now i'll never remember the morning we went to the exchange i woke up in the morning
and i i looked at myself in the mirror and i i saw the stock was trading from
the night before and i looked at the stock price the number of shares i had they went
i'm [ __ ] rich it never hit me until then and when i talk to entrepreneurs today it's always
the same they always say the same thing they say i didn't think about the money my point
is it was never about the money when i talked to entrepreneurs today that had the same experience
from like their basement to to that huge liquidity event they don't even think about it it's the
journey it's the passion for the business that's what got them going that's what got me going
you have to have that catharsis you have to make that decision you're going to take that
path of entrepreneurship and it's not for everybody but if it's in you you'll know
so i say to every entrepreneur that's starting their journey or contemplating it
do not go after entrepreneurship out of the greed of money you will never find it it's a passion
for personal freedom and the only way you're going to make your first million dollars
and this is a material challenge is you have to solve a problem for somebody
and if you solve that problem for one person and it's a similar problem that
millions of other people have that's the core of what a business is entrepreneurs see problems find
solutions and that's how they create a business businesses are always solving problems for people
i've learned a lot on the road you know just the journey i've had i've had a chance to be pitched
ideas from thousands of people thousands and i have learned something to be true there are three
elements that are involved in every single presentation that's successful
in getting financed and if you're an entrepreneur you're trying to make your first million usually
you need to raise capital somewhere even if it's in friends and family so i want you to listen to
this advice because these attributes aren't found some of the time they're found all of the time
and it's really about communications that's what it is it's about communicating the opportunity
and making people understand it because if if you can't explain where you want to go
no one will follow you i have a thesis i'll tell you what it is
what are you watching when you watch shark tank you're watching the pursuit of freedom
is there anything more noble than creating your own wealth and setting yourself free
no that's what shark tank's about it's the essence of personal freedom it's not about getting rich
it's about achieving something for yourself that is unique to our society and capitalism
personal freedom life is like a box of chocolates you don't know when you're just going to school
what's going to happen next it's sort of like the journey you're starting now in some ways and maybe
tell you about some of the mistakes i made which would be in some ways more valuable
than just talking about success because i wouldn't want you to make those again and
i actually feel that way about any entrepreneur that's had success that they would pass forward
a path of least resistance so to speak maybe give you some ideas on what not to do
here it is let's pick it up where you are i'm off to college so i tell my stepfather i really want
to be a photographer or a rock star and he says you're nuts she'll starve to death doing that
it's very very hard and it's very competitive and those are you know very binary outcomes because
either you're a really really good photographer which i'm not sure you are to stay competitive in
the commercial world and frankly i've heard your guitar and you got a long way to go
well at least he was telling me the truth at the time but the point is college is where i went and
and i decided even back then i thought well maybe i should try being an engineer because those guys
seem to get jobs i don't know what i want to do so i enrolled in engineering engineering 101. anyways
um i go to my first class of engineering whoa was that tough whoa whoa whoa whoa and i i wanted to
party and i mean look i'm just telling you the truth so i didn't hang out in engineering too
long and i spent my four years in psychology and in in environmental studies in third year i meet
this girl and we uh you know it's my first serious relationship and we move in together and she was
rather artsy and she convinced me to go to night class in cinematography advanced cinematography
you know i was into photography but i'd never worked with film before there was some complex
technology it's not what it is today but it was tough and i really got into it i was
you know we were we're in we'd go three hours these night classes and then we'd film and then
we'd edit and we'd talk about making film and i was falling in love but i was also falling in
love with cinematography and the potential of what it could be and being a filmmaker kind of
went into that artistic bent but boy that is not a place to to make money easily um
but but here's what happens as i get into the film community i start meeting people that say look you
know we've seen some of your camera work uh can we hire you as a cameraman we're doing an industrial
shoot or we're doing this we're doing that doing some sports filming whatever we just need camera
guys i'm learning the tools of the trade i'm learning how to be a cameraman i'm learning how
to buy film i'm learning how to budget for a shoot industrial commercial you name it i'm a sound guy
i'm a lighting guy i mean when you're that small you're doing everything and i'm just i was just
learning how to do it and really loving it and working a lot you know going to school all day
and then shooting all night editing on weekends when you're really passionate about something
it's fantastic if you can merge that into your work because you don't mind working 25 hours a
day and believe me i was i kept great marks in in in psychology environmental studies i go home
and my dad says to me well how are you going to get a job with this the environmental stuff
hadn't even happened yet and psychology tough you know unless you want to get into research you want
to go do your phd not so easy he was right um he's always right and so he said why don't you
um go get a business degree i know you still want to be a filmmaker and you want to be a musician
and all this stuff and a photographer but why don't you get some tools some building blocks
about business because really even if you pursue any of those you know disciplines you're still
going to need some basic business so you can run your life so i applied i got in this is where the
serendipitous nature of life the box of chocolate starts to happen i'm sitting down with the dean
after i get accepted of the business school and i say to him dean listen um i'm going to spend 24
months here getting this degree and i bet you you have an ongoing need to recruit people from all
around the world why don't you let me make a film about this experience i'm a filmmaker i want to
pursue a business degree but i know how to make films and i could hire a crew i could document
this whole experience from the day everybody meet each other right through the learning in the class
what they're experiencing is as the time goes on and and get you the inside story of what it's like
to pursue you know a business degree in such an intense program because mbas are tough like you
burn a lot of hours you work every day of the week two days later and when i'm just starting
the program he says there's a lot of interest but you're gonna do it for thirty thousand i said done
one of those deals i also said to him dean i can't do the full program and shoot a film for two years
you got to cut me some slack give me a couple of credits on this and mark the film based on
its merits and what others say about it and how it is for you as a tool to recruit so if it's really
a crappy tool then i should get a very low mark and if it's a really good film you should score it
we did that deal and i went to work and i shot that film and it it was a crazy experience
but when it was over 24 months later the film was a unique insight into what the program was
about in a way no other person could have done it now having shot that film i'd hired a crew and i
said guys why don't we form a company together we're really good at this let's form a company
we were really good at it was called special events television and the way we created value
in television to create value you have to create a unique format like friends the show you've heard
of that's a format somebody owns that format nobody else can make friends because they own
the format we went into sports television we created sports formats bobby orr and the
hockey legends was one of them the company took off we were selling the shows each week we were
broadcasting them everywhere and i looked at my partners and i said wow look at this no longer it
was i think it was only two years later we got bought out it was my first transaction
and i went this is good this was a an incredible experience we started with nothing and we created
this company it was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars each towards the end i had enrolled
in a night class with a computer called an osborne computer it was the first portable computer ever
made it was a cpm operating system and i met this guy named john freeman john had designed
a program that drove hewlett-packard plotters now when you're in television you're always making
all these graphics it's very expensive very time consuming titles we'd have to get them printed and
there wasn't any you know digitized technology at that point but john learned how to take a a
multi-pin hewlett-packard plotter which was an xy-axis pen driven by a computer and do graphics
for a giant oil company he worked with he was an executive there and he showed it to me at the you
know and this is right after we'd sold special on television and i looked at it and said john
every guy that buys a plotter from hewlett-packard is going to want one of these software packages
let's form a partnership and i'll market this stuff and you'll write the code and
i will fly all around the world and convince the plotter companies to bundle that software
with their plotters he said wow but i can't give up my job i got a family of kids i said look you
write code all night and weekends i don't have a job i just sold my company and i remember sitting
on the red chair in my living room we were trying to name the company and we called it
soft key s-o-f-t-k-e-y soft key software products john and i and we just kept going and going and
going now here's i think when my first million comes in i started getting calls from everybody
because it was the beginning of the dot-com era and they wanted to invest in my company and we
just kept going we did dozens of products we went to a trade show called comdex and we just got
bigger and bigger a bunch of private equity guys invested in it and then one day um a banker came
to me and said why don't we take softkey software products public i said why don't you work with the
finance guys put a deal together and i'm happy to take it public that was my first million dollars
you