I went from $1/day to billionaire in 10 years... here's how

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
It seems like it was an insane decision to go to China with no money, no plan, no relationships, no language skills, slept in a bush, and literally build your own factory.

**Nick Mowbray** (0:08)
That was a disaster. When I say we were naïve, I feel like that is even an understatement, but to be fair, success is a bad teacher. And in our business now, I'm a huge believer in firing bullets and failing fast. And then if the bullet works, it's a cannonball, and we invest and we build the recipe around that.

**Shaan Puri** (0:25)
How big is the empire today?

**Nick Mowbray** (0:27)
So we have a 2 out of a billion USN in revenue.

**Shaan Puri** (0:30)
And it's public or it's not a public company? No, public.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:34)
No. Wow.

**Shaan Puri** (0:44)
So here's what's fascinating to me. So I have a love language when it comes to business, and my love language is self-made, dropped out of college, family business, multi-billion dollar company with no outside capital. Like you hit all of the things on my little bingo card there, which is what got me interested. I want to start with the origin story. So here's the bullet points. Grew up on a dairy farm, started selling door to door hot air balloons, was in law school, then quit because he didn't like walking up a big hill every day. And then made a crazy rash decision, moved to China with no money, no plan, no relationships, no language skills, slept in a bush, somehow turned that into a billion dollar company. So that's the bullet points. Can you unpack that a little bit?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:32)
That's quite accurate.

**Nick Mowbray** (1:33)
That's quite a good way to summarize it quite quickly. If I was to frame up our probably first 10 years, it's that famous saying that success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. I think that actually really does sum us up. Grew up more or less on a farm and then we moved north for our schooling and my brother won the New Zealand Science Fair with a model hot air balloon. And then we decided or he decided, he was 12, that we should make these kit set balloons and sell them door to door at festivals when we were at school and I'm slightly younger than him. So he kind of hired me as the, when I say hire, I was the free labor to help make the hot air balloons. And yeah, we used to make these model for the air balloons and sell them door to door. I used to, when I was quite young, get my friends together and backpack around New Zealand and sell door to door. And I can tell you that learning how to sell door to door is a great life lesson because you never know who's behind that door. And you never know what response you're getting. And on top of that, selling a flying, burning plastic bag is particularly hard to sell. So it really hones your skills early on.

**Shaan Puri** (2:42)
What was the, what was your technique? So knock, knock.

**Nick Mowbray** (2:45)
I used to be like, we're just a small company trying to get off the ground, wink, wink, like no pun intended.
We were young kids, so that always helped. And, you know, we'd often like, we'd sort of build theses around which neighborhoods were more likely to buy. It was usually not the richest neighborhoods. They were all maybe a little too smart. And so it was sort of somewhere in between. We'd always look for, you know, signs of children in the backyards of houses. And I always remember that one of my good friends, still one of my very good friends today, Fraser, he used to always outsell me. I don't think there was a day where I outsold him. And I always thought I was a much better salesperson than him when the door opened. But he just did not care about being rejected. He'd go from each house, he'd get yelled and shouted at and swear that and had come out laughing and it'd be knocking on the next door within seconds. And I always had to build myself up after getting rejected, which was most of the time to knock on another door. And it just kind of taught me, I guess the power of just persistence, right? And you kind of keep going and if you keep going and have that level of grit and perseverance, then your chances of winning or your chances of success are much higher. So I was certainly learning that at a very, I guess, young age.