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Technology aside, you must work harder and longer

Saturday August 15 2015
daymond

FUBU founder and one of the hosts of the TV programme Shark Tank, Daymond John. PHOTO | COURTESY

FUBU founder and one of the hosts of the TV programme Shark Tank, was in Nairobi for the Global Entrepreneurship Summit.

He spoke to Wallace Kantai about how to make it as an American entrepreneur. He began his business in his mother’s garage — even mortgaged the family’s house.

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Daymond, you’re famous here because of Shark Tank which airs on local station NTV. The story of how you started FUBU sounds like a myth, but is reality.

It’s absolutely true. I had a couple of hats and shirts and I would put them on these new things called videos – which weren’t really popular at the time, and people thought I was a huge company.

We went out and started getting a lot of orders. To make a long story short, I asked my mother — can we mortgage our home? This is all we had to our name. We’d actually rent out half the home to a bunch of strangers because we needed to pay the rent. She said sure, since you have a bunch of orders.

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You know, sales cures all, being an entrepreneur. She said, once you make all these sales, you can put the money back into the house. And that’s how we started the business. Now, I almost lost the house — I didn’t have financial intelligence — but that’s a whole other story, still I found great partners, kept selling the goods, and that’s how I’m here with you now.

What about fear of failure, though? You were mortgaging your mother’s house!

It was a very big step, but I tell everybody that I had to close FUBU three times from 1989 to 1992 because I ran out of money, but I kept on trying because entrepreneurs will fail. But it’s only failure because you put the label “failure” on it.

I didn’t really fail — it was a process for me to get to a better level to make more sales to make more money to create a bigger business.

In Kenya, we know you best for Shark Tank. For Shark Tank, the argument is that it shows a simplistic picture of entrepreneurship. It is on television, it’s very quick, and the whole back story may not necessarily be there.

Well, it’s very quick because it’s television. The shortest pitch on Shark Tank has been 20 minutes, the longest was two and a half hours. You only see eight minutes of that on television.

It then takes us anywhere from three months to six months to close the deal, because I have to find out whether you were telling the truth; Did you really have that amount of sales? Do you have the trade mark?

It looks simplistic because at the end of the day you have to be able to digest it in an hour. But it’s not simplistic — it’s very hard work, it’s real work; these are real entrepreneurs, and this is our real money.

Are we getting to the point where we’re too quick to want results? That if people do not make it in a month, they want to move out of that business?

One hundred per cent. People want to read in 140 characters, they want to wake up like in a music video: Where at the beginning of the video they’re poor and at the end they have the car, the girl or the guy and the mansion! It’s not like that.

Even though technology has changed a lot of things, the fundamentals of business are still the same. You have to get up before everybody, you have to bust your butt, and go to bed after everybody. You can thank everybody for your success but only blame one person for your failure – yourself. That’s never going to change. There will never be a shortcut to success.

You’re in Africa, you’ve come here as part of the GES, and you sit on an important presidential panel in the US. What has your experience been like? What sort of entrepreneurs have you spoken to?

I’m coming here as a PAGE ambassador — Presidential Ambassador of Global Entrepreneurship. I have seen amazing entrepreneurs here.

I have seen people who have created things such as $5 solar lamps that will hopefully replace kerosene; I have seen people who have helped develop land for agriculture; I have seen the conversation about bringing back textiles to this amazing country.

I have seen amazing things and more importantly, I have seen people who have inspired me, who have way less than I had to start a business, and I believe they’ll go on and succeed and be way more successful than I have been or I am. I have heard too many great things about this country, and I have also heard bad things that I ignored, and I’m glad that I came here.

I’ve met amazing people, and I had no idea that Shark Tank actually played here. I go down the street and see so many amazing people who talk about entrepreneurship, how they want to empower themselves and change the world, and it’s an amazing high.

I’m glad that President Barack Obama and the White House have appointed me as an ambassador for global entrepreneurship because I think instead of inspiring people here, I have got more inspired than anybody else.

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