Snack: Spin Master Co-founder

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Introducing Meta Glasses.

**Ronnen Harary** (0:02)
You have questions, they've got answers.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:05)
Hey Meta, what's the capital of Peru? Lima.

**Dan Bova** (0:09)
How do you say, where's the restroom in Spanish? Dónde está el baño?

**Ronnen Harary** (0:14)
Hey Meta, is a hot dog a sandwich?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:17)
Technically, no.

**Dan Bova** (0:18)
Spiritually, yes.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:20)
Hey Meta, what should I do with my life?

**Dan Bova** (0:23)
That's one of life's biggest questions.

**Ronnen Harary** (0:25)
What do you think?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:27)
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**Dan Bova** (1:01)
Hey everyone, welcome to another snack-size edition of our show How Success Happens. I'm Dan Bova, writer and editor at entrepreneur.com.
So I get sent a lot of business books, and one came across my desk that just drew me straight in. So I've got two kids, one who just graduated college, and one who's going into his second year of college. And this title and topic just like vacuumed me in. The title, No Experience Necessary, Why Betting on Yourself in Your 20s is the best decision you'll ever make.
Love it. Love the title, love everything about it. And I got to speak with the author of this book. And I mean, we only talk once, so can I say I love him? That's probably a bit much, but I could say I really, really liked him. I really enjoyed speaking with him. Ronnen Harary is the co-founder and chairman of Spin Master, which is one of the hugest children's entertainment companies on the planet. They've got Paw Patrol, Bakugan, Melissa and Doug, Rubik's Cube, among a million other things you've heard of. He's also the founder of the Toy Movement, which is this amazing global effort that delivers toys to children in underserved communities. And he also leads other philanthropic initiatives through the Ronnen Harary Foundation.
Like I said, awesome guy, super nice guy. So we had a great conversation about his book and about his life as an entrepreneur and also all those old school toys from back in the day where losing a finger during playtime was a very real risk.
But oh so worth it. Alright, so to kick things off, I asked Ronnen how he got into this whole entrepreneur game in the first place.

**Ronnen Harary** (3:05)
So I kind of knew from a young age that business was going to be my thing and also growing up, my dad had a purging carpet business but he didn't own it. He got profiteering in the business. So I grew up with a lot of financial instability in my house and I think that laid a foundation for me to want to take control of my own life and to have equity in something. There was a combination between learning disabilities, financial instability and also curiosity. I was one of those kids that always was wondering what's possible. I'm spending a lot of time now in New York and people are like, Oh, you see the rats in New York? I'm like, No, because I'm always looking up. So when I was a kid, I was always looking up. I was looking at architecture. I love architecture.
Yes, we started my business with my two business partners when we were 23 My first partner, Anton, we met at camp when we were 12 and we were tennis buddies, we swore we'd never go into business together until we needed to go into business to pay for university. So we started this business called Campus Faces.
Then when we graduated, we came across this product called the EarthBuddy, which is a small potato, I had to put them in water, grows grass for hair, and we needed someone else. We started with $10,000 and we couldn't pay salary. So Anton was like, Oh, I got my friend Ben, who I went to business school with, and why did they come into the business? That's how we started.

**Dan Bova** (4:22)
Okay. So just to clarify, I asked him, was the initial business something that they were passionate about in particular or were they passionate about just starting a business, any kind of business?

**Ronnen Harary** (4:39)
It was, we want to be in business. If you would have asked me in university, if I'd end up in the children's entertainment business and toy business and producing TV shows, never came into my consciousness, ever. Not in my consciousness at all. The idea of being in business was, and when we started with the Earth Buddies and our second product was Devil Sticks which broke us into the toy category, we made a decision that we wanted to focus on toys and kids, and we made a broad mission statement which was, we want to design and develop our own toys. We're open to ideas from wherever they come from. We want to partner with a lot of people, and we'll grow the company as big as we possibly can. That was our mission statement, and we developed our culture after that. We were very fortunate after our first product to the Earth Buddy to be close to the zeitgeist of what was happening, and we noticed the trend of kids that were playing with these things called Devil Sticks, three-piece juggling set. And we brought those to market in 1995, and that broke us into the toy industry. And then from there, we learned that there's all these toy inventors, there's about 200 professional toy inventors that may develop ideas for a living, and they never commercialize them, but they will show you their ideas.