From $4/Hour to $4 Billion Net Worth | My First Million

If I told you that a kid flunked out of first grade, I don't think the first thing you would say is that's a future billionaire.

You probably would have joined the crowd of people that made fun of me for being dumb.

Today, he's known as this guy you see on the cover of Forbes, tech entrepreneur. billionaire sun god because of all the work he's done in the solar industry.

But the crazy thing about Hayes is that his story is very much a started from the bottom story. a lot of great leaders that are level five leaders.

There's daddy issues. There's learning disabilities or there's a near-death experience.

Hayes pretty much never does podcasts. I pulled the friend card.

I asked him to do this because I think he's got a story worth telling.

I've never told that one before, definitely on camera, but...

You're in the eye of the storm, right? Like, oh wait, subprime mortgage crisis, you're in the mortgage business.

I would like literally throw up in my driveway before I could go see my family every night. you said the difference between rejection results is just how long you stick with it a lot of people quit when it gets hard Sometimes you don't even know you're quitting.

You just come up with a reason why you think you need to quit.

What was it like meeting you on the first time?

Well, when I met Elon for the first time, We'll be right back.

I think what's interesting about your story, because I have all the research here, and if I just zoom out and I just think about it, I think...

How does a guy who flunked out of first grade end up, you know, one of the... Miss Macy's class.

Shout out to Miss Macy. How does that guy end up... you know, where you are today.

Super successful. You've built a $10 billion company.

You're doing what a lot of entrepreneurs want to do, right?

Like if I think about how I got into entrepreneurship.

Like what would have been the win? The win would have been, I'm having fun.

I am building a company that matters. You know, I'm having the success.

I'm doing it with talented people. You know, one of your co-founders is like, a fourth grade friend.

So that's kind of, that is winning to me.

And you've done that. And so I think what's exciting to me is to hear I guess how you approach this, how you've gone from the guy who can flunk out of first grade to make that happen. if I had met you when you were a kid, maybe 12, 13 years old, 14 years old,

Would you call yourself like, were you really ambitious then?

Were you really smart? If you would have met me in grade school, you probably would have joined the crowd of a lot of people that made fun of me for – you know, being dumb.

You know, I would go to this room called the resource room and the resource room for kids that couldn't read.

And so then I would go, And I would write all my letters backwards and they would like give me a Dick and Jane book to read in the third grade and I would struggle through it.

And it was, it was soul crushing. You're dyslexic, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I have dysgraphia and a form of dyslexia and No one knew what it was in those days.

People just thought you were stupid and people just thought that you just couldn't read and you couldn't keep up. which is why I flunked the first grade.

So it's not fun when you flunk the first grade when all your friends that go to the second grade make fun of you every year for basically 12 years of your life to know you're the kid that flunked the first grade.

Yeah. Because we were all friends in the first grade, and then you didn't go with the rest of the kids.

And so... I had a lot of self-confidence issues, I would say.

I had a lot of questions about whether or not I was even gonna be able to provide for myself at that moment in time.

I overcompensated with sports. I guess I overcompensated with trying to be a dynamic person.

I don't know that I overcompensated in the best ways, but I had a couple teachers that took me under their wing.

There's this one guy, Ron Edwards. He was the gym teacher.

He was this amazing guy, man. And, you know, you got to imagine, I don't have a father.

I'm raised by a single mom and, And he kind of stepped in and he would be like, he knew I loved football.

And he would say, look, Hayes, do you want to go instead? at the time the St.

Louis Cardinals were there. And there was this quarterback, his name was Jim Hart.

And there was this running back. His name was OJ Anderson.

And that was like my outlet, that I was like a fast runner, you know, because I wasn't good at school.

Got to be good at soccer. I'm like, man, I need something.

I need some thing that I can anchor on that maybe I'm good at something.

The only thing I was good at was the 40-yard dash.

But he would take me to these banquets, right? where I would have the opportunity to meet Jim Hart or OJ Anderson.

And it was just kind of a lens for... oh, okay, these guys, maybe there's a way out.

And so now if you meet somebody who maybe is a kid who's dyslexic or has a learning disability like that, what's the perspective you have now, now with the benefit of hindsight? about those same kind of like quote unquote limitations.

Well, it's interesting. Now, when you sit down with people, that have achieved extraordinary outcomes.

And Jim Collins wrote a book about this called Good to Great.

He talked about level five leaders. And I had an opportunity to have lunch with Jim Collins at Stanford.

It had to be 15 years ago. And this was an unlock for me.

And he goes, hey, you're a level five leader.

You know, you're operating on this frequency that allows you to, you know, create these business and do these things.

I'm like, how? What is a level five leader what's the well oftentimes the level five leader is They have a great deal of compassion and empathy for people.

They often give up to go up. they have the ability to empower people instead of micromanage people, recruit top talent. and put them in a place that allows those organizations to scale.

And so the reason is for this, if you dig a couple layers lower, is oftentimes they have a learning disability, many times they're on the spectrum, And so people that have Asperger's or they're on the spectrum when they're in school, they get made fun of a lot too.

This turns out this big T trauma where all your friends make fun of you and you don't have a lot of friends and you're an outcast as a young person. wants you to do things later in your life to gain affirmation. and get respect, especially if you're a male and you want male affirmation.

The second component of that that often you'll see is daddy issues, okay?

A lot of great leaders that are level five leaders have pretty severe daddy issues.

They had a major falling out with their father.

Maybe it's a situation like me where my father left.

So I don't really remember meeting my dad.

I didn't meet him until I was, I think, you know, around 30 years old.

And so... When you dig into some of these level five leaders, you go, oh, there it is.

He's looking for male affirmation. He's looking for respect.

That's why he grinds and does the 100-hour weeks to gain that affirmation.

And the third one... oftentimes it's a near-death experience. or it's a career-ending injury in sports or something along those lines.

And that will force that individual to make a greater sacrifice That and it also forced him not to quit in the face of a pretty significant amount of adversity, which unfortunately, you know, a lot of founders and leaders. do you said a phrase in there you said they they get what do you say they give up to get up what do you say you gotta you gotta give up to go up So when you're really bright, let's say you're the guy that gets a 35 out of 36 on the ACT.

Or you get a, you know, 1550 on the SAT.

You're an achiever. Yeah, you get to brag about it at the cocktail parties about what you did.

And you realize like I'm the smartest guy in the class, okay?

By the way, my two business partners, Jason Walker and Matt Dawson, were the smartest guys in the class.

They had all the tassels when we graduated from high school, all the tassels.

We graduated from college. I wasn't stupid.

I'm like, hey, I want you guys on my side, right?

And there's lots of other people in my life where they were the smartest person in the class.

The smartest person in the class, oftentimes, it's not ego.

It's actually – they're just very competent, and they get frustrated – with other people that it takes them longer to learn things.

And so what do they do there? So forget it.

I'll just do it on my own. Right. I'll do it more efficiently, I can do it faster.

Why would I take an hour to train this individual on how to do it when I can do it myself in 15 minutes.

Well, the problem is they keep doing that same task over and over and over for 15 minutes and they never give up to go up.

And they end up becoming a control freak.

And then they wonder why their business isn't going to scale because they have to be involved in everything all the time.

Right. And so someone that has dyslexia, as an example, Well, you learn to surround yourself with really smart people, right?

They can do, oh, wow, you're amazing at bond math.

You're like the best math mind I've ever met in my entire lifetime.

I'd like to start a company with you. You're brilliant and so you start to surround yourself with all these really talented, amazing, extraordinary minds.

They're good at different things. And instead of trying to do it on your own, you're celebrating that talent around you.

Right. Have you ever heard what Ari Emanuel says about this?

What? So Ari runs CAA, now Endeavor. Yeah.

He also, I think, was dyslexic. And so somebody was asking him, they're like, how do you read contracts?

Your whole business is contracts, basically.

You're a talent agent. Every day is contracts.

He's like, I sit in a room with people who are amazing at contracts.

He's like because I couldn't. He's like I literally could not focus enough to get through it.

So I just built a machine of people, like, who can I bring in that will bring that to the table?

And the same thing, like, I respect them.

I value them. I need them. And they know that.

And because of that, I'm able to have my zone of genius.

They're able to have theirs. And we built a great... team from that.

Yeah. You worked with and for Larry Ellison and with Elon. both of whom I would say are like kind of legends in Silicon Valley as leaders, longtime leaders of companies.

What was their style? Is it similar to what you said?

Do they have their own play style that's totally different?

And give me a sense, how close proximity were you?

Yeah, I was probably like six levels away from Larry Ellison because literally I was a kid in a cubicle that was a good bother of database administrators.

I would basically have my headset on, I would call you.

I would bother you to buy Oracle 7.0. They're like, oh man, you're so good at bothering people.

We're going to let you manage 12 other and teach them how to bother people.

Yeah, yeah. It's like, hey, can you teach me the other 12 people how to bother people and sell Oracle 8.0.

I was like, yeah, no problem at all. And then they're like, wow, you know, we're thinking about not selling one or two products, but like 300 products.

So by the end of it, you know, I was there about eight years.

You know, I was fortunate. I was a global account manager.

I could sell the whole suite of products online. and different things.

But what I learned the most was, one, what phenomenal products do The fact that you could sell air for 80, $90 million and all you ship was a CD blew my mind.

I just couldn't believe this whole concept of software. and the talent of people that could come together to deploy those assets at that stage.

And like the information age, it was the biggest wealth creator at the time when I was there. is between Bill Gates and Larry Ellison on who was the wealthiest individual in the world at the time.

Right. And so I was super inspired by Larry Ellison and very inspired by the collective talent that they recruited and surrounded you with.

What's his superpower, right? You said at the time, maybe one of the wealthiest people in the world Vision, he could pivot.

I mean, you know, obviously we just started with as a database company and there was a handful of other database companies at the time.

It was like Sybase and, Informix, SQL Server, with Microsoft, and then some of those started to drop off or we acquired them.

But the superpower... was his ability to have big, bold vision and ideas to go, nope, now we're going to be an applications company.

Now we're going to be a middleware company.

Now we're going to go acquire some of the hardware providers.

Now we're going to become a software as a service company. and being able to persuade an organization of that size at the time to shift those gears And it was such an aspirational, inspirational place to work with such urgency.

No matter how much we grew, just the urgency to close out a quarter or the urgency to close out a year You just saw the grind factor and the give a shit factor from a group of people.

It was next level. And so I learned like, I learned how to grind.

I learned like, yeah, this is why you come in on a Saturday.

This is why you get in the office at 5.30 in the morning.

This is why you skip your lunch. This is why you go to training.

And so a lot of people... candidly, they were going to go play basketball at three o'clock in the afternoon because Larry built out. all these amazing facilities with basketball courts and six restaurants and all these things.

And I was like, nope, I'm going to go back into training class.

I'm going to sit down and I'm going to go learn about negotiation skills.

I'm going to go learn about... all these various courses you could take to learn about the technology, obviously.

So if you were a feverish learner and you were driven by growth, it was just a platform where you could run as fast as you could.

And his mindset was... I don't care if you're 23 years old.

I don't care if you went to Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale.

All I care about is your numbers. Hit the numbers, get promoted.

And so humbly, every year I got promoted in this company.

And they would joke, when I would join the team, they'd go, okay, we know you're going to be our boss next year. but it just came down to work ethic and your ability to post up numbers and against your peers.

It was very competitive. The bottom 20% got cut.

The top 20% got promoted. And you could look around and it didn't matter age, race, you know, anything.

It just came down to performance. It's like a pro sports team more than it is like... Because, you know, people describe it like, oh, we're a family or... you know, they try to create like comfortable environments, but it sounds like this was more competitive and meritocratic in terms of the culture.

Absolutely. And it was high risk, high reward.

I mean, if you performed, you were compensated accordingly.

I made a tremendous amount of income as a young individual there.

And what you started to see is the confidence build amongst all these other individuals on what they could achieve when they were pushed. to their peak performance level.

And so you started to see people like, Craig Conway leave and go run PeopleSoft at the time, which was our biggest competitor on the HR software side of the business.

Tom Siebel left, he built this amazing software program we use to do all of our customer resource management called Oasis. and Tom Siebel left to go start Siebel Systems and he created a great company.

Another gentleman left to go start, NetSuite, Mark Benioff leaves to go start Salesforce.com.

So you see all these individuals and learning and believing in themselves and their ability to perform regardless of their background or where they grew up. from a kid that grew up in Crevecoeur, Missouri with his mom in an apartment while she worked three jobs. and walk to the washer and dryer every day to the guy that... had an undergrad from Harvard and went to GSB at Stanford.

You were all equals. And then you watch these people and their ability to go launch their own companies.

And in some cases, Larry was very supportive.

And, you know, he was a big investor in Salesforce.com as an example when Mark left and did that.

Then the others he acquired. He acquired PeopleSoft back.

He acquired Siebel Systems back. He acquired NetSuite back.

And so it was just really interesting to see collaborative alphas, like a group of people that just saw themselves as the ability to kind of create technology within the Valley and the level of respect and admiration that we all shared with one another.

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All right, back to the show. Thanks, HubSpot.

Thank you. You also get the itch to leave, to start your own thing.

Well, you see all those other individuals leave.

You can't help but be inspired. Right. But you have a cushy job at that point.

It wasn't cushy. You're making good money, let's say.

Yeah, I was making good money. I was making really good money.

When you're making seven figures and you're like...

I don't know, man, 25, 26 years old from a kid in Missouri.

Like... Your head explodes. What did you do with the money as a young kid, by the way?

Nothing. I couldn't believe it was real.

I just kept it in my bank account. Put it under the mattress.

I was sharing an apartment with Matt Dawson down in the marina in San Francisco running the Golden Gate Bridge. every day.

And Matt and I started to whiteboard all these crazy ideas in our apartment.

What was on the table? What's on the whiteboard?

Oh, you would laugh, man. So like, so we loved Toph.

He and I built this home in Tahoe. And there was this guy, his name was Randy Paul Mean.

And Randy Paul Mean had a hot tub company.

And so Matt and I had this idea. I was like, man, we could just buy Randy Paul Means Hot Tub Company.

I'm sure Randy's like a little checked out.

He's getting older. He's ready to sell it.

Right. And I mean, the annual reoccurring revenue of these hot tubs and the maintenance of these hot tubs could be a great business around Lake Tahoe.

We'll snowboard in the winter. We'll wake surf in the summer.

And we'll just take care of the hot tub business.

We almost did it. You could have been Hayes the hot tub guy.

We talked to our fiancés at the time. They're our wives now.

And we were like, well, do you guys think you would move to Tahoe with us?

We could all live in this one house that we built. up in Kiggswood Estates.

You know, this house Matt and I built up there together.

And we'll raise our kids there and we'll just sell hot tubs and we'll maintain pain hot tubs.

Let's put it this way. The wives shut that one down.

Mostly the living together was the problem.

Yeah, yeah. They were like, ah. No, we're not doing that.

We thought about starting a car wash. We put a bunch of time and energy into, hey, we could start all these different car washes together.

And then ultimately what we decided was, and this was based on kind of a background of learning that you could remotely sell anything.

Once you realize you can sell really complex items, like we were selling from a software perspective, you can do it virtually over the internet.

You're like, okay, you can sell anything virtually over the internet.

It was a huge breakthrough moment for me in my career.

And that led to everything else that I did.

And so ultimately I said, hey, what if we took Matt and Jason's background in residential mortgages And we just digitized it.

We just created a virtual... technology platform that allowed us to sell these mortgages and other financial products.

Maybe it could be insurance or other things virtually.

So you were like, I could take my sales playbook, maybe not playbook, but my sales experience of like, I could sell. this stuff over the phone and through the internet, but now let's find a product that might work for it.

Not hot tubs, but mortgages. What was that?

I guess like what was the sales model back then?

Is this like Google ads didn't lead into a phone call?

There's no Google ads. There's barely the internet at this point in time.

What was the model? What were you doing?

Well, yeah, so here, let's just go back in time.

97, 98 is when the internet really starts to catch some tailwinds, right?

And so you start hearing about the dot-com verticals and this is all the big dot-com companies start popping up.

Well, really, when you look back at the internet in those days and what was going on, the internet was a way to sell things.

Um, online, right? It was like, Hey, do you want to do a trade?

Maybe you want to do that on, um, e-trade.

Right. Do you want to, you know, you remember Webvan?

I don't know, right? If you want to buy groceries or anything, you can buy them online and Webvan will deliver them to you.

Okay. at books on Amazon. So it was basically like, hey, now there's this virtual retail environment where you could sell anything.

So that led you to think, okay, well, what are complicated things that everybody needs in the world that you could, basically bring to the virtual e-commerce world. are doing today with agentic AI.

It's the same thing. How do I take a complex business, That's very people intensive.

Maybe it's insurance company. Maybe it's a mortgage company.

I'll just bring a Gentic AI into it. And I'll automate it.

Well, that's what people were thinking about in 97, 98.

And so our idea. when I left in 2003, right?

Because what happens is dot-com crash happens in 2000.

Everybody gets wiped out. 85, 90% of everybody gets wiped out.

Google launches around 98, 99 once everyone gets crushed and becomes Google.

But that was my window where I said, okay, I've been here eight years.

I've seen a lot of people come and go. I've seen a tremendous amount of success.

I've seen a tremendous amount of failure.

I think now I've got the maturity to think of a big enough idea that can really scale.

And basically I can take advantage of the internet wave.

The information age had already happened.

Those guys had murdered it and became the wealthiest people in the world.

It was Jobs. It was Gates. It was Andy Grove.

It was Larry Ellison. And so now it became the internet age.

And I was like, okay. And I basically created a bad version of Quicken Loans.

Right. Dan Gilbert and Quicken Loans did it a lot better than I did.

Same idea, same time. Dan was a little ahead of me and executed it significantly. better.

I'm curious. Well, they bought Intuit, right?

So that was kind of like the, or they kind of branched out of Intuit.

And they had a tremendous amount of capital and they really invested in technology in a thoughtful way that allowed their organization to scale and build a bigger brand.

Dan was older than me. He was more mature than me.

He was just a better entrepreneur than me, period, at that point in time.

I was like a a 30-year-old kid with the big dream, trying to figure it out with my two best friends from the fourth grade and my sophomore year of business school.

And you guys self-fund it? Did it work right away?

We totally self-funded it. I think we each put in like 50 grand or something along those lines, you know?

And so, well, we... Humbly, we created success very quickly.

We decided to move to Sacramento, California from the Silicon Valley. because we were gonna do these cheesy radio commercials.

I got stuck doing the cheesy radio commercials.

I'm so embarrassed by it to this day. I literally like.

Hey, hi. Yeah, what's the ad? Oh God, it was so bad.

It was like, I had this breathy voice and I would be like, hi, I'm Hayes Barnard. you know call me and you know get a rate in the fours which is like The interest rates were in the fours for like 10 years.

So I just said the same rate for basically a decade of my life.

And then my last line was, I'm so confident I can save you money, I'll even pay for your home to be appraised.

And this is when like Wells Fargo or Bank of America or all these players, they have to charge you 600 bucks for an appraisal.

And I thought, hey, okay, that's a nice thing to do.

I'll give you the appraisal for free if you just give us an opportunity to do your mortgage online for you.

But it was, it's just funny the things you do, Sean.

Oh, wait, have you ever done anything like Like when you look back at your life and go, I cannot believe I actually did that.

But it was like a stepping stone for get you to another stage in your life. was a sushi restaurant chain.

And even worse, like, you know, we were... this is before door dash before uber eats we were it was like a delivery only because we we We didn't want to sign a 10-year lease.

We were like, we don't even know if people want this concept to exist.

Trying to build the Chipotle of sushi. And so I used to go not door to door, but floor to floor in a skyscraper because I realized... the front desk lady orders lunch for everybody in the office.

The most viral way to teach everybody in the office that we exist.

I was like, if I could just schmooze the first front desk lady, I can get like a floor of business.

So I would just go in the elevator. I'd sneak in because I didn't have a badge.

And then I'd push one and I'd get up and I'd smooch her.

Then I'd go back and I'd push two and I'd go up. like a 50 floor building.

But again, it's like our business idea was terrible, objectively.

It was clearly a terrible idea. But that type of selling was actually like pretty interesting and then made a bunch of mistakes and then the story was kind of good and it led you know, the next guy who met me was this like guy who just sold his company for $500 million.

And he found our story so amusing that he was like, I just want you guys to come do something with me.

And I think if we had not done something interesting or amusing that made him literally like laugh i don't think he would have wanted to take a bet on us like he kind of just saw like okay these guys are hustlers They're kind of stupid, but maybe pointed in the right direction, they'll do something, or at least they'll bring some good energy to it.

You know, they'll make me feel young and alive again.

I don't know what his reason was, but it led to the next opportunity in the next.

Isn't it funny though? So people always say like, you know, how'd you make it?

I'm like, well, I started carrying golf bags at the local country club when I was eight years old.

I would carry one bag when I was eight years old.

By the time I was nine years old, I would carry two.

And I would walk in your line and I would talk while you were putting.

I was like a total knucklehead, like a total, but they like kind of liked me.

They were like, Hey, I like this kid. He rides his bike here for like an hour to come carry two golf bags at the Belle Reve Country Club.

There's all these rich guys, the Belle Reve Country Club that I got to go, wow, you guys are members of this like super nice country club in St.

Louis, Missouri. And then I would get 20 bucks a bag and they would buy me a hot dog at the turn.

And I'm like, okay, cool, man. I did that eight to nine.

Yeah, I'm living large. Dude, if you give me 20 bucks on a hot dog today, I'm happy.

Yeah. Exactly. And so when I think about the waterfall of all my gigs or the things that I did...

Then I went to go, I was a sandwich artist at Subway and they wouldn't let you work at Subway until you're like 18.

But I got this guy, Jim Condom, that was the manager.

I'm like, look, man. Just please, I promise you, I'm really mature.

I've had this job. I've been working for a while.

So by the time I was 15 years old, I'd ride my bike to subway.

I was a sandwich artist. And so I like, I'd make the best, I'd carve the boat.

Back in the day where they carved the boat and the bread just perfectly in there. wait in line, they'd be like, nope, I'm waiting for the kid.

The kid gets more black olives, he gives you more.

More, more, more, you know, pickles. Like I'd work there till two in the morning. when I was like 15 years old.

And then I went to, this is another funny one.

I worked at Amoco. I was, I worked at a gas station.

So I'd be the guy that would come out. I'd check your tires.

I'd fill up your tank. I'd check your oil.

I'd wash your windows. And then when I really, when all the grease monkey guys would give me a nod. you know, these guys were amazing.

They were incredible mentors of mine. They'd be like, okay, Hayes, you can do an alternator.

Or you can do a headlight or you can change the, you can plug a few tires or take it off.

So I'd clean these guys' tools. They'd make fun of me.

They'd just be capping on me all day long.

And I'd get there and then if the tool had a little bit of grease on it, I'd be like, nope, do it again, kid.

You know, so we had this funny rapport and then they would leave the whole base just trashed.

And Jason Walker and I. would literally go in there and we would race how fast we could clean the bays, right?

And so it's so funny, if you think about that as kids, Jason and I would clean the bays.

We'd put the soap down. I'm like, dude, we can clean these bays in 15 minutes today.

Well, of course, naturally, later in my life, I'm like, we got to work together.

We can read each other's minds. We work so efficiently together.

But it started in a gas station... in Missouri, you know, with a bunch of guys that would just, we had the best rapport with this awesome group of people at the Amoco.

Um, on Olive and Fifi Road, you know? And so it just goes on from thing to thing, you know, whatever, working on a farm after that. but it gives you this ability to kind of have this humility and have these stepping stones in your life where you meet people Where you go, okay, these are the things I need to do to be successful.

I learned so many lessons from these people. nickname thing?

Because you're a big nickname giver. Something I kind of stole from you.

Oh, I like the nicknames. I was like, Hayes, everyone he meets...

I was like, he kind of has a nickname for him right away.

It builds this rapport right away. Because look, I live in Silicon Valley.

There's a lot of rich and successful people there.

There's not a lot of people who have the like... fun to hang charm that you have.

So I'm like, oh, I want to steal a little bit from your game.

On that, you know, it's almost a big country.

Oh, what's going on here? So Ben is in my phone now as Ben Big Dog Levy, right?

It's like, I'm just giving nicknames out now.

That's going to be my thing. Is that something you're going to do?

Intentionally you picked up from somebody?

I'll tell you where I picked it up. This guy is Zeke Seeger that I used to work for, okay?

Zeke Seeger, he was like the black sheep of the Seeger family, and the Seeger family owned all the car dealerships in Missouri.

So what does Zeke do? Zeke loved to gamble.

He loved to drink beer and he loved to play golf.

So he started, he had a family farm and he started a delivery range on the family farm.

And I was, Johnny, come cut the grass, make sure that all the tee lines were set right.

But Zeke had these nicknames for everybody that worked for him.

And I'll tell you, he taught me one of the greatest lessons of my life.

And this... this one is, I pass this one on to my kids.

So I, did everything as fast as I possibly could because I learned at the gas station, just do it fast, get an attaboy from your boss, you know, get the gold star going to the next day.

And so Zeke brings me in and he had all these nicknames for everybody.

And so this is my second summer there. He said, you're fired.

And I'm like, what, Zeke? Like, what's going on?

And he'd have his little, he called them his little girls. little girls.

So he had this little Budweiser in his hand and he said, yeah, you're fired.

You're out of here. And I said, what? And he goes, every day you come out here and you run around.

And you get all these little things, you know, done real quick.

You go out there and you weed eat the railroad tracks and then you.

You pull the weeds out of the sand traps and you set the tee lines and you do it faster than everybody else.

And I said, oh, thanks, Zeke. I really appreciate it.

He goes, you know, the problem is you come in here and at 11 o'clock every morning after you get everything done and you ask me what you should do for the rest of the day.

Hey Zeke, I got all that done, what do you want me to do?

You do it every single day and you've done it for a year straight.

He goes, you're fired. And I said, well, Zeke, I'm not leaving.

I mean, come on, man. You can't fire me for something like this.

And he goes, no, you're absolutely fired until...

I don't want to see you for the rest of the summer.

You don't come in here and don't ask me what to do again.

And I'm like, okay. So I was angry. I went out there and I picked those balls.

And then now. At 11 o'clock every morning, I'd look around.

I'm like, okay, I probably need to go take the hay. and move the hay up into the barn.

I probably need to go out there and clean the barbecue pit.

So I didn't talk to him for the rest of the summer.

I was like, I'm not gonna go in there one time.

I'm not gonna get in there, you know, whatever it may be.

So he brings me at the end of the summer your last day, right?

You're going back to school. I said, yeah, this is my last day.

And he goes, you coming back next summer?

And I said, yeah, I'd love to come back next summer.

And he said, you're the boss. And he gave me this big ring of keys.

And he goes, there you go. And I said, what?

And he goes, you're the boss. I said, all these guys are 10 years older than me.

And he goes, you're the boss of all of them now.

Because you know why? You didn't come here and ask me what to do.

You knew exactly what to do. And that stuck with me for the rest of my life.

When I worked at Oracle and Larry Ellison, I never went into Dean Panzeca's office once and asked him what to do.

I never went into Hillary Koplow's office once and asked him what to do.

I thought, okay, what would they want me to do as the boss?

And when you do that, you become the boss.

Yeah, you think like the boss, you become the boss.

You become the boss. And so it's the person that goes in there looking for the attaboy, looking for the pat on the back, looking for the affirmation or, hey, what's the next thing you want me to do?

They're never the Right. It's BYO. You bring your own clarity versus being a sort of direction taker at all times.

Yeah. A lot of people get that wrong. Yeah.

So if we go back into the story for a second.

So you leave. You're doing the radio ads.

So the business is working. You start to build this business.

Now a mortgage business sounds like a good business to be in, but... there's always bumps and bruises in any kind of roller coaster here.

So what happens with that business? Well, wait happens, you know, the financial crisis. you know, on Douglas Boulevard where our office was, I think 95% of mortgage companies went out of business.

You know, a lot of people didn't have their hedge position right.

They blew themselves up there because interest rates had increased.

Then also the people that did subprime mortgages were done.

We were lucky. We didn't do a lot of subprime mortgages.

We didn't do any reverse amortization mortgages.

So I wanted to ask you about this. So you're in the eye of the storm, right?

Yeah. Like the 08 crisis. which is the subprime mortgage crisis, you're in the mortgage business.

I'm in it, yeah. You know, I've watched the big short.

That's my level of knowledge about this.

I'm curious like, A, what happened from your perspective?

What's your kind of like layman's explanation of what actually went wrong?

And then B, how did you not fall into the same trap that many others did?

It seems like, there was an incentive to give these subprime mortgages out, you're going to make more money.

Every mortgage sales guy in the country at that time wanted to sell reverse amortization mortgages. and wanted to sell subprime mortgages.

Stated loans was the big thing, right? Let's just have someone make up their income and then we'll give them any loan we can.

A stated loan, so yeah, I'm good for it.

Yeah, yeah, I'm good for it. No, you would basically say, hey, Sean, what's your income?

And you would say, oh, I make $200,000 a year.

Okay, great, $200,000 a year to qualify for this loan.

So what happened at the end of the day, there was a bunch of loans that people received that they shouldn't have received.

Okay. The underwriting criteria wasn't tight enough.

That's what happened. That's why the crisis happened.

The default rate skyrocketed People walked away from their homes.

They're like, hey, I don't know. I have no equity in this house at all.

Who cares? I'll just walk away. I'll take the light fixtures out of here and, you know, whatever. else i can take putting a lot down then basically they were putting nothing down so nothing down stated income yeah And so that felt really, really wrong to me.

Like morally, I was like, I have a saying, the devil doesn't tempt you with spinach.

Okay. All right. And so you're like, you know, he's like, oh, you know, like.

It's, and then the guy, the sales guys would come in, you know, the mortgage guys, hey man, you know, if people want red cars, we got to sell red cars.

People want hamburgers. We got to sell them hamburgers, Hayes.

I heard every analogy under the sun. I'm like, we're not selling hamburgers.

We're not selling red cars. I don't know how this movie ends, but those people don't deserve those loans.

And so we're going to walk away from the volumes.

And we did. We walked away from a tremendous amount of volume.

We walked away from a tremendous amount of people. that wanted to come work for us, take advantage of our cheesy radio commercials and the brand that we had created for ourselves. and sell those loans, because what do they care?

They'll just sell those loans until that company blows up and they'll go on to the next company.

And so I give Jason and Matt a ton of credit here.

Jason has a brilliant mind for underwriting criteria and he has huge ethics.

And he basically said, man, it's not right.

It doesn't smell right. We shouldn't do it.

And Jason and Matt were experts in the industry.

And I said, then great, we're not doing it.

And so it was a hard decision at the time because you're right, everybody else was doing it.

It was the only reason we survived. There were so many buybacks from other companies.

They just said, hey, we can't buy them back. were out.

And we had done some stated loans, and we had to buy some of those back.

But it wasn't at all near the magnitude if we would have done subprime loans and we would have done those kinds of things. you sort of look wrong until you look right in that situation, right?

Meaning like... you're just growing a little bit slower than other people or you're leaving money on the table until finally the crash happens and then you're validated for that strategy.

But it's like, most people are not willing to look wrong or be wrong you know, for 364 days, you know, for the one that was right.

You know, a lot of times it's more than 364 days.

Sometimes it's three years. I just went through it in the residential solar financing business.

There's been about five companies that went bankrupt recently in that space.

Look, we raised pricing, I think, 16 times because the Fed had raised rates so much. in a short period of time.

And it was hard because we lost a lot of market share For a period of time, people said, hey, if you guys are going to have to increase your pricing, but the bond math didn't work.

The unit economics didn't work. And I was like, look, if the unit economics don't work, at some point the music stops and you die.

You blow yourself up. Right. And so the reason that we're a healthy company and we survived was for two reasons.

One, the diversification. And two, was because of the discipline and the devil doesn't tempt you with spinach.

And the second piece to the mortgage piece, just to go back to it, is what happens after 08 is Look, I had to lay off 400 people.

So we had a couple, I would say 1,500 employees or something along those lines.

And I was so depressed, man. I would like literally throw up in my driveway before I could go see my family every night.

I was so, so depressed. They say you're never a real CEO until you go through a near-death experience.

And I went through mine there. I would go to this rock and like literally pray, just get me through this and I promise you I'll do good things for the world.

And so... What I did was diversified. I launched an insurance company next to the mortgage company that allows us to save people money on their homeowners auto insurance.

I then had the idea to get into the energy business and save people money on their electrical bill.

And the way I did that was through the residential solar business.

So that diversification is a good thing at times.

It forces you to kind of diversify the risk within your company. but you've got to have the unit economic discipline on the front end. and have a good sense of ethics and the right thing to do, you know, when other competitors may or may not be willing to do that.

So where does that strategy come from at that point?

Where do the ideas to do insurance, energy, Because you're in the middle of a, you're weathering a storm.

You're laying off people. When I was little, I accidentally almost burned down my house.

And you know, for like... It's like everyone in the neighborhood is looking at you and it's like, he tried to bake a cookie and almost burned down the house.

The mortgage industry almost burned down the house. of America.

So you're in a tough spot. Where do these ideas come from at that stage?

Man, when your soul's getting crushed is when you get the download.

At least that was it for me. When I worked at Oracle, I would run to the Golden Gate Bridge most mornings.

And I sat in a meeting there with HP. We had just done a really big deal with HP.

And what I realized at the time was, you know, yeah, Maybe you needed this software as a CRM solution.

It was a new CRM solution for Oracle. but likely it was a horse trading deal that I was a part of for some reciprocity between Oracle buying You know, a lot of HP servers and laptop computers and printers.

Then in return, HP saying, hey, we're going to take a risk here and buy a CRM solution from Oracle.

And I just felt a little bit like, man, is this what I'm gonna do with my life?

I'm gonna be in these rooms, I'm gonna work with legal groups for like a half a year to get these deals done.

And then it's about, it's a trade, you know, in some way, shape or form at the end of the day.

And so I wanted more meaning in my life.

I wanted to, and so I thought about, hey, what's important to me?

Okay, my mom and I never owned a home. home.

We rented our entire lives. I washer paid 400 bucks a month in rent, our whole lives.

We were always strapped. I always watched my mom work three jobs.

I was always like, mom, can't you get educated and buy a home?

And I, I was just talking to a good friend of mine just a few days ago.

He's from the inner city in St. Louis. And he said, Hayes, you realize – our people, the way we grew up, will never buy a home unless someone really sits down and educates them.

And that was my dream was, hey, could I create a mortgage company that could educate people online, educate people in a non-threatening way where they could learn about the ability to own a home instead of renting their whole life.

The American dream of owning this home, right?

And so I found meaning in that. And I found another group of people that found meaning in that.

Of course, I hired a bunch of processors and underwriters that were single moms.

Right. Because I was raised by a single mom.

Of course, I asked my mom to move from Chicago at the time.

She was taking care of her mother. out to Sacramento to come work with me and be along my side.

And she just retired this year, but she was with me whatever it was, 15 solid years or more.

And then that led me to think about, well, wait a minute, What if I could educate people on their homeowners insurance and auto insurance and how to protect these assets?

And then I found a lot of, you know, candidly, I had a vision for What could I do that really solves a big problem around this that also is tied to a big bill inside of the home?

And that was the vision for, it's the electric bill and it's clean energy. and I can electrify the home.

And that is an amazing opportunity. And so I would advertise with the cheesy ad about, hey, I can save you money on your biggest bills.

And people would call in and we would save them money on their mortgage payment, their homeowners and auto insurance, and their electric bill. that create diversification, but it also allowed me to see what three separate entities underneath one holding company could do to make an impact in home Right.

I want to read you a quote that I really liked.

You said, The difference between rejection results is just how long you stick with it.

And this is like, you know, on one hand it's like, okay, this is kind of just like fortune cookie advice, but for some reason it hit for me.

So what's, I guess, where'd you get that?

And I guess like, what's the kind of like unpack that?

What's the story there? Look, I think a lot of people quit when it gets hard.

And sometimes you don't even know you're quitting.

You just come up with. a reason why you think you need to quit.

Because like, I had no choice. I just had to quit, right?

You become master salesman to yourself. to point you in the other direction.

You want to run by all your friends that you know they're going to tell you to quit.

You know how you do that. Hey, I know the five guys that'll tell me I should quit, so I'm gonna go call those five guys.

And then they'll tell me it's okay to quit.

And then I'm like, I'm blessed for quitting.

And so what happens to a lot of companies is, All companies, they go through really challenging, difficult times.

And it's inevitable. If you run these companies, these companies are just riddled with problems.

Right? That's what they are. And you're always constantly solving the next problem.

And in some way, shape, or form, they're all cyclical.

They always face some massive headwind. It could be a policy headwind.

It could be a financial headwind because of interest rates.

It could be a headwind because of tariffs, whatever it is. you're gonna face one.

And so the key in those moments when you're getting your soul crushed is to find a way to get through it, to find a way to not quit and make sure the team stays together and not quit because the valley is the value.

And no one realizes that When all your competition dies and they're going out of business one after another because of, maybe a bad decision, or maybe they lost the team because people weren't inspired anymore, or maybe it just got too hard and people were fed up with it. that is the moment where your company is actually creating value.

Now, it wouldn't show that in your stock price.

It wouldn't show that in your board meeting necessarily.

But that's the difference. I just went through a really crazy difficult cycle in residential solar over the course of the last really two and a half to three years.

Usually these cycles only last about a year.

This one was two and a half to three years.

Now, we've diversified significantly and made a bunch of investments and innovated in really big ways.

But the valley is the value and 99% of people quit In the moment, they're like, oh, you know, maybe I should just join the board or maybe I should just kind of do something else.

Because again, winner's have options. You know, if you got a little money in the bank, you're like, you know what, man, I'm just going to go do something else with my life.

This is too much of an opportunity cost for me to sit here and slug it out.

But as you grind it out during those moments, there's two things that happen.

One is you gain tremendous market share. and respect from your board, okay, in those kinds of moments.

And the second thing that happens is you see yourself differently. as a different person in the face of adversity and the muscle that you created and what you had to learn to get through that moment, which makes you a stronger executive for the next wave of pain that's going to come your way.

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Alright, back to the show. When you were at SolarCity, I mean, SolarCity is kind of a controversial company.

Like I remember... from the outside, it was like this incredible company, then Tesla was going to acquire it.

And then it was like, But wait, is it in good financial health?

Is it not in good financial health? There's a lot of like, I guess, narrative around it.

Did you learn anything about kind of like The internal storytelling that's required to not only get yourself to believe, but the whole team to believe when there's a lot of noise on the outside.

Yeah, absolutely. Don't listen to the noise.

I have thin skin, which is why I don't do Twitter, which is why I don't do podcasts.

I don't want to read all the comments of people that say, oh gosh, that guy, this and that.

I don't know why, I care. Some people don't care.

I'm like, I actually care. Everybody cares.

Some people say they don't care. But I care.

I really care. And so I'm not good at the public thing.

I'm not good at putting myself out there which is why I don't do any of the self-promotion or anything along those lines, because I'm not man enough to take the blows that come my way.

I'm embarrassed at saying that, but that's really the truth of it, if I make myself vulnerable.

And so for me is I don't read it. I don't read the articles.

I don't look at X all the time. and all the comments and things along those lines.

I keep my head down, I stay focused. and try to feed my mind with the right things.

That's why I don't watch scary movies. You know, I really don't like if I watch a scary movie, it's like stuck in my head for a month.

I'm like. I'm not man enough to watch scary movies.

I just want to watch happy things. Like I wanna watch a comedy.

I wanna, you know, I wanna watch something inspirational, some great documentary.

So I'm just really careful about what narrative.

Yeah, and it also comes down to who I'm going to hang out with.

Like, it's weird, man. Like, you know, when I met my dad, I like, there's a part of me, I would see things in my father, okay?

And so it's like, And I didn't like it after I hung out with them.

I was like, ooh, wow, man, like I do some of those things too.

Like that, is that DNA based? Is that like? you start to question who you are as an individual.

And so you gotta be really careful with, the kind of people you spend your time with and what dialogue that you're having with them because proximity is a powerful thing, man.

It cuts both ways. Right. What was it like meeting Elon the first time?

Would you have suspected then when you met him that like kind of the...

The rise, basically. I mean, now he's, I don't know, the wealthiest guy in the world.

He's created these world-changing companies.

I'm just curious, what was your kind of impression at that stage?

I thought I had a great work when I was working with Larry Ellison or had my own company.

No company has the work ethic and the commitment and the sacrifice factor than an Elon company.

When you go to work for those companies, my son works at SpaceX right now, he's doing his second year internship down at SpaceX. out of all the companies in the world that I would hope my son could go work for, he's 19 years old, I'm like, go work for Elon, man.

Go see what it's like at SpaceX, go down, in Boca Chica, go light some rockets off with Marc Gercosa, some of the greatest engineers in the history of the world. see what it's like to have that level of work ethic, that give a shit factor.

You know, I mean, like when you're in those kinds of environments, it's like, look, you're playing with live ammunition, man.

You got to play full out. And you're in the foxhole.

It's time to go to war. We're the warriors of light.

You go hard or go home. That's just the way that it is.

Because think about it, we're the most highly shortest stock in the history of the world between Tesla and SolarCity.

Everyone said we were the next Enron. We were done.

The articles, you know, were crazy. You think they were, you know, now they're a balance between the two at that time. we were all the biggest morons in the world, right?

Because we were the clean energy guys, the sustainability guys, There's no way we could ever create a company of any value.

Well, that narrative has changed, but... just to be just very direct, it was very, very obvious to me that Elon was the ultimate alpha. and he had a leadership skill and a magnetic energy to get human beings to make the necessary sacrifices to build the most important, disruptive, impactful technologies in the history of the world.

Like when I just, I worked so hard. I never stopped working for nine years of my life.

I'm not kidding you. I just wanted him to be happy.

And he was always so kind to me and he's always so grateful to me.

And, you know, and I would always get a kind nod in the boardroom, but like, I just wanted Lyndon to be happy.

I wanted Pete to be happy. I wanted, you know, E to be happy.

And there is a sacrifice that I think everyone, everyone makes when you work at those companies, a sense of pride and commitment and sacrifice this necessary based on being driven by growth and being around peers and alphas that are gonna push themselves to be the best they can be and driven by contribution. and the difference that you can make in the world.

Yeah, I have this phrase that you don't know what level 10 looks like.

So basically I have this theory, which is really this podcast actually helps me do this, which is, In any area of my life, I think at a certain time, oh, okay, I know what the spectrum is.

I know one is... the bottom, but I know what a 10 is.

And sometimes I fool myself into thinking I'm a 10 at this thing.

And then you go meet somebody who totally breaks your frame.

And you're like, oh, that's what like...

That's what I call level 11. It's like, oh, I didn't even realize the knob actually goes further.

Like you could just crank this baby up. So whether it's like work ethic or even storytelling ability or it's, you know, just how sharp they are.

Because work ethic's a part of it. One of my companies got bought by Twitch.

And I got to work with this guy, Emmett.

Emmett's the founder of Twitch. Yeah. And people, what's Emmett like?

And I'm like, I could tell you a lot of things, but, you know.

One of the things that was very obvious to me, I was like, oh, this guy's oven burns a little hotter.

Like this guy's just genuinely much smarter than me.

And so it's not like, and I hadn't really encountered people at that level of like incisiveness, of sharpness, It's inspiring.

They do Amazon, so you write a six-page memo and you come in and the first 10 minutes is a silent read.

So I'm reading this thing. Within like three minutes, he's done with the paper.

He's highlighted the one, he's found the needle in the haystack, like the one thing that actually matters worth talking about. and he's waiting for the rest of us to catch up.

And it's like, okay, so I love seeing level 11.

In fact, this is why When we came out here, we did your morning routine with you.

Yeah. Because you're kind of like a level 11 of like energy.

Like you're energy rich. I don't even know how old you are, but you're way more energy than me.

I think I'm like 20 years younger than you.

You have 20,000. more energy than me so I'm like 52 52 so I'm like I thought I'm a pretty high energy guy yeah and have a certain vivaciousness for life.

But then you see, oh, that's 11. OK, good.

Now I can recalibrate. I'm actually at a seven.

Cool. But now that I've seen it, that's like a very important thing is literally just to see it.

And so, you know, I hope with this, you know, when I do this podcast, it's like we've talked to so many people who've done whatever, 500, 600 episodes.

The goal is that you break some people's frame.

Yeah, and what is the commitment and sacrifice that's necessary?

Like, you think about it, right? They buy my company, the first one, Paramount Solar, rolled it into SolarCity.

I had this first big exit of my life. What did I do the next day?

I packed up my stuff. I moved into a studio apartment in San Francisco by myself.

Remember, I'm married. I have a wife. I have three kids.

I'm like, I will see you guys in a year.

I went down to Silicon Valley, don't worry, I'm gonna do this.

I'll buy us a house, I'll figure it all out.

Kids are in school, all those kinds of things.

I ate a burrito four nights a week at one in the morning in my little studio apartment. in South San Francisco before I went and built an organization.

We grew that organization from maybe at the time there was 1500 of us max.

I think I brought 400 of the 1500. and we grew it to a 20,000 person organization that did 20,000 residential solar systems a month.

And, you know, it became the largest solar company in the history of the world.

But it's like that – intoxicating energy that you're feeding off of.

When you sit around Lyndon Rive and you see his spirit and you see his energy And it's like literally all, every moment of every day, I don't care if we were mountain biking or, I don't care if we were kite surfing.

I don't care if we were on vacation in Cabo.

We were talking about work. We were talking about different ways we can engineer things, different ways we could create things and do things.

And it was amazing. just to be around those kinds of people where you're absorbing that energy and that competitive spirit to do something. that no one's ever been able to do before, especially when the rest of the world thinks you're crazy and there's no way it's going to work.

I'm going to make a guess. You tell me if this is right.

It seems like maybe prior to that, because you said, I found my tribe.

It's like- for a while, it's like, you don't really quite fit in.

You're sort of an oddball. And then you finally meet a group of people who are wired the way you're wired, who think the way you think, who talk the way you talk, and it's totally normal to be you're weird.

That's gotta be a good feeling, right? Was that how it was for you?

Totally. When I was in Missouri, I was a fish out of water, man.

And I was depressed. Like I was frustrated listening to the conversations around the kitchen table.

I was frustrating listening to conversations on the field.

There was this level of... your skepticism, self-doubt, highly medicated mindsets that lacked ambitious.

And they were like, man, you're just too excited about life. chill out, have a cigarette and relax.

Okay. You know, life isn't that great, buddy.

You know, and I just. I knew I needed to leave.

I knew I needed to pack my car up and I would have gone further than the Silicon Valley if the ocean wasn't there.

I mean, honestly, I didn't come home for a long time.

I stayed out west for a very, very long time.

And the reason was I was all of a sudden around people that were believers.

I was around people that were excited. about things that weren't getting caught up in what they were going to have for dinner at night or the two cups of coffee they needed in the morning to get themselves going, or the smoke.

I was like, oh man, this is incredible. And then I was around those people at Oracle, obviously. you know, really, really bright people operating on a high frequency.

They were hyper motivated to do something with their lives.

Then you kind of graduate to, hey, I'm a founder in this world of the Silicon Valley with other peers and founders.

And then I got plugged into that group of, whoa, These are the greatest founders in the world.

This is Sergey Brin. This is Larry Page.

This is... you know, all the PayPal mafia, the Luke Noseks, the Ken Howerys, you know, like all of a sudden, you were around this peer group of friends that you spent time with and you're like, I can do anything.

Right. I can do anything. If I hang out with these guys and I feed off this energy every morning, I can do anything.

And honestly, I still feel that way today.

This is why I love spending time with people like you.

I love the young energy. I loved, you know, there's a guy, his name's Keller.

He's the founder of Zipline. I just went and visited him at his office a couple weeks ago in San Francisco.

The drone delivery. I just, I want to be around Keller.

You know, he and I went on a hilly trip together.

We went snowboarding together. We became friends.

And he's like, hey man, come visit my office.

I got a lot of things to do. to Keller's office and visit with Keller and just see his operation and what he's doing.

And so I'm really thoughtful about trying to find other people with great energy, great ambition and drive, that are trying to do impactful things to the world and bring them into my life.

So if through that door came like 27-year-old you, right?

You get a second you because you're busy.

Yeah. And you're doing things and you're already in what you're in.

You're doing what you're doing. You have your company. if 27 year old you comes in and he's got all the time in the world and he says, all right, What's the blueprint?

What's the Hayes Barnard way of doing things?

Where should I go point my arrow? Where should I direct my energy?

What do you think you would... How would you explain your way of doing things and what ideas specifically, like what problems do you think are worth solving that you might plant a seed in in the head of 27-year-old you?

Man, that's such a good question. With the gray hair that I have today, I'd probably drop in with them and I'd say, look, you're going to be addicted to success, okay?

You're going to be addicted to productivity.

You're a workaholic. because you're constantly trying to prove to everybody that you're enough.

Okay. And so you're going to take on a lot.

And it's gonna, at times it's gonna feel like the weight of the world's on your shoulders and you're fighting for clean energy tax credits and the big beautiful bill in D.C. and meeting with senators and, you know, all the things.

Yeah. But I need you to think about more than one level of wealth and one level of success. which is financial success, right?

I need you to think about time success.

And I need you to think about mental health success.

And I need you to think about physical health success.

And I want you to think about friendship and community success. because I'm afraid that you're gonna sacrifice those other four Pillars of success for one, which is financial success.

And you got to realize, man, like when you grew up like I did and your mom's got her – head in her hands and she's crying about whether she can turn the air conditioning on.

And she's this amazing woman. All you want to do is help.

All you want to do is carry a couple golf bags and and put 40 bucks down on the kitchen table to make sure that you guys can turn the air conditioning on.

All you want to do is someday hire your mom to come work for your company and say, hey, we're good.

It's okay. All you want to do is give your wife the life that your mother never had.

Give your son the life that you never had.

And you're willing to make this crazy level of success so you have the financial means to make sure that they can go to that. private school.

They can go to that university that they want to go to someday. well, that causes you to make this massive amount of success and give up maybe any time for yourself maybe your mental health suffers because you grind out and your adrenal glands are shot and your doctors are like, hey, man, like,

We got to get you on meds so that you can get your thyroid back in order because you've blown it out.

And so... I'm at a stage now where I would tell that 27 year old guy, I'm like, look, man, The goal is to also solve for happiness.

You don't need to be a martyr. You don't need to just like devote your life to all these other people and all these other things and die miserable.

Okay, at some point in time, I need you to make sure that you're working out every morning, you're doing the breath work.

You're doing the swim. You're doing the HIIT workout with your friends.

You're laughing. You're playing. Because as you create more success... it just, it gets really, really difficult, the amount of people that start targeting you and coming after you.

Someone will watch this podcast and go, man, that's a really nice couch.

He shouldn't have that nice couch right there.

And at times I think, man, I probably shouldn't have that nice couch.

Maybe I don't deserve that nice couch. And so it's just this whole mindset that I think you have to think about where you're a really driven person on, hey, why are you doing it?

What are you doing? But it's the how component.

How do you start politely declining certain things?

How do you not have FOMO for all the things that you'd feel like you need to show up for?

Because I'll feel like I need to be in two cities in the same day and have two different meetings and do it in person.

And you just burn yourself out on the whole thing.

And so I need to learn, tell that kid, take time for yourself, create space.

Give yourself an opportunity to kind of rev down every once in a while.

You'll be better off in the long run. You know, we need you around for the long haul.

Because you've been around, you know, whatever the dinner table of success is. like the top of the top.

I've been around a lot of those people. You don't need to name names, but I...

I would imagine that a lot of those people are a bit of a martyr in the sense of they're not that happy or maybe loving their life in the way that one would assume, when you have a certain level of success.

Has that been true from your experience?

Yeah, I would say... Most of the really successful people I know there's also a meaningful amount of sadness in their life because of the sacrifice.

Maybe it's a lack of connection with their kids.

Maybe it's a lack of connection with an ex-wife or they regret the way they They interacted at certain times because you're revving in the conference room and you're battling all day long in these intense discussions.

It's hard to come back home and then just be like a chill, normal guy.

You know, like you're never a chill, normal guy.

You always have this intense look on your face.

You don't smile as much. You're like, man, is that guy okay?

Like he needs to chill out a little bit.

And so, for sure, with those level of sacrifices, you gather more demons in your life.

And it's sad to say that, but Money doesn't make you happy.

Money doesn't make you a better person. It's like really important.

The more things that you have, it's actually more stressful.

And people that maybe don't have a lot of things would say, oh man, how trite of you to say something like that.

But the reality is the only thing that matters in the end of the day are the relationships that you have. and the love that you have for those deep relationships that you carry on.

Who's the exception? I'm sure there's somebody out there that's found these balances, right?

I have a few North Stars. Yeah, there's like, man, like...

Michael Dell's like kind of the biggest North Star I think I've ever met in my life.

Tell me about him. I don't know much about him.

Well, his marriage with Susan is amazing.

His wife is incredible. She's her own force of nature. what they do philanthropically what they do for the world they're very humble so you're not going to be able to read about it or anything but the impact they make in the world their children like their son, Zach Dell is like, I say to my son, Luke, hey, can you spend time with Zach? read the books that Zach read and talk to Zach because he's like a pretty amazing guy.

But it's the humility that he has. You know, now he politely declined.

He's taught me that. And he creates space for himself to read and relax.

But he didn't go crazy. Like a lot of people that create Michael Dell wealth, they go crazy.

And they lose themselves in this intoxicating environment of winners have options.

You can have anything and do anything. And instead...

He's the kind of guy that just becomes more humble, becomes more of a giver. become more focused on the impact that he can make in the world through all the work.

Now, he still plays big. Don't get me wrong.

You know, he's a bold leader and he takes big swings and big bets.

I mean, this isn't a guy going through the motions and you know, But he's somebody that has this level of humble humility humility about him that I respect and admire.

Tell me about the blue ocean strategy insight you had because we haven't even talked about your current –

The Bain company yet, which is kind of a juggernaut.

But talk about this insight you had. Well, what do you do after, you know, we sold SolarCity to Tesla and, Elon was great.

He wrote me a really nice letter, you know, to the, and he, you know, he kind of cc'd the Tesla board about it.

And, And so you're kinda like, okay, I exited there gracefully, I think, as much as you can, You know, I think people always want you to come back and do different things, and there's at times I feel guilty that I didn't go back and help at times, but...

Where do you go from there? Okay. Well, the insight that I had was, We were by far the biggest solar company in the country.

We had 40% market share in the entire United States.

And so I was recruiting a lot of people from our competitors.

And we were building, you know, the largest manufacturing facility in the Western Hemisphere for solar panels.

And Tesla had built the Gigafactory there.

And we were at this stage where I was like, man, I'm very passionate about sustainability.

I'm really passionate about the deployment of these solutions.

I had been burnt out on sales a little bit.

I was managing, around a 10,000 person sales organization.

And so it's a lot of text messages from sales professionals that want to raise, I'm joking, But, you know, they want to talk about their comp.

I'll tell you. just like, I was like, how do I do something that's not really sales focused, but it's technology focused and I can deploy these solutions.

Okay. And so I was coming off a big high and And I thought about, I read a book called The Blue Ocean Strategy.

We were in a little bit of a red ocean strategy, which was like, hey, beat your competition, beat your competition, just beat your competition.

And I was in a mindset where I was like, what if I can make my competition our biggest partner instead of our biggest competitor?

Explain the premise of Blue Ocean Strategy.

What does it mean? Yeah, it means if you can make sure everybody wins in an environment... where literally even your competitors win, that creates a flywheel effect that allows that organization to scale.

So Red Oceans is like testosterone and you run a solar company, I run a solar company, I'm better than you.

We're going to sell more than you. We're going to win that customer.

Blue Ocean Strategies is like, hey, what do you need?

Like, can I support you in some way, shape or form?

Red Ocean would be like, okay, let's imagine you and I are both gold miners and we're out there, you know, panning for gold.

Blue Ocean is like, I want to be the guy that sells the picks and shovels to everybody.

So the mindset was, if I can enable the entire ecosystem from all the panel manufacturers to all the battery manufacturers, to all the different installers in the marketplace, to all the sales professionals in the marketplace and empower them with a B2B marketplace and platform that allows them to have access to capital, access to each other in an environment where they can transact with consumers, where the consumer wins.

They electrify the home. They lower their carbon footprint.

They save money. The installers win. where they can all install any panel or any battery solution in the marketplace.

And all the manufacturers of these products win because they get access to that marketplace. to the ability to deploy these assets, boy, that would be a cool business.

And that was the beginning of the idea of Good Leap.

It started with point of sale financing for solar, which quickly led to, wait a minute, we should finance all electrified solutions in the home.

HVAC. energy-efficient windows, roofing, smart thermostats, you know, synthetic grass turf, basically anything that allows us to kind of lower that carbon footprint in the home that's a blue ocean strategy.

And so now the banks are winning and the financial institutions are winning because they're getting their eight to 10 percent return on the assets.

All the installers are winning because they have access to all these great products and great sales professionals. and all the sales professionals are winning because they have access to the installers and the products.

So that was a blue ocean strategy. in a marketplace business that allows us to grow pretty quickly.

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Check show notes for details. Can you tell the dad story?

Because you told this privately, so you don't have to say it if you don't want to.

But it was, I think I sent you a note after this.

I sent you a voicemail. I was like, man, that story really moved me at my own, you know, dad issues that are going on.

But the way you told it, It's funny, first of all.

But secondly, I think it's really powerful.

There's a lot of people I think have stuff like this.

I don't know. Personally, I would love to hear.

You're open to share. No, no, look, I'll totally share it.

It's an interesting story. So remember, my dad leaves me in St.

Louis, Missouri. My mom and he and I moved from Ellen to Missouri he worked for Merritt so he was like a guy that would like take people on incentive trips you know so he's a He was a drinker.

You know, he had a lot of problems with alcohol.

You know, he had... you know, I don't know, I want to be respectful to my father and all those kinds of things.

But long story short, he left and they separated.

When you're at a young age, Yeah, I was about two years old.

Okay. And I don't know where he went. We didn't hear from him.

But as a kid... you know, if you're a decent athlete or you're doing things, you really hope that maybe dad calls and goes, Hey man, I saw that.

Wow. I saw that article in the paper or.

And you always think about who your father is and maybe what the situation was.

My mom was amazing. She never said anything poor about my dad. my dad.

So I didn't know much about my father and it wasn't a focus, but I became a man of the house at a pretty young age.

And that wasn't awesome for my mom because I would run her boyfriends off and I was trying to be a little alpha dog around the apartment and things like that.

You know, I regret that too. But... Basically, I finally, when I'm at Oracle and I quote unquote made it, I was like, I wanna find my father.

And I sat next to this guy, Kelly Cook. He was a good old boy, man, from Oklahoma.

Kelly Cook played football at Oklahoma State.

So he was the fullback for Barry Sanders and Thurman Thomas.

Can you imagine? Dude, this is Kelly Cook, man.

This guy's the man, all right? And so Kelly was my, I called him Big Papa.

I got my nickname. He called me Playup. All right.

He's called me play. I call him Big Papa.

So I said, Big Papa, man, I want to find my dad.

He goes, you know, this internet thing. we can maybe find him on the internet.

And I was like, you think we could find him on the internet?

He goes, and he goes, yeah, man, let me see if I can figure it out.

So, I swear, it wasn't like a day. Before all of a sudden, Kelly's on the phone.

He's waving me over. He's waving me over.

And he's like, I love your dad. I got your dad on the phone, man.

I'm like, what? You got my dad on the phone?

And so... He's talking to my dad. Hey, Jim.

Oh, yeah. Jim, you're from Illinois, right?

Yeah. Oh, hey, Jim. That's what I thought.

Yeah. So where are you working right now?

What's going on? So my father at the time, he's talking to him about a suit. about a size of a suit and the length of the arms.

And I'm like, what is going on, man? What is he having this conversation with this guy about?

So he hands up the phone. He goes, hey, you're not going to believe it.

Now I was working at Redwood Shores now at Oracle's HQ, and he goes, your dad, You're gonna believe this man.

Your father is in Palo Alto and he works for Patrick James Clothing Shop.

He found him through tax records. And I was like, really?

He sells clothing like across from Stanford right there?

I mean, it's maybe 15 minutes down the road, okay?

And I'm like, Kelly, come on, you gotta be kidding me.

He goes, no. Well, that rocked me for about. three months.

I'm like, my dad is 15 minutes away from me.

What are the odds both of us are here in, you know, out in the Silicon Valley?

Well, I put my best suit on. I went down there.

Got a big deep breath. And I was like, all right, man, I'm going to go.

I'm going to go meet my dad. I'm going to go in there and make it happen.

So I'm kind of looking in the store. I'm like, is that him?

Is that him? Excited to have any pictures or anything.

And I walked in and I said, hey, how you doing?

And they said, great. And I said, is Jim Barnard here?

And they said, no, Jim doesn't work here on Wednesdays.

It was Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays or something.

I'm like, oh man, okay. And I think subconsciously I wanted a reason to come back.

And so I was, they go, well, how can I help you?

And I was like, oh, at the time I bought custom shirts because I have a 37 inch long arm Okay.

I said, can I get a couple of custom shirts?

They're like, sure. No problem. What's your name?

Well, I use my best friend's name, Jason Walker. you know, from the fourth grade.

I said to Jason Walker, oh, hey, Jason, how you doing?

Anyway, I buy the shirts. And at the end, the guy's like, hey, they're X amount.

How do you want to pay for it? I'm like, oh man, well, I can't give him a credit card that says Hayes Barnard.

So I'm like, hold on a second. I left my wallet in the car.

I go to the ATM. I get the money out. I think it was like $150.

I go in. and I'm like, hey man, I just had cash, is this okay?

Yeah, Jason, you got a phone number. Cool.

We'll call you. In those days, it was like a month and a half before your shirts are done, okay?

So I'm like, all right. So now you can imagine a month and a half I'm sitting there.

Making my phone calls at Oracle, do my whole thing.

And I'm thinking, man, am I going to meet my dad?

Am I going to meet my dad? Put my best suit on.

They call. They leave a voicemail. Your shirts are ready.

I go back. Well, this time I can see him.

This time I'm like, oh man, that's definitely him.

When you see your dad for the first time, you're like, okay, that's his face.

Now he's shorter than me, he's a little fuller than me, but that's his face.

And I'm like, oh boy, okay, this is it. Well, he comes out And he's got a cigarette in his hand.

It isn't lit yet. And he's got the lighter in his hand.

And it's dusk, it's about 5.30 at night because I drove down that after work and he goes back and he goes back in the back alley.

And I'm like, well, he's in that back alley back there.

If I'm ever going to go back there and I don't want to embarrass him or anything.

I'm gonna go there and meet him. And so I get out, I can see him in the rear view mirror.

So my car's parked this way. He was kind of behind me.

So I was kind of looking in the rear view mirror.

So I get out of the car I'm ready. You can imagine, okay?

I'm like 30 years old. I've made it. making good money.

I got my suit. I want my father to be proud of me. you know, big, big moment for me.

And so, but I'm shaking. I'm like, my heart's pumping.

I go around the corner. And he, oh shit, you startled me.

And he's having his cigarette. I said, I'm so sorry.

I didn't mean to startle you. I just came back here to introduce myself to you.

And he said, well, great. He goes, my name is Jim Barnard.

And I took a deep breath and I was like, my name is Hayes Barnard.

And he had that cigarette in his hand. his hands started shaking and you could just see, and he just looked at me and he just said, son, I said yes.

And he's like, I'm so sorry. And I was like, man, don't be sorry at all.

And he buried his head in my chest.

I wrapped my arms around him and I just held him, you know, for like 20 minutes.

He cried in my chest. My whole shirt was covered. and his tears and snot and the whole thing, man, you can imagine, it's really powerful. in the moment I'm like, he probably thought this guy come from Chicago.

Did he come from Missouri? Like, like what is this kid doing out here?

And, um, So, you know, I said, dad, it's okay.

Don't be sorry. Don't be sorry. Don't be sorry.

You know, I just wanted to meet you. And he goes, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry.

And I said, don't be sorry, you know? And so...

Sorry, I'm getting a little emotional. We go inside and this guy I bought the shirts from, his name was Dwayne.

And he goes, hey, Jason, right? And I said, no, no, my name's Hayes.

And he said, Hayes? And my father said –

Hey, Dwayne, he'd worked for him for about 15 years at Patrick James, selling clothes there.

He said, this is my son. This is Hayes Barnard.

And he said, Jim, I didn't know you had a son.

And he said, well, yeah, I got a son. and this is him.

And so that was it. You know, I kind of met my dad there and he said, hey, by any chance, do you like football?

You know, I got 49ers tickets. And I was like, yeah, you know, I.

I do like football, Dad, and I'd love to go to a 49ers game with you.

And then that was it, man. I learned a lot about my life after that. was amazing.

You know, there's all these super interesting things I learned about my life when you meet your father, when you're, when you're 30 years old, you know?

Yeah. The one thing that strikes me there is you weren't resentful or upset.

That seems unusual to me. Well, I had realized by that point in time, probably the best thing that ever happened to me was not having a father.

I know it sounds terrible now, but I didn't have... When I was a young boy, I was angry.

You know, why don't I have a dad and why do we live like this and all those kinds of things.

And then as an older man, you realize that having a mother in that situation and the drive and the responsibility that I gave you was probably one of the greatest gifts that ever happened in my life.

And so... I was there really more probably because I was looking for affirmation from him.

I wanted him to be proud. I wanted him to see how hard I had worked and the things that I had done and have a level of respect for me. that for whatever reason, it was just important to have that affirmation from my dad.

And so... I got that closure. I didn't get a lot of time with him.

He ended up passing away. he definitely had an opportunity to get to know me, to get to know my kids, to get to know my wife, to get to see me and some of the things that I had done and, we expressed a lot of love and respect for each other.

And so for me, it's like sometimes that's your opportunity to show a tremendous amount of compassion and empathy for someone he did the best he could, man.

He had addiction issues. He had some challenges.

He had his own issues with self-confidence.

His father passed away really, really young.

His father was a severe alcoholic. His grandfather was a severe alcoholic.

And so he was adopted by this guy, Hayden Barnard, this renowned doctor in Hensdale, Illinois, when he was 12 years old.

His real name was James Neal O'Brien was my father's name.

But at 12 years old, they changed his name to Jim Barnard.

And that's why he named me Hayden Barnard, because the guy that adopted him was this guy.

His name was Hayden. Hayden Barnard. Yeah.

That's amazing. Yeah. I appreciate you telling us.

Yeah, you're welcome, man. Yeah, it's good.

Thanks for asking. I've never told that one before, definitely on camera, but yeah.

I mean, I think one of the things you try to do is, what did you say your life mission is?

Connect the hearts. of people all around the world for good or for positive.

Yeah, yeah. Connect hearts of others, great positive change in the world.

How do you do that without sharing your own stories and your own vulnerabilities, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a lot of people out there that probably didn't have a father or had challenges with their father in some way, shape, or form.

You know, it honestly, it's a valley for a lot of people when they're young, but it's probably a spike. for people later in their life, you know?

Yeah. You told me about the lay in the dirt story.

I love this story. What's that story? Yeah, look, look.

08 was a very, very difficult time for me, and I was really, really hurting.

And so I had this idea. A friend of mine, Brad Tewksbury, went to this organization at the time.

It was called Building with Books. It's called Build On Now.

And he had gone to Africa and he built a school and he came back.

And Tukes was like this awesome guy I worked with. at Oracle.

And Tukes was like, look, you should do this, man.

You'd find a lot of meaning in this. And so...

When I was like, you know, had the victim mindset, the woe is me.

Oh man, I had to lay off these people. oh man, I'm really hurting right now.

I'm in this tough spot. I went to my executive team and I said, look, Crazy idea.

What if we all go to Africa and we build a school?

And they're like, what man, we're struggling right now.

We just laid off 400 people. Why in the world do we go to Africa and go build a school with some organization called Build On.

I'm like, I don't know, Tukes went, he said it was amazing.

I think we should raise some money from our friends and we should go lay in the dirt and we should get grounded.

And it just called me. Long story short, Everybody's like, we're in.

Let's go make it happen. We raise a little money.

We fly over to Bamako. Over in West Mali, Africa, we load up this like van with... with a goat on top.

Literally, we strapped a goat to the top of this van.

We all got our backpacks and we drive 16 hours out to the Zaremburu tribe.

Why'd you need a goat on the van? Well, I didn't know.

I had no idea because the handler's there.

Don't ask too many questions. You gotta bring a goat.

I'm like, we got to bring a goat. I've never been in Africa.

Like, this is interesting. And so we get there.

We meet the chief. We got the translators.

They're doing a whole thing. We learned, then we slit the goat's throat.

You know, because in this part of the world, you drink the blood of the goat and that's the ceremonial thing and you're welcomed into the village and then The big deal, they cook the goat because most of the time they just eat this grain, this mullet, basically, every single day.

And then I lay it in the dirt. And... And this woman, Awa, I was in her hut.

So they just welcome you. You dance in the village every night, you sing.

These people are so happy and alive. Now it's sad, they die by the time they're 30 years old. because they drink poison every single day and all these other things.

But... They're very, very happy people.

And so I, with my brother-in-law, we're laying in the dirt. in this tent and then everybody else has their own little kind of like hut.

It's like a mud hut kind of, kind of situation.

And, um, all the kookamonja spiders are around you, man.

You know, you go to the bathroom in this little hole, and then when you open up the hole...

There's all the Cucamonga spiders in there as well.

The headlamps on, you're like, oh man, you know, your whole nervous system's being shooken up.

But about every morning, about 2.30 a.m., you can hear Awa.

She's shaking that grain, man. And you're thinking, man, she's shaking that grain for me.

You can just hear it. And you're like, wow, man, like she's up there 2.30 in the morning.

She's shaking that grain for me. And then all of a sudden you hear hacking something.

She's hacking the wood and then she's lighting the fire for you.

And I'm like, what's she lighting a fire for?

Why would she be lighting a fire at like three in the morning?

So every morning for seven nights, you're thinking about this.

And then all of a sudden I would come out in the morning and the bucket of water would be over the fire so I could bathe in the morning with this bucket of warm water.

Well, I figured out on the second day, I said, where do you get the water?

And she's like, oh, let me take you. I thought she was gonna take me around the corner.

We're gone for five hours. We walk like literally like five miles to a river where All this livestock basically lives and she puts the water on her head.

And then she walks back another four or five miles.

I go, you do this every single day. You do this for my bucket of water so that I could bathe?

And I would bathe in the morning and at night before I would go to bed.

And the guilt. it was almost like, wait a second, whoa, man, this is like really messed up.

And so. You know, I just had this epiphany, man, like the fifth night I'm laying in there.

I was like, okay, we're building the school, but it's almost all boys in the school.

We're the girls. Well, the girls are fetching water.

They're filling their buckets versus filling their brains in the classroom.

And I was like, there's gotta be a way for me to figure this out.

Now at the time I was diversifying in the solar business.

And I thought, man, what if I could put solar on all these schools and and we could get Intel and other players to donate the laptops.

We could extend the hours in the classroom so the women can get educated too.

So Awa's kids can get educated. And so I just had this lightning rod moment, man.

Like I just have these big downloads at certain times in my life from like, okay, I need to start a foundation. that's going to basically find a way to light up all these schools.

And so that was the moment. That's how I came up with it.

Wow. Yeah. And so you go back and – you kind of had a model that was like the Tom's model, right?

For what If we sell solar here in the US, then we can give solar in Africa on the schools, right?

That was the... the sort of the blueprint?

Well, let me explain how it went down. So the solar company takes off quick.

You know, we become the second largest solar company Maybe it's the third.

There was like Sunrun. There was SolarCity and Us.

These were kind of like the three players of residential solar in the United States.

And I was partnered with Sunrun and I was partnered with SolarCity.

Like you would sell it, they would install it, right?

That's right. You nailed it. Then we were good at financing as well, so we started to launch our own tax equity funds, our own financing funds.

This is a new way where we could basically, we used Structured finance solutions to offer zero-down solutions for financing for people to electrify their homes, to put solar on their homes.

There's a good story. I don't know what the story is, but they told me it's a good story about how you struck the deal with SolarCity.

Well, so we're doing about 40% of SolarCity's business at the time.

Um, and, and less in Sunrun, but both companies, the woman that founded Sunrun, um, her name's Lynn Urich.

She's amazing woman. And Lyndon, who was the CEO of SolarCity, who's Elon's cousin, I had a great relationship with both of them.

And they both came and said, look, we'd love to buy you.

Okay, we'd love to buy you. We'd love to roll you in.

We'd love to make you a part of the organization and what we're doing.

And so we had a lot of discussions and I was like, well, do you want the insurance company?

Do you want the mortgage company? Like, no, you can keep your other two sad companies, you know, I'm joking.

I'm joking. But we want you and we want the solar business.

And so after some thought, Lynn and I had become really close personal friends.

Our families were vacationing together. Our kids were really close friends.

Our wives were really close friends. His brother, Pete, Also, I became very close with him and his wife and his kids.

And so we were becoming a family. They said, hey, come on, man, you know, we're going to IPO this company and we really need you to be a part of it or we'll IPO it and then we'll buy you like a week or two. later.

And so I said, hey, I'm open to it. You know, let's think about it.

We had met with Elon, we had discussions with him and talked about how we could build the biggest solar company in the history of the world. what this could look like and all the things that we could do.

And so I... was going to build a solar system down in for a school for build on down in Nicaragua.

And I said, look, would you come would you come with me to see us put solar on a school in Nicaragua and the impact we can make?

I have this big vision for putting solar on all these schools.

Well, Lyndon was awesome. He goes, I'm in, let's go make it happen.

So we went down to Nicaragua. We build the solar system for the school.

Lynn and I sit on the roof. He's like, this is unbelievable, man.

This is a really, really cool thing to do.

And I said, what if for every megawatt of energy we deploy here in the United States, we put solar in a school somewhere in the world?

And he was like, I love it, man. Let's make it happen.

Let's do it through a 501c3 nonprofit. And so in three years, we put solar on like 2,500 schools in several countries in the world.

That's amazing. Yeah. You're doing some amazing things right now with your philanthropy around water. but your organization named Give Power, you talked about how you were doing solar panels on schools.

So where'd the shift go from solar panels to water?

Well, so three years later I go back to all these places in the world, whether it was Nepal, or Nicaragua or different parts of Africa and Kenya.

And I realized that we had lit up all these schools.

And then when you walk into the schools, this made me sad.

It was a bunch of guys with their cell phones plugged in or people playing video games on laptops.

I'm like, great. I bought, I brought video games to the developing world.

I gave these guys cell phones because they didn't have cell phones when I was there the first time.

The first time they saw my cell phone and you would like take a picture of them and they were like, whoa, that's me.

They've never seen themselves in a mirror, realize, you know?

Yeah, I mean, these people are amazing. They brush their teeth with a stick.

And now all of a sudden I brought cell phones to this area because we brought power. to this area.

I was like, this wasn't a great idea. And go figure, I was so stupid. that the women weren't sitting in the classroom until 7 o'clock at night.

They were exhausted. They were still going... and fetching water for whatever it was, five hours a day.

And so Awa was still doing her thing and her daughters weren't in the classroom.

That was, that hit me pretty hard, to be honest with you.

I was like, wow, we've done whatever it was at the time, 2,500, 2,600 schools.

And yes, it was great. We bought electricity to school and the school had light, but it didn't accomplish the mission that I wanted.

And what I realized was we need to invent a magic water box, basically.

We've got to find a way to... to bring the water into the village in a way where the Women are in the classroom.

They're not fetching water. And... and it's healthy, affordable water.

So how could you do that? And now at the time now, I've really got this solar thing under my belt.

And we were starting to do these things called microgrids.

Sometimes wealthy people will call us and say, could you do a microgrid on my island?

I'm like, well, I don't know, maybe. Well, our engineers were brilliant.

They can figure this out. And I was like, well, wait a minute.

If we can build microgrids for people on islands off grid with this new battery storage we had invented and solar, This is kind of interesting.

What if we could bring it to the developing world at the same time a friend of mine in my neighborhood in Tiburon had invented a water pump for yachts where he wanted to travel around the world on his yacht and have that water pump pull water out of the ocean so he could drink healthy water all day without having to stop.

I said, how'd you do it? He said, I did it with a solar panel.

I'm like, ooh, wow, that's super interesting.

So I found this guy, his name's Kyle Steffen, who's the president of a company called Spectra Watermakers.

And we went to him and we said, look, crazy idea.

Can we marry you and your genius with these pumps? with these amazing engineers that we have that work with us at SolarCity and Tesla that really understand battery storage and solar, And can we marry that together to be able to produce healthy, affordable, fresh water out of a brackish well or out of the ocean utilizing reverse osmosis and de-cell.

And they were like, can't be done, it's too grid intensive, it's too expensive.

Good luck. You're naive. You have no idea.

You're not a good enough engineer to understand that this is impossible.

It's too expensive. blah, blah, blah, blah.

I said, well, look, I am naive. I want to try, you know, let's give it a shot.

So we spent about a year trying to build that system, maybe a year and a half.

We couldn't get it to work. And then finally we cracked the code.

And I was like, well, let's put it in a container.

We can ship it anywhere in the world. We will drop these things all over the world. and we'll produce healthy, affordable, sustainable water for people off grid in these communities where we've done these schools.

And now we've done that many times over and that was the breakthrough.

And the insight was, wait a minute, okay, we could kind of almost turn this into an economic model like Milkman in the 1960s where we changed the model where women can actually make money and earn a living by distributing this water.

And what people don't understand is, like after it's clean, basically.

Yeah, absolutely. Instead of carrying the dirty water back. take the clean water and become distributors for this, right?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so there's a lot of people that have these causes.

They say, we need to address migration issues.

We need to address these socioeconomic issues, women's rights issues, education issues, healthcare issues.

What I realized, the breakthrough epiphany that I had was, You can't address migration issues until you address the water issue.

You know, when like Greg Brenneman, who is on the board of Home Depot, this guy's an amazing CEO.

He's an incredible philanthropist. He was like the CEO of Yum Yum Brands for a while, Bain Capital, Continental Airlines.

He and I went to Honduras. and we flew around Honduras together.

We went to all these different locations that had issues with migration, water scarcity, all these things.

And he had the breakthrough with me where he was like, you know what? the water issue, man.

Otherwise people are going to move. I go, Greg, look at me.

You and I are pretty capable guys. Imagine you and I grew up here.

We live here. Are we going to leave? If we're drinking poison every day and everyone's dying by the time they're 30, He's like, we're gonna leave.

I said, exactly. So water is the unlock.

Water is the foundation and fundamental thing that now allows you to say, okay, now we can educate the women because they have the time.

They're not fetching water all day long.

Now we can change the socioeconomic model where people can sell the water and distribute the water within the communities like Milkman and Lighten in the 1960s and their tuk-tuks and... all these other cool contraptions they build to distribute this water.

Now we can talk about healthcare issues.

And so, because people are drinking fresh, affordable water and they can stay alive. but you can't stay alive if you drink poison.

And so that's why I'm really passionate about it.

It checks a lot of boxes for me. Yeah, that's amazing.

I went to Africa. I went to Ethiopia with Charity Water.

And we... It was like... Because even when you hear, like, oh, they have to walk to get water, walk is the wrong word, because it's basically...

It might just be scorching hot. First of all, like you're in a, like a desert you're walking and then you are carrying like a farm if everyone's gone to like a personal trainer's had made you do a farmer's carry where you're carrying like 45 pound dumbbells on both side now walk for four So they had us do like the carry of the water.

It's heavy, isn't it? Oh my, I got like 60 steps and I'm like, I work out five times a week.

And this woman would just... Throw it up on her head and walk for four hours.

I mean, it's like the ultimate sales pitch.

It's like... If you could just get everyone in the world to try that walk one time, everybody would be like, yeah, we got to solve this problem.

Yeah, and Charity Water is a phenomenal organization, water.org.

All these people are trying to solve the problem in different ways.

Ours is, there's 2 billion people in the world that lack access to electricity.

They're the same 2 billion people in the world that lack access to sustainable water, that have water scarcity issues.

And so this is not about just water filtration or. or distributing water.

This is about man. This is about hope. This is about opportunity for humanity in these areas and capable people like you.

I'm telling you, Sean. If you laid in the dirt with me, and I just got back from a trip recently, I was over in Kenya.

I did a trek over there with 20 UT students and then I went to Mombasa and I got in the Bowser and I delivered water and I raced the guys with the With the, you know, whatever, the 30 jugs of liters of water in there.

You just realize, like... I'm alive when I'm there.

I'm not in the vitamin business when I'm there.

I'm in the life-saving business when I'm there.

Every drop of water that we distribute, we save life.

And we've got the unit economics. As you know, it all comes down to math.

We've got the unit economics down to a penny a day.

A penny a day for someone. And so- Explain that more.

For one cent, you can provide healthy, affordable drinking water- for one person for a day.

It's a penny a day, man. And we maintain these systems for basically we sell the water in the areas for half of a cent.

Right. okay and that allows us to take care of all the operations and maintenance allows us to pay for all the people that work in the in the in the area that work on the system for us, that maintain the system and those kinds of things.

So it's got real teeth to it. I mean, this thing is a real economic model that scales And so I'm really happy with the team.

It's an extraordinary group of people. that have really thought through okay now how do we go scale that how do we go you know deploy as many of those systems as we possibly can all throughout the world for these people as fast as we can.

And people go, well, you know, What happens with the salt that goes back in?

These systems produce about 75,000 liters of water every single day.

So one system produces 75,000 liters of water every single day.

And we design them at a scale of in which it's a very small amount of salt that goes back into the ocean.

And then now we've invented other systems where we can pull it right out of a brackish well.

The little hidden secret that most people don't know is, A lot of these boreholes that are drilled, they go brackish and then they sit there and then no one does anything with them.

We can take our systems. drop our lines in there, we can desal that water. utilizing reverse osmosis, and we can deliver that healthy water to these communities as well.

Water's life. It's pretty cool. So if somebody's inspired, what's the right way to kind of get involved or give?

What's the call to action? Yeah, look, I mean, you can go to the GivePower website and it's just GivePower.org. and you can kind of see ways in which you can give and those kinds of things.

We're trying to come up with all different types of way where people can participate.

We sent about 1300 people on treks over the last few years.

So I want them to see it. I want them to go.

You shouldn't have to sacrifice your entire life just so you can have a glass of water.

And you're there and you see, when you roll your sleeves up, and you get your hands dirty, and you build one of these systems, you see how technology can transform communities overnight.

Like not over a year, like instantaneous.

The moment the water comes on, everybody's alive.

Everybody's like celebrating and dancing and singing.

And all of a sudden, the kids are healthier and everybody's vibrant.

And it just creates a tremendous amount of optimism and hope and opportunity that's amazing hey dude thank you for doing this i really appreciate it yeah thank you too man I feel like I can rule the world I know I can be what I want to I put my all in it like no days off on the road.

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[From Failure to Billionaire: The Unconventional Path of Hayes Barnard]-[From $4/Hour to $4 Billion Net Worth]

📋 Summary

From the Resource Room to the Forbes Cover: Redefining Leadership

The Anatomy of a Level Five Leader

The Meritocratic Crucible at Oracle

Navigating the Financial Storm

The Blue Ocean Strategy and GivePower

Final Reflection: The Cost of Success

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript