 Usually I start my speech by talking about disruption and innovation about turning disruption off and turning innovation on. And I use an example, let me use this one about self-driving cars because I've heard a lot of discussion about them here. We all know that they'll eliminate truck drivers but what about insurance? It'll be impacted too. These cars don't crash and parking you'll probably send a vehicle home and ought to repair most of them will be electric they won't need to be repaired and real estate will be redesigned because we won't need parking lots and deliveries will be automated and hotels well we'll probably say honey let's just stay in the car and keep driving we don't need a hotel anymore and healthcare the number one cause of emergency room visits is car accidents that that'll be changed dramatically and billboards across the country we're not going to be looking out the window anymore so we won't see billboards and even police who do you arrest in a self-driving car? So all these industries will be disrupted by this one change so it's not just about what's happening in your industry it's about what's happening upstream and downstream from you that can change and disrupt you and that's why I speak on innovation I've written a book about it but you know they asked me when I came here today not to give my normal speech but to talk about me and my journey so I started as a travel agent I've been a product marketer I've been a CIO I've been a CEO I've been a chairman I've served on 14 boards I've been a venture capitalist an author and a speaker I've had many careers and they asked me to focus in particularly about building Travelocity and building Kayak and then there was a little note in the thing they sent me that said you know have you retired and and have you stopped well this is in a recent IBM annual report it said I was operating at full throttle and I still am I have a new startup so at 69 years old I'm trying to do it again because it's so much fun so was I born a businessman did I start that way no but I'd like to credit my mom who at a very early age took me to the library before I even went to school and I started reading and I'm a voracious reader and because my father was an advertising we had 30 magazines that came to the house every month and I read all of them from successful farming to life magazine and it made me curious and curiosity is extremely important if you're going to be an entrepreneur you have to be curious learning new things all the time and my dad taught me to build things we build a go-kart together and because he was in amateur radio we built radios together and I love to build new things so I think my parents a lot and then when I was nine years old they sent me away to camp in Canada for two months every summer I had no idea how challenging it would be I had to carry heavy loads through the woods and learn how to deal with bugs and rain and I loved it I loved it I went back for 12 summers it taught me about adventure and risk and helped me learn tenacity and a lot about teamwork so a lot of my past prepared me for the future and then when I graduated from college I thought I was going to travel but not the way I'd hoped it looked like I was going to fight in Vietnam because I was drafted by the army but I'm blind in one eye so they didn't take me after all but I still traveled my college roommate had a free pass on trans world airlines some of you remember them because his father was a pilot and he said I'm going to spend a year going around the world so two of us went with him we spent a year traveling around the world the best postgraduate course I could have had I got to stoke my lust for adventure I learned by being in other cultures they're more than one right answer I learned patience and how to listen in many languages and I learned that I had to take risks to get where you want to go so that's kind of what formed me and I learned that I love to travel and I still do so what qualities became most important in leadership I think the most important one has to do with risk you see in the 21st century you can't avoid it you can't reduce it you can't transfer it you must accept risk now I started my career as a receptionist in a travel agency almost 50 years ago six months in my manager said let's go do a startup so I left to do my first startup and you might think that was a big risk but really it was a small risk I was 21 I was single I lived in an apartment I wasn't making much money anyway and we ended up building the 50th largest travel company in the United States and then I jumped to my second startup and that was selling mini computers to travel agents six months in that company was sold to American Airlines suddenly I was inside a big company and I was moving up the ladder and one day my boss max hopper the cio said I want you to become vice president of software development I said but max I'm not a programmer I've never managed them he said don't worry you'll do fine suddenly I was in charge of 500 programmers I had no idea what to do what could I bring them well I went back and thought about my early life and believe it or not I started a book club and my seven managers and I read a different book every month because they were geniuses when it came to programming but they didn't understand business at all so I learned I could I could teach them business and we focused on quality and I taught them about deming and about how quality was being managed in making cars and manufacturing and hadn't been done in software so that was the lesson that I could give them together and then max called me again he said I want you to become VP of computer operations I said I don't know anything about computer operations he said you'll do fine suddenly I was running the largest data center in the world handled American Airlines 40 other airlines and 40,000 travel agents I lost my hair doing that job and the problem was that right at that time Saber was spun out of American Airlines and went public so I started listening and of course my bosses wanted more revenue and new products but my customers said lower costs and increase up time and those were conflicting goals it's very hard to lower costs and increase up time and have new products and new revenue it's just a difficult thing to do so I had to blow up the silos between departments and for the first time we set interlocking goals and we were one team making the tension between all those three goals work to produce the result the customers and my bosses wanted and went back to where I was at camp you see we were all in the same canoe for the first time we were working together for one goal now then I was made chief information officer at American and after a few years of being CIO it took a huge risk I was married I had two kids I had a big salary and a big mortgage and I you know I'd run product marketing product development computer operations the division I'd been in two startups and I said you know that little department we have easy Saber that's our first online venture I want to go do that not be CIO and they said well that's pretty crazy and I said no I want to do it and we turned it into travelosu.com and later took it public for $1.2 billion so big risk big reward right since then I've taken a lot of small risks I've been on 14 public and private boards and I said I look back some of those companies shrank some of them flamed out entirely and the rest of them created over six billion dollars of value two of them were unicorns if you don't take risk you don't move forward now I'm all in again with my time and my treasure I have a new startup called wayblazer and people say to me Terry do you have to do another startup I say no I'm on a government pension I'm old I don't have to do another startup I want to do another startup it's fun you can change the world if you take the first risk but you have to take risk and there will be failure if you don't fail you're not moving forward you're not experimenting enough we allow failure and harvest learning says into it we allow failure and harvest learning early on a travelasty we put together a CD-ROM with videos on it because in those days you couldn't send video over the internet you remember it was slow so I spent a million dollars building the product and getting it on the shelves and I lost a million dollars it was a total abject failure and I had to go to my boss the cfo at american airlines and say I lost a million dollars I was terrified you know what he said he said Terry what did you learn well the word spread like wildfire Terry didn't get fired right but also that he was a coach and coaches don't just throw people off the team they work to make the team better no I knew I couldn't learn lose a million bucks again but he changed the way we thought about risk in doing that you see coaches watch this mistake over and over again not to assess blame but to ensure victory we have to learn from our failures and move forward don't write we will never change in the concrete outside your building right we experiment in the sand to let the water come wash it away and write it again and again fail often to succeed sooner accept risk accept failure and lots of you're taking pictures and that's fine but I will show you where to get these slides at the end now safety safety first is the job of a leader you see you can get people to do anything you can have employees who are shot out of a cannon as long as they have a net they have to have a net and as a leader it's your job to provide the net with a net they'll be fearless in order to do it you have to eliminate the boson layer now we're not talking about global warming the ozone layer this is the layer of bozos okay this is the impenetrable layer that stops good ideas from flowing upward it's made up of middle managers it's not their fault they are not rewarded for change it's easier to say no so as a leader you have to reach down through the boson layer and say this is Sally's idea we're going with it and this is Larry's idea and by the way it failed and Larry's getting a promotion and as soon as you do that the boson layer will go away as soon as you kill projects not people kill projects not people and you will find the response is amazing they will try and try again if they know you've got their back because the best ideas come from the bottom they come from the salesperson the person in operations the person out on the line in 1996 we started paging people at travelosity when flights were late that idea came from a customer service agent got tired answering the phone said can't we page them said yeah we started sending emails to people when the price fell nobody'd ever done that before that idea came from a programmer the best ideas come from the bottom you see innovation that happens from the top down is orderly but dumb and innovation that happens from the bottom up is chaotic and smart so we have to find a way to listen to everybody that doesn't eliminate being autocratic an autocratic leader can listen and must listen it's top down first set the tone to get bottom up later set the tone of safety make them sure you're listening and you will hear amazing things this is world war one radar they didn't have radars so they had these big earphones right we all need them at travelosky.com we had a phone booth in the hall it was a symbol when you picked up the phone you listened to customer service and everybody in the company from the guy in the mail room to me had to listen to two calls by customers every month and a staff meeting discussed one did we fix the defect in the company that made the customer call and two what amazing new ideas have you heard from customers this month it involved everybody in the company and the customers pain and that's very important in the indirect businesses we run today now at kayak.com we don't have a phone bank we're a search company but paul english our cto said we'll take emails and we send the emails to the engineers to the programmers and you might think well that's crazy programmers make a lot of money but our slogan is give the pain to the people who cause the pain and it works they are nimble responsive and they know exactly what's going on in the business otherwise they wouldn't general dynamics recently introduced a crowd sourcing program we were talking about crowd sourcing last night getting ideas from all over the world amazingly 50% of their approved ideas came from their own employees they didn't have to crowd source they just had to listen they didn't have a vehicle for it before and now they said hey we've got a pretty good crowd right here let's listen to them if you do that your product can become clay in the customer's hands kayak has the number one mobile app in the world for travel 55 million people have downloaded it but when we started we thought it was about next flight told me he didn't believe in travel ass he believed in you and that's how i got around the bull zone layer because he trusted me so you didn't eat somebody for air cover and somebody well you have to have somebody for air cover i mean it look if the top of the organization is totally opposed and you try and try i would just leave and go somewhere else because they're not going to change you know and sometimes you go and and you have a great idea that you propose to change something and that was the idea that got your boss his job in the first place not going to happen not going to happen not going to happen yeah yeah so one last one clearly i mean this was a remarkable journey that you shared with us and thanks for doing that but it wasn't always smooth sailing oh there must have been many many occasions you talked a lot about failure which yeah there must be many times that you were kind of feeling down and out how did you pick yourself up each time that well i don't know i'm just i'm a positive kind of a person and i really believed in the idea and sometimes we guessed wrong i mean look we were the biggest in the world and Expedia passed us that was terribly depressing but we still had a billion dollar company wasn't the end of the world and we thought well maybe we can pass them again and we got close uh so you know you make decisions quickly we they jumped on hotels we jumped on cruises they were right but they were also lucky you know and you have to understand the luck factor in business and just say i'm i'm gonna keep going uh because we're building a great business here for people and we are changing the world and we did most people don't know travel is the largest part of e-commerce it's larger than the next three categories combined so it's a massive market and and we changed it together fantastic sounds like it's a question of keeping that positive mindset and keep going on living it really is i mean yeah look failure is tough it hurts and i don't know if this new startup is going to work i hope so i'm going out to see investors tomorrow i'm going to convince them it's going to work um but you don't know and that's okay you know look look at sports teams they don't know they're going to win every game and they don't win every game don't and a world-class baseball player fails 70 percent of the time if you have 300 you're awesome right they just get a lot of chances so give yourself a lot of chances and you'll do fine very good thank you so much all right yeah uh questions before we bring everything to a close for terry late in the day so there we have a question yeah go ahead uh thanks terry for sharing this phenomenal journey with you it's with us it was truly inspiring i just have one question for you and it'll be good for us to understand what was your chairman's which is your leader's reaction when uh he was signing the first check for travelocity and when did the financials come into the conversation after you formulated your organizing well you know he understood this was a guy that would take risk and that that that was it was all about risk i mean building a saver system was a huge risk doing this was a huge risk he knew we would lose money he knew we'd lose money for a while luckily we were you know losing the hundreds of thousands he was running a multi-billion organization so uh to him it was a small risk and his attitude which was the best i ever saw when we would do things like this and somebody internally would say well that isn't our business he said we know how to do it and somebody else is going to do it anyway let's us do it and make that money and that was a wonderful attitude that somebody else is going to do it it fits our model let's do it ourselves so uh he's the best boss i could have now he's a very tough autocratic mercurial guy um tough to work for but i'm immensely loyal to him because he was super supportive thank you thanks anything else looks like that looks like we're done all right thank you