my first job I’ll ride out university
was an inside sales job for a company
out of Toronto and I lasted 90 days in
that job before I got promoted and
shipped off to Edmonton as an outside
salesperson and then for the next 20
years I was just this lucky sales guy
who had this unbelievable knack of
showing up in front of the right place
at exactly the right time and I was a
top performer for every single company
that I worked for right up until the
fall of 2001 when I joined a technology
firm the day before 9/11 and even in the
post 9/11 environment I became the
number one sales person in the entire
country in less than six months
unfortunately that company was called
worldcom and not long after I became the
top sales guy in the country they went
on to admit that they conducted 11
billion with a be 11 billion dollars in
accounting fraud and at the time I was
engaged and I’ve been with this lady for
six years and that was the day that she
came home and said to me there’s no
security my job she’s not having
children and three weeks later she moved
out now that whole time I was being a
salesperson what I really wanted to be
was an entrepreneur so at that point I
decided it’s just before my 40th
birthday and I’d always promised myself
if I was going to be an entrepreneur I
would do it before I was 40
so I simplified my life and all I had
left was car payments and a dog and at
that point my goal as an entrepreneur
was I wanted to be a millionaire that
was my goal I’ve been to one of those
health help weekends where you punch
through the board and the board that I
had was I wanted to be a millionaire so
what I decided to do was start a company
and about that time I’d heard about some
research that predicts what it is that
makes entrepreneurs successful and the
data suggests that the biggest predictor
of success of an entrepreneur is
basically the size of your network and
this all happened just before LinkedIn
came around so I got on LinkedIn I got
on LinkedIn on day eight of LinkedIn
there’s over 600 million people on
LinkedIn I’m user three thousand nine
hundred and fifty-six and I started
going to networking events
and sometimes I would meet as many as a
hundred people a week and one of the
reasons I went to networking events is
this research that I had heard of
aligned with what I’d read and a book a
long time ago called seven Habits of
Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
and he says we should be spending more
time in her life doing the things that
are important but not urgent and it
turns out that relationship building and
self development are those things so I
started going to networking events and
like I said all about a hundred people a
month was the average that I would meet
100 new people every single month and
some of those people I would tell them
about my business idea and they would
offer to take me for coffee
so I would go for coffee with these
successful entrepreneurs and I hit this
little idea for a business and over a
span of six months I took this little
idea and I made it really big and then
one day I got a phone call from a friend
of mine named Orion Vancouver and he
told me about a competition for
billion-dollar business ideas and first
prize is a million dollars u.s. now this
competition is held by a very famous
venture capitalist his name is Tim
Draper
he runs a venture capital firm down in
Silicon Valley called draper fisher
Jurvetson and the whole idea is he lets
anybody in the world enter if you want
to enter you have to enter 1,500
characters about your idea not 1,500
words but 1500 characters and the plan
is of all the submissions around the
world he’s going to pick ten they get to
pitch for five minutes to a very famous
venture capitalist so I submitted my
1,500 characters and I looked at these
submissions from all over the world and
I thought that myself I’m gonna be in
the top ten I’m gonna be the top ten so
I ran around town talked to all these
successful entrepreneurs and senior
business people that I knew told them I
was gonna be in the top ten and what do
you think they all said yeah right
you’re a snotty nose first time around
entrepreneur you have no idea what
you’re doing there is no way you’re
gonna make the top ten what turns out
they were right
but it turns out that for whatever
reason Tim Draper decided to let eleven
people get to the next stage and I just
happen to be eleventh so I got my five
minutes of fame so I get to present my
idea over a webcam the whole idea is if
you’re the one that gets picked you win
the contest so I get five minutes and
I’m warned in advance I don’t get five
minutes in 30 seconds I don’t get five
minutes in 15 seconds I get five minutes
and it seemed that no matter what I did
every time I practiced I got it down to
five minutes at eight seconds and what I
was thinking was them the day that I
pitched all I had to do is talk a little
faster I can do that and I can get it
down to five minutes
so the day of the pitch I’m presented to
Tim I’m thirty seconds into my five
minute pitch and he starts asking me
questions and all I can think is one
thing can you please just shut up
because I’ve only got five minutes but
what I learned in that first thirty
seconds is he loved the idea he asked me
to asked me for a business plan which I
sent down a few days later they phoned
me up and say Craig here’s the deal you
need to come down to California you need
to present this idea to all the partners
in the firm I’m a first-time
entrepreneur there’s one thing I need
right now that I don’t have much of
which is money so the age of 40 i phone
my dad and said dad daddy do bomb a
thousand dollars I’m going down to
California to an a billion dollar idea
contest and come back with a million
dollar prize now I’m sure my dad thought
I was crazy but the good thing is he
loves me and he gave me the thousand
dollars I went down to California I
presented my idea and they sent me back
home with a handshake and said move to
California so in order to collect the
prize I had to move to California this
is a really cool place called Yerba
Buena Island it is halfway between San
Francisco and Oakland it is a six minute
commute on public transit from where I
live to my office in downtown San
Francisco that commute was so short I
didn’t would take my car but I did take
my dog now the cool thing is when I
moved to California
for Nia I found a roommates her name is
Andrea she was an animal control officer
for the city of San Francisco and the
reason that became important is that
when I got into the contest I was single
what do you think happened by the time I
moved to California yes I met a lady she
plays French horn for the orchestra here
in town if you ever go to the orchestra
the good-looking lady on the left that
plays French horn her name is Heather
she’s my wife so we got married but here
was the challenge I had to move to
California to collect the million
dollars and she had to stay in Calgary
to keep her job now we’re both in our
40s both want to have a family
so I commuted back and forth every other
week trying to have a family and lucky
enough six months in that’s exactly what
happened and I had to go to Tim Draper
and tell him that I love your money but
I love this lady more and I promised her
and I promised myself I am NOT going to
be a successful entrepreneur with a
ruined marriage and dysfunctional kids
so I put in place a CEO and I came home
and then I had a son and then I had to
reinvent myself because now I’m here in
Calgary and that billion-dollar business
idea that I had really doesn’t matter
and I remember reading something in a
book book by a guy named Jim Collins
called good to great and insight good to
great chapter 5 talks about something
called a hedgehog concept so I was
thinking how do I find a way to create
balance in my life I wanted to find a
way to make a difference now not just
make a living and then good to great he
talks about the things that you’re
passionate about these are the things
you like to do if you didn’t have a job
you’d spend your time doing this he
talks about the things that your gift
adapts when you have a lot of things to
get done these are the things that you
do do because it’s so easy to do them it
makes you feel good about the progress
that you’re making the last thing was
how do you make money and these are the
things that you have to do so I looked
at all the things that I like to do and
the things I was passionate about and
what I did was I created myself a big
hairy audacious goal and my big hairy
audacious goal was how do I find a way
to
liberate and inspire people from all
walks of life to create and
commercialize ideas now when I move down
to California everybody wanted to help
me for three hundred and fifty dollars
an hour and what I promised is the way I
would start living up to that big hairy
audacious goal is I would give my advice
away for free
well almost free if you come to the
Starbucks by my house you buy me a
double tall latte you can have an hour
of my time and I started doing six eight
some weeks ten coffee meetings a week
and then all of a sudden I got a phone
call and I got a phone call from the
University of Calgary and they’d heard
my name and they asked if I wanted to go
teach entrepreneurship at the University
of Calgary and I’m like I have no idea
how to teach but that’s squarely in my
big hairy audacious goal and I love what
Richard Branson says when you have these
opportunities if someone offers you an
amazing opportunity which if you don’t
know you can do it say yes and then
learn how to do it later another way to
do this is say fake it till you make it
so I went and taught at the University
of Calgary and over three years I taught
every single undergraduate
entrepreneurship course they offer
except for one and then there was a
change inside the organisation and they
decided they no longer needed me but
somebody in marketing phoned me up and
said Craig you’ve got this really good
rapport with students and you’re really
good at teaching
can you come teach marketing and that
you have see and I went back to my big
hairy audacious goal which is all about
how do i liberate and Spyer these
students and I said to myself teaching
marketing isn’t gonna do that now about
that time I was walking my dog and
Edworthy Park and I met a lady who used
to work at Bow Valley College and she
was telling me that they’d recently
named their business school the true
School of Business and were focused on
entrepreneurship so what I decided I
would do because I wanted to teach these
students I picked up the phone I called
the Dean of the business school he
answered his phone and I told him that I
liked to help students become
entrepreneurs and that single phone call
has led to the job that I have today and
this is one of the ways that I get to
make a difference Wow
I make a living and I want to share with
you one of my favorite stories about how
you make things happen in life it’s a
story I heard a speaker named Keith
Ferrazzi give one day and he’s in a big
auditorium there’s thirteen hundred
people and there’s this table in the
middle of this stage and he sits on this
table and he tells a story of when him
and his dad and his mom used to live in
Pittsburgh and his dad was a janitor if
I remember the story correctly at a
steel mill and then what was happening
with all the steel mills is all the
steel mills were getting shut down and
it was just before Christmas and Keith’s
dad has lost his job and they had this
routine on Sundays where they would go
to this Italian deli because the mom
didn’t let white bread in the house it’s
kind of like what my son and I used to
do when we should go to spolanos on a
regular basis but on this occasion he’s
dad is driving to the deli and he sees
on the side of the road a bike and it’s
obvious that the bike has been thrown
away and Keith’s dad is thinking to
himself wow do I stop and get the bike
in front of my son and what he did was
he stopped but instead of getting the
bike he went to the house of the bike
was in front of he knocked on the door
the mom answered the door and Keith’s
dad told his story and he asked if he
could have the bike my mom said no she
said I’d rather you come with me she
watched the garage she opened the door
and said I’d rather you take one of
these so here’s an ask I have in the
room go find your big hairy audacious
goal and if you want some help
go networking ask people for help and
they will help you build and help you
find your own profitable purpose you
was an inside sales job for a company
out of Toronto and I lasted 90 days in
that job before I got promoted and
shipped off to Edmonton as an outside
salesperson and then for the next 20
years I was just this lucky sales guy
who had this unbelievable knack of
showing up in front of the right place
at exactly the right time and I was a
top performer for every single company
that I worked for right up until the
fall of 2001 when I joined a technology
firm the day before 9/11 and even in the
post 9/11 environment I became the
number one sales person in the entire
country in less than six months
unfortunately that company was called
worldcom and not long after I became the
top sales guy in the country they went
on to admit that they conducted 11
billion with a be 11 billion dollars in
accounting fraud and at the time I was
engaged and I’ve been with this lady for
six years and that was the day that she
came home and said to me there’s no
security my job she’s not having
children and three weeks later she moved
out now that whole time I was being a
salesperson what I really wanted to be
was an entrepreneur so at that point I
decided it’s just before my 40th
birthday and I’d always promised myself
if I was going to be an entrepreneur I
would do it before I was 40
so I simplified my life and all I had
left was car payments and a dog and at
that point my goal as an entrepreneur
was I wanted to be a millionaire that
was my goal I’ve been to one of those
health help weekends where you punch
through the board and the board that I
had was I wanted to be a millionaire so
what I decided to do was start a company
and about that time I’d heard about some
research that predicts what it is that
makes entrepreneurs successful and the
data suggests that the biggest predictor
of success of an entrepreneur is
basically the size of your network and
this all happened just before LinkedIn
came around so I got on LinkedIn I got
on LinkedIn on day eight of LinkedIn
there’s over 600 million people on
LinkedIn I’m user three thousand nine
hundred and fifty-six and I started
going to networking events
and sometimes I would meet as many as a
hundred people a week and one of the
reasons I went to networking events is
this research that I had heard of
aligned with what I’d read and a book a
long time ago called seven Habits of
Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
and he says we should be spending more
time in her life doing the things that
are important but not urgent and it
turns out that relationship building and
self development are those things so I
started going to networking events and
like I said all about a hundred people a
month was the average that I would meet
100 new people every single month and
some of those people I would tell them
about my business idea and they would
offer to take me for coffee
so I would go for coffee with these
successful entrepreneurs and I hit this
little idea for a business and over a
span of six months I took this little
idea and I made it really big and then
one day I got a phone call from a friend
of mine named Orion Vancouver and he
told me about a competition for
billion-dollar business ideas and first
prize is a million dollars u.s. now this
competition is held by a very famous
venture capitalist his name is Tim
Draper
he runs a venture capital firm down in
Silicon Valley called draper fisher
Jurvetson and the whole idea is he lets
anybody in the world enter if you want
to enter you have to enter 1,500
characters about your idea not 1,500
words but 1500 characters and the plan
is of all the submissions around the
world he’s going to pick ten they get to
pitch for five minutes to a very famous
venture capitalist so I submitted my
1,500 characters and I looked at these
submissions from all over the world and
I thought that myself I’m gonna be in
the top ten I’m gonna be the top ten so
I ran around town talked to all these
successful entrepreneurs and senior
business people that I knew told them I
was gonna be in the top ten and what do
you think they all said yeah right
you’re a snotty nose first time around
entrepreneur you have no idea what
you’re doing there is no way you’re
gonna make the top ten what turns out
they were right
but it turns out that for whatever
reason Tim Draper decided to let eleven
people get to the next stage and I just
happen to be eleventh so I got my five
minutes of fame so I get to present my
idea over a webcam the whole idea is if
you’re the one that gets picked you win
the contest so I get five minutes and
I’m warned in advance I don’t get five
minutes in 30 seconds I don’t get five
minutes in 15 seconds I get five minutes
and it seemed that no matter what I did
every time I practiced I got it down to
five minutes at eight seconds and what I
was thinking was them the day that I
pitched all I had to do is talk a little
faster I can do that and I can get it
down to five minutes
so the day of the pitch I’m presented to
Tim I’m thirty seconds into my five
minute pitch and he starts asking me
questions and all I can think is one
thing can you please just shut up
because I’ve only got five minutes but
what I learned in that first thirty
seconds is he loved the idea he asked me
to asked me for a business plan which I
sent down a few days later they phoned
me up and say Craig here’s the deal you
need to come down to California you need
to present this idea to all the partners
in the firm I’m a first-time
entrepreneur there’s one thing I need
right now that I don’t have much of
which is money so the age of 40 i phone
my dad and said dad daddy do bomb a
thousand dollars I’m going down to
California to an a billion dollar idea
contest and come back with a million
dollar prize now I’m sure my dad thought
I was crazy but the good thing is he
loves me and he gave me the thousand
dollars I went down to California I
presented my idea and they sent me back
home with a handshake and said move to
California so in order to collect the
prize I had to move to California this
is a really cool place called Yerba
Buena Island it is halfway between San
Francisco and Oakland it is a six minute
commute on public transit from where I
live to my office in downtown San
Francisco that commute was so short I
didn’t would take my car but I did take
my dog now the cool thing is when I
moved to California
for Nia I found a roommates her name is
Andrea she was an animal control officer
for the city of San Francisco and the
reason that became important is that
when I got into the contest I was single
what do you think happened by the time I
moved to California yes I met a lady she
plays French horn for the orchestra here
in town if you ever go to the orchestra
the good-looking lady on the left that
plays French horn her name is Heather
she’s my wife so we got married but here
was the challenge I had to move to
California to collect the million
dollars and she had to stay in Calgary
to keep her job now we’re both in our
40s both want to have a family
so I commuted back and forth every other
week trying to have a family and lucky
enough six months in that’s exactly what
happened and I had to go to Tim Draper
and tell him that I love your money but
I love this lady more and I promised her
and I promised myself I am NOT going to
be a successful entrepreneur with a
ruined marriage and dysfunctional kids
so I put in place a CEO and I came home
and then I had a son and then I had to
reinvent myself because now I’m here in
Calgary and that billion-dollar business
idea that I had really doesn’t matter
and I remember reading something in a
book book by a guy named Jim Collins
called good to great and insight good to
great chapter 5 talks about something
called a hedgehog concept so I was
thinking how do I find a way to create
balance in my life I wanted to find a
way to make a difference now not just
make a living and then good to great he
talks about the things that you’re
passionate about these are the things
you like to do if you didn’t have a job
you’d spend your time doing this he
talks about the things that your gift
adapts when you have a lot of things to
get done these are the things that you
do do because it’s so easy to do them it
makes you feel good about the progress
that you’re making the last thing was
how do you make money and these are the
things that you have to do so I looked
at all the things that I like to do and
the things I was passionate about and
what I did was I created myself a big
hairy audacious goal and my big hairy
audacious goal was how do I find a way
to
liberate and inspire people from all
walks of life to create and
commercialize ideas now when I move down
to California everybody wanted to help
me for three hundred and fifty dollars
an hour and what I promised is the way I
would start living up to that big hairy
audacious goal is I would give my advice
away for free
well almost free if you come to the
Starbucks by my house you buy me a
double tall latte you can have an hour
of my time and I started doing six eight
some weeks ten coffee meetings a week
and then all of a sudden I got a phone
call and I got a phone call from the
University of Calgary and they’d heard
my name and they asked if I wanted to go
teach entrepreneurship at the University
of Calgary and I’m like I have no idea
how to teach but that’s squarely in my
big hairy audacious goal and I love what
Richard Branson says when you have these
opportunities if someone offers you an
amazing opportunity which if you don’t
know you can do it say yes and then
learn how to do it later another way to
do this is say fake it till you make it
so I went and taught at the University
of Calgary and over three years I taught
every single undergraduate
entrepreneurship course they offer
except for one and then there was a
change inside the organisation and they
decided they no longer needed me but
somebody in marketing phoned me up and
said Craig you’ve got this really good
rapport with students and you’re really
good at teaching
can you come teach marketing and that
you have see and I went back to my big
hairy audacious goal which is all about
how do i liberate and Spyer these
students and I said to myself teaching
marketing isn’t gonna do that now about
that time I was walking my dog and
Edworthy Park and I met a lady who used
to work at Bow Valley College and she
was telling me that they’d recently
named their business school the true
School of Business and were focused on
entrepreneurship so what I decided I
would do because I wanted to teach these
students I picked up the phone I called
the Dean of the business school he
answered his phone and I told him that I
liked to help students become
entrepreneurs and that single phone call
has led to the job that I have today and
this is one of the ways that I get to
make a difference Wow
I make a living and I want to share with
you one of my favorite stories about how
you make things happen in life it’s a
story I heard a speaker named Keith
Ferrazzi give one day and he’s in a big
auditorium there’s thirteen hundred
people and there’s this table in the
middle of this stage and he sits on this
table and he tells a story of when him
and his dad and his mom used to live in
Pittsburgh and his dad was a janitor if
I remember the story correctly at a
steel mill and then what was happening
with all the steel mills is all the
steel mills were getting shut down and
it was just before Christmas and Keith’s
dad has lost his job and they had this
routine on Sundays where they would go
to this Italian deli because the mom
didn’t let white bread in the house it’s
kind of like what my son and I used to
do when we should go to spolanos on a
regular basis but on this occasion he’s
dad is driving to the deli and he sees
on the side of the road a bike and it’s
obvious that the bike has been thrown
away and Keith’s dad is thinking to
himself wow do I stop and get the bike
in front of my son and what he did was
he stopped but instead of getting the
bike he went to the house of the bike
was in front of he knocked on the door
the mom answered the door and Keith’s
dad told his story and he asked if he
could have the bike my mom said no she
said I’d rather you come with me she
watched the garage she opened the door
and said I’d rather you take one of
these so here’s an ask I have in the
room go find your big hairy audacious
goal and if you want some help
go networking ask people for help and
they will help you build and help you
find your own profitable purpose you
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