Tag Archive for: networking

How We Organized an EPIC Conference in Just 3 Weeks

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Last month Johnny Jen and I co-hosted an amazing conference here in Chiang Mai, Thailand, with a high-caliber lineup of 10 diverse business speakers and about 250 eager attendees.

(I also took a pretty epic selfie with all of them!)

I’d been on a fairly large planning committee for Thailand’s first TEDx conference back in 2010, but this was the first large-scale event I’ve hosted and planned so closely. It was the first time I’ve attempted to create an experience of this scale from scratch (i.e., without a name brand like TED behind it).

A month beforehand, I had no idea I was going to organize a conference for hundreds of people in Thailand of all places!

But the Nomad Summit soon became a force of nature, we sold out of tickets and had people begging us for more within 10 days of listing the event on Facebook!

Ian Robinson made this great recap highlighting all of the speakers as well as the attendees of the event!

It all started in early January sometime when I met with Johnny to begin planning.

We opened ticket sales on January 25th, and 10 days later we sold out, filled beyond capacity.

In fact, there fast grew a secondary market for Nomad Summit tickets — as more and more people were wanting to get in, and as a few folks were unable to travel to Chiang Mai (yes, people flew here to Thailand from far and wide!), or just couldn’t make it at the last minute!

It was an overwhelming success actually.

We relied heavily on the strong brand reputation I’d built up at Digital Nomad Academy since 2011, and as I knew from the start — Johnny’s strong network paired with mine and we had an amazing reach, and lots of great people on board to lend a helping hand.

I made it my job to seek amazing speakers and sponsors from among my circle of friends and colleagues, as well as doing outreach to corporate sponsors who had backed other similar events — and in the end we gathered a truly impressive roster of 10 accomplished speakers, and four great companies who see the potential in events like this and serve our target audience (in this case, the business travel crowd, and entrepreneurs living in Asia as expats).

With a little persistence and the courage to ask people for their help, all the pieces came together, and we were able to get the largest event space at the Ibis Styles hotel, beverage service and staff. I flew in some of the best film crew I know to help us capture and create top-notch, professional video presentations for everyone to enjoy afterward.

And it was glorious:

We had an amazing lineup of thought leaders:

Stephanie Simon – Copyhacks: How Copywriting Can Get You Sexier Dates, Swankier Accommodations, and a Souped Up Bank Account

Marcus Lucas – Superheroes: and 3 Superpowers for Your Online Business

Cody McKibben – Lessons Learned from 8 Years Bootstrapping Businesses & Living Abroad

Brendan Tully – Ecommerce Marketing & Optimization: From 5 and 6 Figures to 7 Figures and Beyond

Taylor West – Personal Brand Building: Liar. Cheat. Thief. Nomad.

Sean Lee – Creation Is Our Most Powerful Work

Joe Lannen & Dylan Basile – Tree Tribe – Social Enterprise: Giving Back is Awesome!

Alice Bush – Coacherr.com – How Success Without Personal Development is Not Sustainable Long Term

Sam Marks – Building a $100 Million Business the Nomadic Way

Johnny FD – Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Hacking

There was SO much great sharing all over Facebook and Twitter! A few attendees even created beautiful artwork and mindmaps of some of the presentations:

I’d spoken on stage at before a large audience three times in the past, but this was the first time I really felt great about it. I felt like I really had something valuable to share, and like I truly impacted people.

Afterward, I got nothing but amazing feedback from an enthusiastic portion of the crowd (Johnny and I both even heard people saying they wanted to pay us more money for the tickets!), and online we got tremendous amounts of positive feedback:

So how did we pull it off?

Here are a few key lessons I’ve drawn from our fortunate success:

1. Be open to opportunity

When I first spoke one-on-one with Johnny, after talking with him, I learned that he’d launched and successfully run the conference the year prior within a very short time, and I learned that they’d been able to pull in Buffer as the event sponsor on short notice too!

But I saw plenty of potential to do much more with it. I could tell from the videos that the first event was held in a small space, with low ceilings, and only limited space for about 140 or so people. I thought, if Buffer was willing to get on board with an unproven, unestablished new event on short notice, then surely this time around we could get more companies involved to sponsor the event, and make it bigger and better. I saw room to grow and improve, and with our powers combined, Johnny and I did just that.

2. When it comes to events at least, find the heart of the action

Depending what your industry or niche is, do your best to find a location that’s central to that demographic. Chiang Mai is kind of like the Shangri La for Digital Nomads — over the last 5 or 6 years I’ve watched as the travel bloggers moved in and hyped it, then the lifestyle designer crowd, and now it gets talked about all the time in our circles of nomadic friends. There’s a growing and healthy expat population here, and at least several hundred of them consider themselves nomadic or are working on their online businesses — in other words, it’s become nomad central. So when we put out our feelers on Facebook to test the idea (before we had booked an event space or any speakers!) all it took was a compelling event description, both Johnny and I invited a small group of our personal friends in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and I believe we posted it once in a local nomad Facebook group. And the thing went gangbusters.

Perhaps the way we slowly dripped out clues helped pique people’s curiosity, but with all the excitement and people hungrily looking for tickets, even though we invited probably less than 400 people individually, the Facebook event reached 33,000!

3. It’s important to find partners

In the past, I’ve definitely been guilty (time and again) of trying to do everything all by myself… but especially when it comes to events, that can be a recipe for overwhelm and under-delivering. Events are social occasions, and as such, the planning and execution should be a social, shared activity too. Any gathering of such large scale will require a team of staff, volunteers, and logistical partners to make it a reality. So a willingness to collaborate with a partner or two will not only drastically cut down on the amount of effort you’ll need to put in to manage all the moving parts, but if done right, it will also hopefully allow you to focus more on what you’re best at, meaning everyone involved can produce better results. It also means you have quantifiably better ideas, and you multiply your reach and abilities with your networks combined.

Thankfully Johnny made my job really straightforward and simple, and he took responsibility for a lot of the tasks I wouldn’t have been overly interested in.

4. Don’t forget the value of the meeting in-person, and shaking hands

As much as I love running a business remotely from my laptop, there is definitely a LOT to be said for the value of working with people in real life, and looking your partner in the eye! Never undervalue face-to-face contact when you’re getting to know a new collaborator and decide whether it’s best to partner up, and what your vision for the project is. I’ve been fortunate to know Johnny socially for a while, but this was a chance for us to really start to get to know each other, and I’m thankful we had the opportunity to meet up in person a few times as we planned our event. I think it had a measurable impact on how well we were able to communicate with each other, and understand each other’s desired outcomes for the event.

I’ve tried to organize events with partners remotely in the past, and while it’s not impossible, it does tend to be exponentially more difficult.

5. Use smart tools to split the workload

This is the case with any project, but for our purposes with the Nomad Summit, we used Google Docs for spreadsheets and documents in the cloud and shared folders with our whole team, we used a shared Google+ brand account and YouTube channel to showcase our videos, Dropbox (mostly for photos gathered from numerous volunteers, attendees, and our professional crew), Slideshare for uploading all our speaker’s slide presentations afterward, and Eventbrite for ticket management and for accepting sponsor payments.

If you do need to communicate remotely with your team/partners, I recommend Google Hangouts for the best overall connectivity, and ScheduleOnce for setting appointment times across timezones.

6. Be generous

The Summit was started as a not-for-profit event, and we wanted to keep that spirit the second time around. My vision was to bring in more corporate sponsors this year to cover as much of the costs as possible, so we could offer an amazing free/low-cost event that rivals some of the other conferences out there that you’d easily pay $300–$500 and up to attend.

So we started by offering 100 free tickets through the Facebook event page, which had the side effect of helping kickstart a bit of viral sharing. Then we encouraged donations (starting from about $6 USD up to $25) so we could upgrade our space to a much larger seminar room to accommodate twice the people. Thankfully because we offered a lot of value up front and maybe established some good will with free tickets, and because of the reputation Nomad Summit had already built in its first year, people were more than generous in return when we asked for assistance to scale up the event 2x. A fair number of people even commented that they wanted to pay us more money!

7. Tap your network to amplify your potential

Just like you can double the possibilities with two partners, you can also bring in other skills, resources, contacts, perspectives, and capabilities just by bringing in the right strategic collaborators — whether they’re speakers, sponsors, crew, or even volunteers, your job should be to find other people who have a vested interest in your vision, and ideally those individuals who also bring their own connections to the table. That’s why I immediately made it my job to start cold emailing people who I thought would be excited to be a part of something like this, to help fund it, or support us in any way possible.

Find win-win-wins and know how to frame things to create the perception of value for others. Some people said no, and that’s fine, just find people who would benefit from being able to add this to their resume.

A few of those early supporters for example were Brendan Tully, and Ozzi Jarvinen at Iglu. Once I was able to say we had BT from The Search Engine Shop on board as a speaker, and Iglu (a great business services company based here in Thailand) on board as a significant sponsor, then others were more eager to get involved too! So, special thanks to you guys.

8. Write a solid sponsor proposal document!

Early on I knew that having a couple significant corporate partners would multiply the possibilities for what kind of experience we could create for people. It’s essential to get as creative as you can about what value you can provide to your sponsors (thankfully with two popular blogs, Johnny and I had some good leverage). And it’s wise to pitch companies specifically for how they would benefit from reaching whatever demographic you’re planning on pulling together.

For me, I am fortunate to have lots of friends and acquaintances who run tech and travel-related companies that want to get in front of our audience, but I also did my research and made my best efforts at connecting with larger corporations that had sponsored similar events in the past as well. Have courage in seeking representatives in lofty companies — though we didn’t close the deal with everyone (on a very short timeline), surprisingly I heard back from almost everyone, and got connected to the right person in several larger organizations (connections that might prove valuable in the future!)

The Nomad Summit was generously sponsored by:

  • DRIP – Drip is the email marketing software trusted by Dan and Ian from the Tropical MBA, James Clear, Dan Norris, Brennan Dunn, and many, many more. If you’ve ever used MailChimp, Drip is more powerful than MailChimp, similar to Infusionsoft – but much cheaper and easier to use.
  • Empire Flippers – THE go-to marketplace if you’re interested in flipping/buying/selling websites, or if you’re interested to sell your own website or online business! We’ve personally met nomads who sold their businesses on Empire Flippers for $10k, $20k, and even $30,000+ dollars that they started right here in Chiang Mai! Great service!
  • Iglu – If you are looking for an easy, legal method to go legit here in Thailand — get your business visa, work permit, a great coworking space, help with accommodation, bank accounts, transportation, etc. Or even if you’re looking to relocate your startup or set up a business here in Thailand, Iglu are the guys to talk to!
  • Coworkation – Inspiring people in inspiring places doing inspiring things. A coworkation is a pop-up coworking space in exotic locations such as Bali, Croatia, Costa Rica or Thailand where your workspace is not confined to an office desk. Work from stunning villas beside infinity pools overlooking the jungle, below waterfalls, lakeside, swim-up bars…or other incredible locations!

Nothing would have been possible without these guys! Thank you to Rob Walling, Justin Cooke, Joseph Magnotti, Ozzi Jarvinen, Stuart Jones, and more!

9. Provide value/tell a good story

Of course at the heart of every good conference are great talks by compelling people. We were very fortunate to get several top-notch individuals involved who all provided tremendous value by sharing their experiences, their insights, tips and tricks. And of course, as co-hosts of the event, Johnny and I both wanted to present our own perspectives as well. So I spent a significant amount of time digging deep for the best wisdom I felt I had to offer this particular audience, and crafting a presentation that I believed would best convey my most valuable ideas. Plus, I tried to go well above and beyond in packaging something that would be engaging, a little funny, and full of useful related tools and resources. This is really the key to a successful conference: stories worth sharing.

If you want to see our presentations from Nomad Summit 2016, keep reading below.

10. Try to surprise

– with bonuses, juicy insider knowledge, humor, special deals, free offers… anything useful and unexpected. Attendees got to see some behind-the-scenes insights into a $100 million dollar business, for example, they got a few laughs from strategically-placed comic relief, they got to watch a world-premier trailer for an upcoming digital nomad documentary featuring Tim Ferriss and Matt Mullenweg (creator of WordPress), and we thankfully had amazing special offers available ONLY to attendees — for great email marketing software, website brokering, coworking/co-living, online training and more.

11. Maintain your commitments to all parties involved

Whatever you promise to your partners, speakers, hired staff, volunteers, sponsors, and your customers/attendees, deliver on it to the best of your ability. As in any sustainable business, you don’t just want to concentrate on what you can get from people now, but you ideally want to build good relationships for the future. This is an ongoing commitment, but for me that means trying to give our speakers and sponsors every grain of value possible out of their participation, and making it easy for them to share and take credit for their contributions.

12. Give incentives for people to share their constructive feedback and testimonials 

Thankfully I got tons of in-person feedback from listeners who approached me after the event. But I also wanted to encourage people to leave their testimonials (that we might be able to use for future events) and their critical feedback about how we might be able to improve as well. We managed to negotiate some free coworking passes from Punspace and AngkorHub fortunately, so I got creative and decided to use them to incentivize people to share!

13. Gather social proof you can use for next time

Since we were successful in bringing on several sponsors, we were able to hire great photographers, which was one of my top priorities for this event (if you need a stellar professional videographer, I highly recommend Cadu Cassau and his amazing team, who took most of the professional shots included above, as well as produced all of our videos this year).

Invest in a professional photo/film team and you’ll have top-notch speaker videos to share afterward and photography you can use to showcase your event. Also encourage your attendees to use your event’s own special hashtag (like #nomadsummit) and be creative in your use of social media content created by conference-goers themselves, like I have in this post.

Want to Watch the 10 Expert Speaker Presentations from the 2016 annual Summit?

We will be releasing a new talk every few days to our subscribers, for for now here are the first two:

Stephanie Simon – Copywriting Hacks:

Marcus Lucas – Superheroes:

If you want to watch my presentation, click here.

Check this sweet mindmap illustration from Kat Ingalls below for a sneak peak, and subscribe below if you want to get my video presentation when it comes out, along with access to my full slides, related resources/tools, and special offers 😉

Some photos courtesy of Stefanie Oeffner, Nick Martin, Bruno Eiroz, L Lee Horton, Cadu Cassau, and Jon Wilkinson. Thanks to Ian Robinson for your great video.

Many thanks to all our fabulous speakers, our emcee Petter Miller, to our volunteers Veronica D’ Robzario, Brad Wages, Alicia Orre, and Angharad Owen, and to the many of you who attended the event!

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How To Get A Life Beyond Code: An Interview with Rajesh Setty

Rajesh Setty is the popular author of the book Beyond Code: Learn To Distinguish Yourself In 9 Simple Steps and another of my absolute favorite bloggers, at Life Beyond Code. He is the president of Foresight Plus, a Silicon Valley management consulting firm that aims to give entrepreneurs a competitive advantage, as well as founder of the new online companies Suggestica and iPolipo. He has lived quite the motivated and successful life, not only as founder, president, and chairman of many companies, but also as an author, teacher, and public speaker.

With such an accomplished list of entrepreneurial pursuits, I thought Rajesh would make the perfect contender for my second business interview. He has had many successes and failures, and has a lot of solid knowledge to share from that experience. I was fortunate enough to be able to meet with him in person on my recent trip to Silicon Valley, and he was kind enough to let me interview him by email.

Rajesh, you are a founder, president, chairman, author, and blogger. Please tell us about the many business projects you are currently involved with.

Cody, first of all thank you for inviting me for this interview. Now, to answer your question, currently I am involved in five different companies. I will go with the latest one first:

  • iPolipo – I am one of the founders and serve as the executive chairman. We think that people want to spend more time “meeting” people rather than “scheduling those meetings” with them. We have a solution that will help in doing just that.
  • Suggestica – I am one of the founders and serve as the president. We think that there is a non-information overload on the web. By bringing trusted content, we not only hope to save time and money, we truly want to bring joy into people’s lives.
  • Compassites – This is a company in India and I serve on their board. Compassites is totally focused on helping entrepreneurs with their product development needs. Their claim to fame is that they can take an idea from concept to launch in record time.
  • Foresight Plus – This is a management consulting firm where I partner with some select businesses and individuals to bring them an unfair and sustainable competitive advantage. I am no longer accepting new clients with this business for the near future.
  • CIGNEX – I was one of the founders and served as the CEO for the first five years. While I am no longer operationally involved in the company, I help in some business development activities when appropriate.

I am involved in a few more projects but those are all in stealth mode. I am an entrepreneur at heart but I am also an author and a teacher. On the business side, I act as a catalyst to speed up multiple projects simultaneously. On the personal side, I love to help already high-performing people reach greater heights.

What sort of background do you come from? And what was your experience like living and working in different countries around the globe and finally coming to reside here in California?

I was born and brought up in Southern India. I come from a middle-class family. My father was a civil engineer working for the state government. That meant that we would move from one place to another place every few years. It seemed like a pain at that time but it taught us to adapt to new situations.

That family background helped me to adjust easily when I lived and worked in five different countries–India, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and France. I am generally a happy person so I enjoyed living and working in all those countries. These experiences have helped me tremendously in the following ways:

  • Increased my respect for diversity: Every country was different and we had to get used to the diversity. Now, it is more fun than a problem.
  • Enhanced my ability to adapt: Each country was also different in terms of how we live and work and basically how to get things done.
  • Expanded my network globally: Relationships in different countries help tremendously with globalization in full force.

Where did you get your formal education and what did you study?

I completed my Bachelor of Engineering at Mysore University in India, in Electronics and Communication. Of course, I didn’t use much of what I studied in my engineering at my work.

Do you have a word of advice for college students and other young people who would like to become successful leaders or entrepreneurs?

I think every college student should try to pursue a life of leadership. If you are a college student, you can learn that by taking some initiative to do what I call “filling in the blanks.” Wherever you are, you can always find something that everyone thinks someone else will take care of–blanks–and rather than thinking that someone else will take care of it, you can take the initiative to take care of it. If you make this a habit, you would have laid a good foundation to become a leader.

Are there any specific skill sets that don’t get taught in school that are invaluable in the business world? What do you recommend to get over those hurdles?

This question is very interesting to me. There are many skills that are not taught in schools, but if you don’t learn them you are at a serious competitive disadvantage. It will take me a while to list all of them, but here are a few for starters:

  1. Building long-term relationships: Long-term relationships can be a huge competitive advantage just because of the sheer fact that it takes a long-time to build them. Everyone knows that, but the schools don’t teach it. You have to learn it on your own initiative.
  2. Improving your likability: When I tell people that likable people have an easier time getting ahead, people usually agree. When I tell people that unlikeable people have a hard time getting things done, people agree to that too. However, when I ask them if they have done anything in the last one year to improve their likability factor, they look at me as if I am from a different world. Likability is a key skill and you have to learn it on your own.
  3. Learning how to learn: Schools teach you stuff but rarely teach you the concept of “learning how to learn.” It is your responsibility to learn the best way to learn new things. Many of your current skills won’t help you to succeed in the future. So while you are delivering your current projects with your current skill sets, you have to also learn new skills. Unlike the times when you were a student, you have less time to learn a lot more. This means you have to learn how to learn.
  4. Leveraging your time: Every one of us has only 24 hours, but successful people get more out of those 24 hours. How can you too get more out of your time? For starters, start designing your activities to yield multiple rewards. For example: you come across a very interesting service on the web, you can see who among your friends will be interested in it and why. Remember that even if only two people are interested, the reasons for their interest may be different. Your job is to send both of them a note explaining the relevance of that service to them. This is an example that you are caring for what they care about.
  5. Building your personal brand: Every person has a personal brand, whether they like it or not. It is “who they are to the world.” So, you have a personal brand too. The real question therefore is: “Is your personal brand effective?” Like likability, personal brands provide a powerful shortcut to many things. It takes a while to build a powerful personal brand and it takes a lot of effort to maintain and grow it, but the rewards are long-term and sweet.

What values would you say have provided you with the greatest motivation to be continually successful? What do you care about most?

If I could pick one value, it would be the ability to touch the lives of people in a positive way. I like to have a magic touch–meaning when someone is already magical (high-performing), I would like to touch them!

As an entrepreneur and executive businessman, what experiences have left the most lasting impression or have been the most memorable in your work experience?

It is hard to single out any one experience during the last decade, Cody. However, every time I see a smile on one or more of our clients’ faces, I feel blessed that we were able to solve a problem for them or open up a significant opportunity with our products or services.

So, you’ve just unveiled your newest venture iPolipo just days ago. Please tell us all about it.

We launched iPolipo in the “controlled beta” mode on Monday, December 11. We hit 90% of our beta customer count by Friday of the same week. This was an overwhelmingly positive response for something that was built over the last one year.

iPolipo solves the everyday scheduling problem for business executives. It is common for two people to exchange multiple emails or voicemails to schedule one meeting. It is also frustrating to hold a particular slot on your calendar open waiting for a confirmation from the other party. iPolipo solves this problem by allowing people to share their free slots on the calendar effectively on the web.

 

And what motivated you to start writing? Tell us about some of your written work.

I started reading early. By the time I was nine, I must have read close to 700 books–mostly novels and other fiction. When I was nine, I had an idea–you can say a crazy idea–to write my own novel. At that age, you don’t have a lot of logic in your head. So I didn’t think much, but wrote a 200-page novel. My parents thought I was mentally ill, as it was odd for a 9-year old kid to write 200 pages of anything. But my craziness continued. I thought, “writing is the hard work; publishing should be easy.” I immediately took action and started searching for a publisher. Long story short, after more than a hundred rejections and four long years, I found a publisher to get my book published. After that there was no looking back, and I have thoroughly enjoyed writing since then.

I have so far got seven books published. Four novels, one collection of poems, one book on mathematics and my latest book Beyond Code (with a foreword by Tom Peters) is a management book that’s focus is to help people distinguish themselves to raise above the commodity crowd. I talk about 9 things that people can do to distinguish themselves. It is available in many major bookstores and almost all online bookstores like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and 800-CEO-READ.

What kind of readers do you write your blog Life Beyond Code for?

My blog is targeted at knowledge workers, entrepreneurs and ambitious students who want to get something more out of their lives. It started off as an extension to the book, but has taken a life of its own. I write on topics that range from how to get more out of your life, the art of leverage, distinguishing yourself, leadership, entrepreneurship and some occasional mini sagas (a mini saga is a story in exactly 50 words).

How do you think web 2.0 technology is changing the way we do business? Is this a positive trend?

Web 2.0, Software as a Service, Open Source or any other thing in and within itself cannot make a significant change. What we do with them is what is causing the change. I just received a business plan to look at where the entrepreneur had explained the business model something like this: “We have a web 2.0 application delivered as a Software as a Service model in the healthcare vertical.” I was sad because the idea should not be to create a buzzword-laden business plan. The underlying magic is the power of the business model and the power of execution. Both idea and the team are important and then comes the “how” part where web 2.0, open source and SaaS models come into play. Sometimes people tend to put the cart before the horse because of all the hype surrounding these buzzwords.

Describe your vision of the future of business. How do you think things might change on an international level, and how might businesses anticipate those changes?

All I know is that the rate of change that is happening at a global level is mind-boggling. I think nobody can cope with this change all on their own. Everyone needs help and whoever realizes this early and builds powerful configurations that can withstand the change can survive and thrive. There aren’t any sure-fire ways or practices that can help any organization to guarantee success. What I tell people is to constantly build the capacity to:

  • handle change
  • relentlessly innovate
  • read the markets
  • anticipate mid to long-term needs and start planning to create offerings before someone else does
  • execute better than the competition

Who do you think are 3 or 4 of the most authoritative experts in leadership, innovation, and business productivity currently, other than yourself?

Here are my current picks, in no particular order:

Leadership

Innovation

Productivity

What one life tip would you like to leave us with, Rajesh?

Focus on ROII. ROII stands for Return On Investment for an Interaction. Everyone is busy and running around to take care of many of their concerns.
People say time is money, but most people really don’t mean it or at least they don’t behave as if time was money. In fact, they do something that is shocking–they treat money as if they can never get it back, and they squander time as if they can easily refill it at a gas station or something like that. In reality, we all know that time lost is gone forever and money invested in the right things will yield multiple returns. Imagine for a second that you did subscribe to the “time is money” philosophy. This would mean that when someone interacts with you, they are investing their time and that means they are investing money in you. Like any business person, they are interested in getting the right return on their investment (in this case, this happens to be time) and it is your duty to provide that return for them.

If you don’t care about providing a decent ROII, you become a liability for that person. Worse, if someone else who is in the same role provides a better ROII for the same job, you have a serious competitive disadvantage.

I wish to thank Rajesh so much for giving me a few hours of his time and sharing his valuable thoughts and experiences! As is fitting, he is the king of ensuring he delivers the highest return-on-investment to everyone he interacts with!

Rajesh Setty currently lives in Silicon Valley with his wife Kavitha and their son Sumukh. You can learn more about him on his website Life Beyond Code, or from his book Beyond Code.

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Sacramento Business Students Meet with Warren Buffett

I met the wealthiest man in the world when I was 22 years old.

Warren Buffett, born in 1930 Nebraska, the “Oracle of Omaha,” is renowned as one of the world’s most talented investors and money managers, the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, and has consistently been ranked among the world’s wealthiest people for at least the last 20 years (frequently in the top 2 or 3 for the last several years running).

Warren Buffett and Cody McKibben

In 2008, Forbes ranked Buffett as the richest person in the world with a net worth somewhere around $62 billion.

Buffett started out with the money he earned as a newspaper boy to buy his first income-producing assets, and despite his now immense fortune, he still lives in a home he purchased for $31,000 in the 1950s and embraces a frugal lifestyle.

In 2006, I learned that apparently Sacramento State University’s President, Alex Gonzalez, didn’t know Buffett’s reputation, and his office was ignoring calls from Buffett’s staff. I had long been an admirer of Buffett’s approach to value investing, as well as the wisdom of his vice chairman Charlie Munger (who’s writings on mental models are definitely worth a read).

I passed some information on to my boss and the Dean of the College of Business Administration where I worked.

A few weeks later, I’d worked with my supervisor Thomas Matlock to organize a meet and greet event for our Executive MBA students, and I had the opportunity to meet Warren myself briefly, shortly after his announcement in 2006 that he’d be giving away 85 percent of his fortune via the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The College of Business was invited to a special reception with Warren Buffett in Rocklin, California.

EMBA students with Warren Buffett

Reprinted from our Business Futures Magazine, Volume 26, Fall 2006:

College of Business Administration Meets Fortune 100’s “Oracle of Omaha”

A 16-member group of faculty, staff, students and community business leaders from the College of Business Administration attended an “Exclusive Meet and Greet” on July 20, 2006 with Warren Buffett.

The reception and the ribbon-cutting ceremony that followed marked the official grand opening of the first California showroom for home furnishers RC Willey. Buffet, second in wealth only to Bill Gates of Microsoft fame, is the CEO and Chair of the Board of Berkshire Hathaway, which purchased RC Willey in 1995. The legendary investor and philanthropist was in the area to support the opening at the store’s new Rocklin location and took the opportunity to meet some of the community.

“Sacramento business was privileged to have Warren Buffet visit the region,” CBA Dean Sanjay Varshney said. “A business leader of his caliber wanting to meet with educators—and students—is a reflection of his character and humility. He enthusiastically chatted with our students and faculty, taking time to pose for pictures with each individual. This was truly an exciting opportunity to meet with the most successful investor on Wall Street—the Oracle of Omaha himself!”

oracle of OmahaDean Varshney and his assistant Thomas Matlock were accompanied to the event by Christopher Cady, President, Pulte Homes Corporation; Mitzi Caycendeo, Chipset Planning Analyst, Intel Corporation (EMBA student); Matt Cologna, VP Industrial Services Group, Grubb and Ellis; Karna Gocke, Associate Physician, UC Davis Medical Center (EMBA student); Kimberly Harrington, Sac State HR Training & Development; Chris Higdon, President and CEO, California Moving Systems; Earl King, VP/Branch Manager, Fidelity Investments (EMBA student); Cody McKibben, Administrative Support Assistant, CBA; Monoo Prasad, Senior Project Manager, Ebay; Tim Ray, Executive Director, External Affairs for Northern California, AT&T; Randy Sater, Senior VP, Teichert Land Company; David Snyder, Director of Economic Development for Placer County; Denver Travis, Professor, CBA; and Chiang Wang, Interim Associate Dean for Graduate and External Programs, CBA.

…

I can’t recall the words we exchanged verbatim, but I will always remember the impression Warren made on me. That moment he gave my hand a firm shake, and looked me in the eyes with a smile.

Though I was starstruck at the time, he was a surprisingly approachable and down-to-earth man. I asked him what advice he had for a young clueless college student who was interested in business but had no idea where to start.

In those short few minutes I had to interact with him, his attitude left a lifelong impression on me. He doesn’t have an entourage; no bodyguards; no driver. He doesn’t spend much money on toys. His idea of happiness is being able to watch his basketball games on a big screen TV in his sweatpants…

And it taught me that, this legendary business tycoon, who is idolized by many, is not some lofty superhuman god. He is still just a man, and a humble one at that. Warren Buffett looked me in the eyes with a sincerity that revealed, while he is very accomplished and in-demand, he still has respect and time for someone just starting out in life.

His tips for me essentially boiled down to:

1. Never stop learning.

Buffett was rejected by Harvard University in 1950. Maybe he just recognized the potential in a young nobody who, at the time, was desperate to break into Stanford University without the typical pedigree many ivy league students have.

Whether through formal schooling or self-guided learning, he started by admonishing me never to stop learning and reading. Like many hugely successful people, Warren is a voracious reader, who has estimated at times he spends up to 80% of his workday reading, 5 or more hours per day.

He was once speaking at the Columbia University School of Business when students asked what was the biggest key to success that he could share with the class? He held up a stack of reports and trade publications he’d brought with him and said: “Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”

2. Find something you absolutely love doing.

I remember very clearly he stressed the importance of finding my own thing that I enjoyed, and just focus on that. As he often does, he discourages copycats and reinforces how not everybody is cut out best to follow his exact path to success. Not everybody is great at finance or investment, and therefore they’re not going to necessarily have the same energy and consistency behind their actions as Buffett would. But everybody can find something they love to do.

In a 2006 CNBC interview, “The Billionaire Next Door”, he was asked “What is the Warren Buffett secret to success?”

His response: “If people get to my age and they have the people love them that they want to have love them, they’re successful. It doesn’t make any difference if they’ve got a thousand dollars in the bank or a billion dollars in the bank… Success is really doing what you love and doing it well. It’s as simple as that. I’ve never met anyone doing that who doesn’t feel like a success. And I’ve met plenty of people who have not achieved that and whose lives are miserable.”

“Really getting to do what you love to do everyday—that’s really the ultimate luxury. And particularly when you get to do it with terrific people around you.”

3. Start now

As far as wealth, while he’d made it clear not everybody is going to be the next Warren Buffett doing the same things he had done, he simply said, “start right now, just do whatever you can.”

Like reading, the main principle of wealth building that Buffett emphasizes is the power of compound interest — or how the simple fact is that when you start saving outweighs how much you save. The more years you stay invested in something, and leave your capital untouched, it can add up to a large sum, even if you never invest another dime.

I’ve carried these lessons with me until today.

Though I don’t keep up with Warren’s 5 hours a day, I spend a very hefty chunk of my personal time reading, watching documentaries, going through training courses, and researching topics for the blog.

I’ve certainly learned a tremendous amount more in my post-university, self-directed education, in areas that impact my business, my wellbeing and my bank account far more than most subjects in school, and I’ve enjoyed it more.

Though it’s taken me many years to hone in specifically on the things that I truly love doing with my time, I have made the sacrifices to build my life and my business around my own interests. I’ve learned to rely on my own skills and resourcefulness to make a living since I quit my job in 2007, and with years of practice, failure, learning, and trying again, I’ve finally built a business where I’m fortunate to do work that is deeply fulfilling, and makes me excited to get out of bed in the morning.

I’m not a rich man by any stretch of the imagination, but I believe I have met Warren’s definition of success: I enjoy my role in the world, what I get to do, and I am surrounded by my favorite people. I have invested in the right things to create a life of my own design, to create incredible personal freedom and flexibility in my career, and I continue to make sacrifices to invest in my own business above everything else — constantly reinvesting in my own platform that allows me to produce new income streams.

If I hadn’t shook hands with such a jolly, generous billionaire at such a young age, who knows, my life could have gone very differently.

Dean Varshney Warren Buffett Thomas Matlock

Mr. Buffett with my Dean Dr. Sanjay Varshney and mentor Thomas Matlock

I credit Warren Buffett for showing me it’s possible to march to your own beat, as opposed to following the typical template life path, and still manage to pull off incredible accomplishments.

Now I live in a beautiful tropical paradise with my wife and son, I’ve traveled over 35 countries, experienced more fabulous memories than I will ever be able to remember, teamed up with a stunningly beautiful young woman, and become a father to an amazing son. I am surrounded by fascinating people and supportive friends, and every day I get to spend my time with people I love.

It took me many years of near impossible struggle, but I’d say I’ve managed to manifest a very wealthy life. Thanks Warren.

Lesson learned: If the wealthiest investor and philanthropist in the world grew an astounding business from just a few dollars from his paper route, just maybe you can too.

Also recommended: How to Think Like Warren Buffett

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