6 lessons Bulgarian startups can learn from Booking.com, Amazon, and Netflix- Insights from Jeff Hoffman’s Campus X talk

There is a line in Oscar Wilde’s play “An Ideal Husband” that goes: “The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.”

Note taken. Staying true to our mission to empower all of you—aspiring founders and startup teams—we share the best bits from one of the most inspiring events held to date at Campus X. 

Last month, at an exclusive, invite-only event, Campus X members had the opportunity to meet Jeff Hoffman. For many in the audience, Jeff was best known for his roles in billion-dollar companies, such as Priceline.com/Booking.com, uBid.com, and others. However, on top of this, he is also a motivational speaker, a humanitarian, a bestselling author, a Hollywood film producer, a producer of a Grammy Award-winning jazz album, and an executive producer of an Emmy Award-winning television show—one can say a busy man! 

But Jeff still found time to enlighten the Campus X audience with invaluable know-how gained from his personal connections with the founders of some of the world’s biggest companies. 

“None of what I'm going to share with you today are things that I knew when I was building a company. And I wish someone had told me what I had to get right,” said Jeff in his opening remarks.

He climbed onto the stage of Campus X as the missing voice he wished he had during his journey to share crucial lessons on business growth that Bulgarian startups can learn from market movers like Booking.com, Amazon, Adidas, and Netflix. 

Let’s cut to the chase and explore how Jeff’s hindsight can turn into foresight for you and your startup.

1. “It's not a money game, it's a talent game” - hire rockstars, not resumes.

   
   

Most startups, pressed for budget, tend to fill desks with "good enough". Hoffman warns against this and puts it simply—greatness isn’t built on average. Aim to hire only the needle-movers—those who can deliver, not just tell beautiful stories through their resumes.

According to him, opting for “good enough” won’t take a startup far. When he asked businesses that didn’t succeed why, the answer was always the same: “We ran out of money.”

“No, you ran out of ideas,” argues Jeff. “If you had brilliant people, you'd never run out of money because you would solve all the problems without being dependent on it. People get too dependent on funding.”

One of the most important formulas for success he learned throughout his entrepreneurial journey across various big and small, private and public companies is: 

smart people + better ideas = needing less money

“The scarcest, most valuable resource in the world isn’t financial capital—it’s the human one.”

The question that you might have popping into your mind now is how to afford them. And rightfully so. 

Jeff gives the answer - the key is prioritising quality over quantity. While this might seem like a substantial investment, the efficiency gains mean it is actually the opposite. 

“One rockstar beats three average hires every time,” said Jeff. Alternatively, attracting fewer people enables companies to afford the rockstars.

A move like this also unlocks unquantifiable benefits. Rockstars create leverage, bring ideas, solve problems, and don’t need micromanaging. They raise the standard for everyone else around them. They take ownership in a way that others rarely do. If you're in a resource-constrained startup environment, this difference in initiative and output isn't just beneficial—it's critical.

“We were a startup, not a multi-billion-dollar company. But I still spent my money on the best,” he notes. 

This wasn’t only a recipe for short-term success, but it also gave his company the agility and confidence in its purpose.

“I could confidently say - if we switched industries right now, we would probably still win. Because all the best people work right here in this building.”

So, how do you find the rockstars?

2. “As a CEO, you should hunt them down” - don’t wait; approach.

   
   

Here’s the kicker: rockstars don’t apply to job posts. They already have jobs. They’re not scrolling job boards and you won’t find them through traditional recruiting channels. 

“What I had to do was rewrite the CEO job description,” said Jeff. His job evolved from running a company full-time to finding the best and brightest to do it for him. 

That means tapping into your network, attending events, doing outreach, and, above all, making your company attractive enough for a rockstar to want to join.

“As CEOs, if our business is doing well, which is probably everyone in this room, we have this bad habit of starting to think we might be pretty smart—we will do some finance, some marketing, some HR—and think we are good at all those just because we are the CEO,” he explained.

However, this wasn’t how successful businesses operate, according to Jeff. Throughout discussions with leaders, he noticed that a lot of them didn’t recognize how important it was to pick the thing they were good at and then spend the rest of their time finding people smarter than them for everything else.

For example, over the years, Jeff discovered that he excelled in marketing, and that’s what he focused on doing - hunting and attracting the industry’s finest for every position at his company.   

“My job is to find rockstars, convince them to work for me, and then take care of them so that they never want to leave,” he said. “That’s why I don't like it when people say I work for Jeff. I work for them. As a CEO, that’s your job - creating and finding leaders.“

3. “Win a golden medal at one thing to be recognized” - specialize, specialize, specialize.

   
   

“Twenty years ago, I started wondering what the companies that became these multi-billion dollar businesses did right that others didn’t,” explained Jeff.

Over the years, he encountered many entrepreneurs who were attempting to build companies as one-stop shops, offering everything a customer needed. Eventually, this led to their downfall. In a world obsessed with doing more, the companies that grew fastest did less.

“In the early Internet days, there were just a few of us - my team at Priceline, Jeff and Pierre building eBay, another Jeff building Amazon - and we used to talk all the time.”

During those discussion

s, it became clear that all these companies succeeded by becoming the best at one thing. In the case of Amazon, the company sold only books for its first seven years.

“Jeff Bezos told me that one day, they would become a marketplace of everything - but not until they became the best booksellers. On my question why, he simply said that you have to win a gold medal at something to be recognized.”

Jeff noticed a similar pattern after discussions with the teams behind other industry-leading companies. The founders of Adidas wanted to offer the best sports shoes to the market. The founder of Zappos wanted to build the biggest shoe seller in the world.

“Nobody hit explosive growth by having four products, three business lines, and running five different companies. They all picked a gold medal and rode it all the way,” explained Jeff.

The Priceline experience: Have one product, but sell it well

During its first years, Priceline was selling a wide range of tourism services - cruises, vacations, hotels, and more. So, he asked his team what their gold medal product was.

“They said, Jeff, ‘No one knows hotels like we know hotels.’ So, we killed the other product lines and took all the people working on them and invested the entire marketing budget in the hotel line.”

This might seem counterintuitive as we’re constantly told to diversify, to hedge, to build multiple revenue streams. But the companies that reach explosive scale usually start by doing one thing better than anyone else. They win a gold medal in that category, become known for it, and then, only then, do they expand their operations. Not out of desperation but from a position of dominance. 

Priceline is a proof.

“Today, we are the world’s largest seller of hotels. We have one product but sell $20 billion a year worth of it and are 10 times bigger than our nearest competitor.”

When you focus in such a way, your marketing becomes sharper. Your operations become simpler. Your customer value proposition becomes clearer. Most importantly, your team knows what game they’re playing. Instead of chasing five OK ideas, everyone rallies behind one great one.

“So the question to ask yourself is: What is your gold medal?”

4. “Don’t go after business opportunities that don’t require your gold medal talent” - pursue your North Star.

   
   

There’s a difference between what your company does and what it's built on. Hoffman calls this your "gold medal talent"—the core capability that sets you apart.

For example, despite the perception, Priceline and Booking.com weren’t travel companies—they were algorithm companies that, at the time, relied on novel revenue optimization models assessing thousands of data points. These companies didn’t chase trends—they chased problems that required their algorithms.

“I had this conversation with Jeff Bezos and asked him about Amazon’s gold medal talent. And he said - ‘Delivery. If it doesn't require difficult delivery, we won't touch it,” Hoffman recalled. 

“So why do you think Amazon was the first company in the world to experiment with drones for delivery? Because that's what they do, right?’’ 

The goal was the same when Amazon bought Whole Foods or when it launched its space program to find less expensive ways to deliver satellites to space.

“With the Whole Foods move, Bezos said he saw that nobody has successfully conquered the grocery delivery market, and he wanted to figure out how to deliver perishable items to people in a more efficient and reasonably-priced way.”

The bottom line—if an idea wouldn’t involve deliveries, it wasn’t up Amazon’s alley. If it didn’t require algorithms, Priceline wouldn’t touch it.

“So, I want you to assess what your gold medal talent is and stop taking on business things that don't require the thing that you are most talented at.”

Opportunities will come that are shiny but misaligned. And while your instinct might be to chase them, but unless they require your gold medal talent, they’ll distract you. It takes courage to narrow your lane, but it’s what allows you to become world-class.

5. “Find your aircraft steel” - just one thing will stick with your audience.

   
   

“Marketing tends to be overdone,” said Jeff. “Companies are telling too many reasons to do business with them—it’s easy to use, it’s fast, it’s this and that—when people need just one.” He calls it the brand asset. 

In other words, a memorable brand isn’t about saying more things—it’s about saying the right thing.

“Ask yourself one question - what is the one and only one reason to do business with me?”

Bear in mind that what you have defined as your “brand asset” might very well differ from what your audience associates you with. 

Fortunately, Jeff gave us the recipe to confidently identify a brand's asset. He told the audience an engaging story about a manufacturing company, specialized in producing metal TV mounts, which approached him asking why their sales weren’t going up even after they entered the big stores. The company marketed its products as easy to assemble, lightweight, foldable, competitively priced, and made of… aircraft steel.

“So, we went to Target and every time somebody picked that TV mount, I approached them and asked why,” said Jeff. “People didn’t know what aircraft steal was, but they said TVs were among the most expensive things in their homes, and they didn’t want any damage.” 

It became evident that the brand asset was aircraft steel. So, they decided to emphasize it.

“We took everything off the package and wrote in giant letters: ‘The only TV mount made of the same steel as aircraft,’ and their sales exploded.”

That single phrase made the difference. It sounded strong, safe, and elite. Even Walmart, which initially rejected them, called back, saying everybody was asking for this TV mount made from aircraft steel.

“I have another friend named Mark who hated going out in the snow to get a DVD from the store. So, he decided to become the first to send DVDs in the mail. And that’s how Mark started Netflix.” 

Once you have confidently identified your brand asset, it's time to refine its messaging.

“It has to be memorable so people can repeat it, and it has to be powerful—they have to care about it, right? It must give them that ‘Wait, what?’ moment.” 

Lesson? Find your sticky idea. Make it simple. Make it repeatable. And make it matter.

6. “Sell more flowers” - build operational religion.

   
   

“Forbes once did a study of the companies with the highest return over a ten-year period. We were shocked to find out that the best performer wasn’t Apple, Microsoft, or Google—it was us. We had 40 straight quarters with increasing profits.”

As a result, Priceline’s stock price jumped from $160 per share to over $5,400 as of today. Forbes attributed this growth to the relentless focus on operational efficiency.

Curious to find out how to make your operations more efficient? 

We, too, were, but before focusing on this, let’s ask you a question: What does a mechanic under a delivery van have to do with flower sales? 

Everything, if you ask Jim McCann, founder of 1-800-Flowers.

In one of the most powerful stories Jeff shared, McCann challenged his entire company with one mission: Sell more flowers. Ultimately, this transformed his company from a small flower shop into a global market leader. To explain how he achieved this massive success, he invited Jeff to his office.

“We were walking down the hall, and all over the walls, there were signs saying ‘Sell more flowers.’”

Everyone in Jim’s company was “programmed” to focus solely on work and bring ideas that would help sell more flowers.

“We go outside to the garage, and there is George, an auto mechanic in a jumpsuit, all greasy, installing fuel filters on trucks,” recalled Jeff. “I asked how this helps sell more flowers, as per the sign on the garage wall.”

Then the mechanic revealed that he had done research and found fuel filters that cost $5 and saved $13 for every tank of gas. 

“That leaves $8 off from the flower delivery that would go to the marketing team to help them sell more flowers,” he explained.

This powerful lesson made Jeff instill the culture within his team to focus only on what “sells more flowers.” 

“Although I am the CEO, my employees have the right to say, ‘Jeff, I don't really understand how that's going to help sell more flowers, so I'm going to say no’. And that's how we achieve that level of profitability because we just don't waste any time.”

The time to grow is now, the place to grow is Campus X

Priceline, Booking.com, Amazon, Netflix, Zappos, Adidas - all these billion-dollar companies got where they are today because of a series of precise choices: better people, sharper focus, smarter operations. They obsessed over one idea, one edge, and one kind of customer.

If there’s one thing you should take away from Jeff’s lecture, it’s this: ask yourself the questions that truly move the needle:

• How many absolute rock stars do I have?

• What is my “gold medal”?

• What is my “aircraft steel”?

• How can I sell more flowers?

  
  

Answering these isn’t always comfortable, but it is necessary. The entrepreneurs that scale the smartest are the ones brave enough to ask them often—and act on the answers.

Join Campus X to ensure you have a front-row seat the next time we welcome a globally-renowned visionary. In the meantime—sell more flowers.