Art of Accomplishment

Your 'billion-dollar idea' is the one you wouldn't sell for $1B

Hudson and his wife both said they wouldn't sell their business for $1 billion if it meant never doing the work again. His daughter later turned that into a test: her 'billion-dollar idea' wasn't something that could grow to $1B but something she wouldn't sell for $1B. Hudson says that's how to tell whether work is deeply meaningful to you.

“And I said, I'm just curious, would you sell this business for $1 billion if we could not do it again? Like, we would be done doing it, but we'd get $1 billion. And both of us went like this. We both went, we wouldn't. Like, that was our answer. I don't know, I told my— I came home, told the story to my daughters. And then like 2 or 3 months later, one of my daughters comes in and says, I found my billion-dollar idea. I'm like, cool, something you can grow into a billion dollars? And she's like, no, something I wouldn't sell for a billion dollars.”

Steal thisAsk of your current work: would I sell it for $1B if I could never do it again? If the answer is yes, keep looking.

He was a bad VC because he 'needed to be needed', so he coached CEOs

After advising a wealthy family he was doing an art installation for to buy oil and gold, Hudson was invited to run clean-tech venture investing for their family office around 2006. He says he was a poor investor because great investors back founders who don't need them, so he coached portfolio CEOs instead, which became his career and later Art of Accomplishment.

“And it turned out I was not a great investor because I needed to be needed too much. Like, a great investor is the investor who's like, they do— I am investing because you don't need me at all. And I was like, I need to be needed, which was horrible as venture investor. And in that, so the only way for me to be successful was to coach the CEOs into like turning their companies around. And we had a positive result on the portfolio, so we invested more.”