Ben Goldhirsh talks about his journey in business and philanthropy.

Transcript

Nice to meet you guys. We need the microphone for this size room, but I’ll share a little bit about the last ten years of my work and effort in life and pull some of the insights that I’m trying to draw upon for the next ten years.

I had an interesting start and kind of kick started into this career. Both my parents passed when I was younger, my mother when I was a senior in high school, my father right when I graduated from college and my father was a very successful entrepreneur.

And so I sort of was in this interesting position of having significant resources at a young age that I didn’t earn and, and I immediately set about trying to validate that position or earn that position that I arbitrarily found myself in. And, and it was a fun time.

Like it was, I was, I think there is a certain beauty that surrounds death and a certain perspective and there’s a freedom that surrounds death and I really brought that freedom to the marketplace and, you know, was just making big bets and moving really aggressively and there was a lot of good stuff that came out of that.

First I, you know, got into the film business and was producing films that I felt kind of matched that intersection of entertainment and relevance and some you’ve probably seen, some you probably haven’t but, you know, became frustrated that each business or each film was its own business and if you liked one film and you didn’t know we made it so we couldn’t have you there for the next film.

So I launched Good as a magazine to be a consistent platform for this conversation around giving a damn.

And Good kind of went from this fun project into a real business where Good now reaches about 10,000,000 people a month.

We expanded into consulting ’cause some of our advertisers wanted out help navigating the space and so our clients are Google, and Facebook, and Airbnb, and Starbucks, and it’s super fun to see how intrepreneurs and those companies can do good things.

And then, you know, they wanted out help in kind of how to do storytelling that they saw in our media so we launched a creative agency and wanted to empower our members so we launched Citizen.

So we now have these sort of multiple businesses that all exist under the Good heading.

But somewhere along that line it stopped being like this fun free-for-all. Like it really very much became a business, you know, that has lots of employees and all the pressures that come with that, the fun that comes with it but it...it, my identity became subsumed by Good and I entirely, we almost went out of business in 2008, you know, trying to do some stupid stuff, almost did it again in 2012 and each time it was so traumatic because it was like my identity was at stake. You know, it was, it’s almost, it’s fascinating.

And I’m super grateful for the GPC. Going to Montana in 2006, 2007, or whenever that was was like a fundamental inflection point in my life and it didn’t solve things for me but it, it allowed me to become aware that there was a problem, which I think lends itself to the sort of identity wedding that would occur with my efforts.

And so me and my family left for a sabbatical last year and we took eight months.

We lived four months in Costa Rica, two months in Indonesia...lived in a month in a van driving around New Zealand, lived in Copenhagen for a while to see what the Scandinavians were up to.

I’d heard a lot about their success and then came home.

And I wasn’t sure-, it was, I tell it was, the best thing about that experience, and I’ll get the insights shortly, was that it, I saw that I did exist outside of work and it was an awesome thing to see.

Like I think coming up in a Puritan Massachusetts, a place where you go to hell if you don’t work, it was cool to be like,

“I’m here and I’m not going to hell.[LAUGHTER] They were wrong,” and, and that was a very lovely thing.

And then I, I got back and I didn’t know-, it was almost like a alcoholic returning to a liquor store where like I opened up my emails and I got...I didn’t have a phone for that period of time and all of a sudden like kind of dove back into work and I totally tweaked out and I was like, “I don’t know what to do.” And so I, I stepped aside.

I appointed our president from our board and just sort of watched from the sideline.

And I took a job teaching at USC, Social Entrepreneurship to the business school kids there and, and it’s been, it wasn’t fun. Like it just wasn’t that awesome being on this leg.

It’s not that fun to do well without doing good, I guess. If the mission of Good is doing well by doing good like, you know, to...it’s hard for me to enjoy that which I have if I’m not putting work in.

And so I’m in an interesting place right now and I told Peggy this earlier that...the first a big media company wanted to buy Good, and it’s one of the reasons I’m in New York right now and these negotiations and it’s not private.

But...it’s super confusing ’cause on the way here, in the taxi ride here this morning I was like, “I’m selling this thing.”

I’ve been beating myself on this thing,” and then sitting in this environment is like,

“Hey. Like, you know what? Like I don’t actually need the money.”

And so much what I crave in the, in the exit is like the “W” [“win”] next to the effort and the validation as opposed to-, and I don’t know what the decision’s going to be.

We’ll see what happens but it is interesting how this environment creates a context where success is different than the, the context that I have out there where it is about those W’s. And even that I have more awareness it’s still the dominant context for me.

And so whether or not I sell the company or not or double down on the company by effectively keeping with it, I do feel like there’s some insights that I’m, I’m gonna bring to the next thing and having this opportunity to talk to you guys forced me on the plane to kind of distill some of these.

First is when we started Good we had this really distinct mission. We said we’re gonna help the, we’re gonna see the sensibility of giving a damn become the dominant sensibility.

This was 2006 and it felt like media was reflecting this paradigm of, “You’re gonna go to Goldman Sachs or you’re gonna go to the Peace Corps.”

And that was something we rejected and we saw this generation that was rising and felt that we could bet on them and bet on us and really reflect that together we were gonna move the world forward, and it was so inspiring and we were after it.

And then I’d say, you know, once Obama got elected in ’08 and some things, you know.

I’d say Arab Spring leading to Occupy leading to SOPA it was like this sensibility of giving a damn has permeated society and in a way we became lost and that led to some of the mistakes that almost put us out of business in 2012.

But I heard the CEO of Invisible Children come to, he came to the office and spoke to the employees a few weeks ago and had this line of, “Don’t have a mission. Be on a mission,” and I found that to be the most inspiring line.

And so whatever the next chapter is if...if it’s good, and for some reason I’m leaning in that direction just because we’re here talking about doing good, like crystalizing this mission of, you know, and I think I know what it is for our next chapter.

It’s helping good people do great things.

And then if you can have that mission it’s sort of useless if you can’t manifest it in particular sub-missions for the people who are actually doing things.

So our media business, can it help good people do great things by helping them understand the world so they can change it? Can you consulting business help intrepreneurs do great things by aligning their KPI’s with impact?

I can see how it can come together and I feel the movement that can come from that.

But I also think about, and just you guys can decide whether these are insights or words [LAUGHTER],

I think it’s important as I think about the next chapter, and I think about this in philanthropy as well where I run a foundation, is it’s one thing to be good at building boats. It’s another thing to be good at choosing rivers.

And I think sometimes like the craftsman in you can really focus on the boat building, which is super important.

But it’s like I launched a, I launched a magazine boat.Like what a terrible boat. What a hard voyage that’s been. Like the amount of water in the media business is just like it’s a shitty river.

And so I think about, you know, how that applies to philanthropy and I think about the investments we’ve made on that front, the grants and the, you know, for-profit investments, half of it’s the boat builder but the other half’s the river.

And so I think that navigation’s super important. And then I’d say like a thing which I’m glad to be here is how to keep this broader context for the decisions at the office ’cause I think at the office like there’s a very confined perspective and there’s very, it feels clear at the time but getting to pull myself out...it feels really good.

And I think having that freedom, partially from the sabbatical, partially from having people like you guys who are in my life and can remind me of this is really valuable.

So yeah, those are, those are my insights and I hope they’re of some value.

Thank you.

[APPLAUSE].