How to Change Your Entire Life in 1 Hour

HEADLINES - Chinedu Echeruo, founder of networking platform MindMeet, tells the crowd at Inc's GrowCo conference that everyone has one person somewhere in the world with the ability to profoundly affect their fortunes.

Good morning. Good morning. So thank you, Jim, for that wonderful introduction. Thank you, Inc, for inviting me to present you. And thank you all, for being here and taking the time to listen to my story and, and my lessons learned during the things I've done over the past few years. So I believe in the power of an hour. So I believe that one hour, could change everything. And I think we're all very powerful creators. 

We all have dreams, we all have challenges that are frictions, to achieving our goals. And in between, between your dream, and you'll go and where you are now is usually a person or a group of people. And I would like all of you to just spend a few seconds to think about who you would actually who would actually change your life if you had an opportunity to meet them. So it could be someone that could help you get a new job, someone who help you raise financing for your company, a key employee would need for your company, just be spend a few few seconds I'm going to ask a few of you your answers just to go. 

If you can meet anyone in the world that could change your life. who would it be? Just a few seconds thinking. So you're right there in front of me. So who do you think? I would say someone like Warren Buffett? Okay. Thank you. And, and your VIP. Hello. So who would change your life? You could actually meet them for an hour.

The President okay. Anyone wants to volunteer someone? Okay. Pope Francis. Okay, wonderful. Thank you for sharing. So one hour can change everything. So just think of the people on earth 7 billion people. And think of how much of our time we actually use productively in between watching your soap operas, going on Facebook, or lounging on your couch. 

You definitely wasted more than an hour in a month. Let's just say that's all you do you waste one hour a month, right? And imagine if each of our time was worth $1. Right. So basically, every month $7 billion of value is burned in the world, we waste all that value. And my belief is that if we could channel that one hour, that all of you just like you have somebody else, you believe you can change your life, that there's also someone out there in the world that feels the exact same way about you that you have experiences and you have value, you have expertise, that if someone could only tap could also change their lives. And that's what gigabit is about. 

But before I talk about giving me the like to tell you who I am and why I'm here speaking to you today. So I was born in Nigeria, I went to the oldest boarding school in Lagos, which is called King's College. And I would wake up really early in the morning to fetch buckets of water from the tap a few feet away from our geometry. I will then ration how much water I use to brush my teeth as well as to shower Then I'll quickly run downstairs before, the more senior, the older kids would wake up and conscript me to go fetch their buckets of water. So it's one of those things you have to wake up early to run away from, from the, from the most senior guys. I ended up my dad's a professor. So we ended up moving to a few cities, I ended up in Bloomington, Indiana. 

So, so there I was 16 years old, and seen snow for the very first time. And I remember looking down from our apartment building and watching the snowflakes, you know, slowly descend down and kind of powdered the ground below, you know, with whiteness, as my first experience with snow. I ended up going to Syracuse University. And I remember being pulled aside by my guidance counselor, and he talked about this thing called investment banking. And it was one hour, and it changed my life. I ended up interning at Goldman Sachs in New York, and then worked at JP Morgan. 

First in the mergers and acquisitions group, and then in leveraged finance group, and threw out all my time at JP Morgan, I had a certain desire, I wanted to be on the other side of the table, I want to be on the side of the entrepreneur who was building their business, and he is financing. And I remember calling my mother, which is what all you know, good. African kids, do. You call your mother, like mom, have a few questions have a few. I want to leave investment banking. And I want to be an entrepreneur. And like every true immigrants, mother, she's like, You're crazy. You're JPMorgan, they're paying you good money, why do you want to leave.

And she said, there's no such thing as being an entrepreneur, on being an entrepreneur is not a job, that what you have to do is yet to actually have a business, you want to build units, find a problem you want to solve. And in my mind, I knew what I needed to do, I needed to get away from investment banking, and have some time to think about how I would end up eventually become an entrepreneur. And that's when I went to business school. So while at Harvard, I didn't interview once for a job, because I knew in my mind that I wanted to be my own boss, I wanted to be someone who would decide how to spend each hour. 

And each year of my life, I wanted that freedom. So after the first company, we started right after Business School failed. It was a really troubling time. So, you know, unemployed, you know, six figures, student loans, have to pay rents. Right? So I ended up having to go back to finance and I remember interviewing for my first job at a hedge fund. And the and the gentleman who interviewed me, he loved he loved me, in terms of HIPAA that would add value to the fund. But he says, Well, actually, we only have, we don't have much money so I can afford to hire you. Right? Okay, no problem, Mark. What I'll do is, I'll work as a consultant, you know, you just pay me on an hourly basis, says, what should they do? We actually can afford that as well. So it's okay, how about this, right? I'll come and work for free. So every morning, I would wake up at 530 from my apartment in Brooklyn, and I would take the subway and you know, get time to get to work on time. And I did this for three months, they did buy me lunch. 

I remember. So that's good. And I've never been a sushi person. So I always used to get a chicken teriyaki instead of sushi. bonide sushi, but then I didn't. And so we ended up raising some capital, I was 25 million. And I eventually left the funds and we reached half 1,000,000,003 years after. But, but what really led me to leave was the same thing that led is always been my passion, which is to be a creator, to be a builder. It's been an entrepreneur. And so I'll tell you a little bit about the first company style, which is called hopstop. 

So I remember going on a date on the Lower East Side. Those of you are familiar with New York is New York has a pretty good grid system for, for street massage in the Lower East Side. That's, that whole system breaks down, right? So I remember getting very lost and being late for my dates. So what I ended up doing right after the, the next morning, actually, because I don't remember what happened during the day, but I know what I did the very next morning. 

So I went to the subway station, I got a subway map, put it on the floor of my apartment, then in Brooklyn. And so how do I figure out how I can describe the subway system to a developer, I could then write an algorithm to give the shortest path. So for those of you who aren't familiar with what hopstop is, it's really, it solved the problem of getting around large cities where subways and buses were a dominant form of transportation. So just like 

Map Quest used to give you driving directions, hopstop did that for subways, buses, trends, ferries, etc, for cities that use those forms of transportation. So, so we worked together, so here I am, right in New York, in a Nigerian in New York, then I found this developer on a marketplace called Elance. And it's now called Upwork. So I gave him the task, and I hired him. And we worked together for four years. So think about it. So African in New York, working with someone in Siberia, Russia, to build hopstop. And we did this for four years. We never saw each other, we never spoke to each other. We did all of this entirely through Hotmail, messenger, and then email. So I think that's the power of what technology can do for people who are creative, who have great ideas, but lack the technical, or other skills to manifest those, those ideas.

So we did that, for again, for four or five years, then in between my, during that time, a couple of things became very clear to me, became very clear to me that my passion and my knowledge of self meant that I realized that that wasn't a growth, I wasn't a growth CEO, I was more passionate about the early years of a company of very ambiguous problems and finding solutions to those problems. So I approached my board and said, like, I think it's time to bring in a new CEO. And they agreed. So in 2009, we hired a gentleman named Joe Meyer, who scaled the business dramatically, I think we were 30, I was top servers, I think around 13 markets when I when I stopped being CEO, and and when Apple bought hopstop. In 2013. We were I think that 300 or so cities with in US was mentioned three to 5 million visitors a month. 

So in hindsight, I think it was one of the best decisions I've made. But also Claire, in terms of in terms of all of you guys going through your own entrepreneurial journey, that to be well aware of your own self and realize what your own limitations are, and have the discipline and the maturity to figure out when it makes sense to either bring in someone else who can focus on on one aspect of the leadership role or any technical role. 

But if also if it's time for you to step away, and then allow somebody else to continue creating value for the company you've built. So it so happens that the that that time of the acquisition was also really wonderful time from a creative perspective for me. And and then I'll talk a little bit more about creativity in terms of how to use as a tool for business. But I'd like to share this a few thoughts on probably what the real message in the in the presentation is how this presentation has been marketed, which is, you know what, what can be learned about how to grow a company to be sold. So the truth to that is that companies really feel for one reason. And who here can can tell me what that one reason is? What's the reason why startups fail or companies fail in general? Exactly. So the one way that's one thing they learned it taught us in business school in marketing. 

I remember the professor said, Look, don't run out of money. That's number one. That's like, if just do that, and you're good, right. And I think that's true. And that's really the only way to, that's the only thing you can really do to make sure your company gets bought. And now I've explained why. It's often said, and I think it's very true that small businesses, startups etc, are never sold, right? They are bought,

right, so you have no control over when a company a larger company decides to buy, right? So the so what that means is that whatever you do, you need to have staying power, you need to build value during that process. So when if somebody decides to buy you, you've normally done two things. One, you've created value. 

One, but you build, you've extended your your ability to be around enough for that company to see the value, and then purchase your company. So essentially, there are three ways to do that. The first is to build a company that solves a real problem that has been talked about. But that's fundamental, the fundamental truth. But the the concrete representation of that solution to that problem is your products. So remember, at hopstop, I spent I obsessed about every single page of the experience, like obsessed about our thing, like how would how what's the best way to represent this information will be the easiest way for them to click. So let me give an example. Right, if a little technical, but if you had a radio button, for example, versus a pull down button, right, a radio button, you can click, one click, and you've done what you want to do in the pull down, you have to click the button, then scroll down. That's the difference. 

So it's that level of detail. And that level of interest into what that product does to the customer is one of the reasons that lead hop stops, could that could allow the customer to achieve so much growth. So even when Google transit eventually launched a similar product to ours, we're still seeing significant growth, because people were really passionate about about hopstop. And I think that passion is because the company and everyone in the company was focused on delivering a product that can solve a need. The second thing you need to do to basically to basically stay around long enough to be bought is growth. Because as everyone knows, you need to scale up right? To to hit your operating and fixed costs, right. And that is actually probably the harder thing to do than the first part, which is to build the product. Right? So one of the key skill sets, that's a rare skill set but but if you possess it allows you to do so much create so much value is to figure out how do you grow? What's your growth strategy? Right with the advent of the social graph, with the gamification of products and apps, with virtuality and and that's keep as possible now, with the with the plugins with all the social graphs, lots of wonderful things can happen with you know, AdSense and SEO is lots of ways of growing. 

But figuring out what those one two or three things that you need to grow your business is key to being able to be profitable. If it's because by being profitable, you now have the time to continue building value and for another company to potentially buy your company. So then the third piece of advice I'll offer is being lean. So hopstop in our world, one of the advantages of having few resources is that you build your company leanly, right. So when you have a huge You know, when you have lots of capital is easy to spend things on things you don't really need. But the advantage of doing things with very limited resources, even if you could have invested my money, or if you could have raised my money, what allows you to do is to build an organization that's very frugal, and very lean. Because when you raise more money, you don't get leaner. 

You don't try you puppies that you know doing things that aren't optimal. But if you don't have the DNA of a lean company to start with, you'll end up essentially even becoming grossly inefficient. And if you're inefficient with the limited resources you have, even if you do raise millions of dollars, you you will eventually run out of money and if you're not showing the traction you need and the growth Need, the ability to raise additional financing will be highly unlikely. So those are just three practical things that any company can do to increase the chance of them being bought. So as I mentioned those those those years in 2013 was really creative time of my life. And it's clear to me now, that creativity is like the easiest way to become a millionaire.

Right? So creativity is the easiest way to create value to create wealth for yourself. Right, so think of creativity as this pond, this ocean, this, this lake, where, and it's full of diamonds, right. And all you have to do is to take your bucket, you have to climb over the hill, and just scoop up the diamonds and all you have to do just go over the hill, and then sell it. That's what all of you have, as creative beings have. And that's a tool that you should use. So let me then give put it in more concrete terms. Uber, was first created in the mind. Airbnb was a concept that somebody's thoughts about this conference itself, was came into someone's head. 

So if you want to create and build something that's of value, right, you have to first of all think it. Right, you have to think of that opportunity. And for you to think of that opportunity, you have to figure out how to stop thinking about the other things, those are the distractions of your everyday life, the routines you have in the morning, the things how you order lunch, the issues you're having with your co workers or employees. Right? Those are the things that are, that's the way society works. And the way we grew up is that those are the things that are objects of our attention. But in between those moments, right, there are the aha moments. 

That's the awareness moments of like, oh, it should be easier for me to get a cab, right, if you don't get your mindset to think about those opportunities, those pains you're experiencing in life, you will never spend effort, then building solutions to those problems. So again, if you don't spend time being creative, it matters of creative, I'm telling man, just stop doing the things you always do. 

And just have time to think to be aware of where you are, have the frustrations, you have the opportunities you see, the conversations you have, that can lead to a whole different new business opportunity. So for me, I invest in my creativity, because it's the source of value, right? It's almost like a business tool for me. And the more you invest in your creativity, you'll be able to see things that other people don't, right, you'll be able to see opportunities that other people have ignored. You even if you are an established company, if you already have a company that you're building, you will see new customer segments to go after, you'll see product innovation ideas that you can bring to bear in your own company, you'll see different angles of doing all kinds of things are essentially free. Again, think of the lake and the diamond. 

So the question in your daily life, how, how many trips? Are you going into that lake to scoop up the diamonds? I think that's a question for everyone to think about an answer. And I think for me, because I was going through this creative process, I thought about the problem of, of human connection. And the fact that so much of our time is wasted. Because there just isn't a way for you to quickly create value with one hour. Right? So I was upstairs in my hotel room, waiting for the time to come down for this conference. And there's an entrepreneur in Australia, there's a potential, there's a business manager in Nigeria, there's someone else in China, that if they could interact with me for just one hour, I will be able to tell them something, give them advice or share a certain kind of knowledge that can also impact them in a material way. 

And right now in the world, there just isn't a way for people to do that. And we therefore are siloed in so many ways. And the ability for us to influence each other for value doesn't exist. And that's what Giga meat is about.

It's a platform where anyone can sign up either with your LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. Twitter accounts. And then say, for a set rate for a one hour meeting with you, either in person via video, Skype or video conference, it could be anywhere from $100 to $50,000, your choice. And that's it, and then take a charity that you'd like to support and give a portion of that money, your choice to the charity, and you said, you don't need a website, you don't need a square account. 

That's it, you're done. And somewhere else, somewhere else in the world, somebody else wants to connect with you, many of you are here, because of certain pieces of knowledge or certain advice that you think one of the speakers were able to impart, or one of the, one of the people within the conference will share with you. But why can that be done? all the time? globally? Right? Why can a button chef restauranteur in Arizona, be able to spend one hour with a sushi chef in Japan that $250 that $500, that this the chef in Japan will charge is nothing compared to the to the elusive elimination of, of problems of ways of looking at the business, right? for the for the, from the from the, from the perspective of the budding entrepreneur in Arizona. So that's, that's, that's the problem that I see, using the lens of my own creativity. 

And that's what gave me wants to solve. So, so if you the way it would work is if you go and click on how it works, just so I can just quickly show so there's basically there's two roles. So one is somebody who's willing to give their time and get paid for it. And the person who's willing to take the meeting and request a meeting with a person. So you get a request for a meeting, you then see who it is you why they want to meet with you, and then decide if you want to take the meeting or not. But once you accept the meeting, we'll help you coordinate the schedules. After the meeting happens, we then move the funds into your PayPal accounts, we send the funds to your charities accounts. So you have a win win win on both fronts. 

You have you've made money, you supported your charity, and you've been able to impact someone in a very meaningful way. Because the people who are requesting meetings with you are the people who've sought you out because they believe that you could change their life. So they are very happy for that opportunity. And all this happens without exchanging contact details. It's only about one hour, isn't it, that's the way that the site works. And the technology works. So you don't want it's not something that you now have someone that's emailing you every single day. It's just that one hour. And that's the one hour you've made available to that person. 

So I encourage you and ask that you please check it out, sign up, please share the slides within your own social and professional networks. Because as I said, in the beginning points of my remark that I think that one hour can change everything. Thank you.

So I heard we have 10 minutes for questions. So I'd love to have if there are questions I'd love to to answer the questions I can

Yeah, that's so that's a good question. So the way I think about it is this way, right? So we all have Facebook accounts, we already have LinkedIn accounts. So no one creates a fake identity on on Giga meat, right? So you bring with you your existing identity and existing reputation. So it's nice if you get an inquiry you get a request from from gigamon says Bill Gates wants to meet you and he wants to meet you in this dark alley at 10:10pm. 

Now so the way it works is that meetings only happen between 7:30am and 7:30pm in public spaces one and each person that requests meetings with you has a link to their existing identity, right. So if it's someone on LinkedIn, you'll see, you see the company they work for, you'll see how many people are connected to them to be able to make that decision whether you want to have meet this person at a coffee shop, or at a restaurant, etc. 

But at the end of the day, it's really your choice of whether you want to, if you if for whatever reason you feel uncomfortable meeting the person in just like they would if you said someone sent you a message on LinkedIn, it's essentially the same thing, right? If someone sends you a message on LinkedIn, you then choose based on that if you want to meet them for coffee, right as the same same thing in gigabits case. But if for whatever reason you chose not meet the person in person, you can meet here via Skype as well.

Hi, good afternoon, I wanted to ask the question, when you share the story about working with your team member in Siberia, what processes did you use to establish trust with him? Or her? And what did you use to protect your intellectual property?

So great question. And that's a question that's often asked with someone who about ideas and protected and so I mean, I think you've heard this answer before, it's like, never really don't worry too much about giving, giving away your idea, especially to the people who are going to be building the site, right? So the people, the engineers, and the computer scientists in the world, would be building their own companies, if those were the things they wanted to do. Right. 

And never under Never underestimate how clear your vision is, right? And how ambiguous might seem to somebody else. So I wouldn't worry too, especially for technical like getting people to build your technology, I would even go further and say that you actually should share your tech your idea with as many people as you can, in especially, especially people who can give you real feedback on that opportunity. Right? So potential customers, potential investors, even because investors even though, you know, entrepreneurs usually don't have a really great relationship with with investors, they're always making you feel bad, you haven't thought about this or haven't thought about that. 

But investors at least bring up issues in your own mind that you should probably think about, even if you don't agree, is still very valuable feedback to be able to listen to so it's like, oh, that's true. How do I think about the competitive force in this area? Or how do I think about markets in my market and challenges in this other area?

I tend to do. 

Hi, great presentation. Thank you, you made a comment that none of the other speakers have made yet this week about understanding if you're a growth CEO, or an early stage CEO, that's probably something that was really obvious for you, in hindsight, but how did you know, at hub stop? Whether or not you are the early stage or grow CEO? And how would you recommend someone else evaluating themselves for that same conclusion?

Sure, I think I didn't know right, I think when I was thinking about hopstop, I was thinking a company, you know, like, who knows, right? You know, you don't think I'm gonna, I'm a 10 year CEO, five years CEO to your CEO, you just want to build something you want to have the benefits of whatever financial success that comes with your startup and the independence, etc. But I think for me, I just realized that I would, I would go into them, I would go in. 

And instead of focusing on growth, instead of figuring out how to close that sale for the for the new ad deal, I was focused on how I can get make the product better. Right? I was just more passionate about the product than the metrics of the business. And I wasn't I wasn't, I didn't have a sales funnel, and how would I have sit, you know, five, sales calls and follow up with this X number of meetings and close this, my that wasn't my passion. Right? My goal wasn't to kind of refine how we did market launches per city, right? That just wasn't my passion. So if if you go into work it as an entrepreneur, or as someone who works at a company, I don't feel your heart is in that, right? You don't feel like you're using all the things you want to use about your personality, then that's a sign that there's there's a mismatch between your core and your situation. 

So that's the one in sign or just a signal, right? That's one but also, if you find that you suck at it. So like if you're, if you're if your goal is to like you've, you've passed the growth area, and now it's all about you figured out your unit economics and it's all about growth and you figured out Well, you're not actually you don't think in a kind of funnel perspective, which is kind of what All you need to do at that stage right? Then it makes sense to bring someone else in

how has an MBA helped you become an entrepreneur as opposed to someone that doesn't come away with an MBA?

That's a tricky one. So I think MBA is a good too, it's because there's so much has been studied about how business works, right? So and that's great about about MBAs, right? It gives you a framework gives you a great framework to think of very ambiguous problems, which is what most startups have to face for most businesses, right? There isn't the, you know, there isn't a cut and dry answer to many business problems, right? So how do you think of an ambiguous problem? What frameworks Do you think about how to how to solve that, that problem? So but having said that, though, the skill set and MB, getting an MBA can be gotten now, right online, in so many courses, they all that knowledge is out there. 

So I think for people who care about, it's a great signal in effect, and it gets you more meetings than then than otherwise. But in the grand scheme of things, I think everything you learned in business school, you can learn online, right? But what's what you don't have, and also, which is a great source of value is the network that you get a being part of a school as well. Hi, hi.

Um, yeah, I grew up in Brooklyn. So hopstop was a huge part of my life growing up, and thank you for that. Thank you. I was wondering how were you able to track the trains? And was an algorithm or did you have like different people in different cities? Tell you or

Yes, I remember. Yeah, good question. And so. So what I did, and that's been leads, like I did everything myself, right. So what we literally did is like I would, I would get on the subway, and out time how long the subway took right? Then remembering my algebra. And I figured out what that x is for how much time that? How fast, how fast the trains go, how long is spent in each stop. So we came up with this way of figuring out well, how would you figure out the time, but everything we did was manual? There is no there was no, we didn't we didn't get information from the MTA. 

So what I did is I had this team in India, again, just being lean, that I would essentially PDF, the subway, the bus schedules, right, and they will enter it. Right? So we just built up this entire process and this processes have been able to ingest large amounts of data, and then share it in a very seamless way. So there is no answer, that's part of the secret sauce is when you lean you do all these things by hand. And that's a real competitive advantage. 

Because most people are looking at the complexity of this of New York City, like it's so much but is by doing do you do you then make me a distance clear on how to do it?

Right over here. Okay. First of all, I want to thank you, it's an honor to know you this hour, I think may have changed my business.

Thank you. Thank you.

I've been coaching CEOs on growth for 30 years, and I'm a poet. And I've been I've just standing up there thinking, How do I get to people in short bites without traveling around the world. And thank you, thank you. antastic. fantastic idea.

Thank you, lastic. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Hi. I also my life changed because of hopstop. I grew up in a smaller town. So I was very intimidated to travel to any big cities. So when my friend told me about hopstop, it made me fearless. Like, I would go to New York City, and I was able to navigate all the subway systems and I loved it. So thank you for that. Thank you. Thank you very much. I do have a question. So with the Giga meat, is that something that you find people use to make income on also? Or is that something like they would receive a 1099? And then it's taxable income for their services?

Yes, it's real income records. It's not about it's about giving, but it's not just about giving. It's about creating value mutually. Right. So as I said, you can try version $100.50 $1,000, right. So whatever you think you want, depending on how much time you have available. You sign up for and it's real income.