CHAPTER EIGHT
The Dream Mentor
It was a good thing Sugar Ray gave me that talk, because rejections pounded me for the rest of fall. The holidays flew by faster than I liked and it was now January, the first week of spring semester, and the prospects of reaching the people I dreamed of were grim.
I was standing in a CVS parking lot one afternoon, a heavy sheet of gray clouds overhead, and a chocolate-brownie ice cream cone in my hand. When life beats you down, at least there’s always ice cream.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. My eyes widened when I saw the Seattle area code. Instantly, it felt like the gray clouds were parting and white light was shining down on me.
“So, you want to interview Bill, huh?”
On the line was Bill Gates’ Chief of Staff.
Stefan Weitz, my Inside Man at Microsoft, had managed to arrange the call. To preserve the Chief of Staff’s privacy, I’ll leave his name out.
I started telling him about the mission, but he said there was no need because Stefan and Qi Lu had already told him all about it.
“I love what you’re doing,” the Chief of Staff said. “I love your initiative. I love that you’re doing this to help others and I’d love to support this”—just hearing that made me feel like I was 99 percent there—“but, the thing is, you’re only about five percent there. I just can’t take this to Bill. You don’t have enough momentum.”
Momentum?
“Look,” he added. “I can’t present an interview request to Bill for a book that doesn’t even have a publisher. Even when Malcolm Gladwell came to us for Outliers, it wasn’t a sure thing. Now—if you can get more interviews done, if you can get a publishing deal from Penguin or Random House—then we can sit down and discuss presenting this to Bill. But before any of that can happen, you need to engineer more momentum.”
He said goodbye and hung up, leaving me in a haze, two words echoing in my head. Five percent? The next thing I knew I was in the storage closet, my head in my hands, those words still reverberating in my mind.
At this rate, my friends would be in rocking chairs by the time the mission was completed. If Qi Lu’s introduction only got me 5 percent of the way there with Bill Gates, then I must be at negative 20 percent with people like Warren Buffett or Bill Clinton. And with all the tests and homework I have for school, I’ll be—
Wait, Bill Clinton…
A vague memory came to me as though there was an itch on my mind.
Didn’t someone tell me over the summer that Bill Clinton and Richard Branson spoke on a cruise ship or something? And some young guy organized it?
I reached for my laptop, Googled “Bill Clinton Richard Branson cruise ship,” and found an article on FastCompany.com:
In 2008 Elliott Bisnow, an entrepreneur with several companies to his name, started Summit Series, an “un-conference conference” that would serve as a mutual aid society for young entrepreneurs. It started with 19 people on a ski trip, and has grown to more than 750 people who attended their latest event in May. Part networking, part TED, part extreme sports, these invitation-only events have become the epicenter of social entrepreneurship. And along the way, Summit Series had raised over $1.5 million for not-for-profits. Participants include Bill Clinton, Russell Simmons, Sean Parker, Mark Cuban, Ted Turner, and John Legend.
I kept reading and then did a double take: Elliott Bisnow, the CEO of Summit Series, the man who brought all these leaders together—was only twenty-five years old. How was that possible? That was my cousin’s age.
I typed in “Elliott Bisnow” and ripped through the search results. Dozens of articles mentioned him, but not one was about him. He had a blog with hundreds of posts, but all they had were pictures—Elliott surfing in Nicaragua; hanging with supermodels in Tel Aviv; at the Running of the Bulls in Spain; at the Tour de France in Belgium; at the White House standing with the cofounder of Twitter and the CEO of Zappos. There were photos of him building classrooms in Haiti, giving vision tests in Jamaica, delivering shoes to kids in Mexico. There was even a video of him in a Diet Coke ad.
In one article, I learned that CNN founder Ted Turner was his hero and that Elliott hoped to meet him one day. Then I discovered a picture of Elliott and Ted Turner shaking hands a year later at the United Nations. There were images of Elliott Bisnow living on a beach in Costa Rica and on a houseboat in Amsterdam. In all the photos, he wore T-shirts and jeans and had a scruffy beard and thick brown hair. I found an article in the Huffington Post titled “Tech’s Biggest Party Boys.” Elliott ranked sixth. The closing line threw me back in my chair. “Bisnow’s latest plan: Buy a $40 million mountain in Utah.”
I continued clicking and missed two meals without noticing. I found a picture of him laughing with President Clinton in someone’s living room, another of him presenting Clinton with an award, and a third with Clinton on stage at a Summit event. Yet there was nothing online that told me exactly who Elliott Bisnow was. It was like going through the blog of the guy from Catch Me If You Can.
I couldn’t wrap my head around this guy. Though at the same time, I experienced a deep, almost overwhelming feeling of connection with him. Elliott’s dream was to bring together the world’s top entrepreneurs, and somehow, he’d pulled it off.
Bill Gates’ Chief of Staff had said I needed to engineer momentum. Clearly, Elliott had figured out how. I felt I was looking at the one person who held the answer.
I lowered my head, closed my eyes, and thought, if there is one thing I want more than anything right now, it’s Elliott’s guidance. I pulled out my journal, turned to a fresh page, and scribbled “Dream Mentors” across the top. On the first line, I wrote: “Elliott Bisnow.”
My pile of homework and tests grew even more, so I spent every night that week in the library, just trying to survive. But each day I caught my mind wandering, imagining what it would be like to talk to Elliott Bisnow. One afternoon, three days before my accounting final, I couldn’t hold myself back anymore. Screw it, I’ll just send him an email. It’s not like I wanted to interview him. I just had one question to ask Elliott so I could get to Bill Gates: How do I engineer momentum?
I began writing a cold email. Two hours later, I was still at it, weaving in details about Elliott so he’d know I’d gone to the twenty-third page of a Google search to find them. I figured he must be the king of cold emails, so it had to be perfect.
From: Alex Banayan
To: Elliott Bisnow
Subject: Mr. Bisnow—I could really use some advice from you
Hi Mr. Bisnow,
My name is Alex and I’m a sophomore at USC. I know this is pretty out-of-the-blue, but I’m a big fan of yours and I could really use your advice on a project I’m working on. I know you’re really busy and that you get a lot of emails, so this will only take sixty seconds to read.
My story is that I’m a nineteen-year-old who is writing a book with the hope of changing the dynamic of my generation. The book will feature some of the world’s most successful people and will focus on what they were doing early on in their careers to get to where they are today. I’m truly humbled by the people who have already jumped on board for this mission—from Microsoft president Qi Lu to author Tim Ferriss. I’m determined to combine the greats from the older generation along with the new generation, and integrate their wisdom and practical advice into one book that changes people’s lives. Like you say, “make no small plans” :)
Mr. Bisnow, being nineteen years old and pursuing my vision does have some obstacles, so it would be unbelievably helpful to get some guidance from you on the topic of: How did you effectively bring all these luminaries together behind a single vision? You did it masterfully with your first ski trip in 2008, and you’ve continued to do it better and better as the years have gone on.
I’m sure you’re really busy, but if there is any chance we can connect so I can soak up some guidance, that would mean the world to me. If you’d like, I could field some specific questions your way via email, we can talk via telephone for a few minutes, or if your schedule permits, I’d love to meet you either at a coffee shop, or…if the planets align…at the world-famous Summit House :)
I totally understand if you’re too busy to respond, but even a one- or two-line reply would really make my day.
Dreaming big,
Alex
I spent thirty minutes searching online for his email address, but I couldn’t find it. Three hours later, I still had nothing. So I typed out my five best guesses of what it could be and put them all in the “To:” field. I prayed to God, and to the holy spirit of the Tim-Ferriss-cold-email, that it would work.
Twenty-four hours later, Elliott replied:
great email
r u in LA tomorrow or thurs?
I checked my calendar. Thursday was my accounting final.
“I’m completely free both days.”
I hoped he wouldn’t want to meet Thursday. At USC, anyone who misses a final exam fails the course.
Elliott replied right back:
can u meet me at 8am in long beach on thurs in the lobby of the renaissance hotel? sorry to make u come so far, i am at a conference here
and u should read “when I stop talking you’ll know I’m dead” and get to the part about the star of ardaban before we meet, maybe it’s a chapter or two in…u will love the book
Go on The Price Is Right—not study for finals. Meet Elliott—risk missing a final. It was as if someone was playing a video game of my life and sitting back, laughing, and flinging banana peels at my feet. Each impossible decision was a checkpoint, testing to see where my heart truly was.
For the first time though, I didn’t hesitate.