The High School Dropout Who Made $2B & Bought an NBA Team

this is ryan smith the guy went from a one point nine gpa high school dropout to a two billion dollar net worth but this isn't your normal dropout story at some point you have a conversation with yourself like okay i gotta make this happen yeah i gotta find a gear that i've never used before when he dropped out he had no plan no money and nowhere to live there's a great story about the early days of q tricks and focus we weren't religious about it and it was actually an incredible forcing function for me some point you could offer five hundred million dollars sell the company and you turned it down every other person i would talk to about this offer was like take it and run alright that you're building it from your family's basement all the way so they ends up basically sell for eight billion dollars you end up going public i didn't do anything else when i doing q i didn't invest i didn't sit on boards no side hustle no side hustle nothing except for hoops what's it like to now own an nba team that's insane my philosophy was don't blink just go i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like the days all on a goal travel never back i wanna start with this like you know you've done what kids like me dream up it's like a build a successful company with my family no less become the super successful guy billionaire nba team owner or he lives this really interesting life what's cool is that if we rewind the clock you were guy who dropped out of high school and had a one point nine gpa in high school so going from a one point nine gpa to like i don't know a two billion dollar net worth that's a pretty big jump we hear these stories where it's like mark zuckerberg bill gates they they were at harvard and then they dropped out with this big grand idea and it came to fruition that's not your story at all so let's do the origin can you take us back you know you're fourteen fifteen sixteen to seventeen years old what was going on in your life at that time yeah i mean instead no secret like my parents split up when i was like fourteen and the world was rocked and you know i was i was very much like okay screw everything no one can tell me what to do and you know i think my parents were trying their hardest to keep us i mean we had five kids they were keeping us all kinda a afloat and i think to be honest with you you know i never really developed the skills for for school and and i didn't think i was really good i knew i was a good athlete i knew i was good at golf and could play poker and like i i knew there was something there but i didn't work hard i didn't finish anything and it was really hard like this concept of finishing and it just never happened and so i think the trajectory i was on at fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen was not a very hopeful one and there was no indication that there was a spark there's no indication that there was good ideas in there right so what was your move so you're not you're not loving school not doing that well no spark there what was the decision to to quit dropout out to to leave yeah i mean it was just kinda forced it was like hey school is like this isn't working out for you like you don't go to class you it's not us it's you study yeah you know there's probably another path for you and i'm an uncle who reached out and said hey ryan you're sixteen we're doing a tech company it was called i'm mall you're not gonna just screw off all day you might as well come work i'm running a sales team come work and i worked in the mail room and i worked with three older gentleman i mean one was in his forty one was there and the founder had just gotten back or someone had just gotten back from soul korea and i would always say like i'm gonna go make money one day i'm gonna go work on the fishing boats in the last because we're paying twenty bucks an hour i'm gonna go do this and my parents are like go do whatever you want just graduate school like we don't care the borrower was really low and like these guys were like no you should go to korea and i was like that sounds and my dad was like if you can pay for it and graduate high school we'll do it so i graduated a high school i got a ged when i was seventeen i went to like a university and just like cranked it out like a you like three months through like packets and like i was with like mothers and like everyone else you and night and i was like i i was like okay i'm gonna crank this thing out and i did it and there was a little bit of a moment like whoa alright when i kinda set my mind something i can do it and then i went out and that's that's when i went to seoul and so you go to sell you're what seventeen years old at this time you have a plan the plan was i communicate i never left utah i i communicate with someone and like we were supposed to show up and like we had jobs they had a house for us they had all these things and you know we had talked to them so i remember getting there and like we had limited cash but we were there we were there to sign a contract and work for a school and move in and we get there and we we go right to the hotel and we're waiting and we call where we're supposed to meet up and no answer no answer no answer no answer next day no answer no answer no answer and we're like what in the world and then finally someone answers and it's a korean woman who didn't speak in english and it was like okay well but this person like i thought we were showing up and they were just gonna i'll be there waiting hey we're so excited to have you and it was exact opposite in like basically after a week in this hotel it was like you have no job you have no house you don't have enough money to be staying in this hotel and so i remember sitting in a in a coffee shop and you know we kinda all called our parents to come home these guys all the parents went to the airport bought of a ticket and they all jumped on the plane but like i sat there my dad's like you're not coming home and i was like what in the world he's like i know what you're gonna do here like you got a chance to go do something and i and i look back as a parent now and i was like what in the world like i would never leave my kid over there but he was like the upside is like way better and so what was your dad was that tough love or was he just sort of like look you just need to look at it this way hanging in there like what what was he what was going through the money you think i have no idea i i like honestly i thought about it so much it's like and that's just my dad like he he's like fine with this kid's failing did you feel like rock bottom at that point oh my word so homes sick in a country no americans no english no money and you just kinda had to go figure it out okay so you meet this guy crash on his couch at some point you have a conversation with yourself like okay i gotta make this happen yeah i gotta find a gear that i've never used to before it's it what to do ended up running into someone who needed an english teacher the school was a ways away i didn't have a place to stay so he said he paid me ten dollars an hour which isn't a lot there so i teach the kids from you know three hours a day in the mornings and i had found out about a place where koreans go to study called the go wan which is like that locker room we just looked at it's about that big but a little bigger no one ever sleeps there and i'd convinced the guy that if i could teach him english one hour a day he'd let me sleep there because they had a shower i i found a little stove i would cook ramen noodles on it because that's all i gonna afford obviously it's tough obviously you're sort of it's like character building moment because you're on your own for so for such an extended period of time but was there like a part of you that was in sort of enjoying mc maneuvering it a little bit not at all this was not no momentum no like at the time there was no like there was no of like myself now looking going okay i'm gonna get crafty edition experience i'm backpack through your have attitude then this was not that i mean this was like i gotta get home right and so you you're teaching one guy did you eventually get more students and how'd you do that in korea there was you know twenty big fifteen to twenty story high rises where everyone lived and i was like okay i'm teaching english i've got twelve hours in the day the better rather than teaching a school it's way better to do these private lessons right and if i could get into one of the high rises and get like starting at four o'clock in the afternoon teach every fifty five minutes right like it's going to be great well how do you do that and i got someone to write at a pager at the time i got someone to write a message in korean and i made like five thousand flyers and i would go in and they'd have these huge mailbox rose but there was a security guard there so i would go in and talk to the security guard and i was like hey man like in english or broken whatever it took i would just try to be their friend okay and i was like let me put these here this let me put these and all these and like well hell and i was like come on and i would normally be pretty successful at it right and then my beep just started hammering i'm blowing up and i was like whoa like this was the first time my life i was like actually there's something in there like you have a good idea and you can execute on it and then i started getting a schedule and like literally like a month later i was making like eight thousand dollars a month is a seventeen year old teaching english and i was like how in the world did i go from there to here that's amazing let's talk about the start of q so you build this company you build it with stewart you build it with your brother with your dad and you're building it from your family's basement all the way you know to the you know to the ends up basically sell for eight billion dollars you end up going public you you have a pretty crazy story over like a twenty something year period where you know what's the origin was it what was the idea and you know what was the early days like yeah so i think i think the the origin and if you talk to all of us it's it's it's it's a little different like it was really my dad and i started i was doing an internship a he packard in la and i get a call that my father had cancer and it was terminal like or pretty close i mean it was like three years throw can't there three years to live max and probably a couple months and he ended up going through and recovering you know and is alive today which is amazing story but i kinda had a moment where i just left california i was working in la and came back deferred school and said i'm spending this whole semester with my dad my dad was always working on technology he come up with this idea of like collecting research online and it seems normal now but at the time it wasn't trusted right well it definitely what companies doing before q yeah they were they were either doing customer satisfaction paper pencil or not doing it at all okay like the thought of asking your employees feedback or your your customer fee feedback but you that seems normal now table stakes there wouldn't do it and so they'd have blind spots everywhere and he would get paid a lot of money to go in there and help companies do this and it was like a novel thing we were gonna go put the customer at the table we were gonna have them part of the decision making process and this is what we were gonna come up with and so he had this idea but he was always messing around and he never really went commercial with anything well i wasn't a he packard and i gotten pretty i learned some tricks around how to i go to market over the phone with technology and so i saw what he was working on and i was like actually i had just been doing that with like some software and support stuff what if we applied it here and so he would come home from as like radiation and chemo and you're just kinda sitting there and i'd be like let's do a business let's let me take this to the world he's like well i have any money i can't pay you i said well let's just let's just go fifty fifty and you know by the time he recovered he couldn't speak we had ten customers and like we we kept finding people that would believe in what we were doing and it was a little gerry maguire moment where i had to find like one person right who was like then take it to the world and like that's kinda how the business started in the basement and and so he couldn't talk at the time even he's what he's right waiting on a board and you're the guy on and i'm on the phone and these people are asking like about deep statistical stuff i don't know and i'm like going back and forth and you know it was a pretty gnarly time i wish i had more pictures in that moment but no one thought it was gonna be anything right and everyone's like oh you started with your with your dad and it was just great like no one like my roommates didn't think it gonna be something like it i didn't even think it was he didn't think it was gonna be something hey let's take quick break for a message from our sponsor hubspot who's making this episode possible listen if you're trying to build something big and i'm talking about a hundred million dollar or a billion dollar company one of the most important things is to focus on the market where is the opportunity you are like a surfer on a surfboard and you were trying to find the biggest best wave possible for you to go on well hubspot put together a cheat sheet that is studying and sort of reverse engineering what's working today so they're looking at the top performing into industries that you could be looking at the funding routes that work the best and the growth strategies does the fastest strength companies are using so if you want a one pager that is a cheat sheet on the the big company playbook you can get it right now just either scan this qr code that you see on the screen or click the link in the description below aren't back to the show there's a great story about the early days of q tricks and focus and i i love this when i researching it i guess it was a junior brother who were talking about like well we have this market we can sell to these people these people and you guys at some point decided no no we wanna narrow down so only the universities and the part i love because focus is a word anybody can throw around right but like if you take focus as an action word what does it mean it means saying no to a bunch of otherwise believable ideas and the thing i read in the research was brother was basically like you know if you're talking him about some other type of customer he would you he's hanging up the phone he's like unless you're talking about these two hundred fifty universities i don't wanna hear it and so could you tell me about like how that went down and like just probably two thousand six two thousand seven and we had found some traction in universities we had found people like my dad my first customer was angelo lee at the kellogg business school she made all of our students use q and then it just kinda went from there and i can go through every professor and kinda how the whole thing worked but my brother at the time was a google he was an really early google and at this time like i didn't have very many people to call and you know i didn't know how good he was but i knew he was like running a big piece of the internet okay right and and google was kinda having the moment and he had been assigned to go run china for google so he was living in beijing he was working with kai fu lee and like running google china wow so for me i think when i would call him and ask for advice and we started developing this dialogue he was four years old me so we were close but not that close i think for him it was like dude you're all over the place i don't have time for this if you're gonna call me stay on script stay focused and like actually finish something and it was a little bit more like get out of here right but he was religious about it and it was actually an incredible forcing function for me and the team to be like okay we're gonna go get the top one hundred universities and nothing else matters right these forcing functions are so powerful know it's like if we play basketball like if if there's a shot blocker it's like you can't bring that weak stuff in here you can't show up on the call and be scattered brand because you know how the other person is gonna respond we know what he's coming at me even when they're not the room you start yeah you know what am i gonna tell what's a story on our next call that we have what progress am i gonna show him right am i am i am i actually telling him the same story i told him last week so what did we actually get done this week right i've gotta actually come up with a new story and you know ultimately i was able to recruit him out of google to move back to utah and that that happened in two thousand nine so we were seven years in and and then when we got together magic started happening mh why is that what what what what change just because he's that good or what would you mean i mean i didn't i knew he was good i didn't know he was a top five or six whatever at the time product person in the world and there was a dynamic between us and i'll just be super honest we were brothers we had to love each other and we were just able to push on each other harder than any executive a person i've ever i've ever met right you know with executives i could probably go our team i could probably go three or four rounds on something really hard before someone said uncle with my brother i could go fifteen because we had to wake up and there was no drama there was no nothing like we spoke each other's language but we were so different you know he was full engineer i was full like business and we met on the product side and we almost had to grow together to like almost like a relationship like where like my weaknesses he had to go fill in those gaps my blind and me too yeah i've read something where you were saying that you know it came to you at some point and he's like hey here's my weaknesses what are yours and you're like yeah i had never really thought about it that yeah to that level of detail i'm i'm great right no he's like hey i suck at these five things what do you suck i was like i don't suck anything bro and he was like sucked oh boy and i've heard him say this like my job is to develop my younger brother who does that yeah that's great and when we took money in two thousand eleven sequoia i remember was like we're only doing this if there's a ceo which one of you the ceo so it wasn't really even stated no there's was we said clearly we are c cofounder i'm not working for my little brother right and like i remember sitting in the room i'm looking across from mike mori who gave steve jobs his first dollar and back larry and sergey and like they're like we need a ceo or we're not investing and like as kicking each other into the table literally it was just crickets because i knew where this conversation was going and that i i still remember the silence because we're all just looking at each other and finally he just stands up and slaps the table and he's like it's him and he points at me and he goes i won't do media and it's sat down and like if you find a jared interview right it's rare if you find a jared smith interview it is super rare and you know that was a moment where i was like alright like we'll still operate too in the box we'll divide the world but like it's a cool moment and then it was like your first time ceo they're giving you we're now in the big leagues like we've taken this money from excel there's the largest series a raised in two thousand in in twelve since two thousand eight and olive of tech it's outside of the bay area which i mean sequoia at the time wasn't even investing there so we came out of nowhere the forbes article was like the biggest company no one's ever heard of right and you know you look at that prior time but now the pressure was honest today's episode just brought you by hubspot because you're using only twenty percent of your business data is like dating somebody who only text you in emojis first of all that's knowing and second you're missing a lot of the content but that's how most businesses are operating today they're only using twenty percent of their data unless you use hubspot that's when all your emails your call logs your chat messages just to turn into insights to help you grow your business because all that data makes all the difference learn more at hubspot dot com so wait what year did you start the company two thousand two two thousand two now we're talking about two thousand twelve ten years ten years you have a sign out there in your office that we walked by it says tune out the noise play the long game and there's a picture of a guy just you know i sitting there with his ears plugged and i've had a lot of people in spot i remember when we had jimmy mister mitsubishi now the biggest youtuber in the world but back then and i played him a clip of him like you know ten years prior and he just said matter of fact that he goes i started this when i twelve years old when i was twelve nobody watched thirteen nobody watched fourteen years old nobody watched fifteen nobody by sixteen is anybody ever gonna watch seventeen nobody watched he's like finally when i was nineteen some people started to watch and even then it was nothing you know just relative to how it grew and so he was talking about you know there's this cliche around the you this sort of ten year overnight success but it's real different when you hear somebody just year after year of just obscurity what was that like for you that period but you against the world and and you know i'll i'll never forget once and i think it was like two thousand and four we in a basement and my father was operating he was in one room on his computer like deep into like stat stuff and i was out there and i was having these issues with our website i was like super frustrating because our competition had just raised a bunch of money the product was cheaper than ours they raised forty million dollars and their product was better than ours better cheaper more resources more funding and i'm like that's that's hard like so i was i was frustrated i was like pissed and i was like are we gonna do this what's going on and like i was almost like argument with my father my father's just sitting there and finally like it's the only time i ever saw got get mad and he like slams the table turns around and he's like who's stopping you like who's stopping you from going to do everything you wanna go do and like in that moment it was like a ton of bricks like if we're gonna go do this you're gonna have to do it like you can't blame there's only two of you right like you're actually gonna have to go do it there's not gonna be a shortcut there's not gonna be an easy button like you're gonna have to go and from that moment on i stopped asking him and you know that was kind of that moment don't ask for permission so i have this photo here this is described the scene oh wow so this is this is me and stewart everything in this photo is bought at a salvage sell from campus so like the printers were five dollars on the board i'm making a list of customers and like setting goals like the twenty five k club yeah and seeing how many we can put on sales calls do you think you did those first time which just dial all day all day like emailing dialing going you still remember your your script ring ring what happens oh yeah i mean i would ask people what they're using have they ever heard of us or have they ever done anything like this and telling him the top researchers in the world were using it if i was calling into dallas i would say i was part of the dallas american marketing association and we went to the conference i would say hey can i just walk you through a demo and at the time there was no zoom right so like i would actually get on the phone send them a link and then they would follow along with me right and i could do the demo this is where i've always told our reps like do you know your product i could do the demo on the phone in a car with a link walking them through right without me looking at the screen and explain to them every single thing that's going on what does it take to be great at sales you were great at sales i mean so i think i think sales gets a really bad name because people like use it as okay the salesperson we don't wanna deal with but i remember a moment a lot of authors would use our software to write books and i remember once daniel pink called me it said i'm writing a book and i want your help i said great and he's like he's like what's the title of the book and he said to sell is human and he basically it's a great book about how every single person is a salesperson they're actually trying to get a group of people to go in one direction or another at some point in the day right and i think that when it comes to like software the first of all is you gotta believe in it you've gotta actually believe that your product has value and you know the person on the other one's life's is going to be better if they use it and so in our case we wanted them to run their businesses from the outside in instead of from the inside out we we believe that their employees are their cup were were their biggest assets and like getting a pulse on them more than once a year was probably a good idea and then we said hey actually if your business operated with a cadence right of this data you're gonna win more and so part of it was educating these people that there was a new way and by the way it was cheaper faster and better and if you as a user would embrace this your personal career inside your organization would skyrocket it right because everyone else is guessing and you'll have this massive propensity of being correct all the time wouldn't be great to know wouldn't it be great to know you don't have to guess and so that was the thought and i was like my word like how do we get this to everyone if somebody had a great reframe they were like sales is the generous act of letting the right person know that you might have a solution to their problem if you think about it that way like it's an act service and you you can approach it maybe maybe differently so you it it does start to work and you get it to work you eventually hit a point where you do something pretty crazy you start this business in your basement and you're dialing for dollars and at some point you get offered five hundred million dollars to sell the company an absurd amount of money that sets up you of your team everybody for life and you turned it down what was that like she was hard because no one had ever no one had ever offered to to buy our company and it was it's it's always a reality check where it's like okay it's kind of a rec committing point you know the the gentleman who was doing it ran a company i'll just be honest it was called survey monkey at the time yeah and you know he was married to sheryl sand and she was running facebook and like they were the power couple and love dave dave was awesome and i was like whoa do i wanna do we wanna go my brother had known him because he worked for cheryl at google like there was just the synergy coming together and he's like i'll take the business like let's go we can partner you can leave and be done like it was like the cleanest moment of all time and yeah i remember sitting around just like next door from here and and one of our our mentors duff thompson's office and you know this is someone who you know you talk about mentors who had who had been there at word perfect and you know every other person i would talk to about this offer was like take it and run right and duff like like we sold word perfect too early you know we had the market microsoft was coming like we sold too early and he was like i he was the only person that said don't take the money he said in my mind you guys are cash flow positive you're cranking you're growing at a hundred percent if you and jared can get along and do this it should be interesting and jared kinda turned to me and my dad turned me and said well what do you wanna do and i just said i i'll come back to you and i i literally i remember getting in the car with my wife and i was like hey we gotta leave like we just gotta drive south and we get in the car with like forty minutes in to a three and a half hour drive she was from vegas so we were going down there and she's like like if it's going good just keep it rolling and i was like you don't worry about like passing that up she's like no like what are you gonna do at home like i i i don't need you around the house word and like this is the time like if we're gonna go for this is the time and it was like was just one of those moments where we knew we were gonna we were gonna go for had you pulled out a lot of cash already secondary were you like we basically already we we were we were profitable so we were paying ourselves yeah and that was a unique thing like profitability in a tech as a young company so we would distribute the money but this was a whole new world right and so we came back and i remember sitting down you know it it's funny dave you know rest in peace like eat he he was an amazing human and he's like i just wanna do what's best for you but i memory flew to town and i was like i knew that i think i was gonna tell him that we were gonna turn it down and i knew how crazy that was but i also needed to hear him out a little so we met at the office and i wanted to walk him through our culture and our company because i wanted them to see you know maybe things changed maybe comes back from a more i i don't know yeah so i was like alright we can't be recognized like i like put on that hat like let's go in and so like we did this hole too where we come back we go to a different office we sit down and i was like i just i think we're gonna go for it and he's like what what makes you think you can do it and like i didn't know what to say and i was like well i just got you to put on a q hat and walk through our building like i i didn't know what else to say and it was like we're just gonna do it and he really respected that and we'd have lunch every week i was out there and like you know we ultimately ended up talking about joining forces later on actually the week before he passed away and then that was kinda it was cool like things happen for a reason and you know we went for and then we decided like if we're gonna turn that down that means we gotta get serious we can't be running this thing on our own personal credit cards and in the credit union bank and all this stuff like but we've gotta actually put all the money back into the business and then you know we decided to go raise money from sequoia and excel at the time it was like taking money from the red sox and the yankee excel just on facebook you know obviously sequoia done google and you know apple and they were the forefront of everything and the goal was hey you guys like watch our back in the tech industry we're gonna sit in utah we're gonna make money and put our heads down and go right and like we got the world covered that's what we need you for it was it was a pretty cool partnership i wanna learn from you more on the business side how you think how you operate one of the things i i liked is you've talked about like working backwards this is one way just to work forwards you're just i don't know was figure it out as we go and of course there's there's that but a very useful exercise to like you know start with the end in mind and then just reverse engineer well if that's true then what needs to be true underneath that and you sort of go can you explain maybe how you do that or an example yeah i mean the think is different from where we are today to where we were then but i i learned something by accident once you know when we did announce the fundraising i remember getting on the phone with a journalist from business insider or julie board and i'll never forget this i'd never really done an interview i've done one interview with forbes and she comes up i mean we're ten years in and no one even knows who we are and she goes i heard you just turn down five hundred million dollars i was just foster so she writes this headline kid who turned down five hundred million dollars with my picture is excited about it and i'm like oh my gosh because it looked like i went to the media with story slammed the story back into dave's face and i was show i was so embarrassed but i knew at that moment the dave wasn't coming back right it was a burn the boat moment machine he burned the boat for us on a possible acquisition the first one in ten years right and i i was so mad and i never forgot about that and so we operated for two more years and we went to raise money and everyone's like well when are you gonna raise money again because kinda when you start you're on that path right and what's the dollar amount and everything and you know my entire thing was well we're gonna raise it a billion dollars because that'll show that we've doubled that's a new mark we're giving away stock to employees this where it's gonna be so when we got down to it excel and sequoia and we brought insight and they they agreed to that and they said alright we're gonna how do you wanna to announce this i was like there's only one person i wanna talk to so i called julie board and i was like hey you might not remember me but you wrote that article that said i turned down fifteen five hundred million dollars i was happy about it and raised seventy million dah and just so you know like we're raising in a billion do you want the story and she's like yes and so she basically took the exact same article the exact same picture and put the folks that turned down five hundred million just raised at a billion new headline new headline you had looked the exact same you have both of those those framed and then i remember sitting there one day after we had done that and there was a lot of our employees that we're like okay wow we're we made it we're here and i was like no no no what's her next article work backwards what's what's her next article like what is she putting up next and two years later it's like the group that turned down five hundred million just raised a two point five billion and you know we knew that that wasn't the goal we knew we had our own mission and the q story and everything but it was very clear from a directional standpoint we raised it two and a half what's the next article a year later it says the group you know or two years later it says the group that raised two and a half or turned down five hundred just sold for and she she literally put four of those together with the same headline the same page i'm grateful for it because it fired us up to go and say well that next one isn't interesting like we actually need to go bigger we need to push harder like we need to go more go up like every decision came to like okay what's the story we're gonna be able to tell when we're done with all this right and you know it's kind of a weird thing because at the end like if you meet sports stars at the end of the world like where they're done playing in what they do they sit around and tell stories they tell stories about what the world is like and you get them together and all they do is just sit and tell stories and you hear bird tell stories you hear age tell stories you hear dwayne wade tell stories like it's awesome and it's kinda like all we have are gonna be these stories that we're gonna be able to tell and when q sold it was probably one of the most under wyoming days of my life so when the the money hits the bank yeah we were at a kind of a president's club type deal with about a hundred of our people and the deal had closed but hadn't funded and i remember sitting there by the pool with like our whole company who would leadership who would like made president's club and i could tell when the money i knew when the money was gonna hit and it like lands and then just hits to everybody and i i could see over the next two hours like this reaction and i'm am returning to my wife like handing my phone and she's like sitting there reading a book and you know there's a lot more zeros there and she's like ugh scary i was like okay we've been grinding for twenty years and your upon your response in the movie scary like and then and then i started watching our people like it's like we just paid off our home we just did that like and then there was a little bit more joy but it became clear to me that it is about the journey because even after all that it wasn't a eureka moment right and so knowing that i'm gonna work till i'm eighty i'm never gonna stop working i already know that about myself and every young person should ask themselves that question right now i don't know that anyone knows exactly what they're gonna do no one has figured it out like i still don't know what i wanna be when i grow up right but what i do know is i'm gonna work tele me because i'm not gonna check out if i was gonna do that i would have done it already alright let's take a quick break because gotta tell you story let me tell you the first time i tried to run payroll for my team i was using a traditional bank and you know the type it's got a junky interface it's built like a two thousand and two tax form and it was open only during business hours and i hit send froze they flagged the transaction they lock my account they put me on hold for forty five minutes and then they told me i gotta visit my local branch and that was the day i started looking for a new banking solution after asking a few founders what they were using i found out about mercury and so now my payroll is two clicks i can wire money i can pay invoices i can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard that's why you use it for all of my companies and so do two hundred thousand other startup founders and so if you're looking to level up your banking head to mercury dot com and apply in minutes mercury is a financial technology company not a bank bank this as provided to choice financial group call them man and evolve bank trust members fdic so we play basketball this morning and it's clear you've been playing basketball since you're a kid and so what's it like to now own an nba team that's insane so it's weird when we are on the road show to go public like you normally go like one day dan san francisco two days in new york one day in boston one day in maryland them back to new york and i had organized our road roadshow to go three days in new york one and then to boston and like no one had really done that the way they were doing it and they're like why are you doing that was like because i'm going to the celtic game and i'm gonna go sit with age yeah and like i'll never forget like sitting in the locker room with age like it it's it's the only thing outside a call i didn't do anything else when i was doing q i didn't invest i didn't sit on boards i didn't by real estate i was literally like q tricks for twenty years heads down when i when we say like intense focus it was like everything else was no side hustle no side hustle we investing no yeah nothing and like it probably two years yeah like it was like nothing except for hoops i would go down to summer and sit there with age and he like he was cool enough to let me like i mean he's running the celtic and it was like i could see lot you're thinking like i wanna to get into this no it just happened i was like i am so intrigued by this i love the nba i love hoops like i love the business side of it and you know when we did sell like my brother was like what are what are you gonna do and i was like i'm gonna i'm gonna go be part of the nba you know with sap i i gotten to know adam was working on a tech counsel for the nba and through sap and bill mc had connected us and you know he was like hey and i i let him know i was like i'm i'm gonna be part of this one way or another like and he was like oh we'd love it like too bad utah not for sale dah and you know he called me and was like hey you know and someone else was like i hear minnesota for sale and so i went down that entire road and that story is pretty famous where ash was like we're jazz fans well do we have to give up our season tickets at the jazz i yeah that's probably part of it right and you know it was like no we grew up jazz fans and i was like yeah like and you just thought the jazz would not come off for sale they were their family was they weren't and like i had pretty try yeah yeah i had approached gail miller who would you know larry and and gail had purchased it for years and they owned it for thirty thirty five years it was in a legacy trust for the family that can never be sold and oh like it literally could never be it was a way it was pretty locked door at least that's what we thought right and you know jazz had on so something changed or what happened yeah i think i think you know i'd approached her and the answer was no and then so you got callback yeah say years later after the about six months later saying hey after we turn down minnesota saying are you still interested i was like you serious yes we're in right and how'd did you negotiate the value or how'd did you how'd you figure it out it was literally a meeting where it was like well are you serious make us an offer in we pulled up the forbes valuation on the phone and i said well how's this because i been know this team of science this was full economist this was like a year before all this madness yeah and i was like is that work like it seems fair right and in like to her credit like it wasn't a big auction or anything in that case no there was no else yeah i think she had sat across the court from ashley and i she knew what we were about she she cared about it being in utah and that was important they had had thirty five years i think they bought it for twenty two million dollars right and would you buy for one point six yeah one point six and it was like okay i've gotta a this looks like about as clean as it could get right i mean it's not all gold when you're running an auction how does it work if you buy french you you're not buying the whole thing so that's the franchise value you're buying a part like a majority stake yeah you just gotta send a wire one day like how does pretty down i mean pretty much i mean we did yeah like yeah that's pretty much how like let's double check the numbers like your car you gotta you gotta go figure it out because you can't put a lot of debt on these and you know my philosophy was don't blink these chance there's thirty of these things in the world just go right and you know as and i had a lot of conversation about like why life's pretty good at this point why are we literally knowing hey we're on this twenty year journey of sacrifice and travel and all of this and literally grinding in a level that most people could never comprehend you interview founders all the time like when i when we're all in it's it's like a different level and then and then going and signing up for a level where there's a lot of pressure there's a lot of responsibility everything's public and you're taking the hopes and dreams of a whole nation here and putting them on your shoulders to go do something right and and you're also impacting the children and like you know kids our kids like q was relatively normal life right even though it was worth on paper like a lot more than an nba team and the nba team is very different yes right in show you didn't take it lightly no and you know there was a lot of personal discussions about what's his for this for ego is this for us is for helping utah it really came down to like utah i wanna finish with a couple of rapid fire almost like life ism this idea of the nine most important minutes of the day what are the nine most board of the day but when your kids wake up when they go home from school when when that go to bed three three three and you show up for those more you just try to hit one right i mean a lot of times like you're planning trip you're doing this and like you have an option to like be at one of those right and so i think that as you schedule as you plan as you optimize those are important moments not all three maybe but like if i can schedule a call i'm not doing it in one of those moments right another one is you know if you don't know what to do if you don't know what you wanna do go figure out what you don't wanna do use use the inversion use the contrast yep what what's that unpack that a little bit i just you know we teach a class at at by we teach a business school class and you know it's every fall and it's it's around leadership and decision making and watching all these kids it's like this is what i wanna go do i didn't know what i wanted to do i think that's why q worked because if i had a picture in my head of what it's just supposed to look like i don't think i would have done q tricks i would have been so focused on that the opportunity or zuckerberg could have been sitting next to you starting a business and you're like you didn't even see it and they're like kicking years out right but what i did know is there was some attributes that i believed in i knew i wanted to be able to have a job where the sky was a limit my age wasn't gonna limit me to what my potential could be i didn't wanna be like well when you're twenty two you can make up to eighty thousand dollars a year and your twenty four you get to one twenty i didn't wanna be chopped i wanna be like if i work hard and everyone else i'm more creative my id is hit like they can go somewhere right i knew i wanted to be like in leadership and i could lead right i knew i wanted to see a lot of businesses very quickly a lot of industries i wanted to know the world and know every industry k i wanted something that was kind of not old school and so like when i started looking at opportunities like i never thought enterprise software but i was like okay i look at it and i kinda put the opportunity right here and i'm like wait sky's a limit i'm gonna be a founder i can create i'm not really capped it's a new school it's a new part of technology can go for a long time like i'm not gonna get the legs pulled out from under me if i start doing well and like i think those attributes is where i would advise kids and younger people or entrepreneurs to say okay don't be so caught up on what this looks like see if it fits and you'll be blown away that it's like oh the auto industry actually works really well for me right never would have thought about that and that's all that really matters and so i think that's kinda how we look you know and now i've got a lot more roles and things that i care about but it has to fit into that us like what do we do does it fit and you know you kinda go through that rubric that's great well listen man thank you for doing this i appreciate it thanks for coming out to utah i mean great out here alright love it let go alright man thank you so much i feel like i could rule world and know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a less travel never looking back hey let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about a podcast that you could check out it is called the science of scaling by mark robe he was the founding ser of hubspot and he's a guest lecturer at harvard business school the guy smart and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like cla y and van and open ai and he's asking about their strategies their tactics and how they're growing their companies as you know head of sales or chief revenue officer if you're looking at to scale a company up if you're a cro or head of sales just look at to level up in your career i think a podcast like this could be great for you listen to the science of scaling wherever you get your podcast