now i'll never remember the morning we went to the exchange i woke up in the morning and 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 and 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
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 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
multi-pin hewlett-packard plotter which was an x-y 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 in 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've got a family i have kids i
said look you write code all night and weekends i don't have a job i just sold my company 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 that was the beginning of a journey
john writes the code we packaged it up our first product was called key chart every product we made
had the key in front of it because we really grew the business but i i flew down to san diego where
a woman named mary zoller was running the plotter division and i put on a show
i said mary you gotta bundle this i'll do it for 12 dollars a unit she just laughed at me at least
she was honest she said kevin i'm the number one plotter on earth everybody writes code for
me what do i need you for maybe you should talk to some of my competitors and it was one of those
bing you know how your phone makes that bing when a message comes in and that's exactly
what i did all the japanese all the german everybody else that was trying to compete
with hewlett-packard the number one plotter i said what if you bundled my software with it and
you got free software maybe that's a competitive edge and boy did that work we sold millions of
copies of key chart millions bundled with all these different plotters that were on the market
and in the end i think we're only getting 12 cents a copy but we were making a ton of money
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 i called up john said john
what do you want to do buddy and he said look um i'm just happy with graphics
you know you want to make this thing huge why don't you buy me out and you go on your journey
i said i'm cool with it john 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
now i'll never remember the morning we went to the exchange i woke up in the morning and 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 talked 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 that was my first million dollars
it was way more than a million but the whole point it was binary it was like zero and then a lot this
whole entrepreneurial journey most people i talk to they have this unique moment in their lives
when this happens and for me it was when i was in grade 11 in high school and i got my first job and
i when i teach these days i always tell this story but i'll tell it to you now
i wanted that job because a girl i was interested in in high school was working at the shoe store
across the mall and this was an ice cream store and they were looking for a scooper
and so i took the job and the first day i was there
the owner was a woman said to me you know when you give the little samples out of ice cream on
little sticks people take their gum and they throw it on the floor and this this store had mexican
tiles beautiful tiles and the gum was you know got stuck on them and it turned dark it looked ugly
day was over you know i shut all the ice cream bins down and i was ready to get back
on my bike go home and she said to me um scrape the gum off the floor you can't lay before you
scrape the gum off the floor and i said well and i knew that this girl was watching me from
across the mall because we're going to check out and you know go get a soda or something together
i was really looking forward to it and i said to the owner i can't he hired me as a scooper i'm not
a scraper i'm not going to get down on my knees because i didn't want a girl across the hall to
see me on my knee scraping gum she said no you're an employee you're going to do exactly what i say
this is magoo's ice cream parlor this was magoo's ice cream parlor it was right here the counter was
right here and she said you're fired get out of my ice cream store but within minutes i was
on my bicycle on my way home in utter shame in shock that she had that kind of control
over my life changed my life forever i have never ever in my life worked for someone again ever
no one has ever had control over me ever and never will and that's when that's another one
of those moments where the lights go off and i realized in life there's two types of people
there's the people that own the store and there's the people that scrape the [ __ ] off the floor
and you kind of have to decide which one do you want to be and i'm not dissing being an
employee there's nothing wrong with that that's a different life you want that security that's
cool and you can be a great employee and i've talked about that before but
i didn't want to be an employee i didn't want someone to have that kind of power over me i
never wanted that ever again and and she was the reason i owe her so much that she
twisted me that day to and i never had a job i never had a full-time job again in my life
i only worked for myself from that day on that was the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey
sometimes being young and trying things you're so naive and you don't know any better
all you do is learn and if you fail it doesn't matter and so whether i was 9 10 12 16 21
the failures were irrelevant and you know whether you're you know 9 12 16 21 22 24 you know i'm
sleeping on the couch you know i have a car with a hole in the floorboard you know i'm i'm living
like a bum and like a student and so what did i have to lose and so i think that influenced me as
much as anything so you know my dad was like go for it you know don't why not what have you got
to lose i've read your but you have the talent you know all these keys to success etc what would you
say is the number one reason why people fail not necessarily why they make it the complete opposite
right lack of brains lack of effort lack of brains lack of effort yeah they just they don't do the
work they don't learn you know when you walk in the room when you start a business and you start
to talk about somebody you're never in a vacuum with no competition you know unless you're just
extremely lucky and if there's going to be competition that means somebody else knows your
business as well as you do when you get started and if you walk into a competitive environment and
they still know more about the business than you do and more about your customers you're going to
lose and but most people don't consider that they don't do the work they don't learn more
about their industry they don't know even about their business i mean and so you've got to put
in the effort to know more about your industry than anybody else um and that's that's the brains
part and that's the effort part as well because look if you're competing with me you you better
know what you're doing otherwise i'm gonna kick your ass you know and you're not gonna outwork me
and so you know the combination is usually what kills businesses early on more than anything
you