After serving as a U.S. Navy SEAL, I started a business. In four years, it failed incredibly, but I learned a lot about business, raising equity, and choosing partners.
I did 20 years in the Navy. I joined the Navy right out of high school and went through Navy boot camp, went to SEAL training, got done with that, and then showed up at a SEAL team, where I did 20 years. That was pretty much my whole adult life.
During the last years of university I started an online business with a couple of friends selling domain names - we started by cybersquatting and then we became a real business. Someone bought us after three years and we made a good deal.
My father built a small business from scratch with years and years of sweat equity and many, many weeks away from home. He employed about 50 people, and by the end of his working years, the business was highly successful. He became a millionaire.
Nobody in my generation ever started out in private equity. We got there by accident. There was no private equity business - actually, the word didn't even exist - when I started. I got there out of the purest of happenstance and so I think many people find what they really enjoy doing just in that way. So another piece of advice for you is: don't worry too much about what you're going to be doing when you get out of business school - life will come your way.
I have become a subscriber for 'Business Week.' It teaches me a lot about business, and I have really started to get into it. I'm interested in business and learning about how everything works.
I must say that in my early years, I was incredibly aggressive. I was working as hard as I could to build a business, to try to dominate a business. And I probably irritated a lot of people.
I actually met one of my business partners [Neal Dodson] at the Governor's School summer program, so we've known each other since we were 15 and 16 years old, and we both ended up at Carnegie Mellon together. He started working for a producer out of school after a few years, and then we started the company together.
If you've never met a Navy SEAL and you ran into one at a bar, you probably still wouldn't know he's a Navy SEAL.
Being a Navy SEAL and sniper taught me all about risk management. Take away all the risk variables under your control and reduce it to an acceptable level. The same fundamentals apply in business.
A lot of people want to be an entrepreneur, so it's important to know that there's a lot of ways to be an entrepreneur. One of the ways is to go about and start your own business. There are also ways that you can gain experience in the context of a larger business, like raising your hand to helm a new office. As you are gaining your skills to run your own business successfully, the first way is to think about how you can do so based on where you already are.
I never had a job. I bought my first house within a year of getting out of school, and I built a custom one four and a half years later. The Art Center didn't teach much about business, but I learned a lot from the Fortune 500 companies that were my clients.
I spent my entire childhood with my father. I started my first business at 16, and we became business partners. He's not just a mentor and somebody that I look up to, but he's also someone whom I took work ethic and determination and all of those qualities from.
I spent some time studying Toyota, because how could a loom maker - they made looms. That was their business for 50 years, 35 years - and then they decided to go into the car business after everyone else was in the car business.
You have to be passionate about your business. If you don't love your business, you are doing a terrible disservice to your customers and clients, your team members and business partners, your family and yourself.
Ludacris is a very smart individual. He's about his business. Everything is business with him. So I learned a lot about making deals from him.
The best thing that happened from that situation when I failed was the fact that I failed and I failed because I was trying to do things that I don't like to do. I like to make movies and I like the creative process. I don't really care about the business end of it. It's not my thing. So I was all of sudden totally immersed in the business end of it and dealing with human resources, lawyers, and accountants, and so on. It wasn't for me.