Motivation Daily by Motiversity - BILLIONAIRE MINDSET - Best Motivational Speech Compilation

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

This is how you can become as rich as Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, and Mark Zuckerberg. In this motivational speech, the world's richest people like Dan Peña, Keith Krach, and Noah Kagan share their advice to become billionaires in 2024. These 40 minutes will change the next 40 YEARS of your life. “You either master money, or, on some level, money masters you.” ― Tony Robbins Speakers:Jaspreet SinghMarcus TaylorYouTube: https://bit.ly/MarcusATaylorChannelInstagram: http://bit.ly/3aLfu3PFacebook: http://bit.ly/2TB9uoiTwitter: https://bit.ly/3xXlFCPBook Marcus to speak at your organization: https://bit.ly/BookMarcusATaylor Walter BondNoah KaganTom BilyeuLisa BilyeuKeith Krach Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello listeners, Motivosity is excited to share that we have launched a new podcast called Morning Motivation by Motivore. If you are looking to start your day with positivity and the most uplifting motivational audio, this is the show for you. For today's episode of Motivation Daily by Motivority Podcast, we are sharing a recent episode from the Morning Motivation Podcasts. If you like it, go follow the show. New episodes are being released every week. The link is in the description. Wealth is mindset before it hits your bank account. When it comes to the differences between the rich and the poor,

it doesn't start with how much money you make. It doesn't start with what degree you have. It doesn't start with who your parents are. It doesn't start with what background you have. It starts with what mindset you have. And this is really the root of wealth. It's your mindset. You've never thought about being a billionaire.

You can't become a billionaire unless you think about it. Find a mentor that has been where you want to be. And shoot for the moon. Entrepreneurs have a greater capacity for uncertainty. They stay up late. They work longer. They are more focused. If you're going to be an entrepreneur,

you're going to need to lead. How far can your eyes see? Some people eyes see welfare. Some people eyes see WIC and food stamps. But some people eyes see 100,000. Some people I see a million. Some people I see a billion.

Can I ask you a question? What do your eyes see? What is your vision? I do think you have to have some level of dream that's bigger than your fear. There's a lot more smarter people out there than they give themselves credit for. The only difference is that I start. How do you get a part of it today right now? You've got to be thinking what's going to progress me towards my goal.

It makes me go, hey, I'm not Elon Musk smart, so I'm going to have to work harder, work differently, surround myself with intelligent people. You must work hard in pursuit of a set of skills that allows you to serve not only yourself but other people. An entrepreneur is drug, is self-discipline, an obsession with progress and evolution, A disruptive entrepreneur is addicted to success. They are addicted to performing under pressure. They are addicted to results. Make yourself rich before you make everybody else rich.

I don't want you to never have the nice things. I want you to have the nice car. I want you to go on the nice vacations. I want you to have the nice home, but I want you to be able to afford it first. And right now, the most important thing financially is to make yourself rich first. And ironically, the people that are looking at,

Looking rich are sacrificing their real richness. What would you say is the worst advice you see or hear being dispensed in the world? It's easy to get rich, and it's not easy. It's ballbusting. It takes a lot of human sacrifice, but you've got to really want it. I mean, you have to want it more than the air that you breathe. What are you doing on your phone all day? There's probably something within there that's a billion dollar opportunity.

The crazy part about business, you only need one hit. That's it. Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett. All these people really just did one thing. But I've worked directly for Zuckerberg, Dustin Moscovitz, Matt Kohler, these are all billionaires. Sean Parker, been around Peter Thiel a little bit. I think the two biggest kind of surprises, two or three of them.

One, they didn't set out to become a billionaire. They just really cared about a problem. Now, the second part of that, most of them didn't get to become a billionaire super rich for 20 years. and recognizing that and being like, okay, cool. If I can be patient and focus on longevity, I can become a millionaire, multimillionaire, maybe billionaire or beyond. Things that's common, especially for employees,

is thinking that they can't escape being an employee. You know, it does take time, patience, and belief, dream, fantasy, and through that bad, you can create the reality. I've done a lot of things, man. I've been swinging for a long time, and that's something that's available to everyone, and I do think that's missed out on, that there's a lot of ordinary people being rich and being successful,

and people think it's an exclusive club. And that's just not true. I tried 24 different businesses to finally get to Absumo to finally eventually get rich. Think about in your own life and your own businesses. Like what is the thing you're looking forward to and excited about? And it can even be small. Like one of my phrases I like is put it on the calendar. What's on the calendar?

What are you looking forward to? What you're excited about? And then the reality is that you can actually get going towards that dream sooner than you realize. Everyone should be an entrepreneur, everyone, because if you get fired today, what's your backup plan? Go on Indeed.com and pray. Like having an entrepreneurship where you can have your own business, and if you start it right now, not how, you just get started. And that, a lot of what we cover that is exactly a million dollar weekend. You can do it in a weekend, which everyone has.

They can change your life for 48 hours. You have the option. And a lot of people, let's take apps soon.com. We have a lot of people who have very successful side businesses, and they're happy with their day jobs. And that's great. But I think people don't swing enough. They don't even get started swinging. And that's, you know, they're not ready on the sidelines.

And there's never, there's never a good time. The best time is right now. It's not yesterday because that passed. It's not tomorrow because you don't know. It's right now. There's 3,100 billioners on the planet, which is not that many. So if you need to, if you want to meet one and learn from one, that's a really great cheat code of life. And they're accessible.

And so taking a step back around interviewing billioners on our YouTube channel and then myself running almost $100 million year of business at absumo.com, It's the power of asking is the most powerful thing that no one is really improving on or really getting started on. And that's available. There's no exclusivity on it. The upside of asking is unlimited and the downside is a moment of discomfort. The second thing with this YouTube channel from interviewing billionaires and millionaires is that there's so many different ways of getting rich. I thought that everyone else is only, you can only get rich on the computer on these worldwide webs. I didn't know how to do it, but I thought that was the only way. And so through the YouTube channel, it's been so powerful and so special.

There's Larry Janesky. He's making $600 million a year on basements. You have this lady Jan, which I guess it's kind of funny. Your name is Jan. She does jam. She got rich selling strawberries. There's Michael Hudner who did ships. There's Rafa and James who did energy trading.

There's such a phenomenal variety of people that are getting rich outside of just computers. And I think that's so exciting to think about, hey, what is the area that? that I really like. Is it cooking? Is it doing landscaping? Is it computers? And the ability in that to create a lifestyle and a lot of money around areas that we're interested in. You hear all these, like, I'd say fake entrepreneurs or fake coaches, they don't actually have any real businesses. They're like, you got a 10x today. And you got a 5X. If you're not 5X and you're failing. And I was like, I've done that. But it's also interesting. What if you, our goals now for Appsuma.com is to grow 10% next year. And it's been that for quite a lot of time.

And the reality is when you set less ambitious goals for yourself, you can stick with them for longer because you're not burnt out, you're not tired. You can sustain. And then by having less ambitious goals, you also have creative freedom because you're not stressed about hitting a target. And that gives you the ability to create 10x opportunities because you're like, okay, cool, I'm not worried about making money in that, but I can go do things like potentially, you know, be moonshots and really drive the company for the future. There's a lot more smarter people out there than they give themselves credit for. The only difference is that I start. That's the biggest difference. But I would say the success of a founder and success if you want to be an employee CEO within

a company is how are you being resourceful? How are you solving the goal and the problems and the priorities with the resources that are available? Most people sit and they complain like, oh, I don't have this. Like there's a lot of people, I'm not getting paid enough. Well, what are you doing about it? Did you put together a proposal? Did you go look at comparison analysis?

Did you go create more revenue so it's obvious that people should get pay you more? you're going somewhere in a car, you're like, of course I want a destination. Then why don't we replicate that in business? If you look at all the best CEOs today, the ones that I admire, almost all of them are immigrants. You know, my father's an immigrant, didn't speak English, came to this country. Sotcha, Microsoft. Name these companies. I mean, just most of them, the guy running Google, Sundar, a lot of the ones.

I mean, even Elon Musk, who he was debatably a great CEO, you know, South Africa. And so what is it with them that we can all learn from? And at Absumo.com, we have Amin from Iran, my father's from Israel, Alona's from Uzbekistan, Sean is from London, Vanessa's from Columbia. Like, you know, what is it about immigrants that we can all copy? Because that is what built America was, well, y'all came here from somewhere else. And so the two things that I've really struck with me, and I saw this woman who exemplified it.

Her name was Sharon. And she kicked so much. And she was working basically at the Best Western, serving breakfast. And if you've never been in a Best Western, It should be called the okay Western. Right? It sucks. It sucks.

But she was working like she was at, you know, the four seasons. I could not believe it. She's like bringing me a pancake. She's doing all these things. And she was acting like a founder and an immigrant. I would say she is an immigrant. And I asked her, I said, you know, tell me more what's really going on. She's like, there's two things.

It's my attitude and it's my effort. Because that's in control, that you're totally in control of your attitude. And that's what I look for when I work with people and we hire people at absolutely when I'm going to. and her effort. There's literally no restriction on effort. There's no law. The only law is 24 hours.

Besides that, you can work as hard as you want. A lot of my success is just because I'm in the market and in the market does well. But I'm curious about these things, number one. So I was curious about social networking and I was like, man, money. I think worldwide it's pretty important. I think there's going to be something if you have a free money tool, that's going to be big. Same thing. Then with Facebook games, that was going to be big.

Then I did payments for games. That was big. And then I did kind of a coupon business, which became absumo. That was big. Then we built SumoMe.com. That was big, which is software tools. So ideally, number one, you're curious. Number two, how do you get a part of it today, right now, not how?

Don't worry that you don't have a website. Don't worry, you don't have a big social media presence. But what can you take action on to put yourself in that space? So can you be in a community online? Can you geographically move? Can you start creating in that space? So I think people are curious maybe, and they can find it, but they don't necessarily try it and understand it,

and they don't do anything about it. And I think the biggest thing for everyone out there is, What are you doing on your phone all day? There's probably something within there that's a billion dollar opportunity. Same thing on what you're doing outside. Same thing what you're watching on content. And just being a little bit more curious than taking action around that. I think money is very sensitive.

I think we're taught a lot about how to create it. But definitely there's much more there as well, how to enjoy it and different things that people enjoy. You know, a lot of the interesting thing about success is that it's always externalized. Right? It's like, that person is an icon. That thing is successful. They're doing well. And I really think it's like when do we finally feel like we're doing what we think our potential is.

And that is our own icon, our own legendary status. And I would say around 40 is when I finally felt more internal validation. I stopped focusing on so much of the external validation. Like how much money do I have? Do I have more than that guy or girl? Did I do the things externally wanting versus like, am I doing really what I want? And I'm proud of the hard work that I'm doing for myself. And around 40, I would say I'm really proud of what I've been able to do.

How is it that some people can become so incredibly wealthy while the majority people don't? It's not that they have some special superpower. It's not that they own some special skill. It's not that they're so much smarter than people. It's not that they work so much harder. It's that they believe that they can. And then they use their time differently. If you go about life and you say, the government's the reason why I'm broke.

My greedy corporation is the reason why I'm stuck. a job that I hate. I can't change my life because of X, Y, and Z. You keep pointing your fingers as to why you can't succeed. Well, it's going to be impossible for you to succeed. The best return that I got on my investment isn't the real estate investments. It's not the stock market investments that I made. It's not the startup investments that I made. It's the investments that I made of myself. Number one, hustle. Number two, try to spend as little money as possible until you make money. Entrepreneurship is hard. You got to work a lot. And in the early days, I mean, I was working around the clock, seven days a week, never took a vacation, never spent money.

I mean, you got to be willing to work. And understanding that it takes time, I say a decade of sacrifice. If you really want to see success in business, there's a lot of people on the internet selling this crap that you can do it in six months. Yeah, you can do it in six months if you put in the decade of learning how it works. But you can't bypass that effort of learning, that effort of going through the mistakes. the effort of everything. Yeah, education can shorten that time, but you can't bypass all that effort. Building a business takes a lot of effort, a lot of time, and a lot of work. Investments that I put into my own financial education have paid off many, many, many, many, many times over, and you can't see those

returns anywhere else. You know, they say that the best investment you can make is in you. I would recommend that you go out and start by reading 25 books. Find the top 25 books in financial education and read them. Find the top five bucks in money management and investing, the top five books in starting a business, the top five books in scaling a business, the top five books in managing a business, and the top five books of entrepreneur biographies.

And it doesn't matter which ones you pick, find the ones with the highest rates. the highest reviews and just read them this is going to cost you less than five hundred dollars but when you do that you're gonna be able to get an MBA level education without paying the price of an MBA and you're gonna look at the world your money and the way you use your money completely differently once you finish these books if you go around saying I can't have that nice thing because I'm broke I can't have the nice thing because I grew up in a bad

environment I can never become successful because of the way I look I can never do it because of whatever, I can guarantee you are never going to become successful. But if we turn this around and you say, huh, how can I become successful? How can I make more money? How can I become wealthy? How can I get out of the situation that I'm in? Now your brain looks at problems completely differently because of now you're not complaining about the problem, but you're trying to find a solution to the problem. And that's the biggest difference between somebody who becomes wealthy and somebody who does not. It starts with the mindset because then once you change the mindset, you're going to start changing your actions.

Now you're going to find out, oh, I don't need to spend money at Gucci. Oh, I don't need to go out and eat every single day. Oh, I can save money here. Oh, I can ask for a raise at my job. Oh, maybe I can start a side hustle. Or maybe I can start my own business. Oh, you mean I could actually potentially take my income from my job? $40,000 a year to $400,000 a year, that's possible because when most people hear that,

you think it's impossible. Somebody like me could never go from $40,000 to $400,000 a year, but until you believe it's possible, you're never going to put in the action to actually make it possible. We're all given 24 hours in a day. So the difference between somebody who becomes successful versus somebody who does not is now what input you put in those 24 hours. If you're spending your time on Netflix, if you're spending a time playing video games, if you're spending all of the time doing things that don't add any value financially to your life, well, if you compare that to somebody who's now working, who's now learning, who's investing in the education, you're going to see two completely different outputs.

Now this is where you don't want to get into the trap of just thinking, you know what, I'm just going to work really hard. I'm going to work 20 hours a day because, well, you can work really hard and still be broke. Now the question is how can you make your hard work the most scalable because that's now what will take you from Okay, I don't want to be broke. So now you start working hard, which is great. I 100% recommend working hard Because without that hard work is going to be impossible for you to see any real level of success But now you're working hard the next question is how can you make your hard work the most rewarding? What can you do to make that hard working be the biggest dividend?

and the highest returns. And this is where people say work smart. You know, some people say work smart, don't work hard. I think that's a bunch of crap. I think you need to work smart and work hard. They go hand in hand because that hard work is going to allow you to scale your smart work, but you now have to understand, okay, I want to become more financially successful. So now how do I do that? What is the financial education? What am I working for? When I make more money, what am I going to do with this money? Where am I going to invest it? How am I earning this money? what can I do in terms of taxes to protect my wealth? What can I do with my investments to scale them? What can I do to build an asset? What can I do to build a business? What can I do to scale the assets that I do own?

So now you start asking these questions. And I know this is getting very deep in some of these topics, but it all starts with that mindset of believing that is possible for you. Because if you don't believe it's possible for you, you're right. But if you believe it's possible for you, you're also right. and whatever your belief is is going to change what output you take. You got to work hard, man. You know, I don't recommend what I do to anybody. But when I started, I had people I needed to prove wrong. I had the whole world telling me that I could never be an entrepreneur.

I had everybody telling me that I was dumb for trying to leave the comfort of trying to be a doctor. I had the whole world telling me that I was throwing every sacrifice my parents made for me away. so I had to work because I knew I didn't want to let that be reality. And I worked 20-hour days, seven days a week. That meant I was sleeping four hours a night consistently. I mean, it's a grind, a real grind you have to go through. And everyone's different. I can't do that same four hours of sleep in the night now.

I need more sleep. I need more rest. That's why I don't tell people what to do. But you've got to be willing to put in the work. that nobody else does because if you're not willing to do that you're going to be outworked and you're going to get beat and business it's a war man people are everyone's out there trying to beat you and if you're not willing to put in the work then someone else is going to come in and they're going to beat you you can become anything you want to become but you're going to

have to pay a heavy price to get there so the question is what is it that you want to do most of you aren't going to know the answer to that so you're going to go explore as Kevin Kelly says don't pre-men optimise. Go experiment. Go try things. Just like Lisa was saying, go play around, go enjoy yourself, figure out what it is that you like. Nothing is ever going to be self-evident. You're never going to come across something like, this is what I meant to do with the rest of my life. You were going to find something that gives you more energy than it takes. When you find something that when you do it, you're like, ooh, this is fun and you're actually energized by it, then you're going to go down the

path of actually gaining skills in that. The more you engage with that, if that continues to be more fun, now it will become a fascination. Once something becomes a fascination, now we're going to really figure out if we can serve other people with that set of skills. If you can, you've got a hope of turning that into a passion. There's a saying called brain plasticity. Your brain actually changes, no matter how old you are, your brain changes. And I was like, okay, well, if that's true, then if I put time and energy into something, my brain will change, I'll get better at it, and that will improve my skills. And then another obsession of mine is to get people to understand. skills have utility. You don't read a book to get an A on the test. You don't read a book to check something off a list. You read a book to learn something that lets you do something in the real world that other people can't do.

Elon Musk has a great quote. You're paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of the problems you solve. So you're learning something so you can solve problems, hard problems, that other people can't solve. And so once you understand, oh, this is mechanical. My brain is disdainting. My brain is disresolved. designed a certain way. There's a certain path that I have to walk to gain skills. And then skills let me do something other people can't do. And by doing things other people can't do, I'm able to serve myself and the group. That's fulfillment. Fulfillments the point. It is so mechanistic. It's all just deadly simple. And when I'm giving honest answers, I'm always looping around, this is how the human mind works. And every time, every time I say something controversial. It's always about biology. I'm just like, okay.

Like, if you want to fight it, fight it. You're going to die tired, and I will propel myself forward because I'm not judging what is true. I don't deal with the world the way that I wish it were. I deal with the world the way that it is. What I'm good at and what we're good at together is not being right all the time. It's basically learning from your mistakes.

So the physics of progress is you come up with a hypothesis. It should be as informed as possible. figure out a way to turn that into something you can actually do. So you're going to run a test. Then you actually run that test. And then this is where most people fall down. You have to lower your psychological defenses to stare nakedly at the results. And oftentimes that's going to be you didn't do something well. You didn't think through this right. You made a mistake somewhere. And then if you're willing to do that and you learn from that, then you can re-inform your hypothesis, make it a little bit better run that whole system again. And once you get in that loop, then you can really make progress.

The key to me being driven is identifying what my passion is and my mission is. So if I don't have a passion and mission, then I don't have a drive. When we started impact theory, it really was to make change. So Quest was the answer to helping people in our lives who were struggling with weight. And impact theory was the answer to people in our lives who were struggling with a poor mindset. And someone like my mom, Quest was already a billion dollar company and my mom was still morbidly obese. And I was trying because I care about her so much. I just want her to live for a long time. I don't care about what she looks like.

She's like, Mom, I want you to eat healthy as you can be around for a long time. And I tried to, you know, give her free Quest bars. I offered to pay for trainers for her. And every time I would say, you know, Mom, like, what can I do? How can I help? She just said, I'm too old. I can't. I can't use the way I'm too old.

And over time we realized the power of the mind. The Quest was amazing for people that were going into the gym, picking up a Quest bar or like thinking, oh, I want to eat something healthy today. But it meant nothing to the people that felt depressed, had anxiety, or didn't believe themselves enough to even go after picking up a healthy protein bar like my mom. So for me, it really was the mindset, was the big key.

And then over time, as we started to work mindset and building the studio because that was our background, we really started to realize that to create actual impact like actual impact we need to go after the younger kids because the age of imprint is between 11 and 15 that's the period where they're most susceptible to the messaging and so if we really want to do no BS what is it actually going to take to make global change on people's mindset you've got to get them young so we basically sat down and said what does that look like what type of studio do we build and then for me my personal

thing has just been leaning more and more into young girls. If I could wake up every single freaking day and fight for that 14 year old girl that was me that didn't believe in herself, that felt ugly, that was teased, that was made fun of from my looks, I will fight for that 14 year old girl so that if I can touch her then and let her know and have her help her to believe, she can become anything she wants if she sets her mind to it and works hard, then I feel like. my job is done. But it has to be to me on a global scale at that age, that's how you really make real change. So every day I wake up for that 14-year-old Lisa. Passion is about acquiring enough

skills that other people care about and you. You have to care about it first and foremost. But if you care about it and other people care about it, now you get into that reciprocal relationship where, and it could be playing the guitar, it could be playing video games, right? Think about somebody that's just an absolute God-tier gamer. And other people will show up at a stadium to watch them play. They'll sit on Twitch for hours watching them play. So you're doing something that brings joy to other people. But they had to get freakishly good at that.

They had to spend a lot of time improving their skill sets. They worked hard to gain a set of skills that allows them to serve not only themselves but other people. That is the name of the game. The problem is people are expecting something to be self-evident. They are told a lie that they're born with a purpose. You're not born with a purpose. You're going to decide that this passion, this thing that you've worked your ass off to get good at that allows you to serve not only yourself but other people, that's now your purpose.

So when I was a quest, my purpose was making sure that people had food that they could choose based on taste and it happened to be good for them. At impact theory, the goal is to give people a growth mindset at scale through story. So I'm just doing entertaining things, but it's designed to help them get that right mindset. That is my purpose. That wasn't my purpose when I was 12 or 20 or even 30. So you're going to decide and then you're going to do things to reinforce that in your own mind. The most successful people in the world are the people that can self-soothe. So can you avoid being triggered?

If you're being triggered and you look outward and you're angry at the person that triggered you, that's weakness. You are manifesting weakness and you have to go, ooh, someone has triggered me. That means I have an insecurity around this thing. I need to address my insecurity. and then that's going to put you in a far more powerful position to move forward. So the people that are successful, they can self-soothe, they can stay emotionally calm in the midst of a storm. When everybody else is panicking, they're only looking at solutions.

And that's the other thing about the no bullshit, what would it take game? The whole point is to switch you out of problem mode into solution mode. Most people can only see these are the 152 ways that this could go wrong. And we started doing that to say, no matter how outrageous, there is a way to pull this off. So what would need to be true for this to work? Stop telling me all the things that aren't going to work. Tell me the thing that is going to work.

And once you get to that, okay, well, if we did X, Y, Z, it would work. Okay. Now, are we willing to do that yes or no? And if we're not, is there another thing that we are willing to do? But at least now we're operating from a position of that would work. And successful people are about that. They are good decision makers. They are hyper resilient.

They don't stop at failure. They don't get in their own way from an ego perspective. They're looking nakedly at their own inadequacies. And they've got enough confidence to get people going behind them. It is this weird thing of, dude, I fear that I'm too dumb to do the things that I want to do in my life. I never know if I'm right. And I go all out every fucking time. And I'm just trying to make it happen.

And so I have the courage of conviction to say, I know about myself. I will keep going until I figure this out. Not that I already understand everything that I have. the courage to figure this out and then I will go through and I will weather that storm people are intoxicated by that certainty where I'm like hey get behind me I will get us through this I'm not telling you I already understand everything but I am telling you I will not stop fighting until we get to the other side dude the way that people will pile in behind you when you do that I have the chills now

because I know how people respond to that so if you can manage your emotions if you've got the courage to fight through that storm If you're not easy to knock off your pedestal and you're humble enough to know that you're almost certainly making mistakes so that you know when to correct course, that's the recipe. Legacy to me was creating impact that when you're gone, someone will, you have touched their lives. And to be able to meet a woman that maybe has read my book radical confidence or has said that they've seen a piece of my question. content and I've taken them from believing that they were maybe worthless or had no value or they didn't believe in themselves and something they heard me say shifted their mindset enough that they believed in themselves after that and they still have to do the work and

things like that but being able to make that shift is such an incredible gift I think like a gift for me that I'm able to see other people shift their lives it's amazing and so again I can wake up every day thinking in that 14 year old girl that maybe is teased or bullied and thinks that she's no good and yet something that I do makes her believe in herself that just makes my heart sing and then eventually I think ideally it's for someone to say they have radical confidence but they don't realize it even came from me that I've impacted culture and the way we think about ourselves and the way we think about confidence so much that radical confidence has now become a blueprint for all, I want to say women, but of course, for everybody

to the point where they don't even realize it stemmed from me because it's such ingrained in how they think. When you know who you're fighting for, like you can picture them, they're real people to you, and you know that the gap between them continuing to suffer and having a tremendous life is a set of ideas and you just have to get clever enough into how you get those ideas across, it's very, very easy to get obsessed. This is, I am obsessed. I'm not, it's literally, I'm not even thinking clearly. I, I have one vice and that vice is stress. And I endure stress in the name of getting those ideas across. I'm already rich. So what would be the point of doing all this? It obviously isn't for money. And the part of the business that has

made us quote unquote micro famous. It's like we could scale back to just that, but we don't. So because I think that the stuff that's made us micro famous affects the 2%. So everybody listen to this, you're in the 2%. The 98% are never coming to this channel. So those people, like today I said to Lisa, the last few days, my blood pressure has been so high, keep getting headaches. And I'm like, you better have, when that happens and you go, why am I doing this? You better be compelled to your core by the reason. I've had a good fortune of living the American dream. I just kind of had an itching to go run my own thing.

You know, the only way it could be a failure is not to have failed. To be honest, the first company I went up was a total disaster. It was like running a 100-yard dash and being smacked in the face with a 2-by-4. I'll never forget. I think it was my second day on the job. The CEO said, Keith, how old I just say this at the next point? board meeting and I go Maria I will not say that that would be a lie you get that big pit in your stomach and you just turn warm it's like I just made the biggest mistake of my life

you know obviously my drive comes from my upbringing and it's about paying it forward and giving it back you know one of the things my dad always said is the key is when the world hands you a sack of sour lemons the objective of the game was a turn to sweet lemonade and I was fortunate enough to be able to do that and and I ended up hooking up with three PhD scientists from the IBM research labs that had a technology. It would change the way mechanical engineering was done. It took about two and a half years, but it worked. And we changed the way mechanical engineering is done with that software from RAS and

we created a thing called mechanical design synthesis and design optimization. We were all set to take it public and then a company called Paramount Technology came in and bought it from us. Our revenue doubled quarter over quarter for 12 quarters in a row. We took it, you know, we took it public after two and three quarters years, got up to 40 billion, and to this day, $3.7 trillion of transaction. Trillion. More than all the trade in the Western Hemisphere, more than eBay, Alibaba, and Amazon combined,

go through that Eribe network. The lesson I learned, and it was always straight in front of my face. You know, I grew up in the Midwest, great Midwestern values, integrity was key. same at General Motors, Purdue, all of that, and there was a different value system. So from there on out, always job was to make sure every organization, every company, had a great set of values and integrity, because people can say, hey, I don't like how you look. I don't like where you went to school, but they can't take your integrity away. You know, it's a tremendous honor to be here.

This truly is my happy place. And so for the class of 2021, and your parents, your families, and your friends, I just have one question for you. Is Purdue the greatest university or what? First of all, you have to trust yourself. And, you know, that's, because you can't trust anybody else unless you trust yourself. And, you know, I found a way to build that trust is keep jumping in water over your head. We can come back to that, but so you go into a new environment, go into a new company, something like that.

So how do you build trust? Well, you do it one-on-one. And so the question is, can you build trust at a launch? Can you do it at a dinner? And what I found, one of the things that works, is you can't be afraid to be vulnerable. Because when you're vulnerable with somebody, about 95% of the time, they'll reciprocate in kind.

And when both sides are vulnerable, that forms a connection. And that is a way that I found all the time. Or also another one is tell me your story. Everybody loves to tell their story. And I'm just naturally a curious person. So I love here. That never bores me. So it's really the power of one-on-one relationships.

We need to go back to this playbook. You went through it really quick, but it feels like this playbook has built a couple multi-billion-dollar businesses. that conduct trillions of dollars worth of business. Walk us through that playbook again. The vision, right? And so for your vision, and our vision at Aribu is really simple. We said we want to build a great sustaining company into the 21st century.

The mission is all about leadership because the object of the game, particularly in Silicon Valley, is to be the category king. Because when you're the category king, you get 80% of the industry resources and 80% of market cap. Players two, three, four, five, six, they could fight over the scrap. So our mission was to create a category called Business to Business, Electronic Commerce, and to be the leader. And then the next thing under that is your values. So, right, integrity is there, courage, high ambition, accountability, respect, the basics. And then we had a set of team rules that kind of personify those values.

And by the way, same team rules for all the companies. The first one is direct open and honest communication. In a word, the truth. Because I had seen General Motors, when you go through 15 levels, you know, I started at the lowest of the low production form to the highs of the high where I was a staff for the board of directors. I could see how that message would change, right? The second one is no ideas, a bad idea.

And then we added parentheses unless CEOs. So because it's all about making a safe environment. And you can make the safe environment when you mock out to CEO. Plus it's fun. The third one is always raise the standard in everything we do and our people, our processes, and our products. And if somebody can't keep up with that standard, you've got to do something about it. Otherwise, you've automatically lowered your standard.

And the fourth one is we're a team first and functional specialist second. So you developers put your feet in the customer's shoes. You sales guys don't make commitments we can't keep. And then the fifth one is the most powerful one of all. And that is hire the best people, especially if they're better than us. And the story out to Silicon Valley is an interesting one for you. I mean, you grew up, small town Ohio. You worked in your dad's machine shop as a welder, went to school to become an engineer.

And I think the plan was to go back to the machine shop. But something, it was a curveball that happened. there. It starts off in small town, Ohio, where my father ran a machine shop and my mother was a teacher. At age 12, I became a welder in my dad's shop. In good times, he employed five workers. In tough times, I was his only employee. My father encouraged me to get some college knowledge and come back as an engineer to help him grow the business into a big company of 10 employees. While I did become an engineer, I never went back to work with my dad. But he was so proud I was a boiler maker and just loved the fact that was also the name of his favorite after work

Adult Beverage here's two you pops and GM came on campus My sophomore year and gave me a full ride they was a GM scholarship. So that was a real big turn in point because along with that one You know amazing summer jobs and all that kind of stuff and and and then GM sent me off to graduate school to to. And then my dad started to call him generous motors. You're being humble. Summer student, but by age 26, you became the youngest VP in their history. What would they have been seeing in you for that to happen? You know, I think they saw somebody who wasn't afraid to take a risk and somebody who wasn't

afraid to own something. And this summer before, I started full-time at General Motors between years at business school, I worked in the New York Treasurer's office. And that basically basically as a staff for the board of directors. My first job was I was a second shift production foreman on the chassis line of Cadillac. But what I saw happening at that time was robotics. This was in the early 80s, it was popping up. I had wrote an equivalent to like a thesis

at Harvard Business School on utilization robotics in Japanese auto industry. So I went and I pitched the board of directors. General Motors should get in the robotics business. And to my surprise, they said, okay. How should we do it? Because they had like the most sophisticated robot technology. I said, you know, we need to join venture because we need a broad product line.

And then they said, with who? And I go, well, can I come back to the next board meeting? And I'll never forget. I came back and I said, we should join venture with a company called Fujitsu Fannik. I understand at that time, all those board of directors, they were World War II veterans. And they said, you mean partner with the Japanese? I go, yes, partner with the Japanese. And we built that up.

Today, it's the largest manufacturer of industrial robots in the world. And the average age of that team probably was in the early 30s. And we put GE, IBM, and Westinghouse out of the business. We just became dominant in that area. You talk about ownership, and I think that's a word that probably connects to a lot of our viewers. But, you know, they'd also be thinking, how do I do that? Like, how did you have the confidence, the ownership to say, you know, I'm ready to go pitch to the board.

Yeah. You know, I think it comes down to, I built a high performance team as we were getting going, right? And that's the most important job of any CEO. And I really believe that the organization, the company, with the best people wins. And the key is how to get them work together as a team, right? You know, the way I believe in that is you've got to have a North Star, a noble call, You also need an enemy because, you know, that stops the water cooler talk, nothing gets the blood stir. You know, the United States State Department we call it adversary, but in business we call it an enemy.

And then the third thing you need is you need a plan. And with all these companies that I had a good fortune to build and these different organizations around, we would always have a playbook. And that's basically the vision, the mission, the values, the team rules, long-term goals, strategy, boil down to execution. So it really was a way to maintain alignment and a tremendous tool when it comes to scaling.