I keep track of it so you
never have to feel left behind.

Before any of this, we ran a moving and storage company. I started Lift It at 23 out of my college apartment with a mountain of debt — doing laundry in my bathtub, jogging to the office to save gas money. No outside investment, no line of credit, which mostly meant that when something went wrong, it went wrong on us. A little over two years later we were doing $1.2 million a year, running installations in more than thirty states.

The part I actually remember isn't the number. It's cold-calling national furniture manufacturers — University Loft, Foliot, Dickson — from a company none of them had heard of, and slowly talking our way into becoming one of Dickson's preferred installers in the country, furnishing some of the largest apartment communities in the U.S. Kim was in it. My brother was in it. I learned more about marketing in those two years than in anything I've bought since.

A few years later I started a podcast. That was 2015; it's 360 episodes now. The honest value of it was never the audience — it was a decade of asking people who had already done it how they actually did it. Daymond John, Barbara Corcoran, Guy Kawasaki, and a long line of others who were generous about the parts most people leave out. I'm also an Entrepreneur in Residence at Founder Institute, the Silicon Valley accelerator.