School of Hard Knocks: The Graduates Behind Jesse Cole, John Caudwell, Jim Keyes and Kim Perell

Jason Mickool

Founder & CEO, Florida Financial Advisors — Tampa, FL

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram

Jason Mickool was never built to be an employee. He dropped out of college, got fired repeatedly and watched multiple early businesses fail, until he found himself sitting with his wife wondering what came next. Her answer changed everything: stop asking someone else for an opportunity and bet on yourself.

The School of Hard Knocks tells it plainly — he started Florida Financial Advisors from his kitchen table after years in corporate leadership and repeated firings. The starting point was humbler than the headline suggests. A NABIP Florida speaker biography records that in 2017, at age 45, he started with no practice, no clients and no brand.

Eight years later he had built the firm into a six-brand financial services platform with $5 billion in assets under advisement and more than 700 advisors, and sold 60 percent of the company to AmeriLife. The same biography describes a platform generating more than $38 million in EBITDA with a valuation exceeding $400 million, and an Inc. 5000 fastest-growing company.

The man employers kept letting go built the kind of company other firms want to buy into.

Mickool has turned his own second chance into a teaching business.

He founded Greatness Lab to help people reach the highest level in life and business, and wrote Built to Lead, Built to Scale, a number-one new release on Amazon in which — as he puts it — he shares real profit-and-loss statements and the decisions that built his company rather than theory.

He also founded Take The Power Back, connecting college students directly with startup and entrepreneurial careers. He lives in Tampa with his wife and business partner, Allyson.

School of Hard Knocks Podcast — “Jason Mickool | He Got Fired From Every Job… Then Built a $130M Company”
NABIP Florida — “Jason Mickool”
School of Hard Knocks — “He Got Fired From Every Job… Then Built a $130M Company | Jason Mickool” (video)

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Greg Perlman  ·  Jason Wersland

Jason Wersland

Founder, Therabody (Theragun) — Los Angeles, CA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X

Dr. Jason Wersland grew up on a Utah farm, where resourcefulness was a way of life — when you live on a farm, as he tells it, you cannot run to Home Depot, so you figure it out. He became a chiropractor in Los Angeles, working with his hands.

Then, in 2007, a motorcycle crash changed the direction of his life: he T-boned a Volkswagen at about 50 miles an hour and was left with a nine-millimeter disc bulge in his neck, no insurance and, by his own account, $84 to his name.

The nerve pain did not stop at night, and the only options on offer were surgery and drugs. So at 3 a.m. in his garage he built his own answer — a Makita jigsaw with the blade rolled up in pliers, wrapped in a dish towel and electrical tape. It worked.

What followed was not overnight success but eight years and five prototypes, from 2008 to 2016, testing on patients and athletes. Three early business partners let him down, and he spent close to $250,000 of his own money buying his company back before a handshake deal with Ben Nazarian gave Theragun the partner who could scale it.

Shopify reports more than 6.5 million Theragun devices sold, and the number one brand in its category.

"That’s when it hit me: I’m dependent on someone else’s time to treat me."

The device Wersland built to treat himself became Therabody, a Los Angeles wellness company whose range has grown from a single percussive device into a full ecosystem covering recovery, sleep, stress and skincare, guided by a scientific advisory board.

His route into elite sport was earned one treatment room at a time, all the way to Real Madrid and Cristiano Ronaldo. His founding principle still runs the brand: treat the injury, not just the pain — a tool built in a garage so one man could heal now helps millions of people do the same.

Shopify — “How Therabody Turned a Homemade Tool Into a Global Recovery Brand”
Adam Mendler — “Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Therabody Founder Jason Wersland”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Jason Mickool  ·  Jesse Cole

Jesse Cole

Founder, Fans First Entertainment (Savannah Bananas) — Savannah, GA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X

Jesse Cole dreamed of playing professional baseball, until a torn shoulder ended his pitching career at Wofford College. He moved to the business side instead, becoming general manager of the struggling Gastonia Grizzlies in his early twenties and filling the gaps between innings with dancing players, grandmothers in beauty pageants and ever wilder promotions.

Attendance climbed, and he bought the team in 2014. Then he and his wife, Emily, fell for Savannah's Historic Grayson Stadium and launched the Savannah Bananas in 2016. The beginning was financially disastrous.

They had taken on more than $1 million in debt and sold only a handful of tickets; in January 2016 their operating account ran out of money.

The Coles sold their house in North Carolina, emptied their savings and retirement accounts, put roughly their last $25,000 into payroll and moved into a tiny converted garage in Savannah, sleeping on an air mattress. When the games began, fans responded — the Bananas sold out their first season and kept selling out.

Cole created Banana Ball, a fast, entertainment-first version of the game, and the School of Hard Knocks describes a business reportedly valued at $1 billion, with a ticket waitlist exceeding five million people and no outside investors.

"Fans first. They deserve to know everything."

Fans First Entertainment remains owned entirely by Jesse and Emily Cole, who have taken no outside equity investment. The organisation has grown to six teams playing to sellout crowds in major stadiums across America, while keeping direct tickets inexpensive and streaming games freely.

Cole has carried the philosophy into books including Find Your Yellow Tux, Fans First and Banana Land, and into keynote speaking — always in the yellow tuxedo that has become his trademark. The lesson of the air mattress stands: put the fan first, and the fans will carry you.

School of Hard Knocks Podcast — “Jesse Cole | He Was $1M in Debt… Now 5 Million People Want His Tickets”
Celebrity Net Worth — “Jesse Cole Net Worth”
The Learning Leader Show — “Jesse Cole: The Savannah Bananas and Fans First”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Jason Wersland  ·  Jhalesa Seymour

Jhalesa Seymour

Founder & CEO, Salt.XO — Miami, FL

Official links: Website · Instagram

Jhalesa Seymour's mother raised five children on a salary of about $30,000 — and, as Seymour tells it, they never wanted for anything. At the University of Central Florida, Seymour struggled with irritation from mainstream feminine hygiene products loaded with synthetic chemicals, and could not find products she felt supported her body's natural balance.

So, in her senior year, with no investors and just $67 to her name, she began handcrafting all-natural soaps in college, handing out free samples on campus and giving fellow students her personal number to text back their verdicts. They came back asking for more.

The numbers that followed, in her Business Insider as-told-to account, tell the story: $154,000 in 2018 making soaps out of her apartment, $1 million in profit the next year, and more than $16 million in sales since.

The School of Hard Knocks reports a brand generating more than $20 million a year, one launch producing $1 million in 30 minutes, a survived crisis of 20,000 orders to fulfil, and the first millionaire in her family by age 25.

Seymour is open about the source of the idea, telling CanvasRebel she had no prior skincare experience and felt God had whispered the ingredients into her ear.

"Salt XO is more than a brand. It’s a movement. And we’re just getting started."

Salt.XO's loyal community — the SaltBaes — has carried the brand from a college kitchen to national recognition, and Seymour has been deliberate about what the money means.

In her Business Insider account she explains that she pays herself a salary, reinvests the rest into her team and business, and is teaching her two young sons financial literacy, which she calls as important as literacy itself.

The girl whose mother stretched $30,000 across five children is now building the generational wealth — and the money lessons — she grew up without.

Urban Magazine — “Salt XO Celebrates Seven Years of Feminine Wellness and Empowerment”
CanvasRebel — “Meet Jhalesa Seymour”
School of Hard Knocks Podcast — “Jhalesa Seymour | She Started With $67… Now Her Soap Company Makes $20 Million/Year”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Jesse Cole  ·  Jim Keyes

Jim Keyes

Former CEO, 7-Eleven and Blockbuster; Founder, Education Is Freedom Foundation — Dallas, TX

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X

Jim Keyes grew up in poverty in a small town in central Massachusetts, in a three-room home without running water or electricity, the son of a father who worked in the local factory and struggled to get by — a path that seemed to be his destiny too. Instead, education became his way out.

He started flipping burgers at McDonald's at fifteen, worked as many as 70 hours a week through high school and college to pay for his education, and became the first in his family to attend college, earning a degree from Holy Cross and an MBA from Columbia.

He rose to chief executive of 7-Eleven, where, as his podcast biographies record, he increased shareholder value tenfold during his tenure and led the sale of the company to its Japanese licensee. He then took on one of retail's hardest jobs as chairman and CEO of Blockbuster during the entertainment industry's most disruptive years.

In 2005 he was inducted into the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans — the organisation that honours people who rose from humble beginnings. The factory town's expected future for him could hardly have been more wrong.

"Because of my background, I feel I have the ability to relate with everyone."

Keyes has spent his later career paying the education forward. He founded the Education Is Freedom Foundation, launched at Radio City Music Hall in 2002 with a keynote message from Nelson Mandela, and served as a founding director of the Dallas Education Foundation.

The Action Catalyst reports that Education Is Freedom has raised $450 million for its fellowships, scholarships and other programmes for hardworking students. His book, Education Is Freedom: The Future Is in Your Hands, makes his argument plain: learning is not just a route to a career, it is the key that unlocks personal freedom itself.

The Investor Relations Podcast — “Jim Keyes”
D Magazine — “Can Blockbuster Reinvent Itself”
The Action Catalyst — “Education is Freedom, with James Keyes – Episode 471 of The Action Catalyst Podcast”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Jhalesa Seymour  ·  John Caudwell

John Caudwell

Founder, Phones 4u / Caudwell Group — Stoke-on-Trent, UK

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram

John Caudwell was born in Birmingham and raised in Stoke-on-Trent, in Wellesley Street, Shelton, in a working-class family. His father had a stroke when John was fourteen and died four years later.

Caudwell abandoned his A-levels to become an apprentice at the Michelin tyre factory, worked there for years as an engineering foreman while earning an engineering qualification, and on the side ran a corner shop and a mail-order business selling clothing to motorcyclists. In 1987 he registered Midland Mobile Phones, initially taking on 26 Motorola phones at £1,350 each.

It took eight months to sell those 26 phones, at £2,500 each, to local plumbers, taxi drivers and television repairmen — and the company made a loss every month for its first two years. He kept going.

The business became the Caudwell Group, including the Singlepoint service provider, which he sold to Vodafone for £405 million in 2003, and the Phones 4u high-street chain.

By the time he sold the wider group in September 2006 for £1.46 billion to private equity firms Providence Equity Partners and Doughty Hanson, a business that once took eight months to sell 26 phones was selling 26 phones a minute and employing 8,000 people around the globe.

"There’s absolutely no value in wealth if you don’t do something with it that’s meaningful."

Giving has become Caudwell's second career. In 2000 he founded Caudwell Children, supporting disabled children and their families; he personally covers the charity's running and management costs so donations go directly to the children, and he also leads the mentoring charity Caudwell Youth.

In February 2013 he became one of the first Britons to sign the Giving Pledge, and he has since raised his commitment to 70 percent of his wealth, given during and after his lifetime. The apprentice from Stoke who sold phones one at a time now measures success by how much of the fortune goes back out.

Wikipedia — “John Caudwell”
OK! — “I'm a self-made billionaire - I've made a pledge that other rich people think is crazy”
Smiley Movement — “John Caudwell: From Mobile Retailer to Billionaire Philanthropist”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Jim Keyes  ·  John Imah

John Imah

Co-founder & CEO, SpreeAI — Los Angeles, CA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram · X

John Imah grew up in a Nigerian immigrant household in Dallas where money was tight and the expected paths were law or medicine — his family had sacrificed to move to America, and several relatives became doctors and nurses. Tech was not on the radar. John had other ideas.

At seven, he took apart the family computer — his parents were furious — and put it back together working. He taught himself to code, and before he turned sixteen he had launched two companies, a mobile game development business and one serving 3D professionals, and sold them both.

College at the University of Texas at Arlington led to a recruiting call from Samsung while he was still enrolled, then partnership and business-development roles at Take-Two Interactive, Twitch, Meta and Snap.

In 2023 he married that tech career to his lifelong love of fashion and co-founded SpreeAI, whose photorealistic AI try-on lets shoppers see clothing, jewelry and accessories on themselves before they buy. AfroTech reported the company had raised nearly $60 million by 2024, and in May 2025 SpreeAI announced a $1.5 billion valuation, with supermodel Naomi Campbell on its board.

The kid who dismantled the household computer now builds the shopping experience for everyone else.

"I was always looking for a way to merge tech and fashion."

Imah's mother, a formative influence on his eye for style, died of breast cancer, and he has since supported the American Cancer Society and STEM education initiatives in Nigeria and the United States. Recognition has followed the work: AfroTech named him a Visionary Founder on its Future 50 list, honoring technology disruptors.

For a generation of immigrant kids told to pick the safe profession, Imah's career is the counter-argument — proof that the interest nobody in the family quite understood can become the thing that changes the family's story.

AfroTech — “John Imah Sold 2 Companies Before He Was 16 Years Old, Now He's Leading A $1.5B AI-Powered Retail Company”
Wikipedia — “John Imah”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  John Caudwell  ·  John Morgan

John Morgan

Founder, Morgan & Morgan — Orlando, FL

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram · X

John Morgan was the eldest of five children in a family that struggled financially — born in Kentucky, raised from fourteen in Winter Park, Florida, working odd jobs from an early age and taking an eighteen-month break from university to sell ads and pay for law school. Then came the day that defined his life.

In 1977 his younger brother Tim, eighteen and working as a lifeguard at Walt Disney World, dove in to search for a missing girl, struck a submerged dock pylon and was paralyzed from the chest down. Doctors gave him ten years. The family hired a lawyer — and that lawyer failed them, while Disney refused to settle.

John vowed to become the lawyer his family never had. In 1988 he and his wife Ultima founded Morgan & Morgan in Orlando on a simple mission: fight for the people, not the powerful. He then did what the legal establishment called scandalous — advertised, heavily, on television and radio, so ordinary families would actually know his name.

The firm grew into what it bills as America's largest injury law firm, with more than 1,100 attorneys, and Forbes placed Morgan on its 2025 Billionaires List, reporting the firm generated over $2 billion in revenue in 2023.

"I see Tim in every single person who walks through our doors, and I’ll be fighting for them all until the day I die."

Beyond the courtroom, Morgan bankrolled two of Florida's biggest ballot fights: the medical marijuana amendment voters approved in 2016 — motivated, he has said, by Tim's paralysis and later struggle with cancer — and the amendment raising Florida's minimum wage toward $15 an hour, which passed in 2020.

He and Ultima have also given millions to food banks, the Harbor House domestic-violence shelter and his law school. Tim beat the doctors' ten-year prediction by decades. His brother built the firm that carries his story into courtrooms across America.

Morgan & Morgan — “Attorney John Morgan”
Central Florida Lifestyle — “Orlando’s John Morgan Named to Forbes 2025 Billionaires List”
Wikipedia — “John Morgan (lawyer)”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  John Imah  ·  Josh Elizetxe

Josh Elizetxe

Founder & CEO, SNOW — Phoenix, AZ

Official links: Website · Instagram

Josh Elizetxe — known to most customers as Josh Snow — did not have much as a kid. He grew up in a rough part of Phoenix, the kind of neighborhood where, as one podcast profile puts it, he could easily have joined a gang.

Instead he spent his afternoons in the Phoenix Public Library, working through the “For Dummies” books, teaching himself to code and starting a business from what he learned. The School of Hard Knocks Podcast tells the humbler version of the same years: a kid from humble beginnings, riding the city bus.

By seventeen, the AZ Tech Podcast reports, he was a millionaire, and the School of Hard Knocks says he sold his first company at that age.

He kept building — graduating summa cum laude from Arizona State's W. P. Carey School of Business at twenty while running a company from his dorm room, then starting Foresold, his holding company for online brands. In 2017 he founded SNOW, a premium teeth-whitening and oral care brand he has described as self-funded, carrying no outside capital and no debt.

The brand reports customers in more than 175 countries and over a million fans, and the School of Hard Knocks credits it with over nine figures a year in revenue, sold everywhere from its own site to Nordstrom Rack and CVS.

"Focus closely on the customers and the efficacy of your products first, then the design and marketing afterward."

SNOW's pitch was simple: professional-style whitening at home, at a price ordinary people could reach, from a founder who — by his own account on the Rich Ad Poor Ad podcast — paid himself $60,000 a year for a long time and plowed everything else back into the products.

He tells young founders to build one thing they can work on for decades instead of chasing the next shiny object. The kid from the library became the lesson he teaches: read everything, start early, and let the work compound.

School of Hard Knocks Podcast (Ausha) — “Josh "Snow" Elizetxe | Founder & CEO of Snow - On Selling a Company at 17, Building a 9-Figure Brand, and the Skills Needed to Be Successful”
AZ Tech Podcast via Listen Notes — “Josh Snow (Elizetxe), Snow Founder & CEO - Consumer products, SaaS and navigating success”
Starter Story — “SNOW Update: How We Nearly Doubled Returning Customers During The Pandemic”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  John Morgan  ·  Karlton Dennis

Karlton Dennis

Founder & CEO, Tax Alchemy — San Luis Obispo, CA

Official links: Website · Facebook · Instagram · X

Karlton Dennis's first career was supposed to be football. He played cornerback at Servite High School, made the Los Angeles Times High School All-Star Football Team, and went on to play Division I football at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where he was a defensive team captain and graduated in 2016 with a degree in kinesiology.

The School of Hard Knocks Podcast picks up the story after the stadium lights went off: Dennis walked away from a future in professional sports and found himself broke, working odd jobs as a personal trainer and wine salesman — by day selling wine for E. & J. Gallo, by night building fitness courses, until he was, by his own account, simply overworked.

In 2017 he joined his mother Karla's tax and accounting firm, Karla Dennis and Associates, and found his real field. He became a licensed enrolled agent, mastered the tax code from the inside, and founded Tax Alchemy, a strategy firm for business owners, real estate investors and high earners.

The athlete who once studied opponents now studies the tax code the same way — looking for the legal plays everybody else misses.

"By day, I was selling wine, and at night, I was stacking my personal training experience and building courses in the fitness and health industry; when all was said and done, I was overworked."

Dennis has turned that second career into a classroom. He hosts the Tax Free Living podcast, built a YouTube channel that Leaders reports grew past half a million subscribers, mentors or coaches more than 1,100 students in tax planning, and wrote The Art of Legal Tax Avoidance.

His firm's own training pages say his work has reached more than 70 million people online. The message never changes: making money is only half the game — keeping it, legally, is the other half, and everyday business owners deserve to know the plays.

School of Hard Knocks Podcast — “Karlton Dennis | Makes $10M/Year , Pays Nothing in Taxes, and Teaches You How”
Leaders — “Karlton Dennis”
Tax Alchemy — “5 Tax Strategies Your CPA Missed”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Josh Elizetxe  ·  Ken McElroy

Ken McElroy

Co-founder & CEO, MC Companies — Scottsdale, AZ

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X

Ken McElroy's real estate education started with free rent. At Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma — where he graduated in 1990 with a degree in business administration and management — a friend offered him a job managing an apartment complex in downtown Seattle. He took it because he was in debt and the job came with a place to live.

Managing other people's tenants taught him the intricacies of the business, and he caught the bug. After graduating he bought his first property, a two-bedroom, two-bathroom house that barely earned anything — and learned more from it than from any classroom.

He worked his way up through duplexes and fourplexes to a 182-unit property in Sun City, Arizona, that he still manages. In 1998 he founded McElroy Management; in 2001 he merged it with Ross McCallister's company to create MC Companies, the Scottsdale multifamily investment and management firm he still leads.

All American Speakers describes a portfolio of 9,000 units across Arizona, Texas and Oklahoma valued at over $2 billion. The manager who once took a job for the free rent now owns the buildings — thousands of units of them.

"Deliver on your promise and everything else works."

McElroy is best known to many readers as Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad real estate advisor and the author of bestselling books including The ABCs of Real Estate Investing and The Sleeping Giant.

He teaches constantly — a podcast, a YouTube channel, speaking stages — and gives back through MC Companies' Sharing the Good Life Foundation, which Real Estate Daily News reported had passed $1 million in cumulative charitable donations.

His philosophy is the one his own career proves: learn the unglamorous work first, deliver on your promise, and let time do the compounding.

Leaders — “Ken McElroy”
All American Speakers — “Ken McElroy”
MC Companies — “Ken McElroy”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Karlton Dennis  ·  Kim Perell

Kim Perell

Founder & CEO, 100.co — Miami, FL

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X

Kim Perell's career began with a bankruptcy — somebody else's. She had joined Xdrive, an internet startup, at twenty-two and risen to Director of Marketing and Sales, recruiting ten million users in her first year. Then Xdrive went under and she was laid off.

Banks would not lend to her, so her 82-year-old grandmother — who, Perell loves to note, did not even know what the internet was — loaned her $10,000 and became her first investor.

Perell started Frontline Direct, a digital marketing firm, at her kitchen table in 2003, maxed out her credit cards and sat at that table, by her account, for three years. The company passed $100 million in revenue by 2010.

It merged into Adconion Direct, she became its CEO, and in 2014 Amobee, a Singtel subsidiary, bought Adconion Direct for $235 million. She went on to run Amobee as its CEO, and she was a multimillionaire before she turned thirty — all of it traced back to one grandmother who believed in her when no bank would.

She did it, she likes to point out, without an MBA: a degree, she told San Diego Magazine, is not a prerequisite for success.

"Your belief has to be greater than everyone else’s doubt."

Perell now runs 100.co in Miami, which uses artificial intelligence to build consumer brands — including Cay Skin, co-founded with supermodel Winnie Harlow. She is an angel investor in more than 100 companies and a bestselling author whose books include The Execution Factor and Jump.

Through her Execution Factor Fund she put her book royalties and $1 million of her own money behind other founders — her way, she told San Diego Magazine, of making the same bet on others that her grandmother once made on her.

Wikipedia — “Kim Perell”
KimPerell.com — “About – Kim Perell”
San Diego Magazine — “Celebrating Women: Kim Perell Wants You to Succeed”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Ken McElroy  ·  Kirt Linington

Kirt Linington

Founder, Linear Roofing & General Contractors — Dallas, TX

Official links: Website · Instagram · Facebook

Kirt Linington was born and raised in South Africa, in a family without money, and did his mandatory military service straight out of high school. He sold everything, boarded a plane with a friend and, by his own telling, had $700 left when he arrived in America.

He then spent 20 years in corporate America, rising to executive vice president at LA Fitness. Most people would call that the finish line. Linington called it a starting point.

At 42, still holding that executive job, he put money into a roofing venture with a friend from LA Fitness who knew the trade, and began knocking on doors himself — humbling work for a senior executive, sitting in living rooms being talked down to by homeowners.

He ran roofing and LA Fitness side by side for four years, until the side business was paying three times his salary.

Founded in 2015, Linear Roofing & General Contractors grew from a team of three to more than 240 people, building a reported $62 million in revenue by applying corporate lessons — recruiting, training, developing people — to a fragmented, mom-and-pop industry.

The School of Hard Knocks podcast describes his 2022 exit as a nine-figure sale; Roofing Contractor reported that Linear's owners agreed to join Stronghouse Solutions, a national platform of roofing companies.

"There's no such thing as business problems, just personal problems that roll into the business."

Linington stayed on to share the playbook. Accepted into the Forbes Business Council, he writes and speaks for other entrepreneurs, and Roofing Contractor gave him its March 2023 cover story as Linear became part of a larger roofing platform. His philosophy is plain: look after your people, train them, recognize them, and let the results follow.

The immigrant who arrived with $700 now teaches late starters the lesson of his own life — that 42 is not too late to knock on the first door, and that wanting to win matters more than protecting your pride.

School of Hard Knocks Podcast via Podscan — “Kirt Linington | He Came to America With $700… Then Sold for 9 Figures, Started Knocking On Doors At 42 & Made Millions”
Shoutout DFW — “Meet Kirt Linington | Owner at Linear Roofing & General Contractors, LLC”
Roofing Contractor — “Cover Story | March 2023”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Kim Perell  ·  Lynnwood Bibbens

Lynnwood Bibbens

Founder & Executive Chairman, ReachTV — Miami, FL

Official links: Website · X

Lynnwood Bibbens grew up in a working-class New Jersey town, watching his grandfather hold down a 9-to-5 job and run a garbage route on the side.

In college he sold Cutco knives, and when a friend's shipping department fell into chaos, Bibbens was brought in to fix it — within six months he was the top sales rep, then an equal partner, and three years later they sold the company to its biggest customer. That pattern never stopped.

In the mid-1990s he scaled an internet company from six deals a day to $40 million in revenue in 18 months, and $100 million 18 months after that, exiting before the dot-com crash.

He founded New England Technology and grew it to $100 million in three years, then built another business to a $250 million run rate that held for eight years. Along the way he moved into film finance, helping finance more than $2 billion in film and TV projects, according to the School of Hard Knocks newsletter.

In 2016 he launched ReachTV, the travel network on airport screens across North America — and when CNN left the airport TV business during the pandemic, ReachTV bought what remained of CNN's airport network in 2021.

"We're actively managing it, just like a sports truck onsite."

ReachTV, now owned by Stagwell, has screens at 2,400 airport gates and in 500,000 hotel rooms, reaching more than 51 million travelers a month, AdExchanger reports. Bibbens has moved from founding CEO into the founder and executive chairman role, while the network he built carries live sports and original series like Ticket to Success, which spotlights minority-owned airport businesses.

His philosophy, as the School of Hard Knocks newsletter puts it, stayed simple through every company he built: put others' needs first, and your own will be met in return.

School of Hard Knocks Podcast via Ausha — “Lynnwood Bibbens | He Sold Cutco Knives In College… Then Built A $2 Billion Empire”
School of Hard Knocks Newsletter — “How Lynnwood Bibbens Turned Hustle Into a $2B Empire”
AdExchanger — “How Reach TV Brings Streaming And Advertising To America’s Airports”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Kirt Linington  ·  Mike Sherbakov

Mike Sherbakov

General Partner, The Veteran Fund — San Diego, CA

Official links: Website · Facebook · Instagram

Mike Sherbakov was born in Russia and immigrated to the United States at five, watching his parents rebuild their lives from the ground up in the Bay Area. His sisters took the academic road — one to Stanford, another to a doctorate at William & Mary. Mike took a different one.

After 9/11, which he felt as a personal attack on the country that had taken his family in, he enlisted in the Marine Corps at 18 and spent five years on active duty.

In San Diego he fell in love with entrepreneurship, building health and wellness companies, including HMS Fitness, inspired by his Marine training, and Karuna Towels, and he sold his health and wellness company in 2015. He made his first angel investment that same year, determined to prove himself with his own money before ever taking anyone else's.

That personal portfolio grew to 130 companies. In 2022, he and his partners launched The Veteran Fund, an early-stage venture firm that invests in technology startups led by military veterans — backing builders the way someone once backed his parents: on work ethic and nerve.

"We immigrated to the U.S. when I was five, and that's something I will just forever be grateful to my parents for having made that decision,"

The fund's reach tells the mission plainly. The Veteran Fund aimed for a $10 million proof-of-concept fund and oversubscribed at $20.2 million, looked at more than 5,000 companies and made 26 investments; its second fund is a $50 million vehicle.

Through Founder Institute, Sherbakov runs the veteran vertical, giving veterans, military spouses and military-community founders a scholarship to go through the accelerator for free. The boy whose parents bet everything on America now spends his career betting on the people who served it.

We Are The Mighty — “Michael Sherbakov’s journey from the battlefield to backing builders”
Infinite Frontiers — “Bridging Military Expertise and Tech Innovation with The Veteran Fund’s Mike Sherbakov”
Mission Oriented Podcast via Libsyn — “Mission Oriented: 201 - Mike Sherbakov - From the Marines to The Veteran Fund”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Lynnwood Bibbens  ·  Mike Wystrach