‘I Was Raised By Entrepreneur Wolves’
Since getting scammed the first time he started a business, Rob Dyrdek has learned a lot of entrepreneurial lessons. For example, he never starts a business unless he sees a clear path to the precise outcome he has in mind.
By Loren Feldman
Meet Rob Dyrdek, high school dropout, professional skateboarder, reality TV star, entrepreneur, and founder of the Dyrdek Machine, which is what he calls a venture creation studio. Rob, soon to turn 47, says his goal is to build 50 to 100 businesses and sell each of them for $75 million to $200 million. In this 21 Hats Conversation—you can listen to the video above or read the edited transcript below—Dyrdek explains his plan.
Loren Feldman
Rob Dyrdek, thank you so much for joining me here. I think our audience may know you as a professional skateboarder, or as a reality TV star, or the host of “Ridiculousness.” They probably know that you’ve got some entrepreneurial chops, but they may not know that you’ve started something called the Dyrdek Machine, which is kind of in the business of manufacturing entrepreneurs and companies. And I think that’s primarily what we’ll talk about today. But the thing I wanted to start with is this: You’re out there in Beverly Hills. There’s some glam aspects to what you do. You’re on TV. Are the lessons that you’ve learned—do you think they are relevant to the everyday life of the more traditional entrepreneurs that I suspect are subscribing to 21 Hats and watching this video?
Rob Dyrdek
I think so. I mean, Look, I am elevated, but I still started at the bottom. And I was raised by entrepreneur wolves when I was 11 and 12 years old. The skate shop that I started going to was founded by a 19-year-old serial entrepreneur who I watched build company after company after company. And then he helped form the Alien Workshop, which is the company that I became a professional skateboarder with and helped name and build that company when I was 16 years old. And so for me, I thought it was always my destiny to be an entrepreneur as I was raised around entrepreneurs. And I built and started my very first company when I was 18 years old, you know, and for me …
Loren Feldman
You weren’t in Beverly Hills, then, right?
Rob Dyrdek
I was not in Beverly Hills. I had moved to San Diego, California, and I did have the relationship with what I like to call founder/market fit, where I had a relationship in the skateboarding industry as a professional skateboarder. So it was easy for me to form a deal with a manufacturing company to create Orion Tucks. Or Orion Aluminum as I called it. I was reading the book The Orion Prophecy at the time, and I brought in five of the best skateboarders in the world and pitched the concept to the manufacturer and then built this entire company and brought it to market for .5 percent of sales. And I thought, look at me, I’m a company owner, I built my first company. Little did I know that they had tricked me and gave me .5 percent of sales and I thought I had really done it. But that was my first lesson early on in the entrepreneur game.
Loren Feldman
What exactly was the lesson you learned?
Rob Dyrdek
It was a lack of education and knowledge. At the end of the day, I built this company, brought the entire idea to them. They were the manufacturing and distribution partner. And I thought it was a great deal that they were going to give me a $500-a-month salary on top of .5 percent of sales. I didn’t reach out to a mentor. I didn’t reach out to somebody to help me. I thought that I’m now a company owner, because I now had a percentage as it was related to the sales. And there’s a big debate in my world of like, Oh, go to college or not go to college—like, start a business and learn as you go through it and learn your lessons. And I think there’s a lot of validation in both. But the more you can educate yourself before you start your first business, I think the less difficult the learning by fire is going to be because the truth behind most entrepreneurs is they’ve got to go through a cycle of building and failing for some amount of time before they finally land in what they understand well enough to create a successful business that becomes their magnum opus. And I think that is one of those things that’s sort of underestimated. The more you can learn about a particular industry, a business, whatever it may be, before you actually try to do it, is invaluable. And I think it’s not spoken about enough.
Loren Feldman
My sense is that the best way to learn—maybe the only way—is to be close to someone else who’s going through it. If you can be number two, or three, or four or five, to someone who’s trying to build a business in an area where you’re interested, that’s a priceless education that you can’t get at a school.
Rob Dyrdek
If you want to create a business, especially a consumer product, in this day and age, you’ve got to understand product and brand because they’re different. Your products are what you’re making. Your brand is the way you bring it alive, the soul of your business. You’ve got to understand media—owned, paid—because that’s how you’re going to basically build your story. Then you’ve got to know how to market it, and you’ve got to know sales. They are not the same. And then, ultimately, you’ve got to understand operations, how this whole thing enters, connects. And then finance, because that’s ultimately the lifeblood of the opportunity. It is everything.
All of these things connect to make a financially viable opportunity. Most people focus on what they love the most, or know best, and try to build a business around that and are deficient in the seven core capabilities that leave them struggling and going through these heavy loops and cycles of failure and retrying. Because they didn’t take the time to understand business multi-dimensionally. So even if you sit next to somebody, you still have to look at that whole business. Even if you’re a brand and marketing guy, you have to understand business multi-dimensionally.
Loren Feldman
What of those core competencies didn’t come as naturally to you? Was there a part of it that you struggled with?
Rob Dyrdek
It is 100 percent operations and finance. And because—what am I? I’m a pro skateboarder, creative guy, marketing guy. I can create these great ad campaigns to sell skate products. I can create a campaign that leads to me now being on television. I thought I was a business guy because I was finding success. And it was only when I decided to stop and dissect and look at every aspect of business, and then decide how much, and how well, I knew it that I realized the operational and financial side was what I tried to completely avoid.
So then what happens? Oh, I’m going to hire a director of ops. I’m going to hire a CFO. Now the problem is, since I didn’t take the time to build general knowledge in these particular core capabilities, I can’t hire properly either. Because my interview process, and how I speak to somebody, and how someone—you can just sell me in an interview, and I’m like, this guy knows operations! This person is so organized. This is my CFO right here. This guy knows numbers.
And then once I focused on mastering financials, it changed my whole life. Because now I look at money completely different. I look at what money means to me. I look at every dollar that comes in and where I put it, and what the return on that dollar is, and how long it took to get that return, ROI and IRR, on everything.
Loren Feldman
What convinced you that you needed to master the financials? And how did you go about doing that?
Rob Dyrdek
I was fortunate enough that I was still having a tremendous amount of success, because I was still taking so many shots. Even if I was having a ton of failures, I still had plenty of capital that I had earned along the way. And so for me, on the financial side, I hired a full time CFO consultant to just start teaching me every single aspect of modeling out every single venture that I wanted to do. And then we began to create what I call tactical models together. I want it to be fully understood what the contribution margins are, and what the cost of goods, and how this all ladders, and then to operate this business. I want to be so clear on the cost structure of every single thing that I do and understand every single one of these cells and why they exist.
I did this over and over, as I looked at every business. We would build the model out together in an incredible deep dive. And that required having somebody that had the skill set, but ultimately then being able to quickly and efficiently build financial models and assess businesses. And this is an operational-minded CFO that could look at a business holistically and build a plan together. And then it became clearer and clearer. And then it became exciting. It went from, I can’t. Finance makes me tired. I just eyeball it. I know I’m making more money. I know I got to pay this much. I make this much. Cut this in half. I think I’m spending this much. I should be good.
Then it evolved into, No, I want to look at my entire life financially, fully integrated, because I read a business book in this era called Start at the End, and the concept of the book is, decide what you want the outcome of your business to be before you ever start it. And if you want to build a business and sell it for $50 million in five years, or you want to build a business and to do 500 grand a year net, $100,000 in profit, and that your goal is to live the rest of your life while running your business and making $100,000 a year in profit, whatever it is, decide what the end game is.
And that really made me reflect and look at my life and say, What type of life do I want? And then, how does business integrate into that? And then how do I build businesses with the same start-at-the-end mentality, where all of them serve the way that I ultimately want to live my life as a whole. I stopped looking at my life as my work in business and my life. I looked at it fully integrated, both from a personal and goal level, but also from a financial level.
Loren Feldman
What does that mean to look at it fully integrated? How do you integrate the two?
Rob Dyrdek
Well, meaning, I’ve extraordinarily ambitious goals for my business, my Dyrdek Machine venture studio. I want to build 50 to 100 businesses that I sell for $75 million to $200 million and make a billion dollars in liquidity. In order to do that, I need to own between 25 percent and 75 percent of each one of these ventures. So now from a lifestyle perspective, I have my early stage goals where I want $100 million—and this is very ambitious—but I want $100 million in asset- and cash-producing assets, non-correlated cash-producing assets that I get to live off of for the rest of my life. So there’s my personal side right now. This is my goal from a personal investment side.
Here is my venture side, if you will. So it ends up being real estate and venture for the most part. And then so now they’re integrated. So one’s leading to the goals of the next one, and then it becomes time and energy. So now I’ve designed, what type of life do I want to live? Well, being an entrepreneur is extraordinarily difficult. I can’t run multiple companies. I can only run one, right, and that’s the Dyrdek Machine. So it’s essential that I build with founders that can be the operators and run these businesses. And I have to create a business that allows me to systematize and create a ton of value and be able to curate elite entrepreneur minds that give us a clear pathway to create value and create some sort of liquidity event whether that be dividends through profitable high margin, high targeted consumer businesses or growth companies that lead to acquisitions.
Loren Feldman
I want to come back to this. I want to ask you what your why is. Why $100 million? Why a billion dollars? What do you get out of this? But let’s hold off on that. First I want to take you through the Dyrdek Machine and what you’re doing with that. Let’s start with, what kind of businesses are you looking for? What kind of businesses do you want to create?
Rob Dyrdek
Consumer products. I mean, we’re market agnostic and look at a lot of different things and have done some media stuff and some SaaS stuff, which I’m not entirely excited about because … This is what I love, truest life passion, is a one-on-one conversation with an entrepreneur. Just general idea, then, Wow, no, that would be amazing. We should do that. Right? And now I’m having this conversation assessing somebody. Do I believe they have the general knowledge and the seven core capabilities? And do they have the experience? Are they talking about a product and idea where they have founder-market fit and have some understanding of the market and the opportunity and they could navigate it at an accelerated pace?
Then we get all excited. Then it’s just like, Oh, man, here we go. Then the idea emerges. Then we, let’s go. We call that the discovery phase. Then let’s do an immersion into that market and make sure that it’s not being done 100 times. There’s so many times that I have been like, What, no, that’s an amazing idea. No one’s ever done it. And I do one search, and there’s like 20 of them. You know what I mean? Or sometimes I’ll be like, this is an amazing $50 million business, and I’ll find three or four that are five or six years old that never broke a couple million dollars, right? It’s like Okay, there just isn’t market for these.
Loren Feldman
How do you know they just didn’t get it right? How do you know that there’s no market for it?
Rob Dyrdek
Yeah, look, it’s an intuitive decision you have to make, because at the end of the day, here’s the thing with diligence. All diligence is is all the reasons you shouldn’t do something. You never do diligence and all of a sudden, like, this is an amazing idea; diligence is like, Okay, I feel pretty good. It’s why I call it systematically fusing art, science, and magic, because it’s creative. You can shape an idea and nuancely shift it, and now it becomes a massive opportunity. So when I look at an idea, I’m looking at it intuitively. Is there a way to twist this a little bit and make it more unique so that it appeals to a broader market?
And it’s still very much based on that intuition. I can talk to an entrepreneur, and in 15 minutes understand the range of their capabilities. And I know where I’m going to get stuck. I can tell if I’m talking to a sales-focused entrepreneur CEO versus a financial or versus a brand. It’s very easy to kind of see. So you’re trying to piece all these things together when you’re making that decision on that idea. But again: art, science and magic, the sciences, the fundamentals of business. If you want to start a business that has 20-percent gross margins …
Let me give you a really good example of a really hard business: beds. There was this huge boom of beds. Oh, man Casper, bed in a box. Well, guess what happened? Your lifetime value in the purchase behavior of a bed is one. Over 15 years. So you sell one bed and now we’re delivering it to you, but every day, you have to get another customer. Versus when you have something like MindRight, My Goodmood Superfood, that’s a platform that has bars and mixed drinks and all these different things. They’re now buying—when they love the product and loyal—they’re buying it every single week, day, month, year. Like the lifetime value in the customer acquisition, all these fancy online terms. Can you create a loyal customer that will buy your product for life is when you’ve got a real, a big opportunity. And I think the positioning of your product’s value prop connected to your brand storytelling is where that actually happens, but for it to actually occur is magic. It’s magic.
I don’t care what anybody says. Every single one of the businesses that I have had that have gone on to be acquired, or at a really large stage is just an amoeba of unforeseen, amazing circumstances that propel it to the next level. Even though I do extraordinarily sophisticated financial overlays that I call the unified theory, that’s tied to the capital needed, the equity needed, option pools, and capital needed all the way along the way to create value, to get to a liquidity event. And here’s our goal, all of this stuff. And need I remind you, you can sell a business for $50 million to $150 million to two or three thousand people. Anything above $200 million, you’re selling it to like 10 people. So again, not relatable—I might be a little maybe Beverly Hillsing you a little bit over here. But it’s still—even with real plans, tactical revenue models, it’s chaos on the way there.
Loren Feldman
Could you walk us through one? You’re at the Dyrdek Machine. You got your founder. You’ve got the idea. You’re excited. Walk us through the Machine method. And if you could give us a real example.
Rob Dyrdek
Okay, so I’ll use mine. I originally met the CEO, who was the CEO of another consumer packaged goods company. I said, Hey, do you ever want to build one day? Reach out to us. I’d love to build a company with you one day. So, like, planted the seed. Eight months later, he said, Hey, I’m going to be leaving. I’d like to create a company. He came and pitched a vegan cookie dough. He presented this concept of vegan cookie dough that could then be cooked as a cookie. At the same time, I’m like, Oh, I like that. That’s interesting. You can chew it, and it’s vegan, or you can cook it. We did a deep immersion in our discovery process, saw that the actual vegan cookie dough market was tiny. Now you can actually bake it. You’re just competing against vegan cookies. I didn’t like it. Didn’t have enough differentiation. He said, Okay.
He came back three months later and said I’m going to blow your mind. He presented a concept of showing how the better for you snack foods went from better for you to functional to hyper functional. So it went from probiotics to then collagen to all these things. And then, as it evolved into vegan and the superfoods, he showed how nootropics and adaptogens and the supplement space were emerging at the same time. There was this huge opportunity now to connect the two and make a functional superfood that has nootropics and adaptogens for both long-term brain health and mood enhancement. And I’m like, this is it.
So then we go into the emerging space. There’s almost nobody there. There’s a handful of people, IQ bar and some different things. Now we look at the competitive landscape, we got founder-market fit, because he had just come from another bar, manufacturing and running another bar business, so that he now fully understands this industry, completely and thoroughly. So now we do this deal. And how it works is, we’re co-founders. And then we put up the first $250,000 to develop it. So we’re co-founders, then we invest in the first round. And now we go and develop this brand completely together. And essentially the Dyrdek Machine has finance, operations, and brand sort of leadership across the board. And then we develop the brand, right? And so, this is to me that shaping: What should we call it? Is it feed your brain? Is it, this is brain food?
And then like we’re presented with this idea from an agency of, What about MindRight? And I’m like, that’s it. MindRight. It’s cultural, it gets your mind right. It’s what the value prop of the product actually is. That ties right back into everything that this thing does. This product does put you in a mind right because when you get mind right, everything else follows. Right now I’m seeing it turned into media. Now I’m saying, Oh, this is it. Before you break up with your girlfriend, get mind right. Before you go into the big podcast, get mind right. So now we’re tying it all together. And so, we’re developing the product, and when it’s a consumable product, what’s the number one thing? Taste, okay, great. You got this value prop that is nootropics and adaptogens that enhances your mood, and it’s superfood and vegan and high in protein, fiber, all these things. But if it doesn’t taste amazing, you’re dead in the water right?
And so we built this brand, MindRight Brain Food. We called it the unstoppable blend, and I bought the website, nootropic superfood. I’m like, it’s genius. You’re dropping superfood. This is like some never been done. I just bought the website. But let’s get out of the office here and test it. And so we take that product, and we go and we test it. We tested with all different types of groups and everything, and boy, everybody hated the word nootropic. And it’s like, Oh, man. But they loved happy brain. They didn’t care about long-term brain health. They didn’t care about anything other than mood enhancement and that this tastes amazing and makes them feel better. So where we looked at it as, it’s unstoppable blends for entrepreneurs and moms on the go and all these … they really connected with happy brain and good mood. And it ended up being we had this more sophisticated like packaging and really the majority that connected with it was 35-year-old women with income below $75,000.
Loren Feldman
What market did you think you were shooting for?
Rob Dyrdek
When you’re a guy creating a product, you’re always a guy. You’re always accidentally aiming it to males, right? And you want to be four quadrants as best you can, and so we ended up making the packaging this iridescent, beautiful soft. And what I realized, too, is in that data was, good mood over everything. And the CEO hit me one day. He said, I got it: Good Mood Superfood. And I’m like, you got it. And now it’s MindRight Good Mood Superfood. And then I realized, our entire ethos, everything with this brand, needs to make you happy. Every Instagram post, every bit of the website, everything we ever create. It should make you happy. We’re the good mood guys, right?
And that process shaped it all the way to a place where now we’ve got to go—we’re ready to go get seed capital, right?
Loren Feldman
You don’t finance it all yourself?
Rob Dyrdek
No, no. Some, I’ll do the second round. I don’t like to finance the seed round. I want as much strategic capital as possible to go to market.
Loren Feldman
Is it about the money? Or is it about getting somebody else’s input?
Rob Dyrdek
Look, I’ll tell you one thing for certain: You learn a whole lot about your business when you take it to raise money. You just do. You show your business to a lot of really smart people who invest in other businesses to really dissect and give you feedback because as you’re building, you get blind. And so I like that stage of just give us the information, but primarily, give us strategic capital. For MindRight, we ended up getting Marcus Lemonis to lead the round. That’s a huge earned media, The Profit, if you’re familiar with him …
Loren Feldman
Sure. Is that a relationship you already had?
Rob Dyrdek
It’s a relationship that I had, but we had never done a business until this one. It was only when I started posting the brand, that he reached out and said, How do I get involved in this? And what sold him? When I brought him the product, and he tasted it. So again, the brand, the storytelling, the feeling, the way we began to talk about it on social through the Machine attracted strategic capital. But when he talked to the founder and the partner and the CEO, he realized, Real deal. When he heard the entire strategy? Real deal. When he tasted it? This has got huge potential.
That’s the depth of what you have to think about when you’re really trying to build something that has an accelerated path to product-market fit. At the Machine, we’re trying to be one big, unfair advantage that accelerates you to product-market fit. Because from that point, capital is cheap. And the business is fun because you’re optimizing and growing it rather than trying to find out if anybody even likes this thing in the first place. So at that stage, we got Marcus, then we got Joe Jonas. So now you have this pop star that adds this deep earned media that then got us all the Forbes articles and TechCrunch articles and all these things that turn into earned media that support your launch and driving your business to market.
Loren Feldman
One thing that stops some entrepreneurs from trying to raise money is they don’t want to have partners.They don’t want to have to answer to somebody. They don’t want to have to operate on somebody else’s timeline, meaning sell the business when the investor wants the business sold. How do you think about those issues?
Rob Dyrdek
Look, do not raise a dime, unless you plan to give somebody a return. Now, if you have a clear path to where you want to own and control your business. And you have a path to create some sort of return for them—say they get 10 percent of the company and then you’re going to run it efficiently and profitably and share that 10 percent with them. And you can explain that to them and they understand that once it gets profitable, they will make their return over time. That’s a special type of investor. That is not a venture investor right?
Loren Feldman
Clearly.
Rob Dyrdek
If you want to maintain control and have everything you’re looking for—friends and family, high net worth individuals that are more friendly. But if you want to go out and raise money and create value and raise additional money, you have to understand how that business is going to be acquired someday. And I think you have to make that decision. If this is their passion project, and this is what they want to do for the rest of their lives, and they don’t ever want to sell it, and there’s not some sort of clear path to making it profitable, and we’re not aligned with where the liquidity is going to come from, then we don’t do it. That’s why I go all the way back to start at the end—like how this company becomes profitable. You have to have a clear path on what that is or what your goal of that is. And then if you need money to get there, then you need to create a strategy for that money that aligns with your personal goals and what your long-term vision is for the business you’re creating.
Loren Feldman
We’ve got a question about your relationship with your boards. How much involvement do you want once these companies get off the ground?
Rob Dyrdek
I’ll give you a complete structure. It goes from weekly calls, to bi-weekly, to monthly, to then just quarterly board meetings. And then to me, when a solid, sound board is put into place after what I would consider, most of the time, the A round. When you’ve really gotten to a place where there’s strategic A money that can now provide a lot more value for the board. Most boards before the A round, that really early stage, aren’t overly sophisticated until true venture capital ends up in there. And then for me, I like to get off the board at that stage, and then become the CEO’s adviser. Because I don’t want to sit in every single one of these companies’ board meetings.
Two of them I still am pretty active. My Pig Out Outstanding Foods just closed a $10 million round at a $100 million valuation. And I’m still on the board of that because we want to go public next year, and I’d like to go through that process. I sit on a public board right now with one of my previous founders, which is way more of an undertaking than I ever anticipated. It’s not where I play, but I liked the journey of going with him on another company that he was taking public. So I do that. But for me, for me personally now, I like to go off the board and just become the advisor over time.
Loren Feldman
Are there things that you and the Machine cannot offer these portfolio companies? At what point do they have to find guidance and help elsewhere?
Rob Dyrdek
Look, we can’t run your company. That’s the big thing. We’re not an incubator. We ultimately are builders who have a team that can build you and help put all the help you hire, everything along the way that you need to eventually go off. But you have to be capable of building and operating this business yourself.
Loren Feldman
Where do most entrepreneurs go wrong when they pitch you? What are they missing when they come to you with an idea?
Rob Dyrdek
I think most that miss with me are when you’re not looking at the multi-dimensional, holistic business as much as product or brand vision. Like, we’re gonna make this a change the world versus how is it financially viable. What I like to tell people is, money loves clarity. Even though I want to create from the idea stage, and it’s my passion. I get caught up in all of it. At the end of the day, I’m trying to make a decision on the return on the capital that I invest here. And at the end, as you build a business, you want more and more clarity on how any investment capital you can bring in is going to turn into more capital for the investor.
And I think that’s probably the thing that most people just underestimate and overlook when they’re selling. They think they just need to sell the dream to an investor. And I think for a lot of friends and family, high net worth individuals, it’s more of a, Hey, let’s take a shot. You can sell that dream. But anyone that’s more sophisticated, who—in my case, it’s my personal capital, right—I’m not a GP here that has LPs. And I’m not managing people’s money. I’m managing my own money. So I still look at everything through the lens of, what is my potential return?
Loren Feldman
What kind of impact did the pandemic have on you from a business standpoint? And now that we’re coming out of it, what do you see happening for businesses going forward?
Rob Dyrdek
I think the thing that is the truest is, it’s a transition as it relates to who you hire and where they’re from. I think for me, I hired a major executive I still haven’t met in person. And they live in the Los Angeles area. It’s not like I couldn’t do it. I’ve hired an entire team of people out of New York to build my media division—have not met them in person. So I think there’s a revolution in the flexibility of how you can build a business.
Loren Feldman
What do you take from that? Are you going to keep doing it that way? Or are you eager to get back to the old way of doing it?
Rob Dyrdek
To me, it’s changed me for life. I’ll never do it any other way. It’s allowed me to be so much more efficient with my time. It’s allowed me to avoid—even though I live in the same, you don’t even get on a freeway to go to my office—it’s still 20 minutes there, 20 minutes back. That’s still 40 minutes in the middle of the day here that I could be spending with my kids in between meetings. So to me, I will probably never have a full office again. So I have this beautiful penthouse in Beverly Hills. Beautiful. It’s expensive. And right now, it’s a podcast studio. And eventually, it’ll be a place if you guys want to come and work, work—for those of you that are in the Los Angeles area. If not, we’ll use it for events, one day, and, and content.
So I think it’s completely changed, but it’s also changed—you now have access to such a larger pool of talent and in a much broader and in a more cost-effective way if you end up having a lot of outsource consultants to manage. So, to me, that was probably the great revolution that changed the way I’ll do business forever. I would think before the pandemic that I would only build companies with people based in the Los Angeles area, and now, I’ve never even met the guy in person, and I’m building a new company based out of New York. I wouldn’t even have thought that was possible.
The story that I told about MindRight? That was all done over Zoom. We did that last year. And then I’ll tell you what it did more than anything. It defined the true Do-Or-Dier mentality of my portfolio and the founders, because not one but every single person took it as an opportunity to be more focused, be more clear now that they couldn’t run around in life. It really became clear to those who used and adapted this new, evolved way of communicating and isolation to drive their business forward. Because a lot of people I know, and a lot of friends, it broke them and jammed them. It broke their spirit, if you will. To me, they were fragile from the jump, because seeing how so many people use this as an opportunity to — even for those that their current business wasn’t going to be able to survive it, they immediately took that new free time and energy to start something new. It was sort of the proof in the pudding of who were the real ones.
Loren Feldman
You mentioned your podcast. I think it’s called Build With Rob, and I think you’ve got maybe three or four episodes out. And your format is, you sit down and talk to the founders you have going through the machine and talk through what they’re doing and how they’ve done it, where things stand.
Rob Dyrdek
Yeah, I want to share the lessons that I’ve learned through the experiences with my founders and partners. Rather than interviewing people that are outside the process, I want to do it because ultimately I want another great entrepreneur to hear how we shaped and built in the journey for each one of these businesses, and be like, I want to build with Rob. I want to build a company with Rob. Because at the end of the day, all I want to do, over and over again, is build and curate amazing entrepreneurs and ideas and shape them into successful, profitable, sustainable, acquirable businesses over and over again. It’s what I love more than anything. And so the way you do that, at scale, is the quality of entrepreneurs and ideas that find their way to you.
Loren Feldman
Even for those who don’t want to build with you or don’t aspire to for whatever reason, I highly recommend the podcast, it’s a great case study approach to learning how businesses are built. And I’ve listened to two of the episodes and they’re really fun and, and informative. You talk about mistakes, you talk about what works. It’s a great listen. So let’s, let’s finish up with that question that I hinted at before. I think you’re a true entrepreneur. I understand how that gets in your blood. People can’t get away from that and they want to keep doing it. But you don’t have to do it at the scale you’re trying to do it at. You could probably live comfortably with the money you have already. You don’t need $100 million. You don’t need $1 billion from the Machine. What drives you to do this?
Rob Dyrdek
Yeah, it’s funny, me and my wife had this debate over vacation of where I told her I don’t believe in the whys as it relates to someone’s drive or their personal ambition. And she was super offended, which I thought was really funny because I’m like, Man, I say I’m fueled by the joy of creation. I love doing this so much. This is actually like my passion and personal mastery, right? So, I look at these companies almost like vintages of wines. Oh, this is the vintage before I understood founder-market fit. Oh, here’s when I didn’t fully understand capital allocation. As you get knowledge and pointed in a single direction towards mastery, your depth gets so wide. And then what does it become? More exciting, more fun, more effortless, more enjoyable. It’s that sort of aspect that I love.
And then for me, I look at what I’m creating is also lessons and knowledge, intellectual capital that I get to pass down to generations of Dyrdeks. For me, my transition went from self preservation to generational preservation after the success that I’ve created and then having children. And so, I have a 500-year plan of what it’ll mean to be a Dyrdek. I own 100 percent of the Dyrdek Machine. I always will, and I’m going to build programs for the Dyrdek family. I’m building a Dyrdek family bank structure that will provide capital and resources for generations of Dyrdeks to come, including, I’m going to record a message to the family, 500 messages, so that every year the family gets another Rob speech at Forever Estates. I’m building a house where I live forever. But that to me is this exciting, how do you make an impact on Dyrdeks forever?
Loren Feldman
Then that just leads me to one more question that I’ve got to ask you, and I’ve had this conversation with a lot of entrepreneurs. You’re talking about providing means for generations of Dyrdeks. That means that they’re going to grow up very differently than you did. They’re not gonna come from Dayton and that kind of hardscrabble growing up that you went through that clearly must have had something to do with turning you into an entrepreneur. Do you worry that you might be removing some of that entrepreneurial drive from the Dyrdeks to come?
Rob Dyrdek
I do not. And it’s a great question, right? Because I won’t demand or say, this is what we are, at the end of the day, Dyrdeks have fully integrated, who they are, what they do, and how they live seamlessly to be happy. At the end of the day, it’s your personal self mastery that leads to happiness, mastering time and energy and relationships. And for me, that’s the ultimate sort of foundation that I want to be now for those that want to pursue the entrepreneurial opportunities that the family’s bank has set forth. That would be their own decision to make. But first and foremost, when 200 family members get together 85 years from now, 100 years from now, it’s going to be 200 super happy, balanced, really optimistic, hopeful, amazing group of people. That will be my bigger intention, as opposed to just, we’ve got a billion-dollar company.
Loren Feldman
That’s great. I hope you’re there to see it. Rob Dyrdek, thank you for taking the time.
