Introducing Hamilton Chan, Esq.

- [Announcer] This is an audio course. Thank you for listening - [Kwame] Hamilton, thanks for joining us today. - [Hamilton] Thank you for having me, Kwame. - [Kwame] It is our pleasure. How would you start us off by telling the audience a little bit about yourself and what you do? - [Hamilton] Absolutely. There's no subject that I love more than talking about myself so thank you for giving me that opportunity. Tell you a little bit, I always start with the fact that I'm born and raised in Los Angeles and maybe that's top of mind right now because Lakers are actively trying to recruit some star players to their team to join LeBron James and Anthony Davis. So I'm really excited about everything going on in Laker land, but I'm born and raised in Los Angeles. I ended up going to Harvard for college. I was a psychology major. Ended up then working at JP Morgan in investment banking in Hong Kong and New York and then went to Harvard Law School and that's really where I learned a lot about negotiations. Negotiation workshop was my favorite class there. I ended up being a teaching assistance in the Harvard Law School Program on Negotiation and I, well had the opportunity in fact to share the stage with Roger Fisher, the author of "Getting to Yes" and to work with the wonderful folks at the Program on Negotiation over there. And I taught the course during law school. Like I taught it in the summer to our practicing attorneys and business executives and then I got to use it in the real world. So I ended up coming back to Los Angeles and working at the law firm of Munger, Tolles and Olson as a corporate transactional attorney. I did deals for Kobe Bryan whom I helped buy a basketball team in Italy. And I also represented Berkshire Hathaway who does obviously huge deals. And I ultimately then moved on to MGM working in business affairs. I helped the studio negotiate contracts with actors, producers, writers, and directors. Ultimately though, I found my calling in entrepreneurship. I was the son of an entrepreneur and had worked at my family business ever since I was a little kid. And somehow the pull of that ultimately grabbed me back and so I joined Charlie Chan Printing as its CEO and then ended up running this commercial printing company for 16 years. It was definitely a labor of love and it was amazing working with my dad. And I think that's when I truly cut my teeth as a negotiation expert because as a small medium sized business owner you are negotiating every single day on the job. So you're negotiating with investors, you're negotiating with customers, with employees with customers, with vendors, everybody. So I felt like I negotiated every single day on the job with on that for the 16 years that I ran the business. I also started a tech startup that was incubated by Y Combinator and that raised about 1.7 million of seed venture capital funding. So I ran both companies at the same time. Ultimately in 2016, I sold my businesses and I started to turn to executive coaching and I ended up coaching a bunch of tech company founders through Y Combinator, through the YC network and I really enjoyed doing that. And then following that, I ended up getting a position as director of executive education at Loyola Law School where I'm a professor and I run the executive education program that's including starting the website, building the platform and we just launched a couple months ago. We have a online platform that provides for online coursework. We also have on-campus classes and our very first launch class was an online course on negotiations and talking about that and talking about negotiations is what brings me here. And I can't believe how long I just droned on about myself. Thank you, Kwame. You are a saint for listening to all of that and to your listeners as well. - [Kwame] No, this was great. And listeners I bet you can understand why I am so excited to have Hamilton on the show. This is going to be great. And in our conversation leading up to this, you've identified three areas that we want to focus on today. First, building rapport. Number two, staying strong and number three, posturing. And I am really excited to get into this because especially staying strong and posturing, those are things that we haven't gone too in depth on. So I'm excited to see where you go.