Runnin' Down a Dream: How to Succeed and Thrive in a Career You Love - Bill Gurley 9/14/2018

all right good morning good morning wow that's pretty good actually thank you I'm Jay Hartzell I'm the Dean

it's my pleasure to see everybody here today and thanks for coming out on a Friday this is one of the craziest weeks on campus all year we started building into this week and thinking into the

year thinking what's gonna be this week and it turns out people want don't mind being around when there's a USC coming on Saturday so it's a really great way for us to bring back some superstars and

Bill girlies definitely one of those superstars so thanks Bill for coming back to campus we've been working on trying to get him back in the right time and the right venue and we'd had this

conversation around what do you wanted to share with our MBA students and so this is a great chance to give back so thank you all for coming out thanks to Tina Mabley and her team for

arm-twisting and making sure that you all knew about this also a thanks of our faculty so Jim Nolan's here Luis Martin's is somewhere in the back there I hope you get a sense of all the

positive momentum around this space and industry and technology from venture fellows to all the work that that Luis is doing with the Kelleher Center Texas venture labs there's a lot of enthusiasm

and excitement I think across the board in a wide range of ways so with that let me introduce our speaker today is Bill so bill Gurley has spent over 15 years

as a general partner at benchmark capital prior to benchmark bill was a partner with Hummer Winblad venture partners before entering the venture capital business he spent four years on Wall Street as a top-ranked Research

Analyst including three years of CS first Boston focusing on personal computer hardware and software his research coverage included companies like Dell compact and Microsoft and he was the lead analyst on the Amazon IPO

in both 95 and 96 bill was a member of institutional investor all-american research team prior to this investment career bill was a design engineer at Compaq Computer where I worked on

products such as the 486 50 and compacts first multiprocessor server for the past 15 years Bill is author the above the crowd blog which focuses on the evolution and economics of the high technology business over his venture

career he has worked with such companies as GrubHub next door open table stitch fix uber and Zillow calm he was suited BS in computer science from University of Florida in 1989 then cleaned up his

resume by coming to University of Texas for an MBA in 1993 he currently serves on the advisory board of our school and it's just been a great supporter for all things we do so thank you again for coming out with that how about a good

round of applause for our friend bill Gurley so thanks for having me so

believe it or not I've been thinking about giving this particular presentation for about a decade and I've been talking to the administration I was inspired after studying the stories of

three people that you might call luminaries they were probably heroes of mine when I read about him and I noticed an overlap a pattern amongst them and so that's what I'm here to talk to about now how many people in the room have

heard of the phrase dream job raise your hand all right everybody's heard the phrase so you know what it means it means chasing a career where you just have immense passion my partner Kevin

Harvey has a phrase that I love he says life is a use it or lose it proposition and for most humans they take one career path and so if you only got one shot and

then it's all over why not do what makes you most happy and so what I'd like to do so by the way one of the reasons this is the audience I want to thank you for being here this is

the audience I wanted to do this presentation to first because I think coming to an MBA program is this an amazingly unique opportunity you have to

come you you you've had your undergrad degree you've worked a little bit and now you have this chance to go do whatever you want and it's a it's an amazing pivot point and so for me

you're the opportunity our audience for this and obviously I wanted to come back to Texas to do it so thanks for having me so what I'm going to do first is I'm going to start by telling three stories

of these luminaries and then after that I'm going to walk through five guidelines that I've inferred from what they and then there's there's some special stories at the end as well so you know

starting Orrville Ohio which happens to be anyone know what company was founded in Orville in 1897 I'll give you 20 bucks if anybody knows

Smuckers that has nothing to do with this presentation so the first gentleman I'm Tom I was a guy named Robert Montgomery that grew up in Orville this

is in 1940 and this is what the town looked like when he did he attended over Ville High School where he was a three-sport Letterman baseball football basketball he was lucky enough one of

his neighbors knew the coach Fred Taylor at Ohio State and he was able to get a spot on a really good basketball team this is Robert number 24 he's a point guard that's him peering into the huddle that's Fred

Taylor the coach of Ohio State at the time Robert wasn't a starter he came off the bench and he didn't get a ton of minutes but this team had john

havelcheck and jerry koozie and John Cassian and his sophomore year they won the national championship they played in the national championship his junior and senior year those two players that I

mentioned went on to the NBA and Robert went into coaching he spent his first year as a JV coach at a high school and then finagled his way onto the staff at

army and so at 22 he was an assistant at army the Black Knights they played here in Gil's Fieldhouse when he was 24 the head coach retired and he begged for the job

this is him signing a contract so 24 he became head coach of a d1 school now what ended up making Roberts successful from my point of view isn't what happened inside the four walls of the

gym where they practice every day it's what he did outside in the first five years of his coaching career he befriended five of the top basketball minds on the East Coast this is Red

Auerbach so havelcheck went to Boston Red was the coach at the time he was able to build a relationship through that there's a Joe lapchick that Claire

B Claire be coached at Long Island University and has the best record of any coach in the Basketball Hall of Fame

Robert met Claire was 25 when he was 27 Robert drove Claire to Clara's induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame and sat next to him the next one's Henry IVA he

coached 36 years at Oklahoma State and was at the time probably one of the most successful basketball coaches of all time that's ever deemed from Indiana and he met all of them and became friends

two of them lapchick and IVA he just went to a coaches luncheon where he knew they were gonna be and he begged he said can I sit next to you and that's how he met both of

them and then he kept following up and hanging out a year later he met Pete knew Pete was the greatest basketball mine on the west coast at the time they became fast friends

years later Pete wouldn't duck Robert into the Basketball Hall of Fame he didn't he didn't limit his peer network to basketball coaches he met football coaches as well this was the coach of

the Cincinnati Bengals Bo Schembechler who would go on to coach at Michigan was his assistant on the basketball team in army and he met Bill Parcells at around

the same time way before bill became a star in the National Football League and then doc councilman was the longtime swimming coach at Indiana and also someone that Robert became friends with

now I'm using the name Robert to obscure things a little bit I'm talking about Bobby Knight so at age 31 Bobby Knight

became head coach at Indiana University five years later at 36 they went undefeated both in the regular season and the postseason won a national

championship that's never been repeated since in over four decades at Indiana he would win three national championships for Coach of the Year awards 11 Big Ten

titles and when he retired he had 902 victories than most of any coach at the time as I said Pete nua inducted Bobby

into the Hall of Fame I'm gonna move on to the next story and then I'll circle back and you'll see where I'm going now I'm going to start in Hibbing Minnesota this is about two or three hours north

of Minnesota another Robert Robert Zimmerman grew up in Hibbing that's what Hibbing looked like when he was young even though it's pretty far north of Minnesota it was a bit of an

urban environment Robert loved music and in this early photo he's got a drum he got a guitar when he was 10 years old and by high school was playing in a band

regularly they used to cover Elvis and Little Richard his yearbook says that he's likely to join Little Richard that didn't happen but what happened was he

went to University of Minnesota he didn't go to class he was hanging out in this place called dinky town which is is this photo right here and at the time you know and this is late 50s early 60s

there's a lot of new stuff happening even though he grew up playing rock and roll he fell in love with folk music and over I'd say eight or nine months he studied every folk album he possibly

could he didn't have a lot of money back at the time you could walk into a record store and listen in a booth he would do that for hours on hours on hours he became friends with people that also liked folk music but had money and he

would go to their house and listen to their record collection he's even accused of having quote borrowed their records and not returned him which is a point of controversy even still today

the next thing that happened I think is one of the most ambitious actions anyone that I know has taken to pursue their dream job he hitchhiked from Minneapolis

to New York City he had a guitar a suitcase in ten dollars and it's 1,200 miles right and so if you ask him today

why he did it he'll talk a little bit about chasing the performers so this is Dave Van ronk Peggy Seeger the new Lost City Ramblers these were people he was listening to in Minnesota but they were

these people were in New York City and so he wanted to see him but there was really one person he wanted to see which is what he got three so what do you got three had become his hero and if you if you're if you just go to Wikipedia once

you find out who this is if you don't know already he went to New York to find what he go through like that was his pursuit because he had he had come to

have this affection and love for would he play and he wanted to know everything he possibly could about it so he went to New York he found what he got three used to perform for him and he started hanging out at three three

venues the Cafe Wha The Gaslight cafe and Gerdes folk city this was the epicenter of folk music at the time and he would sit in each of these venues for hours upon hours and study what the

other artists were doing years later Liam Clancy would say he could perform any one of our songs like us including tonality tempo everything so he was a

mimic he was studying studying studying he got a big break he was asked to open for John Lee Hooker at Gerdes one one day and his career got started

this gentleman's Joe Hammond he was a producer for Aretha Franklin Billie Holiday Count Basie and one day he

walked in and found this gentleman in 1961 I think he's 22 23 something like that the next year Robert Zimmerman

changes his name to Bob Dylan John releases the first album the album does okay in 63 they released their freewheelin Bob Dylan this album goes to

number 22 in the US and number one in the UK and from there everything was off into the races and 63 he performed at the march on Washington with Joan Baez

where Martin Luther King spoke his famous speech a year later he performed for the first time with Johnny Cash another one of his heroes Johnny gave him a guitar and asked if he could record several of his songs Johnny asked

Bob if he could record his songs which he did the rest is history as they say a hundred million albums sold 11 Grammys

an Oscar a Emmy he was introduced into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and then he took it to a whole new level kidding the center award with Clinton

Barack Obama gave him a medal of freedom and then he topped it off with something that's never been done he won the Nobel Prize in Literature the only musician

ever to be given such an award that happened two years ago amazing story all right this one you won't know as well but it's equally inspiring st. Louis

Missouri the the person this time is named Daniel he grew up in st. Louis his

father was a intelligence officer in the military and and moved around Europe quite a bit after the war ended his father became a travel agent and and his mother worked with him and so they

traveled quite a bit now because they were travel agents his mom told him he had to journal everything so he was forced to go on vacation and take notes he wasn't that interested in travel but

he loved food and so when he went back and looked all the journal notes he had always taken we're always about the food they were eating wherever they were and he started to associate different places with the food that he went to he went to

John Burroughs High School in st. Louis

ended up at Trinity College in Connecticut where he would spend every weekend in New York City eating food because that's what he was passionate about he got a Poli Sci major he went

and worked on a campaign for a year wasn't that interesting to him so he went back to New York Robert Zimmerman was chasing folk music Danny was chasing

food so his personal life was all about what he could do and go into different restaurants and exploring he went to work for checkpoint they make those things that you attach to clothes in the

in the store so that when you walk out to beeper goes off this was early in checkpoints life he did incredibly well there and within a year was making 125k years of salesman which he spent the

most of it on on food in New York City one night he was out to eat with his uncle and his aunt and his grandmother at Elios a restaurant sits still Oakland

and he told him that he was studying for the LSAT he was going to take the LSAT next year and and go up his career ladder again and become a lawyer to which his uncle replied we will you just stop it why don't you go open a

restaurant you know that's what you're supposed to do caught him a little off-guard but woke him up and the next day he took the LSAT he never sent the

scores to a single school never applied to a single school he quit his job as a salesman and went to work at a restaurant called Pesce in the front office for $12,500

so he took a 10x salary reduction the reason he chose Pesce is there was a chef there an up-and-coming chef called Michel Romano and he wanted to be around this gentleman and so he would work

during the day in the front office and then at night he'd beg to like do the slop work in the kitchen just so he could get exposure to what was happening there he was also taking a wine class at

night and he met this gentleman who was happened to be the head are one of the top restaurant critics for the walls for the New York Times and so they started hanging out together and going to

different restaurants and talking and learning he did something really interesting he made a list of 12 icons in the restaurant industry these were new people that were doing innovative

things around opening new high-end restaurants Wolfgang Puck's the first one and but there were 12 different a lot of people are on celebrity chef shows today and he started studying him

he created a notebook for each and every one of what makes him special where they do unique and start looking at their recipes then he he got even bolder and

decided to go to Europe he took every single one of the connections he had both in the restaurant industry in the travel industry through his parents plus when he was at at Trinity he would go do

tours in in Europe forests parents and so he had a lot of connections and he'd and he did this now I just had to look this up for the presentation it's a

stodgy re which i think is a Francie Prince work for all working at restaurant for free because that's what he did one of the restaurants that he

worked in he had to pay $500 a month which I I ran the math and that's equal to a negative 25,000 ka year salary so

he's gone for making 125 - 12 - now he's upside down 25 but what he does is what you think he would do he studies so in each and every one of these places each

and every one of these restaurants he's watching the chef he's watching the recipes he goes on the sourcing trips to see how they pick food out of markets or

from are from different fish markets and he just takes tons of notes he looks at the decor looks at the wine list and so on the way home from this like nine month journey

he said it took the entire eight and a half hour flight just to organize the notes when he gets back to New York he'll spend another six or seven months searching a hundred locations to find

the very best location to launch his first restaurant he's 27 years old when he opened Union Square cafe this is

Danny Meyer I love this quote he's most proud of the studying he did on his own not the studying that he did it at

Eternity College like it was and he viewed this as the best work he had ever done as a student Union Square cafe is still open today it's 11 times the GAT

has said it's the very best restaurant in New York Danny Meyer would go on to launch 16 high-end restaurants in New York City four of Ron Michelin stars he

is the undisputed king of high-end restaurants in New York City but he wasn't done a lot of these restaurants Danny would open in areas that needed rejent vacation he had a philosophy that

if he could build a restaurant it could become the the bespoke place that people go and in the community of all that he would get a lift alongside that so he

typically would look for areas that were on the rise but but needed help one area that needed a lot of help was Madison Square Park which wasn't far from Union Square so he and a bunch of other

business people helped launch the Madison Square can service see that rebuilt the park few years after that happened they started improving the park there was a decision made to open to

allow there to be a restaurant in the center of the park he applied got the bid and won and that was the location of the first Shake Shack if a while later

I'm going to go through something so you'll see the work that went into launching the first Shake Shack if you go to the first Shake Shack it doesn't look like this if you want to eat it looks like this when it's open there's

always a line I got to know Danny on the open table board we work together for over and he used to tell me I had to keep it a secret but that this single venue made

way more profit than any of the white white tablecloth restaurants idiom of course fast forward today there's 190

shake Shack's around the world 2015 they took Shake Shack public on the NYC and it's now worth 2.2 billion I think there's one here in Austin correct so

these were the three stories I had read them all independently and I noticed that there was a similar strain that was running through each and every one of these stories and so now I've organized

that I want to talk to you about it the first one is the one that I can provide the least amount of help with you about because I don't know what your passions are but my first piece of advice would

be to find your passion pick a profession of which you have a deep personal interest there's nothing that's going to make you be more successful than if you love doing what you're doing

because you're gonna work harder than anybody else because it's not going to feel like work it's gonna feel like fun so I think this is the most important decision you can possibly make it a career to make sure you have immense

passion for what you're doing this should be your personal passion not your parents not your sisters not your family generation of expectation it needs to be

something that you're doing on your own it might be that you're passionate about the same things your parents are like don't you have to run from them but you need to know that this is something you're doing on your own and then I also

mentioned status and compensation you know there are a lot of high-profile careers that make a lot of money and are generally perceived to be areas where successful people go but if you run at

those things and don't have a passion for them you're gonna burn out eventually it's not gonna be where you want to be and that in the last point is just you can't fake it like somebody else sitting

in some other MBA program has a deep passion for for whatever career path you're going down and they're gonna smoke you if you don't have it yourself this is one of my favorite quotes from

Bobby Knight he says everybody has the will to win people don't have the will to practice and I think this is the test for whether or not you're actually pursuing your dream job which is the the

essence of it that would be considered studying or work or practice do you enjoy that part like do you enjoy the preparation everybody enjoys winning

like do you enjoy the preparation the second of the five guidelines I'd have for you is hone your craft constantly it's it's extremely important to be

obsessive about understanding everything you possibly can about your craft considering an obligation right hold yourself accountable that requires you

to keep learning over time study the history know the pioneers it's the bedrock foundation for what you're going to build upon and it will help you in networking that you're able to talk the

language of the people that came before you strive to know more than everyone else about your particular craft and that can be in a subgroup and what do I

mean by that let's say you love eSports let's just say you've decided you know multiplayer gaming eSports like this is it for you you grow up gaming I love it

all right within the first six months of being in this program you should be the most knowledgeable person at McCombs in eSports like that's doable you should be

able to do that and then by the end of your first year you should be top five of all MBA students and hopefully when you exit your second year you're number one of any MBA student out there it

doesn't mean you're the best eSports person in the world but you've you've separated yourself from everyone else that's out there it's not I can't make you the smartest of the brightest but

it's quite doable to be the most knowledgeable it's it's it's possible to gather more information than somebody

else especially today and then lastly and this is a bit of a caveat depending on what it is that you're chasing you might want to go to where the APIs

Center is and the reason is there's just more networking available there if that's where the great people are and the next two bullet points will tie into

that this is a interesting story from from Bobby Knights biography his second time he met with PETA knew he walked into the room so this guy's like

32 feet newest most famous basketball coaches every walks into the room with 74 plays diagrammed on three by five card sits down in the middle of floor and said hey Pete come go through these

with me so it's probably like I don't know if it's audacious or brilliant or what but it's some people would consider that over-the-top but to get the number one winner you can possibly find and

make them go through that amount of tedious work but he did it Pete did it they both learned from it which is interesting these quotes from the movie

nodirectionhome Martin Scorsese did against Dylan really highlight the point that I'm trying to drive home to you most people would think a Bob Dylan folk singer you know probably just had the

DNA or got lucky or something he was studying like he used the word I'm a musical expeditionary I looked up expeditionary it's an expedition is to

travel for scientific research or exploration and that's what Dylan was doing he was there was no one that knew more about folk music than he did when

he broke out he knew more than anybody and then this another guy in Minneapolis who knew him called him a sponge and then this there's a ruthlessness in the

way Dylan find sources uses them and moves on constantly gathering information and putting it into his own repertoire I'm gonna read from Danny's

book for you because I want to drive home this point of studying you can see I'm a huge fan of Danny I've got all these markers here he's one of these one of the most genuine humans I've ever met

so he has a restaurant in New York called blue smoke which is actually a barbecue place so when they were thinking about launching that he says in

the barbecue within the 35 mile radius of Austin and the Texas Hill Country live five towns I revere each with a distinctly different style of barbecue the elements of barbecue are limited

ribs brisket pulled pork chop pork mince pork sausage chicken coleslaw beans and a handful of sides but it's become an American culinary language with thousands of dialects and accent

I tried to understand each variation during one 36 hour road trip through North Carolina I tasted 14 variations on chopped pork each defined by a subtle

and dramatic differences in texture the degree and type of smoke used the amount of tomato or vinegar and the sauce how much heat was applied to the meat and how well and how much or how little

crackling got chopped in the up and tossed in that's the level of detail he thinks about food I really like this one because it has to do with Shake Shack

but as soon as we won the bid Richard Corinne my most enthusiastic researcher of road food and I set off to study burger and Shake stands all over the country we started out of course at Ted

roost Steak and Shake in st. Louis which

he grew up eating continued on to Kansas City and individually made stops in Michigan Culver Los Angeles in-n-out burger napa tailor's automatic refresh for Chicago Gold Coast dogs plus eight

other establishment Connecticut a names three or four always in search of the best to breed so that's how they that's how they did research for for Shake Shack and I think it drives home this

point of like understand more than anybody else this is a bit of an aside does anybody know this painting this is a painting called first communion it was

painted by Pablo Picasso when it was 15 years old most people I think are brought up and they're told about Picasso and their first art class and

you look at these cubism pictures in you someone will say off seven-year-old could do that what they don't know is that Picasso was a trained classic artist and it mastered by the time it

was 15 and he had spent time studying the way you would if you had set out to be the greatest painter in the world and that's why I made this statement great

knit isn't random it turned if you're going to research something this is your lucky day information is freely available on the Internet that's the good news the bad news is you have zero excuse for not

being the most knowledgeable on any subject you want because it's right there at your fingertips and it's free which is excellent three develop mentors in your field I don't know

any of you are ever dare to be as aggressive as Dylan hitchhiking 1,200 miles to find your mentor but that might be the type of attitude you want to think about in the back of your mind as

you pursue mentors take every chance you can to find somebody who can teach you about the fields you want to excel in and you can work your way up the stack you don't have to jump straight to

straight to the top on on day one treat them with respect debate things learn from them document what you hear share it with others try to get these mentors

interested in you and your own development how do you do this send them notes tell them when you use their advice to be successful send them gifts when you have accomplishments get them

bought in you know like one of the reasons American Idol works because you start voting they're cheering for somebody and all of a sudden you feel like you're part of that process right get them to feel that way about your own

success and then on the mentor thing like never stop you got to keep on pursuing them I I had the remarkable

fortune this year and my 20th year is an investor to meet Stan Druckenmiller and Howard Marks and there are two people I've admired for a very long time I read everything that they write any time they

speak and I got to sit down with both of them for a couple of hours and talk about investing it was awesome and the things that they pushed on changed you

know some of the actions that I'm taking today in my work I had already walked you through these examples every one of these three luminaries had a mentor that was important to him a funny story last

week when I was preparing for this presentation I I was rereading Danny's book and I went back to this notion when he was 25 and he made this list of

people that he considered to be icons in the industry so I texted him I said Danny how many of those 12 icons have you ended up establishing a relationship

with and he sent me this emoji back I was thrilled that he knew how to use emojis he went on to tell me that four of them have become close personal

friends and I think it just documents this point I'm making about how it's an ever searching for mentors and leaning on mentors is a never-ending task for

embrace peers in your field develop relations with them have have discussions have arguments this is the way you learn this is the way that ideas

get shared this is the way you hone and innovate ideas I there's one thing I wish someone had told me when I when I got to MBA school everybody said network network network and I thought it was a

social activity I thought they were like telling me oh you need to develop your social skills and they want me to randomly talk to people that I have no similar interests with and what I've come to realize is no it's not about

that it's about connecting with the people that you have the most overlap with because you'll be able to help each other along the way along the journey

always share best practices and don't worry about giving away any proprietary knowledge it's it's a good trade it's just smart if you get caught up and

worrying about it you're gonna fail to advance and the the activity of sharing with mentors and peers will lead to so many positive things that help you go up

that whatever the negative costs are aren't gonna come in and we're closed celebrate your peers accomplishments as if you were their their own cherrim send

them notes be happy for them that will come back to you in spades and then lastly mint Pierce don't need to be in your exact field you know Bobby

Knight had sat down on a swimming coach and got knowledge some of the entrepreneurs I work with and CEOs find that it's more interesting to go to a conference on a topic that's a little bit far away and because they get more

innovative ideas that they can bring back to their field so it doesn't have to be this close it can be spread out now most of you know that this is the way you're supposed to network online

and you should certainly have a LinkedIn profile you should certainly connect with people I'll give you one piece of advice which is I'd be a little stingy with who you link to I have a rule where I only want

to link to people that I would call and trust their advice because then when I'm searching for a candidate that I want a reference on or something I don't get random answers I get people that I know

I'm gonna use I think people over proliferate their LinkedIn account but and for those of you who are yesterday I think there is a much more incredible resource not an alternative you should

do this in Twitter Twitter's the most amazing networking and learning network ever built and for someone that's pursuing their dream job or chasing a group of mentors or peers it's

remarkable in any given field 52% to 80% of the top experts in that field are on Twitter and they're sharing ideas and you can

connect to them and follow them and your personal feed if you get lucky enough and say something they find interesting they might follow you and the reason this becomes super interesting is that

unlocks direct message and now all of a sudden you can communicate directly electronically whenever you want with that individual it's very very powerful if you're not using Twitter you're

missing out I don't even know any fears anymore but like last one this should this should become this should be obvious to people but always to give the majority of the

credit to the other people that helped you up along the way one it's the right thing to do and to keep you from being an [ __ ] when you're successful I find

all the great to do it it is it's the right thing to do sin letters seem gifts any any time you accomplish something in your career take the time to to to send

messages back to the people that helped you I'll tell you a personal story that's it's quite serious that will help reinforce this my favorite professor

when I was here is Jim Fredrickson who many of you know passed away this year and along the way along my journey three or four times I took the time to write

him a letter send him a note send him a gift and tell him what an impact he had had on me when he passed I didn't have all this anxiety like I do I didn't get

a chance to tell him I took the chances to tell him and I would encourage you guys to do that type of stuff along the way and then lastly eventually you got to pay it back so you become the mentor

people start reaching out to you make sure you take the time here are a few examples of that this is Bobby Knight shortly after one of his sessions with

Pete Newell in the next year Indiana's playing one of Pete's teams they end up in a tournament and together and Bobby uses the stuff that Pete taught him and

beeps Pete on the field and he recalled that notion in the book and he said you know if Pete was willing to do that for me I got to do it for everybody else and let me show you statistically a little

bit of the impact of what Bobby did later in his career this is from Wikipedia these are the Bobby's former players that are coaching either d1 or NBA and this is his former coaches

they're coaching d1 or NBA so it's an immense legacy of people that he developed it went on to be successful if any deep deep basketball fans in the room they know that his point guard at

Army was none other than Mike sous-chefs key who was one of people that have now passed him on career wins 902 and moshevsky asked

Bobby Knight to induct him into the Hall of Fame which is a moving video you can go watch on YouTube if you're interested this is Danny

he's probably the most wonderful human or certainly one of the most wonderful humans I've ever met in my life he talks here about graciousness it it

it's evident and every single thing that he does how he talks to people how he treats his staff his book is worth reading if you get a chance as you can

see I'm a huge fan and now I'm going to tell you two more stories if we have time the reason once again that I wanted to

talk to an MBA class is because an MBA an MBA degree and when you're here is an opportune time to chase your dream job and so the next two stories I'm going to

tell you are more contemporary and they both involved using the MBA program an MBA program as a way to pivot into success so now we're in Marlo Oklahoma

all these are in the Midwest so Sam is my next contestant Sam grew up in Marlo his father worked at Halliburton which is in Duncan a little bitty town right

near and he went to he went to Marlow High School where he also was a multi-sport athlete unfortunately he was five nine and one forty so he didn't get to he didn't get to keep playing in

college I'm about to show you the University attended and you'll know what to do there we go okay perfect

he went to university Oklahoma ended up going to Bane I think he actually worked at Bain Capital and he was pursuing his career path like he thought he was supposed to they relocated in with

Sydney he's sitting in one of these high-rises overlooking two Sydney Opera House and he hears about this book Moneyball by Micheal Lewis he reads it

in three days he can't get it out of his head it's consumed him he decides immediately not unlike Danny in the restaurant that this is what he has to

do so he starts applying to business schools he gets accepted at Harvard and Stanford and in deciding which one he's gonna go to he goes and he he asked for tons of meetings with the schools and he

tells him what he's gonna do I'm going to get a job in sports analytics come hell or high water he claims Harvard looks at him like he's crazy the Stanford staff says come on

that'd be awesome wanna do Shu to everyone that we know he shows up at Stanford Graduate School of Business lo and behold they have a sports management class lo and behold Billy Beane from the

Oakland A's and the Moneyball book is speaking his first semester he gets to know Billy Beane Billy Beane introduces him to Michael Lewis they start spending time together Michael is in Oakland the

school lets him get to know people at the Niners organization and and at several sports organizations all over the country he combines it with hard work he says he's sent a hundred letters

out to get summer interns he ends up with one at the Texans when he gets back from that Michael Lewis asked him to come over and talk football cuz he's working on the

blindside so he helps Michael Lewis on the blindside eventually gets the job with use of rockets spent two and a half hours with Lex Alexander Lex hires him

that I believe 27 years old nine months later the Rockets hired daryl morey and the two of them worked together for seven years I think and built the best

basketball sports analytics department in the country Darryl one executive of the Year last year at the Rockets so at age 35

Sam hickeys name general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers and this is what like nine years after he read Moneyball looking over the

Sydney Opera House for those of you who didn't know the story there's some good and some bad Sam and Darrell had spent a lot of time studying the ways you could turn a program around and I've had long

discussions but they're about as fascinating the way they think through but if you're in particular tough spot the only way to do it is is to shed your

talent improve your salary cap room let your young players get tons of playing time and went through the draft now that's the plan Sam took and like any good entrepreneur a businessperson he

told all his constituents it's about the long term not the short term you got to stay with me on this and he wrote tons of letters he's very

thoughtful he's very smart that strategy led to three of the worst season in the history of the NBA but it also led to the drafting of Joel embiid

who's become a close personal friend of Sam's and some of you may know the rest of the story the minute eventually the ownership got tired of

this strategy and cut ties with Sam about that exact same moment in time everything started getting better and they started winning there were a few fans that supported him along the way

and there are a lot of signs that are way worse than this one of where now we're stinky but I trust hehe but today for those of the you know you know Vegas

has the Sixers as the number two team in the East right now this is Durant I chose the Texas jersey on purpose instead of the Warriors talking about how they're the team to watch and

Barkley goes further he says if they stay healthy this will be a team to watch for ten years so three years of bad ten years are good that's a pretty good trade if you're willing to make it

not everyone was able to make it Sam Sam Sam now is is especially in basketball circles I hope he never goes back to basketball because it'll be more legendary that

this phrase this meme is now an internet meme that's outside of basketball but some of the players started using this phrase when they were losing games and people were upset trust the process

no one used it more than Joel and no one's a bigger fan and he Key's in Joel which frustrates the ownership to no end they're still missing a GM right now and

they're having trouble finding one and now there's a this is the new meme which

is a little more aspirational and and there during the draft when they drafted Ben Simmons there's a video on the web of a sports bar in Philly where they got

everyone together for the draft and before the draft they raised a banner of hinky and retired and and Jones won't

stop so this is last year kiki kiki i think in a little bit of a jab when the Astros for those of you don't know was also an analytics turnaround and when the Astros won last year Hickey wrote I

love it when a plan comes together and then Joel through both memes back trust the process he died for our sins then someone in Philly did this this is

a little over the top got the resurrection with the players so I I think it's an amazing story they want

one fun part about this Sam's now back at Stanford he's teaching two two courses there and he may play you may play two separate dream jobs he's hanging out with startups venture

capitalists and he may do it all over again which i think is really cool all right last one and this was very near and dear to my heart there's an

executive I work with named Katrina Lake she grew up in San Francisco but she went to high school in Minnesota and I used the map of Minnesota so that could all be from the Midwest to kind of I

like that story better this is a high school she went to she went to Stanford thought she was going to be pre-med ended up not liking it very much got an economics major went to work at a

consulting firm called party on and they had a number of clients in the retail and fashion space in Sochi she noticed that she had an affection for that and started hanging around those clients and focusing on those

clients and while she was visiting those places she kept asking herself questions like why does this work this way she told me she was you know in a department store and she's like why are these clothes out here why isn't there just

like one here and you press a button and then it's put into your dressing room because you keep all the inventory in the back where you could stack it better like why and she just kept saying why why why why is this stuff organized this

way and finally she decided you know I'm gonna go do something about this and she came up with a notion of a of a of a company that would be a personal shopper for everybody she didn't quite know how

to launch it so she decided to use her MBA program as a way to launch it and she told me that you know she she planned to graduate but but not a much

higher bar from a classroom perspective but she wanted to use the platform as a way to build a company and so she ended up at Harvard the first thing she did was scoured

LinkedIn and the Alumni directory to find anybody that had anything to do with fashion she was mostly interested in sourcing and merchandising because she didn't have any knowledge there so

she found all kind of contacts in New York she made personal trips asked for meetings not unlike the other people that I've showed you next she found two founders that had launched startups

this is Joanne from trunk club and Kraig from shop at to me in any similar space but we're a little different and she got him on the phone she wanted to hear if what she was thinking about was different and better than what they had

done because she wanted it to be different and better there was a professor at Harvard that that it run had been CEO of a retail store named Jose Alvarez she started writing drafts of what she

wanted to do and got him to push back at first he was very skeptical but she said two back and forth helped her and modified her plan quite a bit in the summer she went to actually a company we

were invested in called poly bore which was a social fashion site where people aggregated likes on the web so kenderson who had run a huge chunk of the revenue at Google

a CEO there so she built that relationship she also got to study how fashion websites spend time with bloggers after graduating she got to

came to San Francisco to launch her company and she did two things that are miraculous for me from a from a mentoring standpoint the first one is

she found Eric Coulson he ran all of data science and Netflix you know you remember the million-dollar prize all that stuff that was under Eric he had recently retired from Netflix and was

looking for something to inspire him and she did and he became an advisor to the company Marko Hanson was over 20 years at gap in merchandising marketing same story

Katrina founder Marc was very excited about helping Katrina Marcus still in the board today Marco would spend you know day a week a day a month in the early days at the company helping her

almost the way an executive chairman would she then found two other people John Fleming ran with CEO of Walmart calm Julie Bernstein I worked with back

at Nordstrom years ago she was CMO at Sephora and hanging out in San Francisco she put Julie on the board and then a feat I've never seen before she recruited erik ainge julie off the board

and into the company and they both worked there Julia's as CEO Owen and Erika's head of data analytics where he is still today coming as 95 data

scientist a fashion company this is her at the very beginning she's trying to figure out exactly what they were going to do for those of you that don't know how it works Katrina Lake runs a company called stitch fix you fill out a 15 page

profile about yourself you have a lot of information way more information than any other retailer has on you and then you press a button a stylus looks at your profile and picks five items the

stylus is sitting in front of a dashboard there's a keep score for every single item in our inventory for every single shopper that's out there unique to that individual shopper as you buy

more the data science studies what you like what you don't like and that's how the system works I was lucky enough to become an investor in this company even though it has inventory has a lot of

inventory there's five warehouses today and along the way as it was starting to succeed this article ran which is a nice tie to the last one Forbes called her

fashionista Moneyball and there are certainly elements that would cause that correlation in her third year she went profitable she only consumed twenty million dollars of venture capital in

the company's life when we went public there was a hundred million in cash on the balance she year five she hit a billion at revenues at age 34 she became

the youngest founder CEO female founder CEO ever last fall when we took stitch Vic's public that's me hiding in the back I think one thing that really

differentiates Katrina if she were here today you know she certainly be proud of this story but I think she's more proud of how she's been able to use the platform to speak out on social change

this was an infographic that they released about a year ago but 31% of the engineers are female 60% of the board

62% of management team and 86% of the entire work and she's not afraid to speak out on topics like this when we did the bake-off for the IPO she insisted all the investment banks put

their diversity record at the front of the pitch deck every single one of them that came in and they all did so these are these are the five profiles that I

shared with you I would I would highlight a couple of things about this first of all you know in the first three if if I said to you hey you say I'm going to be a school I want to do something inspiring and have a great

career I you wouldn't think I would mention opening a restaurant or being a basketball coach or a folk singer like those aren't things you would say and yet it didn't stop these people from

being successful the other thing that I would highlight is all five of them I don't think a single one of them started what they're doing for money it wasn't about in each and every story they were

chasing a passion and a dream that allowed them to to want to study going back to Bob Bobby nice thing about having the will to practice and they all did it on their own

Danny uses a phrase professional research in his book constantly which i think is an interesting phrase because most of us think about the studying and research we do around curriculum and a

teacher and you don't think about if you're in finance or marketing or accounting do you go home at night and study for yourself like to improve your own you know skillset most people don't

do that I think that's interesting for those of you who decided your dream job is consulting they say you got to tell them what you're going to tell them tell them and then tell them what you told them so this is for you

[Music] pick a career about where your passionate be obsessive about the learning lino mentors learn lino peers give the credit to someone else and pay it

forward for those in the music they like music you know I stole the title of this speech from from Tom Petty who unfortunately passed away this year he was once asked what advice he'd have for

four people if he were giving it and and while it's not as ambitious what I've told you it's almost the exact same thing on the exact same vector I'll let

you read that yourself so that's it thank you for allowing me to do that I really we have I don't know what time it is you buy okay questions anyone has any

questions I didn't talk at all about venture capital or any of the companies over hmm

proudest personal achievement I've been very fortunate and had had the help of a lot of people hi there there are a

couple of companies we're very early on we made bets about how we thought date involves it played out a couple that come to mind i sat down with chuck Dippold in an open table he's like I'm

gonna put this computer in the front of a restaurant and make a business out of that and he was in like three restaurants it was very daunting to think and the only way the business

worked is if it took over you know and went nationwide and became a network effect with the consumer side but that's what we thought about it at the moment

and we drew it up another one more recently that it's similar a company called next door that I'm on the board of we were three years on a business

idea that just didn't work called fan base and the team cut back to seven people and started doing weekly powerpoints with the board for new ideas and one of them one of the engineers

said my my friends got a HOA and they want us to build a software platform for them to use and it was almost immediate we were all like oh that's a really good

idea and like in a minute you know the founders me and others like could see forward as to what could possibly happen and those moments of life having that

that opportunity to bet and thinking about what it might become and then seeing it happen to me is like super fulfilling and interesting yeah great question there were a lot

along the way I mentioned you know here Jim Fredrickson really pushed me I I had been used to having coming from

engineering I was used to deterministic questions late and so in in physics or math or whatever there's an answer to the problem and I think what Jim knew is

that in business there's not a right answer and so no matter what I said he was gonna challenge it and make you know come at it from the other side and then I would oh my god I got it wrong like

but he was he was pushing me to see both sides of it which was great I there were so many I not on doors on Wall Street a guy named Al Jackson when

I was here in the summer I literally went to to New York and knocked on the doors and begged for a job and a guy named Al Jackson took a bet on man and they weren't recruiting at the

University of Texas you know and I see him still occasionally and he he first Boston not only hired me but they had a program where they made you as a fresh

MBA student a senior analyst covering companies they just put you out there trial by fire so he had a big impact Frank Quattrone I was about to leave

celsa and go to the buy-side there's a true story and I got a call from Frank Quattrone the famous banker he was leaving Morgan Stanley to start a new bank and he he had heard about me and we

sat down and he said I want you to come be an analyst on and I said you know I don't think I want to be a sell side analysts my entire career and he said what do you want to do and I said I'd love to be a venture capitalist and he

said come work for me I'll move you to Silicon Valley and introduce you to every venture capitalist I know what she did and along the way we as you heard we

competed for lead left on the Amazon IPO which is a wonderful bit of trivia maybe that's my proudest moment door to Morgan Grenfell took amazon

public no one will ever remember that but we beat Morgan and Goldman oh it's just fun and then and then all of my partners all the founding partners at

benchmark taught me the art of being a

venture capitalist so part of my work is the biggest passion you know part of who I think when I was here I discovered it

I want to be a venture capitalist and a couple of things that come together my sister went to rice and was employs 63 compact and so she got options and like I was like wow that's different like and

then I started to understand what was going on I went to work at compact2 for a couple years I also was it compacts read a Peter Lynch book and started trading stocks on

prodigy light and I love Berlin I used turbo Pascal and like Berlin went public wow that compact I bought the stock it went from like 12 to 80 and like so I

was hooked on the gambling and the invest you know investing side and the technology side I also have zero chance of ever leading a group of people

anywhere to anything I have a TD and and I don't like I don't like to lead I'm thrilled that there are people that do so that I can have a symbiotic

relationship with them and so it's that combining of making bets around intuition about where the technology can take us that I think is what I get super excited about

I also having worked on Wall Street for a while I like the slower pace of venture and that it's you know like you look at what he went through it's not measured that quickly its measured kind

of over a seven to 10-year time frame which gives you the opportunity to really to really hone the the products and companies that you're working with the guys on the buy side like the daily

mark I just don't think I could live with that yeah yeah she asked about a moment of

fear I have so many of them I think I'll give you a couple examples like when I went Frank moved me from New York to Silicon Valley I had decided I didn't

want to cover the computer industry more because they were going to combine personal computers with big companies I was going to have to cover HP and Dec and my brain wanted to be going towards the new stuff so I told this to Frankie

said okay we'll get someone else to do pcs you cover the internet and I thought that's awesome but in there's this chart on you sometime that's a euchre and on this

axis it's what you think you know and on this axis is what you really know and that first part of the journey you actually get anxiety and drop so I started reading about the internet and I

realized how little I knew and I freaked out I had an anxiety moment and my advice is to push on through like you'll get down to the bottom of the U curve you'll find your footing and you'll come

up the other side same thing happened in venture the very first company that I invested in was a company called employees out of Williams College moved to Atlanta we hired a new CEO I went to

a board meeting one day and the results were disastrous and ventures kind of weird thing cuz you have this partnership we go out and do you do most of your work by on your own and I

literally I think I was about to break down in hives and I like I asked for a break and I went and walked around the building and I remember I remember this to this day I was thinking what have you

gotten yourself into like how could you ever possibly be successful in this industry you have no idea what to do and and and it's it's in my brain that day that moment and so I you know I would

just tell you keep pushing like you get past it you start to find your feet and you make it through

my least favorite things in my job I'm there's some there's some ridiculously bureaucratic things anybody that works

with stars like 409a evaluations or pain in the butt and they're actually bad bad math and bad finance those things bug me you know any time that you're

unsuccessful in getting a founder to be successful it's tough and you know there's a lot of people that can start

companies a lot of great people start a lot of great companies to go on and emerge as Bezos has done as a great CEO also over a 20 year time frame your odds

of getting to that point just go down and down and down and so you know I'm thrilled to have work with people like Katrina or Matt Maloney a GrubHub or Spencer at Zillow that have risen to the

thing but they don't all make it and so sometimes along the way you're having conversations about how you're gonna have to find a replacement or bring in a new CEO and those are immensely

difficult because you've built such deep personal relationships and give up yeah

Oh to focus or like not be distraught

she understand yeah yeah I almost put it in the in the deck there's a there's a

book called shark proof by harvey mackay that I read when I was here so it's probably outdated and doesn't use any of the digital tools but he had a whole section on your dream job and how to

think about it over the long term not just like drop everything do it right now he would say like keep a folder in your drawer like keep keep kind of shifting

towards it when I was here I thought about the idea of being a VC and I went and talked to the people that were practicing it around town here and they told me I could go work for 20 years and

then we'll talk well that was that felt like just a door that I couldn't get through and so I went to Wall Street just because I'd been convinced I couldn't be a venture capitalist but

after I started succeeding I started tilting back that direction because that's where I wanted to go and then when that opportunity came for someone

that could take me towards it I jumped at it and so I just like let let where you want to be be the compass even if

you can't go for it today for whatever reason Neil asked questions if you're gonna start a company yeah I

mean you could certainly be passionate about doing a start-up and not be passionate about the vertical I will tell you it'll wane over time I've

worked with I've worked with founders that have done that they're really good and built companies that are worth you know seven hundred million eight hundred

million but they usually sell instead of keep going because and I've heard the phrase I don't want to out anybody but like well you know this isn't really my passion the category and so I think

optimally you want it all the lineup right you want it you want to have a passion about Katrina cares about fashion like it's something that matters to her it makes a difference it makes a

difference if you want to go all the way like you know and so maybe that's to

higher bar one last one maybe not okay thank you guys for having me I really thank you build small token of appreciation and