Speaker Spotlight: Jesse Itzler – Keynote Speaker on Mindset, Endurance, and Building Your Life Resume

20 Aug Speaker Spotlight: Jesse Itzler – Keynote Speaker on Mindset, Endurance, and Building Your Life Resume

Jesse Itzler is a keynote speaker who has co-founded and sold two companies for hundreds of millions of dollars, co-owns the Atlanta Hawks, and wrote the New York Times bestseller Living with a SEAL. Through Collaborative Agency Group, he brings audiences a candid, high-energy case for building what he calls a “life resume” instead of just a career resume. Here is what event planners should know before booking him.

Jesse Itzler Keynote Speaker: From Marquis Jet to Living with a SEAL

Itzler co-founded Marquis Jet, the largest prepaid private jet card company in the world, which he and his partner sold to Berkshire Hathaway. He later co-founded Zico Coconut Water and sold that company to Coca-Cola. Both exits give him firsthand, specific stories about spotting an opportunity, taking a risk, and building something from nothing, the kind of material that lands with sales, entrepreneurship, and leadership audiences.

He is also a part-owner of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and the New York Times bestselling author of Living with a SEAL, the account of the 31 days he spent training with a former Navy SEAL who moved into his house. A second book, Living with the Monks, followed the same format. Before any of that, he worked as a rapper on MTV and managed the group Run-DMC, which he uses to talk about reinvention.

What Jesse Itzler Speaks About

Itzler’s keynotes are built around a simple idea: professional success and a well-lived life are not the same thing, and most people over-invest in one and under-invest in the other. His most requested topics include:

Build Your Life Resume, on designing a fuller life through specific, repeatable habits, not just career wins. Ready, Fire, Aim, on taking action before every variable is known. The Spiritual Billionaire, on creating luck and meaning inside a business career. Ignoring the Tap on Your Shoulder, on pushing past the voice that tells people to settle. And The Bus Ride, on what he learned running an ultramarathon and living with monks and Navy SEALs.

He backs the philosophy with numbers, including completing a 100-mile ultramarathon and an Ultraman triathlon (a 6.2-mile swim, 261-mile bike ride, and 52.4-mile run), so the “push past your limits” message is not just a slogan.

Who Should Book Jesse Itzler

Itzler fits sales kickoffs, leadership offsites, and general sessions where the goal is to re-energize a room, not just inform it. Corporate audiences respond to the entrepreneurship and risk-taking material; wellness and incentive events respond to the endurance and mindset stories. The one mistake planners make is booking him purely as a “motivational speaker” and expecting inspirational platitudes. His strength is specific, sometimes uncomfortable stories about the cost of the choices he made, which is what makes the message stick after the event ends.

He is a strong fit alongside other leadership speakers on a multi-speaker agenda, and works equally well as a standalone keynote or closing speaker.

Planners booking Itzler for a general audience also benefit from his name recognition outside the speaking circuit. He is married to Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx, and the two are frequently covered together as one of the more visible entrepreneurial couples in business media. For events where the audience skips speaker bios and looks up the name on their phone during the introduction, that recognition tends to raise engagement before he says a word.

The Bottom Line

Jesse Itzler is a keynote speaker for event planners who want an entrepreneurship and mindset session backed by real financial outcomes (Marquis Jet, Zico) and real physical ones (ultramarathons, Ultraman, 31 days with a Navy SEAL), not just a motivational talk. He is available for 2026 events through Collaborative Agency Group.