The Long View: Chris Nassetta, President and CEO of Hilton

**Chris Nassetta** (0:07)
AI affords extraordinary opportunities to make the digital experiences much, much better, much more customization choice. I think it will revolutionize the way people interact with us digitally.

**Eric Veiel** (0:23)
Welcome back to The Angle from T. Rowe Price, a podcast for curious investors. Just a reminder that outside of the US and Australia, this podcast is for investment professionals only. For this episode of The Long View, I sat down with Chris Nassetta, president and CEO of Hilton. Chris has led Hilton for nearly two decades, navigating the global financial crisis, COVID and the entrance of new competitors. We discussed his leadership journey, Hilton's evolution as a brand led global business, the importance of culture, and how one of the world's most recognized travel brands continues to evolve.
So thanks for joining us on The Angle, Chris.

**Chris Nassetta** (0:58)
Yeah, happy to do it, Eric. Thanks for having me.

**Eric Veiel** (1:00)
So let's start at the beginning. You grew up here in Northern Virginia. And one of the things that I've always been-

**Chris Nassetta** (1:06)
I grew up like nobody can see us, but five miles from where we're sitting is where I grew up. And I live about, believe it or not, I live about a mile from where I grew up.

**Eric Veiel** (1:14)
So you haven't made it very far in life.

**Chris Nassetta** (1:15)
My mother's 93 years old, still lives in the house I grew up in. And yeah, so I did-
you know, it's an interesting journey for me. I did live in Beverly Hills for a few years when I took this job almost 20 years ago. I had to move my family out there. And then of course we moved the business back. And in the hotel business, you know, it's almost like a military life. Typically, you know, people move around the world. Like most of our senior people are moving all around the world every two, three, four years. My existence in the roles I've had is sort of the opposite. I have been- other than my time at Beverly Hills, I have been in and around DC as my home base. But I travel 80 percent of the time. So like a lot of my teams, they move every few years, but then they're relatively static where they are until they move again, where my life is like weekend warrior.
I try and make it home on a Friday night to Sunday morning. I'm off to China first thing Sunday as an example, this coming Sunday. So I'm gone 75, 80 percent of the time. But yes, this is my home base, born and raised, born at Georgetown Hospital nearby.

**Eric Veiel** (2:28)
Excellent. So one of the things that I love is that, I think you were 16, you got your first job on Capitol Hill, but it wasn't like clerking for some powerful senator. You were in the engineering department, proverbially the engineering department of a Holiday Inn. I think that means plunging toilets and changing light bulbs.

**Chris Nassetta** (2:43)
Yeah. Well, and other things. It was 4th and C Street, and my parents were fabulous. My mom still alive, my dad passed away. Fabulous parents. If you wanted to have spending money and go to the movies and do all that kind of stuff, you had to have jobs.
You had to make a living, so to speak, even as a kid. And so as a kid, I was super entrepreneurial, more than anybody wants to know. But I had a lot of different businesses. When I was single, upper single digits, and then into my early teen years of like lawn mowing business, paper route business, painting businesses, snow plowing. I was very, in part because I'm fairly entrepreneurial by nature, but in part out of necessity.

**Eric Veiel** (3:27)
So when you graduated from UVA, you got into real estate development. So not directly into the hotel business, but into real estate development. What drew you to that business?

**Chris Nassetta** (3:37)
Well, it's interesting. I went to McIntyre School of Commerce at UVA, undergraduate business school, graduated a long time ago.
And when I got out, like everybody, I was like trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. And at that time, you know, what was most popular was like investment banking. That was like the, I don't know what the equivalent of like AI today or, you know, the Internet or, you know, sharing economy, pick the private equity. You know, we go through these phases. Sometimes you have multiple industries that are sort of in favor. At that time, when I was coming out of business school, it was really investment banking and all the training programs. And I did all the interviewing for that. But my family, you know, back to that, you know, was in the real estate development business. And I didn't ever work there directly, but I worked with my father and uncle in summers, other summers, where I was like running numbers and doing things, you know, back when we didn't have computers and literally like graph paper and a pencil and an eraser, you know. And as I was interviewing for all the investment banking jobs, and those, you know, some of the great investment banks, I had some opportunities and great training programs. I realized I really, you know, while I knew that would be good for me that, you know, I was more interested in being in and around real estate, real estate finance, and the like. And I wanted to like get to work. I mean, like I'm a really sort of pragmatic, you know, hard work and like, I want to go out and do stuff. So I started looking, looking around and found an opportunity with Oliver Carr, which was the biggest regional developer, you know, Oliver Carr, who's still alive. By the way, I went last summer to his 100th birthday. An amazing person built an amazing business. And I thought they were doing some really interesting things in terms of he was very focused on city planning. He was very early in the days of the suburban expansion. And I just was swept away by all of that.