According to celebrated Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Jeff Hoffman is happily in the latter camp. The and humanitarian behind Priceline/Booking.com and uBid—also a Grammy- and Emmy-winning producer—now spends much of his time helping turn other people’s ideas into solutions. As board chair of the Global Entrepreneurship Network and a founding board member of the Unreasonable Group, he helps channel capital, mentorship, and momentum to problem solvers in 200+ countries. His test is simple: Does it make life better? Think milk without livestock for places without refrigeration, drone fleets that replant forests, devices that pull clean water from thin air.

In this conversation, Hoffman lays out which parts of business translate to civic work—clear value propositions, defined audiences, repeatable playbooks, and measurable outcomes—and what doesn’t. He explains how to decide when to scale and when to go deep, and how to tell stories that move people to act. Unreasonable? Yes—and exactly the kind of stubborn optimism real-world problems require.

America for Bulgaria Foundation: You have done so much across so many industries—you’ve founded companies, produced music and TV, advised global leaders. Is there a thread that connects it all?

Jeff Hoffman: It’s funny because I don’t really like the word, but the thread is “entrepreneurship.” The word has become limiting. When I ask people around the world, “Do you want to be an entrepreneur?” a lot of them say no. They’ll tell me, “I’m not technical,” or “I don’t know how to do apps,” or “I don’t care about money,” because they only hear about the rich entrepreneurs. If it were up to me, I’d rename it “self-determination.”

Entrepreneurship is a mindset, not a job. It’s the mindset of change—making things better, not waiting for someone else. In our nonprofit, we’re on the ground in 200 countries. I was just in Bulgaria, but I’m all over the world, and in so many places people wait for the government to fix a problem, which might happen “maybe” or “never,” instead of fixing it themselves. The entrepreneurial attitude says, “This is not OK, and I’m going to fix it.” It also says, “I may not love my present, but I can design my future.” That’s why I call it self-determination.

The thread is teaching people how to help themselves—the mindset and the skill set. The most common thing I hear is, “I have an amazing idea; I just don’t know how to start.” Step one is the part people don’t know. That’s what we do all over the world. That’s been my focus for a long time.

ABF: What projects—business, creative, or humanitarian—are capturing your imagination in 2025?

J.H.: The ones that excite me most are solving real-world problems. Examples: a group producing meat—from cells—so you can have a steak or cheeseburger without giving birth to a cow, raising it, or killing it. Someone else is doing the same with milk. In many parts of the world after mother’s milk, babies still drink milk, but there’s no cattle and no refrigeration. That entrepreneur found a way to make milk with no cattle and no refrigeration. There’s an army of drones that can plant about 100,000 trees a day—around a million a month—with no humans. Another team created a box that pulls moisture from the air, cleans it, and dispenses a bottle of water, clean drinking water out of thin air. Those are the kinds of solutions that excite me—people solving quality-of-life problems by turning ideas into products and businesses.

ABF: What do you say to someone in a fairly under-resourced place who has a great idea but feels the odds are stacked against them?

J.H.: Everybody feels that, even people in the United States. The difference is that, in the US, the odds are stacked because 500 other people are doing the same thing; it’s competition. Elsewhere the challenge might be money or infrastructure. It’s not easy anywhere; it’s just a different “hard.” That’s why the Global Entrepreneurship Network is in 200 countries—to solve exactly that problem. I was just in Bulgaria, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Armenia; we’re setting up infrastructure everywhere. Unreasonable operates in about 187 countries. A lot of people are bringing resources into those communities.

There’s another part: post-pandemic, everyone and everything you need is online, so you have no excuse for not finding them—provided you can get online. Governments need to ensure people can access the internet. Once you can, there’s no resource you can’t access. During COVID everyone had to figure out how to do business online. So everyone and everything you need is out there, but you have to go find them.

ABF: So how do you help connect aspiring entrepreneurs with resources?

J.H.: Courses, online videos, events, speakers, guidance step by step. Determined entrepreneurs figure it out regardless, but we provide support for everyone. A young Bulgarian entrepreneur reached out to me completely on his own. We started talking; when I came to his country, he asked to meet in person. Determined entrepreneurs don’t accept the “hard part.” They don’t make excuses. But not everybody is built that way, which is why organizations like Unreasonable and the Global Entrepreneurship Network exist—to provide guidance.

ABF: In your book SCALE, you outline what it takes to grow a business. What lessons from business apply to civic-minded initiatives?

J.H.: NGOs and nonprofits often say, “We’re not a business,” right after telling me they’re having trouble raising money and scaling their audience. The same principles apply. We’ve grown our nonprofit presence to 200 countries. At Unreasonable, we’ve collectively raised $11 billion over the years. Why? Because you absolutely run your nonprofit like a business.

Businesses ask: Who cares about what we do? Who is my customer? How do I reach them? What language do I use? How do I inspire them? Same for nonprofits. On fundraising: Who resonates with what you do and is willing to reach into their pocket? In business the return is financial; in nonprofits the return is impact. In both cases people ask, “How much do you need, and what do I get back?” Too many nonprofits can’t answer what changes because of the money they receive. If a child visited a museum and it inspired a life choice, that’s impact! It’s the equivalent of a business selling 1,000 units. Civic organizations often don’t think that way. The best NGOs run themselves professionally around those questions.

ABF: Are there any business lessons that don’t translate to civic work?

J.H.: Profit. Donors don’t care about profit; they care about impact. They want measurable results, and many nonprofits can’t quantify impact. Saying “we inspire people” isn’t a measurement. You have to define what you will measure to prove impact so donors come back next year. Impact isn’t “we built a building.” It’s “how did lives change because of what you built?” If you can’t quantify that, I wouldn’t be a donor either. In the civic world, some areas are easier to measure: medical research or surgeries, for example. Before GoFundMe, I was on the board of an organization that funded surgeries for families with no insurance. Easy to measure: a child needed a liver transplant for $60,000; we raised it; the child is alive. For other areas it’s not that clear, but you still have to find a way to measure and report impact

Preserving history and storytelling are positive impacts, too. Many people care deeply about preserving heritage and stories. Those can be measured as well.

ABF: Not every local solution needs to become global. How do you recognize when something is ready to scale and when it’s better kept small and focused?

J.H.: There are two parts. First: should you scale? Our opinion doesn’t matter. The only opinion that matters is whether there’s a global audience interested in what you do. In many cases, the answer is no, and that’s fine. If the answer is yes—there’s demand and need globally—then the second question is: are you ready to scale?

That’s the franchise model. From the first McDonald’s to the next and the next only works if you have a playbook—a cookie-cutter guide to “here’s how we do it.” If your thing isn’t replicable, it’s not really scalable; you’re just building different things everywhere. The good news now is you can scale digitally. A major museum announced post-pandemic that they’ll never build another building; they’re investing in high-tech immersive digital experiences—VR, 3D, audio, video tours—so visitors anywhere can go deep. It’s not the same as a physical facility, but it’s far more cost-effective to scale internationally with technology.

ABF: You’ve helped people grow their impact. What’s one mistake you see social entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders make again and again?

J.H.: Believing everybody cares about what they care about because they’re so passionate. They don’t segment. If you sell jeans only for 12-year-old girls, you don’t pitch a 35-year-old man. You know where to advertise. In your world, people say, “How can anybody not care?” But many won’t. You have to profile: who will care and why? What else do they care about? Years ago, we discovered that people who collect watches often collect coins or stamps, so we went to coin and stamp shows. That’s profiling.

Another big one: trying to convert the people least likely to love you. I tell people: stop wasting time overcoming “no.” Your job is to find “yes.” The first layer of growth and scale is the people who love you immediately. I call them “second-slide customers.” I once went on a sales call with a 20-slide deck. The first prospect listened to all 20 slides, took notes, said, “Interesting; I’ll get back to you.” My sales lead thought he could talk him into it. The second prospect said on slide two, “Where have you been all my life? I’m in.” My instruction to the team: stop trying to talk 20-slide people into yes; spend your time finding all the second-slide people. In nonprofits it’s the same. At Unreasonable, we raise so much so fast that we often don’t fundraise again for three or four years. We figured out who loves us and we talk to them—not to people who don’t.

I focus on the front end: marketing, messaging, and brand. I’m not the ops or finance guy; I don’t design customer service. I do the brand work that resonates and pulls people in. I also help write pitches and teach pitching. I just taught “the perfect pitch” class in Kazakhstan—how to present yourself to get funding.

ABF: At the America for Bulgaria Foundation, we use storytelling to highlight the work of civic champions—people strengthening their communities, often with little recognition. You use storytelling as a teaching tool. What makes a story truly powerful in your experience?

J.H.: People remember stories; they don’t remember presentations. Storytelling captures the human soul and emotion. What drives a story is impact. On the donor side, we often hear: “I’m passionate about the Incan civilization; I want to build a museum.” That comes across as: you found something you think is cool and want money to keep doing it. That’s not a story.

A story starts at the outcome: how will this change people? Maybe you’re showing how a culture’s innovations can be applied to life today. Then, when I ask, “How will you do that?” you can say, “We’ll build a museum; we’ll guide visitors chronologically; we’ll explain the civilization’s contributions and how to apply those lessons.” That’s a story that goes somewhere. “I want to build a building; give me money” is 99% of pitches. Tell a story that goes somewhere after the thing is built—or after it scales. Why does it need to go to America? Not “because we want to expand,” but “because if people hear this story and learn this lesson, it will impact them in this way.” Then I’m in: I’ll help you make that impact. How do we do it?

ABF: You’ve built businesses, won awards, worked across industries and continents. Of all your accomplishments, what achievement are you proudest of?

J.H.: For me it’s not the businesses or awards—it’s the nonprofits. At World Youth, we’ve rescued abandoned children whose parents were killed in civil wars. Recently a headmaster in Uganda called about “our children.” I was ready to explain that our kids are orphans without family support. She said, “I had to call to tell you: the top five performing students in the entire school are your orphans.” I said, “Wait, what?” She said they’d never seen that before.

We talk to our kids about education being the key to their future—knowledge as wealth. To see them thriving and building their own lives, that’s everything. And at Unreasonable, when we fund and mentor the kinds of companies I mentioned—food, water, trees—that’s what I’m proud of. Food for people who had none, clean water where people were dying from dirty water, access to education where there are no schools. That’s the list that matters to me.

For World Youth, we support homes in Central and South America and in Africa. In the US, we don’t run orphanages; we run programs in inner cities, almost all single-parent homes. Most of our homes are in Africa—Uganda, Ethiopia, Nigeria—and then Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras.

ABF: You’ve visited Bulgaria before. Did anything stay with you from that trip—a moment, a person, an impression?

J.H.: I think I’ve visited three times. Partly because I have friends there—friends I made the first time I went. I was doing a big youth entrepreneurship event in Ljubljana, Slovenia. A busload of about 25 Bulgarians in their twenties raised money among themselves to get a bus, hotels, and food to attend my event. That’s how I met them. They invited me to Bulgaria afterward.

What drew me was the optimism of youth. I’ve met older people who still have a bit of the old Soviet mindset, or who aren’t unhappy but don’t expect things to get much better. Then I met young people who said, “Bulgaria can be a lot better, and we’re going to do it.” A young guy named Boris—he’s 24—believes the country can raise its game. He’s traveled and thinks people are too willing to accept the status quo. He doesn’t want “not so bad”; he wants “really good.” These young entrepreneurs—some civic, not just business—believe they can make the country better. Those are the people I want to spend time with.

ABF: Many of our newsletter readers—teachers, nonprofit leaders, journalists—are working hard to make Bulgaria a better place. If they were in the room right now, what would you want them to hear?

J.H.: Don’t stop. Don’t give up. Change happens because someone is strong enough to push to the finish line. It’s doable; there are examples everywhere. Reach out the way Boris did. Reach out to people around the world who’ve done what you’re trying to do and invite them to learn about Bulgaria and help. Collaboration goes both ways—you have things to share, and so do they. The whole world is connected now. Tell people what you’re trying to do, why it matters, ask for help, and offer help. You’d be amazed how many global collaborations start because someone reached out.

At the forum in Bulgaria [Jeff was a speaker at the Balkan eCommerce Summit 2025 in Sofia, Bulgaria in April 2025, ed.], people asked Boris how he “got dinner with Mr. Hoffman.” He said, “I asked.” Some even asked me if he was related to me. No, he just asked! Boldly ask. Reach out. Share what you’re doing and why and what you love about your country. It’s contagious.

At Unreasonable, we’re looking for people who think they can change the world or their country. Those are the people we want to help.