They hosted our event at their corporate headquarters, including a tour of their amazing logistics facility, from which any item that is in one of their stores originates.

A true entrepreneurial story, Kip has grown The Container Store from a single 1,600 sqft location in Dallas to 43 locations throughout the country, that average 25,000 sqft in size.

The big take-away from his talk was over-communicate to your staff, your partners and your vendors.  If you put your employees first – revenue and profits will follow.

The Container Store philosophy is that 1 great employee = 3 good employees, and 1 good employee = 3 bad employees.  So only hire great employees and over-pay them compared to the market.

Kip also says he gives the same power-point presentation on the company’s status to his board of directors and his employees.  Employees feel they know what is going on in the business and won’t be surprised.

Maybe that is why Fortune has named them one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For – 10 years in a row.

One of the questions posed by the reporter was “What if you can’t pay your mortgage, yet can’t sell your home for enough to pay off your mortgage? Should you mail in your keys and walk away?”

Unfortunately, one of the supposed “experts” actually suggested this is a perfectly rational choice for many people -

People should consider the risk to their credit rating vs. how much
they can save. In some cases, walking away might be a perfectly
rational choice. People may owe $500,000 on a home that is now worth $300,000. You (might be able to buy a much cheaper) home across the street and put $200,000 in your pocket. That might be worth the risk to your credit rating. Furthermore, since this is happening on a very large scale, my guess is that plenty of lenders will still be happy to issue loans in a couple of years to people who walked away.

I am amazed that this continues to be the opinion held by some in our community.  Home owners need to take personal responsibility and try to work things out with their lender. “Just walk away” is the head-in-the-sand type of attitude that got many home owners in the place they are in.

If you are a home owner facing foreclosure, the very first thing you need to do is call your lender, be up front about your situation, and try to work out a payment plan.  Most lenders are very willing to work with you.

If you can’t work something out with your lender and you have some time, list your home at a discount with a real estate agent.  Find someone who is very experienced with short sales, be sure they have closed successfully on at least 2 or 3 as the listing agent.

If time is short, call a reputable real estate investor in your local market.  Experienced investors can purchase your home quickly and prevent a foreclosure on your credit report.

What a talented family They were speaking to a group of entrepreneurs about Ken’s upcoming book – “The One Minute Entrepreneur” that is similar to “The One Minute Manager” in format but focused on helping entrepreneurs think through the skills needed to create a successful company.

I was able to review a manuscript and I believe it will be a great resource for those thinking of starting a company. It covers a lot of the basic skills and “common sense” things that unfortunately aren’t as “common” as they should be. The forward is by Michael Gerber, who has an amazing track record of helping small businesses to
create processes and systems to succeed.

If you ever have the opportunity to hear any of the Blanchards, especially Ken, speak, I highly recommend you do whatever you can to attend. They are all highly sought after speakers who do an excellent job of engaging their audience while
providing a lot of in-depth data and analysis.

And when “The One Minute Entrepreneur” comes out, be sure and pick up a copy!

An article earlier this month by Bob Parsons, founder of GoDaddy.com outlines why, after doing all the filing needed and receiving SEC approval, he decided to withdraw his registration with the SEC to become a public company.

One of the primary reasons cited in his post are the stringent accounting methods that the SEC would require them to use if they wanted to be public.

With the ridiculous Sarbanes-Oxley Act requirements, many companies (and their the CEOs who are now ultimately responsible for financial errors) are deciding to either not go public, or to go public in a foreign market to avoid the overbearing requirements of the US market.

SOX was a typical over-reaction to the Enron/Tyco/etc scandals of the past few years.  Just like preventing you from bringing hair gel on an airplane probably doesn’t make you any safer, but makes you feel safer because “at least they did something“, many of the SOX requirements don’t do anything to stop fraud, while making it much harder to do business as a public company.

Do we really want US companies to feel like that have to go to foreign markets if they want public investment?  Business is what drives our economy.  Let’s figure out how to make it easier for business owners to operate, not hamstring their efforts to grow (and create jobs, and buy buildings, and pay taxes).

One of the interesting things from his business history is that with both of the companies he founded he was the sole investor.  He never raised money and created two companies with revenues in excess of $100M.

Of the 16 rules Parsons has come up with, here are a few that are my favorite:

1. Get and stay out of your comfort zone. I believe that not
much happens of any significance when we’re in our comfort zone. I hear
people say, “But I’m concerned about security.” My response to that is
simple: “Security is for cadavers.”

7. Always be moving forward. Never stop investing. Never stop
improving. Never stop doing something new. The moment you stop
improving your organization, it starts to die. Make it your goal to be
better each and every day, in some small way. Remember the Japanese
concept of Kaizen. Small daily improvements eventually result in huge
advantages.

8. Be quick to decide. Remember what General George S. Patton
said: “A good plan violently executed today is far and away better than
a perfect plan tomorrow.”

You can view Parsons’ entire post at Bob Parsons – My 16 Rules.

The primary catalyst for this move was to create a more streamlined presence that uses the latest “Web 2.0″ type of design methods and is easier for home owners and investors to use.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, Fast Home Offers is the largest lead generation company for real estate investors in North America.  We have nearly 10,000 home owners each month contact us to sell their house and we connect them with professional investors around the world.

If you have any web development needs, be sure to contact The Murph Group.  They have designed may of our web sites and I highly recommend them.

- Slides from the presentation -

Thank you. I’m honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of
the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from
college and this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal.
Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed
around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So
why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a
young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She
felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything
was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that
when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a
girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the
night asking, “We’ve got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?” They said,
“Of course.” My biological mother found out later that my mother had never
graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school.
She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months
later when my parents promised that I would go to college.

This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to
college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford,
and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college
tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I
wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me
figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their
entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK.
It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best
decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the
required classes that didn’t interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that
looked far more interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in
friends’ rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food
with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one
good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I
stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless
later on. Let me give you one example.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in
the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was
beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take
the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do
this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount
of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great
typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way
that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten
years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came
back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with
beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in
college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally
spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no
personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy
class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they
do.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in
college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again,
you can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking
backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your
future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma,
whatever–because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give
you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the
well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to
do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was
twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us
in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We’d just
released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I’d just turned
thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started?
Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the
company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our
visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out.
When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out,
and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone,
and it was devastating. I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt
that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped
the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce
and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and
I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to
dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not
changed that one bit. I’d been rejected but I was still in love. And so I
decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the
best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being
successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure
about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my
life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company
named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.
Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer-animated feature film, “Toy
Story,” and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and
the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current
renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from
Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it.
Sometimes life’s going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.
I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I
did. You’ve got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for
your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only
way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only
way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep
looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when
you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as
the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went
something like “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most
certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past
33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, “If today
were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”
And whenever the answer has been “no” for too many days in a row, I know I need
to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important
thing I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because
almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of
embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death,
leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is
the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the
morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a
pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer
that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six
months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is
doctors’ code for “prepare to die.” It means to try and tell your kids
everything you thought you’d have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few
months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be
as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where
they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines,
put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated
but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a
microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare
form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and,
thankfully, I am fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I
get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you
with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual
concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don’t want to
die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has
ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the
single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old
to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long
from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so
dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living
someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results
of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out
your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you
truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth
Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a
fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to
life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal
computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors,
and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five
years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools
and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole
Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final
issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their
final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you
might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the
words, “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed
off. “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” And I have always wished that for myself, and
now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay
foolish.

Thank you all, very much.