From the Inner City of Vietnam to a Billionaire Entrepreneur: Lessons from a Lifetime of Resilience

Well, Bob, thank you so much for joining us. I have been interviewing Bob, or he'd probably say, bothering him for about 15 years now. And his story is quite something. If you guys have not heard of his book or read his book. I brought this not he didn't know about it, but I'm advertising it. It's a crazy story. And we're going to give you a little bit of a taste of that right now. Bob has been many things. He's been a fifth grade flunk out. He's been a 12th grade almost flunk out. He was a Marine who was shot at in Vietnam. He was a neglected child. He was a programmer working in the basement. Somehow through all of that, he became a multibillionaire and a great philanthropist. And he's also a backer of psychedelic therapy for PTSD. And most of all, he's a survivor. And I really appreciate you being here with us. And let's just get to it. There you go. So what's one part of your story that you think all of us should know about that is like either the moment that you turned your story around or that defined who you were? Oh, I've been a hundred different times. I know. But I'd say if I if I had to pick one of them, it's when I was 17 years old and I joined the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War. And within I was I was failing every subject in high school. At least I think I was passing a jump. And I thought for sure I wasn't going to graduate. And I joined two buddies of mine who went with going down to talk to the Marine Corps recruiter. I went with them. Three of us joined. My mother had to sign for me to join. Yeah. And she said something. And she says, maybe this will be the thing you need to turn you your life around. And it was very prophetic because it did. I was in Vietnam. That's actually hold on one second. So what did she say to you the day that you were heading out to to Vietnam? When when your mom, you just told me in the green room that how she was with you and she left. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. She was my mother and father were both gamblers. And and I loved them both to death, you know. But my the day I left to go to Vietnam, I was a combat Marine and I was most certainly going to I was going to Vietnam and I was going to be in combat. And my dad left didn't say anything. Mom opened the door to my room. I was out with my friends and celebrated that night, you know. And she said, Robert, I'm leaving. I'm going to go to the racetrack with Aunt Bird. Don't get yourself killed. That was it. See you. And then you go to Vietnam and you you almost get yourself killed. And you certainly saw a lot of people. I did. I went when I got I was with the 26 Marines and we were our job was to keep the North Vietnamese out of these little rice farming villages and on one side, jungles on the other. And when we a week before I got there, my squad was ambushed and four guys, four Marines were killed. The one was terribly wounded. And the senior to a man, it was all the senior guys. And the guy who was next senior had been there six weeks. And he became the new leader. He's a dear friend of mine to this day. His name is Barry George. And they turned out to be fantastic. And so, you know, I went on my first ambush that night. I hadn't been with my unit for five hours. And I see my first combat. And I've seen how bad somebody can be wounded. I saved the guy's life that night. And that night I also had my my first kill. I got my first kill. I shot a snake. So you come back and you said something to me that I'd never heard you tell me before, which was that in a way, PTSD became the light that, you know, set you off on your path to success. Can you talk about how you channeled PTSD? What what happened was is when when I first went to Vietnam, I was pretty happy go lucky kid. And when I came back, I was I was completely different. I was I was didn't like being around people. I had a trick temper. Just a lot of a lot of different things. And what I what I've since learned is everybody that has PTSD treats it in one way or another. Some people treat it with alcohol. Others, drugs. Others, exercise. Others, self-isolation. One of the guys I serve with lives up in the mountains of Pennsylvania. We'll never come out. Yeah. And on and on. I treated it by by working when I decided that being a steelworker wasn't for me. And the University of Baltimore ran an ad that you could go to the university. Your your high school grades didn't matter. Check. And, you know, the you could go on a GI Bill check. Yeah. And so I was the University of Baltimore. So I went and I'm like, I worked. I did everything I was ever asked to do and a lot more. So I graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in accountancy. It's amazing that it was something. And then later I was I have become a certified public accountant. I passed it the first time. Thank you, Marine Corps. Yeah. And I went to I was doing a job, accounting job out in Redwood City, California. And I bought a book on programming in the basic computer language. I taught myself how to had a program out of that book and wrote my first programs and became a hobby of mine. And I became really good at it. And I started my first business. I invested forty thousand dollars in it. And I sold it for sixty four million. But to get that to work, I used to work sixty four hour shifts. I would go to work Monday morning and work clear through Tuesday morning, clear through Wednesday morning. And then Wednesday at about eight o'clock, it'd be about sixty four hours. And I would know it was time to stop because I would start hallucinating. I would hear voices that weren't there. You know, we sleep for a reason. Yeah. Their voices weren't there. See things move that were obviously weren't there. So I'd go home, sleep for about eight hours, take a jog around the track, take a shower and work another sixty four hours. And I did that for a couple of years. Had I not done that, that business would have never made it. But because I did, it did. And you probably would never have done that had you not gone through what you went through in Vietnam, because it sounded to me like in a way you didn't want to go to sleep a lot of the nights. Oh, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It's just like, you know, one of my regrets was my kids. I wasn't around them very much. I missed their childhood. But because I had PTSD so bad, it was probably a good thing I wasn't around. Yeah. So you said that you risked 40,000 of your own money to start Parsons Technology. I know you also mentioned that your parents were compulsive gamblers. Did you grow, did you basically grow up with a gambling mentality having been around it? Did you think, you know, hey, I'm going to just throw all my chips in and see how it goes? Or were you so sure that this bet was going to pay off? No, there's a couple of ways to look at that. First, I was never a gambler because I've seen the devastation it caused with my parents in the household. We we had next to nothing. And whatever they had was gambled away. I sent some money home from Vietnam and and I got the poker game, which was about maybe lasted two days. And I won $3,000, which was all the money in the world. But I just did it for something to do. And I sent them bought a money order home, sent it home. I had guys knocking, waking me up, trying to get money from me later. But when I got home, my parents had gambled it all away. Anyhow, so it wouldn't matter. Yeah. But but anyhow, it was I never was a gambler the way my parents were. And but the chances that I took in different businesses that I that I had that were successful, I never, never seen them as gambling. I seen them as it just took a lot of work to get them to work. And I just had to do it the right way. I would have people ask me, suppose it doesn't work. And I always would say, suppose it does. Yeah. So I just think this is so interesting. Bob was not here earlier for when Oprah spoke and when we had, you know, several panels that kept bringing up the same thing. And we were talking earlier. I mean, it's interesting how so many of you super successful self-made entrepreneurs. It's almost like manifest destiny. You believe it in a way that a lot of us don't see it. Do you ever think about like, why is it that you've always, you know, believed and kept focused on what you could do rather than being, you know, set back by all of the obstacles that you face? Yeah. Yeah. You know, one thing I never borrowed money. Never. I have credit lines now, but I never really use them. I just have them. I, you know, I have a lot of people say to me, you know, what do you think about working smart? I said, well, a lot of people work smart. Most of them work for me. I work hard. So you basically go from being a rightful man. I've just always wanted to ask you this, but you go from being a rightful man you know, you have these Super Bowl advertisements that, you know, feature Danica Patrick that were really racy. And then you get into this country club sport of golf. And I've just always been curious, like what drew you to that? Is that a different side to you that, you know, we don't usually see? Tell me about that, Bob Parsons. Well, when I was when I was 30 years old and my first business was was successful. I started taking time off every once in a while where, you know, I started taking Wednesday afternoon off. And with my chief, with my executives, we started playing golf. We were all terrible, but we got better together. Then we started. We took Wednesday afternoon, Wednesday, I mean, Wednesday morning, Wednesday afternoon, and then weekends and you name it. And then a lot of times I'd go to a seminar, a seminar or a convention or something. Never once go to any of the classes, just go someplace where we can play golf. And so it got to be a habit. And I liked it because it took me outside of myself. It's a great way to treat PTSD, I'll say. And it was it was I loved it. So now how many golf courses do you own? I am one national, but there's three courses on it. There's 40, 45 holes. And we have 160 members are all national. There's hardly anybody on the course at any time. And. Cost a million to join and the dues are eighty five thousand a year. We have one rule, only one rule. No member shall interfere with another member's good time. Have you ever kicked anybody out? Everybody loves that rule. I'm sure they do. Have you ever kicked anybody out for not abiding by that rule? No, not that rule. That's that's good. That's good. So your memoir is called Fire in the Hole. And it's described as being both traumatic and hilarious. In that spirit, what is the single funniest mistake you made on the way to the first billion that made you think, wow, I really did flunk that fifth grade? You really want to know? Yeah, I do. When I was when I was when I was 16, a friend of mine named Danny Thorn was. He linked me up with this girl named Pauline and she says she was I had never been with the opposite sex. And she she was all systems go. OK, so I went and I bought a condom one. And the day before I was ready to happen, I took the condom apart. I looked at it and tried it on and so forth. And I was I was ready to go, boy. And so I put it on. I left it on. And I figured when I go to link up with Pauline, I won't have to already have it on. So. So when when I when I got ready to when we were in my friend's basement and we start smooching and like a switchblade, I popped popped up and it from the time I waited between then I went last and it rolled all up and my pubic hair was rolled all up in the condom. But they didn't unroll. So I went straight to the floor because I tried to tough it out. But I just couldn't do it. And OK, I went to the bathroom. I went to the bathroom and tried to get it off, but I couldn't because it's just and so. So anyhow, when I finally did get it off and I put it back on, Pauline was long gone. And she told all her girlfriends. Oh, yeah. That. Oh, I'm sure what happened. And that she kissed me. I ran like myself in the bathroom, wouldn't come out. And I. Yeah, much later. Yes. Yes. Actually, it was. Well, as you guys can probably tell from my red face, I was not expecting that story. So to bring it back full circle, actually kind of going right back to that same period of time since we're celebrating the greatest rags to riches stories and yours is definitely right at the top. If you could go back to that teenage kid in East Baltimore and right before he shipped out, right before your mom left four hours before you were even leaving and tell them that you would end up where you are on this Forbes list, recognizing the most successful people, a billionaire who sold their company to Microsoft for billions, that, you know, you basically your wildest dreams come true. What would you tell that guy? Well, I tell him, you know, more about the right thing to do than you can possibly imagine. Just trust your judgment, son. You'll be OK. OK, great. Well, thank you guys so much. The book is full of these kinds of stories.