Dan Fleyshman was already hustling to make money at just 4 years old. Back then, his parents owned three Levi’s stores and would sell the jeans at a swap meet in Long Beach during the weekends. Fleyshman would set up a stand right next to his parents’ to sell and trade baseball cards.
http://nextshark.com/dan-fleyshman/
In high school, Fleyshman did not stop the grind and worked a multitude of jobs to make money.
“I worked three jobs, working at Ruby’s diner as a host, at the stadium selling cotton candy, peanuts, Cracker Jacks and working for a stock broker, and selling candy at school — actually, I would have the teacher sell it for me in front of the classroom, and I would come pick it up on Friday. I was always trying to figure out ways to earn income to help my mom. I was also saving a lot of money for college.”
Recognizing the money-making potential of a phrase his friend Eden loved to yell out, a 17-year-old Fleyshman, along with Moyal, trademarked the phrase “Who’s your daddy?” for 300 different products in September of 1999.
Fleyshman went all in, putting $43,000 of the money he was saving up for college into the company. This proved to be a move that would change his life forever.
While attending a convention a year after trademarking the phrase, Fleyshman and his team, in a stroke of luck, ran into someone who could land him a licensing deal. The deal, which was based in the UK, was for a whopping $9.5 million and gave him guaranteed revenue for the next three years.
By his early 20s, Who’s Your Daddy, Inc. was making products for about 3000 stores.
But it didn’t stop there. At 22, Fleyshman had his eyes set on creating an energy drink that customers would find tasty. He worked with some of the best chemists in the world to do just that, developing the drink under the “Who’s Your Daddy?” brand.
At 23, he took his company public, becoming the youngest owner of a publicly traded company ever, beating billionaire Dell Inc. founder Michael Dell by just one year.
“Michael Dell was 24 when he went public, so we beat him by a year, but he beat us by like $7 billion dollars. (laughs)”
Over the next few years, Fleyshman’s energy drink rose to became the seventh highest-selling energy drink and was carried in over 55,000 retail stores.
In September of 2008, on the 10-year anniversary of when he started his company in high school, Fleyshman resigned as CEO of Who’s Your Daddy, Inc. at the age of 27 to start Victory Poker, an online poker site that allows people to play poker with each other using real money.
Fleyshman is an avid poker player who regularly participates in the annual World Series of Poker. He was introduced to the game by his family when he was 18 and regularly went to Vegas to play after he turned 21.
“Poker is really interesting. It’s all about reading people. When someone is excited, they lean forward. When they are nervous, they lean back. If they like something, their eyebrows are elevated, gravity takes over, their thumbs go up. So, there’s a lot of ‘poker tells’ that translate into the business world […] There are some big name business guys and athletes that play poker — it’s the new golf — it’s the best way to put it.”
Fleyshman proved not to be immune to failure when he was forced to shut down his baby Victory Poker.
“Victory Poker — one of my greatest successes and one of my biggest failures all at the same time. We hit our year one expectation after 10 weeks. We were just crushing it. We were so excited we were in dozens of countries and tens of thousands of players, and we were like, ‘Oh my God this is so amazing.’
And then April 19, 2010, we were supposed to get $3.5 million for only 15% of the company plus 200K a month in marketing. Huge company deal, we’re all flying to Costa Rica, I bought $63,000 worth of flights; we’re supposed to do a photoshoot in Costa Rica, we’re saying, ‘This contract is amazing,’ and then April 15. Boom. Black Friday happens.”
The Black Friday Fleyshman refers to was the day when federal authorities indicted three of the largest online poker companies in the world: PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Cereus. The three poker sites were suddenly inoperable to U.S. users, and players’ accounts — and the money invested in them — were frozen. The ban was the result of the long-held debate on the legality of online poker.
Seeing the future of online poker in jeopardy, Fleyshman knew his business was no longer viable.
“…On April 19, instead of getting in $3.5 million of funding, I actually paid back the thousands and thousands of players — just so I could sleep at night. The other guys weren’t paying anyone back. But, I just felt it’s not coming back anytime soon — online poker is not going to get regulated for years. I got to pay everybody back and start with a clean slate. And that’s what I did.”
Truly successful entrepreneurs don’t dwell on failure for too long, however. Fleyshman said:
“I have this saying: ‘Don’t sit on the floor and cry about it.’ So, I didn’t want to just sit and think like, ‘Oh God, woe is me. What should I do next? I should jump off a building.’ So for the next year I just started consulting for casinos and other poker companies and going overseas and building my network and just really dove in as hard as I could and started getting busy, because crying and thinking, ‘Oh I lost what could have been a hundred million dollar company’ wasn’t going to save that company, and the government was not going to call me all of a sudden and say, ‘Hey, you can turn it back on now!’ I said, ‘I am just going to stay busy.’ And through that failure I found a lot of success.”
Fleyshman also has a talent for networking with and befriending influencers and celebrities, including ex-Marvel Studios chairman David Maisel, who sits on the board of a few of his companies. Last month, Fleyshman and his new media company First Slice threw a charity poker tournament in and party for EDM giant Steve Aoki at Dan Bilzerian’s house. The celebrities in attendance included Vin Diesel, Ludacris, Chris Brown and Adrian Grenier
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Originally Posted by Dan Fleyshman
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