The Third Door

by Alex Banayan

  Elliott went to the meeting and made his pitch. Sure enough, the man said, “We’d like to go with…the silver package.”

  Now Elliot had no idea what to do.

  “Okay, great,” Elliott said, trying to sound professional. “So, just to make sure, how do you most feel comfortable with the follow-up? What do you like to see when you’re a new client of someone?”

  “Well, they send me an insertion order.”

  “Absolutely,” Elliott said. He wrote down send insertion order and Googled it when he got home.

  Elliott hit the phones every day that summer, selling thirty thousand dollars’ worth of ads. He made 20 percent commission, which put $6,000 in his pocket. After returning to college for his junior year, he woke up at five o’clock every morning to sell ads. Through sheer practice, he became a cold-calling expert. He made twenty-thousand-dollar sales, fifty-thousand-dollar sales, and a few hundred-thousand-dollar sales. He took a semester off from school, then another, eventually dropping out. During the early years of his company, Bisnow Media, Elliott went on to sell a million dollars’ worth of ads.

  “It’s not rocket science,” Elliott told me, sitting up in his pool chair. “And it’s not as complicated as all those business books make it seem, huh?”

  I nodded, then admitted to Elliott that sometimes when I cold-called someone, I’d get so nervous I’d forget what to say.

  “It’s because you’re overthinking it,” he said. “Just tell yourself you’re calling your friend, dial the number, and start talking right away. The best cure for nervousness is immediate action.”

  Immediate action was at the core of Elliott’s life. That, plus relentless hard work, added up over time. Just ten years after Elliott sold his first ad, he and his dad would sell Bisnow Media to a private equity firm for fifty million dollars in cash.

  “Wait,” I said to Elliott, shading my eyes from the sun, “if you were spending all your time cold-calling, how did you have time to start Summit?”

  “It just started as a side project,” he said.

  After dropping out of school, Elliott didn’t know any people his age in the business world. He wanted not only to make new friends, but also to create relationships with people he could learn from. So Elliott cold-called some young entrepreneurs he’d read about in a magazine and asked, “What if we get a bunch of us together and just hang out for a weekend?”

  He rallied the founders of CollegeHumor, TOMS Shoes, Thrillist, and more than a dozen other entrepreneurs, and they all went skiing for a weekend on Elliott’s dime. Elliott even paid for their flights. Of course, he didn’t actually have that kind of money, so he put the $30,000 cost of the trip on a credit card and gave himself until the end of the month to pay it off.

  He then did what he knew best. Elliott cold-called companies and asked if they wanted to sponsor a conference of twenty of the greatest young entrepreneurs in America—and they said yes.

  “My mom helped me book the cabin, I rented a few cars, and once everyone was there, it kind of took care of itself,” Elliott said. “I remember asking my mom, ‘What should I get for these people? Like, apples or granola bars? What kind of granola bars? How do you even get granola bars?’ I had no idea what I was doing. Ever since then, I’ve lived my life by one motto: Bite off more than you can chew. You can figure out how to chew later.”

  Elliott fanned his face with a cocktail menu and looked around the pool deck. “It’s a bit too hot here.”

  He took out his iPhone, opened the weather app, and began flicking through major cities in Europe.

  “Ninety-one degrees in Paris? Nope. Eighty-seven in Berlin? Nope. Eighty-five in Madrid? Nope.” Elliott reclined in his chair, chin tilted high, flicking through cities as if he were Zeus on Mount Olympus.

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “Barcelona: seventy-one and sunny.”

  He opened another app, bought three plane tickets, and we were out the door.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  That’s How You Do Business

  EIGHT HOURS LATER, NIGHTCLUB IN BARCELONA

  Music blared as seven waitresses paraded toward us, firecrackers in one hand, giant bottles of vodka in the other. Seven bottles, six of us. Whenever someone handed Elliott a shot, he’d smile, say “Cheers,” and as everyone downed their drinks, he’d pour his into a potted plant on his left.

  Our plane had landed three hours earlier. In the hotel lobby, Elliott had bumped into a Peruvian media mogul he knew who invited us to a party at the hotel’s nightclub. When we arrived at his table, Elliott had me sit next to the media mogul and tell the Price Is Right story. As I said it, the man’s eyes wandered. Elliott then jumped in and guided the story, interjecting funny details I forgot to include, and by the end we were all laughing and the man asked for my email address to stay in touch.

  Then Elliott pointed to another guy at the table. “Alex, tell him the story.”

  I did, and once I finished, Elliott pointed to someone else. “Now tell him.”

  He continued pointing. “Tell it again. Tell it again.”

  Elliott started pointing to complete strangers. The more uncomfortable the situation, the better I became. Each repetition wore down The Flinch. At a certain point, I could barely feel it.

  “This is what you don’t understand,” Elliott told me. “You probably think everyone loves your story because you were on a game show. But what your story is about isn’t as important as how you tell it.”

  It was now two hours past midnight. I was watching Elliott mingle with the other people at our table. In my business classes we were taught to be professional with new contacts. Exchange business cards, email rather than text. Elliott did the opposite.

  But this wasn’t a skill he was born with, he told me. As we stepped out to the balcony of the nightclub, Elliott admitted that he didn’t have many friends growing up. He was short and chubby, and at school he felt invisible. Bullies called him “midget.” They pronounced his last name as big-nose instead of bis-now. The one place he felt safe was on the tennis court. Elliott decided to leave high school during junior year and enroll at a tennis academy. When he got to college, his social life wasn’t much better. Most people didn’t want to hang out with him or invite him to parties. He eventually got a girlfriend, but she soon broke up with him because she thought it was weird that he woke up so early to make cold calls. When Elliott left college, his social awkwardness stayed with him. He collected so many business cards at networking events that he had to use shoeboxes to store them all. But one night around that time, Elliott learned his lesson.

  He put on a suit and tie and went to meet a potential advertising client at a steakhouse. Elliott was nervous. This was his first time taking a meeting outside of an office. When Elliott greeted the client, the man looked at him and shook his head.

  “Elliott, take off your jacket. Take it off. Now take off your tie. Roll up your sleeves. Grab a seat.”

  Elliott had reserved a table in the corner. The client said they weren’t sitting there. He led Elliott to the bar.

  “Ma’am, we’d like two orders of cheesy fries and a beer.”

  “I thought we’re having a business meeting,” Elliott said.

  “Relax. So, tell me about yourself.”

  They exchanged stories, joked around, and Elliott realized they actually had a lot in common. After an hour of getting to know each other, the man put down his drink and said, “All right, what do you want to sell me?”

  “Well,” Elliott said, “I’d love you to do this, this, and this, at this price.”

  “Well, I’d like to do it at this price, and I’d like to do it like this. Will that work?”

  “Could we change this a little?”

  “Absolutely,” the man said. “Does that sound good?”

  “Sounds great.”

  They shook hands and closed
a sixteen-thousand-dollar deal. They hung out for another hour, and then as they were getting up from the bar, the man looked at Elliott and said, “Kid, that’s how you do business.”

  * * *

  Elliottt and I left the nightclub and headed to our room.

  “I didn’t think you’d actually come,” Elliott said as we stepped down the hallway.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I said you should come with us to Europe, you hesitated. I’m surprised you actually came. Why’d you do it?”

  “I just thought about it logically,” I said. “The best-case scenario was that I would have a great learning experience with you. The worst-case scenario was that I would lose some money, which would’ve hurt, but life would go on, you know?”

  Elliott stopped walking. He looked me in the eyes, but didn’t say a word.

  Then he just continued moving.

  Minutes later, Austin joined us in the room and we got ready to sleep. Elliott was in one bed, Austin in the other, and I was on a rollaway tucked next to the bathroom sink. I hit the lights. A bit later, I heard Elliott’s voice whispering.

  “Alex, you awake?”

  I was exhausted and not in the mood to talk, so I stayed quiet. Thirty seconds later, I heard him whispering to the other side of the room.

  “Austin?” Elliott said, with a smile I could hear through the dark.

  There was a rustle in the sheets.

  “Austin…he’s one of us.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Exponential Life

  “Tell him the Hamptons story,” Austin said, egging Elliott on.

  We were having lunch the following afternoon at a sidewalk café along Barcelona’s La Rambla, and surprisingly, feeling extremely well rested. Elliott had insisted we all get a full eight hours of sleep, do yoga in the morning, and get a few hours of work done before leaving the hotel. He didn’t drink or smoke, and he took conference calls while we walked the streets. His life was a lot more balanced behind the scenes than he made it seem.

  “Oh, man, the Hamptons story?” Elliott said. “Alex, you’re going to love this one.”

  A year after he left college, Elliott had heard about a tennis pro-am in the Hamptons. To play, nonprofessionals like Elliott had to donate $4,000 to charity. Elliott knew a wealthy individual from Washington, D.C., flying there on a private jet and wanted to go with him.

  “Even though I didn’t have much money,” Elliott said, “I decided to make the donation and play in the pro-am, because I thought, ‘If I do that, then I’ll be a baller! And then I’ll fly on the private plane, get to the Hamptons, be in the tournament, everyone will think I’m super legit, and then I’ll take it from there.’ ”

  Over the course of the three-day tournament, people he met asked what he planned to do for the rest of the week. Elliott said he planned on staying in the Hamptons—which he actually hadn’t—but didn’t have a place to stay, prompting those he was talking with to say, “Oh, you should stay with me!” And Elliott innocently replied, “Gosh, I’d love to stay with you! That’s so kind. Thank you for offering.”

  By the end of his trip, one guy loaned Elliott his Aston Martin to drive around, he was sleeping in mansions, and watching Yankees games on TV with one of the owners of the team. “I was backpacking through the Hamptons,” Elliott told me, “and I was just in it. It turned into a three-week adventure.”

  At the tournament, he met a Goldman Sachs executive who said he might be able to get his firm to sponsor the second Summit event. Elliott told him Goldman didn’t even have to pay as long as Elliott could put the firm’s logo on the “sponsors” page of the event website. Elliott then called other companies and said, “Look, it’s almost impossible to get to be a sponsor of Summit right now. We’re working with very few companies, and our most recent client is Goldman Sachs, so if you want to be serious, let’s be serious. We’re only working with the best.” It was another example of Borrowed Credibility. That Goldman Sachs relationship enabled Elliott to lock in other sponsors, which led to a lot of the eventual success of Summit.

  “The point of this story is less about throwing money around and more about personal investing,” Elliott told me. “You have to make a calculated judgment that the amount of money you’re going to put in is going to either pay off way bigger in the long term or enough in the short term to offset your costs. Aside from the money you live on, the rest is your money to play the game.”

  As our lunch continued, one word kept coming back to me: “momentum.” How did Summit go from this small ski trip to being called “a gift to the United States” by President Clinton? I felt I was missing a piece of the puzzle, so I pressed Elliott about Summit’s early days.

  Elliott said that a few years after his first Summit, he read Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek, sold all of his possessions, left day-to-day operations of Bisnow Media, and traveled the world, living between Nicaragua, Tel Aviv, and Amsterdam. Around that time, he flew home to see his parents in D.C. and went to a party where he met a man named Yosi Sergant, the cocreator of the Obama “HOPE” campaign with Shepard Fairey. The Obama administration had tasked Yosi with inviting young entrepreneurs to the White House, and when Elliott told Yosi about Summit, Yosi asked if he would host an event at the White House. Elliott didn’t know if he could pull it off or not, but he said yes anyway. He assumed he could just figure it out. Yosi called a week later.

  “We’re set for the event. It’s on Friday.”

  “Which Friday?” Elliott asked.

  “Next Friday.”

  “That’s impossible, I’ll be in—”

  “And we need all of their Social Security numbers and names by Tuesday at noon. Bring thirty-five people.”

  “But how are we going to get people to say yes in just four days?”

  “Just tell them: When the White House calls, you answer.”

  So Elliott started calling people he had met planning earlier Summit events and they connected him with other entrepreneurs, from the cofounder of Twitter to the CEO of Zappos. Elliott called them up using his most official-sounding voice: “Hello, this is Elliott Bisnow from Summit Series. I have a mandate from the White House. I’m organizing a group on behalf of the Executive Office of the President and we’d like to have so and so there.”

  Yosi insisted that the founders of Method, the ecofriendly soaps, be at the event. So Elliott called their office.

  “Hello, it’s Elliott Bisnow for Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry. I need to speak to their assistant immediately.”

  He got through. “How can I help you?”

  “I’m calling on behalf of the president of the United States of America. The presence of Mr. Ryan and Mr. Lowry has been requested at the White House next Friday.”

  “Well, that’s very gracious of you, but that’s impossible. They’re doing a huge paid speaking engagement next Friday.”

  “Ma’am,” Elliott said, lowering his voice, “when the White House calls, you answer.” And just like that, he got them to cancel their paid speaking gig.

  A few days before the event, Elliott found out that Yosi wasn’t actually planning as high-level an event as he’d assumed. To avoid looking like a fool in front of his new entrepreneur friends, Elliott cold-called the White House offices, spreading a whisper campaign among the senior administration that they weren’t invited to this “exclusive” event—so they would reflexively demand to be there. Elliott told them, “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but all the leading young entrepreneurs in America are coming to the White House, and everybody who’s anybody was invited.”

  And it worked. The people who put together the stimulus package, the staff of the National Economic Council, the environmental team—they all showed up. It reached the point that Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, called Yosi screaming about why he wasn’t invited.

 
The event went so well that word began spreading about Summit, and eventually the Clinton Foundation called Elliott and asked him to host a fundraiser. Later, the Summit team planned another event in D.C., this time with 750 people. The next one took place on a cruise ship in the Caribbean with a thousand people. The events continued swelling in popularity, the following one at a ski resort in Lake Tahoe. Now Elliott was buying a private mountain in Eden, Utah, to make it the home of the Summit community.

  “I could’ve told Yosi, ‘I don’t think we can pull off the event,’ or, ‘Let’s do it in a month,’ ” Elliott told me. “At the end of the day, Yosi said he wanted it on Friday, and we said yes. I’ve learned that you have to go for it, even if there’s a chance you’ll fail. The planets are never going to perfectly align. When you see an opportunity, it’s up to you to jump.”

  FOUR DAYS LATER, NEW YORK CITY

  “What I’m about to tell you,” Elliott told me, “ninety-nine percent of people in the world will never understand.”

  For the first time all week, it was just the two of us. Elliott had told Austin he wanted to talk to me one-on-one. We were standing on a rooftop lounge during sunset, looking out at the Manhattan skyline.

  “You see, most people live a linear life,” he continued. “They go to college, get an internship, graduate, land a job, get a promotion, save up for a vacation each year, work toward their next promotion, and they just do that their whole lives. Their lives move step by step, slowly and predictably.

  “But successful people don’t buy into that model. They opt into an exponential life. Rather than going step by step, they skip steps. People say that you first need to ‘pay your dues’ and get years of experience before you can go out on your own and get what you truly want. Society feeds us this lie that you need to do x, y, and z before you can achieve your dream. It’s bullshit. The only person whose permission you need to live an exponential life is your own.