← The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan
The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan
611: From Homeless to Multi-Billionaire - His Success Habits | John Paul DeJoria
00:59:44
John Paul DeJoria went from being homeless twice to building two global billion-dollar brands, Paul Mitchell and Patrón Tequila, using nothing but resilience, sales mastery, and a refusal to quit. This interview breaks down how he launched Paul Mitchell with just $700 while living in his car, created the ultra-premium tequila category from scratch, and built companies that now operate in 130 countries
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- [00:02]
Nathan Chan
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- [00:49]
What if being homeless twice and launching a company with just $700 while living in your car became the foundation for not building one but two multi billion dollar brands? Well, today's guest, John Paul DeJoria, co founder of John Paul Mitchell Systems and Patron Tequila. A living legend who proves that rock bottom can be a launch pad for extraordinary serious amounts of success. And after spending three and a half years selling encyclopedias door to door, JP learned the art of embracing rejection and becoming virtually rejection proof. So in his business partners $500,000 investment fell through in 1980. JP survived on $2.50 a day while sleeping sleeping in his car and somehow built a hair care empire now in 130 countries. Then he did again with Patron, launching a 37.95 tequila when compared to sold for $5, getting rejected by every distributor and creating the ultra premium tequila category from scratch. And in this conversation you're going to discover how JP convinced suppliers to take a chance on an unknown brand. The reorder business philosophy that built two category defining brands and we why managing billions without an email or a computer and spending time thinking instead of reacting might be the ultimate competitive advantage in this hyper connected world. This is an absolute masterclass in resilience, rejection, proofing and building legacy brands from a founder who's turned nothing into everything twice.
- [02:17]
John Paul DeJoria
Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder podcast with Nathan Chan.
- [02:31]
Nathan Chan
So look, the first question I wanted to ask you is you famously launched John Paul Mitchell Systems in 1980 with $700 while living in your car. What was the immediate actionable survival strategy you enacted on day one to turn that tiny seed into a viable business?
- [02:54]
John Paul DeJoria
Easy. Number one is where Am I going to live or what am I going to eat? So my car was my home, where I'm going to live. Got a blanket, a pillow in there, and all the other stuff went in the trunk or in the other seat. And then to eat, I figured out a way to eat off$2.50 a day where I could be okay and make it so that was the number one. Survival is how do I survive? And once I survive, then I go after business as I should. Where do I take a shower? Shower down at a place called Griffith park, right by the tennis courts. So that was free for everybody to use. And we kind of figured out survival was the number one survive. How am I going to survive? I'm so excited about what we're doing. I've got bills to pay here in another month, and we don't have the money. I've got to go out and sell and I've got to live. Yeah.
- [03:40]
Nathan Chan
And look, your story is one of, like, true. Built from scratch, come from nothing to, you know, incredible success. So you were homeless twice. I want to. I want to delve in. How did you become homeless twice? And now, you know, you've. You've built two incredibly successful companies. You're a billionaire. You know, many people would just, like, think, how. How the hell is that possible?
- [04:07]
John Paul DeJoria
It is definitely unusual. I want to mention to people, though, if you're sleeping in your car, the best way to do it is have sleep in the front seat with your head where the steering wheel is. I've learned that one because this way you could flip your legs over if you're your right side or left side or on your back. And so it's how to get the best use out of your car. The very, very best use out of it.
- [04:27]
Nathan Chan
Okay, that's a good tip. People probably wouldn't expect to hear that one, but it's good. It's good to know wherever you're in.
- [04:33]
John Paul DeJoria
Your car, you want to sleep. Put your head by the steering wheel, because you have. Because your head's only this big. Your body's this big. So you move it around a little bit here. Yeah.
- [04:40]
Nathan Chan
And so did you ever think that you would be where you are today?
- [04:45]
John Paul DeJoria
Not at all. In fact, when we first started the company and our backer pulled out, that's why we had absolutely no money. And I'll tell you about homeless twice in a second here, but our backer pulled out. And he pulled out because inflation in the United States in 1980 was 12.5% unemployment, 10.5% in the United States interest rates. If you could get a loan in in 1980 and 81, 17% was your minimal amount of interest. If you could imagine that that was prime interest. If you could even get a loan. And we waited in line for gasoline. It wasn't the best times, but anyways, now I get home this twice. First time was I was very, very young. Got married very, very young and had a child very, very young. And my wife just couldn't take being a mom anymore. So one day I came home and there was a big pile of clothes. Mine. My little son was sitting on top of it and there was a note. Now, I didn noticed this until after I got in the house. I pulled up into the driveway of our apartment, got out. My wife came right downstairs and got in the car, said she's running to the store, it was her only car, and took off. When I got upstairs, all of a sudden, what was there? A pile of clothes, a little boy and a note. Sorry, I can't handle being a mom anymore. Basically, he's much better off with you. Good luck. What I didn't know was she hadn't paid the rent in months. She didn't pay the electric bills in our utilities in months. And they were, they were kicking us out though I never saw a note. We had two days to be in that apartment and we were gone. And the power was shut off the next day. It was pretty, pretty tough. So what happened was, there you go. I've got a little kid in my hands, I'm homeless. My next chef wasn't coming in for a week. What little money we had in the bank account she cleaned out. So we actually virtually had nothing, not even a car. So I just start there and how do I get a car? I got a hold of somebody, actually a relative that an old 1950 Cadillac they weren't using because the water pump was broken and leaked and the hood was bent in half. I had to tie it down with a rope. So that's how he got going the first time. Second time was everything was going great for me in light. That's when I started John Paul Mitchell Systems. The backer pulled out, but I didn't know it. So I left. Everything I was involved in, I left my wife. At the time, we weren't getting along with the house, my daughter, the money and the newer car. And I went down the hill because half a million dollars was coming in. It never came in for the reasons I mentioned previously. And that's when we decided that, hey, my partner thought the Same thing. When he came over to get some money, there was none. And I said, paul, what can you afford? He said, 350 bucks. I said, well, I'll mash it $350 and I'll somehow survive. And you might. A lot of people say, well, that was the lowest point in life and no it wasn't because that was pretty low. But we were just enthusiastic. We had 30 days to make our product. So I figured out a way how to get it all made with smaller amounts. Obviously, get out there and start selling it door to door.
- [07:45]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. So on the door to door piece, you've said that that is one of the keys. If you could boil it down, like, you would attribute much of your success of learning, you know, door to door selling, you know, for the past, like for three and a half years. Can you, can you talk us through that?
- [08:04]
John Paul DeJoria
Yeah, I sure can. Sure. For after I got in the United States Navy and had a variety of jobs for about three and a half years, I worked for PF Collier Incorporated. Colliers Encyclopedia, not Britannica, not World Book, Colliers and Cyclopedia. Not a lot of people heard about it at that time. They knew about Collier's magazine. So I went to work there. And it was door to door sales commission only. You had five days of training, but you weren't paid for it. You were just trained, period. And you made no money unless you made a sale. And I believe the average lifespan of an encyclopedia salesman going door to door with no leads, this is just door to door cold calling was three and a half days. Well, I lasted three and a half years. But I believe what they told me one thing was that if you knock on 50 doors and they're either politely or maybe not politely closing your face, be as enthusiastic as you possibly can on door number 51 as you were on the first door. Well, for me it was door 100 and something. But I believed them but kept on going and going until I finally got in, gave a presentation or two, finally sold a set of books and learned how to get better each time. I don't consider to be failures. For the first hundred doors, it was a learning experience. You learn what to say, how to say it and you kind of clean up your act, shall we say, was door to door. And I think if they had still door to door sales like that, every one of my kids would have been doing it right now, at least for three months. Because it's the best training in the world how to look someone in the eye and how to Overcome rejection. Very important in life. If you know rejection is coming, it's not going to hurt you as much. Like for me, I knew I'm going to have at least 50 doors, possibly maybe more, maybe less close on me. I couldn't get in and give a presentation. But I believe what I was doing was going to be good. I'd eventually get it. So you got to have a lot of belief in yourself and what you're doing in your product. And this will go later on until I'm sure you're going to be asking about. Never go into the selling business, go into the reorder business where your product was that good. Well, I thought this encyclopedia set that was written more for a high school student to understand and had pictures in it and plastic overlays. Everybody needed one of those. You couldn't just get a one for college because it want to equate to people that are in grammar school or junior high or high school. So I thought it was a great thing for everybody. I really believe in the product that boy, if they were just using and take the yearbooks, keep it up today to be the greatest thing, they tell all their friends about it. So a lot of us do. In what you do, the quality of what you have should be a quality where you feel you're going to be in a reorder business where if they wanted to reorder they could. In this case all they do would get the yearbook. Supposed to get the whole set of encyclopedias because they already got it.
- [10:45]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, I love that philosophy. I want to unpack that. But before I do, you mentioned something about door to door sales and your kids. I have a friend that's he's, he's quite a successful entrepreneur and founder and he did door to door sales and he said the same thing as you. He said, you know, I'm going to put my kids through doing door to door sales because it's the best training ever for life experiences selling. And I think it's, it's really interesting that you say that because you know, if you can sell and you, you, you have sales skills, you really can look after yourself for the rest of your life. And it gives you this, this confidence that you can always go and do things. What do you, do you agree with that?
- [11:30]
John Paul DeJoria
I would definitely agree with that. In fact, if you take a look at how things work out. I went through five days of training selling encyclopedias door to door. So I knew something about it, but not a lot but I knew something about it. Knowing something when I started Patron many years later. I knew absolutely nothing about the alcohol business. Nothing. It was something I went into knowing not a darn thing about it or anything related to it. And if you take a look at the book and we'll cover that a little bit later, I'm sure. And that's success. Unshared is failure. Success and shared is failure is kind of my life story of how you could actually start a business with no money. How to promote it once it gets going, how to find a distributor and be able to get them to take you on even though you're totally unknown. And how do you create something and build it bigger? So there's a way to do these things. By the way. It's all in the books. You know, success insured is failure. But there are things that you can do along the way. Like, how do you start a business if you have no money? How did I start Paul Mitchell on 700 Bucks? I could take the whole hour up and do that with you, but instead I'm gonna take little segments of it so that we don't keep you up the whole day.
- [12:39]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. So let's. Let's unpack that because that is a common thing. So we have a lot of founders that want to start an E Commerce brand, and they say they don't have that much budget. And the amount of stories that I've heard from successful founders that I've interviewed where, you know, they. They get a. They get a supplier to take a chance on them. Can you tell me your story? Like, how did you do that? How did you get, you know, someone with your moq.
- [13:07]
To get a manufacturer to take a chance on you? How do you do that?
- [13:11]
John Paul DeJoria
Easy. I didn't. What happened was, as I explained it, though, not knowing the guy wouldn't show up with the money or the money wouldn't show up in the bank, I ordered a hundred thousand bottles to be made, like, of three different products. I thought we'd have the money be rock and rolling. Okay. Anyways, when didn't come through, they knew because I would tell everybody, I'm starting this new business. I've been in the industry before. They knew who I was, but they thought this money was coming through. When it didn't come through, I picked up the phone, I called the bottle guy and said, hey, how about 10,000 bottle order as a sample run, but not for all three products. Just 10,000, 6,000, the conditioner, and then 2,000 each. A product we had called shampoo one and shampoo two. And they said, well of course we wonder why you never wanted a sample run before. I said no problem. So when they gave that to me, I said the same thing, exact same thing to the silk screener he said sure. Same thing to the filler, he said sure, no problem. And it was two weeks from the time I pulled the trigger to get the bottles till the time I had a finished product. Which means that two to pay the first bill because I set up 30 day billing for everybody because they thought we're going to be really big, had a lot of money, you know, we didn't have any otherwise we wouldn't have been in business had they known that.
- [14:28]
Nathan Chan
So how did you, how did you sell? Like, like that? Like, like that much? It was, it was like talk us through that.
- [14:36]
John Paul DeJoria
No, well, yeah, well you would never know it because I would go the next when I went out and called on people, had a clean shirt on, a jacket so I looked like I was, you know, a well to do businessman. It was like the appearance and it took me and I pretty good salesperson I think. But it took me over a week to get the first 12 orders. Anywhere from $25 to $130 I think was the maximum. But I did get 12 orders and I left the front top of the check empty. In other words, it wasn't made out to anybody. I delivered the products, they gave me the check. I told them to leave it open knowing that I could use this as ammunition to get a distributor. So when I went to find a distributor knowing that without a known brand, without any money, no staff, no money, no advertising, no promotion, I would have to have some extra things there. So I did a few things. One is that I prepared to have something in my pocket to get them as a trump card. Like well, here's 12 customers already. It does sell. At the same time I knew that they would want to pay me my industry in 45 days. I couldn't survive 45 days. I needed to be paid like right away. So I built it to my pricing an extra 5%. And it's in the book how I ended up doing that. So when I presented the whole program to the fellow at Pierce a speed supply, Mr. Henrietta, he said to me, very, very nice man, he was very courteous. Listen to my wholesales presentation. Said JP you have no salesforce, you have no advertising, you have no promotion, you're an unknown brand, you know the industry a little bit. JP I have all the big brands, they have advertising, promotions, staff, all this. I said, well I'll Come and work with every one of your sal until you sell it. And we were really hard up. So I said, if you'll just buy $2,000 from us, I'll give you all of LA county in Orange County, Big area, exclusively. I mean, we were really hard up. 2,000 bucks. We really needed that badly. And so I showed him the whole presentation. I did not tell him how bad off we were, though. And he laughed and said, you know what an unknown brand. We've got all the big brands here. So yeah, jp, I have to say no. He says, unless you have another reason I should consider. I said, yes, sir, I do. And I reached in my pocket, pulled out the 12 checks, put them in front of them. I said, there's your first 12 customers. I've already sold them for you. I've already delivered it for you. Those checks are yours. And he looked at me and just laughed away, said, okay, we'll give you a try, but you better show up here every single day till that sold. They say, yeah, I gladly will, no problem. I said, but I have one more thing to ask. And I said that one more thing that I want to ask. Is this because we need the money. We're brand new, starting out. Can you pay me when the goods arrive? And he laughed again and said, jp, we're Paris Ace Beauty Supply. We pay our bills in 45 days. How about if I give you a 5% discount for paying me right away? How would that be? Well, 5% discount, sure, but you better show up. Yeah, no problem. I will. Okay, I'll do it when the product's delivered. I will go ahead and do that. Okay. Anyway, says he told everyone at my 25th anniversary, we've been in business now 45 years, but our 25th anniversary, I found him and invited talk to our distributors. And he said, so JP leaves my office, within a few minutes, my warehouse man's calling me and say, there's some guy unloading products on our dock, you know, our delivery dock here, wanting a check for $2,000. He laughed again, came over, handed it to me and said, I'll see you in the morning. And that that's how we got our first monies to get going, because no one would take us on.
- [18:11]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, that's crazy. And when it comes to that kind of story, the level of pressure, stress, anxiety, like a lot of people, like, how did you put yourself through that? Did you think that you were going to make it work or you just had nothing to lose? What was your mindset at the time.
- [18:32]
John Paul DeJoria
When you're at the very, very bottom, almost like an act. You could only look up or right. So I couldn't get any lower than I was. Here I'm living in a car and everything else. But what really drove it was that. And I'm going back to selling encyclopedias. What they said was, be prepared for a lot of rejection. You're going to get it. Those that stick through it and don't let them affect you. Then, by gosh, you're going to make it, make some big money. So whenever I tell people the two greatest suggestions I could ever make for you to be successful in your personal life or your business life is, number one, be ready for rejection. If you know it's coming and you're ready for it, it's not going to affect you so much. So if you have 100 disappointments, 500 disappointments, you're just as enthusiastic on the first one as you were on the very last one that you're going to give. And those are two things I learned that, hey, it's just a matter of how many doors can you knock on, how many can you get? Now, once I got it down really well, I could spend one day and get 12 accounts, 12 salons. But in those days, had to really get it down with all the limited things we had to work with. And I finally did.
- [19:38]
Nathan Chan
And when it comes to, I guess.
- [19:42]
Stress and pressure, do you think that the most successful people, their ability to take on the largest amounts of stress and pressure is what allows them to be successful?
- [19:55]
John Paul DeJoria
I would say that you're going to get a lot of pressure, a lot of stress, but if you know also that it's coming, and we did get it. But there were nights I couldn't sleep because I couldn't pay the bills the next day. But if you know that it's coming, you just remind yourself like I did, hey, that's another rejection. I'll somehow make it work out. I leave it to the universe, and it will. I just keep on going forward. And if there were any obstacles on the way, like I couldn't pay the bill, was paid late, or not paid at all, or, you know, hey, I'm a little hungrier than I was yesterday, whatever that possibly might be, it just say, that's another rejection, it'll work its way out, and everything worked out okay eventually.
- [20:32]
Nathan Chan
And how long did it take to work out?
- [20:35]
John Paul DeJoria
Well, two years. And the reason I know two years is because after being in business two years, we were able to pay our bills on time. Not quite them all but pay them on time. We said, whoa, we got it made. Now we could pay our bills on time. For the first time, we had $2,000 left over. I gave half to my partner, I took the other half and we thought, hey, we got life made. Now our bills are paid on time. I got into a little apartment I'm living in now, and son of a gun, we got $2,000 each. Isn't life wonderful? And that's when we knew we made it. And our dream was, if only we could do $5 million a year, we would each have $250,000 in our pockets and profits. Wouldn't that be a wonderful life? And it would have been a wonderful life. We did not know at that time that it could get really, really, really big and huge. But we found out that once I got the company to 5 million and my partner, by the way, wasn't a hairdresser. He was one of my best buddies and he had his beautiful, wonderful Jean bra girlfriend, lived in Hawaii. But he was a hairdresser, a top one, like, one of the best. And he taught hairdressers how to be top hairdressers. Very, very famous in his field. So he would go out and sell, too, and hold hair shows. I would go out and sell and run everything else in the business. So as we got it and we knew that we had $2,000 left each, plus our bills were paid on, on time. After all that stress and all that disappointment we went through, we knew we had it because that, that heavy stress of not paying your bills, not being able to have any money was very, very heavy and a very heavy toll. But we got through it. And then the rest of it was a lot easier.
- [22:07]
Nathan Chan
And at peak. What, what did John Paul Mitchell products get to in terms of revenue and profit?
- [22:15]
John Paul DeJoria
Well, we are today the world's largest privately owned salon hair care styling company. Yep.
- [22:20]
Nathan Chan
Okay. You can't talk numbers, though.
- [22:24]
John Paul DeJoria
We don't give out the information. But, but we're big. We're very, very big. We're in 130 countries throughout the world.
- [22:29]
Nathan Chan
So you talk about the reorder business. I want to, I want to revisit that because it's such a, it's such a simple but clever, clever philosophy that I've come to understand as well myself in business. And, and that is, it is so powerful. If you have a company, you have a business where you can build it up where you don't even need at the first day of every month, you don't even need one new Customer to be profitable. And that is something that you worked out very early on in your journey. Can you talk me through that philosophy and how you came to realize that?
- [23:06]
John Paul DeJoria
Yeah. Well, when you are sitting there with a great idea and a great product, we thought, and you have no money, you do the best you can. And that was it. It wasn't a matter of. I thought about it. I ended up in a situation where the same day the money came in, nothing came in, so I had to improvise. Do I just go back to working for somebody else? Do I go to consulting? What do I do? Or I knew our products were really good if only enough people knew about it. So I had the faith that I'd be in the reorder business. Just use my product, my shampoo one time instead of two, saves you time and money. My conditioner you leave in your hair, saves you time and money and does a variety of things, not just leave the hair in good condition. So I knew I had a great product and I knew that hairdressers, and they were the top, top priority, was the hairdresser. If we could convince hairdressers these are great products, then they could tell their customers what they're using on them, and then they could tell their customers what they use and how to use it at home. So we kind of were the, shall we say, the starters in its infancy of salon retailing, where we would sell them the Paul Mitchell products they would use on the customer's hair, show the customer how they used it, and then show the customer how to use it in between visits. So the hair looks the same. So we had the right idea, the right everything, and the right people that would know the quality of the product. That's hairdressers. Hairdressers know what's going on. No disrespect to drugstores or supermarkets, but when you go there, it's what was advertised. What does it promise me? There's nobody there telling you what it does or how to use it. We went the opposite direction. We would do it through the hair industry. And if distribution ever changed, like it has these last five, six years, if distribution ever changed, we would somehow, if we had to distribute in another way, make sure the hairdressing industry was part of it, give them a piece of the action. Always go back to the hairdresser.
- [24:57]
Nathan Chan
And when it comes to people, it's. There's a statistic that we read online that apparently, John Paul Mitchell Systems, your employee staff turnover is incredibly low. It's reported less than 100 people over decades have left your company. What are the core components when it comes to building a really incredible company culture? You know, you've got a policy around giving free lunch, you know, but what is really driving this unprecedented loyalty?
- [25:30]
John Paul DeJoria
Well, I. I would say that I've worked for people before that maybe weren't the nicest people. I've been in a situation before I had a dollar for lunch. You can't buy very much for that. So I thought, you know, if I'm lucky enough to make it, by gosh, I'm going to try and treat people the way I'd want to be treated. And the first thing I was able to do was give my small staff free lunch. Everybody got free lunch. Because there were all the times when, you know, I didn't have a lunch or for a dollar, I couldn't get very much whatsoever. I've been there before. So it's kind of like doing to others as you would have others do unto you. That was kind of philosophy. And the better we did, then I could get into, hey, here's bonuses, here's some profit sharing. Hey, we could do a health insurance for you. And always bearing in mind what can we do as a team to make a hairdresser's world better and to raise their prestige? Because we're all about loving hairdressers. And when you love what you do and the people you do it with, it's a lot easier.
- [26:23]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, I. I agree. Look, I think when it comes to life, you spend a third of your life working. And, you know, one of the things you want to work out is who do you want to work with? Who are the people? And if you can build an incredible environment around people you personally, as the founder, want to work with, you've got you like that's. That's one core component of life you've got sorted.
- [26:46]
John Paul DeJoria
Yeah, and I knocked out a lot of middle management. In other words, if a person could do the job, why should they need somebody watching them? So I would say the majority of what somebody would have as middle management, I didn't have to have. I just made sure the people that I hired were people that could do more than one thing. So for six months, we couldn't hire anybody. It was just me almost doing everything other than Paul doing the shows himself. And Gene brought his girlfriend. They did the shows, but. And I did packing the boxes. I mean, you name it, I did it. Sending out the invoices, I did it all. After six months, I was able to hire Shirley Wong. Wonderful lady. But she had 10 jobs. I mean, she was the receptionist, the secretary, the biller, the packer. She did 10 different things. It was amazing because that's what we needed. So it allowed me to be more involved in sales and direction of the company, as well as ordering various products. And then it was another year after that, which would be a year and a half in business. But before we hired our second employee, who Mr. Safford turned out to be not only our second employee, but he was a salesperson, a traveling person, and an educational person all in one. So I learned that many, many, many years before that you could do more than just one thing. So I had to do almost everything when we started the business. So it was very easy to turn several things over to a person if they were qualified to handle it. The majority of the time I was right, they were able to qualify and handle it. Occasionally you go wrong, but most time I was right and you are right. I think, in my opinion, it's. Oh, God. We've been around for 45 years now, and I don't think it could be any more than just 100 or two that have left the company that retired or went on to do something else or moved or something. Not. Not very many. Consider we're in 130 countries, have a lot of people that work for us.
- [28:30]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, it's. It's really interesting. It's a. And it's. It's. It's something that you should be incredibly proud of because there. There are a lot of companies out there that don't treat their stuff well. That. There's a lot of companies. There's a lot of companies out there that, you know, they're not a great place to work. I've worked. I've worked at many other places, and I've worked at some crappy companies, too. And I know what it feels like.
- [28:53]
John Paul DeJoria
Well, gotta be kind. Number one priority in life is just be kind to one another. Be kind.
- [28:58]
Nathan Chan
So I'd love to switch gears and talk about Patron. You did something crazy and you got into a totally different business. And when, you know, you launched Patron in the tequila space, tequilas were, you know, usually $5 a bottle. But you launched Patron in 1989, and you priced it at a premium price of $37.95. How did you convince retailers and bartenders to really embrace this ultra premium pricing and create the need for, you know, the sipping tequila category?
- [29:41]
John Paul DeJoria
There were several ways we did it, and I will explain to you, maybe give you a couple of examples. Okay. There's many ways we did it. First of all, nobody would take us. We went to every distributor. They said, are you kidding? 37.95. It might be really good stuff, and it is good, but no one's going to pay that. It's just too much. Nobody would take us. We finally convinced a wine distributor, all they distributed was wine to take us. We convinced him to do it, and we did it. We said, look, we could give you Spago's restaurant if you'll take us. Spago's was the number one restaurant that Wolfgang Puck ran. This is 1989. And then, I mean, 1989. And Martin, my partner that I started the company with, he went ahead and got Baja Cantina. So we told this wine distributor, we'll get you those two accounts. They said, you get those two accounts, we'll distribute for you. Well, we already had them, so we knew we had them, so we gave it to them. But what happened? After one year, they were only selling very, very few. Not even a thousand cases. Like, that's nothing. So we dropped them immediately. And then we went with a bigger distributor that, you know, had more, shall we say, teeth in the industry and more distribution in alcohol. So at first, no one would take it. So what are some of the ways we did it? One of the ways we did it was other than Spagos and places. I knew I would walk into a bar, and in those days, you could do it. I don't know if you could still do it or not. And I would ask the bartender, I would say, I'd like to buy you a shot of tequila. And I think it was like, $3. It was really cheap. So he wouldn't. I give him $3, right? Said, Now, I want you to taste this. Give me an empty glass. And I go from my briefcase and I. Part of. He goes, wow, that is. That's some kind of a tequila, right? But it's really mellow. I said, exactly. That's the future of tequila. That's Patron. You want to treat yourself here with Patron because it's the very, very best. So it took a while to get it going, but there's many other ways that we did that underground type of marketing where we would get 3,000 people at one time, tell them about the product, serve it to them, you know, let them taste it. And then eventually it kind of caught on. I'll never forget once I got a call from one of my distributors with Paul Mitchell from Chicago, and he said, JP I found some of the Patron tequilas. One liquor Store has a whole bunch of it and they're selling it for $25 a bottle. I said, they pay more than $25 a bottle for it. How in the world can they do that? He says. I asked the guy, he says, well, nobody knows about it. It's just sitting here. No one's picking it up. No one knows. But he's just trying to get rid of it. I said, you have no idea. That'll never ever happen again, I guarantee. And of course it never did, because shortly thereafter, the volume started picking up and up and up and up. And before you knew it, Patron was a household word and known as the company that brought ultra premium tequila to the United States and the rest of the western world.
- [32:25]
Nathan Chan
That's, that's a really good story. And you've got another one that I want to ask you around. Jim Beam. So major distributor. They predicted Petrone would be lucky to sell 20,000 cases per year.
- [32:42]
John Paul DeJoria
That's correct.
- [32:43]
Nathan Chan
And that was because of the premium high price of Petron. What did you guys do to eventually sell over 4 million cases a year?
- [32:52]
John Paul DeJoria
Well, it wasn't what we did to scale to it, it's just how we managed it to get that big. And what happened was when. And it was a good distributor, a very big name in the whiskey business. And they came to us in a very nice way and said, guys, based on what the industry is doing now, based on the history of tequila and based on what you have right now, guys, you'll never sell probably more than 20,000 cases a year. It's the best tequila ever, but it's way too expensive for people to buy. And of course we dropped them and took on another distributor who took it up to many more cases a year. And then we dropped them, took over ourselves and built the company. Now, it wasn't a decision, well, let's go build into 100 or a million, 2, 3 million cases, whatever, let's build that. It was a matter of what we're doing is really good now. Now how do we refine it? And I had a fabulous CEO and a fabulous staff and Ed Brown, my CEO, brilliant man, we worked together and he came up with the idea of, let's just make the star of everything, the bottle. And that's what we did. So there was ever an ad. The bottle was the star. In other words, it wasn't a good looking girl, a good looking couple, a good looking guy, a man on a horse. It was just the bottle we made at the start. And then when I did a series of television programs, which I did because of Paul Mitchell. I get on quite a few TV stations, the news. I could talk all about our brand new product, our brand new patron, and how good it is. And then we got some great distributors to agree with us. And then we started really building it. And when we finally got into the 1990s, it really started growing quite, quite rapidly.
- [34:28]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. And when you were getting feedback from other people, big distributors like Jim Beam, who have been, you know, in this space, and this is a whole new space to you to drop the price. What. Where did the conviction come from that you needed to maintain the, the price and that premium feel?
- [34:49]
John Paul DeJoria
Right. Well, it costs, first of all, so much to make the product for us to make a profit, we had to charge that much money. Okay. But we knew what we had was the very best we would be in the reorder business. All we've got to do is let enough people taste it and when they taste it, they'll want to treat it with. We figure at least half of them would want to treat themselves to the best of healing. There was, in fact, I could give you a little story about that. Mr. Miller, my stockbroker at one time with Goldman Sachs, called me on the phone and said, J.P. you're not going to believe this. I was driving through this little Mexican town and I stopped there, I mean a little town, and I stopped there at a Mexican restaurant and I went to get something to eat and drink. He said, this was in Texas, by the way, not Mexico. Mexican restaurant in Texas. He says, and it was just a little funky one. And I said, well, I'll order margarita. I wasn't about to order Patron because the place could not handle tequila like that was probably a two dollar bottle, whatever. I said, I'd like to order a margarita, please. And he says, the waitress said, how about this? For $3 more, I could give you the best tequila you could ever imagine. You could treat yourself. I could put that in there. I said, well, of course, that's great. What is it? She said, patron. So even a funky little inexpensive restaurant had. And she used those words, why don't you treat yourself today? Here, for $3 more you can have the very best tequila there was. And we carried that message to other people, plus did quite a few other things too. But that's all about it in the book too. And you could read about that also. There's quite a few things that we did.
- [36:19]
Nathan Chan
So why did you even decide to get into the tequila business?
- [36:24]
John Paul DeJoria
Back in 1989, early part of actually, late 18, 19, 88, 89. Beginning. A friend of mine was building a house with me for my family on the West Coast. I thought it would be like a family retreat. I was building it. I needed some stone. Stone columns. So he brought me this fellow named Martin. He said, this is a friend of mine, Martin. He just went bankrupt in the hospitality business, and he needs somebody to really work with him. He's really great at designing things. Wants to start a company where he will buy pavers and sell them to restaurants or model homes for architects and furniture and things like that in Mexico. And he just needs someone to be the bank for him and give him a helping hand. So I said, sure, I'll be the bank. I gave him a helping hand. This was 1988. At the end of the year. We were doing okay, but not really that great. And we were starting to build this holiday house for the family. So I said, martin, when you go down to Mexico again, why don't you find out? Because we were just drinking regular tequila. Then why don't you find out what the Mexican aristocrats drank? It's got to be better than what we're drinking. You know, lick the salt and, you know, have your shot and put the lime after so you don't get that. That. That harsh taste the back of your throat. So he said, okay. So he came back, just a couple of plain bottles, and it was pretty smooth. But he said, JP I met a guy named Francisco Alcaraz who can make it smoother. He said, and he found this old distillery that can make it that way, that was making tequila similar to that. So we went ahead and said, okay, I ordered a thousand bottles. I'll be a thousand cases, 12,000 bottles. We said, well, let's give that a start. And if we're. And I was doing good at Paul Mitchell, really good there. So if nobody wanted to buy it. Well, for the next 10 years, if you had a birthday or any kind of a celebration, you got a bottle of tequila. I mean, I figure it was that good, that high of a quality we could do then. And that's kind of how we did. And again, I didn't. Not knowing anything about the business, we came back and we went to distributors. I did it, my partner did it. And nobody wanted to carry it. Nobody wanted to carry it until we got that wine company.
- [38:26]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, gotcha.
- [38:27]
John Paul DeJoria
And that talks about in the book also, we learn the industry quick, first by the vocabulary and then how people went about delivering the vocabulary. That was very important. So assume that people Knew you were already in the business. Another example that I could give you is I have no email. I do not do the computer. I only make telephone calls, texting and WhatsApp. That is it and no more. But yet I have an AI company. Now. How does a guy that's not on a computer, anything else, have an AI company that's starting to grow really, really fast, and it's called Van Diden. It V A N did it. Like Van. He's the guy that did it. I didn't do it. Van did it. Van did it, okay. Which in Latin means to sell. Started this company. But how could I do that one? I got the top engineers, people like Gary Stevens and others, the top people in that field. They knew what the hell they were doing and had great ideas on what to an AI company. They presented to me. They knew what it took. Technically, I knew the business end and the promotional end. It was a great combination. So it goes back to this. If there's something you're doing and someone can do it better than you can, especially a hundred times better, it doesn't mean you shouldn't go in that business. It means that you should know enough about it to bring the top experts in to do what you cannot do. And then learn along the way. Don't try and do everything. I learned that back in 1989. Actually, it was the year I started Patron. I finally turned my warehouse over to a fellow named Luke Jacobellis. I was running everything. And a friend of mine, Mr. John Capra, said, JP, I know this guy Luke. He could reorganize your warehouse. You're trying to do everything and control everything. JP this guy will help you out. And I was one not to let loose of anything. So I brought him on board. Greatest thing I ever did. He eventually became my CEO of the company, and then my daughter followed him. But just a really great guy. And he was able to handle that warehouse and a whole bunch of things I was unable to do really well because I didn't know how to do it really well. So part of it also is learn along the way to delegate and get good people. Get people better than you are. A lot of people, especially that are working for someone else, say, well, I'm not getting someone better than I am to work for me. I'll lose my job. They'll take my job over. No, that's not true. If I ever have anybody that'll hire somebody that's better than they are for that job, that's who I want as a manager. Because that's what I would do. Like, I don't know much about AI, but I sure as all hell, I'm surrounded by people that are. And another AI organization that I'm kind of involved with right now, but has equipment in that field and we think it's going to go a long way. And it's usai, but you'll hear more about that in the future.
- [41:03]
Nathan Chan
So a few things I'd love to unpack there. First and foremost, you've done very well with picking the right people around you. What are you looking for? What are you looking for? How do you know that that person's the real deal? You would get so many people. You've been on Shark Tank, so many people will be asking you for money, want to do business with you. Now, how do you know who to trust? And if somebody's the real deal, how do you. How do you work that out?
- [41:30]
John Paul DeJoria
Well, that's a good question. Yeah, that's a good question. Because that's the toughest thing. I've been burnt before in my life. Even when I made it, I invested in things that, well, people weren't really what I thought they were. So what I do is, number one, I not only look at a resume, but the person wrote that resume. I didn't write it. No one else wrote. They wrote their own resume. So of course they're going to flatter themselves. So when I talk to somebody, I look at them and I listen to where their heart is coming from, not just their words. I go for what energy do I feel from this person? Do I feel a good energy from them? And then, of course, I make sure it's a technical field, that they're more than skilled in that field. And I check that out. I do due diligence to check that out. If it's not investing in something. I have my own home office that does all the due diligence for me. But it's very, very, very difficult to know sometimes if someone's telling the truth or not and if they're going to be honest with you or not. Because I've been ripped off a couple of times too, where people did things they shouldn't have done. But you learn, it's part of business. I think you learn along the way. But don't trust what everybody says and don't ever not check on your business or check on your books because people will take advantage.
- [42:41]
Nathan Chan
You've also shared before around this idea of forgiveness and letting go in life.
- [42:49]
John Paul DeJoria
In life, no matter what you do, you're always going to be bogged down in life with things on your shoulders until you get rid of them. What do you get rid of and how do you get rid of? If you have in your mind at all any jealousy or jealous about anybody doing something, you hate somebody from the past because they did you wrong. You hate yourself because you pass up an opportunity like, oh, my God, if only I did that. Anything that's regret, jealousy, or hate or anger, anything like that, get it off your shoulders. How do you get off your shoulders? If you think about anybody that you don't like, you think about anything you've done in the past that you wish you would have done it differently. You cannot change yesterday's newspapers. You can't do it already happened. Right. So what you do is you say to yourself, hey, Mike, I forgive you for punching me in the stomach when I was in grammar school. You know, Elaine, I forgive you for not showing up for our date and all of a sudden telling people you don't want to go out with me in the first place. You know, I mean, you could go all the way down the line, Jerry, I forgive you for stealing money from me to yourself. You could just say, I forgive you. I forgive you. If it comes in your mind again, just say, hey, that's the old me hanging on to that stuff. The longer you hang on to you, think about it. It builds it even bigger. When it comes to yourself, you got to forgive yourself first. There's no way you're going to change anything you did in the past. So forgive yourself. Hey, everything I did in the past, I did. I'm not going to think about it. I'm not going to wish I did it differently because there's not a thing I could do about it. Get all that off your shoulders and you go forward. If you don't get off your shoulders, you're defying yourself. In situation where you're jealous of somebody or somebody says something, you're really angry at them for saying it, or you dislike somebody because they didn't like you or things like that. When you get it all off your shoulders and those things pop up again, it's forgiven immediately. It's a wonderful thing to go forward with and just let everything go.
- [44:41]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. You're actually, to be honest, more spiritual than I thought. And when I say that, I mean even like from. From, from research. You, you. You've. You've talked about kind of meditation and letting things go and being present. Where does that come from?
- [45:04]
John Paul DeJoria
I think it's just from going along Life and all of a sudden finding yourself. Especially my starter, Paul Mitchell. Waking up in the middle of the night just worried about I can't pay the bills. The next day I graduated several months later to okay, I don't want to think about this anymore. So I'm going to take a piece of paper and I'm going to write on that piece of paper everything I'm thinking about that's going to worry me. And then I'm going to put it on my bathroom mirror. I'm going to tape it there. I can see it in the morning. So psychologically, when I go to bed, I don't have to think about it. It's on the mirror. I'll just look in the. I'll look in the morning. And that really helped me go to sleep. And then when I went to the mirror the next day, those things that kept me awake weren't that important. And I would just cross them off. They weren't as bad as I thought they were. And then after a while, little by little by little, I tried to get it down to fewer moving parts. And somewhere along the way, I don't know where, but somewhere along the way, someone had said to me, or I read or something like that about you got to get things off your shoulders, especially hate, where you hate yourself for doing something or not doing something, or hate somebody else. It'll make life easier. So I took them all the way out, eventually to the past, present, and automatically in the future. I found myself not being upset by it at all. There's nothing I was jealous about in the future. There was nothing that I didn't like. If something happened, I didn't like it. Within a matter of minutes, maybe sometimes hours, it was gone, wasn't there anymore.
- [46:32]
Nathan Chan
That's a great way to live life. And I know for many, many people, they would look at someone like yourself that is super successful and think how wonderful life must be.
- [46:46]
What would you say to them?
- [46:48]
John Paul DeJoria
Go grab the book. Success Unshared is failure. Because it's all about all kinds of no's in there and how to overcome the no's at the same time. How to end up having a pretty good life and being involved with quite a few people. There's quite a few stories in there of the hows, whens and where. So I would say, zebra, read the book here. Just read this book here. It took me almost three years to write this book with three of the best writers in the world. It's my autobiography. But I had to just change to make sure that the reader would be able to do what I was talking about. That's why it took me almost three years to write a book. I think if I was smart, I'd write it in a year. But I kept on reading and I read the whole book over six different times before I thought it was okay. People can now understand and be able to apply it in their own lives, whether it's their personal life or their business life. And since you have a lot of people are going to startups like into the. It's called the digital technological community. That is a wide open community. My God, is that a wide open community. If you want to get an idea of things to do in that community, go online and type in Bandidit. That's the AI company we started. See, what they did is totally thinking out of the block, out of the box, but using computer skills. And we created a platform. That's the word. It's a platform that's kind of like an AI platform, but more of a platform that the engineers develop their geniuses over a few years. And quite a few million dollars I invested in that. However, I could probably do it again, but I have to convince somebody that's a top engineer to do it with me for little to no money, because I would have had no money at the time.
- [48:21]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, it's. I find it. I find it really crazy that, you know, you manage billions of dollars without a computer. Like. Like most people would be kind of dumbfounded by that. Like, when did you decide that this was what you were going to do?
- [48:38]
John Paul DeJoria
What started it was in the seventh grade at Washington Irving Junior High School. Now, seventh grade for me is like the 1950s, early 50s. I was born during World War II. Okay, it's a little older than you guys anyways. And here's what happened. We had to learn and memorize the multiplication table from 1 times 1 all the way up to 12 times 12 all the way up every we could ever do it and memorize it by heart. So when people started talking to me about figures, in most cases I would just add zeros on or deduct zeros and come up with a solution in my mind. I didn't need it. And then when I found myself, let's say, getting into this world, never got into emailing, but getting into this world and seeing people around me, I see people on the telephone for hours, just texting away or on the computers texting away and not calling people on the phone or writing them letters. And I thought, well, you know what? I'm A personal person. If you write me a letter, I'm going to write you right back on that letter of the answer and have someone mail it to you, or I'm going to pick up the phone and call you immediately. So I could keep that involved that way and not get stuck on the computer all the time. In fact, I didn't even see of what a computer was like until way after we started the company and never had one. But then again, Remember, that's the 1980s. Computers are just coming around at that time. I think they were big ones, they were little ones like they have today. So it was a matter of I could do what I did without it. And then when we got into a little bigger size, shall we say, then I had accountants that had computers, calculators, everything you could ever imagine. They did it before. I would do everything by hand. And it worked.
- [50:17]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, it's just crazy to me.
- [50:19]
John Paul DeJoria
I would rather do things well, you all talk to right now because I'm doing a podcast with you. But other than that, I'll address people on the telephone or I'll dictate a letter or I'll have my secretary send out an email. I don't touch it, but it gives me time to think. That's a big deal. Time to think and not be a robot. In fact, recently I talked to 3,500 young people about today's world is you have your telephone and you talk to it or you text to it and you send it to someone else's telephone and they see it and then they look at it and then they answer it. But while they're looking at it, usually there's something underneath on that same subject that went along with whoever they sent you. People are so good at marketing, you all of a sudden get interested and you start going through that. All of a sudden you're on the computer forever. And I see that happening a lot. And there's just no way people should do that. But to all the young people out there, say this, make sure your telephone, your computer is off, off. Not when you go to bed, but at least a couple hours before you go to bed. How are you going to think? You can't think on your own. If you're depending on your computer to give you an answer or your telephone to give you an answer, you're not thinking on your own. You are communicating. Also, it hurts a lot of people. Most young people don't know how to communicate. They could type words out and say whatever they want because they don't have to Face a person in their eyes. When you're in front of somebody and you face them, it's a lot different because now you have their energy going, Their energy is there. So it's something as basic as try not to use your phone if you don't have to have it off at least a couple hours a day and start talking to people. If you want to practice, go in an elevator and look at the wall, not above the door, at what floor you're on, turn around and look at everybody. But the way to communicate with people, if you look them in the eye, you feel uncomfortable doing that. Look in between the eyes or at their eyebrows. It looks like you're looking right in the eye. This way you get through that, shall we say, hesitation of looking someone in the eye because you're actually. They think you're looking them in the eye, but they're not. That's just a little way to start it out. Now, people get used to it. Also. They get used to being more friendly because on that text or that computer, they could say whatever they want and it goes across. If it's something that is wrong and it gets out to more people and you find out it was wrong, how are you going to connect it and correct it at the same time? Do you connect that with the person you send it to and say, hey, could you send this to anybody else, please? Correct them, tell them I was wrong. No, you don't do that. The wrong information gets out. When you're in front of somebody and somebody's in front of you and you're talking, it's much harder to get out something wrong because they'll bust you on it.
- [52:56]
Nathan Chan
So you mentioned something that you brought me back to, something that one of my mentors taught me.
- [53:03]
Who? Very, very, very successful guy. He talked to me about how underrated it is to spend time, to think. How.
- [53:12]
John Paul DeJoria
How.
- [53:12]
Nathan Chan
How often do you spend. Like, are you allocating time? Do you. I. I'm curious. Like, how many times, like, how much. How many hours per day per week would you spend thinking.
- [53:22]
John Paul DeJoria
I. I can't quantify it other than I don't have to spend time on a computer, don't have been on a telephone. I. When I need time, I take time. And if I really want to take time, and I did this a couple times a year, I'll disappear for three days and just hang out with myself and make lists of what's good in my life, what's not good in my life, what I like, what I don't like, who may be good in my life, who may not be good in my life. What can I do and improve my own self and make it better for myself and others? And I will actually take time to do that in my life and just get away and do it.
- [53:51]
Nathan Chan
Love it. All right, last question. We have to work towards wrapping up. I could speak to you all day. J.P. talk to me around your memoir, Success Unshared is Failure. Why did you decide to put that together?
- [54:07]
John Paul DeJoria
I wanted to put it together because so often people say, jp, tell your story. It helps out so many young people. And I do. I talked to colleges. I mean, I talked to government agencies. But it was jp, you got to get it out and you got to share this with more people. The way to do is write a book. So I started trying to write a book about 10 years ago. Didn't do very well at it three years ago about I got really serious and really got into it. And that's why the whole purpose was to be able to write something that I could deliver to millions of people, maybe hopefully a billion people on the planet that'll pass it on and read it and learn how to be kind, how to build a business on kindness, how to build it on trust, and how to build businesses that you know nothing about whatsoever and shortcuts to do it it. And maybe some of the reasons why I got into some of the other newer businesses I'm in right now and what the end result is of that. Another thing I like to leave with all your listeners or your viewing audience is this. You don't have to retire. I will probably live to be a minimum of 125 years old. Minimum. Probably quite a bit older than that. I'll never retire. Because you're always as old as your mind leads you to believe that with all the new things going on in modern medicine, and I'm part of some of those things now that I've invested in and work in right now, I know that the majority of everybody out there is going to go way over 100 years old with no problems at all. And I also know that in a very short period of time, what we know is cancer isn't going to be existing anymore. There's just some great things going on right now. So I've got a good life to look forward to and I want to share it. And if you have a lot and you don't share it, it's failure. A good example is the Giving Pledge, which I'm a member of. Okay. The Giving Pledge is a pledge that says This, I made a lot of money. Most of us are billionaires, right? We made all this money. But we'd like to pledge that when we die, we'll be able to share some of that with people. Or while we're alive, we could do it now. A lot of people wait till they die. They build big temples. They build something with their name on it. Some people do want their life still, but quite a few of us do while we're alive. Like in my case, everything from. From building, helping build communities for a few thousand homeless people to feeding the homeless to helping children to take care of orphans. A variety of things I've already started doing while I'm alive. It's basically a pledge. I want to make the world better because it's been good to me, and that's what it is. The world's been good to me. And I feel that if life is good to you, if you don't share your success, it's a total failure. Because you've only done for yourself more than what you could do for you and your family. In fact, I'd like to quote something. There was a guy named Huey Long in 1932, I believe it was, in the state of Louisiana, the United States that was running for governor. And he said something really profound. And what he said was, even though, by the way, this guy was a liar, boy, could he lie. He was the best bullshitter in the world. But he said something that really stuck out of my mind. I wasn't alive in 1932. I was born after that. That. But the history of that came to me. I never forgot it. He got on the radio because that's what they had in those days, radios. And he said, Now, Mr. Rockefeller up there in New York City, I can't talk like a Louisiana guy, but I'm gonna try. Okay, Mr. Rockefeller up there in New York City, I want you to have a giant barbecue. Have so much barbecue that your children, your children's children, your children's children's children, and a bunch frozen, left over for the next next 50 years for them. But take the leftovers and send it to us four people down here in Louisiana, please. And that's what I'm gonna do for you folks. I'm all my lifetime. I get some of that. In other words, unbelievable is true. In other words, if you have everything and you can share it, to make the world a better place to live, you don't feel that good if you're already hoarding it. You're already worrying about, well, I gotta make more. I gotta make more. I gotta make more. Now, you can't give to everybody, that's for sure. I get hit up a lot. That's why I have a home office of people handling those things for me. So I don't have to go through that anymore. I could have time to think, but that's what it is. You feel good whenever you do something in life to do something for somebody else and ask absolutely nothing in return. It's the best high you'll ever get. And there was nothing we smoked in the 1960s that'll compare to the high you get when you do something for somebody else and you just feel like, I did it, I wanted nothing in return. I just did it. And you thank yourself and you're kind to yourself.
- [58:27]
Nathan Chan
There you go. Yeah, look, I agree the secret to living is giving. So look, thank you again, jp. If anyone wants to check out his memoir, Success is Un Success Unchared is is Failure. It'll be available for pre sale. I've got here. It's set to release April 6, 2026.
- [58:48]
John Paul DeJoria
It'll probably come out before that. I know already we're getting pre orders on Amazon, so you go to Amazon or one of those, you could pre order it, which I would suggest they do because once it's printed up, it'll start flying out the door.
- [59:00]
Nathan Chan
Incredible. Well, look, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.
- [59:04]
John Paul DeJoria
Thank you. Peace, love and happiness.
- [59:06]
Nathan Chan
If you love this episode, make sure to check out my interview with Emma Greed on how solving a problem she was so passionate about led to the creation of Skims and Good American. And so I do think it's so much of it starts with like addressing.
- [59:19]
John Paul DeJoria
Things that bother you that you find.
- [59:23]
Nathan Chan
In know you've got to create a.
- [59:24]
John Paul DeJoria
Solution for because you know at the.
- [59:26]
Nathan Chan
End of the day you've got to.
- [59:27]
John Paul DeJoria
Be passionate enough and sometimes crazy enough to go round and round and round to actually solve a problem.