YouSaid · the spoken record

David Neeleman

lines on the record: 96
first: 2019-02-04
most recent: 2019-02-04
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

“She and I have a very special relationship from this day because of that. It was a miracle. And so she was going through this treatment and herbs there. And so I'm saying I assumed you and you want to sell this company? She said, yes, I do.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because when they found is if you had the surgery, it spread the cancer through your body. And they needed to zap it and get rid of it first. So she got on the plane and he convinced her to go into the treatment. And they just took her almost to death. I mean, bone marrow transplant, everything. And she lived. And she's still alive today.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he said, Get her on an airplane now. And I said, What do you mean? I said, She scheduled for surgery. No, no, don't let her have the surgery. We know this doctor, Blumenshein, that is having amazing success with this. So I called him June. I said, June, I just booked you two tickets on American Airlines. You need to get on the airplane. So she raced out to the airport, got on the airplane.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I couldn't believe it. When he was on the phone, I can still remember hearing his voice. I'm like, hi, Herb. Would you want to come down and meet with us? And so I went down and met with him and smoked filled room with all these guys in there that I had idolized over all the years. And then I came home and then we found out that June had a very serious form of cancer. It was called inflammatory breast cancer. And so I went to the... And so I went to my office and I was just sitting there staring up my phone and it rang and I picked it up and it was a guy named Jim Weichert. And he said, how you doing? I go, I'm just sick. He's a guy we had chartered planes from. I said, I'm just sick. I just found out June has this terminal breast cancer, inflammatory breast cancer. I don't know what I'm going to do.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wrote the system and got it all done, and we were, we launched this thing as the first e ticket airline. Well, Southwest didn't know what a great thing they were buying. That was really kind of the best thing that they were buying from that. They were and have credit today in the Smithsonians being the first ticketless airline. But it was really our system that did it. But kind of going back a little bit, so Herb called me up and said, hey, I hear you might be interested in selling.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said, Well, why don't we just give it to him over the phone? Why do we have to mail him anything? He goes, Well, people want to have something in their hand. So I said, well, let's get a fax number. We can still mail it to them, but we don't really need it at the airport. Rental cars don't have it. And so we didn't have a repository for that information. So I had a young guy that was backing up the computers and he kept telling me he could write us a new reservation system. So I said, why don't you write us a reservation system? And he said, I don't know if I can do it. And I said, well, I'll give you $20,000 and you can buy yourself a jeep if you can do it. And so he went out and”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why don't we just come up with a computer driven form that we can just go through it automatically get done, has a confirmation I'm around it. We just mail people that way and we just accept their confirmation number.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A couple really incredible things happened around that time. I idolized Southwest. And I kind of just, I can't even tell you how I felt about that company when I was building. I would pattern everything we did after Southwest. There was a few things that we did at Morcera that Southwest wasn't doing. One of them is that we invented e-ticket travel. I mean, the first ticketless travel was done at Morcer in the world. And it all came about because a guy who worked for me at the time named Stuart Thatcher came into my office and he goes, yeah, you know, I just went up to the fourth floor. We have like 50 people up there printing tickets and stuffing them and mailing them out.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he said, okay, took the money. And so by the time I got back to the office, June called me in and said, hey, your banker called and said that he handed to inform me this, but someone in your company is embezzling money. She got the biggest kick out of that. So I went back and closed my account and moved on to another bank. But she couldn't imagine that somebody my age, kind of a Neuhaman that always hardworking people but didn't have that kind of money could walk in and pay off their house when they were in their mid-20s.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's our whiskey drinking money. So it's okay. So that was our term for what we distributed. So one year I got my, I was in my maybe 26 or 27 and I got my whiskey drinking money and it was enough for me to pay off my house. And so I went, the first thing I did is I went down to the bank where my family had done business forever. And where this banker was kind of knowing that my dad was always, he was always covering my dad's overdraft treks and my grandpa's overdraft checks kind of knew that these Neelamans didn't have a lot of money. So I walked in there with, I think it was $165,000 check and I said, I just want to pay off my house”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he was really a great guy, one of the most amazing men I've ever met, and he was a great mentor. But he'd say, okay, this is what we're going to do, guys. We're going to do a third to third and a third. Third's going to the government. A third is staying in the company. And a third is going to be whiskey drinking money.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, initially, we were just making enough cash flow. We were just using that, and you aren't buying airplanes, you're just agreeing to pay them like a monthly rent payment on the airplanes with leasing. And then they take a certain amount per hour in reserves for maintenance. And then when the plane's going for maintenance, they use that money to do it. It doesn't require a lot of capital from the very beginning. And so we were just kind of bootstrapping it. And that's how we got it. Mitch was really funny, though, because during those years we were making money. Mitch wasn't a Mormon.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And he said, I got a guy that can help you. And it was a guy named Yuso Schultz. And Yusto was an old FAA guy. So I called Yusto and he was living up in Idaho and he came down. It's okay, let's certify this airline. He's still alive. He's in his mid-90s, this guy, and called me up recently and said, if you got a little something for me to do, I'm still here. But he went through the certification. June was really funny. She wanted to compass rose on the tail because that was a logo of her travel business. So we put a compass rose and then she wanted it. To be magenta. That was her color. And so we made these planes with a blue toe with a magenta compass rose, and it was called Morisser.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was about that time that Steve Hosey, who's a well-known entrepreneur in aircraft leasing business, he called up and said, hey, my wife's from Utah, my relatives come flying on. You guys all the time. You need to get legitimate. I have some airplanes. I will lease you, but I want you to get your own airplane certificate.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So I said, let's fly to LA three days a week. And so we ran an ad in the newspaper. And the first day I didn't give me calls. And then I remember coming in the next day at work. And I heard Verla, who was our receptionist saying, I have twenty four Los Angeles calls on hold. Will somebody please help me? I went running in there and started answering the phones myself and booking people on pieces of paper and it was funny because there was a glitch in the system. So we were basically overbooking every flight by 100 people as we were booking everyone. We lost a little bit of money on that. But it was kind of a big success from the very get-go.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so Hawaiian called me after one season and said, Hey, this plane's going to be going back in about six months. Can we come and base the plane in Salt Lake? And so you can fly straight to Hawaii and back. But for the other six days a week, is there anything you want to do with this airplane? And I said, yeah, I want to fly to LA. You know, there's lots of Mormons in LA and lots of family interest between the two. My grandparents were there. And I kind of spent my whole life in the backseat, back of a station where I had been driving Death Valley between Salt Lake and LA. And I thought, if I could sell those tickets for cheap and I had... Read up a lot on Southwest Airlines. Herb teller was my hero, and I had read every annual report ever on those guys. It was kind of my dream to be like them.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was what we called a reverse rotation. The plane would on a Friday night would start in Honolulu and it would fly nonstop to Salt Lake, and then it would turn around Saturday morning and fly back. So that was the flight. You'd spend basically seven days, six nights in Hawaii, and then fly direct and the whole package was $3.99 because we were buying the charter flight. And so we started this company called Morris Air Charters. And that was kind of the hallmark of our trip was this DC8 that would make this trip.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I just didn't have, I was just getting together the bond. You needed a $250,000 bond because it was a public charter. And I was just trying to arrange that when the other airline failed. So I went back to the drawer, I got the contract out. I went to June and I said, if Mitch, your husband can help with this bond, we can launch these flights directly from Salt Lake City.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. She's about the age of my parents. And so we sat down and she gave me her big smile and she said, you know, if you come to work for me, I'll make sure you get a piece of the company. We can do this together. And I really like what you did. And so she convinced me. She convinced me to do that. And so I. Kept the job at the store at night, and I would go there during the day and called up all those hotels and said, hey, I'm back. Then I called up Hawaiian Airlines. And I had this contract in my drawer at my old office. It was a charter contract to fly a Hawaiian Airlines chartered from Hawaii to Salt Lake directly, bypassing the drive to LA.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I didn't. I lost the milk crate. I could stand up the cash register. But yeah, it was pretty devastating. I mean, maybe they don't want to get out of bed and do anything. But, you know, I just kind of said I got to keep going. And so, and then I got a call from my uncle Stan, who just happened to be the estate lawyer for the Morris family, June and Mitch Morris. And June ran a very successful travel agency in Salt Lake City. It was dealing with mainly corporate travel at the time. And so Michael Stan called up and said, June Morris wants to talk to you about doing some of the things that you were doing on your own for her company.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, my father in law had a drapery business, and I was kind of working in the back room, kind of doing the counting and stuff. So I went back to doing that. And my grandfather's grocery store, I went back to work on my grandfather's grocery store just like I did when I was nine years old without the crate without standing on the crate.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was. I went out and bought myself a BMW. I thought I was, you know, things were great. I never bought another one again after that because I learned my lesson. You're young, things are coming easy. It's good. The money, you know, I mean, you can imagine your first condo you sell, you get to make $350 on it. You're like, wow, that could last me for two weeks just for that one sale, that one phone call. So it started up fast. It was very successful, and then boom.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It did because I had prepaid every single ticket. And it was about a half a million dollars. And I probably had a couple hundred thousand that I had of my own money. And I should have at the time just called everybody up and said, look, I can just give you half your money back. But of course, you know, you file for bankruptcy. Not personally, but it was the business. And then the lawyers ended up getting most everything. So at the time I was in my early 20s, I think it was 2023 or 24, something like that, I really didn't know anything about business or how this all worked.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was all working well until there was a new airline that started and I was a little enamored with this because it was Hawaii Express and they had a big pineapple on the tail and they flew 747s. So I said wow I'm going to switch to these guys. So I started buying tickets from them. And then right before Christmas it was 1982 or maybe 1983, they called me up and said, you know, hey, we're CC operations tomorrow. And I said, you can't cease operations tomorrow. They said, well, we don't have any money. And I said, well, I've prepaid all these people. It was right before Christmas. People I paid for the hotels, but I had no way of getting them over there. Of course, all the airplane tickets were full. I didn't have money to send everybody over there. And so it was kind of a disastrous time. And I learned a huge lesson from that that suited me well through the years, but it was obviously very difficult to go from a point where I had this thriving business from one day to the next.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it was, I had all staff of people, and we were salespeople. People would come in and sit down. We'd show them brochures of different hotels that we had or different condos because then I would call in over to other places and say, hey, could I buy a block of rooms for 20 bucks a night that'd say, okay? And so I just started packaging them.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's how I did it. And I eventually dropped out of college. The company was doing $6 million a year. Wait, your company was doing it?”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the early 80s. 78 was deregulation. So there were airlines that were kind of sprouting up. So there was an airline called Pacific East. And I called the guy that was running it in LA and I said, hey, I'm not a travel agent or anything, but if I send you some money, can you send me some airline tickets? And he said, sure. So I would send him the money. He'd send me the tickets. And then I would package them with these hotels. And then I would say $2.99, you can fly to Hawaii, but you got to drive to LA. So people would say, oh, we love Hawaii. You know, Utah's have always loved Hawaii, so they'd jump in their cars and they'd drive down to LA. Hop on this specific old DC8 and fly over to Hawaii.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, under the resort accommodation section of our local newspaper at the time, I would just run little wand ads and say, hey, Hawaii condo for $75 a night or whatever, $50 a night, sleep six. And so I started getting phone calls and I'd book them and I'd pay him $135. I'd collect $400. And then I would just keep the difference. So I was doing a couple days a day. And next thing you know, I was making some pretty good money just filling up these.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. I was sitting in my accounting class one day and I was talking to someone who was seated behind me and her name was Lily Ronag, so remember. And she told me about this guy, this man who was a friend of her mother's that owned some timeshares in Hawaii at this place called the Imperial Hawaii Resort. And he was having difficulty selling the timeshares. And so I got this idea to go talk to him. I said, give me his name, and I'll call him up. And his name was Al Libra. And so I called him up and I went down to meet with him and I said, hey, how about if I just rent your timeshares out? Because he was paying a weekly maintenance fee on all of them. And it was kind of draining him. I said, let me fill him up. And he said, okay.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, it's kind of what you do, you know, it's the way it works in the church. You get home and you're encouraged to get married. We got married in December, and our first child was born on November 1st, so we didn't, kind of 11 months later. And it was just kind of off to the races from there.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of companies that are in Provo, Utah that door-to-door sales of alarm systems and pest control and whatever. And they take all these guys have come and gals that have come home from missions that are kind of fearless now. And then they say, go sell alarm system or go sell pest control.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was very successful in kind of being a leader, and the first time I had ever done that before. And then also just learning discipline and kind of overcoming my ADD and being able to read scriptures and to learn a language. And when I came back from my mission, I was able to go back to university, where I left getting C's and Ds, I was home getting straight A's. Wow. It made me, I grew up a lot and it taught me discipline, which is something that I hadn't learned in my childhood because of my ADD.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just like the guys in the play in New York City in the Book of Mormon. We didn't have a bike, but we had white shirts, short sleeve white shirts, you know, just a tie, not necessarily a black tie and slacks. But I also...”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it made me very resentful. And I really, and that tucked away in my mind that I wanted to come back to Brazil and I wanted to do something to help these people at some point in time in my life and kind of make my contribution.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But when you're a missionary, you don't hang out with those rich people. They've already got their gods. It's their money or, you know, or whatever. They're humble enough to change. It's really the people that are really downtrodd and really down on their luck. Those that have virtually nothing that listen to your message. And so I spent all my time with those people. And wow, it was an eye-opener for me. Obviously in the United States, we have disparity of income and classes, but at least you have an ability to move from one class to another if you work hard and you're lucky, you know, you have some luck and you do certain things. You have student loans and other things. In Brazil, it's virtually impossible to do that.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had been there several times, and my dad being a journalist and being a foreign correspondent, and he knew all the rich and famous. And so every time we would go visit Brazil, we were hanging out in the sports clubs or hanging out at the beach, we're going to the best restaurants and everything was just like, wow, Brazil is a cool place. Everything's so amazing.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct, and I was so fortunate to be assigned to Brazil. And I think part of the reason is because I was born there and I had a Brazilian passport. So it was just kind of random. You just put it in and you receive your call and your call says you're going to Brazil.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now it wasn't, and it wasn't until years later when my little brother, I have a little brother that is 18 years younger than I am, almost 19 years, that he was diagnosed with it. And my mom, she read this book called Driven to Distraction by Dr. Hallowell. And my mom sent me the book, and she said, you know, Marx has been diagnosed with this. I think you might have this. And it was, of course, didn't read the book, but I did read, there was 21 characteristics of somebody. Who has ADD? And I read those 21 things and I just put the book down and I just got tears in my eyes and I go, wow, this is me.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is what I learned about ADD afterwards if it was something I was interested in, I would devour it. But if it was just something that I wasn't interested in, I just couldn't focus on it.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, it was really hard. And if you ask me today, what was my favorite book I read in high school? I couldn't tell you because I don't recall even reading a single book in high school. You know, I got through it with pretty well decent grades. Did horribly on the ACT. I think I got like an 18 or something. And I think my reading was below 10. My counselor said, I don't know how you got to score the slow. Had you just marked C on every answer, you would have gotten a higher score than what you did. It's like you tried to get the low score possible.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Horrible. I was. You know, it's not that for lack of not wanting to be. I just, you know, it was something I discovered later in life. But I had a raging case of ADD, and I know everyone likes to say they do today, but it was really something that was tough for me because I was gregarious and I could get my way.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, always was. I mean, it was three hours on a Sunday, and it's a cultural thing. I think as much as a religious thing. So you have both elements, you know your neighbors, you talk to them at Church on Sunday, you have boundaried areas in our church where if you lived in a certain geographical area, then you have to go at this church at this time. And when it was my time to serve a mission, there wasn't even a question. It was, you know, I'm going to go on a mission just like my dad did.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Participate as much in high school and do things as sports as maybe as I would have wanted to do. But I think it probably taught me a lot about a lot of things.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My grandfather had a few grocery stores, small grocery stores. He called them miniature markets that were like fast food, and he would make the sandwiches in the back and bring in fresh donuts and, you know, kind of a precursor to maybe a 7-Eleven, but everything was done fresh. So when I was nine years old, I got a job there standing on a milk crate working the cash register, checking out people, counting money. And so that was kind of my introduction to business. And my grandfather was a really kind of old school. He was born in Salt Lake, but his whole family came from Holland. And so, you know, he paid me 50 cents an hour, which kind of made me mad because everyone else made a dollar an hour. He expected more out of me than the other kids. And he was really focused on customer service. There was something in the store that somebody wanted and we didn't have it. He'd run out the back door and run over to Safeway and buy it and bring it back for him. He never wanted to lose a customer. You know, I look back on those years and I didn't get.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a pretty conservative place. I mean, it was obviously a place that was founded by Brigham Young as they started the church. They moved across the country. And my mom said the family were pioneers. They came and covered wagons. My grandmother seven generations back, a lady by the name of Sally Hewlett. The family stories that she was given a book of Mormon by Joseph Smith himself, who was the founder of our church. And a lot of people have those stories. I mean, almost everyone you meet in Salt Lake has a story of somebody who either crossed the plains or cross the ocean or had a grandmother die on the plains. It was just kind of... Part of our Laura of our religion and these pioneer families.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Invited me to Ruth Christ Steakhouse in Dallas and said, This isn't going to work. You're driving everybody insane in this company. And he reached across the table and held my hands. I was crying. And he said, everybody, even the people that your biggest supporters said, you had to go.”
2019-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT