Gurley's presentation champions finding one's "dream job" via passion discovery, relentless skill honing, mentorship, credit-giving, and paying it forward. He uses inspiring examples and emphasizes continuous learning & networking for career fulfillment, showcasing paths from diverse backgrounds to impactful ventures. So what I'm going to do first is I'm going to start by telling three stories of these luminaries and then after that I'm going to walk through five guidelines that I've inferred from what they and then there's there's some special stories at the end as well. so you know starting Orrville Ohio, which happens to be anyone know what company was founded in Orville in 1897. I'll give you 20 bucks if anybody knows smuckers that has nothing to do with this presentation. So the first gentleman, I'm Tom. I was a guy named Robert Montgomery that grew up in Orville. This is in 1940 and this is what the town looked like when he did. He attended Over ville High school where he was a three--sport letterman baseball football basketball. He was lucky enough. One of his neighbors knew the coach Fred Taylor at Ohio State and he was able to get a spot on a really good basketball team. This is Robert number 24. He's a point guard. that's him peering into the huddle. that's Fred Taylor, the coach of Ohio State at the time. Robert wasn't a starter. He came off the bench and he didn't get a ton of minutes. But this team had John Havelcheck and Jerry Koozie and John Cassian. And his sophomore year, they won the national championship. They played in the national championship. his junior and senior year. Those two players that I mentioned, went on to the Nba and Robert went into coaching. He spent his first year as a JV coach at a high school and then finagled his way onto the staff at army. And so at 22 he was an assistant at Army. The Black Knights. They played here in Gil's fieldhouse. when he was 24, the head coach retired and he begged for the job. This is him signing a contract So 24 he became and you'll see where I'm going Now I'm going to start in Hibbing Minnesota. This is about two or three hours north of Minnesota. Another Robert Robert Zimmerman grew up in Hibbing. That's what hibbing looked like when he was young Even though it's pretty far north of Minnesota it was a bit of an urban environment. Robert loved music and in this early photo he's got a drum, he got a guitar when he was 10 years old and by high school was playing in a band regularly. they used to cover Elvis and little Richard. His yearbook says that he's likely to join little Richard That didn't happen but what happened was he went to University of Minnesota. He didn't go to class. he was hanging out in this place called Dinky Town, which is, is this photo right here. And at the time, you know, and this is late 50s, early 60s, there's a lot of new stuff happening, even though he grew up playing rock and roll. He fell in love with folk music. and over, I'd say eight or nine months, he studied every folk album he possibly could. He didn't have a lot of money back at the time. You could walk into a record store and listen in a booth, he would do that for hours, on hours, on hours. He became friends with people that also liked folk music, but had money and he would go to their house and listen to their record collection. He's even accused of having quote, borrowed their records and not returned him, which is a point of controversy even still today. The next thing that happened, I think, is one of the most ambitious actions, anyone that I know has taken to pursue their dream job. He hitchhiked from Minneapolis to New York City. He had a guitar, a suitcase in ten dollars, and it's 1,200 miles, right? And so if you ask him today, why he did it, he'll talk a little bit about chasing the performers. So this is Dave van Ronk, Peggy Seeger, the New Lost City Ramblers. These were people he was listening to in Minnesota, but they were these people were in New York City. And so he wanted to see him, but there was really one person he wanted to see, which is what he got. three. So what do you got? Three had become his hero. And if you if you're if you just go to Wikipedia, once you find out who this is, if you don't know already, he went to New York to find what he go through, like that was his pursuit. Because he had, he had come to have this affection and love for, would he play? And he wanted to know everything he possibly could about it. So he went to New York. he found what he got. Three hone your craft constantly. It's it's extremely important to be obsessive about understanding everything you possibly can about your craft considering an obligation right? Hold yourself accountable That requires you to keep learning over time. Study the history, know the pioneers, it's the bedrock foundation for what you're going to build upon and it will help you in networking that you're able to talk, the language of the people that came before you strive to know more than everyone else about your particular craft and that can be in a subgroup and what do I mean by that? let's say you love esports, let's just say you've decided you know multiplayer gaming esports like this is it for you you grow up gaming I love it all right within the first six months of being in this program you should be the most knowledgeable person at mccombs in esports like that's doable you should be able to do that and then by the end of your first year you should be top five of all MBA students and hopefully when you exit your second year you're number one of any MBA student out there it doesn't mean you're the best esports person in the world but you've you've separated yourself from everyone else that's out there it's not I can't make you the smartest of the brightest but it's quite doable to be the most knowledgeable it's it's it's possible to gather more information than somebody else especially today know any of you are ever dare to be as aggressive as Dylan hitchhiking 1,200 miles to find your mentor. But that might be the type of attitude you want to think about in the back of your mind as you pursue mentors Take every chance you can to find somebody who can teach you about the fields you want to excel in. And you can work your way up the stack. you don't have to jump straight to straight to the top on on day one. Treat them with respect, debate, things, learn from them, document what you hear, share it with others. Try to get these mentors interested in you and your own development. How do you do this? Send them notes. Tell them when you use their advice to be successful, Send them gifts. When you have accomplishments, get them bought in, you know, like one of the reasons American Idol works, because you start voting, they're cheering for somebody. And all of a sudden you feel like you're part of that process, right? Get them to feel that way about your own success. And then on the mentor thing, like never stop. You got to keep on pursuing them. I, I had the remarkable fortune this year and my 20th year is an investor to meet Stan Druckenmiller and Howard Marks. And there are two people I've admired for a very long time. I read everything that they write, any time they speak, and I got to sit down with both of them for a couple of hours and talk about investing. It was awesome. And the things that they pushed on changed, you know, some of the actions this one, you won't know as well, but it's equally inspiring. St. Louis, Missouri. The the person this time is named Daniel. He grew up in St. Louis. His father was a intelligence officer in the military and, and moved around Europe quite a bit. after the War ended, His father became a travel agent and, and his mother worked with him. And so they traveled quite a bit now because they were travel agents. His mom told him he had to journal everything. So he was forced to go on vacation and take notes. He wasn't that interested in travel, but he loved food. And so when he went back and looked all the journal notes he had always taken, we're always about the food they were eating wherever they were. And he started to associate different places with the food that he went to. He went to John Burroughs high school in St. Louis ended up at Trinity College in Connecticut, where he would spend every weekend in New York City eating food because that's what he was passionate about. He got a poli sci major. He went and worked on a campaign for a year. wasn't that interesting to him. So he went back to New York. Robert Zimmerman was chasing folk music. Danny was chasing food. So, his personal life was all about what he could do and go into different restaurants and exploring. He went to work for checkpoint, they make those things that you attach to clothes in the, in the store so that when you walk out to beeper goes off. This was early in checkpoints life. He did incredibly well there. and within a year was making 125K years of salesman, which he spent the most of it on on food in New York City. One night, he was out to eat with his uncle and his aunt and his grandmother at Elios, A restaurant sits still, Oakland. And he told him that he was studying for the LSAT. He was going to take the LSAT next year and and go up his career ladder again and become a lawyer to which his uncle replied, we will you just stop it. Why don't you go open a restaurant? You know, that's what you're supposed to do, caught him a little off-guard, but woke him up. And the next day, he took the LSAT. He never sent the scores to a single school, never applied to a single school. He quit his job as a salesman and went to work at a restaurant called Pesce in the front office for $12,500. So he took a 10x salary reduction. The reason he chose pesce is there was a chef there an up-and-coming chef called Michel Romano. and he wanted to be around this gentleman. And so he would work during the day in the front office and then at night he'd beg to like do the slop work in the kitchen just so he could get exposure to what was happening there. He was also taking a wine class at night, and he met this gentleman, who was happened to be the head, are one of the top restaurant critics for the walls for the New York Times. And so, they started hanging out together and going to different restaurants and talking and learning. He did something really interesting. He made a list of 12 icons in the restaurant industry. These were new people that were doing innovative things around. opening new high--end restaurants, Wolfgang Puck's the first one. And, but there were 12 different, a lot of people are on celebrity chef shows today. and he started studying him. He created a notebook for each and every one of what makes him special, where they do unique and start looking at their recipes. Then he, he got even bolder and decided to go to Europe. He took every single one of the connections he had both in the restaurant industry in the travel industry. Through his parents. plus when he was at at Trinity, he would go do tours in in Europe, forests parents. And so he had a lot of connections and he'd and he did this. Now I just had to look this up for the presentation. It's a stodgy re which I think is a francie prince Work for all working at restaurant for free because that's what he did. One of the restaurants that he worked in. He had to pay $500 a month, which I, I ran the math and that's equal to a negative 25,000 ka year salary. So he's gone for making 125 -12 -Now he's upside down 25. But what he does is what you think he would do, he studies. So in each and every one of these places, each and every one of these restaurants he's watching the chef, he's watching the recipes, he goes on the sourcing trips to see how they pick food out of markets or from are from different fish markets. And he just takes tons of notes. He looks at the decor, looks at the wine list, and so on The way home from this like nine month journey, he said it took the entire eight and a half hour flight just to organize the notes. When he gets back to New York, he'll spend another six or seven months searching a hundred locations to find the very best location to launch his first restaurant. He's 27 years old when he opened Union Square Cafe. this is Danny Meyer. I love this quote. He's most proud of the studying he did. on his own, not the studying that he did it at Eternity College. Like it was. And he viewed this as the best work he had ever done as a student. Union Square Cafe is still open today. It's 11 times. The GAT has said it's the very best restaurant in New York. Danny Meyer would go on to launch 16 high-end restaurants in New York City. four of Ron Michelin stars. He is the undisputed king of high--end restaurants in New York City, but he wasn't done. A lot of these restaurants Danny would open in areas that needed Rejent vacation. He had a philosophy that if he could build a restaurant, it could become the the bespoke place that people go. And in the community of all that, he would get a lift alongside that. So he typically would look for areas that were on the rise, but but needed help. One area that needed a lot of help was Madison Square Park, which wasn't far from Union Square. So he and a bunch of other business people helped launch the Madison Square Can Service. See that rebuilt the park? Few years after that happened, they started improving the park. There was a decision made to open, to allow there to be a restaurant in the center of the park. He applied, got the bid and won and that was the location of the first shake shack. If a while later, I'm going to go through something. So you'll see the work that went into launching the first shake shack. If you go to the first Shake shack, it doesn't look like this. If you want to eat, it looks like this. When it's open, there's always a line. I got to know Danny on the open table. board we work together for over and he used to tell me I had to keep it a secret but that this single venue made way more profit than any of the white white tablecloth restaurants idiom of course, Fast forward today, there's 190, Shake Shack's around the world 2015. They took Shake Shack public on the NYC and it's now worth 2.2 billion. I think there's one here in Austin correct. So these were the three stories I had read them all independently and I noticed that there was a similar strain that was running through each and every one of these stories. And so now I've organized that I want to talk to you about it. The first one is the one that I can provide the least amount of help with you about because I don't know what your passions are. But my first piece of advice would be to find your passion, pick a profession of which you have a deep personal interest. There's nothing that's going to make you be more successful than if you love doing what you're doing because you're gonna work harder than anybody else because it's not going to feel like work it's gonna feel like fun. So I think this is the most important decision you can possibly make it a career to make sure you have immense passion for what you're doing. This should be your personal passion, not your parents, not your This segment stresses the value of peer relationships and collaborative learning. It counters the misconception that networking is merely a social activity, emphasizing the importance of connecting with individuals who share similar interests and can contribute to mutual growth. The speaker underscores the benefits of sharing best practices and celebrating each other's successes, fostering a supportive and mutually beneficial environment. in Marlo. His father worked at Halliburton which is in Duncan a little bitty town right near and he went to he went to Marlow high school where he also was a multi-sport athlete. Unfortunately he was five nine and one forty. So he didn't get to he didn't get to keep playing in college. I'm about to show you the university attended and you'll know what to do. There we go. Okay perfect He went to university. Oklahoma ended up going to Bane. I think he actually worked at Bain Capital and he was pursuing his career path like he thought he was supposed to they relocated in with Sydney. He's sitting in one of these high-rises overlooking two Sydney Opera House. And he hears about this book moneyball by Micheal Lewis. He reads it in three days. He can't get it out of his head. It's consumed him. He decides immediately not unlike Danny in the restaurant that this is what he has to do. So he starts applying to business schools. He gets accepted at Harvard and Stanford and in deciding which one he's gonna go to he goes and he he asked for tons of meetings with the schools and he tells him what he's gonna do. I'm going to get a job in sports analytics, come hell or high water. He claims Harvard looks at him like he's crazy. The Stanford staff says, come on, that'd be awesome. Wanna do shu to everyone that we know he shows up at Stanford, Graduate School of Business. lo and behold, they have a sports management class. lo and behold, Billy Beane from the Oakland A's and the moneyball book is speaking his first semester, he gets to know Billy Beane. Billy Beane introduces him to Michael Lewis, They start spending time together. Michael is in Oakland. The school lets him get to know people at the niners organization and and at several sports organizations all over the country. He combines it with hard work. He says he's sent a hundred letters out to get summer interns He ends up with one at the Texans. when he gets back from that, Michael Lewis asked him to come over and talk football, cuz. He's working on the blindside, so he helps Michael Lewis on the blindside, eventually gets the job with use of rockets. spent two and a half hours with Lex, Alexander, Lex hires him that, I believe, 27 years old. nine months later, the Rockets hired Daryl Morey, and the two of them worked together for seven years, I think, and built the best basketball sports analytics department in the country. Darryl, one executive of the year last year at the Rockets. So at age 35, Sam Hickeys name general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers. And this is what, like nine years after he read moneyball, looking over the Sydney Opera house. for those of you who didn't know the story, there's some good and some bad, Sam and Darrell had spent a lot of time studying the ways you could turn a program around. and I've had long discussions but they're about as fascinating the way they think through. But if you're in particular tough spot, the only way to do it is is to shed your talent, improve your salary cap room, let your young players get tons of playing time and went through the draft. Now that's the plan Sam took And like any good entrepreneur a businessperson, he told all his constituents, it's about the long term, not the short term. You got to stay with me on this and he wrote tons of letters. He's very thoughtful. he's very smart that strategy led to three of the worst season in the history of the NBA. But it also led to the drafting of Joel Embiid who's become a close personal friend of sam's and some of you may know the rest of the story. The minute, eventually the ownership got tired of this strategy and cut ties with Sam about that exact same moment in time, everything started getting better and they started winning. There were a few fans that supported him along the way. And there are a lot of signs that are way worse than this, one of where. now we're stinky, but I trust Hehe. But today, for those of the, you know, you know, Vegas has the sixers as the number two team in the east, Right now, this is Durant. I chose the Texas jersey on purpose instead of the Warriors talking about how they're the team to watch. And Barkley goes further, he says if they stay healthy, this will be a team to watch for ten years. So three years of bad, ten years are good. That's a pretty good trade if you're willing to make it, not everyone was able to make it. Sam, Sam, Sam, now is, is especially in basketball circles. I hope he never goes back to basketball because it'll be more legendary that this phrase, this meme is now an internet meme that's outside of basketball but some of the players started This segment summarizes the speaker's key observations from five diverse and successful careers, emphasizing the importance of passion, continuous learning, mentorship, and giving credit to others, providing valuable insights into career development and success. There's an executive I work with named Katrina Lake, She grew up in San Francisco, but she went to high school in Minnesota. and I used the map of Minnesota. So that could all be from the Midwest, to kind of, I like that story better. This is a high school. She went to, she went to Stanford. Thought she was going to be pre--MED, ended up not liking it very much, got an economics major, went to work at a consulting firm called Party on. And they had a number of clients in the retail and fashion space in Sochi. She noticed that she had an affection for that and started hanging around those clients and focusing on those clients. And while she was visiting those places, she kept asking herself questions like, why does this work this way, she told me she was, you know, in a department store, and she's like, why are these clothes out here? Why isn't there just like one here, and you press a button and then it's put into your dressing room. Because you keep all the inventory in the back where you could stack it better, Like why? And she just kept saying, why, why, Why? Why is this stuff organized this way? And finally, she decided, you know, I'm gonna go do something about this. And she came up with a notion of a, of a, of a company that would be a personal shopper for everybody. She didn't quite know how to launch it. So she decided to use her Mba program as a way to launch it. And she told me that, you know, she, she planned to graduate, but but not a much higher bar from a classroom perspective. But she wanted to use the platform as a way to build a company. And so she ended up at Harvard. The first thing she did was scoured Linkedin and the alumni directory to find anybody that had anything to do with fashion. She was mostly interested in sourcing and merchandising, because she didn't have any knowledge there. So she found all kind of contacts in New York. She made personal trips, asked for meetings, not unlike the other people that I',ve showed you. next. She found two founders that had launched startups This is Joanne from Trunk Club and Kraig from shop at to me in any similar space. But we're a little different. And she got him on the phone. She wanted to hear if what she was thinking about was different and better than what they had done, because she wanted it to be different and better. There was a professor at Harvard that that it run, had been CEO of a retail store named Jose Alvarez. She started writing drafts of what she wanted to do and got him to push back at First, He was very skeptical, but she said two back and forth, helped her and modified her plan quite a bit. In the summer, she went to actually a company we were invested in, called Poly Bore, which was a social fashion site, where people aggregated likes on the web. So, Kenderson, who had run a huge chunk of the revenue at Google a CEO there. So, she built that relationship. She also got to study how fashion websites, spend time with bloggers After graduating, she got to, came to San Francisco to launch her company. And she did two things that are miraculous for me from a from a mentoring standpoint. The first one is, she found Eric Coulson. He ran all of data science and Netflix, You know, you remember the million-dollar prize, all that stuff that was under Eric, He had recently retired from Netflix and was looking for something to inspire him. And she did, and he became an advisor to the company. Marko Hanson was over 20 years at gap in merchandising marketing. Same story, Katrina founder Marc was very excited about helping Katrina Marcus still in the board. today. Marco would spend, you know, day a week, a day, a month, in the early days at the company, helping her almost the way an executive chairman would. she then found two other people. John Fleming, ran with CEO of Walmart Calm, Julie Bernstein, I worked with back at Nordstrom years ago, she was CMO at Sephora and hanging out in San Francisco. She put Julie on the board and then a feat I've never seen before. She recruited Erik Ainge, Julie off the board and into the company. And they both worked there. Julia's as CEO, Owen and Erika's head of data analytics, where he is still today coming as 95 data scientist, a fashion company. This is her at the very beginning. This segment shares impactful moments and mentorships throughout the speaker's career, focusing on pivotal decisions, challenges overcome, and the significance of continuous learning and adaptation in the dynamic world of venture capital. This segment candidly discusses moments of fear and self-doubt experienced throughout the speaker's career, offering valuable advice on navigating uncertainty, building resilience, and persevering through challenging situations. This concluding segment offers final thoughts on the importance of aligning passion with entrepreneurial pursuits, emphasizing the long-term perspective needed for success and the challenges of maintaining passion throughout a company's lifecycle.