YouSaid · the spoken record

Chip Conley

lines on the record: 146
first: 2019-06-20
most recent: 2019-06-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'm going to do that. And in this case, I'm doing it as a social entrepreneur with a social enterprise where 60% of the people are on scholarship. So I'm funding a million dollars a year in scholarships. That is something I want to bet on, but I want to bet on it as a catalyst for others to do their thing.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fat farms and mostly for women, and he ended up creating Canyon Ranch in Tucson, and it really sort of basically created a new hospitality real estate category called the destination spa resort. Spas, it existed for thousands of years, but not a category of real estate called Destination Spa Resort. So I think that's what I'm trying to do. So to answer in the long-winded way Liz's question, When I see something like that and I can see that I can be a social entrepreneur that's actually trying to fix a societal ill, which is ageism and people getting stuck in midlife.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think that that period of time, so midlife used to be a crisis now, it's a marathon, and that's ultimately what led me to saying, you know what, we need to figure out this wisdom school. How do people go into midlife and not think of life as being just a one tank journey? Like you fuel up with all of your education and support up to age 20 or 25, and then you drive this vehicle that we call our bodies for the rest of our life. And at midlife, you're starting to run on fumes. And you need a pit stop. And so the modern elder academy is the idea of that pit stop. And I think it's going to help to create a new category of academia or even hospitality real estate, which is the midlife wisdom school, just like Kenya Ranch 40 years ago. Mel Zickerman overweight accountant from LA wanted to go to a place to get healthy and all the places that he saw 40 years ago were mostly”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. So I think personally, midlife is from 35 to 75, and part of the reason I think, and I think it used to be just 45 to 65, it's happening younger because of the fact that people feel irrelevant earlier in the digital intelligence that we desire in companies mean that there's a greater and greater desire to hire than new digital natives. And I think it's going to last longer midlife because if we're going to live to 100, which is sort of the future as a longevity, we're in the right around 80 right now. But by the time we get to the end of the century, I think we'll be about at 100 for longevity in the US. That means at age 75 you're probably still working. At least by choice or by necessity.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's this reset that happens in midlife. And you could say, frankly, with the millennial generation, it might happen actually earlier in life. It might happen at 35. Frankly, in Silicon Valley, it absolutely happens in the mid-30s, especially if you're an engineer, where you feel like, wow, I am no longer perceived as an up-and-comer and in an industry that is like the entertainment industry or fashion.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Half the movie to go. Well, you do it. And the thing that happens in midlife and how do you know you're in midlife, whatever the age is you feel the weight of the accumulation of what you have acquired in your life. And I don't mean just the physical things. I mean the friends, the responsibilities, the identities, like the sort of invisible name tags that define who you are in the world. And you actually, frankly, are sort of feeling overwhelmed by all of that accumulation.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're in crisis. Is it a plus? No. No, you know, midlife has historically been defined as either 40 to 60 or 45 to 65. The truth is the phrase midlife crisis was coined in 1965. And the reason it didn't exist before then was because longevity in the US was 47 years old in the year 1900 and it became 77 by the year 2000. We added 30 years of longevity in one century.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel comfortable. Yeah, no, I am. Actually, in Frankfurt, the cancer, for those who didn't hear earlier on the thing, I've got cancer. The cancer sort of was another educator of saying, yeah, I think midlife wisdom schools are a thing for the future in a huge way. I think the idea of lifelong learning and how do we go to a retreat that helps us to repurpose ourselves, reframe our mindset, to have a growth mindset about our aspirational aging ahead of us. I think all that's important. No one's done that yet. There's been all kinds of retreat centers, but not a place that has a curriculum for people in midlife.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So what I was realizing is that actually I'm not doing this for ego purposes. I actually feel like I'm doing this more for legacy purposes. I'm doing this to actually help them and I believe in their mission. The Airbnb mission to belong anywhere, help people belong anywhere and turn strangers into friends. All of that was good. And now this modern elder academy that I'm doing in Baja that she's reciting there, you know, the reality is, yeah, it is me being driven again, but I've put guard posts on it. I'm doing it in Baja. I'm doing one location. I'm not doing multiple locations.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Radiviv was at times an exercise in seeing how big Chip's ego could get. Now, I say that not to beat myself up, but I do say that from the perspective of I was this guy who was getting a lot of my sense of self-worth from the fact that this hotel company was successful. And so my ego was on display. And then I joined Airbnb because the founders asked me to. And all of a sudden, I'm not, you know, I was the tiny version of Richard Branson in my company. But now I'm, instead of being the sage on the stage, I'm the guide on the side. And I'm helping these three co-founders take their little tech company and turn it into a global hospitality brand. And I realized in that process that I'm still driven, I'm still totally in it, although I actually was learning how to not do the 70 hour a week kind of thing, not four hours a week.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To succeed at the next thing. And so what I took from that and what I take from Liz's question is I think the real question here is not whether you're going to just be still. I love being still. The fact I'm a meditator, the fact that I have chosen to live in Baja, California an hour north of Capa San Lucas on the beach learning how to serve and having a very simple life there means there's been a lot of conscious choice of how I'm curating my life not living in San Francisco anymore and yeah I have these ideas that I feel like I want to go out and try in the world but the question is how am I executing on them and what is my intent or what's the sort of the silent intent for why I'm doing it and I think for so many of the things I've done in the past certainly”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, totally. You know, Peter Guber, I got to interview him on stage. He's one of the, actually, you know Peter Goober. Yeah, it's fascinating guy. We actually have both been in his box at the Warriors Games. I interviewed him on stage, and this guy's 20 years older than me, and he's been successful in so many different ways. And I was interviewing him on stage at the Airbnb Open, which is our big host open that I was in charge of. We had 20,000 people in LA at this one. And so I'm on stage with this guy. And listening to him and thinking, oh my God, that could be me someday. And he's an amazing guy, but he's constantly so driven.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“divided by having what you wanting what you have speaks to gratitude having what you want is the process of gratification so it's not to say this is not the this so so it says gratitude is better than gratification well that's fine if you're a Buddhist that's fine if you don't want to go out and attain attain and attain I want to go out attain and I want to go gratify but but gratification doesn't necessarily bring happiness it may bring success and for a lot of people who think that success will bring happiness, you know, they go on the hedonic treadmill and end up realizing just when they get the thing that they thought they wanted, there's some new shiny object that becomes the new thing.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It makes it tangible, or disappointment equals expectations minus reality. That's a classic one for any business. Like, okay, what's your customer expectation? And then what is it that you're giving as reality? And if the disappointment is more predominant than the reality, then there's going to be, I'm sorry, if the expectations are high and reality is low, disappointment is what will come from that. And both are negative. The happiness one that I learned in Bhutan was happiness equals wanting what you have”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'd say a couple of the anxiety one's very relevant in the business world, and that's anxiety equals uncertainty times powerlessness. So it's not a plus. It's a times. So the uncertainty and the powerlessness together are combustible. So what I help people to see if they're in that space is what is it that you can try to find some certainty about and what is it where what ways can you actually create some influence and some sense of power? And by doing that, you actually help people get to a place where they have a little bit less anxiety.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of inversely proportional to each other. So if you do the math of like, okay, suffering, disparity equals suffering by meaning eight equals 10 minus 2. If you take 2 and turn it to 4, then 8 becomes 6. And so despair goes down when meaning goes up. And this is when I realized that practice I've had since being a 23-year-old of writing what my lessons were for the week was a practice that actually was giving me meaning. And that equation, which I came up with that night, was...”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And weirdly enough, in my backpack that I brought with me on this trip was man search for meaning Victor Frankl's book. And the reason it was there is because I'd gone through a few really rough months and one of my closest friends, who was my insurance agent, whose name is Chip, had committed suicide four months earlier. And so I was trying to make sense of my life. And so here I had this book. And as I'm reading this book, I had a hard time sleeping that night. I'm reading this book and I was distilling if I were to take the meaning of that book manuscript for meaning and turn it into an equation. It would be disparitable suffering minus meaning. And the way I thought of it is suffering is sort of a constant. If you're a Buddhist and I slightly am you believe that suffering is always ever present. It's the first noble truth of Buddhism. And yet meaning or suffering and meaning are actually there.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No fear of like, okay, I'm dying and it's just going to be terrible. There was that. But I think the thing that was most interesting was just the fact that the oil was moving so slowly. It's like there's a ketchup commercial anticipation a long time ago, maybe Heinz 57 ketchup. It was like, it took so much work to get that damn ketchup out of the bottle. That's how it felt. And so what it felt for me was like, I'm slowly moving to my death, but it's a long time from now. And so that's what I take from it, which is a positive, you know, overall perspective. That night after having all those experiences, I'm by myself in a room at the hospital in St. Louis.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I take from it for five. Subjectively, yeah. I take from it that how I want to honor and experience beauty in my whole life. The gods of efficiency, which I tends to be my religion, these gods of efficiency have a tendency to force me or have its way with me in terms of just getting very clipped in how I do things because I have to get all these things done. you know being clipped and doing things doesn't allow for the time to sort of have the immediacy of seeing in that moment that beautiful thing so i think what it's helped me to see is like how do i create beautiful moments in my life um and how do i take time you know to do you know fasting day three or four days fasting in a row and things like that that allow me to just be in the moment that's one thing number two is uh the calmness i felt so”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I kept coming back to that. And I don't really, I've never actually sat down with a dream analysis or anyone to sort of say, what does it mean? The fact it stairs going downstairs means I may be going to hell. But actually it was up in a mountain chalet way up toward heaven. I don't know. All I know is, you know, forget about heaven and hell. What I know is in that moment, I felt beauty and calmness like I'd never felt before. Yeah, so I was in the...”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because of the way the light's coming in and it's hitting the floor, this oil that's sort of slightly moving or it's like going down these stairs, these beautiful wood stairs, it's casting this beautiful kaleidoscope of colors on the wall. And so what I see is light. I see colors and I see this weird, this Frangiopani scented oil going down these stairs. And that's what I kept seeing. And I never saw anybody else, didn't see anybody on the other side. What I saw myself is observing almost floating above this. I felt incredibly peaceful and everything was moving very, very, very slow motion.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can't do long story short on near-death experiences. What did you see on the other side? There isn't, by the way, a festival of the pilgrimage of the near-death experience in Spain. Spain has the weirdest festivals in the world. What I saw was this, and the fact that happened over and again over again means it's pretty remarkable and worthy to just talk about it. I don't love the mountains. I love the beach. Mountains are okay. I do like it. I love being in nature. So it's interesting, this is a mountain setting. So it's a mountain setting, a chalet with a huge sunroof or skylight, and light is pouring in the skylight beautiful light. And it's pouring in in such a way that there's actually this viscous oil, very heavy oil on the ground on the most beautiful wood grained floor you've ever seen.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fortunately, the paramedic showed up a couple minutes later really quickly, and they put me on a gurney and they put heart monitors on me. And that's the first time of nine times that I went flatline. And they had to get the paddles out the first time they didn't have to use them. About five seconds later, my heart came again. But over the course of the next 90 minutes, in the ambulance, in the ER, et cetera. And I kept saying, okay, this is what I saw on the other side. And whoever was there would take a note of it. And it turns out it was the same thing over and over again. But long story short, it was. Hold on.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, so I was giving a speech on crutches, which is one first sign that Chip should have been staying in bed and not been on this vokour trip was like, yeah, why was I on crutches on stage giving a speech? So I didn't, fortunately, I did not fall over at the speaker as I was standing up at the mic, but I sat down signing books and that's when I slumped in my chair. And then they put me, I probably didn't have a flatline experience there. I just went unconscious for three minutes.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, when I had that flatline experience, and to just give, I was in St. Louis giving a talk, I basically probably had an allergic reaction to an antibiotic for my septic leg and my broken ankle. And I went to the other side nine times over the course of many minutes.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's true. I do. That's right. Yeah. So I loved that process. And it did help me move to what's next. Plus I wrote another book. I wrote a book called Emotional Equations that did well. It became a New York Times bestseller. And it was another thing that just said, listen, this is my new identity. At that point, that was my fourth book. And it's like, okay, yeah, I write, I speak, I go to festivals. I live a good life. You know, stop giving me shit for the fact that I'm no longer a boutique hotelier.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They stepped into a void. And so the fact that I got to a place where ultimately I said, you know what? I'm fascinated with festivals, I'm on the board of Burning Man, and there's no great website for all the world's best festivals. Maybe I'll just go around and become the world's most interesting person and go around to festivals all over the world. And I did that. 36 festivals”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, that's a great question. I made the decision to kill me if I kept doing it. And so I knew I needed to move on. I didn't know, and frankly, then you get into the freaky, in the Great Recession, the freaky thought of like, how am I going to sell this company in the bottom of the recession? So I hadn't yet found the new thing I was moving toward. I knew what I was moving away from. But moving toward something is really important because otherwise when you do leave it, you actually, it's like when people retire and they end up on a golf course depressed. Because they actually didn't move toward something, they just moved away from something, and they just sort of sort of almost wasting their time.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's a fascinating piece of it. Is I realize my identity had moved on. I was ready for what's next, which was to become the world's leading expert on festivals. And I didn't really want to be doing it anymore. But I had to deal with other people's challenge in me changing my identity. And there's lots of ways people change their identity. You can get divorced. You can change your career completely. You can literally change your gender. But in my case, it was just changing the actual fact that I was the founder and CEO of what was the largest boutique hotel company, second largest in the US, but the largest hotel company, frankly, in the San Francisco Bay Area. And for some people who liked having their friend have that role and got a lot of free hotel rooms out of it from me or restaurant reservations or massages in my spas, they didn't like it. But at the end of the day, it was the right decision.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Worth and esteem had a lot to do with basically the roller coaster of my business. Well, fortunately over time I realized that didn't have to be the case. And it was that flatline experience I had 22 years into running my company that helped me to see that is this what I want to do the rest of my life? Actually, it's not. And I thought it was going to be, but it wasn't. And more than anything, I just realized that I started the company for creativity and freedom. Those were the things I said to myself on one Friday afternoon when I said, you know, what did I learn this week about why I'm starting this business? And 22 years later, I said, do I have any creativity and freedom in this business anymore? No, I'm like running a company with 3,500 people. So that's what led me, it was hard though. It was very hard to sell a business that for ultimately when I sold it, it was 24 years that has been your identity for most of your adult life. But it was actually harder for other people than for me.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So great question. One thing to you aspiring entrepreneurs and people who are younger than me, just know that when one of the natural tendencies is we hook our sense of self-esteem and self-worth to our businesses, I remember in the early days of the Phoenix, I had one hotel before I had 52. And that one hotel, when people come to me and say, how are you doing, Chip? I said, well, the Phoenix is doing fine. And finally somebody called me on it. It's like, you know, it's like, I didn't say how I'm doing. So my sense of”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moby would do that when he's going to a hotel room and just shut himself off for a week and to actually figure out music.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're soulful. At the end of one of her pools, the St. Cecilia pool here in Austin just has neon soul. And there's something soulful to her places. And so I want to bet on people like that.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No one really liked her. She was actually very shrewd, really tough negotiator. But when she launched a restaurant, if she got a bad review, people were sort of silently happy. And I'm not that way. And I'm not saying that to say I'm the most likable person in the world, but I will absolutely say that I do a lot of things to make that karmic capitalism work for me in the world. And as such, Liz was just an example of that. And the reason she hates me is because now she feels the obligation to pass it on, pay it forward to someone else because she gets hit up all the time because she's just an amazing hotelier.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so me giving to Liz was going to pay back to me in some way over time. And frankly, it's been me doing that with a lot of different people and then having it come back reputationally. Your reputation is one of the few things in your life that's portable. And frankly, it arrives FedEx before you arrive somewhere because that's what happens with the reputation. People know you before you arrive. And I think that whether it's Liz or a variety of other people who I have tried to help in business, it's just helped my reputation in terms of how people see me. And instead of people standing on the sidelines sort of like jeering, they're cheering. They want, you know, when the New York Times article came out this week and I didn't love it, I had such a support network of people who just said, you know what, we're going to write letters to the editor because it's not a bad article. Chip, but you know what? It's not accurate. And they wanted to help. And I think, you know, I once had a restaurant tour co-founded a restaurant with someone.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She wasn't here for that long, but she was here for, I don't, you know, I can't remember, but like weeks at a time, I did it partly because I loved Liz. You know, I love, you know, she was an attorney who should never have been an attorney who's completely amazing as a designer. So she's one of those.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So Liz Lambert hates me because she even said on your podcast she hates me because I did for her what now I hope and expect she does for other people which is she reached out to me almost 20 years ago I had become a successful entrepreneur hotelier and boutique hotelier and she was creating this funky little motel here in Austin called the Hotel San Jose and similar to my phoenix and she liked what we did with the Phoenix although she was going to do something that was a little more upscale and she wanted my help and so I came here and gave her some suggestions and then I actually sent my general manager from the Phoenix Monica Bernstein down here to Austin basically to help her get launched. Why?”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's a shrewd guy, super shrewd. Yeah, and I think You know, one of the things I learned from my dad a long time ago is build the business plan as if it's not going to succeed. I mean, imagine it succeeding and you're going to attract people for that, investors, employees. But what's plan B? And how do you have a solution for plan B? And so that's why I don't build bowling alleys, bowling alleys sort of like in terms of the shape of them. You can sit in the past churches, but churches have become sort of popular for all kinds of uses post-church era. But yeah, I think it's really critical to sort of understand what is Plan B, C, and D.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We would have turned it into a suite, right? I mean, so the key there, and it's that you just said it exactly right, which is my point to my investors was give me six months. Let me try this. We can ratchet and make it into a suite. And that, in fact, after we sold the hotel a bunch of years later, that's what they did. But I said, give me that time because this was not going to be insurmountable if it didn't work out. But it turned out to package and position the brand of the hotel really well and be something that people valued. But I think the point on that is to sort of say, okay, so how do you try things and do something small enough, but that could have a big impact that is easily solvable if it doesn't work?”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A quote off Would have said a faster order. That's Henry Ford. Yeah, I always attribute it to we can't ask him at this point.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if you're good and if you really understand your customer, it goes beyond the expectations, beyond the desires, beyond focus groups. It's the thing you know that they want next that they don't even know they don't want. They don't even know they want. So long story short is the yoga studio had a line out the door and within a month we were in New York Times, LA Times, Wall Street Journal had stories about this new sort of hotel that's oriented toward business travels who want to stay healthy. And the hotel Vitali ended up becoming the most successful upscale hotel in San Francisco.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A yoga studio on the penthouse level that had free yoga classes every morning. Now, my investors looked at me like, and they're all guys, looked at me like, what are you doing? Now, today this might make sense. 20 years ago, when we were concepting this, they're saying like, there is no financial district hotel in the world that has a yoga studio on the penthouse level. Like, why would we ever do that? And I said, well, because we're going to be the first ones doing it. And so then they said, well, look at all of the customer satisfaction forms you've gotten from people in financial district hotels. And have they asked for a yoga studio? And the answer was no, 10,000 of them. We looked at 10,000. Not one person ever said, why don't you have a yoga studio in your hotel? Yeah.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, the husbander who sort of was looking for that. And so our point of view was, we said this is a person who reads real simple and dwell. So it's actually probably more female oriented. And it's a female business traveler. And if there are five adjectives to define those two magazines, modern urbane, fresh natural, and nurturing, that describes this person. And so we ended up creating on the top floor of the hotel Vitali when we launched 15 years ago.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, thank you. Yeah. Well, so long story short, the hotel battalion, like the Phoenix is in the worst neighborhood in San Francisco. The vitality is sort of like the best neighborhood. It's right on the bay, on the Embarkadero, right across from the ferry building and the farmer's market. So the unrecognized need for the customer we wanted there. So the Vitali means vitality in Latin or in Italian. And we wanted to create a hotel that was sort of what we called for the person who was post W and pre four seasons. You know, David Brooks would call them the bourgeois Bohemian. So the Bobo.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love, you know, it's a great entrepreneurial story to sort of suggest that sometimes it's not the thing that's most obvious and it's not the thing that's most expensive. But this idea of the unrecognized need, how do you mind read your”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But mainly, what they were doing was going on the house phone, and the tour manager is calling his friends and then sometimes writing a letter and sending it out to them in old school US mail and saying, there's this place in San Francisco that actually gives you a free massage. And that's when I realized that really great entrepreneurs don't deliver on your expectations. Well, they hopefully do. They deliver on your expectations. They deliver on your desires. But the thing they get right is this thing at the peak of the pyramid. I wrote a book called Peak, How Great Companies Get their Mojo from Maslow. It's meeting the unrecognized needs of whomever your customer is. And in my case, figuring out that the customer was not all those other people, it's actually the tour manager. And what's his unrecognized need? It's basically to like chill and to relax and then get a free massage.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Overdose could do that as well. And he was by the time he got to San Francisco, he was so stressed out because usually the tour started on the East Coast. And by the time he got to San Francisco, so here's what we did. We had one room of our 44 rooms that was a massage treatment room. Now back in the old days when it was a pay by the airplace, you can imagine what happened in there, but we cleaned it up and we made it into a legitimate massage studio. And so we offered two tour managers when you bring your band here, if you give us 10 room nights, five rooms times two nights, you get a free massage for yourself. And so back in the day when we started doing that, now remember, this is pre-cell phones, pre-internet, pre-frankly laptop computers. People had satellite phones.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there was some logic. So my business school brain was saying, okay, well, who's the person who books all of the hotel rooms for bands coming through town? And I'd gotten to know Bill Graham, who's a music impresario, a concert promoter, and he had said, well, it's usually the concert, whoever's booking the concert, they're doing it. So I tried to, we tried to market to them. Then we tried to market to the venues, like Slims or the Great American Music Hall or the Fillmore, that made sense. And then we found out, oh, there's these travel agents who specialize in entertainment travel. So let's go to markets of them. To be honest with you, none of those worked all that well. They worked okay. The number one thing that worked, this is so funny, was the person who typically made the decision of where the band was going to stay was the tour manager. The tour manager was usually a guy, almost always a guy, about three to five years older than the band. His job was to make sure there was no overdoses and no groupies. And because a groupie might mean the guy doesn't show up at the show. And, of course,”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This land is real and this is that so Arlo Guthrie's in the hotel because the great American music hall's two blocks away Brenda Lee comes in with her bus and we have bus parking so one of the beautiful things about the Phoenix is it had free bus parking which a band's gonna appreciate and she checks in and all of a sudden we'd become a rock and roll hotel we had Arlo Gathri and Brenda Lee and that led to you know Nirvana Pearl Jam you know David Bowie red hot chili peppers you know everybody you can imagine staying there over the years”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's the same as it is now. Yeah, it hasn't changed that much. Yeah, there's a lot of drugs on the street and it's a relatively poor neighborhood, pretty desolate, but it's right in the middle of the city. It's right and it's right near Union Square and the hotel district. So we were the gateway to the Tenderloin, but we were on the opposite side of the Tenderline from where the nicer part of the Tenderloin and Union Square was. So she's driving through there and they're looking for a place to stay. And she wanted a motel. And we were a motel. She comes in. She had no idea that our aspiration was to be a rock and roll hotel. And so she comes in and we had, weirdly enough, a guy named Arlo Guthrie staying at the hotel at the same time.”
2019-06-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT