Terry Jones, CEO of Travelocity, Chairman of Kayak.com | Disrupting Existing Industries With Technology

Welcome to success story the most useful podcasts in the world. I'm your host Scott D. Clary the success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network the HubSpot podcast network has incredible podcasts like the martyck podcast hosted by Benjamin Shapiro each week the martyck podcast tells stories of world class marketers who use technology to create lasting success with their business and their careers if you like any of these topics you're gonna like the martyck podcast science is changing advertising how to set up a CRM so you actually use it private equities take on digital transformation by big social is focused on newsletters if these are topics that resonate with you go check out the martyck podcast wherever you get your podcasts or you can also go listen at HubSpot.com slash podcast network today my guest is Terry Jones Terry is the former CEO of Travelocity chairman of kayak.com CIO of Saber Incorporated he is a digital disrupt author an author a venture capitalist he has founded five startups he has two billion dollar IPOs he has served on 17 corporate boards his success has established him as a thought leader on innovation and disruption as a speaker as an author as a venture capitalist as a board member Terry is focused on helping companies use the tools and techniques that he is used and he is deployed to succeed in an ever changing world he lectures worldwide on innovation and building digital relationships in business and holds several patents he serves on the board of luxury link reard and commerce and smart destinations he is still chairman of the board of kayak.com and he is a special venture partner with general catalyst partners we spoke about his career how he has built several companies from the ground up how he achieved two billion dollar IPOs we spoke about the future of work we spoke about startups we spoke about digital disruption we spoke about covid we spoke about IOT machine learning AI all the technologies that are impacting business and how companies businesses can leverage those for success he is an incredibly brilliant individual very smart man really humble guy so I really hope you enjoy there's business lessons startup lessons culture lessons lessons that we've taken out of covid everything he breaks down he really goes deep so this is Terry Jones obviously serial entrepreneur former CEO of travel law city chairman of kayak.com two billion dollar IPOs let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go let's ended my way up to head of that division. Later I ran all programming operations and became CIO. When I was CIO, there was this little online product we had on AOL, CompuServe, called Easy Saber. And we also served travel agents who said, Hey, why are you doing that? You should shut that down. That's selling both to the enemy. And our chairman said, No, give it to Jones. We'll hide it over an IT where he is. He used to be a travel agent. While the first thing I did, it was 1996. I said, Why is it not on the internet? The internet had just been deregulated. So we put it on the internet. And I said, I don't want to be CIO anymore. I want to do this. People said, Well, you're crazy. There's only 10 people there. I said, No, I think it'll be big. So I went off with those 10 people and we turned that into travelosity.com inside American Airlines. So that was intraponorship. There's a story there we can talk about. Eventually, we took a public for 1.2 billion. And I ran it for six years until Saber decided to buy it back and take a private because they saw it as their future. I saw it as they're going to screw it up. So I left. I actually they did screw it up. They later sold it for only $200 million to expedient. So at that time, you know, I didn't have a job anymore. I've been with American for 18 years. I became a speaker on innovation and an author. I have two books. You can see behind me on innovation and disruption off. And I went to work for venture capital firm looking at travel investments. And we wondered why isn't there vertical search and travel at the time I was on several boards. One of them was overture one of the big search companies. And so we looked at a couple of people who are dabbling in vertical search and the partner there, Joel Cutler, said, let's do it ourselves. I'll fund it. So we found a great CEO and a great CTO. And I became chairman of the board. And we started kayak.com. That was a great seven year run. We took it public and then shortly afterwards sold it to booking.com for $1.8 billion. So since that time, as you said in the intro, I've been a speaker. I've now started on 20 boards of directors. 20 boards. Wow. Very impressive. I was just doing some video narration work. I knew all kinds of stuff. So I've had a lot of different careers and I'm still having fun. I'm an angel investor. And really enjoy traveling around the world, trying to help businesses think about digital disruption. And I'm assuming that some of the stuff that you speak about is, is what you've learned over those two billion dollar IP. So, so what will some of it has more veracity than just what I've read? Yeah. No, I agree. So what were some of the, what were some of the things that you did because you have a playbook for this, like, you know, one time, one time, you can be lucky. Two times, that's not luck anymore, right? So what were some of the things you did different that outside of including technology and automation and systems and bringing it to the, like, these are all important things. But walk me through some of the, the playbook. Well, I had a pretty good education because I'd been a travel agent. I'd, I'd been a marketer at American Airlines marketing department. And I'd been an IT guy, right? So that's kind of the combination of things you need to create an online business, right? You need to be a marketer. You need to know the domain and you need to understand tech. Entrepreneurship is different. At American, you know, the number one thing I did was try to keep people from killing my business because we were competing with the other guys. So they wanted to steal our money. They wanted to kill us. It wasn't hard to get money or space or offices or all that kind of stuff. What was hard was to get rid of the legal department and go around purchasing and not have to buy IT from IT. And so I moved out of the building. We created our own culture. We brought in people from the outside who weren't airline people. That was really hard to do. We weren't allowed to hire from the outside. But we did. And, you know, eventually as it grew up, it became its own strong standalone division. And, you know, that's the problem in big corporations is they usually kill their little projects. You know, when I mentioned that I went to work for this computer startup and it was purchased by American Airlines, the chairman there did something very smart. He said, look, we just bought you. I'm going to send you a CFO and I'm going to ban anyone from American Airlines from coming here for two years because they will screw you up. They're too big. And I'm going to leave you alone. And after two years, you should have learned, you know, how to budget and how to do things you don't know how to do. Then I'll move you to headquarters. Very smart idea. And there are many companies who've done that, you know, you need to put a small idea in a greenhouse and let it grow up and protect it. And then you can create a division or take the technology inside or spin it out. But so often it gets killed. Now, kayak was very different. That was a typical venture fund. It started up. But we did some really interesting things, you know, our IT headquarters was in Boston. Our CEO was in Connecticut with the marketing guys and they were completely separated. And that, you know, that was 15 years ago, but it worked. And we let them do that. They grew separately. They coordinated online, you know, stuff that's more normal today, but wasn't normal then. And a huge difference in marketing in those two companies. Travelosity grew through radio and television and online. There were just banner ads. That's it. There wasn't even search when we started. Kayak grew 100% through search. We didn't, we eventually did a little TV before IPO just to get some buzz. But it's a search company. Now, what would you do today? You'd grow through, you grow through social, right? I mean, every time marketing is changing, you'd use some of the things in the past, but the way that customers find companies has changed radically. And with each new company I've had, we, you know, customer acquisition has been, well, how the heck are we doing it now? What's different? How do we change? It's it's real important. And I think finally, you know, entrepreneurs need to realize that that venture capitalists invest in the idea first, but in the team, either second or first, because they know that the idea you have today won't be to look like the company you have later. So if you don't have the right team, you can have an awesome idea and get nowhere. It's, it's team idea. And then how are you going to get those customers to come to you? And that third one is where many startups fall down. So that's enough for it. So, no, I was going to say the one thing I, I didn't want to interrupt. It was, it's all great lessons. There's a few points that we can pull out from that. The number one being entrepreneurship. And I thought that was very interesting. So my question to you, and there will be the question that hopefully resonated with people that are listening, you decided to double down on this on this entrepreneur opportunity. But you obviously are a very curious person by nature, or you wouldn't have gone down all these different roads. Why did you feel it was right to take this opportunity when you also are like you acknowledged many companies, even if they maybe say they want innovation and they maybe start these little innovation labs, they kill it quite quickly. So there was a risk there too. So what prompted you to go in that route? Well, you know, I actually, I'd been promoted its chief information officer and I found it terrifically boring. That was sort of a coordination role. I like to be a line guy, you know, when I was running operations, I lost my hair at American airlines trying to keep that thing running. And this was just sort of a coordination policy. It was boring. And so when this little opportunity to do this little startup came, I thought, you know, this is going to be big. I believe it's going to be big. And interesting, excuse me, second, I'm going to mute my mic. And I don't know if I can do that. I'm just going to cough. You can cut that up. You know, when the opportunity came along, I thought, look, travel online is going to be huge. And most other people didn't believe that. In fact, we went, all right, after our IPO, we went on a roadshow and it was, it was empty. People thought, oh, it's, you know, it's going to be toys.com or it's going to be shipping companies, something else. Travel turned out to be the biggest piece of e-commerce of all. It's larger than the next four categories combined. But people didn't know that. But I understood what had happened in the travel business that, you know, as airlines deregulated, there were more prices and more fairs. It was darn hard to get a good price. And it took hours working with travel agents. I thought of customers can do themselves. And we'd had this experiment. We called EasySaber going on for years. We only had like a quarter million customers, but still, we knew it would be big. And now, you know, Kayak has 60 million downloads of its app. We travel as ubiquitous. So I was a little going against the grain, but I knew travel and I knew IT and wasn't as big a risk for me. And I, let's not, if I can get another job, but I don't want to be CIA anymore. What do you think? What do you think the personality traits of somebody who steps into that role that allows them to be successful would be? And also two-part question, which I never, I don't like doing this, but I'm going to, I'm going to give you the runway. What would be the cultural traits of a company that would also allow that person to succeed? Well, I think first of all, you said it earlier curiosity. I think you have to be really curious to be an entrepreneur because generally, you're putting together, you're not inventing something like fire. You're putting together parts of things that exist in a new way. I mean, travelosity just put an HTML. Let's take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode linked in marketing solutions. So let's pretend for a second that you set up the perfect campaign. Your team's happy. It's tested super well. Everything is going according to plan, except as a nagging thought in the back of your head. How do I ensure that the people that I'm targeting that are going to see the ad are in the right mindset? They have the intent so that when they see my message, it's going to resonate with them and they're going to make a purchasing decision. This is the question that plagues all marketers. 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And you can use it free for 14 days. It comes with every single feature. Leave no stone unturned. You will see exactly how effective Shopify can be for starting, scaling or growing your business. So to paint on a reservation system. But behind the scenes, you know, we had people running computers, printing tickets. We had 3000 customer service people. It was like a big travel agency. It was just self service. And that's the brilliance of that kind of idea. I mean, look, Apple didn't invent the music player that were MP3 players before. They didn't invent the cell phone. They didn't invent the eWatch. They just made them a lot better. So through curiosity, you can you can set these goals and say, kind of look what's happening over here. Look what's happening over there. Why can't we do that? You know, so many companies say, how did they do that? No, it's how did we do that? You know, we have the brand. We have the people. We have the technology. We have the money. We can do that. But big companies look at startups and go, oh, we couldn't do that. So I think you have to be curious. And I think you the team is is really critical. We had an interesting band of pirates at the beginning and travelosity who believed in the idea and they were willing to take risks and they knew they would fail. And that was okay. They were going to watch the game films and look at that fumble over and over again and say, how can we avoid fumbling next time? Most people in corporations don't like to take risk. And my book disruption off, I say, look, the number one reason you're getting disrupted is you're not taking risks anymore. Every company was founded by a risk taker. But as we get bigger, it's all quarterly earnings and oh, we can't fail. Well, if you're not experimenting, you don't fail. You don't move forward. So it's being fearless and learning to kill projects, not people, right? And all of Terry's project failed. Oh, that was a lousy project. We're giving him another one, right? And you know, kill the silos and the company get people to work together and make faster decisions. You know, those kind of things can really change a company and that happened during COVID. You know, big companies, VPs didn't ask the boss anymore. They just did stuff and move fast. They had to. They had to move fast. They had to do her dad, right? So it pushed people out of the comfort zone, completely pushed people out of the comfort zone, COVID, of course. But one more thing that you touched on, and I kind of heard it when you said that they put you, you know, in this unit, they separated you. They actually moved you away from the company and any of the any of the traditional political and the and the things that would slow you down. They said, for two years, let's go figure it out. So they were encouraging you to be okay with failure and iterating and trying new things and testing. And that's something that you mentioned too. That's something that companies had to be okay with doing COVID, like it or not. Yeah. I mean, look, there was a major retailer had an 18-month plan to get the curbside delivered. When COVID hit, they did it in two days. Well, the boss won't forget that, right? That's the new body. So that's how people are acting now is just saying, look, let's make decisions faster. Mary Barra, GM said it. She said she was thrilled at the speed at which they were able to make decisions, you know, post COVID. In my speech, I use the example of a pinball machine, an idea kind of flowing around the pinball machine and marketing says, oh, it's a dumb idea. And IT says we can't build the software. The manufacturing says we know how to build the product and service says we couldn't fix it. And if you manage to get by all those flippers in the pinball machine, you end up at finance and legal, the biggest flippers of all, right? You just say, the idea is dead. And you can't do that. The job in a corporation today is to say, yes, not, oh, let's go this means saying no and we'll go back to more email. It's to say, yeah, how do I get that idea over the finish line? I heard a great thing the other day, a friend of mine who's a speaker uses the analogy of umpires. And he said he interviewed a bunch of rugby umpires. He said the rugby umpire is there, yes, to show infractions, but their number one goal is to keep the game moving. You know, while still saying, hey, don't do this, don't do that, but keep the game moving. And that's what legal and purchasing have to do instead of saying no, it's like, you can't do this, but you can do it that way, right? Instead of just saying no, it's critical to keep things moving. And you know, big corporations have to wake up and do that as part of their digital transformation. That's what you speak about now and that's what you write about. That's an obviously highly relevant with COVID. So walking through some of the things you're seeing with companies, what have they done during COVID? Well, how have they pivoted? What has emerged from COVID? Well, you know, what's emerged I think is companies realizing that they don't have to do business the old way. I mean, take hotels, for example, they they physically had to stop cleaning rooms when people were there. Now they're saying, you know, people really didn't complain much about having their not having their sheets changed every day. They don't do that at home. So now they're not doing room service anymore. I mean, room cleaning anymore to elite, but yes for them, they're saving a ton of money. You know, e-commerce is up 50%. So companies that never looked at it, they're looking at it. O to O online to offline rapidly increasing where I can, you know, order online, pick up at the store. Companies laid off in record numbers and hiring record numbers. Walmart hired almost a million people. Or 500, that's people, excuse me. On the other hand, JC Penny, Neiman Marcus, Jay Crew are gone. Chipotle saw online orders up 50% of profits down. So they're trying to figure out, you know, how do we, how do we do it? In my business, the speaking business, I build a studio here. I'm not in it right now, but I have a complete studio with a mixer and all that stuff where I can choose high quality remote speeches. And, you know, other speakers were in their garage going, well, look at my graphics. In meetings of change meetings are going to be hybrid going forward. Travel has changed. I talked to an executive, a huge consulting firm. He had a $100 million travel budget pre-COVID. His post-COVID budget is 50. And he said, we totally re-engineered the business. We looked at how to change. So people are looking at these new technologies as well, whether it's AI, big data, 3D printing, the internet of things, and saying, we've got to move quickly to digitize our business to match our customer need and deploy these new technologies to reduce cost dramatically. So when you work with companies, what is the thing that you see having the biggest effect? Like, you look at IoT, you look at AI, you look at companies that are trying to figure it a way to push blockchain into trustless transact. Like, what's the thing that's changing companies the most that you can see the impact in the next six months? Well, I think it's the combination of AI with these technologies. So it's AI and IoT. So you move to manufacturing 4.0 where you can do predictive maintenance. And people who are doing AI and 3D printing, the Boeing just got approved for the first 3D printed, or GE got approved, excuse me, for the first 3D printed engine part. Think about how that part was made before. Five subassemblers made little pieces. They sent them to an assembler, put it together, put it in a warehouse, put it on a ship, put it on a truck, and got it to GE. Now, GE gets a part that's cheaper, lighter, faster, stronger, and no inventory. And people say, well, 3D printing is slow. It only has to be faster than the ship from Asia, right? And it's, so I think it's the combination of people taking big data and AI and putting it behind whether it's robotics or blockchain or drones to really change products. And the other, I think, big change that you're seeing is cloud-connected products. So companies are seeing that cloud-connected products allow them to act like a web company. And a web company, like Travelocity, we knew what every customer was doing every day. We watched every interaction and saved it and improved our product because of it and communicated with the customer. Well, now John Deere has an internet-connected tractor. They don't have to wait for the annual meeting to ask the dealer, well, what are the farmers doing this year? They know what every minute. And they can go out and update that tractor and delight the customer just like Tesla. It gets new every month. I get new stuff. And what car I ever did that before. So by being cloud-connected, you're a faster learner and you're faster to change to market needs and customers. And these are all these are all these are all organizational changes. Now take it a level further or a level deeper. Future of work. What are you seeing with companies now? Because now you mentioned a few things. And future of working two ways, future of work in terms of how people work, but also future of work in terms of what jobs are people going to be doing. Right. Well, and they're both changing. You know, recent surveys show that most leaders want everyone back in the office, but most workers want a flexible schedule. They like two days in the office and three days in home or something like that. So I think there's going to be a collision here. And I think the workers are going to win because we have great demand for labor right now. And you know, two of the boards I'm on, companies, one company is sold all their real estate and another is sold off half of it already. They're just not planning on coming back because the CFO loves the economics. And the productivity is good. Yeah, it depends what business you're in. Obviously, a manufacturing business can't do the same thing. So I think we're going to see much more and continued work from anywhere. And it's going to be part office, part not. I think we have to be careful not to lose the creativity aspect that that evolves from bouncing into other people and talking with them at the water cooler or whatever. And then I think, you know, jobs are changing. And we're we're automating lots of mundane tasks and robotic process automation combined with AI is getting rid of a lot of those tasks. But on the other hand, we're learning new tasks like, you know, a great video salesperson is in terrific demand right now. You know, somebody you can build a relationship and close deals without ever going there. That's a big new deal. Data analytics is greening off the chart. Anybody can analyze all those big data because, you know, some companies have these crystal clear data lakes, but most people have data swamps. And, you know, we've got to change that to use these data to great effect. So I think work will change. I think another big thing we haven't talked about is how business models are changing. So, you know, kayak is one of those asset list, asset list companies that just puts, you know, creates a platform putting buyers and sellers together and it's worth almost $2 billion. But do we have other new models like outcomes? So Phillips, the lighting company recently went to skip all airport and Amsterdam said, we're not going to sell you light bulbs anymore. We want to sell you light. They said, what? Said, we want to light your airport. We want a 20 year contract to light the airport. And they got it. So what do they do? They immediately, what does that mean? No, what just for that example? Yeah, we'll keep your airport lit. We will pay for the power. We'll keep the bulbs there. We'll make sure everything is lit all the time. So you don't have to have people change in bulbs. You don't have to pay for the power. We'll just light the airport. And it's lighting is a service. Last. So what do they do? They put in bulbs that last 75% longer that they weren't selling before. They put the same bulbs use half the power because Phillips is paying for the power. And they even recycle the bulbs and re-manufactured them now because it's in their interest. So they've went from selling bulbs to selling a long-term, highly profitable contract. And they saved a ton of money for the airport. So Honeywell is doing things like that. GE is selling power by the hour. And then we're seeing models like subscriptions for things we never thought we'd subscribe to like dinner. You know, I subscribe to a box meal service or razors. Who thought you'd subscribe to razors? Billion dollar business. And then people are going direct to consumer on crazy things like D to C suitcases and D to C mattresses. You know, things we always had to go to the store for. Now suddenly we don't. I mean, who would have thought you'd buy a mattress online and get a hundred-day try? But so we have. And you can ship it back if you don't like it. Yeah. Yeah. If you if you do that or just changing experience, just changing customer experience. I mean, Apple killed Nokia by changing the phone experience. Spotify. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot. HubSpot is the leading business CRM. Now creating a legacy business starts with investing in sustainable scalable tools. HubSpot is the number one CRM for starting growing and scaling businesses. With the HubSpot CRM, you have a purpose-built solution that's tailored to your business and your business alone. Now I've used HubSpot for many years now, but just this year, the releasing some new features, these are some of the ones that I'm definitely most excited about. So first new feature is called business units. So business units allow you to confidently manage contacts, marketing and sales assets and settings across multiple brands, which means clearer insights to empower whatever it is you're trying to do. There's also new admin features like permissions templates and OKTA integration, which makes it easier than ever to add, remove and edit users, give them the proper permissions as needed. 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They're just a cab company with software. That's the difference. It's just software, but it's a better user experience. So people are looking at new ways to disrupt by changing the model or changing the customer experience or both. So we spoke. So I think that's an incredible insight. And you spoke about some use cases for large companies that are looking to disrupt, but also you spoke about some existing startups that obviously have disrupted. What are some other startups that people or use cases that people may not know about that are innovating? And you think they will be mega disruptors and completely display some major incumbents in the next two years. Do you have any? About the next two years. Exactly. I met a company three years ago, Zipline, and they started doing drone deliveries of blood in Africa. And because it's very hard, the roads aren't good, blood is perishable, and they said we started in Africa because they don't have any drone roads. So we hit when I started New York State where they wouldn't let us do it. It was very smart. And you know, they said, you talk about software crashing. They said, well, our airplanes crashed a bunch. You know, we had to learn how to out of fly these drones. And you know, they catch them in a net. It's crazy. But now they got noticed in the US, they've got a huge trial in North Carolina flying COVID tests and drugs and blood to remote hospitals. So drone delivery got approved during COVID. I think it's going to go like crazy. There's another city in the Southwest or Southeast where they started doing drone testing as a real place. And most people were opposed to it. Now they're hooked on it. They love it. So that's going to grow very fast. And I think that we're going to see manufacturing change as well dramatically with 3D printing. And I think there's going to be a lot of 3D printing that's done by boutique houses that will create things. So taking AI to iterate a thousand CAD designs that could never be built. But they can only be built by 3D and then showing like Ford did recently. They re-engineered a seat bracket. This is sort of mundane thing. But guess what? It's twice as strong and it weighs 30% less. Well think about all the parts in your car that might weigh 30% less. What would that do to mileage? It can only be done through 3D printing. So I think those two are really exciting. But my book talks about 10 technologies that are coming to change the world. And that's the first half. With examples, like drones using for firefighting and black chain for smart contracts. But the second part of the book is what do you do about it? So the first part of the book is to scare the hell out of you. And the second part of the book is to say you're listening there. What can I do? Like increase risk, test more, go projects, not people. But you can turn that book around for an entrepreneur and say these are the places where you want to go think about a new idea. Because these are places where corporations will move slowly. And the books, both books are kind of cookbooks. They're 72 three page chapters. So they're super fast to read. And you can use it as a how to book. Do you see these ideas being adopted by some legacy organizations? Do you like who's buying this book? Is it just the person who's already in line with innovation is already looking into these technologies? Or do you see some people that are talking to you, buying the book, trying to understand these ideas that are in companies that are 100 years old? Yeah, sure. Not the GE's or the IBM's or one of some of some of the other ones. There are companies who are doing it. I mean, I mean, Mac Truck is deploying IoT in all their trucks. I just talked to the one who is the largest truck stop, which is on I 80 in Iowa. And we were talking about, look, if Mac has smart trucks, then you got to work with them. So you have sensors at your at your stop so that you can say, hey, this truck is coming. It's not going to make it across the country without new breaks. We can fix it and get you back on the road in four hours. And you can actually bid on it. So the connection of big brands who are automating, you know, they need people to help them wherever they are. That's what GE is doing with their jet engines. So yes, large companies are looking at this and saying, how can I deploy 5G with IoT to have smarter networks in my factories? And one of the companies I'm on the board of is doing that. But at the same time, smaller companies are looking at these technologies and partnering up with large companies to help them do things that the large lumbering giant just can't get done quickly. Yeah, I've seen that actually quite a bit. Were they had these? Yeah. Well, I've seen, you know, I see companies acquire these startups and they turn into innovation labs within larger companies. That's right. Exactly like your experience. Sure. I mean, one of the large insurance companies I work with bought a lot of small insurance startup, but they made sure to leave them 50 miles away where they were. They said, we don't, we don't want to bring into corporate headquarters. We'll kill you. But we're just going to come over here and learn. You know, and lots of companies go to Silicon Valley to learn. It's called the Silicon Valley petting zoo, you know, where you go and you see half a dozen companies and you start, you get inspired or you get scared. I was there with the chairman of American Express and like 30 companies. And I said, why do you come out here? He said, look, we either get inspired by these companies or we buy them, you know, in in corporate because they are the next big thing. And he mentioned that American Express was an express freight company. That's how they started. That's where their name comes from. They were a freight company. Then they became a travel company. Now they're a financial giant. He said, I don't know what will be next, but it's not going to be financed. It'll be something different. That's how you build a hundred year old company. That's it. That's it. That's that's that's that's that that quote in it of itself. It's just a really smart thing to just internalize because that that transcends executives, entrepreneurs, anything. You mentioned it yourself. When you invest in a company, I don't know, you know, you're on boards. I'm sure you invested in some smaller company. It's the people, right? And it's the it's the people that will lead to that hundred year old company when that culture of iterating and just being adaptable is part of that founder team. Well, and so important because, you know, if you're sitting around saying, how did they do that? We can't do that. You know, these these startups are biting your ankles and turn around and say, well, wait a minute. We have things startup would kill for them. We have a brand. We have capital. We have factories. We have supply chains. We have salespeople. We just don't have imagination. So how can we be looking at those ideas and say, we have everything a startup would kill for it? Let's let's go figure out how to do that in smart companies. Do that. Look at mass mutual insurance, 150 years old. They just bought a hundred million in Bitcoin. Wow. You know, that's that's pretty startling to see those kind of changes. But on the other hand, you know, Jamie Dimon just came out at Chase and said, you know, FinTech is a huge threat to banks. My daughter got a mortgage during COVID and the banker was reviewing her past statements and said to her, who is this Mr. Venmo? And why are you sending so much money to him? I mean, ignorance of the current state of play, right? Oh my God. She said, what? Well, I mean, if that's your if that's your company, you got trouble. You got that sort of trouble. That's that's a you know, that's a that's yeah, FinTech, but that's even a step away from all the all the blockchain applications and decentralized finance stuff. Like that's so far from where the consumer is at right now. And that is a scary thought when you have the the too big to fail that's saying stuff like that. Yeah, that they don't know. Very scary. Somebody said to me, a bank used to be a place. And it was a place you had to go there and you talked to your banker and I used to have a paid, you know, little savings book when I was five years old. Now, you know, a bank is a brand and it better have awesome consumer relations and digital presence because that's all it is. You know, and money is digital. The use of cash dropped 57% during COVID. So digital digital is the way to go. I my barber, I do go to a barber, but only for my beard. My barber the other day said, I'm sorry, I can only take cash. My machine is down and I went, I don't have any cash. I got I got to come back. Yeah, I can't do it. Yeah, I don't remember the last time I had cash. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. So, you know, innovation and disruption are two sides of the same coin. You only call it a disruption because you didn't do it. If you did it, it would be an innovation, but you didn't. So I was disrupting this. It's terrible, right? So you have a choice. You can innovate or get disrupted. Yeah, but then you have the, like you said, you have the chairman, chairman of AMX, of American American Express, and you have the, you know, JP Morgan talking about disruption, chairman of AMX, AMX saying, we need to come down here for inspiration. It's just, it's just, you know, both in finance, just complete mindset shift. Look at my total. Who's the president of IBM right now? The former president of Red Hat. I mean, I knew Jenny Rometti pretty well, and I did my last startup was funded by IBM. And she tried hard to change IBM and it was a great executive, but she was also an insider. So to have now, you know, they, they do their biggest acquisition in history. They're what? 120 year old company now. And who's the guy around the company? The guy from the acquisition? Well, there's a guy who can do what Lou Gerstner did, you know, when Lou came from the outside from the cigarette company, they can both, you know, chop apart that big beast and use its great assets to new impact. But a lot of companies don't take that right. Look at what Mary Barrett did, you know, announcing the end of the internal combustion engine by 2035. That's an incredibly gutsy move for a company like that. And it's going to be heart wrenching inside that company to get there. But I think she knows they have to get there. So much easier for Tesla, you know, who started that way, they, you know, it's easy when you don't have a legacy. It's much harder when you do. Yeah. Very, very good. Okay. We went through a lot of stuff. I'm going to, I'm going to do some rapid fire questions. But before, before I pivot into this, and I just to pull some stuff out of your career, but before we pivot any closing thoughts on any of the topics we went through. And then also, where do people get your books? Where do people connect with you online? Well, I hope we have folks out there who will take a look at these books because they're good reads. They're very fast. They're available on Amazon and paperback and Kindle format and in audiobooks. And I narrated both of them since I'm a public speaker. So a lot of ways to get them very quick reads. You know, innovation is pretty timeless. Disruption is right now. What are the technologies coming and what do I, what do I do about them? My website is tbjones.com. It's hard to get a Jones URL. So tbjones.com is what I got. And you can, you can look at my blogs. All my videos are there. You can watch many of my speeches and get more of these lessons. And you can contact me through that if you want to. And, you know, sometimes people come with interesting ideas. And I'm an advisor to lots of companies. And I consult with folks and I invest. All right. So do you have a, what's your best social? Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, what's what you want to do? Yeah, everything is best for me. And it's, it's Terrell Jones, T-E-R-R-E-L. I don't tweet a lot. I just don't spend the time to do it. I'm busy doing other things. No, I'm good. Very good. Okay. Some rapid fire. Biggest challenge that you had over your career could be personal, could be professional. How'd you overcome it? Well, I think the, the best challenge I had was, was really building, traveling inside American Airlines against all odds. And I mentioned some of the things we did. You know, we moved out of the company. We created our own culture. We hired people from the outside. We negotiated so that our budget was sort of secret to other people. And we even got to the point where I boss, we had a debate when we had all the executives of the company debate whether we should keep or sell travel. I didn't know what was going to happen. They ended up keeping it. And what happened after that was everybody kind of calmed down and quit throwing Molotov cocktails at us because they understood the business better. Because, you know, people don't like change. So that was a huge challenge, but it was the most fun I ever had in my life building that company. It was, it was just a ball. Amazing. You've had multiple people that have been influential and impactful in your life. Who would be one that you would say had an incredible impact on what did they teach you? I think it was Bob Crandall, the chairman of American Airlines. He was a detailed minded micro manager who would take, but he would take great risk. So he let, he invested $250 million and was losing it, building the saber system. Eventually became a $2 billion company. You know, he let me do a very early video project that cost millions in airports and took the risk. You know, other things that didn't work and he understood that the things wouldn't always work. So he's a tough taskmaster. You couldn't ever BS him. But as long as you told the truth and said, I don't know the answer, but I'll get it. You would survive. And the people who BS them would be fired. He taught me how to be a detailed minded but flexible startup leader, I think. Great guy. Good. What would be a book or a podcast that you'd recommend people check out that you've learned from? You know, I'm going to look behind me here because I got a whole bunch of great, great books. You know, Reed Hoffman wrote a book called Litt's Scaling about how he scaled his business. John Chambers connecting the dots, you know, built Cisco, really good book. One you might not have heard of. Let me see if I can see it here. Is actually a book by a Coke of the Coke brothers. You know, they're the third largest private company in the United States. And you know, one side of Coke brothers you probably heard of is they have very right wing political views and you might like that or not like that. But they're consum managers. Um, so his book about about profits is a really excellent manager book is how they've scaled Coke brothers to be such an amazingly large successful company that most people don't know much about. Amazing. Good. That's a new one. I read, Reed Hoffman one I've heard of Litt's Scaling. Connecting the dots, I don't think I've ever had on this show. And then this one by the, what's the name of the book is? Do you know what the name of the book is? Or just by the, and I don't, uh, here it is. It's called, it's called good profit. Uh, good profit. Good profit. Okay. Um, very interesting book. And of course, uh, Vanny Hoff's book behind the cloud is, is also really interesting to understand how cloud started. Because the subscription model is everywhere today. Um, everybody's trying to have subscription everything. Um, but if you go back to the basics and read his book, it kind of helps you get grounded on what can be a good subscription box. Well, he's the one to champion the, he's the one to champion the migration from on-prem servers too. Right. He was a good boss story because Larry let him do it and Larry was still his mentor, even though, you know, he created this, this huge, uh, different company. I mean, there's a company in Germany, 140 years old. They sold air compressors. Now they sell air as a service. You need compressed air in your business? No supply, compressed air. We know when you need more. We'll calm. We have sensors. We sell you air. What a business. It's like selling water. Yeah. Yeah. Um, if you could tell your 20 year old self, one thing, what would that be? Uh, don't worry. It'll be okay. Even though you're going to have a a lot of different careers. So take the risks. You know, you can do it. You can change. I mean, look, I, I encourage people to get a liberal education. And in the reason I do that, I mean, that liberal arts because the technology you learn today is going to be outmoded in 10 years. So what you have to do is learn how to learn and be curious because I gave a graduation speech a whole bunch of nurses and doctors and the professors got mad at me because they said, look, all this stuff you learn going to be outdated in 10 years. Just, you know, learn how to deal with patients, learn how to learn new technologies and be open to it because, gosh, look, my, my first reservation the first day was there by telegram in 1970, which was ridiculous. I was typing invoices and I was using the dial phone. My last company was an AI startup. So did one lifetime, less than one lifetime. Yeah. Did knowing telegraphy help my AI company? No, it didn't. No. But you know, learn how to change and learning about customers was much more important. Amazing. And then last question, what does success mean to you? Well, I can meet a lot of things. For me, I mean, I like being successful is the satisfaction I get out of something. So it doesn't necessarily have to be profitable. It can be a tremendous learning experience. It can be helping other people, you know, success comes in all kinds of different forms. It can be mentoring people and bringing them along. I mean, that's incredibly rewarding. I mean, today, you know, I mentor lots and lots of companies because, you know, I've got 50 years of business knowledge, some of which is useful and some of which I have an clue what they're talking about. So when I can help them or say, we had a problem like that, you know, that's very satisfying. In this time in my life, I get the most satisfaction. I mean, I'm chairman of a big boys and girls camp up in Minnesota and we take kids out for a month in the wilderness. No phones, no internet connection, nothing. And boy, does that create leaders? Because it challenges the hell out of it. So it's great to do it with you if that's a big success in my life that we've made that. So successful. We do it in the inner city as well in St. Louis. Success comes in many forms. That's amazing. All right. That's that's all I got Terry. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thank you. It's really, really good. All right. Good to talk to you. Send me a note when you're going to run.