I said, "I know why I am doing everything I am doing right now, to get that child from where she is to where she needs to be."

That is the sum total of everything I just told you. That is that Mark Twain quote, "The two most important days are the day you're born and the day you find out why." That's a day that I knew why. What I'm here to do is to help her Get By the way, just very quickly, she is a 4.0 pre-med student in college right now.

We pay for all four years of college, but if you saw her today, you would never believe that's the same child. She's bright, she's effusive, she helps all the other kids. She's 4.0 and she's on her way to being a pediatric surgeon. You know what the difference between that, where she was and where she is? It's everybody in this room.

And I'm about to make that case for you guys. Everybody in this room deserves to live their red carpet moment. So, I'm walking down the street one day and I see this sign and it says that. You may be successful, which everyone in this room is, but do you matter? And I stood there again thinking somebody knew I was coming down the street.

Somebody put this sign up for me. And I'm reading the sign and I'm thinking, "What's the difference?" I'll tell you what the difference is. Being successful is doing one more exit, one more acquisition, one more transaction, and one more dollar. But you know what mattering is? It's changing the life of one more human being.

Mattering is making a difference in the life of somebody else. Success is making yours better. And I realized right then, I'm doing a real good job at success and I ain't doing much to matter. Mattering is that little girl. And I didn't know the connection between those two things yet, but I knew something was off because I kept having business success and making more money, but I still wasn't mattering.

So, let me tell you the story. This is not my house, by the way, so please don't show up. I don't know whose house that is, they posted it on the internet. I just clicked nice house on the internet to get this picture. But I did it to illustrate a point. Things are going well.

I'm doing transactions, we're taking companies public, we're selling them. We had failures, too, but our successes way dwarfed our failures. And I'm at home one night and I'm being honest with you guys, I felt bad. Right? There are a lot of people are struggling and everybody in this room isn't. We're doing really well and they're not and it was bothering me fundamentally and I started feeling guilty about being successful and making money.

So, I turned on my TV. When I feel bad, my escape when I need a break is sports. Okay? So, I turn on sports and while I'm flipping through the channels, there is a news report that pops on. And the news report shows a bunch of women in my area all in a house crying and I stop.

I'm looking for the game, remember? And I stop and I was like, "Whoa, what's going on? There must have been a like a mass murder." All these women are hysterical. There wasn't. Here's the story.

There was a women's shelter, a house, that two women bought down the street from me for abused women to live in for free. The problem with that is there's no revenue model. So, guess what happened? They hadn't paid their mortgage in four months and they were being evicted at midnight the next day. The news reporter that I'm watching, she goes up to the first woman.

She's doing her job, guys, don't blame her. She goes up to the first woman and she says, "You've all failed to pay your mortgage and you're being evicted tomorrow. Where will you go?" And the first woman says, "He said he'd kill me if he ever saw me again, so I can't go home." She said, "I lay in this house every night and I can't sleep because every creak in the wood, I'm sure he found me and he's coming in to kill me.

I just lay here sleeplessly, scared to death every night." And the reporter said, "What are you going to do?" And she said, "I guess I'll just go hide in the streets and hope he doesn't find me." The reporter turns to the next woman. "What about you, ma'am?" And you know what she said?

She said, "I can't go back there cuz he broke all my ribs last time. I was in the hospital for months." And she said, "I have these two kids." She said, "I have no money because I can't get a job. I can't get a job because I have two kids, but I can't pay for daycare cuz I don't have a job."

She said, "So, I'm stuck nowhere forever with nowhere to go." And the woman turned back By the way, the reason this story upset me was obviously my mom wasn't abused, she was single. But I remember watching the news one night and it was a end of a story and the female reporter said, "And that's the end of the story from here. The woman is recovering in the hospital and the man is in jail."

And she goes back to you, Ed. And Ed shakes his head and she says, "What?" And the the reporter, that male reporter, says this, "Why didn't she just leave?" And I remember thinking, "You know what message the news just delivered? The first time you're abused, it's his fault. Every other time after that, it's yours cuz you didn't leave."

And I remember yelling at my TV, "What do you mean leave? Where There's nowhere to go. They have no money, they have no relatives, there's nowhere to go, so they're stuck in that abusive situation." That's why I reacted to this. Kicking all these women out on the street, they have nowhere else to go. And the news reporter finished with the second woman who said, "I don't have child care and I have no money and I have no job."

And she said, "What are you going to do?" And that woman said, "I guess we'll go hide on the street with my kids and hope I don't get kidnapped or raped." And you know what the news reporter did? She turned to the camera and said, "Well, that's it it from here, Jim." And she said, "Coming up next, sports."

I want you to think about that. These women are being dispersed to the street. Coming up next, sports. And I stopped and I realized something. Do you guys remember the Indonesian tsunami? One Monday night, I turned my TV on and it said, "Indonesian death toll hits 90,000.

Coming up next, Monday night football." That's it. 90,000 people and 10 seconds later we're excited about a football game. That's just a blip. And so, when I watched that, I had a thought at the time that every one of you has had. I was watching this with these women and I was like, "No, no, no, we can't kick them out."

Right? They need to do something. They should help those women. Right? And I thought something while I was sitting there. This was a life-changing night.

If you if every one of us is watching that story and says they should help those women, who's helping those women? Nobody, because everybody watching TV says, "Man, I hope they do something. I hope they help them." So, I jumped off my couch and I had a life-changing moment. I wrote four words on my board. The four words are the reason when friends keep saying to me, "Why don't you retire?

Why don't you just go play golf?" It's because of these four Well, it's two reasons. One, golf is not a sport and I won't play it until you're allowed to play defense. I just got to say. If I could block Leo's shot with my club, I'd totally play golf. But until it has defense, I'm out.

So, my friends like, "Why don't you retire?" These are the four words that I wrote on my wall. There is no they. Guys, they don't help those women, it's us. It's you. If you don't look at a problem and say, "There is no they, I got this one," nothing changes in the world.

So, you know what happened that night? That money that I felt guilty about 20 minutes ago, thank God I was the one that set big goals and worked really hard. Thank God I had that money I hated 20 minutes ago. Because you know what I did? I said, "It's me. I will help those women.

There is no they." And I called the news station and it was a public story and I said, "Give me the info." And I wrote it down. And the next day, I found out what they owed and and who was evicting them. And the next I wasn't blaming them, but that's their property, no one's paying rent on it.

I went down to the bank and I decided to do this anonymously, no wires, no checks, because I don't want the story to be internet entrepreneur saves women, cuz then they're interviewing me. I wanted it to be anonymous cuz the story is we need to protect women in every community. And we need to give them a place to go. That's the story, so I didn't want to be in it.

So, I went down the bank and all the bank people were backing up slowly into the vault and I was like, "You're all on break at the same time I need something." I was all excited and this face peeks out from around from the vault and it's the bank president. He's visiting that branch and he's like, "Call the police, turn off the alarm. I know that guy.

It's Mr. Hoffman." He's like, "Jeff, what exactly are you doing?" And I was like, "Dude, it's my money. I just need this much of it now." And he's like, "Okay, but in the future, when you walk in the bank, put down a duffel bag, tell us to fill it with money, that's a bank robbery where we work."

And I was like, "Fine, I won't do that again, just give me my money." So, I took the cash, I went over to the place, and I went to these women, and the woman that was on the new the the head of the house, I said, "I need to talk to you for a minute." And she said, "Whatever we owe you, we can't pay you." And I said, "Can you just give me 30 seconds?"

She said, "No, get out of here. This is not the right day." And I said, I pushed the duffel bag across, I said, "Can you just look in this?" She said, "No." I said, "If you open it, I'll leave." She said, "Fine."

Rolled her eyes and opened the bag. And she said, "What is this?" I said, "I paid all your back rent, all 4 months." She said, "This is a lot more money than our back rent." I said, "I wanted you guys to have at least a year with no pressure, so I also gave you an entire year's worth of your expenses.

So, you don't have to worry about it for the whole next year." And she got up and to run to tell the other women, I said, "Hang on, before you go." And she said, "What?" And I said, "I couldn't sleep last night thinking about that woman who couldn't sleep in the house, so I also put enough money in there for you to buy a security system and hire two security guards."

And she got up and I grabbed her hand one more time. I said, "One more thing." She said, "What?" And I said, "You women are never going to get jobs, the ones that have kids, cuz they can't pay for daycare. So, I'm going to fund a daycare center, and we're going to build it here on the property, so they can watch your kids, so all these women can go get trained and go get jobs."

And she ran off crying, and I left, and I went home. That I turned the news back on, the woman was on, and the same reporter. She said, "This time it's tears of joy." And the woman said, "What happened?" The reporter. And the woman who owned the house said, "It was a miracle.

Some man just walked in the door and did everything I told you." And you know what I wrote on my board underneath that? I wrote this. Your success is someone else's miracle. It changed my relationship with money. It's still on my wall.

Your success is someone else's miracle. I was like, "It's not a miracle at all, it's just my hard work. I made good decisions. I work hard, I stay focused, I hire the best people." That's not a miracle. It is to somebody else.

A miracle that I walked in that door. It changed my relationship with money that day. And I realized this, there's no shame in life in making money, even though people were giving me a hard time about it. The shame is in not using your success to help others. So, I'm going to tell you what happened next. Um, I'm in my office.

All my the next morning, all my employees are there. And there's a big buzz going on in the break room at at coffee. And uh Heidi that works for me comes down the hall, and she goes, "Jeff, did you hear what happened?" And I was like, "What?" And she said, "Don't you watch the news? There was this women's shelter."

The whole story. I said, "Oh, I did see that on the news, that's really great." And I go back to working. She's like, "Really great? That's all you have to say?" And I said, "No, it's fantastic.

Thank God someone helped those women." And I go back, and she's like, "This is a weird reaction." She's like, "I know you better than this. I thought you'd be excited." And I said, "Oh, super excited." And I went back to work, and she said, "Oh my god."

And I looked up, and unfortunately made eye contact, and she said, "It was you, wasn't it?" And I was busted. And I said, "Fine, yes, it was me. Go back to work." And she ran down the hall screaming, "Jeff did that. Jeff did that."

And all my employees came down the hall to my office. And they were really excited. And they said, "You did that?" But I got to tell you guys something, I had a realization again in that moment. I looked at them, and I said, "No, I didn't do that." And they said, "We're confused."

I said, "You did that." Said, "The only reason I have the money to do that is cuz I have the best damn employees on the planet. There's no profit, there's no success, and there's no wealth on my part if it isn't for you guys. You did that." And you know what I saw happen? Every person that works for me changed.

Heidi put her hand over her heart, and I swear I could see her chest swell. And she said, "We did do that, didn't we?" And I watched them change, and they all went home and told their families what they did. And so, I started a program that I'm going to challenge you guys to do. This is a company in Ohio that actually painted my quote on the wall.

The program I'm about to tell you about, they implemented. Um, the hands of the tree have the names of their employees, and the little cards have the people in their community that they have helped since they started this program. The reason I put it up there is since I started actually sort of consulting to this company, uh they are now they made best companies to work for in Ohio, and last year they made the Forbes list of best companies in America to work for. And there is a direct correlation between their community involvement in that.

So, let me give you guys a challenge. I started a program right then, where every quarter I take a percentage I take it off the top, you can do what you want. I take it off of the revenue, not off the profitability. I take a percentage every quarter, and I put it in the community fund, and I tell my employees, "Take this money and go find someone to help in our community."

By the way, don't tell me that you and your company make a contribution. Because when they go home, you guys a lot of you might remember the old United Way thing. They take money out of your paycheck, and your company donates to the United Way. Do you own that? No. Do you feel any emotion towards that?

No. So, if you have the boss say, "Our company made a donation to such and such cause in our community." They don't own that. They didn't choose it, you did. And they don't feel it. I give it to the employees, and I say, "You guys decide who you want to help in this community every single quarter."

And let me tell you how that turns into a triple bottom line. One quarter, I had the employees come into my Well, actually, I was walking down the hall, and they were all in the conference room. And my lawyer was in there, right? My paid lawyer that I didn't call is in my conference room in my office.

So, I stop, and I walk in, and they're all doing something on the board. I said, "What are you guys doing?" And they said, "We're planning out how to work double shifts." I said, "We don't do that here. I don't want you guys neglecting your families." They said, "We solved that.

This chart is who's taking care of whose kids, and who's taking care of whose pets." I said, "Why are you guys doing this?" And they said, "Because we just confirmed with the lawyer that if we finish this contract under budget and ahead of time, the company gets a big bonus, a six-figure bonus." I said, "Oh, you want the bonus money."

They said, "Yeah, about that, we were meaning to talk to you." I said, "About what?" They said, "If we do double shifts, deliver under budget, ahead of time, and get the budget the bonus, which is not in the forecast, cuz it's a bonus, right? So, it's not appearing anywhere." They said, "Can we put it in the community fund?"

I said, "Are you kidding me?" And they said, "We want to put the money in the community fund." I said, "Why?" They said, "We were watching the news last night, Jeff, and there was a tenement house that burned down on the bad side of town. All the families in there, four families, lost their homes. They lost all their clothing.

They lost all their belongings, and they have no money and no insurance. They're homeless, clothesless, they lost their personal effects, they're on the streets." I said, "What do you want to do?" They said, "We want to crush this contract, get the big bonus. We already called Habitat for Humanity, and we want to build four houses." You know what started happening on Saturdays?

My employees and their kids were helping Habitat for Humanity to not have a problem with us putting up all the money to build houses. You know what was going on? I turned my news on one night. My employees are all down the street building houses for those families. You know what they're wearing? Not that I asked them to, my company's t-shirts.

So, you know what call I get from the news? Is your company is building houses for these families in town? I said, "Yes, sir." I didn't have anything to do with it. I said, "Call the employees. This was their idea, not mine."

And I said, "The money comes from our profitability, because we have the best damn employees on the planet. We deliver great products, our customers love us. We're under budget, we're ahead of time. Everybody wins. The company wins, the customers win, the shareholders win, and the community wins." You know what happened after this?

That same lady, Heidi, one day I said, "I noticed, no big deal, but I noticed you come into work 15 minutes later every day now. Are you driving a different route?" She said, "I am." I said, "What are you doing?" She said, "Every day before I come to work, I drive past the women's shelter, stop and look at it, then I stop for a minute in front of those four houses, and I look inside and see four families with clean homes, with the electricity, with running water, which the tenement structure didn't even have, laughing and getting their kids ready for school, then I go to work."

You want to know why we had I sold that company to a Fortune 500 company, and when I sold it, I found out we had 0% voluntary turnover. In all the years from the day I started the company to the day I sold it, not one person that worked for me ever quit. And I said, "Why don't you guys quit?" They're like, "Is this a problem?

Do you want us to quit?" I said, "I don't understand it." They said, "That's why. Because now we drive through a community that we're saving. We drive past things that we built, and it inspires us to work harder, become more profitable, and help more people. So, the money I give away to the community fund, I will challenge you to do like this company is doing that I showed you.

It's an amazing project that they've been helping people. I talked to you about leaving your legacy for yourself. That was the story I told you about me finding things to do that let me make money and still live the life I wanted to live. I just talked you about leaving a legacy for your community by having your company set up a community fund.

By the way, I did this with a real estate company that now every house they sell, they take a percentage and put it in the pot to buy somebody in their community a house that doesn't have one. Every time they sell a house, they take a chunk of that, and they put it in that fund. And when they get enough, they buy a house for someone in their community that's never had a home before. It's a pretty cool triple bottom line, guys.

Here's the last part I want to share with you guys today. And it's about leaving a legacy for your employees, which I didn't know was a thing. I'm going to tell you this last story about that became a thing, because I got a call one day from a guy that said, "Jeff, I want to hire you as president of my company." And I was like, he did not a guy that knew me.

I said, "Yeah, I have my own company. I'm not looking for a job." I'm thinking that. But I also have to tell you guys, I'm an engineer. And just cuz I'm a CEO, I have no training in HR, yet I hire people. So I was like, "You know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to take the interview, not tell him anything about me, just so I can see how interviews go, so I can do one better." So I go to the interview. And the guy presents me his business plan. And he says to me, "Here's the plan for our company, vision statement, mission statement." At the end of him presenting the plan and the company, "You know what your business plan is?

It's your dream. It's not the person you're interviewing. That's your dream. When you show me your mission statement, that's your dream. Okay? And he showed me all that and I was like, "Okay, that's what you want."

And then you know what we do next? You tell them a job description. And a job description is a list of things you can do to help me achieve my dream. If you do them, I'll pay you. If you don't, you're fired." And I was like, "Boy, super motivating."

And he said, "What do you mean?" I said, "If I got this right, you want me to bust my ass so you can buy a boat one day." And he's like, "I didn't say that." I said, "You kind of did, okay?" And then I got in my car and I went home and I said, "What am I doing?

What are you doing?" When you hire somebody, you're pitching your vision and your mission statement and your company's goals. That's your dream. So I'm going to tell you what I changed. I was like, "Oh my god, I'm pitching them my dream. That's not why they came in here."

So I have a new interview question. It's the first question I ask everybody. I don't ever start by talking about my company, my vision, my mission. I start by asking one single question to everybody. I say, "Tell me one thing you need to do with your life so that you'll look back one day and say, 'Time well spent.'"

I want people to look back at their life. I told you mine was 50 families, 50 countries, 50 dinners. I've done 100 of them now. I'm good. I can look back and say, "All right, I used that time well." That's the goal, man.

It's my new definition of success. Has nothing to do with money or fame anymore. My new definition of success is just to be able to look back at your life, even with all your failures and mistakes, and say, "I used my time on this planet well." That's it. You might have money, you might not. The question is, do you love your life the way it turned out?

If you would say, "I don't want to trade my life with anybody else's," don't touch it. You are successful. You might have money, you might not. That's not the definition. And so that's what I want people to do. Including people that work for me.

So I'm going to tell you the first person. I said to this guy, Chris, I'm engineering from an I'm hiring him for an engineering job. And I said, "Chris, tell me what's one thing before we start. Tell me one thing you need to do with your life so that you'll look back and say, 'I used my time in this life well.'"

And I thought he was going to say, "Jeff, if this is some kind of California Zen thing, I'm out." He's an engineer. He didn't. He said, "Jeff, that's easy." He said, "Buy my mom a house in Florida, fully paid, where she can live the rest of her life in sunshine with no debts, as a thank you for the sacrifice she made raising me."

I said, "Wow, what's the story?" He said, "Jeff, we grew up in a mobile home park. We were the poor people in the poor place." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "We were in an Airstream. Everyone else had a mobile home.

Mobile homes have bedrooms and separate doors. An Airstream is just one room." And he said it was so old that the metal was rusted. And it was so cold in Eastern Pennsylvania that snow came through the holes. And he said, "We were so poor, we only had blank one blanket. And my mom didn't ask for help because she didn't want her employers to know that they were that poor cuz people would all look down on her and they may never promote her."

So I said, "What did you do?" He said, "Every night, I picked that blanket up, I put it over the holes in the side of the Airstream to block the snow and I watched my mom and my sister shiver all night." He said, "I lay there and I said to myself every night, someday, somehow, I will work hard enough to be successful enough to buy my mother a house in Florida, fully paid, so she can live the rest of her life as a thank you." I said, "Dude, you're hired."

He said, "You didn't even interview me." I said, "Oh, yes, I did. I said, "This interview is done." You can teach skills. You can't rewrite somebody's DNA. Employees driven by passion and purpose will far outperform employees driven by paycheck any day.

If you got an employee whose primary focus is the carrot you're hanging with in front of them for equity and bonuses, that is not how you build greatness. You can't build greatness on the backs of average people. Great people have a bigger mission in mind. The money is how they get there, but they don't focus on the money.

So I'm going to tell you what I did. I went home and I printed a picture. And it was a picture of a house in Florida. And I put it on the wall next to Chris's office. And the next day everybody came in and they said, "What is that?" And I said, "That's the reason Chris works for me.

What's yours?" And you want to know what you could see in my office if you went there right now? I went to every person that works for me and I said, "Tell me one thing you got to get done in your life so you will look back and say, 'I spent my time well.' And I, your career working with me, I will commit to helping make that thing happen for you."

So you go to my office now and you see what looks like a bunch of random pictures. They're not random at all. I know why everybody comes in the office. They don't come in so I can get a boat. They come in to take care of their mother. Whatever it is, I know all those things.

And I I want to ask you, do you? Do you know why people really work for you? It ain't for the paycheck. They got plans, too, but we don't ask that in the process. I'm going to tell you how this story ended. This story ended that this was the company I told you that we had zero voluntary turnover.

In fact, I had people that worked for me for four companies. Because I had all the rock stars, all wanted to come work at our company. So we kept building great innovations and selling them. And we were on a roll, but we sold this company. And I gave everybody a cut. And by the way, I am not a believer in greed.

When people ask me how to distribute equity, I'm going to tell you something everybody told me not to do. I gave shares to the receptionist. Not only did I give stock to everybody, I gave shares to the receptionist. Somebody said, "How did you get the investors to approve that?" I said, "I didn't. I gave her some of mine."

Her husband called me that night and said, "This is really horrible. My wife completely misunderstood you." I said, "What do you mean?" And he said, "She thinks you gave her some stock." And I said, "Um, I did." And he said, "She's an hourly employee.

She's a receptionist. She doesn't get stock." I said, "She does now." And the next 2 days later, I heard her telling my vice president, "No, no, no, you pick up your trash." And he said, "You don't need to act like you own the place." She said, "I do."

Okay? You want to know how to have optimal performance? Make everybody feel You can own 100% of something really small or you can own a small percent of a hundred billion dollar company. It's your call. You don't get there without rock star employees that think they own the place. So everybody got their cut.

Chris went and bought his mom a house. We set her up. We sent her in the winter to Florida for a week. She knew her son made money. She didn't say how much. He said, "Mom, I made some money.

We sold the company. I'm buying you an all expenses paid trip to Florida." She left to Florida for a week. During that week, at the end of the week, we had her come to the house. Well, the thing was, when she stopped by the house, she looked at him, her son, and looked at me and she said, "Take me to the airport."

And I said, "Why are you upset?" And she turned to her son and said, "You drove me over here. You know I live in a piece of crap Airstream and you drove me over here to show me that your boss has another vacation home in Florida." And she said, "Take me to the airport." And I said, "Look, I'll take you to the airport, but I need you to do me one favor."

And she said, "What?" And I said, "If you come down the hall to my bedroom, I'll take you to the airport. I just want you to look." And she turned to her husband and husband, her son, and said, "Okay, this getting really weird. Your boss wants me to go to his bedroom for a favor and then we'll go to the airport?"

And I remember Chris had to turn away cuz he was laughing. And he's like, "Mom, just do what the boss says and then you can go to the airport." And she said, "Fine, I'll look at your stupid bedroom and then take me to the airport." Well, the reason that she thought it was my house was cuz remember what I told you about Airstreams?

They don't have extra bedrooms. All she had was a bedroom and just their bedroom furniture and nothing else. So during the week she was on vacation, I had my team ship me her bedroom. And I reinstalled it in this bedroom. But all the way down to this level of detail. In the middle of the night, Chris's mom, when she was stressed out about not being a good mother, she would sit up in the dark and she would brush her hair a thousand times.

And cuz they were so poor, she didn't want to turn on the lights in the Airstream to run up the electric bill, so she did it in the dark. And because she was combing her hair in the dark, every night, the last thing she did before she went to bed was take her hairbrush and turn it in a 90° angle on the nightstand so she could find it in the pitch black. So I had them ship me the air the hairbrush. And I went over and put it in the nightstand and I turned it 90°.

And when she opened the door and looked in that room, the moment she realized that was her house was one of the best moments of my entire life. And it wasn't even me. We were all hugging and crying and I was like, "Mom, it's not even my mom." And we were hugging and I'm saying, "Mom," and we're all in tears.

And I stood there and said, "This is one of the best moments of my entire life and I didn't buy or get anything. I gave something." In that moment, when she realized that was her house, and you know how that ended? Chris turned to me. And he looked at his watch and said, "We should get back to the office."

I said, "Back to the office?" I expected to never see him again. I expected him to say, "I got mine. Later, dude." You know what he said? He said, "We should get back to the office, go back to the wall and see who's next."

You want to know why we we build multi-billion dollar companies? Cuz I had the best damn employees on the planet. I knew what they wanted. I helped them get it. He wanted to go deliver the same thing to another family that works for us. Being a business owner is your chance to leave a legacy for your employees, for your community, and for your employees.

I never thought about it until that day. I have the chance to change life. There was a family of Vietnamese immigrants. He is now a vice president in a Fortune 500 with three kids in college. He calls me every day on the anniversary of the date he knocked on our company's door straight from Vietnam, barely spoke English, was an immigrant, and asked me for a job.

Every year on the anniversary he calls me and says, "Our whole life changed the day you opened the door." And I say, "Look, man, everything happened after I opened the door was all you. But I have the privilege of being a business owner, which gives me the chance to open a door when nobody else will. It's It's a privilege to be able to do that for people."

So, the last thing I want to share with you is some of the things that Richard asked me to mention that we are working on now. I don't uh I'm not really building businesses anymore. My primary focus is on my I created my own youth charity to make sure that 100% of all proceeds go directly Everybody that works for me is a volunteer. Uh I pay all the bills, there's no overhead, 100% of all funds go to children.

The picture on the bottom left is we're building schools and orphanages, and we're picking up all the kids that were uh abandoned by mostly military violence in all these countries. We're building schools for them. We're building homes for them. We're getting them medical care. We're feeding and educating them. Um we did uh in the lower right, that's World Youth Horizons, and I bring that up because Richard's whole group at Collective Genius uh very, very graciously donated to World Youth Horizons.

So, now uh we're building more homes that'll take more homeless orphans uh around the world and give them a place to live and people to take care of them thanks to uh uh your guys' generosity, Richard, which I want to thank you. Some of the other people in this room are part of that organization. We appreciate it. In the lower right is a program that I support uh called Dream Hustle Code, where we're teaching uh kids in the inner cities, I mentioned it earlier, in America.

We're teaching them skills, especially how to be tech entrepreneurs, cuz it takes nothing but a brain. Doesn't matter what color you are or how poor you are. If you're smart and resourceful, we can teach you how to write code. We can teach you tech skills, and we can give them an opportunity. On that trip you see me with them there.

We flew these kids from the worst neighborhoods who've never been out of the hood, have never seen anything but drugs and gangs. We flew them to Silicon Valley. We toured with all my relationships, all the Silicon Valley companies, Apple, Google, Facebook, and showed them the lives they could have. Then I took them all down to uh LA, and I gave them a VIP tour of Warner Brothers television and movie studios to show them the 200 jobs that are in the credits at the end of the movie.

There's one Tom Cruise, and there's 250 people that it takes to make that movie. And we showed them all the jobs they could have. So, that's an example of the kind of programs that we spend our time in. We focus most of our energy on preparing youth and educating them and inspiring them to lead the life they should be leaving, not the one that leading, not the one they're currently having.

Um I think I'm sorry I went way over my time. I thank you guys very much for coming and listening to me today. Thank you. But he's got more than they bargained for today. [laughter] I feel like a comedian trying to follow Chris Rock right now. Uh whatever I say is not going to compare to that.

But who wants to be a little bit more like Jeff in the future after hearing that talk, right? So, one thing we'd like to do is make it a 100% write-off if you donate to Jeff's nonprofit. Um yeah, you get a 50% write-off typically uh if you donate to a charity in the United States, you can write off 50% on your taxes. If you're already doing business with Family Office Club, you know, we have uh pitchdecks.com, our database division.

We have many different divisions in our company, sponsorship and exhibit table. Uh we'll credit 50% of any donation that you make to his nonprofit um towards uh any of that stuff, so that you get half tax write-off and half free credit for business that you're doing here uh with the Family Office Club uh in those different divisions, just to encourage you to get involved. Uh you can go to worldyouthhorizons.com, and when you make a donation, just send um my EA, Genevieve, uh the receipt of the donation, and then we'll we'll make that an even better deal in case you're not motivated enough to support Jeff and his nonprofit, then uh hopefully that adds to that. Thank you.

Yeah, you're welcome. Um also, I just wanted to add that, you know, I wasn't planning to talk about this, but, you know, Gary Vaynerchuk, most of you know, he talks about how kindness is one of the most advanced business strategies to get business done. And in a meeting today, we were negotiating a $100 million deal between someone here in the room and one of the panelists on stage, and I saw the individual who was doing the pitch, who said he was very skeptical in the beginning about doing it. But he said during the meeting, everyone was laughing, having a good time, and that's unusual.

He said, "I never laugh in a business meeting, in an investment committee meeting. People aren't laughing. They're talking about the terms, and negotiating hard, and positioning." And that's what helps uh get business done. Uh we have a friend here, Josh from Accountable Equity. Can you raise your hand, Josh, over there?

So, Josh has a hospitality company, and he talks about spreading love through hospitality. Who talks about love in an investment pitch? Right? Uh nobody, I can tell you. So, uh Bharat, who's on stage here, he laughs at probably every meeting I'm possibly that I'm at with him. And he gets more deals done because of that, cuz he's likable.

He's a normal human being. It's authentic. It's genuine, just like Jeff was on stage just now. So, I just want to mention those things and just point that out and emphasize it, because it makes you stand out from others uh when you're when you're like that, um and a lot of people are not.